I Can't Believe He's Not Butter

      Well, it's the end of August, the season closed through with the delicacy of a butter-churn.   Everything, once again, turned out exactly as expected, no luck or saving graces daring to intercede.   The dreaded day came and went.   My mother's uncle, a kindly old gentleman, passed away Sunday.   And now the more bracing fact, that I won't be teaching this year at all, the last hope being needed as a pinch-hitter dashed by my employer's rather glib silence.   So much for respect.   I have to say, I'm not sure what's worse: the continuation of this bleak situation, the general tenor of my relationship with my employer of the past seven years, or the simple fact that I won't be teaching.   More I think than most of my colleagues, I enjoy teaching.   As frustrating as the job can sometimes be, there's precious little more rewarding than seeing a student light up with some new idea or new way of looking at things, the happy anagnorisis.   I'm going to miss it.   And, damn, I was good at it, too (though I never really did believe my own 'press,' thankfully).   But there we are.   And I'll miss the kids, too, at least the ones that actually cared.   There are always fewer of them than one would like, but always a few more than one tends to expect.

      In short, there's not much to be happy about.   The more optimistically-inclined would probably say that the Not-So-Good Doctor is now "at a crossroads."   Pardon me if I'm not so optimistic, given that my luck in the past several years has been the stuff of blues dirges.   Welcome to the butter-churn.  

      This means I'm going to have a find a way through all of this, which will require me to be things that I normally am not (and which I have a horrible time trying to be): aggressive, gregarious, self-promoting, 'hungry,' in the Cassian sense of the word.   In other words, it means having to be very, very fake-- and very much not myself, which always leaves me with a queasy, unsettled feeling in my gut.   Which, I suppose, is a way of saying that things are only going to get worse before they get better.   I am a grain of mustard seed, ready for the Great Poupon....

      So, don't count on too much blogging in the next while.   It's best if events inside the churn are left undescribed: I'm sure no one would want to read about them, and I'm even more sure I wouldn't want to write about them.   Makes me wonder, though, if happiness is a warm bun....

      In the interim, check out these two lengthy pieces, one, a surprisingly good assessment of the career of Graham Greene, and the other a study of the implications of daytime reality television which eventually reveals a very Bushian skew but does contain some good observations on the nature of that hideous beast.

---

      ADDENDUM: It never ceases to amaze me the ridiculousness of some parts of the academic world.   Evidently, the student in question could never, ever, ever have tolerated reading Leonard Cohen's The Favourite Game (with Breavman's famous shouting of F G to summon the spirit of Bertha), let alone Beautiful Losers, or even my now-medieval M.A. thesis.   We both surely must have been harrassing somebody....