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a woman's brain, in word form
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| I think that unemployment is going to cause me to start updating livejournal again because I'm rapidly running out of pointless things to do.
Anyway, so far the graduated life has left me drunk and smoking a lot and sustaining all of the weird bruises that tend to go along with those activities. According to my minor injuries I had a much crazier fourth of July than I actually had. I mean it was fun but I wasn't doing anything crazy enough to cause these kinds of bruises (I think).
Speaking of minor injuries, I pretty much face planted off of my longboard today. Only I didn't actually hit my face which is I guess fortunate, but I am nonetheless somewhat scraped up and bloody.
I'm reading an absurd amount of books lately. I reread the Dragonlance books (well the Chronicles anyway) and they are still massively epic. And now I'm rereading Hitchhiker's Guide and Douglas Adams is still a goddamn visionary.
Country Fair is this weekend and it should be a-okay, I think I will appreciate it more this year because I won't have had a massive breakdown the night before. I haven't been back to Nevada since December and I probably won't BE back until December because I am unemployed and have to pay bills and other nonsense things instead of gallivanting around, but hopefully I'll get out of Eugene soon because I might be on the verge of going mad here.
Okay, this isn't a very good activity because I'm not actually doing anything to blog about. So hopefully I'll become employed soon, and then I'll write a lot of neurotic entries about how worried I am that I'm going to fail at my job and get fired! Always good to have something to look forward to! | comments: Leave a comment   |
| I graduated on Saturday.
So far I can't really comprehend it, I've spent the past several days bumming around my (new!) apartment reading Jane Austen and playing Cave Story. Oh, and drinking.
So anyway, a lot of things have been going on but they're pretty much the same things that are always going on. I accidentally stayed out until dawn so now my sleep schedule is completely boned, but since I have absolutely nothing to do anyway it's pretty alright.
Okay, well, that's all for me. Farewell. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| One of my assignments for my Eng 410 class is to keep a sort of record of the poem's we're reading and my reactions to them. It can even be in blog form! I'm not sure if it's at all appropriate to link my professor to my livejournal but since the new and improved purpose of this thing is to talk about literature I think it's acceptable to put it here anyway.
This is pretty casual and not very well written.
( Shakespeare, sonnet #24, and Milton ) | | comments: Leave a comment |
| This term I'm taking an English class called "Reinventing the Modern Novel" - and I'm actually really enjoying it. Basically, we read a modern novel, and then we read a post-modern novel that's dealing with some of the same issues, and then we compare them. So far the novels have actually been directly related (ie Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway compared to Michael Cunningham's The Hours) but I've been lead to believe that the next pair won't work quite like that (we've so far read five of the six novels).
That's really all just unnecessary background information, though - what I've actually been thinking about a lot lately is how I read books. The thing is, I value aesthetics much more than morals; I think frankly that it is boring to read a novel and say "I think that Conrad is a racist" or even "I think that Marlow is a racist". Who cares?
I am much more interested in the craft of the novels I read. Rather than worrying about whether in Heart of Darkness Conrad hates women or Africans or whether only Marlow hates women or Africans, I'm thinking about how Marlow is the character telling the entire story And it doesn't just degenerate into a typical first person narrative but is left in quotation marks for the entire novel - there's something in that which draws the reader in and makes them a listener just as much as the first narrator is. Look at the layers of narration! I am reading a book written by Conrad from the perspective of a nameless sailor sitting on a ship and listening to a man named Marlow tell a story about an experience he had in the jungle - it's beautiful. I'd be more likely to get upset over an incomplete frame narrative (for what it's worth, the one in Heart of Darkness is wonderfully complete) than about the fact that Marlow - or the sailor relating listening to this story, or Conrad himself - might be racist.
