SL -28

Today (Monday) was the first day I could have applied my study leave schedule, which looks something like this:

• 9.00-11.00 watch film
  
• 11.00-13.00 read fiction
  
• 13.00-15.00 lunch and watch tv episodes
  
• 15.00-17.00 read fiction/articles
  
• 17.00-18.00 write 500 words
  

I actually drafted something in the region of 2800 words - most of which were new although I was rewriting some stuff. As I slept until 10.00 (having dealt with clock change by going to bed at 2.30 on the grounds it was really 1.30, then not sleeping), the plan was scuppered. But I did watch the last hour of Superman: The Movie, and now I need to find 800 words to write about it, which seems unlikely right now. Oddly Reeve is better than I remembered and Hackman worse. I guess I'm watching Flash Gordon tomorrow, until Star Trek: The Slow Motion Picture arrives. One of these will be a hardship.

More than that, I need to write a review whose final deadline is this week. I've read the book twice, but it isn't sticking.

I've worked out how to have two text windows open at once - script and notes - but whereas up to now Scrivener has helped me by letting me write in a modular way, my discussion of the Star Wars trilogy ranged a little more across than anticipated, and I felt a little hemmed in. I guess I need to glue the blocks and then reseparate where necessary. I have a plot summary of THX 1138, but not of the trilogy as such. One is better known than the other? Or trim it back?

Some of today's juicy quotes:

• In Empire "they accomplish only minor victories and suffer major defeats, reversing the pattern of the previous film" (Gordon 1980: 313)
  
• "Jim Hoagland argues that implicit [in Star Wars] is an entire commentary on the American involvement in Viet Nam!" (Pielke 1983: 155) [those crazy kids!]
  
• Luke "is sort of clean–cut, cornfed, adolescent Oedipus" (Gordon 1980: 314)
  
• Star Wars "invites adult spectators to regress to an earlier phase in their social and psychic development and to indulge in infantile fantasies of omnipotence and oedipal strife as well as nostalgically returning to [the 1950s]" (Kräker 2004: 358)
  
• “The concept of the blockbuster film is to ‘eat’ its audience before they know what is happening [...] The film is marketed as a critic-proof must-see phenomenon designed to make maximum profits during the first weekend that it opens, creating unstoppable momentum” (Miller 1999: 93)
  
• "We are supposed to have a good time with the film [Star Wars] without being troubled, upset, or otherwise provoked to deep thought" (Pielke 1983: 145)
  
• Vader's turn to the dark side was "an event reminiscent of the myth of Satan's defection from the Hebrew god" (Pielke 1983: 146)
  

If I can work out what I did with Superman II and the Amazon parcel arrives, I might have a chapter finished by Monday.

I want this book: Screwball Consensus: Franklin Roosevelt, Alan Turing, and Preston Sturges. Unfortunately, I can't find it listed anywhere. An article? Or maybe Liquid Totems: Holocaust, Computer, and Suburb, manuscript in progress?

Tilda has found a place under the desk to sleep. Fine.

22809 / 100000 words. 23% done!

That Eastercon Schedule in Full

Friday
Watch sf movie
Read book
Think about tidying up
Make banoffee pie
Go to pub
Eat banoffee pie

Saturday
Go to Paddock Wood
Walk to gallery
Bus to Tonbridge
Look for bookshop that was closed last time
Have odd sense of deja vu

Or:

Plan tidying up
Go to pub.

Sunday
Sleep in
Bugger tidying up
Meet friend at pub

Monday
Watch sf film
Tidy up
Wait for house guests.