Canto I

I, Lemurpants, halfway along life’s path, in my fifth year at Southeast Tuscany University and preparing for a tenure bid, find myself lost in a dark wood of over-trimmed juniper and boxwood hedges. After being set upon by three monstrous NCAA mascots— a Nittany Lion, a Saluki, and a Hoosier (a frightening beast to behold!), I am delivered to safety by Virgil, a pagan emeritus faculty member from the defunct Classics Department (a low-completion program eliminated in a misdirected money-saving purge). He professes to have been sent to by rescue by my long departed love Beatrice (we met at a May Day protest while we were both visiting assistants at West Umbria State U. She was promised an interview would materialize when a tenure-track line was approved, but alas. . . )

I Didn't Have the Grades for Princeton. Or the Stomach, I Guess.

There Is No Pressure for a Girl to Be a Girl
by Caroline Kitchener

Walk down Prospect Avenue in Princeton, New Jersey on the first Sunday in February, and you'll find a horde of shivering college sophomores huddled together on a front lawn, smeared in ketchup, maple syrup, and egg yolk. They're organized into stations: one group choking down live goldfish, the other pounding out push-ups as senior members shovel dog food into their mouths.

These are the students trying to win membership at Tiger Inn (or TI), widely known as the frattiest and hardest-drinking of Princeton University's 11 eating clubs -- exclusive institutions similar to co-ed fraternities. This group is loud, unafraid, and endowed with a collectively remarkable gag reflex. But the most striking thing about the students standing on this lawn? Most of them are girls.


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