Been Away for A While

I spent most of last week wishing I had an internet connection, because I had some frigging awesome Facebook update statuses planned. Now they're lost to the ether...

Actually, in our always-connected world, I think it's healthy to take some time off from social media, un-social media, anti-social media, and MySpace (I've been taking a break from that one since at least 2011. Seriously, I have no idea how to get into MySpace anymore, but I don't really care). Granted, that break is easier to manage when libraries are shut down and you're not too keen on the idea of bringing your laptop to the library parking lot and accessing the free WiFi. Also, the other people who usually loiter in said parking lot doing that scare the bejesus out of you (it's like all the pill-heads of Oconee County congregate in the parking lot...but I digress). But I have opinions on current events that must be shared!

First off: cops getting killed is always a tragedy, but it doesn't mean that the police union reps get to use that as an excuse to settle a personal beef with the mayor. I thought it was classless what the patrolmen did to de Blasio, turning their backs on him. Real good look for you guys, especially considering that you're not exactly living up to the "protect" part of "to protect and serve." Cops are like anyone else, there are good ones and there are bad ones. It just seems like the bad ones are hellbent on not being held accountable for it, and their feelings are hurt because the mayor of New York sided with the protestors. To equate peaceable demonstrations with the madman who gunned down two cops because he happened to say that's why he was doing it is pretty shitty.

Anyway, I spent a good chunk of last week working my way thru The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. I realize that, as Murakami writes in Japanese and has to be translated into English in order for me to read him (because I don't even know where to begin to learn Japanese), I probably miss something in the translation. But what I get in return is a very exciting, challenging, and beautiful novel. I have to think most of what Murakami does gets translated into the works, so if I did miss anything I still got to have a wonderful experience with the book. I highly recommend it, or really anything he's done (which can be iffy because I've only read four of his books, but based on those four I can recommend him highly).

I also drove to my "new favorite bookstore" in Greenville last week, though I didn't end up buying anything that day. I did go to another bookstore just a short drive back in the direction I'd come, and there I found a biography of Lester Bangs. Rock critics in general don't seem like the kind of guys whose lives are interesting enough to merit a full-scale biography, but Bangs was the exception to that rule. He paid the price for that, in a sense, but I've been a fan of his since receiving a copy of the posthumous collection Psychotic Reaction and Carburator Dung. One of the things Bangs stressed in his work was to not automatically worship someone just because they happened to be a talented singer or whatever; it's a lesson that we should all take to heart, really. The book (Let It Blurt, by Jim DeRogatis) was awesome.

Anyway, I have a cold now, so my New Year's plans include hopefully recovering in time to welcome in 2015 healthier than I am right at this moment. I might also want to look into getting WiFi at my house...or not. Like I said, taking breaks from this online crap is probably healthy, from time to time. Just so long as North Korea doesn't hack me, I'll be fine.

Battle Beyond the Stars

How Star Wars Conquered the Universe is the book that conquered my attention span this past week (well really, the last three or four days), it's an insightful, illuminating, and just plain fun book about everyone's favorite space fantasy (well, those of us with good taste anyway), no matter how many times George Lucas has tried to screw it up. I kid, but really...the prequel trilogy is like a Litmus test for whether I really want to be friends with someone.

I think the sense of letdown that I and many of my ilk (i.e., long-term Star Wars fans) felt at the time of the first prequel (and which in no way was assuaged by the two follow-ups) is born in some ways of our own failure to see the original trilogy for what it was (a kid's movie). Anyone born between 1977 and 1983 who grew up with Luke, Leia, Han and Chewie, didn't know what to make of Anakin, Boring Obi-Wan, and Padme (really, "Padme?" What the hell, George...what the hell?), much less that freak Jar-Jar Binks. I remember when my friends and I left the theater way back in 1999, we tried to console ourselves that it was somehow better than we'd thought. It was cool, I guess, to see "that son of a bitch split in half" (as my cousin Brandon says some esteemed film critic behind him exclaiming when Darth Maul was sliced in two), but two and a half hours of Trade Federation and blockade talk does not a space epic make. I think it's why I responded far more favorably to the recent Star Trek reboot than I ever did to the original series of films: that one had action and whiz-bang special effects (and a pretty decent story, to boot).

And you know who directed that one? J.J. Abrams, who is behind the helm of the new planned Star Wars trilogy. In a time when Peter Jackson might as well call his Hobbit trilogy "The Quest for More Cash," Lucasfilm is now under the banner of the All-Mighty Mouse and being revisited in an attempt to...well, I don't know what (unless you count "nearly killing beloved American treasure Harrison Ford in a freak doorway accident" as motivation for revisiting the galaxy a long time ago and far, far away). I have the uneasy mixture of dread and "please god, don't let it suck" that a lot of my fellow fans surely must feel since 1999 (or 2002, or 2005). I'll probably go see the new Star Wars movies; I'd be a fool not to. But right now, I'm not sure how I'll feel about it.

The prequels have a reputation (justly in some cases, unjustly in others) of being awful. Just plain crap, really, and a lot about the prequel trilogy falls under that label. But for better or worse, Star Wars helped birth the recent trend of multi-movie epics with comic-book heroes or Hobbits from Middle Earth....and I don't mean the classic trilogy, either. As the book points out, the prequels made money; they were virtually critic-proof, and they proved that a story presented in multiple entries didn't need to worry about losing audiences (even if those audiences came to hate the very thing they were seeing). You wouldn't have Lord of the Rings without the prequels, nor would you have Twilight (if you know me, you know which of the two aforementioned properties I favor and which one makes my skin crawl). The prequel trilogy, shoddy and ineffectual as it was in furthering the story of Anakin Skywalker, did a lot for making studios aware of how profitable multi-part epics were.

I'm also less inclined, after reading the book, to think of George Lucas as the Evil Emperor. The book confirmed, for one thing, my theory that the Ewoks were the Viet-Cong (okay, maybe it wasn't my theory alone, but I'd like to think I was one of the first to see shades of Vietnam in the trilogy's depiction of a primitive rebellion standing up to a major technological enterprise). It also reminded me that, at heart, Lucas might never get around to making the small, independent films he set out to do, but he did start out wanting to make movies outside of the Hollywood system, and as much as Star Wars has helped to further that, it was never his intention. He was an artists first and foremost, looking to stay true to his vision. In the wake of Sony caving to North Korea, we need more artists like Lucas (even if they have the annoying habit of going back and adding digital effects that add nothing to the story).

I will always be a Star Wars nerd; it's just part of who I am, ladies. But I do think that some of the aspects of the "Expanded Universe" are just plain silly or not worth my time. I read the Timothy Zahn trilogy back in the day, but subsequent encounters with lesser Star Wars novels reminded me that the movies were great. The books, not so much. Star Wars fandom has certainly gained more cultural cache in recent years; it's okay to be a dork who wants to dress up as Boba Fett, I guess. And I celebrate that, I do. But I hope that J.J. Abrams doesn't screw it up. I really hope so. Because the last thing anyone wants is another Jar-Jar Binks roaming around doing stupid shit.

Well, I *Was* Going to See If Anyone Wanted to Go See "The Interview"

This week saw a triumph of totalitarian fear-mongering over the most sacred right that we as Americans enjoy with such abandon here in the States. Brought to its knees by a ruthless clan of hell-spawned mouth-breathing tyrants, a major entertainment facility bowed to pressure and decided to let said tyrants run rampant on them.


But enough about the Keeping Up with the Kardashians marathons on the E! network. This is more important.


The internet can be an amazing and disgusting thing. It's amazing in that you can connect with people the world over, eschewing the traditional boundaries of borders and geopolitical conflicts to really get to know people a world away. But then they hack one of your country's major movie studios, at the behest of the world's most obvious candidate for "asshole thuggery as form of government," and suddenly you're reminded that the internet is full of trolls. And sometimes these trolls work for North Korea.


Let me say this up front: chances are, The Interview wasn't going to sweep the Oscars next time around. Rogen/Franco productions rarely aspire beyond the level of stoner comedy that is best exemplified by Pineapple Express (a film which, as the years go by, I wonder about: suppose the second half of the movie, after Dale takes a hit of the title weed and then witnesses a real-life hit, was a fever dream of pothead paranoia? It would certainly explain the ratcheting up of violence and cartoonish situations that the film becomes). They're funny in parts (not always all the way through, but likeable enough), and while I still find Seth Rogen's laugh grating I do have a fondness for his persona onscreen. I was likely going to wait for the DVD release, to be honest.


But then...in case you've been living under a rock, The Interview concerns the fictional assassination of a very real figure in global politics (the spoiled fat rich kid from Pee-Wee's Big Adventure...I'm sorry, I mean Kim Jong Un). And perhaps understandably, the North Korean government (based on a "cult of personality" system that contains stories perhaps apocryphal but none the less amusing/horrifying such as the suggestion that state media told the people that their team had won the recent World Cup) was a little upset about this. Not understandably, a group of hackers (widely reported as having been enabled by North Korea to do so) hacked into the system of The Interview's parent studio Sony and had a field day releasing private emails that painted the executives in petty, unflattering lights. But then shit got real: these same hackers (whose choice of acronym as "Guardians of Peace," GOP, couldn't help but make this Obama Liberal chuckle a little) threatened "9/11 style attacks" on movie theaters that showed the movie. And so Sony, who didn't negotiate with terrorists, backed down.


The movie is in limbo as of this writing.


