Zar

If this should be moved somewhere else, mods, do so. I'm not really sure about the appropriate place for this.

I'm in my fourth year of college. I've interacted with a wide variety of professors and students. I was originally a Physics major, but I switched to English because I am a good writer (or so my peers and teachers tell me) and because (at the time I switched) I had vague ideas about becoming a journalist or author. The idea of influencing masses of people with my ideas via fiction (ala Kurt Vonnegut Jr., J.D. Salinger, Ayn Rand, etc.) held great appeal to me. However, now I feel disenchanted. I've taken three years of literature classes, and I feel jaded and uninterested.

We debate the thematic and critical approaches in class, and the characters, and what they represent, and the context ad nauseum. In the end, it all just seems like so much mental masturbation to me. I suppose it's a problem of my personality, and I tend to think, "These people debating the relative merits of these texts will have no impact on human society. They will read the appropriate works and become experts in their 'field'. Which means they know a lot about something that will really have no impact on the course of human events."

I know I sound cynical, because I am. I can understand how reading a certain work can alter one's perspective on the world, or society, because I have done that. But in the end, I think, what does it matter? There are six billion of us. Perhaps one can feel smarter because they are aware of many divergent approaches and ideas and such. But does it really make a difference? Are people like this, who know the true causes of wars, who understand psychology (as we understand it today), who understand the socioeconomic factors that dictate today's society -- do they really make a difference in the real world? They may know much, but what do they do? They seem like glorified movie critics to me.

I guess I'm an empiricist at heart. I'd like to hear opposing points of view. I know that learning these things can help your critical thinking skills, etc., and thus prepare you for a "real job". But many of these "real jobs" also seem pointless to me. They were constructed by human society to fulfill a need also constructed by human society.

Okay. I've rambled enough. I should not have switched majors, basically.

shakran

Sure, you can go down the road you've started on. Hell look at my life. I'm a TV photographer. I take pictures of life but never actively participate in it. The vast majority of humanity does not see my work because they're not in my market. By tomorrow most of those who DO see my work will have forgotten the pictures they saw tonight. What's the point of my job?

I get off work and go down to the animal shelter to walk dogs. Eventually every dog I walk will be dead. Once they're all dead, what does it matter that I helped them? They certainly don't remember or care - - -they're dead.

Everything humans do is to fulfill a need that, if you wait long enough, won't mean a damn thing. The trick is to realize that the future meaning of today's works just is not important at all.

Viewers might not remember every picture I took but if I do my job right they'll remember the story and maybe it will have a positive impact on their life or cause them to have a positive impact on someone else's life. Stranger things have happened. And so what if we'll all be dead 100 years from now and the fact that one of my stories helped get a homeless guy a job and a bed doesn't mean anything to anybody. It meant something to us, now.

Your comments are a direct reflection of why humans invented religion. Without a god or some sort of "higher purpose" life on earth seemed pointless. Of course, the religion inventors didn't stop to think "well. . .what purpose does this God of ours serve? Why is GOD here?" But it's very comforting to think that what we do now is watched over by a being we can't understand and that there's a higher purpose to the universe than the one that's visible to us now.

Ustwo

You are suffering what most people who move from a hard science to the fuzzy world of humanities discover.

I took more higher level humanities type classes then my major required because I enjoyed it, but the testing was always a joke as it seemed far more based on how much you could spit out vrs how much you understood. Few classes did you really need to think in, unlike my physics exams which tested how well you could apply what you learned. The classes were more about understanding what the instructors thought was important, at least as far as grading went.

So yes you have learned a lot of different ways to mentaly masturbate, I won't sugar coat it. I wouldn't call it useless, I think my studies in these fields have given me a far greater understanding of society and history than most around me, but that and .25 cents won't get me a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

But then again so what.

You will be what you make yourself to be, you could still be that great author, or you end up serving fries but you need your own vision, no school is going to give you that. The issue for you would still be the same had you stayed in physics. Yes you would have a different and measureable toolset unlike you get from humanities, but what to do with it beyond 'get a job' would still require vision on your part.

__________________
Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host

Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.

ubertuber

Great post Ustwo.

