dulcetly...notes on a bookish life

I was just siting here trying to read at the table, trying to figure out why it was getting so damned dark outside, and realized it's just clouding up. I have at least until closer to seven til it starts actually getting dark. It was warm today earlier, in the eighties, but it looks like it's breaking.

I've been working most of the day on school things--I have to prepare a short little presentation on a literary magazine that publishes "emerging american poetry" as per the class's nomer. I chose The Tiny, since there seems to be lots of emerging and nigh emerging folks in there. Also we have some reading to do in some little bitsy book on literary theory, (so small I seem to have lost it on my desk). Start talking theory and I have bad first round of grad school flashbacks--that hulking copy of The Critical Tradition, glowering at me from the bookshelf a few feet away. I'm all down with the feminist/marxist theory stuff, but alot of the other just confuses the bejesus out of me. We had a whole semester course devoted to it at DePaul, but I remember sort of absorbing it, spewing it back out in a couple of essays, then just never thinking about it again. Too hard to wrap my head around. Definitely, why I'd never make it as a scholar.

We also, for the thesis seminar, have to write up a contract on what we hope to accomplish, what we want from the class, given that people are at various stages with their manuscripts at this point. I've got the whole mess that is girl show, which has just been sort of pouring out since the bginning of the year, without any rhyme or reason, so I'm looking for help mostly with organization, and getting it work as a book as whole. I did discover last Monday that they have miraculously done away with the critical portion of the thesis, which will infinitely make my life a helluva lot easier in the coming year. At first I was a little hesitant (is this just another way of dumbing things down--separating the creative writing and literature curriculum even further than they already are). Then I was like, seriously, I'll willingly be dumb if that means one less half-assed essay I have to write. Color me happy.