Category Archives: Reading

Squidbillies, Metalocalypse, and Pinball Numbers

Posted on 16 March 2009 | 3 comments

I have so much to do that I am having a hard time figuring out a logical order to do things in, so I am watching Scooby-Doo on Cartoon Network and watching this on my laptop:

I should be making my own little movies for my assistantship, but I can’t pass up watching Scooby-Doo. Since they took away The Golden Girls, Scooby and pals are my only joy in the morning, aside from walking the dogs and eating left-over Anime Peter Pan birthday cake for breakfast. Now Drew is cooking pizza and it smells better than my cake tasted.

David was home this weekend. We played Guitar Hero, watched Squidbillies and Metalocalypse. This is just what I needed: two more adult cartoons to fight for my time. I mean, would you rather watch hillbilly squids or read Toni Morrison? That was a joke, of course. But, I can access full episodes of both cartoons online.

*

Tonight I am going to Heather’s dad’s funeral. I spent a lot of time over the weekend wondering why, but then I realized that I will never understand why. I am pretty sure that God doesn’t have to answer to us. Instead, we answer to [Them], so I should just get it that I will never get it. And focus on living my life in a way that pleases [Them]. It could have been me. I could have been swept away to the pearly gates, begging St. Peter to let me. I would just tell him that one of my favorite beers is St. Peter’s Porter. I am sure I would be a shoo-in.

Shannon and I are riding to the funeral together, and I am looking forward to spending time with her. I was supposed to go out with her this weekend, but I inadvertently ate an entire half-pound bag of Almond M&Ms then drove to Upland to be with Heather. We met at Payne’s coffee shop, and I had some frozen custard alogn with my coffee. I think the HUGE amount of sugar made me sick. I was fine when I left Upland, but then I got about half-way home before I started sweating, chilling, and feeling like I was going to throw up. My mom is diabetic, so you would think I would pay more attention to the amount of sugar I eat. However, I was reading and just kept eating the M&Ms until I realized they were all gone. It happens.

3 Comments

Posted in Beer, Fat, Reading, Relationships, Religion, School

Roseanne and J. Alfred Prufrock

Posted on 6 March 2009 | 3 comments

At this point, your guess about why I am up at 4 AM watching reruns of Roseanne is as good as mine. I suppose there are worse things I could be doing right now than watching Darlene and Becky banter across the old brown couch. I forgot how funny the early episodes are, and I forgot how much they remind me of my family. Before the show started taking itself so seriously and before Tom Arnold came into the picture, it was a beautiful simply complex portrayal of blue-collar life in Lansford, a town not unlike Hartford City.

I am watching an early episode in which Jackie and Booker start dating. Most of the episode is filmed in a bowling alley, and the subplot is Becky’s first rendezvous with Chip. I remember why I love Darlene (Sara Gilbert). I think I might have wished she lived in Hartford City.  I look back now and think that she reminds me of my friend, Tisha: sarcastic, smart, and a little feisty. My life is better for knowing Tish.

I woke up at 3 AM—I laid in the bed for about 45 minutes before I gave in and finally got up—in order to begin memorizing “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” I am sure Bec will be thrilled that I am trying to memorize another poem. I think she got her fill of “A Supermarket in California.” I can’t imagine I woke up so early for T.S. Eliot, although the beauty of the poem does not escape me. Here is the opening, a loose interpretation of a sonnet:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats 5
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question … 10
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

I am sure my early morning can be attributed to the stress of the coming two weeks. Or the stress of the next few months. I am take my comprehensive exams in August. While I realized they were looming around the corner like a teenage tranny at RuPaul’s dressing room door, making my book list and going over it with Debbie yesterday really hammered it home. I have six months to prepare for the biggest test of my life. And I have to pass it.

Because I have to break up my serious study time into small chunks, I tend to spend a lot of time stumbling around on the Internet. I have decided to stop calling it procrastinating, because I have learned some interesting facts and been able to find some helpful websites during these mini-breaks. I found this site last night. I couldn’t resist reading some of the other posts on the blog, but the one I originally stumbled onto was the best. This morning I found this: F*** My Life. You, the viewer, actually get to vote: does the person’s life really suck or did they deserve what happened? Genius.

It’s now 4:44 and the episode that’s on—Dan wants to get a family photo to send into their high school reunion committee and it just so happened that when he and Roseanne broke up for a week their senior year, he slept with the woman who is organizing the reunion—reminds me of how I feel about high school reunions: they are a mechanism by which some people reassure themselves that their lives turned out better than others. I am not sure this is how reunions function for my class. Maybe I am naive. Maybe when I finally get my PhD, I will go back to a reunion. Maybe I won’t.

