spring has sprang

Every year around this time I just want to hop a flight to some far-off land and revel in my own foreignness.

I will have to settle for drinking French wine and pretending to speak German with my friend, Diversey Stinks.

Ja, dis iss das gut vine! I am gettink sooo droonk! Du bist ein beetch!

One less burr under my saddle

So, I took a full-length practice Lit GRE yesterday: 230 questions in 2 hours and 50 minutes.

Sweet sassy molassey, that's a load o' literature. Somewhere around #150, weariness crept into my resolve, a feeling similar to that of driving from Colorado to Iowa and suddenly realizing that you've got all of Nebraska yet ahead. I made that journey by car approximately a zillion times during college, and I knew that when that feeling came upon me, it was time for a giant fountain Diet Coke. Ahhh...

Crisp refreshment 'twas not to be mine yesterday. So I soldiered on, and did much, much better than I had expected. So much better, in fact, that I feel unburdened and confident for the exam on Saturday. It's not an impossibility! Although I did misidentify passages by Donne and Whitman, two of the most distinctive writers EVER. Seriously. I figured, hey, those answers are too easy; surely the correct answers are Walter Pater and H.D., respectively. I told Manfriend (also an English nerd) about this, and he just laffed and laffed. I guess you had to be there.

Things I still don't know very well:
- Greek and Roman mythology
- any grammatic definitions beyond your basic verb, noun, adjective, adverb
- what the fuck a "lamia" is (I'd like to think it's what the popular labia call the uncool labia, but that's probably wrong)

Let me bring you back to the subject

You're packed in your stack,
Especially in the back,
Brother, wanna thank your mother
For a butt like that.
Can I get some fries with that shake-shake booty?
If looks could kill,
You would be an Uzi.
You're a shotgun: bang!
What's up with that thang?
I wanna know, how does it hang?
-Salt-N-Pepa, "Shoop," 1993


The above lyrics will not be on the Literature GRE. Too bad, since they are forever lodged in my memory. Ditto many, many mediocre pop songs circa 1995-1999, my high school years. Judge not, hipsters: I grew up in rural splendor, nestled in the Rocky Mountains. We didn't get the Internet at home until maybe 1997, and even then, my parents weren't about to let me bandy their credit card about the 'net, purchasing the cool music I had read about in Seventeen. That meant that I bought CDs at Wal-Mart and through BMG. Ah, BMG, how I loved your "Overlooked Masterpieces" section, with its recommendations of The Boy with the Arab Strap and Gram Parson's GP/Grievous Angel, possibly my first musical purchases that don't embarrass me today, aside from Beatles albums.

I listened to the Belle & Sebastian album over and over, yearning to be the sort of person who bought a Belle & Sebastian album, a person totally unlike everyone I knew in my wee corner of the world. I wonder what I thought I would be like at this age. I couldn't have conceived of it as a teenager, but I think my life now fulfills all those dreams I had of being savvy and well-read, engaged in interesting work, and surrounded by interesting people, places, food, art, music. A smart kid among smart kids. I know it's the story of a million urban transplants, but that doesn't make it any less satisfying. So, rock on, younger self, rock on.

Speaking of acceptable nerdery: I'm working on the late Victorians now, specifically, Thomas Hardy. I have to say, the 19th century has been pretty great, aside from the fact that many of these writers were so prolific that I can't fit all their important works onto an index card. Hello, Tennyson. It's been a relief to delve into a century whose culture/politics/social concerns are so familiar. Ruskin didn't like the effects of industrialization? Me neither! J.S. Mill arguing against the subjection of women? I'm right there with you, John!

Best of all, while the classical and Biblical references persist in the poetry of the 1800s, the days of Absalom and Achitophel are far behind us. That means you don't have to know the entire Bible and the intricacies of early-17th-century English politics in order to understand the poems. I applaud this truly shoop-worthy literary development.

My Secret?

I read The Economist before union meetings.

Curse you, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and your sprung rhythm, too.

A refrain of "Margaret, are you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving?" has been lodged firmly in my brain for about seven hours now.

I've never particularly loved Hopkins, or this poem, but something about it captures my mood right now. I'm leaving Chicago by train tonight, going east to Kalamazoo, Michigan. My parents have bought my paternal grandparents' farmhouse, and they're in the process of moving there from Colorado. We used to live right down the road, and I spent a lot of time with my grandparents until we moved away when I was six.

Slowly, we've unearthed a century's-worth of my grandmother's collections, opening the boxes I found so mysterious as a child. Secrets revealed: great-grandma's rubber girdles, enough white gloves to outfit a ladies' auxiliary, tiny handbag mirrors, leather wallets from the Chicago World's Fair, scrapbooks of greeting cards, Native American arts traded to my great-grandfather, steamer trunks with unfamiliar monograms. The force of these everyday items accumulates until the modern world begins to look strange to me. We drink the metallic, earthy water drawn from the well that stains the sinks brown; the smell is so familiar.

So, I'm going back, back, back. I think I might get lost somewhere in 1963...if I don't post again by Tuesday, send a search party.


"Spring and Fall, to a Young Child"

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Yoko, oh no, oh no-o

So, having plowed through vast tracts of medieval and Restoration literature, I thought, hey! why not do some practice sections of the Lit GRE? So, I timed myself for two 20-minute sections of about 35 questions each. I got about 67% of the questions right.

I made two discoveries, though:
1) Swinburne referred to Chapman as the "high priest of Homer." Keats wrote another poem about Chapman before he died--like nearly every other Romantic poet--at a ridiculously young age.
2) I am smrt.

To study:
- Greek mythology
- the Romantics, and who wrote about whom
- 20th-century Afro-American lit
- Donne
- transitive vs. intransitive verbs
- Samuel Johnson
- 18th-century novels (esp. Richardson, Fielding)

I have to wonder how germane this whole exercise is to the identification of suitable grad school applicants by admissions committees. Surely, after this exam is done, a good half of what I've memorized will drift away like so much dandelion fluff. Or, it will all be superceded by "margaritas = good" and the romantic plots of "Grey's Anatomy" in my pile of mental index cards, unless I someday read all these works in full, thereby settling them firmly into memory.

But I still want to do well. Of course.

In other news, Manfriend bought tickets to this summer's Pitchfork Music Festival! And Neko Case's new album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood! Damn, it's good. Really, really, really good. Thanks, Manfriend!

Unleashing my word-hoard

Today's reading was the uber-classic, Beowulf, which I have not quite finished. I first read this in an English Lit survey class the fall semester of my sophomore year, and didn't really take my time with it. Sixty pages of Danes and Geats gets shuffled to the bottom of the pile when you've got a lab report and a history paper due the next day and your English professor is never going to test you on your knowledge of Beowulf's martial prowess.

Other projects: A tasty dinner of "Arabian Spinach," featuring my favorite legume, the garbanzo.