Managed to crawl on my belly through the ghastly trenches of the last hundred pages of “Officers and Gentlemen” over the weekend. What a dreadful, conflicted, nonsensical read! To triangulate the novel’s problems: it portrays the mentally-unstable absurdities of war in a stiff, dry manner that shows pathetically when placed next to Heller’s brilliant depiction of the same in “Catch 22”; it confounds the reader with the same obsessively acronymical, plotless military-porn that characterize Tom Clancy’s oeuvre; and it is finally damned by the complete absence of the charm, buoyancy and fey social commentary of Waugh’s earlier novels. A total poop. <\/p>\n
Whether it was class being rather dull last night or the fact that the calendar tells me it’s March – which means there are !!!only 60 days standing between me and my 3-thesis-paper deadline!!!<\/i> – last night I experienced the powerful desire to do some school work. <\/p>\n
I abandoned my darling Justin in Weston, stayed downtown and bunked in at SMC’s awesome “open ’till midnight” Kelly Library. Decided on a thesis for my Tuesday class: am intending to discuss the degradation of high culture under the rise of the cult of youth as depicted in Waugh’s novels. <\/p>\n
I’ll be appealing to Arthur Danto and Roger Scruton’s opposing views on aesthetic development to do this, which is fun because I like scrappy philosophers, and both these fellows defend their ideas like dogs with a bone. Danto says art as we have known it is ended, but! humanity is progressing into a brave new world of personal experiences of expression, using different forms and media. Scruton (who I think would have found a very sympathetic reader in Waugh) agrees that art is dead, but feels that humanity and high culture are about to join it in the grave. <\/p>\n
All I need is to do some background reading, whip up a bibliography, find some better wording to frame it in and email my professors. Then, I’m all ready to get down to brass tacks and defend my thesis! <\/p>\n
*gong sounds*
\n*ninjas attack thesis*
\n*Moira performs debilitating high kicks to ninjas*
\n*thesis is saved*<\/p>\n
Dinner tomorrow night with Managed to crawl on my belly through the ghastly trenches of the last hundred pages of “Officers and Gentlemen” over the weekend. What a dreadful, conflicted, nonsensical read! To triangulate the novel’s problems: it portrays the mentally-unstable absurdities of war in a stiff, dry manner that shows pathetically when placed next to Heller’s brilliant depiction […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-consciousness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/870"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=870"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/870\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}