[insert your favorite line here]

So I've been spending my days--and nights--with Allen Ginsberg. No need to call the Honor Code office. To quote one of my classmates, "It wasn't women Ginsberg was keeping awake at night." Although. . . well, that's a tangent unnecessary.

The reason I've been hanging out with AG and his seminal (pun intended) text is, of course, why I do everything: creative writing theory. The assignment this time around is to "theorize" a text. In other words, to look at what they're doing and how they're doing it and why they're doing it. And I, of course, have written two-and-a-half pages out of the six-to-seven due, oh, Monday.

It's not that I haven't been working on my paper. I have. I've read and read and read. I've taken notes. I've marked passages with post-its. And I listened to/slept through conference, went shopping with my sister, went to dinner with my sister & co., went to Borders (where I bought The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and Grosse Pointe Blank--and I rather desparately want to listen to TMoLH, but I don't want to associate it with Howl for the rest of my life, which is what will happen).

I'm being driven mad looking for any social interaction that will exempt me from writing this paper and then tonight I realized this was a paper that I cannot write in silence. Nope. It's going to require music blaring--which I unfortunately cannot do because people want to sleep. And it's difficult to figure out what music best complements Howl. Too bad I don't have much jazz in my collection.

"Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell." WCWilliams intro to Howl