Author Archives: Mandy

The Mad Ones

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This bastard and I are having ourselves a little stare-down.

It technically began on Saturday, when I picked him up from the city library; but really, this antagonism has been going on for years.

I don’t like the Beats. There, I said it. Of all the literary generational cliques, this is the one that gets my eyes rolling.

Maybe it’s because I came to the Beats too late; I was already in college by the time I read The Dharma Bums (after a smokin’ hot alum gave me his copy during my semester abroad). I know I read On the Road at some point after that, if for no other reason than I knew I was supposed to, but I wasn’t impressed with any of it and found these guys to be just a little misogynistic.

So we’re reading On the Road for Travel Lit, and I just can’t bring myself to do it. This two-books-a-week nonsense has been going on for a month now, and this is the first one I’m not going to read. NotGonnaDoIt.

The thing is, I’ve already read it once, so this would kind of be a re-read, although the library only had this copy of the original scroll, which leaves the names unchanged and apparently has some gay sex scenes. And I do owe the Beats another chance, seeing how I was kind of a little snot as an undergrad, but I really don’t wanna…

I even poked around online and at the video store for the Kristen Stewart movie (which came out earlier here, for some reason), but it’s not available for another 10 days. Plus, it looks like it bombed in the States.

I don’t know. Maybe I’ll flip through it, or if I can find an Irish supplier of whatever drug Kerouac was on when he wrote it, I’ll take some of that and pull another all-nighter (kidding).

Right now, though, I’m more concerned with cleaning out my fridge and pantry. See, I’ve decided to give up dairy for Lent, so I’m spending my Fat Tuesday* eating all the dairy products in my kitchen, which is more difficult than one might imagine, especially considering I just bought myself a Cadbury’s Milk Tray. Happy Valentine’s Day to me!

*Fat Tuesday is called Pancake Tuesday here. It is endearing to see all of Ireland and the UK obsessing over pancakes, but I find their final fling before Lent a bit lacking in ambition.

Before Midnight, Part II

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Photo courtesy © Berlinale

Once again, somewhere in the world, audiences are seeing that movie I really want to see.

Before Midnight had its European premiere tonight at the Berlin Film Festival. In reality, the film is already over and they’re all talking about it at the theater’s bar. It was some event called the Presentation of European Shooting Stars 2013, and I really, really, really wanted to go.

Really. I tried to buy a ticket online. They went on sale at 9am Friday morning, and I was at my laptap promptly at 9am. I went through a 30-second pop-up “waiting room” window twice, and when I finally thought I had booked a ticket, I was denied. Then I saw on the programme page that the event was sold out.

I would have gone, too. I was trolling LastMinute.com for hotel deals within a kilometer of the theatre and scoping out Berlin travel sites. I haven’t been anywhere since Christmas and was looking forward to a quick getaway.

It’s definitely for the best. I really can’t afford the jet-set lifestyle right now, and as badly as I want to, I don’t need to skip any more classes.

What gets me is that the festival had a massive spoiler about the film in its programme. I say massive, although they really just gave away part of the set-up, but if you’re familiar with the story at all, you know that giving away the set-up of one of these films basically steals nine years’ worth of magic from the audience. I can also see a review up online, but I only read the subheading, which contains a slight criticism that really could apply to any of the Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight films.

You can probably expect another of these posts when Before Midnight plays at South by Southwest. My boyfriend has offered to sneak in with a video camera, but that is generally frowned upon at film festivals.

UPDATE: Of course, the film’s stars were in Berlin tonight.

No more all-nighters.

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I have both of my “read a book every week” classes tomorrow, so this is usually the night – at least, for the past two weeks – when I don’t get to sleep.

However, I’m caught up on my reading tonight, so I’m forcing myself to go to bed, even though there are plenty of things I could be working on right now, calling my name…

To that end, I took some of the herbal sleeping remedy recommended by the girl at the health foods store, followed by a cuppa Pukka-brand Night Time tea, and now I’m ready for beddy-bye.

I have also, within the past hour, hit upon a new idea for my thesis, the proposal for which is due on Friday. I have had my topic picked for months, but this new idea is imaginative and collaborative and boldly experiential.

