Posts have been woefully sparse since school began. My apologies. Here is a brief rundown of today. Maybe you'll get a taste for what life has been like this fall. 

25 October 2011. Very tired today. My own fault, I suppose. It is rather demoralizing to wake up just over five hours after you went to sleep, to a world that looks almost exactly the same: pitch-black outside, pitch-black inside. Shower, e-mails. LMB made baked oatmeal for breakfast, which was delicious. By the time I stepped outside to catch the nine o’clock bus, the morning had become spectacular: lapidary, crisp, the sky brilliant, leaves and lawns infused with yellow sunshine. I walked briskly from the bus stop to Weatherly, where my office is, and met for about five minutes with one of my better students about the essay due tomorrow. Then I walked to Scott’s house. As I walked, I thought hard about the final project for L758, my late medieval literature seminar, for which I'm hoping to write a paper about theories about absorption in art, and about late medieval Books of Hours.

At Scott's house, Blanche, the white cat, greeted me. Scott was just leaving to meet with his adviser, so we stood outside and chatted for a bit before he left. He has very kindly given some of us keys to his house. I went indoors, curled up on the living room sofa, and dozed for about half-an-hour. The old furnace purred up through the 1930s-vintage grates, the white sunshine fell in still oblongs on the dark hardwood floor, and the cats rattled their food bowls in the kitchen. Eventually, I went back outside to sit on the patio and read my Bible, Isaiah 6 this morning. The passage worked oxymoronically for me: reading about God's holiness, I was struck by His nearness, by the parallel between the hem of His robe filling the temple and the woman in Mark 5 touching the hem of Christ's robe and being healed.

Scott came home, and we sat on the back patio, talking over tea/coffee in the cool autumn sunshine. Blanche tried to poke her face into our cups but was deterred by the steam. At about half eleven, Mary came over. The three of us went inside, ate lunch, and discussed our seminar readings for this week about Pearl. Then we walked to campus for class at one o'clock.

Seminar today lasted from one until four. After the seminar I stayed in the classroom with the other half-dozen grad students who are also in Old English from a quarter-past-four to half five. Today we had a midterm exam. I had studied thoroughly, I thought, but there were still a couple of questions out of left field that made me flounder. Oh, well. Nothing I could do about it. At half five I went to another talk for W501, this time by an expert in teaching composition. She led an engaging workshop. 

Mary and I ducked out at the end to drive out to the Cs' house. For Bible study this semester, we've asked women in the church to present to us once or twice a month about their life experiences, testimonies, lessons, etc. Mrs. C had graciously offered to host us at her house and lead the first of these talks. The Cs are quite lavish in their hospitality. Everyone came tonight: Carmen, Courtney, Cindy, Laura, Lisa, Mary, and even two Chinese girls, Lilly and Charlene. Mrs. C was as upbeat and joyful as ever. Afterward she and her daughters served pumpkin pie and apple pie to us, and we all stood around and talked.

When we got home, I went straight up to my room and sat down to answer a stack of student e-mails: questions about and a draft of their essay due tomorrow. Now it's time for bed. It will all begin again in the morning. Tomorrow I need to translate a long passage from Bede for Old English on Thursday and start reading the York Mystery Plays for seminar next week. Also in class I'll be given a nice thick stack of essays to grade.

Now Playing: Antonin Dvorak, "New World" symphony.

Photos of our house-painting party this past Saturday are in this album, and photos from Bob's birthday party are in this album.

Now Playing: Haydn, Concerto in C Major for Cello and Orchestra.

This piece has been stuck in my head all evening, which is my own fault, because I've been listening to it over and over again. Scott and I drove up to DePauw last Friday to see Yo-Yo Ma play, and this was one of the pieces he performed. It was a glorious day: high autumn, quintessential autumn, fields of stubble running smoothly into forest-eaves gilt and garishly colored like the painted rafters of a medieval parish church. Blue sky. Intense sunshine.

Yo-Yo Ma is quite a performer. His presence fills the auditorium when he walks onstage. He likes to talk a lot and make jokes, and while he plays he nods and winks at the audience or at the other musicians onstage. The concert hall at DePauw's music school has surprisingly excellent acoustics. The strings sounded amazingly warm, hospitable, joyful. Yo-Yo Ma also played one of Bach's suites for unaccompanied cello and an andante by Tchaikovsky.

Last week was an insanely good week for music. In addition to the Yo-Yo Ma concert, on Wednesday a group of us (Courtney, Matt, Mary, Eric, Lisa, Scott, and me) went to a performance by one of the IU symphony orchestras. They played Dvorak's "New World" symphony. Glorious. Almost every time I hear one of these orchestras play, I remember why recordings simply aren't good enough. The recorded pieces even out the tambres of the instruments, hide some parts, distort dynamics, etc., so when I hear a live orchestra play, the piece always has far more richness and depth--startlingly more, in fact.

Then the Saturday night before, we went to see Cosi fan Tutte, a production put on by the IU opera. A Mozart comedy: simplistic plot, cynical ending, good music.