Lughnasa                                                               Harvest Moon

Sunday lassitude.  The slow easy feeling that overcomes one when Sunday morning is over.  It dominated my afternoon and early evening.  Ah.

Raspberry picking has become an every other day event.  The red and golden canes put out fruit which seems to ripen on a two to three day cycle.  Picking at these intervals gets ripe fruit and reduces over-ripe berries to a few.  Abundance from a small amount of ground.

Working in Modern and Contemporary Poetry today with William Carlos Williams, a pediatrician who wrote in conscious dialogue with Walt Whitman.

Modpo, as University of Pennsylvania professor Al Filreis calls the course, has, so far, the most effective pedagogy of any of the MOOCs I’ve taken.  The students, six of them, who react to the poems and his questions, give the class a dialogical aspect, real classroom dynamics.  I feel moved into the discussion, almost as if I’m participating directly rather than thinking my response to Professor Filreis’s questions.

Modern and the Post Modern, which is in its eighth week while ModPo is only in its second, today focuses on Freud, especially his Civilization and its Discontents.  These two courses complement each other with ModPo focusing on how modernism took shape in American poetry while the other course traces the development of the idea of the modern from the enlightenment onward.

There’s a positive resonance, an intellectual vibration, one sparking ideas for the other.  I’ll be interest to see how my thinking about modernism and reimagining faith will have grown and changed when I’m done with them both sometime in November.