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Sammi decided that last night was a good night to break out some weird honey-infused bourbon and watch shows with four basic character types of female protagonists. I had no objection. I like Desperate Housewives quite a lot--Sammi only has the first season, so we've been watching that over and over. I seriously enjoy Bree, even though she's normally not the type of character I can sympathize with--yes, she's a supermom type and a Christian conservative, but she's also a gun nut and a cheerful control freak who is close to losing her shit because of her family. Makes her interesting. I still want to write a little MUNCLE crossover just so I can send her and Illya on a shooting range date. I have the Crossover Disease.
BUT I STILL MANAGED TO GET MY HOMEWORK DONE! And I got my grant forms in! Apparently I'm eligible for a $2,500 grant because of my drive-thru work at the Taco Bell. Who knew? If I get it (and that is a fairly big if), it will net me more money than I ever earned actually working there.
***
CLASSES:
In ENG 201, We're reading McLuhan ("Media is the message" guy) and doing Baudrillard again, I am not kidding. This time around, there are four levels of simulacra. That is one more level than before. Even weirder, it's the same basic article from my last class, it's just a different translation. I don't even know what's going on.
NEW LEVELS OF SIMULACRA:
1) That which reflects reality
2) That which masks or misrepresents reality
3) That which masks absence of basic reality
4) That which bears no relation to reality
mindfudged you guys MMMMMMMINDFUDGED
*
We did Puritan and then Romantic stuff in Childrens' Poetry. One of the definitions someone gave for childrens' poetry yesterday was that "Kid's stuff is usually didactic or has a moral, and adult poems are just, like, images." (Which is sort of true; even that crazy hippie Shel Silverstein wrote his share of "Remember, kids, be a free spirit!" poems, which technically still have a moral. Oh, yeah, and the prof doesn't like Shel Silverstein. She thinks most of his poems are just nonsense that doesn't necessarily have a deeper meaning. Sammi, who's in the class along with me, shared my huge WTF moment.)
This didacticism, Alton says, is a leftover from Puritan poetry, when most poetry for the small ones specifically was aimed at saving them from Hell. (Which prompted an outburst of "But I don't believe that's right!" from some girl. I really fucking hate that shit, I'm sorry. There are some times and places where your opinion doesn't matter and nobody cares.)
Childrens' Romantic poetry was often less didactic and usually nature-based, because of the Romantic belief that children were innocent tabulae rasa who were at one with nature. Even up until the 1970s, pretty much any childrens' poetry anthology had at least one nature-based poem in it.
Also, I hadn't known that Blake's "The Tyger" was meant to be a childrens' poem. It was paired with "The Lamb" in a nifty two-volume book that was themed around the dichotomy of innocence and experience. We got into a discussion about whether "The Tyger" was meant to suggest that tygers were in some way Satanic before I broke it up by mentioning that the poem was much less intense and scary if you sung it to the tune of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" (which, by the way, is called "The Star" and was written by Jane Taylor and has five stanzas. Also, the familiar tune was written by Mozart years before she wrote the poem. The more you know!).
BUT I STILL MANAGED TO GET MY HOMEWORK DONE! And I got my grant forms in! Apparently I'm eligible for a $2,500 grant because of my drive-thru work at the Taco Bell. Who knew? If I get it (and that is a fairly big if), it will net me more money than I ever earned actually working there.
CLASSES:
In ENG 201, We're reading McLuhan ("Media is the message" guy) and doing Baudrillard again, I am not kidding. This time around, there are four levels of simulacra. That is one more level than before. Even weirder, it's the same basic article from my last class, it's just a different translation. I don't even know what's going on.
NEW LEVELS OF SIMULACRA:
1) That which reflects reality
2) That which masks or misrepresents reality
3) That which masks absence of basic reality
4) That which bears no relation to reality
mindfudged you guys MMMMMMMINDFUDGED
*
We did Puritan and then Romantic stuff in Childrens' Poetry. One of the definitions someone gave for childrens' poetry yesterday was that "Kid's stuff is usually didactic or has a moral, and adult poems are just, like, images." (Which is sort of true; even that crazy hippie Shel Silverstein wrote his share of "Remember, kids, be a free spirit!" poems, which technically still have a moral. Oh, yeah, and the prof doesn't like Shel Silverstein. She thinks most of his poems are just nonsense that doesn't necessarily have a deeper meaning. Sammi, who's in the class along with me, shared my huge WTF moment.)
This didacticism, Alton says, is a leftover from Puritan poetry, when most poetry for the small ones specifically was aimed at saving them from Hell. (Which prompted an outburst of "But I don't believe that's right!" from some girl. I really fucking hate that shit, I'm sorry. There are some times and places where your opinion doesn't matter and nobody cares.)
Childrens' Romantic poetry was often less didactic and usually nature-based, because of the Romantic belief that children were innocent tabulae rasa who were at one with nature. Even up until the 1970s, pretty much any childrens' poetry anthology had at least one nature-based poem in it.
Also, I hadn't known that Blake's "The Tyger" was meant to be a childrens' poem. It was paired with "The Lamb" in a nifty two-volume book that was themed around the dichotomy of innocence and experience. We got into a discussion about whether "The Tyger" was meant to suggest that tygers were in some way Satanic before I broke it up by mentioning that the poem was much less intense and scary if you sung it to the tune of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" (which, by the way, is called "The Star" and was written by Jane Taylor and has five stanzas. Also, the familiar tune was written by Mozart years before she wrote the poem. The more you know!).
