Burly Will Return

I almost missed it! I was so used to the new John Swartzwelder book coming out in the Spring that I just assumed we weren’t getting one this year. I was wrong!

Detective Made Easy” is the a new Frank Burly novel that will be coming out this Summer! Good times! For the 100% of people who haven’t been following my every word for the past few years, John Swartzwelder is a former Simpsons writer who now writes novels, especially novels about Frank Burly, a comically idiotic detective.

I base my online book ordering every year around when I can order the latest Frank Burly adventure, so hopefully, before too long, I’ll be posting about what I’m getting this year.

I am bad at reading.

It has come to the part of the year when I’m supposed to start thinking about what classes I need to take next year, so I’ve been doing that.

Every English class I’ve had so far has assured us that the more we read, the quicker we will get at it. I disagree. I read an awful lot and have done so for about as long as most of my fellow students have been alive. I remain a pitifully slow reader (as I said, just a while ago). By the claims that the English Professors are making, I should have plenty of experience points to make myself a reader guy of outstanding levels. But I don’t.

As I’ve said before, I specifically picked classes in which I’d read at least some of the reading material, to give myself a bonus head start, and in spite of that I still feel like I am behind. I look at the classes for next year and there is much less that I’ve read, so it is only going to get harder. I expect School Level 2 to really make me feel like an idiot.

(Every English class so far has also assured us that English degrees are much in demand in the job market. It really comes across as bad self confidence on the part of English departments)

The Story of my Two New Classes

I’m over halfway though my second semester of school and it occurs to me that I haven’t posted anything about my new classes. Time to remedy that, I guess.

I have two classes this semester that I didn’t have in the last one. They’re both English classes, one an Introduction to Prose and Fiction, the other a Reading Popular Culture class. Each class has its ups and its downs, the ups mostly being that they introduce me to new works and then discuss them. The downs being all the same stuff I’ve complained about in other posts about school.

I really don’t enjoy literary analysis. No, that’s not entirely accurate. I don’t enjoy doing literary analysis because I’m told to. If I read something and I’m struck with some opinion that I’d like to discuss, just try to stop me from sharing that opinion (and I’ve picked up plenty of things for writing such opinions in essay form that I quite appreciate). But in these classes you’re expected to force yourself to come up with some opinion and then dress it up like you’re not just doing some homework, but like you actually care. And, furthermore, you’re supposed to frame your essay as though you’re certain about this opinion you’re pretending to care about. You can’t say “I think John Authorington’s use of a radioactive lobster is pretty neat because he also used a giant red monster the other time Protagonist Joe was nervous. I wonder if there’s something to that. Let’s look at the evidence…” but you are absolutely expected to say “Authorington uses the radioactive lobster, and other red monsters, to represent Protagonist Joe’s nervousness FOR ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN JUST LOOK AT ALL THE PROOF…” I don’t care for that. I hate pretending that any of my opinions are absolute certainties even when I care about them. When I’m making up crap just to pass an assignment and I’m expected to act like I’m so committed, I feel terrible about that. At least if I could write about stuff I had an opinion on, I’d be able to at least put some gusto into my arguments.

I suppose the argument from the school’s point of view is that they’re trying to teach you how to do analysis of things you do care about, but they have to teach you somewhere. If you don’t find something to opine about in the works that the teacher is teaching, you can’t expect to get to switch to something the teacher doesn’t know just because that’s what you want to write about. My rebuttal is “Fart sound, middle finger, don’t care, shut up.” It’s the same thing that’s bothered me time and again: I don’t care if the school can tell if I’m learning, I care if I can tell that I’m learning. I know, I know. School doesn’t work that way, I know, but the fact that “school doesn’t work that way” is not a reason for me to stop complaining about it. It is, in fact, the reason I keep complaining about it.

These classes have got me to read a number of short stories and stuff, though, which has been nice. And a couple novels too. Tarzan of the Apes and Oroonoko. I might, conceivably, have wound up reading Tarzan someday, but I had never even heard of Oroonoko, so I’m glad I was introduced to it. I like reading books.

I Bet It Is Set In Florida

There’s a new Dave Barry novel coming out! Learning this proves that my joining Twitter was not a mistake. Learning this proves that my spending a bunch of money and reading time on school was a mistake. I’ve been waiting forever for this it seems like.

I grew up reading Dave Barry’s column every Sunday. I watched the sitcom based on his life. And, most importantly, I read his novels Big Trouble and Tricky Business. Those things were comedy gold. I’ve read them each twice, and this is something true of very few books (Stephen King’s the Stand and George Orwell’s Animal Farm are two of the only others I can think of right now). And then it seemed like there was nothing for a long time. At least one of those novels had a movie version come out, I recall, but eventually my life got significantly less Dave Barry in it. It made me sad. But now there’s a new novel.

The new book, Insane City, of which I have only just learned and haven’t even read what it is about is officially the book I’m looking forward to most in 2013.

First Thoughts About Second Semester

My History class is in the Chemistry Building and my English class is in the Computer Science building. What the chunks? So I’ve just completed my third day of my second semester of my first year. Let’s see what I have to say about that:

I think I’m a little more confident about how well I’m going to do in my classes this year.

Mythology and Astronomy are my only courses that continue on as they were, so I know where I stand in those ones. I’m doing alright and I think I’ll keep doing so. My History class has changed, though. We’ve a new teacher to cover a different time period, and a new classroom for some reason to go with that. I liked our previous classroom (it’s the same auditorium in which my Mythology class was and is held) and don’t understand why what seems to me to be my largest class has been moved to slightly smaller quarters. I’m thinking that this term of History may be slightly easier, though. I’m more familiar with the time period we’ve reached, and also I think there’s one fewer essays to deal with, which leaves more time for other classes, which I will need.

My English class has been replaced with two new English classes. This is where I’m going to be spending most of my time this year. As I’ve already mentioned, I’ve chosen classes wherein I’ve already read, or at least owned, several of the books on the syllabus (Breakfast of Champions, the Maltese Falcon, the Picture of Dorian Grey, Watchmen, etc.) because that’ll save me time, but also I can say I’m genuinely interested in all of those (that’s why I read them), so I’ve got that going for me.

I guess I should cut the rambling here. What I’m trying to say here is, so far things look alright.