Wednesday, May 19, 2004
You know, I'd really promised myself I'd be good...
...but, as they say in France, it is more strong than me.
This morning saw the The Hero (first of the three dreaded subjects: the others are Sin and Redemption and Old English) busted open like a cheap pinata. Wham. I was delighted to find that, in the end, I had only needed to know one text for that stupid class, which is fortunate, as I only ever really read two. It was Paradise Lost. Furthermore, the twits who drew up that class completely blew off the question on that one, asking the single most obvious one imaginable in a class called "The Hero": in what way is Satan a traditional epic hero?
Oh, shut the FUCK UP.
No, seriously, I really thought I was in college here. I mean, everything else I see prompts me to that conclusion, you know? Everywhere I look, I see frats, facilities, meal plans, broadband in all the rooms, parties...oh...wait hold on...
Well, that's not the point. I finished high school, but am still being constantly evaluated and occasionally graded, and am paying for the pleasure; ergo, I am in college. But hand to God, folks, you wouldn't believe it from some of the questions on that exam. It was one question from the Michaelmas term course on Romanticism and Revolution, and two from the Hero, which we had for Hilary and Trinity terms. And it was a goddamn joke, by and large. I can't tell whether this is typical HM humor, the irritation with easy questions--I should think the majority of us would be happy as a cat ripping the back of the sofa to find simple questions with straightforward answers. My problem is not, SAMANTHA, that I can't give straightforward answers (hey, I think all my answers are straightforward), but that whenever they ask such elementary questions, which can be answered with a brief, half-page litany of Satan's heroic characteristics, I'm convinced it's a trick question. That question, taken at face value, could be more than adequately answered--no exaggeration here--by a 7th grader with only a cursory knowledge of the plot. One does not even have to have taken a look at Milton; all one really would need to do are find the fucking SparkNotes, and even THOSE would have you overprepared. So it became a matter of self-respect: either I had gotten myself into a confederacy of dunces, or they were as clever as they were supposed to be, and it was a trick question that one was supposed to navigate with the utmost precariousness. I chose the latter.
The only challenge, then, was figuring out how to write more than was being asked on the surface, and address what lay beneath. This may strike you as paranoid. It was. That question makes an average 10th grade take-home essay of about 1500 words, but only if the student is quoting constantly from the book. With the text in front of you, all you have to do is find places where Satan acts heroic. The whole thing becomes a glorified list. Without the text (and of course we don't get the text), I had to give a very brief, and very inglorious enumeration of Satan's heroic virtues (clever like Odysseus, intrepid like Aeneas, valorous like Hector, and dutiful, loyal, with "sapienza and fortitudino like every other epic fucking hero, ever), but bracket it on one side with a fleshing-out of the very heated debate over whose side Milton took, God's or Satan's (I chose the latter), and on the other with an explanation of the wickedness of Milton's God, and the tragedy of his Satan. Gack. It was pretty gory. Solid enough, though.
Before that came the Romanticism question, for which I had prepared Blake. By "prepared," I mean "wrote an essay on on the plane back to Ireland in January, threw an eye over it a week ago, found it to be reasonably sound, all things considered, tucked some verses away in my head for later use, and decided to more or less verbally mambo my way through the exam." Lucky again. The Blake question was: "For every living thing is holy." Discuss with reference to Blake. Shazam. That's more or less a request to regurgitate the content of my essay, which I must post sooner or later. You may remember its title: "God Wants Your Penis and Mr. Blake Does Not Suggest You Give it to Him." It was great. Get past the part where you explain that living, for Blake, was not merely existing, but exercising to their fullest all of our God-given human faculties, which means recognizing, respecting and above all cultivating impulse, not mortifying it, then quote like crazy, especially the obscure bits no one reads, mambo a bit more and you're home free. Throw in an aside about his relationship to Rousseau just to keep that whole "Romanticism" thing in mind, and you're golden.
Kinehora. Oy.
Then the last one, maybe I should give them some credit. It wasn't terrible. Specifically, because it got me out of doing the godawful Northanger Abbey question (discuss the concept of plot and heroine in any text on the course. Are you taking the piss? That's a fucking joke, mate), which I had expected to be totally bollocksed by. I had prepared Northanger at the last minute, as it was the only other text I'd read, but I really wasn't looking forward to it. Fortunately, the first question on the Hero section was sort of the "thought" question. Thing is, it didn't require much of that.
It was a quote about the destruction of Aeneas' Troy propelling his development into a true hero. The question asked us to address the interrelation of the destruction of the home and the resulting heroism in any text on the course--OR ANY APPROPRIATE TEXT.
YES! OH, YES! WOOHOO!
Well, the only question there was, which other appropriate text? I sat back and shuffled through all the stories I remembered as involving domestic destruction, and I was about to settle on Fight Club, which I'd just seen again the other night, but just as I was trying to figure out where the H went in Chuck Palahniuk (I'd been right: hoo-ah!), it hit me. I'm not sure exactly what it was that hit me, but it was big, black and hurt like hell. Anyone get the license plate number? But once I'd gotten back in my seat and order had been restored to the gigantic hall we were in (it was the massive complex of the RDS, and it's used for all sorts of things around Dublin. It's not college property. It smelled of horse poop because horses often run around and then poop in there, apparently), I realized what text I was going to use. And I was very thankful they said "text," and not "book." That woulda fucked me.
I began by saying that as far as contemporary cultural phenomena (I'm blanking on what I wrote there) go, it is inarguable that the single text (and here came an ass-covering explanation that in this postmodern era we treat any concerted coincidence of signifiers as a "text," whether filmed, printed, or photographed) which is most immediately relevant to the question of heroic development's being prompted by the destruction of the home is The Matrix.
Honestly, I tried. I had been very sober up until then, very assiduous, straightforward and orthodox. But somewhere in that third hour something went plop, I suppose. It was something minor, though, because the essay that emerged was bizarrely formal. I included a disclaimer after announcing I was using The Matrix that said, basically, that I was aware that academic analysis of The Matrix had lost the edginess that it had a few years ago, and that this essay was meant to be empty of the sauciness and nerve that usually mark analysis of the popular and contemporary. There was to be nothing "new" here, for as DeLillo done said, "there's no more danger in the new." Instead, whatever novelty graced the essay was hoped to derive itself only from the renewing of affection for the old methods. But that was a huge lie. I hate the old methods. Honestly, I don't consciously bullshit often. That last bit? Pure, non-genetically modified, free-range Texas Longhorn bullshit.
Then I jumped in. It was short, sweet and finished with an adequate bang. I trotted in Beckett on Habit (the exact same quotations I used for the Beckett essay on Monday) to explain the necessity of destroying Thomas Anderson's "home" (that is, his entire reality: couch, name, time, city, identity, everything), which is where Habit, the veil of preconception, is happiest, before he could become the hero Neo. At the end I think I shot myself in the foot, though. I presume the whole purpose of that anile course was to make us think about the definition of Hero. It was appropriate, then, to close the discussion of it by happening on an entirely new (so far as I know), though maybe somewhat specious definition. The thing about Beckett's Habit is that, in the moments where it's broken, we have a moment of stark, uncomfortable clarity. It is uncomfortable because we've been stripped of our defenses, our language of names for things. To ease the discomfort, another habit slips right over us. We don't even notice. It's a glimpse of the cosmic, and then bam it's right back to normal. Neo, though, sees reality, reacts by barfing and fainting, but then wakes up eventually and says, "I can't go back, can I?" Duhhh hey, no. No going back. His habit is broken permanently. And that is what makes a hero, I said--the clarity of the moment habit-breaking never fades fades for them. They stay constant and true. Also it was said better, and "hero" was the last word.