__________________
Cogito ergo spud -- I think, therefore I yam

Poppinjay

I switched to English mid stream, going from an analytical course of study that was very easy for me, and one that I excelled at, to something I truly enjoyed.

I struggled as an English major. Our book load was incredibly daunting. My GPA dropped from a near 4.0 to a 2.8. And towards the end, I was burnt out and felt exactly the way you do, Zar. So I worked in a double major with journalism and graduated a year later than planned.

All I can say about English as a major, is that after getting a couple of years distance from the college experience, I found it to be more rewarding than I ever thought it would be.

__________________
I think the Apocalypse is happening all around us. We go on eating desserts and watching TV. I know I do. I wish we were more capable of sustained passion and sustained resistance. We should be screaming and what we do is gossip. -Lydia Millet

lurkette

I've been on both sides of the fence on this one. My undergraduate major was in theater, and my grad degree is in rhetoric and media studies. However, I spent the last seven years managing research projects for academics doing work on brain development. And let me tell you, just because it's empirical doesn't mean it makes a damn bit more difference in the lives of people than a good play or song or novel. Apart from the direct intervention we're doing with orphans in Romania, the science we're doing may or may not make any difference, policy-wise, or even in the world of research. And whatever difference it might make is years away. The way I live my life on a day-to-day basis was changed just as much by, say, reading Chuck Palahniuk as by understanding the role of the amygdala in the formation of anxiety disorders.

For the most part, everything any person does is only additive. Even for the "greats" like MLK and Gandhi and Einstein that we all look up to, their work was just very large cogs in an even larger machine. If you want to touch people, be an inspiration to them through the way you live your life, not necessarily through the products of it. Do what you love, what inspires you and gets you out of bed in the morning, do it to the best of your ability, and let the chips fall where they may. If literature isn't it, keep looking till you find it.

__________________
"If ten million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."

- Anatole France

roachboy

there is alot that could say about this, but i have no time at the moment.
a couple quick things:

1. i would not be surprised, zar,if it turns out that you are as much fried from being a senior as you are disillusioned with the literature major that you pursued. not that i doubt the content of your criticism of litcrit modes of interacting with texts--i am just saying that by the time you crawl to the last semester of your last year in univeristy, you are probably kinda burned out.
i was.
so i would allow for that possibility and, on that basis, see if your relationship to your academic training changes over time.

2. there are limitations to the procedures/assumptions particular to literary studies programs--just as there are limitations to the procedures/assumptions in any discipline. my background is in history and english (undergrad majors)--i decided to go to grad school--my marxist background combined with a sense of limitation like you outline to push me toward history--i learnd alot from literature/theory etc. but i did not want to have to route all arguments about all aspects of the social world through literary texts and their analysis.

3. contra ustwo, i do not think the "hard science"/"fuzzy" thing is worth much.
the hard sciences in the main do not address philosophical prblems, including epistemological questions, which is strange given the kind of claims about knowledge of the world generated by pracitioners. in the humanities, you can get the epistemological models, but their application to the sciences is often arbitrary.

the problem is the division of intellectual labour built into univeristy organization--the seperation of modes of knowing about the world from each other, the discouraging of meaningful dialogue across disciplines, etc.

an example: from a philosophcal viewpoint, much of what ustwo says about the sciences appears to be naieve.
no doubt, from his viewpoint, much of what i would say about that would appear arbitrary.
i dont think there is a question of principle involved in this-more a function of the seperation of ways of thinking.

it seems that you are talking about your encounter with this kind of limitation, whch follows from how the academic disciplines of literary studies define themselves as over against other, closely aligned fields (like history---and this process works the other way as well for historians, say) and the way in which the humaities define themselves as over against the sciences, and vice versa.

unless you are thinking of going into academics, there is no requirement for you to actually think within these limtations--they are bureaucratic functions. give yourself time, keep posing questions about the world in whcih you find yourself, keep learning, keep moving, produce the kind of work that pleases you, that fits with the ideas you have about what constitues political action, what constitutes art, etc.

the ultimate fiction of acadmeic work is that analyzing texts provides the folk who do the analysing with some kind of mastery--over the analytic objects first, over the processes whereby those objects are created second, over the problems that one encounters with trying to figure out how to do creative work etc. you read a text per week in each seminar, each of which took a ong time to write--they turn up one after another as if they required no particular duration to be produced. at the end of the seminar, you are expected to write something that works on the same order as those texts that you encountered in the class. that is insane.

i hope this makes sense--i am writing it very quickly and have to go now to do stuff in 3-d land.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Jinn

Humanities academia IS mostly useless, simply because of its pedantic and repetetive learning. Oh hey, look.. this author did the same damn thing as 10000 others. And yes, you'll be a more "actualized" person who better understands culture and stands as one of the enlightened. It's a worthless degree.

Unless you get a job. I'm a Software Test Engineer testing DOD-ceritified document retention software with my mostly-completed degree in Computer Science.

My boss is a "Communication" major.

^ And there is the contradiction. Most education, whether its the back-breaking mind-fucking engineering classes you've ever seen, or a class in "Male Female Communication," its about preparing yourself for a job. My boss is fine.. she doesn't need a CS degree -- the communication degree taught her how to tell people exactly what needs to be done (without being condescending) and deal with the scientific details.

So my question to you, is what kind of JOB role do you see yourself in?

__________________
"I'm typing on a computer of science, which is being sent by science wires to a little science server where you can access it. I'm not typing on a computer of philosophy or religion or whatever other thing you think can be used to understand the universe because they're a poor substitute in the role of understanding the universe which exists independent from ourselves." - Willravel

roachboy

philosophy.
literature.
art.
music.
history.
mathematics.
politics.
ethics.
interpretation.
creative work.
all a waste of time.
no money in em.
must be useless.


plato
artistotle
rumi
calvino
kant
hegel
wittgenstein
joyce
proust
dostoevsky
sterne
cervantes
cantor
godel
russell
who gives a shit?
they all did the same thing.
what they wrote does not help with a 9-5.
so why bother?

clearly.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Elphaba

Zar, perhaps your major has provided you a skill that will serve you for a lifetime. Critical thinking and analysis will open many doors, IMO, depending on how you market your education.

Do you plan on an advanced degree? If you do, build upon you BA in a direction that you wish it to go. A "hard" science requires the very skills you have achieved in your undergraduate education.

My two cents.

Strange Famous

American college seems very different to UK univeristies

I chose what degree I was going to do at the start of my course, and every module I took related to it, American education seems much wider and generalist, where as what I did was very specialist.

Around 60% of my first degree was specifically the study of Marxism and the future society after the collapse of capitalism. Maybe the problem is that you feel isolated... I think study, or the appreciation of literature can be an end in its own right. If youre sayi9ng that studying fiction wont change the world, I'd probably agree, but most of us wont change the world whatever we do or try.... I would guess ultimatel that the study of the arts only has value in the field of art. If art seems valueless, then perhaps you shouldnt study it?

__________________
"Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate,
for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven. For nothing
hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain
without being uncovered."

The Gospel of Thomas

Ustwo

While I think the American highschool system is inferior to the European equivalents, at the University level it is this degree of specialization which I think makes the European system inferior, and most in my field of study get done earlier but can't poor piss out of a boot.

If you only know your field of study, its hard to bring ideas from other fields into yours to improve it. You end up just preaching what is already known, and following paths already laid out.

BTW what school offers a degree in Marxism and the fall of capitalism?

__________________
Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host

Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.

Suave

I'm posting without reading any previous posts in this thread save the first one. Affecting the world with a social science or humanities background: one large area is public policy. There are also applications in business, education, and I'd say every facet of life. It is not something that is an application in and of itself like engineering, but is incredibly useful.

__________________
"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions." - Albert Einstein

"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something." - Plato

Strange Famous

My degree's are

Ba (hons) Politics
Ma Social and Politicla Thought

But it just happened that most of the modules I took were related to Marxism because this is what I found myself interested in. I am sure you wouldnt agree, but in my impression, the study of politics is necessariky the study of the end of capiatlism and the future socialist society which will follow.

I would kind of agree that it would be better to have at least a year of some generalist education, and then the three years specialisation. I did study some other subjects - economics and history - in my first year, but I think a broader year long general education would have been a good idea. I believe in America a degree takes four years to complete? In the UK it is three, so the extra year could be afforded.

__________________
"Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate,
for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven. For nothing
hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain
without being uncovered."

The Gospel of Thomas

Astrocloud

Zar, I'm going to have to say that the restlessness you feel is common after being in school so fricking long. My degree was in Applied Mathematics. By the time I rolled out of that school -I was soooo sick of it. My thoughts were that that unless I went into Acedamia, I would never use what I learned in School. I was mostly right.

What each particular Major teaches is a "Type of Thinking". For example: toward the end of my school career I took a graduate level class in Law. The class was given daily homework followed by a class discussion (about the homework). In my major, it was typical to give daily homework (which would not be graded) followed by a short quiz. By adapting to this style of teaching -I was well prepared to tackle this Law class. In fact I got an A+.

Some of the other majors didn't seem so well prepared for the class. In fact -it seemed that a vast amount of poly-sci students would come to class without doing the homwork. They'd have the audacity to join in on the class discussion. I really didn't understand why they'd stick their foot in their mouth so often but I also think that the class was a "weeder" for them.

Anyways, I digress. I think you should write a book. Your original inspiration for going into your major are (for lack of a better expression) success stories. The vast amount of mental masturbation -was meant for people who weren't going to be successful writers. Don't let it get you down -the school is simply covering all bases.

Rodney

Anybody who's not kicking at the traces in their fourth year of college isn't going to amount to much. Yes, college is where you learn all sorts of good things. But it's also a stultifying and infantalizing hierarchy where many competent and intelligent young men and women are taught that the way to success is to agree (or not seriously disagree) with your professor's pet theories -- especially in the humanities.

I had a jouralism major, which arguably teaches you how to do something, and took a program that included lots of hands-on field work and internships (more rare 30 years ago than now); and I still couldn't wait to graduate. The more mature you become in college, the more you realize that it's all a game; a beneficial game, if you're lucky, but a game nonetheless.

As to the humanities: they make a great minor. They really are good for learning about what makes the world tick, but you should also pick up some skill along the way that'll let you make your way through life. I minored in political science (arguable not a humanity, but let's be real), and it has done me a great deal of good in understanding federal, state, and local politics over the years, and it's made my life better. On the other hands, I know a married couple who _both_ majored in Medieval French Literature (they met each other in the program) and well, they've been running a breakfast/lunch restaurant for the last 25 years. And I'm not sure what skills they picked up in college helped them along the way, unless they took Fry Cooking 101.

In a similar thread here about what use people made of their major, I recall one gentleman talking about how a degree in history helped him in his insurance career -- by giving him the research and writing skills he needed, plus statistics. If all you've learned how to do in English Lit is argue, I'd say that it's at least something.

BigBen

It sounds to me like you are well prepared to go and start a fantastic adventure, write your memoires and allow us lowly serfs to live vicariously through your tales...

I agree with the above post that says that you should feel this way in your senior year. I would question you if you didn't.

Without humanities, what would the hard science folks live for? Engineers can build the wall, but that wall is yearning for art to be hung upon it. A physicist can describe the changes in sound pressure in your ear, but only a musician can use sound to make you feel. A chemist can make acid-free paper and non-running ink, but it means nothing if the words don't move the reader.

Fuck those bean-counters and yes-men. You are put here to do something better. Your humanities degree has given you the skill set to really do something. It is up to you to do it.

__________________
3.141592654
Hey, if you are impressed with my memorizing pi to 10 digits, you should see the size of my penis.

Gilda

Majors in the humanities aren't for everyone, and if you're this dissatisfied with it, then you're right, it was a poor choice.

Literature study isn't career training, though it does come in handy in a variety of professions. Literature study is about learning new ways of thinking about how stories are told, created, and interpreted. This is important because it is through stories that we pass on our culture from one generation to another.

