Tragic Endings

Does anyone want to come and see Burial at Thebes with me? It is required for next semester and I do not want to go on the organised Eng Soc trip (usual reasons). It should still be interesting though! It is a reworking of Sophocles's 'Antigone', but this is literally all I know about it.

I was lucky I did not burst into tears halfway through my seminar today. Asking a roomful of emotionally fragile English lit students to bring in their favourite love poem was probably not the brightest idea ever. For the record, this was mine:

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds about the sky,

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

Philip Larkin, Talking in Bed


I think I did it wrong, everyone else had got things like Keats and Byron and Shakespeare. Some Carol Ann Duffy. It was surprising how many people had brought things they did not really care about; one girl brought that Shakespearean sonnet, the 'My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun' one (I am sorry, I do not know the number) for the sole reason that it was a Shakespearean sonnet and therefore was about love. It is, but not in the traditional sense and she must have known that because she was in the first year with the rest of us when we spent two weeks looking at how Shakespeare's sonnets are actually about death and time and decay and very rarely about any positive form of love. Honestly.

On a related note, I was in Blackwell's yesterday and had to restrain myself from injuring the pair of overbred lit students in front of me. They were sniggering about some sort of 'inappropriate' novel they had found (and by 'inappropriate' I mean 'teenage fiction', not 'pornographic') and generally acting pretty pleased with themselves that they were above all that sort of thing. I hate how studying 'Literature' makes people into giant obnoxious monsters, but I hate even more how 90% of the people who choose to study literature are already giant obnoxious monsters. This is why I love Cognitive Poetics, I think, because it is closer to what I want to do with texts (treat them like cute fluffy bunnies and watch them frolic around) rather than what I have been forced to do with texts every day since Fresher's Week (circle them, cawing, until someone else has staked them down and then tear them apart systematically and with something approaching hatred).

On an unrelated note, last night was quite a lot of fun! Rachel's little brother stayed the night, and we went to the Grove as a form of entertainment. Four glasses of wine later I was passionately arguing with a tramp who had attached himself to the group and trying to find one good song on the jukebox. We stole a trolley on the way home (found it in someone else's garden!) and had trolley races up the street, and then I was a bit ill and passed out on my bed. This morning, it turns out that I had pinched the Grove's Sunday lunch menu and stuck it to our living room wall, which I do not remember doing AT ALL. Worrying.

Sorry I am such a lush, guys.