blurbs

Ugh, anyone can come up with a syllabus. Seriously. Here's mine. 

This is the syllabus for a major in nowness and the past (career options: librarian, groupie, glamour vlogger, stand-up comedian, performance artist, ecological activist)

The Now And The Past major is one that challenges as much as it encourages the student to critically experience the immediacy of the present through a lens shaped by the grinding stone of the past. The program prepares the student for the practical aspects of daily thought that is maintained by an analytical inquiry into the theoretical frameworks of the past and present. Understanding and appreciating the sensation and jouissance of thought is crucial; it is through the splicing of experience into meaningful categories of study and the process of holistic consideration and consolidation that the program reaches its crux in its inquiry into the human experience. 

Course sampler

NATP BC1001 Introduction to Stuff That Is Pretty Much "Now"

Examination on the meaning of the term "Now" opens up a host of questions relating to experience, even the experience of experience, and the course progresses, experience of experience of experience. This stages an attempt to introduce Nowness into the intellectual consciousness as not just a general theory of the world but as a a field of knowledge and a state of mind. Questions raised include: What is Now? What, then, is the Past? What is the What of the Now and the Past and how do we locate it and how can we enumerate all its various details if at all? What Now? Now, What? How Now is Now? Should Now be on Twitter? If Now was on Twitter how would its tweets be constructed? 

NATP BC 1002 Articulating The Now in relation to The Past 

In technicalizing the articulation of experience, this course attempts to reconsider versions of The Now and The Past and ways and means in which they are articulated. It is inherent in the very act of articulation that it is simultaneously destroyed. While gaining an awareness of limitations, students will explore and exploit new and novel expressions of the present in relation to past to build a distinctive, expressive foundation of thought. The course will also prompt inquiries into the relationship between Now and Past, and ways and means of describing this relationship in a coherent, constantly analytical manner.

NATP AH 3111 Diane Arbus and Now

In this course we explore the life and work of Arbus, detailing her conquests into the landscape of Otherness, the celebration and solace found within her expression of immediacies. The beauty, drudgery, connivance and blasphemy of a "past" interacts almost sculpturally with her work on the mortal subject, raising relevant and resonant questions about the nature of Now and the relationships between Now and Past.

Coursework: interpretive dance

NATP IS 2219 OK So What About The Future? — An epistemological glance of what is Now

In this necessarily personal and intimate class, students will inquire deep within and question the empirical methods used to ascertain experience. The persistence of the Future perturbs with its unpredictability and illogical empirical existence. Through the cognitive and spiritual dissonance of anxiety and excitement, students will embark on private projects to answer questions that cannot be articulated in the mortal languages. 

Coursework: metaphysical thesis

NATP PQRST 1010101 I Guess We Should Talk About Feminism Since We're Here

A radical social, economic and cultural shift in the intellectual landscape with roots beginning in the Biblical narrative of Ruth, the course seeks to understand the impact of Feminism on intellectual thought and our perception of what is Now. The course will study diverse fields such as marine biology, business and management, game theory and art history to gain insights and perspectives that reveal greater, deeper truth about our singular existence. The introductory class will take us from Austen's grave to Lady Gaga's secret fashion lair, from Marie Curie's schoolroom to the aesthetics of Ke$ha's manager's antiheteronormative powder room.

Coursework: potato sculptures (an exercise in Otherness and the fertile vision)

NATP KFCKCRW 1221 Food of the Now (this is NOT lunch, you guys!!!) 

An exciting, interactive daily journey into our confrontations with the immediacy of food. The routine-like structure of the class arrests us with a familiarity that resonates with an unsettling, cognitive dissonance, featuring the olfactory and gustatory effects of visual, edible sculptures and forms. The striking immediacy that hits the perceiving subject, upon interaction with these forms, is examined and then responded to. Attendantly, the recalling of the past through this intimate immediacy is observed and reflected upon.

Class meets daily at 1200 in the John Galt Dining Hall.

NATP BC 666 Perceiving Time

As an exercise in duration, the class requires patience and concentration. Be enriched as Prof. Mary LaBelle DeLaName raises issues of temperance and temporality, tackling a range of hands-on time perception in the Tibetian, Mesopotamian, Middle-American and Alaskan cultures, even taking excursions farther afield into the experience of time in the Saturnic moons of Sianarq and Tarqeq.

Health warning: students may experience the Rip Van Winkle phenomenon in certain scenarios.