Yesterday at our weekly MAPH social hour (all the booze your tuition money can buy), I was delighted to discover that many of the students in my preceptor group aren't fond of certain trends in modern literature. Jonathan Safran Foer and — most important for my purposes — the dreadful Dave Eggers were mentioned.

Finally, a university where the people with decent taste are the majority. Or, at least, the vocal minority. There was much playa-hating.

I had to be careful, of course, because with so many English geeks about you take a chance everytime you mention a book. I dislike Dickens (it's phase two here, I'm told) and my faint praise was not kindly received. Thank god and Evelyn Waugh that Little Dorrit is so proverbially awful or I wouldn't have had a graceful way out of that.

Mostly though it was people critizing the same genre or work or author for different but related reasons. Moby Dick and Infinite Jest, two books I've put off reading for surprisingly similar reasons, were both recommended to me.

Oh, and we talked the varieties of drunkeness that accompany certain liquors, a subject I find all-too-fascinating.

Thankfully, except for Raymond Carver, my favorite authors seem to be largely unknown to the students here. A few people have read bits of Murakami, which is good because the shorter stuff is better anyways. Amazingly, I have met no one who knows about Chicago native Joseph Epstein, my favorite essayist.

I say "people," and there was a rotating crowd of people discussing literature in what most observers would (falsely?) consider a pretentious way, but one person stood out in particular. I think I've found our Hegelian. Even the way she professed to dislike New Yorker fiction while reading it obsessively anyways was dead on.

Now, unlike some of the people I knew at Lawrence, I never came to dislike the Hegelian. Maybe it was our shared academic interests, or maybe it was simply that I never thought she was taking herself quite so seriously. In any case, even though the Hegelian was a bit intense at times, ultimately, in that big interdepartmental battle royale I spent four years imagining, I always ended up on her side. If I could make any of my fantasies into a movie...

I'm reminded of that time in the VR when she stormed in and asked me, snarkily, if I ever wrote about her on my little blog. At least one of us must have been drunk, because the whole situation was hilarious.

Apparently I haven't offended anybody quite yet. I'd thought that the B section of our preceptor group hated me for my boorish behavior on Monday, but I had a nice chat with a few of them on the way home. Ended up splitting a goat-cheese and olive pizza with two of them, even.

I did somehow get myself into an embarassing conversation where I somehow ended up pointing out a dangling modifier in one girl's essay, but she took it well and it was obvious I'd been tricked... somehow... into acting like the geeky copy editor I am.

Anyways, it's pretty odd to be among so many people who, if not English geeks themselves, are at least fellow travelers. It's still possible that this is all in my head, of course, and I'll have to play a game of Illuminati (my new litmus test) before passing final judgment on any of these people — but assuming I can find a group to hang out without outside of the designated social hours, this could be an interesting year.