Why do you want to…join American Studies? What should the field be? What about pedagogy? America? Courses? Outlooks? A quizzing, an inquiry, a testing and a trying-out. An hour and a quarter, until the “Literature” contingent broke for their commuter buses (or a drink?), I was asked, pushed, pulled, cajoled, enticed, challenged…

To be privileged, to tell the world what is America, I thought that was good and wanted to do it more. An experiment, noble, I became a kind of patriot, wanting it to last. The world has changed, and our place within it. The Great Cultures, the isolated and primitive, are all now partaking of urban life; the world wants translation and interpretation. This is what I do.

The study of the city – problematizing and exoticizing what is ordinary; taking the bookish-bound beyond the edges of the pages of their texts to see and note the odyssey upon which they are bound. What, who, how…doubled back upon the city’s people(s); their seeing, seeing themselves seeing…How I hear, what I try to see…a seeing, a hearing!

Next day’s flitting doubts race through mentality’s self-wishings and wonder how wise this is to try to sell myself as if I were a believer and practitioner, and one of “them.”

{…almost any ordeal to get new material?}