Hurrah! Carl has revived the Once Upon a Time Challenge for a second go. I love a good annual challenge; it lends such a sense of stability to my reading life. This is why I am thinking of reviving the Unread Authors Challenge for a second go round later in the summer. At any rate, last year I had a rare challenge success with the Once Upon a Time Challenge, combining the fun with the virtuous to read Grendel, The Golden Ass, Something Rotten, Morphology of the Folktale, and A Wizard of Earthsea. All were delightful and rich with new knowledge, and I am now eager to plunge back in to my mountain of fantasy-tinged unread books.
To see the rules, or join the challenge, go to Carl's site. Here they are in brief:
There are three quests you can follow in your journey through the four relevant genres of fantasy, folklore, fairy tales, and mythology.
Quest 1: Read at least 5 books that fit somewhere within the Once Upon a Time II criteria. They might all be fantasy, or folklore, or fairy tales, or mythology…or your five books might be a combination from the four genres.
Quest 2: Read at least one book from each of the four categories. In this quest you will be reading 4 books total: one fantasy, one folklore, one fairy tale, and one mythology.
Quest 3: Fulfill the requirements for Quest the First or Quest the Second AND top it off with a June reading of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The challenge runs from March 21, 2008 to June 20, 2008.
This year I am again going for Quest 1. Here is a short list of five, with a few alternates thrown in:
Ovid Metamorphoses
Octavia Butler Parable of the Talents
Ursula K. Le Guin The Left Hand of Darkness
Joseph Campbell The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Susanna Clarke The Ladies of Grace Adieu
Alternates/Extra Credit:
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
Inkheart by Cornelia Funke
A Sudden, Wild Magic by Diana Wynn Jones
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
The Complete Greek Tragedies: Sophocles II (Ajax, The Women of Trachis, Electra & Philoctetes)
I like to combine a little bit of classic(al) literature, a little bit of academic study, a little bit of self-defined genre fiction, and a little bit of mainstream borrowing of fantasy's trappings. I can barely wait till it begins!
What other news? I have just started an intriguing tale of the London suburbs that LibraryThing sent me as part of the Early Reviewers program (I fell behind in reviewing these a bit during the dissertation-finishing craze, so I am now making them top reading priority): Rachel Cusk's Arlington Park. So far the characters seem deeply sad in their utter lack of redeeming features and painfully accurate humanity. I am busily preparing to teach the second half of Don Quixote when I return from Spring Break, which presents a veritable mountain of reading for the next few days.
D and I have been watching Dexter digitally - it's amazing how much of the day can be frittered away with unlimited digital movies from Netflix, when one has access to a PC rather than an ineligible spinster of a Mac. Michael C. Hall is quite brilliant in it, as he was in Six Feet Under, but the rest of the cast often seems strained and under-rehearsed (or too broadly conceived to begin with). The opening credits are as terrifying a piece of mundanity as has ever been produced by the human mind (my friend C warned me about their creepy genius, but I still wasn't adequately prepared). In fact, it is this play between banal monstrosity and serial killer abnormality that is the show's greatest strength. Although it is (famously) about a sociopathic serial killer who works for the Miami cops as a blood spatter specialist and only kills other murderers who have eluded more conventional justice, Dexter (for all his inability to *feel* as a human should) is no more numbed and insensitive to the crimes they investigate than any other character in this fictional force. All of them have, in one way or another, dulled their humanity in the face of ambition, distraction, or (at the very least) the deadening scraping of repeated horror.
Other bitlets of interest:
In America, Mondays are theatrical "dark days," but in Britain, where they have the same standard M-F workweek, theatres are dark on Sunday. Now the National Theatre is following patron demand and moving to stage Sunday performances as well.
Are prizes that limit submissions by the gender of the artist (like the Orange Prize for Literature) inherently sexist? I am sorry to admit I hadn't really given it any thought, despite the large part of each day I devote to feminist rants against the gender-machinations of pop culture (a ritual that I perversely feel absolves me of guilt for addictedly consuming said culture). I was intrigued to learn that a number of prominent female authors refuse to allow their publishers to submit their novels for the Orange Prize, on feminist grounds. Food for thought, certainly.
I have also been catching up on my blog-reading (a monumental task), and have decided to join the Sunday Salon. I'm absurdly excited about the opportunity to devote time every Sunday to guilt-free pleasure reading and blogging. I won't be able to participate this Sunday, because I will be traveling back to the East Coast, but I hope to start the following weekend.
