Anyone who has ever had a cat or plural knows that cat hairs get everywhere. Well, one long black hair — thanks, Guy — has gotten into my laptop’s monitor screen. I don’t know how it got in there, but sure enough, it did, and it’s bleedin’ annoying to look at. Any idea how to get this out without sending the whole computer back to Dell? Or am I, as we say, S.O.L.?

I’ve seen a few episodes of Heroes, usually when NBC or SciFi runs a marathon of the show. I recently became aware that George Takei has joined the cast as Hiro’s father. I came across a screen-capture of the car Takei’s character uses, and I laughed aloud. Here it is:

The only thing that could make this any better was if Takei’s character had a chauffeur named Sulu.

For Fundementals in Fiction last night (out of 12 students, only eight showed up, including, to my surprise, the Fratiot), we spent the entire class period discussing “The Displaced Person” by Flannery O’Conner. The story concerns a displaced Pole who finds work on a farm in the rural South shortly after the end of the Second World War, and whose arrival disrupts the farm’s workers and sets them against one another. Okay, so that’s not a very good description of the story, but if you have the chance to read it, or to see the movie which stars a young Samuel L. Jackson*, it’ll keep you interested.

Anyway, the story ends (spoilers from this point forward) with the brake on a tractor slipping, and that piece of farm equipment rolling down an incline and killing the Pole. There wasn’t a lot of time to discuss this death, and I took some heat for believing that it wasn’t necessarily intentional. There’s a lot of build-up in the story to the resentment of the white trash (the Shortleys) and the blacks (Astor & Sulk) on the farm to the arrival of this driven Pole, who works hard, quickly earns Mrs McIntyre’s favor, and threatens the employment of everyone else. At the end of the story, Chauncey Shortley’s wife has died, and he’s been lobbying the townspeople to pressure McIntyre to fire the Pole (Gruziac). Chauncey backs the tractor onto a slight incline and sets the brake, then jumps off to go back to the barn. The brake slips, and Gruziac, reparing another tractor, doesn’t see it roll onto him, while Chauncey, Sulk, and McIntyre all watch it roll him over. Because Chauncey feels an “impulse” while manuevering the tractor, much of the class — including Prof A. — felt that his actions were intentional in arranging an “accident.”

I don’t know that I believe that, though. Before we started talking about “The Displaced Person” we’d been talking about the literary canon, and that a requirement for a writer’s entry into it being that their writing had to be universal — stories written in the 15th century had to be accessible in the 21st, for example. Sure, Shakespeare’s stuff probably meant different things to his contemporary audience, but that doesn’t mean those of us lucky enough to live in this modern day age can’t enjoy Shakespeare.

Anyone who has read this blog for awhile knows of my borderline road-rage. Sure, when someone swerves out in front of me or runs a red-light or cuts me off, I feel an impulse of anger. But just because I feel that impulse, it doesn’t mean that I act on it. I’d say I’m not the only person who has certain impulses that we repress.

Is Chauncey guilty of something? Sure, he, Sulk, and Mrs McIntyre all see the tractor slip its brake, and they all know it’ll hit Gruziac, and none of them shout a warning or try to jump on the tractor and yank the brake. They’re guilty of negligence — and they know it — of allowing this to happen, of not doing something to prevent it once the brake did slip, of allowing their dislike for Gruziac to cloud their judgement. But does that mean Chauncey knew the brake would slip? Maybe. But I’m not convinced, and the evidence that is often pointed at, that “impulse”, is precisely why. Chauncey starts the story as his wife’s bitch. He listens to her and obeys her and only starts acting independently - when his wife is dead and gone. He goes from “wife’s bitch” to “gossiper” to “murderer”? I don’t know that I buy it.

*We watched the movie in class the first day. I was hoping there’d be a scene with Sammy J. in a barn with a snake so I could shout “motherfucking snakes in a motherfuckin’ barn!” but there wasn’t so I couldn’t.