10 Years After

Summoning Of The Muse

In one sense this weekend has been disasterous. I spent probably over 20 hours working on the paper for my Milton class. Saturday night I thought I had finished it. However, when I saved it to disk and switched computers to print it out, I lost it. At first I thought I had lost the whole thing. Instead, after much panic, I managed to restore some of the lost document. However, I ended up staying up until 5 am (4, thanks to daylight savings) rewriting the paper. Needless to say, I am exhausted today.

The place wasn't at all what I had expected. It was more like some arthouse coffee shop than what I had been thinking. It was also during some arts festival thing. That meant there were lost of people mililng around while we did our presentations. However, luckily, none of them expressed much interest in what we were doing or saying. We stood at one end of an open ended wooden building overlooking a tranquil pond. I went first and I think I blasted everyone away from talking too close to the microphone set up for us to use. After that the av guy stayed close to the equilizer and constantly tweeked knobs as the others gave their presenations, which was very distracting. I did better than I thought I was going to do - I was dreading doing this. Unfortunately, I skipped over a bunch of stuff that I wanted to talk about that was in my paper. Eh, rack it up to first to go nervousness.

A few papers I thought were good. Two others - Kim and Ruben - did papers on "Lycidas" as well. A third good one was on an interesting connection between a family relative that lived at the same time as Milton. I'm not sure what this last one argued, if anything, but the connection was nice even if a bit of an overly biographical timeline of Milton's life.

The others consisted of some meandering papers on Milton's travels through Europe and, especially, Itally; a paper on why Milton wasn't mysoginistic; why Milton should be thought of along with Shakespeare when one thinks of great sonnets; a bizarre comparison of Satan in "Paradise Lost" to Dr Faust in the Christopher Marlowe play; a restatement of Stanley Fish's argument that Milton's exception of Catholic rights to a free press in the Areopagitica should be compared to how the modern person doesn't wish to grant neo-nazis, the KKK, or NAMBLA free press rights, but that we (should) consider the idea of a free press as a fundamental right.

This last paper struck me as extremely strange. The argument of relevitizing Milton's exclusion of the Catholics and trying to match it to some groups' desire to quelch free press to other groups doesn't make sense. Shouldn't the modern reader simply see that such groups that wish for a restrictive press are not in favor of a free press for all - only for those who share their own views. I mean, making such a bold jump immediately caused me to think that such an argument, if applied to the Holocaust, would mean that we should not criticize the Nazi's for the Final Solution. Instead, we should see it in the context of a perceived problem for their society in much the same way that in the post-9/11 America we see the destruction of Al-Qada as a necessity for our society's wellfare. Which, of course, is completely insane on it's own, much less as an argument to justify the genocide of the Jews.

Anyways, back to the presentations. The setting was nice, and had I had more sleep and wasn't so hungry I would have liked to explore the place further. The artsy stuff wasn't impressive - of all the student/faculty art there only one piece interested me. However, the natural setting of the place was incredible. Also, I counted 5 people absent. I think it'll be interesting to see how that is handled.

After the presentations I went to eat at Olive Garden. I spent the rest of the evening working on homework for Intro to Linguistics.