January 10, 2007

Students reading

In my intro. course I asked the students to suggest novels for our final reading. The results were surprising, pleasantly so: some old chestnuts, to be sure, as well as some best-sellers, but also quite a few new novels, some of which I didn't know. Not as many books by women as I would have liked (I added a couple of ringers to the list: guess which two) but that gives me something to work on.

I suppose this is a risky venture; one of my colleagues did the same thing some time ago and ended up having to teach Anne Rice. Don't get me wrong: I have read most of the vampire books myself; I teach genre fiction; I research street literature. And I think almost any novel has something to tell us, even if it is only a cautionary tale. But I still hope to hell they don't select The Da Vinci Code!

December 21, 2006

The intro. survey course

is over, though I still have a scad of marking. It was a lot of fun: there were some really interested and interesting students, and we did some more creative assignments than I usually assign. I'm in the middle of reading a pile of Behn/Wilmot mash-ups, and they are a hoot. Just saw a post over at xoom about some creative projects the students did with Beowulf, all involving performing. How cool is that?

November 16, 2006

Got to teach

about ballads today. So cool, to talk about a subject on which I have done a lot of work. Though there is a bit of a danger of going overboard with the backstory and the details — all that reading has to squeeze out somewhere, right? if only to make room for more — but I think I kept the lid on. Played two songs: Frankie Armstrong singing "Tam Lin" and Joan Baez's "Mary Hamilton." Was worried that the students might find those grand old ballads too slow, but they liked them. (I mean, those that said anything, liked them.) And was very glad that the sound system worked, else I would have had to treat them to a verse or two myself. Well, perhaps "treat" is the wrong word. Heard Armstrong sing once, and she is fabulous. Glad I got a chance to share her.

November 4, 2006

Marks on paper

At Academic Coach, Mary McKinney posts about the differences between writing something in longhand, and producing it on a computer. Now I have often made comparisons between my own writing in the two modes, and have a fairly nuanced understanding of what sorts of tasks are best accomplished how. But McKinney links to an article in which Shari Wilson discusses the evaluation of students, a wrinkle I had previously not considered. She begins with an anecdote about a student who scored A's and B's with in-class assignments, yet C's and D's on computer-generated essays. After an interesting discussion about the characteristics of each process, she makes the logical conclusion: that instructors need to evaluate their students using a variety of assignments. Luckily for my students I already vary their assignments, though not with much consideration for modes of writing in their own right.

McKinney also links to "The Phenomenology of Writing by Hand" by Daniel Chandler. I am not going to pretend to evaluate it, other than to say that it seemed somewhat schematic (no doubt because of my utter ignorance of the discipline). But some parts are evocative: the description of revision as a physical act, for instance. Many writers who enjoy writing as a "bodily act" are quoted, and it is true, there is certainly pleasure in pens and paper. But for myself, I think I have to some extent transferred created similar pleasures on the computer, with a whole-hearted embrace of geekery. Not the sorts of pleasures the writers quoted in this article describe; to a person, they disdain what Iris Murdoch called that "glass square which separates one from one's thoughts and gives them a premature air of completeness."

I can't agree there. Writing with a computer has expanded the range of my writing incalculably. I love pens and paper, but nowadays they are almost a fetish, or at least a hobby, rather than my main tools.

October 27, 2006

Teaching Carnival #14

is up over at m2h blogging. Lots of discussion of reading and writing. As I said in a comment over there, "It's fascinating, isn't it, how each month people's posts seem to work so well together. I have never had such a feeling of teaching as a shared project as I have had since the teaching carnival started."

And check out "What's the point of a college education?" I think I will send it to my students.

Finally, Marcia asks, "BTW, do any of you use images in some way in your writing assignments? If you're searching for a topic for the next teaching carnival, I'd be interested in hearing what you have to offer on the visual." Now might be the time to defend my use of Keynote presentations in literature classes!

October 5, 2006

Three things

There is a Feminist SF Carnival. Here is the fifth edition.

Pros and cons of teaching popular culture at My Amusement Park (via the latest Teaching Carnival).

Barbie® is not a lesbian. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

October 3, 2006

This may seem obvious

but it has taken me several years to discover it: in order to get papers back in a timely fashion so that one is not savaged in the course evaluations, one must not be reluctant to read said papers, and in order not to be reluctant to read them, one must give out assignments that are likely to elicit something interesting. I have a batch of papers right now and I am making myself late because when I finish one I keep on picking up the next. This is unprecedented.

September 26, 2006

Effeminate women

[Xposted to The Long Eighteenth]

Yesterday in my graduate seminar we discussed Margaret Cavendish's Bell in Campo and The Sociable Companions. It was a lively discussion — they are an interested group — and at one point someone brought up the ways in which the two armies in Bell in Campo are described. "Masculine" is used to describe the army of men, while "feminine" and "effeminate" would seem to be used interchangeably to describe Lady Victoria's army of women. It is also used to insultingly refer to men who prefer to stay home rather than fight. This led to a sweeping pronouncement from me about the ways in which the definitions of words often narrow and focus over time; it would seem that at one time "effeminate" could have been used to mean more or less "feminine" without any shading — though it was also used in our contemporary sense — but now it is used pretty exclusively as a pejorative applied to gay men who are perceived as lacking in "masculine" traits. We discussed various female equivalents and unpacked the some of the meanings "Amazon" held in the period.

This is one reason, among many, that I like the 18thc: English, always in flux, is just at enough of a remove after three centuries, give or take, that it is deceptively familiar. But upon closer examination there are significant little moments of vertigo, moments which can be useful as an entrée into a discussion of, say, gender roles.

September 15, 2006

Students in the stacks

There is an excellent discussion over at The Long Eighteenth about encouraging/forcing/teaching students to use the library. As David Mazella points out, it is difficult to do much intensive work on research skills in a survey course. But perhaps I could do something more in my intro. course next term as we have abandoned the survey format for our first year offerings. Probably not as ambitious as this course (thanks John Russell), but something more than the standard single visit from the librarian that I usually do.

And it's only the second week

Had my first "did I miss anything?" of the term, today, and was reminded again of Tom Wayman's oft-referenced poem. It was on my door last year but was ruined during some work on the ceiling this past summer. I just printed it out and put it up again. Now I am ready for the term [girds blue-veined loins].¹

Gosh, so many of us have threatened to distribute it far and wide to our classes, or have at least blogged it; we clearly are nowhere near critical mass.

¹ Prize — or perhaps just personal satisfaction — to the first reader to correctly identify that reference.

September 11, 2006

Another first,

this time my grad class. I felt a little sluggish but otherwise think it went reasonably well. (Other than there seeming to be no internet access in the classroom. Perhaps there is a jack somewhere but I didn't get the door unlocked until the class was due to begin and so was not about to crawl around the edges of the room like the woman in "The Yellow Wallpaper," looking for an ethernet jack. First impressions are so important.) I was up late last night mucking with the course website and a migraine seemed to be coming on, always a dilemma. Do I gamble and not take the pill, and perhaps wake up with a headache? Or do I take the pill, probably avoid the potential headache, but most certainly spend much of the next day with cotton wool between my ears?

Do ya feel lucky, punk?

Well, do ya?

September 7, 2006

First days

The Jinker Boy began Kindergarten this week. Excited, nervous, and generally happy about the whole thing, though he is sceptical of the big kids in the playground at recess. As well he should be, if memory serves. I surprised myself by not crying once. It's not that I'm not wistful that he is growing up. But, and at the risk of sounding like a Hallmark card, each stage is so fascinating that I could hardly wish to stop the clock. (Now my own clock is another matter. See illustration, above [though I wear better shoes].)

Had my first class today and it went really well, no doubt because I did minimal preparation. And because I showed them this video and compared it with this text in order to introduce the idea of literary language. Sort of a last meal before we begin Beowulf next week. (Speaking of which, has anyone seen this movie? I bought it but cannot bring myself to watch it. But it is always good to have a contingency plan in case your coffee goes down the wrong way half way through class and you need to fill some dead air while you give yourself the Heimlich manoeuvre.)

Teaching tip o' the day.

September 6, 2006

Preparing for first class

tomorrow so thought I would read the section in the newest Teaching Carnival on first days. Lots of sharing of anxieties, lots of camaraderie. And some things to think on. For example, this post about good, bad, and ugly first classes. I have been guilty of several items listed under the latter two: I routinely spend more than five minutes on the syllabus, and I at least mention that students will be boiled in oil if I catch them plagiarizing. This latter is not an institutional requirement — the telling, not the boiling — but it is strongly recommended and so I will continue to make at least a passing reference. But Piss Poor Prof (and what were his parents thinking when they named him?!?) is right: they can read; this is university: let them go through the syllabus themselves. Dr. Crazy shares my ambivalence about the balancing act between saying what you need to and not boring everyone silly.

A White Bear ponders the inexplicable reactions of undergraduates, something I have noticed myself. Show up late and forget your notes and you are sure to have the best class of the term. Prepare for days and the hour is sure to drag on until the room is empty of oxygen. Shocking but true.

Oso Raro's schvitz reminded me of my first class as a new hire, when the lovely eggplant colour of my newly dyed tinted (sorry, Mum) hair started to drip down my neck and forehead. (That won't happen tomorrow; I had my tresses toned last week.)

Finally, a sobering series of posts from Spencer Schaffner on instructors being exposed or abused on YouTube. Holy Crap! Any of my students even think of doing this, you are so boiled in oil.

September 5, 2006

First Teaching Carnival of the new academic year,

Teaching Carnival #11, is up at George William's WorkBook. Lots of great stuff; see in particular the section on teaching and technology. Alan Liu offers a draft policy framing for students how to use Wikipedia as a source, complete with bibliography (responses here, here, here, and here). One respondent briefly discusses having students write for Wikipedia, as I plan this term. Several posts on teaching with blogging.

And there are comics.

May 28, 2006

Oh, and despite

a few tense moments with the A/V equipment at the beginning, my paper went well. The whole session was interesting and worked nicely together, in fact, despite there being four of us presenting in 75 minutes (20 minutes per presentation being the norm) and some brusqueness from the chair during the question period. Loosen up!

It has been such a pleasure working on my own stuff; it feels like it has been ages since I have sat down with something meaty and interesting. I hope to turn it into a full-scale paper over the rest of the summer. Well, that and several other projects which would individually also take the rest of the summer to complete. Not to mention the things I have to do, such as prepare for Sept.

Sigh.

April 14, 2006

Teaching C18 words

A discussion about student malapropisms (eg. "Samuel Richardson is abscessed with sex") on C18-L prompted Kirstin Wilcox to ask for words, the meanings of which have changed over time. She offers some examples and envisions handing such a list out to students. Well, of course Jack Lynch, whom we all admire (in the contemporary sense), got there first: he posted a link to his marvellous "A Guide to Eighteenth-Century English Vocabulary" (PDF). Which I and no doubt many others will make available to students, with gratitude and of course full attribution.

January 18, 2006

The Libertine

Natalie Bennett has a nice review of Laurence Dunmore's The Libertine.

