this is no longer the road trip

New Blog

2011-01-20T18:17:00.000-08:00

Dearest readers (all three of you),

I started a tumblr. The URL is as follows: http://citizendork.tumblr.com/ I'll let the first post explain why. Please redirect your interwebs and bookmark accordingly.

A New Year's Resolution

2011-01-07T11:35:00.001-08:00

I'm bad at resolutions. I usually forget them or ignore them. This year I'm trying something slightly different. I'm going to try harder at something I'm already trying to do: this year I want to publish at least three short stories.

I was originally thinking two, which seems like a realistic goal (maybe), but I thought hell, why not push myself a bit. I've spent the break revising many of the short stories I've written over the last year into drafts I'm happy with. I've got four good short stories to send around (I started submitting yesterday), with two more coming up, as soon as I polish up the most recent drafts. That's six stories. By the end of the year, I want half of them to be in print or online journals. Now it's public, so you all get to hold me to this and harass me to submit.

Books I've Read: December

2011-01-06T09:59:00.000-08:00

2666 by Roberto Bolano. See previous post. Man, what a tome.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. This is the first Atwood I've read, and I enjoyed it. It's literary fiction and science fiction in equal measures, and tells the story of one of the last surviving human beings as he remembers the events leading up to the biologically-engineered apocalypse. It's also a fun satire of corporate responsibility, technology, and what happens when we think we're above human failings. There are a few points where Atwood gets carried away with the satire and derails the story for a few pages to make a point about Starbucks or video games or whatever is on her mind, but generally this was excellent, and I recommend it. There's a sequel too, called The Year of the Flood, that I want to check out at some point.

Straight Man by Richard Russo. A novel set in an English department. It's pretty slapsticky, very witty, and always funny, and it manages to make riveting, hilarious reading out of personnel hiring committees and budget cuts. This is my second Russo novel (I've also read Empire Falls), and it's by far my favorite. Highly recommended!

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. This much-loved sci-fi novel was published in 1956, and in some ways it shows it. For example, it opens with a long expository prologue that explains the history of the world and some of the ideas at play, something not many sci-fi writers would try nowadays. The pacing has a distinctly retro feel--some parts feel like Bester was really taking his time, others feel like he had a deadline and needed to get the job done. Some of the perspective shifts and how they're accomplished/developed feel a little amateurish by today's standards. In other ways, the novel feels very modern. Nothing ages faster than sci-fi (try reading some early William Gibson now that it's 2011), but The Stars My Destination feels timeless. It's action, comic-booky science, and depiction of scary corporate interests feel like they could have come from the '70s or '90s or 2000s just as easily as the '50s. And the main character! Damn! Gully Foyle is a great anti-hero, one of the most fascinating characters I've seen in a sci-fi novel. He's violent, stupid, uneducated, and a murder and rapist, and Bester does some really interesting things with him by the end of the novel. Did I mention that the book is full of intrigue and action? At times it feels like a science-fiction version of a good James Bond movie. I'm very glad I read this one--it was really interesting.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. More classic genre fiction. I own an anthology of old pulp detective stories and I'd read stuff by Mickey Spillane and Dashiell Hammett and not really liked it much, so I was leery of The Big Sleep. And then I read the first paragraph:
It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.
BOOM! The language throughout The Big Sleep is similarly amazing, and it elevates what would be an exciting but rather conventional detective story into literature. People are starting to reevaluate Chandler and accept him as one of the great American stylists and I can see why. Gorgeous writing.

I'm Still a Bad Blogger

2010-12-16T12:06:00.000-08:00

But I'm home! And, two nights ago, I finished 2666, which Jeff and Selena gave me to read before I left for New Hampshire in the summer, and which I have been reading for four freaking months.

Now, of course, I have school, I have student papers, I have writing to do, but still. Four months? For one book? Ah, but what a book--it's almost a thousand pages, many of which have no paragraph breaks. Sentences will run on for pages, it's often experimental and surreal, cast of thousands, etc. Plot summary is futile.

I'm not sure if I can recommend 2666. While it was a damn good book, in the time I took to read it I could have read at least four or five other damn good books, without the pressure of a punishing 900-page slog. It's super-dark, confusing, often very disturbing (I had creepy 2666-infected dreams at least twice), and not at all rewarding in a plotty sense. But oh man, the language, the images, the dozens of fantastic dream sequences... If you're really into Latin American lit, or you're looking for a summer project and you've already read Proust and Infinite Jest and you're moving onto the next behemoth, give it a shot. Just don't try to do it during grad school.

Guilt

2010-11-07T06:54:00.000-08:00

It's been two months since I've blogged. Ashley is blogging every day. Josh is blogging again (and helping his wife in labor as I write this! Woo hoo!). I have blogger's guilt. I blame Chelsea for not needling me into doing it. For shame, Chelsea.

Actually, I blame school. School is not exciting to write (or, I'm assuming read) about. I've got student papers, I read short stories, I eke in some writing when I can. I've actually been frustrated with how little writing I'm getting done--students take up a lot of time, and I'm trying to force myself to find a balance between the TAship that's paying for me to be here and the thing I'm actually supposed to be doing while I'm here, but it's hard.

I've been writing recently because I have a story coming due in workshop. I was trying to write this historical piece about an American soldier who goes traveling after World War I and ends up in India and has to shoot a tiger, but I think I may have found my "faking it" limit. I can write a story about hunting. I can write a story set in 1918. I think I can write a story set in India. But I can't do all three at once. Too many levels of abstraction, too much research to do. I wrote like fifteen pages, did a ton of research, read half of Man-eaters of Kumaon by Jim Corbett (a British colonel who spent thirty years tracking and shooting man-eating tigers and leopards in central India; super-interesting), then I threw it away and started writing something else. The new story is coming very easily.

In other news, I'm going down to Boston for a northwest brew festival on Monday! Boundary Bay! Deschutes! Issaquah and Lompoc! I'm really stoked. I also have my plane tickets home. December 14th, kids. I'll see you then, and I'll try to be a better blogger.

What I Would Have Written About

2010-09-06T20:57:00.001-07:00

I would have written about arriving in Massachusetts and being confronted by awful New England traffic and clueless Masshole drivers. I would have written about getting lost in a warren of unmarked state highways less than two hours from home. I would have written about the long and hellish move from Dunn's Bridge Lane to my new place on Central Avenue, and my neighbors who I thought at first were meth-heads, but now I'm pretty sure were just really wasted when I met them, and I would have written about the cigarette ash in my windowsills and the slanting floors and the fact that I didn't have power for the first four days I lived here.

I would have written about building a shelf and tacking up panelboard so I could write notes to myself in dry-erase pens on my walls while I'm working on my fiction. I would have written about decorating my apartment with pages and covers from vintage science fiction pulps (an arts and crafts project! Me!). I would have written about seeing my New Hampshire friends again, and orientation for English 401, and the horrifying heat wave that swept New England, followed by the very disappointing hurricane, and visiting Scarlet and Carl in Boston, and the insane Scottish guy who yelled at us for "keeping the black man down."

I would have written about these things but I no longer have as much time as I did this summer, and, as you can see from the list, I've been busy. I'll try to do better, and you can just imagine those seven or eight awesome blog entries that I would have written. Back to writing now!

Road Trip 2010 Day 3: God made dirt and dirt will bust your ass

2010-08-22T13:53:00.000-07:00

I rolled up to a toll booth in Illinois blasting Old Dirty Bastard's "Baby I Got Your Money" and as soon as the toll booth lady asked me for the $1.25, the chorus, where Kelis sings "Hey, say hey, baby I got your money, dontcha worry" kicked in. She didn't seem to notice.

Road Trip 2010 Day 3: The Angry Truck Driver

2010-08-21T10:54:00.000-07:00

You see a lot of sketchy people in bathrooms along the interstate. 99% of the time, you ignore these people and they ignore you and everybody does their business and goes happily on their way. About 0.8% of the time you wind up talking to these sketchy people for some reason, and they turn out to be really pleasant, nice people (albeit with awkward weight/fashion/hygiene/what-have-you problems). The other 0.2% of the time, you wind up talking to these people for some reason and they turn out to be just as crazy as they look. Such was the case with The Angry Truck Driver.

TATD was pretty standard--beer belly, tee-shirt tucked into jeans, giant belt buckle, beard, baseball cap--except for the fact that he was washing his hands furiously in the Conoco convenient mart's bathroom. I was washing my hands as well and couldn't help but look over and notice his anxiety. He must have noticed me looking, because he said, very loudly, "This water is cold!"

I wasn't getting any hot water either, so I nodded, said, "Yeah, man," and gave a "what are you gonna do?" kind of shrug, but TATD wasn't done.

"This water is COLD!"

"Maybe we should talk to the manager?" I offered.

TATD huffed and shut off the sink, dried his hands just as ferociously as he had scrubbed his hands, said "Cold water doesn't kill fucking germs!" and walked out the door.

And that was The Angry Truck Driver.

Road Trip 2010 Day 2: Ambivalent about South Dakota

2010-08-20T08:33:00.000-07:00

The first two times I drove through South Dakota I hated it. Kitschy tourist billboards and dinosaur-themed water parks obstructing the views of the beautiful Black Hills, crowds of gross tourists at Mount Rushmore, swarms of Harley-Davidsons and no hotel rooms--not my favorite place.But, driving through western South Dakota in the afternoon and evening of my second day, I began to reconsider. I-90 through Eastern Montana and Wyoming is empty. Like, really empty. Closes in the winter because there are no humans to plow it and it's under too much snow, no gas for 90 miles, never see another car kind of empty. This time it felt pretty good to see other people, suburban sprawl, and fast food restaurants--and Starbucks! I hadn't seen a Starbucks since Missoula, and while it's not my favorite coffee, it's a lot better than the swill McDonald's sells, which I became intimately acquainted with later on in the trip.

Anyway, I was starting to reconsider South Dakota. Maybe, in the right context, it was actually pretty cool. Any state that has Wall Drug in it can't be all that bad. I got a little less stoked when I stopped for a nap outside a visitor's center, lay in the grass, and felt something tickling my arm. I looked down to see a grasshopper the size of my fucking finger chilling on my arm.

Grasshoppers, the myth: cute, cuddly, look like Jiminy Cricket.

Grasshoppers, the reality: ugly, terrifying, look like the aliens from District 9.

It was so big I could see that it was looking at me with its beady little grasshopper eye, probably sizing me up, figuring out if it could take me. I brushed him off my arm and went to sleep.

My faith was further shaken when I reached eastern South Dakota, which is almost as empty as Wyoming. The entire region also reeks of cow poop. Eastern South Dakota is also home to approximately one thousand gajillion bugs, half of which committed suicide on my car's windshield. About one hour after the sun went down, I drove through a bug storm. It was actually pretty amazing. I've never seen anything like it. I was used to quite a few bugs splattering on my windshield after sunset--it happens--but I drove for several minutes through massive clouds of bugs that hit my car so fast and so hard it sounded like it was raining (and hard, New Englandy rain, not soft Seattle rain). I was afraid to turn my windshield wipers on and smear my windshield into a completely opaque mess of guts, wings and shattered carapaces, so I squinted through the splatter until I reached a gas station and spent a good five minutes scrubbing it down. I wish I had a working camera. Verdict is still out on South Dakota.

I would have felt pretty bad if I accidentally killed this guy. Such a gentleman.

Road Trip 2010 Day 1: Camaraderie

2010-08-20T08:19:00.000-07:00

I planned on sleeping in my car as much as possible on the trip from Seattle to New Hampshire, because I am broke. By 11:30 on the first day I was tired of driving, so I pulled into a rest stop outside of Bozeman, Montana. I had my blanket, a rolled towel for a pillow (yep, forgot a pillow), and a big heavy wrench to defend myself in case I was set upon by a crowd of wild vagrants.

I was expecting to be a bit sketched out by the whole sleeping-at-a-rest-stop thing, but it turned out great! After some experimenting about how to get comfortable in my tiny car (pro tip: move all the luggage to the front and sleep on the back seat with your legs curled up however will work), I was good to go. And I was not the only person sleeping there, which helped.

There were at least half a dozen other cars camping out at the rest stop, including a van with a young couple and their kid (they had a mattress, though, wussies), and a few other traveling college/grad-school aged guys. I fell asleep to the roar of I-90 and the glow of the young mom's booklight.

We all woke up at about the same time the next morning, when the sunlight became too bright to sleep through. Everybody got out of their cars to stretch and look around, then we all went into the bathroom to wash up, brush teeth, etc. Everybody was smiling at each other like we were some weird, temporary I-90 family. It was great.

This is the Road Trip Again

2010-08-15T19:58:00.000-07:00

In about twelve hours I leave the northwest for the northeast. I hope my car survives, and I hope the weather cools off a bit (Washington is in the middle of a heatwave, but the national forecast looks promising). I've been so busy these last few days, what with getting trip stuff together, Sam and Jon's wedding, and Ashley and Kili in town--the fact that I'm leaving here is just now sinking in, and it's kind of got me in a funk.

I'm going to miss the northwest, and the people in it, a lot. This has been a most excellent summer, and I'm sorry to see it go.

As for the road trip itself, I would take pictures, but I accidentally broke my camera last night at the wedding. Dad and I tried to fix it today, and Dad eventually got it to a place where it will turn off and on, take pictures, and do everything but focus, so it's basically useless. Oh well. At the very least there will be some written blog entries. I might have to supplement them with pictures I find on the internet.

So Washington people, goodbye; New Hampshire people, get ready. I'll be switching coasts soon.

Accountability

2010-08-07T11:49:00.000-07:00

Reading through my old blog entries, I found this paragraph in a post from April 21st.

So my goal for the summer is to try to spend less time in front of a screen. I'm not sure how well this is going to work out, since I'm going to try to bust out as much of my thesis as I can (goal for the summer is three-hundred pages of crappy first draft), and I have to work at least twelve hours a week for Smarthinking, but hey, it will be the summer. I'm going to go on runs, go on hikes, get outside, lounge in the sun and read a book--I also have an extensive reading list for the summer, which I plan to supplement with trips to used bookstores. We'll see how it goes.

So, how well did I do?

Less time in front of the screen. Hmm. While I definitely spent less time in front of the screen than I do during the school year, I still spent quite a bit, and I wasn't working on my thesis (see below). Mostly I was g-chatting, or watching movies, or listening to music (I found a lot of new music this summer), with a little bit of writing thrown in here and there. Still, it was nice to have a break from the nine months glued to a computer screen that is my school year.

Thesis. I totally failed in this category. Three hundred pages, Ian? Really? Wow. Well, at least I have a semi-legitimate excuse: I abandoned the project I was working on (for which I had written a good thirty pages of new material on top of the sixty I'd written in school) halfway through the summer in favor of a more manageable project. On this new project I've got twenty-five pages and a few homeless paragraphs floating around. So, in total, I wrote about fifty-five pages of thesis this summer, thirty of which don't count. I don't feel too bad about it, though. It's the summer, I've got another year and a half at least. It'll get done.

Getting outside. A bunch! I think I only ran once, and I'm not a big fan of lounging outside and reading a book when I could be lounging inside on a very comfortable bed or couch and reading a book, but I went on a ton of hikes and found out I really like hiking. So success!

Reading. I've read a bunch this summer, although surprisingly little from the reading list I set up. Still, I don't feel too bad. I've already written a lot about the books I read this summer in the "Books I've Read" posts (May, June, July), so I won't say much more here.

Also, happy first anniversary to this is no longer the road trip. I started this blog on August 7th, 2009, with a post about my dehydrated cat. A lot has changed since then. I've moved across the country, started a new program, become a hell of a better writer, gone to conferences and got fiction published, joined the world of singledom, moved back across the country, and gotten to know my niece and nephew. I hope this next year is just as interesting.

Books I've Read: July

2010-08-03T11:45:00.000-07:00

The Story Thief by Joshua Young. Yeeeeeaaah! It's Josh's book, and I'll say little about it to prevent from spoiling it for all of you, dear readers, or from embarrassing its author. I will say that I loved it, and that it's not only Josh's prolificity (prolificness? prolificiness? I don't know, he freaking writes a lot) that drives me mad with envy, it's also his willingness to cut what he's revising to shreds and rebuild it, expand it, tweak it, and generally turn it from a solid first draft into an actual novel. Nice!

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. I picked this up because Jeff and Selena and I were talking about it and I haven't read it since high school and I wanted to see how I would react to it now. Strongly, it turned out. Bear with my huge, sweeping generalizations here: reactions to High Fidelity are pretty strongly divided along gender lines. Women often are bothered by it--Rob, the narrator is neurotic and whiny, the book is a find-the-right-woman-who-will-fix-you fantasy, who gives a shit about all those old soul records, etc. One WWU student I talked to actually had to get rid of the book because she said that having it on her night stand felt like "having a sketchy stranger in her room." Most men (and bear in mind that most men who have reactions to the novel High Fidelity are the kind of guys who seek the book out to read it) think that it is an incredibly accurate representation of the male mind at work. Jeff, in response to Selena's comment that Rob is whiny and neurotic, replied that yes, Rob is whiny and neurotic, but he gives voice to neuroticisms that most guys think about but would never in a million years actually talk about, which I think is a good way to describe it.

I was really torn by High Fidelity, and it's narrator especially. It is a find-the-right-woman-who-will-fix-you fantasy, and the last quarter of the book is mostly about Rob bumbling around and being a douchebag while Laura (the love interest) patiently tries to put his life together for him. Rob definitely doesn't earn points for likability. He's a self-consciously hip narcissistic hypocrite who sees the problems in his behavior and lets it eat at him, then does nothing whatsoever to change it. Unfortunately, Rob is also so similar to me that it's shocking. He's an A.V. nerd, like me and most of my male friends, and if he developed an obsession with twenty-year-old video games, we would probably be besties. This was upsetting for me to realize--I wanted to hate Rob, but I didn't. I couldn't! This needs more thinking about...

Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour by Bryan Lee O'Malley. Several people have asked me why I like these books and I have had a hard time explaining why--the plot sounds gimmicky and infantile, the art style is highly stylized (it appeals to me, but I can see how it would drive some people insane), and the narrator's comments often start to feel a bit dictatorial. But then I noticed the blurb on the back of the last book, from Joss Whedon: "Scott Pilgrim is the best book ever. It is the chronicle of our time. With Kung Fu, so, yeah: perfect." Word Joss Whedon! Basically the fact that Joss Whedon is blurbing this book should tell you why I like it--he could have written it. It has that same mix of angst and pop-culture references and ass-kicking that made Buffy the Vampire Slayer so awesome. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, it's a lot like Buffy. Huh. Anyway, I was actually a bit disappointed with the ending of the Scott Pilgrim series. I'm not sure what I expected--it ended exactly how anybody could have predicted it would end all along--but it just felt a little too... easy? Not earth-shatteringly awesome? I'm not sure.

The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis. Ah! A male-coming-of-age novel with a narrator I can really love to hate. The Rachel Papers takes place in the five hours before Charles Highway turns twenty years old. He spends those five hours recounting the previous year or so of his life, with special emphasis on his relationship with Rachel, a girl he sets out to bed but with whom he winds up falling in love. Charles Highway is arrogant, manipulative, hypocritical, elitist, callous, disgusting on pretty much every level (including and especially the level of personal hygiene, his lack of which he spends a great deal of time describing), and is just an all around asshole. There's really nothing good to be said about him, at any point in the novel. That said, I didn't have to like the narrator to enjoy the novel. It was very funny, and much of the pleasure I got from it came from seeing what the hell Charles was going to do next--his willingness to tailor his musical tastes, conversational modes, and even his accent to suit the various women he tries to pick up is rather funny, and the used condom switcheroo is a great moment.

Yes, "the used condom switcheroo." This book is freaking filthy. I honestly have never read anything so crass. I'm trying to think of a good analog to help explain it, since--as my family reads this blog--there's no way in hell I'm going to quote some of it's more filthy passages (many of which run on literally for pages), but I'm having trouble finding one that's adequate. I guess it reminded me a bit of a British novel version of American Pie, only much, much, much raunchier and willing to describe the gritty details of... well, of just about everything that American Pie can only hint at if it wants to keep its 'R' rating. Its several pages dedicated to the symptoms of Charles bad case of gonorrhea were particularly memorable, and terrifying, and I also wondered how many different ways Martin Amis--who is, by the way, a very well-respected, very British novelist--could think of to describe bronchitic phlegm. Yeah, ick, ick, ick. I enjoyed the book, but if you're easily offended or disgusted or embarrassed, this is not the book for you.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. This is a book my professors and classmates were raving about all last year and one that I wasn't that interested in. Old people? Stories about grief? Small town life on the coast of Maine? It just didn't seem like there was a lot there that appealed to me. But man am I glad I read this book. It's solidly written and very compelling, and I love how Strout handles Olive. The book is composed of thirteen short stories that all share a setting and a character--cantankerous middle school math teacher Olive Kitteridge. Sometimes Olive is the focus of the story, sometimes she only passes through a scene or gets a mention, but she's always there. Olive is a fascinating character, and I was never sure whether to hate her for her domineering pushiness and cold passive aggression, or love her for her ability to push through all the horrible things that life piles in front of her (or sometimes, like in one of my favorite stories, "Security," love and hate her in great measures, at the same time). The book is definitely a downer, but it's worth it.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower. Maybe it's that I came to this short story collection after Olive Kitteridge, which puts its emotions right up front, but Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned bothered me. Wells Tower's name and some of his more successful short stories (like "Retreat," which I read here and in the Pushcart Prize anthology a few years ago) get tossed around a lot in writing programs, because he's young (mid-30s), hip, and regularly places work in places like The New Yorker and The Paris Review. Wells Tower also writes like a young, hip dude. I'm curious to see if other MFAers (particularly fiction people) have noticed this, but there seems to be a certain mode that white male writers younger than forty-five tend to fall into. Emotion is hinted at but rarely mentioned outright. Everyone is very, very angry and/or callous. Outright statements of intent or emotion are passed over in favor of oblique images or dialogue. It's all about elision, deferment, and deflection. Think Raymond Carver but more ironic.

This is fine for a while, but after three or four stories in the same style, it gets really tiring. I found myself looking for the huge emotional crescendos in Olive Kitteridge, or the heart-on-your-sleeve angst of Scott Pilgrim. Still, this wasn't a complete waste of time. The title story is excellent, "Retreat," which I mentioned earlier, is flawed but interesting, and "On the Show" gives up Tower's typical narrative structure completely and gives us a collage of workers and guests at a small town carnival that's really, really awesome. Also, this is a good example of what I want not to do in my own writing: reticent white guy lit.

Positive Thinking! Positive Thinking!

2010-07-29T10:34:00.000-07:00

I leave for New Hampshire in eighteen days, which is very strange. I feel like I just got here. As many of you know, New Hampshire isn't exactly my favorite place in the world, but I am trying to keep the blog-whining to a minimum. To that end, I've decided to talk a bit about things I'm actually looking forward to (!!) about returning to the Live Free or Die State.

Living free or dying. I intend to live free.

The other option is dying hard. This kind of shit happens in New Hampshire all the time.

Teaching. Oh man did I miss teaching this last year. I can't wait to have students, to be in front of a classroom again, even to grade papers--Smarthinking has made me realize how awesome it is to grade and evaluate on your own terms.

Writing and reading. Sure, I'm writing and reading this summer, but it's going to be fun to have myself exposed to stuff I wouldn't pick up on my own, and to have a dedicated writing schedule. Writing over breaks always feels kind of like a dalliance or a hobby, even when I'm really cranking it out; in school it's basically all there is, so it feels much much more important.

Shipyard Summer. I know this is weird, since I'm in the land of microbreweries, but I have been totally craving Shipyard Summer Ale. I've been enjoying a lot of Northwest summer ales and IPAs (apparently there's a very distinct "west coast" style of IPA, pioneered by WA and OR microbreweries, that has a lot more kick to it than its east coast cousin, which explains why all the IPA in New England sucks except for Smuttynose) but the Shipyard Summer is kind of like liquid crack-beer. It accompanies hot, muggy weather quite nicely. I promise I'm not cheating on you, delicious Northwest brews! It's just a fling.

Having a car. New Hampshire is going to suck a lot less when I can get around it, or leave any time I want to go Boston or Portland or the mountains. Thanks for the car, Kate and Adam! You have noooooo idea how awesome this is. (Fingers crossed the Civic makes it across the country incident-free.)

My new apartment. I can't wait to have my own space and fill it up with books and video games and brand new kitchen stuff and the things I like. Plus, it's in downtown Dover, right next to an awesome used books store and a bunch of nice bars, coffeehouses, and restaurants. Sweet.

My building. I'm in one of the studios on the corner.

Fall in New England. We haven't had a ton of summer weather in Washington, which I'm just fine with. I'm already done with 85-degree-plus weather, sweating myself to sleep, sitting in front of fans, etc. (And has anybody else noticed how the red lights in Seattle are one or two minutes longer once the temperature gets to about ninety? I swear I'm not making this up.) I know that once I arrive in New Hampshire I'll have even more miserable weather to deal with for awhile, but then fall will be here, and it will be nice and cool and pretty-colored, and I can eat apples and candy corn and wear coats again. Huzzah!

Yeah, it's pretty there.

Hiking. I hear the hiking in New Hampshire is great, and they do have lots of woods and mountains (sorry, "mountains"). I'm going to buy a best hikes book and use my newfound transportation to travel the state and walk all over it.

Seeing my cat. I miss her.

Clementine circa early 2007.

See, positive thinking! Maybe I could follow this up with a list of things I won't miss about the Pacific Northwest. It might be short, but worth it.

On my Mind

2010-07-18T11:52:00.000-07:00

It turns out I really enjoy hiking. I've hiked Tiger Mountain and Mount Si and a good chunk of the trails in Saint Ed's, and I'm wondering why I didn't start doing this sooner. I lived in Bellingham for six years, for god's sake, and I never went hiking once. What was I doing with that time? Why wasn't I climbing Oyster Dome or exploring Chuckanut? Stupid Ian. I'm considering buying a better hiking backpack when I get some money (read: when student loans drop), and I'll definitely pick up a New Hampshire trail guide when I get back for the summer.

***

I'm dreading going back to New Hampshire; I'm going to miss the Northwest a lot. The landscape, my friends, my family, the ethnic food, the mild weather, all the cool little places in Fremont that I've found in the last two months. There are definitely things I'm looking forward to on the east coast--primarily my new apartment, a corner studio in the heart of downtown Dover that overlooks the old textile mill--but I'm enjoying this weird limbo summer away from school and my work.

***

Speaking of my work, I'm writing again. New thesis project is underway. I don't really want to talk about it, so you'll get to read it when it's done. Heh.

***

I just realized that I've been back for two months and still haven't eaten any sushi. This needs to be remedied.

***

Other tidbits: Smarthinking is over and done with and I'll soon spend a weekend wandering around Bellingham, looking at the water, hiking, drinking Boundary Bay, visiting the farmer's market, etc. I can't wait. Everyone should listen to Veckatimest by Grizzly Bear. The Young Ward is close to walking, and she's loving it. When Josh's novel The Story Thief hits the shelves and is a triumphant New York Times' Bestseller, listen to old Ennio Morricone tracks while you read it--they fit together like puzzle pieces, and it's weird. That's all.

A Brief Summary of the Weekend

2010-07-06T09:43:00.000-07:00

Friday

I drove up to Sam's cabin near Cle Elum with Jarret for a night of delicious food and Chris's homebrewed beer (which is delicious). I ate salmon and lots of good food, tried to solve a ridiculous puzzle, and sat next to a campfire and talked until very late. It was lovely.

Saturday

Got up early and drove out of the mountains so I could do the Fremont zombie walk. Tore up clothes with Lindsey and Sydney and had a lovely day wandering around Fremont, lunching on lamb burger, and checking out all the costumes. Lindsey, Sydney and I went as corporate zombies (office clothes, a tie for me, coffee cups) and got many compliments on our zombie-gear. We are in approximately 3000 complete strangers' photographs.

The best part about dressing as a zombie is the more dilapidated your clothes become, the better of a job you are doing. As I became progressively more covered in dirt, blood, and sweaty smeary make-up, my costume looked better and better. What an excellent day! Everybody was having a goofy good time, there was a great feeling of goodwill, and we pretty much had great times with random strangers all day. I highly recommend going on a zombie walk. Pictures are on Facebook, but I'm too lazy to upload them here. Sorry.

Sunday

Seattle weather defeated us! Some friends and I camped out at Gasworks at noon, hoping to have a good spot by the time fireworks started, and for a while it was great--cloudy but warm, good food and hanging out--but then it started raining and we had to retreat to Lindsey's friend's apartment in Fremont to watch movies (This is It, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, and season one of The Guild; excellent lazy holiday watching) and wait for the show. The view from the roof was incredible--Ali's apartment is near the Fremont bridge, so the underside of the bridge is arcing overhead toward Queen Anne, Seattle's skyscrapers are poking out from behind the hill, and Lake Union and Gasworks are right below. The fireworks were lovely. Of course, I forgot my camera.

Monday

Recovery day. I was lazy and sat around, watched more of The Guild, drove over to Woodinville to play Magic with Chris, Chris, and Ballew, ate Thai food with the parents, and generally took it easy after my crazy weekend. Man, I wish all weekends could be like this.

Nothing is happening on the writing front. I am feeling more and more justified in my laziness, as it seems few people from UNH are getting anything done this summer, yet I am still full of jealous rage when others are productive (I'm looking at you, Josh). I am wavering on my dedication to my thesis. The project seems too big, too massive in scope and ambition for an MFA thesis, and frankly, I don't think I've got the chops for it yet. I may try to reconfigure it as a collection of related short stories and novellas, but more likely it's just going to go in a back drawer until I'm ready for it. I've got another project in mind that I'm pretty pumped about and is slightly shorter and more achievable. I'll keep you posted.

Books I've Read: June

2010-06-29T22:39:00.000-07:00

Tailchaser's Song by Tad Williams. This is a dorky fantasy novel about talking cats who go on a quest. It was my friend Lindsey's favorite book as a kid, so I read it, and I found myself enjoying it quite a bit. It's like Watership Down with cats, and I do love cats. It also had a fascinatingly down-beat ending. It totally skips the standard fantasy-trope "Everything is all right, here's your reward in the form of a title / a love interest / a big wad of magic or money" ending and goes for something really ambiguous and cool. I won't spoil it in case you ever read it.

Masters of Doom by David Kushner. This is the biography of John Romero and John Carmack that I think I mentioned earlier. It was really interesting, full of cool details of video game development in the early nineties, and a blow-by-blow description of how these two titans of game development fell out (Ion Storm--yikes). I was thinking about this and the Salinger biography, and it's fascinating how often geniuses are douchebags. John Carmack was the worst kind of programmer-nerd--no social skills whatever, he talked like a robot for years just because he thought he could, lived in an empty apartment with a computer and a mattress--and made a habit until his late twenties of just being a dick and generally mistreating people. This guy was also singlehandedly responsible for creating the PC gaming industry in the early 90s. Every single graphical breakthrough came from his brain. Odd how often genius and douchebaggery coincide.

Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness, Scott Pilgrim Gets it Together, and Scott Pilgrim vs. The Universe by Bryan Lee O'Malley. I had never heard of this series of graphic novels before I saw the trailer for the upcoming movie (which could either be an awesome guilty pleasure or just really, really, really, really bad), and I was intrigued because of how they were supposed to treat video games, anime, and nerd culture--as an integral part of the narrative and visual style. I loved them for their witty banter and jokes about NES and Genesis games that made my childhood nerdiness feel hip. They're quite funny, and total fluff. I read all five books in about seven hours. The sixth comes out in a few weeks, and I intend on parking my ass in a Barnes and Noble and reading the entire thing to find out how it ends. Highly recommended.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon. Okay, this one is in progress, but I felt guilty about how little I've read this month, so I'm putting it on here to make myself feel better. This book is crazy! It's set in an alternate history where after World War II, European Jews sheltered in Sitka, Alaska instead of Israel. And it's a Chandler-esque literary crime thriller, full of hard-drinking, fast-shooting, Yarmulke-wearing police detectives and black-hatted, side-curled, corrupt Orthodox Jew crime families. Pretty awesome stuff. I won't say too much about it, since I'm only 2/3 of the way through, but I'm really enjoying it so far, and I know I'm missing out on a ton of awesome stuff because I don't know that much about Judaism. There are whole paragraphs that I just don't get at all, which is kind of too bad.

Josh, you're next.

Hey look

2010-06-28T21:05:00.001-07:00

New format! Also, to try to counter some of my nerdosity, I hiked up to the top of Tiger Mountain today, and regretted not bringing my camera. Oh well. It was a lovely hike, nice exercise, and now I am very, very tired. I bet tomorrow I will need to eat ibuprofen like popcorn. Worth it.

Nerdosity

2010-06-25T22:11:00.000-07:00

Perhaps this summer I have aged backwards and become, once again, a twelve year-old boy. When I was a twelve year-old boy I was a huge nerd, and I am reaching impressive new levels of nerdiness. Ladies and gentlemen, the facts:

My friend from college has got me getting back into Magic: The Gathering. Gabe dug up my old cards for me, and I have been building decks and realizing how hopelessly outclassed my cards from the mid-nineties are compared to the new stuff. My creatures stand no chance! As much as I love the game, what I really want to do is buy a booster pack, rip into the foil and smell that vacuum-sealed fresh-ink scent all new Magic cards used to have. It is the smell of my young nerdhood.
I have been babysitting Kaylee at Gabe and Amanda's house, which seems to have a never-ending supply of DiGiornio pizza. DiGiornio pizza is my weakness--once I bake one, it is hard for me not to eat the entire thing. I love it, and I have been eating it almost every day for lunch. Turns out when you eat pizza almost every day, you get really greasy. Greasy hair, greasy skin, lots of zits... and yet I can't help myself. DiGiornio truly is the food of the gods. Soon I will be stuffing it into my head--which will be attached to my ginormous blob of a body by a neck the circumference of a five gallon bucket--while I drink Mountain Dew and play World of Warcraft.
I'm not at WoW yet (nor will I ever be), but I am enjoying the hell out of Assassin's Creed 2, which, believe it or not, is better than the first one (Holtmeier take note). I play it on Gabe's PS3 when the young ward is sleeping or willing to entertain herself. There's even more great stabby action, and I'm learning a ton about renaissance Italy. It's pretty cool when I can play a video game and nerd out over architecture, art, medieval politics, etc.
That same friend who got me back into Magic is exposing me to a bunch of really solid electronica (cheers, Lindsey). I highly recommend Discovery, Jonsi, Passion Pit, and especially Miike Snow. I know electronica isn't really nerdy--it's rather hip at the moment, as far as I can tell--but I can't shake my old techno and electronica stereotypes: ravers, comp-sci students, weird skinny guys who do modtracking and never leave their rooms. Well, the music is damn good anyway.
Up until this morning, I have had no car for a while, which means most of my social interactions have been through texting, gchat, and Facebook. Ugh.
I am reading a book about John Romero and John Carmack, the two guys who designed and programmed Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. It's a fascinating book full of lots of cool details about how video game development worked in the nineties.

Well, that's about it. There are other, non-nerdy ways I'm spending my time, too: taking Kaylee on walks, playing catch with dogs, listening to the Avett Brothers (awesome, Kate!), other stuff. More updates soon!

Hey look, I'm a guest blogger

2010-06-18T08:47:00.000-07:00

I wrote a guest post, ramblings about short story form, for Jory over at Literary Magpie. Check it out here.

