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離れ顔なんて三日もすりゃすぐに忘れてしまった
It's been a while since I've written a truly long and disconnected and embarrassing entry, so let's go! Please don't feel any sort of obligation to read the whole thing. XD
1. Icons.
Over the past week I have replaced five of my six icons. The Muktaar icon will always be hilarious, and the Ayumi Hamasaki "Step You" icon is good for creeping out![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
athena_crikey, and of course Ayu's "Ourselves" is the best music video in the world entire world ever, but I thought perhaps it was time for a change. (I'd been using the "Step You" icon since September of last year or something like that, hahaha, old!)
So. I kept the "Easy Breezy" icon because I luuuuurve it. (Despite my hatred for phones in real life, I love phones in music videos - the alternate version of Ayaya's "Zutto Suki de Ii Desu Ka," ah, so good - and that video is full of them. I went through a little obsession with Shakira's "Don't Bother" video in October. I don't know why I felt the need to mention that just now, there's no phone in it. But I guess the shots of her just sitting around the room remind me of this shot of Hikki staring at her phone that is off the hook as if she is waiting for a call that can't come because she has taken the phone off the hook, hahaha.)
(I love the Barenaked Ladies song "Enid" and I always pictured that video to be full of telephones. You know, "I took your phone message oh and speaking of communication~" &c. Then I saw the video and was sorely disappointed. :( )
(Aw man, I am really sad right now because that Escaflowne video set to "Superman (It's Not Easy)" is no longer on YouTube. Man, it was kind of amateur but I really liked it, Van is still like my favourite character from anything ever.)
Ahaha, wait, what was I talking about? XD;;
I have three J-pop icons and three Disney icons because I feel that accurately represents the general state of my brain right now. XD (Except that at this moment I am watching Escaflowne music videos. Hahaha, let's ignore that.) Reina is my default as usual because she is my hero. Then I have an icon I made in March of last year. My very favourite part of Morning Musume's "Shabondama" video is at the end of Rika's monologue where she screams "dakishimete yo~~~" and everyone reaches as though towards something completely unattainable. Aha, compared to the four icons I didn't make, this icon looks really amateur. And it is. XD But I dig it anyway, because "Shabondama" is awesome, and Rika USED to be awesome, before "Aisu Kuriimu to My Purin" came along and destroyed her. ;_; ;_; ;_; ;_;
(I am very bitter about this, I hope you can tell.)
Then a Tarzan icon, because even if it isn't Disney's most popular animated feature, I think it has moved up to be my second favourite. (Switching places with Hunchback of Notre Dame. Just ... 'cause.) Besides having great music (I always fail at listening to the soundtrack because I just put "Son of Man" on repeat for like three hours, hahaha, yessss) and absolutely awesome animation and the jungle and Jane's fantastic monologue ("and Daddy - they took my boot!"), there is something in this movie that I really feel like I relate to. That idea of being caught between where you grew up and where you want to go, and having to make a decision that you can never take back. And I look at that and I have no idea why I feel like I can relate to that, there's not really any specific event in my life that is all that comparable. But oh man, I love that movie ...
And the obligatory PotC icon. XD! Replacing my Davy Jones icon that nobody ever got. WELL FINE! XD One thing that I think is interesting about PotC is that in the first movie, there aren't really any scenes that stand out as my favourites. If I absolutely had to had to choose, I would say the scene of Jack's entrance and that scene with Jack and Barbossa, "and then I'll shout the name back to you." But in that movie I look forward to lines more than scenes. And I look forward to the apples. <3 However, I think I clearly prefer certain scenes in the sequel over other scenes. And I think that's an insult, like, the first movie was all so good I couldn't choose favourites, but the second wasn't as consistant and so I end up having favourites without thinking about it. The scene where Will boards the broken ship and then Jack bargains with Davy Jones, that scene is a definite favourite. And I also really like the Isla Cruces sequence. Or at least the parts with the principal characters in them. And not so much the fighting bit, just because I tend to get distracted during fighting bits. But the rest of it, haha. XD;
NEW PARAGRAPH! One thing I really like in PotC2 is the shots of people walking or running but the camera is really faraway. I am so not a fan of the cannibal sequence but I must confess I heart the free-for-all running to the Pearl at the end of it. I ADORE that one quick shot from behind of Jack running towards the boat as the sails are being quickly unfurled. I get a kick out of free-for-all scenes like that. XD And I also really like the faraway time-elapsed shot of Jack and Liz and Norrington walking across the Isla Cruces sand, I like the music there too. And I like that the three-way sword fight includes a couple faraway shots where it's just these three faraway guys running frantically across the beach.
Shut up, you know it's awesome. XD
And then an Aladdin icon to replace the Muktaar. For this I shall make a new heading. XD
2. A lot of Aladdin and a little Hercules.
The icon is of Jasmine and I don't think I'm supposed to admit this, but I've never really been a fan of Jasmine by herself. I mean, obviously the movie doesn't work without her, and I don't mind her or anything, and I do think it's interesting to look at her role in the movie and within the larger scope of the Disney Princesses and other Disney women. Just today I read a short Entertainment Weekly article in which they mention that Jasmine is the first animated Disney heroine to act the part of seductress, even if she is only pretending to be interested in the men (Prince Ali - "I'm rich too, you know" &c. - and, later in the movie, Jafar). And I mean, that's pretty interesting. But other than that, even if she's "feisty" (this is the word applied to every Disney heroine to appear since 1989, I swear to God and I am so incredibly sick of hearing it) and determined and whatever, it's just always seemed to me that all those qualities nevertheless come together into a rather bland character. I mean, like I said, I like her within the context of Aladdin, but on her own there's nothing that really draws me to her. (Well, it doesn't help that in the series she's written sort of inconsistently - "The Secret of Dagger Rock" is the best thing ever while in "Sneeze the Day," a good episode for Al and Iago, I can't even stand her for all the screaming that she does, honestly.) Even when I was in elementary school I would've picked Ariel or Belle over Jasmine any day, I think. Well I loved Ariel so there was no contest there. :3
Nevertheless, I have a Jasmine PEZ dispenser in my room and now a Jasmine icon in my journal. XD
As I mentioned in an earlier entry, on Friday night I watched Aladdin twice in a row instead of studying. XD I was totally surprised to find that even on my one millionth viewing of this movie I still noticed things I'd never noticed before. I mean, stupid things, not like "omg suddenly the plot makes sense," hahahaha, of course not. XD; But a continuity error I never noticed before is that when Jasmine is pretending she's in love with Jafar, she puts on the crown he had previously offered her. But as soon as the crown serves its plot purpose - acting as a mirror in which Jafar can see Aladdin sneaking around behind him -, it disappears without a trace! And something silly that I noticed is that Genie pronounces "bona fide" two different ways throughout the course of the movie. XD The first time it's in a song lyric so maybe it doesn't count, though, haha. And one line I think is interesting is Jafar's "You're speechless, I see. A fine quality in a wife," just because it so perfectly echoes Ursula's "it's she who holds her tongue who gets a man" but at the same time is so different. Aha, I spent way too much time analyzing Ursula's song last year. XD
And then something I noticed the last time I watched the movie, however many months ago that was, but then I remembered I noticed it, haha: Genie asks Al, "So, you've just won the heart of the princess, what are you going to do next?" as "When You Wish Upon a Star" (the quintessential Disney anthem) plays briefly in the background music. Genie tells Al that the answer is "I'm going to free the genie," but of course we all know the more appropriate response is "I'm going to Disney World!" XD XD XD XD XD XD XD You have no idea how happy this makes me that they included such a lame little reference like that. A reference to THEIR OWN MARKETING CAMPAIGN. Hahaha, Disney, excellent, I love how unashamed you are. XD
Speaking of Genie, the second time I watched the movie I had the pop-up trivia feature turned on. Which was the lamest thing ever because it couldn't decide who its audience was. One minute it informs us that Tupperware didn't really exist at the time the story is set, the next minute it's going on about medieval Iranian architecture, the next minute it's making a totally unnecessary pun. But admittedly there were some interesting points. One part I thought was kind of funny was during one of Genie's strings of impressions, when the trivia mentioned that the movie's creators figured that Genie had travelled all around the world and through all different times (this makes no sense - if he's bound to his master what's he doing going all over the place like that? but let's pretend for the moment that it does make sense), and that's why it was "natural" for him to constantly be referencing the people and the things that he does. Except that's the wussiest explanation I've ever heard! And sort of self-centred, a little bit. If Genie has been all over the world and all through time, why are the vast majority of his impressions based on twentieth-century Americans? I think it's kind of cute that the trivia tried to justify his characterization like that, but it's also totally unnecessary. You can't explain Genie and why he is as he is without leaving the world of the Aladdinverse. Even the series writers knew this - in one episode a sprite asks Genie what he is and he replies, "Comic relief, mainly."
(That is the same episode where the characters are trying to guess what Carpet is trying to tell them and Genie is pretending like it's Charades and he's shouting things like, "Spinning! You're spinning! You're in a whirlpool! Time vortex - you're in a time vortex! ... I remember that episode." Ahaha, I have quoted that last bit an embarrassing number of times and of course nobody ever gets it. Ahahaha ... excellent.)
But it seems to me like the movie's creators were kind of a wee little bit deluding themselves when it came to Genie. I read another article today which ends with his lead animator expressing his joy at having been part of a movie that will bring laughter to people for generations. And yeah, the movie has jokes that I'm sure will still be funny when I'm an old lady. But if you think it's all going to stay as funny as it may have been in 1992, then you are only kidding yourself. Aladdin is going to date itself worse than any other animated Disney feature I can think of. And apparently the trivia took this into an account, as they felt the need to add notes clarifying who Ed Sullivan and Groucho Marx were. And - my favourite - when Genie does his Ahnold impersonation, the trivia note read "Arnold Schwarzenegger was a famous bodybuilder and actor before he became governor of California." Ha ha ha! I first saw this movie when I was five and I had no idea who these people were. All of the scenes I remember from that day involve Iago, because I thought Iago was a riot, much funnier than Genie whose jokes I didn't really understand. And I'm sure my kids are going to have an even worse time of it, being removed from the time of the movie's release by a whole generation. Reviewers of Aladdin love to heap praise on Robin Williams for all the impressions he threw into his improvisations of the script, but it seems the jokes Genie is left with are mostly intended for a very specific audience that is at some point in the future not going to exist.
I mean, obviously this happens with everything. Laughter may be universal but humour is such a specific thing. But in no other Disney movie are the jokes so fastened to the time period and the culture into which the movie was released. To me that's interesting. And it's interesting that the trivia notes try to justify it in such an unnecessary manner ... ^^;
Moving on. :) After watching the movie and the storyboards for several of the deleted songs (I remembered like all the words to "You Can Count on Me" but I don't remember listening to that song an extraordinary number of times ... ?), I decided to go look for MP3s of the rest of the deleted songs, and in the process I sort of dipped back into the fandom just to take a look at how it has progressed since I left it five years ago. The AML, once the hub of the fandom, has practically gone AWOL, but there are still active forums and I recognized more of the forum members than I thought I would. I feel like I am divulging my dirty past to you guys here. XD;
One thing I get a total kick out of is that the problem with "The Ethereal" is still a hot topic of conversation. For those of you not in the know (and why aren't you? haha), "The Ethereal" is one of the more bizarre episodes, in which some unearthly being comes to Agrabah and decides to destroy the city because there is nothing there that merits its existence. And man, I don't even remember it properly, but there's something about Al and Abu and Genie working to make this magic spear to defeat the Ethereal, and it's just totally bizarre. But to get to the point, Jasmine dives under a falling tower in order to save a wayward child, and she dies. (This is suspiciously similar to how Megara dies in Hercules, in my opinion. ^_~ ) What I love about the Aladdin fandom is that nobody is concerned about how ridiculous the rest of the episode is. The only reason people ever talk about this episode is because Jasmine dies and Aladdin shows no sign of any sort of emotional response. You have no idea how OFFENSIVE this is to the fans! XD And, I mean, it is totally out of character and such a difference from the rest of the series. He's more upset in the first Uncouthma episode when Genie tells him that Jasmine is probably going to dump him on account of his being a jerk. :P There are different theories that people have come up with, like maybe he couldn't believe it was real, or maybe he was by this point already too emotionally drained. (Or maybe he knew he's protected by a Main Character Shield and soon enough Jasmine would be revived?) But I prefer to look at things from a writer's perspective and I think perhaps they figured this episode was melodramatic enough as it is, there was no need for some big crying scene especially when the tragedy was going to be remedied some three minutes later. I mean, if Aladdin's grief had been portrayed the same way it sometimes is in fanfiction ... that would've been pretty heavy for a series that, like it or not, was produced with children in mind as the target audience. (Despite lines like in "Two to Tangle" where Mozenrath is totally playing the role of Jasmine's overly aggressive boyfriend. When I first saw that part I was like WHAT!!! It's probably not as bad as I make it out to be but still.)
Ahahaha, I love how insane this series is. Oh snap, a magic mirror transformed us into small animals! Oh snap, my boyfriend is a cursed pile of treasure! AW SNAP, TAR!!! Oh snap, my friends are trapped in a necklace wearing awkward facial expressions! Oh snap, my girlfriend and that blind dude are sleep-induced zombies! Oh snap, I made the Philosopher's Stone in my Easy Bake Oven, eat your heart out Voldemort! Oh snap, a creepy robot!
