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I was in a diner in a nearby town recently, the kind of place where The Beatles on my t-shirt were a band of suspicious foreigners. The dry-rotting building had multiple levels filled with Naugahyde booths and tables with mismatched chairs. It’s known for pie.

The engineers were there. I suspect there are only a dozen civil engineers in the world, and here eight of them were. They stood in line to order, deeply tanned, all-American guys wearing dusty calfskin work boots, dark blue jeans with belts, collared shirts and baseball caps over baseball haircuts. They all had cells and PDAs and used them while they waited. It was clear who was in charge—he and his second-hand man were the most voluble. The ones in the middle spoke deferentially to their bosses but freely with one another, and the kid at the bottom watched silently. They were working on a project for the university.

They sat at the long table next to mine with plastic baskets of sandwiches, chips and garlic pickle slices, and munched purposefully. After a while their elder said something about Iraq, and they discussed the crazy amount of money to be made there. Their voices drawled sleepily like airline pilots’, and they paused to wipe mustard off the corners of their mouths with paper napkins and to sip Coca-Cola. Two women sat down nearby. The engineers went quiet, for the same reason they’d have held the door open for them. Then another man joined the women and they looked at each other and turned back to their conversation.

They had a job to do, but they weren’t going to rush it. There was pleasure in the food, companionship, and the pause, but they intended to get back to it. The work they described took neither nature nor the human into account. You were either with them or against them, and they’d be astonished if you were against them.

I dawdled over my sandwich, reading a volume of poetry, and they looked my way a few times. They were too polite to say anything while I was still there, of course, even to each other, but the kid registered their glances and took an extra-large bite. He put it in his cheek and worked at it like a squirrel, smacking his lips a little in my general direction.

I thought of James Dickey describing working in a business and how

…every day I used to take a book of poems with me just to touch, every now and then, or as a reminder of the world where I lived most as I wished to. And I remember also the very distinct sense of danger I felt when carrying the book…the distinct and delicious sense of subversiveness and danger in carrying a book…as if it were a bomb, here in this place that had no need of it, that would be embarrassed and nonplussed by it, that would finally destroy it by its enormous weight of organized indifference….

The engineers got up to leave, and as they ambled out, each loomed for just a second in my light while he tried to read what I was reading. It was a collection by William Carlos Williams.

I looked up, and their faces were puzzled, curious, suspicious. They might have caught just a title or two—“The Flower,” “For A Low Voice,”—but no more. These things lacked utility and a guy probably shouldn’t think about them, but they did.

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Our friends at Featherproof Books, one of the most innovative new presses going, have a grand deal for you: They’ve made one of my short stories into a chapbook, and you can have “The Stork” for free. All you need to do is download it, print it, fold it, and enjoy! I hope you’ll share the link with all those you love, hate, or feel indifferent about.

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An adjunct’s sabbatical, that is, which means I’ll be staying in the teaching harness until I drop but taking a few days off from this blog to make a revision deadline for my book. Please check in next week, when I’ll have colorful stories about the (5-minute) sabbatical I took in France (the one in my head).

By the way, here’s an opportunity in the National Parks for some of our friends eligible for real sabbatical leaves. I knew I should have been a botanist.

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We went to a lecture last night by Leonard S. Marcus, author, critic, and children’s book historian, who’d told a group in an earlier session with quiet amusement that “independent scholar” finally offered a title for what he’d been doing all along. His books include a biography of Margaret Wise Brown (author of Goodnight Moon) and most recently Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature. The head of the Center for Children’s Books, which co-hosted the lecture, said Marcus’s work is one of the main reasons children’s literature is being taken seriously in academe.

Marcus’s talk, “A New Deal for the Nursery,” was on one of his previous books, Golden Legacy: How Golden Books Won Children’s Hearts, Changed Publishing Forever, and Became An American Icon Along the Way. In it he tells a great story about how the Western Printing Company of Racine, Wisconsin, changed the way American children read.

Children’s books had never been given much attention by mainstream publishers or critics. Western eventually went into business with Simon & Schuster, Disney, and others to produce various Golden Books, and had offices in New York. Their innovation was making beautiful little books to be sold in dimestores to the masses. The books, starting with Poky Little Puppy, the best-selling picture book of all time, cost only a quarter when other children’s books, such as Make Way for Ducklings, sold for two dollars in bookstores, which could be intimidating for some consumers and didn’t exist in many towns.

