110 & Other Musings

so, i have a list of books from which to make final selections for 110 in the fall.  here it is:

1 - The Road - Cormac McCarthy

2 - The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky

3 - Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris

4 - Round Ireland with a Fridge - Tony Hawks

5 - A Place So Foreign and Eight More - Cory Doctorow

6 - The Visibles - Sara Shepard

7 - The Likeness - Tana French

8 - Eat Pray Love - Elizabeth Gilbert

9 - Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri

10 - Bright Lights, Big Ass - Jen Lancaster

11 - My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult*

*My Sister's Keeper will definitely be among the final selections, it's the choice from last year's 110 class.

Plus I just got the Best American Essays 2008 so I will choose some essays from there to add more non-fiction to the list of texts.  The only thing I feel like I'm really being remiss about not adding is a graphic novel.  I'll have to think on that.  But I have gotten non-fiction, sci-fi, suspense, short stories, and general fiction on the list, and a couple of pulitzer prize winners to satisfy anyone who feels like we should read "serious literature".    some of the narrative non-fiction also doubles as travel narrative too so that's so sweet.  and only the road and my sister's keeper have been made into movies, so i can live with that.  i didn't want to have a lot of books that had also been adapted to the silver screen.  my one other immediate concern is whether or not a bunch of 18-22 year olds will have read eat pray love.  i know a lot of people my age who have read it, but i'm not sure that your typical college student would have picked it up.  well, i have the books on order or have them on my table just waiting for me to pick them up and read them, so i'm hoping to have my mind made up by june 30th - that's my deadline!

currently sitting in my office right now, blogging instead of working.  i should be grading, or planning for my 101 this week, or reading for my exams.  i've basically told myself i have to stay here until 5pm and then i can go home but i'm really hoping that i can actually get something done in these 3.5 hours...other than blogging!  guess i'll have to wait and see and report back later....

This Week's Reading Promises

OK.  So I wasn't so good at keeping my reading promises for this last week.  I have two short stories by Katherine Mansfield left to read and have not finished Howards End or read Molloy.  But, I did manage to read 8 short stories by Mansfield and I also read Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" and Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead", both of which are on my lists so perhaps I'll just look at this week as a wash?  Yes, I think I will.  It's a much more positive POV!

Anyway, this week's promises are as follows (I am putting it in schedule form for me, so that I'll be able to judge my progress all week):

Sunday - The Playboy of the Western World - J.M. Synge

Monday - "At the Bay" & "Prelude" - Katherine Mansfield

Tuesday - "Mr. Bennett & Mrs. Brown" (re-read) & "Modern Fiction" - Virginia Woolf

Wednesday - "Tradition and Individual Talent" & "Hamlet" & "The Metaphysical Poets" - T. S. Eliot

Thursday - Endgame - Samuel Beckett

the bonus selection (i.e., wouldn't it be great to get all of the above read plus this too?!) - E.M. Forster's A Room with a View - in other words, it's not really a part of my promises but well, I'd love to be able to check it off the list this week.

So all that's left to say is ready...set...go!

Waiting for Godot

Well, like Estragon (what a name!) and Vladimir, I am still waiting for Godot to make his appearance.  I'm at the end of the first act, and am having a couple of hershey's kisses as my reward.  So far, I know that Estragon's boots and Vladimir's hat have some significance, and I also am picking up on the constant refrain of "nothing matters" and its nihilistic point of view.  There's an interesting comment upon memory, too.  And of course there's the ominous tree and the question of whether or not one or both of them will hang themselves.  The cover of my book says that the play is a tragicomedy in two acts.  I'm no genius, but I'm thinking maybe that tree has something to do with the tragedy part of that description.  Will update after reading Act 2.

UPDATE:  I don't know why but these are my favorite lines in the play..... Let's go_We can't_Why not?_We're waiting for Godot_Ah!

Another thing that's interesting about this play is it's treatment and commentary of time. ...

Okay, so I'm now done with the play.  I'm not sure what I think about it.  It's both interesting and strange.  It's one of those things where I think I get it, but I'm not sure that I got it all.  Does the tragedy lie in waiting for something that never comes?  Or in believing that something will come but in reality nothing ever comes?  Or, is the meaningless repetition of each day, not seeing any real differences between one day to the next and having those differences that do exist mean nothing, the tragedy?  If these questions make no sense, then I've totally gotten into the mood of the play, which is thought provoking but in some ways makes no sense!  I am left with many questions at the end and not a whole lot of answers.  Ah! 

