Tuesday, July 24, 2012

An Upstart Crow introduces himself.

"Welcome to the camp,
I guess you all know why we're here."
-The Who, "We're Not Gonna Take It" from Tommy (1969)

Hello. If you are reading this, it means you have somehow reached my blog. Welcome. Please make yourself at home. At this point, you probably have a few questions. Let me try to answer them:


Who do you think you are?


Okay, fair enough. My name is Bryson David Hoff. I am, as of this writing, on the cusp of starting my junior year of college. I attend Millikin University, a small, private college in Decatur, IL, where I study Theatre and Creative Writing. I am also an Honors Student and a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, one of the country's largest men's social fraternities. 

If you are really interested, you can check out my Blogger profile or better yet, read what I end up writing on here, as it will (hopefully) be more entertaining than any dry biography I could hope to type up. Next question.


Why "An Upstart Crow"? Kind of pretentious, don't you think?


Yeah, a little bit. Let me explain. 

The name comes from an Elizabethan theatre critique written by Robert Greene, who offered one of the first reviews of the work of William Shakespeare. The exact quote is:

"... there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country."

Basically, I chose the title as a reminder that Shakespeare, who you'll quickly see is a big hero of mine, started out being thought of as some pretentious punk from the boonies who had no business trying to be anything more. And if him, why not me?

Not to be corny or anything.


Don't you think the internet has enough blogs? Why add another one?


Ah, yes, now we're getting somewhere. Basically, this coming semester I'll be taking part in a study abroad program. From September through December, I'll be living and studying in London. One of the courses is called Blogging From Overseas. Hopefully you can see where I'm going with this. 

Anyway, during that time I'll be writing about my experiences and everything I see and do during my time in Europe. My hope is that keeping this blog will be fun enough that it'll keep going even after the course has ended and I've returned to the United States. That's mostly on you, though, hypothetical reader, since writing without an audience gets tiring and frustrating after awhile. I know. I write poetry.


Do you always write like this?


Yeah, basically. I promise to try to be more interesting when I've got actual things to write about. The verboseness, though, never really goes away.

Anyway, I don't really know how to end this post, so here's a picture of a bunny with a pancake on its head:

He's a flap-jack rabbit! *ba-dump ching*