b l o g o s

what one can learn about one's self from cleaning out one's office

A few years back, during a round of budget cuts, the English Department, which never, ever has any money, made its final cuts.* It cut out long distance telephone service, and it cut out exam books. These are the little booklets of lined paper (sometimes known as blue books) that students use for exams. The solution was to xerox exam books, and so students were given stapled sets of paper with lines crookedly xeroxed onto them. These little copies were so sad.

And then a couple years later I was jointly appointed in English and Communication, a department where people get grants, and things are much more flush. Imagine my delight when, during a supply-gathering visit to the main office I discovered that Communication had exam books! Loads of them, sheathed in plastic wrap, in various sizes (5, 10, 20 pages).

Today while I was cleaning out my office, I found several stashes of those exam books, tucked under a stack of folders on my filing cabinet, hidden away in a drawer, stacked with my course packets on my bookshelves. Two packs weren't even open. Apparently over the past four years I have been hording them, like a child of the Depression who dies of old age in a house with a basement full of canned beans, or a hibernating animal after a long, hungry winter with a fort of twigs and nuts. After I cleaned out my office, I had a stack of exam books more than a foot high, my little nutty stash.

*by final, I mean final. When the next round of budget cuts came, the Head reportedly showed the Dean the budget, and the Dean reportedly said "nevermind."

Dear KM,

It's weird isn't it, traveling. Dropping into someone's place and life for several days, assuming their rhythms, catching up on things large and mundane, sharing real-time quandaries, shopping so much together that we start to shop for each other, eating in sync to the point that we both migrate to the same thing on the menu. And, wham, jetting off.

Our conversations, though, continue in my head. I know I could email them, but without a steaming bowl of pho or a plate of daal between us, or the path through kensington gardens beneath us, or the two shins albums on a loop like they were at that one place, it just doesn't seem right.

What do you think about this swine flu business? Should my friend fly to Austin this week? What's going on with X, Y, and Z (with X being a person, Y being a place, and Z being a thing)? Your brother gets more and more excited about moving to Pennsylvania every day. I wish I had a big bowl of Special (U)K, chased by one of those frothy hot chocolates from around the corner. I think soy milk tastes better over there. Both real estate transactions are now ready to close. I have worn my zip-up track jacket from fat face so much that it needs to be washed, but I can't seem to take it off to wash it. I hope you and your friend W have fun this weekend.

I didn't really get jet lag, but I'm definitely having KM-lag.

xox,
debbie

banana tales

In line to get my boarding pass at heathrow the other day, I got behind a multi-generational family that took forever to, as the brits say, get themselves sorted. The issue had to do with getting their seats reassigned to accommodate the fiery grandmother with deep and bright red hair who was in a wheelchair. Fair play, of course, though I've no idea why it took upwards of forty-five minutes.

The grandmother was obviously the ruler, because her daughter kept rushing over to her to clear each decision, and she (the grandmother) wasn't happy with anything. Never smiled once, in fact. Meantime, the skinny and bored tween granddaughter ate a banana while shifting her weight and staring at people in the line next to her. When she finished the banana, she tried to give the peel to her grandmother, who shrieked at her for even considering it. The daughter then handed the peel to her mother who was busy rebooking and who absentmindedly took it, like that game we all played when we were kids. The mother then handed it to the quiet and helpful grandfather who, after a quick glance around the bin-free ticketing area, tucked it on the top of a bag hanging on the back of the grandmother's chair. When the grandmother got a whiff and craned around to see the peel hanging on her chair, all hell broke loose. The flamy hair shook all at once. I--and a few others--took a step back.

***
While in London, I met KM's friend Jess who is making a name for herself food-wise in London. She has a cool blog, has even done a tv appearance, and occasionally runs demonstration workshops at places like Whole Foods. This is hard work, especially with a low-attention-span set like mothers of young children who themselves can be, well, distracting. During this demonstration, Jess had a display of fresh fruit, paid for out of pocket. In the middle of Jess's instruction on a particular technique, a little boy started reaching for the fruit. His mother interrupted Jess's demonstration to ask if the boy could have one of the display bananas. Jess paused and said yes, and then after the boy gobbled it down, the mother left the peel on the counter for Jess to clean up.

***

Yesterday on the way to campus I had a banana. It took me less than a minute to eat it, and then I considered these two scenes on the rest of my walk while toting the peel, limp, mottled, and folded in my left hand.

royal hound

words, desire, pain

KM scored us tickets to an afternoon performance of Madame de Sade, a play written by Yukio Mashima about the Marquis de Sade and told from the point of view of five women. The play has gotten bad reviews, but I think a lot of the reviewers, in grumbling about how the play is "all telling no showing," have missed the point, and wildly so. The point of the play seems to me to be exactly about the complexities of women and sex, and the way that the telling and retelling--and hearing and rehearing--of the lurid actions of the Marquis shocks even as it sets these behooped women on the edges of their skirts. So yes, all manner of intensities traffic through words about sex, and the play deals with fluctuating morals even as it elicits them from the audience. This particular audience was naughty and loved the bawdiness.

My favorite scene was when the Madame lashed out at her mother (played by Dame Judi Densch) for judging her own participation in sadomasochism, and my favorite character was the first one to speak onstage--a woman of loose morals who happens to have just come from horse riding and so has a whip that she takes to striking against the skirts of her dress to make her points. She ends up becoming something of a hero at the start of the revolution. I. LOVED. HER.

The wigs and the lavish dresses were characters in and of themselves, really.

Seeing this play made me want to reread Deleuze on de Sade, because I could sense a good deal of consonance between Deleuze and Mashima.

bat for lashes, shepherd's bush empire (london)

It turns out I'm missing the likes of Fleet Foxes and Clem Snide here in London by mere weeks, but I did manage to score a resell ticket to Bat for Lashes tonight. I don't know too much about BfL except that I like the single "What's a Girl to Do," and the lead singer, Natasha Khan (pretty much the whole of Bat for Lashes), has a truly lovely voice.

Tonight Khan floated on stage with her cute little upturned nose, loads of silvery shimmery eyeshadow, black fingerless gloves, and a fluttery victorian-style tie-on collar made of tulle. At the beginning of the show most of her hair was tucked into the collar but by the end after rocking on a couple of numbers ("For this one, I want to see you dahncing," she directed us), most of it had gotten loose.

Her voice reminds me of bjork in strength and range, only less piercing (which to me is very good). The new album is a bit slow, but the mood of the show didn't demand much more than that. When she thanked everyone genuinely for cheering, the guy in front of me turned to the guy beside him and said, "she's so SWEET." And he's right. When the microphone gave her raging feedback, she apologized in the transition to the next song and said "I'm gonna make it all bettah." At which point she got out these wind-chimey things and sang what can be best descrbed as a gorgeous lullaby. It was a great show: Khan held to her reputation for the fantastical, while still giggling at the shouts from the audience. I really don't get to see women singers often enough.

scattershot 9, london edition

1. if one more person says "lovely" unsarcastically in response to something I've said or how I look, I swear I will not be able to go home.

2. in camden town: a little tin full of hot moroccan food for four pounds, eaten standing up under a wee head shop overhang (to stay dry) with super loud punk music blasting, can be damn tasty. but it requires focus.

3. whippets galore. i miss mine.

4. i am told ticket scalping is legal here. i plan to find out how effective it is on friday night before the bat for lashes concert.

5. i loves me some belgian hot chocolate at tea time.

6. researching at the british library the week after easter may not be worth the hassle, though research begets more research questions, and so on my last day i may well take my colleague's advice and give a tug to one of the large, round, perfectly symmetrical white curls on the head of one researcher (apparently a fixture in the rare books room) to prove to myself--and the world!--that he is in fact wearing a wig.

7. coastal hiking and biking on the isle of wight awaits.

8. KM warned me about this, but british sitcom plots move at a breakneck speed. i'm only on episode 4 of gavin & stacy, but this couple that met in episode 1 is already planning a wedding.

9. KM is an extraordinary host, and a travel-planning, deal-finding genius.

here's something

So far, the single biggest advantage to being in London vis-a-vis my job is that I can wake up in the morning, answer all my email, and then have about seven or eight hours of a day before another email trickles in, since it is the dead of night back home. Experience tells me that another advantage, to be felt when I return home late next week, will be that I will wake up prit-tee early and have lots of time to work in the still and dark.

smoking fish man

nostos

The word nostalgia comes from the greek nostos, which means return, or return home. This week, a good friend returned to C-U, and for both of us it meant a mix of catching up, looking forward, and a heavy dose of nostalgia. L, whose nickname is monkey princess (I have blogged about her here before), and I have traveled strangely parallel paths. For starters, we are from roughly the same region in the south (sw virginia and ne tennessee); we both ended up in the same place for graduate school; and we both got our first jobs at Illinois and started at the same time, L in anthropology and me in English. Her grad school advisor lived next door to one of my committee members, and they discovered we were both coming to Illinois, so coffee--or lunch, we can't quite recall--swiftly followed.

In keeping with our parallel existences, we each (independently) bought places in Champaign that were very similar, and we proceeded to launch our careers here. We hung out a lot with our friend whom we called Pato, an economist of education. L and Pato kept Jada when I was at conferences and tended to me when I gouged my knee while mt. biking; Pato and I picked up a feverish L and her trunk at the airport after a dig in Kenya; L and I advised Pato on his love life. We were all going through this new faculty thing together, and from this vantage point things seem like they were so simple. L is now at Berkeley; Pato moved on to Wellesley, and I am on my way to Penn State.

I just dropped L off at the train station. We took the long way there, driving by her old co-op building and by my old condo building, by the park where the three of us used to meet and where Jada would run in crazy circles around us. We skirted around downtown where we used to eat pizza at Jupiter's and sip martinis at Boltini after long days of teaching and writing. After I dropped her off, I came straight home and went to my attic to dig out the picture, below. This is of one of L's birthday parties at boltini. I made cupcakes. The birthday princess was daintily opening her cupcake, and not being able to take the primness, I plunged my face into it. This shot was taken right after that. We were younger; we were blonder; we were much more capable of staying out late. Yet aside from being quite a bit busier, living in houses with spouses, and having tenure, we are still pretty much the same.