Epiphanies with words. A few years ago, I had this roommate.... I needed an excuse to leave the room at any given time to get away for a bit. I often needed a break. I took up smoking. Cigarettes never really appealed to me, though, so when a friend of mine went to the tobacconist where his brother worked, I tagged along and bought a pipe. I needed to get away quite a bit, and soon my pipe was full of yucky goo that had accumulated from smoking it. I thought about cleaning it, and I wondered how I could do that--what I might use. Then I had a kind of epiphany.

Pipe cleaners aren't just for elementary school art projects.

The other thing I wanted to talk about here was James Joyce. We're reading him now in two of my classes. I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man a while back, and when I did, I found something on the internet. Apparently there was a correspondence between Joyce and his wife, Nora, that somehow got leaked to the world. They don't have the letters she wrote, but his are intact. I read them a couple years ago online. Think of a dirty, drunken Irishman writing sex letters to his wife. Think of the filth this guy would write. Now imagine that guy has the writing abilities of James Joyce. Disgusting words I'd never heard strung together like no one else could. It made such an impression on me that now I can't read anything he wrote without thinking of it. Stephen Dedalus, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, that kid from "Araby?" No. Nora keeps bumping everything else out of my head while I read with her fat ass.

I wanted to post a link for anyone curious and courageous enough to read it, but since I read them, the letters seem to have been taken off of the internet, so I can't post the link like I had hoped. I found a few snippets, though, so I've copied and pasted links to sites with those snippets here.

http://everything2.com/user/enth/writeups/James+Joyce%2527s+love+letters+to+Nora+Barnacle

http://www.nerve.com/regulars/jacksnaughtybits/bestof/index.asp?page=2

In class on Friday we talked about the word 'awesome'--how it comes from the word 'awe' and is supposed to denote such special things, but we just throw it around willy-nilly. The other day I was walking downtown and I was listening to a comedian called Eddie Izzard, and he discussed it, too. Instead of posting the entire album, I found a youtube video of it. You can see that here.

Also, I just met up with my group for Emergent Literature class. Group no. 3, Life as Fiction and Language. I am not too sure what that means. I watched Stranger than Fiction yesterday. I did enjoy the movie. It wasn't my favorite movie, but it was clever sometimes, and who doesn't love Dustin Hoffman? I don't think I'm much closer to knowing what "Life as Fiction and Language" means, though.

I started to create a blog for my capstone class when I thought that class is really about incorporating all of the classes I've taken and making one whole or something. I don't really know; I've been an English major for under a year still. With that thought, though, I decided to make only one blog even though I have two different classes (Emergent Lit and the capstone one) that require blogs. I feel like most of the students in one class is in the other anyway.

I ordered most of my books from the internet this semester, and today more of them came in. I got my copy of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets today. I put it in my pocket and kept it with me as I headed to nutrition class. I read some of it before nutrition class started.

This part of my blog is a funny thought about Friday's lecture in Emergent Lit. It relates to something I learned in high school Latin class. On Friday we talked about a circle that was divided in half. Inside the circle represented literature. In one half of the circle was literature that filled the reader up. Dr. Sexson called it 'plenosis.' The other side was literature that emptied the reader. It was labeled 'kenosis.' When we talked about plenosis, we talked about things like comedies where a man "gets the girl" and goes on to do what we implied happened after that--a "walls of Jericho situation." It seems, at least to me, that the word plenosis comes from the Latin word plenus, which means full. It's not very funny, but it is a little bit funny because plenus is also the Latin word for pregnant, which is the end result in plenosis-type literature.