Will's Coffee House

Illness Redux

2006-09-25T07:41:00.000-07:00

I'm going to get ripped into mercilessly by A Certain Someone for admitting this ("WHY DON'T YOU TAKE SUPPLEMENTS AND EAT BETTER, YOU F***WAD?!?!"), but I'm sick. Feels like a mild flu, but I woke up with a wretched sore throat and zero energy this morning, plus that slightly detached feeling that suggests light fever. Would like to go home and curl up and take drugs and sleep, but I've got to teach--oh, they'll be getting the 'smooth jazz' version of me today--and then, what fun, meet one-on-one with the President of the University--lovely--and it's nice and late in afternoon, so, just when I'm ready to collapse, I've got to meet with the Pontiff and convince him that I'm worth keeping around...snivel, whimper, bitch, moan...

Must Not Smoke...Must Not Smoke...Must Not Smoke...

2006-09-22T10:05:00.000-07:00

I began smoking midway through my freshman year at college; I suppose I figured that since I wasn't have sex, I might as well do something else 'reckless' and 'adult.' (Ah, the idiocy of youth, which cannot recognize irony though it is painted on the two-by-four with which one is being smashed in the face.) Also, everyone at the UCLA Theater Department smoked, and I was desperate to fit in. I smoked long enough to learn to really, really like it. A lot.

I quit before I began my sophomore year. For many reasons. One, I was finally having sex, so I no longer needed a substitute. Two, my parents, who had never before spoken to me in such harsh tones, informed me that though they couldn't and wouldn't forbid me to stop smoking, they could make my life a hell of disapprobation until I did. Trust me, as trained WASPs, they could deliver magnificently on this threat. Strong incentive, there. Three--and this is how I was able to quit easily--I developed bronchitis that turned into pneumonia, and I couldn't take anything into my lungs for several weeks that wasn't just air. So, since I sweated out my withdrawal during this miserable period, and emerged unaddicted (physically), I figured, f*** it, and quit.

I still miss it, though. Smoking isn't just cool--it's...oh, it's good. It feels so...good to do it. Jesus, people, we all know it kills you, yet millions of us do it anyway--like Renton said of heroin in Trainspotting, "We wouldn't do it if it didn't feel good." But I've been good. One or two, here and there--if I'm at a family wedding, and folks are lighting up, I'll bum a few. But I've made a vow--I will never again purchase cigarettes for my own consumption. Never. And I've stuck to it, and it works.

But it was easier when I was in SoCal, where--essentially--no one smokes, and where smoking is viewed as rather worse than clubbing baby seals to death in front of retarded children on Christmas morning. In such a culture, Not Smoking is easy--shoot, you can't even smoke in bars in California--the insanity of that is just...I shake my head, at a loss for words.

But I'm not in SoCal anymore. I'm in the Midwest. The Heartland. The Heart-and-Lungsland. Where everyone--and I mean everyone smokes. I leave a class, and my students--all of them, light up, and I see them bristle with the joy that comes of that first drag and the knowledge that, at 18, they've got years to smoke before they have to think about quitting. And oh, how I envy them. And oh, how I want to join them.

I want to smoke.

I won't.

But I remember, and I want to smoke.

Anger

2006-09-21T07:36:00.000-07:00

Just met with a student--I meet with all my students for one-on-one conferences before a paper is due; I just vastly prefer it to handed-in drafts, and the small sizes of my classes and the staggered schedule of due-dates make it a feasible practice.

The paper topic was a simple one, since this is the lower-level of the two required freshman composition courses--I like to make the first paper easy, so my kids don't A. vapor-lock on an assignment they can't wrap their terrified heads around, and B. totally screw up their GPAs and decide abruptly to quit college and join the service industry. Some of these kids are training to be nurses, and we need nurses, dammit--they have to stay here and learn.

The topic, as I say, was simple: Describe a moment in your life that changed your view of how you communicate with others. (I stress in class, by the way, that we need not get Lifetime Movie of the Week moments of death-bed conversations or jailhouse confessions--that these pieces can be light and funny--but in general, students seem to have no trouble telling me about how they finally worked up the courage to tell the school counsellor that Daddy was touching them in their 'bathing-suit parts.' Such openness is unnerving for all kinds of reasons, but it does make for a less-than-boring grading experience.)

Anyway--this student had not gone for such a moment--instead, he described the moment he spoke his first word. Which, and this touches my very soul, was "Book"--as he held up a Berenstein Bears tome for his mother to read to him. Love that. And it was a finely written piece--I've already drilled into their heads to keep their writing simple and straightforward--and they've taken happily to that advice, and as a result, very few of them are producing crap, which I consider a major triumph for freshmen.

I made my usual witty and incisive editorial comments, then told him, in summing up, that he should be pleased, that "It's a beautifully written piece." He took a long moment and couldn't look at me. "What?" I asked. He answered, "It's just that...I've never had an English teacher tell me something I wrote was beautiful--or even good." And I smiled and said, "Well, maybe they weren't paying attention." And he nodded, and looked slightly tearfully suprised and pleased, and left as quickly as possible, muttering "I really appreciate hearing that..."

I'm pissed. What the hell happened to this kid? Where were his teachers and what were they thinking? It was good--and good writing doesn't come out of nowhere. He must have done good work before--why wasn't he told this? This poor kid thinks he sucks, and he doesn't--and that's a piece of cruelty I'm angry about. Somewhere out there, there's an English teacher or two who needs a swift kick to the sack (or, if a woman, a cutting remark about, say, her weight.) My job should not have to include teaching kids that they're not dumb. And yet too much of it is just that. Grrrrrr...

And Again--

2006-09-19T10:14:00.000-07:00

I have nothing to say. I don't know if this is a sign of contentment, or resignation. Perhaps both. Fulmination is usually the result of a lack of either, and an overabundance of caffeine--by the way, am I showing my age when I confess that I have never consumed a Red Bull? I think I am. Too old fashioned not to prefer coffee, I suppose. But I do--I don't like soda, as a general rule, and, well--that's about it, really. Though the last soda I drank regularly was JOLT! (a product of the late '80s' attempt to find a legal substitute for cocaine, which eventually yielded the billions of coffeehouses that popped up in the '90s, JOLT! was cola with "all the sugar and twice the caffeine!" and MAN did it make it easy to finish your assignments on-time, and several pages over the minimum length. I'd just write for hours and hours and hours and hours and come up with something that would make Hunter S. Thompson shake his head and say, "Whoa--ease up on the juice, pal.") But since I'm not hyper-caffeinated, and because Shakespeare went well and all's right with the world, until I have to go upstairs at 2:00 and stare at the blank, resentful faces of my Comp. students, I have nothing to say.

Which strangely enough, feels good.

Sigh and Sigh Again

2006-09-18T07:14:00.000-07:00

See, this is why I didn't want to start blogging again--I'm struck by days in which I have rien de tout to say, and so have to fall back on pretentious faux-French (just did it again!) to convey some semblance of an entry.

Weekend was pleasant, if a bit hectic--parents and sibling and sibling's Highly Significant Other (they live together in sin in a condo which they mutually own--I've pointed out that they might as well get married, since co-owned real estate is a hell of a lot more binding than nuptual vows) were all in town, first to visit the city of the Alma Mater of Mom and Dad and Brother, thereat to watch a football game at which the home team won, hurrah--so nice not to have to walk the streets with a bunch of surly, drunken people looking for a face they don't like so they can collectively take out their frustrations on him (and I definitely have such a face, smug little bastard that I am.)

So I drove to said city, waited out the football game--actually, watched it in a hotel bar with a drink--as a side note, if you have a headache, two Advil chased with a vodka gimlet will clear that sucker right up--whilst I reviewed drafts (students' first paper is due on Friday, which means this week will be the Suck That Is Grading, What Fun) and prepped lesson plans for the upcoming week. Then the game ended, I met up with them, and the drinking began. And continued. Through to Sunday.

It was that kind of slow, steady drinking that never lets up and doesn't feel like a bender because you're never totally, stinking blind at any given moment, and yet there's rarely a point at which you don't have a drink in your hand (kind of like Dashell Hammett's The Thin Man--read it sometime--Nick Charles would fix himself a drink on the way to the bathroom at 3:00 in the morning). Anyway.

So now it's Monday and I feel like there was no weekend, and I'm wasted and cranky and just...well, I've nothing to say. So, in lieu of, I've offer my apologies and explanation for this here--but no excuses: I regret nothing. (Oh, that's so not true...)

Grrrrr...

2006-09-14T10:38:00.001-07:00

I think, apart from the existence of people like Paris Hilton, what I hate most in this life is uncertainty. Which means, of course, that I hate most of this life, since life is uncertainty, as everyone from the Stoics to Stephen Hawking will tell you. And some uncertainty is good--as we all remember from that one cool episode of The Twilight Zone, a life where one knows the outcome of absolutely everything before it happens is, literally, Hell. But I just had a short chat with the chair (person, not inanimate object) who hired me, and he reminded me, in the kindest possible way--really a great guy, him--that while he thinks the department is lucky to have me and they'd love to keep me around, that I'm technically only a Visiting Professor and there are no guarantees and that while it's highly, highly probable that I'll be picked up for next year at least, that he can't assure me of that, and the decision really isn't in his hands, and they may decide just to do a full-blown job search and kick me to the curb at the end of it (well, he didn't say that, but trust me, that would be the outcome.) Which blows, because I really love this place, and it seems to love me--my students are lively and engaged and becoming more so with each day--they're getting ready to trust me and like me, which is all to the good, yes?--and everyone here has been, as I've said elsewhere, as lovely as can be. And to have the chance of losing all this--particularly after a gruelling cross-country move to get here--is just...chilling. Uncertainty. Not a good thing, here. Sigh...

Another Meme

2006-09-12T07:39:00.000-07:00

Memes are the junk food, the Cliff's Notes, the unsavory short-cuts of blogs. They're so damn easy, but they make you feel a little weak, a little fraudulent. Yet once you start down this dark path, forever will it consume you...Or something like that.

2 moments in your life you'd like to erase:

1. Having sex with a young woman who was sweet and giving and kind and a good friend and for whom I felt virtually nothing. I was everything that was vile about men in that moment. Never again.

2. I'd rather not go into too much detail about this one. Let's just say it has to do with the beginning of the series of events that led to my divorce. Out of fairness to all parties involved, I shan't give my own, biased perspective when others can't rebut said perspective. 'Nuff said.

4 moments you'd like to relive:

1. Arriving home from a staggeringly awful night at work and discovering a young woman with whom I was deliriously, fabulously in love meeting me at the door wearing lingerie and a *serious* come-hither look on her face. I've never felt more loved and wanted in my life.

2. Listening to the roars of applause and cheers as the curtain rang down on a performance of a play I'd written.

3. The first time I taught a class *well*--when I began to feel myself taken over by my enthusiasm for the material, and to feel that enthusiasm catching on and to feel the absolute (and yes, benevolent) master of a group of adoring young minds. Quite the egotistical rush.

4. Getting seriously stoned and wandering with a group of similarly stoned friends through a college town and winding up in a movie theater watching a Terry Gilliam movie. Whoa...

2 places you wouldn't go to/go to again:

1. Stratford-on-Avon. On a recent trip to England, I finally, as a Renaissance scholar, made the hajj and went. It's a remarkably unremarkable place--nothing special about it at all. Which, of course, was the point--the birthplace of genius looks just like every other place--this bolt of lightning appeared out of a house and a family and a town just like any other--that's what's wonderful about the man. But the tourism and the banality of the place were also depressing. There's no there there, and I don't need to see it again.

2. A ski-slope. Seriously, not going again. Do I enjoy skiing? Mildly, but not nearly enough to endure the hassle of equipment, travel, lines, and the possibility of severe injury. Screw it--I'll stay in the lodge by the fire with a book and brandy-laced tea, thanks.

4 places you can't wait to visit/visit again:

1. Rome.

2. Venice.

3. Florence.

4. Genoa. (See if you can tell what all these places have in common.)

2 foods you can't stand:

1. Artichokes. Though I'm trying to cure myself of this habit. Hasn't happened yet. But I soldier on.

2. Collard greens. People keep telling me that I just haven't had them cooked properly, but I keep going to places where I'm assured they are cooked properly, and I've yet to take a bite of them I didn't immediately want to spit out.

4 foods you love:

1. Prime rib. Heaven.

2. Thin-crust pizza. Heaven for people who weren't quite good enough to get into Prime rib Heaven.

3. Dim Sum. No explanation necessary for those who've had it done right.

4. Anything with hollandaise sauce. Seriously, birthday cake would taste better with hollandaise sauce on it.

2 songs that make you change the station:

1. Only two? Sigh. There are so many fabulously f***ing awful songs out there--anything whiny, in particular, will get me to stab the panel with a snarl of "Oh, shut the f*** up!" But all right--let's go for one that will cause your stomach to cramp just by my mentioning it: Ms. Dion's My Heart Will Go On. Yeah, I know--go lie down, you'll feel better.

2. Anything by Creed. Anything. They could cover Dark Side of the Moon and turn it into unbearable s***.

4 songs you play over and over:

1. Big Time by Peter Gabriel. If Richard III has a theme song, it would be this, and I love thinking of him as I listen to it.

2. Don McLean's American Pie. OK, it's interminable, and the metaphor is heavy-handed, but dammit, it's catchy, and I'm proud of the fact that, yes, I know all the lyrics by heart.

3. Speaking of Pink Floyd: Just about anything from The Wall, but Comfortably Numb resonates with me in a way that probably isn't healthy. But there it is.

4. Anything by the Beatles. Except Paperback Writer. And Number Nine. And anything sung by Ringo. Oh, hell with it, let's just say Penny Lane.

2 books you'd never finish/read again:

1. To The Lighthouse. No...more...Woolf...please. OK, lock me in a room with Mrs. Dalloway, and I won't go mad--it's a pretty good book--but God, this one almost killed me. Hated it on page one, and that was the most enjoyable part of it.

2. Finnegan's Wake. As a man who's read Clarissa, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, Trollope's Barsetshire Chronicles series and Palliser novels, scads of Hemingway, Twain, Faulker, Hardy, and the complete novels of Dickens, Eliot, Austen, Fielding, Smollett, the Brontes, and Harper Lee (five bonus points if you spot the joke there), I feel I've established my bona fides as a reader without having to slog through a meandering morass of stream-of-consciousness crap. I did Dubliners. I did Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I did Ulysses. I'm DONE.

4 books you've read more than once and/or will read again:

1. This will overlap with my previous meme, but I'll try to throw in something new. Tom Jones. (I'm in the process of rereading now, so that's an easy one.)

2. Absalom, Absalom. If you want to understand why race relations in America were, are, and will forever be completely and irredeemably f***ed up, read this book.

3. Stephen King's It. Because it's a great read, and hush--that's why.

4. Heart of Darkness. This, I suspect, reveals something very unpleasant about me, but I reread it not only because I teach it, but because it's one of the few absolutely perfect pieces of sustained English prose ever written. And, let's face it, we could all stand to do with a reminder that, in the larger scheme of things, we need the world--not the other way 'round, and there's no way to know that and not have it creep the living s*** out of you. (I will not, however, reread Lord of the Flies--some things about human nature, while undeniably true, I just don't need to be reminded of, thanks.)

Oh, and a Meme

2006-09-11T07:59:00.000-07:00

I figure if I post twice in one day, I can skip posting tomorrow, so why the hell not: A meme borrowed from Flavia and Ph.D. Me:

The Book Meme

1. One book that changed your life? Oh, God. Hmmm. Let me start off by saying that, to keep this interesting, I will exclude Shakespeare from all of my answers. Those of you familiar with the BBC Radio program 'Desert Island Disks' know that its premise is that one can only take a certain number of songs/albums to a desert island, as well as one book--and that, with regards to the latter, the producers finally gave in and said that the guest could take one book in addition to the Complete Works of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, because everyone kept giving those as answers. Wise move. So--let's see. Don Quixote comes to mind. An argument about true goodness and how it so often appears as folly to those who cannot see beyond their own cynicism, which they mistake for wisdom. It's a lesson that sank in, and sank in deep. When I'm forced to do the right thing, and know that I'll look like an idiot for doing so--driving back several miles to return the excessive change that a cashier gave me--I feel like a fool, but I know that somewhere Don Quixote is smiling. And I do it with a lighter heart.

2. One book you have read more than once? There are several of these. Lolita, Huckleberry Finn, Treasure Island (reread it--you'll be surprised how good it remains), The Count of Monte Cristo--I could go on. One? Paradise Lost. Because it needs to be reread and reread and reread and it gets better every time. Samuel Johnson famously said that "Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions." Here, as in so many other matters of his literary criticism, Johnson, though a genius is his own right, was about a wrong as is humanly possible.

3. One book you would want on a desert island? I think that this is one where people might make the worst error--they probably think that to take something 'deep' and 'challenging' is the thing to do. This is a mistake. You're on a desert island--you're going to want beach reading. But good beach reading--beach reading with enough meat on it to make you think and laugh and reflect. But not to have to drag yourself back to. Do not bring Finnegan's Wake or Gravity's Rainbow. For me, this is easy: The Count of Monte Cristo--it's hella long (and thus can sustain lengthy rereadings), and fascinating, and exciting, and a visceral pleasure to read. Plus a profound meditation on the nature of justice and mercy. No question, here.

4. One book that made you laugh? Well, I laughed plenty at The DaVinci Code, The Bridges of Madison County, and everything that Brett Easton Ellis ever wrote, but I assume this prompt wants a book that made me laugh on purpose: in which case, Tom Jones. Fielding is a comic genius, and if you read this book and don't laugh often and hard, there's something wrong with you.

5. One book that made you cry? Oy. Um, hmm. Not much of a crier. But, and this will sound weird, I can think of one distinctly where I wept: The Pickwick Papers. The good and kind and too-virtuous-for-the-world Mr. Pickwick is convicted in court of Breach of Promise, and refuses to pay the judgment because he is innocent and cannot, in good conscience, participate in an injustice. So he is sent to debtor's prison--a dreadful place, to be sure. His servant, loyal and street-smart and very funny Sam Weller (I laughed a lot at this book, too), demands to go with him--he's afraid that Pickwick will get eaten alive in prison--but Pickwick, good and kind, refuses to let him, promising to keep him on salary so long as he's in prison, so Sam needn't worry about money. Sam persists--Pickwick refuses. So Sam does something very clever--he goes to his father, and asks to borrow money from him--a trifling amount--the old man gives him the money. Then Sam asks his father to demand the money. The old man--knowing what's going on--does so. Sam refuses to pay, so the old man quickly takes him to the prison and has him locked up for failure to pay--and Sam rejoins Pickwick. When they meet, Pickwick realizes what Sam has done out of love for his master. He cries, and so did I--all throughout. A beautiful moment--I love Dickens for such moments.

6. One book you wish had been written? A complete version of Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood--what the f***ing f*** happened, Charles? God damn you for dying like that. F***in' prick.

7. One book you wish had never been written? Again, many people make the wrong call here: Mein Kampf is a popular choice, or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion--but such nominations are wrong-headed if kind-hearted. Such books are, in the long wrong, good things--because they identify the evil men and women of the world so clearly. They show us who the monsters are, and show us how they think. (Ann Coulter, anyone?) When evil reveals itself, good has more tools with which to fight it. No, I like the fact that such books exist, though I hate the fact that they have to. For me, something like Paul's Epistles, which codified and ossified and ultimately corrupted the nature of Christian identity and Christian love seem to me to have been much more detrimental to the state of mankind. To tell people that there's only one way to be good is a hurtful and, I think, ultimately wicked thing. Virtue is in many ways simple--the Golden Rule really does sum it up--but it's also terribly subjective, and telling people that Not F***ing = Being Good is crap. Paul angers me as few other men have; I wish that some other early Christian writer had been collected and included in the NT--I really do. (Apologies for the blasphemous nature of this answer--rest assured, my damnation is a given.)

8. One book you are currently reading? The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. Which is in no way connected with that piece-of-s*** Tom Cruise movie. (A phrase that is becoming more and more of a redundancy, I'm sorry to say.)

9. One book you have been meaning to read? Well, Ive been meaning to finish Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. My God, but it's long...brilliant, but long. And life is hectic and short...Still, one shouldn't shy from such things, I suppose. Just as soon as I finish watching this porno, I'll get right on it.

A Parabolic Life

2006-09-11T07:43:00.000-07:00

My life is, as the heading implies, a bit of a apex-oriented curve these days. (Yes, I suck at math, but I'm good at physics, so it balances out a bit.) Here's how it works: I teach Freshamn Composition at 8:00 (a class that no one wants to be in, at an hour no one wants to be awake at), then Shakespeare at 11:00 (a class that everyone wants to be in, at an hour that's quite respectable, even for college students), then a second section of Freshman Composition at 2:00 (again, no one wants to be there, and the hour is late enough so that they're beginning to feel resentful for still having to be on-campus.) So here's how the day breaks down, endothermically:

The day begins at zero. Literally. No one is awake, no one is happy, no one wants to talk. This includes yours truly. Yet such is our cross to bear, as we trudgingly haul them up the road to Golgotha. (Side note--you know, after that walk, do you think that maybe Jesus was just a trifle relieved to get to the top--I mean, I know the nails hurt and all, but after spending a weekend carrying weighty and unwieldy objects up stairs, I have to say that after about an hour, getting nailed to a tree doesn't sound too bad if it means the end of heavy lifting.) (And yes, I am going to Hell, thank you very much. See you there.) But as the hour progresses, the caffeine we've downed just prior begins to kick in, the morning sun fills us with Vitamin D, and we slowly rise from our zombie-like stupor to become engaged and energetic. The climb has begun.

The parabola reaches its apex at Shakespeare. They're stoked, I'm stoked--it's a great class and a fun time is had by all. (It helps that at the moment we're doing Titus Andronicus, about which, say what you will, you cannot say that it is boring.) So that moment is our peak--but we're so peaked, that we're a little tired when we leave.

And so the descent continues. It's not a crash, but by 2:00, we've all had lunch, and like as not it's the last class of the day and we're all 'looking forward to' the commute home--that is, looking forward to getting it the f*** over with--and while we enter awake and alert, we begin to clock-watch, and get distracted, and care less and less, and the last 15 minutes are like pulling teeth to get them stay focused and engaged. (Fortunately, I am kinetic as all hell when in front of a class, so they do so. But grudgingly.) And then we all go home and properly, blissfully crash. The parabola concludes.

I'd like to go off from here on how this is a metaphor for life, but come on, how trite would that be. No, I'm just going to look forward to Shakespeare--I'm on the climb, and don't want to harsh my buzz with gloomy thought...

One Complaint

2006-09-08T08:40:00.000-07:00

About my new job, before I rush off to teach Shakespeare and love my life for 50 minutes, and it's this: my office--and indeed, the entire building in which my office is located--is f***ing FREEZING. You could store meat in this place--I realize that the Midwest summers are brutally humid and hot (and I'm in the basement, so presumably the chill is worst down here), and so they have to give the air conditioner a good workout 24/7, but I'm having to bundle up and rub my hands together if I'm here more than half-an-hour. COLLLLLLLLD...But I'm still too green to complain. Maybe when I get tenure...

Just Poking My Head Out

2006-09-07T10:19:00.000-07:00

We may or may not be starting up again. Not to be a tease, but I don't want to make promises and then not deliver. Massive changes have occurred in the life of your humble narrator in the several-month-interim, probably too many to note in the space of a single entry. Briefly:

1. I was interviewed, by phone and then in person, for a Visiting Professorship at a small Midwestern liberal arts college, located near a major city, making it all but ideal for my professional needs/wants.

2. I was offered said job. They liked me, they really really liked me! (Also, said professorship is quite likely to become tenure-track; fingers crossed on that. In the meanwhile, though, I have an actual income, which I quite enjoy.)

3. I accepted said job, and now write to you from my very own office, at my very own departmentally assigned computer, having started teaching just this very morning (and EIGHT A.-F***ING-M.!!!)

4. I moved (needless to say) cross country, from sunny SoCal, taking in tow two cats and a few of my more precious belongings. The rest were loaded into a trailer truck that a moving service assured me would arrive the day after I did.

5. The moving service lied. I am without My Stuff. No books. No TV. No DVDs. Nothing. Well, not nothing. Thank God I kept my computer and my...um...well, mostly just my computer. I've had to spend a revolting amount of money on necessities. And an air mattress. The moving people assure me that My Stuff will arrive tomorrow night. I continue to suspect them of perfidy, however.

6. I'm loving the Midwest. The people here are frighteningly pleasant. The first question I get asked by everyone--and I mean everyone--is "Is there something I can help you with?" To which my jade response is a step back and a slit-eyed look of "What do you want...?" But no, the Stepford wives would bow their robotic heads in shame at this place. Niceness abounds. I am, however, dreading the winter, which I know will kick the living s*** out of me.

So--new job, new town, new life. Alone, but not hating it. Stuff-less, but surviving. I get to teach courses and texts I design and choose, including one on Shakespeare, which is a tonic to my tired soul. And I have both a coffee-maker and a bread-maker, so my mornings are bliss. Apart from the "Eight A.-F***ing-M." thing.

Such is my state. Will there be updates? Qui peut dire? Stay tuned. Or not...

Author's Addendum: OK, I caught this item in a local paper, and I may have to alter everything I've thought or just said about the Midwest:

http://www.twincities.com/mld/pioneerpress/news/local/15447475.htm?source=yahoodist&content=twc_news

David Lynch is right about America. Underneath it all, we are one seriously f***ed up nation...

The Coffee Shop Is Closed

2006-06-06T12:08:00.000-07:00

Until further notice, which might be quite some time, I'm resigning my blogging duties.

It's something I've enjoyed doing, but not so much of late--more of a burden than a pleasure, and in the face of things like Bush's latest, pathetic attempt to distract voters from his horrific performance as president by victimizing gays/lesbians in a way that resembles in a terrifyingly eerie manner the early Nuremberg laws (one of which forbade marriage between Jews and non-Jews--hmm, Jews = Condition of birth, celebration of millenia-old culture, freedom to pursue that birth and that culture; Gays/Lesbians = hmmm...no, the man isn't Hitler, and we're not headed for a Holocaust, so the comparison is, thank God, not entirely apt, but there's enough of a resemblance to the political instinct behind this viciousness--i.e., rouse/distract the populace by isolating/stigmatizing a traditionally despised minority--that appalls me)--in the face of such things, I say, it's become an exercise in cursing the darkness, and I just don't have the energy anymore, which brings me to the last and most important reason: it's interfering with my creative/academic writing. One can only type so many words in a day, and I need to spend my energy on something other than being ephemerally amusing. I appreciate the readership and the friendships I've gained, and I'll continue to lurk and post to other blogs, but for now, Mr. Dryden is leaving town for the season.

Vale. (Had to end on a note of priggish pretentiousness, didn't I?)

Berkeley Nights

2006-05-31T12:01:00.000-07:00

As for what I did with my nights in Berkeley--don't get too excited--I mean, the highpoints were a brilliantly improvised paella and a performance of King Lear, so, you know, we're not talking about a blue-lit descent into Sadean excess. Sorry.

But after a long--LONG--day of grading papers from poor, clueless college-bound illiterates, there's something to be said about being able to spend time with--oh, right, I forgot to mention this part.

Hmmm. Where to begin. Once upon a time, back in the dark days of my marriage, a former student of mine of ridiculous attractiveness of both mind and body--one of those annoying people that God tapped twice with his magic wand--fell head over heels in love with me, and it was kinda sorta rather completely mutual, and there was wild flirtation between us and then before I had a chance to really break the 7th commandment she transferred to Berkeley, where she now resides. (Much to the ache of my heart and the relief of my conscience.)

So, now that I'm free, I saw her. She produced the paella. She sat beside me and wept at King Lear (for which she apologized, poor thing--I tried to explain, as a former actor and a Shakespearean one to boot, that I was wildly in favor of audiences weeping at performances, particularly of something as heart-wrenching as Lear's reconciliation with--and the loss of--Cordelia. I mean, shouldn't we weep at such things?)

But before you get too eyebrow-wagglingly vicarious, stop. Alas for the lost opportunity to spin a tale of wild, unbridled eroticism, she's living with someone. Happily. Committedly. And besides, having been burned badly by someone's infidelity recently, it would have been...oh, just monstrously hypocritical of me to engage in that ugly activity. So, no, no juicy details to relate. She was a perfect lady. Well, not perfect--I mean, I made a wisecrack and she punched me, so, you know, not quite Elizabeth Bennett, here. Still--

There's something about--even sans real romance--spending time with someone who, in another life, you know you'd be very *good* with. That's not this life, but just knowing that those feelings, that possibility is within you--that's a good thing. And it was nice to remember what it's like, in the middle of a gruelling day, to have someone to look forward to coming home to at the end of it. Also a good thing, that.

And fun. She's fun. And when I'm with her, God help me, I'm fun. Which I don't want to overdescribe or analyze, because fun cease to be fun when you do that. I'll just say that I very very rarely have/am it, and I did/was. A vacation from my own state of bone-deep priggishness. It was very--and OK, I say this with just a hint of salaciousness--sweet.

So. That. Dinner of paella chez her upstairs neighbor (another knock-out, what the hell is it about Berkeley women?) the first night, dinner at a trattoria (Berkeley service is indeed the worst in the world--I have flow charts and spread-sheets to prove this) and Lear afterwards (the guy who played Lear was good, the guy who played Edmund--MY GODDAMNED PART--sucked like a Hoover inside a wind tunnel, and the stage combat was choreographed by the Three Stooges) the next night--and a lazy afternoon and a ride to the airport the third. Too short a time. But, better than being rough and sweaty, it was good, that trip.

C'est tout.

Tired. Again.

2006-05-29T13:33:00.000-07:00

Back from three days at Berkeley, the daylight hours of which were spent grading endless reams of college entrance placement essays...and spent shaking my head to clear the hum of cliches, bathos, and ignorance from my head--and these were the kids who got into the UC system, mind you--when our civilization falls, and it will, historians will cite as one of the subtle but key causes of its collapse the shift from the ideal of "Everyone should have the chance to attend college" to the expectation that "Everyone should attend college." Because no, no, we shouldn't. We really, really shouldn't, not all of us.

But more of this another time. Tired. Bleary-eyed and brain-blanked. And then there's the subject of what I did with my nights in Berkeley. (Hint: it made up for the days, and then some...)

Yet More Night Thoughts

2006-05-20T22:51:00.000-07:00

You know, I've suffered from a number of the more unpleasant emotional states related to romance: bitter break-ups, heartbreaks that stretch on for months--even years (I'm somewhat self-indulgent in this respect--as in many others), terminal loneliness, the grim stasis of the dying stages of a long-term affair, unrequited and unrequitable love (both sides of that issue--neither is much fun), and so forth. Right now I'm suffering from several, none of your damn business which. But in the dark of the night, I am struck by a thought that, while it does not warmly comfort, takes the sting down a notch or two:

Inasmuch as I'm in no sense ready to be with someone right now--Thank God. Because if I were, I'd have to genuinely, fully, really, honestly Date. And dating sucks. (I believe I'm quoting Rochefoucauld on this point.) Spending time with someone to see if you want to spend time with someone? What? What?! Isn't that like eating food to see if it makes you sick? True, you never know unless you try, but...failure is just so...morbidly unpleasant. Oh, I know, I know--there's no alternative, and all we can do, if we don't want to be alone, is grow a pair and go out. And that'll happen. But...urgh. She gets in the car, you get in the car (you have opened the door for her, because you are polite), and then...awkward moment of silence, prompted by the realization that you don't know this person, and here she is in your personal space, and what the hell, man?! Then you start the car up and drive. And talk. If you can. If not...more silence--and the evening will be full of them. Waitress takes your drinks order, leaves, and you have to look at each other. Awkward moment. Movie ends, lights come on, each of you looks to see if the other is one of those people who sits through the credits. Awkward moment. End of the evening, and...oh, man, AWKWARD MOMENT. Must we? Surely, there must be a better way? No? Really? Damn--no wonder people stay in otherwise dead relationships--at least the silence in comfortably welcome...

Great Beginnings

2006-05-17T13:19:00.000-07:00

A totally subjective list of what are, to my mind, the greatest openings to novels in English (narrows things down a bit, but I don't want to have to explain the significance of the tense used in Camus's The Stranger, or why Tolstoy's "All happy familes are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" is clever, but completely untrue.) Call it a prose variation on the now-defunct Poetry Friday:

5. Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely— having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

4. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

3. You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly--Tom's Aunt Polly, she is--and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.

2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

And, of course:

1. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.

It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood. France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous.

In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries by armed men, and highway robberies, took place in the capital itself every night; families were publicly cautioned not to go out of town without removing their furniture to upholsterers’ warehouses for security; the highwayman in the dark was a City tradesman in the light, and, being recognised and challenged by his fellow-tradesman whom he stopped in his character of “the Captain,” gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the mall was waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shot three dead, and then got shot dead himself by the other four, “in consequence of the failure of his ammunition” after which the mall was robbed in peace; that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London, was made to stand and deliver on Turnham Green, by one highwayman, who despoiled the illustrious creature in sight of all his retinue; prisoners in London gaols fought battles with their turnkeys, and the majesty of the law fired blunderbusses in among them, loaded with rounds of shot and ball; thieves snipped off diamond crosses from the necks of noble lords at Court drawing-rooms; musketeers went into St. Giles’s, to search for contraband goods, and the mob fired on the musketeers, and the musketeers fired on the mob, and nobody thought any of these occurrences much out of the common way. In the midst of them, the hangman, ever busy and ever worse than useless, was in constant requisition; now, stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker on Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday; now, burning people in the hand at Newgate by the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of Westminster Hall; to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and to-morrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer’s boy of sixpence.

All these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass in and close upon the dear old year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Environed by them, while the Woodman and the Farmer worked unheeded, those two of the large jaws, and those other two of the plain and the fair faces, trod with stir enough, and carried their divine rights with a high hand. Thus did the year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five conduct their Greatnesses, and myriads of small creatures—the creatures of this chronicle among the rest—along the roads that lay before them.

...

2006-05-16T00:01:00.000-07:00

...done...with...grading...nap-time...now...go...away...

Comfortably Numb

2006-05-12T15:03:00.000-07:00

Well, it's official--I've gone without sex so long that I no longer miss it. Just never think about it anymore. ("What never?" "Well, hardly ever." And when I do, it's a "shrug-and-meh" moment.) I can't decide whether or not this is a good thing--since I've no prospect of intimacy in the forseeable future, or so completely and utterly sad that I should curl into a ball and retreat into a total dormancy of despair. Decisions, decisions.

I suppose pragmatism demands that I go with the former--after all, I still have grading to do. And perhaps my continuing streak of mild depression has something to do with it. I mean, combine depression with anti-depression meds with an extended period of involuntarily erotic solitude (make whatever jokes you like about that expression, I'll wait 'til you're done...pause...there), and you'll get somebody for whom the monkish life-style doesn't seem to be too unfeasible. (Although if The Name of the Rose was accurate, those guys weren't exactly going without all that much.)

But it's strange to suddenly realize that something you used to ache over is something that you've largely forgotten. Oh, I'm still prone to lengthy fits of sentimental mourning--but sex? Not so much. Odd. Disturbing? Maybe--if I ever do wind up in someone else's arms, this may be a problem I'll have to work through (poor thing, whoever she is, I'll have to be quite explicit about how it's not her, it's me--but that line never works, does it?) But for now, eh, it's probably just as well. Sex for me has always been--sappy and immature as this sounds, and I know it does, so just back off--deeply emotional. And since I'm still...tentative, emotionally speaking, better to not have that particular monkey on my back, prodding me forward to do heartless things for the sake of an amoral libido. So, time passes and we'll see what happens (almost said, "we'll see what comes," damn, that's just too easy, isn't it?)--and in the meanwhile, well, bedtime means sleep, and I've always been a fan of sleep...

Disturbing

2006-05-10T13:32:00.000-07:00

How creepy is it that the articulated views of an avowed Shiite fundamentalist (I'm referring to the recent letter from the President of Iran to our own Chief Executive, readable in its entirety here: http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-727571,36-769886,0.html) come off as much more intelligent, nuanced, and civilized than anything that's come out of Bush's mouth since...well, ever? (BTW, I don't agree with everything--or even much--Ahmadi-Najad has to say in the letter--for instance, I happen to be strongly pro-Israel, and I'm more than mildly irritated at his one-sided characterization of the establishment of the Israeli state--but I wouldn't mind getting into an argument with the guy about why I think/feel that way, and I sense that it would be an argument, rather than two guys yelling at each other and not listening to anything other than the sound of his own voice.)

I can't abide fundamentalism--it replaces emapthy and objectivity, without which we're nothing more than animals with advanced motors skills--but this guy strikes me as intelligent, thoughtful, and convinced of, rather than blinded by his faith. In that sense--and this scares the hell out of me--he's a better leader than ours. Sigh. (Of course, one could cheerfully go off on tangents about the ridiculous human rights violations that exist in Islamic theocracies--word of advice: don't be a woman, or gay, or...well, anything other than decidedly conformist--and I'm no blinkered idealist to pretend that this is a "good guy"--but he's got a grasp on his material that our guy doesn't--and he's smart enough to know that the way to seize the moral high-ground is to point out the hypocrisy of a bully...Hmmm. Maybe it's better than these people don't get the bomb. Too shrewd, all too shrewd.)

Author's Addendum: I should add that what I find most terrifying about this letter is the fact that Ahmadi-Najad argues with such conviction that liberal democracy is an idea that history is slowly proving to have been a failure. I find it terrifying because it's so plausible. Democracy has always been the exception, rather than the rule--and as we see increasingly in this country, it doesn't work when a population doesn't much care that votes are rigged, provided that they like the guy who wins--and when they like the guy who wins because he's of the same religous faith--sincere or not--as they. That terrifies me. Europe is small, and getting smaller. Canada looks big on the map, but it's a tiny amount of people in a large amount of space. And as for us--well, religion is something we demand from our leaders--more than nearly any other quality of character. We're not a theocracy--but when domestic and international policy is based on appealing to the fundamentalist 'base' of our leaders, the distinction is a fine one. Democracy is messy, complex, requires empathy and compromise. Religion--fundamentalist religion--is so damn easy. And humanity is a lazy species when it comes to our willingness to think. I worry. I really do. Ahmadi-Najad is articulate, intelligent, and educated. He also believes in a world that will eventually drive out all non-believers. That those two visions can co-exist suggests either that he's nuts, and I don't think he is--or that he's looking back at history and looking ahead at its implications. And it worries me that he may be right.

Problems

2006-05-09T14:49:00.000-07:00

The problem with therapy is that it's either too short or too long--either it ends before you've hit the moment of breakthrough or it ends long afterwards. Today it was too short. When the 50-minute mark arrived, I was about five minutes away from the complete and total breakdown--the eruption of weeping out the pain and frustration I've been carrying around for the better part of a year. But then it ended, and I walked out, and my male ego reasserted itself, and now all that's left is a small choking sensation in my throat as I shove it all back down into the dark corner I keep such things in.

Because the problem with pain is that it's embarassing. Embarassing for those who feel it, and doubly so for those with whom it's 'shared.' Crying in front of another person--collapsing in front of another person--these things just make you feel worse. "A trouble shared is a trouble halved"--what a crock. A trouble shared is a trouble doubled--because you've just made another person party to suffering he/she can't do anything to alleviate, and who therefore feels embarassed and inadequate and awkward. So what the hell--why bother to express such pain? Why bother to make someone else's day worse and your own no better? All you can really do with pain is feel it until you stop feeling it. And no one can help with that.

Which is a problem.

Grading Continues

2006-05-08T10:48:00.000-07:00

And as a result, no updates are forthcoming in the near-future. Though I've been irked recently by the initiatives in several states to ban the sale of sex toys, so I feel another rant in defense of perversion coming on...stay tuned...

Applause.

2006-05-03T10:31:00.000-07:00

Mexico is officially the smartest, coolest nation in the Western Hemisphere as of yesterday:

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-mexico-drugs.html

God bless them--it's God's work, it really, really is...

Very Depressing

2006-05-01T13:55:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, I finally broke down and bought a cell phone. I wasn't proud of the fact, quite the contrary. I told myself that I was only going to use it for reasonably important communication, and that I was not going to change my life or habits as a result.

Last week, the SIM card, which had always been sketchy, gave up the ghost entirely. Dead. No phone. And in the period between that day and the day this weekend when I got it fixed...I felt...helpless. Untethered. Vulnerable. Whatever would I do without it? How would I keep in touch? That whole resolve about not changing my life or habits? Yeah, not so much, that. Instant addiction--technology makes smack look like decaf. I suck...

Snore.

2006-04-29T12:23:00.000-07:00

I'm becoming, once again, a lazy and erratic blogger--there was a piece on Slate the other day from a woman explaining why she quit her blog--that it wasn't encouraging her to write, it was *replacing* her writing. There's something to be said for that. I mean, if I'm here typing my random thoughts and tedious accounts of emotional turmoil, I'm not banging away at the novel or the articles, now, am I? And yet I really, really should. Which isn't to say that I'm quitting, but that I suspect that I have to prioritize a bit more...Something to think about. Regardless--there'll be less from me next week in any case, as I've a huge stack of grading first thing on Monday, and then a mid-term at the end of the week, so this will be a brutal period of academic drudgery, alas. So, you know, if I'm silent, I'm suffering for it...

Better Today, But...

2006-04-25T10:54:00.000-07:00

The black fog has turned to gray--which actually matches the weather at the moment, so I feel in sync with the world--very eurythmic of me, no? Anyway, since I'm still down a bit, I'm feeling uncreative, so in lieu of originality, a meme borrowed from phd.me (http://probablyedandme.blogspot.com/):

Accent: Well, of course I can't detect it, but I assume I've got a bit of the elongated, flattened vowels of the Southern Californian--but basically, I sound like everyone on television, since we're all from SoCal.

Booze: In moderation. Wine with dinner if someone else is buying or I'm celebrating something. Calvados on a late afternoon with tea. Either a martini (gin) or a gimlet (vodka) pre-dinner. That's about it.

Chore I hate: Dusting/Vacuuming. Seriously, anyone who enjoys these activities should not be allowed to vote or drive a motor vehicle.

Dog or cat: Cat--though if I could have a dog, I probably would.

Essential electronics: Desktop, Xbox (though I'm trying to wean myself)...that's about it.

Favorite cologne: Ha! Trick question, right? None, of course. Though if that Axe stuff did what the commercials imply...

Gold or silver: Silver

Hometown: Los Angeles. Go ahead and sneer--we don't care, because you're all just jealous. (Or so we tell ourselves so we can continue to live vapid lives focused around our looks and our gaudy material possessions.)

Insomnia: Very rarely, and usually an after-effect from napping, so I've got no one else to blame.

