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Nov 14, 2003

I was going to tell you all about this great article in the Onion, but Blogger beat me to it.

Auburn game this weekend...and I may be getting cheap tickets! Party on!
Nick ::: 6:10 PM ::: 0 comments

Nov 13, 2003

Today, NN received a letter from Aspen, which says he has 3 days to pay $450 in overdue rent, or he has to vacate.

It is so wrong of me to feel so good about another's misfortune.

Wheeeeeeeee!
Nick ::: 4:38 PM ::: 0 comments

Nov 12, 2003

First Robbie sublet his room. Now Brad is switching to a new apartment. What the fuck is going on? I feel like I'm on some sort of reality TV show, people getting kicked off right and left.

Brandonn has not improved a damn thing despite our letter. His check to cover the enormous phone bill he ran up bounced, leaving Brad paying $200 he didn't owe. But now B is being all selfless and noble and taking it upon himself to move because he doesn't want to kick NN out. Which leaves me with NN and this Ian guy I don't even know and a totally trashed apartment.

But moving is not a good arrangement for me now. I've got too much shit to pack up and too much stuff to straighten out before I go. Plus I already know everybody down here and Aspen is a large enough place that switching apartments would be like moving to a new neighborhood.

And kicking NN out is out of the question. B flatly refuses to be involved in such a venture and R is gone. I don't have the oomph to accomplish such a thing on my own, and Ian hasn't been here long enough to understand the misery that is living with NN. This situation is fucked up beyond all recognition and I have no idea what to do.
Nick ::: 5:26 PM ::: 0 comments

I woke up at 12:30 today, which is bad because that's normally when I leave for the bus. But then I really hurried and got down to the stop by 1:00, so it would have been OK if the bus had come by immediately. Instead, the bus came by at 1:33, three minutes after my class starts. So I decided to skip.

So now I'm sitting here, reading blogs and munching on a bagel, knowing that two floors down people are listening to a Marine Science lecture and I'm probably one of the random 15 people called on the roll today. And I don't care.
Nick ::: 2:13 PM ::: 0 comments

Slavish work in photoshop and nine tests were all it took to bring you this radically redesigned blogskin.
Nick ::: 1:37 AM ::: 0 comments

Nov 11, 2003

We've started reading Heart of Darkness in English. As most of you probably know, I read it last year for AP and was one of the few students who really liked it. It's a good book, and creepy, and smart. It's reproduced in full in my textbook.

But, as with most academic publishers, those dear folks at Norton felt that what Conrad's novel really lacked was a bunch of dull commentary by lesser authors appended to the back. Since I read the book recently and remember it quite well, I decided to poke through some of that stuff for a new perspective.

This was stupid of me, because one particular essay ended up really pissing me off. Some militant named Achebe (pronounced, presumably, like "achieve" after someone's broken your nose) decided to denounce Marlow's thoughtful and compelling narrative with five pages of bulky excerpts and sniggering commentary.

Essentially, his thesis amounts to "Conrad is a very bad racist and I don't like his book."

Never mind the insightful, critical, and unique portrait of no less a subject than human civilization. Never mind the metaphoric use of light and darkness to express the conflict within the universal spirit of mankind. Never mind the depiction of savagery as brutal truth and freedom from comforting illusion.

That's all unimportant when the writer has the gall to describe a group of black people as frenzied!

This man, secure in his tower of Nigerian ivory, is ripping pages out of books. He is stripping the author of his thoughtfulness and ideas, ignoring the novel's metaphors and turning a deaf ear to its ironies. The smug Achebe sees nothing in the novel beyond his chosen excerpts; he hears nothing in the author's voice but the overuse of adjectives.

This man cannot, and should not, read. He is so consumed by his own agenda, his mind is so wholly obsessed with his own ideas, that he cannot see beyond them even in another's work. It is inconceivable to such a limited mind that Conrad could be setting up Europe and Africa as metaphorical antitheses that are morally equivalent.

No, all that Achebe's tunnel vision perceives is the establishment of difference, of opposite, and his simplistic mind assumes that one must be good and the other evil. No allowance is made for the principle of balance; the eminent Achebe cannot believe in an idea whose complexity transcends his simple crusade.

Anyway, I've ranted enough. To hell with this guy. Heart of Darkness is a damn good book.
Nick ::: 5:15 PM ::: 0 comments

I have now replaced that old thing about not having any friends with a list of currents. These have been overused to the point of really extreme annoyance on blogs everywhere since the dawn of time. I decided that now, when everyone is totally sick of them, is the perfect time to add them to my own blog, in a pretentiously ironic way.

Have a cartoon:

Nick ::: 12:55 AM ::: 0 comments