UD first heard about Mount Auburn Cemetery from her mother, a gardener who loved to visit its famous arboretum. UD‘s sister-in-law recently attended Stanislaw Baranczak’s burial there.

This afternoon, she and others visited a Soltan grave on a Mount Auburn hillside overlooking a pond. A rafter of wild turkeys paraded by as they neared the hill, and they stopped their car and gawked. The tom displayed his brilliant various featherings.

… were. So what if UD has lived here most of her life. Walking to her first class yesterday (Modern British Poetry), skirting the Mall and the cherry blossoms, she was amazed at the spring, and she couldn’t imagine any students would show up to her class.

As she said to them a moment later (they all showed up):

Are you kidding me? [Looks out the windows.] No contest!

Let’s have class outside, one of them said, and others took up the cry.

I have, UD explained, an extremely long list of reasons why I don’t teach outside.

Such as? They wanted to know.

Such as even if this is in absolute urban terms a small well-mannered city it is still loud. There will be incessant airplanes taking off and landing. There will be sirens galore. Traffic will consist of groaning FedEx trucks and honking limos. If we go to the outdoor classroom (GW has an outdoor classroom, complete with podium and seating) we will almost certainly displace many innocents who have just set up their laptops in the sun. Groups of students and groups of kiddies from the childcare centers all around will drift noisily about. There are simply too many distractions.

*****************

So we went.

*****************

My students crowded into elevators, then followed, sheeplike, UD the shepherdess, past twelve or thirteen Starbucks. We tried our luck with the designated outdoor classroom, and there it was, glistening in the mild spring sun and – as anticipated – populated by various students. I felt guilty – but then I noticed a sign just under the podium asking students to please give way if a class wants the space, so okay.

UD made her voice louder than usual (UD has a very loud voice already – something about which Mr UD often has occasion to complain – but UD just as often explains that she grew up in a large loud Jewish family and then became a singer so what do you expect) as she talked about “Notes from Dialysis,” one of the many wonderful dreary British poems we’re studying. I thought of Hugo Williams inside inside inside, hour after hour after hour, so many days of the week, and sometimes gazing past the clinic’s windows at a world like this one – full sun, the flowers already coming up, and everyone milling about amazed… And within UD‘s view there were few people older than twenty-two…

***************

On her way to this poetry class (before she allowed herself to be persuaded to go outside), UD overheard the following conversation between two guys, two GW students, who were walking close behind her.

You know there’s not enough food here for the birds, right?

Well, we’re talking about the negotiations.

The void, ‘thesda-style.

Sitting at my desk writing a lecture about Blood Meridian, I just watched, from my front windows, an enormous hawk stand on my post and rail fence and look for a few minutes at the half-eaten body of a rabbit that I earlier this morning watched a crow pick at.

That was certainly a long sentence.

Let’s rewrite it McCarthy-style (the hawk has since descended, picked up the body in its claws, and taken it halfway up an adjacent tree).

She wrote the lecture and looked out of the window and a hawk was there and it watched the body of the crow-picked rabbit and looked around itself and then it floated down and lifted the dead rabbit in its talons and took it up to a tree and began to eat.

********************

(Looked like this. Without the snow. Plus maybe that’s a squirrel.)

A red tailed hawk waits. It waits and waits. It sits high up in one of our big old trees, staring down at a tree stump under which a rabbit sits frozen. Ten minutes ago, while Les UDs ate lunch, they were startled by the hawk rushing out of nowhere onto a crazily running around rabbit.

Wait. Hello. There are two hawks up there, roosting in slightly separated trees, staring at the stump.

For the last few weeks I’ve seen hawks flying overhead in our backwoods. I think they may have eaten the squirrel that for hours was madly circling in our driveway yesterday. Animal Control said it had probably been hit by a car and its brains were fried. (Hm. It occurs to me that the squirrel might have been beaned by one of the hawks… My manners are tearing off heads… ) Eventually it circled into the street and died along a curb – these hawks must have dined on that and decided more than ever that chez Soltans was the place to be. Mice, rabbits, and squirrels galore, some of them just lying there dead for the taking.

Its thrilling to see the hawks – they’re massive, beautifully feathered. The current setting – light snow along the trees, broody skies – is positively mythic. But now UD gets to worry about their hitting her upside the head while she’s walking her small (but not too small – I think she’s safe) dog on her property.

… this.

We named her after Emilia Plater, a Polish heroine to whom Mr UD is related.

********************

Oh, okay. So this is
what she really looks like.

La Kid‘s in San Diego for work.
But she had time yesterday for the zoo.
(Click for the big pic.)

UD‘s backwoods, this morning.

Early morning shot of
UD‘s backyard.
Everything has iced over.

Click on this photo, which La Kid
just took from inside the house,
to see UD‘s icy Buddha atop
an upside down birdbath.

What woke me early this morning felt like raw cold, not house cold. I followed the cold to the living room, where the wind had blown open a set of casement windows.

I’m in the habit of latching them in the middle and not bothering with the bottom and top. Now the doors were flung open to the incredible cold and the incredibly clear night sky. A blast of arctic reality.

The NYT story is here.

Here’s Campos:

… Only when [national university] rankings expanded in the mid-1990s to encompass 50 and then 100 schools in numerical order did GW appear on these lists. Like the vast majority of colleges and universities, George Washington’s ranking has always been very stable. The school lurked and continues to lurk on the edge of the top 50, with practically no variation in its ranking from year to year. This suggests, of course, that what [ex-president Stephen] Trachtenberg did for the school’s overall reputation was exactly nothing, although his ability to convince credulous journalists that he had taken a humble inexpensive commuter school and transformed it into a high-priced academic powerhouse no doubt played a role in helping raise his salary by the time he departed to $3.7 million. (To the — very considerable — extent that a university’s endowment can be considered a proxy for its overall academic status, the history of GW’s endowment suggests strongly that the school’s status didn’t improve at all during Trachtenberg’s tenure.)

… Stephen Joel Trachtenberg might be considered academia’s king of meta-bullshit. His oft-repeated claims that he cynically and successfully exploited the Veblenesque yearnings of America’s middle and upper classes in order to make George Washington University much richer and more prestigious turns out to be just so much bullshit. But what most certainly isn’t bullshit is that he managed to exploit those claims themselves — although the prime beneficiary of those claims turned out not to be the institution that ended up paying him millions of dollars a year for his services.

******************

UD thanks Dr_Doctorstein for the link to Campos.

UD‘s sister-in-law,
with her colleague Alahna,
says goodbye to her office.