So. College starts on Thursday. That is also the deadline for the semester's first issue of the college newspaper, where I edit two sections and write a weekly column. I've got work to do. I have guidelines to write, not to mention a column, and I'm thinking of writing an article or two for the News section, 'cause we don't seem to have anybody else to do it just now. But we'll see. So far, I'm just avoiding doing anything, including this entry, which I'm finally getting to a bit late. But I refuse to miss a day this early into it.

My domains are the Op/Ed section, and the Literary section. The latter has only had poetry so far, although I'm open to short stories if any come in worth printing. Either way, I have standards. Subjective standards, to be sure -- the criteria for publication are that a given piece has to have literary merit, and fit the tone of the section; the latter is defined as "Whatever Shmuel thinks fits the tone of the section, 'cause it's his baby" -- but I figure that's better than just accepting everything that comes in.

I seem to be an exception in that regard. But I'd rather print a small handful of good poems than a large number of mediocre ones. The latter scares away the good poets, and leaves nothing but mediocrity. My hope is that the former will encourage the submission of more good poetry.

One advantage of subjective criteria is that it makes it possible for one to reject lots of submissions without having to claim that said submission were "bad," whatever that means. It makes it easier on the poets. Not to mention easier on me.

I'd cover some of it this week, but too much has been going on with the City University of New York, and I figure that my primary responsibility is to cover the local stuff. Mayor Giuliani's crusade to end Open Admissions and privatize "remedial" education has continued, and if I don't write about it, who will? As opposed to the national stuff, which you can hardly escape.

I'll probably write more about that as the week goes on, and I get my facts together. Maybe I'll even post the final product, although I'd want to wait until after the paper hits the stands. We'll see.

I'm about a quarter of the way through The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende. Allende's been recommended by Mary Anne and Mouthorgan lately, so I figured I'd give her a try.

I liked the beginning of it. But it wasn't long before I was introduced to the narrator of the story. The book alternates between third-person and first-person sections, you see, and it quickly becomes clear that the narrator of the third-person sections is the guy whose perspective we get in the first-person sections. I don't yet see what's gained by this, especially as Allende seems to slip up at times, having the narrator know things he couldn't possibly be aware of... but that may be a premature judgement, and that's not the real problem here.

The problem is that I hate the narrator. Loathe him. Simply put, he's pond scum. "No one's going to convince me that I wasn't a good patron... in general there's nothing I regret" he says, just before he describes how he raped and impregnated just about every adolescent girl in the village he controlled. There have been a couple of moments where I wanted to reach into the book and throttle him, or, barring that, just hurl the book across the room. (I didn't. I never do. I just closed it for a bit, while I yelled at it.)

This is the narrator, you understand. This is somebody we're supposed to be rooting for.

On the other hand, Clara is a delight. And she's just married him at the point I'm at, so perhaps things will pick up.

A not entirely dissimilar situation prevails with Possession, by A.S. Byatt, which I'm about a third of the way through. I loved her Still Life and Babel Tower, so I had some hopes for this book, which won the Booker Prize in 1990. But my respect for the protagonist is shattered on page 11, and I've had trouble getting past that.

See, a key plot point in the book is that Roland discovers two unfinished letters by Randolph Henry Ash tucked into a long-neglected book, which have been gathering dust in a library vault, and, instead of reporting the find, as integrity would demand, he swipes them, and keeps them to himself.

This might not be unforgivable if it bothered him. If he felt unaccountably compelled to do so, but was uncomfortable with the idea, or was scared of the consequences, I might be able to forgive him. But, instead, on page 11, we find him walking out of the library with his ill-gotten goods, passing "notices about mutilation of volumes, about theft, with which he quite failed to associate himself." How can one relate to somebody like that? And, worse, this is a romance. For a romance to work, we must like the principals, and want them to get together, or all is lost.

Byatt's writing is still wonderful, but I don't care about the principals at all. (Although the two poets the principals are studying seem likeable enough. So there's still the story within the story to look forward to.)

I'm being dull and pedantic, I think. I'm tempted to junk this entire entry, but it's probably better than nothing. I'll try to do better tomorrow.