Odd topics for articles

Writing articles and conference papers may be my only outlet for really strange (or silly) paper ideas:

• Comets and Astronomical allusions, Defoe, Lady Mary, and the GM
  
• Horses, William of Orange, the Irish, and Swift
  
• Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Akerman's Jeanne Diehlman, bodies, and resignation
• Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and George Eliot, early cinema adaptations, realism, and 19C visual media
• Amanuenses as objects or subjects???
  
• ...

I will keep updating this list... None of you anonymous and random readers better steal my embryonic ideas! They're my babies!!!

Martinus Scriblerus is a no-no

I just finished rereading Martinus Scriblerus and realized that there is no way I can write an entire chapter on just that alone. This is rather funny, but I thought the text was much heftier because I read it on ECCO in its original, first edition format. I thought the text was at least 150 pages, but it's no more than 70 or so. Ha.

I did rethink the idea of rereading... I am considering a way to expand it into rereading, recreating, and rewriting. I could then examine new editions, sequels, and the 18C fan fiction... This would actually work well with my interests in adaptations and the theoretical spaces created through practices of re-creation.

Hmm... something to mull over after I finish my last course...

Some general texts I'm keeping in mind:

• The Dunciad
• Gulliver's Travels
• Robinson Crusoe
• Moll Flanders
• Roxana
• Pamela
• Shamela
• Joseph Andrews
• Anti-Pamela
• Clarissa
  

Back to Square 1

Remember that show on PBS? Wow. That was when math was not only cool but totally do-able.

Anyway, I met with my actual adviser, who happened to be in town this week. Looks like I'm going back to the partial drawing board. My current idea was too narrow. He kindly stated that he could see it work as an article but not as a dissertation topic.

However, I think I want to stick with the concept of rereading practices. So, I need to find out ways to broaden the idea and limit it to choose specific texts.

Things I will be looking for after this semester is over:

• Prefaces
• Epilogues
• Advertisements
• Changes in Editions
• Sequels by the same author and other authors (the fanfic!)
• Marginalia and annotations
• Literary Criticism
  
• Whether I wish to examine satires, dramas, novels, etc.
• Secondary criticism
• A notion of how my argument will progress through the texts I am using
• What I found joyful about studying specific 18C texts... maybe this will give me a clue about what I should write on.

I also should find out about my new teaching appt for next semester. The fun never stops!

Some questions I am thinking about:

• How do authors engage their readers into a practice of rereading?
• How do authors reread their own texts?
• In what way does an author address his reader? Does this truly reflect the common response to a text?
  
• What does it mean to engage with a text through writing your own sequel and/or annotation?
• Are the ways we read and reread different when we approach different genres? Why or why not?
  

Other suggested authors

My sortadviser recommended Smollett and Manly in lieu of Austen. I have read Humphry Clinker, but not a few of his others (Roderick Random, Peregrin Pickle). I've never read Manly. I've heard she's quite a kick in the pants...

I suppose that the time is right to get back into the 18C soon. I just need to finish up these minor courses...And they are slowly eating at my soul. It's not that I don't enjoy their subject matter -- I just don't enjoy them now.


More to come when the semester finally ends. My last semester of graduate-level courses.... Woo!

My primary texts (so far)

Here are the texts I am considering for my dissertation:

• Martinus Scriblerus
• Tale of a Tub
• The Female Quixote
• Northanger Abbey

I also considered Tristram Shandy and The Man of Feeling, but those two are a bit problematic when it comes to defining them as satires. They also happen to be the craziest reader-oriented texts I can think of. Oh well.

I'm sure that many, many more minor texts will be addressed along the way, but these texts will spearhead my chapters. I think that Northanger or Tale of a Tub will be my job talk chapters... More than likely Tale of a Tub... How many times do I need to present on Northanger to call it "all good"? Seriously. I think I've presented on NA about 3 times already.

Is Tale of a Tub well-known for people outside of the 18C? Maybe I should ask for your opinions. Have any of you ever heard of Jonathan Swift's Tale of a Tub? If you're in this MA program, you had to read for your masters exam... Anyone else?

The real adviser responds

This week has been revelatory for me. I received immediate responses from my director/adviser which were both positive and critical. My adviser has the strongest moral character I've ever encountered in a person. It's as though he is the reincarnation of Johnson, dare I say it...

