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[Sep. 19th, 2009|09:37 am] |
I can't seem to shake this cold that I got right after my exams were over. I guess it doesn't help that I've continued to go out drinking and carousing as if my sinuses weren't clogged with viscous fluids and my cough didn't sound like terminal emphysema. The only thing that really saddens me is that I'm missing the one chance at good running weather than Boston has to offer -- it's been sunny and sixty-to-seventy every single morning, and every single morning I've woken up either dead tired or dead hungover and in absolutely no mood to strap on my sneakers. I will regret this in November.
Last night, on the train ride to a shitty sports bar with Ryan and a gaggle of his adorable young Americorps colleagues, a frisson of my habitual anti-sociality ran over me. Instead of chatting, I hunched over The Master and Margarita, graphic novel version, and marveled at how much the colorful illustrations brought out the paltriness of the novel's religious sub-story. In print, Bulgakov skates the thin ice of Biblical kitsch without too many embarrassing spills, but the translation into a different medium makes it painfully obvious just how tendentious his project really was from the get-go, and how paradoxically lucky he is to have been accosted by Soviet demons.
It's a weird feeling when some art object you love, treasure, and place on a pedestal suddenly loses its magical aura -- a pain that literary studies pretty much hammers home every few weeks or so. But it's also a good corrective to high art posturing. I'm ridiculously happy to have found Harvard's comics collection, and, to the palpable confusion of the library staff, to have checked out a tome of Walter Benjamin alongside the first issue of Tex Arcana. Work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, indeed.
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| Mysteries within |
[Dec. 13th, 2008|09:40 am] |
Friends-only, blah blah. Holler to be added, blah blah. |
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