Entry #4 in the ongoing "Dear Student" series

Dear Student #1: Alright already. Just, please, don't send me another goddamn draft.

Dear Student #2: I appreciate your hope, but no, this is not an A paper. You cannot use what I said as a major plank of your argument. Also, "quote" is a verb, not a noun. 

[entry for Dear Student #3 redacted for its incivility.]

Dear Student #4: Thank you for reminding me that I'm not a horrible teacher.

---

A useful phrase: l'esprit d'escalier. In German, Treppenwitz. It's one of life's most frustrating experiences. On Saturday, to a friend of a friend, I said, "What?" when really what I meant was "Being fat and drinking water does not mean I'm pregnant, you ass." Or any of the other clever, biting things I thought to say fifteen minutes after the conversation. She's lucky I'm taking mood stabilizers, a benzo, and some buproprion. By law, I may not be responsible for my actions, otherwise.

Hey, presto!

I usually become irritated easily with customer service reps. It's not very reasonable. It's a shitty job, and they are almost never the source of whatever problem to begin with. My irritation is rarely productive, which only increases it. This morning, for example, I couldn't get the Verizon lady to answer my questions because I wasn't listed as an account decision-maker. 

This afternoon, however, I talked to a Verizon CSR (Paul something) who not only was able to answer my questions clearly, but also was able to make (most of) the changes I requested to our bill and our account. I'm satisfied. It's an anomaly, yes, but finally, I encountered a competent, helpful CSR. Cheers to you, Paul Verizon.

****

In other news, I'm ready for the Democrats to choose a contender. Prior to the Florida and Michigan primaries, the DNC made it clear to everyone that they didn't count. For Florida, Sen. Clinton even signed a contract agreeing that Florida votes were moot and that the state wouldn't contribute delegates to the candidates' totals. In Michigan, her name was the only name on the ballot. Although she and her campaign may wish the Florida and Michigan votes held significance, they don't, really.

By no metric is she ahead. More than anything, though, I wonder why it isn't more of a problem that she's trying to go back on the agreements. Surely that's more troubling than Obama saying that the government has caused people to feel embittered about its ability to serve them. Even if he is an elitist, why don't people want their president to represent the best qualities of America? 

President Bush appeared on Deal or No Deal on Monday. Reportedly, the show tied its worst ratings for Monday nights. Even Vonnegut couldn't have made that up.  

Dear student #3

Dear student,

You are upset with the grade for your last paper. I would be, too, if I were you. You're lucky you didn't fail that assignment. Despite your semester-long blasé attitude, I'll let you write another draft, an opportunity for more instruction and a test that determines whether you really are "totally willing to do any extra work or writing" to better your grade.

For this additional draft, consider your audience and your source material. Don't use the Graham Greene essay to justify hating to read. It doesn't help your case.

Also, an announcement

I'd like to say (and please correct those who believe otherwise) that just because I'm not taking or teaching classes this summer does not mean that I'm "getting the summer off." It means that the next 4 months are my best chance for writing chapters of my dissertation. A chapter a month strikes me as reasonable. 

And no, I can't write 4 chapters in May and June. That would be at least 40 pages every 2 weeks. Although I can write 40 pages in 2 weeks, I'm not sure I could sustain that feat for 8 weeks. Can you? Let's be reasonable. Without other academic responsibilities, writing 4 chapters this summer can happen and isn't an overwhelming goal. Writing the entire thing, then revising it by the end of the summer is not possible, [insert friend's name here]. And it doesn't constitute being "off."

Dear Student #2 (in what might become a series)

Joseph Conrad may not have ever mastered British ways, but he did master the English language. Trust me on this one.

Conrad hated Russia, true, but not because of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. At that point, he was 60 and had hated Russia for a long time, probably because his Polish father was exiled for revolutionary activities. And Conrad was a Pole, not a Polack or a Pollock. 

Finally, the sentence "My teachers love my mother because . . ." cannot end well.

Something reminded me

One of my favorite literary devices is the allusion. It's like hypertext, but instead of having to click the word, reading it sets into motion a cloud of referents. I especially like it because it works well with how I encounter the world: one idea makes me think of another that makes me think of this poem, and what other poems did that poet write? Pretty soon, I'm off on a far different mental path, and then I'm suddenly at school, wondering how did I possibly drive here without noticing?

So, I followed a link from a friend's blog and read around the site. I discovered that the content (little, gnomic statements about life) made me think of poems I know or half remember, as though each statement were an unknowing allusion. Although I'm not the ideal reader of the site, it is kind of fun to read one of its aphorisms and then send myself on a sprawling search.

"No regret" reminded me of "Danse Russe" by William Carlos Williams. I love this poem in part because the tone is delightful. It describes a quiet moment of absurdity and love, and although most readers may take "lonely" to be typically a negative emotion, Williams uses it as a way to think about the pleasure of missing the beloved who is near or about to arrive. Then, loneliness becomes transformed into a longing that will be fulfilled. Now, I am the kind of person who likes to anticipate more than to arrive, so the idea appeals to me, that one's primary or essential element is longing. Here is Williams' poem:

Danse Russe

If when my wife is sleeping

and the baby and Kathleen

are sleeping

and the sun is a flame-white disc

in the silken mists

above shining trees,—

if I in my north room

dance naked, grotesquely

before my mirror

waving my shirt around my head

and singing softly to myself:

" I am lonely, lonely.

I was born to be lonely,

I am best so!"

If I admire my arms, my face,

my shoulders, flanks, buttocks

against the yellow drawn shades,—

Who shall say I am not

the happy genius of my household?

As I've mentioned before, a large part of the human condition is being ridiculous. Williams describes his naked dance, swinging his shirt around like an idiot. I know that dance. I've done it, seen Sam do it, and it's utterly charming how Williams talks about it. Sometimes, reader, we are grotesque, but far better to acknowledge it yourself than to have the reminder shoved upon you. 

Dear student

Your essay is awful. It presents the exact opposite of the author's expressed ideas. You also don't seem to know that the essay was published in [fill in the date], which means your assumptions don't make any sense. Your mechanics are a mess, and I suspect your wordy sentences result from your attempt to reach the required draft length. If it weren't so terrible, the essay would be banal. Worse, you often use words you clearly don't understand the meaning of. For example, a child cannot be venerable. Unless he is the Last Emperor, I suppose. You don't know what I'm talking about, do you.

Oh, student. This essay is all wrong. Historically, analytically, and stylistically. Please don't cry again when I tell you this.

No sleep

And for no good reason, I got about 3 hours of sleep last night. Also, I'm tempted to run down a list of minor ailments, aches, and bodily worries. I won't because I don't want to turn into one of those fat, old biddies who tell you about their colitis. Please don't let my mother well up within me and bore us all with my swollen ankle, my headache, my—— Okay. It's happening. I'm going to stop now.

The Return

So, I feel like I'm coming back to my senses, back to my life. What is still not clear is how my absence has affected the life I haven't been living. What am I coming back to? Have the houseplants died? Where has the dust settled? What kind of housekeeping needs to be done now? 

I'm tempted to call my incipient emergence a sea change, except that I can't forget the origin of the phrase, from The Tempest:

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that does fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something right and strange.

In the song, the Duke's dead body becomes exotic, when changed by the sea. But, also, Ariel is lying. Lying about the Duke's death, and also lying about what a sea-change actually produces.

What has happened, is happening, bears no beauty, but at least it's honest.

And now, for your delectation, a 1917 offering from Mr. Pound:

The Return

SEE, they return; ah, see the tentative

Movements, and the slow feet,

The trouble in the pace and the uncertain

Wavering! 

See, they return, one, and by one,        5

With fear, as half-awakened;

As if the snow should hesitate

And murmur in the wind,

            and half turn back;

These were the “Wing’d-with-Awe,”        10

            inviolable. 

Gods of that wingèd shoe!

With them the silver hounds,

            sniffing the trace of air! 

Haie! Haie!        15

    These were the swift to harry;

These the keen-scented;

These were the souls of blood. 

Slow on the leash,

            pallid the leash-men!

Post 20

And I haven't even posted the poem that gives the collection that gives this weblog its name. As Dr. Cross would mumble, let's not sully it further with commentary. So here it is, by Mina Loy:

Lunar Baedecker (1917)

A silver Lucifer

serves

cocaine in cornucopia

To some somnambulists

of adolescent thighs

draped

in satirical draperies

Peris in livery

prepare

Lethe

for posthumous parvenues

Delirious Avenues

lit

with the chandelier souls

of infusoria

from Pharoah's tombstones

lead

to mercurial doomsdays

Odious oasis

in furrowed phosphorous---

the eye-white sky-light

white-light district

of lunar lusts

---Stellectric signs

"Wing shows on Starway"

"Zodiac carrousel"

Cyclones

of ecstatic lust

and ashes whirl

crusaders

from hallucinatory citadels

of shattered glass 

into evacuate craters

A flock of dreams

browse on Necropolis

From the shores

of oval oceans

in the oxidized Orient

Onyx eyed Odalisques

and ornithologists

observe

the flight

of Eros obsolete

And "Immortality"

mildews . . .

in the museums of the moon.

"Nocturnal cyclops"

"Crystal concubine"

-----------------

Pocked with personification

the fossil virgin of the skies

waxes and wanes---

3-2-1, Dave!

I just realized that we missed Dave's birthday. We adopted him from my friend E. Geoghegan (I'm spelling that one out because there's a song that goes with it), who adopted Dav'e mom, Wiser. He was one of five in the litter, so Dave's former name was Jackie Jackson.  Dave was born March 21, 2002, and we brought him home at 8 weeks. As a kitten, Dave's favorite activities included running around Sam's shoulders, getting into people's plates as they tried to eat, and trying to make friends with Jane. Now, as a 6-year-old, he likes to play with Nora, sit in laps, and purr loudly. Outside reports suggest that Dave is not as sweet as I think he is and engages in such activities as pissing in corners of the house and hissing at visitors. Our lovable Dave: I will never forget when you fit in my shoe. Happy belated birthday, Dave!

Passed

I passed. It's hard to convey what a huge deal this is, even to myself. I am now in the midpoint between student and professor. (weird!). I will never take another test that is not on my terms. I have been admitted into the club.

It's an odd feeling. I'm not a different person than I was yesterday. I simply got through a task that in retrospect really was a hoop, not a trial. Administratively, the oral exam doesn't carry much weight. I still need to figure out how to make my preparation and subsequent experience meaningful to me. 

I know I should feel relieved, thrilled. So many of my friends, colleagues, family, Sam (!) have been incredibly supportive, and I'm grateful for that support. 

But until I find a way to make the exam (and my anticipation of the exam) personally meaningful, I risk continuing to feel, well, a little empty. A little fooled by my department and by academia in general. I don't know why—despite all evidence to the contrary—admittance to the professoriate still seems based on a meritocracy. I guess, rather than a pass, I still want that A.

Still, I passed. On to the diss.

Body of War

The film Body of War opens at the Belcourt on May 9. It's a small, independent film about Tobias Young, an Iraqi veteran. Young enlisted on September 13, 2001 out of a spirit of patriotism and desire to defend our country. Many people I know, including Sam, had that desire, and many followed it. Young, like many others who enlisted to battle terrorists, was surprised when he was sent to Iraq, after Bush claimed the mission was accomplished, after it had become clear to everyone (except Chaney) that no WMDs existed. Shortly after he arrived, while traveling in an unarmored vehicle, he was shot and sustained a spinal injury. The film follows Young's recovery, his increasing anger at the Bush administration, and his attempts to cope with being a newly married paraplegic. 

If you can't see the film, buy the album of songs that inspired the film, including tracks by Eddie Vedder, Bruce Springsteen, and Public Enemy. Part of the proceeds goes to the charity Iraq Veterans Against the War. (Also worthwhile is the soundtrack for Into the Wild, which includes Vedder's adaptation of the Phil Ochs song "Here's to the State." In any version you hear, the phrase "go find yourself another country to be part of" responds defiantly to the attitude "love it or leave it." Bush and his abettors should leave, not those who oppose him.) 

A Democrat may win the White House in 2008, but what happened in 2000 can happen again. Don't let hope get in the way of resolve. Educate yourself. Take as much action as you can. And for the sake of us all, vote. 

No class today

Last night, I found myself with a turned ankle. I'm not exactly sure how it happened: one moment I was at the top of the stairs by the door, the next I was far closer to the ground than I expected to be. (It's like discovering that you're wearing two pairs of underwear. You ask with astonishment, "Who could have done this?" but the answer is that you've done it to yourself, when you weren't looking.)

A quick roll-call of parts determined that everything seemed properly attached and contained. My ankle hurt but not enough to cancel our rendezvous with friends. (Incidentally, Sam searched out an extremely close parking spot, one of the many, subtle ways he takes care of me.) Three glasses of wine later, I felt great.

Not so much this morning. It takes about ten minutes to get from my car to my classroom, which typically seems a short distance. The stiff ankle, and the egg it had grown in the night, said no, and I called in. This interlude reveals two unhappy faults: 1) I tend to whine about physical pain, and 2) I readily to notice minor pains, which I then whine about. 

I'm also a bit of a liar. A couple of weeks ago I was moving fairly slowly one morning, and consequently, I was late to class. On my way there, I created an elaborate story to tell to my students. See, I was driving with the windows open because it's such a nice day. At a stoplight, a small bird flew into the car through one of the open windows and then tried to fly back out through the windshield. We both panicked. I swatted at the thing with a book, and it eventually figured out how to get out the car. 

The students laughed, but I don't think they bought it. But what are they going to do? Call me on it? I'm the one grading them. At least I had an entertaining excuse, if not a good one.

So what new lie can I tell them on Monday about how I turned my ankle? Perhaps it will have to do with encountering my doppelgänger. Or maybe another bird story. It could be a theme.

Lost in the desert

It's been 2 years and 10 months, roughly, since I began trying to find a way to feel better, this time. Chris refers to it as my time wandering the desert. I took a blood panel for the lithium this week, and my plasma concentration (.6) is at the low end of therapeutic, which, combined with lamictal, is about where it should be. I'm more resilient than I have been, but I'm still having low periods. It may be that I've reached the limit of what meds can do, and I need to try even harder. The exam will be a litmus test.

--

 Yesterday, I was sitting at a red light and heard a tremendous crash. Looking over, I saw a passenger climb quickly out of one of the cars, screaming, "I can't hear anything, I can't hear anything!" (The EMT and police arrived before my light turned green, so I drove home.) Her panic is haunting. I hope she's okay.

The kind of shit I get excited about

MoMA is having an exhibit through May 12 called Design and the Elastic Mind. The sheer number and combinations of projects submitted bogs my mind. Some of the projects seem somewhat familiar (e.g., those inspired by science fiction), some are fanciful (e.g., eight things for lonely men, including a machine that steals the covers), and others offer a view of a future that is incipient or happening now. The example most germane to my studies is telepresence.

Telepresence allows a person to operate at a distance in at least one sensory modality (e.g., vision).  The goal is to replace one's input with the sensory details of another location. In essence, the difference between telepresence and virtual reality is that the remote location is not virtual. DARPA and NASA grants started off the process of developing telepresence technologies. (One can easily imagine military applications of this technology.)

Telepresence is an intermediary between present embodiment and virtual embodiment, and it offers me a third possible answer to questions about sensory experiences and embodiment.

Part of what's amazing about it is that surgeons are already using it. In an effort called "Operation Lindberg," Dr. Jacque Marescaux and his team from Institut de recherche contre les cancers de l'appareil digestif (IRCAD) in Paris successfully used telepresence techniques in a laparoscopic cholecystectomy (gall bladder removal) in 2001. (Unfortunately, they performed the operation on 9/7/2001.) Dr. Marescaux operated in New York City on a 68-year-old woman in Strasbourg, France.

It really makes sense. Laparoscopy has been around a long time, and surgeons have been using the technique on humans since roughly 1990. The development of robotic systems like ZEUS allowed what might have been a leap to become a simple step.

The ZEUS system uses robotic arms and a tiny camera in the patient's body. The main surgeon sits at a console, looking at a monitor showing the camera's output and manipulating controls to move the robotic instruments. Systems like these have numerous advantages, not least the abilities to filter out a surgeon's tremble and to scale motions. (One can program the system to reduce a surgeon's motions to a level otherwise impossible for the unaided human hand. Analogues to cinema's effects on vision, anyone?)

If the main surgeon is already looking through a camera and using robotic instruments, the last barrier to clinical robotic assisted remote telepresence surgery (RARTS) is communication lag among the computers, which has since been reduced to thousandths of a second. 

In other words, your doctor can operate on you wherever you are—France, Iraq, space, the bottom of the ocean—provided that the right technology is present. Yet again, technology extends the human sensorium, further complicating embodiment as a concept.

yay!

Not blogging from JJ"s

Two items: 

1. Happy belated birthday, Dan. And thanks for saying reassuring (yet true, I assume) information about taking the oral exam.

2. I have recently been thinking about Arundhati Roy's novel The God of Small Things. Few novels strike so deeply and so precisely: "The Big Things lurk unsaid inside." The novel's mostly from the children's point of view, but it describes (in part) what happens when families calculate the depth of each insult and keep a tally. I don't mean to be enigmatic—it's a side effect of keeping an online journal—but in more meditative moments, I remember what the twins' mother says to her daughter: "When you hurt people, they love you a little less." Rahel notes that "Love has been re-apportioned." In one of the most heartbreaking—and familiar—paragraphs from her perspective:

"Some things come with their own punishments. Like bedrooms with built-in cupboards. They would all learn more about punishments soon. That they came in different sizes. That some were so big they were like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. You could spend your whole life in them, wandering through dark shelving" (109).

It resonates. "The Big Things lurk unsaid inside." But you can still see the hurt and the re-apportioning. Despite a personal decision to put my thinking about difficulties with my parents on hold, despite their beliefs about how much they love me and always have, nothing was the same after I got sick as a child. Even now, 20 years later, it's hard. For years, the cost of my hospital bills and therapy was the excuse for not being able to afford things. My being sick hurts my family. And I believe it makes them love me less.

The hurt and re-apportioning work in both directions. 

Blogging from JJ's

Many of my students are writing analyses for the first time. It's been difficult to convince them that I'm giving them the tools for analysis but that they don't have to use all of the tools. One student's writing on a Bertrand Russell essay about Conrad and feels she needs to bring in the historical relationships among Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and Britain. In 1250 words. I told her that I'll accept papers up to 10 pages, but no more.

To shift somewhat:

The following poem reminds me a lot of the previous post's Berryman poem, in that Bishop uses form to constrain deep, aching emotion. You've probably read it, but it's such a lovely villanelle. 

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master, 

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last of three houses went.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident

the art of losing's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

--

Please note that this poem is copyrighted, and I've stolen it. I have mixed feelings on whether a company (like Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, LLC) should get to own a poem.

A typically constrained poet, Bishop breaks her own conventions with this poem: using two exclamation marks, the parenthetical outburst, the stuttering last line. Yet, she still manages to contain an otherwise destroying grief, the death of her lover, Macedo Soares. Although she affects a light tone until the last stanza, the poem as a whole always drives me close to tears. The chosen details ("the joking voice, a gesture/I love") are countered by the oddly formal "shan't." In the final line, she must command herself to complete the poem. She pushes the disaster of Soares's suicide away with the conditional "may" and the couching of grief as simile ("like"), but it doesn't work. She feels, and makes the reader feel, the intensity. The discipline it shows—she wrote 17 drafts—amazes me, but I think I understand the impulse of containment. To do otherwise risks spinning out of control: out of art, mastery, and eventually language. What in another poem might be a command to another (e.g., "Accept the fluster") emerges as commands to herself, as the parenthetical, italicized statement reveals. She is essentially talking to herself and to her dead Macedo, as one addresses a headstone, speaking for her own benefit into the void. She's trying to comfort herself, even through the disowned lie in the final stanza. 

"One Art" is perhaps the most affecting elegy I've encountered.

Better living through chemistry

It may be that few posts on this blog will revolve around a central idea or point. Except for those made up mainly of a poem. Berryman:

Dream Song 45

He stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back.

He thought they was old friends. He felt on the stair

where her papa found them bare

they became familiar. When the papers were lost

rich with pals' secrets, he thought he had the knack

of ruin. Their paths crossed

and once they crossed in jail; they crossed in bed;

and over an unsigned letter their eyes met,

and in an Asian city

directionless & lurchy at two & three,

or trembling to a telephone's fresh threat,

and when some wired his head

to reach a wrong opinion, 'Epileptic'.

But he noted now that: they were not old friends.

He did not know this one.

This one was a stranger, come to make amends

for all the imposters, and to make it stick.

Henry nodded, un-.

---

This is a poem that couldn't really be written now. The "un-" would seem contrived, partly because of the need for a rhyme with "one," partly for the sake of being clever. But the poem contains (truly) a violent realization: what seemed like destruction only foreshadowed the possible extent of pain. Despite the poem's list of familiarity with the "imposters," Berryman chooses only to gesture at what the real ruin might be. Henry (Berryman's surrogate) has an insight that undoes him: what resides in his head turns out to be the strange but true ruination. Henry can only nod (affirm what's happening), nod it (move ruin's container) and nod at it (acknowledge the unmaking of himself). On all three levels, the nod leads inexorably to the interrupted dead end. 

That end fits, in terms of tone and rhyme. Although 45 does not follow a strict form, one can see rhyme schemes that are consistent within each 6-line stanza: ABBCAC; ABCCBA(or even AABBAA, if you like the slant);and ABCBAC. 

To take the poem at its word, though, would be a mistake. For despite the suicidal ideation present in the poem, Berryman plays, undercutting the poem's gravity. He uses near homonyms (stared, stair), dream-like associations (telephone, wired), and lots of internal rhyme, slant rhyme, and what might be called inverted rhyme (fresh threat). The repetition of phrases instantiates the false familiarity that the text addresses, but the shift in verb, from was to were, shows a change in register.

In the final analysis, Berryman's speaker (who is Henry and who is also Berryman) ridicules himself, his fears, and his ultimate destruction, after which is silence. 

Would you like some making strange, berserker

1. April 14. From 12:30–2:20 pm. In my department chair's office. 

2. I may be a little in love with Obama. His interview with Chris Matthews revealed both his considerable charm and his strategies for fixing much of what's wrong in the U.S. When any question raised a divisive issue, he kept bring it back to what Americans share, and it wasn't corny. I like to think that I recognize when I'm manipulated by political figures and cultural products (e.g., stupid tearjerkers). For example, in 1998, I went to the National Mall for the July 4 celebration. More than a million people (including me) sang the national anthem together. Even as I felt the tears well up, I thought about the politics of nationalism and my complicity in it. In contrast, Obama offers a kind of American politics founded on unity, not tribal, ethnic, partisan, or gender loyalties. (I'm looking at you, Clinton boosters. You know who you are.)

3. That said, I'd like to turn my more philosophical eye toward Verfremdungs. I don't like most of you. As I'm beginning to feel better, I'm beginning to enjoy being caustic again. I could give lots of examples from the past couple of weeks, like saying to a crying woman that her problems are boring. They are boring. My own problems are boring. I don't know why you people even read any of this. 

It may be alienation, but it's my alienation and I might remember how to enjoy it again. And now a poem, from the esteemed John Berryman:

Dream Song 1

Huffy Henry hid       the day,

unappeaseable Henry sulked.

I see his point,—a trying to put things over.

It was the thought that they thought

they could do it made Henry wicked & away.

But he should have come out and talked.

All the world like a woolen lover

once did seem on Henry's side.

Then came a departure.

Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.

I don't see how Henry, pried

open for all the world to see, survived.

What he has now to say is a long

wonder the world can bear & be.

Once in a sycamore I was glad

all at the top, and I sang.

Hard on the land wears the sea

and empty grows every bed.

A few fires extinguished

After some time the corner, the computer seems to be working better. My space bar is a little wonky, but if that's the deal, I'm fine with it.

Money-wise, it looks as though the financial aid people are going to come through after all. If I had known before the summer award letter came, however, it would have been nice.

At any rate, class yesterday was less than exciting, and I finally dinged a student for resting her head, perhaps sleeping, by asking her a direct question about the reading. When she said she didn't know, I told her that when one is awake, one tends to have more ideas about what's going on in class. So I probably won't teach that Flannery O'Connor essay again. 

Third, my exam has been pushed back by at least a week (provisionally April 17), which takes some of the pressure off. 

Which leads me to my question of the day: do any of you (you few, you happy few) have a system for keeping track of books? I would have sworn that I have Kittler's discourse book, but it would seem that I don't and have never checked it out from the bookstore. Is that possible?

How do you keep track of what you have? Or do my diamond shoes hurt too much?