Philistine

So it’s the weekend, and my schedule has settled into a bit of equilibrium, believe it or not: a marathon Thursday evening of unsuccessful computer building (the new motherboard had a dead ethernet port) kept me from going to sleep too early, which is usually the answer. It’s not completely normal, however, as I passed out around 9pm last night and awoke in great shape at 4am.

After a Friday afternoon round of golf, my ambitions were patently domestic–to do the dishes, dig into a mounting pile of laundry, and to cook a real dinner (my signature meatloaf). It went pretty well, but the temptation–when cooking for one–to forgo making side dishes eventuated in a very meatloaf-heavy dinner. My recipe does, however, incorporate every food group, so that’s something.

This after a pretty interesting day: prior to the golf, I had a meeting with one of my deans and with Kate Daniels, the poet and MFA director here. Since the dean was running late, we got to know each other and got along swimmingly–she even offered me a “terrorist fist bump” on the whole Kenyon thing. Based on first impressions, she’s a brilliant, connected, and accommodating lady, and seemed to really want to help me get linked in with Nashville’s considerable literary resources.

Once the dean arrived we got down to business: essentially, the plan is to establish, for the MFA students, “writer-in-residence” opportunities in the Houses I manage. The best part: the dean has left it up to me and to Kate to sort this whole thing out. I get to work on coming up with flashy names for the residencies, but–more importantly–it seems I will be tapped directly into the circulation of writers as they visit our campus. Cornelius Eady and others will be coming in the fall, and Kate even indicated that she might be interested in pursuing other writers with whom I’ve worked and corresponded–most interestingly, for very selfish reasons–she seemed to latch onto the idea (hers, actually) of having Valerie down in the future.

What goes without saying here is that Kate Daniels is an enormously heavy hitter in her own right, and she’s also promised an introduction to Tony Earley, who teaches here in the spring. Not a bad day’s work.

I promise that my next post will be less informative, more entertaining. Just putting that out there.