… (he wrote me once to ask whether one should be drunk when reading Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano), is the author of the notorious, and apparently very funny, Fake Steven Knapp parody Twitter account (Knapp is George Washington University’s president).

UD says apparently because she has not read Hunter’s parody; but she vividly remembers him as a rough-and-tumble class presence who would likely have the knack for this sort of thing. The Washington Post wrote about Hunter last year.

Anyway, he’s looking to pass the thing on to a new Twitterer (he feels it’s time for him to stop), and, in a badly written article (“he’s ready to give up the comedic reigns and hand the torch over to a new, fitting replacement”), In the Capital spreads the word about Hunter’s search for a replacement.

UD‘s hometown – the place where she lived from 1963 until she left for college and other adventures, and then returned to in 1995 – is featured in the Washington Post.

… while we’ve been away at the beach. Late Wednesday night, two men walking on the tracks near our house were killed by a freight train.

[T]he train conductor saw the two men and applied the train brakes. They say the conductor also sounded the horn several times before the train hit the men.

… the favorite photos of the year cut. (Scroll down.)

… Eyed Click Beetle on my trash can.

… a new pair of glasses.

La Kid has returned to Dublin
from Malta. She continues her
internship in the literary
department of the Abbey Theatre.

Major excitement on Rokeby Avenue today. UD is in her office at Foggy Bottom right now, where she just received this email from Mr. UD:

The groups we saw walking around with maps [this morning] are members of the American Volksport Association, or others tagging along on walks this group is organizing (in particular their local club Annapolis Amblers). Today’s 10k walk is Kensington-Garrett Park. They are directed from Penn Place on Rokeby and then up on Argyle, but before that they are directed to take a little sidetrip a bit further on Rokeby to see the garden sculptures of Ferdinand the Bull. So today hundreds of people will walk on Rokeby to our house, look at the bulls, and then turn around go back, and take Argyle uphill, a special trip just to see our house.

Mitzi Wasserman Rapp with
her four children.

Campsite, Bavarian Alps, 1960.

UD: White cardigan, badminton racquet.

…tedious by a lieutenant governor.

… with their much-sought-after song, are back in UD‘s trees.

What they don’t tell you is that wood thrush never shut up.

You spend the first week after they’ve appeared in ecstasy.

You spend the rest of the summer wanting to throttle them.

See this post for background.

Press release.

**************
UD thanks her sister.

Even as she writes, UD is watching multiple Priuses, BMWs, and pickups gather across the street from her Garrett Park house. An important civic ceremony is about to be held there. If UD knew how to take pictures, she’d take pictures of it.

But, you know. Use your imagination. Glamorously redone farmish house in one of the richest counties in the richest state in the country. Pleasantly cool wet weather. Modest news media presence. Spectacular spring blossoms everywhere. Insane colorful lushness.

UD knew about this event because her sister, Morrissey fanatic and MOOC-producer, works for the Montgomery County Department of Environmental Protection, and told her about it.

Twenty people in trench coats are smiling and shaking each others’ hands while standing atop a semi-permeable driveway. County Executive Ike Leggett, elegant in a really good suit, stands in the middle of this semi-circle getting ready to say a few words.

About what? What’s the deal?

Well, the county is announcing a new program that financially compensates citizens who put in water gardens, semi-permeable driveways and God know what else along the lines of eco-mindedness. They’ve chosen UD‘s neighbor’s place for the announcement, which makes sense because she’s definitely put in all of that plus one of those absolutely no lawn (contrast to this UD‘s dandelion-rich expanse) cottage gardens.

Man – ANOTHER Prius. Wow.

Is the thousand dollar check or whatever my neighbor’s about to get a nice thing?

I guess so…. I mean… How to say this… We Rokeby Avenue folk are not exactly hurting financially; and my neighbor’s garden easily represents tens of thousands of dollars of expense… “Maybe they should target the program a little differently,” suggests Mr UD…

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

Ike is about to climb them well-worn stairs (that’s George, to Martha, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf) and say a few words of thanks to my neighbor for allowing the event to take place at her place (as if the rest of us wouldn’t jump at the chance for this sort of attention… Over here over here! Look what I’ve done with my pachysandra! Sure she’s done this English rural thingie and it’s all environmentally correct blah blah but I’ve got a well-established Japanese garden over here without all those garish colors… A study in greens and textures over here! Maybe you can’t appreciate it because it’s quiet, subtle, tranquil, Japanese tea room kind of thing… Contemplative stroll garden over here!!… No one’s listening…).

…non-filthy rich.

George Washington University, “a place known for its beautiful cars,” it says here, has taken a hit: A new BMW M5 parked on campus got hammered by a tree.

Unbelievably, the tragedy was compounded. A man, desperate to reach the car (perhaps he is the owner), crossed a police line around it and got arrested.