And this is of course patently bullshit. It's worse than bullshit. It's flat-out wrong. Of course habit consumes him again. He just has a shiny new "real world" where the old "real world" used to reside. Buncha crap, if you ask me. Oh, well. They're not going to argue that sort of thing. They know these essays are a pain to write. Plus I didn't flip anybody off this time--a 'habit' I developed on the SAT II's--so hopefully that's points in the bag for me.
No guarantees about Sin and Redemption though. I'm like Papa Bear. If I find myself backed into a corner I might be forced to do something stupid. Except that usually that works out pretty well for Papa Bear. Bah. I can't write anymore today. I'm written out from this morning, goddammit, and I don't know why I'm spending so much time with you all. I fed you yesterday.
It's really a bunghole of a day outside. Windy as hell, gray, but not really wet. I brought a disc to the exam (it's all I had in my hand walking in, which I liked. The walk takes almost an hour, though, which I didn't), and a bunch of us on the team who were there threw for a while afterward, but the wind was so fucking annoying that we ended up giving up after under an hour. Hopefully tomorrow is nicer.
This morning saw the The Hero (first of the three dreaded subjects: the others are Sin and Redemption and Old English) busted open like a cheap pinata. Wham. I was delighted to find that, in the end, I had only needed to know one text for that stupid class, which is fortunate, as I only ever really read two. It was Paradise Lost. Furthermore, the twits who drew up that class completely blew off the question on that one, asking the single most obvious one imaginable in a class called "The Hero": in what way is Satan a traditional epic hero?
Oh, shut the FUCK UP.
No, seriously, I really thought I was in college here. I mean, everything else I see prompts me to that conclusion, you know? Everywhere I look, I see frats, facilities, meal plans, broadband in all the rooms, parties...oh...wait hold on...
Well, that's not the point. I finished high school, but am still being constantly evaluated and occasionally graded, and am paying for the pleasure; ergo, I am in college. But hand to God, folks, you wouldn't believe it from some of the questions on that exam. It was one question from the Michaelmas term course on Romanticism and Revolution, and two from the Hero, which we had for Hilary and Trinity terms. And it was a goddamn joke, by and large. I can't tell whether this is typical HM humor, the irritation with easy questions--I should think the majority of us would be happy as a cat ripping the back of the sofa to find simple questions with straightforward answers. My problem is not, SAMANTHA, that I can't give straightforward answers (hey, I think all my answers are straightforward), but that whenever they ask such elementary questions, which can be answered with a brief, half-page litany of Satan's heroic characteristics, I'm convinced it's a trick question. That question, taken at face value, could be more than adequately answered--no exaggeration here--by a 7th grader with only a cursory knowledge of the plot. One does not even have to have taken a look at Milton; all one really would need to do are find the fucking SparkNotes, and even THOSE would have you overprepared. So it became a matter of self-respect: either I had gotten myself into a confederacy of dunces, or they were as clever as they were supposed to be, and it was a trick question that one was supposed to navigate with the utmost precariousness. I chose the latter.
The only challenge, then, was figuring out how to write more than was being asked on the surface, and address what lay beneath. This may strike you as paranoid. It was. That question makes an average 10th grade take-home essay of about 1500 words, but only if the student is quoting constantly from the book. With the text in front of you, all you have to do is find places where Satan acts heroic. The whole thing becomes a glorified list. Without the text (and of course we don't get the text), I had to give a very brief, and very inglorious enumeration of Satan's heroic virtues (clever like Odysseus, intrepid like Aeneas, valorous like Hector, and dutiful, loyal, with "sapienza and fortitudino like every other epic fucking hero, ever), but bracket it on one side with a fleshing-out of the very heated debate over whose side Milton took, God's or Satan's (I chose the latter), and on the other with an explanation of the wickedness of Milton's God, and the tragedy of his Satan. Gack. It was pretty gory. Solid enough, though.
