Well said, Henry.
Speaking of which, I'm quitting the blog. At least for now. Keeping up with it (or the world) while I'm out here is counterproductive to my hopes and goals for the summer.
The obligations of a writer, as I see them, are twofold: first, to live well, and second, to translate that lived experience into the written word.
I am twenty-one years old, and for the moment, exclusively concerned with the former. Living well is already a full-time job.
I have nothing else to say.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Sunday, May 13, 2012
West.
"The closer you get to Canada, the more things'll eat your horse."
-The Missouri Breaks
-The Missouri Breaks
Well, Montana's pretty close.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
"If all mankind were to disappear,
the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos."
-E.O. Wilson
-E.O. Wilson
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Friday, April 20, 2012
A triune from C.S. Lewis...
Pun intended; get it?
"The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is."
"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."
"You can't, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behavior of your genes."
"The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is."
"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."
"You can't, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behavior of your genes."
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
I’m working as a farmhand out in Livingston, Montana with my girlfriend this summer.
I start the two-thousand mile drive out there as soon as I finish finals in a couple weeks. From there it's three months of five-AM wakeup calls and living in a camper without electricity.
I can’t wait.
Doing this has been a dream of mine for a long, long time. But whenever people ask me why I’m so anxious to give up creature-comforts in exchange for hard labor under a hot sun, I can’t seem to come up with a good, cogent answer. Instead, I offer them a series of vague platitudes about personal growth. I talk about the transformative power of the openness of the American West, and the freedom with which it has always been associated. I mention the need for solitude and quiet in any sort of genuine introspection, and the increasing difficulty of finding either solitude or quiet in a contemporary American society saturated with the intrusive clamor of social-media. I tell them the belief that money begets food, if you really think about it, is nothing more than an inducted superstition. I tell them that convenience is a cheap trick, and although we do less, we aren’t any happier; I say that everything not directly necessary for physical, intellectual, and emotional sustenance (i.e. food, and books, and love) is not only superfluous to life, but maybe even an active impediment to finding any meaning in this world.
But when I say these things, my voice runs thin and I can’t help but feel like a phony. Because that’s exactly what I am, regurgitating a bunch of half-chewed mush I’ve read, and heard, and felt, but never experienced; I’m like a coach who’s never played the game. I don’t actually know if any of the platitudes I offer are true—and when I say them, it’s clear that I don’t know, that I’m bullshitting, that I’m exactly the kind of person to whom most people don’t like to listen for very long.
Still, I speak because I have a hunch that my words hold at least some truth-- hell, I desperately hope that they do, because anxiety has always tipped the scales against meaning in this upwardly-mobile life I’ve been taught to live, and I don't see it getting any better without some sort of radical change. I suppose the possibility of finding truth in the spew of my words, even if it’s only a kernel, even if I’m going to need to look for the rest elsewhere, is why I’m willing to sacrifice comfort for three months of hard work. I also recognize that I imagine Montana as Arcadia, and I know that there are plenty of wake-up calls in store for me this summer. I’m sure that physical labor is largely miserable; I’m sure that solitude is both lonely and boring; I’m sure that simplicity is not only inconvenient, but unglamorous, too. But I don’t know these things, either. I don’t know what is true, and what isn’t, and that difference is exactly what I hope to sort out.
So, the best answer for why I feel the need go to Montana, an answer that thus far I’ve been unable to articulate, is that I want to go so I can answer that same question myself.
I can’t wait.
Doing this has been a dream of mine for a long, long time. But whenever people ask me why I’m so anxious to give up creature-comforts in exchange for hard labor under a hot sun, I can’t seem to come up with a good, cogent answer. Instead, I offer them a series of vague platitudes about personal growth. I talk about the transformative power of the openness of the American West, and the freedom with which it has always been associated. I mention the need for solitude and quiet in any sort of genuine introspection, and the increasing difficulty of finding either solitude or quiet in a contemporary American society saturated with the intrusive clamor of social-media. I tell them the belief that money begets food, if you really think about it, is nothing more than an inducted superstition. I tell them that convenience is a cheap trick, and although we do less, we aren’t any happier; I say that everything not directly necessary for physical, intellectual, and emotional sustenance (i.e. food, and books, and love) is not only superfluous to life, but maybe even an active impediment to finding any meaning in this world.
