Two, and three.

That's the premise of my next paper. We're confined to Tolkien's translation of Gawain and the Green Knight , but it's full of usable examples and, I think, cheeky commentary on the chivalric code. I've decided to argue (we can argue for or against the efficaciousness of chivalry) that chivalry did not work. Here are my reasons, which I'm explaining in the hopes that it'll make my paper flow continuously. I will of course be phrasing everything somewhat differently. #1 They thought chopping off a man's head at Christmastime all in good fun. Death, anyone? #2 Even those who purportedly followed the chivalric path didn't recognize a chivalric act when it hit them in the face. #3 Gawain slept-maybe (he at least spent a lot of time kissing her)-with the wife of the lord of the castle who so kindly took him in and gave him the best of care. #4 Gawain was deceitful and didn't tell the lord that the lady had given him a belt. #5 This is the mo...

Maybe not entirely lazy. I usually can't sit for long before doing something , and I believe my kids are being fed sugar on the sly because their energy has increased by leaps and bounds. Even the lure of t.v. (which we watched a lot of) wasn't enough to calm them down. You see? That was a calm moment. Between fielding requests for milk/water/juice/bananas/bread/don't we have another type of food? and refereeing spats (he/she started it!) I managed to complete some homework assignments, chief among them reading The Wizard of Earthsea . Damm wanted to know if I had liked the book as it was a favorite of his. My answer? I'm neutral. I neither liked nor disliked the book. It did not draw me in, wanting to know more; in fact, Le Guin's characters seemed rather remote to me. I wonder, though, if I have been conditioned to expect character development and can no longer enjoy authors that follow a different path. Is the focus on character development a recen...