Archive for November, 2007


NaBloPoMo? NotNoMo.

Well, today’s the last day of NaBloPoMo. I made it. Did you?

There were a few times that I didn’t have anything to say, or forgot to post until way late into the night, but you know, these things happen sometimes. I feel accomplished. Each word I type gives me a sense of glee to know that I actually finished something that I started. And I met all sorts of wonderful new people! I hope you all who started hanging around here will continue to do so. I’ll keep reading all of your lovely blogs because I thought they were so good.

Tomorrow is the big Conference day, and when it’s over, I’ll tell you all about what a mess it was putting it together, but for now, I’ve really got to get on this paper that I’m presenting for it tomorrow. I’ve been pouring over this poem for hours on end, and I’m making headway, but it’s fairly slow going. Things are, however, beginning to fall into place mentally, though; I’ve just got to start getting those ideas out of my head, off of my book and notebook, and into a word processor. After that? No sweat. 5-7 pages should just fall right out. I mean, I’ve done more prep work for this paper than I’ve done in a long time.

Also, I’ll post the paper here after a few months if I can’t get any takers for publication. The title is “Counting the Stars: A New Critical approach to Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella Sonnet 5.” If you’re interested, I can send it to you when I finish it, just comment and ask me.

Congratulations everyone for a job well done!

P.S. As a bonus, here’s the poem itself:

It is most true, that eyes are formed to serve
The, inward light; and that the heavenly part
Ought to be king, from whose rules who do swerve,
Rebels to Nature, strive for their own smart.
It is most true, what we call Cupid’s dart,
An image is, which for ourselves we carve;
And, fools, adore in temple of our heart,
Till that good god make Church and churchmen starve.
True, that true beauty virtue is indeed,
Whereof this beauty can be but a shade,
Which elements with mortal mixture breed;
True, that on earth we are but pilgrims made,
And should in soul up to our country move;
True; and yet true, that I must Stella love.

Enjoy!

In Which I Explain My Goings On

So, I’ve been pretty busy over the last few days. I’ve been planning a conference that’s being held this coming Saturday at my school, and I’ve been trying to get a paper written for said conference. I thought I’d share a little bit of how I’ve been doing the research for it, so I took a few pictures of part of my notes.

The text in question is Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella Sonnet #5, and I’ll be presenting a new critical analysis of those 14 lines of poetry. Have a look:

Here’s the text, with some of my annotations. Yes, it’s just the little part, not anything around it.

Next is my trusty Moleskine notebook.

And finally, you can see the two together, to get an idea of what I do with textual analysis.

That’s pretty much it! Go check out my Flickr page to see those pictures and some extra explanation about them.

One more day! Whew! It’s been long, but I’m glad I’ve made it thus far!

Cookies

Does anyone else like cookies? I’m a big fan of them. I hear from some older adults that we (and our parents) are a cookie generation, while many of the older people of the United States aren’t so much for cookies. I’m not sure of the veracity of this, but I figure it’s as plausible as any theory on the cosmopolitan trends of baked goods.

Anyway, today in Literary Criticism, a group presented to us on feminist criticism. They brought home-baked cookies with which to win us over. They were so good, I used my crappy phone camera to take a picture so you all could be jealous of the wonderful cookies that we had today.

So, compliments of the feminist criticism group, I give to you these cookies (excuse the quality of the image. The camera in my phone really does suck. A lot.)

They were some fine cookies, especially since they followed the mantra from one of my favorite childhood stories, If you Give a Mouse a Cookie…, and they had some milk for us to wash down the cookies.

Spam, anyone?

I don’t know about you all, (ok, well, I know about Rachelskirts because we’ve talked about it before) but I get rather a lot of spam. I usually browse through, laughing at the funnier subject lines that come across. Usually these funny ones are entirely random conglomerations of words, but occasionally the “personal male enhancement” spam messages have pretty funny subject lines.

I think I laughed harder at one of those lines today than I have ever laughed before at anything. Here it is: “You won’t need to furtively put socks into your trunks anymore!”

Whenever I have other spam messages that go something like “Tennis racquet Onion Child Bee Horse Mosquito Liquid,” the bit of diction in the former subject was a breath of fresh air.

What are your favorite spam message subject lines?

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