—Sorry. But the little guy read through some of today’s posts and immediately stuffed his rucksack with a physics primer and a few paperback anthologies on Renaissance revenge tragedies, then lit out for one of the nearby community colleges to “make my way in the world.”
Because let’s face it: no punkass kitten fetishist is going to call him a failed academic—even if it means he has to has to purchase every last grade with handmolded balls of his best Charas hash, or sleep with every last Old English T.A. harboring some secret desire to rub a scaled rodent between her pale breasts so that she can pretend she’s being sexed up by the Dragon who, like, totally fucked up King Beowulf!
Damn, I’ve done my fair share of college ejukatin—not a failed academic yet Jeff, but I’m doing my darnedest—and no varmint ever gave me a tasty ball of hash in exchange for a better grade.
Um, where might the lil fella be enrolling? Inquiring minds, you know.
I prefer Nepalese Temple Balls. Wait, wait, really soft Lebanese Red. Mmmmm…..
Go into architecture if you want a cheap degree–because there are no objective criteria to be had, all your important classes are graded on how much the professor likes you. (wink wink)
Number of English TAs I have known: 2.
Number I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out had been secretively nursing obsessive thoughts about the scaly embrace of Beowulf-themed armadillo fetishes betwixt their pale, willowy bosoms: 1.
The other one was a guy and he hated Beowulf.
So from my POV (and can I possibly speak from another?) your li’l friend should avoid the University of Washington and should instead beeline for the liberal arts boutique schools of the northeast.
Jeff, if the little feller checks in, just remind him if he meets a little hippie ‘dilla gal with a nice smile and a pair of breasts so big and beautiful it seems too good to be true– it probably is.
There’s a lot of learnin’ goin’ in at those community colleges besides what they teach you in books. Word.
I don’t know. Failed or successful academic, there is seldom big bucks there. Now a dancing armadillo. We’re talking big time showbiz, American Idol, Dancing With The Stars. I think the little fellow has made a serious career miscalculation.
Daylight come an me want go home.
BEEEEOOOOOO. BEEEEOOOOO.
BUSH IS TEH EVIL !!!
Failed or successful academic, there is seldom big bucks there.
I take it Lew’s never met anybody who required the students in the large lecture class they taught to buy a textbook that they themselves wrote.
Those would be the dweeby-looking guys tooling around campus in Ferraris.
waitaminit! isn’t there a commentrix here whose coursework had something to do with old english or beowulf or something? I think she’s got an in with the scaly little guy!
Not that there’s anything wrong with that…
tw: Just because you asked
totally OT, but I doubt the dillo minds one bit.
Anyone try google talk? me likey.
Flashback to freshman english class at Notre Dame where the seemingly 256 year old professor with excess orifice hair (a natural Geatish warrior himself) read us Beowulf in old english. The horror, the horror.
Pleanty of pale breasts though.
Wait a minute. I thought Beowulf went up against Grendel.
Honestly Jeff, you are so Orwellian.
Jay, you ignorant slut.
Beowulf kicked Grendel’s ass. Then he kicked Grendel’s mother’s ass. (Which has to be a bitch – you’re kicking back in the great hall, the mead is flowing, and then some bint knocks on the door to complain that you killed her son. Christ, how many generations of you things do I have to f-ing kill, anyway?)
Then later he decided to go swimming across the ocean, for reasons that are completely unfathomable to me. I was too busy thinking that “whale-way” has to be the GAYEST poetic metaphor for “ocean” ever. And this big dragon came swimming up and it ate his ass. I think he took it within him – Beowulf was nothing if not a stone cold take-you-to-hell-with-him kind of guy – but it ate his ass and good. That story is in his second epic, Beowulf II: The Revenge, the first (but, alas, not only) incidence of a decent first movie being followed up by an eminently forgettable sequel.
Why do I remember all this crap?
So Grendel was the original Cindy Sheehan then?
No wait, got that backwards. Grendel’s *MOM* was the original Cind…aah heil! Screwed up a perfectly good joke…
I personally wanted to rub Beowulf between my…fingers and thumbs.
What is with all this “failed academic” stuff? Did I miss something?
Fuck… 122 words in only 2 sentences. You expect me to make sense of this shit? I’m going back to listen to morningwood.
Oh, and tell him to keep an open mind with “Jerusalem Deliverd” if he’s going to insist on actually reading that Renaissance stuff. It makes Orwell look practically terse.
