I do love baseball, and I am always a little glum when the last game of the season ends and winter buckles on its galoshes. Though I was rooting hard for the Blue Jays and game 7 didn't end as I'd hoped, this World Series was nonetheless excellent: one thrilling game after another and so many stellar performances. It was a fine end-of-summer party.

Yesterday's class went well, I think, despite a couple of unnerving participant emergencies. The quality of the poets' drafts is really, really high, to my great delight. Whitman is unlocking something for these writers.

Now, if only I can prevent them from scrubbing the dirt off their messy starts and tying up their flapping loose ends and inventing neat logical transitions and shaping tidy conclusions and nailing their metaphors to the wall, etc. That is the big danger: the urge to reduce, fix, polish, when you're in the midst of a sloppy strange mystery. I know there are participants in the class who feel safest when they're in control. But this is primordial mud we're tracking all over the house. I hope, hope, hope they will try hard to keep their mops in the cupboard.