Got to be birds flying higher

My last Thursday class was tough. I was so exhausted—I stayed up too late and got up too early—and when my turn came around, I kind of flubbed the delivery. But, the semester is done like dinner. Time to put a fork in it ;-D. I just have one assignment to hand in and that’s it. I’ll be back next week to drop off my piece(s) for the grad show and then won’t be back again until convocation in May.

I expected the last few classes to be wrapped in some kind of sentimental, nostalgic montage of feelings and experience, but there were none. There was mostly a lot of thirst and hunger. I didn’t have lunch until 3pm on Wednesday and when Thursday’s class was over, I wolfed down a cheese bun and a buffalo chicken wrap. It takes a lot of calories to simply stay awake.

I’ll post pictures of my work in the coming days. Mostly I just want to rest and clean up around the house. Every horizontal surface has been fair game for the past three and a half months and it felt so rewarding to simply vacuum yesterday and not step over a giant pile of art supplies to get into my office!

Studios have to be cleared out by the 22nd and I grabbed everything in one trip this afternoon. It is going to be so weird to not have any homework. I completed three writing assignments, eleven projects, learned a lot about papermaking, started a couple things over twice and generally worked a lot more than I normally would at my own pace. Two of the projects were kind of turds and one of those will go in the recycle bin, heh!

Thankfully today is my Friday off and I could sleep in this morning. I'm going to need all the time to finish my homework to my degree of satisfaction. You can catch up at http://purpleponyart.livejournal.com

LOL, this weekend's movie for Monday's class is a breeze--Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 movie The Birds. I watched it as a child but don't remember much. I may have gotten bored and switched the channel too. It is very loosely based on Daphne du Maurier's book which is more about the Cold War compared to the movie. The movie still makes a great case for the supernatural and eeriness created by something that isn't there. It's never overtly said (except by one panicked citizen) why the birds are there, but one can surmise it has to do with Melanie Daniels' arrival to Bodega Bay. Dun-dun-dun!

The movie is very slow paced and silent, which would have created a lot of tension. I wasn't feeling that tension, but I bet in a dark theatre full of people it would have. A modern version would have a blizzards of birds and brooding power meows. I'm surprised it hasn't been remade.

My birds were piqued by the opening scene, but unruffled otherwise btw.

Watch on YouTube

I thought I was presenting my homework today, but it turns out that it's next week. My instructor had computer problems and it shifted everything by a week. However, that didn't stop my brain from spinning out of control.

I was legit flailing around in bed this morning because I had a dream that I was back in junior high, taking a test about comic books. You had to draw a comic and answer short answer questions. The comic I drew had two My Little Ponies in it. During the exam, there was a guy who would not shut up and it was annoying me.

I handed my test in, but once I left the classroom, which was in my high school, of all places, I realized that I hadn't answered half the questions. I went back inside and asked the teacher, who turned out to be Gillian Anderson, for me test back. She had to really think about it and I saw that she had already marked it. Yikes!

She gave me the test back and I sat back down to answer it, but I couldn't remember some of the answers, PLUS the answer spaces had been blacked out with marker. I don't know how the dream ended because I woke up flailing. Oh man...my poor brain! It has too much to think about.

My instructor jokingly called the mid-term the point of no return--you know that part in a story or movie where there's no going back. There wouldn't be much of a story or movie if we didn't have mitigating circumstances.

I suppose it's fitting that the point of no return marks character growth! There were three parts to the exam--a few ice breaker questions, since the class is taught online, a short answer section where we had to pick a selection we liked and disliked and reasons why and then the third part, which was a short 300-500 word response using selections from the class.

That third part was tough! The topic was on the Moon and I was just stumped. Years of LJ means that I can bang out a thousand words on just about any topic, but the question, Could humans survive without the Moon? had me beat! I spoke to scientific facts and then settled on the answer that yes, humans would survive, but there would be an environmental catastrophe and cultural disaster. I'll let you know how I did!

I was so hungry after the exam. It felt like I ran a marathon. The bonus of writing an exam online is that you can walk around and grab a snack, and in my case, I grabbed nuts, two Wagon Wheels and a granola bar. I had leftover pasta for lunch and wolfed it down like a teenage boy, LOL!

