Urns and Stuff...

So I was writing a post on Keats "Ode on a Grecian Urn", and here's what I thought about it.
I have to admit, I was a bit leery coming to Ode on a Grecian Urn. The poem is almost a punch-line, associated with doe-eyed young poets in white shirts with flaring sleeves, open at the throat, sighing heavy sighs. Despite my early days as a poetry junkie, I'd somehow missed Ode, so I came to it with some preconceptions.
First time through, it struck me as vaguely...not to use a fifty-cent SAT word, but...pedestrian. It seemed pretty obvious to me that the urn was wicked pretty and stirred some wistful longing in Keats. Okay, next.
So then, I was standing in the rain, waiting to pick the kids up from school, and made another stab at it. Very different reading the second time around.
It seemed to me that Keats saw the best things in life, frozen in time upon the urn, and the figures' eternal static postures reminded him that all those good things are so transient in real life. They are captured in the urn, but that's the only permanent manifestation of all the good things...when experienced, they are fleeting, and the urn serves as a reminder for all time that the good things are impermanent, and maybe that's part of what makes them so dear.
I suppose watching all the little kids rip-snorting out of class at the end of the day reminded me of Keats urn. They all grow up, and end up with mortgages and divorces and bitterness; but for that one moment in time, frozen in my memory, they were all six years old and wild for life.
*sigh*
Oh well. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
~Jack

Okay...

So I finally got around to writing my paper. Hell, I even got an A. But my professor said I needed to lay off with the semicolons; despite my technically correct usage, she said I was in imminent danger of losing their narrative "punch".
I loves me a semicolon. You can string together phrases without worrying about comma placement or awkward conjunctions or coordinating clauses. You can babble endlessly with a few well-placed semicolons; and the best part is that my paper was on Jane Eyre. Read some Charlotte Bronte one of these days...that kid was totally obsessed with the semicolon. I mean, it's totally rampant, especially in her dialogue.
So, to my Seminar in English Literature professor, I want to give a big old Colonel Klink shout-out.

Valentine's Anomie

That's my old Paladin on the right there. Yes, I am such a geek that I used to draw my own character portraits. And let's talk about geekiness...
I have a seven-page paper to write on Jane Eyre and Victorian society, but I can't get moving. It's due tomorrow night; I have a nice thesis statement, a rough idea, sources lined up and citations highlighted for use...but I can't get writing.
I'm in the proverbial funk.
Profoundly less than satisfied.
Do you think that, maybe (work with me here)...do you think maybe growing up as a total book-worm can ruin somebody's life? Maybe lead to some inflated ideas about how things should be?
Blame it on my middle-school obsession with Tolkien, followed by Robert E. Howard, followed by Michael Moorcock, Frank Herbert, Harlan Ellison, John Bellairs and Ursula LeGuin...all of that followed by another thirty years of voraciously reading every book I could get my hands on: real life falls a little flat, don't you think?
Where's the dramatic climax? Where's the heroic sacrifice that saves the day? Where's the love that topples kingdoms and lasts for all eternity?
Real life just kind of...goes on. No structure. No plot. No denoument, no climax.
Blah.
Even better:
meh.

What's on My Nightstand?

What with work, school and mr. mom duties, my real genius these days lies in tagging along in the reflected brilliance of the wise Strumpet ( www.strumpetslife.blogspot.com ). No end to the clever idea hooks and creative sparks therein, yo. Thus, I steal this from her.
What's on my nightstand? Well, that's a long and funky story...y'see, I live in a house of mess. My wife is a clutter-magnet, as are my kids. Me, I'm Mr.Mom...I spend my time picking up after the brood. I'm no anal-retentive neat-freak; far from it. But I hate seeing shit laying all over the house. I can Lysol and disinfect the whole house; but when there's piles of toys and clutter shit all over, it still looks like a pig-sty. A germ-free pigsty, sure...but still a pigsty.
I have one place where I relax my guard, and that's my side of the bed. Since I was a wee nipper, I've always been nicknamed 'the Nester', because I tend to make nests. I like blankets, and I like to read. So my side of the book is knee deep in piles of books. Literally. Notebooks full of bad poetry and short stories well started but never finished; comic books; D&D books (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 3.5, and 4th editions); textbooks, magazines, and most of all, plain old books.
So here's a quick sample from book-stack 1a, the one closest to the actual bed:
Jane Eyre (for school); Norton Anthology of English Lit (vol D and vol E); the ubiquitous TS Eliot; TX Hamme's the Sling and the Stone; 4th Edition Player's Handbook; Mencken's Treatise on the Gods; Jung's Man and His Symbols; Chris Hitchens' God is Not Greatand finally, capping off the stack, several issues of Guitar Player magazine.
It's not pretty. Obsessive, compulsive, eclectic, sure. But not pretty.
Oh yeah, there's an empty Yuengling lager bottle precariously balanced on top. Not only do I read in bed...sometimes I drink beer in bed.
I'm such a redneck sometimes.

