on commence....trois

Little pieces of paper with notes everywhere

From December 2019: student finishing up final exam at a desk outside my office. "C's hands trembling. Heartbreaking." Test anxiety PLUS he acknowledged that he had skipped some of the reading.

The real heartbreaker is that I can't remember the student, though I probably could if I looked at my roll from last semester, which now is on-line complete with photos.

Coming to end of teaching one way or another. The title of Jan Kott's famous essay reverberates: "King Lear or Endgame."

Starting new semester with a schedule  (worst of career) so frighteningly difficult that two of my acquaintance asked if the department head was trying to get me to retire. I don't think so. But see the academic classic "Stoner," where a chair uses a schedule as a weapon.

Picked up a long-neglected copy of Walter Benjamin's "Illuminations" in my office. Folded inside was the first page of a paper I wrote for a comparative lyric course in 1978. Before theory! Title: "'Time's trans-shifting' and the Lyric Imagination." It was on the subjunctive in poems by Spenser, Ronsard, and ????. The paper was written for Frank Warnke (who was a guest teacher in summer 1978), of esteemed and beloved memory. It received an A+. Two of my friends/frenemies asked me how I did and when I said "fine," their eyes sparkled. So I knew that FJW had sprinkled many A+s throughout the class--so there I and D! Both became quite famous, especially D in the field of literacy studies.

The paper came complete with an epigraph from Wallace Stevens. The title came from a poem by Robert Herrick.

The whole production is sooooooo 1978.

"The Argument of his Book" from Hesperides.

I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers, 

Of April, May, of June, and July flowers. 

I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes, 

Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes. 

I write of youth, of love, and have access 

By these to sing of cleanly wantonness. 

I sing of dews, of rains, and piece by piece 

Of balm, of oil, of spice, and ambergris. 

I sing of Time's trans-shifting; and I write 

How roses first came red, and lilies white. 

I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing 

The court of Mab, and of the fairy king. 

I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall) 

Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all. 

Frank J. Warnke, a former chairman of the department of comparative literature at the University of Georgia, died Monday of injuries suffered when he was struck by an automobile in Antwerp, Belgium. He was 62 years old.

Dr. Warnke, who was still on the University of Georgia faculty, was teaching at the University of Antwerp in an exchange program.

He leaves his wife, Janice; two sisters, Ruth Lancetti of Alexandria, Va., and Margaret Macdonald of Washington, and a brother, Paul, also of Washington, a specialist on disarmament.