The Mower mown

Teaching Marvell this week, which is exhilarating; I think he's far more tricky than Donne, because his complications are so much sneakier. I have to be really sharp to read him, and even more so to offer any guidance to his poems.

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We had the third job candidate for the African-American lit position visit us yesterday, so a lot of time was taken up with that while I wasn't frantically grading british lit papers. There was one moment in particular that gave me pause. I and a colleague were having a semi-formal interview with him, and one of us asked about his approach to teaching a standard American literature survey. He went on to rattle off a bunch of names including Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Charles Chesnutt, and so on. My colleague followed up with a question about how he would use some of the traditional figures like Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, Whitman, et. al. His immediate response: I don't really know anything about those writers.

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Tonight represents the end of a series of about 10 days during which the work just simply hasn't let up. I'm tired. A friend called a while ago, and her first comment: "you sound awfully tired. Are you okay?" I was; I am. And that's what makes me so excited. It pleases me that I can be this physically and mentally tired, and still feel good, honestly good.

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Another article about David Foster Wallace came out this week; I read it with great interest. It tells about the way his creative process was changed by the disease and by the treatments he was under for it. The question I kept asking myself: what would I be like if I went off my pills? What would I recover? But anyway: seeing as the date of his suicide roughly coincides with my own most recent Difficulty, I've found accounts of him and his writing most interesting. He was far far far far more intelligent that I could ever hope to be, so I'm not looking to him as a model--more like a reminder that even the best geniuses among us are flawed geniuses.

Infinite Jest was one of about five things that helped me make it.

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What shall I change next, hmmm? There are some awfully good candidates. And now that I truly appreciate the power of focused, deliberate thinking, I've got tools.

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To not mind being seen as a fool.

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Come out of the question, and be.