I had a couple of good beers last night with my delicious chicken etouffee.  The first one was an oldie but goody: Skullsplitter Scotch Ale. I am finding that I really love Scotch Ales. They have some body and nice complex taste. I also had a nice Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout. Usually, okay sometimes, Chocolate Stouts are too sweet, but this one was particularly tasty with some nice coffee undertones. Brooklyn’s was the chocolate equivalent of Breckenridge’s Vanilla Porter.  I would drink it again. And again with HomeMade Peppermint Chip Ice Cream.

Maybe I am awake so early today because I am excited to get Minerva out of the garage, give her a bath, fill her up, check her tire pressure, and ride her all over the countryside. I mean I can’t go too far today, but I a girl can dream (funny Freudian slip I accidentally typed cream to begin with). I have until one o’clock when I am supposed to meet Julie at the Blue Bottle for coffee. Maybe I can talk her into beer at the Heorot.

Adult swim is really weird at 5 AM. Is it idiotic or genius? Frequently, the line is very fine, like one pixel fine.  And, I think Drew’s cat pooped over by the fish tank again. This is why I don’t get up early as a rule. This is why I am glad we are going to pull up this carpet this summer.

Oh, and I cut my hair last night.

Also this.

3 Comments

Posted in Beer, Literature, Motorcycles, Reading, School

Sometimes Things Are What They Seem

Posted on 15 February 2009 | 2 comments

Right now I am sitting on the couch in my living room watching Natural Born Killers with Becky’s nephew Jacob. He is staying with us for a couple of days. When I asked him why he was on break in the middle of February, he responded by explaining that the rich kids at his school needed to go skiing. While some of his classmates are at Breckenridge, he is here. In Muncie. Brave young man that he is.

I had forgotten how strange, how deranged, how fucked up this movie is.

It is very fucked up.

The most fucked up.

Only Tarantino and Stone together could make this fucked up shit happen this well.

*

I spent the weekend in Chicago. I miss it already. I spent the hours of sitting at CElla’s booth counting the numbers of writer stereotypes I saw. Apparently, there is a school somewhere that teaches a class in how to dress as a writer. Hopefully they teach their students how to write as well.

Perhaps, though, they concentrate more on teaching their students how to look like Rembrandt:slf_prtrt_gorget_beretWe counted the berets (particularly those paired with a scarf), the long flowing skirts, the Nathans (men with beards, plaid shirts, and corduroys), men with leather vests, and women with tall leather boots. I hope they can write as well as they dress. There is something to be said for originality, in both realms.

*

I went to some excellent panels while I was there. The best ones involved writers that I already knew I loved: Lucille Clifton, Kim Addonizio, and Dorothy Allison. From each woman I took new strength, insight, and inspiration.

Clifton reminded me of the universality of suffering and how common the female experience is. She reminded me that good writing reaches the heart whether or not we have shared experience. I have never had an abortion but that didn’t keep me from weeping at Clifton’s reading of Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Mother” and her reading of her own “Lost Baby Poem.” I was moved deeper than I have been in a long time. I didn’t have to have my own abortion to understand the implications of their words. My guts moved at them.

Kim Addonizio reminded me not to take myself too seriously. There she was on the stage at one of the largest sessions at the conference laughing at herself as the woman who was signing her poems made the motions for vibrator and dildo. The same sign for both but the former with a little jiggle of the wrist. Addonizio has the kindest eyes. And the most sincere laugh. What do you say to a woman whose poetry changed your life and made you want to write something other than the shit you wrote before? I stood before her smiling and saying, “Thank you.” It was all I could say.

I hope I never get the opportunity to speak with Alice Walker or Toni Morrison. I would probably throw up like on South Park when Stan talks to Wendy.

Finally, Dorothy Allison taught me that she isn’t my Yankee-ass’s granny, which I take to mean that she isn’t my mammy. I don’t want her for my granny or my mammy; I just want to read her writing and have it change me for the better. I want to know how someone can love and hate a place at the same time, how someone can hold onto their past while simultaneously purging it, and how my writing can reflect all those things I loved about growing up somewhere like Hartford City, but how it can also betray the fact that I need so desperately to never return to it. How does she do that? I think humor and honesty. Without saying it, she said it.

Sometimes things are what they seem; sometimes they aren’t.

The worst panel was about being a gay writer in the Midwest. This panel quickly digressed into an advertisement for Chicago, and how they (Chicago Queers) feel so oppressed because they don’t get the publicity of San Francisco or New York. They don’t even get as much press as LA: “We have big events and they don’t get into the Advocate or Out.” gay-boys“Sniffle, sniffle, and dry your eyes,” I wanted to tell them,”come to Muncie to see the real Midwest. Then you can go home and choose one of your many gay bars at which to drown your sorrows, while the queers here in Muncie all join up at the one, the only, Mark III Tap Room. Seriously. Get rural in the Midwest and then figure out why half the room got up and left your session.”

