A well-wrought urn

I don't want to brag or anything, but not only have I completed the most complicated syllabus of my entire life (a ground-up revision of my graduate Donne class, now structured so it's also a sort of methods class and a sort of review of 20th-century literary studies), but I've written all the assignments, too.

This is something I've never done before. I mean, sure: my syllabi always say what the assignments will consist of--a presentation, a close-reading paper, a research paper, a midterm, whatever--and I have a decent idea what they'll probably entail. But write them? No. Usually I do that at the last possible minute, either when a student asks whether they might be getting the assignment sheet soon or when I happen to glance at the syllabus and realize, shit! that thing is due in two weeks! I need to write it immediatamente!

But because this class is so complicated and the assignments build on each other, involve an interlocking set of skills, will overlap in time, and are largely unlike any assignments I've designed before, I felt I had to come up with detailed instructions now, just so I could get everything clear in my own head and make reasonable decisions about how to schedule their component parts. So with my syllabus doc and four other files all open, I moved back and forth among them, composing, revising, changing due dates, and altering the particulars in innumerable ways. Finally I arrived at a sequence that seems doable and makes sense.

Parts will still fail, I'm sure, and I'll undoubtedly have to make at least medium-sized changes between this instantiation of the class and the next one. But for now it all looks like a perfect and beautiful whole, complete, unshakable and enduring.

Now, if only I'd spent half as much energy on my writing projects. . .

From beyond the grave

Last night I had the weirdest and most Early Modern dream I've ever had or expect to have. Not only was I John Donne--or at least inhabiting his body, more on which in a moment--but I was dying, dramatically, and trying to get home before I did. Most of the dream was about the slow and painful carriage ride home.

As Donne got out of the carriage and met some unspecified family members, he swooned, and I--apparently his soul or consciousness, not the physical man--watched all of this dispassionately, feeling very fresh and young indeed, and wondering idly what would happen to me when he died. Clearly I would survive this. Maybe I'd enter another body? Maybe I'd just sit out there as an untethered consciousness? The only thing that troubled me was whether I'd remember being attached to the body and perspective of this particular man, or would have to start fresh.

Whether this is an argument for or against my particular career path, I leave you to decide.