Fringe and Stuff...

I had a very good break. A month long. I finished a draft of The Story Thief (but I have sooooooooo much work to do on it. Thanks again to Ian for some great, great comments...I have some reworking and some cutting to do, before I start really beefing up the second half of the novel...there's so much that I'm starting to realize needs to make its way into the novel...anyway...). I wrote a ton of poems too. I started writing some short stories for my workshop this semester. I sort-of planned some of my class...at least I finished my syllabus. Barely.

I also made a lot of time for some TV watching or more accurately some computer watching. I made it through season 2 of Dexter and started season one of Fringe, and Em and I are almost done with season one of the Wire. One disc left. I'm in love with all three of those shows, for so many different reasons.

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I saw Beetlejuice for the first time last night. Yeah, I know. Talk to my mom if you think that's crazy. I just wasn't allowed to see it as a kid and time passed and then I turned 28, and Em was like "You should probably see it already." I've been waiting forever. Netflix has it marked as "A very long wait." And the blockbuster here closed. And the Hollywood didn't have it...until last night. We watched that and UP. Oh man, Up was really great. If you haven't seen it (I'm sure, like always i'm months behind and you've all seen it), see it!

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I think my Magical-realism class will be cool. We'll see. My teacher is cool (Robin Romm). Her writing is sort of in that vein, though I've only seen excerpts, but it's good. Our books look cool. She's allowing the poets in the class to write prose poems, but I think I might just try to write some short stories. We'll see what I'm in the mood for. There's a lot of genre haters in the class. It's bullshit if you ask me, but I'm trying to take it in stride (yeah, first day, people just started bashing). Sure, I think the same thing about genre many people do, but I still give it a chance. It seems like a lot of students might want to discredit writing if it seems to be genre, rather than finding the literary in it. Though, I might be speaking to soon. We'll see.

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OK. I just go a ton of books (mostly for class) in the mail and I'm stoked for them all. I want to push through most my class books early, so I can go back and read them again, and also, so I can read whatever I want during the quarter. That, for some reason, is keeping me sane in grad. school. I read Sedaris during the last semester. That was a nice change of pace.

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I made some tofu salad today (like egg salad but with no animal products...i use Veganaise instead of mayo and it's good BTW). Dave. It's good. I think I'm gonna make some hummus tomorrow.

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I should probably see Avatar already. I keep putting it off. We'll see how that goes.

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Got a gym membership. So, we started working out again...i've been slacking lately. I think this membership thing will help.

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I know, sometimes this blog turns into a sort of web-to-do-or-this-is-what-I-did list. Maybe sometime soon, I post about things cinematic or literary, but maybe not. I'll probably have something to say about Fringe and Dexter and The Wire and the films I watch. OK. Fringe: So, into it. There are some meta-Xfiles nods throughout. One was in an episode in season one: there's an actual shot of Fox Mulder looking up at some lights in the sky. At the beginning of season two, Broyles is in DC talking to a committee of Senators about his Fringe unit--they're trying to shut it down after some crazy shit went down, fucking bureaucracy--and one of the senators says something like, "The US government has spent too much money funding the X cases and the Fringe unit without results." The cool thing about Fringe is that there are almost always results and always some kind of answers, but the story just keeps getting deeper and more intertwined, even stories that seem unrelated, end up related. Anyway, I like that element. But I like the idea of science development is what's causing problems, not monsters or aliens, but actual science getting out of control, or used for the wrong reasons. It's interesting.

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Alright, I'm gonna watch some SVU and read poetry. Yeah. I said it.

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Who's gonna see Toothfairy? Looks like a good one!

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Later,

Love,

Joshua