Greetings from Vermont.

I’m here for a Mellon-sponsored workshop on Cinema and Media Studies in the Liberal Arts, and am learning much, making great connections, enjoying a brief blast of fall crispness.  I’ll look forward to posting some thoughts from the workshop, perhaps tomorrow, once I’ve had a chance to process them a bit.

In the meantime, a program note:  the spam problem has gotten bad enough that I’m done with mere gardening, and am busting out the DDT.  I’ve enabled the CAPTCHAs function on ExpressionEngine; in order to comment, you’ll now have to input the text contained in an image.  I’m planning in the next few days to enable the “membership” feature as well, which will allow you, should you so choose, to register with the site; members will not be required to deal with the CAPTCHAs in order to comment.  My apologies for any inconvenience that this may cause, but the blacklist just isn’t doing it anymore.

It’s 4.24 am as I begin this entry.  I’m sitting in the Ontario (California; you have no idea how many times I’ve been asked for my passport when trying to fly here) airport, availing myself of the free wi-fi, feeling mighty blessed, the hour notwithstanding.  Back in January, after the ritual end-of-year counting of blessings, I listed my fondest hopes for the new year.  Chiefest among those hopes was getting R. home from London, and keeping him with me for a while.

With a few interruptions, I managed to do that.  Until this morning.  Today, as I sit in the airport waiting to fly to Vermont for a workshop, he’s tooling up the 15, headed on his own coast-hopping adventure.  For a year.

Given the almost-year we had together, though, I can’t complain much.  My stress level has been awfully high for much of it, but the joy of having him around made it all bearable.

My blessings extend beyond that, however; I’d hoped, in January, to put the old project to bed this year, and while that outcome is hardly written in stone as yet, I feel somewhat safe in acknowledging that the manuscript is, once again, with outside readers, and that the editor I’m working with is an absolute dream, willing to take a chance on something that seems a little weird.  Which is all I’ve ever hoped for.

I’ve also managed to find clarity on my new projects, and though it’s been impossible to get anything done on them of late, I’ve got the possibility of an imminent leave to keep me focused and calm.

As I said in January, though, my most important hope was “to find myself, this time next year, in a world substantively more peaceful, and in a country substantively more compassionate, than the one I find myself in today.” For that, I’m still hopeful, and hope that you are, too.  In a year in which the Red Sox can pull it off, I think the rest of us stand a pretty good chance.

And I say unto you, holy moly.

I’ve just gotten an email message from my pals at MoveOn.org about dealing with potential voting rights infringements next Tuesday, and while I expect that many of the like-minded readers of this site already get the same email messages that I get, this one seems important enough to reproduce here.  I’ll put the full message below the fold, but I encourage anyone concerned about how to protect their voting rights to take a gander.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s something odd:  a screenshot of my recent keyword analysis, looking at what searches have brought folks hither, from yon.

I’m trying to decide whether to be heartened by this.  It’s got to be good news, right, that suddenly everyone and their Aunt Melba wants to read that article, right?

This weekend, I discovered and zapped the first two pieces of this (dare not even to mention the name) that have appeared here since the migration.  I’ve zapped, as I said, and I’ve updated the blacklist.  But now that I know that they’ve found me, my basic peace-of-mind has been de-pacified.  I lie in wait, blinds drawn, peeking out on the moonlit front yard, listening for trouble, shotgun in hand.

I’ve thus far resisted the move to require registration for commenting, preferring whatever extra smidge of dialogue openness promotes.  But this current state of paranoia may be too much.  I’ll give it a couple of weeks and then decide whether to beef up the security system or not.

I’m pleased to admit, here (the Internet) and now (approximately 7.55 pm, Wednesday, October 20), that I declared the ALCS “over” last Saturday, after the Yankees went up 3-0 in the series, having shellacked the Sox 19 to 8.

I’ll also admit, while I’m at it, that I declared, with heavy heart and gloomy outlook, the presidential race “over” in the weeks after the RNC, when Dubya was way, way up and Kerry just didn’t seem to be coming out to play.

The moral of the story?  It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.

And I’m now thinking that Boston may be my kinda town.  But I’m not predicting nothing.

It’s actually not yet over, fall break, that glorious moment marking the halfway point of the semester.  It’s brief, a mere two days, but if (like me) you already don’t teach on Friday, having Monday and Tuesday off can result in a beautiful five-day weekend, in which you can:

1.  Do a big pile of work on the anthology, such that you end the weekend a mere three weeks behind schedule, rather than the six weeks you were dogged by going into the weekend.

2.  Actually re-read the text for Wednesday’s class, rather than relying on your crappy memory of something you last read two years ago to carry through the discussion, as you have on an alarming number of occasions of late.

3.  Get some grading done at something that feels like leisure, rather than sprinting through batches of papers with an eye toward “good enough” and “not a chance.”

4.  Manage to persuade the guy you owe an essay to that really and truly, you’ll be able to give him a much better product by the end of December than by the end of October.

5.  Run.  Run like the wind.  Or like the wind would run if it blew only in a four square foot rectangular area the size of a treadmill.  Watch Auburn absolutely smother Arkansas while you’re running, and feel profoundly ambivalent about the way things are going these days in the old SEC.  Manage to use that ambivalence to run six miles for the first time in at least four years.

6.  Discover, much to your chagrin, the Sour Apple Martini.

7.  Revel in the fact that it’s been absolutely pissing here for the last two days.  Fall, it appears, has finally broken here in SoCal.

At last! I’m posting! About a book! A book I read! For fun!

I bought Sara Paretsky’s Blacklist in the airport bookstore as I was departing for Sussex. I also picked up James Lee Burke’s Last Car to Elysian Fields. I devoured them both, the Burke on the way to and during my stay in Sussex, and the Paretsky on the way home, and in the couple of days after I got back. It had been years since I’d read a mystery of any variety, and it was just lovely to fall into the plot, wondering what was coming next. But Paretsky’s novel, which ties old political scandals of the McCarthy era to the new horrors of the PATRIOT Act has stuck with me.

As have both detectives. Warshawski’s lover is off playing reporter-hero in Afghanistan, while Robicheaux is battling all his old demons after the loss of his wife. There’s gotta be a way to hook these two up; I think they’re made for each other.

Okay, so no shock: it’s an HBO Sunday night drama, and I’m there. I have to say, though, The Wire started out a little rockily for me in the first season—so many characters, so many streetnames, so hard to keep everybody straight—but I nonetheless got completely sucked in by the middle of that season. Season two was odd: suddenly we’re leaving the guys we followed last time out to the side, and looking instead at the dock workers—and somehow, they managed to make it work. I still miss Frank Sobotka, who was perhaps the best good-guy-caught-up-in-bad-stuff television character I’ve ever seen. This season, the third, may be the best of them all, though. Watching Stringer Bell turn into the bank while Colvin tries to create “Hamsterdam” is just the most obvious set of examples of what makes the show so great: in no other cop show has the real ambiguity of the line between the good guys and the bad been so thoroughly explored.

That, and I see a major explosion coming between Stringer and Avon Barksdale. Should be interesting.