Spring 2009

So far, that is my graduation date from Dominguez Hills. Brandon asked me the other day, am I loving it? And I couldn't answer. I'm not loving it, but I am loving getting it done, and reading texts and writing is of course a love of mine, so it's a tough question to answer directly. If there were even shadows of a Blythe, Joe, John, or Brandon...well, then I would be loving it. I have some good recommends for next semester, and of course even the instructors that you don't like, you learn from. I'm learning in American Lit to at least attempt to follow directions, and that drafting is a really good idea. I'm learning from my British Lit professor that one should never shrink back from students -- it's very unbecoming, and elicits a grotesque kind of frustrating sympathy. It gives me a feeling of distaste when it appears that someone is broken, or has been run over, and the response is only a flexible kind of pliant bendability; not a rigid, defensive armor, with weakness in the joints, perhaps; but this gumby-like teetering, this blowing in the breeze of discussion, and helpless referral to things apparently concrete, like a computer slide presenting the FACTS from 1762, the FACTS about Daniel DeFoe, facts which are themselves fluid and temporal, it makes one long for fire, for ice, for strength, for passion. She is the epitome of water, with her pooling blue eyes, and flat look -- I need a leader, for goodness' sake.

Or at least be funny, for crying out loud.

In order to graduate in 2009 I will have to take summer school, and four classes in the Fall and four classes (including my senior seminar) in the Spring. The Fall semester could end up being four survey classes. Sigh. It's all so good, but I should have gone to school at seventeen. I should have done this, and then got married...then had kids...it's all so backward. Ten years of marriage, but only two and half years of college. There's just not enough beer and tequila to manage it all.

Still Dying...This Time Of Myth Allusion

My American Lit professor viciously drug us across two weeks of mythological allusion within "The Wasteland." This deeply fascinated him, but after one day on this subject I was already burnt out -- especially since we spent most of out time focusing on the footnotes of the text. After two grueling weeks of the Fisher King, and the grail myth, and the Arthurian Knight myths...I was OVER IT. The information just seemed so stale.

So last Tues we started on As I Lay Dying, and guess what he wanted to talk about? Mythological allusion. But we started talking about stream of consciousness writing and that ate up a good 45 mins, and then he looks at the clock and realizes that he wants to talk about myth, and then gives me this opening -- "So is there anything else that you guys want to talk about with this book...." And I took the opportunity to bring up the presence of the omniscient narrator(s) in the novel and thank goodness he went off on that and then went into grotesque irony and humor. So that saved the day.

I can only hope I don't look too miserable in class.

As I Lay Dying

I'm so happy to be reading this novel again. This is my third time through the novel, and new things are popping up everywhere. I found in Anse's first passage where he regrets letting Darl get drafted into the military. It seems that this read around Anse is a lot more emotional, especially about his children. I'm noticing how everyone paints Anse as a bad man, but really, Addie is a little more lunatic than everyone thinks. It's not just because she gets off on whipping the kids, but it's her ideas about how the world around her should function; for her; by her. Addie is the Hebrew god of this novel, and her family runs around the land like temple robbers, devout at that. I am really into Anse's point of view this time, and what people say about him, contrasted with what Addie says about her life, and their marriage.

I'm also interested in all the lines in this novel. The image of the cross, looking like this -- + -- is everywhere, beginning with the first paragraphs, where Darl describes walking on the path (the y plane) and compares his and Jewel's height (the x axis). Jewel is taller than he, so sits higher on the plane; Darl is sub-par; his mind is beneath the surface. This could be read as Jewel having a higher sense of awareness, but I see the line, as drawn by Faulkner, the y line at least, as sanity, and the Darl will prove, by deviating from the line as much as possible that he's not sane. Cash follows the line with a gripping obsessive finality that seems devoid of emotion. Our first introduction to Cash's mind is a series of lines that follow one another, logically, and with intense purpose. Anse is overwhelmed by the thought of living next to a government line, a road; Addie insisted on it. Dewey Dell has a definite agenda, and by getting from point a to point b she feels it will be accomplished (by following that line to town). Vardaman is also somewhat deranged, but his association of the fish with his mother is based on principles of time, and that time flows in one direction. I don't know enough about theories of time to expound on this more, but it's there, like furniture in a dark room -- I bump into these ideas, but I can't tell what they are in the dark.

