Return To the Blogosphere

Here it is, May 1; I’ve just submitted grades for the 68 students who took my sections of the online film course, and have a breather until Monday, May 7, when I start Latin II. Later in the summer I’ll start the Graduate Music History Survey, which will fulfill the music course requirement of this degree – actually, I will have to do a DIS with Dr. Martinez for an extra hour in music as well, but that’s fine with me. Then I have three weeks off in August, then back to the coal mine, probably teaching two sections again and taking three, or possibly four classes.

I think that with luck I can finish the coursework next spring, read over the summer, take prelims in the fall, start writing the dissertation, and (again, with luck) walk in May ’08. Anyway, one of my many summer tasks (this will be the lightest load I’ve had since I got here) is to make sure I am on track. I now know there’s no such thing as a fast track in this degree, but I don’t want to spend any unneeded time here.

This spring I took Victorian Performance Culture, which looked at plays from early melodrama to Ibsen and Shaw, as well as other aspects of spectacle in Victorian novels; circus, music halls, the rise of a new middle class and their leisure activities, Oscar Wilde and the flaneur, and a host of other fascinating subjects. I wrote a paper on the origins of the Savoy Theatre (being a Gilbert & Sullivan devotee) and another on my favorite of their operas, Ruddigore, discussing its (highly relative) lack of success when it opened in 1887 following the smash success of The Mikado. My thesis was that it was not well-received because the late Victorian West End audience did not relate well to a parody of melodrama, which they saw as a step backward in time and also across the Thames to the south London theatres which catered to the lower classes. The illustration in this post is by Gilbert himself; whether it’s a typical character in melodrama or Mad Margaret from Ruddigore, I don’t know. I only know there have been moments when I could relate.

I also took Gender and Disease in the Victorian Novel, which centered around a series of novels but also pulled in a huge amount of other readings, from medical narratives to critical theory. I wrote on Dracula as the personification of Consumption. I was pretty excited about that one because as Dr. Kennedy noted, it’s hard to find a new angle on Drac.

Both of these courses were with English grad students. Almost to a person they were young brunette women. I have no idea what that portends, if anything, but I couldn’t help noticing it. Both instructors were fantastic and the courses were stimulating and fun. I’m taking English History 1750 – 1890 in the fall, and that will complete my major area.

I also took Latin I. I hesitated too long over whether to take it credit-no credit, and ended up sweating each quiz and exam, but I think I pulled an A nevertheless. I will definitely take Latin II and III c/nc; that way I need a “B” average to pass and it doesn’t affect my gpa. Once I complete III, that’s my second language out of the way. It was harder than I expected but also very satisfying and I enjoyed it. I sometimes felt a little overwhelmed with the sheer memorization of declensions and conjugations – many and many a time before the weekly test I’d wonder if I really had enough Random Access Memory to pull it off. Latin reminds me of doing cryptography, or what I imagine cryptography was like before computer encryption. More of a puzzle to be solved, and I like that.

So that’s what I’ve been doing. It seems as if the last half of the semester came at such a rush and I was running all the time to keep up. And then the unimaginable – Les passing away. It was such a shock, and it felt especially distressing not to be able to pick up and go be with Jan. I’m so glad Joe and Susan and their family did – that meant the world to Jan, I know, and to all of us.