And...Another One?

On the Joss/NPH Glee episode

Joss Whedon. Neil Patrick Harris. My favorite entirely unrealistic show choir fantasy. I have been waiting for this episode for two months.

The verdict: yes and no.

Things I loved: Every moment NPH was on. That man is a god. Some unusually good lines. Idina Menzel and Lea Michel's (or as I like to call her, Little Idina's) show-stopping rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream"--seriously, are they going to do the entire Les Mis soundtrack? I sure hope so. Also, Jesse's back! Hoorah and double-hooray!

Things I didn't love: Arty's treatment of Tina, the weirdly contrived and sped-up plot point about his dreams of dancing--and the crushing of those dreams, ignoring the fact that there actualy are wheelchair dance troupes. Seriously. Professional ones. Also, the bit about Idina being Little Idina's mom--of course it was inevitable, but my quarrel is with the way they did it--what the hell? Contrived and nonsensical. And, most importantly--"Dream On" is NOT a Les Mis audition song. Some kid is going to be very, very disappointed when this show inspires them to try out for Phantom with "Tik Tok" or something.

So in general: I love Joss. I love NPH. I love Glee. I love the music. The plot continues to be completely ridiculous, but isn't that why we watch it?

Eagerly awaiting next week's...Lady Gaga episode?
Yours &c,
E. A. Weatherfield

Forced writing is rarely good writing

Summer is a strange bubble. It feels terminal--the warmth, the quiet, but mostly the strange freedom. Oh, it's summer, I don't have to get up in the morning, I don't have homework I should be doing. I must be dying. All this reading time--can't be real. I have sideslipped into an alternate reality. I am living in the matrix. This is faerie-land, and if I poke my head out into the real world, I will discover that a million years have passed and everyone I love has died, while I was curled in my papasaun catching up on FABLES.

Too easy to loose ties in summer, too easy to dip into a story, too easy to spend five days under figurative water, lose yourself in the figurative woods. Too easy to overexert or to atrophy. Green season, mean season. Mind-slag.

Time is an illusion. Summer-time?

Some radioactive brain juice to infect you.
Yours &c,
E. A. Weatherfield

On meeting authors

Last night the fantastic YA author buddies Holly Black and Cassandra Clare came to our area for a reading-signing thing. Holly writes books about faeries and Cassandra writes books about demon hunters. I went with my best friend, because she and I plan to BE these two when we grow up.

The presentation was enjoyable. Holly read from her new book and Cassandra from her upcoming (about which there were proportionally more squeals and whispers than I had altogether expected). Then they taught us the octopus-in-a-coffee-shop con, which is a "family-friendly" version of the dog-in-a-bar con, which is the same as the violin con, which any Neil Gaiman fan should know.

They took questions. I did not ask one. One person asked where they got their shoes, because their shoes were fantastic. One fan raised her hand twice, but mostly told completely pointless stories without questions in them. I learned that, in order to be a moderately bestselling author with a medium-sized but devoted fanbase, I'll have to learn more tact and handle things gracefully. Shame.

There was a long line to get books signed. My friend and I passed the time by headbanging to MUCC. I believe I deeply injured the sensibilities of the small child staring at us shamelessly when my cell phone died and I said "fuck" quite loudly, because what if a life-or-death text message came my way within the next hour?

Our books were signed. We had pleasant conversation with the authors. On our way out we had pleasant conversation with a librarian and the wonderful folk of Pudd'n Head Books, the even more wonderful book store hosting the event.

All in all, a success.
Questions? Comments? Concerns? Slanders?
I'll take 'em all.

Yours &c,
E. A. Weatherfield.

Review

Just read the graphic novel BEAST by Marian Churchland. It was fabulous. The art was fresh, beautiful, dynamic, the story an interesting new version of "Beauty and the Beast." In it, a sculptor called Colette is offered a dream commission to sculpt a marble portrait of her benefactor. She arrives at the derelict mansion where she is to do the job and discovers that the subject is to be a strange but (in my opinion) beautiful shadow-creature known as Beast.

Things I liked: extremely appealing aesthetic, well-written, not as maudlin or explicitly laid out as your average Beast update.
Things I didn't like: rather unsatisfying ending, in my opinion.
Verdict: Read it now.

Blurbs

This is no haiku
That statement is both untrue
And logic'ly sound.

100 Words

Sir Bedevere knocked on yet another door, hoping it was the last.
“Hello?” a young girl answered, strangely dressed even for this strange decade.
“Good morrow, madam,” said Sir Bedevere, “May I speak with the man of the house?”
“There’s only one man in this house,” she said with amusement, “and he’s not exactly the kind you seek.”
“I would speak with him anon, an’ it please you.”
“Alright then,” she said, grinning snidely. She called, “Bedevere!” and a little mopsy dog came bounding to her side.
“We named him after the Monty Python character,” the girl explained.
“I see.”

In Terra Pax

My thirteen-year-old cousin's best friend became a fan of "My stomach drops when I think about you being with someone else" on Facebook. Makes you laugh. Then makes you wonder.

Got my first ever publishers' rejection letters today--two brief, messily hand-addressed papers I picked up from the desk in our hundred-year-old English building. They wanted to thank me for submitting, but regretted to inform me that they were unable to publish my stories in our school's student literary magazine.

Had a Freudian slip just then; accidentally typed "punish" instead of "publish."

Today was a barefoot-in-the-clover-patch, cinnamon-soda-that's-rather-flat day for me. How 'bout you?

Yours &c,
E. A. Weatherfield

Tabs

These are the tabs that are open on my computer right now:

An article about the worst Spider-Man story arcs
A Web Comic
Facebook
Netflix instant player--Firefly
This is for a paper I'm doing
This man is my hero
And this is his new book
South Park Studios, because who has time for cable any more?

