Swiv's Idea of a University
Created | Updated Oct 29, 2003
It's possible that I'm taking the 'It's not worth it' theme a little too far. I appear to have lost all motivation to do any work, and the fact that I've got a week and a half before the essay I've been working towards for a week and a half is due in isn't helping any.
So I haven't needed to go and build sandcastles yet. I'm not doing too badly though - I'm about to start writing the essay on what we can learn from the Historical Novel, so I'm hoping it'll be done by the start of next week. I'm going to be helped by the fact that my little wall chart tells me that the England v Uruguay match on Sunday is on ITV2, a channel I can't get. This may spoil my plans to roll over to my friend's flat at 7:30am to have fry-up and have multiple heart attacks (no, not from the lard, from the fact England have been playing shockingly badly...) but it does mean that I won't spend half the day recuperating from the rugby and might do some work.
Or not. It depends how far I've got with this 'telescope' game. One of my friends sent me a link to a little game on the Dyson website. You have a nice grid, with a little silver-grey ball, and a black hole you have to pot it into, and some telescopes - different colours are different lengths - with which you shunt the ball around the grid and into the hole. It's incredibly addictive - just ask Witty Ditty! - and I've been playing it for a large proportion of the last 24 hours (in between reading The Bagenders lunatic Lord of the Rings fan-fiction).
It should be obvious by now that I really don't want to write this essay. I just made chocolate banana cake to kill some more time. It's not even like it's a particularly dull topic, it's just that I actually have no idea what I'm going to write for it. I think I have maybe four salient points, and then it's going to be an attempt to make the 'filler' - or the 'and this novel supports this idea here, and this other novel supports it here' passages - not seem like too much waffle. It's possible I'm going to need everyone of the available days to make this work!
On the plus side, I actually had a modern history tutorial that I understood. It was on historical thought - which means what people think that history is and why we should study it. It veers from one guy who believed that you can think yourself back into other people's minds and recreate their thoughts to understand what happened - all history is then a history of ideas, not of events. At the other extreme is a certain MJ Oakeshott who believes that there is a gulf between the past and the present (the past being effectively the past before we were born, ie that we can't remember) that we can't overcome, that we only know things as we experience, and so history is a set of images that we build up in our minds, it's different for everybody and there is no single 'truth'.
So that was me demonstrating my understanding. On which note I'm going to return to my historical novel notes with a highlighter. I'm currently going over Mr-Marxist-Georg-Lukacs who believes the historical novel is somehow symbolic of bourgeois decline. So that'll be fun then.
Wonder if the cake's ready?
