Thank you.
Now to change the tone, the topic, and everything
I told Alison that because I teach English,
and for many of the years that I taught it,
I was what we jokingly referred to a composition slave.
I was sometimes called one week before the quarter began
and told by my department chairman,
we need you to teach a course and that'll
be starting next Monday.
You have to teach literature since the beginning of time
up to the Renaissance.
And for slave wages, of course, and you said, yeah,
because there were a million other graduate
students who would do it for free or something.
And so I ended up reading.
One year I taught from the Old Testament
through the Renaissance second period
and I taught from "Beowulf" up to that time
and I was always in a time warp; not quite
understanding what century, I have to look at my notes,
where am I today?
And one of the things that happened
was that, that was during the time
when I was really learning about the difficulty of being
a woman in the job situation.
And I was trying to teach these things in an egalitarian way.
I wanted my students to understand
that women had made a difference in history and literature,
but then there were no women.
When they were there, they didn't have a voice.
And don't worry, I'm not going to go into a militant diatribe.
I don't have the energy for that anymore.
But what happened was that, for example,
I taught "The Odyssey," which I love.
And the character of Penelope, a smart woman, a queen.
And we are asked to believe that for 20 years, while her husband
was out having a blast, sleeping with goddesses,
and eating well, she was there weaving and weaving
a shroud for her father-in-law.
And I said, no, I have to do something about this
or I'm really going to start feeling
resentful about literature since the beginning of time.
And so what I did for myself was I wrote
a series of poems called--