Today:

I set to work at last on the rest of the applications. Still to go: University of Stillanother State, Dead White Man University, Notastate University.

I calculate that I have written precisely .5% of my term papers, due 14/01.

I get my hair cut.

I ponder the possibility of submitting not a paper on my More book, but rather a title, an epigraph, and a series of excellent footnotes.

A man in Pakistan shoots Benazir Bhutto in the neck and blows himself and twenty-odd others to smithereens. The Conscientious Orientalist is shocked. I, as usual, am not. I wonder, irreverently, if I would be able to call her brave if I did not think her beautiful. I wonder if I would be able to call her brave if she were not a woman.

My father outdoes himself, astonishes me, by referring to Pakistanis (all of them) as “barbarians.”

I watch a televised crowd carry Bhutto’s coffin, hundreds or thousands of people, yelling and weeping and shaking their fists. I wonder whether our American culture would not be improved by a greater proclivity for yelling and weeping and shaking of fists. I watch the fires and the crowds, and listen to my father’s voice, “fucking barbarians.”

Tomorrow:

Home to the 42nd Street library. Hope to get that word count up to, say, 15%. Polish that Stillanotherstate application; click “submit.”

To the Morgan Library, to gaze lovingly at old things, be overawed as I always am that it was once possible to obtain those books as a private collection.

Reunite with the Progressive Schoolteacher, the Rhetorical Tranny, the Foucauldian Bombshell, the Boy Lawyer.

Go, in general, about my business.

My life, by any standard, is a quiet one. My world, miraculously, is at peace. The universe is capable of astonishing incongruities.