How cheery.
It is also a month that brings with it all kinds of other goodies, including midterms, Guy Fawkes Night, endless essays, NaNoWriMo, hand-turkeys (see below), and all those various holiday festivities celebrating the commencement of the usurping of America. Not to mention the ensuing familial hilarity that comes along with all that pumpkin pie! Thank goodness for colonization, huh?

November is also National Pomegranate Month. Wouldn't want anyone to miss out on that.
November is also the centre of the quarter. And I am writing a paper right now about centres. And epiphanies. And gnomons. Gnomon is an exceptionally fun word to say.
You know, I think it is a true testament to the power of James Joyce that I actually enjoy writing papers on his stuff even though it is painstaking and my notes for this paper look a little like a modernist novel themselves, and I don't really have anything much to say here because it is midterm season and my brain is otherwise preoccupied, but I needed a break.
Gnomons (from the Greek for "interpreter") can be two things.
This:
or
this (it's the thing that casts a shadow on a sundial):

Pretty nifty, no?
I mean, they'd be a whole lot niftier if I didn't have to write a paper about them, but whatever. It all relates to Joyce's "A Painful Case," for which Addison's quote would actually make a very apt epigraph. It's a bummer of a story. But it's brilliant. Totally brilliant.
Anyway, it's full of gnomons and stuff. At least, I'm making a painful case (heeheehee) that it's full of gnomons and that the piece that is missing is the centre and that you can only get to the centre through the epiphany and the epiphany is here is the realization of all that poor James Duffy lacks.
Phew. So I think what I'm saying is that nothing equals everything and everything is that cavity in the heart filled with what is missing.
Something like that.
In any case (painful or otherwise), It would appear that during the schoolyear I seem to only update poor Blog when I have papers due or a midterm tomorrow (crap!), or am otherwise avoiding unpleasant tasks.
So back to it, I guess.
May your Novembers be full of pomegranates and gnomons.
Cheers!