My office window is steps from this crash scene. It will be a difficult day for me. I hope they’ve cleaned things up by the time I get to campus.

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

The only headline I can think of for this is AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY.

… spring.

I post something on this blog every day, most often of course something related to universities. But here I am, 5:50 PM, just starting in on today’s writing, and I’m posting that I’m not posting.

Not posting something about plagiarism, athletics, conflict of interest. Not posting about poetry.

I think, as the song I link to up there goes, that I have spring fever. I mean, spring fever’s part of it, part of the restlessness, the difficulty concentrating, the tendency to wander to the garden and do something – anything – to stay outside on a cool sunny day in the Arboretum And Bird Central Station which is Garrett Park Maryland. The Solomon’s Seal is out, the fallen cherry at the top of the hill puts out white flowers. The white-flowering dogwood that shelters the topiary bulls has been hammered by heavy snow the last few winters, but its lost limbs have allowed it to clarify itself, and it’s more beautiful, more Japanese – in my green and white garden – than ever.

So I wander about, feeling that it would be madness not to be wandering about.

As always, in these supercharged settings, I’m thinking mainly of the dead world-lovers for whom I’m taking up the task of loving the world. Gillian Rose, Tony Judt, Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Lasch, and Paul Monette can’t be here – neither, for that matter, can George Orwell and Albert Camus – and I take seriously my role as proxy world-lover for them. Their writing taught me why I should love existence, and now I’m parading my gratitude.

The restlessness is more than that, though. Now that my fear for my sister-in-law is over – she lives in Watertown, and was hunkered down, alone, during the shootouts – I have time to think about what it must have been like for her, and for her neighbors. Relief and sadness come at me at the same time. Also some crazy sort of pity for the depraved little fucker in the boat, bleeding, trembling, trying to do himself in but too weak … Hiding out in the neighbor’s yard like some sick kid’s game…

We sent Joanna an assortment of Beacon Hill chocolates – survivor’s chocolates, we called them in our jokey note… All part of conjuring the event as farce rather than tragedy, and why not.

It’s what the song says. I feel so gay, in a melancholy way.

Sunset, Malta. La Kid.

Who has, for a week,
left dark chilly Galway
for the sun.

Next week, she starts
an internship at the
Abbey Theatre.

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

Whew. Took a bit of work but I found
Malta in Molly Bloom’s soliloquy.

I said I was tired we lay over the firtree cove a wild place I suppose it must be the highest rock in existence the galleries and casemates and those frightful rocks and Saint Michaels cave with the icicles or whatever they call them hanging down and ladders all the mud plotching my boots Im sure thats the way down the monkeys go under the sea to Africa when they die the ships out far like chips that was the Malta boat passing Yes the sea and the sky you could do what you liked lie there for ever

(UD had lunch last week with a
woman her equal in Joyce madness.
This woman named her daughter Molly,
while UD‘s La Kid is Anna Livia.)

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

A completely, completely charming and
hilarious poem about Malta by Richard
Blanco, whose work my friend d. has
been after me to read:

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

WE’RE NOT GOING TO MALTA. . .

because the winds are too strong, our Captain
announces, his voice like an oracle coming through the
loudspeakers of every lounge and hall, as if the ship
itself were speaking. We’re not going to Malta–an
enchanting island country fifty miles from Sicily,
according to the brochure of the tour we’re not taking.
But what if we did go to Malta? What if, as we are
escorted on foot through the walled “Silent City” of
Mdina, the walls begin speaking to me; and after we
stop a few minutes to admire the impressive
architecture, I feel Malta could be the place for me.
What if, as we stroll the bastions to admire the
panoramic harbor and stunning countryside, I dream
of buying a little Maltese farm, raising Maltese horses
in the green Maltese hills. What if, after we see the
cathedral in Mosta saved by a miracle, I believe that
Malta itself is a miracle; and before I’m transported
back to the pier with a complimentary beverage, I’m
struck with Malta fever, discover I am very Maltese
indeed, and decide I must return to Malta, learn to
speak Maltese with an English (or Spanish) accent,
work as a Maltese professor of English at the University
of Malta, and teach a course on The Maltese Falcon. Or,
what if when we stop at a factory to shop for famous
Malteseware, I discover that making Maltese crosses is
my true passion. Yes, I’d get a Maltese cat and a
Maltese dog, make Maltese friends, drink Malted milk,
join the Knights of Malta, and be happy for the rest of
my Maltesian life. But we’re not going to Malta. Malta
is drifting past us, or we are drifting past it–an
amorphous hump of green and brown bobbing in the
portholes with the horizon as the ship heaves over
whitecaps wisping into rainbows for a moment, then
dissolving back into the sea.