I woke up to Rod Blagojevich this morning.

Let me clarify.

He was on “Good Morning America,” being interviewed by Diane Sawyer.

My husband, flipping through the channels in his daily quest of up-to-the-minute local weather, had the television on “mute” until Blagojevich appeared, when, naturally, he elbowed me in the ribs so that I woke instantly to the weirdly Travolta-esque whine of Blago’s repeated assertion that what he’d been doing all along was acting on behalf of the good people of Illinois.

(If you need a Spark’s Notes sort of update, let me point you to Lynn Sweet’s article at the Chicago Sun-Times; I’m a fan of hers, and she offers a straightforward accounting of this morning’s interview:

Of course the GREAT, AMAZING, FABULOUS moment was when Blagojevich said he’d approached Oprah Winfrey to take Obama’s senate seat.

Immediately I sat up in bed (even...

Want a fight? Ask someone’s opinion of a poem.

I had NO idea. I was kidding when I wondered if we were going to the mattresses over a poem.

(True note: of my undergraduates, a non-old-movie-type kid from Ohio whom I didn’t even know read the blog, asked me whether “going to the mattresses” had some kind of subtle sexual innuendo of which she was unaware. She had never heard the phrase. Although she didn’t say it directly, I suspect she was curious about whether poetry and sex always went together. I delivered a short lecture about The Godfather Trilogy and Mario Puzo’s novels. I believe I only baffled her further.)

Anyway, do you have any idea how thrilled I am to have started this row?

(To be honest, had I been wiser, I would have known that asking readers what they thought about a specific work of wildly public poetry would get at least as many responses as an earlier...

I have to ask: what did you think of the inaugural poem “Praise Song for the Day” by Yale professor and poet Elizabeth Alexander?

We’ve been arguing about it most of the day, and I want to throw the question out there even though it makes me a little nervous.

From what I’ve been hearing in the hallways and reading on various Web sites, there is a wide divide between those who found it to be an appropriate, original, complex and moving piece of poetry and those who regarded it as trite, tedious, uninspiring, and barely even a poem.

Interestingly enough, the aesthetic assessments of Alexander’s work appeared to have little connection to the political leaning of the person responding. Does art, or the attempt to make art, transcend politics?

I have deeply conservative friends who said that Alexander’s reading of the poem was the only humble, sincere, acceptable part of the...

“You ARE going to the &$# BALL!” I yelled into the phone, voice in full-Brooklyn fishwife.

I’d become the opposite of Cinderella’s benign Godmother; I was the Stepmother From Elm Street. My youngest kid and his wife were invited to one of the Inaugural Balls and they weren’t sure whether they should go, given the expense, the complexity of travel plans, the time away from work, etc.

He didn’t relish the idea of getting a tux.

“Go to a FILENE’S BASEMENT! GO TO A THRIFT SHOP IN A FANCY NEIGHBORHOOD! BRIBE A HEAD WAITER!” I was shouting into the receiver as my husband tried to pry my hands from the phone.

An INAUGURAL BALL? Someone related to my family? We’ve always been the type of group not usually permitted to enter the Department of Motor Vehicles without an escort.

The kid (an attorney in his 30s, I should explain) earned the invite; he was an Obama staff member since...

So far 52 seems fine. Whew.

Okay, so I got called a “windbag” by one disgruntled reader of the previous post, but most of you were generous beyond measure and enormously, affectionately, wonderfully kind.

Thank you.

My bet is that you wouldn’t believe how much having these exchanges means to me. Many of the responses were from former students, current colleagues (near and far). I adore the fact that people who could (and do) pick up the phone and ask for me to come and have a cup of coffee next week, actually read the blog.

There are other surprises.

I was tickled, for example, that John Jackson said he’d raise a glass — that meant a lot, especially because I’ve never met John Jackson.

(Actually, I’ve never met any of my Brainstorm colleagues, which is a little odd given how much time we spend in one another’s virtual company. I mean, it’s not like we all get together...

Tomorrow is my birthday.

Thank you.

I like birthdays. I love telling people my age. Not because they’re surprised by the number: I look so precisely the way a non-surgically-enhanced, non-jazzercizing, woman in her 50s is meant to look there’s no need for anyone, ever, to fake the “I CAN’T believe it!” response.

No, the reason I like mentioning my age is because people are indeed surprised — but their deep sense of shock comes from the fact that I’m willing to say my age out loud. A few of them even seem to panic a little bit, as if I’m immediately going to start discussing other scary subjects, clutching at their lapels to argue about hormonal imbalances, equal pay for equal work, or cellulite.

This delights me.

I’m so delighted by telling the truth unasked that I will occasionally begin a speech by stating my age and weight so that no member of the audience has to...

So I get an e-mail containing what has emerged as the world’s single most terrifying statement: “I wasn’t sure if you knew there was a clip of you as a student on YouTube.”

Oh. My. God.

But the sender is friendly correspondent — isn’t she? Although a friendly correspondent could also be the one warning you that you’ve got to be careful, got to call in the lawyer and — at the very least — warn the spouse.

Oh. My God.

Not that I did a damn thing wilder than anybody else between 1975 and 1978. Seriously. And certainly NOT while anybody with a video or film camera was around. Those things were HUGE back then — not like the tiny evil cell camera movie-making possibilities existing today and putting all of us in jeopardy.

Not that I’m bitter.

But there I am, dumb-struck, open-mouthed, and wide-eyed — no kidding — by this wholly unexpected (I have to say it, because we’re talking...

There were two great articles in The Wall Street Journal today: one titled “Blockbuster or Bust” by Anita Elberse, an associate professor at the Harvard Business School and another called “Why We Keep Falling for Financial Scams” by Stephen Greenspan, emeritus professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut.

I read Elberse’s first, despite the fact that Greenspan’s appeared on the front page of the Weekend Journal. You’ll understand why: Elberse’s piece had as its irresistible subtitle “Why struggling publishers will keep placing outrageous bids on new books.”

Did I have a choice? No. I swallowed the piece whole.

This is a subject: 1. close to my heart; 2. one which keeps me eating that same heart OUT as I try to comprehend why Sarah Silverman (attractive as she is, and as much as I enjoyed her video “I’m F***ing Matt Damon” as well as her video “The Great ...

My deal with myself is that I’m allowed to watch anything I want when I’m on the treadmill. So I’m watching a show I’ve never seen before — Intervention (more about this bizarre program in a later post, don’t worry) — and oddly enough the ads that keep popping up are for NutriSystem. I hate them, but I’m watching them in order to put in my time on the treadmill (don’t get me started on irony). I don’t know what struck me as odd about the ad placements since the theme of the entire show was simply restraint, withholding, abstinence, and self-deprivation.

But all that aside, what really got my attention was the fact that NutriSystem offers distinctly different diet plans for men and for women.

At least that’s what their ads say. There I am in my unfinished basement under the bare light bulb in a T-shirt from the ice cream store my husband worked at when he was a kid, wearing...

“Forget about washing your face” he said, “And come to bed.”

He was holding my face in his hands. I was thinking, now we were alone, “Eight hours on the plane, and I must look like hell; he hasn’t seen me in four months; my mouth is a lint filled dryer and if I throw my arms around his neck he’ll smell thirty weeks of tears, he’ll smell my fear, my craving for him, and that one-way ticket bringing me like a homesick angel to Heathrow today? It will be a joke.”

His voice was husky when he said again “Come to bed” but this time he rubbed his cheek against my neck when he said it. I felt the heat of his breath, smelled his worry, tasted his moist, afraid mouth, and so stinking and grinning and sweating we fell, wrapped together like ribbons untied into Boxing Day.