First blog

I'm new to the whole journal-on-the-Internet thing, and am still trying to overcome my own nervousness, but I think it's going alright.

I'll try the introduction-route, as others have. I'm eighteen years old(turning nineteen in October), and am in my sophmore year at MSU. I am an MTA major, because I've always loved movies and my dream is to become a filmmaker.

I also have a love for books and since this is an English course, I'll rattle off a few of my favorites: Victor Hugo's Les Miserables andThe Toilers of the Sea, William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Vladimar Nabokov's Lolita, Antoine de Saint Exupery's The Little Prince, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Mrs. Dalloway, Roald Dahl's Matilda, EM Forster's A Room With a View and Howards End, Bill Watterson's The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book. And on and on. I'll stop there. If there is one thing I picked up in class today, it's that lists are tedious, except when they apply in some way or another to yourself.

I have read the first fifty-five pages of Bloom's The Book of J, as well as the first three chapters of Frye, and am to chapter forty in Genesis. Haven't started reading The Slave yet, but shall soon(I was lucky enough to obtain it from the Bozeman Public Library). The reading load is rather hefty, but I won't complain. Principally because I've always found religous matters and various perceptions of religous traditions rather fascinating. Even my unsuccessful stint as a fundamentalist Christian--ages eleven to thirteen, roughly--and inevitable disillusion didn't obliterate my interest. In truth, my subsequent discovery of the works of John Shelby Spong(author and former Bishop of Newark) helped secure my comfort with looking critcally at Christianity, and other faiths.

Alright, I've rambled enough now. I'll conclude by saying that this course promises to be stimulating, in the best sense.

I have the feeling that this course will prove stimulating, in the best sense.