Wesleyan

That's the great Wesleyan student tradition:

Four, five times a year, when they know student tour guides will be showing prospective students through the library, the undergrads take over the reading room and strip down to their underwear. We were there at noon on a Sunday after a heavy kegger Saturday: the library was empty.

Of the ten or so schools we've visited I've been least impressed by Wesleyan, and since I always leave the latest one thinking it the best one until I've a few days distance, I can safely say if I was eighteen and this was my decision, Wesleyan would already be out of sight and mind.

Two cool academic programs though:

First, the College of Social Studies is a concentration of history, political theory, philosophy, and economics, is a variation of a great book curriculum which I would be interested in but Planet? Not so much. The tour guide also said a majority of CSS students end up applying to law school, and ick.

Second, in many departments, including psychology, which is, as I type this, what she wants to study, students can apply at the beginning of the second semester of the junior year, for an accelerated masters AND GET THE FIFTH YEAR FOR FREE, two degrees for the price of one. Um. Ding!

But the campus is boring, Middletown looks skeevy, the dorms look like ratty by-the-hour motels circa 1975, the tour guides were polo-pop-ups with hair super-gelled, and the admission administrators couldn't be bothered to show up for a info session. Not a bad vibe, an absence of vibe.

Planet liked it. It's her call. She can apply where she wants to apply, though I'm guessing this will sink out of competition within a month.

Oh, want to live dangerously? Try driving 70 in a 55 on the Merritt Parkway when everyone else is doing 85.

Today in torrential rain, Connecticut College, then drive to Worcester in torrential rain to see Clark tomorrow, in torrential rain.

Have some linkages:

• An unaccustomed truth.
• Lying Liberals and their Loathsome Lies!
• Party of Cruelty.
• Happiest days of crackers' lives.
• Land of Make-Believe.
• Frank Rich embraces the emerging meme that crackers are raging against the inevitable demographics of 2040. Hop on the Duh Bus, Frank.
• Purple Line!
• My future hell.
• The 500 Worse Passwords.
• Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.
• Old God's Almost Dead.

AFTER THE RAIN

Anthony Hecht

The barbed-wire fences rust

As their cedar uprights blacken   

After a night of rain.

Some early, innocent lust

Gets me outdoors to smell

The teasle, the pelted bracken,   

The cold, mossed-over well,   

Rank with its iron chain,

And takes me off for a stroll.   

Wetness has taken over.

From drain and creeper twine

It’s runnelled and trenched and edged

A pebbled serpentine   

Secretly, as though pledged   

To attain a difficult goal

And join some important river.

The air is a smear of ashes   

With a cool taste of coins.   

Stiff among misty washes,

The trees are as black as wicks,   

Silent, detached and old.   

A pallor undermines

Some damp and swollen sticks.   

The woods are rich with mould.

How even and pure this light!   

All things stand on their own,   

Equal and shadowless,

In a world gone pale and neuter,   

Yet riddled with fresh delight.   

The heart of every stone

Conceals a toad, and the grass   

Shines with a douse of pewter.

Somewhere a branch rustles   

With the life of squirrels or birds,   

Some life that is quick and right.   

This queer, delicious bareness,   

This plain, uniform light,   

In which both elms and thistles,   

Grass, boulders, even words,   

Speak for a Spartan fairness,

Might, as I think it over,   

Speak in a form of signs,   

If only one could know

All of its hidden tricks,

Saying that I must go

With a cool taste of coins

To join some important river,   

Some damp and swollen Styx.

Yet what puzzles me the most   

Is my unwavering taste

For these dim, weathery ghosts,   

And how, from the very first,   

An early, innocent lust

Delighted in such wastes,

Sought with a reckless thirst   

A light so pure and just.