[A word to the wise:  what follows is twice as long as it ought to be, and very rambly.  I’m operating on three nights in a row of three hours of sleep, and am correspondingly stupid beyond belief.]

I’ve expended a tremendous amount of energy over the last several months in searching out ways to take this site seriously (yesterday’s entry notwithstanding) as a both a locus for and a form of scholarly thought.  And that’s been good.  I’m largely proud of this site and the conversations that have taken place here, pleased with the writing I’ve done and even more so with the friends I’ve made.

But there are a couple of problems, and I’m not quite sure how to characterize them.  They’re multi-faceted, as problems usually are.  Here’s the first one:  aside from the writing I’ve done here, and a few other ancillary texts (the response to my press’s outside reader’s reports, for instance), I’ve done no writing whatsoever since the summer ended.  And since the summer was almost entirely taken up with research toward the INP, the result is that I’ve done no new scholarly writing in a long, long time.

Of course, I can’t blame this entirely on the blog.  There’s been that little tenure review thing, the manuscript review thing, this weekend’s conference.  And the teaching thing, and my insane expectations thereof.  (Any of my former students reading herein would no doubt be happy to corroborate my claim that I assign what can only be described as ass-loads of reading; my current students would no doubt chime in that this semester I’ve assigned about 30% more reading than usual, and the usual is usually too much already.  Call it a math problem:  on a three-day-a-week teaching schedule, there are a third more class sessions during the semester than I’m used to; in designing the two new classes I’m teaching right now, I stupidly put as much material into each class session as I usually do on a twice-a-week schedule, with the result that… well, let’s just say that even I can’t keep up with my assignments.)

All that’s beside the point, though, which point is that despite the fact that I know, rationally, that I can’t blame the blog for my failure to get any new writing done in the last few months, I’m nonetheless unsettled about the ontological status of the blog within my writing life, at the moment.

The other issue may be thornier, or may in fact be simpler.  I’m not sure which.  Maybe it’s simpler, but harder on some level to admit to.

It’s this:  really, the thing I want to be writing right now is fiction.  A novel.  One I’ve wanted to write for years.  And I can see ahead of me, in the middle distance, the freedom to do so, arriving shortly, announced by a phone call from the dean.  [Insert video of me compulsively knocking on every wooden surface I can find, which, considering I’m writing from an Airbus 319 somewhere over the midwest, is not many.]

There’s a risk involved in this, of course.  It’s been years since I’ve written any fiction, and while I’ve gotten to a point of relative confidence with my scholarly writing, knowing that, even if a first draft of an article is terrible, I can just slave away at it and get feedback and slave away some more until it doesn’t suck.  But a novel:  what if I spend years on it, and no amount of slavage makes it unsucky?

Here’s the other risk—and this is the one that impinges on the blog a bit:  the center of the novel is derived (if only loosely) from certain aspects of my (pretty much nonexistent) relationship with my father.  And there’s some autobiographical writing I’d like to do here around that actual relationship as a means of sorting through some of the issues therein.  And that is a clear change in my “no blogging about the personal life” policy that I’ve had since starting.  (A policy apparently so strict that I apparently can’t even bring myself to refer to it as my personal life—a very odd and, I assume, unconscious slip.)

All this by way of announcing, around the back way, and through a dozen caveats and diversions, that I may be adding some new material here shortly, doing some thinking about personal stuff out here in public.  And also by way of thinking through my nervousness about it.

This nervousness—really, it feels a bit akin to that dream where you realize you’ve gone to class naked—has a lot to do with the absolute separation I’ve had in place between my academic life and my personal life for close to eleven years now; my partner and I have been in a commuter relationship all that time, and so my personal life has gotten conducted out of sight of my colleagues, for the most part, and my work life has happened in his absence.  In 2004, though, both will be in the same place, and so I’m wondering, on many levels, how one does this mixing of the academic and the personal on a regular basis.  That kind of mixing—and the kind of exposure I feel like I’m about to venture out into in terms of my writing, both here and elsewhere—feels like a paradigm shift to me, and yet it’s the kind of thing that most academics, and many bloggers, have always dealt with, and enjoyed.

I suppose it’s a question of redrawing boundaries—having the line between my academic and my personal lives geographically determined for me for so long, I’m uncertain about how to draw that line in the absence of natural borders.  With the blog, too:  the decision not to write about my personal life was never really made consciously, but if I’m going to allow myself to venture now in a memoir-esque direction, how will I know where to stop?

