Gack. I just scheduled out the next three weeks of school work and it doesn’t look pretty. Three papers, a presentation, a poetry portfolio, and a couple more books to read. Yikes.

I can hardly wait to see the backside of this semester. My independent study has been interesting but didn’t quite come together the way I had hoped. It has entirely clarified what an academic sabbatical is truly for; it’s extremely hard to do serious research for an academic paper alongside a number of other competing interests. The intensity of the independent study I had envisioned was probably more like research for a dissertation rather than a single, relatively short paper. At the end of this, I will have read a lot and thought a lot, but I can’t see this paper being as thought provoking or as comprehensive as I would have hoped.

My poetry workshop has turned out to be a bust, more or less. The poets in the class really like the independent format but for fiction writing folks like me who were hoping to hone some poetry skills, that never really happened. I don’t feel like I know anything more about poetry today than I did twelve weeks ago. The constructive criticism (or at least that’s what we’ll call it) has been far too diffuse to be of much help and I think I personally would have benefited far more from a traditional workshop format rather than the small group format we went with. I also understand that the workshop does not exist solely for my benefit, but still…

Which leaves my Joyce class. Most of my distaste for Joyce remains, although I have a better understanding and appreciation of the man’s work. I don’t care for slogging through impenetrable text week and after, but I really do like going to class and trying to hash out what it all means, if it means anything at all. Perhaps the best part about this class is now being somewhat knowledgeable about Joyce’s work. Joyce is one of those authors whose name is thrown around quite a bit. Having read most of his work (and I can’t see myself ever bothering to pick up Finnegan’s Wake unless it’s to toss it on a bonfire somewhere) and a fair bit of criticism, it’s my feeling that his name is often dropped to impart some sort of credibility (see my post on The Departed for this syndrome) but I question how many people have actually done the tough leg work of grappling with Dubliners, A Portrait, and especially Ulysses to pull out any relevant, personal meaning.

I register for spring classes tomorrow. I’m hoping to get a fiction workshop, a course on contemporary Native American novels, and another course on visual narratives. We’ll see if everything is still open when I register.

Current Mood: Daunted |
Currently Listening To – Oasis – “Be Here Now”