AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
This guy. Let me tell you about this guy.
His name was John Milton, and for some fucking reason I cannot escape him this semester. Maybe it's because I foolishly signed up for a class called "John Milton" but holy fuck me I never expected Aeropagitica to ambush me on Livejournal.
I found this shit, was scrolling through, said "yeah this is boring," and was two seconds away from clicking the back button when I saw that word and my eyes almost screwed out of my head. We're also going to get some hilarious (only read like "HUUUUUUULARIOUS") interpretation of Marlowe's Faust and, hold onto your ass because we're about to get into some
TECHNICAL SHIT:
Paradise Lost.

So it has come to my attention that my little sister is something of Steven Strogatz fangirl. Apparently, he writes the best math textbooks she's ever had to read

Can a life be so devoid of content that this passes as entertaining?
I'm about to find out.

For example, Finding Your Roots is a wonderfully lucid explanation of imaginary and complex numbers, but when he gets to fractals, which seems the really fascinating part, the writing becomes dense, cursory and leaves me fumbling for meaning:

I can't believe this is happening. On Livejournal, no less. I'm reading an entry about Fractals on Livejournal at 1:29 PM on a Monday.
... When I was 10 and I was "imagining my life in 12 years" for my 5th (6th, 7th who the fuck even knows) grade English assignment, I'm sure I imagined myself as somewhat more of a success than this.
Sorry, 10 year old me.

I had a navel orange as part of breakfast/lunch and for the first time, marveled at its name. Wikipedia tells me "A single mutation in 1820 in an orchard of sweet oranges planted at a monastery in Brazil yielded the navel orange [...]

Ah, like the single mutation in the form of a perfect special defense IV that spawned my entire "indeterminate" egg group progeny.
I tried plotting that family tree, incidentally.
Very creepy.
Controlled inbreeding and alien virus infection. Pokemon takes a very dark turn when you look under the surface, good grief.

Or, Paradise Lost, the really good parts

So, near the end of Bk 2, Satan flies out of Hell, searching for earth,

No, nope. Not doing this.

Reading Areopagitica and PL so close together emphasizes how much free will matters to Milton

Oh he reserved all his good lines that he himself spoke and believed in for Satan.
Wonder if that means anything?

The only time Milton's God seems interesting

IS NEVER SHUT UP. Any time you make something "really boring" to "make a point" you have fucked up somewhere.

Read Marlowe's Faustus again for the first time in 7 years. Kind of want to see a modern stage production of it now in which Faustus is a hipster grad student.

Honest to God I cannot believe how pretentious college is. No wonder people hate intellectually-minded folk.

Also rereading Paradise Lost. I think I'm getting old. The first time I read PL, I like every other teenager who encounters Milton, thought OMG SATAN IS SO COOL. And now, I just feel he's sad and childish, just like Faustus.

Really? I just keep imagining him doing jazz hands at every turn. He really strikes me as a character from a musical.

Was so congested last night I couldn't sleep so finally got and up and read Duchess of Malfi until I dozed off in the middle of Act 3.

Yeah the Duchess of Malfi is pretty cool or something idk I guess school hasn't beaten that one to death for me yet.

Nothing like a desperate tragedy of revenge, murder, and torture to put you to sleep.

I know you're trying to be "lolironically funny" but it's seriously the only good thing you'll read in any Renaissance drama class.

I have absolutely nothing to say about this play except perhaps to compare it to Edward II what with the anxiety of princes consorting with the base born.

You have nothing to say about revenge, murder and incest and yet you have a fifteen thousand paragraph essay about fractals?
Whatever.

Was freaking out because I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE REFORMATION OR CALVINISM OR THE PURITANS IN ENGLAND

Oh. Stand back and let me paint you a rich narrative, then:
So some assholes decided they wanted to be the head Christfags because they disagreed with current head Christfags because they disagreed on philosophical issues so incredibly minute that I'm pretty sure no one even then gave a flying fuck. Then there was a civil war and this guy named Oliver Cromwell did some shit then he became Lord Protectorate then some assholes came over to this shithole called America and yeah. I think they did that shit before the civil war, actually.

Now I just need to figure out if the Calvinists and the Puritans were exactly the same thing (are Puritans a subset of Calvinists? the other way around?)

Same shit, different asshole.

I tend to be resentful of Milton's prose tracts because they can be dense to wade through

ALSO BORING AS SHIT, GODDAMN.

but once you are in it, it is wonderful; he knows just how to make rhetoric compelling.

NO HE DOESN'T. SHUT UP.
Milton was so incredibly boring even to himself that he frequently wandered off on totally irrelevant subjects only to barely tie it back into whatever he was saying.

Today I shall blather about Isabella Whitney and how charming the entire conceit of "Her Will to London" (1573)

No you shan't, because I'm not reading it.

Dryden's not all bad; when he teams up with Horace (who is also not all bad), he can be engaging. From Dryden's translation of Horace:

Sorry, just drooled all over myself. Wow, this is dire.

I rushed to the library restroom, scrubbing my hands (probably doing a plausible impression of Lady Macbeth) and wondering what idiot ever thought that the kind of faucets you have to press down on to get water from were hygienic

Oh because Lady Macbeth scrubbed her hands to get blood that wasn't there off.
Oh man, between this, having to get up early for shitty group work, and the song that just popped up, I think it's nap time.
Feels like I just took some antihistamine, shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.