… wins the George Washington University
Battle of the A Capella Bands.

Here’s a photo from the GW newspaper,
of that night’s soloist, Laura Scuderi.
La Kid conducted two of their three songs.

They perform again tomorrow night
at GW’s Jack Morton Auditorium, at 8.

And here’s a photo of the group
going nuts because they’ve just won.

La Kid has her back to the camera;
she’s got a pink headband on.

Here’s a photo also taken last night,
outside Lisner Auditorium, as the group
celebrated its victory. La Kid
is in the back row, all the way to the
right. (Click photos to enlarge.)

UD was a few feet away from
all of this, hyperventilating.

Well, spring. The massive, massed, multicolored azaleas all over UD‘s town, Garrett Park, are hallucinogenic.

They are, like UD lately, manic.

UD‘s baseline affect is happy. Add exercise and healthy eating and you get borderline hebephrenia.

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

Bouncing off the walls has its advantages. It’s the last week of class, a crazy time, and UD finds she’s got more than enough energy for it. University committees, exams, independent studies, office hours, honors theses – she’s up for it. Her endorphins make all things possible.

Yet they also, undeniably, make her a little nuts. She’s done an EXCESS WELL-BEING Google search and gotten nowhere…
Patient presents with striking amor vitae. Seasonal Affective Disorder diagnosis based upon patient’s compulsive rendition of When It’s Springtime in the Rockies.

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

UD giggles while lecturing on The Waste Land. “‘April is the cruelest month.’ Are you kidding?”

I woke up with O Bid Your Faithful Ariel Fly singing in my head. As I got ready to leave for campus, I tried singing a bit of it, but I find it pretty unsingable (listen to the YouTube I just linked to and you’ll see why).

Thinking about Thomas Linley, its composer, always depresses me a bit – he was only twenty-two when he died, in a boating accident.

Admittedly this happened over two hundred years ago, but it still saddens me as I try to sing the thing. As I try to sing the thing, I tell myself that I should really try hard to sing it, I shouldn’t stop singing when the notes go hurling themselves into the ether, because Linley deserves it, it’s an homage to him, a remembrance… But I really cannot sing this song.

This afternoon, on campus, I joined my daughter outside for a chat; and as I approached her, I saw that she was reading The Tempest, which struck me as an odd coincidence, since I’d been thinking about – and singing about – Ariel on and off all day.

Did I eerily intuit what La Kid would be reading? Did I foresee Ariel?

Then I remembered that the last email I read before I went to bed last night was from Ariel Feldman, a student in my American Poetry course. It was Feldman, not Soltan, who’d played with my head, threading Ariels through my subconscious until when morning broke I was singing Linley.

… that a whole bunch of people were standing on the roof of The Avenue, an apartment building I can see from my classroom’s windows.

Forgot about it until, returning to my office and chatting with a colleague, she asked if I’d been able to see the Shuttle fly by.

I think. I’ve been doing major garden work today, and there are always a few macabre discoveries. The skull I’ve brought in and put on the desk in front of me (I’m gazing at it as I type) still has quite a few of its little teeth, and its head is a perfectly intact pearly thing bisected by thin wavy lines. I’ve just Google Imaged

rat skull
fox skull
squirrel skull
rabbit skull

and found that the rat’s teeth are all wrong, the fox is totally something else, the squirrel is too small, and the rabbit — well, the rabbit’s just right… And when you think of how many rabbits UD‘s garden has, and how they’re always getting eaten by the foxes who live at the top of UD’s hill — and how the bird’s eye view of the skull looks just like this (upper left) — I think we’ve got a match.

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

Update: Next day. My sister
(with whom I’ve just finished
filming my fourth lecture
on poetry for the Faculty
Project) took a picture
of the skull from above:

I’m filming a series of lectures – something I’ve never done before – and the experience brings home to me the curious fact that I never shut up.

The knack of never shutting up is a nifty one to have if you’re a professor. Professors lecture constantly; and there’s the extra matter of directing discussion, responding extemporaneously to comments, holding forth during office hours. Mix in campus and professional meetings, and being a motormouth is all to the good.

I talk fast too. I’ve had to slow myself down for these lectures, which are going out to the world. I think I enunciate pretty well, even talking fast, but I have to slow down for the lectures.

Even when I’ve got bronchitis I’m jabbering. I might stop singing when my lungs get so bad I can’t make a good tone; but I never stop talking.

UD grew up with lots of animals – dogs (her mother bred them), guinea pigs (her father experimented on them), etc. And she always talked to them when there weren’t human beings to talk to – long monologues incorporating their many nicknames, their odd and winsome ways, memories of how they behaved when they were babies… At the moment, Les UDs have no dog, and UD still talks her strange dog talk. To the air.

