Where the muses sing.

Inspiration for this blog came to me in two separate stages. I am an early morning toilet seat hugger. I sit atop that comfortable plastic seat clutching reading material ranging from Cosmo sexytimes to French grammar books. At home in Los Angeles, I stare at Hindi script letters, (I plan to replace those with Sanskrit and Bengali in the fall), mounted on the wall in front of me. This morning I did the usual in my grandmother's bathroom in my parents' new house. Desperate for anything, I grabbed at the first fat book on the bookshelf in the living room-- Don Quixote. Perfect. Cervantian self-deprecation is common in Pakistan, but I still need to get back in the swing of our speech habits, and so this morning it woke me up-- that smell of esparto grass...
If GoogleChat statuses are an intimate form of twittering than I will Gwitter, Glitter, Gchitterchatter? with the great books and great professors that so changed my approach to learning almost five years ago. My copy of Don Quixote had handwriting from when I still took notes by hand, it also smelled of the desperation with which I was learning about these writers who so desperately tried to make their mark. And the blunders with which the mark was made. My first status change, then, was with the Odyssey. What better book anyway, for the Odyssey is about us, young, still-not-over-college graduates who roam with a purpose and endure this strange hardship that is not quite comprehensible to us or anyone else, but somehow we go on because we believe we'll come out in our own private Ithacas.
But why stop at that, said the Toilet Muse, later in the afternoon. She's right, I think. Why stop at that? So a blog post a day about a couple of lines from the books in the 2004-2005 HUM Sequence. We'll start with Athena's question.

Of course, I may be more erudite now, and less constrained, to say whatever it is I think fits the bill.