The Film Noir Experience

Well, ladies and gentlemen. This is it. This is the end of NaNoWriMo and I have a measly 3,000 words written. I did not meet the objective. I am, however, not sad by this because of the circus of paperwork my life has become what with job applications and visa applications and trying to come up with a suitable PhD topic that I won't mind spending the next (at least) three years of my life working on AND that will attract appropriate amounts of funding. That's a lot of work.

On top of this, there is the emotional work of dealing with my first Christmas away from home, which will also be John's and my First Christmas together as a couple. On top of this, the universe as seen fit for the honeymoon period of living together to be over so we've been going through bouts of being at each other's throats. Fun. But, we have, separately and collectively decided that this is going to be an amazing Christmas, no matter how we might bitch at each other or how I might be homesick. Its going to be fun and exciting (And, oh dear Powers That Be please, let it be relaxing.)

The plus side of the whole NaNoWriMo experience is that I think I will be able to roll what I have written into a piece of slash fiction that I wrote whilst I was supposed to be studying for the GREs. This added addition of 3,000 words, plus a lot of tweaking to make the new stuff and the old stuff actually make sense may mean that, when all is said and done, I have something that is readable by the general public and not just a big festival of crap.

I'm feeling very hopeful. And, hopeful feels good. I'm going to watch the end of Murder, She Wrote and have lunch now. I have been, on the sly, working on a podcast, as well as a number of reviews and another installment on my ethics odyssey, so watch this space for updates of actual interest soon.

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I'm going to take a break out my recap of what I've been learning to say that we've arrived to the point in our learning that we can now play games that involve us saying things like Wyt ti'n ei yfed e. "You drink it." in order to get people to guess what it is you are thinking of, in this case you could say cwrw or "beer" . Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I have gotten to the point in my Welsh learning that I'm ready to take a road trip with a small child.

I know will take you back to your regularly scheduled This Week in Welsh.

I teased you almost a fortnight ago with the prospect of more aspect. If you've been following my Welsh adventure, you are already well versed in the verbal expression of temporal flow, and so you will be ready to dive straight into present perfect. Now, if you haven't been following the adventure (WHY NOT?) or you would like a little refresher course in grammar, I will now give a little digest of what in heaven's name the present perfect actually is.

The Present Perfect, to quote Wikipedia is, "The present perfect tense is a perfect tense used to express action that has been completed with respect to the present." In English we express with by using the words "have" or "has" with the past participle of the verb. (It is important at this point to remember that this "have" does not connote possession nor does it refer to any activity that "must" take place.) The present perfect refers to things that are right now, in this moment, finished. And, in Welsh you let people know this being using a construction with the word wedi.

In the present tense if you want to say:" I read the book", in Cymraegyou'd say Dw i'n darllen. The 'n here is a contraction of the word yn. In the present perfect, you toss out the yn and replace it with wedi. So, to say: "I have read the book." you say,Dw i wedi darllen.. See, easy as a lion. And, there you have it, folks.

Thank you for tuning into this week in Welsh. Next week will delve into the important topics of accusative/dative pronouns and the "must" construction.

Hwyl Fawr!

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Its that time of year again. The time of year where the television is full of ads scored with children's choirs singing carols and store windows are full of displays and window decals with penguins dancing with wrapped packages. Which for me, as an American, means Thanksgiving! Last year, I held a Thanksgiving feast for my housemates and a few of the other masters' students and it was a huge success. This year, my friend Anne-Marie and I decided to co-host the event. It became a magical refuge that felt very much like home.