Last night D took me out to Osteria Mozza in LA for a delightful dinner in celebration of finishing my dissertation (fingers crossed that it actually gets accepted). Could I have been any happier than when I saw that this restaurant offered no fewer than FIVE varieties of burrata (mozzarella that has been mixed with heavy cream midway through the cheesemaking process)? I could not. I briefly considered ordering all five variations on my new gastronomical beloved before I finally agreed to have merely one (it is a sign of the depth of my love for D that I even gave him half, without growling possessively at him), as well as a pasta course (the most roll-your-eyes-back-in-your-head delicate and delicious goat cheese ravioli) and a steak in a balsamic sauce. As we were finishing our main courses, I remarked that I was getting moderately full. D replied: "I don't know: if you saw a bucket of burrata I don't think you would pass it by." I closed my eyes: "Are there any words in the English language more beautiful," I asked him, "than 'bucket of burrata'?". (This was not the first time this week that I had eaten burrata, I blush to admit. I had a really excellent dish of my dairy darling at a dissertation-celebrating meal at Obelisk in DC with my parents. God, it was good.)
But then I woke up this morning to more rejections from jobs I had applied for, which, truth be told, made me too depressed to get out of bed. (There is an important lesson here: don't check email in bed.) I can't even describe how brutal the academic job search has been emotionally. Best not to dwell on it, I guess. So I finally wrenched myself out of bed, cleaned the kitchen, and headed out for the farmer's market, where I bought strawberries, some very tasty looking asparagus, and the world's most expensive tomato.
Now it is time for a concerted dwelling on the positive. The goodness of having my dissertation finished (PLEASE let it pass, ye gods of higher education) goes without saying, but a more immediate, if no less anxiety-inducing, source of happiness is the fact that UNC is the number one seed in the nation in the NCAA tournament. Go Heels! Oh, college basketball, what a balm you are for my life's woes. I give you, just as a taste of the delights of this season, the game winning shot that Tyler Hansbrough tossed off against Virginia Tech in the ACC Championship, and (even more delightful) the goofy, loose-limbed dance of joy he (normally utterly taciturn in his concentration) did after watching it go in:
What's more, it emerges that UNC has the best academic record (measured by graduation rates) among its tourney-bound athletes of any of the #1 and #2 seeds, a considerably better showing than its posh nemesis, Duke. The story of the conflict between the two parts of the term "student-athlete" that this study tells is a grim one, but I feel proud of UNC for defying the national statistics. It is good to be able to feel positive about the pedagogical soundness of college sports (and about public education in general) even as I am donning elaborate UNC-themed outfits, enacting vast superstitious rituals to guarantee our continued sportive success, and yelling obscenities at the television and its representations of our foes.
Egging me on through this cathartic madness is Will Blythe's delightful account of his lifelong experience of the Duke-Carolina rivalry (he is a Tar Heel, not to worry), which was loaned to me by my kind and surprisingly open-minded Dookie friend. Here is one of many tales Blythe tells in To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever, of the time when he had to interview Uma Thurman just after the season opener against Santa Clara, a game which seemed certain to be a Tar Heel blowout:
I was scanning the box score to the Santa Clara game when Thurman arrived. She was lovely, a long pink scarf draped around her swan's neck.
"This is unbelievable," I said.
Out on the West Coast, North Carolina had lost to Santa Clara, 77 to 66. I explained the shocking nature of the upset to Thurman, the way it had ripped a hole in my sense of normalcy, toyed with my expectations, screwed my sense that the world would deliver justice and satisfaction. [...]
Thurman was very kind and tried to keep my spirits up. She was going through some hard times herself, like the tag end of her marriage to Ethan Hawke, which I had to admit was painful, having myself gone through the dissolution of a long matrimony. On the other hand, that was just life. Theoretically, you could always get another spouse. This was basketball. You couldn't get another season with Sean May, Marvin Williams, and Rashad McCants on the same team. No way.
"I'm so sorry," Thurman said. "Let's not talk about it," I said. "It might make you feel better," she said. "You don't believe that," I said. "Not really." "How's your love life?" "Let's not talk about it." (20-21)
I have just reached the part in which Blythe, who has written for the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review as well as Rolling Stone, uses the work of 19th century English essayist William Hazlitt on hatred to illuminate his feelings for Duke. Yes, indeed. It was a good, if, mmm, multifaceted education we got at Carolina.