Since my retirement in 1991, I have continued doing some of the things I’ve always done, which shows either the persistence of habit or a lack of enough imagination to do something else. I gave classes for awhile at the Lifetime Learning Center at the Sand Point School (Otto Reinert also taught there). At the retirement home where I now live, I am at some distance from the campus, and I miss easy access to the library, but I am able to work with some of the others here to give informal classes for our fellow-residents—no papers, no tests, no grades. These have included such topics as Alice in Wonderland for Grown-ups, Reading Short Stories, and Shakespeare.
I have written two books since retiring: Ritual and Experiment in Modern Poetry (St. Martins P, 1995) and Winter Love: Ezra Pound and HD (U Wisconsin P, 2003; Italian translation: Un Amore in Inverno).
I write an occasional article or book review for the journals as I go along,
the most interesting being “Polyglotism in Rabelais and Finnegans Wake,”
Modern Language Journal, 2003, and a review of The Post-Human Dada Guide
in Modernism Modernity, 2011. My next project, which I am doing mostly by
not doing much, is a study of the early 20th-century woman novelist
pseudonymed Bryher.
It is nice to have plenty of time for reading, including the entire series of Palliser novels by Trollope.