But when I say these things, my voice runs thin and I can’t help but feel like a phony. Because that’s exactly what I am, regurgitating a bunch of half-chewed mush I’ve read, and heard, and felt, but never experienced; I’m like a coach who’s never played the game. I don’t actually know if any of the platitudes I offer are true—and when I say them, it’s clear that I don’t know, that I’m bullshitting, that I’m exactly the kind of person to whom most people don’t like to listen for very long.
Still, I speak because I have a hunch that my words hold at least some truth-- hell, I desperately hope that they do, because anxiety has always tipped the scales against meaning in this upwardly-mobile life I’ve been taught to live, and I don't see it getting any better without some sort of radical change. I suppose the possibility of finding truth in the spew of my words, even if it’s only a kernel, even if I’m going to need to look for the rest elsewhere, is why I’m willing to sacrifice comfort for three months of hard work. I also recognize that I imagine Montana as Arcadia, and I know that there are plenty of wake-up calls in store for me this summer. I’m sure that physical labor is largely miserable; I’m sure that solitude is both lonely and boring; I’m sure that simplicity is not only inconvenient, but unglamorous, too. But I don’t know these things, either. I don’t know what is true, and what isn’t, and that difference is exactly what I hope to sort out.
So, the best answer for why I feel the need go to Montana, an answer that thus far I’ve been unable to articulate, is that I want to go so I can answer that same question myself.
Monday, April 16, 2012
You may have sensed in my previous post a certain cynicism surrounding the merit of American higher education.
Granted, my acridity may have been recently exacerbated by a string of late nights (early mornings, really) writing critical essays on 17th century metaphysical poets and memorizing the rules of predicate logic. I have a week to go until finals, and I am ready to be done. This is not to say that I don't like school-- I do. Or learning-- I do. What I do not like, however, is school, or learning, solely in the hopes of some reward: a grade, a GPA, a job. That said, I don't want to seem young, or self-righteous, or stereotypically liberal, because I probably am all those things. So, I'm going to hand the reigns over to Wendell Berry, who you'd be hard pressed to call any one of them:
“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.”
“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.”
Monday, April 2, 2012
Ladies, Gentlemen,
Wayward Gentry is officially up and running again. Thank you all so much for your patience. For a little while there, the requirements of a college degree caught up with me. I sincerely apologize. However, I would like to make it up to all of you: since Wayward Gentry was put on the back-burner in the interest of a certain piece of paper I hope to be handed by Chancellor Zeppos come next May, I'm going to let all of you, my readers, decide by popular vote what I do with my diploma. The options are as follows.
1. Make it into a paper airplane-- a perennial boyhood favorite. The simpler ones fly better.
2. Make it into a funny hat-- jaunty in style, preferably.
3. Burn it-- ostentatious, puerile, and not-quite metaphorical. This one reminds me of a trophy I snapped in half after I lost in the finals of a U12 tennis tournament... afterwards, I wished I hadn't.
4. Hang it on a wall-- hey, it's what all my professors have done with theirs! (pretension, horn-rimmed glasses, and accessorial mahogany furniture optional)
5. Doctor it-- white out the 'English', write in 'Engineering', or 'Economics', and set about making my parents' 200 grand back.
Suggestions are also, as always, welcome.
And Ladies, Gentlemen,
it's a pleasure to be back.
More to come soon.
-CL
1. Make it into a paper airplane-- a perennial boyhood favorite. The simpler ones fly better.
2. Make it into a funny hat-- jaunty in style, preferably.
3. Burn it-- ostentatious, puerile, and not-quite metaphorical. This one reminds me of a trophy I snapped in half after I lost in the finals of a U12 tennis tournament... afterwards, I wished I hadn't.
