Now Playing: Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 5 in E minor.

As of today I have finally had all my classes. “All” seems like an overstatement since I’m only taking three. It’s a weird schedule: class Wednesday night, Thursday night, and then for an hour on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.

Medieval literature so far has proved to be the most inscrutable of the three. The professors (it’s team-taught) are both lovely, but the critical literary theory we’ve been reading is like deep, dark mud. The vocabulary is nearly impenetrable, and as far as I can tell the ideas are rather divorced from reality. Nonetheless, we had a good discussion in class today about the reading. There’s a definite satisfaction to be had from struggling through a text and beginning to understand what it says. I will be quite thankful when we move on to Chaucer, though!

Creative writing is probably going to be similar to most of the other poetry classes I’ve taken. We’re starting out by reading W.H. Auden, who seems tame compared to some of the contemporary stuff Dr. J assigned in that senior-level poetry class! But I’m happy to be writing poetry again.

Digital Humanities promises to be quite the experience. It’s also team-taught, but by four people. Apparently there’s a whole world of resources out on the internet waiting to be used. This evening I discovered Early English Books Online as well as a database that lets you search the whole Old English corpus! Pretty amazing. The class will be quite practical and so involve a lot of work. We’re supposed to be helping out with encoding texts into digital archives. And now cue all those snide jokes about the awful grunt work grad students are given….

Think it will be a decent term, once I figure out where everything will fall. Having so many open hours during the day feels very strange.