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You Know, This Obsession Just Isn't Healthy
March 09, 2004, 11:10 p.m. Yeah, I’m not happy with it. It’s basically the remnants of the design I was working on before, till I got slapped down by the artist. Ha! Vincent can’t deny me! Lapsed copyright rules! But anyway, unsatisfied. The background’s too busy and it’s pretty hard to read, innit? Oh well, just highlight the text. I’ll keep working on it. I’m back at uni, and it’s okay so far. There are about forty people in my Japanese art course –only two of them guys. It’s called Art in the Age of the Samurai, so I suspect that they went “Samurai? I like samurai! Swords! Cool!” That and my Literature of Troy class are all I’ve had so far. There are more guys in that course, which comforts me some. I hate being in a class with all girls, it makes me feel so very . . . safe and boring. Troy was good, too, because it’s a seminar, and today it was taken by two lecturers who played off each other nicely. It’s a cool dynamic that lends the class a lot of enthusiasm. Unfortunately, that won’t be happening again, as it’ll just be the one person taking the seminar after this week. But anyway – we were going over the texts we’ll be discussing in this course, and we came to this poet, Henryson, who wrote The Testament of Cresseide. Now, Henryson really dug Chaucer, very much the fan, so when he tackled the Troilus/Cressida material, he basically wrote the sequel to Chaucer’s poem. Which is interesting, cause if you think about it, he’s basically written fanfiction. And it’s become part of the ‘literary canon’. Y’know, in fact, every poet or author who takes a myth and retells it for their own, or poets who wrote stories and tangentially placed them in King Arthur’s court – they were writing fanfic. Except, see, it’s the good fanfic that’s stayed in our consciousness – all the bad, “OMG!!1Legloasizsoooooohott”-equivalents got winnowed out, passed into the void of obscurity like so much chaff into the air. Which is something I shall remember next time someone derides fanfic : ) My sister and I are home alone for the next two weeks – our parents have gone on holiday down the south coast. It’s pretty sweet, living with out parental guidance, but they took the dog. Now that’s just cruel. And we can’t let the house run to seed too much, cause we have relatives using our house as a way-station tomorrow night. Grr.
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