Some recommended classes

Now that it's time to pick Winter classes, here are recommendations from members of Lit Collab. See also our Fall 2008 Very Unofficial Collection of Helpful Hints for New Lit Students (PDF), which has more suggestions on page 5 from Jordan '09, Ellen '10, and me. Feel free to comment on this post with a list of your own favorites!

Danielle '10

Basic Narrative Technique or anything like it is crucial for jump-starting your creative writing skills. Even if you think you know all the basics, trust me, you don't. Take this class.

Sign up for every creative writing class, attend the first meeting, and decide which ones you want to keep, if any. If you don't have a writing class every quarter, you can always do independent study, and the great thing about independent study is that you can pick which teacher you get to work with and what you work on.

Torrie '10

Some of the best courses are the random ones taken outside of your major. I highly recommend looking into the Anthropology and Classics departments; Professor Erickson in Classics is wonderful.

The language departments offer cool courses on literature, film, culture, etc. which are taught in English, so there is no need to be afraid to take a course in the Italian department if you don't speak the language. Just look for courses that have weird letter combinations after them, like Ys and Zs, and they will often be the English-language offerings.

The English department has a lot of great classes. I loved Environment and Literature, Detective Fiction and Fairy Tales. For professors, I recommend Zinn, Hiltner and Shirley Lim (who is also very involved in CCS).

If you are interested in creative writing, take Barry Spacks.

As a Lit student it seems almost required — but very fun and rewarding — to take either or both John Wilson's Diaries course and Caroline Allen's Telling Life Stories.

Take Walking Biology before you graduate.

Britta '09

Try the Feminist Studies department. I signed up for Gender, Science, and New Technology, not expecting much, and I loved it. Experience with academic feminist study can add a lot of depth to your understanding of literature, and it's also just refreshing to be part of a room full of people who agree about the equality of human beings.

Take at least one graduate-level class — even better if you buddy with a CCS Lit friend and take it together. Danielle and I picked one in the Comparative Literature program and learned a lot in a tiny class from a distinguished visiting professor. So good! If the class you choose turns out to be too hard, you can drop it halfway through and still have had a valuable experience. All you have to do is pick up a form in the CCS office and get a few signatures.

Advice about writing papers

The following quote is from an email that Professor Richard Corum (now retired) sent to his CCS Lit Shakespeare class in October 2007, when we had a paper due soon. I find this oddly helpful to re-read when I'm working on an essay, and I hope you will too.

You're being asked to do this task entirely on your own. The point of this is not to defeat you and lead to learned helplessness, but to empower you, to give you confidence that you can do this kind of work on your own — that, more generally, you can learn to do all kinds of difficult things. This is the most important part of the assignment because this is the only hope that your age group will be able to keep on creating new knowledge once all of your teachers are dead. What you are most up against in doing this are, most likely, your feelings of panic, incapacity, fear, of wanting to do the right thing, the best thing, of succeeding even if success is handed to you. To write this paper you need to be able to get these emotions under some control, and to keep them from destroying the possibility of stepping outside your comfort zone. If you are in your comfort zone on this paper you aren't doing the assignment (unless you've done a lot of things like this in the past).

Take risks, and make this, in whatever way possible, something pleasurable for yourself. And, remember, it's better to get nowhere (this time) than to cave in and do the same old, same old.

Mapping the college

Hidden within the CCS website, there's a map of our building (left). I made a new version (right) as part of the in-progress website revision.

I could list the current uses of each room (and the past uses of some of them), but that's not very exciting. Instead, here's some history.

The college folklore is that our building is a "temporary" structure built during World War II as a commissary for the Marine air station that later became the UCSB campus. I haven't found evidence to convince me that this building was supposed to be temporary — seems like it's normal military construction, not intended to last a hundred years, maybe hasty, but durable enough. Commissary usually means grocery store, but the UCSB Long-Range Development Plan identifies Building 494 as a mess hall. This makes sense, since the book arts lab has old kitchen equipment hookups and a shed with extra sinks. I've heard that the Old Little Theater was a movie theater.

UCSB Geography has a great article about the spatial history of the campus and its department, which includes the following aerial photos (with circles added by me). Compare to the current map of the campus and Google Maps satellite view.

From the UC Library, that's the barracks area of the Marine base, probably photographed sometime between 1942 (when the buildings were constructed) and 1946 (when it stopped operating). It can be seen in context in this 1944 aerial photo of the whole station. According to the California State Military Museum, the station was established here to use the existing Goleta airport for training pilots. (It's no coincidence that there's now a WWII memorial right next to the airport parking lot.)

In the photo, building 494 is surrounded by an orderly arrangement of two-story barracks buildings; a few of them are still standing as buildings 429, 407, and 408. The Old Gym (with the swimming pool on the left) is there too. The tall lines of trees had been planted as windbreaks when the land was a ranch — see this history from the Music department as well as this map from 1888, which is part of a fascinating set of maps of the Goleta slough area. The row of eucalyptus trees along Ocean Road (between campus and Isla Vista) is also an old windbreak — and according to the UCSB LRDP it was "utilized as a gun range that included grenades, bombs, bomb fuses, pyrotechnics, rockets, small arms, and machine gun related ordnance," which is awesome except that the ground may be contaminated.

