Posting plans have been completely overcome by the days-long non-cooperation of my hosting provider.  They’re back, but now I find myself with precious little to say, except that it’s been a fabulous trip, and I’m not quite ready to re-enter the SoCal end-of-semester, Christmas-season melee.  I return tomorrow, ready or not, to find myself with ten days left in the semester, and two days (or fewer) left in the review that has loomed so large over said semester.

I believe this to have been only the third Thanksgiving that I’ve spent away from my family, in the 36-year history of my spending Thanksgivings.  I feel a certain shock in that admission, but on another level, I shouldn’t be surprised; for the majority of those years, I lived in the same town as my mother, and during the crucial grad school too-poor-and-pissed-off-to-travel years, I lived right across the river from the aunt to whose house my mother and sister and I had long made the over the causeway and through the airport migration.  Family was not only all there was, it was convenient.

There was one year before this one, however, when I did not accompany Mom and D. on what we had affectionately named the Eating Tour of the Industrial Northeast; instead, I joined R. in the then pretty podunk Louisiana town that he was living in (now transformed into a chi-chi New Orleans bedroom community), where we hiked and talked and wrote, and utterly failed to consider the problem of where we would eat on Thanksgiving Day, until, unfortunately, Thanksgiving Day.  It would be one thing to report that we had Thanksgiving dinner at the Waffle House, after forty-five minutes’ tooling around revealed no other open eating establishments; it is wholly another to report that we ate there twice that day.

The trip was still, quality of food and residue of guilt aside, a tremendous success.  This time out, we met up in the decidedly non-podunk London, where every eating establishment was happily open, given that, here, it was simply Thursday.  So we ate, drank, and were decidedly thankful—not least for not contending with the official insistence upon Heartfelt Gratitude for Things Unquantifiable.

I’ll likely wind up returning to the familial feast next year, and I’m on point of returning to the daily grind (if only ten days-worth) tomorrow, and I’ll be decidedly happy about both returns—but the break has nonetheless been lovely all around.

I’m headed back to London this afternoon for Thanksgiving break.  We’re in a hotel this time, where R’s managed to cadge free high-speed access, so I ought to be able to update from there.  In fact, I hope to get some good pondering and scribbling time in.  To that end, here’s a list of what I am and am not carrying with me:

• A hard copy of the manuscript, for re-reading and some final editing:  yes.
• Student papers, for grading or commenting:  no.
• Books that I’ll be teaching in the coming weeks:  no.¹
• Novels.  Actual novels.  Novels that I haven’t even read before:  yes.

Five days of rainy, cold break-like bliss.  Here’s wishing the same for all of you.  And happy turkey day to all my US-based and expat pals.

¹This, in fact, is a lie:  I’m carrying one small volume that I’ll be teaching upon my return, but it’s one I’ve been dying to read anyhow, so it hardly seems to count.

[Part 2 in a series.  Part 1 is here.]

I have erased my father from my memory.  Or memories.  My mother tells me that when I was a child, quite young, he was the most important thing in my life, and I in his.  We were devoted to one another.  I have no memory of any of this.  It says horrible pop-psychology things about me, I’m sure, but all I remember is being left.  There are big black holes in the past where my father used to be, like he’s been cut out of all my mental photographs.

But then, my memory plays tricks on me.  I know this.  I remember things that can’t possibly have happened.  Things that my mother denies.

There are the crawling lessons, for instance.  I remember quite definitely that my sister had a very hard time learning to crawl.  Many of the particulars escape me, though, and when I last asked my mother about this incident, she denied it entirely, denied that D. had ever faltered in her hands-and-knees coordination.  But like the few other flashes of my childhood that I retain, I take it as real, despite the fact that it doesn’t fit in with everything else I know.

D. couldn’t, or wouldn’t crawl.  Take that as a beginning.  Mom was worried about this, afraid that if D. walked before she crawled, it would produce some insurmountable developmental disorder.  What this specifically boded for a child, I’m still not sure.  I was six or seven at the time, and I was convinced that walking before she crawled would leave her permanently confused, without any foundational support.

This was the year that we went to New Jersey for Christmas.  My parents were in the beginning stages of what was ultimately a very bitter divorce, and Mom had brought my sister and me to stay with my aunt for the holidays.  She was determined to get my sister to crawl before the trip was over.

Which is where the memory begins to fall apart, as all of my memories eventually seem to.  My sister was born on October 2, 1973.  If this was Christmas 1974, my sister had greater problems than that potential walking-before-crawling confusion.  If this was Christmas 1973… well, why would my mother be worried about a three-month-old child who wasn’t crawling yet?

