Oh Bleeding Nun, Bleeding Nun, Wherefore Art Thou, Bleeding Nun?

The latest stop in my sort of chaotic, researchy wanderings has included some plays by that most eminent of the Sturm und Drang persuasion, Friedrich von Schiller. The focus of my inquiry has been thwarted, though. I read, or thought I read somewhere, that the famous Bleeding Nun episode from Lewis's The Monk was borrowed from The Robbers. After reading all of the plays in the collected volume I picked up from the library, though, I'm disappointed in this regard. Not a single bleeding nun to be found amid the thwarted, young heroic barons and mistakenly murdered and wrongly imputed maidens. Not one. However, I've discovered something that Schiller does do remarkably well. Have this for a sample:

"I have been told that the great never know what misery is; that they fly from the knowledge of it. But I will teach the duke what misery is; I will paint to him, in all the writhing agonies of death, what misery is; I will cry aloud, in wailings that shall creep through the very marrow of his bones, what misery is; and, while at my picture his hairs shall stand on end like quills upon the porcupine, will I shriek into his affrighted ear, that in the hour of death the sinews of these mighty gods of earth shall shrivel and shrink, and that at the day of judgment beggars and kings shall be weighed together in the same balance."

And this from sweet Louisa, daughter of the town fiddler and prized primarily--as is typical of the logic of this kind of romance--for her artlessness and innocence. I still want my bleeding nun, but I see what the big deal is.

Ah, Spring!

Annoys me. Or, rather, it predisposes me to annoyance. I friend of mine from some years ago recently blogged about how Spring makes her feel...lascivious isn't quite the right word...randy might be. You know,

"The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies."

(NB: no dolphins splashing in the above, queercat)

For as long as I can remember, though, I do get the characteristic Spring Fever, accompanied by itchy palms and feet, the irrepressible desire to open windows and just BE in outside spaces, the longing to flee. What accompanies it, though, is not the desire to spawn with strangers, but a sudden and deep distaste for the flesh explosion that particularly comes along with warming weather in previous cold climes. Everyone who teaches can identify, I'd imagine. You suddenly come face-to-ass with all that flesh-ness previously hidden under $90 sweat pants and Ugg boots. And, it really isn't just that. Winter brain fog melts into Spring anxiety. At the moment, for example, I'm incredibly annoyed that, while I recalled all three volumes of Edward Long's 1868 History of Jamaica, the library only held Volume 2 for me. I, of course, checked it out and went merrily home, believing that the three had been surely collected in the one quite imposing tome I had received. As it turns out, this isn't the case. Really, though, this is my fault, and this is the place at which curmudgeons--whether Spring feverish or not--go bad. Had I been paying attention, I would no doubt have stumbled home weighed down with all 2000 odd pages of the thing. Instead, I sit here grumpily writing about undergraduate skin folds and the idiocies of library search and hold functions. Clearly, I need a life.

Still, I remember being a freshman (since none of you knew me then, let me paint this picture for you: extremely doughy, long and crazy red hair, facial piercings, chain-smoking, with that mushroomy look one gets from spending virtually all of one's time in a tiny dormroom slogging through the Bible and really anything else that made me feel a little bit less like I was wasting my life) and hating all the healthy hippies with their frizbee and their dogs, making happy homes on the campus quad at the first hint of Spring. Maybe my annoyance is vestigial, but I don't suppose it really matters.

The Horror...The Horror

I realize that this post should really be entitled, Domestic Antics, part 2, but that didn't really work out so well. The complete lack of privacy during that little trip, complicated and improved by my beloved nephews who have no sense of personal space or time (bless them) rendered further blogging while in the thick of things impractical if not impossible. This means I'll leave you with the image of me stretched out on makeshift bed amid a tumble of laundry in the middle of the night, starving, and doing my best to ignore the inevitable squeaking of the poor hamster's wheel. I, Abject. Suffice it to say, it was lovely to be there and lovely to come home. The intervening eight and a half hour drive through a snow storm that stretched from Virginia to New York was not lovely. When I finally got here, the entire front of my car was covered with a thick crust of ice. It took a whole day of sitting in the sun and my strenuous efforts with an ice scraper to get it off. My ocd was tweaked with satisfaction, though, at the sight. billy, perhaps, can sympathize.

Since then things have been non-stop. My students are alternately adorable and terrifying. The weather is, by turns, lovely and crappy. People seem to be in the collective state of denial generally brought on by winter's death rattle. B, of course, in particular. Two weeks. Christ. Who ever heard of two full weeks of vacation in the middle of the semester? I'm telling you, Buffalonians are soft. In Montana, they never cancelled school no matter how bad the weather was, we only got one week off during Spring semester, and almost nobody went to college or left the state. So there.

I'm sort of on tenterhooks--not that I know what these are--this week. I'm getting ready to hand two very rough chapters in for comments, so I'm officially in self-flagellation mode. Writer's remorse, maybe? Brief periods of placid self-assurance are continuously swept away by a moment of horror in which I think suddenly of the worst thing that could be said to me about my project so far. With an effort, I quell the panic, and sink once again into comfortable denial. Okay, fellow writers, this would be a good moment for you to come clean about your own writerly loathing and, maybe, self-destructive behaviors. Surely, I'm not the only one, right? Ummm. Right? The above picture of one of my favorite horror villains is intended to give you the appropriate, visceral, organ-cringing sensation just in case you don't sympathize.