As someone who fancies himself an artist (or perhaps more accurately, an appreciator of other's art), I can't help but think that this chilling effect on the film industry doesn't do much for the idea of America being a land of free speech. After all, campaigns mounted in opposition of something usually have the opposite of the desired effect. And chances are that, had Sony not backed down, The Interview would be judged as a movie, not as a political statement (albeit one that hasn't been made yet). The merits of the movie will forever be lost to time, because even if it does get a wide release it won't be seen just on its own terms. Chaplin made The Great Dictator about Hitler, but he wisely chose to name his Hitler something different (and perhaps in a lesson that the filmmakers behind The Interview could have chosen to heed, didn't kill him off). The film has certain iconic moments that merit its inclusion in any discussion of film history, and it's a brave film for its time and ours. But Chaplin made the film in 1939 and 1940, when the true horrors of the Holocaust weren't known or even enacted yet. He said that if he'd known such facts at the time he wouldn't have made the film, which would be history's loss. It's not a completely successful film (the "Jewish ghetto" screams Hollywood backlot), but enough of it works and enough of it is still relevant to make it something that deserves to be seen.


I thought of Chaplin when the news about The Interview came down, but it's not the only film to have that kind of impact (and safe to say, a movie critical of Hitler while the USA was still on the sidelines didn't escape unscathed from criticism, though I don't think the Nazis ever tried to blow up theaters showing it). Monty Python's Life of Brian and The Last Temptation of Christ both tackled religion, and while I can't speak to the latter film I have seen the former. It's actually a critique of religion's ability to warp the human psyche, to make us all followers of people who often don't merit our devotion. Think of all the charismatic TV preachers in the Eighties who were exposed as money-grubbing sex fiends and you see how prophetic Life of Brian was. Controversy is often a boost to a film or album or book's profile: if you haven't offended anyone, the thinking goes, you're not doing your job.


I don't know if The Interview will ever be fully released. Kim Jong Un has to die sometime, though not likely at the hands of James Franco and Seth Rogen. I don't unilaterally condemn Sony for deciding to do what they did, they had to think about the threat and take it much more seriously than they might have, had the magic phrase "9/11" not entered the mix. It's just a damn shame, is all. Even if the movie was terrible, the marketplace needed to be the decider of that, not some big baby with his chubby finger on the nuclear trigger (oh great, now I've pissed off the North Koreans; I fully expect to be hacked now). Kim Jong Un can go fuck himself, for all I care. Yeah, I said it...please don't hack me!


I wonder what this means for my screenplay in development, Chokin' the Putin (in which a Canadian comedian goes to Russia to strangle Vladimir Putin)

What To Read (When You're Between Semesters) for Fun

You may have noticed that a certain Southern US university has been in the news lately for what can best be described as "the stupidest fucking thing I've personally ever seen privilaged white kids do with too much time on their hands, as well as a frankly offensive view that the African-American community in this country can be reduced to crude stereotypes and it's okay because it's a tradition to do so, and also let's face it these self-involved brats probably think it's hilarious and won't learn a goddam thing about how to be senstive to others because they're programmed from the outset to be jerks what with their 'fraternal' organization which codifies gay panic as 'hey, bros just gotta hang out, dude, who knows what could happen am I right?' and which cover their ass with 'service commitments' which in no way excuse their borderline asinine behavior." But I'm not going to talk about that, because it's Christmas. And Christmas is the season of ignoring idiots who will be running used-car dealerships in twenty years.

No, I'd like to take the time to exult in the fact that, after this week is over, I and my fellow grad students can go back to something I'm sure we've all missed (even those of us who snuck in an occasional George Saunders short-story collection or a critical look at Derrida through cartoons): reading for fun. I already have a few things picked out, but allow me to highlight some works that I think some of my peers should check out, assuming that they have similar reading tastes as I (or they just have time on their hands and nothing in particular picked out). At any rate:

Civilwarland In Bad Decline (George Saunders): Read this when I was supposed to be reading other things, it's absolutely batshit crazy and hilarious and moving all at once.

The Financial Lives of the Poets (Jess Walter): Just finished this one over the weekend, it's the story of a guy down on his luck who tries to become a drug dealer so that he can support his family. I've never seen Breaking Bad, so I don't know if this is "Breaking Bad as comedy" per se, but it's pretty good.

A Fan's Notes (Frederick Exley): Actually, this is one that I read way, way back, I mentioned it in a paper for one of my classes and thought "damn, I'd like to read that again." Hard to describe, really.

The Fortress of Solitude/Dissident Gardens/Motherless Brooklyn (Jonathan Lethem): This was "The Year of Reading Lethem" for me, and these three titles did not disappoint. I ran into the dreaded "wall of self-imposed indifference towards my original topic" when I tried to make a paper topic about the use of music in Fortress, but it's still worth the trip. The other two are similarly beautiful.

The Man in the High Castle (Philip K. Dick): Lethem's always talking about this guy, I found a copy with a hilariously misleading "old timey science-fiction" cover, but it's fantastic overall. Think Pynchon/Vonnegut, minus the sense of humor.

Vineland (Thomas Pynchon): This feels like a dry run for the much more awesome (and soon to be a major motion picture) Inherent Vice, but that's not a bad thing.

True Grit/The Dog of the South/Masters of Atlantis/Norwood/Gringoes (Charles Portis): Really, you can't go wrong (even his "not that great" books are good in parts).

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Haruki Murakami): Mind-bending as always, this is a fantastic treasure of a book.

I would list more, but I'm running low on what else I've read or re-read over the past year that could bear mention here. All as a way of talking about those certain idiots who did some stupid shit and put a certain university in the news. But really, these books are all fantastic ways to kill time during the Christmas break, if you're so inclined.

Semester's End

The regular semester ended last week (i.e., classes meeting during their regular times), and exam week is coming up. Grad students apparently don't do exams (yay!) but they do do papers (boo!). So while an entire library's worth of undergrads surround me, freaking out about which bone connects to the thigh bone or whether Shakespeare meant for The Merchant of Venice to be a satire or taken at face value, I'm working on a text analysis project that so far has delivered nada. So I'm taking a breather to record my thoughts at the official end of my first full semester back in school.

Suffice it to say, it's both been harder and easier than I originally envisioned. I took some good classes this semester, some more challenging than I'd thought. And I discovered something about myself in one of my classes that I never thought would occur, at least not since my undergrad days: I enjoy writing fiction.

Back when I was an undergrad, I took a couple of workshop classes because I thought I could write fiction. Those workshops didn't convey to me the message that I sucked at fiction writing, per se, but they made me realize that it was harder than I was willing to put the effort into at the time, and so my fiction-writing career stalled on the tracks of my own inherent laziness. I was an essay-writing guy, I said (there's probably a word for that, but I'm too lazy to type it up), and my essays would be my route to historical significance as one of the most original thinkers of Western civilization.

Did I mention how much of a pretentious asshole I was back then?

Anyway, before taking a workshop class this semester, purely because I needed a fourth class to fill out my required hours, I thought fiction-writing and I were done. But I started to enjoy the idea of writing fiction, because there's something about it that trumps most non-fiction writing: it can be about whatever the fuck you want it to be. As long as it makes sense (and sometimes not even then: try reading Barry Hannah sometime), it can be good. And something that I didn't really get about workshop my previous run-through in college: it's okay if what you turn in isn't worked out just yet. That's why it's called "workshop," you work on it. The feedback I got for my three stories was encouraging, helpful, and enthusiastic. So they're all to blame when I assault the world with my book of short stories.

Kidding (about the blaming. The book of short stories? That might just become a reality).

I'm signed up for another workshop in the spring, and I'm hoping to work on some stuff over the Christmas break so that, while not being first to volunteer, I can at least be in the second or third week to turn in my first story. Never thought I'd say this again, but I want to write fiction.

Literary theory, however...I recognize it's super-important if you're going to talk about literature and junk. But I have my bullshit detector on at all times when dealing with Derrida, Foucault, etc. That's just how it has to be. I did end up reading Roland Barthes for fun, as well as Walter Benjamin (his name kept cropping up, though we never covered him in class). And I liked being challenged, even if I felt like the challenge sometimes was too challenging.

I'm looking forward to the break, to a chance to read for fun full-time again (I snuck in a few fun-reading things here and there, like someone on a strict diet of fruits and berries might go for the occasional hamburger when no one's looking). One of the books I read when I was supposed to be reading for class was by a friend, Becky Adnot-Haynes. If you haven't bought her debut story collection The Year of Perfect Happiness, do so. Seriously, stop reading this and go to your local bookstore (or if they don't have it, try online) and get it. I can wait...

Okay, so: one semester down, fiction writing a go, reading for fun...oh yes, be sure to have a good holiday season (whatever you celebrate, or even if you celebrate nothing at all). I got stuff to do between now and Friday. And as has often been the case this past semester, that can sneak up on you before you know it.

Oh yeah...how 'bout them Lamecocks, huh? Sorry, I had to represent for my Tigers...:-)

The Elephant In the Room

First off, let me say this: I will never be pulled over by a cop because I'm driving "in the wrong part of town," nor will I ever be followed by security or rent-a-cops through a store because I "look suspicious" based solely upon the color of my skin. I'll never be stopped and asked to get out of my car, while my questions about why I was stopped remain unanswered. I will never, ever, ever know what it's like to be black in America (or Latino, for that matter; they get some of the same treatment from law enforcement that blacks have historically gotten in the past). No amount of books read, movies seen, music listened to, will ever make me understand, really understand, the trials and tribulations of those of color in a society in which they are always "the suspect" when anything goes wrong or is suspected of going wrong. I'm planning on writing my final paper for one of my classes about Arab-Americans in the wake of 9/11, yet I'll never know what it's like to be on the shortlist of "possible terrorist suspects" simply because my name is wrong or my skin is too dark.

