END

That's right: another quarter is coming to a dramatic close, another year soon to follow it. It's been a very busy fall for me even though, erm, on paper I've accomplished rather little. But I think I'm still on target to get a few Great Things off my list this academic year, so that's good.

I also went through a bit of a fallow zone there in terms of work ethic, and I'm beginning to feel the old manic energy coursing through the hamster wheel. I didn't get much time off last summer and it turns out that 19 years of formal education have conditioned me to need that.

But not to worry. Soon, once again, I will be invincible.

The To-Do List Maze

I've started using this notepad I have to make elaborate To-Do lists every day. This is at once satisfying and hearbreaking. After a certain amount of effort and struggle I get to cross something off the list ("check flagged emails" or "reclaim US Air miles") but then five more items inevitably rise up to take their place.

In fact, the whole process brings an ironic twist to the printed message on the pad, which I got at the GDC last year: "Whatever the Game Demands...". That vague ellipsis is exactly the kind of dangerous gap that populates my lists. I write "Weber essay" on there every day as if today will be the day I put the 40 page behemoth to bed. "Taxes" covers a multitude of problems ranging from 1099 cryptography to the arcana of education deductions and, of course, finding out which online filing services think I'm impoverished enough to file for free. You get the idea.

I did think about trying out one of the more alarmist DIY organizing thingies, but somehow "systems" with names like "Getting Things Done" and the "Hipster PDA" turn me off from the get-go. Also, they're clearly targeted for the people who would rather spend time organizing their problems than solving them. Despite my disdain, I cannot resist the siren call of websites plugging this stuff. Sample post: "Want to get more done? Start earlier in the day." Hmmmm....

Nah. Instead, I've decided to ascend to the next level of abstraction and write about my tasks instead.

New Year, New Faces

I'm working on a redesign of this site in my less-than-abundant free time. In the meanwhile, however, I finally got the gumption to do something I've been meaning to for a long time: an academic blog. It ain't much, but it will be home for my (putative) posts on academic subjects and (highly putative) future publications.

I'm drawing the line at publishing a CV for all the world to see, but I guess I will put some more details up there at some point about classes I've taken, papers I've worked on, etc. Maybe.

Also: what should I put in the footer over there? Maybe Anna can bake me some legalese.

The next dip in the roller coaster

I passed Quals! Almost immediately, I've found myself plunging into the fall quarter at school. Classes are starting, activities are activating, and numerous things that I'm supposed to be coordinating are ratcheting into alarming and violent motion. One of the many Summer Resolutions I didn't live up to in the past few months was to get together a professional academic page for myself. There I could at least make a list of all the things I'm supposed to be doing, so that at least if I didn't do them people could still look at it and say "My, that Ed is an over-scheduled guy. Let's send him money!" Or something.

Anyway, I haven't made said site, or assembled a CV, or even changed the look of this particular hunk of code. Now book buying, lectures and social events are replacing the total quiet (and quiet desperation of Quals study) that I have known for so long. It never ceases to amaze me just how true the truism is about time moving faster as you get older.

And there good things on the horizon. This weekend we're heading to Tahoe with A and E (our friends, not a television network). I've never been, and I'm totally excited. And next week we're going to see Travesties in the city. I haven't gone to see a play in SF, or a play anywhere, since we left New York. Wow. I'll keep you posted.

Zemblan mountain girls

I am reading Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire for the first time, and it is far and away the best thing that has come out of the frantic literary cramming that has defined my summer. The text is brilliant, beautiful, and flamboyantly deranged. If you've never read it, the novel consists of a 999 line (perhaps unfinished) poem and the much longer commentary of a potentially crazed scholar. The scholar intersperses his (often obviously wrong) notes on the poem with long, febrile passages about Zembla, a kingdom that may exist only in his paranoid and homoerotically charged imagination. He cracked me up with this gem: "Zemblan mountain girls are as a rule mere mechanisms of haphazard lust, and Garh was no exception." Needless to say, the protagonist strolls away without a second glance for poor Garh.

But what warms my heart now, as I pore through endless anthology head-notes and learned introductions, is Nabokov's dark satire on the even darker art of criticism. "A Commentary where placid scholarship should reign is not the place for blasting the preposterous defects of that little obituary." Perhaps every footnote to another's work is another step down the road to madness, or as the poet suggests near the end of his last canto,

Man's life as commentary to abstruse
Unfinished poem. Note for further use.

