| Advice for an English paper? |
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| 07:42pm 18/09/2009 |
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mood:  nervous music: Some terrible movie with Paul Blackthorne
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HELP!
Okay, so I need some advice. I have a paper due soon and it's over The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. If anyone has read that, then I would be greatly appreciative if you can help me out with this.
Basically we were talking in class about class distinctions and the like in the book, which led to everyone naturally assuming that Toad was the upper-class of society. I was talking this over with Sean (who has never read the book, but is excellent for bouncing ideas off of) and I think I've established a tentative theory, but I'm not certain it holds water. So, if you're familiar with either class structure. in England during the Industrial Age or the book, read on:
1. Badger, Mole, and Rat are closer to Nature and therefore more content, while Toad is constantly attempting to break into the human world and getting into trouble because of it;
2. The animal society may be broken up into lower, middle, and upper class like human society, but the human society is an entirely different sphere;
3. When the two mix, not only does trouble arise, but even the lower-class of the human sphere is considered above the upper-class of the animal sphere (e.g., when the barge woman throws Toad off and proclaims him a filthy toad; no matter how rich he is, he is still a filthy creature);
4. Toad inherited his wealth from his father, who presumably worked to earn it, and so assumes he is on par with the aristocracy/nobility because he was born with wealth, HOWEVER he was not born with a title, which is more important in the long run;
5. ERGO Grahame is using Toad to represent the nouveau riche of the industrial age in England. Mole & co. are content with their place in life and closer to Nature, and represent gentlemen, but they are still not Lord or Baron etc. Toad, however, is trying to go against his nature as well as Nature, breaking into a sphere of society where he does not belong. No matter how wealthy, he is still a Toad by birth, not a titled gentry.
I've been mulling it over and think it makes sense, but my knowledge of late 19th-early 20th British history is curiously lacking. I also feel as if Grahame is incredibly hard to analyze. It seemed every time I had put my finger on something I felt was important, he would have another character who directly contradicted that notion. I still feel as if there's something that completely destroys my argument in one line that I somehow completely missed.
Anyway, thoughts? My first draft is due on Tuesday. |
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| The Endless Perpetuation of Sheep |
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| 12:23pm 31/08/2009 |
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mood:  amused music: Burning Heart by Survivor
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Highlights from Morgan's class today:
"The word 'Italia' originally referred to 'the land of heifers'. Whether they meant the cattle or the women, I don't know."
"I have nothing against sheep--except that they're stupid and dirty. And I have nothing against shepherds, except they perpetuate sheep."
"The Greeks were very 'Why are we here?' and talked about it for 2000 years. The Romans said, 'Because! Right, that's settled, let's get on with it.' "
"No one knows where the Etruscans came from and who cares, anyway? They're constantly theorizing and such. A giant spaceship could have landed and brought them all. Very Stargate, with Ra coming and saying, 'Right, you're all Etruscans!' I mean, it's like high school. Who cares what high school was like? You're an undergrad! Why does it matter what you were before? You're all Etruscans now!" |
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| Happy Birthday! |
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| 12:08am 15/08/2009 |
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Happy 21st, Court!
(I feel so behind...November will come... someday...)
afkjslajf I'd post a long sappy thing but I've got two finals I need to finish studying/writing tonight. In short, love you, gorgeous! |
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| Weather Report |
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| 07:49am 05/08/2009 |
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mood:  hot
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High today: 104
High tomorrow: 105
High Friday: 102
My air conditioner broke. FML. |
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| Rewind. Start Over. |
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| 04:17pm 31/07/2009 |
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mood: depressed music: Suicide is Painless by Johnny Mandel
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This day was a complete and total bust. A bust that a raven would be ashamed to sit upon above a chamber door. A bust that Jayne Mansfield would slink away from in embarrassment. A bust that narcotics cops would point and jeer at.
When you're putting "The friendly Smurfs" as one of the Hellenistic kingdoms, there is something terribly, tragically wrong.
But I did draw two pretty pictures, so there's that. They're views from Waggener, so if you ever were curious where I spent 96% of my life--and I know you all are--you'll still be curious, because I don't have a scanner.
And now to drown my sorrows (by which I mean pizza) in ranch dressing and diet Coke. |
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| Shamelessly stolen from aquitaneq |
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| 11:22pm 15/07/2009 |
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mood: bored
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The BBC says the average person will have only have read 6 of the 100 books below.
Put an X next to the ones you have read. Total each section as you go along...
Normally I would interject that an English major has an advantage in this, except most of these books I read on my own outside of class. The BBC comes up with startling depressing numbers when it comes to literacy, apparently.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X May it rot.
Total so far: 10
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare X Though I may have skimmed some of the sonnets.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger X
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
Total so far: 16
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X Clark Gable improved this immensely.
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy One day, when I can afford a notebook entirely dedicated to keeping track of all the characters...
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky X
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X I would have chosen Peter Pan to include, but there you go.
Total so far: 23
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy X His short stories are vastly underrated, by the way.
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens X Not actually about the magician.
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe X Isn't this redundant?
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
Total so far: 29
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X And I regret it terribly.
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
Total so far: 34
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X
52 Dune - Frank Herbert X
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Total so far: 38
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas X
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac XOXOXOXO
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy X
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X
Total so far: 46
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce X Though I couldn't tell you a thing about it. That book lends new meaning to the word 'incomprehensible'.
