Love In The Asylum

Representative excerpt from my reading this week:

"To thee clepe I, thou goddesse of torment,
Thou cruel Furie, sorwing ever in peyne;
Help me, that am the sorwful instrument
That helpeth lovers, as I can, to pleyne!
For wel sit it, the sothe for to seyne,
A woful wight to han a drery fere,
And, to a sorwful tale, a sory chere."

HOW IS THIS ENGLISH. FUCK YOU GEOFFREY CHAUCER WHY CAN'T YOU SPELL.

(I have 1000 lines of this to read before I'm allowed to go to bed. On the bright side, I'm hearing it in my head in Paul Bettany's voice. So there is that to improve the evening.)

 So what was the best part of today?

Well, I got both my midterm papers back in my lit classes, and I did decently well on both of them - a B+ on the AmLit paper and an A- on the Victorian Lit paper. A little baffling since I thought the AmLit paper was much more strongly written, but hey, I'll take what I can get. And the second paper for my AmLit class is actually just a substantial revision of the first paper, so I'm reasonably sure I can get high marks on that. I also managed to survive 45 minutes worth of popcorn-style discussion in that class without revealing that I had not, in fact, read the book we were discussing (the bookstore was sold out, and the copy I ordered online hasn't come yet).

After dinner I went to Cubberly to hear Joyce Carol Oates read one of her short stories, which was pretty much awesome. She did a Q&A afterward, and she is both very interesting and very funny and personable. The story, about a woman who gets assaulted by a robber who breaks into her house, was good, if a little grim. And she talked a lot about her process as a writer, especially compelling since she has the kind of prolificacy that most of us only dream about (159 novels, plus short stories, reviews, and critical essays?). I felt like I should have been taking notes. I would have gone to the table after to buy one of her books if I wasn't feeling broke as hell right now.

But given both of those, the best part of my day was actually this: walking through the plaza and seeing written on the sidewalk in chalk the message "Nothing is Free." And next to it, in much smaller letters and someone else's handwriting, an arrow pointing to that and the words "The chalk was free." 

Saw this on somebody's flist, and it looked kind of fun...

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