I listen to the Harry Potter series as I exercise and I just finished the 5th book (one of my least favorites-along with number 2). On that note, I saw this on Pintrest and had to post it.

My opinion of Lizzie from Pride and Prejudice. I shouldn't think it, but I do.

A friend sent me this from a site about funny facebook conversations. I got a kick out of it.

I found this comic and thought it was very funny, although I have always found "The Yellow Wallpaper" a little too close to my fears about mental illness.

I am currently reading My Antonia. There was a quote I thought particularly applicable to me. I felt this while doing my thesis, but I couldn't express it in words-I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric [his mentor in college], I was not deceived about myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past. They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the plough against the sun. They were all I had for an answer to the new appeal. I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took up in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with other things. But whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within it, and in some strange way they accompanied me through all my new experiences. They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped to wonder whether they were alive anywhere else, or how.

This has probably already made the rounds, but I found it hilarious. Once again, why did I choose my field?

I listened to Joyce's Dubliners on CD. The various short stories were read by famous Irish actors and authors. The reading of "The Dead," my favorite story of the lot, by Stephen Rea was so incredibly sensitive to every nuance and poignant. The emotion carried in Joyce's writing is amazing. The absolute miscommunication between the two that have been married for so long... The desparate longing for someone else to understand and speak the same "language" as we do... The arrogant assumption on all our parts that others are thinking our selfish desires when we are. It is an amazing story and is read so beautifully. Check it out.

Well it was a rough first week trying to get in the groove of doing the class, but things are looking much better today.

In honor of the fact that I am now teaching an English class (unfortunately not a literature one), I decided to post this in case anyone hasn't seen it yet: Jane Austen Fight Club (with yet another appropriate blog background change).

I found this on a friend's blog thought it was hilarious.

Here are my results for the several chunks of my thesis I submitted:

I write like
James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Ha! I wish. Some of my other scholarly writing has gotten Kurt Vonnegut and David Foster Wallace. Hum.

Here are results for my journal (the parts that are less likely to do harm if spread somewhere on the internet by some chance-though the site claims it won't-you never know):

I write like
Cory Doctorow

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I don't even know who that is except that it is not the really famous Doctorow that they read in lit classes. After submitting several more in addition to those previous, it seems that my personal writing can get nothing but this guy.


I submitted some Joyce and here is what he got:

I write like
James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Whew. At least they for sure got it right that time :)

I think this is a funny mock infomercial with the Bronte sisters. Very creative weapons.

There is a new play about the American Bloomsbury. It is about Fuller and includes Hawthorne, Emerson and Thoreau. I am trying to decide if I want to go see it. I think I will try. I think the dynamics between that group were very interesting and it would be cool to see someone's take on it. Although I read the sources the writer used and I had read them for my thesis. But the article said it was funny.

Not much has been going on lately, so I don't really have anything to write about. I'm applying for jobs, but nothing so far. I've been reading The Brothers Karamazov and The Encyclopedia of the Universe and Everyday Math for Dummies. I've gotten hooked on an Irish TV show that aired in the 90s-Ballykissangel. I'm slowly getting caught up on my scrapbook for the last two years. That's about it.

There is not much going on with my life currently, so I suppose now is the time wax philosophical, but I seem to be dry. I guess I could mention that I have a goal to finish reading all of Charlotte Bronte's works. I am currently on the last novel-The Professor. She is not that spectacular of a writer and Jane Eyre is probably her most concise and artistic work, but Vilette is haunting.
Something I find very funny is that she uses the word subaltern several times in Shirley. That is a word meaning someone who is oppressed. Subaltern Studies (which basically studied the lower classes in India during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) informed my thesis. My nineteenth-century transatlantic committee chair (who should have been familiar with the Brontes) took the most issue with me using that word to describe the lower classes and those without power in the novel in Hawthorne's novels. Bronte and Hawthorne were contemporaries. If only I had known this I could have brought it in as more evidence that I wasn't off my rocker in my choice of theory and work.

I thought this was a hilarious Monty Python skit about Thomas Hardy writing a novel.

More Hawthorne stuff (don't worry, hopefully only a couple more weeks:).
Towards the end of his life he got sick and his wife said: "I am amazed that such a fortress as his stomach should give way." It appears that she had a way with words as well.

It is funny that as I am studying for my defense, I am finding that I like Herman Melville more and more. Lately, "Bartleby, the Scrivner" has become my life's theme (being on the other end of the "I would prefer not to" and trying not to act badly in response). In my reading, I ran across this statement Melville made about Hawthorne's work being "the rich and rare distilment of a spicy and slowly-oozing heart." That is such awesome diction! I am going to have to read the unabridged version of Moby Dick after my defense.

My three nephews and I made a pilgrimage to Ernest Hemingway's grave site and memorial in Ketchum, Idaho last Saturday. He is their favorite writer, well a favorite writer for two of them. It was a lot of driving but it was a really fun trip. We had some bread and cheese and sparkling grape juice to commemorate what most of his books were about:) My nephews penned some tributes to him and our journey on a typewriter (Brad's, not Bryan's). It was lovely country out there.

Here is the grave. People had left a wine bottle, vodka, shot gun shell, a flag, some notes, and some money.



This is my nephew composing some of his own writing on the spot.


Here is the movable feast we had.

I just discovered who the writer of this awesome song is and I love his version. I think I will have to check out some of John Hiatt's other stuff.



Apparently my chair handed my thesis to a committee member and we are still waiting to hear back. Agony.

I just finished reading Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. It was very informative not only about his life, but about the times. I enjoyed it.

I have been listening to Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men as I drive. I wanted to read it again since all I could remember about the book was nearly drowning in it in the eleventh grade while trying to write essays on what then seemed unintelligable passages from the book. I'm finding it more intelligable now. I came across this quote that I thought was very applicable to thesis writing.

"If something takes too long, something happens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting. In the end they just ask you those crappy little questions."

Finished moving in, but no internet at the apartment yet and using my laptop at the library is excruciatingly slow (am I spoiled or what?).
Been listening to Room With A View on audio tape and it is quite hilarious if a little didactic. What modern book isn't?