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...