Folklore Class

I taught the first session of the second class I've been assigned to teach here. It's called American Culture and Folklore, and I think it went quite well. The students are first year students, so they are just beginning. But their language skills and general abilities seemed quite high, and I think they will be very interesting to work with. We talked about key concepts like culture, tradition, worldview, folklore, and related issues. At one point I was explaining assimilation, and I asked them if they had seen Star Trek. Most people nodded and said yes, much more so than is usually the case in my American classrooms (American students claim to have never seen Star Trek). So then I asked if they knew the Borg, and they again said yes. So I said "Then you are familiar with the term assimilation?" They laughed and said yes again. Most of my lecture on understanding culture and folklore seemed to go over well. I got through a lot of material (happily, because I only have 7 total class meetings, many fewer than at home), and they seemed to understand it all quite easily and quickly. We briefly covered many kinds of folklore and art, from foodways, to Lascaux Cave paintings, to Shakespeare and the Grimm Brothers, to Picasso and Pueblo potters.

I asked them if they would be interested in having American students as pen pals on email, and they all said yes, so please let me know if you know college age students who would be interested in having a Croatian college student to chat with online (as an email penpal).

There was an American writer here in town yesterday, Roger Rueff, who spoke about his theory of writing, especially for screen plays. He wrote the screenplay for the film The Big Kahuna. He was interesting, though there was some disagreement over his theory (which was basically that all films should have one main character with one main story arc with one of four possible outcomes). It seemed a bit restrictive, but when challenged he claimed he wasn't saying everyone had to write this way. But he did seem to be suggesting that otherwise the script would not make a good movie. When he was presented with examples that people thought did not fit his theory and yet were still good films, like Almodovar's films, or ensemble films like Crash or The Big Chill, he basically concluded that none of those were ultimately really very moving or compelling films (because there was no character he could relate to). Anyway, I really enjoyed the event overall regardless of whether his theory seems right. It was in the university library museum room, where the walls were all lined with beautiful old manuscripts, fragments of medieval architecture -- stone statues, parts of churches, and so on -- and the chairs we sat in seemed to be beautiful old church choir chairs, big and wooden.

Afterwards a group of faculty and a few students took the writer out for coffee at a cafe overlooking the sea. It was the first really warm and sunny day since I've been here, so it was very nice. All the outdoor seating at all cafes in town (of which there are many) was filled up, for the first time since I've been here. But we found a table and crowded around it. One of the people I met is a professor here in cultural studies. He seemed quite nice and interesting, got his PhD at U of Texas and taught for a while in the States, but came back here when U.S. politics got so disheartening. It was really nice to connect with people and be intellectually stimulated. So it's been a good few days.