First off, what’s with my bad luck with iPods lately? First, mine dies. Then after Amy graciously allows me to use hers, iTunes (in a delightful fit of whimsy) decides to format the $#@%* thing. This glitch has something to do with a wider computer problem I’ve had since a problematic installation of Audacity, a WAV splitting program, that worked twice and then caused total and complete system failure. No blue screen of death, just straight to reboot. This somehow reset some programs like Firefox and iTunes back to their first-install state, and for some lovely reason iTunes decided it really, really wanted to sync the iPod automatically. Since there’s way more music in my library than the 4 GB iPod can hold, iTunes figured that the next best step would be to format the device and start over.

Needless to say, I would have put that option a little further down the list. Annoying? Not hardly.

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With one month left in school, this is the point that I look at my schedule of project due dates and determine that it cannot be done. Yet somehow it has to get done, and somehow it always does.

My story “Writing Machines” is up for critique in about 90 minutes. I’ve gotten two thumbs up so far but we’ll see what the larger group has to say. With no plot per se, no main character, no dialogue, and an ending that literally blames the reader if s/he doesn’t like the story, it’s a fair bet that it may confound some people. An evil part of me hopes so.

I read The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven last week and have to say that it disappointed me. I haven’t read any Sherman Alexie previously and, having now read the collection that helped propel him to stardom, I find myself agreeing with a lot of his critics. As I said in class yesterday, I would much rather reread Landfill Meditations in an attempt to wrap my brain around what Gerald Vizenor is up to rather than reread Alexie’s pretty straightforward stories. I also tie these two back to some of the critical reading I did on utopia and dystopia. For me, Vizenor is the king of Indian Utopian thinking and, based on this one collection, Alexie is the reigning dystopian writer. This may well turn into a conference paper down the line…

This week I’m reading Adrian Louis’ Wild Indians and Other Creatures and I ab-so-lute-ly love it. It’s funny, it’s clever, it’s dirty, and it’s magnificent. I read just about everything today in the following terms: I wish I could write like this, I’m glad I don’t write like this, and I think I could write like this. Louis falls in this last category and, for a writer eager for to experiment with a variety of styles, it’s pretty exciting stuff.

Current Mood: Busy |
Currently Listening To – Eddie Vedder – “Into the Wild (Soundtrack)”