A Manly Heart-to-Heart

"Lance!" Art greeted his best friend, "I haven't seen you in years! Literally. What the hell have you been doing?"
"Well," said Lance, "I slew a dragon."
"Slaying dragons is good."
"And then I had this thing going with this girl Elaine, which was great and all, until she got pregnant. Which might not have been such a huge problem, if it weren't that I didn't like her all that much in the first place."
"Man, that's rough," said Art.
"Yeah, and to make it worse, after she has the baby she kills herself. By floating in a boat. And I feel even more guilty now that I was only with her because she reminded me of my true love, who is unattainable."
"Aw, Lance, don't give me that. You could get any lady you wanted. You're the only Frenchman here, for chrissakes."
"No, not this one. This love is shameful."
"Lance, you know you can tell me anything. Who is this lady?"
"It's your wife."

Your Arthurian-legend-in-context for the day.

The Event of People Making Music in a Room

I think I never had a better idea than going to last night's Ani DiFranco concert.

Let's start this story at the beginning. I discovered Ani last year, while cruising iTunes, hoping for some new music that wouldn't bore me, that wasn't the same as every other song. I stumbled upon her then-new album Not a Pretty Girl by happy, happy chance. Listened to the clips. Skipped around the house in joy at finding something worth listening to. Bought the album.

So a few weeks ago I discover that this concert is going to happen. I wasn't sure at first--I don't drive, and neither does my roommate Maria, so I worried about rides, and would the taxi work and would it cost too much, and all of that. But it fell into place; we got a ride, we got tickets, we were on our way.

So last night we arrive at the Pageant, Maria and I in our almost-matching hippie dresses, with our ride Bathsheba, who is 21 and so goes to the other side of the line. Maria and I are not allowed on the floor, but we find that the table closest to the stage is occupied by only two girls, and they have room for us. We are in business. We never learn their names, but they makes us a list of the songs played on a scrap of napkin.

Opening for Ani is the inestimable Buddy Wakefield. He is wigged out. His eyes are wide and he twitches elaborately. He radiates joy. You can feel the audience relaxing. You can feel your shoulder muscles loosening as he speaks. Magic words in rhythm. The diva beat-boxes. We cheer. He introduces Ani, and there is a bit of a wait.

When Ani walks onstage, she is smaller than I expected. Her hair looks unwashed, and she wears loose pants and an army green tank top with no bra. I didn't expect to be better dressed than Ani. She is beautiful. She has a guitar. She plays it like magic, like weaving. Some people sing along. Some people move.

It's cliche to say you've been under a spell, but after two hours of Ani DiFranco's music, this is how I feel. Eating pecan pancakes afterward, the only straight girl at the table, I feel a shimmer behind my brain. The spell lingers now. The knots in my muscles have flown apart. I feel like the breeze is a giant flower petal against my cheek. My concert tee is soft and loose. I have cut off the collar.

Buddy Wakefield signed his CD after the show. He asked my name and then he wrote, "Thank Goodness For Evangeline!" with Spanish upside-down-exclamation-marks. Same to you, Buddy, and Mama DiFranco too.

"Hearts don't break. They bruise and then they heal."

Yours &c,
E. A. Weatherfield

On Pleasant Days

Warm again today. So warm I had to wear shoes. Nice breeze, and when it hits the trees all the flying petals and leaves and pollen look just like a rainbow snowstorm. The window is open and I can hear someone outside playing guitar or something, but I can't see them. Think about the satisfaction of having more of a paper written than you have left to write, and think about how good a Thin Mint tastes.

Last night after "So You Think Your Story Is Finished? Then Send It To the New Yorker" class, my friends and I forwent our homework session to do a dramatic reading of the infamous story "My Immortal." Again. And tonight is the Ani DiFranco concert. The way I've been acting, it's almost like the crushing workload of Egyptian mythology, creative writing, comic-bookery, Gilbert & Sullivan, Darío, and Bach didn't exist. Horrible.

Today, thinking about places. We discussed them in class, how people collect them and how full of story they are. I remember millionaire castles, cinnamon dust, summer swamp stench, and meningitis prevention medication that turned my friends' pee orange, but not mine. Want to write about everywhere I've been and everything I've done and haven't. I wonder if everyone feels this way, at the very least everyone who writes. I think they do.

My life is a filler of pages, and some days it's not all that interesting.

Yours &c,
E. A. Weatherfield

This is why we allow parents texting

I just received a text message from my mother:

U have 31 days left of school!!!

My mother is so excited about my semester ending that she's counting the days. There's something almost subversive about that.

I love my mother.

One day I really will start making consistent posts

When I think I hate Missouri because it's so big and so backwards, I look out the window and see the flowers on the tree, big but weightless, watercolor. It smells so nice this time of year and the grass is so soft. Silly, silly people will insist on wearing shoes, or on my wearing shoes inside the cafeteria. The sky is big bright blue, but that's okay, because it's nicely enclosed by a border of trees.

Re-reading V for Vendetta in my comic book class. This is an interesting experience--I'd forgotten how much better the book was than the movie. More on this after today's class discussion--I'm interested to see it talked about in an academic setting.

And tomorrow night is the Ani DiFranco concert at the Pageant that I will be attending with my roommate and about 50 of her friends from the Vagina Monologues cast. This is why I've been waiting for college since I was eight. That, and all the lectures and Shakespeare plays...

And for the record, about half the things on my previous posts aren't true any more. It seems like there's something important in that fact...

Never mind.

Yours &c,
E. A. Weatherfield