Oh wait…I forgot.

(This post is primarily intended for my liberry blog, but I figured I’d post it here, too.)

Okay, I know I said I’d post every week, and now it’s been at least two. But I’ve been super-busy!

I’m currently reading East of Eden by John Steinbeck, and it’s pretty good so far, but I’m only a quarter into it. In my defense, it’s another really long novel, probably the longest I’ve read so far this year. I’ll finish it. Eventually.

In the meantime, I figured I’d give you an update on what I’ve been up to, along with a couple reading recommendations.

I’m about to finish my master’s degree in liberal arts. I say about to finish: I still have two-thirds of my thesis to write. Here’s a lovely rendition of what I call my Thesis Monster, drawn by my husband:

As you can tell, I’m not exactly into this thesis business. Anyway, my thesis might as well be called “Don DeLillo Writes the Same Novel Over and Over” because that’s basically it. I didn’t realize that until I was far enough into it that changing my topic would be ridiculous. So I’m stuck writing a thesis I’m not really interested in. So it goes.

But what do you mean, he writes the same novel over and over? you ask. I think I’ve talked about it before on this blog, but I’ll repeat. DeLillo basically follows a formula: his protagonist finds his world saturated with postmodern commoditization of some sort (in my thesis, it’s three kinds of media: film/video, music, books), and he tries to escape it. He withdraws from the world, but usually comes back, and his quest for an identity beyond what the media has created him is almost entirely unsuccessful. (Every time I say it, it makes a little more sense to me.)

If you’re interested in Postmodernism and what media is doing, and you’re looking for a challenge, check out Baudrillard, Jameson, and McLuhan.

Anyway, the probablility of LSUS merging with Tech has scared me into working on the Thesis Monster again, and I’ve funneled most of my pleasure-reading time into that. And I have a sick cat who I have to feed five times a day through a tube:

As I’m sure you can imagine, I don’t have a lot of time on my hands.

But! I’d like to direct you to some DeLillo! I talked about Great Jones Street early this year and Americana and Cosmopolis last year, but I haven’t reviewed what  I think is DeLillo’s best novel, White Noise (absolutely no relation to the movie that came out a few years ago with the same name). It’s about a family in the midwest and what happens when a train wrecks and causes a huge black cloud to spread all over town, forcing an evacuation. It deals with death, family, religion, and general awesomeness. It’s a good (and not boring) introduction to DeLillo. Too bad I’m not using it in my thesis!

So. I’ll eventually finish reading East of Eden, and then I’ll post a good ol’ proper review of it. In the meantime, I’ll try to post snippets about other things. If you’re really hankering for new book reviews, ask your favorite librarian to contribute to the blog!

In my last post, I said I was searching around to try to figure out what to write about. I finished that paper yesterday after like six hours – it was particularly torturous. I was frustrated and had read through all my rss feeds (Google Reader is my very favorite procrastination tool) and had randomly surfed flickr for a while when I remembered the lovely Yahoo! Answers video and gave my search results a closer look (as in I clicked on the stupidest-looking links). This one’s particularly awesome. It’s from a free essay site, and the person who wrote it has apparently never read Hamlet: he doesn’t even get Claudius’s name right, and he makes that known in the title! Here’s a sample:

Imagine: A lazy undergrad (we’ll call him Education Major) can’t find the time to read Hamlet because of all of his Education Major-y plans. So he searches the internet for a paper. He knows that SchoolSucks (remember that?) isn’t a good idea because he got caught using that one when he was in high school. His mummy hasn’t put money in his bank account yet, so there’s no way he can afford to pay for an essay (check out this one on plagiarism!). He’s desperate and not too smart. So he types in Hamlet and rhetoric or the like. It’s the first free essay listed – about the fifth result down the first page, so it must be good! The funny thing is that after he turns it in, the professor will probably think it’s fishy because it’s so much better than what he usually does.

I go to a university where, instead of making students buy something useful like the MLA Handbook, students must buy a book (okay, well, I didn’t) called something like Avoiding Plagiarism. If you’re in college and don’t know what plagiarism is, or you have a hard time figuring out if you’re copying someone else’s work, you probably shouldn’t be in college. There, I said it. Poor Education Major is probably better of learning a trade. Like welding.

Back in the day, I graded papers under the table for a professor. She had assigned a short essay on The Great Gatsby to her 200-ish level students, very few (quite possibly none) of which were English majors. I had so much fun grading these papers: at least half the class cut and pasted their papers from one website. Yes. One. It was fantastic – I slapped so many huge, red Fs on those papers. Those students better be glad I wasn’t the professor – their asses would have been reported. The actual professor just gave them the Fs, which disappointed me.

That’s one of my fondest undergrad memories.

Anyway. Let this be a warning to the Education Majors of the world: don’t be that retarded. Professors can be stupid, but not that stupid – and they’re usually really smart. Or, at least, if you do insist on plagiarising, get the characters’ names right. Is that asking too much?

Look at my cats. Just look at them. They are entirely ridiculous.

Interlude over.