barbara_hambly: Writering and Teachering

barbara_hambly (

barbara_hambly) wrote,
@ 2008-05-01 08:18:00

Current location:	home, and glad to be here
Current music:	kitty purring

Writering and Teachering
One of the problems about being a full-time writer and having a blog is that my life, as a writer, is so dull. "Sat in front of computer for 6 hours. Sat in front of TV for 90 minutes. Went to bed." Thrill-a-minute City!

I SO much look forward to sat-in-front-of-computer day today.

A local paper in Riverside - where I went to school and took karate and started my writing career - is running a little interview with me; they got the photographer from a sister-paper to meet me on campus yesterday afternoon and take a picture for the article. It was a cloudy-bright day of mild temperature and diffuse light; the college campus has a desert-plant botanical garden, which makes a nice setting. I'm hoping I can work out a deal with the photographer to use the shots (if they're good) as book-jacket photos. Most decent-and-recent shots of me include party-hair and dermal illustration; it would be good to have one where I look halfway respectable.

Then I went on to explain the origins of capitalism and the Summa Theologica to my incomprehending class, lightened up with a discussion of Medieval Football (which students thought should be re-instituted) and what a lousy king King John was. (The man lost the entire Royal Treasury in quicksand and took a bath every six weeks. No wonder they made him sign the Magna Carta.)

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	archangelbeth 2008-05-01 03:44 pm UTC (link)
	...literal quicksand? beth's eyes get big I wish I'd gone to your classes. (Youth is wasted on students, clearly.) (Reply to this)(Thread)

	writergirlie 2008-05-02 01:16 am UTC (link)
	I wish I'd gone to your classes. Amen to that. Don't get me wrong, my Western Civ professors were great, but I bet Barbara's 1000x more fascinating :). (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

barbara_hambly
2008-05-02 02:34 am UTC (link)

Well, as my department chair points out, for most of these people, this is going to be the last history class they'll ever take. The job-market is so focussed, and so competitive, that I think students narrow their beam-width very early: completely understandable, since it's a big, scary world out there, and most people who're in a 3-hr night-class are there because they're working already, and their energy is sliced very thin.
But, history, and writing, though not the most profitable things in the world, have the possibility of being ice-cream for the heart. I'd like to at least open a window for some of my students to come back to. I've had at least one student come up to me after the last class and say, "I used to hate history, and you've changed my mind."
Every history-buff I've ever met, got that way by contact with another history-buff. (My family seems to have a genetic predisposition. I got it from my dad, it more or less skipped my sister and brother but my sister married a history buff, and both her children have the passion.)

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	writergirlie 2008-05-02 04:39 am UTC (link)
	Not sure where I got my history bug, but boy, once it took hold, it really took hold ;). (Reply to this)(Parent)

	evremonde 2008-05-01 03:49 pm UTC (link)
	I'm half-afraid of asking about Medieval Football. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	snowy_owlet 2008-05-01 04:05 pm UTC (link)
	I'm not! Please tell us all about it! (Reply to this)(Parent)

	ross_teneyck 2008-05-01 04:22 pm UTC (link)
	King John was not a good man; He had his little ways. And sometimes no one spoke to him For days and day and days... (Quoting from memory, and probably getting it wrong.) (Reply to this)

	dorianegray 2008-05-01 08:45 pm UTC (link)
	Yes, but everybody's day is boring if you tell it like that! (Me: "Went to work. Came home. Sat in front of computer. Went to bed.") (Reply to this)

	writergirlie 2008-05-02 01:13 am UTC (link)
	Promise you'll share the interview/article with us once it's published? :) (Reply to this)(Thread)

	writergirlie 2008-05-02 01:14 am UTC (link)
	Oh and from one medieval geek (and I mean that kindly, mind :)) to another: I was bursting with joy when I went to the very place where they signed the Magna Carta when I was in England a few weeks back. And I saw pieces of the Magna Carta itself at the British Library!! It's a wonder I didn't spontaneously combust :). (Reply to this)(Parent)

	handworn 2008-05-03 03:33 am UTC (link)
	Every six weeks? Did you mean literally lousy? Yes, second to the motion that we encourage the interview/article to be available to us on the Net. (Reply to this)

John

kibihofmann
2008-05-04 09:25 am UTC (link)

The bathing thing is simply a product of his time - a few centuries later Liz I didn't bathe much more frequently.

As for being a bad king - he could read and write which was a step up from luminaries like Richard I and he left the English navy in a pretty good state. It's true he lost land to the French, but imagining the Magna Carta was a reaction specifically to *his* abuses is misleading your students - it was simply a noble/king power struggle, not a "rights of the common man" thing.

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