One last note:  there's an excerpt from The London Times on the back of the book:  "...one of the most noble and moving plays of our generation, a threnody of hope deceived and deferred but never extinguished; a play suffused with tenderness for the whole human perplexity; with phrases that come like a sharp stab of beauty and pain" - HMM.......

And yes, I had to look up threnody too. 

More Mansfield Short Stories

So, there is light at the end of the tunnel.  I only have two short stories by Katherine Mansfield left to read and I will have an item checked off my to-do list.  Of course, I've saved the longest stories for last.  Hopefully I can get through those tomorrow.

But tonight I read "The Garden Party" and "The Stranger" and "The Daughters of the Late Colonel".  I have to say, I liked all three of these stories.  "The Garden Party" is about a party that a wealthy family is giving, and upon hearing about the death of one of the work-men, Laura, one of the daughters, insists that they cancel the party.  Her mother and her sister disagree and the party goes on, and Laura comments upon how this party has been the most wonderful party they've ever given.  The message seems to be that life must go on even in the face of death, and that our awareness of death, and death as a reminder, is supposed to help us enjoy those things in life that are most important.  At least, I think that's what the message is supposed to be.  "The Daughters of the Late Colonel" is pretty self-explanatory from the title.  One thing I liked about this story was the continual reference to time (I don't know why, but that always strikes me) and Mansfield has a wonderful gift for making ordinary things seem so extraordinary.  Anyway, the daughters of the late colonel are now free from their father's tyranny after he dies after a long illness.  They could never please him while he was alive, and now that he is gone, at the end of the story they think about what their lives could be like.  They could possibly meet men and get married and have lives of their own, but in the end it seems they are too afraid to actually consider living any other kind of life, and that's really sad because not only did their father treat them terribly while he was alive, they seem to have no chance of recovering what they have lost even after he is dead.  And lastly, I read "The Stranger".  I think so far, along with "The Doll's House", this is one of my favorite stories.  It's about Mr. Hammond, who has been waiting anxiously for his wife to return from a long journey overseas.  When she finally returns, he can't wait to be alone with her.  But his wife recounts the death of a stranger and after doing so, Mr. Hammond feels like this stranger will always be between them.  I know why I liked this story so much and why it's also frustrating for me on one level.  A recurring theme in Mansfield's short stories (or at least why I have come to view as a recurring theme) is that no one gets their happily ever after.  Usually it's the women who have to suffer lives of quiet desperation and unhappiness and for the most part I understand why she wrote stories with this particular theme.  But seriously, most of us just want someone to love us unconditionally, to want to be with us to the exclusion of everything else, and Mr. Hammond just wants a quiet few days alone with his wife to be happy, and he doesn't get them, and it's sad to me.  

Word Debt

One of my goals for May was to finish a writing project I've been working on for about ever.  The goal was to write 1667 words per day starting on May 15th.  It's May 19th, and I'm already in word debt.  How many words you ask?  Well, as of yesterday....1936...and I have yet to write anything today.  Seriously, I had no idea just how much time teaching 101 would take out of my schedule during the first session.  I really did think I'd have plenty of time to write, read, and teach.  But oddly I've really only had time to do the latter.  So, here I am in word debt.  

UPDATE:  It's Saturday and I'm not in as much word debt as I was when I woke up this morning (7100 words, give or take).  Wrote almost 4800 words and I'm super excited.  I might be able to finish this little project by my May 31st deadline after all!  Keep your fingers crossed!

Katherine Mansfield - "The Doll's House" & "Pictures" & "Bliss"

OK - I just finished Katherine Mansfield's "The Doll's House" (1921) and I liked it and it is definitely going on my list.  It's an incredibly interesting little story about three little girls who get a doll's house from a woman who has stayed with their family for a while.  The little girls manage to invite all of the other little girls to their house to see the doll's house, except for the Kelvey girls, who are outcasts in this little community because their mother is a washerwoman and their father is believed to be in jail.  There is an incredible emphasis on the gaze and looking and seeing and watching, but it is also intertwined with silence, too, specifically the silence of the Kelvey girls as they listen (aural surveillance) to everything that's said around them but don't talk to the girls because the girls have been forbidden by their families to talk to Lil and Else Kelvey.  

