Teaching in a Sauna Tuesday, Mar 27 2007 

academia and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 9:11 am

My classes started yesterday. Based on first impressions, I think it’s going to be a good quarter. The HTC students might be a little quiet, but the GLBTers will make up for that I’m sure. The GLBT lit class has a lot of students that I already know, either from past classes or from Open Doors. (I also already know half of the HTC students.) It’s always nice (and somewhat affirming) to have repeaters. Ellis Hall

But the main thing that sticks out in my mind about my classes yesterday was the unbearable heat in Ellis Hall. (I’m not quite sure why, but I love this picture of Ellis.) We’re in the transition period between winter and spring, and the thermostat is not quite set for the warmer weather.

Because the building is so hot inside, most of the windows are open, but then the sounds from outside — like lawn mowers during my HTC class — make it difficult to hear in class. There’s a lot to love about Ellis Hall, but the semi-annual temperature problem is not one of them.

Due to the heat, I ended up letting both of my classes go early. I was going to give my HTC class a PowerPoint presentation about eighteenth-century English society and I was going to show my GLBT class a documentary about Stonewall and its aftermath. but it was just too hot to make them (or me) sit there another minute. Sweat was pouring down my back, and I felt like my clothes were sticking to the furniture every time I stood up. I’ve put the PowerPoint presentation on Blackboard, so the HTCers can just look at it there sometime, if they want. I can show the video at a later date — either tomorrow or next week.

Tomorrow will be the first real class for the GLBT class. I’m looking forward to seeing what they make of Stone Butch Blues.  It’s an amazing book. The HTC class doesn’t meet again until Thursday. We’ll be watching Stage Beauty in there. I really like this movie, but I also object to some of its misrepresentations of the period. I just hope Ellis is cooler tomorrow and Thursday!

So, the quarter is off and running. One down, 39 days to go!

 

Back in Athens and Ready to Go Sunday, Mar 25 2007 

academia and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 8:00 pm

I got back from Georgia a few hours ago. On the whole, being at the conference (ASECS) was really good, and I definitely enjoyed hanging out a bit in Atlanta. My paper went really well on Thursday, which pretty much meant that anything else fun or good was icing on the cake. The panel I put together and chaired also seemed to go well. I’ll try to give my review of the conference sometime this week. I’ll also post about the museum I visited.

But what’s really on my mind is the fact that my sabbatical is completely over starting tomorrow at 1 pm, when I start teaching again! While in Atlanta, I have to admit, I really disliked the idea of going back into the classroom. Don’t get me wrong: I love teaching, and I love many of my students (I love my students, but I don’t love my students). But having the past several months to spend almost unlimited time reading and thinking and writing has been really enjoyable. It wasn’t quite like being on vacation — since I did work a lot.

But now that I’m back in Athens and doing a little prep work for tomorrow — I figure I’ll give my tutorial students a little background about the period, and we’re going to watch a 54-minute documentary about Stonewall and its aftermath in my Lesbian & Gay Lit class — I’m actually feeling a little excited about teaching again.

I’ve long felt that a great deal of my sense of self-worth comes from my teaching. I’m not the best teacher around or anything, but teaching is very invigorating. I love talking with my students about the writers, texts, and issues I love. I love introducing them to my favorite books and authors and hearing what they think about them. I enjoy teaching, and I’m fairly good at it. When my research has been slow or non-existent, I’ve always been able to fall back on my teaching for a sense of accomplishment. It’s going to be interesting to see how I feel about it now that it’s going to interrupt my on-going (and definitely not non-existent) research.

This quarter I’m teaching the eighteenth-century tutorial, which I hope will be a lot of fun. It’s my first time, so I’m anxiously excited to see how it goes. I’m also teaching my GLBT Lit class, which is probably my favorite course to teach each year. Not the least of my excitement comes from knowing that my current crop of favorite former students (most of which have had this class) are graduating — hopefully this quarter will bring me a new set of Brodie “girls.”

I’ve already been so busy in recent weeks that I’ve not had time to blog, so I’m a little worried about whether I’m really going to be able to keep it going, but I hope so. Starting tomorrow, I’m sure I’ll have lots to blog about. So, cheers to the start of a new quarter!

 

Eighteenth-Century Wigs Sunday, Jan 7 2007 

research and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 1:08 pm

I just finished reading Lynn Festa’s article entitled “Personal Effects: Wigs and Possessive Individualism in the Long Eighteenth Century,” published in Eighteenth-Century Life volume 29, issue 2 in 2005. It’s an excellent essay on what wearing a wig meant in the eighteenth century.

