Wednesday, October 4, 2006

this man IS mick jagger

This morning, Prof. Bourassa (click here for a bio and a nice, candid photo, as well as a list of this man's six--count 'em, six--degrees, ye gads!) was in a silly mood.

"I can't get 'Can't Get No Satisfaction' out of my head!" He said. "I think we should all start singing it at the end of class. Today, I am Mick Jagger." Then someone questioned the syllabus, how we had a week of poetry scheduled for now, when in fact we did that the first week and now we're doing Lolita, and his response was, in a British accent: "Fuck poetry, it's all about rock'n'roll!"

Apparently.

Honestly, though, having this one English class floating in the sea of Sociology (forgive the metaphor, but hey) is quite a relief. It helps that the professor occasionally likes to impersonate rock stars. It helps that the view out the window is of the St. John river valley and is quite pretty at 9 am. And I'm not accusing sociologists of being un-fun--Clow and my colleague Fuller are certainly examples to the contrary! But there's something about talking about texts, narratives, books, morals, art, especially with Bourassa, that is such a welcome break from the discussions of contextualization, social theory and metatheory, research methods, and so on. Especially when you can laugh and feel like you're part of a lively discussion (Bourassa should really give tips to other professors on how to engage your students, because honestly, there's nothing worse than a silence aching to be filled after a professor asks something and then stares out at the audience, saying "I've got lots of time! I'll just wait!"), as well as hear exchanges like the following:

Bourassa: So, what else can we say love is?
Student: Love is not lust.
Bourassa: What? Oh god... I owe apologies to more than a few people!

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