Marcia Carlisle was Houppert's professor at Bennington in the early 80s, and Houppert praises her "stealthy approach to teaching history, luring us in with novels and diaries and memoirs that brought an emotional understanding of the period and its hardships." Carlisle favored allowing her students to arrive at their own opinions — in the discussion of Virginia Woolf's "A Room Of One's Own," Houppert remembers that she "weighed in to raise a question or two, but otherwise sat tight, a sphinx having posed her riddle." This approach resonated with Houppert, moving her "from a dark swirl of discontent about the state of the world and my place in it to a systematic analysis of injustice." Later the two became friends, and when Carlisle contracted a degenerative neuromuscular disease, she asked Houppert to edit her essay on the illness. The essay, which was never published, sounds like a profound statement of collective spirit in the face of personal pain. Of her former teacher, Houppert writes,

For a while, despair consumed her. Then, she did what feminists have done all along. She took a hard look at her circumstances and considered her personal story in the larger political context. I am reminded of a passage in "A Room of One's Own," in which Woolf observes that, "[w]omen have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size." Marcia saw a similar desire to inflate oneself among the able-bodied — at the expense of the disabled. She began to move from internalizing her anger to placing it a historical context of oppression — insisting that Phillips Exeter add ramps to buildings not only to accommodate her but to make it an inclusive campus, to alter its "wheelchair access" buttons outside doors to read "universal access," and to end its practice of holding faculty meetings in inaccessible second-floor conference rooms. She was determined to teach her students to reframe their understanding of disabled.

Houppert doesn't know why Carlisle decided to make her the beneficiary of her $75,000 life insurance policy. She says,

Perhaps Marcia was playing the role of Woolf's aunt, bequeathing me a small measure of artistic freedom.

Or perhaps not.

In truth, I'll never know, and maybe that was Marcia's point:

How did we get here? she might ask. How did this happen?

If Carlisle's goal was to make sure that the conversation about disability — and larger questions of the place of the female and/or ill body in the world — kept going after her death, then she chose a worthy heir. Houppert writes affectingly of Carlisle's illness not in familiar terms of individual strength and struggle, but in political terms, and it's clear that she is continuing with the "systematic analysis of injustice" that her professor taught her. It's also clear how much this professor affected her. Houppert's piece isn't just a remembrance of a single woman; it's a testament to the power that teachers can have not only over our minds, but over the values that shape our lives.

It was impossible for me to read Houppert's essay without thinking of my own teachers. I will be grateful forever to the one who taught me that literary criticism can be like playing, the one who sweetly explained that my poetry made it clear I should be a fiction writer, and the one who told me what a rare and worthwhile skill it was to be funny. But more than anything else, Houppert's words brought to mind two incidents that happened when I was about twenty-two years old. Houppert writes of a conversation with Carlisle soon after college:

"I wanna do something that matters, that will make a difference in the world," I confided in a half-whisper, because I knew it sounded corny.

She could have looked at me with a softly condescending smile that said, This, too, shall pass. But she didn't.

"You can," she said.

I had just graduated and was working at my university when a fairly famous male critic came to visit. He asked me what I had studied, and I told him literary theory. He shook his head and said, "Oh sweetie, you'll grow out of it." I wasn't quite green enough to take his words to heart, but I might have been, if not for conversations like the one I'd had with my classics professor a few months earlier. I'd gone to her office to ask what I should do with my life, and I had told her I wanted to be "a public intellectual." She fixed me with a kind but appraising stare, and said, "Yes. I think you can do this. But you should move to New York."

What's ironic about these two interactions is that what I said to my classics professor was kind of callow and silly, while what I said to the critic was not. But my professor was the one who chose to take me seriously. She was the one who looked at a very young woman with more arrogance than experience and gave that young woman actual advice. I didn't move to New York for a long time, but I never forgot that someone had given me permission to claim a position of importance for myself. It's a permission that everyone deserves and that many of us — women especially — are often denied. But once given, it provides protection — against people like the critic (who, to be fair, may have been more anti-theory than he was sexist), against those who view public speech by women as shrill or narcissistic, and against anyone with a stake in making intellectual or political endeavor seem pointless or overweening or uncool. Marcia Carlisle, in sitting back and letting her students find the answers for themselves, was giving them this permission. Houppert clearly benefited from it, and now she is repaying her old teacher by sharing her lessons with the world.

A Room Of Her Own [Washington Post]

• I think we can all agree that there's a real dearth of trashy fashion lines by C-List stars. Thank god Tara Reid is filling the void with "Mantra." The new collection "includes t-shirts, dresses, bikinis, ponchos and hoodies decorated with beads and charms." [Perez Hilton]
• Which is good, because fellow I-don't-even-know-what-letter-Lister Kelly Osborne's reality show, Project Catwalk, was just dropped in the UK. [The Star]
• Janice on Tyra: "Nor did I ever get a note or call thanking me for helping to put her show on the map. Whatever. She’s not my favorite person." [NY Mag]
• Presses, stopped: "Barack Obama has a 33-inch waist, and his jacket is a 40 long." This info comes from his tailor! [Racked]

• This is how we want our birthdays celebrated from now on: "Rumor has it (Sonia) Rykiel’s daughter, Nathalie, has asked a host of international designers, including Karl Lagerfeld, Donna Karan and Jean Paul Gaultier, to design an outfit in the spirit of Rykiel to pay homage to the sweater queen as part of her jubilee." [WWD]
• Not surprisingly, French Vogue editrice Carine Roitfeld's Paris pad is huge, chic, less than cozy. [Fashion Week Daily]
• Just in time for alleged "Twilight vampire mania," black lipgloss is everywhere but on our mouths! [LAT]
• Both American Eagle and Chico's had better-than-expected profits, even though they had to slash prices/launch a "Debbie Phelps line" to do it. [NYT]
• Thanks to Nuclear Wintour, tennis has had the fashion seal of approval for a while now. No wonder Lacoste and Ralph Lauren can't keep tennis couture on the shelves! [WWD]
• Those of us getting nostalgic for the days when Madonna was awesome can check out icons of her sartorial career at a London exhibition next year. "Highlights of the 300-item show will include her iconic pink Material Girl dress, which she wore in the video to her 1985 hit, and the gown she wore playing Argentinian heroine Evita in the 1996 movie." [The Telegraph]
• Kate Moss talks dirty — or at least talks about talking dirty — in Interview, despite our specific injunctions to avoid speaking. Also does nude pictorial. (NSFW although it's "artistic.") [The Sun]
• And wanna see her in a Turkish bath? Knock yourselves out. [Fashionista]
• "Telephoning from his 152-foot navy-hulled yacht moored off the island of Capri,' Valentino acts exactly as one would wish an iconic Italian designer to. [BlackBook]
• Victoria's Secret model Doutzen Kroes: '"I always went over the top when I liked the guys! I would send flowers and love notes," the lovely blonde dished. "I'm sure they're laughing now, because they're like 'Oh, shoot!' But this was when I was 13. Men now send me flowers, and I like it that way,"' Oh, shut it. [Radar]
• Former model Carol Alt's novel: "I wanted to teach in an entertaining kind of way. I have a wealth of knowledge about the modeling industry and how to create a career, not just survive the season. I wanted to be able to teach the girls coming in to the business what it's all about and what to expect. Nobody tells them and they're shocked," [CBS News]
• "I Kissed A Girl" singer Katy Perry, and Betsey Johnson, who kissed Anna Nicole, love each other. [BlackBook]
• Lifetime piggybacks on its Runway coup with Blush: The Search for America's Greatest Makeup Artist. Two words, Lifetime: Top Design. [Variety]
• Olympic golden girls Nastia Liukin, Shawn Johnson, and Alicia Sacramone "will be the new faces of CoverGirl." Aren't they kinda young? [Chic and Untroubled via NY Mag]
• Elton John auctions deco brooch; apparently will fetch a lot of money. [The Star]
• J Crew's down; they're blaming "system upgrades" but I'm blaming "high prices." [WSJ]
• Mark Ronson's spinning at fashion week. I feel manipulated; why do I love them all of a sudden? [Fashion Week Daily]
• We're normally wary of fashion types co-opting lit cause they think it sounds cool or whatever, but the invites to Abigail Lorick (who does all the ghost designing for Gossip Girl's "fashion shows" nb) sounds genuinely rad: "it’s a battered copy of Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece “A Room of One’s Own,” all wrapped up in a silk scarf bow." [Style.com]
• London's Jewish Museum of Art launches an exhibit on "Schmatte Counture" that seems to have very little to do with either rags or fashion. [Telegraph]
• Free YSL bags! Well, sort of. "The limited edition cotton totes, designed by Stefano Pilati, are the latest wrinkle in the French house's ongoing "Manifesto" program, in which newspaper-style catalogues are handed out to women on the streets of key fashion cities. More than half a million copies of the catalogue will be distributed in Paris, New York, London, Milan, Tokyo and Hong Kong, with 5,000 in each city tucked into the black or white totes." [WWD]
• They're also hawking a $50-something bracelet. "For their latest fragrance and lip gloss (as seen on the cast of Gossip Girl, as well as model Coco Rocha), YSL did something major: They put both beauty items into tiny gold charms, attached them to a YSL bracelet, and sent them straight to Sephora." [Nylon]