Thursdays that is. Last year Thursday was the bane of my existence. It's my busiest day of the week, but it's not scary at all. I had modernism first at 11. It's going to hurt me to have a 9am class next semester. This teacher has my favorite accent so far. I wasn't expecting to hear so many different Irish accents. One of my roommates has a really thick one and sometimes I really can't understand what she's saying. Some people sound more British--but you can't say that or they'll get offended. This Modernism teacher sounds really cool though. She's a little bit up tight and she doesn't mess around, and she's very correct. We're reading stuff by T.S. Eliot right now and the way she says "Prufrock" (from
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock) just, I don't know, strikes my fancy I guess. One thing that I can say is common to all the Irish people I've talked to so far is that they articulate consonances. Americans don't.
I like this class so far. I really like T.S. Eliot actually. Well, his writing. I don't particularly like him because he completely wrote off all 19th century poetry and he really hated Matthew Arnold and
Dover Beach. He was kind of a pompous ass really. He always puts in Latin and ancient Greek words in the epigraphs of his poems or in the most important section of his poems--the parts that tell you what the hell he's getting at. And his point in doing that was to show you that he was more cultured than you. If you can't read Latin or Greek then you aren't worthy of understanding his idea. I still like his poems though. But I have the internet giving me translations. I also haven't read
The Wasteland yet, and whoever I've talked to about it always gives me the same face.
Music History is driving me up the wall. I only have it once a week, but the days I do have it, it's two hours. Separately though. It's kind of weird actually: the first class is at noon and the second at 5. The woman teaching it looks a lot taller from far away. Her voice drives me crazy. She's much too wispy. I want to hear her yell. I have to remind myself that this is a first year ("Freshers") course. They teach history here before theory. And that's messed up because the whole first lecture she taught us musical forms and the general form of the symphony. I learned that two years ago in first year theory. But that's all fine, it doesn't bother me that much 'cause I forgot some of that stuff anyway. But our whole second lecture today was about how to write academic essays. What to do in your opening paragraphs, avoid slang, be concise. She told us to avoid long sentences too. I thought that was weird. But c'mon man. Isn't that high school stuff? I didn't have to take English 101 freshman year, but even in 102 we didn't go over that stuff. I feel like it should be a given. Our first assignment is to review a performance of Haydn's String Quartet Op. 33, No 2. The finale is called The Joke.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDkWBzH6dkE
Irish was interesting. We have two teachers. One takes Wednesday, one takes Thursday. The one today is a native speaker--she did all her schooling and business and basically lived just speaking Irish until her 3rd year of university. She's a little blunt and does not appreciate any kind of meekness. She taught us a little tiny bit of grammar though. And two or three things about punctuation, which was actually really helpful. So far this whole class has been repeating phrases the teacher speaks and then rewriting them phonetically. It's really hard. It's also hard because they squish words together seemingly arbitrarily, and there's this really cool beat to everything. It's an awesome language to listen to, but it's hard to learn that flow. There are nine people in our class and both teachers ask questions of individual students. I always feel like I sound like an idiot. I have no expectation of being able to read or write
Poetry class. It's also a first year English class and there's one know-it-all who is all about meter and things any poetry that has no meter is "pretentious nonsense."
Whatever man. This teacher is interesting to me. She's American. But she's been here so long that she has this Irish influenced American accent. It's really cool actually. She uses all their phrases and colloquialisms and there are certain words that sound completely Irish. She's funny though. I don't when we're going to start focusing on anything, if we are. So far it's just been running through different things--poetic eras, examples, Irish poetry, types of poems, poetic form. But we never get very deep into any of that specifically, it's always "we'll come back to this later." A lot of teachers do that and it's really annoying. They'll tell you what they are going to say beforehand instead of just saying it. I'm hoping she doesn't make us write anything.
I got an email from the international society a little bit ago. The first trip is next Saturday and it's to Glendalough for the day. It's a "6th century monastic site." All I really know about it is that the monastery is St. Kevin's and that came first. Then there's the monastic city that came from that. That's where the round tower is. There's a really big famous granite cross there, and a really really old cemetery. It's going to be creepy.
In two weekends is the weekend trip to Galway. That one is going to cost 70 Euro. I guess that's not too terrible. It covers bus fare (10 euro each way) and two nights at a hostel. You have to pay more to do other things though. I want to see the Cliffs of Moher, and there is a guided tour put on by the hostel for that apparently. But maybe I could go by myself and not have to pay? I'll find out. They also do a tour of the Aran Islands. That one might be worth it to pay for.
Tomorrow I'm doing a whole lot of nothing, and Saturday I'm going to Dublin again! I'm going to try to see the Book of Kells and St. Stephen's Green.
I really want a typewriter.
