Dan Chiasson gets a sandwich

Poet and critic Dan Chiasson is blogging this week over at the Paris Review's "Culture Diaries." Good eating tips and some poetry:

9:30 A.M. I meet the students in this storied room, where Robert Lowell once taught (he wrote a great poem about teaching at BU and living a few blocks away, “Memories of West Street and Lepke”). Lots of stuff comes up: Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler, the online virtual world Second Life, Chris Marker’s film La Jetée, James Bond—two hours, and the list could be ten times as long. One nice thing about poetry: Anything and everything is its subject.

12:00 P.M. I get a sandwich at a remarkable place in Brookline Village. My friend Katie told me about it. Go for the ham and piemento. In the car, I keep switching between an interview with Ann Beattie on a local NPR show called Hear and Now (I’ve never read Beattie, but I like the way she talks about her work) and the morons on WTKK, Boston’s Talk Radio Revolution. I like listening to talk radio. I like argument almost for its own sake. But the white guy anger really disturbs me. I’ve noticed more and more I’m getting shouted at and otherwise roughly handled by men in big trucks behind me on the road (must be my Bernie Sanders bumper sticker, or perhaps my general air of being a privileged weenie). Often these guys are in the trades, and their drywall or plumbing business is advertised right on their trucks. Now, is that any way to drum up business?