Back from the conference babble

Really, this is just a bunch of random notes. I'd intended to blog a bit while I was away, but things got too busy for that (which certainly wasn't the plan). So, here's a little catch-up.

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Most importantly, welcome to the world, Leif! Can't wait to meet you.

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When a conference is bad, it's really bad. This, sadly, is the state of things at most of the big discipline wide conferences, or so it seems to me. I've tried to avoid them, even in job-hunting years, because it feels like talking quietly into a mob.

Fortunately, the conference I've been at recently has been smaller, and the energy of it has been good - I've got a possible project coming out of it, and a little kick in the pants to finish the projects I've been working on.

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I love the scenery here - desert and mountains and cool air. I'd been tooling around a bit in the rental car, enjoying being able to take a drive with the window down. If I'd managed a musical entry for the week, it would've been "Poet: A Tribute to Townes Van Zandt" which would've been perfect for the winding road and this scenery.

It's a little hard to think about how to discuss the album. It's a tribute, after all, which means it is highlighting the songwriting and the interpretations of the folks appearing on it. Worse, I don't have it all with me when I want it. The rental doesn't have any way to play from an iPod (how demanding we get as consumers), and when I really want the album is when I'm driving towards the mountains. It's got some gems: Emmylou Harris singing "Snake Song," for one. Willie Nelson's heartbreaking take on "Marie" for another. It's not the only tribute to Van Zandt - Steve Earle recently released an album of Van Zandt songs. And his songs crop up here and there across a number of Lyle Lovett albums as well. But it's my favorite of them, and that says a lot considering.

I first heard Townes Van Zandt's music in second grade music class. He was wedged in among a lot of the famous song writers that my music teacher at the time liked: Dylan, Guthrie, and I think - though my memory may be playing wishful tricks on me - even a song by Cohen. I didn't blink much over him then, but heard some of his music again in college. His music has been a fixture of road trips for me ever since. He's got the wanderlust that I so often feel, and sometimes he's cornered it. Most times, however, it's got him instead. I sympathize. Or empathize. Whatever. Part of the joy of his music is the tension that exists in his songs between the heartbreak life can bring and the joy just being in the world can offer.

And who among us isn't wandering down those roads?

Taking Stock

I spent the day in the car, driving through the desert and around town. Music on the stereo (the Black Angels "Passover," if you're interested, who probably sound a little like the Doors except the Doors leave me cold and the Black Angels don't), and the windows down.

In the near distance, a mountain beckoned. The sun felt heavenly, and just being able to roll through town reading street names that sounded like they'd been named not just for saints but for lost lovers was more relaxing than I can tell. One thing I think the Southwest has over the rest of the country is the names of places: San Mateo, Esperanza, Villa Maria, Soledad....I could go on.

Lunch was at a little dive: a combination Mexican plate that was to die for. It's nice to see the old travel rules still work: the best places to eat always have the most police cars out front of them at lunch time.

The trip was good; there were a lot of questions after about the presentation, and I got a chance to reconnect with some old colleagues. And, with the exception of whatever edits come on the book, this more or less ends the research related part of my school year though now I've got a paper I can try to work up to something for the start of next year and the new job, plus two presentations in the pipeline. I like having a day after the conference hoopla to enjoy the place I'm visiting, though it happened by accident this time.

Life is, I think, moving along nicely.

Failed Systems and Systems of Failure

There's Socialism and Communism and Capitalism
said Neal,
and there's Feminism and Hedonism,
          and there's Catholicism and Bipedalism and Consumerism,

but I think Narcissism is the system
that means the most to me...
- from Tony Hoagland, "What Narcissism Means to Me"

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Like much of the country, they're predicting ridiculously cold temperatures here. Radiating "orphan," at least six people have stopped me in the last two days to warn me of the temperatures and to tell me to keep warm as though this weren't an intuitive behavior to a boy from Texas.

As ever, I am amused at how the cold and the snow changes things. It's come to serve as the key idea in much of what I don't understand living here. There are peculiar rules here that run counter to what you've learned about living in the snow elsewhere. For example:

snow + hazard lights on a car = ability to park anywhere you want

or

snow + 4 wheel drive = no need for extra distance between driving vehicles

or

snow + sports = no need for clothing

It's very strange how the snow trumps common sense. Today, I watched one car unload in that "not parking space" next to handicapped spaces, and another car pull in, turn its hazards on, and break out the cell phone to have a conference. This only seems to happen when it snows.

I'm tempted, each time I see it, to simply walk over the car as it blocks that space or to find a bat and break out their headlights.

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My roommate has scored an on-campus interview.

In the notification, the committee chair mentioned that they remembered him as a student, and this sparked an entire evening's scavenger hunt to determine just when and how this person knew him because he was convinced he had to say something back about how he remembered them, too.

I suggested going vague but affable: "I hope you just remember the better moments." No.

I suggested avoidance and deflection: "I'm looking forward to catching up with you and meeting the department." No.

I suggested embarrassed honesty, clever trickery, vapid flattery. No. No. No. I ran out of adjectives. I ran out of interest. I ran out of the room. This morning there was a knock on my office door.

"I think he made a mistake," he said. "I don't think he knew me. I'm just going to accept."

All I could do was nod, thinking of how much preparation time had been lost searching through year books and transcripts and departmental web sites. Committees, be careful what you say. The tensions are high this year.

