Notes

In the future when having brilliant ideas about reforming social/academic clubs remember that this brings one in contact with bureaucracy.

This would be so much easier if I didn't live an hour (hour and half with traffic) away from my campus.

On a minor note we had a wonderful pre-class discussion/debate about why book burning is immoral. Which it is in my opinion and in (thankfully) most of my fellow classmates opinions. A quote I've heard before and I think needs repeating(and I paraphrase) "A society that burns books will soon burn people." As my professor pointed out by burning a book you are not just expressing your own opinion but violently suppressing ideas. Even if you do not burn all copies of a book you have still suppressed the idea.

Campus Frustrations

I'm frustrated as hell with my University at the moment. We have some great medievalists in the English department and we have a Medieval Studies MA in the English department(or so it seems but good luck finding clear info on it). We don't have a Medieval Studies program for undergrads. We don't have any clear support system for Medievalist in training or those even interested in it. I only know about our Society for Renaissance and Medieval studies because I was searching to make sure there wasn't already a Medieval club before I started getting paper work together.

You don't know who to talk to either for advice, and until this year the History department was devoid of Medievalists. So who do you talk to? The Chaucerian? The Anglo-Saxonist? The random Medievalist grad student that assures you there are lots of Medievalists floating about and tells you about all these great graduate classes?

How many undergrads are losing out because they don't know where to look or how to talk to? If I hadn't taken any upper level English classes I wouldn't know half of what I do about those to talk to on campus. Shouldn't out advisers be pointing students in the direction of faculty to talk to and actually advising us based on our goals? Shouldn't the enrollment system keep Freshmen out of upper level seminar classes? (Whoops different rant).

I'm still going to try and put together the Medieval Club, since the SRMS isn't a 'student' organization (and seems to be many grad students but they don't even make it clear what the requirements to join are). I want other students interested in becoming Medievalists to have the feeling of not being alone, whether they come from the History or English side of it. I want to get my fellow students interested in the subject. It's going to be a hell of alot of work, and I'm insane for doing it with everything else I have on my plate (including being in the Classics Club).

Tonight I plan nothing more ambitious than buying a bottle of wine and ordering in Indian. And if I do anything more than write my paper and watching Dresden Files this weekend, I'll be shocked.

Sunday Comic

Hey it is technically Sunday now.

Hamlet as Dark Comedy

Before the break in my Shakespeare class the Professor asked us why Hamlet is a tragedy. There were many ranging answers. She who annoys Geek just by speaking made a good point or two about Ophelia and Gertrude though it all tied back into her Shakespeare anti-feminist subtext theory she goes on about. The classical definition of tragedy found its way into the mix.

I brought up that really Hamlet is a comedy, a dark comedy but a comedy none the less. I mentioned briefly one of the reason the 'Slaughterhouse' scene in R&G are Dead works so well is that Hamlet has the dark humor already built into the text. I found myself auguring the case further against some of my fellow students that could see nothing of comedy in a play were everyone (almost everyone) dies.

I maintain therein lies the dark humor.

Hamlet in his mock insanity often is darkly witty with his word play and doesn't hold is punches against anyone. Even with Ophelia, who we must believe he once –if not still- loved, his tongue is humorless dark. "Get thee to a nunn'ry…" he tells her, and though lost on most modern audiences Elizabethan audiences would recognized the double play on the word nunn'ry, slang for whore house. Hamlet's statement to the dead Polonius ("I took thee for thy better…") and the speech to Yorick's skull are disturbingly humorous in ways. The absurdity of giving a dead man a back handed compliment, or the image of a skull telling the Queen where she'd end up one day can be taken as darkly funny.

Claudius smoothly admitted incest, "Therefore our sometimes sister, now our Queen…" has enough built in humor it's hard to believe the man could say it with a straight face.

Ophelia's insanity is tragic by her words bitingly funny. Even playing the role seriously an actress could prompt laughter with just the right quirk to Ophelia.

Then end of the play if very much 'rocks fall everyone dies'. The main players drop like domino's with R&G being the last touch, the two almost forgotten characters by this point. No one wins but the man that the audience as barely scene; Fortinbras.

The idea of Hamlet as a dark comedy is hardly new or groundbreaking, while checking my term and quotes I even came across the wiki article on it. I'm sure if I looked sparknotes would have something to say on the matter. Strangely enough, for some in my class you would have thought I'd just told them that Jack and Rose really weren't on the Titanic. She who annoys became huffy and rolled her eyes, since she has taken it upon herself to disagree with everything I say.

The Professor pointed out that if Macbeth could be turned into the dark comedy of Scotland P.A. and Romeo and Juliet would be a comedy only for the lack of a happy ending, then Hamlet as dark comedy did not stretch things and ended the discussion.

