I have given up on reading The Old Curiosity Shop before my seminar at 9am tomorrow. I am going to skip to the last few chapters and read them, just so I know exactly how the ending goes. Then I will come back to it when I begin to write this bitch of an essay:
"'One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing' (Oscar Wilde). Do writers expect particular responses to their texts on the part of their readers? How are these historically shaped?"
I shall let you know how I get on with that.
Today was a shambles. Alex woke me up with a cup of tea at 8:30am, which is probably the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me, but after breakfast we watched the Big Bang Theory and ended up falling asleep again until 11:30am. Well, I was asleep until then. Alex continued to sleep, IN MY BED, until gone 1pm. By this time I had finished Waiting for the Barbarians, thought about the themes and such like, written a good few paragraphs about J.M. Coetzee himself and written a response to the text. Still he was asleep. In the end I had to get in the shower and hope he wouldn't wake up just as I was gingerly opening my door to throw my pyjamas out of the bathroom (Some of you may wonder why I can't leave my pyjamas in the bathroom whilst I shower. The answer is this: the whole of my bathroom is my shower. Everything on the bathroom floor will get wet.). By the time I was done he finally woke up and left me to get changed. I was very glad of this.
My seminar today on Waiting for the Barbarians was possibly the best class I've had with my wonderful tutor this semester. I say 'wonderful' not in a creepy way. Oh who am I kidding, it is in a slightly creepy way. Basically, my tutor is THE EPITOME of an English university tutor. He wears cord trousers with braces with a dark shirt and, recently, a bow tie. He combines this look with a tweed blazer, an old brown leather satchel (which I really want to steal) and he has a POCKET WATCH. A pocket watch. My pal from the flat downstairs is also in this seminar group with me, and we regularly coo over him on the way to the class (This pal of mine is male, I might add, and is in a long-term heterosexual relationship. This just emphasises quite how astonishing this man is.). Honestly I could talk about him all day, he's just so lovely. I will be quite sad to not be taught by him next semester, as not only does he look the part, he really knows what he is talking about. His class is the one I get the most out of, and we only see him for an hour each week.
Anyway, enough of my fangirl ramblings about teachers. That is another reason why today has been a shambles; all I've done all day is talk nonsense to my flatmates about completely and utterly irrelevant things, when I could have been finishing off the Dickens. I tried to get it done in the library but just got distracted by all of the people who also appeared to be distracted, so I gave up and decided I would be more productive at home. Oh how I was wrong. Flat 21 has just been wittering on to each other for the past four to five hours.
And it is really important that I go to bed early tonight.
No more missing 9am seminars.
Goodbye.
(N.B. Even though the title suggests I am infatuated with my tutor, I am not. I am just obsessed with how he can fit the picture of an English tutor so well. Please do not tell on me to UEA.)
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