Today I woke up feeling sick and exhausted, body crumbling to dust, the ants are back in my apt. and it was raining. Drove to campus cause i missed the bus and paid for all-day parking in the garage, prepped for my last class of the semester, gorged on cough drops. Then, somehow, class went fine. It was brief, but we talked about Edith Wharton and Gossip Girls' debt to Wharton, and about how American corporatism disrupts the bildungsroman/everything. As one student remarked: the everyday excoriations of the stock market seem more brutal and intrinsically gothic than anything else we've read (in a semester that included Dorian Gray). Then I got to see an esteemed colleague become Dr. Esteemed Colleague, with a brilliant final dissertation oral exam. Then I went to the public library to get my parking validated, and found a used copy of Proletarian Literature in the United States (1935) for a couple of bucks in the library book sale.Here's Langston Hughes's poem "Park Bench," from this anthology:
I live on a park bench.
You, Park Avenue.
Hell of a distance
Between us two.
I beg a dime for dinner --
You got a butler and maid.
But I'm wakin' up!
Say, ain't you afraid
That I might, just maybe,
In a year or two,
Move on over
To Park Avenue?
