Whee!

After the previous post, I’ve decided I’ll use “or” when I title my first book and eschew the catchy title, colon, description of work -convention.

Compare.

After Yan Hui: The Traditional Intellectual in Modern Chinese Fiction

After Yan Hui, or, Scholars, Society and Fiction

Instantly cooler. As cool as Yan Hui gets. …Hooray for nerdy obsessions!

I actually did write that paper, the first one, for my Chinese lit course in Beijing. You know, all of my intellectual work comes back to the same three themes:

1) man’s relation to God and His creation,
2) boundaries and connection, and
3) Yan Hui (and, by extension, all the things that Yan Hui represents – the goals, process
and effectiveness of education, relationships with teachers, etc).

Oh, God. My work is about my life. I like to think that I’m objective about my work and not trapped in this endless cycling, but… I build conclusions filtered by the same preoccupations and concerns, reconfigured to reflect my state of mind at any given moment, unconsciously trying to make sense of the world I experience through the words I read and write. I delight in the abundance and complexity of what I find. I do. At the same time, I am afraid of the hamster-in-his-wheel syndrome, blindly, perpetually re-hashing the same ideas.

All of this has come from my current procrastination activity: I have been going through my papers from college. Doing so, I have found a few “I’ve been up all night, and oh God! What’ll I title this damn paper?!!” doozies. Here, to delight you, I present some of my favorites:

“Place of Rest: The Ecological Significance of Repentance in Paradise Lost”
-- how grad school is that? I’d get in on the title alone.
“Cecilia, Projectrix”
-- this is the time OED handed me my argument on a silver platter. Projectrix is one of my favorite words.
“Duck, Duck, Ghost: The ‘Here’ in Ibsen’s Domestic Dramas”
-- Amy’s favorite
“Bird of Prey: Brand’s Fowl, Compromise”
-- tee hee
“I Miss Ibsen: Fun with Strindberg”
-- I wish it had been fun

Joe’s Modern Theater course inspired the most playful titles. I think I was so flattened by desperation at the modern world he was forcing me to examine – devoid of connection, meaning, hope – that my writhing brain started firing in random directions to make words fun and keep myself sane. My worst college paper, “Imagination and Intensity: ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ and ‘Dejection: An Ode,’” was the result of Joe sitting me down and ordering me (ordering me) to see the “darker side of the Romantic imagination.” I don’t like looking at despair; my mind rebels.

Honorable mention goes to:

“A Breath of Fresh Air: The Basics of Breathing Coordination”
-- The paper I put least effort into during college, a book report for breathing class.
The title’s not bad, actually. Or maybe it is, and staring at all the worse ones have
warped my senses.

“You Be the Magistrate!”
-- Did you ever read the “You Be the Jury!” books? The book presented cases and you had
to decide whether the suspect was guilty or not. When Ellen had us do something
remarkably similar in her class on Pre-modern Chinese Law, I couldn’t resist.

“Activating Human Potential at the Boundaries of Self”
-- ‘Say that again?’ The most laughably, stereotypically “SLC” of my paper titles, I
believe. Written for Sandra Robinson, if that clarifies anything for SLC grads among my
readers. Notable, I suppose, for being the first paper I ever wrote about China.

“From the Mouth of God to the Magus’s Hands”
-- Sounds rather indecent, doesn’t it? It’s really about Giotto’s painting of the Adoration.

“Love in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre”
-- Just in case you confused it with another Jane Eyre. …What a vague title.
Love? What about love?

“1+1: Dickens, Lawrence and Hemingway on Human Connection, Sex, and the Experience of Significance in Industrial Society”
-- Cumbersome enough for you? I was just going to call it “Industrial Sex,” but then
realized that would be the title Joe put in my evaluation. Thought better of it.

“Nature Ne’er Deserts the Wise and Pure…or the Repentant”
-- Quoting an unrelated poem by Coleridge to title a paper on Dante is totally
legitimate.

“Rare Egyptian!: Regal Self and Statehood in Dramas of the Renaissance and Restoration”
-- Fancy, intelligent-sounding title. Awful paper.

“Lost Petrarchan Poem Uncovered in Vatican Library!”
-- Title for an academic paper, headline… same difference. Contains my imitation
Petrarchian sestina. Notable for forcing me to realize that I am not Petrarch. It could
have been worse. I could have been Meaghan and facing the fact that I was not
Shakespeare.

“A Vanishing Narrator and Fictitious Publishers: A Fitting End to The Captain’s Daughter”
-- My paper on Pushkin’s historical fiction. Schlegel’s quote, “The historian is a
prophet facing backwards,” intrigued me (did I mention the process of
studying/writing/interpreting history among my obsessions?). I tried to use the quote to
read Pushkin, taking a final passage, written as though by the book’s publishers, and
tracing its statements backwards into the body of the work. Besides being here because
it’s an awful title and deserves mocking, I am sorry I never quite worked my thoughts out
about the historian. This is the trouble with most of my literature papers: reading
them, I can feel myself overreaching, straining to come to conclusions too complex and
sophisticated for my young brain.

“哦加拿大!” (translation)
-- That’s, umm, “Oh, Canada!” …If you were stuck on a train for 30 hours with a friend,
you just might come up with a similar activity to pass the time. I’ll tell you all the
story sometime. It’s better bilingual, but, among my acquaintance, there’s rather a
limited audience for Chinese-English storytelling. All of you – get to work studying
Chinese! It’s an awesome language. Really. Go! Study!

“辣椒”
-- Poem about hot-sauce, written in couplets and as close an approximation of
trochaic tetrameter as I could accomplish in Chinese. (missing the last unstressed
syllable on each foot – I could label it headless iambic tetrameter, but I like
considering most the two-syllable words together as a foot. Is that allowed?) …All the
cool kids were doing it.


I hope you enjoyed the jaunt down memory lane. I should compile my paper titles; it would provide an interesting picture of my college career. For myself, of course. I wouldn’t subject you all to that. Or I could amuse myself with a recap of semesters in terms of their papers…and webboard posts. I think fall 2004 (and maybe even spring 2005) would just say: “Webboard! GAH.”