Two presentations to do tomorrow. As usual, I've left the bulk of the writing until the last minute. But I feel as though I did more research on Hejinian than was needed, so I just need to put it into a format that flows nicely. I'm thinking about seven pages. The Coupland presentation won't take me long to do up since the biography presentations have been quite informal (mostly talking rather than reading from paper).

Thankfully, Andrea is coming into town tomorrow for a couple of days. It will be a nice break from things. We're staying in a hotel tomorrow night. In an actual bed. I'm excited.

I spent a few hours in Robarts researching yesterday, then came home and vegged out in front of the computer. I wanted to get to bed a bit early but something in my brain goes nuts at around midnight and I can't pull myself away from looking up information online. As hard as it is for me to remember things I learn, I can't stop filling my head with new stuff, mostly trivia that I'm curious about. Decades from now folks are going to find me dead in front of my computer looking up the names of the guys in Salmonblaster.

It snowed HARD in the city yesterday. Canada.com said there were so many car accidents as a result that police had to stop responding to the sites and advised people to get a tow and head to special drop-in centres. I spent a good portion of the day tromping around campus, trying to make sense of the white blur everywhere.

I finished Salih's book, which I read in the short term loan section of Robarts, listening to the winds howl against the building. It was quiet and nice. I went to L'Espresso for a bit and chilled out reading City of Glass. They didn't have any coffee brewed, so I had an Americano. I had to ask what it was because I'm pretty coffee-illiterate. It's essentially espresso and hot water and it tastes like coffee if you stir it like mad.

I also bought my plane ticket to Vancouver, so I suppose this means I'm officially going. Today I'm going to finish Lord of the Flies and Heart of Darkness. I also have to return a cell phone I found to a guy on campus. It's amazing I found it considering it was a white phone dropped into an infinite landscape of snow.

I went to campus yesterday and to return a DVD and read M. H. Abrams' article on critical artistic theories for my Tragedy course. I've discovered the trick to finding a good location to sit and study in Robarts. On the upper floors there are certain desks wedged in the corners with their chair backs facing windows. It's like cutting yourself off completely from the rest of the library and having a view to boot. The trouble is that others know about the desks, so you have to be crafty and get there early or be patient in the hunt.

I eventually completed the 2-4 page response paper on Abrams and realized that I'd read that Shakespeare play a week early by accident. At least it's out of the way. Today is the day I have stuffed with classes, so I'll be looking forward to getting home.

Last night I watched what used to be my favorite episode of the X-Files, D.P.O. (or as I referred to it, Lightning Boy). Giovanni Ribisi plays a mentally ill redneck teenage kid who can channel lightning. Jack Black plays his friend Zero who works at an arcade. It's interesting to see him young and playing a more dramatic role.

I ended up writing a page before I went to Robarts. The journal I was looking for wasn't there, only a book shaped hole where it should have been. After bumming around the library for a bit I went to see The Savages, which was absolutely amazing.

I went home and pretty much went straight to bed. My trip to Europe has been playing tricks on my internal clock. I woke up at 8 AM with little trouble and set to work on the last three pages of my paper. I'm currently a conclusion away from finishing it. Then I can start a NEW semester.

I used a portion of my time in the library to work out my schedule. I have three classes on Tuesday and one on Wednesday. I kind of like that arrangement, although I'm sure it will be hell for my procrastinating nature.

I sat down and hand-wrote some prose yesterday. First time in forever I've done that.

I met with Paul at the Kelly Library cafe and we discussed our presentation, which should be no big whoop. Apparently he had spent last year teaching in Germany and really wants to go back to the hamlet in the north part of the country where he was living. I went to Robarts afterward to grab some material on Visconti when I ran into Jonathan Abresch, a guy I went to Carleton with who migrated to Toronto for the same reason I did. It was only the first time I'd seen him on campus since the very beginning of the semester, so we chatted for a bit.

