i know where there are chairs in renaissance literature! in comus, there's an enchanted chair on which the lady becomes transfixed. and there's the silver seat in the garden of proserpina in the mammon cave episode (from faerie queene 2, which is probably where c.s. lewis's source for his silver chair comes from!). that's what we should get for nohrnberg. a tall silver barstool, which would be funny to see in the dim corridors of bryan hall, and a leafy something can easily be attached to it, for the effect described in the poem:

And in the midst thereof a siluer seat,
With a thicke Arber goodly ouer dight

bob says that we'll have to put something sticky on the comus chair, but i don't think we do because according to nohrnberg's comus lecture, at least my 10second condensed version of it, is that you only get stuck in it permanently if you're very virtuous (too virtuous) and none of us are.

oh yes. addy wants it known far and wide that she woke up at 9am (o sacrifice!) to buy me two black and white cookies to send onto the bus with urvashi, and that, as i was eating them, i might reflect, as the poem goes, shui zhi pan zhong can, li li jie xin ku. (who would have known that the meal in front of you is each and every grain of it the result of sweat and blood) although i noticed addy's pencil-scrawled "to minz from new york with love" on the bag, the information of her morning heroism came only after i'd given one to zach long, who drove us all, and had eaten the other one swiftly not at all mindful of her superhuman effort. it was very very good though. soft and fluffy inside and dipped half in dark and half in white chocolate. new yorkers, according to her, live on these. i conclude, however, that her friend urvashi and i have no yuan2 fen4 whatsoever. for three days the jefferson people swamp her with interviews and seminars and when they finally let her go, there will be no more than an hour left before she has to get her bus. i arrange with her to meet her in that hour and i wait at home half the morning for her to call, but when she finally does i'm in the dining hall and the reception immediately died on me and it is already 12.20. i wonder whether to go to the station anyway and see if i can find her, and ordinarily i would have, i think, but it's so cold and rainy out today, i don't even know where to look for her, and by the time i get there it'll be 12.30 and she'll have one foot on her bus already. and it's not as if i've got time to pack some food for her to take with her, which would have been something, so what good can i do?! she'll just think i'm mad to run to the station to wave at her. it's not even as if i know her or anything! but i do feel very annoyed, after all the addy fanfare, we saw each other for all the 3 minutes it took to drive from the station to her hotel! oh well. you know what they say. shi nian xiu de tong chuan du. it takes ten years of karma to earn a river crossing together. a 3 minute car ride and a common friend probably took several years in the making. not to complain!