To Mars

Carceraglio makes ready to move to Colorado, a place Carceraglio has never seen but imagines thus:

"...[Philip K.] Dick's Mars is the prototype of his characteristic desert of misery, in which the most dismal features of a provincial 1950s Amercia are unremittingly reproduced and perpetuated against a backdrop of ecological sterility and the intensive use of low-yield technology."
--Frederic Jameson, "The Experiments of Time: Providence and Realism," in The Novel, Volume 2, Forms and Themes.

Or thus:

Beyond this flood a frozen continent
Lies dark and wild, beat with perpetual storms
Of whirlwind and dire hail, which on firm land
Thaws not, but gathers heap, and ruin seems
Of ancient pile; all else deep snow and ice,
A gulf profound as that Serbonian bog
Betwixt Damietta and Mount Casius old,
Where whole armies have sunk: the parching air
Burns frore, and cold performs the effect of fire.
--Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II.

Coconut School

From Kenneth Koch's "A la Coconut School"

Oh, to go back to the Schools
With all that we know today!
The teachers we thought were such fools!
The hours and hours of play!
On était un peu ridicule
And went riding about on a mule
With a pleasure undreamed-of today
Bonheur aujourd'hui même pas revé!

[carceraglio thanks Martin Browning for pointing out this poem]

*

From Matthew Stadler's Reading Notes to "Don't Take Any Jobs," describing a writing class he taught in his apartment:

We drank, ate, and played a lot of games. Class made us happy. The other thing we did was read together. But we never read our own work. “Workshop critiques”—submitting your own work for critique by the group—had only ever confused me, disastrously so in graduate school, where the workshop was full of articulate, educated people who knew a thousand ways to describe failure. I think great writing is, de facto, indefensible. It’s great because the writing is its own only argument—nothing further can be said to explain the pleasure it brings. Throw that kind of meat in front of a pack of hungry wolves, and the results will be predictable. Instead, we read great work by other people and marveled at their successes. We read closely, desirously, word by word, trying to understand how the writing we admired did what it did to us.

I marshaled these citations to write something about graduate school, but I'm not sure what that something is.