Before that came the Romanticism question, for which I had prepared Blake. By "prepared," I mean "wrote an essay on on the plane back to Ireland in January, threw an eye over it a week ago, found it to be reasonably sound, all things considered, tucked some verses away in my head for later use, and decided to more or less verbally mambo my way through the exam." Lucky again. The Blake question was: "For every living thing is holy." Discuss with reference to Blake. Shazam. That's more or less a request to regurgitate the content of my essay, which I must post sooner or later. You may remember its title: "God Wants Your Penis and Mr. Blake Does Not Suggest You Give it to Him." It was great. Get past the part where you explain that living, for Blake, was not merely existing, but exercising to their fullest all of our God-given human faculties, which means recognizing, respecting and above all cultivating impulse, not mortifying it, then quote like crazy, especially the obscure bits no one reads, mambo a bit more and you're home free. Throw in an aside about his relationship to Rousseau just to keep that whole "Romanticism" thing in mind, and you're golden.
Kinehora. Oy.
Then the last one, maybe I should give them some credit. It wasn't terrible. Specifically, because it got me out of doing the godawful Northanger Abbey question (discuss the concept of plot and heroine in any text on the course. Are you taking the piss? That's a fucking joke, mate), which I had expected to be totally bollocksed by. I had prepared Northanger at the last minute, as it was the only other text I'd read, but I really wasn't looking forward to it. Fortunately, the first question on the Hero section was sort of the "thought" question. Thing is, it didn't require much of that.
It was a quote about the destruction of Aeneas' Troy propelling his development into a true hero. The question asked us to address the interrelation of the destruction of the home and the resulting heroism in any text on the course--OR ANY APPROPRIATE TEXT.
YES! OH, YES! WOOHOO!
Well, the only question there was, which other appropriate text? I sat back and shuffled through all the stories I remembered as involving domestic destruction, and I was about to settle on Fight Club, which I'd just seen again the other night, but just as I was trying to figure out where the H went in Chuck Palahniuk (I'd been right: hoo-ah!), it hit me. I'm not sure exactly what it was that hit me, but it was big, black and hurt like hell. Anyone get the license plate number? But once I'd gotten back in my seat and order had been restored to the gigantic hall we were in (it was the massive complex of the RDS, and it's used for all sorts of things around Dublin. It's not college property. It smelled of horse poop because horses often run around and then poop in there, apparently), I realized what text I was going to use. And I was very thankful they said "text," and not "book." That woulda fucked me.
I began by saying that as far as contemporary cultural phenomena (I'm blanking on what I wrote there) go, it is inarguable that the single text (and here came an ass-covering explanation that in this postmodern era we treat any concerted coincidence of signifiers as a "text," whether filmed, printed, or photographed) which is most immediately relevant to the question of heroic development's being prompted by the destruction of the home is The Matrix.
Honestly, I tried. I had been very sober up until then, very assiduous, straightforward and orthodox. But somewhere in that third hour something went plop, I suppose. It was something minor, though, because the essay that emerged was bizarrely formal. I included a disclaimer after announcing I was using The Matrix that said, basically, that I was aware that academic analysis of The Matrix had lost the edginess that it had a few years ago, and that this essay was meant to be empty of the sauciness and nerve that usually mark analysis of the popular and contemporary. There was to be nothing "new" here, for as DeLillo done said, "there's no more danger in the new." Instead, whatever novelty graced the essay was hoped to derive itself only from the renewing of affection for the old methods. But that was a huge lie. I hate the old methods. Honestly, I don't consciously bullshit often. That last bit? Pure, non-genetically modified, free-range Texas Longhorn bullshit.