I am more and more seriously thinking of a course called something like, "The Contemporary Long-18thc," in which I would show films like this one and Stage Beauty, and have students read Carolan's Farewell, Bedlam, and novels by Ross King (who was in grad. school at York at the same time I was but has gone on to fame and fortune) and Emma Donoghue.

As I'm writing this it strikes me how many of these books and films focus on the theatre. Maybe I could incorporate some contemporary material into the grad. course on women in Restoration and 18thc theatre I'm teaching next fall.

November 4, 2005

Reading habits

I have been thinking, off and on, about my students' reactions to publishing and writing conventions. In an odd way, the 18thc is further away from their experience than the 16th, since hardly any of them has escaped the prescription of one Shakespearean play, per year of high school (no more, no less).

[Side note: A student in my women's writing class, a mature student, told us that hers had been an "experimental year": they had been taught no Shakespeare in high school. At any point. She did not think there were any more serial killers in her year, proportionately, than in the population at large (I asked), though whether that makes the experiment a failure or a success, I'm not sure.]

At any rate, as a rule they react badly to even their limited exposure to 18thc printing and publishing conventions. I say limited because of course practically any text they come across is heavily mediated by editors and modern publishing practice. And the more junior the student, the more they complain (or the less self-conscious they are about complaining). We read Robinson Crusoe in my introduction to prose class and there was practically a rebellion because of the lack of chapters. Students who had borrowed cheesy moth-eaten editions from the public library, with chapters added (and sometimes even named!), were at risk of being mugged by the students who had shelled out for the decent edition I ordered through the bookstore. Though there is one student, bless her, who said she didn't mind the lack of chapters at all. I asked her how she decided where to stop reading, and she said, "I just read to the bottom of the page I'm on and shut the book."

Also with Robinson Crusoe: I had one student who was unable to read past "viz" until he found out what it meant. So here I am, in the strange (for an English instructor) position of telling them to read more skimmingly; to try to figure things out contextually but not to worry overmuch if something doesn't make sense, at least, as long as it doesn't seem too significant. But no, one "viz" and they stop dead.

A senior student is being driven mad by capital letters in unexpected places. I assure her she will get acclimatized, but here it is November and she is still irritated, so perhaps not. And don't get them started on long sentences.

Not sure where I'm going with this. I suppose I'm just venting about their venting.

I hope I don't sound critical or impatient, because I'm not feeling that way. I am, however, bemused. I use these opportunities to launch into discussions of changes in print technologies and conventions. And I tell them to thank their lucky stars for modern editions and then tell them about the long "s" &c. Sometimes, though, it feels as though 90% of what I teach is context.

Good thing New Criticism is long gone.

See "18th Century Ligatures and Fonts" by David Manthey.

And some further reading:

Robinson Crusoe and The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe.
An extremely abridged children's version. With pictures and the added bonus of a Greek translation.
According to the Guardian, "600 barrels of loot found on Crusoe island" (26/9/05).
Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964): "Stranded on Mars with only a monkey as a companion, an astronaut must figure out how to find oxygen, water, and food on the lifeless planet." Defoe has a writing credit, and Adam West is in it. I'm sold.
Las Aventuras de Robinson Crusoe (1954). Directed by Luis Buñuel. Holy mother!
The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (TV series, 1964). Listen to the theme music.
Robinson Crusoe, the game.
And did you know? February 1 is Robinson Crusoe Day.

October 19, 2005

Gaining my religion

Well, okay, that is overstating. Really overstating. Monkeys-are-nothing-to-be-ashamed-of overstating. Please don't de-link me P.Z. Myers overstating.

But my classes have been interesting lately, and in part because some of the students are bringing their religion with them.

Let me back up. I am sure I am not the only teacher of English literature who feels that dealing in the classroom with religious material is a minefield.

Once, during my first or second year of teaching, I read out some passages from the Book of Revelation as part of a class on Yeats' "The Second Coming." How could I not? It's all there. Anyway, I read it, neither rolling my eyes nor shaking my finger, and a student wrote, in the teaching evaluation at the end of the course, that s/he had not liked my reading from the Bible. Now, whether s/he thought I was proselytizing or being disrespectful by reducing the Bible to literature, I am not sure; that was all s/he wrote. I continue to read from the Book of Revelation when teaching that particular poem, but now I twist myself into an embarrassed pretzel beforehand explaining what I am, and am not, doing, by standing in front of them with that resonant black volume. (It probably doesn't help that I have an old Bible that belonged to my father, aged and portentous looking. The Bible, not my father. Perhaps if I squinted at a computer print out and stumbled over the words. Ah, but it feels so good in the hand.)

That course was an introductory survey with lots of modern and contemporary material. How does one negotiate these issues when teaching earlier periods?

Throw our particular students into the mix: New Brunswick has apparently one of the highest, if not the highest, rates of church attendance in the country, as well as a relatively homogeneous population. When I taught in Toronto I always assumed a certain level of world-weariness with any religious elements in literature, on the part of my students. Though to be fair, I could have been projecting. Also, the student population was much more diverse, and for many of them, if they had any interest at all in such things, it was academic. Here, however, I am more worried about stepping on my students' toes, than boring them. (Side note: a friend of mine who teaches Romantic literature at a good university in a solid farming part of the country has got up the noses of the campus Christian fellowship people and is periodically invited to debate the campus chaplain about the existence of a deity, à la Huxley and Wilberforce. So far, he has wisely declined.)

I have found, over the years, a modification in my own attitudes toward religious elements in literary texts. When I was a student I skimmed over them, much as I click past any televangelists who darken my screen when I channel-surf. But how long can one allow oneself to wilfully ignore elements that were certainly important to many of the writers themselves, as well as to their readers? And so I have comfortably settled into discussing "religious discourse," "Christian ideology," the Christian "world view" or "mythos" (if I am feeling daring), and the like.

But something odd, and interesting, is happening right now. Well, since the summer, really, when I taught a course on post/apocalyptic sf. It was a small class, a very small class, and at our first meeting I wanted to find out what sorts of sff they had already read. Some said "none," so I started throwing out various possibilities — Stephen King, fairy tales, and so on (yes, I know I'm stretching it) — and the Left Behind series came up. Well, three of them who claimed they wouldn't know an sff text if it bit them on the rump had read books from that series; one of them had read them all. These students then identified themselves as Christians and that became part of the discourse of the class. Then again, I began with the Book of Revelation (will I never learn?), but still, the shape the class took was a surprise. These three students by no means imposed or dominated — in fact, they were all markedly diffident — but that a relatively significant proportion of the class brought a Christian perspective, of necessity shaped our discussions, particularly given our subject matter. I mean, you can't write the end of the world without going to the source. In retrospect, I am proud that they all felt comfortable "coming out," particularly as I think I am pretty clear that my own perspective is more Marx than St. Mark. (Okay, that fell flat. Moving along ... )

This term I am teaching 18thc prose and poetry and writing by women before 1800. In the former I put in as much Wilmot, Behn, Manley, and Haywood as possible, but there are some other sorts of texts one needs to read. And as we know, with reference to the second course, religion was a clear entry point for early modern women seeking to write without being run out of town or branded as whores. I have been used to teaching such texts as examples of using the masters' tools (take that, Audre Lorde). You know: discourse, ideology, mythos, rhetorical strategies, discursive tactics. Well, and haven't some of the students just blown me out of the water by actually engaging with these texts on their own terms? Read some of their blog entries, if you please. Anne Askew and Margaret Fell Fox — the latter a "gutsy gal" — are right-on heroines. Hannah More is "bold and compassionate." Part of me wants to pull them up short and say, "you need to engage with these materials critically!" But another part is gleeful — gleeful! — that they are so involved with these texts, many of which, to be truthful, have always been quite opaque to me in any affective way. I mean, I put up with students admitting to crushes on Mr. Rochester with great good humour, even tacit encouragement (read! connect!). This engagement with the religion of our writers is new, but exciting. Certainly I will shape and channel the discussion as best I can, but how satisfying that there is a discussion in the first place. I am in the odd position of wondering if the other students — the ones whose world views are much closer to my own — are feeling silenced. So between trying to make room for everyone, and deflecting the person who keeps snorting that the idea of transubstantiation is ludicrous, much to the irritation of the Catholic students (and you thought that old chestnut died when Anne Askew did), it is proving an interesting term.

Mind you, even the devout students draw the line at Margery Kempe.

[cross-posted at The Valve]

September 13, 2005

Second week of classes

and I have the cold from hell, courtesy of the Jinker Boy. Began my 18thc lit. class this afternoon. The students probably thought that someone had kidnapped the prof and replaced her with a scarecrow, cleverly disguised with glasses. "The 18thc was one of the most vibrant periods of ... what was I saying?" We'll see how the numbers are next week. But even if I drove them all away, the class was still marginally better than the intro. to prose class this morning, when I forgot one of my computer plugs and so could not show the carefully prepared Keynote presentation on printing technologies I stayed up until 2am preparing. Lots of illustrations, including some lovely illuminations from the Book of Kells.¹ But never mind: I described them. Probably quite vividly.

¹ And, who knew? We have a facsimile edition at our Fredericton campus.

September 8, 2005

Busy

preparing for two first classes tomorrow, one an introductory prose class, and the other a third year class in women's writing before 1775, a course which will rely heavily on online readings. One keener has already set up her blog.

I can't say that it was a restful summer, except in the sense that a change is as good as a rest, in which case, it was all too restful. In fact, rather than coming back to class invigorated, this term I feel more like I will be escaping into teaching.

So let's see how that goes, shall we?

August 9, 2005

Blogging in the classroom

I once set up a group blog for my students, but for the most part I set up central course blogs from which I link to the individual blogs the students are required to maintain. Admittedly this does not always work for every student: some take to it like ducks to water while others barely get their toes wet. Just ran across an interesting post at decorabilia about blogging in the classroom. Not sure I will go back to group blogs, but I do think I will follow the advice about structured assignments. I usually post optional discussion questions, but that does not always work for the students who have stalled. One year I gave them interim blog marks, with comments, so that they could adjust their blogging for the duration. Breaking up the mark is more work for me but I think I will go back to it since blogging is so new for most of them.

As you may have discerned, I am in the middle of assigning marks for the blogs my summer students made.

July 25, 2005

Three spanking new

course blogs: select quotations, postscript, and prosaic. Not much to see yet, and they're pretty generic. So why am I telling you this? Because I can't get my head around posting about Douglas Coupland's Girlfriend in a Coma yet but need to post something, that's why.

We talked about Coupland today in the sf course. Damn, that's a good class; I'll be very sorry when it's over this Thursday. We're going out with a bang (snicker): we'll be watching Night of the Comet (IMDB).

July 20, 2005

Today in sf class

Naomie Harris as Selena; Megan Burns as Hannah

we watched 28 Days Later, which has brought to a head for me the issue of the ethics of showing blood and gore in the classroom. I warned them that it would be violent, and in fact no-one seemed too bothered; afterwards, a couple even said it had not been nearly as bad as they had expected (given my histrionics beforehand, I suppose). Sometimes films with potentially upsetting content are good choices for a class; I showed Boys Don't Cry to my gender studies class two years ago and it proved to be a significant event for many of the students. Of course I warned them ahead of time what they could expect, and one or two did not come to class. It is important to prepare them, and to make it clear that there will be no repercussions for missing a film with violent and/or sexual content. But then tastes vary so much; what might upset one, might be water off a duck's back for another, and might amuse a third. To say that a film depicts "violence" is not too helpful; "contains sexual violence," or "it's a splatterfest," or "there are graphic battle scenes," might be more useful. Or, "brain-eating zombies running amok," as the case may be.

