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| Scenes from a Saturday |
31 March 2007
Scenes from this morning
Since Mary and I had the same Saturday off (it doesn't happen often enough), we took Micah to the park and took these pictures:
30 March 2007
Eliphaz's breakdown
I really enjoy Job 22. Having lost the battle of wits with Job, having seen his arguments shredded and heard Job's speech end, at the end of chapter 21, with "all that is left of your answers is falsehood," he proceeds to make stuff up. In the face of Job's claims to innocence, and in direct contradiction to the narrator in chapters one and two, Eliphaz accuses the book's namesake of about half a dozen things that he apparently makes up out of nowhere.
J.B. has moved into its "gossiping society women" phase, and my classes are actually into it. We're about to get to the Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar scene (which seems to be MacLeish's throwaway scene), and the groups within each class will also be presenting their ideas for Job movies.
I came up with the idea when I got to the Elihu section last spring and couldn't bear the thought of close-reading seven chapters of his pontificating. Instead, I broke my (seventy minute) classes into groups and had them come up with a concept for a movie based on Job. The class was a hit, so I've given these groups about thirty minutes of class time over the last three classes to do likewise. (The original groups only had twenty, so these ideas had better be good ones.) In last year's classes, I got Job-in-Athens (starring UGA's starting quarterback as Job, the head football coach as God, and the university president as Satan--not too far off from the way people talk around here), hip-hop Job (starring Tupac, who could be Forrest-Gumped in if he didn't come out of his quasi-mortem hiding), and Job-for-president, among others. We ought to have some fun Monday (instead, once more, of close-reading Elihu).
Beowulf has wiped out the entire Grendel clan and is headed back to Geatland. I'm sure we're in for some long speeches to Higelac.
And in the paper-writing arena, I've got research done for my Milton paper, have most of it done for Hegel, and haven't even generated a solid idea for Beowulf. This is going to be an interesting month. The good news is that none of the three profs expects a full-length, 20-page paper. The bad news is that there are three of them.
Now back to grading freshman papers. 12 to go on my laptop screen, and about four more that I haven't downloaded yet. I'm on the downward slope...
J.B. has moved into its "gossiping society women" phase, and my classes are actually into it. We're about to get to the Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar scene (which seems to be MacLeish's throwaway scene), and the groups within each class will also be presenting their ideas for Job movies.
I came up with the idea when I got to the Elihu section last spring and couldn't bear the thought of close-reading seven chapters of his pontificating. Instead, I broke my (seventy minute) classes into groups and had them come up with a concept for a movie based on Job. The class was a hit, so I've given these groups about thirty minutes of class time over the last three classes to do likewise. (The original groups only had twenty, so these ideas had better be good ones.) In last year's classes, I got Job-in-Athens (starring UGA's starting quarterback as Job, the head football coach as God, and the university president as Satan--not too far off from the way people talk around here), hip-hop Job (starring Tupac, who could be Forrest-Gumped in if he didn't come out of his quasi-mortem hiding), and Job-for-president, among others. We ought to have some fun Monday (instead, once more, of close-reading Elihu).
Beowulf has wiped out the entire Grendel clan and is headed back to Geatland. I'm sure we're in for some long speeches to Higelac.
And in the paper-writing arena, I've got research done for my Milton paper, have most of it done for Hegel, and haven't even generated a solid idea for Beowulf. This is going to be an interesting month. The good news is that none of the three profs expects a full-length, 20-page paper. The bad news is that there are three of them.
Now back to grading freshman papers. 12 to go on my laptop screen, and about four more that I haven't downloaded yet. I'm on the downward slope...
29 March 2007
Making the rounds
I met today both with my major professor and with the professor over in the religion department, both of whom will be conducting my comprehensive exams a little over a year from now. Dr. Medine (over in Religion) liked my comps list, and Dr. Freer thinks I have an article-in-the-making cooking with my Milton paper. That makes three papers that I'll be shaping up to submit for publication next year (one on Milton, one on Wordsworth, and one on Irving), plus three that are themselves shaping up into a book-length project that still needs a couple chapters (they're in my mind and in my notebooks; I just need to write them) and an introductory essay (also in my mind but not yet in my notebooks). Oh, and then there's comprehensive exams to be taken and a dissertation out there to be written. I think next year will be a busy one.
