avoid plot summary - what are you arguing here?

i have been procrastinating like a mad thing over this lecture i'm supposed to be writing for tuesday. pretty soon i'm gonna have to pull the plug on the ol' interweb for a couple of hours and really do some work. the thesen poem below this entry is one i am lecturing on. i particularly like the end.

which reminds me - is there anybody in the audience still on dialup? when g+b move into the 21st century i'm thinking of returning to a one-month-at-a-time view, to make navigating easier. but i know my blog is pretty image-heavy for dialup. speak now or forever hold your peace.

did an interesting exercise with my students this morning, getting them to punctuate a long run-on poem and talk about the interpretative difference the old "period" can make. considering some literary graf to extend this discussion. we shall see.

exhuasting-wed was very good, as usual. _transgender studies reader_ got some good discussion going, and winifred gave a very good presentation. (can you tell i've been marking? everything is "good". pretty soon i'll start making my own marginal notes: "interesting idea - expand", "relate this to the text", "how does this further your argument?" . . . dooooom) we were talking about the history of trans-studies, like early 20th C sexology texts, and then feminist responses to the early transgender movement/theory. i got to tell stories about sheila jeffreys and feel special and melbourne-ish.

our medieval class started late cos there was a distinguished scholar guy giving a lecture on medieval stuff. my favourite bit was about the green children of woolpit, which were "two strange children who reportedly appeared in the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, United Kingdom in the 12th century." (thankyou, wikipedia - "this is not an academic source") um, they were dragged out a ditch one day, and had green skin and only ate beans and no-one knew where they came from. distinguished scholar had a theory that it was cos they ate raw broad beans and had a rare-ish genetic defect.

so we didn't get to spend much time on the old english riddles, but all got far too excited about them, big nerds that we are. we were learning about the vikings ransacking all of england and the resurection of literate culture in the late 9th C by king alfred. he decided to teach people to write in english, rather than latin, which was a huge deal.

i'm beginning to think i don't paraphrase information terribly well. anybody wanna do some group work? i have coloured textas.