Prep

I'm going to preface this with a disclaimer: it's almost midnight, and it's been a full-on day, so this is going to be full of mistakes, but I gotta get this down. I'm absoluetly buzzing.

First off, minor excitement: it snowed tonight! We emerged from the subway and it was coming down, very light, very soft, but very much there. (I'm going to try for a poetic description in a minute, but firstly you should know that rather thaqn mereley observing the experience, I was wandering down the street with my mouth wide open to catch the icy pricks on my tongue and laughing like an idiot at the excitement of it all). By the time we reached the diner where we were stopping for dessert it was dusted all down the front of my coat, like I'd been eating beignets and making a mess of myself with the icing sugar. They say snow is exciting the first time you see it and a pain in the arse everytime thereafter, but I'd be happy to showel driveways every year for the rest of my life for the experience of seeing snow fall that first time. It was absolutely magical. Everything it touched looked as though it were covered with millions of tiny crystals, especially when the streetlights hit it, and it falls so silently. It's not like rain, which patters or splatters, depending how heavy it is, and there's something eerie and enchanting about that quiet, even with the blaring horns of New York taxis all around.

Okay, now the major excitement (for me, anyway, and you gotta remember I can be uber nerdy when the mood strikes me, as it did today). We went to Yale!!! Second stop on my thus-far highly successful Ivy League lecture series, and I gotta tell you, they seem far more impressed with my academic standing over here than they do back home, I mean, they were that concerned for my safety (you can imagine the throng of faculty and students clamouring to meet me), that they even arranged for a police escort to see me safely from the campus. Impressive, huh?

It really was pretty amazing though. The campus is stunning. A lot of it was actually built around 1935, but the architect designed it to look much older, to the point of shattering window panes and reparing them and using all kinds of bricks in the walls to make it look as though there'd been all this restorative work done. And the library (oh the library!) is designed to resemble a cathedral inside and out. I'll try and get some pics up soon. The central desk looks like an altar and there's a shrine to Lady Yale, who bares uncanny resemblance to the Virgin Mary.

I should probably interupt my gushing at this point to explain a little about my enthgusiasm for spending my intermission seeking out libraries and campuses. Sadly, I realised a few days ago that I had to cut my side trip to Bennington College in Vermont(where Donna Tartt wrote much of The Secret History and upon which the fictional Hampden College is based (for those of you who don't know TSH is one of the major primary texts I'm using in my thesis and also the book that started my obsession with American college life)). To this point I'd always thought I'd do almost anything for my thesis, but it's easy to make such lofty claims from the warmth of a cozy library. Turns out the only way to reach the campus, or the surrounding township, if you don't happen to own a car, is to hitchike. And that's my limit. I will not hitchike when it's -12 and snowing. Just not happening. So channelling all my nerdy excitemnt into the Ivys instead. And boy are they awesome so far! After we took the campus tour we went to a nearby cafe and it was full of students discussing set texts and projects they were working on, and they all sounded so smart! We also hung around to have dinner in one of the many book shop cafes (eep!) and on the train ride back I just felt so invigurated. I did a whole heap of unrealistic goal setting in my journal when we got back to the apartment, and I'm all like, 'Yeah, I could totally become a tenured professor at an Ivy League school in the next fifty years! I'm gonna become an article-publishing machine when I get back, read every book ever written, make the next draft of my novel kick-ass, understand the major cultural theorists (to this point I've got my hands on copies of Kristeva's Power's of Horror and some pretty hardcover talking about Lacan's take on Freud and applying it to crime fiction), and generally become some kind of literary/academic wunderkind...oh, and I figure I'll do away with sleep too. Of course, it's all too easy to ride this inspirational high whilst wandering through the snowy quads of Yale, about a zillion miles and several months away from having to think a scholarly thought or write a coherent, grammatically correct, creative sentence. But for now, I'm chosing to remain convinced that these things are indeed possible.

Ooh, while I'm briefely re-visiting the world of academia: have been asked to chair one of the sessions for the Magic and the Supernatural conference (they just randomly selected people), which I know isn't a big deal, but freaking out just the same! And, Ash, if you're reading, I've seen the draft program and there's a Lord of the Rings session! I will, of course take notes, and they're going to put all the papers up online before hand too, so I'll send you the link as soon as they're up!

Ooh, and Tully and Ash and other other 21st Century Lit. course people: just finished Stephen King's Lisey's Story and there were SO MANY paralles with Ellis's Lunar Park! Though not actually sure which was published first, Lisey's Story was '06 I think and can't remember when Lunar Park was. But there were Daddy issues, blurry lines between fiction and reality, ideas about writers and their interactions with their work, horror (duh), even a lot of similarities with the way each text uses language, making innocent, child-like saysings and objects really creepy. Would make a great comparative study.

Right. I need to stop now. Tomorrow we take on Broadway!

This is uber goober (Margs) signing out!