76 The Inferno – Dante X
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackery
Total so far: 51
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert X
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
Total so far: 56
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X In French, actually.
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole X Not as good as I'd hoped, alas.
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas X
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X BFG was better.
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo X
Total: 64/100
Clearly I've been remiss in my reading--though tellingly, most of the ones I have not read are modern. I imagine after studying for my GRE in Literature, I'll have all of these (and many more) covered thoroughly. The question is not 'have you read' some of these novels, but in many cases, why would you want to?
I'd also like to add that after tonight, there will be fifty people out there wrongly despising Anton Chekhov and this displeases me greatly. We're reading "The Lady with a Dog", AKA "There are much better short stories by him out there, but we refuse to acknowledge them because some tasteless snob decided that this was his best and we're much too lazy to dig up the others and show them as proof that Chekhov actually was, in fact, funny."
And that is all. |
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| Art is an Extension of Human Nature, Which Needs No Justification |
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| 02:17pm 14/07/2009 |
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mood: blissful
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I'm in love with my professor.
I'm signed up for two classes this term--alas, fair TA Michael, I knew him well--and was missing chances to tramp about the woods and play park ranger/botanist* but all good things must end. And then begin again, because back to the professor love.
My first class I thought would be the more interesting one, Introduction to Ancient Rome, but it's mostly things I already knew and the textbook I really wanted to use (am I this nerdy? Yes, yes I am) is apparently only 'recommended'. It's got tons of primary sources and divulges tidbits from everyone from Apicius to Zeus (though he's not quoted; clearly, the temple priests were remiss). The professor, a graduate student, is sweet and personifies nerdiness. She was talking about patronage and slipped in a quote from The Godfather and then laughed at herself, so she's pretty adorable.
But she's not the one I love.
No, I am in love with my 20th Century Short Story professor. He of the Hemingway white suit, with a slow Southern drawl like lemonade in the sun that nearly disguises the fact he slips in expressions like 'ass-tear out of here' and other such amusements. He of the voice so powerfully emotive that I felt chills up my spine when he read Poe, the way it should be.
I'll confess, English had grown almost prosaic for me. I've got so many things that I read out of necessity, not for pleasure, and forgot the way you can drown in a novel and soak up short stories. I recently rediscovered some of the passion I had lost thanks to Harold Bloom, who scolds English majors for being apologetic about their field. There is a kind of embarrassment in admitting to being an English major, an inferiority complex of the sort that demands justification, which we find in relating it to other fields: sociology, anthropology, history, to name a few. Of course, an English major--or even the amateur** of literature--must be proficient in all these fields and more, but we've supplanted English with our own resentful sulkiness, like petulant children. Bloom aptly refers to this as "The School of Resentment", wherein we thrust our own prejudices upon literature and feel the need to proclaim a reason for literature***. I scoff, rightfully so. Do you go to the Louvre and demand that there be a reason for the statue of Nike? Do you look at it and think, "Yes, quite pretty, but what's the point?" No. It's for aesthetic pleasure, the greatest pleasure a human being can have.
To wit: "The idea that you benefit the insulted and injured by reading someone of their own origins rather than reading Shakespeare is one of the oddest illusions ever promoted by or in our schools."
How does this relate? When I signed up for 20th Century Short Story, I no longer thought of the excitement and ardor of my deep love for literature, but simply that it fulfilled an Area III requirement. School degree plans will be the death of intellectual curiosity.
But my professor breathes life back into the stories, fills them with human nature and psychological questioning and symbolism and motifs and never once diverges from the writing to espouse his own ideas. He never strays far from the story itself. He never once asked what the Marxist would think of Young Goodman Brown or what the psychologist would recommend for Montresor, but asked what the story itself said. Remarkable!
We're not confined to the boundaries of the English language, either, but have Gogol and Chekhov on our reading list. Scanning the syllabus, I felt an excitement previously lost well up within me at such breadth: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Kafka, Gilman, Chopin, Barthelme, and so many more of my old favorites, lovingly compiled into one small summer course.
Sheer bliss, my friends.
* I received an A in that class, for the record.
** Meant in the original sense of the word, from the Latin "amare", to love.
*** I wish I had been familiar with this critic before taking "Literature and Social Justice." Literature does not need a reason or justification, it simply is. |
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| It Is Truly Sad When You Want a Digital Camera to Take a Picture of Your Dinner |
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| 09:08pm 21/06/2009 |
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mood: content music: End of the Line by Traveling Wilburys
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But it was sooo good.
Tofu BBQ Sandwich
1/2 box of hard tofu
3 tbsp. vegetable oil
5 tbsp. barbecue sauce (I used Sweet Ray's Honey Chipotle)
2 tbsp. minced garlic
1/2 onion diced; 1/2 sliced
1 tomato, sliced
Hamburger buns
1. Drain tofu and press between two thick layers of paper towels for an hour, until all water has been pressed out.
2. Cut into 1/4 in. slices and place on a plate in the freezer for an hour.
3. Heat the vegetable oil over high heat. When it's popping, place the tofu slices in and fry until crispy on both sides.
4. Add diced onion, garlic, and barbecue sauce, making sure it coats the tofu well.
5. Place directly on bun and garnish with onion and tomato slices plus whatever else you like on your hamburgers.
Excellent with roast corn and strawberry shortcake for dessert, by the way.
And you thought tofu couldn't be good. |
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