Not that it's really necessary in order for me to post one, but it is Poem on Your Blog Day. I choose another poem about a painting.

Nude Descending a Staircase
X. J. Kennedy

Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,
A gold of lemon, root and rind,
She sifts in sunlight down the stairs
With nothing on. Nor on her mind.

We spy beneath the banister
A constant thresh of thigh on thigh--
Her lips imprint the swinging air
That parts to let her parts go by.

One woman waterfall, she wears
Her slow descent like a long cape
And pausing, on the final stair
Collects her motions into shape.

Now I must go purchase some sort of suitable dress for this banquet. Short girl + long dresses = shopping madness.

Because I have RSVPs on the brain right now (getting people to come to this banquet is like herding cats), when Geoffrey showed me the response card for his friend's wedding today it struck me quite strongly. The reply options on the card read:

____ Cannot wait to attend

____ Cannot attend

Now this is both confusing and technically duplicative. I'm sure they thought they were being very cute and colloquial, though.

I'm off to listen to Professor Singer play the viola at my friend Angel's party. Hurrah for the Public Interest Auction!

Ryan at pdf chase is mostly right about the stupidity of our online registration system. (I especially enjoy the e-mails it automatically sends, which do not contain a copy of your bids due to "security reasons." Because my choice of Bankruptcy over Antitrust needs to be kept secret.) The whole rigmarole is especially foreign to people who have come from small undergraduate institutions. Although CMC had quirks of its own (nothing online, not even grades, but then HLS just got those this year), everything was refreshingly simple. You showed up at your appointed time with a list in hand, quickly compared it to the oversubscribed courses on the blackboard, dropped and replaced anything that had filled, and told an actual human being to enroll you in certain classes. Stone age, but comprehensible.

The only reason I can see for having such an emphasis on fairness and everyone repeatedly getting a new shot at the top classes is that we only take electives for two years. Getting shafted during registration in undergrad meant one term's worth of mediocre courses, whereas we now have fewer chances to fit in those much sought after seminars. I do hope they switch over to biannual registration, though. Trying to assess whether you'd rather take one class in the spring versus another in the fall is just absurd.

Update: Dean Rakoff just sent us an e-mail with the results of a survey about the registration system. The semester-by-semester registration reform was preferred by a 2/3 margin, but, as is typical, nothing will happen for months while the proposals for change are in committee.

I had always wondered what happened to the photos of me and the other ladies of the HLS FedSoc hanging out with Justice Scalia. One of them appeared in the yearbook today. How nice.

Easily amused: the submission I just finished reading cites repeatedly to the scholarship of one Glenn Reynolds. Hee hee.

Today's goals: set up overdue meetings with faculty assistants. Get in touch with other recommender. Type up tentative list of judges for clerkships. Read and review two articles for the journal. Oh, and go to the last Advanced Crim Pro class.

The pressure is increasing. And we still can't find anyone to sublet our place for the summer!

Probably the only Bush post I will ever make: Is this guy for real? How uninhibited do you have to be to rub a bald stranger's head? Or wipe your glasses on other people's clothes? What possible explanation can there be for his behavior? There's not being self conscious, and there's being out of sync with normal human standards for personal touching. (Via Wonkette and Boing Boing, respectively)

Hypertext version of The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot, via M. Yglesias.

For those of you considering children: food for thought.

I knew this was coming, but am still deeply saddened by the passage of the Oldsmobile. My first and only car, regretfully sold before coming to Boston, was an Olds: a 1989 Cutlass Ciera. It was huge and unwieldy to park, but it was made of metal, not plastic, and I loved it. And it wasn't my father's Oldsmobile, either. It was my grandfather's. (That just meant that it had a distinct cherry tobacco smell for the first few months.) There's one just like it parked by Pound Hall and it makes me nostalgic for the old beater. My poor car . . . I hope Uncle Charlie is taking good care of her.

Two different people have pointed me at this article in the Washington Post about the town where I went to high school, Sugar Land. I really don't know what to say except that yes, there are people like that there, in addition to the huge Indian population, NBA players, and vast hordes of normal suburbanites.

Another list post, this time via In Favor of Thinking. It's embarassing, as all such assessments of cultural literacy tend to be. This is exacerbated by the inclusion of several really terrible books which no person should feel compelled to read (The Last of the Mohicans and Doctor Zhivago, I'm looking at you).

To play: post this list on your blog, putting titles you've read in boldface.

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

Edited to add Bronte and Voltaire. I haven't the time or inclination to trace the origins of this list, but it strikes me as fundamentally flawed. Only one Austen book? So little poetry? Phooey.

I suppose this sort of data is useful, but shouldn't it be adjusted for the size of the graduating class if it is to accurately reflect the strength of each school? This really overstates Harvard's achievement in packing the benches. If you spray out graduates like a firehose you're bound to hit something.

