University Diaries
A professor of English describes American university life.
A professor of English describes American university life.
January 16, 2009 - 2:07pm
The poet W.D. Snodgrass has died. Here's a poem of his written in the spring but just as right for the beginning of the year.
UD interrupts each stanza with a little interpretation. Go here for the poem unmolested.
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January 1, 2009 - 5:36pm
With the new year, we tell ourselves the story of a year. The story of last year. The story of the year to come.
The storyteller, Doris Lessing says in her Nobel speech, "will [always] be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for good and for ill. It is our stories, the storyteller, that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed."
November 16, 2008 - 5:17pm
Norman Maclean, an Aristotelian, learned deeply what Aristotle taught: tragic art is cathartic. Toward the end of his life, he wrote a small American tragedy, A River Runs Through It, and in writing it released himself from decades of grief and confusion over his murdered brother.
November 13, 2008 - 7:53pm
UD has stepped in the same river twice, and reread, after twenty years, Norman Maclean's story, A River Runs Through It. She hasn't seen the film again, but she remembers admiring it.
Maclean was an English professor at the University of Chicago when UD was a graduate student there. He must have been retired, or almost retired.
October 26, 2008 - 10:44am
It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, and UD's gazing at twelve white roses in a twelve-cup teapot. That's her foreground. Her background is the Atlantic Ocean. She's on sabbatical from her university and living at the beach, where quiet autumn days and an exhilarating setting create the perfect conditions for thought and for writing.
