You really can call me Laura! Some of you still seem to feel like you need to call me Professor or Dr. or something like that. No need for that, really! (Plus, I am just an instructor and not a professor, so I don't want to get in trouble with the professor police, ha ha.) Anyway, since I'm on a first-name basis with all of you, please do the same and just call me Laura.
Storybook Coverpages. I'll be updating the list of Storybook websites for Myth-Folklore and Indian Epics on Monday afternoon when people have finished turning in their Week 4 coverpages. You can continue to experiment with your coverpage design all semester long, of course! Starting tomorrow, Tuesday, for the Week 5 Internet assignment you will be looking at and commenting on each other's Storybooks via the class list. I'll have more to say about that in tomorrow's announcements.
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. You can then check the contents of the stack to make sure I received your assignment. I will be reading and replying to the assignments in the order they were turned in. If you turned in your assignment on Sunday or later, you may have to wait a few days before you will get comments back from me.
Monday Events on Campus. As part of Mid-Day Music in the Union today, come hear Atiba Williams play piano from noon-1PM in the Food Court (time/location/details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.
Myth Monday. Each Monday, I'll be sharing a link here to one of my favorite resources online for folklore, mythology and epics. Last week was Sita Sings the Blues, a feature-length animated film version of the Ramayana by Nina Paley. This week, in honor of Rosh Hashanah (see below), I wanted to share an amazing resource for Jewish mythology and folklore: a collection of stories called Legends of the Jews by the great scholar Louis Ginzberg. The book is available at several websites, including the Sacred Texts website. Ginzberg's monumental collection is full of traditional Jewish tales that feature familiar Bible characters, but in stories you have probably never heard before. (Those of you in Myth-Folklore who did the Noah-Babel unit read some folktales and legends from this book - like the story of Noah and Satan and the vineyard, for example.) Especially if you are interested in Bible storytelling traditions, this is a brilliant book - I think you would probably be delighted and surprised by what you can find browsing the stories it contains!
Rosh Hashanah. Sunday evening at sunset marked the start of the Jewish holiday of the New Year, Rosh Hashanah. The holiday takes up two days, so it will end at nightfall on Tuesday, September 18. Like many religious holidays, Rosh Hashanah is based on a lunar calendar, so it falls on a different day each year, depending on the cycle of moon. According to Jewish tradition, this is the day of the year on which God created man, and it is also the day of the year on which the Last Judgment will take place. One of the rituals on Rosh Hashanah is the blowing of the shofar, the ram's horn, to awaken the faithful before the coming judgment. You can read more about the holiday at Wikipedia, and below you can see the blowing of the shofar as shown here in an illuminated Hebrew manuscript:
