Blur

Today was pretty much the Hump Day of the Hump Week of the Hump Month: the semester is a downhill road from here. Students who haven't managed to overcome their propensity for oversleeping, spacing out in class or with homework, and the like are probably not going to pull out of their current patterns, and this is the week when I stop overextending myself and trying to haul them back onto the Happy Raft. Sink or swim, y'all. I have my own paddling to do.

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We're trying a different med for the headaches. We'll see how it goes.

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And now, let's play Name That Novel! I copied pages from several books, pulled more-or-less randomly from home, to use for our erasures a while back. A few days later, in one of my comp sections, something made me remember and refer to the following passage. Students swore I was misremembering the scene, and that it was from another of the author's novels, but when I came home and checked, there it was--and here it is:

". . . [X], frightened at the spreading thighs, alone in the house, and horrified at the screaming wretch his wife had become, went mad with apprehension. Using his hands, his strong fingers for forceps, he had pulled and twisted the baby. The midwife, arriving late, had found the baby's head pulled out of shape, its neck stretched, its body warped; and she had pushed the head back and molded the body with her hands. But [X] always remembered, and was ashamed."

First person to correctly identify the title and author wins, oh I don't know, a slightly dogeared copy of Allison Funk's chapbook From the Sketchbooks of Vanessa Bell. (A nice chapbook!)

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Two words: GO, BOSTON!

[photo: driver's side blur, 10/12/07]