The Director of the USU Press

His name is Michael. He was a Literary Studies major, so I figured he'd be interested to know I plan on changing my emphasis. I thought he'd be excited for me, but when I told him he made the weirdest exasperated kind of face. "You like to read," he said.

I nodded emphatically and asked, "Have you read Middlemarch?"

He nodded.

"Well, when we started reading it," I said, "I hated it. But now that I've finished it, I want to read it again. I want to write another paper on it." (even though I haven't actually written the first one, but that's beside the point) "Dr. McCuskey's Victorian Literature class is my favorite this semester."

Michael squinched his eyes and snort-giggled and said, "Christina you've got it bad! Wouldn't you rather work at a computer all day and make money and then come home and read Middlemarch?"

The answer is no. I want to read. It's one of the things I've always loved. I once got grounded from reading in the fifth grade because I wasn't doing my math homework, and it was horrible. And I don't actually want to read books like Middlemarch all the time; I'd prefer to read scholarly work for a career so that fiction is still fun.

So after that Michael and I had this great, albeit depressing, discussion of why such rewarding intellectual work is undervalued, especially by universities. If Lit Studies students are "only reading a novel" (Middlemarch), then why do they need any money? The problem is that university people are only interested in the economic, quantitative value of things, and the benefits of the humanities can't be measured that way.

P.S. I want to put pictures on here; my blog feels really boring compared to others, but when I'm not talking about movies what kind of pictures can I post? Ideas please! They're always welcome in the humanities! ;)