Have I Been Spoiled or Have the Rules Changed?

I visited the library in my hometown on Tuesday.  My memories from that place are filled with the tales of Sherlock Holmes, the exploits of Dr. Doolittle, and the exciting adventures of Taran in Prydain.  I used to bike to that deceptively small building every day during the summer, spending hours in those ridiculously blocky and utterly uncomfortable chairs diving into any tale I could find.  Always, when I think of libraries, my mind wanders back to that simple, happy time and a little of the magic and mystery, that which hasn’t been killed by my recent hours of studying and essaying and homeworking, from childhood perceptions still twists and turns through my mind like a tendril of hazy fog, just out of reach but friendly with every other sense.  I visited the library in my hometown on Tuesday and every one of those happy memories disappeared when one of the librarians, amongst the vulture-like chattering of her coworkers, answered her cell phone and proceeded to have a conversation that, I may be going out on a limb here, seemed to have never even met the words ‘emergency’ or ‘important.’  Ironically, the sign taped to the glass doors, through which a patron enters, reads something like “Please turn off all cell phones, pagers, etc…”  Now, I assume this message is one made of politeness and civility for the other patrons present in the library, and as I sat in one of those chairs, you know, the uncomfortable, blocky ones, I could only sit and wonder what the hell had happened to my library.

Now, I realize I may have been spoiled.  Perhaps my memory of my hometown library has been romanticized by Time and my idea of libraries these days is obviously heavily influenced by the UMM Library.  True, the library here is often full of ebullient freshmen working in groups and making ribald statements with their “outside voices.”  However, the 1st floor of the library is often totally quiet, as is the 3rd floor (although slightly less so), and I’m almost positive that Albus Dumbledore himself would avada kedavra anyone who more than sneezed on the 4th floor.  But, the experience at my hometown library leaves me wondering if this kind of behavior in the library, the kind of disrespectful behavior that every movie I’ve ever seen involving libraries has attempted to subvert, (Shhhhh, this is a library), is running rampant everywhere these days.  What happened to the dignity inherent in these halls of books?  To where did the respect for learning and libraries go?  Maybe this is an isolated incident and I am simply overreacting.

Yeah, I don’t think so.  Even if this is the only instance of the idea behind a library being walked on, I still hate the idea of it happening.  I’m certainly not advocating some sort of speaking ban in libraries but I do think the right (yeah, right) of patrons should be respected, the right to an escape from the emergency whistle and fire engine red world outside, the right to a quiet place of study, the right to a hushed environment of academic pursuit and imaginative tomfoolery.  You are entitled to this and so am I and the only addendum is that neither one of us encroaches on the other’s library right.  The library should be a place of learning, of intellectual adventure, of creative journeying, and librarians like Mrs. Cell Phone are killing those opportunities for growth and exploration.

Something from Nothing

I’ve been in a funk for awhile now.  It’s been the can’t-focus, can’t-sleep, overly-stressed, slowly-dying kind of funk.  My brain feels like a too small container filled with too much yogurt, slow moving and berry-filled.  All of this grad. school crap coupled with the regular undergrad. crap, well, it’s a lot of poop and it’s everywhere.  Half of the time I feel like what my mother would call a space cadet, that is, a person whose mind is off on his or her own planet.  I used to be able to imagine the most vivid of scenes when I would go to bed, drifting off to sleepland was always a journey filled with thick, luscious forests and bizarre table-men but now I can only visit that happy place for a fraction of a moment before a hazy, grey (yes, I chose to spell that color that way) mist covers my imagination.  I can’t focus, even on the fun stuff, and it sucks.

Well, today was funkless.  I woke up, showered, and started planning out my hour-by-hour schedule, as I’ve done for awhile now.  I was heading on through the noon hour with a solid 1.5 hour block of To The Lighthouse when I realized something, something simple that should have hit me full in the face a long time ago.  I’ve been waking up every morning to plan out the things that I need to do and the real fact is this: I don’t have to do any of this.  I don’t have to work on grad. school apps, I don’t have to read To The Lighthouse, and I certainly don’t need to memorize the conjugation of Italian verbs.  I’ve always prided myself on a being a person who acts with excitement and passion, someone who strays from obligation in favor of being led by the heart.  Yet here I am, waking up every day and planning out a schedule full of things without any sense of meaning or importance.  So, I stopped.  I put my pen down, closed my notebook, and thought about what I want.  I want to go to grad. school and I want to be taking this Virginia Woolf class.  I want to be doing the things that I’m doing but I’d forgotten that.  My schedule didn’t really change any, I still planned out my hours the same way but I didn’t look at the list as a domineering overlord with a chagrined grimace and a dry whip.  Finally, I’ve got my focus and my passion back, the things that I like most about myself, and all it took was the realization that all I have to do is nothing.

Outside. The Trees are Shedding

Outside.  The trees are shedding

Coats of green and yellow

Shirts of autumnal crimson

And

Hats of goldenrod.

