Tuesday, September 23, 2008
I went to the main campus library last night after having spent appoximately eleven minutes on an elliptical machine at the student recreation center, which took an enormous amount of time to find, situated as it is amid numerous other buildings. I left shortly before nine in the evening, still struck aghast by the result of my inquiry into renting a locker: "There's a waiting-list at least a year long." The blue-eyed pale-face (I have yet to grow accustomed to living in an area where I am darker than most of the other inhabitants) at the towel desk registered the expression of incredulity on my face with due professional sympathy, but I perceived my reaction startled him a little nevertheless. I proceeded downstairs to inspect the locker room, which is indeed smaller than the one adjoining my junior high gym. This scratches plans for daily showers there before school.
One must check out some book to complete the activation process for one's library card; I chose three books by Alexander Woolcott, a figure about whom I have known but never read in detail. This morning I read his words about A. E. Housman, describing the time when Housman was a marginal professor taking a set of his poetry to a publisher. Housman declined the offer by the publisher to accept royalties:
Professor Housman had written some poems because he could not help himself, and an extremely painful experience he had found it. He would no more think of selling these things which had been wrung from his troubled heart than he would have cut off his hand and sent it to market.The thought immediately sprung to my head, illustrative of Housman's nobility and my lack thereof: I would with little forethought cut off my hand and sell it, if I thought it would fetch anything. Nevermind writing anything worthy of publication.
Yesterday I began a sympathy diet with a high school friend, who currently resides in New York. I am not fat, to be sure, but I am just as certainly not slender, either; if only to find clothes that fit, among other reasons, I need to drop weight. Weigh-in: 145.
Labels: A. E. Housman, Alexander Woolcott, diet, elliptical, friends, losing weight, New York, poetry, professionalism, publication, school, student recreation, writing
[Lauree Frances Keith concluded this diatribe at 7:05 AM]