... okay, maybe that's enough. XD;;;; One thing that I wonder about this series is, if it had come out when I was older, would I even like it at all? I mean, I first watched the series before my brother was even in first grade, so I had completely accepted it as canon and as good before I was old enough to really question things like that. And the fandom totally accepts the series and the sequels. And I'm not saying that they shouldn't. But I wonder if there's a comparable fandom for Tarzan and I wonder what they think of their TV series. That series came out when I was in high school and I never managed to watch an entire episode. All of the voices were so obviously different people, which bothered me. (In Aladdin the only principal character whose voice actor changes is Genie, and I don't think it's as noticeable ... but again, I could be saying this because I saw the series when I was so young and couldn't tell the difference.) And the plots were the same in like every episode! I didn't like that they focused so much on British characters. It seems to contradict the first movie, where Jane's all, if you come to England you can never come back. What! Why not? Look at all these people in the series who are coming and going! And that episode where they go underground and see the dinosaurs, haha, probably it is no more and no less ridiculous than anything Aladdin includes, but from the very start Aladdin is a story about magic and monsters and fantastical things. The Tarzan episode with the dinosaurs makes me think that the series creators wanted to pull inspiration from the original novels, but it doesn't work as well as they'd like because the style and the tone of the story changed in the transition to a Disney film. Yeah, Edgar Rice Burroughs could put sci-fi elements into his stories, because that's what he was writing. But Disney's Tarzan is a lot more realistic than that, what are they doing going underground and finding dinosaurs???
So I kind of ignore that the Tarzan series and sequels exist, just as I ignore that the Hunchback of Notre Dame sequel exists. Sooooooo unnecessary.
(Although I guess I should admit I do like that clip one of the Family Channel commercials used where Tarzan is like, "Sorry. I have to go save people again. -_- " HAHA!)
It's interesting that there are some Disney sequel attempts that I REJECT (Cinderella II is a joke that should never have been made - whose idea is it to dig up these classic movies and append sequels that are of a totally different style and obviously from a totally different time period?) and some I totally embrace. For all my gripes about it, I do love the Aladdin series, and I don't mind the Beauty and the Beast Christmas movie, and I like The Lion King II even if only for the music and that dude who just wants his mother to love him. ;_; I like the TV series for The Little Mermaid because it reminds me so strongly of my childhood but I don't remember the sequel well enough to judge it. (And if we're counting collaborations with Pixar, Toy Story 2 rocks my socks.) But most of all I looooooooove the Hercules series like you would not even believe. I mean, I know it's so obscure and I'm one of like five people who have seen the whole thing. But apart from Seinfeld I think it's the funniest show I've ever seen. It does require a certain amount from its audience, in that the more you know about Ancient Greece the more references you'll recognize. And then to enjoy the references you recognize you have to be okay with the way the series takes Greek myths and totally messes them up. But to me it is such a hilarious mixture of Greek myths and high school sitcoms and everything I think is funny. They sing a song about Prometheus! They sing a song about Icarus that begins with the line "Who soars like an eagle in flight?" The Trojan War is a high school rivalry exaggerated to make an exciting newspaper article and Galatea is a creepy stalker girlfriend. (Not to mention the Aladdin crossover episode!!) Even though the series contradicts the movie in an important point (Hades is not supposed to know Hercules is alive until he's an adult), it still stays true to the spirit of it and is so totally awesome. (Though will probably date itself only a bit less than Aladdin, haha.) I wish this series hadn't been so hated upon because it is the best thing ever in the entire world ever. :(
Anyway, what was I talking about, hahahaha. So I took a little look to see how the Aladdin fandom is doing and I am glad to see there is still plenty to talk about and a fair amount of stuff going on. :) And now perhaps I should move on to a new topic, even though you all know I could talk about ridiculous Disney stuff forever, hahaha. XD!
Aaaah, one last thing one last thing! On YouTube someone has uploaded the Japanese dubbed version of "I Won't Say (I'm in Love)" (check how she sings the last line in English, hahaha). <3333
3. Ukifune.
"Ukifune" is the name given to one of the characters from The Tale of Genji. Scholars have had to give these characters their names because the original is so indirect about addressing people. :P But anyway, Ukifune is an important character in the last five (or so) chapters of the novel. Though she is sort of already promised to and claimed by Kaoru (who grew up believing himself to be the son of Genji but who is actually the illegitimate son of Genji's wife the Third Princess and some dude I forget where he comes from called Kashiwagi), when her beauty is discovered by Niou (Genji's grandson, though only like a year younger than Kaoru), he sleeps with her under the guise that he is Kaoru. And she believes he's Kaoru, too, until like halfway through. x_x;; This sort of thing really happens a lot more in the Genji than it should, in my opinion, hahaha. And then Ukifune spends like a billion pages being angsty about this, because that is what the characters of Genji do with their time. XD; And then she goes all Ophelia and drowns herself, only for some unexplained reason she doesn't die but instead is found by monks and then she angsts some more and finally decides to become a nun.
That was all rather convulted backstory (even after simplifying it) to introduce you to the song I have been obsessing over for the past couple of weeks! While writing one of my reading responses I looked up Ukifune on Wikipedia and found that the band Go!Go!7188 had made a song based on her story. I think it's interesting when modern, mainstream sort of bands have songs based on old stories, but somehow this one is even more interesting to me, probably just because it's in Japanese. ^^; The funny thing is, when I saw the cover of the single I totally recognized it from having seen it on some J-pop site back in high school. But at the time I didn't care at all because I had no idea who Ukifune was.
Go!Go!7188 - "Ukifune" (music video)
Go!Go!7188 - "Ukifune" (in a concert)
Go!Go!7188 - "Ukifune" (Jiken)
Go!Go!7188 - "Ukifune" (Music Station) (my favourite part about this is one of the comments at the bottom, where the person says they've started reading Genji just to find out about Ukifune. aha. if you're starting at the beginning of a thousand page, heavily footnoted book where no one even has a name just to satisfy a passing curiosity about one of the characters at the very end, let me guess how far you're gonna get.)
When writing my response, I wasn't feeling all that sympathetic towards Ukifune, I was just so sick of reading Genji and so sick of characters spending entire billion page chapters just sitting there weeping. (I guess I should be honest - chapter fifty-one, which I was writing about, is more interesting than that. I like at the beginning how Niou asks the servants to cover for him and keep pretending like he's Kaoru and they're all running around stressed out because of the pressure he's put on them. But after that the chapter does degenerate into copious amounts of weeping.) But when I first heard this song, I felt like, oh. I guess she is actually sad and I guess she maybe even has reason to be. I think this song really captures a certain feeling of abandonment and the lyrics are beautiful. And what's especially interesting about the lyrics is they don't just tell the story of Ukifune, but they are at least a little bit influenced by the actual way in which The Tale of Genji is written, with all the references to nature and the seasons. According to the translator's note on that page, there are even grammatical touches that are similar to those used in Genji's much older Japanese, but I don't know half enough to recognize them for what they are.
