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I grew up not far from here relatively speaking, although, you know, again, I don't know.

For a lot of you people, the DC area, you might look with New Jersey with a certain amount

of contempt, but New Jersey, the East Coast, such as it is.

But I've spent the last eight years in the Midwest.

Part of tonight's talk grows out of my own confrontation between the disparate cultures of

the East Coast and Midwest as manifested especially in their popular approaches to literature.

That's my informal way of saying the reactions I get in class from students based upon where they're from.

In addition to my day job as a professor teaching courses in the great books in Greek and Latin,

I also moonlight.

Actually, I don't moonlight, so I don't earn anything for this.

This is a purely voluntary thing.

I volunteer as a member of the editorial board

for a Catholic literary magazine called Dappled Things.

So in that capacity, I, along with our whole team of editors,

some more than others, probably them more than me, do the heavy

task of sifting through many entries each month of what young Catholic authors deemed to be

the next great thing in Catholic literature. So no one's submitted there yet, not secretly,

like no one's like here specifically about the rejected manuscript.

Okay, good.

Just being sure.

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