So I can't speak to whether Michael Brown was innocent or Darren Wilson was justified, at least not without bringing in a lot of speculation on my part about what happened. I do believe that Brown's name was dragged through the mud because that's just the way the media works: blame the dead victim, if you're uncomfortable questioning the suspect because he's in a position of authority. Look at the Bill Cosby case, the multiple allegations of rape against him. I don't *want* to believe that he did that, but my instinct is that yeah, he probably did. We don't know these people.

But to get back to the Ferguson situation: it's intolerable to me that there won't be a trial. At least in the Trayvon Martin case, there was a trial. Anytime someone without a gun runs up against someone with a gun and the unarmed person ends up dead, there should be questions asked. Sometimes it's not even racially motivated, sometimes it's just one person with a gun who has to feel like he has the cojones to use it. I have family members who fetishize weapons, who seem to be attached to their guns (and not their guns to them). I feel sorry for them, really.

We live in a country where race is almost always a factor; that's just a fact. If Wilson had been black, or Brown white, would we have seen the level of outrage first at the murder, and then at the grand jury results? Probably not. Is Wilson a racist? There's no evidence of that as far as I know, though of course it could easily come out tomorrow that he's a Klansman or something equally abhorrent. Was Brown guilty of theft, as has been argued by those who seem to suggest, with their words, that he "had it coming?" I don't know, though I suspect that, if the video leaked to the media from the store where this all started is legit, he very well may have been. Does that justify shooting someone until they are dead? I think it's likely that Brown might very well have been the badass that Wilson paints him as, slamming doors and reaching for guns and trying to tackle Wilson instead of running away. Myths arise around incidents like this, until the truth gets lost. What we do know for sure is this: Michael Brown is dead, Darren Wilson is alive. And the people who treat this like "team Darren Wilson" or "team Michael Brown" are sick.

Nobody wins when something like this happens; a grand jury indictment wouldn't have brought Michael Brown back any more than the acquittal of Zimmerman brought Martin back. We discussed a book in one of my classes this past week, arguing whether survivors of the Holocaust can really be "witnesses" because they didn't go through the ultimate point of the camps (i.e., the gas chambers). Michael Brown can't speak for what happened, and I doubt Darren Wilson will ever really tell the truth; he has to tell a version of it (a "narrative," which has become an over-used word outside of literary circles of late) that he can live with, in which Brown is "strong like Hulk Hogan" and he's just the little man, the Barney Fife of the situation, only with a gun. I hope to God I never face a situation like that (odds are I won't be armed, considering that I don't own a gun and have no desire to own one). Like George Zimmerman, Darren Wilson may be out of jail, but he'll never be free. Neither will the Brown family.

Riots, marches, these are to be expected, and I applaud the peaceful ones while I find the amount of looting done by those taking advantage of the uproar heartbreaking. I understand the frustration and anger, though. A lot of people who put on the badge of police officer, whether in big cities or small towns, do so because they genuinely want to serve and protect. But there are those who use it as an excuse to back up their prejudices with a badge and the authority granted them by the pistol on their hip. We have a lot of wannabe John Waynes running around, basically, and they are more of a threat than the unarmed black teens they tend to gun down. When you shoot first and ask questions later, you don't make time for the possibility that you're wrong. Why in the world didn't Wilson use a taser instead? I have no idea if he had one on him or not, but that would've been the best solution all around. Bullet wounds have a nasty habit of being permanent.

So that's my take, anyway, and I hope that people remember (but I doubt they will) that this story all started with two people on a small-town road somewhere, one armed and the other one not. One person didn't get to walk away from this, nor give exclusive interviews. One person didn't get to tell his side of the story to the grand jury, to be cross-examined (assuming that Wilson did, which seems unlikely with all the stuff we've learned about the prosecutor's office in that part of Missouri). One person won't be charged with the robbery he allegedly committed, nor the possible "assaulting a police officer" charge he might have faced (and could very well have been guilty of, on both accounts). One person died in the streets of Ferguson that day, the person who didn't have a gun.

Think about that before you open your mouth about how Michael Brown "deserved" what he got.

Burning Down the House (Writing Exercise from Fiction Class)

(This was a writing exercise for my Fiction Workshop class last month, we had to pick three things from a list. One was a character type, the next was a setting, and the third was an object. I picked a deaf arsonist, a certain Clemson landmark on fire, and an ice swan wedding sculpture. And I was listening to Talking Heads a lot around that time, so..."Burning Down the House")

   I could see Tillman Hall burning from the highway, and I parked right outside the building because I had a sinking feeling that I knew who was behind it. Sure enough, Helen Keller was running around in the inside, lit match in hand, setting fire to the curtains in the windows as I entered. Helen, blind, deaf, and supposedly dead for at least sixty years, was very much alive and quite the firebug now. She was high on my list of suspects to bring in, along with Nazi war criminals in Argentina and citizens of Atlantis who roamed the world looking for something decent to eat. Keller had been my collar for at least two suspicious arsons, though her case was always thrown out whenever her attorney pulled up Keller’s page on Wikipedia and showed the jury that, technically, her client was dead and thus couldn’t have been “the Firestarter of Des Moines,” among other aliases.

  Keller, sensing my presence, tackled me and threw me to the floor. She moved her fingers over my mouth, indicating that I should talk. “We need to get out of here, Helen,” I said. She nodded, and let me off the floor. She was built like an NFL linebacker in her extreme old age.

 “Water!” she cried out, and at first I thought she meant to fetch a water hose, to put out the fire she’d started. But I followed her outstretched arm with my eyes until I hit upon an ice sculpture, of a swan. I didn’t have time to figure out what an ice swan was doing in Tillman, much less why Helen had brought it in here (or if she’d come across it while setting the hall on fire). I grabbed her hand to my mouth, said “Ok,” and went to pick up the swan, which looked pretty translucent at this point. It had been sweating, however, and somehow it was heavier than it might have been before the flames licked at it. It slipped from my grasp and crashed to the floor.

 Helen may have been deaf and blind, but she was no fool. Her dead eyes turned on me with a fierceness I’d only beholden once before, when I collared Martin Bormann in Buenos Aires with a briefcase full of bratwurst, bound for Berlin by way of Burbank, Boston, and Barcelona. I went to Helen, nudging her to follow me out of the now engulfed building. But she was having none of it; she had sensed that my butterfingers rendered the ice swan kaput, and she was pissed.

 “Helen,” I yelled, though of course she was deaf, “we need to leave now. I’m sorry about the swan, but we don’t leave now, we will die.”

 She finally nodded, eyes losing their fierceness as a tear trickled down from her eye. I threw the matchbox into the flames, Helen was in enough trouble without this arson added to her litany. Like I said, she was supposed to have died decades earlier; historians the world over had an axe to grind about her supposed immortality and what it meant in the existential crisis that was modern life. Besides, she had known “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman personally, and he was a jackass. So we exited through the front, Helen convincing as an ancient secretary with smoke-filled lungs, and I escorted her to my Dodge Dart. We drove off before the campus police could question us. I drove to the airport, figuring that if Buenos Aires had been good enough for Martin Bormann, it was good enough for Helen Keller. Some sunshine and salsa dancing would do her a world of good.

The Pynchon Principle

Recently, in between bouts of class-assigned reading, I made time for Thomas Pynchon's 1990 work Vineland, finishing it last week while enjoying my oh-so-brief Fall Break (I may have stated in my last post that said break was a week-long affair. That was wishful thinking). I've been big on Pynchon for years, and I always meant to get around to Vineland (indeed, this was probably the third time I'd attempted to read it, and on the second time I purchased a copy). Indeed, it and Tom Wolfe's The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby were the last two books I purchased from the now-defunct McClure's Bookshop in downtown Clemson.

Vineland feels to me like a dry run for Inherent Vice (2009, and soon to be a major motion picture). It's good on its own merits (if not great), but it feels like something that Pynchon returned to for Vice with much greater returns on the reader's investment. Then again, when I read Vice last year, I was having a crappy summer, and I felt like the book was a godsend to what ailed me. So I might have a profoundly deeper attachment to it than I ever will to Vineland. Inherent Vice is Pynchon's Rubber Soul, to use the Beatles as an analogy; in turn, Vineland is Help!: The Soundtrack to the Major Motion Picture.

Both books deal with the ramifications of the Sixties counterculture, and what was wrought by the rising tide of conservatism in the wake of such acts as burning draft cards, protesting the Vietnam War, and Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. Funny how relevant such thoughts seem, what with the recent election results (if you're a Democrat like me, this past Tuesday was like having the "Darth Vader theme" on repeat in your mental iPod as you watched the election results). I've long considered Richard Nixon our most fascinating president, and not in a good way (he's the mirror image of "good old" Ronald Reagan, whose chief personality trait was Not Being Nixon). Nixon managed to win the presidency (twice!) by appealing to our baser instincts, our more unrestrained fears; Pynchon quite naturally (as someone whose speciality is humor-tinged paranoia) returns to the well of the Nixon years for material, at least in these two books (Bleeding Edge marks his entrance into the Bush Era, positioning 9/11 as the result perhaps of a videogame-esque conspiracy). Nixon is a tired punchline at this point for us liberals, as Watergate pretty much did him in (though it's chilling to consider that the whole scandal broke in June of 1972, and Nixon was still re-elected by an overwhelming majority).

