Class Notes 4/16 - paper presentations

Schedule

16th
Craig
Kari
Doug
Jennie Lynn

19th
Lisa m
Rian Taylor
Amy
Tai
Sam

21st
Adam
Pat
Victoria
Mick

23rd
ZuZu
Erin
Nick

26th
Group 2
Group 1

28th
Group 3
Group 4

30th
summary

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Craig - talked about his college career and decisions

Kari - War & Peace, talking in thrid person, sees themselves as a character acting....
also, Why does it matter that I read this? A very good question.

Doug - He read us a passage from his paper called The Empress that brought tears to my eyes. It was personal and touching. Captstone is not the top stone, but the corner stone of a pyramid.

Jennie Lynn - talked about the dance, and childhood, futility of language

--all good presentations, and I keep getting good ideas to add to my own paper.

Class Notes 4/12 - paper presentations

Kevin, Abby, Joan, Katie, and Ronald all presented their paper topics in class. All very captivating topics and ideas.
I took notes on the presentations, but they don't do the people and their presentations justice. So go read thier Final Papers posted on their blogs.

just some little things

- need the Kevin 2.0 version/experience to get to the Kevin 3.0
- Kevin also mentioned he had a cheesy pic on his blog and a cheesy journal entry he did while traveling, (but perhaps those things aren't cheesy, but rather a transcendence of the universe?)
-Sacred is sacrificing everything

Class Notes 4/9 - & thoughts on my Final Paper Topic

Today in class we sat around in a circle to reveal and discuss people's individual paper topics. Some people are further along than others, which is okay because sometimes inspiration strikes us early, or at the last second, or in between.
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My inspiration struck this morning at about 8:40 am when I was scrambling to find a paper topic that I adored before class. Because if I don't love it, I won't write it. I grabbed three texts looking for a push towards a format for my Final Paper, because I knew that I wanted to write about: literature as an epiphany.....I just didn't know how to get there.

So as I was desperately going through my four book shelves that hold ungodly amounts of books I found Italo Calvino's The Uses of Literature, Lapham's Quarterly "Arts & Letters", and finally as an off hand thought, Alberto Manguel's A Reading Diary. I know what the book is about, but I've never read it, but reading the blurbs on the front and back, I knew this book would be a brilliant model.

"the membrane between life and literature is exquisitely permeable....A Reading Diary records glorious seepage between the two and, in the process, illuminates both." - Anne Fadiman

"an elegant and timely little book on the subjuect of the minor miracle that takes place everytime we open a book and a world that takes shape in our hands." - Star Tribune

"It's difficult to come away without wanting to start on your own lists and journals and literary bric-a-brac." - San Antonio Express-News

Here is a brief idea of what the book is about:
"In A Reading Diary, Alberto Manguel writes about what he's reading, as he makes connections with world events, with books he's read in the past, and books on his list to read.
As he writes about the experience of reading, he notices how the world around
him changes in what seems to be his hap-paced mad ride through literature and
life.
Manguel turns the experience of everyday into extraordinary
literariness. As he explains, "The experience of everyday life is negated by
what we want it to be, negated in turn by what we hope it really is." Surrounded
by stacks of books, he keeps notes of those moments when he was browsing through
books, rediscovering the classics he read years ago, and stumbling across
unlooked-for literary treasures."

So my paper will be my personal Reading Diary modeled after Alberto Manguel's . This year has been an epiphany. The dots are beginning to connect. What I am reading now illuminates what I have read, and what I have read illuminates what I've been reading. The more I read the more coincidences don't seem that coincidental anymore. Life and Literature and nearly inextricable from one another, and does life imitate art? Oscar Wilde might be someone I'm interested in, and my reading of Ulysses by James Joyce has been extremely influential with a lot of my connecting this year.

I'm interested in the "minor miracle" that takes place when we read, the little epiphanies, little explosions, the "oh's", and how do these all culminate into the mind shattering explosion? the big shebang? The ultimate epiphany? The still point? The collapse of space and time? When do we feel "strangely tired"? Is literature the music in the reeds that gives us hint at the bigger epiphany that may or may not lead us to exit stage left? What about anagnorsis, a recognition through literature. What literature dive bombs our very core, and we are sporagmosed, but enlightened?

This blog is my rough paper idea blog. I welcome comments and suggestions and critique.

Class Notes 4/7

Schedule for the rest of the class:

Individual presentations start:
Monday12 with Little Gidding,
Wednesday 14 with Dry Salvages,
Firday 16 with East Coker,
Monday 19 with Burnt Norton

Group Presentations and relevent dates:
Friday 23 Groups 3 & 4
Monday 26 Groups 1 & 2
Wednesday 28 recitations, see how far we can get
Friday 30 finish recitations, summative statements

for the rest of the class period we had a Paper Topic Workshop:

Abby - Suggested Title, Almost the Rememberance, everyone here comes on the scene late....there were people before us.

