Last night, I sat out on the campus after the BBQ with five men and one woman, while they drank beer and talked about fiction. I drank cranberry juice (good for the prostate, you know).Three of the men were named Andrew and the one woman was named Heaven (child of Hippies). I sat downwind of one of the Andrews while he smoked, so combined with what must have been grass pollen, the tobacco smoke gave me hay fever. Then, this morning, it was announced that there should be no "open containers" outside of the dormitories. I had abetted a misdemeanor.
After I had my tea and a yogurt, I went to the Multi-Purpose Room for welcome and the first lecture (It's 365 steps away from my dorm hallway; I've walked it several times today). Marvin Bell, who for a long time taught in the University of Iowa Writers Workshop (daddy of American MFA programs), gave a brilliant, thickly textured talk about poetry. I'm supposed to write a review of what he said. Good luck with that. I did manage notes, but I'll have to try to reconstruct them tonight. At 11:30. I went to an orientation meeting. I went to lunch and things were fine. I had rice, chicken, and asparagus (!), and since kitchen is so spartan, I decided to trade lunch for dinner today. For dinner, I'll have a blueberry yogurt smoothie and scrambled eggs.
After lunch, someone interviewed a novelist named Claire Davis about revising fiction and opening up possibilities in your own work. I'll bet she can swear like a sailor, almost did more than once. Then another novelist talked about Idiosyncratic Narrative Omniscience in Recent American Fiction (notice that I capitalized those previous words; it was that kind of a talk. I experienced a clear loss of connection. I was tired, and it wasn't interesting.
Then we were instructed in the use of Moodle, which has taken the place of Blackboard. It's a way of submitting our work--the portion of our work the administration will allow to be submitted that way--on line.
It's now 5:01. At 7:30, there's a reading by a novelist and two poets. I expect I'll be done in by the end of that time, but I'll still get two of my "residency reviews" written up.
I'm going into google to see how Tiger did in the Masters today. More la
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