To The Promised Land

I've been to San Francisco.

It was good.

I flew out on Saturday morning to go a-hunting for an apartment. I flew Jetblue into Oakland, which, during the flight, was awesome. I watched about 2 hours of Celebrity Poker and then about 2 hours of that top chef reality show, then about 2 hours of Sudoku. I'm glad we don't have cable at home; I'd watch it far too much. (I'm also glad I avoid Sudoku puzzles... that, too, sucks up a lot of time.)

Then I got to Oakland, spent an hour trying to go 5 miles to the Bay Bridge, missed my first appointment, but then finally made it over.

Once in SF, all went more or less smoothly. I found a nice little place in what seems to be a good neighborhood. I found it quickly enough so that I had most of Sunday to wander around, go to the beach, do a little sight-seeing, discover that some roads in SF do, in fact, go straight up and straight down, etc.

I have pictures, but they're at home. I'm not. I'm outside Philly for more training. But I've been neglecting the blog for a week or so, so here you go.o

I'm the Poet, She's the Philosopher

Check this out, the post on negative energy. My wife is becoming more and more of a deep thinker every day. I'm not saying she wasn't bright from the start, just that she's increasingly meditative and contemplative. I think, in turn, I'm becoming more and more something else. Maybe she's transferred her love of R&B to me. (By this math, meditation + Erykah Badu = inner peace -- I buy that)

I've had En Vogue's "Giving Him Something He Can Feel" stuck in my head for a week now. That's a great song. It's also a song that, if you know it, it can get stuck in your head just by reading the title. "Giving Him Something He Can Feel."

AAA is ok

I called AAA yesterday to order a triptik to CA, routing us through a couple of overnight stops and ending in SF. When I said the last stop was SF, the guy said, "As long as you promise not to leave your heart there."

Which made me think of other California songs. I'd had Tom Petty's "California" stuck in my head for about a week ("California's been good to me, I hope it don't fall into the sea"). Plus, the new Chili Peppers song, "Dani California." Of course, that sounds very Rick Rubin like one of their other hits, "Californication."

I searched my iTunes, and found the Gipsy Kings' "Hotel California," which was in The Big Lebowski, and is much more fun than the Eagles' version.

Gomez has a song called "California," but it's not that great.

Then I'd forgotten about R.E.M. Other than Gomez (and, maybe the Gipsy Kinds), they're the only ones not from CA. They have a cool song called "I Remember California" from Green.

Needless to say, M-N's gonna get sick of a new mix I'm building by about Connecticut. Can't wait till Nebraska. Oh, I guess we could start Nebraska with "Omaha" (Counting Crows) or the Springsteen Nebraska album, though I don't like that so much. Dar Williams has an awesome cover of "Highway Patrolman," though. If only we could get through Nebraska in the time it takes to listen to one Counting Crows song and a Dar Williams track.

Cape Ann and Fried Clams

I spent the day in Cape Ann yesterday for a training session. I got there early enough to walk to the beach, meet a dog, and walk back.

I was technically in Essex (pronounced "Ess-ex"), or Gloucester (not pronounced "Glow-chest-er," by the way). Or Cape Ann (pronounced "Cah-pay Dee-um"). Either way, it was near the ocean. It was also near the fried clam stand where the fried clam was invented. I'm not sure how the clam community feels about this. Probably not too good.

But despite my fondness for all things battered and fried, I stay away from fried clams. I eat many gross things, and this is completely a double standard, but I think clams are icky.

Fried clams weren't really the focus of the day, actually. Just one conversation with a local. I also had a conversation with a woman who's brother went to my college and lived across the hall from me one year and, another year, was involved in an awful incident where a lacrosse player (and, yes, at the school a lacrosse player is proudly reduced to being known just as a lacrosse player) broke into his room and beat the crap out of him.

Fortunately, I learned he's doing well now, studying to work with deaf students and teach math. This made me wonder what the lacrosse player is doing now. I'm pretty sure he's not playing lacrosse professionally. Also, as he got off without punishment after a "trial," where he was judged by his peers, I doubt he's remorseful or penitent.

If I meet his sister along the way, I'll let you know.

Book Report: Why Did I Ever

Somewhere between planning a trip to SF to apartment-hunt, organizing logistics for babycare whilst I train for the new job, packing what goes and deciding what won't go, watching a lousy episode of Lost, not writing poetry, etc., I found time to finish a quick read: Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison.

The book is written in short, mostly numbered notes, like quick prose poems rather than regular fiction. Early on, the notes are fragmented and they require focus from the reader to figure out the narrative. As it goes on, the notes tend to flow into each other more. Plotlines emerge, and characters become consistent.

It's not so much a story about things as it is about people. Robison, superficially, is capturing the narrator's fragmented, disjointed psyche with the note format. More than that, though, she uses the form for the usual goal: attempting to convey a genuine reality. Life, of course, is too complicated and multi-tasked to be truly represented in a linear, traditional story.

Robison never commits to the idea, in my opinion, not fully. I realized near the end that she was going to tie up stories, bring resolution to conflicts and complete subplots. I didn't want that. I was enjoying the craziness too much. There's something reassuring in the unconnected pieces. They resonate.

Many of the notes reminded me of absurdist-leaning poetry, stuff like Russell Edson or Kenneth Koch, maybe some Dean Young, too. Like this:
"I say, 'I'd be happy in this room if I had a dust mop.'
'No,' I say with a sigh, 'that is not true. It wouldn't end there."

She's able to throw these things in and not feel compelled in any way to justify them. Take this:
"A news thing with the president comes on the television. He tells the press, 'Let's not take the super-flew-us route,' and moves his hands in a snaking motion. I think that's wrong in several ways. And I think perhaps a syllable maximum should be set for some people and, I'm sorry, but rather a low one."

As for why I read this one, Kate was reading it in VT last June(?). It looked like a cool idea for a book. But now that I look at it, there's a blurb from Amy Hempel, who teaches at Bennington, on the back. And she thanks Rick Moody (also Bennie) in her notes. Sometimes I wonder about that. People get their friends to write blurbs, so is Robison a small-time writer, or is Hempel bigger than I know? Does it matter? Not really. I'd just like to have a book out with blurbs from great writers, like:
"This book was so amazing I came back to life to read it." -Emily Dickinson

That would be awesome.

Good place for a Quaker

Everyone we talk to about moving to SF says how beautiful it is, how much we'll like, all that stuff. That's great. It's nice to hear.

One guy, however, told me yesterday that first, it's the most beautiful city in the country. Then he decided it was the most beautiful city in the world. I qualify that statement by noting that he's from New York and lives in Boston, two ugly cities. But he went on to talk about sitting on the bay with his sister, looking at the whole city in about August of 1989, discussing its grandeur. Then, of course, the '89 earthquake. I guess some of the houses on his sister's street were leveled because they'd been built on landfill. Fortunately, her house was on bedrock and only had some structural damage. Still, he said, earthquakes, damage and destruction.

I understand people being reluctant to move to SF b/c of earthquakes, but to go off on the topic while discussing how beautiful of a city it is to a guy who's about to move his family there seems misplaced. Still, it should be a good city for a family of Quakers.

Grover psychosis

So the little man doesn't get much tv. There are multiple reasons for this and they aren't all part of our Concentrated Rule-based Approach to Parenting (CRAP). I just don't watch much tv, especially not during his waking hours. And we also don't think a 10-month-old needs to be pacified like that too much. He'll have plenty of time for tv later.

But today I flipped it on and there was Regis and somebody talking to Tom Hanks. So I flipped around, stumbling upon Sesame Street. Grover was there talking to an Alaskan sled dog (Akita? Huskie?). Anyway, the boy immediately started jumping for joy. No, literally, jumping up and down smiling and giggling. They then cut to a little film about native Alaskans. His enthusiasm dipped a bit, but I think he was still eager for Grover to come back.

What is it about Muppets? I mean, the boy wasn't just happy, he was nearly convulsing with elation. He definitely didn't have the same reaction to Regis.

Into the metaphorical fire

My training has begun for the new SF job, thankfully in the Boston area this week. For this week and next, I'm working jobs 1-17 more or less simultaneously. I'm definitely eating a lot of granola bars in the car as meals.

Thankfully, M-N thought to buy some wine, so those non-BN, post-tutoring, after training, once the boy is in bed or at least towards dinner nights can have some degree of relaxation. She'll be a great yogi/doula/general-calming-influence.

Here's something unrelated: I was on my way to Waltham this morning, home of several hotels often used for meetings and conferences. The way I usually go (Rt. 1) was backed up, so I ducked over to I-95. That was a mistake. Apparently, there was some huge back-up on 93, which extended back past the 128/93 split, down 95 well past the ramp I entered on. I just needed to get to 128 (where the traffic was light, somehow). But then I saw a car with some Quaker stickers on it. And it was a friend (also, a Friend) from our meeting. I was going to beep, but knowing MA drivers, the size of that jam, the likelihood of violent reprisals from non-Friends in other cars, and my own timid nature, I didn't.

But still, it was cool to see a friend amidst the hordes of angry drivers.

