Goodbye

It's been fun, but this is the last week of class. I'm really looking forward to having somewhat less of a horrible workload for the rest of the semester. Here are my favorite things from this class:



1: Goblin Market

2: The Ancient Mariner

3: Frankenstein

4: Mrs. Dalloway

5: Blake's Poems

Penultimate Blog

This week we read Mrs. Dalloway and T.S. Eliot. Stream of consciousness is pretty fun when not taken too far; I dunno about Joyce. I learned to like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and especially "The Waste Land" way more than I had before. It's easier when you realize that the Waste Land is about the collage of the parts rather trying to see it as a cohesive whole, and when you focus on the impression the poem is making instead of trying to follow the narrative too perfectly.

I hate how Eliot was an American who became so British that he is now included in British Literature classes. Pound tried to do the same thing, but didn't quite make it out of the American canon. Not that I'm some kind of patriot or anything, but the concept of switching countries just so you can be more pretentious is disgusting to me. Have you imaginary readers heard Pound read his poems in that rolling, incomprehensible, fake Irish brogue? Ridiculous. Those wannbe British poets are a pathetic bunch of pre-Madonna's.

Abby, did you see that joke? Gold!

Yerp

This week we read some poems by Yeats. Keats, Yeets -- lots of rhyming and awkward syntax to accomodate the scheme and meter, lots of old, dead words. Yeets was so crazy about old stuff. I bet he wished he lived in the middle ages just like Edwin Arlington Robinson and his Miniver did. But EAR, imho, wrote about longing for antiquity in a much livelier way.

Not that I heet Yeets or anything; as discussed in a previous blog, my mind just has a natural gag reflex to obselete language which isn't so outdated that it's a whole different paradigm from modern vernacular. I like lots of things about Yeets/Keets etc., but I talk about the positive stuff in my classes so much that all the negative opinions build up and get blogged where I won't get in trouble for them.

Margaret Rabb, my favorite teacher and a successful, terrific poet, adores Keats/Yeets. So, so many of her poems are responses to them or other old poems or to Greco-Roman myths. She probably wishes she could get away with saying "thee" and "thither." I could never spend my art-life looking backward like that.

We had to do our web pages this week. I humiliated myself by trying to be all leadery. I thought maybe we were supposed to all work on the same site, so made a joint Gmail account for us all and got us a blank web page to edit together, and I told everyone about it like it was the all-important master plan. Of course, it turned out we were really just supposed to make our own pages and link to them and most people had started working on their own pages already. I hope people don't hate me now. I am so not some jackass leader; I was just afraid we weren't gonna get our work done, and I misunderstood the assignment.

Goblins and Dickens

Rossetti's "Goblin Market" was a lot of fun to read. The narrative of the poem is so easy to follow, yet the symbolism opens itself up in so many fascinating ways. I wrote my paper on the lesbian-y sexual overtones in the poem. I can't believe that this used to be seen as a children's parable. I would have expected 19th-century people to have been shocked by how sexual the poem is. Were they really so suppressed that they didn't get it?

Great Expectations was less enjoyable. I actually think the plot is very entertaining, although it certainly doesn't seem very realistic, but Dickens's slow, descriptive style puts me to sleep. I hope that you can be a good teacher without liking all the books you're supposed to like. It seems like almost all of the students I know are like me in that they love some of the classics and think some of them are mediocre or just so dated that they're no fun anymore. All of the teachers I know, on the other hand, seem to love everything written before 1930. Maybe there's a chip they put in your head during graduate school. Or maybe the grad students get Stockholm Syndrome: the classic books take control of so much of their time and lives that the grad students go crazy and fall in love with them.

P.S. I love my teachers, and I really do enjoy most of the stuff they make me read.

Week 3

This week we read poems by Browning, Tennyson, and Arnold. Honestly, I'm not really crazy about the style of these poems. The end-line rhyming and the use of high-toned English seems so obselete. For some reason, these poems feel more dated to me than the works of older poets like Shakespeare and Chaucer. This is probably because Browning and her contemporaries use diction and constructions that are close enough to modern-day writing that I read their poems as if they were contemporary, while a whole different section of my brain is used for reading works that are so old that they are drastically different.

My favorite poem of the week is Woman's Law Is Man's by Tennyson. The lack of thudding end-line rhymes is nice, and I really identify with the point he makes about how it's the differences between men and women that make them so appealing to each other.

Frankenstein

Frankenstein is my girlfriend's favorite book. I'm not really sure why. She hates reading, and Frankenstein is written in such grandiose language. I can't believe Katie enjoyed reading all those big words. For a while I was sure she'd only read some kind of "Illustrated Classics" version, but she's proven that she read the real thing. She also loves Paradise Lost and the Illiad, so I guess she's not averse to difficult or dense readings. Katie says that Frankenstein is "such a girly book," and she's right. The characters are always getting overcome by emotion and breaking down into tears and whatnot.

I like Frankenstein, too, but not nearly so much. I don't care about Victor and his struggles nearly as much as the monster, and he just doesn't get enough page time for me. Also, the book is such a stereotypical Romance: the characters are always getting enraptured by the sublimity of nature, all the nice characters turn out to be aristocrats even if they're poor, and at least half of the book is devoted to the narrator telling us how he feels rather than showing us actions.

I want to want Obama to win the election. He's so exciting and young and different compared to the other candidates. But he's not going to try to get us healthcare, and Hillary is. Does that outweigh the fact that Hillary voted for the war? Yes, probably...

Wow, I just realized that you can't edit your posts once you "Publish" them. That sucks.