Random Facts: Like a Horse and Carriage

2010-06-08T16:08:00.000-07:00

Apparently I have entered the stage in life where the next natural step is to get married. Over the past year a frightening number of my friends have become engaged, and since I came back only a few weeks ago, four people I know have made the pledge to tie the knot (okay, so two couples). Almost certainly, before I leave, somebody else will pop the question. It's exciting, and I'm really happy for all of them, but man I'm glad it's not me carrying a ring around in my pocket, waiting for the right time to ask. I'm just not at that point.

Anyway, this has got me thinking about love, and when I start thinking about something, I usually wind up poking around on Wikipedia and the internet until I find some interesting facts. Well, here they are:

Falling in love activates the same areas of the brain that see increased activity in people diagnosed with OCD. Also, estimated serotonin levels drop to those of OCD sufferers. Scientists and psychologists don't really have an explanation for this, but one psychologist notes that obsession has been the go-to metaphor for love for poets and songwriters throughout all of human history.
To lessen the effects of lovesickness, Ibn Sena, the tenth century Iranian physician/philosopher recommends that the affected man (and it's an unstated assumption, for some reason, that the afflicted is always a man) go hunting, take part in intellectual arguments, or, because "The image that he [the lover] has within himself is nothing but a delusion," engage in shit-talking about his beloved to help bring him down to earth.
Look at this hilarious picture I found on Wikipedia.

In 1960, the average groom was 23 years old and the average bride was 20. In 2008, the average groom is 29 and the average bride is 27.
Also in 2008, experts estimated that weddings in the US are a fifty billion dollar industry.
Sixty-five percent of people surveyed tilt their heads to the right when kissing.
And finally, a man's beard grows fastest when he's anticipating sex.

Books I've Read: May

2010-05-30T16:45:00.000-07:00

I'm into summer now, which means lots of time to read. And oh man, do I have a stack. I've included some thoughts on each book, written as I finished them. Welcome to my longest blog post ever. MWAHAHA.

Hyperion by Dan Simmons. It's been years and years since I read a big, beefy, science fiction epic, and this one was awesome. Hyperion steals its frame story from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and gives it a bad-ass sci-fi twist. It's about seven people on a pilgrimage that may or may not determine the fate of humanity, but will almost certainly kill them. What I love best about sci-fi is its ability to explore ideas (pretty much a genre requirement unless you're going Cormac McCarthy's The Road route), and Hyperion has a lot of awesome ideas: a creepy-ass time-traveling God-monster named the Shrike (the subject of the pilgrimage); a colony on a distant planet built by poets, artists, and their benefactor, an old man named Sad King Billy; John Keats brought back to life as an AI; and so, so many more. The book is full of ideas that made me stop and go "Man, I wish I had thought of that first." That said, man this book is not well-written. My expectations are typically lower when I pick up a genre paperback (although they shouldn't be), and Hyperion is way above most similar novels in terms of writing style, but there were some serious tics that bothered me. Dan Simmons usually describes things very well, but he always has to give you a sense of the size. Or not a sense, really, he just tells you how many meters tall/long/deep something is. The shrike is three meters tall, the seas of Maui-Covenant are "hundreds of meters deep," the blades of the Sea of Grass are "two meters tall." I read one paragraph of description where he used the word "meters" fourteen times. FOURTEEN TIMES! He also just doesn't do subtlety. In a way that's good--I was in the mood for a big, candy-colored sci-fi extravaganza, and that's exactly what I got. All in all, I really enjoyed Hyperion, and will be checking out its sequel, Fall of Hyperion, when I get through my current stack. If you're a sci-fi fan especially, Hyperion is required reading. It won the Hugo and the Locus that year, and was shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Award and the Arthur C. Clarke award. Deservedly so.

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. As a huge fan of Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums, it's pretty pathetic that I haven't read this book until now. I've read a few of Salinger's short stories featuring the Glass family--which Anderson took as a model for his Tenenbaums--but in this novel (actually, it was originally published as a short story and a novella) the influence is pretty clear: the family of child prodigies, with a history full of disaster, suicide, and disappointment, who live in an eccentrically-decorated Manhattan abode. Sound familiar, Tenenbaum fans? It's amazing how Salinger can make neurotic bickering somehow beautiful. Listen to this passage, in which Zooey reacts to his mother telling him that he makes people nervous and is a bad conversationalist:

Zooey turned full around to look at his mother. He turned around and looked at her, in this instance, in precisely the same way that, at one time or another, in one year or another, all his brothers and sisters (and especially his brothers) had turned around and looked at her. Not just with objective wonder at the rising of a truth, fragmentary or not, up through what often seemed to be an impenetrable mass of prejudices, cliches, and bromides. But with admiration, affection, and, not least, gratitude. And, oddly or no, Mrs. Glass invariably took this "tribute," when it came, in bountiful stride. She would look back with grace and modesty at the son or daughter who had given her the look. She now presented this gracious and modest countenance to Zooey. "You do," she said, without without accusation in her voice. "Neither you nor Buddy know how to talk to people you don't like." She thought it over. "Don't love, really," she amended. And Zooey continued to stand gazing at her, not shaving.

Damn, Salinger. You're my man. While this book is definitely awesome, do not jump into it without first reading Nine Stories. A brief introduction to the Glass family is useful, especially since the main characters of Franny and Zooey so often hide their deep understanding and affection for one another under abrasive witticisms and repetitive, one-sided arguments.

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields. This is my summer reading list's concession to the hip and contemporary lit-crit scene. You need some cojones to subtitle your book "A Manifesto," but Shields pulls it off. Writers and academics, this is a must read book. Shields covers a lot of ground in this book, but the basic premise (or at least, what I took from it) is that because our mass-media saturated, internet-mediated consciousnesses are starved for "reality," we are drawn less to fictional work and more to work that presents (or claims to present) reality: memoir, reality television, documentary. Because of this, the novel, the scripted film or television show, the traditional play, etc. have been pushed out of the cultural spotlight. Shields talks especially about the novel, which, as he sees it, hit its peak relevance in the first half of the nineteenth century. Shields argues that these old forms have become so hopelessly mired in convention and genre expectations that they no longer reflect reality in any way--they give us only what we expect out of them. He calls for writers to enliven the novel by drawing on collage, a separation from traditional narrative and methods of characterization, and a kind of hip-hop inspired "sampling" of other works. To this end, about 98% of Reality Hunger is plagiarized from other sources, ranging from Joyce to James Frey to Eminem. Shields includes a note in the back that says Random House wouldn't allow the book to be published without an appendix that attributes the sources. Shields includes the appendix, but tells his readers that he isn't happy about it, that the point is that he shouldn't have to include the appendix, and he encourages his readers to use scissors to remove the offending pages. Through it's odd form and many of its arguments, Reality Hunger implies that we need to reconsider our notions of plagiarism and what is and is not considered original work. Although I disagreed with much of what Shields/his many sources had to say, I really enjoyed this book. I'm only scratching the surface of what Reality Hunger has to offer (I haven't even mentioned the section on the history of hip-hop and how it relates to his argument), so I really recommend you pick it up.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon. After The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and the excellent nonfiction collection Maps and Legends, I counted Chabon among my favorite writer. So I was a little embarrassed when I got into a conversation about him with a fellow MFAer and realized that I barely knew the work of the author I claimed to love. So this summer one of my reading projects is to read the entire Chabon back catalog. There are six novels and two short story collections I haven't read. Mysteries of Pittsburgh is his first novel, published back in 1988, and it's definitely first-novelly. There are a lot of ideas and quirky characters and shiny pieces of dialogue, but I felt like it failed to become more than the sum of its parts. I can't say I was really impressed. Skip this one.

Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry by Leanne Shapton. After reading Reality Hunger, I got interested in weird structures and fiction that includes chunks of reality. Important Artifacts and... is the chronicle of a relationship, which the reader sees through photographs and descriptions in an auction catalog. I read it in about two hours, and it kind of reminded me of reconnecting with an old friend on Facebook--you try to figure out who they've become by piecing together the evidence in photographs, wall posts, pages they've liked. There's a feeling of voyeurism, and sometimes weird glimpses behind the scenes. Early in the catalog, after Lenore and Harold have met, had a few dates, and exchanged letters and mix CDs, is a description of a handwritten note and envelope:

A note on St. Regis stationary, in Doolan's hand. Reads: "Please join me in room 1045. x L." 8 1/4 x 6 in.
Included in lot is a St. Regis envelope with various inscriptions on the back reading "Come to room 1045" / "Am in room 1045" / "Meet me in room 1045" / "See you in room 1045"

In the accompanying photograph, we can see that the inscriptions on the envelope have all been crossed out. There's a lot of stuff like that in Important Artifacts and..., and in a weird way, these things make the characters feel more real than straightforward prose would, I think. I picked this up because I was considering adopting a similar format (or rather, what I thought was a similar format) for my thesis. Still considering it, but I'm not sure how useful Shapton's book was for me.

Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon. Now this is more like it, Mikey C. His aforementioned nonfiction collection, Maps and Legends, is an appreciation of genre work and literary forms that don't earn the same cred as natural-realist fiction--comic books, sci-fi, mythologies, fantasy, detective stories, etc. Chabon argues that literary fiction would be a lot more entertaining to a lot more people (and would probably sell better) if it learned to play with some of qualities of genre fiction; and genre fiction would be more respectable if their writers used the same kind of no-bullshit cliche detector that literary fiction writers are trained to develop. Gentlemen of the Road is kind of Maps and Legends in practice--a beautifully-written, intelligent, erudite novel about two con men on an adventure in the Caucasus mountains in the tenth century. The sentences are gorgeous, the characters are well developed, and the history is handled exactingly, but the book never forgets that its primarily an adventure novel. There are cliffhangers and narrow escapes, disguises and reversals, and sweet illustrations by the guy who draws the comic "Prince Valiant." It's the most beautiful novel I've read that includes marauding vikings, decapitations, disembowelments, hemp-smoking scallawags, and an elephant that pounds one character into a bloody pulp. It's violent, smart, and really entertaining, and I wish I could build a time machine and give this book to my twelve year-old self. Definitely recommended.

Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon. Back to reality (kind of) with Chabon's follow-up to Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Oh, PS, I'm not reading them in chronological order. Wonder Boys tells the story of the worst weekend of novelist Grady Tripp's life--his wife leaves him, his mistress is pregnant, his twenty-six-hundred page novel-in-progress still isn't finished, his pot addiction is mixing with his anxiety in unhealthy ways, and his editor is about to lose his job. And that's only in the first chapter. Things get much, much bleaker from there. Chabon keeps it light, mostly through Tripp's hilarious, embittered first-person narration--his wit never fails even when everything around him falls apart in ridiculous screwball ways. For me, Grady Tripp is right up there with Holden Caulfield and Humbert Humbert in the ranks of memorable first-person narrators. I don't want to say too much more about this book because I had such a freaking good time finding out how Grady Tripp's horrible three days unfolded and I wouldn't want to ruin it for you, dear reader. Check it out.

Werewolves in their Youth by Michael Chabon. It was weird coming back to short stories after reading so many novels, and I wonder if that didn't color my perception of Werewolves in their Youth. I didn't like this collection, with the exception of a few stories. Not really at all. This was published in 1999, after Chabon was a New York Times Bestseller two times over, and the stories in it were snapped up by the New Yorker, Harper's, and GQ. It was received well, and it comes up fairly often in MFA discussions of good collections. Maybe it's me? Regardless, I just wasn't into it. Chabon gives his readers massive chunks of exposition to contextualize his characters' struggles and seems to make a rule out of telling, not showing. I found myself wondering how some of these stories would be received in a fiction workshop. There were some bright spots, though. The title story is a classic, and "Son of the Wolfman," about a woman who decides to keep her baby conceived by rape, much to her infertile husband's chagrin, was very good. "In the Black Mill," a Lovecraft pastiche, is supposedly written by one of the characters from Wonder Boys, and it's a damn good horror story. The other stories have some good stuff in them, but just didn't do it for me. I'm curious to read his first short story collection, A Model World to see if automatic acceptances into the New Yorker and Playboy made Chabon lazy, or if this is just how he handles short stories.

Racing the Beam by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost. I picked up Racing the Beam because it relates to my thesis, which spends a little bit of time talking about programming for the Atari 2600. Racing the Beam is kind of a cross between academic critique, industry history, and technical elucidation. It discusses things like the Atari's MOS 6507 processor's relationship to the electron gun in CRTs, and in the same paragraph, it will go all academic and drop some Marshall McLuhan on your ass. What I found most interesting was the information about how early video games were programmed, and how Atari was a "code farm"--programmers responsible for video games that made the company tens of millions of dollars lived on a $20,000 a year salary and received no public or in-house recognition for their work, not even their name in the manual. The technical information will be useful for me, but it was hard to slog through. I can only read so much about assembly language compilers before my brain starts shutting down. Oh, one cool note: the title comes from a slang term that was popular among Atari programmers. Because the Atari only had 128 bytes of RAM (the computer I'm writing this on has about 23.5 million times more memory, ha!), the programmers couldn't store any information for later use. Everything had to be processed on the fly, literally as the electron beam lit up the phosphor on the inside of the television screen, hence their code needed to be fast and tight enough to "race the beam."

In Search of J.D. Salinger by Ian Hamilton. Franny and Zooey got me interested in learning a bit more about Salinger, so I picked up this literary biography. It is excellent, and if you're interested in Salinger, you should read it. I'm going to spoil the end a little bit, which I thought was the most interesting part of the book. Hamilton opens the last chapter by narrating his experience of finishing his Salinger biography (which, he tells his readers, differed greatly from the book we've just read) and sending it off to the publisher, getting galley proofs, doing publicity, etc. Then Salinger sued him for using snippets of his language from his personal letters. Salinger's letters were available in many different libraries and personal collections, unpublished and publicly available, and Hamilton and his publisher thought the court case was a slam dunk. After two years of verdicts, appeals, and counter-appeals, they lost, and Hamilton had to rewrite the book, exorcising material from Salinger's letters from it and emphasizing his conflicted three-part role of Salinger's fan, Salinger's biographer, and Salinger's legal opponent. It's a very interesting read.

So that's it. Those are all the book I read in May. I promise that next time I read a bunch of books in one month I'll keep the notes brief.

Kaylee, Reading, Writing, Bellingham

2010-05-27T22:55:00.001-07:00

I've taken to referring to my niece Kaylee, in my own brain at least, as "my young ward." My young ward is very cranky today. Shh! My young ward is sleeping! It's funny how quickly my day has come to revolve around Kaylee--when she sleeps, when she needs to eat, when she can play around in the dining room while I write or check my e-mail--but it feels less like a job and more like I'm just hanging out with my niece. Except for that really bad teething day--THAT felt like work.

***

I'm reading a ton. For the last two weeks I've been keeping a running draft of my comments on books I've read in the month of May (I told you I'd keep doing it). Because I'm on vacation now, and because I've spent most of my free time reading and thinking about what I've read, that blog post is going to be huge. Start getting ready now.

In related news, I failed at my goal to take two weeks off of writing about four days ago. I made it about a week and a half before I revised some short stories (cheers, Josh!) and sent a bunch of material out. Already got a rejection back on my lone sci-fi short story, and I'm looking for more places to send it.

***

I am off to Bellingham this weekend, and lifting my spending freeze long enough to buy some delicious B'ham food. I'm thinking Casa Que Pasa, some Boundary Bay beer, and a cyser at Honeymoon. If I can sneak sushi in there (lunch at the public market?) I will be even happier.

Super Broke Survival Guide

2010-05-23T19:08:00.000-07:00

So you're a grad student home for the summer, looking to maximize your time and minimize your expenses? I'm in the same boat. Finding myself without a nine-to-five this summer, I've put together a few practical pointers for those academics stuck in the weird in-between months of summer.

Mooch. Most likely, your friends have real jobs with real paychecks. Your friends will also be excited to have you back from school, at least for a little while. Take advantage of this excitement. They'll have no problem giving you rides, buying you a beer or a coffee, maybe even taking you out to dinner. Be warned though, at some point your friends will catch on, and you may have to demonstrate your non-moochiness by springing for their movie ticket or paying for snacks. It will be worth it--the longer you can mooch, the more money you'll save.
Dinner with the parents. Not only are you parents willing to offer you free dinner, but it's delicious and the company is good. Never ever go out for dinner. If you absolutely have to and it can't be avoided, stick to five dollar footlongs at Subway or jumbo burritos at Taco del Mar--both are cheap and filling.
Tax-free job. You'll make more money if it's tax-free. I recommend babysitting your awesome niece.
Library card. Summer means time to read for pleasure, but books are expensive! Find that library card from home that you have buried somewhere and make use of it. King County has an amazing library system--I've been able to find everything I've looked for, including some pretty obscure stuff--and it's convenient and free.
Free internet (and Netflix log-in if possible). Books are covered, but what about music, movies, and television shows? This is why God gave us Bittorent. Find free internet, either at a cafe or your parents house, and download to your hearts content. Bonus points if you can score a Netflix log-in to watch Instant Watch movies and television.

Home

2010-05-14T16:59:00.000-07:00

There's this thing that I kind of forgot about. It's called "free time." Since I got home late last night, I've slept, unpacked, and that's about it. I've been lounging around, catching up on the blogs I read, meeting Dad's two new beehives (new project), working my way through Dan Simmons' sci-fi epic Hyperion--cheers, Kingston; it's awesome!--and biding time before I get to meet my new nephew, Maxwell Holiday Hunter, tonight.

What I am not doing is writing. I am taking a break for a few weeks, I think. Josh, I got the e-mail with your notes, and I'm opting not to look at them until I decompress for a bit. Thank you, and send The Story Thief when you're done with your polishing!

Think I'll work some Smarthinking shifts this weekend to try and get some money, but mostly I plan on reading and relaxing. I'll update again when I actually have something to talk about. For now, it's good to be home.

Books I've Read (so far this year)

2010-05-08T13:47:00.001-07:00

My professor mentioned that she keeps a book journal, just a list of every book she's read and when she read it. I think this is a great idea, and I'm going to one-up her by posting it on my blog. See anything you like? Comment on it. Recommend something. Let's have a discussion. The plan is to eventually post one of these every one or two months, but as I'm just starting this, I figured I would do everything I've read so far this year (as best I can remember). Unless I say otherwise, you can assume I read it for class. Here goes...

January

Fortress of Solitude, by Jonathan Lethem. Read it for fun. Epic, difficult, and odd. Totally worth it.
How I Became a Famous Novelist, by Steve Hely. Read it for fun. Very funny satire of book people. Totally nails the scenes set in an MFA.
The Shell Collector, by Anthony Doerr. Read two stories out of it for a class last semester, read the rest over the break for fun. Beautiful short story collection. This story is a must read.

February

Best American Short Stories 2009, edited by Alice Sebold. Awful selections! Avoid at all costs.
Bringing the Devil to his Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life, edited by Charles Baxter and Peter Turchi. Didn't read the whole thing, but read a good chunk of the essays within, which were very good.
Burning down the House, by Charles Baxter. Several essays assigned for class, then read the rest for fun. Some really interesting observations about how fiction works.

March

OnWriting, by Stephen King. I've read this before, but got to revisit it for class. It's by far the best King book I've read. He should do memoir more often.
Reading like a Writer, by Francine Prose. Another reread for my form and technique class. An insanely useful book for fiction writers.

April

The Faith of the Writer, by Joyce Carol Oates. Hated it.
Day Moon, by Jon Anderson. A poetry collection, recommended to me by the inimitable Andrew "Babypoet" Booth. It was alright, but didn't do much for me (sorry, BP).
The Woman in the Woods, by Ann Joslin Williams. Read it for fun. My professor's collection of linked short stories. This book filled me with an insane jealousy--I wish I could write short stories like this.
The Pearl of Kuwait, by Tom Paine. Read it for fun. My other professor's novel, written from the first-person POV of a stoned California surfer turned US Marine in Operation Desert Storm. Kind of like Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure in the Middle East, which is to say, awesome.
Ron Carlson Writes a Story, by Ron Carlson. Interesting, but I'm not sure if it really helped me all that much.

That's it for full books, although I'm sure I'm forgetting stuff from over the break and from March, which seemed a lot busier than my reading list makes it seem. I've also read several volumes worth of my colleagues' material for my fiction and non-fiction workshops, a folder stuffed to bursting with short stories and essays pulled from books and magazines, and a stack of lit journals I read for fun (mostly I just read the fiction out of them, and the occasional essay, including one by my former professor, Susanne Paola). Notable journals are AGNI, The Northwest Review, Green Mountain Review, Opium, and The Waterstone Review.

This was fun. I have a lot of reading I'd like to tackle over the summer, so hopefully I'll post another list soon. Readers of my blog, you should do this too! Or post it in the comments! It's fun to think about what you've been reading.

Wrapping Up

2010-05-01T20:00:00.000-07:00

I'm just finishing off an awesomely productive day. I wrote the last ten pages of a short story draft, revised a piece for my nonfiction final, read and commented on a story for workshop, read a story from a journal, crossed some random around-the-house crap off my to-do list, went running, and sat in the sun. And now I'm blogging. What a day!

It's the end of the semester, and before today I was kind of freaking out. I have less than a week to wrap up all my classes, revise at least twenty-five pages of nonfiction, and write a story for workshop. Oh, and I have to get my stuff in order, find a self-storage place and move all my crap out of the apartment. So I'm a little busy. Today made me feel like I could take it all on. I'm sure it will be back to panic and chaos tomorrow, but maybe not.
I can't wait to fly back to Seattle (I've using the all-purpose, recognizable "Seattle" in favor of "Bothell," or sometimes even "Bellingham," just because people know where it is). I can't wait to see my friends and enjoy the northwest summer and eat smoked salmon and barbecued hamburgers. I can't wait for good microbrews. I can't wait for time to read some books and time to start working on my thesis again.

But first I have to scramble through these next two weeks. Don't expect a lot in the way of updates for a while, although we'll see how busy I am at work. I'm looking forward to seeing all of you northwesterners soon!

Hell Wednesday

2010-04-24T07:35:00.001-07:00

On Wednesday I showed up at work and found out that a network error had wiped out our computers. Apparently McAfee sent an update to its corporate antivirus clients that identified one of Windows XP's key system files as a virus, quarantined it, and shut down the computer. We had no way to fix it. Most of UNH's network shut down.

But I needed the money, so I didn't go home. I sat there without the internet, without any work to do, for five hours. I learned a couple of things from this.

I spend a disturbing number of my waking hours in front of a computer. I work thirty hours a week at two jobs, and both of them require that I sit in front of a computer. At the OCM I'm sometimes at loose ends, and kill time by reading blogs, checking up on Facebook, and reading music/movie/video game reviews and commentary. When I'm logged on to work for Smarthinking, I'll sometimes take a break between student essays to check up on a couple of my sites. When I'm not working, at school, sleeping, or reading, I'm in front of the computer, either writing or responding to my classmates' writing. I'm a little terrified to take a guess at how many hours a week I spend in front of a screen. It's way too many.
DO YOU KNOW HOW LONG FIVE HOURS IS? Five hours without the internet!? My God! The boredom caused by #2 is what made me realize #1. I was itching to check my e-mail, or get on Facebook. Shit, I practically had the shakes. I'm an addict. Instead of writhing around on the ground and sweating it out, I had a nice conversation with my coworkers, who were, of course, in the same situation.

So my goal for the summer is to try to spend less time in front of a screen. I'm not sure how well this is going to work out, since I'm going to try to bust out as much of my thesis as I can (goal for the summer is three-hundred pages of crappy first draft), and I have to work at least twelve hours a week for Smarthinking, but hey, it will be the summer. I'm going to go on runs, go on hikes, get outside, lounge in the sun and read a book--I also have an extensive reading list for the summer, which I plan to supplement with trips to used bookstores. We'll see how it goes.

AWP 2010: Pros and Cons

2010-04-16T07:36:00.000-07:00

I attended AWP in Denver last week, and man was it fun. Of course, there were not-as-awesome bits mixed in with all the partying and literariness and schmoozing. Let me run through my list of AWP pros and cons.

Pro: Hanging out with Josh, Chas, and Kenny—not to mention Joy, Andrea, Leslie, and Nancy. The four of us guys split a hotel room and shared beds. It was great to see my Western friends again—man I've missed you guys—and talk books, drink beer, wander around Denver, watch YouTube videos of people falling down, etc.

AWP dudes. Notice my ripped jeans and bloody knee. This is shortly after my epic fail where I fell off a sidewalk because I wasn't paying attention to where I was walking.

Con: Sleep farts. That's all I'm saying. I won't say who.

But it definitely wasn't this guy.

Pro: Michael freaking Chabon. He gave the keynote speech and we arrived early so we could sit in the front. Josh pointed out that we were sitting only a few feet from the guy, who was schmoozing with reporters and fans. We considered getting a picture with him, but decided that would be a little too dorky fanboy. Josh and Chas went to the bathroom, and Kenny and Mary (one of Kenny's friends at Portland State's publishing program) went up to talk to Chabon—apparently they go to school with his brother. It was my chance, so I went. He was super-nice, shook our hands, took pictures with us, and, when we tried to go sit back down, dragged us back to tell him about his brother, who he hadn't seen in a year. He then proceeded to give a totally kickass keynote address.

Con: I'm not ever going to be as cool as Michael Chabon. He played himself on the Simpsons! He wrote Kavalier and Clay and won the Pulitzer! He scripted Spiderman 2. As the guy who introduced him said, “He's the coolest guy I've ever shook hands with.” I couldn't agree more.

Look at that shirt! Look at that hair! His smile is so dazzling!

Pro: There were not as many crazy people as there were at Chicago's convention last year. I'm not sure why this was—perhaps because it was a smaller city. It's also possible that my judgment is skewed because this year I wasn't sitting at The Bellingham Review table, which is a magnet for insane people. Last year a children's writer who dressed like a homeless woman gave us a card and smiled at us with a terrifyingly vacant expression. “I drew a can of worms on the back. Would you like to know why?” Kenny and I shook our heads and asked why. “Because writing is like a can of worms. When you open it up—” She smiled even bigger and got so excited her voice became a whisper. “—You never know what you're going to get.” There was less of that this year.

Two of the crazy people we did find.

Con: Crazy people were replaced with hipsters. I felt severely under-dressed and un-hip the entire time. As Leslie from WWU pointed out, at academic conferences, everyone is dowdy and awkward, and at writer's conferences, all the young people are hot and hip and trying to show off.

Pro: The bookfair. AWP's bookfair basically consists of free literary magazines, people I haven't seen in a few years, hot chicks behind tables (how else to draw attention to your magazine?) and weird giveaways—I received a beer cozy from The Minnetonka Review, and last year I got a plastic pizza cutter from The Mid-American Review. I found that several of my old WWU friends edit journals now (which is sweet—I have an in), I got a ton of litmags, I learned that Michael Czyzniejewski—the editor of one of my favorite magazines, The Mid-American Review—has a vague recollection of me from the numerous stories of mine he's rejected, barely missed Sam Ligon about five times, bumped into professors new and old, and generally had a great time.

Con: The last day of the bookfair, however, is a little strange. All the conference-goers are nursing hangovers that have been snowballing from the last three nights, and they let the public in, so there's a few hundred extra people. Also, journals don't want to take their stockpiles of back issues home, so they give them out for free, which is good, but also overwhelming when you realize your bag is falling apart because there's forty pounds of literature in it. It's a weird vibe. The girl at the Yalobusha Review table gave me a tall plastic cup of cheap merlot, which helped.

Pro: Denver is a cool city. Also, the convention center, where the conference was held, was being assaulted by a giant bear. There was good food and cheap beer, one of the best fast-food pizza restaurants I've ever found, and just a nice vibe throughout.

Look out for the giant bear.

Con: But Denver wasn't without its drawbacks. It's the mile high city, and the elevation got to us. Everybody I was with had fierce headaches and most people were sick by the end of the trip. I dodged those bullets, but, like everyone else, I was dehydrated the entire time, had a nose full of bloody boogers (the little capillaries in their explode at high altitudes), and the skin on my hands got so dry that it cracked open and fell apart. Bummer. I was pretty glad to return to sea level.

It's in Washington D.C. next year, and I am so there. I had a great time! Here's some other, random pictures, courtesy of Josh's Facebook album.

Kenny's friends stayed in the hotel across the street, the Brown Palace, which is one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever been in. These are the elevator doors, which have walnut, gold, and dragons on them. Awesome.

The elevator to our hotel. Not as classy as the Brown Palace.

More Chabon love. That's Kenny and Mary, from PSU.

Before Chabon's speech.

The view from our hotel window. The brown building is the Brown Palace.

Okay, a quick break from pictures to share an anecdote. We thought the Brown Palace was a hilarious name for a hotel, and it quickly became a euphemism. "Don't go into the bathroom--I just built a brown palace."

Guess who built the most ostentatious brown palaces?

AWP

2010-04-08T16:16:00.000-07:00

Josh wants me to blog, so I'm blogging while he's in the shower. Suck it! Ha ha! Okay, now he's out. Josh, Kenny, Chas, and I are sharing a hotel room in Denver while we attend AWP. Today is the first day of the conference proper, and I've attended a panel, a reading, wandered the bookfair, and schmoozed with people from UNH and WWU (and a few inbetween from Houston and Portland State). I'm already pooped, lying on the hotel bed, and in a few hours I have to be up and about for the keynote address by Michael Chabon. Denver is also awesome, although I wish I could afford to eat all the delicious steak and Mexican food and beer. Oh well. Possibly I'll blog more about this later.

On Conformity

2010-03-09T07:27:00.000-08:00

MGMT is coming to my school, and I’m pretty stoked. Many of my fellow Wildcats do not share my excitement. Two of the undergrads who do workstudy in the same office as me had never heard of MGMT. “SCOPE [the Student Committee on Popular Entertainment] has been bringing some good shows lately,” one of the girls said. “Like Akon!”

I cringed inside. They also mentioned an excellent show by Sean Kingston. “Who’s that?” I asked.

“You know, he does that song ‘Beautiful girls.’ You’ve heard it.”

They played it for me. I had never heard it. I wasn’t missing anything. I played them “Time to Pretend” and “Electric Feel” by MGMT. They had never heard either song.

The SCOPE message board was in the middle of a flame war. “Plymouth gets Drake and we get MGMT?” one user wrote, and pointed out that Drake has had twelve top-100 singles (including songs he’s been a guest on), and MGMT has only had one—therefore, Drake is the better musician. I wanted to point out that by his logic, Drake is a better artist than Nirvana, and twice as talented as Jimi Hendrix, but I refrained. Like my coworkers, many on the boards have never heard of MGMT (I hadn’t heard of Drake before yesterday).

This drives home something that’s been bubbling beneath the surface ever since I got here. There’s not a lot of diversity. I was warned about this before I came, but I didn’t realize how it would manifest itself on a college campus. College campuses are full of different types of people, I thought—jocks, popular kids, mods, nerds, hippies, goths, punks, business majors, stoners, hipsters, frat boys, and all the weird gradations in between. At least WWU was like this (although I suppose they were wannabe frat boys, since we didn’t have any frats).

UNH seems to have two groups: the hipsters—the people defending MGMT on the message boards, the girls who wear mod dresses and the guys who wear skinny jeans and thick-rimmed glasses and scarves, the people I overhear on the bus talking about Arrested Development—and everybody else.

Everybody else listens to Akon, Lupe Fiasco, Young Money, Ke$ha, or whatever else is killing the Top 40 charts at the moment. They drive spotless new cars, wear Hollister, and drink at the socials every Thursday night (Thirsty Thursdays) at Scorps (a local bar).

Everybody Else.

I haven’t seen a hippie since I got here. Several people who ride my bus are math grad students and talk a lot about their research, but they seem to exist uneasily somewhere on the hipster spectrum, and they disappear once we’re off the bus—faceless in a crowd of Abercrombie, North Face, and perfectly coifed hair. The conformity disturbs me a little, especially coming from Western and Bellingham, a town incredibly tolerant of personal eccentricity. One day when I was back in Bellingham over winter break I watched a woman wearing a top hat and a long coat she appeared to have sewn out of other clothes walk down the street and stand in front of the Bagelry. This would never happen in Durham, I thought. Nothing like it ever has and nothing ever will.

Hipsters, conforming to their own silly bullshit.

Recent Happenings

2010-03-07T16:10:00.000-08:00

Hey everybody. Just thought I'd give you the rundown, or the lowdown, or the dealyo. Here are some things that happened! Or are happening!

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We went to a hockey game. It was the last hockey game of the regular season, and UNH (#1 in our league) was playing Boston College (#2) for a spot in the quarterfinals. It was a tense game. By the end of the second period we were down three-to-nothing and it was looking hopeless, but we scored three goals (are they called that in hockey?) in the third period to tie it up, and nobody scored in overtime. It was my first hockey game, and very exciting. I think I might actually see if I can go to a few more next year. There were two notable things about this hockey game:

They played the Canadian national anthem before the game, even though both teams were American and as far as I could tell, everybody there was from either New Hampshire or Massachusetts. I guess it's a hockey thing.
Hockey brings out my most violent impulses. I was surprised at how sedate the crowd was, especially for the first two periods. For two and a half hours I had to stop myself from jumping up and screaming "HIT HIM IN THE FACE WITH YOUR STICK!" while the undergrads and middle-aged alumni behind us commented casually on the plays

So anyway, it was really fun.

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I'm about to watch the Oscars. I'm hoping Hurt Locker beats out Avatar, but I'm being realistic. We're having people over for dinner--Ashley made delicious bread, we're trying to salvage a soup we maybe screwed up, and our friend Nate is bringing up "lobster macaroni and cheese," which sounds scary but I'm betting will be delicious.

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I'm a freaking writing machine. I polished off a short story (promising) and a nonfiction article (we'll see what the class says about it) earlier this week, I finished the second chapter of my novel's messy first draft, started another nonfiction piece and wrote half a short story--and those last three things I did today. I feel like Josh Young or some shit. I also commented on a workshop story, sat in the sun, and finished off Stephen King's On Writing, which I'm reading for my form and technique class and which I'm thoroughly enjoying (I've actually read it twice before, but for a few years).

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That's about all. I'm a little less busy now, so I'll try to update more (Chelsea).

Difficulties, Pt II

2010-03-02T09:28:00.000-08:00

Last night I got food poisoning and threw up at four in the morning. Hell of a week.

I did, however, get the short story I've been working on into decent shape.

Difficulties

2010-03-01T10:30:00.000-08:00

It's difficult to do homework without power. We lost our power Thursday night because of a big nasty storm (one of those wicked nor'easters they're always talking about), and didn't get it back until Saturday night. I spent the weekend at a friend's apartment with a terrible internet connection, which meant I could write, but not research or do my online tutoring job. Before the storm hit I was grossly sick (in fact I'm still not completely recovered). Now Ashley is sick and our apartment continues to be a gross pit of sickness. This semester is conspiring against us--neither of us will ever get on top of the workload.

In other random news, my friend Josh (formerly of WWU, now doing his MFA in Las Cruces, NM) posted an interesting commentary about workshop difficulties on his blog All Headlights and Vapor Trails. You can read the original post here. I want to post the comment I made on my own blog because dammit, I'm in full rant mode and I want to. Basically, Josh's post is about how he's frustrated that fiction workshops overemphasize criticism of a story, making what's not working in a story a more important topic of discussion than what is working. In his teaching and his workshopping, he tries to talk about what isn't working in terms of what is. ("This section would be better if you changed this and this, to make it parallel the scene on page three.") You should read the rest of the post--it's interesting. He also takes his fellow MFAers to task for only reading their colleagues' pieces once before commenting. In my comment I talk about what pisses me off in the workshop:

I'm okay with the balance of support and criticism, as least in my workshop (probably about 25-75). What bugs the hell out of me is the way we fall into phrasing our quibbles. "I like x and y about your story, but I do have some questions..." is such a euphemistic way to segue into talking problems about the story. For me, that kind of language just doesn't help--if something is wrong with my story, I want to fucking know that it's a problem. Telling me you have a question about it doesn't help much, telling me that it sucks does.

I often wound up treating student papers quite differently because they don't have the (typically) thick skin creative writers develop in the workshop, and to much overt criticism can shut them down entirely. Euphemistic workshop language seems appropriate for college freshmen--they need the cushion--it doesn't seem appropriate for writers in their mid-twenties or later who have been doing this for years.

As for reading, I usually give it a quick "enjoyment" reading (also to get the threads of the story in place in my head before I start getting critical with it), then get into the nitty-gritty on my second reading. I usually only have time to give the really flawed or challenging drafts a third reading, unfortunately.

It is weird how people write because something is due, and it does seem counter-intuitive. I wonder how often it's a problem with time to write. Now that my semester is in full swing, I'm finding myself stupid busy--working 30 hours at two jobs and reading other students' work, mostly--and I'm ashamed to say I am in the process of writing a phoning-it-in short story. I haven't had time to do better, and that sucks. Hopefully something interesting comes out of it, but right now... ugh.

But I thought my images were subtle with a deep ring of metaphor! WAH!

Josh is *hopefully* coming to AWP and crashing with Kenny, Chas, and I. He's a stud, his comments at WWU were always hard-nosed and useful, and he mentions me all the time on his blog. Nice.

Update from the bottom of a pit

2010-02-25T07:18:00.000-08:00

I have been sick for six days. I have left the apartment only two times since Saturday afternoon, and both times were horrible mistakes. After much haranguing from Ashley and friends, I have finally agreed to go to the health center (my way is to wait it out and see if I get better on my own, but that doesn't seem to be happening). The worst part about being this sick is that I'm sick enough to stay home and have oodles of time on my hands, but too sick to have the mental wherewithal to use it. If my brain were functioning right I could have written so much! I could have done so much work, as well as non-required writing, but instead I just tool around in OpenOffice for an hour, write a decent paragraph, then lie on the couch. Blerg. Anyway, I'll stop whining--just wanted to give an update. I look forward to health, energy, and proper brain function.

If Scorsese can do it, why can't I?

2010-02-20T12:57:00.000-08:00

Last night Ashley and I went to see the new Martin Scorsese movie Shutter Island. It was pretty good, but not great—wait for it to hit the cheap theaters, or maybe DVD if you've got a nice big TV. I found that the last third of the movie dragged pretty badly, and MAN did I see that twist ending coming from a looooooooong way off. Still, the first parts of the movie were quite unsettling—both Ashley and I had really messed up dreams.

Anyway, it got me thinking about genre. Scorsese is clearly playing a lot with genre, mixing 40s and 50s hardboiled noir-style narratives, camera angles, and performances with surreal and psychological horror. Leonardo DiCaprio's and Mark Ruffalo's dialogue from early on in the film sounds like something straight out of a fifties detective movies (plus a few F-bombs). I think a lot of the audience was a bit put off by the genre anachronisms early on in the movie. The acting style took a little while to get used to and the (intentionally, I think) overdramatic score drew giggles from the undergrads next to me, but I had a great time, especially as the straightforward detective narrative descended into weirder, hallucinatory spaces.

Whenever I see genre done right, in writing, film, or TV, I always miss Western. New Hampshire's MFA program coasts by on this “Yeah, genre writing is cool, we can talk about genre,” attitude, but when it actually comes up in conversation, none of the students or professors actually have the vocabulary to talk about it. WWU made sure its students could talk about genre fiction, in its popular and experimental forms. Matt, a friend and fiction classmate—and a sci fi nerd who takes his work to some pretty damn experimental places—gave me Dan Simmons's Hyperion for my birthday. “Wow,” I thought. “I knew Matt was a nerd, but this is some hard-core sci-fi nerdery.” I was surprised, but I shouldn't have been. Deep genre stuff, and our predilection for it, never comes up in class.

In a little over a month I'll be at the AWP conference in Denver. Michael Chabon, a supporter of ghettoized genres in all mediums, is the keynote speaker, and I'm curious to see if he'll bring up sci-fi or comic books in his speech to the—very academy-centric—AWP crowd. Chabon is interesting because he manages to be a best-selling author who genre-hops—Kavalier and Clay was a period piece, his next novel was sci-fi, and he's jumped through children's fantasy, serialized mystery novellas, and steampunk short stories since then—but also maintains pretty good cred with academic creative writers (he went to Iowa for his MFA and teaches in Berkeley, I think). I hope he takes stodgy academic writers to task—short stories and novels don't have to be boring. It's possible to have both nuanced characters and aliens, lyrical prose and exploding helicopters. I'll keep you posted on what Chabon says. I'm going to go write a story where something interesting happens.

"Heat" has the greatest action scene in cinematic history

2010-02-15T11:48:00.000-08:00

Yes it does. At about the halfway mark in Heat is an action scene so astounding that I was literally on the edge of my seat the whole time. In it, a group of four bank thieves are confronted by the police as they attempt to flee the scene, and a bloody, prolonged gunfight drastically changes the course of the rest of the movie (I don’t want to say too much in an effort to keep this relatively spoiler-free).

It’s violent, it’s fast, it’s amazingly edited and very tense, an it feels real (apparently it’s so real that the US Marines use it as an example of the proper way to retreat while under fire). But that’s not why I was on the edge of my seat. I was on the edge of my seat because of the writing! The movie makes painfully clear what’s at stake for every character who has a part in the scene.

Robert De Niro’s character Neil and Tom Sizemore’s Michael are there because they are thieves and it’s the only thing they know how to do, the only work they can really take pleasure in. (One interesting aspect of this movie is the links it makes between cops and robbers, two classes of professionals who work on opposite sides in the same field, often using the same methods.) Neil agreed to do the job for Val Kilmer’s character Chris, who is there because he’s a gambling addict and thinks that the money will help him out of his debts. He also wants the money because he sees it as key in saving his disintegrating marriage (it’s not, the viewer is aware). Donald, played by Dennis Haysbert, is a getaway driver called in at the last minute. He’s an ex-con, trapped in a miserable job assigned by his parole officer, who gets back into the game because he’s sick of being treated like shit by the real world he tried desperately to join. Finally there’s Vincent, played by Al Pacino, the cop who has become obsessed with the head thief, Neil. In Neil, Vincent sees a reflection of himself, a professional torn by the complications of the career he chose.

For the first eighty minutes of the movie we’ve seen these characters fight with their wives, love their children, go out for drinks with their families and friends, and argue whether or not hitting the bank is worth the risk. We’ve seen Neil meet a woman named Eady who asks him if he’s lonely. “I’m alone, I’m not lonely,” he replies, but his relationship with her and his friends reveals that he’s desperately alone, trapped in his work, and unable to make a real connection with anybody. More so than in any crime movie—maybe with the exception of The Godfather—you feel like you know these characters. They’re not just cops and robbers, they’re people, they’re practically your friends, which is why, when Chris sees Vincent across the street and raises his gun to fire, I panicked. I don’t want any of them to die! I thought.

You have to see this movie. It’s awesome, and it’s surprisingly well-written for a Hollywood crime thriller—there are a few clunkers, but for the most part the characters express themselves with cliché-free eloquence—and the gunfight is only one of several amazing scenes. Here's a link to a YouTube video version, but you really need to see the whole movie to get the full context.

I am a Bad Blogger

2010-02-09T10:33:00.000-08:00

It would be nice to start this post with something like, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe it's been two and a half months since I've blogged!" But of course, I'm well aware that it has been a very, very long time since I've clicked on "New Post," and every time I see a new post pop up on gauchedroitegauche (daily! Daily!) I feel a tug of guilt.

So I'm going to try to be a better blogger. The problem is, that's not as easy as it sounds. I have reasons for never posting on this damn thing. Here are some of them.

Nothing to write about. If I blogged daily, every entry would consist of "I woke up and went to work and school. Then I wrote." Grad school is a grind, and after six weeks of glorious vacation in the Pacific Northwest, I am right back in it.
Other outlets. I am writing a novel for my thesis. I'm about sixty-five pages in. I'm also writing a bunch of nonfiction for my nonfiction class. I don't need to write any more, and if I have an idea I really want to explore and write about, I'm going to do it in an essay or a piece of fiction, probably not in a blog post.
I will shortly be in possession of Beatles Rock Band. Yes, yes, I know that this doesn't excuse the last two and a half months of bad blogging, it's just a warning that this is probably going to continue, because soon this game will suck up all my free time. Oh, also in the box o' stuff with Beatles Rock Band is Contra, A Boy and his Blob, Vice: Project Doom, and a bunch of PS2 games, including the first two Katamari titles. I'm going to be doing some gaming.
Laziness. Meh.

So there you have it. Apologies, apologies. I will try harder, I promise. I think the quantity of my blog posts might be a direct corollary to how much downtime I have at work (I am blogging from a lull in excitement at the Office of Conduct and Mediation). I'll definitely keep you posted if anything exciting happens.

Oh! This is old news, but something kind of exciting happened. I got my copy of 5x5, the litzine that published my short piece "Ten Inch Guns." Here is their website. You should totally buy a copy of the winter 2009 issue, which has my story in it. Also some sweet poems and a really weird/creepy/awesome comic-drawing thingy. Check it out. I'll be in touch.

Ode to a Ford Taurus

2009-11-27T08:51:00.001-08:00

Dear Ford Taurus,

My parents bought you from some sketchy Russians, and when my old car died, you were bequeathed to me. We had some good times, Ford Taurus. You broke down in Madison, Wisconsin. You broke down in Astoria, Oregon. You successfully towed a U-Haul trailer across the country, and your lack of fuel-efficient air conditioning almost killed my cat. Good times, good times.

But now your transmission is shot, and not even the weird people on Craigslist want you. I have to take you to a junkyard. I know it's an ignoble end for a car that has served so well, but maybe if you hadn't crapped out so unexpectedly, or left me stranded in this little New England town, I would be more moved by your plight.

I wanted to take you to Boston again, and up the coast to Maine. We could have driven to New York, and I know I promised you a trip to Detroit (the land of your birth), but now I'll be taking the trains and buses. Farewell Ford Taurus. I hope your parts make other car-owners happy.

Sincerely,

Ian

Happy Belated Halloween

2009-11-10T04:53:00.000-08:00

Ha, I never post on here any more. So Ashley and I had a lovely Halloween. She went as Margot Tenenbaum (of The Royal Tenenbaums) and I went as a deer. Friday night was a party at Andrew and Keith's house and Saturday night we went to the Portsmouth parade, then watched Donnie Darko, always an excellent Halloween choice.

Ashley doing her best Margot expression.

Deer.

At the parade, small children wanted their picture taken with me. "My daughter is really into bucks. All about bucks. She wants her picture taken with anything buck-related. Do you mind?" Of course not. Here are some other kick-ass costumes we saw.

Keith and Nate as Garth and Wayne.

GREENMAN!

Greenman and the deer dancing, Ashley poking her head out creepily.

Video game characters in the Portsmouth parade. The guy dressed up as Ness from Earthbound gets an A for obscurity.

Fun Spot is the Spot for Fun

2009-10-21T20:08:00.000-07:00

I'm so sorry that this is so late. I visited Funspot two Sundays ago, and I'm just now getting to blog about it. Life and school have both been kind of kicking my ass, but right now I'm just too burnt out to do serious writing, so I'm blogging instead.

Laconia, NH is a weird little tourist spot on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee, full of water slides, rock walls, and minigolf courses. It also has Funspot, the largest arcade in the world. No kidding. The largest arcade in the world is in some little shitty rundown lakeside resort town in New Hampshire. Who knew? It's got around 250 arcade games. It's several stories. It's huge, and it's my own little nerd heaven.

But Funspot isn't just full of games, it's full of old games. It's home to the American Classic Arcade Museum, a group dedicated to preserving old machines from the 70s and 80s. It is also the setting for the second half of the fantastic documentary King of Kong, a film about two men (one from Redmond, WA!) vying for the top score in Donkey Kong--if you haven't seen this, you have to. It's amazing.

We spent hours at Funspot and I feel like I barely scratched the surface. There are so many more games I want to play, and some I want to beat (looking at you TMNT and Simpsons). Here are some pics.

Did I mention they have a bar with cheap Stella Artois?

Ashley playing Donkey Kong on the machine that set the world record.

NERD HEAVEN.

Gabe used to talk about this game all the time. Finally played it in the arcades. I have to say, the laserdisc technology is pretty impressive for the early '80s, but the game itself sucks.

This is Computer Space, the world's first arcade game. Sadly, it was being repaired.

This game was also shut down for repairs. If anybody can tell me what it is about just by looking at the cabinet, I will give you fifty dollars.

The Kanc Picture Dump

2009-10-11T06:24:00.001-07:00

Yesterday Ashley and I drove into the White Mountains to tour the famous Kancamagus Highway. It's a huge fall foliage spot, a thirty-four mile drive through the mountains and forests. There were lots of tourists, and the traffic to get there was pretty bad, but it was worth it. The leaves here are amazing!

Getting out and looking at nature and mountains made both Ashley and I very homesick. I couldn't help but compare the Kanc to Chuckanut Drive, and Chuckanut wins. Yeah, the fall foliage is amazing, and Washington just doesn't get leaves the way New England does, but give me the rugged Pacific coast and evergreens any day. Here's a bunch of pictures, in no particular order.

Blustery New England Morning

2009-10-07T04:47:00.000-07:00

The view from my balcony

BONUS PICTURE: Ashley dressed me as a hipster and I don't know what to think.

I look like freaking Chelsea.

Fall Traditions

2009-10-05T11:39:00.000-07:00

Every fall, as Halloween approaches, my teeth begin to ache and I salivate more than usual. It's time for candy corn.

I gorge myself on this stuff every October. It's a new thing. I never touched it as a kid, not even in high school or early college. But then when I lived with Seamus and Ashley, in the fall of '06, I got really sick and spent a week on the couch, playing Final Fantasy XII, watching movies, sweating, dying, and eating nothing but candy corn and loaves of french bread. Ever since then, candy corn is fall comfort food. I bought a tub at Hannaford's yesterday.

I also need to accompany it with a video game, so I started back in on Link to the Past. What a fantastic game. I played it until I could eat no more candy corn and felt guilty about not doing homework, then I stopped. Also, if you haven't noticed by now, my secret goal here at thisisnolongertheroadtrip is to write about video games until I have driven everybody I know into a state of coma-like boredom.

Ashley and I also bought a scented candle, which is SOP for me in autumn as well. It's my favorite season. School is really, really time-consuming, so I haven't had a lot of time to get out and do things that are actually fun/worth writing about. Ashley and I did, however, buy our plane tickets home. We're getting out of here on the 11th of December and spending almost six weeks in Washington! Get ready Bellingham, friends who still live in the area, and Gabe and Amanda and Kaylee. I also got a second job, working as an online tutor for Smarthinking. I'm going through their training program right now and getting pretty excited about it. I'll have students again, sort of! I really miss teaching, and this will bring a bit of it back to me. The training manual is full of funny composition neologisms. I am an e-structor who focuses on HOCs before I focus on LOCs when I am writing an asynchronous tutorial. They also won't me to know that "although you can't see your students, you can still touch them."

I will, however, refrain from touching them.

First Fall Color on the UNH Campus

2009-09-26T18:18:00.001-07:00

Sarah from the Office of Conduct and Management (where I work, casually known as the OCM) told me I needed to see the fall color early when the first leaves started to turn, then again at the peak of the season. I had wanted to hike up Mount Major near Lake Winnipesaukee to check out the trees and the views of the lake, but unfortunately, the homework load didn't let us. Instead, Ashley and I drove down to campus, which he hadn't had time to really check out yet.

It was family weekend, which meant a ton of parents and little kids, and an inordinate number of students out and about for a Saturday afternoon, but it was still nice. We wandered through the trails and looked for the College Woods, but could not find them. We guessed that they were the little woodsy breaks between clusters of buildings on campus and wrote off the grandeur of the name College Woods to the tiny New England scale of things ("Guys, this mountain is huge!"), but a quick Google search proves us wrong. We actually drove through part of them on the way home, to avoid the family weekend traffic; it's a big 250 acre nature preserve that the campus shoulders up against, with plenty of hiking and biking trails. Another time, College Woods, maybe deeper into fall or after the first snow.

Anyway, here's pictures from around campus.

We've got wicked oak trees here.

The camera doesn't really capture how vivid these red leaves were. Some of the trees look like they're on fire.

These little dudes are all over campus, and love to run under the feet of passersby, stand paralyzed with fear for a second, then run back under the bush they came from.

Hitchcock Hall, on the upper quad, where I work.

Groundhog! Woodchuck1 Whistle Pig! Land Beaver!

The backside of Thompson Hall, which is the cool old building they like to show people on the website.

Defacing signs is big here.

The Weather

2009-09-22T19:47:00.000-07:00

I had a conversation with Kelly, a fiction prof at WWU, about the Northwest's weather. She was from Florida, and didn't understand when Washingtonians commented on the weather's changeability--"If you don't like the weather, just wait five minutes." She lived in the midwest for a time, and was used to thunderstorms descending from a blue sky, pouring out, and disappearing just as quickly. "The weather doesn't change here. It's just always gray. All the time," she said.

I laughed and agreed, and it wasn't until I got here that I understood Northwesterners perspective on their weather. It's about unpredictability. In Washington, weather forecasts aren't very useful: they may say that tomorrow will be rainy in the morning with clouds dissipating throughout the afternoon, but the weather invariably pulls a fast one--sunny in the morning, rain squalls in the afternoon, clouds at night. Or something else, who knows. In other parts of the country, and especially in New England--reading the forecast is like reading the movie times. It was humid and in the seventies today--miserable--and I looked online to check the weather tomorrow. The forecast says it will be humid and in the seventies, and I know, without a doubt, that it will be.