The lyrics mention the cutting of the narrator's hair, surely a reference to how Ukifune cuts her hair when she becomes a nun (as all Heian nuns cut off their long hair). Well, of course you could just read it without thinking it's a reference, and one of the following lines is about cigarettes (or 煙草 "tabako," anyway) when I don't remember anyone ever smoking anything in the novel. Maybe I am trying too hard to read references into this song, but I wonder if the "tabako no nioi" is supposed to refer to Niou ... maybe not? I like the idea that it does though. Because otherwise there's only one man mentioned in the lyrics when Ukifune's problem is that she has two men pursuing her. Well either way, I like that the lyrics sort of convey the idea of a Heian woman, waiting there in her rooms that she's not supposed to leave. (In my lit. class we had several discussions about how crazy we would go if we were Heian women, haha. Like every other class our prof had to scold us for thinking too twenty-first-century Western. XD; )
And on a different level, I like that, at that part near the end of the song, the "ki" of "yuki" becomes the "ki" of "kimi." And I like all the "nai"s, it reminds me of Ayaya's "Kiseki no Kaori Dance" and that part I like with all the "nai"s. Haha. ^^;
If I may say more about Genji ... For me, the thing with The Tale of Genji is that I didn't really enjoy the actual act of reading it (except the scenes with Tou no Chuujou's long-lost hick daughter, hahaha, I thought she was hilarious), but I loved talking about it in class (my classmates were total fans of Lady Rokujou and how she, like Rasputin, is impossible to kill) and I enjoyed reading the supplementary articles and I get a toooooootal kick out of being able to act like I'm all knowledgeable about it and everything. But oof, reading it was harsh. I really like learning about Heian literature but I am so picky about what I like when I read it, hahaha. One thing I thought was interesting was when the footnotes (we read Royall Tyler's translation, if anyone cares at all) marked continuity errors. I think they were for the most part about people's ages, but some of them should have been really obvious errors and I'm not sure why Murasaki Shikibu wrote them in the first place. Maybe she decided someone's age had to shift and she would go back and fix the previous chapters later? I think it's really interesting to read what we know about her writing process, which I guess comes from text analysis and the few times she mentions the novel in her diary. I like the idea of her just one day deciding to write a novel and then writing and writing with no real direction until she died. Because that reminds me of the way I used to write when I was younger. :) All into it and enjoying it and don't ask me what's going to happen next, I won't know until tomorrow!
There's a lot of speculation about the process of writing The Tale of Genji and I don't really know a lot about it ... she went back and edited some chapters, some chapters are missing, some chapters may have been written by someone other than Murasaki Shikibu. I could never be someone who works on trying to figure all of that out because wouldn't it so frustrating? You could say computer analysis tells us that certain chapters were written by a different author but you would never know for sure and you would never know who. And I dunno ... it's interesting, but I don't know if there's a real point to figuring out whether or not certain chapters weren't hers, you know? I guess they want to figure out if the work we have is not as she intended it to be, but it's been around for so long and is so ingrained into the history of Japanese literature that it seems to me the question of authorship almost doesn't matter anymore.
Change of topic! On Thursday we were talking about the novel's final chapter, "The Floating Bridge of Dreams" (how poetic hehe), and the prof was telling us about how a floating bridge is a bridge made of boats and planks that are just lying precariously in the water while you cross them, and when I made a note of this in my binder I wrote how it is like what Will and Elizabeth use in the first PotC movie when they want to get from the Isla to the Interceptor. XD Awesome!
4. NaNoWriMo!!!
I won NaNoWriMo 2006!!! XD XD XD XD And I feel a lot prouder than I did in 2004, I think because I felt a lot more hardcore, because I approached the last week of November with 6,000 words that I had to write every day in order to finish. On Wednesday alone I wrote 9,000 words in something like six and a half hours. This blows my mind that during the week of death where I was absolutely buried in schoolwork (and sort of sacrificing it in favour of writing, to be honest), I was able to bust out 9k in one day. This makes my production level the rest of the year look absolutely pathetic. But one of my friends busted out 28k in one day and I was talking to her about that, hahaha, how it makes her seem so lazy the rest of the time!! XD Hilarity.
The novel is still not done, even after two times through NaNoWriMo. Scenes are missing and whole arcs are missing and I have no idea how close I am to an ending or what that ending will be. And I don't know how much I'll keep working on it ... I like the idea of working on it at a calmer pace but maybe it benefited from being busted out so quickly? One thing I notice when I write a lot of words in a short amount of time is how everything automatically ties in together a bit more than it would otherwise, just because it's all in your head at the same time and there's no chance to forget anything. Another thing I liked about NaNo this year was how I was able to be more carefree about it than I've been in the past. There are so many continuity errors - Ana's apartment sometimes has one bathroom and sometimes two, depending on the mood I was in - and usually that would drive me batty but right now I'm totally cool with it. Like, for once I have faith that I'll be able to find and fix them later. And there are several really random scenes, too, that never do anything or go anywhere. And because I wrote a bunch in 2005 and then left it alone for a year before coming back to it in 2006, several of the characters had total personality shifts. But it doesn't even bother me like it does with my main novel project. Which, by the way, I am excited to get back to. :d Haha, yesterday after coming home from school I had no idea what to do with myself. I was like, why am I home so early? Shouldn't I be in the computer lab forcing out six kajillion words? What am I supposed to do with all this time ... ? XD
Aaaaah, sigh. I miss NaNo but it's good to have a break and hopefully over December I'll be able to write lots and do other things I wanted to do during the semester that I didn't so much have the time for. And my friends and I have been tossing around the idea of doing NaNo in January, an idea which I whole-heartedly support. One of the things that made NaNo kind of weird this year was thatathena_crikey wasn't doing it! It took me a while to get used to logging into the site and seeing her bar empty, instead of like ten thousand words ahead of mine. And the_wykydtron didn't finish and betaraider horked hers out in four days. So even though there are forums full of NaNo participants, it was like I had lost my local NaNo group which is perhaps another reason why I feel more hardcore for finishing. Because I feel more like I did it by myself, and isn't that an accomplishment? Aren't I just so awesome to have won NaNo in a year when one of my friends was too busy to even start? :D :D :D :D
If this reads like I am praising myself way too much, please keep in mind I have endured three years of quite solidly losing NaNoWriMo and would like to for once bask in the glow of victory. XD
I think a third reason I felt so hardcore this year is that I wrote a large chunk of my novel in the school computer lab (often until like eight or nine at night), and surrounded by all those people who were (pretending to be) working on their essays, I really felt like I was also working hard towards some important goal. And I am proud of myself for starting to overcome my inability to write on computers. Well, the one day I tried to write on a school PC I got horribly distracted. I think I am less familiar with Macs which leads me to be more focused while writing on them. Although I still do love my notebooks and I did write a fair amount by hand, too, which is why it will take a week or two until I can send out my incomplete and terrible NaNo novel to the friends I promised I'd send it to. :X
5. One more bit about PotC2.
I was looking at Wikipedia yesterday, and wow, someone has gone through and added a whole thwack of stuff so that now PotC is its own crazy huge category. (I would argue though that this is not quite as awesome as when I discovered someone had gone through and made a surprising number of pages about the Aladdin TV series.) And a trivia section for PotC2, yay!! This one is my favourite:
For a dose of authenticity in the final twist at the end of the film, the actors were not told, prior to filming, that Geoffrey Rush would be appearing in the movie. They were told, before the scene was shot, that the person coming down the stairs would be Anamaria from The Curse of the Black Pearl; the looks of surprise on their faces as Rush descends are genuine.
