I feel like I should take a bow , leave the stage, and never blog again after "The Maltese Futon" post.
But I won't. Because I have other things to babble about in this post.
Because my book is done. At least done enough that I can send it on to my editor, and pretend it isn't my problem for a bit. Let me also note - because everyone around here seemed to think it would be heretical for an academic to do so - that it is done and available to be sent on-time.
But it won't because when I e-mailed my editor the list of questions I'd been compiling about the process and things I didn't know about how they wanted this draft to appear, I received a reply telling me they wouldn't even be looking at it until maybe early September and so to hold off a little bit as they'd be out of town anyway, and also the bibliographic formatting had been changed.
For those of you who care, it came out to 251 pages, though that's with the charts and such pulled out (and there are a lot of 'em, my friends). My longest sentence is still 70 words (though I do hold out hope there might be some easy way to find that sentence so I can take it down a notch).
But it is (more or less) done.
The Maltese Futon
Driving along this evening, I passed a store that, on the quickest glance, was called "Raymond Chandler Furniture."
This set off the whole set of thoughts that only come when driving, like what would it be like to work there? I imagine a store populated with down-on-their-luck salesmen with names like Mickey and Jack, who could make a sale but always wound up paying for it. They'd be grim, straight talkers, with an angled hats and suits that hadn't been crisp since they'd had their first drink twenty years before. Real hard luck cases. Masters of the hard sell because they'd seen it from both ends.
It seems like the sort of store you could go into and say "I want a table with legs so long, you'd have to have two dinners to give them the full once over."
Oh, sure, you'd have to get a little roughed up to get your purchase home with you, and there'd be customers wandering through who looked like they'd seen the business end of the hard-luck stick. But it'd be worth it just to sit on a couch so comfortable you'd tell it your secrets and say thanks when it stole your remote.
The only problem was I don't know if I need furniture.
This set off the whole set of thoughts that only come when driving, like what would it be like to work there? I imagine a store populated with down-on-their-luck salesmen with names like Mickey and Jack, who could make a sale but always wound up paying for it. They'd be grim, straight talkers, with an angled hats and suits that hadn't been crisp since they'd had their first drink twenty years before. Real hard luck cases. Masters of the hard sell because they'd seen it from both ends.
It seems like the sort of store you could go into and say "I want a table with legs so long, you'd have to have two dinners to give them the full once over."
Oh, sure, you'd have to get a little roughed up to get your purchase home with you, and there'd be customers wandering through who looked like they'd seen the business end of the hard-luck stick. But it'd be worth it just to sit on a couch so comfortable you'd tell it your secrets and say thanks when it stole your remote.
The only problem was I don't know if I need furniture.
Frag(ments), Son of Scraps
The deadline is coming, and I hope I am Chicken Little about it falling on my head. Still no time for a real post, I think, so random thoughts have been collecting here for days. So read it, because suffering is good for the soul.
---
Even in the office on weekends, I can't work here. The printers here don't like my word processor. I'm pretty computer savvy, and I've done the tweaks and surfed the help forums (fori? is forum its own plural? fuck it. but remember to do a search and replace in the manuscript.) Really, it's probably another configuration problem on the part of the network, the way my e-mail client can no longer access the mail server here, forcing me to use Microsoft Exchange.
---
I'm sick of hearing people explain why the Barack Obama cover is fine. I get it.
What I want to know is why haven't we heard from the comedians, explaining why we can say for sure it isn't funny. Anybody who has ever been on stage can tell you there's a simple way to tell if something is funny: check if the people you intended to are laughing.
You can call it satire, and dress it up in First Amendment considerations, and whatever you like. But at the end of the day, if you made a joke and your audience didn't laugh, it was a bad decision. But for the record, if you want to satire a group's view, you need to reference the group in your satire, not just their bogus view.
