10/27/06: Laura and I went to the Pantheon this week. There was an installation by a Brazilian sculptor named Ernesto Neto. The piece is called “Leviathan-Thot” and it is supposed to be a visual representation of Hobbes’s Leviathan, combined with the Egyptian god Thoth. There was a video with the sculptor giving some explanation of it. He gave a very good performance of the sexy, misunderstood sculptor. I thought the installation was neat, but the explanation was kind of lame.

The Pantheon has all these remains of important French people: Rousseau, Voltaire, Marie Curie. There was a plaque commemorating Toussaint L’Ouverture, but his body was not there. There was also this kind of weird exhibit about Marie and Pierre Curie. Did you know Pierre Curie died when he was run over by a horse and carriage the day after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906? They had a print of the newspaper from the following day on the wall. The weirdest thing about the Curie exhibit was this natural-history-museum-esque replica of a donkey that was unable to choose between two perfectly equal bales of hay. This was intended to demonstrate some 14th-century philosopher’s principle of balance, which was somehow related to Pierre Curie’s work on radiation. And it was kind of weird that it was in the Pantheon at all.

Last night I had dinner with two professors emerita from UMASS. During my last year in Amherst, I lived in both of their houses while they were living in the south of France for five months and three months, respectively. I killed all of Virginia’s plants, and I broke Sara’s washing machine and flooded her basement. But both of them still thought I was a pretty good house-sitter. With Virginia I think I redeemed myself by cleaning her house better than her long-standing once-a-month housekeeper (whom she had told me to hire before she got back, and whose cleaning skills were singularly unimpressive). And when I spoke with Sara’s husband on the phone and explained about the washing machine, he said that they knew they needed a new washing machine and they were sorry it had died on my watch. He was also impressed with my problem-solving skills, because upon discovering the flooded basement I called a company that was listed under “Basement water damage cleanup” (or some such) in the yellow pages, and then called their homeowner’s insurance company. And when he kept congratulating me on being so calm and clever, all I could think was, “What did you expect me to do? Run down the street screaming ‘The basement is flooded! The basement is flooded!’?”

Anyway, V. retired after my first year at UMASS, so I had a few classes with her. (Including “Theatre in Society,” which featured one of my favorite memories. One of my colleagues did a presentation on Symbolism, in which he read Poe’s “The Bells” in its entirety, for the sole purpose of killing time because he wasn’t prepared. And as he kept turning pages we all figured out what was going on, and we just kind of supported him in his non-preparedness. And then we went to happy hour at Rafter’s. Or to lunch at the Newman Center. Now I’m just being nostalgic.) V. and S. are in Paris for a few weeks, mostly working in libraries. It was kind of weird to see Virginia in Paris, and to kill a whole bottle of wine with her before Sara got back, and then to go to dinner with them and drink a lot more wine with dinner. We gossiped a little about the Montpellier conference, especially this one professor who had told me my dissertation sounded boring. I explained my fellowship to them, and Sara was impressed that I get to be in this seminar with Sam, whereas Virginia viewed the seminar as my once-a-week three-hour obligation to show up somewhere. Anyway, we had a high old time, and Virginia told me that I must go to Versailles to see Marie Antoinette’s little theatre before October 31, and she is going to get tickets for us to see Beckett’s Happy Days at the Vieux-Colombier with a famous French actress, and I also just have to see a new play called Le Moliere imaginaire at some tiny theatre.