I realized about five minutes after this went up that I'd completely neglected to include my very moving True Story Of Part Of Why I Switched From Being A Literature Major To Being A Rhetoric Major In Gradual School, so here it is, pinned as an appendix, or an embroidered Letter even, to the story text:
In my second or third year of grad school I started realizing that I was enjoying teaching writing as an underpaid TA a lot more than I was enjoying PhD level literature studies. Part of what cinched it was when we were reading The Scarlet Letter, which I'd somehow never read before, go figure. One day in the U of Arizona library, I ran into a classmate (I forget his name; he was German and I want to call him Klaus, damn me) and joked, "Hey, you know what? I think Hester and Dimmesdale have something going on." A lame joke, to be sure, but deliberately so, because DUH.
Klaus or Gerhard or whatever just looked at me like I had observed that I am a big boy and I like big trucks, vroom! vroom! and he replied, "Vell, I suppose you *could* read it for the plot."
I also enjoyed being a writing TA and spent years teaching at the Uni level - actually took an extra year of classes to stick around and be an advisor to a few students (it was the early nineties so there were no jobs, anyhow).
Wound up in tech. The road to that was, as the narrator in John Irving's "The Water-Method Man" says of his urinary tract, 'a narrow, winding road,' but at the end of the day, it's sort of worked out......I document my work, and occasionally add easter-egg prose to be discovered by the future.
When I was in college, I dated a guy who introduced me to the works of John Irving. Of course, the movie adaptation of Garp was out. I had bought a copy in the bookstore. He recommended Hotel New Hampshire, (awful terrible movie!), The 158-Pound Marriage and The Water Method Man. I've read most of his stuff. I read The Last Chairlift last spring. None of his books adapt well for the screen, IMO. Changing the ending of Garp? What they did to Owen Meany? I guess Cider House Rules was an okay adaptation.
I've pretty much read his books all my adult life.
I enjoyed the movie version of Hotel New Hampshire. Though I did watch it on mushrooms after seeing whatever Laurie Anderson film was out in 1987, with college friends, at another college, trying to have conversations with professors who were colleagues of my host’s father. So, yeah, Hotel New Hampshire was a nice, enjoyable movie. And it had SUE BEAR!!! (Maybe that makes more sense on ‘shrooms.)
One of the best movies that, for tangled copyright reasons, never legally showed up on DVD, but thank Crom somebody did a digital transfer (from the laserdisc, I *think*) to YouTube, which has been allowed to remain.
I love thinking about books that were made into successful movies. I read Jaws as a teenager, and when the movie came out I thought it was quite brilliant that they let go of all the book's subplots and simply focused on the shark.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is another one I felt good about when the movie came out, although I'm not really sure what the trick was now. Maybe they made the ending make more sense for me?
Also too, John Grisham's The Client! Say what you will about Susan Sarandon, but she and Tommy Lee Jones brought a real interesting subtext to that relationship that I did not get from the book, and it made the whole thing more interesting.
Actually, I feel like most of John Grisham's books translate well to film, and I don't think he wrote them just to make movie money. I think he wrote them so he could justify not being a lawyer any more.
Well, you've to get the plot more or less right first before you can do anything else worthwhile with the text. That said, actually understanding the plot and certain other basic features of a text CAN get in the way of the occasional persnickety grad student's utterly brilliant, world-off-axis-tilting theory about what the text REALLY means. And that obstruction, in turn, might hinder the immediate and global political consequences that would follow naturally from general acceptance of said theory about said literary text. So there!
Me, 2005: I like computers! Yay networking, yay web design, yay hardware!
University, 2006: Yeah, no, you're going to learn programming and animation, that's all we got.
Me, 2007-2010: Boo! I am now a Social and Behavioral Science major, concentrating in Geographic Information Systems, with a Minor in Global Studies! Whar jobs??
Workforce, 2010: yeah, no, your college did GIS weird, so we can't help you.
Me, 2013: Well, I've been working with kids for 5 years now, maybe I can be a teacher?
Credential Program: Hell yeah you can! Let's throw you straight to the fuckin' wolves!
Me, 2014: Wait, people think I'm good at this??
Me, 2023: No, really, am I any good at this or not?
(I am, in fact, not very good at this, but I am insanely patient and willing work myself to the bone for low pay. Yay?)
We did not have Women's Studies in the 70's so I made up my own program using English Lit as a major and Humanities as a minor. Women through history. It was amazing, I loved it.
English major/philosophy minor. Worked in a machine shop to get through college. I work in manufacturing now and have been lucky enough to travel the world.
I so get this. I did a double major in Literature and Psychology, realized how much they crossed over and realized that psychology was more interesting. I did some other stuff for a bit, but ultimately came back to psychology.
