simplistic dualistic and binary, or what vargas llosa thought

so my norteamericana ass was feelin particularly oppressed by the latest in a series of crappy books i have to read to understand latin american literary tradition...doña barbara was like martin rivas meets my fair lady with everybody kickin it on the plains in venezuela and the critical theory babbling not so critically about the clash between civilization and barbarism. yes here at catolica you can say civilizing the people without any irony at all...
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the superconservative stance of the school was starting to get me down what with boring boring boring all lecture all the time...static dogmatic systematic old school pedagical structure meaning that the structural design of all of my classes is to transmit to me the correct answer which when tested i will spit back up like gerbers applesauce

i guess it wasnt as big a deal last semester, partly cause my main struggle was to figure out what the hell everone was talkin about...now i know more or less (ma o meno) but kinda wish i dint...even when we are dealing with interesting material there is such an emphasis on lecture that it just kinda puts me to sleep...i have one class thats much more interactive and its my fave even though the material isnt exactly page turner, its a linguistic class concerned with the evolution of the varying kinds of español de america...but the prof rocks and extracts the info from the class and keeps everyone involved instead of droning on and on and on about it...

many of the students in my prog are feeling tired and bored and wanna just finish this crap up and go home, and i am among them...tryin to remind myself theres a reason im here and even a good reason i took that class, now much clearer since finally finally finally we are reading the groovy stuff i signed up for, starting with deep rivers which rocked in english and promises to rock harder still in español

then theres the pollution/allergy/asthma/cold sitch which has been fucketyuped but getting better my brain has been foggy my energy super low while i fight for breath...have gotten a refill on the prescrip i got last time things got this bad when a chest x ray showed a viral infection of the lungs, apparently not so uncommon here...plus allergy pills and cold meds echinacea and the inhaler...the only good thing is it makes me really think about that next cigarrete, if i gotta puff the inhaler to breathe well enough to smoke well its enough to get me to cut way way way back...

so i been sicky sleepy headachy having asthma attacks tired all the time and skipped a lot of class last week which i am now paying the ultimate price as all by assignments fall on my head so that this week i found myself writing a paper with jen about a book we both hated/didnt finish/couldnt catchai..between 20s venezuelan colloqialisms and the wierd jolty transitions we got nothin except this book sucks...the critical theory confirmed that explaining how homeboy shows up on the range and fights barbarism in the form of doña barbara, barbaric because she is a powerful woman who rules the range without fences and has inherited as her mestiza heritage all kinda black magic from the superstitious indians...homeboy shows up from the ciudad, teaches her daughter how to speak proper spanish and eventually marries her, she prancing around cooking and ironing and all happy and shit, then homeskippy gets the law on his side to claim the land and puts up fences...and doña barbara basically dissapears..

sounded like some fucked up shit to me..homeboy is named santo luzardo and lives in this joint called altamira while barbara lives in el miedo...im not even kidding about that...

but the critical theory just went on and on about civilization vs barbarism and the novel as a founding fiction that exemplified the creation of a venezualan natl identity...the oh so obvious allegorical form followed to a fuckin t

its all the silence that just about breaks my head...like theres this big fucked up eurocentric rascist sexist classist elephant in the gotdam classroom and we all not sposed to say shit

so i just kept getting more and more annoyed and thats when jen shows up with some new theory she tracked down with some post marxist feminist structuralist perspectives and quotes from the good latin american authors who im sposed to understand as having learned thier trade from this crappy book all about just how cruddy it really is...so we write a big ass paper that is in a nutshell, carlos fuentes said this book sucks and heres why...

thats right, quotes from the masters, radical rereading of the novel plus some crap i hardly got about the meaning of meaning all barthes quoting whatev that lost me..

so we wrote a big ass paper ripping the book and the traditional theory to shreds and then presented to the class, which was nervewracking but not so bad, i only forgot the spanish word for hegemony...

i aint had that much fun in a long long time...

the funny part is i felt ok about the book and basically got its place in the trad once we had established all the many many ways in which the author was completely full of shit...

but i guess thats the notion of radical rereading eh? that once youve torn it apart and pointed out the shit thats tryin to pretend it aint even there you can appreciate the thing for what it is..