At the same time, I realize that literature doesn't exist in a vacuum. At some point even I have to stop just appreciating the words and acknowledge what they're actually saying - and I do that, honestly. Some books have nice morals, or make nice points; some argue well enough that I change my own opinions, or some I just instantly agree with. I appreciate things like that, I do - but I can't bring myself to care whether Heart of Darkness is horrifically racist or not because I don't think that's the important thing to focus on.
Focus on the words, focus on how well written the novel is, focus if you want to on the fact that the entire narrative is unreliable (that's what I've been doing), but why pull out the most boring, mundane thing possible and spend all of your energy arguing something senseless? If Conrad was racist (or if Marlow was racist! ...and doesn't having to say even that make the claim useless?) does that change the fact that he wrote a novel that's still being read, discussed, enjoyed and hated over one hundred years later? If Conrad was racist, how much of that do we have to blame on the times in which he lived? Can we pin our 2009 sensitivities on a man who wrote a book in 1898?
I don't think we can. We don't have Conrad's brain in a jar to explore at will, we have only the text that he left us with. By labeling it racist we make an unfair and completely unjustifiable claim, gaining nothing and, perhaps, losing something beautiful. Where's the sense in that? | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| Then spoke Gangleri: 'What way is there to heaven from earth?'
Then High replied, laughing: 'That is not an intelligent question. Has no one ever told you that the gods built a bridge to heaven from earth called Bifrost?'
Snorri Sturluson's Edda
This is apparently "the most extensive account of Norse myths and legends that has survived from the Middle Ages" - amazing both because it details how the world was created from the body of a dead frost giant [1] and because it was written by a man named SNORRI.
At the same time, it's kind of bizarre - Norse mythology as it was known by a Christian so although it's scattered through with first hand quotes from the original Norse poetry, it has a definite Christian quality. It's basically the same dilemma you face when reading Beowulf (and in fact I am reading this for my Beowulf class). How do you know what's originally there, what was added later by the Christian authors? And more importantly, how then can you tell what the connections actually are between this older poetry and religion, and later Christian poetry and beliefs?
These are the kinds of questions that keep me up at night.
[1] "From Ymir's flesh was earth created, and from blood, sea; rocks of bones, trees of hair, and from his skull, the sky.
And from his eyelashes the joyous gods made Midgard for men's sons, and from his brains were those cruel clouds all created." | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Current Music: | boards of canada - turquoise hexagon sun | | Time: | 05:17 pm |
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| "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" by Oscar Wilde
Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.
Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.
This is one of my favorite lines in poetry, both because it is Oscar Wilde writing a ballad and because it is so blatantly ridiculous. At the first level, it's a cute but not mind blowing concept - because in the context of this poem of course what it means is that everyone is constantly doing terrible things to the people they love, killing them in thousands of little ways, and most of us will never be hanged for it.
But that isn't what it actually says. What it says is that "each man does not die" - of course each man dies! He may not be hanged but he'll get sick; he'll do potentially dangerous things; he'll grow old; he'll die. If, then, everyone dies, is it because they kill the things they love? It's almost a suggestion that perfect respect and kindness, brotherhood amongst men, would remove the necessity of death - had Adam and Eve never eaten from the tree of knowledge, had there been no original sin, had Cain never killed Abel, humanity could still be in the garden of Eden, right?
The thing is, I'm neither religious nor sentimental enough to think that people ever have or will exist without the baser aspects of our natures. But I like the idea that maybe, somehow, eternal life comes from treating better the things and people we care about, that there is a goal, a meaning attached to being a decent human being. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| on the heels of my pseudo-statement that this was now going to have to be retitled "literary blog" or some such, I want to bring you an entirely personal entry that does not mention books in any way (although the poetic abilities of a certain indie group may at one point be discussed).
first: i dreamt last night of fishing from the dusty, dehydrated banks of lahontan, catching carp and releasing it again. it was huge; my brother had to help me cut it free.
second: tequila does not have to be bad.
third: ( picaresque > (or, sure, =>) castaways, yes? ) | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
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a woman's brain, in word form
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