A new semester!

Well, here I am, a week and a half into the new semester, and it's time for a Real and Proper Update on classes and life in my last semester of college.

First, I'm taking my second required senior capstone. The course is called The Gothic Tradition, which is far more up my alley than I thought it would be. Usually I can't stand horror and paranormal things (says the person who tells ghost stories professionally), but this is neither of those things. Well, it is a little. At this point, though, the style often feels reminiscent of 18th-century Scooby-Doo, but that's the time frame and establishment of the genre that allowed Scooby-Doo to happen.

I'm also taking Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which makes up entirely for not taking Greek this semester. Since Middle English is closer to Modern English than Ancient Greek is, studying Chaucer is a bit easier than studying Homer, or Plato, or Xenophon. It still takes patience, though. Things would have been pronounced differently than we might think of them today, though. At the time Chaucer was writing, you didn't waste time writing unnecessary letters, so words like "knight" would have actually been pronounced with a "k" and "gh" sound.

I'm taking Creative Writing too, which I'm only about half-enthused about. We're doing poetry right now. I can't stand poetry. I need the expansive detail that prose allows. GAAAHHHH! Well, college is supposed to be a learning experience, right?

Finally, I'm taking Ancient Sexualities. We've only spent time discussing sexualities and the discourse surrounding it, mostly through reading Michel Focault. I don't like Focault. He writes too much and says too little. (Apparently that's a French thing.) It would be more interesting if he were more direct, but I've still learned things: For example, we can't say that Achilles and Patroclus from the Iliad are hella gay (even though it's easy to read them that way). "Hella gay" wasn't a thing in 900 BCE Greece. They didn't have the same concept of relationships and sexuality as we do now.


That's what I'm taking, and hopefully it'll be an interesting semester!