Seven Red

So I taught my first classes in downtown Chicago (the Loop, for those of you who don’t know the town) this morning, and it was a weird feeling. It wasn’t strange being in the middle of a major financial district, since I worked almost exclusively in major financial districts (in New York, and in San Francisco) for all my non-academic jobs, with the exception of a stint in various places in Albany. But it was strange to have an academic job and walk out of your classroom into the middle of Jackson and Wabash, with the El running overhead and all the bustle. I guess I’ve attached a feeling of place to those two parts of my working life: the academic being associated with some isolated Giant University Town, and the financial being associated with the urban center. Up until this quarter, all my classes have been located at the slightly more urban campus, but that one is still somewhat divided from the city space simply through concentration; it’s still a campus, in other words. But in the Loop, you’re right in the middle of the city, and nothing divides you from any other worker in that city. (Needless to say, this mirrors the classic division of practical and theoretical knowledge that has reigned more or less since Aristotle, so it probably wasn’t too hard to simply transpose such a dominant set of categories on to geographical coordinates, even unconsciously). But these came crashing together in a strange and pleasant way today.

By the way, does anybody else out there get “First Day of Class Sore Throat?” I guess I don’t really project-talk so much in the off-season, and then two classes of syllabus/policies/assignments which involves mostly me yapping always leaves my throat sore. Ouchies.

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