quitting

I really don't like quitting. It's not that I completely buy into that whole quitters-never-win mantra. Just personally, I don't like not finishing things. Call it a compulsion. Even if I hate a book, if I've read the first twenty-five pages, I have to finish it. I always have to clean my plate.

And today I had to drop a class. I've been saying I need to drop that class for at least a week now, but it took a lot of self-pep-talking to be able to log into the registration site and finally do it. In the end, I made it about someone else. I thought that if I told the prof I was dropping then it would be easier for me to actually do so. So after class this morning, I went up and broke the news to him that I'm a horrible disappointment to all that is ENGL 396: English Avant-Gardes. I'm glad that I did; because, the class is full, and the kid next to me was glad that now he can register for it. So I didn't quit; I gave my spot in the class to someone else. How selfless of me.

In memory of my enrollment in the class, I'll say a bit about the interesting stuff we were looking at. Today we were talking about the first of two issues of a little modernist magazine put together by the bitter, self-righteous, and sort of cool in spite of that Wyndham Lewis, called Blast. Blast, in this instance, probably used more for its meaning as an impolite word, closer to damn than fuck. Here's a few images of its pages, which are visually ...awesome.

the cover -- described by the Chicago modernist magazine Little Review as "something between magenta and lavender, about the colour of a sick headache"

Double-clicking on this will make it easier to read, and it's worth reading, I think. One of my favorite bits: "WE NEED THE UNCONSCIOUSNESS OF HUMANITY --- their stupidity, animalism, and dreams. We believe in no perfectibility of our own." Hilarious.


These two are interestingly juxtaposed, and get even more fascinating when considered with some of the next pages that go on to "BLESS ENGLAND!" and "BLESS FRANCE."
"--Oh !-- Papa is wonderful: but all papas are!"
Love it.

One page I find particularly worth noting is this one that addresses the Suffragettes, those crazy women who wanted to vote and be allowed to get divorces and other radical things like that.

It's condescending as hell. (And I would have, had I stayed in the class, gotten to learn more about the issues of misogyny and feminist theory within the context of English Avant-Gardes.) "(You don't mind being called things?)" So annoying. And yet, the magazine still has to address the Suffragettes. They can't be ignored within this text because their energy, though Lewis seems to be working hard to polarize it from the energies of the Avant-Gardes, is ultimately present. It's working against the same blasted British stasis that the Artist, the Individual, is if the the Artist or the Individual is one who eschews his (deliberately not his or her) categorization by class, gender, race, education, etc., and who creates movement. And so even though Lewis here advises the Suffragettes to "stick to what [they] understand," meaning not art, he still gives space to the Suffragettes within Blast, within his art.

There's so much more to say, but the reason I had to drop the class is because I don't have the time to get the requisite writing done for it.

I got all these images, by the way, from the Modernist Journals Project at Brown. The whole of both issues of Blast are available for the viewing there.