Suddenly it's October
For once I won’t complain that the North Island is getting all the attention in the news. They’re having storms, heavy rain, landslides and flooding, and we’re having… misty drizzle.
Suddenly the end of term (and of the academic year) is approaching fast. Apart from making me panic about how much vocab I’ve got to learn before next week’s oral exam (which the lecturer has told us will focus on using the vocab we’ve learnt, so there goes my plan of just revising the basic words, because that means he’s going to ask us questions about the themes we’ve covered – all weighty things like history, politics, religion, art, literature, media, technology and the environment, and you really need to know all the appropriate words to be able to talk about them (so if I’m quiet here over the next couple of weeks, you’ll know it’s because I’m frantically trying to cram the Spanish words for self-portrait, slavery, and bias* into my head), the impending end of term has reminded me of all the books I’ve got sitting in my “to be released” box (especially since our big weeding the other day) that I’d mentally marked as themed releases for around the university. So in an attempt to release most of them while there’s still plenty of students around to pick them up, I’ve decided to drop off a few each morning on my way to work.
So yesterday I released Les Mains Sales by Jean-Paul Sartre in the French department and The Archbishop’s Ceiling by Arthur Miller in the English department, and this morning released Teaching As a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner in the Education department, The Warden by Anthony Trollope in the English department, and Els arbres amics by Pep Coll in the Spanish department (that was one of the books elizq-16 sent over for the Dunedin convention, which boreal gave to me because she knew I was studying Spanish. It wasn’t until I got it home and looked at it properly that I discovered it was actually in Catalan, so there’s no way I’d be able to read it. I don’t know if anyone in the Spanish department speaks Catalan either (most of the lecturers and tutors are South American), but I reckon there’s more chance of it finding a reader there than anywhere else I could release it!)
Currently reading: The Newtonian Casino by Thomas A Bass
*In case you were wondering: autorretrato, esclavitud, and parcialidad.