Wednesday's Job lesson was rather run-of-the-mill, but the grand shape of the book is really coming together, I think, for the students. I think also that when the book makes its turn around chapter 38, the ending will be that much better for our knowing the structure of the first four-fifths of the book.
J.B. gets weirder with every scene, which makes it a joy to teach.
Although my paper proposal for Hegel class was atrocious (I fear that I might lose esteem with Dr. Cole--that's how slipshod it was), I actually have a pretty strong idea of what I'm going to be writing. My Milton paper has a definite shape. The real X-factor this semester is my Beowulf paper. But I have a hunch that I've done more thinking and research already than have my compatriots, so at least we'll all suffer together as the end of April approaches.
And in one more development, I took some time yesterday (between grading and preparing for classes) to write a scene from my perhaps-never-to-be-finished Saul novel. I like the way the scene sounds. I only hope that I'll have the time some day to build a book around it.
Wednesday's Job lesson was rather run-of-the-mill, but the grand shape of the book is really coming together, I think, for the students. I think also that when the book makes its turn around chapter 38, the ending will be that much better for our knowing the structure of the first four-fifths of the book.
J.B. gets weirder with every scene, which makes it a joy to teach.
Although my paper proposal for Hegel class was atrocious (I fear that I might lose esteem with Dr. Cole--that's how slipshod it was), I actually have a pretty strong idea of what I'm going to be writing. My Milton paper has a definite shape. The real X-factor this semester is my Beowulf paper. But I have a hunch that I've done more thinking and research already than have my compatriots, so at least we'll all suffer together as the end of April approaches.
And in one more development, I took some time yesterday (between grading and preparing for classes) to write a scene from my perhaps-never-to-be-finished Saul novel. I like the way the scene sounds. I only hope that I'll have the time some day to build a book around it.
26 March 2007
Job 13
Today I taught Job chapters 11-14, so I've got more plainly in mind the content of ch. 13 and its place in the scene. Job's speech that starts in chapter 12 and runs to chapter 14, his longest to that point in the book, responds to Zophar's proto-apophatic claim that the depth and height of God's wisdom makes his own claims to justice not wrong but spurious. The first thing that Job does is to note the character of the wisdom tradition, that it holds wisdom intelligible and even cumulative as one grows older. Thus Zophar's claim doesn't match up with the larger literature. Then he notes the obvious disconnect between asserting Job's guilt dogmatically on one hand and divine inscrutability on the other.
Then comes chapter 13, where Job the accused becomes Job the accuser. He accuses all three, now that each has had a chance to speak, of showing partiality rather than judging with true wisdom. Moreover, he turns the traditional wisdom formulae on their heads and claims that taking sides with God, when God's wrong, will yield judgment no less disastrous than what Job has faced.
In the play, Eliphaz and Bildad and Zophar have yet to appear, and they won't until very late. Both of my classes noted well that J.B. is a more human story than Job, lacking though it might be in the hardcore Hebrew intellectual content. (I'm coming to believe that Job is an even more sophisticated bit of critical Hebrew philosophy than Ecclesiastes, which used to be my favorite Biblical philosophy book.) Because the messengers carry human depravity as well as messages, J.B.'s and Sarah's receptions of bad news are at once more nauseating and more powerful.
In Beowulf class we're in the anti-hall, the lair of Grendel, and Beowulf is about to find out how useless Hrunting is in that strange subterranean world. When I start teaching full-time, Beowulf is definitely going to be on my syllabus for literary surveys--I've become entirely too familiar with it not to include it.
And in the cantata world, we've got three more practices to refine. The production sounds presentable already, so I look forward to fine-tuning it over the next week and a half.
Then comes chapter 13, where Job the accused becomes Job the accuser. He accuses all three, now that each has had a chance to speak, of showing partiality rather than judging with true wisdom. Moreover, he turns the traditional wisdom formulae on their heads and claims that taking sides with God, when God's wrong, will yield judgment no less disastrous than what Job has faced.
