2nd Day of Apologies

Kevin
-Channeling the Barman Poet
-Why are you doing it man? To Graduate, but so much more.
-Channel Arnold Keats and Pater now to tell why all is so important
-Using Don Quixote for apology!
-English students know the benefits of studying poetry while others (outside) remain oblivious.
-Beyond the greater good.

Gabby
-A Sudden Manifestation of the Divine
-Science Class - Wanted to be Nurse
-The Pig-In-A-Bag was her future!
-The Pig recited lines from Frye!
-She incorporated the semester into her story. It was sublime. ;)
-They never will get it.
-"A fool that persists in his folly will become wise."

Ben
-40 year old illiterate man
-Began seeing with poetry seeing eyes in his hometown, and became an English Major.
-Talked of center and circumference, he said that a person would never be happy in the center of their lives until they engage in the circumference of it too. Those that don't engage in poetry are only waiting to die.

Rosanne
-4th class with Dr. Sexson
-She feels like she needs to read classical mythology over and over and over.
-She wrote a poem for her apology.
-Many incorporated themes and stories from semester (and past semesters) in poem. It was sublime. ;)

Kyle 1
-Personal explanation of why I am an English Major. He's stressed :) but he loves stories.
-"If stories are not important, why have we not quit making them?"
- For millenia, stories have been fun and diversion.... this has now poured over into movies and video games.
-Why are they important? A world of nature that is olblivious to our wants and desire. We want to turn this world into a better representation of what we call home.
-Don Quixote understood this better than them all.
-I would lose my ability to make the world what I want it to be if stories and the ability to make them was gone.
- Haroon and the Sea of Stories!

Jake
-If a major does not offer high salary and many job offers after college, it is considered worthless. Literature falls here. But literature is the major of passion.
-Literature is emotion. Building a bridge is not.
-Cruelty is just a word but it becomes more, it becomes real, when we read of it from Harriet Beecher Stowe or Anne Franke.
-As long as there is love and suffering, we need literature.

Kayla
-Words whisper to her in her sleep.
-Words teach her to live, love, observe, write, and embrace her forever companion, her imagination.
-As a reader I can only visit other worlds, but as a writer I can create.
-It is the mirror that makes that which is distorted beautiful.
-People burn books because they are afraid of the power within them.
-Proud to be a part of that power.

Erica
-Personal story: English teaching major - Parents not surprised by her decision to teach, but were surprised by decision to go to grad school for literature.
-All literature teaches us, even if it is by seeing a new word in a crazy poem.
-Don Quixote is not just a satire of chivalry, it's a beacon for those people who need to be inspired to do what they want!
-Self-proclaimed romantic. Only she, a literature lover, can be amongst the gods.

1st Day of Apologies

Sarah
- Ghostlier Demarcations, Keener Sounds
- Not English Major, but embraces the power of art.
-Girl born in prison image
-Fish and Wildlife Management and Liberal Studies

Doug
-Pragmatic approach to Lit.
-German approach, he was illiterate and felt stupid.
-Basic blocks of what words are, simple letters, 26 in our alphabet/Germans 32 letters
-Within every symbol in a word, you totally change meaning of word. Same with word is where a sentence is. Same with where sentence is in paragraph, paragraph in chapter, chapter in book, and book in culture and so on.
-Culturally based literature, you can't have one without the other.
-Ovid and Homer achieve immortality because we can understand their words on paper. It is the words that give them immortality.

Jessica
-"How do I know what I think until I see what I say?"
-Plato calls poets "Liars" and "Madmen", we take English classes without knowing what they'll be about.
-Aristotle, learning to write by reading what you like.
-"The Matrix" and the Allegory of the Cave, enjoying it without this knowledge, enjoying it more with it.
-John Dunne, recon quote

Kelsey
-Worse than normal english major, english ed.
-Talked about class and how random it is.
-Without imagination, there would be no NO writers.
-"Imagine all the people" sharing all the while (Not in her speech).
-Allows me to morph into a better person/Allows me to be truly myself

Kyle 2
-"I'm an English Major because I think I do a lot more work than everyone else does."
-Receive immortality. (with culture surviving)
-Touched on touchstones.
-Personal touchstone is last lines from Robert Frost's "Road less taken"
-Matt Arnold's right - Poet informs beyond nature.

Lisa
-I'm sorry for gaining tons of knowledge from literature!
-What will I do with this Major?
-Where will I NOT go with this Major!?
-"I have an imagination to feed"
-People in other majors student's caught in Keat's "Dark Chamber", and other major's are looking for us, the secret, in the mist. They won't find it.
-Many peers caught up in age of Chaos. ("like totally awesome dude"), Economics won't take use from here. You were boring listening to my presentation.
Heather
-Not english major, why apologize.
-They have applied the work to themselves, so they should apologize to the work.
(Does she know we're not saying sorry, we're saying I love what I do!)
-Psychology major now, wants to stay connected to the literary world.
-Poetry is all around us. People go through their lives not knowing that it's all around, she doesn't want to be this.
-The ignorant owe the apologies.

