What the college would like us to know

As part of our series of posts learning about Mudrick (see these five descriptions and an alumna's perspective), here's a description of him from the Spring 2008 Literature Symposium announcements, probably written by John Wilson or Caroline Allen [paragraph breaks mine]:

Marvin Mudrick founded the College of Creative Studies in 1967. The existence and survival of CCS have depended on the ideas for education that Mudrick set down after Chancellor Cheadle asked him to "work up an academic plan for this campus." After the Regents approved it, Mudrick ran CCS as its Provost for nearly twenty years. Moreover he taught a literature class and a class in the writing of narrative prose every quarter. 

His classes were exciting, funny, and unlike anybody else's. Besides being a teacher and administrator, Mudrick was a brilliant and prolific writer. He published essays quarterly in The Hudson Review without missing a deadline for over twenty-five years, and most of these essays are collected in his books. But as good as his writing was, his talk was even better. He had the gift of gab and used it. In the classroom, according to Max Schott, Mudrick "took delight in arguing, loved hyperbole, had a propensity for intellectual provocation and irreverence and blasphemy, took pleasure in kicking against the pricks, and was convinced and tried to convince others that talk and the thinking in it (even about serious things, or especially about them) could and should be entertaining." 

Mudrick spoke in this way in a number of CCS symposia: starting with certain notions and improvising as he went along with a lot of wit and a lot of enthusiasm, trying to ignite a feeling for literature and music in others. One of these, an Art Symposium called "Am I Enjoying Myself Yet?" was videotaped in 1985. It will be shown for this symposium.

I enjoyed watching that videotape; it was helpful to hear him speak in his own words.

Also check out the only mention of Mudrick on the college website right now, this dull page titled History of the College of Creative Studies [paragraph breaks mine]:

Planning for the college began in 1965 when Chancellor Vernon I. Cheadle commissioned Dr. Marvin Mudrick, Professor of English, to serve as Academic Planner for the UCSB campus during the academic year 1965–1966. He was asked to propose a long-range academic plan for this campus’ growth. Chancellor Cheadle informed Dr. Mudrick early in their discussions that he was interested in the possibility of a special small college that would serve a part of the student population for which the University, at that time, made no provision.

Dr. Mudrick, who himself entered college at 15, formulated several proposals. Among them was the suggestion for a separate college, independently staffed and administered, with a specially selected and identifiable student body: students who, in addition to meeting UC entrance requirements, demonstrate “talent for original work in an art or science” (CCS Proposal, p. 1). The proposal was approved by the Regents in February 1967 and the College opened in Fall 1967 with an enrollment of 50 students. The College was originally housed in a cramped Marine barracks building next to the library — a relic of WWII when the seaside campus was a military base. The College moved to its present site, still a former Marine barrack, but a larger one, in the fall of 1975.

Literature showing up in sneaky places

Genre fiction in literature classes

In our meeting on January 7 we talked a little bit about genre fiction and its relationship to literary fiction, so here are a few related links that people may find interesting:

Science Fiction Authors That Lit Geeks Think It's Cool To Read — people who blur those boundaries.

Beautiful Sci-Fi covers — about an experiment in non-cheesy covers for science fiction books.

Thoughts on Genre — a quote from Joyce Carol Oates on "a tacit contract between [genre readers] and the writer."

Formula, Convention, and Cliche: Repetition in Genre Fiction — slightly more formal than the above posts.

Literature classes on Facebook

In our meeting today I talked about my dad's Facebook groups for the classes he's teaching at USC in American Studies (he's an English professor):

ARLT101.Spring2009, "Los Angeles: The Fiction"

AMST301.Spring2009, "America, the Frontier, and the New West"

Check out the "discussions" for his lecture notes. They're kind of silly but good, including lecture notes and a "YouTube Bibliography". He's told me that his students like to check Facebook during his classes anyway, so why not put the class there as well?

There's one UCSB English class that I know of with a Facebook page: ENGL 122NW: Narratives of War.

Quarterly updates

Summary of this past quarter in Lit Collab: we got to know each other, vented about classes and professors, distributed the Very Unofficial Collection of Helpful Hints for New Lit Students, went on a tour of the Book Arts lab, held a peer advising session for next quarter's classes, and started a little writing group. We also got a paper recycling bin in room 143. A few of us started using Wordie.

