It’s a love-fest! A couple of days ago I posted about an old essay of mine on an art book called the Codex Seraphinianus, and about all the responses I’ve gotten to that essay over the years. To my enormous pleasure, that post generated a whole new round of reader response, which came in via the comments section here, via email, and via Facebook. A few people who wrote in mentioned Dr. Terry Harpold, the professor at UF who first introduced me to the Codex in a course called Eccentric Spaces and Spacialities. Dr. Harpold, it seems, has the makings of a cult web-following, and that’s a fire I feel is well worth stoking. As it happens, I was down in Gainesville over July 4th weekend, visiting my little sister. I hadn’t been there since 2005, and I was only in town for a few days, so I didn’t even attempt to touch base with Dr. Harpold (or any of my other former profs) but when I visited Goerings Bookstore–which gets the book orders for the sweeping majority of UF’s English department course offerings–I saw the reading list for the most recent iteration of Harpold’s LIT 4930, and snapped the photo you see just above. It seems that the latest version of the course is called “The Literary Representation of Space,” and is being offered Summer B, 2009, ie right now. I’m straight-up jealous of anyone who gets to study Mrs. Dalloway with Dr. Harpold, a book that wasn’t on the syllabus when I took the course. Housekeeping, however, is a Space/s mainstay. It’s one of my all-time favorite pieces of literature. I don’t even know how many times I’ve read it, but I do know that I read it for the first time because Dr. Harpold assigned it to me. One more thing I’ll always be grateful for.

LIT 4930 Summer B – The Literary Representation of Space

Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path (Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 2008) by Terry Harpold