And also just finished "Pictures" (1919) which is about Miss Ada Moss who is a contralto singer who can't find work, so she tries to get a casting call as an actress instead, but that also doesn't pan out.  If she can't find work before 8pm the following night, her landlady is going to kick her out because she can't pay the rent.  So finally after finding no job she ends up at Cafe de Madrid, where she sits down at a table and ends up having a drink with a man who joins her.  It's left unsaid at the end of the story whether, when she goes off with the man, if she is going with the intent to sell herself or if she thinks he's actually capable of helping her find a job.  Can't say that these endings to Mansfield's stories are very good.

Lastly, I've finished "Bliss" (1918) which is also a strange little story.  It's about Bertha who has a little daughter that she adores and apparently a husband that she adores as well, but who she's never really desired sexually.  The 'bliss' that she's feeling is posed as being a sexual awakening, and she thinks that for the first time she actually wants her husband, but of course there's this other character-Miss Fulton--who complicates this sexual awakening and makes the reader wonder if this is really a desire for her husband or a desire for Miss Fulton.  The twist comes at the end (spoiler alert!) when Bertha overhears Miss Fulton and her husband making plans for a rendezvous, which is perhaps surprising because the entire evening (there's been a dinner party at Bertha's house), her husband has seemed to dislike Miss Fulton, which we now know at the end of the story to be a facade.  So Bertha's sexual awakening is thwarted. This story is interesting to me, but I'm not sure if I'll keep it on my list.  

Definitely of the three stories I've read tonight, "The Doll's House" is my favorite.  

Reading This Week & 110 Titles to Consider

First of all the fun stuff.  I'll be teaching Reading Now in the fall and I am totally stoked.  I'm already compiling a list of potential books and short story collections.  The hardest part will be choosing!  Here's what I have so far:

The Poe Shadow_Matthew Pearl; The Road_Cormac McCarthy; Interpreter of Maladies_Jhumpa Lahiri; My Sister's Keeper_Jodi Picoult; The Omnivore's Dilemma_Michael Pollan; You Suck_Christopher Moore; Then We Came to the End_Joshua Ferris; Admission_Jean Hanff Korelitz; Apologize, Apologize!_Elizabeth Kelly; Round Ireland with a Fridge_Tony Hawks; Bright Lights, Big Ass_Jen Lancaster; A Place So Foreign and Eight More_Cory Doctorow; and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies_Seth Grahame-Smith (thanks to JM for those last two inspired ideas).  

Now I have promised that I will finish reading Howards End, and that I will also read Beckett's Molloy and the rest of the Katherine Mansfield short stories (The Doll's House, The Garden Party, At the Bay, The Stranger, Pictures, Bliss, Prelude, and The Daughters of the Late Colonel) I have assigned myself as well as make final selections of poetry for my first list.  Yep.  Those are my promises.  Hope I can keep them!

And to that end, I'm off to read...

spend the money already!

Seriously.  Sometimes I just want to shout out "you're a graduate-student-wanna-be-professor! spend the money and buy the book already.  you will probably want to use it to teach with yourself!  hello!!!???"

OK. Seems I've shouted that out.  I think I feel better now.

The Summer of Reading Has Begun!

Well, my summer of reading has at last begun.  Granted, I've only read two short stories by Katherine Mansfield, but I've read them, and they're on my list of things to read, so progress has been made.

First of all, I read "The Wind Blows".  It's very modern (read:  I'll need to read it again to truly understand what happens!) but it's not horrible.  The problem here is that I can't exactly say what it's about.  It seems to be about a woman who is remembering going to piano lessons to escape a mother that she hates, but she is remembering as she is on a boat with her brother, looking on another brother and sister walking along the same path that she once walked along with her brother.  The best part of the story is the atmosphere.  The wind and the sea are constant forces, almost like characters.  I think that's the part that I liked the most.  I have to narrow down exactly which short stories  will make it to my final list and this is a contender for the moment.

