Asides

The Happy Tutor, despite his recent suggestions that he has “gone from satire to sermon”, seems to have now recanted (partially, he makes it clear), for which I am glad. There’s room in this world for both the productive and the critical impulse to coexist, and for all Phil’s fine efforts, I think the world would be a poorer place without the Tutor’s “Satire of Wealth and Power in the Tradition of Roman Comedy — Stupid, Obscene and Cruel.” Consider a comparison between Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale and his Parson’s Tale, one a satire and the other a sermon, and what each has to offer us. (Consider, also, the one to which many of us more attend.)

I haven’t the Tutor’s skill at satire, but Amanda’s recent post sparked my interest, and — in the spirit of satire — I’ll see if I might extend her fine, scathing take on the apparently disgusting (didn’t watch it, and won’t, but I have to note that the sponsored links at the end of that Salon review were for “Atlanta Breast Implants”, “Plastic Surgeon in CT”, and “Pageant Gowns for Sale”: please tell me this was intentional, like maybe an attempt at ironic humor) new Fox reality show The Swan a bit further.
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Haven’t been posting much lately, or commenting either: kind of a between-things feel to a lot of stuff these days. My mom’s estate drags on and on, feeling like it’s headed for something of a Jarndyce & Jarndyce protractedness (although, since my mom was a public librarian, hardly of that scale), and the 18 months of dealing with it has just been a perpetual reminder of the fact that she died young and unexpectedly and lost her mind very quickly while dying. And though the weather’s finally moving away from that long Northeastern winter, the wretchedly gray and sodden rain and fog and clouds have lately made it darker than it was in January, and still no green on the trees. And I’m flailing and unfocused on the dissertation: again, very much a feeling of days between stations, and an accompanying black mood of apathetic surliness.

So there’s the litany of complaint. On the good side, I’m working on CCCC proposals, and today downloaded Drupal to try and do an install and do some fooling around with, thinking that after proposals are done, it might be nice to finally return to those discussions of the collaborative Open Writing Classroom syllabus, if folks are still interested. And it’s supposed to get sunnier and warmer by the weekend. Maybe by that point I’ll feel less stuck between places.

Noting my occasional practice of rhetorical overstatement, a good friend referred to me in a recent e-mail as “the Sultan of Screed, the Bishop of Burn.”

God, I could just kiss her.

Michelle of Phlebas would be so proud of me.

Lest I be perceived as someone who blogs only the presentations, I’ll note that I had a fine time away from the panels, as well. It was terrific to run into the Pitt folks again, especially Malkiel, and I saw them briefly at the Friday night CCCC dance, where I also learned — after twenty-plus years of wondering — what it looks like to dance to “Sweet Home Alabama”. (One kind of sways, apparently. In that way, it’s a lot like the worst-ever song for dancing, GNR’s “Civil War”. Worst for dancing meaning, you know, excepting John Zorn and the like. And if you’re at CCCC, rhythm really isn’t all that much of a concern, and becomes less so the more drinks you have on Friday night.) I also had a fine time at Wednesday night’s dinner with the blogging folks, and at Thursday night’s dinner with the contingent of 30+ of my institution’s faculty, students, and veterans, with my only gripe being that my peers at Big State U seemed to bolt their dinners and quickly disperse in every direction: so much for any sort of institutional cohesion or community. Still, I managed to spend a good bit of time with Dennis, Clancy, and Charlie, all of whom are fine and pleasant people whose company made me wish I’d met them in person long ago. Clancy does a great karaoke version of Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin'”, and I had a few big bar tabs, and made a bunch of new acquaintances.

And, OK, finally: here are the boots.

Tink and Zeugma greeted me at the door. I’m gonna go put on some Warren Zevon, pour myself some red wine, take off my boots, and enjoy being here with the girls. It’s nice to be back home.

I was going to post a picture of the wonderful handmade Lucchese boots I bought today, but I don’t have the right computer connection, so it’ll wait until I get home. Suffice to say I’m having a fine, fine time in San Antonio, and the conference hasn’t even started yet. If any of you conference folks are in town, I’m staying at the Menger, and — having not run into any conference folks yet — am looking for someone to have dinner with tonight. Give me a call or drop me a line.

The last time I flew, I was on leave and had hitched a space-a ride from Warner-Robins AFB out to Travis on a KC-135 tanker, and found myself on a bench seat atop a hundred thousand pounds of really, really cold jet fuel.

That was nine years ago, so I wanted to be super-prepared this time. I got to the airport two hours early, anticipating ticket mixups, undermedicated baggage checkers, Guardsmen with M16s, drug-sniffing dogs going after the kitten fur on my pants leg, quarter-mile lines at the security gates, interrogation chambers with polygraphs and sodium pentothal, cavity searches with bullet-nosed flashlights — you know, stuff like that. Turns out it took me all of about ten minutes to get through check-in.

So I’m cooling my heels at Gate 4, putting off reading some Marxian economics.

(Yes, the conference doesn’t start until Wednesday, but a flight tomorrow would have gotten in at 10:25 at night, and my presentation’s bright and early the following morning. So I’ll have some time to shop for a nice pair of cowboy boots in San Antonio.)

So I’ve been remiss about posting lately, and consequently remiss about my dissertation work. Not much to say about that, I’m afraid: Sergeant First Class Baca used to tell us that the effective range of an excuse is zero meters. Still, maybe Pathfinder training for SFC Baca skipped over the differences between excuses and explanations, and so I’ll offer to you that it’s been a bit of a busy time, what with estates, funerals, litigation, and the like, and I aim to be more interesting again sometime soon. (Now there’s a hell of promise, ain’t it?) I fly to Texas on Monday for my discipline’s annual conference, which I’ll certainly blog. Until then, Zeugma senses I’m going away again soon, and continues to climb and cling.

March is the month in which my brother, David, is allowed to receive CDs at the prison. He gave me a shopping list of good contemporary stuff — Coldplay, Outkast, Jet, et cetera — and also asked me to burn him some mix CDs. So I burned him a disc of mellow contemporary electronica (Kruder & Dorfmeister, Peace Orchestra, Dzihan & Kamien, Tosca, DJ Krush & Toshinori Kondo, Tricky) and a disc of classical piano (Glenn Gould’s second run at the Golberg Variations, Serkin’s Moonlight, Ashkenazy’s Chopin Nocturnes, Eschenbach’s Mozart) and a disc of orchestral standards. That last was the hardest to do: how do you give someone who doesn’t much know classical music eighty minutes of the best orchestral music you know?

You leave out a lot, is what you do. Here’s the disc I sent David:

1. Karajan conducting Sibelius: Finlandia
2. Boskovsky conducting Strauss: The Blue Danube
3. Karajan conducting Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsody Number 4
4. Bernstein conducting Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue
5. Solti conducting Beethoven: 4th movement, 9th symphony
6. Jochum conducting Orff: O Fortuna

So here’s my request for advice: what are the best recordings ever of classical orchestral music that you know? If you had eighty minutes, how would you make a second classical disc for David, before the end of March?

Well, I might start by responding to all the kind feedback I’ve received lately.

Hm.

On the good side: I managed to get all my mom’s furniture moved out of the house and put into storage. Close, now, to putting things to rest, a year and a half after her death. Seventy-five degrees in DC; finer weather one couldn’t ask for. Saw family and friends, including some folks I hadn’t seen in fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years, and had a fine time.

On the sad side: my dad’s mom died Sunday, so I’ll be going back down this weekend. At 92, she’d had a full and happy life, and tonight I’m putting together something to say at the funeral on Friday. Between my mom and his mom, I worry that my dad’s feeling pretty conscious of his own mortality.

Posting may again be intermittent.

May you never have to do this.

Come the lawyers with hands extended and petitions all a-flutter, their communications peppered with “allege” and “affirm”, “prays” and “prejudice”, a dance of writing and counter-writing, rhetoric more style and form than substance, but still with substance disguising substance in endless hermeneutic regression, one reference yielding another and yet another, all the way down to the bedrock of death and avarice, and even then, at rock bottom, they dig.

As pretty and trite as that may be, it’s not a fair depiction: the lawyer I’ve retained is a fine and friendly man, brilliant and talented and persistent, and I couldn’t ask for better representation. But in the case of this dispute, now gone on a year and a half, the strange rhetorical dance — at times seeming like a game of telephone in fancy language — wears on me some.

I drive down to DC tomorrow to help put it all to bed. Another month, or maybe two, with the lawyers: that’ll do it, I hope. And then, like I think Mom wanted, I can rest a bit.

Posting may again be intermittent from now through Sunday.