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| Tomorrow I’ll take my students on a field trip to the campus library.
The well may be drying up. My adviser told me to apply for a “diversity” fellowship.
My hair hasn’t been cut since July. Now there are strange little curls in the back.
I watched Bright Star, the Keats movie. Keats was wimpy, but he did have a monumental (platonic) love affair, until he died young.
I’m not jesting; I was moved. A few scenes were downright poetical. Here’s one of them.
Keats seemed to want to die, which was unfortunate for Fanny Brawne, his girlfriend. Near the end of his life, Keats went to Italy and left Fanny by herself to worry about him.
Maybe if Keats hadn’t been so in love with his own early death, he would’ve used a warmer coat, and wouldn’t have caught a chill, and would’ve lived to make Fanny (and himself) happy instead of miserable.
I guess I didn’t like Keats much, except for his gentleness with the young children and the cat. But Fanny, I liked. She was ordinary, steadfast, brave, optimistic. So I find myself thinking kindly of Keats, for Fanny’s sake. | | |
| Here’s one of my favorite passages from David Copperfield.I was such a child, and so little, that frequently when I went into the bar of a strange public-house for a glass of ale or porter, to moisten what I had had for dinner, they were afraid to give it me. I remember one hot evening I went into the bar of a public-house, and said to the landlord:“What is your best — your very best — ale a glass?” For it was a special occasion. I don’t know what. It may have been my birthday.“Twopence-halfpenny,” says the landlord, “is the price of the Genuine Stunning ale.”“Then,” says I, producing the money, “just draw me a glass of the Genuine Stunning, if you please, with a good head to it.”The landlord looked at me in return over the bar, from head to foot, with a strange smile on his face; and instead of drawing the beer, looked round the screen and said something to his wife. She came out from behind it, with her work in her hand, and joined him in surveying me. … They asked me a good many questions; as, what my name was, how old I was, where I lived, how I was employed, and how I came there. To all of which, that I might commit nobody, I invented, I am afraid, appropriate answers. They served me with the ale, though I suspect it was not the Genuine Stunning: and the landlord’s wife, opening the little half-door at the bar, and bending down, gave me my money back, and gave me a kiss that was half admiring, and half compassionate, but all womanly and good, I am sure.♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦A year ago on this date, Barack Obama won the presidential election. Since then …It’s OK. I didn’t accomplish much this year, either.
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| I told my students that I go to church. Immediately they started talking about their own churches. This was the first time I’d ever mentioned my faith to one of my classes.
(Some other people are less timid about their faith, even here at Cornell. A few months ago, I was eating in a cafeteria when some fellow Christians ambushed me and insisted on presenting the Gospel, even though I said I was a Christian. They had to make sure I was the right sort of Christian, i.e., one whose interpretation of the Bible was just like theirs.)
Anyway, it felt good to declare my faith to my students. It made me feel as though I had more faith. Maybe that’s why some people proselytize: proselytizing causes them, the proselytizers, to believe more intensely. | | |
| The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey is a great British mystery novel from the 1940s. Its narrative is engrossing. The book also wallows in violent snobbery.
A youth accuses two spinsters of kidnapping and beating her. The author quickly sides with the spinsters because they’re the classy characters; their accuser is a proletarian philistine.The author goes on and on about the spinsters’ classy wine and furniture. Even when the house burns down, the furniture gets saved. The author can’t bring herself to ruin the furniture.The spinsters, the lawyers, and the detectives — the heroes — fantasize about whipping (and even undressing!) the youth.
Very disturbing.Here’s a perceptive review by the novelist Sarah Waters (who, by the way, was nominated for this year’s Man Booker Prize). But the review gives away a lot, so you should read the novel first.At nights I’ve been lying in bed, stealing hours from my sleep to read the novel. I don’t have time to read during the day: I grade until I’m dizzy, and then I write philosophy until I’m too dizzy to do that. My prose is horrible, of course.If I have time, I run. Last week I had enough time for 27 miles. This week I’ll be lucky to run 15.
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| Chile vs. Ecuador, World Cup qualifier, in Santiago.
We must win to qualify for the playoff against the fourth-placed CONCACAF team.
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