Job title: Lecturer.

Kids: None, alas. I'd go into more detail, but I've blogged about it recently and set off an old-fashioned (though highly articulate) flame-war by doing so.

Living arrangements: A cozy if unfinished garret in a large house owned by an incredibly charitable friend who lets me live here dirt cheap, largely--I think--because I feed his cats and bring the mail and garbage pails in.

Most admirable trait: Oh, God. OK, if *your* life is falling apart and *you're* in a state of crisis and you need someone to come in and rescue you and know exactly what to do and what to say, I'm your man. I am The Fixer. Now, if I could just transfer those skills onto my *own* life.

Number of sexual partners: At present, or over the course of my life? None to the former, and as for the second, well, few. Kind of a serial monogamist, so I can count my sexual partners on one partially maimed hand...

Overnight hospital stays: I believe I had to stay over one night after my birth. Apart from that, none. (Knocking wood with vehemence...)

Phobias: Used to be driving--got over that, though. Rats freak me out, but I can be in the same room with white ones in cages. Nothing too severe--which isn't to say that I'm brave.

Quote: "Be of use." John Irving, The Cider House Rules

Religion: Culturally, Episcopalian--very High Church. Practically, um--well, I know a lot of Christmas carols!

Siblings: Younger brother. Much taller and more successful than I am, the bastard.

Time I wake up: Without an alarm clock, 9:30. On the dot. Every time. I am a cyborg, clearly.

Unusual talent or skill: I can juggle, does that count?

Vegetable I refuse to eat: Refuse? Um. Artichokes (had a bad, bad, bad experience with one, once--plus, it never called the next day) and green peppers.

Worst habit: Sloth.

X-rays: Teeth, right arm

Yummy foods I make: Ah, see, here's where I'm a magician. There's this device where all I have to do is punch a few buttons, and then, poof!, pizza appears right at the front door! Beat that!

Zodiac sign: Capricorn. Just like Jesus, with whom I've so much in common.

Mood Update

2006-04-23T17:58:00.000-07:00

Today's forecast: Black fog, with increasing black fog late in the afternoon, then 30-40% likelihood of panic attacks later into this evening.

Have I mentioned that I really hate my brain and its shiftless inability to regulate its own neurotransmitters? I really, really do.

Might not have anything much to blog about for a bit--I can't believe that depression actually serves as a source of inspiration to some writerly types...

Sigh. Heavy Sigh.

2006-04-23T13:32:00.000-07:00

Well, I was enjoying Cold Mountain, right up until the end. (Spoilers ahead.) I hate randomly unhappy endings--endings that end badly just because, and not because they've been interwoven into the true theme of the story. (The worst offender of all time in this category is The Mill on the Floss, which essentially ends with "And then suddenly there was a flood and they all died, which sorted out the complex inter-personal problems I've built up for 350 pages very easily." Nice job there, Ms. Eliot. Pity you lived in the pre-nuclear era--you could have just had someone drop the bomb.) Random misfortune is, of course, part of the warp and woof of life, but fiction demands more, I think, unless said fiction is about random misfortune. Which, I don't know, maybe Cold Mountain is, and yet the way the ending was handled was, to my mind, shockingly ham-fisted, given the care with which the author had treated his subject up until then. "Oh, and before they could live happily ever after, this happened, so they didn't. But aren't the hills of North Carolina pretty? The End." Screw that--it's just a "f*** you" to the reader. Yes, I suppose there's a case to be made about, oh, the not-really-irony of a man trying to escape senseless brutality and death, seeking a place of refuge, only to find that it has followed him there. But if that's so, then give us a head's up--foreshadowing, motif--something. Not just...well, not just that. It ends with such a note of de rigeur--"Well, can't end happily--got to make them close the book with tears in their eyes--now, how to do it, how to it...hmmm...oh, the hell with it--here." Nope, not buyin' what he's sellin'. I'm not saying that the story needs to end happily, mind--perhaps it shouldn't. But given where he'd pointed it, that seemed a likelier outcome than any other--a novel is not an O. Henry short story--no 'twist' endings, please, especially if they're not really 'twists' so much as 'cop-outs.' Disappointing, very very disappointing...

Top Ten List--Redux

2006-04-17T13:40:00.000-07:00

OK, OK, I'm bored and trapped at school, and while I could be spending this time finishing reading Cold Mountain (which I'm not hating nearly as much as I thought I would), I instead choose to foist off on you a once-promised Top Ten list.

The Top Ten Things You're Probably Embarassed About Enjoying, But Shouldn't Be:

10. Reading Complete And Total Crap Fiction.

Obviously, I have The DaVinci Code in mind here, which is, in fact, as dreadful a piece of 'imaginative' sludge to ever slop out of the New York Times Best Sellers list. But a line from (forgive me) an episode of The X-Files kind of resonates: "The worst book ever written is better than the best movie ever filmed." It's not true, but the act of reading in and of itself sets you above the slack-jawed majority who can't even be bothered to do that much. It's one of the few genuinely healthy mental activities, working the imagination (despite what Cervantes might have thought), and reading even the worst of the worst is vastly better than reading nothing at all. When I worked in a book store, there was a woman who came in every week to buy a new Harlequin romance. I sneered at her at first, until I realized--this woman was reading a book a week. No matter if it was crap, it was still time she spent turning pages, understanding language, and not watching television. Good for her--and for you.

9. Science Fiction and Fantasy.

I'm serious. I used to be a major geek in this respect--I've essentially grown out of it--still have a penchant for "Horror" as a genre, but that's another topic for another time--but I know people my own age and older who are still way, way into this stuff. But you know what? Speaking of Cervantes--generally speaking, these folks are like lesser, sadder versions of Don Quixote. They read and watch and 'convention' (is that verb-able?) this stuff because they're idealists at heart--they believe in a better world with finer ideals--a world that rewards the virtuous and punishes the wicked and they believe in it enough to give themselves over to the fantasy that such worlds can exist. Let 'em, I say. It prevents them from getting bored and turning into computer hackers and virus-makers. They're good people, oddly oriented. Leave them alone.

8. Masturbation.

Too obvious for words, but OK--everyone does it, nobody wants to admit it, because it seems as though it's a substitute for real sex, and if you spank/pet it, it means you can't get someone else to do it for you. Crap. As anyone will tell you who's been in a long-term relationship. And it beats the hell out of pretending to love someone so he/she will sleep with you. (OK, that's mostly a guy thing. Women, in my experience, delude themselves into thinking they're in love so they can have sex with the guy. Sad little gendered world, isn't it?) So do it freely, happily, unashamedly. Just not, you know, on the bus or in church.

7. Desperate Housewives.

I have no idea why this is on the list, but someone whose taste and intelligence I trust is utterly addicted to the show, and I just want to tell her that, Hey, It's OK. Like all soap operas, it has the redeeming feature of demanding a sustained attention span (got to remember one episode to the next--and there's a week in-between!) and it doesn't take itself too seriously, like, oh, say, Lost. I understand this season sucks, though. And it does mean that you can't make fun of people who watch The O.C. or Veronica Mars. If any such people still exist.

6. Being A Lawyer.

Fact is, it's a miserable job--long hours, abusive clients/bosses, competition as the bitter milieu of every day. It sucks as a job, and while it may (and does) turn many of its practitioners into monsters, it's still a job that needs to be done, and just thank God that you're not the one who has to do it.

5. Knowing A Lot.

I've never known a person who was enormously well-educated not to be constantly apologizing for this fact in conversation. "Oh, yeah, it's just like what Charlemagne was trying to do in Flanders," he/she will say in casual reference to the Iraq situation, and people will look at him/her with resentment for knowing what the hell he's talking about. "Sorry," he/she will say, "I just, you know, read a lot." And then change the subject to something related to NASCAR. Stop apologizing. When you're sneered at for knowing a thing or two, sneer back and say, "Just because I crack a book now and then, and retain what I discover, and want to share it, how exactly does that make me morally deficient? Read a book." (Author's note: I have no idea what, if anything, Charlemagne tried to accomplish in Flanders. Just made it up. So stop staring at me resentfully.)

4. Listening to Horrible Music. Yes, even Boy Bands.

Again, this falls into the category, of "At least it's music." Granted, it is emetic, cloying, vacuous, and 'catchy' in the worst possible way (as in, "I can't get this crap out of my head!!!") but it's ultimately innocuous--the lyrics (apart from most of rap, alas) are pacifistic, idealize love (admitted, this sets up a false ideal of what love is, but one can't have everything), and generally extol a fairly gentle way of living/being. Yeah, it's stupid--but it's nice stupidity--and, again, at least you're listening to music. Which in itself is good for the soul. The Greeks knew this, and we've never forgotten it.

3. Eating Junk Food.

Moderation makes this completely acceptable behavior. So you went and ate the whole freaking bag of Cool Ranch Flavor Doritos (c). Don't berate yourself--just don't do it again tomorrow. Junk Food isn't good for you, God knows, but in reasonable doses, it isn't really bad for you, either. Exercise, drink lots of water, eat lots of fruits and green vegetables, and then you don't have to sneak the Oreos crumbled into the Ben & Jerry's--you can snarf it down with zest and pride--you've earned your treat.

2. Being Unable to Come Up With Ten Really Good Entries to a Top Ten List.

I mean, seriously, it's not as if you're getting paid to write this. So if you have to fudge a bit by throwing in a meta-literary moment that causes the reader to be 'aware' of the author and his/her own experience of reading--that creates a moment of abstraction--objection that questions the organicism of the moment, go right ahead. Just be sure to justify it in academic jargon that no one will understand.

1. Xbox.

Because I said so, that's why. Yes, I'm biased beyond belief--yes, it's immature--yes, there are billions of ways I could be better spending my time--but it keeps me quiet, indoors, and venting my frustration at something utterly incapable of being offended or injured. Trust me, I'm a better person because of it--look, my life is so tediously dreadful that I've got to escape from it to an absolute degree, so it's either Xbox or heroin--I think I've made the right call. And if your life is dreadful, too--and it must be, since you're reading this--then by all means, jack in and let the pain wash away...

You'll notice that I didn't include 'watching professional sports with an obsession bordering on mental illness' or 'voting Republican.' That's because nobody who does this is, in fact, ashamed of it. Which is a problem all its own, but that's for another time...

Jesus Is Weeping...

2006-04-16T10:58:00.000-07:00

Once again this year, we maintain the fiction that my brother and I are 4 and 12 respectively, and have the obligatory Easter Egg hunt--a very contained scenario, inasmuch as we're essentially confined to the tiny confines of the main room of the second-rate beach house my parents are renting while they add a second story to theirs (yes, they do have money, thanks). And, as we've begun to do in recent years, my brother and I have taken over hiding the eggs, leaving my parents--both in their early-to-mid-60s, mind you--to hunt.

Which wouldn't seem too pathetic, except for my mother. Who treats the hunt--a competition of who finds the most--with a ruthless severity--as if the loser will, in fact, suffer ritual execution (I suppose "scourging and crucifixion" comes to mind)--and rushes from potential hiding-place to potential hiding-place in frantic excitement, screaming (no, not an expression) with frustration when she and my father happen upon the same egg--"NOOOOOO!!!!"--and by the time we get down to the last few, she's giving him full-blown body checks out of the way, and calling him names that simply don't seem to go with the spirit of the holiday.

Fortunately for us, she won this year. Which means we don't have to hear finds disputed and scores debated for, oh, the next year or so. Happy Easter. Christos aneste--Alithos aneste.

Urgh...

2006-04-10T13:44:00.000-07:00

Still Xbox-ing my mind into mush. I'm 36 years old, I have a Ph.D. from a top-15 English Department, I'm published in both academic and fictional venues, and yet I'm saying things to myself like "Well, let me put in one more hour--maybe in that time I can figure out a way to join the Thieves' Guild!" I...am...pathetic. Pathetic and just, in someway, fundamentally wrong about the way I'm choosing to live my life. I mean, sure, it could be worse--heroin/meth, pedophilia, Christian conservatism, but still. I'm just...sad. Oh, don't misunderstand; I'm not going to stop. I mean, seriously, my Xbox is the only thing I've got going for me in my life right now. (Well, no, that's not entirely true...there are other things...people...but that's another discussion for another time. Point is, I'm mostly alone and at loose ends, and jacking in to The Box makes all the ennui go bye-bye. So hush, just let me waste the few precious moments I have on Earth before the Grim Reaper sweeps his remorseless scythe in my direction.)

And I especially need distracting/cheering up--a friendly colleague of mine just announced that she's pregnant, and she and her husband are thrilled and it's just wonderful. And I congratulated her--genuinely--but at the same time thought "...F***. No, really: F***." Because that's what I need to be doing. (Well, not getting pregnant--I'll leave that to you ladies and thank God that when He was handing out punishments for Apple Eating, I only got stuck with the agricultural duties.) But I should be having kids. Actually, I should have had them a couple of years ago. I'm ready. I really am. But, inasmuch as I'm alone--and thus way, way distant from being in a position to find someone willing to carry on my genetic material--that's just not going to happen anytime soon. And that means...well, I'm 36. It may, in fact, never happen. I may never have kids. Ever. That...is a sobering thought. Very. Saddening. Mournful. Cold.

Sigh. Can you blame me for Xbox-ing? I think not.

Yeah, yeah, yeah...

2006-04-05T10:33:00.000-07:00

I know, I haven't been terribly good about posting. But between the Xbox (I'm putting together a blog entry about the Top Ten things that you shouldn't be ashamed of indulging in--guess what's going to be Number One?) and the start of the new quarter, I'm busier than--oh, which do we prefer, a one-armed paper-hanger, or a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest? (What it is with amputees as the epitomes of harried activity? Hmm--there's a seminar paper in this, said the appalling academic.) Anyway, point is--

I apologize for the scarcity and the brevity of my posts, but the course that I'm teaching is one of those where it counts (credit-wise) as TWO full courses--that's how much it demands of both students and teachers. So I'm essentially teaching a four-class load all of a sudden, and I'm also teaching the rhetoric of Paul's epistles to a group of students who include devout Christians (for whom I'm dissecting--i.e. challenging--the word of God), angry militant atheists (for whom I'm treating respectfully--i.e. validating--the words responsible for the subjugation of women, gays, etc.), and everything in-between. Complex waters to navigate...but I seem to be doing OK. Since I'm pretty much a liberal humanist, I don't sound like a proselytizer, but since I've received years of Biblical study, I definitely 'talk the talk,' so the devout don't question my bona fides...Still, yikes.

Good news is, I got my student evaluations from last quarter in--apparently, I rock. My overall average (isn't that rendundant?) was a 6.5+ out of a possible 7 (7 being Godlike), which, when you consider that the average of all instructors hovers somewhere just over 5, pretty much makes me King of the Mountain around here. Plus I got comments like "The best teacher I have ever had in my life" and "I learned more in one week with him than I did in all of last quarter"--so, you know, hard not to feel good about that. Well, it would be if such reviews translated into being offered a job. One would think that, since I have years of demonstrating the fact that I'm actually quite brilliant at the very activity that they're hiring me to perform, that universities might, I don't know, want to hire me. Apparently, though, not. Baffling. Maybe there's some secret handshake I haven't learned. OK...off to class. Must continue to spread the light of my wisdom unto the masses...

Minor League Post

2006-04-01T20:41:00.000-08:00

But better than nothing at all, I suppose. I was watching A History of Violence--a B- film, even if it is a Cronenberg, and even if Mario Bello does get naked therein--and it occurred to me, watching it, that movie-makers have got to just...stop having people chat when there's killing to be done. One of the greatest lines--indeed, one of the greatest scenes in all of cinema is in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, in which a gunslinger earlier maimed by "The Ugly"--Tuco, played brilliantly by Eli Wallach--it's almost enough to make you forgive him for being in Godfather III, only not quite--anyway--the maimed gunslinger has Tuco dead to rights--the ugly little bandito is taking a bubble bath, seemingly helpless. And the gunslinger, who's come all this way and hunted for so long in order to find the man responsible for crippling him--and whom he now has dead in his sights--decides to chat: "I've been looking for you for 8 months. Whenever I should have had a gun in my right hand, I thought of you. Now I find you in exactly the position that suits me. I had lots of time to learn to shoot with my left."

Nice speech, except that at the end of it, with a blank expression, Tuco pulls a gun out from under the bubbles and blows the guy away. He then stands and, with an expression of bemused contempt, tells the dying man, "When you have to shoot, shoot. Don't talk." At which point moviegoers around the world leapt out of their seats with a chorus of THANK you!!! (And for those of you who prefer Pixar to Sergio Leone, yes, there was a running discussion of the similar phenomenon of 'monologuing' among supervillains. Yet another sign that some people get why this behavior is foolish, and why the villain in that particularly clever film makes a point of not doing it.)

Screenwriters need to wise up to the fact that when you're going to kill someone, that's what you do, isn't it? I mean, the smart killers know not to talk and the dumb ones can't think of anything clever to say. So just...shoot. Please. And I won't have to roll my eyes when villains played by Ed Harris--playing a professional killer, for God's sake--take the time out to have a little colloquy with their intended victims, thus allowing for the inevitable moment of "suprise!"

Please. I ask for so little, really.

Time Out

2006-03-28T11:55:00.000-08:00

There's a FOXTROT cartoon that I'm quite fond of--Jason, the 10-year-old wunderkind wanders into the kitchen sometime in early October and announces to his mother, "Well, I'm done with my homework." "For the week?" she asks. "For the year," he explains, as if this is the most natural thing in the world. Then turns around, saying, "Excuse me, I have to go meld with the TV for the next few months." Well, I don't have months, but I have a new Xbox 360 on the way and a week to myself, so, with all due respect to my readers--and bear in mind, I love you all more than I can--f*** off, I'm having fun! Come back in a week when I'm miserable again--it's always more entertaining to read about someone's unhappiness than their stuporific joy--don't believe me? Go talk to a friend who's in the first flush of joyful, mutual love--then go talk to someone in the midst of a horrific break-up. Yeah, I think you get the point. Later...

Sisyphus and Me--Twins Separated at Birth?

2006-03-26T10:24:00.000-08:00

I'm getting bad about updates, I know--in my defense, I was handed, on one day (Friday), 22 exams (essay based, and in addition to the 22 I already had) and 44 end-of-term papers to grade. So, you know, that's where I've been. Not having fun or anything.

Fortunately--if such a word can be applied as perversely at this one--my parents have corralled me into house-sitting this weekend, so I've got an empty (minus the dogs) house and total silence (beach house, nothing but waves and gulls--very soothing, except I can't take the time to nap, dammit), and no distractions...God, how I wish I had distractions. See, this was what was good about being married. In precisely this sort of situation, when I need it the most, there'd be someone to walk in the room and say, "I'm bored--can we go out and play?"

To which I wouldn't even take the time to respond--I'd just leap out of the chair and grab the car keys and her wrist, and the eye wouldn't even be able to follow us, we'd be out of the room so fast--one of those movie moments where the next thing you see/hear is the slamming door. And if she were to say, "Can we stay in and play"--well, so much the better! But, no. Alone. With nothing to do but be professionally productive and responsible. Dammit.

OK, back to the grading. This concludes this test of the Possibility of An Actual Life Broadcast System--if this had been an Actual Life, you wouldn't have heard a damn thing. Well, maybe just that slamming door...

I Got Blisters On Me Fingers!!!

2006-03-23T18:15:00.000-08:00

It's true, actually. I spent the day (well, several hours of it) putting together a new computer desk--one that required the use of hammer and screwdriver, not just one of those "comes with the package" s-shaped octaganal screw-thingies. I'm actually quite handy with tools--you wouldn't think it to look at me. Or to know me, really. But thanks to--of all things--my experience as a Theater major, I can both build--using power tools and lumber and everything!--and sew; given a pattern, I can make a shirt from scratch. I never have, since I have more important things to do with my life, but still--if I ever decide I want to move to Indonesia and work for pennies a day, hey, I gots da skeelz. But I haven't built anything in awhile, and as a result, my hands are of the delicate scholarly type, so yes, I'm blistered. And yes, typing hurts. Which is why this entry will end here.

Busy, busy, busy...

2006-03-22T14:29:00.000-08:00

Marathon office hours continue as frantic students realize at the last minute that they don't understand the assigned text or the essay prompt and that not doing so might just affect their grade on the paper. So I'm beseiged night (via e-mails questions and drafts) and day (the aforementioned office hours) and thus have nothing to report or new to bitch about. Same old, same old, moan, moan, moan...

Finals Week

2006-03-21T10:03:00.000-08:00

Nothing much going on--no grading yet to do (though I proctor my first final in 1/2 an hour, so that'll change anon--"anon"? God I'm pretentious--soon, OK?)--yet I'm running hither and yon--oh God, I'm doing it again--listening to the unabridged Don Quixote in the car during my daily commute--filling prescriptions at the pharmacy--seeing my pill-shrink to discuss the notion of eliminating one of my drugs, just because I'm tired of the side-effects--and maybe reducing one of the others--and there's e-mail and blogging and World of Warcraft--whoops, did I just cop to that--nevermind, no--um, porn--lots and lots of porn--phew, dodged that bullet--anyway--scrambling is the order of the day--imagine what it would be like if I were busy!

One thought did occur to me: if you're a hard-core Fundamentalist Christian, and believe that the Bible is the unfiltered Word of God, shouldn't you be required to know both Hebrew and Classical Greek so you can read the version untouched by human hands...? Of course, most fundamentalists don't even speak *one* language ('tongues' doesn't count), so I guess asking them to master two particularly tricky ones might be too much to ask. Nevermind, go picket another family planning clinic...

