EGADS! Invites You to Learn About the Changes in MLA 7

EGADS! Invites You to Learn About the Changes in MLA 7

Dr. Diana Dominguez of the English Department at The University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College will present an overview of changes in the MLA Handbook, 7th edition to the English Graduate Advancement and Development Society this Wednesday evening. All interested UTB/TSC students, faculty, alumni and friends are invited. Before Dr. Dominguez’s presentation, EGADS! will have its monthly business meeting.

Where: Mary Rose Cardenas Hall South 117

When: Business meeting, 5:30-6:15, Wed., Sep. 2
MLA 7 presentation, 6:15-7:00, Wed. Sep. 2

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EGADS! Business Meeting Agenda, Sep. 2, 2009


Introductions

Minutes

Announcements/Reports

• The Journal for South Texas English Studies
• 2010 Spring Conference
• Spring 2009 scholarship applications request
• Upcoming EGADS! events
• September EGADS! cultural event 5:30 Sep. 23, Oscar Cesares
• Next EGADS! meeting October 7, Jenny Ashley to present
• Next elections in April

Items for Discussion

• Halloween spooky poetry and story reading
• Fall party in Nov. or Dec., need organizer
• Nov. or Dec cultural event (depending on party month)
• VP to organize membership retention, attraction
• Better EGADS! event publication
• Sting Radio
• SGA funding opportunities

New Business

Reminder of Next Meeting and Events Dates

More Details About Library Debacle

Since I am fairly familiar with the library's D.H. Lawrence collection, I thought I'd see what the new University Boulevard Library received in the big move and what was left in the oversized closet known as the closed Oliviera Library. The "libraries" have two copies of Lawrence's novel, The Rainbow, but neither is in UBL, which is the only library people are allowed to use. While you have to specially request a copy of The Rainbow so you can get it the next day, you may, however, check out a book of criticism on the book. How does that make sense? Why would a book of criticism be more available to students and staff than the novel? Other D.H. Lawrence novels, such as John Thomas and Lady Jane and the expurgated first edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover, were left in the library's archive, aka The Closet.

Progress????? New Library 1/3 the Size of the Old One

UTB/TSC's new library is only one-third of the size of the old library! The old library now becomes a closet for much of the collection. Forget about paper deadlines. You may have to wait to check out that book you need. Here's the story from The Collegian:

Students might have to wait a day in order to check out a book because of the limited amount of shelf space in UTB/TSC’s new, three-story library.

Of the 300,000 books in the Arnulfo L. Oliveira Memorial Library, 100,000 of the newer part of the collection and the entire reference collection have been moved to the New Library, located next to the Education and Business Complex.

"Because of the amount of shelf space that we have in the new building, it’s about one-third of what we have in [Oliveira Library]," said Douglas Ferrier, dean of Instructional Support.

Click here to read the rest of the story.

UTB/TSC Journal Seeks Submissions

The Journal for South Texas English Studies, a blind-peer-reviewed publication, is seeking submissions for its inaugural edition, which has been aptly themed “New Beginnings.” The first edition will be published online on December 1, 2009. New beginnings occur when anything new is attempted, when one literary period changes to another, when an author pens a coming-of-age novel, when technology profoundly changes culture, when a new literary theory is debuted, when a new literary technique is attempted, when new theories emerge, and when communities are threatened by new challenges. As you can see, this is an open-ended theme. Papers not connected to the theme will be considered, but those that follow the theme have the best chance to be published.
Scholarly papers can include topics in literature written in English, rhetoric and composition, and literary theory. The biannual journal, which is a collaboration between University of Texas at Brownsville graduate English students and the UTB English Department, also accepts book reviews and a small quantity of poetry and creative prose.
Scholarly papers should not exceed 8,000 words. There is no limit to the number of poems that may be submitted, but the total number of lines cannot exceed 100. We accept short fiction up to 1,500 words, flash fiction up to 800 words, and creative non-fiction up to 2,000 words. Please make inquires to book editor Jenny Ashley if you wish to submit a book review at SouthTexasEnglishStudies@gmail.com. If you have any other questions or wish to make a submission (as a Microsoft Word attachment), please e-mail editor Andrew Keese at SouthTexasEnglishStudies@gmail.com. For more information and for submission guidelines, please visit the journal’s website at www.southtexasenglish.blogspot.com.

Deadline for submissions: September 30, 2009

The Agonies of Applying to Ph.D. Programs

Here is a link to an interesting blog post of a person who got accepted into a Texas English Ph.D. program.

So You Want to Be an English Professor?

This is an excerpt from a story that appeared in Inside Higher Education for those who wish to become English professors:

The 20-plus-year job crisis in the foreign language and English professoriate has persisted beyond the shelf-life of “crisis.” Simply put, the increasing reliance on adjunct labor, the creation of compromise full-time non-tenure-track positions, and the continued overproduction of Ph.D.’s fall more neatly under the term “reality” than they do “crisis.”

