Friday, August 5, 2005

Make Yourselves Uncomfortable

Ph. and I stopped up on campus after 5:00 p.m. this evening--late enough to park close to the office.  I had a few books to shuffle into my campus workspace, and I needed to run a couple of PDFs from chapters I intend to use this fall in WRT307: Professional Writing.  I'll share a link to the syllabus when it's ready; all you'll find there now is drafty stuff, tentative experimentation and pre-planning.

On the way out of HBC (home to the Writing Program) and on a whim, Ph. and I tried a door on Hall of Languages, the building where I'll be teaching the class.  I've been meaning to peek in on the space for a few weeks since I learned about the assignment, but I just haven't gotten around to it.  Low priority that it is. And being after hours, I'd expect it to be locked.  But the door creaked open.

"We try to encourage their young minds to wander" - Morticia

Local lore has it that SU's Hall of Languages, viewbook frontpiece that it is (appearing on all the admissions brochures) influenced the design of the house in the Addams Family.  Yep: 1313 Cemetery Lane.  You decide.

And so I'll be teaching composition in the building of campus buildings (notable improvement from the basement of Bowne Hall (Chemistry?) and the "Orange Grove" modular building I taught in last fall, not that I'm hard to please re: teaching spaces).  I recall that our teaching request forms invited us to rank preferences for courses, wired-ness and time of day; all in all, I fared well on the counts of the course and the technology.  Time o' day: 12:45-1:40 p.m., MWF.  I know.

Their house is a museum.
When people come to see 'em
They really are a screa-um.
The Addams Family. (track)

Museum, eh?

The best part of this architectural mash-up (HL201/1313CL) is that Gomez (or Fester?) was endlessly inviting prospective business clients over to the house where they'd get all unsettled by Lurch or Cousin Itt or Thing or Kitty Kat (all of the cast, really).  Interesting relation:  the theme of deals-chased-off by the grotesque, the bizarre.

"Make yourselves uncomfortable." - Fester to his clients

Just checking campus spaces, reporting on them.  And so I'll stop here, on the precipice of the unnerving next-step that would be explaining how any of this has seeped into my imaginings about what the course could be. But Ph. and I did check the room, and we found that the furniture is far more agreeable to a semester of Professional Writing than the corresponding space (the Play Room?) on Cemetery Lane.

Posted by Derek Mueller at August 5, 2005 9:56 PM to Dry Ogre Chalking