Never Underestimate the Power of a Top Hat, or, Lisa From 3 to 5

So...the last few days have been devoid of posts because I finally hit on the solution to reaching some kind of success rate in this business of graduate school. To wit, read everything and take notes, then read it again...and take more notes...and read it and your notes again and take further notes if need be! It paid off, because lights are shining in the darkness on Freud and Lacan, but between that, re-reading the 900 wonderful pages of John Sutherland's annotated Vanity Fair Oxford edition, and similar readings, and future papers...I warn my readers to not expect regular posts too often.

But, since orientation, I have had some terrific lectures, a great precept group meeting where I learned to share my insights more openly (for even when I'm wrong, which is most of the time now, I get closer to being write through listening to others...everyone in my group is helping me understand better), and moved towards better senses of argument tracking and precision of language.

I also had two different nights out.

Thursday, I went to Old Town with Peter, Alex, Erik, Jess, Ashley, Julie, and Jamie to see the Second City. Before that we had a dinner at an Irish pub called Corcoran's across the street, which served the best corned beef I've had outside Musso & Frank. Turned out to be Guinness's 250th anniversary, so we got samples, glasses, noisemakers, and cardboard top hats...looking at mine right now next to my Emerson diploma. I wore that hat the rest of the night and had a fantastic time...the Second City was hilarious, especially the second half of their show, with an improvised sketch about a private eye, a parody of the Hall of Presidents at Disney, and a plea to adopt normal black children instead of Asians and Africans...and my group talked all night and laughed and wandered the streets and rode El trains and Metras...it was a nice way to unwind.

Last night, Karen Slovin gave a dinner party at her apartment upstairs. She made a fantastic pasta, I tossed a salad, Peter baked brownies (finally got to try them...delicious!), and twelve people or so congregated around a crowded food table despite the roomy living room and drank a LOT of red wine. Victorian meal style. On the one hand, I got accused of being something not very nice at one point in the conversations. On the other hand, I had a blast talking to everyone concerned (including my accuser), and found another person who, like Peter, I feel a bit switched at birth with...Jenny's opinions on religion were almost the same as mind, just with different word choices in expression. I also met Preston and Harold who live on the second floor. Two great guys who study computer science and math...and whose midnight ponderings regarding Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica helped my tired, overfed body realize it needed sleep. (No disrespect when I say I came to college to escape mathematics.) Should have worn the top hat...

I have to wrap up, for today will be my last non-work-centered day of the year, and it will be spent at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival and another potluck dinner. BUT...yesterday I had a small lunch with Lisa, proprietress of Color Me Veggie, in town for a wedding this weekend. She and I are on remarkably similar roads...dealing with personal issues and professional doubts, but a lot sunnier than before. At least she looked and felt sunnier, and I know I feel sunnier these days...and though we'd spent two months together in L.A., then met in Boardman, and now again in Chicago...a hard life...it was hard to let go when we gave each other a good-bye embrace. She would love what I'm doing now. Especially with the modern poets.

But Lisa is part of my present which reaches back into the past. Always there and wonderful...but right now, I've got the future on my mind.

And now, to be or not to bop...

I also had two

A Kaleidoscope of Amelias...and a Sad Confession

Let's get the bad news out of the way, first.

The last 24 hours have seen a troubling return of my mood swings. Ever since I finished my first paper ever with supreme confidence, which still holds, I have been feeling a significant social anxiety. So many new friends who actually like my company and who don't care what I do or how I do it...and I become horribly flustered, apologetic, soul-bearing, calling Mom and annoying her when things get hairy, sweating buckets over a tiny stove in someone else's apartment...but the thing is, now I know, and now I can do something constructive. My mind is unable to conceive of the idea that other people see me differently from how I see myself, and I am convinced that since I am never satisfied and always want to prove things to myself, I have to prove things to others. Peter hammered in the spike when he called it "execessive empathy."

I think I need counseling. Not extensively, but enough to help me know for sure that other people do not hold me to the demanding standards I hold myself to. Writing about it and admitting it is the first step.

But last night's pot luck where I made an imitation tomato-vodka sauce bow ties was a load of fun, as was orientation today when I met a lot of new people, actually got a girl's phone number (if for no other reason then to prove I could handle myself), and joined the Pub...and decided to eliminate beer from my diet. I've had four in two days and I think that's helped me become mentally out of sorts.

But what I was thinking about today, emerging from a shroudy mist of Bela Lugosi playing God (enough to turn one agnostic) and imagining what the world would be like if it was only the U. of Chicago with its annoying ombudspeople, and using Foucault's literary theories to get to the heart of Sigmund Freud (a BIG perhaps), is Amelia.

