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Feb 2016
On bus rides, I often see grad students
suspended in their own scholastic slime
or as I call it-monotony. For instance, once
walking with what I presumed to be a friend,
I told them I had read Rilke they had presumed
that I had read it for a class-no. I read it for my
own pleasure, how trivial of me. One of the
most endemic pathological problems of
the university is that their mindset is
engrained, too rigid, too mundane.
There is no funding for creativity, the only method
is the paint by numbers system. No new poets
in the canon, anything new is cannon fodder.

The only way to cultivate a dream here is
to **** it before, it can infiltrate and pollute
the minds of the young.
Conformity at least is the religion of the
university, and life must go on as it has before
-stagnating. The university masters here
wield art with grand indifference.

In this presumed friend eyes, no
curriculum exists outside of what is assigned,
their own  life is vicarious- a tenthhand extension,
examing the writing of a 1000 year old text.
They translate these texts while learning obscure
idiosyncrasies of Old Norse by heart. Little
do these "academics" realize that these people
who wrote these texts lived full lives: full
of  love, betrayal, stab wounds , and dirt.
They lived more than these quibbling academics
who argue on about written contradictions of texts.
The irony irons on.

The greatest call for me is to write,
these texts were never meant to be dissected and
investigated scientifically. I think for me, at least,
they are meant to inspire, these works inspire me
to live. The madness of Don Quixote stills
boils in my blood, literature has encrazed me.
I yearn to live, love, and live so much I know
how to die.
tenthhand- more than firsthand or secondhand
encrazed- ex. like enloquicido in Spanish, en-loco-ecer, en- intensive prefix like in enjoin, embrace (/n/ --> /m/ conforming to /b/);
B Wasserman
Written by
B Wasserman  Minneapolis
(Minneapolis)   
515
 
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