I’m still out of town visiting with my friends, but I just had to pop in to say that the college town where my friend W. works is far superior to New Wye. It is like Zembla, but with a better downtown and without the smug self-satisfaction. I totally have a city crush.
I’ll be back to regular life and regular posting in a few days, doubtless with a little longing in my heart.
Monthly Archive for July, 2008
It’s almost the end of July — almost the end of the summer. I kind of can’t believe it, mostly because in Zembla the summer doesn’t start until June 16th and doesn’t end until September 30th or thereabouts (this is just due to the differing schedules at Zembla University and Wordsmith). July just doesn’t feel like the end of anything for me. July should be a month spent in flip flops, working on my tan and sulking that I have nothing to do. The horrible knowledge that I will have to deal with school starting up again in about three weeks (THREE MOTHERFUCKING WEEKS) is, haha, mildly terrifying.
Another reason the end of the summer seems to be assaulting me with such force is that in about a week or so, half of my Very Good Friends from Wordsmith will be leaving town, moving far, far away where oodles of money and possible tenure and teaching and/or publishing glory await them. Out of the dozen or so people who got hired along with me, these six of us have become a very close group, and we’ve built a lot of fun memories in the past year. I am in complete denial that three of them will be gone so soon. (What? Leaving? LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU.)
Their success is a truly happy thing, though: they’re all brilliant and talented, and it would be a travesty if they hadn’t been able to find such great positions, even in the admittedly slim job market. It also gives me hope for finding a similarly great job opportunity for myself in the next couple of years. Of course, it’s also incredibly good to have friends with good experiences on the (terrifying) job market who are always offering to help with practice job talks, mock interviews, and reading/reviewing articles. There’s a closeness and collegiality in this department that was sorely lacking among the many rank, festering assholes by whom I was surrounded in Zembla. Um, what? I never said that TO THEIR FACES.
So, anyway. Three of my good, good friends are leaving very soon, so we have been trying to spend as much time together as possible before that happens. Yesterday, we saddled up and rode out into the country in search of good barbeque, music, and general festivities. On the way we passed many a ramshackle house and many a herd of goats (also: donkeys, horses, and cows — this was the COUNTRY, people!). We found the barbeque and ate so much we declared ourselves pregnant with giant pig babies — man, can I tell you how much it hurts when those pig babies start kicking with their many little hooves?! — but wound up forgoing the music fest (too expensive) in favor of coming back to New Wye and spending the evening floating around the pool and drinking wine.
Tomorrow we are driving to the city in my friend B.’s sister’s minivan (we are just that fancy) to pick up my friend D. at the airport. She’s returning from a summer at home in Germany, and then she’ll be leaving town again in the next week for her new job. While in town we’ll visit the twin meccas of IKEA and H&M, and, although I plan not to spend any (much?) money, I am quite excited to admire their cheap and fashionable European-style wares.
There’s plenty of excitement afoot here in New Wye, but much of it is so bittersweet — knowing that these three women who have become such good friends to me over the last year are going to be gone so soon casts a bit of a shadow over the otherwise fun activities. If I think about it too much I’ll just start to get all misty, and we can’t have that, at least not yet.
In other fun friend news, the great Suomichris (grad school and Stupid Bank colleague from Zembla U.) will be visiting this part of the country next week! We’ll be hanging out with our mutual friend W., who lives in another college town a couple of hours away from me, and I can tell you that we will likely get pretty effing rowdy. I haven’t seen him since I returned to Zembla to defend my dissertation back in November, and haven’t seen W. since some time before that. I suppose it’s comforting to know that, despite cross-country moves (something to which all of us academics in the U.S. have to steel ourselves, like it or not), good friends can still find ways of coming together, and of not losing touch. This is a good thing.
In the midst of all this, I have got to be planning my curriculum for Fall Semester and getting my second article out to the Journal of Awesomeness, but I think I’ll find a way to clock the necessary hours at my desk in spite of all the plans that will take me out and about, across the region. If I can’t manage to nourish my friendships at the same time as my career, the career doesn’t really amount to much, does it?
So how do you find the balance between your friends/family and your job/school life?
Sometimes it feels like I am writing into a soundless abyss. I always have so much to say, and everyone and no one to say it to.
After a couple of months, I have finally finished Dave Eggers’s most recent novel, What Is the What. It’s an incredibly relentless novel, in length, subject matter, and narrative voice, and at times I found it quite difficult to approach.
I have loved Eggers’s writing for a long time, and expected to love this book just as much as I had loved A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, You Shall Know Our Velocity, or any of his great short fiction. What I found when I cracked this novel, however, was very different. Here, Eggers still experiments with form, blending fiction and non-fiction gracefully, but his usual voice and cadence have been replaced with a sort of ventriloquizing of the voice of Valentino Achak Deng, who narrates (but does not write) this “autobiography.”