Post St. Patrick's Day

2006-03-18T12:39:00.000-08:00

So inasmuch as my last name is decidedly Irish (and unpronounceably so), I had everybody and his cousin coming up to me yesterday and the day before, wanting to know what I was going to do to celebrate. "I mean, dude, I'm not Irish--"--this was the general sentiment--"--and I'm gonna get so fucking wasted, I may go permanently blind. So you must be going to go seriously insane, am I right?" No, no you're not. Irish people don't really act any different on March 17th as they do on any other day. We get drunk, but no drunker than usual--it was a Friday night, so I guarantee you that the Irish populations of Chicago, Boston, New York, et al. went out and got good and properly s***-faced, but they did the same thing last week, and they'll do the same thing next week. It's just not that big of a deal with us. Yeah, yeah, yeah--we're Irish, and today, for one day, that's cool. Tomorrow we'll go back to being bog-trotters, potato-eaters, poetic drunks. BFD. It's mostly a day for grade-school children to physically abuse their peers for not wearing green, and for the makers of green dye to poison alcoholics across the nation by forcing them to choke down gallons of their product in cheap beer. Not a great, great day for Our People, is what I'm saying. Being proud of being Irish is like being proud of being tall--you had nothing to do with it--and anyway, these days, it's really no scandal to be a Mick--the days of No Irish Need Apply signs are long gone--now we're corrupt police officials and alderman, and rule over our own corners of the metropolis with the iron fisted brutality that was once wielded against us. Progress! So. Go out on St. Paddy's Day--get drunk, get into a fight, go home and abuse the wife and kids. But remember, it's not "tradition"--it's just Friday.

Last Days

2006-03-16T10:17:00.000-08:00

To all my fellow teachers, profs, and lecturers--is it just me, or do last days inherently suck? Much worse than first days--which likewise suck, but that's because you've got to do procedural crap and the students don't know or trust you and it's awkward and you don't really have time to build up a good solid head of 'thinking-out-loud' performative steam. But that's another bitch-and-moan for another day. Last days--what do you say?

"And so...there you go! All you'll ever need to know about this particular subject!" I think not.

"And so...now you can see just how much there is to learn about this subject..." Weak, very weak--impotence disguised as idealism.

"OK, so, here's what'll be on the final..." Pragmatic, but dull--do you really want to send them out with that ashy taste in their mouths?

"OK, well, um...it's been swell, thank you all so much..." Kissing up? Not pretty.

The fact is, and I tell my students this, that the last day of class is not like the last chapter in a mystery novel--it's not all going to magically tie together in the end. And frankly, I add, if I had anything important to say, I'd've said it already. They're wiped and terrified about the final and their last essays. I'm wiped in anticipation of grading those same documents. We're all tired and cranky and we just want to go home. Plus--you know--you've gotten to know and like these kids. (At least, I usually have.) And once the class ends--well, it's like the end of the run of a play--everybody hugs and cries and says "Oh, we must keep in touch"--and then you go your separate ways and never speak again. C'est la vie et le monde. And so for me, last days are anticlimactic and kind of hollow. Does anybody have any suggestions as to how to fix this?--and don't recommend bringing candy or pizza--that too is kissing up, and I just won't do it...

...ummm...

2006-03-15T00:05:00.000-08:00

To be honest, I'm only posting so as to confirm that I continue to sustain life functions. I'm picking up classes for a colleague who covered for me when I went on that campus visit (will those people ever get around to just saying "no" and putting me out of my misery???), and that means that I'm on my feet lecturing for three straight hours--it's a wee bit tiring, mentally and physically, and all I really want to do at the end of the day is slap my arm, find the vein, insert the sweet syringe of cable television, and press the plunger. Mmmmm...laugh tracks...So I've nothing profound or witty to say, alas. (That is, even less so than usual.) For interim amusement, I refer you to the blogs of those who have posted in response to mine--their clean and shiny places of self-expression put mine to shame--enjoy them as I do...

Down With Love--and with A Certain Show

2006-03-12T11:31:00.000-08:00

--as a topic of fulmination, at any rate. I woke up this morning, looked over my last two posts, rolled my eyes, and muttered, "Give me a f***ing break." (And yes, I actually spoke in asterisks. It's not easy--very glottal.) Love and its absence is fundamentally boring, isn't it? Someone who's happy in love is tedious and irritating, someone who's unhappy in love is...tedious and irritating. Basically, it's an emotion--and thus, while it's engaging to experience it, it's dull to talk about it, especially at length. I mean, sex is fun, but would you want to read a long, explicit description of--OK, bad example. Food--better--one of my favorite things to do at restaurants is to take the bottle of wine and, reading the description of the 'flavors' and 'overtones' and the 'finish' of said vintage, ask my compatriots what it is they think they're tasting. Nobody ever gets it right--"vanilla!" "blackberry!" "chocolate!" "cherry!" "parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme!"--and we all laugh at the purple prose of the most bizarre description-- "a smooth finish of chutney and baked potato"--describing food is just...pointless. Taste doesn't translate well into prose. Much less something like love. So, f*** it. Moving on--

Have I mentioned that I could not give less of a rat's ass about the premiere tonight of The Sopranos? I couldn't. Not if you paid me. I no longer care--and, like most HBO subscribers, I once cared a lot. But now? Meh. I feel about the show the way I felt about The Godfather III--even before it came out and was revealed to be a scar on the face of an otherwise masterful cinematic narrative--can we ever forget the soul-dead look on Michael's broodinf face at the end of that second film--goddammit, that's how the story ends!--my first thought upon hearing that it was being made was, "Do we really need any more of this?" No, no we don't. I don't care about these people anymore. I simply don't. The first few seasons were brilliant, and then David Chase because an 800-pound gorilla--someone whom no one would say "no" to--as in "No, David, that idea doesn't work"--or "No, David, I think we need the story to focus on this character"--instead, we got meandering crap, material so dull that even actors as brilliant as David Strathairn and Steve Buscemi couldn't save it. We're now at the stage where, Tony and Co. having killed off all the interesting characters, we have to introduce new characters just so that they can eventually be killed in that last episode. To hell with it. Yes, Adriana's murder was chilling beyond words--no doubt about it. But one brilliant moment or two does not a season justify. Much less a season that comes around about as often as a presidential election. I'm done. I'm out. Y'all can watch--I'm going to read Gibbon, play XBox, and go to bed feeling free and easy...

I Feel For You--Or Do I?

2006-03-11T22:39:00.000-08:00

Goodness, I seem to be provoking a lot of responses these days. (Apart from my selection of a Hopkins poem for my Friday contribution--that appears either entirely unobjectionable and/or totally boring. Probably the latter--I still like it, though.)

Still, with all due appreciation--and I do appreciate it--the last post wasn't a cry for attention--no, really! That is, oddly enough, I didn't mean it be about me, per se, but about a problem with love--a problem that I think a lot of people have, and which, admittedly, I used myself as an example of (since I think I'm about as bad as a person can be on that level and not qualify as a clinical sociopath.) That is: empathy.

Is empathy possible? Freud would say that it's a delusion--a pleasant one, but a delusion ne'er-the-less. I think Montaigne would agree--though he'd be spritely and sweet about it, and we wouldn't be nearly so creeped out after reading his version of the same sentiment. We are, aren't we, fundamentally isolated in our own heads, right? I mean, like the stoned hippie asks while staring at the lava lamp, "Like, what if the color blue that I see is, like, a totally different color than the color blue you see? Whoa..." But it's true. Blue is what you see, not what I see. I can't ever really know what you see--and how much less can I know what you feel? So when we think of love as being tied up with empathy--hurting when someone else hurts--being happy when someone else is happy--isn't it counter-intuitive? Is it really possible?

Of course it is, you say. And, truth be told, I agree. The sweeping fiat of "there's no such thing as love" is just plain silly--we may not agree on what the word means--does anyone?--but humanity's been grooving on each other for too long for us to deny the existence of something that merits the name "love." I mean, when logic goes up against empiricism, we go with empiricism--isn't that what the whole Age of Enlightenment was about?

Anyway--

So love exists. Maybe not the absolute, aestheticized love of Sapphic odes and Puccini arias, but it exists. There may be no such thing as soul-mates, true, but "close enough" is good enough. Agreed.

But surely, for love to be "close enough," there has to be something in us that's open to giving it. Love--real love--is an exchange, isn't it? I mean, isn't that why we laugh at Don Quixote and Cervantes's mocking of courtly love--the one-sided adoration of the non-existant belle dame sans merci? We laugh because love requires a minimum of two people; otherwise, it's just, um, self-pleasuring, let's say. And between those two people, there has to be something given and received, yes? And each one has to do both? Yes? No?

Hmm. Maybe no. Maybe I'm just attempting to prescribe the unprescribable. Maybe love it completely and utterly individual phenomenon. And what works for two particular people (or, three, what the hell!) isn't what will work for, or be a model for, anybody else.

But can we really swing so far into that absolute? I think not. De gustibus non disputandum, and all that, but come on--there's a reason we can all tell stories about "our worst blind date ever" and know that those listening will laugh in sympathy--there are rules--maybe not absolute, but strong enough to act as guideposts--sure, we may color outside the lines, but that doesn't mean that the lines aren't there.

So let's say that there is a convention to love. Surely (I'm using that word a lot--though I want credit for not making a single Airplane reference--until now) part of that convention is "you gotta give to get"--and, in addition "you gotta want to give"--I don't agree with much of what Paul said--almost none of it, really--but he has a point when he writes about love, and how one can do wonderful things, but if one does them without love, it profits one nothing. (Though a man who saves lives and eases pain without love may profit others immensely, so maybe he doesn't have a point. Stupid multi-dimensional nature of experience...) But to love really is to love givingly--right? Isn't it? I think so. I think love means patience without a big show of being patient. It means sacrifice without grumbling--it means giving without whining--it means being there for the boring stuff and not checking your watch every five minutes. I means a lot. And it's worth it, God knows. It's really, really worth it.

But it's only worth it if we're worth it. And I still find myself wanting. Then again--maybe my problem is that it means so much to me--that I value it so highly and miss it so much--that I think that in order to be worth something so amazing and wonderful, I have to be equally amazing and wonderful. And given how I feel about love--well, I don't think anyone could be that wonderful, not all the time. Hmm. That's probably a healthy conclusion. Certainly my shrink would agree. And hey, it means I'm free to be a snivelling, childishly selfish prick and still feel like I'm owed love, right now, dammit. Goody.

More Night Thoughts

2006-03-10T21:45:00.000-08:00

What I hope will be my last word on this subject for awhile:

It occurs to me, as I ponder, Job-like, the injustice of the universe that has robbed me of love and companionship that, unlike poor Job, I actually have a single, grim little piece of comfort--I can at least know why I'm alone right now. Because, to a great extent, I deserve to be. To wit:

I'm not especially loveable. Or indeed, even moderately so. Or indeed, even slightly so. I am, in fact, quite unloveable.

I don't say this out of false modesty, or self-pity, or out of some depression-induced sense of self-loathing. I don't think I'm a bad person, or a hateful one. I'm not. But to be loved--to be worthy of being loved--one has to be exceptional in a certain way, a way in which I'm not exceptional at all.

What way, you ask. Well, give me moment--it's hard to articulate and I've been drinking. (More red wine, which suggests that perhaps I am acting out of self-loathing, only I'm drinking from my parents' cellar, which means it's good red wine, so back off.)

In order to be loveable, one must be capable of love oneself, yes? And I wonder, sometimes, whether or not I am. In any meaningful sense. Meaningful? Yes, in the sense of being giving. Not just giving--happily giving. Because my greatest fault--and I have many--is that I'm terribly selfish. It really is all about me, when it comes right down to it. Don't get me wrong, I don't want other people hurt, and I care if they are, but mostly--almost entirely--when I act in a good and kind way, I do so because I like being thought of as good and kind. Hobbes, of course, would say that that's what we all do--that we act virtuously out of enlightened self-interest. Freud would agree--hell, even Christ suggests that the basis of morality is "Do as you would be done by"--be good and you increase the odds that others will be good to you. And perhaps love operates like that. Perhaps, somehow, one has to force oneself outside of one's self and into the wants and needs of others because those wants and need matter more. I think of Dickens's Marley describing the duty of humanity : "It is required of every man...that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death." Spirit going forth--that's love, isn't it?

I don't seem to have that. Not with any kind of dependability. Get me in the right mood--on the right day, and sure, I'm tender and self-sacrificing, and so on. Romantic, even. But mostly? Mostly, there's something in me that--pulls back from it. From feeling bad when the person I'm with feels bad--from confrontations where I'll have to hear what I don't want to hear about myself--from being genuinely open and being found wanting. Why, I don't know. Afraid of being hurt? Simple, childish, foot-stomping me-first-ness? Maybe--though the one's cowardly and the other's contemptible. Whatever the reason, though, if you can't be giving--if you can't be adoringly giving on a consistent basis--do you deserve to be loved? I don't think so. And that means that I don't, doesn't it? For all of my ability to be charming, and patient, and kind--and I've got those, I really do--I think that I'm too selfish to deserve love. I think that I place myself first too often, too easily. And I don't deserve to be loved, then.

Sigh. Now that's depressing.

Friday Poem - March 10

2006-03-10T19:01:00.000-08:00

Spring and Fall: to a young child
by Gerard Hopkins

MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow's spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

The Light at the End of the Tunnel---

2006-03-09T10:24:00.000-08:00

--is the headlights of the oncoming train.

Which is to say that I finally--finally--finished my grading. Yes, you won't have to hear me Bitch & Moan about that for...well, at least another week.

Unfortunately, I chose to celebrate my completion of grading by doing what all people in my romantic situation do--drinking alone. Several--rather too many--glasses of incredibly cheap red wine last night. On an empty stomach.

And this morning, I ponder--does anything give you a worse hangover than cheap red wine? (Except for drinking champagne over several hours under a hot sun, which as a practice is, I believe, banned under the Geneva convention--my God is that a suicidal practice.)

So today will be spent, head in hands, whimpering about how life isn't fair. Which should amuse my students to no end...

Responding to Reader Response

2006-03-08T10:42:00.000-08:00

Janet posted an articulate and valid response to my recent diatribe against Eva Longoria and her ilk--it's well worth reading, and a reminder that, despite my attempts to keep this blog an intellectually totaliatarian space, other people will insist on having their own opinions. In the interest of giving both sides of the dialogue fair play, I trancribe her remarks verbatim:

I'm sorry that men are being deprived of their "flesh". Not. I hate to dissolve the arguement, but women feel better when they have muscles instead of fat. When slender, we enjoy meals more, we have more energy...

I am a dancer and am very pleased with my body. I am not constantly hungry. I am not emancipated. I am a women who can do twelve jetes in a row, high kicks for over two minutes and run the mile without sweating.

Granted, there are several celebrities that could use a few deep-fried twinkies. But Julia Roberts, Penelope Cruz and Gwyneth Paltrow do not fall into this catagory. These stars are a few that DO respect their bodies. They are slender, as well as intelligent and talented. You do not have to have sex with them. Some men prefer bigger women. But I can bet that Julia Roberts isn't feeling sorry for her lack of fleshy eye-candy. It isn't weight that make these women beautiful. Have you looked at their smiles? Listened to them laugh?

Next time a women walks by, do not focus on the size of her waist and hips. They are what they are. Rather, think to yourself, "I wonder if she likes snow and roasting marshmallows?"

Points well taken. My response:

Actually, my objection isn't at the thinness of such women--which, as you point out, can be healthy--it's the fact that just because they're thin, they're hot. Thinness (or fleshiness) isn't the definitive quality of beauty. My objection is that these are not beautiful women--they're simply not, and yet we're told that they are because they conform to the one requirement of beauty that these people acknowledge--thinness.

(And no, I'm not imagining that Julia Roberts--or indeed, any woman with a scrap of self-esteem--gives a rat's ass what I think about her. Why should she? My anger isn't directed at her--let her live her life as she chooses--but at the forces surrounding her that shove her down my throat as the epitome of movie-star gorgeousness. Which, dammit, she isn't. It isn't just about sex--it's about being told that this is what I want. And yes I have seen them smile, and dammit, Roberts and Cruz are horse-faced when they do, and there's something disturbingly rodent-like about Longoria under the same conditions. I'm sorry--and in their defense, they could be dropped from the top of the ugly tree, hit every branch and land among the roots, and still look better than I, so, you know, I'm not delusional about their relative visual appeal. And Ionly feel justified in commenting on their personal appearances because others--including their own representatives, have put this issue into play. Otherwise, I'd have the respect not to discuss an issue that's none of my business. Well, OK, I might, but I'd be nice about it.)

There are, I will concede, beautiful women who are on the thin side of the 'norm' (whatever that is.) But I should also add that the thinness of these women isn't, by my eye, based on muscle but the absence thereof. And as for feeling better, well, of course--and those of us old enough to remember Linda Hamilton in TERMINATOR 2 can attest that a well-toned women can be seriously attractive. I'd certainly be willing to trade your ideal of a worked body for the death-camp chic that seems to predominate.

As for these women being intelligent, well, um, Gwyneth Paltrow in particular needs to stop spouting off ignorant comments about 'culture' for me to buy into such a notion. They're actresses, and while their success in a challenging profession is to be admired, it's no guarantee of genuine brains.

As for what I think when a woman walks by, I don't think anything. I'm far too self-absorbed to notice. (And trust me, no woman wants to be thought about by me, anyway--she'd have to run straight home and scrub herself clean.)

Nope, Nope, Nope

2006-03-06T09:51:00.000-08:00

Not going to do it. Not going to comment on the Oscars. I mean, really, who gives a s***? Between this and the Winter Olympics, I think we've all been force fed our yearly ration of "S*** You Couldn't Care Less About But Which We're Going To TELL You You Care About Because We Paid For All This Airtime," haven't we? And it's only March! Sigh. OK, I watched a little bit of it. I'm a Jon Stewart fan, so what the hell, I'll stay for the monologue. And I stuck around for Clooney's acceptance speech, where he said "I don't know how you measure art"--and I wanted to leap out of the chair yelling "Yes! Exactly! Precisely! That's why this whole thing is bulls***! Now throw that statuette into the first row and walk off!" But no--I mean, the speech was still cool and all, but...sigh. Then I went back to my grading. Which conceivably sucked even worse than watching the rest of the Oscars. But not much. (I've been using the word "sucked" and variations on it far too often of late. So let me swap in "blew." There, much better.)

Not A Good Weekend

2006-03-05T14:54:00.000-08:00

Which sounds like I'm going start reporting yet another return of the black fog, but no, I'm psychologically quite fit. (Not "as a fiddle," of course, and what the hell does that mean, anyway? Is there some reason a cello is out-of-shape? And what about something not even in the strings section--somebody tell me why a baritone sax isn't fit, pray?)

But no, it's just the damned grading. Endless. Sisyphean. It's weekends like this that I wish I'd gone into physics. Lucky bastards only have scan-trons to grade. Drop the sheet in the slot and wait for the grade to pop out. (I know, I know, there are science-types out there getting irate and saying, "It's not like that at all--our work is hard and our grading sucks too!" But let me indulge in my mopish fantasy, all right, guys?) But paper after paper after paper discussing the exact same plot point of the exact same novel (did I mention that the plot point is a suicide? yeah, that's an added plus)--it's got me listening to Depeche Mode's "Blasphemous Rumors" and Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" on my Ipod and getting really, really into them--I should add "Mad World" and just be done with it all, I suppose.

Anyway, so, this weekend sucks. And no, I haven't heard anything. The phrase "They shoot horses, don't they?" comes to mind...(And no, I repeat, I'm not depressed. I'm just reacting quite sensibly to a serious of rotten concurrences. Actually, it's kind of refreshing to look around and know that my cranky morbidity is actually coming from outside my own head. Nice thing, sanity.)

Friday Poem - March 3

2006-03-03T10:06:00.000-08:00

A long poem--no need to bother if you're pressed for time--but one I read and reread and never stop feeling fulfilled and inspired by reading.

Ulysses
by Alfred Tennyson

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vest the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers;
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breath were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle-
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me-
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads- you and I are old;
Old age had yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho
'We are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

[1842]

Still No News

2006-03-02T10:31:00.000-08:00

Massive stack of grading this weekend--45 versions of the exact same paper, I fear--such is the pitfall of teaching a massive survey course--everyone ends up with the exact same assignment on the exact same passage and drawing the exact same obvious conclusions that they express in the exact same language. Next stop, Groundhog Day's Punxsatawney, where I'll live the same paper over and over and over--only, thank God, in my world, suicide will work the first time. No note will be necessary; I'll just position my corpse so that I'm pointing towards the huge stack of remaining ungraded papers--everyone will understand...

Meantime, no word from anyone. Which means "No" from everyone. When they want you, they tell you. When they don't, they dawdle, because who the hell cares if they piss you off? I say again (and again) (and again): This sucks.

Yet More Rejection

2006-02-28T10:20:00.000-08:00

Got an email yesterday from one college, and a letter was waiting for me at home (after a commute of nearly two hours, thanks to the fact that rain causes Southern California drivers to become incapable of...well, just incapable)--both rejections. Which means, totting things up, that that's five out of the seven schools I interviewed with at the MLA have rejected me. One of the remaining two has made no attempt to contact me, so they're almost certainly getting around to telling me "no", and the final school who had dangled the hope of a campus visit just recently has been silent ever since, despite the fact that they said they hoped to make an offer to someone within the week. It's been a week. They haven't made me an offer. Do the math. Finally, the school I did visit told me that they'd let me know withing two weeks. It's been two weeks. I think we're looking at my being on the losing side of a shut-out. This sucks.

