English

I didn't realize I had fallen asleep in English until the person beside me gave me a shove and handed me a list of essay topics. I hope the prof didn't say anything important about the assignment.

I'm getting tired of English. I find that each day I get more and more apathetic towards it. I try not to, it just happens that way.

My prof is one of the most down-to-earth English profs I have ever had. At the beginning of the semester I was quite glad that she wasn't the type to use strange, esoteric concepts, flowery language and odd tones of voice. She seems to have realistic expectations for her assignments too. She even sounds interesting, being somewhat on the passionate side of her topic.

And yet, I can't quite get over the fact that every morning, and I mean every morning, she arrives to class and complains about how it's too early in the day and that she is tired and would rather not be there. I know that at least half the people there feel the same, so I really wish that she would just stop mentioning it.

I'm not entirely crazy about the books that we've read so far:

North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell
Features a protagonist that is entirely too perfect and so morally righteous that it's sickening. She spends the first half of the novel being an independent, liberated woman, and the second half being utterly hopeless and being completely ruled over by everyone around her. She says "oh" way too many times. The book contains many long-winded passages filled with flowery language and detailed descriptions, that are extremely hard to skim. It starts out painfully slow, and then all of a sudden, it changes pace and ends entirely too fast. Thoroughly unsatisfying.

Nice Work, David Lodge
Though I must admit that the mental image of a middle-aged man driving a sexy car through traffic blaring Jennifer Rush is kind of funny, I did not like this book very much. I think it centres around the fact that I didn't really like either of the protagonists. One was a conservative, middle-aged, sexually repressed prude, and the other was a liberated, overidealistic, out-to-lunch feminist. Though normally I would be drawn towards the second one, she was just too over the top.

A Child of the Jago, Arthur Morrison
Reads more like an anthropology textbook than a novel. It's really big on describing places and events, but lacks character development so much that I honestly don't care what happens to the characters. The descriptions of life in the slums of London should be horrific, I suppose, but they just don't seem to be any worse than what you'd see on the Downtown Eastside. And for some reason or other, descriptions of women fighting, digging their nails into each other and tearing out large patches of each other's hair just doesn't seem to bother me as much as it probably should. Maybe I'm just desensitized. I guess I just didn't like the way that the people in the book were so disgusting, savage and strange that they weren't human.

I think that's half the problem with the Downtown Eastside. Damn. Now I'm thinking, and whenever a book makes me think, I've got to conceed that it was good, at least sort of.

Trainspotting's next. Though I've already read and enjoyed that one, in spite of the gross parts.

Matt Good on Iraq
probably the most interesting graffiti I have ever seen (today at least)