When you prepare for Thanksgiving, anywhere you have it, you have to start with a menu and a guest list. Thanksgiving is a holiday that celebrates being thankful for what you have and that to us meant inviting our friends here in Wales. When all was said and done we'd invited around twenty people. Which brings us to the menu. If you have twenty people coming over for dinner to celebrate a holiday none of them have ever celebrated before, you want to have as much tradition on the table as possible. We started with the centerpiece, Anne-Marie's boyfriend Eamonn has a bigger house than either of us have and he offered us the space; he also offered to take on the bird which was a whopping 19.4 pounds. Which left Anne-Marie and I to faff about the side dishes. The line in the dishes ended up resembling a wonky mason-dixon line with Anne-Marie making such dishes as Mach Choux and cornbread dressing and me filling in with the green bean casserole, cranberry relish and what came to be known as "Yankee stuffing" (It was a lovely apple and sausage affair.) To this mix there was also added sweet potato casserole, squash casserole, sugar snap peas, mashed potatoes and some really spectacular homemade gravy. And, of course, we had pie for dessert. I made a chocolate pecan pie and Anne-Marie provided mini-pumpkin (ish) pies (they were actually butternut squash), key lime pie, and a cherry cheese pie.

But, long before we could ever get to the end product that was the actual and awesome meal, we had to begin by navigating the grocery store.

Most American recipes are full of helpful descriptions of amounts like, "half stick of butter" or "one can carnation sweetened condensed milk". Which, unfortunately do not translate because butter does not always come and sticks and can sizes vary with country. On top of this, there is the added bonus of many staples of traditional American food just not being available places that are not America. Things like, dark corn syrup and French's fried onions. So, you make do.

Instead of just using a can of sweetened condensed milk, Anne-Marie weighed out what she thought was the appropriate measurement. This made for a slightly soupy cherry cheese pie. Instead of using crunchy onions, I used pickled pearl onions and cheese and onion potato chips. This gave the green bean casserole a slightly vinegar taste.

But, the hardest one to deal with was the corn syrup, because in order to make pecan pie you need something that is equal to taste and texture as dark corn syrup. In the end, I settled for black treacle. This had the color of tar with the consistency of corn syrup and a slight flavor or molasses. The pie turned out fine in the end. I left the last slice with one of Eamonn's housemates. When I asked if he wanted it, his face lit up.

The feast raged until well past 11, and then it strolled along merrily until 1:30 in the morning. Worn out, John and I took a cab with our leftovers back to our flat where we snuggled on the sofa and watched a documentary on symbolism. I ended up going to bed around 3 o'clock.

Thanksgiving is one of those traditions that I used to look at with skepticism. It was so close to Christmas, why did we bother? On top of that, when we're told the whole story of the pilgrims which makes you secretly wonder if it should be named something like, as Sarah suggests, "Happy National Kill the Natives in the Name of Colonialism Day". But, regardless of how I used to feel, I am now grateful for this tradition that has given me the opportunity to pause and appreciate all that I have, and to share that bounty with people that I have made my life brighter since I have moved so far from home.

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I've been reading Teach Yourself Ethics by Mel Thompson. This is not because it was recommended by the Sarah or Preston but rather because it was less expensive than the books that they suggested and seemed to give a good overview of the topic. I like overviews, they provide you with the opportunity to read a little about everything and then zoom in on what you find most interesting.

So far the book has talked about determinism and reductionism. From what I have gathered from the book, determinism is based on a theory that things, like say our actions, may be determined by causes our in the world, such as our genetics or the surrounding environment. So, its a bit like karma in that determinism argues that there is may be a verifiable link between cause and effect.

Thompson says about Reductionism that it is, "a philosophical rather than an ethical problem, but it is relevant because it claims to render moral language, and the whole idea of personal freedom, meaningless." (2006:21) Reductionism suggests that we are nothing more than the electrical impulses in the brain that cause us to do the things that we do.

Why are either of these things important, you may ask? They are important because in order to be able to have ethical dilemmas, we have to be able to make choices. If what we do is predetermined by our biochemistry or by the environment or if we are nothing more than the biochemical/electrical impulses in our brains then we are not responsible for our actions. As Thompson puts it, "For moral choice (and therefore ethics) to make any sense, I have to believe that a person is more than determined electrical impulses." (2006: 22)

Now, there are things we obviously don't have control over. Like the weather. I can not help that it is raining outside because I did not cause the low pressure centre that is currently over Cardiff (Although chaos theory would suggest that I may have done things that have contributed to the low pressure centre. This, however, is definitely outside the scope of this discussion.) So, in order to discuss ethics, it seems we have to come to a decision about the extent to which people are free to make the choices that they make.

