Woo! I finished Moby-Dick last night, read the whole thing in less than a week! Yeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaahhh!!! Suck it, Melville!

Wow. I have to say, that was one of the most grueling works I've had to read in a while; the print was tiny, and it took forever to get through one page. The last 35 pages took me two hours last night, and I consider myself a pretty fast reader. Plus, the story went on so many diversions, talking about the mating habits of whales, and how they strip the blubber from a whale (called ribboning) to boil it down to oil, and all the different functions that have to be performed aboard ship. I mean, it was interesting stuff, and I'm glad I read it, but the book was 400 pages of set-up then 30 pages of blistering excitement. On the whole, I liked it, but man, was it a chore to get through.

I also re-read John K's novella "Another Orphan", which is about a commodities broker who wakes up on the Pequod. The jokes and references to characters in Moby-Dick finally made sense, and the title of the story was given a much better sense of importance. I could really see this time why the story won the 1983 Nebula. I can't remember if the story appears in his collection The Pure Product, but it's definitely in Meeting in Infinity.

This morning, for whatever reason, I woke early and got to the Global Village coffeehouse (my new campus hangout) two hours before class. I critiqued the stories for tonight's class (that I was simply too tired to get to last night after finishing the above book), and read a bit in White Noise, which I'll be drawing from for my big postmodernism paper. Speaking of, I was a little worried about the "outline" I turned in today, so I talked to my prof after class, and he said it was exactly what he was looking for. I'll be writing on the zombification of America through commercialism and consumerism, as represented in Rushdie's Fury, and Dr. Thompson thought this was an intriguing topic (and liked the word zombification). We went over, from start to finish, what he expected out of the paper, and it was extraordinarily helpful. He compared critical essays to a lawyer arguing his case in the courtroom, an analogy which is now firmly entrenched in my brain. I now know how to tackle this paper (and any future papers), and don't feel helpless about this anymore.

So I guess I'm sort of caught up. I need to have a rough draft of the pomo paper done by Monday, but that seems to be the biggest, most immediate thing. I have a paper to do in my romanticism class, but that's due at the end of the semester, which is, gah! only a few weeks away. I'll be able to relax again in the middle of December.

I'm not sure how many other big readings I have left. There are only small things in the pomo class (and no more position papers, yay!), but in romanticism, we still have Poe, and Whitman, and we're scheduled to read Walden. I'm not sure if we'll even have time to do it.

***

In non-school related news, I saw The Matrix: Revolutions last Friday after work, and am still chewing it over. I liked it, but it still left so many unanswered questions. It was straight-forward action almost the whole time, and not a lot of philosophical speculation like the previous two films, which is a big thing I liked about them. They also spent quite a lot of time on the secondary characters, almost more than the primary three, which was strange. I know those characters feature more in the video game Enter the Matrix, and it's possible the Wachowskis wanted them to have screen time too. Janet has some interesting things to say about it, and there's a decent review at Science Fiction Weekly. I'm probably going to have to see it again before I can render any decent conclusions.

On the chapbook front, we've sold about half of our copies, so if you don't have yours, get it quick. They make good Christmas presents, and the first story is actually a Christmas story (sort of). Santa's in it, and the Buddha, and Janet did a really cool mandala illustration to accompany it. What more could you want? I also put up a reviews page on the TCP site, and will happily post first impressions as well as in-depth reviews, if anyone's interested.

Things have been pretty solitary lately, what with the business of school and all. My parents came over on Saturday and we talked some more about wedding stuff. But other than that, I didn't hardly leave my apartment all weekend. This coming weekend will be another busy one as I do much work on the pomo paper, but I'll need to go out at some point. I need social human contact! And of course, I'm missing Janet like hell, but that's nothing new.

---

Now Reading:
White Noise by Don DeLillo

Stories Out to Publishers:
2

Books Read This Year:
53

Zines/Fiction Mags Read This Year:
35