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.
Lordie pie. I visit this blog to learn things I’d never imagined. HL as the inspiration for the Addams Family Homestead? Life on campus will never be the same for me again.
In full haunted view out your office window, right? Of course, I’m just the messenger. 😉
“We gladly devour those who would subdue us.” Morticia…
I went on a search to find the above, (CRS) couldn’t remember it all…. and found this wild link to “Ede’s Directory of Households”…look out for some of these “students” in a place like that…
LOL!!
You make me laugh. Thanks for the chuckle. Now that you mention this…yes, quite a resemblance, and when walking through it, it is kinda creepy.
I will be cautious, Sybel. Courage in preparedness, right?
And A., I learned of the lore straight from local authorities (scroll down). As for the classroom, I’ll take the paradox of creepy and luxurious (real chairs and tables, projectors galore, and windows aplenty) in a trade for cramped, windowless and yellow (hypothetically, I mean). Plus, from the inside of such an ominous place, might not even notice. And, on a grave note, we meet on Halloween.