Not Much, Really

2006-02-27T10:36:00.000-08:00

The past few days having been spent in illness--an illness exacerbated by the realization that soon we'll be forced to endure a film version of The DaVinci Code, directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks--kind of a perfect storm of pop cultural banality (yeah, yeah, I like Hanks, too--but I like him precisely for his blandness--he's not what you'd call 'dynamic' or 'edgy')--anyway, it's a hideous, hideous thought--bad book! bad, bad book! no biscuit!--I haven't anything much to comment on or confess or what have you. Still pretty bitter; learning to mask it well. I'm reaching a point, soon, where I'll have to turn things around a bit in my life, which has fallen into an unacceptable state of barren sloth. I need to A. exercise more, B. eat better, C. work on publishing articles--which, of course, involves researching and writing the damned things, D. keep plugging away at the novel, and E. just generally wake up a bit--I feel half-asleep most of the time, sluggish and unmotivated. But it's coming, this moment. Just...not...yet...(Little joke for you St. Augustine fans out there.)

Night Thoughts

2006-02-25T23:35:00.000-08:00

I have a capacity for bitterness that I'm not fond of. Byronic melodrama aside (and I don't have the dark looks or profile to pull that off), it's not an attractive quality. It feels petulant--not childish, but adolescent--the impulse isn't to stomp one's foot but to sneer and say hateful things that one doesn't really mean, but which express the ugliness that's percolating within. It is, as I say, not appealing--it speaks to a weakness of character, an ability to forget all the good things my life contains and to focus only on what I've lost, or lack. And yet I keep circling around it.

Late nights are the worst. I don't work a normal 9 to 5 schedule, so I can and do stay up quite late. But those around me go to bed earlier, and it leaves me alone in quiet and darkness, the perfect environment for brooding. Alone. That's the sting. I'm alone, and it feels unfair, and unfairness makes me bitter. QED.

But why? It's not as if I particularly deserve to be with someone. After all, isn't my propensity for bitterness Exhibit A in the case of Why I Shouldn't Be With Someone? (Well, actually, Exhibit A would be my looks, but the propensity for bitterness is in the top six or seven, trust me.) There are people I know who are kind and giving and patient and good, and who are, through no fault of their own, alone. Hell, I don't even much like other people--surely I'm tempermentally designed to be alone. Misanthropes shouldn't date, shouldn't marry, and I'm a misanthrope. I should be alone. QED, again.

But like Johnathan Swift, the patron saint of misanthropes (well, maybe Ambrose Bierce or H.L. Mencken) said, "Principally I hate and detest that animal called man; although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth." Hating the lot as a lot doesn't mean there aren't individual exceptions. And there are for me, plenty. Enough so that, perhaps, I'm not utterly wasted on human company. On love. Perhaps.

At the moment, though, not. There's no one here. And I'm aware, at night especially, of the emptiness. Of the empty time between now and bed, when there's no one here to share the quiet. Of the empty bed itself that's waiting in the next room. Of the emptiness that fills--hah, oxymoron--my head and my heart.

And I know--believe me, I know how incredibly freaking tedious it is to hear someone drivel on about 'boo-hoo-hoo, poor me I'm so alone in the world'--well, I know how tedious it sounds to my ears when I drivel on about it. When others do so, I'm actually quite sympathetic. But then, that's because those others aren't moody pricks who deserve to be alone. Still, conversationally, it's a dud--it's a complaint about something that isn't, fundamentally vacuous as a subject. I mean, you're literally talking about nothing. Yawn. And yet, sometimes it's all one can think about, and that means it's all one can talk about. So, boring, perhaps, but inevitable.

And yet it's something I have to get used to. Something that I can't be bitter about. Because if I'm bitter, oh, you'd better believe I'm going to stay alone--who the hell needs this kind of noise on a first date? But the only reason I'd be on a date (a huge, huge hypothetical, I might add) would be to alleviate the bitterness. So the condition precludes the cure. Damn these vicious cycles.

It's not easy, being with someone. I know this. (Believe me, I have nothing but grateful sympathy for those who have and who still put up with me, as friends and lovers. If it's not easy in the abstract, it's doubly so with a moody prick like me.) And it's too easy to simply say, Oh, if only someone were here, then it would all be OK. Because of course it wouldn't. The strange comfort is that if someone were here, I know that I'd just find something else to grouse about--that I wouldn't be happy--I'd just be miserable about something else. That's how it's always been in the past, that's how it'd be now. Except--

Except maybe not. My new shrink is working out well; people have been telling me how much more relaxed I seem, how much more confident--I'm in much more of a toss-the-head-and-say-what-the-hell frame of mind. I'm actually feeling good about things--even the prospect of not getting hired this year and spending another year on the market doesn't faze me; I like where I live, what I do, the people I work with. I like what I'm teaching (usually--the next few weeks are going to suck, but that's just because of the text, not the students). I like teaching--no, I love teaching, and I'm grateful to be able to do it. In short--so much of my life is so good, and I really am aware of it, in a way I haven't been for, well, years. So maybe--I don't know. Maybe I'm obsessing over being alone because it's the one big piece that's missing. No, it wouldn't be perfect, my life, but it's finally--I'm finally good. Ready. Calm. Even happy. I like this 'me.' And there's no one here to give myself to--to make happy--to be happy with. Happiness needs to be shared to be whole. I'm not whole. And at night, it's easy to think about that, and nothing else.

Eva Longoria is Not Pretty

2006-02-24T21:54:00.000-08:00

Neither is Penelope Cruz. Neither is Julia Roberts. Neither is Kirsten Dunst. Tara Reid never was, even before her recent skankification. Mischa Barton makes me shuddder. Gwyneth Paltrow? Please--though I love Sliding Doors, it ain't because I'm smitten at the sight of her. Stop telling me that these women are beautiful, just because they're skinny. Have you actually looked at them? They're not attractive, and yet I'm being told--forcefully, insistently--that I ought to be sexually aroused by the very sight of them. I'm not, and stop it. Just because they weigh nothing does not mean they're hot. On the contrary, really. The perversity of such thinness is that it actually makes genuinely beautiful women--think Angelina Jolie about 4 years ago--look like life-models for Corpse Bride. (I've talked about this elsewhere, and won't rehash the point.)

There's been a long tradition in American popular culture of describing anyone who's female with zero body fat and a lack of obvious physical deformities and facial scars as "beautiful"--witness the fact that Jackie Kennedy was "beautiful"--a woman who, if she were working at the Dairy Queen, you'd only have looked at twice if she'd given you the wrong change. That goes double for the late, unmissed Princess Diana--a plain jane in $8 billion worth of clothes and jewelry. I'm not sure why this is so.

It's easy, of course, to blame High Fashion (and I do). But what I find fascinating is the degree to which we, the public, lap up the lie. I mean, if we're being appealed to at our most primal, back-of-the-brain level, how it possible that we're falling for this s***? Sex is hard-wired, isn't it? I mean, isn't this why you can't "cure" homosexuals? Have you ever tried to feed your dog something he doesn't like? He won't eat it. He knows what he wants--it's primal--and he can't be 'worked into' liking what he doesn't want. Men like flesh--sorry if I'm putting it crudely, but there it is--and yet we're being denied the very thing we actually want. And being told that we don't actually want it, we want...Lara Flynn Boyle. But we don't--dear God, we don't. We're being told to ignore the steak and just eat the breadstick. And yet somehow, despite the primal urge and the sane logic behind it--we're believing this. Why? I'm no fan of conspiracy theories--I spend the entire miserable 3 hours I spend reading The DaVinci Code muttering "Give me a f***ing break!"--but there's got to be one. Nothing else makes sense. Unless...

Unless. See, I read about how men are losing their minds over Jessica Alba--who thanks to looks and diet, appears to be about 12--and I worry--are we appealed to as potential pedophiles? Because that's what these women look like. When women get too skinny--when malnutrition reaches a certain point, the female body stops menstruating. It reverts back to pre-pubescence, the clock turned forcefully back to childhood. Is that what we're being subliminally sold? Women who are of legal age but illegal form? I worry that this is so--I worry that rather than being sold sex, we're being sold power--dominance of adult over child--in the form of sex. Because that dynamic, when it sinks into the heads of men who think that that's what they want, and women who think that that's how they have to look/act to get men--then, folks, this just can't lead anywhere good.

So, please. Please stop telling me that Sarah Jessica Parker is hot. She isn't--she looks, thanks to diet and surgery, exactly as she did when she was on Square Pegs back in the '80s (look it up on imdb, you 20-somethings.) And that means, if she's legitimately hot, then Humbert Humbert was just a man slightly ahead of his time. And that. Is scary.

Author's Note: The subject for this blog was not conceived by the blogger. Credit goes to a certain young woman who knows who she is and prefers to remain anonymous. But she gets a big 'thank you' from me, plus any other acts of gratitude she cares to name.

Friday Poem

2006-02-24T13:27:00.000-08:00

Not a pretty poem--ugly, scary, loving tenderness turned into its most dreadful perversion--Browning's fascination with the monstrous and the sordid makes Poe look like Beatrix Potter. But his ability to find humanity in evil makes him one of the bravest of poets. And the last line always sends chills up my spine--one thinks of the silence that greets genocide and sexual slavery and pedophile priests. Fearlessly brilliant, Browning. But not for the faint of heart. Only a very good man could write such a poem; only a very good man could fathom evil so completely and see it as helpless madness, and respond with horrified sympathy. Which perhaps makes him the oddest kind of optimist. Anyway, enjoy, but not too much:

Porphyria’s Lover
by Robert Browning

The rain set early in tonight,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria; straight
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;
Which done, she rose, and from her form
Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,
And laid her soiled gloves by, untied
Her hat and let the damp hair fall,
And, last, she sat down by my side
And called me. When no voice replied,
She put my arm about her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,
And spread, o’er all, her yellow hair,
Murmuring how she loved me—she
Too weak, for all her heart’s endeavor,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me forever.
But passion sometimes would prevail,
Nor could tonight’s gay feast restrain
A sudden thought of one so pale
For love of her, and all in vain:
So, she was come through wind and rain.
Be sure I looked up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshiped me: surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain.
As a shut bud that holds a bee,
I warily oped her lids: again
Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.
And I untightened next the tress
About her neck; her cheek once more
Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss:
I propped her head up as before
Only, this time my shoulder bore
Her head, which droops upon it still:
The smiling rosy little head,
So glad it has its utmost will,
That all it scorned at once is fled,
And I, its love, am gained instead!
Porphyria’s love: she guessed not how
Her darling one wish would be heard.
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word!

Tired...So Very Tired...

2006-02-22T14:42:00.000-08:00

The flu has struck again; I'm in the 'barely hold my head up' stage. No thoughts to post; none are possible at this point. I just love being sick and alone--nothing to perk your spirits up like being completely dependent on someone else when there is, in fact, no one else. Life sucks. For the moment. Will return when it doesn't quite so much.

Interesting Development

2006-02-21T10:37:00.000-08:00

So I've been figuring that since I've gotten two outright "no"s from my MLA interviews (seven of them, if you'll recall) and heard nary a word from any of the others, well past the point at which they said they'd get back to me, that I'd gotten tacit "no"s from the other five. Which meant I was 0 for 7. Which was something I made gallows-humorous jokes about, but don't actually find funny. At all. But then yesterday I got an e-mail from one of said schools, telling me that their committee had fallen a bit behind, that I was still being considered, that they were going to decide on whom to invite for a campus visit ASAP, and was I still interested. Yes, yes I was, I wrote back, doing a little--but only a little--victory dance; this isn't, after all, a campus visit--this is only the possibility of one. Still, beats the proverbial poke in the eye with a sharp stick, no? Fingers are to remain crossed until further notice...

Just So You Know...

2006-02-19T18:29:00.000-08:00

I'm essentially taking today and tomorrow off--sleeping in as much as possible (though I couldn't sleep in today--had to get up to drive down the coast to a cliff-side restaurant for alcohol-laden brunch--is there any other kind?--then back through hideous traffic and--for some reason I was sleepy!--a long snore-fest)--and generally doing nothing productive or intellectually taxing. (TV plays a major role, though I'll be thrilled when the Olympics go away and never ever come back. At least not for two more years. Urgh...curling...ice dancing...make it stop...) Anyway, such intellectual indolence largely precludes my contribution to the blog, since of course I must, when here, engage all my wits in a dazzling display of intellectual virtuosity. (And nevermind the smart-ass questions like "Then why don't we get to see any of this?") So I'm largely mum until later this week. Down-time. Recharging. Lazy. Problem with this? Take it up with the management...

Distraction, Borrowed from Abd & Mon

2006-02-17T11:17:00.000-08:00

Bold the ones you've read, italicise the ones you might read, cross out the ones you won't and underline the ones on your book shelf. (N.B.: Sorry, I can't figure out how to cross out something here--I'm too computer-handicapped. So I've marked them with "XXX"s. Odd list of books, I might add, but what the hell.)

The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams
The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J. K. Rowling
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
1984 - George Orwell
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - J. K. Rowling
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
XXX The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini XXX
XXX The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold XXX
Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
XXX Angels and Demons - Dan Brown XXX
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C. S. Lewis
XXX Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides XXX
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Good Omens - Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman
XXX Atonement - Ian McEwan XXX
XXX The Shadow Of The Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon XXX
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Dune - Frank Herbert

An Odd Choice for Friday Poetry

2006-02-16T10:41:00.000-08:00

Normally--almost unilaterally--I *hate* Shelley. Yet he's got one poem that so brilliantly encapsulates the rage of the conscientious resident of a decaying age that it just seems too perfect, given our own national state of affairs, not to offer today. Draw as many comparisons to contemporary figures/events as you can; the winner gets a $10 gift certificate to Barnes & Noble.

ENGLAND IN 1819

An old, mad, blind, despis'd, and dying king,
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn--mud from a muddy spring,
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,
A people starv'd and stabb'd in the untill'd field,
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edg'd sword to all who wield,
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay,
Religion Christless, Godless--a book seal'd,
A Senate--Time's worst statute unrepeal'd,
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

Justified anger, beautifully expressed. He had one good day as a poet, did Percy...

Nothing New To Report

2006-02-15T13:28:00.000-08:00

No word from the hiring (or perhaps "not-hiring") university, which is starting to worry me. I'm finding myself remarkably OK with the idea of not getting the job. It's going to sting, getting that phone-call, but it's going to be bearable in the long run, I think. Sure, I want the job--I want it badly, but, I don't know, I'm getting better about understanding how random and indifferent the job market is, and how taking things personally just misses the true nature of things. Either that, or I'm in the most beautiful state of denial, and why would I want to mess with that? Right?

Today.

2006-02-14T10:09:00.000-08:00

What I'm going to do today. Teach a class I'm not totally prepped for, but will no doubt improvise my way through with my usual aplomb. See my shrink, and probably wind up talking about my social anxiety and why it means I'll be alone forever. Go back to L.A. and stop in at the perfect Greek deli, where I'll acquire frozen pita, tzatziki (which is a yogurt/garlic/dill sauce) and taramasalata (which is a caviar spread.) I will go home, nap, maybe read a little. I will then prepare dinner--I will marinate chicken breasts in a Southwestern dry rub with brown sugar and fiery spices. I will bake said chicken breasts, avoiding over-baking them so that there's still that tender, savory quality to them. I will then slice them into thin, not-quite-fajita-sized strips (and chunks). I will put the pita in the oven and toast it ever so slightly--just enough crunch, not too much. I will then place the sliced, spicy/sweet chicken in said pita, then slather it with the tzatziki, creating a taste sensation that surely must approach that of the ambrosia of Olympus. I will open a bottle of cheap red wine, and with laden plate in hand, I will go upstairs and watch something--not a romantic comedy, I don't need that s*** today--on DVD--maybe Eddie Izzard. I'll watch House, which I love. I'll eat this wonderful food (which is suprisingly not horribly bad for me), and drink the...well, palatable wine, and be alone, and enjoy it. I will, in short, forget what today is, and what it meant a year ago, and what it means now. And for some reason, I will be thinking, as I have all day, of another of my favorite poems:

Why so Pale and Wan?
Sir John Suckling

WHY so pale and wan, fond lover?
Prithee, why so pale?
Will, when looking well can't move her,
Looking ill prevail?
Prithee, why so pale?

Why so dull and mute, young sinner?
Prithee, why so mute?
Will, when speaking well can't win her,
Saying nothing do 't?
Prithee, why so mute?

Quit, quit for shame! This will not move;
This cannot take her.
If of herself she will not love,
Nothing can make her:
The devil take her!

Love that. A perfect antidote to the waves of bathos that threaten all sane people this day, yes?

Living Through History

2006-02-12T21:24:00.000-08:00

Do you realize that not since the Jefferson administration could one American citizen turn to another and say, "Hey! Didja hear?! The Vice President just shot a guy!" Makes one pause and realize that we live in great, great times...

So...Close...

2006-02-12T17:12:00.000-08:00

Nearly there...midterms are 3/4 graded...just one last set of essay questions to do...so close to being done with grading for the first time in two weeks...so close...

I Should Add...

2006-02-11T18:17:00.000-08:00

...in regards to my recent jeremiad regarding dating, that I have serious personal concerns about pursuing this activity. The last time I went on a 'getting to know you' date--the last time I went out with someone I wasn't already dating by virtue of prior intimate friendship, in short--the woman in question wound up doing Skinemax soft-core porn. I wish I were kidding; I'm not. Now, I'm not saying that the experience of going out with me that one time was enough to drive this woman into this, shall we say, dark little cul-de-sac of a profession. But on our date she waxed eloquent about her acting ambitions, and told me how she dreamed of playing roles like Lady Macbeth and Madame Ranevskya, and after that evening, she's doing stuff like Sensual Visions of Erotic Nightscenes II and whatnot. There's probably no connection, but can I afford to take that chance? I think not.

Poem

2006-02-11T11:03:00.000-08:00

Just because this one's been rattling around in my head for the past few weeks, and it's my favorite short poem. Well, favorite one that isn't by Browning. Or Rochester. Or Eliot. Look, it's really, really good, OK?

Dover Beach
by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; -on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
[1867]

Those last two stanzas always get to me.

Bafflement

2006-02-10T22:58:00.000-08:00

Valentine's Day is upon us, and as someone who's alone for the first time in a long while, I have to ask:

How do people date? I mean, how do they do it?

How do you walk into a room where you don't know anybody, and with such a presumptuous attitude that you actually intend to foist yourself onto a total stranger and make demands on his/her attention? And even assuming you're that arrogant, how do you stand to listen to the idle conversation of a total stranger?

That's the part that always gets me--it's not that other people are boring, inherently--OK, they are, mostly, but I only think that because I'm a misanthropic pr**k, so presumably this bias doesn't apply to most--but what the hell can two total strangers have to say to one another? The stereotype of talking about the weather has a ring of truth to it--it's just about the only common experience two people can be certain of. I don't get it. Other people are boring. It's not their fault, but they are. You don't know what this other person thinks, or believes, and you don't want to tick him/her off, so you stick to the most bland and innocuous of subjects, which is like slogging your way through a meal of dry toast and tapwater. Plus there's the awkward moment when one or both of you realize that the other person is A. a nut, B. a pervert, C. a bigot, D. 'born again', E.--you know what? I could go through the alphabet and have to start on Greek letters. It's all so...improbable, enjoying the company of a stranger enough to want to see him/her again.

Or maybe it's just a skill I've never learned. My relationships--and despite my advanced, borderline decrepit age, there have been damned few of them--have all been based on long-standing aquaintance. Women I'd known for months, or even years, and so already knew that I was in some sense 'right for' and vice versa. I can't imagine 'getting to know' someone while under the pressure of being out on a date, which is strenuous enough, what with the pretending to be the best version of yourself even if no such version exists, and trying at the same time to see past the mask of the other person's false persona to the real, grungy truth underneath. Plus trying to have a good time. And when you include the little dance of sex--incremental steps towards an event you both really want and are both so nervous about that you'd just as soon forget that it's a possibility--jeez, never mind how do people do it, why do people do it?

Oh, God--I'm going to die alone, one of those deaths where the neighbors have to notice the smell before anyone finds the body. OK, bring on Valentine's Day--I'm in the right frame of mind for it, now.

A Brief Note

2006-02-09T10:30:00.000-08:00

It occurs to me, regarding this flap--"flap"? no, they're setting buildings on fire all over the world--it's defnitely moved into the "total f***ing nightmare" category--over the Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed, that one good thing has come out of it. The culture of Islam--well, at least the mouthy, loud-voiced part of the culture, which is the only part of the culture we ever hear from, since the sane, rational part of the culture is invariably, contemptably silent whenever atrocities are committed in said culture's name (though the same can be said about Christianity and its fundamentalist blowhards, which just goes to prove that the bulk of humanity may be quiet and sane, but they're also laconic to the point of sin, or just out-and-out snivelling cowards, but I digress)--the culture of Islam has had, as one of its main 'talking points,' for as long as--well, for as long as it was created in the 7th century, near as I can tell--that the West is corrupt, degenerate, sinful, loathsome, etc. Which may well be true, but thanks to this debacle, we have a comeback: "Maybe, but at least we're f***ing grown-ups--you a**holes are throwing a murderous temper tantrum over a freaking set of cartoons!!!" Seriously, I say this to the Muslims of the world who go home at night with flecked spittle caked on their mouths and soot on their clothes--you guys are an embarassment to your religion, your culture, and if you think Mohammed isn't looking down and weeping that the world perceives his message through you guys, you're delusion the point of earning a toxic mixture of scorn and sympathy. So, thank you--for so long, the U.S. has been the Prick of the Planet--you guys are not only taking the heat off, but causing our detractors to scratch their heads and say, "You know, maybe those Americans have a point--these people are f***ing nuts." Nice job, guys. Now go accuse one of the Teletubbies of promoting the gay agenda. Oh wait, that's been done.

Grading Woes

2006-02-08T13:15:00.000-08:00

Still wading through the huge pile of papers that accumulated in my absence last week and my recovery thereafter. I've got to have them done by tomorrow, and each one takes a little bit longer than the last. With acknowledgments to La Lecturess, I don't know which is worse--awful, awful papers, or simply mediocre ones. Because the awful papers have always struck me as very easy to grade--it's abundantly evident why they suck, and critical comments, both in the margins and at the end (the composition of which is always the most time-consuming part of the process) are just as series of bullet-points identifying the glaring obvious flaws. "This paper sucks, and here's why--boom, boom, boom--'D'--next!" Quick and simple, such papers, though enervating in large numbers, of course. And the great ones are even better--nothing a student likes better than to read "I don't have any substantial criticism to make--here's what great about your work." (This is usually followed by "You have an actual thesis! And you use the assigned text to support it!"--such a rarity in our lives...) But how you explain mediocrity to the mediocre? How do explain why you know, instinctively, that this is a C+ paper--not awful, not good, just...kind of there. Meets the minimal requirements, but something's missing--creativity? How do you quantify that? Flair? Subtlety? These things become almost impossible to articulate, and it's like describing the flavor of a bowl of instant oatmeal--it's not good, but it's not capital-B bad, it's just...a C+ experience. Mediocrity is marked more by an amorphous absence that hard to put your finger on--it's not defined by being bad--it's defined by being "not good'--you can say what it doesn't have, but when it comes time to evaluating what it does, I find myself at a loss for words. Which, prolix and glib fellow that I am, is both frustrating and unpleasantly surprising. Bottom line: I almost wish they were all Ds--it would be easier and faster and the pain would be over. Stupid bell curve...

Must...Write...

2006-02-07T10:17:00.000-08:00

Sigh. I know it's anathema to admit this, but I still contain, in the dark recesses of my soul, a desire to be a creative writer. I know, I know, it's enough to have me branded with a scarlet 'D' (for 'Dilettante,' the worst slur that can be flung upon an academic) in my scholarly circles, but it's there, dammit, and the fact is, I've got about a hundred pages of a genuinely kick-butt novel written. (Excerpted briefly here: http://willscoffeehouse.blogspot.com/2005/06/mmmf-here-read-this.html ) And everyone--but everyone--who's read it has told me to keep going. (Of course, they may just be treating me with kid gloves, being as how I'm all cute and vulnerable and they don't want to hurt my all-too-tender feelings. But no, I'm friends with enough truly nasty people--like attracts like, after all--that they'd tell me, with relish, if they thought it sucked.) But the damned thing is a serious burden on my time, especially since the damn thing's historical, and that means I gotta do research (what do mean, Dryden can't drive a Lamborghini to his rendevous with Rochester?), and jeez, in the words of Maria Bamford (lovely, brilliant, talented comic--one of the stars of The Comedians of Comedy), "realizing my potential would seriously cut into my laying-around time. I got a lot of s*** to not do." And so, I suppose I have to choose between that and producing publishable articles and the doing of nothing that is really the balm to my soul. (Oh, and exercise. Yeah, right.) Anyway, all this is just a childish stamping of the foot at being told, by my conscience, that I need to clean up my room and do my homework and empty the dishwasher and finish my vegetables, rather that play with my Star Wars action figures--who would win in a fight--Boba Fett or Yoda?--and I'm just venting said childishness in the hope that in really confronting the fact that it is so childish, I'll get off my butt and do something to correct this immaturity. But damn, that Xbox is looking really tempting right about now...

Very, Very, VERY Tired...

2006-02-06T10:04:00.000-08:00

The Santa Anas are blowing, causing fire and soot and sucking the life out of every part of me. Not sleeping well--wake up unable to breathe through my orifice of choice. Plus this type of weather makes the cat cranky--actually, all types of weather make the cat cranky--life makes the cat cranky--and he decides, invariably, to display said crankiness by yelling at me loudly at, oh, say 2:00 a.m. and every half-hour thereafter. At about 3:30, I start to consider seriously taking advantage of the fact that he's a black tabby and using him to perform a satanic ritual to the Dark Master of All Things Sweetly Impure. But no, instead I pet him for five minutes 'til he's asleep, and he stays so, until I roll over, and it begins again...This is like having a baby, only he's never going to grow up and do chores, so what's the point, I ask you?

So, no sleep, and a ton of grading, and more to come--just finishing up on their first papers, and they've got their mid-terms this week, and, just, UUUUUUUURGGGH...

Plus I was supposed to see someone special this weekend and it didn't happen. (Stupid God and His stupid refusal to make everything in my life go exactly as I want. Surely He must realize that I deserve such favoritism.)

So I'm cranky. And tired. And overworked. And lonely. Except for the cat. It's not enough, somehow.

Another Meme

2006-02-03T11:37:00.000-08:00

I keep getting tagged...thanks, abdme--yet I have no one on whom to foist such things. Still, not to be a spoil-sport...

What were you doing 10 years ago?

I was working for my father's law office as a paralegal right before being switched over to being the entirety of the accounts receivable department. I was living with the woman I'd later marry and our mutual friend in Los Angeles. I drove a scooter to work, even in the rain. I had very little money and didn't mind.

What were you doing 1 year ago?

Pretty much what I'm doing now. I was/am lecturing at a major university--same class, though they've given me extra courses. I was missing cues that my wife wasn't happy. I was brooding over my failure in the job market. I was reasonably miserable. I had very, very little money and I minded a lot.

Five snacks you enjoy:

Oreos--but only within, like, the first 30 minutes of opening the package--they have to be cut-your-teeth-on-them fresh, or forget it.

Ruffles and Green Onion Dip--not the kind in the jar, the kind you waste an entire carton of sour cream to make.

Buffalo Wings. Ranch dressing preferred over Blue Cheese.

Oven-Warmed Pita and Tzatziki

Caviar, Diced Onions and Cream Cheese, on Toast Points, with Champagne to chase. Let it not be said that I'm not spoiled and pretentious.

Five songs to which you know all the lyrics:

Let's Misbehave - Cole Porter

Yesterday - The Beatles

The Obvious Child - Paul Simon

I am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General - W.S. Gilbert

The Ballad of Gilligan's Island--both versions!

Five things you would do if you were a millionaire:

Move to the Italian Riviera.

Stop screwing around and finish the novel.

Sleep more.

Eat better.

Swim.

Five bad habits:

Not exercising enough.

Eating really, really, appallingly, immaturely bad food.

Did somebody say Xbox?

Mmmm...Network TV...

Does porn count as a bad habit? No? Whew--I mean, that is--not that I ever--can we change the god-d**ned subject please???

Five things you like doing:

I thought we'd dropped porn as a subject!!!

Did somebody say Xbox?

Swimming. When the hell is spring going to roll around?

Teaching.

Reading. Anything. Everything. Except Anne Rice. Never, never again, not even if she goes back to her day job of writing proper pornography...Not that I ever--dammit! New topic!

Five things you would never wear again:

Clip-on suspenders. Either they're real, or they're not.

Boots. I'm not in construction, I don't ride horses, and I'm not gay. 'Nuff said.

Any piece of clothing that plays music when you press part of it. Same goes for clothing that 'lights up.' Grow up, for God' sake.

Anything yellow. Just not my color, folks.

Speedos. On a skinny little kid taking swimming lessons, they're OK--past 25 or so, they're just an act of universal cruelty.

Five favorite toys:

Did somebody say Xbox?

The cat is a toy, right?

2-XL. That robot 8-track player from the late 70s? Anybody remember that? Best toy I ever got.

Stretch Armstrong. Did you know that when Stretch Armstrong is in a swordfight and gets stabbed that he bleeds a thick blue liquid that coagulates on the floor of your closet and has to be professionally sanded off? I found that out the hard--and painful--way. It was still worth it.

Does this category include sex toys? No? Good, because--that is--I mean, not that I ever--all right, enough of this s***!!! I quit!

Home Again, Home Again...

2006-02-03T09:56:00.000-08:00

So...tired...

I know I have faithful readers who want to know how things went, but I've never appreciated how out-wiping a campus visit is 'til now. My flight into the University town got in very late on Tuesday, my flight out on Thursday left very late indeed, so I got no sleep before the first day (since my body told me it wasn't nearly time to go to bed) and then got an extra half-day of interviews and meetings because they had the time before I had to be at the airport. I met everybody. And I had to be "on" the whole time--to listen enthusiastically and with engagement is, in itself, tiring, and in the middle of a caffeine crash, not the easiest thing to pull off. (I found myself sitting listening to someone talking about something very important and paying close attention while also screaming at my medula oblongata "Don't yawn! Don't yawn! Don't yawn!!!") Anyway--highlights. (And warning: I will not catch all the typos.)

First--getting there is trouble free. No lines at check-in or security, no screaming babies on either flight, transferring at Hub Airport smooth and easy. The guy from the department who picks me up is low-key friendliness itself (which will be a running motif for the visit.) And the hotel is lovely. A real hotel, not a chain. Room much larger than the department could have stuck me in--clean and nicely decorated. Immediately feel ten times better entering said room.

No sleep, though. I watch the State of the Union, and feel depressed that this is the man who is the face and voice of our country.

Next day, get up, dress immaculately, use the in-room coffee maker to its fullest potential. I'm picked up by Head of Search Committee--cheerful, easy conversationalist, attractive--just someone you feel comfortable around. Driven to campus, which (being an old Southern Liberal Arts school) is still very antebellum in some sections--rather cool. More coffee at the department, and somebody's brought in brownies for the staff. Meet with Dean--genteel, ambitious for the school--really devoted to moving it forward, has a plan to do so, made it clear that this was a teaching job first and foremost (good news.) Meet with Head of Dept.--a bit more formal but pleasant and warm nonetheless, re-emphasized the teaching aspect of the job (me taking every opportunity to emphasize that that's what I live for), and that was that. Lunch with potential colleagues (pizza--not bad!--definitely fresh crust, which is always a plus)--talk about myself a bit, tried not to sound insufferable. Think I pulled it off. Next--crunch time--and now I'm post-meal and feeling my coffee buzz beginning to wane--I have to go teach my class. This is my real audition, and I know it...ooooohhh dear...16 Strangers (who are themselves post-lunch) look up at me and wonder just how awful this is going to be. Plus I've got academic worthies--including Head of Committee and Head of Department taking notes in the back row. Oh dear. Oh f*** oh dear, as my father used to say.

But.

I give my handout, ask them if any of them have heard of Montaigne--none of them have. I smile and say that in that case, this will be a treat...(pause)...or the most boring 70 minutes of their lives, let's find out! Good, solid laughs from everyone in the room. I've got them. And now I'm the driver's seat. I talk clearly and emphatically--I pick people at random and have them read from the play--I ask questions and get answers--the lesson plan flows like a dream. More laughs--and a sense of genuine engagement. They're with me. They're writing down a lot of what I'm saying. (One of them falls asleep, I have to admit--but she came in looking as sleep-deprived as I, so I'm not offended or worried.) Academic worthies are grinning and nodding--Head of Department is clearly enjoying herself. It's good--it's very, very good. I get to the end, and talk about the beauty of the end of the play, and I get a little misty. I finish. Pause. And I say, quietly, "Thank you." Immediate, spontaneous and sincere applause. One or two of them come up to shake my hand or thank me on the way out. It really went about as well as it could have--though of course I immediately worry--did I lecture too much? Did I give them too little opportunity to speak for themselves...? I don't know. Head of Department lets me know how much she enjoyed it and vanishes. Head of Committee, as we walk away, comments that she's "going to have to go back and re-read that play!" It seems like a bit of a triumph, probably the highpoint of the visit. Rest of the day is blurry--I've spent all my energy on the class. Tour of campus--my God there's a lot of history there. And the good news is that there's a lot of building going on. Dean wasn't kidding--this place is growing, fast. A good sign. Stop in briefly at the Theater Dept.'s design center, where the woman in charge finds out that I'm an old theater guy who knows about design and directing and whatnot and instantly falls in love with me. (Another highpoint: "I'd really like to get you here so you can help me work on this program." Nice.) Then it's back to the hotel to crash for a couple of hours before dinner with the whole hiring committee. Dinner is nice--Cuban/Caribbean, everything on the menu is "jerked"--but suprisingly non-interviewish. I ask one or two questions, but mostly we all seem to want to make fun of the State of the Union and Bush in general. I find myself very relaxed and cracking jokes. One of my better ones--when the subject of house-ownership is raised--apparently it's quite feasible in this area--I point out that one cannot purchase a house in Southern California unless said "house" is modified by the adjective "crack." Laughs. Anyway--Back to hotel, where I *do* sleep, though poorly. I'm drained, and I kind of dread having to be "on" for most of the next day. Debate whether to hang the breakfast order on my door for next morning--deciding that I'd rather sleep in. Sloth beats gluttony.

Next morning. More coffee. Pack up--check out. Nice woman--every time I'm given a ride by someone, it's a new person from the department, so there isn't a single moment when I'm not having to give my David Copperfield-esque biography. I find myself telling the same self-deprecating jokes to everyone--I hope they don't compare conversational notes too closely. I'm taken on a tour of the locality by a gentleman who could, quite clearly, sit down and dictate a seven-volume history of the region without consulting a single secondary source--he know everything about this place. Much of it is fascinating, and the rest is informative. There are some lovely areas--you can hit "scenic countryside" if you drive more than 15 minutes in any area. I am told, and by no means for the first time, that this is a conservative city, both religiously and politically, but that the university maintains an island of diversity and open-mindedness, so it's never unbearable. Back to campus to get picked up for lunch. Lunch is very good--Louisiana cuisine--I go with a first-rate po'boy. Good conversation, too--for the first time, I'm the topic of discussion, and the two women I'm with love (if they weren't just being effusively polite--which is, come to think of it, a possibility) what I have to say. Back to campus, where I'm unexpectedly interviewed by the head of the Composition section of the program. Goes OK, I think--my answers to some of her questions are, it turns out, the answers that she herself gives to her students, so that's a good sign. Much comparison of the student populations at this school and my own--I make the case that my experience in teaching Comp. would segue nicely into teaching there. Don't know how successful I am, but I try. Brief tour of the library afterwards. Then back to sit in the office of one of the committtee members--very much my age and my type, though he's married with two kids and seems properly distracted and wryly stressed about this. Really nice guy--get the sense that if I'm there, he'll be a friend. Also run into a guy who used to teach at my current school, several decades ago. We chat about the place, what's changed (a lot), what hasn't (very little), and about the area and Southern California and it's a good chat to have had. And then taken to airport by one last guy--the only guy who dishes a little dirt to me while I'm there. Moment of worry--flights have been f***ed up due to weather. But I'm there early enough to get a different flight to Major Hub, and the connection is ontime. So, back as smoothly as I came.

I'm feeling very anti-climactic about it all. It went well, and everybody was nice, but there's also the sense of how real and possibly permanent this could all be. Which is a lot to think about when you're a tired as I am. (Abdme complained of similar symptoms after her campus visit--I'm with you there, sister.) And of course, ha ha!, I have to get cracking on a huge stack of grading that came in while I was away and needs to be done yesterday...So. There. More than you wanted to know. Going to nap now. Then grade. Then nap again. Repeat.

Aaaaaaaagh!!!

2006-01-30T09:50:00.000-08:00

I hope that this will be my last blog for awhile that isn't titled by an interjection. It's a cute theme, but I'd like to just get through the bottleneck and then have a nice little lie-down and a cup of tea and a quiet read, if that's all right with the world. Anyway. Bags are not packed, but everything that's going in them is hung in order and ready to go. Shoes need to be shined (with shakey hands, so I can't wear anything I care about.) Lesson plan needs to be finalized--can I argue that a tragic universe is organized by the principles of moira while a comic one is organized by the principles of tyche? I think I can, but must make sure. (You're starting to be glad you won't be at the lecture, aren't you? Don't worry--I'll be cool about my presentation of obscure Greek terms--I tend to use references to The Simpsons and Family Guy to make my points.) I'm remembering to breathe (thanks, ArticulateDad, I had forgotten) and now it's really just a question of getting to the airport ontime and then...then it's in God's hands. Well, and mine. And the students in the class. And the people I'm meeting. And...you know what? I'm f***ed. (Kidding! Kidding! At worst, at worst, I'm "taken out for a nice dinner and subjected to some inappropriately heavy petting on the cabride home.") Will report back when/if I return...

Uuurgh...

2006-01-28T21:42:00.000-08:00

Well, the countdown is definitely getting into the interesting numbers. I leave on Tuesday at noon-ish, and to judge by my intinerary, I'll spend the next two days meeting every one at the university up to and including the janitorial staff. Which is good, actually, since the more people one meets, the more sense of a place one gets. I've pulled together something like a lecture--need to flesh it out a bit, but I've got Montaigne and skepticism and the nature of error in a humanistic/comic universe and all kinds of fancy stuff to bring in, so maybe they'll come away thinking of me as something other than a complete f***ing idiot. I have to admit, I really am still a little thrown by the change of topics. I mean, I know the play I've been assigned--I can do it. It's just that my head was so very into the other play that I'm still pulling it into the proper sphere (or out of the improper orifice, if you want to get smutty, and shame on you if you do.) Anyway, I may post over the next couple of panicky days, I may not. Ora pro me...

Yikes!

2006-01-27T11:20:00.000-08:00

OK OK OK OK OK OK...I'm not panicking, I'm not panicking, I'm not panicking...Just found out that the play I'd been expecting to lecture on during my campus interview is not in fact the play I'll be expected to be lecturing on. Nobody's fault--the schedule said one thing and the progress of the class said another. Which is how classes should be--the fluidity of the group dynamic needs to supercede the structure of the preliminary model. (You'd never guess that I was an English Lit. guy, would you? Well, actually, I used to have an idiot savant relationship to physics. Bombed in every science and math class I ever took in high school, then suddenly, senior year, I took physics--and, I kind you not, I did not get a single question wrong. Not on a homework assignment, not on an in-class exercise, not on a test or an exam. Not. One. The teacher was flummoxed--which was impressive, since he'd be a professor of physics at Tehran University--escaped when the Shah fell and the Ayatollah was killing all the smart secularists--and especially so when, as he put it, "I don't understand--you've gotten the right answer to this question, but I've never seen it solved this way before!" Fascinating, and a little sad--if I'd known about my talent there, I might have gone in a completely different direction in life--majoring in physics rather than Theatre--and who knows where that would have led me? I'd like to meet the parallel-universe version of myself to find out what happened. Anyway--)

Point is, the play that I've prepped to teach to within an inch of its life? Not gonna be lecturing on it. And now I've got only a couple of days to pull together something truly dazzling on a completely different play...now, I'm brilliant, and cool, and I work well under pressure--used to do improv comedy, don't you know--but man...this better be the last curve ball I get thrown in a bit, dammit. I'm serious. I want this job.

Trying, TRYING To Be Healthy

2006-01-25T13:13:00.000-08:00

Mentally speaking. It's not easy. I'm realizing, as I move towards the campus visit, how very comfortable I've become in just accepting my anxiety and the attendant depression. Which suggests that there needs to be another stage beyond that of the last stage of grief. When I first was diagnosed with depression, I went through mini-versions of all the usual--denial, fear, anger, bargaining, and then, finally, I accepted that, yes, I was a depressive, and probably would be for most of my life. Which is a seductive and poisonous frame of mind to linger in. Because if you accept being a depressive, then doing anything about it--making the effort to not let it run your mental life, becomes much more elusive. "Well, of course I'm miserable--I'm a depressive, I'm supposed to be miserable." Easy to think that. And so one sinks into the torpor that ensures that when depression hits, you just sit back and accept it.

But that's nonsense. Depression isn't an inevitability--and one has an enormous control over the intensity and frequency with which it intrudes into one's life. So rather than just sighing heavily and saying, "Well, it'll pass in time," I'm trying--trying--to confront it. To say, "No, it will pass because I'm going to face it, fiercely and logically and without self-pity--it will pass because I evict it, not because I allow it to ruin my life for a few weeks rather than do something about it."

But--high, whiny voice--it's hard. I confront it, and it diminishes, and then I have to think about other things, and it comes creeping back again. And I confront it, and it slinks away, and as soon as my back is turned, there it is again. It's quite tiring--I feel like I have to keep one eye always peeled for that grim cloud, and the distraction makes other things--like teaching or prepping that nightmare-long paper on Marlowe's Tamburlaine for my mock job-talk (which I'm delivering this afternoon, much to my exhausted non-delight--aaagh--see?!--immediately I go to a negative, 'woe-is-me' anticipation of the event--wrong! wrong! wrong!--what I should be saying is, "Well, at least it's better than having to listen to a nightmare-long paper on Tamburlaine"--right? No? Still bad and self-compromising? Dammit!!!)--anyway, point is, I'm trying. Small steps. Small, small steps. (Tiny, but heartfelt growl of frustration...)

Oh, Boy.