Outside.  The trees are shedding,

embracing the crisp apple air,

while the squirrels squirrel away

berries, autumnal crimson.

Outside.  The trees are shedding,

but inside, I am donning

insulated shirts and

colorful coats and

hats the color of

autumnal crimson.

Hey, GRE, go eat a box of rusty nails

Before I jump in, I just want to say this: I understand the need for something like the GRE.  Graduate schools need a cutoff point in order to adequately file down the amount of candidates up for not very many positions.  A standardized test is the easiest way for them to achieve this arbitrary slimming of the applicants, hence the GRE.  I get it.

But I still think the GRE is a shit test.  I just received my scores in the mail, and I was able to see how I had fared on the writing sections.  I did well because I had gotten two writing prompts to which I could directly tie ideas I’ve been talking about in my classes but I’m just wondering this: what if I hadn’t gotten those prompts?  What if I would have been given another totally legitimate and totally ungrounded question by the capricious ETS computer elf?  Writing quality, while not totally married to, is still directly linked to a writer’s understanding of a topic or idea.  If I had gotten a topic with which I had no experience and on which I couldn’t write very well, would I have gotten a worse score and therefore been deemed a mediocre or poor writer?  If the words I encountered on the verbal section were words I had never seen before, would that mean I was not A. a good English major? b. a well read individual? c. fit for graduate school work?  The answer to all of these questions should be a solid and resounding no but the real answer is a little closer to maybe.  If I had been given words I didn’t recognize on the verbal section, leading me to tanking it and rocking the 50th percentile, then I wouldn’t have made the cut-off for pretty much every school I would like to attend.  I have it on good information that some schools refuse to even consider an applicant if he or she does not have GRE scores above a certain percentile.  It’s not that they look at those scores in comparison with your GPA, your writing sample, your letters of recommendation, or your letter of intent.  Nope, these things don’t even see the light of the dingy committee boardroom because as soon as those GRE scores are out in the open, well, your boat has already sailed.  Yeah, I did alright on my GRE and my scores are good enough to jump through the arbitrary hoops that most of my schools have set up but really, all I’ve proved are these two things: I do well on standardized tests and I was lucky enough to run into words and prompts that I have seen before.  Neither of these two things has ANYTHING to do with intelligence, work ethic, dedication, or ability in my field, all traits of someone who can excel in graduate school and beyond.  But hey, I’m sure I’ll be fine, you know, since I know what ‘perspicacious’ and ‘paucity’ mean.

One of my very favorite things about writing is always having a story in my head.  Writing leaves a residual narrative in my head and no matter where I am, things are always moving around in there.  Oftentimes the only stuff to come out of that area of moto perpetuo is nonsensical and unworkable but every once in awhile an idea strikes on another of its kind like a flint and the spark that flares off becomes a key to a story, a step to the upstairs level of what I had thought was only a single level, ranch-style story without a basement or porch.  When that spark lights up my brain with little fizzes of narrative or plot, I can’t help but make a bee-line to the nearest form of word recorder, whether that is the pen/paper combo, my laptop, which I have named Wednesday, or scribbling all over the my forearm, which, coincidentally, doubles as a fleshy notepad.  Even though writing is difficult for me due to a myriad reasons, all legitimate at the time but useless in the long run, I always have a story happening in my head.

In A Funk

Things are piling up and for some reason unknown to me, I can’t seem to get anything done.  I’ve been making to-do lists and schedules all week but I am still behind on just about everything I need to get done.  I’m even having a difficult time doing the fun things, the stuff that I used to do instead of my homework, yeah, that’s not even happening.  So what have I been doing?  I have no freakin’ clue.  Time feels like a magic trick, of which I can only grasp a tiny bit while the rest gets lost in the magician’s voluminous hat.  Yuck, this blows.

Disjointed Thoughts on ‘The Hours’

“My life has been stolen from me…I’m living a life I have no wish to live.”

I just finished watching The Hours for my Virginia Woolf class and although I am still munching over it, I wanted to share some of my initial thoughts on what could be one of the better films I have ever seen.

The story is told in three parts, two of which are directly linked while the third is much more oblique in its connection to the other two.  The film is based on The Hours, a book by Michael Cunningham, which is in turn based on Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. As I’ve never read Cunningham’s book (although with this movie being its product, I believe I will) I will be speaking only to the film’s relation to Woolf’s novel.

As a stand-alone film, The Hours is a beautiful and tragic attempt at capturing the loneliness and despair one can find in life.  The English major in me was hard at work during the film; I was frantically scribbling down quotes like “I wrestle alone in the dark, in the deep dark.”  This particular line is spoken by Nicole Kidman as she plays Virginia Woolf in the midst of writing Mrs. Dalloway.  On the surface, Woolf seems crazy and her suicide seems to support this.  However, if interpreted in the context of her novel, Woolf’s desire for isolation and death is actually a reflection of her need for not only an escape, but ultimately a catalyst for human connection.  As she notes, “someone has to die in order for the rest of us to value life…the poet, the visionary”  (movie).  Kidman brilliantly displays Woolf’s desperate understanding of the needs and functions of society and the final scene is at once a brief moment of clarity and a heart-wrenching emotional experience.  At the risk of becoming overdramatic and gushy, I will stop, but seriously, too much good in one place.