Breast Bands, Beowulf, and the Thirteenth Warrior

Moved this to its own post, added a few things. Plus how the hell did I type cliff notes instead of footnotes?

I've been playing Twilight Princess in between reading The Cambridge Companion to Dante. One of my big papers is tentatively going to look at Dante's Greek bias. The man seriously did not like the Greeks, not that the Classical sources he used helped matters. I should be working more on my research, since I have four big papers this semster (five if you count the take-home-essay test), but I needed a break.

I'm just so frustrated in my major research project, as anything over the lack of anything on breast binding or breast bands in the Middle Ages, other than the off-handed reference in the Gies' Life in a Medieval City. Curse the unhelpful footnotes and probably sources that are in other languages.

Curse my inability to speak anything but English and a smattering of Kilingon and Minbari.

I'm about ready to scrap the topic in favor of the Church's influence on sumptuary laws and how the power of the secular world eventaully overpowered it. I would love to stick to my original idea but I'm starting to think that I'll need resources that just aren't available to me as an undergrad in Texas.

Not helping matters is the fact I've been thinking off one of my classmates topics (he's looking at positive representations of Muslims in Medieval literature) and in a round about fashion brought my mind the The 13th Warrior (yes Beowulf, is Anglo-Saxon and wouldn't really work fall into his range, but my mind works in odd ways. Side note: Crichton used Beowulf as a 'inspiration' for Eaters of the Dead, later renamed to match the title of the movie. Now there's some mindless trivia for you). I'm now wanting to re-read Beowulf, and rewatch the movie, because I'm pretty sure my mind has jumbled up bits of the movie with bits of the book.

It is always interesting how much film can color our memory of a text.

Graduate Level Class Update

Thank you to everyone that commented with advise and kind words. I was approved to take the class as a Conference course, so it'll show up as a 4000 level on my transcript.

I've decided (thought it should have been plain to me earlier) that the girl who gave me the hardest time about the 5000 level class, and was the originator of the "No one will give you a rec letter' is a petty bitter person. I really should have known better than to talk to her since she is also the one that had a fit that I was in upper level History classes without taking the History Research Class.

You'd also think I'd know better than to ask my father advise about anything at time point in my life.

So, long story short (too late), my class line up for spring looks something like this:
Topics in Classic Myth (with the Prof who is trying to convince me to take Greek next semester instead of Latin)
Intro to History Research with Prof I like(Hey don't look at me like that, I've been waiting for a session that wasn't American History focused)
British Empire (with my fav Prof in the History Department)
Medieval History (This is a Saturday class. Only for you Medieval History would I give up sleeping in.)
Chaucer Conference Course

If the stars align correctly I should be done Thursday mid-day then be on a plane to K-zoo.

Breaking Barriers, or An Undergraduate In a Graduate level class

Barriers are everywhere. Some are tangible. Some are invisible or imagined but no less daunting than the psychical ones.

Police tape around a crime scene. The only teenage girl in a highschool weight training class. The dividers put up in the once vaunted 'open class rooms'. A student with LDs in honors classes. The glass between an inmate and the family visiting them. A English major in a upper level chemistry class. A child safety gate.

If I'm approved by my Professor (and boy, do I wish the undergrad advisor had just told me to talk to him, since I have two other classes with him, instead of forwarding it to him but that's a different issue), I'll be crossing one of those invisible barriers. I've been told by several people since those wee hours of Friday morning that I have a lot of 'gaul', 'nerve', 'balls', and 'common sense'. Not mention a very strong look of disapproval from a senior and a lecture about how I'd ruined my chances of ever getting a letter of recommendation from anyone in the English department, that how dare I even think about a 5000 level class, and that it just isn't done.

Have I crossed a line?

Part of me wants to know why shouldn't I request approval for a class I want to take? I've always done so in the past, both in high school and at University. The worst that happens is that my Professor says no, that I'm not ready for the class. I'm not going to beat my breast, rend my clothing and wail like the a figure from Greek Tragedy. I sent a very nice polite email to the English advisor and acknowledged that it was a graduate level class and I would more than understand being turned down.

But there is another part of me that worries that I have crossed a line. That I look arrogant, naive, and foolish. That this is something that just isn't done.

More than that, part of me worries now that I was fooling myself and that I wouldn't be able to handle it. I'm struggling with my thesis for my paper on Chaucer's use of female assent in marriage and which books of the Canterbury tales to narrow my focus to. So how can I dare think that I could handle Chaucer's Literary Geography? I have doubts where I once had none.

Is a undergraduate trying to take a graduate level class a unpardonable sin? Will I be made to sew a red letter of some sort to my clothing? Your thoughts?