After picking up Professor Hutcheon book on adaptation at the University bookstore, I went home and fell asleep in front of some Simpsons episodes. After I woke up I watched I Shot Andy Warhol, which was the basis for one of the first essays I wrote at University over five years ago. Lili Taylor and Jared Harris are both really good in it. Hell, so is Stephen Dorff. I get a kick out of all things Warhol anyhow.

I broke down my Death in Venice essay into word counts for each section. I find it helps me write with more consistency at greater lengths when I know exactly where to stop and start arguments. I'm 553 words into a 4225 word paper. It shouldn't be too difficult. The trickiest part is going to be sourcing the opera-related material. I still don't even have a copy of the damned libretto.

But I do have peanut butter cups.

I hit the library right after film class to work on my Death in Venice research and finally found a great location to work. There's a desk against a corner window on the 13th floor that essentially makes a nook out of the area by the windowsill. The desk wall blocks out traffic noise, and there's a great view to clear my head. I sat for awhile studying Nietzsche and Freud and taking notes before heading downstairs to start typing, and knocked out a page before heading to African-Canadian Lit.

My presentation on Oni went fine, and was the last of the year. Ama Ede was a guest in the class. I've met Ama a handful of times. He used to be the writer-in-residence at Carleton, and before class started we sat around gossiping about Ottawa, which I will take any opportunity to do. He's a good guy and gave a reading of his material after class.

I still had about five pages of Death in Venice research to write, but I was feeling tired so I went home and napped for an hour and a half. I've been having a prolonged series of late nights over the last while, and I figured that as long as I'm inevitably going to stay up until at least 3 AM, I might as well work while I'm doing it. After the nap I ended up picking away at talking points until around 5 before finally hitting the sack.

I boarded the bus for class this morning but traffic on Keele Street was completely gridlocked. We sat for nearly an hour and had only moved a couple of blocks. I know there was construction work going on, and that must have been coupled with an accident or fire (a fire truck did speed by, sirens blaring). At one point the driver of a Go bus behind us approached the driver of our bus about his mirror, prompting our driver to put the bus in park and GET OUT to check it out. That's when I decided to hike it home.

I took a nap during which FedEx showed up with what I'm assuming is my Eurail pass. What are the chances they'll come back tomorrow before 11 AM? I have a feeling I'll be asking Jay for a lift to their offices. The remainder of my university bursary appeared in the mail a bit later.

I did return to campus later on for African-Canadian Lit. We watched a film called Rude, which had an involving story and was great in that Canadian production kind of way. Afterwards I tried doing some research on Death in Venice at Robarts, but I couldn't concentrate, so I headed home after about 45 minutes. I used to be able to get a lot of work done at the library at Carleton, but I find Robarts a kind of tricky place to study. The desks are always too open to traffic, and the cleaning staff often decides to buffer the floor with this loud machine right in the middle of the day. I need to find a better study hole.

I walked home from Keele station, poked a bit at some more stuff on Thomas Mann and watched a few episodes of Scrubs (I really dig Zach Braff). Tomorrow I'm meeting with the Death in Venice group for a bit. Before that I'm attending a seminar on making Canadian journals available for online research. More on that after I find out exactly what it entails.

My girlfriend is awesome.

I thought it was way past my bedtime, but the clock has fallen back an hour, so now it's only moderately past my bedtime.

Today I went to the movies. I accidentally bought a ticket for Cronenberg's Eastern Promises and didn't realize it until the title popped up on the screen (I was eased into it a little by the preliminary Telefilm Canada co-production credit). For a minute I thought, "well, okay, I like Cronenberg. Maybe I'll just stay and see it," but five minutes into the film I was presented with bloody vaginal discharge and the most realistic throat-slashing I've ever seen on film. I really wasn't in the mood, especially since I hadn't intended to see THAT film, so I theatre-hopped over to see Gone Baby Gone - Ben Affleck's directorial debut with his brother Casey in the lead. What a fantastic movie. The performances are all top notch, especially Affleck and Amy Ryan, who plays a neglectful Bostonian mother with a mouth like a racist sailor with such centred effect that you'd swear the casting director just picked her up off the street. It's a really intense thriller and one of those great neo-noirs of late that I've been really excited about.