Then I jumped in. It was short, sweet and finished with an adequate bang. I trotted in Beckett on Habit (the exact same quotations I used for the Beckett essay on Monday) to explain the necessity of destroying Thomas Anderson's "home" (that is, his entire reality: couch, name, time, city, identity, everything), which is where Habit, the veil of preconception, is happiest, before he could become the hero Neo. At the end I think I shot myself in the foot, though. I presume the whole purpose of that anile course was to make us think about the definition of Hero. It was appropriate, then, to close the discussion of it by happening on an entirely new (so far as I know), though maybe somewhat specious definition. The thing about Beckett's Habit is that, in the moments where it's broken, we have a moment of stark, uncomfortable clarity. It is uncomfortable because we've been stripped of our defenses, our language of names for things. To ease the discomfort, another habit slips right over us. We don't even notice. It's a glimpse of the cosmic, and then bam it's right back to normal. Neo, though, sees reality, reacts by barfing and fainting, but then wakes up eventually and says, "I can't go back, can I?" Duhhh hey, no. No going back. His habit is broken permanently. And that is what makes a hero, I said--the clarity of the moment habit-breaking never fades fades for them. They stay constant and true. Also it was said better, and "hero" was the last word.
And this is of course patently bullshit. It's worse than bullshit. It's flat-out wrong. Of course habit consumes him again. He just has a shiny new "real world" where the old "real world" used to reside. Buncha crap, if you ask me. Oh, well. They're not going to argue that sort of thing. They know these essays are a pain to write. Plus I didn't flip anybody off this time--a 'habit' I developed on the SAT II's--so hopefully that's points in the bag for me.
No guarantees about Sin and Redemption though. I'm like Papa Bear. If I find myself backed into a corner I might be forced to do something stupid. Except that usually that works out pretty well for Papa Bear. Bah. I can't write anymore today. I'm written out from this morning, goddammit, and I don't know why I'm spending so much time with you all. I fed you yesterday.
It's really a bunghole of a day outside. Windy as hell, gray, but not really wet. I brought a disc to the exam (it's all I had in my hand walking in, which I liked. The walk takes almost an hour, though, which I didn't), and a bunch of us on the team who were there threw for a while afterward, but the wind was so fucking annoying that we ended up giving up after under an hour. Hopefully tomorrow is nicer.
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
Terribly, terribly sorry...
...to have left you all in limbo for so long. It's just that between Seema and Paris and exams and there only being FIVE computers at Halls and there being no functional computers at college, as they've inexplicably DISCONNECTED both of the Beckett Complabs, just to make everyone's life easier, well...blogging's been a wee bit tough lately.
Today, though, it's gorgeously sunny, not a cloud to be seen, like it was two days ago, when it hit 21°C. 70°F--that's the Irish summer for you. It lasts three days or so and from there on out it's a long slow trudge towards Winter.
I am having a devil of a time readjusting to the QWERTY keyboard after spending so much time with that French AZERTY one. Apologies for qny spelling errors.
Ultimate this evening, after I spend the next six hours or so barrelling back through Northanger Abbey, Paradise Lost and the oeuvre of Mister Blake. Today I'm off from exams, but tomorrow is Romanticism and Revolution/The Hero. Theatre was yesterday. It was in three sections, for three terms, dedicated to one of three aspects of theatre: period, genre, theme. Of course when they say period, they really just mean old. We worked UP to Shakespeare and Marlowe. We began with the morality plays, Everyman and Mankind, which are decent enough, but then moved on to the insensate Fulgens and Lucres which, I'm sorry, has no bearing whatever on my continued existence as a member of society, productive or otherwise. That was part A. The question I chose was a quick 'n' easy one: How is Doctor Faustus a typical renaissance drama? I said it was iconic but not typical, whatever that means, that it was, if anything, a more hyperbolic expression of the core humanism of the Renaissance, yada yada yada, one hour bam done.
