Thursday, January 31

Today is Thursday of WEEK 3 of the class. If you have not turned in your Week 2 Storybook assignment yet, you may still do that for partial credit until noon today. For those of you in Myth-Folklore, Thursday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Wednesday.

Storybook Stack. I'm still working my way through the large stack of Storybook assignments that people have turned in. If you turned in a Storybook assignment on Sunday, you should have comments back from me. If you turned in something on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, it is probably still in the stack (contents of the stack). Please check to make sure!

My Ning participation. Just to clarify (as a few people have asked about this): After the first week of Introduction posts, my participation at the Ning is very random and sporadic. It takes me most of the week to keep up with replying to all the Storybook assignments and helping people with their websites, writing these announcements, etc. Some weeks are less busy and I can spend more time at the Ning - but in a busy week (like this one), I am scrambling just to keep up with the Storybooks! You should be getting one or two comments every week on your posts from other students in the class - and when I can, I also like to drop in too. But please don't worry if I am not commenting on your posts; instead, I promise comments on your Storybook assignments by the end of the week! :-)

Week 3 Read and Respond assignment. The Week 3 blog commenting assignment is not available yet; it will be available starting on Friday. The blog commenting assignment is the only assignment you cannot complete early because people will still be adding posts to their blog today, Thursday. So please wait until midnight tonight when people should have finished their Week 3 blog posts, and then on Friday (starting tonight at midnight if you want), you can do the Read and Respond assignment. It's available all day Friday, and also over the weekend (with the grace period on Monday morning).

Thursday Events on Campus. You can make a FREE FLOWER PEN at the Union, first floor lobby, 11:30AM - 12:30PM... getting ready for the showing of Perks of Being a Wallflower this weekend (time/location/details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

January 31: Alan Lomax. Today marks the birthday of Alan Lomax, one of the most important figures in the history of American folk music. He was born on January 31 in 1915 and died in 2002. You can read about his life and career at Wikipedia. After he graduated from college, Lomax began working in 1937 at the Archive of Folk Song of the Library of Congress. He traveled all over the country recording folk singers and recording interviews with musicians like Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Jelly Roll Morton. In the 1950s, he began collecting folk music from all over the world and produced the influential multi-volume record series, Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music. Check out the Alan Lomax Collection at the Library of Congress online; the image below is an album cover from his collection of Prison Songs:

Here is one of those songs in a YouTube video: