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"Okay, now I want to talk about this letter from Hawthorne..." my prof said, and all ten or twelve of us dutiful scholars (less than half the class) flipped to the second page of our handouts. Yawn.

And then Gretchen said, "Don't ever become a famous writer." Before that could even register with me she went on. "Especailly the kind that will be studied in college classes two hundred years later. If you do, all your e-mails, all your love letters, will be read and reproduced and people will make fun of you."

I don't really think I've written anything that could be called a love letter--just letters to people I love--but just thinking about people reading my e-mails made me shudder and twitch in terror.

This immediately follwed by Oh god, my livejournal...

Not that there's anything terrible here...stupid, maybe, but not detrimental to my writing career, unless it makes people think less of me, which doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility. And not that I'm going to become a famous writer, either, though that would be fun. So I'm not too worried about it.

We read a most amusing (and sweet, even by my standards) love letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was telling his wife about this farm they were going to move to.

"Dearest, provide thyself with a good stock of furs; and if thou canst obtain the skin of a polar bear, thou wilt find it a very suitable summer dress for this region.

"I went to see our cows foddered yesterday afternoon. We have eight of our own, and the number is now increased by a transcendental heifer belonging to Miss Margaret Fuller [a feminist interested in transcendentalism, which was a new fad at the time]. She is very fractious, I believe, and apt to kick over the milk pail... Thy husband intends to convert himself into a milk-maid this evening.

"...I did not milk the cows last night, because Mr. Ripley was afraid to trust them to my hands, or me to their horns--I know not which. But this morning, I have done wonders. Before breakfast, I went out to the barn, and began to chop hay for the cattle, and with such 'righteous vehemence' (as Mr. Ripley says) did I labor, that, in the space of ten minutes, I broke the machine.... After breakfast, Mr. Ripley put a four-pronged fork into my hands, which he gave me to understand was called a pitch-fork; and he and Mr. Farley being armed with similar weapons, we all three commenced a gallant attack upon a heap of manure. This affair being concluded, and they husband having purified himself, he sits down to finish this letter to his most beloved wife...

"Miss Fuller's cow has made herself ruler of the herd, and behaves in a very tyrannical manner... Dearest, I shall make an excellent husbandman. I feel the original Adam stirring within me."

The silliness had seemed to begin earlier than four-pronged forks and tyrannical cows and Gretchen telling us not to be famous writers. I am not surprised to say that it started with me.

Before class had even officially started I was proclaiming my intentions to never read anything with the word "romance" in the title. (This Hawthorne book we're reading is called THe Blithedale Romance.) People laughed. "Really! It's so fake," I said, "so dumb."

"So, what would you rather have, science fiction?" a girl asked.

"Yes, actually!" Science fiction is my favorite!

"Oh, and that isn't fake and dumb?"

"Hey, if this had lasers and aliens, I'd probably like it better," I said.

Then Gretchen chimed in. "Well, Priscilla could be an alien," she said. "You don't know yet."

"This is true," I said. (Priscilla is a romantic archetype, a slight, fair girl who's introduced into the story under mysterious circumstances; one of the main chracters brings her, saying an old man left her with him and told him to take her with him to this experimental socialist commune farm, which is what the story's about.) "I think it would be cool if Priscilla were an alien!"

So, besides having us read his love letters and laugh at them, Mr. Hawthorne had to deal with us blaspheming his novel by putting aliens in it... Being a famous writer perhaps isn't all it's cracked up to be.