We've been having a weird summer hangover: humid, no rain, and the leaves don't know whether to die or hold on for another week. In a couple of weeks, Ashley and I are going to drive the Kancamagus in Northern New Hampshire to see the foliage. Pictures will happen, I promise.

My Obsessive Nerdery

2009-09-17T18:24:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot about old video games recently. Yesterday I watched my friend Patrick breeze through Super Mario Brothers like he had just beaten it yesterday. He knew every secret, every warp, every hidden block—like it was encoded into his genes. Nathan fared almost as well. They trash talked while they played. Patrick, from Alabama, would stand up and yell “BOOM!” every time he pulled off a difficult maneuver.

Nothing makes me feel more at home than playing a Mario game with somebody. This is what I'm into right now: how junk entertainment like NES games from the 80s can worm its way into our brains and hearts, into our art and music. They can become something bigger than computer code on a dusty gray chipboard. If I were still taking theory classes at WWU, I would be preparing to write a paper on how vintage video games affect discourse and aesthetics. Since I'm in an MFA, I'm brainstorming ways to slip this stuff into fiction without it coming off as indulgent, nerd-elitist, or overly referential. It's hard, but, to me at least, it's important.

So it turns out Ashley and I are both dripping with Nostalgia. In that spirit, here's the transcript from one of my favorite scenes in Mad Men, when Don Draper sells the idea of the slide carousel to Kodak.

Nostalgia.
It’s delicate, but potent…
Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound.
It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone.
This device… isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine.
It goes backwards, forwards.
It takes us to a place where we ache to go again.
It’s not called the Wheel.
It’s called the Carousel.
It lets us travel the way a child travels.
Around and around and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.

Bring on the emo comments, Chelsea!

Playlist

2009-09-13T12:04:00.000-07:00

Albums I've been listening to:

The Turtles - "Twenty Greatest Hits"
Fleet Foxes - "Sun Giant EP"
The Zombies - "Odessy and Oracle"
The Love Lights - "Problems and Solutions" and "Lakes and Ponds EP"
Arcade Fire - "Neon Bible"
The Shins - "Wincing the Night Away"

Here's a link to some Love Lights stuff. I recommend "Evermore" from Lakes and Ponds, and anything from either of the live albums. They played in Bellingham last night, at Boundary Bay, and I would love to have been able to go. I need to catch up with Jeff and con him into sending me some new recordings.

I'm posting this because I have nothing real to post. I'm doing homework, reading a lot, and working at the OCM. Promise I'll update when something exciting happens.

What am I doing here again?

2009-09-07T19:14:00.000-07:00

During a discussion in a fiction workshop at WWU, the topic of making sacrifices for the art came up. The stereotype goes that writers aren't good family people, they have a hard time maintaining friendships, keeping pets and plants alive, etc. But they write. They produce literature. Which was more important. The fact that we were all locked in a room together at eight o'clock at night, tired and hungry and caffeine-depleted, and paying thousands of dollars to be there seemed to say that yes, we were the type of people who were willing to make sacrifices to write. Kenny disagreed. Yes, literature is important, we're all here because we want to write and have to write, but—and this is exactly what he said—“In the end it's just a book.” He would love to spend his life writing, Kenny said, but he would love even more to spend it with his wife and sons and daughter.

Today my brother Gabe and his wife Amanda became parents, and I became an uncle. My mom skyped Ashley and I from the hospital room where my niece Kaylee was born. They are 3100 miles away, in Seattle; I am wondering what the hell I am doing in New Hampshire; and I am thinking about what Kenny said.

Congrats Gabe and Amanda, and happy birthday Kaylee!

Another Quick Update

2009-09-07T11:15:00.001-07:00

On Saturday night, Ashley and I went to the beginning of the year MFA program party. Lots of cool people here, but Ashley was the only person there from the MA. Matt and Patrick, who hosted the party in their tiny second-story apartment, were gracious hosts and quite entertaining. Matt is from Seattle and he, Ash and I commiserated about the sorry state of mountains and coffee in this state. As much as I love Ashley, it's been just her and me for more than a month--it's nice to talk to new people.

Ever since I got accepted here I've had that kind of stereotypical MFA thought in my head. "Everybody else is going to be working on a novel. I've got to start one, got to get one going." After an aborted attempt this summer, I stumbled on a story to tell completely by accident on the second day of classes. It could lead nowhere, or it could be my thesis. Right now I'm having fun planning out parts of it in my head.

I got a job! I'm working at the Office of Conduct and Mediation, keeping my fingers crossed that the raise they hinted at in the interviews will happen sooner rather than later, and that I can pull in some more hours than what I've started with. I start tomorrow. Basically I'm the principal's office: I keep track of academic sanctions, make sure people who got busted for drinking on-campus end up in the drug and alcohol awareness classes, possibly mediate low-level student disputes, that kind of thing.

It's easy to lose an hour or two to Legend of Zelda. I've forgotten what an addictive little game it is. It's so good I'm thinking of playing through the SNES sequel next, although I should really be writing instead of gaming. And yes, Holtmeier, that's how I roll.

Gold cartridge, yo.

What I'm enjoying right now

2009-09-03T15:56:00.000-07:00

Mad Men. This incredibly-written series has almost succeeded in washing the bad taste of Lost out of my mouth. It's clever, it's stylish, it doesn't sanitize early 1960s America (all the characters smoke copiously and cringe-worthy sexism abounds), and it treats its characters and structure in a way I'm used to seeing in literary fiction, not television. Very interesting, and I highly recommend you check it out.

Don Draper, where have you been all my life?

Good old Gatsby. I'm rereading parts of The Great Gatsby for my novel craft class, and I'm falling once again into Fitzgerald's beautiful prose. Most writers, when going for that concise expression of deep truths in poetic prose, come off as pretentious. Fitzgerald just comes off as mind-stompingly awesome.

"Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!"

Old School video games. I spent a few Wii points on Mega Man 9, which is a contemporary game (released late in 2008) designed to look like it's a twenty year-old NES game. Twenty-four colors, primitive music, two-button controls, and sprite flicker if too much is happening on the screen; it's like it popped out of a time warp from 1987, and I love it. It is also, like the old Mega Man games, so hard I sometimes want to throw my Wiimote across the room. Mega Man 9, and some conversations with Brett about the games he's been playing have got me itching to pull out my NES games. I think the original Zelda might be next.

This blog post has been brought to you by The Old School.

Back to school

2009-09-01T18:25:00.000-07:00

Hamilton Smith, my home for the next 2-3 years.

Now that I'm back in school, my culture shock is subsiding. Students are pretty much the same everywhere. There aren't nearly as many nalgene bottles, and the Death Cab and so-Cal punk patches on backpacks have been replaced by Guster and Phish and Vampire Weekend, but other than that, they're pretty much the same. Weirdly enough, not many young people speak with that classic thick New English accent (you won't hear of an eighteen year-old going fah in the cah)--it's mostly a thirty-five and up kind of thing. Not sure why.

Also, people seem to wear flannel and plaid-print shirts here in a completely straight-faced, un-ironic way. I guess that's what happens when your home doesn't have a rich history of lumberjacking to stereotype.

I've had all three of my classes now, and I enjoy them. My professors are all great and the vibe in the MFA program is laid back and intelligent. I really like all the fiction people, and I can't wait to start workshopping. Off to write now.

A bit of Borges

2009-08-30T13:02:00.000-07:00

I mentioned in an earlier post that I'm rereading some selected Borges short fiction. Today I reread "The Approach to al-Mu'tasim," which is one of my favorites, and, I think, the quintessential Borges story. Borges once wrote that he saw no reason in writing a five-hundred page novel to express an idea that he could relate orally in five minutes. "The Approach to al-Mu'tasim" is an academic book review of a novel that doesn't exist, complete with footnotes, references to other works, and white-tower snootiness. The fictional novel, The Conversation with the Man Called Al-Mu'tasim: A Game of Shifting Mirrors, tells the story of a law student in Bombay who has rejected the old-school Islamic faith of his family. During a protest, the student murders (or thinks he has murdered) a Hindu. I'll let Borges take it from here:

The underlying plot is this: a man, the fugitive student freethinker we already know, falls among the lowest class of people and, in a kind of contest of evil-doing, takes up their ways. All at once, with the wonder and terror of Robinson Crusoe upon discovering the footprint of a man in the sand, he becomes aware of a sudden brief change in that world of ruthlessness - a certain tenderness, a moment of happiness, a forgiving silence in one of his loathsome companions. 'It was as though a stranger, a third and more subtle person, had entered into the conversation.' The hero knows that the scoundrel he is talking to is quite incapable of this unexpected turn; he therefore deduces that the man is echoing someone else, a friend, or the friend of a friend. Rethinking the problem, he arrives at the mysterious conclusion that 'somewhere on earth is a man from whom this light emanates; somewhere on earth a man exists who is equal to this light.' The student decides to spend his life in search of him.

The law student goes on an epic journey, looking for this man by observing reflections of his soul in others. More mindfuckery follows: al-Mu'tasim, the man the law student searches for, is in turn searching for someone else in the same fashion, and that someone searches for someone else. To complicate matters, there are two versions of the manuscript, and Borges has read only the inferior one, which strips it of its more literary qualities and paints on a thick layer of allegory. Then there's the comparison to The Conference of the Birds, a real book of poems by Farid ud-Din Attar, which takes on a similiar theme. All of this, by the way, is compressed into about five pages. Whoa.

Borges best work is all about his weird mysticism--antiquities, ancient labyrinths, smoke and mirrors, sorcerors and kings seeking answers to the mysteries of the universe--and metafiction. "The Approach to al-Mu'tasim" supplies both. Here's a link to the story.

This story was translated by Norman di Giovanni, a friend of Borges who has received flak for his occasionally questionable translations (although a friend who's read Borges in Spanish thinks his translations are fantastic) and his strained relationship with Maria Kodama, Borges's widow and executor of his literary estate. Due to some crazy fluke in the contract for the English language rights, Giovanni wound up with 50% of the royalties of the collected and selected works of Borges (most translators get either a tiny percentage or merely an advance with no royalties). According to Kodama, Giovanni, once a bosom buddy of Borges, has wound up stealing millions of dollars from her husband's estate. She also prevented reprints of almost a dozen books written by or about Borges, until recently, just because Giovanni had a hand in translating material for them. Oh literary drama. (You'll notice the link to "The Approach to al-Mu'tasim" leads to Giovanni's website.)

If you haven't read Borges, I highly recommend you check him out. Very good stuff.

Ian's Long Lost Rant

2009-08-30T09:43:00.000-07:00

Lost spoilers ahead.

I recently read an interview with Patton Oswalt where he said, “Television is the way Hollywood was in the late ’60s and early ’70s. The dream era I would have loved to have been part of in Hollywood then is happening right now, but it’s happening on television, with these big complicated story arcs and real character-driven shows and sheer ambiguity left and right.” Shows like The Wire and Battlestar Galactica are pushing their respective genres into new, artistic territory, 30 Rock is doing a weird meta-take on television comedy, and Mad Men is bringing an obsessive eye for detail and craftsmanship to TV. All of these shows are wonderfully written, I might add.

With all this great TV out there, I cannot explain the popularity of Lost. Yes, it's got a deep and enigmatic mythology, and it often borrows its narrative structure from old adventure serials (plus flashbacks), but on a fictional level, it commits a cardinal sin. Everything in Lost, down to the musical score, is in service to either the plot or the structure. The first season establishes a pattern that follows through most of the series. Something is happening on the island, and it typically focuses around one or two characters. The island scenes are intercut with flashbacks that illuminate that episode's lead character's motives and history, or serve as an (often heavy-handed) metaphor for what's happening in the present, back on the island. In the first season, this worked pretty well; Lost sets itself up as a character driven mystery show. Subsequent seasons, however, keep the flashback structure around after it's already accomplished what it needs to do, which leads to endlessly complicating back stories, motives that seem contradictory, and a general watering down of the characters.

The cast of Lost, scowling.

For example, at the end of the first season, I found Sun and Jin to be the most interesting characters—their uneasy marriage was fascinating, and having the others on the island not understand their language and the dynamics of their relationship was a great decision on the writers' parts. She lives in fear of her shady, controlling husband. He feels bound by duty and family to provide for his wife, and he probably holds this against her. I may be a nerd, but Jin's apology for his behavior in the season finale was heart-wrenching. Over the next two or three seasons we get more Jin and Sun flashbacks, and that interesting character dynamic dissolves into melodrama. She can't get pregnant! But the doctor lied, it's Jin who's infertile! She had an affair and Jin was sent to kill the guy, but he let him go! Sun sold Jin into working for her father to pay Jin's mother, who was blackmailing them! Okay Lost, I don't give a shit anymore. Halfway through season two, I just stopped caring about all the characters. There were a few exceptions, episodes or arcs where plot and character somehow magically aligned and produced something great, but I'll talk about those in a bit.

Perhaps the most infuriating thing about Lost was its reliance on what Roger Ebert calls “The Idiot Plot.” The idiot plot is “A plot that requires all the characters to be idiots. If they weren't, they'd immediately figure out everything and the movie [or television show] would be over.” Specifically, I'm referring to the inability of Lost's characters to communicate in any logical or realistic way. When a character has an important piece of information or knows something that can help or harm the group, instead of telling somebody they either a) keep it to themselves, or b) march off into the jungle (sometimes with a few other characters who have no idea what they've actually been recruited to do) to “solve” the problem. Why do they do this? Why don't they sit down and talk it out? In season one, why doesn't Locke tell anybody about the mysterious hatch that may lead to their rescue?

Because the plot demands it.

Because if the characters did act in a logical or realistic way, there would be no show, there would be no drama, and there would be a hell of a lot fewer unanswered questions. In seasons three and four, many characters repeatedly ask Ben and Juliet about the Others—who are they, why are they treating their captives like animals, why did they kidnap children? They invariably respond either “We're the good guys” (usually followed by a dramatic music cue) or “You wouldn't understand even if I did explain it to you.” Amazingly, even when the power dynamic shifts, the survivors don't press for details. Juliet's defection from the Others would seem like a great time to sit her down and finally get some answers out of her. Why don't they? Because the plot demands it. The writers have decided that the answer to that mystery needs to be withheld, and they''ll suspend logic to do it.

And this is neither here nor there, but the Sawyer-Jack-Kate (and later Juliet) love traingle is grating. Just grating. Shoot me in the face.

The cast of Battlestar Galactica, also sitting/standing dramatically, although not scowling.

So the characters make no sense, the plot walks over anything in its path, including logic (and sometimes itself—plot holes!), and usually watching the show feels like an exercise in frustration. Why is it so successful? Why did I put myself through all five seasons of it? I have a few ideas. The mythology is interesting, and even when I no longer cared about the characters, I still wanted to know what the deal was with the smoke monster, and why there was a giant, four-toed statue foot on an abandoned shore of the island. The cliffhangers are often absurd, but they work—we all want to know what happens next—and I think the forced ambiguity brings a lot of people back. I haven't delved much into Lost fandom, but I know a little bit about all the forums, blogs, theories, etc. on the internet. And of course, people love finding all the little cultural and philosophical references (“Sawyer was reading Watership Down! What does it mean!?”)

Who gives a shit?

And then there are those brief moments of genius, where everything comes together. Locke's crisis of faith and its resolution as the hatch disintegrated around him in season two was awesome, as was switching the flashbacks to flashforwards at the end of season three. My favorite moment in Lost was “The Constant,” where Desmond is unstuck in time. Sure, it's half borrowed from Slaughterhouse-Five (which the show nods to in a reference a few episodes later), but it was also genius, and an interesting variation on its flashback/flashforward structure. But do these flashes of genius really make it worth slogging through hours and hours of bad dialogue and ridiculous plots? Not for me.

Yes, if I could go back in time I would tell myself not to bother with Lost (although now it's too late for me, and I'll watch the sixth and final season as it airs). For a good example of what Lost could have been like, I recommend the first season of Heroes—a show that draws many comparisons to Lost, and in later seasons descended into even more ridiculous plot excess and character nonsense. If you've seen Lost but not Battlestar Galactica, watch it now. Like Lost, sometimes the writers get confused and need to retcon something or hastily bung up a plothole, and the second half of the last season was a disappointment, but this is how good sci-fi television should be. Also, watch The Wire. Everybody needs to watch The Wire. End rant, soon I'll get back to things you may actually care about, I promise.

The only TV show I'll ever need.

Fleet Foxes

2009-08-29T11:06:00.000-07:00

Tropical storm Danny is passing by New Hampshire, and bringing with it quite a bit of rain. It started yesterday evening and it's still going--feels like home. I'm sitting in my newly cleaned apartment, looking at the rain fill up the parking lot and soak the deck, listening to Fleet Foxes.

For those who don't know, Fleet Foxes is from Seattle, and I can think of no better soundtrack to a cold, dark, rainy Northwest day. It almost feels like Bellingham here, but I know the rain will quit and we'll be back to our regular humid hell. Oh well, here's another Fleet Foxes song.

Nerd bonus: The Fleet Foxes sound is partly inspired by Robin Pecknold's memories of old Final Fantasy music. A man after my own heart.

Grad schooled

2009-08-26T13:24:00.000-07:00

Policies, information packets, orientations, professors who don't know which day they teach... Yep, I'm back in grad school.

Ashley and I had the introductory orientation yesterday (though Ash is in TA prep all week as well), and we met a roomful of colleagues, a few profs, and a bunch of administrators and office-type people. There are WAY more people here than at WWU, and it's going to be hard to get used to. I probably won't know everybody in the grad school, which is weird, but makes sense considering there's an MFA, an MA in English, an MA in linguistics, and PhDs in literature and composition. Geez!

