Lisa Batya Feld's Blog, page 20

Home again...

It was wonderful spending so much time with my folks (and yours, osewalrus !). We each took different nights to cook and got pretty inventive: Uri was rocking the French fusion, I tried my hand at Cuban cuisine, Mom did some mouthwatering stuff on the grill and Tateh's pasta has to be tasted to be believed. Wow. We hit the Clark Museum for a Picasso/Degas double-header and went on lots of long walks, challenged each other at the gym, and played an insane amount of cards. Just wonderful tim...

Not so bad going down...

Today was going to be a hell day: too much work, and all of it impossible, a dead computer and a long call to customer service, and a bike to repair.

Instead, I had a delicious bike ride before the day heated up, customer service couldn't have been more helpful, and it looks like the work situation will smooth itself out with minimal stress. The bike can't be repaired until I get back from N'ton, but I can manage until then, and if that's the only crimp in the day, I'll definitely take it.

I'm living in a country western song...

Lost my ride and my home, or more specifically, the gears and tires on my bike are shot and my computer chose this week to crap out on me. Now all I need is a woman to leave me and a dog to run away, and I'm set.

Annotated babbleography

I'm trying to plow through the 50 annotations I need to do for my thesis defense and it's frustrating the hell out of me. Once I've put the time and attention into reading a novel, I really want to get an annotation out of it, but what do you do when the book leaves you cold and you don't know what's so special about it? Do you write about what didn't work for you and risk looking like an unlettered heathen, or do you try and BS through a two-page paper, trying to make up reasons why it's a...

Swan Song

Long, full day yesterday, but last night was my very last workshop in the program, and my story was the very last story we critiqued. I'd started out the semester feeling so much pressure to "make it," to step beyond "good for workshop" and into just "good" as many of my classmates had done. And as the semester went on, I had to accept that it just wasn't going to happen; I was stuck, I had plateaued; I had to confront that truth and move on. Just get a story in and accept that it was goin...

I eat pressure for breakfast

Got up at 5 AM and started work, ran a poetry workshop for Jerrod Bohn outside in an insane windstorm, wrote my presentation materials from scratch and rocked my Shakespeare presentation, and tonight is my very last writing workshop in the program. I'm pretty damned proud of myself.

Still have a Shakespeare paper and a fiction rewrite, but those are a week away. At this point, the pressure level drops significantly.

The final countdown!

Just handed in my last workshop story. And Marianne sent this around to everyone to celebrate the end of workshop for all of us second-years. Just one more week of classes and two more papers to go!

Richard III

I so don't want to do my short story today; I just want to skip it and go straight to Shakespeare. I'm leading a discussion on Richard III and doing a paper comparing his sibling issues to Henry V's, and I really want to start the discussion by pointing out that trying to understand Richard III by reading Henry VII's chroniclers is a little like trying to understand Obama by watching Fox News. Of course, I've always had a soft spot for British bad boys; one of my favorite quotes is Anthony ...

Home stretch

Roughly 10 days left of the semester, and I have a ridiculous amount that needs to get done. I just pounded out a complete story rewrite in a day, I have another day to write a totally new story, and then I have a 15-page paper and a presentation due next week, and another gut-and-rewrite immediately after that. And that's not counting regular homework, internships, or work. There are moments when I have no freaking clue how I'm going to get it all done.

At the same time, there are moments ...

AWP = Awesomeness

After all the effort it took to get ready for AWP, designing merchandise, promoting the program, seeing if people needed rides, etc, AWP itself was an absolute blast. I went to a bunch of fascinating panels and readings on everything from literary SFF to new ways to think about plot to how to critique students who are working with religious material in workshop. One of the poetry readings had me absolutely dying on the floor with laughter. And the bookfair was pretty awesome as well: I got...