Next was considerably more appetizing: Is it helpful to read Waiting for Godot with reference to the medieval morality play (that is, pure naive allegory)? I will not bore you with the details; I will just, at some point, put up the massive essay I wrote on precisely that question. Sha-ZAM! The basic gist was, it is helpful, but--like everything else in Godot--not quite. The handy thing was, I had all these quotations from Beckett's own criticism of other books stored up in my head ("The danger is in the neatness of identifications...it would be easy to treat every concept like 'a bass dropt neck fust in till a bung crate' and make a really tidy job of it." It's from a very fine book of Finnegans Wake crit published by Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Co in 1929, with Beckett editing. I highly recommend that any study any of you ever do on Beckett begin with that quotation. That, or the one he himself proscribed for his critics: "Nothing is more real than nothing," from Democritus, and "Where one is worth nothing, there one should want nothing," from Geulincx, whoever that is), so I could basically blast through the essay happily.
Finally came Theme. This term's theme was home and homecoming. We did Agamemnon, Hamlet, Long Day's Journey, The Homecoming (Pinter) and Ghosts. All cheerful, happy books that give you such schpilkes to get home again. God, what a ghastly reading list. Also one of the best I've ever had. This was a good term for theatre, except for the fact that my new tutor, who replaced Mark, is totally fucking useless. The questions in this section were considerably vaguer than in the others. The one I finally settled on was: 'The home may be where the heart is, but it is also a place of intimate violence and aggression.' Discuss with reference to at least one text from this term.
I chose The Homecoming, toward which the question was most obviously geared (I was more or less sober as a priest during the exam, except for the line, "Kyd's confession having been gently extracted from him with hot tongs," and the part where I quoted Monty Python. That was from the Argument clinic sketch, though, so it was a very sober line and entirely appropriate for the subject at hand: "An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition." See? No harm, no foul). A lot of people shied away from that question on the grounds that How the hell do you write about a subject like that in just an hour? I went for it because I just so happened to have preexisting prejudices regarding the family structure, all of which had been put into words on many occasions, and it was no trouble at all to fill up one page in minutes. Those prejudices in very brief, for the few who haven't suffered them, are that the family, by definition, is a doomed, misbegotten structure, as, in a family of five, only two of those people, Ma and Pa, actually volunteered to live together. The rest of the family were not consulted, not interviewed and not given options. They are disenfranchised from birth and kept in a state of economic and psychological subjection to these people with whom they have not necessarily got anything but biology in common. It is more than a microcosm of civilization and its discontents (and yes, that was brought in on a platter, it's very applicable to Pinter), it is an amplification. Furthermore, even between siblings, the resentment is palpable. "Why should I have to live with these other jerks and compete with them for affection?" And yet, unless they leave the womb--as Stewie of "The Family Guy" calls it, most appropriately, that "ovarian gulag"--of the home and family, there is no escape for anyone. So they have to repress themselves in order to coexist, and ensure a measure of gratification for themselves. Neuroses far more intense than those created by mere 'civilization' erupt epispastically (I have ALWAYS wanted to use that word, which means 'like blisters,' and now I regret not doing it in the exam. Poo.). The reason brothers roughhouse is because it's the closest approximation of their displaced self-destructive fantasies, and if that doesn't nail Pinter on the head, I might as well quit now.
I should go work now, and cease bloviating. I don't like exams only because I can't write by hand. I hate it. I have to see the words immediately on the page. They have to come as fast as I can think them and then there has to has to HAS TO be a goddamn backspace option. I have to be able to slip words in between other words. I hate handwriting. I've said it before. I think it's a senescent art and belongs in a home. Give me a typewriter any day. Wish I had one. For now, the muted tapping of computer keys will have to do.
Incidentally I had a wonderful time with Seema, however short her stay was, and it renewed my fondness for hosting people. We spent one day trundling all over with a frisbee and two cameras, covering half a dozen arrondissements, and walking over eight miles. It was fabulous. There are now pictures of me with a disc in front of the Eiffel tower, the Arc de Triomphe, les Invalides (both sides), the Louvre (again) and many, many more. I have definitely moved on in my relationship with Paris. Where once I went to see the monuments, now I go to play frisbee in front of the monuments.