The other story I read is called "The Fly".  It's a little bit crazy.  It's about an old man going to visit his boss, and the old man remarks that his daughters went to Belgium and saw the grave of his son, as well as his boss' son, who had died in the war.  The boss practically comes apart thinking about this, since it was his only son, and he'd built his business for his son to inherit, and now that he's gone he feels like all that work has been for nothing.  Well, as he's mourning, he spies a fly that has fallen into an inkwell.  He dips his pen into the ink and puts the fly onto the blotting paper.  The fly bounces back and seems to survive, but the boss drops another drop of ink on the fly, waiting to see if he'll bounce back again.  It does, but slower this time.  It's clear that the boss admires the fly's struggle to survive, but he still drops a third drop on the fly.  The fly recovers once more, but it takes longer, and it doesn't seem to be a full recovery.  He finally drops one more drop of ink on the fly, and this kills it.  Of course, this fly is a metaphor for the soldiers who lost their lives in battle.  They could only recover from so many wounds before succumbing at last to death, especially when the party inflicting the wounds has no mercy.  It's characterized as a fascination with seeing just how much they can take before they can no longer fight for life, like it's just a big game.  After the fly dies, the boss tries to remember what he'd been thinking about before he began playing with the fly, but he can't of course.  This story was more intelligible, but somehow it just didn't feel like it was as beautifully written as "The Wind Blows."  Not a strong contender for the final list.

What Should I Do Now?

So I turned in my seminar paper this afternoon with about 40 minutes to spare.  It took forever to print out, and then once that was done, and it was stapled and I was all ready to drive to campus to hand it off to my professor, I happened to notice that the title was still [add lame title here] - my special placeholder for when I have no idea what my paper is going to be called.  So of course I sat there for a minute, my brain completely exhausted, trying to come up with a title.  Know what I finally settled on?  "Space and Time in E. M. Forster's 'The Other Side of the Hedge'".  Yes, I know.  Super original, right?  Well, what did you expect?  I was operating on only 5 hours of sleep.  And while when I was undergrad I totally prided myself on being able to function on at least 5 hours of sleep, I can no longer say this is true in my old age.  Brain function is definitely impaired after about 10 hours or so.  Anyway, it was my final seminar paper and I'm glad it's done.  It wasn't perfect, nor was it everything that I wanted it to be, but I don't think I'm embarrassed to turn it in.  It wasn't my best work but I also think it was far from being my worst paper ever.

And after turning it in, I bought myself a pizza and then took a three hour nap.  Then I watched this past Monday's episode of House.  OMG!  I'm so obsessed with House.  Yes.  Still obsessed.  Cannot wait for next week's episode.  Though I'm sad that it will be the season finale.  What will I do without new episodes for a whole summer? 

Oddly, now I have no idea what to do with myself.  I'm pretty firm in my resolution to not do anything school related tonight.  That can totally wait until tomorrow when I finally get started on my reading list.  But I find myself wanting to read, but I just don't have any desire to read.  Strange, I know.  I just feel like I've been reading for the last 72 hours and would like to not right now.  

A Bit of Synchronicity

I just looked up at the clock on my desk.  It's 5.55 on 5/5.  Cool!

What is totally uncool is that I am still writing my space and place paper.  The good news--I have about 14 bad pages.  Bad pages can turn into good pages, right?

Space and Place Daze

Here I am.  Sitting in the library working on my space and place paper.  The very last seminar paper I'll ever have to write.  To be truthful, I've gotten some good work done today.  I currently have 4 1/4 handwritten pages (yes, I'm still archaic and write all my papers by hand before typing them into Word!  Don't hate a system that works!) and that is an improvement over the 0 pages I had written when I woke up this morning.  Granted, these pages are really rough, and I'm about to have a very harsh transition to the next part of the paper, but still, I'm at least finally writing and going somewhere, which is better than the nowhere that I was occupying yesterday.

SIDEBAR: It's amazing how hot my new travel mug keeps my coffee!  Where has this cup been all my life?