You have no idea how completely and indescribably happy this one little paragraph makes me.
1. Icons.
Over the past week I have replaced five of my six icons. The Muktaar icon will always be hilarious, and the Ayumi Hamasaki "Step You" icon is good for creeping out
athena_crikey, and of course Ayu's "Ourselves" is the best music video in the world entire world ever, but I thought perhaps it was time for a change. (I'd been using the "Step You" icon since September of last year or something like that, hahaha, old!)So. I kept the "Easy Breezy" icon because I luuuuurve it. (Despite my hatred for phones in real life, I love phones in music videos - the alternate version of Ayaya's "Zutto Suki de Ii Desu Ka," ah, so good - and that video is full of them. I went through a little obsession with Shakira's "Don't Bother" video in October. I don't know why I felt the need to mention that just now, there's no phone in it. But I guess the shots of her just sitting around the room remind me of this shot of Hikki staring at her phone that is off the hook as if she is waiting for a call that can't come because she has taken the phone off the hook, hahaha.)
(I love the Barenaked Ladies song "Enid" and I always pictured that video to be full of telephones. You know, "I took your phone message oh and speaking of communication~" &c. Then I saw the video and was sorely disappointed. :( )
(Aw man, I am really sad right now because that Escaflowne video set to "Superman (It's Not Easy)" is no longer on YouTube. Man, it was kind of amateur but I really liked it, Van is still like my favourite character from anything ever.)
Ahaha, wait, what was I talking about? XD;;
I have three J-pop icons and three Disney icons because I feel that accurately represents the general state of my brain right now. XD (Except that at this moment I am watching Escaflowne music videos. Hahaha, let's ignore that.) Reina is my default as usual because she is my hero. Then I have an icon I made in March of last year. My very favourite part of Morning Musume's "Shabondama" video is at the end of Rika's monologue where she screams "dakishimete yo~~~" and everyone reaches as though towards something completely unattainable. Aha, compared to the four icons I didn't make, this icon looks really amateur. And it is. XD But I dig it anyway, because "Shabondama" is awesome, and Rika USED to be awesome, before "Aisu Kuriimu to My Purin" came along and destroyed her. ;_; ;_; ;_; ;_;
(I am very bitter about this, I hope you can tell.)
Then a Tarzan icon, because even if it isn't Disney's most popular animated feature, I think it has moved up to be my second favourite. (Switching places with Hunchback of Notre Dame. Just ... 'cause.) Besides having great music (I always fail at listening to the soundtrack because I just put "Son of Man" on repeat for like three hours, hahaha, yessss) and absolutely awesome animation and the jungle and Jane's fantastic monologue ("and Daddy - they took my boot!"), there is something in this movie that I really feel like I relate to. That idea of being caught between where you grew up and where you want to go, and having to make a decision that you can never take back. And I look at that and I have no idea why I feel like I can relate to that, there's not really any specific event in my life that is all that comparable. But oh man, I love that movie ...
And the obligatory PotC icon. XD! Replacing my Davy Jones icon that nobody ever got. WELL FINE! XD One thing that I think is interesting about PotC is that in the first movie, there aren't really any scenes that stand out as my favourites. If I absolutely had to had to choose, I would say the scene of Jack's entrance and that scene with Jack and Barbossa, "and then I'll shout the name back to you." But in that movie I look forward to lines more than scenes. And I look forward to the apples. <3 However, I think I clearly prefer certain scenes in the sequel over other scenes. And I think that's an insult, like, the first movie was all so good I couldn't choose favourites, but the second wasn't as consistant and so I end up having favourites without thinking about it. The scene where Will boards the broken ship and then Jack bargains with Davy Jones, that scene is a definite favourite. And I also really like the Isla Cruces sequence. Or at least the parts with the principal characters in them. And not so much the fighting bit, just because I tend to get distracted during fighting bits. But the rest of it, haha. XD;
NEW PARAGRAPH! One thing I really like in PotC2 is the shots of people walking or running but the camera is really faraway. I am so not a fan of the cannibal sequence but I must confess I heart the free-for-all running to the Pearl at the end of it. I ADORE that one quick shot from behind of Jack running towards the boat as the sails are being quickly unfurled. I get a kick out of free-for-all scenes like that. XD And I also really like the faraway time-elapsed shot of Jack and Liz and Norrington walking across the Isla Cruces sand, I like the music there too. And I like that the three-way sword fight includes a couple faraway shots where it's just these three faraway guys running frantically across the beach.
Shut up, you know it's awesome. XD
And then an Aladdin icon to replace the Muktaar. For this I shall make a new heading. XD
2. A lot of Aladdin and a little Hercules.
The icon is of Jasmine and I don't think I'm supposed to admit this, but I've never really been a fan of Jasmine by herself. I mean, obviously the movie doesn't work without her, and I don't mind her or anything, and I do think it's interesting to look at her role in the movie and within the larger scope of the Disney Princesses and other Disney women. Just today I read a short Entertainment Weekly article in which they mention that Jasmine is the first animated Disney heroine to act the part of seductress, even if she is only pretending to be interested in the men (Prince Ali - "I'm rich too, you know" &c. - and, later in the movie, Jafar). And I mean, that's pretty interesting. But other than that, even if she's "feisty" (this is the word applied to every Disney heroine to appear since 1989, I swear to God and I am so incredibly sick of hearing it) and determined and whatever, it's just always seemed to me that all those qualities nevertheless come together into a rather bland character. I mean, like I said, I like her within the context of Aladdin, but on her own there's nothing that really draws me to her. (Well, it doesn't help that in the series she's written sort of inconsistently - "The Secret of Dagger Rock" is the best thing ever while in "Sneeze the Day," a good episode for Al and Iago, I can't even stand her for all the screaming that she does, honestly.) Even when I was in elementary school I would've picked Ariel or Belle over Jasmine any day, I think. Well I loved Ariel so there was no contest there. :3
Nevertheless, I have a Jasmine PEZ dispenser in my room and now a Jasmine icon in my journal. XD
As I mentioned in an earlier entry, on Friday night I watched Aladdin twice in a row instead of studying. XD I was totally surprised to find that even on my one millionth viewing of this movie I still noticed things I'd never noticed before. I mean, stupid things, not like "omg suddenly the plot makes sense," hahahaha, of course not. XD; But a continuity error I never noticed before is that when Jasmine is pretending she's in love with Jafar, she puts on the crown he had previously offered her. But as soon as the crown serves its plot purpose - acting as a mirror in which Jafar can see Aladdin sneaking around behind him -, it disappears without a trace! And something silly that I noticed is that Genie pronounces "bona fide" two different ways throughout the course of the movie. XD The first time it's in a song lyric so maybe it doesn't count, though, haha. And one line I think is interesting is Jafar's "You're speechless, I see. A fine quality in a wife," just because it so perfectly echoes Ursula's "it's she who holds her tongue who gets a man" but at the same time is so different. Aha, I spent way too much time analyzing Ursula's song last year. XD
And then something I noticed the last time I watched the movie, however many months ago that was, but then I remembered I noticed it, haha: Genie asks Al, "So, you've just won the heart of the princess, what are you going to do next?" as "When You Wish Upon a Star" (the quintessential Disney anthem) plays briefly in the background music. Genie tells Al that the answer is "I'm going to free the genie," but of course we all know the more appropriate response is "I'm going to Disney World!" XD XD XD XD XD XD XD You have no idea how happy this makes me that they included such a lame little reference like that. A reference to THEIR OWN MARKETING CAMPAIGN. Hahaha, Disney, excellent, I love how unashamed you are. XD
Speaking of Genie, the second time I watched the movie I had the pop-up trivia feature turned on. Which was the lamest thing ever because it couldn't decide who its audience was. One minute it informs us that Tupperware didn't really exist at the time the story is set, the next minute it's going on about medieval Iranian architecture, the next minute it's making a totally unnecessary pun. But admittedly there were some interesting points. One part I thought was kind of funny was during one of Genie's strings of impressions, when the trivia mentioned that the movie's creators figured that Genie had travelled all around the world and through all different times (this makes no sense - if he's bound to his master what's he doing going all over the place like that? but let's pretend for the moment that it does make sense), and that's why it was "natural" for him to constantly be referencing the people and the things that he does. Except that's the wussiest explanation I've ever heard! And sort of self-centred, a little bit. If Genie has been all over the world and all through time, why are the vast majority of his impressions based on twentieth-century Americans? I think it's kind of cute that the trivia tried to justify his characterization like that, but it's also totally unnecessary. You can't explain Genie and why he is as he is without leaving the world of the Aladdinverse. Even the series writers knew this - in one episode a sprite asks Genie what he is and he replies, "Comic relief, mainly."
