Classes started for me yesterday. My ONLY* class this semester.
and oh boy, il fait mauvais indeed.
At syempre my temper got tested right away when the tricycle driver wanted to charge me 60bucks from ateneo to krus na ligas. (As much as i feel for you guys and the kind of hard work that u do--but gud gawd! you can be such assholes... can't you stick to you're fare matrixes! 25pesos lang from any point in Katips--and CP garcia ain't that fuckin' far! how can you justify more than a 50% increase, ano ba kayo manong... actually i could report him to the management, but i can't bear his, like 3-day suspension (?) on my conscience--but my patience has its limits. so i ended up getting off at Petron Station near l'eglise (*wink) dela Strada to prendre a katips jeep.
I haven't blogged about how horrible the weather was the day I enrolled--the long lines etc. let's just say that I'm glad that I'm so over undergrad status during general registration...though that wasn't enough for the lines at payment--walang sinasanto kapag dun na.
>>>
my prof. is considered to be of the old school and terror-kind.
my classmates have cautioned me na and stuff last sem, but i ended
up taking her--since the over all consensus is, she is damn brilliant.
besides, if i really am serious about this, how can i survive the wild if I can't survive her class?
and as i entered her room yesterday (I was the first one to arrive) she chatted me up.
got freaked when she knew my name (does my ignorant reputation precede me?)--but soon found out it was easy to guess since we were only 3 in her class! the smallest class size I've ever been to.
so wala ng kawala ito. hindi na gagana ang mga poker-face (bluffing) method ko. hehehe especially after she declared na as much as possible she wants to conduct lectures tête-à-tête (*cough,s excuse my french)--since she likes to analyze her students' body language daw, to discern their receptiveness--oh no...
she wanted to know where i was coming from,
alas! perennial rites of passage na yata 'to
I wanted to invent something like: "i graduated with a BA in english lit at Swarthmore and attended Cornell's school of theory and criticism last summer..."
BAHH!!! NEVER!
Syempre taas noo kong sinabi na i got my BFA in UP, yeah you heard that right! you smug, snobby, lit people out there, FINE ARTS!
"So you don't have much experience in 'reading' theoretical texts"
"Besides, my prerequisite classes...yes."
*Silence...
then, my other classmate arrived--she seems nice. though she appeared like she didn't want anything to do with me
...puis walks "Mrs. H"
half-american? from assumption, MA at Georgetown--socialite,
as old as my prof.
she apologizes for being late.
then she looks at us "young folks"
...when my prof asked the "where are you coming from" query
she admitted she had zero experience in theory
...my prof asked has she taken any prerequisites na...
"i wasn't asked to take any"
...my prof stopped...
"I do not mean to discourage you in any way...but
I had a student once, same case as you...who before
the sem ended I asked to drop or fail"
--and she did.
(I am scared.)
Mrs. H was gracious, she didn't know she had to take any prereqs--she wasn't advised
during enrollment...
to my prof's dismay "this is really unprofessional I am sorry, but the department made a huge mistake, you should talk to them immediately...."
"unless you want to wing it...but it's best you take the prereqs first"
so our class of three now looks like a class of two nalang.
I feel bad for Mrs H. though, I can't imagine her in a class with undergrads!
...
after the incident, she gave us assignments right away.
we should read all that we could on
lit theory, the current state
how is it diff from Lit criticism
and Lit history
we could start as early as the Greeks (which she admits are the more salient)or from the turn of the century
from Sartre--Abrams, Eagleton...etc
...saan hahantong ang tagpong ito?
so I got a head start na agad. besides, after committing my first blunder of the sem
by saying "Sed" instead of "Sa-id/Saïd" in front of her, which elicited a stark "Who?" I am eager to show her na may ibubuga naman ako, at saka I'm psyched to do it, hehehe.
So I ended up in Starbucks Katips on my fave spot, and started reading:
"Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction" by Jonathan Culler.
This is the petit tresor i found in Fullybooked highstreet during the weekend :-) Thank god I haven't bought it online just yet!
Oxford UP's VSI series is really good, highly recommended. The topics are diverse I think they have more than 200 volumes na, and they are surprisingly easy and engaging to read--written by experts on the field. I currently own 4 of them, and I plan to have more pa, especially the one on Postmodernism (which is my fave topic right now) and Poststructuralism.
Idol ko si Culler, he is so cool...I've read some of his works last sem, and after reading his attempt to introduce THEORY to the masses, siya na ang peg ko. I want to be the Jonathan Culler of the Philippines! hahahaha
he's so good at elucidating stuff
na I finally can get my head around Derrida's
"Il n'y a pas de hors-texte"
I encountered this in a medyo "mediated" form from one of my profs something like "there is nothing outside language" --which after I heard became my number one slogan/answer when somebody asks me "why are you studying literature?" unfortunately hindi ko pa nagagamit ito, since wala namang nagtatanong hahaha.
after being aware of French this summer i was happy to recognize it! baka sabihin ko na siya in french pag nagkaroon ako ng chance :P
"pourquoi??? c'est simple, il n'y a pas de hors-texte"
pagbigyan nyo nako sige na.
and man! it's sooo deep. it blows my effing mind.
heto ah "presence is in a way a kind of absence"
life itself is suffused with signs!!!
..."logic of supplementarity"
the pleasures of text?
--damn right.
...the pleasures of thought
i'll just take it one at a time.
let's see :-)
*Just can't do one more-- I almost died before the summer. The Plan? get a little richer, then quit cold turkey.