Four Amelias who have become inertwined in my soul.

Amelia Johnson, who will finally be born only to die in March 2010, almost three years after I dreamed her up after a chat with Stephen Christy on the streets of Santa Monica, and back then she was called Emily, but to my great publisher's mind An Elegy for Emily Johnson sounded too much like The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Can I argue with the man who's done so much for me, along with Dave "Imagist Supreme" Valeza?

Amelia Pace-Borah, the lovely, good-hearted MAPHer from Austin, Texas with pixie blonde hair, a really cool fiance, two dogs, and a basement apartment. Not a bad symbol for the sort of person I hope to set up housekeeping with someday.

Amelia Last Name Unknown, Peter's friend in the city, whom I know only by proxy, but whose name is too striking and coincidental for me to ignore.

And Amelia Sedley. I finally got my copy of Vanity Fair, 2008 Oxford Edition, for Elaine Hadley's class, and tomorrow I begin re-reading (Nabokov would approve) my third-favorite novel of all time. And as I mused over my happiness it struck me that when I first read it during the Conference Summer, William Dobbin had stood out for me, the poor, earnest, heart-the-size-of-a-watermelon-and-pure-gold (Lawrence S. Ritter/Jimmy Austin) soldier who makes good, but who cannot get over his love for his dead best friend George Osborne's wife...even though he knew Amelia Sedley was far too good for George and, by the end, not good enough for him. But as a figure of hopeless devotion, I felt I understood Dobbin more than any other character...and maybe I was reaching back to that when I chose the name Amelia for my figure, a woman more worthy of lifelong near-worship.

Today at the Smart Museum our tour ended with a series of artworks by a seventy-something black man who traveled the world and came to draw multi-colored landscapes which combined the real and the way he thought the real felt, like taking a picture with your subconscious holding the camera.

The Amelias are like that for me.

A Few Small Links

...before the next post. Though today I discovered that teleology does not have to necessarily end in anything! See, the Marxist would critique that Freud's discussion of foreplay as a mechanism is automatically leading towards a teleological end of intercourse, BUT, there is also a pleasure in experiencing tension by itself, and a pleasure in practices like flirting where you don't know what the end is but you know there will be some end and all the joy comes from neither party having any preconceptions, and...okay, I'm talking like a grad student. I'm halfway between turning in my first paper and a potluck dinner. Give me a break! I could go on about how the desire to achieve an idealized sexual subject-object relationship is actually a desire to return to a state of non-differentiation when we had no concept of subject or object...fine, I'll stop.

All of these came from Arts & Letters Daily...

http://www.miller-mccune.com/news/this-is-your-brain-on-kafka-1474

Or, in my case, this is why I love Borges and why I get so much pleasure in dissecting Eagleton, Freud, Foucault, etc., for every hard bit of reading we do will force us to impose logic...will make us smarter.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23111

Andrew O'Hagan, who wrote a decent novel I read in the Pretty Pictures era, now offers up an appreciation of Samuel Johnson's 300th birthday much shorter than mine, and more informative. Another reminder that despite James Boswell's excellence, there is always much more to a life than one 1,000-page text can hold. I feel for Johnson, ambitious, determined to succeed as a scholar, trying to be a friend, hungry for female companionship and understanding...if only I could write a dictionary of my own.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/136084.html

Tribute to Ted Kennedy and link to article I haven't read yet but is on the Rostan mainframe...apparently, English professors discovered that in the Victorian novel, the agonistic (NOT agnostic) structure prevails of heroes v. villains, and the heroes are more often than not conscientious open-minded nurturers while villains are undisciplined self-centered social dominators. The idea is that this resembles the psychological evolution of humans from egaltarian to political, structured, altrusitic creatures, which makes sense for Darwin's culture and a progressive era. Trollope would have agreed...how much he would have been embarrassed by the extraordinary piece I just read arguing for the lesbian subtext of Can You Forgive Her? is another story.

"Won't You Let Out Your Heart, Please, From Behind That Locked Door?"

Abigail Zitin, soon-to-be-Ph. D., likes Mr. Rostan's Thoughts About Things at least to a degree...if her comments on the "single page" I wrote about on Friday are an indication. Her lead-off comment was that the blog shows a "fluent, clear, and expressive prose style," which I DID NOT show any traces of on that page. It was my own misinterpretation of the prompt. However, after taking very careful notes during the precept group meeting, I revised the whole page...doubled it, even...for what will be my first graded paper in the MAPH program.

