4 Days: In Which I Talk about Reading All Day

Four days left in my undergraduate career, guys.

What a beautiful tower that is!

Yesterday, I spoke for a while about the past, about my relationship with UT, about how I was doing a lot of thinking... I didn't spend much of today being quite as pensive. If my life were a movie, today would warrant nothing more than an amusing montage of me changing my position on my couch every hour or so while I read.


Two of my three classes were cancelled today. Well, they weren't "cancelled" - my professors announced that we weren't meeting formally and that today was a reading day. This is professor-speak for 'cancelled', of course, but apparently straight up canceling class is frowned upon these days. Instead, they encourage us to take the time to meet with them, the TAs, or study for our exams later this week.

I took the opportunity of uninterrupted freedom to finish reading The Collector (John Fowles) and After Leaving Mr MacKenzie (Jean Rhys) for my 20th Century British Novel class. One was creepy, one was rather depressing; both were quick reads. However, as fast a reader as I am, wading through 400 or so pages still takes a while. It was something like 6 or 7 hours, probably. (I think I read between 50-60 pages an hour these days.)

I worried a little over the weekend about finishing these books, but obviously not too worried, otherwise I guess I might have done something about it. I knew that it would require some time and not too much energy to read them, but I was so preoccupied over the weekend about working on my Victorian Lit paper.

Whenever I am stressed and worried, I think about Pride and Prejudice. No surprises, it has been occupying my mind the last few days. To me, the book represents everything that I love about being a book-lover: a reliable, well-told story that I can go back to anytime I want to, with wonderful characters and an ending that I can sigh over. All afternoon, while I was reading about kidnapping murderers (Collector) and borderline alcoholism (MacKenzie) I was thinking of Lizzie Bennet and Mr Darcy. I was thinking of balls at Netherfield, grand country homes, music, and how much I would love to sink into Austen's prose... thinking that I'd even settle for the movie, if only I could be swept away for just a little while.

It is fanciful, easy, to drift off in thought into the quaint English countryside, and all afternoon I resolutely stared at the books I was supposed to read. "For the last time, school has to come first," I have been telling myself.

If yesterday was reminiscent, today is wistful. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

5 Days: The 5 Stages of Mourning and Dickens

I thought I might count down the last few days of my undergraduate life, record my thoughts... perhaps engage in a little ranting. (Just a little, I promise.)

A keychain tassel hanging from my rear view mirror... just to remind me.

5 more days until my undergraduate career at The University of Texas at Austin is over. (If you count Friday as 0, Thursday as 1, etc., etc.)

I've been thinking a lot today about the past, specifically, about four years ago now, when I was about to get onstage for my last time in the senior play, and thinking how much I really didn't like the play that much, and how I was really excited that I was almost through working at Macy's, and how ugh if I could just get through, like, two more weeks of stupid high school classes and drama that I would be able to just push it all behind me and move forward. High school was totally dragging me down, man.

I realized then that I had accepted the end of my career as a high school student at St Michael's.

Tonight was a little alumni dinner for St Michael's students, and aside from the people who had brought their kids, I was the youngest alumnus there. I was in good company, though, because my friend and her fiance (Class of 2006 and 2005 respectively) were there, and I was happy that I wasn't the only young'un (as Class of 2008). I had a delightful time, and it was wonderful to have a free dinner and get to meet new people.

-----

I think I'm mourning my relationship with UT.

The five stages of mourning:

1) Denial and Isolation: Me, circa February: "May is, like, really far away. I don't even know what day I'm graduating, anyway. It's sometime in May, though, right?"

2) Anger: Me, circa late March: "I am just so DONE with this. Why the hell do I even have to do any of this? God, I am so close that I can taste it but I have to do so much work between now and then I can't even stand it!

3) Bargaining: Me, circa four weeks ago: "But I can always go to grad school, right? This doesn't have to end, right??

4) Depression: Me, circa the last two weeks: "I am never getting a job. I don't want to grow up. Who the hell even thought that college was a good idea? Who is the idiot who let me do this?!"

5) Acceptance: Me, circa ??? "...It might actually be fun out there in the real world."

Am I actually at the acceptance part? Am I stuck in limbo between Bargaining and Depression? Have I even left Bargaining yet? Is it possible to slide between the two, because I've been volleying back and forth between the last three for a few weeks.

I might be at the Acceptance part, mostly because I want to get on with reading books that I want to read, not that school tells me to read.

In any case, I would like to take this opportunity to invoke Dickens, because although I'm pretty sure he's applicable in every situation, he is especially applicable in this one:

"And now those six days which were to have run out so slowly, had run out fast and were gone, and to-morrow looked me in the face more steadily than I could look at it." (Great Expectations, Ch 19)

I can't stop thinking about that quote. 

"Well this morning, and bathed. The day divine."

The title of this blog is an excerpt from George Eliot's diary. I love that not having a headache and having a bath make the day divine.

George Eliot, if you're not familiar, is the pseudonym of the 19th century woman Marian Evans (or Mary Anne, or Mary Ann... because the woman seriously changed her name all the time.)

