I CAN HAZ THESIS STATEMENT?

Since I am now officially done beating my brain into a pulpy mush to extract papers, etc. (at least for this semester) and griping about it, I can now get back on an ivory-soap box and talk about why it is important to be able to construct coherent sentences from your brain-mush.

Even if you are not a giant geek like I am, flying into giddy fits over discovering the shared etymological root of punch (the drink) and punch (the flying fist)*, it is pretty obvious that yes, words are important. You use them every day to convey important (or trivial) ideas, and you need to organize them properly in order to convince your professor (and friends, and later on your boss, coworkers, lover, parole officer, etc) that you are not a flaming numbskull. You take advantage of this skill (or lack thereof) every time you open your mouth. Fortunately or unfortunately, we cannot aways rely on the Gift of Gab (and all the relevant "like"s and "y'know"s that tend to fill conversational/logistic gaps) to help us out. Your words at some point have to take the form of squiggly little letter on a page (or screen). They are there for longer than are soundwaves in the air, and give your audience time to reread, process and criticize what you have put forth. Opportunities for judgment are increased exponentially. So please at least attempt to make yourself sound like a functioning human being (but don't try too hard--overwriting is pretty damn agonizing to read as well).

This article on Salon by Kim Brooks does a pretty good job of expressing the frustration I often feel when I encounter the writing of my peers. And, as I will almost inevitably be teaching a chunk of composition classes at some point in my life, the same article is incredibly depressing to me. I have over the course of my education been blessed with some fantastic English teachers, both in high school and in college. And, were I ever (*shudder*) to end up in the same position, I can only hope I live up to the standards they set. More likely, I think, I would be driven to drink. Because I have also had my share of shoddy English teachers, But, looking around at my classmates, I couldn't always blame them for their apathy or their rote, heads-down approach to the curriculum. Teaching is hella hard. But even so, I'm going to hope that some attempt is being made to wedge Critical Thinking and the Production of Ideas and Discourse into this/my generations head. Because even the small slice I've personally witnessed is...well, unacceptable.

Okay, I'm stepping down of my "elitist" soapbox. But goddammit, I'm not asking everyone to go out there and write the Great American Novel, or even develop an appreciation for the Mediocre American Novel(s). JUST MAKE YOUR WORDS WORK.

*[In case you're interested, by the way, the etymology is from the Indo-European root penk(w)e-, which is where we get the word "five" (cf. Greek pent-)-- punch traditionally had five ingredients, a punch is made from the five fingers of a fist. Ta Da!]

More Procrastination via BritLit Villains

It's a struggle to bring myself to start my final essay/project for BritLit, even though my professor basically told me that no matter what I turn in, I'm getting an A in the class. Despite this and her insistence that I needn't stress over this at all, I've fixated on the idea of each character being written in an imitation of the style of their original work. This is possibly a mistake. I can probably pull off some old-school alliteration for Grendel, but am I really going to take it upon myself to imitate Shakespeare? And Milton, in all the glory of his squirrley syntax in twenty line sentences?

Yeah, I guess so.

Basic outline (major paraphrasing):

[Grendel, Iago, Mephistopheles, and Satan are iin Heaven, with yellow VISITOR passes looped around their necks]

Grendel: RAR! GORE AND VIOLENCE THROUGH THE FRONT DOOR FTW!

Satan: Maybe that's not the best way to do things.

Iago: Yeah, I remember somebody who tried to straight-up bring an army to bear on his Almighty creator, and if I recall correctly that didn't work out so well. Should have gone my route with some servile subterfuge.

Meph: Hush your mouth, Iago.

Satan: You were just following the path I laid out when I successfully employed deception to bring about a little thing known as, I don't know, The Fall of Mankind.

Meph: Laid out so successfully that millennia later I could use the same lure of knowledge and flattery to damn Faustus, a son of Adam who by all rights should have learned from his parents' Fall. (Sucker.)

Satan: Thank you, my good fiend. And we, already bent as demons, had to worm our way into the domain of our victims, we did not have the luxury of being cozily ensconced in their nest, as you were.

