It's Labeled "Sarcastic Gift #2"

I suspect that Matt got me a really great and thoughtful present. I'm getting him a gift certificate to Best Buy… and now, the night before our little version of Christmas, I can think of some great gifts I hadn't even considered.

Tomorrow I think we're going to church- it'd be a real suprise if we didn't. It'd actually be a good thing if we did go; I need the solemnity of a Catholic mass, the pomp and the ritual, every now and then.

Graham and I ate at the little Italian restaurant for dinner, then rented Soul Survivor because the DVD cover was trying to convince us we were renting Final Destination. Any movie that wants to be Final Destination… well, you have to wonder, and then you have to see it.

I'm not quite sure what the movie was about, or what happened in the movie.

As for New Year's, I'm not sure what the deal is. It turns out that I'm arriving in the cities on New Year's Eve Day at 5:40 p.m--around the same time I thought I'd be arriving in Brainerd--so my house is out. (Plus, my whole family will be home.) If the plane gets delayed, I may have to celebrate the New Year in the air. That will make me angry.

But things will work out. I worry a bit too much about plans and logistics, of late, and there are already plenty of alternatives, at Graham's (potentially) or elsewhere. Other parties in town and parties in other towns… meh.

O.k. I think I should wrap some presents now. Later.

Arson: Potential Hobby?

I want to destroy billboards; I've decided that advertising is the most horrible industry ever created. So there goes another job option. I'll never be an ad-man, unless I sell out at 25.

The best way to destroy them, I think, would involve The Deathtrap and a quiver of flaming arrows. As Al pointed out, there just aren't enough intelligent arsonists out there.

To Do: Bust Some Heads

Today we went down to the cities to celebrate Christmas with my mom's side of the family. We exchanged the obligatory secret-santa gifts--I both gave and received a gift certificate ("the gift that says 'Go to the store!' "), which means that the death of our secret-santa system isn't far off--and watched the adults do a more mercenary form of gift-exchange.

Jeremy had explained it weeks ago, but this is the first time I'd seen mercenary gift-giving in progress. All the presents are put into a collective pool, and numbers are drawn. The first person picks any present. The next person can either pick a present from the pool or choose something that's already been unwrapped, taking it from the original owner. If you lose your present, you can unwrap a new present or steal an already opened one.

The system has the potential to devolve into a viscious circle of gift-trading, but what I saw was incredible. It was actually exciting to watch people open presents: good presents were stolen (repeatedly) and bad presents… well, tough luck. It's about time someone put the drama back in Christmas.

For the twelfth amazing time, my dad admitted to trying to brainwash us: "Well, even if you didn't enjoy [AM radio], I hoped that something would sink in. I was just trying to make my boys into better people". Or something like that. I called him out on it, Matt provided moral support, and we listened to FM radio for a few wonderful miles.

Matt had cigarette-lighter adapter that worked with my laptop. That was pretty cool.

Tomorrow I celebrate yet another Christmas. My dad's side, Brobdinagians all, will be here tomorrow for an even more thoughtless gift exchange. I cop-ed out and got my cousin a Lawrence T-shirt, and if prior Christmases are any guide, I'll get a football or a book of crossword puzzles.

If only there were a happy medium between giving someone a list of things to buy and getting random stuff you didn't want!

There is, but my relatives, who see me about six times a year, aren't likely to find it.

Our neighbors are bulldozing their house to the ground on January 7th. They gave my dad the key and told us to take anything we want (they removed the furniture, but not much else, from the sound of it) before the thoughtless destruction begins. In short: owner-sanctioned looting. I'm going to see about getting that key.

I'm becoming increasingly motivated/radicalized this break. The Diplomat, The Politician, The Feminist… they would love Brainerd. I want to start something at Lawrence, bust some heads and all that. In time, this energy will all be sublimated into a seemingly-difficult course schedule, but right now The Wishy-Washy Moderates and a half-dozen other schemes are buzzing in my head. All this… enthusiasm…

It's probably just all the devilwhite sugar I had today. Apparently that's my niche around my relatives: the comical lazy glutton. Glutton? Is that my special distinction? Eating?

