LAX

LAX was empty, and so, relatively speaking, was my plane.   I could probably have stretched out and slept the entire way back - oh, dream on.   As it was, I finished my grading just as we were dropping into Newark.   Curious how setting a weekly response paper for an undergraduate class seems like a really good idea, pedagogically - but one then has to live with the regular consequences.   But they are (mostly) writing!   And they are (mostly) writing well!   And I also finished re-reading To the Lighthouse - which I would think that I knew well - hell, I even, once upon a time, did an edition of it - but it squirms and shifts and becomes a different text each time that I read it - and this week, re-reading it straight after The Waste Land, I became very conscious of how the novel echoes the poem - not just the obvious stuff like anxieties about finding form and unity and at the same time realising that everything is shifting, but the rather awkward and failed attempts at demotic speech and thought, and the way in which myths and (in the case of Woolf alone, I think) fairy tales are appealed to.   So I know, at least, where tomorrow's class will start ...