Sunday, March 06, 2011

Step across this line

I think it started with the liminal nesting dolls. There we all were enjoying our four-hour layover in the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport (which showed up on the boarding passes as "Minneapolis SPA" but we never found the spa) when a student said, "This is like liminal nesting dolls!" Meaning, I think, that we were straddling several overlapping thresholds, in the middle of our trip and the middle of the midwest while preparing to cross over to our California adventure.

We stepped across that line and made it to San Francisco, but not before attempting to assemble a syllabus for a Concepts of Place class focusing on Hell. What would you put on the reading list? A student suggested House of Leaves and another called for Dante's Inferno, but when I asked how we could plan a class trip to Hell, the answer was simple: Virgil Airlines.

Maybe next time. This week I think we'll stick with California.

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