I need to sit down at this point to reread all of my primary texts. I think that I can do a great deal of this work during the winter break. Or at least after I complete the papers for my minor courses. I also need to accumulate secondary and critical material for my project. In the end, I think I may have 4 stacks of texts to read: primary/18C sources, sources on reading theory, sources on satire, and sources on the practice of reception theory.

According to my adviser, I still need to hone in and "conceptualize" my project. I'm just grateful that my project has a slight thumbs up instead of an outright thumbs down. Yay!

Well, well, well

So, I just submitted 3 double spaced pages to my sortadvisor. I call this person my sortadvisor because this person isn't exactly my advisor but is doing the job of one anyway.

At any rate, I don't think I'm quite ready to develop my prospectus yet... I still have a lot of reading to do, and I don't have much time to do it in this semester. Sure, I'm currently goofing off, relaxing at home, instead of working myself silly. But, after what happened to me last week, I don't think I can handle being stressed 100% of the time. It sucks.

My current interests are studying the figure of the reader and the practices of rereading in eighteenth-century satire. I've come to the conclusion that I actually enjoy reading satire. I love it. I thought I loved the novel more, but I don't. Satire is just so much more interesting. Who knew? I didn't realize my love for satire until after my prelims. I guess I just learned what prelims are truly good for...

Post Prelims blahs and the start of a new trend

So, it's been several months since my dreaded prelims, and I'm now starting work on my dissertation prospectus (aka proposal). The proposal for our program is a vague bit of writing. It needs to say what you want to write, but it doesn't resemble anything that you will actually produce. All in all, it's a way to show what you're about to learn to a bunch of people who think you should have learned these things by now.

A bit frustrating, no?

So, onward and upward, as they say. I will post more and more as I continue to toil for this illustrious prize known as the Ph.D.

I passed!!!

I passed!!! WOO-HOO!!!

Robert Burns is hot!!!

No wonder he fathered so many bastard children. Woo-hoo!

Poor William Cowper

He was terrified of public speaking, but he ended up a lawyer. Before an important public examination, Cowper did some fairly rash things (per John D. Baird):

Seeking temporary relief, Cowper spent a late summer holiday with Ashley Cowper and his family at Margate, only to suffer a disastrous failure of nerve. Convinced that his dearest hopes were allowed him only to be dashed, he could not bring himself to propose marriage to Theadora when the opportunity was given him. When he returned to London the sense of doom returned, and he began to think of escape. At first he hoped to go mad, but as the dreaded date early in December drew nearer the more certainly effective release of suicide recommended itself. About a week before the examination he bought a half-ounce of laudanum. Unable to swallow the fatal dose, he prepared for flight to France, then decided to drown himself, then attempted to stab himself with his penknife (the blade broke), and finally hanged himself with a garter which snapped just as he lost consciousness. He collapsed in his bed, where Thurlow found him in a state which thirty years later that coarse spirit could not recall without emotion. The clerkship and Theadora were lost forever.

Man. That has to suck.

Odds and Ends

Although many folks thought Edmund Burke was a genius (which he was), his nickname at Parliament was "Dinner Bell" because people would leave the moment he rose to speak.

Here's to you, Dinner Bell!

Oliver Goldsmith was often drunk. Once, he was so drunk that he mistook a gentleman's home for an inn... Thus, the beginnings of She Stoops to Conquer.

Here's to you, drunk guy!

William Cowper owned three pet bunnies named Puss, Tiney and Bess.

Literary Criticism and Aesthetics

This is mainly a note to myself, but if I were to write up a syllabus for a course on 18C aesthetics and literary criticism, I would include (so far):

• Aristotle's Poetics
• Longinus On the Sublime
• D'Avenant's Preface to Gondibert and Hobbes's response
• Howard's Preface to Four New Plays
• Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy and Heads of an Answer to Rymer
  
• Buckingham's The Rehearsal
• Rymer's Tragedies of the Last Age Consider'd
• Temple's Essay on the Gardens of Epicurus or Ancient and Modern Learning
• Pope
• Dennis' The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry and his critique of Pope's Rape of the Lock
• Addison and Steele's The Spectator (selections)
• Hume's Essays On Tragedy and The Standard of Taste
• Fielding's critique of Richardson and character in theatre
• Richardson's last chapter of Clarissa
  
• Akenside's Pleasure of the Imagination
• Johnson
• Burke's Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful
• Barbauld

Coolio. Back to reading...

