the suffering black body

sorry i haven't been updating properly. i suddenly became stressed!

and now the computer won't let me type not in bold. booo.

we had a very good victorian class yesterday. we meet in my living room nowadays, i make coffee and this week winifred bought a big box of biccies. i do love my victorian class. there's just the four of us, and the prof is so lovely. we were talking about story of an african farm, which is a very odd book, and the autobiography of harriet martineau, which makes more sense but goes on a bit. we managed to find points of connection between the two, and had a good old chat about female self-representation and the problem of celebrating female authors and proto-feminism in a racist context. stuff which ties in quite nicely with my major paper, actually.

my caribbean class is improving. some of the little MAs have starting offering some sort of independent opinions, and we're all becoming more willing to to interrupt the loud women, which is fun, y'know, having a dialogue. and i got to use the rules of academia to argue with an annoying person and make holes in her argument. um, not that it's all about personal politics. . . . we're still doing interesting books! well, interesting but icky. last week's had lots of sexual abuse and self-harming (breathe, eyes, memory by danticat), and this week is about a man dying of AIDS (my brother, jamaica kincaid). i think i might write my final essay on the suffering black body on display, and the problems with literature based on that. but i just thought of that this morning, when i woke up stressed. i've no idea what to write for my victorian essay. i'd like to fit in fun home, cos i love it so much, but the essay could easily become not-victorian-enough.

weather continues hot. i have been borrowing the dog and walking to the lake (my "walking without a dog" experiment found that it is No Fun), and am trying the exciting experiment of drying my clothes in the sun. first time since i got here. it's not stinking hot, though, not like home. it does seem hotter, like 30 degrees is REALLY HOT, maybe a humidity thing? but there's generally a cool breeze, and i haven't got sunburnt once. it's funny, all this bush kid acquired knowledge is becoming redundant, like how to watch out for snakes and what time of the day the UV rays are highest.