Malted Hops

This is going to be freakishly boring for most of you.

So, a few weeks ago I wrote a good essay for my Children's Literature class. About a week after I handed it in, the professor e-mailed me asking if I could come in to talk about my essay. I was worried, but when I actually met with him, he just asked me to clarify a few of the more complicated things (ie, everything other than "this book am good. this am feminist, this am coming of age"I) had written in the essay. The professor told me that he liked to have a few students come in from each class to talk to him, so he could get to know them better. That sounded like a lie, since the school year was ending in a day or two, but I shrugged it off.

Last Monday I handed in a really, really good essay for my 18th Century Lit class. It was on this novel, Rasselas, by Samuel Johnson, who was this big deal 18th century literary critic and writer. I like almost everything he's written, and I've read almost everything he's written. So, I was able to use all that knowledge to make a bunch of complex allusions and references to other Johnson stuff while commenting on the novel, and I figured that would just come across well. I didn't really care, though, because I knew I had written a bad-ass essay.

Last night, J and I were watching 'the Talented Mr. Ripley', when my 18th Century Lit TA called, asking me to meet him today (today today) so we could talk about my paper. This TA is great, smart, into the class, puts a ton of work into grading the papers.

I meet him, it's really hot out - we talk about the paper, and he asks me to clarify a few things in my paper that he says he didn't really understand. I was surprised he didn't understand them, because I was pretty sure he had read the other Johnson stuff, but, I did it, babbled on, waiting for the ball to drop. And, yes, after I spent about 20 minutes explaining the paper, he basically admitted that the stuff I had written was intelligent, blah blah, better than the rest of the class, so forth, and the allusions were really good and clear (not obtuse like I was lead to believe, at first) - the allusions were actually too clear and too pointed. He thought I'd plagiarized the paper at first, and wanted to test me to see if I knew what I meant, and after my long explanation he realized that I hadn't. Shit - he actually thought the writing itself was too good, and that was a symbol of an "internet paper" too. And, we talked, and had a good conversation, and what not.

But, I'm fucking angry at all of this. I know now that the Children's Literature professor was doing the same thing - seeing if I actually knew what I had written. My shitty papers get to fly by with A-'s. The papers I actually work on, and actually know things about, also get A-'s (for being overly ambitious or some shit), but I have to go in and spend a half-hour defending myself for being doing a better job than the bog standard average. It's pretty fucking anti-intellectual IMO - some of the English kids here are fucking retards that never got beyond an AP English level understanding of books. They don't read on their own, or if they do read, it's based on some cultural or political interest that has absolutely fuck all to do with literature. They don't have any sense of a 'literature' as a whole, they don't read stuff written before fucking 1801 (the school has to require English majors to take 3 pre-1800 literature classes). They don't read any criticism, so they don't have any idea about what criticism is - and yet that's what fucking English essays are. And - English classes are geared towards these fuckwits, and essays are supposed to look like regurgitations of everything the professor said in class combined with an incredibly cursory knowledge of whatever book we're reading. If the essays are anything beyond that, then of course, people are fucking plagiarizing.

And is everyone who does large amounts of plagiarizing (raping an entire essay, etc.) a fucking idiot? If I was to plagiarize something, I would flip through books so as to document the stolen paper as thoroughly as possible, and I wouldn't be confident that the writing would look like my own, so I would purposefully fuck up the syntax and structure until it looked like one of the shitty papers that gets handed in usually. Who the fuck actually hands in a paper that they wouldn't be able to defend if someone asked them about it?

And, this is what gets me - I really thought I was writing below standard for my English classes...that I was getting by because I said a couple of interesting things or whatever. But, bleh - I tossed this shit out Monday morning, and I get called out for it?

Fuck people who say that you don't have to understand literature to write English essays, fuck people who say that older authors are irrelevant, fuck people who say that all ideas are essentially as valid as any other idea, and fuck people who say that self-expression is more important than actually making conclusions in anything creative - prose, poetry, art, fucking cooking.

Stn 2000