Marginalia on Procrastination

Wrote two poems today (kind of. mostly.), and I am absurdly proud of myself for this. I guess I'll take what I can get, inch by inch.

While celebrating this, I am trying desperately not to think about the looming monstrosity of my Chaucer paper, which is due in less than a week now and on which I have barely started. (By "trying not to think about" I of course mean "procrastinating by blogging about" Funny, that.) Well, I reread the tales I'm critiquing (Miller's Tale, Reeve's Tale) and wrote some comments in the margins, but I doubt that noting things like "Oh, snap!" and "stealing babies!!!" in the margins is really going to help me come time to actually hammer out this thing. But who knows. Also, turns out the sources I spent hours picking out are probably going to be little to no help at all, but I lugged six hardcover books home from the library and damned if I'm not going to cite the things. I give not a fig for fastidious scholarship (obviously)!

Positively Anti-Motivated

The final project/essay in my British Literature class is to write a "quadrilogue" -- that is, a conversation between four voices about a certain theme and how it's treated in the different works we've discussed. These voices can be characters from the works, or authors, or modern intellectuals/critics. Since the latter two option are hella boring, I'm thinking--

Grendel (Beowulf), Mephistopheles (Dr. Faustus), Iago (Othello), and Satan (Paradise Lost) discussing... oh, I dunno... the nature of the threat to the community?

Picking four main villains (quoteunquote) seems a little obvious, I know, but it just seems like it would be so much fun. You know, for a paper at least. Considering how anti-excited I am for my other final papers (and oh, they are legion), this is pretty positive. Would Meph acknowledge this version of Satan as his over(under?)lord? Would Iago and Satan be involved in snarky one-upmanship? (Hint: Yes.)

Anyway, just typing out this thought bubble to avoid reading some John Donne and critical essays on Chaucer. Procrastination is the name of the game this evening, and, I suspect, for the remaining two weeks of the semester. Pip pip!

Blogadise Lost

So I've been reading Paradise Lost-- partly because I've been meaning to read it, but also because it's necessary for my Brit Lit class and, well, we know how that goes. Anyway, apparently Milton has a lot of interesting things to say about the sign and the representation of the thing vs. the thing itself, and deifying the representation over the thing (at least according to David Hawkes, who did the introduction and notes for the Barnes & Noble Classics edition), which may or may not have some uncomfortable implications for my view of language. I'll have to read more of it, though, before I can pass judgement. Anyway, before I got in to all that, there was a quotation at the beginning of the introduction which caught my eye:

Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them as to be as active as that sole whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest effcacie and extraction of the living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.

-Milton, Areopagitica (1644)

And it reminded me that, oh yeah, books aren't just assignments to be analysed and extracted and turned in for points in class. They are inspiration. They are why I'm on the path I'm on, wherever that's going. And that is living, that is important--and it's good to be reminded of that every once in a while, even by a kind of pompous, long dead guy. So thanks, books. You're awesome.

[Side note: While writing this post, I spent a good ten to fifteen minutes distracted by looking up the word "paradise" on the Oxford English Dictionary Online. And two things-- One, I'm letting my geek flag fly and celebrating because LSU resubscribed to the OED. It is maybe something a flagship university should have, I think. Two, the Old English word for Paradise, before we borrowed "Paradisium" from Latin, was "neorxnawanga". Which is way cooler. I'm bringing it back.]