Friday, October 17 - Sunday, October 19

HAPPY WEEKEND! You have reached the end of Week 8! The Week 8 Read and Respond assignment (blog commenting) is available now, and the remaining Week 8 assignments are due on Friday or on Saturday or Sunday - please make sure you get started on those assignments soon. Have a great weekend!

IMPORTANT NOTE: IT Maintenance. On the third Sunday of every month, IT does maintenance on its servers. There will be a maintenance window this Sunday, October 19. This often causes service outages, which may affect you if you are trying to publish webpages at that time. The maintenance window is in the morning, and the maintenance should be completed before noon on Sunday. For specific information and updates, see the IT Alerts page at alerts.ou.edu (this is also a good page to check if you are experiencing problems with Desire2Learn, email, or other IT services).

Writing - Revising. Most of you are about to add your second story to your Storybook (the Week 8 Storybook assignment). The pattern of the last two weeks - writing, then revising - will repeat for the next six weeks of the semester. In Week 8, Week 10, and Week 12, you will be adding new stories to your Storybook. In Week 9, Week 11, and Week 13, you will be revising, along with some final revision assignments to complete your project in Week 14 and Week 15. I know that for many of you having to do all this revising is something unfamiliar, since in many university courses there is not a lot of emphasis on revising. By including revision - lots of revision - as part of the writing process, I hope everybody will wind up with something they can be really proud of by the end of the semester.

Storybook Stack. I'm still working my way through the stack of Storybook assignments that people have turned in this week, and my goal is to return comments to you before the weekend for any assignment submitted before noon on Friday. If you want to check to make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here.

FRIDAY: OU Library Book Sale. For information about the Library Book Sale that is taking place this Friday, see the previous announcement.

October 18: Veerappan. Friday, October 18, in 2004 marks the death of Veerappan, the famou Indian bandit and smuggler whose outlaw exploits made him a kind of modern-day "Robin Hood. You can read more about his life and outlaw career in this Wikipedia article. Veerappan was famous for his dramatic moustache, as you can see in this sand sculpture created by Sudarsan Patnaik, an internationally famous sand artist:

Thursday, October 16

Today is Thursday of WEEK 8 of the class. If you have not turned in your Week 7 Storybook assignment yet, you may still do that for partial credit. For those of you in Myth-Folklore or World Lit, Thursday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Wednesday. (Indian Epics has no Wednesday assignments, so there is no Thursday morning grace period.)

Storybook Stack. I've still got a few items left in the Storybook stack. If you turned in an assignment on or before 10PM on Monday, you should have comments back from me now. If you turned something in later on Monday or on Tuesday or Wednesday, your assignment is probably still in the stack, waiting for me to get to it. If you want to check to make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here. The final deadline for turning in a late Week 7 Storybook assignment for partial credit is Friday at noon.

My schedule today. I usually try to schedule my out of office appointments each week for Wednesday, but today I have those appointments on Thursday. So, I may be a bit more slow to respond to your emails today than on the other days of the week - but if you send me an email during the day today, I'll definitely get back to you by the end of the day, hopefully by around 3PM or so.

OU Library Book Sale (FRIDAY). For information about the Library Book Sale that will take place this Friday, see yesterday's announcements.

October 16: Oscar Wilde. Today marks the birthday in the year 1854 of the great Irish writer, Oscar Wilde. You can read more about Oscar Wilde's life and career as a writer in this detailed Wikipedia article. Wilde is probably most famous for his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and his play The Importance of Being Earnest - and also for his conviction in 1895 of "gross indecency" (homosexuality). He spent two years in jail as a result, and died three years after his release from prison, penniless and in self-imposed exile. My favorite works by Oscar Wilde are his fairy tales, which you can read online at SurLaLune. The image below is an illustration by Jessie King for Wilde's fairy tale entitled The Fisherman and His Soul:

Wednesday, October 15

Today is Wednesday of WEEK 8 of the class. If you have not turned in your Week 7 Storybook assignment yet, you may still do that for partial credit. Wednesday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Tuesday.

Storybook Stack. There are still quite a few Storybook assignments in the stack and I am making my way through them in the order that they were turned in. If you turned something in before 8PM on Sunay, you should have comments back from me already. If you turned something in later on Sunday or on Monday or Tuesday, it is probably still in the stack. If you want to check and make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here.