Definitely a bang.  Or maybe California just breaks off from the rest of the US and goes off to hang with Hawaii.  Either way, it’s The End of the World.  (But Australia’s down there, like, WTF mates?) [Flash required; watch that volume.  Via Metafilter.]

I took off from Ontario this morning, not only on time but a full ten minutes early (Pilot:  “Well, folks, everybody’s here, so we’re gonna go”).  The skies were relatively clear, much as yesterday—visible smoke, but visible sky as well—and the faint smell of smoke was not much more overwhelming than that found when walking down a neighborhood street during winter.

But once airborne, both the fires themselves and their precipitating causes were immediately visible—smoke in the air, sparse desert vegetation, arid land.  Brown in every direction, as far as the eye could see.

What a shock, then, to land in Minneapolis to find that it was 40 degrees cooler, and raining.  And that rain had been a snow flurry some minutes earlier.  Boston is not quite that cool, but still lovely.  One of the people I met here today complained that there’s supposed to be rain tomorrow, and I just wanted to cheer.

I can’t bring the rain home with me, but I will apparently be bringing something much needed—the temperature is falling, the humidity is rising, and the winds are falling still.  What was a high of 102 two days ago will be a high of 66 on Thursday.

Here’s wishing everyone a little cool, and a little wet, and a little more appreciation thereof.

Here’s the part where I start feeling guilty—because we’ve been spared, largely, here in Claremont.  And so I start thinking things like “whew, that was close” and “thank goodness that’s over” when in fact it’s gotten so much worse in other parts of the state.

The evacuations in Claremont and surrounding towns have ended and even the air here has largely cleared today.  Largely, meaning no visible ash in the air; largely, meaning I could walk outside without my mucous membranes going into immediate revolt.  Largely, meaning there was actually some blue visible in the sky today.

Thanks for the good wishes; I’m now officially passing those wishes on to folks in San Diego, in Simi Valley, and in Big Bear, where they need them more.

I’m headed to Boston tomorrow, and will return on Thursday.  My conference starts on Friday, assuming I can convince the speakers that they’re not flying into Armageddon.  I’ll hope to be posting more good news, of more varieties, very soon.

[UPDATE, 10.27.03, 9.59 pm:  Thanks to all of you one more time for your good wishes, and your concern today when my hosting provider tanked.  An inauspicious, if dramatic, moment to go incommunicado.  You’re the best.  Every last one of you.]

Here are words I hope never to have to say again:  I have packed my emergency evacuation kit, and can be ready to get out of the house in ten minutes or less.

Updates since last night:

–The Grand Prix fire, which began north of Rancho Cucamonga, and the Old fire, near San Bernadino, have merged into one 35-mile wall of fire, after one or the other managed to jump an eight-lane freeway.

–50 homes in the northern part of Claremont (Padua Hills and Claraboya) have burned.

–That part of Claremont north of Baseline Road is under mandatory evacuation.

–The fire has thus far cost over $6 million to fight, not including the cost of the damage that it has done.

–Both the Grand Prix and the Old fires are believed to be the result of arson.

I’m not expecting to be evacuated, but I’m ready if I need to be.  I’ve got the laptop, and will hope to keep you posted.

[UPDATE, 10.26.03, 1.15 pm:  I adore my institution, and I do think we’re relatively safe here, but this strikes me as recklessly optimistic.]

I’m finding googlings in my recent referrer logs that look like this:

MT-Blacklist!), but is there some other purpose such a search could possibly have?

[UPDATE, 10.26.03, 8.17 am:  Yup.  Confirmation:  the IP of the search is listed in my referrer logs as 61.181.5.69, and I’ve just found in my activity log three entries that look like this:

     2003.10.25 02:14:10    61.181.5.69    MT-Blacklist comment denial:
                                             00000-online-casino.com

Jay Allen is my new hero.]

On Behind the Typeface, the rise and fall of Cooper Black.

Flash required; serious font-fetish not strictly necessary.

Accordion Guy, who not only got to attend an extended Q&A with Neal Stephenson but also won one of the door-prizes (a trip backstage to meet the author), lucky bastard, blogged his notes from the Q&A.  The entry is entirely fascinating in a wonderfully geeky way, but there’s one passage in particular that caught my attention.  Stephenson digresses momentarily, talking about his arrival in Toronto:

He’d flown in from London, and over the duration of the flight started to feel feverish. On the “three-mile long walk from the plane to customs” (Toronto, despite the fact that it’s a major Canadian hub, has what has to be one of the most poorly-designed airports on the planet), passed by a customs officer, who was seated with a laptop. The laptop was attached via some kind of interface cable to a pole, on which sat a box. This pole/box setup was position in such a way that all passengers had to pass by it. After Stephenson walked past it, the customs official stopped him and asked him to walk past it again. When he asked why, the customs official showed him the setup—the box was a sensitive infrared camera which was hooked to to the laptop. While the other passengers who walked past showed up as moving blue shapes, Stephenson registered as hot red flare. A nurse showed up, and after a brief interview during which he assured her that he hadn’t been spending the last few weeks “hanging out on a pig farm in Guangxing”, was free to go.

