The blogging decorum is rusty, but I'll probably fall in with it again here. Isn't much to say for this first day of class, but I can say that I think I know what to say when people complain that something is boring(no, YOU are boring).

I confess I hold a somewhat hard-to-shake the idea (coined by paraphrase my brother in-law of all people) that a critic is someone who wanted to be an artist but couldn't draw. i'm reminded also of a great couple of lines from a song by my beloved Rufus Wainwright called As in Happy : "Maybe the critic was right/And my work is just sterile pee/ Or maybe the critic was wrong/Now stretched on the rack feeling slightly icky".
I'd be most intrigued to see if this notion will be corrected in the course of this class or not.