Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Cold, cold, or cold medicine?

After a packed-full teaching and other faculty-work work week, after writing and delivering a paper, after seeing Bright Star, after taking a particularly emotional poem to my writing group and getting what felt to me like a small amount of gratuitous snark, I fell prey to what seems like my by-now-familiar stress-ailment--something very like a cold, with sneezing, a little fever, hot eyes, tendency to fall apart. But yesterday and today, I had no commitments, aside from some online chat appointments with students, so I was able to stay home, and found myself prone to resting. Actually prone. As in, horizontal, for much of both days.

Is it an actual illness? Is it the fact that it's a little bit cold in my house and, for that matter, outside? Or is it the generic cold medicine I took? I don't know for a fact, but the fact is, I slept a lot. And when I wasn't sleeping, I actually did a fair amount of my work lying in bed. Like, I don't know, Proust. Or Milton, or Swift; or Voltaire, Trollope, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Colette, and Winston Churchill.

I'm investigating as of this moment the feasibility of an academic discipline called Bed Studies. You study the cultural significance of beds and bed-related artifacts. In Advanced Bed Studies, you take classes and teach from bed. I am the founder of this discipline, though I give the nod to my forbears. I rest on the featherbeds of giants.

6 comments:

  1. You are the Nobel Laureate of beds. My mentor, my idol.

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  2. What she said. I am deep into Bed Studies today, mostly due to Son's illness. Also due to Son's not sleeping and sleep walking, which are or will soon become legendary.
    I hope I can get anything done, because right now I am overwhelmed by all the things I haven't done, namely sent any new work out in decades (thus no new publications and then I wonder...does it matter?). And also my novel took a turn for the weird, and, if I devoted, say 2,000 words to that weird turn, should I axe it? Or go with it and possibly spoil the whole thing?
    I'd better blog about it.

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  3. Add Edith Wharton to your list. She wrote in bed until noon. That was her modus operandi. She had a maid to bring her tea. I think for bed studies/ studio to work you have to have a maid - but if anyone can do it, please do!

    How was Bright Star? I'm hearing mixed reviews. Do I want to plunk down real money to see it?

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  4. Yes yes yes see Bright Star. Just be prepared to cry.

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  5. Rest on the featherbeds of giants.

    Holy cow. That's huge.

    I am going to try to use that phrase in the near future.

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  6. Perhaps you could wear a nightie with an ermine collar and receive students and faculty for meetings bedside. Yes, you are just that regal, my dear.

    ReplyDelete

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