I can't wait to find out what hand our glorious narrator had in his subject's untimely death.

Done!

I just handed in my last paper for the year. It's hard to believe a year of grad school has passed already. I'll have something intelligent to say about this later, perhaps. But right now by brain feels like a thoroughly juiced lemon. I have nothing more to add.

Canon fodder

Egad.

My employers, aka my intellectual overlords and beloved colleagues, have made some changes to the list that will define my summer. I am looking forward to spending some quality time with quality books, though there is also a slight sense of dread involved. I can't imagine how hard it must be to put together a list like this--where's Pynchon? Or any number of other 20th century authors? On the other hand, who would I be to boot anyone off this list to make room for them?

Quarter Notes

So the spring quarter is well underway here on the Farm, though I just now worked out what classes I'll be taking. The ten-week cycle is markedly more brutal than semesters, or maybe I'm just getting old. But at least they still have summer vacation.

It's hard to believe that my first year of grad school is two-thirds over. Life really is moving at a blur. Even the normally imperturbable weather situation has changed from Constant Sunshine to Constant Rain. I'm told that will resolve itself in another few weeks. My grand plans for scintillating research, stunning literary productivity and profound personal transformation have, as usual, fallen by the wayside. But hey, I'm getting married. Those who knew me in college would probably count that as profound personal transformation.

Even my blogging has sunk below my previous, inattentive minim to a new pathetic low. I'll try and do better. I keep meaning to set up a more professional one on my Stanford page, but for some inscrutable reason the university maintains a bizarro CGI policy that has really limited my interest in setting up another installation of Movable Type. Sometimes computers are bad. I am glad we brought none to Hawaii.

Modes of Raising Ponderous Articles

I'm in the midst of writing up final papers for the winter quarter here, and things are hectic. It's a beautiful day outside, but I'm stuck in a tiny, airless room trying to think of some clever things to say about the early issues of Scientific American. Nothing comes to mind, but I did find this interesting article in Volume 2, titled "Modes of Raising Ponderous Articles." If only this applied to me...

The longest day...

...has not yet come to a close. It's time to get together a presentation on Scientific American, first published in 1845. Yup, they've got those early editions just sitting around in a corner of the library basement, ready for any fool to check it out. Tonight, I am that fool.

Croquet

I'm sitting in a meeting room at the Stanford Humanities Center hearing about Croquet, a prototype for a new sort of operating system (no, wait, this is interesting). As the presenter points out, our computer screens look pretty much unchanged since the mid-eighties, with the exception of color. We've still got little icons, windows, folders, and all the rest of it. Meanwhile, the computers we're using to access those tools have grown exponentially more powerful. So why not build better worlds?

Croquet is still in its ugly duckling phase, but the idea is very interesting. A collaborative, massive multi-user set of online spaces that can run on basically anything (macs, PCs, PDAs, Play Station 2s, etc). And the most interesting part about it is that there is no server or central organizer--everything is peer-to-peer and (allegedly) infinitely scalable. It does flash. It does Voice over IP (making it yet another Internet phone service), and even live video sharing.

There are a lot of questions here: if there's no central repository for information, what happens when some of it's not available? And how fast would this really be if 10,000 people were having a virtual cocktail party in the same Croquet space?

Whether or not Croquet ever takes off, it raises some profound and long-festering issues with the way we use computers. Why windows? Why folders? We've all grown up in a world of documents and time-stamps, but the things we do on our computers are increasingly interactive, streamed (as opposed to divided into discrete chunks), and mixed-media. The window/desktop information metaphors are fine for an individual user approaching the computer as a glorified file cabinet. But what about graphic designers, film editors, or students working on group projects?

Croquet takes on, in its relentless Pomeranian underdog way, the main deficiency of the digital world as we know it. As the presenter put it today, "there's no there there." The only really compelling virtual spaces are in online games. Just about everything else compelling is text-based or very linearly multimedia (you watch videos, or you call up your friends in Hungary to chat). So why shouldn't we use all our fancy graphics cards and sophisticated processors to create virtual spaces we can enjoy?

Episodes of Sunshine

I have a little doohickey in Firefox that pops up with the weather forecast ever day. Yesterday's title for the little partly-cloudy picture was "Episodes of Sunshine." Yeah. I know how that can be.

