Happy Thanksgiving

This nightmare got me out of bed:

I was teaching college again and couldn’t get the whippersnappers to hear, let alone listen to, what I was saying – not least because my mother was visiting the class, and her phone kept ringing. It played the overture to Rossini’s William Tell.

I had to ask her to leave the room.

I hope the students understood the gravity of the offense.

Happy Thanksgiving. Karin took Daniel and Abel to her mother’s. I stayed behind with Samuel, who was ill. I cleaned the basement.

I’ve been mystified by a billboard proclaiming KFC’s temporary “festive” pot-pie. How’s it supposed to differ from ordinary pot-pie?

My research has yielded no satisfactory answer – although I’ve read that this pot-pie doesn’t contain turkey (as I thought it might).

Obviously, to find out, I should hike over to KFC and eat one of these new pot-pies.

P.S. Karin wonders if the campaign is a response to McDonald’s’s “holiday” pies.

Mansfield Park

This novel is more savage than its predecessors. Its matrons and widows are at least as pharisaical as those of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice; its young gentlemen, at least as dissolute. In addition, the family’s fortune depends on volatile West Indian holdings. Will the slaves generate enough income to make up for the profligacy of the eldest son? And what will befall poor little Fanny Price, the household’s live-in cousin?

I don’t know how this story will turn out. For once, I’m in suspense.

The movie didn’t appear until 1999. I won’t be reviewing it for my “1996” series – at least, not for many years. (Recall that I’ve been casting a wider net, reviewing material that appeared from 1995 to 1997.)

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I’m nine or so books behind my hoped-for reading pace. So, recently, I read two celebrated mini-books: Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, about Ireland’s Magdalene laundries; and Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, about Nazi Germany, the USSR, and Donald Trump.

You could argue that they’re basically the same book. To use jargon from my old job as a tutor in IUSB’s first-year writing program: the second book is a “theory” text, and the first is an “example” text; and a student who read both books could write a paper making plenty of connections between them (one connection per body paragraph, of course).

(I wonder how teachers of first-year English at IU are coping with A.I. Not too badly, I expect. The in-house rules for papers are so detailed and peculiar, the bots probably still haven’t learned how to follow them.)

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This is Disney’s best song.

Abel has been standing up next to the furniture.