April 18, 2004
If Only I Had an Inner Tube
I have been reading a bit of Virginia Woolf this evening. "What on earth could prompt you to such a foolish action?" Well, that's a good question, sorta. It was assigned for English Lit II.
Quite a depressing thing, really. Just before I started reading, I couldn't prevent myself from flipping forward through the remainder of the Norton Anthology to see what lay ahead . . . Names come popping out at me: James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, George Orwell, Samuel Beckett. None of them are on the syllabus, we haven't time for them, and that makes me a little sad. I hardly dare to . . . but I do anyway . . . turn backwards and look again at who we skipped over on our way here: Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling.
Oh, look. I'm shedding a tear.
Buck up, old chap. Time to read Woolf. So I do, starting with a brief biography . . . just a few key details about her life and times and so forth.
Oh, my.
Oh, my.
So that would be where that whole Orlando thing came from, then. Special. Well, let's see what she has to say for herself.
Ah, wonderful. My mind is already in the midst of its usual roiling turmoil (I'm not agitated, but there's so much to think about . . . random English Lit reading assignments are the least of my worries right now. In fact, they aren't a worry at all. They're rather fun. Clearly I should have more assignments like this. More classes like this. There isn't nearly enough required concentrated reading going on. Far too many random worksheets floating around. Anyway, I've never been the most linear thinker around, exactly. Nasty tendency to hijack my own trains, and I often wonder if I subconsciously set up my room in such a way that I could be constantly distracted by "shiny objects." But I digress . . .) and I have no idea now where I was going to end the pre-parentheses sentence anyway, so whether I digress or not is no longer important. Better jump to a new paragraph.
Oh, yes. In the midst of all the pleasant buzzing of my brain, I may or may not be able to focus on traditional prose or poetic writing at any given time. The question is simply this: How am I supposed to focus when the author's mind was apparently doing just what mine is whilst she wrote? But it's so much fun.
I feel like . . . well, I feel like there's a dense pea-souper and not much else between my ears right now (no comments from the Peanut Gallery . . . or the rest of the SC, either, please), but nevermind that. I feel like I'm lazily listening to myself think, or perhaps listening to a few of my friends converse in the special way they have . . . And it's really quite pleasant. I'd describe the sensation further for you, but I'd like to let the piece speak for itself.
It's quite short and it would be a reasonably pleasant read even if it did nothing but meander aimlessly, starting from nowhere and nothing and leading to the same destination . . . But don't be deceived! I hope that you, like me, will get at least a small chuckle out of the last line.
Have a little fun. If Literature were a water park, this would be its lazy river.
Or . . . ummm . . . something . . .
Posted by Jared at April 18, 2004 11:59 PM | TrackBack