A short interval

(what the Irish call intermission) for my reading.

I've started to accent Ts. As in, "three twenTY" instead of the northwest-slurred "three twendy." I don't say "tree" for "three" yet, though. It's involuntary and only happens at work when I'm talking to the Irish. Sometimes Americans, when I'm trying to fake being not American.

Reading The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien for this contemporary Irish lit. class. It was banned and everything, burned, whatever. I'm not especially enjoying it. It's tough for me to just enjoy a novel that refuses to overwhelm me. As in, a novel that is a telling of a story and not a total immersion. She doesn't capture the voice of the girl the way Salinger captures Holden. And, coming after Katherine Mansfield (last week, modernism), the more beautiful parts of her prose just seem flat and a bit contrived.

In other news, I'm going to read a lot of Mansfield. I intended to skim a few short stories after I finished work (1 a.m.) Thursday for Friday morning but I ended up reading so carefully all the assigned stories. Ironically, after I went to bed at 4 a.m., I slept through class the next morning. I need a coffee maker. I cannot bear to face the day knowing that I have to ride 20 minutes in order to get bad coffee. I took 125 grams of Guatemala Antigua Fairtrade from work tonight and intend on making use of it as soon as I find a french press.

Anyway, better get back to the grind of reading easy fiction. She mentioned "C.K. Chesterton" (the girl gets G.K. Chesterton's name wrong; they're at school in a convent) in the book and it just made me want to go pick up some hardcore philosophy/theology, subsequently failing all my classes and spending all my time reading books that don't apply to class.

Interesting article from Mother Jones (surprisingly more even-handed than originally thought) on Baylor University, and generally the tension between liberal, modern education and religion. At one point in a quip about hate speech the writer suggests that the doctrinal problems of Christian schools are not confined to Christian schools alone; that secular institutions unwittingly are subject to their own doctrines that need to be revealed in the light of liberal education in general.

Professing Faith

Deconstruct that. (My new catch-phrase, a la Seacrest out).