About your blogger:

Favorite novelists:  Faulkner (William), Eliot (George), Roth (Philip), Wright (Richard)

Favorite poets:  Dickinson, Frost, Eliot (T.S.), Stevens (Wallace)

Least teachable novelist: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Favorite career:  teaching

Least favorite job: selling and delivering auto parts (I was fired after roughly six hours much to the humiliation of my father, who had gotten me the job)

Favorite teaching moment: having an American lit. class file in with thirteen dozen roses on the last day of class

Least favorite teaching moment: having a panic attack while teaching an Anne Sexton poem on the next-to-last day of class in the summer of 1989

Most important teachers: Mrs. Lester (8th grade English), Loren Taylor (undergraduate intro to lit teacher, who chain smoked and coughed as he lectured but taught me how to read), David Levy (American intellectual history) and Roy Male (19th century American lit.) in graduate school at OU

Most important "intellectual" influences:  Pauline Kael, Stanley Fish

Favorite quotes: "Coming to know is the liveliest pleasure" (Aristotle, Poetics), "We must be patient with the makeshift of human understanding" (George Eliot)

Worst character trait (or at least one of them):  impatience

Favorite Bible quote:  "As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool returns to his folly"  (Proverbs 26:11)

Favorite all-time singer:  Nina Simone

Favorite opera:  The Magic Flute

Favorite food:  BC (before cancer): duck; PC, sushi (obviously)

Favorite all-time meal:  At Gordon Ramsey's restaurant Verre in Dubai

Favorite city:  Paris

Favorite reasonably priced restaurants in Paris: A la Biche aux bois, Chez Nanesse, Le Coude fou, L'Escargot

Favorite all-time movies:  La Regle du jeu (Jean Renoir 1939), Nashville (Robert Altman), The Godfather, Parts I & II (Coppola)

Favorite (current) TV personalities:  Chris Hayes, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert

All-time favorite TV show:  As the World Turns (1956-2010).  R.I.P., Bob, Lisa, and the family

Guilty pleasure:  see above

Worst vice:  see above; smoking (not necessarily in that order)

Today's morning routine with variation:  Stumble downstairs, clothes in hand; put on clothes in dark; let Kimber out; put out dog food; lay out eleven pills, let Kimber back in and listen to her snarf down the food, swallow eleven pills--and then this morning, throw up (a dog? vomit? is there a theme here?).  Sorry today's entry isn't more interesting, but after the last event, I wasn't exactly feeling inspired.