Meredith Finally Attends Class. Spends Three Days Geeking Out About Annotations

Despite the warning from Doug Hill that there would be 1-3 inches of snow inside the D.C. Metro area, we finally had class. Granted, the professor had the wrong room number and was a good fifteen minutes late (before anyone starts about the 15 minute rule, I'm a) not sure that applies to graduate school[where you should really want to be, right?] and b) I once waited over an hour and a half for a professor to show up when I took Linguistics one summer at Mason. It was a one month, three hour course. I was not going to miss a day just because the teacher didn't show up.)

It was magical. Really, he could have read from the syllabus in the style of HAL 9000 from 7:20 to 10:20 and I still probably would have been satisfied. Mercifully though, he did not. It's a research methods course and he started by warning us that he occasionally gives homework problems meant to stump us. We are to make note of the time it takes us to complete each problem and should never spend more than an hour. I don't know that I won't occasionally spend more time on something. Once I'm given a question to answer, I like to, you know, answer it.

There is also a 15 page bibliographical essay (in addition to two shorter papers [5 pages] on the two course texts and two oral reports, one on a field covered by Mason faculty and the other on our research for the essay) on a topic of our choosing. I am kind of stumped as to what to do and completely open to suggestions. Monday, I started re-reading Leaves of Grass and now have Whitman on the brain (which has a way of bringing Melville to mind, as the two are exceedingly similar, especially if you look at the Calamus poems and the read "Squeeze of the Hand"...which I will probably do tonight.) I was considering looking at how or where to the two men intersect (male-male bonding, images of masculinity, and radical democracy). The Former Professor has suggested that I look into whether or not they were even aware of each other. This is a possibility as I could translate it into a potential thesis later on. Then again, it's really not stepping out of my research comfort zone at all. I already know the big names in American Renaissance from the Melville thesis. Also, there is just so much information in that field that the problem isn't finding sources but rather eliminating them.

Then again, I could go wildly in the other direction and look at something I know nothing about at all but am intrigued by. Earlier this summer, I read Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino and still have no earthly idea what I actually read. The entire novel is a conversation between Marco Polo and Kubla Khan, wherein Polo describes fantastical cities to Khan. Turns out, each one is actually Venice. Experiments with form have always interested me (that was part of the initial appeal of both Melville and Joyce and a big part of why I loved Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) but I can also find them annoyingly gimmicky. I don't want to get annoyed by my topic.

Oh, decisions, decisions...