I’ve got about ten minutes of wi-fi left on yesterday’s nickel, so just a quick note about the book reviews I alluded to yesterday.  I’ll be dropping them over there on the right once they’re ready; that sidebar is its own separate blog, one of the special added bonuses of this migration to Expression Engine.  I’m going to try to rejigger this page so that comments to the sideblog appear in recent comments on the left.  And with that, it’s back to the beach.

Internet access here in Wailea sucks.  Which is the only bad thing I have to say about the place.

These two factors together should serve as explanation for my silence.  That, and if you imagine a really huge rum-based drink, you’ll start to get the picture.

The only real news that I have to report is that I’ve spent a bunch of my time here reading.  Novels.  Contemporary novels, if you can imagine that.  Book reports will follow when I’ve got access enough, and time.

Best to all, and one of those fruity rum drinks, too.

Planned Obsolescence was born a bit over two years ago on the island of Oahu.  As has been true for many others, a journey back to the origin is inevitable.  Like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn, like a lost dog finding its way home in a cinematic cross-country adventure, Planned Obsolescence is drawn back to Hawaii by an inexorable force.

A force that is mostly like a woman who really, really needs a vacation.

More from the islands.

So I just got my copy of the American Literary Scholarship 2002 in the mail, and for the first time ever, I’m mentioned in it.

Well, sorta.

In Jerome Klinkowitz’s review article covering recent work on fiction from the 1960s to the present is a paragraph on DeLillo criticism, which includes the following passage:

A more recent DeLillo novel gets comprehensive treatment in the essays commissioned by editors Joseph Dewey et al for their UnderWords:  Perspectives on Don DeLillo’s Underworld (Delaware).  Much like Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, Underworld seems written with complex critical responses in mind, and one of the best is “The Unmaking of History:  Baseball, Cold War, and Underworld” (pp. 144-60) contributed by Katherine Fitzpatrick.  She proposes that for DeLillo history is a weave of narratives, following historian J.H. Heller’s sense of historiographic narratology, centering on “the cultural value of this moment” as opposed to any collection of facts.

Okay, so yay, me.  But… Katherine?

I suppose I should feel better that the blurb gets J. H. Hexter‘s name wrong, too.  He’s way more famous than me, even if he is dead.

I received in yesterday’s mail a survey asking me to rate my recent experience with the Sony Service Center.  I am forwarding, along with said survey, a hard copy of this.

They asked.  I answered.

Things I have not been doing this summer, that I still hold some hope of getting to soon:

1.  Finishing the three half-written articles that really ought to have been done a long time ago.

2.  Figuring out how those three articles might begin to come together with a couple of other already-done articles in some form that might turn itself into a “book.”

3.  Revising the syllabi for next year’s classes, such that neither my students nor I have an unbearable workload, but that said classes remain interesting for all concerned.

Things I have been working on, but not at quite the pace I’d like, that I’m really hoping to step up over the next couple of weeks:

1.  Electra.

2.  The anthology whose editorial board I’m on.

Things I have been working quite hard on, that weren’t originally part of the summer plan, but that have managed to take over every available moment for the last several weeks:

1.  Reading legal documents at great length, and attempting to translate them into a language with which I am familiar.

2.  Documenting, at great length, my general trust- and credit-worthiness.

3.  Learning to read electrical plans, and making follow-on decisions about power outlets, voice/data jacks, and ceiling fan j-boxes.

4.  Restrategizing my entire financial plan for the next couple of years, and recalibrating my lifestyle expectations from “comfortable” to “grad student.”

Life is good, but work is suffering.  If I haven’t done so adequately before now, let me take this moment to express my deep gratitude for the blessings of tenure, and most of all for the fact that, if the items on the first list are severely delayed by the items on the third, it just doesn’t matter.  For the first time in my life, I’m on no one’s schedule but my own.