I've been trooping (I really have to say I prefer that etymology to trouping) through final papers at the end of my first quarter in grad school. The first one was long, but interesting, and ever since then I've been struggling to keep my focus. It's just so easy to keep browsing the web, checking random blogs, and conducting "research" on new books, new games, and new media.

Meanwhile, the episodes of sunshine are long gone, replaced by "low clouds." Well, soon it will be time to break through those for some quality time with the old wintry mix back east. Ah, slush. It's been a while.

So if the infrequent trickle of postings here slows to a complete stop, blame the weather. Since there is no Internet in the particular corner of New Jersey I'm heading toward, making contact will involve trudging through the wintry mix to a wifi hotspot somewhere. To be honest, I'll probably just watch a bunch of movies instead. I advise you to do the same.

Happy holidays!

The checklist

It occurred to me the other day in class that I've been a grad student for almost two months now. I did a lot of soul-searching during the application process, wondering just what I was getting into and why. Now, at least, I can answer some of those early questions. Am I becoming the grad student I feared within me? Am I living up to the stereotype?

Reads ostentatious literature in cafes
Well, I certainly have been carrying around a lot of weighty tomes, and I kind of enjoy having someone else tell me to dive into Plato's Republic or Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Somehow, knowing that I'm reading this stuff for some greater purpose gives me the strength to actually see it through. BUT, I have yet to sit around in a cafe doing this reading. So far, that part of grad student life seems totally alien to me. Why would I want to read in a place where people can watch me, and judge me, for what I've got on the tiny, sticky table? Perhaps this is a New York sentiment, but I really value private space.

Makes obscure references/incapable of carrying on normal conversations
Hmmm...I have noticed myself doing this. If you're going to be excited about your reading (and you're never going to get through it if you can't muster some excitement), you'll find yourself wanting to tell people about it. The little problem-solving gnome bouncing around our subconscious works with what you give him. If you spend your day watching WB reruns, soon the world will become unveiled as a grand allegory for teenage relationship angst. If you spend your day reading critical theorists, well, that's what you've got to bring to the water-cooler conversation. I am fighting this essential fact, but it's hard. I watched the Simpsons a couple of weeks ago, and that helped, except I'm no longer surrounded by other people who watch the Simpsons, so it's a Pyrrhic victory.

Lurks awkwardly in public academic spaces
So far, I'd like to think I've escaped this fate. My campus movements are planned, efficient, and professional. Only rarely, on my trips to the library, do I wander the stacks, muttering angrily.

dresses weirdly
I think it's fair to say that I pretty much blend in with the undergrads, sartorially, though I can't bring myself to engage in their painfully non-ironic school spirit. I mean, they are like Marines when it comes to seeing the lighter side of The Code. I pity the fool who wears blue this weekend (it's Big Game around here, so everyone is even more earnestly enthused than usual).

Adopts obscure academics as personal idols
At the risk of offending the many godlike puissances who roam the halls of Stanford's English department, this is another thing I don't yet do. Sure, I'll read a monograph as readily as the next young scholar, but so far no religious experiences.

Rides a bike, with special little clips for the pants
Ok, you got me. Though someone told me today I had the coolest bike clips she'd ever seen. Ok, yes, she's a grad student too. But whatever. It gets me around, and the bike grease thing is a pain in the ass.

Literary Darwinism

In the latest humanities-sciences collision, Literary Darwinism is sweeping the nation. Or at least a swath of pages in this week's New York Times Magazine. I'm not sure how I feel about the whole idea (reading genetically-coded survival traits into the choices of fictional characters), but it does make for fun critical zingers:

Literary Darwinism is not equally good at explaining everything. It is best on big social novels, on people behaving in groups. As the British novelist Ian McEwan notes in his contribution to "The Literary Animal," "If one reads accounts of . . . troops of bonobo . . . one sees rehearsed all the major themes of the English 19th-century novel." But I don't think even by stretching one's imagination primates evoke "The Waste Land" or "Finnegans Wake." Tone, point of view, reliability of the narrator - these are literary tropes that often elude Literary Darwinists, an interpretive limitation that can be traced to Darwin himself; his son once complained that "it often astonished us what trash he would tolerate in the way of novels. The chief requisites were a pretty girl and a good ending." Darwin was drawn to books that were Darwinian. Similarly, Literary Darwinists are better on Émile Zola and John Steinbeck than, say, Henry James or Gustave Flaubert. I would read their take on Shakespeare's histories before the tragedies and the tragedies before the comedies, and in "The Tempest" I'd be curious about their observations on the Prospero, Miranda and Fernando triad but not on Caliban or Ariel. I don't care if there are selection pressures on mooncalfs and sprites.