Many American fathers were away from home when Golden Books started in 1942, the first full year of American involvement in the war. Eleanor Roosevelt had told parents to read to their kids as way to comfort them and help them learn, and readily-available, cheap books made that possible. Golden gathered a group of writers and artists that included Russian and Eastern European émigrés (such as Feodor Rojankovsky), progressive educators (such as Lucy Sprague Mitchell, friend of John Dewey and student of William James), and enough defectors from Walt Disney’s shop that Golden began to be called the East Coast “Disney Studios in exile.” Many of the books were about the modern world and showed modern families and working people at their jobs, as in The Taxi That Hurried.

A battle for the hearts and minds of American kids occurred along the way. Anne Carol Moore, for instance, the New York Public Library’s first children’s librarian and an important critic who helped initiate the Newbery and Caldecott awards, disliked and distrusted Golden books for their popularity and populism, and thought them more like despicable comic books than appropriate children’s literature. But Golden had found a way to bypass critics with attractive displays and affordability, and the company thrived. Eventually they made so much money that when Walt Disney, who had put most of his money into his films, wanted to build a theme park in Southern California, he got startup funds from Western/Golden and ABC, who’d been televising his shows. By the mid-’70s, other publishers had figured out how to do what Golden did—mostly with paperbacks, not hardcovers—and Golden’s influence began to wane.

I’ve bought a lot of Golden books over the years and still have many of them here in the house, from Bugs Bunny in Double Trouble on Diamond Island, a Big Little Book that cost 39 cents in 1967 (how cool were those things, with their hard covers and perfect size for little hands?), to the Richard Scarry books, to a recent Golden Guide on birds that Starbuck picked out for himself. (O! Where are the supermarket volumes of the Golden Book Encyclopedia of my youth?) I still love their pacing, layout (as in Scarry, where the words of “Mealtime” are shown associatively, not alphabetically) and gorgeous illustrations that sparked an early interest in fine art.

Children’s literature clearly has an effect on its readers, and more scholars and writers are looking into it. More than a decade ago, Herbert Kohl wrote Should We Burn Babar?: Essays on Children’s Literature and the Power of Stories, which asks if most children’s lit ignores stories of cooperative action and implicitly reinforces systems such as colonialism. The latest issue of The New Yorker has a piece by Adam Gopnick that revisits (and refutes) that argument. And Mark Sarvas, blogger and novelist, had a hand in bringing to an American publisher Tintin and the Secret of Literature, by Tom McCarthy, about which one reader wrote, “What have Foucault, Derrida, Sartre, Barthes, Baudelaire, Freud, Bataille and Bachelard got in common? Give up? They all appear in this book.”

I too take the power of children’s literature very seriously. My wife and I shape our sons without them knowing it by filling the house with books we’ve loved since childhood, new books chosen to our sensibilities, and books our sons pick excitedly for themselves. I even allow Crazy Larry’s gifts to find their way on to the shelves, knowing he picked them because they disturbed him as a child and he’s never gotten past that. Starbuck has the most curious expression as he leafs through a book Larry sent him as an exercise in consciousness: One Monster After Another, Mercer Mayer’s classic full of Wild-‘n-Windy Typhoonigators sucking up whole Blue Oceans of Bubbly-Goo. At least, that’s what Starbuck says the book is about. I’m too scared to look.

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I have something in the new issue of Brevity, the premiere online journal of concise literary nonfiction, if you’re interested.

And though the good people of my youth had a saying that went, “The only thing more worthless than a writer talking about his work is teats on a boar hog,” you can check Brevity’s Creative Nonfiction Blog this week or next for my brief guest-post called “Sabi and Dying.”

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The fall semester was only two weeks old, and we’d already worked through Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe. But my students and I didn’t know each other well yet, and I was aware when I assigned Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” that the add/drop date hadn’t passed.

Undergrads often hate “Bartleby,” a weird story about an aging lawyer who has an infestation in his office: a copyist who won’t work yet won’t leave because, he says, “I prefer not to.” In fact he says little else, no matter how the lawyer reasons, pleads, threatens, or cajoles. Students get frustrated with the archaic language, fail to see the humor, and demand to know why the lawyer doesn’t just call the police and be done with it. (It’s a good question, and the story carries its own answer.) Bartleby himself is described like the walking dead or a ghost, but he’s not Poe-uncanny, just discomfiting. He’s a blank and refuses to provide any answers, for the lawyer or for readers.

That Tuesday morning my wife and I watched with you as the Towers collapsed in real time on our TVs. We can’t help but think of our own particulars even as others die at a distance: I’d proposed to my wife a year earlier on the Staten Island Ferry with the Twin Towers filling the sky behind her with light, and now she was six weeks pregnant, with no way to know how the world meant now. There was an awful disconnect in these thoughts.

That night I dreaded teaching the next day. I had nothing to say, especially about short stories written 150 years earlier. I remember seeing an ad, blown off the side of a bus, lying in the debris. Ben Stiller mugged goofily for his new movie, his face surrounded by ashen rubble and twisted vehicles, and I felt sure that stories had become useless—at best, false comfort; at worst, desecration.

An e-mail that night from the administration asked us to talk with classes about what had happened and to remind students of resources if they felt overwhelmed. But in my morning class on 9/12, students told me they were sick of having to discuss the event, though they were still visibly shaken, stunned, sullen, and tearful. Not much was known then, as I recall. Weren’t there rumors of some surviving the towers’ collapse? Had the name bin Laden been uttered? What did this mean? In the struggle for metaphor there had been comparisons to Pearl Harbor, and one student shook and cried “Cowards!”

I wasn’t thinking, just responding, and said whoever they were, they were mass murderers, but was it an act of cowardice to strap yourself into a jumbo jet laden with 24,000 gallons of aviation fuel and fly it into a skyscraper? It’s a measure of my own alienation that I worried for my little adjunct job with that comment until Susan Sontag wrote in the September 24th issue of The New Yorker, “In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.”

Most of us wanted to believe in the hope for normalcy, I think, and when I asked if they wanted to talk about Melville, my students surprised me and said yes. We discussed the story’s setting in Manhattan, and someone said it was weird that our lawyer-narrator had walked around Trinity Church in his angst, when it had been reported that one of the Tower’s radio masts had fallen into Trinity Churchyard and stuck there like a spear. We looked at period photos I’d brought of The Tombs, where Bartleby is held, and some by Jacob Riis a few years later, and noted their hard sadness. Students’ usual anger over the story’s difficulties was muted to puzzlement that it couldn’t be reasoned through, explained away, or solved.

I explained a few of the story’s similarities with Moby Dick, published a couple of years earlier, which I referred to as the weirdness of the whale. The novel is also about fear of an unknowable Other, whether it’s a monstrous white whale, a monomaniacal ship’s captain, or a headhunting bedmate, and Hegel’s line, “Each consciousness pursues the death of the other,” came to mind. Both story and novel look deeply into what may be our first terror: the “awful lonesomeness” of discovering that the world and its people are not ourselves and that we cannot control or often even understand them. In that distance and mutual unintelligibility—or much worse, in the blankness of the face of the salty or social deep—we’re left thinking individually, “The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?” Melville’s own biography adds to the melancholy, since this great genius was snubbed by critics and public, and his own family thought him mad.

But true art, I believe, often provides the hope of rescue, even if it merely takes the form of more awareness or reduced simplicity. One may never know why things happen, what it means to be led to death by someone holding a grudge, for which he believes a fair settlement is the lives of all aboard. But the writer’s art—naming the things of the world, detailing its processes, providing the experience of having lived in perplexing or terrifying times—buoys us up. In Moby Dick, Ishmael performs an incredibly detailed anatomy both of the cetacean mammal called a whale and of life and death on the Pequod. He gives us all the stuff of the world, such as “outfits for the larders and cellars of 180 sail of Dutch whalemen:

400,000 lbs. of beef.
60,000 lbs. Friesland pork.
150,000 lbs. of stock fish.
550,000 lbs. of biscuit.
72,000 lbs. of soft bread.
2,800 firkins of butter.
20,000 lbs. Texel & Leyden cheese.
144,000 lbs. cheese (probably an inferior article).
550 ankers of Geneva.
10,800 barrels of beer.

“Most statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading,” he admits; “not so in the present case, however, where the reader is flooded with whole pipes, barrels, quarts, and gills of good gin and good cheer.” In “Bartleby” too the reader is flooded with concrete sensory details, from the description of Turkey, “a short, pursy Englishman…somewhere not far from sixty,” whose face “blazed like a grate full of Christmas coals,” to the Spitzenberg apples and “small, flat, round, and very spicy” ginger-cakes sold in stalls near the Custom House and Post Office.

“No ideas but in things,” W.C. Williams says in “A Sort of a Song":

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.

—through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

Abstractions, such as “madness,” “cowardliness,” and “weird” keep us from the one understanding we can attain, limited as it is. Ishmael says, “For now, since by many prolonged experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect of the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country….”

Details are a triumph, and their telling our greatest art. Abstractions mean everything and therefore nothing; specifics lead to storytelling, some small escape from our fatal encounter with the world’s otherness. When Ishmael recounts finding himself the lone survivor of the Pequod’s sinking, saved by the weird detail of an empty coffin, of all things, that pops to the surface, he quotes Job, “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” The lawyer survives lonesome Bartleby, whom he has come to resemble, and is moved to try to construct a story about Bartleby’s past that will explain what has happened. Even he admits it’s inadequate, but like other rites for the dead it helps the living become more human by sharing what we all must face. “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!” he cries in empathy for us all.

Does it help to know, now, the names of Mohamed Atta and his gang, the type and configuration of the airplanes? The precise cause of the buildings’ collapse? We’d mourn our dead anyway and rage at those others who would presume to control our lives. But the stories that emerge from the specifics help, and like the narrator-protagonists in Melville’s fiction we’ll tell them again and again, compulsively, revising them for complexity, trying to enhance meaning.

My class was a mess that day, but I thought I might be able to find something to say in meetings to come about literature’s attempt to reconcile people and stones. As Melville writes in Moby Dick, “There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.”

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The Large Hadron Collider at CERN will fire up Wednesday morning, though “it might take a month or two to ramp up the proton energies to five trillion electron volts—as high as the machine will go before shutting down for the winter—and collide them.” A few unscientific minds have suggested the world will end when our physicist friends throw the switch. It’s simply not true, and if it is, you’ll never be able to call me on it. Plus I’ll never have to make that dental appointment.

Here’s a very good explanation of the process by a team member, whom you may remember playing keyboards in the background of the video for the UK hit “Things Can Only Get Better.” Who says the universe doesn’t have a sense of humor?

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Have you had the experience recently of your physician turning her computer screen toward you and googling something she needs to know? I have, twice in a month, and I have to say, it was a little disconcerting.

I thought the natural order was that patients, hungry for any scrap of information about their health, googled and read up on medical topics so they could ask dumb questions of their doctors. The doctors, playing their parts, were supposed to say in stentorian tones, “No, that’s a common misconception. You must have been reading the Wikipedia entry for dysbaric osteonecrosis!” After all, don’t they teach things in med school that you can’t learn in the first dozen hits of an online search?

But both my family doctor and a neurosurgeon (I’m fine) googled things for me as I sat with them recently and looked on. The brain surgeon in particular thought Wikipedia is great. He said he makes his interns use it when they ask questions, and then he proceeded to give me an hour of basic instruction on Internet use. (He also said doctors don’t have to be very smart, they just need good memories, and admitted he had no idea what many of the medical terms meant on the Wiki entry he was looking up.) Hey, I am the Internet, pal, I wanted to tell him, but he had knives and loves to use them.

I use Google, Wikipedia, and other first-responder tools all the time, but I do know my way around a library and have enough research experience to have a feel for when a source is adequate. For instance, I needed to remind myself today which year women’s suffrage was enacted—an important fact to get right but one that’s easy to check (and crosscheck, if you want).

On the other hand, I wanted the lyrics to a song called “Make Believe” from the early ‘20s. It wasn’t all that important to my book, but I wanted it. Felt that need? It’s like the hunger for air during a breath-hold. Not only could I not find it easily online, I fell down that familiar well of context—who wrote the lyrics, what else he penned, who he worked with, what sorts of things he wrote about, etc. And I never could pin down the difference between “Make Believe” and something called “Make Believe and Smile,” leaving me wondering if the latter was the extended title, or something else entirely, or just a mistake. Any time there’s a hitch like this, I slow way, way down, even for something trivial, and get myself to the shelves (or change it to something I know).

