Ode to Narcissism

Cosmopolitans?

Taking a class focused solely on Toni Morrison, and I gotta say… she is totally underrated.

Beloved is pretty fucking great, too.  Better than The Bluest Eye, which isn’t bad.

Got into a small debate today regarding cosmopolitanism. It was brought up in a British Romanticism class, and then expounded upon and torn apart by two extremely annoying women (one my age-ish, the other in her 40’s and a PhD student).  The PhD student is a German Romanticism scholar and kept bringing up Germany in a British Lit class.  I laughed my ass off when she explained that she didn’t agree with Martha Nussbaum’s Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism because Nussbaum criticizes patriotism and nationalism.  She said that she felt nationalism and patriotism were good things that promoted a sense of community within the United States.  The other woman (my age) chimed in to say that she felt that Nussbaum is an idiot because not everyone agrees on morals and so creating that kind of world society centered around shared morals would be impossible to do without ostracizing entire civilizations of people.  I couldn’t resist telling both of these women that by cultivating patriotism and nationalism within the United States, we are, in essence, excluding everyone who is not American, which is a huge chunk of the world.  Therefore, nationalism and patriotism are less inclusive than cosmopolitanism would be.  I also had to explain that Nussbaum, like anyone else with a brain, understands that we can’t please everyone in every place in the world.  There will always be small factions that disagree, regardless of what the issue is.  That’s reality.  All Nussbaum is trying to do is propose a world society that would be as inclusive as possible, with basic morals shared by almost everyone in the world (killing is bad, and the like) as governing factors.

So that was interesting.

My Romanticism professor (and, incidentally, my Women in Poetry professor) reminds me of Helena Bonham Carter in those british timeperiod films she’s done.

I had a conversation with my friend today concerning Ryan Adam’s decision to leave The Cardinals despite extolling the virtues of being in the band, and calling them his musical soulmates and whatnot a few months ago (you know, before his marriage to the singer of “Candy”).  I don’t really care that much about the Cardinals, to be totally honest.  They are a good band, and I appreciate what they do, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that I am a huge Cardinals fan, so this isn’t some kind of fan rant (at least on that side of the issue), but seriously… Ryan, what the fuck?  How can you praise them so much and then drop them out of nowhere?  Now, I don’t know everything about the issue and probably never will, but that seems a tad fickle to me.  Perhaps their status as soul-savers was a bit of an overstatement to begin with, or perhaps this sudden dropping of them is some sort of hissy-fit reaction to an arisen issue.  It just all seems a little… emotional… to me.  And that kind of bouncing-ball reaction to shit has its implications in everything that you do in your life, so that is something to think about.

Not that it matters.

University is going great.  I am really enjoying it, and it is definitely confirming that my future plans are in line with what I should be doing for a living.  I’m so excited to be learning new things, but at the same time, this quarter sees a return to familiar waters, and that is very comforting.  Women’s poetry, romanticism, British Lit… this is all good and well-known stuff, so I’m appreciative of that.  I’m also taking a class wherein we’ll be learning about how ensconced everyone is in ideology, and the ways in which these different ideological perspectives affect social interraction, as well as the ways in which artforms are used to effectively express political, social, and other viewpoints.

The relationship is golden.

What more can I say?

Nothing for now.  I feel idiotic, typing in these rambling half-sentences… but they’re all I can muster at the moment.