A Failed Attempt to Prove the Relevance of the Humanities

Anyone who has known me for more than a week understands that I have a deep, warm love of procrastination. So you'll understand why I'm sitting here staring out the window at a sapling when I should be working on the presentation I have to give tomorrow over The Knight's Tale.

I'm getting into a groove here finally and feeling far less anxious (I'm terribly frightened of new people, you see), plus the work load has picked up a bit, so I haven't had time to write the past couple of days. Additionally, I've been deliberating how to report my goings-on here without A) simply walking through every mundane second of my day (e.g., "then I perused junk websites on the internet for an hour while evading my theoretical Freud readings...") or B) boring to the brink of madness any readers this blog might have with horrifying accounts of said theoretical readings ("then Freud spends 3 pages reviewing the definitions of the German words heimlich and unheimlich ..."). You see the perilous cycle in which I find myself then.

I am learning some new stuff though, silly and pointless though it may seem. I guess "gothic" is one of those words you hear a lot without really thinking about what it means. So when you think of gothic literature you probably think of like, Christopher Walken with his teeth filed down:

That's from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. In case you were wondering if Christopher Walken really filed his teeth down.

Or maybe this:

That's "The Raven." In case you were wondering why I posted a picture of a guy talking to a raven.

Or...perhaps this:

And to be honest I'm not really sure how that last one fits in at all.

BUT. It turns out that gothic is only about headless horsemen and lunatic opium eaters on the surface. REALLY it's all about American history and our anxiety over our treatment of Indians and black people and whatnot. It's actually pretty interesting. So suck on that for a while the next time you watch The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror.

Or you could check out this insane book we're reading called Edgar Huntly, which is about a crazy white guy who sleepwalks and tomahawks a bunch of Indians to death then sacrifices a panther and eats it. He also kills his brother-in-law. It's nuts.

On that note, I must excuse myself so I can go consider why Chaucer preferred to write stories about knights encountering fairy queens than to write about their exploits of daring in battles against the heathens. And no, it's not because he was gay. Seriously, I took out student loans for this. Please refer back to The Simpsons clip from my first post for relevant commentary.

Cheers!