First I want to thank
Lee Durkee, a real trouper. He spoke to my noon class yesterday and then he had to stick around with me for three hours before speaking to my four o'clock class. Above and beyond! We occupied ourselves in various ways. We had Arnold Palmers at
Ajax, for example, and sipped them very, very, very slowly as the minutes ticked by.
The young woman with all the parking tickets was working and refused to let us pay! So thanks to her too. I also took Lee to
the mysterious part of the library and revealed unto him its glories. I guess my favorite thing he said was to my four o'clock class, when he suddenly - and truthfully! - declared, "
GREEN ACRES was magic realism." I didn't have the heart to tell him that,
like Craig Ferguson, not one of those kids has any idea what GREEN ACRES is. Tragically! (On the other hand,
the New York Times doesn't understand GREEN ACRES any better than my students do,
as I have most forcefully demonstrated here.) I am pretty sure I mumbled something about magic realism to the students at some point earlier this semester, at least. This morning Lee sent me a video of
John Dee's magic mirror.
"Click" here to see it. And look, I must thank Sarah, who made this doll (pictured above) for me. I have
lost all contact with Sarah since
leaving facebook, so if anyone who knows Sarah sees this, tell her I said thanks! It was handed to me by a third party, the doll was, just the other day, gratis, out of nowhere, without warning. The way I remember it, I was at a reading by
Melissa Ginsburg and
Ann Fisher-Wirth at
the Powerhouse, some months ago, and Sarah was there and asked me what my spirit animal was and I said probably
orangutan and here you see the happy result. I have something else Sarah made, a candy-striped
pole festooned with plush red
squids, for which I paid cold cash money after spying it displayed as part of her undergraduate senior Honors thesis project. And you know, I like to brandish it. I was at a
Christmas party last year where all the kids (and none of the adults) were wearing
devil hats, so I wheedled my way into a spare devil
hat, only, in the most
Freudian way possible,
the horns on my devil hat refused to stand up, which should have
taught me a lesson about hubris or something, but sometimes I like to put on the drooping devil hat and brandish the squid stick (as I call it, no, in my mind I capitalize it, The Squid Stick) and
feel like some kind of wizard, I guess (see John Dee, above). Photo below
by Blair Hobbs.
