Date: Monday, 9/22/69

I’m pleased to report that I’m back on track for now. I stayed until very late at the library last night and caught up with everything I wanted to work on. Since two of my classes are purely academic in structure, I know how to study for them. It may be a bit time consuming but at least I am clear about what needs to be done and how to get it all done on time. I enjoy both the Psychology and Philosophy courses.

They’re not as challenging as I thought they would be. I assumed that my classmates’ private school educations would trump my public school one. But my formulas keep me always ahead and aware of what needs to be covered. I give myself plenty of time to digest it too.

It’s rewarding to be at the top of the classes.

In contrast to the rows of seats we sat in at Niles North, here at the College, we sit around large wooden tables. Each classroom is set up that way. There are only 12 students per class. I like not talking to the backs of other students’ heads when I answer a question. We can look at each other and discuss the work rather than only respond to the professor’s questions.

However, as always, there are those anomalies. Need I say who? As always—Dr. Fish and Prof. Calderon.

Dr. Fish’s poetry class is the most disturbing one. His comments in class always make me feel inferior. He never deviates at all from his theory that women aren’t qualified to read poetry let alone write it.

When I walk out of his classroom, I am convinced that this will be my one and only term here. It takes hours of work for me to trust that I can pass his course and be true to myself in the work. If nothing else, I have mastered new skills as a student to make my work for the odious old fuck face presentable.

While working on my papers for his class, I want to suggest to him that I could be a writer. I want to suggest to him that I could make a living as a writer. Plainly, his course, I would tell him, has taught me that already.

I feel foolish describing what goes on in his class in my diary. I waste my own time here just as he does. Listening to Dr. Fish repeating often his belief that women can’t write poetry and shouldn’t be allowed in discussions of it, I know my blood rushes straight to my face, neck and hands. Being a red head creates some dangerous problems. People are aware, sometimes before I am, how angry I am. I know he has observed my red face response in reaction to his stupid ideas.

In his class, by the way, we don’t sit around the table. There is no table. He has a podium at the front of the room. He appears at some point right when he thinks he should show up, places his books onto the podium and stares at them. He looks like a walrus. He dresses in the same standard issue clothing each day—brown corduroy jacket, knit tie, checkered shirt, grey trousers and saddle shoes. He makes harumphing walrus sounds as if he prepares to start the class. He looks around, surprised that no one has left. Then he plows ahead with his prepared remarks and ignores any raised hands until he has completed what he has decided to say to us that day.

He jettisoned some of the assignments that were on his original syllabus to make room for Coleridge’s Conversation Poems. I don’t mind as I like them and I’m going to write my term paper on one of them. There’s a rumor that the reason he changed the syllabus is he’s writing an article about these poems and needs the class to help with his article.

Even though he has that academic side to him, there are those days, like today, when we come to class prepared to work but he stops what he is lecturing about to become weird.

Today, Dr. Fish stopped talking about Coleridge in mid-sentence and counted all the women in the room.

He closed his book, stepped away from the podium, and said, “No woman sitting in this room should take it into her head to become a poet. It is not possible, not physically or mentally possible for a woman to write poetry of any kind.”

I don’t know why he says those things but the room goes still when he does.

His lectures are brilliant but the room goes so still when he behaves like that. No one feels comfortable sitting there.

When he stopped talking about the inability of women to write poetry, he then told us about a conversation he had with Coleridge last night. It’s truly a bizarre experience to listen to him recite these stories. We’ve heard them before because whenever he veers off from his lecture, he tells us these exact stories, every time.

Collectively, we know he is both brilliant and a nut case. On top of that he is a misogynist.

I told Neal, who sits next to me in the class that I call Dr. Fish “Old Fuck Face.” He told me that was a perfect description and then proceeded to tell others in the class of my renaming of Dr. Fish. Everyone whispers “Old Fuck Face” as we leave his classroom. Someone will say, “Did you hear Old Fuck Face say that he talks to Coleridge at night?” We hold our breaths, afraid that Old Fuck Face heard us. Once we are out of earshot, we laugh to expel the horrible tension he stirs up in us.

I know if I could make myself sit down to read ‘A Room of One’s Own’ I will feel better. Eileen assures me I will. I don’t know why I’m afraid to pick up that book and see what Woolf has to say about men like Dr. Fish. Tonight, I must crack it open or I stole that damn book for no reason.

While I am explaining the differences in my classes, I should mention that my pottery class is also completely different from the academic classes. First of all, it isn’t a class I can study for. Not in the classical sense of study.

Prof. Calderon talks so much about beauty and how beauty is found, who creates it, and why. You listen to her say that word, beauty, and it’s now a new language that I am learning. Very different from what I had thought this class was going to be. (I should go and thank Prof. Keating for making me take this class. He would probably be pleased to know how much I like it.)

Not unlike how my Aunt Money charges up a room with her perfume, Prof. Calderon makes a room fire up with her excitement for throwing pots.

She talks about the art and science of clay and of beauty. She embodies that too. The one thing I see in my mind whenever I think of her class is how she took her fingers along the side of a small pot and showed that curve, the roundness of it, the way a woman might touch her own swollen belly when pregnant.

I blurted out that thought. She didn’t know who said it. She whirled around looking at the room and asked who had uttered those words?

I raised my hand. She stared at me for a few seconds before saying, “Excellent comment Scags. Making that direct connection to the power of clay to show fecundity is essential to understanding its purpose.”

She smiled right at me. “I expect you to continue letting us hear your insights.”

I must have blushed and turned completely red because she said, “Don’t worry, Scags. We’ll all help you find that power here. That’s why we structure the class this way.”

Then she returned to holding the pots and showing us things about them that I couldn’t pay any attention to. I had become too self-conscious. Looking around the room to help me divert my thoughts, I noticed that the entire room was filled with women. Not one man had signed up for the class. Maybe beauty is a frightening topic for a man to discuss.

I was granted one easy class. That’s the Phys. Ed class. I don’t worry about it or even think about it. I get up and run with the team every morning. I feel so lucky to have this gorgeous woodland to float through. The colors are more robust than any I have ever seen in the Fall. Though I was told that once the leaves are gone, this is also a bleak landscape. We shall see.

The sounds of the leaves underfoot make me feel like I am getting things done. It’s as if I were going places and seeing things I never saw before even when I run pretty much the same course every day.

Alex paired me with Douglas. We run side by side every day. He’s not new here but he can’t believe how beautiful the woods are too. We gobble up the sights of it and compare what we have seen from day to day. Soon the woods will look different and there will be much less light. I don’t care about that at all.

I like running in the mountains rather than on flat land. Yes, it is more rigorous than running in Skokie. I even had the shit scared out of me when one morning, a huge owl hovered over me. I saw its enormous talons hanging near my head and wondered what it would be like to be scooped up by and dragged off to its nest. The wingspan was about 10 feet. I mean it. It felt mythic or maybe even like a dinosaur had returned to find its way into the modern world. Douglas told me that they can scoop up baby calves. Or dogs. Once, they saw a bear out on the trails. You definitely have to be careful.