I've finally begun the painstaking process of typing up all my notes from university. I've been called ridiculous and crazy for doing this (more than once; thanks guys) but there's some good reasoning behind it:

1) All my notebooks are old, ugly, ratty, and I want to get rid of them

2) People I know take these courses I took and maybe the notes could come in handy

3) I'm starting to realize that since graduating (this is U of T) my brain has not been working the same way. I'm a lot less critical and argumentative and I'd like to get some of the knowledge back. Just reading through these notes isn't the same thing as re-learning all about T.S. Eliot and radical postmodern feminism, but it's a kind of memory. I wrote is all down after all.

4) It's pretty funny to look at all these drawings and notes I wrote. English 140 Literarture for Our Time--a requirement for any English Degree at U o' T--enraged me every day. Even though I ironically liked nightschool in the summertime. On the last page of my notes I wrote

May 14

How can you [the professor], as a white woman of privilege, justify teaching a course titled "Literature for Our Time" which--with the exception of Virginia Woolf (a white woman)--teaches only the works of white men?* In the 20th century are you telling me you forgot the revolutions of consciousness that gave us books by Richard Wright and James Baldwin? What about Audre fucking Lorde?

Not that this note ever made it to the professor. But it was my sole complaint that all of the English courses I took were so old-dead-white-guy (with Virginia Woolf to throw us off the scent) that you'd have no idea anyone else even knew how to read.

And this is notebook one. It's going to be a long revisiting.


Notes on the above:
* For argument's sake, here's the syllabus from this modern--lit course:

Heartbreak House - Shaw
To the Lighthouse - Woolf
The Waste Land and other poems - T.S. Eliot
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett
Poems by Robert Frost
Poems by W.B. Yeats
Bruno's Dream - Iris Murdoch