Special Topics in Calamity Physics Read Online Free PDF

of Arts and Sciences and the Hicks-burg State Colleges, the universities of Idaho and Oklahoma and Alabama at Runic, at Stanley, at Monterey, at Flitch, at Parkland, at Picayune, at Petal.
    "Why should I waste my time teaching puffed-up teenagers whose minds are curdled by arrogance and materialism? No, I shall spend my energies enlightening America's unassuming and ordinary. 'There's majesty in no one but the Common Man.' " (When questioned by colleagues as to why he no longer wished to educate the Ivy League, Dad adored waxing poetic on the Common Man. And yet, sometimes in private, particularly while grading a frighteningly flawed final exam or widely-off-the-mark research paper, even the illustrious, unspoiled Common Man could become, in Dad's eyes, a "half-wit," a "nimrod," a "monstrous misuse of matter.")
    An excerpt from Dad's personal University of Arkansas at Wilsonville Web page (www.uaw.edu/polisci/vanmeer):
    Dr. Gareth van Meer (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1978) is the Visiting Professor of Political Science for the 1997-1998 school year. He hails from Ole Miss, where he is Chair of the Department of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Study of the United States. He is interested, broadly, in political and economic revitalization, military and humanitarian involvement, and post-conflict renewal of Third World nations. He is currently working on a book entitled The Iron Grip, about African and South American ethnic politics and civil war.
    Dad was always hailing from somewhere, usually Ole Miss, though we never went back to Oxford in the ten years we traveled. He was also always "currently working on The Iron Grip" though I knew as well as he did that the Grip —fifty-five legal pads filled with unintelligible handwriting (much of it water damaged), stored in a large cardboard box labeled in black permanent marker, GRIP—had not been worked on, currently or otherwise, in the last fifteen years.
    "America," Dad sighed as he drove the blue Volvo station wagon across another state line. Welcome to Florida, the Sunshine State. I flipped down the visor so I wasn't blinded. "Nothing like this country. No indeedy-o. Really is the Promised Land. Land of the Free and the Brave. Now how about that Sonnet number 30? You didn't finish. 'When to the sessions of sweet silent thought, I summon up remembrance of things past.' Come on, I know you know this one. Speak up. 'And with old woes
    From second grade at Wadsworth Elementary in Wadsworth, Kentucky, until my senior year of high school at the St. Gallway School in Stockton, North Carolina, I spent as much time in the blue Volvo as I did in a classroom. Although Dad always maintained an elaborate explanation for our itinerant existence (see below), I secretly imagined we wandered the country because he was fleeing my mother's ghost, or else he was looking for it in every rented two-bedroom house with a grouchy porch swing, every diner serving waffles tasting of sponge, every motel with pancake pillows, bald carpeting and TVs with a broken CONTRAST button so newscasters resembled Oompa Loompas.
    Dad, on Childrearing: "There's no education superior to travel. Think of The Motorcycle Diaries, or what Montrose St. Millet wrote in Ages of Exploration: 'To be still is to be stupid. To be stupid is to die.' And so we shall live. Every Betsy sitting next to you in a classroom will only know Maple Street on which sits her boxy white house, inside of which whimper her boxy white parents. After your travels, you'll know Maple Street, sure, but also wilderness and ruins, carnivals and the moon. You'll know the man sitting on an apple crate outside a gas station in Cheerless, Texas, who lost his legs in Vietnam, the woman in the tollbooth outside of Dismal, Delaware, in possession of six children, a husband with black lung but no teeth. When a teacher asks the class to interpret Paradise Lost, no one will be able to grab your coattails, sweet, for you will be flying far, far