b l o g o s

clearing out

John and I spent the better part of the last day of 2005 clearing out the basement. Mostly the basement was full of the crap we didn’t know what to do with when we moved in late July, and most of the boxes had been open when one or the other of us (usually me) decided to empty them one by one in search of a particular sweater, pair of winter boots, or extension cord. It's the kind of excruciatingly slow unpacking that can create periodic fits of insanity. The rest of the stuff I hadn't searched out was just kind of there amidst the mounds of tape wads and packing material waiting to be dealt with. And despite the fact that we made our way past the piles of crap every time we wanted to replenish our diet coke supply or locate the electrical tape, and despite the fact that we show our disastrous basement to the entire neighborhood when we accidently leave the basement light on at night, we still hadn’t dealt with it.

Today, deal we did. I bagged up packing material and carried empty boxes out to the curb for recycling while John organized all our tools by “project.” I’m not sure how this will work out, but I do know exactly where to go if we ever need to, say, wallpaper again. And having our 20+ screwdrivers all in the same place will be divine. In addition to 20+ screwdrivers we also discovered that we have four tape measures, about 80 wrenches/wrench parts, 5 or so boxcutters, scores of allen wrenches from our biking and ikea habits, and perhaps most perplexing, two studfinders. If anyone ever needs to find two studs simultaneously, come on over, and we’ll direct you to the studfinding shelf.

Tillie, meanwhile, flitted from exciting new toy to exciting new toy: my softball cleat, a sharpie pen, a paper clip, a stuffed octopus, a bottle of water, and some unidentified black plastic object, probably a part to the vacuum cleaner we tossed a few weeks ago when it set off the fire alarm. I tossed out streams of photo negatives—with scanners, who needs em?—old rugs, curtain rods, and everything made of wicker, but was happy to rediscover my bowling ball, the other softball cleat, and the missing wheel to our shopvac.

We were a little like Jack Gladney in White Noise when he attacked his attic with trash bags. The difference is that Gladney was working through an identity crisis spurred by encountering a student of his while buying rope at a hardware store. The student/cashier marveled that the professor and head of Hitler Studies was “just a regular guy.” Our crisis, however, was truly and only a basement one.

If John is proud of the tool organizational system, I’m pretty proud of one of my side projects: we now have new batteries in all the flashlights and in the digital clock. This in preparation for tornado season, when we’ll no doubt spend some time in the basement listening to the radio-cast and drinking from our stash of diet cokes and “high-end” boxed wine. We unrolled a big rug and are planning to drag in the grey couch from the garage just to add to our tornado warning comfort. In fact, maybe we’ll even spend new years eve in our clean basement.

On second thought, Cathy P. and John T’s hot tub is heating up. I think we’ll save the basement for tornado time.

file under WTF

My parents like to use the speaker feature of my dad’s cell phone when they call me. It’s efficient (no more passing me back and forth), allows for a more steady signal, and it’s even kind of charming. They don’t however call when they’re waiting at the airport gate, like the couple sitting here next to me who just hung up with their son. Not so charming, really. And very, very loud.

things to remember next time, in order of importance

1. my laptop in my hotel room, before checking out and boarding the metro to the airport
2. robe and slippers, for breezing through security checkpoints (maybe it’s just DC National, but damn)
3. napkins, when I buy lunch at maui tacos for the plane

Number of available identity categories at MLA: 2.

Shortly after arriving in DC I realized I’d made a wee mistake: I had booked a room that’s closer to the home of George and Laura Bush than conference headquarters. And so when it turned out that Collin only had 45 minutes to hang between interviews—he's on Syracuse's interview squad this year—I broke down and took a cab up to DuPont Circle. On the cab ride I wondered how all the stressed interviewees were coping with the sprawling clusters of hotels, especially the rhet/comp candidates, for whom the jobs and often the interviews are comparatively plentiful and therefore somewhat squeezed together. I’m so glad I’m not interviewing.

Collin’s hotel lobby was dotted with waiting interviewees, some talking on cell phones, others just holding their cell phones open, presumably watching the cell clock. Several people had folders open on their laps, and one guy in shiny Italian shoes seemed to be meditating. I couldn’t take the compression. I had to get out.

On a bench outside while Collin scarfed down a croissant, we confirmed with Clancy Ratliff, a PhD candidate from Minnesota who happened by, that in fact, the hotel sprawl was the biggest challenge this year. Clancy, who had a nice slate of interviews and was, I bet, performing well, was doing what I would totally do were I interviewing here, which I wasn’t: spending a ton of money on cabs.

Later on I was relieved to find that the lobby of the Marriott Wardman, the main hotel, was so much larger than the one at Collin’s hotel that the anxiety enjoyed a little more elbow room. Or maybe it was the happy hour effect. The spectacle expanded, too, to include more of the conference proper, introducing new questions such as: who is this joker squinting to read my nametag? What does one eat and drink before a 7:15 panel? (Answers: I don’t know because I can’t read his nametag; orange powder-dusted bar mix and a Perrier.)

By midnight, after our moderately well attended panel, tasty Ethiopian food, and a long metro ride back to George and Laura’s, I was feeling pretty good about my compact, non-interviewy MLA. And then I got on the elevator with four men, all in suits, all clearly part of the same interview team, as evidenced from their chortly demeanors and self impressed tones. Good, I thought, they’re so involved in recounting their prospective hires and processing their scotch-and-sodas that they won’t notice me. But the bearded guy with his tie still tucked in his shirt and a lopsided MLA nametag looked my direction, smiled, tilted his head somewhat condescendingly, and asked me: “Are you interviewing? You look like you’re interviewing.”

Apparently the soft-soled boots and the scuffed bag weren’t enough. I gotta get out of here.

freaks and germs

I leave early in the morning to fly to DC for the MLA, a.k.a. the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, a.k.a. Freak Show. I and many others call it a freak show because of the way the gathering turns everybody into freaks, if only a little bit. It might also well be called Viral Vortex, because all these people—as in more than 10,000—converge in the same place after sucking up family and airplane germs over the holidays. And more than a few people will return home with what is affectionately known as the MLA Plague.

The MLA is so big and so freaky and so germy because this is where people go to interview and get interviewed for jobs in English and other Modern Languages. I think there are plenty of blog accounts of the MLA. Here’s one. But the very best, most hilarious account of MLA interviews, and the one that better captures this freak show business I’m talking about, was done by my pals Spencer Schaffner and Brandy Parris, who, incidentally John and I are meeting for beers later. Check out their Nine Interviews here. If you’ve already seen them, I highly recommend watching it again.

The beauty of this year’s trip to MLA is that I’m only going to give a paper, something one might do at any run-of-the-mill conference. No giving or receiving job interviews, no waiting for jammed elevators to take me to nosebleed suite-level floors to shake hands of germy strangers, er, I mean possible future colleagues. So I’m hoping the negative sides of MLA will be tempered somewhat this time. What’s more, since my panel—on ancient rhetorics and pedagogy—is scheduled for a latish 7:15 tomorrow evening, I am doing MLA in less than 24 hours. And I’m going to see five friends and eat Ethiopean food to boot. Oh how I love ethiopean food. And friends!

Elizabeth, whom I bestfriended in graduate school, and I are planning to run together on Thursday morning, which is tres excellente. Just like old times, except I think I’m slower. But running still boosts the old immune system. Even though I’m hoping to stay freak- and germ-free in my 24-hour MLA stint, I am, let’s face it, by no means immune to either.

mechanical processes?

So many days spent "writing" go by in blurry fits and starts. Those quotes are there because, while I typed a lot for many hours, and while the word document got longer and took up slightly more disk space, I didn’t really write all that much—i.e., start piecing together arguments, or catching glimpses of what they might be. I did manage to find a really fun “side track” in trying to situate this wild dude Burke liked named Paget, an English physicist-phoneticist who spent lots of his time fashioning models of the human larynx out of paraffin, plasticene, and rubber bands. He would give little public demonstrations of these models in various locations around London (this is circa 1926), and have the models say things like "Hullo!" and "London, are you there?" This apparently tore up the audience, inasmuch as a 1926 London audience could be torn up.

