“Yeah, last night a rat came out of the dumpster and ran up his arm.”

Today, leaving the Foggy Bottom station, UD watched a construction worker tell this to a woman he strolled with as he exited the site of George Washington University’s new science building.

He took the woman’s hands then.

“Wanna have lunch?”

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

Why not, thought UD. Why not. A city full of rats still gets pristine October afternoons. The streets glowed in sunlight, copper leaves fell along metro grates, mums flashed in front of fine cafes.

Disregard the ratworld, she thought, which made her think of the student in her short story class who can’t stand any of the works we’ve read except for Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilych, because Ilych offers salvation. Which made her think of Georg Lukacs, who attacked Kafka’s writing because it makes social action feel futile…

UD went on musing as she reached the door to her office. She thought: The difference between ratworld and artworld is two transposed letters…

… along various backyard paths I’ve
made, I discovered one of these:

(I found this cleaned-up button here.
Mine is soaking in soap and
warm water.).

It’s a vintage Post Office Department
button, dating anywhere from the late
nineteenth century to 1940.

Here’s one in the Postal Museum.

The puffballs are migrating. The giant puffball mushrooms UD‘s forest/meadow produces every autumn have begun breaking through the soil (just like the first photo of this sequence), but this year they’re appearing much closer to her house — four of them, so far, in a line along a little path she cleared between the pachysandra and the woods’ edge. There are another five somewhat hidden in the woods.

UD wants to photograph all of this and put it on her blog, and in fact she’s about to have brunch with her neighbor and photographer, Tamara Trocki, in order to get some picture-taking training. She was disappointed not to get a photograph of the big beautiful spider web suspended from her dogwood tree last Sunday morning. It had rained the night before, and the water drops and the sun brought out every filament. But by the time UD began thinking about taking a picture, the web had collapsed. (It looked more or less like this.)

As the puffballs grow (this is a matter for anxiety too, since the squirrels and who knows what else scratch and eat away at the mushrooms as they enlarge) – and they get enormous (this is some of last year’s crop) – I’d like to keep taking pictures, to chronicle the grotesque size and shape of these things over the next couple of weeks.

When they reach full size they do what they’ve been waiting to do – blow their top and disperse their spore cloud through the universe. Smashing ripe puffballs is a fine old American pastime.

… on two triple word squares (she plays online Scrabble).

The word: EXPURGED.

Her score for that move: 230.

Her score for the game: 592.

(She made another seven-letter [STYLINGS] using one triple word square in the move just after EXPURGED. 110 points.)

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

Update: Sorry. The link on EXPURGED takes you only to the Scrabble site, not to the page with scores and words. I guess you have to be a member to get to that page.

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

More Snapshots from Home:

I discovered, this morning, a big, beautiful spider web hanging from my dogwood tree. After a night of rain, the web is bejeweled, studded with water.

I’m a bad photographer, and I certainly can’t do justice to this delicate sight; but here’s what it looks like.

But just immense; and instead of the black background in the linked picture, imagine a cascade of the sharp coppery leaves of an autumn dogwood as the web’s setting.

… “the most abundant and best studied bird in North America,” but this is the first time I’ve seen it around these parts. Pictures here.

What I mainly see around here are mourning doves, nuthatches, bluejays, robins, cardinals, wrens, starlings, grackles, owls, chickadees, woodpeckers, thrushes, catbirds, and hummingbirds. Never seen a red-winged blackbird before this afternoon.

Fine, it’s not a great picture.

Click on it and you’ll see that one of the deer’s antlers has come loose and sweeps across his face. UD‘s sister took the picture just after this guy finished some antler-entwined fighting/play with another buck.

When UD was growing up, there were a few books in her parents’ library that always caught her attention. Even before she could read.

The Uprooted, by Oscar Handlin,
was one of them.

Its cover was rather strange

which may be why it caught little UD‘s eye.

She read it a little, over the years… took it down
from the shelf now and then… She came to realize
that it was a very important book, a definitive account
of the experience of immigration.

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

This morning, looking for the Center for European Studies at Harvard, where the conference on The Closing of the American Mind was taking place, I saw a woman holding the same piece of paper I was, and she too was looking about. We began to chat. She had some sort of accent.

We found the place and went on chatting in the lobby. Lilian, she said was her name. Lilian Handlin. Handlin? said old UD. Any relation to Oscar? My husband, she said.

And I don’t know. I don’t know quite how to say it, but to meet the wife of the man who wrote that book, the book my parents so admired and cherished… My parents wrote their names on a little brown book plate they pasted onto its first page… And to see how happy Lilian was for me to evoke how much the book meant… Too wonderful.

