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 deeply 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 (MCAS Santa Barbara). It seems like normal wartime construction, not intended to last a hundred years, maybe hasty, but pretty durable anyway. 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.

Update (November 17, 2009):

I've been informed that the mystery structure in the second image is an old lookout tower. Wow!

I've also been learning more about "temporary" WWII construction. Here's a great article from the University of Utah about their similar buildings as worthy of historic consideration. From the article:

The main reason that these structures were labeled "temporary" was due to the general opinion that wars end...These structures were built with the expectation that they would last only 5 to 20 years. However, they have been somewhat over-designed if the objective was to erect temporary structures. President Roosevelt promised the mothers of servicemen that modern facilities and adequate shelter would be provided...a standard of health and comfort previously unknown by U.S. troops during wartime.

The significance of these buildings often lies in their connection to [the whole war effort] rather than as individual buildings...Though few renowned individuals, if any, have graced these buildings' halls, thousands of the unsung did on their way to and from the battlefield.

They are also significant for the way they influenced the building industry. These "temporary" buildings represent a construction methodology that swept the country after the war; that is, standardized plans, prefabrication of components and construction crews that specialized in only one aspect of the construction process.

[For the university's purposes,] costly new construction has often been postponed or even avoided in many instances by simply upgrading these "temporary" buildings with relatively inexpensive modifications such as adding insulation, making them ADA accessible, interior remodeling, a periodic painting, or as has often been the case, moving them to a needed location.

The blog City of Sound discusses another CCS-like building adapted for academic use at MIT (quoting from How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand, one of my favorite books):

"(A) temporary building left over from World War II without even a name, only a number: Building 20...'Unusual flexibility made the building ideal for laboratory and experimental space.'"

"Building 20 was...spartan in its amenities, often dirty, and implacably ugly. Whatever was the attraction?...'One never needs to worry about injuring the architectural or artistic value of the environment'; 'We feel the space is really ours. We designed it. We run it. The building is full of small microenvironments, each of which is different and each a creative space. Thus the building has a lot of personality.'"

Building 494 is a lot like that. You don't have to worry about getting it dirty, and it's full of nicely worn-in rooms that have adapted to their uses. Students are allowed to make many modifications, although we have to ask before doing permanent structural damage (it's a small building, not a huge one like MIT's). City of Sound goes on to discuss the replacement for Building 20, called Stata and designed by Frank Gehry, and how it both continues that tradition of hackability (with careful planning for flexible spaces) and doesn't continue it (because it's a very expensive new building). It'd be nice if CCS had the funds for a replacement building, much less one like Stata, but even then it'd lose something important that Building 494 has.

The Golden Gate National Recreation Area also has a page explaining their preserved WWII temporary buildings. And I found references to a document from 1993 titled World War II Temporary Military Buildings: A Brief History of the Architecture and Planning of Cantonments and Training Stations in the United States, but I don't have access to it.