Of course, maybe it is our mistake, though not the way it's being spun. Perhaps the New Yorker cover is a signal about just who the magazine is targeted to. Let me admit up front that I've done my time with New Yorker subscriptions. They have some great writing and some great insights. But at the same time, I can say definitively that the New Yorker isn't a magazine for whom I'm the key demographic. And in fact, academics and liberals, let me suggest that most of us aren't. Look at how much of the magazine is given over to things that will never have relevance to your life even if you actually lived in NYC. And I don't just mean ads, though these are a pretty big hint in and of themselves. Bulova watches? Nights at the Met?
If you, like me, didn't like the cover and found it questionable at best and poor taste at worst, let me offer up a new thought. Maybe the cover isn't funny because it's not meant to be funny to us.
I'm just sayin'.
---
Incidentally, I'm also sick to death of anything to do with Brett Favre. I don't know why, particularly since I don't pay attention to the NFL or MLB or much of any sport that isn't basketball, why I keep hearing stories about this. But they need to stop.
---
Neighbors: putting your trash in the hall to take out "later" is not a good solution. I'm tired, full of cabin fever, and if you keep it up, I might let the air out of your tires.
---
Getting set for Season 2 of "Mad Men" and Season 3 of "Lost." For those of you considering either, here's my big thought.
"Lost" and 'Mad Men" are nice contrasts. "Lost" is so awash in daddy issues (and notice that, particularly in the first season, the only characters who get real relationship oriented bask stories are the males) that Freud would have to invent a new complex for it. In contrast, while "Mad Men"'s lead character is a male, some of the most interesting stories in it have to do with sexual/office politics for women.
"Lost" still frustrates me in some ways. I feel like there were a few moments in Season 2 where the writers completely forgot how they'd written characters just an episode or two back. And there is a constant character as deus ex machina shtick that will wear completely through shortly if it hasn't already. But for all of that, there are a couple of the lesser characters who I enjoy enough to continue.
"Mad Men" was a little slow for me initially, but one of the things I liked about it is that even when I knew something was coming, it always was used in a way that surprised me. I'm a big fan of anything that can take something that's nearing cliche and make me think "well, that was new!"
---
It was an interesting moment when I realized, as I was advising incoming freshmen, that every moment I have to do something that is institutionally supportive (helping with incoming freshmen, strategic planning, etc) that I'm looking for ways to game the system. Not for my benefit exactly, but to find a way around some imagined and inevitable poor planning by someone above me.
Maybe worse, maybe not, I found myself explaining the visible portion of that iceberg to the incoming freshmen as part of their orientation.
It's going to be a good year, for real.
---
Even in the office on weekends, I can't work here. The printers here don't like my word processor. I'm pretty computer savvy, and I've done the tweaks and surfed the help forums (fori? is forum its own plural? fuck it. but remember to do a search and replace in the manuscript.) Really, it's probably another configuration problem on the part of the network, the way my e-mail client can no longer access the mail server here, forcing me to use Microsoft Exchange.
---
I'm sick of hearing people explain why the Barack Obama cover is fine. I get it.What I want to know is why haven't we heard from the comedians, explaining why we can say for sure it isn't funny. Anybody who has ever been on stage can tell you there's a simple way to tell if something is funny: check if the people you intended to are laughing.
You can call it satire, and dress it up in First Amendment considerations, and whatever you like. But at the end of the day, if you made a joke and your audience didn't laugh, it was a bad decision. But for the record, if you want to satire a group's view, you need to reference the group in your satire, not just their bogus view.
Of course, maybe it is our mistake, though not the way it's being spun. Perhaps the New Yorker cover is a signal about just who the magazine is targeted to. Let me admit up front that I've done my time with New Yorker subscriptions. They have some great writing and some great insights. But at the same time, I can say definitively that the New Yorker isn't a magazine for whom I'm the key demographic. And in fact, academics and liberals, let me suggest that most of us aren't. Look at how much of the magazine is given over to things that will never have relevance to your life even if you actually lived in NYC. And I don't just mean ads, though these are a pretty big hint in and of themselves. Bulova watches? Nights at the Met?
If you, like me, didn't like the cover and found it questionable at best and poor taste at worst, let me offer up a new thought. Maybe the cover isn't funny because it's not meant to be funny to us.
