b l o g o s

Dear Courtney Love,

It has recently come to my attention that you claim to have originated the phrase "kookoo bananas." First off? you don't even spell it right--it's "cuckoo bananas"--and second? My bff E! has been using that phrase since at least the the fall of 2007, and I have cited her here before and could offer much earlier emails as proof if you like. JM even used it in his class this past spring, after I visited E! in the ROC in January and brought it on home with me, like a little catchy head cold, and one of his students wrote on an evaluation form that JM was not only a great professor, but that he used the student's new favorite phrase, "cuckoo bananas"!  We called E! at once to tell her about the phenonemon she had created. That student, Ms. Love, has probably never heard of you, having barely entered elementary school when your band Hole slipped back into the ether. (I still spin to "Awful," btw--it's a great little sprint song.)

What is more, your claim to have coined the phrase, or to own the phrase "kookoo bananas" reminds me of my off-and-on grad school boyfriend (or whatever) who swore he invented the phrase "fuckin-a taco" in college. He kind of liked Nirvana too, for what it's worth. Here's something: I never really believed that he invented that phrase; in fact, I have been known to tell people about his claim when I want to thumbnail his cocky mofo-ness. (grad school bf, if you're reading this, hi!) People don't exactly "invent" phrases like that, and when they do, they often don't take. I can think of two exceptions: 1) Metaspencer's "undergrounduate library", and 2) E!'s "cuckoo bananas." C.b. is a very handy phrase, because a lot of things these days are in fact c.b., like, just to take a random example, the fact that the nominee of a major political party can't even talk about googling, let alone do a google search without the help of half his staff.

sincerely,
debbie

reunioning, etc.

I haven't done much blogging lately; been too busy catching up on all the review-y type things I need to finish this summer. Finished one today, hooray, and I'll take another with me when I go to Tennessee this week to visit family and go to my high school reunion, twenty years.  Yowz. I'm not sure one weekend is enough to make the transition from Fleet Foxes live at Pitchfork to Guns-n-Roses on someone's ipod attached to speakers, but I'll manage, I'm sure. I'm really looking forward to seeing everyone. At our five year reunion, I got voted "most changed" because I had grown out my bangs. At our ten year reunion, all the women wore black knee-length dresses, so this time I've opted for pants. Which means now I'll be dressed like all the guys.

I've been reading Barbara Kingsolver's wonderful book about living off the local fare in appalachia, and this has me itching even more to go home. My dad has promised a bike trip and fresh blueberries and peaches, and I have my fingers crossed for fresh corn.

swirly clouds on the prairie

festival mentions

As was probably evident from my previous post, the Pitchfork music festival was really, really great. So great that blogos is going to give a few little awards. Feel free to add your own!

1. still rolling around in my head, four days later: Fleet Foxes
2. best food stand, hands down: Chicago Diner. Though this may not be fair since I kept going back and therefore did not try the other yummy-looking food. I mean: A music festival with thai noodles and indian plates? Forget it. The vegan ice cream cones get second place, and also the beer.�
3. biggest surprise rockin' performance: the Dodo's (yes, that's how they punctuate it. those indie kids!)
4. best swag: saucony (I think) was distributing sweatbands that said "winner" or "loser." we got one of each. Practical!
5. most English professor friendly: Vampire Weekend. They sing about oxford commas and mansard roofs, for crying out loud.�
6. Least thorough bag checker: ours, on Saturday. She was too busy squawking about how tall my and John's kids are going to be that she didn't even care that our water bottles were sealed.
7. Most thorough bag checker: ours, on Sunday. All those people who breezed by the bag checkers with bongs and weed and whatnot have us decoys to thank. Our guy unrolled each anorak and dug down in every pocket in my backpack. And there are many.
8. Best recovery: Dodo's lead singer Meric Long, whose chair broke while he was rocking out (see above, number 3), and who continued to sing while laying on the floor until they brought him another chair.

a festival of voices

Saturday at Pitchfork will be tough to beat, and it seemed to me like the day of the vocals. For us, it started with Fleet Foxes, whose super-cute lead singer Robin Pecknold belted out folksy, choral-y tunes from a chair, all hunched over his guitar. His voice is pretty amazing. His "Winter Hymnal" really got the crowd's attention--a collective gasp preceded the applause. And by the time the band cleared out so that he could do "Oliver James" solo, even the chatty pot-smokers in front of us were utterly quiet.

Vampire Weekend was the perfect boppy happy-hour band, and they gave probably the crispest performance. Their lead, Ezra Koenig, also has some nice range, and they gave a fun great show, despite the mud-wrestling fest beside us that was getting as many cheers as they were.

The Hold Steady's Craig Finn lent some throat to it all, though as JM pointed out (and then I texted to E!), during that show all the dudes were nodding their heads to the beat, while all the women were texting or looking bored. C called them the "man band."

And as expected, Animal Collective was incredible. I always thought Panda Bear was doing all that yelping, but I learned last night that it was mostly the lead singer, Avey Tare. I know I've been going on about the awesome voices,� but I don't mean to take away from the band effort. They are, after all, a collective. So here's a clip of an interlude from another show. It's a bit they also did last night.

Oh, and we decided that Vampire Weekend looks like our students, Animal Collective looks like our grad students, and Craig Finn looks like us.

burfday weekend

My birthday is Monday, but the celebration starts tonight, people. I was, after all, technically supposed to be born in June--my poor mother had to wait it out in the hot Tennessee summer. Check that: the celebration started yesterday when I picked up my sweet iphone 3G (this, courtesy of Ianqui, is hilarious.) It's like ear and hand candy. Today, I confess, I checked gmail while I was doing dishes.

Anyway, burfday weekend (extended play version). Tonight, it's a joint bday dinner with wee baby M (ha), who turned almost thirty last week, and S. Then tomorrow we train up to Chicago for some shopping and dinner. And then? Then? On Saturday E! and her own personal spouse will arrive on the train from Rochester, and shortly thereafter we will make our way to the Pitchfork music festival. Bring on the heat! Bring on the noise! Bring on the hipsters!

I am, needless to say, positively giddy about seeing Animal Collective and Vampire Weekend. But Fleet Foxes has also captured my fancy lately, and I loves me some Dodos too. And I'll try to see !!! as well, just to see if anyone tries to pronounce that. See what you started Prince?

There is also talk of hot dogs, of vegetarian food (we are a flexi lot), of a movie, and of more shopping and lunch on Monday before the train home.

bring on my desk.

There is nothing quite like a weekend full of shin-bruising, arm-killing, brick-moving labor to make me nearly ecstatic to return to some of the desk tasks that fill my weekdays: reading stuff for colleagues, booking travel (some pleasure, some business), administering a course, assembling materials for my grad seminar, trekking to the library. The last one was in fact a little difficult because I have what a lot of athletes call "dead legs," and also because I decided to take with me a stack of books that needed to be returned. This hurt the insides of my forearms, which are quite sore from carrying bricks. My forearms feel like they used to feel when I was in high school and volleyball practice started up. Big, heavy, old bricks are not the same as a high-velocity volleyball, but  on the day following repetitive motion with either, my forearms know no difference.

"don't move gravel." --Sappho 145

A fragment of a poem attributed to the early sixth century poet Alcaeus goes like this:

This I know for certain, that if a man moves gravel . . . he will probably get a sore head.

A fragment by his slightly more famous contemporary is even more direct, if not pithy (see title). And you thought Sappho only wrote about sexy stuff! JM and I were laughing at these lines earlier today while we shoveled and wheelbarrowed three tons of gravel. That is not an exaggeration, but it is the amount a dumptruck dumped in our driveway for our patio project. Above is the area we shoveled from, after we shoveled from it.

And while it's known that the ancient greeks had wheelbarrows (though maybe not in the 6th c), perhaps they had different ways of moving gravel, because I didn't so much get a sore head. But sore hands, a sore foot, and sore shoulders, oh yeah.

flash

It's discombobulating enough to come out of an animated science-fiction movie set seven or eight hundred years in the future into the brightness of the now. But to have that movie snap off mid-credits because a massive thunderstorm is rolling by, and to walk out into the generator-lit hallway with an alarm blaring and teenaged movie workers dashing around asking each other what to do, this is another thing altogether. It was, in two words, and to invoke my friend e!, cuckoo bananas.

JM and I were on a little date, and the plan had been to head to Luna, the fancy and tasty tapas place in Champaign. But alas, we did not make it there, because the storm that sparked pandemonium in the movie theater was about to do the same on Neil street, the main road that connects the movie theater to Luna.

Let's just say that yesterday I learned some things. First, flash floods: now I see what all the fuss is about. This shit is dangerous and it happens in minutes. Second, I respond well in a mini-crisis, or at least I did in this one. I became focused and deliberate and drove us off the flooding Neil street, sneaking past a stalling mazda, into the parking lot of a small business called i-power, a place that appears to sell nutrition supplements and whose workers were gawking at the street outside. At that point, for about a hundred-yard stretch of street, the water was rushing above car wheels and rising fast. JM was sweet and encouraging while I maneuvered the car. He is so g.d. awesome. (But I knew that.) I also learned that there is such a thing as "high ground" here in the flatlands. We snaked around the building next to the train tracks--this was higher ground, and then up into the furthest north-east parking space. Even higher.

Other cars kept driving through the water, each one creating a dirty wake, the shore the middle of a parking lot. Later when the water got even higher, SUV drivers charged through, fast enough (I swear) to pull a water-skier. And so the other thing I learned, though this shouldn't have surprised me, is that people can be really fucking stupid. Driving into water in a mid-sized sedan while construction cones are floating past? Not a good idea. When their engine dried out a little, the stalled mazda people tried to make it back out of the parking lot, only to reconsider and stall again, across two lanes of traffic. The woman parked next to us got out of her car and began obsessively flattening the median bushes with her sandal, presumably to clear the way to drive over all that concrete into the AAA parking lot, which was on even higher ground.  When we got out of our car to peer down the street, a man in a black slicker asked us the best way to get to the other side of campus. Later, across the street at T.G.I. Friday's, where we rode out the storm, and dinner, we heard that a kid had to crawl out his back window. His car was still sitting there, askew, the water lapping his door handles.

physicality and libraries

Yesterday I spent some unhappy, downright uncomfortable time in the library. I allowed myself 15 minutes to  check out the 2001 bound volume of RSQ, which has, among other things, Richard Graff's cool article on Aristotle and written style. Twenty minutes should be fine, no? No. I've been retrieving articles from rhetoric journals for years here, and so spatially I know what floor and approximately what shelf they are on--the usual suspects, Rhetorica, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Rhetoric Review, QJS. They're all proximate to one another because of topic and title. And as far as I can remember, RSQ has been right in there with them. So without bothering to check the call number, I bopped down to floor 3.5 (yep, there's a touch of Being John Malkovich in our stacks), but lo, there was no RSQ.

Long story short, RSQ is now (or was it always?) shelved in the Q section (for oversized stuff--the RSQ newsletter was at one point 8.5 x 11). The Q section is on 2E, the dungeony, musty, not temp controlled, dark depths of the east part of the library. The ceilings there are low--about 6.5 feet--but the doorways are way lower, and the caged lightbulbs hang down, like bats, waiting to graze the head of any person of estimable height (ie me). It sucks to hit your head. So I stoop. As in bend-at-the-waist stoop. It turns out this posture, and the lack of light, makes it nearly impossible to read the call numbers, and so I got lost. Also, stooping while trying to read call numbers puts one at risk for tripping over the large piles of books in the walkways. I felt like I was doing some secret academic obstacle course. (The place is an utter mess thanks, I think, to some book shifting that's going on this summer.) And then? When I finally found RSQ tucked on a shelf next to a caged cubicle that looked like it would be used by Oz of Buffy fame if he decided to go to graduate school to study history, I could not find my way out of the second floor. I took one stairway that led up three flights (half-flights?) to--I kid you not--a sealed wall. It was a little unsettling, and physically just awful. When I got out of there, I was clammy and nauseous, and a little disoriented. And it took much longer than 15 minutes.