Fare thee well, Peanut Butter

The reality of the move got clearer last night as we sent off Peanut Butter to a new home. A very nice young couple from Boston adopted him.

Ok, so we were going to part ways with him regardless of the move, but I'm just glad he went to good people.

The other cat wasted no time in reclaiming the bed. Now it's her house, again.

And it's bright and sunny today. I woke up at 5:48 thinking I'd overslept and it was 10 or 11. It was just clear and sunny for the first time in 10 days. So much for the ark-building business I was planning...

Lucky 14

I was trying to figure out why this huge move feels so casual to me. So I charted all the times I've moved in my life:

1) Ft. Lauderdale, FL to Madison, WI
2) Madison to Green Bay
3) Green Bay to Clifton Park, NY
4) Clifton Park to Haverhill, MA
5) Haverhill to Waterville, ME (college)
1 summer in Haverhill, then back to ME
6) back to Haverhill, then move to Sioux City, IA for summer
back to ME
7) summer in Boston, living downtown
back to ME
after graduation, to IA briefly, then to back to ME for half-summer
8) ME to Boston, MA
9) Boston to Denver
10) Denver to Columbus, OH
11) Columbus to Kents Hill, ME
12) Kents Hill to Canton, MA
13) Canton to Norwood, MA

and now #14, to California. Maybe that's why I just make a list and go. (Oh, and it'd have been one more if I hadn't gone to a low-rez MFA program -- 12a is Vermont.)

3 CD reviews you didn't ask for

Here's something completely unrelated to the impending move/job change.
I've been listening to Paul Simon's new album, Surprise, at BN (where I've been working a couple nights a week in the music/DVD dept. After 9 or so on a Thursday, there's not much else to do but listen to the cd we're playing). It's ok. It was produced by Brian Eno, who makes everything sound very antiseptic and clean. Graceland was clean, too, but on that album Simon was more playful. Here, he's good and has some clever things to say, as with the well-titled lead track, "How can you live in the Northeast?" But, like James Taylor's recent albums, Simon seems far too content and peaceful to make an interesting record. That's not such a big deal for Taylor, who's naturally sedated, but Simon was more adventurous long ago.

Then there's Bruce Springsteen's new album, We Shall Overcome. It's a bunch of old folk tunes Pete Seeger performed (but didn't necessarily write). This is also now playing at Barnes & Noble. I figured I'd like it. The songs are leftist and carry a new anti-Bush admin feeling. Plus, it's a fun idea. Springsteen got a bunch of musicians together and started recording with minimal or no rehearsal, so the album plays very lively and loose. Yet it sucks. It sucks hard. It's not tuneful, the songs are sloppy (maybe rehearsals are good), and Springsteen's nonsensical shouting is irritating.

Then there's Pearl Jam. I'm a softie for PJ. The early albums are both sentimental favorites and, speaking objectively, wicked awesome. Then No Code was good, but not as good as Vitalogy. Yield was good, too, but still not Vitalogy. Binaural had some good songs, but sucked as an album (and had a wretched first single, "Nothing as it seems." Riot Act had some great songs, but as Eddie Vedder noted, it's hard to make an album about economics and politics that's very fun. But Pearl Jam, the new one, is great. All the reviews say it's their best since Vitalogy, and it is. The first single, "World Wide Suicide," is both a fun rock song and a decent slam on the Iraq War and Bush (though, as usual, Vedder's singing is tough to understand -- perhaps that's why it's been a hit, actually -- if everyone knew the song was so political, they might balk). The rest of the album is just as strong. I could go on, but I probably should be planning our yard sale or preparing for the job in some way...

Now it gets crazy

So here's the conflict: My new job wants me to be in trainings and meetings as I'm able to be for most of the next 4 weeks, then be in San Francisco in mid-June. But I need to finish out my schedule at job 1 (BN), finish my tutoring at job 2, and still keep the boy alive (jobs 3, 4, 5, and 6).

I'm working on balance. I'll go to some of the trainings, work most of my shifts at BN, and rearrange some of the tutoring to make it work. The boy, I figure, is about ready for some independence.

Somewhere, perhaps when we emerge on the left coast, I think I'll have made some decent scratch from all this, maybe enough to cover the move.

No, that's not likely.

TORGO FINDS WORK

Indeed.

I got offered a job in San Francisco with the people I tutor for. It's the one non-teaching job I applied to. I actually applied to the office in Philly, but they thought I was overqualified for that specific job. Then they had this higher opening in their new SF office.

Sweet.

More to follow, I'm sure.

Torgo vs. AAA

This is Torgo, in case you haven't seen him before. Technically speaking, he's a satyr (half-man, half-goat). But the movie was so low-budget, he basically just had gigantic knees.

