Lesson Plan for Week 4: General Thoughts and Notes

Patrick Mooney, TA
Eng 193, Prof. Newfield
23 October 2012

1. Thought for the day:

   It is indeed a peculiarity of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are 'obviousnesses') obviousnesses as obviousnesses, which we cannot fail to recognize and before which we have the inevitable and natural reaction of crying out (aloud or in the still, small voice of conscience): That's obvious! That's right! That's true! -Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (tr. Ben Brewster)

2. Administrative matters:
   • The UCen bookstore will begin returning books to publishers on 5 November. If you have been planning to buy books for a course from them, you should do so in the near future.
   • There is no lecture on Thursday. Instead, there will be a screening of Roman Polanski's Chinatown, which will be in Girvetz 1910 at 3:30 and will run until nearly 6 p.m.
     • Watching the film is mandatory, but attending this particular screening is optional. If you prefer to watch it in some other way, that's fine! Just make sure that you have done so by Tuesday 29 October.
   • Due to the screening of Chinatown, my office hours on Thursday will be from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m. - one hour later than normal.
   • Your detection structure assignment will be returned during group work this evening.
     • Everyone receives either a check (indicating the assignment was performed adequately), a check-plus (which means that you received a small bonus of 1% of the total points for the quarter) or a check-minus (which means that you receive a small penalty of 1% of the total points for the quarter).
       • If you received a check-minus, you have the option of either (a) just accepting the penalty and moving on, or (b) fixing the assignment, based on my notes, and turning it in during section in week 5. If you take option (b), this will remove the penalty entirely.
       • It is not necessary to redo the assignment from scratch. Just fix the problems that I indicated in my notes and resubmit it. If you have any questions about what was wrong with your assignment, please come talk to me!
       • This is the only assignment during the quarter for which I will allow rewrites. Your papers must be submitted in a final form from which you expect to receive a grade that cannot be improved through rewrites.
   • Questions about appropriate articles for the upcoming paper? Other paper-related questions?
     • If you have any questions or problems while writing your paper - from I'm having difficulties integrating this evidence into my argument to I just don't know what to write about or I just can't get started - please come talk to me! Helping you with your writing is a very important part of my job.
   • Other questions?
3. Group work, based loosely on this article. (You may find it helpful to log into the UCSB Library Proxy Server before clicking on that link.)
   • For those who have asked, the musical selections played during the exercise were:
     • Cake, Meanwhile, Rick James…
     • Ollano, Partir Revenir
     • Gorillaz, On Melancholy Hill
     • Shivaree, Goodnight Moon
     • Miike Snow, Cult Logic
4. Questions we would have discussed, had we had time to discuss them:

   Consider the following quotations from Mosley's Black Betty:

   • I tried to think of better things. About our new young Irish president and Martin Luther King; about how the world was changing and a black man in America had the chance to be a man for the first time in hundreds of years. (45; ch. 1)
   • I found myself roaming outside my native black community, a community that had been transplanted from southern Texas and Louisiana. When I had to work in the white world, Alamo was the perfect tool. He was crazy and naturally criminal. He would have hated Negroes if it wasn't for World War One. He felt that all those white generals and politicians had set up the poor white trash the same way black folks were set up.

     He was right. (78; ch. 5)

   • I wanted to kill Clovis too, but there wasn't any reason for it. She hadn't done anything. It was me. I had reached out for the white man's brass ring and got caught up short, that's all. They taught me when I was a boy to stay in my place. I was a fool for forgetting that lesson, and now all I was doing was paying for that foolishness. (106; ch. 8)

   What views about race does Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins here express? About race relations? To what extent are these views specific to the historical period in which the novel is set?