Well, I've got to get to sleep, if I'm going to get up before noon tomorrow. Later.

More On Milton (For Some Reason)

Thanks to The Politician, who sent me my first christmas card ever. He broke another record, in fact, by sending the first christmas card ever to have a rhetorical "burn" inside.

I know I�ve gone on about this before, but I�ve been thinking a bit more about the temperance vs. abstinence argument.

As those of us who�ve taken �Milton and the 17th Century� well know, my man Milton famously said �I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary.�

In Areopagitica (from which the above quote was taken), Milton argued for complete freedom of the press (or near-complete- you can�t have those Catholics saying whatever they want), noting that truth had better be able to defend itself if it�s worth anything at all.

In Comus: A Mask, Milton tells the story of a virtuous girl who resists temptation even though she is surrounded be it.

And Paradise Lost is unusual in its depiction of prelapsarian [before-the-fall] Adam and Eve: the couple quarrels, feasts, and enjoys sex well before that nastiness with the apple.

His point, you see, is one I wholeheartedly agree with. My papist-hating friend thought that there was something inherently suspicious about any virtue that is afraid of vice.

This all adds up to temperance. Temperance is desire under control; abstinence is desire denied. We all have to eat, so everyone is either temperate or gluttonous. We don�t all have to have sex, so everyone is either abstinent, temperate, or lustful.

The traditional view (at least, the one I grew up with) was that abstinence is better than temperance; completely denying temptation is better than try to live with it.

But for Milton, abstinence is the hiding place for every �fugitive and cloistered virtue.� For example, beliefs (would-be truths) that are sheltered from serious argument, and the monks (the would-be chaste) who are sheltered from feminine society before they understand what they�re missing: both represent a kind of cowardice hiding behind a veneer of respectibility.

Anyone who gives up something they don�t really understand/appreciate is being abstinent, taking the easy way out. It�s one thing to swear off alcohol, it�s quite another thing to choose to not to drink after having a Desperado, the greatest beer ever made. Yes it is.

Milton chooses temperance. A temperate drinker could be someone who drinks in moderation, or it could be someone who has drank in the past and now chooses not to or someone who knows, somehow, the joys of drinking. The point is that the temperate man understands the whole story- his decision is harder, and therefore more commendable, because he knows exactly what he�s giving up.

The whole argument is basically an old-school approve to the maxim �don�t knock it before you try it,� but since it's 350 years old, it sounds a little better.

Ents: The Musical

I'm one to flake out on things. Sunday morning church, Thanksgiving hunting, Spontaneous Roadtrips- the more outlandish and exciting the scheme, the less likely I am to go along with it.

It's partially because, growing up, the outlandish schemes were usually my father's, and as such they usually involved subzero temperatures, noxious chemicals, or heavy lifting. They were never, and still aren't, any fun; statistically, when asked to do something, it's usually the best policy around here to answer "no".

Most of my flakeness, my tendency to bail out on good plans, can be pinned only on me. I worry about choices, my alternate pasts and Schroeder's cat futures. So I usually commit myself to the choices, hoping that this way I won't miss anything, then I flake out if the scheme isn't feasible or if it doesn't sound too great on second thought or if I'm really tired.

Right now I'm wondering what would have happened had I visited Mankato instead of going straight home from Appleton. I'm not sure when I'll see my hereto-life-buddy again (on what I suppose is a positive note, he's still the reckless short-sighted hedonist I remember: he's smoking again/still) but I'll work something out.

My big decision, to stay away from Minnesota for a bit longer, seems to have been a good one.

Jinx's house is just as weird as you'd expect. You walk in the door and a tiny little ratdog skitters across the hardwood floor in spastic greeting. Once the dog, a chihuahua-doberman-pitbull-labrador-mix, realizes the gravity of the situation, it backpedals and retreats to the kitchen, its tail wagging as a far-more-spastic creature dives after it in glee.