Er, honestly? I like Beowulf. One of my fondest memories in grad school was a semester spent working through Klaeber’s text of the poem, Saxon grammar in hand, under the guidance of a Vietnam-era Marine-turned historical linguist. Great class, great fellow students, including one guy who had taught himself to read the Elder Edda in the original Icelandic, just for fun.
Hwaet?
Oh, and Robert – you may be conflating Beowulf’s boast of his exploits before Hrothgar’s court (which involved superhuman swimming feats, coupled with fighting monsters that sound suspiciously like narwhales) with his combat against the dragon at the end of the epic. My memory is pretty flawed too, but I think the last conflict with the dragon is framed in terms of Beowulf’s hubris, in assuming that he could tackle the wyrm alone, without benefit of Divine assistance. That interpretation seems to be born out by the details of Beowulf’s final moments and the comments of his young shield-companion.
I like Beowulf.
Yeah, there’s a reason it’s lasted umpteen kajillion years. It’s a decent yarn.
You’re right about his last fight with the dragon not being at sea, but the link says that he got kilt because his men ran away, not because the gods forsook him. And he did take the firebreathing pig down with him, too.
Good on him.
You’re right, Robert – I had forgotten how Beowulf’s companions deserted him. It’s a pretty telling contrast with the ideal in Germanic warrior culture, epitomized by the shield-companions of Ecgtheow in the Battle of Maldon, who stoically stay, fight, and die against overwhelming odds.
Wiglaf’s anger about his “ring-giver” being left to die has an authentic “Saxon” ring to it – a very sharp contrast to the Christian overtones that later monkish chroniclers added to the original oral composition.
An easy way to expose an anti-American :
http://futurist.typepad.com/
Only a pair?
“She” is not what “she” seems.
More Dead European Male stuff – good deal. I wonder if memorizing The Jabberwocky will get the armadillo any chicks? The physics text won’t. Unless things are really different now.
She’s probably be happier with a pangolin. or even a giant pangolin, if size matters.
Poor armadillo. Failed insectivore living with a failed academic…
You know, Jeff, if you’d write all your posts in alliterative meter no one would give you crap about the long sentences ever again.
The lovable, huggable pangolin…
RS? You’re not alone. Beowulf kicks all kinds of ass. So does Gilgamesh.
I think it’s kind of cool that a lot of the great classics of literature and music really are good.
So the Dillo is now a dinky dragon? Riiiight, and every lizard is a Brontosaur on their mothers side.
TW: well yeah I’m green with envy on where the little bastard gets rubbed.
Gilgamesh – wasn’t Enkidu gay or something?
Ecgtheow – now that’s an interesting name.
I should read Beowulf. Sounds like a cool story.
I don’t think Enkidu was gay—IIRC, he was a virgin until Gilgamesh hired a prostitute for him.
Musilhoon, if you want to read Beowulf, Seamus Heaney’s translation is a fantastic place to start. For the purist, though, Klaeber’s edition is definitive.
And definite kudos to Gilgamesh – but on the subject of enduring epics, let’s not forget the Kalevala or the Táin Bó Cúalnge. Plus, there’s always the Mabinogion – the names alone in that one are worth the read.
I studied Beowulf with Raymond Tripp, who wrote did one of the most controversial translations, which focused a lot on word play. Unfortunately, it’s out of print.
Equally unfortunate is that I just found out, by doing some quick Googling, that Dr Tripp passed away last year. He was a fascinating guy—in fact, he was my comps area tester in OE and ME when I took my PhD orals. Big Owen Barfied / CS Lewis fan. A real throwback.
I’m very sad to learn of his passing.
RS: I’d put Kalevala somewhere between Apollonius’s Argonautica and Tolkien’s Silmarillion, in that it’s more “based on” the overall mythology than a retelling of a specific legend. Actually the canonical (Akkadian) version of Gilgamesh isn’t far different, being based on Sumerian tales of “Bilgamesh” and spliced with accounts of the Flood (yes, that flood).
Pity we’ll never know what tales, if any, lay behind Homer’s two epics…
David – that reminds me: wasn’t there a report last summer that German archaeologists had located a tomb connected in some way to the Gilgamesh epic near the banks of the Euphrates? I never did hear the follow-up to that – of course, it could be like those stories a few months ago about locating the homeland of Odysseus that turned out to be less than promised.
Makes me want to break out my copy of M.I. Finley for another read.