Things I'm Thinking About. . .

Not grammar, clearly. No dangling prepositions here, no indeed! Well, I am packing and preparing for class next week, as the move and the first day of classes are both on May 29, so this isn't really a real post, it's just my way of getting down the things that have been floating around my head as I pack, especially since I have still been glancing at blogs, and even commenting on some, but not writing my own, which means the thoughts are accumulating and have to spill out at some point or another. So to save my husband my 1 A.M. insights into life and the universe, here's a little run-down!

1) The practical stuff: I am actually wondering if getting the UHaul on the 29th was smart. I probably should have reserved it for the 28th, provided they're open on that day, loaded it on Memorial Day and unloaded it on the 29th--the official move-in day. Hmmm. . . This is one of those thoughts that might require further action on my part. . .

2) I'm thinking about gender, though not in the way mentioned here. Actually, I am rather thinking about how my own perceptions of gender relate to the academic writings on the subject (represented very well by M's post, linked above) and the religious discussions on the subject that I have seen in various places, many of which I find disturbing in their characterizations of men's and women's roles. I fall somewhere in between. I can play "gender theory" with the best of them--you should see my paper on “Literacy, Patriarchy and Performance: Pedro Almodóvar on Writers and Writing” (it's a literacy-as-gender-performativity-thing)--but how I view things in the real world diverges somewhat from what I produce for conferences and courses. ADDENDUM: How I view things in the real world diverges somewhat from what I produce for conferences and courses where the subject of gender is concerned!

3) I'm thinking about how pregnancy hormones affect the mind. I've read in books that around this or that month of pregnancy, one can become "forgetful," "absent-minded," etc., but I've never seen anything about paranoia. Granted, I can be rather a worry-wort normally anyway, but seeing as how hormones are powerful creatures, it doesn't seem unlikely that they might be affecting my obsessive worrying about whether the baby is O.K., etc. In the middle of an obsessive moment the other night, it occurred to me how spoiled I am (we are?) by medical technology. It's one of the reasons I haven't wanted, in past pregnancies, to find out the sex of my baby. That and resisting the whole "must-buy-gender-appropriate-stuff" urge--I really resent the marketing push that reinforces the need for people to find out if they're having a boy or a girl, but I digress. . . Basically, I realize that my grandmother didn't have any special assurance that her 7 children were healthy and "normal." The doctors didn't even believe her when she said that she was having twins! (They had hiccups at the same time--out of sync!) My mother had to have an x-ray before delivering me at home to make sure my head would fit through her pelvis--the fit was exact. And that little doppler thing that they use to listen to the baby's heart now--how many women never heard their babies' heartbeats in utero? They just trusted that the heartbeat was there! (And somehow did not doubt that what was inside them was, indeed, a baby.)

4) I am thinking how nice it will be, for the first time, to teach a course that I have already taught--in the way I taught it previously. I have this bad habit of revamping each course I teach each time I teach it--thereby making more work for myself. But when I was pregnant for my daughter 2 summers ago, I taught Intro to Lit with a focus on fantasy as manifested in various literary genres. While I will rearrange the sequence somewhat and pare down the assignments some, I have left the syllabus mostly the same. Yay!

5) On the dissertation front, I am thinking about D. H. Lawrence's anxieties about gender and literacy--basically, if you were a scholar, could you also be a man? He seems to think not. In Lawrence, manly men are ignorant, country men, like his own father whom he hated. He left that background to become a writer. Evidently, he felt that he had sacrificed a vital part of his nature in doing so. I like Lawrence for this reason--in the midst of his machismo, he's so conflicted! Actually, I like Forster because he's conflicted, too, it's just different. . .

6) Another dissertation-related thought is what constitutes "literate activity." It's a central idea for me, which probably means I should keep it well-guarded and certainly not blog about it. Oh well! You see, though, different theorists and historians mean different things when they talk about "literacy." Some talk about the ability to read, while some focus more on writing. Some merely concern themselves with the presence of writing within a culture, whether or not anyone actually has access to the written materials. Some measure the ability to read by the ability to, say, sign one's name--this has been a traditional marker of literacy for historians, though we should be able to perceive some problems there. Then, there's "functional" vs. "advanced" literacy. I admit to bypassing a number of these questions, as "advanced" literacy is more my concern--I know, how elitist of me. But I'm focusing on fiction, after all. There is a certain assumption of literacy on the part of the author, who assumes that someone, somewhere will be reading this work, and writes according to his or her perception of the level of literacy of that reader. Which makes postmodern fiction either completely elitist, or an admission of despair. (I'm teaching Calvino's Invisible Cities this summer. Yum!) So I use the term "literate activity," which means that any time the author portrays someone reading or writing, I'm there. But I also contend that literate conversation--that is, verbal interaction between people that is informed by literacy (especially advanced literacy)--is also literate activity. If you haven't read the same books, you can't exactly talk about them now, can you?

7) And, then, Entropy has me thinking about the Holy Spirit & prayer and the role of the Gentiles in the development of Christianity, and I thank her for not letting me forget that Pentecost is approaching!