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There's No Place Like Home
March 25, 2004, 10:25 p.m. Because Caraxus asked me how uni was going: I have to say, there is nothing like an honours-stream English tute. You walk in, you take your spot, you smile at the person next to you. The tutor comes in and then the tutorial starts and suddenly, you’re home. You’re interjecting, calling out opinions, waving your hands with enthusiasm, making notes with exclamation marks and question marks and arrows going everywhere. You’re pronouncing sentence upon characters: “He’s an idiot! He has this vision that he marries her, and he’s desperately unhappy, so what does he do? He goes and marries her!” and sparring with your fellow students: “Wow, you guys are so harsh.” and making jokes: “Well he’s a strapping specimen on manhood, isn’t he?” Ah, I love it. Really, there is no place I belong more than in that tutorial room. There’s also a cute guy in the tute, but I think he’s gay. And if not . . . well, he identifies too much with Latimer, from George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil – the character I was calling an idiot – who is described as: “fragile, nervous, ineffectual”. A ‘poetic soul’ in the worst sense of the word – i.e., needs a good slap upside the head to knock some sense into him. But anyway. As for my other subjects, they’re going well. Art in the Age of the Samurai is a bit drier than expected, I’m still struggling with Chaucer in The Literature of Troy (Troilus is another character who needs a slap upside the head) and Religion and Film is great stuff – we looked at horror this week. I really have to see Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, but apparently Fisher AV has it. So how are all your respective time-occupiers?
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