I don’t really *hate* LOTR. That just sounded better in the tagline than “confessions of a LOTR-disliker” or “confessions of a nerd who is not into LOTR.” I suppose “I don’t love LOTR. Why do you?” might have been passable, but too late now. Point is, I do have a certain appreciation for the books, although my appreciation is pretty much strictly academic, rather than having any genuine love for the story or feeling like the text resonated with me on a personal level. Anyway, I encourage the debating on the text to continue in my earlier post. It’s good for me :-)

And in the spirit of full disclosure, I will say that I do pretty much hate the Peter Jackson movies. I pretty much hate Peter Jackson. I dare say he’s the most overrated director of our time. Revoke the rights to make the Hobbit, Tolkien heirs!!!

Hmm… Seems like an update here is a bit overdue.

In a nutshell:
The Tolkien class is moving along. The students so far have either 1. not discovered that I am a fraud or 2. discovered it and that’s why they never come to my office hours. Either way, less work for me :-) Unfortunately, the reading is killer. Both in terms of quantity and quality. In general, I enjoy Tolkien’s letters. It’s rather nice to get a sense of who he was and why he wrote the things he did. But honestly, not everything the man wrote was gold. And he wrote some pretty shitty poems, frankly. And then liked to attribute them to Sam and Bilbo. Psssh! If you’re going to write crappy poetry, just own up to it instead of attributing it to your fictional characters.

I’m applying to teach another course next year. I’ll already be teaching a History of Psychiatry in the US course–one which I tried to propose to teach for the history department this year, but was summariy rejected by the autocrat in charge of pretty much all graduate teaching positions in the department. So now I’m sucking up to the autocrat and trying to pitch something slightly more canonical as far as US history goes, but still something with that good old R. Batty twist to it. Right now I’m thinking something along the lines of “Crime, Punishment, and Social Reform: A History of Criminal Justice in the US, 1800-19**.” I’m a little worried that it might be at once both too conventional sounding (people like to talk about law and social reform) but at the same time, not radical enough (it doesn’t exactly scream “let’s talk about oppressed minorities”). Of course, I want it to have a bit more of a science-y spin and talk about the invention of the penitentiary, the rise of criminology, forensic psychiatry, and eugenics. But given that I’m still an outsider to the history department, I’m not really sure how best to strike a balance between what kind of class I think the autocrat would like, what kind of class I would like, and what kind of class I think the students will like. Honestly, I think developing a syllabus is one of the hardest parts of teaching. Whatever happened to the days of just sitting the kids down with a textbook and making them do problem sets? Hmm, guess I’m in the wrong field for that.

And last but not least, I’m taking a literary history of schizophrenia class this term. The downside is that the class is focused exclusively on German literature, which means it has little to no immediate relevance to my own work. But on the upside, it’s about schizophrenia in the nineteenth-century! If that’s not inherently a sweet topic, then I don’t know what is. Unfortunately, I seem to be in the minority on this one, since the class is really, really small. I think it must be the German part that turns people off, even though we’re reading all the texts in translation. Regardless, the fact that it’s a small class means that even though I’m just auditing, I’m putting a lot of work into it. But the texts are pretty cool. I can now say that I highly recommend Büchener’s Lenz. And some parts of it are more relevant than others since we’re also reading some more canonical psychiatric texts as well, which will fit in nicely with my dissertation.

For the first time in quite a while, I’m getting excited about my work again. I was feeling good about things at the beginning of this academic year, but the failure to actually propose my dissertation in December like I had wanted, combined with some completely asinine departmental politics during the winter quarer, pretty much destroyed all the motivation I had to do some serious dissertation work this year. Of course, just because I wasn’t working on it doesn’t mean it wasn’t omnipresent, lurking in the recesses of my mind, nagging at me in idle moments (you know, like when you’re trying to fall asleep). But it was clinging to me like a heavy burden, not lingering seductively just out of reach. But now, now I’m starting to feel the old flame rekindle. I’m rembering that the reason I started doing this was because I like the things I study. I may still hate the ostentation and pretention of academia, I may feel my stomach turn at the politicking and patronage that makes it seem like being a grad student is like being courtier during the rule of a particular oppressive and moody monarch, and I may still feel despondent when I think about how I use the word “douchebag” to describe some of my colleagues a thousand times more often than I use the words “brilliant” or “wonderful.” But when I pick up an old psychiatric text and thumb through its pages, when I hear people talk about nosology and etiology, when I read stories about hallucinations and paranoia, when I look at the statististics from a nineteenth century asylum… I feel it again. I feel that little twinge of delight and giddiness; that desperate urge to read more and then talk about it with others. I guess what I’m saying is that even after all these years of disillutionment and frustration, monomania still turns me on. Hot! :-D

Other hot things coming soon: reviews of Pandora’s Box and Robot Monster