Oberlin

New leader in the clubhouse. 4-1-4, with three mandatory January sessions plus a freshman seminar. No core courses, minimum nine credits each in the sciences, the social sciences, the humanities. Double majoring encouraged.

Planet would have two choices if she decided to major in music, a BA in Music through the college or a BA in Music Performance through the music conservatory. If the latter, she would need to apply to both the college and the conservatory. We've been warned by people before getting to Oberlin as well as by Oberlin admissions officers yesterday that the Conservatory degree is for musicians with serious professional ambitions and the appropriate dedication and drive. Planet will not be applying to the Conservatory.

 

Oberlin charters buses to and from campus to Boston, Chicago, New York, and DC at the beginning and end of semesters and Thanksgiving and Spring breaks, and students can ride for $100 round trip, which pleases me. Bands stop to play - last Spring both Animal Collective and Beach House came through, among others. Shuttles to Cleveland run weekends - we were told that Cleveland has the second largest theater district in America after NYC. Is that true?

Very pretty campus, small, not presumptuous town. The nearest town of size is Lorain, which we drove through and is a dump. Flat soybean farms surrounding. I wouldn't like it because the chances to backpack and deep wood don't exist, but it isn't an issue in Planet's case.

It's been a year since we made our first New England trip, and our impressions of Bowdoin and Middlebury and Williams have faded, so when I say I haven't heard Planet chirp so positively about a visit to any college that assertion is compromised by faded memories, but I haven't seen her beam as much at a school since our first visit to Gettysburg.

Kenyon this morning, then drive to NY to visit Hamilton.

Some links of note while they're still fresh, a poem, some music, below the fold:

• Ethan experiences a real-life ethical dilemma. I don't think he' a hypocrite.
• Justin had a similar experience.
• Leverage.
• Lack of self-awareness watch.
• On Wikileaks (III).
• Of Time and the night.
• The crisis of the American working class.
• Cossacks in tricorns.
• Speaking of hypocrisy, it would take every ounce of my adherence to my beliefs to keep me from opening this fat-fucker's skull with a shovel.
• Speaking of fat-fuckers.
• Like a mosque to a flame.
• Rather than getting mad at the self-serving religious bigots in the Republican Party, how about getting mad at all the Democrats who aren't calling the Republicans bigots.
• Speaking of the pussiness of America's professional liberals, watch them stay silent as America's professional pigs vilify Christiane Amanpour.
• How to identify and boycott Israeli products.
• Dangerously ambitious Virginia pig.
• An argument for going to a tea party.
• zencomix in (and on) The Philippines.
• As predicted here (I'm too lazy to go find), the first of these has appeared, two months (at least) prematurely.
• Crisis in East Deer Park? Heh, one of the complainers in the article was once Planet's daycare provider when Planet was two, lives three houses down from Elric's parents.

• The orthodox marketing of experimental fiction.
• Via Silliman, four Scalapino books of poetry via pdf.
• The bike-snob book.
• Early McCarthy.
• McCarthy and Nevil Shute.
• Speaking of another McCarthy, Tom, I am struggling mightily with Remainder: I want to fucking strangle the protagonist, but since I'm assuming I'm supposed to want to strangle the protagonist....
• New Eno in the works. Lotsa Eno in the CD player this trip, serendipitously (if inevitably).
• Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.
• Why do bassists want the most sex?

THE MINNEAPOLIS POEM

James Wright

1

I wonder how many old men last winter

Hungry and frightened by namelessness prowled   

The Mississippi shore

Lashed blind by the wind, dreaming

Of suicide in the river.

The police remove their cadavers by daybreak   

And turn them in somewhere.

Where?

How does the city keep lists of its fathers   

Who have no names?

By Nicollet Island I gaze down at the dark water   

So beautifully slow.

And I wish my brothers good luck

And a warm grave.

   2

The Chippewa young men

Stab one another shrieking

Jesus Christ.

Split-lipped homosexuals limp in terror of assault.   

High school backfields search under benches   

Near the Post Office. Their faces are the rich   

Raw bacon without eyes.

The Walker Art Center crowd stare

At the Guthrie Theater.

   3

Tall Negro girls from Chicago

Listen to light songs.

They know when the supposed patron

Is a plainclothesman.

A cop’s palm

Is a roach dangling down the scorched fangs   

Of a light bulb.

The soul of a cop’s eyes

Is an eternity of Sunday daybreak in the suburbs   

Of Juárez, Mexico.

   4

The legless beggars are gone, carried away

By white birds.

The Artificial Limbs Exchange is gutted

And sown with lime.

The whalebone crutches and hand-me-down trusses   

Huddle together dreaming in a desolation

Of dry groins.

I think of poor men astonished to waken   

Exposed in broad daylight by the blade   

Of a strange plough.

   5

All over the walls of comb cells

Automobiles perfumed and blindered   

Consent with a mutter of high good humor   

To take their two naps a day.

Without sound windows glide back

Into dusk.

The sockets of a thousand blind bee graves tier upon tier

Tower not quite toppling.

There are men in this city who labor dawn after dawn

To sell me my death.

   6

But I could not bear

To allow my poor brother my body to die

In Minneapolis.

The old man Walt Whitman our countryman

Is now in America our country

Dead.

But he was not buried in Minneapolis

At least.

And no more may I be Please God.

   7

I want to be lifted up

By some great white bird unknown to the police,

And soar for a thousand miles and be carefully hidden   

Modest and golden as one last corn grain,

Stored with the secrets of the wheat and the mysterious lives   

Of the unnamed poor.

Been listening to my Delgados collection this trip: