Maggots and Men!

Most respected comrade-students! 

Please post your questions, observations, and textual equivalents to tempestuous applause (in the spirit of the Soviet experience) on the blog thread below. The filmmakers and I hope to respond to some of them. But beyond that, I encourage you to channel your inner collectivist and engage with each other on this site, too! 

In solidarity, 

Professor K

Office Hours, in-person (4/30) and online (next week)

Dear students, 

The last office hour--not to mention, our last day of class all together--is crowning now! I will be available for speed-meetings of ten minutes max tomorrow from 4-5 pm after the movie in my office THH 261. Sign up as soon as you can on the thread below. And if you were advised by me last week (in person or over email), please cede your time to other students who haven't had the chance to meet with me yet. 

Also, please say "thank you" when you receive this additional individual attention. No one owes it to you in particular. You likely won't get tons of it in the future from other professors. And you'll get even less of it if you don't express gratitude for their ceding precious time in their schedules to attend to your concerns and desires. Take this advice to heart now and your life will be easier and more felicitous down the line, I swear it! 

During the non-instruction period next week, I will intermittently check the blog (not my email) for your questions about the website project, including your personal essays and collaborative main-page statements. Remember that you have excellent resources for writing and critical thinking in your classmates, and an incredibly targeted audience in your group! Also consider that a part of the assignment grade is based on your ability to work without supervision from on high, and to execute a complex task as self-managing members of a group. 

All that said, good luck!

Sign up for office hours tomorrow!

Grab a ten-minute slot during tomorrow extended office hours from 3:30 - 5:00 pm. Three or so of you had already requested a meeting on Thursday, so let's start at 4:00 to play it safe.

And remember that I'll be playing the HBO version of Angels in America on the big screen at the same time, in case you want to research your reader response on the play, or just see more of Meryl Streep in Rabbi "drag," Al Pacino at his most awful as Roy Cohn, and Mary-Louise Parker as Harper, the pill-popping ex-Mormon with the closeted husband and hyperactive fantasy life. I can't recommend it enough.

Angels in America, Act Three (the last of Millennium Approaches)

Tomorrow we're going to turn back to the big questions with a special emphasis on History and tolerance (diversity, difference). Post your own big (or not-so-big) questions below. And be sure to bring the handouts from today's class!

_Angels in America_ Take One/Act One and Two!

In _Millenium Approaches_, the first half of his two-part dramatic epic _Angels in America_, Tony Kushner poses what Russian thinkers have called "the accursed questions"--those big philosophical questions about the role of the nation, man's place in society, the social function of art, and so on. We will consider these accursed questions and the others you pose below in Tuesday's class. 

Website Group Themes

You're off the hook for discussion questions tonight...

Now's your chance to call dibs on one of the website topics we collected at the end of class today. Some groups of five have already formed; others are starting to form and still need a participant or two or three; others await formation altogether. Please read the "want-ads" for the partially-formed ones below, and confer with the following list for themes that don't yet belong to a team.

When you sign up for a theme in the thread that follows, make mention of your special angle: How might you approach the topic? With what texts? With what focus? (If you'd like to explore cross-cultural encounters in cold-war culture, you might add you'd like to write about Nekrasov and advertising, for instance. If you want to work on paranoia, you might claim Queer and Angels in America, and connect suspicions about communism and queerness together. And so on)

Proposing options while you select a theme will give other unaffiliated students the chance to pick your theme, pick you as a team member; and potentially develop a topic for the personal page that complements yours. For those students already in groups, such notations will help you prepare for Thursday's class, when we spend more time fleshing out the group theme for the project main page and collaborative essay.

Potential Topics

Cross-Cultural Encounters

Beauty

Consumption 

Paranoia/Uncertainty/Doubt

Aesthetics (Kitsch, Propaganda, Avant-Garde)

Technology

The Family 

Sexuality

Truth/Freedom

Ethics/Responsibility

*A new one?

Add a new topic in the comment thread!

Complete Group: Ideal gender 

Members: Kaylie, Claire, Ryan, Jordan and Ben.

Incomplete Group: Nonconformism 

Members: Connie, Colin, Shant, and Daniel

They need 1 teammate.

Incomplete Group: Public/Private

Members: Lindsay, Ian and Jon.

They need 2 teammates.

Disco and Atomic War

Drop one interesting detail-bomb about Disco and the Atomic War on the blog thread below, just so your prof. knows you were paying as much attention to the movie as an Estonian straining to hear Finnish broadcasts of rock 'n' roll... 

Last Day with The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Books Six and Seven

The last two books of ULB get really heavy and then, of course, light again. Please feel emboldened like Stalin's son or Kundera's narrator to tackle the big metaphysical issues in your questions and observations below. 

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Day Five: Lightness and Weight (again), Public and Private (again)

When we tackle Book 5 this Tuesday, we'll put Tomas and his existential code back in the spotlight, but also complicate his code with the binaries we pursued in Books 1-4. To refresh the memories of those who attended class on Thursday (and implant a fresh memory in the mind of those who missed out), we focused on publicity/privacy and truth/lies on the intimate level of the individual and the broader plane of political or world-historical experience. We homed in on how each character contextualizes or "solipsizes" these questions: for Tereza, through her mother, photography, plumbing and a general obsession with surveillance and exposure; for Sabina, painting and love-making or romantic affairs; and for Franz, the hypocritical "glass house" he longs to live in, after Andre Breton.

Please ask your own question about the two worlds of public and private, and about "living in a lie," whether you take your inspiration from Milan Kundera's novel or Vaclav Havel's essay, "The Power of the Powerless." Here's a link to the essay you MUST read!

http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/165havel.html 

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Day Four: Back to Soul and Body

Tereza's existential heading, "Body and Soul," returns with all its vertiginousness (a verifiable word) and weight. Please post your question on Book 4 here.