UCSB moved from its former location (now SBCC) to this spot in 1958. In this 1960 photo, the campus still has most of the old barracks-area buildings, with the addition of the Santa Rosa dorm and some other structures. I'd like to know what that thing is on the other side of the lagoon — that area is now just some crumbling pavement in the grass.

When the College of Creative Studies was founded in 1967, it was housed in the one-story WWII-era building a little north of its present home. In 1975, it moved to building 494 so that an extension to the library could be built on the site of the old place.

The UCSB Long-Range Development Plan's "Sensitivity Study for Potential Historical Resources" says that the few remaining Marine buildings on campus have "low potential to be historical resources" and can be knocked down. Noooooo! These structures aren't beautiful or distinctive, but their presence is educational and adds character to UCSB. They excite curiosity about the history of the campus, they can teach about World War II and the experiences of Marines, they add diversity and interest to the range of structures on campus, and they make students think about the uses and re-uses of places and buildings. I think the CCS home and similar buildings are significant enough to merit working with, not just razing, when planning a future grand avenue and bland dorm complex. (See the "Library Mall" page of the short version of the Campus Plan.) Luckily the UCSB budget probably won't be able to pay for new construction projects for a while.

Summer reading

Heather recently posted this stack of books she read over the summer:

Yay! I got inspired to take a picture of my stack, with some in common because we both took "Reading and Writing Personal History" with Barry Spacks:

All of my books were for summer English and Literature classes; I wouldn't read that much on my own. I got most absorbed in This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff, When I Was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago, and Kindred by Octavia Butler (I'd already read it in 10th grade, but it was good the second time too).

In other news, the CCS Student Lounge now has a set of this year's New Yorker issues for reading and borrowing but not stealing. We're watching you.

Isla Vista

As a Lit major, you probably have opinions about the local coffee. Here are mine. Nicoletti's (and its branches at the Arbor, by Buchanan, etc.) is pretty much the only option on campus, and it's sufficient between classes but not great. Luckily Caje in Isla Vista is reasonably good. It's tastier, quieter, and less crowded than Java Jones. This is what Caje looks like:

Isla Vista in general gets a lot of loathing, but I'm fond of it. Check out this detailed UCSB and Isla Vista Walking Tour by a Physics professor. A few of the highlighted locations: the entrance to a long-defunct asphalt mine, the memorial to the symbolic Isla Vista tree, the geodesic dome house, the Celtic cross at Coal Oil Point, and remnants of Isla Vista's primeval oak forest. You also can't miss the Food Co-op.

Local opportunities for getting published

A compilation of details for all the UCSB-related publications I could find:

Creative writing

Catalyst is UCSB's free undergraduate literary journal of original poetry and short fiction. To reach the current editorial staff, contact Ann Wainwright (wainwright@english.ucsb.edu), undergraduate advisor in English.

Into the Teeth of the Wind is a poetry journal produced by CCS students who serve as editors, contributors, and publishers. Submissions are also sought from the greater community. Submit poems to windsteeth@ccs.ucsb.edu.

Matchbox Magazine is a free UC-wide literary arts magazine edited by UC Santa Cruz students. Submit work to matchboxmag@yahoo.com.

Spectrum is the literary journal of the College of Creative Studies. Many students have had writing or artwork published in this magazine, and others have served as editors or assisted in another aspect of production. Spectrum accepts submissions of prose, poetry, nonfiction, and art from anyone, anywhere. Submit work to spectrum.ccs.ucsb@gmail.com.

WORD Magazine is a quarterly Isla Vista arts and culture magazine produced by UCSB students as part of the course INT 185ST. More information.

Journalism

The Daily Nexus, UCSB's campus newspaper, holds meetings for interested writers, copyeditors, illustrators, and photographers near the beginning of every quarter.

The Daily Sound, a small local daily newspaper, sometimes has internships for students.

The Independent, Santa Barbara's weekly paper, also sometimes hires students as columnists and interns.

Research

California Engineer is a research journal for undergraduate engineers in the UC system.

Focus Media Journal is the annual scholarly publication of the Film and Media Studies Department at UCSB. It accepts student submissions from all majors; see this announcement for instructions.

Discovery is UCSB's journal of undergraduate student research (see here). Manuscripts are considered from all scholarly fields and must be based on original research. A letter of recommendation from a faculty member must accompany your camera-ready manuscript. Deadline for submissions is one week after Spring quarter finals. Complete guidelines may be obtained from the Math Department Office, Room 6607 in South Hall.

The Law and Society Journal at UCSB accepts original student submissions related to law and society, including reviews, photo essays, and editorials.

Pictures of Building 494

I've heard people complain about the odd colors of the CCS building, but this is what it looked like in 2003 (credit to Brendan Barnwell):

I like the colors: