Current mood:

accomplished

i had my theory/criticism class and my creative writing class today.

my theory class is going to be fun. i haven't taken a class like it before, and the teacher is great. he's this old british dude with hornrimmed glasses who digresses a lot about grammatics and critical viewpoints. at the end of class he asked how many people had not bought the book already, and of those he asked how many of them worked thirty hours a week or more, and to all those he gave a free copy of the book (a hugeass anthology, like $60). it is going to be a challenge, if only because i have only encountered criticism in direct correspondence with literature, and here we are 90% looking at abstract criticism, and so it will be a bit harder to grasp. but the work load is not bad at all, so i should be fine.

my creative writing class is, like wyly's class was last semester, utterly different from anything i have experienced yet. it is run by a grad student, which seems like it could go either way at this point. the class is huge, 23 people, which may or may not have dictated the workshop schedule: the first half of quarter is writing-free - we just read. then the second half is workshop only. each person is only workshopped twice, and there are only two assignments due: one 8-12 page (double spaced) <>i>complete</i> story (as in with a discernable beginning, middle, end) and a 3-4 page (again, double spaced) "short-short," or standalone first-half of another story. our final is to majorly revise one of these two stories, which means, she said, about 40% rewritten.

i don't know if i even want to go into all the things about that bit of information that don't sit well with me. at any rate we'll see how things play out. it is a prerequisite for the upper division creative writing, and it is my cushion space for the semester; i have read most of what we will be reading the first month, and if i need to (for the sake of my other classes, or because i decide i hate the class) i can re-workshop one of my short-shorts and one of my long-longs. or would it be long-short.

say now, that's almost poetic.