Category: School Page 2 of 10

Heavy Reading

So I just checked out the reading list for my Victorian Novel class in the Spring. The list of books follows, along with the page number count for each one (taken from the Modern Library paperbacks, accounting for the notes and commentary, so the number given is the text itself only):

Jane Eyre – 682 pages
Bleak House – 861 pages
Mill on the Floss – 656 pages
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – 453 pages
Portrait of a Lady – 450 pages (guesstimated)
Vanity Fair – 810 (guesstimated)
Dracula – 366
Picture of Dorian Gray – 200 (guesstimated)

For a total of ….. 4,478 pages.

Wow. I knew Victorian novelists were long-winded coming in, but I think the professor picked the longest work from every single author! Okay, I know that’s not really true. Mill on the Floss is shorter than Middlemarch, and Bleak House, though REALLY LONG, is, I think, shorter than Pickwick Papers. Don’t know about the others. Why Bleak House, I wonder? Because he assumes we’ll already have read Great Expectations and David Copperfield? (I haven’t, because I hate me some Dickens.) At least I’ve already read three of them, though I could use a refresher. Taking contemporary lit classes has spoiled me; 20th century writers don’t usually write so much, like, maxing at 400 pages or so.

So far the other class I’m in (Literary Theory) only has one book listed, but I somehow doubt it’ll stay that way. Or else he’s got a heap bunch of articles we’ll need to read. Even so, I think the list above and the amount of mental effort I’ll need to put into the theory class (I’ve never had theory before at any level) will guarantee that the semester I’m about to finish will remain the easiest of my graduate career. Especially once you add in oral exam prep…

Class connections…

Two things I’m really grateful for at the moment.

1 – That I chose to do my short paper/panel assignment on Ellen Douglas’ Can’t Quit You Baby, because of all the books we’ve read so far in Southern Lit, it’s my favorite. Each one we read I like better than the previous one, which either means that I like the newest books the best (which is not usually true), that I’m very fickle (which is true), or that I’m getting better acclimated to the class and materials each week (which is probably true to some extent). Anyway, Can’t Quit You Baby has an awesome intrusive narratorial voice which makes me happy. I hope I can work it into my paper somehow. Or maybe write my long paper on this novel, too, and incorporate it (I haven’t even thought about the long paper yet).

2 – That I had the Harlem Renaissance class last semester, because the article we have to read and respond to in the paper/panel discussion is about the relationship between the white employer and the black employee who are the main characters in the book, and whether Douglas is co-opting African-American culture in the form of the black woman order to “save” the white woman from her detached and superficial life. That idea came up a lot in the Harlem Renaissance class, especially relating to music and the ways that white music producers took over jazz and blues and smoothed them out to sell them to white audiences (often with white performers). I haven’t finished reading the article yet, but I already feel like I have a grounding in the point of view the author is coming from, which is encouraging.

I don’t know what I’m going to write yet, or what tack I want to take in the short paper, but at least I won’t be completely lost, like I would’ve been if I’d had to write about some of the earlier books.

I’m also grateful for having acquired the other two Rilo Kiley albums I was missing (three if you include their first self-produced EP), but I think I’ve already done a fine job convincing everyone that I’m obsessed with Rilo Kiley at the moment. I wonder if that will happen every time I got to a concert, or if as I get more used to going to concerts the desire to listen to the band 24/7 for the next several days will go away. Meanwhile, I did find out that Inara George, the singer in The Bird and the Bee, also has a solo album called Rise Up (actually recorded before the band was formed), and based on the 30-second previews at the Amazon.com store, it’s just as good as The Bird and the Bee’s stuff. I wish there were a wishlist for the Amazon.com MP3 store. This is a problem with iTunes as well…I mean, just because the music is digital and I could have it right now doesn’t mean I have the money right now, and I might like to have a list of MP3s to remember to buy in the future when I have money. Just a thought.

EDIT: Third thing I’m thankful for in relation to the paper–there’s a whole Ingmar Bergman connection I think I can make, which will be AWESOME, because nobody else will do that for sure. The main character actually goes to see Persona at one point, there are some similarities between the Persona characters and the Can’t Quit You Baby characters, and none of the critics so far have even mentioned it or tried to examine what a Bergman-Douglas connection might mean! Plus I may even be able to bring in the Spiritual trilogy and its spider-god. It would help if I knew what the spider-god meant, but maybe I can read up on Bergman some, too, which would be good for me anyway.

School, Southern Lit, and Rhetoric

My dad is convinced that since I apparently have so much time to write posts about Firefox extensions and puzzle games, school must not be taxing me too much. And he’s right, just now. There’s a fair chance that will change, but by and large, this looks to be one of the less time-consuming semesters I’ve had.

I’m taking two classes, plus continuing as a Research Assistant for the same professor I worked for last spring (still working on the same research project involving multimodal composition–last semester we gathered data, this one we’re number-crunching). We’re through the first two of eight or nine novels in Contemporary Southern Literature, a course for which I feel woefully unprepared. I’m not that interested in Southern Lit (I signed up for the Contemporary American class before the topic was announced, hoping it would be something postmodern), and I’d only heard of two of the authors before the class. But I’m looking at it as a chance to be introduced to authors that I otherwise wouldn’t know about or read.

So far we’ve read two Eudora Welty novels (Losing Battles and The Optimist’s Daughter), and the biggest challenge for me is figuring out how to relate to the characters. Losing Battles is set during a ginormous family reunion in Mississippi, and is either a nostalgic look at a fading way of agrarian community life or a mocking look at a family who refuses to keep up with the times. I don’t have a frame of reference for that type of family, mostly wanted them all to shut up and go away, and identified immediately with the one outsider to the family, the one who wanted to take her husband (who’s in the family) and move somewhere else. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the book; I did, but I didn’t know how to react to it or what to say about it. It’s really weird when my mom is from the South, my dad grew up on a farm, and I can’t understand a book about a Southern farm family nearly as well as I can any book about British socialites. Some of it may simply be that I subconsciously don’t want to understand rural stories because I want to be a city girl, but I know how prejudiced that is, and I don’t want to be like that.

The Optimist’s Daughter is still set in Mississippi, but with a much smaller cast and more identifiable characters and situations (for me, at least), so I enjoyed it a lot more, even though it’s a much more serious book. I’m expecting to have this identification problem throughout the semester, but hopefully it’ll get easier with each example of a Southern novel. The best part is there’s only one long paper at the end, and a shorter response paper in the middle, which responds to a piece of criticism the professor assigns. And dude, I love responding to what other critics say, especially when they’re WRONG (and the one we had for today was SO WRONG), so it shouldn’t be difficult. Of course, it will help my participation grade if I could, you know, think of something to say about some of these novels instead of just sitting there absorbing everything.

The other class is Rhetoric and Composition, which I thought would be about writing but is really about teaching. Which is fine; I’m not currently planning to teach at a university level, but you never know, and a lot of the theory and stuff behind it will be applicable if I teach at a high school level, or even homeschooling my own kids. You know, when I get some of those. ‘Cause, yeah. I decided last year some time that I’m definitely trying the homeschooling thing. Anyway, RhetComp is going to be sort of interesting assessment-wise, because there’s no paper (yay!), but the professor is expecting us to come up with our own assignments, sort of–he’s got a list of several things we could do, and we can pick and choose what we want to do and how much we want to do of each thing. At the end of the semester, we have to be able to show what all we’ve done to make our case for our grade. I’ve never had a class that operated like that. I need to go talk with him this week about what I’m going to do to earn the grade. I’m guessing “read stuff and sit and listen in class” isn’t going to be enough.

Besides that, I’m spending time getting to know some of the new students (great crop of newbies this year; I pretty much like all of them that I’ve met), working on the website for our student association, and continuing to watch too many movies. Multiple times. Like now, I’m watching Celine and Julie Go Boating for the third time this week, because it’s really surreal and I’ve got most of the plot points, but other ones keep passing me by. Probably because I keep writing blog posts and things while watching it. The print also sucks, but the company who owns the rights hasn’t released it on DVD yet. Grr Aaargh. So, that’s what’s going on my real life, which I realize I’ve been posting about a lot less than I used to; the reasons for that range from the fact that my life’s pretty boring right now to the fact that I’m starting to get a little bit more traffic on the media posts from search engines and stuff, which means I’m not as excited about talking about personal stuff as I used to be.

Home again, home again

Home to Waco, that is. I realized over the last couple of weeks that I’ve been using “home” to mean whichever place (my parents’ house in St. Louis or my apartment in Waco) I’m not at. Which gets confusing. My apologies for that. In any case, I’m safely back in Texas, uneventful drive, except for the almost constant annoying rain. And the real frogdrowning rain for a few minutes in Oklahoma. Oklahoma has some weird weather, y’all.

