English 110-ers —
Here’s tomorrow’s line up:
The Aroma Espresso Bar at 145 Greene St at 7 for the pre-game.
The Angelika Film Center at18 West Houston at 7:45 for the main event.
Papers are due by email (mentzs@stjohns.edu) by 5 pm. Please give me a mailing address so that I can send these back to you with comments and grades early next week.
Looking forward to Tempestuous travels as we wend our ways to Soho…
Here’s the website for anyone else who likes this image.
To English 110-ers
As we almost figured out yesterday, our final meeting next week will take place at the Angelika Film Center at 18 West Houston Street in Manhattan, at the 7:45 pm showing of Taymor’s Tempest. Tickets are available online if you want to get them that way. $13 for adults plus whatever fees the web shakes out of you. 
The best subway stop is probably the F at Broadway-Lafayette, if you’re coming from STJ.
Since our class officially starts at 6:55, that gives us time for a pre-film chat over coffee. Two possible suggestions —
Aroma Espresso Bar at 145 Greene St
Please indicate preferences, and negotiate carpools and other logistics, in comments. I’ll be driving over from campus in the afternoon, but then I’ll head straight north to CT after the show, so I’m perhaps not an ideal ride.
He was probably in his mid-fifties, ramrod thin, with a flash of gray in his dark hair. His mouth sometimes pulled down to one side, as if caught between a smile and a frown. He wore the same black bathing suit every time I saw him come to the pool. I never learned his name.
He told me a little bit of his story one day. He’d had an accident in the water when he was a boy, about the same age as my kids, who were at the pool that summer to take swimming lessons of their own. “I almost drowned,” he said, with that pulled-down grimace of a smile. “And since then I’ve been terrified of the water.” Now, as an adult, he’d signed up for a summer of private lessons.
We watched him, trying not to stare. His body froze underwater, muscles clenching & straining & grabbing at nothing. He wore a full set of water wings & floaties, and his arms and legs churned aimlessly.
He got better, slowly. At the end of the summer — during which time Olivia learned to put her face in the water & Ian learned rotary breathing for his crawl stroke — he could support himself w/o floaties. Eventually he swam, by himself, across the deep end of the pool, maybe 15 feet or so, in 12′ deep water. I’ve seldom seem anyone so triumphant, or so scared.
I think of this story a lot at the end of the semester. Learning is painful, risky, and dangerous — sometimes we teachers forget that. You have to put yourself in an untenable position — in the destructive element immerse, to borrow Conrad’s language — to make real education possible.
As I wait all day for your set of questions and your speculative look-backs on your not-yet-completed academic careers, I’ll pose a few questions of my own, plus answer the question that Dr Ahmad dodged a few weeks ago.
Questions inside of STJ:
1. Should all students have a blog? I’ve found, this semester, that keeping a blog has been great for me, in terms of creating a forum for my own academic memoir-ing and notes. I do wonder, though, if rather than having you all read & comment on my blog, if I should not have had you each create your own & keep them throughout your graduate career here (and after, perhaps). I know some of you are already doing this, but I’d like to have your thoughts about making it a requirement for this course.
2. Who’s is and who’s out? This course, right now, is a requirement for all DA students & more or less off-limits for MA & BA/MA students, though Dane & Gavin managed to sneak in. What are your thoughts about this division of our student populations? Do you like it this way? How would you feel about opening the course up to all MA students?
Outside STJ:
1. Scholarly organizations: I’m a member, or have been, of the Modern Language Association, the Shakespeare Association of America, the Renaissance Society of America, the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publication, the Society for the Study of Science, Literature, and the Arts, the Maritime Historical Society, and I’m sure a few more. How many of you know what scholarly orgs are in your sub-fields, and how many are already members? Should we spend time on this in class? These organizations are your intellectual conduit for the world beyond STJ.
2. STJ alums: One of the liveliest recent stories about a STJ MA alum is Paul Devlin’s recent writing in slate.com, among other places, in response to a new book on rap lyrics, which Paul claims have been mistranscribed. Paul’s a PhD candidate at Stony Brook now. How much use would it be to you to have some contact with recent grads of our program?
My 30-year legacy: It’s a tough question, and I don’t really blame Dr Ahmad for ducking it a few weeks ago, but I think that 30 years down the road I’d like people to remember my contributions to early modern studies in terms of reaching toward a more flexible notion of style in the writing of literary criticism, and also a more capacious sense of public outreach for literary critical work. I’m somewhat optimistic that we’re moving toward a more open form of of diachronic historicism in literary studies, and I’d like to be a part of that. My meaningful outreach will likely be in ecological and maritime circles, but one of the great things about being a career teacher is that I hope to touch any number of other sub-fields through my students as time passes.
Too late for this year’s syllabus, but perhaps in time for your holiday shopping, I found Gregory Colon Semenza’s wonderful book on how to thrive as a grad student in these difficult times. It came out in 2005, so before the current economic crisis, but it’s a very useful guide to some of the unspoken rules and norms of the profession, esp in terms of what you need to do when choosing an advisor, writing a seminar paper, going to conferences, and publishing articles. Not to mention things like teaching and service. It’s thorough, sane, and full of excellent insider information.
You may find Semenza’s standards high — he advises publishing at least two articles before finishing your doctoral degree, and establishing a daily routine of working at least 10 hours each weekday plus some extra hours on the weekends. He doesn’t seem to have to work toward rent or food while a grad student, perhaps because he lived in State College, not NYC. But I strongly recommend it for anyone uncertain about what professional goals grad students should be setting for their academic work.
I would think about assigning this book the next time I teach this class.
…For us the Continent of the sea, not the nuptial land with its perfume of fenugreek; for us the free space of the sea, not this earthly side of man, blinded by domestic stars.
Selected Poems, ed. Mary Ann Caws
(Train reading on the way home from the TemFest…)
It’s tem-festuous weather here in DC, with a nip of winter in the wind. An excellent day for an academic event & some meditation on storms.
My talk yokes together a new production of The Tempest in San Francisco, an ancient epic about the nature of the universe, a poem written in French in 1955, and some final attention to fathers and daughters.
I’m looking forward to it. 
No rain right now, but a fantastic gale off the Sound. 
The sound and smell of the wind is amazing. It’s warm air for November, hurling and tumbling itself onto shore. A half-dozen seagulls hover stationary above the beach, held in place by the onrushing wind. While I was watching, one dipped into the seaweed below — it’s about half-tide and ebbing, with mounds of fresh seaweed piled up from earlier this morning — to snatch a quick bite.
Conrad knows about this sort of thing:
If you would know the age of the earth, look upon the sea in a storm. The grayness of the whole immense surface, the wind furrows upon the faces of the waves, the great masses of foam, tossed about and waving, like matted white locks, give to the sea in a gale an appearance of hoary age, lustreless, dull, without gleams, as though it had been created before light itself.
A less happy story about flooding in Norfolk, VA. Te state attorney general is trying to prove that global warming is a hoax while town residents watch the tides before they park each night. Perhaps each, in its way, is reacting to climate change?
