Syllabus for the coming 7 days, revised

Incorporating Larry’s emendations, the next week of work looks like this:

Discussion—Thursday, July 9
Great Expectations

Lecture—Friday, July 10
Quiz: Great Expectations

Lecture—Monday, July 13
Due: Essay 2, draft 2
Due: Essay 3, draft 1

Discussion—Tuesday, July 14
Due: Midterm

Lecture—Wednesday, July 15
Quiz: The Comedy of Errors

The crush of work has not been alleviated: it has merely been shifted to the weekend. This is no especial kindness.

Two notes on working thoughtfully this weekend:

Use caffeine smartly. Unfocused writers write unfocused essays. The pharmacology of caffeine is pretty straightforward: caffeine has no meaningful effect on whether or not you are sleepy, though it can dull the feeling of sleepiness. Its significant effect is that, taken in controlled doses, it helps you control when you are focused.

The caffeine you drink in a sip of coffee reaches peak efficacy at 30–45 minutes. As soon as you get past this peak you begin to feel tired, even though the caffeine stays in your bloodstream around 24 hours. You want to sip coffee slowly over the course of a 6- or 8-hour period. Because coffee is disgusting as all get out once it grows cold, this means you will want a few small cups of hot coffee or a thermal mug that will keep coffee warm for hours.

For me, a Thermos Nissan coffee mug is as important as nearly any other learning tool.

Revise. You cannot write a paper; you can only rewrite a paper.

That might look like an epigram, but I mean it earnestly: there is not a single paragraph in the 160 pages (so far) of my dissertation that has not been rewritten from the ground up. I have to write two or three dumb things for every reasonably intelligent thing I have to say.

By rewriting an essay, you do something central to the development of your argument: you take the conclusion of the first draft of your argument and you are able to begin with it as a premise. When you reach a new conclusion, that new conclusion will be by definition more sophisticated.

Another way of thinking about it is simply as a competition. How many of your colleagues are drafting and then rewriting the essays for the midterm? If you draft and then rewrite, you will at least be ahead of them in the quality and subtlety of your work.

Borges’s Library

Borges served as director of the Biblioteca Nacional de la República Argentina in Buenos Aires from 1955–73, although he was blind nearly all those years. In 1961, during Borges’s directorship, the Italian-Argentine architect Clorindo Testa designed a new building for the library:

Exterior of the Biblioteca Nacional de la República Argentina. Photograph by Dante Marcola.

Testa’s Biblioteca, mired in bureaucracy, was not begun until 1971—near the end of Borges’s tenure—and was inaugurated in 1992, six years after Borges’s death. It is, moreover, more inelegant than anything Borges imagined:

Spiral staircase in the Biblioteca Nacional de la República Argentina. Photograph by Dante Marcola.

Contrast to this the symmetry and delicacy of the ceiling of old Biblioteca Nacional, in which Borges worked and which his vision would have been strong enough to see in the first years he worked there:

Ceiling of the old Biblioteca Nacional de la República Argentina. Photograph by gollmar.

As for Borges’s Library of Babel, the most accurate models strike me as these:

• By Dante Salatino
• By Hyperdiscordia

Reminder 45

Here’s an example of the sort of sentence structure I’ve seen unusually frequently this summer:

For the story “Mumu,” it would fit under the Social Critique heading…

Did you catch the grammatical slip there?

The sentence begins with a fragment—”For the story”—in which the noun (”the story”) is the object of a preposition (”For”). The sentence that follows the comma—”it would fit under…”—forgets that the noun “story” is the object of the preposition and pretends that it is the subject of the fragment by associating the word with the pronoun “it.”

A more correct way to craft that sentence would be to write

For the story “Mumu,” the most appropriate category would be “Stories Related to Dog Ownership in Tsarist Russia”…

That sentence is at least grammatically correct; it is, however, a bit inelegant and a bit indirect. My preference would be for a sentence comme ça:

I group “Mumu” and Great Expectations as stories partially concerning deranged older women.

Note the structure there: subject (”I”) + verb (”group”) + direct object (”story X and novel Y”) + prepositional object (”as Z”). This is the simplest grammatical structure in English, and is the appropriate sentence structure in which to express complicated ideas.

Calm music for a manic week

Larry’s Monday lecture on theme and variations put me in the mind of this remarkable movement from George Rochberg’s String Quartet No. 6: “Variations on the Pachelbel Canon in D”—perhaps the most serene eight minutes of music you could ask for in the middle of a week like this.

Meshes of the Afternoon, by Maya Deren (1943)

Points remaining: the grade distribution chart after week 2

The grade distribution after week 2

Just over 28% of your course grade has been determined after the second week of ILS 121.

Books in the waste room of “Araby”

The priest’s waste room is a symbol of—among other forces of convention—the style of fiction Joyce shows up as so much clichéd trash. For this reason it’s important to know not only what the texts therein are about but how they’re written.

Compare the opening paragraph of “Araby” to the opening paragraphs from the texts in the priest’s waste room—the waste room of nineteenth-century writing, in other words:

The opening paragraph of Sir Walter Scott's The Abbot (1820)

The opening lines of The Devout Communicant, Exemplified in His Behavior Before, At, and After the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper: Practically Suited to All the Parts of that Divide Ordinance (1869, edited from the sixth edition of 1683)

The opening paragraph of The Memoirs of Vidocq: Principal Agent of the French Police (1828, translated into English in 1834)

Sonnet recitation sign-up sheet for tomorrow

Come with

1. An imitation of a Shakespearean sonnet,
2. A memorized Shakespearean sonnet to recite,
3. Questions or thoughts you have about the course or your performance: this is our first real chance to talk heart to heart about how things are going for you this summer and how you can kick 823 points of ass, and about what I can to better support you and your colleagues in your work.

The meetings will be in my office, 7134 Helen C. White Hall.

You can’t get to the 7th floor of Helen C. from the library: you have to enter through a set of exterior doors to the left of the entrance to the library. Take the elevator to the 7th floor, turn right, and walk to the end of the hallway; turn right again and keep walking. 7134 will be on your left.

If this is your first time to the 7th floor of HCW, come 5 or 10 minutes early to give yourself enough time to find the place.

• 11:30 am – Alec
• 11:40 – Lauren
• 11:50 – René
• 12:00 pm – Jasmine
• 12:10 – Kham Thee
• 12:20 – Athavi
• 12:30 – Daniel
• [break]
• 1:30 pm – Eric
• 1:40 – Jessica
• 1:50 – Jay
• 2:00 – Erica
• 2:10 – Kia
• 2:20 – Kristen
• 2:30 – Samuel
• 2:40 – Roberto

Essay #2 sign-up sheet for conferences with David

Here are the times you signed up to meet with David this coming Wednesday (July 8) and Thursday (July 9):

Wednesday, July 8

• 7:00 pm – Athavi
• 7:25 – Erica
• 7:50 – Lauren
• 8:15 – René
• 8:40 – Kia
• 9:05 – Eric
• 9:30 – Jay

Thursday, July 9

• 7:00 pm – Alec
• 7:25 – Kham Thee
• 7:50 – Jessica
• 8:15 – Kristen
• 8:40 – Roberto
• 9:05 – Dan
• 9:30 – Samuel

Excellent context for “The Yellow Wallpaper”

If, like me, you are having trouble reading the smudged font of the Weir Mitchell piece linked below, you can find an excellent secondary source in a wonderful 1983 essay by Suzanne Poirier: “The Weir Mitchell rest cure: doctor and patients,” from Women’s Studies.