I keep a list of reasons why I'm happy not to be in graduate school. Here are a few: when I was searching for a room in the fall I came across a young man who was a graduate student in English at a university in New York. For one of his required courses he was reading an anthropological study of the readers of romance novels. How many removes from the real thing is that? I can't even count them. (In other contexts a study of the readers of trash might not seem so dire, but here it seems like — oh, I don't know, an exercise in cynicism. How did it become a requirement?!)

I told a fellow of a research institute that I studied Andrew Marvell. "Oh! He's really good! I mean, what I study is essentially doggerel, so when I turn to Marvell I'm like, 'Gosh, this is real poetry!'" She was my age, and charming, and had we lived in the same city I would have tried to befriend her, but I don't understand how one can dedicate one's life to doggerel.

A professor emerita at a university in New York: "I try to read my star graduate student's book, but every time I start it I can't make head or tail of it, and then I get bored, and I always end up reading a novel instead. I so glad I'm retired, and I don't have to bother about what Dante might have drawn as a child, I can concentrate on my grandchildren's drawings!" (This was in a non-academic setting, so I guess she figured she could say whatever she wanted.)

Charles Simic on the crisis in translation: "Academics used to buy books in translation, to see what Russian or German authors were writing. They don't do that any more."