I was looking forward to talking to Jinx's parents, the cartoonish "laconic dad" and "overzealous mother" characters in my head, but everyone's favorite Unitarians were gone after the first night. The family that lives in the basement (Jinx's oldest sister's family) lurked in the background. Sometimes you would hear voices from underneath.

We all slept in a big room (Jinx has no bedroom) near the source of all entertainment- the television.

The first night, all we did was watch movies. We saw:
Happy Campers
Serendipity
Orgazmo
Da Hip Hop Witch Project (half)

"We" is Rock Show Girl, Jinx, myself, and a relatively new acquaintance named The Cheerful Cynic. This freshman is self-dubbed; he claimed that title and he'll have it until I can find enough real cynics to kill and maim him.

Sadly, The Cheerful Cynic is black, and, protected by our government's fascist "anti-hate-crime" laws, he is safe from my deadly grasp. Later, he bought some crayola-green pants, presumable to tempt his already-uncertain fate.

On the plus side, The Cheerful Cynic knows he's black and he's very easygoing about it. I finally got to use my reverse-discrimination jokes. Like this one:

The Cheerful Cynic: Hey [Jinx]! Er… I mean, [Rock Show Girl]! Sorry, sometimes I get the two of you mixed up.
Our Bold Hero: Yeah, they all look the same to you, don't they!

We made dinner: spaghetti, which I ate in the manner of the native people, using "tongs" to scoop the noodles onto my plate. As always, no one approved of the old-school "hands" method I grew up with.

The next day we had lunch at Culvers. I'd never been to a Culvers before (that's why we went, actually) and the Jumbo Butterburger with Cheese was impressive.

We went on the Jelly Belly Factory tour, willingly submitting to twenty minutes of interesting corporate propaganda. It was fun, even if I seem unable to find the good flavors in any given mixed bag. We got free hats, too.

We went thrifting at some point with one of Jinx's less hyper friends. She's also an English major, so we made fun of the romance novels for a bit. After finding it hidden in another section, I decided to buy The Vagina Monologues for 26 cents.

Dinner was served by an obviously-stoned clerk at Jinx's favorite restaurant, Taco Bell.

That night was more cultured:
The Man Who Cried
Cool Hand Luke
Y Tu Mama Tambien

Sunday we, sans one Cheerful Cynic, went to Rock Show Girl's house. Her place felt more like home- we ate dinner with her family, watched the Simpsons, and tried to figure out the driving/riding arrangements for Tuesday. (I ended up driving straight from Crystal Lake (near Chicago) to Appleton (around Lawrence) on Tuesday morning, after I dropped those two off at the train station).

Then we watched movies:
Supertroopers
Better Off Dead
Wacko's Wish

Rock Show Girl was almost as excited to see her cat as Jinx was to see her dog. She's usually verbally eclipsed by the more-talkative Jinx, so it was interesting to see R.S.G in her environment.

Jinx still talked more than anyone, but R.S.G had a lot of stories about her high school musicals (a production of "the Wiz" without any blacks) about the private kindergarten "La Petite Academie"… as we got closer to Crystal Lake, everything had a story. Rock Show Girl had phenomenal taste in books too: her room was girly (read: cat paraphernalia) but old-school sci-fi filled the bookshelves.

Her crowing achievement? R.S.G has seen the Multiracial Cinderella Spectacular- she's knows the words to "It's Possible".

We watched Bowling For Columbine that night, at a 30-screen theater several towns. The road there led us past Willow Creek, the famed megachurch (or "cult" as a nervous Rock Show Girl insisted), which was really exciting.

The movie was just what I expected, which isn't a good thing. Still, it had its moments: Michael Moore's power is indirectly proportional to his distance from Flint, Michigan, but near Flint he had some fine moments.

On the way back, before the deadly barrage of tween-pop began, Jinx and I tried unsuccessfully to convince Rock Show Girl to drive us onto the Willow Creek compound. From the road it looked huge and nondenominational.