Rent a Negro

I just got an email from the English department that the author of the book/satirical website Rent-A-Negro is coming to Stanford. The site is hilarious, and it whales on that delicate dance, the "oh, sure, I have diverse friends" move made so often in our new post-politically correct world.

I find myself wondering if the author, damali ayo, has actually rented herself out to anyone (the site has a great list of itemized prices for different things, like assuring others that the renter is not a racist). Maybe, since she's described as a "conceptual artist," she really did. And I think I've gotten crazy emails from the weirdosphere...

Revisiting Cloud Atlas

I've joined a contemporary literature reading group at school, and the first book we're reading is none other than David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. I really enjoyed reading this book in March, and I've enjoyed rereading it now--which is a rare thing for me, by the way. I blogged about the book, and another Mitchell novel, back in the spring.

It is very strange to revisit this ground, especially since I devoted an unusual amount of personal energy to promoting it to my friends after my first reading--and now too, I suppose, since Anna and I are starting an informal book club with a couple of friends, and we're reading Cloud Atlas for that too.

The second time through the novel a little of the luster has worn off, but I'm also more inclined to pay attention to the linking maneuvers Mitchell uses to keep his flotilla of narratives in sync. I'm very curious to hear what my fellow readers have to say about Mitchell--so far anecdotal reactions have been really positive, but I'm still not sure where to fit the author into my literary world view. One advantage of reading a contemporary author is the online ephemera, and Mitchell is quite willing to open up his treasure-chest of inspirations. And, as it turns out, he lives somewhere near Courtmacsherry, ancestral abode of one branch of my family.

Browsing the Stanford library catalog recently, I discovered a piece of classical music called Cloud Atlas by a contemporary Japanese composer, Toshi Ichiyanagi. I know Mitchell spent several years living in Japan, so I've found myself wondering if there's a connection. The Stanford music library has scores for the piece, but no recording. So far I haven't seen this composer mentioned in connection with the novel, but I haven't looked very hard.

Rolling rolling falling down

Musical introduction

One of the joys of having an old, beat-up iPod stuffed full of music you've half-forgotten is coming across new/old favorites. I've started grad school, and the soundtrack (this second) is Soul Coughing. "I'm rolling I'm rolling I'm rolling".

Ok, on to the thing here

Yes, I am rolling. Classes are in swing, and I'm "shopping" like crazy. It's more of a Soviet supermarket kind of shopping, but whatever. The illusion of choice beguiles me, as ever. Things won't shake out for another day or two, so all I'll say right now is that I'm happily surprised with how many courses there are that line up with my (admittedly old) interests.

And now the humorous self-deprecating narrative

The other thing I'm doing like crazy is riding my new bike. Now, when I say "crazy" here, I do mean "a lot", but I also mean "like a person who is not sane." Over the weekend, as I cruised along, I decided to signal on Stanford's Campus Drive. This, as it turned out, was not something I could just do on the first try. Yes, I can steer with one hand off the handlebar. But no, I can't do that and stick my other arm out sideways. At least not without flinging myself to the ground while passing drivers look on with bemusement. I actually had to bid [as if I were diving for a disc in ultimate] to keep myself from face-planting. It was sweet. I got up and got back on that damn thing and rode it to the fucking turn lane. I turned. I am injured.

Then, today, I was tootling around some of the Farm's impressive Spanish Colonial colonnades. Fine biking arenas. Unfortunately, they're elevated and I wanted to get down. A guy in front of me rode his bike down some steps. It looked so easy. Three steps. "How hard could it be?" I asked, as I inched my little red engine of doom toward the precipice. In retrospect, the key seems to be leaning back in the seat. Or maybe going a little faster. Or hiring a Sherpa to carry the bike for you while you sip yak-butter tea and contemplate Stanford's well-manicured lawns. Anyway, I got to reopen the finest of my wounds, on my knee. This wound, a historic site of Ed-World conflict since the late 1990s, has never really healed beyond a shiny purple scar. But it's going to be months before I get back to that point, I think.