It was interesting to watch the film again, six months after my last viewing. It is such a perversely beautiful film, with a great soundtrack. And JR, if you are reading this, yes, I was wrong about the zombie soldier being the only black soldier. It was interesting to see the two other endings, as well (four in total, the released version and three alternates), though the storyboarded ending that I had heard so much about made next to no sense. The class was happy with the ending that was released, though one or two confessed that one of the bleaker endings would have been more consistent with the rest of the film.

Two suppurating thumbs up.

Cillian Murphy as Jim

July 18, 2005

Zombie goodness

[cross-posted to my course blog]

It's a strange world, people.

Apparently, scientists have made zombie dogs, à la Frankenstein (link from Exclamation Mark). Very creepy. Unless they are Miniature Schnauzers like my little Sally, in which case it would be perfectly understandable.

Then there is this guy's blog. And be sure to check out some of his links.

But wait, there's more. A quick Google brings us:

Wikipedia: Zombies (they say that 28 Days Later is technically not a zombie movie. As if.) and Zombie computers
The I Love Zombies Page: "Zombie Lovers of the World Unite!"
Zombies at monstrous.com
Zombie links at Yahoo
Slate review of George Romero's Land of the Dead
Some sites about zombie movies
Zombies on the web: a philosophical investigation of zombies
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Zombies
More philosophy of zombies
When the zombies take over, how long till the electricity fails?:

Bottom line? My guess is that within 4-6 hours there would be scattered blackouts and brownouts in numerous areas, within 12 hours much of the system would be unstable, and within 24 hours most portions of the United States and Canada, aside from a rare island of service in a rural area near a hydroelectric source, would be without power. Some installations served by wind farms and solar might continue, but they would be very small. By the end of a week, I'd be surprised if more than a few abandoned sites were still supplying power.

Preparing for zombies: "This website includes the common sense advice for preparing for a zombie invasion"
Zombie Infection Simulation v2.3 - The Original (Warning: the graphic would not go away once I had brought it up. It infected my screen!). Created by the same person who brings us Urban Dead: "a massively multiplayer zombie-infection web-game.... Help to evacuate or loot a quarantined city, before the zombies make you one of them."
Zombies!!!: a board game.
ZOMBIES on flickr
Living with Zombies: an online comic
Zombies?: another online comic
Zombies Calling: yet another comic
Zombies and Voodoo Trivia Quiz (my score was respectable)
The Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency
All Things Zombie: "Your Zombie Resource Site!"
Brains4Zombies.com, "Your online home for Brains and Brain-related Products," an Amazon.com parody.
Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island

July 13, 2005

Three's a crowd, even at the end of the world

"They fought for the Ultimate Prize!"

Today in class we watched Roger Corman's weird and wonderful The Last Woman on Earth, now out of copyright and available for free. And for the record, at no point does Betsy Jones-Moreland wear a sheet: she is dressed in chic dresses, for the most part. Often with gloves. Nor are the two men ever without their shirts. And if they had been, they wouldn't have looked like these two. They are notable, in fact, for both being winded and dishevelled whenever they fight (If you watch it for no other reason, be sure to see the fish-fight between the men. Women have cat-fights and men have fish-fights, apparently.).

It is a fascinating film. Shot over a long weekend in Puerto Rico, it still manages to have many stylish moments. And the sets! The groovy beach house, and the contrast between it, and the other various Modernist icons (the Caribbean Hilton, an Atomic-age church), with the crumbling castle in the final scenes, is to die for.

Spoiler alert

As well as cool architecture and some odd and compelling shots, this film offers fascinatingly ambiguous gender politics. Cut to Ev, placidly reading a book of Caribbean recipes (and how many ways can one prepare fish?); cut to Ev, talking about wanting babies. But then cut to Harold, engaging in marital rape; cut to Harold, telling Ev her only role is to be his wife. Then add into the mix that the institution of marriage itself is questioned as an empty formula, if only by the nihilistic Martin, and that Ev sleeps with Martin and in fact runs away with him, and suffers not a whit for it, and what do we have? Has Corman run off the rails, or is he offering a compelling critique of mid-century mores?

You be the judge.

And if there is another end-of-the-world film in which the catastrophe itself is so underplayed, I will eat my copy of The Omega Man.

July 11, 2005

Oryx and Crake IV

A student in my summer course has posted a series of interesting posts about Atwood's novel.

Previous posts about the novel: here, here, and here.

July 10, 2005

One of my students

is writing about Left Behind II: Tribulation Force and so I watched it today. While aggravating on a number of levels — apart from anything else, surely the Antichrist would not be so easy to fool? Surely he would have all sorts of minions to prevent people from copying files from his laptop? — it was also oddly compelling. Now I'm watching (the star studded) Outbreak on tv; this course will be the death of me.

July 3, 2005

Grade inflation

A few days ago, David at Cronaca pointed toward an interesting discussion at Marginal Revolution on grade inflation. Be sure to follow the links to this post at Economist's View, and to this French study (PDF file). Bottom line: the lower in rank the instructor, the higher the grades, for obvious reasons (the need for decent teaching evaluations, first and foremost). Fair warning to all incoming students.

June 29, 2005

Peyton Place on the edge of the volcano

Well, I didn't cry. And what a good film. Fred Astaire was marvellous, as was Ava Gardner as the retired party girl. Gregory Peck was too soulful for the stolid Dwight Towers of the novel; he took the character off in other, more cinematic directions. I can't really say a good time was had by all — in fact, the class was uncharacteristically quiet as the credits rolled — but the discussion was good once everyone had cleared their throats.

June 28, 2005

I hate to brag

but a student in my summer course has recently published a fine series of posts on George Stewart's Earth Abides, with at least one more promised.

And speaking of that class, why, oh why, did I schedule a screening of On the Beach? I just finished rereading the novel last night and yes, it is dated, the dialogue is clunky, the gender politics suck, and the characterization is wooden, but nevertheless yours truly was shedding real salt tears. It was the dead baby, you see. There is an excellent chance I will humiliate myself in class tomorrow. Unless the DVD player stops working. Saayy ...

June 15, 2005

Writing tools

Tony, who I doubt needs them, links to Fifty Writing Tools. I can already see that I should have a closer look.

June 14, 2005

The End is Nigh

It is scheduled for next Monday, in fact, starting at 1pm. The course blog for my summer course, end of days and all that, is up and already full of all sorts of end-of-the-world goodness. And two students are so eager for the apocalypse they are up and blogging, one a veteran but the other brand new to the blogosphere. Drop by, anyone interested in a heads up for Judgement Day.

May 25, 2005

Novels of female education

An MA student with whom I am doing a Directed Reading course this summer has set up a blog, Familiar Letters, in which to comment on her reading of novels of female education. If the subject at all interests you, you may want to wander over and give her forty fits, as my mother would say, by leaving a comment. This is the first time I have asked a graduate student to blog. Marvellously useful tool with which to keep in touch with each other while she is reading, particularly as she and I are both leaving town at different points and won't always be able to meet regularly.

So far she has looked at Eliza Haywood's The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, and Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote.

May 19, 2005

I Am Legend

[cross-posted to the blog for my summer course]

Quite the cover, hey?

When I was a kid I read constantly. Sometimes I would read while I walked down the street. I still read constantly, but not quite so dangerously. Until today: I picked up Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954) as I hadn't read it and it is the novel on which The Omega Man, which we will be watching the first week of class [in my summer course], is based. I got the book from the library and took it to an appointment Uptown, to read in the waiting room. Driving back to campus, I found myself sitting at red lights sneaking a quick paragraph. (What would I have said if a cop had stopped me?)

Not sure what it is about this novel that has jerked me back into the past. It is an old paperback edition from 1964,¹ just like the yellowing books my father kept in the basement when I was growing up: Ian Fleming, Edgar Rice Burroughs, various Ace Doubles. Maybe the smell of the fragile paper has touched some atavistic memory and I am again that antisocial little bookworm. The book is certainly a throw-back in more ways than one: at a mere 122 pages, it would be considered a novella by current standards.

I haven't seen The Omega Man for a couple of years but I seem to remember the creatures more as zombies, à la Beneath the Planet of the Apes, rather than as vampires. They are certainly not very smart vampires; more like the shuffling creatures of old European legend than the silvery-tongued Count (or the silvery-haired Spike).

Anxiety, chain-smoking, binge-drinking, near madness: the immobile Heston only hints at these elements in the film; Robert Neville in the book is a much more credible portrait of the beleaguered man, alone. Also, I don't remember much back story in the film, whereas the deaths of Neville's wife and daughter figure pretty significantly in the novel, in a loaded, can't-talk-about-it sort of way. Matheson is masterful with the succinct yet telling psychological detail. It's a tightly-packed 122 pages.

Another element absent from the film, at least in such detail: Neville's compulsion to research into the plague. (And here I had thought that Dan Simmons had introduced the science-fictional — as opposed to the fantasy/horror/folkloric — vampire). But Neville is not, it is important to note, a scientist. And some of his experiments border on, or become, atrocities.

Practically the first thing we are told is Neville's intense sexual frustration, his anger that the vampire women expose themselves to him to taunt him and draw him out. The sexuality in this text is very much of its time: uncomfortable and repressed. He is the adult version of the guy on a date begging the girl to have sex with him because sexual frustration can be physically damaging to men, doncha know? Neville, in his thirties, is like a tortured Catholic schoolboy who doesn't know what to do with his erection:

Did he have to start thinking about them [the vampire women] again? He tossed over on his stomach with a curse and pressed his face into the hot pillow. He lay there, breathing heavily, body writing slightly on the sheet. Let the morning come. His mind spoke the words it spoke every night. Dear God, let the morning come. (Ch. 1, 8)

His response to his frustration is sadistic. It conflates with his empirical science. The interesting thing, for me, is his complete awareness of the process:

The cross. He held one in his hand, gold and shiny in the morning sun. This, too, drove the vampires away.

Why? Was there a logical answer, something he could accept without slipping on banana skins of mysticism?

There was only one way to find out.

He took the woman from her bed, pretending not to notice the question posed in his mind: Why do you always experiment on women? He didn't care to admit that the inference had any validity. She just happened to be the first one he'd come across, that was all. What about the man in the living room, though? For God's sake! he flared back. I'm not going to rape the woman!

Crossing your fingers, Neville? Knocking on wood?

He ignored that, beginning to suspect his mind of harboring an alien. Once he might have termed it conscience. Now it was only an annoyance. Morality, after all, had fallen with society. He was his own ethic.
....

But he wouldn't let himself pass the afternoon near her. After binding her to a chair, he secluded himself in the garage and puttered around with the car. She was wearing a torn black dress and too much was visible as she breathed....

At six-thirty her eyes opened. ...

Then she saw the cross and she jerked her eyes from it with a sudden rattling gasp and her body twisted in the chair.

