It's Raining Books... Hallelujah!

Pictured at the left are my required textbooks for the three classes I'm taking this semester. Well, all but the four that haven't arrived at the bookstore quite yet (one of them hasn't been published yet). So these twenty-five, plus four. Yes, that is Cher in a feather headdress and matching bikini. I guess it's a really good thing I like to read.

I have now survived two days of class, as both teacher and student, and so far it's good (and by "good" I mean terrifying). I will not be panicking, because from the looks of my 3 syllabi I won't have time to panic or even to consider it. I guess maybe you're wondering how I have time to ramble on so, if I have so much work to do? Well, I had to send off in the mail for a secret decoder ring to translate my assignment for one of my classes, so I'm waiting on that to come in. I am not whining, though it sounds and looks a lot like whining. I hear that the first semester is just this giant imaginative leap you have to make in your understanding of what is humanly possible and then the rest is pretty steady and you at least know what to expect. The people in my program have very diverse interests (with maybe a little bit of a tilt toward contemporary pop culture and representations of ethnicity and gender in art (especially in film). All of which I find really interesting, so conversations are usually fun until they get tangled up in theory I haven't read quite yet (they promise me this will come in the first weeks of reading - yay). I am getting more interested in the history of traveling cultures (think circuses, bands, etc..), especially from the early 20th century before there were so many options for home entertainment.

"My" class, as I call the one I'm teaching, is off to a pretty good start, I guess. For all of you former Nederlanders, one of my students is from a town not far from Maastricht. I haven't asked her about it directly yet, but Sjoerd told me online how to pronounce her name (as difficult as that sounds) and she seemed surprised that I got it right the first time. One of the young men in my class is a wrestler (don't ask me how this came up in class) who made me feel his cauliflower ear. I had no idea this really happened, but it's true - something about injuring the tissues traps water and it grows back kinda bumpy. The only students (besides the Dutch one) that are not from Iowa are a football player from Texas, who laughed when I said I was from Arkansas, and a girl from North Dakota (I don't know the story there, or if there even is one). Tomorrow we're doing the Flannery O'Connor (who went to school here) story, "Good Country People," just to totally run their expectations off the road from day two. Anyway, I'm excited (and by "excited" I mean terrified).
More soon.

Maybe it's asking too much of you wonderful people to read two blogs. If you feel this way, you can choose one and stick with it. Something just wouldn't let me give this one, my blog, up. The new one (for which Joel and I will both write) is www.ashley-joel.blogspot.com. But as I said, if you don't have any room for another blog in your life, don't feel obligated to read them both. I promise to make a conscious effort to not overlap the content too much.

We went to see Casablanca at the Saturday night outdoor movie last night. It really is an excellent film - I even laughed out loud a couple of times. I don't find the love story itself that moving, though, except how much Rick (Bogart) is affected by Ilsa (Bergman). For some reason, I just don't care that much about her. Maybe I should chalk this up to my tendency to hurt when men hurt. Where the heck does this tendency come from? To see an old man (or a young one, for that matter) feel ashamed, sad, or disappointed breaks me in two. Not to say that I don't sympathize with women - I do - the effect just isn't as visceral. I'm sure somebody out there can come up with a psychoanalytical reason for this (Ellen? Brooke?).
Anyway, Sam is the best. Except for maybe Captain Renault.
The only bad thing about the outdoor movie deal is that sitting on the ground for so long really takes a toll on the old backside. Not only that (numbness, etc), but my arms and legs also try to go to sleep, which can be pretty distracting.
Another distraction, which I find really disturbing, is a daydream I always have while we're sitting out on the Pentacrest (big lawn). It's in front of a huge university building (think marble and columns) that says "Natural Sciences" and has sculptures of a buffalo, a moose, and an elk. So the terrible thing I keep imagining is that I will suddenly see someone standing on top of the building and they will jump while everyone else is focused on the screen. I don't usually imagine tragedies like this, but the closeness of such a big building and so many people gathered and looking toward but not really at the building just triggers this image. Strange, I know.
Sorry if that was a downer. I'm just glad it hasn't happened. More later.