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I finished Harry Matthew’s The Journalist yesterday and quite enjoyed it although, like many books in my restrictions and obstructions class, it wouldn’t appeal to a broad audience. The central idea is that the narrator has suffered a breakdown of some sort and has decided to write a journal to track the events of his life. He is having an affair with his brother-in-law’s wife, his son is acting strangely, and he’s stuck in a dull job. Early on, he stops taking his lorarzepan, and as the medication wears off, his paranoia increases and he begins obsessively detailing the minutia of his life in his journal and develops an impossibly complex categorization to track his thoughts, feelings, dreams, and “objective” statements. As I said in class, I liked the book’s strong database aesthetic.

I also picked up a number of books from Half-Price books last weekend, all of which will be on my Ph.D. preliminary exams: The Tin Drum, Dorderlands/La Frontera, The Death of Artemio Cruz, Song of Solomon, and House of Spirits. I also checked out from the library Magic(al) Realism: A New Critical Idiom by Maggie Bowers (which looks concise), and Magic Realism: Theory, History, and Community by Zaomra et al. (which looks comprehensive). These two critical books should help me flesh out my “major” area, which is mostly going to be classics of “magical realism” and contemporary fantasy/slipstream.

I also received my mid-term evaluations for the composition course I’m teaching and the results were very positive. There were a few blase’ responses, but the only sharp comments were directed at the assignments (which I have no control over) and the format of the course (small group discussion, large group discussion, and paper writing…is that really a fair criticism of a course entitled “Introduction to College Writing”?).

Otherwise, my semester works like this: busy Monday, crushed on Tuesday, recover Wednesday, suffer Thursday, work like hell Friday, recover Saturday/Sunday. All things being equal, I prefer a steady schedule that keeps me busy rather than this peak-valley-peak-valley routine, which absolutely exhausts me.

The ankle is feeling almost back to normal after rolling it Saturday—a four-day turnaround, about par for the course. I will probably give indoor a go on Monday, so wish me luck…

Current Mood: Sure |
Currently Listening To - The Hold Steady - “Almost Killed Me”

We’re having student conferences this week (15-20 minutes per student, 20 students) in lieu of classes, so I arranged the appointments on Mon-Tues-Fri so I’ve had Wed and Thurs at home and man, has it been lovely. The difference between driving three days a week versus four is pretty significant and I’ve gotten a lot done with that extra time. It’s amazing how getting just a little more sleep and getting a little more time away from driving reaps generous rewards in terms of alertness and productivity.

In case you hadn’t noticed the trend, check out my “Current Mood” history for the last couple weeks:

9/22 - Current Mood: Zzzzzzzz |
9/17 - Current Mood: Pretty Goo…zzzzzzzzzzzz |
9/14 - Current Mood: To Continue a Theme, Tired |
9/13 - Current Mood: Victorious but Beat |
9/12 - Current Mood: Pleased |
9/12 - Current Mood: Okay, But Tired |

I’m really enjoying the teaching and I think the students are learning, which is a good thing. The course on composition teaching theory is pretty frustrating at times since practically everything we read is counter intuitive (and is not how any of us were ever taught). The general theory is that the instructor must constantly push against being an “authority” (on anything, really) and always push the students to explore, struggle, and discover on their own. Again, generally speaking, any sort of directive or qualitative remark (i.e. “You should change this confusing sentence”) closes down ways of thinking, limits possibilities, and reconfirms hierarchies of student/teacher and novice/expert.

Of course, running against this is the fact that most of us instructors are twice as old as the average freshman and have learned a thing or two ourselves about reading and writing given that we are all, you know, Ph.D. students in English. While in theory I appreciate the idea of making these students to struggle to figure out how they can write better, I also think it’s silly to pretend that 1) an institutional student/teacher hierarchy doesn’t already exist (and will exist as long as teachers submit grades) and 2) that sometimes a student will be helped more by just being told something straight-up rather than always redirecting them into avenues of flailing and frustration.

I also feel that a lot of this theory we’re reading is to keep us honest, so we don’t stand before the class and expound Writing’s Necessary Truths from on high. But often it sets you to feel as though nothing you’re doing is “right,” even though I also understand that this frustration and struggling to come to terms with how to teach college composition is also part of the comp program’s master plan: make the student question, reassess, find his or her own way of making meaning. Only in this instance, I am the student.

Just because I recognize this doesn’t mean I have to like it though, or even buy into it.

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I’ve been putting in some serious work trying to develop a book list for my preliminary exam, which looks like I will be taking next fall or spring. Originally I intended to do Modern Fiction as my major area and Native American Literature and Slipstream/New Wave Fabulism/New Weird as my minors. A few things have changed.

First, I wanted to focus more on world literature so I included a mess of Latin American writers along with a few Asian and African works that all loosely fall under the umbrella of “magic realism.” That meant booting some of the American and Europeans. In addition, as I’ve been reading Brian McHale’s excellent Postmodernist Fiction I’ve learned that a lot of the books I like comfortably fall under the even broader category of postmodernist writing. Then a faculty member suggested that the “slipstream” minor might seem to similar to the major area, and that I should consider a minor that takes advantage of my computer/web skills and my interest in visual aspects of storytelling.