… lying on both sides of us. We’re somewhere south of Boston, and the Quiet Car is a laptop monastery of strict observance. You don’t dare cough.

The calm water, the pale sky, the thin clouds, the soft train rocking — it’s one hell of a tranquillizing setting. The thing, the custom, the routine, the practice, is to nod off at your screen, to gaze at your computer until your eyes deaden and you zone out.

When you reenter the cloister, the open water’s gone. It’s swamp now, with scruffy trees fronting industrial sheds.

I feel intimate enough with the guy across the table from me – a big guy, young, with an OLD GUYS RULE baseball cap and a CAPE COD BASEBALL SUMMERTIME TRADITION t-shirt – to have, post-nap, elaborately adjusted my bra in front of him. We’ve shared this corner of the library for hours. He has plugged my computer in for me. He has told me to expect that when the train slows down our wi-fi connection will get messed up.

Speaking of connections — some strange and unsettling ones for UD among the people at this Harvard event. Straussianism, the University of Chicago, and Allan Bloom are not exactly unknowns for ol’ UD.

In 1979, or 1980, my friend Kevin, a fellow literature grad student at the University of Chicago (now a big shot lawyer) said I had to take a course with Allan Bloom. “You’ll love him. I promise. You will absolutely love him.”

Bloom’s course on Rousseau fit my schedule, but I knew nothing about him, and, unlike another course that I’d taken outside the English department – the philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s course on metaphor – Rousseau wasn’t that interesting to me. I decided to sit in on a class and check it out.

I sat midway up in a white lecture theater on a bright afternoon and waited in a roomful of men for Bloom to appear. He did, right on time, preceded by a cloud of smoke and the sound of hacking.

There was such chaotic energy to him that right away the students in the room seemed statues and Bloom the only living thing.

Once I got a good look at him, I realized Bloom was the man I’d seen one cold afternoon last semester at The Point, a lakefront park near the university. This man was big – very broad, very tall – and wore an absolutely amazing coat of gleaming brown fur all over his body, down to the ground. He looked haunted. A haunted seal.

I thought of the Henry James story, “The Beast in the Jungle,” of its main character John Marcher on his way to visit his friend May Bartram’s grave. Maybe Marcher’s name came to me because this man, with his massive, somehow military coat, and his heavy gait, seemed a sort of soldier on a march.

I’d also seen Bloom, I realized, one beautiful afternoon on campus when I was sitting on a little hill in front of the Divinity Building and Saul Bellow walked by. I sat up to get a good look at the person who wrote Herzog, a book that from the first time I read it (I must have been fourteen) had a terrifically strong impact on me. This man, the brown seal, John Marcher, was Bellow’s walking companion.

So, no more glimpses; this was the real thing, front and center, all lit up by the sun and the bright white lecture hall.

I sensed the high-strung attentiveness in the men around me, but eh. For me, it wasn’t working. For me, Bloom was all neurotic foreground, and I couldn’t work my way to the background. Maybe if the subject matter had already drawn me to it… But I wasn’t a political philosopher. Ricoeur’s course on metaphor worked perfectly for me (though I didn’t do very well in it) because much of it was ultimately getting at what made literary language weird and powerful. But Rousseau, especially in the hands of this strange man, wasn’t doing it for me.

… where she will talk, at a Harvard conference, about Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind 25 years after its publication. William Kristol will introduce her; Thomas Pangle is a fellow commentator. Other speakers include Paul Cantor (whose essay on White Noise I always assign when I teach Don DeLillo) and Nannerl Keohane.

UD will blog throughout this experience.

… her town, Garrett Park, Maryland. (“Waiting for a Rain Garden.”)

Taken in Galway Ireland,
one day before her birthday.

Who knows why Les UDs keep skirting disaster? During this immense storm (it’s still going on), I looked outside to see a very large tree limb on our car – a heavy thick central limb and many smaller limbs, all bristling with leaves and twigs…. The sight would have been very pretty if it weren’t sitting on our car.

UD went out there in the rain and noted that it wasn’t exactly on our car but rather had sort of mainly fallen on the street and only lightly tangentially fallen on our car. I couldn’t see any damage. I pulled on the main limb. Much too heavy to move.

“Do you like a challenge?” I asked Mr UD when I got back inside. He squared his shoulders, marched out there, and did in fact move the whole thing closer to the curb. I stood about pointlessly, repeating Don’t hoit yourself!, as if this amusing New York accent would make the incident amusing.

Mr UD then drove off to get dinner while UD took out her lopper and lopped the limbs that lay in the lane. She laboriously lopped the leaves that lived down the lane.