4. Hang it on a wall-- hey, it's what all my professors have done with theirs! (pretension, horn-rimmed glasses, and accessorial mahogany furniture optional)
5. Doctor it-- white out the 'English', write in 'Engineering', or 'Economics', and set about making my parents' 200 grand back.
Suggestions are also, as always, welcome.
And Ladies, Gentlemen,
it's a pleasure to be back.
More to come soon.
-CL
Sunday, January 22, 2012
George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946
Would you admit that the English language is in a bad way? Click here.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Kieran in Kyrgyzstan...
A dear friend of mine, Kieran, is currently abroad in Kyrgyzstan. Clearly, he is much more adventurous than I am. He also has a questionable mustache. That was not entirely pertinent or necessary but I thought some direct characterization was in order. I also wanted to make fun of his mustache. Anyways, he is both a wonderful writer and person and is currently experiencing a world that for most of is literally unimaginable. Here's his first post:
Pre-departure
It didn’t set in until I did the laundry the night before. Five months of clothing: three jackets, four pants, twelve shirts, five sweaters, fifteen underwear and socks, hiking boots, running shoes, casual shoes, dress shoes, a scarf, a beanie, and a pair of gloves. Oh, and a “comfort item”, as my handbook suggested. What can bring comfort to me in a third-world, post-Soviet, virtually unknown country? My best guess was a set of pictures and a necklace my girlfriend made me. And of course my books.
The morning of departure was full of frantic movement streaked with tears, like drops of rain on an airplane window. Except I’m not a precision-welded metal machine, I’m a fleshy, sensitive young man hurtling across the planet to what could be a twenty-first century gulag, for all I know.
Transit
Sleep is hard to come by for me on an airplane, even on what I was told were two very smooth flights. The first, from New York to Istanbul was 8 hours and they had a fully-stocked, if a little dated, in-flight entertainment system. There were scores of films and I settled on Moneyball. Brad Pitt’s portrayal of Billy Beane, the cocky yet conflicted GM of the Oakland A’s who played baseball by numbers and very nearly succeeded, was captivating enough to distract me during the lengthy periods of turbulence over a stormy Atlantic. With some deep breaths, I was able to calm my neuroses enough to reach what everyone else around me knew so well: the stillness of sleep.
Arrival
So it turns out Bishkek isn’t a gulag after all. Upon landing, we failed our first Russian signage test and turned the wrong way out of the plane, only to be pointed in the right direction by a local Kyrgyz man. The visa process went smoothly thanks to our program coordinator, and we retrieved our luggage. To get outside, we walked through a gauntlet of hired taxi drivers with their Russian hats and unsmiling faces out to the parking lot, where our hired taxi driver was. Dina, our coordinator and guide, had her bag lost in transit and so we were told to wait in the van while she checked on its status. Without any Russian to save us, we were alone, helpless yet joking. The joking was only to cover up the deep and almost dormant fear that had been present since we boarded at JFK and that I don’t expect to leave for some time. I am unsettled, closer now to the characters of Kafka and Dostoevsky than I ever have been. I am in a modernist crisis, and I’m blogging my way through it. Join me.
Me again everybody.
Best of luck Kieran. While you're over there try to change the 'y' to 'ie': an eponymous country would be a nice souvenir.
The rest of you can join me in keeping up with Kieran's travels and thoughts at: http://kiergyzstan.tumblr.com/
Best, CL.
Pre-departure
It didn’t set in until I did the laundry the night before. Five months of clothing: three jackets, four pants, twelve shirts, five sweaters, fifteen underwear and socks, hiking boots, running shoes, casual shoes, dress shoes, a scarf, a beanie, and a pair of gloves. Oh, and a “comfort item”, as my handbook suggested. What can bring comfort to me in a third-world, post-Soviet, virtually unknown country? My best guess was a set of pictures and a necklace my girlfriend made me. And of course my books.
The morning of departure was full of frantic movement streaked with tears, like drops of rain on an airplane window. Except I’m not a precision-welded metal machine, I’m a fleshy, sensitive young man hurtling across the planet to what could be a twenty-first century gulag, for all I know.
