Books and thoughts

I have been intermittently thinking about Lois McMaster Bujold and the Aeneid. Or, rather, does killing your main character and then bringing him back to life constitute a Journey to the Underworld and back? It's all sort of compressed: Miles gets self-knowledge (although, interestingly, somewhat delayed self-knowledge) from the experience, whereas someone like Aeneas we actually see receiving information during his trip through Hades. That's actually very characteristic of the series, I think: to take a standard sort of plot and apply it in a sci-fi kind of way. Now I want to go read Memory and see how far this goes.

But the next thing I read for fun, however, after Prometheus Unbound, is going to be Helen Beaton, by Adelaide Rouse. It seems to be a turn of the century (19th-20th, that is) college story -- I shall see how it stacks up against Anne of the Island and Jean Webster's novels. It will also make me wish I were going to an all-girls college in 1910, I suppose. It's such a different world, though: there are so many rules at my college, and I suppose at all colleges and universities and fines if you break them, and disciplinary committees. Whereas in When Patty Went to College they paint the walls of their room, take the doors off the hinges, and paint the furniture, and although they aren't supposed to, the impression is that if you can get away with starting to do it, no one is going to punish you for having done it. At my college, there is now a sign up in the dining hall noting that "Students are forbidden to remove dishes, silverware, or food, from the dining commons" with the appropriate punishments for first-time and recidivist offenders. (The dishes and silverware I can understand, but the food? And they still have paper plates and cups and plastic forks out. I do not get it.) It isn't that I don't understand why a modern college needs to have all of these rules and regulations, but it does make one wax nostalgic for a time when they mostly trusted people to behave, and to be sufficiently embarrassed by admonishment as to make worse things more or less unnecessary. Of course, these people are from a very elite, very small group of people who all can be counted on to share the proper feelings and respect the boundaries. We oi( polloi/ need to be kept in line

And on that note of the degredation of college culture, in celebration of Talk Like a Pirate Day, I present the following (if you haven't already seen it):