Now Playing: Flook, "Haven," "Souter Creek."

Appropriate music for today: it's been raining all day. Rain, rain, rain. Tiny yellow sweet gum leaves on the wet sidewalks, pressed and curled like baby hands, and vivid scarlet-and-gold sugar maple leaves bright as headlights through a window, and brown-and-yellow elm leaves furled like sherds of pottery.

Work, work, work. I'm trying to do a better job of preparing my students for their second essay, which is due on Friday. Being observed on Wednesday doesn't help the stress level, unfortunately.

Another perfect autumn evening happened today when Scott and I came back to my house from medieval Latin reading group. It was just starting to sprinkle outside as we walked in the door. Laura sat against the sofa, facing out onto the back patio through the open door, reading. The house was quiet. Scott and I started to make tea for my housemates, Cindy, Mary, and Eric. Since Kroger's cilantro selection left much to be desired, Scott had the delightful job of picking out the slimy or brown leaves from the bunch, while I chopped up chicken and marinated it in buttermilk.

Chicken curry was the main item on the menu tonight, straight out of an Indian-food-made-easy cookbook I bought at Borders in Chicago. While the wok heated, I diced tomatoes and onions, furiously trying to have them ready before the butter in the bottom of the wok started to spatter. Scott and Eric stood by, watching. In the living room, Cindy, Ethan, and Laura were chatting.

With Scott and Eric still keeping a lackadaisical eye on me, I sauteed the onions and garlic with cinnamon sticks, whole cloves, cardamom, and turmeric. Then tomatoes. Then, when all of that had become this sweet-smelling, bubbling mass, I added the chicken, and it all bubbled away together. Mary arrived, exuberant, flailing, uproariously energetic, and set about making a pear-and-spinach salad.

Just before the curry finished simmering, I threw in the actual curry powder, and Scott added the fresh cilantro. While we waited for it, we munched on the salad, and when at last it was ready, we all sat around the living room, cradling our bowls of warm, creamy curry and rice, and drinking the rich, red wine Eric had brought. Rain spattered on the patio behind us, and a north breeze swirled through the still-open patio door.

But inside everything was warm, fragrant, rich. We all sat around and talked, planning a trip to the opera sometime in the next few weeks, discussing books, etc. Laura and Mary cooked up a scheme for making a B-rated horror film. To follow the curry we had a red-wine-and-chocolate cake Laura had baked, with delicious fluffy icing.

After tea, Ethan, Lindsay, Scott, and I drove to the IU Auditorium for an orchestra concert at eight o'clock. We scuttled through the rain, keeping our heads down against the chilly wind. Inside we found that we were joining a stream of people into the auditorium, up through the tunnel from the atrium into the auditorium itself. Red plush seats, gold railings, gilt trim around the stage.

The orchestra played three pieces tonight. The entire second half of the concert was Camille Saint-Saens's Symphony No. 3 in C minor, "Organ." Fantastic (medieval Latin fantastic-us , late Latin phantasticus , < Greek ϕανταστικός , < ϕαντάζειν to make visible (middle voice ϕαντάζεσθαι , in late Greek to imagine, have visions) OED) in the true sense of the word: Gothic, evocative of Jane Eyre and The Hunchback of Notre Dame rolled into one--perfect for a stormy September evening.

In highschool I used to listen to this piece over and over, imagining all sorts of wild, grim, Scottish-Highlands-type stories to accompany the music. Yet I love the opening of the final movement, and indeed the whole final movement, with its resolution into clarion, bell-pealing, golden-toned victory. The organ, of course, helps with this, with its bold, clanging chords, as do the strings, which have incredibly difficult phrases to play as they build anticipation. Such a great piece.


After the concert Lisa, who had joined us after class, and the rest of us met up with Peter, who's sitting first chair in the orchestra right now. We all congratulated him on a job well done before making our way home through the rain.

Laura, Lindsay, and I watched The Pianist this evening. Now I want to listen to lots and lots of Chopin, and maybe Beethoven's "Moonlight." A gut-wrenching production, though not quite as intense as Schindler's List. Having seen both those films, I think I'm finished with World War II tales for a little while.

Every time I watch a World War II film, it makes me wonder what would happen if that were to happen here, now, again--what we would do, what would become of us--not just our society as a whole, but my small network of friends and family. A natural reaction, I suppose. The images of burned-out, bombed buildings make me shiver with the closeness of such a happening. I look at my cozy townhouse and know that one packet of explosives would reduce it in a few seconds, adding it to that landscape of past and future ruins.

Laura and I were musing after the film about how World War II really isn't that far away. It still looms over our cultural landscape, even as other wars have begun to replace it in immediacy. I sometimes think that the Holocaust is the nightmare of academia, and that that is what drives gender and race studies--the fear of such brutal discrimination returning.

For most of my class of freshman composition students, though, World War II may be much more in the shadowy past. Laura has a great-grandmother who endured the war in a concentration camp in Latvia; I have a grandfather who was at Normandy. Losing that generation will mean losing perspective. Even though films can't capture the horror of that war, at least they force me to remember what is at stake when something like that arises again. And they prompt me to be thankful for the comparative peace I enjoy now.

This past week was crazy but good.

Last Friday, Syneva drove up from Nashville to visit. It was really wonderful to get to see her. She, Cindy, and I went out to dinner at a Turkish restaurant. Though the evening was really too warm to sit outside, we did, and we ate delicious minty soup and grape leaves. On Saturday, Syneva, Scott, and I braved the heat again in order to go to the Fourth Street Festival, where we saw works by all sorts of local artists--woodworkers, painters, sculptors, glass-blowers, leather-workers, potters, etc.

On Monday it cooled down suddenly, so Laura organized a bonfire to celebrate the beginning of autumn. We have a fire pit behind our house, which served the occasion perfectly. Laura bought a big bag of enormous marshmallows for us to toast. Grant G., Peter, Nathaniel, Eric, Cindy, and Scott all joined us.

Then Emmaline flew into Indianapolis on Tuesday evening. Scott and I drove up to the airport to collect her. It was as though no time at all had passed since we'd seen each other; we picked right up with catching up on each other's lives. She stayed until Friday afternoon. Whenever I wasn't in class, we were doing things together: shopping at the mall, visiting Nashville to look at the artisans' shops, hiking Lake Griffey, exploring the zoo, or eating with friends from church. Scott even cooked a delicious pasta sauce for us one evening.

Yesterday afternoon was the church outreach picnic. Since I'm on the outreach committee, I helped set up, which took a solid couple of hours. During most of the picnic, I played with the small children, which was my designated job. Mostly that meant pushing Jane on the swing and opening bottles of bubbles and packages of chalk for the kids. It also meant that I got to talk to their parents--Wes and Angie, Amy, Minda--which was quite pleasant.

So it's been a wonderful week for hanging out with people, but now I'm a bit behind on school, so tomorrow will be an intense reading day.

Photos from last week are here.