Updated the site with the National Novel Writing Month 2003 logo. Yes I'm doing it again, writing a novel in 30 days. I've got an outline, characters, and I think I can write it from start to finish this time. It's love story, and those stories are short.

I also updated the two new books I'm reading:

Paradise Park by Allegra Goodman and
I Heard the Owl Call My Name by Margaret Craven.

Someone told me that I write like Allegra Goodman, so I decided to check her out. I wanted a shorter book to read on the train, so I picked up the Craven book from the paperback rack at the library. Smaller books fit better in my purse.

I'm still slogging through the Kafka book. He does take time to read.

I read somewhere that on Halloween, All Soul's Day and Day of the Dead, the veil between the realms of the living and dead become loosed. I wonder if it's true, because I've been missing my dead grandmother a whole lately.

It started on Tuesday, and every day it gets worse. Maybe she's trying to visit me or something. I was going to go out and hang out with friends on Halloween, but I think I should stay home in case my grandmother is trying to visit.

My cousin said grandma was haunting and visiting her when I was at home for the funeral. My aunt said the same thing was happening to her, and we were sharing a room together. I never had the feeling I was being visited or haunted. Why would grandma visit them and not me?

But maybe Halloween is my chance, especially because I'm missing her something awful right now. I just want to see and talk to her one last time, even if she is a ghost.

I'm addicted to this online game called Hexic. I started playing it last night, and I couldn't stop. I have no idea why I like the game or why it's so addictive, it just is.

So I thought I'd blown my modern art history mid term and gotten a B or some other lower grade, because the last part really threw me. I thought I had studied everything I was supposed to, but I was I wrong.

The last part consisted of writing one of two essays. I thought he was going to give an essay on comparing AbEx-Colour Field and AbEx-Action, so I studied for that question. He said he was going to give an essay on comparing AbEx NYC and Art Informel, but I didn't study for it. I thought the AbEx movement comparison was a more compelling argument.

Why study for two, when you only have to do one right?

So I was right about the AbEx NYC comparison to Art Informel being on the mid term, but I wasn't expecting the other question to be about Pop Art. And of course, I didn't really devote much time pop art.

I could have written the Art Informel essay, but you had to compare works of art and I couldn't remember the names of any of the Art Informel pieces at the time.

So I wrote this two page BS rant on Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, where I said Pop Art was not a reaction to AbEx or fulfillment of NeoDada, but was brought about by changes happening in American and British Culture. I cited the invention of television, the media and Hollywood, and the growing interest in Hollywood stars and stardom as birthing Pop Art stars Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol.

Talk about making it up as you go along. I thought for sure he wouldn't buy my argument and give me like maybe 5 points on a 20 point essay.

So it was so shocking that I got 100/100 and an A, and a comment that he agreed with me and that I really understood pop art.

He even held on to my test along with a few others, and said he was going to read from some of them as examples for what people should have written, but thank god he ran out of time and decided not to do that. That would have been embarrassing to hear my own BS read out loud in class. How scary is that?

But I guess I shouldn't be so surprised by my grade. I managed to convince my art history professor one night after class, that Jackson Pollock's AbEx Action paintings birthed conceptual art because of how Pollock showed tme in artwork.

You don't have to right about art, you just have to argue it well.