b l o g o s

how yardwork resembles writing a book

1. Both are rather daunting, especially when you have 'let things go' a little.
2. No matter how hard you have worked, there's always that neglected, shabby corner to look at when you are feeling a little too proud of yourself.
3. For some reason, the shabby sections don't stand out for onlookers, who tend to notice  parts you hadn't planned to work on. 
4. Those same onlookers can be sweet an encouraging, but you know it, they know it, and you know they know it: you're in over your head.
5. It seems like there's never enough time to do everything you want.
6. If you don't tend to it regularly, it might either a. turn into an uncontrollable jungle, or b. die.
7. Extended sessions make your neck and hands hurt like hell.

Now. If only keyboarding felt nearly as good as swinging an ax.

melding

Our drive back was particularly easy, in part because we got up ass early like we usually do for return drives. This means that a good portion of the drive is over before driver and passenger reach full consciousness. Though the endless NPR cycles can be rather mind-numbing. Yesterday's, for example, followed the reports of the bizarre supreme court rulings with a singing lobster. Did anyone else hear that crap? Grr.

Luckily, though, we had Jonathan Lethem's short story collection Men and Cartoons on audio, which quickly overtook NPR even as it detracted our attention from the hills in the rear view. As anyone who reads Lethem knows, he has a flair for melding outrageous and mundane. Even the superheroes his stories hover around are third-rate and short-lived. The best instance of course is "Super Goat Man," who in his short, five-issue comic life battled "dull villains" such as "Vest Man" and "False Dave," but who finds a second life as the Walt Whitman chair in the Humanities at a small New England college. I think "Super Goat Man" is my favorite in the collection, in part because it puts Lethem's other-worldly stamp on the ever-fun genre of academic fiction. Lethem's ability to capture the tragedy in mediocrity makes his plots fit perfectly with academe. You can read "Super Goat Man" for free here. (I think--unless this site is just for New Yorker subscribers; I can neither remember nor tell.)

Probably the tightest, most vivid, and even most suspenseful story in the collection is called "The Vision." A bonus for me are his descriptions of Roberta Jar, the protagonist's "giantess" neighbor who "was six two, or three . . . and with none of that hunched manner with which women apologize for great height." I'm pretty sure Jar does not appear without some mention of her towerdom--she's even at one point described as "tall in her chair." That cracked this tall woman up. USA Today printed an excerpt here.

PT cruising, leg the fourth

Not that anyone should care, but we went ahead and ran through the rest of Ghostmap on the penultimate leg of our trip, leaving only the Lethem stories and maybe (if we're really desperate) a Buffy episode. Though we'll take turns watching that with headphones I suppose.

I'm still mulling it, but the epilogue of Ghostmap takes this urbaphiliac turn that I suppose isn't surprising coming from an author who likes to write and think about cities. And while I agree with most of the things SJ says about cities--ie they enable relatively miniscule carbon footprints, and they can sustain niche marketing like nobody's business (though he phrases it more eloquently)--I still wonder about the way he writes about them: he seems to think that if something isn't a densely-packed urban center, then it's rural. Hm. Now despite the fact that I was driving through the rest of New York state, western PA, and eastern OH while listening to the last couple cds, most of which would seem to support SJ's view, I nevertheless think his urbaphilia is a little over-the-top and casts the slightest shadow over the rest of the book for me.

The epilogue also goes on a bit too long about bird flu and terrorism for my taste, reminding me of the time a group of faculty members was informed that the campus was developing an emergency plan in case the terrorists sprayed us all with bird flu. Sans epilogue, though, the book was terrific: smart as hell, etc. The change in tone from the rest of the book to the epilogue makes me wonder if SJ's editors requested the epilogue for the sake of relevance, as if the cool interconnecting histories of cholera, epidemiology, and public works isn't instructive enough.   

PT cruising, leg 3

Our June road trip is not yet over, but it's been awesome. For example, in western PA and eastern NY? There are places where trees stretch up to the sky, like, pulling the ground with them. (I hear this phenomenon is called hills.) Also, I feel at-home in a house where there's a pet for every room, and I do so love shopping with E.

It's nice, too, to think and talk about writing and work in a relaxed way while taking a break from it, if that makes sense. This is not something I remember being able to do pre-tenure (the relaxed part anyway), but that's probably just me.

And tomorrow when we leave for leg the last, we will look forward to 3 more hours of Ghostmap, and some Jonathan Lethem short stories. yay.

PT cruising, leg 2

JM and I are spending the night in a cozy little inn in the Western PA sticks. The lobby is filled with hand-hewn furniture, the floor with bricks stamped 1924 (those must have been a late addition). The Cruiser looks right at home out front--elsewhere it looks like a damned wedding cake. There are no cell signals, but there is wireless.

We ate our dinner on a flat, smooth rock: cold chicken and pizza, and a tasty bottle of wine JM's mom brought to us from South Africa.

And then we plugged in my laptop and watched Buffy open up the hellmouth. They should really keep that thing closed.

best audiobook ever

Seriously. This thing had me sitting forward in the Cruiser seat, my face practically shoved into the windshield and purposefully slowing down lest we reach our destination before the fourth cd ended. The last audiobook that had me this entranced is Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: for the first few chapters of that, I was so riveted that I didn't realize one of our bikes had come off the rack and was hanging by its lock, its rear tire dragging along I-376. This shit is dangerous. 

Huge thanks to C and E for the reco.

some unrelated observations

1. These Liberal Arts schools make a point I've often wondered about: why are colleges and universities beholden to a commercial magazine's rankings?

2. The bed- and bedding-industry may be the least-considered beneficiary of the late 20th-c/early 21st-c bourgeoisie. (This prompted by our recent purchase of a used Tempur-pedic bed, followed swiftly by our purchase of new sheets, pillows, and comforter: OMG.)

3. That is one big-ass whippet.

4. And finally, rental car companies really ought to think about clientele before assigning vehicles. The company I use, after all, has other pertinent information on file with my license number. But here's hoping that the white PT cruiser will get us plenty of senior discounts in OH and NY.

check.

Now that the only remaining item on my to-do list marked "high priority" is "make dentist appointment," I feel like I can finally get my summer on.

Getting the summer on will mean more time spent sleeping and staring at the spinach and basil in the garden. But it also means back to the Burke book (hooray!) and back to two other projects I'm cooking up, including one on the elocutionary movement that I and my new co-author are pretty excited about. The summer thing also means trips! We have three scheduled--one each month starting this week--and possibly one more bike excursion.

So. It's time to clean up the desk and get organized for remainder of summer.

And to those of you at the RSA Institute: I hope it's going well! If you're blogging your seminar or workshop let me know in the comments with links.

 

oh yeah?

gah.

I drove the copyedited MS for ARCS 4e to Fedex yesterday and plunked down $75. to ship it to Boston. It didn't not occur to me that I could have almost bought a plane ticket and delivered it myself.

I'm posting this as a reminder to myself for when a little royalty check finds its way to me in a year or so: this is NOT easy money. Though I am pretty happy with the new edition, and I already miss my daily phone convos with my ever-wry coauthor (coming soon to an RSA Institute near you).

In the acknowledgements to 3e, said coauthor has a bit about how Tillie Warnock (I believe) once told her that sometimes writers need to know how to ignore their yards. I thought about that line more than once over the past few weeks when I passed by an upstairs window. But as the grass grew, so did the mint, which can only mean one thing:

MOJITO.