The hour badly spent

At this point, the topic sort of writes Shane Oram’s column all by itself.

In past years, gender roles were defined clearly in almost every society. Now, in the face of constant change, it seems chivalry has been cast away to conform to female independence and male laziness.

Our parents’ generations – and the ones before them – were bound to simple standards on how men and women should act. This system seemed to be ideal for many years.

As technology advances and many men get trapped by video games and the Internet, words like “slacker” are being thrown around to describe the increasing lack of motivation this gender might demonstrate. In this generation, men are having a hard time steering through adulthood especially in the areas of friendship, drinking, sex and the future.

Of course the internet is destroying everything, just like it always does. Social interactions were much easier when men just stuck to a medieval rape manual.

However, on the other side of the spectrum, some women have not made it easy for men to be chivalrous. In this shift in role definition, women have become more independent, branching out of the house into more traditionally masculine roles.

No longer do they need a man to support them financially, socially or sometimes emotionally.

Chivalrous actions are based on love and kindness — not some hidden agenda to undermine women. I hope women can accept and enjoy these fruitful displays of honor and respect and not give in to radical schemes and misconstrued propaganda.

Why does chivalry continue to make headlines here? Why can’t we stop being such spazzes, put down the medieval rape manuals and reconceptualize our boy-girl relations? Try this: when a girl calls you and wants to go out somewhere, just say "I can’t; I have to practice my guitar." When she points out that you don’t actually have a guitar, tell her "What is this, the Inquisition? Get off my ass!"

[Source: K-State Collegian]

Determined to meet other, better English majors and silently judge them, Friday night I hiked to downtown Manhattan for a poetry reading at the Streckler-Nelson Art Gallery.

What’s more sad: that this kewgr leers down at me on my way up the stairs to the gallery, or the fact that I kind of wanted her? Just kidding! These are both cause to celebrate! I’d never been here before so I gave myself a quick tour. It seemed to be about the size of 10 dorm rooms, all full of paintings and pottery and plants. I would have taken better notes but I was too busy prowling for grad students to hit on. After a minute of this I remembered I don’t know anybody and made my way to the room full of chairs. I sat two seats down from a Pretentious Literary Douchebag who had his nose in Penguin Classics’ Medieval Literature. Jonathan Holden, a poetry professor with furious, leonine eyebrows sat in front of me with his wife. Apropos of nothing, I like to secretly sit behind my professors and snap photos of the back of their heads whenever I see them at some function.

See, I snapped this one of Donald Hedrick - perverted Shakespeare professor - last week at the violin concert:

Meanwhile, the grad students around me made small talk:

"Aren’t we having fun?"
"Fun fun fun!"
"By the way, I put arsenic in your club soda!"
"Great! That way I won’t have to see your douchebag face anymore!"
"Super!"
"Grand!"

Once we got started, the rule was that anybody with poetry of some sort should just walk on up to the podium and show off. Lisa, the first reader, was boring. The guy after her, Joe, wore a button-down shirt two sizes too small, and no matter what he did, he was showing off his triceps. He had taken a passage James Joyce had written about snot and copied it onto a roll of toilet paper. After him, a hipster cutie presented her "Studies in Prepositions," poems consisting of the same preposition repeated musically for entire stanzas. "It does neat stuff in your head," she explained, which I took to mean when she’s done I won’t know whether to hate her for thumbing her nose at conventions I continually fail to get the hang of, or to love her for her playful, impish mastery of the quirks of language. I put this dilemma to rest the instant I realized that this chick was probably kinky enough that if I could give her a really clever pickup line, she might tie me up and ride me so hard I couldn’t stand up straight for three days. In that context, her poems were pretty rad. Her last one was somewhat more traditional. "This is where we move past morphology into syntax," she said. Hot!

Next: until now, all the poets had the common decency to read TWO or THREE of their favorites and then sit back down (Joe: "I’m gonna share a couple of these and then stop ruining your life"), but this particular reader, Nelson, had written a bunch of Really Deep poems about birds and the night and vegetables and breasts, earnestly challenging us to ponder things like The Night and Love and Curiosity and Truth and Beauty and Birds and the size of his thesaurus and, well, Breasts. He must have used the word "breast" every stanza and the thing is, well, the thing is I have NEVER IN MY LIFE WANTED ANYBODY TO STOP SAYING THE WORD BREAST LIKE I WANTED HIM TO STOP FUCKING SAYING THE WORD BREAST but he just went on and on (like this sentence), with these awful mosaics, so many of them, their roman numerals crashing against my BREAST like kamikaze pilots, a sickening montage of VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI…… until finally he was done.

It is my secret wish to become the school’s Pretentious Literary Douchebag. But the guy sitting two seats across from me, his nose in Penguin Classics’ Medieval Literature, had me completely outclassed. He was a slender man, with a strong chin, gold-rimmed glasses, hair like a field of sun-kissed Kansas wheat, eyes as blue as swimming pools and flowing with erudition; he wore an oxford and a blazer that had a gold star pinned to the collar, as though he had just stepped out of Dead Poets’ Society and materialized in this very room, Streckler-Nelson Gallery in Manhattan, at 7pm this Friday night in February. He got up and introduced himself.

"Those of you who know me know I’m rather fond of medieval literature," he smirked, leading me to reflect wistfully on James Joyce’s snot. While he read, I got up to get some wine.

The lady after him was excellent; she recited from memory a poem about having an orgasm (or was she really just having an orgasm right before our very eyes?). Climax notwithstanding, she used a lot of muted synechdoche and really managed to craft a good poem. Some other people recited some other stuff after her, but I wasn’t paying attention because an orgasm is kind of a tough act to follow. Then the thing was over! I probably should have stuck around to meet people, but true to form, I had a better party to go to, so I bounced. But not before snapping a pic of Lit MILF Elizabeth Dodd:

Hot pants, Liz! I mean, Ms. Dodd. Ahem.

Yesterday a superhot Colombian grad student presented a "deconstruction" of Afro-Columbian art in the Big 12 room. She showed off some older Colombian paintings and sculpture as well as some of her own mixed-media work, which was pretty rad. Sadly, she kind of zoomed through each piece, in soft-spoken Spanish, without giving us much time to reflect on the details of the works she showed us.

Her translator - who was really cute - cute is the new hot - also kept throwing us off with gaffes like this one: "There were very few soldiers within the independence movement who were black. Oh, I’m sorry; there were MANY black soldiers within the movement who were black. They just weren’t recognized."

Apparently, still not.