A handful of made-up sentences

Just a quick note before I have to go to class.

I've been harboring some nostalgia lately for Amherst College. I think part of it is the time of year - homecoming is approaching, and it's the time of year when Amherst looks spectacular and makes you fall in love.

I just finished reading two pieces in the latest Amherst magazine - an interview (by a friend) with the venerable Bill Pritchard (who graduated from AC in 1953 and has been teaching there pretty much forever), and a review of English at Amherst: a History by Theodore Baird, by another alumnus who's also a poet. Here's a quote from the second piece:

"No such dynamic exists in the other places I’ve been as a teacher where students take courses in a range of methodologies without feeling that anything so dire as the fate of their minds (or the fate of literature) hangs in the balance. This seems to me Baird’s idea and the idea that inspires his marvelous English at Amherst: if you can convince a large number of 18-year-olds that making up sentences is an act of deep moral imagination, you do it, no matter how much work that entails...."

Dan Chiasson in Amherst, 59 (4) (Summer 2007)

I never really thought about the uniqueness of English (my major) at Amherst, because I didn't have any basis for comparison. I just knew it was (for lack of a less boring word) wonderful - it's described much better in this review. And, of course, I got to take two classes with Pritchard.

Classes are beginning to speed along, but maybe I'll give an update on them soon.