Where Mute Memories Start Talking

The one thing that could possibly rival fire alarms as my most feared inanimate object in high school was a device colloquially known as a “Norton”. For those uninformed, the object in question formally goes by the moniker of “Norton Anthology of English Literature”. They are extremely large “books” which contain copious amounts of work from a certain era, country, or culture. They are a thorough pain in the ass to carry around, and are extremely thick to the point where handling the book becomes extremely awkward due to the odd shape.

After my second year of high school, I always told my parents to avoid buying the book since I honestly never even opened it outside of class. I could’ve easily just borrowed the thing from someone who was in English during a different period. Since I was one of the special kids in honors classes, it was usually pretty easy for me to borrow a book from the DGAF water polo players as long as I promised to return it by the end of the year so they could mix it with hash and smoke it over summer.

Of course my parents refused to comply, despite my good intentions of saving them money and saving me the hassle of dragging a 3,000 page piece of rubbish around campus. The book was honestly a pain to read even during the times I decided to go through it a bit. For starters, anytime you’re reading something that comes before page 500 or after page 2700, the book slants awkwardly to one side. It forces you to tilt your head to avoid glare from the standard reading light. To complicate matters even further, the pages start to curve when you approach the middle of the book, creating a large bump on the text which interrupts normal eye scanning patterns necessary for coherent reading. My attention span is horrible as is, I don’t need these extra distractions while I attempt to grubble through excerpts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Lo and behold, my English class this quarter uses a Norton Anthology as a textbook. Shoot me in the face. After four years of never even bothering to deal with these horrid contraptions, I think I’ll be forced to give one a decent read. I got through AP English with an A and a 5 without reading any Norton excerpts ONCE, but I don’t think the same strategy will bode well in this institution of higher academia (haaaa).

On a final note, I’ve started to notice that once you hit a certain level, academics and common sense start to become inversely related. Think about that for a second. To give an example: all my professors are very intelligent, but total dumbshits at the same time. I miss real life sometimes, and I think that many members of the faculty here could use a good dose of real life, just so they realize how idealized all their crackpot theories and politics are, and how ineffective said theories would be if someone foolishly tried to implement them in the real world.