I'm just sayin'.
---
Incidentally, I'm also sick to death of anything to do with Brett Favre. I don't know why, particularly since I don't pay attention to the NFL or MLB or much of any sport that isn't basketball, why I keep hearing stories about this. But they need to stop.
---
Neighbors: putting your trash in the hall to take out "later" is not a good solution. I'm tired, full of cabin fever, and if you keep it up, I might let the air out of your tires.
---
Getting set for Season 2 of "Mad Men" and Season 3 of "Lost." For those of you considering either, here's my big thought.
"Lost" and 'Mad Men" are nice contrasts. "Lost" is so awash in daddy issues (and notice that, particularly in the first season, the only characters who get real relationship oriented bask stories are the males) that Freud would have to invent a new complex for it. In contrast, while "Mad Men"'s lead character is a male, some of the most interesting stories in it have to do with sexual/office politics for women.
"Lost" still frustrates me in some ways. I feel like there were a few moments in Season 2 where the writers completely forgot how they'd written characters just an episode or two back. And there is a constant character as deus ex machina shtick that will wear completely through shortly if it hasn't already. But for all of that, there are a couple of the lesser characters who I enjoy enough to continue.
"Mad Men" was a little slow for me initially, but one of the things I liked about it is that even when I knew something was coming, it always was used in a way that surprised me. I'm a big fan of anything that can take something that's nearing cliche and make me think "well, that was new!"
---
It was an interesting moment when I realized, as I was advising incoming freshmen, that every moment I have to do something that is institutionally supportive (helping with incoming freshmen, strategic planning, etc) that I'm looking for ways to game the system. Not for my benefit exactly, but to find a way around some imagined and inevitable poor planning by someone above me.
Maybe worse, maybe not, I found myself explaining the visible portion of that iceberg to the incoming freshmen as part of their orientation.
It's going to be a good year, for real.
Half-asleep Musical Rambling
Technically, I'm probably due for a nap.
But I've been sitting/laying here, waiting for my campus e-mail account to start working again so I can send a couple of notes off before I go mid-afternoon jammies. But instead of grumbling, I've been surfing the Internet looking at music stuff. This is rarely a good thing, financially, as I have a bit of a problem with compulsively buying music.
And so when Pandora - which I love and must plug again because it is the best way to find cool, new music since that cute, slightly nerdy girl at the record store - showed me that a band (Slow Runner) whose debut album ("No Disassemble") I loved had a new album out ("Mermaids") with a song that I couldn't get enough of on it ("The Stakes Have Been Raised"), I had to go looking. It was, as the quote goes, a moral imperative. As it turns out, they have two new albums, and they may have been bumped from their label, which intrigues me because their album was that good that there's no way they should have been dropped. Still, it wouldn't be the first time the business didn't recognize greatness.
And so, off I went, in part because it's a long way to payday and two albums might be a bad move (since I just got a few including a long sought after copy of Howlin' Wolf's "London Sessions" that is as good as I'd hope). And what did I find was all sorts of news with lots of potential.
First, Karen O. of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs has some nice recordings in a much more mellow vein up for listening on MySpace under the name "Native Korean Rock." They're different from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs by miles, but worth a listen.
Second, I stumbled on a new album by Paul Westerberg that's available for download for $.49. That's right: 49 cents. Westerberg, considered by some to be one of the greatest living song writers around, made his bones in college/alternative radio underachievers The Replacements. And though I came to 'em late, I love 'em. So when the mastermind behind one of the original lo-fi, garage production rock bands of all time put out an album that cheap, I had to get it. I mean, when is the last time you paid 49 cents for anything? Be warned, the album is a bit of a scratchpad, but it's a good one (and again: 49 cents!).
And so now, not just because I can't get to my e-mail, the dog and I are dozing on the carpet in front of the stereo listening.