But I met the other incoming fiction students, as well as a few second years in my program, and I met Tom and Ann, who are the two fiction profs (there's maybe ten or eleven fiction MFA students total, so two profs is all they really need. I'm going to a meeting about Barnstorm, which is UNH's online literary journal--very excited. Classes start on Monday. Things are finally starting to pick up after a very, very long two and a half weeks.

I wish things were picking up on the job search. I interviewed and was turned down for a work study position in the HR department. I'm still waiting to hear from Inquiry, but my fingers are crossed. I have an interview tomorrow for a judicial clerk work study job (office crap), but as far as getting a real job that will earn me more than sixty bucks a week, I'm not having a lot of luck. Craigslist and postings on the employment sites I hit are thinning out, and today I walked and drove through Dover for two hours and didn't find a thing. Friday I'm signing up at a temp agency, which will be unsteady hours at best, but it will be something. End complaint. Wish me luck.

Crisis Averted

2009-08-25T14:18:00.001-07:00

Thirteen and a half pounds of Adam's crunchy.

I survived Hurricane Bill

2009-08-23T08:02:00.000-07:00

Early this morning, Hurricane Bill, a category 1 hurricane, passed by the Massachusetts and New Hampshire coastline. New Hampshire was lashed by threatening clouds and a devastating drizzle. This is the parking lot of my apartment complex, now rendered nearly unrecognizable:

There are at least three puddles in our parking lot. Tragic.

But the damage wasn't limited to only the parking lot. Our apartment is in shambles.

Ashley is checking the national weather service and sending SOS e-mails to everybody she knows.

Our cat was stuck outside in the deluge, and barely escaped with her life.

Actually, we gave her a bath.

We've been deeply affected by this disaster. Please send food, money, and beer we can trade to the National Guard for medical supplies. Thank you.

Settling

2009-08-21T12:50:00.000-07:00

Man, it's amazing what putting some furniture and posters up can do to a place. This is starting to feel less like an apartment where I sleep, eat, use the internet, and watch Lost, and more like a home.

The office, coming together.

Let me tell you the story of this desk. I contacted "Gabriel" on craigslist, who told us to come by and pick up the desk at 8:30. We arrived to find not Gabriel, but his two very confused (most probably stoned) roommates. They lived in a crappy, mostly empty college house that reminded me quite a bit of the one on Ellis Street. Their living room contained one falling-apart couch, a giant HDTV on a wooden stand, an XBox, and literally nothing else. The stoned roommates showed us into the basement, where Gabriel had disassembled and stored the desk, along with fifty or so years of cobwebs, mold, and mildew. We left our number on a sticky note, drove home, got a call from Gabriel, and drove back twenty minutes later to pick up the desk. Stupidly, we paid $45 for this. The picture probably makes it look better than it is. We had to wash the mold and mildew and crap off each piece before we assembled it (using only the pictures from craigslist and Gabriel's sometimes cryptic labels as a guide). The boards were slightly warped, the cabinet shakes, it's missing some screws, it reeks of basement, there's a rather large piece we couldn't find a place for and thus left out... it's a POS. But it's our desk, and I, if not Ashley, love it anyway.

I'm getting back into the writing mode. Unpacking all of my books and putting them up on shelves has something to do with it, I think. It's amazing how two months of summer can leave you so dumb and out of practice. I'm reading Creating the Story: Guides for Writers by Rebecca Rule and Susan Wheeler, who used to (and may still, I'm not sure) teach fiction at UNH. Donna gave me the book as a graduation present, and her name is on the inside cover. I'm also supplementing it with some old Borges short stories I haven't read since freshman year of college and the odd story from a Crab Creek Review or a MAR--unpacking everything I realized I've accumulated quite the library of old literary magazines.

Other than that, not much is happening. Still looking for a job, although it looks like I've got my work study taken care of--I'll be working in the HR department at UNH, doing office assistant stuff. Ashley's comp camp starts on Monday, and hopefully financial aid will drop soon, so I can pay off my credit cards, make a budget, and maybe even buy some more furniture (I'm pretty worried about money). I'll keep y'all posted.

Some random bits

2009-08-18T21:08:00.000-07:00

These are some things that have been on my mind lately.

The tallest mountain in New Hampshire is Mount Washington, at 6,288 feet. Occasionally I see cars with bumper stickers that say “This car climbed Mt. Washington!” I'm not sure if New Hampshirites intend these bumper stickers to be ironic, but to a Washingtonian, they're pretty funny. The very fact that you can drive your car to the top of the “mountain” pretty much negates your bragging rights. I need to make friends with some locals and see if they really think Mount Washington is all that.

We finally have a bed! Hooray!

The heat and humidity here are horrendous. Today I watched a local weather report on mute. The weatherman was pointing to his humidity scale, which ranged from “Negligible,” up through “Some humidity” and “High humidity,” to “Oppressive” (70% and above). He was pointing at oppressive. Walking outside or onto my balcony is like walking into a sauna.

The other day, on the way down to Boston, I saw a new Volkswagen Beetle that was the exact shade of cheesy orange as the Gold Chocobos from Final Fantasy VII. The color brought memories of that video game, which I haven't played all the way through since I was in high school, flooding back. Other Final Fantasy fans? I'll bet you remember this? Eh? Eh? Matt? Eh?

Yep, that's the color right there.

Things are slowing down a bit. Ashley and I are watching a lot of Lost, and when we're all caught up I'll share my thoughts. I've been skirting my exercise routine, doing job interviews, and surfing craigslist for furniture and employment. I'll keep you posted if anything exciting happens.

Beantown

2009-08-17T14:11:00.000-07:00

Two days ago Ashley and I found out Emily, a friend from Washington was in Boston for a few days, and yesterday we went down to visit her. The original plan was to go to Walden Pond and live simply, or maybe build some foundations under castles in the sky, but that fell through (and thus I was deprived of the excuse for stupid Thoreau jokes). Instead, we tooled around Boston, had lunch at a delicious Indian buffet, met a bunch of cool people, and took a ferry out to Spectacle Island in the harbor.

Boston is a very cool city. It was actually hard for me to come back to New Hampshire after spending an afternoon in Boston. Imagine spending the day in Seattle and then returning to, I don't know, Cle Elum. I kind of feel deprived of the big city comforts that I'm used to from Seattle—street entertainers, amazing food everywhere, shopping, posters for art and music and opera and indie films, sigh... Of course, I don't have to pay twenty-seven freaking dollars (!!!) to park in New Hampshire, so that's score one for my state.

Boston is kind of like Dover in one way, though. They just haven't figured out how traffic works. As Armando, our host for the day, said, “They can found the greatest country on earth, but they can't invent the grid system.” Also, much of the interstate traffic runs underground through these massive tunnels. Ashley was kind of freaked out by driving on an eight-lane, underground freeway, but hey, it's better than demolishing all those two-hundred year-old buildings up above and putting the interstate up there.

And oh man, the buildings. The architecture is amazing, and it seems like half the buildings have these amazing stories behind them. We left a subway station and found we'd just exited the Old State House, a building constructed in the early 1700s. We were standing beneath the balcony where Colonel Thomas Crafts, one of the Sons of Liberty, read the newly-penned Declaration of Independence to the city of Boston. It happened twelve feet above our heads. Freaking WOW!

The Old State House. There's the balcony. Also, there's a unicorn on the roof.

More old buildings. And some new ones.

We took a boat from the harbor (I wanted to throw a teabag into the water) to Spectacle Island, which was a landfill for a hundred years and is now a state park. It turns out when you hollow out the ground beneath a city and fill it with subway tunnels and the two interstate highways, you get a lot of dirt and nowhere to put it. So the city of Boston dumped all of it on the landfill on Spectacle Island (enlarging the island a great deal in the process), planted some trees, and called it a park. We hung out on a lovely beach and played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

Spectacle Island, ex-landfill.

I'M ON A BOAT. (Grimacing)

A tour boat in the harbor.

The Boston skyline and ominous cloud from Spectacle Island's beach.

Tell me if you think of any excuses to return to Boston. We're strongly considering going down for Guster's Lost and Gone Forever ten-year anniversary show at the Orpheum, but we're a little iffy about the money situation. Historic walking tour? Lunch at Durgin Park? Red Sox game?

Ashley is America.

Things that I like (so far)

2009-08-15T12:53:00.000-07:00

Last night on the phone, my mom mentioned she's been reading my blog (hi mom). “It's good. Remember to keep it positive,” she said. And I laughed. It has been a little whiny and gripy around thisisnolongertheroadtrip, so I'm going to try and pick things up a little bit. Here are some of the things that I've found and absolutely loved.

The bridge from Kittery to Portsmouth. You cross from Maine to New Hampshire over the Piscataqua on a cool bridge built as a memorial to New Hampshire's fallen World War I soldiers and sailors. Entering Portsmouth, you can look to your right and see an old line of riverfront brick buildings, their sides right up against the river. Every time I see them I feel for a second that I'm not looking at buildings on the Piscataqua, but on the Thames. There's another awesome bridge from Portsmouth to Newington that crosses a small bay always crowded with white sailboats. It's gorgeous, and looks so New England.

The UNH campus. It's old and made of bricks. It's got bell towers and halls named after local scholars, and somewhere in it, Charles Simic is probably hanging out writing something genius.

Deb, the helpful hairstylist. I got a haircut today in a tiny walk-in place on Central street in Dover. Deb, the barber, asked if I came here often to get my hair cut by Al. I said no, and that I was new in town. “Welcome to Dover,” she said, and launched into a long list of the best places to eat, to buy groceries and home furnishings, to pick local fruit, and to buy cheap gas. Ashley and I got tons of ideas of places to eat and things to do. Cheers, Deb!

The cemeteries. Turns out when the area has been inhabited for four hundred years, there are lots of cemeteries. Ashley and I walked around a big one today just outside of Portsmouth. It's weird to see names of families I recognize from buildings on UNH's campus, or the handful of state parks we drove past yesterday. I thought about last summer when we walked around Bayview cemetery in Bellingham and marveled at the grave stones from the 1890s and early 1900s. Today I saw the grave of a preacher who was buried in 1731. Many of the graves from the 1800s had fresh flowers on them—family members still come to honor their lineage. “Nobody stays in one place for one hundred years in the west,” Ashley said. It's a very different sense of history.

Tuttle Farm. On our way back from the cemetery we stopped at Tuttle farm, the oldest continually running family farm in the country (est. 1632). I've complained before on here about the weirdness of the grocery stores—no good cheese or peanut butter, unfamiliar brands, etc. Tuttle farm fixed all this. It carries mostly locally grown organics (most of them grown at Tuttle farm itself), along with tons of plants and herbs, candles, locally made soaps, and all that crazy hippie crap I'm used to in Bellingham. The place even smelled like the Bellingham Co-op. We're definitely going back.

The New Hampshire Coast

2009-08-14T16:01:00.000-07:00

Today Ashley and I took a trip down highway 1A, the coastal road that runs from Portsmouth down into Massachusetts. We thought we would drive for a bit and find a nice beach to sit on and read, maybe dip our toes in the Atlantic. The 1A follows the coast through Rye and Hampton, both of which have a lot of beaches, so I thought this would be an easy jaunt.

Turns out the New England coast isn't like the Washington coast. It's very developed. Ashley and I found ourselves driving through tourist town after tourist town, little Atlantic replicas of Seaside, Oregon, with businesses like the Aegean Inn and the Lobster Lock-up. Here's Little Jack's.

Lobsters are everywhere. They're on the Maine license plate, on many restaurants (almost every restaurant, cafe, or crappy food stand serves lobster), even on lots of signs, billboards, and hotel vacancy signs. Here's a carved wooden one at the place we stopped for lunch.

These little coastal tourist towns seem to be 75% parking lot. It turns out most of New Hampshire's coastline is rocky and not too great for sunbathing or volleyball, so the tiny portions of beach that are sandy and flat are packed. I wish we'd gotten a picture of the thousands of tourists on the sand, but it looked a lot like this.

I guess hanging out under a sun umbrella is a really New Englandy thing to do. Between Rye and Hampton we drove past a line of seaside houses. In Washington, you have to be pretty loaded to pay for a house right on the water, but these houses surprised me. They were huge, gated, built of imported stone, with croquet lawns, manicured gardens (we even saw a couple of gardeners tending to one), and spacious rooftop decks. Ridiculous!

After a stop for lunch and a bit of backtracking, Ashley and I did find a stretch of uncrowded beach, where the parking was free. I think it was mostly empty because it was covered in rocks and there was no easy access from the road (we had to scramble down a hill of boulders to get to it). It was nice to lie in the sun and get my feet wet in the Atlantic. Next time we head out to the coast I know what to expect.

In other news, Ashley and I tried the lobster rolls, which she loved but were a bit on the mayo-y side for me. We're supposed to get a bed any day now, which is good news because the air mattress doesn't hold air so well any more (sorry Mom and Dad, who we borrowed it from), and we had to sleep on the floor last night. Our backs are killing us. Also I've started getting deeper into the job hunt. Fingers crossed for a nice job teaching composition online!

Notes on beer

2009-08-13T11:40:00.000-07:00

The day we arrived we hit the grocery store to stock up on essentials. I investigated the beer aisle. Beer is cheap here, and our local supermarket (Hannaford) carries beer from quite a few microbreweries I recognize--Kona, Dogfish Head, Blue Moon, and Red Hook to name a few. I've also heard it's easy to find Alaskan over here. What isn't easy to find is Pyramid, and this is going to be a big problem when winter rolls around and Snow Cap hits the shelves in the Pacific Northwest. Ashley assures me that there will be good winter brews here too, but my stomach still yearns for Snow Cap.

Also, Sam Adams is everywhere. Everywhere. I'm trying to think of a beer that's as prevalent in Washington as Sam Adams is here, but I can't. There are Sam Adams displays, letterboards with sales chalked on them, giveaways, flyers, delivery vans--everywhere I look I see the smug grinning bastard face of Samuel Adams.

Drink my beer, Ian. You're in my land now. Mwahaha.

I had a glass of the Sam Adams summer ale at Fat Belly's, a grill Ashley and I stopped at in Portsmouth, and it was very disappointing. I know their lager is good, though, so maybe not all is lost.

That first day at the grocery I picked up a six-pack from an excellent brewery in Maine called Shipyard. Like almost everything else in Maine, this beer has a lobster on it:

This beer was excellent. Yesterday at the store I tried to pick up their Export Ale, but they only had twelve packs and I was feeling poor (also, I have nobody to share the beer with), so instead I picked up a six-pack of Smuttynose IPA. Smuttynose is based out of Portsmouth, just a few miles from my apartment, and this is one of the better bottled IPAs I've had. It's as hoppy as some of Boundary Bay's brews. It reminded me of Bellingham. Pretty tasty stuff.

In other beer news, Ashley and I made beercan chicken a few nights ago (this was a disaster--don't ask) and the only can of beer we had in the apartment was the Sturgis memorial lager.

For those of your unfamiliar with beercan chicken, you have to drink the can about 1/3 to 1/2 of the way down before you can use it, so it was up to me to choke down six horrible ounces of biker brew. Unsurprisingly, it tasted like crap. Friends and family, you better get ready to fill me with delicious Northwest beer when I return. And now, here are a bunch of random pictures from the last week. Click for less blurry versions.

Our new apartment, still in its early stages.

Bedroom mess.

This is the single most difficult piece of furniture I've ever put together. Gah!

Ashley and I took a walk through Portsmouth, and it was good.

More Portsmouth.

Five questions for New Hampshirites (and New Englanders in general)

2009-08-12T07:59:00.000-07:00

1. What's up with all the bunting? It's everywhere, along with tons of American flags. I've never been to a place that has so much red, white and blue. We drove past a house that had an American flag in every window (and the old houses here have lots of windows)! There are Obama-Biden stickers everywhere, and a surprising number of still-hanging-on Kerry-Edwards stickers. Some sort of New English pride thing, maybe? All of this I can understand, except for the bunting. I don't think I've ever seen bunting outside of period films, and now it's everywhere. What's up with all the bunting?

2. How are west coasters supposed to eat here? Food here is generally cheaper than back home (no sales tax, sweet), but we're finding it difficult to find some of our staples: no Tilamook cheese, yogurt, or sour cream; no Adam's peanut butter or gourmet peanut butter of any kind; no Hershey's syrup (that one's weird); and on a weird note, it's not called Dreyer's ice cream over here, it's called Edy's, even though it's the exact same product.

3. Why so serious? A mean way to put it would be that everybody is just a little uptight, but that's not quite accurate. Ash characterized it as a lack of west coast earnestness, which is a good way to put it, but I think there's also a lack of self-deprecation. Everything is important. And with good reason: Dover was established in 1623, a donation from Andrew Carnegie helped establish the University of New Hampshire, and many local restaurants, no matter how skeezy, proudly trace their history (Asia Fantasia! Fine Chinese and Korean takeout since 1958!). This all isn't to say New Hampshirites don't joke or have fun—we bought our bed from a jocular, elbow-nudging old guy named Frank—but there's kind of a current of seriousness running beneath everything.

4. Why does your traffic suck so bad? Everybody gets backed up at the tolls as people frantically lane change between the cash, EZ Pass, and exact change lanes—that's to be expected. But why does Dover, with barely 26,000 people, get swamped by bumper-to-bumper traffic during rush hours? I have two theories about this. Firstly, the town is so old there's no grid system—streets intersect at weird angles, there are no stoplights where there should be, occasionally stoplights where I'm used to seeing stop signs, pedestrian-only roads, giant six-way intersections where two or more of the roads are one-way.... it's a giant mess. I'm getting used to it, though. Secondly, nobody here takes the bus. Everybody drives. I'm hoping this changes when school starts and the students return.

5. Why is wine so expensive? When we find bottles we recognize from Bellingham and Seattle, they're four to seven dollars more expensive. The local stuff is expensive too, although oddly the French imports aren't too much more than they are at home. What makes this even weirder is that beer is much cheaper than in Washington (haven't compared liquor yet). As we are too poor to afford a $13 bottle of wine that tastes like a $6 bottle, this makes Ashley very sad.

