In Which We Learn Something Kind Of Interesting About Some Important Literary Figures

Week from Hell is finally over (I suppose it has been for a few days now), and I can breathe again. Briefly - I'll give my cancelled presentation next Monday (December 4), my economics assignment got done and turned in, as did my public management essay (a day early, even). As for my other essay (for Theories and Actors of the Policy Process - TAPP), which was due by Friday at 5:00, I had it in by 2:00. OR SO I THOUGHT! Instead, at six that night I got an email explaining that my emailed essay did not go through and that I would have to try again. Bummer. But by this Monday, when I asked my professor if he'd gotten my emailed essay, he hadn't even checked his email yet and I'm just resting on the assumption that he got it. Oh, and let's not forget a presentation for public management this Thursday. But who's counting?

Now, for the first time in a long, long time I decided to have fun over the weekend. So on Friday we went out for drinks, and on Saturday I went to the Natural History Museum and saw a movie with friends. It was an actual weekend. Unbelievable!

The movie: Pan's Labyrinth.
The trailer makes it look sort of bad, but it really is a very beautiful and very brutal film. the film is about a girl who moves to rural Spain, at the end of the Civil War. Her new step-father is a fascist general who is in the country-side rooting out communists still living in the mountains. He is a brutal general and has a habit of killing almost indiscriminately. He has no concern for the girl and is indifferent to his wife's pregnancy other than that it result in a son for him. The little girl, on the other hand, is obsessed with her fairy tales and wanders into the woods one day to encounter a faun who tells her that she is the princess of an underworld kingdom. In order to return to her kingdom, she must complete three tasks. The tasks, in and of themselves, are horrifying, far more so than in, say, any Harry Potter movie, to date.

On a final note, the movie made me realize that I knew nothing whatsoever about the Spanish Civil War, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. It's complicated, to say the least. But kind of fascinating. Especially interesting was the list of famous people who supported either side. Particularly Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Evelyn Waugh supporting the fascists. Who knew?