In more positive news

The furnace keeps farting

Fuck you Thomas Hardy, Sarah Grand, and CCNY for making me read this shit

If I read Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure and Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins when I first moved to the United States, I shall have never picked up another book in my life. This would be the end to my English education and I shall have never kindled a fire to read and write books of my own.

I hate this fucking class and everybody in it. The fact that they (the professor and the students) enjoy this class-the discussions, the readings, and the assignments-is an indication of their stupidity and their inability to learn anything worthwhile. To think, I must read both of these books in detail and dissect every sentence in order to write this stupid paper. Nothing is worse than to be forced to read shitty things in detail.

There are two types of literary study today. One is literary in nature. We start with the details in the book, making connections and links to ideas, history, art, and industry. If the literary course is historical in nature, we are given a brief review of that history and see how each book or writing explicates or differs from that history in terms of content, language, format, and style. It is all compassing, but it starts with the book as the starting ground of discussion.

If you have a bad professor, like I do, you will not start from the details in the book. The professor will spit out two "major concepts" and all the conversation will stay in the general arena. You will agree or disagree and that's it. The discussion does not have room to grown beyond those major concepts because it is being bracketed.

The other camouflages itself as a literature class, but does not essentially talk about the book at all. I don't know what to call this other study, but it comprises of reading in Middle English (not intending to learn or finding more insight about the Middle Ages or novels from the Middle Ages, but do it because it is fun) or locating all the British castles referenced in a piece of fiction. These classes are often obsessed with learning the motivations or experiences of the authors without assigning any autobiography, essays, or criticisms. One simply reads a book and then talk about how the author might have "felt." These are not literature classes. These are foreign language classes (Middle English or Elvish) or Fictionalized Reality courses (trace the locations in Dubliners). Sometimes they are not courses at all, like the one where you read a book and attempt to discover how a writer felt without any first person reference. I hate these classes. These classes veil themselves inside undergraduate and graduate English programs and in my opinion, threaten the legitimacy of literary study. Not only that, I don't learn anything from these courses. I know nothing about the book. All I have is what someone "felt" or a map of Dublin marked with asterisks. What education does one take from this? How did this come to pass? What program approved this course and its professor?

Probably going to eat my way through this death.

Knishes should be served with gravy. A knish is essentially a giant ball of mashes potatoes. Why not serve it with a side of gravy? Whoever decided that knishes should be served with mustard?

"Has China lost its morality and sense of compassion in its rush to modernity?"

No, the Chinese haven't had any morality since the 1960's when their spirits were stripped by Chairman Mao. What this shows, along with dozens of other incidents is that "prosperity" and "education" has done nothing for the Chinese.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/world/asia/chinese-toddler-who-was-run-over-twice-dies.html?_r=1&hp

I am so tired of this Fin de Siecle course and reading all of these stupid, ill written books that do not follow reasonable order. I am sure that there are much better books from the 1880's to the 1890's than The Heavenly Twins by Sarah Grand and Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. Their characters act out of nature and jump from one idea to another without any connection. I am also tired of the lecture, where the professor throws out some general idea and asks us to "comment on it." No, your ideas are stupid and do not make any sense. I hate professor that make grand generalizations without any close reading of the text. This is not a graduate course.

There Are New Revelations Everyday!

There is a Charles Dickens summer camp! Summer camp! Charles Dickens! Together. For high school students and adults.

Fuck me, everybody knew about the Creators Project this weekend except me. It feels pretty shitty when you invite someone to do something, they say their busy, and don't tell you that they are going to the event down the street from where you live. It's even worse when they have tickets and you don't. New Yorkers are sly. Everybody tries to be a step ahead of you.

What do you do when you can't sleep, a mosquito is buzzing in your ear, the melatonin isn't working and you keep thinking of the new novel by Jeffery Eugenides, David Foster Wallace's suicide, and the cry baby Jonathan Franzen? Why you go on the internet, of course.

I can see how people go crazy in the night, sleep deprived, and overheated. A mosquito first flies into the left ear, then the right. Your body itches at the left wrist, the right ankle, the left knee, and the right calf. You can't open the bottle of Irish whiskey because the cork has dried out. You settle for the bourbon and let the cool warmth take you. What happens when the sleeping pill and the alcohol stops working?