so, apparently bad things happen when you don't pay your library fines

... Like, for example, your grad school won't release your transcripts to prospective employers. Because you owe them ONE DOLLAR. Which you would certainly have paid if they had actually charged you the fine while you still lived there, instead of sending a bill which promptly got lost three months later.

Can I get a good old-fashioned job-market AAAUUGGHHH?

AAAUUUGGGHHHH!!!

Am teaching Spenser. I got a "how would you teach Spenser?" question on my doctoral exams, Lo These Many Years Ago, and wrote a long response that could be summed up as "I'd tell the students all about Ariosto and how he was much cooler." (The professor who set the question was not impressed.) Much to my shock, I seem to have learned to like Spenser in the meantime. I'm not sure my students are impressed.

WTFQ, Norton?

So, it seems there is a new edition of the Norton Anthology out. I'm sure everybody in the world knew this except me, but I didn't, because I live under a rock, and in any case I drew up my syllabi for this year before I moved to New SLAC Town, and thus had nowhere to tell people to send desk copies. So I've only just had a chance to look at it.

Wait, what happened to Book 3 of the Faerie Queene? They didn't have the whole thing in there to begin with, but this time around they've totally and completely gutted it, with only three cantos left standing. Book 3 is the fun part, dammit! I don't even like Spenser all that much, but even I like Book 3. Who the hell decided this would be a good idea?

They seem to have deleted Margery Kempe's examination for heresy, too. Growf.

On the bright side, there is an online archive of deleted bits -- which is helpful, and means I don't have to do anything really desperate such as forcing my students to read about that bore Redcrosse -- but browsing it makes for interesting and depressing reading. They've deleted so much fabulous stuff over the years! Mankind! And "Sir Orfeo"! And the Franklin's and Merchant's tales, not to mention Sir Thopas. Substantial chunks of The Tragedy of Mariam seem to have appeared in the last edition and become considerably less substantial in this one; "Lludd and Llewelys" and a couple of Marie de France's fables have appeared and disappeared just as quickly.

Oh well. The Norton is eterne in mutabilitie, I guess. Now I just have to figure out what the heck I'm going to do about Utopia now that they've given the students the whole text instead of excerpts. I'd really like to teach the whole thing. On the other hand, I don't want to not teach all the Spenser I'd planned to cover, or the extra Shakespeare play, or... Yeah, too many great things to read, not enough time. (Most of my professors in undergrad sailed blithely ahead and said, "OK, we're going to read it all," and I was generally with them all the way, so I was well into grad school before I discovered that there are limits to the sort of reading load that most undergraduates are willing to consider reasonable.)

Oh, screw it. I think we're going to read it all.