In the play, Eliphaz and Bildad and Zophar have yet to appear, and they won't until very late. Both of my classes noted well that J.B. is a more human story than Job, lacking though it might be in the hardcore Hebrew intellectual content. (I'm coming to believe that Job is an even more sophisticated bit of critical Hebrew philosophy than Ecclesiastes, which used to be my favorite Biblical philosophy book.) Because the messengers carry human depravity as well as messages, J.B.'s and Sarah's receptions of bad news are at once more nauseating and more powerful.
In Beowulf class we're in the anti-hall, the lair of Grendel, and Beowulf is about to find out how useless Hrunting is in that strange subterranean world. When I start teaching full-time, Beowulf is definitely going to be on my syllabus for literary surveys--I've become entirely too familiar with it not to include it.
And in the cantata world, we've got three more practices to refine. The production sounds presentable already, so I look forward to fine-tuning it over the next week and a half.
23 March 2007
Confession of a Fanboy
I've succumbed to a bit of image-consumerism. Since I had a 25% discount coupon, I bought myself a pocket-sized Moleskine notebook at Borders today. Now I have the groovy little notebook that wannabe poets and intellectuals like so much to carry around.
The bottom of the ad page says something about contemporary nomadism... I have to chuckle at that. I'm about as far from nomadic as one might get.
The bottom of the ad page says something about contemporary nomadism... I have to chuckle at that. I'm about as far from nomadic as one might get.
Job
It's been a while since I posted anything substantial, and I have to point to microbes as the culprits. About two weeks ago Micah got the flu. Then Mary got a virus that wasn't the flu. Then I got a bacterial something-or-other (perhaps strep?) that was unrelated to the previous two. Then Micah got strep. Then it was Wednesday of this week before I finally had a full day to work.
So unfortunately, I've been coasting to some extent through Job. I have done some real intellectual work on this unit, retooling the way I teach the text to focus on Job as a character and an intellectual (a la Hamlet, really), but I still feel like I'm cheating the book. Fortunately, J.B. is a strong enough play that it pretty much teaches itself; the fast-moving scenes are packed with philosophical land mines, and such land mines make for good class discussions.
In the world of Beowulf, we're about to translate our way into Grendel's lair, and Dr. Evans laid out a plan today to catch us back up from his sickness. I translated for three solid hours yesterday, translating over a hundred lines and pushing my brain past translation into reading for one of the first times in my Old English career. My hope is that I'll be able to reach that once or twice more before the semester's out. There's really nothing like thinking in another language as far as intellectual thrills go. I've had it happen to me a couple times each in Greek and Hebrew, and such experiences make me hope that wherever I land professionally, I'll be able to teach some sort of language classes as I go.
Hopefully I'll have some hours really to plan this week's Job lessons. I'm realizing on this read just how interesting Job is as a character, what he sees that his interlocutors don't. For the first time I'm realizing that the shape of the story might be secondary to Job's own intellectual flights. I had been so focused before on Job's speeches as apologiae that I hadn't paid attention to their particulars, to the ways that he sees.
For instance, in today's readings (chapters 8-10), Job does not simply participate in Bildad's game of blame-and-respond but deconstructs (I couldn't come up with a less trendy word) the very categories in which Bildad's game happens, noting that the same judge that Bildad would have the innocent man convince is also the blaming prosecutor. (Job isn't aware of chapter one's divine bet, I don't think.) With one character playing so many roles, Job protests, there's no chance of his winning that game. And even as he waxes theological, another level of meaning critiques Eliphaz and Bildad themselves. (At this point in the book, Zophar and Elihu haven't yet chimed in.)
In another for instance, chapter 9 ends with Job saying that he would speak his mind if he weren't afraid of spurring the wrath of God. Then the form of chapter ten is a series of indirect statements that go something like, "But if I could speak freely and without fear to God, I'd say..." The arm's-length distancing of himself from his words is brilliant, and the things he hypothetically might say but won't be blamed for saying are positively acidic.
