Puttering Little Routines

William Gass has me muddling about in his home.  For some time now, I’ve been considering the professor’s toaster, his tooth brushing habits and his obsession with Hitler.  He has older man pains and older man indignities and older man memories that are all a bit too familiar.  And this is his purpose, with “The Underground”, I’m unwittingly drawn into this intensely personal world he’s trying to burrow an escape from. 

Like his professor I work from home, largely.  I have puttering little routines and note the way memory cuts into his present and leaves dents in his mind, not unlike they way memories can interrupt my little progressions as well.   I don’t want to be in his house, any more than I want to return to the discourse on the Third Reich.  Appropriately I read this mostly, in the bathroom, where I don’t want to be for very long either.  It is his sharpened turn of phrase that makes the gloomy places worth exploring and the gloomy professor, someone you reluctantly want to learn ever more about. 

I brought my book to the High School, welcome-back night last evening.   I didn’t make any progress on it, but I had it just in case.  Instead we had quite a bit of ground to cover, going from the auditorium, to the gym, to chemistry class, approximating our daughter’s schedule and battery of classes.  I didn’t have much of anything to say when the topics in math were explained.  In Social Studies I tried the best I could to limit myself to one or two points of inquiry.  Most importantly “what is the geographic focus of this look at the world from 1750 to 1900?”  I don’t think there is much point in telling the tale of industrialization to high school students, unless you cover where it was that this process started. 

In English they are going the read Yeats.  This got me excited.  Looking around the room, I mastered the urge to ask “Which Yeats?!” I imagined the collection of Yeats poetry that should be sitting on my shelf at home.  The same book I took to Ireland when I was twenty and was reading when I sat in a pub somewhere on the island of Valentia near Kerry and a local fisherman named Aeo saw my book and told me: “Yeats was a fucking faggot. You wanna read a writer with real balls, read Flan O’Brian.  He was writing about tripping before there was acid.”  And I didn’t bother to tell all this to my daughter when I got home, but I found my book and I suggested it was important to me and that she, with a sense of what an Irish accent sounded like should read the poems with that voice in her head.  She nodded dutifully and suggested she was very tired and wanted to head to bed.  I wouldn’t have been particularly interested in Yeats when I was fifteen either.