66.f.95.03

I would have loved to have seen it, but even I think this is too big for a last-minute trip!  It’s a performance of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, but set in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Here’s a story at the NYT. This article mainly focuses on the play’s director, Paul Chan, and  also offers us some interesting feed for our class, particularly vis-a-vis art as activism, a la Crimp’s “Mourning and Militancy.“

Some of you might also be interested in this play as a way of understanding the notion of site specificity, which I have talked to several of you about in office hours.

Also, Prof. Drabinski sent me this link for us to check out. It’s to a slideshow at CNN.com, which highlights a group’s efforts to add panels for African Americans to the national AIDS quilt. The group is called “Call My Name.”

Finally, thanks to Joe for this article, which, as he points out on one of the class blogs, speaks to several of the themes that are culminating for us at the end of the semester.

Hello!

Please do not forget your blogging assignment for Tuesday. The idea is to choose a single approach to your reading of Adrienne Kennedy, to read though a lens. All of these approaches begin in rather simple and baseline ways, but the purpose of the exercise is to push the approach into telling you something deeper about the play in general, to consider the relationship between mechanism and meaning.

(It is fine if you have already started or are already done: this is just to spur those of you who have not yet begun!)

Here are some suggestions: Read the rest of this entry »

Apologies for the long post ahead, but I want to get my chat out before class, because we’re going to need to hit the ground running in order to do Addie justice and overcome the specter of the comps.

Your blogging has been looking good, especially as I imagine that you are all itching to “get back to the book.”

But oh! please know that all of this is for the book, in honor of it, even.

Again, if we imagine that literature has anything to teach us, then it is on us to look at all the different kinds of ways that teaching might happen. Sometimes that means looking at the social and historical milieu of a text. Sometimes it means looking to source texts that might help us decode writerly decisions. Sometimes, like now, it means expanding the conceptual apparatuses with which we approach texts. True, one might argue that a text’s meaningfulness comes to us through its beauty, but I am pretty sure y’all have the appreciation part down– now it’s time for the rigor.

I am reminded of the final lines of Keat’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which I like to think of as a beautyful poem that best captures the pleasure and frustration of scholarly contemplation: Read the rest of this entry »

As you might have noticed, Kennedy’s play includes a strong dose of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and a few of you have expressed dismay at not feeling quite up to speed on your nineteenth century lit.

Rest assured, you can read Kennedy’s play without the Hardy (otherwise I wouldn’t have assigned it!), but it is also good to seek out more information. In fact, this is the kind of seeking-out you should do whenever you are reading literature. When you don’t know something, pause. Ask yourself: is this something I could learn a little bit more about? If the answer is “yes,” then of course go for it. If the answer is no, file it away. At some point your analysis of the text might be tripped-up by this thing you do not know– but knowing that you do not know it will make recovery easier.

And there is almost always a middle-space. It often has a name: wikipedia. Again, as I’ve said in class, the wik is not a great primary source, but when you need dates, geographies, or plot summaries, it is a nice place to start. If you are going to write a paper on the function of the Hardy text in Kennedy’s play, then wikipedia is not enough; you must read the book. But if you need to get the gist of the Hardy, so as to consider why Kennedy has chosen this text… you get my point.

So here are some links to get you started. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, The New York Times published an op-ed by famed sociologist Orlando Patterson. I, personally, thinks it slips too many things together too quickly, though I guess its purpose is to elicit a response out of the mixture, to get us to think about a particular confluence of effects and affects.

Aside from the article’s content, per se, I found it particularly relevent to today’s class. Like Petry, Patterson is trying to get us to see all these things about where race and gender come together, and the negative and positive consequences therein.

Interesting stuff! I would really like you to read it, if you get a chance. Read the rest of this entry »

Both classes should remember that papers are due BEFORE midnight, Monday night.

Johnson Chapel usually closes by 7p, so feel free to email the paper to me in order to meet the deadline, and bring a hardcopy to me later, either in my box on Tuesday before 3p or in class that same day. Please do not take your paper to the English Department office.

I randomly spot-check e-mailed papers against their hardcopies, so please be sure that they are the same paper, to save all the embarassment and sad-feelings.

I am no longer looking at drafts; I do not grant extensions, and, yes, I absolutely believe you can say something quite significant in 3 pages: economy of argument, precision in language, and a tight-leash on redundancy.

Good luck!

Hello all!

Just in case you have forgotten in the haze of paper-writing, remember that all you need for Tuesday is to have listened to the Martin Luther King, Jr. recording, “I’ve been to the Mountaintop,” and also be ready to talk about “Like a Winding Sheet.”

Chances are slim that we will get to the King on Tuesday, insofar as it seems that you all have a lot to say about the Petry story. Looking at the iMix link, it looks like the King is not there. Click here to download the audiobook version, which has a fabulous introduction/background piece at the beginning. And I am sorry I cannot get a copy to you, but my laptop died over the weekend, taking its riches to its grave (or at least the apple store in Holyoke!).

Here is a clip from the end of the speech, to watch AFTER you’ve listened to the rest. It’s only the last minute or so, but it is nice to get a visual to go with the voice.

Also, more resources are listed after the video.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hi 95ers, saw this link at The Atlantic Monthly and thought of you.

Here’s a taste, but of course you should check out the article:

Infantile “amnesia” refers to the apparent absence or weakness of memories formed at ages younger than 3 or 4. Some evidence indicates that these early-life memories are not actually lost or forgotten, but are rather merely mislabeled or otherwise inaccessible to adult cognition. One potential reason for this inaccessibility is that adults tend to use language in encoding and retrieving memories, and this strategy may not be sufficient for retrieving memories formed in early-life, which may have been encoded before language is firmly entrenched in the developing brain.

Here is the snippet mentioned in class, though you may have already found it…

According to Faulkner, the story began with a vision of a little girl’s muddy drawers as she climbed a tree to look at death while her brothers, lacking her courage, waited below:

I tried first to tell it with one brother, and that wasn’t enough. That was Section One. I tried it with another brother, and that wasn’t enough. That was Section Two. I tried the third brother, because Caddy was still to me too beautiful and too moving to reduce her to telling what was going on, that it would be more passionate to see her through somebody else’s eyes, I thought. And that failed and I tried myself—the fourth section— to tell what happened, and I still failed.[1]

Today the L.A. Times ran this story on correlations between racism, stress, and illness. It dovetails with some of the conversation we had around Epstein’s “Ghetto Miasma” piece, but is a little bit less narrative in its use of medical data. I strongly recommend reading this one when you get a chance.

What I found most interesting, however, are the comments people have left on the article. I spend a lot of time reading newspapers, etc., and am generally quite good at taking comments with a grain o’ salt. But these are pretty interesting in the way many refuse to believe anything in the article might be true (which is problematic if only because, in other parts of our national discourse, personal testimony rules). Read the rest of this entry »