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I am taking a break this week from discussing my new Welsh knowledge (which, by the way, is considerable. We learned a new aspect) to dispell a myth. There is a pernicious rumor out there that when the English conquered the whole island their first order of business was the plunder the Welsh language and steal its vowels. This is a misunderstanding that comes from words such as nhw, which means "they" and cynnwys which I believe means "include" and bwyd which I know means "food".

I speculate that this rumor is actually borne of a misunderstanding that native English speakers have of our own language. This is where I will begin. We represent our vowels with five graphemes, that is, five letters, that is A, E, I, O, U. However, we have more vowels. So many more vowels. The letter O can be said in "on" or like "hone". It can be reduced to an almost I like sound as in "Thorough". If you're reading this, you get it, because its something every literate learner has had to deal with. South English Standard Pronunciation, or RP (what English people speak), has 19 vowels in it. The dialect I speak has about 14 vowels. Yes, I admit, "merry", "Mary" and "marry" all sound the same coming out of my mouth.

Cymraeg uses the letters A, E, I, O, U and they do represent vowel sounds. It also uses W,Y to represent vowels. In addition to this, long and short vowels can form what are known as "minimal pairs". This means that the difference between two words can come down to vowel length. This is cool if your a nerd like me. Its irritating if you're a language learner. What you should get from this is Welsh is a vowel-rific language.

Posted by Kate at 09:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When I first heard of Batman Beyond I was a bit perplexed. Beyond what? I thought. I had visions of a Batman set someplace that was not Gotham; Batman elected to public office, turning up to Capitol Hill in the Bat suit and voting down criminally minded pieces of legislation. (Hey, it could work.) But, that is not what Batman Beyond is. It is the story of Batman beyond Bruce Wayne, beyond the Joker, beyond Scarecrow, The Riddler, Penguin, and Harvey Two-Face.
Season 2 picks up with Terry McGinnis, a high school student in the employ of Bruce Wayne. Now, McGinnis doesn’t just have any part-time job working for Wayne, he has the job. He is Batman. While McGinnis is out in the Batsuit, kicking keister and taking names Bruce Wayne stays behind in the batcave and takes care of lower key, Batman-ish things (tests theories, builds things, researches, that sort of thing). The season opens with an episode called “Splicers” in which the teens of Gotham are having their DNA spliced with the DNA of animals in a body art sort of way. Of course, Batman has to investigate this new trend because he suspects something fishy is going on. After a few fights and some narrow misses, the evil genius behind Splicing is vanquished. The first episode, with its clean animation, its absolutely horrifying villain, and its excellent voice talent (one of the spliced teens is voice by Ice-T).
All in all, this is an entertaining show. The episodes explore both Terry’s life as a high school student, brother and son as well as his time as Batman. He takes on Curaré from the League of Assassins, Spell Binder, Shriek, The Stalker and the Jokerz. However, the most entertaining episodes didn’t deal with the big villains, but rather with how the Terry balanced his responsibilities as the dark knight with his responsibilities to his family and friends.
The show has interesting animation; its quite visually appealing. Gotham has a very smooth, very streamlined look in this series. Its still the dark and possibly dangerous place its always been, it just seemed updated and a little more technically advanced. And, you couldn’t get really when it comes to the vocal talent, In addition to guest voices such Ice-T, Stockard Channing, Seth Green and Teri Garr lent their voices to the show. Bruce Wayne in the series is voiced by Kevin Conroy, who was also Batman in Batman: The Animated Series.
If I have one complaint about the show, it is this: the villains just aren’t up to snuff. There was a real sense of rivalry between Batman and villains like the Joker. There was a sense of history. Also, they were just cool. While the Batman Beyond villains may have potential, (The villain Spellbinder can affect what people see and think and Shriek blames Batman for his hearing loss) they just can’t stand up to previous Batman villains.
Even with this complaint, I’d have to say the show more than makes up for it with the Batsuit, which is a character all by itself, from its rocket feet to its Bat vision. The suit is genius and it is looked at in depth in this season in episode 4, “Lost Soul”. Plus, you have to love Bruce Wayne running the show from the Batcave. Its brilliant when Batman is hanging from a building looking like he’s talking to himself when he’s really talking to Bruce Wayne.
The second season comes on four discs. It has commentary on two episodes: “Splicers” and “Egg Baby” the latter of which the show one an Emmy for. There is also a panel of the show’s creators talking on the fourth disc. I prefer there to be commentary on every episode, but I will gladly take what I can get and the perspectives of the directors, producers and talent on the episodes were quite interesting. Also, the set includes French and Spanish language tracks.
Even with the semi-cool villains and the limited commentary, this show is still awesome. If you like Batman, I recommend that you give Terry McGinnis a try as he grows into the batsuit.