18th Century Cat Lovers Unite!

The eighteenth century is rife with cat lovers. There's Christopher Smart and Samuel Johnson, to name a few...
Thomas Gray also loved his cat. Unfortunately it died in a tragic fish bowl accident. He wrote a fantastic poem about her death:

Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes

Twas on a lofty vase's side,
Where China's gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima, reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.

Her conscious tail her joy declared;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,
She saw; and purred applause.

Still had she gazed; but 'midst the tide
Two angel forms were seen to glide,
The genii of the stream:
Their scaly armor's Tyrian hue
Through richest purple to the view
Betrayed a golden gleam.

The hapless nymph with wonder saw:
A whisker first and then a claw,
With many an ardent wish,
She stretched in vain to reach the prize.
What female heart can gold despise?
What cat's averse to fish?

Presumptuous maid! with looks intent
Again she stretched, again she bent,
Nor knew the gulf between.
(Malignant Fate sat by and smiled)
The slippery verge her feet beguiled,
She tumbled headlong in.

Eight times emerging from the flood
She mewed to every watery god,
Some speedy aid to send.
No dolphin came, no Nereid stirred;
Nor cruel Tom, nor Susan heard;
A favorite has no friend!

From hence, ye beauties, undeceived,
Know, one false step is ne'er retrieved,
And be with caution bold.
Not all that tempts your wandering eyes
And heedless hearts, is lawful prize;
Nor all that glisters, gold.

What a way to die

I'm often surprised by what biographers say, but James Sambrook is well-known for his reputed biography on James Thomson. So, it comes as a shock to see what Thomson's contemporaries said about his father's death:

In autumn 1715 Thomson entered the College of Edinburgh. On 9 February 1716 his father died, probably of an apoplectic stroke, though local legend said he was struck by a ball of fire while carrying out an exorcism.

WTF? A satanic fireball? That's fucking awesome.

Aside from this, Sambrook also shares other interesting tidbits about Thomson:

Thomson was a keen and practised drinker.

His indolence was well known. It was said that, at Eastbury, he ate the ripe side of peaches hanging on the tree, without taking his hands from his pockets. Also that, at home in Richmond, he was found in bed one day at 2 p.m. by Charles Burney, the musicologist, who asked him why he was in bed at that hour and received the reply: ‘I had no motive to rise’

Little is known about Elizabeth Young. It seems that she was red-haired, and that, like Thomson, she spoke with a broad Scots brogue. Further testimony is contradictory: she is described on the one hand as a quick-tempered, harsh-tongued tomboy, on the other as a gentle-mannered, elegant-minded woman. There is general agreement, though, that her mother (the widow of a naval captain) was a coarse, vulgar woman, and that she opposed the match because Thomson's financial prospects were uncertain. Reportedly, she said to her daughter, ‘What! would you marry Thomson? He will make ballads and you will sing them’

It seems that the wake was as drunken as Thomson could have wished (see his Seasons, ‘Autumn’, 565–9) , for it is said that an unidentified clergyman ‘boasted, that at a supper after Thomson's funeral, he left Quin drunk under the table, whilst he was able to walk home’

Again. Fucking awesome. That's all there is to say.

Stop rhyming I mean it -- Anybody want a peanut?

This isn't really about rhyming per se, but it is about the popularity of the heroic couplet in the Eighteenth-Century. Here's a list of pro-heroic coupleters:

• Dryden (in poetry and drama, baby!)
  
• Denham's Cooper's Hill
• Pope
• Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes
• Goldsmith's The Deserted Village
• Chaucer (he's not 18C, but he's the enabler)

Now, people who don't like the heroic couplet in epic poetry:

• Matthew Prior

He claims he doesn't like it, yet it seems like he uses it... I'm probably wrong about this, but...

• rhyming couplet
• epic poetry
• iambic pentameter (the jury is still out on the iambic)
  

Hmmm...

PS- Okay, so I suppose that Prior's lines are enjambed instead of closed... but seriously, he's THIS close to being a heroic coupleter, it hurts!

Ouch!

Here's another interesting historical bitch slap. Nicholas Rowe, a loyal whig, tried to apply for a job with Oxford, a loyal Tory:

Oxford advised him to study Spanish, which Rowe did, in expectation of a possible foreign posting, only to be told by Oxford, when he reported his mastery of the language, ‘Then, Sir, I envy you the pleasure of reading “Don Quixote” in the original’.

