English 271: How Does This Sound?

 

I've put in a good amount of work, consolidating the events that transpired at Loyola U. in Chicago in 2008. All the particulars of the course (English 271, How Does This Sound, Ultramodern Metaphor, 25 East Pearson Street, room 306, Prof. Laura Goldstein) and my involvement in it (Opera Bufa 2.5 days, my lecture on the third day) are now well documented. There are some details as to how the lecture day (June 19) went that are worth relating. The funniest is a quirk of Loyola classrooms, as a ricochet against Opera Bufa. Loyola, of course, is a religious institution. It follows from this that all the classrooms come equipped with a rather large, plasticine Christ-figure, hanging in a lofty position at the back of the room. Room 306 happened to be a downwards-slope model academic room, so that when I lectured, I was gazing upwards at the class of about twenty students. The plasticine Christ appeared to be gazing down at me from a great height. I remember feeling a wry sense of amusement at this circumstance; Opera Bufa is an intermittently racy book, and some of the passages the students wanted me to explicate were racy ones. If Jesus were there, would he have approved?