Some days I am *such* a loser.

[truepenny]

We have just proved that Truepenny would rather do ANYTHING than work on her dissertation.

I caught myself literally two clicks and a piece of software away from starting the Learn Greek Online! course brought to us by the island of Cyprus, also the providers of the Greek-English/English-Greek dictionary with handy Ancient Greek attachment which saves SO much wear and tear on my poor brain.

Now, to understand the full implications of this moment of insanity, you must know that despite the years and years and years of language classes, the Classics major, and all the rest of it, I hate doing language work. Hate it with a fiery Armageddon-like passion. And yet, there I was, absolutely on the brink of starting to learn Modern Greek via the Internet, because it seemed a more appealling intellectual pursuit than reading secondary sources on Hamlet. And that's arrant nonsense.

I caught myself, took a good long look at all those submerged thought processes, and went off to read a chapter and a half of Hamlet and Revenge by Eleanor Prosser. It would be more, except that she's insisting on leading me by the hand through the play, scene by scene, and I don't need her guidance, thank you VERY much. Or, as Spike would say, "I got bored."

If, when I've finished the dis., the Learn Greek Online thingy still looks like a good idea, I'll do it. But it is not a legitimate avoidance technique against getting the goddamned dis. finished in the first place.

Argh.

Comments

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

At least you're not running for Governor of Minnesota.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

True. Things could always be worse.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I appreciate. And it helps a little.

[pameladean]

Eleanor Prosser? I read that book for my M.A. thesis, though frankly at this remove I have no recollection whether I admired it or trampled it into the mud. Weirdly, I liked being led by the hand through the play. It was like a kind of critical version of Rashomen, if that makes any sense.

I do however most heartily sympathize with your general desire to be doing anything else, anything else at all. Every novel I've written has done that to me at some point, and the thesis certainly did as well. Lord knows what a dissertation would have done if I'd got that far.

Pamela

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

That's the one. Her cultural context stuff on revenge and spirits is very helpful (even though some of the things I've been writing on are a part of that context which her discussion completely ignores), but her reading of the play is simplistic in the extreme. You cannot treat characters in a Shakespeare play as if they were real people with veristic psychology. They aren't. And my personal feeling is that you cannot have a useful and productive discussion of Shakespeare if you do not talk about metatheatrical elements. Also, Prosser's moral schematic is horrifyingly reductive and is driving me to scribble obscene marginalia--never a good sign.

To be fair, she was writing in 1967 and I'm reading in 2003--and the subtlety and sophistication of literary criticism has come a very very long way in the intervening not-quite-40 years. But that doesn't make the reading any less painful.

(And, before anyone has to ask, I'm reading her because she does put the revenge tragedy in its cultural context and does lay out Protestant vs. Catholic beliefs on Purgatory. She has been genuinely helpful; I just wish I could convince myself I was justified in skipping the analysis of Hamlet proper.)

The novels do this to me, too, but never as badly. I think because, down at the bottom, those are entirely self-imposed obligations. The dissertation still smacks of homework. Bleah.