We've got a lot of ground to cover, and I'll try to make it fast. I notice with some horror that I haven't written anything significant here since before spring break. This is unacceptable. We need to catch up. Let's do this doubletime. No punctuation. With banjos. So we tookalittletrainoverta San Francisco three days couldn't shower couldn't get much sleep got there atealottafood but I don't like Indian went through two museums went through used bookstores lookin at every cover on every sci-fi book bought some books with excellent and gratuitous iconically sci-fi covers annI cutthecoversoff annI tapedemtomydoor when we got back.
So that was spring break. That was also a literary experiment I don't care to repeat. As for spring quarter: Physics - Meh. Philosophy - our professor was tiny Jewish badass, but never stayed on subject ("What is Nerf, anyway?"). We read Hume, Kant, Billy Budd by Melville, and Heart of Darkness by Conrad. We also watched Apocalypse Now. The philosophy I didn't get a lot out of. I'm not much for analytic philosophy. I'm told I should read Sartre and Camus and such people. Billy Budd also left me cold, but Heart of Darkness was excellent. It's kind of but not exactly like a Lovecraft novella. See, Lovecraftian cosmology works like this: man is unimaginably tiny and irrelevant in a universe which is huge, illogical, and utterly alien. In his stories, this works out to there being older much more powerful beings which terrorize the main characters through most of the story until they discover that there are even older and more powerful and terrifying creatures. Then they run like hell and the story ends. Heart of Darkness can be thought of as the same sort of thing, but one rung up: from the point of view of the natives of Africa, the European colonizers are the Old Ones or the Shadow from Out of Time who come with their incomprehensible technology and culture and non-Euclidean geometry. However, Conrad has us see things from the point of view of Marlow, who is horrified by the sepulchral cities of his own civilization as much as by the primordial savagery he encounters in Africa. Good book. As for Apocalypse Now, "Charlie don't surf."
More classes: the course on Lolita ended up being worthless; everything was about artifice and how clever Nabokov is. While yes, Nabokov is certainly a technical genius, having assignments like, "Draw the hotel room at the Enchanted Hunters" is not particularly helpful to understanding the novel, nor is it interesting. We watched both the Kubrick and Lyne film adaptations and had to write, not reviews, but parodies of reviews. I got a good grade on my first parody despite the professor almost certainly having no clue who I was parodying (she called it a "clever, subtle parody". I basically quoted some paragraphs with only slight modifications from T. S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and just made the rest sound vaguely British.) Our midterm grades came from writing 20 questions for a midterm test based on questions Nabokov would have asked. All you had to do was come up with questions that were either ridiculously pretentious - "Plot Jean Farlow on minus time-space or plus soul-time. Do not feel constrained by the Cartesian plane." - or blindingly obvious - "Is Humbert insane?" I eventually stopped going to class and took the damn thing pass or fail. I passed. She apparently really liked my work.
Incidentally, if you want a film adaptation, the Kubrick's the one for you. The Lyne one is mindnumbingly bad.
On the other hand, the course on Ulysses was superb, not least because the book is absolutely brilliant, and it was very useful to reread it in a structured setting. While the professor did dwell a bit much on gendered readings of the text, she wasn't bad, and my TA was excellent - very elitist, knowledgeable, funny, and mostly having the same reasons for liking literature that I do.
So yes, school went relatively well. I think I shall leave this a mostly factual post and get to overall generalizations and issues next post.
Except to say that in the past couple of days I have listened to nothing but Michael Jackson and King Crimson. That's a juxtaposition for you.