William Wycherley I read the essay in part because I’m looking for an article to begin my eighteenth-century class with next quarter. My course is going to focus on “The Making of the Modern Self: Writing Identity in the Long Eighteenth century,” so I want to begin with an article about identity that is kind of fun too. What could be more fun than wigs? Maybe I can help bring back wigs as a male fashion necessity! Here’s a portrait of William Wycherley — wouldn’t I look great in big, curly wig like his?!

Eighteenth-Century Life has become one of my favorite journals. I like that it publishes high quality articles about a wide range of interesting subjects. The most recent issue, for example, has articles on the significance of Venice for Scots in the Age of the Grand Tour; Violence, Virtue, and Politics in the Visual Culture of the French Revolution; displaying curiosities; and entomology. This article by Festa is typical in its ability to construct a complex argument that is of interest to general eighteenth-century scholars.

In this essay, Festa “addresses the shifting relation between personal possessions and personal identity, the objects one owns and the characteristics individuals are deemed to possess” (49). She’s interested in how wigs marked, but also obscured, individuality at various points in the long eighteenth century. It’s a fascinating study.

(more…)

 

Lesbian Fiction: Curious Tea Tuesday, Jan 2 2007 

books and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 11:19 am

Over the past week, I’ve read two novels that I enjoyed very much: Katherine Forrest‘s Curious Wine and Michelle Tea‘s Valencia. I’m making a concerted effort to read some lesbian fiction over the next several weeks in preparation for my Lesbian and Gay Lit class in the spring.

When I read my evaluations from last winter recently, a few of the lesbian students mentioned that they thought we should read more works by women than we did that term. I usually include Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues as an honorary lesbian text, but at least one student thought that wasn’t right: she argued that this novel was really about being transgendered, not about being a lesbian. That’s kind of debatable, but I take her point. Last year, we read Feinberg, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Isabel Miller’s Patience and Sarah, and a few poems by lesbian writers. (One of these poems, by the poet Chrystos, is one of my favorite poems ever: “I Suck” is the title. I highly recommend it. I also love Susan Griffin’s “In Response to a Man’s Question ….”) We also read a chapter from Song of the Loon, a chapter from Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, Larry Kramer’s Faggots, and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. So, the number of texts by women and by men were roughly the same, but the amount of class time spent on “lesbian texts” and “gay male texts” favored the men a little.

Ultimately, there are three problems that make this favoring difficult to address. First, OU is on 10-week quarters. This means that we simply don’t have time to read as much as I would like. So, I tend to change the reading list from year to year to address the changing demographics and tastes of my students. Of course this means that I’m always a year behind: this year’s class will address last year’s suggestions for improvement. Second, I know less about lesbian writers and texts than I do gay male authors and their works, and the lesbian texts I do know about don’t always stand up in quality and importance to the male-authored ones. I recognize my own bias in making that assertion — to some degree, I’m sure that I think some of the male texts are better and more important than some of the female-authored texts because I’m a gay male, but it’s not just that inherent bias. As much as I like Rubyfruit Jungle (a novel that I teach from time to time), it’s simply not in the same league as Angels in America or Stone Butch Blues. And finally, I am the only member of my department that teaches this course. If someone else taught the course, students would undoubtedly get a different take on Lesbian and Gay Lit, one that might include more (or at least different) knowledge and discussion of lesbian works.

(more…)

 

Being Evaluated (Part 2) Monday, Dec 18 2006 

teaching thisgaudygildedstage 1:52 pm

I began my blog with a post entitled “Being Evaluated.” That post was about having my scholarship evaluated by experts in my field and having my teaching evaluated by my students. In this post, I’d like to update my thoughts about these forms of evaluation.

Today, I read my teaching evaluations for the year. In 2006 I taught 5 classes: Lesbian & Gay Lit, a grad course on late eighteenth-century Brit Lit, Literary Theory, Critical Approaches to Drama, and Women & Literature. At the end of the year, we select the evaluations from 4 classes to submit to the “Budget and Rating Committee” as part of our annual evaluation.

For the first time in my teaching career, I didn’t have anyone in any of my classes who just hated me and everything else about the class s/he took with me. Usually, there’s somebody who is taking a course under duress and decides to take out his or her frustration by giving me low scores. This is especially the case in the L&G Lit course — for some reason I still don’t understand, I usually have someone in that class who complains about the course content — it’s too gay! But not this time. One or two people thought the class might emphasize sex a little too much. A few of the lesbians want more women-centered texts (which is a totally legitmate complaint, I think). And one or two people want less reading, but I don’t feel like I’ve taught a good course if someone doesn’t complain about too much reading and/or writing. The theory students seemed especially appreciative that we studied theory by applying it to short stories by E. M. Forster. My Women & Lit students had useful suggestions for improving the commonplace book assignment. And my grad students seem to have learned a lot about the late eighteenth century, which I’m especially delighted to read since it was the best grad class I’ve taught so far in my career (and the third of the “long eighteenth century” that I know the least about).

So, I’m very pleased that my students seem to have thought my classes were good learning experiences for them. (more…)

 

Reading Samuel Pepys Friday, Dec 15 2006 

books and research and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 12:09 pm

I’ve long enjoyed reading around in the Diary of Samuel Pepys, a late seventeenth-century English bureaucrat who worked in the Naval Office. The level of minute detail that Pepys included in his diary — on just about every imaginable facet of life: entertainment, his sex life, his relationship with his wife, his duties in the Naval Office, his thoughts about the monarch, government, and administration, what he ate, what he drank, how he traveled from one place to another, the coronation of Charles II, the Great Fire of 1666, and much, much more — make it an important source of information for historians and literary scholars alike.

Samuel PepysIn the past, I’ve looked up specific entries in the diary, Pepys’s thoughts on the libertines I write about: Sir Charles Sedley, George Villiers, the duke of Buckingham, and John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, for example. I haven’t ever just started at the beginning and simply read the diary. Until now (sort of).

I’ve decided to teach the Diary in my eighteenth-century class this spring. Since it’s actually a 9 volume set (in print, plus a companion volume and an index), I obviously can’t teach the whole thing. Instead, I’ll order an edition of selections from the Diary, probably the Modern Library edition, which presents the selections in order rather than topically, like the California edition, A Pepys Anthology.

Since I’ve never taught more than one or two entries from the Diary, I thought that I should read through the edition I’m going to order and begin to think about what kinds of directions I want to give my students to guide them in their reading. So, I started reading in January 1660 and am working my way through to the end, 1669. I can’t predict what my students will make of it, but I think it’s a fascinating read. I’m already learning so much. For instance, I didn’t know that Pepys actually sailed over to the Netherlands as part of the official party that brought the royal family back to England in 1660. I’ve also become increasingly impressed with just how much Pepys bustles around London. (If I didn’t have anything else to do, I would love to join the ranks of scholars working on “London Studies,” but since I am busy elsewhere, maybe I can just teach a class sometime on London.)

(more…)

 

Staging Governance Friday, Dec 8 2006 

books and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 5:12 pm

I recently finished reading Daniel O’Quinn’s Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800, the last of the three books I’m reviewing for a journal. In sum, it’s an interesting book that definitely adds to our current understanding of the effects of colonialism on London society in the late eighteenth century. As with the other two books, however, I’ll save the usual review stuff for that essay.

What I’d like to write about here is how reading this book has helped me think a bit about my approach to teaching. As I read the introduction to O’Quinn’s book, I was struck by a phrase he uses in the following sentence:

Charting and adjudicating the limits of social interaction, the theatre, perhaps more than any other form of cultural production, offers a glimpse of how change swept through a culture in the midst of fundamental social transformation both at home and abroad. (12)

First, I want to say that I totally agree with the general sentiment of first part of this statement: due to its reconstruction of social life for the stage, the theater is indeed uniquely able to comment on socio-political change and transformation in any historical period. The whole point of the theater is, in a way, to offer such mapping and judgment. Martin Esslin’s An Anatomy of Drama makes this argument succinctly and convincingly. (I teach Esslin’s book from time to time — it’s profound and accessible at the same time, if that’s possible.)

But I am also struck by the fact that “charting and adjudicating the limit of social interaction” is what literature more generally does in a given culture. Here’s how I would rephrase O’Quinn’s construction:

artistic texts (literary and non-literary, canonical and non-canonical, written and visual) chart and adjudicate the contours of cultural and political debate.

In many ways this is a great summary phrase for how new historicist and cultural studies scholars view literary texts. So, due to my training in those perspectives, I’ve long thought about texts in this way, but reading O’Quinn’s book has crystallized these particular words — chart and adjudicate — for me, helping me focus my preexisting ideas and think about them more productively.

Literary texts chart contemporary debates by delineating the sides of a particular debate and showing us where the points of agreement and disagreement lie. They also show us the limits of debate — what can be imagined and what cannot; what can be published and what cannot; what can be written and what cannot; etc.

(more…)

 

Hard: A Review Tuesday, Dec 5 2006 

books and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 10:41 pm

New York City was the perfect (and somewhat obvious) place to read Wayne Hoffman’s new novel, Hard, which is about the crackdown on gay sex in various venues in NYC in the late 1990s. I finished reading the novel over the weekend. It’s a great read that raises lots of interesting questions about gay liberation and sexual politics without forgetting to entertain its readers.

Hard by Wayne HoffmanThe novel centers on Moe Pearlman, who is known for giving the best blow jobs in the city. He practices his skills in this activity every chance he gets: at sex parties, in the backrooms of bars, in adult theaters, and at home with the various men he’s met online. Moe is also a graduate student and a would-be journalist. In part, the novel focuses on the love lives of Moe and his two best friends, Gene and Aaron. Moe has long been attracted to a man he sees in a diner window. Gene, Moe’s ex-lover who also happens to be HIV+, moves to New York at the beginning of the novel; the closeness of their friendship causes friction in Gene’s new relationship with Dustin, who can’t seem to get over his jealousy of Moe. And Aaron discovers that his new love interest is moonlighting as a prostitute.

The novel is also about Moe’s antipathy for Frank DeSoto, a gay activist who is behind the mayor’s crusade to close down the gay sex venues. Frank believes that gay men must stop indulging in promiscuous sex due to the AIDS crisis; he therefore aligns himself with more conservative, anti-gay forces to try to force gay men into celibacy. If Hard has a villain, it’s Frank DeSoto.

But one of the best parts of Hoffman’s novel is that, while the novel clearly opposes Frank’s ideology and methods, it avoids simply demonizing him. Over the course of the book, we see why Frank has adopted his current views. We also see his faults and hypocrisies. I like that Moe is not simply right and Frank is not merely wrong. Indeed, Hoffman draws each of his characters as fully developed (albeit fictionalized) people. They have realistic problems, to which they generally find realistic answers, if they find answers at all.

(more…)

 

What Do I Want to Be When I Grow Up? Tuesday, Nov 21 2006 

academia and books and queer culture and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 11:05 pm

Recently, I started reading Wayne Hoffman’s novel, Hard. Since I haven’t finished it yet, I don’t want to review it or even write too much about it now. But it’s raised a couple of issues for me that I thought I’d record and reflect on here.

The novel is (partly) about Moe Pearlman, a New Yorker who is on a crusade to preserve his right/opportunity to engage in promiscuous sex in various venues as a conservative mayor (in league with another crusading gay man) works to shut down all of the bathhouses, sex clubs, and adult theaters where Moe indulges his desires. So, in sum, it’s a book about the ethics of gay sexual freedom in an age where AIDS still exists but in which its power to frighten gay men and restrict their sexual activities seems to have waned.

My first thought about the book is how it obviously responds to Larry Kramer’s Faggots, a 1978 novel that criticizes 1970s gay male promiscuity. Even a cursory search demonstrates that Kramer has a vexed reputation in the gay community. He is often dimissed as simply anti-sex. In reviewing Hard, Christopher Bram explicitly compares these two novels and repeats the usual criticism of Kramer and his novel. I have to admit that I love Faggots and now teach it annually in my GLBT Lit course. It’s definitely not a simple novel, nor is it simply anti-sex, in my opinion.

Thinking about the relationship between these two novels made me think about teaching Hoffman’s novel as a response to Kramer’s. I think these two books would work well together, with Angels in America spliced in between. Teaching these three works together would raise interesting issues about sexual freedom, responsibility, relationships, and AIDS, just to name a few. The biggest drawback might be that each of these works is a little long, so it might become difficult to schedule them without taking time away from the lesbian authors I’d also want to teach in the class. (But that’s not an issue I have to think about now.)

(more…)

 

Writing Recommendation Letters Friday, Nov 17 2006 

academia and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 2:28 pm

It’s recommendation season, and I’m swamped with letters to write. In general, I like writing these letters about as much as I like grading (ugh!). It’s not a genre of writing that we’re really trained in. Plus, sometimes I end up writing letters for students that I’m not totally behind, which is difficult, since I don’t want to lie and say a student is wonderful if I really think that s/he is only mediocre. But I’m a sucker that way; I find it difficult to say no, especially if I feel that I’m someone’s last resort.

But this year is different. All of the people I’m writing for — 3 MA or former MA students and 5 or 6 undergraduates — are all students I believe in, which perhaps makes it all the more difficult. I want to write them each the best letter I can, because I really think they deserve to go on to a graduate program. I certainly don’t want to be the reason one of them doesn’t get to do what s/he wants to do.

As I write these particular letters, however, I find myself getting into a funk, especially as I write some of the undergraduates’ recommendations. There’s a group of them that I’m really quite fond of, and now they’re all graduating. For the first time, I feel the cyclical nature of being a professor: every few years, a new crop of undergraduates show up, stick around for a while, and then graduate.

(more…)

 

« Previous Page — Next Page »