Transit
Sleep is hard to come by for me on an airplane, even on what I was told were two very smooth flights. The first, from New York to Istanbul was 8 hours and they had a fully-stocked, if a little dated, in-flight entertainment system. There were scores of films and I settled on Moneyball. Brad Pitt’s portrayal of Billy Beane, the cocky yet conflicted GM of the Oakland A’s who played baseball by numbers and very nearly succeeded, was captivating enough to distract me during the lengthy periods of turbulence over a stormy Atlantic. With some deep breaths, I was able to calm my neuroses enough to reach what everyone else around me knew so well: the stillness of sleep.
Arrival
So it turns out Bishkek isn’t a gulag after all. Upon landing, we failed our first Russian signage test and turned the wrong way out of the plane, only to be pointed in the right direction by a local Kyrgyz man. The visa process went smoothly thanks to our program coordinator, and we retrieved our luggage. To get outside, we walked through a gauntlet of hired taxi drivers with their Russian hats and unsmiling faces out to the parking lot, where our hired taxi driver was. Dina, our coordinator and guide, had her bag lost in transit and so we were told to wait in the van while she checked on its status. Without any Russian to save us, we were alone, helpless yet joking. The joking was only to cover up the deep and almost dormant fear that had been present since we boarded at JFK and that I don’t expect to leave for some time. I am unsettled, closer now to the characters of Kafka and Dostoevsky than I ever have been. I am in a modernist crisis, and I’m blogging my way through it. Join me.
Me again everybody.
Best of luck Kieran. While you're over there try to change the 'y' to 'ie': an eponymous country would be a nice souvenir.
The rest of you can join me in keeping up with Kieran's travels and thoughts at: http://kiergyzstan.tumblr.com/
Best, CL.
Monday, January 16, 2012
Dear Administrative Committee,
My name is Curtis Fincher, I am a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, and I hope to one day be a writer. I write to you now to petition to be allowed to take and receive credit for the graduate level course Literature and the Craft of Writing taught this semester by Professor Blank, the head of the creative writing department and my personal academic advisor. Typically, the College of Arts and Sciences reserves the privilege to enroll in graduate level courses exclusively for seniors, however I strongly believe that my situation merits your special consideration.
I have dreamed of being a writer ever since I was in high school and my sophomore year English teacher, Mrs. McManus, a small, funny, and stern Irish-American woman, wrote at the bottom of an essay four words in red ink that have since directed and consumed my life: “you should write books,” she said, and I still believe her. I am currently an English major with a concentration in Creative Writing. I have a 4.0 within my major and I hope to enroll in the English Honors program this spring and write a creative dissertation next year. After college (those two words seem far too near, these days), I plan on applying to various, fully funded, Creative Writing MFA programs. Admission into such a program is the next step towards my dream of becoming a writer, and as you can imagine, is extremely competitive-- the acceptance rates of top schools generally hover around slightly less than half of a percent. While there are many factors considered by MFA admissions committees, the two most important criteria are professor recommendations and the applicant’s creative portfolio. With these, we have now arrived at the two principle reasons why I need to take Literature and the Craft of Writing this semester.
As I am sure you are aware, faculty notoriety matters when it comes to recommendations: you are more likely to trust the words of somebody whose name you recognize, and even more likely to trust the words of somebody who you personally know. As such, I was extremely lucky to have a professor as widely known as Professor Blank teach my freshman year creative writing workshop. I was even luckier to be able to cultivate a personal relationship with him outside the classroom through his office hours, and I took my second workshop with him last spring. This spring, I am enrolled in another one of his workshops, and I would love the opportunity to take Literature and the Craft of Writing with him as well.
I had the pleasure of attending the class on Wednesday and it is entirely different from any undergraduate Creative Writing course I have taken here at Vanderbilt. The class is small and intimate and most importantly, every other person in it wants to be an author just like I do. The undergraduate creative writing courses are filled with students who think it would be fun to write; the MFA students in Literature and the Craft of Writing need to write, and the class, at its core, is about how to make a living while doing so.