I'm in the middle of researching and writing a paper about 19th century women who wrote under male pseudonyms, and the three I'm focusing on are Marian Evans (George Eliot), Charlotte Bronte (Currer Bell), and Olive Schreiner (Ralph Iron). Setting out, I didn't think I would have as much fun as I have the last few weeks, but it's been rather delightful delving into books, biographies, and letters. Of course it's not nearly as much fun as writing a paper about Elvish, but 19th century fiction is a close second for me in terms of literary taste!

The paper itself isn't too much, really: 12-15 pages. While I used to have trouble reaching that limit, I find I'm having trouble confining myself to it. I think I might have done too much research. I'm 13 pages in at the moment and I haven't written an introduction, have barely touched the conclusion, but have five solid middle sections about the three women, the state of the novel at the time, and a brief history of pseudonyms. The thing is, none of those sections are quite finished yet... do you think my professor will give me a page limit extension?

While I've been researching, I've been learning a great deal of things about pseudonyms and my authors. Here are a couple things I hope you find interesting, too!

-"Anonym" is totally a word! Which make sense, of course, given that "pseudonym" is also a word, but I don't think I've ever heard it used. It's always "This is an anonymous work" or "Published anonymously".

-Upon showing her father her wildly popular novel Jane Eyre (which was devoured by the literary public in both England and America - and apparently even Queen Victoria read it), Charlotte Bronte's father read it, called her sisters (also published authors) into the room and said (and here I will paraphrase) "Do you girls know that your sister wrote a novel and it actually doesn't suck?"

-19th century newspapers had gossip columns about "Literary and Art Gossip". Let's go back to that and leave "lose fifteen pounds in fifteen minutes!"and "did someone who we don't care about cheat on another person we don't care about?" columns behind!

-Some writers have employed upwards of 100 pseudonyms (here I am thinking about Kierkegaard and Voltaire).

-There are dictionaries about pseudonyms! As in, you look up a name and it tells you who it was! And there's a whole SHELF of them in one of the UT libraries! (Guess who had a field day in the dictionary section the other day!)

-Stephen King used the pseudonym "Richard Bachman" for a while in the late 1970s. He was found out in 1985 by a nosy reporter, and later issued a notice of Bachman's death from "cancer of the pseudonym". King then dedicated The Dark Half (apparently about a pen name that assumes a sinister life of its own) in 1989 to "the late Richard Bachman".

Tomorrow I have to bring a rough draft of the paper to class, and I hope I'll get a chance to talk to my professor about it, because I worry about these things. I've put so much effort into it so far, and if he tells me I have to scrap it and start over I might not survive the next week!

Something fun I will do when I have to turn it in next Friday is turn in the paper pseudonymously. Because, come on - You can't write a paper about pseudonyms without using one yourself! I have borrowed some names for this purpose. While of course my real name will be on the paper (the last thing I want is to not receive credit for it!) the title page will read:

The Nineteenth Century Nom de Plume: An Exploration of Women and their Pseudonyms

By Alex L. Ross 

"Alex" is a nod to my darling brother, whose middle name is Alexander. 

"L" is for "Lee", a middle name my mother's family is particularly fond of.

and 

"Ross" is the last name of one of my characters in the story I'm writing. I'm particularly attached to her, so I hope she doesn't mind if I borrow it for a while. :)

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Expect a really sappy blog to come in the next week or so, in which I will lament (and celebrate) my LAST WEEK OF UNDERGRADUATE STUDY.

Wonderful!!

So I've had some pretty awesome news I've been sitting on recently.

A while ago, I submitted the paper I wrote last semester to LAUNCH, an undergraduate journal at UT, in the hopes that maybe something would come out of it. I wasn't too worried about it, because although I was proud of it, honestly where does a paper about Tolkien and the etymology of Elvish belong in an undergraduate journal? I'd guess it belonged better in a... well... I don't know where. A Tolkien Fanatic magazine or something.

They contacted me recently and said that they had decided to include it in the journal... which is... just...

I don't have enough words for it. So I'll use memes.

Attack this with wholehearted vengeance!

Yeah, big balla. 

The most interesting man in the world thinks I'm legit, guys!

Peeta will make ALL the bread references!

Suspicious Fry has every right to be suspicious.

OKAY, ENOUGH.

(Memes courtesy of memegenerator.net... where I happily just spent the last half hour thinking of fun things to make into memes!)

Iraqi Poetry Kickstarter

So y'all know that I've been interning at a publishing company in my spare time (HAH) this semester. Well, we've established a Kickstarter project to try and acquire funding to publish a book of Iraqi poetry by Soheil Najm, Ishtar's Songs: Iraqi Poetry Since the 1970s.

If you are unfamiliar with Kickstarter.com, it is a website that allows the consumer to choose what projects are funded. They focus on creative projects, and if the project isn't fully funded in the allotted time, no money exchanges hands. It's kind of a win-win situation.

If you are interested in backing the project or learning more, please go here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1915595067/iraqi-poetry-translated-art

If you back $50, you'll get a wildly enthusiastic email sent from me, the student intern, so says the rewards!

...If you back $2500, we'll publish your book. Not that I'm telling you to do so, of course, because to my knowledge none of you really have books you'd like to publish... but it's there. Waiting. Just for you.

If you are interested in learning more about the press, please go here: http://plainviewpress.net/