I was nervous, to be sure, for a while. The terms of MAPH clearly spell out that a B- average must be maintained in the Core and a B overall for the year. With so much work and so little grades, the margin for error is, well, marginal. But I have to tell myself that working hard and doing the best I can will result in the success I know I can have. Bill the would-be philosopher-king said it best on Friday when I confessed my worries: the fact that I could go home the same night I got my exercise back and immediately start over meant I had nothing to worry about.

The past three days have seen two hours, MINIMUM, devoted to the paper. But I have also made time to relax...to eat Karen Slovin's squash, re-watch the Noam Chomsky documentary they showed us at Emerson, and debate literary theory and the best "entrance music" there is. To talk to my parents as they settle in to a truly empty nest. To learn how to play an H. P. Lovecraft-themed board game of Lovecraftian complexity from the hostess with the mostest on the ball, Karen Singerman. To experience the delirious pleasure of the 2005 Lifetime movie Cyber Seduction: His Secret Life. (Message to high school students: pornography is bad, pornography will wreck your and your family's life, pornography will introduce you to slutty girls who claim you beat and tried to rape them if you reject them, and pornography should always be called by all four syllables.) To feel the Godly ecstasy of services at Rockefeller Chapel, the most grandiose church I've ever been in.

And to listen to a little George Harrison.

The Beatles all shot their best wads as solo artists before the end of 1973. It may be debatable who had the best solo career overall, but as to what the best solo album is, no argument on my part. I love John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Ram, and Ringo, but the triple-vinyl All Things Must Pass is one of the greatest moments in rock 'n' roll history. Period.

George Harrison was not a simple man. He was a passionate lover and devoted friend but also a recluse. He was known as the "Quiet Beatle" but could become the most fiery and uncompromising of men if you argued against his personal credo and value...and on top of that he had a delightful, whimsical sense of humor. And he was known all over the world with the sort of fame which makes you filthy rich, but his overriding quality was a deep and sincere love of God and the spiritual.

All Things Must Pass is a statement of character and beliefs, expressed by a brilliant musician, expressive singer, and thoughtful songwriter who hitherto had been restricted to one or two songs per album. George seized his day and throttled it.

From a purely surface perspective, the album is almost flawless. You can't have a better aggregation than the Beatles, but George, playing a melodic slide guitar throughout, did the best he could: Eric Clapton, Dave Mason, Gary (Procol Harum) Brooker, Gary ("Dream Weaver") Wright, Carl Radle, Klaus Voorman, Jim Gordon, Ringo himself, I think Jim Keltner, and Badfinger for good measure, all layered together with some apropos strings and horns by Phil Spector at the top of his game. The melodies stick in your head, and George's voice was never better, running the gamut from light-hearted to earnest to prophetic to sweetly near-seductive.

And under the surface? George's lyrics are a combination of philosophical observation, romantic probing of the self, and religious exhortation. All Things Must Pass is for the most part a record with the higher powers on mind: I imagine George, 27 at the time, pondering his place in a world where his public identity was now as individual as his private one, and both were given by the blessings of God. In Beatles songs like "Within You Without You" and "The Inner Light" he had considered the nature of the divine and how it links humans together. Now, beyond "My Sweet Lord," he good-humoredly warned against excessive attention to religious doctrine in favor of focus on faith ("Awaiting On You All"), mused on the light and dark sides of the universe ("Beware of Darkness," "I Dig Love"), accepted the mystery of it all (the gorgeous title track), and offered up a plea to the higher powers ("Hear Me Lord").

But the other parts of his personality came through as well. "Apple Scruffs" and "Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp" are charming, knowing, semi-comic sketches, while "Wah-Wah" and "Let It Down" let him rock out like the Carl Perkins-lover he was. And while musically he never lets you forget that he was the same man who wrote the immortal "Something," lyrically he brought back its heartfelt mood in the album's two standout tracks, the Multiple-Walls-of-Sound "What Is Life?" and a cover of Bob Dylan's "If Not For You" which ranks with Jimi Hendrix, the Byrds, and Garth Brooks as the greatest cover of a Dylan tune ever, and I usually favor it as THE BEST. Dylan, a man with as complex a character as Harrison, also co-wrote the opening "I'd Have You Anytime," and allegedly the one song I haven't been able to get out of my head, the countryish "Behind That Locked Door," was about him.

