Ups and Downs

• UP: I've turned my grades in.  Hooray!
• DOWN: ...and I've already got a complaint. 
• UP: I managed to get a reasonably cheap fare to the MLA--about $420 cheaper, to be precise, than what the university's travel agent quoted. 
• DOWN: The return flight is...well...let's just say that Virgil may be accompanying me.  It will take seven hours and two changes.  Bear in mind that I'm going from Rochester to Philadelphia, a trip short enough that some of my colleagues are just going to drive.  (Why don't you drive, you ask? Because my car is fourteen years old and somewhat less reliable than the "my grandmother died" excuse.) 
• UP: Putting the final touches on my paper for the MLA, which I need to send to the session chair.
• DOWN: Authors of whom nobody in the audience will have heard + context, ditto + 15 minutes allotted time = serious frustration. 
• UP: My paper was accepted for the Midwest Victorian Studies Association meeting in April.  A trip to Chicago! Hooray, take two!
• DOWN: This means I have to finish watching The Prime Minister, which, despite John Gielgud, is not the most thrilling biopic ever made. In fact, it exerts a remarkably soporific effect... 
• UP: I'll be going to California about a week after the MLA.  It should be warm(er). 
• DOWN: My plane is leaving at 6:00 in the morning. I'm not having much luck with flights, it seems. 

Comments

[Amardeep]

Is the movie of the "Prime Minister" based on the Trollope novel of the same name? I read the novel back in grad school...

The whole crypto-Jewish thing (the Ferdinand Lopez character) got a little old after awhile. Borderline anti-Semitism, I would say. Do they clean it up in the film?

[Miriam]

Nope--it's WWII propaganda, with Benjamin Disraeli filling in for Winston Churchill (!). In fact, one of the unintentionally comical things about the film is its desperate avoidance of any hint that Disraeli was, you know, born Jewish. (This is all the more interesting because, just a few years previously, the George Arliss vehicle Disraeli made a big to-do about precisely that.) Disraeli is just a mysterious "outsider," as far as the filmmakers are concerned...

[What Now?]

I laughed out loud at your Virgil remark--too bad about your intricate travel plans, but thanks for a good laugh!