All of Aimee's Buckeye talk is reminding me of my high school geometry teacher, a fiftyish eccentric dandy and sweet guy who did things like wear a pink suit on Valentine's day. Anyway, every year on the day of the big Ohio State-Michigan game, he'd come to school decked out head to toe in OSU gear: Buckeye cap, jacket, sweatpants, the works. Then, during his classes (and he'd repeat this act for every single class during the course of the day) he'd stop in the middle of class and announce, "This is the day when the Buckeyes of Ohio State meet the Wolverines of Michigan." (He'd pronounce this last word "Meeeesh-igan"--does this have some significance, Buckeye fans?) As he launched into a stirring speech about the proud history of the game and of the Buckeyes, he would proceed to take off his clothes, piece by piece--at which point it would be revealed that he was in fact wearing many layers of Ohio State gear, until he was down to an OSU T-shirt and shorts. (Add this to the "you couldn't do that in school anymore" file, along with the time I menaced a squeamish labmate of mine during frog dissection with a pair of blunt scissors.) He would then draw himself up and give a rousing rendition of the Ohio State fight song, ending with a high note on the "O-hi-ooooo!"



In case anyone doubts this, I caught it on tape for our video yearbook.

I suggest that Aimee name her new dog "Haiku."

I'm ashamed to admit that I've never actually read any of Coetzee's books; Robin (who's much better read in contemporary fiction than I am) keeps scaring me off them by telling me how harrowing they are. I have seen him a couple times around Stanford, though, where he's been a visiting professor.



I heard him read from Youth last year. He has a remarkable voice: small, precise, dry, literally chilling to listen to; if any living writer embodies the Yeatsian dictum to "cast a cold eye" it's him. Youth is ostensibly memoir but told in the third person; musings that would seem self-indulgent, as when the young Coetzee wonders about his future as a writer and about the quality of his work, are regarded with such detachment--and at times, with such withering contempt--that the effect is quite the opposite: no one could be harder on Coetzee than Coetzee. The action, at least in the section he read to us from, was utterly dull, recounting Coetzee's work as a computer analyst at a British military base: little there but the routines of work, awkward meals with the one acquaintance he seems to make, the loneliness of his room. It was a memoir actually driven by self-hatred; the drama lay not in the events but in the sometimes palapable disgust of the backwards glance.



Coetzee seems to be one of those people who is truly a misanthrope by temperment rather than from embittered experience. By all accounts he was unfailingly polite when forced into conversation, but preferred to remain in his office with the door closed, and would rarely give more than one-sentence answers to questions breathlessly posed by students or fans.

J.M. Coetzee has won the Nobel Prize for literature (thanks Jordan).

Memo from our department administrator: "The Mac's have all been upgraded to OS X and are suffering."

Wish my snacking habits were as healthy as Stephanie's. I'm about to go park myself in front of Cubs-Braves Game 2 with Pringles on my left hand and Chicken in a Biskits on my right. (The latter taste extremely good with milk, in a third-grade kind of way.)

Cubs win!