Abject failure to keep up with this small corner of the internetz. I had visions of tracking my first year of grad school, sharing the delights and stresses therein and, well, I’ve managed to regurgitate only one post forgotten from july. Perhaps a different tack is in order.

this week:

*Mary Karr’s Lit. My first Karr exposure (with the accompanying Paris Review interview from 2007) has me in her fan camp. Sharp, funny, keen writing. I will say the interview was just right; by the end of Lit I was feeling over-saturated (and lines from the interview echoed verbatim which was a strange déjà vu). Perhaps it’s just a function of a long memoir especially—reading so relentlessly from one p.o.v. leaves me wondering about the others.

*Shelley’s The Cenci. Whoa. A seriously unsettling play. The language is gorgeous and I spent a lot of time penciling in careful underlines, hoping to remember some delicious combinations of words. Mentally, though, I was a bit split as a reader. The 21st century me was irritated—thinking how superior Bastard out of Carolina or some equally gritty, honest look at molestation/incest is—with poetic treatment of particularly horrible act (and Shelley, because you admit to heightening the poetic elements doesn’t make me feel better). The romanticist/historicist take, well, I’m still working on that. A strange piece of work.

*FWS syllabus: you slay me. Still. I’ve settled on organizing my class around food, and am working on the actual assignments before I settle on readings. Some mixture of a personal narrative, a research-based presentation…bleh. I’m not sure. Scintillating stuff, no?

The benefit of this week is that a Jesuit school imparts Easter with deadly (heh) significance and we get Thursday through Monday off. The benefit of this week in Boston is Patriot’s Day/Marathon Monday and a state holiday. So, it’s a week in which I will attend no class while attempting to make some FWS decisions, read as much as possible about gender and needlework between 1780-1830 and hope there’s something there to argue and a text to argue it with.

(David Foster Wallace has assured me that the preposition rule is pointless, and though I generally disagree I like the way that last sentence sounds so I will leave it be. This self-conscious parenthetical references him as well and I feel as though I should have more to say (perhaps a footnote?) but I don’t so I will end here and later wish I’d just deleted this entire last bit.)