January 2011
12 posts
An update on reading and resolutions
The first five books I’ve read this year:
The Art of Subtext, Charles Baxter (layers and layers of subtext from now on)
What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, Damion Searls (super story collection in which somewhat odd characters do not much beautifully)
The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins (good for thinking about plot and tension, bad for going to bed on...
Try a little grass
My fellow MFA students and I have started picnicking in the enormous park in the middle of campus.
This being Southern California, the park is perfectly manicured, supremely verdant, and yet we are the only people stop and sit.
The other day, as I lay on said grass in my undershirt beneath a blazing sun, I realized that it makes sense that no undergraduates stray from the paved paths. They are...
“Uncle Willoughby had been somewhat on the tabasco side as a young man…”
– P.G. Wodehouse, “Jeeves Takes Charge” and my new favo(u)rite expression.
Roll Call
It turns out that I am terrible at taking roll. Something about the hand-eye-ear coordination involved. Every morning for the past four classes I have read through my list of students, alphabetized by first name so I may learn their faces faster, and I either mark everyone as absent or no-one as absent. It’s a tic, some flaw in my wiring, and it’s going to really complicated final...
Ms. Hempel was not, she knew, a very good teacher. She made easy plays at popularity: dismissing class a few minutes early on Friday afternoons; beginning each year by reading the Philip Larkin poem about how your parents fuck you up…
— Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Bynum
I do both of these things! Actually, I let my students out early pretty much every class.
"Grapevine" is actually a word for "Interstate"
As I was driving back to Orange County from San Francisco yesterday, I saw a sign a few miles from where 152 through Gilroy hits I-5. The sign said: “The I-5 Grapevine is closed to Los Angeles.”
But then I was on I-5 and it seemed pretty open (and also like a major thoroughfare impervious to closure), so I thought that maybe a grapevine was some jazzy road term like mousetrap. Or...
Last year, my New Year’s resolution was to always have well-groomed eyebrows. I succeeded (except for the incident of the nail clipper trim).
This year, it’s to read 100 books.
Last night I spent a good amount of time running around shouting, “It’s the end of a decade! Can you believe it? A whole new decade is now upon us!”
I just now realized that the reason no one acknowledged my enthusiasm is that I was a year off.
2010 in Travel and Tears
January
I donned my power suit and went to some meetings in New York with my dad (aka boss).
February
I started getting rejected from grad school. Ultimately, 14 out of 15 schools would reject me. I cried some and sat on my sofa a lot.
March
I got into grad school in Texas!
April
I went to D.C. to visit my best friend.
May
I went to Austin with my mom to get the lay of the land. We...