Iago: Yeah, I set myself up pretty sweet on the inside, didn't I? And I probably earned a pretty good place in your little kingdom of sinners along the way, huh? But you have to hand it to me-- I set up my lies completely from scratch, unfounded--- I had no demonic side-show tricks or magic fruit to follow through with--and that "valiant" Moor still killed himself and his little lady while his domain went to pot around him.

Satan: You indeed have a deep spot in my legions. A traitor's place is always guaranteed.

Grendel: YEAH, BETRAYAL IS PRETTY INTENSE. CAIN THE FIRST KIN-SLAYER WAS MY GREATGREATGREATGREAT GRANDDADDY SO I'M A MONSTER. ALSO FROM HELL I WATCHED HROTHGAR'S CLAN TURN ON EACH OTHER AND HIS SUPER-FANCY GOLD HALL BURNED UP. I WAS LIKE HAHAHA.

Satan: And surely we can agree on the effectiveness of the "divide and conquer" strategy? Simple Eve was won when Adam's guiding "manly grace" was elsewhere distracted.

Meph: Faustus as well was taken in solitude, no matter how scholarly; he himself had walled off his well-intentioned friends

Iago: I convinced Othello to abhor and discard his nearest and dearest (excluding, of course, yours truly) by implying my poisons in opportune moments when, just the two of us, the reason of others would not stand in my way.

Grendel: I SURE DO LIKE TO MUNCH ON A HEAP OF THANES BUT IT WAS BEST WHEN THEY SCATTERED AND HID IN THEIR OUTHOUSES AND I KNEW I WAS RULING THE ROOST

Satan: Pitiful humans just can't keep their wits about them, can they?

St. Peter: Well, I think you've sufficiently demonstrated to the junior hosts the nature(s) of the threat they face. Off you go back to hell then!

[Scene]

Well, that was helpful. Time to go actually write the thing, I suppose.

Two more days and I'm free.

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.]

A place for everything, and everything...goes to hell.

Ugh. I thought trying to be organized was going to make my life better, or easier, or something, but the attempt has been taking over my life like a malevolent creeping spider vine type thing, generally making my weeks into one long borderline anxiety attack. I am even less fun than I normally am. It is like being a hamster running on a wheel in an inhumanely small cage. Except the wheel is sticky. And also has spikes.

It's funny, because when I look at my workload for the day, or week, or whatever, I always think, "Oh, that's not so bad. I can totally do this before (insert applicable deadline here)." Then I actually sit down to do whatever the work is, and everything goes to hell. Whatever part of my brain is in charge of my time-management is apparently run by a psychotic ADD ringmaster, or something equally unproductive.

Also, it doesn't help that we lost a damn hour last night. Always so unfair.

Nor does it help that I'm posting this instead of working on translating Old Irish, but such is life.

Well, while I'm working on getting my priorities straight, I'm going to bake a nice batch of blueberry muffins. Surely that will cheer me up!

If I read or type the word(s) poetry/poems one more time in the next hour, I'm revoking my own literacy privledges

Just finished reading Chelsey Minnis's Poemland. I had been somewhat avoiding picking it up for a few weeks because both the back and front covers are printed with a close up of annoyingly pink fur and some confusing barcode type things (these, of course, are painfully relevant to the themes of the book. Go figure.).

Anyway, still not 100% on whether or not I like this book (certainly it did not ignite such distaste in me as Tao Lin's did), but at least now I feel significantly better about my struggle with writing poetry and the nature of poetry. This (along with money, and various shiny things) is what Minnis deals with in Poemland. Her way of grappling with this question is apparently by publishing a book with a lot of bizarre similes and more ellipses than, well, it is a lot of ellipses also. [I was going to put in some witty turn of phrase here but I cracked under the pressure of producing one. So there.] Not quite sure what my own way of dealing with my relationship with (to? no, with) poetry is, but to see someone else slopping around in their own poetic mud eases my mind just a smidge.

Mind, I don't feel particularly better about any future of my quoteunquote writing career (end result: probably hermitude), but its nice to have some breathing space away from the panic-weight for a while.

Of course, Chelsey Minnis lives in Boulder, Colorado. Obviously she can make money from publishing a book of lines fretting over said lines. That's what they do there in utopia.