Well, that's that. No more phone calls, no more mailings and the CNN camper is no longer parked downtown - Indiana has gone back to being a backwater. I got to cast a presidential vote that actually counted for something, but now it is back to the mundane dross of life; I will vote in November, but it won't matter. I do wonder how many of the votes for HRC came from crossovers who think that #1 she will be easier to defeat in November or #2 that she'll get elected, mess matters up and then a "real" Republican will get the nomination in 2012. I probably shouldn't say this too loudly.
I get to cover all sorts of wonderfully depressing topics today in my classes so, naturally, it is grey and wet. As a recovering English major, I will occasionally get random fragments of poetry stuck in my head, at which point I am then obligated, as per the terms of my student loan contracts, to determine the full text. For years, I struggled to find the poem with the phrase "when it is cold November in my soul" only to learn, eventually, that it is actually from a novel I thoroughly loathe: Moby Dick. Well, at least that's one brownie point for Melville. (For the reacord, I've read lots of Melville, all of it under duress.)
It's not a "cold November in my soul" but it feels that way outside. Sam has absolutely refused to set the smallest fraction of his being past the door.
4 comments:
It is possible to get a PhD in English Literature without ever reading Melville's Moby Dick or Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. I did it.
I thought all you New Englanders were supposed to like Melville. Isn't it the next law after the one where you're supposed to like Hawthorne?
My last Kenyon College English paper was a 26 page beauty for Judy Smith's "Moby Dick" seminar. Got an A+.
I heart "Moby Dick".
I have a special place in my heart for Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying". This may have been the first book in my education to "blow me away". It was the last book in a survey course on 19th Cent. Amer. Lit.
The night before the final paper was due, I was actually working on "Their Eyes Were Watching God" (We had read it just before) and not finding inspiration. I went to bed hoping to find a way to make the paper work in the AM. Inspiration about a family's descent into madness hit me over night.
I woke up in the AM, called in sick to work and wrote an A+ paper in time for the late afternoon class.
I was only raised in New England for a time. I was born in the South. Coincidence?
Yes they all left...I live next to our county Fairgrounds, and OBama made a surprise visit a few days before the primary, CNN, MSNBC, Fox, the local news, they were all there.
Told the wife to run out our back door screaming incoherently, climb the fence to the fairgrounds, and try to see how fast she could sprint across the short field to the dairy barn where Obama was speaking. If she beat the Secret Service agents I would let her come back home. :)
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