Ah, I have a great job...
So unfortunately, I've been coasting to some extent through Job. I have done some real intellectual work on this unit, retooling the way I teach the text to focus on Job as a character and an intellectual (a la Hamlet, really), but I still feel like I'm cheating the book. Fortunately, J.B. is a strong enough play that it pretty much teaches itself; the fast-moving scenes are packed with philosophical land mines, and such land mines make for good class discussions.
In the world of Beowulf, we're about to translate our way into Grendel's lair, and Dr. Evans laid out a plan today to catch us back up from his sickness. I translated for three solid hours yesterday, translating over a hundred lines and pushing my brain past translation into reading for one of the first times in my Old English career. My hope is that I'll be able to reach that once or twice more before the semester's out. There's really nothing like thinking in another language as far as intellectual thrills go. I've had it happen to me a couple times each in Greek and Hebrew, and such experiences make me hope that wherever I land professionally, I'll be able to teach some sort of language classes as I go.
Hopefully I'll have some hours really to plan this week's Job lessons. I'm realizing on this read just how interesting Job is as a character, what he sees that his interlocutors don't. For the first time I'm realizing that the shape of the story might be secondary to Job's own intellectual flights. I had been so focused before on Job's speeches as apologiae that I hadn't paid attention to their particulars, to the ways that he sees.
For instance, in today's readings (chapters 8-10), Job does not simply participate in Bildad's game of blame-and-respond but deconstructs (I couldn't come up with a less trendy word) the very categories in which Bildad's game happens, noting that the same judge that Bildad would have the innocent man convince is also the blaming prosecutor. (Job isn't aware of chapter one's divine bet, I don't think.) With one character playing so many roles, Job protests, there's no chance of his winning that game. And even as he waxes theological, another level of meaning critiques Eliphaz and Bildad themselves. (At this point in the book, Zophar and Elihu haven't yet chimed in.)
In another for instance, chapter 9 ends with Job saying that he would speak his mind if he weren't afraid of spurring the wrath of God. Then the form of chapter ten is a series of indirect statements that go something like, "But if I could speak freely and without fear to God, I'd say..." The arm's-length distancing of himself from his words is brilliant, and the things he hypothetically might say but won't be blamed for saying are positively acidic.
Ah, I have a great job...
12 March 2007
Link request
To my readers with blogs of your own:
At the prompting of my department, I've created a more formal academic web site. I've put a link to it in the links section in the right column.
As a favor to me, I'd like to ask each of you to put my name, Nathan Gilmour, in a post with a link to that site. Its address is thus:
http://ngilmour.myweb.uga.edu/index.html
From what folks tell me, schools to which I'll be applying for teaching gigs will be Googling me, and according to what they say, it's better for one's professional web site to land high on the search list. Since I'm competing with a writer in Washington state for the "Nathan Gilmour" hits anyway, I could use some help.
So I appreciate any links you can provide. Yes, the site is still lame, but I'm working on it.
At the prompting of my department, I've created a more formal academic web site. I've put a link to it in the links section in the right column.
As a favor to me, I'd like to ask each of you to put my name, Nathan Gilmour, in a post with a link to that site. Its address is thus:
http://ngilmour.myweb.uga.edu/index.html
From what folks tell me, schools to which I'll be applying for teaching gigs will be Googling me, and according to what they say, it's better for one's professional web site to land high on the search list. Since I'm competing with a writer in Washington state for the "Nathan Gilmour" hits anyway, I could use some help.
So I appreciate any links you can provide. Yes, the site is still lame, but I'm working on it.
10 March 2007
08 March 2007
Ending David, Beginning a Break
Monday we wrapped up the David unit with the rise of Solomon. I think that, by the end, my students had a real, literary familiarity with David, the kind that one gets by the end of Hamlet or the gospel of Luke. I asserted over and over during the course of the unit that the genius of the books of Samuel, the reason why 1 Timothy can say that it's good for instruction and why Rabbinic Judaisms and various Christian traditions can claim it as good for moral formation, is the texts' insistence upon the larger-than-life goodness of David and the larger-than-life wickedness of David. This is no watered-down "realism" where David is "just like one of us"; he's more rotten than any of us could conceive being one chapter, and he's more heroic and magnanimous than we're capable of the next. I think that, as David faded into his three-line obituary and Solomon rose, Michael Corleone-style, to seize rule of Jerusalem, just about everyone who had been on that ride got it.
