Largemouth bass

I have decided finally to follow in the illustrious footsteps of Adam Clayton, Flea, and my niece and learn to play bass. So far I have no callouses on my fingers, but I have made it through the Hal Leonard Bass Method Book 1 and am well into book two. And I can do the vamp from the White Stripes's "Seven Nation Army." Bow-ba-bow-bow-bow boooow bow. Ah, the gentle embrace of the bass clef. She is a tender mistress indeed. Soon there will be a terrible garage band. Now if I could only figure out how to mute my strings.

May we with right & conscience make this claime?

So here's some good news: I've been approved and contracted to edit Henry V for an actual full-on peer-reviewed Shakespeare edition. Who the hell am I to undertake such a task? You may well ask, but somehow (probably with no little amount of dodgy back channel pleading on the part of my colleagues and friends ) I've gotten a proposal for an edition accepted by an editorial board. Said approval was not without my share of snarky comments and jabs at the thinness of my critical underpinnings (ooo, matron!), but at any rate, I've got a project to look forward to after the completion of the monograph. Wahoo.

What this means, of course, is that I have to produce an edition worthy of a decent Shakespeare series, which is a bit terrifying, but overall it contributes to my growing sense that maybe I'm an actual professional academic after all. I'm writing a book, I've got grad students to guide, mold, and usher about at SAA--does that make them my own advisor's grandstudents or something?--anyway, I'm suddenly feeling like somebody on occasion.

As my increasingly smelly and urgently pee-filled dog keeps reminding me, I have other duties to attend to. More later.

January

I always save reading my student evaluations until January, when I'm in a foul mood anyway. And since M. went back to law school this morning, my mood could hardly be bleaker. I wasn't going to read them until later today, but then a member of the evaluation committee casually mentioned in the hallway that one of my students from last semester hated everything about me. Cited offenses:

• Rudeness (quite possible, but always tempered with love and respect)
• Making fun of people's religion (it's likely that someone heard a mocking tone once or twice when I speak of religion in general, but I usually don't overtly mock it out loud, and certainly not with specific people in mind; anyway, it's hard not to take an irreverent tone toward religion in general when teaching the Reformation)
• Mocking speech impediments (I can't even think of who in my class had a mockable speech impediment, and I certainly don't recall mocking one. If anything, I tried to keep everyone's malice away from the more awkwardly-spoken students)

It doesn't matter for my temperament, of course, if this evaluation is outweighed by thirty glowing ones. My day is ruined regardless. The drawback of wanting to be liked.

I was thrown a lovely birthday party on Saturday last by my dear bride, who spent the majority of the day making tapas. The evening concluded, though, with a long discussion of ghosts and hauntings, and though I am a skeptic dyed not so much in the wool as in the deep dermis, I was a little spooked by my friends' experiences with angry specters and flying cans of beans. Then just before bed and after an hour's conversation about cowboy ghosts in New Mexico, M discovered a small white box wrapped in twine on the hall table, which I opened to reveal two tin cowboys. Why? I have no idea how this could be significant as either a birthday gift or a joke. It's just baffling, and more so because no one at the party admits to leaving them. I slept with the lights on, expecting to be assaulted by demon-possessed tin cowboy golems at any time. Still puzzling it.