Class sucks.

I've decided that I'm terminating at a Master's, because I can do what I want on that degree without having to go through four or five more years of departmental bullshit. In fact, I really narrow my options down if I go on to a PhD, because then I'm considered too specialized. I do much better outside of a rigid structure anyway, and if I chose to continue teaching at the university--which I could certainly do on the education I'd have by then--I can more or less do whatever the hell I wanted to. Sign me up!

I took a good, hard look at everything from my personality to what I really enjoy doing, and I just don't have the passion for the scholarship part of it. I like English as an intellectual exercise sometimes. Let's talk about subversive power structures in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, whoo-hoo! Or how about Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost--was he really trying to say he was an atheist? Or how about the underlying rhetoric of cosmetic ads? Talk to me baby! But I like that best accompanied by a cold beer and some good buddies.

I'm simply not interested in burying myself in Emily Dickenson and discussing the meaning of Her Fucking Dashes (the bizarre punctuation she uses in her poems) for the rest of my life--or the equivalent. I want to read the newspaper again. Or a book for fun. I want to read Foucault and think to myself, now how does this work in the *real* world, not how can I apply this to Tom Sawyer. And yes, I'm geeky enough to actually still read Foucault without being in school. How can you pass up something entitled Discipline & Punish?

I've been coming to this decision for a while, but something in the class I'm currently taking really punctuated it for me. This has been a class filled with some of the most bizzare people sitting in the same room together. Check out The Undesirable Element's latest post (see the sidebar) for some more of that class' nonsense. But some of them are *really* into what they do. One girl has been scrapbooking about Emily Dickenson (or somesuch) since she was in highschool--she's in the PhD program now. For her project she is writing about a manuscript of E.D.'s poems by writing her own manuscript about how she is reading the manuscript...or...ehrm...I can't really figure it out. It made my head spin. But another chick in that class, the Gypsy, as we refer to her, said something the other day about "Keats' famous comma."

And that's when I realized that I didn't give a shit about English graduate school.

Keats' famous comma is in the line before last of Ode on a Grecian Urn. This particular poem does not have the best history with me personally (not that it cares), as I always saw it as the perfect poem for White Male Domination. Keats is waxing on about this cold and unchangable pot, about how it remains long after men have died, how it's, like, the Holy Grail of Greek influence, and how some kind of eternal truth (as defined by Dead White Males) is to be found on that pot, if she would but only reveal it to us! He totally sexualizes the pot. Being a young undergraduate, that stupid poem came to represent everything that was so wrong with the world in a way that only English majors can understand. When he starts the poem with "THOU still unravish'd bride of quietness," you know you're in for some patriarchal goodness. All I wanted to do by the end of the poem was to smash the urn into a bazillion pieces. Which, I suppose, is some sort of metaphor for militant feminism. Whatever. Pressing forward. The "famous" comma is in the next to last line:

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

The "controversy" is in the comma after the word "beauty." People have been fighting about it for over 100 years. Is the urn talking to Keats? To the reader? Is Keats translating the urn for the reader? Does the urn stop talking after the word "beauty" and does Keats say the rest, or does the urn say the whole last two lines? Does anybody give a flying fuck?

I'm not saying that it isn't an interesting thing or a philosophically important thing (is it??). It's just not something I can devote a lifetime to. I'm not programmed that way. People are starving, kids are being abused, people can't read, governments are screwing things up, and I need to do things that make me think and feel like I'm addressing those problems in some way. I know what that means for me, and it has nothing to do with Emily's Fucking Dashes.

Such things make interesting cocktail conversation, but I don't think I'd want to build a life around it. The Gypsy, however, seemed really into it, as she seems to be with most things English. I'm not that into it. I'm just casually dating it, I'm not ready to settle down with it and have kids. I still want to read the newspaper and have a life of my own.

-- Virgil