But Pynchon is, in many ways, the child of the counterculture. He was born in 1937, so he's a little old for the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the Sixties, but he managed to make it his own with The Crying of Lot 49. In 1973, he brought to the world Gravity's Rainbow, a book nominally about the end of the Second World War which, quite honestly, I find hard to categorize. It's just so batshit insane that reading it (and liking it) made me feel like I was joining an exclusive club. I didn't get all of it, but it felt like that was okay; the point was just to go on the ride.

I think that's what brings me back to Pynchon every few years, makes me seek out one of his books that I haven't read yet (a list which is starting to shrink in favor of the ones I have). I don't honestly recall when I first realized that Pynchon was around, and a writer I might want to read. I know that I picked up V. once from the library when I was a teenager, but I didn't get too far into it (I'd be on the flip side of thirty before I finally got around to it). Mason & Dixon came out when I was in high school, and I remember checking it out a few times (but only getting so far before feeling like the sheer length of the book stood against me in my efforts to read it); I have a hard-to-find-apparently paperback copy that I bought recently at a used book sale, I might save that for December. Gravity's Rainbow I remember buying at the old Clemson Newstand back in the day, The Crying of Lot 49 was probably a thrift-store buy that I got but didn't read until it came up on the reading list for my 20th Century Lit survey course (always nice when it works out like that, you don't have to buy a copy because you already had it), and I tackled Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge last year or so. With Vineland under my belt (and M&D purchased, if not read), that leaves Against the Day and Slow Learner (a collection of his short, early fiction).

The question "who is your favorite author?" came up in my Fiction Workshop class recently, and I opined that, right now anyway, it's Lethem. And it is, for sure. But favorite writers are in some ways like favorite musicians or actors; the list is always changing, depending on the older you get (and perhaps the more sophisticated your tastes are, or just a matter of losing sight of whatever it was that made you like that author in the first place). I've read a lot more authors over the past ten years than I'd have thought I would, in terms of those whose existence was a mystery to me until I began to look beyond the usual favorites. I think it's a process of maturation to cast away some of your favorites in anything because they either don't speak to you anymore or you've just outgrown them (and realize how ridiculous you look in Hammer pants...not that I ever wore Hammer pants, that's just an example). Thomas Pynchon is an author to whom I return after years at a time, so it might be a while before I tackle Mason & Dixon or Against the Day (both of which are heavyweights, literally). But I'll tackle them, by goodness. Pynchon looks at paranoia with a demented sense of humor, and I think we could all use something like that right about now. I'm just thrilled/nervous about the Inherent Vice film, I can't wait to see it and I'm terrified that it's gonna suck. But such is the bargain we strike with anything we care about artistically.

Reading, Writing, Resting

The two sweetest words in the life of any college student, other than "spring break": Fall Break.

It's right around the corner, and I for one am looking forward to it. I'm also shocked as hell at how quickly the semester has flown by. I mean, we come back from fall break next week and it's maybe three more weeks of classes. Where did my semester go?

Time is sneaky like that, and so in the interest of taking some stock of it, let me advise any fellow grad students of the following: Mountain Dew Code Red and the cable company's music channel option of "all jazz all the time" is fantastic for getting a paper that you didn't realize was due on Monday typed up on Saturday night. But it can lead to an awfully long time to get to bed.

I speak from recent (last night) experience...

But (knock on wood) I got it done, and I'm up on most of my reading for this week before the break (got a couple of pages left in one book, but I should be able to bang it out before Wednesday) and my exhaustion is that of a man who has earned it by...sitting in one place and reading a lot?

I have to admit, with my previous work experience, "sit here and read this article, book, website, what have you" actually sounded pretty awesome. Like a lot of things that sounded awesome at the time, it's proven to be more complicated, but I'm stressed in a good way. Usually when I'm stressed, it's been over work (and how futile my experience of it at certain jobs has been) or girls (how futile my experience at wooing them has been). But this is a good kind of stress, I think. I'm actually being required to use that thing that's between my ears, covered by a thin (but not too thin) layer of skin and hair. I'm blanking on what it's called, actually, but it starts with a letter...jeez, I should really plan these things out before hitting the "publish" option, but what are ya gonna do?

After last night's binge of Code Red and jazz, I am worse for wear today, though I hope in a good way. I do not plan to imbibe as much Code Red as I did last night (if indeed at all) and I might avoid jazz music for a while, as it can both get me energized or slow me down (and if I'm totally honest, always make me feel like I'm in a Woody Allen film). I spend the bulk of my time at home today, reading Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. It feels like a dry run for Inherent Vice, and actually suffers a little by comparison, but it's not bad in and of itself, and I look forward to possibly finishing it later tonight, after checking to make sure the paper I wrote last night is legible. Not that that's ever stopped me from turning in something before.

Anyway, I look forward to the oh-so-brief vacation period that is fall break (unless they rescind it for some reason), and I don't honestly know what I'll be doing during that week, other than maybe (hopefully) getting ahead of some end-of-the-semester assignments and also just relaxing. I'll probably steer clear of any Code Red, however. That shit will kill you...

Baseball Been Very, Very Good to Me

This is the NFL season in which I have not watched a single game all the way through (and as a Giants fan, I think I saved myself some grief in avoiding the shutout they suffered against the Eagles last week). I made this moral stand because Roger Goodell is a poopy-head, but also because I have come to question the morality and ethics of a sport in which a man like Ray Rice can be seen beating his significant other and this somehow qualifies as only meriting a two-game suspension (yeah, I know he's on the "do not call" list now, but if not for the uproar he would still be looking at a chance to come back to his team ASAP). So as a longtime sports fan who must find *something* in which to invest his time, I turn to that old stand-by, minor-league hockey.

I kid...actually, my first love when it comes to sports was baseball. Like a lot of first loves, I moved on a while ago, on to other loves (basketball, football, golf...no, not that last one, that will never happen). But I remember baseball fondly, and I turn to it now because, goddam it, there is nothing wrong with it.

"Ahem," I hear you say, "how soon you forget the steroids era, Barry Bonds, and so on?" And you're right: I'm a huge hypocrite. But at least with baseball, I know nothing is left that could shock me, really.

When I got into baseball, it was at a time in my youth when I could still hold to the tenet of every young sports fan: these guys are heroes. Nowadays, of course, I know instinctually that this isn't the case (even though my heart wants it to be so, when I get invested in a team or a player). But disillusionment with the game of baseball didn't kill my love for it. Yes, Ty Cobb was a racist asshole, but most of his records have been broken now. Yes, baseball was ignorant in segregating itself from black players who had to make their own way in the Negro Leagues, but that's why Jackie Robinson is the most important baseball player ever (if not the most important athlete ever). Baseball is a reflection of America's sins as much as its saving graces, but one of the sports' saving graces is that it can contain such seeming contradictions as Cobb and Robinson within its collective history and not implode.

Baseball also lends itself well, perhaps too well, to poetry. Literature about baseball is hard to beat (the closest any sport comes to matching baseball for pure lyric beauty, in my opinion, is basketball; football, based on the books I've read, is third, though how far back or close depends on the author). Baseball is lyrical, as anyone who's read anything from a cheap Fifties-era bio of Willie Mays aimed at children or W. P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe (the basis for Field of Dreams) could tell you (and that would be me, specifically). It lends itself much better to the written art, because it combines the drama of the individual with the drama of the collective team effort. Football is more martial, more military: when George Carlin died, Sports Center ran his monologue about football versus baseball and completely missed the point (Carlin was praising baseball, and damning football). Football is perfect if you're using metaphors about war; baseball is more peaceful, more pastoral. And as anyone who's studied pastoral poetry can tell you, the poets who wrote about the beauty of the country were poseurs, dandified city-dwellers who faked it.

Baseball has never been, nor ever will be, perfect; I saw Field of Dreams last night on TV and, while I appreciate James Earl Jones' soliloquey to it, I'm calling bullshit on the part about baseball representing what we could be again if we only just tried. It's more complicated than that, though of course it's deceptively simple. Baseball has seen its fair share of issues (there's that whole racial-discrimination thing I mentioned at the top, for starters, but also cheating, steroids, domestic abuse, drug abuse, booze and so on), but at its core it's a beautiful thing to behold. Yes, the pace is glacial at times, and yes, the element of human error can cost a game (I'm not sure how I feel about instant replay being used; I admit it's useful, but do we really want to eliminate human error from the game?). I have complicated feelings about it, but I've already been through the wringer with baseball; the Ray Rice thing is my trial by fire with the NFL, and so far they're losing me. I don't know that I'll ever really look at football with quite the same amount of affection: if Jameis Winston goes to any team that I care about, the odds are I'll be doing this self-imposed football ban for quite a while. But I know baseball is fucked-up, at least. I'm comfortable with the contradictions, for now (barring something on the same level happening with MLB). Baseball and basketball in particular translate well to the written and cinematic medium; that's why you'll never see a football Field of Dreams or even Major League. Football may be exciting, but I wonder if it's too much so. Baseball's just about my speed now. Too bad I came to this realization right as the World Series is about to be played, followed by months of off-season. But like baseball, I never said I was perfect.

Putting Away Childish Things?

I turned thirty-five this past week, so I guess technically I'm a little older than I was before my birthday, but I don't feel it yet. I had a mild scare when, getting on top of my bed last night to rest and get some reading done while having the TV on for mindless white noise in the background, I felt a pain in the upper part of my left leg, but that's why God created Aleve. Plus, I've had bad legs, a bad back, a bad neck, bad hair, bad skin, bad eyes, and bad everything else for a long, long time.

The thing about getting older is, you're supposed to put away childish things. But as I get deeper into the concept of being a "graduate student," especially one in a field like English, I wonder if that's wise advice. In a sense, childish stuff is *all* we deal with, and I'm not just talking about the children's lit majors.

We deal in a world of make-believe, unlike historians or scientists. We contribute ideas more than things (unlike engineers), and we won't save lives with our otherwise invaluable insights into the themes of love and women's rights in Jane Austen or some other such research. Nobody dies if we screw up the interpretation of Gravity's Rainbow, in other words.

I have been a reader far longer than I can remember, and I take it for granted that when I open a book, I'm going to forget that what I'm reading is just words, just symbols, arranged on a page in order to make coherent thoughts (or in the case of William S. Burroughs, fucked-up junkie delusions). No, I get carried away to East Egg and West Egg, aboard the Pequod or in a beat-up car driving across the country and into Mexico and beyond, or whatever book I find myself in (that last one was The Dog of the South by Charles Portis, by the by). I remember reading the book How To Read Literature Like a Professor, which pointed out this fact to me, which should have been screamingly obvious, but it's still worth considering. True, a similar process can occur with film (even if the screen is miniscule, you can still get caught up in what's going on) or with music. Both of those fall under the rubric "the humanities," which is kinda what I do now. I'm a humanist in training. I'm all for humans, you could say.

"The life of the mind" is a phrase Barton Fink uses in the movie named for him to describe what he does (in the case of the movie, trying to write a script for a wrestling movie when he's more well known for social dramas about immigrant families in the urban tenements far from the eye of Hollywood), and it's used in the film to show how cut-off Barton is from his fellow human beings, because he's an "intellectual." We have a long history in this country of dismissing and holding suspect our self-professed intellectuals, as well we should. But it's important to point out, in the recent drive to promote the sciences and other more "practical" majors in colleges and universities, that art should be an essential component of anyone's education. I guess I'm going into that good fight for the integrity of the arts, those "childish things" that we use to define us. Putting them away? Nah, I'm just getting started. One of the things I love is when I think I've read/seen/heard it all and I get proven wrong. I look forward to getting proven wrong a lot over the course of my time in grad school. We might not save the world with our work, but we sure will make it a lot more interesting (I hope, anyway).

Desert Island Discs: "More Songs About Buildings and Food" (Talking Heads)

I've spent the better part of today reading a book called "Marooned: Desert Island Discs," which is a sequel in spirit to an earlier collection of "Desert Island Discs" edited by Greil Marcus (who provides the forward for this collection), which came out in 1979. The newer collection dates from 2007, and quite frankly it includes a lot of music I'm not familiar with, at least so far (I have heard of My Bloody Valentine, even though I'm not familiar with them all that much). As is often the case when reading something like this, I started to think about what I might pick to be stuck with on a desert island (assuming there was a working soundsystem or my iPod was charged up and incapable of running out of power, at least until I was rescued). I guess I gave away my pick in the post title, but first a word about contenders:

The Modern Lovers, Precise Modern Lovers Order: this is a collection of two concerts done by the original Moder Lovers line-up (Jonathan Richman, Jerry Harrison, plus a couple of other guys) that I picked up because it boasted a live cover of the Velvet Underground's "Foggy Notion." It's a fantastic record, front to back, and "A Plea for Tenderness" is probably my favorite (though the live version of "Roadrunner" is no slouch).

The Velvet Underground, Loaded: speaking of the Velvets, the double-disc reissue of their final album with Lou Reed is a must-have. You've got "Sweet Jane," "Rock and Roll," "Oh Sweet Nuthin'," "Lonesome Cowboy Bill" (okay, it may just be me that likes that song) and so many others.

Joy Division, Substance: I wish I had the moment back when, arrogant because I'd recently bought the Heart and Soul boxset, I decided "nah, I don't need this anymore" and sold it for some extra cash. Any disc that has "Transmission," "Digital," and "Love Will Tear Us Apart" (plus the only live recording of JD performing "Ceremony") is a must. Stupid me, selling it because I didn't think (running theme throughout my life).

The Who, Sell Out: nothing about this album should work (a bunch of songs stringed together with fake ads for products, all thumbing their nose at the idea of rock music being "art" by boiling it down as simple slogans, etc.), but it does. This was the first Who album that made me love the Who.

All fine choices, and I could go on (and trust me, it's my blog; I could do so), but in the interest of time, let me go ahead and explain my pick: Talking Heads, More Songs About Buildings and Food.

One of the requirements I'd have to have for an album that I was forced to listen to for the rest of my life (assuming the boat never does track me down) is mystery, or at least "non-familiarity," and as much as I love some of the other albums listed, I know them too well. I know Loaded has quite a few Doug Yule lead vocals; I know the expanded version of Sell Out includes one of Roger Daltrey's few songwriting attempts within the Who (where Pete Townshend did most of the work in songwriting). But I don't know More Songs as well as I'd like to. That's because, for a brief time, it stopped my fandom of Talking Heads in its tracks.

I bought Talking Heads 77 (red cover, only broken up by the title in green letters: harder to think of a less appetizing color scheme besides Never Mind the Bollocks' green on pink) and loved it instantly. It's such a non-punk "punk" album: there are songs about psycho killers, government employees, books to read, etc., which all seem outside the normal range of punk-rock topics (at least as handed down through the ages), but it's a fucking masterpiece of its time. The back cover features the band, looking as normal as possible (in fact, they look almost like the first couple of batches of nubile camp counselers who get chopped up in the Friday the 13th movies, down to Tina Weymouth being "the Final Girl" after Jerry Harrison and Chris Frantz have been dispatched, with David Byrne being the only suspect because he does, after all, sing lead on "Psycho Killer"). More Songs has the now-iconic image of the band reproduced in blocks, their forms distinctly human and yet not. It's my nominee for the case of an album's art being better than the music (a runner-up: Sgt. Pepper. Yes, it changed music when it came out, but saying it's the Beatles ' best album is wrong on so many levels).

That's because, when I got the album and started playing it...meh. I mean, "Take Me to the River" is easily one of the top ten best cover songs of all time (and it led me, years later, to get my hands on an Al Green best-of), but a lot of the album feels iffy. It's the first go-around for the partnership between the band and Brian Eno, and compared to the other fruits of that collaberation (Fear of Music, Remain in Light, and the Byrne/Eno side project My Life In the Bush of Ghosts), it doesn't have the same force, the same appeal. There are some great songs on there ("I'm Not In Love," "Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town," the mild-hint-of-lesbianism-or-just-frustration-with-men "The Girls Want to Be With the Girls"), but the overall feel of the album doesn't leave you with a satisfied grin, like the first album did. At least it didn't for me, not for a long, long time.

It took me a while to embrace the Heads (who had been part of my Eighties childhood: "Burning Down the House" was etched into my psyche thanks to music television long before I knew what "music videos" were). I picked up the 2005 "best of," which is honestly worthy of the title, and that led to Fear of Music, Remain in Light, and even My Life In the Bush of Ghosts. Talking Heads are now stuck in my record collection, no matter what. But through it all, I've rarely revisited More Songs. I have the feeling if, confined to a desert island for the rest of my natural days, I could probably revisit it to death (trust me, any work of music gets old if you hear it enough), but maybe before I'd worn out the grooves of "Take Me to the River," I'd end up appreciating the album more than I do now. One thing about music, it gets stuck in your head; I have no doubt I've got enough up there to recall it on my mental iPod, whether I want to hear it or not. But More Songs About Buildings and Food is an exception and, as of yet, one that I've not visited with in years. Maybe if I had no other option, I'd give it a chance.

They're Not Role Models

Unless you've been living under a rock recently, no doubt you're aware that the NFL is in a bit of a downward tailspin into the deck of its own collective hubris. The Ray Rice incident (as well as the Adrian Peterson incident, and other high-profile cases of "athletes behaving badly) has done much to undercut the rule of Roger "I will get this right" Goodell, and that's a good thing. I am no fan of uncontested authority, and ole Rog has gotten by with far too much of it over the years. Down with the bastards.

But it brings up something that I think needs more addressing: the worship we afford sports performers, and why that adulation might be (hell, almost always is) misplaced.

Being an athlete is different than being an entertainer for a living (though some atheletes embrace both aspects). Sports are ephemeral, fleeting; a touchdown catch or a home run is over before you can say much of anything about it (nice try, Joe Buck), and no amount of highlights on Sports Center will make up for the obvious "well, that was nice but it's over now" aspect of any game. In art, the comparable examples are live theatrical or musical performances, or "performance art" like the kind Yoko Ono or Andy Kaufman performed: videotape or digital media might record it, but it's always at a degree or two removed from the actual moment of conception and execution.

So when we see Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant dunk a ball or make an amazing shot, we tend to think this tells us something about who they are, and that's not fair to them or to us. Talent does not always mean character (Jordan is notoriously competitive, and rumors about why he really left basketball to play baseball are rife with suggestions that it was to avoid a possible suspension for gambling; Kobe's just a hyper-egotistical dick, in many accounts). Charles Barkley famously said that he didn't want to be a role model. Maybe we should take him and all the others up on that.

