For some boring technical reasons, and some boring aesthetic reasons as well, I am changing hosts and switching to Wordpress.org instead of Wordpress.com.? I fully expect things to go tits up at some point during the whole process, as my computer skills are (as Miss Jay on Top Model would say) broke down and busted. Forgive any ensuing mess.
Monthly Archive for March, 2008
Ah, yes, it’s that time again: the time when chowderheads the country over make their way south for a week of binge drinking, casual sex, and flashing their tits at the “Girls Gone Wild” cameraman. That’s right; it’s Spring Break!
I plan on spending the first half of the break relaxifying with my friend C. There will be much playing with the baby and much talking and probably much sitting on her back deck and sipping whiskey drinks. I leave tomorrow, and I cannot wait.
When I get back, the town will still be blissfully, mercifully empty of students for a few more days, though I may not get to enjoy it that much: I will have several giant piles of crap awaiting my attention, and chief among them is a batch of freshman comp essays. That is enough to make me want to stab out my own eyes with a crayon, so I shall banish the thought and concentrate on the days of whiskey and relaxing in my future. Vacation, ho!
I hosted a Big Lebowski party this past weekend, and I happen to have a shitload of milk, kahlua, and vodka left over. This is quite lucky, because it means that, after a long morning of conferences and then a long afternoon of trying to get the students to discuss incredibly dense Modernist-Surrealist-Revolutionary poetry, I can relax at home with a few Caucasians (minus the Cremora and roofies, of course).
If you have ever had a job that involved talking all goddamned day long, you might know what I mean when I say that at the end of such a day, you start to feel a little woozy and hallucinatory as the sound of your own voice reverberates and echoes and wiggles around inside our already fragile cranium. I spent the morning uttering the same suggestions to student after student after chowderheaded jerkburger student as they each came into my office and sat around whining about how haaaard this assignment was, and how it was so much haaaaarder than the pervious one. I’m all, “Um, yeah, the assignments do get progressively more complex as the semester goes by, and if you thought the second out of five was too hard, then let me tell you, YOU ARE FUCKED.” Dear dog.
Then, to talk about difficult poetry for three hours after all that…well, ugh, my brain is fried. Fried and crispy and salty and delicious, and full of thoughts of dinner and sleep.
Good thing I have tomorrow “off,” which merely means I will spend tomorrow grading, reading, planning, researching, and proctoring make-up exams. Day “off,” my ass.
My annual review today went well: apparently I am “good” (on that scale of “shitty” to “excellent”), and will be invited to stay. I will also likely get a modest raise. I am feeling very happy and relieved about the whole thing.
In other news, remind me that on a morning when I have a stressfully anticipated career-type activity, I do not necessarily need to drink coffee. The naturally occurring adrenaline coursing through my veins will be more than enough stimulation for one Alfina-sized person.
After a brief spate of fiction, my lit classes return to poetry this week. It’s not just any old poetry, oh no. If they thought Wordsworth and Shelley were inscrutable, I have no idea what my kids are going to make of Aimé Césaire. This is a man whose poetry is not only culturally and politically alien to them, but whose language is ridiculously dense. Reading his stuff in a gradual school French seminar taught me very important phrases like “the great delirium of his mentula” or “scrofulent bubo,” which — one never knows — I may have occasion to use one day if something incredibly disgusting goes wrong in a faraway francophone land.
I have already warned them that they will need to have a pencil and a very big dictionary in hand (or on screen, as the case may be) when reading (which they will be doing in the English translation). I’m sure, however, since this is something I spoke about in the last five minutes of class on a Thursday afternoon, that they did not listen, will not remember, and thus will not heed my warning. And then we will have our next installment in the saga of Vague’s Students Don’t Know What Words Mean and Therefore Say Dumb Things.
As for moving from understanding Césaire’s diction to performing any kind of deeper analysis, I have my worries. The whole concept of analysis and/or interpretation is not something the kids have exactly grasped yet. Every now and then they will launch into some thesis about how there are “a lot of threes” in the text, and couldn’t that possibly be “Christ symbolism,” but beyond that they are not what I would call hermeneutic detectives. This is going to be challenging. Do you think there is any chance of me getting them to take interest? Man oh man. Where’s a copy of Understanding Poetry by Dr. J. Evans Pritchard when you need one?
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