But the definitive track on the record is the song which appears twice, "Isn't It a Pity?," a tune about the Beatles' break-up on one hand and the inability of humanity to come together in love, peace, anything on the other, which is first a massively-orchestrated epic and second a ruminating acoustic piece. The literary analyst in me is interested in the two placements of the song, which does NOT bookend the album per se--version one was the end of side one, after "Wah-Wah," while version two is the penultimate track before "Hear Me Lord"--but the emotional me is always moved by the little anger, the little sadness, the resignation.

All Things Must Pass was just what I needed to listen to as the MAPH year began. In its way, it has as much food for thought as Freud and Foucault, but conveys its message in a far more melodic manner. When George Harrison asks for God's blessing after learning to accept the world as it is and the changes which will always follow, it is nothing but inspirational for a man in his own time of change and growth who knows alone he is nothing but with faith, love, and friendship, will make it through and hopefully build a better world before it's all over.

"It's time to start smiling, what else should we do?"

P.S. Garth Brooks was not a typo...any skeptic should hear his piano-and-voice cover of Time Out of Mind's "To Make You Feel My Love."

A Single Page

The first paper at the University of Chicago, assigned Wednesday afternoon by Miller, was akin to the thoughts emerging from the id and filtered through the superego so the ego can make them nice, shiny, and sensible. Write a single, double-spaced page tracking Freud's argument that there are multiple sexual instincts (very important, btw, because if there was only one instinct it would imply a normal form of sexuality which would make so much of the world perverse and mentally "wrong," which is anathema to Freud and should be to anyone) by taking one of the perversions and relating the multiple components and motive forces Freud argues they have. Do not summarize, embellish, or go point-by-point but stick to the text. This assignment will not be graded.

5:00 p.m., Wednesday: I start taking notes

6:30: break to eat Peter's linguine and veggie meatballs with this really sweet tomato sauce...many thanks on my end to my roomie, whose excellence with my favorite food fueled my efforts to finish this. In return, I helped him as best as I could since, we being in the same precept group, we're not supposed to know who wrote what paper.

7:15: resume compiling notes, finish, write a first draft and make my analytic exposition fit on a single page

9:15: break to do the dishes and watch an unexpected fireworks show with Peter and Karen

10:15: reread paper and realize I was writing about multiple perversions and not just one, but that's why I took so many notes! Fairly easily rewrite paper to focus on one very-well explained perversion.

12:20 a.m., Thursday: go to bed

8:00: following workout and breakfast, an hour of revisions and refining the language, continually readjusting to keep it in one page

10:00: after excellent meeting with Professor Keenleyside (whom I sat next to at the English luncheon way back during Campus Days), I retreat to the Regenstein, where many fellow MAPHers already are in the act of final typing and printing. Read over paper again, feel great, until a casual remark from a colleague whose name escaped me at the moment (and stil ldoes) about parsing makes me read it one more time and figure out that one, the entire final paragraph is needless, and two, a final structural overhaul will result in both a more logical and less summarized paper! Diligent, finger-flying acts of copying, pasting, changing words, and spell-checking ensue, but all from a state of calm. It's like when I was falling behind in the Verbal GRE and took a deep breath, mentally muscled through, and earned a 730 which made me feel so damn good.

11:20: print out twelve copies, only one of which bears my name

11:37: turn in the paper 23 minutes before the deadline

1:00 p.m.: having been suddenly recalled to the apartment right after submission when AT&T sends a man to hook up the Internet (which really works! Wired and in the loop, to use Anna Neher's favorite phrase!), I proceed to spill my drink in the lecture hall while balancing my lunch container on the desk and trying to retrieve my seatmate's coffee cup, and then spill that as well. Needless to say, my mind was almost useless for the rest of the day.

But the lessons learned from this single page are going to serve me well. I discovered that all my stresses vanished in the face of working on a difficult problem, and I took great pleasure in trying many solutions before finally making something work! And in the future, when I cannot waste an entire evening, I shall make sure I immediately plunge into a brief but focused activity to keep my mind sharp...reading a good book, for instance.

The rest of my life...I sunk into a small depression Wednesday afternoon stemming from a sudden fear of my worthiness in the program and my own psychological blocks...thinking I upset the world, and not wanting others to pay special attention to me even though when I need help or am clearly suffering emotional pain I require attention, and holding those I respect in way-too-high regard. But I was out almost as soon as I fell in! Very rare and very good. It helped to have a great advisory meeting, a long talk with the MAPH mentors, and two brief but crucial talks with Abigail which ended with both of us understanding the other a lot better while keeping the mutual good feelings which have been there since our first meeting...I'm lucky to be with her. Also helped to discover Chicago radio and its excellence after listening to George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, an album which will soon get a blog post of its own...maybe this weekend after I've written my first graded paper, a paper apparently very few do well on. All I can say is, I didn't come here to do something easy. (And last night, four very tired souls--myself, Peter, Erik, and Ashley--watched the Twilight Zone where a horribly overacting William Shatner becomes obsessed with a penny fortune-telling machine in the Ohio countryside...just what we needed.)

