Grumpy Professors

If there's any garden flower that decomposes as beautifully as a zinnia, I'm not sure what it is.

I mean, look at these weird, feathery little projections coming from the center of the blossom in this extreme close-up. They're like gills, or some other protrusions you'd find on an undersea creature. Nature is so strange.

There's not much to say about yesterday. I spent the morning mostly reading, and a roofing team visited in the afternoon at the behest of the landlords, who are thinking about some roof repairs. All I had to do was let them in the side gate so they could check out the property. The repair job itself isn't supposed to happen until next spring, and it will probably be hugely disruptive because I imagine there will be scaffolding and who knows what else, so we have that to look forward to.

I came across two quotes in my reading that I thought were pretty interesting. The first was from a New Yorker profile of author Barbara Kingsolver, who lives on a farm in rural southwestern Virginia:

Because of her Zip Code, Kingsolver has long been a kind of MAGA whisperer, an unofficial Ambassador of Real America. She hopes that that gig ends soon, and dismisses the possibility of Trumpism having a successor, insisting that the President has cultivated a cult of personality, not a lasting political movement. (“He chose a Vice-President with the charisma of a turd,” she adds.)

God, I hope she's right -- that Trumpism is a political blip.

And the second was from the book I'm reading of journalist Thomas Mallon's diaries from the early 1980s. He wrote this in April 1984 while teaching at Vassar, where some teachers were lamenting the lassitude exhibited by their students:

Reached the limits of my patience in English 226...You see, (the students) don't do their work because they have "problems" -- emotions of one kind or another: that's all "problems" means. And the underlying assumption is a hyper-romantic one that the emotions make work impossible, that it is an inevitable and necessary thing for work to give way before them. That work can sometimes be an escape from emotion never occurs to them, because it never occurs to them that emotions sometimes should be escaped. That would be "artificial" and "insincere."

This struck me as funny because it seems so contemporary. Wouldn't many teachers grouse in the exact same way today? We're always hearing about what "snowflakes" young people are. And this was in 1984! The kids he was writing about are my generation -- I was a college freshman that year. I must say I don't think I ever shirked an assignment because of "problems," but maybe I did and just don't remember.

I walked the dog in the evening. We're seeing more of that golden autumnal light, the long shadows of fall.