What is the Very Unofficial Collection of Helpful Hints for New Lit Students? It's a 10-page pamphlet/zine organized by last year's Lit Collab members for this year's new students. It includes notes about people and places, practical tips about classes, myths debunked, the library explained, a lot of recommendations for classes, secrets of the English department, information about Study Abroad, and more. You can download it as a PDF.

Our plans for next quarter: organizing another Scrabble evening (see photos of last year's Scrabble tournament), further decorating room 143, getting a stapler for the computer lab (and chaining it to the wall), bringing Robyn to one of our meetings to chat about the Lit program, holding a more effective peer advising session, and...who knows what else? Maybe designing and ordering some CCS Lit t-shirts?

I have a class next quarter during our usual meeting time, so we're probably going to move meetings from Wednesdays at 5 pm to Wednesdays at 2:30 pm.

Sad news!

I got an email from Christopher recently about Professor Corum's "Shakespeare and Theory" class canceling and I wrote back in concern about Corum's health since there were rumors that he was feeling ill. Christopher wrote back saying that Corum is fine — just retiring.

While I'm glad there is nothing physically wrong with Corum, I'm severely disappointed by this change of events. Not only am I losing out on a great class that will fulfill one of the few requirements we have, I'm losing my adviser.

Though I will say that GOLD does not yet say "canceled" nor did the man himself confirm the news in response to the email I sent, but I'm pretty certain that Christopher has all his facts straight.

What another alumna says

Gall and Gumption is an interesting blog by a former Literature student named Kia. She graduated in 1981 and also taught here for a while; she was friends with Marvin Mudrick and is friends with other CCS Lit old-timers like Max Schott. I think some of you are familiar with her name because she's been published in Spectrum several times. She's written several good blog posts about Mudrick, which makes me happy. Learning about CCS history helps me understand why this college is like it is now, which is a useful understanding to have as I try to get the most out of CCS Lit and also try to help make the program better. You probably share my aims and would like to learn more too! Yay!

This 1995 article is a summary of part of CCS history, mostly from a CCS point of view. Here's some relevant background material from it:

Since the college was established as a reaction to conventional undergraduate instruction, there has been tension between the college and some academic departments, especially English.

Some of the bad feeling between the college and the English department has to do with personality conflicts of long standing; some has to do with the approach to literature. The college is interested in teaching students to read carefully and to write well, while the English department is more interested in literary theory.

The external review team found that the college's literature faculty was "extraordinarily inbred," most being former College of Creative Studies students who had received their Ph.D.s from UC Santa Barbara, and recommended that they be replaced by English department faculty.

The literature lecturers disagreed. "It's almost impossible to find people who have enough of a sense of what's going on here to teach here," said Max Schott.

"It is true that we don't spend time talking about intellectual fads like 'deconstruction' and the 'new historicism,'" said Kia Penso, another college lecturer. "Primarily we read the literature and talk about what we have read. But the fact that we don't devote a lot of time to literary theory doesn't mean we are less rigorous."

Kia's blog posts give first-person detail and color to that history. She explains aspects of Mudrick's personality:

The exuberance that so grated on his critics was an urgency of feeling about the richness of this idea as he experienced it, and an impatience with all the phony or less satisfactory notions of the good that just got in the way. Yeah, there are people who laugh at their own jokes because they're nervous and don't know how to be cool. Marvin laughed at his own jokes because he was jubilant, full of high spirits, of energy, of rejoicing in goodness and beauty, in what was out there.

She has ideas that I like:

Which is sort of the point of literature, to give you a more interesting and revealing and rich theory of life and experience (including literature and music, yes) than the half-baked notions we walk about with unthinking.

She also describes her ideas about how to teach reading, which seem to be a decent description of the CCS approach. That approach is one of those controversial things about CCS Lit (note the statement in the above news article that "The college is interested in teaching students to read carefully and to write well, while the English department is more interested in literary theory"), and the success of this approach depends very much on how good the teacher is.

There's an interesting comment on a post criticizing Adam Gopnik, which is one of the posts that I might find interesting (along with this one about riding trains) even if I didn't care about CCS. The comment is about Mudrick's strange appeal:

I went to bed perusing Mudrick on the web-don't even wonder why after all these years his voice is singing high ptched over my shoulder as I read what I type....The thing about Marvin was that you loved him so much despite every reason to dislike him.

