Spring Makes Everything Nicer

We're onto the last day of school. I actually had my last day yesterday since I don't have any classes on Tuesdays. That just leaves reading days and finals, woot!

I didn't write my 2,000 words for last week in my novel, but I did write an extremely awesome paper. That last sentence, as some of my roommates would say, is verifiable proof that I have no life. Whatever, it's a freakin' awesome paper. 10 pages comparing Martin Dressler: the Tale of an American Dreamer with motifs and archetypes from myths, legends, and folktales. And that's why I'm going to get a degree in folklore: I get super excited and nerdy about it.

I realized that just about every research paper I write ends up going back to the Trickster archetype. Last semester, my research paper for my Shakespeare class was all about Iago in Othello and the role of the Trickster. I ended up talking for a page or two about Tricksters in Martin Dressler. If anyone's just dying to know what I'm talking about when I say "the Trickster archetype," look up anything by Carl Jung. He wrote some amazing stuff on the collective unconscious; a lot of psychoanalytical stuff. Anyway, I love reading just about anything that he's written. Tricksters represent, a lot of the time, brain over brawn. They're all over in fairy tales and are rather popular in modern times as well: The Joker, Bugs Bunny, Bart Simpson, Robin Hood, etc.

Like I said, the paper is awesome.

Also, have any of you seen the movie The Illusionist? That movie was based on a book written by Steven Millhauser, the same guy who wrote Martin Dressler. If anyone's looking for an interesting read, I would definitely recommend it. Millhauser's books seem to have a theme of taking things to an obsession. In The Illusionist, a magician wants to literally disappear. In Martin Dressler, a businessman wants to create a new way of life. It's a classic American novel with striking comments on what it means to have a dream, especially in America. All of the books we read in my American Novel class were incredibly insightful, and I'd recommend them to anybody.

Here's the list:
Martin Dressler:the Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
My Antonia by Willa Cather
The Sun also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
City of Glass by Paul Auster
The Things They Carried by Tim O'brien

Read 'em!

And I'm taking a Romantic literature class in the spring (romantic in the literary sense, so it's not a class about romance novels or anything). We're going to read Frankenstein (which I'm super excited about) as well as Emma and some other stuff.

Anyway, I'd better get writing my 2,000 words for this week. Ciao!