Another Fry Up

So you can share my addiction: herewith the YouTube links for the most recent episode of QI:  part one, part two and part three.  It's a pip.  If you don't end up hooked on the show, you're a stronger soul than I.  (Careful, NSFW due to bits of naughty language.)

Also, finally picked up Fry's The Stars' Tennis Balls, which I had been trying to locate for some time.  You have to love his bio from it: 

Stephen Fry was born in the twentieth century and will die in the twenty-first.  In the course of writing six books he has drunk four hundred and twelve thousand cups of coffee, smoked one a half million cigarettes and worn out nineteen pairs of trousers.  He has no birth sign.

The novel's a variation on The Count of Monte Cristo, though its title is torn from Webster's The Duchess of Malfi.  Can't wait until I can actually take the time to read it. 

A Little Note For Now

Consider this an update more in theory than in fact.  As ever of late, I'm whelmed by marking that seems only to worsen with each passing week; in the past week alone, I've probably been grading assignments for thirty to forty hours entirely exclusive of my normal teaching duties and (worse inevitably following worse) making all kinds of extra-curricular meetings for students who didn't, or couldn't be bothered to, signup to discuss coursework in normal times.  Let's just say it's exhausting and leave it at that. 

In the interim, until I can actually think about a real entry, herewith a few short takes:

• Finally watched, in bits and pieces, the Guy Pearce film of The Count of Monte Cristo, which is a travesty of a film for anyone that knows the Dumas novel.  While it's nothing new for Hollywood to revamp a tale for its own purposes, the unmitigated evisceration of Dumas' plot, right down to excluding major characters and excoriating all of the issues of mercy so key to the novel, is utterly unpardonable.  More sadly, though, it reminded me of how long it has been since I read anything for pleasure; seems like an eternity. 
  
• Though I can't feign much interest in the technological material, I discovered to my great joy that Stephen Fry-- the actor, director, novelist, comedian and general polymath-- has a blog.  I was particularly impressed by his discussion (a "blessay," as he calls it) of the global warming debate, partially by way of Pascal's Wager before he rightly rejects Pascal's practical cynicism.  It's long, and perhaps too dense and tangential for most, but it's a terrific read, especially if you know Fry's voice and can it hear it in your head as the words roll by; he and Lewis Black are the only comedians capable of regularly turning material into virtuoso comic arias.
  
• Speaking of Stephen Fry, unfortunately we in North America are not privy to most of his television projects as they inexplicably don't get aired over here.  Blessed be, then, YouTube, which offers most of the episodes of his brilliant series QI, a rare programme that's both delightfully informative and deliciously funny.  I highly recommend going over to YouTube and entering "QI Fry" as your search terms and savouring the results.  I also managed to purchase Fry's Bright Young Things last week, his film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies; it's quite good, though the last sections drag a bit.  Watch it if you can find it, though the latter will certainly be more difficult than the former.
  
• Can you tell I'm procrastinating from marking?  I thought so.
  
• Have been trying with some of my classes in recent weeks to add some oddities to add some spice to the duller lessons of grammar & writing.  Did some lectures on the history of the word "word," contranyms, and the counter-instinctive nature of prose, as opposed to the instinctual nature of poetry (with the primary unit of logic for the former being the sentence, but the latter being the line).  One wonders, however, how much any of this takes in convincing my young charges to thing more actively about language.  It has, at least, to be more interesting than the myriad rules for comma usage.  *shrug*

Okay, I've obliged this blog long enough for now.  Marking beckons like an angry shrew, so I'd best attend its call.  Until later, probably much later,

the increasingly recondite, scattered and almost completely exasperated Dr J

Bloody Brilliant

Although I should note that XP never, ever rebooted so quickly before.  And Vista, well Vista, the less I say about that intrusive piece of fecund technology the better (lest Microflaccid decide to make any George Lucas-like "improvements")....

link via Clevergirl, with thanks.

She's Baaaaaack....

And this time, she's got company.  Gawd help the Internets-- and all of us.  ;-)

(Historical side-note: It was Christie and RK that were primarily responsible for kicking this blog into existence so many years ago, way back when I actually thought I would maintain it diligently.  Anyway, now you know whom to blame.)

Spending all day marking & trying to figure out how to handle a new transit strike that promises to start very soon.  Life, ain't she grand?  Pffft.

Jesus H. Kristeva

Sorry, everyone, but I haven't had any time whatsoever in the past-- has it really been?-- two months to write.  Such is life at New Institution, alas.  That's also unlikely to change anytime soon, unfortunately. 

I was reminded tonight, though, of an old "issue" for (inter-)textualists, the one commonly called Tommy Westphall Syndrome.  (Make sure you read the "external links" at the bottom.)  Given the spectacularly, to say nothing of circularly, onanistic nature of such thinking, I was reminded that the Westphall Syndrome is probably the best example in the past thirty years of a broad cultural koan, and a ludicrously over-considered one at that.  Two other thoughts occurred to me.  One:  that this "riddle," if it deserves to be called that, reminds me of the episode of Frasier in which the good shrink, bored at work, subconsciously manufactures for himself a dream that's psychologically indecipherable just for the challenge.  The other, of course, was much cheekier, and speaks to the absurdity of the riddling itself:  that the pontificators should be well and gladly pleased that St. Elsewhere never crossed over with Newhart.  Then whose dream would television be?  Or would all dreams be collective after all?  In which case, not only would the world, and all its fictional worlds, be dreams within dreams, but shared ones to boot?  In which case, we'd have gone beyond Kristevan incredulities and landed somewhere in Jung's town.  How's that for an imponderable ponderable?