I've been in a minor funk the past two days. Nothing spectacular. Really, I think, some of that autumnal sadness I've mentioned my mom and I have. Change of the seasons, the end of something, so to speak. Winter riding at your heels.

I gave a presentation this evening in my writing workshop about genre-bending fiction, interstitial fiction, slipstream writing--take your pick, there are some minor differences, but they all seem to have some things in common. Before it was time for me to present on this subject, though, we got into this discussion on Modernist writers and Postmodernist writers. The professor asked the class how many of us had studied Modernism in literature. I raised my hand. He asked how many have studied Postmodernism in literature. I raised my hand. No one else had--or if they had read and studied either, they weren't aware of it. I know for sure some of them have read Modernist writers, as I had a class on James Joyce with a couple of them last spring. They just didn't have an awareness of literary historical contexts. That's fine, but the prof ended up asking me to describe these isms to the rest of the class, and I ended up talking for about forty minutes, and then gave my presentation on top of that, which was about twenty minutes long, so I felt like I'd pretty much lectured for most of the class period. A couple of students came up to me after class and said something to the effect of, "All those writers and books you referred to, did you read them all?" I said, "Yes." They said, "Wow, how literary." I kind of laughed. Kind of.

It depressed me a little. That's all. I mean, it felt good to be able to talk at length about things I know a bit about, and make sense, and feel like I was communicating at a reasonably effective level, but I was also a bit disappointed.

Oh well--I'm good at studying these things on my own. I'm used to not having a peer group, although I love it when I do have one, even if for fleeting periods of time, or through the internet.

I'm gonna make a late dinner and take a bath and drink some tea and read something that doesn't have anything to do with school readings, then try sleeping. Lately it's either been, I can't fall asleep for hours on end, or else I wake up four hours into sleep, and am then up for four hours, until I fall asleep again, usually for four or five more hours. Very disjointed. I try to fill the awake time in between with school work, so I get lots done that way. Hopefully this will sort itself out over time.

Hope everyone out there is well and good.