Adam Vs. Modern British Literature

Goodbye

2008-03-09T19:05:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-02T13:44:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-24T12:04:00.000-08:00

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or anything; as discussed in a previous blog, my mind just has a natural gag reflex to obselete language which isn't so outdated that it's a whole different paradigm from modern vernacular.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

2008-02-17T14:16:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-10T13:49:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-03T13:39:00.000-08:00

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...

2008-01-26T15:35:00.001-08:00

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

Week Two

2008-01-26T15:10:00.000-08:00

To flollow through with what I set up last week, William Blake easily defeated me. I had him in a headlock, but he escaped and tricked me into sweeping his chimney by using reverse psychology and saying how much fun it would be. It so wasn't.

The readings this week have been great. I'm really attracted to the world of murky, mystical mist Colridge creates in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Water, and the ocean in particular, is great for exploring psychology and symbolism -- it's all deep and layered with endless fathoms of secrets.

In December I drove to Norman to see my girlfriend, and I took the backroads because it was rush hour. It was cold and windy, and it was drizzling really hard and at all kinds of strange angles. Clouds were tearing around wildly, and the fog was so dense that it was impossible to see more than a few feet. I was listening to the second half of Super Black Market Clash, which consists of soft but heavy, bizzarre dub songs, with lots of thumping noises and trinkling noises, and the music gave my head the texture of the air outside.

Anyway, the point is that I became obsessed with the idea that the sky had turned into the ocean and I was going to run into a huge grey whale that had run aground on the country road. The concept made me feel all drunk and giddy. I really want to write something about that dementia I felt, and the certainty I pretended to feel that a whale was beached on the road just past my threshold of vision, twenty or so feet in front of me. I really want to write something about that, as you can probably tell by the overwrought way I just described it.

Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" was awesome as well. I love his concept of intellectual beauty as the part of us humans that is somehow greater than human. I also love how he doesn't spell out for us what exactly he means by "Intellectual Beauty," just like I love how Coleridge lets us guess about why the mariner shoots the albatross.

Adam out!

Hello

2008-01-16T12:03:00.000-08:00

In all likelihood, you already know this because you're my teacher, but I'm going to be using this space to discuss my thoughts about the readings for my online British Literature class. This week I'll be reading William Blake. Tune in later to see who wins! So far I've mostly just read the one about his pipe. It was very nice. I wish a cherub from the clouds (preferably Jack Black or John C. Reilly) would come down and make me practice rocking.