Talk of Scott Walker’s college career made me think of the highlights of my time in the halls of dear old U of Minnesota — the pipes clanking on a winter’s day, the creak of the wood floor as the professor strolled from side to side, the gentle snore of a student in the back row. My first year I had an English class. Chaucer. Ye parfit c’nick yclept Gwioin doth hither be swain and so on. Reading this at 8 a.m. was like trying to untie wet shoelaces while wearing oven mitts.
The teacher was a short hunchbacked old man with a face like a long potato, dressed in an old suit with the obligatory elbow patches, smelling of pipe smoke, and he would point out the ribald parts for our amusement. Once he recited a naughty ditty that used the Homeric line “rosy-finger’d dawn” as a punch line for the discussion of the works of Sappho, something that would get him a week in the stocks nowadays, pelted with organic produce. It was a wonderful class. Don’t remember a word of it.
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