But you should hear English TAs on the subject of Wikipedia. Hoo-ah. We must fight it with all means at our disposal, by which they mean verbally denouncing all open-content sources to the rhet classes they’re teaching. Then they ban it from the research and writing process. One young guy was so disturbed by the various drafts that he tracked over time for the entry on Auburn University that he couldn’t speak of them calmly, and couldn’t shut off, so on several occasions he finished with his class and came into his group office raging at anyone who would listen.

After my experience with the doctors, I’ve felt less self-conscious about my constant but measured use of online sources including Wikipedia. I noted today that in the August 2008 issue of American Libraries, the magazine of the American Library Association, several people weigh in on its use, including the editor, a feature writer, and professional librarian readers. They’re all in favor of it, especially as a “centerpiece around which to teach searching and critical reading skills, as well as evaluation of a resource’s content,” as the author of the article “Dissecting the Web Through Wikipedia” says. Adam Bennington asks us to

Embrace the enemy: In the end, students are going to use Wikipedia anyway. If they don’t access it from school, they will look at it from home or another library. If they don’t cite it directly in a paper, they will probably have at least looked at an entry, and it may wind up influencing them. Librarians and other educators may as well capitalize on the opportunity to use the resource as a teaching example as well as to make the profession and its skills more relevant to students…. Evaluating resources they find through Google or Wikipedia will be critical when using that information to make decisions.

Let’s get this thing going then. I want my doctors to have the best possible skills for diagnosing by Wikipedia.

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Saw a flyer yesterday on a bulletin board in the English Building:

CHECK US OUT THIS THURSDAY!!!
FREE FOOD!
BAGS!
M16 SIMULATOR!
AND MORE!!!

I needed to know what more Army ROTC could possibly provide, so I force-marched over to take a look. In the small grassy space west of the Armory, about 50 students in blue-and orange ROTC t-shirts and shorts were chatting, playing bean-bag toss, and trying to get a grill going. Rock music played loudly from an unseen stereo in an Armory window.

Just before four o’clock, the music went down and someone yelled for them to tuck their shirts into their pants and fall in. The cadets formed up in two platoons in front of a tan Humvee in the grass, and the student platoon sergeants reported that all were accounted for.

“Guidons?” the cadet First Sergeant asked.

“No guidons,” a cadet Platoon Sergeant said.

“Guidons?”

Other students walked past on the sidewalk, coming from or going to their dorm rooms, the gym, and the Greek houses, and a busy road behind the formation made it hard to hear.

“Don’t worry about guidons,” the battalion commander said from the side.

There was a short awards ceremony for those who got scholarships or had excelled in summer programs. A quarter of the cadets got awards. When it was nearly over, a young woman with long straight hair ran up. She wore a ROTC shirt and madras shorts, and had an ankle tattoo and heavy earrings. She dropped her bag next to me, said something apologetic, and ran to join the others. When the formation was over and she came back to get her bag, I asked her kiddingly if she’d get an Article 15 for being late.

“I didn’t want to be late.” She laughed. “I had a class and ran over afterward.”

We talked about the barbecue, held to welcome back cadets and give others on campus a chance to meet them. There were fun things to do, she said, like the grenade toss, and the M-16 simulator, which everybody who tried it seemed to love. “I was never much into that shooting thing,” she said. “But then I tried it and it was awesome! Especially shooting those helicopters!” She pointed an imaginary gun to the sky and made a pshoo-pshoo noise. The music came back on loudly, and she invited me to stay for a burger. Air Force and Marine cadets in dress uniforms filed in and out of the Armory.

I went over and introduced myself to Sergeant First Class South, who was shooting the breeze next to the battalion sergeant major. SFC South was a new arrival, just up with his family from duty in Orlando. His pressed BDUs had a Combat Infantry badge with a star over it and an Air Assault Badge pinned on the breast. He’d retired but worked as a defense contractor to help train the cadets. He thought it a good job and a welcome transition to civilian life, a chance to learn “how to deal with doctors, lawyers” and the like far from any military post after 20 years in the service. He got to take classes himself, and his young children loved playing with neighborhood kids in a nearby small town where he lived.

