I spent the holiday weekend doing basically two things: listening to the new Lady Gaga and rereading Jane Austen’s Emma. The Emma urge had struck me, weirdly, just as I was reaching the gripping climax of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and I actually interrupted Larsson briefly to indulge it. I didn’t reread the whole novel straight, nor did I ( Read more... )

As soon as the readings were all done for my classes (well, actually I still have to look up vocabulary words for two scenes in Lorca's Bodas de Sangre; please don't tell my pendejo perezoso of a Spanish professor), I started The GIrl WIth the Dragon Tattoo. On the train home this evening I reached page 398 (out of 587), which also happens to be ( Read more... )

I'm writing this from my office, where I arrived this morning at 8:30 with the intention to spend the morning working on a giant mailing that really should have been finished before the holidays and is going to cause me considerable pain upon my return next week when I have to tell my co-workers that yes, incredibly, it's still not finished. As my ( Read more... )

Not that I have time to be writing this or anything, but by next weekend when I can see this movie again my thoughts won’t be fresh. For a few minutes at least, DH should get to take precedence over my fucking Spanish oral report and the additional tarea for tomorrow which mi querida profesora hasn’t bothered to email to me after five days. I ( Read more... )

Last night in Spanish class, tuve un arrebato - I had a fit - when our professor assigned the homework for Wednesday’s class. It consisted of:

• Writing a one-sentence synopsis of each paragraph of the short story we had read for that night’s class. The story, “Cine Prado” by the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska, is three pages long, 2000 words, 13 ( Read more... )

Oy, but the posting of this fic has been a comedy of errors. First I was going to post it, then the Marauder mods were, then I was, except that I didn't have the login info to get in. Then I got the login info, but it was for the LJ end of the Bang rather than the DreamWidth end (because all the fics in this Bang are over 20,000 words, they were ( Read more... )

My long-ass fic about Snape, Advanced Potion-Making, will begin posting later today at the Marauder Big Bang site (community.livejournal.com/marauderbigbang/). (I’ll add a direct link to the initial post as soon as I have one).

Back home at my own LJ, however, there are several additional people and phenomena whose input and contributions to the fic ( Read more... )

I feel a bit of a churl. For the last month I’ve had just enough spare time and energy to read f-listy posts as they went by, but not enough for the back-and-forth of commenting. This despite the fact that several of you were undergoing crises of fandom identity, making declarations of sexual identity, and posting delightful updates about your ( Read more... )

After a month’s worth of distractions and interruptions, I reached the end of Richard Price’s Clockers on the train this morning. Price is excellent, and he’s a New York writer (in subject matter, I mean, not residence). I’ll be reading more of him; I may even finally see The Color of Money because of him. What’s more, I can now finally see the ( Read more... )

I mentioned in the previous post that only one of my two weekend projects was Snape-related, but on second thought, why can’t studying for my final involve Snape as well? Please join me as I attempt to master and differentiate twelve, count ‘em, twelve Spanish verb tenses by using them to describe major Snape-related events from the Harry Potter ( Read more... )