Let me know if I bleed on you.

master of my domains

If by "domains" we mean the new wireless network in my apartment. But hey, it works. Even on my venerable Dell laptop, which recently got a big needle full of Linux pumped into its battered ass. Tivo has been networked, and the Xbox once it is turned on to discover an ethernet cable attached to its rear. I have finally gotten to the "what's it all for?" stage of home wireless networking. Give me time on that one.

Anna thinks it's time for me to get out there and learn. Apparently, the Time Before School has lead me to focus on less than urgent issues (like the wireless network). Yesterday, I spent several hours staring at the rear derailleur of my new mountain bike. (How did the French get put in charge of biking terminology, anyway? "Ze wheels, you must pedal to turn zem? And zere is no food, no sex on la bicyclette? Poff. Fetch me a croissant.") I was staring at it because the old chain broke, and I bought a new one but couldn't figure out how to put it on. Just in case you think I'm a complete idiot, the old chain fell off before I could look at it. Ok, carry on thinking of me as pretty much a complete idiot. In the end, it took my new friend Ben and a flanking maneuver by a squadron of friendly Korean grad students to put the thing back together right.

So as you can see, my transformation into a Stanford student is nearly complete. I have a bike. I have freckles. I engage in athletic activity. I have escutcheoned Escondido, hoven by Hoover, binged in Bing (on books, oh ye of little faith), and qrossed the Quad. Technology is my servant and the four-lane highway my footstool. Incidentally, a "bing" can mean a heap or pile, usually of stones, earth, trees, dead bodies, corn, potatoes, etc. It's also a kind of tea.

Hm. You see right through me. Granted, the past few weeks have not been the most productive of my life. Granted, my grand ambitions to write the great American something--no novel, surely, but I would have settled for short story or even poem--have once again fallen pathetically by the wayside. Soon I will be able to compile my anthology of writing about not writing. Yes, I have trouble with writerly discipline. Yes, I need deadlines. But, oh, they are coming for me. The tea parties and welcome meetings are bearing down on me. The nib of doctoral studies will soon tattoo critical theory across my back. Is it not right and just to savor the last days of an unexpected summer vacation? Or am I too old for that crap?

Now all that remains to seek out is an adviser, some classes, classmates, undergrads, and a big, big mess o' reading. Here I come.

The great books program

Ah, summer. Especially the summer before starting grad school in literature. Not only did I have the time and inclination to pick some of the really weighty tomes off my shelf, I had the nagging sense that I'm going to need every scrap of book learnin' I can get before school starts driving me on.

This summer I chose (boldly, valiantly, Pyrrhically) to read A la recherche du temps perdu in French. This, as everyone advised me, was a bad idea. Two months and sixty pages later--I skipped the ponderously learned introduction, itself 130 pages--I have about 100 flashcards with Proustian vocabulary and a new appreciation for the humdrum practice of employing periods and white space to break up long thoughts which, if Proust were writing this sentence, would remind him of a certain smell, of cut grass after a young anemic boy has romped weakly on it and the cats have prowled it, wafting up from the garden on Sunday afternoons, the day upon which everything in Proust's life took place, when, in this particular era of Sundays, his aunt and his great-aunt would beat each other with parasols while singing the Marseilles and he would fling madeleines at them from his depressing little garret, and which thoughts, to pick up a noun that last raised its head half a page ago, seem wedded inextricably to the complexity of Proust's prose such that it would be as impossible for anyone else to think them as to write them without resorting to a ritalin-prozac-vodka cocktail.

Whew. So let me tell you my impressions.

Ok, so Proust has to be one of the most easily parodied greats out there, and I've loved reading the 60 pages I've gotten through, don't get me wrong. It's just hard work. Sooo, to take a break this summer, I read: David Copperfield. That's right, keen reader--I'm admitting that I'd never read it until three weeks ago. How I passed the GRE test in literature, how I got into English grad school, how I graduated from a bevy of "liberal arts" institutions, I leave as an exercise to you.

Dickens was, in many ways, entirely the opposite of Proust. It was written in a language I understand easily, written in language I understand easily, full of action, and broken up into bite-sized chapters for my serial convenience. I started out reading David Copperfield in reprints of the original serial editions, which were sent out like magazines once a month, chock full of ads. It was a real reminder of the commercial underpinnings of the enterprise--before there were soaps or Reader's Digest, there was the Dickens novel for entertainment. In contrast, Proust's work is eminently non-commercial--it took him years to get the thing published, and it's almost as if the whole thing was written for Proust's personal enjoyment (or psychological self-analysis) than for any reader, paying or otherwise.

Perversely, the sense of readerly pleasure I got from Dickens made me wonder if the author was torturing himself to pump out the pages. It might be a personal bias from my brief career in journalism, but the pressure of cyclical publishing deadlines is enough to stress anyone out, and the idea of turning the languorous British novel into a deadline-driven money machine makes me think the pleasure of writing would have been subsumed by the agonies of production. Likewise, A la recherche is difficult to read because it come straight out of Proust's head, and yet it's comforting to think that the writer was cozy in his own skin, developing these long skeins of thought over the stretch of years. Somehow everything in Proust brings to mind quiet bedrooms, the sedate consumption of long books, and the pleasure of habitual breakfasts. I guess what I'm saying is that the thoughts of Proust are scary, but the brunches of Proust don't sound half bad.

So, after delving into two new five-star literary experiences--Anna and her mother kept telling me how much they envied me for getting to read David Copperfield for the first time--it was time to find something new. I went to the Stanford library. Ahhhh, I love books, and the places we keep them.I'll save Glyn Maxwell's The Sugar Mile for another day, and maybe get into Franco Moretti, my current reading project.

Approaching cruising altitude

Little by little, debit by debit, we are getting things set up around here. Tonight, we bought a printer. It's the cheapest laser printer in the land, but that means it's simple and (hopefully) will get the job done right. Considering that Stanford's charging 6 cents a sheet for printing, it seems like a good business decision.

Also, after about eight calls to Stanford's tech services line, which managed to convey the sense of desperate siege and imminent collapse through touch-tone menus and overflowing voice mail in-boxes, we finally got our cable turned on. Hello, TIVO! After some traumatic resettlement issues, and a long phone home session, Tivo seems to be adjusting ok. He came with a stash of shows we'd recorded before we left New York, which is good because we may not be seeing any more West Wing reruns soon (without Bravo, that is).

Where is Battlestar Galactica? What will I do for the next three weeks? And why does Aaron Sorkin kill someone off in every one of his season finales?

benefits

A, rummaging through drawer: I wish I had a black turtleneck sweater.

E, patiently tolerant of girlfriend's sweater "problem": Well, you're about to be dating an English PhD candidate. I think you'll have one issued to you by the government.

Mr. Jefferson's Campus

Last week I flew down to Charlottesville, Virginia, for a visit to UVA. The campus is beautiful, even if it’s only rated for 50 degrees and the weather was 35. It’s dominated by the spirit of Thomas Jefferson, whose “academical village” features a Rotunda, a Lawn, a classical amphitheater, and a pretty spiffy English department. Lucky undergrads can even live in old-school rooms facing out on the Lawn. No running water, no heat, but they get a great view, and the satisfaction of sharing a colonnade with the Colonnade Club and the Rotunda (see above).
They are very serious about Jefferson down there (well, the good parts), and the history of the place is very much centered on the man. It’s strange to remember how old parts of the United States are, nestled in the cracks between the strip malls and the Starbucks.

Back to winter

Well, Anna and I have returned from a four-day trip to California. It's hard to believe that "winter" can mean so many things to so many people. In California, for example, it means sixty-degree weather and occasional gorgeous days. In New York, it means entrenched snow that gathers an armor coating of dirt while the commuters below burnish their rage. On the other hand, New York does have its advantages.
But the trip was a lot of fun. As Anna noted, we spent a day each at Stanford and Berkeley. Beautiful campuses. The main outcome of the trip, though, was to realize just how varied and complicated our options are. Of course, just as we have to decide if we like school, school has to decide if it likes us.

contrasts

We visited programs at Stanford and Berkeley this weekend.

And now, for a flashback to high school, a matching exercise.

Which school has the following?

1. "Frodo lives!" scratched into the cement in front of the law school

2. A scary, ribbed building labeled only with "School of Law"

3. Totem poles in the halls of the anthropology building

4. 100 ergonomic chairs I happen to know cost in the neighborhood of $800 each, arrayed around shiny lecture hall desks

5. Christmas lights in the law library

6. A view of the Golden Gate Bridge

7. An art professor who doesn't let lawyers ride shotgun in his car

8. The largest collection of ecclesiastical law texts outside the Vatican

9. English grad students who laugh hysterically when asked about the possibility of finishing a PhD in fewer than 5 years