vangoghspillow

[vangoghspillow]

follow my studyblr.

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this blog is, in hindsight, fucking embarrassing 

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ok universe, i’m ready to feel good things. make me feel good things.

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Imagine, Queer Eye giving Lucifer a makeover…

Tan: Okay, obviously this man does not need me. We Brit’s have very good taste.

Bobby: I’ll say…look at this place? And the nightclub…Swanky.

Jonathon: LOOK AT HIS GORGEOUS HAIR. I JUST WANNA EAT HIM UP.

Tan: Seriously, what are we here for, exactly??

Antoni: So, Lucifer, what do you like to eat?

Lucifer: Oh, hm. I’ve got some avocado honey over there.

Antoni: Oh, awesome. What else?

Lucifer: …alcohol.

Everyone: …

Karamo: Lucifer, you seem pretty successful, what are some goals for yourself in the future?

Lucifer: Well to be perfectly honest I’ve recently come to the realization that I hate myself and am finding it hard to forgive myself for things I didn’t do and I put so much stock into what humanity as a whole thinks of me. There’s also the fact that I am completely, utterly in love and feel I cannot be with her because I have to protect her.

Jonathon: 911! ALL HANDS ON DECK! THIS IS NOT A DRILL PEOPLE, CHOP CHOP! SELF LOVE SELF LOVE SELF LOVE!

*fab 5 tackle Lucifer to the ground*

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Hades: babe what’s wrong?

Persephone, drunk, scratching two of cerberus’ heads, weeping: I don’t have enough hands

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Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction and Paul Fry's Yale lectures for what I assume to be his intro to theory class (on YouTube) were where I started in undergrad.

And I've heard the Oxford Very Short Introduction to Literary Theory by Jonathan Culler is good.

If you're in grad school (or maybe just an undergrad with a lot of time and dedication on their hands) and, after all that, still don't know which primary texts to start with, the Norton anthology is always a good home base.

*curtsies* Hi Duke, do you have any suggestions on where to start learning with literary theory? Any particular books to recommend for beginners? I had a literary theory class in undergrad but the professor was absolutely awful and I took nothing away from the class and it only made me absolutely despise theory so I'm looking to re-introduce myself to it.

*Curtsies* You and I have that in common, but give the literary theory tag a browse and lmk if I haven’t answered your question there.

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I lied I looked in the notes of that post and I’m gonna briefly climb on that hill: everyone out there claiming that academia uses too many weird terms or complicated words like. I’ve found two reasons for this:

what I’m reading is now so niche that the author is assuming the only people reading it are already knowledgeable in the subject (which, if I’m reading that particular text, I am, or I probably wouldn’t have even come across the text in the first place)

the larger words are used because there’s a lot of concepts and using that word would make the whole thing more succinct 

I’ve seen all kinds of other reasons claimed for this use of language, such as trying to deliberately keep poor people out of academia and not wanting to share their subject and instead making it overly complicated as a gatekeeping tactic and I just… don’t get it? I sincerely don’t, because never have I sat down with an academic textbook to have an easy read. I read it for pleasure as well as learning because I’m interested in the subject, but I’m often annotating the book, making notes, and…….. constantly looking up the dozens of words I don’t know in a dictionary. 

I’m not saying there’s nothing to critique about academia, but in terms of gatekeeping and classism I’d sooner point to the extortionate price of these books rather than the words they contain – especially now we all have easy access to Google and therefore the definition of every single word and concept we could possibly come across.

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[tries to crowd surf at a TED talk]

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Take your anxiety meds with Red Bull to create SLOWFAST, the hot new emotion teens are raving about!

SlowFast™: It Feels Incredibly Bad.

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Early Autumn fashion @ the Attic 

[vangoghspillow]

Look I came into this PhD program with a specialty I didn’t click with because I had a lot of people who reacted antagonistically to my interests because they were pretentious (and to be fair, a lot of the people who study what I do are pretentious about it--I equate pretension with insincerity) but listen. I’m starting a paper on Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Carson’s translation of Bakkhai and I am so exhilarated. I am planning on taking a class next semester just on Walter Benjamin (my bby) and the German Marxist Aesthetic in the 30s. I fucking love theory and I won’t apologize for it. Gimme those post-structuralists (even some of the structuralists tbh). Gimme semiotics. I am so happy I switched into doing something I truly enjoy rather than something I thought would make me seem less like a hipster in a mustache. But you know what? The Waste Land is a god damn miracle of literature. It truly is a masterpiece. This is a field I feel so passionately about that I will fight tooth and nail for a job. This is where I belong. And to sign off this really...ridiculously superfluous ranting (I hardly use this blog anymore at all) I will leave you all with two quotes: 

“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.“ - The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot 

“In the matter of poetry, everybody is trying to say the same thing. Your business and my business is with the commonplaces, helping one another to the world. Whether I understand what I am saying is not the important thing. The important thing is to be faithful to the event.” -Allen Grossman, Summa Lyrica. 

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listen, i’m not sure if it’s unethical to listen to gas pedal and deepthroat while grading my students’ assignments, but honestly after a long day it’s the only thing that can keep me upright.

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i have not legitimately had a crush on anyone in like years. and now i remember why. this is terrifying!

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Okay but they’re right

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a headline from the gay alternative no. 5, 1973