Kevin - model notion of how we take all these different things from previous classes, influences, everything that brought us here and try to make it cohesive, practical concerns, $ getting our money's worth
we should be scared of Kevin.....

Nick - Silence and NDE

Lisa Meyer - what you know now, what you didn't know before, and what difference does it make.

Joan - Sacred Duty, right action......Stranger Than Fiction also came to my mind

Katie - without dark, no light

Brianne - time, time grown old, "The Readiness is All"

------- Class Friday will be another Paper Topic Workshop.

Class Notes 4/5

First off thank you to everyone who came to The Baxter Tuesday night!

Notes

Dr. Sexson read alound from a print out of his own blog entry......(putting the class on the spot....writing the blog we didn't write...but it helped clear up some things and was very helpful)

Hamlet using metaphors to talk about his father....
Gita without Hamlet, philosophical, theological lessons....Hamlet without Gita, dramatic enactment story, together you get the lessons AND the story.

Hamlet, in the first part of the play is motivated by passion and attatchment.
last part of the play, hovering above the world......in the world not of it.

What does it mean to be ready?

Harold Bloom would say Hamlet is cold and robotic, Dr. Sexson disagrees, the Gita is a model, Hamlet is responsive to everything, attatched.

Horatio must play the role on Sanja. The poet. The storyteller.
What is the role of the poet? Role of the English major?
Chronicle the events, see into the deep heart of things, not the historical

Horation is the English major in Hamlet. (If anyone has take Shakespeare with Dr. Minton they will know that Horatio is one of her favorite characters.)

For the English major, the responsibility is to remember.....

Read, at some point in your life, Borges, The Secret Miracle

ever have a conversation where you didn't notice time passing? (yes, often the ones in this class)

minor characters can be major.....

For Kari looking at Hamlet this way, the play is more appealing....

So Hamlet, it is a play, let's play....at the highest possible level, dance in measure.

FOr the rest of the class we talked about our own paper topics....

mysticism, reconcilliation of opposites....To The Lighthouse......a mysticl text. Work with things on an ontological level.

documentary, "Into the Great Silence"

antiintellectualism, is alive and well in Bozeman, MT

"get hit with a brick from Hamilton Hall and the would be it."

Memorized Four Quartets

Today April 6!! Tuesday.
Recitation/Filming of our memorized T.S. Eliot Four Quartets lines at The Baxter (on Main St. above Ted's Grill and The Bacchus). 6pm-9pm. Wear black if possible, socks, and creative/tasteful mask or make-up is optional.

Class Notes 3/31

notes

Homework blogging: 2nd epiphany in Hamlet, what does he learn? last topic, relationship between Bhagavad-Gita & Hamlet......specifically last scene.

Hamlet, dark epiphany, whole entirety of life is dark and corrupt, play of illusions....play, act, pretending.....

everything is maya = illusion

in Act V Hamlet transcends this notion of corrupt world and illusion

Blogging homework: blog about other blogs...

We discussed paper topics in class and some people shared theirs....ZuZu, Joan, Doug, Taylor...

Taylor .....she talked about detachment as well and said, "Dr. Sexson craftily led me down the path of knowledge." to which Dr. Sexson replied, "that's my job. Sexson sexsoning."

Hamlet's soliloquy Act IV Scene 4 (pg 103 in my book)
"How all occasions do inform...."
part of the first dark epiphany
*see page 59 in Bhagavad-Gita, "learned men see with an equal eye.."

Dr. Sexson - "I'm going to kill you Joan, but don't take it personally. And I wont take it personally." (it's one of those you had to be there conversations.....but if you've read the Bhagavad-Gita you'll get it)

has anyone ever praised you???
well....get over it! it has nothing to do with you.
praise and blame, rise above......detach......(true anger management program)

be in the world, not of it

Brianne's blog, time
Dry Salvages, pg. 42 "While time is withdrawn,
consider the future
and past with an equal mind."
*see page 59 in Bhagavad Gita (above)

Oppenheimer, inventor of the atomic bomb, page 103 in Bhagavad Gita, "I am become death, destroyer of worlds."

pg 39
we had the experience but missed the meaning......we are the creatures who have created meaning for ourselves.
approach to the meaning restores...

Taylor, moments of epiphany in fairy tales...difference between children and adult epiphanies...

"go said the bird for the leaves were full of children"

Charles Kingsley - The Water Babies
here is an except from a paper I wrote for Brit Lit II with Dr. Lisa Eckert,
"The story becomes more like a fairy-tale and delves into a world where the lines between reality and fantasy are smeared. Tom drowns in a stream, but does not die. He goes through a sort of de-evolution, from being a land-baby into a water-baby. He now lives in the water with all the creatures you would find in a stream. He swims around as half-human and half-fish." He also makes a lobster friend. The paper really talked about Darwin and Kingsley and The Water Babies as an exploration of evolution.....

little baby otters don't have epiphanies, they are epiphanies....
how do we regain this ability to be epiphanies....?