He said cadets were welcome to bring friends to this event—in case they were interested in ROTC, since you could take military science classes without obligation—and that the cadets with “surveys” on clipboards for passersby were a recruiting tactic too. The clipboard cadets were engaged with the grill, and passersby rarely looked in the direction of the gathering, though one pretty young woman smiled at them, and a couple of wiseacres snickered.

South said there was a rock-climbing wall inside the Armory, and the shooting simulator, which could portray different scenarios all over the world, and different weapons, from 9mm pistols to grenade launchers. “The kids like it,” he said, “and it’s certainly easier and cheaper than getting them to a range.” He said ROTC also sends some cadets to training programs, such as a military map-reading course in Indiana. I mentioned the old joke in the enlisted ranks that there’s nothing more dangerous than a freshly-minted Second Lieutenant with a map and a compass.

South laughed hard, briefly, then put his instructor’s face back on. “We learn all kinds of things out there,” he said. “Funny how many are afraid of the dark. But you get a bunch of city kids in the woods for the first time…. I tell them that a lot of what they’ll need to know about military life they’ll need to learn as they go. It’ll almost be like college all over again. They need to pick up some books, do some reading to find this stuff out. They won’t always have an NCO right there to tell them how things work. They’re going to have soldiers who get DUIs, soldiers with marital problems, all the stuff they’ll need to deal with that they haven’t even imagined yet. They ask me, ‘What do I say when I meet my new platoon sergeant?’ I tell them, well, don’t act like you know everything.”

Nearby half-a-dozen cadets and one friend were being shown how to throw grenades from an improvised pit. The target was a shapeless enemy soldier behind folding chairs draped in ponchos. The kill zone was marked out with white tape and little orange construction cones in the grass. Someone overthrew it and the inert grenade clattered to a stop near my feet. The cadet running the activity looked sheepish. “At least it’s a dud,” he said to the others.

There were many opportunities for students to join something this muggy August day. Across the street a giant banner hung on a wrought fence:

Sigma Phi Epsilon
RECRUITMENT EVENT
TODAY at 5

The Ice Arena was across from the Armory too, groups of skaters entering together, and a gang of mopeds was parked at the curb of the Academic Services Center. A Jimmy John’s car with a megaphone on its roof rolled past slowly, announcing, “We’re looking for drivers at three campus locations….”

At the barbecue, a couple of cadets sat on the tailgate of the Humvee turning M-16s over curiously in their laps. The hardest-looking assistant professor I’ve ever seen, a full-bird Colonel assigned to the ROTC battalion, watched his cadets play bean-bag toss with a tiny smile of pleasure as flames leapt from the grill and smoke poured across the sidewalk.

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Crazy Larry, always hungry for acting roles, sent me an ad he found on Craig’s List:

People meet me (an author) at book signings and events and are always surprised; they imagine me differently somehow. It occurred to me that perhaps there is someone out there better suited to be me, to be the me I seem to be in readers’ minds. You would accompany me at my next book event, and who knows what else; the idea is evolving and I’m letting it unfold as organically as possible. If this sounds intriguing—and this is totally for real—email me a bit about yourself and then I will in turn share my name and book titles. You do not need to be a professional actor at all. You don’t even necessarily need to be female, though I will tell you that I am. Thanks for your time. Compensation: No pay.

Who knows what else, indeed? Here’s an idea to let unfold organically: Get actors to play us, college teachers. After all, students I meet at the start of every new semester are always surprised; they imagined I would look different somehow.

Since Larry’s looking for a gig, I’ll have him be the me I seem to be in students’ minds when they register. On the first day of class he’ll arrive to my room costumed in tweed and glasses, adept at thoughtful looks he’s practiced in the mirror. He’ll call the roll delightfully, projecting students’ names, his voice rich and modulated.

After that it gets a little dicey. He’s just an actor, after all, not a teacher, and after waving a piece of chalk around dramatically, he begins to sweat. After a couple of minutes, students openly challenge him, and he looks around shiftily. Suddenly he bows, waits for applause that never comes, and runs out of the room. Scene.

Meanwhile, the middle-aged student in the back of the room who’s been trying to give him surreptitious hand gestures is faced with a choice. Should he reveal that he’s actually the teacher? Run out after Larry? Or join the forming mob and plan to slip away when it chases Larry out of the building?