Ch-ch-ch-changes!
New thingums:
1 - Job. I am now the Research Assistant to the Associate Deans of the college of Engineering. What that really means is I help the graduate students in the engineering college write immaculate theses. I am thrilled.
2 - Classes. I am taking the best classes ever constructed. Well, I am taking the best ones offered in the English department. Persuasive Writing (a class I should have taken instead of the useless Writing About Literature - which was more like regurgitating the five-paragraph essay, eating it, and then regurgitating it again). I am taking it with the fabulous Brian Jackson whose discipline I could totally get into, not in a 'I want to write papers and become a scholar of this field' type of way, but in a 'I want to keep up with your work and subsequent rhetorical conversations which rock my rhetorical socks' type of way. His energy for the subject is buoyant. I feel a little sheepish for not being better versed in persuasive writing and rhetoric in general - so I'm going to try and haul out the big guns insofar as subsequent assignments go. Also, Literary Theory 2 - very cool. My professor had us start out on a diet of Foucault, Foucault, and more Foucault - something hard to stomach in the most French of ways. I hope I survive.
3 - House. My sisters, cousin, and friends of sisters are planning on living in a mansion next fall. The rent would be only slightly more than I paid at the White House. This place is gothically gorgeous. It has wood floors, a spiral staircase, a study, a living room, a family room, a dining room, a balcony (several balconies, actually), a fireplace with a carved mantle, trellised windows, a secret garden, carved arched ceilings, glass doorknobs, a thousand nooks and closets, real tiles in the bathroom and kitchen (no linoleum), and grape vines crawling up the brick exterior. It has little embellisments and dodads that I'm sure have names I will never know. The backyard we would share with the house next door - there is a fire pit and a swingset alongside a large sweeping lawn and a parking lot for all the inhabitants of the houses. The house looks like it is creeping with stories - it has an aura of importance and history. I secretly hope it is infested with ghosts!
4 - Books. I have been re-reading "A Series of Unfortunate Events" and I am thrilled by them once more. The supplemental installment, The Beatrice Letters was recently on sale at the bookstore and I indulged in its purchase. This series is one piece of art which fascinates me. I once read that "Lemony Snicket" - Daniel Handler - wrote the series in part out of response to the poorly-crafted (and rhetorically idiotic) children's novels decking the public's bookshelves today. The rhetorical implications are just stinking cool when you read and re-read these books. Consequently, I've long been of the same opinion about children's fiction. When I read "A Series of Unfortunate Events" my savage breast is soothed and I find I don't despise the world for its hackneyed authors quite as much as I used to. The books generate a sort of hope for fiction and metafiction, a new enthusiasm for style and story, a delightful sensation of enjoyment instead of disgust.
Along those lines, Stephanie Meyer just released a new book. I had to read the first chapter of Eclipse for a YA fiction class last week. I hated it. Drivel. You cannot dissuade me from this violent opinion. I hate those books - I detest the sight of them, the sleek black and red covers with minimized text, the style of their Buffy-the-vampire-slayer rhetoric, the gothic-romance names that seem to have creeped right out of a Bronte novel. Plus I think the narrator's voice is stupid. I have come to realize that story and plot isn't enough for me. Give me a form I delight in - words which please and interest me. Don't just throw violent melodrama into a paperback and call it legitimate fiction. I am surprised that 'my-boyfriend-is-a-vampire-life-is-so-hard' drama has caught on so well - to me it's almost voyeuristic in its repulsiveness. This is the kind of drivel I think Brigham Young was referring to when he said this: "In our part of the land many of our young women just hope and pray, if they ever thought of prayer, ‘I do wish some villain would come along and break open my room and steal me and carry me off; I want to be stolen, I want to be carried away; I want to be lost with the Indians, I want to be shipwrecked and to go through some terrible scene, so that I can experience what this beloved lady has experienced whom I have been reading about.’” (23 July 1873) Perhaps society has stooped to re-inventing the gothic novel and calling it literature. Go read some Dostoyevsky. It'll be good for you. It'll clean out your system - teach you what you should learn to stomach instead of this animalistic garbage. If Dostoyevsky is asking too much, opt for Austen, Twain or Hawthorne. For heavens' sakes go read Hemingway if big words scare you. You'd have more fun reading Faulkner, CS Lewis, or Dickens. Even Poe has some literary gums to smack - and he'll give you that little gothic twinkle in your eye if that's what you're really after. (But, in my opinion, if you want truly haunting, go read Cormac McCarthy. That'll send your little vampire boyfriend screaming into the bathroom to change the tighty-whities he's just soiled).
5 - Pierced ears. I finally pierced my ears. I did it because I think pierced ears are lovely. Non-pierced ears are also lovely - I have loved them a long while. They're cheaper, which is ohso lovely. But no more. For some reason I felt I should have this grand rhetorical excuse for getting it done, but I can't really come up with one. I just wanted to. It's not to make a statement or to signal any type of personal philosophical change. I think earrings are lovely - they bring a sparkle to my face and shower glitter on my cheeks. I like them just for that, and I think that is enough.
