September. September. What the heck did I do in September?<\/p>\n
Well, I went to Washington, DC, for work for a few days. Unfortunately, my visit coincided with the Pope’s, which kept a lot of the faculty members I had planned to meet with on campus away. I didn’t have any problem at Georgetown, the Tuesday the Pontiff was still in transit, but Wednesday at GWU in Foggy Bottom was pretty<\/i> quiet. I met with only one professor all day, which is an all-time low. I had plenty of cancellations the next day at American University, too, but there I easily met with three times as many people.<\/p>\n
I’ve spent a lot of this past week making phone calls with instructors to reschedule our chats. It’s now finally done, for better or worse, and I have notes from about seventeen instructors I’ll likely spend most of this coming Monday typing up.<\/p>\n
Beyond that, I’m hard-pressed to think what I actually did with the month.<\/p>\n
I watched five movies:<\/p>\n
I think Byzantium<\/i> was the best of them, and Next<\/i> easily the worst. The former’s a genuinely interesting and unique take on the vampire myth, with really great performances by Saoirse Ronan and Gemma Arterton, while the latter’s a painfully dumb Nicolas Cage movie. (And to think, it’s the movie I decided on after I quit watching Crank<\/i> midway though because I thought it<\/i> was unenjoyable and stupid.)<\/p>\n
Kwaidan<\/i> is gorgeous, if very slow, but at least it does<\/i> something with its beautiful visuals. Walter Mitty<\/i>, on the other hand, looks great, but in the service of such an uninteresting story.<\/p>\n
I liked The Rules of the Game<\/i> a lot, but I don’t have a whole lot to say about it, I guess.<\/p>\n
In September, I managed to read three<\/i> books, which is at least one better than what I’ve been averaging each month this year. (Seriously, as of today, I’ve only read sixteen books since January. It’s a little sad.) This month, I was helped by my long drive to and from DC, listening to Amy Poehler read from her memoir Yes Please<\/i> along the way. (It’s really great.) I also read A Stranger in Olondria<\/i> by Sofia Samatar, which is kind of deliriously beautiful, and The Martian<\/i>, which is…well, it’s enjoyable for what it is.<\/p>\n
I finally caught up with Andy Weir’s book in anticipation of the movie, opening this weekend I think, and I’m a little surprised it became such a sensation. Mark Watney, Weir’s stranded astronaut, can be entertaining, but I hesitate to call him, much less anyone else in the book, a character<\/i>. There’s nothing elegant to Weir’s prose, nor any real depth to the people he’s writing about. I didn’t dislike the book, and heaven knows it reads quickly and does exactly what it says on the tin, but at times I felt like I was trapped inside a math problem.<\/p>\n
I feel like Weir would write a really interesting intro science textbook, but I’m not losing sleep waiting on his next novel.<\/p>\n
I read fifty-two stories in September. (I may have been helped considerably by the purchase of this flash fiction collection<\/a>. The stories are very short.) Favorites, listed in the order I read them, include:<\/p>\n I do note most of those Flash Fiction International<\/i> stories, much as I may like them in the moment — and as much as they may help me make my story-a-day quota — don’t really stick with me, nor make the favorites list. Oh well.<\/p>\n I don’t include any of my own stories, of course — though I do have one in Mythic Delirium<\/a> that just went live — or the stories I bought and edited for Kaleidotrope — whose newest issue<\/a> also just went live, by the way. Let’s take it as read that I love all of those and you will too.<\/p>\n Finally, in September, I listed to some music. If you’re so inclined, you could listen to it too:<\/p>\n\n