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| i am not dead; merely preoccupied.
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| Remember how freaked out I was over book last year? Don't even get me started on this year. I have three times as many required texts, and I can't even borrow twelve of them. Frig, man. The great annual lesson: never seek a university degree in the Liberal Arts.
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| Book lists are in, and I am poised on the cusp between heaven and hell.
I love reading. I have no money. That's an awful lot of books for just
two courses....
If anybody can help me get hold of any of these
books cheaply, please let me know. Half.com is precluded by my Canadian
address, but apart from that, who knows?
Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Lattimore
Sophocles, Oedipus the King, Theban Plays (Penguin)
Aristophanes, The Clouds, trans. Henderson (Focus)
Plato, The Symposium (Penguin)
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (Penguin)
Virgil, the Aeneid, trans. Fitzgerald (Vintage)
Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Humprhies (Indiana)
St. Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Chadwick (Oxford University Press)
Anonymous, Beowulf, trans. Heaney
Plato, Republic (Cambridge)
Thucydides, Peloponnesian Wars (Penguin)
Aristotle, Politics (Penguin)
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Penguin)
Augustine, City of God (Doubleday "Image")
And naturally, that's not including the actual textbooks. Eep.
I
assume other editions are fine, so long as the same translation is
used. I wonder if there's any way to verify that apart from tracking
down the correct edition, writing down the name of the translator, and
comparing it against any used bookstore finds. Or maybe the translation
rarely matters? Oh hell, it'll matter. The prof from one of these
courses (who I really rather liked, red socks and all) was always
splitting linguistic hairs in the GenEd/Intro course which somehow
hooked me on all of this. But will it matter much? Hmmm... I think I do already have City of God, at any rate.... and probably Don Quixote, if he didn't mould.....
I
think the scariest part is that I'm actually supposed to read all of
these, and then some, within a three-month window. As a part-time
student, I fear for the sanity of all full-timers. Especially when I
see ALL of Utopia and ALL of The Prince and Discourses, among a
half-dozen other texts, on the reading list for winter term. We have
all gone mad.
(Oh shit. 26 more "suggested" for our end-term essay. How many of these will I have time for?) | | |
| I decided around 11:30 to attend the Harry Potter
launch. It
was fun enough (though I'm still upset I had to miss Potions class the
following day because of work). I arrived about ten to midnight and
watched the
fire-eating clown outside for a minute, until she extinguished her
torches with a flourish and gasped "Il est ici! Harry Potter!" As I
wandered through the doors she was enthusing to her friend that this
was the FIRST TIME the torches had EVER gone out when she'd tried to do
it that way. Yay for her. 
After
getting distracted by the non-Harry displays for a few minutes, I found
my way up the spiral staircase to the second floor, where I encountered
pandemonium. Hundreds of grown-ups (and the occasional child) were
lined up in a convoluted tracery of colored electrical tape which
covered nearly every aisle of the second level. I slipped into a
non-taped alley by the discount CD bin and watched the choreographed
drama unfold.
There was an unconvincing Dementor wafting
around the other side of the staircase near the TV cameras,
unconvincing largely because she had donned her hood just moments
before, in plain view. Some loud clock bells tolled over the PA,
perhaps counting to twenty-four but certainly surpassing twelve. Harry
Potter approached a pirate-style treasure chest sitting on a small
platform, opened it, and removed a copy of the children's version of
HP6, holding it aloft with both hands before suddenly going limp and
dropping the book. He seized his wand, turned towards the Dementor, and
cast his expecto patronum spell (the result being the
Demontor's scampering retreat behind the Starbucks counter). He then
turned to a large black thing, cast another spell to lift off the
topcloth (which retracted to the ceiling), and then yanked on the black
covering beneath. It remained fast. A sales associate in a
cobbled-together with costume hurried over and gave the pile a few
strategic swipes with a boxcutter. Harry was then able to present a
giant stack of boxes of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
in both editions to the crowd. More applause was raised for the
appearance of the adult cover. Then Harry strode off through the crowd
(passing right by me -- actually a pretty good Harry), sales associates
began distributing books to the front-of-line faithful, and the show
was over.
I didn't see too many people in costume -- maybe a
couple dozen -- but what costumes I saw were elaborate. The salespeople
scared me. It was also next to impossible to get outside without going
to the back of the line, buying a copy of the book, and then slipping
down the stairs. There was eventually a break through which I and a few
other observers managed to escape. All in all, it was a fun way to
spend forty minutes on a dead Friday night.
When
will I get my copy? When I can afford one, which means "once Dad has
bought a copy at Club Price, three family members have read it, and it
finally passes on to me." Please post spoiler warnings. Pretty pretty
please. | | |
| I don't believe in much until I've felt it between my toes.
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