It’s possible I might have taken too much hippie potion. We’ll see if this idea stands up in the morning light.

Inbox Poetry

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I’ve been reading all day, so words are starting to swim, and I’m highly amused by these adjacent emails in my Hotmail inbox (one is from my boyfriend, and the other is from my Travel Literature professor):

TollDick

Confession Time

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On top of neglecting my blog and drinking more Starbucks than I should, I did something very bad this past week.

For the first time since I’ve been in grad school… I slept through a class.

Right now, my 20-year-old self is howling with laughter: “What, one class? All year? Try almost failing your Tuesday/Thursday Women’s Studies course because you never showed up on Tuesdays.”

But I feel horrible. It ties in with the whole “making sure I get my money’s worth” out of this programme. One of my fellow students calculated that each class meeting is worth €200.

To be fair, I overslept because I was up late reading. I’m still struggling to pin down a routine with this two-books-a-week course load. Plus, there is so much extracurricular reading I want to do right now. (Thanks, Mom!)

Before Midnight

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I write a lot of my blog posts late at night, right before I go to bed. I try to get them posted before midnight Irish time, but sometimes I settle for “oh well, it’s still yesterday in Texas” when I’m trying to post daily entries. It’s gotten worse this semester, with these four-day weekends and the amount of reading I have to do – I’m not sleeping at night.

All this to say, in my mind, it’s still January 20, which means: Happy Before Midnight Premiere Day!

As I write this, audiences at Sundance Film Festival are watching the world premiere of Before Midnight, the third film in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise / Before Sunset storyline. The films follow Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy around various European cities in the timeframes indicated by the titles. The installments are spaced nine years apart, with release dates in 1995, 2004, and now 2013.

Take the film-release frenzy of your Harry Potter, your Twilight, your Hunger Games, mix in a little indie-movie snobbery, stir it all together and allow to steep into a strong arthouse brew, then add a splash of Gen-X disenchantment and a sprinkle of wanderlust, and that is how excited I am about this movie. I am completely invested in these characters, and I cannot wait to find out what happens to them.

Before Midnight is screening at the Berlin Film Festival in a few weeks, and I’m very tempted to just go…

Books Books Books

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Last semester, I had one textbook. I remembered textbook costs being astronomical when I was an undergrad, so I was pleasantly surprised that I only had to drop €30 on one book.

This semester is more complicated. In two of my courses we are reading a book each week, and in a third course the professor is e-mailing PDFs that he is scanning from the out-of-print book he wants to use for the course. It is so much more complicated than it needs to be.

I’m trying to get into a routine and – most importantly – stay on top of the reading, but right now, things are weird. I have this web stretching from the college library to the city library to my Kindle to my iPhone to Charlie Byrne’s to the campus bookstore to the college library’s website and back again.

For today’s reading, one professor said he would make copies of the excerpts he wanted us to read, but the copier broke so he couldn’t make enough copies. I found the books he was using in the campus library and the city library, but I didn’t know which passages he had assigned so I just started reading the complete books. I read much more than I needed to, and it was tough to bring my thoughts back to the specific passages we were discussing in class.

It is nice that half of the books are in the public domain, but in order to get the free Kindle version, I have to pay the international delivery charge because my Kindle is registered in the States. The charge is usually about $3 and for some reason Amazon always sends a nasty message to my Kindle reminding me that I have a monthly limit on download charges. I can get the same public domain books free on my iPhone, but I haven’t tried reading on that yet.

I go to Charlie Byrne’s every couple of days and squirrel away a few of the books on the syllabi. I’ll go in at some point and make a big credit card purchase. I guess the rest will come from the campus bookstore.

It’s a pain. Today, for example, I finally got confirmation that I get to take the class that was giving me so much trouble last week. Our book for next week is Kim by Rudyard Kipling, which I actually read as an undergrad but I also drank a lot as an undergrad so I should probably reread it. A group of us went to the college library after class and all the copies were already checked out. Charlie Byrne’s doesn’t have it, so I downloaded it on my iPhone for free. Still, I wanted a hard copy, so I decided to check the city library when I went there for an event tonight. Mistakenly, I sat through my whole event and then approached the lady at the circulation desk, who told me their only copy had just been checked out tonight.

Face. Palm.