Wednesday, August 29, 2007

The Beginning of the End

Monday marked my last first day of school. Very exciting! It is really hard to believe that this is my last semester of college. Today I found myself thinking how next semester I'll order my books ahead of time (I HATE the textbook-buying process), and I have to remind myself that there will be no next semester!

All of my classes look like they are going to be pretty interesting. I'm taking interpersonal communication, where I will learn how to be everyone's favorite person; history of western dress, where I will learn how and why people dressed the way they did in olden days; and life and literature of the American South, where my love for the South will continue to blossom.

I can already tell that southern lit will be my favorite. The prof, Dr. Clarke, came to class yesterday dressed in a blue and white pinstriped suit. He has a very deep laugh, and made several references to how Jack Daniels has changed his life. He reminds me of Dustin Hoffman in Stranger than Fiction, but a little older and friendlier. Kyle is pretty sure that he had Dr. Clarke when he was at A&M, and he remembers Dr. Clarke telling the class that he was giving whiskey up for lent, which seems to fit his present Jack Daniels comments. Ah, it's nice to meet a consistent person.

We are going to read a pretty wide range of authors, kicking the semester off with Faulkner, which will be nice to get out of the way, as he is nobody's favorite. Then on to Robert Penn Warren, Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, and various short stories by writers such as Flannery O' Connor and Eudora Welty. I have a pretty good feeling that I will be blogging about lots of happenings and discussions from this class, but for today, I will leave you with Dr. Clarke's reasoning for why there are no dates on our syllabus:

"Northerners live by the clock; Southerners live by the rhythm of the season."

Here's to a good semester.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

ohhh i love dr. clark! btw, i've been meaning to call you for a while, so i'll try to call you tomorrow during my afternoon commute.

-lizzo

Annie said...

That really does sound like a fun class. I'm a little jealous. =)

J.C. Wimberly said...

Exciting. You should take to smoking a pipe in class--that might subtlely endear you to the professor.

As for Faulkner, hopefully you won't have to read The Sound and the Fury. At the end of every page, I remember thinking, "huh?" (at least, at the end of every page that I read ).

Blogahon said...

Sounds like a GREAT professor. So you are one semester shy of the "real world," huh!?!? Enjoy it and the prospect of what lies ahead for you and Kyle - such an exciting time!