English is better than comparative lit

Comp lit asks how you feel.
English beats you with a leather strap and you enjoy it.

Comp lit is a course titled “Word and Image: Ekphrasis, the Iconic Narrative, and the Graphic Novel.”

English knows what ekphrasis is.

Comp lit is a herniated bowel leaking shit and Spam Lite into soft-core porn. It tastes like sociology but isn’t interested in “the greater good lolwut?”. It wants to be the radiant puma of gender theory but is secretly too afraid of its own mediocre smut.

English is a labyrinth of mirrors inside another labyrinth of mirrors inside a crepe slathered with Nutella and deep fried. It is the best friend and sometime lover of the Bodleian Library. It has read Foucault and knows Foucault is cheap.

English is through being pedantic. Comp lit only just learned how.

Comp lit wishes you would learn German.

Comp lit is an intimate seminar.
English knows intimacy is cheap.

Comp lit wants to discuss relationships.
English discusses relationships but knows they are cheap.

Comp lit loves Foucault. Comp lit is a sad puppy with eyeballs that don’t really fit.

Comp lit is contained fully by its sweater vest. After graduation, it joins the staff of an interior design magazine or markets whimsical dishware to trophy wives via Anthropologie.

English is a dapper gentleman of elfin build. It starves on the streets of a metaphysical tundra. No one notices but the whole world mourns.

Comp lit reminds you that it has read Ovid in the original Latin.
English knows Latin is cheap.

Comp lit makes a cut. English makes an incision.
Comp lit wears clothing. English wears raiment.
Comp lit talks. English engages in discourse.

Comp lit uses the word “paradigmatically.”

English uses not only words, but also language.

Comp lit asks, “What is culture?”
English asks, “What is?”

Comp lit asks a question.
English asks.

(P.S. The above rant structure is not my idea. It is modeled on spicy ongoing debates between followers of two poetic schools: Flarf and Conceptualism.)

The art of making phone calls

If you’re anything like me, making work-related phone calls brings you discomfort. It makes your brain feel uniquely ashamed, as if the left and right halves were buttcheeks, and your corpus callosum the cruel wedgie between.

Formal phone conversations are #2 on my list of scary items, after #1: people who like expensive food so much that they basically exist as imitations of imitations of imitations of Parisians. High-end restaurants and their patrons give me the willies. I’m not about to shit out wads of Jacksons for duck confit and premium champagnes. I’m an English major: Taco Bell and psychedelics contribute more to my aesthetic anyway.

I always worry that what is so obvious about me in a fancy restaurant also becomes obvious when I speak on the phone. “Scandal!” exclaim the elite. “This is not one of our kind. This is a pimply girl who sits in a sweaty cave and thinks of semicolons.”

Really. You can hear it in my voice. SEMICOLONS.

So sometimes adults are mean to me when I call them with questions. I receive hysterics containing the old “I absolutely cannot talk to you for two minutes, as I am out of the office today” excuse. I receive condescension. I receive secretaries. I receive menopause.

I deal with it by delivering a stern talk. “Bitch please,” I say with an air of utmost gravity. I orate. ”It is a strange and suspicious thing that you should use your office phone to tell me that you are not in your office. It is not my fault you hate your job, your life, or your children, but I rather like my job. I think employment is a reasonable thing to have occasionally. I’d like to do my job well. My workface is undaunted by your bitchface. It will make lush, newsworthy information come out of your bitchface’s mouth. It will make deformed nuggetmeat of your secretary.”

A serious violation of phone etiquette (and probably several other kinds of etiquette). But one that rewards.

Why Shakespeare was not “the first feminist”

Sorry in advance about all the snark. Oh lookit, I just made backformation happen. Sweet.

Once upon a time in some class, we started talking about women, and then literature, and then literary women, and then women in literature, and so on. Isn’t it funny how a certain kind of literature written by a certain kind of woman always ends up being treated as “women’s literature”? Jeez.

And somehow we ended up at Shakespeare; I didn’t mind. In fact it was an interesting conversation…until someone– an obstinate, hairy, boring, sweater vest-wearing type who makes a big deal out of reading Faulkner but must not be named because individually specific hate on the Interwebs is not nice– brought up the least forgivable of all cliches.

“Oh I know ALL about Shakespeare,” he insisted. “He was THE FIRST FEMINIST.”

Please. In truth I love your sweater vest and your attempt at academic facial hair…I just don’t love, you know, you.