That night we watched:
On the Line
Clueless

Tuesday I drove to Lawrence and watched Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers on the Ultrascreen. It was good, but since we'd watched the extended edition of Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring a few hours before, I was burnt out and tired before the new movie was over. The ents ruled, though.

The Politician cut his long golden locks. What Dalila convinced him to commit such a crime, I do not know.

I left Lawrence that morning and drove back… deciding at the last moment not to visit Larson. I'll find my way to Mankato soon enough. In a final gratuitous act of socialization with Lawrence people, I ate dinner at Buca's with Luke, Ann, and Meg(h)an (it's easy to eat there, when you have reservations). The food was pretty good; I like the eat-out-of-a-communal-trough aspect.

Later.

How Much Can I Blog While Waiting For One Girl To Pack?

I just saw Star Trek: Nemisis with Jonas, Jeremy, and a hundred scattered loners, and now I'm waiting for Rock Show Girl and Jinx to get packed. This weekend should be interesting.

That was quick…

More Americans Get Their News

I'm through treating this page like some sort of literary vomitorium. Enough blather! More trivialities!

We watched The Muppet Christmas Carol a few days ago, which (I now admit) isn't the best Muppet Movie (it is worlds better than Muppets in Space, though) but which (I continue to submit) is the best adaptation of Dickens' story.

I just got back from a post-Milton-final lunch with Jonas, The Politician, and other assorted Republicans. Miss Bates, coworker and feminist-Republican, was there, but, with incomprehensible talk of football tangling the air, a cross-table conversation was infeasible. I rocked out silently, which was mistaken for twitching. I guess I'm not going to do that ever again.

I think I angered The Mighty Republican King, who lives across the hall, when I mumbled a vague reply to his invitation to a (Republican) party. I wouldn't know anyone there; though I do think it would be cool to be able to say "I joined the Republican party yesterday, and man did I get ripped." Also, I think that all Republican take offense when you wantonly throw around the adjective "Republican."

The Mighty Republican King said today that 90% of the campus is leftist--these College Republicans see leftists everywhere, a good beginning for a conspiracy theory they haven't bothered to finish--but I think that 90% of the campus is wishy-washy or (as some call it) "apathetic". The Leftists may be powerful and have their own newspaper (the apocalyptic One Minute Left, which refuses to publish dissenting (Republican) opinions) but the Wishy-Washy Moderates have an underground following; we are the silent majority. And next year, when we rise up…

I finished the Milton final, and with that I'm done with all the really hard work. I have a paper to write, and a Geology test to ignore, and then… well, I'm actually not leaving here for a while. There's no incentive to go home, when all I'll do is chores and thumb-twiddling.

I hatched a crazy scheme, a scheme I have absolutely no faith in. As it stands now, I'll finish on Friday then drive to Jinx's house to party it down with her, Rock Show Girl, and whoever else decides to come. This is the iffy part of the plan, because I just can't believe that someone would just invite a bunch of people to their house. Jinx denies any allegations of flake-hood.

After a weekend of movies and patent-pending antics in wherever Jinx lives, I'll come back to Lawrence and hook up with Jonas and about twenty other people to watch the midnight showing of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers at the new gigantious three-story seventy-foot-wide Ultrascreen theater. These guys (most of them are probably guys, I'm guessing) are appropriately enthusiastic about the new movie; it'll be like seeing it with ten Arnos. (Arno is metric, so he's worth about two of these guys after conversion.)

Then, next Wednesday, I leave for home. I was talking to Larson, and maybe I'll visit him as long as I'm on a Midwestern tour… but, whatever.

Later.

Ann Knows Who Thomas und Andrea Are.
Also, A Book-Related Rant.

I'm told that it's Milton's birthday, and it is.

I celebrated the my own special way, reviewing his early works in preparation for a huge final tomorrow.

I no longer have a favorite author; a favorite longest word: yes. But author: no.

The first authors that I called my "favorites" are a swirl of half-remembered names. I didn't really know what was out there, so I jumped from G.C. Warner (The Boxcar Children Series) to Bruce Coville (The My Teacher Is An Alien Series) to C.S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Naria) to Susan Cooper (The Dark is Rising Sequence); the last author I'd read was usually my favorite.