This has also been posted to Blogcritics.org

Posted by Kate at 04:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Its been really slow going, this writing a novel. Its seven days into the month and I've started it three times. The first two times fizzled out. But, now I think I have a solid idea, one that will encompass the previous two fizzles so I won't lose anything in the word count department...

Not that there was much to lose.

As previously mentioned, I appear to be writing a chick lit title. At first, I didn't know how I felt about this. Although, I have read a fair amount of chick lit, it is not my favorite genre. I'd much rather read memoirs or biographies or fiction. (Although, I honestly spend most of my time reading academic tomes, most of which deal with the subjects of language, rhetoric and the brain. Does this surprise anyone?) I got to thinking about it and it seems to me that the reason I was not too sure about writing "chick lit" was that I was surprised that those were the first ideas to spring out of me.

So far I've written about 600 words (well behind pace. In order to reach 50,000 words by November 30th, one would have to write about 1,667 words a day.) I am tentatively calling it "Study Questions". It is about a group of friends going through Graduate/Professional school.

Does the topic really surprise you that much?

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My brilliant idea of posting every day last week in order to keep up and review the Welsh I have learned crashed and burned on Tuesday. And, I paid for it this morning. There was a new teacher today filling in for our normal Monday teacher. She had a brilliantly Welsh name, Angharad.

Now, how great is that?

Names are interesting. They are these little verbal markers of persons and places and things. Vocal and written reminders not of what something or somebody is, but who they are. They can be a very big deal and getting someone's name wrong, transgressing that little bit by altering or forgetting or somehow misusing that marker can be incredibly unnerving and can cause a tussle.

Ever been talking to someone you used to be friends with ages ago? Ever not be able to remember their name? You knew it, in fact you used to use it all the time. Now, its just slipped right past you. How awkward is that? Now, add a significant other stopping by that you, by the rules of etiquette should introduce, and that awkwardness reaches a feverish level because you could be caught out.

Ever given someone a nickname and have them not take kindly to it? That's happened quite a bit to me since I've moved to Wales. I get called "Kath" a lot, which I don't like. I understand that it is an awful lot of work to pronounce the whole three sllyables of my name, especially when you are busy processing things at 5 sllyables a second but, don't ask me what my name is if you're immediately just going to change it.

But, even worse than that.... "Kathy". I have heard with increasing frequency, "Aww, Johnny and Kathy."

Excuse me? I don't fucking think so. "Kathy" (or "Cathy" as that is how she spells it.) is an overworked, office monkey in a trendy skirt that doesn't flatter her body type who is freaked out about food, work, clothing and men and has on way too much eye makeup. I give you this as an example. Although Cathy appears to be wearing no eye makeup she is clearly wearing some sort of matching shirt and skirt combination that divides her in the middle and makes her look like overly round. And, here, while she is not freaking out, you can tell it is anticipated because everyone is freaking out around her and running towards her aid.

I am not Cathy. Or, Kathy. Or, Kath. I am Katharine. If this is just too much effort, you may call me either Kate or Kat. (See how nice I am providing you with two options?)

Posted by Kate at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

So, it has been pointed out to me that whilst I am still unemployed (and it looks like there is going to be no change to that status in the near future) I might as well take advantage of my copious (if irritating) amounts of spare time. Obviously, I can't study Welsh all the time. I have taken it upon myself to work on a novel. I will obviously be keeping you updated on my process.

