I'm going a little stir crazy being in the apartment so much this weekend. I have to return a library book today, so I'll be rejoining the land of the living, however briefly. I made it about halfway through the MacEwen biography, wrote my McCaffrey response (which ended up being a comparison of Perloff and Susan Sontag's ideas of interpretation) and watched my first Fassbinder film, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, which I'm looking at this week in Race and Cinema. What makes that film so interesting is the back story behind it. The male lead was Fassbinder's lover for a period and ended up hanging himself in prison after stabbing three people.

I went to the grocery store yesterday, but it was closed, so I ordered pizza. Jay went home for Easter and to my family's for dinner. My parents packed up some food for me, which was really thoughtful, and now I don't have to shop for a few days. When he came back I was knee-deep in playing True Crime: Streets of LA on the PS2. It's fun to run over and shoot people. I tried playing Final Fantasy XII but there was too much storyline and not enough actual gameplay.

I also talked with Rachael for a bit, which was nice, because we haven't talked in months. Today I'll be reading more about MacEwen. I'm liking it a lot more than Sullivan's last biography. She's more inclined to involve the process of writing about a subject, and I find that the most interesting part.

I have Douglas Coupland's email address. It's surprisingly plain and straightforward. I googled it and it isn't posted anywhere on the Internet. I've been informed that he'd be interested in talking to me after Professor Sullivan pitched the PhD thesis angle. Now it's a matter of drafting a formal letter that I can send to him and his agent to hopefully set up a time and mode of interview.

No wonder I can't sleep.

My analysis on Knud Rasmussen is due at 6 PM today and I still have to watch the bloody film. It's a scene analysis, though, which typically writes quickly. I just have to make sure I put more of me in it. That's my new strategy for the semester. No more summaries. Me me me. You want my opinion, you've got it.

To work.

Since I returned from Europe I've been waking up under my own power at 7 AM, including today, though I chose to sleep in until 9. I have the feeling I won't be able to sustain this pattern.

WHAT I'M IN FOR (PART ONE)

Day one back at U of T is in the can. My first class on Tragedy in African and American Literature under Professor Quayson has a pretty intimidating workload: 2-4 page responses due every week, a presentation, a thesis proposal, a paper, plus a 40-item annotated bibliography. He also made it clear that he can't stand lateness or laziness. I should probably just live at the library like I was originally planning.

The Avant-Garde: Theory and Practice with Professor (call me Tim) Yu sounds amazing. I can already tell his lecture style is comprehensive and that the material is going to be thought-provoking (with even some Canadian content thrown in - Steve McCaffrey's Seven Pages Missing). Five 250-word response papers, presentation, paper, a 5-7 item annotated bibliography, plus a participation mark.

The Pragmatics of Writing Bibliography is helmed by Professor Sullivan, who knows many famous people and their relatives. She's also written biographies for Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Smart and Gwendolyn MacEwen. It's my smallest course by way of population (eight people) and according to Sullivan will be run like a workshop. Fine by me. Because I was late in registering for the course, I missed the email instructing the students to have a subject picked for a research project to work on. I'd really like to do Coupland in preparation for my PhD but it might be tricky given that we're ideally supposed to choose a subject whose records are kept in Toronto. I'll think on it. The course has a short reading list (four texts) and further requires a project bibliography, a paper and a presentation of research.

In between classes I went to the Varsity and saw Atonement, which blew me away with its technique of telling a story visually before gradually setting it to words. It brought to mind the atmospheric elements of Picnic at Hanging Rock and the brutal scope of Cold Mountain.

Tonight from 6-8 I have my final course in Race and Cinema. After that I'll pack a tent and make my way for Robarts.