Well, I almost switched from electrical engineering to psychology but I was too techno-nerd and all of the psychology people I knew at the time were poors.
Even after it became clear that unless a student was actually interested in the subject and motivated to understand it, I was a lousy teacher, I soldiered on and completed the doctorate (in philosophy). Luckily, even though I dutifully applied for teaching jobs, I failed to get one, and so I too have none of what I guess we are calling ragrets. Although I do miss buttonholing colleagues and making them explain stuff to me, as it takes me rather longer to figure them out myself.
My white whale of a great American book is …wait for it….Moby Dick. I have read maybe half???? However, I have never been able to finish it. The other big one is Ulysses…I keep trying once every ten years….but no…
Dude was paid by the word/length of his submissions. It's chock-a-block with useless prose on the nature of whaling. It would be a fantastic book if it were edited down to like a third of its current size.
Tristram Shandy for me. Every year, I faithfully took it on holiday. Every year, I came back from holiday having faithfully read the first few pages and stopped dead In my sandy tracks.
I read V. when I was about 15, after a knock-down drag-out with the librarian during which my mother, bless her, said she wanted me to read whatever I wanted to read. I had just picked it at random, but the hassle with the librarian made sure I finished it.
Damn, Tristram Shandy and Gravity's Rainbow are among my favorite novels, and have reread them a couple-three times. Now, Mason & Dixon defeated me utterly, and Vineland was as vile and misogynistic a tract as any I have ever seen, dog save us from the rancid sexual fantasies of middle aged men who never quite got over being twelve years old and peeking at discarded copies of Hustler, reminiscent of John Barth (viz. Giles Goat Boy and A Floating Opera and The Sot Weed Factor) at his worst. The male gaze, indeed.
I'm rereading Vineland again right now. It's an odd one, and I think some of the misogyny is also critique. But Pynchon doesn't write female characters very well, which is hardly unique to him.
My specialty was narratology. There is a book called Reading for the Plot by Peter Brooks. My dissertation was on the happy ending in Victorian fiction.
I've never read Paradise Lost or Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and I never will. Nor have I read any of the Canterbury Tales. I read the Cliff Notes. I listened to the lectures and learned stuff, but I never read any of it.
I read all of it....realizing, in college, that my job was essentially reading books and then commenting on them made me realize that there were perfect ways to spend one's life, and that I was probably never going to make my living as a book critic for the NYT.
Oh, "attention-seeking". And here I thought the "A" was for "asshole". If she's got "B" and "C" shirts, I already have thoughts about what those stand for.
I realized about five minutes after this went up that I'd completely neglected to include my very moving True Story Of Part Of Why I Switched From Being A Literature Major To Being A Rhetoric Major In Gradual School, so here it is, pinned as an appendix, or an embroidered Letter even, to the story text:
In my second or third year of grad school I started realizing that I was enjoying teaching writing as an underpaid TA a lot more than I was enjoying PhD level literature studies. Part of what cinched it was when we were reading The Scarlet Letter, which I'd somehow never read before, go figure. One day in the U of Arizona library, I ran into a classmate (I forget his name; he was German and I want to call him Klaus, damn me) and joked, "Hey, you know what? I think Hester and Dimmesdale have something going on." A lame joke, to be sure, but deliberately so, because DUH.
Klaus or Gerhard or whatever just looked at me like I had observed that I am a big boy and I like big trucks, vroom! vroom! and he replied, "Vell, I suppose you *could* read it for the plot."
Dear reader, I have NO RAGRETS
Germans are weird.
How can you tell?
I was in a LTR with one for 7 years. 1st light is not wrong.
I prefer to read Mace's shirt for the simplest exegesis: Mace is fucking her pastor. End of story.
In Bawston, that would be Mace is fucking her pastah.
His linguine must be satisfying her.
A satisfied Republican? I've never heard of one.
That might explain her TMI speech at the National Prayer Breakfast.
Oh, and thanks for reminding me of THAT.
Excellent reading of the subtext.
I also enjoyed being a writing TA and spent years teaching at the Uni level - actually took an extra year of classes to stick around and be an advisor to a few students (it was the early nineties so there were no jobs, anyhow).
Wound up in tech. The road to that was, as the narrator in John Irving's "The Water-Method Man" says of his urinary tract, 'a narrow, winding road,' but at the end of the day, it's sort of worked out......I document my work, and occasionally add easter-egg prose to be discovered by the future.
Well, from many cystoscopies I've learned that it's not THAT narrow, until it gets to your prostate, and then .... it's a bit of a squeeze.
I'll see myself out.
