Field Trip City

Happy Halloween. I met up with the Opera folks and went over what we're going to look at until our next meeting in a couple of weeks. I have a few ideas regarding thematic, biographical and linguistic angles that I can bring up on Death in Venice, but I need to do more research. Tomorrow I'm meeting with ANOTHER group to go over an annotation exercise for Bibliography, which sounds pretty intense. The readings and research at this level are constant and voluminous.

I watched the Peanuts Halloween special on YouTube before heading over to Matt's. His new place is in a nice spot but he and Kim have apparently been having their share of problems with the apartment. They've been riding their landlord a bit to take care of them. They made some vegan pitas for supper and Matt and I settled in to watch Halloween I and II. The original Halloween is a suspense classic and a dictionary definition of proper horror execution. I hadn't seen the second in years, but it wasn't as good as I recalled. It has a great elements to it (the ending may be even better than the first), but those elements are intercut with a gore-intent bodycount victimizing people the audience can't possibly care less about. Halloween is scarier because the people who die, though fewer in number, are more or less established personalities. Plus, it's set at a spookier time of day - the first half of the film sees the sun gradually setting behind the red and orange trees of suburbia, and you get the sense that the inevitable is coming with the approaching night.

I'm exhausted. Tomorrow I'll be phoning my girl to wish her a happy birthday. It will be outstanding to hear her voice.