everything is broken
Folks, my goddamn car battery is dead. My headlights are the old kind that flip upward when you turn them on, and I guess some ice got caked underneath them the last time I drove, because one of them didn't flip all the way back down and, I suppose, therefore stayed on all night. I don't know how old the battery is, so add this to the weather and I think the thing gave up the ghost. Next step: find an auto parts store within walking distance. In the meantime I get to do this trek by foot, across campus and beyond to the Workshop building.
I've determined that Chris is an excellent workshop leader, but in seminar (where we theoretically analyze Published Literature) he just enjoys fucking with people. Yesterday we read a chapter from Mildred Haun's The Hawk's Done Gone called "Barshia's Horse He Made, It Flew." I'd never heard of it either. It was a pretty good story, though, told in heavy Appalachian dialect about this guy named Barshia who has a neurological problem with his foot and is fat and mean-tempered and hits people, but also has a sort of artistic sensibility and makes (or causes to be made by his family) nice little sculptures and tables and stuff. At the end he makes this life-size wingéd horse and takes it up on the roof and, well, you decide what happens from there. The problem started when people began to condemn Barshia's character; Chris leapt to his defense and explained that you couldn't be sure because of the narrator's bias.
"But he hit a child on the head with a hammer," someone says. (There was a scar for life, etc.)
Chris suggests you can't be sure that actually happened, because it was the narrator telling us, and could you necessarily trust the narrator, etc.
"But then you don't know if anything in the book actually happened," our intrepid student points out.
"Maybe not," says Chris.
"Then why read?" asks the student.
Chris grins wickedly and spreads his hands. "I don't know why you read," he says. "Why do you read?" The discussion got worse after that because people started trying to apply modern ideas of domestic violence and someone tried to make an unfortunate analogy to slavery. At least nobody brought up Hitler, which seems to happen pretty often whenever someone needs a convenient emblem of evil.
It's not a naked picture of Anna Kournikova; it's a virus. Or technically a worm, I guess.
Lair of the White Worm fan site.