This is not to say that we shouldn't admire their work on the field of play. Another corallary to artists: people, individuals, can be incredibly fucked-up and still do great things in their chosen profession. The idea of the artist struggling with his or her demons is fuel for great art, be it Lou Reed or Lord Byron. Art is a way to explore what tortures someone inside, to expose it to the light and connect with others because of it. Athletes, on the other hand, are supposed to be professionally numb to real life: they're told to "leave it off the field" if they're going through incredible emotional pain, to play through it. Sports can and should be informed by artistry, but it doesn't require that someone come from the wrong side of the tracks and have everything in the world against them. Some of the most painful and honest memoirs I've ever read were sports memoirs, which are usually just an attempt to cash in on their well-known names (Jerry West and Dr. J, for instance, write about how their talent and fame *didn't* solve all their problems, not by a long shot). It's not that we can't or shouldn't admire someone for what they do in their chosen profession; I just wonder if we need to keep reminding ourselves that what a person does, no matter how talented they are at it, doesn't mean that's who they *are*.

In the long run, hero worship is too ingrained in our collective DNA to be overturned overnight, or even within a generation or two. We'll always have that need for someone, be they an artist on canvas or with the written word or with a jump shot, that we can look up to, but let's try and make it more about the talent than the person. Because the person might not be someone that we want to emulate, when they're not performing.

Also, My Back Is Killing Me

Today, September 25, marks a month since I drove to the campus of my former university, ready to begin a career as a newly-minted "graduate student" and hopefully take my place among the great scholars who have contributed to intelligent discussions of Shakespeare, Milton, and Michael Bay. Granted, a month ago it was just orientation (classes started the next week), but I figure it's worth marking the occasion.

I started off sick to my stomach as I walked to the building, and for the first couple of weeks I seriously questioned what the hell I thought I was doing. I'd forgotten how nerve-wracking it can be to find yourself in a new situation, friendless and anonymous until the first awkward movements towards getting to know your peers (classmates or co-workers) are over and you can get down to the nitty-gritty of mocking things together (like, in my classmates' case, certain dead French philosophers who may or may not have been full of shit). It had been four years at my previous place of employment, four long years where I'd built up a certain amount of goodwill and simple "being-stuck-together-ness" with my work friends, and now that was gone (though I still try to keep in touch via Facebook, it's just not the same).

A month in, and I can say this: it's a lot more challenging than I thought it'd be, but in a good way. I likely will never read Derrida for fun (hell, I don't think Derrida read Derrida for fun), but I did get around to reading Roland Barthes' Mythologies and I think I understood most of it. I'm a month in and feeling like, if I don't end up being the world's best grad student or anything ridiculous like that, I can at least aim for doing good enough to land some kind of rewarding job after.

I have been wrapped up in grad school, almost to the point of forgetting that there's other things beside it. I have classes Monday through Wednesday, at night, and once I swing by Taco Bell I'm heading home (though I might cut back on the TB; last night I had a dream where an alligator bit off my right arm, or maybe I dreamed that I was writing a short story where that happened to the main character; paging Dr. Freud!). I still try to read for fun, though nothing that distracts me for too long from my main objective of Trying to Read Foucault And Understand Him (almost a lost cause). I kinda wonder if I'm getting late-in-life ADD, because I like to read with the TV at home but sometimes it hurts more than it helps. Which is why, a lot of times, I head to the on-campus library to get bulk reading done (your lit theory, your short story from a classmate in Fiction class, etc.). My grandmother said something yesterday about how I can't spend my whole life reading; she doesn't know how appealing that sounds some days.

At any rate, I like what I'm doing, it's a lot more responsibility than I've had for four years or so. I wouldn't mind making the dean's list, but right now I'm just trying my best. You do the best with what you got, so what I got right now is being put to use. Also, my back is killing me, because my Lit Theory book could flatten a small country off the face of the earth. But then I've had back problems for years.

Updating the Canon With More Dead (and Not-Dead) White Guys

In a class discussion last night, we sat around debating the merits of the traditional "canon" of writers one should study in college, because for one thing Shakespeare has been done to death and also because the canon seems to lean disproportionately towards "dead white guys," mostly pre-WWII (so you got your Homer, your Hemingway, and your whatever anonymous asshole who wrote Beowulf). I was thinking afterwards about how we could update the canon not just to include more multicultural aspects (Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, just to name three that I encountered in undergrad classes not strictly devoted to the "Western literary canon") but also more relevant Dead White Guys, because if I have to hear one more time about Grendel I'll jump off a castle parapet (though it did inspire John Gardner's Grendel, which is fucking excellent by the way). So let's start with my picks for the Recently Dead (i.e. post-1945) White Guys, and then I'll throw in some Still-Alive (or Not-Dead) White Guys for balance (because I want to avoid the suggestion that we English majors are necrophiliacs).

Recently Dead White Guys

Vonnegut springs to mind immediately, you could have an entire class devoted to him (and should; I've only read about six or seven of his books but my god, what books!). Never dull, always engaging, and really challenging your perceptions (but not in quite the same shrill way as a contemporary, Gore Vidal).

David Foster Wallace, whose non-fiction I'm more familiar with (though I swear, I'll get around to Infinite Jest eventually).

Walker Percy is one of my personal favorites, I'm sure he's covered in Southern Lit classes but I think it's time to add him to the "essential reads" list.

Hunter S. Thompson and George Plimpton - whoa there, I can hear you saying, weren't those two journalists? Well, yes (though HST's flights of drug-induced fancy could be said to straddle the border between fiction and non-fiction), but they showed that "literature" needn't be confined to such distinctions. Plus, they're really fucking good at what they do (I'd throw in Tom Wolfe, except that he's very much alive, and responsible for some doorstop-length novels that, like his namesake from earlier in the twentieth century, I've personally found unreadable).

It pains me to include Kerouac, but if you're going to have Burroughs and Ginsberg (especially in a Beats-heavy course), you gotta have him and his On the Road. Read it when you're in your twenties, you'll love it. Thirties? Not so much.

Not-Dead White Guys

Now, the fun part for me is in leading with Jonathan Lethem, who is currently my "author that I bore people by telling them how good he is." But really, he's that good: The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn will be required reading for college courses in fifty years, assuming a massive asteroid hasn't destroyed us all.

Thomas Pynchon, since the death of J.D. Salinger, has become the "reclusive writer in residence" for American letters, and he's still churning out interesting, dynamic material. Like Vonnegut, I think a course could be devoted to him alone. I'd like to teach that course, come to think of it (though I still need to tackle Mason & Dixon, Against the Day, Vineland, and Slow Learner).

Charles Portis is a fucking master of the written word, I read True Grit in one sitting. Some of his other books aren't quite up to that level, but The Dog of the South is closest. Do yourself a favor and read either of those, now.

Jonathan Franzen I respect more than I like, I read The Corrections with some "professional jealousy" (back then I was still thinking about tackling the Great American Novel), but Freedom was quite beautiful. He's pretentious as hell and an asshole to boot, but you don't have to like your authors on a personal level in order to read their work.

Chuck Klosterman has written some fiction, yes, but I'm more interested in his non-fiction. Again, a guy primarily known for non-fiction should get in because he's that fucking good. In my imaginary canon, it's a tie between him and Greil Marcus in the "writing about music" wing, and if I had to choose one...sorry, Greil.

Michael Chabon is big in my book, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is one of the books that restored my faith in fiction. A must-read, even if he doesn't make it in for covering comic books and music in his novels.

Those are the Dead White Guys (and Not-Dead White Guys) I came up with, they don't have to elbow out the Even Deader White Guys or any Non-White Guys already in the canon (though I think we can all agree that Lord of the Flies should be put out of its misery). I'm not in charge and I don't get to pick, but I do get to daydream when I should be working on actual grad-school stuff.

McClure's Bookshop

A while back, I did a blog post about my favorite bookstores, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t mention any by name (because I wanted to be able to go back to those places without running the risk that something I may have said about any of them, however innocent or not meant as critical, might be perceived as such. Yelp and other online resources of rating places of business aside, I think we run the risk of doing so much online critiquing that we forget the very human faces behind the counter, the ones who didn’t know that we’d been judging them all along so that we could tell people later to go there or not go there). I’m going to mention one by name now, specifically because I learned that they’re closing soon. That place is McClure’s Bookstore, in downtown Clemson.

I went in on Saturday, after a less-than-satisfactory trip to the library, just on a whim (I believe the object of my perusal was the possibility of a Philip Larkin poetry collection being there. I’ve been reading James Wolcott’s “Critical Mass,” which sparked my interest in Larkin. Books have a funny way of leading you to other books like that). When I saw the sign on the door saying that McClure’s would be closing on October 18, I felt awful. It was a bit like a death in the family, albeit a slow and prolonged one, during which you were encouraged to rummage through the soon-to-be-departed loved one’s belongings. Everything was on sale, marked down considerably from its normal price. I picked up four books, paid what would be the usual cost of two together (it’s a used bookstore, so most of their inventory is in the four- to five-dollar range), and opined rather awkwardly that the place had been something of a second home for me. I’m sure the lady behind the counter (whose job would be kaput in a little over a month) felt it even more than I could imagine; I remember when the Winn-Dixie in West Union was shutting its doors in 2005, I jumped ship to the Ingles across the street and seeing the shelves of my former workplace decimated by bargain shoppers in W-D’s last days. I’ll never forget the remorse I felt when the Circuit City in Anderson was closing and I went by to be a bit of a vulture, looking to pick up CDs or DVDs on the cheap. The sight of those employees who were still there, their mixture of grudging acceptance of their fate and some ill-will towards the bastards hassling them over the price of a phone charger, it put me off the whole endeavor, and I left without making a purchase.

