on literature and reading

Today's adventure involved a new class - Japanese Literature. Now, as a literature student (English lit & creative writing BA at Royal Holloway for those who don't know) I was looking forward to this one. I imagined epic stories about samurajs, sword battles and coy geishas saved out of adversary situations. Kind of like British Medieval stories, but without the lazy and selfish knights. Here, the hero would act out of courage, out of the duty attached to his title - out of a pure good heart. But those are all details of my flurrying mind. As it turns out, I won't be reading anything. It's a literature course without literature! Like cheesecake without cheese, or Starbucks without coffee. Instead the course appears to be lecture-based, where the professor tells us about the traditions, periods and trends in Japan's literary history from the beginning of writing, to 1867. But if that's the way they want it...

The teacher is British. What kind of British I have yet to find out. But he's exactly the kind of stuffy, pretentious, self-important, chinos-wearing, making-jokes-no-one-really-laughs-at-but-himself kind of literature professor you want.

Edit, edit: New findings: he went to Cambridge University! Studied Natural Sciences and Japanese Studies (well, that explains why we're not reading any actual texts I suppose...)

Anyway, Mr Teacher is short and wears too large trousers for his own good. He looks somewhat like a hobbit, albeit (am I using that word correctly?) not a very nice one. However, I feel good having at least one British teacher. Perhaps there is hope for my accent after all?!

Tomorrow is the tough day. Four courses, 9am-7.40pm, and I have to find a printing device on campus somehow. Could be interesting. Or painful. Or maybe both. Maybe one for me, and one for everyone else who watched me fight tooth and nail with the copy machine before realising my mistake? We shall see.

Jo x