I met up with the folks in my Bibliography group to discuss the annotation assignment and had one of those moments in which I felt completely outclassed intelligence wise. The people I go to school with are so smart. It's going to force me to work that much harder, in the long run. Afterwards I swung by HMV to pick up the new Buck 65 album, and while I was there I grabbed The Truman Show and Shaun of the Dead for cheap.

When I got home I dialed up Andrea and we talked on the phone for about three hours. I hadn't heard her voice since September and it made me feel as though a bird were alive in my chest. Conveniently enough she received the package I sent her ON her birthday, so that worked out nicely. Despite the fact that we talk almost everyday there are certain things that need to be said in person when the opportunity is given. 57 days and I'm Berlin-bound.

I watched Spielberg's adaptation of War of the Worlds, which had great visuals but lacked a bit in the arenas of character and plot. Still, it has scenes that are humbling in their realization - mob rule in the streets, a train passing while completely aflame, and the first appearance of the alien crafts in particular. I'd say it's worth checking out.

After the movie I finished off my latest short story (title: "To Become Immortal, and Then Die") and submitted it to the In/Words crew. I tried getting down to business with a reading, but kept getting sucked into this debate with some people on Facebook about racism. I'm considering it good exercise for my African-Canadian Lit class. Grad school involves a whole new level of rationalization when it comes to goofing off.

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.

Today was much better. It started out with Touch of Evil and proceeded into another lunch at the Red Room with Tony and Eileen. About three quarters of the restaurant was furnished with couches and upholstery. Tony and Eileen both seem like nice people and they're entertaining to listen to. Eileen really reminds me of Esther.

After that I studied up for African-Canadian literature. Nick Walsh (which I just noticed is eerily close to Nitz Walsh) was one of the presenters on Djanet Sears' Harlem Duet. Nick has got to have his eyes on being a professor, as he's one of those people that really goes all out for presentations and discussion. Turns out the guy's brother is the guitarist for Jen Militia.

Sometimes I find it difficult to talk in that class because Professor Clarke speaks from the heart and I feel like my relatively useless observations about Bakhtin's notion of polyphonic textual nature as it relates to Sears' play aren't going to register in quite the same way. I'm also white. Now, granted, 95% of the class is white. But I don't want to feel as though I'm talking in politically correct platitudes just to contribute to a discussion. It wouldn't be fair to the material. Professor Clarke talks at great length about the texts we study, and that's to be expected, but it's hard to deliver a complimentary idea that's more classically theoretical in approach when we're dealing with such emotional subject matter. That said, I'm learning a lot in the class, and the books have all been great reads.

I chatted a bit with Brooke afterwards, about where we're from and such. She mentioned a couple of places she's been to in Ottawa (including this one Russian bar...). It gave me a chance to gush about the city. She's from London, and I told her I'd heard stories...

I made the walk from Keele station again. After I got home I lounged for a bit befoe popping in Death in Venice, which I watched for an hour or so before putting on Orson Welles' broadcast of The War of the Worlds. I laid on the couch and listened to it for the first time, 69 years to the day it was first broadcast, and let its imagery play around inside my head. For those of you who don't know much about the story of the broadcast, it's a really interesting one: read more about it here.

Tomorrow I'm meeting with my Opera group before heading over to Matt's to do up Halloween. Have a happy one.

Today I was waiting for the bus when a car whirled around the corner and pulled over. A lady in the passenger seat asked me if I knew where St. Clair Avenue was. I thought I had an idea, so I started to point, but then I second guessed myself and told her, "No, sorry," in an effort to back away from the responsibility of getting her ass lost. She gave me a look and gesture as if to say, "Then why the hell were you about to tell me?" before the car drove away. Of course, five seconds after she took off I realized that my gut geographical instinct was correct. But that's what happens when I'm put on the spot.

The people I've encountered in Toronto are by action a lot meaner and nastier than folks in Ottawa, though I may be generalizing from a bad mood. I really felt as though I was going through the motions today, not wanting to interact with the world. Nevertheless I got through class and headed home. My Opera class ends at 5 PM, which is right in the middle of rush hour, so the trip home is always intense, especially when you don't want to deal with it at a level of great seething passion.

I was waiting for the bus at Keele Station and I was one of the first on the platform. 15 minutes passed without a bus showing up, and by that time the platform was overflowing with commuters. I spent about five minutes wondering about the mechanics of walking home before I decided to go ahead and try it under the reasoning that it would be good exercise in my typically exerciseless existence. I left the crowd in my dust and hiked up Keele Street.

Honestly, the walk did me a lot of good, mind and body wise. I'm going to make the effort more often. It only took about 40 minutes from station to front door and it gave me the opportunity to grasp a better idea of the area west of my apartment (the bus travels east before heading south. Keele is cut up into two chunks and it's taken me a while to wrap my head around it). After arriving home I ate some dinner, studied a bit, finished off X-Files Season 2 and vegged online.

I felt ahead of the game today, given that I finished a couple of film readings early, but I decided to get back to investigating wikis. I signed up for one hosted at Wikispaces but the code control sucked ass, so I added another at PBWiki, which seems to function a bit better. Honestly, though, the WYSIWYG editors at these sites are awful and wiki markup isn't nearly as friendly as HTML. I did manage to create a couple of pages on a free membership. The idea is that if I start paying, I can mess around with the CSS and eliminate the need for templates. As for being ahead of the game, I spent a few HOURS messing around with it without realizing how much time was passing. It always happens that way when I'm designing. It's probably why I don't remember much about college, all that time spent in front of a computer screen flying by as fast as it did.

I did manage to finish the majority of my readings. The plan is to go in a bit early tomorrow and work on Death in Venice-related research for my group meeting on Wednesday.

I heard back about an email I sent to the Canadian Council for the Arts, who told me that I couldn't apply for the grant I had my eye on. There is still one option I have if I apply as a collective, so I'm going to give it a shot. Thankfully, the application isn't due until the end of next month. I bought a phone card online that will allow me to call Andrea on her birthday and watched Night of the Living Dead, which made me think back to past Zombiethons with Ottawa folk. Ash was kind enough to catch me up on some of the action from this year's installment.

(WARNING: Major spoilers to The Shining ahead)

"...there is no way, within the film, to be sure with any confidence exactly what happens, or precisely how, or really why."

Roger Ebert wrote that about The Shining in one of his "Great Movies" reviews. He meant it in a positive context, taking into account that the film is about madness. I watched it for the first time in a couple of years tonight. I had it primed to go on that list of horror films I mentioned yesterday.

I haven't read the King novel, but I love the film. It gets better with every viewing. You put more and more pieces together but always wind up with a puzzle that doesn't look like a sane conception. There are parts of The Shining I just don't get, but any indication of success in trying makes the film a pure experience. That's what I appreciate about a great horror film. To me, the real horror in any situation is having my world turned sideways and made uncanny. I was online today, reading reviews for Saw IV which has just hit theatres. I saw the first Saw movie and thought it was a neat idea poorly executed on important levels. I didn't see any of the sequels, but curiosity drove me to read about them. The descriptions portray the films simply as sequences of torture in which people are mutilated in the most sadistic, barbarous ways imaginable. I understand the visceral thrill of that kind of film - who doesn't remember being a kid and talking about the gory details of the latest slasher flick to hit video, especially if you hadn't seen it? But even given the extreme violence of films like those in the Saw series, I don't find movies of that ilk scary. Disgusting, sure. Gory and brutal, yes, but not scary.

To me, that's why The Shining is so brilliant. It has moments of extreme violence, but they're buried in piercing tensions and a psychologically draining narrative. When Jack suddenly jumps out and kills Halloran with an axe blow to the heart, it's more horrifying than two hours filled with the same footage. This time I was really into how frighteningly Nicholson plays his role. He makes the transition from an eloquent, polite speaker at the beginning of the film to an animal shouting in agonizing frustration in the hedge maze at the end. When he pursues Wendy slowly up the staircase, threatening her, telling her he's going to "bash her brains in, bash 'em right the fuck in," no matter how many times you've seen the film there's a look in his eye that convinces you he might just do it this time:



The film works on so many levels, really, that you can pick one and enjoy it apart from the rest, which might be sound advice if you're trying to make sense of it on the whole.

I also watched Wild Strawberries. I can't communicate how wonderfully affected I am by Bergman's films. His dialogue is always so rich and passionate and full of existential longing. Wild Strawberries plays a lot with surrealist elements - I remembered seeing a clip of one of the more nightmarish bits played in an undergraduate film class. The film is about an elderly professor coming to terms with old age, remembering back to moments of past happiness and sadness, ultimately realizing that he hasn't yet ceased learning and instructing at 78. Bergman constantly describes his character as "growing cold," hardened to life, jaded in the midst of a life weighed down by thought. On a road trip he offers a ride to young people squabbling (even fighting physically) over the existence of God. They ask him his opinion and he comes to his own self-realization - that life isn't about proving God's existence or absence one way or the other. In times of sadness, rather than grow too despondent over present remedies, it benefits one more to think back on times of past joy.

I read a few film articles today, including a couple by Bazin. I still have a few more to go. I watched some X-Files over chicken soup - my cough is turning resolutely into a cold. I downloaded a new version of Internet Explorer because some websites like CNN.com weren't properly formatted in the version I was using. I also had a conversation with Andrea today about her troubles with a public journal that her employer found, and it intimidated me into making this journal private. On the bright side I can probably start using a lot more profanity and being completely honest about people I dislike. None of those people belong to my cherished, valuable readership of course.

Reading Landow and discussing him in class prompted me to look a little further at wiki technology today. I went online and messed around with editing and attachments at TWiki.org. I could see myself really becoming absorbed in it.

I tried making a list of my ten favorite horror films, but I couldn't count off more than six. I don't watch as much horror as I used to (yet another indication that I'm mellowing, perhaps). That said I watched Nosferatu for the first time tonight and found Max Schreck's performance utterly creepy. Take a look at the moment he rises from the coffin in the hold of the ship. Tell me that didn't make people completely WET themselves in 1922.

I also watched Schindler's List, which is an obviously heartwrenching movie, but I didn't feel truly affected until Schindler breaks down towards the end. It's a triumph of Liam Neeson's to allow his character to shift the way he does, and I can't recall the last time I've seen such a realistic flow of character development in a film. That scene MAKES the film, because you see a man who has spent the last three hours onscreen slowly changing his mind about Jewish inferiority without blinking finally pour his life at the feet of the people he ultimately tries to protect.

I've got a copy of Bergman's Wild Strawberries to watch. It's going to be a dour weekend.

I spent some time in the library searching out work by Barthes to no avail, though I did nab a copy of Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge. I also sent off some mail and listened to SModcast. My cough has still not gone away, so it might be time to hit the IDA.