Oh, and the weirdest thing. When Seema and I were throwing on the Champ de Mars, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, who should show up but my new mate Matt, the guy I'd gone to see Casablanca with. I'd seen him since then, at a little Revolution'air (the club team I was chilling with) throwing session on Wednesday on the Esplanade des Invalides (it was a fucking circus; the wind was insane, spirit-crushing), and now here he was. He was in the area after a class (he's only in town for a few weeks, taking French--he's on a year off before starting at Reed), had seen a disc flying, figured it was some French people and headed on over to see if he could get in. And bam there I was. It was freakish, hair-raising, frankly. So we chilled. Finally Seema and I staggered back to the flat, bunions bleeding, and made a not-entirely-but-largely disastrous lasagna (I blame numerous factors, none of them us) and a whole lot of excellent creme brulee. She takes most of the credit for the the latter, naturally. We left most of it for Claude and Jill, along with a Teflon pan I'd bought them to supplement their non-teflon skillet, which drove me to distraction. I figured it was a start, as far as showing gratitude goes. Because it was a fantastic week, the most successful vacation I've had in ages and something I'm just dying to do again next year.
Home in eleven days, folks. Eleven days.
Today, though, it's gorgeously sunny, not a cloud to be seen, like it was two days ago, when it hit 21°C. 70°F--that's the Irish summer for you. It lasts three days or so and from there on out it's a long slow trudge towards Winter.
I am having a devil of a time readjusting to the QWERTY keyboard after spending so much time with that French AZERTY one. Apologies for qny spelling errors.
Ultimate this evening, after I spend the next six hours or so barrelling back through Northanger Abbey, Paradise Lost and the oeuvre of Mister Blake. Today I'm off from exams, but tomorrow is Romanticism and Revolution/The Hero. Theatre was yesterday. It was in three sections, for three terms, dedicated to one of three aspects of theatre: period, genre, theme. Of course when they say period, they really just mean old. We worked UP to Shakespeare and Marlowe. We began with the morality plays, Everyman and Mankind, which are decent enough, but then moved on to the insensate Fulgens and Lucres which, I'm sorry, has no bearing whatever on my continued existence as a member of society, productive or otherwise. That was part A. The question I chose was a quick 'n' easy one: How is Doctor Faustus a typical renaissance drama? I said it was iconic but not typical, whatever that means, that it was, if anything, a more hyperbolic expression of the core humanism of the Renaissance, yada yada yada, one hour bam done.
Next was considerably more appetizing: Is it helpful to read Waiting for Godot with reference to the medieval morality play (that is, pure naive allegory)? I will not bore you with the details; I will just, at some point, put up the massive essay I wrote on precisely that question. Sha-ZAM! The basic gist was, it is helpful, but--like everything else in Godot--not quite. The handy thing was, I had all these quotations from Beckett's own criticism of other books stored up in my head ("The danger is in the neatness of identifications...it would be easy to treat every concept like 'a bass dropt neck fust in till a bung crate' and make a really tidy job of it." It's from a very fine book of Finnegans Wake crit published by Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Co in 1929, with Beckett editing. I highly recommend that any study any of you ever do on Beckett begin with that quotation. That, or the one he himself proscribed for his critics: "Nothing is more real than nothing," from Democritus, and "Where one is worth nothing, there one should want nothing," from Geulincx, whoever that is), so I could basically blast through the essay happily.
Finally came Theme. This term's theme was home and homecoming. We did Agamemnon, Hamlet, Long Day's Journey, The Homecoming (Pinter) and Ghosts. All cheerful, happy books that give you such schpilkes to get home again. God, what a ghastly reading list. Also one of the best I've ever had. This was a good term for theatre, except for the fact that my new tutor, who replaced Mark, is totally fucking useless. The questions in this section were considerably vaguer than in the others. The one I finally settled on was: 'The home may be where the heart is, but it is also a place of intimate violence and aggression.' Discuss with reference to at least one text from this term.
