Second Week and Sonnets

Hello again, faithful readers. It is second week for me here in the land of crumpets, and I've already turned in a paper and given a presentation...we waste no time here at Oxford.

19thc. etching of the Lower Camera, where I spent my week.

So I spent most of the rest of last week rather uneventfully in the library reading up for the paper I had due on Monday in my sonnet course. I actually picked this week to go for two reasons, 1) so that I could get it out of the way before B-Course presentations, and 2) because the topic was "Monuments and Frames," and I thought, how hard can that be? I've had monuments, death, and immortality floating around in my mind anyway for a little bit since I'm working on stuff like that for my dissertation, so it seemed like it would be easy. Yeah. Then I did the reading.

It looks like this now though.

Apparently our professor is all about literary theory, which is horrible for me, because I hate theory. All the secondary readings she assigned us were full of lit-crit/psycho-babble that went way over my head...which of course was a problem for me, since I needed to be able to talk about some of them intelligently in a paper and presentation. Seriously, I cannot express how horrible these readings were. And, to add insult to injury, only ONE of them was even explicitly about sonnets. What the heck? Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about here:

"When an object speaks in riddles, it reveals its true 'substance.' That is to say, the innate obscurity of matter in the history of physics, like the inscrutability of things in lyrics poetry, betrays the inescapable role of language in depicting nonempirical qualities--the invisible aspect--of material phenomena."

WAT. So I thought I would have better luck with the primary sources, but they were basically a bust too for "monumental" topics. On the other hand, I was introduced to a new woman writer who I think I could grow to hate almost as much as I hate Margery Kempe. I don't know if any of you are familiar with the work of Anne Bradstreet, but if you don't want to be slowly bored to death, I recommend you stay as far away as possible from her poetry. I was subjected to some of her "sonnets" within the last week and I have to confess I've never seen more unremarkable sonneteering in my life. Here's one her poems:

If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were lov'd by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me ye women if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole Mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that Rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee, give recompence.
Thy love is such I can no way repay,
The heavens reward thee manifold I pray.
Then while we live, in love let's so persever,
That when we live no more, we may live ever.

I'm sorry, but being a Puritan housewife in seventeenth century Massachusetts still does not excuse trite couplets and uninspired imagery. Needless to say, my paper ended up being a thinly-veiled hate letter to Anne Bradstreet. Luckily my professor isn't too terribly attached to her, so I got away with it in my presentation on Monday by framing my hate as questions about her writing style. Mission accomplished.

More Izaya, courtesy of Pixiv.

So preparing for this and sort of reading for my B-Course pretty much occupied most of my week, although the monotony was briefly punctuated by Anime Soc on Friday with Meagan, where I got my weekly Izaya fix and discussed Madoka Magica and Level E (still my new favorite show) with my fellow geeks. I also, most unfortunately for my free time, discovered Pixiv this week, which is an online community for artists like deviantART, but better and in Japanese. It is also an even bigger time-sink than tvtropes [warning: if you click that link, you may be stuck for the rest of the day, so clear your calendar], since it's easy to spend hours looking at pretty pictures and following the image tags from search to search. Like when you go on Wikipedia to look up Tunisia and 2 hours and 200 hotlinks later are reading about the wild haggis.  In spite of this, I did in fact get my paper/presentation in on time, but I should probably quit before I become permanently addicted like I already am to 4chan, which, incidentally, is arguably the scariest place on the internets.

Yep, that's the library again. Starting to see a pattern, are we?

Looks like I'm going to spend the rest of the week in the library again; three of my classmates gave excellent B-Course presentations this morning and I still haven't figured out how to call up an manuscript to the Special Collections Reading Room (luckily my presentation isn't until fifth week). I seriously need to make friends with some early printed books in the near future so that I will have something to say/write a 5,000 word essay on by end of term. I also need to get back to work on my dissertation...I haven't heard anything from my supervisor yet so I'm kind of going to hope he forgot about me for a little while longer since I haven't prepared anything yet. In fact, I think I might go look up some books in the library catalog right now; just writing about it is stressing me out. Until next week, devoted followers!

Adios,
KQ

More Pixiv art; you guys should be used to seeing Star Driver by now.