It is day two and I have only about 500 words written, but I think I may have a promising chick lit idea. It pains me a little that I am writing a piece of chick lit, but such is life. I don't have a title as yet nor does my main character have a name but these are things that will eventually work themselves out.

My profile is here if you'd like to monitor my progress.

Posted by Kate at 06:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Pick Me Up is an incredible reference geared towards helping people answer those pressing questions like, “How are things related?” and what exactly is an “emirp”? The book is divided up into eight areas of expertise, color-coded for convenience. The book suggested that you start anywhere, so I did. I opened up to a page at random (pg. 186-187) where I read about religion, specifically “Religion: Islam to India” which covered Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism. There were brief descriptions that compromised the bottom third of the pages. The top portion was taken up by pictures which included images of holy sites such as Mecca, The Golden Temple in Amritsar and the river Ganges as well as photographs of items of importance/interest to the different religions.

From there, I followed a reference to “forever” in the book that took me to page 249 which asked the question, “What time is it?” This section had a number of questions that it answered in the same, blurby style as before, with a brief description and some small illustrations. There was more to said on this page than on the religion page, but then, with “time” what sort of illustrations could you show? (Sundials, clocks and calendars, if you were curious.) There was a bit about “when time began”which briefly discussed the different calendars that have been in use. This contained a reference to Latin, so I jumped to page 54. Here I found interesting little tidbits on some of the world’s languages. For example, Ecclesiastical Latin is an official Language in Vatican City, even if everyone uses Italian. I did not know that. From there, I went to page 96 on colonization (not surprisingly referenced in a blurb on the English language). I then spent the next hour and a half surfing through the 352 page book, moving from one topic to the next covering everything from numbers to art, then to how to tell stories, the ancient Greeks, democracy, I Ching and world literature. (I am more than a little embarrassed to admit, having graduated from high school one, town away from the National Czech and Slovak Museum that I did not know where Franz Kafka was from.) A few more hours of with this volume, and I will be queen of the pub quiz.

The eight areas of expertise that the book was divided up into are : Science, technology and space, Society, places and beliefs, History, The natural world, People who made the world, Arts, entertainment and media, You and your body, and Planet Earth. In a table of contents of sorts there is a list of all the things that you’ll find in each of these sections, including page numbers. And, as always there is an index at the back of the book.

Each page as a bar that is color-coded on it that includes some text that explains what you’ll find on the pages as well what section the page belongs to. Each set of pages is not necessarily connected to what is preceded or followed by them in the book, so this is not your standard encyclopedia. It’s a little like a hard-copy of a website complete with reference links, a more colorful wikipedia, if you will.

Because each of the pages has small boxes of text that describe whatever the topic on those pages are, nothing is gone into in great detail. However, what is there is interesting. There was typically only one link per blurb, so there were things that could have been linked to other pages, but were not. But, there is always the index, if you’ve read something that you feel should be linked to something.

The format of the book lended itself to amused browsing taking you from interesting snippet to interesting snippet without dragging you down into a load of information you might not understand/be interested in. It is handy to have a reference book that hits the highlights and saves you from having to wade through an entire Encyclopedia Britanica entry. This book is definitely geared towards the younger set, junior high and high school students but I found it interesting nevertheless. In short, Pick Me Up is something that you’ll not only want to pick up, but that you’ll loath to put down.

This review has also been posted at BlogCritics.

Posted by Kate at 05:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Something that has always caught me a little off-guard living in a foreign country is the number of Non-Americans that can intelligently and insightfully discuss American politics. My personal views on Politics are very often informed by my own code of ethics, and as is suggested in the post I just linked to, this tends to be informed by my knee-jerk reactions to things. For example, I think killing is wrong and so one should try everything within one's power to not go to war because wars involve lots of killing. However, not only is this a simplistic view of the world, it tends to also be a simplistic view of politics because many things are much too complicated to be solved with a black and white, right or wrong judgement.

Anyway, this is a clip of Alex Jones cut to some of the Brave Heart music. The music gets a little over-the-top, but as the poster of the video explains in the comments, he's made the clip as a tribute to both Alex Jones and to the dynamic American spirit. Having grown up with that spirit, I think this is wicked.

Posted by Kate at 04:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)