I have everything I need for tomorrow's big dinner with the girls.  Can't give away the full menu or too many details (since some of you are readers of this blog!) but suffice it to say, it will be fabulous and I cannot wait.  I might starve myself all day just so that I can eat, eat, eat tomorrow night.  Though I have no idea what I was thinking when I chose this date weeks ago.  There is a definite conflict as there will be a brand new episode of House on (in which House and Cuddy will finally get together and stop teasing us), but alas, that's why Steve Jobs created iTunes and TV downloads, right?  It's probably a good thing.  I'll download the episode on Tuesday and that'll be my reward for finishing my paper.

And by the way, once I get done with this paper, I'm totally catching up on Lost.  Since I seem to live my life by the carrot and stick approach, Lost will be my reward for keeping up with all the reading I have to do this summer.  On next week's list of books to read:  Howards End (which I have already started, yeah!), A Room with a View (also by Forster) and several short stories by Katherine Mansfield.  Yeah, I've basically figured out that to just be done with the fiction on my first list by the end of June, I need to read three books a week.  Yeah.  Perhaps now my meaning is crystal clear when I say I'll be reading all summer long.

But now I'm distracted.  Time to get back to work.

Insomnia

I have been trying to fall asleep for the last two hours to no avail.  So now I am trying a tried and true remedy for insomnia that I hope won't fail me.  A cup of tea with a few drops of valerian root.  I figured that while I drink my tea I might as well blog, because perhaps what's keeping me awake is that there are about a million things racing through my mind.

Like the fact that I have to prepare teach in the first summer session which is only 10 days away!  I've decided to do something different with the "theme" of the class this time around.  I'm going to have my students read about space and place and the readings will be more challenging than what I've used in the past but I'm hoping that will be a good thing.  Plus, I have chosen only four main readings for the summer session and am planning to have them do more assignments with each particular reading rather than having them work with a particular source only once before moving on to the next source.  I hope the students will like it.  I'm focusing on home, mobility (where the world is home), the city, and the wilderness.  We'll see what happens.  

SIDEBAR:  My tea is still too hot to drink!

Speaking of space and place, I have to start working on my seminar paper tomorrow.  It's due next Wednesday and I would absolutely love to have a complete draft by the time I go to bed on Monday night which means I have to be serious about writing over the weekend.  The good thing is that I have done all the reading and research I need to do (or rather, that I'm planning to do) so I'm really at the point where I'm ready to write.  I just need to sit down and write.  

I turned in my seminar paper for my Victorian class this morning.  Whew.  So glad that that's done and out of the way.  I wrote about the role of violence in The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling.  I can't really articulate just how happy I am to be done with that paper because it represents the very last paper that I have to write on a particular topic to fit into the theme of a class.  My space/place paper is much more interesting to me because it's on literature that I might be able to use in my dissertation and it's using space/place theory which I will also use in my diss so it's a win-win all around.  I think that's why I'm just so ready to start working on it and seeing how it turns out.  I also think that if it turns out well, this will be the paper that I continue to work on and revise over the summer and then try to submit it for publication near the end of the year.  

I continue to edit the drafts of my exam lists.  I think I've made good head way on my historical time period list.  I've whittled the primary texts down to 53 (I don't even know how many were on there before but I know it was more than that) and I've begun to select specific poems and replace the "selected poems" place holder.  The goal is to be able to have a revised draft of that list and my postcolonial theory list by the end of next week.  But now that May 1st has arrived I'll be starting to read and let me just say what a daunting task that is shaping up to be.  I just blew another $100 at Amazon on books, and I'm still not even close to being done buying what I want to have on my shelf by the time I start writing my exams.  I don't want to have to worry about the library not having a book that I need or it being checked out by someone else or recalled.  The first book on my list to read is Howards End by E.M. Forster and then I think I'll follow that with A Room with a View, also by Forster, so look for book reviews coming soon!

And lastly, I see June on the horizon, and that makes me recall last June when I wrote a +50,000 word "book" in 30 days.  November just isn't a good time for me to participate in NaNoWriMo so I chose June instead last year and I'm thinking I'm going to try to write another "book" this year.  There.  I've put the idea out there so now anyone who reads this has carte blanche to bug me about whether or not I achieved my goal.  Also, anyone reading this is invited to join me in my crazy month of writing.  It's fun and rewarding and I highly recommend it.  You never know.  You could be the next Stephenie Meyer.  he-he-he-he....