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Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Lit Class... First Night...

Back in January, while Biker Dude sat drinking cup after cup of over sugarred coffee and staring out the window at the five foot high piles of snow bordering the driveway, I decided to take a literature class. I figured it was hopeless to try to get Biker Dude to do anything until the snow melted and the temperatures returned to above 50 degrees. Around here (Northern Illinois) that's not always a predictable thing. Temperatures jump up to the sixties even in January, for maybe a day or two, and, just after teasing us into thinking we can actually take off a layer of clothing, they plummet down to single digits and stay there, or below that, for the next month. Then they creep upwards a degree at a time just until March, when, again they plummet down to arctic values. By April though, they finally stay above thirty. The snow gets to melt and the gas bill finally drops below $100.

While Biker Dude mumbled about this being the longest winter in history and turned the tattered pages of the same bike catalog he'd been looking at since last fall, I decided to get out of the house. I registered for a Literature class at the community college a mile from my house and went back to school.

Class started out awesomely. Is that a word? No? Well, it may not be, but it sums up how excited I was after the first class.

I bought the textbook ahead of time, I got a used copy of course. I like my books mangled. The more creased and written in, the better. Anyway, the textbook was titled, "Fiction: A Pocket Anthology", by R. S. Gwynn. It consisted of some reference material on literature terms and a glossary, but mainly, it was a collection of 41 short stories by authors such as Hawthorne, Poe, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway, Jackson. Munro, Carver, Atwood.. and more. I thumbed through it and spotted a few stories I had read in high school and college.

The instructor passed out the syllabus, and upon looking over it over, I saw that, along with four major papers we had to write, we were going to read ALL of the stories.

In every other class I've ever taken, Fiction Class: where we used Janet Burroway's excellent book, "Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft" and Fiction Class again: where we used Perrine's book, "Literature: Story and Structure," we only ever read and discussed a few of the stories or chapters.

This class was going to cover the entire book. Wooohooo! The instructor let us go home early, and I went home that night and started to read. Later, I called my girlfriend and yakked non-stop for half an hour about all the cool stuff we were going to do. I got off the phone, after she told me how excited she was about me being so excited, as well as about her day, and I read another assigned story until I fell asleep.

The next day I took a look at the syllabus again and started planning out what I would write my papers on.

That was week one.

Week two came along and... well, that's another story.

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