I'm actually going to write about literature, gasp!

Way back when, Virginia Woolf brought me down from my cocaine high and allowed me to sleep peacefully into the night.

As an English major, the only thing that I can say it really gives me is the ability to think and analyze things for myself. All in all, that is the only thing that studying English gives you, as someone who already speaks it natively. Sure there is a benefit in speaking well, or writing well, but in the practical gist of things that is only fluff, in my opinion.

But beyond that, as a writer I feel this "requirement" to sit through certain classics because somehow they will pertain to my opinions or perceptions on things. Or maybe it's just a requirement because of that possibility I am drunk at some bar that smells like fish sticks and some literature fanatic finds out I write and wants to talk to me about it. I mean, if you don't have those fundamentals you're a quack, right? Apparently so. I guess. I can't ever tell. But there are so many classics I have been unable to sit through. I failed throughout my American Lit I class to read everything I was supposed to read and gather opinions about it.

Then there is the "required reading outside of school but if you are some counterculturian you should know this piece because I guarantee it shapes everything against the grain." One of these authors is Vonnegut, which I will admit I have been unable to sit through on numerous occasions. Maybe there is something wrong with me, like I am not legit. That is what I have been telling myself for so long now. Audrey, you don't get the Vonnegut craze? Sure he said some interesting things, he was an interesting guy. He had the background too. But really, when it comes right down to it... well, hell... when you pick up that book it's like slime right back into the I'm in the middle of reading this bookcase. It isn't that Vonnegut is bad, I just do not feel the draw.

Anyway, I guess what I am trying to say as I am close to the end of my rather confusing studies in English literature and writing, I have decided that the majority of what I read and was told to like was actually a farce. I mean, hell, no wonder I am so confused. No wonder I have no sense of what I am doing. I find my own classics, like Cormac McCarthy, even though he's up to writing right now. Or Richard Brautigan, a poet and prose writer who disturbed most critics and who frankly, I don't even know why I love so much sometimes. I'd rather read Sombrero Fallout every single day for the rest of my life than sit through something racked down my throat in literature classics as genius and all of that nonsense. I'm not saying any of this is bad. It's hard to say that something is just badly written when I can barely get words out these days. But I can't seem to see why something is regarded as genius or not. And why the lessons of William Burroughs only permeate through my poetry professor's mouth when she sees there is nothing more to tell me in the arc of my frustration over trying to write something suitable for an academic establishment.

Then again, hell if I know what I have been doing the past five years. I remember reading Richard Brautigan in one of my early creative writing classes in Columbia. The professor just had a look on her face like, "Oh man this girl is gonna be a pain in the ass," and that was it. Since then, I have served myself a heaping plate of asking way too many questions about something that should be set in stone. I served myself a heaping plate of pissed off Audrey making it hard to learn anything at all. 3 years later I sat in a classroom with a professor and editor of one of the more important literary magazines to date. I sat there the entire semester and became so fueled with anger that I was spending so much time trying to please this person who has already pinned me down as an imbecile. Either you wrote like him, and you were a male writing about oil in a car, or you were in need of not drinking so much and smoking so many joints.

Ah, there I go again, spilling coffee on my bed.