Mr. Thompson

The past two semesters have afforded me the great opportunity not only to study an interesting topic, but to work with extremely intelligent people (many of whom should one day become professors), and to feel as though my work was not in vain by virtue of such things as being awarded certain honors, the successful conference, etc.

I feel we all interacted very well and in many ways have come to realize the power as well as the frustration of hard word. For those who are graduating--myself included--look back upon this two-semester course as being, probably, one of the most substantive courses you've ever experienced in college.

I'd also like to extend not only a thanks but a respectful commendation to Professor Tougaw, whose affability and doctrine of treating his students like colleagues instead of subordinates have brightened my view of academe a bit.

Thanks. God bless. Good-bye.

I had a great time at the conference. Being a moderator was a good experience; before the conference, I hadn't been on a stage in a long time, though I used to be on them a lot. Everybody did really well, and several professors commented to me afterwards that it was conducted very professionally. You all fielded the questions smoothly (I did my best to avoid the esoteric question-askers), and, all in all, the conference felt like the perfect culmination to two semesters' worth of work. What else is better than a public forum?

In this dream, I keep seeing people I know in my grandmother's house, people who normally would never ever be there. Everyone wants to have a big party. I go upstairs in my grandmother's house, which strangely is now a very large room with high, vaulted ceilings. It looks like a humongous attic--maybe something out of Edward Scissorhands--but everyone is partying up there. There is no fun feeling to this dream, however; in fact, it all feels odd and anxiety-inducing.

I am working for a strange food service company which, in addition to delivering food, has a restaurant, though the restaurant is a shabby-looking place in a large warehouse. I am working in the warehouse as a waiter. Everything is big and dusty and vast and I have a hard time efficiently serving the food. Someone keeps talking about "him," but I don't know who "he" is. It can't have been the owner of the business, because he, in the dream, sits atop a large armchair that looms over the entire warehouse/restaurant.

My family and I move into a new house (actually a rather large apartment) somewhere in what appears to be Queens. Of course I feel out of place. I have trouble parking and it is always dusk outside. One night I come home and, though I go through our front door, I keep ending up in other peoples' places. I keep thinking they're all going to call the cops on me, and I can't find my apartment.

Michael Myers, the crazed killer from the Halloween movies, makes yet another appearance in my dreams. This time, he's after me in a strange suburban house that I can't find my way out of. There is a huge whole in the center of the house and you can see from the basement up to the top floors. It's dark outside. The neighborhood resembles the one in which I grew up. The cops come but they can't find Michael. They assure me it's OK to go back inside the house. Of course, it isn't. Michael chases me again. I don't remember much else even though I know there was more.

I'm ashamed that I couldn't identify _Pride and Prejudice_.

Other than this, I'll be fine.

Writing about poetry can be either fulfilling or disastrous. It's very easy to fall into several horrific trends while writing about a particular poem:
1- Over-analysis, whereby you force absurd meaning and interpretation into every line, giving every comma some metaphoric purpose when its really just a way of separating clauses.
2- Term-collages, whereby you throw out every poetic term you know because either you don't know what to say or you wish to show how many poetry books you've read.
3- Vagueness, whereby you make unqualified remarks about what might be going on in the poem, but by virtue of its being a poem, the symbolism makes it so difficult to make any firm assertions.
Ideally, you need to find a good blend of interpretation, formal analysis, and shameless personal opinion, with a dash of elegance in your writing. This is extremely difficult. It's easy to sound like an idiot when writing about poetry. That's my take on it.

This is a short poem by DH Lawrence which I think resonates so firmly the growing trend of modernist poetry. Lawrence wrote it, or at least published it, in 1929, a year before his death:

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

This short, unrhymed poem is Lawrence's way of conveying the pride of humanity, how a small bird defies death by remaining stoic, and yet we, as humans, drown ourselves in the poem's titular fault--self-pity. Lawrence's poetry is somewhat ignored nowadays; his novels are more widely read. He was, however, a gifted poet, and I recommend that everyone read his work. In the case of this poem, I believe the power of it comes from the amazingly modern feel to it: the enjambment, for instance, serves a revelatory purpose, the enjambed lines themselves constantly completing the emotion/observation that the preceding lines start. This poem is so different from anything published, say, 30 years prior to its own publication. In 1899, British poets such as Thomas Hardy still had a dinstinctly Victorian flavor to their work.

I am at some university, a big, gothic building with fences around it. Medieval-looking hallways. I don't know what I'm looking for. I see Bill Maher (the guy on TV who does "Real Time") walking on campus, talking to a student, acting very smugly as he usually does. Maher, on this campus, is a professor. I try to talk to him but he walks past and says nothing. The campus is then revealed to be an amalgam of an unknown building and my old elementary school. A huge mansion looms on a hill above. I am intrigued with the height of the ceilings. For no reason whatsoever, all of a sudden men are coming after me (as usual). I hide with some people in a safe house, and supposedly the Bill Maher character knows how to escape but he never comes.