"Why are you afraid of it?" he asked, startled at the sound of his own voice after so long.

Her eyes, suddenly on him, made him shudder. The way they glowed, the way her tongue licked across her red lips as if it were a separate life in her mouth. The way she flexed her body as it trying to move it closer to him....

"The cross!" he snapped angrily.

He was on his feet, the glass falling and splashing across the rug. He grabbed the sting with tense fingers and swung the cross before her eyes. She flung her head away with a frightened snarl and recoiled into the chair.

"Look at it!" he yelled at her.

A sound of terror-stricken whining came from her. Her eyes moved wildly around the room, great white eyes with pupils like specks of soot.

He grabbed at her shoulder, then jerked his hand back. It was dribbling blood from raw teeth wounds.

His stomach muscles jerked in. The hand lashed out again, this time smashing her across the cheek and snapping her head to the side.

Ten minutes later he threw her body out the front door and slammed it again in their [the vampires'] faces. Then he stood there against the door breathing heavily. Faintly he heard through the soundproofing the sound of them fighting like jackals for the spoils. (Ch. 7, 38-39)

Ten minutes can be a long time.

Oh, and did I mention that he killed his wife?: "'I put her away again,' he said. 'I had to do the same thing to her I'd done to the others. My own wife.' There was a clicking in his throat" (Ch.18, 105).

The interesting thing here is his acute self-awareness; he is no macho movie hero, stomping over the bodies obliviously. I mean, he's not oblivious. A surly Robinson Crusoe, full of liquor, quick with his fists. Cold and unlikable (well who wouldn't be?), but familiar. Somehow noble. And in the end, an icon of rugged individualism, toppled by a hoard of mutated vampires, the next stage in human evolution and culture. Sort of like the commie hoards (remember, 1954). Ruth, the infected woman sent to spy on him, looks more like Honey at the end:

Her reddish hair was drawn back into a tight cluster behind her head and clipped there. She looked very clean-cut and self-possessed.... Her smile with the tight, forced smile of a woman who was trying to forgo being a woman in favor of her dedication. (Ch.21, 118, 119)

I regret not putting this on the course, but the book order has gone in and really, there is just so much to choose from. So many books; so little time. But read it if you have the chance.

Fun fact:

Apparently a planned remake of The Omega Man, to have starred Arnold Scwharznegger, has bogged down. We all dodged a bullet there.

Here are some reviews:

By Lisa DuMond
By J.C. Maçek III: "the Thinking Person's Vampire Story"
By Alan David Price
brothersjudd.com discuss the novel as political allegory. Scroll down for loads of links.

¹ Richard Matheson, I Am Legend. Montreal: Bantam, 1964.

May 17, 2005

Literature and Film of the Apocalypse

Course blog up, in preliminary form, for English 3722: Contemporary Speculative Fiction: Literature and Film of the Apocalypse. Comments and suggestions welcome. And a big thank you to everyone who has already made suggestions.

May 4, 2005

Across the finish line!

Just entered the final grades for my last course. Hasn't really sunk in yet. Huge load fallen etc. etc. Though I have a pile of other pressing things, all due yesterday. Still, hope to get back to my usual level of posting pronto. Just after I go and have a nice nap. Just for a little while.

Meanwhile, for your perusal: Idioms illustrated by fourth graders (via BoingBoing) and heroes of atheism mugs and tea-towels (via things magazine). Major sellers, it would seem.

And, Mark Woods reminds us that it is the thirty-fifth anniversary of Kent State.

April 20, 2005

Will this be on the exam?

Finally! An avatar that gets my body right.

Make one yourself (via Lauren. Who looks pretty cranky.)

Along a similar theme . . .

April 15, 2005

Apocalypse soon ... keep radios handy

SFSignal links to a Guardian story about possible end-of-the-world scenarios (was it a slow news day?), and adds various sf texts about each one. The Website at the End of the Universe coincidentally (or... is is?) has its own series of apocalyptic links. I say, bring it on! I am very soon going to have to order the books for my summer course, "The Apocalypse in Text and Film."

In more cheerful news, the CBC will next month feature a series on sf. Here is the whole story from SF Canada:

Weekdays from May 16 through May 27 CBC Radio's Between the Covers will feature a special series of short speculative fiction, hosted and curated by Nalo Hopkinson. The series, entitled "Six Impossible Things," will include fiction by Marcie Tentchoff, Penn Kemp, Nancy Kilpatrick, Pam MacLean, Wade Bell, Terence M. Green, Nalo Hopkinson, Phyllis Gotlieb, Rhea Rose-Fleming, Sandra Kasturi, Dora Knez, Edward Willett, Ashok Mathur, Dan Rubin, Larissa Lai, Wilma Kenny, Yves Meynard, Nega Mezlekia, Candas Jane Dorsey, and Ven Begamudre. You'll have two opportunities to hear the work — weekday afternoons in the second half hour of the RoundUp (2:30 p.m.) and weeknights on Between The Covers at 10:40 p.m.

Here is Nalo's blog.

April 12, 2005

But then

this brought me back down.

March 31, 2005

UNBSJ English Honours Students

will present their Honours Theses this Friday (tomorrow), at 2 pm, in the Faculty/Staff Lounge. Free, all are welcome, refreshments. Michele Petley will present "When the Colonizer Becomes the Colonized: Unveiling Postcolonial Tendencies in Alistair's MacLeod's No Great Mischief," and Tom Halford will present "Reading and Writing The Diary of Samuel Pepys: Latent Guilt and Anxiety in Ink."

Local readers, pass it on.

March 17, 2005

Poetry coffeehouse

this evening, part of IWW@UNBSJ. It was organized by two of our fabulous local poets, Heather Craig and Susie Bowers, who both read, along with Anne Compton, Robert Moore, and several others. The idea was to read poems by women who had been influencial, ones own poems, or both. Bob read three poems about Helen of Troy, including "Helen" by H.D. and Margaret Atwood's "Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing," then read his own poem about Helen, and another about Penelope, both from So Rarely in Our Skins. Anne read a wonderful poem, part of a group project with which she is involved: several poets were turned loose in the basement of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery and asked to choose a piece of art and then write about it. Anne chose "Victoria Kynaston" by Allan Ramsay (1749), above, and wrote a lovely poem from the perspective of the sitter. It reminded me of Browning's "My Last Duchess" in some ways — the portrait of a woman, the emphasis on her as object — but with the corrective of being from the woman's point of view.

(Now that I think of it, the two poems would be powerful, taught together.)

March 15, 2005

How the Vote was Won

An early-twentieth-century suffragist comedy in one-act by Cicely Hamilton and Christopher St. John.

Local readers: come to a read-through by the students of ENGL3622: Writing by Women II, on Monday March 21 at 2pm in the Whitebone Lounge at UNBSJ. All welcome; free admission.

Part of International Women's Week @ UNBSJ.

Download the poster (11"×8.5" PDF).

March 11, 2005

Worst prof ever!

melinama recently collected some stellar examples of comments from student evaluations. Lots of gems, but the one that really got my goat is "This was supposed to be a class on great Victorian literature, but half the writers were women." Be sure to read the comments; there's a real conversation going on.

My favourite evaluation story was a comment received by a friend of mine, some years back:

She dresses really wierd.
And she takes the reading too seriously. They're just books.

Followed a close second by a comment one of Joe's students wrote: "I wish he would change his sweater."

Just so we don't despair, melinama also posts some tips on how to improve those evaluations. Here's one I try to follow: "Make hip references to celebrities, moral issues, wacky current events."

February 2, 2005

Discussing Elizabeth Barrett Browning's

use of morphine in my intro. class today (maybe I'm sleazy to pander but they really seem to brighten up when I mention the various addictions of the writers we're discussing) and was wishing, earlier this evening, that I had some myself. Had a meeting with the other members of my dept. at which I was presenting a somewhat contentious proposal about reorganization, and not only have I come down with a cold, but I developed a migraine. Usually I would have just left and gone home to bed, but didn't feel I could this time, it being my initiative and all. To add some piquancy to the evening, begged a ride home from the person at the table least enamoured with my proposal, and had to fight hard not to throw up in her new car as we made chitchat for twenty minutes.

Came home and decided to go right to bed, but was worried that the Jinker Boy, having been without me for some hours, would object:

Me: Sweetie, I'm very sorry, but Mummy has a headache and has to go to bed now.
JB: (not moving eyes from Blue's Clues DVD) Well go to bed then.
Joe: (snorts, then looks abashed and pats my shoulder).

So, doped up and clutching my ice packs, I crashed out and had vivid dreams about programme requirements.

January 31, 2005

It's the most wonderful time

of the year.

Well, not really. But I'm short on time and material.

Here is My Creepy Valentine and Chocolate Voodoo Doll (via Fishbucket).

Apropos of the card, above, my women's writing class is planning a performance of Cicely Hamilton and Christopher St. John's How the Vote Was Won: A Play in One Act, a very funny piece suitable for a group (Literature of the Women's Suffrage Campaign in England). I will post more. Or not.

January 27, 2005

Blow 'em up real good!

He's the last man on Earth. And he needs a drink.

I need to be thinking this term, off and on, about the summer course I will be teaching next July. It will be speculative fiction, but it can take any shape. I have always taught it with some sort of overarching theme: "Loving the Alien," "Gender in Space," or "Gender and Sexuality." This time I was thinking of going with single-sex societies. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland; Phillip Wylie's The Disappearance, which is back in print (here's the edition I have); Sheri Tepper's Gate to Women's Country; Suzy McKee Charnas's Holdfast Chronicles. But since it will be a summer course, and hence more concentrated, I can't really assign the same amount of reading as during the regular term and so I was hoping to fit in several films. Trouble is, can't think of any films based on my prospective theme. Maybe going back to some version of "Loving the Alien" would be more fruitful: hey, then I could show Alien (as you see, it's not necessarily really loving the alien, but more an exploration of how different writers try to create non-humans).

Later: Was thinking about this further and have more or less decided to go with the apocalypse (now there's a catch-phrase: relax, sit back, and go with the apocalypse). One of my favourite themes, as regular readers may know. I could use some of my same-sex societies — both Tepper and Charnas write about post-disaster cultures — and there are gazillion films: so many that I'm sure I can avoid Kevin Costner. Plus there's a cool a graphic novel series. There seems to be a sub-genre of same-sex societies within post-apocalyptic narratives; I wonder why? Is shaking up the heteronormative status quo that apocalyptic a concept? Is losing "the opposite sex" the most dreadful marker of loss and change that we can think of?

Possible cheery texts and films:

The Last Man by Mary Shelley.
John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids (1951), and the film (1962).
On The Beach: Nevil Shute's 1957 novel, and the 1959 film based on it.
A Boy and His Dog — Harlan Ellison's story and the 1975 film .
The Children of Men by P.D. James. Too bad Greybeard by Brian Aldiss seems to be out of print; they would work well together.
The Omega Man. A classic.
Luc Besson, La Dernier Combat (Fr, 1983)
Night of the Comet for some comic relief.

There is a ton of stuff; I think I will try to have pairs: either filmed versions of written texts, or at least texts and films that work closely together.

There are some RPGs too; don't know much about that but depending upon who signs up for the course, that could be worked in...

I'm multitasking as I write this. The remake of The Dawn of the Dead is on PPV. And I'll tell you one thing: I miss those nice, slow Romero zombies. None of whom were under ten.

Okay. That was tense.

January 9, 2005

Divided attention

Students in my Women's Writing class are just starting their blogs, and several of them are having an interesting conversation about Dorothy Wordsworth's journals.

January 6, 2005

New Course Blog

up and ... well, standing still, for the moment. But here, nonetheless.

Haven't added any content yet. And will still be tweaking the design. Not sure I like the colours in the sidebar, and the title is yucky. Any suggestions about how to make smoother fonts using a transparent background in Photoshop, send 'em on.

December 13, 2004

One almost down

and two to go. Classes, I mean.

I thought I was being modest and sensible by this year forgoing the annual enthusiastic list of things to accomplish before classes begin again. I figured I would only have one item on the list: clearing up my office of the backlog of papers that cover every horizontal space. Surely I could manage that, at least?

It's looking doubtful.

December 10, 2004

Yeah, I'm marking. So?!?

Buyer beware! A lot of us get cranky when university classes are treated like consumer products. Here is the recent post from D.G. Jerz that leads to the contentious article by Ailee Slater. Clancy steps back and flags some of the porcine responses to the Slater's complaint � or rather, to Slater herself.

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum writes about what he calls "the Cecil B. DeMille Syndrome": you know, those essays that begin, "In today's society ... " Which reminds me of the other Miriam's post of last month, "Write No Evil": among her suggestions: don't write, "This novel has many ideas." And no emoticons! ;-P

Gerald Lucas posts about the opportunities online learning may present to avoid the strictures of educational conditioning.

The cyclical furor over "liberal bias/groupthink in academia" seems peculiarly American, though we north of the 49th parallel had best not get too complacent. See the recent posts by John Holbo at Crooked Timber.

And finally, two for the road: Online University Grants Cat a Master's, Gets Sued (via Kairosnews), and the University of Bums on Seats (thanks, Sharon!).

December 7, 2004

Marking, but

I had to share. One of my first year students just wrote, of "The Gentleman's Study," "This poem is just a regurgitation of Swift's poem."

And thus do we get our little rewards.

December 1, 2004

Counting the hours

One ... more ... class.

Had our last prose narrative meeting this past Monday. A small, but very good group. We had discussions, rather than classes, and that was a pleasure.

Gender Studies finished today. Much larger, but also a good group. Quite a few of them clearly engaged with the course, and with each other, and I was glad to be able to offer them something to move on to (we are organizing for International Women's Day, starting next week;¹ there may be some action on campus climate issues as a result of recent — and some not-so-recent —anti-transgender harassment).

The intro. class will continue next term.

Marking-marking-marking for the next who-can-tell-how-long, but it all has to be tied-up before Dec. 14th when we leave for NYC for ten days or so.

¹ Mon. Dec. 6 at 1:30 in the Faculty/Staff lounge, if anyone is interested.

November 7, 2004

Foe

Have spent most of the evening putting together some links and discussion questions. for my class tomorrow on J. M. Coetzee's wonderful Foe. (It is a class in prose narrative before 1800, but we are reading two contemporary texts, Foe and Greg Hollingshead's Bedlam.) I love the way Coetzee evokes c18th language; it makes the ending all the more effective. Look, I can't explain, I have some marking to do; just read it.

It's short.

October 20, 2004

EEP!

One of my students just dropped my course, mainly, as far as I can tell, because she was uncomfortable with the blogging. Certainly there are security and privacy issues when asking students to blog that I may need to consider more carefully. (Still, I wish she had spoken with me first). How have others addressed such concerns?

October 12, 2004

Teaching/blogging

Clancy Ratliff has a great post called "Blogging and Writing Pedagogy" in which she lists some topics for an introductory workshop. Good comments and suggestions, too.

And Lilith (I thought I blogged this already but I don't see it. A "senior moment," as one of my friends would say, though frankly, in reference to my state of mind lately, that would be an insult to seniors) has a detailed and very useful post about the workshops she just finished. Lots of links, lots of food for thought.

Things my students say

Beowulf was rewarded for his heroic deeds with lots of dinner parties.

Sir Gawain was adept at the marital arts.

Faustus sold his soul to the Devil to become a magician.

October 7, 2004

If I didn't laugh I'd cry

Okay, this is hilarious. Or tragic, depending. I was obsessively following my referrer links (that is not the hilarious or tragic part. Well, or if it is, it pales in comparison) when I came to a reference on Beautiful Stuff to my link to Tom Wayman's poem, "Did I Miss Anything?" Go read the poem first, then read the comments on Beautiful Stuff.

Lost and found day

Yesterday was not a stellar day. Last minute fussing and administrative confusion with my grant application, two classes that were less than inspirational, and the inability to get online all yesterday evening (our server was down. Again.)

On the plus side: had a good conversation with two students after Gender Studies (they must have found the material compelling, even if I wasn't). The Jinker Boy's Scholastic book order came in, so there was fun reading in the evening¹. And I watched the second half of The Godfather. It really is one of those films that have become so iconic that we don't even look at it anymore. I had forgotten how out of step Pacino looks in his dark wool, there in swinging Las Vegas or with his bright young wife, like a Hasidim who's wandered into the Kentucky Derby.

¹ Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are came with a wonderful DVD — part of a really nice Scholastic series that I can't find on their difficult-to-search-site — that also includes In the Night Kitchen and The Nutshell Library. Watching the DVD I realised that Sendak finds children's feet as endearing as I do.

(Does that sound wierd?)

And can you believe that In the Night Kitchen was banned? Oh, yes:

In the Night Kitchen (1970) proved controversial on its release, as several well-meaning librarians and teachers reacted to Mickey's nudity by removing the book from the shelves and/or covering the child's offending genitalia with marker, tape, or other method of obscuring it.  The book continues to appear on lists of banned or challenged books, somewhat to the consternation of those who can find nothing disturbing or "sexual" in the nudity of such a young child as Mickey appears to be.
Sendak himself has said that he did not intend to be controversial with this book; his concern was more aesthetic, to avoid the "mess" that would result from Mickey's falling into the batter with his clothes on. (source)

Very practical, too.

<< Is anyone disturbed?

Bonus links:
Nice, visual Sendak page
Another nice page
Sendak exhibit in Pittsburgh
Wally Hastings' children's literature page.

September 29, 2004

Academic blogging

Liz Lawley has a useful resource page called "Weblogs in Academia." Lot's of good links about using blogs, wikis, etc., for both teaching and research.

Banned books

Watermark has a great, linky post on Banned Books Week.

My colleagues and I did a course not quite four years ago called Banned Books, and each of the six of us taught a two-week block. I did Aphra Behn (not banned in the usual sense, but banished from the canon for a century and a half). We taught it on overload and not everyone liked teaching a snippet to a largely unknown group so we never repeated the experiment, though I thought it was a great model. A books-into-films course could be taught the same way, or, well, anything with a lot of breadth. Maybe we'll do it again sometime.

September 24, 2004

Academic blogging

Crooked Timber points towards a Guardian piece on academic blogging. Clancy also links, and notes her relief that the article debunks the worry about theft of ideas. The article ends by alluding to the potential for conflict between faculty and administration of issues of ownership and control. This may seem like a non-starter to those of us who blog but enough concerns have been raised about intellectual property, that I wouldn't be surprised if there is some sort of crackdown, somewhere.

Which makes me feel (admit it you retired activist), a little gleeful.

September 14, 2004

Blogging for grades

Chuck links to a discussion about potential problems with classroom blogging. I have certainly seen the “vagueness” Steven Krause mentions and have taken to posting questions to help anyone who may be stalled. This year I am also emphasizing linking, to each other and to the wider world, so that posts aren’t just individual responses to the readings, not much different than a paper reading log, as some have been in the past. Just took my Prose Narrative Before 1800 class to the computer lab and got them all signed up with Blogger. A small but interested, and interesting, group; I am looking forward to seeing what they/we can do. It should be an interesting course: it’s all built around “conversations” between 18thc texts and writers, between 18thc and contemporary texts, and among the students themselves.

September 11, 2004

Teaching tools

"New Tools for Back-to-School: Blogs, Swarms, Wikis, and Games" in the current issue of Educause Review (from mamamusings). Brian Lamb's piece on educational uses for wikis is particularly useful

Dennis Jerz on evaluating student blogging, via George at Palimpsest. I like the idea of a "blog portfolio" as it gives students some ability to shape their work retrospectively, and the categories look useful too.

Tips on getting everyone involved during groupwork — often an issue for me, too — also at Palimpsest.

Student Jeff Wei writes in the student paper about Chuck Tryon's use of blogging in class. A positive article, though you have to love the student who is quoted as saying that blogging is "horrible [and] annoying."

September 1, 2004

Final pre-workshop post

Our web gurus here at UNB have put together a useful and attractive page, Blogging @ UNB, which links to material of particular interest to academic bloggers and those interested in using weblogs in teaching, as well as to some foundational material about blogging itself. One of the links is to blogshop, an excellent resource for new bloggers.

Some other links:

blog research:
blogonblog: Torill Mortensen and Jill Walker's "blog about using blogs."
blogresearch: "a shared space for discussion of blog-related research"
Seb's OpenMind-Research Blogs

edublogging:
Edublog WebRing
English 515 — Advanced Professional Writing: excellent links!
Moving to the Public: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom
PhDweblogs.net
Topic Exchange—Edblogging

August 19, 2004

Another syllabus

And now for something completely slightly different...

Server down

from 5pm yesterday. Fine this morninging, as you see. Working on a second syllabus today so doubt I will post anything interesting. Until I post the link, of course.

August 17, 2004

Too busy

with my course syllabus to post.

But it's looking kinda nice, isn't it?

Thanks again to Liz.

Update (1:21am): Well I was proud, but the site seems to be broken in IE5.2 for Mac O/S X. Crap. Well, I'm too tired to deal with it right now. (It looks great in Safari, btw).

August 16, 2004

Adieu

One of the three students, of the many I have forced to blog, who kept up their blogging after the class ended has decided to pack it in. His final post outlines his reasons. The three of them, all from the same sf class, formed a real little community; it feels like the end of an era. Though the other two have spread out and are building wider online networks, so they should survive the rupture (you hear me, you two?). Classes starting soon, and a whole new group to suck into the vortex introduce to blogging. Though no-one could replace Zhengshu; we'll miss you.

August 13, 2004

Courseware

Setting up Conversations, a new blog for my upcoming Prose Narrative Before 1800 course, with Liz's fabulous courseware. So far so good, and much easier to do than I had anticipated. Haven't added much in the way of content yet, and plan to tweak the look, add some graphics, etc. etc. But the bones are there, and they're good ones.

[Remember the Absolutely Fabulous episode where Germaine Greer, playing Eddy's fantasy mother, tells her, "Your entire body hangs off my cheekbones"?]

If I do upgrade I'll eventually port everything over, but classes start in three weeks so I have to be practical. And I'm embarrassed to say it, but I've never really minded the fiddly stuff, as long as I have time, so going through the same process for three courses isn't really that dreadful to contemplate.

In fact, I'm having a lot of fun.

July 5, 2004

Gilman

Some great links about Charlotte Perkins Gilman and nineteenth-century women writers in general at wood s lot.

Here is my student's site from the sf course last fall.

June 25, 2004

Gender links

The Dominion posts a link to Kate Bornstein’s Gender Aptitude Test. Something for my Gender Studies class in Sept.

Check out Christine's posts at ms.musings about the HUGE class action suit against Wal-Mart.

Sarah Bakewell reviews Norma Clarke’s The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (via Cup of Chicha). I will order this for our library, pronto; at first glance it seems to be an updated, indepth analysis of some of the same dynamics Gayle Tuchman and Nina Fortin looked at years ago with regards to the 19th-century, but with earlier writers.

June 21, 2004

Choosing a novel

for my upcoming introduction to gender studies course.¹ I had thought of Morrison's Beloved, of course, but it's been done to death and I wanted to do something Canadian. I want something accessible, that treats gender and race issues, by a contemporary author. One of my colleagues recommended I look at

Anita Rau Badami's The Hero's Walk and Tamarind Mem,
Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night, and
Bharati Mukherjee's Desirable Daughters.

I think that I will go with Tamarind Mem. The Hero's Walk is set entirely in India, and I wanted to be able to talk about cross-cultural experience. Desirable Daughters fits the bill and I look forward to reading it myself, but I think it might not be entirely accessible to a lower level class of non-English majors, and Cereus Blooms at Night is wrenching, even just skimming through (it is for that reason that I thought of, and discarded, Ann Marie MacDonald's Fall On Your Knees: it is simply too daunting to think of reading it again, even though I know students love it.) But there is still time to drive the staff at the bookstore crazy by changing my order, so if anyone has any other suggestions, please don't hesitate to send them on.

¹ Issues of Gender (ed. Ellen G. Friedman and Jennifer D. Marshall) is the main course text.

June 16, 2004

Violent writing

A couple of weeks ago, John Lovas posted about the recent spate of ludicrous overreactions to students who give vent in writing, and called for professional organizations to adopt resolutions and produce guidelines for instructors (just read about it on the Kairos News listserv). I wonder if this is something ACCUTE should consider? As far as I know there have been no Canadian incidents, but a resolution of support might not be a bad idea.

[I have just sent this message to the ACCUTE listserv].

June 5, 2004

Bedlam II

Recently finished reading Greg Hollingshead's forthcoming novel, Bedlam (previously mentioned here). I enjoyed it immensely.

Am deciding about whether or not to put it on my prose narrative before 1800 course next fall. On the plus side: it's a compelling read, but more importantly, Hollingshead is giving a reading in Saint John and the class could attend. On the negative side: the reading is early in October so I will have had little time to develop a context; the students will have read Bedlam before they have read much from the period itself; and reading a contemporary novel might throw off their reading of 18th-century texts. On balance, though, I think that the chance to hear — and possibly interact with — a living, breathing author overrides other considerations. And I will have a month to set the stage.

Links:

Artist Rod Dickinson's construction of James Tilly Matthews' Air Loom

Mike Jay's The Air Loom Gang (Bantam Press, 2003)

John Haslam's Illustrations of Madness:  Exhibiting a Singular Case of Insanity, and a No Less Remarkable Difference in Medical Opinion:  Developing the Nature of Assailment, and the Manner of Working Events; with a Description of the Tortures Experienced by Bomb-bursting, Lobster-cracking, and Lengthening the Brain (London: Rivingtons, 1810) (facsimile.)

Roy Porter's facsimile edition, with introduction, of Haslan's text.

May 30, 2004

Quaker narratives

wood s lot links to to the Digital Quaker Collection. Wonderful, wonderful resource! Now I can point my students towards some actual texts instead of simply assuring them that scads of these narratives existed, that they feed directly into the novel, and that women wrote many, many of them.

May 23, 2004

Whither PowerPoint?

Brett Peters has a slew of links, all of which take the piss out of PowerPoint (from Jim Henley via Alas, a blog). And it's all true. And yet, I have requested "smart" (I know, I know) classrooms next Sept. I like using visuals, and they are better quality on a screen than in black and white on overheads; I use overheads to provide an outline for the class; overheads are expensive, and not environmentally sound. I'm not planning to put my lectures in bullets, but I think there must be other, intelligent and interesting ways to use the technology. Keynote, in my case. Is anyone out there going to defend presentation technology? Anyone seen it used well, to enhance, not to dumb down?

May 19, 2004

Bedlam

I was lucky enough to be given bound proofs of Greg Hollingshead's forthcoming novel, Bedlam. Isn't it a marvellous cover? Hollingshead is coming to Saint John in the fall as part of our annual Lorenzo Society Reading Series, and I am wondering whether or not to put the novel on my "Prose Narrative Before 1800" course. It might be interesting to discuss a contemporary text that seeks to represent the period we are studying, and it would be wonderful for them to be able to attend a reading and ask questions of a real, live author.

Here is what he writes about the novel:

Bedlam is a novel based on the true story of James Tilly Matthews, an inmate of Bethlem Hospital at Moorfields in London during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Although delusional, Matthews is in for political reasons, and his wife Margaret spends ten years trying to get him out. Her primary opponent, the author of an eloquent description of his condition (the first extended account of a paranoid system in English), is the author and apothecary John Haslam, a man compromised by defending an imprisonment he has been given no reason for, of a patient who he knows would be better off released. Bedlam is told in the voices of these three characters.

The British social historian Roy Porter has told this story most thoroughly in his 1988 edition of Haslam's book concerning Matthews, Illustrations of Madness (1810). While exercising some fictional licence, I am doing my best to be faithful to the characters, their voices, their experiences, and the times.

Homepage.
HarperCollins Interview on Bedlam.
Working the Airloom: on writing historical fiction.
Interview (Nov. 03).
Audio of Hollingshead reading from The Roaring Girl, winner of the 1995 Governor General's Award for Fiction.

May 12, 2004

Blogging and Pepys

One of our Honours students is thinking of writing an honours thesis on Pepys. He expressed interest in some sort of comparison between what Pepys did, and blogging. Obviously he wouldn't be the first to see the connection: there is Phil Gyford's on-line Pepys diary project, and the Pepys Projects link directories (I and now II). He hasn't got too far with it yet (and may in fact go in another direction altogether), but if he did do Pepys I would be involved, as the resident Restoration/18th-c person and sole blogger. We have a program in Information and Communication Studies here, and they would no doubt prove a resource. He (the student) has already done a webpage on Pepys. He seems interested in self-representation in life writing, online and on paper, and authorial negotiation of public and private. I mentioned to him that there are a plethora of academics in the area working on some of these very questions. I would welcome any suggestions for possible directions in which to point him to help him focus and narrow his project.

May 7, 2004

Collecting links for teaching

Tetrameter.com: "a page devoted to four-footed verse" (from The Salt-Box).

ReadPrint "offers thousands of free books for students, teachers, and the classic enthusiast" (via Stephany Aulenback).

May 6, 2004

Wikis in class

Samantha Blackmon points towards a post at Common Craft called "Wikis Described in Plain English." Like George, I'm thinking of using a wiki for teaching next Sept.: I am considering having the students in my intro. to lit. in English class build a course wiki for studying (exams — and what might be on them — being close to their hearts). One year I had them do a collaborative study guide which I posted on-line, but that was a lot of work (for me) and I'm not sure how much ownership they felt by the end of the process. But a wiki is ongoing and offers the instant gratification of creating something immediately. And they sound pretty straightforward to work with; I'll experiment over the summer.

May 5, 2004

One down, one to go

Signed off on one class today—er, yesterday. Just my intro. class left to finish: half-way through their exams, then a few odds and ends. Can't imagine teaching a spring course. Classes have already started. Yikes!

April 21, 2004

Beckett's Endgame

A brief brag: Robert Moore, a colleague of mine, recently mounted a production of Beckett's Endgame (here's a review), and my introductory students did a webpage about the production, of which I am very proud.

April 18, 2004

Note to self

Like the author of Arete, I am attaching a copy of this Tom Wayman poem to all future syllabi. And I'll keep a few in my satchel, for good measure.

April 14, 2004

We're teaching him to share

Our exam period started yesterday, and my students have their first exam in less than an hour. Rather them than me; if I had to write anything more than my name this morning I would be in deep trouble. All three of us have the cold from hell — brought into the house by Typhoid Jinker Boy and passed around — and the worst of it is that he is feeling so rotten that none of us can get the solid night's sleep we all so desperately need. And he won't give up that damn soother, even with his little nose so plugged up!

Anyway, I'll go in there and try to keep my eyes from crossing, and hope no-one asks any hard questions.

March 26, 2004

Looking good about now

jill/txt points towards grading software. That's right. Why should students be the only ones who can cheat?

March 20, 2004

Heart of Darkness

wood s lot links to In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885–1960. Students of English 1200: here is some context for our reading last week, and next week as well.

February 17, 2004

Introducing...

Three former students who blogged for my sf class last term have not only kept up their blogs, but recently refurbished them. If you would like to see what three of UNBSJ's best and brightest are up to, check out (in alphabetical order) A Ratboy's Notebook, blogging it, and Zhengshu's New Book (brand new; Consumption of Cacti contains previous posts).

January 31, 2004

If a blogger posted in the forest and nobody read it...

Joseph Duemer at Reading and Writing has a thoughtful post on blogging and audience. He writes, “When I began the first version of this weblog I had little sense of audience.” I have also recently been thinking of readership. When I began this blog last summer I was mainly writing for myself: doodling on the keyboard, noting things I wanted to remember. The only person who seemed to be reading was my significant other. I was gob-smacked when one of my colleagues mentioned that he had also been reading. Shortly thereafter I asked my sf class to start blogging, and began blogging to them, including the teacherly tone and excess of explanation. Guess it showed: Don at Revolutionary Moderation read the blog during that time and commented, “I get the feeling, looking around, that the blog is primarily meant to be read by her students, but you know, funny thing about the internet...” And he was right. I am only a Flippery Fish—one link or so away from a Slimy Mollusk—but a modest number of complete strangers have visited, and some have come back. And yet they don’t always feel like complete strangers, either; many are academics of one sort of another, and there is something refreshing about discussing our work mediated by the screen and keyboard, not having to worry about institutional relationships. Then there is the newborn Palimpsest, a new group blog spearheaded by George H. Williams, set up to explore applying the open source model to teaching materials.

Some of my students from that first class are still reading, and a couple are keeping up their own blogs (here, and here), and now there’s the new women’s writing class, so my students will remain an important part of my projected audience. But knowing that there are others out there, strangers, has given me a wider sense of scope and potential for something that started out as a mole-blind experiment.

And then, as Joseph also comments, the technology itself is fun.

