My Wonderful Class

Well, we've had a lot of twists and turns over the past two weeks. The good news is the class is still going, although it may have a few surprises ahead of it yet. For one thing, we are now seriously confronted with the fear that the Centre for Student Programming will shut us down, for a variety of reasons that are too much of a headache to get into. Fortunately, our faculty sponsor is doing everything in her power to prevent that from happening. I really do owe a great debt of gratitude to her.

Attendance was rather poor last week. My understanding is that most who signed up were faced with a harsh editing deadline. My cynical opinion is that if you can't make it to the first session, you can't make it to the class, period. I'm sure I'm just responding out of retaliation, though, since far beyond the lack of turnout, I was annoyed that only two contacted me in any way saying what was up. Personally, I find this sort of rude behaviour rather intolerable out of classmates and friends as much as potential students.

But everyone's saying I'm being too strict, so what do I know?

This upcoming Monday, we will be talking about surrealism in anime. I admit that even though this is a subject of great interest to me, I haven't as thoroughly researched it as I should. I'm depending on my co-presenter, Erik, to draw upon Japanese theatre for much of the lecture. I would also pose a closer association between Japanese animation and experimental cinema, but without a strong theoretical basis for that, I have only my experiences, really, to draw from.

This is also something I'm running aground with in my thesis, the fact that there is little critical literature directly applicable to my subject. My ambition with my paper was to create that literature, so to found a body of work from which future theorists could hopefully draw, but I hadn't anticipated having to do it again for my class. It seemed a lot easier to stick DVDs in without comment if there were more than just a handful of students.

Well, maybe this coming week will surprise me.