I’m definitely starting graduate school. I graduate with my BA May 17th, and less than three weeks later I will begin working on my MA in Urban Studies. I’m pretty darn excited, so excited its making concentrating on my current classes a bit more difficult. Nothing to kill your motivation like being accepted into grad school, eh? I’m so tempted to just throw in the towel, but I seem to be temperamentally incapable of quite rolling over and dying. My first residency and classes will be June 4-11. I’ll be taking the following:
- Foundations for Arts in Transformation
- Arts, Creativity, and Human Development
- Arts and Spiritual Development
- Arts in Education
- Organization for Community Arts
I’m sure there will be lots of fuel there for future pontifications.
I’m really nor sure where I’m going to be working so if you know any place that is hiring English Majors, besides Wendy’s, then feel free to pass along some information. I was listening to The Prairie Home Companion the other day and they told me that, “An English Major’s prize, is a job selling fries, or making lattes nice and hot…” I’m afraid that might end up being my lot, at least for the next couple of years. I do have an interview next week with Americorps for a possible literacy position in Pittsburgh.
On April 1, 2008 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr’s latest work, Armageddon in Retrospect, was published. I received it in the mail on the 9th, and was done with it by the 12th. I really do love old KVJ (not to be confused with KJV). He really did respect Jesus, I’m a little disappointed he never really became a full, outright, follower of him. Anyway, Armageddon is a series of short stories and essays about war and peace. KVJ served during WW2, and even though he was not in combat for very long he saw some gruesome pictures of humanity. His accounts of his German captivity in Dresden is haunting. His depictions of Americans as just like their German enemies, as well as the Russians, helps remind us that we are no better than our enemies most of the time. The allies firebombed Dresden into rubble. Dresden that was a civilian city filled with hospitals, schools, the arts, and churches. Over 100,000 lost their lives overnight, many of them women and children. Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners spent weeks digging out bodies from the rubble. One corpse he found was of a young boy with his dog still leashed to him.
Anyone who likes KVJ will like this book. It is much more reserved than some of his other books. It has an older feel to it. Anyone interested in some creative arguments against war should pick it up too. Fiction is capable of making the truth digestible, even if not desirable.
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