Back to Work-ish

Okay, so after my watching a movie (which turned out, after two hours, to be a mini-series, which turned out, after two hours, that I didn't actually watch the whole thing), I went to go meet with a student of mine who, quite rationally, assumed that we were meeting in my office, even after I emailed him to meet me here. No worries. For the past hour and a half I've been cheerfully plugging away at the poetics/rhetoric paper that has easily had more than 14 pages of meandering and drafting and figuring out what, exactly, I'm going to say. But then I got all...sticky with it. Ugh. What, exactly, do I want to say? It's something about war poetry and rhetoric and Burke and the lack of rhetorical involvement in literature while literary theory was in vogue and...I don't know.

I'm thinking I'll send this next (as always, inchoate) draft to my mom. She's super-nice and I think that I've bothered Dr. Jackson enough today.

And while she's looking over it, maybe I can take a break. Yeah. Maybe I'll finish that miniseries.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Products of A Slightly Fevered Mind After A Long Girls' Night Out.

1. 28 Dresses Later a high-adrenaline zombie-bridesmaid thriller. When one dress too many turns the minds of the perpetual bridesmaid, they roam post-apocalyptic London, tearing to shreds everyone with well-manicured nails and biting them with their recently-whitened teeth. 2. I wake up, groggy, bed-headed, pajamaed. Lying next to me, fully dressed on top of the bed is Gregory Mankiw, the economist. "You're Greg Mankiw," I intelligently remark. He springs out of bed and stands up. "Would you like to discuss consumer surplus and tariffs?" "Why are you here?" I ask. "Don't you remember the Make-a-Wish Foundation?" 3. I was going to throw my tiara, but it turns out to be made of popcorn. "What a cheap groom I have," I think. He's already changed into jeans by the time his extensive family starts playing a traditional game of "here kitty, kitty," around the equally extensive reception grounds. I have no idea why we
Read more

In Defense of Stephanie Meyer.

It occurs to me that at this late stage I haven't lent my voice to the already cacophonous choruses debating the literary merits of Ms. Meyer's work. I realize that by making any sort of statement, I risk alienating good friends with strong opinions, but weighing that hazard against that of letting my friend continue in strong opinions unchecked, I have decided to go forth as originally planned. I don't think Stephanie Meyer is a bad writer. Now this isn't to say that I think her prose merits inclusion in the next Norton's anthology or that a world of Twilight would usher in the literary revolution we've been waiting for, but I've had enough of people calling her a talentless hack. Sure, maybe some lines of teenage angst strike the reader as perhaps overly melodramatic, or crudely hewn, but that doesn't make her talentless. In fact, if she's talentless, then may God bless me with the talentlessness to make the New York Times Bestseller Lists for seem
Read more

Moms and Vets: a little rant about people who complain about Mothers Day

Another year and yet again more op-eds published with the somehow still surprising revelation that not everyone is/has/wants to be a picture perfect mother. I don't understand why this is still news--why is it important to say again and again how no one is/has/wants to be June Cleaver? Feels like "asked and answered." But consider another minor holiday dedicated to a group of people who sometimes endure harrowing experiences: Veterans Day. Imagine these op-ed perspectives talking about how Veterans Day is so painful because: I wanted to be a veteran, but couldn't due to health reasons. I thought I wanted to be a veteran, but it wasn't what I expected and now I regret it. I don't want to be a veteran. Some veterans do terrible things.  Some veterans are lazy. There aren't any veterans in my family. There are veterans in my family, and some of them are not very good people.  I know some veterans who makes a really big deal out of Veterans Day, but it's e
Read more