Cupcakes cooling, for those still following along. It'll be time to remove them from the pan soon.
Watching Ginepri/Haas still. This is exciting. I envy you again, msbelle.
Reading about systemic polysemy. I was wondering about the following two paragraphs:
As it happens, there are curious conditions on the transfer that takes the names of artists into their individual works (i.e, into count nouns -- it's another rule that takes the names of writers into mass nouns that denote their oeuvres, as in "300 pages of Marx"). We can use the name of a painter or sculptor freely to refer to his or her works -- three Picassos, a new Giacometti -- though we don't ordinarily do this with the names of composers (*We heard four Beethovens). And we can only use the names of directors and authors in this way when they're associated with genre films or genre fiction. It's a lot easier to say There's a Hitchcock playing at the Bijou than There's a Bergman playing at the Bijou. When we speak of "a John Ford" or "a Kurosawa," we're probably thinking of the director's genre movies (Westerns or samurai films as the case may be) rather than his other works. And "a Woody Allen" is much more likely to be, say, Annie Hall than Another Woman.
It's the same with works of fiction. It seems normal to say I love to curl up with an Agatha Christie or a John Grisham, but odd to say the same thing of Doystoyevsky or Italo Calvino (I can imagine saying that of Dickens). And while it's fine to say That's my favorite Neil Simon, you probably wouldn't speak of my favorite O'Neill in that way. With literary or cinematic works, that is, the name-to-count-noun construction presumes that the works by the author are of a generic muchness: one's pretty much the same as the next.
I agree that the President saying he read "three Shakespeares" souunds weird, but if I say I'm going to watch a Kurosawa, I don't care what genre it is. I'm telling you who directed the movie I'm about to sit down to.
Hmm.
Okay, this match needs to end soon. I have to go buy a DVD burner before my coupon expires.