Special topics in calamity physics - By Marisha Pessl Page 0,9

tulip poplar trees nine meters from the shoulder of the highway?

Dad didn't like to talk about that.

"That very morning your mother had talked to me of plans to enroll in a night class, Intro to Moths of North America, so rid yourself of such dour thoughts. Natasha was the victim of one too many butterfly nights." Dad gazed at the floor. "A sort of moth moon madness," he added quietly.

He smiled then and looked back at me, where I was standing in the door, but his eyes were heavy, as if it required strength to hold them to my face. "We'll leave it at that," he said.

II

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Due to the surprisingly high sales of The Powers That Be (compared to the other page-turners published by Harvard University Press that year, including Currency Abroad [Toney, 1987] and FDR and His Big Deal: A New Look at the First 100 Days [Robbe, 1987]), his impeccable twelve-page curriculum vitae, the frequent appearance of his essays in such respected, highly specialized (yet little-read) journals as International Affairs and American Policies and Daniel Hewitt's Federal Forum (not to mention a nomination in 1990 for the heralded Johann D. Stuart Prize for American Political Science Scholarship), Dad had managed to make enough of a name for himself to be a perennial visiting lecturer at political science departments across the country.

Mind you, Dad no longer wooed top-tiered universities for their esteemed multinamed teaching positions: the Eliza Grey Peastone-Parkinson Professor of Government at Princeton, the Louisa May Holmo-Gilsendanner Professor of International Politics at MIT. (I assumed, given the extreme competition, these institutions weren't mourning Dad's absence from their "tight-knit circle of incest"—what he called highbrow academia.)

No, Dad was now interested in bringing his erudition, international fieldwork experience and research to the bottom tiers ("bottom-feeders" he called them in a Bourbon Mood), the schools no one had ever heard of, sometimes not even the students enrolled in them: the Cheswick Colleges, the Dodson-Miner Colleges, the Hattiesburg Colleges of Arts and Sciences and the Hicks-burg State Colleges, the universities of Idaho and Oklahoma and Alabama at Runic, at Stanley, at Monterey, at Flitch, at Parkland, at Picayune, at Petal.

"Why should I waste my time teaching puffed-up teenagers whose minds are curdled by arrogance and materialism? No, I shall spend my energies enlightening America's unassuming and ordinary. 'There's majesty in no one but the Common Man.' " (When questioned by colleagues as to why he no longer wished to educate the Ivy League, Dad adored waxing poetic on the Common Man. And yet, sometimes in private, particularly while grading a frighteningly flawed final exam or widely-off-the-mark research paper, even the illustrious, unspoiled Common Man could become, in Dad's eyes, a "half-wit," a "nimrod," a "monstrous misuse of matter.")

An excerpt from Dad's personal University of Arkansas at Wilsonville Web page (www.uaw.edu/polisci/vanmeer):

Dr. Gareth van Meer (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1978) is the Visiting Professor of Political Science for the 1997-1998 school year. He hails from Ole Miss, where he is Chair of the Department of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Study of the United States. He is interested, broadly, in political and economic revitalization, military and humanitarian involvement, and post-conflict renewal of Third World nations. He is currently working on a book entitled The Iron Grip, about African and South American ethnic politics and civil war.

Dad was always hailing from somewhere, usually Ole Miss, though we never went back to Oxford in the ten years we traveled. He was also always "currently working on The Iron Grip" though I knew as well as he did that the Grip —fifty-five legal pads filled with unintelligible handwriting (much of it water damaged), stored in a large cardboard box labeled in black permanent marker, GRIP—had not been worked on, currently or otherwise, in the last fifteen years.

"America," Dad sighed as he drove the blue Volvo station wagon across another state line. Welcome to Florida, the Sunshine State. I flipped down the visor so I wasn't blinded. "Nothing like this country. No indeedy-o. Really is the Promised Land. Land of the Free and the Brave. Now how about that Sonnet number 30? You didn't finish. 'When to the sessions of sweet silent thought, I summon up remembrance of things past.' Come on, I know you know this one. Speak up. 'And with old woes

From second grade at Wadsworth Elementary in Wadsworth, Kentucky, until my senior year of high school at the St. Gallway School in Stockton, North