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9:09 AM NYC!
So flying off tomorrow to New York for AWP (I'm presenting in panel S111 should you want to stop in and say hello). New York! New York! I love New York. I love how many of the wonderful things I read have the town's name on the inside, in the copyright page, or right on the title (as in Times or Review of Books or Er). And I love the giant space the city has occupied in fiction, movies, television, and music. There's just so many great NYC songs! I love New York songs! One of my favorites is Lou Reed's Romeo had Juliette, but the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl's Fairytale of New York is up there too, though my all time favorite is TMBG's Everyone's Your Friend in New York City (terrific song, fuzzy clip: "Friend" starts at the 4:30-min. mark, and it's nearly impossible to make out, so here are the lyrics).
I love NYC! I love NYC nearly as much as this blond kid loves Andrew WK's "I Love NYC"! I love it almost as much as BJ Snowden loves being In Canada!
Sunday, January 20, 2008
9:01 PM Señor Don Veneno
Over the winter break, while the networks covered the escaped San Francisco tiger mauling, we spent the better part of our news grazing for updates on the Colombian hostage release situation. It was confusing enough to begin with, then grew incredibly more confusing, with the families being flown to Venezuela, where Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez accused the Colombian government of bad faith. Colombian president Alvaro Uribe accused the FARC of not wanting to release the hostages because they didn't actually have one of the hostages they claimed to have. (Chavez responded by saying that Uribe was lying.) For a few days, in between shots of the prostrate tiger and of people leaving little stuffed tigers & flowers & drawings, we were all trying to sort out what the hell was going on. One hour you heard that a helicopter was on its way, and that the hostages were about to be set free. The next hour Chavez was yelling something and the Colombian spokesperson was responding, the spokesperson looking simultaneously angry and accusative and befuddled. And nothing anybody was saying made sense: because it sounded, almost, like Uribe was saying that the guerrillas were lying about who and how many hostages they had or could release.
It all eventually sorted itself out: Uribe was in fact right. The guerrillas had lost the youngest, a child born to one of the hostages, Clara Rojas, while in captivity. The kid, Emmanuel, had been left in the care of an abusive idiot, and when said idiot eventually took the kid to a hospital (broken arm) and came up with a not-terribly-persuasive story of how this kid happened to be in his possession, Colombia's child protective care services took over, cared for him, and found him a foster home. The government didn't know who the kid was at the time, but they were able to track him down when the abusive idiot came back around, a couple of years later, looking for the kid once more--because the FARC wanted him back. So they could, you know, release him. To his family.
The situation's grown a little less convoluted, and this article provides both a decent overview and a fair gloss over the weirder, soap operaish parts of the ordeal--which is not to make light of anything: the reason why Colombians were watching, why everybody was waiting for news, was because these people had been kept in captivity--chained and under the perpetual threat of death--for over five years. All the same, the insane logic, the mindboggling ineptitude of some of the principals--that's all telenovela, and that's the other Colombian thing I ended up tuning into: because mom got me hooked me on Madre Luna.
One of its major plot points is these bandidos de la Sierra--the Sierra bandits--who are never called guerilleros, though they kidnap, blackmail, intimidate, wear military uniforms, all the usual stuff. (Part of why they're not explicitly called guerilleros is that Madre Luna is one of these Mexico-Colombian production efforts where most of what may be too identifiably Colombian is written out of the scripts so they'll play better in Telemundo; part of it may just be that guerillas may be too heavy a thing for soap operas.) And the involutions of the plot are about as plausible as the Emmanuel case, where the bandits are running around behaving like total jackasses, chased out of a house by a ghost at one point, and with the major heavy, Veneno ("Poison") shacking up with a wealthy widow and running his criminal operation in hiding from the comfort of a pool with a gorgeous view of Girardot.
So yes: Colombia, where real awfulness and actual pain can be the result of situations too convoluted for even Colombia's own notoriously free-wheeling (and frequently awesome) telenovelas.
