day one

today was the first day of school.
this semester i will be wrestling with Descartes, and Kant (among others) in my philosophy class, and i am more than a little bit scared. i've taken all sorts of philosophy before, but those classes are flakey, buttered breakfast pastries compared to this stuff.

also i will be taking on Dante, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Villon, Voltaire and three authors so monumentally bad-ass that they all go by the mysterious nom-de-plume Anonymous, i.e., the authors of the Mabinogion, Tristan and Yseult, and the Carmina Burana.

i will also be making a full frontal assault (notice how i'm into the phrase "full-frontal" coupled with a word you expect to be nudity but ends up being something else? its so delicious) on Latin 202. i haven't taken latin in...almost two years. luckily we are using the same book i used back then, and i don't think i've forgotten as much as i was afraid i had. still, it is latin, and as for being the great grandad of all western languages, it is nothing to be trifled with. seriously. latin don't take no for an answer, and it don't take shit from nobody. it don't mess around, and pussyfooting will not be tolerated.

not to be outdone, though, today, certainly unattended, is African American Literature Until 1940. there are what feel like a hundred books for this class, though in reality there are only about 15. yes. that's right. ONLY 15 books. i took this class because i knew and liked the professor from AfrAm Lit Since 1940. i got an "A" in the class. there were only five books. which is about what you'd expect for an English class...even a bit light. apparently one of two things happened: the number of African American writers since 1940 either a) decreased exponentially, leaving us with only five African American authors in the last 50 years, or b) exploded since 1940, thus limiting the number of books and authors we were able to consider. my guess is it is most likely the latter explanation at work here, which makes me wonder: are we reading every book written by a black author before 1940?

seriously though. not every book, but damn well near every author at least.
i guess over the span of 200 years, that's not a lot of books to consider...but over the span of 10 weeks it is.

and that's just on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Monday/Wednesday/Friday classes are as follows, though still yet to be experienced:

20th Century Drama (also damn near 15 books)
and
Lit theory and criticism


anticipate many future detailed posts about reading related headaches.