Something about the day after the fourth-of-July holiday makes me start contemplating musical renditions of Americanness. It’s not just the Sousa being piped into my local Walgreens as I’m trying to get my prescriptions refilled. It’s not just the patriotism-lite of Lee Greenwood’s ubiquitous “God Bless the U.S.A.,” as admirably explored by Michael Bérubé:

…the song’s version of patriotism is completely contentless. Two verses and three choruses, and Mr. Greenwood couldn’t find a single reason to love the U.S.A.? Yeah, yeah, I know, pride, pride, freedom, freedom: “I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free.” But free to do what? To fire employees without cause, thanks to the at-will employment doctrine? To abolish the estate tax? To hold up a sign saying that Matthew Shepherd got what he deserved? Or to protest foolish wars, march for civil rights, and support the right of kids with Down syndrome to be educated in regular classrooms where they can go to visit Fort Robideau with their nondisabled peers? “God Bless the U.S.A.” doesn’t say, and that’s what makes it such a perfect emblem of a certain kind of right-wing contentless patriotism, the kind of patriotism that supports the troops by flying flags from cars while supporting a President who leads the troops off to needless slaughter and then cuts their veterans’ benefits. Had Greenwood said anything about that freedom– “I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free of all taxes on my estate of $36 million,” or “I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free to fight for the right to register Mississippi’s black voters in the face of murderous right-wing opposition”– one imagines that his song would be a good deal less popular.

My own issues with fourth-of-July music have definitely got something to do with all that. But it’s also, alas, wrapped around what I think to be a series of memories whose wires have gotten all crossed in my brain. First, the Chicago song, “Saturday in the Park,” where I think it was the fourth of July. (In fact, now that I think about it, every day in that park seems to be the fourth of July!) Then, from approximately the same period, me flipping through my parents’ album collection, in which I know they had some 5th Dimension. (I know, this makes no sense whatsoever, but bear with me.) Then, from a little later in my childhood, the altogether astonishing Fifth of Beethoven, which may or may not be implicated in this mess.

What’s got me off on this rather appalling trip down my parents’ musical memory lane is that I could almost swear that they had some album called “5th of July.” All my searching has only turned up the Lanford Wilson play, so I’m almost certainly conflating the 5th Dimension and the Chicago song, schmooing in the title of the “Fifth of Beethoven,” and somehow producing an album about the day after the fireworks. Which almost certainly doesn’t exist. But I obsess about it this time every year, and if somebody could give me definitive proof one way or the other, I could put those processing cycles to much better use.

Like trying to decide whether granite countertops or Zodiaq are the way to go.

Ogged finds the country we live in mighty funny indeed, but I’ve just got to say:  a world in which one person can slap together a tell-all blog documenting her way more tawdry than titillating inside-the-beltway sexual shenanigans, proceed to get fired from her Capitol Hill job, and wind up with a $300,000 book deal based on a 25-page proposal, while, hypothetically, another person works two jobs to get through grad school, spends six years first on a dissertation and then on the book drawn therefrom, and spends another two years begging somebody, anybody, to please please take pity on her and print a few measly copies of the damn thing—that’s one seriously fucked-up world.  Indeed.

(Note to self:  More sex.  Less theory.  It’s the American way.)

As today’s main entry might suggest, I’ve been reading Oblivion of late. I’m a little over halfway through, and I absolutely love it. Screw Walter Kirn; he’s wrong. Period.

Via Unfogged, Mike Matt Taibbi’s takedown of Christopher Hitchens and his fellow hyper-self-righteous members of the journalistic profession. As ogged points, out, there’s a deep desire to cheer upon reaching the following:

I’m off on this tangent because I’m enraged by the numerous attempts at verbose, pseudoliterary, “nuanced” criticism of Moore this week by the learned priests of our business. (And no, I’m not overlooking this newspaper.) Michael Moore may be an ass, and impossible to like as a public figure, and a little loose with the facts, and greedy, and a shameless panderer. But he wouldn’t be necessary if even one percent of the rest of us had any balls at all.

If even one reporter had stood up during a pre-Iraq Bush press conference last year and shouted, “Bullshit!” it might have made a difference.