You have a sly, equivocating vein that suits me not.
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.)
One Comment
Nate
For those of use grappling with the reality of not being able to pepper you with syllabus questions every day, I think this would be a great habit to get in to. (You have my vote anyhow.) Also, what’s the preposition rule again?