Stratofanatic's Emporium

So, I've had an absolutely beautiful schedule this semester: four classes, all back-to-back on MWF, with only one prep and plenty of time to work in the mornings. Well, a kink's just been thrown into those gears. Apparently, one of the lecturers here suddenly resigned yesterday, and I responded to the frantic emails of the WP director calling for help. I figured, why not, what with my (relatively) open schedule. Plus, it's just good to help out the department during a pickle.*** So I'm going over the previous instructor's course documents and D2L, trying to get a feel for what he was doing after 10 weeks. Plus, no idea if he had given his students any more indication about his leaving than he did the university. This'll be weird . . . but, also, strangely less pressure than my normal classes. I'll meet the students tomorrow. We'll see how it goes! ***Incidentally, our WP director told me how she'd been bragging just the other day, "Oh, Oct...

Life conspires to make my existence dull, apparently. The solar eclipse hit Tennessee just a month after I left for Tucson; Arizona barely saw anything dramatic, whereas the world went completely dark in the Murf. Then, after narrowing missing out on that job in Houston, Hurricane Harvey struck  the area, causing massive flooding and evacuation. Now, yesterday witnessed a huge white supremacist rally in Shelbysville and Murfreesboro, TN. Worried that another Charlottesville might happen, businesses closed, people were warned away, and the university canceled several scheduled weekend events. Interesting tidbit: the rally organizers picked the area because they thought it significantly less likely to spur counter-protests than in Charlottesville, a relatively liberal bastion . . . which implies that Tennessee is particularly racist-friendly. Nonetheless, there was a enough push back that the organizers canceled the Murfreesboro rally at the last minute.  Mad respect to e...

Currently, I've begun reading a psychoanalytic interpretation of Stephen R. Donaldson (cuz that's how I roll, baby). Although quite well-written, especially engaging with Julia Kristeva's theory, the incompetent literary analysis finally irritated me so much that, after a particularly egregious misreading, I wrote in the margins, "Jesus, no, this is just stupid!" Since this was a library book, no less, I now have the difficult moral decision of whether to erase that remark when I return the book. On one hand, marginalia is technically vandalism. On the other, I feel a responsibility to warn all those fresh-eyed eager young undergrads, bedazzled by the complexities of Theory, who might be tempted to consider anything this particular book said seriously. Anyway, in other news. After getting bored with writing a feminist analysis of Tolkien, I decided to write a feminist analysis of Donaldson (spurred by the enthusiasm I felt in writing the encyclopedia article abo...

Open up my mailbox yesterday, and what do I see but a letter from the Sejong Cultural Society informing me about the "2018 Sejong Writing Competition." Needless to say, I haven't the foggiest notion how they found me or why they contacted me -- I recently did a movie review on South Korean film director Bong Joon-ho, but that's it (and that hasn't even been published yet). Most ironic of all: the writing contest isn't even open to anyone over 25 years old!