(That is the same episode where the characters are trying to guess what Carpet is trying to tell them and Genie is pretending like it's Charades and he's shouting things like, "Spinning! You're spinning! You're in a whirlpool! Time vortex - you're in a time vortex! ... I remember that episode." Ahaha, I have quoted that last bit an embarrassing number of times and of course nobody ever gets it. Ahahaha ... excellent.)
But it seems to me like the movie's creators were kind of a wee little bit deluding themselves when it came to Genie. I read another article today which ends with his lead animator expressing his joy at having been part of a movie that will bring laughter to people for generations. And yeah, the movie has jokes that I'm sure will still be funny when I'm an old lady. But if you think it's all going to stay as funny as it may have been in 1992, then you are only kidding yourself. Aladdin is going to date itself worse than any other animated Disney feature I can think of. And apparently the trivia took this into an account, as they felt the need to add notes clarifying who Ed Sullivan and Groucho Marx were. And - my favourite - when Genie does his Ahnold impersonation, the trivia note read "Arnold Schwarzenegger was a famous bodybuilder and actor before he became governor of California." Ha ha ha! I first saw this movie when I was five and I had no idea who these people were. All of the scenes I remember from that day involve Iago, because I thought Iago was a riot, much funnier than Genie whose jokes I didn't really understand. And I'm sure my kids are going to have an even worse time of it, being removed from the time of the movie's release by a whole generation. Reviewers of Aladdin love to heap praise on Robin Williams for all the impressions he threw into his improvisations of the script, but it seems the jokes Genie is left with are mostly intended for a very specific audience that is at some point in the future not going to exist.
I mean, obviously this happens with everything. Laughter may be universal but humour is such a specific thing. But in no other Disney movie are the jokes so fastened to the time period and the culture into which the movie was released. To me that's interesting. And it's interesting that the trivia notes try to justify it in such an unnecessary manner ... ^^;
Moving on. :) After watching the movie and the storyboards for several of the deleted songs (I remembered like all the words to "You Can Count on Me" but I don't remember listening to that song an extraordinary number of times ... ?), I decided to go look for MP3s of the rest of the deleted songs, and in the process I sort of dipped back into the fandom just to take a look at how it has progressed since I left it five years ago. The AML, once the hub of the fandom, has practically gone AWOL, but there are still active forums and I recognized more of the forum members than I thought I would. I feel like I am divulging my dirty past to you guys here. XD;
One thing I get a total kick out of is that the problem with "The Ethereal" is still a hot topic of conversation. For those of you not in the know (and why aren't you? haha), "The Ethereal" is one of the more bizarre episodes, in which some unearthly being comes to Agrabah and decides to destroy the city because there is nothing there that merits its existence. And man, I don't even remember it properly, but there's something about Al and Abu and Genie working to make this magic spear to defeat the Ethereal, and it's just totally bizarre. But to get to the point, Jasmine dives under a falling tower in order to save a wayward child, and she dies. (This is suspiciously similar to how Megara dies in Hercules, in my opinion. ^_~ ) What I love about the Aladdin fandom is that nobody is concerned about how ridiculous the rest of the episode is. The only reason people ever talk about this episode is because Jasmine dies and Aladdin shows no sign of any sort of emotional response. You have no idea how OFFENSIVE this is to the fans! XD And, I mean, it is totally out of character and such a difference from the rest of the series. He's more upset in the first Uncouthma episode when Genie tells him that Jasmine is probably going to dump him on account of his being a jerk. :P There are different theories that people have come up with, like maybe he couldn't believe it was real, or maybe he was by this point already too emotionally drained. (Or maybe he knew he's protected by a Main Character Shield and soon enough Jasmine would be revived?) But I prefer to look at things from a writer's perspective and I think perhaps they figured this episode was melodramatic enough as it is, there was no need for some big crying scene especially when the tragedy was going to be remedied some three minutes later. I mean, if Aladdin's grief had been portrayed the same way it sometimes is in fanfiction ... that would've been pretty heavy for a series that, like it or not, was produced with children in mind as the target audience. (Despite lines like in "Two to Tangle" where Mozenrath is totally playing the role of Jasmine's overly aggressive boyfriend. When I first saw that part I was like WHAT!!! It's probably not as bad as I make it out to be but still.)
Ahahaha, I love how insane this series is. Oh snap, a magic mirror transformed us into small animals! Oh snap, my boyfriend is a cursed pile of treasure! AW SNAP, TAR!!! Oh snap, my friends are trapped in a necklace wearing awkward facial expressions! Oh snap, my girlfriend and that blind dude are sleep-induced zombies! Oh snap, I made the Philosopher's Stone in my Easy Bake Oven, eat your heart out Voldemort! Oh snap, a creepy robot!