On another note, I thought it particularly interesting how the characters in the movie (and I’m assuming Cunningham’s novel) had traits of characters from Mrs. Dalloway but no one was a straight analog of another character.  Richard (Ed Harris) took the same route into the clearing at the end of the path as Septimus but instead of his chosen ending being forced by his experience in the War, Richard (originally the name of Clarissa’s husband in Woolf’s novel, mind you) it seems instead to be caused (at least mostly) by his mother’s abandonment of Richard, his father, and sister.  Harris’ character is not a true analog for any character because he is a combination of both Richard and Septimus while Clarissa is a combination of Mrs. Dalloway and Rezia.  I’ve not quite worked out the implications of this match-up in my mind but for now it will have to suffice it say this: hmmm, interesting.

A Trip to the Renaissance or Hello, Mr. Anachronism

B, K, and I visited the MN Renaissance festival today.  Apart from various “ye olde” signs and the other anachronisms that belonged in the Middle Ages (uhhh, Beowulf isn’t exactly Renaissance Literature, folks…) it was quite fun.  Turkey legs, drinking horns, suits of armor, and all the pottery anyone could ever need.  All in all, what more could you want?  As we were walking around and seeing the sights I couldn’t help but think: these are my people.  The nerds who think it’s cool to dress up in cloaks, dresses, and robes; those people are my kind of people.  I plan on making the study of Renaissance Lit. my life and the idea of a festival celebrating not only the people of that time but the art, the style, and the feeling of that time, well, it’s just plain awesome.

In other news, I picked up Jonathan L. Hamilton’s debut novel ‘Johannes Cabal: The Necromancer’ today.  I’m only about 25 pages in right now but it’s a lot of fun so far.  Hamilton is really comfortable on the page, his characters are quirky, and his lexicon is just short of colossal.  I’m really digging it.

Writing from a coffee shop

I have to admit, I feel very poetic posting from this tiny little coffee shop, all curled up in a big armchair with a steamy mug of delicious on the table beside me.  I’ve got a bunch of Virginia Woolf books beside me and a notebook full of my random scribblings beside those.  Life is pretty good.

Atmospheres like this tend to have the same creative and inspirational affect on me.  The wall paintings and unused fireplace, the mugs of coffee scattered around the tables like cast off memories, the people talking quietly about town gossip or the paper that professor so-and-so just assigned, everything here makes me want to be creative.  I started writing a new story when I got to Morris this year, a story that started out just like any of my other stories: exciting, fun, and likely to never get finished.  Yet, I’ve found myself needing to write this year more than I ever have before.  Being able to jump into my made up world with my made up characters and write along as they sort out their troubles has been and continues to be the best mental face-washing I can find.  Graduate school issues, the GRE, classes, activities, the CA job, all of this stuff has been piling up and it feels good to be able to step away from that pile of important but stressful things for a little while.  So, for now I think I will bid Mrs. Woolf a short goodbye and hop off to the Broom Kingdom, where things just might work out after all.

About time for one of these

Well, it’s been quite a long time until I blogged.  As per usual school and other things have taken my life by storm and the adjustment has been slow and a little rough thus far.  I always get so optimistic about how much extra time I will have during the year and have to face the real world once I’m actually here.  Anyway, I only have a few things to write about/post today and then I am off to jump into that magical world some call homework and others call hell.

For everyone not familiar with America’s newest club, the Douchers of America, meet Congressman Joe Wilson.  He’s a Republican from South Carolina and a few nights ago he shouted out the words, “You lie,” to the President of the United States during said President’s speech.  No big deal though, you know, I think the speech was probably only being broadcast to, oh, I dunno, maybe a few hundred…million people.  I’m all for having dissenting opinions on things and not going along with the majority just because it’s the majority but really Joe Wilson?  Last time I checked, expressing your opinion in the form of a petulant child who is having a tizzy over being told he was wrong is not, in fact, the type of behavior promoted for either the general adult population or the representatives of vast amounts of people.  Joe Wilson, you are a doucher and your parents need a good reprimand for never teaching their immature baby boy to grow the hell up and learn what the word respect means.  But I should say thanks to Joe Wilson.  As a voter who tends to lean toward the liberal end of the scope, you have just given me a little self-esteem boost for a) not being you  b) not having nor would I ever have voted for you  c) not being a Republican.  Kudos, and good luck with puberty.

And because we should all get to see something pretty every day, I have this video for you all.  Enjoy