When I was in college, I dated a guy who introduced me to the works of John Irving. Of course, the movie adaptation of Garp was out. I had bought a copy in the bookstore. He recommended Hotel New Hampshire, (awful terrible movie!), The 158-Pound Marriage and The Water Method Man. I've read most of his stuff. I read The Last Chairlift last spring. None of his books adapt well for the screen, IMO. Changing the ending of Garp? What they did to Owen Meany? I guess Cider House Rules was an okay adaptation.
I've pretty much read his books all my adult life.
Same here. The books are vastly better than the movies….
I remember a book review that said the author had something-or-other in their work "like John Irving has bears"
I enjoyed the movie version of Hotel New Hampshire. Though I did watch it on mushrooms after seeing whatever Laurie Anderson film was out in 1987, with college friends, at another college, trying to have conversations with professors who were colleagues of my host’s father. So, yeah, Hotel New Hampshire was a nice, enjoyable movie. And it had SUE BEAR!!! (Maybe that makes more sense on ‘shrooms.)
HOME OF THE BRAVE!
One of the best movies that, for tangled copyright reasons, never legally showed up on DVD, but thank Crom somebody did a digital transfer (from the laserdisc, I *think*) to YouTube, which has been allowed to remain.
https://youtu.be/mua8Pr6uRso
That is IT! Thank you! I don't remember it much, but I certainly remember the night.
I love thinking about books that were made into successful movies. I read Jaws as a teenager, and when the movie came out I thought it was quite brilliant that they let go of all the book's subplots and simply focused on the shark.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is another one I felt good about when the movie came out, although I'm not really sure what the trick was now. Maybe they made the ending make more sense for me?
Also too, John Grisham's The Client! Say what you will about Susan Sarandon, but she and Tommy Lee Jones brought a real interesting subtext to that relationship that I did not get from the book, and it made the whole thing more interesting.
Actually, I feel like most of John Grisham's books translate well to film, and I don't think he wrote them just to make movie money. I think he wrote them so he could justify not being a lawyer any more.
Well, you've to get the plot more or less right first before you can do anything else worthwhile with the text. That said, actually understanding the plot and certain other basic features of a text CAN get in the way of the occasional persnickety grad student's utterly brilliant, world-off-axis-tilting theory about what the text REALLY means. And that obstruction, in turn, might hinder the immediate and global political consequences that would follow naturally from general acceptance of said theory about said literary text. So there!
Me, 2005: I like computers! Yay networking, yay web design, yay hardware!
University, 2006: Yeah, no, you're going to learn programming and animation, that's all we got.
Me, 2007-2010: Boo! I am now a Social and Behavioral Science major, concentrating in Geographic Information Systems, with a Minor in Global Studies! Whar jobs??
Workforce, 2010: yeah, no, your college did GIS weird, so we can't help you.
Me, 2013: Well, I've been working with kids for 5 years now, maybe I can be a teacher?
Credential Program: Hell yeah you can! Let's throw you straight to the fuckin' wolves!
Me, 2014: Wait, people think I'm good at this??
Me, 2023: No, really, am I any good at this or not?
(I am, in fact, not very good at this, but I am insanely patient and willing work myself to the bone for low pay. Yay?)
NO REGRATS!!!
My college did not have majors, but I migrated from Literature to Women's Studies.
Because I've always been drawn to the front lines.
We did not have Women's Studies in the 70's so I made up my own program using English Lit as a major and Humanities as a minor. Women through history. It was amazing, I loved it.
English major/philosophy minor. Worked in a machine shop to get through college. I work in manufacturing now and have been lucky enough to travel the world.
I so get this. I did a double major in Literature and Psychology, realized how much they crossed over and realized that psychology was more interesting. I did some other stuff for a bit, but ultimately came back to psychology.
Well, I almost switched from electrical engineering to psychology but I was too techno-nerd and all of the psychology people I knew at the time were poors.
Even after it became clear that unless a student was actually interested in the subject and motivated to understand it, I was a lousy teacher, I soldiered on and completed the doctorate (in philosophy). Luckily, even though I dutifully applied for teaching jobs, I failed to get one, and so I too have none of what I guess we are calling ragrets. Although I do miss buttonholing colleagues and making them explain stuff to me, as it takes me rather longer to figure them out myself.
"Hosue Republican" is a misspelling of Hose Republican, which is a redundancy.
My white whale of a great American book is …wait for it….Moby Dick. I have read maybe half???? However, I have never been able to finish it. The other big one is Ulysses…I keep trying once every ten years….but no…
I can get over the whale slaughter. It freaks me out. No judging I get people love it, but I could not.
I love Moby Dick. I read it every few years.
Ulysses, though. Nope. No can do. Tried repeatedly.
Dude was paid by the word/length of his submissions. It's chock-a-block with useless prose on the nature of whaling. It would be a fantastic book if it were edited down to like a third of its current size.
Or you could read The Encantadas.