Shakespeare was not the first feminist. Plenty would argue that he wasn’t a feminist at all. I say he was not a feminist because “feminism,” while sometimes used in a general sense, is also a highly specific cultural term belonging to (relatively) recent history. We can’t apply it to Shakespeare without risking confusion. The word just didn’t exist; no writer at the time would ever self-identify that way.

Nor do I see overwhelming evidence of the substance of feminism. Yeah, he wrote lady characters who knew something about opening up a can of whoopass. But this praise of courageous, resourceful women wasn’t new; it operated within the boundaries of social structures, which is to say it didn’t make a serious attempt to shuffle them. It’s one thing to appreciate ladies– Joseph Fiennes knows all about that– and another to change something fundamental about the way they exist in society.

That may be asking too much; I can’t think of many writers, in Shakespeare’s time or before, who did make such a change. But if we had to choose one who at least tried: Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim. Heinrich Corfuckingnelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, expert of the occult. Real life wizard. Possibly the inspiration for vague references by J.K. Rowling.

Agrippa did not “make a difference,” as such, with his Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex. But he was straightforward in addressing the topic. He took the time to write an entire treatise dedicated to it. He acknowledged what he was writing, and maybe that’s all we need to say he was a “feminist” before Shakespeare ever was or wasn’t.

Thoughts? Call me out on my ignorance; I haven’t studied Shakespeare.

Do work. Read Chaucer.

Errbody loves Shakespeare. Errbody reads Shakespeare errday. He’s so well loved that he’s inspired spinoffs in classrooms the world over: strained, over-enunciated renditions put on by unwilling tweens under the watchful eyes of their repressed schoolmarms (scary, menopausal versions of me). I call it the “theatre of constipation.”

But enthusiasm– and awareness– ebbs alarmingly when it comes to Chaucer. I’ve met people who think there was a section in The Canterbury Tales called “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

 

 

I’ve also met people who think The Canterbury Tales was the only thing Chaucer ever wrote. But, OK, let’s just pretend for a moment that it was. He’d still be one of the greatest poets to ever go down on the lettered population of the Middle Ages. I don’t know why he and Shakespeare are so often taught in the same course; they wrote different kinds of English. Different kinds of poetry. And they lived in different Englands. I myself only mentioned William at the beginning of this post for advertising purposes, to draw you in.

But different as they are, their writings share many subtleties and show off the pretty young thang that was (and is) the English language. In other words, people should read Chaucer, and not just for the stories he told. He symbolizes debates that were happening about what was proper in writing, about what made one kind of literature classy and another trash. He represents the variety of linguistic choices available to writers at the time: which pronoun should a character use when speaking to a friend? A lover? A superior? And what does that say about the condition of their relationship, their opinions of each other, their social status?

England at the time was even more of an armpit than it is now. It was a mess of politics and linguistic anxiety. The Norman invasion was already old, but French still had quite a grip as a language of governance and prestige. Chaucer was one piece of evidence that English could still be a powerful language, a literary language. And a national language. This was mostly good. Unfortunately you could also see it partly as a British precursor to the “This is America. Speak English.” movement, but on the whole it was good.

So yeah. Read Chaucer. By “read” I don’t mean “read,” I mean read. Read in Middle English or read translations, either one, it’s all good. Shakespeare is great too, but his writing doesn’t put up as much of a fight, being of a later stage in the history of English and therefore a lot more intelligible. Which is not to say anything about quality; I don’t think the quality of either writer’s work is in question. Comparisons like that are just…well…

http://images.cheezburger.com/completestore/2010/5/25/129193076744052134.jpg

Yeah.

 

Yeah.

Cover letters, Part II

Dear bossperson,

If this sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve met. I have already written to every bossperson in existence. Bosspeople may be cleverly disguised with many appearances and many names, but they are all in fact one monster. I don’t mean to be racist, but I just can’t tell them apart!

I say “bossperson” rather than “bossdude” because it is inappropriate to assume you are male. But you probably are. You may have joined a fraternity as a student; you may have studied economics. You were “educated at an elite institution,” but before that you attended “university” at some place in Arizona (I don’t recall that there were schools in Arizona). I know this because I have seen your LinkedIn profile. I know what you look like, where you live, how the same internship and then the same job has been passed down in your rich-ass family from father to son. I know horrible little things about you that the Internet whispered to me through a tin can. And I spent two seconds on your website before the shitty navigation and flashing hyperlinks drove me away.

