Is Rafa Benitez mad? Or does he just not want to win the Premier League? Why he doesn’t field an understrength team against European minnows in the more-forgiving Champions League as opposed to the intensely more competitive every-game-counts Premier League, I don’t know. Liverpool are in decent form. Why tinker?

Did anyone see Jose Mourinho’s demise at Chelski coming so early? I certainly didn’t. After he survived the summer I figured he was good for the season. Wrong-o. I can’t say that this is the best tactic. A number of the clubs key players are loyal to Mourinho and I would think that this move may have deep-sixed Cheski’s quest for a quadruple.

And we’re not even to October yet and I’m already sick of hearing about @#$@in’ Ars*nal. Yes, they’re playing well at the moment but it’s easy to ignore their cake schedule. Of their six games so far, four have been at home and one (Spurs) was in London. So the only travel game has been Blackburn. Now look at their upcoming fixtures: home to Newcastle (who just lost to Derby for christ’s sake) then away to West Ham (erm, still in London) then home again to both Sunderland and Bolton. So just to put this in perspective, for the first two months of the season (nine games), they’ve had to play one league game outside London, and in those six wins they faced four of the bottom six teams. In that same time, Liverpool has hosted Chelski, and Chelski will also be playing Man Ure tomorrow.

Recap: play lots of games at home, play one away game outside London, play crap teams, and avoid the other three Big Teams. Must be a nice way to ease into a season.

I had a meeting with my professor Friday to go over my novel and it went really, really well. He doesn’t shy away from (ahem) critical remarks, but he was overwhelming positive. Better yet, he had a lot of helpful suggestions to improve the novel. Overall, it made me excited to start revising it. When I get time. Whenever that is.

Almost exciting is taking notes for my Joyce paper, which has consisted of circling proper nouns in Dubliners in red pencil and trying to make an argument about whether they appear as subjects or objects in the sentence, and why that’s significant. Exciting shit, this scholarship. Another professor referred to Joyce scholars as “aliens.”

In a vexing turn of events, it looks like I’m going to have to restructure my independent study. I had grouped my books into three basic categories: fictional societies; the human, inhuman, and post-human in sci-fi; and American dystopia. After kicking this around with my professor a bit, we mutually agreed that it the study should have a narrower focus. As structured, this is a breadth of work covering a lot of material shallowly; it would be more useful to read with more of a thesis in mind.

So what I’m toying with now is the (failed) utopian promise of California, and how the locus for utopian thinking slid northward to Oregon and California. “North is better than southern California” is a prominent theme in a lot of Philip K Dick’s work as well as in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Obviously, Kim Stanley Robinson’s California Trilogy will be central, too. The question is why the Pacific Northwest became the new hot spot for utopian thinking, and whether the problems of southern California (as presented in these novels) would be solved by moving north. This entails a lot more research, and is more utopian-based rather than sci-fi based. Which is okay. As long as I get something useful out of it.

Current Mood: Bored |