And now I get to grade papers.
I'm picking up my brother from the airport tonight and taking a Beowulf exam tomorrow; then it's two and a half days with little brother followed by five days of paper-writing and paper-grading and cantata-narration-writing and perhaps a couple hours of sleep here and there. And then, next Monday, it's back to teaching, this time Job.
Rock and roll.
And now I get to grade papers.
I'm picking up my brother from the airport tonight and taking a Beowulf exam tomorrow; then it's two and a half days with little brother followed by five days of paper-writing and paper-grading and cantata-narration-writing and perhaps a couple hours of sleep here and there. And then, next Monday, it's back to teaching, this time Job.
Rock and roll.
03 March 2007
A Big ol' Hunk of Beowulf, that's Hwaet.
Yikes. I just finished the first part of the weekend's homework in Beowulf class. Fifty-four lines. Yeesh.
Now on to the next bit...
Now on to the next bit...
01 March 2007
Back to the Grind
I just spent forty-five minutes plowing through the first 12 pages of Adorno for next week. Welcome back, Cole's class.
Yesterday I taught one of the most fun lessons in my Hebrew Bible and/as Literature class, the David and Bathsheba lesson. Tomorrow is another one, the Absalom lesson. David's cool-headed maneuvering in 2 Samuel 11 brought just the reactions that it brought last year--the loyalists called it a "mistake," and the rest thought him monstrous. I did take more care this year to keep David's heroic attractiveness in the picture, letting students do a "moral seismograph" of David's career. I had them chart a line above and below the line of moral indifference, and almost all of them had David at his highest when he achieved his military victories and lowest when he murdered Uriah. The aftermath of Bathsheba's unnamed child's death was the place where folks started to fight.
It's the genius of 2 Samuel, really. I could read David's reaction to six different people and get six different reactions, based on their loyalty to the picture that David painted of himself, the golden boy of Israel. (I, for one, am not fooled.) And tomorrow, when David mourns over Absalom and Joab kicks his butt for it, I imagine I'll get six more different reactions, the pragmatists and the family-sentimentalists and the bloodline-covanenters disagreeing on whether David's treatment of his men after Absalom's revolt was, in fact, as bad as Joab makes it. (It is.)
I graded the last of the second paper this morning, and the third doesn't come in until next Friday. Until then, I crank away on papers and try to sleep a bit.
On second thought, I'd better crank away on those papers.
Yesterday I taught one of the most fun lessons in my Hebrew Bible and/as Literature class, the David and Bathsheba lesson. Tomorrow is another one, the Absalom lesson. David's cool-headed maneuvering in 2 Samuel 11 brought just the reactions that it brought last year--the loyalists called it a "mistake," and the rest thought him monstrous. I did take more care this year to keep David's heroic attractiveness in the picture, letting students do a "moral seismograph" of David's career. I had them chart a line above and below the line of moral indifference, and almost all of them had David at his highest when he achieved his military victories and lowest when he murdered Uriah. The aftermath of Bathsheba's unnamed child's death was the place where folks started to fight.
It's the genius of 2 Samuel, really. I could read David's reaction to six different people and get six different reactions, based on their loyalty to the picture that David painted of himself, the golden boy of Israel. (I, for one, am not fooled.) And tomorrow, when David mourns over Absalom and Joab kicks his butt for it, I imagine I'll get six more different reactions, the pragmatists and the family-sentimentalists and the bloodline-covanenters disagreeing on whether David's treatment of his men after Absalom's revolt was, in fact, as bad as Joab makes it. (It is.)
I graded the last of the second paper this morning, and the third doesn't come in until next Friday. Until then, I crank away on papers and try to sleep a bit.
On second thought, I'd better crank away on those papers.
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