This is my copy of Flaubert's masterpiece Madame Bovary. This is a Dover Thrift Edition, one of the incredibly low-cost books our professor listed for us for this particular class. He knew of the soaring costs of books, about the racket of college book sales, and so gave us the cheap copies. This copy probably was the most expensive of the bunch at two bucks.
Aah...this class was one of my favorites. It was the Fall of 2003, and English 253, an upper division English prerequisite, was the class, taught by the pony-tail sporting poet Jim Cushing. It was Wednesday nights, 6-9. This class covered the English Romantics, Melville's "Bartleby", Elliot's Prufrock, Joyce's Dubliners, Kate Chopin and Mary Shelley and Kafka...I was riding my bike, not smoking, and just trying to finish up my last year of undergraduate studies. After the first class, I noticed that a good friend of mine was also taking it. Since he was a mechanical engineering major and I was math, we never got to share any classes. We were both surprised about seeing each other upon leaving, and decided to carpool for the rest of the quarter.
Well, for us, "carpooling" meant him driving me, but it gave us a chance to hang out regularly. Since we were graduating seniors, we were safe in the knowledge that we would be able to get the class (if it came down to it), and since we were both artists as heart (he with drawing skills, me with words), we felt comfortable that we could pay enough attention to the lectures to pass, so we...er, always had some fun before class. Like slamming a few beers, or other recreational activities.
We always sat in the front row of a large seminar style class listening intently to the lectures, trying to pay attention, sometimes getting the giggles. My friend had a different Madame Bovary copy than this. The class copy--the cheap one--was, for one reason, able to get to the price by using very small type-set and cramming everything into as small a space as possible. During the lectures, Doc Cushing would alert us to pages and passages he used as lecture fodder, but the pages never matched my friend's copy, which was 80 pages longer than ours. One night we used the remainder of the lecture deriving the equation that would tell us where in his copy we needed to look for the same passage. That was the kind of time we had. (We both passed easily, me with an A and he with an A or B.)
I've included the sheet from my notes from the class covering Flaubert. It shows the brainal wanderings of the semi-bored. One day I produced a laugh from my friend when I put the pencil in my left hand and slowly wrote, "The left hand gets a try." You can see the sentence in my even worse left handed writing there; it took a solid few minutes to get it down on paper.
If you look close, after the left-handed sentence, you can see when I left for the "bathroom", I actually ran over to the UU, which was close by, to check up on the Yankees/Marlins World Series game that was happening that night.
That reminds me: Game 7 between the Red Sox and my Yankees in the ALCS that year (the winner was off to the World Series, the loser was done for the season) was to start right before class was to start. In other times I might have skipped class for the game, but, strangely not here. In any case, I remember getting home and wanting to see who'd won. I walked in the door and before I could ask my roommate, or even say anything, the television was on and Aaron Boone was stepping up to the plate.
"Whoa..." I said, as I threw my notebook down and checked the info on the screen: 11th inning, tie game, light-hitting Boone in as a pinch-hitter. "Earn your pinstripes, Boone!" I yelled at the screen, without taking a seat. First pitch from knuckleballer Tim Wakefield flutters in, and Boone crushes it out of right-field. Home-run, Yankees go to the World Series, just like that.
All this from a novel about the first desperate housewife. Sometimes literature is so much more than the leaves themselves...
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