I used to reread Moby every 3 or 4 years but The Encantadas is da bomb
Oh, I love all that "useless" prose. I guess some of it could go, but some of us like the detail.
Tristram Shandy for me. Every year, I faithfully took it on holiday. Every year, I came back from holiday having faithfully read the first few pages and stopped dead In my sandy tracks.
I persevered with Tristram! So much to love, actually. I punished myself with Pilgrim’s Progress…just because.
You're a better man, woman, person, camera, TV than I am, Gunga Din.
Gravity's Rainbow is mine.
My hubby loves that book…and I can’t get thru it!!!
Ha. I was about to say that. The first 1/3 or so was just enthralling. And then... for no reason that I can define, I stopped reading it.
And a few years later I tried again, with the same results.
And again, a few years after that. I have no idea why. I just know that first third is the fucking bomb.
I fucking love Pynchon
I read V. when I was about 15, after a knock-down drag-out with the librarian during which my mother, bless her, said she wanted me to read whatever I wanted to read. I had just picked it at random, but the hassle with the librarian made sure I finished it.
I loved V…but Gravity defeated me
I loved V. I’ve had trouble with Gravity’s Rainbow.
Damn, Tristram Shandy and Gravity's Rainbow are among my favorite novels, and have reread them a couple-three times. Now, Mason & Dixon defeated me utterly, and Vineland was as vile and misogynistic a tract as any I have ever seen, dog save us from the rancid sexual fantasies of middle aged men who never quite got over being twelve years old and peeking at discarded copies of Hustler, reminiscent of John Barth (viz. Giles Goat Boy and A Floating Opera and The Sot Weed Factor) at his worst. The male gaze, indeed.
I read Mason & Dixon twice in a summer.
I'm rereading Vineland again right now. It's an odd one, and I think some of the misogyny is also critique. But Pynchon doesn't write female characters very well, which is hardly unique to him.
My specialty was narratology. There is a book called Reading for the Plot by Peter Brooks. My dissertation was on the happy ending in Victorian fiction.
I've never read Paradise Lost or Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and I never will. Nor have I read any of the Canterbury Tales. I read the Cliff Notes. I listened to the lectures and learned stuff, but I never read any of it.
I have read Paradise Lost, In Memoriam, as well as Mill's On Political Economy, and I'm a better man for it, but I'll be damned if I can tell you why.
I read all of it....realizing, in college, that my job was essentially reading books and then commenting on them made me realize that there were perfect ways to spend one's life, and that I was probably never going to make my living as a book critic for the NYT.
I just did my first public poetry reading, and it included excerpts from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.
Speaking it I realized that Byron really was head-and-shoulders above most of his contemporaries; his language is purest, highest romance.
Sample it in little bits.
I read the Wife of Bath for my english A level. That was enough for me.
The No Ragrets joke I actually saw in 2 different things the same year - it was in We’re the Millers and American Dad like 2 months apart.
Thank you for sharing that…I really needed a laugh today
dang Rutger!
Lots of grifters and wingnut sites are selling cheap white t shirts with a red A on them. Nothing performative or unserious about that.
Lots of grifters and wingnut sites are selling cheap white t shirts with a red A on them. Nothing performative or unserious about that.
" ...'Spouter Inn' tee from New Bedford. (No that didn’t happen, I made it all up.)"
Thank you for the clarification, so's I don't spend an hour googling. In this timeline, I can't safely assume anything's a joke anymore
A could Also stand for something else.
Just saying.....
Oh, "attention-seeking". And here I thought the "A" was for "asshole". If she's got "B" and "C" shirts, I already have thoughts about what those stand for.
"I don’t care what the establishment throws at me." It sounds like she cares to an unhealthily obsessive degree.
I thought brunettes were supposed to be the smart ones? Maybe some glasses would help Nancy Mace; maybe nothing will.
BTW, one of the most amusing and interesting takes on the U.S. government is in the prologue to "The Scarlet Letter."
She's really surging ahead in this season of America's Next Top Sarah Palin
Republicans don't do "reading". I'd guess most have no idea what the red letter is all about.
Clearly Mace wasn't getting enough attention...
Ta, Dok. I won't say what I think the A on Mace's shirt stands for, because it's obvious.
Waiting for the impending morning tabs, I like to read the previous days articles.
Oh my lord, I love Wet Leg. I missed the reference the first time. They’re all I listened to last summer. That band can rock the roof off. Kudos Dok.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iLX2WvGDbL0&pp=ygUVd2V0IGxlZyBjaGFpc2UgbG9uZ3Vl
Whar comment?
A is for "asshole".
A is for "asshole".
Excellent post! This gets me out of having to read to book right?
The letter A is an appropriate symbol but not for the reason Hester M. thinks.