I hope this paper comes out clearer and shinier and A minusier than the last. Also, I just love swimming in Falkner's words. I want to go back to his house. Yeah, it's getting creepy.

Grumble

I got my Huckleberry Finn essay back and I got a B+. Pretty good, pretty good. According to his rubrick I suck at grammar, and that greatly affected my grade. Without the "D+" score for grammar I probably would have gotten an A-. All this is iced with the general boredom I experience during this guy's lectures. What I'm wondering is if he wants us to write about things like the reasons Huckleberry Finn is classified as regionalist, or something. That utterly bores me and feels like a bunch of baloney. I'm really grumpy because we've gone over "The Wasteland" for two weeks, all lecture proving that Eliot was trying to use myth and create myth and work with myth, and Joseph Campbell and the Fisher King...all fascinating, but apparently meaning that if I am going to go on my own with my own ideas I'm going to have to be as exhaustive. I mean this guy is serious about defining terms. I understand his concerns; he kept writing words like "clarify" and "explain" on my paper, so I get that I need to be more articulate...in a three page paper. I get it though, this is pressuring me to write the best essays I've ever written, and okay, that may take more than three hours. Sometimes I don't enjoy the jabs, you know? I have such a problem with pride, really. It's like -- why aren't you praising me? Why aren't you overlooking my lack of a highschool grammar education? Whine, whine. Well, I will...gulp...spend more time drafting. No getting by this one.

Back to Business: Moll Flanders: "Let Them Be Told"

Upon asking my overflowing-with-knowledge but apologetic-to-alarm Brit Lit (All my Brit Lit Instructors have been female, BTW) instructor if we were going to be writing about Moll Flanders, I discovered that no, no we probably weren't going to get an opportunity to write about the novel. I hope the poisonous dart of frustration didn't actually come out of my eyeball; I ran away too quickly to actually know whether it hit her or not.

I mean what is the point of having us BUY a novel that isn't in the anthology if we aren't going to write about it? And isn't the point of a survey class to cover several pieces within a given amount of time and then to have the scrutinize them on the own? At the 300 level? I feel like I'm being shoved back in the nest. Ugh...I feel so fragmented. First I'm on two campuses, which is not quite tearing me apart Jim Stark style, but does create some division in my mind, if only on a spacial level. Then I have a poetry class with a very sweet instructor, but there's nothing special going on there, hence I often forget about the class when preparing. I think I've already told most of you about the Lit Crit class from the bizzaro version of my life -- where the instructor is actually treating us like college juniors, only the entire class is cross eyed (myself included) after reading work that seems utterly ironic and impossible to penetrate; seriously, Derrida is somewhere looking at us laughing uncontrollably. I mean what kind of system doesn't require you to take ANY underclass literature courses to qualify for their literature program, and then approves an instructor that chooses to only give you theoretical texts to see what you make of them? Oooh, avant garde, yeah, hooray. Please, just one diagram. If he wold only give us one diagram. One definition. Seriously, I think he's afraid of the texts, and afraid to teach them. I looked at the class today, and I think I saw human cattle. The survey courses aren't nearly as vague -- but both of the instructors are overwhelming us with Old Historicism and New Historicism and History and Herstory and the PAST. These poor texts. We are waving at them from afar...and I seriously think our Brit Lit is a Anglo-Sympathizer. She is far too forgiving when she discusses Eurocentrism and Anglo-Power. She's very pretty, and she has these watery eyes that do remind of some Anglo faraway upon a time, but she is just...I don't know, silly about England. I just really can't fathom why she made us buy a text we aren't going to write about. I'm almost mad.

So I figured that since I'm not going to write about Moll Flanders I'm going to have to blog about it.

