Kanlaon

Ugh, whose smart idea was it to give a midterm on this day?

I guess that would be me, professor-par-excellence!!

Spent three hours this morning devising a midterm that would be sure to give students a true intellectual workout: Have asked them to write a review of the books we have read thus far; or to re-write an essay in their own words, that sort of thing. Truly, the fact that it took me three hours to devise interesting questions which students can hardly fail to appreciate is making me a bit giddy–!!

So lost in thought that it doesn’t hit me until long after hubby has left for the office: today is Valentine’s Day! So, I call up dear man and say: Where are my flowers? Where are my chocolates? At which he declares he was planning to take me out to dinner tonight — ha ha ha!

Since feel so self-righteous, so very organized, decide to treat myself by relaxing for an hour in front of 40-inch flat screen HDTV. And– holy moly! — they are showing Brokeback Mountain, which I last saw Christmas Day of 2005, all by my lonesome, in a downtown Palo Alto theatre, hubby and son having declared they wouldn’t be caught dead going to see that movie (most of the movie audience female, ranging in age from 16 to about 70).

OK, happened to land on the scene where Heath Ledger wakes up after night of sinful pleasure with Jake and stumbles out of their tent (when I look up from my book a few minutes later this tent happens to be buried in deep snowdrift — very picturesque!), puking or otherwise doubled over. Suddenly Jake is there! Heath is furious! Heath slugs him! (though, because this scene is in snow and I am corrected by blog reader who says their first intimacy was not in snow, then perhaps many things happened between Jake and Heath already before the slug I have just witnessed.) Cut to wedding scene with Heath and Michelle (how sweet, they actually did end up together, these two), and then a scene where the wonderfully sardonic Randy Quaid tells Jake he has no further need of his services, and furthermore lets it be known that he has spied the boys “stemming the rose” (Why has no one ever given this man an Academy Award? Think it’s wonderful how he radiates pure malevolence without ever once raising his voice.)

In case you’re wondering, I’ve also done research on St. Valentine, Martyr of Rome, who was beheaded on this day by evil Emperor Claudius (also known as “the Goth”), after he was caught trying to aid some Christian martyrs, sometime about the year 270 A.D. No current chapels to his memory, but Butler writes in his Lives of the Saints that St. Valentine’s remains are housed in “the church of St. Praxedes” outside Rome.

FINALLY, I also perused a several weeks-old issue of the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review (I subscribe to so many magazines and newspapers that they’re coming out of my ears!). Here are the books I am most interested in reading:

(1) After reading Alan Cheuse’s review of Daniel Alarcon’s first novel, Lost City Radio, which Cheuse calls “shadowy and brilliant”:

Daniel Alarcon’s Lost City Radio

(2) After reading Katherine Hill’s review of Jon Clinch’s re-telling of Hucklebbery Finn, the appropriately titled novel Finn:

Jon Clinch’s Finn

(3) After reading Cecile Alduy’s review of Milan Kundera’s The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, which purportedly contains a spirited defense of the modern novel:

Milan Kundera’s The Curtain (Because I badly need for someone to tell me why it is so important for me to write one — NOW.)