2006-01-24T12:42:00.000-08:00

Had a bad moment--well, 'spell,' really, just now--I got tired--really, really tired in the middle of a lecture. That never happens. Lecturing is the thing that picks me up--in the same way that intense exercise gives you an out-of-the-body rush of endorphins, a really great lecture where all my synapses are firing and I'm coming up spontaneously with ideas that are so brilliant that I'm not even sure that I'm the one thinking of them--the ancients used to think of themselves as infused with the spirits of gods or demons when they really got onto an oratorical roll, and I know what they meant--it's a thing that leaves me feeling about 20 pounds lighter and in an infinitely better mood than when I went in.

But today, I stumbled mid-way through. Just felt the wind go out of my sails. Why, I'm not sure. I was teaching the second of two sections--giving, in short, the same lecture that I'd given the day before, so some of the spontaneity had gone out of it--and once again, I slept briefly and badly--and I'm still anxious and tense and thus muscularly clenched all the time--but really, that's all happened to me before, and I've still been a thoroughbred on the turf during class. Not today. Sigh. I suppose I just need to suck it up and exercise a lot this afternoon so that I can go to bed early and really sleep, hard, for an extra couple of hours, and catch up on the REM sleep I'm losing by these jolt-awakes. Maybe that'll help. Or, you know, I could just drink more and not worry about anything at all...

Bad Sleep = Bad Sign

2006-01-23T09:58:00.000-08:00

Normally, I'm quite a good sleeper--insomnia occasionally, but nothing absurd, and usually it happens on days that I've napped extensively, so it's not too hard to find the causative link there. But last night I woke up at least four times--those sudden "oh my God something horrible is happening" jerk-awakes that are just no damn fun, especially since you have to wake up enough to realize that, no, nothing is immediately wrong externally (except for the fact that clearly something is internally), and then you have to get back to sleep while worrying about what that internal glitch might be. And when I woke up fully--no need for the alarm clock this morning--I realized what it is: the campus visit. It's coming. This time next week I'll be packing. I'm going. It's real. And the 'clench' has begun. Travel. Scrutiny. Performance. Oh my. Plus, plus I continue to not hear from any of the other schools I interviewed with...and the longer I wait, the less likely it is that they'll call...Sigh. So I have reasons to be anxious and depressed. But--and I suppose this is good, in a perverse way--I have reasons to be anxious and depressed. At least I'm not wandering around in a muddled fog, feeling helpless in the face of ignorance as to that cause of my jumpy bleakness. Or bleak jumpiness. Not sure which. Sigh. And this is only the beginning...

Btch, Btch, B*tch...What Do You Mean, You're Bored?

2006-01-21T11:17:00.000-08:00

A person who shall remain nameless but who is rather dear to me commented the other day, in review of my blog: "You complain a lot." I must have looked wounded, because she quickly revised, "Well--you vent." Which is better, to be sure. But not entirely. The negativity factor 'round these parts is, I admit, strikingly high. A glance at other blogs in my particular genre (overeducated academic types balancing personal and professional needs) shows that my colleagues do seem to have the ability to mention, every so often, something that they enjoy or at least find less than soul-scarringly offensive. Not so much, here. And perhaps that's a bit of a downer. A little vitriol goes a long way, and past a certain point, you just sound like the crusty-haired guy outside Starbucks with spittle in the corner of his mouth and a cardboard sign around his neck that explains that the reason he needs your spare change is that the CIA stole the impulse control portion of his brain and swapped in that of an evil clone. (You should, by the way, make a point of talking to him--he's got stories to tell, that man.)

So I'm trying to figure out A. why I'm so relentlessly bitter, and B. how to lighten things up.

On the A. front, I'm just in a perpetual mood of serious pissed-offed-ness these days. It has much, much to do with personal troubles I choose not to discuss, but in which I feel I was severely and unfairly d*cked over by someone who should have been better than that. And since my life remains in a state of numbed-shock-alternatating-with-grief-and-loneliness as a result, ehhhh...I'm a little tetchy. Not an excuse, just an explanation. Similarly, I've just started with a new shrink, whom I enjoy quite a bit (though I'm not sure I can afford her--damn insurance non-coverage!)--well, not 'enjoy'--but she's very blunt and smart, and she's forcing me to stop "exploring my feelings" and actually put a bridle on the little bastards. After our first session, when I'd explained my thinking about myself in the articulate detail for which I am justly famous, she checked over her notes, nodded as if confirming her diagnosis, then looked me in the eye and calmly said, "Well, I think you should know that, thinking the way you do, having the view of yourself and the world that you do, it is quite literally impossible for you to be happy. At all." Zoinks! O...K...I mean, she's right, but geez, to come right out and say it??? So, I got work to do in the attic, and it's unpleasant. Hence, crankiness.

Plus, I tend towards the comic herein (well, towards attempting the comic--as someone else who shall remain nameless often tells me, I'm not funny--though this is usually after a witticism I've made at her expense, so she's scarcely unbiased), and happiness and cheer do not lend themselves to comedy. The Three Stooges are only funny when they're pissed off and beating the living s*** out of each other. Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny are only funny when they're trying to get each other killed. If these guys just trotted out the tea cart and exchanged compliments over scones, you'd change the channel. Same here. If I have a brilliant moment or two in class where I win both laughs and enlightenment by comparing the Virgilian Underworld to Disneyland (and yes, I did that), who the hell wants to hear about that? "Pat yourself on the back a little more, you smug bastard," you'd think, and rightly so.

Which brings us to B.--how, given these stumbling blocks, do I cheer up things around here? Ideas? Suggestions? 'Cause frankly, I got nothing...

Gay Cowboys Eating Pudding

2006-01-20T22:18:00.000-08:00

Little joke for you South Park aficianados, there. And I'm sure I'm not the first (or the millionth) to make it. Anyway--

Does it speak ill of me that I simply do not want to see Brokeback Mountain? I mean, as one born and raised in the City of the Angels, I've spent most of my life in the company of men--good friends, many of them--best friends in some cases--discovering, denying, indulging furtively in, denying again, indulging less furtively in, agonizing over, kinda enjoying, doing everything they can to avoid, and finally embracing their homosexuality. It really just isn't a story I need to see fictionalized. I'm sure their angst and torment and eye-opening discoveries are lovingly shot and lit, beautifully paced, and well written. But do I really have to give a good goddamn about these fictional versions of real people I know? I think not. I have already sat through this movie; it's just that my version didn't have chaps and boots and horses. Well, actually, come to think of it...No horses, though.

The fact of the matter is, narrative needs to be, I don't know, mildly original to be diverting. For me, at least. I mean, I can certainly understand why gay men might want to see this movie--after all, the success of staggeringly s***ty movies in the African-African community based solely on the fact that they're written by and star African-Americans argues that 'target audiences' can make a film--that communities denied cultural representation will flock to see any version of themselves onscreen--and if it's not an obnoxious or condescending version, so much the better. So if gay men want to see themselves portrayed as something other than the neutred 'best friend' godawful Nora Ephron movies, hey, I'm all for it.

But the film's not just big in the Rainbow-flagged circle. Presumably this is a film that's succeeding more widely because film critics have universally told us that it's brilliant. But they said that about Million Dollar Baby. And A Beautiful Mind. And Cinderella Man. And...sleepy yet? I know I am. These movies weren't brilliant--they just didn't suck. (Except for A Beautiful Mind: a more panderingly manipulative piece of tripe never crawled across the screen. Take it from one who knows: insanity is not cinematically compelling--go f*** yourself, Ron Howard.) And I can smell "it doesn't suck" on this movie. And I just...don't...care.

Look: I don't need to see another "plucky hero(ine) struggles against fashionable illness" movie. I don't need to see another Holocaust movie. (Trust me, ADL, we're not going to forget anytime soon. Honest.) I don't need to see another "tortured genius triumphs over/succumbs to substance abuse/the burden of his/her own genius" movie. (Yes, Ray Charles chased the dragon, Iris Murdoch went squirrelly, Jackson Pollack used a steering wheel the way he used a paintbrush, and Virginia Woolf drowned in the river, pulled to the bottom by the weight of her own nose. AND???) Stop. Making. These. Movies. Stop making movies that we wouldn't care about if you didn't tell us we had to. It's tiresome. Too much ink has been spilled on the wretched nature of the mindless blockbuster--and yes, everything Michael Bay touches is pitch, and we who see it are defiled thereby. But nobody talks about the "good movies" that leave us feeling just as hollow, just as frustrated, just as cheated out of our nearly 10 bucks. Stop making "important" movies. Stop making "good" movies. Stop making movies that critics will fawn over just because they'll feel guilty if they don't. (I mean, please--gay men? Cowboy setting? Could any self-respecting movie critic rip on this film without immediately receiving a hundred angry e-mails comparing him to the murderers of Matthew Shepherd? I think not.)

I know the Academy will vote for it. I know that tearful acceptance speeches pleading for people to hear its 'beautiful message of tolerance' will be made. I know that metrosexuals will suddenly feel an urge to buy stetsons. But count me out. If I want to experience the aestheticized misery of being gay in a bigoted world, I'll go reread Maurice or Giovanni's Room. Movies are supposed to take me away from my annoyances--this kind of flick just fuels them. There, I said it. Let the screams of "homophobe" fly.

Moodiness

2006-01-19T23:15:00.000-08:00

Dispositional Update: My humors have taken a swing from the Melancholic to the Choleric. Just plain old ill-tempered-ness and impatience with, frankly, everything and everyone, who are, of course, in conspiracy against me--or so the voices in my head (who all sound strangely like my third-grade French instructor who introduced me to the concept of inappropriate touching) tell me. But really, what I'm ticked off at, is the mood itself. Choler? Again??? When, I ask you, do I get to be Sanguine? Never? Really? Well, could I at least be Phlegmatic? They seem nice and relaxed! No? So I'm stuck between Dreamy Depressive Philosophical Bleak Bergman-esque Imaginative Untethered Whiny Narcissistic Self-Pitying Gloom and Angry Irritable Impulsive Knee-Jerk-ish Cranky Obnoxious Tempermental Snarling? These are my choices? Feeling like an extroverted jerk or an introverted jerk? Crap. Somebody pass me a jar of leeches--I need to draw out the black bile and the spleen, but leave the blood, OK, guys? I need that stuff.

But as it is, I find myself, as I listen to Sense and Sensibility on CD during my lengthy commutes, barking at Marianne to snap the hell out of it and grow the hell up--yes, Willoughby is a duplicitous prick, of course he is, he's your first boyfriend--all first boyfriends are duplicitous pricks! Just suck it up and get over it--and stop reading so much damn poetry! And as for you, Elinor: you know, 'stoic forbearance' is nice up to a point, but after about twelve chapters, I think we all feel the desire to force your head into a bucket of water until the bubbles stop, you god-d***ed saint.

Hmm. Come to think of it--that may be why I'm in this mood. Damn you, Austen!

S*** What I Gotta Do Over the Next Few Days

2006-01-19T10:23:00.000-08:00

1. Finish reading "Song of Myself."
2. Shot of Jack Daniels to take the taste of Whitman out of my mouth.
3. Draw up lesson plans for teaching "Song of Myself."
4. Second (and possibly third) shot of Jack Daniels to ease the guilt of forcing Whitman on unsuspecting freshmen.
5. Finish prepping lesson plan for campus visit. This will involve reading not only the play I've been assigned, but 'background' reading as well. Pleasant enough, but--
6. Fourth shot of Jack Daniels to take the edge off of my nerves over upcoming campus visit.
7. Nap. Detox.
8. Continue to read Gibbon's Decline and Fall. Yes, I know it's three volumes and eighty bajillion pages long, but that's no excuse.
9. Congratulate myself on not pursuing an activity (see #8) that requires a shot of Jack Daniels afterwards. Shot of Jack Daniels to celebrate.
10. Exercise.
11. Shot of Jack Daniels to rehydrate after exercise.
12. Continue to compile list of 'things I like about myself' as per new therapist's instructions. Shot of Jack Daniels to facilitate. Find it surprisingly easy afterwards, if "I'm f***ing awesome" and "I don't take s*** from no one" consitute acceptable entries. Many typos, but who gives a flying f***? F*** it.
13. Shot of Jack Daniels--Just Because, OK? And what the f*** are you looking at?!
14. Find bed, or softer portion of floor. Sleep, trying not to lie on my back, since that's how you asphyxiate on your own vomit.
15. Wake up. Realize that waking up was not a good idea. Return to sleep, only mildly concerned that I can recall nothing of the previous 24 hours.
16. Scream at drummer next door to knock it the f*** off.
17. Realize that there is no drummer next door, and that that's my head.
18. Summon will to rise. Brush teeth. Brush tongue. Brush roof of mouth. Gargle with Windex, which seems to be the only thing that will remove the aftertaste of sludge.
19. Realize that gargling with Windex hurts quite a lot. Realize that I'm a pathetic loser, alone and hungover and accomplishing nothing with my life. Long, long crying jag.
20. Drive to Costco. For some reason, we're out of Jack Daniels.

Dullness, With Continued Dullness Throughout The Week

2006-01-18T10:27:00.000-08:00

Just not a damned thing of interest going on. I'm gingerly prepping my lecture for my campus visit--though do I prepare a full-blown formal 'lecture' or do I prep myself for a Socratic chat with students? The latter prospect worries me, as I will be a stranger and they will, understandably, be reticent about speaking or making eye contact. (Those of you who teach will know what I mean--students don't trust you until maybe, maybe the third week, when they realize that those 'humorous' comments you've been making are, in fact, safe to laugh at.) Decisions, decisions. And of course, I have to prep my questions for the folks who'll be giving me the final look-see, but frankly, I'm so eager for the job that I want to just blurt out "Anything! I'll take anything! An outdoor office! A 12-course teaching load! Publishing expected every other week! Anything, I tell you! Anything!" That would, I suspect, be undignified.

Meantime, I continue to teach--though distractedly. Aeneid this week (yahoo!), Leaves of Grass next week (considerably subdued response, indicating the suppression of an "Oh God NO" response--apologies to Whitman fans out there, but deliberately masturbatory prose should either be properly pornographic, or what's the point?). And on we go. Sigh. I'm starting once again to dive into Gibbon's Decline and Fall--it's just one of those books I have to have read, and which I do enjoy reading, but life keeps coming along to pull me away with other commitments. Still, if I could make it through Herodotus, Thucydides, Tacitus, Livy, and Suetonius, I suppose I owe to myself to read the guy who tells the rest of the story, yes?

To Blog Or Not To Blog

2006-01-16T14:00:00.000-08:00

Frankly, I've little excuse or motivation to blog today--I've just spent the better part of the past four days pursuing la dolce far niente and rather enjoying doing so. How niente, you ask? Pretty close to total--I mean, I didn't even read trash fiction, which is something I tend to do even while in a persistent vegetative state, so there you go. Of course, on two of the previous three days, I've had ("had"?! "been fortunate enough") to be taken out for staggeringly expensive meals: Pacific Dining Car (a tradition among the men in my immediate family is that we ring in the New Year by a lunch-visit thereto--no women allowed, it's strictly a 'guy thing'), and Moonshadows, overlooking the surf in Malibu. Much vodka/gin (depending on whether I'm ordering gimlets--vodka--or martinis--gin) and wine was consumed--hell, I had port at the end of both meals, as well as desserts that contained the word 'souffle' (though one was 'souffle cake,' which to me is like 'eggless omelet,' but whatever, it was good.) Point being, a lot of sleeping in the next day was called for--I've never understood the phrase "I feel liverish" before, but as I'm entering my later 30s, I'm starting to. So dozing and TV/DVD watching has been the order of the 3-day weekend (and what better way to celebrate the legacy of a man of boundless energy and political activity than to spend the day commemorating him doing f***-all, I ask you?)

Still, I have to abandon my hedonistic ways. I'm getting lazy, both mentally and physically, and my latest physical exam produced warning signs that I can't ignore, given my family history. So, I rather suspect that this weekend was my last hurrah for a bit, and that from hereon in I have to actually shop for food that's good for me, and exercise before I eat it, and read challenging works of criticism and classical philosophy/history rather than, as my mother puts it, "studying the inside of my eyelids for a few hours." Sigh. I know I'll feel better for having swapped over to clean living, but torpor is just so...seductive. Ah, the Deadly Sin of Sloth. There's so much to be said for it. No wonder I didn't want to blog today.

Campus Visit Anon

2006-01-12T09:53:00.000-08:00

I don't normally do requests, because...well, frankly, because I never actually get requests. But since abdme has asked, I'm happy to elaborate: early in December, I had a phone interview with a Southern Research University--unlike some of my fellow academics, I actually prefer phone interviews. For one thing, you can have them in your bathrobe and bunny slippers. (And yes, I actually own a pair, thanks to my friend/roommate/landlord--though to his credit and mine, they are Killer Bunny Slippers, huge jagged-fanged things that derive from the Rosetta Stone of Nerd Comedy, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I mostly wear them in front of new acquaintances, just to make sure they know they're dealing with a geek-addled eccentric.) For another--and this is more personal--I'm just not that good in interview situations. Apparently I'm very intense. (I know, you're thinking, You? Intense? Get out! But no, it's true.) And such intensity--I get too enthusiastic about whatever it is I'm talking about and just...go off--appears to be off-putting. Also, I'm simultaneously incredibly awkward and self-conscious, so I tend to twist my body into pretzel-like shapes of body-space defensiveness--all told, not a pretty picture. But over the phone, said picture is eliminated, and I come across as breezy and charming. Or so I'm told.

Anyway, it must be true in some sort, because said phone interview led to my being asked about a week later for a campus visit late this month. Details as to what I'll be expected to do are still hazy--though early reports indicate that rather than giving a paper, I'll be expected to teach an upper-division class, probably in Shakespeare. This..is...good. If I shine anywhere in life (a big "if"), it's in front of a class. I get to be the best version of myself: confident, smart, witty, charismatic, charming, entertaining, erudite, and enlightening. I get, in short, to rock. (I know, this sounds megalomaniacal, but my new shrink has insisted that I identify three things that are good about myself every day in an effort to combat my crippling self-loathing, so I'm just building up a repertoire.) And the chance to do Shakespeare makes it all the better--I'll get to recite monologues from memory--get to act, which always seems to wow 'em--and show that I can really, you know, teach. So, hopes are, miraculously enough, high. One never knows what the competition will be like, and I rather expect, given the number of applicants and the fact we're down to the final three, that it will be stiff. But I'm in the running, and it's a free trip to a lovely part of the country, and it's a chance to teach--and that...is always a good thing.

Crankiness Ebbs

2006-01-11T12:05:00.000-08:00

Having recovered from my hangover nicely--my students were actually rather intimidated by my surly, Byronic manner, so I was able to snarl and grimace my way through the hour and a half without challenge or interruption. Unpleasant of me, perhaps, but it's better to be feared than be loved, as good old Niccolo reminds us.

It strikes me that I haven't fulminated properly against something larger than the circumstances of my own life in quite awhile. While political blogs are, for the most part, stridently unreadable--yes, yes, we all know that Bush is the Anti-Christ and that Secular Liberalism is in fact the Sign of the Apocalypse, could we change the subject please???--there's something to be said for saying something about the world outside one's own sphere of activity.

Nothing, however, comes to mind these days. Perhaps it's just that leaping back into a full-time teaching schedule has rattled me into a state of emotional exhaustion from which I'm unable to arouse the appropriate level of ironic spleen, but the fact is that as I limp home at the end of the day, I'm inclined to collapse in front of televison (or, if I'm particularly good, to get on the treadmill in front of television) or computer screen and just jack myself into the electronic feed of mindless pablum. Mmmm...CSI...24...House...

I'm trying to be good and work a little bit on the novel each day, though again, being creative and giving a rat's butt about characters who exist only in my fevered imagination (except it isn't fevered--it's torpid) is rather difficult. (Whiny little bastard, ain't I?) Still, following my 20-minute rule, I press on. Feebly.

But none of this is to the point--which, in itself, is the point. (Ooo, I'm clever.) I really can't spend my time ripping on the wiretapping scandal, or Abramoff's multiple pleas of guilty (you've gotta know that every time he pleads guilty to another crime, that's another Congressional individual who has to change his shorts, given what kind of canary-like singing--or rat-like ratting out--he must be trading for leniency), or whether Alito will single-handedly make abortion punishable by stoning (he won't, people--I'll say it again and again--the Supreme Court hates to overturn precedent--because it makes it that much easier for their own precedents to be overturned--trust me, Roe v. Wade isn't going anywhere). I just can't quite summon the bilious 'oomph' to make myself amusing on these subjects. So for the time being, I shall continue to focus squarely on the most important thing in the whole wide universe: me. And since I'm plagued by a bi-polar tendency towards self-aggrandisement and self-loathing, it should be quite a ride...

Shhhh...

2006-01-10T10:23:00.000-08:00

No talking above a whisper.

No sudden movements.

In fact, no talking and no movement whatsoever. There was wine. Then whiskey. Then calvados. Then some serious lying down while I felt the movement of the world as it revolved around the sun. And this morning, there is bright, bright, lasik-surgery bright sunlight. And traffic noise. And a taste I can't quite identify in my mouth but which I'd swear has something to do with the process of radioactive decay.

And I have to teach. This should be...amusing. Tomorrow. Today, nothing is amusing. At all. Groan...