And here's part of what I like about it: the album is one track. You've got to listen to it all or fast forward yourself, and I like that album feeling. One of the things I think that's gotten lost in the age of quick downloaded mp3s is the joy of a well put-together album. Maybe that's why I've been listening to so much older stuff lately: because there can be a very different aesthetic to putting together something that long musically. Maybe I'm thinking about this because I'm starting to think beyond the book to upcoming projects, and one of the things I'm thinking about is how we pull action and thought from older historical practices onto modern ones. Or maybe it's because I'm curious at this creation as an example of an alternative to current modes of production?
By setting it up this way and charging what he is, Westerberg is not only going against the stream in the same way I was thinking maybe Slow Runner was (or in a way similar to bands releasing their own digital bootlegs of shows a la Pearl Jam or even Joseph Arthur who, for awhile at least, was recording his shows on the spot and selling them to the audience right there), he's paying a little homage to those earlier forms. There's something pretty amazing, after all, about picking an album that hangs together - let's say "Kind of Blue" by Miles Davis - and taking the afternoon off to just listen to the whole thing to see how it flows and carries you with it. Not many artists do that these days, honestly.
And so, sitting here waiting for IT to get it together, even though I'm tired, I'm having a pretty good time.
But I've been sitting/laying here, waiting for my campus e-mail account to start working again so I can send a couple of notes off before I go mid-afternoon jammies. But instead of grumbling, I've been surfing the Internet looking at music stuff. This is rarely a good thing, financially, as I have a bit of a problem with compulsively buying music.
And so when Pandora - which I love and must plug again because it is the best way to find cool, new music since that cute, slightly nerdy girl at the record store - showed me that a band (Slow Runner) whose debut album ("No Disassemble") I loved had a new album out ("Mermaids") with a song that I couldn't get enough of on it ("The Stakes Have Been Raised"), I had to go looking. It was, as the quote goes, a moral imperative. As it turns out, they have two new albums, and they may have been bumped from their label, which intrigues me because their album was that good that there's no way they should have been dropped. Still, it wouldn't be the first time the business didn't recognize greatness.
And so, off I went, in part because it's a long way to payday and two albums might be a bad move (since I just got a few including a long sought after copy of Howlin' Wolf's "London Sessions" that is as good as I'd hope). And what did I find was all sorts of news with lots of potential.
First, Karen O. of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs has some nice recordings in a much more mellow vein up for listening on MySpace under the name "Native Korean Rock." They're different from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs by miles, but worth a listen.
Second, I stumbled on a new album by Paul Westerberg that's available for download for $.49. That's right: 49 cents. Westerberg, considered by some to be one of the greatest living song writers around, made his bones in college/alternative radio underachievers The Replacements. And though I came to 'em late, I love 'em. So when the mastermind behind one of the original lo-fi, garage production rock bands of all time put out an album that cheap, I had to get it. I mean, when is the last time you paid 49 cents for anything? Be warned, the album is a bit of a scratchpad, but it's a good one (and again: 49 cents!).
And so now, not just because I can't get to my e-mail, the dog and I are dozing on the carpet in front of the stereo listening.
And here's part of what I like about it: the album is one track. You've got to listen to it all or fast forward yourself, and I like that album feeling. One of the things I think that's gotten lost in the age of quick downloaded mp3s is the joy of a well put-together album. Maybe that's why I've been listening to so much older stuff lately: because there can be a very different aesthetic to putting together something that long musically. Maybe I'm thinking about this because I'm starting to think beyond the book to upcoming projects, and one of the things I'm thinking about is how we pull action and thought from older historical practices onto modern ones. Or maybe it's because I'm curious at this creation as an example of an alternative to current modes of production?
By setting it up this way and charging what he is, Westerberg is not only going against the stream in the same way I was thinking maybe Slow Runner was (or in a way similar to bands releasing their own digital bootlegs of shows a la Pearl Jam or even Joseph Arthur who, for awhile at least, was recording his shows on the spot and selling them to the audience right there), he's paying a little homage to those earlier forms. There's something pretty amazing, after all, about picking an album that hangs together - let's say "Kind of Blue" by Miles Davis - and taking the afternoon off to just listen to the whole thing to see how it flows and carries you with it. Not many artists do that these days, honestly.