Much like this.
1 - Job. I am now the Research Assistant to the Associate Deans of the college of Engineering. What that really means is I help the graduate students in the engineering college write immaculate theses. I am thrilled.
2 - Classes. I am taking the best classes ever constructed. Well, I am taking the best ones offered in the English department. Persuasive Writing (a class I should have taken instead of the useless Writing About Literature - which was more like regurgitating the five-paragraph essay, eating it, and then regurgitating it again). I am taking it with the fabulous Brian Jackson whose discipline I could totally get into, not in a 'I want to write papers and become a scholar of this field' type of way, but in a 'I want to keep up with your work and subsequent rhetorical conversations which rock my rhetorical socks' type of way. His energy for the subject is buoyant. I feel a little sheepish for not being better versed in persuasive writing and rhetoric in general - so I'm going to try and haul out the big guns insofar as subsequent assignments go. Also, Literary Theory 2 - very cool. My professor had us start out on a diet of Foucault, Foucault, and more Foucault - something hard to stomach in the most French of ways. I hope I survive.
3 - House. My sisters, cousin, and friends of sisters are planning on living in a mansion next fall. The rent would be only slightly more than I paid at the White House. This place is gothically gorgeous. It has wood floors, a spiral staircase, a study, a living room, a family room, a dining room, a balcony (several balconies, actually), a fireplace with a carved mantle, trellised windows, a secret garden, carved arched ceilings, glass doorknobs, a thousand nooks and closets, real tiles in the bathroom and kitchen (no linoleum), and grape vines crawling up the brick exterior. It has little embellisments and dodads that I'm sure have names I will never know. The backyard we would share with the house next door - there is a fire pit and a swingset alongside a large sweeping lawn and a parking lot for all the inhabitants of the houses. The house looks like it is creeping with stories - it has an aura of importance and history. I secretly hope it is infested with ghosts!
4 - Books. I have been re-reading "A Series of Unfortunate Events" and I am thrilled by them once more. The supplemental installment, The Beatrice Letters was recently on sale at the bookstore and I indulged in its purchase. This series is one piece of art which fascinates me. I once read that "Lemony Snicket" - Daniel Handler - wrote the series in part out of response to the poorly-crafted (and rhetorically idiotic) children's novels decking the public's bookshelves today. The rhetorical implications are just stinking cool when you read and re-read these books. Consequently, I've long been of the same opinion about children's fiction. When I read "A Series of Unfortunate Events" my savage breast is soothed and I find I don't despise the world for its hackneyed authors quite as much as I used to. The books generate a sort of hope for fiction and metafiction, a new enthusiasm for style and story, a delightful sensation of enjoyment instead of disgust.
Along those lines, Stephanie Meyer just released a new book. I had to read the first chapter of Eclipse for a YA fiction class last week. I hated it. Drivel. You cannot dissuade me from this violent opinion. I hate those books - I detest the sight of them, the sleek black and red covers with minimized text, the style of their Buffy-the-vampire-slayer rhetoric, the gothic-romance names that seem to have creeped right out of a Bronte novel. Plus I think the narrator's voice is stupid. I have come to realize that story and plot isn't enough for me. Give me a form I delight in - words which please and interest me. Don't just throw violent melodrama into a paperback and call it legitimate fiction. I am surprised that 'my-boyfriend-is-a-vampire-life-is-so-hard' drama has caught on so well - to me it's almost voyeuristic in its repulsiveness. This is the kind of drivel I think Brigham Young was referring to when he said this: "In our part of the land many of our young women just hope and pray, if they ever thought of prayer, ‘I do wish some villain would come along and break open my room and steal me and carry me off; I want to be stolen, I want to be carried away; I want to be lost with the Indians, I want to be shipwrecked and to go through some terrible scene, so that I can experience what this beloved lady has experienced whom I have been reading about.’” (23 July 1873) Perhaps society has stooped to re-inventing the gothic novel and calling it literature. Go read some Dostoyevsky. It'll be good for you. It'll clean out your system - teach you what you should learn to stomach instead of this animalistic garbage. If Dostoyevsky is asking too much, opt for Austen, Twain or Hawthorne. For heavens' sakes go read Hemingway if big words scare you. You'd have more fun reading Faulkner, CS Lewis, or Dickens. Even Poe has some literary gums to smack - and he'll give you that little gothic twinkle in your eye if that's what you're really after. (But, in my opinion, if you want truly haunting, go read Cormac McCarthy. That'll send your little vampire boyfriend screaming into the bathroom to change the tighty-whities he's just soiled).
5 - Pierced ears. I finally pierced my ears. I did it because I think pierced ears are lovely. Non-pierced ears are also lovely - I have loved them a long while. They're cheaper, which is ohso lovely. But no more. For some reason I felt I should have this grand rhetorical excuse for getting it done, but I can't really come up with one. I just wanted to. It's not to make a statement or to signal any type of personal philosophical change. I think earrings are lovely - they bring a sparkle to my face and shower glitter on my cheeks. I like them just for that, and I think that is enough.
Much like this.