... okay, maybe that's enough. XD;;;; One thing that I wonder about this series is, if it had come out when I was older, would I even like it at all? I mean, I first watched the series before my brother was even in first grade, so I had completely accepted it as canon and as good before I was old enough to really question things like that. And the fandom totally accepts the series and the sequels. And I'm not saying that they shouldn't. But I wonder if there's a comparable fandom for Tarzan and I wonder what they think of their TV series. That series came out when I was in high school and I never managed to watch an entire episode. All of the voices were so obviously different people, which bothered me. (In Aladdin the only principal character whose voice actor changes is Genie, and I don't think it's as noticeable ... but again, I could be saying this because I saw the series when I was so young and couldn't tell the difference.) And the plots were the same in like every episode! I didn't like that they focused so much on British characters. It seems to contradict the first movie, where Jane's all, if you come to England you can never come back. What! Why not? Look at all these people in the series who are coming and going! And that episode where they go underground and see the dinosaurs, haha, probably it is no more and no less ridiculous than anything Aladdin includes, but from the very start Aladdin is a story about magic and monsters and fantastical things. The Tarzan episode with the dinosaurs makes me think that the series creators wanted to pull inspiration from the original novels, but it doesn't work as well as they'd like because the style and the tone of the story changed in the transition to a Disney film. Yeah, Edgar Rice Burroughs could put sci-fi elements into his stories, because that's what he was writing. But Disney's Tarzan is a lot more realistic than that, what are they doing going underground and finding dinosaurs???
So I kind of ignore that the Tarzan series and sequels exist, just as I ignore that the Hunchback of Notre Dame sequel exists. Sooooooo unnecessary.
(Although I guess I should admit I do like that clip one of the Family Channel commercials used where Tarzan is like, "Sorry. I have to go save people again. -_- " HAHA!)
It's interesting that there are some Disney sequel attempts that I REJECT (Cinderella II is a joke that should never have been made - whose idea is it to dig up these classic movies and append sequels that are of a totally different style and obviously from a totally different time period?) and some I totally embrace. For all my gripes about it, I do love the Aladdin series, and I don't mind the Beauty and the Beast Christmas movie, and I like The Lion King II even if only for the music and that dude who just wants his mother to love him. ;_; I like the TV series for The Little Mermaid because it reminds me so strongly of my childhood but I don't remember the sequel well enough to judge it. (And if we're counting collaborations with Pixar, Toy Story 2 rocks my socks.) But most of all I looooooooove the Hercules series like you would not even believe. I mean, I know it's so obscure and I'm one of like five people who have seen the whole thing. But apart from Seinfeld I think it's the funniest show I've ever seen. It does require a certain amount from its audience, in that the more you know about Ancient Greece the more references you'll recognize. And then to enjoy the references you recognize you have to be okay with the way the series takes Greek myths and totally messes them up. But to me it is such a hilarious mixture of Greek myths and high school sitcoms and everything I think is funny. They sing a song about Prometheus! They sing a song about Icarus that begins with the line "Who soars like an eagle in flight?" The Trojan War is a high school rivalry exaggerated to make an exciting newspaper article and Galatea is a creepy stalker girlfriend. (Not to mention the Aladdin crossover episode!!) Even though the series contradicts the movie in an important point (Hades is not supposed to know Hercules is alive until he's an adult), it still stays true to the spirit of it and is so totally awesome. (Though will probably date itself only a bit less than Aladdin, haha.) I wish this series hadn't been so hated upon because it is the best thing ever in the entire world ever. :(
Anyway, what was I talking about, hahahaha. So I took a little look to see how the Aladdin fandom is doing and I am glad to see there is still plenty to talk about and a fair amount of stuff going on. :) And now perhaps I should move on to a new topic, even though you all know I could talk about ridiculous Disney stuff forever, hahaha. XD!
Aaaah, one last thing one last thing! On YouTube someone has uploaded the Japanese dubbed version of "I Won't Say (I'm in Love)" (check how she sings the last line in English, hahaha). <3333
3. Ukifune.
"Ukifune" is the name given to one of the characters from The Tale of Genji. Scholars have had to give these characters their names because the original is so indirect about addressing people. :P But anyway, Ukifune is an important character in the last five (or so) chapters of the novel. Though she is sort of already promised to and claimed by Kaoru (who grew up believing himself to be the son of Genji but who is actually the illegitimate son of Genji's wife the Third Princess and some dude I forget where he comes from called Kashiwagi), when her beauty is discovered by Niou (Genji's grandson, though only like a year younger than Kaoru), he sleeps with her under the guise that he is Kaoru. And she believes he's Kaoru, too, until like halfway through. x_x;; This sort of thing really happens a lot more in the Genji than it should, in my opinion, hahaha. And then Ukifune spends like a billion pages being angsty about this, because that is what the characters of Genji do with their time. XD; And then she goes all Ophelia and drowns herself, only for some unexplained reason she doesn't die but instead is found by monks and then she angsts some more and finally decides to become a nun.
That was all rather convulted backstory (even after simplifying it) to introduce you to the song I have been obsessing over for the past couple of weeks! While writing one of my reading responses I looked up Ukifune on Wikipedia and found that the band Go!Go!7188 had made a song based on her story. I think it's interesting when modern, mainstream sort of bands have songs based on old stories, but somehow this one is even more interesting to me, probably just because it's in Japanese. ^^; The funny thing is, when I saw the cover of the single I totally recognized it from having seen it on some J-pop site back in high school. But at the time I didn't care at all because I had no idea who Ukifune was.
Go!Go!7188 - "Ukifune" (music video)
Go!Go!7188 - "Ukifune" (in a concert)
Go!Go!7188 - "Ukifune" (Jiken)
Go!Go!7188 - "Ukifune" (Music Station) (my favourite part about this is one of the comments at the bottom, where the person says they've started reading Genji just to find out about Ukifune. aha. if you're starting at the beginning of a thousand page, heavily footnoted book where no one even has a name just to satisfy a passing curiosity about one of the characters at the very end, let me guess how far you're gonna get.)
When writing my response, I wasn't feeling all that sympathetic towards Ukifune, I was just so sick of reading Genji and so sick of characters spending entire billion page chapters just sitting there weeping. (I guess I should be honest - chapter fifty-one, which I was writing about, is more interesting than that. I like at the beginning how Niou asks the servants to cover for him and keep pretending like he's Kaoru and they're all running around stressed out because of the pressure he's put on them. But after that the chapter does degenerate into copious amounts of weeping.) But when I first heard this song, I felt like, oh. I guess she is actually sad and I guess she maybe even has reason to be. I think this song really captures a certain feeling of abandonment and the lyrics are beautiful. And what's especially interesting about the lyrics is they don't just tell the story of Ukifune, but they are at least a little bit influenced by the actual way in which The Tale of Genji is written, with all the references to nature and the seasons. According to the translator's note on that page, there are even grammatical touches that are similar to those used in Genji's much older Japanese, but I don't know half enough to recognize them for what they are.
