Damn you, Gertrude Stein.

The BBQ Pit
1

Yes, you. Take your Stanzas in Meditation and get the hell out of my life. Stop filling my impressionable young mind with this whatever-it-is. If I ever see another pronoun that’s not instantly flanked by dozens of colorful adjectives, nouns, adverbs and verbs and everything else that I can’t remember the last time I saw them, it’ll be entirely too soon. And if you go bringing that “or that which one which or” up in here, I’m gonna get my shotgun.

Yes, I’m laying the blame on you. Not me, who doesn’t give two bags of llama shit about poetry and would happily spend the rest of my life devouring novels without feeling I’m missing anything. Not me, who clearly doesn’t understand what the fuck “Write a short essay on how you can read Stein so as to take something from it” means, and hasn’t gone to ask the professor. Not me, who so far has written three lines of a skinny anorexic worm of type. Not me, who is posting on the SDMB rather than doing any actual work.

Besides, every time I write something that resembles poetry, even though I’ve never spent longer than half an hour on one, even though I clearly don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, even though I could be writing the Collected Anthology of Vogon Literature for all I know, it gets better feedback than the short stories I slave over, which inevitably get torn apart. No, I’m not bitter towards poetry.

So I blame Gertrude Stein. Yeah. If Stanzas in Meditation hadn’t existed, I wouldn’t be in this mess right now.

In resolution, after this semester ends:
-No more poetry.
-No more late nights agonizing about how I just haven’t found “the right way to read poetry.” THERE IS NO RIGHT WAY.
-And definitely no more mustachioed, jackbooted lesbians.

well, okay, I may make a few concessions. :stuck_out_tongue:

2

Nice rant.

I’m sitting here avoiding compiling an annotated bibliography on “American Exceptionalism as formed along the lines of Cooley’s Looking-glass self,” and believe me, I hear ya.

3

I’m supposed to be designing a web page for a fictional company. I’m, uh, doing research. Yeah, that’s it.

4

I’m meant to be writing an essay about how the characteristics of short-term capitalism have led to the ‘corrosion’ of valued human traits, ala, trust, committment and decent ethics.

I’d rather be here! Does that show an absence of ethics in itself?

5

Term papers on the grass, alas, alas.

6

Yeah, I remember when I almost flunked a lit. class because I could not write a paper on a book by Kathy Acker. Not “would not” or “forgot to,” COULD NOT write a paper on her book. It just made no sense. The book was less than two-hundred pages long, but I couldn’t find a handle on it, couldn’t think of a damn thing to say about it other than, “Why did you waste my time with this shit?”

Come to think of it, I should have turned that in. The prof. couldn’t give me less than zero, could he?

7

Yet another bored student posting…

In the next few weeks, I have to write:

  • a six-page paper on the social effects of the Black Death

  • a term paper about the epidemiology of fibromyalgia syndrome

  • a term paper about the role of infectious diseases in the Holocaust

  • a microbiology lab report

  • I have to study for:

  • six exams during finals week, and one the Friday before.
    Ack!