I stood up and left in the middle of my syntax class this morning. I was stopped before I reached the door by the professor, who wanted to give me some handouts and return a homework and say that I could talk to her in her office if I wanted. It could have been embarrasing, or should have perhaps, but I didn't mind so much. I went and stood next to a video camera in front of Parrish porch and tied a white ribbon around Dan Consiglio's arm. The sun appropriately ducked behind cloud cover, casting a sombre atmosphere on the proceedings, which then progressed to threatening drizzle and then full-out droplets. One of the speakers alluded to the crowd standing in the rain as an example of enduring hardship for the sake of conviction. I wrote a long post about what was said and my reactions to it, but it got erased. Durn computer. In general, I thought that the speakers were well-spoken and expressed a considerable range of approaches to the question of how to respond to and understand the situation (the unfortunateness, as someone referred to it). There was to some extent a lack of focus and avoidance of concrete discussion which I found frustrating, beginning with the three scheduled professorial speeches, which set the tone for the gathering. Thompson Bradley, ex-Russian prof, gave an impassioned critique of the language used by the media, and then launched into what he introduced as "what we can do right now" to respond constructively to the attacks, which turned out to be using this as an opportunity to reconfigure the way nations interact militarily and economically, and the way our so-called "democracy" functions. Of course, nobody mentioned that even if we did have a democracy more based on the input of the populace, our deliberate response would be no less angered and violent. Nobody really attempted to deal with the sentiments that are held by the majority of Americans outside of this campus until late in the rally, when Will Ortman stood up with a flag in his pocket to defend America's honor in the face of condemnations of imperialism and globalization that had been flying all afternoon. After that campus arch-conservative Dave Thomas expressed some even more unpopular opinions, and was mocked and booed. I was somewhat disheartened by this, not that it came as a surprise, but I would have expected more respect for differing points of view, especially since these were not all radical by any means. Some of the more poignant statements made earlier were those of community members, including a '74 graduate who exhorted us to realize the impact that college students have had and can have on situations like this, and a woman, awed and heartened by the presence of so many "beautiful people," who encouraged us to go into high schools and middle schools to engage kids in Socratic dialogue about the attacks. One student recounted a personal experience with anti-American sentiment in the West Bank, and another gave a well-intentioned but fumbling, rambling argument that we take the opportunity to ameliorate the effects of brutal Taliban oppresion.

Rain and Republicans brought the rally to a fractured close, and Ben and Ester and I went off to do practical things. Ben disappeared before I found out that we can't have hello and okay in the fragrance garden, which, incidentally, really sucks. I don't know where to have it now. Wharton Courtyard, Worth Courtyard, Kohlberg Courtyard, Magill Walk, all have their sticking points. Ester and I visited Jenny Yim and her pooch, and I was asked to DJ a fundraiser for a triple-degree-burned quadrepeligic (to make a long story longer), and then I invented a turkey wrap at Essie Maes, garnished with Asian-salad dressing. I came back here (oh, I'm writing from the Barn! We have DSL at the Barn! I can send e-mail and surf the intranet from the Barn!) and talked to Joel for a while and talked to Ester for a while and played rock and roll music with Rubes and Blechs. Matt is so excited about this! So am I, don't get me wrong. He has a new guitar song that completely rocks, on which I want to play a distorted flute. We also worked on a fragment from last week that grew from arpegiatted picking to vibraphone third patterns to funk bass to bliss, and a little on our eponymous groove, from "this is your captain speaking." This is going to be damn good. It's the next step.

After a while I went to a poetry slam at Paces. Talking to Stephanie later, who calls herself "an elitist; I never go to slams, only to readings," I realized that I am an elitist; I never go to poetry readings. Last time I went to a slam I ended up with a girlfriend, but I didn't quite succumb to the temptation to read. This time I read, abetted by a "Japanese poetry slam" format wherein we were given two lines from which to create six-line poems. I only wrote with one of the lines: "I refuse to tell you," and I changed its tense and wrote only four lines. People came up with some good stuff, including a lovely bit by Jedd about watermelons, and Ben's "I refuse to tell you that a sin dancing with a shrew is ant/agonistic. My affliction: heterosexuality." Mine was as follows:

I refused to tell you what I thought when
we saw "A Moon for the Misbegotten."
You asked my opinion on the plot and
characterization. I'd forgetten.

I neglected to preface it with "What sense it has is informed by the rhyme" or "It's about O'Neill" or "I've never actually seen it" or anything except "I wrote the other one," and despite an effort to articulate it came out rather quickly, and consequently it didn't get quite the response I had hoped, although a bunch of people laughed. I think most people didn't understand it. Many people read interesting things (Allen Friedman's Spam e-mail poem, Alex Edelson's trio of articulate pieces touching on vampirism and love) and many people read things about the unfortunateness. The culmination was a "performance art piece" by freshman lunatic Johnathon Schneider. Untitled "A Message from our Sponsors," it was an advertisement for a gas powered toothbrushed which ended up with him on the floor in spasms.

Rather than going home I went visiting. First Annie, who was writing about Van Der Weyden, and told me that her roommate had videos of the robot from the Apples concert. Then Lodge One, where I hung out for an hour or so as we discussed, chiefly, clothing and nudity. Those gals are so endearing. They do the lodge thing well. As I was leaving I ran into Matt and his companion Elena Cuffari, and so I went with them to Rob's room. We listened to B&S and had a nice chat, Rubin looking spiffy in my corduroy jacket. I hadn't really met Elena before this; I like her. She's what you would expect of Matt, in a funny way. She wants to be a ling major (she's in my syntax class. So is Jeff Wu, as it turns out.) Back here Alana was visiting, but because Joel was writing about 1001 Crucifixions, she was talking to the others of us (although she was wearing his shirt.) She and I agree a lot about love. Kollontai and all that.