It's really kind of awful the way the Professor of Poetry elections have degenerated into such a total shitshow. And that Ruth Padel was forced to resign because of blatant sexism as much as the unfortunate fact that she had to open her mouth about the allegations against Walcott instead of just waiting and riding out the tide. It's frustrating too, (though not really surprising) the way so many of the British academics & literati have swarmed to Walcott's defense, and yet they're ready to crucify Padel over a much lesser offense. If she really did organize the smear campaign, that's one thing, and there should be consequences for that. But talking to two newspapers about allegations that were, as she herself pointed out, 'already in the public domain' hardly seems severe enough a crime to warrant a forced resignation. And it really pisses me off that the defense most commonly used in this whole debacle, at least as far as Walcott goes, is that 'it would be almost impossible to find a professor of his generation who hadn't done the same thing.' That, or--Lord Byron was a womanizer, Eliot was a racist, Coleridge was a smackhead, and so on and so forth, and so Walcott should be excused for his behavior since so many of the greats before him also had raging character flaws. And that that shouldn't be enough to deny someone the post. But, I'm sorry--it's not the seventeen hundreds, or even the nineteen hundreds. If you're being put up for the second most prestigious poetry post in the entire country--a position that intrinsically entails working with students--and you have two cases of sexual harrassment under your belt, yeah, I think that should sufficiently knock you out of the running. And yet Oxford, for all that I adore about it, is still in so many ways that 'good ole boys club.' Of course Padel got reamed. She knocked England's big boy out of the way--many in this community weren't going to take that lightly.

It is too bad, all around. For women, for women artists, for the work Padel was planning on doing in British schools, taking poetry back to the classroom in interesting, concrete ways. And it's too bad for the position itself, which is going to be colored by scandal, whoever eventually takes the post.

On to other things.

I still have no desire to write, and I really don't know why. It's like pulling teeth banging out a page. And I procrastinate like all hell. Hah. Like now, writing this.

How many people still read this? I was a bad little blogger for quite some time, so for all I know I may have lost quite a bit of my happy little readership.

I still want to go up to him & say, I'm only here for a month more, and I'm worth it. This doesn't have to be anything--I know you don't want it to be anything--but I'm worth it. Except, you know, people don't actually say those things. And it probably wouldn't matter, even if I did. It's just frustrating. I don't want to leave with regrets.