The lyrics mention the cutting of the narrator's hair, surely a reference to how Ukifune cuts her hair when she becomes a nun (as all Heian nuns cut off their long hair). Well, of course you could just read it without thinking it's a reference, and one of the following lines is about cigarettes (or 煙草 "tabako," anyway) when I don't remember anyone ever smoking anything in the novel. Maybe I am trying too hard to read references into this song, but I wonder if the "tabako no nioi" is supposed to refer to Niou ... maybe not? I like the idea that it does though. Because otherwise there's only one man mentioned in the lyrics when Ukifune's problem is that she has two men pursuing her. Well either way, I like that the lyrics sort of convey the idea of a Heian woman, waiting there in her rooms that she's not supposed to leave. (In my lit. class we had several discussions about how crazy we would go if we were Heian women, haha. Like every other class our prof had to scold us for thinking too twenty-first-century Western. XD; )
And on a different level, I like that, at that part near the end of the song, the "ki" of "yuki" becomes the "ki" of "kimi." And I like all the "nai"s, it reminds me of Ayaya's "Kiseki no Kaori Dance" and that part I like with all the "nai"s. Haha. ^^;
If I may say more about Genji ... For me, the thing with The Tale of Genji is that I didn't really enjoy the actual act of reading it (except the scenes with Tou no Chuujou's long-lost hick daughter, hahaha, I thought she was hilarious), but I loved talking about it in class (my classmates were total fans of Lady Rokujou and how she, like Rasputin, is impossible to kill) and I enjoyed reading the supplementary articles and I get a toooooootal kick out of being able to act like I'm all knowledgeable about it and everything. But oof, reading it was harsh. I really like learning about Heian literature but I am so picky about what I like when I read it, hahaha. One thing I thought was interesting was when the footnotes (we read Royall Tyler's translation, if anyone cares at all) marked continuity errors. I think they were for the most part about people's ages, but some of them should have been really obvious errors and I'm not sure why Murasaki Shikibu wrote them in the first place. Maybe she decided someone's age had to shift and she would go back and fix the previous chapters later? I think it's really interesting to read what we know about her writing process, which I guess comes from text analysis and the few times she mentions the novel in her diary. I like the idea of her just one day deciding to write a novel and then writing and writing with no real direction until she died. Because that reminds me of the way I used to write when I was younger. :) All into it and enjoying it and don't ask me what's going to happen next, I won't know until tomorrow!
There's a lot of speculation about the process of writing The Tale of Genji and I don't really know a lot about it ... she went back and edited some chapters, some chapters are missing, some chapters may have been written by someone other than Murasaki Shikibu. I could never be someone who works on trying to figure all of that out because wouldn't it so frustrating? You could say computer analysis tells us that certain chapters were written by a different author but you would never know for sure and you would never know who. And I dunno ... it's interesting, but I don't know if there's a real point to figuring out whether or not certain chapters weren't hers, you know? I guess they want to figure out if the work we have is not as she intended it to be, but it's been around for so long and is so ingrained into the history of Japanese literature that it seems to me the question of authorship almost doesn't matter anymore.
Change of topic! On Thursday we were talking about the novel's final chapter, "The Floating Bridge of Dreams" (how poetic hehe), and the prof was telling us about how a floating bridge is a bridge made of boats and planks that are just lying precariously in the water while you cross them, and when I made a note of this in my binder I wrote how it is like what Will and Elizabeth use in the first PotC movie when they want to get from the Isla to the Interceptor. XD Awesome!
4. NaNoWriMo!!!
I won NaNoWriMo 2006!!! XD XD XD XD And I feel a lot prouder than I did in 2004, I think because I felt a lot more hardcore, because I approached the last week of November with 6,000 words that I had to write every day in order to finish. On Wednesday alone I wrote 9,000 words in something like six and a half hours. This blows my mind that during the week of death where I was absolutely buried in schoolwork (and sort of sacrificing it in favour of writing, to be honest), I was able to bust out 9k in one day. This makes my production level the rest of the year look absolutely pathetic. But one of my friends busted out 28k in one day and I was talking to her about that, hahaha, how it makes her seem so lazy the rest of the time!! XD Hilarity.
The novel is still not done, even after two times through NaNoWriMo. Scenes are missing and whole arcs are missing and I have no idea how close I am to an ending or what that ending will be. And I don't know how much I'll keep working on it ... I like the idea of working on it at a calmer pace but maybe it benefited from being busted out so quickly? One thing I notice when I write a lot of words in a short amount of time is how everything automatically ties in together a bit more than it would otherwise, just because it's all in your head at the same time and there's no chance to forget anything. Another thing I liked about NaNo this year was how I was able to be more carefree about it than I've been in the past. There are so many continuity errors - Ana's apartment sometimes has one bathroom and sometimes two, depending on the mood I was in - and usually that would drive me batty but right now I'm totally cool with it. Like, for once I have faith that I'll be able to find and fix them later. And there are several really random scenes, too, that never do anything or go anywhere. And because I wrote a bunch in 2005 and then left it alone for a year before coming back to it in 2006, several of the characters had total personality shifts. But it doesn't even bother me like it does with my main novel project. Which, by the way, I am excited to get back to. :d Haha, yesterday after coming home from school I had no idea what to do with myself. I was like, why am I home so early? Shouldn't I be in the computer lab forcing out six kajillion words? What am I supposed to do with all this time ... ? XD
Aaaaah, sigh. I miss NaNo but it's good to have a break and hopefully over December I'll be able to write lots and do other things I wanted to do during the semester that I didn't so much have the time for. And my friends and I have been tossing around the idea of doing NaNo in January, an idea which I whole-heartedly support. One of the things that made NaNo kind of weird this year was that
athena_crikey wasn't doing it! It took me a while to get used to logging into the site and seeing her bar empty, instead of like ten thousand words ahead of mine. And the_wykydtron didn't finish and betaraider horked hers out in four days. So even though there are forums full of NaNo participants, it was like I had lost my local NaNo group which is perhaps another reason why I feel more hardcore for finishing. Because I feel more like I did it by myself, and isn't that an accomplishment? Aren't I just so awesome to have won NaNo in a year when one of my friends was too busy to even start? :D :D :D :DIf this reads like I am praising myself way too much, please keep in mind I have endured three years of quite solidly losing NaNoWriMo and would like to for once bask in the glow of victory. XD
I think a third reason I felt so hardcore this year is that I wrote a large chunk of my novel in the school computer lab (often until like eight or nine at night), and surrounded by all those people who were (pretending to be) working on their essays, I really felt like I was also working hard towards some important goal. And I am proud of myself for starting to overcome my inability to write on computers. Well, the one day I tried to write on a school PC I got horribly distracted. I think I am less familiar with Macs which leads me to be more focused while writing on them. Although I still do love my notebooks and I did write a fair amount by hand, too, which is why it will take a week or two until I can send out my incomplete and terrible NaNo novel to the friends I promised I'd send it to. :X
5. One more bit about PotC2.
I was looking at Wikipedia yesterday, and wow, someone has gone through and added a whole thwack of stuff so that now PotC is its own crazy huge category. (I would argue though that this is not quite as awesome as when I discovered someone had gone through and made a surprising number of pages about the Aladdin TV series.) And a trivia section for PotC2, yay!! This one is my favourite:
For a dose of authenticity in the final twist at the end of the film, the actors were not told, prior to filming, that Geoffrey Rush would be appearing in the movie. They were told, before the scene was shot, that the person coming down the stairs would be Anamaria from The Curse of the Black Pearl; the looks of surprise on their faces as Rush descends are genuine.
You have no idea how completely and indescribably happy this one little paragraph makes me.