As most of you already know, I started my second semester of grad school last week. Along with all the writing exercises and workshops I attended during the residency, I had to develop my second-semester study plan, which you can think of as a contract between the student and the program. The student outlines his or her goals for the semester, details the work to be done, and guarantees the delivery of that work by a certain date. In return, the program promises to give the student credit for the work. It’s the kind of thing you need if you attend one of those hippy schools that don’t believe in strict requirements or letter grades.
After starting and abandoning three different novels last semester, I needed to come up with a study plan to streamline my writing process. The one my advisor and I came up with comes down to this: I will send him a complete draft of a new chapter from my novel every three weeks, which means that, at the end of the semester, I’ll have the first five chapters of my novel completed.
I’m very excited.
Along with the creative writing, I need to write a twenty-page critical paper and fifteen more annotations. I still need to select the topic for my critical paper, but I’m all set on the annotations. Here’s the reading list that they’ll be drawn from (in no particular order):
- Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland.
- Crossley-Holland, Kevin. The Norse Myths.
- Gardner, John. Grendel.
- Barth, John. Giles Goat-Boy.
- Markson, David. Wittgenstein’s Mistress.
- Pike, Christopher. Sati.
- Rice, Ann. Christ out of Egypt.
- Hossain, Rokeya Sakhawat. Sultana’s Dream.
- Russ, Joanna. We Who Are About To….
- Gaiman, Neal. American Gods.
- Adams, Douglas. Long Dark Teatime of the Soul.
- Le Guin, Ursula K. Always Coming Home.
- Morrow, James. Only Begotten Daughter.
- Lewis, C.S. Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold.
- Hesse, Hermann. Narcissus and Goldmund.
- Milton, John. Paradise Lost.
- Shelley, Percy. Prometheus Unbound.
- McCarthy, Cormac. The Road.
- Banville, John. Mefisto.
- Sturgeon, Theodore. More Than Human.
- Dennett, Daniel. Breaking the Spell: Religion as natural phenomenon.
- Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus.
Seriously. Look at that list. Books like Only Begotten Daughter (which replaces the Virgin Mary with a guy, Jesus with a girl, and the Holy Land with NYC in the 1970s) and Grendal (which shows us the Beowulf tale from the perspective of the monster) and Mefisto (which retells the story of Faust) all re-imagine popular myths and tales. Others, such as Always Coming Home and We Who Are About To…, are innovative sci-fi/fantasy books. And still others, Herland and Sultana’s Dream, investigate different ideas of feminist utopias. Then you’ve got the classics like Milton, Shelley, and Shakespeare. And, smack dab in the middle, a nice light comedy from Douglas Adams (where the Norse gods are major suspects in a mystery).
Seriously. It’s gonna be one hell of a semester.
I took the last two nights off since returning from the residency. But tonight…the semester begins!
Wish me luck.
4 Comments
you got that shit brah… - no luck needed…
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8491896865632168074
here you go kyle. Just play this when you need some help.
Looks interesting. Though, Ann Rice and C.S. Lewis are a bit weak.
The C.S. Lewis book I am pretty psyched for (pun intended). It’s a reworking of the Cupid and Psyche myth (hence, the pun). I’m a big of Lewis. The Chronicles of Narnia are fantastic, and The Screwtape Letters is like a book by Mark Twain, had Twain been a devout Christian, as opposed to the opposite.
The Anne Rice book could be a disappointment, however. I am a big fan of the first five books of the Vampire Chronicles, though after Memnoch the Devil, things just got silly. I also enjoyed the Mayfair Witches series. But, I’ve also read a couple of books by her that just didn’t do it for me. So, it could go either way.
The other thing that concerns me about the Rice book is the subject. I’ve read a couple of retellings of the Christ story (let it be known that Norman Mailer’s “The Gospel According to the Son” was by far the worst). If she sticks to “the gospel truth,” then I fear the book will suck; but if she allows her imagination to profane the tale, if she is willing to commit sacrilege, then, like The Last Temptation of Christ, it could be spiritually and intellectually stimulating. I don’t think she’ll pull it off, but here’s hoping.
I’m probably most excited about Mefisto and American Gods. Gaiman has always intrigued me, and Mefisto has some great blurbs on the back, including one from the Cleveland Plain Dealer that reads, “Intense, cerebral, linguistically inventive…”. Sounds fun.