Also, when there aren’t human beings to talk to, UD sings. She used to be uncomfortable, singing to herself on metro platforms and all, but now people with wires coming out of their ears talk out loud everywhere, so she’s comfortable.

UD gathers she’s pretty silent while sleeping, but her dream self blabs like mad.

Of course I knew I never shut up before I started the lecture series – my husband, a rather quiet person, has pointed this out to me. He has said You never shut up, especially during conversations in which I leap into his sentences, helpfully finishing them for him. Like some professors (the non-mouthy ones), he’s a careful, deliberative speaker, and you have to be willing to wait, sometimes, for him to formulate a thought. I can’t wait. I want to talk.

I can go on and on and on, class after class, about characters like Melville’s Bartleby the scrivener, who never says anything, or Kafka’s man of few words, the hunger artist, or Beckett’s Krapp with his sputtering tape. As the twentieth century wears on, twentieth century literary characters say less and less, and UD says more and more. She can yammer about the eloquence of silence til the cows come home. She’s like a preacher who gasses on every Sunday for decades about the ineffability of God.

She wants her students to be like that – verbally fluent, in on the bull session, piping up. “Joy is the overflowing consciousness of reality,” writes Simone Weil. Joy is the overblowing of one’s bag of wind.

UD this morning, in a George Washington University newspaper editorial.

A widely-used source for online courses called Udemy has begun an initiative called the Faculty Project where professors post free courses on the site.

Margaret Soltan, an English professor, was contacted by a Udemy associate several weeks ago and now has an 11-lecture series on poetry with more than 100 subscribers from around the world.

“My experience so far has been great. I look forward to every Saturday when I get to film my lecture,” Soltan said.

Why did an outside organization … provide this course?

Professors such as Soltan are helping spread knowledge and open up the world of higher education but they should have the opportunity to do this under the GW banner.

The elite institutions are already launching their own versions of free online courses. It would be a shame for the University to be left behind.

This sign appears on a building at the
Academy of Fine Arts on Mysliwiecka
Street in Warsaw.

It’s where Mr UD’s father,
Jerzy Soltan, worked.

The sign says:

Thank you for this place,
Professor Jerzy S.

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

UD thanks Andrzej.

UD’s cousin-in-law, Todd,
just won Best Stage Combat
Choreography from
Washington Area Theatre
Community Honors.

It was for some sword slashing in
Romeo and Juliet. Here he is
in full regalia at the awards event.

… is the title of UD‘s first column at Inside Higher Ed about her experience putting together a lecture series on poetry for Udemy’s Faculty Project. MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Course. She’s writing a series at IHE about this new form of teaching.

… at her other campus, at Inside Higher Education, will follow her adventures with Udemy’s Faculty Project. She’s written her first post, and it will appear Sunday evening. Title: MOOC Synthesizer.

UD‘s first Udemy lecture, on poetry, should appear in a few days. I’ll link my readers to it.

… interviewed by WBUR about the exhibit she has curated – Contemporary Egyptian Video Artists – at the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

The last week has been quite the treat around UD‘s forested acre. Walking along one of her paths a few days ago, she stopped to admire a dead vole. Near the vole lay three well-licked plastic containers carelessly discarded by the deer after their last picnic. The deer have begun sleeping out in the open about midway up UD‘s back hill. People walking along Rokeby Avenue gawk at this sight while UD wonders if she could make money charging admission.

A huge grackle visitation yesterday afternoon turned the area around her house into a shriekfest. Grackles are glossy blackbirds with fixed angry eyes. UD‘s permanent residents – the calm and elegant mourning doves, the genial robins and cardinals – made themselves scarce.

UD‘s been gazing with love and concern (will it be okay if there’s a late frost?) at her spice viburnum, in full bloom and scent. A gift from her mother, who wisely told UD to plant it by her front door, this bush is insanely beautiful and fragrant.

UD‘s master plan has always been to tolerate the deer all over her backyard, but to keep them from the front. She yells at them when she sees them trespass toward Rokeby, etc. The master plan is a joke.

I’ve now filmed my first lecture on poetry for Udemy (Udemy was featured in yesterday’s New York Times); it hasn’t yet been made publicly available on the Faculty Project page, but it will be up pretty soon.

UD is excited to see among her cohort of Udemy lecturers Thomas Pogge, whose work she has long admired.

I haven’t yet figured out how to add images and film clips to my course, but I’ll learn.

… UD‘s been busy today pulling together her course for Udemy’s Faculty Project. Her sister, the Morrissey fanatic, is here, helping her set up the camera and the mike and all of that. They’ve done a few brief practice videos, and these look pretty good.

At first they broadened the picture to include UD‘s deck and forest as background, but the light was weird. Plus there were all these cavorting squirrels. So now they’re working on a more interior shot.