*

I had two new beers while I was in Chicago: Belhaven Wee Heavy and The Reverend Avery Ale.

*

Mickey and Mallory just shot the Indian on a bad trip. Things will begin to go very badly for them. It will involve lots of biting snakes and my favorite song on the soundtrack. And, Jacob will still be moving his hand keeping time to the music. Or, he will  go upstairs and go to bed. And so will I.

2 Comments

Posted in Beer, Feminism, Literature, Queer, Reading, School, Writing

Cookies! Chicago. And writing.

Posted on 4 February 2009 | 3 comments

Oh, Beautiful Blog, how I’ve neglected thee! I traded you in for empty days and nights of Facebook. I whored myself out to fine printed texts, and I left you lonely, abandoned so I could experience companionship with real, tangible people. Now I am filling you with my thoughts while watching Maury Povich tell women which man of many is their baby daddy. I am still slumming, pouring my affections elsewhere and hoping you’ll turn your head.

And, I am drinking a Monty Python’s Holy Grail Ale and thinking of a peanut butter and jelly kind of life.

Enough soft-core internet porn.

I am in the middle of baking cookies for our CElla’s Round Trip Bake Sale tomorrow. I just made some really tasty oatmeal, raisin, white chocolate chip cookies. I packed them in little bags of three. Would you buy three little cookies for a dollar? I would if they tasted wicked-delicious like these do. I would spend a dollar for my cookies, but maybe not yours.

We (the Fat Cats and two correctly spelled Rachels) are raising money to go to Chicago. I didn’t realize until yesterday that we leave next week. On Wednesday. We leave in less than a week and we still don’t have our chapbook finished, which does make me a little nervous. Now, I need to learn how to use a bookmaking program in the next two days, so I can produce our book over the weekend. This may be a complete disaster.

I think God is teaching me patience. If not, it’s a cruel trick.

I haven’t been writing or reading like I should be. I have been in somewhat of a funk for a variety of reasons and I am finding it difficult to make myself do the things I need to do. Sometimes I feel like a rapid cycling bi-polar because I can be elated one day and in the gutter depressed the next. I should harness that for my writing.

Good writers have Crazy Brain. I haven’t met one who doesn’t. Next weekend, I will be around a whole bunch of Crazy Brain.

And then, I get to have lunch or something with my friend Corey. I hope I get to have lunch with him ’cause it would be really sweet.

I will just be happy to be in Chicago: I will touch the buildings and run my fingers lovingly along their skin as I walk past them. I will breathe the thick, close air of too many people. I will kiss the lake, love each street my feet touch, relish the stink of the city bus, and retain the press of the bag lady’s hand as she takes the coins from my palm. I will let my mind be transported to a different life, one I could have had but let go of in order to have the life I have.

We can’t go back in time. There is no rewind. We can only go forward. Fast forward.

I need to enjoy things as they come and present themselves to me. I need to work on loving the moment, not thinking about the future or the past. Why can’t I do this anymore? I used to be so good about living in every moment, but they just keep comng faster and faster. Time is relative.

3 Comments

Posted in Beer, PBJ, Reading, School, Writing

Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me

Posted on 29 January 2009 | 2 comments

What do “The Second Choice” by Theodor Dreiser, “Hands” by Sherwood Anderson, and “The Wagner Matinee” by Willa Cather all have in common? The fact is that I have to teach them all for my ENG 605 Literature Pedagogy class. Also, they are all written during the early part of the 20th century. They are dirty and gritty and explore all of those ideas that make us cringe: industry, relationships, sexuality, public and private domains, music, and modernization in all of its forms.

I think I could spend the entire class period talking about Dreiser. Well, now that I think a little more about it, I could spend a whole class period talking about each story. Each story is thick and voluminous, not easily explored in one pass. Short stories remind me of the Grand Canyon: on first glance you think you’ve seen it all (yeah, it’s a big hole), but then you realize that there are layers of color, trenches and rises, shrubbery, animals, and a river way down there at the bottom that you can barely see from the rim.

Teaching is about gleaning. It’s about looking around for the scraps that no one will notice and that no one cares about until you point them out, or until your students point them out to you. I think teaching resembles standing next to a dumpster of knowledge, poking around in it with a stick. You find something new and suddenly everyone wants it. In teaching that is good.

If everyone is interested enough to talk, then you know you’ve hit some sort of truth or importance in text. Your resonance strikes with someone else’s resonance and before you know it you’ve blown a speaker!

2 Comments

Posted in Gleaning, Literature, Modernism, Pedagogy, Reading, School, Teaching, Writing