I liked reading the second-hand Mudrick advice in some of the posts, reminding me to not worry too much about self-indulgence when writing:

If he read a book on Chaucer he would dispatch it efficiently and then have lots of room to write about Chaucer in a way that considerably increased your pleasure and understanding of Chaucer...The extended inquiry into ideas that you find in one of Mudrick's pieces, the pursuit of the author's presence, the use of jokes as little revelations, all of this sort of thing is self-indulgence...not at all in conformity with that great American virtue of being sparing of words and "sincere" with the few simple ones you use, and in which thinking and inquiring into the ideas that people live by is a frightful piece of presumption.

And to not worry too much about using generalizations when writing and talking:

A generalization was a place from which you launched out into a subject, with the assumption that your observations -- or the observations of other readers in conversation with you -- would correct the generalization. That was what it was out there for, to be corrected, to be filled with content, or to be discarded as not sufficiently descriptive or for any number of reasons that resulted from investigating the questions it raised.

If you're interested in more, I quoted some other people talking about Mudrick in an earlier post. There's also a book called Mudrick Transcribed, but I haven't read that yet.

Robyn returns!

For everyone who hasn't already heard, Robyn Bell will be returning to the mothership for the Spring 2008 Quarter.

As a meager second year, I've only had once class with Robyn. The course was titled "Graphic Novels" and cycled through a collection of books that were certainly not "comic books," with authors like Neil Gaiman, Craig Thompson and Marjane Satrapi (writer of now motion picture Persepolis!). The ten weeks of writing, reading, discussing and, on one day, painting with Robyn were enough to leave me with a strong impression. Besides her sharp wit and wry sense of humor, which always kept the class at a relaxed but crackling mood, she constantly drank green tea out of those little Arizona juice boxes. That was super adorable. I remember thinking that.

For those of you that have been here longer, I'm sure you have better anecdotes to tell about the professor who many consider the "heart" of CCS Literature. Those lucky enough to have her as an adviser tell stories of her sitting with them and imparting lessons in between checking classes on their yellow slips. Those that are yet to experience one of her amazing classes, well, I feel much like my friend Megan did when she realized I hadn't seen the third Star Wars and told me she wished she could go back and experience it again. Robyn's like that — a showdown on a lava covered rock. Meaning that she'll keep your hearts abeating and your brains aworking. Rejoice.

Robyn will be teaching two courses next quarter as follows:

Solo Author

Is there a writer you like who is not taught, or not sufficiently taught? In this course, you investigate that writer. You sleuth through all your author's writing and through pertinent criticism, biography. You teach class in small weekly installments; distribute weekly written reports; and in the end produce an article, for class, presenting your findings, mysteries, and other research.

Emily Dickinson's Bookmaking

When she was in her late twenties and early thirties, Emily Dickinson transformed herself from a gifted amateur to "one of the greatest poets of all time." We watch that happen. How? By reading, in very approximate chronological order, most of the poems she produced then — those that she copied and bound into 40 small booklets. From first to last, we try to keep up with her; we follow Dickinson's hairpin turns, light-year leaps, and zero-to-the-bone stops.

Also, the Literature Collaborative will hopefully be co-hosting a welcome back party for Robyn at the beginning of the quarter, so keep an ear out for news!

And don't forget to sign up for Robyn's classes when your next pass time comes!

Dictate III, winter blowout edition

Dictate was so much fun on Thursday evening! Here's who read: Heather Bartlett, Rachel Heine, Steph Soule-Maggio, Erin Johnson, me, Alyse Speyer, Sophie Gore Browne, Amy Katz, Franciscus Alex Rebro, and Morgan Burke. Amy Arani also played her lovely songs again.

Alyse Speyer ran the show and Jessica Delfanti helped organize the event, including obtaining the tasty treats (with Stacie Nellor's assistance). We were honored to have Dean Tiffney and Professor Corum in the audience among all our other fans.

A couple friends asked me for the names of the books I referenced in the essay I read, and I'm immodest so here's my whole works cited, but the two main ones are Oranges by John McPhee and The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan. Anybody else, especially people who read at Dictate, can get their work posted here on the blog for everybody to read and re-read — just let me know if you're interested. Self-promotion is good for you.