in which i unwisely discuss my own arrogance in somewhat graphic and unlikeable detail

So i'm at Germone's apartment this weekend. He's got work and so i have all this freeform time at night, but i've got quite a bit of homework to plow through, so i'm trying to make good use of the time/space tucson limbo. one of the things that i'm supposed to do during the break is read "dreaming of palestine" by randa ghazy. i guess the book started as a writing assignment that she got when she was 15, and her teacher pushed her to expand it into a novel. i'm only 20 pages into it, but my kneejerk opinion is that this book is a nut-and-corn bedazzled P.O.S. it's like somebody told a teenage e.e. cummings to write a political novel about someplace he'd never been to. i'm not a big fan of the free-form, unstructured, experimental novel. unless you're william burroughs or joyce or even kathy acker, you're probably not good enough to jump the narrative shark, ESPECIALLY at the age of 15, and ESPECIALLY when your subject matter is the israel/palestine conflict, and ESPECIALLY when the author is born and raised in italy. i'm extra bummed because this book is going to be a big part of at least two upcoming papers that i know of, one a reading/viewing log incorporating the novel with the film "Paradise Now" with an article from the International Socialist Review and the other our first major research essay. At least there's the movie and the ISR article, so there's other stuff to write about.

Having said that, the class is getting really interesting, if more because of the subject matter than the class's format or the instructor. In all fairness to him, though- he has been excellent about helping me write more technically driven papers. i've met with him with drafts and he does have a keen technical eye, and i appreciate his more bare-bones journalistic sensibility. i tend to get kind of flowery when i write and he challenges me to be less ornate and more factually stubstantial, and that's HARD! four pages of facts and citations and really thesis-focused writing is hard without (very much) stylistic embellishment.

another thing that i'm starting to think about the teacher is that maybe it's not his job to be providing that much instruction in class for this course- a lot of the course requirements are like, read this book, watch this movie, read this article, dissect this theme/concept and stir. he spent a great deal of class time going through the pretty simple one or two paged handouts (thomas jefferson, david hume, kipling, aime cesaire and vijay prashad) about colonialism and that really rubbed me the wrong way, because WHY? IT'S NOT THAT GD HARD, but the kids in my class ARE FUCKING IDIOTS and they STILL haven't wrapped their tiny little dinosaur brains around the ideas, so maybe it's the kids and not the teacher. also, he's a poly-sci major, not an english major, so he's got a different sensibility...

finally, i have to admit that a significant portion of my sense of self revolves around the idea that i am a good writer, and for me to be in an english class and not immediately recieve some sort of acknowledgement (proverbial handjob) of talent recognition, then i get pissed. it's kind of gross, and i probably need to outgrow that, but i'm just not there quite yet. i think that he sort of picked up on that from my overactivity in class discussions and was-perhaps understandably- put off. the respect that i've gotten from him i think is about 30-40% because i'm a good writer, and that 60-70% is because he sees me working really hard to do the best work i can. it's humbling to have to work so hard at something you like to believe you're already really good at for relatively modest feedback... still, it gets me to try really hard, and it's nice to be known for that, too.