School's Not Quite Out for the Summer, Yet (Sorry Alice)

Three more weeks of classes, then finals, but, the only thing I have to do on finals week is turn in papers, and I am honestly hoping to be done with them by that point.

I now have a thesis and an adviser.  I am searching for one more person for my panel, and I have to fill out the paperwork, but those are minor things compared to the research I am going to have to start doing over the summer.

My thesis is going to be on Melville's critique of American Exceptionalism in his novella, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile.  I am going to have to do a lot of historical research, but it is a good jumping off point to studying satire.  It is definitely Melville's most entertaining work, and it should be more widely read.

Except for class presentations on papers, I am through with my presentations for the semester.  I have learned a lot, and I am definitely glad that I took the opportunity to give a presentation at the University of Akron Student Innovation Symposium (UASIS).

Hoping to find out whether I have gotten an assistantship or not.  I am thinking it should be any time.  People who are currently graduate assistants have told me -- from the phone call I received last week asking me whether I was still interested or not -- that I am under consideration.  We'll see.

I need to find a job for the summer.  It would be nice to do something tutoring related, but I am not above working waiting tables or something like that.  Waiting tables might be my best bet, but that would ruin my nights and weekends, which I have grown pretty accustomed to.  Still, as the phrase goes, "beggars can't be choosers" -- unless you're that guy who begs by the alley outside of my old apartment building in Chicago.

Melville and Penis Jokes

"Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and assisted by two allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the mariner's call it, and with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a grenadier carrying a dead comrade from the field.  Extending it upon the forecastle deck, he now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt, as an African hunter the pelt of a boa.  This done he turns the pelt inside out, like a pantaloon leg; gives it a good stretching, so as almost to double its diameter; and at last hangs it, well spread, in the rigging, to dry.  Ere long, it is taken down; when removing some three feet of it, towards the pointed extremity, and then cutting two slits for arm-holes at the other end, he lengthwise slips himself bodily into it.  The mincer now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling.  Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office."


Where does his head go? ;-)