Saturday, November 24, 2007
10:54 AM Thumbs Up
The semester's coming to a close and not a moment too soon. We are all aware of the dangers of obsessive study. Moreover, we are also aware that there's been far too much moping going on--and that fun as that is, it's the kind of thing that should perhaps be administered in way tiny doses. Doses tinier, at any rate, than the ones presented here.
So. Some additional complaints: (1) I wish I were a more efficient writer. I just cut fifty pages out of the novel. I'm not even counting the two discarded monster versions of the same thing that were abandoned at several stages--I think there might be stuff in there that might resurface as stand-alone material, but for now it's just sitting in various folders. (2) I'm loving the material I'm gathering for the dissertation, but I'm also keenly aware that I'm diving headfirst into this monster very soon--that if all goes according to plan, I'll be done with school and looking for jobs in schools very soon, this despite my knowing that the market is saturated, and that my areas of interest (the history of the novel, the 19th century novel, and contemporary American and British novels) are already likely flooded with other PhDs, and plus that academic life is apparently not terribly different from an academic novel.
And so. The opposite of complaints. I'm thrilled. Inexplicably so. There's a pile of clean laundry in the middle of my room, and as soon as I'm done with this post I'm getting to folding. (I am, unlike Achewood's Cornelius Bear, a fan of laundry.) I wrote a couple of pages in the newly trimmed novel and they are good.
Plus: just got the West Branch issues in which "Divers" appears and they're lovely. And Redivider has accepted "The Orlando Sonnet" and so it may show up sometime next year.
And I'll be presenting at AWP this year! Should you be attending too, you should say hi. I'll be presenting on Saturday at 9 am (it's panel number S111), on the relationship between academia and contemporary publishing.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
11:30 PM Arms Outstretched
I wrote this bit a few days ago:Somewhere, in some parallel universe, there's a dictionary of cumbersome words for cumbersome feelings. In this dictionary there's probably a word for the weeks where you're feeling slightly off all day, from morning to night, and where all the things that give you (I mean, by the way, me) comfort have been slightly tweaked, so that everything you love--exercise, reading, writing, company, solitude--is just slightly irritating, as are you. You, right now, are slightly irritated and in turn irritating. With yourself. With the world. With your face. With your vanity. With your monstrous self-regard. With your navel-gazing. And this irritation--which is very much a real irritation, a kind of minute physical void right below the sternum--Anyway. It goes on. You needn't hear the rest of it, since it's more of the same. And, at any rate, the irritation is gone. It's been replaced by an inexplainable loneliness--inexplainable because this week I've not gone a day without spending at least a bit of time with people, all sorts of people, people whose wonderfulness is undeniable and a boon and a source of amazement. As in: these are amazing people, these people I know.
Listen: all I want to do right now is listen to sad music. Or, failing that, all I want to do is listen to love songs and run an inventory of all my failures. Let's set up a little index, a little catalog, a little database.
Here's what I love, though: that the heart keeps running its course oblivious to all common sense, like some hamster in some bright-blue wire-mesh wheel. The heart, the body, the world--we all go on.
Listen: I miss my hamster. I miss Molly.
Or, because you're here, because you're reading this, I'd like to know where you've been, where you're going, whether you've felt this tiny yawning void too. Did I say hello? Did I tell you I was happy to see you?
It's late--I should have been asleep half-an-hour ago. It's late and I'm not sure what I wanted to tell you. I'm a bit happy, I'm a bit sad. But that's all of us. Somehow, for some reason, it seemed really important to find the words for it and now I can't remember why.
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
12:44 PM And the CV's been updated. Yes.
11:45 AM Less Abstruse! Less Commentary!
Many thanks to John Feith for his absolutely wonderful video/song, and for his offer to make "Waxwing," his song, the official song of Waxwing, the Vladimir Nabokov Appreciation Page. And so it is done. "Waxwing" is Waxwing's official song! See also Hailey Wojcik's terrific ukulele-based "Nabokov's Butterfly."
Those two will be added to NaboPop soonish--Friday at the latest--and there are three new Nabokovilia entries as well: Susan Hubbard, McSweeney's, and A Night at the Nabokov Hotel. So yes! Happy fourth!
And so yes: much less abstruse entry. And way less emo than the one immediately preceding it. Speaking of emo, though, I'd been wondering why such a seemingly inoffensive label/attitude/silly-lifestyle-choice was so easily ridiculed, and I'm guessing it's not just b/c it's so bathetic--though it is--and pathetic--though it is--and not just because it's so regimented--though it is--and maybe it's just that it's just so self-involved. And it'll pass if it hasn't already. Has it? Who knows? Anyway--back to the self-involvement: leave it to a grad student to take up like four paragraphs, two of them on songs, to say that break-ups are really sad. But--by the way? They are. Way sad. Doing way better, though. This is what I do: I run, I write, I work, I run again.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
9:27 PM Bound by Symmetry
So yes: disaster averted. I photographed the first on my way to the Clark County Library. Then, when I came back (ten minutes later) it had been amended. So apparently lobsters are not coming.
So lately it's all been about sad. It's not a constant sadness, and it's not even the sort of sadness that's even close to unique. It's pretty much everyone's sadness, at one point or another, and so I'd rather not bore you with it--but so yes, after a third or fourth sad song, and after walking down late at night and realizing, halfway home, Oh, I'm tearing up. This is me crying. Again. And sort of enjoying it. And mostly not--mostly just reminding myself that it passes. And keeping busy: running, writing, prepping & teaching, going home, listening to sad music, enjoying the sadness and growing bored with it and mostly just completely befuddled by the human heart. Mine. Yours. Everyone's. What are we doing, carrying around this thing? And what would we do without it? What would we do with all the sad songs?
Which it occurred to me, right around this time, that mopey songs, the songs where people talk about lost love--these songs (and the feelings expressed therein) are little miracles of insularity: it's all about the moping and the bemoaning and the why-why-why. They're myopic little creatures. As are songs of newfound love. And one type of song cannot possibly even imagine the other type--they might as well be living in completely isolated universes, though of course they are not. One is the natural complement to the other: everyone's moving on, but someone gets a sad song, someone else gets At Last. Or whatever.
I've been reading Richard Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy for the past year--ten pages a day. I've skipped to Burton's Cure of Love-Melancholy wherein he suggests mostly what everyone's been suggesting, and what seems to actually be working, which is just keeping busy:"The first rule to be observed in this stubborn and unbridled passion, is exercise and diet. It is an old and well-known, sentence, Sine Cerere et Saccho friget Venus (love grows cool without bread and wine). As an idle sedentary life, liberal feeding, are great causes of it, so the opposite, labour, slender and sparing diet, with continual business, are the best and most ordinary means to prevent it."
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
2:25 PM Also: Lunch is for Closers Only. And for Pool Ducks.
My phone has a camera, and so I am taking pictures and putting them up on Flickr. As are you. As is the world. Hi!
And hello, ducks! They've been at the apartment-complex pool for a few weeks: they are getting fat on everybody's bread, mine included. They're getting so they'll shun inferior bread, which is eaten by an entourage of blackbirds and pigeons.
So the Nabokov page has updates.
And there are a few new pieces of mine available online. Two for McSweeney's: The Spooky Japanese Girl is There for You and The Lead Singer is Distracting Me. One for Conjunctions: The Coca-Cola Executive in the Zapatoca Outhouse. Both are sites that I visit and read and admire, so this is a big big treat and an honor.
I'll be teaching World Lit 1 this summer--session 2. And I'll be flying to Honolulu soon for a conference.
Right now I should also be working on a paper due this Friday--it's nearly complete, and I may in fact cannibalize much of it for my presentation--as well as studying for a final. But it's a small break. And then it's back to the studying and the writing and--soon--the grading of papers and finals. But not yet.
...
Ok. Back to work.
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