College reading: yuck
Oct. 10th, 2011 12:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethToday was set aside for reading texts for college. I need to read The Woman in White for Friday after next, I think. It's tedious and annoying so far. I got up to page 80. Then I switched to something for Cultural Studies we don't need to read for another two or three weeks. I thought I'd read a few pages and go back to the tedious long paragraphs of boredom. Instead I discovered it's another book I don't want to spend any more time with than absolutely necessary. Jimmy Corrigan The Smartest Kid on Earth. I think. The cover is weird and difficult to read. The whole thing is weird and difficult to read. It does things with panel layouts that don't usually happen, so you sort of have to read the page and the rearrange it in your head a lot of the time. And it is kind of gross and very depressing. It kicks off with a suicide, wanders through child abuse both by violence and neglect, adds casual racism, and ends up with more deaths. And, also, seems utterly pointless and I don't know why we're studying it. So it adds to the pile of texts that this semester started with murder, cancer, and much more murder, carried on through suicide and the holocaust as drawn with the most disturbing mice ever, and then this. Can we not study texts we'd want to spend time with? Is there nothing of value to learn from stories with hope and happiness and an ongoing lack of suicide? I suspect my grade this semester will greatly resemble the cultural studies unit with the movies, which were mostly prostitutes and serial killers and battleship potemkin. That wouldn't be good. I only pulled that together to a decent average because I studied Doctor Who and the UEA and learned much the same things about film technique but applied to texts I could stand to let my brain look at. And, see, we learned tons about television from studying Doctor Who, and nothing we studied got above a PG rating. I'm pretty sure it's not necessary to traumatise your students to have interesting studyings to do.
College offers only and precisely enough credits to pass. So I have to do all of them. And one of my fellow part time students is stuffed for 10 credits at level 2. I can study The Short Story at level 2 because I skipped it when it was offered at level 1. I did Doctor Who instead. The other student did not, and can't study it at both levels. Doctor Who has saved my degree. Rock.
My ear hurts and my studying is depressing and I'm already quite depressed enough thanks.
Also, we have had four weeks of this Contemporary Narrative unit and so far we have studied the definition of metafiction and also noticed that texts refer to lots of different discourses. And that a bunch of dudes with too much time on their hands started looking at life and saying it was all narrative, because humans use narrative to figure out the world, so they see it all through narrative, so life is, basically, a story. Which I heard summed up much more quickly in the intro to The Storyteller dvds. With better puppets. ANYway, 8 hours of class, 6 hours of teaching, and he keeps going on about mobius strips and how the author in metafiction is inside and outside texts at once and how everyone thinks they're the author of their own life but they get rewritten by outside forces as demonstrated by anecdotes from his teaching career. And I don't care. Life is not a narrative, or even a collection of competing narratives drawn from different discourses. Life is a bunch of stuff that happens that we understand with the tools available, which include narratives drawn from different discourses. Getting too Matrix about it just gets boring. We know we're not the boss of our own lives. Most of us are mature students with a lot of competing demands on our lives who are living not exactly the story we thought we would. We have noticed this. Being able to quote some dude saying it doesn't make it any more true. Also they tend to get wanky. And be translated from French, which doesn't help with the clarity.
Anyway. I do not get that 'learning something' feeling from class so far. And we're at least a third of the way through.
And college still hasn't provided the appropriate computer chairs, though I can now get onto Blackboard, so that's a big win.
... also I forgot to order my NUS card. Or my cinema card for that matter. All my cards keep running out because I don't do anything so I forget them. :-p Bored. Sulk.
Okay, so, anyway, I didn't like the texts and I don't like college.
On the plus side Victorians and Victorianism is looking much better by comparison. Tedious it may be, but disturbing it... actually is too, because it keeps saying stuff about asylums, and Victorian mental health care is just a nightmare of itself.
Ugh.
I must pick something for my dissertation that I can study and study and not creep myself out with at all.
I'd pick some Doctor Who but there's so much Doctor Who.
I don't know, how many thousand words could I figure to write about Survival anyway?
Also I kind of want to write about fanfic. There's some most awesome fanfic out there. But I don't know if it's awesome to study.
Plus the stuff I'm thinking of right now is Stargate Atlantis fanfic, and I'd kind of have to actually watch the source text to have the appropriate context for that.
... and the more I look at this stuff, the more sure I am I don't want this to be the rest of my life. Texts and meta. College and cuts and complaints.
There has to be more than this.
College offers only and precisely enough credits to pass. So I have to do all of them. And one of my fellow part time students is stuffed for 10 credits at level 2. I can study The Short Story at level 2 because I skipped it when it was offered at level 1. I did Doctor Who instead. The other student did not, and can't study it at both levels. Doctor Who has saved my degree. Rock.
My ear hurts and my studying is depressing and I'm already quite depressed enough thanks.
Also, we have had four weeks of this Contemporary Narrative unit and so far we have studied the definition of metafiction and also noticed that texts refer to lots of different discourses. And that a bunch of dudes with too much time on their hands started looking at life and saying it was all narrative, because humans use narrative to figure out the world, so they see it all through narrative, so life is, basically, a story. Which I heard summed up much more quickly in the intro to The Storyteller dvds. With better puppets. ANYway, 8 hours of class, 6 hours of teaching, and he keeps going on about mobius strips and how the author in metafiction is inside and outside texts at once and how everyone thinks they're the author of their own life but they get rewritten by outside forces as demonstrated by anecdotes from his teaching career. And I don't care. Life is not a narrative, or even a collection of competing narratives drawn from different discourses. Life is a bunch of stuff that happens that we understand with the tools available, which include narratives drawn from different discourses. Getting too Matrix about it just gets boring. We know we're not the boss of our own lives. Most of us are mature students with a lot of competing demands on our lives who are living not exactly the story we thought we would. We have noticed this. Being able to quote some dude saying it doesn't make it any more true. Also they tend to get wanky. And be translated from French, which doesn't help with the clarity.
Anyway. I do not get that 'learning something' feeling from class so far. And we're at least a third of the way through.
And college still hasn't provided the appropriate computer chairs, though I can now get onto Blackboard, so that's a big win.
... also I forgot to order my NUS card. Or my cinema card for that matter. All my cards keep running out because I don't do anything so I forget them. :-p Bored. Sulk.
Okay, so, anyway, I didn't like the texts and I don't like college.
On the plus side Victorians and Victorianism is looking much better by comparison. Tedious it may be, but disturbing it... actually is too, because it keeps saying stuff about asylums, and Victorian mental health care is just a nightmare of itself.
Ugh.
I must pick something for my dissertation that I can study and study and not creep myself out with at all.
I'd pick some Doctor Who but there's so much Doctor Who.
I don't know, how many thousand words could I figure to write about Survival anyway?
Also I kind of want to write about fanfic. There's some most awesome fanfic out there. But I don't know if it's awesome to study.
Plus the stuff I'm thinking of right now is Stargate Atlantis fanfic, and I'd kind of have to actually watch the source text to have the appropriate context for that.
... and the more I look at this stuff, the more sure I am I don't want this to be the rest of my life. Texts and meta. College and cuts and complaints.
There has to be more than this.