Claire
-Film major, and we're all story tellers.
-Bored with reality.
-I'd rather live in someone elses world.
-Shelley lives this out best, at least writes it best. Wants to create other worlds for us.
-Suspension of Disbelief, first heard in theatre, now in literature, and on film. We accept the ridiculous because it's fun and good and somewhere deep inside we all want this.
-Don Quixote, we all want to keep the storytelling alive and in life.
-Shelley says we should live by these rules, and fiction is a catalyst. Don Quixote does this and does something that's different than everyone else. He could have done this.

Carly
-Statement of why we love literature. In Praise of my literary hero, Don Quixote.
-Don Quixotes mission is to become like his heroes, and she wants her quest to be just like that. His dignity in presenting himself is everytime more entertaining.
-He explains why he does what he does and he gets looked at as even more crazy.
-Reading and experiencing that divine is as close to bringing God to earth as we can get.
-Quoted pg. 88 from Quixote, great words.
MS - "In the prison of his days/Teach the free man how to praise." -In Memory of W.B. Yeats

Don't Vomit Your Paper!

But what if it was as beautiful as that? Perhaps then he would like us to "vomit" our papers for the class. ;)

Response to Maggie's "I am Don Quixote"

Let's just get it all out of the way, right up front and honest.

YOU are not Don Quixote. ;-)

YOU are a regurgitation.

I am a regurgitation.

Yes, Dr. Sexson did say that the world is "divided into pragmatic Sancho Panzas and idealistic Don Quixotes." But I believe that on Wednseday he proved himself wrong. I think what he really wants to say is that the world is divided into regurgiations of the pragmatic Sancho Panza and regurgitations of the idealistic Don Quixote. Because we all know that it doesn't matter how much we want to be in the books, be in the stories... he WAS living the fantasy. (I wish I could do this myself, sometime... maybe always...). 

I would go as far to say that our lives would be extended even further than they already are though our love of books.... if we could live as Don Quixote lives.

Imagine that! If he were to believe he was able to live 1,000 years old because of an incredible story he had read in his time of reading/going koo-koo, then he would "really" live that long.

But back to my point at hand, if you and I can both be regurgitations of a man as idealistic and wonderful as Don Quixote, that's perfect. I don't think that any human being can find a more perfect person to be the regurgitative product of. So enjoy it and embrace every story like that... it's how we al should and I'd even go as far as saying it's the reason that English Majors are English Majors (we all have a little Quixote in us. ;)

Don Quixote and Neo

Both Don Quixote and Neo have something in common: that their everyday world of reality is an illusion. These men in each of their respective narratives is differently situated with regard to this theme, however. In the book, the idea that the everyday world is an illusion is a falsehood, and Don Quixote would be perhaps less amusing but more himself if he would reject the idea. In the movie, this idea is true and Neo must come to accept it. In both cases, however, what the work presents as the reality to which the protagonist must be reconciled is a fiction replete with outlandish unrealities, and we (the reader of the book or the viewer of the film) are expected to know this. And thus we draw a connection with Alice In Wonderland, because as we all know, The Matrix is a "displacement" of Alice's story.


Oh, the connections to be made. ;)

Touchstone

"This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper."

- The Hollow Men, T.S. Elliot


BEAUTIFUL!

Read Before Watching - A Defense of Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley

So doing my daily hop and sift through the wonderful and dangerous land that is the World Wide Web, I discovered an "experience" that one could only express through the use of the (now common vocab to us all) sublime.

I believe even Longinus would be proud of these people and their work they have so wonderfully portrayed here. :)

At first you'd think I'd be blown away by the fact that they were doing an excellent job of reading the defense (even if it is a slightly abridged version) but I was not. It was the background music that caught me off guard. As soon as I heard it, all I could think was, "Yes....mmmmmmm........perfect".

It was simply divine listening to the Bach Suites play along as some of the most eloquent words ever written on poetry were voiced in a very well thought out video. The most incredible thing about this was the fact that I was just allowed, about a week ago, to listen to one of my classmates in another class (Sexson's 304) play the very song they begin reading with.

The coincidence was beyond words, the connections between these people and the two classes were almost to much for my mind to handle at once. So, I did the only thing reasonable. I just laid back and soaked it in, dealing with it the only true way the sublime, in all its beauty and mystique, can be dealt with. So go ahead and enjoy this, please.

(What else is there to be said? What else can be said?).

Nothing

The Divine