I just got word that I'll be teaching a lyric-essay class for the Solstice MFA program! This makes me very happy, as does the conversation accruing around the poem in yesterday's post. I also made some progress with that sucking-drain-of-badness poem I was complaining about a couple of days ago. So despite the ongoing wretched condition of our driveway, things seem to be looking up around here.

To celebrate, I've started reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina again. I daresay I will have to skip the train scene and the scene when she leaves her son. I can't reread George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss or John Updike's Rabbit, Run without skipping the drowning scenes; and if anything, Anna Karenina is worse because Anna's tortured decision making is woven so thoroughly into the plot. I wince about Shakespeare's Othello too. Oh, poor Desdemona: everything goes wrong for her. As much as I love rereading, it has a serious down side that cannot be avoided. I always know what's coming.