life, death, and adrienne

Death of a diamond cutter, RIP Rich

I haven't been writing for a while because things have been somewhat less boring recently. And what, dare you ask, could be diverting me? A holiday to New York? (close) A new shiny internship? (closer) That's right, it's Exam Season! And I've got twenty days to do something about a mound of Greek/Roman/art/Chaucer-related exams that are about to come my way. Oh, joy.

But then I realised that Adrienne Rich had died and nobody had told me. Not even the newspapers or the old reliable Yahoo news.

Nope.

On the 27th of March 2012 everybody had more important things to think about than the death of one very influential feminist (yeuk, says everyone, what a dirty word), and National Book Award-winning poet. And it's not as if she isn't known over here. Far from it. Richy is even on the Leaving Cert course - and once you're on exam papers, well, you've really made it. That's when Caesar knew he really made it: when he made it on to every single one of the past papers of the exam I am about to do. Do being an overstatement. Crawl through is more like what'll be happening.

GO AWAY Chaucer... this is why I can't blog when I'm doing
 exams. Smarmy-looking poets on horses always find a way
 to interrupt

Anyway. Despite making it onto the Irish exam papers and doing her thesis on Yeats, there wasn't a sign of any announcement anywhere near me. There might have been in other parts of the world, but here: zilch. I have just read that the New York Times put her obituary on their front page: on the 28th of March the front page here was likely to be something about the Government or the Premier League.

The only way I finally found out was when someone was writing about her as their hero, and managed to mention that the eighty-two-year-old poet had snuffed it in California only a fortnight ago. And yet every day I'm told about Victoria Beckham trying on her clothes and thinking they're for 'everywoman'. How is that news? HOW? Oh, well. I guess that's why people have blogs. So they can write about something other than Victoria Beckham's fashion line. And yet here I am, wasting my blog talking about her. Oh, well.

monday knight madness

You know you've hit a low point in your life when you find yourself saying - actually saying, aloud, like talking - 'Mordred is king? Tch, I don't want Mordred to be king! What? Who wrote this? WHO WROTE THIS?'

Welcome to the bottom of the world. The pit, if you will, of doom.

That's the kind of thing I'm saying to myself at 7 o'clock on a Monday night while other people are getting ready to go out, get the shift, get moving, get pizza, or get something. The only thing I'm getting is annoyed because some 15th century dude made Mordred king while Arthur was in France. And then he let him take over and ruin everything. Well, he let the people let him take over. It's a long story.
(Should've said Spoiler Alert there really - sorry for ruining all those surprises.)

The worst part is, I don't even hate Mordred that much. Why am I talking to myself about something I don't even care about? The only reason I even know who he is is because I've got a tutorial on the Death of Arthur in two days. I'm not into the fantasy genre. The only thing I knew about Guinevere before I read it was that her name sounded sort of like Genevieve, and Keira Knightley played her in that crap Clive Owen version. Before last week Mordred wasn't even a thing.

... so that's what was happening in Camelot when Mordred took over

dr seuss and the art of being un-bored

If only lectures were like this

When I'm not reading books about green knights that say things like 'bi bonnken', or books about people who don't have phones (that's the 18th century for you!), or books about rampaging Macedonians, I'm absorbing college life. And by absorbing I mean sleeping on the couch to the backdrop of Sky News.

All that aside, in my dozy states I've developed a sort of passion for Dr Seuss. First of all,  I'm a girl who understands the meaning of boredom. Well, I like to think I do. Seriously, after an hour in a lecture where the only word you understood was 'neutrally', boredom doesn't even come into it. Boredom is a dodgy pub that you passed 40 miles ago, and you're on the way to becoming an Actual Dead Person, killed by the boredom of your own degree.

Anyway. That has little to do with the supposed topic of this blog post, Mr Dr Seuss. Here is a man who made worlds that were so un-boring it was impossible to be, well, bored. Fluffy trees with fluffier creatures hanging out of them, trying to sleep. Foxes wearing soxes. Jungles of Nool. Landscapes that curved and held no straight lines. Boredom didn't come into it.

life goals: part one

Right. Let’s get this thing started.
Life Goals:
1 getting it started (see above)
2 getting it done
3 getting it done without getting metaphorically/literally Smushed by something/one.

HOW TO ACHIEVE SAID ‘LIFE GOALS’:

1. Getting It Started.
A vital step in the process of doing Anything.
You see, I find that some people think they have it all sorted. They think they have, if you will, the Fox in the Bag. The course. The job. The girl. The guy. The praise. The glory.
These people are all wrong. You see, the key to having it all sorted, to having, excuse the gesture, the Book on the Shelf, is this: Doing by Undoing.
If you are like me, you have this proverbial Car in the Garage due to an overwhelming ability to be lazy and to also get it done.
Watch and learn...

punctuation lessons

... another Important Thing

Thought punctuation was all about the commas and apostrophes? Think again. As I discovered today, there is a whole other world of punctuation out there that I was horrifically unaware of. The shame! THE SHAME! Oh, it’s horrible, it’s horrible. Not knowing this kind of USEFUL information meant that I would be more suited to giving tours of Machu Piccu than ‘reading’ English. When I lived in those dark times of Not Knowing How To Put A Line Into My Essay, I would have been better at pointing out historical archaeological details about a place that I had never been to than sitting down reading something that had been written in the 1700s by some guy with five slaves and 300 acres. Without even considering the question, To Put In Inverted Commas or Not To Put In Inverted Commas, I was blind to the real study of English. The Real Stuff.

But, all jokes aside, seriously.
Seriously. One day in front of the television and I’d learn what the weather was like in Turin. One day in an English class and I learn that when you use the dash (‘The Hyphen’), you must leave a space either side so that the lecturer correcting your essay won’t have an actual stroke. It transforms this sentence of made-up words that my lecturer likes to pontificate with, from this

Neutrally explicified-

To this:

Neutrally explicified –

I know. Totally different, right?

the questionable land of punctuation marks