And so, sitting here waiting for IT to get it together, even though I'm tired, I'm having a pretty good time.
Musing
It's weird to think about what can make a difference in someone's life.
I was talking with a friend the other evening about hearing from one of my students, and I expressed a bit of cynicism (I know! Shocking, right?) about the student's reasons for contacting me. My friend, though, was a bit more optimistic, and suggested that perhaps I'd made a difference I didn't even realize. And as we talked about it, I realized that it was often the smallest things that made a difference for me, so maybe I had done something for this student and not even known it. I certainly tried, but you just never know.
I've been trying to think about specific moments that made a difference in my life. Most of them are small things. One that comes to mind is my undergraduate adviser rightly calling me on crappy work and expressing his distress that I wasn't doing better and wanting to know what would snap me out of it. There wasn't anything at the time that would have pulled me out of that particular nosedive. I was working too much, my family life was nuts, I was in the midst of breaking off an engagement. Getting out of school was a skin of the teeth affair for me. And if you'd suggested even one more hour in a classroom the day I finished, I'd have socked you in the teeth. But if he hadn't suggested that there was a higher level for me, I'd likely never have thought about going back to school when corporate America was doing its level-best to burn a hole through my head and stomach.
Or I find myself thinking about my best friend's mom, gladly letting me spend every day of practically every weekend of a long childhood at their house because as she once tried to tell me, sometimes a break was needed from trying to keep my family's wheels on the road.
What's funny to me is that I didn't really pick up on those lessons until long after they were both offered. But eventually I did. And I could certainly list more. There are a lot of big and little moments where people near and dear and even a few who weren't quite so close did something worth being proud of. I do wonder whether they know the difference they made.
I was talking with a friend the other evening about hearing from one of my students, and I expressed a bit of cynicism (I know! Shocking, right?) about the student's reasons for contacting me. My friend, though, was a bit more optimistic, and suggested that perhaps I'd made a difference I didn't even realize. And as we talked about it, I realized that it was often the smallest things that made a difference for me, so maybe I had done something for this student and not even known it. I certainly tried, but you just never know.
I've been trying to think about specific moments that made a difference in my life. Most of them are small things. One that comes to mind is my undergraduate adviser rightly calling me on crappy work and expressing his distress that I wasn't doing better and wanting to know what would snap me out of it. There wasn't anything at the time that would have pulled me out of that particular nosedive. I was working too much, my family life was nuts, I was in the midst of breaking off an engagement. Getting out of school was a skin of the teeth affair for me. And if you'd suggested even one more hour in a classroom the day I finished, I'd have socked you in the teeth. But if he hadn't suggested that there was a higher level for me, I'd likely never have thought about going back to school when corporate America was doing its level-best to burn a hole through my head and stomach.
Or I find myself thinking about my best friend's mom, gladly letting me spend every day of practically every weekend of a long childhood at their house because as she once tried to tell me, sometimes a break was needed from trying to keep my family's wheels on the road.
What's funny to me is that I didn't really pick up on those lessons until long after they were both offered. But eventually I did. And I could certainly list more. There are a lot of big and little moments where people near and dear and even a few who weren't quite so close did something worth being proud of. I do wonder whether they know the difference they made.
...and day not long enough.
Skylark sings allI want to write something.
day, and day
not long enough.
- BashÅ
But nothing is coming. I'm tired in that senseless, not likely to lead to sleep sort of way. I've been worn down and sick, but neither in any useful way.
But I'm trying to focus on the bits that are good: the sound, beyond static and telephony, of dear voices; the friendly smile of my dog, hot in his chair, looking for a touch on the head; the moment when the humidity will break and stop feeling like Louisiana minus the Cajun food and cold drinks.
I'm tired, but I do not want to sleep.
Scraps
Too long to be random bullets, and besides, they're really just only half-imagined things anyway...
---
If you believe the counter in my word processor, I'm sitting at about 41,000 words between the two projects. The smaller one is done, more or less, and should be off to the editors in the next day or so. The larger one could be done by the end of next week.
As a writer - and let me say I'm using that term loosely - I'm drawn to the sentence level of construction. When I read books, sometimes I'm stopped by a particular sentence that seems so perfect and clear. In the book I'm reading now - The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano - a sentence stopped me tonight. It read: "I spent the rest of the day with Maria and chasing Maria." I'm not sure why it stopped me. The most perfect sentence I've ever read was also translated. I won't tell you what it was, because I found it, and it is probably only perfect to me.
According to that same counter, the larger project has just under 3,000 sentences in it. They average 11 words long, but the longest is 67. Not a single one of them has that sort of simple perfection. I don't think I've written one like that yet, in any format.
A boy can dream.
---
Tonight, driving in the car, I didn't have my .mp3 player, and the car cd player had nothing like what I wanted to hear. Rounding a corner, I tried to remember what five discs I played in my room the first night I appeared in grad school to make the tiny, tripped out closet that was my room in the co-op seem a little more like home. I could only recall one was Lyle Lovett and another the Gipsy Kings.
I was frustrated because I'm not sure anything even on my .mp3 player would have been what I wanted for that particular moment in the car. If only I had my entire music collection everywhere I go
And that's when that creepy cyborg future hit me that we're probably only a few years off from having something like that. Some little chip or hard drive that holds who knows how much information stuck in some flap under the skin.
The drive wasn't the same after that.
---
I'd taken the drive to go to the post office and the grocery store, and also to tease out why it is that distance adds significance to everything. For example, though I had things in my apartment to eat, there was nothing there I wanted, and the only things I wanted were far away. It seemed to me that something sweet that I had to go get must surely taste sweeter than something actually in my apartment.
But distance does that to most things, right? Silence seems more intense when distance is involved. Longing, too. Or so I've heard. And probably other things. Irony sometimes works better with time, so why not distance?
Distance is a lens for too many things, I thought.
And then, the wind picking up, the thought escaped me. Or I escaped it.
---
If you believe the counter in my word processor, I'm sitting at about 41,000 words between the two projects. The smaller one is done, more or less, and should be off to the editors in the next day or so. The larger one could be done by the end of next week.
As a writer - and let me say I'm using that term loosely - I'm drawn to the sentence level of construction. When I read books, sometimes I'm stopped by a particular sentence that seems so perfect and clear. In the book I'm reading now - The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano - a sentence stopped me tonight. It read: "I spent the rest of the day with Maria and chasing Maria." I'm not sure why it stopped me. The most perfect sentence I've ever read was also translated. I won't tell you what it was, because I found it, and it is probably only perfect to me.
According to that same counter, the larger project has just under 3,000 sentences in it. They average 11 words long, but the longest is 67. Not a single one of them has that sort of simple perfection. I don't think I've written one like that yet, in any format.
A boy can dream.
---
Tonight, driving in the car, I didn't have my .mp3 player, and the car cd player had nothing like what I wanted to hear. Rounding a corner, I tried to remember what five discs I played in my room the first night I appeared in grad school to make the tiny, tripped out closet that was my room in the co-op seem a little more like home. I could only recall one was Lyle Lovett and another the Gipsy Kings.
I was frustrated because I'm not sure anything even on my .mp3 player would have been what I wanted for that particular moment in the car. If only I had my entire music collection everywhere I go
And that's when that creepy cyborg future hit me that we're probably only a few years off from having something like that. Some little chip or hard drive that holds who knows how much information stuck in some flap under the skin.
The drive wasn't the same after that.
---
I'd taken the drive to go to the post office and the grocery store, and also to tease out why it is that distance adds significance to everything. For example, though I had things in my apartment to eat, there was nothing there I wanted, and the only things I wanted were far away. It seemed to me that something sweet that I had to go get must surely taste sweeter than something actually in my apartment.
But distance does that to most things, right? Silence seems more intense when distance is involved. Longing, too. Or so I've heard. And probably other things. Irony sometimes works better with time, so why not distance?
Distance is a lens for too many things, I thought.
And then, the wind picking up, the thought escaped me. Or I escaped it.
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