every now and then i think that i know something about something... and yet...

Well, today I went to a kickboxing "boot camp" and now I cannot lift my arms...

awesome...

in other news, planning on heading out for a late night drive tonight to think about plot lines and syllabi for the classes I'm teaching this fall... plot lines apply to the couple of fics that I have kicking around in my head right now...

we'll see what happens. Nothing really other than that to report. More movies to watch tomorrow and pull reviews of. Also, will be reading on the grotesque, the monster and what it means to be human.

Thinking that when I teach my class I'll start them off with Plato and his conception of the body as a prison and an infection that taints the soul... maybe use that as an entry point into H.G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau. First I'll have the students tell me what they think about Plato, get them to start thinking in terms of dualism, and then hand them Doctor Moreau and ask them how their previous thoughts apply to the text. Bonus points if you can pick up on the racist/misogynist/colonial impulses in the narrator as well.

From there, I think that we'll move into a discussion of animal/human hybrids (wolfman, Dracula, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, probably something from Victorian England) and then into plant/human hybrids ("Rapuccinnis Daughter," "His Vegetable Wife," maybe an episode of TOS Star Trek, something else that I can't think of right now...). After that, I think that I'll move into the grotesque body (elephant man, conjoined twins, blind people/beggars, etc;) to talk about the stigma of ugliness and poverty and what they mean to how we think about humanity... and lastly, I'll end with a talk about disease... for disease is the uber terror, for it is the invasion of the body by an outside entity... So yeah, "Masque of the Red Death," excerpts from Defoe's The Plague Years and maybe something else. I'd like to fit in a section about temptation and the demonic (pretty much so that I can teach "Young Goodman Brown," Robert Johnson, and "Goblin Market"... but we'll have to wait and see. I may be able to fit those into other categories).

Second semester I'll be teaching about the cyborg and the human and really digging into some of the concepts that were taken for granted in the first class (the separation of mind/body, the idea of the body as "infection," the fact that there is such a thing as an "interior" and an "exterior"). The book will be Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and yes, we'll be watching Bladerunner) and I may be pulling in some Star Trek fandom here as well (for instance, what's so great about being human?? What about Spock? etc;). I know that I will be teaching, "The Real Girl," "The Sandman" and maybe one other piece (that I cannot remember the name of). For sure, we will be reading Haraway, probably Minsky, LeMettrie, and Hayles. After that, I'm not sure. I plan on hitting them pretty hard with the theory that I think they'll need to begin classes next year.

Anyway, this was a successful little note taking adventure for me and I now feel better about my classes. Good thing, I'd like to have a syllabus up and running in the next couple of weeks, and now I know what kind of reading I need to get done in order to do so. The first thing: More Theory for First Semester. After that, we'll see. I need to re-read Do Androids Dream... and Doctor Moreau as well as come up with class notes on all the short stories. I also need to develop a course-pack of the short stories and excerpts for the students...

hmmmmm... of all the things I have to do, I'm actually really looking forward to this. Tomorrow I will have more. Hopefully I will have been to the library and pulled some of the texts that I need. I need to start taking notes on all this (another reason that I want to teach Victorian texts, I can use them in my field exam!) so I'll get to that tomorrow.

Anyway, I guess I can go drive around and think about plot now... awesome.

Peace and good night.

ee..