The English Student Apologist.

Many students enter university wanting to study some thing in particular they had determined is worth spending four years exploring, but part way through decide to choose some other area of study they hadn't yet discovered until they had already entered. I think there was an episode of The Cosby Show about this, probably concerning Denise.

Anyway. Ignore the fact that I love the Huxtable's. What I want to focus on is that discovery of a new fascination.

I have always loved reading, and, though university English courses can get burdensome with that activity, there aren't many things I would rather do than sit around and talk about books with other people who enjoy sitting around and talking about books. My splitting decision, however, did arrive, though it took form in a desire to travel and wander rather than switch degree programs. I am, after all, a vagabond at heart. We know this. But today, while anchored in the library, I received a most freshening dose of literature that reinvigorated my convictions. I had to immediately share it with one whom I knew (assumed?) would also appreciate it. But I think I might document how beautifully blistering this is, a single page out of Michael Ondaatje's novel, Coming Through Slaughter:

You didn't know me for instance when I was with the Brewitts, without Nora. Three of us played cards all evening and then Jaelin would stay downstairs and Robin and I would go to bed, me with his wife. He would be alone and silent downstairs. Then eventually he would sit down and press into the teeth of the piano. His practice reached us upstairs, each note a finger on our flesh. The unheard tap of his calloused fingers and the muscle reaching into the machine and plucking the note, the sound travelling up the stairs and through the door, touching her on the shoulder. The music was his dance in the auditorium of enemies. But I loved him downstairs as much as she loved the man downstairs. God, to sit down and play, to tip it over into music! To remove the anger and stuff it down the piano fresh every night. He would wait for half an hour as dogs wait for masters to go to sleep before they move into the garbage of the kitchen. The music was so uncertain it was heartbreaking and beautiful. Coming through the walls. The lost anger at her or me or himself. Bullets of music delivered onto the bed we were on.

Everybody's love in the air.

--

This single page turned every recent thought about. Literature has the ability to make fictions more beautiful than reality. That feeling a book gives you, the way it cups around your heart, is one I don't suppose any textbook could ever give. As a result, my argument is not for Economics, but for English.

A good read

I recently finished reading The Educated Imagination, a series of lectures by Northrop Frye in which he asks what literature really is and answers what we ought to use it for--questions that tend to be taken for granted.

Frye is, in most circles, considered to be the most renowned literary critic of the 20th Century. He was a primary aid in shaping literary criticism as a discipline several decades ago, claiming that many literary critics perform while maintaining a use of ideology. The critical study of English literature is still a baby. Not like philosophy, which is another of my loves.

The reason I wanted to make mention of this book is because of its presentation. If its reader has the beginnings of an interest in studying literature, this book intuitively presents a method of criticism much more readable to most than some of the other pillar critics such as Jacques Derrida or Roland Barthes. So if you wish to learn about a view of the study of literature, you might want to look it up.

That being said, I have in my mind the idea that perhaps the discussion of literature is a dry topic to some readers. I'm studying English and Philosophy in school, however, so such topics are usually at the front of my mind, or near to it. But if you are yawning, I do apologize. You could always read Harry Potter.

Or, if you need a quick jump. Watch this amazingness:



Listening to:
Matthew Good - Hospital Music
Rebekah Higgs - Rebekah Higgs