Overdue Back to School Entry

I don't teach on Thursdays, but today I went to school to do library work for my Methods of Lit Research MA class, only to discover that I had left my ID at home. Fantastic. So I put on my most purposeful teacherly face and breezed past the lib guards. And spent most of the afternoon poring over tomes in the reference section for answers to such questions as:

1) Who were the members of "the tribe of Ben" and what are their poems like?
2) In how many poems does Emily Dickinson use the words mourn, mourned, mourner, mourners, and mournful?
3) Suppose you were writing a novel set in the Philippines during the early 1900s and wanted to mention the banks operating then. Where would you find the information? What were those banks?

Imagine 27 other similarly delightful questions (and yes, there is sarcasm in this clause), whose answers are due on Saturday. Seriously, though, there is something fascinating about digging up all this obscure artifactual information; knowing that the answer exists somewhere in the recesses of the lib is comforting.

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I've been enjoying hanging out with certain people from the department lately, looking forward to our weekly dinner/drinking session. We've been to Cantina, Chiggy's, and Silungan; wonder where we'll go next? Finally realized it's no fun being hermetic in the workplace. Besides, listening to new friends discuss lit crit over beer (after making corny lit jokes) might help me to overcome my fear of theory.

Vince and I were supposed to check papers over coffee at Dunkin Donuts yesterday, but ended up quoting Gamalinda poems from memory and talking about fatal flaws, "spectral presences" and what Baryon used to call archive fever: the compulsion to write down text messages and save e-mails and memorialize moments. He also said something about theory demanding rigorous thinking from us, giving us ideas and vocabularies to help frame the world. That's it, I thought. My thinking can hardly be described as rigorous. That has got to be learned.

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When Ali guest-lectured in one of Lawrence's Philo 101 classes three weeks ago, I sat in. It was good pretending to be his student again; this time, I looked at how he taught as well as what he said, and still enjoyed his freewheeling storytelling style. He strayed from the primary text to give contemporary parables that connect philosophy with real life. And the students' silence was an interested kind of silence. They were listening. Intently.

The lecture was on Marcel's "Broken World"---or more precisely, it took Marcel's "Broken World" as a jumping-off point. How to live in a broken world where easy one-line answers trivialize our personal and political problems. He said there are ways of living that can face and withstand the riot of the world. There are friendships that flourish despite gaps, that are even nourished by them. But finding a way to live with the paradox of brokenness and wholeness is highly individual. I suppose it's less like tightrope-walking and more like ice skating, where we negotiate with the ice and with ourselves without looking at the figures inevitably scratched by our blades.

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