The Great Reorganization continues - I'm knee-deep in the G's. Whilst trying to rip my copy of Feeder's Echo Park I could hear it skipping in the drive. I took the CD out and there was a big chunk of the disc about to split off. I'm worried that keeping the CD's so compressed in the binders is going to break them. I'll probably have to take out all the artwork and store it in a separate box. Something to do after the move.

TGR also instilled within me the desire to watch Can't Hardly Wait (I burned the soundtrack last week), so I put it on. I still love that film. The cast is great, especially 24-year-old Seth Green as the wigger. And it's one of those films that featues a plethora of now-popular actors just starting out. I notice someone new every time I watch it.

I finished my Stein readings - including section from Melanctha, Four Saints in Three Acts, and The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans - for the week school starts up again. Today I'm going to catch There Will Be Blood at a matinee and get some film readings done at the library.

Class: Have you seen the film version of Beloved?
Quayson: No, I won't watch it, I don't want to see it.
Class: Why not?
Quayson: Oprah.

One more class to go. Unfortunately, it's Race and Cinema and I have neither watched the film nor done any of the readings. Although I have read three out of the four articles in the past (Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" several times), so it could be worse. I have the movie on my computer, so I'll watch it soon - Jezebel, a Warner picture from 1938 with Henry Fonda and Bette Davis. Amazingly, I've never seen a Bette Davis movie.

The discussion of Stein in class yesterday was interesting. There's something about trying to get at the root of intent that turns me on about the avant-garde, starting with the notion that a writer is saying something, anything, and working towards illumination.

I really need a shave.

Last night I had a dream that I was at my family's place, and they were keeping an injured seagull they had found in a thin glass tank filled with water. It looked like it had drowned, so I emptied the tank, picked up the bird and pushed the water out of its body. For a moment its skin turned translucent, so I knew when it was emptied. The bird was still alive. I nursed it back to health slowly. Gradually it turned into a kitten, so I started feeding it soft cat food. By the end of the dream it was healthy and we were best buds.

I spent awhile last night reading Gertrude Stein, who began to make more and more sense to me as the night wore on. I get the feeling that her writing tries incredibly hard to sustain a moment - a point in our lives at which we experience full awareness and feel it burn a place into our memory. Stein is fun to read out loud.

I also started reading Professor Sullivan's biography on Elizabeth Smart, of whom I'm not familiar. It is interesting to read about high class social life in Ottawa during the early part of the 20th century. It's funny to think that society papers wrote extensively about how people dressed for parties. When I move back to Ottawa I'm going to start a paper that details every party I throw - what my friends are wearing, what jokes they tell. Riveting stuff to a mass audience.