Last week I really put nose to grindstone and ground into flour the four books assigned to me this semester. And then I was done. Not for the weekend, but until August, which is the next time I will be assigned homework.Like I said before, through a series of very bad mistakes that all happened at once, I ended up in an architecture program. I take all the classes the architects take, save their design class. Three professors teach all of the classes, and funnel all of the work towards this six hour design class. So if someone, also known as the humanities students, doesn't take the design class, they don't have to do work.
I knew architects when I was on campus at Arkansas. That is to say, I heard tell of them, because they never came out of their building. They stayed there, day in and day out (and even in days beyond) to work on their projects, which I deduced to be miniature black holes which suck all free time and happiness out of the surrounding air. Now I see it first hand, as the rest of the students stay in school till the odd hours of the night (never even; they never seem to get off at a regular 6, 8, or even 10).
To keep the four humanities students busy, they gave us four Italian books. I will come out now and say that the Italians have an amazing capacity for the desire to be depressed. All four books ended unhappily. Some situations I didn't know were even possible. Now, looking back on the quartet of novels, I think that fascism really messed with the Italian people's inner clocks.
I did get something from each novel. The Leopard was the only novel I was glad I read; it gave a pretty quick run down of Italian history. The Garden of the Finzi-Contini gave the location of a secret Jewish romantic spot in Venice (I'm not kidding about the ethnicity) that I plan to visit. Among Women Only gave a description of Turin, which I now do not plan to visit. And The Conformist made me very thankful I am not a fascist.
Actually, The Conformist just made me curl into a ball and cry.
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