To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive

wintercreek, I finished The Sparrow the other day, and OMG I WANT TO INCLUDE THIS IN MY CLASS SO BAD. It's exactly the kind of novel I want the course to be about--using science fiction not only to look at ourselves from a different perspective, but on historical personages from a different perspective as well. SO. AWESOME.

Andandandandand, best of all, it's not as long as I thought it was! We could get through it in perhaps three weeks, which, if it's the longest work on the syllabus, would be reasonable enough. Ah! Hooray!

So with that on there, I've filled, hmm, perhaps two-thirds of the syllabus. Here's what I'm planning on:

- The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [Oooh, and excerpts from sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary reports or the conquistadors' relaciones for comparison purposes--holy cow, is my Early Am Lit class coming in handy here?]
- The Martian Chronicles - Bradbury
- "Paradises Lost" - Le Guin*
- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Adams
- "Strangers" and possibly "Fortune Hunter" - Poul Anderson
- "The Screwfly Solution" - Raccoona Sheldon
- Stories from Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics (probably some combination of "The Distance of the Moon," "The Sign in Space," "Without Colors," and "The Spiral")
- Excerpts from Margaret Cavendish's A New World Called the Blazing-World
- Radio version of War of the Worlds and the various fabulous historical sources on same that nickless sent me
- Contact (film version) [Comparing and contrasting this to Sparrow would be amazing]
- Serenity (or possibly the episode "Ariel")
- Babylon 5: "Believers" or perhaps "The Geometry of Shadows"
- TNG: "Darmok"

I'm tempted to include the Vorkosigan novella "The Mountains of Mourning," but it would be tricky because you need to read the whole thing to discuss it in any kind of interesting way. Perhaps over spring break... I would also like to include an episode of The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne, but that would have to be very bootleg, alas, since there are no DVDs of it. Boooo. Perhaps there is a suitable steampunk short story lying around somewhere... (Recs? castalianspring?) I also haven't finished reading through all the recommendations y'all gave me last time I posted on this, so there will be more short stories selected from that, I'm sure. (I'm thinking "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" and "Repent, Harlequin!" will be definites, but I probably need four or five more all together.)

My main theme is still turning out to be space exploration and alien interaction, but I feel like I should throw in something connected to the other major sci-fi threads out there--time travel, cyberpunk, androids, alternate universes, etc. I think I should probably include a NewWho episode so my film/TV examples aren't all American, but...gah. I'm still ticked off at that show. Maybe I'd better find a time travel short story instead. (There's The Time Machine, but I'm starting to run low on time in the semester. There's Heinlein's "All You Zombies," but I can't see sustaining 50 minutes of discussion on it.) I would like to include something from BSG, but I really don't know how I would manage to find an episode that didn't require yards of explanation for nonfans, so that may be a non-starter. Are there more non-space opera short stories I'm missing that need to be on here and weren't suggested before?

Another question: if you could pick one or two episodes each of Farscape and Futurama to put on this syllabus, which would it be? I haven't seen either series in too long, so I don't recall which would be best. Perhaps "Revenging Angel" for FS? (I need things that aren't too continuity-heavy, but of course the best episodes are the ones steeped in continuity, and I don't really remember a lot of them anymore, sigh.) The two I remember most clearly from Futurama are "Jurassic Bark" (which, come to think of it, would illustrate time travel rather well) and whichever one it is where Fry moves the stars for Leela. I would also like to use that series in a similar manner to HHG, as an example of sci-fi trope parody, so any particularly great examples of that would be welcome.

For you comic/graphic novel folks out there, any short examples to offer? I feel like there's probably good stuff there, but I just don't know about it. It would have to be readable for and discussable in one 50-minute class, because I'm running low on slots in the semester.

And finally, if y'all know some good fandom-related essays, blog entries, or the like, I'd love to hear about them, since one of the three paper assignments is going to be related to fandom. I figure Henry Jenkins is probably the go-to guy for this; anyone know if Textual Poachers is still the gold standard of fandom anthropology-type stuff, or are his newer books just as good? (I see he has a blog as well...I'll have to look through that and see if any entries are particularly relevant to what the assignment will be.)

* If anyone knows how to get copies of this novella not bundled in the collection The Birthday of the World, that would be fantastic. Since it's less than 30% of the book, I should be able to get the library to digitize it and make it available for my students to print out--I would hate to make them buy the book just for a small part of it--but at 100+ pages, I bet most of my students won't bother to print it out, and, if my experience is any indication, read it. I don't know why, but they buy and read the textbooks, but completely ignore the online material. Damned frustrating.

I am currently trying to write the worst possible research essay opening as part of an exercise for my students on how to write good introductions. (Never fear; I will also be showing them examples of good intros and teaching them the conventions of good research paper introductions.) The course topic is heroes, so I'm trying to write something that would fit into that. So far, I have:

Since the dawn of time, people have looked to heroes for examples of how to act. Sometimes these heroes are fictional. These fictional heroes can be found in comic books and movies, such as Batman or Superman. Everyone looks up to these figures because they save lives and defeat evil.

Bad enough?

Thankfully, that is worse than anything I've ever had to grade, but presumably the exaggeration will get the point across.

Now I need to find some good essay intros. Anyone have any favorites? I'd like to just take intros from some of the journal articles I'm reading for my Joyce paper, but I don't want to completely befuddle the kiddies.

*

This particular plague I have is taking a while to move on out. Booo. I bought a nice, big box of tissues last week--probably 200 or so in the box--and since Friday I have used two-thirds of it. Rhinovirus, you have officially outstayed your welcome.

I got a form in my departmental mailbox today asking me to give the secretaries my preferences for 101 class meeting times next semester. This seems so unreal. In August, I will be teaching two classes. This summer, I will be constructing a syllabus. CRA. ZEE.

Further craziness, in the crazy-amazing sense, is the chicken recipe I cooked up last night. It's not really a recipe so much as a "throw all these things together in the amounts you think proper and cook" kind of deal, but it is OMNOMNOMish nonetheless. I took two giant frozen chicken breasts and put them in a pan, added about an eighth of a cup of olive oil--maybe more--I drizzled, basically--then the juice of two navel oranges (I think a few tablespoons of orange juice along with that would've been effective, but I didn't have any), and a chopped-up third of a sweet onion. Then I sprinkled garlic and rosemary liberally over the whole thing, and cinnamon not so liberally. I let it marinate/defrost in the fridge for twenty-four hours before sauteing everything in a frying pan. For my leftovers, I tried dipping bites of the chicken in honey, and that was good as well.

Apropos of nothing: in an attempt to procrastinate on annotating articles for my 505 project, I had an epiphanic understanding of the circle of fifths last night. I finally get what it's doing, and why it's a circle, and why everything on the circle is where it is. I'm sure there's much more I don't get, but that's kind of awesome anyway. (The reason I was looking such a thing up trails back to the music from last Friday's BSG. I want the soundtrack nooooooow.)