First exam and books

Milan Kundera has a very long middle finger. He is able to raise it at style, at storytelling, at pacing and at relevance at once and not get burned. Finished "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" just now. Really enjoyed it, but I'm left marveling that he can start a book on philosophical speculation, move through years of characters lives with no discernible direction, leave me confused as to which characters and which, reveal two of the main characters deaths 30 pages before the book ends and THEN go on to continue the narrative with them still living and never mention the deaths again.....and still have an incredible book. I did something with this book that I've never done before: every time I came to a fragment, sentence or passage I liked, I underlined it. Felt utterly wrong for the first couple times, but it made certain passages stick and I think it'll be really interesting if I go back and re-read it.

Yesterday morning I finished the "graphic novel" "Watchmen". I've never been a fan of comic books, but this one certainly earns its praise for utter moral ambiguity. T The story takes place in the Cold War. In this alternate history, superheroes along the Batman line (without superpowers) actually existed, but have been banned as the public became uneasy. The question of "what would adults who put on tights to fight crime really have been like" is a central issue, as is "and what do they do afterwards?" So, you have heroes who are just in it for fame/money, who have been utterly consumed by their fake identities, who are effective but utter assholes (including a rapist), who have been pushed into it by their parents, and the only one with actual superpowers (the typical nuclear-experiment-gone-wrong scenario) feels disconnected from humanity and ultimately says "fuck it" and goes to live on Mars. In this way, extreme stereotypes are re-examined from new angles--and with excellent storytelling. Huge numbers of parallel stories (including a comic-within-a-comic), backstories, and thematic elements (one chapter is, panel for panel, compositionally the same forwards and backwards) tie it together. I was impressed.

And exams. Yeah, school. International Relations was okay. The first question "does IR theory fail to solve the problems of the current international system?" could not have been vaguer if it had asked, "so, like, what is IR?" Which theory? Which problems? Answers...how? So I waffled. The other two were better. I chose "compare realist and neorealist views of the war in Iraq", a pretty basic ideology question, and "how would a Marxist view globalization?", which was fun because it was just an excuse to take easy pot shots at inequality and exploitation. Wee!

Psychology tomorrow. 90 multiple choice. Not really looking forward to it, but then, who would?