Extended Absence?

Updating once a week is not blogging. I'm sorry. I will try to be better. I think the problem is that there really doesn't feel like there's anything to report. There is, though. Of course. I just need to write it down...

I finished my prospectus last weekend. That is, I finished the first draft of my prospectus. I don't know if I told you all, but I am writing about David Rudkin and Mark Ravenhill (playwrights) and I will be focusing on the intersections of queer theory and violence. A small sample:

Following Fromm, then, I understand violence to be an impulse of destructive aggression that culminates in an act of violation committed on the body of the subject or the body of another. On a stage, this violence is always simulated, whether performed realistically for the audience or created through language. These representations of violence, of damage to bodies, hold considerable power and, as Sierz says, have the ability to “go beyond words.” So this is not a study about queer killers, per se. I am much more interested in violence as a single but important component of the ways in which we perceive queer bodies interacting in a theatrical space.
Because of the ways in which Rudkin and Ravenhill approach their subject matter, my focus is not queer murderers, or even queer suicides, but the queer as a subject participating in societies that are violent. The plays I have chosen for this study certainly portray queers who commit acts of violence, but I am interested in how these queer characters are represented as in-teracting in the matrix of their societies.

That last paragraph is too short. I will need to fix it later...

But with the prospectus momentarily out of the way, I am working on a paper for my history class. I wrote my teacher a proposal describing how I was going to write a paper about the liver and desire in Shakespeare (remember how they always told us that you fall in love with your liver in Shakespeare?) but once I started researching it, I got bored. The liver? Zzzzz.
Mostly it wasn't sexy enough. So now I think I am going to write about that old war horse Othello, which my friends and I did in college. It's going to be a paper about male friendship in Elizabethan England.

What else? I need to write about The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which I saw last week. (I loved it.) But I think I am going to catch Gone Baby Gone tonight, so maybe I'll wait and do a Casey Affleck double feature post.

Haven't been reading a lot of fun stuff in any of my other classes. Not since David Edgar's Pentecost a couple of weeks ago.

Oh yeah, and I am coming to California on December fifteenth! I will be there for three weeks. I am very excited.