Anatomy of a party

Greetings--groans, talk of my wrenched back--back injuries in general, why they feel particularly debilitating--holiday travels--hearing from an old penpal after a break of many years--the difficulty of keeping up with old friends.  Greetings--from reading John Mulgan's memoirs to this festive party not an easy transition--more greetings--congratulations on the new book!--a glass of wine--chat about holiday doings--greetings by guests on their way out, forced to leave early for a grandchild's birthday party.  Greetings to colleagues, shop talk: the mood at the APA in San Antonio happier than last year?--the ongoing parlous state of hiring in Classics--job interviews--the rules prescribing inquiries into one's personal life during a campus visit--questions about children--questions about religion--story of a Jew asked by a Catholic whether she thinks she'll fit into the small rural Catholic college she's visiting--a happy ending to the story--Catholic education and Jesuits--what does the S.J. stands for?  Refill.  Try Mulgan story again.  An affectionate, nicely put together speech by the host: the work that goes into a book--the difference between architecture and book-writing--his wife's book, brilliant--congratulations--laughter, applause.  Good speech by a happy author: an account of the book and the thinking behind it--smiles, nods, applause.  Back to Mulgan for a third try--despairing, depressive books that we love anyway--the appeal of memoirs about war very difficult to describe--the disillusionment wreaked by war--the disillusionment of post-war intellectuals on the left--why disillusionment is now an always-already state, if it exists at all--memoirs, still politically acute these days?--the memoir-style short fiction of the South--trying to understand the American South--memorializing civil wars different from memorializing other types of war--fiction that tries to say the unsayable--Holocaust fiction--Holocaust memorials--Germany coming to terms with the Holocaust--the social impact of sentimental and melodramatic TV in the 1960s--the Eichmann trial.  Greetings from a new arrival--introductions--Kantian ethics not only in the second Critique--ancient medical writing: how one enters that field of study--the influence of early Greek medical writing on philosophy--the discovery of nerves in the third century BCE--the limits of describing ancient philosophy as a battle between teleology and mechanics--Tim Lenoir's work on 19th century Germany--visions of the body/mind relation in Leibniz.  Interruption: comparing calendars.  Refill.  Greetings--the work of the new semester--a seminar on the novel--Lukacs, Bakhtin--the task of choosing novels to read alongside the theory very difficult--David Foster Wallace---how to juggle the demands of work--relief that Tino Sehgal's Guggenheim piece is not running this winter, mixed with regret.  Time to go?  Time for a bite of cheese.  Now time to go.