Monday, August 20

Today is Monday of Week 1, the first day of the new semester! There is an Orientation Week of assignments to help you learn about how this online class works, and you can find all the week's assignment here: Orientation Week assignments. You have assignments due on Tuesday, so I hope you can get started today!

Class Procedures and Reminders

Two Classes | One Set of Announcements. These Announcements are for BOTH the Myth-Folklore class AND the Indian Epics class. Each class has its own reading materials, but the weekly assignments are the same. So, these shared announcements are a way for those of you in Myth-Folklore to learn more about India (a great land of stories!), and also for the people in the Indian Epics class to learn about other storytelling traditions from the Myth class.

Please call me Laura! I will be on a first-name basis with all of you, and I hope you will feel comfortable just calling me Laura.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Myth Video. Are aliens part of modern mythology? Absolutely. Here's an Aeon video about that: Stranger Aliens.

Myth Item. And here's some mythology on campus: OU has a sphinx.

Words from India. Those of you in Indian Epics will see that I am always trying to find India connections, and the English language itself contains many words from India; for example, you can read about the Indian origins of the word JUGGERNAUT if you are curious.

India Video. And they have TED talks in India too, so here is a TED talk by my favorite commentator on Indian mythology: Devdutt Pattanaik, East v. West.

Writing. In addition to learning about ancient stories, you will also be writing your own stories in this class, so in the immortal words of Star Trek, I hope you will boldly write what no one has written before.

Reading. Reading is powerful too! Here's a cartoon from Caro Martini about visiting new worlds in books:

And here's one more video for today: Art in the Library. The video is a few years old now; some of the art shown is still in Bizzell, but there is also new art, which is an excuse for you to go take a look around Bizzell and see what art you can find!

Event on Campus. There is an exhibit at the FJJ Museum of Art through the end of this month: Visual Voices: Contemporary Chickasaw Art. Find out more. This piece, "Water Jar" by Joanna Underwood Blackburn, is one of the items in the exhibit:

Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

August 20: Lovecraft. On this day in 1890, the writer H. P. Lovecraft was born (he died in 1937). You can find out more about H. P. Lovecraft at Wikipedia, and also about his creation Cthulhu. The image below shows a sketch of Cthulhu by Lovecraft himself:

Check out the Twitter stream for information and fun stuff during the day, or click here for past announcements.