Day of Terror, Day of Doom

2006-01-09T09:35:00.000-08:00

No, not really. Just my birthday, with its usual intimations of futility (and mortality, just because I'm a traditionalist.) Suddenly alone again, holidays are going to suck for awhile, though I must acknowledge that the presence of friends (some of whom treated me to a lovely feast last night), fulfilling work (teaching is a tonic to me, can't say why, but I'm not about to argue with it), and family helps a lot. Still, it would be nice to have this be the year in which I get The Job, just so I don't have to be staring at 40 (still a few years off, but still) and contemplating a life in which I have no *place*. But I'm resolved not to be gloomy. No, that's a lie. I'm going to be damned gloomy, and enjoy it. It's my party, and I'll sulk if I want to...

I am "It," Apparently

2006-01-07T21:48:00.000-08:00

According to abdme (http://probablyedandme.blogspot.com/), I am now tagged with another "meme." Unfortunately, I am hampered in my ability to become un-tagged, inasmuch as I do not know five other bloggers. (Actually, that's not entirely true, since the powers-that-be at the Composition office are demanding that I force my students to create blogs and submit weekly entries, which I think violates the 6th Amendment, but nevermind.) So while I will gladly submit to the onus of being "It" and revealing 5 weird things about myself (might as well just say "5 things about myself"), I think I have to break this cyber-based chain letter. My regrets and apologies.

So:

5 Weird Things About Me:

1. I have an encyclopedic knowledge of and obsession with Musical Theater, yet I am not gay.
2. I have owned a Cuisinart for almost 9 years, and I have never used it once.
3. I'm actually more comfortable wearing a tie than not wearing one. Yes, even in bed.
4. I lapse into cloying baby-talk around all furry pet-like animals. Trust me, if you knew me, you'd find this arrestingly incongruous. (Strangely, I do not lapse into baby-talk around actual babies, to whom I speak as if they're fellow 30-somethings at a cocktail party.)
5. When I lecture, I stare at the floor and, while pacing, place my feet into intricate patterns on the squares of linoleum (or whatever kind of flooring there is--carpet drives me nuts, but even there, I'll find some way to draw protractor-precise geometrical shapes with my feet. How this must look to my students, I've no idea.)

There are, needless to say, far weirder things about myself that I could share, but you don't want me to; believe me, you just don't.

Two Down...

2006-01-05T13:28:00.000-08:00

Rejection #2 came in. I don't feel terribly conversational about it. This one was less of a long-shot than the first--the first I could write off as something I probably wasn't going to get anyway--this one, I thought I had a shot at--the interview went very well--friendly, smooth answers to their questions, laughter at my jokes, etc. I don't know. "You can never tell," right? But this one stings harder than the first, and now I'm starting to be afraid to check my e-mail. I think of what it means not to get hired, again. I think of facing another round of the hiring process. And I want to--well, not weep, I'm just not a crier--but crawl back into bed and let oblivion take over. But I can't, of course. Too much work to do. Five more potential "yes"es to go. But one more rejection establishes a pattern, and I'm just not quite secure enough to be the guy who can, after seven rejections, say, laughing, "Can you believe it! Seven rejections! Man, I must have worn the wrong cologne on that trip!" I suppose it would be nice to be that guy. Perhaps I should work on it.

Bad News

2006-01-04T13:18:00.000-08:00

I just received my first post-MLA rejection e-mail. One interviewing committee has given me the thumbs-down. Depressing? Well, a bit, of course. On the other hand, it was inevitable that somebody wasn't going to ask me for a campus visit, and indeed that several somebodies would and will not. Still, we all want to be wanted, and one down narrows the list of possibilities, and all that. Sigh. Shrug. Attempt at stoic forbearance.

Loomings and a Post-Mortem

2006-01-03T10:22:00.000-08:00

The new quarter begins on Friday--don't ask, quarter system and the administration is trying to make up for class time lost to holidays--and I'm simply not ready for it. I know, I know, I said that the start of classes would be a good thing, and it will--but I'd like One More Week, please. No? Fine. It's just that I'm still tired--it's incredibly self-indulgently feeble of me to say so, but I still haven't recovered from Washington. Which was an interesting experience, now that I'm in some state to talk about it. Some of you will have been to the Modern Language Association convention and will know what I'm talking about; some won't, and you're the only ones who need to read this. (Did I say "need"? My, but I'm arrogant.) Thing is, all the interviews are held in suites spread out through 2 or 3 hotels. (One hotel was a 12 dollar cabride away from the others, which meant I had to fork over about 36 bucks a day just to make it to where I needed to be, which doesn't sound like much except I'm, you know, perpetually broke.) So all the interviewees--all those fresh-faced, newly-minted Ph.D.s gather in the huge, huge lobbies of these hotels, waiting (they're usually at least a couple hours early--nerves, you see) to be summoned to a 30+ minute gauntlet of interrogation which may determine The Rest Of Their Lives. They are, to put it one way, stressed. To put it another, it's like walking into the waiting area for Room 101 from 1984. Everybody's jumpy--there's no place to sit, and I mean no place, the whole lobby is a seething mass of misery, so people wander, forlorn, looking for some quiet corner to curl up in and weep, or else open up their folder/dossier (everyone carries one) and review for the fourteen billionth time their letters of application (what did I claim to be able to do?) and just...pulse with agonized anticipation. Not a happy place. Come to think of it, perhaps the Hell for academics is this: a perpetual MLA convention, with the promise of release from perdition if one aces the interview, but the clock doesn't move, and the elevators are too full to get on, and the house phones don't work so you can't call up to find which room you're suppose to be at, and you've lost your dossier, and this is forever...Yeah, that's good. I like that.

Personally, I simply wasn't as miserable as I thought I'd be. The sight I've just described knocked me out of my own head a bit, and I realized that I really, really didn't want to be one of those people. So instead, I stalked a seat, found one, and sat with my coffee and a copy of Gaiman's Neverwhere, and just relaxed and enjoyed the read, realizing that, hey, I know my stuff, and if I don't, a few minutes of cramming is not going to supply this deficiency. And as a result, I was, I think, more at ease than virtually everyone else. (Which, by the way, should tell you how bad it was--if I walk into a very crowded, very large room, and I'm the most relaxed person there...you know you're in a horrible, horrible place.)

But it was still quite draining. I may have been confident that I could jump through the interlocutorial hoops, and so I could, but I still had to do the jumping. And travel always wigs me out. And so I'm still a bit tired, and not really ready to realign my formidable intellect (irony alert) to the business of teaching just now. Yet I must. So. Off to do reading and lesson plans and whatnot. Fun and frivolity, commented Eeyore, as he cropped another thistle.

New Years Day

2006-01-01T11:09:00.000-08:00

--and frankly, do we care? Should we? I don't--it mostly means that I've got to remember to write a different year on my checks. I know it's pretentiously cliche' to remark that the demarcation of time is culturally specific and therefore objectively random and that one's life does not change between the 31st and the 1st and that treating a year as a contained unit in one's life is just as silly as treating a few notes in a symphony as significant to the whole and so on and so forth--yet I agree with all of this.

New Year's (kind of like my birthday, which follows hard upon) is a time that for a long while I've expected to be much more of an event and experience than it ever proves to be. The televised countdown (which in the age of satellite TV occurs at 9:00 here on the West Coast, which means that our own midnight seems repetitive and anti-climactic) just doesn't do anything for me, because you get to the scream "Happy New Year" and then...what? Well, if you're with someone appropriate, you kiss, and that's nice, but then...what? It's not as if the end of one year opens the floodgates for a slew of new experiences that were just being held back by those last few minutes of December. It's just another day (to quote the consistently underrated Oingo Boingo). Go to bed, wake up, and nothing's changed. (Unless you've had drunken New Year's Eve sex with a total stranger and no protection--then life might get real interesting real fast.)

I suppose what redeems it as a holiday is the fact that--I think instinctively--it's a holiday that marks the shift from the Family Oriented shenanigans of Christmas (or Hannukah, or what have you) to shenanigans based around Friends. Because, having spent New Year's with both, I rather think that New Year's was meant to be spent with Friends--with peers, rather than parents (or children.) There might be something to the idea of a moment to pause with those of your own time of life--to look around at the faces of your second, voluntary family--and be aware of the journey you're on, and that it's the presence of each other that makes that journey worthwhile most of the time.

Didn't have that experience this year, needless to say--but not having it this year made me realize this--so maybe next year, I'll remember, and be less of a snarky jerk about the holiday.

Yeah, I know, probably not. You know how New Year's resolutions always turn out.

Back

2005-12-31T10:26:00.000-08:00

From Washington, where my hosts were kindness and graciousness personified, the weather was surprisingly mild, I actually had a chance to take in live theater (the Shakespeare DC's production of Comedy of Errors--very funny, uneven cast, but they wavered between the brilliant and the competent, so a fine show overall), and my interviews went, with one exception, quite well. I think. One never knows. Coming from the world of theater, I always offer an analogy about these interviews (one I've shared with many people over the past few days, so bear with me if you've heard this one): Academic interviews are like auditions: you only know "how it went" if you completely and utterly tanked, went down in flames, crashed and burned, and fill in your vehicular point of comparison here. (Although even then, you can't always tell--Dustin Hofffman famously blew his audition for The Graduate, and we all know how that turned out.) But beyond jsut flat-out agonizing failure to do anything right, one can simply never tell what will follow. Totally and utterly brilliant you may be, but if the director decides that he wants someone three inches taller, you will not get a call-back. So I may well have been brilliant--and hey, I flatter myself that I was, once or twice--but if they decide they want someone who's more attuned to Gender Studies, or Poetry-versus-drama, or if I rubbed even one of the three-member committee the wrong way, I'm out. So we do not know, and we shall not know for at about a month for most of these places. I am once again in the realm of thumb-twiddling. Which is a rich and fertile breeding ground for neurosis, self-loathing, and unfocused anxiety. Gonna be a great New Year. (Actually, my mood is good, and with the start of classes, I'll be busy and therefore distractedly productive. All good, it will be, as Yoda might say...)

Happy New Year.

Semper Eadem

2005-12-24T12:13:00.000-08:00

Christmas-time is here, by golly;
Disapproval would be folly;
Deck the halls with hunks of holly;
Fill the cup and don't say when!

Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens;
Mix the punch; drag out the Dickens;
Even though the prospect sickens,
Brother, here we go again.

Thank you, Tom Lehrer, for expressing the mid-30s attitude to Christmas for the childless. I'm not really as dark as I sound, actually. It's sunny and warm and I seem to be recovering nicely from the illness with three days still to go 'til the trip to MLA and the seven (seven!) interviews thereat. (Apparently I'm excruciatingly lucky to have received this many. Either that or I'm exquisitely brilliant. I'm inclined to think 'lucky,' aren't you? No? Really? Aw, go on! You're too kind. Anyway--)

The problem with the interviews is that, of course, I cannot focus on the 'here and now' of Hearth and Home, which is a pity, since my family does Hearth and Home rather well; our experience of the holidays is not exactly that of the Cratchits (a. we're well-off, and b. it's a bit treacly, that scene, isn't it--I mean, the only point at which we all perk up is when Mrs. Cratchit starts going off on Scrooge--you go, girl!), but we're pretty much into the tree and the fire and the stockings that would be hung by the chimney with care if we had one that could support such adornment but we really don't. And it's nice, and everyone's genuinely happy to see each other, and we don't have to wait on tenterhooks for that point in the evening when that one family member has just enough to drink to bring up the skeletons in the closet and the ugliness that has festered between him and his cousin for forty-odd years and then the first punch is thrown and why can't you take it outside someone wails and oh man you know someone's gonna get thrown into that tree and knock it over and break Great-gramma Evelyn's antique angel ornament that she managed to smuggle out of Prague right before the invasion and is the only memory she has of her parents and what now is there for her to live for and down she goes with that second stroke and then you've gotta wait for the ambulance to arrive and well great we might as well get s***faced because here's another f***ing Christmas gone to s***, thank you all so much, you've made your mother cry again, and what's that, fourteen years in a row, way to go a**holes.

We don't do that. So, you know, it would be something I'd like to enjoy more than I am, but performance anxiety about these damned interviews is ruining all, thank you so much, MLA, you've made me cry again, and what's that, two years in a row, way to go a**holes.

Hope y'all are merry and bright and whatnot. Merry Whatever...

New Developments

2005-12-18T17:09:00.000-08:00

A. I'm sick, again. Pray God it'll be brief, and, really, it's not that severe and it's much better that it's happening now and not a week from now, when Christmas hits and the flight to Washington and interviews with prestigious universities follow. So, small favors. Speaking of which--

B. I've been invited for a campus visit. This is the final stage of the hiring process. A school has liked me enough to offer to fly me out and meet with me over a few days--and I'll probably have to give a lengthy paper in front of the whole department (no pressure there!) Anyway, this is the point at which I'll either get the job, or not. It's down to 3 candidates. Won't happen until late January, but if you feel like crossing your fingers now, it couldn't hurt.

A Random Thought

2005-12-15T12:26:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but bear with me: What's wrong with America today? Well, plenty, but plenty's right as well, and yet there's a sense of something a bit out of control--the stridency of the right and the flaccidity of the left leaving the whole engine of government and culture heading out into the future like the proverbial runaway train. (No, I'm not deliberately citing Tom Petty--the analogy predated that song, thank you.) I'm listening to A Confederacy of Dunces in my car as I make my long commutes, and it strikes me, listening to a book of that era (late 60s), that maybe what we've lost is a memory. Officer Mancuso arrives at the Widow Reilly's house, and sees a weathered but still legible WWII poster about "Loose lips sinking ships" and it struck me as I heard that--that that was the collective memory of the people of that time. Not just of that war, but living through it--sacrificing and struggling and living with the fear of an uncertain outcome against a terrible enemy--and coming out the other side realizing that they'd just won perhaps the most important war since the Greeks pushed the Persians back on the plains of Plataea. And there was the memory of that in what they did with the rest of their lives--the sense that that achievement, that victory defined America. Sure, we devolved quickly into Communist witch-hunts and race riots and Kennedy's assassination--but through it all, I think that the men and women--that much-hyped 'Greatest Generation'--were able to look upon each other and the world with a sense of the fundamental justness and decency of their character because they had, in ways large and small, participated in that triumph.

But the sign on the Widow Reilly's door is fading, and what memory replaces it? Well, Vietnam, perhaps--certainly, it was a collective experience that brought with it little but shame--and I include--indeed, I foreground the treatment of the veterans of that war--receiving them with embarassment and slight, regarding them as 'losers'--our nation showed an ugly side in its treatment of those men. And the stupidity of the war from a political standpoint--the futility of it--that replaced, I think, the memory of WWII. We became the Bully Nation--the Cowardly Nation--the nation who acted out of self-interest, not justice.

But such cynicism has a relatively short shelf-life. It's self-abusive, and most people would rather be self-forgiving. No, I don't think it's the memory of Vietnam that has us careening along unseen tracks--I think it's the fact that we have no collective memory. No event replaced the fading Vietnam, and now, unable to be defined viscerally by our past, we don't know who we are. "America" is up for grabs, it seems--but as much as the Far Right tries to snatch it for itself, it's a Sisyphean task--without any history--any memory--to anchor their claims, they'll lose whatever ground they gain as fast as we can change the channel. (Witness the dismal failure of their attempt to sell "The War on Christmas" as the issue of the day.) We've lost our past. And without it--how can we know where we're headed?

Chaos ensues...

And the Black Fog Rolls in Again

2005-12-13T20:26:00.000-08:00

What the f***ing f***?!?! I mean, will nothing put this depression into remission??? I finished the quarter with my usual teacherly aplomb, I got all my grading done in smoothly efficient time, I've got at least seven interviews scheduled for the MLA convention (sigh--I have to go to Washington in the dead of winter--but still, seven!), and, yet, somehow, I'm convinced that Life Sucks, I'm Worthless, and There's No Point To Any Of It. The advantage to having experienced depression before is that I recognize such thoughts as the products of a disorder, and not an objective reality, but still--come on, brain!!! We're supposed to be working together on this, right?!?!? Stupid serotonin levels. Damn them and such...

This Thing Called a "Meme"

2005-12-08T17:35:00.000-08:00

It's either grade papers and exams, worry about tomorrow's phone interview for a really nice job at a really good school, or frivel away the time by blogging nonsensically. Guess which one I choose? Thanks to "abd me" (check out her blog at http://probablyedandme.blogspot.com) for this form of procrastination, a kind of self-revelatory count-down called, I take it, a "Meme," which sounds vaguely Greek in origin if pronounced "meem," but probably isn't. Anyway, here goes:

10 Random Things You Might Not Know About Me:
10. I can 'crack' not just my knuckles, but virtually every joint in my body, often with disturbing loudness.
9. I'm not allergic to anything.
8. I can sing pretty much all of Gilbert & Sullivan by heart. Though if you're nice to me, I won't.
7. I'm addicted to computer RPGs, to the exclusion of food, sleep, and human contact.
6. (This is embarassing.) I love Romantic Comedies--even the dreadful ones with Jennifer Lopez. (Sorry, I should just say "even the ones with Jennifer Lopez." Although Kate Hudson is really giving her a run for her money in the 'dreadful' race.)
5. I have to sleep with a pillow over my eyes.
4. I used to smoke--and I miss it.
3. I think pugs are the coolest dogs ever. Shut up, they are so. No, you're wrong.
2. I really don't like white wine.
1. The life I appear to lead is not my secret identity, but oh, how I wish it were.

9 Places I've Visited:
9. County Cork, and yes, I've kissed the Blarney Stone.
8. Salem, Massachusetts, which has turned the hysteria-induced execution of largely innocent people into a source of tourism.
7. The top of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, which is more impressive than it sounds, since you have to climb a lot of stairs and ignore any latent vertigo.
6. The Louvre. And the Mona Lisa is called La Giaconde, and depending where you stand in the room, her expression changes. It's quite cool.
5. Mont St. Michel. "Hey! Let's build a cathedral city on a tidal plain!" "Why?" "Because it will look amazingly spooky and impressive and cool!" "OK, then."
4. St. John's College, Oxford. Where I delivered a paper on 18th Century Pornography.
3. Fanning Island. Middle of the Pacific, 3 Degrees north of the equator.
2. Alcatraz. Just to make sure I had the whole 'experience,' I tipped a couple of the guides to rape me in the shower. I still get Christmas cards.
1. The Mall of America, where I worked selling troll dolls in one of the most humiliating post-collegiate periods of my life.

8 Ways to Win My Heart:
8. Shut up and leave me alone; I'm reading.
7. Shut up and leave me alone; I'm XBoxing.
6. Just shut up and leave me alone.
5. Wait, come back, I'm lonely. Hold me. Lingerie helps this procedure. Unless you're a guy, in which case--eh, so long as it's tasteful...
4. Bring me coffee in the morning--Latte, with a splash of half-and-half, if you can.
3. Listen to me prattle on about pretentious crap with enthusiasm and/or patience.
2. Reach for my hand for no reason whatsoever. That goes double for hugging me from behind.
1. Put up with me when I'm at my worst. (Which is to say, "Put up with me.")

7 Things I Want to Do Before I Die:
7. Finish my g*d-d**ned novel.
6. Publish my g*d-d**ned novel.
5. Have at least 24 hours of sustained 'fun.'
6. Visit Rome.
5. See Wagner's Ring Cycle at Bayreuth.
4. Have a child (or two.)
3. Get a really good teaching job.
2. Really learn Latin. Then--
1. Really learn Greek. (Note: Neither this nor #2 will ever actually occur.)

6 Things I'm Afraid Of:
6. Rats.
5. Things that look like rats--mice, possums, even capybaras give me the willies. (Or the Willards, if you're inclined to bad horror movies and puns, which few are, I'll admit.)
4. Teaching the first day of a new class.
3. Change. (The process, not the coins in my pocket--those I'm fine with.)
2. Job interviews, especially ones that require me to travel cross-country.
1. The realization that I may very well have to deal with periodic and often lengthy bouts of severe depression for the rest of my life. (Sorry to bring the mood down, but it really does scare me.)

5 Things I Don't Like:
5. Plane travel. I'm not afraid of flying, but I just don't trust them to get me where I want to go, on time and with all my luggage. None of them seem to care about their jobs with enough fanaticism to inspire total confidence.
4. Artichokes. Ate a bad one once, got sick, can't do it again.
3. White chocolate. Ate about five pounds of it once at one sitting. Can't do it again.
2. People having inane conversations on cell phones in places where they shouldn't, like...anywhere I can hear them, basically.
1. Abridged versions of novels. Whom are these for, and how can we stop them from breeding?

4 Ways To Turn Me Off:
4. Answer a cell phone in the middle of our conversation. You're not a surgeon or a member of the bomb squad--let it go to voice mail.
3. Abuse, slight, or try to crack wise with a bartender, waitress, hostess, or busboy. They don't need your crap, and they don't think you're funny. And tip them right, for God's sake.
2. Ask me about plot points, actors' names and what else they've been in, or how the story ends--we're in a movie theater, will you please just watch the f***ing movie???
1. Complain about your relationship with your mother, your co-workers, your shrink, your ex, or your siblings before we've started sleeping together on a regular basis.

3 Things I Do Every Day:
3. Convert oxygen to carbon dioxide.
2. Bathe.
1. Check my e-mail. (Multiply #1 by approx. 473.)

2 Things That Make Me Happy:
2. Love. (I'd name someone whom I love, but it said "things," not people. Besides, you know who you are, and isn't that enough?)
1. Delivered pizza. Seriously, it's like magic--you ask for it, and it comes to you, perfect every time.

1 Thing On My Mind Right Now:
1. I'm in my mid-30s--shouldn't I be doing something more meaningful with my time than filling out a Meme?