PPRL304 is my Friday entrepreneurship class. As most of you know, a lot of creative people have great vision and talent, but the business part is missing. Our first assignment is to come up with some values, whether we have a business or not. To do that, the teacher gave us what was essentially a quiz, and who loves quizzes more than LJ/DW?

I will post my responses later as I'm not sure if we're discussing them on Friday.

( First block of questions here )

I discovered a second set of questions in the assignment. The instructor made the assignment in PowerPoint with a giant font and exported it as a PDF, LOL!

1. What kind of a business do you want to have?
2. Where do you want to start your business?
3. Do you want to work on your own?
4. How much money do you want to make?
5. Will you have a second job or will this be your only focus?
6. What time of day do you work best?
7. What are you going to sell?
8. Can you sell anything else?
9. Do you want to have a family?
10. Does you see your business have the opportunity to change at some point in the future? Into what?

When I read that Any Empire was Nate Powell follow up to Swallow Me Whole
, I assumed both books were related and ordered both of them. The only relation between the two is that they are set in the fictional (?) Southern US town of Wormwood and trace the development of its young characters. Swallow Me Whole is by far the more abstract one. Make no mistake, these are two very writerly graphic novels, not very readerly at all. Trying to divine more meaning from them after the first couple of passes gave me a headache, so I was content to let my teacher to do all the explaining for Any Empire.

I liked Any Empire better, possibly because it was more accessible and familiar with its 80s setting. Part One concerns little neighbourhood boys, Lee and Purdy, who have an odd yet typical friendship with other neighbourhood boys. They are all obsessed with playing army, comics and establishing a pecking order. Sarah, the main female character, overlaps with this gang of boys when she discovers that someone is mysteriously killing turtles. Part Two catches up with the three of them as young adults and the direct impact their childhood has had on each of them.

Rather than discuss the plot - it would be too easy to give away the book - it's easier to look at some of the themes and motifs that run throughout. Boxes and containers are repeated constantly, and another motif becomes apparent after the events in Part Two. There are pushes and pulls between large open spaces that intersect with fantasy and reality. Time is rather fluid. Purdy is an interesting character who goes from one pecking order to another when he joins the army. There are also some deep allusions to fascism that might be easy to miss. The pervasive theme of militarism as part of everyday life is what the book is ultimately asking along what the the effect and meaning of living in such a culture is. There's a neat reference to a 1939 anti-war cartoon that gets changed up a little in the book.

While Any Empire is a quick read and uses text sparingly, that doesn't mean it is an easy read. The ending is a complete puzzler at first. The best that Alex could explain it as what happens when when the only outcome is the worst possible outcome, the last possibility for a hopeful outcome is to diverge into fantasy, which the characters often did as children. As such, I found the ending lacking in closure and unsatisfying. It could be an effect of reading too much work with ambiguous or abrupt endings as of late. The ending becomes more clear and realistic once one realizes that a clue dropped twice in the book is a real thing - which makes it even more uncomfortable.

I finally finished Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje, one of the books assigned for English 317. At its heart, it's about the collision of mental illness and creativity and uses fictional elements of jazz musician Buddy Bolden's life to illustrate this. The work can be thought of a series of photographs (photography is a minor theme) as Ondaatje uses the cut up method and various narrators to tell the story of Bolden's life, acquaintances and institutionalization. The "Slaughter" in the title actually refers to a town of the same name, the last town Buddy Bolden passes through before reaching the state mental hospital. I didn't care very much for the book. It was not the stream of consciousness style, or the cut ups or the lack of traditional narrative. It was just mostly confusing and tedious. It was so confusing that my teacher noted that three essays that used the book got one vital part wrong - it's Bolden who slices the nipple off his wife's lover, not the other way around. The one thing that has always bothered me about Ondaatje's novel writing as opposed to his poetry is that it lacks authenticity. A rich personality like Bolden deserves more than flat characterization. The man just seems like a total bore that buggers off for two years screwing his friend's wife while he stays at their house. Bolden's two year disappearance could have been used to great effect in moving the plot along as his friend Webb tries to find him, but the opportunity is squandered.