Thursday, February 28, 2008

SETSULED ANGRY! SETSULED SMASH USING NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE!! FuuuuuuAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGHCCCKK!!! Bu-LUDDY FUUUCK!!

I'm upset.

I just took the mid-midtermish (I guess that makes it a quarter term? Except there's only two--fuck it) thing in my British Literature class and I fucking ran out of fucking time. we had a choice of two essay prompts, the first asking for analysis of women's roles in English culture and how a woman's standing in society or something was seen to change over time in the texts we've read because the teacher, for some reason, spends 30% of the time trying to shoehorn a feminist dissertation into the British Literature class. This annoys me, so I chose prompt 2, which asked me to describe the changes in religious culture evident in the texts and how those changes related to historical events.

I spent some time just staring at the prompt, wondering how I could make something out of it that wouldn't be parroting the introductory texts, and I decided to frame the essay around masochism, and how the more utilitarian drives depicted in Beowulf transitioned into the Christian promotion of humility and self-denial. We were required to use direct quotes from at least three of the works we've read so far. And I thought I was doing fine--I was happy with my thesis statement, moseyed through two paragraphs, and all of a sudden there was only twenty minutes left. Yes, I was supposed to write an essay discussing a country's religious changes, tying them to historical events, making sure to quote three separate texts, all in under an hour.

I sped through a paragraph on Sir Gawain's existential conflict, and was starting a new paragraph on Margery Kempe when the teacher called "time". I was in the middle of a sentence that was going something like, "Kempe's self-loathing at missing so many confessions was not abetted until she transferred her emotional support system to her personal conception of Christ, who in her mind," madly I searched for a quote, the teacher Ended Things, and I lamely finished, "was willing to have sex with her."

GGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH! Am I a fucking hamster, dancing for your amusement??! Bloody school. I suppose this somehow demonstrates my failure to understand English Literature, right? Surely it's perfectly sensible to judge my assimilation of knowledge by how quickly I can write? Ugh. I bet all he wanted was a loose assembly of quotes. It's all just bloody, fucking, forms at the end of the day. Can't they just be honest?

Will . . . not . . . break . . . things . . .

Because I live vicariously through Donald Duck lately, here's another cartoon, kids. This is Cured Duck from 1945. I don't know why all the versions of this on YouTube are subtitled. I don't recognise the language here, but I love that they apparently had no idea how to translate Donald most of the time. And I love the way the anger management machine laughs.

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