We are currently home to the most selective MFA program in the country, and the six students who I interacted with on Wednesday absolutely blew me away. I have so much to learn from them and I think that being in a class with people who read, write, and digest literature in the way that they do would be an absolutely invaluable experience for me. Additionally, to return to the importance of professor recommendations in the MFA application process, being in a class with six older students who are better and more experienced at both reading and writing will push me tremendously (an additional side note here: I am interning this semester with the Nashville Review, a Literary Magazine published by our MFA students, and my boss, Rebecca Alsoblank, is in the class with me— so it would be an added benefit to be able to further immerse myself into that community and world as well). I think it is a good, good thing that I will be the weakest link in the class. It will force me to work as hard as I know how, and this work ethic, in the end, will be reflected in both my verbal commentary and written products. I believe that Professor Blank witnessing this—my absolute limits as both a writer and a reader—will solidify and strengthen the MFA recommendation I hope he will one day write for me. Further, while the class is offered next year when I will be a senior, Professor Blank will not be teaching it either semester. Thus, this semester is my only opportunity to take the class with him.
Another reason why I think it is important that I take the class this semester as opposed to next year is that it will inevitably improve the creative portfolio that I will be submitting to MFA programs. My creative dissertation next year as an English Honors student will form the bulk of this portfolio (as it will be the most substantial work that I will have done to date) and to have already seen how the students in an MFA program write and think will do a great service for my own writing and my own thinking. This will in turn be reflected in my creative dissertation--i.e. a large part of my creative portfolio--which will increase my odds of being admitted to a top flight program amidst a very competitive application process. Also, in the English Honors Program graduate level courses serve for Honors credit, so Literature and the Craft of Writing will help me achieve the six hours of Honors credit I will need for the Honors Program in the most productive and beneficial manner possible.
It is worth noting, also, that I went to speak with Professor Blank yesterday. I asked him if there was anything in particular that I should write or mention in my petition to increase my chances of being admitted into his class. He said that he could not think of anything, although he did wish that there were a magic phrase or sentence he could tell me (unfortunately, no such phrase, outside of 1,250 words of candid pleading in elegant Garamond typeface, exists). One thing he did say, however, was to make sure I mentioned that I have his full and total support in taking the course. He thinks that I can not only handle the workload and depth of thought which the class will entail, but that having that kind of exposure to such talented MFA students will serve me well in my development as a writer.
I will not hear back from your committee until after the add/drop period is over. I am currently registered for twelve hours in hopes of having these four hours approved, and if they are not, I will have to take courses here this summer in order to graduate on time. However, I feel that my reasons for wanting to take the course this semester are compelling enough to merit the risk; I want to take this course badly enough to merit the risk. I cannot thank all of you enough for your time and I hope that whatever this petition has lacked in brevity it has compensated for with thoroughness. Please know that my reasons for writing you have been pure and good: I want to learn to write as well as I can and I believe this is the best manner for me to do so while completing the requirements of a Vanderbilt Undergraduate College Arts and Sciences degree. Once again, thank you so much for your time.
Sincerely,
Curtis Lee
I have dreamed of being a writer ever since I was in high school and my sophomore year English teacher, Mrs. McManus, a small, funny, and stern Irish-American woman, wrote at the bottom of an essay four words in red ink that have since directed and consumed my life: “you should write books,” she said, and I still believe her. I am currently an English major with a concentration in Creative Writing. I have a 4.0 within my major and I hope to enroll in the English Honors program this spring and write a creative dissertation next year. After college (those two words seem far too near, these days), I plan on applying to various, fully funded, Creative Writing MFA programs. Admission into such a program is the next step towards my dream of becoming a writer, and as you can imagine, is extremely competitive-- the acceptance rates of top schools generally hover around slightly less than half of a percent. While there are many factors considered by MFA admissions committees, the two most important criteria are professor recommendations and the applicant’s creative portfolio. With these, we have now arrived at the two principle reasons why I need to take Literature and the Craft of Writing this semester.