Somehow two memories have gotten intertwined in my head.  Maybe this was the following summer, during our usual visit.  Maybe that Christmas passed uneventfully, except for the absence of my father.  I can’t speculate too far on the actual events surrounding the crawling lessons.  There’s no one to compare notes with since no one else remembers it at all.  I have no choice but to treat the memory as whole and true, if contradictory.

I sat watching as my aunt and my mother crawled around on the floor, my pudgy little sister looking on bewilderedly.  They tried everything.  At one point, my mother had my sister by the wrists and my aunt had her by the ankles, and they’d alternate picking them up and putting them down, moving her around the room, hoping she’d get the idea.  D. went along with it, but once they’d let go and sit back, waiting to see if she’d do it on her own… nothing.  She’d sit there on her hands and knees, rocking back and forth slightly as if revving her engines, but she wouldn’t go anywhere.

Finally, either my aunt or my mother (I have no memory-sense as to which, and if I did, I’m not sure I could trust it) bought a mouse.  A small grey wind-up mouse, complete with long felt tail.  I don’t remember how it was introduced, whether they let her see it or touch it or anything at first.  But then my aunt or my mother, whichever it was, wound up the mouse and let it go, right in front of my sister.  She took off like a shot, hands and knees flying, chasing after the mouse.

That’s the moment I remember, the mouse skittering along the floor and my sister trying to catch it.  I also remember thinking that she just hadn’t had anywhere important to go before that.

The rest is too slap-stick, too colored by my later knowledge of my mother, loving and wildly attentive, but always much too concerned about precisely the wrong thing.  It’s too filled-in, as though my memory is creating a patch-job, hoping that I won’t notice the mismatched fabric and the holes underneath.

When asked, via other channels, what twentieth-century theorist I am, I should have known the eventual response:

You are Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari! That’s right! You’re two people! Actually, you’re probably a lot more than that, because you argued that all of us are, fundamentally, schizophrenics. Your notion of the rhizome is far too popular amoung people who fantasize about digital technology. One of you is dead, and the other isn’t.

My students, who hated A Thousand Plateaus by what I take to be about an 18-to-2 margin, will either find this hysterically funny, or aggravatingly typical, or will simply smirk in an ironic gesture of knowingness.

I’ve spent a number of hours that I’m actually afraid to tally over the last week reading applications for the three jobs that my department is seeking to fill this year, and I must say that nary a one had the panache of Alex Golub’s job letter.  He’s got style, he’s got verve, and boy, has he got a sense of mission.  He explicitly bills this as a template, oh you early-modernists and pre-1900 Americanists, so take note.¹ [Via Liz.]

¹Please note that IA‘s disclaimer applies here as well.

[Part 1 in a series.  Read Part 2 and Part 3.]

While in Prague this summer, I got the following email message:

From:  [DLB]@[company].com
Subject: [GF]’s Address & Phone Number
Date: June 5, 2003 1:53:35 PM PDT

If this is repeat information, please forgive me.

If you would like to stay in touch with [GF], you may
contact him at the following address and number:

[GF]
[address deleted]
[suburb of Salt Lake City], Utah [zip]
[phone number deleted]

Thank you and God Bless.

In Him, Sincerely,
[DLB]
[company]
[phone number]

The shortest distance between a problem and a solution is the distance between your knees and the floor….

I have no idea who DLB is.  GF, on the other hand, is my father.
Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, it’s not quite The End of the World, but bloggers all over are waking up to discover that their BlogRolls have been hijacked.

I’ve deleted mine, for the time being; I’ll have to reconstruct over the next few days.  A note to those of you once linked to here:  I’m going to have to reconstruct from memory, and said memory is notably faulty.  If I miss you at first, please don’t take offense.  Drop me a line and I’ll rectify, PDQ.

From The Onion, “Mom Finds Out About Blog”:

With the raw materials in my blog, she could actually construct an accurate picture of who I am. This is fucking serious.

First there was AoIR in Toronto.  Then a quick trip to Boston for a meeting.  Then the conference I organized here.  Then several days with Mom.

This week there is the desperate catching-up on all the stuff I should have done over the last three weeks, but haven’t.  But the catching-up requires the falling-behind of other things.  As almost always, writing is the first thing to go.

There’s much to say.  I’ll hope to find a moment to start saying some of it soon.

Rory, having recently rediscovered the instruction manual from a 1970s-era cassette player, has used the surreal illustrations contained therein to create The Recording Industry Guide to Home Taping.

Is it any coincidence that this ghost-written voice of the RIAA reminds me so much of the similarly channeled voice of Homeland Security?