After I read Tolkein, I started calling him my favorite author. I remember being sent to the nurses office to read The Hobbit with Adam, Meghan Thurlow, and other assorted Blue Birds while the Red Birds back in the classroom learned about Narnia.

(The Yellow Birds, who had different teachers, presumably learned about pumping gas or something. Our class was the one (cloistered and) groomed for excellence. We didn't really use these ornithological terms, but the idea is the same.)

I paced while I read, which annoyed Meghan T, which was funny, but I digress. I called Tolkein my favorite author for a while--until ninth grade, I think--but in reality I didn't spend much time reading his stuff.

I read Brian Jacques' Redwall series (the name I had for five years of German class, "Martin", comes from one of his books) religiously. Hatchet was o.k. too, but no story set in Canada could ever really entertain me.

In ninth grade, I tried some heady stuff and (since I couldn't understand it, and thought I did) hated it. I ended up changing favorite authors, abandoning de facto Jacques rule under Tolkein's flag for straight-up obsession with Robert Jordan, the authorial equivalent of the equally-talented-and-mercenary Matt Groening. I've read at least 20,000 pages of Jordan's Wheel of Time series, and I know now that it will never end.

All through high school, Grisham, King, and (especially) Crichton were my "favorites". Airport novels. I liked Dickens, but only A Tale of Two Cities, for somewhat transparent, less-than-truly-literary, reasons.

I read a lot of stories when I could have been reading novels, but since I was entertained I can't really complain. I would like to note, as long as I'm making some sort of public record, that

#1. There's nothing shameful about telling a good story, especially if you can make a living doing it and
#2. That the works of "hip" authors like P.K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut and Isaac Asimov are just as easy to read as the "popular trash" which books snobs (like me) deride.

Granted, the "hip" authors tend to spend their time on ideas, not story, and their books are, in fact, better, but reading Vonnegut doesn't make you smarter than anyone; it just means that you have better taste.

I've seen too many people spend too much energy putting down authors who don't really deserve their scorn, and the affected intellectual superiority of people in coffeehouses who sit around reading the aforementioned, as if these very popular and easy-to-read authors are some kind of secret, pretending all the while that only geniuses read these books and that those same geniuses would actually read them in public, inspires me to write long, angry sentences full of long, angry clauses. Confused, twisted angry sentences.

Then again, in any given coffeehouse I usually have a problem with someone.

At college, I was introduced to literature- really introduced. At first, what impressed me most was the decadence- Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Milton, because they write in a different form of English, seem like the real geniuses. They are, in fact, geniuses, but, I loved the complexity a little too much. I still see the value of complexity--slowing the reader down forces him to focus on each individual word--but I think that modern critics are praising the complexity and not the writing.

Like Milton (who, last year, took the "favorite author" spot from its momentary possessor, Stephen King, instantly making me one of the most pretentious blowhards this side of Hamline University), much like good old papist-hating Milton during his career as a writer, I have moved from decadence, from the need to make things complicated, to (or possible "back to") clarity.

Or, at least, to an ironic acceptance of unnecessary complexity that makes everything hilarious for me and frustrating for everyone else. Hah!, as Jinx might say.

I'd still claim Milton and Donne (The Flea, whoo!) as my favorite writers if I wasn't so sick of reading their work (and plus, haven't I been talking about "authors", not "writers" and certainly not "la-de-da poets"?) but then again, maybe I wouldn't. If I had to choose a work to be stuck with for all eternity, I'd definitely pick something newer- Faulkner or Murakami, probably, but I really would rather not choose.

Having a single "favorite author" is hard work- it requires the kind of commitment that I'm much too lazy to commit to, a constant reappraisal of every author you've ever read, and a neverending comparison of everything you read with everything else. No thanks. I'd rather just have a bundle of authors I kind of like… well, whatever. No favorite author.