Two final thoughts today: Marc moved into Ohio State yesterday, and I have wished him well enough in private that he doesn't need another good thought from me in public, so no flowery language here...but we're on parallel paths and it strikes me very hard.

And a few notable names passed away this week, but the one I want to acknowledge is Henry Gibson. Actor of sterling comic timing, clever poet and lyricist, did everything from Laugh-In to Wedding Crashers (as the priest whom Vince Vaughan nearly terrifies with his monologuing), but I'll always remember him for two very different roles. One, the voice of Wilbur in the original Charlotte's Web...a bit of artistry where Wilbur's gentleness, loyalty, and longing all were as deeply felt as in the book. Two, Haven Hamilton in Nashville, the most vain and uncompromising man ever to get a stranglehold on the limelight...and once seen in his lip-smacking worst and final, stunningly noble best, never forgotten.

"If the doctor says you're through, keep a-goin'!

He's a human just like you! Keep a-goin'!"

"Who's the piano player? Frog? He plays like a frog...why couldn't we get Pig?"

How I Lost My First Game of Trivial Pursuit in Three Years

Yesterday was a day of traveling afield, seeking out new territories upon which to ask new questions…and failing to conquer an old one.

The day began, as many of my best days usually do, with an immersion in books…our tour of the Regenstein Library, where I discovered the existence of several Trollopian first editions and got to actually touch a William Blake series of engravings of the Book of Job, which coincidentally I am reading right now…what I'll never forget about Blake is a year ago, studying for the GRE, I read several excerpts from Songs of Experience before a shift at Barnes & Noble and spent an hour feeling very depressed, where smiling was an effort…

(Isn't the contrast between "The Lamb" and "The Tyger" overwhelming, that the same all-powerful being who made the gentlest of souls also made that "fearful symmetry?")

Professor Levin is a heck of a lecturer. Unlike Professor Miller, whom he matches in being able to talk for 75 minutes on one subject and sound in control the whole time, he moves around, gets animated, draws comparisons between The Interpretation of Dreams and Taster's Choice commercials…hee…

Then I read my first academic essay on Trollope, Ayelet Ben-Yishai's "The Fact of a Rumor," which established the crucial importance for me of The Eustace Diamonds in the Grand Narrative. The central figures of the Palliser Saga only appear, in her words, as "spectator-commentators," but it is their judgment of Lizzie's scheming which drives the plot onward, and in their reactions, the reader comes to understand the way they think and react to life…it is a case study in their psychology. Understanding this enables us to read the entire Saga in a new light by knowing a little better exactly why the characters behave as they do.

My meeting with Abigail was a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, she opened up a whole range of possibilities for me I hadn't considered in terms of my academics. On the other hand, I felt a terrible guilt all through the meeting. She was impressed by how much planning I put into picking courses but was worried I was consigning myself too narrowly, and I suddenly became afraid of being obstinate…she assured me I wasn't, but as my family knows, I find it hard to accept other people's analysis of my behavior. Then, she was running late, and I was her next-to-last meeting before Chelsie, who needed to catch a downtown bus, so my sense of guilt increased. Why, oh why, do I keep feeling a need to assume all the problems in a situation are my fault?

But the night ended well…after a long walk to Treasure Island, I met Karen and Stuart Singerman at their apartment for the first MAPH Board Game Night. Almost twenty of us crammed in and, wanting to interact with more people, I chose the larger table where Apples to Apples and Trivial Pursuit were the battlegrounds of the day. However…not everyone knew about my past television experience. I should have excused myself, but I hadn't played any trivia in months and Trivial Pursuit in particular, such a part of my childhood, in three years (people stopped wanting to play with me after high school), so I couldn't resist. Now Stephen and I SHOULD HAVE WON, but since we had six pie pieces before any other team had two, the rule became that we had to answer every question on the card in the center circle, and we got five…but missed a teaser about bullfighters, so after the time limit ran out the game ended in a draw.

