Just in case you were worried about me...

It's funny lately -- I feel as a balloon might, let loose from the innatentive hand of some tiny child and left to drift among the winds. The slightest puff of air sends me shooting into the lands of Despairia, where all is dreary ash. Likewise, a wee crosscurrent will propel me back over the sea of emotion to HappyFairyLand, where all is sweetness and light and verdant green grass. Given my family history, I'm a little worried I might be bipolar, but since none of these moods has lasted longer than a day or two, I think I'm safe right now. I'm just another case of fourth-year angst, I guess.

If you haven't been able to tell yet from my flowers of rhetoric (seen, in all their silly glory, above), I'm in a good mood today. Specifically because my Renaissance Professor (who might well be the cutest old man ever, with wit and intelligence and endearing self-deprecation) gave us an article today by Frank Lentricchia. It is called "Last Will and Testament of an Ex-Literary Critic".

A (very) brief excerpt:
"To be certified as an academic literary critic, you need to believe, and be willing to assert, that Ezra Pound's Cantos, a work twice the length of Paradise Lost, and which 99 percent of all serious students of literature find too difficult to read, actually forwards the cause of worldwide anti-Semitism...I believe that what is now called literary theory is a form of Xeroxing. Tell me your theory, and I'll tell you in advance what you'll say about any work of literature, especially those you haven't read. Texts are not read, they are preread."

Take that, literary criticism! No longer alone in my secret fears, I expose you now as a murderer. You seek to kill my pleasure in simply reading -- but I won't let you. You want to create a world where (as one prof, whose course I later dropped, once admitted) I can't read anything without analyzing it's relevance to imperialism or gender politics or Marxism. Well, you won't kill my happiness! I will read books because I want to, not because they must be studied for the greater good of humanity. Certainly, I'll note sexism and politics and philosophy creeping in, but that's only because that is part of human experience. And human experience is what literature is all about.
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I now feel justified in saying this: I hate my literary criticism course. I think it's stupid and overly obtuse. Literary criticism does have its place, and for that reason I won't drop the course (well, that, and I need it to graduate). I'm so glad my professor and Frank Lentricchia finally told me it was okay to just like literature, not to try and tear it apart to find all the hidden biasses and prejudices.

Writing

I don't think I've ever really thought about this before, but writing is hard. I guess as an English student I'm spoiled with good writing most of the time, so I don't really realize how difficult it is to make words sound anything like reality.

However, a few examples of mediocre writing have sprung up before me in the last few days (not the least of which is my own attempt at a sonnet), so now I've got some points of comparison. And it's pretty obvious. Good writing pulls you in, makes you interested, doesn't make you think "That verb's in the wrong place" or "that rhyme is awkward" or "I'm not sure what she's saying here".

And the sad thing is, I don't think I'm that good a writer. I realized a few years back that most of my friends are artistically talented in some way. But I can't draw, I can carry a tune but I'm no bard, and I've never written anything but a few juvenile Mary Sue stories in my youth. I'm surrounded by doodlers, painters, writers, potters, musicians, and actors. For a while I consoled myself with the idea that at least I could write -- but I can't, really. I can write essays, but just 'cause I have to, and I can write speeches, but that's more to do with the fact that I can talk well, not that I'm the next Martin Luther King Jr. or anything.

Funny thing is, it's this blog that's made me realize most that I'm not a writer. I thought I would have profound things to say, but mostly I just end up talking about myself. It's not particularly funny, or very interesting, or very inspiring. It's just the random thoughts of a not-so-unique university student. I mean, what I say means something to me at the time, but when I read back over my posts, they're not exactly diamonds in the rough.

And now, in true, uncreative form, I don't even know how to end this post. I've tried a couple of things, but everything sounds so maudlin ("Poor wee me...") that it's just not worth the space.

An Exercise in Pain

I never really understood why people referred to the dentist's chair as a "modern torture chamber" until today. They were welding in my mouth. Welding! I swear I saw sparks. Another minute and I would have confessed to trying to overthrow the government.

(Also, I may have to get a mouth guard because, apparently, the intermittent jaw pain comes from me grinding my teeth in my sleep. So much for my efforts to have less stress...)

An Entirely Lovely Afternoon

My apartment may be small, but apparently there's still room enough for six girls and one guy to make pea soup, bake fresh pretzels, fix a computer, read a book, do homework, take a nap, listen to a fun folk band, and do emails. All at the same time.

It was just peachy.

A Weekend to Remember

'Twas a lovely weekend. My friend Reuble (who is from India) had expressed a wish to see polar bears, and learn a bit more about the country he's now been living in for four years. So I convinced him to come stay at my house for the weekend, where I would give him some good Canadian experiences: going to the zoo to see polar bears, going to the art gallery to see the Group of Seven, and eating good stodgy food like stew and shepard's pie.

All in all, the weekend was a complete success. The highlight for Reuble was definately the polar bears (they were the reason he wanted to go to the zoo, and we saw them getting fed) but there were lots of other animals active in the nice fall sunshine when we went to the zoo Saturday. We saw jaguars having a tug of war over a tire, a vibrant green and yellow snake curving around branches, observed in detail octopus suckers as he travelled along the glass. There was also a red panda trotting up and down trees with the greatest of ease, elephants playing with tires and balls, and a camel who spat and displayed his lip to us in a very unflattering manner.

On Sunday Dad dragooned us into raking up leaves in the morning, but we didn't mind too much. then we drove to the McMichael and saw the art gallery a couple of other friends We all muchly enjoyed the Group of Seven, and I especially liked Lawren Harris.

Our trip back last night was pretty eventful -- we missed the normal transit bus to get to where we'd pick up our bus, and so had to fight with a driver to get transfers (this driver, let us say, appears not to have had any good lovin', or any positive human contact, for quite some time. Then we made our way through the enormous crowd of students at the bus stop to get on a bus.

[Aside: I've decided that the incredible sense of tension that is nearly palpable in groups of students waiting for the bus must be due to the fact that students at my university are generally neurotic and constantly worried about (or trying to control) details, but are too polite to actually start pushing and shoving and yelling]

We were travelling fine, when about 20 minutes outside of Kingston, someone tried to change lanes... into our bus. Miraculously, no one was hurt -- the car ended up in the ditch and the bus now has a lovely long scrape on it, but everyone was fine. However, we were stopped on the side of the road while the driver gave police statements for more than an hour. Our bus driver was really nice though -- when he finally did come back he came straight in, sat down, got the bus going on the road and then got on the intercom to give us an update while he was still out of breath (from running back to the bus from the crash site). We finally did get back at midnight, with one more story to tell.

Reuble, I think, enjoyed himself because of all the new things he was doing, but I had a really good time for a rather different (and more commonplace) reason: people. I really do enjoy observing and learning more about people, and this was a great opportunity. I got to know Reuble much better -- we had some fabulous discussions about culture differences, dealing with parents, and our mutual desire to avoid conflict whenever possible. I also got to see my Dad at his very best amusing entertaining mode -- teasing me while we raked the leaves, using large words all over the place to impress Reuble, and telling interesting stories to Reuble and Laurena at the zoo. (I remember pretending to watch a turtle at one point, when I was actually just enjoying seeing Laurena and Dad on the other side of the glass, clearly having an animated conversation)

And, of course, the fascinating psychological study of trapping 50 university students (tired, worried, hungry, and some with exams the next morning) in a bus on the side of a highway for an hour. It was dark, so we couldn't even see the accident. The shift from annoyance over the delay to concern for the other car to confusion about why the driver was gone to mounting anger (and some mutinous mutterings) as our time by the roadside reached and passed the one hour mark was more absorbing than any television or book.

Fecundity

This is a very good word. According to my dictionary, fecund means "fruitful or fertile, productive, prolific". I like how the word rolls off my tongue, how it manages to sound slightly smutty and wholly pompous at the same time. It has both hints of sex-like-crazed-weazels and eminent-professor-publishes-thesis to it.

My brain feels very fecund right now. Ideas and thoughts (about my life, about others, about Renaissance literature and faith and postmodernism and pain and self-deception and zoo animals) bounce around in my brain, turning about and occasionally kicking at my the inside of my skull. Some days I feel like Zeus about to have Athena pop, fully formed, out of his brain.

My brain is a breeding ground.

On Days Like These...

There are times when the world opens up before you and you can see the rhyme and reason, the trials and the triumphs which inform our lives and make sense of the chaos. There are moments of epiphany when you realize that the events of everyday life sometimes become extraordinary, sometimes expose the seeds of farce and tragedy that lie within all our experiences. When someone comes up to you to say "What you once said changed my life" you realize that what you say is not unimportant, but that it shapes the tenor and the hue of the world in which all of us live. It is vital.

I was talking about such heady things to a friend of mine today. At that awkward ending moment, when both of us knew we must part ways, but didn't really want to stop talking, I said "It's an odd world we live in." The fact that this trite observation actually meant something to us in that moment just tells you of the kind of conversation we were having.

He thought about it for a minute, and then smiled and said "Yes, and on days like these, it's fun."

Rhetoric versus Philosophy

I think I've realised why I hate literary theory so much, and why I'm so interested in writing sermons. I'm a rhetorician!

I know rhetorician isn't quite the right word anymore, but we talk about this sort of thing a lot in my Renaissance Lit. class, so it sounds slightly inadequate for me to say I'm a speech-maker or a persuader or a whatever other modern term one might substitute for rhetorician. Suffice it to say, I'm not interested in abstract theory or figuring out how/why things work. I'm a very practical person, in that what I want to know is how things affect people. Since I'm an English major, I'm specifically interested in how words affect people. How to make people agree, why they disagree, what emotions an argument carries, and so on.

This is why I like literature, but not literary theory. This is why philosophy (whether modern or ancient, written in today's language or incomprehensible jargon) holds no interest for me, makes me ask "what's the point?". This is why I like preaching, and essay writing, and having long involved conversations with people. I like the notion of trying to understand how you explain something so that others will get it, and knowing the best way to convince someone of your point.

Now, I know this has a bit of a control-freak edge to it (but then again, so do I...). Being a preacher, or a rhetorician, or even just a teacher, means you could abuse your power, use the tricks of rhetoric to make people agree black is white and good is evil and there are five lights, not four. Classic Philosophers hated rhetoricians, called them liars and sophists. That connotation still exists today --look at political speech-making today. It's all about convincing people that you're right, when you're actually very very wrong.

But that sort of thing makes me mad, gives preachers and speech-makers a bad name. I know for myself that the sermons that have made me the maddest (to the point where I've nearly walked out) where not those where I disagreed with the theological point was being made, but those where I agreed with the point, but thought that the method used to convince people was dirty. I don't know if you've ever had this experience, but sometimes you just know (whether they're right or wrong) that people are not being clean with their rhetoric. They're using all the emotional and tactical and linguistic tricks to make you agree with them -- not because they're right or wrong, but because they get off on knowing that they can do that.

Now, while I do admit there's a certain pleasure in knowing you've convinced someone, I don't want to trick people into agreeing with me. Yes, I'm a rhetorician, committed to the notion that words have power and communication is a meaningful exchange -- but I won't stoop to use whatever means necessary to get my point across.