Hi all. Staying sober here. No time to drink . . . no time for much of anything, but I guess that's good. I'm also losing some weight, which is great, but I could sure use a bit more sleep.
Rant Alert (decrying postmodernism - feel free to skip to the hug)
It's good thing that this is my last semester because I'm all out of patience with literary theory/criticism. If there is a bigger waste of academic effort in the western world, I can't imagine what it would be. How bad is it? . . . well, let me tell you:
Today's class studied "research" (which means a very different thing in Lit than it means in science) of a theory (which in Lit means "a notion"). It proposed that any contact between two men involves a sexual component and so is "homosocial" in nature ("queer theory" is all the rage in academia). The same theory applies to women. So, I asked in class what it meant if someone wants the companionship of a child - the class went dead silent. Then I asked what it meant if someone wants the companionship of a dog, and they cracked up.
Mind you, this trendy academic nonsense is not presented as simply as I've written it here and generally involves long strings of four and five syllable words. Example: A simple phrase such as "Contemporary buildings are alienating'' would be worded like this:
"Pre/post/spacialities of counter-architectural hyper-contemporaneity (re)commits us to an ambivalent recurrentiality of antisociality/seductivity, one enunciated in a de/gendered-Baudrillardian discourse of granulated subjectivity."
Every now and again in life, you run into something so spectacularly ridiculous that it's very existence seems impossible. Such is the state of English departments at universities across the free world. The professor of my class required a written response to the reading on homosocial theory. Mine began like this: “This essay struck me the same as most literary papers of that type, regardless of their subject: – as a multi-paged mass of impotent mental masturbation that possesses little meaning and accomplishes nothing." So, now the professor is going to think I'm a sh*t stirrer.
Remember: Friends don't let friends major in English.
Hugs to all.