better this time

Went in for my last fitting and I'll get my dress back tomorrow. It's amazing how much better it looks now that it's been adjusted. The little hooks for the bustle are practically invisible. Mme Wong has been working on wedding dresses for 47 years, which is mind boggling.

Alan has made the green sauce from our favorite Mexican place. Mmm yum.

American letters

Samantha's responsible for this post, as I can't stop thinking about it. I even wrote a lengthy poetic piece that was lost to a bad connection and my pathetic Compaq work computer. Seeing as I've taken more than my fair share of certifications tonight, this is a much better task. This thought has potential for so many academic essays and it needs much more time to come together. But here I can begin.

American Literature and I do not get along. We dislike each other intensely, but smile at parties and in classrooms, find the occasional nice thing to say to each other while furiously whispering behind backs about all of our most hated qualities.

Twain's wit was brilliant in his non-fiction, but I can't stand to read his novels. My attempt to read Faulkner for the first time has failed miserably because I threw The Sound & The Fury across the room and have not picked up since page 62. Willa Cather should have stuck with journalism instead of those profoundly dull novels. Kerouac began to grate on me once I wasn't sixteen anymore and he started talking about mysticism. Steinbeck left me unmoved, and I stand by my assertion that it sounds more fun to eat cardboard pancakes under a freeway overpass than ever read one of Salinger's pretentious works ever again. The ponderous canon so often excerpted and read in classrooms across the country leaves me on the whole unmoved.

I could not begin to explain why I feel as if a gulf seperates me from these books, or why Slavic literature crosses the room to dance with me. I can only speculate that some accident of nature or nuture cut me loose. It's not in the subject matter, the plots or the style alone. It's all, it's one, it's not any of those. In the 10th grade, I discovered Dostoevsky, I read everything Kerouac had penned, I struggled past the headaches to get to heart and brains of Burroughs and I read exactly one story in my American literature class that wrenched me into it. Tom Godwin's The Cold Equation made me cry, caused a fight in our classroom and our teacher to assign us lengthy essays on why we were bad children. So far as I know, Godwin is American but I would only give you a wry smile if you told me he was not really one.

What will save American literature from itself is time. As American culture grows more fractured, authors can break away from the dusty, dull monotholith of Great American Classics. The massive connection of the 21st century will bring new voices. My favorite Americans are ones whose work reflects a disconnection from the culture of their day. Edith Wharton, Hawthorne's The Scarlett Letter, William Burroughs, Bret Easton Ellis, and a handful of others will join me at the bar. We'll knock back the hard liquor and make sly comments in low voices, while American Literature sips her punch and frowns from the other side of the room.