THERE. THERE IT IS. IT'S FINISHED AND I'M HAPPY :)

Please excuse the emoticon. It won't happen again, I promise.

It reflects, however, that I have now officially entered the holiday spirit, since my paper on Bernard Mandeville is finished. (well, actually, it needs a round of editing, a spell-check, page numbers added, and a title, but why split hairs?) It was pretty much the only thing I had to do since coming back, and it was weighing pretty heavily on me. Luckily, it turned out to be one of those essays where I just sit down and the ideas flow out, into the keyboard, and onto the screen. I think I almost resent those more: if all the ideas are there, and I KNOW they're there, typing them out seems so redundant that it actually offends me to be forced to do it. I know that makes very little sense, but that's why they're called emotions instead of logical tenets.

I was also a little worried about length, since the paper was to be 15-20 pages, and there was a point when I would have been certain I would barely squeeze in at 14 1/2. Well, I'm standing at 20 now, and the addition of the title, name, and date may just push the whole thing over to 21. I like meeting the upper end of a page length requirement; it allows me to feel very accomplished.

But the main source of worriment on this essay was that I did rather terribly on my presentation. It was a general overview on how the satirists of the eighteenth century undermined the authority of the medical practitioners, and the professor flagalated me for:
-relying too heavily on material discussed in class
-relying too heavily on a single critic rather than my own ideas or actual primary texts
-summarizing rather than arguing
-choosing a topic that was too broad

All of which was fair enough, to be honest. So I scraped that direction entirely, and a new idea eventually came to me. (Honestly, these occasional brilliant lightning bolts of ideas that come out of nowhere are the best part of grad school, and basically the only things that suggest to me I'm in the right field.) New idea: an eighteenth century writer named Bernard Mandeville made basically a career out of saying that the English economy is propelled by the production of vice-filled goods. I wanted to show that he practiced what he preached, that through promoting his own written works, he promoted his own vice-filled commodity, the book, and set up terms for how that book should be consumed. And I do all this by a close-reading of his final, and often ignored book, A Letter to Dion, in which he defends his most famous work, The Fable of the Hive, from an attack a man named Dion made on it in Dion's book, Alciphron.

So, as an argument based on a close-reading of a little-known author's most obscure work that itself was a response to a response of his best work, I'm hoping that I've dealt with most of the complaints with my presentation. And I feel good that I've done that, and that I've written a good essay that stands on its own.

On the other hand, it's a course about satire and the city in the eighteenth century, and I've written a paper that is about neither a) satire, nor b) the city. So even though I've discussed the topic with the professor, if he/she wanted to get nasty about it, she/he could really ding me on that front.
But hey, at least I got the century right. That counts for something, right?

Later HoliDays.

I came across this while researching...

What Nature wants (a phrase I much distrust)
Extends to Luxury, extends to Lust:
And if we count among the Needs of life
Another's Toil, why not another's Wife?
--Alexander Pope, "Epistle to Bathurst"

Turns out that the real threat to marriage isn't gay marriage, but that big screen HDTV. You heard it hear first, folks. Luxury is a gateway vice to adultery.

Later Days.

It's really Mr. Mandeville's fault for being so devilishly inscrutible.

It's been a while since the last post. Things have been busy--well, nationally, things have been busy. Yay! Canadian Politics are interesting! And the NDP matter! And though the pros and cons of that are worthy of their own post, my own busyness prohibits it. I leave on Saturday for Someplace Else, and I've been desperately trying to wrap up everything at Blank first. (Hey, typing Blank is easier than typing __________. What a shock.)

My marking for students is almost done--I've got about 8 assignments left to mark, and 5 of those are because the student in question hasn't handed them in. I can't remember the last time I was so entertained by my students' final essays. For the most part, they're a pretty sharp bunch, especially for a first year course. (Either I'm getting easy in my old age, or it's because it's a first year course full of fourth year students wanting to cross off their English elective.) And the essays have had some really, really awesome secondary sources. One managed to use Mein Kampf to draw a connection between propaganda and the US in a way that wasn't entirely inflammatory. (Just partially inflammatory, which is what happens when you mention Hitler. Ever. And I can't wait to see the interesting key-word searches this post will create.) Another used Baldwin's PETA video. I checked that out personally. I was expecting a happy-go-lucky fun-loving Baldwin, ala 30 Rock. That is not what I got. Most disturbing thing ever. Finally, one student writing about school discipline used a 1953 film designed for 8 year olds. This lead to a three hour marathon in which Person and friend watched the entire gamut of 50s educational films, from the weenie roasts in "What To Do on a Date" to the bold truth in "The Trouble with Women." Surprisingly, the male-oriented "As Boys Grow" was very accurate. The female "As Girls Grow" was not--ladies, remember that to be safe, you should avoid washing your hair when you're having your period. That's how it works, right? Sadly, since the student was using a 1953 film without either irony or historical context, it didn't really work for a university level paper.
My work for the blog class is done too; I'm ready for the presentation on Friday, slideshow and all. The slideshow will be an academic first for me, so I'm hoping it works well. I'm comparing one comic book blog that involved detailed, personal introspection and another that involved the Punisher punching a polar bear in the face. Which will the audience prefer?
The only thing not going well is my 18th century paper. It's 15-20 pages, and I've finished... um, well, I wrote an outline. *Cough*. Since I've given up on finishing that one by Saturday, the question now is how to minimize the number of books I need to take home. So far, I've winnowed it down to a mere fifteen.
...
Yeah, maybe I should go work on that instead of typing this.


Later Days.