Version 6.0ish. Digital Humanities. Running. Linux.

Prof Hacker’s end of semester checklist post suggested writing some sort of “End of the Semester Roundup” post so I thought I would write one up. This semester was one of great advancements for me. I taught my first college level courses and had a great time doing so. Originally, my schedule involved teaching two sections of Composition I but during the first week of the semester I ended up adding a section of Composition II as well.

Comp I was a lot of work, but well worth it. I saw a lot of advancement in my student’s work as the semester went on. I also saw a lot if disappointing efforts from others. Teaching writing and grammar also allowed me to sharpen my own skills and talk about some of the adventures I have had over the years as a student and academic. Check out the class weblog for more information.

Composition II was a great joy to teach. I got to teach a lot of my favourite canonical authors like Chopin, Gilman, and Ibsen.An unconscious theme of discussing gender and women’s liberation became a focus of our close readings as the semester advanced through short stories to plays (A Doll House, Othello) and then to poets like Plath and Dickinson. Immediately, a handful of students stood apart from the rest of the class but I also saw many others slowly begin to contribute more and more as they became more comfortable with their own close reading skills. My focus in class was on what my students wanted to discuss. Of course, I would bring lecture notes with ideas I wanted to highlight. However, after our daily, randomly selected, journal readers I would ask the class where they wanted to begin, what they wanted to discuss, and that is where we would start. I could talk for hours about most of the texts we read, but I am more concerned with what my students wish to discuss.

One student in particular started the semester off very slowly only to eventually be the first to raise their hand almost every class. Another only contributed on Fridays, somehow, but always blew our minds with their ideas. Almost every student in class had a day where they stood out and shone brighter than anyone else.

The week of my classroom observation by Dr. Alexander coincided with my favorite week of the semester: the week we discussed (post)modern authors like Borges, Coover, and Auster. I was very impressed with my students and their ability to tackle these difficult texts. I can’t wait to teach 102 again and hope I get a chance to pick up a section in the spring. Check out our course weblog.

This semester I ran our course weblogs on WordPress and am thrilled with the results. I have run WP on a number of websites, including this one, for the past four years and couldn’t be happier with the results. In the spring I think I am going to try the dreaded Blackboard for my classes. As an offsite alternative, I believe I am going to wade my toes into the world of Drupal as well. I am going to spend some time over break considering my options.

I also guest lectured for two classes in Dr. McCadden’s upper level class ENG203 The Origins of Literature. I presented two lectures: “Telemachus & The Search For the Ideal Son in Classical Greek Literature” and “The Odyssey & Nonlinear Reading.”

Another project I am going to finish over break is the long-awaited draft of my article on Shelley Jackson for The Quarterly Conversation. I was supposed to have this completed for the winter issue, but the hectic nature of the fall semester got in the way. Scott Esposito was gracious enough to give me an extension. I’m hoping to have something to him early in the new year.

I have a handful of journal article proposals that I need to send over break as well. A few of them are spinoff projects from my MA thesis and others are ideas that I have brewed for a period of time. Hopefully some of them will be publishable.

in the spring, currently, I am teaching two sections of Comp I. One is MWF, the other TT. This isn’t the most ideal schedule, but hopefully I will pick another Comp I, a Comp II, or another class. I am very happy to have a few weeks off to get some of my work done and prep for the spring. However, I am also excited to get back to Burlington and begin teaching again.

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• According to her monthly Web Site column, Jeanette Winterson is creating a children’s show for the BBC.
• Scott Esposito on the role of research in Infinite Jest.  Also see the comment section for some discussion from myself and others on the difference between the sort of notes Wallace and Borges created for their imaginary works.
• Jacket Copy on John Barth’s The Floating Opera
• Henry Jenkins on the role of fan fiction as critical commentary on texts.
• The new issue of Open Letters is, as always, worth your time.
  

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Scott’s post last month about the Kindle’s ability to hold hundreds of books contrasted with most American’s lack of reading got me thinking of how Amazon’s new device could be properly used and/or marketed. Scott writes:

And among the majority of the American reading public (as measured by the NEA), anything over 11 books per year is a lot. It doesn’t really make sense to have an ebook reader that can hold hundreds of titles at once, unless you’re planning on being the one to sell hundreds of books to fill it.

A lot of people I know who own a Kindle note that one of the most pleasurable aspects of it is the ability to have newspaper content sent to them every morning. That is fine, but why can’t someone just get that via an RSS reader? I assume if you’re on the move a lot in the morning it’s useful, but wouldn’t you have a Blackberry or IPhone or Android phone for that?

