Wiscon!

Is this not the best schedule ever? Mind you, I booked the trip without realizing it was Memorial day (I have some weird mental block about Remembrance Day and Veteran's Day and Memorial Day-- "the military remembrance holiday goes in November!") and was concerned about that, because it meant that I had to request vacation unnecessarily (and when your library has two full-time staff members, that's not a trivial thing). But I think I will need Sunday afternoon and Monday to recover-- and I was concerned that Friday would be light on programming, but that's clearly not the case.

Still need to work out transportation and such. Yay, only one week left!

(no subject)

As I was at Duke this morning (hooray for summer vacation! Free parking and only a quarter-mile to walk to the library) it hit me-- wasn't the writer of all that Japanese feminist pop-culture/science-fiction criticism named something like Kotani Mari? And wasn't one of the panelists at the Wiscon panel on feminism and Japan named something like Kotani Mari?

...So now I have four days to catch up on reading "Alien Bedfellows" and her book on the technogothic, in hopes that I might be able to say "Hi! I like your books!" if I get the chance. I had the technogothic book out for four whole weeks and I hardly made any headway into it!

When I was reading all those Fujimi Orchestra novels, I thought I was making some progress with my reading speed in Japanese. But what little progress I made seems to have atrophied, and I can attribute a lot of it to how easy the Fujimi Orchestra novels are. (Stephen Krashen says that narrow reading in a specific genre is a good thing, and in fact the Fujimi Orchestra novels probably did teach me more than attempting to slog through literature in class, so I won't be annoyed that I can't suddenly breeze through literary criticism, even easy pop-culture criticism).

Speaking of which, I can't believe how many Fujimi novels have come out that I haven't read. They've pretty much exhausted their dramatic possibilities at this point-- but I'd like to catch up on at least the latest one, next time I have money for Japanese books.

Also must make vague gestures in the direction of apartment cleanliness. I finished my first round for the day, so I will take a break now and hopefully do another round sometime this evening.