… a great dorm for next year, her sophomore year at George Washington University, where her mother works.

It’s Ivory Tower, and she’ll be sharing the apartment with friends.

According to this Georgetown University blog, GW’s becoming known not merely for its rabidly political student body, but also for its newer dorms, like Ivory Tower:

[I]t’s hard not to get a little crosstown envy. George Washington University was ranked first for most politically active students, second for best college town, and eighth for best dorms…

La Kid, already far more sophisticated,
due to many trips to New York City,
than her ‘thesdacentric mother, gets
her photo taken with the famous
Naked Cowboy.

(That’s her friend Julia, also enjoying the
Naked Cowboy’s armpit.)

He has a political science degree from the
University of Cincinnati. He’s running for
mayor.

Apparently the C-Span coverage of the final event of the Institute for Civic Studies at Tufts (Mr UD‘s one of the organizers) will not be live today, as I thought.  It will be broadcast some time in August. I’ll let you know.

UD‘s colleagues: Saving people from their own wieners.

Pusher who went to med school
might finally have to close shop.

But don’t be too sure.

It’s been obvious for
almost five years that
this addict, who
lives and practices very
near UD, has been
a major drug distributor,
drawing fellow addicts
from far and wide
(one of whom,
intriguingly, tells
police he’s
“an Attorney General
[Quasi Judicial Officers]
in the District of Columbia.”
A junkie’s lie? 
Or is there something
there?).

Until a few days ago,
this man had privileges
at UD‘s local hospital.

… because the weather was so beautiful she just wanted to stay out there, UD listened to C-Span’s coverage of the Sotomayor hearings. She finds Sotomayor’s low, slow voice intriguing, and wonders why there’s so little New York accent to it.

It looks as though C-Span will also be covering the closing event of the Summer Institute of Civic Studies at Tufts University (Mr UD is one of the organizers), which began its inaugural two-week run yesterday. Details on the event:

The Obama Administration’s
Civic Agenda After Six Months
Friday, July 24, 12 pm-2 pm

“I love your peaceful setting,” said a man walking by my house a half hour ago. He meant the wide lawn with the little brown house in the middle of it; the fireflies flashing against the dark green of the forests on either side of the lot and the light green of the azaleas and hollies in the yard; and he meant the dreamsicle cat who appeared out of nowhere a week ago and put our house on its circuit.

The cat — a well-tended ‘thesdan — sat purring in my lap, and I thought, Yes, even a cat… As if the scene needs more icons of ease… Gray weathered Adirondack chairs and waves of pachysandra with topiary bulls. Almost no cars, because we’re close to the end of a dead-end street; a few trains, but not long freights with loud whistles. Little commuter trains that chuff in, pause to let people off in Garrett Park, and toot goodbye. Trains out of a children’s book.

Lots of walkers pass by, taking in the warm evening, listening to the wood thrush on Rokeby Avenue. They can’t see the sky. You can’t see the sky here for the trees. Sometimes it bothers me, and I wish I were at the beach, or at our little house in the mountains, where it’s all sky. But the peacefulness that man felt — it’s about enclosure. Our house is closed in by forest, by enormous trees that make us feel hidden, by a split rail fence. And all the absurd animals that dot the lawn — the cat, the rabbits at the hosta, the mourning doves and the robins — they add to this sense of self-containment, this Henri Rousseau simplicity and safety.

A piece of music played over and over in my mind as I sat in the chair holding the cat. Henry Purcell’s harpsichord ground in C minor, which I play a lot, and which I found on Youtube via this article in Harper’s about Purcell’s song Music for a While, my favorite piece of music. Either you like the messy heavy chords of Romanticism, or you like the highly clarified separate notes of the Baroque. I like the Baroque, and the simple self-contained motion of that ground curled up in me and purred.

As I’d hoped, the weird song of the wood thrushes is all around me now, after their nesting.  I thought I’d only hear it in the morning and the evening, but they sing from the high trees in the copses around our house all the time.   According to this guy, they must be at the height of their “territorial breeding activity.”

I keep drawing everyone’s attention to it — my husband’s, my daughter’s, my sister’s; and, today, while he was visiting, my friend Jon’s — but no one cares.  No one tries to distinguish the thrush’s ee-o-lay from the enormous ambient birdnoise of Garrett Park. 

I know they don’t care, and I don’t mind, and I turn the whole thing into a joke.  Let’s humor Miss Marple…

I was just as indifferent years ago when my mother, sitting with me in her beautiful Japanese garden, hushed our conversation and told me to listen to this or that impossible-to-distinguish piping.  She held her 1980 Field Guide to the Birds by Roger Tory Peterson in her lap, and I smiled as she now and then, with a little pencil, placed an X on his Systematic Checklist next to pileated woodpecker or purple martin.  I couldn’t name the plants in her garden, and I couldn’t distinguish the birds who pulled at her feeders.

Now I take that book from the books I inherited, and I study very closely the thrushes, the plovers.  I even discover a line of poetry in a heading on page 121:  HEADS OF BELTED PLOVERS.

Boots of spanish leather, heads of belted plovers.

Heads of belted plovers is the beginning of a poem.

I’ll try to think of one.

Second from left.
Not sure where this was taken.

… for a couple of days. (Is this a tweet?) Blogging continues apace.

.. and here’s my kid sister on a Concordia University professor’s blog today.

Told you she was a Morrissey fanatic.

Circa 1960. Somewhere on the west coast.

With my little sister, the Morrissey fanatic.

… this morning. They didn’t like the sound quality on my lecture, and want me to do it again.

Later.

… that Les UDs have a little country house with big Catskill views near Cooperstown, New York.

They own this
house, its twenty
acres and its
pond, because
this man —

— Wojciech Fangor,
lived up there
and asked his
friend, Jerzy
Soltan, to buy
some land
adjacent to his.

Fangor has been back in Poland for years (he said he got tired of spending most of his time chopping wood for the winter). Mr UD visited with him not long ago.

Fangor, among others, is featured in a new documentary about Polish poster art. The film’s producer is an art professor at Oregon State.

He looks a little gruff, doesn’t he? He’s enormous — very much over six feet — with a barrel chest and an insanely deep voice and the big rough hands of an outdoorsman who can build anything. But he’s sweet and affectionate and hilarious. He adopted every stray cat in Schoharie County and let them crawl all over him.

Gloomy glamour shot. She took it herself. Leaning into her Mac.