Which comes to my big concern for all of these devices: All of them only do some of the things that the other might not be able to do. The average reader, if they read at all, is not invested in reading enough to spend hundreds of dollars on a device the way they would be for a high definition television. My coworkers often share books, passing hardcovers back and forth as each reads them. I’d be surprised if many of them even own books in the way that prolific readers do. They are invested in other things. I’m not sure how to market the Kindle to the common reader, but I am interested in seeing what happens next.

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Conversational Reading recently posed the question, can you read with music playing? The article they link to says no, but Scott disagrees:

For one thing, I’ve found that Philip Glass’s Music in 12 Parts makes almost perfect “white noise” for shutting out the sound of virtually anything: ambient sound, crying children, loud-talking neighbors, jackhammering, aircraft landing directly overhead (just make sure to have a good pair of headphones).

But for those times that I’ve actually listened to the music as accompaniment, I’ve also found classical pieces rewarding. Usually this is serendipitous, as in the right stretch of Mahler will just happen to coincide with a perfect moment from Dostoevsky, but certain periods of composition definitely do go with certain periods of literature. I especially like listening to the serialists while enjoying a good modernist novel.

I agree with Scott on this issue. As I noted in my comment, I listen to a lot of jazz while reading in the evening. Whether it is Miles Davis or Albert Ayler or Billie Holiday, my reading and listening flows in whatever direction it sees fit. I don’t try to “sync” the music to the words, I have tried that in the past but just found it distracting. In high school I did that a lot with science fiction and fantasy novels. Maybe I’ll write more about that sometime. Generally, whatever I am listening to in the background serves to accentuate my reading experience.

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• In These Times on nazi skinheads in the military.
• In the new issue of The Quarterly Conversation, Scott Esposito looks on a new anthology of Mexican literature.
• Literary Kicks reviews a new production of Porgy & Bess.  Miles Davis’ soundtrack to the film is one of my favorite albums he recorded during the fifties.
• More hardcore in The Guardian: this time it is a profile of Discord Records.
• All About Jazz reviews Black Flag’s mostly instrumental and always excellent Family Man and Process Of Weeding Out albums.

This week’s video is from a CBS appearance Davis did in 1958, the same year as his adaptation of Porgy & Bess.  He performs So What, from the Kind Of Blue album.  Jimmy Cobb is on drums and, oh yeah, some guy named John Coltrane is playing saxophone as well.

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(inspiration)

During the fall of 2004, the following are guilty as charged of offering inspiration for what you are reading.

• Scott Rettberg’s hypertext fiction The Meddlesome Passenger.
• Jorge Luis Borges’ collection Labyrinths, especially The Library Of Babel, The Immortal, and The Circular Ruins.
• The literary weblog Conversational Reading, which, beyond generally getting me excited about literature, introduced me to the work of Gilbert Sorrentino, referenced in the penultimate lexia.
• Jill/txt was a daily, still, source of inspiration.  A conversation with Jill in real life inspired a lexia.
• Grand Text Auto in general.
• Shelley Jackson’s My Body a Wunderkammer, which made me cry more than once and pushed me to be brave enough to write about sexuality issues.
• Of course, The Unknown Collective’s The Unknown, which greatly influenced how I both read and write hypertext, and my aesthetic vision for hypertext fiction.
• Derik Badman’s, who I met on a , writing about constraints at the time I was writing War Prayers inspired me to try to write three hundred word, exact, entries.
• Although offline, Rettberg and Nick Montfort’s sticker novel Implementation was paradoxically what made me create a blog to document War Prayers.  I had to get my words onto a screen somewhere.  I even created a few summary stickers, one of which still is on a wall at The Richard Stockton College Of New Jersey underneath an Implementation sticker.

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My first post in WP 2.7…I love the new dashboard…

• Two links for Jean-Philippe Toussaint from The Quarterly Conversation: a nice interview and a review of Monsieur from Scott Esposito.
• Literary Kicks on Plato’s Republic.  Been thinking about Plato a lot lately because this is one of the audiobooks in my queue right now.
• My Twitter pal Samhita over at Feministing wonders if a restraining order is ever enough.
• The Guardian does a really cool interview with Herbie Hancock.  I need to check out his solo work; he played on my favorite Miles Davis record In A Silent Way.
• Judith Butler on the November election.

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