This came out a little gripier than I intended. Sorry New Hampshirites, I really do like your state! It's just the little things that hang me up and make me remember I'm not at home. Last night my friend in New York posted a Facebook status update about a meteor shower from midnight to five a.m. Man, I thought, wouldn't it be cool to be on the east coast so I could see that? I didn't realize until this morning that I am on the east coast, and, had it been clear last night, I would have seen the meteor shower. This is going to take some getting used to.

Road Trip Day 6: End of the road

2009-08-11T19:01:00.001-07:00

We made it up to Dover on the sixth day. I was surprised by how much it resembled Washington—lots of water, some hills, and trees (mostly deciduous, but hey). On our way to the apartment we crossed a bridge and saw dozens of sailboats out in the bay. Very lovely, in a very New Englandy way.

The apartment was nice, but waaaay too hot. Thankfully we have AC, so we cranked it while we lugged everything in from the trailer, hit the grocery store, and began to settle in. I don't want to bore you with all the details of food and furniture and moving in stuff, so I'll keep it short. Suffice it to say, we're here.

Updates on this blog will probably slow down now as I'm updating in real time, not catching up (sorry Chelsea, I can no longer be your ideal blogger), but I'll continue posting my thoughts, observations and ramblings. Keep reading, keep commenting (it's nice to know y'all are out there reading), and I'll be seeing you before you know it.

My new town, as seen in 1877.

Road Trip Day 5: Out east

2009-08-11T10:28:00.000-07:00

People told me that New England was different, and I knew it would be, but I didn't think it would be this different.

We drove through upstate New York, and I did not feel like I was in America. Something about it tickled the back of my mind—the way the farms were so small, how little fences butted up against little fields and little thickets of trees. It was farmland, but compared to the country we'd been driving through for days, the unending fields of corn and wheat extending to the horizon, it was dramatically reduced in scale.

Then it hit me. This looks exactly like the French countryside Ashley and I drove through in December. But for the cars, the freeway signs and the trees, it could be France. It's a weird feeling, knowing that you're still in your own country but feeling out of place, gawking at the landscape.

The weirdness increased when we stopped at a travel oasis (I-90 is a toll road through New York as well). The people looked and acted different. They wore different clothes and different hairstyles from their west coast cousins, cashiers acted differently, everybody talked in unfamiliar accents (“Harold, wait in the caah”), and they knew we were different too. We got stares whenever we stopped. It's a weird place, this New England.

Road Trip Day 5: Double meat

2009-08-11T10:01:00.000-07:00

In Ohio and Pennsylvania, Ashley and I were confronted by a horrifying realization. Americans are fat. Of course it's a stereotype, but on the west coast, it's a stereotype that's easy to laugh off. Sure some Americans are fat, but many of us are skinny and beautiful, right? Right? In Pennsylvania, the words “obesity epidemic” take on new meaning. It's as widespread here as the common cold.

We stopped at a Subway to get lunch and plan out the last leg of our trip. I bought a ham sub.

“Would you like double meat?” the sandwich-maker asked.

“No.”

“Double cheese?”

“No.”

“Would you like to add bacon to your sandwich?”

“Uh, no.”

“Make it a combo and pay thirty-three more cents for a large soda?”

“No thank you.”

She nodded and finished my non-double-meat-double-cheese-added-bacon (yet still huge) sandwich. On the way into the bathroom I noticed a Subway advertisement. “Double your meat and get a free cookie!” And to think I could have had a free cookie.

Road Trip Day 4: Never go to Maumee, Ohio

2009-08-10T18:38:00.000-07:00

We stayed at a Motel 6 in Maumee, Ohio. The only reason we stopped at the motel, hidden behind a strip mall of mini golf courses and low-rent beauty salons, was because we were both starving. On our way in, a fat man in sweatpants threw a styrofoam cup into the bushes (everybody litters in Ohio, it's weird). The hostess ignored us while we checked in. There was bulletproof glass in the hallway. In our room—accessed via a narrow, stained hallway—peeling stickers reminding us to use the deadbolt and warning us that Motel 6 was not accountable for stolen property coated the door.

Ashley had a monster of a headache, and we were dying of hunger, but Maumee had little to offer. There was a Chicago-style pizza place next to us, but we'd ordered pizza into the hotel room the night before, so we skipped it and drove across the freeway looking for something, anything. Hunger eventually forced us into a Frisch's Big Boy.

The food was sad and greasy, the waitstaff was composed of Maumeeians in their 40s and 50s, and Ashley's headache was so bad she was nauseous. I stared at my cheese steak sandwich. The people in the booth behind us were massively fat and having a loud conversation full of Star Wars puns and references. (The woman related a story about how she accidentally cut somebody off in traffic and responded to the shouted “Nice driving, Princess!” by yelling “We all drive like that... on Alderaan!”)

Needless to say we crashed early and left Maumee ASAP.

Apparently there is one cool thing in Maumee. We didn't see it.

Road Trip Day 4: I Hate Indiana

2009-08-10T16:33:00.000-07:00

Chicago was beautiful, but the traffic sucked. Driving the trailer through rush hour traffic in a huge city after three days of country was really nerve-wracking, plus it was easy to get distracted by all the awesome old brick buildings and cool skyscrapers. Chicago is gorgeous.

And then we crossed into Indiana. Gary, Indiana, right across the state border. It's like the city of Chicago squatted over the border and took a giant, industrial crap. It's nothing but train tracks, water treatment plants, piles of dirt, and sadness. For miles. The less time I spend on Gary, Indiana, the happier everybody will be.

Lovely Gary, IN

Interstate 90 is a toll highway through the state, which basically means it's a giant express lane to get out of Indiana as quickly as possible. There were few exits, and no major cities along the road. We stopped once, for gas, in a tiny mom and pop gas station that also sold fireworks, where we were the only customer. I walked in the door, looked up, and was faced with a huge confederate flag. In Indiana? I thought, and I hit the bathroom and filled my water as quickly as possible. The bathroom was full of pretty nasty graffiti, and a sign from the management that begged the vandals to stop because children used the restrooms as well (+5 for the courteous sign, -250 for the confederate flag). I looked up and saw scrawled across the ceiling in big black letters, “CRIPS.”

Soon we left Indiana, and its haze and industrial scuzz behind, and we entered Ohio. Ohio! Round on the sides and high in the middle, Oh-hi-oh! Things were looking up. Until we stopped for the night in Maumee.

Road Trip Day 4: I <3 Wisconsin

2009-08-10T10:02:00.000-07:00

Dear Wisconsin,

I knew I would love you from the moment we stopped at the visitor's center and you had recycling bins. Yours were the first we'd seen since Washington, and they made me happy. Then there were the trees, the hills, the (small) mountains, the lakes and rivers--it all felt like home. I even found a public radio station and listened to the moderator interview a professor about Iranian politics. Wisconsin, you were a welcome reprieve from the never-ending corn fields of Minnesota, lined with their Bible verses and "Life begins at the moment of conception" billboards.

You've got good cheese, and mustard, and tasty cranberries. You've got a great college town (Madison) and friendly people. Your electoral votes went for Obama. I wish I could stay. But I'm just passing through, following I-90 down to the Illinois border, where Ashley and I turn on Sufjan Stevens' album "Illinois" and fork our money over to the toll booth lady. Goodbye Wisconsin.

Until we meet again,

Ian

Road Trip Day 3: Where the heck is Wall Drug?

2009-08-09T14:22:00.001-07:00

There it is.

Wall Drug is difficult to describe. Signs appear for fifty miles beforehand—and a few scattered ones in the empty parts of Wyoming and Montana—advertising free ice water! Fudge! Five cent coffee! Tyrannosaurus Rex! Free coffee for Vietnam vets! Homemade pie! Yes, Wall Drug has every good thing in the entire world.

When you get there, Wall Drug turns out to be a kind of weird tourist trap. But not just any tourist trap! It's a tourist trap so large, so weird and entertaining, that an entire town of other, smaller tourist traps has sprung up around it. It's like a drug store, a museum, a gift shop and a playground all rolled into one place. Ashley and I wandered its halls, sampling the five cent coffee (surprisingly drinkable), eating the fresh-baked doughnuts (delicious), looking at the hundreds of 19th century photographs of South Dakota and the American West, examining the huge concrete jackalope and the stuffed buffalo, and feeding money into the mechanical band (those robots do a mean version of “Bad Moon Rising”).

It's one of the few roadside attractions I don't feel gypped spending time at, because there's so much, and it's all interesting. There's even an entire room dedicated to photographs and newspaper clippings of Ted Hustead and his family, who have run Wall Drug since the early 1930s, and are basically the reason anybody stops in the tiny town of Wall, SD.

It's way too much to take in, and we would have loved to spend another few hours there, but we had a cat overheating in the car, so we had to leave. On the way out, however, we stopped at a gas station— overrun with bikers, just like everything else—and purchased a Sturgis 2009 Rally souvenir beer, which I plan to try out in a live video on this blog. Technology allows us to do such useful things, doesn't it? I could go on for so much longer about how amazing Wall Drug is, but instead I'll shut up and leave you with some pictures.

Harleys everywhere

Jackalopes

More Jackalope.

Road Trip Day 2: Biker Gangs

2009-08-09T13:59:00.001-07:00

We just happened to be driving through South Dakota near the beginning of the 69th annual Sturgis Motorcyle Rally, an event that draws more than half a million Harley Davidson owners to a little town in western South Dakota. Harleys blew past us in the fast lane all day, riding in groups or by themselves, towing motorcycle trailers or flashing American flags.

As we approached Spearfish, where we planned to stop for the night, Harleys passed us in droves. They swarmed off I-90 to the fast food restaurants and bars. We ate dinner at Arby's and looked for a motel with vacancies, but no luck. It was almost dark, and I didn't want to drive the trailer at night, but we had no choice. We continued on past Sturgis to Rapid City, where the hotels were also full of Harley riders. Eventually we found a room (smoking, ugh) in a Days Inn I'm pretty sure was occupied exclusively by bikers. When I went out to get my clothes from the car, a big drunken group of them stumbled down the stairs from the second floor.

So Sturgis made our evening a pain, and we were both sick to death of seeing bikers and their bikes—especially when two of them set up camp directly outside our window in starred-and-striped folding chairs to chain smoke and talk bikes—but I liked the idea of it. I liked that without corporate sponsorship, an event can unify a culture like that. In the last few years, Sturgis's rally has drawn between 500,000 and 750,000 bikers. They catch up, carouse, compete in races and events, and generally have a great time. It's kind of a grass-roots American culture thing that doesn't happen that often anymore, and I'm glad I got to see a little bit of it.

Road Trip Day 2: Fellow Washingtonians

2009-08-09T13:43:00.000-07:00

I-90. Love it or leave it.

In Wyoming, we pulled off the freeway to gas up and drove past a couple of hippies, a man and a woman, walking into town. He wore long hair and a guitar thrown over his back, she was in a skirt, dreads, and a Grateful Dead tee shirt. When we saw their nalgenes, we knew they were from Washington.

Nobody carries nalgenes around outside of Western Washington (and maybe parts of California). As we proceeded further and further west, we got weirder and weirder looks for filling our water bottles at soda dispensers and water fountains. In the New Hampshire welcome center, a man actually stared at me as I filled my nalgene from the tap. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

The woman smiled at me as she filled her nalgene at the soda fountain in the gas station convenience store, and I didn't see them again until Ashley and I were ready to pull out. Then the woman, sitting in the shade of the convenience store's awning, called out, “Hey, which way are you guys going? West?”

“No, sorry, we're going east.”

“Oh, I saw the Washington plates and thought you were going home.”

“Sorry, we're headed for New Hampshire.”

We said goodbye and got on the road. “I wish we could just turn around and let those hippies sit on top of our trailer, all the way back to Washington,” Ashley said.

Road Trip Day 2: Clerks

2009-08-08T16:22:00.001-07:00

Outside our motel in Drummond

Whew. I'm catching up on the road trip business as fast as I can so I can move on to actual life in NH. Sorry for the flurry of posts--soon I'll slow down.

Everybody in these Montana towns seems to know each other. The night before I saw the motel clerk chatting up the good old boys about trucks, and before we left Drummond that morning we stopped at a gas station where the clerk and the customers all seemed to know each other. I guess that happens in a town of 318 people (thanks Wikipedia) where the biggest thing that happens every year is a cattle meet.

Montana's mountains flattened out and we drove, drove, drove. Montana is BIG. I-90 stretches for 552 miles across the state (again, thanks Wikipedia) and for more than half of them there's not much to look at. We stopped in a town called Columbus to buy food, and felt like total out-of-towners when we got lost and bumped our Taurus and U-Haul trailer through tiny residential streets, searching for the grocery store. When we did find it, we rushed in to locate the bathroom and speedwalked a full circle around the store before realizing the bathroom was right next to the entrance. We bought our food and checked out. The clerk, an older woman, had a friendly chat with the woman in front of us about finances, the economy, and her job at the supermarket--they knew each other. When we got to the front of the line she stopped talking, ran our food through the laser and shoved it in bags, and wouldn't make eye contact. She only responded to us when I asked if I had to sign the receipt. At first I was puzzled--what had brought this on? There could be a number of things:

The rude clerk left me in a bad mood for the rest of the drive out of Montana. Were we really such obvious foreigners? And was it normal to treat foreigners with such disdain? Then I realized what had probably brought this on: Ashley's dress. The woman glared at it a few times. It's a red dress, very cute, not too flashy, but definitely out of place in Columbus, where most of the women (and all the shoppers in the IGA were women, many with kids) wore mom jeans and blousy shirts. I don't think the red, slightly low-cut dress went over well in the little town full of rural Montanans, kids, and churches.

It made me think about standards of taste. What is perfectly acceptable in Western Washington (Ashley wore the dress to her sister's wedding for God's sake) is viewed as too dressy, too revealing, too whatever, in other parts. It made me nervous for arriving in New Hampshire—I might have to relearn all these little social codes I'd never really thought about. I might piss people off without even realizing it. More thoughts on stuff like this as it comes.

Here's a lovely brochure from the Sky Motel in Drummond:

Road Trip Day 1: Montana at night

2009-08-08T10:06:00.000-07:00

Montana was big, beautiful, empty, and, on a Saturday night, full of highway patrol. I saw at least one every mile. One followed me for ten miles and made me nervous, even though I knew I wasn't speeding (damn trailer slowing me down) or doing anything illegal. I pulled into a gas station and he followed me there too. We nodded at each other as we pumped our gas. Lightning flickered over the hills—Montana is gorgeous.

Also poor. Pulled up alongside the gas station was an RV with a table out front. A woman ducked in and out of the motor home and her children milled around the table. The cop walked over to them and asked, “What are you guys selling today?”

“Mugs,” said the boy.

The girl yelled, “Tee shirts!”

“Great. Where do you guys live?”

“Over there,” one of them said, and pointed up between two hills. “We're going home soon.”

The cop and I were the only people at the gas station, and I hadn't seen a single car pull off the interstate to investigate the little mountain town—they couldn't have been getting much business.

We drove to Drummond, Montana and stayed in the Sky Motel, which looked sketchy at first glance. It was seedy, the upstairs rooms could only be accessed by walking through the front office and up a tiny flight of stairs, and there were three good ol' boys out front talking trucks with the counter girl. There was some confusion among the staff when I tried to rent a room, and the counter girl—who they all called Booger—got really mad and said “Shee-it” under her breath. The room was great, Clementine was glad to be out of the car, and we were glad to get some sleep. If you're ever passing through Drummond, MT, I recommend the Sky Motel. Day two, with rude grocery store clerks and thousands of Harley Davidsons, is coming soon!

Road Trip Day 1: Your cat has died of dysentery

2009-08-07T19:18:00.000-07:00

On the first day of the drive from Seattle to New Hampshire, there was a moment in Eastern Washington where I thought that this must be what hell feels like. Ashley was asleep, the iPod was playing some tired David Bowie song I'd heard a million times before, and the air was so hot it brought up those weird mirages on the concrete. For a solid twenty minutes I felt like a zombie. This is what hell feels like.

I wasn't the only overheated one. We stopped at a gas station Subway and ate sandwiches in the shade of the building (near a sign that read the time and the temp—107 degrees!). Our cat, Clementine, was in her carrier, acting kind of drunk and weird. Her nose had white flecks all over it and she was rolling around over and over again. She had pushed her towel all the way to the back and was lying on the bare plastic. We gave her an ice cube and moved on.

In an hour or so, we noticed her panting. We didn't get a picture of a cat panting, but it looks a lot like this:

Now imagine that but with the cuteness replaced by panic and fatigue, and you have a pretty good idea of what our cat looked like.

I had never seen a cat do this before, and it freaked me out. That can't be normal, right? I assumed she was dehydrated, but we couldn't get her to drink. About this time, the car was overheating from driving up a mountain in the Idaho panhandle so we pulled off into the Mullan Tree national historical site to give the car a rest and help our cat. We didn't know what to do (we weren't even sure she was dehydrated, although we assumed she must be), so we wound up holding her on her back, filling soda caps full of tiny cat-sized drinks of water and pouring them into her mouth. She looked pissed, licked the spilled water off her face, and fell asleep for a good five hours.

Later I looked up the symptoms. Turns out she was dehydrated—seriously dehydrated. If we had waited a few more hours we would have had to take her to a vet to get an IV, and since there's a severe lack of vets in the mountains of Idaho, our cat would probably have died.

Is it weird that this makes me feel somehow badass, like a pioneer crossing the country, enduring hardships, close to death? Like in Oregon Trail: Your cat is sick. Your cat has died of dysentery. Ashley drowned while fording the river. Well, the cat lives, and is currently climbing in and out of a box that I haven't unpacked yet.

If you want to know about dehydrated cats—and don't we all?—go here.