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I've been struggling to finish a syllabus, wanting an assignment that might generate something students could put in a portfolio. Some courses, I am concluding, simply are not meant for this type of idea. Or maybe some professors aren't geared up for it. The thought of having to force this to something that I don't do myself and so wouldn't know quite so well how to judge anyway just didn't make sense.

But I'd been hearing and reading hither and yon about the need to try and help students relate things to real world job possibilities. We're student-centered, I heard. Students are consumers, someone wrote, and must be treated as such: give them what they want.

Hooey.

My class will be worth the trip because it's going to make them think of something in a way the business world doesn't. And it isn't exactly a commonly mentioned point of view anywhere else either.

Employers, here's what you can expect: a well-researched argument that considers the unpopular opinion. That's my contribution. Thank you. Bye bye.

Summer Begins

I knew it must be summer vacation by the need for music and the car windows down.

Truth be told, I've never understood anyone who drove with the windows up and the air conditioning on. Even though that means I arrive places sweaty and gross, having the windows down seems like an utter necessity when I'm driving. And so today, when I went out to drop some things at the post office and to pick up one or two things at the grocery store and instead found myself driving aimlessly with every window down and the stereo up, I knew.

Sometimes this need hits the way it did when I was a kid. The way the last days of summer brought a sense of desperation and laziness at the same time. It hits me like the perfect word. It hits me the way people in movies realize something true about their lover. It stops me from doing things. It makes me do other things instead. Examples: I could not clean my room today, try as I might. I could drink a beer. I could not work on my C.V. I could dream about living other places. I could not pay attention to the documentary about Joy Division. I could turn the stereo on, not so loud as to drown out the breeze.

At the back of my head, there's an itch that says if the book is done - when it is done, since I'll have at least one more round of edits to do, I'm sure - that it's my last academic obligation, and I can apply for anything I want because I won't have a writing contract hanging over my head. I could go places. I could sell out and pay off my debts. I could sink in them, give it all up, and become a painter.

I could doze off in my comfortable camping chair on the patio, the dog half-asleep but watching for suspicious walkers on the street below.

I'm refusing most anything that requires me to schedule. I slept too late this morning, and I'm not sorry. I've got a running list of books to try and read before it starts again. I will not RSVP to say I'm not RSVP'ing, no matter who the university official is. I'm dreaming up silly schemes and forgetting about syllabi.

I declare vacation.

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.

Scraps

Too long to be random bullets, and besides, they're really just only half-imagined things anyway...

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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.

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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.

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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.

Notes on the Start of July

Today didn't go as planned. Not in a bad way, mind you. It was just long. Every errand - and there were a few - took twice as long as they should. In part, this was due to the shoddy driving that happens in these parts.

A word to drivers: first, when you get in the car, before you ever turn the key, think about where you're going and how you're going to get there. Keep this goal in mind when deciding when to change lanes, etc. It's always better to be in the lane you want sooner than later. Second it helps if you start to cut the wheel about a third of the way out of a parking space. If you back straight out all the way, and then start trying to turn, it just holds everyone up. And that makes you both a slow driver and a jackass. Third, it's okay to drive slow. Just do it in the proper lane, and don't get upset if someone starts to pass you. It isn't a statement on your man- or womanhood if they do.

Losing time to errands is frustrating because I'm on the clock for a few things. My book deadline is coming up, and while I'm making progress, it is slower than I'd like. I've realized it is because it feels a bit like busy work. The book is essentially an updated version of my dissertation. But as I've been updating, I've found myself uncomfortable with the idea of leaving ideas in the same way I expressed them in the dissertation. But in a lot of cases - in my background chapter, for example - I was very satisfied with how that came out, so rewording things seems like more work for no good reason. But it seems a bit like plagiarism not to reword them, though I do wonder whether that's the sort of act one can do to one's self.

Wow, I just made plagiarism seem even dirtier. Sweet.

And now I've got an additional writing deadline coming up because I've got an article accepted for an edited collection, but the deadline hits around the same time as the book deadline. So things are hopping here, and that's forcing me to rethink little distractions - like my newly acquired love for the video game "God of War" or my attempts to juggle episodic television shows like "Lost," which I still haven't made it through the first season of. And I've been slowly struggling through the latest by William Gibson, though it isn't because the book isn't good. I'm just not in that zone right now, I suppose. And that's a shame because I did manage a stop at the bookstore where I found three new books to try and get to: Junot Diaz' Drown, Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives, and Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible. Thank goodness for faculty discounts and gift cards.

I'm also pretty taken with silicon bakeware; I've been slowly experimenting with baking things with fresh fruit in them (if you do it late enough at night, it's not so bad to have the oven at 400). Nothing truly spectacular yet, but it's been nice to have something sweet to snack on as the days have run.

I did not, however, find a birthday gift for Mom #2. This is because, or so it seems to me, that in spite of all the years and lectures and advice, I know nothing about except that she likes pansies. And I'm pretty sure I've run out of crap with pansies on them to buy for her. And so, the day's at an impasse on that score, and her gift - whatever it is - is going to be late fore sure as she's one of a few folks hanging from the branches of the family tree who has a July 4th birthday.

But, of course, the time I spent putting this up could have been spent re-writing a sentence I wrote three years ago. And so now, I must away.