After the flick I grabbed a bagel and coffee and went to Robarts to work on the annotation exercise. My group is looking at the poem "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection" by Gerard Manley Hopkins. We have to pick out twenty points for annotation, and I'm looking at extratextual elements. It basically involves researching the etymology of certain terms and expressions via dictionaries, guides and other support materials. After about three hours of research I had picked out seven and decided to call it a night.

I walked home from Keele station and watched some Seinfeld while eating dinner, did laundry, read some more of Notes from the Hyena's Belly, and watched a documentary on the making of Halloween (which primarily features a bunch of people sitting around talking about how great it was to get rich). Think I'll use that extra hour to get some additional sleep.

I think the material I've been reading for classes has had a hand in affecting my disposition lately. One of my courses deals with the failure of an artist to express himself the way he wanted, his talent beaten into the ground until he died a joke, a has-been, virtually creditless in the eyes of the general public. I watched The Lady from Shanghai today and was struck by the intrigue of the scenes in the aquarium, the Chinese theatre, and the hall of mirrors. But I can't watch it and not feel every instance of obvious studio-made cuts and awful overdubbing that could have been avoided if Welles had been allowed a final edit.

Another course gears toward the history of racism in this country, featuring story after story of struggle, senseless violence, loneliness, and persecution. Lately I've been reading short stories by Austin Clarke, stories that take place in the streets of Toronto, places I'm becoming more and more familiar with. While a lot of his work is terrific, it portrays black men and women time and again failing utterly in their attempts to be subjective notions of "Canadian." Often they die or are killed in the process. And I sit in my room in Toronto by myself and the despair gets to me, as it would anyone else with a claim to humanity, I would hope.

The power went out tonight for about half an hour. From my balcony, patches of the city were still lit, but the predominant area around the building was pitch black, even the traffic lights. It looked a bit like the end of the world. Strangely enough, I downloaded the new Radiohead record today. The last time a giant blackout hit Ontario, I was safely in a Montreal hotel on a trip to see Radiohead perform. I'd like to write something here about Radiohead and music in general soon. Music has always been something I've had a strong passion for, and I don't devote it the attention I used to.

I spent about six hours in Robarts today, hunching over Bibliography and Touch of Evil readings, taking notes, and checking out the film Kiss Me Deadly - an insane film noir from 1955 that obviously influenced Tarantino, Scorsese and even David Lynch. Towards the end of the original noir era, the films had the tendency to explode out from under themselves. The protagonists would often experience delusion and go crazy. But this film is unparalleled in how it falls apart. It has to be seen to be believed.

I'm in love with Media Commons. They're well stocked in old movies that I can sign out for a couple of days at a time, hence my being able to watch Shanghai and eventually Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night in the comfort of Jay's own home. By the end of the school year I figure I'll be able to attribute about a fifth of my tuition to money otherwise spent on video rentals.

In seven hours I'm doing my first presentation of the year on Touch of Evil. It took a little more work than I thought it would, which is why I'm up at 3 AM. I'll have to lug my laptop to school and back, which I'm not looking forward to. I don't particularly enjoy the commute, especially back from school. Toronto seems to be in perpetual rush hour.

I really enjoyed working on this presentation. I went into school early and watched the 108-minute laserdisc version of TOE in the Media Commons room of Robarts library. Media Commons essentially acts as a video store. You can take out (mostly) anything you want for a couple of days for free.

After a quick bite at Tim Hortons, I had my second Opera class and watched some clips of different performances of Orpheus. Professors Clark and Hutcheon are thus far stellar in the classroom. Professor Clark used a PIANO to emphasize a point. My GOD. In class today I learned by video, audio recording and piano. It's a dream come true.

I should try for sleep. Six hours and ten minutes. Wish me luck.