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

Arithmatic of humanity

Between this (we knew him, but didn't like him, even before) and this (made what should have been happy, tragic), a bunch of my friends keep thinking, "man, humanity is sad, sad, sad." I want to restore faith in humanity for them, but how? Does it require big acts of kindness to counter-act big acts of violence and hate? Or is the quiet, well-lived life that keeps plodding along trying to to its best, enough? Today on the radio, the old-timey radio station was commercial- and pledge-free because of "a friend in North Austin" and a bunch of my friends are pitching in to buy diapers for low-income mothers.I want to do grand acts of kindness, but I don't know if I can, right now. Does that count in the balance? Is faith in humanity a series of bank transactions, deposits and withdrawals, so that acts of cruelty and callousness must be counter-acted by well-meaning patsies who have to try to buoy up humanity well enough to keep Q (or almost any alien) fr...
Read more

Blogpoll for My Comedic Future

Okay, so I'm 90% certain I'm leaving Divine Comedy after this semester (but last time I said that I stayed for another year so here we go.) It takes more time and work than a hobby and pays less than a part-time job. So I figure I don't have time for all that. But I still like comedy-- who do you guys think I should join: Humor U or LOL? Humor U probably has fewer rehearsals, so that would be less time, but LOL is improv and I'm way better at improv AND I'd get to hang out with the troupe (assuming the troupe is as fun and friendly as DC). Voice in and convince me!
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