Since you slogged through this pretentious rambling (all I seem to be spouting of late), I won't bother you with more. I've actually got more studying to do… I've got a really long, really nasty Milton final tomorrow. I'll try to post some actual news next time.

Later.

There are Puritan movements still around today… (muttering)… feminist councils…

Tomorrow I have my last class with Prof Goldgar, who vows to revisit the entire 17th century in preparation for the final. All the italicized quotes in this post are his.

I've never had a student recommend [Dead Poets Society] to me; they seem to think I'd throw up.

Goldgar, the English department's proverbial dead man walking, is a throwback, a holdover from an exceptionally tenacious era. He's an old-school lecturer on a campus where discussion, general education requirements, and all the other liberal arts virtues we learned in Freshman Studies threaten to replace a centuries-old tradition. I'm not saying that the new style of teaching isn't good, it's just that the old style works too, and some teachers seem to forget that.

What's happened to this school? One of the greatest works in the English language and only one of you has read it?

Prof Goldgar takes his turn at British Writers I and British Writers II whenever duty calls. But 18th Century Fiction, Satire, and (my) Milton and the 17th Century class are completely his. He teaches religious poetry (I don't believe in anything. It's not an understatement or "way of speaking", it's literal truth), metaphysical love poetry (…intrinsically dumb poem, you see, but it's a love poem, so I'm repeating myself), epic poetry, plays, and other various forgotten art forms- the grand works of forgotten poets and playwrights.

There is a sense in which I don't believe anything I've ever read. It's fiction, why should I believe it?"

He doesn't believe the religious poetry he teaches, the satire targets dead strangers, and an English class devoid of feminism, postmodernism, and Shakespeare seems like a departmental quirk; but Goldgar is a defender of old works and old teaching styles.

[Spencer] wrote six chapters and planned to write many more, but God is merciful.

The students love him. You can roughly categorize students by the Profs they admire. The Poet loves Prof Bloom, that new professor who inevitably guides class discussions to feminist revelations, bright-eyed all the while because the material is just as new for her. Prof Spurgin I haven't had. Prof Dintenfass doesn't seem to have too many devotees, but Ann speaks of him often.

I was told that I could put this on the computer, and play it from there. I became physically ill after that comment.

Representative Man and myself seem to be the only true fans of Prof Fritzell; Prof Goldgar, the wise, slightly brazen curmudgeon, is a more populist Professor. His class is loaded with English majors who laugh at his every remark, who fawn a little too much for my taste, and who make me (occasionally) ashamed of the other English students.

Well, it's common knowledge… isn't it? St. Patrick… drove the snakes out of Ireland? Remember that?

Prof Fritzell is a genius, but you can't really be sure. He's like a quantum physics theory that no one quite understands: it certainly sounds impressive, the masses admit- but we can't be sure that it's true. With Fritzell a text has its own mythology and several levels of meaning, all put there by an incredibly self-conscious author who was equally aware of the limits of human language. Every text is a bible, and I can see the appeal in that.

This reminds me of a story. A friend of mine was in a Music Appreciation Class once and he had this old German professor. The professor would play a piece of music, look at the class, say "Vasn't that just beautiful!" and then play the next piece. English students seem to think that simplicity and clarity are bad… can't something just be beautiful?

Prof Goldgar, though he may not be as entertaining, is far more lucid than Prof Fritzell, and it's much easier see his intelligence than it is to guess at his manic collegue's. Prof Goldgar is the favorite professor of Lawrence's mainstream would-be literati because he's both intelligent and intelligible. His anecdotes (which are actually funny, in a room full of English majors) are funny and his analysis is correct. Or as he would say:

Dip me in honey and throw me to the lesbians!

Later.

The Donuts of the Elders of Zion

I'm posting for the title's sake, I guess. It's a book that remains to be written.

I'm not ready to go to sleep, because that means I have to wake up and go to school.

Thanksgiving break makes everything so anticlimactic- it stunts the enthusiasm we'd otherwise have for Christmas break and puts everyone a little off balance just before finals week. I need to get my bearings; I just hope there's nothing important going on in class tomorrow.

Later.