Since we have to follow the biographical record, I defended my prospectus a couple of weeks ago and am now ABD. Not that my ten pages of flimsy generalizations about Henry James and Gertrude Stein needed much defending from my dissertation committee; mostly the English professors just wanted to ask the philosophy professor about his perception research. (”Wow! So, say if you took someone and plugged his ears, and put him in a suit where he couldn’t feel anything, would his vision change? Would he fall over?”)
Then everyone signed a green piece of paper and I quit the ivory tower for the year. Now I’m back in Reno paying off loans, because if the personified world is going to give me stupid onuses, at least it gives me equally stupid ways to carry them. But I got immediately sick of spending my time instrumentally, so I’ve been working on the most useless thing I could think of, which is sphinx that riddles you about verbs. Since I’m neither a real programmer nor a real classicist, I expect never to derive any benefit from it whatsoever.
