in which my blog turns boring
[
Turns boring? they all say, as if it were heretofore a rollicking good time]
You would think I'd have copious free time now that
the book is off to layout, but you'd be wrong. There's the pesky enterprise app and the management thereof, which sucks time and life (yes, both books!) right out from under me, and causes great stress for my boss. The good news is that it will eventually end, the bad news is that "eventually" is about six weeks away. I am so very, very over it. I have never enjoyed reading lit theory as much as I do now, if only because it is
not my work. I hate my work. This is not news to my boss, lest any of you think I've just dooced myself or something.
My brain is tired. My eyes are tired. My knees hurt (although that's a function of the weather, my constant sitting position, and a whole host of other factors not related to my work, but it's still annoying). The process that we have to deal with in order to get our work done is maddening; we spend more time managing people outside our company, who are technically supposed to be managing
us, that when the end of the day rolls around we have little of our own work done. For example, right now it's a quarter past four in the morning and I have a little bit of a lot of things completed from my list. But that's worthless, since it's only the completed stuff that counts and that's not what I have. I have three hours to finish a ton of things, and I won't. I am too tired, I can't think clearly, and this day is going to suck ass. As will tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, through Monday when I'll have to deliver a "complete" thing that will then be hammered on and this whole process will start over.
So let me talk about school. I love it. It makes me happy. The nine hours I spend in class each week and the couple hours on the weekend when I do all my reading or essay writing, it's like a vacation. Yes, of course I should be spending a hell of a lot more time on schoolwork but unfortunately my petition for more hours in the day and days in the week was never approved by whatever higher power controls those things.
I don't have any stories about poor students who
write poems instead of giving presentations, but I think at this point in the semester other students are just as annoyed with her as I have been. My methods prof, a very patient fellow, avoids looking in her general direction and thus doesn't always see her when she wants to make a comment. But he let her speak once, whereupon she said "there is some really crazy shit in here, really weird." We are reading
Redrawing the Boundaries and the "here" to which she refers is Marjorie Perloff's essay on Modernist studies (it's not weird). Student begins reading the "crazy and weird" part, which goes something like this: "From [x to y to z], modernism perceived its own mission as a call for rupture." We were all very puzzled as to the "crazy and weird" part, even the students who hate the book and are in school only to get their MA for the pay raise it brings to public school teachers. No one said anything and we quickly moved on. But hey, at least she didn't write a poem about it. This is the same student who still thinks that our "scholarly book review" is just a book review done by a grad student (not a review of a scholarly book used in our research), and who selected
To The Lighthouse as her target text for our seminar project in the theory class ("choose a short story or narrative poem") until we finally beat the meaning of "short story" into her (we all held up our copies of our own target texts and noted the difference in thickness), and who, when she asked me what book I was reviewing and I said
Providence Tales and the Birth of American Literature said "oh, he'll like that" (as if it matters or not what the prof "likes") because "that seems to be his field." Hmm. This book: late 17thC New England. Prof's field: Victorian. Well, I guess the fields are both...old? Contain books? Whatever.
Also? I am soooo not a fan of Gertrude Stein.