Beach Book

For explanation on the concept of the beach book, go check out the wise woman:
http://strumpetslife.blogspot.com/2009/01/these-books-were-made-for-walking-new.html

First, an apology: I'm taking my "Senior Seminar in British Literature" this semester (on top of hectic work schedule and full-time Mr. Mom duties), so writing for my own good-happiness-stuff has somewhat fallen by the wayside. My professor is not one for slack-ass papers, no way: it's MLA or the highway, and you can't dazzle her with bullshit (my specialty).

My beach book: the Signet edition of T.S. Eliot's the Wasteland and Other Poems. The why of this particular book is a long story...

I left college after five years and joined the Navy. It seemed like a particularly dramatic and romantic gesture at the time. It was a good choice: I got to travel, I got a little discipline instilled in me (like it or not), and I got to indulge my freaky, Jack Kerouac / Zen lunatic personality in diverse and interesting places.

But it got lonely.
So I took to carrying around a copy of TS Eliot in my back pocket. My Kerouac-ian wandering often left me sitting, alone at a bar, hundreds of miles from home, drinking and trying to be Kerouac-ian. Tom Eliot was (and remains) the thread of my existence, the guy who binds the tangled threads of my life into some semblance of a coherent fabric. So I took to carrying my Eliot with me, reading it to pass the time.

"To pass the time"? Okay, let's drop the bullshit. I've secretly harboured the notion that one day I'd be sitting there reading my Eliot with a cold Coors in front of me, and a cute girl would sit down next to me and confess her own love for ol' Missouri Tom Eliot, and then I would know I had officially met Her (capital aitch-ee-arrrrr) and I could give up the wandering and spend my days basking in her glory, reading poetry and being artsy with Her and just living a life of barely-post-adolescent-literati daydreams.

Pathetic? Maybe. But I'm kind of proud of that twenty-years-ago-me kid. There was a certain romantic purity there, ya dig?

Anyhow, I ended up stationed in Virginia Beach, and I took to reading my Tom Eliot on the beach (still hoping to meet capital-aitch-ee-arrr). That summer I met the woman who would become my wife, and she had not the slightest interest in TS Eliot. Crazy, how I abandoned those crazy romantic artsy notions in exchange for an extremely (note the capital letters) Hot Chick. Okay, so the Hot Chick ended up having the soul of an accountant. I was weak. Whatever.

So that's why, when I think of reading at the beach, I always think of the dumb-ass me of twenty years ago, self-consciously reading TS Eliot, waiting for Ms. Right to sweep me off my artsy little feet.

New Specs

So I turn 40 in two weeks, and my reading glasses I've had since 1994 aren't quite cuttin' it anymore. I had a shit-ton of money left over in my health-care spending account that I was going to lose if I didn't use it, so I got some new glasses. Bifocals. I'm blind up close and far away. Yay for me.
So the optometrist guy recommends these no-line variable glasses: distance vision through the top of the lens, middle ground through the middle, and up-close through the bottom part. Sounds great in theory; but you spend a lot of time tilting your head, trying to find that elusive sweet spot of focus.
And taking a leak is a total nightmare, because you have to look down, but looking down looks through the up-close part of the lens, so you have to crane your neck over so you're looking down while looking through the top half of the lenses, and it makes you look like you must have the tiniest little wang in the world.
Getting old sometimes sucks.

Leisure Sucks

Our ongoing Economic Downturn (yes, it has assumed proper-noun status) has allowed me quite a bit of laying-around-on-my-ass time lately. Luckily, I work for a company that doesn't lay people off when times get hard; but we do shut down production for extended periods. When that happens, you make more money by burning vacation, so that's what I've been doing.
I did a bit of house-cleaning. I played quite a bit of Battlefield 2142. Hmmmm...that's about it. I've been between classes, so no school work. I finally had all this time to write and get all my me-things underway; instead, I sat around on my ass doing a lot of stupid, frivolous nothing.
I guess I work better under pressure. I'm kind of a lava-lamp: I don't really do much until you put some heat on me.
~Jack