Damn. That's gotta hurt.

The Introduction by Anne Finch

I really enjoyed reading this poem, so I'm sharing it with you:

Did I, my lines intend for publick view,
How many censures, wou'd their faults persue,
Some wou'd, because such words they do affect,
Cry they're insipid, empty, uncorrect.
And many, have attain'd, dull and untaught
The name of Witt, only by finding fault.
True judges, might condemn their want of witt,
And all might say, they're by a Woman writt.
Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,
Such an intruder on the rights of men,
Such a presumptuous Creature, is esteem'd,
The fault, can by no vertue be redeem'd.
They tell us, we mistake our sex and way;
Good breeding, fassion, dancing, dressing, play
Are the accomplishments we shou'd desire;
To write, or read, or think, or to enquire
Wou'd cloud our beauty, and exaust our time;
And interrupt the Conquests of our prime;
Whilst the dull mannage, of a servile house
Is held by some, our outmost art, and use.
Sure 'twas not ever thus, nor are we told
Fables, of Women that excell'd of old;
To whom, by the diffusive hand of Heaven
Some share of witt, and poetry was given.
On that glad day, on which the Ark return'd,
The holy pledge, for which the Land had mourn'd,
The joyfull Tribes, attend itt on the way,
The Levites do the sacred Charge convey,
Whilst various Instruments, before itt play;
Here, holy Virgins in the Concert joyn,
The louder notes, to soften, and refine,
And with alternate verse, compleat the Hymn Devine.
Loe! the yong Poet, after Gods own heart,
By Him inspired, and taught the Muses Art,
Return'd from Conquest, a bright Chorus meets,
That sing his slayn ten thousand in the streets.
In such loud numbers they his acts declare,
Proclaim the wonders, of his early war,
That Saul upon the vast applause does frown,
And feels, itts mighty thunder shake the Crown.
What, can the threat'n'd Judgment now prolong?
Half of the Kingdom is already gone;
The fairest half, whose influence guides the rest,
Have David's Empire, o're their hearts confess't.
A Woman here, leads fainting Israel on,
She fights, she wins, she tryumphs with a song,
Devout, Majestick, for the subject fitt,
And far above her arms, exalts her witt,
Then, to the peacefull, shady Palm withdraws,
And rules the rescu'd Nation with her Laws.
How are we fal'n, fal'n by mistaken rules?
And Education's, more than Nature's fools,
Debarr'd from all improve-ments of the mind,
And to be dull, expected and dessigned;
And if some one, would Soar above the rest,
With warmer fancy, and ambition press't,
So strong, th' opposing faction still appears,
The hopes to thrive, can ne're outweigh the fears,
Be caution'd then my Muse, and still retir'd;
Nor be dispis'd, aiming to be admir'd;
Conscious of wants, still with contracted wing,
To some few freinds, and to thy sorrows sing;
For groves of Lawrell, thou wert never meant;
Be dark enough thy shades, and be thou there content.

One more for the pro-prosers...

Joseph Addison discusses how blank verse is ideal for Tragedy because it is often heard in normal English discourse. He then states,

I am therefore very much offended when I see a Play in Rhyme; which is as absurd in English, as a tragedy of Hexameters would have been in Greek or Latin.

Dryden, looks like you're going DOWN!

He may be a genius, but he's also a jerk

John Dennis is an early genius of 18C literary criticism. But, he despised Alexander Pope and attacked him on a very personal level. He would claim that Pope's writing were as natural as his physical deformity. As if this weren't bad enough, Dennis also sued his own mother:

Dennis brought a chancery suit against his mother. She had defrauded him, he claimed, of the interest on his uncle's bequest. Her son had become an unfilial spendthrift, his mother countered. It is likely that the family arrived at an out-of-court settlement.

Who sues their own mom???
He then proceeded to take the "Grand Tour" of Europe with one of his friends in 1688.

His literary criticism is genius, but there's only so much genius that can account for being that kind of jerk.

As if they didn't know what would happen

George Farquhar is yet another Restoration playwright who got bamboozled into marriage by a poor widow and died shortly after. First George Etherege, and now this guy. Come on, people. You write, act, and read all of the same materials. Wouldn't you think you would know a cunning widow from a rich one? Sheesh!

What is a civet cat?

According to Paula R. Backscheider, "in the early 1690s Daniel Defoe invested in highly speculative ventures such as civet cats and a diving bell." Evidently, Defoe lost a large sum of his fortune to these ventures.

What I want to know is. . .


what is a civet cat?

And how could this creature be considered an investment? Do they dive for fish or something?

***
PS- It turns out a civet cat may be a cousin to the racoon or one of these.

Dude, Defoe. Did you think the civet cat would be sweeping the nation with its popularity as a house pet? Dude.

Worshipping Temple

I just read Sir William Temple's "An Essay Upon an Ancient and Modern Learning" and found it amazing. Many of the examples and topics that Temple addresses are ongoing in academia today. For example, Temple discusses how wealth and power become detrimental to learning and knowledge acquisition. He states:

It is no wonder then, that learning has been so little advanced since it grew to be mercenary, and the progress of it has been fettered by the cares of the world, and disturbed by the desires of being rich, or the fears of being poor.

What I find most upsetting about academia today is its obsession with money. Administrators want profits and students want high paying jobs. I would say that faculty want to get paid, but their salaries are so low, this would be a rather moot point. When higher education becomes involved with wealth, we're in for a world of trouble. Folks only want what is profitable, which isn't always what's best. As a civilization, we will pay the price, so to speak.

Did Locke just make a funny?

Per John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding:

Wake a man out of a sound sleep, and ask him what he was that moment thinking of. If he himself be conscious of nothing he then thought on, he must be a notable diviner of thoughts that can assure him that he was thinking. May he not, with more reason, assure him he was not asleep? This is something beyond philosophy; and it cannot be less than revelation, that discovers to another thoughts in my mind, when I can find none there myself. And they must needs have a penetrating sight who can certainly see that I think, when I cannot perceive it myself, and when I declare that I do not; and yet can see that dogs or elephants do not think, when they give all the demonstration of it imaginable, except only telling us that they do so. This some may suspect to be a step beyond the Rosicrucians; it seeming easier to make one's self invisible to others, than to make another's thoughts visible to me, which are not visible to himself.

Okay. So, the setup may be long, but was this comment a little jab at those fiesty Rosicrucians? Hmmm. Maybe I need more sleep.

How did they know?

According to J.M. Armistead, Restoration playwright Nathaniel Lee lived well for a brief period of time: "The signs of high living were becoming visible in his growing paunch and red nose."

Is he basing this on portraits? How the hell does he know that Lee had a red nose??

Pilgrim's Progress. . . I get it, okay?

I can see why Pilgrim's Progress is so widely read. You've got action, adventure, a pilgrim named Christian, allegory. . . what more can a person want in religious material??? Bunyan even kills off a major minor character!

I assume that our contemporary version of Pilgrim's Progress would be those freaky VeggieTales. I know nothing about these guys, but I distrust computer animated TV shows. They just creep me out. And a bunch of anthropomorphic vegetables spouting off on morality and religion seems unappetizing. I mean, if vegetables are getting anthropomorphized, what the hell are we going to eat?

At least Christian kicks some devil ass. . . I doubt VeggieTales does. I seriously doubt it.

Porn vs. Political Satire

What made John Wilmot, the 2nd Earl of Rochester, hot? It's not a question of whether he was hot or not because he clearly was HOT!
Was it for his dirty ditties? Or was it his sharp satiric edge? Or...

Was it his lovable smirk?
Look at that adorable monkey!

After I saw that terrible film, The Libertine, I can't help but imagine Johnny Depp reading to me every time I read Rochester's poetry. I mean, Johnny Depp would be the ideal image of what we would WANT Rochester to be like.

Yet, I think our contemporary version of Rochester would be Stavros Niachros. Or Paris Hilton. Blah.

Perhaps we should return to the idealization of true wit and leave behind the slutty twit.

Or maybe we should all go out and buy ourselves a pet monkey. . . Nah.

One more for prose...

George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham is also pro-prose:

• Let’s have, at least, once in our lives, a time/When we may hear some reasen, not all Rhyme:/We have these ten years felt it’s Influence;/Pray let this prove a year of Prose and Sence.

Yet, his play The Rehearsal is a mismash of all sorts of awfully rhymed couplets and verse. And why not? He's mocking the pompous John Dryden, the one guy we still read in undergrad classes today. If only Buckingham wrote more in verse. . .

