UD woke up early today (she always wakes up early) and wandered into the office – a messy space, full of books. She glanced out the windows at her front garden to see what sort of day it was (overcast) and gradually realized that her split rail fence, one section of which had long ago fallen to the ground (under the weight of a massive snow storm), had been rebuilt!
Right after that snow storm, UD had dragged the fallen rails into her woods and hadn’t replaced them. They were an end piece, and Les UDs thought the fence looked okay without its last section.
A year ago, my neighbor, Caroline, asked if she could have the rails for her new garden design, and UD said take them.
And now that section of the split rail fence had been restored! The new wood was almost yellow next to the weathered gray of the rest of the fence. It had been expertly installed.
Who had done it? When? Why did I only notice it this morning?
Because Les UDs had come home late last night. Both had had long days on campus; and then, when Mr UD picked me up at Grosvenor metro, I proposed that we continue down the Rockville Pike and have dinner at the place we call Ninja Loser (few people go there and UD can never remember its actual name), so we spent a couple of hours eating their spectacular avocado salad and shrimp tempura rolls.
By the time we got back to Garrett Park, it was too dark to notice the new rails.
But here they were, mysteriously ablaze on the end of my old fence…
Mr UD went out to the driveway to get the New York Times and he scrutinized the thing.
“Who replaced it?” he asked.
“Well,” said UD, “here are some possibilities. An anonymous samaritan. A company delivering rails to someone else in town that found itself with a few extra. An act of God.”
“Nothing persuasive there.”
“No, look, here’s the deal. I think. The town did it. The town’s crew did it. They do all sorts of sprucing-up jobs around town, and they eventually noticed our less-than-complete split rail fence. It’s our Garrett Park taxes at work.”
“That’s probably it. But there’s a bit of complexity here…”
“Yes. That land is owned by the town, not by us. The town owns a bunch of feet of land in front of every house. We paid for the fence, but it’s really the town’s, since it sits on land that belongs to Garrett Park. So the town has the right to do whatever it wants with the fence, I guess. Even fix it.”
… (“Thickening Our Receipts”) from Garrett Park, Maryland.
A cold sunny morning.
An old orange fox appears
Along the deer path.
Suddenly I realize
All of the squirrels in the garden
Have disappeared.
UD has spent part of this weekend setting up the equipment Udemy sent her. She has been asked to prepare a series of lectures for The Faculty Project. Like Professor Garland, she has received her microphone, and some other stuff, from Udemy, and with her sister’s help she has begun to learn how to use it.
Her subject will be poetry. She will start writing the lectures as soon as she feels ready to use the technology.
UD hopes some of her readers will be interested in clicking on her course and communing with her that way. She will post updates here on University Diaries, as each lecture goes online.
… Home.
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Holy Autocracy, Batman! Word’s getting around!
… is as I write circling and circling the White House – which is unusual. I have no idea why. Landing trouble? There’s no wind – it’s a gorgeous day out there: bright blue skies and puffy white clouds. Maybe the President – or whoever’s in there – wants to stay aloft in this remarkable sky. Enjoy the sights.
Can this be true? I mean the part about the top professors. Because Udemy has chosen your bloggeure, UD, for the Faculty Project.
UD is currently emailing back and forth with Udemy, asking a lot of questions… UD very much likes the democratizing element here – teaching people all over the world, for free… And – I dunno – she feels a very strong affinity with the name…
Philosophers have taken to the pages of the New York Times in an effort to justify themselves; but Paul Shaffer’s comment (it’s this post’s headline) after Whitney Houston’s death does a better job of this than all of their efforts.
Shaffer’s comment has concision, modesty, and beauty; it acknowledges the existence of a philosophical (and aesthetic, and spiritual) tradition within which people have long thought and written about the almost-inexplicable disparities at war within us:
In me there are two souls, alas, and their
Division tears my life in two.
Faust’s famous complaint can be seen as the beginning of philosophical wisdom, whether we imagine that insight in terms of Platonic darks and lights or Freudian death- and life-drives … UD likes the way Shaffer says “some kind of sense,” because philosophy cautions against the possibility of making fully satisfactory sense out of this latest event in the history of human vitality/self-destruction. We all lead some variant of this energized and then at times totally-flopping-into-nothingness-and-defeat life; but when icons of vitalism, intensity, and creative energy (Houston, David Foster Wallace, Amy Winehouse, and, farther back, Lenny Bruce – our most powerful artists) run through those two currents of vivacity and void all their lives, right in front of us, and then ultimately (and early in the race) collapse, they rivet our attention to human bondage.
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Les UDs were finishing dinner last night at Indian Ocean restaurant on Connecticut Avenue, with their friends Steve and Di Elkin, when La Kid called Mr UD about Houston. She was walking back from a charity event at which she and her George Washington University a cappella group, The Sirens, had performed. As UD watched Mr UD listening to her, she felt that weird maternal helpless thing where you understand how your kid feels and it’s bad but you can’t do anything about it.
In the middle of my Don DeLillo seminar this morning, a ceiling light flashed and a very loud alarm sounded.
And sounded and sounded.
“Guess we’d better get out of here,” I said to my students as a colleague popped his head into the room. “Should we get out?” he asked. Yes, said UD. Time to get out.
As we tromped downstairs from the fourth floor, we were joined by ever-swelling masses of humanity.
Everyone was thinking the same thing: It’s effing cold out there.
UD had been discussing the many senses of “plot” in Libra, and she just kept doing that — as they tromped the stairs, as her group gathered around her outside the building, and as they were told to get away from the building! by a security person. Talk, talk, talk. UD never stopped. “At $50,000 a year tuition,” she explained to her class, “I think you deserve seamless instruction.”