A bookstore is a refuge for me, always has been. I don’t remember when I first heard about McClure’s, or when it opened, or my first visit, but I have been there and often since at least the time I got my undergrad degree. I couldn’t list all the books I’ve bought there over the years, some read and loved and kept, others unread and donated elsewhere or read, appreciated, but not really for me and so falling into someone else’s hands through borrowing or donation (I could probably pick out the ones I donated to my local library, as most of them ended up on the hands of the “Friends of the Library,” and I see them in the book sale they hold every month). If anything, I can probably list some of the ones that I haven’t gotten to yet, because every bibliophile has that collection of books he or she just hasn’t gotten to around yet. But when we get the time, oh boy:

The Broom of the System (David Foster Wallace), Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (David Lipsky) – both are DFW-related (the first, of course, by Wallace, and a damn sight skinnier than Infinite Jest, the second a biography of sorts about him).

Nowhere to Run (Gerri Hirshey) – All about the rise of soul music and R&B. I am a sucker for music books.

Little Big Man (Thomas Berger) – Talk about coincidence: Berger died recently, so I picked up the book both because of that and also because repeated viewings of the movie over the years made me want to check it out.

The Confessions of Nat Turner (William Styron) – I read Sophie’s Choice in June or July, and thought I was ready to dip into another Styron. Not yet, though I have it and Lie Down In Darkness (bought at one of those library sales) waiting in the wings when I do.

The Eden Express (Mark Vonnegut) – Hearing this mentioned by Kurt Vonnegut (the father) and by Kurt’s biographer made me curious enough to pick it up.

At any rate, you get the idea: McClure’s has done a lot to add to the sagging of my bookshelves. I forgot to mention Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy, but I’m not sure I can get to the “no quotation marks around dialogue” in the novel. Not yet anyway. And there’s the four I bought today: a memoir by Beatles recording engineer Geoff Emerick, a Samuel Beckett novel (never read him before), George Orwell’s “Why I Write,” and a book compiling examples of bad imitation Faulkner.

I imagine I’ll be back before the store closes, though the selections will naturally slim down as time wears on and my fellow bibliophiles come to mourn and also gnaw at the remains. It’s a shame, really, because McClure’s was a fantastic excuse to stop downtown whenever I wasn’t at work or school and needed to kill some time aimlessly wandering the aisles. One of the things that gets lost in this rush to turn everything into an online emporium is the simple pleasure of wandering the aisles, waiting to see if anything catches your eye (and the surprises that sometimes do; I came across “Love In the Ruins” at McClure’s, read it in a day, and became a Walker Percy fan for life). I’ve come across so many things that I never thought I’d find, or books that I never thought I’d have any interest in reading, at McClure’s and other bookstores like, the small independent ones that don’t get the foot traffic of the big chain stores but which have their loyal customers. As always when a business that I loved is shutting its doors, the temptation to ask “could I have done more” crops up. I brought in books for store credit; suppose I hadn’t been so stingy and actually paid for some of the books I got on store credit?

But of course it’s not about that: Kathy and Ken (the owners) have their reasons for shutting down, and I respect that. I hate it, but I respect it. After they’re gone, downtown will be a bunch of bars, fast-food places, and sunglass stores (or at least one sunglass store). There’ll be clothing stores (including the one I used to work in), and did I mention the bars? (As a non-drinker, I see no joy in the idea of downtown being bar-centric, but I could social-drink just to avoid being rude.)

I will miss McClure’s, deeply. I have spent many hours there not just looking for a book, but looking. Not to get into an anti-internet rant here, but you can’t browse the shelves of an online bookstore, not like you could for real. Bing prompts you to search for something specific; suppose I don’t know what I want to search for, until I find it? Someday the bulk of our retail experience will be online (I’ve already had to buy two books for classes online, because they weren’t available at the one bookstore on-campus). It’ll be more convenient, but it won’t be as fun. Not for the browsers in the audience.

So if you’re in Clemson over the next month or so, drop by McClure’s and pick up a book or two, or three. Take a minute to remember the time you found that book you’d given up on, or discovered an author you’d never heard of who became your favorite. Don’t be shy about that collection of Hunter S. Thompson articles, you might not get another chance. And even if the history of the War of 1812 isn’t your thing, you might know someone for whom it is. Just take a minute to appreciate something beautiful, because it will be gone soon. And goddam it, what a loss.

My Civil Disobedience

In 1846, in the midst of his Walden two-year experiment, Henry David Thoreau was arrested for back taxes (specifically poll taxes that he hadn't paid in six years or so. Thank you, Wikipedia). He spent a night in jail rather than pay the fines, though he was released when someone paid them on his behalf. The root of his refusal to pay the taxes was his opposition to slavery and its almost pre-ordained spread thanks to the utterly illegal Mexican War being conducted at the time. Throeau got the essay "Civil Disobedience" out of it, a powerful statement of his unwillingness to go along with laws or governments that he deemed illegal. He died in 1862, just as the Civil War was getting into full swing. It was the conflict that would forever end the injustice of slavery, though certainly our racial history since then hasn't done much to make many think that all our problems ended in 1865.

Throeau's essay lived on, as inspiration to the non-violent movements of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. It's not all non-violence (there was certainly enough there to suggest that Thoreau might not have been simply content with non-violent protest, though it's hard to see him as any kind of anarchist). It's up there with the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and other important documents that try and formulate what kind of nation we are to be.

But Thoreau's protest, his actual arrest, did nothing to prevent the Mexican War from escalating. It did nothing to halt the spread of slavery. In short, while noble, it was at best a gesture. This isn't a criticism, just a statement of fact. It gave birth to a great thing ("Civil Disobedience" the essay, as well as the concept of non-violent resistence), but it didn't impact the immediate situation one lick.

I bring all this up as a way to justify (to myself, if no one else) my decision to refrain from watching any NFL games until Roger Goodell is no longer the commissioner of the league. No, please, hear me out...

Okay, it's a stupid and futile gesture, because professional football is the number one sport in the country, and one guy saying he ain't watching anymore isn't going to mean much to the league. But I'm tired of the way in which Goodell, since the inaugeration of his reign, has been arbitrary in his "punishments" handed out to players, and the way in which he personifies the arrogance of the league.

This has been building up for a while, but what put me over the edge was the Ray Rice "suspension" of two games for domestic abuse. I'm sorry, but when you hit a woman, a slap on the wrist does not begin to cover it. Goodell, like all corporate jackasses, tried to cover himself by saying that the legal process hadn't found enough to convict Rice or even press charges against him. These are fine words coming from the guy notorious for brandishing the suspension baton over his charges even though they've often been cleared or only held briefly for acts and conduct off the field. Goodell has a track record of handing out excessive punishments, often to players of the African-American persuasion. I'm not saying Roger Goodell is a racist, but have you heard his defense of the Washington team nickname (as much a slur on Native Americans as the n-word is for African-Americans)? Give me a break.

And so I am taking a break, from watching the NFL. Whenever it's game day, I'll find something else to watch or just turn off the TV entirely. I won't be immune to the various shows on ESPN that feature highlights, of course (I'm banning the NFL, not sports TV), and I'll hope for my Giants to shock the world and once again stomp them out. But the NFL games themselves, glorifications of the mindset that the NFL is trying to enslave us with (namely "I have to watch this!"), will have no appeal for me, not anymore. Not while Goodell is in charge.

While we're on the subject, why have one commissioner for a sports league? Why not have a panel of more than one person in charge? The whole idea behind sports commissioners was born of the 1919 Black Sox scandal and the subsequent fury of the baseball owners when the players who bet on the World Series that year were acquitted in a court of law. They gave over power to one guy, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, with the understanding that the players would be banned for life. Nowadays, it seems like it's the commissioners who should be banned. Absolute power corrupts absolutely; maybe it's time we said enough with the idea of one man or woman having all the power over the sport. What really makes all this seem ridiculous is that, if you are suspended by the commissioner of a sport, you can always appeal your sentence...to the very commissioner who suspended you in the first place.

Orwell would be proud...

So no, I don't expect too many other people to join me in this, not diehard football fans anyway. I'm willing to abstain from the NFL until some other hairpiece with a suit comes into office (who, I bet, will be even less palatable because he or she will be handpicked by Goodell, who was similarly handpicked by his predecessor Tagliabue). I went most of my life without succumbing to the lure of the NFL; I've only really been following the sport since 2007. Maybe I'm not the guy to be saying "down with Goodell," but I'm one of the ones saying it. And I'll continue to say it until he leaves. It's the absolute least I can do.

A Sense of Where You Are

Yesterday morning, I really, really wanted to throw up...

I should explain: yesterday was the graduate student orientation for the English department at school, and I had a legit excuse to be on campus for the first time since I graduated. Walking towards my old haunts in my snug new pants (I have gotten to waist size 40 now, though I expect that to change as the semester wears on and I am likely to have to park far, far away), I felt a wave of nostalgia for all the times, good and bad, I'd had on-campus in the past. Then I felt a wave of nausea.

I didn't puke, thankfully, though I did hyperventilate a little (well, climbing to the fourth floor of a building will do that, too), and I had to break for the nearest bathroom upon reaching the fourth floor and give myself silent validations in the mirror (if I'd said them out loud, people might have looked at me funny. It was pretty quiet in the hallway). I made it on time to the meeting place and sat towards the back, trying not to make an ass of myself.

