boo-boo kitty
In three hours the first Frank Conroy workshop begins. Frank has a reputation for brutal honesty in the process of critique—as opposed to other instructors, who try to soft-pedal it somewhat—but given that he's the director and has been teaching for aeons, it seems obligatory to take him. At first it seemed best to do it in the final semester, the way that you have to fight the big boss at the very end of Super Mario Bros. 3 or Blaster Master, but then it occurred to us that you might risk leaving Iowa with your artistic ego crushed, so we settled on second-year fall semester as the optimal time. "We" because Marlowe and Vu and Peyton and S. Patterson and Julia and everyone are in there with me.
I also think Frank is about the sole Workshop-affiliated person who hasn't seen this site by now. Except for the first-year students, whom we don't really know yet. They seem eager and shy and sometimes suprisingly tall.
I finally got around to reading Terry Castle's piece on Sappho, linked from Eclogues a while back. She follows Sappho's historical image through its twists and turns, explains critical opinion via references to Patsy Cline, and gets a good dig at obsessive post-structuralism at the end. I never interacted with Castle much at the expensive university, even though she was the chair of the English department, but I remember her as short, sanguine, and energetic.
And MIT will prevent student suicides by expanding mental health services. We can hope.