She’d brought her little brown leather notebook out with her. She checked her list of recurrent themes in the four novels we’ve so far read and talked and talked and talked. The class talked too.
They let us back in after fifteen minutes and we all enjoyed the feeling of warming up as we reentered the fourth floor classroom. Once everyone got settled, UD started up talking again.
I met this guy, Antonio Tapies, in the Spanish Pyrenees, when I was, what, fifteen? My parents had arranged a summer for me in Barcelona, the Pyrenees, and Ibiza, with the family of a Catalan colleague of his. The family lived in all three places.
These people had been very close to Joan Miro, and on a wall near their Barcelona apartment’s dining room table was one of his canvases, squiggly black objects against a lot of emptiness.
Tapies came for an evening visit to their Pyrenees farm (their acres of strawberries were gathered by villagers and then put into pies for us). I remember thinking it odd or pretentious or whatever that he wore sunglasses all evening, sitting on the dark patio and talking softly. I remember being told by the family what an honor it was to meet this eminent man, but his name meant nothing to me.
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And as long as I’m writing about Artists I Have Known:
An exhibition [at the National Museum in Krakow] of the works of Wojciech Fangor is bound to strike a chord with a multitude of devotees. Set to run from 12.10.2012 to 6.01 2013 in the Main Building, the concept of the show is tightly linked to the artist’s biography. 2012 sees Fangor’s 90th birthday. The first of his pieces to command attention in studies of his work was created at the easel whilst he was a pupil of Tadeusz Pruszkowski. He was fifteen years old at the time and the exhibition will thus also celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the working life of one of Poland’s most significant 20th century artists.
UD knew Fangor when he lived next door to her little upstate New York house. His house was big, with a big studio in which hung big unfinished canvases. A substantial man with a booming voice and enormous hands, he spent a lot of time, those summers (we only go there in the summer; he and his wife lived there all year), chopping wood for the winter. He loved his many cats, all of them strays. He built himself an observatory, in which we’d gather to gaze at the amazing sky. In the evenings, he and Magda curled up on their big country bed and laughed at American television shows.
I’ve been pretty bed-bound — recovering from bronchitis. My bed faces a wall of windows overlooking open forest, and it’s a real bird theater out there. All day long, robins, wrens, blue jays, mourning doves, and crows fly through. The mourning doves pick among the dry leaves on the forest floor.
Both yesterday and today, I’ve seen a falcon! The female American kestrel.
…curates the current show at the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Six Artists From Cairo.
“Last night,” said UD to Mr UD as he drove her to the Grosvenor Metro stop this morning, “I dreamt that a man and his family asked me for help. I was walking home and they stopped me and asked me for some sort of assistance.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So I said to the man What do you do for a living? And he said I’m a CIA agent. And I said If you’re a CIA agent you can survive anything and then I kept walking.”
“Was that the whole dream?”
“Well, here’s something else. In my arms, I was carrying home meat. Wrapped supermarket meat of all kinds. No bag. Just carrying all these wrapped meats.”
Les UDs gazed at the gorgeous morning fog along Wisconsin Avenue. It made everything moody.
“I don’t know what it means,” said UD, “but I think I know some of the influences. This ex-CIA agent, a GW grad, is in trouble for leaking information. I read about him before I went to sleep. Plus I spent the weekend with my sister, a vegetarian.”
“Fine. That explains it.”
“It doesn’t really.”
“Does anyone take the interpretation of dreams seriously anymore? Dreams are so weird. How can such weird stuff tell us anything?”
“Art is weird. It’s often completely absurd. Do we say that – I don’t know – Mrozek’s The Elephant tells us nothing because it’s absurd?”
Mr UD smiled broadly.
“One of my happiest memories is when Mrozek visited us in Cambridge when I was a little kid. I made him laugh! I said something that made Mrozek laugh.”
… of all things, has, on this day of Wikipedia blackout and Google protest over SOPA, just gotten back from a New Republic and GW Law School-sponsored gathering next door to her office on politics and the internet. Machers from the FTC, the FCC, and the State Department chatted about, as the State guy said, “the implications of connectedness.” Basic idea seems to be that the gov is eager to get every last one of us connected, and to make the country rich via internet-related business activity. But there are security and intellectual property problems aplenty.
Everyone on stage was male, slender, well-suited, and articulate. Also oddly superannuated. Numerically they’re forty or fifty, but decades of precocity seem to have placed them in their late sixties. They have already become wise.
People at UD‘s table (all of us munching scones and downing tea) were surprised and amused to find that she’s an English professor. Everyone else was a journalist or a law professor. UD told them she figured she was invited because of la blogue.
So I went to the university bookstore today to buy a couple of books for my classes. Of course I should get them at no cost, but I tend to forget to fill out the get-them-at-no-cost form, and then the first day of class is upon me and I must hie to the GW bookstore.
The morning had been bleak and wet, and I couldn’t help noting the contrast between a high desert (UD has just returned from a week in Sedona) and a low swamp. But by the time I got my ass in gear for the short walk to the store, the sky had gone all powder blue, and it looked as though DC had decided to try to win me back.
As always, I kept having La Kid sightings – kept thinking (wrongly) I was seeing my daughter (she’s a GW student) walking just ahead of me, or striding toward me, blond hair bouncing, expensive scarf whipping in the wind, black leggings and silver Wellies working it. I’ve tried, on this blog, to convey just how incredibly good GW women look – how chic, how burnished, how preternaturally put together. La Kid is one of these.
The snaky line at the bookstore moved fast. Students exchanged winter break stories (“I spent Christmas on a scummy beach in Louisiana. But it was a beach.”) and agreed that they weren’t ready for the new semester. They texted and texted and texted. One woman told another the entire plot of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Although UD has been suffering from a bit of post-travel fatigue, she found that her teaching, later in the day, perked her up nicely.