Yes, college version 2.0 (the grad school edition) is finally within reach, and even as I type this I can feel the urge to bolt towards safer climes racing through me (or maybe it's the Mountain Dew). After all the bellyaching I've made about the past two weeks of "freedom," I am literally terrified of taking that big step towards grad school. But that's a good thing.

In all honesty, I'm much more comfortable being a failure at things; I know the ropes of picking yourself back up whenever something, be it a job opportunity or a relationship with someone, goes off the rails or never got on the track to begin with. I've been there, done that. I know my strengths (obsessive mix CDs of "love gone wrong" songs, for instance, or fruitless job searches on the internet), but success, or the opportunity for success? Uncharted territory, baby.

It is all new to me, and new can be scary, but it can also be invigorating. Just make sure you don't eat anything you don't want to taste again, in case things are *too* invigorating.

I recently read a book that I'd had my eye out for and stumbled across at a used bookstore a couple months back. It's called A Sense of Where You Are, about Bill Bradley before he was a senator or a New York Knick, back when he was just the best basketball player Princeton had ever seen. Like a lot of things you might look forward to with anticipation, it didn't quite live up to the wait (I'd rate it three and a half stars, but the rating system on Facebook allows for no halves). But the title itself (about knowing where you are on the basketball court, where your teammates and/or opponents are) is a pretty good metaphor for life (and being an English guy, I love my metaphors). I'm not alone here, and I have plenty of things to look forward to as the semester begins. I just have to make sure I've got a good read on the layout of the court.

Or something like that.

It's not perfect, but it will fit for now. That urge to vomit (still have it, still haven't actually done so) will subside in time (or, with an ill-place dinner at one of the lesser-grade restaurants I might frequent, come spilling out in one glorious sweep), but mixed with the fear is some positive trembling. I think I'm ready, I certainly hope so (my current inability to reopen my Clemson email, moribund since my graduation in August 2008 not withstanding).

Wait, did I just write about wanting to vomit? And post it here? My apologies...:-p

What Will Your Verse Be?

My sister texted me Monday night, asking if Robin Williams had died. I thought she might have meant Robbie Williams, former-boy-bander-turned-no-hit-wonder. Wishful thinking on my part, as it turned out.

When someone dies by their own hand, as Williams did, it tends to make their work or life before then seem like a "countdown to self-destruction." You go over their last hours, trying to make sense of what, often times, will never make any sense no matter how often you examine it. It's part of our hard-wiring to seek answers where none may reside; how else to explain how legitimate conspiracy theory turns into fringe obsession? Lee Harvey Oswald may not have acted alone, but we'll never really know the truth, so it bothers us. I imagine the same will be true of Robin Williams.

Much has been made of the "tears of a clown" thread in comedy, how performers make us laugh while masking their inner demons (or letting them out for all to see). I watched the Ken Burns documentary on Mark Twain when it re-aired recently, and his last years were full of turmoil and loss. It's no wonder that, in his last works, he was a misanthrope who held out little if any hope for humanity; he'd lost his wife, two of his three daughters (as well as a son when he was first married to Livy, who died a few months after being born), and much of his fortune (though he managed to pay off his creditors thanks to exhaustive world tours). Frankly, if you read about Twain's life, it's a miracle that he didn't kill himself.

Robin Williams, when I was a kid, was hysterically funny. Then, as I aged and he went into more family-friendly fare, his reputation became tarnished. Whether his later movies were really terrible or just had the reputation of being so, I can't say; I rarely felt that same excitement at seeing his name in the credits that I might have circa Good Morning, Vietnam or Dead Poets Society. Fact is, I'd thought that I outgrew him, and little that he did in the years since Mrs. Doubtfire really registered with me.

I guess that's why his loss hit so hard, not because I'd still treasured him but because I'd cast him aside. I have softened in my view of him of late, feeling like the good work he did from my childhood still holds up (and if you ever get the chance to see his stand-up, do). It's a little late, but still.

Depression doesn't care if you're rich and famous, or broke and miserable. It comes along to all of us, at some point, and sometimes it's just a passing phase. But sometimes it's an illness that needs treatment. I've known of two people personally connected to me who took their own lives, and let me say this: suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

I'd like to fancy myself as a "humorous fellow," and if you'll allow that (not saying I'm fricking hilarious all the time, but I have a pretty healthy sense of humor at least), I can say from experience that there's a lot of truth to the idea that comedians can be the most miserable bunch of people in the world. But humor allows for an outlet for all the rage, anger, sadness and whatever else comes with it and with life itself. What's most heartbreaking about Williams' suicide, apart from the obvious pain his family is in, is that he couldn't use that gift to help himself, not in the last days.

It's eerie to me now, considering that Dead Poets is my favorite Robin Williams performance, how that film deals with a suicide, and how it tears apart the school where Williams is the inspirational teacher. From mythology on down, through James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, through Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain, through Ernest Hemingway and David Foster Wallace, suicide has taken too many creative voices. Robin Williams is now one of those, and he will be missed.

The Great Two-Week Hiatus Between Work and Grad School

Friends, Romans, countrymen...I am out of a job for the time being.

By choice, mind you, by choice...my tenure at Tigertown Graphics (yeah, I said it!) ended this past week, on a Thursday instead of Friday because Friday starts the new pay period and I graciously decided that a check for one day of work wasn't worth it. So let me say to those TTG folks that I'm friends with on the Book of Faces: thank you for putting up with me for four years. I can be a handful (i.e., a pain in the ass sometimes), but I did enjoy the times when I wasn't being made to do work (I am incredibly lazy) and if you're friend with me on the Book of Faces, it means that I want to stay in touch with you (some of my peeps don't have Facebook accounts, so holler at me via smoke signals if you must). There is one particular person I don't want any contact with because he was always licking on me and stealing my food and just being a real hound with my free time. I speak, of course, of Dundee.

(Dundee was the dog/mascot of the back-area printing crew. Dogs can't have Facebook accounts)

Anyway, I am now in that limbo between work and grad school (and the assistantship that comes with it: I got the gig I wanted - helping with the Literary Festival - now it's just a matter of harassing Jonathan Lethem enough to get him to visit us in SC). I have a lot of free time, more free time than I really need, I think (but I won't volunteer any of it away for fruitless causes). I have plenty of time to get online and make an ass of myself (again, perhaps too much time). Right now I'm staying close to home because my grandma is away on vacation and my grandpa wanted to stay put. I'm reminded of how awful summer TV programming is, but I'm doing more reading-for-fun than anything else. Right now I'm in the middle of a Steve McQueen biography. I just finished a book about the outbreak of WWI in 1914. I'm covering all my bases.

I need to spend as little money as possible, I'm okay but I don't get paid by the school for a while so it might not be a bad idea to be a little thrifty. I'm looking forward to it, scared to death by it, and just in general preparing myself for some uncharted territory. I'm grateful for the opportunity, and I just hope I don't screw it up.

So, enjoy the last few weeks of summer, my friends, because once school starts back it's on like Donkey Kong.

R.E.M., "What's The Frequency, Kenneth?"

I had an epiphany yesterday, as I was floating on a raft in my uncle Heath's pool on the fourth of July (flipping over sides from my back to my front as a precaution against too-severe sunburn): I'm on vacation.

Yes, in less than a month I won't be working at the place I'm employed currently, so I decided to use some of my vacation time while I still had it. I plan on saying adios to my current workplace around the beginning of August, and I was originally going to use all my vacation time then, to tide me over financially until I started grad school and the assistantship, but I needed a break and I figured unless I went overboard with my spending, I'd be good financially until I got my first paycheck from the Uni.

I have since spent all my savings on a diamond tiara...

Just kidding, I'm looking forward to next week, if only because I'm not beholden to anything until the Monday after this next one. Oh brother, it's been a while since I could say that...I already have the duty of babysitting my adorable niece tomorrow while her parents get a much-needed afternoon out of the house. But beyond that, I'm free as a bird.

I imagine I'll be making shoebox-airplanes and bored to death with ESPN's continuing yeah-America-is-out-of-it-but-dammit-we-paid-for-the-rights World Cup coverage. For my peeps who genuinely love soccer, I have no quarrel with you. But the incessant bandwagon-jumping seems...well, bandwagon-jumping. I didn't drink the Kool-Aid on this one.

I've been listening to the most recent "best of" of R.E.M., which is a two-disc bad-boy picking up some of the best stuff from their early years as well as their post-Bill-Berry alright-ness. I'm in the camp that thinks R.E.M. were best in the Eighties and early Nineties (not that they should've stopped then, but everything post-1997 is murky waters for me, at least). I remember "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" as being "the song about what that guy said to Dan Rather," as well as the video that introduced me to the Nudie suit (I was unaware of Gram Parsons or country music circa 1974's penchant for the Nudie suits at the time). Monster was heralded as the band's "rock" album, after the previous two were mildly acoustic affairs. And I so desperately want one of my friends to be named Kenneth, just so I can ask him what the frequency is. Anyway, on Thursday afternoon, after depositing my check from work, I blasted this as I drove around post-work-but-not-ready-to-go-home-yet (a condition I usually find myself in on Fridays).

Next week, I want to get all the paperwork that's still to be done regarding my assistantship out of the way. I also want to get a much-needed haircut. But most of all, I want to be able to relax. I already got that ball rolling at my uncle's pool party (and avoided a severe sunburn; there's a little redness on my shoulders, but otherwise I came out of it okay). Got a few books I can read (including one about the origins of the First World War, because I'm a history nerd), and basically if I can't relax anytime between now and the week after this next one, there's something wrong with me. But I'll do my damnedest.