But I just looked up what time my class is that starts tomorrow, and it’s from 11:20am to 12:50pm. The heck? Are they serving lunch in this class? That’s the weirdest-timed class I’ve ever seen. And I thought the normal-semester grad class time of 3:30-6:30 was sort of odd. They must have a some sort of sadist writing schedules. Ah well. The good side of that is that I thought it was at 9- or 10-something, and this means I get to sleep later.

In other news, I saw Waitress last night, as my last official activity in St. Louis, and I wasn’t disappointed at all. Quite a feat for my most-highly-anticipated indie film of the summer, right? It was warm, and witty, and perhaps a little cliched in one instance which I won’t tell you about, because it would spoil the denoument if I did, but the whole thing was so sweet-hearted that I couldn’t hardly fault it. I’ll write more when I get around to doing May’s recap (still working on April’s…I watched A LOT of movies in April), but I wanted to encourage anyone who likes sweet-tempered indie romances to see it while it’s in theatres. It does have an arguably problematic outlook on adultery for a while, but I think it ended it up okay…good for discussion, at the very least. In related news, the aspiring filmmakers on On the Lot ought to look to Waitress and films like it as examples–tonight’s set of short films (the ones I saw…I got home about halfway through) largely did themselves in through trying to be too clever. Just be real, folks. Be real. (How’s that for a cliche?)

Oh, and also, no Music Monday this week. I was going to do it tonight, but I’m just too tired. I also know I missed Trailer Thursday last week or two, but there’s not much coming out…Shrek 3 and Pirates 3, and you pretty much know whether or not you want to see those without even seeing a trailer. It’s a paradoxical fact that the more free time I have, the less I blog.

Unrelated Thoughts

  • There is a bird outside, perhaps a mockingbird given the variety in his/her song, that is singing away like it’s the first day of spring. Except it’s midnight. Could someone please tell him to go to sleep so I can? Otherwise, I would BE asleep instead of down here writing a post.
  • I didn’t blog the American Idol results because I forgot it was a two-hour show so I was fifteen minutes late and didn’t feel like rewinding and didn’t feel like blogging from the middle, and didn’t really have that much to say about it anyway. Il Divo is cute. Kelly Clarkson is awesome. Jack Black rocks and Ben Stiller…doesn’t. Yay for 70 million votes and at least 30 million dollars donated. The surprise duet between Celine Dion and creepy holographic Elvis was lame. And making Jordin wait all the way to the end and think she’d been eliminated only to eliminate nobody? Mean. I mean, I’m glad nobody was eliminated, ESPECIALLY Jordin. But I felt tricked (both by the Elvis thing and the no elimination thing), and that didn’t make me happy.
  • Hot Fuzz is incredibly good. GO SEE IT NOW. If you like a) cop movies and/or b) British comedy you will love it. And who doesn’t love at least one of those two things? I’m not even kidding. I haven’t laughed that hard since…okay, well I laughed that hard when I was just watching videos on Comedy Central.com.
  • Speaking of which, note to self: Do not go on Comedy Central.com and expect to watch only one video. It doesn’t work that way. I say an hour and a half later.
  • Avenue Montaigne is not quite as good as Hot Fuzz, and in a very much different way–French instead of British, for one thing, and quietly sweet instead of raucously funny and action-packed. But if you love Paris and ensemble casts, then you might like Avenue Montaigne.
  • Everyone seems to think I’m a masochist for taking summer classes. But everyone I know here is taking summer classes, we’re all taking the same summer classes, and in my summer classes I get to read Woolf and Lawrence, and then learn French! And do it with cool, smart people! So it’s going to be awesome. Plus, I’m going to host movie-watching night every week, which will be awesome on even more levels (not the least of which will be motivation to keep my apartment clean).
  • St. Louis people, strong-arm the theatre managers there to make sure they’re playing Black Book and Waitress during the two and a half week window I’m home in the middle of May. If I miss those two (especially Waitress), I’ll be pouty all summer.
  • Have you guys seen the Ford Edge commercials directed by David Mamet? They’re the ones with the two guys who talk about the Edge being faster than a BMW and quieter than a Lexus? They’ve been running during American Idol pretty regularly, so you probably have. Anyway, I’m going to adopt the “True story? True story.” It’ll replace the Grey’s Anatomy “Seriously? Seriously.” This is the plan. However, Grey’s “seriouslys” have been in my vocabulary for like two years now, so switching might be more difficult than I foresee.
  • Each bullet point is getting randomer and weirder. Perhaps it’s time to try sleep again. If the darned bird has realized that it’s FREAKIN’ MIDNIGHT and has also gone to sleep.

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