January 28, 2004

Brave Nude World

I always tell my students to to define their criteria when they are critiquing or reviewing a text. Well here, via Ed via Maud Newton, is a site that is very clear on the definition of a noteworthy sf text: one that includes positive portrayals of nudism. Examples:

[Philip Jose] Farmer's first Riverworld novel, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, begins promisingly enough, from a nudist point of view: Most of the approximately 35 billion people who ever lived on Earth are mysteriously resurrected along the banks of a 10-million mile river on a distant planet, and no one has any clothes.

and

... [Piers] Anthony's [work] cannot be taken very seriously as good writing or even good science fiction.... Nevertheless, the books of his "Adept" series deserve passing mention, since they are among the few in which we have a society where complete nudity is the rule ...

January 27, 2004

Cultural vocabulary

I'm teaching Frankenstein to my intro. class this week. Today I mentioned that Victor Frankenstein is immediately repulsed as soon as the creature moves, particularly when he sees its “dull and yellow” eyes. He does not have even a fleeting moment's elation after virtually years of obsessive work. I made a comparison with the classic film: blank looks. You know: "It's alive!" They laughed, more at their professor bug-eyed and yelling, than in recognition.

The incident reminded me of the last time I taught "Ozymandias" and, in an effort to find common ground, mentioned that the poem reminded me of Charlton Heston falling to his knees when he sees the Statue of Liberty, at the end of The Planet of the Apes, and howling, "Noooo!" Again blank looks. Didn't I mean Mark Wahlberg?

At least I didn't fall to my knees.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said--"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert....Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1817)

[Charlton Heston, actor, Republican, and past president of the NRA. Look on his works and despair.]

January 26, 2004

Welcome, Palimpsest

Palimpsest ("Open source teaching resources. Good stuff, free") is already proving to be a valuable place to visit. I'm excited to be a participant. And many, many thanks to George H. Williams for all his work; the site looks great! Mauve, yet professional. Of course, one would expect such restrained yet lively taste from a dix–huitièmiste.

January 19, 2004

What I've been doing

Had a surprise birthday party for Joe on Friday, which wasn't, as it turned out, a surprise, though he was very gracious and played along. I'm now exhausted and broke, but it was a good party.

Have a migraine today and spent it in bed with my trusty ice-packs. Awake now at this ungodly hour but back to bed soon. Cancelled class tomorrow; it's for their own good.

My laptop has died. Enough said. How to get a new one? Sigh.

The new blog for the women's writing class is percolating nicely.

January 12, 2004

On-line Teaching Resources II

Following up on a previous entry: George H. Williams is organizing a blog for those interested in developing a way to share teaching resources on the web. Go to his site for more information.

I've signed up.

January 9, 2004

On-line Teaching Resources

George H. Williams has started to explore the idea of some sort of on-line mechanism to share teaching resources (a blog, or a wiki [whatever that is!!]?). Judging by the comments to his post, many others would be interested in joining in. I know that I would, and will keep an eye on developments. I feel the same dissatisfaction with password-protected courseware, like our own WebCT here at UNBSJ, that is expressed here. In fact I, like many others, am in the process of shifting away from WebCT; I still have it set up this term, but I have also set up a course blog for one class, which is a much more elegant option. I doubt I would abandon WebCT completely, but I wouldn't be sorry to avoid its clunky discussion function. I suppose there are security and privacy issues for the students; I will look forward to hearing what GHW et al. have to say about that. I seem to remember a discussion some months ago now at mamamusings about the ethics involved in blogging for students and asking students to blog. These issues would all come to the fore again if one moved completely away from courseware. But the idea of sharing resources is tantalizing, and is anyway a separate issue from the briar-patch of students' on-line participation.

Postscript: here are some excellent posts from mamamusings last summer: what's wrong with courseware (it's closed); mt as courseware (scarily technical but I am getting closer to biting the bullet); and professorial ethics and boundaries (blogging and students; this one generated some very interesting discussion. And—full circle—an entry by George W. Williams seems to have acted as catalyst. And a post from Weez Blog).

January 6, 2004

Students, blogging

By and large, requiring the students to blog for the sf class was successful; those who took to it formed a real little online community (links to all the blogs on the right). However, some of them never really got going, and in at least one case it was because they were uncomfortable with the technology. I gave them the option of traditional journaling, and one took me up on it, but when I read her journal after class had ended, I was sorry that she hadn't been in the mix all along. So, for the Writing by Women class starting the day after tomorrow, I will not give them the paper option (though I will give them the option of giving me or a classmate their entries to post). I have also set up a group blog, writingwomen, for those who do not want to set up their own. I suspect that most will use it, but you never know; some of the students in the sf class were clear that they wanted to have their own blogs, even though they had never done it before.

To be continued.

December 10, 2003

I'll post this, then crash

Something more on the recent discussion of Ballard's Crash and the question of why it was even on an sf course. One of my students just posted impressions of the novel:

I didn't even see the world of Crash as Earth, or even the possible future Earth, but instead "a Counter-Earth", sort of a Twighlight Zonesque concept. I know, I watch too much television. The World Ballard is depicting, initially seemed to me, like a doppelganger world, with negating duplicates of everyone on the existing Earth.

Of course the writer is not arguing literally that Ballard has written an alternate universe narrative, but I'm wondering if one couldn't justify categorizing the novel as sf based solely on its tone?

December 9, 2003

Tis the season

It's exam time; the students are haunting the hallways looking simultaneously exhausted and wired and the faculty are not much better. None but the very dedicated are wearing make-up or fiddling with their hair; for most of us, finding matching socks is the limit of our vanity (or more likely, of our energy).

A couple of weeks ago I was snarling with irritation that the tinsel and lights were already clogging every sight-line; Xmas seemed a long way in the future. Now it is less than two weeks away and the Jinker Boy is the only one for whom I have presents. We�re flying by the seat of our pants; we only made my department's annual party because I happened to glance at the kitchen calendar not an hour and a half before it began. (Sorry, SB, if you're reading this.) And as usual, I started the month with grandiose plans to make presents for people — I make origami mobiles...or, at least, I did — but now they�ll be lucky to get one crane.

On the plus side, I have already begun, very tentatively because there are still exams to proctor and mark, the Xmas reading binge. Various books are beguilingly scattered around the house. Am particularly eager to sit down with True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (go here for a review and an excerpt).

It won the Booker in 2001. I'm literally on the first page, but it's fascinating — Carey is trying to reproduce the voice of a barely literate man, the famous Australian outlaw Ned Kelly. My students and I were recently talking about books that use invented jargon, like Antony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, and how after a surprisingly brief time the reader becomes acclimatized (an excerpt for those who wonder what I mean). Perhaps there will be a similar dynamic here, though I wouldn't want the language to become transparent, just comfortable. Now that I think of it, perhaps some of Faulkner is a better comparison: As I Lay Dying comes to mind. Here is a link to a site about Kelly, and another, and here�s one about his lieutenant, Joe Byrne.

The Kelly gang was famous for, among other things, its homemade armour.

The State Library of Victoria in Melbourne, where the armour is held, has some cool Ned Kelly e-cards:

Can only imagine how such an apparition must have seemed to those who saw it.

We saw a fascinating art exhibit a few years ago — okay, almost a decade ago — at the Met in NYC: Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly series, painted in the mid-1940s. He really captured the other-worldly quality the armor gave the men. Here is one of the paintings:

There is something Quixotic about this image. Another part of my interest, of course, is reading about another ex-colony: one with which I often feel that Canada has more in common, than we do with the U.S.

Well, what began as a whingeing yet cryptic few lines has turned into a long blather. And a cranky baby and his cranky mum need to go to bed.

No comment

A student in my intro. class just came up to me in the hallway and asked, of the exam the class is about to write in two hours, "Is it hard?"

December 5, 2003

Crash test dummy

Two weeks ago I had my sf class read J.G. Ballard's Crash. (For anyone unfamiliar with the novel, here is the blurb from the back cover:

In this hallucinatory novel, an automobile provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a 'TV scientist' turned 'nightmare angel of the highways,' experiments with erotic atrocities among auto crash victims, each more sinister than the last. James Ballard, his friend and fellow obsessive, tells the story of this twisted visionary as he careens rapidly toward his own demise in an internationally orchestrated car crash with Elizabeth Taylor. A classic work of cutting-edge fiction, Crash explores both the disturbing implications and horrific possibilities of contemporary society's increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations.

A little overblown, but you get the idea.)

This is the second class I have asked to read this novel, and while the previous one uniformly disliked it, they did so with none of the vehemence of the current group (see here, here and here [26/11/03:9am]). Of course they are two different groups of people, but I wonder if asking this year’s bunch to blog might have increased their comfort levels with me, and each other, and allowed them to be more forthright.

One aspect of the whole discussion has given me real pause: two students told me that the novel had made them extremely uncomfortable due to events in their own pasts. I had not considered this possibility with this particular text; certainly it’s full of graphic descriptions of sex and physical injuries, but the sex is consensual and the injuries are from car crashes: it lacks the sort of coercion, abuse of power, or interpersonal violence that would have automatically impelled me to issue a content warning. Actually, I have only once ever put something on a course that I thought warranted such a warning: I showed Boys Don’t Cry last year in my intro. to gender studies class, because the subject was important enough to override considerations of comfort (here is the official page from Fox, which manages not to mention that Brandon Teena was transgendered). I put Crash on this year’s course as part of a section on technology interfacing with sexuality (we also read William Gibson’s “Burning Chrome” and Candas Jane Dorsey’s “(Learning About) Machine Sex”), but while it is an early example of the treatment of this theme, because of the reactions this year I doubt I will assign the whole novel again. Perhaps just an excerpt; there is one published in the RE/Search edition of The Atrocity Exhibition that I have, that would work.

Anyway, apart from anything else, I realized that I don’t want to read it again, so how can I teach it?

The whole discussion was an interesting exercise, however. The students questioned whether it is sf at all, and I have to agree that it is only in the broadest sense. It seems to be set at the time of the writing (pub. 1971), but it is strangely prophetic in its evocation of a world where individuals are disassociated from any sense of community by the impersonality of their surroundings; to whatever extent that was true thirty years ago, it must be even more so now. And even though that last may be arguable, the novel is prescient in terms of sf trends.

One of my students wrote a somewhat more appreciative blog entry than most of his classmates, and I think it’s worth quoting at length:

Seeing the reaction of the class towards James Ballard's Crash, I felt inclined to say a few things about it that I think I left unsaid. When we were on our break i was explaining to Krystal how i had felt about this novel. I told her about when I had visited England when i was about 13 and my parents and I were at the Piccadilly train station and somehow i got seperated from my parents and I ended up getting up close to the actual platform of the tracks, eventually the train had come and it whizzed by me and it just caught me offguard. It didn't scare me neither did it fascinate me, for me those 30 seconds of the train whizzing by me with all the lights, sounds and wind will always be a memory. This is how I felt about Crash. The whole novel seemed to me as just a plethora of sexual images. To the point where I had just become numb. And this is where I maybe understood where Ballard was coming from. Media in the contemporary world seems to forcefeed society with images of violence and sex and more imporatantly death, to the point where we take it for granted. In my opinion technology has amost numbed us to these aspects of society. We watch violence and death on the news and it does not seem to affect us anymore. The abundance of sex and our continued interactions in everything that we come in contact whether it's advertisements, movies, sitcoms whatever, we take sex and it's societal implications for granted. Maybe Ballard believes that we shouldn't.