My sidetrack/diversion wasn’t so much these laryngeal demonstrations, which I’ve known about for some time, but some sifting through broader scholarship having to do with this strange tendency to want to produce “working” models of human parts, a tendency that Jessica Riskin, a history of science professor at Stanford, traces to at least the 18th century. She compares similar kinds of rudimentary models with contemporary efforts to create artificial intelligence and also with the notion of “wetware,” a very new term used by computer scientists and science fiction writers to refer to the brain and nervous system. Riskin has an awesome article in Critical Inquiry that talks about one wacky French guy by the name of Jacques Vaucanson, who in 1738 fashioned a mechanical duck with see-through feathers that would, also in front of an audience, eat grain. As if that weren't enough, while the audience looked on, apparently slack-mouthed, the mechanical duck would poop.

I think one Christmas I got a doll that peed, but the novelty, believe me, wore off far more quickly than my niece and nephew's Q-20 game, whereby the computer, by asking a series of questions, can frequently guess the word in your head. It's almost uncanny that the word my niece and nephew both most frequently have in their respective heads is, you guessed it: poop. Or one of its many synonyms. Q-20 can guess this one, by the way, with about 6 questions.

So what is it that fellows like Paget and Vaucanson and presumably their audiences learn from these simulated models? If Riskin is right, and I think she is, these zany little experiments served to test the boundaries between human or animal and machine, to determine which bodily “mechanisms” work in a machine-like fashion, and which ones don’t. The interesting thing, as she points out in her wetware article, is that such boundaries tend to be tested on actions that are deemed prime indicators of life—like defecating or talking.

So while my diversion took me away from Burke, who frankly didn’t think much of machines and in fact thought they were The Big Problem, I’m still pretty sure today’s sifting wasn’t diversive at all—maybe a fit, but hopefully a start.

prairie hike

I know it sounds like something of an oxymoron, but Monticello's Allerton park (the wilder south side, not the side with the statues and stuff) has a few moderate inclines and a nice section of restored prairie. And the south side just reopened after nine--count them, nine--weeks of deerhunting season. That means we haven't been able to run or walk--I mean hike--at the park since October 22. Right around or just after October 22, we drove there with Tifani, Sofia, and their dog Maggie, and the entrance was ribboned off, admitting hunters only. That's when we learned about the hunting.

Now the hunting itself didn't shock me so much. I grew up in Tennessee, after all, with a dog who could fashion his nose, back, and tail into a perfectly straight line when a bird flew overhead, and who disappeared for days at a time with my dad during autumn. I even went to grad school in a place where the first day of deer season was a no-school holiday for the local school district.

So in early November when I wanted to go running at Allerton, figuring park management only allowed hunting on, say, alternate weeks, I called the park office to find that the south side would be closed until Christmas Day. I was so stunned by the news that I didn't really register the park woman's explanation--that October 22-29 was set aside for a shotgun hunt, and then October 30-December 24 the park would be closed for bow and arrow hunting.

I hung up, disappointed about the news that we wouldn't be able to hike or run until Christmas Day. But then wait a minute. Did she say bow and arrow? As in William Tell? Cowboys and Indians? I found this reference to "bow and arrow" hunting somewhat puzzling, but even more puzzling, I thought, is that bow and arrow toters--archers I think is the proper name--would follow the guys in trucks with gunracks. Now I don't know much about archery, but it seems to me that the level of difficulty is already pretty high without letting the crazy shotgun shooters in there first. John and I speculated that the bow and arrow hunt would be followed by those who want to use even more challenging means of bagging themselves a deer--like a lasso fashioned from twine, or, my favorite idea, a tarp. And the poor deer. Dying from an arrow wound must be much slower than a bullet. But how would I know? I didn't even know people still used those things.

According to the Allerton fact page on the deer hunt, "An archery hunt was chosen over alternative methods of deer control for reasons of safety, efficacy, and IDNR approval." The IDNR is apparently the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. I visited the IDNR  website to try find out just how effective (and safe) bow and arrow hunting is, and while I couldn't find that information, I did find plenty of information on purchasing   "harvest pins" to mark the bagging of a deer or a turkey. I assume hunters sport these pins on their orange hats, like football players who get a helmet sticker for every QB sack. Quarterbacks, turkeys: what's the difference really? For starters, the QB has an offensive line, and as that very funny Fountains of Wayne song puts it, "all kinds of time."

Anyhow, the protracted hunt, the Allerton page says, is for "research" and follows a "successful" similarly-structured hunt in 2004, the year I was gone to Pittsburgh (which accounts for my utter confusion about the park's closure). The 2004 hunt, according to the site, "was generally well-received in the community, resulting in 1,020 applications to participate in the hunt." Now, gauging the community reception from the number of hunting applications seems to me to be stacking the deck somewhat. If these 1,020 applications come from Monticello alone, then I admit that's pretty overwhelming community support. But Monticello only has a notch more than 5,000 residents, indicating to me at least that unless the applicants included a couple of preschoolers, they most likely came from a more widespread area, like, say, the state. Not the community. The site goes on to admit that "There was some concern among animal rights advocates regarding the choice of bow hunting over shotgun or sharp-shooting, but objections were relatively minimal."

Hm, now, maybe my intuition about bow and arrow hunting is right. It seems like a much more slow and painful death, and I still wonder about efficacy. I mean the notion that the archers got eight times the number of days on the land as the shooters seems like they might not be quite so efficacious. I hope the Allerton folks can get it straight, and I also hope to someday see the results of this research they're conducting on white tail deer. Very curious about that research. 

it's just not christmas eve without getting out the digital camera

I figure while I'm at it, I'll post a shot of Tillie Olson for Megan and Stephanie, who requested more dog-blog action. Tillie went along with me for a slushy run and got pretty nasty, so she's shown post-bath here all shiny and smelling a lot like John's shampoo-conditioner combo. Incidentally, when she came downstairs running around and shaking like a maniac after the bath, Jada, who fears baths more than death itself, began to obsessively lick her own paws, as if to plead self-cleaning.

ERRATA: It has come to my attention (see response below) that the photo above is not fully accurate. Please accept my apologies and this insert:

king wrong

C-U is enjoying a bit of a warm spell today--the temps soared into the 40s--and so John and I set out on our bikes to catch an afternoon showing of King Kong. I'm a huge Naomi Watts fan, and not a few people have commented on how my sweetie is a ringer for Adrian Brody, so predictably I find him kind of cute as well. And Jack Black? In King Kong? The alliterative rhyminess itself is a draw. Besides, it's break, for crying out loud. And I did some good writing this morning. And the movie is showing at the local Art, where the popcorn is cheap and there are no annoying commercials or on-screen trivia games before the movie starts.

Still in all, I was a little nervous when we found out, upon buying what at the time seemed a sufficient amount of popcorn, that the movie runs more than 3 hours. The popcorn kid proudly announced to my horror that the credits put it well over the 3:15 mark. I have a probably not uncommon fear of getting stuck in super long movies. Sometimes the fear seems work-related--as if 2 hours of guilty pleasure is quite enough, more than I deserve. But I'm on break. I should relax.

And yet after an hour I could not figure out what cutting-edge remake I was in fact watching. Was it:  1) Apocalypse Now Redux II; 2) Jurassic Park; 3) TRex meets Large Monkey on MTV's Battlebots; [see image of poster above for 2&3] 4) the lost final episode of last season's Lost; or 5) Brokeback Mountain on a Depression-era steamer?  And after two hours I was biking home. Fast. That's right, I didn't even stay for Kong to get transported back to New York, though I think what may have happened is this: the remaining passengers on the ship run into Ben Obi-Wan Kinobe and board a starfighter to finish chronicling Narnia.

This is not a matter of suspension of disbelief, it seems to me, but true generic confusion. And I really didn't want to use this blog to write about movies.

OFL quote one

"Look at those curls. I used to try to buy curls like that, but perms would never take in my hair."

(Idly uttered by Our Favorite Librarian [OFL*] upon looking at my university i.d. photo before swiping it to admit me into the stacks).

*see esp. the comment section in "tell me why," below.