Tuesday Tedium

Tuesdays are the worst.

8 am staff meetings followed by class and work till 6:45.

(With several short breaks that are usually spent skimming far-too-long readings. Sometimes a 20 minute nap.)

Now I have two papers to write along with plenty more reading to catch up on. But I just want to make cookies and watch Portlandia videos. Or both, preferably. 

*The following is mostly just prewriting for an essay. Feel free to ignore.*

We just finished Fugitive Pieces in my Women's Lit. class. Everyone seemed to love it, but I didn't so much.  Well, I can certainly appreciate it on a sentence level.  The prose is remarkably lyrical and could certainly be classified as prose-poetry.  Michael's metaphors and imagery are truly evocative––surprising yet precise.  Although, they do become somewhat...distracting at times.  I tend to agree with one critic who labeled her writing "over-accessorized."  But what Michaels seriously lacks, in my opinion, is character development.  Maybe this seems insensitive, but Jakob is far too maudlin and well...pathetic for my liking. No not my liking. My understanding.  While I think it is an interesting idea to explore the effects of the Holocaust on the second generation that never experienced the ghettoes or concentration camps, it's just not believable for me. Yes, Jakob lost his family at a very young age, but Athos becomes his family.  I don't understand his habit of comparing every woman he meets to the sister he hardly knew? For fifty years? And his claim that the most important events in his life are the ones he never even witnessed? I don't buy it.  Not because it isn't possible. Michaels just doesn't make it believable.  She's too tied up in describing the exact shade of the Mediterranean or the whisper-weight of white linen on olive skin.  But most troubling, or at least incomprehensible, is Jakob's sudden healing.  After decades of self pity, a few pages of sexual exploration with a woman half his age rectifies that? Really? I suppose he calls it love. But Michaels doesn't prove it.  What the novel lacks is Eliot's objective correlative––a concrete representation of and explanation for Jakob's extreme melancholy. (Which is somewhat ironic because Michaels references this concept several times.)

That's all I suppose. I don't think I'll actually end up using any of this though. It certainly doesn't answer any of the far too leading (in my opinion) "discussion" questions.