As I am sure you are aware, faculty notoriety matters when it comes to recommendations: you are more likely to trust the words of somebody whose name you recognize, and even more likely to trust the words of somebody who you personally know. As such, I was extremely lucky to have a professor as widely known as Professor Blank teach my freshman year creative writing workshop. I was even luckier to be able to cultivate a personal relationship with him outside the classroom through his office hours, and I took my second workshop with him last spring. This spring, I am enrolled in another one of his workshops, and I would love the opportunity to take Literature and the Craft of Writing with him as well.
I had the pleasure of attending the class on Wednesday and it is entirely different from any undergraduate Creative Writing course I have taken here at Vanderbilt. The class is small and intimate and most importantly, every other person in it wants to be an author just like I do. The undergraduate creative writing courses are filled with students who think it would be fun to write; the MFA students in Literature and the Craft of Writing need to write, and the class, at its core, is about how to make a living while doing so.
We are currently home to the most selective MFA program in the country, and the six students who I interacted with on Wednesday absolutely blew me away. I have so much to learn from them and I think that being in a class with people who read, write, and digest literature in the way that they do would be an absolutely invaluable experience for me. Additionally, to return to the importance of professor recommendations in the MFA application process, being in a class with six older students who are better and more experienced at both reading and writing will push me tremendously (an additional side note here: I am interning this semester with the Nashville Review, a Literary Magazine published by our MFA students, and my boss, Rebecca Alsoblank, is in the class with me— so it would be an added benefit to be able to further immerse myself into that community and world as well). I think it is a good, good thing that I will be the weakest link in the class. It will force me to work as hard as I know how, and this work ethic, in the end, will be reflected in both my verbal commentary and written products. I believe that Professor Blank witnessing this—my absolute limits as both a writer and a reader—will solidify and strengthen the MFA recommendation I hope he will one day write for me. Further, while the class is offered next year when I will be a senior, Professor Blank will not be teaching it either semester. Thus, this semester is my only opportunity to take the class with him.
Another reason why I think it is important that I take the class this semester as opposed to next year is that it will inevitably improve the creative portfolio that I will be submitting to MFA programs. My creative dissertation next year as an English Honors student will form the bulk of this portfolio (as it will be the most substantial work that I will have done to date) and to have already seen how the students in an MFA program write and think will do a great service for my own writing and my own thinking. This will in turn be reflected in my creative dissertation--i.e. a large part of my creative portfolio--which will increase my odds of being admitted to a top flight program amidst a very competitive application process. Also, in the English Honors Program graduate level courses serve for Honors credit, so Literature and the Craft of Writing will help me achieve the six hours of Honors credit I will need for the Honors Program in the most productive and beneficial manner possible.
It is worth noting, also, that I went to speak with Professor Blank yesterday. I asked him if there was anything in particular that I should write or mention in my petition to increase my chances of being admitted into his class. He said that he could not think of anything, although he did wish that there were a magic phrase or sentence he could tell me (unfortunately, no such phrase, outside of 1,250 words of candid pleading in elegant Garamond typeface, exists). One thing he did say, however, was to make sure I mentioned that I have his full and total support in taking the course. He thinks that I can not only handle the workload and depth of thought which the class will entail, but that having that kind of exposure to such talented MFA students will serve me well in my development as a writer.
I will not hear back from your committee until after the add/drop period is over. I am currently registered for twelve hours in hopes of having these four hours approved, and if they are not, I will have to take courses here this summer in order to graduate on time. However, I feel that my reasons for wanting to take the course this semester are compelling enough to merit the risk; I want to take this course badly enough to merit the risk. I cannot thank all of you enough for your time and I hope that whatever this petition has lacked in brevity it has compensated for with thoroughness. Please know that my reasons for writing you have been pure and good: I want to learn to write as well as I can and I believe this is the best manner for me to do so while completing the requirements of a Vanderbilt Undergraduate College Arts and Sciences degree. Once again, thank you so much for your time.
Sincerely,
Curtis Lee
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