Yesterday's reading
Nov. 14th, 2005 09:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyIt went well, I think; I read the Boneprince sequence from Chapter 2 of Mélusine (pp. 54-66). My audience consisted of my husband, my dissertation director, and 7 or 8 Creative Writing students there for an assignment. They were a good, attentive audience (some of the students were taking notes, which I find infinitely amusing), and since the venue is not large, 10 people was actually a comfortable number.
The thing is--and I'm not sure if it's an ironic thing, or a peculiar thing, or just a thing--the thing is, there is a possibility that those students were my own legacy to myself. The second time I taught Creative Writing, in the spring of 2000, I required my students to attend two readings over the course of the semester, and I distinctly recall at least one other TA saying, That's a really good idea. I should do that. This is the way of TAs, you understand; we borrow from each other, and hand good ideas down from one year to the next in a kind of half-oral, half-written tradition, only semi-formalized but also the best kind of community and solidarity. So it's possible--not probable, since it's hardly such a radical idea that someone else couldn't have thought of it independently--that whoever's teaching that section of Creative Writing is using an idea they got, at however many removes, from me, and that's why my audience was bigger than 2.
The notion is kind of cool, and kind of scary, and thinking about it for too long makes me feel like I'm about to wander into a time-travel story.
The thing is--and I'm not sure if it's an ironic thing, or a peculiar thing, or just a thing--the thing is, there is a possibility that those students were my own legacy to myself. The second time I taught Creative Writing, in the spring of 2000, I required my students to attend two readings over the course of the semester, and I distinctly recall at least one other TA saying, That's a really good idea. I should do that. This is the way of TAs, you understand; we borrow from each other, and hand good ideas down from one year to the next in a kind of half-oral, half-written tradition, only semi-formalized but also the best kind of community and solidarity. So it's possible--not probable, since it's hardly such a radical idea that someone else couldn't have thought of it independently--that whoever's teaching that section of Creative Writing is using an idea they got, at however many removes, from me, and that's why my audience was bigger than 2.
The notion is kind of cool, and kind of scary, and thinking about it for too long makes me feel like I'm about to wander into a time-travel story.
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no subject
Date: 2005-11-14 05:24 pm (UTC)And you do that other stuff all the time. And now they know. Which...is just damn cool.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-14 08:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-14 09:07 pm (UTC)