wendy

Really crazy day today in Arlington. Check this out! Yeah, sitting in my office, trying to get stuff done when the dark clouds rolled in. Then the heaviest sheets of rain I've ever seen. Then the hail. Then the deafening tornado sirens a la zombie apocalypse movie. The disembodied voice on the speaker told us to find shelter immediately--ran down six flights of stairs, trying to keep away from windows just in case anything was imminent, to the basement level. Hid out there for about an hour until the same voice came back on and declared an 'all clear.' Turns out there were two (possibly three) tornadoes that hit the DFW metroplex today, one of which (the worst of them, I believe) a mere few miles from our campus. Anyhow, we were lucky and thankful and everything else.
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So, this is Dr. Wendy Faris (her eyes really are that blue). Her CV is just staggering. She is the Chair of our English Department. She attended Stanford (B.A.) and Harvard for graduate work (M.A., PhD). She speaks several languages. She is also my teacher for my Literary Primitivism course (and future Literary Modernism teacher for this summer). She is a big name in those two fields, of course, but also a keen and well-known/published scholar in Magical Realism, aesthetics, and Georges Bataille (among many other French thinkers/writers). She is a fantastic mentor (we have had several article/book exchanges outside the reach of class about the topics above and I foresee her being a large part of my post-coursework path: comp lists, dissertation proposal, etc). She has a great interest in late 19th century and Modern art (Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism) and is even an artist herself.

She seemed quite caught off guard about my portrait request but then we hung out for a bit, long after everyone else left, and debriefed on last Friday's big Animal Studies lecture series. Exciting, though busy, times ahead.

Onward!