Managed to crawl on my belly through the ghastly trenches of the last hundred pages of “Officers and Gentlemen” over the weekend. What a dreadful, conflicted, nonsensical read! To triangulate the novel’s problems: it portrays the mentally-unstable absurdities of war in a stiff, dry manner that shows pathetically when placed next to Heller’s brilliant depiction of the same in “Catch 22”; it confounds the reader with the same obsessively acronymical, plotless military-porn that characterize Tom Clancy’s oeuvre; and it is finally damned by the complete absence of the charm, buoyancy and fey social commentary of Waugh’s earlier novels. A total poop.

Whether it was class being rather dull last night or the fact that the calendar tells me it’s March – which means there are !!!only 60 days standing between me and my 3-thesis-paper deadline!!! – last night I experienced the powerful desire to do some school work.

I abandoned my darling Justin in Weston, stayed downtown and bunked in at SMC’s awesome “open ’till midnight” Kelly Library. Decided on a thesis for my Tuesday class: am intending to discuss the degradation of high culture under the rise of the cult of youth as depicted in Waugh’s novels.

I’ll be appealing to Arthur Danto and Roger Scruton’s opposing views on aesthetic development to do this, which is fun because I like scrappy philosophers, and both these fellows defend their ideas like dogs with a bone. Danto says art as we have known it is ended, but! humanity is progressing into a brave new world of personal experiences of expression, using different forms and media. Scruton (who I think would have found a very sympathetic reader in Waugh) agrees that art is dead, but feels that humanity and high culture are about to join it in the grave.

All I need is to do some background reading, whip up a bibliography, find some better wording to frame it in and email my professors. Then, I’m all ready to get down to brass tacks and defend my thesis!

*gong sounds*
*ninjas attack thesis*
*Moira performs debilitating high kicks to ninjas*
*thesis is saved*

Dinner tomorrow night with and and other LJers at the Indian Hut – very exciting!