Saturday, February 16, 2008

All Work and No Play?



I was so wiped out after driving back home from college that, after I got some groceries (a bit of lunch meat, yogurt, some chicken) I fell asleep before I even put it in the refrigerator. And I slept for over 12 hours. So much for the perishables. Since morning, I've read a D. H. Lawrence novella and half of a 75-page essay on scansion, done 3 loads of laundry (two more to go), and betrayed my resolution to eat healthy food by going to a nearby Mexican restaurant. While reading the rest of the essay (and possibly also while grading 20 term papers), I'll be listening to Silvestrov's Symphony No. 6, hopefully enough to have an idea of what to write for a review.

Yet to do this weekend--
grading of aforementioned papers
writing of two poetic masterpieces
writing of aforementioned review

This coming week I'll be reading the entire output of either Anne Sexton or Elizabeth Bishop for a paper due in two weeks, reading a decade's worth of the Georgia Review for another paper due in several weeks, and deciding what passage to write a 5-page essay on for my Modernist British Fiction class--for this last one, I'm wondering if I should go for the Lawrence, as my dislike of The Virgin and the Gipsy may make it an easier paper to write. I'd heard from some established author or other (who was it--Gary Snyder, Ellen Bryant Voigt?) that, though Lawrence wrote a great deal, he essentially wrote the same novel eight times over. I don't know if that's true, but The Virgin and the Gipsy is pretty damned sloppy writing. One of the characters, who is named, who comes in toward the end of the work is referred to as "the little Jewess" something on the order of five times per page. Not "she" or by her name: "the little Jewess." Occasionally, he will refer to her as "the tiny Jewess" for infrequent variety (who is this--Yentl-belle?), but that's about it. It would be fun to tear this book apart, but in all likelihood, I'll take the high road and go for something by Elizabeth Bowen or perhaps Dorothy Richardson.

The scansion essay calls.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sometimes I really miss school, and then I read something like this and I feel exhausted just reading it. Good luck getting everything done!

Kristen said...

No problem. Keep going--and avoid lunch meat! Phooey!