Today was the first day of classes, and boy oh boy was it grand. First I had British Detective fiction which...lets face it...is the best thing in the history of ever. We literally...literally...spent almost two hours talking about the characteristics of classic detective stories, such as the "quirky detective," the "picturesque but limited setting," and the way that the author disrupts classically safe places, like the home, or the church, in order to get the reader's attention and challenge their feelings of comfort and normalcy. We also watched a clip of BBC's Agatha Christie's Miss Marple's Murder at the Vicarage, which I, being a complete weirdo, had already seen. It was really fun, and completely up my alley, interest-wise. The only unfortunate part of this is class is that I have to read Bleak House by Charles Dickens in two weeks. It is 985 pages. Yikes. That is 70 pages a day. I'm 45 in, and it is actually a lot more readable than I thought it would be. Considering the last time I read Dickens was freshman year of high school, that makes sense.
Right after BDF (British Detective Fiction), I had Mythologizing Shakespeare. So, you may remember that three girls in my house are named Hannah. Well. We are all in that class. As are three other girls from my house. There are eight of us in Clarendon Villas. Two people in my house are not in this class with me. There are ten people in the class. So. In summary. My Shakespeare class is 60% my housemates, and 30% Hannah. Alright. Moving on. The professor is a kindly and excitable gentleman who knows absolutely EVERYTHING about Shakespeare. As an introduction, we all went around the room and said one thing that we knew about the famous playwright. He took that tidbit, and talked for at least five minutes about it, exploring various factoids and tidbits as if they were of the utmost importance. I brought up the fact that Shakespeare only had a grammar school education, and how many people in academia latched onto this fact and proclaimed that there was no way Shakespeare could have written such amazing work, and therefore it had to be someone else. Much to my satisfaction, he declared quite forcefully that that particular back alley of academic theory was complete and utter rubbish. It was a fascinating two hours, in which I immensely expanded my knowledge of Shakespeare in all areas. Did you know that there are some words in his plays which people to this day have no idea what they mean? They may not even be the words he intended! Between the handwritten copy and the printed versions there was often confusion and error, so some words might actually have been wrong this whole time. Of course professors spend hundreds of pages debating these minute details about this word or that word, because that is what professors do, but THERE IS NO WAY OF KNOWING. Crazy, huh?
After classes I walked to my internship and back, to make sure I could get there by myself...I only made one wrong turn! Hopefully tomorrow I can cut that down to zero. I read some Dickens and Shakespeare, and had some Jammie Dodgers. Now it's about time for bed.
Your classes sound perfect for you. I miss you.
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