You know, my conference roomie, Tara, said she’d seen something like that, though she interpreted it as a more standard video monitoring point.  Of course I’m pleased that health officials have got that SARS thing under control, but I can’t help but be a little concerned that this technology has been deployed with so little announcement.  Today, they screen for fevers.  What next?

Tuesday’s high temperature here in Claremont was 102 on Mr. Fahrenheit’s scale.  Today it’s snowing.

Of course, what it’s snowing is not flakes of frozen water but flakes of ash.

This is, for those of you who’ve been around a while, a phenomenon far more recurrent than any of us would like.  Here’s last year’s version:

Where There’s Smoke…

Just a few miles north of here—how few can be attested by the near-constant whirring of engines overhead and the overwhelmingly acrid air—the mountains are on fire, and have been for a week.  Air quality has deteriorated to the extent that all non-essential outdoor activities on campus have been canceled for the duration.  And once again this morning, I’ve awakened to find my apartment filled with the smell of smoke.

Few of you will be faced with neighborhood wildfires, but perhaps you might understand why I’ve recently become obsessed with this site of late.  We’re the Williams Fire, if you want to get the lowdown on our situation.

Posted by KF at September 30, 2002 06:27 AM

This time around, we’re being threatened by the Grand Prix, which I find a little unnerving.  That, and the fact that Weather.com has gotten into the act, declaring our predominant weather condition today to be “smoke.”

[UPDATE, 10.25.03, 5.51 pm:  Seriously—it’s beginning to look like Armageddon out there.  The sky is this unearthly brown, the light looks as though earth’s gaffers have gotten a bit carried away with the yellow filters, and the sun—when you can find it—has been RED all day.  Bright, glowing red.]

I should begin with the caveat (possibly disingenuous) that I’m not ordinarily big on the “let me share with you the completely bizarre dream I had last night” conversational gambit.  (What was the song that David Silver sang part of to me and Liz before Jason’s panel?  Something about no one caring about your dreams, unless they’re in them…)

However:  this dream was much too terrifying, and much too vivid, to simply leave be.  I dreamed, just before waking up this morning, that I was going rapidly, unmistakably, and irremediably insane.  Someone referred to the disorder that I was suffering in the dream as bipolar, but the evidence (a bizarre concept when it comes to dreams, I recognize) in fact suggests that what I was suffering was more akin to schizophrenia.  In the course of the dream, I rapidly lost all concept of or ability to distinguish “reality” (again, a bizarre concept to consider in relation to dreams).  I was hallucinating (ditto), both visually and aurally, and at least at first I was aware that these were hallucinations, but my ability to distinguish between the things I was perceiving and the actual world (mm-hm) rapidly deteriorated.  Family members (who appeared to me as more and more distorted and threatening, as the dream wore on) presented me with things I’d done that I had no memory of, things that provided clear evidence of the break I’d apparently suffered—for instance, having sent over 60 rambling and somewhat threatening messages to a listserv in rapid succession, each less coherent than the last.  Even more, I found myself unable to maintain a clear distinction between my thoughts and my actions (on the bizarreness of such a distinction within the unconscious mind, see above)—at one point, I saw (or imagined I saw) that our house and our truck (whose house and whose truck?  don’t know) had weeds and flowers growing on their roofs, and I attempted to tell someone that they needed to be mowed, but the words wouldn’t come out right, and I found myself instead having to fight off the incredibly strong urge to do that mowing.

Needless to say, I’m deeply unnerved by this dream.  The only real-life impetus for it (and please don’t ask me to define “real-life” today; I’m feeling a bit shaky in my grasp thereof) is I think that I’ve been reading too much postmodernist theory, and that the sense of contemporary representation as schizophrenia—the links of the signifying chain having been broken, leaving us surrounded by a heap of unrelated signifiers, as Jameson lifts from Lacan—has left an imprint on my unconscious.  I need some more awake-time, though, before I can piece through the multiple layers of consciousness, consciousness within the unconscious, dream, hallucination within the dream, to even begin to sort out what it might all mean.