I chose The Homecoming, toward which the question was most obviously geared (I was more or less sober as a priest during the exam, except for the line, "Kyd's confession having been gently extracted from him with hot tongs," and the part where I quoted Monty Python. That was from the Argument clinic sketch, though, so it was a very sober line and entirely appropriate for the subject at hand: "An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition." See? No harm, no foul). A lot of people shied away from that question on the grounds that How the hell do you write about a subject like that in just an hour? I went for it because I just so happened to have preexisting prejudices regarding the family structure, all of which had been put into words on many occasions, and it was no trouble at all to fill up one page in minutes. Those prejudices in very brief, for the few who haven't suffered them, are that the family, by definition, is a doomed, misbegotten structure, as, in a family of five, only two of those people, Ma and Pa, actually volunteered to live together. The rest of the family were not consulted, not interviewed and not given options. They are disenfranchised from birth and kept in a state of economic and psychological subjection to these people with whom they have not necessarily got anything but biology in common. It is more than a microcosm of civilization and its discontents (and yes, that was brought in on a platter, it's very applicable to Pinter), it is an amplification. Furthermore, even between siblings, the resentment is palpable. "Why should I have to live with these other jerks and compete with them for affection?" And yet, unless they leave the womb--as Stewie of "The Family Guy" calls it, most appropriately, that "ovarian gulag"--of the home and family, there is no escape for anyone. So they have to repress themselves in order to coexist, and ensure a measure of gratification for themselves. Neuroses far more intense than those created by mere 'civilization' erupt epispastically (I have ALWAYS wanted to use that word, which means 'like blisters,' and now I regret not doing it in the exam. Poo.). The reason brothers roughhouse is because it's the closest approximation of their displaced self-destructive fantasies, and if that doesn't nail Pinter on the head, I might as well quit now.
I should go work now, and cease bloviating. I don't like exams only because I can't write by hand. I hate it. I have to see the words immediately on the page. They have to come as fast as I can think them and then there has to has to HAS TO be a goddamn backspace option. I have to be able to slip words in between other words. I hate handwriting. I've said it before. I think it's a senescent art and belongs in a home. Give me a typewriter any day. Wish I had one. For now, the muted tapping of computer keys will have to do.
Incidentally I had a wonderful time with Seema, however short her stay was, and it renewed my fondness for hosting people. We spent one day trundling all over with a frisbee and two cameras, covering half a dozen arrondissements, and walking over eight miles. It was fabulous. There are now pictures of me with a disc in front of the Eiffel tower, the Arc de Triomphe, les Invalides (both sides), the Louvre (again) and many, many more. I have definitely moved on in my relationship with Paris. Where once I went to see the monuments, now I go to play frisbee in front of the monuments.
Oh, and the weirdest thing. When Seema and I were throwing on the Champ de Mars, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, who should show up but my new mate Matt, the guy I'd gone to see Casablanca with. I'd seen him since then, at a little Revolution'air (the club team I was chilling with) throwing session on Wednesday on the Esplanade des Invalides (it was a fucking circus; the wind was insane, spirit-crushing), and now here he was. He was in the area after a class (he's only in town for a few weeks, taking French--he's on a year off before starting at Reed), had seen a disc flying, figured it was some French people and headed on over to see if he could get in. And bam there I was. It was freakish, hair-raising, frankly. So we chilled. Finally Seema and I staggered back to the flat, bunions bleeding, and made a not-entirely-but-largely disastrous lasagna (I blame numerous factors, none of them us) and a whole lot of excellent creme brulee. She takes most of the credit for the the latter, naturally. We left most of it for Claude and Jill, along with a Teflon pan I'd bought them to supplement their non-teflon skillet, which drove me to distraction. I figured it was a start, as far as showing gratitude goes. Because it was a fantastic week, the most successful vacation I've had in ages and something I'm just dying to do again next year.
Home in eleven days, folks. Eleven days.
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