TWEET TWEET

Yesterday, I had a visit from Dr. Tanya Mears. Tanya is a former student in Afro-American Studies who wrote her doctoral dissertation on a body of literature written in Colonial Puritan New England on the occasion of the public execution of a condemned criminal. The sermons, "last words," and poetry are called, collectively, Execution Literature, and Tanya's dissertation [which I directed] deals with the subset of that literature written about persons of African descent. Now Tanya is turning her dissertation into a scholarly monograph, and her visit was for the purpose of our strategizing on how best to do that. I directed only two dissertations during my twelve years as Graduate Program Director in Afro-American Studies [it is, after all, not my field], and the first has already been published as a book, by Dr. Jennifer Jensen-Wallach, so once Tanya's book comes out I will be batting a thousand.

Tanya is a tall, vivacious, witty Black woman, seriously Catholic [she graciously forgives me my atheism], totally plugged in to the modern culture, and something of a fashionista. Some years ago. she prevailed upon me to coordinate the color of my socks, my pants, my shirts, my shoes, and my belts, and she has been after me for years to get Instant messaging, something I seem not to be able to accomplish on my computer. It was under her influence that I signed up for FaceBook, and though I now have a circle of friends [mostly former Afro-Am students], I never write on my wall [is that the correct phrase?], to Tanya's manifest irritation.

Anyway, after a long planning session, she joined Susie and me for dinner at Azure, a pretty good restaurant across the street, and over entrees, she arm-twisted me into joining Twitter. She assured me that I would acquire "followers" and that the traffic to this blog would increase exponentially.

So I am now on FaceBook and Twitter, Lord help me. I just checked, and I do not yet have a single follower. What ever happened to the leisurely reading [and writing] of books?