Which word is more fun, "paganism" or "heathenry?" I was writing an abstract on an article about Beowulf the other day and I had to choose between those words several times. I like them both, but paganism sounds more like fires and full moons and heathenry sounds more like ancient kings and their funeral pyres.
I just finished reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for my American Lit class and as we were having a discussion about the ending I came to a realization. Tom Sawyer is Dignan from Bottle Rocket. Everyone in the class kept going on about how Tom annoyed them by making everything so complicated and taking control of things away from Huck and putting Huck and Jim through such misery just so things could be "right." I thought of Dignan telling Anthony he had to "escape" from the hospital by climbing out his window and down his rope of sheets. It made me so happy, sitting there in class thinking of all the connections between the two characters. I've always loved the end of Huck Finn. Tom comes in and makes everything so much fun. And Huck is a little like Anthony, too: "You've got to get me one of those jumpsuits." I wonder if Wes Anderson had Tom in mind at all.
This'll probably be my last blog for awhile. I have a long semester of Sipping and finishing up and then there's graduation which Emily Jade Barfhead Susan Shaw Lapish has informed me is roughly equitable to death. But there will be time for blogging after death.
I'm sitting here contemplating my impending departure from Omaha and the uncertainty of my return. It's a beautiful day today, steel gray sky, white everywhere, even the road in front of our house is still covered with snow. I was driving down the long straight road back from the library today, listening to Aimee Mann and looking at the stark landscape and it was beautiful. I don't want to live here, but this place intrigues me, thinking back on those people who first decided, "let's claim this territory as our own." It's so alien to me.
It's been snowing for over twenty-four hours. I love snowy days like this. They seem to give one liscense not to do anything. And I have two brothers to shovel and snowblow so I sat inside and read The Faerie Queene in preparation for my SIP. It's such a psychedelic narrative poem. Narrative poetry is pretty trippy to start with, but when you put it in Middle English and use phrases like "I feare the fickle freakes" and "mincing mineon" and talk about women who would rather be turned to stone than have sex (you know, that's an interesting idea, because you find it a lot in mythology, too: Apollo wanted Daphne and she turned into a laurel tree, whereas when Zeus wanted women they were all cool with it. Makes you wonder . . .) I've decided that "Stone Virgins" would be a pretty cool band name.
William and I started watching the extended edition of Return of the King. I have such trouble watching that movie because the parts with Frodo and Sam are so boring. I feel like Jackson tries to put in conflict to make the trek through Mordor more interesting, but it backfires. If he just relied on the idea of Mordor and trusted that it would be threatening enough in itself I think it would have been better. Besides that, I'm liking the movie more this time through. Even Liv Tyler, not seeing her for six months has made her much more tolerable.