You're right. I'll have a lot less practical effect on the world as an English professor than eithe my wife, who is an ER nurse, or my sister, currently a pre-med major. They'll save lives and heal bodies and minds. What I do seems so small in comparison.

But I realized some time back that it isn't a race, I don't have to look at myself not saving lives and think that that means I'm a failure. If I send some students out into the world with a few new ideas and new skills they didn't have before that enhances their lives, their ability to empahize with others, their ability to connect to a story on a personal level or pass on a story to a child or a friend, then I've done a little bit to make their lives a little bit better than they otherwise would have, and make the world, at least the part of it my students inhabit a little bit better place. It may be such a small contribution that it's like a drop in the ocean compared to the world, compared to what someone like Charles Drew (scientist) or Harry Benjamin (doctor) or Lynn Conway (computer engineer) did, but it may make a small piece of a small corner of the world a little bit better than it was, and I think that matters.

Gilda

flstf

Reminds me of something that I think Picasso said:

"When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning.
When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine."
Pablo Picasso

Zar

Thank you all for the replies. It's interesting looking back at my half-cocked and half-drunk (heh) opening post.

What is also interesting is that my original post was inspired by roachboy. I find that I must put forth much more effort to read and comprehend his posts than most others, but I generally find the effort worthwhile. He is one of the most unique posters here in terms of perspective and writing style. I should add that roachboy's contribution to this particular discussion was enlightening, as usual.

But, basically, I found myself reading his posts, and I was thinking, "All of this analysis, all of this argument on this essentially random message board, what is the point?" I was feeling quite nihilistic at the time. And after jumping through some mental hoops, this segued into what you see at the top of this thread.

To respond to some of the posts: undoubtedly, some or much of the sentiment I expressed in my opening post can be attributed to burnout. Perhaps I've had a few too many professors who believe that their expertise on British Romantic Poetry [or insert alternate literature topic here] makes them god's gift to mankind (I am not saying that all professors of a given topic are like this -- some seem to fit the bill though). Perhaps I've written a few too many papers that seem utterly pedantic and pointless in order to get that elusive (or not so elusive, depending on a number of factors) A.

I realize, on some level, that going down the road I've outlined can only lead to bitterness. I know that not everyone (not even a tiny fraction of humanity) can be an Isaac Newton and radically alter mankind's perception of the universe that surrounds us. I know that one must find satisfaction in one's own life however they can, by doing whatever they can. No one's ideal of a happy life will fit another person's. I know this all on an intellectual level, at least.

I do still have a hold on my dream though. I still fervently want to become an author. I write daily. Maybe it will all come true, maybe it won't. Only time will tell.

I do know I have a beautiful fiancee that I plan to spend the rest of my life with, and she makes me happier than I ever knew was possible.

And I have a backup plan, for I plan to go to a prestigious (as I've already been accepted) law school and become a bloodsucking lawyer following the completion of my undergraduate degree. Being able to comfortably support the family my fiancee and I have in mind is really all the happiness I could truly wish for.

But we'll see what happens .

roachboy

zar: thanks for the sentiments about roachboy.
inside the compliment, the underlying question---"what are you doing here"---bothers me from time to time---i cant always figure it out. and something about what you wrote above makes me feel like i should defend roachboy a little. like you hit a nerve or something.

usually, this is something that i do while i am drinking coffee and waking up in the morning. between stops on my tour of newspapers. the posts that i put up do not usually take terribly long to write--not much longer than it takes to read, i would think. i check in periodically during the day if there is something interesting going on and if i have time.

i say all this because the idea that you would read stuff that i put up here--or that roachboy says, depending on your viewpoint----as grist for the mill of "what good is a humanities education if this roachboy fellow ends up in a place like this" is kinda depressing.

you cant judge the 3-d lives of folk who post here from what they post, i think.
there is a convention in tfp about community that tends to work on the assumption that this board is transparent, that the personae that swim about are reflections of the 3-d people who manoever them.
and you can see, if you cruise around here long enough, that for the folk who feel that way, it is that way.

it is not like that for me: roachboy is a persona. he is in many ways an extended exercize in disciplining the writing of the 3-d sort who is sitting at a desk, looking over his glasses, wondering between clauses why exactly he feels compelled to respond.

