It is a bad sign...

[hawkwing_lb]

...when you snap a pencil in a lecture, then have to hold your breath until you feel dizzy to keep from shouting at the lecturer in frustration and rage, yes?

Yeah, I thought so too.

I don't think I'm cut out for the study of literature. In any language. Particularly when the lecturer sounds more like he's giving a paper than talking to a class.

And he seems to think that poetry being 'divorced from logic' is a good thing.

Ambiguous I can get behind. 'Beyond logic' tends to equal WTF?

I don't understand the view of something that's - for all practical purposes - damn nigh incomprehensible as somehow good or more worthwhile than something that's accessible. Incomprehensible is intellectually lazy, elitist and insufferably damned pretentious (for 'damned' read other, stronger expletives that I will not start saying because then I'd find it hard to stop).

I will not starting hitting things and screaming, alright? I mean, I'm beyond that. Really.

Venting finished. Completement fini. I'm going to go and work on safe boring grammar now.

Why is everyone still looking at me funny?

Comments

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Oof. Sadly, pretentious twits are found everywhere. Save your spleen for more important things..;-)

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Don't worry, I do :-). That was just a bit of venting. Lookit all the italicses :-). I'm just lucky there weren't ALL CAPS and multiple exclamation marks :-).

LJ as de-stressing tool.

Btw, I understand most USians have had a recent holiday. Is it appropriate to give you 'Happy Thanksgiving', or some such?

(Or am I just confused again? *g*)

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Oh, that was _venting_..sorry. Please, vent away. I'll stand back over here, and watch the fireworks. Yes, it was a Happy Thanksgiving. We are free from Britain. Or something. :-D

[(Anonymous)]

Actually, I think the very fact that you are infuriated by the idiot quite superb. I have some (be it a mere glimmer) of hope for the study of literature when even one of the student body does not sit and suck this mindless pap, to regurgitate it into the mouths of the next crop of bird-brains (the only people who will take the subject, eventually).
This:
"I don't understand the view of something that's - for all practical purposes - damn nigh incomprehensible as somehow good or more worthwhile than something that's accessible. Incomprehensible is intellectually lazy, elitist and insufferably damned pretentious "

was pure music to my ears. I couldn't say it nearly as well. Who says you have not benefited from the study of literature?

Having just met a young Scot at WFC who has been sucked into this pretentious crud... it does SO reassure an old monkey to read this coming from one of the new generation of writers.
More power to your elbow! Can we send you a gross of pencils?

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Oh, he wasn't an idiot. Not precisely. But how is it possible for ostensibly intelligent people to swallow (as you put it) this pretentious crud?

Sigh. Poetry is good. Even French poetry. Doesn't have to be impossible to understand to be worth reading. Illogical is more like to put me off reading, and for reading read studying, than otherwise. Ambiguous I can get behind. Many-layered I will cheer. 'Beyond logic' is a phrase that could really... irritate me.

As has already been shown above, I guess *g*.

If I have to study French lit next year, I swear, I'll quit. Or go apply for engineering or something, I don't know. Anything to stay away from lit-crit and philosophy written by depressive graduates of the École Normale Supérior.

There was a reason I didn't chose to study English at college level.

Pencils would certainly be nice :-). 144 might be a few too many, though *g*.

(On second thought, maybe not. Ulp.)

[(Anonymous)]

Good poetry, Great poetry - from Fishes' heaven to Minstrel in the gallery... is the pure and condensed essence of language and emotion.

French... I once heard the wife of the local French ambassador (who was a Doctor of French literature) describing the wonderful way that de Sade had used tedium as a tool to convey his literary metaphor... yeah. The French beat the English to trivialisation of literary merit.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Tedium... oh boy oh boy.

I'm not actually surprised that so much of French lit is... (to someone used to something slightly less exquisitely French) terrible. The interesting part of my French course is about culture and society, and what these guys went/go through at the École Normale Supérior would be enough to drive anyone into depressive fits :-).