If your people had standards, I could use my information against you. I could blackmail you into hiring me. But your people do not have standards. They still speak to you after having seen your website. And they tend to call me Lisa Shin or Lindsay Chen or, fuck it, Chong Bong Wong.

You’ll be glad to hear that I recently completed a certification class in answering the goddamn phone and using Microsoft Fucking Word. Hire me, and my glowing minimum-wage babyface, my tender secretarial flesh, will thrive in the fast-paced environment of your office. I’ll be there every morning, equipped with your coffee and my outgoing, driven attitude, smiling at you with my babycheeks and wondering when you’re going to do us all a favor and just die already.

As I was saying, I’m incredibly passionate about public relations. Definitely my thing.

Love,

An applicant of the detail-oriented persuasion, who advises you to watch your cholesterol

Cover letters, Part I

This is based on a true story of a true story of a true story. A real cover letter sucking reality from thousands of cover letters that may or may not have really been written.

Hey bossperson,

I think you should give me money to complete tasks that you are too famous or too old to complete. I’ve been called some pretty true names, among them “asswipe,” but if you hire me and pay me I will adorn your office with youthful pheromones. I will look deep into your eyes. I will be that multitasking rockstar who thrives in the fast-paced environment of your elite businessplace. I will walk your ugly bitchdog. I will schedule your important bitchflights. And I will lift up to 50 pounds.

I find that my degrees in Bulgarian studies and deep shit, along with my master’s degree in mastery and doctorate in doctoration, make me the ideal– nay, the obvious– candidate for this position. I am streamlined, obsessive. I am a sleek puma of professional appearance. I will synergize you explosively in the mouth. I am, drawing on years of academic experience, going to brew your coffee as if my job depended on it (which it probably will).

The truth is that I’ve never lifted 50 pounds, but that doesn’t mean I can’t learn! It was an oversight on my part to exclude “willing to get yolked” from my résumé. So FYI, I am completely ready to get yolked. I feel it to be an element of my destiny: we have met before, yolkedness and I. Gym memberships haunt me like kicked puppies, even though I have never kicked a puppy. I would not want you to hire a puppykicker.

I urge you to consider seriously. I am among the most unsuccessful jobseekers in the world, willing to flout both career advice and letter-template convention in the name of something not always as good or tasty as love. Giving me money would be a noble thing. If you don’t immediately hire me, I will make my CEO engineer-dad become your best CEO engineer-friend, and then you will hire me. If you don’t, I will just work for my dad.

Regards,

Employeeperson/champion/eagle

Baddest ass William Blake

If you haven’t heard of William Blake, don’t be concerned. Your ignorance is naturally occurring and I do not hate you, I just think you deserve to die a painful death after a tedious masturbatory lifetime spent earning wages or something.

The reality is that you almost certainly have encountered Blake in your literary studies; most people do. So you’re safe from that tedious masturbatory future. You will never face the threat of a stable income. Are you not relieved?


Oh man, a livelihood. Groooss.

If you need something to jog your memory… William Blake was bi-winning. He had Tyger blood. It’s a nice poem, “The Tyger,” and for some unknowable reason his most widely taught, but did your accelergiftated English class teacher teach it to you like…this?


BAM.


BAM. (This photo, and the next, are from a book called America a Prophecy).


BAM.

Sorry if I didn’t prepare you for that last one; hopefully you aren’t showing this blog to 10-year-olds anyway (though that’s not to say you shouldn’t). The point is that you just cannot read Blake without the pictures; it’d be rainbow cake without the rainbow, Knives without the Chau, socks without business. The nineties without OK Computer.


I knocked on this piece of wood until it resigned and gave me a gift card.

So with Blake it’s not form and content, it’s form as content, and when you read the text in isolation, you’re taking some destructive liberties with its meaning.

It’s also worth noting that not all of his poetry was cute and sing-songy like “The Tyger”; often it was violent, sexual, troublingly subversive, and fucking terrifying, not to mention just good old trippy. I’ve always been candid about the 18th century being my favorite hallucinogen.

Blake himself had a number of radical thoughts about faith, art, war, and sex, among other things, and was more or less unapologetic about it, making remarks like “That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care.” Douchey, but in the best possible way.