I found this voice a bit abrasive, at first — perhaps due to the blunt, static, almost Hemingway-like syntax, and perhaps due to the fact that it stood in place of the more lyrical, denser, more complex syntax I have come to expect from Eggers — and it stood in the way of my approaching the novel for quite some time. By the time I was half-way through the 500-page book, I was still unsure where Eggers was going, and, on a more basic level, whether I was even enjoying it.
I knew the book had been widely praised: so many readers claimed it as a giant leap forward for Eggers, away from the “too-clever” postmodern self-consciousness of his earlier books and into a deeper and richer subject matter. I suspected this had a lot to do with the book’s focus on genocide in Sudan, and the idea that Eggers was bringing more attention to that international crisis. A valid and noble thing, to be sure, but was the book really all that good?
I continued slogging through, feeling as if I were being beaten down by the unrelenting hammer of Eggers-as-Valentino’s narrative voice, only occasionally catching my breath at particularly graceful moments, such as this one, where Valentino describes the experience of seeing his fellow Lost Boys die along the journey:
By the next afternoon, we had seen eight more dead boys along the path, those from groups ahead of ours, and we added three more of our own. On that day and in the days to come, when a boy was going to die, he would first stop talking. His throat would be too dry and to speak required too much energy. Then his eyes would sink deeper, circled in ever-darker shadows. He would no longer answer to his name. His walk would slow, his feet shuffling, and he would be among the boys who would rest longer. Eventually a dying boy would find a tree, and he would sit against the tree and fall asleep. When his head touched the tree, the life in him would fall away and his flesh would return to the earth.
The persistent repetition of “would” must surely echo Valentino’s own storytelling style, but the progression of the boys’ symptoms from voicelessness to dissociation from their names to the falling-away of life itself reflects a more artful influence. The final image is also one of the few figural/metaphoric moments from this unusually literal story. Moments like these were timely reminders that I was reading a Dave Eggers novel, not a strict autobiography. Eggers also uses an interesting device throughout the book, having present-day Valentino address parts of his story to the people he encounters throughout the day, which serves to tie the two timelines together in an interesting way and to reinforce the story’s genesis in an oral history, one told to Eggers by Valentino over the several years they collaborated on this book.
I have always been enamored with formal experimentation and stylistic devices, so these elements were helpful in keeping my interest throughout the long (long, very long, relentless) novel. It’s good that they were, too, otherwise I might never have made it to the end. By the last hundred pages or so, I had finally become invested in the story being told, and I’ll admit that for the last fifty or so pages, I was squinting through my tears as I neared the novel’s end.
While I can’t add to the universal, univocal raves for this book that I’ve seen elsewhere, I can say that it does truly reward persistence. Valentino’s voice eventually becomes familiar and inextricable, and its moments of brilliance glow a bit brighter as the book moves closer to the finish. It’s no Heartbreaking Work, but it manages to be heartbreaking enough anyway.
I never post recipes, but I think it’s high time I do, only because I have to share the salad that is saving my summer. It is so fucking hot around here that basically all I want to eat, all I can imagine eating, is boatloads of fresh fruit and vegetables. This is what I have been doing with the carloads of produce I have been schlepping home from the grocery stores and roadside stands of New Wye:
I’ve made a million variations on this salad, but here’s how to make the one pictured above. You’ll need:
1 ripe (but not too soft) avocado, cut in chunks
1 mango, cut in chunks
1/2 red onion, coarsely diced
handful of grape tomatoes, sliced in half lengthwise
handful of cucumber slices or chunks
handful of cilantro, coarsely chopped
juice of 1/2 lime (or other citrus fruit)
drizzle of olive oil
salt & pepper
protein: any type of bean will do — here I used pintos — or you can add chicken or something if you’re feeling meatier.
Basically, just combine it all together. My only tip is that immediately after you dump your avocado into the bowl, take a second to squeeze the lime juice directly over it, then go back to the rest of your chopping. The lime juice will prevent the avocado from turning brown.
This is great by itself, as a side dish (above I am having it with my honey-chili-lime-glazed tilapia, which is super easy and only requires the stove to be on for 4 minutes), in a pita, with tortilla chips, etc. You can also tweak it: using sesame oil and chick peas instead of olive oil and pintos makes it taste more Asian than Mexican, for example. You can also futz around with different fruits and vegetables in whatever manner you choose. The important part is this: an idiot can make this in less than ten minutes and not even break a sweat. I will be eating it until approximately September.
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