Today was the day of Eve Ate the Apple - the all-day reading of Paradise Lost, masterminded and organized by Ann Coiro and attended by all kinds of luminaries - you'll be sorry to have missed Ben Sifuentes-Jauregui reading Satan, wearing shiny red glitter horns, or Phil Furmanski ventriloquizing the same anti-hero - who somehow ended up reading the lines "I should ill become this throne, O peers,/And this imperial sovereignty, adorned/With splendour, armed with power, if aught proposed/And judged of public moment, in the shape/Of difficulty or danger could deter/Me from attempting." I managed to grab my favorite pieces about light and sight - including the line about Hell "no light, but rather darkness visible" - that somehow I try and assimilate to Flash! - and the invocation that opens Book III, in which the blind Milton looks inward for illumination.
And it was also Murray Hall's birthday! (more or less). And we cut two cakes - yes, obviously, devil's food cake and angel cake. Thank you, Rick, once again for your inspirational event planning! In class yesterday, we were talking (when not wrestling with Barthes) about the odd places in which photographs could now turn up (I'm still mystified about the tattooing process, by the way), and they included Cakes. And here, like an on-time visual aid, was Murray Hall, twice over, adorning these gooey concoctions. English Department Chairs, past and present and (sigh) future, were handing out slices: I took especial pleasure in choosing a slice for Quionne that meant that she could eat her office. Yes, of course, those are apples in the background.
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