I asked my students what images they associate with love, what metaphors and similes come to mind. “Love is a battlefield,” they answer, thinking of old Pat Benatar. “Love is a warm puppy,” they answer, thinking of old Charlie Brown.

I thought these were pretty old-fashioned responses.

I asked my friends the same question and also got old answers: “Love is an aching in the heart,” replies one, citing the Supremes song; “Love has no pride,” replies another, departing from the linguistic angle of the question in order to invoke Bonnie Raitt. Answers come from Peggy Lee: “Fever”; Aretha Franklin: “Respect”; Martha and the Vandellas: “Heat Wave”; and Patsy Cline: “Crazy.”

Bonnie reminded me of a bizarre song popular when we were growing up called “The Bright Elusive Butterfly of Love.” It included lines saying you might wake up some morning to “the sound of something moving...

I’ve been teaching a later schedule for the past couple of years, getting into the office around noon and finishing my last class around 9:30, when it’s dark and the hallways are empty. Now I’m back to teaching at 8 a.m., meaning I get to the office by 6:30. The hallways are still empty and, except for the cleaning crew, I’m the only one around for about half an hour. It’s light when I get to work, but it won’t be by December, when the final classes meet and the year winds down.

The last semester I taught an 8 o’clock class was fall of 2001. That perfect autumn morning I remember teaching a class on Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, explaining some key points from Freud’s essay “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life,” and kidding about how little had changed over the last 89 years.

It wasn’t until 9:15, when I saw my husband waiting for me outside my classroom door,...

Picturing

Weeks before your death you cut yourself out of family photographs. Baby pictures show only babies, no smiling mother. Children hold onto empty spaces, seeming silly.

Scissors move straight through the middle of some: there’s my father in front of the house, alone; there’s the tree in the backyard full of flowers with no one underneath it. It is as if you wanted to see, exactly, how the world would look without you. Cutting through those pictures must have been like opening a vein, the sharp point making a furrow right through the past.

But still I see you, in the parking lot with the red and blue market behind you; you smile at me as I carry the packages. We open the car doors, switch the radio on, and drive away.

(Illustration incorporates an image from Flickr Creative Commons)

OK, I gotta say it: Palin did a good enough job just now for me to feel she’s a real enough politician to be called by her surname.

I was more impressed by her acceptance speech than I thought I would be — not by her message, because there wasn’t any, but by her poise and ability to deliver a funny line without stepping on it. She was much better, for example, than Mitt Romney, who would have got the hook on an old Vaudeville stage and who would never have been heard from again (banned from the platform for having chosen such an absurdly ill-fitting role to play).

Yep, whoever wrote Palin’s script gets full marks, but — to be fair — her timing, too, was excellent. An 8.7, I’d say (points off for snarling and grimacing at key moments and for the pit-bull hockey-mom analogy).

She did forfeit a few points with me when she dragged the kids out, one by one, after saying IN BIG...

(Opinion crossposted at Campaign U. … contains links to material some readers may find objectionable … )

Turns out that Jo Anne Worley from Laugh-In is Sarah Palin’s body double:

This is Palin’s performance in the McCain campaign so far.

This is my favorite line from Elayne Boosler:

“You ever notice that the same people who are against abortion are for capital punishment? Typical fisherman’s attitude, throw ‘em back when they’re small and kill ‘em when they’re bigger. … Conservatives are against sex education in the schools because they think there is a connection between promiscuity and sex education, meaning that kids do it because they learn about it in class. No way. I had four years of algebra and I never do math. These are the folks who say they’re against abortion because birth is a miracle. Hey, popcorn is a miracle, too, if you don’t know how it’s done.”

And a...

One of my favorite bumper sticker declares: “Unions: the folks who brought you the Weekend.” Unions also brought us this weekend’s holiday (for those who have Monday off, that is…).

Personally, I take Labor Day seriously, even though doesn’t have the same significance for me as it does for some people because I don’t own white shoes. But I like Labor Day for what it conjures up: images of hot-dogs, stoop-based Spauldings games, the day-before-school-starts, and ladies fanning themselves with folded paper plates.

I also like it because I am a working-class girl. It is a badge I wear proudly, along with “Union Made.” (And yes, “Union Maid.” That too.)

Soon after she got off the boat from Sicily, my grandmother started sewing buttonholes for the shirts of elegant, unknown men who worked in offices— while she herself, and her seven children, worked and lived in a tenement on the...

My former student, Hanley, called me this afternoon and said “You’re not voting for McCain, are you?”

Hanley teaches tough kids in New Hampshire (yes, they exist) and is writing a novel. He’s a smart kid himself and we talk about his writing a couple of times a month even though he graduated from UConn a few years ago. He took several classes with me and knows me pretty well.

He knew, therefore, that asking if I intend to vote for McCain is like asking me whether I’m going to start teaching Jazzercise or learning to skydive. These are not reasonable questions. Certainly not for a person who is sober.

But I hadn’t heard the news about Sarah Palin, you see. I hadn’t heard that McCain threw his trackers off-scent and decided to appoint a 44-year-old woman as his v.p. candidate.

Hanley was afraid that I would find her gender more persuasive than her politics.

I told him the...

A real Weblog would have me talking like a regular person, right? I mean, writing all the time about the talking all the time that goes on in my head, narrating my life in the pointless, pointillist way one does just in order to keep going, keep sane, when nobody is listening and nobody is watching and god knows nobody at all is expected to read?

Since this is the first day of classes, and since I have finished teaching these first of my classes, maybe I should entirely indulge myself and write in an unfiltered legit blog voice.

(Would that be called a “bloice” by those who make a habit, or a profession — it’s probably a profession by now; somebody has a Web site about it, I’m sure, somebody is making a profit from it somewhere — out of combing words?)

But I’m not sure I can unedit myself, put words into some kind of order without looking at them the way an English professor look...

Five Things First Year Students Need To Hear

1. Don’t call your parents every time you need to make a decision, not even the really huge ones like about which socks to wear on the first day of class or what to do if your roommate’s iPod is too loud;

2. If your roommate’s iPod is too loud, gesture to your roommate to remove the earbud and have a conversation. You remember conversation. It’s that thing that happens when people speak in words while not texting or being on the phone with someone else. Conversations are good. Learn how to have them, even with people you haven’t met before. Make eye contact and smile — please don’t be too hip or cool to smile — and say hello. Introduce yourself. It’s one of the best things you’ll ever learn how to do;

3. Don’t just keep doing what you’ve always done before. Remember, university life houses both the arrivals and the departures gates — if ...

A transcript:

“Nobody ever inherits a trait directly, not from your parents or your family or even from your ancestors. What you have instead is a tendency toward something. It turns out that you have a real talent for mathematics: Maybe your Uncle Leo is a mathematician. It doesn’t mean that you inherited your skills or that there’s some genetic imprint in your family that’s fond of decimal numbers. What it could mean is that you and Uncle Leo were both students of a great mathematician at some point. The real implication is that you’ve had a lot of experiences in other lives working with mathematical concepts, with numbers, ideas, theories, and in this lifetime you get to exercise those skills. You may have picked a family for this life that you knew would encourage your love for a field or some particular talent. But it’s not part of your DNA. Better to think of it as part of your 1...