I ought to keep a tally of everyone that's for prose versus rhyme. I'm pretty sure the pro-prosers are winning this game.

On the whole, The Rehearsal would be a great play to re-adapt for a modern audience. It would simply take someone bold enough to make fun of a contemporary film or tv director. . . We could take jabs at Martin Scorsese awful editing or Oliver Stone's heavy handedness. Take that!

George Etherege is ril, ril funny

Harriet from The Man of Mode is one of my favourite female characters in a Restoration play. She's pretty, fiesty and down to earth. She can match, if not excel, in wit against Dorimant. I suppose many female roles were like this at the time, but I particularly like her because she reminds me of Harriet from So I Married an Axe Murderer. Here are a few of my favourite lines:

• Women then ought to be no more fond of dressing than Fools should be of talking; Hoods and Modesty, Masques and Silence, things that shadow and conceal; they should think of nothing else.
• Varnish'd over with good breeding, many a Blockhead makes a tolerable show.

Now, let's compare her to Harriet from SIMAM:
...

Okay, so I can't think of anything super witty from her... but that is simply because she was upstaged by Mike Meyers. Well, I suppose that Harriet from MoM wins this battle... for now.

There's nothing funny about Milton

Nonetheless, Milton's Paradise Lost is fantastic. I can't imagine why I would need to state something so obvious, but then I recalled what it was like to be a Freshman again.

I'm about a third of the way through and will be finished later tonight. Here are my favorite tidbits thus far:

• This neglect then of Rhyme so little is to e taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar Readers, tat it rather is to be esteem’d an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover’d to Heroic Poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of Rhyming.

Rhyme seems to be this argument that keeps surfacing among writers like Robert Howard, Dryden, and Milton. Howard says that rhyme ruins the spontaneity and vulgarity that we love so much in Restoration theatre. Dryden says a big screw you to Howard and writes Conquest of Granada in verse. Milton says a big screw y'all to everyone and writes Paradise Lost in blank verse, sans rhyme of course.

• Of Man’s First disobedience, and the Fruit/Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste/Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,/

Yeah. This needs no introduction. If you have no idea where this comes from, open the text up to page 1.

• Long is the way/And hard, that out of Hell leads up to Light

A famous line made even more famous to the popular masses by what contemporary film? I will give you a virtual cookie if you get it right.

• Towards him they bend/With awful reverence prone; and as a God/Extol him equal to the highest in Heav’n.

If you were to take anything from Paradise Lost, and there is much to take from it, the biggest lesson is that you don't piss off number 1. You don't worship idols, and you certainly don't try to act like top dog. As my dad used to say, "Insubordination is the one thing that guarantees you get fired." Tsk, tsk, Satan. Tsk, tsk.

More to come. . . later.

More Bunyan love

I have found John Bunyan to be the Emo of the 17C. He constantly oscillates between finding God and bemoaning his sinful past. It's awesome, frankly:
Now was I in great distress, thinking in very deed, that this might well be so; wherefore I went up and down bemoaning my sad condition; counting my self far worse than a thousand fools for standing off thus long, and spending so many years in sin as I have done; still crying out, Oh, that I had turned sooner! Oh, that I had turned seven years ago! It made me also angry with my self, to think that I should have no more wit, but to trifle away my time, till my Soul and Heaven were lost.
If John Bunyan were around today, he would be heading up Dashboard Confessional and wearing mascara.

Here's to you, John Bunyan. You kept it real-er than real. You weren't afraid to bemoan. You were a true warrior of emotive punk.

I guess somebody's got to do it. . .

John Bunyan passed some of his time in the Bedford county gaol writing verse (and making shoelaces). -- Richard L. Greaves for Oxford's Dictionary of National Biography.

As far as blogs go

Why have this blog? Well, I suppose it's less noticeable than my last blog. I don't have hoards of people reading it from time to time and wondering who is writing it.

I'm a student in a particular university. However, like many writers, I would prefer to keep things general here.

I do study Eighteenth Century British literature. I could be classified as "Asian." And most of what I will post is funny. Some of it sad. Some of it very, very angry.

I'm studying for my exams this summer. So, you'll see many posts by me as I procrastinate. I will also let you know of some funny things I find in what I read. They are truly treasures worth sharing. At least to anyone who reads this thing.