Japandamonium!!!

I'm finally FINALLY done with our good Mr. Chaucer, but am not completely satisfied with my final product. I think that I may try to turn what I did here into the basis of an Honors project at Oberlin, but I'll have to talk to a few profs about it, see if i can get both approval and support. Nice to be finally god damn done though. So now onto my paper on Dylan, which I had thought was going to be the more intense of these two projects, but I gave more time to Chaucer than I was intending to and now my work on Dylan is going to have to suffer for it to keep me on schedule. Sacrifices, sacrifices. Hopefully by Sunday I will have Dylan and Sci-Fi out of the way, and i'l only be a day behind. Senate House opens up again tomorrow, and John and I expect to get there at 10:30 in the morning and work till 9:00 at night, with a lunchbreak. Hopefully I'll be able to step up my productivity once I'm there; it will be a better working environment, and the hours will be long. I've been finding it almost impossible to get anything done once I get home. I can have the best of intentions but there's always some other way I end up using my time; it's become so psychologically defeating that I've given it up altogether and just decided to work when it's worktime and relax when it's not. The long library hours give us a good amount of worktime though, so I think I'll be in good shape.

Getting that work done is HARD though. Even when I can stay good and focused, it's really god damn hard to produce good and thorough writing. I can't imagine how in god's name we do it back at Oberlin. Here I will apply myself for a full day's worth of worktime, and get out enough material that I can look at it the next day and see where it doesn't make sense, and correct or edit it. But this takes TIME! And I'm only working on ONE paper! At Oberlin I'll have seven hours of classes and meals and extracurriculars in a day, and I'm still supposed to be reading five hundred pages a week and writing a paper for every hundred of them. Our work, I am beginning to think, must really rather suck. Why do they want us to turn in work that sucks? It's beyond me.

Johnny Toz sent me a brilliant NYTimes article by Michael Chabon, who, if you have not heard of him, I will introduce to you as the most sensetive and gifted American writer since John Steinbeck (Steinbeck who if you don't like him, it's because you were forced to read Of Mice and Men when you were in High School and never read East of Eden, which you should not let wild horses stop you from reading, immediately). It's a wonderful article, please do yourself the favor of reading it.

Apparently it's not 4000 miles to Oberlin, but 3776 (or 3281 nautical miles), according to this "How Far Is It?" site. The confusing thing is that it gives both headings as "north" - is the direction that it's following over the North Pole?

Churchill says: "The empires of the future are the empires of the mind."