Critical Theory Since Plato

I am trying to find tasks to occupy my time as the country grows ever-more alarming. Who the hell asked Elon Musk to do ANYTHING government-related? They sneaked him in the way people used to put blankets over their friends in the backseat of a car, to get them in free to a drive-in movie.

 So, I am downsizing books, packing some up for storage, weeding out what I want to keep on my shelves, for now. I found some very precious books from when I was in college: my textbook on John Milton, poems and essay collections by William Carlos Williams, a slender copy of The Wasteland, with a black-and grey cover. I also found my first-edition copy of Ariel by Sylvia Plath, and a book of Dylan Thomas's collected poems (probably bought at the same place). The latter two I bought and read on my own. 

 Nostalgically, I went onto Alibris a few minutes ago, wondering if there might possibly be a copy of a dreadful textbook I had for a class in my senior undergrad year: Critical Theory Since Plato. Yes, it is a real book, or at least I had remembered it as such. The Alibris search brought it up immediately.

I have thought for some time about creating a legend about CTSP in the book I'm currently writing, that students swear a book of such bone-crushing dullness cannot possibly exist. The urban legend leads to a Watergate-style break-in by soused English majors when they hear CTSP lurks somewhere in the always-locked faculty library. Maybe not soused--God knows how many times my friends and I went on the silliest,  almost Pythonesque adventures when I was an undergrad, without a drop of Demon Rum in sight. Plus, there's enough drunks in my book already that it's practically its own AA meeting.

A professor named Hazard Adams wrote Critical Theory Since Plato. Now there's a name: it sounds like someone who writes about living among grizzlies, or mushing a dog team through Alaska. Apparently Hazard Adams was, in real life, a well-liked professor at the University of Washington (he passed away in 1993). But what a name! There had to be a grizzly in there, somehow, somewhere.

 But I digress, as always (sometimes I fear I digress so much that I will make myself ageless). The real-world Critical Theory Since Plato has a plain, bull's-blood-red cover, with the title and author's name stamped in brassy gold. I remember from my first copy that this book looked old even when it was brand-new. The dull cover wraps an equally dull text: so tedious that I literally do not remember anything about it.

So why pay nine bucks on Alibris for a book I clearly hated, from a year that's in the top category of "the most traumatic years of my life?" I simply want to see if I might understand anything in the book after forty-odd years, with nearly fifteen years of that time spent in academia. I suppose my entertainments these days are as dull as that textbook.

For nine bucks, why not?  I can even promise you an update, Faithful Readers. 

Onward.