Update: I'm in Paris! I'm here until Oct. 2, improving my bootleg French.

The wind howled as she sailed intrepidly over the sharp tips of the bluebooks, a #2 Bic mechanical pencil her only defense against the flapping of their inky pages. An insipid comment about Frost assailed her, and though she leapt away, it left a red gash on her thigh. Around her she could hear the crashes of incorrect scansions, the intentional fallacy, and unsubstantiated claims. Missing textual citations rippled the air, as trite phrases about imagination and reality in Stevens showered from above, leaving her wounded and gasping for breath.

"DO YOU SURRENDER?? DO YOU SURRENDER??," she heard above the din. Another egregious misreading exploded to her left, narrowly missing her and sending her sprawling on the deck.

For a moment, all she could see was the pitch and roll of bluebooks, the spike and loop of messy handwriting, and the black, black cloud of smoke that belched forth with each deadly split infinitive.

"DO YOU SURRENDER??"

The bluebooks whirled around her, gaps in logic filling the thick air.

She stood up, pencil in hand.

"DO YOU SURRENDER??"

Taking a deep breath, she drew on all her strength to face the heavy storm of unarticulated warrants and aimless paragraphs. Defiantly, she yelled,

"I HAVE NOT YET BEGUN TO GRADE!"

One of my fantasies is to work in an anonymous office and sneak out once a week for clandestine sessions of polyphony.

Actually, I have done this.

American Literature

• Mark Strand
• Ron Silliman
• Jean Toomer's Cane
• The Nineteenth Century:
  • Poe's "The Poetic Principle"
  • Poe's "The Philosophy of Composition"
  • William Wells Brown's Clotel; or, The President's Daughter
  • Charles Brockden Brown
  • Wieland; or, The Transformation
  • The Last of the Mohicans

African-American Studies

• Jean Toomer's Cane
• William Wells Brown's Clotel; or, The President's Daughter
• David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World

Idiosyncrasies

• Vergangenheitsbewaltigung
• Which Springer-Verlag Graduate Text in Mathematics are you?
• The Asian Stereotype
• what all the kids are reading
• The Sacred Harp
• Generative metrical theory
• Lluis Domenech i Montaner

To upvote later, when I have more votes:

• Modern science and Romantic discontent
• perfect number
• The obsession with "natural" things
• Freakonomics
• literary criticism
• Why Self-Lamination is impractical
• A business card left for my daughter, the waitress

Possible future nodes:

• Literary studies
  • Pheng Cheah or his book Spectral Nationality
  • Colleen Lye or her book America's Asia
  • Irigaray's This Sex Which Is Not One
  • Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book
  • The Intentional Fallacy (I'm stunned that this isn't already on E2... not even as a nodeshell)
  • Middlemarch, Henry James, and William Dean Howells
  • The Mirror Phase (ditto)
  • Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era
  • Marjorie Perloff's "Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?"
  • Tom Gunning (ok, so he's really film.)
• 19th century American literature
  • Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie
  • Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance
  • Harriet Wilson's Our Nig
  • Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel (the Fiedler nodeshell could use filling, too)
  • The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion
  • Pierre, or possibly the Melville-Sendak connection
• Poetry in English after 1900
  • language poetry (must supersede that way-too-short w/u)
  • H.D. (must supersede that all-too-perfunctory w/u)
  • Lyn Hejinian (I cannot BELIEVE all these important poets aren't in here!)
  • Ron Silliman - done!
  • Barrett Watten
  • Brenda Hillman
  • Theresa Hak Kyung Cha or her book Dictee
  • Leslie Scalapino
  • Donald Revell
  • Bernadette Mayer or The Formal Field of Kissing
  • Nathaniel Mackey
  • Thylias Moss
  • Lisa Robertson's The Weather
  • or, relatedly, the Office of Soft Architecture
• Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? -- this is a line from Whitman's Song of Myself

I admit it. I have a blog.