Monday Monday

For about half an hour it was raining today. Like really raining. Like sheets, buckets, drenching, cats, dogs, hamsters, everything. It was great. I love it.

The Odyssey is grand. Hermes is my favorite Greek god.

My new poetry teacher is not so cool. He's a McCarthy. Not that that is inherently bad or anything. Maybe this one will go backwards. I don't like him much now, but maybe by the end of the term I will. He's just kind of bland and he spent the whole hour talking about different examples of historical context. You see something in a museum. It means something different to you than it did to whomever wrote it or whomever that guy wrote it for. Yes, right, great. He went on a little rant about how bad it is to say that something is "timeless." He used Jane Austen a lot too. He said, you say that Pride and Prejudice is timeless it means that everything Jane Austen had to deal with it irrelevant. The fact that she was a woman and had to hide the fact that she was writing because it was improper and blah blah blah it all doesn't matter if you say it's a timeless novel. I say, lighten up man.

Film was rather interesting. We're kind of getting into theory stuff instead of just "this is what a fade out looks like" or "this is how a long shot works" or "those bird noises were produced in a studio, but you couldn't tell could you?" Today he was talking about indeterminacy. I like this idea. It's basically only giving so much information and then the rest is just left to be inferred by the audience. In Casablanca the example was: did Rick and Ilsa have sex in the movie? Well, you can say no and justify it by saying that you don't ever see it on screen. Orrr you could say yes and justify it by symbolism and gaps in the narrative time. I think it's interesting. I mean, if it's all just given to you all the time, what is there left to think about? Sure, I like a lot of movies where everything is laid out and clear and everything makes sense and it's entertaining. But it's also nice and frustrating to be left wondering sometimes.

The rest of the day I've just been reading. It's kind of cool to read The Odyssey and Ulysses at the same time. I really have no idea what's going on in Ulysses though. It's definitely a steam of consciousness thing and this guy doesn't tell you when he's switching from narration to being inside his head. And there is a lot of history he alludes to that I just don't know anything about. There's a lot of Irish history brought up in all my classes that just goes over my head. But I'm hoping I won't really need to know that much in detail for exams. Anyway, Ulysses is a Anglicized and Irish-ized Odysseus. He's mentioned a few characters from the Odyssey, but I'm not seeing the bigger connection yet. I'm only 20 dense pages in though I guess. He's also talked about and quoted Shakespeare a lot so far--mostly Hamlet. It's kind of weird.

Oh yes. Pride and Prejudice. I feel like this is the kind of book where you could just start at the last hundred pages and be alright. She has lots of quotable lines though.

My bathroom drain was clogged and I didn't know it, so I flooded about a square foot of my room last night. It's all under control now though.