The “new” minor looks to be something along the lines of Visual Narratives, Hypertext, and Textuality. This means looking at non-traditional books like House of Leaves and A Humument, e-texts like Patchwork Girl and Afternoon, A Story, and probably some graphic novels. Overall, this possibility excites me.

Anyway, that’s a long post to make up for weeks of relative inactivity.

Oh, my O-30 team Mad City United leaped to the top of the league with a 3-0 win last Thursday, putting us at 3-0-0 on the season with a +13 goal difference. Alas, I wasn’t there since it was a weeknight game, but I’m looking forward to this Saturday’s match after a week’s layoff.

Current Mood: Good (and not that tired) |

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That’s pretty much how I feel right about now. Just beat. This semester is going to be very rough if the first three weeks are any indication of what’s to come. Teaching comp 101 is taxing work with 24 students, although that number has now dropped and will drop some more as students find out that I’m really not kidding—at all—when I say if I don’t get an assignment within a week of its due date that I won’t accept it, and hence they can’t pass the class.

It may sound draconian but the premise is pretty simple—I’m hired to teach them composition, not scramble to figure out who has turned in what and the assignments build, so without turning in assignment 2.1 you really can’t get at what 2.2 wants you to do. A week is plenty of time to get a single assignment in, and I’ve even taken the extra step of emailing them the day before to say “if it’s not in today, you’re not able to pass.” Comp 101 strongly encourages students to work out multiple interpretations of a text; sadly for these students, these emails are one case where there’s not a lot of room for creative interpretation. Strange too how these “warning” emails are met with silence, yet the “sorry, you now have to drop” emails are responded to within hours.

Overall the teaching goes really well. The majority of the students are motivated and hard-working, and those folks make it a whole lot easier to get to the interesting stuff rather than bookkeeping.

But the pedagogy course is going to be a lot of work and the project assistantship is like a bottomless pit made of time-sucking antimatter. In theory, I’m supposed to put in 10 hours of teaching and 10 hours of program support. Perhaps not surprisingly, the first couple weeks have been skewed by about the power of ten. Considering I’m being paid around $8/hr for this work, let’s just say I’ll be finding new ways to prioritize tasks and cap the hours spent working so I have some free time to do things—and things that arent’s driving back and forth between Milwaukee.

Things like eating. And sleeping.

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I took a break to watch the last 20 minutes of Man Ure vs. Villarreal and about 10 minutes of it was top-notch stuff.

I did think it strange that Derek Rae was going all Castilian on us with his pronunciation of Santi Cazorla as ca-THOR-la. Doubly strange that Argentinian Ariel Ibagaza got the plain ol’ anglicized iba-GAZ-a. It could be that Derek Rae knows something I don’t, but I also doubt that he would pronounce Zaragoza as thera-GO-tha, which would be, you know, consistent.

Current Mood: Pretty Goo…zzzzzzzzzzzz |

Good Lord, there’s far too much to mention here and I have far too little time to blather about it. Robinho to Man City of all places? And everybody and their brother saying it was the wrong move? And Keegan fired from, I mean quit from, I mean maybe neither from Newcastle? And now Alan Curbishley leaving West Ham despite a good start? And Man City being taken over by the newest billionaire on the block? Fraizer Campbell to Spurs on loan?

I don’t have any idea how to begin to process all that, much less formulate coherent thoughts. Makes the league a bit more interesting, for awhile at least.

You probably didn’t notice, but the New England Revolution got pounded 4-0 by Joe Public of Jamaica in the qualifiers for the CONCACAF Champions League. That brought the aggregate score to a healthy 6-1 in favor of the islanders.

Look, the Revs have been playing in the league, played in (and won) the SuperLiga, and now played in the CONCACAF Champions League. That’s a lot of games and a lot of travel for an MLS squad with a strict salary cap and small roster size. MLS really needs to decide whether they want to grow up and compete in these regional and global competitions or whether teams still need to be conservative with their cash regarding salaries and roster size. Obviously, you can’t have it both ways.

Right, so I taught my first section of English 101 yesterday. It went well I think, and I also happened to notice that 8:00 am is early in the morning. Tuesday at 8:00 am marked the first class of the 2008-09 academic year at UWM, and I was pleased that for the vast majority of students, this class was their first exposure to college learnin’.

Things were complicated by me not having the class roster in my mailbox as I was expecting, and then not being able to print it from my online UWM account, and then having the admin’s computer freeze as it was downloading an enormous PDF in order to find my class ID# so she could print a roster for me. I arrived to class about a minute late, sweaty and out of breath having run about two blocks to get there, and still without a roster. Probably not the ideal way to kick off the teaching semester, but it could have been worse.

We do it all over again tomorrow at 8:00. I’m looking forward to it.

Current Mood: Fine |
Currently Listening To - The Hold Steady - “Boys and Girls in America”