Walking home from Vaughan's Lounge tonight, after an evening glass of wine. It's October, and fall is in the air; there's a coolness at morning and evening. People in New Orleans love Halloween, and houses are decorated with spooky trimmings, anticipating the festivities.
That's not the moon in the sky, it's a streetlight. Although the moon, a crescent tonight, might look similarly romantic.
We wander home, where dinner awaits, and school tomorrow.
3 comments:
On reading this I instantly thought of you, Auntie, because I really do fear for you as you enter that den of buffoons and poseurs who appear to constitute the 'academy' of literary studies. I should explain that 'Theodore Dalrymple' is the nom-de-plume of Anthony Daniels, a retired doctor and psychiatrist, and a regular and acerbic commentator 'over here' on the follies of the day:
"The medical profession used often to be twitted with the mortality of its own members: for if doctors knew so much, how came it that they died like everyone else?
I think a more interesting question is why people who study literature for a living write so badly. After all, death is a fundamental and inescapable condition of human existence; bad writing is not. It seem, however, to be almost an advantage nowadays in academic life, at least in the humanities, to write barbarously. Advancement is secure if you can veer between incomprehensibility and banality, while passing seamlessly through obvious error...
Academic literary study seems these days to be ninth-rate philosophy, or drunken verbiage without the alcohol. I'd rather listen to my local pub bore than to a paper entitled 'Open Ended Poetic Closure and the Digital Interface':'The aim of this paper is to read Plath's work through the lens of contemporary hermeneutic discourse concerning the autonomy of text and language, while situating it within recent developments in digital poetry and electronic means of experiencing literary texts.'
I have sometimes tried to write parodies of such language, but try as I might, clarity keeps breaking out. The habit of using language to convey meaning is too deeply ingrained in me now ever to be overcome. I am a dinosaur."
- Theodore Dalrymple, Second Opinion
David, I appreciate your comment. 1) I am not engaged in "literary study" - except as much as my program requires a certain amount of literature courses for the degree. I am in a writing program; the main goal is to write. Believe it or not, we aren't told how to write; it's more about creating a writing community and supporting one anothers' effort.
2) You say, "people who study literature for a living write so badly." Citation, please, or STFU. Some scholars write shitty, others don't. Unless you can provide a comprehensive analysis of the field, you are simply making an unfounded assertion.
3) I'm having a good time doing this. WTF is wrong with that? Stop harshing my buzz, dammit. You ought to visit New Orleans sometime, it would relax you and open up your eyes. Seriously, you need to get out there on St. Claude Avenue and shake your booty to some brass band music to dislodge that stick out of your ass.
Perhaps, Auntie, I should practice writing, too, because "people who study literature for a living write so badly" were the words of Mr. Dalrymple not me and I apologise if that was not clear. Even so, I think he offered an excellent example in the quoted words of, as it happens, Ms. Georgiana Banita (nope, me neither!) who appears to be a lecturer in American Studies at Bamberg University - for once I almost feel sorry for the Germans! As to your suggestion that I plod through reams of 'such stuff that nightmares are made of', please take pity. Anyway, it's you who is the student of literature, not me.
As for your beloved N'Orleans, alas, perhaps if you practiced writing about it rather than displaying all those photos which give away so much of the rather seedy truth, you might have convinced me. Also, it would have been good exercise for your writing skills. "Words, words, words" as that doomy Dane was wont to say!
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