roachboy only exists here. i like that he is hidden. i like that he is anonymous.
he gets into debates. sometimes i participate in them really, sometimes not.

i am interested in how conservative ideology bends the thinking of the folk who use it to process information. roachboy tries to understand the shifting terrain of right ideology, the ways its signifiers are constructed, and the extent to which the types of arguments that folk who use this framework run out are shaped by it. i--the 3-d fellow--am interested in the limitations of this ideology--what information can and cannot be assimilated by the folk who employ it. can folk who think through right ideology also think about capitalism as a social system, for example. teh answer, from what i have figured out so far anyway, is tht the folk behind the personae can, but only to the extent that you get to them--if you find someone who works entirely within the ideology and will not step out of it in this context cannot even start thinkign about capitalism as a mode of production. i think the discourse explains that. and i think that is interesting.

i should say that the other reason roachboy swims around in here is because the conversations are often interesting in themselves--there are alot of smart folk. there are some who i have to assume are smart, but who seem to make it a mission to conceal it. and there are others, who i ignore.
==========
as for the idea you have of being a writer:

remember what eliot said:

everyone is a poet at 18: no-one at 40.

there is alot to that.
keep going with your writing. be stubborn. you have no idea where you might land.

here are a couple of sentences that speak to the experience of the fellow behind roachboy:

dont confuse academic work with creative work: in the main, they are not the same thing. literature programs (creative writing apart) are geared around the collecting and classifying of finished works. cultural capital within acadmeic fields is a function of lists that are generated: academics will legitimate themselves by being "the guy who talks about x" or "the woman who talks about y" or "the guy who talks about x using the vestiges of deconstruction" or "the woman who talks about z through the lens of material culture"---the system is geared this way. in the main, you will find that most academics do not really like people who make stuff who are not either famous or dead--they prefer a combination of those two features.

you can learn alot from literature programs: theoretical frames, ways to read--for myself, i found my training opened up literary modernism for me--a psace i still like to swim about in, from whcih i take all kinds of stuff both in academic writing that i do and in creative work. but i also know that you cannot--cannot--accept the conflation of modes of reading texts with accounts of what the writer went through (the process) to make the text. so there is no way to coherently get from a literature program information about how to write.
not beyond the rudimentary level--because, in the end, making stuff requires distance.
from this follows the problem that i have with creative writing programs--the up side--theyu create potentially interesting environments for folk who should come primarily (to my mind) in order to buy themselves time to focus on their work--that is who are already fairly advanced in their own way of wroking and who are not there to be molded in any deep way by the program. more to interact with other folk who also work in the medium. you cant really routinize creative work. it doesnt seem to work like that.

that because, it seems to me that you have to be able to assume considerable autonomy--you need to work with voice, feel authorized to tamper with the order of things that are taken as given, both as such and in a particular sequence as a function of being given in the world. and you have to feel authorized to take what you want or need from what is around you, inclduing your academic training, and use it for your own purposes. so you need, to use the clche, to own your own training. that takes time.

literary analysis is about listmakng, rearragement of a textual order, assimilation, putting things into place again. quite the opposite of the autonomy you need to hang onto to be able to reprocess the world.

i---the 3-d guy---work on both sides of the mirror--history and piano---and i have found that it is more dangerous for your career as a historian to come out of the closet as an artist or musician than it is to come out about anything else. the assumption is not that you may be able to generate more interesting work because you do these two (or more) things--rather, it is understood as divided loyalty.

i have been working on piano for about 30 years now.
i dont know if what i do is interesting to many other folk---it only matters to a limited extent, really--but i find it really interesting and think that, over time, it has become a space that is open to all the other things that i do, in ways that are sometimes direct, sometimes not.
all i know is that i would never have imagined this space possible when i was 22--and if i had stopped playing, it would not have been possible. no-one else could have done this, and even if others worked in spaces that ere close to it, the meaning would be different because it would be someone else's space.

so keep going.
like i said, you have no idea where you could end up.

btw this post took 17 minutes.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite