A Rapturous Verbatim

"Moose Out Front Shoulda Told Ya..."

2010-07-25T18:52:00.003-04:00

Sorry folks, blog's closed.

Read this for the full story.

Check out my new project over on WordPress.

Thanks for reading! :-)

What Would I Say To You Now?

2010-07-15T15:19:00.000-04:00

Over the past six months, I've undergone some pretty drastic changes. I've moved to a new city, started a new and totally unfamiliar job, and began in earnest the process of trying to piece together what exactly this crazy life of mine is going to look like.

As time has gone on, I've had to make some pretty important decisions regarding what things will stay in my life and what will be jettisoned. It's a process that I took on with trepidation but am now pleased to say has turned out remarkably well. For the first time in a really long time, I'm happy with things. It's not all looking exactly like I wished it would, but I am legitimately and seriously happy.

Back when I first started A Rapturous Verbatim--a blog whose title has, I've come to realize, been laughably ironic--I was not so much on the happy side. I was in the midst of my junior year at Princeton, and things were beginning to get a bit on the dicey side with the onset of my independent work. (I never did regale my faithful audience with the story of how I got the nickname "Fastest Thesis in the West," did I? Another time, perhaps.) I wasn't doing anything creative, and I wanted to have something just for me, something I could enjoy and create.

And, if you'll recall, in my very first post, I made what in hindsight is a stunning declaration:

I can't promise everything that ends up here will be polished or even fun to read. I can't promise that my ranting will go anywhere, that any ideas I come up with will ever come to fruition, or that anything I write here will make any sense.

How about that, huh?

It's funny the way things turn out. Before too long, I'd begun treating ARV like a clearinghouse for my most profound and well-reasoned ideas. It was a place to go to do seriously, thoughtful writing. It was an opportunity for me to take an idea and draw it out to its fullest without feeling the obligations of academic discourse.

It was also, ultimately, depressing as hell.

If you look back, you'll notice that within the first couple of months, I wrote not one but two posts declaring fresh starts. (That's right. Two fresh starts in the first four months. A real winner I had on my hands.) And even worse than that, most of the material in there was simply me bitching about how I haven't done enough writing lately.

As it turns out, that's still a legit problem. But over the last four years, I've discovered that whining about your problems doesn't actually, you know, fix them.

Fortunately for my faithful reading audience--and really, you guys are troopers--I figured all this out a couple of years ago. And so my response was to start up a new blog, one that would allow me to be a little lighter, more amusing, less polished (again), and more off-the-cuff. I launched A Tournament of Lies thinking that the two blogs would play off of each other but develop organically. I'd originally envisioned 1-2 posts per week on ARV and 3-4 posts per week (if not more) on AToL. I'd figured on it being a good way to showcase the two sides of my personality.

But, as I've said a few times already, things changed. Things have been changing. And to quote an old song by Mary-Chapin Carpenter (born in Princeton, no less!), "The old way isn't working anymore." As I've become less, shall we say, miserable, I've been neglecting ARV. (Or populating it with mostly book reviews, which it turns out not everyone digs.) All because I felt the blog had pigeonholed itself into a particular voice or style. And while my early AToL posts were fresh and funny, I've been noticing the same things happening over there lately too.

The straw came with my two latest AToL posts. I started by telling what I thought was a silly story--the kind of thing I'd originally intended the blog to do--but I realized that the story was getting more out of hand than I'd expected, for two reasons: a) it was running far longer than I thought it would (I do have a tendency to do that...), and b) it was less silly funny than sardonically funny, way darker than it seemed when I conceived the idea of writing it down (I tend to do that too, actually...).

Don't get me wrong: I think the story was totally worth sharing. But it didn't seem to fit the venue. It was too funny to be posted on ARV, and too dark to be posted on AToL.

Well damn it, now what?

My solution in the past had been to create a new blog, but we see how well that's worked out. I've run into the same problem again, where my style and tone have shifted so much that the things I'm writing don't seem to fit the molds that have been defined by what came before. It felt, I realized, like when I decided that it was time to abandon my old childish, immature Xanga from high school (which is still hanging around there somewhere on the Internet, if you go dig it out) in favor of what I perceived would be a fresh, mature perspective.

And now, dear readers, that time has come again.

I've come to the conclusion that A Rapturous Verbatim and A Tournament of Lies, fascinating and not-totally-ill-advised experiments that they were, have run their life spans to the end. After just over 100 posts on each, I just don't see how I can, in my present state, sustain these two blogs anymore and have them function the way I'd planned--or, rather, the way they've turned out. So the time has come to shut the door for good.

With the exception of one last forthcoming post, this will be the final entry posted on either of these two blogs.

Rest assured that I'm not dropping out of the blogging game. I've been hard at work over the past few days crafting the beginnings of a new, stripped-down project, one that I hope will better reflect me and my daily life and the things I want to write down and share with the world. My goal is to have it be devoid of the kind of defining characteristics that ended up strangling these two blogs as the years have gone on. But time will tell, I suppose.

So really, I'm seeing this as nothing more than the beginning of a new chapter. I have no intentions of taking down the blogs, since I feel strongly about keeping them intact as a landmark of a very specific period of my life. But the fact is, that period is over, and the time has come to move on and start fresh. There's more to say, just nothing more to say here.

Full details will be posted here when the new project is ready for primetime. Until then, thanks for indulging me around these parts for the past few years, and I hope you'll follow along to the new joint and keep up with things.

What would I say to you now? You'll just have to wait and find out.

Early Review: Pretend All Your Life

2010-05-05T22:20:00.000-04:00

It's been a long time, but at last I am once more posting another selection I received from the LibraryThing Early Reviewer's program. (I know. You're all thrilled. Restrain thyselves, if you please.)

The latest selection is Pretend All Your Life, the debut novel by Joseph Mackin, which deals with the aftermath of the September 11th attacks in New York City. The novel hit bookshelves on, of all days, April 1. (Unfortunate? Appropriate? You be the judge.) I have posted below, as per standard operating procedure, my review of this slim tome, for those who may be interested.

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Pretend All Your Life is a perfectly okay novel. I suppose that falls under the category of damning with faint praise, but I can't think of any other thing to say that's more apt. Its interest in a significant historical event, one that has only very rarely been handled with both depth and sensitivity, is admirable and brave, but I did not find that 9-11 really added any kind of depth to the story. I left this book wanting to have liked it more than I did, but not able to truly find an substantive reason to give it higher marks.

The novel revolves around tortured plastic surgeon Dr. Richard Gallin, whose practice has been suffering in the months since 9-11 ravaged New York City. Beyond his mere financial troubles, he is also mourning the loss of his son Bernardo, who died in the attacks, an event that renews thoughts of his former wife, who passed away many years before. As he struggles to fill the voids, his life becomes complicated by the presence of a journalist looking to ruin him, and the reemergence of a figure from his past who makes an unexpected and uneasy demand of him.

On the surface, the novel seems very interested in giving depth and interest to its characters, but this is not sustained as the work plays on. We get a strong sketch of Gallin, whose frustrations and listlessness are awkwardly but interestingly intermixed with his sexual longings. For a plastic surgeon, this is an interesting juxtaposition, one that leads the reader to expect a depth of profundity that is ultimately not found. Gallin ends up being little more than a puppet, bending to the whims of a cast of supporting characters that are shockingly static. Gallin's girlfriend Ana serves as little more than a token love interest and a source for tears. Conniving journalist Nick Adams is merely a rat whose tendency to walk around rehearsing his moments of triumph is borderline laughable. Even Bernardo's widow Kiran offers little more than a physical body for Gallin to guiltily fawn over. For a novel so invested in the notion of identity, too many identities fall far too flat.

Yet the novel most notably struggles because its B plot, involving Gallin's controversial firing of a nurse who tested positive for HIV, does not seem to match the impact or substance of the A plot. AIDS enters the plot early and its entrance feels lucid, natural. But as the novel progresses, Mackin almost feels the need to militantly explore the notion of the virus, to the point where it feels in contradiction to the questions the novel raises about a world after 9-11. The notion of this very pre-WTC epidemic invading a novel that is so intensely focused on the aftermath of the attacks feels unnatural and manufactured. And in fact, this is what I feel is the novel's greatest weakness: in its effort to combine several "big" ideas into a relatively compact, high-concept narrative, it all feels too convenient, too convoluted, too constructed. The plot feels so disconnected from its underlying meaning that the characters and events feel not like real people and events, but as a series of specific acts and objects that develop because the author needs them too, not because the story logically moves that way. There is little ebb and flow to the novel, only pushing and pulling.

Unfortunately, saying more requires a spoiler alert so, Reader, consider yourself warned. Where the novel becomes most troubling is in its handling of the return of Bernardo, whose demands on Gallin are couched in the language of rebirth and renewal that were commonplace after 9-11. As a cultural landmark, Bernardo's justifications are legitimate and accurate, but as he continually prattles on about how Gallin could never truly understand his motivations, these feelings lose their impact. If Mackin's intent is to characterize how Bernardo's feelings belong only to those who lived through 9-11, this is, at worst, an arrogant and unhelpful assertion, one that reinforces the type of American selfishness that purportedly inspired the attacks in the first place. At best, it is, to be blunt, lazy writing. A novel that deals with deep thoughts needs to explore those thoughts thoroughly, not reduce them to mere clichés. Either Mackin doesn't want to explore these ideas or he can't--either way, he should not if he can't do so completely.

By the time Pretend All Your Life ends, it feels strangely abrupt and, despite its meager but patient build-up, unsatisfying. In a way, this mirrors the suddenness and surprise of 9-11 itself, a singular moment that causes everything to come to a screeching halt. But there is very little sense that anything substantial has happened, or that anyone has been able to realize what they wanted. And the final gesture, one that is surely meant to be dramatic and foreboding, instead comes off as a line that begs for more where there is nothing more to find. I may be in the minority, but I feel this is an ironically appropriate image for the novel itself: it wants to be profound, expressive, and dramatic, but offers little substance beyond its surface intrigue. William Gibson's Pattern Recognition proved that 9-11 is ready for novelistic treatment, and so I'm convinced there's more to find within this story, but I fear Mackin has not unearthed it. As a 9-11 metaphor, it is fitting; as a novel, it is sadly underwhelming.

Mayday

2010-05-01T18:20:00.007-04:00

Hi there again, friends. It's been quite a while, I know.

If it's any consolation, know first and foremost that I've missed you horribly. It's been frustrating to think that I've got so much to tell, so many stories to impart, so many ideas bouncing around in my brain--and yet, so little time to let them coalesce and develop and become real and true on the typewritten page. This wasn't how I'd planned for things to happen at all, but the truly funny thing is that, for the last two months, that's been the unofficial motto of my life. Strange, eh?

When last you heard from me, I was riffing on one of my Early Reviewer books. This was way back in 2009, and while I've been quiet for the first four months of 2010, it hasn't been for lack of news to impart. In fact, things have been a veritable whirlwind of excitement.

Let's, for the moment, forget completely about January. It was, frankly, a fucked-up month, with lots of fucked-up emotions and events that could be easily construed as fucked-up. If I was hoping to take 2010 by the horns and start the decade off strong, I failed in spectacular fashion. But, on the upside, I got a start date for that new job I'd been alluding to in previous posts, a date that, I figured, would mark the start of the beginning of a new, exciting, and totally different looking life.

At the risk of messing with my time-honored tradition of narrative suspense, I should let you know that things aren't quite as green and lovely as I'd anticipated. Perhaps ye, O faithful readers who have stuck with me through thick and thin, may have already guessed that something, anything, everything would find itself scattered and awry by the time its implications had managed to enter into focus. But while that pattern--reinforced, no doubt, by years of self-hatred, self-distrust, and self-defeat--was not a shock, the actual events that transpired to mire me, once more, too soon, in a pit of self-created despair did not, for once, have anything to do with me. This time, my friends, I didn't do this to myself.

Which is perhaps why I have returned once more to my writing, to getting these words down and out for others to see, because writing has always been a refuge for me--hell, it's a refuge for me today (but more on that later, I promise). I've come to the realization that I need to devote myself to this work, and I need to do more than to think about it, to say it, to write it in blog posts that, taken as a whole, increasingly sound like an over-and-over-and-over-again repetition of the same broken-record mantra that, despite all the talking, I can't quite seem to put into action.

I can't promise this will be the moment that changes it all. But I've had some pretty substantive moments over the past few months, moments I've neglected to share. Neglect, I shall, no more.

The move to DC has been...interesting, to say the least. The move proper took place three months ago to the day, when, after a day of loading lots of my crap into a fairly cramped bedroom in an Annandale basement, I handed over my first official rent check to my landlord. It's been a hell of a ride since then, one that commenced with an immediate trip to Texas to see Karen and, presumably, clear my mind in advance of the beginning of my job.

Funny story: panic attacks have a funny way of not clearing one's mind. Just saying.

Another funny story: ER visits are not the most romantic way to spend Valentine's Day weekend. Again, just saying.

So upon my return to the greater Washington, DC, area, I was filled with a touch more trepidation than I was hoping. As a man of reason and overthinker extraordinaire, I spent much of my time trying to figure out what the hell it was that sent me into a hospital with a raging fit of anxiety. Which left me woefully underprepared for the commencement of my "real-world" life on February 22, when my training began.

Fortunately, I seemed to fit in pretty nicely. Sure, the training was extensive and a lot to handle, but I have also thrived considerably in the classroom setting, and this experience was no exception. By the end of the class five weeks later, I had earned the valedictorian award for having the best cumulative test scores of all my classmates. And I'd earned one other thing: a new roommate.

See, as my fortunes were improving at work and I gained confidence in my decision to come to DC in the first place, that confidence seemed to rub off on Karen, who felt increasingly motivated to join me in DC, find a job, and forge out on our path together. Noble goals, surely, and goals that I was all too happy to embrace, as what more could a guy ask for than to have his woman offer to come thousands of miles to be by his side?

The problem is, as has oft been the case in my life, the moment I let things believe they're going well, that's when they take a turn for the worse. First, despite gaining the approval of my landlord and roommate for Karen's indefinite stay, tension began to mount almost immediately in the form of silly passive-aggressiveness and a general unlikablility from the roommate (who, truth be told, wasn't terribly likable in the first place). We tried our best to not let this enter into our lives, but as the needling became more frequent and the frustration of an increasingly unsuccessful job search mounted, things got a little unsavory here and there. Nothing too bad, truth be told, but just unpleasant. And avoidable, which is really what bothered me most.

But on top of all this came a ray of hope: just as Karen was preparing to hear on a significant and much-wanted offer from an agency in the area, another interview popped up very suddenly--and almost just as suddenly came an offer. Dear readers, I tell you, after so many months of hearing "no," to finally hear a "yes" made me so damn happy for her. Within days, we were looking at an apartment, planning to move out of the basement and away from the toxicity of present roommate relations, and preparing for the page to truly turn on the next chapter.

And then it all turned sour.

Karen has discussed it in detail herself [~~so I'll not go into any more detail here, as it's not my place~~] and, with her blessing, I can tell you that something happened. Something catastrophic. To borrow the parlance of our times, a game-changer. Two weeks ago Saturday, April 17, Karen's mom passed away, very suddenly and without any warning. I've long prided myself on my ability to convey feelings and emotions in my writing, as it's a skill not many are blessed with, but I have to be honest when I tell you, faithful readers, that it was such an emotional and mental collapse that I can't even begin to describe it.

And frankly, that's where I've been the past two weeks. I'll confess that I have little room to speak of catastrophe compared to what Karen is experiencing, but in the aftermath of what's occurred, it's been agonizingly difficult to extract myself from the mire. Everything really has changed. The apartment is gone. I'm still in the basement. The job, which has since exited training and entered into real-deal big-time mode, is frustrating the shit out of me. And, as of this morning, I'm once more alone in this God-forsaken room.

I've spoken to lots of people about this over the past few days, all of whom have urged me to stay strong and focused and try not to let things bother me too much--which is easier said than done, but nonetheless appreciated. What hurts the most is how suddenly and quickly everything changed, from the heights of ecstasy to the depths of the darkest despair, with no warning or preparation. It's been one of the worst kicks in the teeth I've ever experienced--and again, I haven't even come close to taking the brunt of it. So on top of all that, I feel horrendously guilty for having taken it as hard as I have.

But the simple fact, which is so impossibly hard to deny at this point, is that everything has changed. I've learned that this whole endeavor has been a mistake--not one I never should have made, I suspect, but one that's going to be really hard to fix. I'm doing my damnedest, because if there's one thing I have learned, it's that complacency is easy to accept but damn near impossible to live with. And at this point, the status quo is not cutting it.

So keep your eyes peeled for more frequent posts to come. There's bound to be another adventure on the horizons, even if I have no damn clue what that adventure is right now. Hopefully it'll come to me soon. But in the meantime, I'll be writing, because that has been very much missing as of late, and if I ever hope to regain the sense of confidence and composure I need to dig myself out of this mire, it's going to have to start from there.

Early Review: Then Came the Evening

2009-12-22T22:42:00.002-05:00

Now that my LibraryThing Early Reviewer backlog is at last cleared out, I can finally get back to the business of posting early reviews that are, in fact, early. Well, kind of.

My selection from the November batch was Then Came the Evening, the debut novel by Brian Hart. The book was actually released on this very day, December 22, 2009, and is available in bookstores everywhere. It is written in a very stripped-down bare-bones style, very reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy, so if you are interested in such titles, you will probably be very interested in my review of the book, which I've reproduced here as is my custom.

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You can tell that Brian Hart wants really badly to be the next incarnation of Cormac McCarthy. From the very first pages of Then Came the Evening, all the trademark moves are present: a grizzled, rough-edged protagonist, a violent encounter, scorched-earth imagery, and family strife. The first chapter of the novel sets up something that feels both familiar yet new, something truly promising. Unfortunately, the novel, while passable, fails to really live up to those expectations, and ends up feeling more like an imitator than an innovator.

The novel opens with Bandy Dorner, a Vietnam vet with a host of unnamed problems on his mind, awaking in a ditch, piss-drunk and having driven his car through a fence. As his father and two police officers try to wrangle him, one of the cops ends up dead, and Bandy ends up in prison for twenty years. In the meantime, his wife Iona, pregnant with his son, leaves him to live with another man. By the time Bandy gets out, Iona is a widower and a drug addict, Tracy is a grown man, and Bandy is a shell of his former self. All three reconvene on the old family farm, each hoping to find redemption in their new family unit, but the past refuses to die.

The McCarthyian influence that infuses the work is perhaps best seen in Hart's descriptions of the land, which are painstakingly detailed and as vivid as the brilliant cover image on the book jacket. The Idaho setting, familiar to the author, truly comes alive as Hart portrays a hard, unyielding environment that is dirty but hearty, tough but alive. It's clear he wants the land to be a character, and it is, particularly since the landscape plays a powerful role in some of the most important scenes in the novel. However (and I will concede it may be a personal thing, because I have the same criticism of McCarthy), the oppressiveness of the land imagery seems to cast a layer of grime and filth over the novel, as if the whole thing is tainted with dirt. The consistency of that dirtiness, in my mind, gives an unwelcome uniformity to the novel: though things change, everything feels the same.

In much the same way, the characterization throughout the novel is strong, but there's an unwelcome flatness to even the main characters that grows to become exceptionally frustrating. As an openly flawed protagonist, one should probably expect that Bandy will have a very difficult time fostering any kind of change, and much of the tension of the middle of the novel is in wondering whether or not he will. But at the start of the third act, Bandy partakes in something that he knows is wrong, that will ultimately destroy the good faith he has built, and the lack of remorse (or, frankly, of any kind of reaction from him) is maddening and unrealistic. And while Iona and Tracy do end up being reasonably well-balanced characters in the end, Iona's detox from her drug addiction is dealt with so minimally--particularly when compared to the treatment of Bandy's jail time--that it feels almost too forced to seem genuine.

In addition, Hart's attempts to create a convincing portrait of small-town America is, by fits and starts, compelling and unrealistic. While the town of Lake Fork is real, and Hart knows all the landmarks of the area that give it a sense of realism, the relationships between the various people in town don't always ring true. Rather than creating figures that struggle with their ability to accept Bandy when he leaves prison, Hart seems content to rely on types, figures that are static in their responses but that, in summation, give the sense of complexity. Few of the secondary characters, even Wilhelm, the most substantial one, make a powerful impact. And at the end of the novel, when one of the secondary characters is revealed to have done something that resonates with events earlier in the plot, the idea that no one else in the town knew it until then feels awfully contrived.

By the end, the novel feels like it has been an incredible trial, but rather than coming off as redemptive and renewing, it leaves the reader exhausted and overwhelmed. There is a nice cyclicality to the conclusion--one that does, in fairness, feel a little forced, but at least it's forgivable--but the toll it has taken to reach that point doesn't really seem worth it. It's as if Hart wants to beat the roughness into our heads, and sure, by the end, we get it, but when I reached the end of Then Came the Evening, I was almost glad to see it finished. And despite its successes here and there, when a novel leaves you with that feeling, that can't help but give you pause.

Early Review: Flying

2009-12-18T21:04:00.000-05:00

The long, drawn out process of catching up on the late reviews I've had to do as a member of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers group is, officially, at an end! And, if I may say so myself, what a way to clear out the backlog.

In what has clearly been a case of saving the best for last--or, more appropriately, saving the longest for last--I have finally gotten around to reading Flying by Eric Kraft, a lengthy tome consisting of three novellas, two of which were previously published, that tell one continuous story. The book was originally released on March 3, 2009, and by the time I received it, it was already on bookshelves, but that does not excuse my delinquency in any way.

And as you will see by the content of my review, the time I've taken getting around to it was the most regrettable part of the read, as I have found it to be one of the best contemporary fiction works I've read in quite some time. Unsurprisingly, it was recently named one of Barnes & Noble's Editors' Picks for the Best Fiction Books of 2009, and if you're a fan of this blog, I believe you will be incredibly interested in reading more about this thoroughly excellent title, and so I present my review below.

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I feel it is my duty to begin this long-overdue review by extending my sincerest apologies to the author, Eric Kraft. When I received Flying as an Early Reviewers book many months ago, I was exiting the swamp of graduate school and simply could not motivate myself to read a nearly 600-page book. And so, despite my solemn obligations, it languished on my bookshelf for months and months. Heaven only knows what prompted me to pick it up on Monday. All I do know is that today is Friday, and the book is complete. And so I extend my apology: I'm sorry, sir, that I did not read this book sooner, because it is an unequivocally wonderful piece of literature.

The novel, which really consists of three parts (two of which were previously published novellas), tells the story of Peter Leroy, Kraft's protagonist throughout all his works. Peter narrates the story of an adventure he made as a 15-year-old, in which he built an "aerocycle" (lovingly recreated by plans found in Impractical Craftsman magazine) and "flew" (the term, he admits almost immediately, is very loosely used) to New Mexico on the pretense of attending a prestigious high school summer program. The program is a fabrication: really, Peter's friend Matthew got the spot because he never told Peter about the program, so Peter invented a new program and deceived the necessary parties into letting him go. As Peter retakes the trip fifty years later, his wife Albertine at his side, he reflects on the places he's seen and the things he has and hasn't done--and the reader quickly learns that deception is an integral part of the tale.

The novel succeeds as a read because it works on so many levels, not the least of which is the detail with which Kraft allows Peter to operate in both a fictional and nonfictional framework. Peter Leroy, we're quick to learn, is the quintessential unreliable narrator, and though the thrust of the book is his quest to right the wrongs that his deceptions have wrought, we see that his stories often are too good to be true--to borrow Albertine's words, they lack the ring of truth. Albertine becomes a great foil for him, a motivation and inspiration for him to try to come clean, but the act of deciphering what is true and what is "embellished" is constantly at the novel's forefront. It's a high-wire act that Kraft executes perfectly: we never feel too frustrated by Peter, and even at his most dishonest, he is nonetheless incredibly entertaining.

What makes the novel so entertaining, however, is the fact that it is legitimately funny, perhaps one of the only novels I have ever read that actually made me laugh aloud. It works because, unlike most funny books, the entire function of Flying is not simply to make the reader laugh. Instead, the laughter comes as the targets of Kraft's satire become increasingly more absurd. At the start, we laugh at the town of Babbington's lame attempt at "redefinition," but as each town Peter visits becomes a more potent example of the commodification of processed experiences, the original target becomes less and less absurd. But, in an expert move, Kraft allows the reader to see Peter as an increasingly absurd figure, a memoirist who tells stories that few people care to hear. Yet the reader is constantly entranced, leading us to laugh a little at ourselves for becoming so involved in the joke--a joke that works on a number of levels and evolves to remain fresh.

The novel's structure, too, is pitch-perfect as well, as each part of the novel is formed in a different way. In part one, as Peter conceives his plan and builds his aerocycle, we bounce erratically back and forth between the past and the present, with much of the focus on the nostalgia factor of the young Peter's project. The second part resembles a picaresque, in which Peter in the 1950s travels by aerocycle and Peter and Albertine in the present travel by electric car over roughly the same areas, often seeing the exact same locations in each consecutive chapter. This gives the second part a far more reflective, insightful quality. In part three, we contrast Peter and Albertine's abrupt return trip with young Peter's adventures in New Mexico, as he tries to assimilate himself (with some success) into a group of like-minded individuals. In each case, Kraft is careful to draw distinct thematic connections between the past and present, all while pacing the story at an admirably comfortable pace.

But the true joy of Flying is in its language, rich with metaphor and beauty. Kraft's sentences are marvelous, long and flowing, reading naturally and seductively and wrapping around the reader's mind in an intoxicating way. It is appropriate that he alludes often to Proust, for the influence on Kraft's style is obvious, as is the propensity towards digression. Peter is a memoirist at all times, even when he's merely reflecting on memoirs, and the result is that there are brief moments, often of minimal consequence to the plot, of self-contained truths that are so incisive that they stick in your mind. The same goes for the more humorous passages, particular those in dialogue: Kraft proves he is as comfortable with an amusing back and forth as he is with a thoroughly ridiculous and long speech. Kraft has many, many tricks up his sleeve, and he knows not only how to use them, but where to use them to gain their maximal effect.

The result, in case I haven't made it clear enough, is a novel that is an unbridled joy to read. It is long, sure, but it demands to be read, refuses to let your interest slip for a moment, and, despite a rather quick resolution in the end, makes you both satisfied by having taken the journey but leaving you craving more. It is, in that manner, like any good trip should be. One final note: my Early Reviewer copy was missing 16 pages near the end. I immediately went to the Internet, found the nearest library that had it in stock, and went to that library right after work to read the missing pages because I didn't want to miss a word. I was that hooked on Flying--and I suspect you will be too.

For Love of the Crash

2009-12-17T12:23:00.004-05:00

I'm going to break with tradition here and give you a very important piece of information right up front. The moral of this post is this: I think I really enjoy AFI's latest album, Crash Love. And while that doesn't seem terribly important--and in fact, in the grand scheme of things, it is probably of very little consequence whatsoever--I feel like there's something to be extrapolated from this experience.

My first AFI album was 2003's Sing the Sorrow. I bought it strictly on the strength of its first single, "Girl's Not Grey," and the fact that it was on sale for $7.99. I figured there had to be more than one good song on there, right? Well, I threw it into the CD player in my car and quickly found it very hard to digest. It was weird and not terribly coherent, and at least half the songs featured animalistic screaming that I just didn't find appealing. The only song I consistently liked was "Girl's Not Grey," and it was hard to justify keeping the CD in my car for one single track when I could just as easily rip the song, put it on a mix CD--yes, ever-nostalgic reader, these were my pre-iPod days--and have one disc that featured songs I knew I liked.

And so I put it aside onto my CD rack, believing it destined to collect dust from here until eternity. But somehow, after a few weeks, I felt called back, like I needed to reexamine the disc, give it another shot. Could one or two quick listens really have been sufficient? Might there actually be a gem on there I'm overlooking because I'm more concerned about dashed expectations than I am with the quality of that with which I've been presented?

I took another listen. Nope, still hated it. Back to collecting dust.

I repeated this process several times over that fateful year, and each time I listened, I felt like I was getting no farther in my quest to appreciate the disc for anything more than a strong single and an incredible purchase value. The tracks were unyielding, unwilling to give me anything that my ears could comfortably grasp onto. The frustration mounted with each new listen.

Then finally, after around ten listens that yielded nothing, I gave it another shot--and it's hard to explain what happened. For some reason, the tracks felt different to me. I was beginning to lose myself in the guitar work and the melodies. Davey Havok's voice began to leap rapturously from the speakers and I found that, despite a year of hating, I was finding the even-numbered tracks (which, interestingly, were the ones that featured the least screaming) to be incredibly satisfying. From there, I began developing an appreciation for several of the odd tracks too, the screaming somehow now fitting the timbre of the song in ways I hadn't realized before.

And then finally, after over a year, the moment came where I realized that I didn't actually hate the disc anymore. In fact, I loved it. And yes, it still remains one of my favorite CDs.

So it was with my first AFI experience: a very gradual, slow development of appreciation. But I felt as if learning to like Sing the Sorrow was a trial that I had passed, that I could now expect to access their other work and be able to appreciate them like I hadn't before. I went out and acquired the preceding album, The Art of Drowning, after hearing that disc's single, "The Days of the Phoenix" (which I will say is arguably the best song the band has ever recorded).

And what happened? You guessed it: I hated that one too!

Now, at the risk of turning this into a novella of music reviews, I'll spare you the experience of what happened with that disc. I'll even admit that, as of right now, I haven't given it the most fair of listens. But when I heard word of a new AFI disc, to be released ominously on 6/6/06, I was thrilled. I had written off The Art of Drowning because I felt like I didn't know where the band had been coming from stylistically prior to that, so I was trying too hard to project Sing the Sorrow on their earlier material, instead of doing it the other way, which would have, you know, made sense.

When the devilish day arrived, I raced to Best Buy to acquire the CD and immediately put it in the car and cranked the volume. And once more, I was shocked and dismayed. It opened with an intro track followed by "Kill Caustic," a vicious, aggressive number in the old screaming style, and then the single, "Miss Murder." A pretty strong start, I'd say. But then the album slipped into electronic tones, techno-style ambient sounds that seemed like the second verse of "Death of Seasons" had been dragged out to album length. I couldn't wrap my head around it at all, and decided that I was, for the most part, disappointed.

But then, after a few more listens, it started growing on me and I became enraptured with that disc too--a disc that even many fans, as well as critics, had written off as not being their best work.

Later on down the line, when I went even farther back into their catalog, to Black Sails in the Sunset, I barely listened to any of it because I couldn't enjoy it. Then I recently burned it for a friend of mine and, lo and behold, I found myself attracted to many of the tracks as I relistened. Once again, it took time.

Which brings us to the present, and Crash Love. This was an exercise in self-awareness: I had figured on hating it from the get-go, so I didn't feel like I entered the first listen with any kind of expectations at all. And sure enough, as soon as I put it in, I was rather surprised. After listening to the whole thing straight through, and being relatively underwhelmed, I could point to two things missing from the disc, two things that had peppered all of AFI's work before that moment: 1) Davey's screaming (yes, dear reader, I had come to actually miss it!), and 2) the call-and-response choruses provided by their fan club, The Despair Faction. Sure, the music sounded like AFI, but it was missing some things that were quintessentially AFI, and I couldn't get behind it in the end.

It had been languishing on my CD rack for the past two months. Occasionally, I would listen to the bonus tracks (which I initially felt were far stronger than the album tracks), but I couldn't even get behind the single, "Medicate." Even my adventure to DC for the job interview, where I was hosted by a good friend who is an even bigger AFI fan than I am (the same good friend of two paragraphs previous), couldn't sway me, despite listening to Crash Love a few times in her car. The familiar story was repeating itself again.

Then yesterday, I found myself drawn to the CD again, for reasons I can't explain. I had been substitute teaching on Monday and Tuesday, and had heard no music over those two days, but I somehow found a chorus from Crash Love in my head. It prompted me to grab the CD and put it in my car, where I started from track one, "Torch Song." And a remarkable thing happened.

As I drove, the chorus came up: (Anything!) I'd tear out my eyes for you, my dear / (Anything!) To see everything that you do, I'd do. And, son of a bitch, I was singing along. Like I knew the words instinctively, like I had all along. On the next track, "Beautiful Thieves," the same thing happened. By the time the fourth track, "Too Shy to Scream," came on, I was full-on rollicking. It was, I realized, the song I'd had in my head that day, and I was finally satisfied to have heard it at last.

Just to make sure it wasn't a fluke, I listened to those tracks again last night. And sure enough, they were stuck in my head and resonating strongly, just like they had been earlier that day. It was no fluke. And even though I've only been really obsessed with the first half of the album recently, I think it's safe to say the rest of it isn't too far from coming around.

Which brings us to the aforementioned moral of this post: I think I really do enjoy Crash Love.

I know what you're thinking. That can't be it, can it? I read all of this just to find out that it's nothing more than a music retrospective? What's the point!

I can't promise I can assuage those concerns in a few short paragraphs. The truth is, when I first conceived this post, I thought it might be funny to look back in time and see how, despite different perspectives and lessons learned over time, the same exact thing happened. Silly Dave, not learning from his mistakes--that doesn't sound familiar at all, does it! I really thought it wouldn't go much farther than that.

But as I've been writing, I've also been reflecting. And after much reflection, I've decided that maybe the real moral of the story is patience above all else. It doesn't matter how much I knew, what I was expecting, or what I had planned. I needed to be patient and let the albums take their course over me before I could really come to appreciate them. In a way, that's not too dissimilar from my own present situation. I'm in the midst of great transition, with some prospects ahead that are making me equal parts thrilled and apprehensive. I've never been one to particularly like the idea that I don't know what's going to happen, particularly when that outcome isn't guaranteed to be a good one. That does not, however, make those moments any less worth experiencing. It's worth it to see those things through and to appreciate the adventure they provide, without so obsessively looking towards the outcome. It's been said before, but it bears repeating: if you look only for the destination, you'll miss the whole journey.

And so I preach patience, a commodity I'd like to think I have but could always do better at exercising. The way things are going now feels good and right, and that's enough. If I can focus on truly savoring the experience, on living in the moment as opposed to for the moment, the juice will be that much sweeter. And all those great things that I've been dreaming of and wishing for--all those things that drive my fears, when I feel like I'll never realize them--well, they could be right around the corner. Like AFI, and like those beautiful thieves, when they happen they'll be the things no one suspects at all.

On Thanks and Giving

2009-11-23T14:49:00.006-05:00

Several weeks ago, after publishing my last post, I realized that October was at an end. It was a realization that I reacted to with a strangely mixed emotion. For one thing, it meant that my fortnight in Texas--a trip I have been reticent about, for no particular reason--was about to end, and this did not make me particularly happy. But it also meant that November was about to begin, and November meant the beginning of autumn's wane into winter. And though I am not a fan of winter, I am an outspoken fan of the holiday season.

It also meant the beginning of a month in which casual writers the world over buckle down and commit themselves to a professional-like writing schedule. Some tackle that long-brewing novel in their heads, others strive to compose one new entry to their blog per day. Whether they commit to NaNoWriMo or NaBloPoMo or any of the other NaWhoKnowsMos, a not-professional-but-sure-would-like-to-be writer such as myself can't help but be inspired by such an endeavor. As for me, I pretty much knew I would not be able to commit to a daily blog posting (I rarely have anything that interesting to say), nor did I suspect I would be able to stick to a daily writing schedule while working on the novel (my unscheduled life, nice though it may seem, rarely leaves me the time to settle down and be free to just write). It was a bizarre realization, honestly: me, with no schedule, unable to use a month where everyone artificially creates a schedule in order to, you know, begin establishing a schedule. That, my friends, is a very special kind of screwed up.

But while October, and particularly its end, was rather spectacular, the current month has not, by and large, been a negative one. Once the glow of Texas wore off and I realized that I was no longer there and that I needed to settle back in to what my life has turned into (for better or worse), things started coming together in the most unusual way. It occurred to me that, with the holidays forthcoming, I could use some source of income to be able to finance the holiday gifts I was planning on getting for people. Because, truth be told, I find the giving part of the holiday season to be much more rewarding than the receiving. It's nice to put thought into getting something for someone, and the effort I place into my gift-giving makes me feel a lot better about the commercialization of the holidays: suddenly, a venture to the mall isn't a trial, it's an adventure. To me, the magic of the holiday season is the genuine spirit of altruism that infects us all for that sadly short period of time--and wouldn't we all be a little better off if we were more altruistic?

When it came time to settle in and get what I had framed in my mind as "just any old job," I hit a major mental snag. I had printed out the application for a particular retail establishment (whose name I've opted to omit) and began filling it out when I was overcome with a powerful sense of defeat. Had it really come to this? I thought. I mean, don't get me wrong, I have very little to complain about in my life, and the things I do complain about are pretty small potatoes in the grand scheme. And sure, no one ever likes to hear an Ivy Leaguer complain about anything (because, unbeknownst to me, the words on your diploma limit or delimit what you can and can't do in your everyday life), but I was disheartened. Sure, the economy's tough, but I really thought my education would give me an edge in an exceptionally competitive environment, and it hurt that, to that point, it hadn't. It was that strange mingling of pride and denial that kept me from completing the aforementioned application. I had dived headlong into an existential crisis and I did not like it.

It is perhaps appropriate then that, in the midst of my greatest hopelessness, I should find the most poignant restoration of my faith. For lack of a better term, I bitched openly to several of my closest friends, one of whom mentioned that, though it was not my area of expertise, her company was hiring and that she could arrange for me to have an interview if I was interested. There was a risk involved, as the position would entail relocating to the Washington, DC, area, but there was also a set of opportunities opening up that I hadn't been presented with in the six months preceding this. So I took her up on the offer, and found myself in DC a week later for the interview.

Now I find myself in New Jersey again. Employed. In the process of planning my relocation. And preparing for the greatest life change I have known so far.

Of course, those who have made the transition before will, like so many others, argue that I still have nothing to complain about now. And this, for the most part, is true. It would be unkind and untrue to say that I'm "complaining" about what's soon to transpire; the fact is, I'm thrilled to pieces. It's the beginning of a career, it's a chance to assert my independence, it's an opportunity to see a new part of the country. But most importantly, it's a chance to prove that I have what it takes to do the growing up that I don't truly think many people believe I'm capable of yet. And sure, it's alarming to think that I have a lot of growing up to do, and that I haven't really had the opportunity yet at age 24 to have to start growing up. But the time has come to start proving the naysayers wrong.

The fact of the matter is that I've reached the point in my life where I need to start staking out what I want my life to look like. I've been complacent for too long, not because it's been in my nature but because I haven't really had to be anything but. I realize now that most of the things I've wanted out of my life--except, perhaps, my choice of graduate school--have gone the way I wanted by virtue of my desire and effort. But sometimes, desire and effort just aren't enough. I wanted to work in publishing, and I applied to most every position I was interested in and qualified for over six months...and it still didn't happen. But that's life. And sure, the common expression is "Shit happens," but not everything that doesn't exactly go your way is shit.

I prefer Karen's variation: "Life happens." Because that's what most of life is: you plan and you plan and you hope things will go that way, but you also need to be prepared for the unexpected. The people who succeed aren't just the ones who work hard and dream big and do all they can to make it happen; they also know how to roll with the things that don't quite go the way they'd hoped. They stay true to themselves even when the chips fall the wrong way. One of my idols, Walt Disney, failed miserably at almost every turn as a cartoonist, being accused by one of his editors of lacking creativity and having no good ideas. But he stuck with his work, made the best of what he had, and ultimately created one of the most recognizable images the world has ever known.

But more than that, he knew the value of risk. An old story says that he sold his prized possession, his camera, in order to buy a train ticket to Hollywood, where he hoped to go to set up his studio. It didn't matter that failure would have left him with nothing, or that he had already had one attempt at starting a studio fail. He had to take a chance to accomplish what he dreamed of, and he took it. And with greatest risk comes greatest reward.

The time finally felt right for me to take that risk, to take a chance on staking out on my own. Who knows how it'll go, or what will become of it? I know what I'd like to see happen, and I'll try my damnedest to see it through, but the bottom line is that I'll never make it happen if I don't try. So here I go. Time to jump, sink or swim.

So this holiday season is especially significant, and particularly bittersweet. My uncle's job has necessitated what is shaping up to be a permanent move for the whole family from New Jersey to Florida. Going to their house for Thanksgiving and Christmas has been a long-standing tradition, one that we all look forward to each year. But now, between my impending move to Virginia, their likely move to Miami, and the myriad other changes that I've observed in my little suburban hometown, things look like they're about to take a drastic turn. I don't know much, but I know 2010 is going to look a lot different than 2009 did.

I'm glad, though. 2009, in retrospect, has treated me a lot better than 2008 did. And I had no reason to believe this year would really be much better. My life twelve months ago looked very different than it does now, and I'm very glad it does. Despite the bumps in the road, I'm going in a positive direction, and I realize I have a lot of positive things and people surrounding me, influences that are guiding me and helping me and supporting me throughout the maze-like twists and turns I'm experiencing now.

I don't feel nearly as alone as I used to.

That alone is more than enough cause to feel generous, more than enough reason to be thankful. So while the pages of the calendar may have been flipping a little faster than I'd really taken note of, and I've perhaps been a bit hesitant to embrace the spirit of the holidays this year, I know in my heart that the time and the season are lining up pretty darn well this year. And while I tend to shun the winter chill and dread the coming of the cold, this time around, I've got a good fire going in my soul and I've got a lot to look forward to.

Early Review: Ambrose Bierce's Write It Right

2009-10-31T20:15:00.002-04:00

Having fallen horribly behind on my Early Review books for LibraryThing, I am proud to say that I am, perhaps for the first time, publishing an "early review" for a book that has not actually been published yet!

The lucky recipient of my first timely review is, interestingly, a nonfiction work, Ambrose Bierce's Write It Right: The Celebrated Cynic's Language Peeves Deciphered, Appraised, and Annotated for 21st-Century Readers, edited and annotated by language maven Jan Freeman and due to be published on November 10, 2009. I have reprinted my review below for the benefit of language lovers like me who may want to pick this title up.

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If you're anything like me, the most exposure you've ever had to Ambrose Bierce is his famous short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," and it's hard to tell from that story alone what one would expect from this particular volume, particularly since texts on grammar and style tend to be more caustic than constructive. That would be the case with this edition, an "annotated" version of Bierce's original work with contemporary commentary that reads far livelier than one would expect.

After a brief foreword by Jan Freeman, our scholarly guide, the text consists of Bierce's original introduction, followed by his so-called "Black List" of words and phrases that are, to put it bluntly, never to be used in print. Bierce's original entries are, as you would expect, inflexible and definite: he wraps quotations around constructions that ought never see the light of print and, with few exceptions, his explanations for why the errors are as such are extremely terse and rather didactic. Those familiar with classic grammar texts like Strunk & White's The Elements of Style will find many familiar examples herein, as well as plenty that are baffling but, according to Bierce, equally damnable.

Freeman, as the annotator, does a fine job in several respects, the first and most obvious of which is lending readability to a work that is otherwise almost devoid of interest as a cover-to-cover read. Since Bierce's words are often so brief, she does an admirable job of trying to elucidate the reasons why Bierce would object to a particular construction, attempting to provide a type of narrative to the many individual points he harps on. In that respect, she gives the text a fresh update--even if it's at the expense of making the book feel less like a textbook and more like a history lesson.

History, however, is clearly Freeman's strong suit, as the text betrays the fact that she is extremely well-read in points of grammar and usage. In addition to a nine-page bibliography of recommended reading at the back of the book--a selection of works that spans multiple centuries--Freeman incorporates specific points of order from newspapers, magazines, and books by other authors throughout her annotations. The result is a work that is highly scholarly but doesn't always read like it is.

If there is criticism to be had, it is in the often uneasy balance between lighthearted commentary and fierce criticism of the original work. Though the annotations are essential and, frankly, pleasurable to read, Freeman often gives very little credence to Bierce's points. While her research is very adept at providing reasons why Bierce is bunkum, it does become a bit tiresome to read over and over why a particular rule is rubbish. (More often than not, it can be attributed to Bierce's background in journalism.)

Even more frustrating is Freeman's tendency, while putting down many of Bierce's rules, to reduce grammar to something that is perhaps far more flexible than a grammarian would want to admit. Certainly Bierce was a radically bitter cynic--one would think a true grammarian could be no less--but Freeman is often guilty of claiming that, because others have written with a particular word or phrase, then either usage is technically correct. It's a bit too loose for my liking, the kind of thing that irks writers of Standard Written English when confronted with the idiosyncrasies of spoken language. One senses that Freeman's playing fast and loose to counter Bierce's strictness, but the result is not necessarily balance as much as it is discomforting dissonance.

Ultimately, if there is a problem with the text, it is that it's a bit unsure of its identity: does it want to be a grammar text, or does it want to be a well-researched look into Bierce's ideas and thoughts? Truth be told, when it tries to be the latter, it succeeds in spite of its flaws. Freeman seems to know that she, like all great grammar cynics, is never going to be authoritative, and she treats Bierce's source work with the appropriate amount of reverence and respect while also keeping it as contemporary as possible. As an artifact of language change, Freeman's annotated edition of Write It Right is a both valuable and entertaining contribution to the never-ending language wars.

Ill. Advised.

2009-09-23T11:27:00.004-04:00

I hate being sick.

I'm pretty sure it, like all substantial psychological issues, stems back to my childhood. I recall getting the chicken pox in kindergarten, just after my third-grade brother got over his bout of the itchy spots. He had just over ten spots, which is commonly seen as the bare minimum to guarantee you won't get them ever again. I had them all over my body. It was not the first stroke of poor luck against my grossly malnourished immune system--the myriad ear infections I suffered as a toddler, which necessitated an early myringotomy, come to mind--and it most certainly would not be the last.

Next came the flu in second grade. Then came countless incidents of strep throat, which have scarred me enough that any time I have a sore throat (as I do now, for instance) I immediately pull out the flashlight and check to see if there are spots of white along with the red discoloration in the back of my mouth. Factor in the fact that the vicious spasms of stomach flu never lasted the requisite twenty-four hours but would strike me for a minimum of three days of violent gastrointestinal distress, and perhaps you can begin to understand why the prospect of getting sick fills me with dread.

Of course, if there has been any upside to a childhood filled with viruses and diseases, it's that my once-feeble immune system has proven itself to be quite a champion in recent memory. I've managed to go through long stretches without illness, which has been a blessing, but the coinciding downside has been that the illnesses I do get tend to be pretty intense, even if they are as simple as head colds--as is the case with the cold I'm suffering from right now. They are also characterized by an awful sense of timing, kicking in during such inopportune occasions as, say, the week of the actual performances of the plays and musicals I acted in during middle and high schools.

(True story: I was ill for at least one night in seven of the eight performances I participated in, most often with--you guessed it--strep or sore throat. And the one show I was healthy for, 2006's Godspell, I ended up spraining my ankle during the first act of the last performance and, while I completed the show, I couldn't walk without crutches for two weeks afterwards.)

So here I am, less than a week removed from a lovely trip to Walt Disney World, with at least two posts in my to-be-blogged backlog (backblog, perhaps?), and I'm instead lounging on the recliner--because my room is too damn warm and I may or may not have a bit of a fever--bitching to my surely dwindling readership about how under the weather I am. Awesome.

The problem with my present illness is that, for the first time in a long time, I once more have reason to engage in unabashedly optimistic thinking. On Monday, when I first started coming down with the sniffles, I was faced with a difficult job-related decision. It wasn't an optimal situation for me because it was far from full-time employment, and that was what I was seeking. I was debating how best to approach this when I received another e-mail on Tuesday--this day, more sick, but, as my Twitter indicated, not so sick that I couldn't play eighteen holes--indicating that a full-time position had opened up, if I was interested in it. Naturally, I was, and today--full blown feeling-like-shit, the kind of feeling-like-shit that had me in the recliner almost all day--I received another e-mail telling me I could come in on Friday for an interview.

Before this much more ideal opportunity presented itself, the former was very much worth wrestling with, particularly given my inability to get much more of a lead from anywhere else. As many of my friends and former colleagues have been lamenting, the job market has been horrendous, no matter how much the pundits have been claiming that the economy is, at long last, climbing out of the crapper. It was very difficult to simply say no to an offer just because it wasn't "perfect," no matter how much it may have been, as my parents wisely noted, a stepping stone to something better.

But what I've been realizing as I've had the time to reflect today is that the very significant changes I've been promising myself haven't quite happened yet--and that's perfectly fine. None of the things that I'm looking for are going to happen overnight: I'm not going to finish my novel or screenplay tonight, I won't be rail thin tomorrow, and I'm not going to be making the big money bucks at a job next week. Change, as much as it may pain me, is a process, not an occurrence, and this is why I think so many people tend to fear it. I think we all have particular idealizations of what we'd like things to be like, but we get frustrated by the fact that it is going to take not just work but prolonged, consistent work to get there.

Is constant fluctuation the ideal situation to be in? Of course not. But neither is stagnation when one's present situation is dissatisfying. And the way I see it, things aren't going too badly right now: I've finally got myself a viable possible job opportunity; despite certain disagreements I've had with fitness-related video games lately, I'm losing weight at a slow, steady pace; and my writing projects are still proceeding, even if they are doing so at a slower rate than I'd like. The change I wish to see in myself isn't going to just happen all at once, but I'm finally starting to see myself embodying the act of changing. And if that leads me to the things I'm really dreaming of, that just may be the real cure to my ills.

Early Review: The Rough Guide to Men's Health

2009-08-24T23:32:00.002-04:00

I've recently found myself embracing a long-awaited resurgence in reading, so I've taken advantage and given myself an opportunity to knock down more of my LibraryThing Early Reviewer responsibilities, delinquent though they may be.

This review is quite a change of pace, as it is not at all a novel but more of a nonfiction reference guide: The Rough Guide to Men's Health, written by Lloyd Bradley in conjunction with a number of experts and originally published in December of 2008. Despite it not being a novel, my testicularly blessed readers may have particular interest in this text, and so I present my review for your perusal.

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There's only so much a person can expect from a reference book on men's health--particularly when that person is horribly unused to reading any nonfiction at all. Despite this, I was excited to receive The Rough Guide to Men's Health, expecting that, as a man whose health could use some improvement, I would be able to glean some ideas from it. In the end, it proves to be a useful, well-written, easy-to-read manual that's lacking in certain areas, but is nevertheless a great start for any man trying to look and feel better.

The Guide is divided into three parts, with the first part, "Wherever, Whenever," being the one that makes up the bulk of the book. This section features lengthy chapters focusing on specific aspects of male health--from physical fitness to digestion, the workings of the brain to working it in the bedroom. The second part, "Fit for Life," is much shorter and more focused on what to expect as one ages, and how one can maintain the best health possible over time. The final part is a reference suggestion, chock full of Web sites and suggested readings, as well as a handy self-diagnosis section and an A-Z list of ailments men can expect to deal with in life.

While the book's structure and wide range of topics make it feel as if it wants to be comprehensive, it's worth noting right off the bat that it is far from an exhaustive guide. Men expecting to find each chapter providing a specific outline of what to do to reach their maximal health will be disappointed, as the book is less interested in explaining precisely what to do as it is in giving a clear, straightforward explanation of how each system works. Along the way, of course, Bradley and his team of experts give you suggestions as to how best to feel healthful, but it's usually done by way of showing how our 21st-Century lifestyles are disrupting how our systems ought to run. This is not a fault, per se, but something the how-to reader should be aware of.

The text of this section, and the rest of the book, actually, is incredibly readable. Bradley's tone is relatively jovial but also businesslike: he understands how a man would want to be addressed, and the book speaks very comfortably in that manner. Alongside the main text are a great deal of text boxes, charts, facts, figures, and images, all of which add to the book's value as a resource. Interestingly, however, they take away from the narrative of the book, which is surprisingly engaging and well-presented. There are moments that feel like information overload, particularly since many of the info boxes have a tendency to repeat things (almost verbatim) from the main text--and, in a few cases, from other text boxes in other parts of the book. But all in all, the book never feels like a chore to read, which is a huge plus.

While the first section is incredibly well-written and engaging, the other two leave a bit to be desired, most probably because they are so dreadfully short. "Fit for Life" feels like a bit of an afterthought, as it tries to compress dealing with aging, doctors, and the motivation to keep at a fitness plan all within 35 brief pages. Incorporating these details more into the earlier sections might have been more palatable in terms of structure and effectiveness. The reference section, by contrast, is equally brief but surprisingly comprehensive, and while the self-diagnostic tables are far from the be-all and end-all of identifying one's ills, they are a useful start.

All told, The Rough Guide to Men's Health is full of good information, even if it's not always presented in the ideal or expected manner. (Or, for that matter, well-edited: note well, there are typos galore.) But it is a compulsively readable book that takes a notoriously boring topic and adds fresh life to it. It's the kind of book that makes you want to make the changes it professes about, and that alone makes it worth the price of admission. It may not singlehandedly save your life, but it'll get you on the right path--and, as Bradley astutely points out near the end, sometimes the motivation is the hardest part.

Living the Dream?

2009-08-18T14:48:00.002-04:00

For someone who has been griping all summer about the fact that he doesn't have a job, I've noticed I have a pretty severe problem with Mondays. This has come as an especially noteworthy surprise to me lately because I have always maintained that it is Tuesday, and not Monday, that is unequivocally the worst day of the week. (For a recap of that argument, see here.) After much soul-searching, I've decided that I suspect it's the fault of the Monday-Friday work week, and the expectation that I should be going to a place of employment on a Monday morning, that I feel I'm being driven headlong into the doldrums every Sunday night when I go to sleep.

And lest ye remind me that the problem is far from exclusively Davidian, I know, damn it. I'm well aware that the struggling economy is striking everyone very strongly--and I'm even more astutely aware that an industry as insular as the publishing industry is only going to get more compact the harder times get. So the task of getting my foot in the door is exceptionally challenging, even with my exceptionally small feet. But before I let this turn into a rant about why my credentials seem to be getting me nowhere (that's another rant, for another day, in the distant future, when/if I continue to be in the same unemployed boat), I instead want to mention two encounters I've had over the past two days, each of which has given me a bit of a different perspective on what it means to be in my present condition.

Last night after dinner, which followed a day of concentrated job searching in the wake of my typical Monday morning petulance, I took a ride with my father to a job site. On the way back from the errand, we drove past a bar and grill in Elmwood Park that had recently opened, one that he drove past on an almost-daily basis but never went into in the two months it had been open for business. He asked me if I wanted to stop for a drink and, naturally, I agreed.

The place was relatively quiet and we had no trouble finding a seat at the bar. He ordered his standard, a screwdriver, while I tried to enjoy a Blue Moon from the tap. Unfortunately for me, the keg was tapped and I quickly assured the amusingly frazzled bartender that another screwdriver would be just fine. Based on this exchange, and my father's curiosity about how the place was doing, we struck up a conversation with the bartender. Of course, the discussion eventually steered towards the economy. I offered up the usual spiel on my job search, but the guy had a certain quality to him, and when he started pressing me a bit more on what I wanted to do, I dropped the act and bared a bit more than usual. I told him about my novel, about the screenplay Karen and I are working on, and about my aspirations to be a writer.

In response, he asked me if I had a business card. Naturally, I was a bit taken aback--I told him no and asked him why he was interested. He responded by reaching into his own pocket and handing me one of his cards. Turns out our bartender does some acting in New York City, and is in contact with a number of directors who are frequently looking for scripts to take a look at. He urged me to keep working and keep him posted about how the script is progressing, going so far as to say he'd help me shop it around a bit once it was completed. And like so many other situations I've been in lately, he stressed that making the connections is the most important part, because I never know what might happen from having met him.

And of course, he's absolutely right. One never knows what opportunity they'll have missed because they didn't say what needed to be said to this or that person at the given time. Maybe this will be the connection that makes it all come together, maybe it won't. But if nothing else, it gives me an awfully good reason to hold onto my focus in the midst of all my frustrations.

In the face of all this career-seeking discussion, by contrast, I was faced with a meeting today with an old compatriot whose career has taken a rather sudden turn. My old high school theatre teacher retired from education several years ago--amidst of a number of instance of (surprise!) student disrespect and overbearing parental demands. He left with no regrets and pursued more seriously his then-part-time work as a stagehand, working with several local venues and theatre companies. He sets up and operates equipment during concerts and live performances, doing more physical work, by his own admission, than he'd ever planned on doing at his age.

And he loves it.

Our lunch opened with my typical lamentations, but he deftly switched gears and started sharing stories from the road, chatting about his experiences like it wasn't over six years since we'd talked. It was not only inspiring to hear that things were going well for him, but also to hear that he was doing what he loved and making his living now with absolutely no regrets. And I mentioned to him that I could only hope to be so lucky as to achieve the same thing. His response: "Keep dreaming."

Believe me, I want to. It's really hard right now, staring down a future that is more indefinite than I've ever known it to be. But I do know there are a few things I have going for me already, and I plan on riding those things out to their foregone conclusions in the hopes that I'll get a few more answers than I've gotten so far. It's hard to stay positive, to keep reminding myself that things are going to work out, but every now and again you meet a few people that remind you it's possible. I may not be living the dream right now, but at least I feel like that dream may actually come to life soon.

It's not much, but it's better than I was thinking and feeling on Monday. Time will tell if it'll only last the week, to be replaced this time next week by more self-doubt and loathing. All I do know for sure is that something's gotta give soon--and I only hope it's as a result of the big picture coming more clearly into focus.

Early Review: The Unit

2009-08-10T13:13:00.003-04:00

Here we go again, back to the old LibraryThing early review backlog!

Today's as-always-delinquent selection is Ninni Holmqvist's debut novel, the dystopian The Unit, translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy and published in translation in June of 2009. I have reprinted my review below for the benefit of those who may be interested.

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Ninni Holmqvist's debut novel The Unit is a good book that could be a great book, a work that raises a number of interesting questions about the kinds of things we take for granted. But it is a novel about identity that leaves the reader to question more about the narrator's identity than we probably should. It starts strong, builds an intriguing premise, but falls sadly flat at the end.

The novel's protagonist is fifty-year-old Dorrit Weger, a spouse-less, childless woman whose age has caused her to be moved to the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological material. Her dystopic near-future Sweden demands that all "dispensable" members of society move to these units and undergo mandatory scientific testing and organ donation, for the benefit of those "indispensable" people (namely parents and important job-holders) out in the community. As time progresses, the sheen of the unit's easygoing, carefree life wears off and Dorrit finds herself suddenly needing to make a very difficult choice.

The fact that the novel is narrated in the first-person gives us an excellent insight into Dorrit, whose acceptance of her new life is very subtly interposed with her understanding that not everything is like it seems in the unit. Granted, those with a wide breadth of experience in dystopian literature will find little innovative in what Holmqvist says, the surprise is perhaps that the unit is fairly transparently nefarious. So we see this all through Dorrit's eyes, eyes that are much less transparent as the novel progresses.

Sadly, Dorrit's supporting cast is far less intriguing than Dorrit herself. The most significant secondary characters are Johannes, the older man with whom Dorrit finds love in the unit, and Alice, whose significant battery of tests and donations makes her the benchmark of how one's life in the unit becomes increasingly more uncomfortable. Other characters serve to help build the notion that the unit is a caring, accepting community, but the conversations Dorrit has with her fellow dispensables are far less intriguing and insightful than they probably ought to be.

Despite this issue, the novel is thematically very strong. Holmqvist does a nice (if a touch obvious) job of weaving threads of feminine identity into the the proceedings, particularly the ways in which dispensable females are missing the experience of being a mother. Motherhood is a critical facet of the novel, particularly in the later stages, and the commentary Holmqvist offers through her mouthpiece Dorrit on aging and gender are extremely fascinating and worth considering--especially in light of contemporary debates on healthcare reform and the impending failure of social security.

But where the novel trips up is in its resolution. Without divulging too much, Dorrit's choices in the final two parts of the novel don't seem to be motivated by anything identifiable in the early parts. Two moments in particular are baffling: the point at which she admits, without provocation, that two key plots points are actually fabrications; and the final chapter, which almost completely undoes most of Part 3. It's hard to decipher what Holmqvist was trying to do here, but the sudden unreliability of the narrator undoes a great deal of the work she'd accomplished in the rest of the text. Rather than leave the reader intrigued, the ending leaves him scratching his head wondering what exactly has happened and why.

Though the novel's execution is far less crisp in the end than it is at the beginning, The Unit is nevertheless an engaging and thought-provoking work. It is very readable and reasonably paced for the most part, proving that Holmqvist is a very capable writer whose talent just needs a little bit of tweaking. If nothing else, The Unit serves as evidence that she is an author whose future work will likely be well worth waiting for.

The Customer Isn't Always Right

2009-08-05T14:27:00.000-04:00

I know for a fact that the Starbucks Coffee Company will not live or die as a result of the three dollars they just received from me--three dollars for a Caramel Macchiato, sitting in a cup right next to my laptop right now as I sit waiting in their E. College Ave. location. Nevertheless, I felt exceptionally good about the money I spent on this drink, for a reason you might not suspect.

Having worked in food service and retail for approximately six consecutive years in my teens, I understand that it is an unforgiving profession. Whether you in your travels want to admit this or not, the people behind the counter or register are, occasionally, trying to serve you as best they can. Sure, they can be cold and rude and unhelpful on occasion, but if they really were that ineffective or foul-tempered all the time, they wouldn't be employed for very long. What I'm trying to get at here is that sometimes, the clerk's shitty mood is actually the fault of the customer--perhaps not you, but someone behind you that has left an indelibly crappy mark on his or her day.

Case in point: an older woman (perhaps in her 50s or 60s) came up to the counter and asked the clerk something in a voice I could not hear clearly. He responded that they only do samples three times a day, but that the cookies are available for purchase if she was interested. The woman proceeded to launch a passive-aggressive tirade explaining that she would never come back to that Starbucks again. She even went so far as to tell the children that were accompanying her that the store was "stingy," and when stores are that cheap, they don't deserve her business. She proceeded to take her drinks and leave.

I was intrigued by the exchange, and particularly by the manner in which the clerks and baristas handled both themselves and the situation. They were professional, straightforward, and polite--all while simultaneously remaining unwilling to kowtow to the rude and unreasonable requests of this snarky woman. I was, as I typically am, thrilled to see people refuse to acknowledge those who believe they are, for no good reason, more deserving or privileged than others.

All of this I observed while seated at the very table I am at now. I'd been here for about a half hour, and was sitting waiting for Darrell to arrive and help me pass the time while Karen defended her Master's essay. I had bought no drink and was simply planning on mooching the free Internet and killing time in peace while spending no money. But the interaction between the staff and the woman was such that I couldn't keep out of my chair.

I went to the counter and ordered a Caramel Macchiato. Then I asked the barista making my drink what had happened. Turns out she was a "regular" whose orders were exceptionally demanding and complicated, whose children left messes at all the tables they used when they came in, and whose sensibilities were apparently incensed by the clerks refusal to give all her children a sample of one of the cookies. Upon hearing the entire story, I told them in no uncertain terms that the only reason I'd purchased my drink was because of how marvelously they had handled the situation--right down to the clearly sarcastic but absolutely deserved "Have a wonderful day, ma'am!" the barista delivered as she left.

I didn't buy the drink because I thought Starbucks desperately needed my three dollars. But I felt good about spending it because I understand how difficult the situation must have been for them, and they handled it with aplomb. Little Miss Demanding was entirely in the wrong, trying to take advantage of the outdated mantra that the customer is always right. What most people these days fail to realize is that the expression, while generally true, does have its limits. And when you ask a place of business to just give you something for free, they are well within their rights to refuse--and when they do, it is you, and not them, that are wrong.

So kudos to the men in black and green for defusing the situation well. They've been laughing about and discussing it for the past fifteen minutes, and it's been great to overhear them because even now there's no malice, just disbelief and frustration. It's a nice reminder that they're not just obnoxious douchebags who want nothing to do with you--they're flesh-and-blood humans with a job to do who only want to do it as easily, effectively, and quickly as possible. And sure, we're all pretty jaded when it comes to service and retail because of the Clerksian notion that just because they serve you doesn't mean they like you. But how much of that do we bring on ourselves because we selfishly think we're entitled to something special because they're the server and we're the customer?

If I learned anything from my time at Trader Joe's, it's that good retail is not a one-way street: it's an exchange. A clerk's attempts to serve you well only succeed if you are willing to give a little bit back too. That's not some radical, brilliant notion either--just good old fashioned common sense and human decency. Wouldn't it be great to see those things making a comeback?

Early Review: Death of a Past Life

2009-07-16T12:56:00.003-04:00

With the summer reaching its apex, and my job-hunting trials reaching that point of stagnation better known as frustrating-beyond-belief, it seems only appropriate that I should return to my LibraryThing duties and post some delinquent early reviews.

The first victim of my too-much-to-read-and-not-enough-time-to-review-until-now streak is Robert N. Reincke's historical novel Death of a Past Life, originally published late last year. I have reprinted my review below for the benefit of those who may be interested.

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Death of a Past Life is an enigmatic book, an epic history that feels much of the time like it doesn't know quite what it wishes to be. Throughout, we get a strong sense of Robert Reincke's passion towards his material--it is, after all, based on his own family history, we are told--but it's hard to figure out what his ultimate plan was. And unfortunately, it's even harder to say whether he executed that plan effectively.

The novel opens with a short, typo-ridden passage "From the Life of Ann K.," which we learn much later was an actual unfinished work, written by Reincke's grandfather. From this, we are transported back to Russia in 1911 and into the daily lives of the bourgeois Katschalin family. As the Bolsheviks, World War I, Stalin, and World War II gradually ravage St. Petersburg and its environs, the family becomes fragmented by circumstance and necessity. While many try merely to stay together, the toll the conflicts take on Nick, Nina, and their daughter Ann become the focal point of the story, as they struggle to merely survive through famine and hardship.

Though the plot sounds riveting, there is a substantial conflict between Reincke's highly-researched historical passages and the details of family life. Domestic scenes are often portrayed as being simple and unassuming--a prime example involves the children at play on the family's dacha--and it's surprisingly hard to get a strong sense of the family's economic status because there is so little detail about their wealth and opulence (or lack thereof). As such, when the political turmoils of twentieth-century Russia begin to take their tolls at the end of Book 1, the depth of the hardship is difficult to fathom. From an historical standpoint, however, Reincke's prose, accurate though not always objective, is clear and precise. It creates an odd disconnect, one even more disconcerting for the fact that the novel is so invested in history's impact on the family and the familiar.

Nevertheless, the novel becomes increasingly more readable and engaging as it goes on. Early scenes of domestic benignity are populated by a very large cast of characters, many of whom play little more than a passing role in the proceedings. It is a very Russian-novel gesture, for certain, and one that I imagine is rooted deeply in Reincke's desire to properly anthologize his own family history, but it doesn't give the reader an opportunity to truly sympathize with many figures. In Books 2 and 3, when the focus shifts far more explicitly onto Nick, Nina, and Ann, the work begins to capture some of that missing emotional impact: we are allowed time with these characters, and as such we feel at last for their plight.

Though Book 3 is the novel's strongest section, it suffers, as does the rest of the novel, from a strange sense of abridgement--as if the book, though almost 500 pages in length, doesn't spend nearly as much time in each year of the life as it should. Particularly in later years, perhaps because of lack of content or particularly focused memories, entire years pass in the span of a few pages, most of the time concentrating on one single conversation between two characters. The result is the sense that the novel wishes to be an epic, but simply does not have the material to sustain it. More focus on particularly powerful (if disparate) moments, rather than on what seems to be the need to cover every year of the family history, would have made the impact of the work stronger.

So too would have been a clearer focus on the novel's intent. I've noted before that the novel seems to want to be historiography, ethnography, family history, and political treatise all in one, but by the time the novel comes to an end, it's hard to decipher what its larger point has been. The epilogue, in which the author lays himself bare as a descendent of the book's characters, reads like an unfortunately cheesy afterthought, with clichéd messages about "learning from the past so that we don't repeat it" obscuring the impact of the family's ultimate triumph. It feels like just another example of Reincke meaning well but trying to do too much, trying to turn it into a "message novel" where a semi-fictional historical novel would have sufficed.

Overall, the book is quite readable and easy enough to digest--even though the copy I received, which appeared to be not a proof but a finished bound copy, featured enough typos that it was rather noticeable. It seems, in summary, to be a microcosm for the work as a whole: a well-meaning, decently executed novel that, despite its best intentions, has more imperfections than I'm sure the author intended. Death of a Past Life tries, admirably, but it doesn't feel destined to enter the pantheon of great Russian family epics any time soon.

One in the Books

2009-06-24T11:28:00.003-04:00

Last night was a very momentous night for me. A night that's been a very long time coming. A night I've been imagining for months, if not years. But it's hard to grasp the magnitude of the accomplishment I finally achieved without some background.

N.B. I may or may not have told this story before. In fact, I'm pretty sure I have. But I'm (a) too lazy to go looking back through the archives to find it, and (b) pretty sure that anyone who was reading this blog back in those days probably isn't reading it anymore. So everyone gets to hear the story, and damn it, you're gonna like it.

I remember when I was a junior at Princeton, walking down Prospect Avenue towards Charter one spring afternoon. I was walking alone, looking around, taking in the beauty of the budding New Jersey spring, when my mind wavered momentarily to my academic responsibilities. I was smack dab in the middle of a JP that I had been irresponsibly ignoring--and believe me, it didn't help that I'd met with my advisor exactly once all semester, and for a total of about seven minutes--and even though I had a vague idea about my thesis topic, I was having one of my famous moments of self-doubt.

Then, like a flash, my mind shifted ever so slightly, away from the academic and towards a part of me that had lay dormant for a while but wasn't quite ready to roll over and die. I took my situation and projected it onto a fictional character, the character of a guy like me who was freaking out about his senior thesis and trying to figure out a way to turn the most important academic project of his life into something more personally and professionally meaningful than it presently was.

I began scheming about some of the dreams I'd had, and I projected those on him. So I couldn't make my way to see Poland any time soon? Give him funding to go there! Never met most of my father's side of the family? Have him go meet his family there! It seemed like an pretty nifty idea, one that, for some strange reason, stuck out in my mind more so than any other creative ideas had in recent memory. I resolved to keep it at the forefront of my thinking, and to meditate further on it when I had more free time.

Before long, this relatively simple idea took on a life of its own. At the risk of playing spoiler to a story I haven't even written yet, I'll withhold the details; but suffice it to say I managed to develop one of the most elaborate plots I've ever conceived. And even more promising, I'd managed to populate it with characters that I felt for in deep, meaningful ways. They were tortured, conflicted, complex. They were exactly the kinds of characters I loved to read about--and when I realized that, at the time, I had no idea how these characters would react to the situations that I'd placed them in, I got really excited. I knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that this idea was alive, and that it needed to be realized.

It didn't take long for me to sketch out some of the finer details, working through certain points in my mind before committing myself to seeing them through. By senior year, I'd been thinking about it so much that I had a complete, vivid mental picture of the entire first chapter, right down from the actions to the images, from the larger environs to the tics each character expressed. I knew precisely how it would start, precisely how it would develop, and precisely how it would end. All that was left for me to do was to write it.

But that was two years ago.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I loved Princeton, and I still do, but senior year did not treat me well. And one of the things that my unfortunate senior year imbued me with was a powerful sense of guilt--manifest specifically as the feeling that, if I was working on something that wasn't academic, I was being irresponsible. (And yes, I know, I've written on that before too.) So for two years, my great chapter languished in the recesses of my subconscious. Every now and again it whispered to me, and I would try to sit down and give it a go, but the words didn't come with ease. (For the past two years, they haven't at all, no matter the arena.) I'd written barely a page by the time my final semester of grad school began.

But with the end of grad school, as I've written for my last two posts, has come a new sensation, a feeling of inevitability in all the things I'd left behind for two years. It started one night when, three glasses of wine deep, I picked up the laptop and started typing, bringing myself to four pages. Not much, but a start.

Then, after an exceptionally frustrating day, I shut the door of my room, sequestered myself inside, and opened the document again. Another five pages, bringing me to a total of nine. Still nowhere near the end of the chapter, but at least it was going.

Finally, last night, the floodgates broke open. Monday was another day of mounting frustrations, but Tuesday had shown promise. I got some news on a possible job lead--which may or may not pan out but is still better than the tactics I've been using thus far--and because it was finally sunny (for only the third day this month), it seemed ideal weather for a walk. And during this walk, like that walk three long years ago, I was taking everything in when the right synapses snapped to life and gave me a fresh insight into my story. Specifically, how the story would move beyondthat first chapter. I was elated and impatient--I knew that I couldn't get to the new material without finishing the old stuff, so I steeled my resolve and told myself I'd work that night.

So after dinner, I packed up my things, drove to Starbucks, settled in with a Frappuccino and my laptop, and got to work. And you know what happened?

Three hours later, Chapter One was complete. Done. For real and for true.

The satisfaction I felt is hard to put into words. It wasn't so much that I felt it was an amazing accomplishment, but the pressure of the perfectionism I'd placed over myself was finally released. It's hard for me to say whether or not I think the chapter is precisely how I'd imagined it would turn out, but it managed to hit all the points I'd planned, and I'm very much satisfied with the style and the impact of the whole thing.

But more important than all that: it's done. I don't need to sit and explain to people what I'm planning to do, how I expect it will come together. It has come together. Instead of dreaming about it, it's real and tangible, and I can show it to people instead of waxing philosophic about it. And the most satisfying part is knowing that because it's done, I know it can be done. This isn't just a fantasy anymore, in which I would ideally like to write the book. It's being written. And I have a sample chapter to prove it.

Nevertheless, I can't let my focus waver. I don't expect to have hyperproductive nights like last night all the time. But I do need to keep focused and continue working on my goal. In his splendid memoir On Writing, Stephen King notes that no matter what you're writing, "the work is always accomplished one word at a time" (156). One word at a time, one sentence at a time, one paragraph at a time, one chapter at a time. I can't rest too long on my laurels just because I've hit a benchmark--there are still many more to come.

So with this post, the celebration officially ends. I'm incredibly proud that I've finally reached a landmark on my journey, but contentment and complacency has been the bane of my existence for far too long. I can no longer be satisfied with simply Chapter One, because around the corner, Chapter Two still waits to be written.

The Time to Act

2009-06-16T18:26:00.002-04:00

This may come as a surprise to you, dear patient readers, but I love to write. I believe I may or may not have made quite an extensive point about that in my last post, and you can go back and decipher what trite message I may have enveloped in those particular words on your own time. But now is not the time for reminiscence nor is it the time for speculation. As if the title of this post wasn't clear enough, it is the time for action.

Summer has always held a redemptive charge to me. I know I've been, over time, an outspoken advocate of the spring, but summer means business. It doesn't fuck around with the occasional teasing of brisk bluster or the threat of flurries amidst the constant rainfall. Summer means business, and in New Jersey, that business is boatloads of heat and humidity. (And, being New Jersey, business is good.) And with the weather, and the general environment of the region, trying so hard to be not only lively but consistent, I've always felt it was my duty to approach this season with a similarly go-getter attitude. Winter's a fine time for malaise, but when the weather heats up, it's go time.

Which brings me to today. Yesterday was not a banner day for me: after two weeks of being home with no leads on the job search, I've finally become impatient with things. See, I'm a man of routine. And for all my bitching in this blog about how much I hated my old routine, I've found it's surprisingly difficult to live without one. Not to mention how challenging it is to suffice on one's expecting lifestyle without any kind of regular income. I'd imagined I would be able to let my stash hold me up for most of the summer, but I've got plans far more ambitious than that--as a result, this kid needs money, big time.

So today, I decided to make a few changes, a few active choices that would, hopefully, allow me to enjoy a greater quality of life over the course of my job hunt. For starters, I decided that I would be taking a ride up to my local Borders to inquire about the possibility of employment. Because I figure if I can't find a job in publishing at this very moment, it might not hurt to have a job working for a bookstore when the publishers come a-callin'. So that's on my to-do list effective immediately.

And it was this notion of a to-do list that's set me on this newfound path. I discovered a short time ago that I'm not the only one in my corner of the blogosphere looking to make changes. And while I certainly won't steal her idea, I've been inspired by the notion of tangible progress to the point where I feel I want to make some tangible goals of my own.

At which point I realized that, despite all my wavering and whimpering and whining, I've actually been astonishingly productive over the last few weeks--and all of that productivity has been in the service of things that have been goal-oriented all along. My attempt to work at a bookstore, for instance, was something I told myself I'd start considering around July 4th. My job hunt, in a perfect world, is the kind of thing I'd like to see realized by my birthday. These are tangible deadlines for tangible goals, and I'm working towards them.

Then I extrapolated further and realized that many of my other goals have been accompanied by deadlines as well. In the absence of regular employment, I've been working on my creative projects--two in particular. My manuscript comes and goes in waves, as I don't feel like I want to rush it for the sake of getting it done. I believe in it, and I believe it will come when it does and I just need to be ready to get the inspiration down. But the other endeavor is my screenplay, an idea hatched near the end of last semester and taken up in earnest by a collaborator that has proven to be not only incredibly creative and funny, but also exceptionally diligent and persistent. And, truth be told, it's her belief in the project that has driven me to invest serious time and thought into it.

Once we realized that we were on to something, and that we were creating material for a viable project that was taking shape faster than either of us probably could have imagined, we set some deadlines as well. By July 4th, we want a sketch of the plot in its entirety, whether storyboarded or just plotted out in paragraphs. Each scene, with at least some vague idea of how we get from one to the next to the next and so on through the whole story. And by my birthday, September 9th, we want a first draft of the entire script done.

And the craziest part about all of this is that, no matter how many times I look at these dates and these goals, I can't help but say to myself, "Yes, you are going to meet that goal." By my birthday, I believe our screenplay will be done.

So on top of all of these goals, which I will of course keep you, loyal readers, posted on, I will also be renewing my weight-loss project. Last year, you'll remember, I took the baseball season as my guide and managed to lose twenty pounds between April and October. I was pleased with what I accomplished, and thrilled that I've kept it off since then. But, like I said, this is a time for action, not complacency. I'm not satisfied with what I weigh now, and now that I've proven to myself that I can do it, I want to do it again. Thus I've tacked on another goal: by the end of the summer, I want to lose another twenty pounds. And to give myself added incentive, I've set myself to the task of dropping at least fifteen by the time I go to Chicago in August for my dear friends' wedding. It will not only make me feel better, but it will perhaps even give me the chance to buy some sexy new clothes and show off The New Hotness™--coming soon!

But I can't act without the tiny, piddling audience I've somehow been able to maintain over the years. So I will be devoting myself to far more regularity in my posting as well, beginning with this one. It's time to stop talking and start doing, to get myself on the path towards the life I want to live, rather than sitting back and letting it happen in front of me. I'm already doing it, setting myself in the right direction, and the time has come to pack up the old camp, follow the trail, and see where it leads me.

And I'll get right to it, just as soon as I finish this episode of Lost.

...what? I've got five seasons to watch before the new season in January. That's a goal and a deadline too, you know!

Out Across the Rooftops, Out Towards the Hills

2009-06-04T14:18:00.003-04:00

A friend of mine recently lamented that reading this blog "made [him] want to slit [his] wrists, it was so emo." I suppose, despite my recent streak of happiness, I haven't exactly been writing the most uplifting things around here, and for that I blame my silly mind, which tends to lose confidence the longer it allows a topic to ruminate.

The truth is that, over the past week, I've already tired a bit of letting things stay too long in strict contemplation mode. It's been a week since I returned home to New Jersey and, in that time, not much has transpired worth noting. I've been applying to some jobs--all of which have yielded, thus far, no responses. I've been running errands with my parents, one of which resulted in one of the finest acquisitions of recent memory, but most have which have simply burned up my time. I've been doing a lot of sitting and relaxing, along with a fair share of walking and music-listening. All told, the status quo has been pretty, well, uneventful.

The spare time I've had on my hands has been both a blessing and a curse. I came home from Penn State with an enormous pile of books on my To Be Read stack. And while the TBR pile has been relocated from the third shelf of Billy bookcase to the corner of my room (perched carefully on a makeshift dais of the Neverender: Children of the Fence Edition), the time I've been idling since graduation has done very little to put any kind of dent in it. I partly blame the fact that for a while I was far more interested in spending time with my friends than sitting alone reading, but that's not the only factor.

While visiting Detroit two weekends ago--yes, that was Mystery Destination #2, for my Facebook and Twitter followers--I brought along a pair of books, the last two I took out of the Penn State library. They were Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse and Youth by J. M. Coetzee. Combined, they numbered scarcely more than 300 pages. Nevertheless, it took me WEEKS to finish reading them. They just did nothing for me, and few books in recent weeks have been able to grab me the way I'd like one to. A book that digs in its claws, won't let me go, and makes me turn the final page begging for more--I haven't read one that's done that for me in too too long.

The latest book in this trend has been William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch. Now, I know what you may be thinking: if you know me, I've actively voiced my dislike for Burroughs since first reading him in late 2007. At the time, I recall thinking The Soft Machine and Nova Express were filthy, nonsensical, and completely devoid of meaning. The fold-in and cut-up methods he used were things I just didn't understand. I didn't know what was happening, why it was happening, or why I should give a shit. All I knew was each was filled with drugs and body parts and fluids and other things that I just don't feel need to be mentioned here. I'd heard better things about Naked Lunch, though, and besides, it was on the list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, so I figured why not?

Big mistake.

In a number of ways, the book is practically unreadable. One of those ways, of course, is the filthiness, the vile descriptions of things that I gather are the reflections of someone so far gone on drugs that they're willing to believe these things can exist. But I've got a strong stomach for that kind of stuff (hell, I LIKED Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted) and it's not like I'm finding myself physically incapable of reading on. I'm just frustrated by the lack of plot and general coherence--the exact same complaint I had about his other books. In other words, just another book that was supposed to be great that I simply can't get through.

And I know what you're thinking. Why don't you just put it aside and read another book instead? There are two answers to that. The first is that, because I'm stubborn (and because I've never NOT finished a book I've started), I'm going to eventually finish it anyway, so why not do it now while it's still fresh in my head? The second is that I've already done that three times already, leaving four mediocre books off to the side, and I'd feel bad having five books going at the same time when I have a hard enough time keeping track of one.

But last night, my reaction against Naked Lunch was so strong that I came to a realization and, surprisingly enough, acted on it. I thought to myself, "Fuck, I could write something better than this shit!" So I put the book down, picked up my laptop, opened up my long-neglected manuscript, and started working on it.

It had been a while since I'd worked on it, a few months at least. It was hard enough motivating myself to write the papers I needed to finish to get my degree, so I figured a personal project that had no impact on my academic work was a bad thing to focus on. But it was also the same nagging issue that's been keeping many of my creative projects from getting off the ground: the feeling that I would never be able to pull it off, so why even bother trying.

Well, with nothing else on my plate for the foreseeable future, that attitude registered as bullshit. So off I went. And in one night, I added about 1000 words to the manuscript, doubling its current length. And when I reread those new pages this morning, they sounded good--not great, but they sounded up to par with what I'd expected of the work.

It was at that moment that I realized that this wasn't just a tiny step, a nudge in the right direction. I was doing it. I was writing that novel I've been talking about for so long.

Then I started chatting through Twitter with a fellow Princeton alumna who'd participated in last November's National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). She received a paperback proof of her book as recognition of her accomplishment, and now she's looking to work on a second novel, as well as try to get the first one published. This was a person with a shockingly similar background as my own, doing precisely what it was I hoped to do, and we've been talking for much of the day about how we can both reasonably try to get our respective projects off the ground.

So even though the economy sucks and my job hunt is totally stagnant right now, I genuinely don't feel the need to see this as a bad situation. I've got a work in progress that I'm proud of, encouraged about, and excited to work on. I've got three other ideas in the works that all have varying degrees of seriousness, all of which I can put in work on whenever I want because of all the free time I have. And I figure all I need is for one of those four projects to be completed and become a success--then I'm right on the fast track to the life I've been craving all along. All I needed was to put something into a little bit of action, and now that I have, I'm way more excited about the potential these new projects possess.

I commented many months ago to the effect that I felt like my life was in a condition of permanent stagnation so long as I was still in grad school. Now I'm out, at long last, and instead of seeing the malaise carry through, I find myself instead possessed of creativity and motivation for things I haven't wanted for far too long. I'm glad to see that I was right, and I'm thrilled about where things can and will go from here. I haven't felt this excited in forever--instead of holding back, hoping that one day I'll see it, sitting and waiting for these things to come to me until then, I'm actually working towards them. It feels real. It feels possible. It feels almost inevitable.

And yes. It feels good, sir.

Location: Liminality

2009-05-19T14:44:00.002-04:00

In what could arguably be the understatement of a lifetime, the past two years have been incredibly tumultuous. Despite the ups and downs (and, as any regular readers of this blog can attest, there have been a lot of downs), on Sunday, I successfully dispatched that period of my life by walking on stage, shaking Graham Spanier's hand, and receiving my diploma from the Pennsylvania State University. It's a matter of record now: I have a nice piece of paper that they can't take away from me, and a declaration from the Board of Trustees that they really meant it.

I'm free. I'm free!

But if my feelings were as simple as that, there would be no need for a post here, would there? After all, this is the more meditative, complex side of what I choose to reveal online. It's where I go to verbally work out the conflicts that I feel need to be worked out, whether they are actually anything of substance or just matters of strict self-importance. And this conflict goes about as deep as any other I've experienced in my short life, for it's not at all simple to explain how I've been waiting for months and months for this day to come but nevertheless find myself regretting having wished that time away.

Time out. Again, it's not that simple. Do I wish I had time to work on my papers a bit more, or to regretfully ignore the course reading that I just couldn't manage to complete? Absolutely not. (Let's be perfectly clear here: someday, somehow, I will read the entirety of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa--all 1500+ pages of it--but to assign it as reading during Week 12? That's just fucking cruel and unusual.) The stress of work has been the thing that has had the most adverse impact on my happiness during my grad school tenure, so of course I won't be sorry to see it go.

The bad feelings I have now are in the same vein as those I felt prior to my departure from Princeton: namely, that I had one last chance to see all my friends before we went off on our separate paths. And sure, I had a whole month to enjoy their company then, and I also am fortunate to have kept in good contact with almost all of them, and Reunions is probably the single most incredible experience we as alumni can have and that gives us all the chance to see each other with some regularity. All of these things helped to mediate the feeling that there was some kind of finality to the relationships I had with them.

That was never the case at Penn State--at least not until very recently. From the start, when I came to the bruising realization that this whole gig wasn't for me, the whole experience had been mentally sheathed in a veil of temporariness. It was little more than a pit stop along the larger path of my life, a cheesy roadside tourist trap that sucks you in for longer than you expect it to, provides a few fun stories down the line, but is ultimately forgettable in the grand scheme. I'd had some wonderful experiences and met some fantastic people, but I feel like I did a lot early on to put some distance between me and these people and events. I didn't let myself get too deep, too invested in my feelings for them, because I knew that I would be putting actual distance between me and them very soon. I trained myself well to be ready to throw this away.

But Destiny had other plans. I feel like Alanis Morissette put it best when she said, "Life has a funny way of sneaking up on you when you think everything's okay and everything's going right." It didn't matter that I'd decided precisely how I wanted to frame this phase of my life because, like it or not, to borrow one of my recent catchphrases, "This is happening." And it's happening the way it should, and not the way I want to--which, I've had to learn, are not the same thing.

I don't have any problem with this. I feel incredibly blessed that, in the past month, I've been given a very clear indication of why I came to State College in the first place--even if I'm still not sure what the ultimate take-home point is supposed to be. But I'm having a hard time flipping the switch in my mind, to quickly adjust from (for all intents and purposes) not really caring about this place and anything associated with it to suddenly having very deep, emotional investment in what's happened here. And what's even more difficult is that, once that change started to happen, I started to realize that there were other things (especially other people) that I discovered I would have a hard time just letting go. It was as if I'd kicked away a single stone and the whole thing began to cave in.

So I'm having a really hard time now trying to negotiate the fact that, with the end of this part of my journey, I feel like I'm still trapped in the middle of an indiscriminate...something. It most frequently manifests itself in the same kind of guilt that I'm experiencing right now: I know I have over a week where I have zero responsibilities and zero plans, but I can't help but feel that there's something I should be doing. Should I be reading more? Watching all the TV and movies I told myself I'd watch (like, God help me, Lost)? Working on the book or screenplay that I've been tossing around? Playing more video games? Hard to say--no sooner do I start doing one of those things than I feel like I should be doing something else. Like, perhaps, trying harder to find a job. So that I can get back into some kind of steady grind, the kind that I've been used to for so long and now, it seems, I can't escape from.

The last thing I want is for my life to slip into predictability so soon. And I've got opportunities at my feet to be able to kill that notion. But it's all part of the larger problem that I've got a lot of different paths and places that I could bring myself to right now, and I have no sense whatsoever of which is the right path to take. I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a fucking pussy and that I'm scared to death of failure. I wish I had the balls to grab the bull by the horns and take the chances that I feel like I should. And I wish I really could live in the moment and just appreciate the here and now more, instead of constantly panicking about my future. But that's never been my style. I hate it, and I want to change it, but that's not me.

So here I am at a major crossroads. The past is, for all intents and purposes, done and resolved. I am what I'll be for right now. It's time to take a step down one path and, goddamn it, I don't know what to do. All I know is that if there's anything more horrifying to me than going the wrong way, it's standing still. But until I really get a good sense of what the next move is, here I stand. I wish it was all more clear. I wish it was all simpler. I wish I didn't hold myself to such ungodly unreasonable personal standards. I wish I had the fortitude to follow the things I believed in most and trust that everything would take care of itself the way I try to trick myself into thinking it will.

But it's never quite that simple, is it? Damn.

It Pours

2009-04-23T10:45:00.002-04:00

A wise man once told me a truism about life. (Well, actually, he didn't tell me. He told his daughter, who then proceeded to tell me.) I don't often buy into the notion of little nuggets of home-grown wisdom like that because, by and large, they're schmaltzy bullshit that doesn't pan out under the scrutiny of real life. But this one hit me when I first heard it, and it has hit me time and time again, to the point where I can't call it coincidence anymore.

He likened the bad things we experience to a figurative pile of shit that gets dumped onto you over the course of your life. Depending on the time, you get more shit or less shit dumped onto you, but over the course of a lifetime, everyone gets the exact same amount. It's how we manage and deal with it that dictates our own happiness.

And while there are a great many people that are most certainly far worse off than I will ever be, the fundamental truth stands that it's what we do about our situations, our chances, our opportunities that dictate how our demeanor ends up. Even during the most trying moments of our lives, this concept makes complete sense. I recall four years ago, after my grandmother died, my mother turned to God to help her through. She went and talked to her priest and vented her feelings and frustrations in the confessional. When she was through, Father Kevin looked her in the eye and told her, "You know what they say about how God never gives you more than you can handle? That's bullshit. Sometimes it is too much. But that doesn't mean it can't be dealt with eventually, and with the right help." Same message, different messenger.

All of which is a fairly roundabout way of saying that, after almost a year and a half of doubt, self-loathing, and dissatisfaction, I kind of figured something was due to give. And boy, did it ever.

The other old adage I tend not to buy into is "When it rains, it pours." Sure, the connotation is often negative, but not everything ends up piling on all at once in unmanageable ways. After all, if the wise man's metaphor stands to reason, there will be moments where the shit just sort of dribbles down at a steady pace and you have no problem dealing it when the time comes -- kind of like washing the dishes you use for dinner right after you finish eating, so that you don't end up with a sink full of dirty dishes later on.

But yesterday, it poured, in the most glorious kind of way possible. The kind of storm of good fortune that doesn't have you cowering inside under shelter but begs you to run out and dance crazily in the torrents. (I know about this kind of storm because I've been in one, at a Dave Matthews Band concert in 2001. People were literally trying to run out from under the overhang so they could get soaked along with the rest of us. It was one of the few purely transcendental moments of my life.)

At moments like these, I feel like you have to step back and acknowledge how amazing they truly are. Which is the entire point of this post.

I feel bad saying this, but I get the sense that over time, while this blog has certainly been more about the pensive, well-thought-out side of my mind, it's also been a lot more depressing than A Tournament of Lies. My shit pile has been on the rise for quite some time, and since I see writing as therapeutic, I would come here to reflect on the things that were going on, to try and make sense of the misery and break through the malaise. Sure, I knew in the back of my mind that my life, on the grand scale, wasn't nearly as fucked up as it could be, but no one ever wants to hear that when they're mired in hopelessness. So here I vented, I raged, I reflected, I coped. And it worked marvelously.

But now is not the time for anger or sadness or disappointment. There will be a time for that later, I know this. I've been blessed for the first time in a long time with an overabundance of joy, and it's about damn time that I brought some of that back here.

So that's your official notice. Happy Dave is on the clock, and while he'll be watching the sky for the next shitstorm, he wants to make it perfectly clear that, from the looks of things, there's not a cloud in sight.

Early Review: Going to See the Elephant

2009-04-08T11:56:00.003-04:00

LibraryThing sends me free books, I read them and review them, and everyone is happy. That, in case you haven't been able to tell before, is the gist of their Early Reviewers program, but it's been rare that an ER book has elicited a purely wondrous reaction from my cynical self.

Until now.

I present for your approval my review of Going to See the Elephant, the debut novel by Rodes Fishburne, published on the penultimate day of 2008. For the benefit of those who don't typically look at my LibraryThing profile, I've reprinted the review I've written below, in the hopes that it might gain a little more exposure for this unassuming but wonderful work.

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It's often understood that first writers tend to write almost exclusively about what they know. This fact becomes very strongly evident in the first pages of Rodes Fishburne's debut novel Going to See the Elephant, as our intrepid hero, Slater Brown, struggles to find the idea that will capture his imagination and bring him fame as a great writer. Such a metaliterary moment might seem to portend dangerous territory, but Fishburne's novel quickly develops into a charming and entertaining story that flies by almost too quickly.

The novel follows Slater Brown to San Francisco, where he has relocated in search of the perfect story (his "elephant," as the brief Author's Note informs us). He struggles in his first days, lacking inspiration and losing both faith and money at an alarming pace. He eventually finds a job at a low-rent, rundown local paper, the Morning Trumpet, where the disbelieving editor forces him to prove himself by writing a great story. Lacking ideas, he seeks out a local lunchtime mystic who gives him a busted radio and headphones that, unwittingly, allows Slater to overhear telephone conversations on the bus, conversations that give him huge scoops on big stories. Soon, his life takes turns he never could have anticipated.

While that last sentence there was an unapologetically clichéd way of admitting that there's more to the plot I don't want to tell, the novel succeeds by virtue of the fact that it seems constantly on the urge of inviting cliché but never falls into the trap. Fishburne's plot has a certain slapstick quality to it, but it never veers so far off course that it sacrifices plausibility. The tone of his writing is also well-matched to the story being told: the pages flip over at a remarkably quick pace, but the book manages to avoid the curse of page-turners by actually remaining memorable, often due to the occasionally brilliant turn of phrase that Fishburne is prone to.

Similarly, the novel succeeds incredibly on the strength of its characters. Slater Brown is a remarkably relatable figure, even if the reader has no inclination to be a writer. His trials while attempting to manage his dreams with his need to survive are incredibly realistic, and the dismay he feels at his wasted potential in the early pages is remarkably poignant. Many of the novel's characters -- from the chess prodigy Callio to the brilliant inventor Milo -- have quirky characteristics, but do battle with reasonable and expected life issues in a way that never alienates them from the reader's sympathies.

It also helps that, unlike many books that advertise their humor and attempt to be funny, this book actually IS funny. Fishburne has a knack, as I've mentioned, for the well-composed line, and his descriptions are often just wry enough to elicit a giggle at a regular pace. But he also paces the story well, inserting moments of humor and silliness at an appropriate remove from the more emotional moments. Neither the funny nor the serious moments ever feel like cheap shots: they feel like the natural progressions of the character's lives, which is a great testament to Fishburne's young but powerful writing abilities.

If the novel has any weaknesses, they are difficult to identify. Without a doubt, many people will find the novel's absurdity to be a stretch of realism, particularly since Fishburne feels so strongly about setting the story within realistic contexts. The city of San Francisco practically becomes a character in and of itself, and its many moods parallel Slater's in interesting if expected ways. Milo's creations may seem out of place in an otherwise reasonably realistic landscape, but they don't push the bounds of credibility too far. And while the bumbling mayor becomes a parody of himself by the novel's end, the politics really don't matter very much when it's all said and done. It's all in service of a larger narrative about dreams, abilities, and embracing the moment -- and to that end, the novel succeeds with flying colors.

While one typically ought to raise a red flag when one sees fairly unblemished praise of a debut novel, I don't feel like such a warning is necessary here. Going to See the Elephant has no pretense of being more than it is, which is a funny, charming story that has a few nuggets of genuine wisdom hidden within its pages. Like Slater himself, the novel finds its niche and operates masterfully within it; I can't praise it any more than to say it accomplishes exactly what it seems to set out to do. Inspiring, amusing, and heartwarming, it's a novel you'll almost certainly be rooting for -- and best of all, in the end, it ends up being the underdog that wins.

The Curse of the Thirty-First

2009-03-31T14:02:00.002-04:00

My emotions have just gone so out of whack that I don't know what they are, let alone how to contain them. I don't even feel like writing about any of this is a good idea, for lots of reasons that I have no doubt I'll get to, but suffice to say that if today you come here seeking reasoned, well-tempered, decently thought-out observations, you're liable to be disappointed.

March 31st just hasn't been kind to my family. Granted, there's really only one bad thing that's happened on March 31st prior to today, and that was the sudden passing of my grandmother on this date in 2005. I remember the whole scene like it was yesterday, no matter how much I wish I could forget it: I woke up, went to seminar, and after an uneventful morning was about to go have lunch with my roommate Charlie. I casually checked my phone, saw a voicemail, and heard my father's benign voice telling me to call him back. I sensed that something was up, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. When I called him back, and he told me my grandmother was dead, I fucking lost it. I staggered backwards to the nearest bench and fell to it, waving off Charlie to go eat while my father tried to explain to me how the hell that had happened. When the discussion was over, I ran back inside, slammed the door of my room, and bawled for what must have been at least an hour. It was, and still is, one of the worst feelings I ever had in my life.

I remember those feelings clearly every time this part of the year rolls around -- partly because my grandfather died almost two weeks shy of one year afterwards, on March 18, 2006 -- but I'm sure for my mother it's even worse. She was inconsolable for quite some time, and it took her almost a year to even be able to talk about Grandma without welling up. And despite what she insists, it still hurts.

So for more bad shit to go down on the anniversary of that, of all the possible days in the year, seems less like coincidence than it does karmic bullshit.

Mom insists she's fine, and I'm sure to a certain degree she is, but I'm not entirely sure I am. And like I said earlier, I can't even put a name to what I'm feeling. I'm upset, for sure, and incredibly angry, for a lot of different reasons. (Let's just say a few more names have been written on my shit list in permanent marker within the past hour.) I feel like Mom is really trying to be strong and tough and deal with this, but I just can't entirely believe her when she says that everything really is alright. Because it's not.

But by the same token, I know that this feeling isn't just the result of what happened today. I've been feeling in a malaise for the past few days, and even people that don't know me too well have taken note. In fact, I was pretty surprised at who did notice, almost as surprised as I was at who didn't. (But since I don't want this to turn back into the angsty immaturity of my Xanga days, let's just say that certain things have been duly noted.)

I needed a weekend off to relax myself, and I got it, but certain other frustrations kicked back into gear and unsettled things to the point where I'm not sure the weekend ended up on a higher note for me than it did before. And since then, my interest and motivation have once more plummeted to shockingly low levels, all during the time of the year when I really need these things to start ramping themselves up.

So if I've been able to come up with anything as a source of my current despondency, I have to believe that it's a perfect storm of fucked-up things hitting all at once, exacerbated by today's craptacular revelations. And perhaps even more insulting to my psyche is that tomorrow is April Fool's Day, a day that I have gone on record as deploring. And despite my better judgment, I allowed myself to be talked into not one but two pranks that, had they gone off, would have been really amusing. One, in particular, had me especially excited, and looking forward to springing the trap. Now, I'm not even sure I want to go through with them. And furthermore, I feel like karma is once again screwing me over for going against my convictions.

Not that my convictions are really stable right now anyway. For the first time in a long time, life has started to scare me again. Nothing seems to have been working out in my favor lately, whether little things or bigger issues, and the trend is beginning to feel disturbing. It's to the point where I'm not sure I can lean back on my typical crutch and blame it all on State College because it's starting to feel more pervasive than that. And that's what's gotten me so unbelievably fucked up.

A Tuesday

2009-03-18T11:42:00.002-04:00

I'm an extremely superstitious person. I can't help that. Perhaps it was fated by Destiny when she bestowed upon me the gifts necessary to become a passably incisive literary critic: the type of person who seeks to imbue meaning into every text he encounters is liable to find himself seeking explanation for every event in his life, irrespective of significance or relevance.

At the same time, I have to believe that my faithfulness towards superstition has damned me to fall into a vicious circle. The more I believe that a circumstance is going to end up in a particular way, the more I will subconsciously do to ensure that negative outcome. And my hatred of Tuesdays is the kind of thing that is both reflexive and self-perpetuating.

I came to the conclusion that Tuesdays were the worst day of the week a long time ago. The argument works through simple process of elimination. Firstly, discount Saturdays and Sundays because the weekend is, for obvious reasons, not even in the competition. That leaves us the work week. The two easiest days to discount then are Wednesday and Friday -- the latter because it is the final day of the week and precursor to the weekend, and the former because "Hump Day," as it is affectionately known in many circles, marks the beginning of the downhill slide towards relaxation. I further remove Monday from the discussion because, though it is the start of a new week, most people spend a substantial portion of the day bitching and adjusting, as opposed to actually being productive. Its therapeutic nature makes it at least borderline tolerable. The competition, then, is between Tuesday and Thursday, so what do we have framing these two? On Thursday, we're on the downward slide that Wednesday had foretold, and we can anticipate tomorrow being Friday, so it can't be all that bad. But on Tuesday, you're framed by the beginning of the week and by the minimally-inviting promise that you're almost halfway there.

So fuck Tuesdays. QED.

Yet something about this past Tuesday -- St. Patrick's Day, for those of you playing at home from some indiscriminate week in the near or distant future -- felt like it wanted to buck the system, go against the trend. It was a heads-up, one-on-one battle between a shockingly positive mind set and the inexorable march of fate. So let's get right to the highlights.

The day was doomed to a bad start. I'd gone out Monday night with a friend to see Watchmen. I had promised I'd attend with her before spring break, but while in DC for a few days, I went to see it with Alicia. So I already knew what was going to happen, and I knew that I was not going to enjoy it. (It's not that it's a bad movie, per se, but I know I just didn't like it.) So, despite my better judgment, I dispensed with my typical viewing of 24 to once more see a movie I did not care for. And rather than cut my losses and head to sleep, I instead returned to my friend's apartment, where we played Rock Band until almost 3:00am. And we both had seminar (the same seminar, in fact) the next morning. At 9:00am.

So began the craptacularity [trademark pending]. Seminar was uneventful, perhaps with the exception of the fact that I confidently participated and made an impact despite having only read two of the play's five acts. After a short pat on the back, I printed my material for my editing class and proceeded to The Corner Room for a lengthy lunch and reading respite. I ate, I drank, I finished my crossword, and I put a large dent into Going to See the Elephant (Early Review post forthcoming). Things were looking up.

As I made my way to editing, I couldn't help but notice that spring was most definitely in the air. Not so much because the weather was warm, but because the intangible sensation of the season seemed omnipresent. Winter warm spells are nice, but they carry a sense of dread, because you know that there's a cold front just waiting to shatter the serenity, to break in and kill any anticipation of prolonged warmth. But when spring is really, truly here, you feel the season fighting back. It won't let the chill back in, even if the temperature does drop a bit here and there. This was what I felt as I walked to class: the battle had raged, and spring was emerging triumphant. So too were my spirits.

The rest of my classes passed without incident. I reflected on how the job search seemed to be in good shape -- I even applied for a position that seemed particularly suited to my skills and interests. I returned home, curled up with Going to See the Elephant, and finished it. And, despite a threatening last-minute twist, it ended in a fully satisfying fashion, which further instilled a sense of profound happiness within me. Could it be that the simple joys of the day were going to successfully squash the heavy hand of fate?

It seemed so, until about 7:30pm. After watching Jeopardy!, I became inexplicably tired, but I didn't want to go to sleep. In fact, I wanted to read more. So I opted to drive to Starbucks, grab some coffee to wake me up, and try to put another notch in Gain, the Richard Powers novel I've been slowly working on since October. I parked, I drank, I read, I got sleepy again. Only an hour and a half later, I was ready to go.

Ascending the stairs, and strolled confidently to the door, pushed it open, and approached my car. Which had a large pink envelope in the windshield wipers reading "Parking Violation."

Rather than simply recount the string of curses I spewed forth at the sight, I should explain that I was equal parts pissed off and confounded. Upon my arrival, I'd actively sought out some sign, either posted in the lot or written on the meter, that would explain when the meter ran out. Finding none, I checked the other spaces to see if other cars were parked at expired meters; they were. (Apparently, they also had permits, but I did not take note of this.) By all accounts, I thought I was okay, but I was obviously wrong.

What was most irritating, though, was that it wasn't the Borough that cited me -- it was some private company called Parking Management & Enforcement. The ticket had no address: just a P.O. Box, a phone number, and a website, which also features no information about the company or its office location. Furthermore, the ticket claimed I had a mere 48 hours to pay the $15 fine -- not extravagant, I know, but still thrice as expensive as a standard Borough citation -- or they would sic a collections agency on me. Essentially, their operation is designed to eliminate any option to argue: just shut up, pay, and deal with it. But since I attempted to find some kind of posting about the meters' hours of operation and failed, I don't feel like I can just lay down and deal with this.

So now, I'm on an agitated quest to find a human being at this place to argue with, because I want to at least make it worth the $15 I may end up shelling out anyway. But with the (admittedly, stolen) Internet at my apartment on the fritz, my options are to either go back to campus, find a free WiFi hotspot in town, or visit to friends' houses to borrow their connections. None of which are terribly problematic options, but they are terribly inconvenient.

Which essentially brings me to my point: whether a mere character flaw or damaging vice, I find that I get most angry at little things, not at major concerns. I have a genuine belief that most "big deal" things end up resolving themselves in satisfactory ways: after all, whenever I see people that I consider to be utter wastes of life managing to keep their shit together, I figure little ol' me and my nice education should be able to traverse the treacherous tides decently enough. But my inability to control the more minute details of my life -- like, say, bullshit partking tickets -- irritates me because it's enough to sidetrack me from my larger goals. And sadly, the little bumps end up adding up, even though they inevitably are forgotten in a relatively short period of time.

And I've discovered, furthermore, that my experiences in graduate school have amounted to that very type of sum. All told, my degree is on-track and my job search is, while not terribly fruitful, not completely stalled out either. But the past two years have thrown a lot of bumps onto my road. Some have been fairly minor (centipede infestations, loss of motivation, etc.); others have been pretty life-changing (complete career change; end of a long-term relationship, etc.). Yet they all add up to a sense that this period of my life has been excessively flawed, intensely unhappy, and ultimately damaging. Despite trying to see it all as a chance to grow and improve, it's proven to be a consistently demeaning set of challenges that have come at a troublingly persistent pace.

Having thought all this through, the overwhelming feeling I was left with is that, as incomprehensible as it might seem to the sane, rational mind, the town of State College must be out to get me. And as ridiculous as it must sound to posit that an entire municipality is somehow in control of my personal wheel of fortune, I'm equally hard-pressed to come up with events and occurrences while here that I can't classify as dire, dour, or some diabolical mix of both. So my lamentably superstitious mind clings to that explanation, implausible though it may be. Which is, despite my tone, a blessing in disguise, because that means I have but two more months left until I can dispatch this unfortunate chapter from my narrative and carry on writing the story I want to write, with a degree that identifies me as master not only of the arts but of my own fate.

Early Review: The Power of Who!

2009-03-10T00:14:00.004-04:00

As the current educationally-related bane of my existence reaches its moment of completion, I'll take this opportunity to put forth one last spurt of fauxductivity that is sure to make the folks at LibraryThing very happy.

In yet another installment of "Dave has too many Early Reviewer books in his queue and the backlog has gotten to him so badly that he needs to read and review them all at once," I give you my review of Bob Beaudine's inspirational self-help book The Power of Who! You Already Know Everyone You Need to Know, published in January of this year. I have reprinted my review below for those of you who may care -- knowing full well, of course, that painfully few (if any) of you actually do. At least I mean well.

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Bob Beaudine's book The Power of Who! opens with a very personable introduction, followed by sentence that is marked out in block-quote style, as if to suggest that it above all else is worth remembering. That sentence is, and I quote, "Take everything you have ever heard or learned about networking and just throw it out" (xiv). It's a radical and memorable idea. The presentation of that idea, however, is a microcosm of his entire book. Beaudine has some fresh, new ideas, and he presents them clearly and convincingly, but the vast majority of the book falls into typical self-help territory -- though, admittedly, it's an awfully fun read.

The essential premise of the book is, according to its subtitle, that you already know everyone you need to know. Beaudine suggests that if you consciously think about your friends and relations, you can come up with a circle of about 100 people and 40 goals/steps towards achieving the success and satisfaction you've always dreamed of. After outlining these ideas, and giving some pretty compelling reasons for their legitimacy, Beaudine uses them to introduce a new model of networking that involves not random, possibly-well-placed strangers, but the friends you already know and love -- friends that are willing to help you just because you are you. Understanding this and using it to your advantage, according to Beaudine, is the key to realizing your dreams.

At first glance -- and especially because I tend to write in a fairly jaded, unconvinced voice -- it may seem as if Beaudine's plan is a whole lot of self-help hoo-hah. But I have to confess that the first half of the book, in which he explains and illustrates this plan, is actually the best part. Beaudine argues rather convincingly for the inefficacy of networking, and while he tends to lean on words like "fate" and "destiny" a little too strongly for the pragmatist's liking, the simple logic of his reasoning is surprisingly strong. Not only does it make sense, but it's fun to read, interspersed with anecdotes and situations that make you feel less like a member of a large audience and more like a friend.

While The Power of Who! starts out very strongly, however, its effects begin to wane as time goes on. As the book progresses, Beaudine opts to shift towards business advice mode, dispensing his time-tested wisdom on such things as interview skills and the people with whom you should surround yourself to guarantee success. And while much of this information is, like the first part, practical and well thought out, it's also the kind of thing that one can find in almost any business or self-help book. After all, how many times can one be expected to read that the best thing one can do in an interview is to "be yourself" before it gets a little tiresome. Whereas the book starts off on a rather unusual and refreshing foot, it slips into tedious redundancy as it approaches its end.

Even more disconcerting is the fact that Beaudine's examples betray one of the weaknesses in his argument that he only very briefly considers: the placement and position of your "Who!" is what makes them so effective -- i.e., if your "Who!" are CEOs and presidents, you're likely to find that they will, in fact, take care of most any job problem you face. Unfortunately for the rest of us -- and yes, that includes the younger crowd, whom Beaudine mentions for a short moment in a later chapter but otherwise glosses over -- we may not have "Who!" friends that are nearly as well-connected. And sure, the argument rests upon circles intersecting with other circles, but I don't think Beaudine acknowledges fully enough the plain fact that some people's circles are just going to be objectively better than others'.

While that notion threatens to derail the book and send it face-first into accusations of elitism, Beaudine wisely tempers these notions by telling amusing and witty stories about his own life. Stories that, yes, involve very highly-connected people (the first one involves a gentleman named George W., and I'll give you two guesses as to who he is), but stories that are told in a very personable, down-to-earth style that tempers the highfalutin nature of their subjects. Beaudine's storytelling style truly helps ground the book, and while his constant interjections of "Big Mistake!" may occasionally get tiresome, you never get the sense that you're reading the work of a man who's out of touch with hard work, no matter how wealthy and successful he may be.

All told, if the self-help thing is up your alley, it's hard to say no to The Power of Who! When you think about Beaudine's theory completely, it's a low-pressure and very practical idea that, even at its simplest level, is easy to execute. (And if you're not finding success, it can't really hurt, can it?) I only wish that the whole book was as lucid and enlightening as the first half, because then it would have really been worth the strong recommendation. Regardless, it's at the very least worth a gander.

Early Review: Any Given Doomsday

2009-03-09T17:24:00.004-04:00

After an afternoon of working on a paper that has failed to hold my interest or attention for very long, I've opted to distract myself by once more digging into my to-be-reviewed pile and convincing LibraryThing that my opinions are worth a damn.

In today's procrastinatory installment of Dave as Early Reviewer, I present the first book in Lori Handeland's new fantasy series, entitled The Phoenix Chronicles. For the benefit of my faithful readers who like their reading extra pulpy, I present below my review of Any Given Doomsday, which was first published in November 2008.

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Let me preface my review of Lori Handeland's novel Any Given Doomsday by confessing that pulpy vampire fiction isn't really my cup of tea. Even as I was drawn into the book and found many of its scenes surprisingly compelling, I couldn't help but fixate on the fact that this just isn't my kind of reading. Ultimately, that's the way I feel I have to assess the novel: it's probably ideal for fans of the author or the genre, but I doubt it's likely to win over any non-believers.

The story revolves around psychic former cop Elizabeth Phoenix, who has attempted to move past the death of her former partner by working for his widow's bar. Her psychic abilities send her to the home of her former foster mother, Ruthie, whom Liz finds viciously murdered. As she will later discover, though, Ruthie bestowed Liz with a special gift in her dying moments, forcing Liz to come to terms with both her gift and the newfound curse she has to carry -- all, of course, in order to save mankind from nasty demons.

If my wrap-up was excessively glib at the end, it is at least in keeping with the tone of the novel. Liz is our first-person narrator, and we are privileged with the firsthand experience she provides us of both the human (jealousy, confusion, denial, etc.) and nonhuman (transformations, ghost whispers, demon killing, etc.) struggles she is forced to endure. While these would surely be enough to confuse and irritate even the most hardened of souls, Liz is the type of character who, in Handeland's words, "will say anything." This is not always, as it turns out, good for the novel. Though Liz's dry riffing does add a touch of humor to the proceedings, the fact is that it often feels out of place, often rendering Liz a character that feels painfully immature. Yes, she's only twenty-five, but you would think after a while she would catch on to the admittedly screwed-up nuances of her new world.

The novel actually works best when it is concealing, rather than revealing, its hand. The early scenes of Liz's fights against strange creatures are surprisingly frightening because we share her uncertainty and respect her need to improvise in order to save her own life. But the creepy crawly creatures of the story are most intimidating when we don't know what we're up to -- sadly, as the novel progresses and we find out what's going down, the intimidation factor wears off (perhaps because we only see a small portion of the master plan).

Fans of urban fantasy will be unsurprised to learn that the book is dripping with illicit sexual encounters, but again, sparer turns out to be better as the novel goes on. When the first flickers of tension break out into a full-blown sexual encounter halfway through the book, the impact is intense and evocative, just as Handeland presumably wants it to be. But the ashes are left to smolder a bit too long, and ultimately the novel seems to devolve into a series of critical sex scenes that tease at and lead up to a final, climactic sex scene that, unsurprisingly, feels a little empty and unsatisfying by the time it finally hints. A little goes a long way, but a lot tends to numb the reader by the time the plot machinations are finished.

By the time the novel is done, it seems a bit disheartening to find that the conclusion really only sets up the fact that there's another book to come in the series -- a volume that has a sneak preview right after the last page, go figure! Unfortunately, Any Given Doomsday feels a little bit too much like setup for my liking, resulting in a novel that has a bunch of disparate parts that all seem like they want to work together but don't quite mesh. I suspect it's because Handeland figured she would smooth everything out over the next few books. To that end, I have to admit that Any Given Doomsday will probably have fantasy fans waiting to see what will come next. But if it's not up your alley, one trip into The Phoenix Chronicles will probably be more than enough for you.

Early Review: The Assignment

2009-03-08T14:07:00.006-04:00

Concluding my procrastination at fulfilling my LibraryThing responsibilities, I present one final review-in-waiting that came as a result of Early Reviewers.

Saving the oddest for last, I present my review of The Assignment; or, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers, written in 1986 by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, translated in 1988 by Joel Agee, and published afresh in October of 2008. For the benefit of those who don't typically look at my LibraryThing profile, I hope the review will turn some more folks on to this decidedly odd little novella.

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I have to give Joel Agee a great deal of credit. As the translator of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's exceedingly quirky 1986 novella The Assignment; or, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers, he recognized both potential and difficulty and managed to rise to the challenge with aplomb.

Potential, because the novella, though over twenty years old, manages to speak to the kind of panic that is urgent and contemporaneous. Opening with the wonderfully cinematic scene of a coffin being suspended by helicopter and transported across Europe, the story quickly takes us into the world of a journalist known only as F. She has been hired by the widow of the woman in the coffin, Tina von Lambert, to reconstruct her murder as a documentary in the hopes of solving the otherwise cold case. As F. travels to North Africa, she becomes enmeshed in complex political machinations, switches of identity, and dangerous missions that entrap her in a labyrinth beneath the desert from which she must, against all odds, escape.

Difficulty, because each of the novel's twenty-four chapters consists of a single sentence. The enlightening foreward by Theodore Ziolkowski explains that Dürrenmatt was inspired by Bach, whose Well Tempered Clavier I likewise featured twenty-four movements (in German, we are told, the word for a sentence and a musical movement is the same). The result is a story that must have been a translator's nightmare, as ideas and clauses pile on top of one another and stream-of-consciousness is always on the verge of taking over the narrative's tenuous grasp on order.

The question that must be answered, of course, is does it all work? As a cohesive unit, surprisingly, it does. Agee's ability to keep the single-sentence unity of each chapter intact contributes strongly to the aforementioned sense of urgency: the short chapters glide quickly, the longer chapters gain pace as the reader progresses. The result is a novel that pushes uncomfortably forward while the screws of the plot twist and turn in innumerable ways. That it forces us to slow down but does not allow us to adds to the effect of the book on the reader.

That the book seems constantly on the verge of spinning out of control is in no small part the result of Dürrenmatt's subject matter. The novel's central conspiracy becomes almost completely irrelevant by the end while, as the convoluted subtitle suggests, the theme of constant surveillance emerges. Dürrenmatt's must have sensed that the Orwellian Big Brother of his time was either present or on the verge of being realized, because he presciently ties constant observation with large-scale international conspiracy in a way that makes the novel feel (almost) at home in the present as it did in the mid-1980s.

Perhaps the only piece of the puzzle that doesn't quite mesh so well is that it is incredibly hard to decipher whether or not Dürrenmatt actually ties all the loose ends together. It seems obvious that the central argument of the book is far more concerned with confusion and coercion than with clarity, but a bit of resolution would have been somewhat more helpful. The deus ex machina ending is slightly unsatisfying, but perhaps no more unexpected or unusual than anything else that preceded it. In short, the novella refuses to tidy things up -- and perhaps that's the point -- but it still concludes the work on an uneasy note that feels like it has more to do with merely the themes.

But the fact that the book has become more accurate and realistic since its initial publication in German is a testament to the strength of Dürrenmatt's material. The Assignment represents the work of an author who sensed the need to capture something greater than he could fathom, as well as the work of a translator who sensed a great thing that needed to be realized. Both succeed gloriously, producing a work that feels frighteningly contemporary -- and, to be sure, just downright frightening.

Simple Pleasures, Drastic Measures

2009-03-03T16:36:00.003-05:00

I saw an eagle today, and it got me thinking.

Okay, perhaps it wasn't an eagle proper. The partially failed efforts of my eighteenth century seminar professor to successfully clear a dry-erase board resulted in a smeared dry-erase pattern that vaguely resembled an aerie-dweller. At least, I thought so. You too can be the judge.

(Now might be a great time to point out that I have a Twitter now! You should go check it out and follow, since I'm a whore for shameless self-promotion and desperately require attention in order to feed the falsely extravagant ego that's standing in front of an otherwise hollow, weak-willed shell of a man.)

Regardless of your own personal view on the legitimacy or merit of spying animal shapes in semi-satisfactory erasures, the fact that I found, documented, felt the need to comment upon, and shared such a discovery spoke strongly to me. It reawakened a particular yen that kicks in every now and again, one that gets its share of face time in this, my humble little corner of the Internet (when that corner is not cluttered, of course, with bitching after bantering after diatribe after ranting after raving after tirade about how awful and soul-sucking my work currently is). And that is, of course, my desire to say something that is meaningful and interesting to as many people as possible.

Despite putting myself on a career track that would have consisted primarily of researching and writing texts on some of my favorite works of literature, plus a healthy dose of teaching those works to presumably appreciative (read: awake) students, my graduate work -- and the prospect of an academic career in general -- has stifled my creativity. This is not a new revelation, as I've proved herein time and time again. But I've been trying very hard to rationalize how it is that a life of writing (albeit academic writing) could be so incurably detrimental to, well, my (creative) writing -- of which this blog is included.

It's equally unsurprising that I've felt both pain and pity over the jettisoning of my blogging during times of great stress. Quoth the author, from an ill-conceived draft, begun over a month ago, that shall hereafter never see the light of day:

I had every intention of taking the clichéd resolution approach to blogging, embracing the turning of the calendar as an excuse to turn a new leaf and start fresh and set myself to a particular (and particularly stringent) schedule and yada yada yada. I should have known that my resolve would quickly be shattered when, on New Year's Eve, I fashioned an idea for a blog entry about how my world would be transformed in 2009, as a direct result of jettisoning the poor karma and horrid fortunes that 2008 brought me. I took this idea -- which I'd fomented through judicious bouts of sitting at the computer, staring at the blinking caret, ready to rock -- and proceeding to shelve it, thinking, Meh, I'm not in the mood right now. I can write it later.

And now, as you have seen, a month later, that very promising post has been unceremoniously relegated to a relatively uninteresting vignette meant only to serve as a passable but by no means notable way of entering my latest entry. Poor little misbegotten post. You never really stood a chance, did you?

And, as it turned out, neither did that draft. That to me is fucked up. But then, it's always harder to work on things that need be done than on things that want to be done.

But rather than go down that same, tired path in this missive, I want to tie it into my aforementioned eagle. It would seem that today, of all days, my mind was tuned in enough to receive even the simplest of inspirations. Whether the result of ennui, impatience, or the malaise of indifference that has as of late characterized my participation in seminar, something in my crazy head was crying out for some meaningful stimulus. And there, miraculously, it was!

What I have to wonder, however, is if it's really so miraculous. It strikes me that these kinds of things happen on an almost everyday basis. And if you, like me, have the kind of mind that's wired to the type of detail that you feel strongly compelled to examine in all its glorious minutiae, then you understand that it's actually a natural, organic, and surprisingly regular occurrence. Sure, in our daily doldrums, we often miss the "little things" that those with an surplus of clever ideas (and often, consequently, a dearth of attentive ears -- and yes, I know how damnably close to self-description this veers) cry desperately for us to awaken and discover. Yet those are the very same things I've been neglecting to the degree that their reemergence takes on almost religious significance.

I know what you're wondering. What if I'm not a creative-minded person? What if these things genuinely just have no impact on my life? Why should I care?

I want to posit that it matters because there's so much negative stigma associated with the simple things that they're so easy to lose sight of. And while it's true that our world has a depth of complexity so vast that it makes the mini-verse of Lost pale in comparison, why do we have to feel so bad about noticing the spare, glorious details of life? What's wrong with taking the time to savor the beauty in a small, plain thing? Or in enjoying a diversionary task that will not make you any more productive but might, in the short run, make you less likely to snap under the pressure of excruciating reality? Why do we too often need to reach that brink before the simple joys made themselves apparent?

If I long to be a writer, I understand that I will need to make myself available to these opportunities more often. And it's comforting to know that, as I near the end of the trial that has been my graduate work, my senses appear to be reawakening to the possibilities around them. I can only hope that, when all is said and done, I shall, like my precious eagle, find myself able to not only be seen but to soar.

Early Review: The Swap

2009-02-26T12:55:00.002-05:00

The LibraryThingification of A Rapturous Verbatim continues!

Striving fervently to be a good member of LibraryThing and specifically of its Early Reviewers program, I once more offer my review of a book that I received before it was published but has long since appeared on store shelves.

Today's review is of British author Antony Moore's debut novel The Swap, first published in August 2008. For the benefit of those who don't typically look at my LibraryThing profile, I've reprinted the review I've written below, so that it might get a bit more exposure for those who might be interested in the book.

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Antony Moore's debut novel The Swap is, much to this reviewer's surprise, a better novel than I think it intends to be. With its close-up comic-book cover, a somewhat self-deprecating back cover blurb, and a hero who's greatest aspiration turns out to be little more than screwing up as little as possible, one would probably enter this book with low expectations. And with a few exceptions (including a sadly egregious one), one would be right.

The novel begins with a brief scene between two children, in which one inexplicably exchanges his pristine copy of Superman One for a useless length of pipe. The two go their separate ways and we recover their trails twenty years later: the young thug who gave away the comic has turned out to be Harvey Briscoe, a fat chain-smoking nothing who runs (poorly) a comic shop and endlessly rues the day he gave away his most prized possession. The occasion of his high school reunion heralds the return of the man he swapped with, Charles "Bleeder" Odd, who has become marvelously successful and, Harvey presumes, might be willing to give back the comic and let bygones be bygones.

From this simple setup, the novel spirals quickly out of control. Murder and misappropriation set the wheels into motion, and Moore handles the shift from innocent scheme to diabolical plotting with ease. If there is any complaint to be had about the nature of the mystery, it is that the substance of the murder, and the clues that spring up every now and then, are minimal at best. We spend a great deal of time in Harvey's mind as he works out scenarios, but the actual case is far simpler and more niftily resolved than the suspense would lead us to believe.

On the upside, the reader is treated to an in-depth examination of Harvey, a character who turns out to be much more enthralling and more sympathetic than we expect. Without giving away too much of the plot, it still seems fair to say that Harvey's critical flaw is that he makes way too much of the forces that surround him, always opting for the convoluted way out as opposed to the more simple idea. It turns him into a pleasantly complex character: a man whose whole life is comic books finds himself in a hard-boiled mystery that he feels he alone must solve, almost as if he himself is turning into a character. It's a wonderfully executed parallel.

Fortunately, Moore's supporting cast doesn't let Harvey down. The story is populated with characters that are fairly obviously drawn in black and white, and we know from the get-go who is good and who is bad. Jeff, the truly thuggish bully, provides a number of potential conflicts and shifts to the mystery, and though he is pretty unoriginal, he serves his function to the story well. Maisie too is a refreshing but flat love interest, Harvey's foil in many ways but also attracted to him in an unrealistic (but very comic-like) manner. And though Bleeder Odd appears only at a few select moments in the book, Harvey's obsession and description bring him to life like a fine supporting actor.

If the novel's characterization is its strength, though, the plotting of the climax is its downfall. There is a certain amount of inexorability that Moore plants throughout the novel: even though the ultimate resolution of the murder is only a little bit surprising, we see it coming and anticipate that things will all reveal themselves feasibly in the end. Instead, perhaps taking the "cliffhanger" approach, Moore turns the tables on the reader in the final pages, crafting an ending that is as frustrating as it is unsatisfying. It's hard to describe without spoiling it all, but suffice to say that it doesn't seem terribly consistent with the wonderful characterization that was the novel's hallmark. One suspects Moore wanted to throw in one last twist to stun the reader, but it feels more like a punch in the gut than a playful shove. Until the last 20 pages, the novel was fantastic; the final moments, however, felt a bit like a betrayal.

Despite the last-second machinations of a perhaps overly clever author, The Swap manages to elevate itself beyond its presumptively humble origins. The work rises above the level of mere pulp, delivering characters that we care enough about to want to follow them through a journey of increasing (and increasingly unnecessary) complexity. While the audience for such a novel seems hard to pin down, it is a mostly fine example of a classical mystery, smattered with British slang and plenty of vulgarity, yet possessing a surprising amount of heart. It's most certainly worth the read -- well, at least the first 250 pages are. After that, you be the judge.

Early Review: How to Write a Suicide Note

2009-02-22T14:05:00.004-05:00

Continuing the series that I began but abandoned a while back, I return to my LibraryThing responsibilities and offer a review of a book that I received for free through their wonderful Early Reviewers program. (Although this one, I'm afraid, has already been published. Damn you, semester work.)

I submit for your approval my review of How to Write a Suicide Note: serial essays that saved a woman's life, a book of poetry by Sherry Quan Lee, first published in June 2008. For the benefit of those who don't typically look at my LibraryThing profile, I've reprinted the review I've written below, so that it might get a bit more exposure for those who might be interested in this collection.

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I've spent a substantial amount of time ruminating on Sherry Quan Lee's volume of intensely personal poetry, for lack of the right way to express my feelings about it. It's hard to make sense of a book that is so clearly an expression of genuineness -- it's almost impossible to judge it objectively. This ambivalence permeates much of the collection itself: it falls somewhere between a great achievement and something that just misses the mark.

Despite the attention-grabbing title, How to Write a Suicide Note is far from being strictly about suicide. The collection is divided into a number of sections that are best described as larger "themes," ideas that permeate the section. What Quan Lee does surprisingly well is turn the many reflections in each section into a narrative of sorts, baring her emotions about particular conflicts and then showing, often in more abstract ways, how she comes to grips with those feelings. It gives the collection a very nice sense of unity as a whole.

Where the work starts to feel a little less cogent is in the development of the individual sections. For the most part, we are allowed to see that Quan Lee is struggling with her mixed heritage, her time growing up, and her troubled past relationships. Her treatment of these topics through the poetry is involving but also a little too safe: she often conceals more than she reveals. For these reasons, much of her verse tends to get a little bit repetitive and clichéd. Where more detail could have allowed these moments to stand out from other, similar works, they instead bleed together with both contemporary poetic traditions as well as the other poems in the section. In short, there are few individual poems that stick out as being truly memorable.

Yet she is also unabashed at pointing out that the purpose of the collection is to simply get her feelings out there, and she is to be respected and admired for doing so. Regardless of whether the particular turn of phrase becomes memorable or not, the essence of the poems is intense, and the sparse, simplistic language that she uses is perfectly suited to the situation. Quan Lee, I gather, doesn't hope to change the world or open up larger avenues for multiracial peoples, but we get a strong sense of the struggle she personally must deal with. If nothing else, the collection comes off feeling (sometimes uncomfortably) like a published diary -- an individual venting and, in so doing, coping with her life.

That writing is a coping strategy is perhaps the collection's greatest strength. Littered throughout the sections, and particularly through the first section, we get wonderful imagery about the act of writing and its transformative qualities -- and it is here that Quan Lee shines. If the collection itself is an introspective look at personal demons, the treatment of the personal, individual act of writing lends an additional air of authenticity to the proceedings. It also gives the collection the sense of urgency that would otherwise be missing: we feel as if the poet needs to get the words out in order to stay alive and, for better or worse, what we are reading is the result of that intense need.

As I have already mentioned, however, with that sense of urgency comes a feeling that the collection is a bit too touch-and-go. It's hard for me to judge because I have very little experience with reading contemporary poetry, but I feel as if the collection, though already spare, could have used a little more pruning in order to truly have a stronger impact. And in the end, How to Write a Suicide Note feels like it's caught between what it is and what it wants to be, and that makes it mediocre at best. As an artifact, it is moving; as a work of literature, it is wanting.

A Dream Deferred; or, the Consequences of Stress

2008-12-17T09:38:00.004-05:00

After yet another tumultuous term -- because as of late, has there been any other kind? -- the end is in sight and I can feel the overwhelming relief coming over me. Unfortunately, though I am already home for the calendar year, I still have one more assignment to complete before I can close the door on the semester for good.

The road to this moment has been incredibly stressful, not in the least because I had pictured this semester as the one in which I would change my habits and work on things well in advance, a tactic that was well-intentioned but poorly executed. It was also, notably, the first semester in which I truly began to feel Scholar's Guilt: that sense when you do something fun (like, for instance, play some Wii or drink heavily while watching football) that you could -- and should -- be doing something productive, like reading or writing.

With a day left until it's all said and done, that guilt has finally dissipated a tad. Last night, for instance, I gave myself a little while to have a glass of wine, chat with my parents, and watch a few episodes of Family Guy, and I didn't feel all that bad about it. All because I know that, like or not, by the time midnight rolls around this evening, it will all be over and done with. What a relief.

Around this time of year, though, the high-pressure world of graduate work has instilled in me two rather distressing feelings that I wish I didn't have. The first, and most surprising, is the feeling that, despite being a mere eight days until the big day, it just doesn't feel like Christmas. Sure, once I start shopping in earnest and we decorate the tree and the house becomes filled with the aroma of mistletoe and peppermint candles, it'll kick in right on schedule. But the breathless anticipation that always accompanied Christmases of yesteryear has vanished as work consumes me. And I'll accept that you might be able to attribute some of that to my getting older and Christmas just not holding the same magic that it did when my age was in single digits, but I adore this time of year -- well, except for the weather -- and it bothers me that it just hasn't been the same for the past two years.

But the other feeling I've been getting from my immersion in work is that there are so many other things that I would like to be doing, that I wish I could be doing, but am not. It first hit me on the drive home from State College, while I took a friend to the airport in Philadelphia. The shuffle feature on my iPod played "Bounce" by System of a Down, and my traveling companion asked if we could listen to all of Toxicity as a result. I of course agreed, and then insisted that we follow it up by listening to Mezmerize and Hypnotize, which I regard as the peak of their creative output. It was not only a satisfying listen, but also a reminder that I used to have such reverence and appreciation for new music, and that with less time on my hands and more effort involved in finding good, new, original stuff, I'm not so much on the pulse of the music world as I am struggling to keep my blood pressure up.

The bottom line is that I have lots to read, lots to play, and lots to listen to, and I've been restricted (as I'm sure most of us have) by my school responsibilities. It sucks, to be sure, but none of this was what prompted me to write this post this morning. No, it was the dismaying experience I had upon awakening this morning that has spurred my fingers into non-Bloomsbury motion.

I went to sleep early last night expecting to wake up early and get working on my last paper. I set my alarm for 7:00am and hit the hay around 11:00pm, a solid eight hours that should have left me perfectly rested for the day ahead. I woke a couple times in the middle of the night, and just before the alarm went off, I fell asleep and slipped marvelously into a dream. I don't remember the exact content of the dream, but I do recall that the cast of characters was entrancing. One particular character -- yes, a female; and no, it wasn't that kind of dream -- was especially memorable even though she was, in terms of appearance, nondescript. There was a sweetness and tenderness to the dream that made me really happy, and when the alarm went off at 7:00am and jarred me rudely from the splendor, it was even more distressing than the typical unwanted wake-up call.

Disappointed, disjointed, and still kind of tired, I reset the alarm for 8:00am and fell back asleep. I was unable to rejoin the dream world I'd been in just minutes before, but I did manage to have another dream in which I and some close friends were riding roller coasters. Since the weather is the one thing about this time of year that I can't abide by, it was really rather pleasant to be imagining myself outside in warmth, partaking in one of my favorite hobbies. That too was disrupted by the alarm at 8:00am, and I probably should have known it was coming, but the fact that two of the best dreams I've had in recent memory were killed by an alarm -- and one that was set literally on the precipice of sweet freedom. Oh God, how I wish those dreams could have waited just one more day!

Instead, I lay in bed with my computer on my lap, recalling what a nice night of sleep I had and how great it would have been to be able to keep those dreams going. Or, if nothing else, to be able to maintain the feeling of calm and serenity that they created in me. That is, I believe, what I miss most of all about the person I was before grad school, and as far as I can tell, it's the thing that I'll be most invested in regaining come May.

And so, if you are so inclined, I invite you to use the comments to share your own nice dreams or hopeful aspirations that have been abruptly ended or temporarily sidelined. Seeing them all might be a nice way to try and realize them in the near future!

Between the Devil and the Deep Sea

2008-11-11T10:28:00.002-05:00

One of my classes this semester has been on the Bloomsbury Group -- complete, as you might imagine, with a healthy dose of Virginia Woolf. As I perused the last of her major works on our syllabus, her 1939 essay Three Guineas, I ran across the title of this post, which Woolf used to describe the state of educated women circa 1938. And while I am neither woman nor living in 1938, I couldn't help but relate to that quandary.

I've always been a proponent of education and a fan (albeit sometimes begrudgingly) of school, particularly literature. Books spoke to me from an early age much more so than math, science, and history ever did, and I've been rewarded at several points in my life with continuing affirmation of their power and influence. I can recall entering Princeton as a frightened, painfully shy, doubt-swathed young freshman and thinking that my plan of majoring in English should, at the very least, be up for discussion in such a prestigious and enlightening environment. But after a year's worth of immersion in most every subject that remotely interested me (including one foray into sociology that was amazingly close to convincing) I found myself in an 8:30am comparative literature class -- the only 8:00am class I ever took -- on short fiction. And for reasons I've never been able to nail down, that class sold me that I'd had the right idea all along.

Now, almost five years removed from that moment, I find myself in a very different set of environs: the basement of a local coffee shop in State College, Pennsylvania, sitting behind a computer and blogging because, despite having woken up early solely for this purpose, I just can't seem to bring myself to get any work done.

I'd be jumping the gun if I confessed to being worried yet. Sure, I'm sleep-deprived (although I've got a couple of theories on that one that I'm pretty sure can be easily substantiated), and sure, I need to finish grading my students' papers so that I can either a) go on to the next batch or b) continue working on drafts of my final papers, but I still feel as if I'm in a slightly better place at this point in the semester than I have been in recent semesters.

So what the fuck's the problem?

I feel that much of this blog's history has been a series of iterations on my lack of motivation where once I'd been of the headstrong, go-getter, overachieving type. It's a topic I've rehashed ad nauseam, in posts in which I've sworn to solve my issues and pull my head out of my ass and get into gear. Nonetheless, that really hasn't transpired.

And I'm in an even more awkward situation at this very moment, despite approaching a crossroads that is littered with equal parts clarity and uncertainty, the likes of which I've never known before. After much soul-searching, I've come to the realization that the academy, to which I'd been so confidently attached for the better part of my life, is not to be my ultimate destination. And while the vast majority of students make that (and I hesitate to use this phrase) real-world transition at some point in their lives, often right around my current age, I'm afraid that perhaps my transition is arriving prematurely.

I suspect that -- you knew the point of this post had to come eventually -- my increasingly intense disaffection for the academic world is what's stifling the larger part of my inspiration.

I'm not about to proffer this explanation as the sole and single solution to that which ails me, but it sure seems like a substantial part of the problem, for one especially convincing reason. For all my student life, I've had certain qualities that defined who I was, and though it took quite a bit of time, I eventually became very comfortable with the identity I'd carved out for myself. But as the stakes grew higher and I found myself learning more and more strongly towards complete immersion in academia as a career move, I've slowly and perhaps inadvertently started jettisoning components of my personality that I suppose I felt, at the time, were incompatible with my professional maturity.

Take, for instance, my writing. I lamented to my friend Emily a few weeks ago that I felt as if I've lost touch with my once fruitful creative side -- my neglect of my blogs is an obvious, palatable symptom of that disease. I recall being a voracious guitarist in high school, joining up with a few friends in a band that had no serious aspirations, but gave me an outlet to unleash my composition skills. In middle school and high school, I joined clubs and took classes that allowed me to write creative fiction in addition to my otherwise staid academic work, the realization of a talent I unveiled at the tender age of four on a notepad.

I was especially proud of my fiction, not because I was an especially good writer, but because I could see in my work potential. And to be fair to myself, I still see that potential occasionally when I wander off into my nebula on either of my blogs. Though I don't write here nearly as often as I'd like to, I enjoy it madly and adore it when people read and comment, because I know I'm reaching them and engaging in an interaction that is meaningful and satisfying.

But by the same token, I'm frequently overcome with the idea that if I'm going to be immersing myself in any project, it should be an academic one. Perhaps that's the right idea. Yet it is this project, the project of working towards a more personal, more self-satisfying goal, that I find myself drawn to.

Like Virginia Woolf and the daughters of educated men, however, I find myself caught between the devil and the deep sea: I know that once I finish my Masters in a few short months, I will be substantially more free to re-explore those parts of my identity that I've let fall by the wayside during my academic endeavors; but at the same time, I need to get those things done to reach that point, even though the passion for those projects has been long since smoldering to a cool ash.

I've diagnosed the problem, I'm fairly confident in the solution, but the cure is still six months coming. I don't know how to respond or react to that -- and, as this post has proven, it's safe to say my mind has already decided for me where it wants to focus its attention. The malaise, while far less apocalyptic than it's been in my admittedly-hyperdramatic past, is still there, staring me in the face. And the only way out is to keep tricking myself and reminding myself that the fruition of my hopes is coming.

Until then, it's time to see what kind of magic is left up these sleeves.

The Problem with Porno

2008-10-21T18:13:00.002-04:00

I tend not to subscribe to the Obligatory State Fandom Rule, which clearly dictates that if someone famous is born in the same state as you, you have to adore them. I suspect this works more in less populous states, or at least in less overtly beloved states, but if you're from New Jersey, for instance, the law of the land is that you must love Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen, and Kevin Smith.

Sorry guys, but Bon Jovi has always been way too cheesy for my tastes, and Bruce never could sing and still can't. Kevin Smith, on the other hand, can write and direct a damn funny movie, and he was doing the "crude but good-hearted" flick long before Judd Apatow became a household name (and, with the exception perhaps of the unfortunate Jersey Girl, has consistently done it better).

So I'm incredibly stoked about K.S.'s upcoming feature, which grabbed my attention (and, apparently, the Weinstein Brothers' as well) by the title alone:

Zack and Miri Make a Porno.

Straightforward. Blunt. To the point. Gotta love it.

Unfortunately, that same title has been causing a number of problems with promoting the flick, including newspapers and TV stations who have flat refused to carry ads because of that pesky five-letter P-word. (No, not that one, you sicko.) And while I'm all about freedom of expression -- and especially in this case, as the usually-rigid MPAA approved a green-band (or all-ages) trailer for the film that includes its complete title -- I suppose I can understand why some people may not like that word.

Except when they say stupid shit like this:

Diane Levin, an education professor specializing in child development at Boston's Wheelock College, said the posters at city bus stops send a message to children that working in the porn industry is an acceptable occupation.

"It's drawing attention to a movie which is mainstreaming and normalizing pornography, saying if you need money, this is what you do," said Levin, co-author of "So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids."

The stick-figure images are especially appealing to youngsters, since "stick figures are something for children," she said.

Read the whole article here.

Consider me officially enraged.

I'm endlessly amazed at how little research talking-head academics do when cited for mainstream stories. Because, as a recovering academic myself, I know that the academy typically demands extremely rigorous research before anything is even considered a possibility for future publication.

So it's astounding to me that Professor Levin could level such a harsh charge against a movie that I'm almost certain she has not seen. (After all, it's not being released until October 31.) In fact, reading any of the copious available interviews with Smith regarding the movie -- which can be easily found using that most primitive of academic search engines, a little site called Google -- would quickly reveal that the film is not intended to glorify pornography whatsoever, and that it is instead both a skewering of the over-the-top world of internet porn as well as a thinly-veiled jab at his own experience independently making his first feature, Clerks.

And as for the bit about the stick figures, that too was part of the joke: just look at the freaking caption! "Seth Rogen & Elizabeth Banks made a movie so titillating that we can only show you this drawing." It's clearly not meant to try and attract children; rather, it's again a clever jibe at the MPAA, which felt that the original version, which still exists as the official Canadian poster, was too risque for all audiences despite it just barely toeing the line of inappropriate.

(If your virgin eyes can handle it, you can look at it here.)

It seems pretty clear to me that Smith has made a movie that's very clearly skewed towards adults and that is meant only for mature audiences. After all, anyone going to see a movie with "porno" in its title has to know what to expect from it. (This point, in fact, was a key part of Smith's ultimately successfully appeal to have the original NC-17 rating reduced to an [ironically] more advertising-friendly R.) And as I've already said, I'm all about freedom of expression, so if the MPAA is cool with it, I don't see why that single word should be such an issue.

Of course, there are parents who don't see it that way:

One complaint came from a man watching a game in September with his young son, who did not understand a suicide-squeeze bunt the Dodgers tried, Rawitch said.

"He was explaining to his son what a squeeze bunt was. Commercial break, the ad comes on, and the kid asks, `Dad, what does porno mean?"' Rawitch said. "Dodgers baseball has always been about family, and we've always been sensitive to the type of advertising that runs on our games."

So let me get this straight: it's perfectly legitimate to play highly-suggestive commercials hocking Viagra and Cialis during sports events, and that's less "family-friendly" than this commercial for a raunchy comedy? I smell bullshit. If this guy's kid watched one of those commercials and asked, "Daddy, how do I know if I have a four-hour long erection?" would he wig out just as badly? Or would he, like any normal parent, come up with a perfectly plausible explanation that doesn't reveal too much information and then quickly change the subject before the kid realizes this is something that's inappropriate for his age and thusly totally worth fixating on for the foreseeable future?

I'm not interested in turning this into a "parents should freaking parent" argument (though I stand by that thesis), and frankly I think this is mostly the case of the media turning a non-issue into a front-page story in the entertainment section. But what it continues to prove to me is that we are a country of raging hypocrites -- the kind who love our skin flicks and buy our perfumes and colognes based on how sexy the models look, but inexplicably wig out when we hear a single word, and one that isn't even a dirty word or a patently offensively word to boot!

"Porno" doesn't make us uncomfortable because it's a "bad word," but because we have a cultural rift over sex that is spiraling more and more out of control with each new day. We're trained from an early age that it is morally degrading and ethically wrong to think about sex or willingly seek it for pleasurable purposes. We're made to think it's ugly and awful and worth shunning. And we're told to ignore it, while on billboards and in even the most well-lit corners of the Internet, it grows and thrives and expands while we look at it through the slits between the fingers on the hands that cover our eyes.

It took a lot of balls for Kevin Smith to call his movie by this title precisely because it asks us to confront the issue head-on. And yet here we are, placing it on the pedestal of newsworthiness while pointing an accusatory finger at it and shouting, "Not on my bus stop!" It seems to me like Mr. Smith is making his point loud and clear, and he's getting lots of free press out of it, too. And if you care at all about freedom of expression, you'll support the cause by buying a ticket opening weekend. I know I will.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno is in theatres October 31.

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EDIT (10-22-2008, 4:00pm): Not to be a braggart, but I love being right. Click here to see Kevin Smith himself use the same argument I employed in the fourth-to-last paragraph.

From This Day Forward

2008-10-06T16:10:00.002-04:00

I still remember July 1, 2006, like it was yesterday.

The event was less of a surprise to me than to most, since I was one of the few people let in on the secret. It was meticulously planned and intricately organized, but in the end, to my great surprise, my brother was unable to contain his excitement and popped the question earlier in the afternoon, rather than waiting until sunset like he'd planned. A few days later, over the Fourth of July weekend, a holiday barbecue was the ruse through which two families came together to celebrate a long-awaited engagement.

I remember that day when my brother asked me to be his Best Man, a role I graciously accepted with no hesitation because a) he's my only brother and this would probably be my only shot, and b) the wedding was to be over two years away, and I imagined the workload, when distributed over that length of time, wouldn't be nearly so overbearing.

The past week has disproved a few of what I'd held as fundamental axioms of weddings -- namely, that no matter how long an engagement is, it will inevitably sneak up on you when you least expect it; and that the work of a Best Man is far greater than I'd anticipated.

The four days leading up to the wedding -- including, though through no fault of the bride and groom, the arduous late-night trek from Central Pennsylvania back to the friendly confines of North Jersey -- were among the most exhausting and chaotic days I've experienced in quite some time. So much so, in fact, that I needed several hours on Sunday just to gather up the energy needed to extricate myself from the floor and get back into my car for the return trip. Those same four days were also, as it turns out, some of the most fun and rewarding days I've experienced in my life.

Perhaps I should have anticipated the lack of rest and relaxation that would come out of this weekend, but it is, I suppose, my own fault too for naïvely believing that Friday, which was designated on all of our schedules as "breathing day," would instead be spent running even more last-minute errands. The list of things that needed to be accomplished won't be repeated here, for not only would it prove to be horrifically boring reading, but it also was so extensive and happened so quickly that it's all but a blur to me right now.

Suffice to say, however, that the payoff of Saturday was well worth the days (and weeks and months and years) of work and trouble that led up to it.

I knew on Thursday that my typically stoic stance would be drastically challenged, as the rehearsal of the ceremony at the church raised more than a few quivers on my lips. I had not expected to be so moved, particularly since the priest was mostly adept at keeping the tone humorous and jovial, and I anticipated anything from single tears to full-fledged bawling come 2:00pm on Saturday.

Shockingly, I kept my composure together, though it would be challenged well enough. Photographs at my parents' house went swimmingly, and considering how goddamn dashing I look in a tuxedo, I can't be blamed for allowing a bit (okay, a lot) of hubris to get into my system and present itself as a front to the emotional firestorm brewing inside me. (It should be noted that one needed only to touch me and feel the absurd amount of sweat pulsing from my body to realize that my faux machismo was strictly faux.) A few interesting incidents involving the rings kept me on my toes, and kept my hand in my pocket every few minutes fumbling with the box to make sure it was still there. And, naturally, though I plastered my best confident shit-eating grin for my own stroll down the aisle, watching my brother escort my stone-faced father and my extremely emotional mother threatened my moxie to the core.

I survived that first onslaught with flying colors, but when my brother spoke his vows with a quaking voice -- the same brother, mind you, who almost always refuses to take himself seriously in my presence; the same brother whose taste for cursing and fart jokes easily rivals my own; yes, the very same brother who, after the ceremony, put on what I affectionately call his "doof-face" in the picture I took for my cell phone background* -- I was fucking jelly.

My own speaking -- much later at the reception, as I toasted he and his beautiful bride -- was, so I was told, coherent and beautiful. Which surprised me because that speech, which I'd been planning since that very same summer day over two years before, had undergone many manifestations since that time. So many that, when it came time for me to begin writing down the final copy, I simply couldn't find the words. Instead of having a complete written text, I woke up on the morning of October 4, grabbed an index card, and wrote myself a "road map" of sorts, so that I would have points of reference for where I needed my speech to go.

As it turned out, I didn't need the card at all. The words came right from the heart, just as I suspected they would, and they spoke volumes about the work, the luck, and the joy that I've been seeing on their faces for over nine years now. I meant it when I said that I can't imagine two people more perfect for each other, and I meant it even more earnestly when I said that we should all be so lucky to find in our lifetimes what they found in just a few short years.

So while I freeze in the suddenly bitter-cold State College autumn and they enjoy the equatorial pleasures of 90-degree highs and 80-degree lows in sunny Aruba on their honeymoon, I can't hate on them too badly. They deserve nothing but the best, and if I'm to believe the reaction of one of my brother's fellow firefighters, the wedding was nothing short of that. For as one of Wayne's bravest so eloquently put it:

"This was one for the record books."

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* I submit, for your approval, the picture in question:

Is that not totally doofy?

Early Review: What We All Long For

2008-09-13T12:33:00.002-04:00

As a LibraryThing member, I not only get to catalog my books in a manner that makes my inner OCD feel calm and satiated, but I also get to, through their Early Reviewers program, read books prior to their publication date and offer my own candid views on these works.

I recently finished my review of the upcoming What We All Long For, by Dionne Brand. For the benefit of those who don't typically look at my LibraryThing profile, I've reprinted the review I've written below, so that it might get a bit more exposure for those interested in the novel.

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I've spent quite a while trying to figure out how to start a review for What We All Long For, and each time I do I delete it and start anew. I feel like it's due to the fact that the novel is a tricky one to pin down: a work that is invested in multi-ethnicity but doesn't quite nail it; a work that features a mystery but isn't that mysterious; a work that wants to make a case for desire but also for a politics of morality. In the end, it tries but I'm not sure it succeeds on these counts.

The core issue with What We All Long For seems to stem from a plot that features numerous narrative perspectives and several main characters, but seems to meander rather than point in a certain direction. The main focus of our attention is on Tuyen, a second-generation Vietnamese-American lesbian who is struggling through both making a living as an artist and winning the affections of her neighbor and best friend Carla, who adamantly denies any homosexual tendencies. While Brand could have made a number of interesting interactions between the women, she instead stresses the silences and absences of discussion, perhaps to let the reader think there's a void to be filled, but coming off mostly as being indecisive about how to address the awkwardness.

Carla's silence, we learn, reflects her inability to deal with her brother, Jamal, who is constantly finding himself in trouble from which Carla must bail him out. While Jamal takes a secondary role in the novel, Carla's reactions to him and to how her family treats Jamal are some of the most poignant passages in the novel, a true domestic strife that comes off as authentic despite moments that threaten to descend into schmaltz. Sure, Jamal is played off to be a caricature, but at least he elicits genuineness from Carla, who reveals a deceptively hidden roundness at those moments.

This subplot, however, is underused, as are many other plots that tangle themselves throughout the novel. Tuyen's friend Oku, a black man who desires the love of Jackie, a clothing store owner already in a committed relationship, is the responsible foil to the somewhat immature Tuyen, but doesn't come off as being terribly influential to her, existing within his own story in too isolated a manner.

The same happens, most unfortunately, with the novel's most self-conscious attempt at a mysterious sub-plot: the disappearance and eventual return of Tuyen's long-lost brother Quy, who disappeared at the dock as her family left Vietnam for Toronto. Quy's first-person journey is intriguing but, again, underused -- he vanishes for long stretches of pages at a time and his tale, while fascinating, is simply not substantial enough to warrant the deviations. And while his potential return and the impact of that return on the dynamic of Tuyen's family (particularly on her long-suffering brother Binh) has incredible potential, it is hinted at but never truly mined to its fullest.

All of which leads to a finale that throws a huge wrench into the proceedings and threatens the very foundational relationships of the novel, but cops out from exploring them deeply. It's as if Brand wants us to decipher for ourselves what will happen to the people we've seen now that we have this event to consider, but it feels instead as if she simply didn't know what to make of it herself and simply cut the book off at that point. Like so many other elements of the novel, Brand has ambitious plans but falls short of executing them, leaving us wanting instead of deliberating, ironically longing for more but having nothing left to work with.

As an infusion, the novel struggles to piece everything together. From the awkward implementation of slang to the lack of development of the subplots, the novel comes off as an ambitious idea that the author couldn't quite pull off, a success in conception but a failure in execution. There's enough here to suggest that Brand has talent and ability, but What We All Long For is not necessarily the highest realization of either.

Early Review: Happy Hour Is for Amateurs

2008-08-21T13:19:00.002-04:00

As a LibraryThing member, I not only get to catalog my books in a manner that makes my inner OCD feel calm and satiated, but I also get to, through their Early Reviewers program, read books prior to their publication date and offer my own candid views on these works.

I recently finished my review of the upcoming Happy Hour Is for Amateurs: A Lost Decade in the World's Worst Profession, by an anonymous first-time author who goes by the handle of The Philadelphia Lawyer. For the benefit of those who don't typically look at my LibraryThing profile, I've reprinted the review I've written below, so that it might get a bit more exposure for those interested in the novel.

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The Philadelphia Lawyer wants to be the next Tucker Max. The reigning king of "fratire," unsurprisingly, even makes a cameo appearance at the end of Happy Hour Is for Amateurs, as if an obvious gesture towards the Lawyer's inspiration and aspirations. This book, however, is not nearly as evenly-developed as Max's, though its strengths do make it worth a read if this type of book is your cup of tea.

The book takes the reader through three years of law school and then a decade of employment in almost every facet of law practice. The chronological construction of the book is fairly obviously pointed out at first, but many of the early chapters, like in Max's book, seem to emphasize not the progression of time but the quality of the tale. By the end of the book, when chronology becomes much more important, the lack of cohesion becomes more obviously a weakness. It's not exactly clear whether the Lawyer just wants to share awesome stories or wants to tell the larger narrative of how he became disenchanted with law, which can be frustrating.

Strangely, the ultimate narrative of his move away from law is the most redemptive part of the book. The final 50 or so pages, as he slips into the meta-narrative of his foray onto his website and, finally, publication, is well-written and suspenseful, and since we identify with his character as something more than a narrator, we root for his success despite the book itself proving it to us. Sure, he makes several really bad decisions, but unlike Max, he's not a complete jerk, and this is the book's greatest strength.

Unfortunately, the book's greatest weakness is the content of his various tales, particularly those that take place after law school. The format of the stories becomes excessively familiar -- place a teaser at the start, develop the set-up, and then resolve the teaser at the end -- and the stories themselves become wearisome because of their general lack of interesting content. An early story about his attempt to bed three girls in one weekend, for instance, has no payoff save for the fact that he had sex with them all, and some were better than others.

In a bar (and a few drinks deep), one might be engrossed by such an escapade, but the types of stories that are bar-worthy typically involve some gross or humorous payoff, and far too many of the Lawyer's stories lack them. It also doesn't help that the most amusing of these stories are the ones involving sexual escapades, which tail off substantially when he meets his future wife. This leaves us with stories of office boredom -- which are fascinating forays into the underbelly of law, but as workplace satire fall far short of, say, Office Space -- and escapades with exotic drugs -- which likewise fall far short of, say, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Ultimately, the Philadelphia Lawyer does have some interesting things to say, but the book in its entirety is too touch-and-go to convey that interest. He is unafraid to wear his influences on his sleeve but finds himself struggling to live up to their examples. He has a few funny things to say but not nearly as many as he thinks he does. And yet, even in mediocrity, he finds a marginal amount of success. All of which adds up to a book that is not exactly memorable, but not exactly regrettable either -- though how great a compliment that is will depend on the reader.

An Open Letter to the State of Maryland

2008-08-10T22:02:00.004-04:00

Dear Maryland,

Yes, that's right. I'm taking this straight to you. I've had my incidents with you before, and though I've neglected to document them in this forum, let's face it: I've failed to document lots of things in this forum. But after today's debacle, I find I can maintain my stoic silence no more.

You are, without a doubt, the worst state in the union when it comes to driving.

Caveat: I know I have, time and time again, stated for the record that my least favorite road in the entire country is the Washington, D.C. Beltway. And that, given the orientation of the District amongst and betwixt both Virginia and Maryland, you can only be held accountable for approximately 50% of the shitty driving that occurs on that road. Consider this concession made, but know that my current displeasure stems from an incident that did not occur on the brief stretch of the notorious I-495 on which I traversed today, but rather on the more lamentably awful 80-mile stretch of I-95 that connects Washingtonians to the border of that "small wonder," Delaware.

I departed from my friend Alicia's residence in Arlington, VA at approximately 3:00pm today. Traveling northward through many a brief but fascinating stretch of parkways and interstates that cut a fairly straightforward swath through the southeast corner of Washington, I found myself merging onto I-95 just shy of exit 29 near Laurel. I filled my gas tank -- at $3.65 a gallon for Shell, no less! -- at exit 33, and returned to the highway a mere 20 miles south of downtown Baltimore and approximately 75 miles from Delaware.

Time now for a little math. I departed the gas station, according to my receipt, at 3:36pm. At 65 miles per hour, and accounting for the unavoidable attraction of my foot to the accelerator, I should have entered Delaware somewhere in the vicinity of 4:45pm, right? And with Delaware being such a brief, 10-mile stretch, I should have almost certainly been back in my wonderful home state of New Jersey by approximately 5:00pm, yes?

If so, then why the hell did I not get into New Jersey until after 6:30pm?

The answer, for your information, is because just north of Baltimore, and for the twenty-odd miles beyond it, I-95 was practically a parking lot. A four-lane parking lot. I've never seen such a large road be so completely at a standstill, plodding along at a pace not to dissimilar from that of Peter Gibbons when he spies an old man with a walker proceeding much faster than he.

I found out much later that this was the likely the result of traffic being diverted away from the Bay Bridge, where a tractor trailer tumbled off the span and into the Bay. Certainly, this is a very reasonable explanation, but I find it astonishing that I never once saw a significant influx of people enter the highway at any point, nor did I discover any reason for the snail's-pace traffic to suddenly dissipate and give way to vehicles that rediscovered suddenly, as if escaping from some mechanical hypnotism, that they could drive at the speed limit again.

I tend to want to seek out reasons for stupidity when I see it, but there was none to be found here, and in between bouts of screaming and cursing -- which the new Margot & the Nuclear So and So's disc, The Daytrotter Sessions EP, was only marginally effective at tempering -- my mind was rankled by that awful, stomach-churning feeling known as déjà vu. I've seen driving like this before -- yes, yes, on that god-awful Beltway that you thought we'd finished talking about, but seriously, when five lanes of drivers are doing the same goddamn speed, it bears repeating -- and my experiences with it are almost always localized in the Chesapeake area. Go figure.

Now, I know you'll protest that I'm being unfair, that I'm attributing this awful experience to a set of circumstances that are extraordinary and over which you had no control. But there is another gripe I have about you, Maryland, and your stretch of I-95 that is simply diabolical and wholly inexplicable.

Somehow, within a 55-mile stretch, you charge a staggering ELEVEN DOLLARS in tolls. How could this be?

And yes, I know, the last toll is technically a mile into Delaware (believe me, the First State's gonna be hearing from me too). But even if you except that absurd $4.00 toll -- which, apparently, much be based on time and not distance, considering that the southbound lanes in Delaware were a parking lot -- how do you justify asking folks to cough up $2.00 at the Fort McHenry tunnel in Baltimore, only to demand a whopping $5.00 less than 40 miles later for a tall but otherwise pissant crossing of the Susquehanna River?

It's the fucking Susquehanna River. It costs me just a dollar more to cross the Hudson, and at least there's something useful and entertaining on the other side of that river. At least my state has the courtesy of only charging you when you try to get out.

So in short, Maryland, the nearly-three hours I spent trying to traverse your green fields today have convinced me that there must be some kind of pall cast by your drivers that make it utterly miserable for the rest of us out-of-staters. I don't quite know what the problem is, but if you figure it out, please swing by me and bring it to my attention so that we can begin to rectify this little problem.

I'll even comp your tolls on the way back home.

Sincerely,
Me

Something Old, Something New

2008-07-21T16:22:00.002-04:00

Hi again.

Remember me?

Probably not, but that's okay. Abhorrently pretentious postmodern sentiment aside, I hardly remember myself these days too.

Part of it, as you may recall, has to do with that massive list of books I've been trying to read this summer, a project that has been going well if not stalling out a bit as of late. I have, though, accomplished two short-term goals in my reading project: firstly, that I've finished 20 of the books -- which, as far as I can figure, puts me almost halfway through what I would have reasonably expected to have read this summer -- and secondly, that I've completed 100 books from the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. If nothing else, all this makes me feel like I've accomplished something academic and noteworthy -- two words that may or may not be mutually exclusive, I'm beginning to think.

Granted, that means substantial portions of my summer have been spent indoors, buried behind stacks of paper. There are, admittedly, worse ways to spend one's time -- particularly during our current streak of oppressively muggy days that inspire sweat immediately upon exposure, sweat that frequently ends up in the most inconvenient (read: stankiest) places possible. Kind of like the wonderful (read: hellish) experience I had moving all the shit out of my old apartment and into my new one this past, glorious (read: ungodly) weekend. I swear, I've never sweat so much in one instance in my entire life -- which is particularly shocking since, as a fat guy, any more exertion than what is needed to propel a jelly doughnut from one's hand to one's mouth is usually enough to send the sweat glands into a rather excitable state.

But I digress (and, furthermore, I don't feel the need to detail any more minutely the grossness of my person during said endeavor). The fact of the matter is that I've been reading a lot, and one of the discoveries I've made is that I really love reading -- much more, in fact, than I enjoy writing about what I read. This may account for, among other things, my general malaise at paper-writing and my reluctance to be able to sit right down and write a book review immediately after finishing a text, like I used to. (There's more to say about this in another post, I promise.)

However, as my last parenthetical has alluded to, -- and damn right I used that as a noun, bitches -- I've been equally delinquent at updating this blog. And after thinking it through a little bit, I've realized that the reason is that I've developed, over the course of seventy posts, a particular style and voice for this blog that I feel my readers, few though they may be, have come to expect. I write at considerable length, try to use vocabulary that is erudite if not bordering on grandiloquent (case in point), and though there is the occasional dry humor (which, occasionally, is funny), I tend to discuss more serious, more abstract, and more thoughtful (read: more trite) topics herein. Which becomes a major bummer when some really funny shit goes down and I want to write something about it.

Thinking all this through, I've hit upon what I feel is a pretty good solution. Ladies and gentlemen, I present the official premiere of...

MY NEW BLOG!

Don't worry. A Rapturous Verbatim is not going anywhere. (Please stop booing.) It will still be here to offer the same sort of incisive social commentary (read: self-inflated bullshit) that it's offered for over two years now. It will, however, be supplemented by another blog, which will contain briefer posts about lighter fare. I consider it more of a forum for random, noteworthy observations, outright humor, and perhaps a bit more bawdiness. Moreover, it offers me a chance to explore a new voice and see how I can operate within it -- since I've mentioned in the past how frustrated I've been with the tendency for my writing to be restricted by my academic tendencies.

The new adventure, A Tournament of Lies, can be found, conveniently enough, at http://atournamentoflies.blogspot.com. (P.S. 10 points to Amanda for identifying the source of this title reference.) I'll also be posting a link on the side of this blog that will take you there, in the event you don't want to update your bookmarks. (And, yes, AToL will have a link back to ARV, in case you embrace change a little too emphatically.)

As A Tournament of Lies develops, you'll find it to be lighter, funnier, and probably updated more frequently, as the whole idea is to not have to ruminate on an issue long enough to flesh out an entry of substantial length. It will be more off-the-cuff, and hopefully more current, than this blog has become because of how this project developed.

In essence, though, two blogs, though hardly an apt way to identify my persona and character, should give you a stronger idea of where I'm coming from, what inspires me, and how this twisted, fucked-up head of mine likes to operate. I hope you'll enjoy it.

Early Review: The Age of the Conglomerates

2008-06-13T16:03:00.003-04:00

As a LibraryThing member, I not only get to catalog my books in a manner that makes my inner OCD feel calm and satiated, but I also get to, through their Early Reviewers program, read books prior to their publication date and offer my own candid views on these works.

I recently finished my first review, for The Age of the Conglomerates: A Novel of the Future, by first-time author Thomas Nevins. For the benefit of those who don't typically look at my LibraryThing profile, I've reprinted the review I've written below, so that it might get a bit more exposure for those interested in the novel.

------------------------

The Age of the Conglomerates, Thomas Nevins's premiere novel, has a description that simply drips with promise and potential -- potential that is, almost instantaneously, diluted amongst amateurish writing and poor idea management.

To summarize the plot is, frankly, somewhat worthless, as one of the novel's biggest flaws is that lack of focus and direction in any of the three main storylines. Christine, a doctor; her discarded sister, X; and their grandparents, the "Coots" George and Patsy, all seek to find solace and acceptance in a world that we're repeatedly told is out of their hands to control.

The main problem, here is with the word "told": rather than subtly show us a world gone awry due to economic and political turmoil, Nevins chooses instead to utilize lengthy expository passages that are uninteresting and blandly constructed, the novel's prologue being perhaps the most hackneyed among them. One almost gets the sense that perhaps Nevins is shooting for a clichéd, pulpy style, but the novel noticeably lacks that level of self-awareness, the ironic wink that is the mark of a truly talented writer.

At the risk of implying that Nevins is not a talented writer, I will instead assert that the novel does not reflect his skills at their peak. Short, declarative sentences are the rule of the day, which leads to a book that speeds along at a rapid pace but which doesn't really engross the reader stylistically.

As for the plot, which I've alluded to already but deftly sidestepped, my own evasiveness is a sadly apt metaphor for the story. There appears to be little cohesion between the plots save for a sudden tying-up at the end, a literal and figurative gathering of the threads that had been separate throughout. But that ending is incredibly unsatisfying, mostly because the device of the "Baby Brigade" appears too suddenly and without any justification or explanation. One doesn't get the sense of the stakes of the mission, so the whole mission feels too hack to be believed.

Similarly unbelievable are several of the plot twists, particularly those involving character loyalties, which are telegraphed so obviously that one is inclined to insist for much of the novel that there's no way that guy could possibly be on her side -- oh, but he is! Such turns are executed too matter-of-factly, without any suspense or description, and it makes much of the end of the novel feel too convenient and expected. Even the romantic threads are drastically undertreated, to the point that the emphasis on love and loyalty at the end again feels forced.

Generally speaking, the novel reads as if it feels too rushed for its own good. Nevins's ideas about the nature of power and class in a world driven by economic gain, I fear, are the only portions of the novel that were completely fleshed out during the writing, leaving a novel that wants to be suspenseful and thought-provoking, but is instead a lifeless head-scratcher.

The Summer of Self-Loathing

2008-05-28T20:00:00.004-04:00

I'm a glutton for punishment.

Case in point: I'd been working on a post declaring my temporary sabbatical from blogging when I realized that I'd wanted to elucidate an idea I'd been alluding to, both here and on various other forms of Internet communication services, for some time now. And so no sooner did I get myself through the "goodbye for now" than did I realize that there was another post that needed to happen. (Eight minutes later, you'll note, that very post began to form.)

It is with this thought in mind that I bring you an explanation for what I've been calling "The Summer of Self-Loathing."

It's not, for starters, about viciously masochistic self-hatred, at least not in a literal sense. It means that I'm attempting to do way too much in way too small a span of time, and that the end result will likely be an untangled, frayed Dave dangling perilously in the wind.

The biggest conflict is the one between my summer job and my commitments, both personally and professionally, to my graduate work. I knew that the time was shortly to come when I'd need to draw a line in the sand and declare that my academic work was simply more important than a mindless paycheck. Unfortunately, with my needing to be home for my brother's October wedding (and all the best-mannish/house-fixer-upper-ing that that entails), staying home was a damn near necessity.

So I'm still working my boring-ass summer gig, and it still doesn't excite me in the least, and it still distracts me from the massive pile of books I'm meaning to read this summer. What pile, you ask?

THAT pile.

For those of you with bad vision, and those wondering why exactly I've ordered things the way I have, I assure you there's a method to my madness. My to-be-read pile for the summer consists of three distinct categories:

"Pleasure" Reading (or, anything not required but not necessarily light or fun)
Julian Barnes - Arthur & George
Charlotte Brontë - Jane Eyre
Octavia E. Butler - Lilith's Brood
Italo Calvino - If on a winter's night a traveler
Willa Cather - O Pioneers!
Wilkie Collins - The Woman in White
Samuel R. Delany - Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Daphne du Maurier - Rebecca
Neal Gabler - Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination
Neil Gaiman - American Gods
Alan Garner - Thursbitch
Seamus Heaney [translator] - Beowulf (Bilingual Edition)
Ernest Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea
Kazuo Ishiguro - A Pale View of Hills
Kazuo Ishiguro - When We Were Orphans
Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go
Henry James - Tales of Henry James
Franz Kafka - Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared)
Cormac McCarthy - All the Pretty Horses
Haruki Murakami - after the quake: stories
Vladimir Nabokov - Bend Sinister
Vladimir Nabokov - Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
Thomas Nevins - The Age of the Conglomerates: A Novel of the Future [a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book!]
Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman
Chuck Palahniuk - Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey
Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time
Jean Rhys - Wide Sargasso Sea
Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint
Bram Stoker - Dracula
John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces
Kurt Vonnegut - Happy Birthday, Wanda June
Kurt Vonnegut - Between Time and Timbuktu, or Prometheus-5
Jennifer Hart Weed, Richard Davis, and Ronald Weed [editors] - 24 and Philosophy: The World According to Jack

Writing Books That I Must Peruse in Order to Decide Which Texts I'll Use in My Writing Classes Come This Fall
Dohra Ahmad [editor] - Rotten English: A Literary Anthology
John Dufresne - The Lie That Tells a Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction
Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein - "They Say/I Say": The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing
Stuart Greene and April Lidinsky - From Inquiry to Academic Writing: A Practical Guide
Diana Hacker - A Pocket Style Manual [Fifth Edition]
Diana Hacker - Rules for Writers [Sixth Edition]
Maxine Hairston and Michael Keene - Successful Writing [Fifth Edition]
Sharon Hamilton - Essential Literary Terms: A Brief Norton Guide with Exercises
Noah Lukeman - A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation
Andrea A. Lunsford and John J. Ruszkiewicz - Everything's an Argument [Fourth Edition]
Louis Mendoza and S. Shankar [editors] - Crossing into America: The New Literature of Immigration
Peter Turchi and Andrea Barrett [editors] - The Story Behind the Story: 26 Writers and How They Work

Advance Reading for Next Semester's Classes
Peter Ackroyd - The Trial of Elizabeth Cree
E. Lynn Harris - If This World Were Mine
Marina Lewycka - A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian
Dinaw Mengestu - The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
Ruth Ozeki - All Over Creation
Susan Power - The Grass Dancer
Richard Powers - Gain
Nelly Rosario - Song of the Water Saints
Adrian Tomine - Shortcomings
M. G. Vassanji - The Book of Secrets
William T. Vollmann - Europe Central
Martin Heidegger - Basic Writings
Michael Cunningham - The Hours
E. M. Forster - Howards End
E. M. Forster - A Passage to India
E. M. Forster - Maurice
Christopher Reed - Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity
Zadie Smith - On Beauty
Lytton Strachey - Eminent Victorians
Virginia Woolf - Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own

In order to make this list somewhat more palatable, I've given myself some timelines. I need to make my textbook orders by June 13, so sometime soon, I'm gonna knock out most if not all of that second column. Outside of that, there's the sensible idea that books read closer to the fall will be better retained, so I'm saving most of the third column for later in the summer. So I've been working through the first list so far, with mostly success.

My real-time progress on the reading can be found by either looking at my LibraryThing profile and reading my reviews, or by checking out my AIM profile.

Oh, and one more thing. The truly eagle-eyed among you might notice that not all the books on the above list are represented in the further-above photo. That's because some have been added in the intervening weeks since I took said photo. And since I'm a compulsive book buyer, and can't resist a well-timed coupon from Barnes & Noble or Borders, that list is almost always growing on a day-by-day basis.

Fingers crossed I don't drop before the leaves change.

Pardon the Interruption

2008-05-28T19:52:00.003-04:00

While I've joked considerably about the general lack of readership my blog receives, this note is strictly to inform the few of you that do read that there will be a slight service delay as I work to resolve some things.

A few of those issues are somewhat personal, and I may or may not, at a later date, decide to discuss them herein. If you're truly that curious, you probably feel free enough to IM or e-mail or call or visit me and ask me yourself, in which case I'll probably spill my guts to you if I haven't already. That seems like a fair compromise to me.

You may also have noticed that I didn't post an "M.lb." blog this past week, or the week before. For the curious weight watchers out there, I assure you the program is still in progress, but it has stalled out, largely for reasons closely associated with the aforementioned veiled "undisclosed circumstances." If you must know, I'm still down roughly ten pounds, and very proud that I'm not putting any weight back on, but I've got some things to handle before I get back to losing weight in earnest. Frankly, I'll probably just abandon the weekly posts (they haven't been all that popular anyway), but I'll bring the topic up if I feel it warrants discussing -- which is generally the way things have always run around my neck of the blogosphere.

Other than that, the truth of the matter is that the upcoming weeks plan to be extraordinarily busy: this weekend alone, I have three days of my first alumni trip to Reunions, plus John's bachelor party, to be followed next weekend by John and Caitlin's wedding, to be followed two weeks thereafter by Michael and Sara's wedding. As my schedule has barely allowed time for me to keep up with the massive amount of reading I've planned on doing for the summer, I'm thinking I should get that business in line first, before spouting off at the keyboard.

So forgive my somewhat-insolent silence, but real life is forcing me away from the computer for awhile. Rest assured, I'm still here and thriving -- I just need to some time to clear my head. If you're willing to find me around here, I assure you I'd appreciate your joining me in the real world during this brief respite.

Soon to be back to your regularly-scheduled programming...

M.lb. - Week 7, etc.

2008-05-12T13:55:00.003-04:00

Day 43
May 12, 2008
Weight: x - 10

We're at something of an impasse here. After several weeks of doing this experiment at Penn State, where I had the benefit of a supposedly "very accurate" electronic scale, I have now returned to Wayne and have to use my home scale, which is spring-loaded and reads somewhat lower than the electronic scale did.

I had been hoping that, at this point in the game, I'd have been able to get a decent estimate of the difference between the two and take it from there, but that hasn't quite panned out. Here's the not-so-scientific study I recently did:

At the start of Week 4, the day before my fourth weigh-in, I weighed myself on the home scale to see what it said. Relative to the electronic scale (and the reading of x that I've been using as my starting weight), the home scale said I was at x - 10.5. That next day, as you can see in the post above, the electronic scale read x - 8. So, assuming I didn't somehow lose a whole bunch of weight over one day, the two scales should have been about 2.5 lbs. apart.

A few weeks later, and things have gotten more complicated. I broke my cardinal rule of one weigh-in per week on Friday, because I knew I was leaving to come home. The scale, as it had this past Monday, read x - 10, unsurprising since I'd been sick. I ate breakfast during the drive home, but got back and hopped on the home scale anyway -- which read, shockingly, x - 17.5! Something clearly was amiss.

This morning's weigh-in came back down to x - 15.5 on the home scale. Not knowing what that is relative to the electronic scale has been frustrating, but I think I've hit upon a solution.

As many of you know, the past two weeks have been very trying for me, dealing not only with the stress of finals and final projects, but also with some unexplainable mystery illness that sidelined me from most anything fun. In fact, after a week and a half of dealing (poorly) with it, it was an unexplainable sleepless Thursday night that led me, after an hour-and-a-half of tossing and turning, to wake up at 6:00am on Friday morning -- running on a whole three hours of sleep -- and pack all my shit up and get the fuck out of State College so I could get home and see a doctor stat.

Today, I saw the doctor, who diagnosed me with an infection of the sinuses behind my eyes -- which explains the headache, the tingles, the pressure, the fucked-up equilibrium, and the lack of any constant nose-blowing. I'm currently on antibiotics to kill the bastard, and hopefully I should be back to fighting form really soon.

But while I was at the doctor, they had me hop on the scale. And their scale read, within a tiny little margin of error, almost precisely what the electronic scale had measured last week: x - 10! So I'm going to trust that the roughly five-pound discrepancy between the doctor's scale and my home scale is equal to the discrepancy between the electronic scale and the home scale.

So I'm going to stick with x - 10 as my official weight for the week, and the actual reading of my home scale for the week will be the baseline for further decreases from there.

(If this still feels arbitrary, take it on good faith that my home scale has never read me as weighing any more than ten pounds above what it is now, which still makes all the numbers make sense. Granted, if I were willing to divulge the actual numbers of the scale, this might be a whole lot easier to manage, but...nope, sorry. Still not willing.)

And so begins the home leg of this journey, which will be much more challenging since I'll not have the benefit of a gym to go to every day. So I'm really going to have to make sure I watch what I eat and limit my portions and caloric intake accordingly. Naturally, so long as the weather holds up, I'll try to get out on my bike or take a walk around Packanack Lake or do some other kind of exercise that suits me. But the way I see it, I'm now at the point where I'm trying to really follow Dr. Rosenthal's rules for weight control, which he gave me so many, many months ago, and which specifically say that long-term weight loss is a matter of maintaining control of your eating, not your exercising (although, as he admitted, exercise never hurts).

So I've given myself a jump-start already, and it's time to see what happens next. I've got wedding season starting in a few short weeks, and I need to get myself on a roll if I want to find long-term success over the next few months.

Let the Summer of Self-Loathing begin!

M.lb. - Week 6

2008-05-05T13:36:00.002-04:00

Day 36
May 5, 2008
Weight: x - 10

This week's post will be very short and sweet, since I've got a lot of work to do and I also haven't been feeling very well. I'm attributing most of my success to the fact that I haven't eaten shit. Which I know isn't healthy. And I know I need to actually start eating, and I swear I will if I can shake this borderline-hypochondriac thing that's been bothering me as of late. But in the absence of the gym -- because I'm pretty sure it's not a healthy idea to work out intensely when you feel dizzy and lightheaded all the time -- I've been eating less and it seems that my weight loss indicates that I'm still keeping a negative balance which isn't so bad.

I'd list my goals for the week, but the truth is that I'm far more concerned with getting healthy and getting all my school shit done than with my workouts. I'll just try to keep the healthy eating plan alive for a few more days and then, fingers crossed, getting myself back into gear when I return home for the summer.

See you back in Wayne!

Bibliophiles Anonymous, Anyone?

2008-04-29T22:46:00.005-04:00

Hello, everyone.

My name is Dave, and... And...

(Keep it together, damn it!)

...and I'm a bookaholic.

Please don't look down on me, because as much as I may be addicted to text, to the pleasures and minutiae of the written word, I am not a debilitated downer but rather a ravenous reader. I consume texts, at an alarming rate; but only rarely do they totally consume me. And when that does happen, I have the good sense to not wallow in my own self-awareness, but seek instead to share the joy of my discoveries to others. I refuse to be held down by my addiction; no, I rise up from it, like a phoenix new born with each new great read!

And besides, though I have submitted myself to the mercy of this outing, I do have more outlets than this for dealing with my obsession. Like LibraryThing, for instance. There aren't many places, after all, where I can exercise the same kind of compulsive control over my books as I do with the physical collection that sits on my bookshelves -- alphabetical by author, chronological by date of publication, and almost all in looks-like-they-were-never-even-read condition. Plus, as one constantly on the lookout for new reads, groups like "1001 Books to Read Before You Die" fit wonderfully for people like me who set absurdly excessive goals and hold ridiculously unreasonable expectations for themselves. Plus it gives me at least 900 more future acquisitions.

So, as you might expect, the last thing you want to do with someone like me is to put me in a position where I can acquire a large number of books at one time, particularly if that acquisition comes at little or no cost to me. Which is precisely what happened a week and a half ago.

The Thursday before last, my ENGL 602 class (a 75-minute weekly seminar that teaches us how to teach rhetoric and composition classes) did not meet in its normal setting but rather held a book fair, featuring four major textbook publishers. The goal of the fair was to see a variety of books in the hopes that, having seen them, you'll know which text you'll want to use next year when there is no more 602 and you're essentially on your own. For me, though the required first-year book, Making Sense, was organized rather well, it had a huge number of readings, few of which I used in class. For as much money as textbooks cost, I want to make sure I use them for all they're worth, so I went to the fair looking for a brief, compact book that explained different varieties of essay styles and perhaps a more accessible way of introducing grammar into my classroom.

Shortly after arriving, I fell upon one of my all-time textbook loves, Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. Sure, not everyone is in love with this book, but it's compulsively readable in the strangest way, and I love that it presents its case in a prescriptive but firm style. Like Lynne Truss's books, I may not agree with everything this says, but I damn sure love that they stick to it with conviction. Plus, let's face it, grammar texts that students will want to read don't come around often.

I must have been coddling the book a little too closely for a little too long because I was approached by a rep from the publishing house. I was planning on my polite refusal of assistance, and started sidling slowly away to avoid whatever pitch I anticipated she was planning, but instead of trying to sell me on something, she merely invited me to -- gasp! -- take the book. Just take it.

W-w-what?!

Turns out all I had to do was provide a little contact info and I could take any book on their table. Suddenly, my world opened up. I could take any books I wanted, at no cost to me! The fair was suddenly middling no longer.

I perused the next two publishers' tables in depth, looking for any books that caught my eye. Sadly, there weren't many, although I was able to snag a copy of the brief edition of Everything's an Argument, a text I'd heard through the grapevine would fit my needs rather well. So I had my potential textbook and my grammar guide -- mission accomplished!

Of course, I hadn't reached the fourth table yet. And when I saw who was at this fourth table, my jaw almost literally dropped.

Norton.

I feel like non-academics might not quite understand how big a deal this is, so permit me to pander just a touch here. Norton is the publisher of two of the finest academic resources for literary scholars: the Norton Critical Edition, landmark texts that are loaded with critical essays and explanatory glosses; and Norton Anthologies, which are essentially the industry-standard one-stop-shop for the important texts of literary history. So for the English graduate student, this table was a damn-near-literal bookgasm of monumental proportions.

They had Norton Critical Editions. They had Norton Anthologies (LOTS of them). They had other, less well-known collections. They had random great books (like Kafka's Amerika and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf). And best of all, in fitting with the nature of the fair, all of these were up for grabs if we wanted them, simply by signing our name.

When it was all said and done, I wasn't sure how many I signed up for, but I felt a little bad for having asked for so much -- so bad that I helped bring boxes of books back to Burroughs to be placed in mailboxes. (Full disclosure: It also didn't hurt that the Norton rep was young, cute, and female.) I knew I wasn't getting any of those books that day, but I knew they would have to come eventually.

Eventually meant yesterday. There, sitting in the mailroom, were three relatively large boxes weighing an absurd amount. Carrying them to the bus, then to my car, then into my apartment -- in the rain, no less -- was a chore, but when I got inside and opened the boxes, the effort was suddenly well worth it.

Between the texts I'd gotten from Norton, and the couple others I'd requested that also came, I had about twenty new books. Including FIVE Norton Anthologies -- English Literature (Eighth Edition), volumes 1 and 2; American Literature (Seventh Edition); Short Fiction (Seventh Edition); and Shakespeare (Second Edition). It didn't take much math for me to figure out that these books alone (which are roughly 3000 pages each) constituted an absurd amount of text, and there was much more beneath them.

So I did a quick count after I'd opened everything. In the end, the amount of pages I received in that shipment was roughly 19,500.

I'll type that one more time, just in case you think it's a typo. 19,500. As in, nineteen thousand five hundred pages.

Given this revelation, what do you think the bibliophile in me thought? If you guessed that I was satisfied, you're only partially right. Because as soon as I noticed how close I was to a nice round number, I simply couldn't resist taking a little trip and reaching the milestone.

So I ventured out to the Barnes & Noble on the Benner Pike and bought a book that I've walked past in the bookstores many a time before, but simply couldn't bring myself to buy. Until yesterday. James Joyce's Ulysses. Which, based solely on its reputation, is probably going to bring the pain, and bring it hard.

But having acquired that, I can now claim that in one day, I received over twenty thousand pages of text, and for it all I paid a grand total of $16.22.

My name is Dave, and I am a bookaholic.

The story should end here, since I've come full-circle. But since I finally gave in and bought the book that I've known for a while would challenge me like few others, I decided to truly go for the gusto. I searched on Amazon earlier tonight, and with a few quick clicks, committed myself to my reading project for the summer.

Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (or In Search of Lost Time, in English). A novel that is over 4,000 pages in length -- in the Modern Library translation, 4,344 pages, to be exact. The novel that holds the Guinness record for the longest novel ever published in English. And the novel that, despite a number of highly avant-garde and unpublished works that have emerged in the last century, still remains the longest novel ever to be published and popularly received in English.

This is the task that I have voluntarily set myself to for the summer, despite having acquired over 20,000 pages of new text in the past 48 hours alone.

My name is Dave, and I am a bookaholic. And I fear I am too far gone to be saved.

Have mercy on me.

M.lb. - Week 5

2008-04-28T22:32:00.005-04:00

Day 29
April 28, 2008
Weight: x - 7

Progress: Alright, I'll admit it. I think trying to not lose weight during a weekend when I knew I was not going to pay much attention to calories, health content, or moderation was probably a misguided idea. Still, given the circumstances, and the fact that I honestly didn't eat as badly as I thought I was going to, I didn't end up falling off the wagon too badly. I lost only a little bit of ground, and this week should get me back on track.

Mostly what I've learned from The Weekend in terms of eating is that it's definitely the drinking that does me in. We drank a lot this weekend, and though Friday wasn't exactly a banner day in terms of knowing what and what not to eat, at the end of it all, I didn't eat nearly as much as I thought I was going to -- but did drink about as much as I'd anticipated. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that most of the regain was empty calories from the booze, so we know that I can't afford to go all out and go on a bender if I want to keep myself on track.

Goals for the Week: The primary goal, obviously, is to make up the ground I lost. I was fortunate to have only gained a pound, and by next week's weigh-in, I'd like to see myself back to at least the x - 8 marker I'd hit at the beginning of Week 4. If I can make up the ground, I'll at least prove to myself that the gain, and not the loss, has been the fluke, which will do wonders, I'm sure, for my mental condition as I continue on this plan.

The only other goal is to try and remain focused and in the gym each day this week, considering that the semester's end is sneaking up on me and that means papers and projects are bearing down. All told, though I'm stressing, it's not nearly as bad as it seems once I get down to it and start working. So the goals will be the make sure that work stress doesn't push me to make bad eating choices or cheat on something that I should know better than to have. I need to start building momentum for the trip home, where I won't have the convenience of a daily gym regimen, and so it's time to start committing for real to those eating habits and carry them through the summer. It all starts here.

Avalanche Warning

2008-04-28T18:36:00.002-04:00

Just a little teaser/heads-up post to warn all two or three of my loyal readers that you are about to be inundated with a barrage of mid- to high-quality content.

I currently have five posts in process, none of which are done and all of which I'd like to try and get out this week, if my work load allows.

Sometime later this evening, I'll post the shorter-than-usual M.lb. update for the week (it's not looking too pretty, so I may be cutting back substantially on that one).

In addition, as teased on Friday, there are three posts in progress for each day of The Weekend, which I promise will be exciting reading when they're all done.

Finally, for those literate types out there -- you know who you are, checking the Bibliophilistic link over on the sidebar when no one's looking; it's cool, your secret's safe with me -- I'll be posting one of my irregularly-scheduled "interesting day posts." I know I just said in the last post that I'm not a fan of teasers, but the punchline of today's events is that I acquired over 20,000 pages worth of reading today and paid less than $17.00 for all of it. Stay tuned for the explanation.

And as for the rest of it, it'll be coming soon enough, I promise. So just relax and, as The Raconteurs would say, "Take it as it comes, and be thankful when it's done."

Capital T, Capital W

2008-04-25T01:29:00.003-04:00

I'm not normally a fan of teaser posts, but this one is just way too exciting not to mention.

Weeks of planning, edge-of-my-seat twists, and near-breathless anticipation have almost ended. The plans are settled, the arrangements are certain, the anticipation is waning.

The moment is here.

While there are obviously no guarantees, Fate has in many ways conspired to provide us with, at the very least, the potential of one of those gatherings of mythic proportions. A weekend so stacked with a combination of kick-ass activities and desperate need that it should, by all accounts, become legendary upon execution.

And that execution begins in just a few short hours.

I will attempt, if possible, to blog on-the-spot this weekend, though I promise nothing. At the very least, a full recap will be provided upon return. But when you hear about it isn't important.

No matter what happens, this train don't stop till Monday morning. And it's going to be one hell of a ride.

So hold on tight, kids.

The Weekend is here...

M.lb. - Week 4

2008-04-21T09:07:00.003-04:00

Day 22
April 21, 2008
Weight: x - 8

Progress: At last! The wall I've been waiting to break through has officially been busted open! I definitely thought I was in for it this weekend, what with going home to visit the family and not having access to the gym, but I guess my eating habits made up for it because my body finally realized I'm serious about slimming down.

This is a really good feeling, obviously. But I'm trying to temper it with just a little bit of disbelief, so that I understand things won't be progressing at this rate for very long. In fact, I was so stunned by what I saw when I jumped on the scale this morning that I stepped off, recalibrated it, and tried again -- only to find the same number staring me back in the face! (Of course, I didn't dare try a third time, lest I unduly tempt the weight-management gods.)

I finally feel as if my work is paying off, and I certainly didn't get punished for my trip home this weekend. On the ride back to Jersey, I stopped off at a Cracker Barrel, where I ate about half the meal I was given and took the rest home. On Saturday, at my cousin's First Communion, I had a little bit of everything, but emphasized the "little" bit: it allowed me to try it all, not feel stuffed, and still feel free to enjoy a little bit of cake in the end. Sunday was little more than my dinner, which was substantive but not my usual stuff-your-face-before-the-drive-back meal, and now I find I have not paid for missing out on the gym these past few days.

Frankly, this is the kind of change I've been waiting for: knowing that I don't have to rely entirely on getting to the gym in order to lose weight. When I saw the cardiologist back in September, he had told me about this. He mentioned that cardiovascular exercise is never a bad idea, but that losing weight for real is more about what (and how much) one eats than is it about getting regular exercise. So even though I haven't been to the gym for three days, a trend I will kick later today, it still has worked out that my eating habits have continued to drive my weight loss success.

Goals for the Week: This week's goals are surprisingly modest, because it's gonna be a doozy for the next seven days. With all the things I need to work on for classes, I'm sure I'll be tempted to fall off the wagon a little bit, but I need to resist that temptation. In addition, this weekend is The Weekend, when I go to visit Alicia and see a bunch of totally awesome bands and engage in other such craziness. Knowing this is coming, I need to be as diligent as possible for the remaining five days so that I don't go overboard and blow it. Friday I know I'll be hitting the gym, so I'll be alright that night, and Sunday I won't be drinking because of the need to drive home -- so if I can moderate Saturday okay, I should be fine for the week.

In all honesty, my goal for the next week is to simply not gain. With all the possibilities present for not sticking to the plan, but with a strong new resolve to remain focused, I just want to minimize the damage I'm sure to partake in this weekend. It'll be interesting to see how drinking affects my plan: I've been noticeably alcohol-free for the past three weeks (save for a couple of screwdrivers on Saturday and some beer at poker), but I anticipate there will be some degree of intoxication involved this weekend, which translates naturally to empty calories. The key, of course, will be to exercise moderation as best I can and try to move around a bit on Saturday to offset the beers preemptively. (Perhaps I might be able to convince Alicia that [at least] one venture to the gym is in order?)

I truly feel that if I can get through this week and not gain any of what I've already lost, I'll be in really good shape to work hard for the last two weeks of the semester and begin parlaying the new diet and exercise regimens into a summer of healthy eating and continued success. My goal for this project all along has been to try and lose 1-2 pounds a week, which would result in a loss of somewhere between 20 and 40 pounds by the tux fitting and, if I kept it up, about 25-50 pounds lost by Tony's wedding.

If I were to hit the high end of that tux-fitting mark (which would put us some time in August), I would once again be back around that mark I hit junior year, when I weighed the least I had since high school. That would be a damn good feeling to have again. And that's going to be the motivation I use to keep at this plan and stay driven.

Remember The Thirty-Two

2008-04-16T21:19:00.002-04:00

It's been one year.

After all my issues with taxes were finally resolved yesterday, I at last had some time to relax and think about things with some clarity -- at which point I realized that it was a mere day away from the one-year anniversary of the tragedy at Virginia Tech. It hadn't entirely snuck up on me: I'd seen an article in USA Today a week or so ago that made mention of the upcoming anniversary, so it was always in the back of my mind. I guess it just didn't compute that it's the day after tax day (but then, tax day was never an issue for me like it was this year).

It really hit me during seminar yesterday, when Danielle called from home with the slightest tinge of panic in her voice. I quickly learned that she had banged her car up a little bit and was upset over that, but I harbor my suspicions that her mind wasn't only on her car when she called me.

Last night I had a chance to really sit and reflect, and the more I thought about everything -- about all the thoughts and feelings I'd had that cold April day last year when I literally woke up to the news -- the more unsettled I became. I couldn't sleep last night, first staying up because I couldn't will myself tired, then tossing and turning once I'd resigned myself to my bed.

By the time morning came, I resolved to myself that there was something within me I needed to exorcise today, to make peace with how I felt about all this. Because, for one thing, my most tangible connection to the tragedy is back in New Jersey, probably wishing I could be there to hug and hold on this day -- a feeling I most assuredly held last April 16th. But she had her church, and she went to mass this morning to reflect and pray, which is an admirable and proper thing to do if that's your inclination. It is not, however, mine.

In the end, I decided to use my class as a forum to get some things off my chest. I reserved the end of class this morning to simply address my students face to face, telling them about what it felt like for me to live vicariously through the tragedy, the anxiety I felt while waiting to hear how people I knew were doing and the powerlessness I felt to help anything or console anyone I cared about.

Then I told a story.

I won't repeat that story here, for the sake of space and because I certainly wouldn't want the person whom it concerns to stumble upon this blog and have to relive that experience again. But the truth is, it was thinking about that story that kept me up last night. I put my current malaise into perspective and tried to imagine what it must have been like to have had one's world, one's security so devastatingly rocked. Or what it must be like for the survivors, some of whom were saved by someone who never made it out.

I still can't fathom that. How can you even begin to come to terms with the idea that someone else gave you a second chance at life? Especially at such a young age, an age of blissful ignorance. An age where you go to class like any other day and can't imagine that on that very day you'll come within a hairsbreadth of the beyond. It's a depressing, morbid thought, I know, but I just can't help but think about that, struggling with it, unable to comprehend it. I pray I'll never have to.

For those I know who are in that situation, or who are simply coming to terms with being a survivor of the tragedy, I have both sympathy and the utmost respect for you. The character of the Hokies, both those who have since left Blacksburg and those who stayed without hesitation, is unflappable; they are stoic, loyal, and courageous, and any one of us should be proud to know them and be associated with them.

As for me, technically I'm only a Hokie by association, but there's a lot of strength in the conviction, repeated so often last year, that at these times, we are all Hokies.

Today is the day to remember that sense of community, the combined strength that gets all of through times like those that transpired a year ago. It's a day to, as I entreated my students, remember how lucky we are for the opportunities we have, and to remind ourselves never to take those opportunities for granted because we just never know.

But on top of all that, today is a day to remember. To remember not just the blessings but to remember the thirty-two souls who never imagined when they woke up on April 16, 2007 that it would be their last day. The way we keep them alive is to think of them and to think often, to keep their memories alive.

There's no need to bring any politics or opinions or even emotions into that act either. It's too tempting to use tragedy for particular agendas, and like I told my students, though my views are pretty solid, what those views and their justifications are is just not relevant. What is relevant -- all that is relevant -- is that we remember.

So even though the day is nearly over, I encourage you, if you haven't already, to simply take a moment and think about The Thirty-Two. Think about them and think about all the survivors and all the people affected and think about all those things you don't normally take the time to think about. When it comes down to it, those are the only things that matter, and it's a shame we need moments like these to put that in perspective.

Stay strong, Tech. Hokie, Hokie, Hokie, Hi!

Taxed

2008-04-15T16:29:00.002-04:00

You don't have to be an employee of the IRS, the United States Postal Service, Jackson Hewitt, H&R Block, or any other tax preparation company to know that April 15 is a terrible day. Like most good academic deadlines, it's stressful, unwavering, and feels horribly unfair and unnecessary.

This year has been a particularly tricky one for me because of the move to Pennsylvania for grad school, a change that has not only necessitated multiple state returns (which are a bitch to figure out, even with tax-for-dummies-like-me software like TurboTax) but has also, as far as I can figure, pushed me into a higher tax bracket.

Forgive me for challenging the greater gods of the Internal Revenue Service, but are you fucking kidding me? Without delving into the specifics of my financial situation, I think it's fairly safe to assume that, as a graduate student, with particular emphasis on student, I don't make a whole lot of money. And sure, I made more this year than I ever have in one year. (Though it sure doesn't feel that way -- damn you, rent!) But I still find it hard to believe that my Penn State stipend pushed me so far into a new bracket that my refund should plummet like it did.

And that's before I even got to the state returns. I first attempted to straighten out my tax situation over spring break, and found myself increasingly frustrated by my multi-state situation. The Federal return, unfair though I deemed it to be, still made sense and calculated the same refund every time I did it. No reason to believe I'd done anything wrong.

It was dealing with state taxes that totally threw me. First I tried claiming part-time residence in Pennsylvania. When they insisted that I absolutely must have some income from my farm, I abandoned that route. I read a little more carefully and realized, to my then-pleasure, that being a college student meant that I didn't have to claim residency while at school, so I could simply be a New Jersey resident (a fact that, tax complications aside, never ceases to make me smile). I presumed this would make things much easier.

Au contraire, mon frere! Because now we're entering the world of the nonresident return, which is fairly complicated when you consider that relatively equal parts of my income this year came from New Jersey sources (two W-2s from NJ employers) and from Penn State (one additional W-2). That, and apparently Pennsylvania and New Jersey have a reciprocal tax agreement with each other, so that income earned in one state while a resident of the other isn't subject to double-taxing. How convenient!

But navigating the waters of how to apply this agreement, and how to qualify which sources of income should be taxed by which state is, for lack of a better term, taxing -- not only to me, but to my illustrious tax-prep software. I came up with several very different scenarios while at home: one had me owe New Jersey $95, one had me owe them $0, one gave me a refund of $118! And this didn't even include my attempts at a Pennsylvania nonresident return quite yet, as I wasn't sure it was necessary.

As soon as TurboTax came to the MacBook (and, subsequently, back to State College), the solution was cleared up: yes, I need a Pennsylvania return. And despite my work at home assuring me that I would owe no Pennsylvania taxes, no sooner did I crunch the numbers than I owed Pennsylvania a staggering $283, on top of the $95 I owed New Jersey.

This, I deduced, was fucked up. That was more than my Federal refund, and thusly, it made no sense at all.

The end result of all this rigmarole was that I claimed (I believe properly) that all my income is to be taxed by New Jersey, so none of my New Jersey-earned income is subject to PA taxes, nor is my stipend subject to PA taxes (the W-2 says so). So I owe Pennsylvania nothing, and I still owe New Jersey $95 -- which, still, makes no sense to me. But at this point, I've decided that I can't put this off anymore and that maybe, if there's a just and loving god somewhere, the State of New Jersey may somehow realize that I'm a poor, hard-working kid who's gotten screwed by the tax system, and maybe I'll get a surprise refund after the fact.

Yeah, and maybe the Cubs will win a World Series sometime this century. I'll believe both when I see them. (Caveat: Sorry, Mary.)

All of this has me thinking, however, why April, wondrous month of springtime renewal and amusement park re-openings and glorious, glorious baseball that it is, should feature so many unfortunate days. (Remember April Fool's Day?) Hell, even last year, when the dreaded thesis bore down on me, I didn't quite have this sense of emptiness and ennui as I do this time around. Why should that be?

I posited this question to my friend Alicia, who, even in comparison to me and my frustrations, has been having an abysmal last few days. She's been sick, stressed out with too much work and too little time to do it (I'll be there soon, too; it just hasn't hit me yet), and this morning ran into a little car trouble that, after a quick diagnostic check at the local repair shop, quickly morphed into a lot of car trouble. She gets the whole April malaise just as badly as I do, if not worse. I listened patiently to the tale of her plights, offering what little useless advice I could, then accepted her invitation to share my own.

Upon hearing of my tax struggles, she reminded me of one crucial point I'd forgotten: her father is an accountant.

And, naturally, since every accountant on Earth is pulling their hair out today, she could offer little more than, "I'd have you call my dad, but it's, you know, April 15. Live and learn, eh?"

At least now I know for next year.

M.lb. - Week 3

2008-04-14T14:29:00.003-04:00

Day 15
April 14, 2008
Weight: x - 1

Progress: It's taken two weeks, but I've finally seen some (albeit small) results. I'm down one pound from when I started this thing, and yet I'm still frustrated by a number of issues that I feel are keeping me from really progressing.

Firstly, I'm frustrated by the fact that a single pound could represent little more than a standard weight fluctuation -- and if that's the case, my progress over two weeks has been minimal at best. I understand that I'm not necessarily eating as well as I could, but every day I try to do at least a little rough math on my calorie intake and I find it very hard to fathom that, given the amount of exercising I'm doing in comparison with how relatively little I'm eating, my progress has been this slow. I feel like when I was doing this junior year, I was eating far more in a day than I am now, and was seeing much better results much sooner. I'm trying to remain focus, but I'm putting a lot of effort into this and the snail's pace that it's going at has me pretty irritated.

In addition, I fear for what could happen if I take, say, a weekend and let myself go a little bit. I know for a fact that a great deal of my current weight issues stems from one week of vacation last summer, and while that was an exceptional example of letting myself go, I still wonder if all this is being held in such a tenuous balance that if I slip just a little, the whole thing will fall apart. That's a bigger worry than any other because, while I know I can be good and keep this together for awhile, I don't want to feel like all the work can be undone in one fell swoop because that will kill my motivation.

Fortunately, I still feel good working out. I haven't significantly tired yet, even though I upped my output to six days a week (Thursdays are just unreasonable in terms of working out), and I've been trying to do something cardio-related for at least 30 minutes, and in most cases 40 minutes. That adds up to roughly 400-500 calories a session, which puts me at right around the same weekly pace I was at a few years ago. I'm thinking perhaps the next step is to start eliminating potential problem foods from the diet in order to keep pace.

Goals for the Week: The main goal is to keep up the exercise and try to start doing something about the food. Beth's advice about "the sigh" is great, and I wish I'd have followed it last night as it would have saved me a significant streak of discomfort. At this point, however, I really only give myself a treat once a week -- and by a treat, I mean a whole meal that's not ideal (like the Five Guys I finally gave in and had for lunch today). I've been feeling like it's okay because I'm doing the exercise too, but I think it's time I started really concentrated on making smart eating choices when I have a choice -- and that includes not eating to excess at parties and/or social functions.

The other major goal, in keeping with the theory of "the sigh," is to simply start working on portion control. Last time around I let my body naturally start relying on less and less food, but I need to take a more diligent role in making it happen this time. I need to pay attention to my eating, and especially the amount of water I drink with meals, as that affects my stomach capacity immensely. Mostly, I need to start feeling unafraid to put something aside as a leftover and save it for another day; if I can start making one big meal turn into two smaller meals, I won't get that full-up feeling that I hate and I'll probably be able to deal better with eating, which is really the source of all this.

Two weeks down, and we're finally getting somewhere. Let's hope to keep the trend alive next week!

M.lb. - Week 2

2008-04-07T13:32:00.005-04:00

Day 8
April 7, 2008
Weight: x

Progress: One week of my project is officially in the books -- and, unfortunately, the progress has been far slower than I'd anticipated. After I returned home from class this afternoon, I hopped on the scale having eaten only a banana thus far today. And found that my weight was exactly the same as it was when I took my first measurement last Monday.

This is, obviously, rather discouraging, but I'm going to try and keep my head up for a number of very convincing reasons, the first of which is the role of one particularly egregious bingeing session on Friday night. As an end-of-pay-week celebration, Danielle and I dined at the Olive Garden, where I partook in the Asiago Steak entrée I'd been jonesing after for weeks. Unfortunately, I also partook in an appetizer which, when combined with the entrée and the massive bowl of salad we were delivered, turned out to be way too much food. Like, borderline-vomiting too much. It was awful, and it reminded me of why I hate the way I look so much.

So I'm thinking that I've learned a lesson from my experience at the Olive Garden, which is that portion control must be exercised even more steadfastly when I'm not eating at home. Fair enough. And sure, Danielle and I took care of a bit more of the bunny this week (there's nothing but head left), but we spaced it out in such a way that I truly don't believe it had an impact on my result.

The key for me is that I've been trying to improve my fitness by getting myself to the gym with some kind of regularity. In all honesty, the motivation of getting off my ass is the toughest part, because once I'm actually at the gym, I tend to give it my all. Fortunately, that has not translated yet into feelings of death after I finish working out -- in fact, I tend to finish a little breathless but still feeling good about myself. Sure, I'm a bit flushed, but I'm also out of shape, so I'm okay with that for now. As long as I'm not getting coughing fits or feeling dizzy or lightheaded, I'm going to keep at this pace and see what happens.

My biggest gym-related challenge at this point is the middle of my week. Wednesday and Thursday are not good workout days, and as much as I feel like I'd be okay with five days a week, I know it's just not going to be enough to get the results I want. I'll have to figure out ways to get Wednesday workouts in (even if that means coming home to shower sometime during my four-hour afternoon break -- which, naturally, requires that I be prepared for Chaucer before Wednesday afternoon), at which point I should feel okay about skipping Thursdays. As for today, however, I'm a little sore, though I'm trying to convince myself that I'll at least get out some time later and sit on the bike for a little while just to keep my momentum going.

Goals for the Week: My main goal for the week is modest: I'd like the scale to register something below x this time next week. I honestly believe if I can fit one more day of the gym and avoid the one evening of gluttony that I believe set me back this week, I should be in the red next week no problem.

In terms of major changes, I'm thinking about what things I tend to fill up on a lot and where I might be able to make small changes here and there. For the time being, my major empty calories come from alcohol and coffee -- mostly from the coffee, since my drinking averages out to less than one drink per day. However, I'm convinced that if I work on regulating the amount of sugar, milk, and/or creamer that goes into the coffee, rather than cutting it out entirely, I can keep it in there. My snacking hasn't been bad except for the bunny, which should be done by the end of the week and thusly no longer an issue. If there's any major dietary change I need to stick with, it's trying to get some salad into my diet every day, since my vegetable consumption sucks.

What I'm mostly discovering is that I don't eat terribly, and I don't feel like I have to starve myself to get results. I just need to be more careful with my portions, trying to make large portions last for two or more meals, and make sure I stop eating when I'm not hungry anymore. I'll also work on trying to fill up on water during the day in order both to hydrate and to fend off any potential hunger pangs.

All relatively minor changes, to be sure. I'll implement them for a week and see what happens next Monday.

Fuck April Fools Day

2008-04-01T23:33:00.003-04:00

I'm serious. I hate this holiday.

First of all, I'm probably being way too generous with that term. It used to be that holidays were restricted to "holy days" (crazy notion, eh?) or, at a not-so-painful linguistic stretch, a day on which people could escape the joylessness of work and relax, spending the day with family and friends, perhaps with a modicum of fine liquors, and most certainly without any undue stress.

April Fools Day in no way satisfies that final condition, not when those of us humorless saps spend the day trying to avoid the jerks who crawl out of the woodwork on days like this and get their fill of pranks, puns, and parodies before the day is through. There's nothing relaxing about trying to get some snide idiot to make a single honest, straightforward comment without spewing "April Fools!" in your face and laughing that stupid hyena laugh that can only be ascribed to those for whom the lowness of their level of social etiquette and tact is rivaled only by that of their sense of humor (on an objective scale, of course).

Besides, April Fools clearly falls in line with the trinity of fake holidays used to fill the winter -- I refer, of course, to Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, and today. I'm convinced these days exist as "holidays" solely because someone far older and far wiser (and probably far deader) than I realized that Christmas (and, to a certain degree, yes, New Year's) occur right at the beginning of winter, and with the exception of President's Day (and really, who actually celebrates that? anyone?), the somber cold season clambers on with nary a real holiday until the full vestiges of spring have sprung and we're ready for Memorial Day. None of these holidays are real or really that important!

Valentine's Day, though it may have begun as a saint's day, is now either a) a Hallmark holiday, b) a battleground between the single and the attached, or c) a day to honor the great Al Capone and his contributions to the celebrations.

St. Patrick's Day, also initially a saint's day, has now turned into nothing more than an excuse for amateurs to step out and drink themselves stupid because they have an excuse (see also: New Year's Day); and, notwithstanding Guinness's "valiant" efforts to legitimate it via their Proposition 3-17 campaign, nothing so blatantly underscores the shallowness of this day quite like the concept, straight out of Happy Valley, of "State Paddy's Day," a day specifically designated for St. Patrick's-like activity (read: drinking to excess) because St. Patrick's Day often falls during Penn State's spring break (read: we wanna get wasted at school too!).

April Fools Day, like its March counterpart, provides only an excuse for the dregs of society to show their faces for 24 hours without fear of rebuke or retribution, but in this case, instead of targeting alcoholics, we target assholes instead.

This April Fools Day, however, was an occasion for marking two rather interesting and noteworthy events. Firstly, because of a rather unfortunate and untimely rain delay yesterday, the Yankees home opener -- one of the few games in their history scheduled to be played in March, go figure -- was rescheduled for this evening. Normally, though impatient for the return of my boys, I would be okay with this; however, ESPN employs lying sacks of shit (caveat: not you, Amy) who told me they'd be broadcasting the game but then instead opted to show the NCAA women's tournament.

Brief Digression: Hey Yankees, I know it's only the first game of the season, and I'm probably getting worked up over nothing, but 3-2 against the Blue Jays? Don't you think we can do better than that? I do. Because sure, we got seven solid innings out of Chien-Ming Wang, and the Joba-Mariano connection in the 8th and 9th worked almost like a charm. And yeah, A-Rod the RBI machine picked up right where he left off at the end of the regular season last year. But that 8th inning was an embarrassment: Johnny Damon leads off with a triple, and no one can bring him in? This kind of shit ruined the last few postseasons, and I hope this little incident isn't a harbinger of things to come. Just sayin'.

As the Smashing Pumpkins taught us, however, "the end is the beginning is the end" (or was it "the beginning is the end is the beginning"...I can never keep that straight), and as the Yankees opened a new season, the bookstore heralded a long-awaited present that punctuated with near-certainty the career of one of my favorite writers.

Those of you who were reading this at this time last year may recall my reaction to the death of Kurt Vonnegut. I still consider him one of my literary heroes, and the news of a posthumous book of unpublished work, Armageddon in Retrospect, made my heart soar at the end of 2007. Finally, after months of waiting, the book came out today, and my ravenous appetite for the text consumed the better part of my afternoon. For me, a fan and aficionado of the man's entire literary career, it was a warm, inviting reminder of the talent we lost, a book that, though it speaks of the serious but topical issue of war, still manages to come across as comforting. (You can read my full review here, on LibraryThing.)

Danielle, however, is not so much a fan of Mr. Vonnegut, try as I may. But she was excited to see the acquisition for which I'd pined so many months, so this evening I showed her the book. She flipped it over, looked at the picture on the back, and squealed with delight. After explaining to me why, she confessed, "I love Kurt Vonnegut a little bit more now!"

So what was it that sent her girlish squeaking all a-flitter? Try and figure it out yourself. Here's the photo in question:

Have you guessed? Here, verbatim, is her explanation:

"It's a lawn gnome riding on top of a pig!"

That's right, folks. Arguably the finest literary genius of our time, reduced to a kitschy ornamentation hanging from his garden door.

I am so glad April Fools Day is over. Fuck this day.

M.lb. - Opening Day

2008-03-31T13:27:00.006-04:00

This post is not (entirely) what you think it is. It is the start, I hope, of something new and exciting, and something that I hope those of you who read this blog will become involved in. In fact, I'll be urging your involvement as much as you possibly can as I begin this new endeavor.

First, some background. I'm sitting here on my couch, in a tiny, lonely apartment, waiting for the New York Yankees rain delay to end so I can enjoy the first game of the as-always-anticipated regular season. I've always loved the beginning of baseball season because it signifies to me the certain end of winter, a season I frankly abhor. It's cold, it's miserable, and you can't do anything that I consider fun, like go swimming or ride roller coasters or watch/play/attend baseball games. The baseball season is a crucial step in my emergence from hibernation and my dispatch of cabin fever. It's what really invigorates me again.

The winter this year has been especially cruel. Not personally, but mostly in a psychological sense. The delay of my fall papers, which have hung over my head for all but the past couple of weeks, did a great deal to increase the stress and dismay that I normally feel in the winter. It also hasn't helped that I've felt lethargic and sedentary for months, and that the motivation and inspiration to want to go to the gym and get myself moving has been hampered.

Above all, since I've been to grad school, though I came here with the desire to lose weight, I've actually gained. I'm not proud of this, but I have to admit it: back in junior year at Princeton, when I got sick and tired of being fat and decided I would start my 20s by trying to slim down, I successfully got myself down to the least I'd weighed since high school. It was still far short of my ultimate goal, but I was proud of what I was able to accomplish.

Unfortunately, since then, the stress of senior year, applications, and the adjustments I've made in grad school have had a terribly adverse effect on me. In the interest of full disclosure, which I feel I've got to start doing with regards to all this, I currently weigh more than I ever have before. And that's really scary to me. It's gotten to a point far beyond the mere compunction I'd felt at spoiling my good efforts of two years ago. It's time I put my foot down and said I've had enough.

Which is where you come in.

Today, I'm starting a new program that I've cleverly called Minus the Pounds, or M.lb. for short (get it?). I'm timing this with the beginning of the Yankees' season in the hopes that I can play the progression of the baseball season -- which is never a sprint but more of a marathon -- into my plan to patiently and progressively lose the weight I want to. It's also convenient that the last game of the Yankees' regular season falls on September 28, which is the weekend before my brother gets married. I promised myself I'd lose the weight for his wedding, yet I haven't been able to parlay that motivation into anything concentrated and successful.

Yet.

Starting with this post, I'll be posting weekly, every Monday, with a report of my current relative weight, my progress in terms of diet and exercise, and general musings about how I'm feeling. I ask you all to contribute whatever you can in terms of comments and exposure. Get on here and comment, sharing whatever you'd like: your own weight loss stories, your words of encouragement, even some creative jeers and jibes, if you will. More importantly, if you have a blog or know some people who tend to read these things, invite them to check this out and offer some words of encouragement as well.

Why am I making this so public? First of all, it's because, to a certain degree, I'm an attention whore. (I was going to get that accusation anyway, so I might as well handle it outright.) But this is about far more than merely having a whole bunch of people pat me on the back for losing weight. What I'm really hoping to get out of this is a sense of responsibility. Sure, it seems weird to ask the online world to expect things of me, but in truth, I have a traditionally hard time of doing things for my own good. I mean, if you think about it, this whole project is undertaken for the sake of my brother, so I don't look so fat in his wedding photos. It's not really about me at all, but I'm hoping with some build-up, I'll be able to turn this into something that I want to do for me and no one else.

But enough of this palaver! Let's get this show on the road!

------------------------

Day 1
March 31, 2008
Weight: x

Progress: After conceiving of this project last week, I decided to give myself the weekend as a head-start, both to give myself a good starting number and to try to get myself into the gym again to see how my body reacted to, you know, movement. So far, I'm happy to say that two days of the gym have left me neither sore nor excessively winded. I've also been trying to eat less, and only when I'm really hungry, though I allowed myself a little chocolate bunny yesterday, as I haven't touched it since Easter.

I'm going to, for the sake of a little modesty, define my establishing weight as x. All future updates will be relative to x, though I will have a notebook on me that will keep track of the true numbers. I don't have any particular goal right now -- I just want to start fitting into my clothes better and see what kind of weight loss rate I can establish and maintain. I'll start thinking in terms of goals once I leave State College for the year and head home for the summer.

So it begins. Once again, if you've got advice, suggestion, or mocking you'd like to share, hit up the comments and invite others to do the same.

Thanks in advance, and stay tuned!

An Eye-Opening Eye Closing

2008-03-25T20:50:00.003-04:00

I like sleeping. A whole lot. In fact, I would go so far as to consider it one of my favorite pastimes (right up there with video games, baseball, and eating to excess). I've been finding that, as a graduate student, a great change has come over me since my undergrad days with regards to this noble activity.

Back then, I loved sleeping, and would frequently nap in the afternoons and sleep on weekends and days off until some time that was, more often than not, followed by "pm". Granted, at that point, I was going to bed at times when television frequently shows little more than Billy Mays infomercials. There was nothing wrong with this arrangement in the eyes of anyone except the parents paying for what they presumed was an education being sorely wasted by my abysmal sleeping schedule. (My degree showed them...ha!)

But now, as I'm beginning to develop into what I can only call by the term "an old man," I'm finding that my inclination towards sleeping has, if nothing else, shifted back a few hours. When I'm in State College, attempting (that being the operative word) to be productive, I start to really get tired right around the pm-am switchover, and typically start to crave the comfort of my flannel sheets around 1:00am. As an undergrad, this is shameful; but as a grad student, with no one else's expectations to have to tolerate or satiate, I have no problem with this bedtime at all. Consequently, I find it very hard to sleep past 10:00am most mornings, even on weekends, if I manage to make it that long. This very weekend, in fact, after a much-needed night of restful sleep in my own (much tinier) bed, I could only manage to top out at around 9:30am.

And on Easter Sunday, I was up before my brother, which I assure you is quite the accomplishment. See, as a kid, I never slept in -- had to wake up early and play Nintendo before the parents woke up and caught me, after all -- and my brother would routinely maintain unconsciousness for several hours after I'd given up the game. We reversed roles for a few years when I was in college and he was working the five-days-a-week gig, but it's starting to look like the tides may be turning yet again.

Now, in fairness, he does a shit ton more during his average day than I do in mine -- and, in fact, I suspect the mostly sedentary nature of my present lifestyle is attributing to my desire to constantly be going to sleep -- but this whole sleeping thing has me awfully fascinated as of late. Especially because, over the past week or so, I'd been sleeping very restlessly without having anything on my hand or hanging over my head -- as you'll recall from the previous post, I exorcised that demon last week -- and only in the past day or two has that remedied itself.

I even found myself in the strange position, last night, of doing something I'd successfully being able to only during the last six months or so: having a dream, waking myself from it, and being able to fall asleep again and resume it. I made this happen during the fall semester a few times, and during all of these episodes, I had convinced myself that part of the dream was the belief that I'd woken up and fallen back asleep, thus not disrupting the continuity. But when I was able to resume the dream twice in the same night, it was too creepy to write off. This particular accomplishment has me rather curious because we've all had those dreams that we wished wouldn't end, as well as those that seemed poised to reach a climax when they are interrupted by, say, the regrettable droning of the alarm clock in the morning. Does it make me [more] fucked up [than normal] that I can occasionally do this? Is there a non-crackpot psychological explanation for why I can do this in the first place?

I realize that I've gone on at length here about my sleeping habits, with little or no indication of direction or purpose. This is all very true. I was inspired to think about these things earlier today, during my office hours, when the girl sitting next to me in the library fell asleep three times during the two hours I was next to her.

There are a few caveats due here. Firstly, I do my office hours in the library's Humanities Reading Room, which is a very long room consisting of two rows of rather comfortable plush chairs and ottomans. This presents a problem at most hours of the day when seeking a seat, since at least half those chairs are occupied by oddly-contorted unconscious undergrads. No matter what time of day you go. Even if it's roughly an hour after most people have woken up -- because, seriously, who the fuck naps at 11:00am?

Now, I was in this room at 2:00pm, which is prime nap time, as far as I'm concerned. But this girl wasn't like many others who take out notebooks and sheets of paper as mere pretense for their dozing: those fakers can be found curled up with their jackets draped over them like blankets and the "work" they were doing stacked neatly on the small tables next to the chairs. No, these folks are all about show. The true passed-out workers are found in the same manner in which I found my collegiate colleague when I took the chair next to her: a book half in hand, half on the cushion, slumped over as if her neck were snapped, glasses and earbuds ever so slightly askew against her head. This was, doubtless, a girl who couldn't stay awake while reading.

(Which I found to be atrocious because, when she regained consciousness and her book moved, I could see she was reading Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories. And while I'll be the last to admit that any of my recreational pleasures are remotely near normal, I have to confess that being curled up in a plush chair with a Philip Roth novel would be downright heavenly.)

I found her asleep, I would leave her asleep. But twice during my tenure in the chair, she would awaken and resume her work -- a pattern that has astonished me all along. Because while my own productivity overall is neither admirable nor commendable, I wonder why this girl couldn't stay focused for long enough to get through a few stories.

I was forced to consider a few possibilities: that her sleep schedule was even more fucked up than my own, and she was fighting sleep as best she could to no avail; that she was simply managing her time poorly, something that I'm not good at either but that has improved over time; or, most likely of all, that I was simply being a curmudgeonly old fart who has forgotten already how good he had it as an undergrad.

And what freaked me out most of all was that, no matter which of these options I chose, they all pointed to the same general symptom: goddamn it, I'm getting old.

So that was what I learned today. I'm going to go back to trying to regain a little of my youth. By drinking Scotch, watching Food Network, and then going to bed...soon...

I'm too far gone already, aren't I?

Rejoining the Wagon

2008-03-22T13:34:00.007-04:00

My fine fellow Princetonian, Laura Sillers, whose blog Life of Soup I read regularly, recently won the Washington Post's second annual Peep diorama contest -- you can see her winning entry here -- and in giving her congratulations and catching up, we briefly discussed our respective blogs. I'd confessed to her, "I was starting to get a little worried...I put your blog on my page and then you didn't post for a while," something that's happened to almost every member of my little blogroll on the side of this page. She then reminded me, "Haha, I think you did the same when I put you on there." Touché.

I'll be the first to admit that my life isn't terribly exciting right now, and a great deal of the truly fascinating mental things that are going on in my mind aren't anywhere near fruition and, therefore, not particularly worth being brought up in a public forum. That, and the majority of most of my days, as I confessed to Laura, consist of the following sequence of events: "woke up today...went to class...read a bunch...wasn't productive enough...watched Food Network...went to bed." Enthralling shit, I know.

The most exciting thing that happened during my spring break, for instance, besides my tattoo, was the aforementioned power outage that left two days of very little action and even less consciousness. (Related side note: How the hell do the Amish do it?) The week did eventually give way to a lunch with an old teacher of mine, who is doing quite well in his quest for the Ph.D. he never got when he was younger; a trip to Princeton, to see some friends and make myself feel better about the fact that Princeton basketball really does suck more now than it did when I was an undergrad; and a few other small adventures to see people who were home that I hadn't seen in a while.

The one thing I didn't do while home was work with any kind of diligence. And that bit me in the ass come Friday, when I realized I still had a paper to finish from last semester that would, by Monday, have dire consequences if left unfinished.

A Brief History: Last semester, I took a class on science fiction that really interested me, but when it came time to the write the paper (on Coheed and Cambria), I got so caught up in it that it took on an overwhelming new life, becoming far more involved than I'd originally anticipated. I opted to defer my grade in order to have more time to spend on it, and have been working with little urgency since then as a result of not having a set deadline for its completion.

All of which was fine and dandy until I received an e-mail on Thursday, informing me that on Monday, all unresolved deferred grades without a professor's approval for extension would automatically become failures. Fuck.

So the race until Monday became tense, with me trying to get my thoughts coherent and well-developed while continuing to struggle with the same sense that I desperately needed something to give and let me get through this paper in one piece. It all culminated with an e-mail to the professor, asking if a paper turned into his mailbox on Monday morning would be there with enough time for me to receive a grade. Response: affirmative. All I had to do now was, you know, finish it by Monday.

And it cost me a lot of sleep, and probably a few years off the end of my life, but I got it done, and handed in on time. All was good in the proverbial 'hood, right?

Well...except for the fact that I, panicky bastard that I am, would not rest until I knew my grade was certain. So I checked every couple of hours, to no avail, until finally, at around 3:30, my weighty eyelids decided they'd been open long enough and it was time for the kind of nap I'd savored in a near-epicurean fashion during my undergraduate days. Off to bed I strolled, falling quickly asleep for about three hours.

I awoke to the always-entertaining sound of my upstairs neighbors fucking so vocally that I thought the girl must have been filming a (bad) porno flick. So much for more sleep.

Awake and somewhat refreshed, it was once more time to check my grade, which had, at last, been filled in. With an F.

The words that followed featured the words "fuck" or "shit" so many times that even I don't believe I could write them here enough times to do myself justice. I was upset, I was disappointed, I was confused, and I was freaking the hell out. The next few hours were spent trying to calm myself (a fun task, I assure you) as well as try to, as reasonably as possible, plot out the course of action necessary to ensure this didn't permanently blemish my graduate school record.

A few hours and lots of whimpering later, Danielle, in her infinite wisdom, decided I needed a drink and offered to pour me some conciliatory Scotch. I liked her thinking, and I'd really wanted a glass of Macallan 12 to celebrate the demise of the semester that had heretofore haunted me, but she suggested that perhaps I might have some Glenlivet 12 instead, and save the Macallan for when I'd actually settled this whole thing.

So she poured me some Glenlivet and, as the glass was placed before me, I decided to check the grade one last time. And it was a good thing I decided not to have some of the Scotch while I did so, because it would've ended up spewed across the screen -- a screen which now read "A."

I'm not really sure what happened, why it happened, or how it happened, but my grade was just entered late. So in the course of a few hours, I'd improved my grade from an F to an A, something I'm proud to say had never happened to me before -- but, in hindsight, I'm glad it happened at the particular moment it did, so that I didn't actually have to go groveling in the Grad School office begging them not to ruin the rest of my life by failing me.

So it was, in fact, all good in the 'hood.

The rest of the week, thankfully, has been uneventful. I'm back home for Easter weekend, and have no obligations nearly as impending as that to contend with this time around. Also, there's power here, which is great, as well as a few books that I'd been wanting to read for fun that I can actually peruse guilt-free -- at least for the time being. Unfortunately, the one thing home does not have is Scotch. But that's not such a travesty either.

Right after I saw the grade, I downed the Glenlivet and poured out the Macallan, just like I said I would.

Yup. All good.

When the Bug Bites...

2008-03-10T16:25:00.002-04:00

...you simply must answer the call. It's not the kind of thing that everyone experiences, but if you hear it, the best you can hope to do is put it off for a while. It never stops calling, it never gets quieter. And to resist is futile.

So on Friday I gave in and answered the call:

(Click it to see the full-size image.)

It's healing pretty well so far and looks really killer, so I couldn't be more excited.

Sometime in the next few days, I'll get back and blog a full, proper post. But because of the weather or some human calamity (or a combination of both), we've been without power for the better part of three days, and just got power back a few minutes ago after over 48 hours in the dark. How that happens in suburban New Jersey is beyond me, so I need some time to readjust to the world of the living and collect some thoughts that have more substance than "Fuck you, PSE&G."

When my head is clear and the shock of not having to pee in the dark wears off, I'll be back in full form.

In Shameless Adoration of Quadrennial Occurrences

2008-02-29T15:26:00.004-05:00

CAVEAT: There is no substance to this post.

Well, almost none. I had planned to write about a particular topic I overheard on the bus ride back to the car after class, but the discussion got me so riled up that I needed to listen to gloriously loud music to beat it out of my aching brain. Consequently, I don't remember exactly the salient points of my argument, so it will remain to be told another day when, perhaps, it causes me less agony.

But then I realized that my intended rant gave me an excuse to post something into my blog today -- that's today...you know, February 29th -- and it was not a great or unreasonable intuitive leap for me to realize that I was far more interested in the heading of the post reading "February 29, 2008" than I was in writing something that any of my two or three readers might actually give a fuck about.

Of course, I do have a cousin born on February 29th. One of those second cousins, twice- or thrice-removed or some shit. I'm not entirely sure about my relation to him, but I know for sure that you only need one major vein to get from my capillary to his, no matter how distant, so I can further justify this post by wishing Josh a happy birthday. And there it is.

Now I really am out of useful things to say. But then, to be perfectly honest, that really happened yesterday, around 8:30am, when I put the finishing touches on the brain drain of a paper that, you will recall, I bitched about several days ago. One down, one to go, and much more time available for me to complete it.

Given that time frame, and the general mushy consistency of my grey matter, I've been able to get away with spending this day in quiet solitude, doing nothing of importance except beginning to post books to my LibraryThing profile. Since I dig it so much, and often find that the Books application in my Facebook profile is my sole motivation for going on Facebook at all (even though it's gotten really buggy and crappy lately), I've decided to modify the template of this here blog a little and make a nice bibliophilistic display on the right side under the Ego heading.

You can use those fancy little widgets to search, see 12 random books of mine, or click the "Bibliophilistic" link to go directly to my catalog see all the books in My Library (which I hope I will be able to complete over spring break, so keeping looking for additions over the next two weeks). It's kind of on the narcissistic side, I know, but I love hearing from people who read good books and are willing to share them with me, so I hope this will help spur on the same kind of cooperation. And, of course, if you've got any good reads you think I should work on adding, feel free to comment and let me know, either here or on my LibraryThing profile.

Oh yes, and since I'm a whore for attention, friend me on LibraryThing if you're so inclined. As long as your library doesn't suck. Just kidding. (Kinda.)

Annnnnnnd, now I'm really done. Happy Leap Day!

Feeling Down About Keeping Up

2008-02-27T13:41:00.002-05:00

The Internet is an incredible thing. I mean, here I am, with lots of better things that I could be doing with my time, and instead of being responsible and productive, I'm bullshitting in a blog that no one reads because it gives me a sense of pride in putting my writing out there and, to a certain extent, perpetuates my deluded notion that I'm providing a way for people to keep up with me. This kind of thing just wasn't possible before some smart (and currently, very rich) folks realized the cyberpotential and put it to productive use.

Things like blogs and Facebook and e-mail and instant message have made it so easy for people to stay in touch and communicate, but at the same time I feel like it's having this strange impact on the kinds of relationships I'm able to maintain, and it actually depresses, rather than uplifts, me to think about all the people on my IM list and how few of them I actually maintain contact with.

I'm sure you've all been there, or are there right now. Go on, take a look. Whether it's AIM, Adium, Pidgin, iChat, or some other program, there's probably anywhere between 100-200 names over there. And of those, maybe upwards of 50-75 are actually online or posting an away message right now. But how many of them have you actually held real conversations with in the past, oh, six months? My count is depressingly low -- I'm currently trying my damnedest to sneak it up into double-figures.

I've always been the kind of person who's counted more on small quantities of really close friends than large groups of friendly acquaintances. Some people like to roll the other way, and I respect that decision. For me, it's been about having a few people that you know always have your back, being able to turn to them and know that they'll be there to support you. Otherwise, really, what are friends for? I would expect to be held to that kind of standard as a friend, too, and I'd be more than willing to stick my neck out for anyone close to me who might need it.

Because of this, I've reflected a lot over the past few years about how going to college changes the relationships game. All of a sudden, people that you were extremely close to become devastatingly distant: questions your parents ask you about how they're doing are suddenly a challenge to accurately answer. And all the while you sit and wonder to yourself, Well, shit, when did that happen?

And you would think that the Internet would solve this problem, that you'd be so much more inclined to keep up with people if you saw their names on your buddy list every day. But instead, we (or perhaps just the royal we, what do I know?) look at away messages as judges of mindset. We follow what our buddies are up to by what they say they're doing, where they are, what movie quotes and song lyrics appear in their profiles. We have at our disposal the potential for incredible lines of communication but, just like we do when people become too distant in location, time, and memory to call them, we let them fall by the wayside.

I always thought, personally, it had to do with the phone. I don't like the phone. Something about it has always made me feel terribly vulnerable, but only when calling. I love receiving phone calls but I always feel horribly awkward making them, as if I'm intruding on someone's day by ringing them up. I panic about how they'll perceive the call, and try to predict how stupid I'll feel if the call doesn't go well, if we don't speak to each other again for weeks, months, or years, if my telephonic olive branch falls to the ground and toasts in the sun. It's probably a very silly thing, but I'm super-conscious of how I'm perceived when I put myself out there, and I always have.

But now, IMs and e-mails have taken over the same sort of category. I've got a list of a few people -- some friends, some professors, etc. -- that I've been meaning to keep in touch with, whose e-mail addresses and screen names (if applicable) I've kept around just so that I could reestablish contact with them if I suddenly craved hearing from them. And yet, like that dreaded phone call, I'm terribly worried about what happens after I click "Send." What if they don't write back? What if they get it but think I'm a loser/nut/stalker/worse because I've got nothing better to do than try to catch up with them? What if they're pissed because it's been so long and they wonder why the fuck I chose now of all times to reopen the lines of communication?

I seriously think it's a sickness, but I can't be the only one who thinks these things, can I?

I mean, if it really were that easy, we wouldn't fall out of touch in the first place. And sure, people's lives change and they move on and grow in different directions and sometimes the truly magical things that brought you together in the first place end up being insignificant trifles that fell by the wayside long ago but you were too lost in the moment to notice they were gone until now. I totally appreciate and understand that. But I still wonder why it's so hard, in the self-proclaimed Age of Communication, to, well, communicate.

I've got half a mind to send out a few e-mails now and see what people are up to, just because. Sure, I'll sit and wait and wonder what they think of me, and I'll probably freak out every second that goes by without a reply. But at the end of the day, I can sit back and enjoy the delusion that maybe they've read this post and understood that it applies to them and that they get that I'm actually interested in knowing how they've been doing.

But since I understand the nature of that delusion, perhaps it's better to just say it in the e-mail itself. Not only would it be more direct, and have a more guaranteed effect, but it might just be the beginning of breaking down these barriers between our desires to know how the people we care about are doing and our fears of what they may think of us now. Who knows? Maybe they'll be just as excited to hear from you as you'll be when(/if?) they send a reply. Now that would be communication at work.

Nobody's Fault But Mine

2008-02-26T12:20:00.002-05:00

It's frustrating when you can't seem to get things done in a timely manner. It's even more frustrating when you realize you've got nothing to blame but your own lazy ass. Which puts me in my current predicament: I'm supposed to be working on a paper, but I've been sidetracked, and now I'm writing a blog entry that no one will read purportedly as a catharsis for my lack of creativity and motivation.

I've had these things hanging over my head for some time now, I know. And while I tend to operate pretty well under pressure, it seems that these papers just aren't going nearly as smoothly as one might expect, particularly given my previous track record. ("Fastest Thesis in the West," anyone? Thank you, Jeff Bagdis, for my favorite recent moniker.) I haven't quite determined if it's a self-consciousness issue, or a moment of self-doubt, or a silly case of not feeling like what I do is going to live up to standards I'm not even sure of yet. Whatever it is, it's totally fucking up my mojo and threatening to turn the next two weeks in a muddled morass of monotony and misery.

I knew from the start that the end of February was going to be problematic, and it has been, but again, it's all my own fault. If I'd been more diligent in the reading of this one particular text, I would have realized that the work would have solved a great many of the problems I've had in conceiving my issue and that it would make the writing of this paper much easier than I had anticipated. Of course, I've also had my doubts that the topic I planned to discuss would actually fill at least 20 pages, but it sure seems like that's a more reasonable expectation now -- it helps, too, that when you realize you can break a paper down into smaller segments, and that those segments can easily fit a 5-6 page requirement, you're good as gold.

I know too that part of it is the sense of transformation I'm attempting to instill in my English 015 students: not only does high school writing not really cut it as college writing, neither does undergraduate writing really cut it as graduate writing (or, as it should more appropriately be called, pre-professional writing, with the prefix pre- interpreted in the very loosest sense). And I can't help but feel that, at least in the case of the paper on The Dress Lodger, I'm doing nothing more than writing a glorified undergraduate paper. And sure, I remember not learning all the ins and outs of college writing in my first semester at Princeton -- Professor Kim received a great number of indirect diatribes, none of which I ever told to her face, of course -- but there's a whole lot of pressure to professionalize pretty quickly and it doesn't help when your first work reeks inexcusably of what you "used to do," not what you're "supposed to do."

Granted, Paul and Lisa are about as cool as one could expect from professor types, particularly those with whom you're fraternizing in your first semester. I know they both know I work hard, that I'm capable of good things, and that I'm just a lowly first year -- and that all of this will be taken into account when the dreaded grading happens. But I also feel like I owe them something better than they're expecting, something that will really wow them and convince them that I'm not just another first year. And I guess it's fair to say that my primary fear at this point is that that's all I'll end up being.

Which, I stupidly realize, predicts that I won't gain anything from this whole experience, which is a total fallacy. I know I'm supposed to learn and improve and that I'm not going to be the best right now and that nobody has the kinds of expectations for my work that I have and...well...

Yeah, it sounds pretty fucking stupid, doesn't it?

Which leaves me with little left to blog about and a substantial amount of other writing to do. And as counterproductive as it may end up being, I have to admit that, by this point, I've resigned myself to the fact that I've got a fairly 50/50 odds in terms of grades, and that it's just a matter of sitting down and getting it done, which is something I've been able to do with fair success before.

So enough dissecting my mindset. Time to go work on that paper about dissection, and hope that I fare better than the corpses of which I write.

The Folderol of Flawlessness

2008-02-23T11:03:00.002-05:00

I'm starting to get really tired of sports. And that's not only because I generally despise this time of year, which is, in my opinion, a wasteland: football is gone, baseball hasn't started up yet, hockey is grinding along but is not quite center stage, and the focus is on the NBA and college basketball (neither of which can save basketball from the sad truth that it's a dull, boring sport).

It's bad enough that golf highlights are the pinnacle of my SportsCenter experience on February mornings -- the bastards and their warm weather... -- but for two consecutive seasons, we have been immersed in two radically diametric threads of discussion, and it's possible that I may be the first one to put the two together and draw them out to their logical conclusion.

Unless you've lived under a rock for the past six months or detest the NFL so much that you can ignore it through its omnipresent season, you may have remembered a little team called the New England Patriots, and how from very early in the season (I want to say it started around Week 5), talk amongst sports aficionados -- or at least those they'll allow on television -- was that this could be the first perfect season since the 1972 Miami Dolphins went 17-0 and won Super Bowl VII.

Notwithstanding the fact that, at that point, it was Week 5. Or that there were still two other teams with 5-0 records. The Patriots were adorned with the title of potential perfection -- aww hell, fuck "potential." As the season wore on, there was the occasional grumbling about when they'd trip up, but few if any genuinely believed they would. (As a point of reference, look up how many articles declared the Patriots Super Bowl Champions after the end of the AFC Championship game; there are more than you think there are.) Even when the two remaining undefeateds met, New England at Indianapolis in Week 9, the fact that it was the Colts whose bid at perfection was ended did not surprise too many people. (And who actually gave a crap that the Cowboys too suffered their first loss that day?)

The truth that New England was showing great weakness and beatability around the halfway point of the regular season? Brushed under the table. The magnitude of "Spygate" and its related allegations? Water under the bridge. It wasn't even about football anymore, it was about destiny, as if somehow, the anointed Patriots deserved, from Week 5, to win it all more than anyone else because they had the potential to be flawless.

But as we know, in the end, they were not perfect. They only lost one game. The one game that mattered. The Super Bowl. And as much as I may despise the New England Patriots, and as much as I may love that my Giants are Super Bowl Champions, you have to give them just a little bit of credit, because 18-1 is a pretty damn impressive mark to reach.

It's that 1 that's ruined everyone. The 1 that got away. The 1 that, according to many, would have justified it all. And this is where I begin to take issue. Sure, anyone in professional sports who tells you that winning isn't everything is feeding you a years-old pile of horseshit, and most of us know that. But think of how the expectations for the Patriots have changed: a Super Bowl will no longer be enough. It will have to be perfect.

We as a culture obsess so much about perfection, and the sports writers across this fine land fed into that obsession in the worst way over the NFL season. It was all about being perfect and winning and nothing else. Consider what happened during the college football season, a season in which near-perfection is the only way to reach the National Championship -- a truth that should, on its own, show the inadequacy of the BCS system as a college football playoff. The only team that went to its bowl game undefeated was Hawaii -- #10 Hawaii. Ranked at #10 because a computer didn't think their perfection was impressive enough, that they didn't play hard enough teams, that they didn't really earn it.

And now we are just hours away from college basketball's game of the year, #1 Memphis vs. #2 Tennessee, with Memphis sitting at 25-0, looking to defend perfection while all around them the media dares to believe and expect that they will see it happen. The players even filmed a montage before a feature on SportsCenter this morning in which they must have said "perfect" at least ten times. Do you honestly mean to tell me that if they don't win, if perfection becomes tainted, these kids will feel nearly as tall as they do now, unscatched, unblemished, untainted? (If you need a hint, start searching for articles on the Patriots written after February 4, 2008. The answer will become quickly obvious.)

The obsession over perfection on its own wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that the other top sports story is the Senate hearings on baseball's steroids scandal. A bunch of highly-paid men, earning their paychecks by playing a game, forced to either own up to having cheated or perjure themselves in front of Congress in defense of their good names. It's an absolute travesty, for sure, but is anybody seeing the connection that I'm seeing here?

On one hand, players are doping themselves stupid to give themselves the utmost competitive edge. On the other hand, the possibility of perfection in sports is cause for compulsive celebration in the hands of the media.

Umm...duh?

Does anybody not see that perhaps athletes dope because we expect perfection from them? That cheating, whether through performance enhancers or illegal videotaping, is done so that some one or some team may be able to reach the pinnacle of perfection and receive the endless accolades of an adoring legion of fans back home? And if this is all so obvious, why isn't it equally obvious that kids in college and even in high school do the same kinds of things, adopt the same dubious standards of good sportsmanship, because the expectation isn't just to win, it's to win all the time, every time?

We're blind to that kind of impact, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. There's painfully little differentiation between the crazed Little League parent's rant that my-little-Johnny-is-the-best-and-should-play-all-six innings-of-every-game-and-what-do-you-know-you-stupid-ignorant-coach and the staggering expectations of New England's pursuit of perfection.

We all agree that steroids and cheating aren't right, but perpetuate their presence because we believe it's the sport or the rules that need to change, and not our perceptions.

And in that regard, our perceptions couldn't be any farther from perfect.

No Country for Inconsistent Authors

2008-02-11T22:37:00.000-05:00

Let's not mince words with some flashy introduction this time around -- mostly because I want to get back to reading the book I'm going to bitch about in this post. I'll be a good little student-writer and put my thesis right up front: I'd like to rant briefly on the inconsistency of talented authors to be able to write good books.

My case study is Cormac McCarthy. I have no doubt that Cormac McCarthy is a talented author, and anyone who does need only consider his winning of the National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses (before you ask, yes, the same one they recently made into a movie; that issue will come up again shortly, so don't say I didn't warn you) or even the virtually unanimous praise he's received for his well-known Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West (which Wikipedia tells me is among the greatest novels written in the 20th Century -- and if it's on the Internet, it has to be true!).

McCarthy fans, however, will notice I've made one glaring omission in the list of his honors, and the reason I haven't mentioned it yet is that it is the crux of my argument. I know Cormac McCarthy is a talented author, and because of this I've been tempted on many occasions to read his books. So it's not surprising that I recently found myself staring at a shelf full of Cormac McCarthy novels wondering which one I should start with.

And after great consideration, I decided to go with what seemed like a slam-dunk choice: his most recent novel, The Road, which was not only an Oprah's Book Club selection but was also the recipient of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. My English-dork brain was all a-flutter looking at the pretty foil-stamped medal on the trade paperback cover. Ooh, I've read Pulitzer winners before! To Kill a Mockingbird ... American Pastoral ... Middlesex ... they were all so good! And that doesn't even include Beloved or The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, both of which I own and am just itching to read! How can I go wrong?

Here's how: in plain English, The Road sucks.

With all due respect to Mr. McCarthy, and to the legions of readers who have bestowed heaps of praise upon this book -- and trust me, there are plenty: it's practically impossible to find even a partly-negative review that wasn't posted to Amazon by some 12-year-old who could manage anything more insightful than "dis shit iz teh SUX0RS frrlz" -- I simply couldn't wait to finish this book so that I would never have to pick it up again.

The language, while beautiful in spurts, is somewhat repetitive, and only gets worse as the novel progresses. The two main characters are almost totally flat and not particularly interesting because they don't develop meaningfully (in fact, when something interesting does happen, at the end, it is almost devoid of emotional impact because it too is portrayed flatly). The dialogue, by and large, is even more repetitive, often consisting of back-and-forth exchanges of the exact same lines which end up feeling emotionless, stilted, and unnatural to the point of feeling almost scripted.

Oh, and one more thing: NOTHING HAPPENS. The plot meanders on for 287 chapterless pages, with painfully little rising action save for a few interesting and/or grotesque scenes and some confusing, unexplained flashbacks that are never resolved. Not even the final few paragraphs, which should be profound but end up feeling too detached and ethereal, don't save anything. Like I said before, by that point, I was just glad to put the book down.

I don't give up on books, especially not ones I've bought. And it pretty much took everything I had to not give up on The Road.

So I was pretty bummed about this. Especially given all the really incredible stuff I'd read about his writing, much of which came around the same time that a great deal of admiration was being lavished upon the Coen brothers for their film adaptation of the novel he wrote before The Road, a little book called No Country for Old Men. I was feeling betrayed and hurt, not ready to dive back into McCarthy's fray.

But sure enough, after a few days at home itching for some new fiction to read -- and having plowed through Mark Haddon's excellent novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time -- I couldn't resist the lure of that shiny red cover. I gave in and bought it. Then put off opening the book for a couple of days. But alas, I could hold off no longer. I put Cormac McCarthy on notice: you've got one last shot to wow me, sir. Don't make me regret it.

Boy, did I eat my words.

From page 5, No Country for Old Men leaped off the page, grabbed me by the throat, and hauled me in. I didn't think the action of the first chapter could possibly be matched, but the body count kept climbing. And just when the killing spree started slowing down, I realized that the suspense being built by the novel was overwhelming and intense, masterful even. And it sure doesn't hurt that Anton Chigurh may just be the most realistically horrifying villain ever committed to the printed page. Seriously. I'm glad it's fiction, because the man is evil fucking incarnate.

I'm now within a hundred pages of the end. The suspense is killing me, and I have to finish typing this so I can get back to the story and find out what happens in the last few chapters. It's that good. In fact, it's as good (if not better) than I was expecting a Cormac McCarthy novel to be.

So why is it that authors can't be that good all the time? Why does topical, self-indulgent crap like The Road end up being universally (and, in my opinion, undeservedly) praised when great works like No Country for Old Men show the same author at the height of his talents and skills, a writer in the motherfucking zone? Why couldn't Oprah command all the housewives in America to read a novel with a body count rivaling that of a John Woo film, instead of dull postapocalyptic drivel?

And why didn't someone (like an editor, perhaps?) insist to Mr. McCarthy to keep writing books in the fast-paced, edgy style that embodies No Country for Old Men? Because I'll go on record here: I may have hated The Road, but on the awesomeness of No Country for Old Men, I'll be making it a point to read all of Cormac McCarthy's previous works in the near future. And if he writes more novels in the same vein as this blood-soaked drama, I'll be sure to be first in line at the bookstore to pick it up and power my way through the prose.

That is, of course, after I actually finish this one.

Which reminds me.

Dispatching the Lead Balloon

2008-02-06T14:47:00.000-05:00

I say that because it appears that last post went over like one. (At least based on the lack of commentage -- I don't use counters or anything like that because I don't care enough about this to care about how many people actually look the blog, and yet, paradoxically, I do care how many people have something meaningful to say about what I write. Hmm...)

I'm kind of at a loss for where to go with this post because my last one was a hastily-assembled mélange of disparate ideas. Ultimately, this one will likely be organized no better. Which is fine by me because -- here I go reaching for a metaphor again -- the current state of my life is a huge mess of things that should, in my view, have some meaningful connection but don't.

For one thing, I'm going home this weekend and hoping to find more success at my productivity than I've been finding lately. To say that so bluntly isn't terribly fair to me, but I refuse to give myself the benefit of the doubt about this (though, I've been thinking, perhaps that's my problem). In terms of reading and the work associated with my classes this semester, I'm right about where I'd like to be: caught up in two classes, ahead in one, and ever so slightly behind on the last. On average, I'm up to date. But I'm still behind on the stuff I was finishing up last semester, and for the life of me I can't seem to stir up the goddamn motivation to sit down and just pound those fuckers out. I tell myself that I care so much about them, and maybe it's that I care too much about them that's keeping me from sealing the deal.

One might argue, at this point, that I'm stressing myself out too much and need to take a break. To that I say: one day ahead of you. Yesterday, for no good reason other than the fact that a working clock was not within my line of sight, I sat down on the futon and, instead of reading my Chaucer like a good boy, I picked up the old Classic Controller, turned on the Wii, and started playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. I'd successfully completed both the original Legend of Zelda -- in two hours and nineteen minutes (and amassing 100% items), a time I will use as my benchmark for future completeness runs -- and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, the oft-maligned but underrated NES sequel (which is, I should add, significantly more challenging), and felt that moving on to the SNES game was the right move.

So I started playing. And stopped almost ten hours later. (Somewhere in South Bend, I fear that Charles, for several years at Princeton my patron saint of productivity, is having a coronary event right now.)

And no, I'm not going to apologize for that, even though I'm still slightly behind on my Chaucer reading (and class is in 35 minutes). Because it was fun. For one day, I didn't give a fuck about deadlines and requirements and what-not because I didn't have to, and it felt wonderful.

Except that, like excessive intoxication, the hangover's always a bitch. I've spent lots of today simply regretting it, for no perceptible reason other than my slavish mental devotion to the ideal that one must do something productive every day save Saturday and Sunday -- which I'm beginning more and more to think is bullshit, by the by. Maybe I also feel a bit guilty that I can be that obsessively devoted to a video game, or to the many pleasure books I've read so far this semester, but can't find it in myself to devote a similar level of energy to some of my work.

Or maybe it's that I'm struggling to find some kind, any kind, of common ground between the two. Frankly, I'm getting really sick of the belief that I have to be two separate people: the responsible, hard-working graduate student by day; the laid-back, hanging-out, fun-loving guy by night. Why am I stuck in that rut where I think I should be more one than the other, where I feel like I'm not being serious enough and that that's a bad thing?

Don't get me wrong. I pissed away my Sunday playing poker and then watching the G-men totally bend Tom Brady, Bill Belichick, and the rest of the Patriots over and fuck the "perfect season" right up their collective asses and didn't regret it at all. Especially not when the Giants won. And, you know, ruined perfection. Like I knew they would weeks ago. Because the Patriots have been beatable since the Ravens debacle. And they got beaten. Badly. And left Tom Brady's pretty face subject to shit like this:

But I digress. No regrets. None at all.

I didn't even regret taking an hour and a quarter of my life and devote it to listening to the new Mars Volta disc The Bedlam in Goliath last week, like I promised myself I would. I regretted it even less when I discovered it was a funky, heavy, ass-kicking album that delivers the goods every which way but sideways and leaves you beginning for more. (Did I mention I really, really like this album?)

So why all of a sudden do I regret not taking care of other things when I was doing these things, which I very much enjoy? And will it all start going away once I, for better or worse, get my shit together and actually finish the things I've been meaning to? Because the last thing I want to end up doing is perpetuating a pattern of regret and obligation where I'm miserable working on a project and satisfied only when it's been completed. Isn't the joy supposed to be more in the journey than the destination? If so, why is that not working out for me?

So perhaps this initially random rant has congealed around an actual core problem, something that will involve more soul-searching and self-examination to unearth. The only problem with that is: with so much still on my plate, when will I have the time to do that thinking without the threat of impending remorse?

Oh, the movie never ends; it goes on and on and on and on...

How to Humble Yourself in Just a Few Easy Steps!

2008-01-30T20:42:00.000-05:00

Have too many things been going right for you in a consecutive stretch of time? Are you dreading with dire anticipation the uppance bound to come? Are you still hungover from your tenure at a highly exclusive private university and find you are still so naturally snobby that you can't help but think you need to get knocked down a peg or two?

If any or many of these apply to you, read on and see how yours truly, who had begun to fancy himself pretty good at this life thing in the past week or so, experienced several surprises, twists of fate, and ego checks that have left him so affected that he's found himself unable to find any useful or coherent way to tie these events together -- because really, how can one live without a telos? -- except to use this cheap and not-so-accurate device. Shall we?

1) Talk excessively about how excited you are about seeing a movie, adamantly refuse to see it on account of presuming it will frighten you, then get the courage to go see it with a friend...who quickly comments that it was no big deal.

Okay, I'm the king of oversimplifications here -- a pattern you'll notice repeating itself throughout this tenuously-coherent post -- but after anticipating for some time (and also after reading several summaries of the film's plot [and successfully seeking out an animated .gif of the monster itself {yup I'm that vain...and yup, I did it again}]), I finally saw Cloverfield.

And, of course, I brought Christi with me, since she's the resident fanatic of scary-type films, not to mention the least likely to mock me mercilessly if I got too frightened.

In the end, I thought the film had its share of Davie-no-likey moments (the sequence in the subway, for instance, was an unpleasant few minutes, to be sure), but it kept me on the edge of my seat throughout, even though I knew what was coming. Seemed to me like a real winner.

Until the film ended. And Christi and I started talking.

Firstly, I want to make it perfectly clear that my own opinion on the film was not swayed in any way by Christi's immediate post-film utterance ("Oh, thank God"). I stand by my assertion that it's a 75-minute edge-of-your-seat thrill ride that, for the most part, doesn't really let up in the excitement department.

The problem is, the film doesn't exactly hold up to scrupulous analysis. Like not at all. In fact, the more I think about it, the more hard-pressed I find myself to recommend it. At the end of the day, Cloverfield works best (and, in fact, may work only) as mindless entertainment experienced with as little prior knowledge as possible. Which, unfortunately, means that unless you're an obsessive J.J. Abrams fanboy, you're not likely to find yourself watching this over and over again when it comes out on DVD.

Which means, in a couple of ways, I had to eat my words on this one. Strike one.

2) Read through stacks of pleasure books that you have no business reading all while attempting at all costs to (unsuccessfully) avoid the professor for whom you still have work due.

Okay, so maybe you're not all in the same situation as I am, forced to submit papers late because your attempts to hastily construct worthwhile arguments failed the I-can-do-this-over-Christmas-break test. But when you've got these kinds of responsibilities on your head, you probably have no business buying a bunch of books that have no redeeming value to your education, no matter how awesome Vladimir Nabokov and Philip Roth may be.

Nonetheless, the call of the Barnes & Noble -- particularly one conveniently situated in the student center in which one is spending the hour before one's next class, which comprises the final four hours of what has already been, to this point a nine-hour-long day -- proved too strong to resist. Of course, I was driven partly by altruism: it was the only store in the area that carried the mass-market paperback edition of Pat Conroy's The Prince of Tides, the book Danielle's been wanting to read as of late. And when you're me, and you're buying a book from a bookstore, you simply can't resist leaving until you've acquired one for yourself.

Which is how Cormac McCarthy's The Road ended up on the list of fun books for me to read.

Now don't you give me that look! I know it was a former Oprah's Book Club pick, but it's a fucking Pulitzer Prize winner, for God's sake! Hell, if she can take three Faulkner books off the market of Books That Can Be Read By People Who Value Their Penises, I'm allowed a pass here and there too.

Which brings me to...

3) Refuse for weeks and weeks to buy a novel written by your former professor on account of it being in hardcover and thereby too expensive...then give in and buy it when you find it in the bargain bin.

Let me preface this by saying that I mean no disrespect to Sophie Gee. She's a great professor, I loved both of the classes of hers that I took while at Princeton (an opinion not swayed at all by the Pre-Pre-Pre-Pre-Party that took place one fateful November morning), and I'm sure she's a very talented writer of historical fiction. But unless a book is so unbelievably good that I can't wait for the paperback, or it's in the bargain section of the Barnes & Noble, I'll take a trade paperback, thank you.
Permission for a brief digression. Can we not agree on the unequivocal superiority of the trade paperback to all other forms of book? Hardcovers look pretty, sure, but it's awkward to have to deal with the jacket and still keep it pretty-looking. And the mass-market paperback is of shoddy construction, printed on shoddy paper, and just begs to be abused. Books demand respect. That's why I demand the trade paperback, and so should you.
So despite the fact that I refuse to buy the newest book by Chuck Palahniuk (the one contemporary author whose books I will pick up as soon as humanly possible) until it comes out in paperback, I was tempted when I saw Professor Gee's novel, The Scandal of the Season, in hardcover at my local B&N over winter break. It seemed fascinating (it's a historical fiction narrative that concerns the writing of the great Alexander Pope poem, "The Rape of the Lock"), but for $24.00, I simply couldn't. Professor Gee would have to wait until paperback for the miniscule residuals she'd make off my purchase of her book.

But then something strange happened. I was walking through the Barnes & Noble just a few weeks after first seeing the book, and I found it unceremoniously discarded to the bargain table. So naturally, I gave it another look. $6.98 seemed much more reasonable (and is, in truth, far cheaper than the average trade paperback), but, anal-retentive bibliophile that I am, I simply couldn't spend the money on a book whose jacket had been folded, torn, and bent in such unpleasant ways. Sorry, Professor Gee, but I just can't.

I had cast the book to the back of my mind when, on a recent trip to yet another Barnes & Noble (have you noticed I like books?), I found it again. In another bargain section. This time for three dollars and ninety-eight cents. This time, I took pause. Less than four dollars is a seriously good deal for a hardcover. Especially when my B&N member discount would bring the total to $3.58. All I needed to do was find one with a jacket in pristine condition, to my excessively exacting standards.

And goddamn it, I found one. So, of course, I ate my words (again) and bought the fucking book. For about three-and-a-half bucks.

Professor Gee will make almost no money off my purchase, sadly, but I get the sense that a Princeton professor is probably doing pretty okay on her salary. And would likely get more value out of knowing that a former student enjoyed her work. And, naturally, should I enjoy the book, I'll absolutely pass that along to her.

I really wish any narrative threads associated with this book ended here, but sadly it doesn't. Next on my unfortunate list...

4) Get hopelessly pwn3d when your girlfriend, who has never read "The Rape of the Lock," grossly mistakes its subject matter.

First of all, this is really not as bad as you think it's going to be. She didn't mistake that word. It was the L-word she got caught up on.

See, she didn't know it was a great satirical poem that not only criticizes the triviality of a family feud that stems from the unwelcome snipping of a lock of hair but also lampoons common poetical conventions of the time. Nor did she realize it was the source of the quote, made famous by its appearance on the Genus Edition box of Trivial Pursuit, "What mighty Contests rise from trivial Things." No, no. She had no idea.

So when she verbally assailed my purchase of The Scandal of the Season saying, "I had no idea you were so interested in shipping," I was understandably confused. It took me a minute or so to put the pieces of all of it together.

(You may want to take a minute, at this time, to try and figure it out yourself before I reveal it below.)

She had interpreted "lock" not as pieces of hair, or even as a security device constructed by, say, the Master company. No, she'd heard "lock" and thought of the kind of lock that appears in the Panama Canal. And, running with this thought, she presumed the poem must concern some robbery or misappropriation occurring on the Canal. Which, naturally, must mean the book and its source poem must concern shipping, and why the fuck would I give a shit about any of that?

First I laughed. Then I cried. Huge, wailing, baby tears. In fact, I still well up thinking about it.

So there you have it! Four foolproof ways to put yourself back in your place, if you find you've been overstepping your bounds a bit.

Of course, if you find the humiliation to be too overwhelming, you can at least take solace in the fact that, even through all this, sometimes things do go right. Even if those good things have been unexpectedly delayed by about three months. And you know that can only mean one thing...

Time to go listen to the new Volta!

On 1-18-08, 2-3-08, and All Points in Between

2008-01-21T00:38:00.000-05:00

I had originally planned to open this post with a brief (and probably uninteresting) digression about how, whenever I delay posting for any short but appreciable length of time -- say, a few days -- I inevitably end up with far more to write about than I originally intended and, as a result, end up not with focused posts but melanges of casual observations and recent anecdotes.

Then, as I tried to think up my (usually unsuccessfully) witty title, I realized that I'd ended said title with a preposition. Which reminds me of perhaps one of the funniest exchanges ever shared by another person. Let's go back there, shall we?

The time is Summer 2007. Ruben Pope, my illustrious former roommate, is spending the summer in Princeton working at A Little Taste of Cuba, his beloved cigar shop, and doing undisclosed research at the Firestone Library. During one such trip, he approaches a gentleman working there and asks about the location of a book that's he's seeking, saying to the gentleman, "Where's this book at?"

The gentleman, clearly either miffed, smarmy, or generally displeased with his lot in life, looks disdainfully at Ruben and replies, "You know, if you go to Princeton, you should know that it's improper to end your sentences with a preposition."

At which point the ever-industrious Mr. Pope, thinking with a quickness as yet unseen in his collegiate academic pursuits, considers the comment for a moment and replies, "Where's this book at...

[beat]

"...Fucker?"

And...scene.

And this is why, despite all I may say when confronted with unfiltered, uncensored memories, I do miss the company of Ruben Pope.

Moving on.

So, if you spend any time at all in the online realm, you're familiar with a little movie called Cloverfield. Several people on a message board I frequent have been following this film since the first then-untitled trailer was screened before Transformers back in July. For the past six months, the film has been hyped not in traditional media outlets but through a viral marketing campaign that has built an exhaustive back story on teh Intarwebs.

Now that everyone's up to speed, it's time to start wondering (rightly so) why I would care. After all, one look at the trailer or the official website would make it perfectly clear that this is A MONSTER MOVIE. Which probably also means it's A SCARY MOVIE. And Dave does neither of these things.

Okay, maybe that's not entirely true. But as a certifiably ginormous pussy, neither of these are really in my field of typical immersion. The last time I indulged myself in a monster film was the abhorrent 1998 Godzilla, and the scariest thing about that flick was Matthew Broderick's misguided belief that it would reinvigorate his movie career. As for horror, I was able to sit (willingly, in fact) through both Saw and Saw II, the former because of the influence of online marketing and the latter because I, like so many other fans, thought it might actually be similar to the first one and not become merely an exercise in how gorily one could depict various demises. (As you may have noticed, I do not include Saw III or Saw IV in this list -- guess I was wrong about that please-be-more-than-just-torture-porn thing.) And over the years, a few flicks that some might consider horror films (the works of M. Night Shyamalan, for instance) have also ranked among my favorites.

But the fact is that I avoid horror films because I'm afraid of getting scared. It all stems back to fourth grade when I, the curious but naïve soul that I was, decided to watch the ABC miniseries The Langoliers, based on a Stephen King novella. At the time, I thought I was being really brave by watching something that I figured would scare me, but I was intrigued and wondered how bad it could possibly be. Then, without ever having seen the end of either of the two parts, I learned very quickly the first lesson of proper evil-creature horror films: withholding the sight of the monsters as long as possible makes the film scarier because the viewer's imagination has to fill in, and they'll picture something far more frightening than anything you could put on screen.

Son of a bitch, were they right.

I spent roughly the next two weeks having trouble sleeping, constantly checking under my bed and behind the closet doors for any semblance of what I figured were ghastly, horrific, demonic creatures. (After all, they moved lightning-quick and devoured you whole...gotta get them before they get you, right?) It wasn't until years later, watching the miniseries rerun on the Sci-Fi Channel, that I actually saw the Langoliers and put my nightmarish imagination to rest. Granted, if I'd known at nine years old that what I was fearing was essentially a flying meatball with a Mickey Mouse-shaped mouth and teeth that rotated around said mouth like a chainsaw -- all of which was rendered in typically cheesy circa-1994 television special effects -- it probably would have still fueled my nightmares. But seeing it so far down the line was mostly laughable.

Yet the damage was done, and I'd branded myself a horror-film sissy. So why did my fascination with horror continue? And why did I, even after insisting that I wanted nothing to do with it, even consider seeing Cloverfield? Better yet, why do I still do? Even reading through online spoilers (including an exhaustive and ultimately successful search for an image of the monster), I still want to actually experience this film. For reasons that boggle my mind, especially as I read through the reviews.

See, I thought the online marketing angle was pretty nifty, but from the start I was skeptical of a few things -- most potently, I wondered how a barely-90-minute film, consisting almost exclusively of "found footage" taken by the people on the ground at the moment of the attack, could manage to include the elaborate back story constructed online. What I've learned is...it doesn't. There's no reasoning or explanation to be had in the film, and this frustrates me for a number of reasons, but for one especially strong one above all.

I wrote a seminar paper last semester on Coheed and Cambria, and how the unfolding of the story across multiple media could contribute to new literacies and engage new potentialities in storytelling. That description may seem like a bullshit pose to explain away writing a paper on a rock band, but I do truly believe in the potentialities that are being examined by the band. And when you see a marketing campaign like the one behind Cloverfield, you can't help but think that this is a game-changing, market-breaking new wave in storytelling.

But it's not. It's not because the Coheed and Cambria story relies on multiple media in order to tell its complete story. Cloverfield, on the other hand, limits its story to what appears on the screen, with the marketing behind it being only a mythology. It's not so important where the monster came from or why it's attacking New York or what will happen after the credits roll -- that's not the story. The story is about the people and what appears on the tape. To me, that's cheating the diligent thinker out of the time invested in the story developing in the online world, a story that seems far more interesting and in-depth than a simple oh-no-it's-coming-run-for-your-lives monster flick. This seemed like a brilliant opportunity for moviemaking to move beyond the silver screen, but instead it's only innovative in a technical sense. Why does the film itself have to separate itself so distinctly from the truly fascinating storytelling it was engaging in through the alternate media? Why couldn't it have played into what we learned online, instead of being so limited and so liminal?

Granted, I still haven't seen Cloverfield. And I'm still debating whether or not I want to. But what I see happening here is that the film will create a desire only for plot revelations and images of the monster. And once those two are satiated, I doubt many people will share my enthusiasm for wanting to immerse themselves in this experience, an experience that may be new but is far from being truly groundbreaking.

I sigh, heartily.

But then I remember that the New York Giants have, somehow, against all odds, made their way into Super Bowl XLII. And I think about Eli Manning and how desperately he must be looking for redemption after the Giants' incredible Week 17 performance. I think about how sick and tired I am (and most of the people I know are) of New England (read: Boston) succeeding in pretty much every sport. I think about how due that pompous fuck Tom Brady is for a fall, and about how everyone is already predicting that the Patriots will coast to victory, and how no one will suspect the Giants to be able to do much of anything in two weeks.

And I think about how utterly dangerous that makes the Giants. And how primed it makes them to be the ones to take down the Patriot machine.

And I think it's going to be a hell of a game, and a long two weeks waiting for it to be played.

I Never Said WHEN They'd Follow...

2008-01-17T23:18:00.000-05:00

The new year has already dealt me a rather important but familiar lesson: no matter how much we claim that new years represent new starts -- as evidenced by our absurd societal dependence on resolutions to manufacture change (mostly unsuccessfully, I should add) -- some things simply don't change because we turn the calendar. Case in point: my inability to punctually maintain this blog, which took a hit near the end of last semester and, as we can clearly see, hasn't improved much in 2008.

Fortunately for me, there's eleven-and-a-half months to go, so all hope is not lost.

But continuing the trend of having a perfectly reasonable excuse for my abandonment of my trusty escritorial friend, and perhaps even amplifying it, I have a number of good excuses this time! For one thing, the rush of getting back to school with minimal hiccups was enough to keep me occupied for the last few days of my precious but restless winter break. True, it's mostly my own fault, what with the not-getting-my-papers-done-before-their-original-due-dates and what not, but working damn-near-full time hours at the hospital -- which necessitated waking up at 6:15am five days a week, something I haven't done since high school -- didn't help.

Nor did the scheduling of multiple appointments with multiple doctors in the scant four weeks I was home. I saw four doctors -- an allergist, a cardiologist, a dentist, and an endocrinologist -- while I was in New Jersey, most of which gave me a relatively clean bill of health or, at the very least, told me things I didn't already suspect (such as, for instance, the shocking revelation that I'm allergic to dogs and cats; D's bid for a fuzzy companion in the future took a staggering blow at the news). But the endocrinologist required of me a significant gamut of lab work and other such tests, including one test that easily ranks among the most awkward medical-related endeavors I've ever had to venture upon.

Okay, full disclosure. The test I'm about describe wasn't the most awkward of the tests I needed to do this time around, but there's no way I'm describing that particular honor in a public blog, so we settle for the runner up.

To those who are uninitiated, a 24-hour urine collection test is not especially fun, particularly when you have to do it while at work. It basically entails carrying a big jug around with you for 24 hours and making sure that everything you pee ends up in that jug before returning it to the laboratory. Which is especially difficult when you're at work during said 24 hour time period.

Now, I know what you're thinking and you're actually close to right: I work at a hospital, and my life's a fairly open book anyway, so it shouldn't be that big a deal, particularly since I'm surrounded by people who are used to that kind of thing. All fair points. But in my own defense, picture this, if you will: would you want to be carrying a jug of your own piss around the office all day? Yeah, me neither. I don't really care much that anyone knows I need to do it, I just don't think I need to make a public spectacle of my piss jug.

So I did what any mildly-unbalanced young man would do in this situation: I held it. All day. Oh sweet merciful mother did that last hour suck.

Except for that brief bout of borderline bladder bursting, the rest of the test went off without a hitch, except of course for the part where I had to, you know, pee in a jug. It could be that the preservative in the bottle was what made it worse, because the risk of splashing (and subsequent burning OWOWOWOWOW) necessitated peeing into a separate vessel and then pouring those contents slowly into the jug. And since I simply could not rationalize using any vessel in my house that might have, might ever, or might have thought about, even if in a past life, containing food or drink, it meant first filling a specimen cup. You know, those tiny little ones. That don't hold much. Yeah, those.

Can you see why this was awkward as hell?

Fortunately, that's now in the past, something I can just as thankfully apply to the event referred to in my previous post. Charles hit the nail right on the head: having succeeded at the Blazin' Challenge in the Blacksburg Buffalo Wild Wings scarcely a year ago, but failing to redeem the t-shirts that I justly deserved, I felt the need to take on the challenge again -- at the recently-opened location at nearby Palisades Center -- and truly earn my threads.

That, and I had indulged my competitive streak and challenged first Caitlin then John to take me on. Sometimes my natural douchiness has truly regrettable consequences.

But since I've spent a large portion of this post already describing in more-than-casually-acceptable detail scatalogical processes, I'll spare the goriness this time. Except to just say OH GOD THE BURNING WHY OH WHY DID I FUCKING DO THAT OWOWOWOWOWOW.

Which, painfully and awkwardly, brings me back to State College, where the first week of classes has gone off relatively without a hitch. My ENGL 015 class is at a far less ungodly hour this semester (10:10am, as opposed to the abysmal 8:00am of the fall) and my students have already shown me a great deal of personality and enthusiasm, which I pray doesn't peter out in the coming weeks. My seminars are also quite wonderful, if not particularly focused: Chaucer, Modernism, and Alfred Hitchcock are my topics of inquiry, and all are winners thus far. And they're even more enjoyable since the work load is pretty fairly distributed throughout. Methinks this may be the semester I really get a handle on this grad school thing.

And if I can get that straightened out, maybe I'll be able to get this whole regular-updating thing down too!

...

Yeah. Don't get your hopes up.

------------------------

Next Time: Dave the Sissy addresses the phenomenon of the intriguing-but-too-scary-for-me-to-see-without-risking-weeks-of-nightmares film Cloverfield and wonders why entertainment can't live up to the intrigue and complication of its marketing campaigns, in what may end up being a thinly-veiled attempt at reconciling the thesis of his sci-fi paper with something other than just Coheed and Cambria. Stay tuned!

I'm Back, and I'm Blazin'™

2008-01-09T22:28:00.000-05:00

A new year, a new start, and a new escapade that has set my ass afire.

Details to follow...