To an extent, I had to justify choosing the novel, and that made me think about it beyond the obvious human/technological interface idea. It is, above all, a novel of ideas. A concept novel. I think that Ballard had this neato idea about people who got off on car crashes as emblems of what he saw as dangerous social and cultural trends, but instead of writing a story, as one of my students wished on his Crash webpage, he sat down and wrote a whole novel. I have to say it: that sort of unremitting focus in spite of all other considerations: it’s such a guy thing. But that being said, and as I remarked to my students, they may have hated it but I doubt that they will forget having read it. They may forget characters or incidents, but they won’t forget the queasy feeling they had as they read it, or the central linkage of sex, twisted metal, and wounds. And how long do they think they would have remembered, in comparison, an earnest editorial, say, on over-dependence on technology? And really, how else can we measure the success of a piece of writing but by the strength of its impact? One of my students wrote :

There's a saying I've heard once or thrice that every personal library should have one book that can offend anybody. Well, now my library has such a book, and it's name is Crash.... it's staying in my library as that book that can offend anyone. A trophy, if you will, to a literary war-wound received during my university days.

It is a fascinating novel; it must be practically unique in being so full of sex, from cover to cover, yet in utterly failing to titillate. It is the most unsexy dirty book that one can imagine, and that can hardly be unintentional in a writer of Ballard’s talent. (That is one reason why the Cronenberg film is so irritating: it could not, by virtue of being a visual medium, never mind the beautiful actors, achieve the almost ascetic quality that the novel has. Perversely ascetic—degradedly and begrimedly ascetic—or do I mean passionless? Or just enervated?). No-one in it to like, or sympathize with. Or, to even understand. Ballard makes us feel the same disassociation, the same anomie, as his characters. I suspect that that is the real reason for the strong reactions from many readers, myself included.

I can’t help thinking that Ballard must have had in mind the old comparison between being compelled by something, and not being able to look away from an accident. “You know. It was like a car crash; I couldn’t look away.”

November 14, 2003

Mondo Barbie

Students of Engl 3722: apropos of our discussion of John Varley's "The Barbie Murders," which led to those disturbing disclosures about how so many of us abused our Barbies when we were wee, here is a page that explains how to safely behead a Barbie.

And here is a link to Mondo Barbie, a collection of stories about Barbies, including Varley's.

November 8, 2003

Second blast of the trumpet

I'm teaching a new course on women's writing for January 2004, and am in the middle of putting together the syllabus. For the first class I am planning to introduce the students to some anti-women texts, and so just did a web search for John Knox's The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558). Imagine my surprise to discover that there is a recent horror novel, by Eric McCormack, that uses the same title. I don't usually read contemporary horror, but this review makes it sound something special. McCormack teaches c17th lit. at the U of Waterloo, apparently: he is ONE OF US.

Uh–oh: further searching has turned up another novel, A Monstrous Regiment of Women (2000) by Laurie R. King. What on earth is going on?!??

Unknown artist, portrait of John Knox 1509-1572

November 7, 2003

Rochester, oh Rochester!

We read John Wilmot's "The Imperfect Enjoyment" and Aphra Behn's "The Disappointment" today in my intro. class. A significant number of the young men in the class thought that both poems were tragic. The women were silent on the issue.

(Here is Mark Ynys-Mon's "shrine" to Rochester, with some interesting links: who knew that there was a site called Pornokrates, advertising "historic smut for the discerning voyeur"?)

(Eddie Anderson as Rochester; Jack Benny)

September 23, 2003

On Pope

Here is a link to a blog entry on Alexander Pope posted on Aaron Haspel's godofthemachine.com (culling his readers to a select few since June 2002). Not a fan, but he has some insights. Not a fan of the c18th at all, I would suspect, and since Pope was such a self–conscious spokesperson of "the age" (if we can use the inclusive term for such a vital and changing period), he is damned by definition.

At any rate, my students in English 3204 just read Pope's "An Essay on Criticism" and "An Essay on Man," and may be in the mood for a little Pope–trashing. They liked the former, but he lost most of them with the latter.

September 21, 2003

Sir Gawain and the Green Pimp

I have been struck, (re)reading these old and middle English texts for my intro. class, at the number of elements in them, echoed in c19th texts, that I had previously labeled "modern." Neither angst, ambivalence, anomie, nor anxiety—you see how susceptible I am proving to medieval poetics, particularly alliterative verse—were invented by the moderns. And the nostalgia in which much c19th literature is steeped was part of the English literary tradition from the beginning.

The Green Knight and his talking head.

[Students: click on the graphic. And, here are two other useful sites: 1, 2.

And two student parodies: 1, 2.]

September 20, 2003

From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf...

Preparing for a series of classes on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I've really enjoyed re-reading it — it's been a long time and I had forgotten the careful patterning.

It's my theory that you need (well, I need) to read a text at least twice for it to enter into long�term memory.

Hold that thought: Sally the nasty little she's-lucky-she's-so-cute Schnauzer has just woken up the Jinker Boy from his peaceful nap in the back of the car; I am following the whole sorry story on the baby monitor. JB, like his mummy, does not like to be woken prematurely.

September 14, 2003

Madly off in all directions

I'm getting whiplash; I just spent two weeks immersed in Beowulf, and now I am rereading Dryden, Pope and Johnson in preparation for a class on c18th aesthetics. Then, back some centuries to Marie de France's Lanval. [Here is the comphrehensive site for the International Marie de France Society. And here is their logo:]

My sf students have begun to blog. Well, to be fair, some were blogging already; but they have begun to blog for their course with me. I will add their URLS to my list 'o links, as they come online. It's very exciting! There are some who seemed nonplussed by the idea, but there are enough others who are conversant with the internet, and willing to share their knowledge, that I have every confidence they will all be up and blogging soon.

September 7, 2003

Beowulf

Preparing for the first section of my intro. class, I was disconcerted to discover that there is a computer project called Beowulf. Their site is hosted by the Scyld Computing Corporation. I hope all those concerned read to the end.

I have a confession to make: I had never read Beowulf until I came to prepare for this class; the earliest texts I studied as an undergraduate were Chaucer's. I have been enjoying it immensely.

[first page of sole existing MS]

I am fascinated by the irony that what is commonly believed to be one of the foundational literary texts in English is saturated with the same nostalgia that later (Romantic and other) writers evince towards the past.

And, I would recommend it to anyone who decries the gore and violence of contemporary popular culture:

the bloodshot water
surged underneath. It was a sore blow
to all of the Danes, friends of the Shieldings,
a hurt to each and every one
of that noble company when they came upon
Aeschere's head at the foot of the cliff.

Everybody gazed as the hot gore
kept wallowing up and an urgent war–horn
repeated its notes: the whole party
sat down to watch.
[Seamus Heaney's translation, Norton Anthology]

Students: here is a useful site from Anne Savage at McMaster U, and another from Georgetown U.

August 9, 2003

SF books, course

The trip to Shediac wasn't an entire waste; apart from the glorious swim, we stopped in at Champlain Place in Moncton on the way back and while the others went on the rides at Crystal Palace I snuck off to Chapters and got a couple of books: the lastest volume of Gardner's Dozois's extremely useful series, The Year's Best Science Fiction, which has some great stuff in it, Aye, and Gomorrah and other stories by Samuel Delany, and Salt by Adam Roberts, author of Stone (see post of 25/7/03).

I am about half–way through Delany's collection and am enjoying it very much. Here is Claude Lalumière's brief review. I am including two of the shorter pieces in the course kit for English 3722: "Contemporary Science Fiction: Gender and Sexuality," which I'm teaching in September (next month!!): "Aye, and Gomorrah" and "Among the Blobs." They, and Joanna Russ's "When It Changed" and Eleanor Arnasons "The Potter of Bones," are together in a class I've called "Cruising and Herbal Tea" (is that terrible?). Arnason's story is in Dozois's collection.

I'm organizing the course a little differently this year; I've taught it in two previous incarnations, and both times I organized the material chronologically. This time, in order to make connections clearer, I've grouped the readings into four main categories: "Men and Women," "Homosex," "Genderbending," and "Beyond the Body." In "Men and Women" we'll read Charlotter Perkin's Gilman's Herland and Sheri Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country, as well as some short stories: C.L. Moore's “Shambleau” (1933), Leigh Brackett's “The Woman from Altair” (1951), Cordwainer Smith's "The Ballad of Lost C'mell" (1962), James Tiptree Jr.'s "The Women Men Don't See" (1973), Pamela Sargent, "Fears" (1984), Connie Willis's “All My Darling Daughters” (1985), Pat Murphy's "His Vegetable Wife" (1985), and Rick Wilber's “War Bride” (1990). In "Homosex" we'll read the four mentioned above, and Maureen McHugh's China Mountain Zhang (last time I taught it I had them read Delany's Dhalgren and almost had a rebellion. Too bad—and shocking—that Stars in my pocket like grains of sand is out of print). In "Genderbending" we'll read Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X, Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, Octavia Butler's Dawn, and John Varley's "The Barbie Murders" and “Picnic on Nearside” (1974). And one other that slips my mind. In the final section we'll read Ballard's Crash, William Gibson's "Burning Chrome" and Candas Jane Dorsey's "(Learning About) Machine Sex" (1988).

It's been fun putting the readings together, but difficult; there is endless choice. So, I've just tried to choose some texts that are representative of different tendencies or themes.

July 2, 2003

Here are the two entries of my abortive blogger blog

Tuesday, July 01, 2003: An inauspicious beginning to this blog 

Have posted nothing for June. Spent the time tinkering with my web site instead, and still am not happy with it.

Have not continued to read Ryman's Was; got sidetracked by Roy Porter's Enlightenment: Britain and the creation of the modern world, which is proving very helpful in my thinking about English 3204: c18th Prose and Poetry, which I have taught for a couple of years now but am in the process of revamping. He is such a deft, persuasive writer, and Enlightenment is just the kind of intellectual history of the period to provide a useful context for students. I will not ask them to read the whole book, of course, or we would never get to the literary texts. But I plan to reproduce some passages in their kit (through CanCopy of course; all legal and aboveboard).

See Porter's obituary in The Guardian (March 5, 2002).

Monday, May 19, 2003: Reading Ryman 

I've just started reading Geoff Ryman's Was. I've had it on my shelf for awhile but have been reluctant to read it; my friend Glenn told me some time ago that he found it a difficult novel to read. Ryman is coming to a sf conference in Guelph that I was thinking of going to—won't be, but that's by the by—so I decided to finally read it. Glenn was right; it is very difficult. I can't seem to read more than a few chapters at a time; not my usual practice. The novel, as far as I can tell—I'm not very far into it—is a layering of the story of an ill man in the 1980s (probably AIDS) with a retelling of the story of Dorothy of The Wizard of Oz. It is the latter strain that is discomfiting; Dorothy is an unloved orphan, foisted onto her harsh Aunt and taciturn uncle in the ironically named Manhattan, Kansas. The kicker, for me, is that Auntie Em is cruel to Toto. So, small doses.

Here is an interesting article by Steffen Hantke: "There's no place like home": Geoff Ryman's Was and Turner's Myth of National Childhood."