(Hot times.) Oprah is a fish. (Summer in the city.)

(I've encountered a blogging dilemma: I have three things to write about, but there's not much of a connection between them. Actually. There's a connection between two of them. But not the third. I've decided to solve this dilemma very simply -- with the elegant use of parentheses. Now. Stop. Don't judge what you can't understand.)

(So the other night, I was making something to eat in the kitchen when I heard, from the street below outside my seventh story window, I heard a noise. A noise that could only be described as a scuffle. A bit of shrieking. A yelp or two. I hear my roommate get up from the couch and walk to the window. "Oh my god," she exclaims, "you've got to come over here. There's girls fighting in the street down there." Not uninterested, but not that interested, I finish what I'm doing and then casually approach the viewing post. The scene: directly below our balcony, but across the street, there are two groups of girls moving in packs eastward down Division. They are yelling at each other, things I can imagine quite clearly, but couldn't actually hear. They are each individually gesticulating quite wildly. But the strangest thing, from my god's-eye vantage point, was the seemingly choreographed staging. The girls periodically lunged at one another -- but not each on their own terms. The groups appeared to lunge, each girl a mere limb of a larger menace. On occasion this ballet would break down and a fist (or an open hand, or a two-handed shove) would breach the approximately two-foot gap regularly separating the groups. This went on for what was probably only about 25 seconds or so. At which point, my roommate (not me, I was watching the show, and waiting for them to break into song) thought aloud, "Maybe we should call the police?" And just then, Officer Krupke showed up and arrested one of the girls, which effectively shut up the rest of them. The show over, I went back to my food. Nothing like dinner theater. A true experience in this cosmopolitan city.)

I'm having this dilemma. I've always had a healthy disdain for Oprah's Book Club -- a disdain nurtured through the early years of contemporary novels-turned-bestsellers, and cultivated into a disgust with the Club's more recent reincarnation as a pusher of classics onto the unsuspecting hordes. In its original form, the Book Club annoyed me because She always seemed to point her all-powerful Midas finger at what appeared (judging by their covers, at least) to be romantic novels focused on strong central heroines -- books that would encourage battered (or bored) wives to leave their husbands and "find themselves." Silliness. And now, my disgust stems from the fact that all these wonderful classics of literature can no longer be found without an obnoxious "Oprah's Book Club" seal on it -- as though the author has posthumously won a Fulitzer Prize (yeah, the F is on purpose...think about it...little more...ok...good...now you get it).

So, most recently, She assigned the world "summer reading" -- three Faulkner novels (which come in a repulsively convenient OBC set now): As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Light In August. Now. Setting aside the fact that these happen to be some of my all-time favorite novels, including at least one top-fiver, that She has branded as the Israel of the summer of 2005 (chosen people and all...get it?). Setting that aside. She has also created a rather disturbing dilemma for me.

To guide the masses through Faulkner's masterful tangles of language, She has set up a website (or, more accurately, her people called some people who did lunch with other people, who paid some other people to set it up). Included on this website are several quite helpful and interesting items. Including: video lectures for each novel from various distinguished professors from various prestigious universities, interactive questions and answers with said professors (and not just short replies, but quite thoughtful responses), character descriptions, glossaries, biographical information on Faulkner...and the list goes on. There is, quite honestly, a wealth of information.

And. To further compound my dilemma. One of the professors featured (for Light in August) is one of my favorite professors from Brown, Professor Arnold Weinstein. This is awesome for two reasons: (1) he's wildly amazing, and I relish the opportunity to read more of his thoughts on literature; and (2) I took his class on Faulkner at Brown--the first time he ever taught it--and we read Light In August, and it's very cool to see lectures on the web that pretty clearly grew out of lectures I experienced in person (you know, cool in the "I knew him way back when..." kind of way).

Finally. Necessary background information. Last spring I taught As I Lay Dying to my junior English class. And this coming spring I will teach it again.

So now you understand my dilemma. You don't? Well, you should, but I'll spell it out. I really really want to use some of the resources on this website for my class. But it's Oprah's! Can I? Do I dare? Am I selling out? (A question that implies its own answer, and my already-made decision on the dilemma at hand.)

A good friend, when I accepted my current job over a year ago, suggested that I was selling out. My thoughts on religion. To Judaism. For money. I agreed.

So. If Adonai, for cash. Why not Oprah, for the education of my students. Seems fair.

(As my "life in the big city" bookend, I wanted to mention the following. Today, on a relatively innocuous trip to Osco for Polysporin and de-wrinkle laundry spray, I passed an equally innocuous Dunkin' Donuts. I paused for a red light outside said Dunkin' Donuts, and during this respite from walking I was approached by a shuffling man in a White Sox hat. He hadn't been speaking to anyone else, and after he said his bit to me, he went back to the wall of the Dunkin' Donuts, still without talking to anyone else. Meanwhile, there were plenty of people walking by, and plenty of people waiting with me for the light to change. Plenty of people, I should add, who were much the same age as me and with much the same look as I offer to the world. This is what he said to me, and only to me: "Hey man...want some weed? I got some good weed." To which I replied: "No thanks."

Now. I've been told by several people that there is nothing about me that proclaims: HE SMOKES WEED. And I've believed them -- not without a little sadness, I'll be honest, as I harbor a certain romanticism in my heart for hippies. So I ask you. All of you. And please comment. Was this just a random occurrence? Or is there something about me after all -- something that whispers some coded language leftover from the 1960s and adapted to this new millenium? I ask you.)