One more time--into the breach!

Next week! Here goes something or other! School starts again--my brief retirement now seems all too brief. I worked in the yard maybe four hours in 11 weeks--a record for activity. I battled a bougainvilla, planted some native plants, let the lawn die, and now it's back to classes. My last full-time year. The year after this, down to half-time if all goes well. Duck into school a couple times a week, the rest of the time practicing and writing.

A friend's partner told me last week that retirement is okay, but after a couple of years, you get bored with naps on the couch and gardening, though he's also writing novels, staying active in other ways. I don't see myself getting restless, except maybe to get more ideas realized, play instruments better.

Meanwhile, put off the music more or less for another nine months and shuffle as much in around classwork as possible.

The Skin of our Teeth

After days of anxious watching, I believe the one literature course I'm teaching this semester--Literature of the Bible--has finally gained enough students to run. I have fifteen, unless some wandering soul drops, and fifteen is the absolute minimum--seventeen is more solid, 20 is preferred. Other lit classes filled much earlier: one on horror, another on comedy, women in literature closed right away. You get to wondering what prevents people from taking a Bible as Lit course: is it me? Or do most people have such fixed ideas about the Bible, or they've read it in bits and pieces, so they think they've read it, and there's no reason to take a class in it. They can do that at church. I suspect it's one of those collections of texts that people have dipped into as their pastors or rabbis directed them. The analogy would be taking a couple of lines from King Lear--using them as the text for a sermon, taking a couple of lines from Comedy of Errors, using that as a sermon, or the basis for a prayer meeting, taking a couple of verses from one of Paul's letters, or a psalm, creating a wall hanging. Then saying, Well, of course I've read Shakespeare--no point taking a class in it.

There are several other lit courses in equally dire straits. Another explanation might be that, in the current times, there are fewer people interested in reading from an actual book, as opposed to reading from the computer screen, getting their information from Google and Wikipedia, watching television, etc. Obviously there are still people reading--bookstores are staying in business and Amazon seems healthy (though diversified into many other products besides books). But what are they reading? There is a lot of printed material that is roughly equivalent to watching television--romances, suspense stories, science fiction, horror. I can't say I have a lot of admiration for people who spend their time reading that: it's just another form of entertainment, with no intellectual/challenge value at all, except that it's reading, not watching something.