[NOVEMBER 2007.]
In Memoriam H.S.
Here? A stone
blocks the airway.
I will not name it
granite or turquoise,
sapphire or coal.
It has stopped your breath.
Your children touch it
with their fingers, weeping
for the kindness in your broken body,
as if in this late age stones
still held audience for tears.
the novel is always quantified, always counting and we feel it through that count. The poems don't even seem to be by you. They just float in and reference something else, just off camera.
If ever the twain should meet.
If there were anyone
Whose thoughts entailed anyone
Then I declare that someone
Would have to be you
I just made myself a large martini and had it with a veggie burger. Now where was I.
Last week I left my class, where nothing had happened, and walked out into campus, where nothing was happening, and the empty light briefly convinced me that I wasn’t anywhere at all, that I had been making all these moves on some kind of blank Cartesian grid. But it’s not true; look at all that otherness. Start with the trees and work your way up.
An object was dropped on our porch this morning! Happy days, when objects are dropped on the porch! Why, just last week someone amazing sent me the 1960 Mitropoulos recording of Mahler’s Eighth! But J. went to collect the package and it turned out to be the PMLA. Apparently we are going to get two copies of the PMLA at our house every month from now on. This is terrible. I am trying my very hardest to stay completely ignorant of current trends in my field.
Rereading Der Prozeß (first time in German!) has been a lifesaver too. More on that soon.
"A large martini and a veggie burger?" Interesting combination of the healthy and unhealthy
I know, Black Angus would be a better source of iron, but I can't come back as a steer!
THAT GUY AT METAMEAT MADE US ALL FOLLOW HIM TO A NEW SUBDOMAIN AND HE DOESN’T EVEN DO ANYTHING WITH IT
Gentle souls, even if we gave over the rest of our lives to defending each other it wouldn’t be enough. Tomorrow I am teaching my de facto last class—the semester still has some limping to do but I’ve structured things so as to turn the students out on their own, with presentations and such, while I resume my usual fretful occupation of licking my own amygdala.
Every copy of Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus is always checked out of every university library. The academics take it home and water it with their thin tears.
I’ve decided to take the next two semesters, i.e. the whole of 2008, off from teaching, which I can do because the state university system is not quite yet entirely bankrupt. This year I want to finish a dissertation draft fulfilling the minimum requirement of being a scholarly document typed on the right kind of paper, so that if I then decide to jump off the academic fertilizer barge I can at least meet the benchmark of being The Guy In The Office With A Ph.D. and my grandparents, all four of them still alive and in good health, might not disown me from shame. Otherwise I can start teaching again and try actually to be a good teacher, go to conferences, revise the dissertation with appropriate performative footnotes, drown every protest in the barrel of worse alternatives.
Everything else is about the same. One thing I dislike: having used this class as an excuse for so much, when I gave it so little.
blank island
unmoored from the sea floor
blind drift
& if being a lit student in these times makes you want to holler like Marvin Gaye, where can you go that is not a reminder? There is the life sciences building with its TRICERATOPS SKULL and the public library which is really a nice library SUPPORT INTELLECTUAL CULTURE OUTSIDE THE UNIVERSITY
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The world is trying to get to 50,000 words by December 1. I will try the same thing. rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
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O for a jaunt
On the Tyrrhenian Sea
To play the rebec
On a xebec
With a tenrec and thee
illustrate please!
Are you playing Scrabble or do your meds need re-adjusting?
Hmm. Y’all are assigning a lot of causal efficacy to these meds.
Hey shouldn you be doin somethin
shouldn you be doin somethin
isn the Novemmaber
time fr you to doin somethin
Last week I sat by myself on the park bench and ate an enormous box of takeout peanut penne from the holistic pharmacy down the street. Everyone else in the world was too occupied to sit on that bench and eat that peanut penne.
As long as we can’t even define happiness, we’ll take quiescence. Yes we will. It’s just weird to be losing all this time, when I’m like any other pampered bastard trying to beat back the timewolves.