Wandering the halls of the Modern Language Association convention in San Francisco last month brought to mind the two years I attended MLA conventions, waited in drafty hotel hallways for interviews to begin, and, looking back, participated, sadly enough, in an academic ritual Dante could not have imagined in his visions of hell.

And my baptism by fire led to no job prospects.

To read more, click here.

Library Situation Worse than Thought

The library situation at UTB/TSC is worse than I thought. The new University Boulevard Library will open with only the most popular texts. Other texts will stay behind in Oliviera in the so-called Library Archive Services. Oliviera will be a closed collection. That means, you will have to request a book from from the so-called archives, and will be brought to you at their convenience to the new library. That means, no cruising the stacks to find what you need. I hope you are good at the computer catalog at finding what you don't know what you need to find. Can someone tell me why our new library is smaller than our old one? Does this make any sense to anyone?

Latina Author to Speak at UTPA

Oakland, Calif., native and Chicana author Lucha Corpi is giving a talk in the UTPA Student Union Theater on Nov. 5 from 7-9 p.m. She has recently released a mystery novel called Death at Solstice. Corpi, who is also a poet, has been involved in the Chicano civil rights movement and was instrumental in forming Aztlán Cultural, an arts service organization. She won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1979 and was awarded first prize in the Palabra Nueva competition for the short story, "Martyrs of the Soul," in 1983. Corpi completed her first mystery novel, Eulogy for a Brown Angel, in 1992.

This is the synopsis of Death at Solstice via Barnes and Noble's website:

Chicana detective Gloria Damasco has a "dark gift," an extrasensory prescience that underscores her investigations and compels her to solve numerous cases. This time, the recurring vision haunting her dreams contains two pairs of dark eyes watching her in the night, a phantom horse and rider, and the voice of a woman pleading for help. But most disquieting of all is Gloria's sensation of being trapped underwater, unable to free herself, unable to breathe.

When Gloria is asked to help the owners of the Oro Blanco winery in California's Shenandoah Valley, she finds herself on the road to the legendary Gold Country. And she can't help but wonder if the ever-more persistent visions might foreshadow this new case that involves the theft of a family heirloom, a pair of antique diamond and emerald earrings rumored to have belonged to Mexico's Empress Carlota.

Soon Gloria learns that there's more to the case than stolen jewelry. Mysterious accidents, threatening anonymous notes, the disappearance of a woman believed to be a saint, and a ghost horse thought to have belonged to notorious bandit Joaquín Murrieta are some of the pieces Gloria struggles to fit together. A woman's gruesome murder and the discovery of a group of young women from Mexico being held against their will in an abandoned house send Gloria on a fateful journey to a Witches' Sabbath to find the final pieces of the puzzle before someone else is killed.

New Library is Quite Disappointing

Shame on UTB/TSC for this disgrace of a new library. It's a pretty building, but why open up a library with a smaller capacity than your old one? They are going to keep the old library, but it will have limited hours and house what the university is calling "archives." The general selection of books will be split up. Only the most used books will move to the new library. So, now, if I want to scan the D.H. Lawrence books, I will have to go to two places, and one of the places may not be open. This move is bad for students. They need to keep selections together. Maybe the new library could have been the science library or the liberal arts library? They might have just moved all of the non-library functions out of the old library, and you would have had a heck of a lot more space. Ugh! This is so bad for UTB/TSC academics. Very poor planning.

'Captain America at Home'

This is so kool. Jarret Keene is my favorite contemporary poet.

Top This Poetry Reading!

I love this reading of John Milton's Sonnet 23 by Ian Richardson:

Talking About Some Shakespeare

Charlie Rose gets Harold Bloom and Kenneth Branagh to talk Shakespeare. It is really good. I know Bloom is something of a nutcase, but you can't deny his genius.

Herald Snaps Shot of EGADS! Member

Look at Jason Stern in The Brownsville Herald.

Submit Your Papers for A&M Conference

Texas A&M University is hosting a conference, "18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers," on April 8-11. The deadline to submit proposals is Oct. 15. I think it is odd that the proposals are going to be blind reviewed. That's a high standard for a conference. Please check it out.

Oscar Casares to Speak at UTB/TSC in September

Here's a video about author Oscar Casares, who will be giving a booksigning of his new novel, Amigoland, on Sept. 23 at 5:30 in the campus bookstore:

The Fascinating Life of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Daughter, a Writer

Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House on the Prairie series, wasn't nearly as interesting as her author daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. In a New Yorker article, Art Critic Judith Thurman writes of Lane:

She had lived among bohemians in Paris and Greenwich Village, Soviet peasants and revolutionaries, intellectuals in Weimar Berlin, survivors of the massacres in Armenia, Albanian rebels, and camel-drivers on the road to Baghdad.

How's that for a nice taste? If you don't want to read the whole article, Kate Harding wrote a good summary of the New Yorker article on Salon.com's Broadsheet, which is where this first caught my attention.

For me, this is especially fascinating because I loved the Little House series when I was a kid. In 5th grade, I wrote a 500 word essay on Laura Ingalls Wilder. (500 words! I thought it was going to kill me!) My life has come full circle.