While lopping, UD talked to herself about how interesting it was that her neighbors kept driving by, very carefully making their way around the thing, and then in a very neighborly and sympathetic way waving at me, but not stopping to help.

Soon enough, though, a town maintenance man came by, his white truck emblazoned on both sides with Washington Redskins flags. He took over.

So here’s UD, for the first time in her life, in a cardiology waiting room.

Because her cholesterol is up there, and because she’s une femme d’un certain age, her doctor told her to get a stress test and a something-count (starts with a c?) and other things.

So, you know, it’s ‘thesda, so everything’s nice, pleasant building, pleasant waiting room, pleasant receptionists.

UD looks around.

The other people in this room are seriously old. One of them – thin, pale, palsied – is wearing a helmet.

A helmet! Call UD delusional, call her effing nuts, but she feels certain she is way out of the way of wearing a helmet. These people have weak hearts. UD may be proved wrong in a few moments, but she is willing to swear up and down that she’s got a strong heart.

She doesn’t belong here, id est. She’s a displaced person, id est.

So here’s Dr Sanderson, rational, forbearing, good listener. In sum, a kindly WASP. He shows up after his assistant sticks stuff all over me, etc., etc., etc.

Sanderson looks at the results of all my tests and then he looks at me.

“We’re not doing a stress test on you. It would be pointless. It’s obvious that your heart is fine.”

I knew it! Good old ticker! Tarzan chest pound here! AH EE AH EE AHHHHH EE AH EE AH.

Sanderson gives her a Go and sin somewhat less sermon, with special attention to the Mediterranean Diet, and UD leaps off the examining table and gets the hell out.

First day back at George Washington University after a long hot summer was strange; but then GW, fashionably set in Foggy Bottom, is an unusual school. To get Washingtonians accustomed to its new visual identity, the university has plastered the Foggy Bottom metro station with logos and slogans and postmodern images of the first president. UD exited the station mentally draped in her place of business.

But now the business of getting coffee and a scone at the Starbucks in GW Hospital ensued; and as she stood in line singing along to Ella Fitzgerald singing Lullaby of Birdland, GW’s new banners began to fade. Miserable interns brooded at tables; the woman at the counter asked UD her name and UD eyed the cup to see how she’d misspell it; outside the cafe’s big windows, some sort of street work or street cleaning was making a lot of noise. This was the city, and UD’d been in the suburbs for months, a quiet setting.

Instantly, on leaving the hospital, UD was greeted by students and colleagues here and there and over there, which made the loud streets feel less like a city than a village. UD felt both happy and threatened at the thought of how long she’d stomped these grounds.

Approaching her office in Academic Center, she worried: Would she remember, after all this time, her latest password?

In fact she had forgotten it. Panicked scrabbling about revealed a scrap of paper on which she’d written it.

She prepared her courses – The Short Story in the morning and Modernism in the afternoon – and she was happy because UD loves these subjects and because both class lists included several repeat customers. How lurid could UD be if multiple people went out of their way to endure her not once but twice?

Sometimes UD‘s classes are right in Academic Center, steps from her office; sometimes getting to them means a stroll among endless, almost identical, groundscrapers. This semester it’s a stroll, and UD made all the absent-minded professor mistakes available to her here. After glancing at the addresses, she convinced herself the buildings meant were ones in which she’d already taught. How many basements of how many corporate towers does GW rent after all? Can’t be many. So in hellish heat she set out, noting that, on every single block, road or building work was underway, making her zigzaggedly cross to avoid one closed sidewalk after another. Sirens – construction, security – blasted madly. Flag-ridden limousines drove through stop signs.

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

Ah shit. Recognizing her mistake in the middle of F Street, UD suddenly turns around and there’s her friend Michael, a dean. “Getting run over, Mawgaret?” he asks in his lovely British accent. “Trying to,” says UD.

Finding the first classroom, once UD rights herself, is a cinch – it’s in the supercool Elliott School building, across from the State Department. Her second classroom is the one in the basement of a rather distant corporate tower, and here, even when she finds the building, she and everyone else run around confused. When UD finally finds her class, a woman looking for an Arabic course follows her into the room. “It says 103 right here,” she tells UD. UD tells her that Arabic is not one of her strengths.

UD begins her fall semester teaching this morning. This afternoon, she has tea with Jihene, a Tunisian scholar whose research stay at George Washington University UD sponsored. This evening, UD leafs through her old copy of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind. She has been asked to talk about the book at a Harvard event next month marking its twenty-fifth anniversary.

A full day. But somehow UD will find time to blog.