OU Library Book Sale (FRIDAY). The Library Book Sale will be held on Friday, October 17th from 10AM until 4PM at Bizzell Memorial Library. The sale will be open to members of the OU Community only from 10AM until 1PM. Thousands of books will be offered for sale. Hardback books will be $2.00. Paperbacks will be $1.00. Payment can be made in cash or by check (it looks like they don't take credit cards).

October 15: Sai Baba. Today, October 15, marks the anniversary of the death in 1918 of Sai Baba of Shardi, a man who is revered as a saint by both Hindus and Muslims. The year of his birth is unknown, and it is not clear whether he came from a Hindu family or a Muslim one. He lived the life of an ascetic and preached a gospel of love, charity and simplicity. He encouraged his Muslim followers to read the Koran, and he encouraged his Hindu followers to read the Ramayana, the Bhagavad-Gita, and other sacred Hindu texts. You can read a detailed account of Sai Baba's life and teachings at Wikipedia, which is also the source of this icon, a painting inspired by one of the photographs of Sai Baba taken during his lifetime:

Tuesday, October 14

Today is Tuesday, the first day of WEEK 8 of the class. Yes, this means the semester is one-half over! (In the Indian Epics class, you will see it is a review week before you start the Mahabharata in Week 9.) For those of you who are working ahead, Weeks 9 and 10 are also available! If you have not turned in your Week 7 Storybook assignment yet, you may still do that for partial credit.

Storybook Stack. As usual at the beginning of the week there are still LOTS of Storybook assignments in the stack. If you turned something in before noon on Saturday, you should have comments back from me already. If you turned something in later on Saturday or on Sunday or Monday, it is probably still in the stack. If you want to check and make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here.

October 14: Price Business School. I've been asked to make a special announcement for a program being presented Tuesday evening by the Price Business School: From Wall Street To Main Street - The Financial Crisis and its Impact on Our Local Economy. The program will take place on Tuesday, October 14, from 5:30-7 PM, in the Dodson Lounge in Price Hall (first floor). If you want to find out more about how the national situation is affecting folks here in the state of Oklahoma, this sounds like a good way to find out! Click here for more information about the program, including a list of speakers.

October 14: Festival of Sukkot. Today, October 14, 2008, marks the beginning of the Jewish Festival of Sukkot, known as "Feast of the Booths" or "Feast of the Tabernacles" in English. The holiday began at sundown on Monday evening, and lasts for one week. The word Sukkot in Hebrew is the plural form of the word Sukkah, which means a booth or hut. During the festival, people build special huts in which to celebrate the holiday. You can read more about the Festival of Sukkot at Wikipedia, which is also the source for the image of a festival booth below:

Monday, October 13

Today is Monday, and Week 7 of the class is now over. Monday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Friday/Saturday/Sunday. Week 8 will begin tomorrow - and those assignments are available now if you want to get started. The Week 9 assignments are also available now, too! (Week 10 will be available tomorrow.)

Grading. I've gotten numerous emails recently as people are checking up on their grades, so I thought I should make a general announcement about that. Each week there are 30 points of required work, so to get an A in the class, you need to be getting around 27-30 points per week. There is extra credit every week, too - some people use extra credit to make up for missed work, but you can also use extra credit to get ahead in class, earning more than 30 points per week. For a chart that shows you week by week point totals and other information about the grading system, you might want to look again at this Grading Information page - you saw this page back in the first week of the semester, but now you will be able to make better sense of the information, watching your total points adding up week by week. Let me know if you have any questions that are not answered on that page.

Storybook stack. As always on Monday, I will have a huge bunch of assignments in the Storybook stack that were turned in over the weekend or on Monday morning. The first thing I will do on Monday morning when I get to work is to update the list of items in the Storybook stack. So, after 8 a.m. or so on Monday, you will be able to check the contents of the stack to make sure I received your assignment. I will be reading and reply to the assignments in the order they were turned in.

October 13: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Monday, October 13, marks the birthday in 1948 of the great Pakistani qawwali singer, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Sadly, he died in 1997, but he left behind an amazing musical career with many beautiful recordings. You can read more about his musical career and legacy in this Wikipedia article. I was lucky enough to hear him perform in 1993, and it was one of the most marvelous concerts I have ever attended. Qawwali is a musical style traditionally associated with Sufism (that should mean something to those of you in World Literature, and also to those of you in Myth-Folklore who read about Rumi back in Week 6). There are some wonderful concert recordings at YouTube - and here is a picture that give you a sense of what his ecstatic concert performances looked like: