professor sollors is a gentleman, the verray parfit gentil knyght, tactful and kind, with beautiful manners, encouraging and gentle. he knew exactly what to do with me, that is to say, what he did was exactly the right thing - he gave me a book.

i had been uncertain about taking his class a few days ago, but thinking on his kindness, and after spending all of tonight reading his profiles (which everyone should too) and about his work at the longfellow institute, i am absolutely taken.

the politics of race focalised precisely through the issues of multilingualism has personal resonances for me - should have, for all of us in singapore. as for the work of the longfellow institute, at this time i am less convinced about its significance or perhaps what it really means to recuperate multilingual literatures, but its work in translation and the contexts of translation is interesting and i think it's a place to which i have the right skills to contribute. and sollors's intellectual profile is astonishing, and his scholarly modus operandi could well be akin to nohrnberg's. don't we all remember the footnote in the analogy that came from the us airways inflight magazine? i do believe sollors is like that, his incidental knowledge can rival nohrnberg, and he is very well versed in the classics - his book on ethnicity, which i have just ordered and am waiting eagerly for, is said to quote ovid and pliny.

and the reservations about the class? well, i don't know, twice the faculty attention in a class of half the expected number - i think that might mathematically work out to mean i'm getting four times the attention i should be, doesn't it? and i'm more and more pleased about the visiting fellows - i am excited to be see senior scholars who might be a role model for what i may become ten, fifteen years down the road. or maybe that's idealising the situation but surely there is everything to learn from this experience?