› . local author .

RSSCategoriesAbout

: notes on place, literature, history, and method :

So You Wanna Prepare for a Literature Seminar

A few questions to consider in the week leading up to a seminar, to guide your engagement with the assigned material, and improve your well-being, scholastically speaking.

To suggest additions and/or emendations, write an email.

——————————————————————————————

{Before reading}

About the author

  • When/where did the author live and work? (decades; country, city)
  • Who were some of the author’s associates? (literary, artistic, political, philosophical, etc.)
  • What literary or artistic movements did the author participate in? Or inaugurate? Or respond to?
  • What forms did the author typically write in?

About the text

  • When/where was the text published? (year, city)
  • Where did the text appear in the course of the writers career? (first? last?)
  • What is the text’s apparent form and/or genre?

{During reading}

  • How do the paratexts frame the reading? Consider title page, epigraphs, preface, editor’s introduction.

  • Where and how does the text depart from its apparent genre? Identify specific passages that demonstrate these departures.

  • Highlight 3-5 passages that seem formally or thematically important. Think of these as passages you would want to read aloud in seminar.

  • Note recurring images, words, or syntactic patterns. Have we encountered those images/words/patterns in previous texts?

  • Highlight any passages that genuinely puzzle you. Consider asking about these during class.

{After reading}

  • Where does this text fit in the narrative of the course, up to this point?

    • What lines of thought does the text continue? (Identity exemplary passages to share in class.)

    • What new lines of thought does the text introduce or engage with? (Identify exemplary passages to share in class.)

    • What is the strongest case for this text’s inclusion on the syllabus? What would be a case for excluding this text from the syllabus?

  • What is the relation between the primary text and any assigned secondary readings (theory, history, scholarship)? Does the primary text exemplify the points made in the secondary texts, or diverge?

Some Trees

——————————————————————————————

for Annie Dillard (-2026)

——————
                                I believed
a mind’s shattering released
the objects of its scrutiny: trees, blue plums in a bowl,

            (Louise Glück, from “World Breaking Apart”)

——————
32) When I say ‘hope,’ I don’t mean hope for anything in particular. I guess I just mean thinking that it’s worth it to keep one’s eyes open. “What are all those / fuzzy-looking things out there? / Trees? Well, I’m tired / of them”: the last words of William Carlos Williams’s English grandmother.

            (Maggie Nelson, from Bluets)

——————
I think you
would like the Chestnut
Tree, I met in my walk.
It hit my notice suddenly -
and I thought the Skies
were in Blossom -
Then there’s a noiseless
noise in the Orchard,
that I let persons hear -

            (Emily Dickinson, from a letter to T. W. Higginson)

——————
Annie, it has taken me a long time to live.
And to take a long time to live is to take a long time
To understand that your life is your own life.

            (James Wright, from “Voices Between Waking and Sleeping in the Mountains”)

——————
As a rule after lunch mother has a nap

and I go out to walk.
The bare blue trees and bleached wooden sky of April
carve into me with knives of light.

Something inside it reminds me of childhood
it is the light of the stalled time after lunch
when clocks tick

and hearts shut
and fathers leave to go back to work
and mothers stand at the kitchen sink pondering

something they never tell.
You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.

Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?

            (Anne Carson, from “The Glass Essay”)

                                     ——————
The present of our life looks different under trees.
…
Some trees, like giant sequoias, are, practically speaking, immortal, vulnerable only to another ice age. They are not even susceptible to fire. Sequoia wood barely burns, and the bark is “nearly as fireproof as asbestos. The top of one sequoia, struck by lightning a few years ago during a July thunderstorm, smoldered quietly, without apparently damaging the tree, until it was put out by a snowstorm in October.”
…
We run around under these obelisk-creatures, teetering on our soft, small feet. We are out on a jaunt, picnicking, fattening like puppies for our deaths. Shall I carve a name on this trunk? What if I fell in a forest: Would a tree hear?

            (Annie Dillard, from “The Present,” Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

[ to submit a tree, email trees@grantrosson.com ]

Top Five Songs About Cutting Hair

——————————————————————————————

  1. Adrianne Lenker - cut my hair (live)

  2. Pavement - Cut Your Hair

  3. CSNY - Almost Cut My Hair

  4. Alexander Pope - The Rape of the Lock

  5. Beck - Devil’s Haircut

It’s the end of summer, and I need to cut my hair, but I’m doing this instead.


« Newer posts
Page 1
Older posts »