Eschewed Obfuscation

Both of these were read for English class. Just some notes and thoughts.


Beowulf: A New Verse Translation
by Seamus Heaney (trans.)
213 pages (trade paperback)
Genre: Poetry/Literary/Historical

I really like Heaney's translation, though Kennedy's strict adherence to the poetic structure is attractive. Here though, Heaney's voice shines through as he becomes the unnamed poet and writer of Beowulf.  (It was amusing when we did the scansion exercise and people were tapping or clapping out the rhythm and still getting it wrong.) I'm rarely in a poetry-reading mood, and it was a pain to read this as assigned for class when I yearned for some decent action prose, but that reflects not at all on the actual merits. The version I read had side-by-side Old English and modern translation, which was nice for linguistic curiosity.

For the record, I still think that Grendel was a real monster, not a metaphorical fear; he was probably a human outcast from the community, and exaggerated in the tale. Which brings me to...


Grendel
by John Gardner
174 pages (hardcover)
Genre: Fiction/Literary/Historical/Post-Modern

In this novel, the idea of the Shaper really resonated with me. The Shaper makes Grendel more monstrous and the Danes more heroic; yet, he is the sole recorder of their society's history, as keeper of their oral tradition. His words change the meaning of the world for Grendel. And personally, I believe that words create (not only express, but create) meaning. The nihilism lesson was also mildly interesting, if sometimes only skim-worthy. It's a short novel and plays with intriguing ideas of structure and metastructure.

Yesterday was my first class for the English 101 course I'm taking, Composition & Critical Thought. The professor is funny and engaging; we're writing a research paper, but we get to pick any illustration from the main textbook to research/analyze. The textbook, Seeing and Writing 3 by Donald and Christine McQuade, is wonderful. I think the course will be challenging but doable, which is a great combination. It's every Monday and Wednesday evening, so another class tomorrow. The prof handed out a great essay by Zoe Ingalls, "The Discipline of the Hand," on which we're to write a comparison essay (drawing vs. writing) due next week. The essay/article concerns sketching, but the essential principles can be applied to both critical and creative writing.

"It's like dancing," [Ms. Gussow] says. "When you are truly dancing, you don't consider each movement that you are making. Something impels you--the rhythm of the music, the rhythm of your body. I think that when you draw rapidly, a similar instinctual movement opens up."

Profound, indeed.

I've barely thought about Alex recently, much less written any more of her story. My writing has been more and more neglected--I haven't even gotten around to finishing book reviews for LJ. I owe two banners to various friends, promises I made a month ago, and I don't remember when I last opened Photoshop. I just found a great resource for movies, but am putting off downloading because I know it's just a time drain. I always end up putting LJ reading and Achaea before everything else. Homework gets done, of course.
Life is...tiring.

Thanks so much, overflood! I love it. El-jay!

So, today I discovered that Hotmail appends ADVERTISEMENTS at the bottom of every email. WTF?!? I'm seriously considering switching to Gmail now, for everyday use as well as archive. Arg.

And I still have a lot of section reviews to do, it's 9:36 and I'm tired, but instead of doing my homework I'm downloading fsts. XD

Photoshop is stressful, not stress-relieving. Ignore whatever tiger_san says. XD Spent like two hours this afternoon working on a photo-manip wallpaper (admittedly, it's taking a lot longer because it's my first photo-manip ever), and I'm not done yet. Just realized that I'm probably going to use a different image for the background, so that's an hour's work wasted. But I'm satisfied with the coloring I did on the model, changing the silver headpiece to gold/copper and the dress from gray to green.

I'm not even going to think about the other afternoon I spent extracting and smudging the model photo, my eyes hurt just thinking about it. This wallpaper is definitely the most time-consuming Photoshop work I've done. I'm thinking like 6-8 hrs already, and I'm only halfway finished. Not counting time spent on deviantART and stock.xchng browsing for stock photos, because I got distracted a lot. Which might not be a good thing, because today I found a beautiful set of photos that might work better than the aspen trees I have already.

Note to self: Experiment with adding pillar? It'd be another couple hours of work smudging and extracting, and not sure if I can blend it in convincingly. Need to find decent grunge brushes, too. Small grunge brushes. Try not to overwork the brushing, like Tian's example that inspired me in the first place. And figure out how to hide the feet.

Oh yeah, random fact: Mr. Biehl, a math teacher at Charter (though not mine), writes for the television show Num3ers and thus is kind of obsessive over it, I heard. 

Wow, this was a really ranty post. And here's more ranting: I've got a page and a half of population statistics to memorize for an ISS (social studies) test on Monday. Bleh. At least there's no school tomorrow... Stopping now, because my eyes are sore.

Finished writing a poem for school, then realized that it doesn't exactly fit the teacher's requirements. Mrs. Hollstein seems to be a sort of liberal teacher, but who knows? It's due Thursday, so I'll ask her about my poem today and finish the mini-project tomorrow. (I call it a mini-project because we have to decorate the poem and add a photo of ourselves, too.)

I'm not satisfied with it, but I can't change the weird parts without violating the outline even more.