And for all the fun, there was still a lingering unease that I had gotten too showy of myself in front of my new colleagues by doing nothing but playing a game. I never made a point about Jeopardy, but as things unfolded there was an increasing sense of good-natured groaning and accusations that Stephen (a GREAT partner) wasn't doing anything for us (completely untrue). I hate being the center of attention, and I was worried that this would put me in ill-standing. But Matt, who drove me home, told me that if I did stand out, it was with good reason, and I really fit in.

That's what I wanted so badly from this program, to find a community where I could learn from others and be one of a group and not anyone particularly special. And yesterday I had lunch with one set of people, after-class drinks with another, and game night consisted of a completely different third. I've never had so many friends so fast…I love it here.

Only problem with last night? Karen and Stuart (who got engaged when he proposed to her at graduation from Kenyon, an event captured forever in a sweet photograph) were TOO hospitable. They never buy bread, and I'm a sucker for homemade bread, so Karen and I ate a great deal of her two loaves, and there were far too many snacks, and wine, and sherry…let's just say today I was glad to have a good workout.

A Fire in the Belly and a Bug for the Killing

September 14th was my first official day as a graduate student, and I quickly discovered that whatever was in me from Emerson is far from dead…has only become stronger. My note-taking abilities are sharp, my mind is working overtime, and a lecture yesterday put a fire in my belly, or more appropriately, a dictionary's worth of words on my tongue.

Jeff McMahon, our writing advisor, gave a short talk after Professor Miller's words on Rear Window about "entering the conversation." He told us that if things go the way they should, our core ideas and specialties will remain but the specific questions and answers we ask will change, and they will change as we learn new languages, new concepts, and discover which side of the academic conversation we want to dialogue with. When he finished speaking, two thoughts filled my mind…one, "There's so much I don't know still," and two, "Let's get started knowing it!"

One way to enter the conversation is to keep an open mind to all the different disciplines of humanities, and lately, I have been overhearing some of the friendliest people in MAPH talk about philosophy with more passion than anyone else, and so I sought out several people, paramount among them Bill French, who resembles a British Invasion lead singer and speaks to everyone with unfeigned open acceptance. I told him about my work with Trollope, and he suggested I read Michel Foucault. In Wendy and Sox's course way back when I had read the chapter on the panopticon from Discipline and Punish, but yesterday, after some review of class texts, I read a short book which introduced Foucault's ideas and it made me want to read more. Foucault's major thrust was that human identity is based on us being part of a collective where the life we live is determined by practices and institutions with histories of their own which affect how we think and act, in fact control it through the knowledge arising from practices and the power such knowledge brings…but history is also contingent and not pre-determined, so the optimism of Foucalt (which I had never realized before) is that we can CHANGE who we are by "straying afield" from the notion of who we should be, and such change can only happen in common! Did Obama read Foucault? (By the way, it appears my key text is The History of Sexuality, which deals with ethics and institutional change as much as sex.)

By the way, http://chronicle.com/article/Taking-the-Right-Seriously/48333/ is a GREAT article about the lack of politically-conservative educators in America and new first steps towards inclusion. As a moderate who believes that education is supposed to teach you how to think, I THINK this is long overdue and welcome a range of ideas.

Now, yesterday was not all work and no play. I celebrated my first day of class by cooking a giant pot of jambalaya, subsequently shared with Peter (who loves turkey sausage). We talked more about the class and what courses we hope to take over the next year, and it was nice to sit down one-on-one with someone (especially someone like Peter) after a long day of one-way dialogue. I also killed bugs…we have windows and fans open and running because no matter how pleasant it gets outside, the apartment is STEAMING to a degree, and the bugs fly in…but they're so slow in Illinois I can grab them in my hand and crush them…and Peter's friend Maggie, also a Vassar graduate, is crashing with us while she looks for a new apartment…she's moving to Chicago to teach (I expressed my admiration) but took the wrong bus and in her words "ended up in a scene from The Wire."

I have a lot to do today, including reading some of the current conversations about Trollope through literary journals…another great way to enter the conversation as I learn exactly WHAT the conversation is and what terms they're framing it in…but to wrap up…for now…I want to direct everyone's attention to Color Me Veggie at http://colormeveggie.blogspot.com/, where Lisa Huberman shares her vegetarian cooking adventures…read it now before she gets too busy taking the theatrical world by storm…and a prayer for a peaceful rest for Norman Bourlag, the Nobel Peace Prize winner whose work on farming was decried by environmentalists but saved the lives of countless millions, and who died at 96 still trying to feed Africa…and why have I been listening to "The Dirty Jobs" from Quadrophenia over and over?