Finally, because I’m teaching an introductory creative writing course this year, I’ve been reading some of the work I’m assigning my students. I’m a bit wary about this class because I’m coming off a semester in which I taught an Intro to Lit class to the worst batch of students I’ve ever encountered. I still feel bad for the 7 good students in that section (I had to resist writing “cesspool”) who had to endure the idiocy of their 25 classmates. I swear, by the end of the semester I was convinced that 3 or 4 short buses pulled up each day to drop off these seat-occupying semi-literates who were just a couple of IQ points above needing to be watered twice a day. If any of the 25 deficient students are reading this essay (or more likely, if someone is reading it to him or her), let me address you directly: get on your knees and give thanks to your creator that breathing is an involuntary act: you’d be long dead if it wasn’t.

Anyway, it has been enjoyable reading short fiction by Andre Dubus, Tim Gautreaux, Flannery O’Connor, and this Chekhov guy, as well as poetry by Ron Padgett and Naomi Shihab Nye. Because my course last semester wound up being so god-awful even after I enjoyed preparing for it, I am beginning this term full of trepidation and fear. It’s the same strategy I use when we go to parties: if I complain about it, talk to my wife (excessively and tediously) about how the gathering is sure to be numbingly dull and how most of the people who are going to be there are asshats, etc., then I’ll have a good time. We’ll see if it works for this class.

* * *

Books Bought: None

Books Gotten rid of: None

Books From the Dead Monk Bench: The Mathematical Experience

Books Checked Out: When I Was Cool by Sam Kashner. The Idea of a University, by Cardinal Newman, Survival or Prophecy: Letters of Thomas Merton and Dom Jean-Marie Leclerq

Books received as Christmas gifts: Good Poems and Homegrown Democrat by Garrison Keillor, Who Let the Dogs In? by Molly Ivins, Our Lady of the Lost and Found by Diane Schoemperlen, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson.

Books Read: Homegrown Democrat, Who Let the Dogs In?, Our Lady of the Lost and Found, When I Was Cool, Selected Letters, Vol. 2 by Jack Kerouac, Milton by William Blake, Love Had a Compass, by Robert Lax.

Books I Pretended to Have Read: The Polyphonic Spree, by Nick Hornby

1 I actually liked How to Be Good much more than most people I know. The narrator’s husband is a good comic foil, his friend who writes the monthly books column in a men’s fashion magazine (thereby making him the least-read critic on the planet) (until now perhaps) is quite funny as well, and the scene where the narrator goes to church is worthy of Evelyn Waugh. But I don’t seem to be alone in finding the main character unconvincing, and in a first-person narrative, that’s going to be a problem

2 I’ll do an actual count in the next essay, or the one after that.