stunt_muppet

Turns out my dorm does get Sci-Fi Channel after all - its failure to appear on my TV during my freshman year was some quirk of the television, not the college network.

This means I've been missing New Who and Sarah Jane Adventures and Eureka all this time and I didn't even have to. They were right there the whole time and I just never knew about it.

"Kicking myself" does not cover it.

(We still don't have BBC America, though. I checked.)
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In homework-related news, it seems that scholarly essays specifically offering a deconstructionist reading of Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" simply don't exist, which seems strange given the blatant sight/blindness binary in the text. Of course, the fact that I can't find full text for any of them doesn't really help. I suppose this means I'll actually have to read the thing instead of relying on other researchers. Le sigh.

Doesn't help that, as my attempts to explain what I was doing to my mother revealed, I don't actually fully understand what deconstructionism  is. I know the basic concept of it - linguistic/conceptual binaries, and which member of each binary is valued or devalued, and reading the text based on reversing the hierarchy of binaries, etc. But I'm not sure what I'm supposed to get from doing that to a text, what interpretation this'll lead me to. And frankly, looking it up in literary theory dictionaries isn't helping, since those very quickly descend into theoretical technobabble that I don't understand and don't feel like dealing with.

I'm apprehensive about this English half of my major, really, because while I love reading and love writing and have grown to love picking at the layers of texts, dealing with actual theory occasionally makes me quite impatient. I enjoyed looking at the parallels between, for example, "Ligeia" and "The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe", for example, since that wasn't taken from a particular critical school - it was just looking at them both next to each other, seeing what did and did not match up, and wondering why. Once I actually have to conform to a single critical perspective - feminism, Marxism, historicism, the like - I find I have to spend so much time remembering what it is I'm doing and why that the fun's sucked out of it.

Possibly I'm overthinking this too.

I have a feeling this evening is going to end with me writing fic. Just a feeling.
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I realized the other day that if, I thought my teacher would let me do it, I would so write a research paper comparing the scene where the Fourth Doctor confronts Sutekh in Pyramids of Mars with the Tenth Doctor's climactic scene in "The Satan Pit". I'd love to look at the differences in the way that the old series and new series treat a very similar situation - the confrontation with a figure explicitly named as a kind of evil god or devil. You could look at the nature of the god-figure itself, the Doctor's status relative to said god-figure, the method by which the god-figure is imprisoned and, finally, defeated, what other religious imagery and/or themes make themselves known, and while we're here what does it say about both serials that...wait wait spoilers nevermind.

Why is it that I could really easily go on all day about the implications of a kid's science fiction show but it can take me ages to claw out a paper on actual proper literature?
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Also, Kayliesaur and Sweet Bean, I'm not making as much progress on this paper as I thought I was. I may not be able to do dinner tonight; I'd really like to get a bit more done.