I think that there is strong suggestion in the text that language is the most powerful weapon a person of either gender can wield against another, and Moll's story is about a woman realizing that her worth is contingent on her ability to manipulate language and control others through artful conversation. I haven't read the whole novel yet, but I think that from the beginning her character only has an advantage when she can articulate her feelings clearly. I'm not sure if this theme is adequately developed all way through the novel -- we'll see.

And is it just me or is the time change evil?

Movie Break

I finally got around to seeing Anderson's There Will Be Blood, which I thought was masterful. I have been thinking about it all night in my sleep -- having dreams about unclogging pipes and overflowing sinks. That movie watched like an excellent book, probably because it was based on such a good adaptation, and I really loved the way the credits were done...and the music was really good, very Hitchcockian, actually -- where the music enhances the suspense, but doesn't compete with the scene.

What I'm trying to figure out is why I didn't particularly care for Paul Dano's performance as Eli Sunday. I really liked him in Little Miss Sunshine. He's a good screamer, and there were moments where he shone, but for some reason I kept thinking, while I was watching him that he wasn't believable. Of course, you have got to hand it to anyone who dare act against Day-Lewis. Come to think of it, I hated DiCaprio's performance in Gangs, too. So maybe I'm just witnessing an eclipse. When ol' Eli gets it in the bowling alley, I was a little relieved.

I want to see it again, though it is a hard watch. A lot of the scenery reminded me of our road trip, and make me hungry for America again. Now that I've seen TWBB, I don't know what to do with myself, cinematically. But I think the Art Theater in Long Beach is having it's final pre-restoration showing tonight. So we better get there early.

My Oscar Speech! (Also known as "pats on the back all around!")

Well, folks, I have my first essay back from grading. The class is English Literature, something like from 1600 to 1800. A lot of Restoration and such. In my paper I argued that Dryden's poem, "MacFlecknoe" has it's legs cut off by Rochester's "A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind." I went into it figuring there were some deep philisophical tensions implied by pitting the poems against eachother, but I really couldn't get a handle on these, so I went ahead and wrote the paper. My strongest argument was that Dryden's speaker -- who is only directly speaking at the beginning of the poem, and indirectly speaks as he quotes Mac -- takes the position of superior on the basis of imagining itself a literary giant, and this attitude is what Rochester's speaker chiefly attacks in Satyr. Weaker but also significant was my claim that the wit used in Mac, the satire, was weak and didn't appear to help the speaker acheive the status that it was trying so desperately to both hold on to and establish; the result being that Dryden's poem reads as a panicked attempt to hold on to the trasitory experience of being "great" and Rochester's arguments being strengthened and becoming more firmly established due to their ability to scrutinize other works through them with less support through sentiment and appeal to pathos.

And, my dears, I got an A. Hooray! The first A of the semester. It's always a boost; a little shower of relief; a reassuring touch; a spark of understanding between teacher and pupil.

I'm not admittedly superstitious, but there is something nice about the first grade of the semseter being a mark of excellence. It sets the tone for a semester of hard work and payoff. It's not so much that I invest mass amounts of time to school -- I'm rather lazy, if you must know -- but I do really try to use my noodle as much as possible. And sometimes going with your gut, which I am inclined to do, even when you think you aren't giving the instructor what they want, necessarily, can help you grow, intellectually as well as emotionally, because when you give your ideas credence by writing about them in a formal essay, you do yourself a good service. Even if I don't get the highest mark, I can say with some passion that I always try to follow a voice from within, and even though I recognize that voice as having small chance of being truly original, I come away with a scant impression that I have tried to be true to myself.

I'm sure this reads as very self-congratulatory, but really, I almost have to continue to convince myself that in going to school, in following my dream to be a writer, I am overcoming some obstacles in my life...proving to myself that I too am alive...

Well, this got altogether far too existential for enjoyment. But please don't forget that there are students out there that appreciate recognition, and don't simply slave for the A, but work toward standards of excellence, standards that are a part of their inner make-up, and who are truly grateful for the opportunity to take great risks, and relish a good reward.