At last: charges have been filed against Kerri Dunn, the visiting professor who faked a hate crime at my alma mater this spring.

It has been looming in my mind of late that sometime soon I will no longer have access to the OED. No more looking up random words and their etymologies, no more lists of quotations, no nothing. Just whatever inferior free dictionaries the web has to offer. Maybe if I am at a firm I can afford the yearly subscription. For less than a dollar a day I can satisfy my OED obsession – it is tempting.

I don't know what to think of this; Greg Weston, the HLS FedSoc's resident disaffected Kerry-supporting libertarian, now has a blog of his own. Does this mean he has permanently ceded Ex Parte to the Bush crowd? Don't make me come over there, boys.

First they came for the cravats and waistcoats, but I said nothing…

Waddling Thunder went shopping for suits this weekend. I heartily approve of any firm that still requires, or at least encourages, its associates to wear suits. Part of this is my selfish desire to have a more aesthetically pleasing work environment (all men look better in suits, as WT observes) and to avoid the treacherous shoals of business casual for women (no one knows what this means, except that it involves guesswork and twin sets). But part of it is based a rebellion against the ceaseless decrease in formality that marks our culture. I may have disagreed with Austin Bramwell about many things, but never fashion. Next thing you know, we’ll all be trundling around the office in polo shirts with the firm name embroidered on the front like a bunch of computer programmers or something. Bah.

Will Baude thinks that business casual has benefits for those of us in hot climates, but there are many light summer-weight fabrics which can keep you cool yet still look professional. And the answer to Amanda Butler’s problem (other than SAS shoes) is to spend a lot on a well made, perfectly fitted pair of pumps. That cheap shoes destroy your feet is one of the great truths of our time.

Update: JCA mentions one of the reasons I left California. She leaves out the tendency of male Californian professionals to wear Hawaiian shirts and khakis to the office. It's making me queasy just thinking about it.

Tiffany and Bill are engaged! Hurrah! And so soon after Dana and Tom's nine year anniversary . . . perhaps there's something in the air at this time of year for Midwestern couples.

One of the benefits of living with a grad student (besides having someone around who can converse about things other than law or politics) is that he passes along to me any random tidbits of medieval legal knowledge he comes across in his studies. How else would I hear about Visigothic ideas of due process?

If an accuser failed to prove his case by direct evidence, he was permitted to use torture to obtain a confession. However, use of torture was conditioned on an oath that it was not being used maliciously and production of a written description of the crime by the accuser to compare to any confession obtained. Torture was limited to three days. If no confession emerged, the accuser fell victim to whatever penalty would have fallen upon the guilty party, save that in lieu of the death penalty the accuser was enslaved to the innocent accused. If the accuser killed his victim during the course of the torture, he was delivered to the family of the accused to be killed.

I wonder if Dershowitz knows about this?

I'm a bit behind on this one, but the paper was sucking my will to live toward the end of this week.

Neil Gaiman recently won a Nebula award for his novella, Coraline. It's actually a (very creepy) children's book, but one that older people can also enjoy. The author could not be present at the Nebula awards ceremony, though, so he requested that someone else read his acceptance speech in the event of a win.

That someone else was Harlan Ellison.

Now some of you may know that Mr. Ellison, in addition to being an accomplished writer, is something of a strong personality. (CMC readers may recall his lecture at the Athenaeum in 2001. Over the course of the evening, he told dirty jokes, read an entire short story, switched dinner tables halfway through the meal, called a student a bitch, asked for contributions to support his intellectual property lawsuit, went more than thirty minutes over his allotted time, and scandalized the audience. This was a relatively tame evening for Harlan. I proudly admit to being the person who invited him. It was beautiful. But I digress.)

The Harlan Ellison persona, created and manifested over decades, is of being utterly uncontrollable. So who could resist the opportunity to make Harlan Ellison say anything he wanted? Not Neil Gaiman (scroll down for the full text of the speech). An excerpt:

The knowledge that the person reading the acceptance speech will actually say whatever I write here is deeply intimidating. Think about it: for the first time in my life, possibly for the first time in anyone's life, I can make Harlan Ellison say, literally, anything. And he will. Because it's my acceptance speech. He's not going to extemporise here, or suddenly start telling a joke about a duck trying to buy a condom or something. He has to read what I've written. I could make him proclaim his love of the Republican party, or reveal his membership in Al Quaida. I could write down the words "I, Harlan Ellison, am actually a science fiction writer" in my awards speech, and he'd have to say them. I wouldn't actually do any of this, though, because Harlan's revenge would be swift in coming and incredibly funny whenever he told people about it. Well, incredibly funny for everyone except me, anyway. I'd still be in Hibernia, pursued by enraged lascars and apothecaries.

I would have paid a great deal of money to see this.