Tag Archives: literature

literature

Passion and Gratitude

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So I was talking to a recently acquired friend about my love affair with Chekhov. God help us all when I get to talking about Chekhov.

I don’t even know a whole lot about Anton Chekhov. I only know “Lady with the Pet Dog.”

Actually we were talking about what I would consider “good literature,” but even that was after the point of origin. We were talking about passion. Yes, that was it, indeed.

We were talking about passion, about living a passionate life, about what made one passionate.

So I started discussing literature, which, is as far as I’m concerned, started for me with Anton Checkhov’s “Lady with the Pet Dog.”

Anton Checkhov’s story is all about passion, or rather, it culminates in what I consider to be the perfect example of passion. It’s a rather unoriginal story when reduced to its plot: man meets girl, man gets girl, man loses girl, man summons courage to get her back, and the end is left open, while optimistic (at least in the mind of the lovers) it is open ended and ambiguous.

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college

Best Line Ever

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Studying for my African American Lit final, I came across this gem.

Zora Neale Hurston, in 1928 wrote an essay called “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.”

From this essay comes this wonderful line:

“Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”

I am digging this woman, truly.

musing

It Takes a Pattern to Raise a Consciousness

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I was talking with Jenny and it struck me how alike my papers all throughout college thus far have been.

The first one I wrote was on John Locke’s theory of personal identity. It was my first paper in more years than I can really count, and I actually wrote it while using my grandfather as a reference. An amateurish paper, certainly, and I’ll probably cringe when I read it again. Locke’s theory is that identity is merely a sum of all experience. My conclusion as to my grandfather’s identity was that, when he could remember memories, he was my grandfather. When he could not, when the dementia was flaring up (or whatever dementia does), he was not.

Even in my first feeble attempts, I was attempting to negotiate identity.

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college

Twenty Seven Weeks

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I’m feeling kind of writerly right now. It’s a good thing, considering how I have another paper due, two really, if I want to give myself a wee bit of breathing room. My latest paper is on the gender and racial constuction within James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man.” It’s a terrifically horrifying story, one that constructs one white man’s entire sexual identity as a negation of blackness.

It’s a fertile topic, anyway.

Since my lap top has gone to the Laptop Heaven in the Sky (or at least, Best Buy), I’m currently at a loss, doing most of my homework from a PC, which is a very strange feeling. Luckily for me, after the incident last year which involved my falling asleep over a fully caffeinated and sugared coke, I bought an accident protection plan which, oddly enough, expired five days after this year’s coffee incident.

Close calls, indeed.

Barring any major crisis, I have twenty seven weeks (or, more accurately twenty six weeks and 5 days) until my education as an undergraduate is over. This was the thought that kept me awake at work last night, enjoying that hour of extra pay while the rest of the world slept it away.

But for now, I’m off to write that paper before I totally lose that writin’ feeling.

It’s slipping away already.

recommended reading

Scream My Name, Bitch

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It’s been a while since I’ve heard my name screamed. Years, really, and it wouldn’t have been so memorable, I think, had those two piercing syllables not been hitchhiking on the back of a half empty vodka bottle, and aimed about an inch or two below my graying  widow’s peak.

Tonight I heard my name screamed. Squeaked would probably be a better adjective had it lacked a bit of volume. I wasn’t even first choice, which, given the situation, wouldn’t have been a bad thing.

We had a Rottweiler loose in the hospital.

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literature, relationships

I should be writing a paper, but…

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I just had to get this off my chest.

There are some books that are simply great reads. Books tattered and torn, scribbled in and folded, books in which passages are memorized and can be repeated at will. Books that, with every read, simply get better. There’s a frame of the familiar, and within the familiar, there is constant surprise. Whether it’s a new connection, a stunning simile, or simply an image that sits with you differently than it did the first time.

Tom Robbins is the example I typically use for this. His writing is magnificent, even blurbed as a roller coaster of prose. With that, I heartily agree. And yet he has characters that, no matter how many times you pick up the book, never change from the last time you picked it up. Sure, they’re not static within the confines of the paper, but within the book itself, they are as unchanging as the clock in Arizona. But set within a familiar story, new details can and do leap out at you when you least expect it, and often when you’re not looking.

I think a good relationship is like this.

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