Notes on a Sunday Afternoon

It's finally all coming together. After grading 36 finals, I am beginning to understand why some teachers used ye olde scantron. Essay questions are murder. I am tempted to exerpt a few, but a good teacher would never do that.





Currently, I am absolutely devouring an Manu Chao produced album by Amadou and Mariam called Dimanche a Bamako. It's my favorite purchase in a long time. Pick it up. It's feeding into my repressed love of afro-pop. I got my first whiff of afro-pop back in 2000 when I took a postcolonial theory class. The professor, known for having one ear pierced, loved to play music at the beginning of class, probably to show he was still with it. Anyway, he lent me this amazing compilation called the music in my head, which is A+. Check it.

In the new semester (tomorrow), I will be teaching a few old faves...

• The Odyssey
• Beowulf
• Grendel
• Star Wars trilogy
• and...Robinson Crusoe. Pray for me.

Rise of Nostalgia

...I'm trying to pull myself together for the end of the semester and I'm putting together a few notes about the rise of the novel, which totally puts me back in my 18th Century Public Sphere class at the U of C. I went to my bookcase and busted out Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel, the one book that made real sense to me in grad school. It's quite stuffy, totally diachronic, really self-important, but I love it. Watt makes it all make sense. Anyway, I'm looking through it and looking at my really eager notes ("ridotto?? look up" and "8 hanging days at Tyburn?") and I was momentarily transported back and for a few minutes, grad studies weren't so bad. It made me slightly sad, like the smell of pineapples.