Comment cela

It's very green all around, everyone's happy to get their leaves back. That and the fact that it's a languid yet crisp saturday does put somewhat of a festive touch in the air; to that add the sound of the concert coming from the park, and the chatter of happy kids, and you have un jour d'or.

Almost.

Mister sun has decided to play hide and seek avec des nuages, so i am taking a blog-break from sun bathing/studying french outside. It is getting a little bit demanding, french, but that only makes this soon to be third year french student happy. Fiez-vous à moi! In fact i am dreaming of the day when i will begin working on my master's thesis, and :-P i already have my topic picked out! I plan to analyse these two books written by two lovers who were first brought together by quirk of fate, then separated for life, finally to be brought together by their books, where one book was written as a rebuttal to the other. My goal is simple. I will be looking to separate relative truth from absolute truth. And the fact that they were written in two different languages (spanning two continents), will instigate if not satiate the linguist in me. Qu'en pensez vous? C'est une bonne idée, n'est-ce pas?

Oh, that reminds me, this math prof went to a 3 hour session of right-brain thesis defences last week. My, what interesting topics! Just to give you a flavour, it ranged from "The sexual desire (in particular Asian men wanting to bed white women...um, at first i thought they had the genders transposed, but i guess c'est vrai aussi!)", to "The power of media (words versus photographs, truth be told, this one wasn't as appealing)", to "Fiction embedded in non-fiction proposed as fiction (There is no fiction or non-fiction, there are just narratives!)", to "Sexuality (homosexuality in American literature or rather lack thereof)" to "Class passing (think working girl, Melanie Griffth as Sigourney Weaver)" to finally the topic that interested me the most, "Masculinity (as perceived in Hardy's Novels)".

It's a comparison of the ideal man (Gabriel Oak in Far from the Madding Crowd, one of Hardy's earlier novels), and that of a failed man (Jude Fawley from Jude The Obscure, Hardy's more mature (then uber-infamous) novel). Freud was brought in to triangulate; with his view that manhood is asserted by prowess in the following fields (sex and ambition).

Hardy's unsaid premise is, there is no ideal man, or so was professed by the presenter. This sure is food for thought pour petite moi, as y'all know i am very interested in the mankind. LOL. So i guess i will have to read the second book and decide it for myself some time soon!

For now, i just let out a very pronounced hmm!