I dream about William Blake all the time. Once I dreamt he and I and Allen Ginsberg smeared ourselves with coconut butter and fed each other tofurkey while reading “Howl” to a luscious accompaniment of tambourines. We conceived a love child together across so many temporal-spatial boundaries and all three of us gave birth to it simultaneously. Its name was Bob Dylan and it was so damn beautiful.

Baddest ass Mary Wollstonecraft

Sometimes folks ask me if I’m a feminist.  Dear folks, please don’t ask me what you already know.  One does not approach the obelisk and request a phallic exhibition.

That said, I prefer to be called Egalinator or simply Avenger; Warrior Princess would be functional but not, I think, connotative in the ideal way.  In all truth I am not a feminist but rather an anti-douche pugilist, which brings me now to eulogize a dead white writer who is so much more than a dead white writer; she is the righteous babe of righteous babes, a smart bitch par excellence, and she is none other than the relentless Mary Wollstonecrizzle.

Much is made of her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, but possibly more interesting than the material itself is the spirit in which she wrote it, i.e. a dazzling superfirenovasplosion headed straight for the moribund balls of douche-in-a-bag lady-hatin’ French politican Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, and a virtuosic echo of the ballcrushing A Vindication of the Rights of Men, aimed at professional douchebrit Edmund Burke.

FYI: this was not a good time for the English lady (but honestly, when is it ever a good time in England?).  As a woman there, you could acceptably write novels, or books for children, or instructional pamphlets acclimating girls to the domestic craphole that was their lives, but it was not OK to attack the most prominent Parliamentarian in the country.  It was more OK to attack the Frenchman, but on the whole you were best appreciated in the kitchen, making us all a nasty English sandwich.

So along comes Mary, Mary Ninja Turtle Bad-boy-bad-boy-whatcha-gonna-do Wollstonecraft, and shits on it ALL.  To top it off, she moves to Paris right smack fucking dab in the middle of the French Revolution.

This is where things get unfortunate (funny how France does that to you).  Mary has an oopsie child with a candy-truck goon man, Gilbert Imlay (reincarnated in modern times as Jeremih); he abandons her.  She attempts suicide, only to be rescued, only to meet and marry another man, only to have another damn baby, and oh god two babies is the same as 400 babies, and Mary Wollstonecraft DIES.

But it is not all bad; you know Baby #2.  You know her.  She is a literary tradition. She is Mary Shelley.  The moral of the story is that you should have zero babies unless one of them is going to be Mary Shelley.

Baddest ass Christopher Marlowe

People with no great interest in literature– and that’s fine, really, because not everyone is born into glory– seem to have a general awareness of Christopher Marlowe as a contemporary of Willie Shake. The impression we get from high school curricula is that while Will Shizzle was boning the English canon (and Gwyneth Paltrow on the side), other writers were just, I don’t know, existing.

A gross misconception, to the point of hilarity. I think the scholarly consensus is that Marlowe was the Han Solo to Shakespeare’s Skywalker. A blasphemer, a proud rebel, an Elizabethan rockstar and a hardcore indulger in sex, drugs, and…theater, this man was a raging mass of brick wall, testosterone, and unstoppable playwright. With intellect alone he could bite off the faces of lesser beings, and often did so. They were his wench. All of England was his wench. He was so notoriously aggressive that when he was killed via brain-stabbing (better believe it), the authorities didn’t bother with much investigation because hey, that motherfucker (with his thirty goddamn dicks) was bound to get himself murdered sooner or later.

One formal pardon later, Marlowe’s killer is a respectable man with a clean reputation, and Marlowe himself is shrouded in mystery. There are some who claim that his death was fabricated, that he lived on with a new identity as…yes, the Shakinator. Proponents of this theory are neither unique nor interesting; they’re simply unfortunate.

An enticing life, a thrilling and horrible end, not to mention inflammatory writings on atheism: the magic of Marlowe, I would think, makes him hands-down the finer slab of flesh. Gwyneth Paltrow was missing out (but then again, she always is).

So you’ve read The Merchant of Venice, but have you read The Jew of Malta? We all know Shakespeare to have been “influenced” by Marlowe, but making vague statements like that is, as far as I’m concerned, a way of glossing over a great artist and leaving him off our sadly lacking reading lists. He was so much fun. Such controversy. I mean, the cosmically poetic beauty of it, dude.

Riddle me this, pedagogues: I’d hit that. Wouldn’t you?