I do not deserve to be a grad student.

Haven’t written much because I’ve come home for the holidays and have been too busy eating high-calorie meals with long lost pals, getting drunk with elderly relatives, and making out merry all over the city of Toronto. This is a good place. 

While looking through boxes in my mum’s LOVELY new place in Cabbagetown, I found a folder full of my undergraduate essays, including a gem called: ‘“What a rant, say you, is here”: Problematizing Edward Young’s conception of ‘Originality’ and the Author in his ‘Conjectures on Original Composition’’. First off, I’m not sure when I discovered the formula for essay-titles, but if anyone is not aware yet, this is it:

Witty pun or quote/Colon/Explanatory bit about your essay with a few academic-sounding words. 

e.g. Pic of the Litter: The politics of cats, captions and ‘laughing out loud’ in the internet’s postmodern milieu.

A+.

The essay I found is not exceptional. I did fine on it, but reading it over, it mostly just ramblingly contradicts Edward Young’s opinion that imitation is a low and ultimately useless form of creative output. (Sorry, everyone after Madonna.) My chosen approach to debunking this theory was to craft some imitative poems of my own, and being the hopeless Bard-worshipper I am, I rewrote some of the more famous sonnets. About cheese. And Maury Povich.

Sonnet 18

Shall I compare Brie to a summer’s day?

Chevre art more lovely and more temperate:

Gruyere doth shake the dear tastebuds of May,

And Cheddar’s lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of Parmigiano shines,

And oft is Swiss’ gold complexion dimm’d;

And every curd from curd sometimes declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course unserv’d:

But thy eternal odour will not fade,

Nor lose possession of that taste thou ow’st;

Nor milk shall brag thou wanderest in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou growest (blue)

So long as men can eat, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to cheese.

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of third wives

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it augmentation finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! It is an ever-fixed mark,

That lived in trailers and is never shaken;

It is the star to ev’ry gold-digg’r’s bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although her man be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But Botoxeth it out even to the edge of doom:

If this be error and on Maury proved,

I never writ, nor Hefner never loved.

Guys. What a stupid essay. I basically wrote 2750 words of explanatory nonsense because one day I thought it would be fun to write a sonnet to dairy. The best part of discovering this paper, though, is without question this comment from my professor:

“I like the flow of your sentences, and your general style. … the only issues for me were the moments where you claim (not apparently tongue in cheek) that your poems are the equal of Shakespeare’s.”

Well. I’d like to see ol’ William write a blog post. GOOD LUCK FIGURING OUT GOOGLE YOU SIXTEENTH CENTURY PONCE.