Pedagomania update
I dropped the class that was the focus of my late, hysterical student-dom. All my cryptic, thrilled notes about student-dom in the earlier blog entry refer to being in that class. And not to the main business at hand, my thesis, which only tangentially takes place in the arena of student-dom. It's mostly just sitting at my desk and writing. --Perhaps I shouldn't have been so cryptic. I knew what I meant; I just didn't want the Arabic professor's name coming up in some Google search.

I came to that Arabic-lit teacher's office hours TWICE in three weeks. Now that it's all over, I think my manic efforts to secure his approval had something to do with the extreme discomfort I felt at being in a class of Ivy-league undergrads. I am as old as their parents. I was like one of those fabled Japanese soldiers who never got the news that the war was over. And not just age, but class differentiated me: look, kids, here's how you'd age without cosmetic dentistry and a good dermatologist. Three times a week, I was living out the scene in Brave New World where the mother, the savage, turns up amid all the pretty people.

School: it's a Verblödung, a cretin-i-fying, in the end. Anyways, now I just have my advisor to deal with. Much better.

Just now somebody was ringing my doorbell like crazy, at 4 on a Sunday morning.

Edited, later.

I don't have an intercom or a way to see the front door. I called the police. The police at my door say, "Is your name ____ ____? Is your apartment number ___? Is your car a Chevy bla bla bla?" (I can't remember car names, or recognize them). I say yes to the first two questions and no to the last, implying that I do in fact have a car, and they point to the tow truck idling at the curb and say, "these guys are repo men. They're here to get a white Chevy, but there're three white Chevys here on the street."

It's MY job to help out the repo men? And the police were so quick to label me, as if they were saying, "let's get to the bottom of this; your sleep was disturbed and you had to call us because you're a deadbeat, ma'am." You know, with that visciousness you see on that show "Class," I mean that show "Cops"? But that's their real job, the protection of property.

I said, to the repo guy in the truck, who looked really hapless, a skinny guy wearing sunglasses at night, "I don't own a car. Take any car you want, just stop ringing my doorbell."

I left just as the police were saying, weird, the name is ___ ___ and the address is right.

It is weird. Damn. I used to say, "Identity crime? Ha. Somebody else could hardly make a worse hash of it than I have." As if to prove this, right when the doorbell rang, I had been having a dream about sex with some guy, some imaginary guy, and the voiceover of my dream was talking about how this could "nonetheless be considered gay sex." [i should edit out the dream, too, but it's funny.]

Clear Cut news & pedagomania outbreak

Charles D'Ambrosio once again, at long last, in The Stranger's books pages. He reviews the Clear Cut anthology reading at Elliot Bay. This "audience review" feature started as a jokey, smirky way to get out of town writers into the Stranger--a total waste of ink. But this one by Charles D'Ambrosio, besides being local (or regional, anyway), is worth reading. So was Heather McHugh's, a few weeks ago.

In other news, my student-self is undergoing some kind of paroxysm of, uh, a spasm. Maybe it's the death spasm of my student-hood, in this my final semester ever at the Institute. It has that feel, what I've been doing: a bit hysterical, a bit melancholy like a late-bloomed talent. I'd be more specific, but it's all so embarrassing. [Late edit: I was obliquely referring to the class I was taking,about Arabic literature. And its teacher. I was just trying to keep the name from coming up in a Google search.] Let's just say it involves eagerness, reading, name-dropping, e-mail, and office hours. Yes, office hours, this early in the semester. What is next??? Extra credit? Are there further modes of abasement? Oh, let's hope so.

I told Naima this is probably going to happen again with me. At the Elderhostel they'll be saying to me, "yes, yes ma'am, we're all aware how very smart you once were. Now please take your seat and stop bothering the other students."

Abject-o-rama. Or, the beauty of the swerve.

(how are those for M.F.A. thesis titles? Ha ha. I kid.)

I fell asleep this afternoon. In my room, with the sun flooding in. There is a state of sleepiness I sometimes reach, where the least little percussive sound puts me further under. It has to be the right sound, like somebody hammering on a house a few blocks away. With each tap, there's a reaction completely beyond my control: I slip down. A weird but utterly just disproportion obtains between the tiny, dim percussion and the immense distance I am dropping down.

I've read good descriptions of death and fainting lately, in the last month. These are all weakened by being put together here. The passages just erupt, or swerve, there's no expecting them from what has come before. Which is an effect that's lost here, with all these things labeled and lined up next to one another. (The Graham Greene is the weakest, but it's in this frivolous novel, it's shockingly good in its context, being so out of context.)

Dying: "…Saunders shot him in the back through the opening door. Death came to him in the form of unbearable pain. It was as if he had to deliver this pain as a woman delivers a child, and he sobbed and moaned in the effort. At last it came out of him and he followed his only child into a vast desolation." Graham Greene, A Gun for Sale.

Fainting: "Fortunately I am beginning to drift, and my body to go numb as I leave it. My mouth opens, I am aware, if that is awareness, of two cold parted slabs that must be lips, and of a hole that must be the mouth itself, and of a thing, the tongue, which I can push out of the hole, as I do now. I hope I am not going to be called on to say anything because besides going numb I am also sweating a lot and turning white, in a fishy way. Also, something which I usually think of as consciousness is shooting backwards, at a geometrically accelerating pace, according to a certain formula, out of the back of my head, and I am not sure that I will be able to stay with it. The people in front of me are growing smaller and therefore less dangerous. They are also tilting. A convention allows me to record these details." J.M. Coetzee, Dusklands.

Dying: "Towards evening Andrey Yefemitch died of an apoplectic stroke. At first he had a violent shivering fit and a feeling of sickness; something revolting, as it seemed, penetrating through his whole body, even to his fingertips, strained from his stomach to his head and flooded his eyes and ears. There was a greenness before his eyes. Andrey Yefemitch understood that his end had come, and remembered that Ivan Dmitrich, Mihail Averyanitch, and millions of people believed in immortality. And what if it really existed? But he did not want immortality, and he thought of it only for one instant. A herd of deer, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful, of which he had been reading the day before, ran by him; then a peasant woman stretched out her hand to him with a registered letter… Mihail Averyanitch said something, then it all vanished, and Andrey Yefemitch sank into oblivion forever." Anton Chekhov, "Ward No. 6" (ellipsis in the original).

Waking: "I lay there in a sick stupor, with my head aching very much, and growing slowly numb with cold, till the dawn light came shining through the cracks of the shed and a locomotive whistled in the station. These and a blinding thirst brought me to life, and I found I was in no pain. Pain of the slightest had been my obsession and secret terror, from a boy. Had I now been drugged with it, to oblivion?" T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Doesn't fit in this category, but is so beautiful a swerve: "Edward sighed. People do sigh, in fiction, and in real life after they have been trapped in a fantasy and a sudden noise, movement, a physical demand, sets them free to rejoin the insistent clatter and irrelevance of day-to-day living. Edward sighed again. He realized that noises, shadows, even his own body, were in a continual state of jealously toward him, as they are toward all human beings. Even the furniture of his room--the table, the bed, the chairs, the light bulb, everything which the landlord termed 'fixtures and furnishings' experienced this dark uneasiness at his every thought and act; while within his own body his arms were jealous of his hands, his head was jealous of his belly, his eyes could not bear the fact that they were not his ears; his mouth moaned that it was not his fingertips touching; there was no satisfaction anywhere; there was war." Janet Frame, Scented Gardens for the Blind.

Late addition: an entry on swooning, by jodi via jenny, whose blog, jenny's, reminds me that I'd like to read Kathleen Stewart.