To read on about Torgo and his film career, turn to Page 74.
To help Torgo battle a flat tire, go on to the next paragraph.

So if Torgo had a flat tire on his wife's Hyundai, he'd have trouble changing it. It's hard to bend and unscrew bolts with such big knees. You never see goats changing tires, do you? They always get low-to-the-ground creatures to do it, like wolverines, badgers, and effective running backs.

I, however, have fairly normal knees. I don't have an excuse. But this morning, when aforementioned tire was flat, I couldn't get those damn bolts off. I was actually turning the wheel with the wrench without the bolts moving.

Fortunately, we had nowhere in particular to go. The AAA guy came, scared Little Dude with his power tool, and proceeded to explain how they put the bolts on so tight that you need a $700 drill to get them off. I'm not sure if he was suggesting I should tip him, you know, for bringing his $700 drill.

I found out later that the last time M-N had a flat, it took her and a maintenance guy from her school standing on the wrench to make it turn. I didn't think to stand on it. If it had been me and a half-man, half-goat, we could have done it.

Reading lists

The NY Times has an article about the 25 best American fiction works of the last 25 years. Of all the books, I've only read Beloved and 1 1/2 Philip Roth books.

But what a boring list. Roth, McCormac, DeLillo, Updike... over and over again. Maybe I should read some of those (except Roth, I don't care for Roth), but it seems terribly provincial. Granted, Harold Bloom was a judge. But there were also much better judges, people with interesting ideas and stodginess not quite so ingrained in the very essence of their beings.

How'd I end up here?

I went to a job interview yesterday in scenic Westchester County, outside NYC. It was fairly last minute, and I went via the train. So I figured, train to the town, train back home. But then, there wasn't a convenient train home so they put me on a train from the town to Grand Central Station, then I had to go over to Penn Station, then take a train home from there.

The result of this was that I found myself unexpectedly here:

walking through the middle of Manhattan at 5 p.m. on a Thursday amidst the throngs of people, remembering why I dislike NYC so much (it's dirty and unpleasant and overcrowded and just generally sad, in my opinion).

I did walk by the big library with the stone lions which always reminds me of Ghostbusters and is cool for that.

I also had a struggle getting out of Grand Central Station to a surface-level sidewalk, but when I eventually just followed a stream of people, I got put out just where I wanted to be, which was nice.

Then, on my way to Penn Station, I needed to pick up some dinner. I kept passing McDonald's and Burger King, but I wanted something unique to NY. I love the giant pastrami sandwiches you can get in NY delis, so that was what I was looking for. But I mostly saw chain fast food and pizza places.

When I got to Penn Station, I figured I'd walk around the outside, but the only cool-looking non-major chain I saw had Seattle in its name. So I went inside the station, found a deli, and got my pastrami. But it was miniscule. The bread was smaller than the palm of my hand and they didn't stack the pastrami much more than an inch.

So I ended up getting a $4 hot dog on the train. That, incidentally, was microwaved and a bit soggy, but gigantic.

The other point about the trip was this: If you ever have an opportunity to vote on whether cell phones should be allowed on airplanes, take a train trip and then decide. People on trains use cell phones (except in the quiet car), and it's awful. At one point on the trip down, I had a woman in front of me discussing her career change, someone across and up a seat ordering theater tickets indecisively, and a person across from me trying to get a dinner date.

Fortunately, I had some tunes.

Welcome to Seattle

That's the National Weather Service forecast for Norwood this week. Awesome.

There was a point in January when I was interviewing with a school in Tacoma, Washington. One of several schools that took the time to give me multiple interviews then just disappeared into the ether---sorry, tangent. Anyway, Tacoma was in the middle of some sort of record-breaking streak of days with rain. It was something like 35 or 40.

Here, it was last sunny on Monday. It's now Wednesday night, it's rained for two days with much more in the forecast, and I'm already pissed off about it.

I was tutoring a girl for the SAT and they have these vocab cards. They're color-coded. Yellow cards are positive, happy words, grey are angry, nasty words, then there's orchid and green and other colors I can't ever remember. She was having trouble learning the grey ones this week. We decided this may not be the week to learn the grey words.

I miss the sun. Maybe I really am from Florida. I figured just being born there and then moving to Wisconsin within 4 months or so negated my citizenship and took away my supply of oranges. Maybe not.

Book Report: Chronicle of a Death Foretold

What a strange little book. I suppose it's a novella, as it's barely 120 pages.

This is the second Gabriel Garcia Marquez book I've read recently and now, after breezing through this one, I'm not sure why I've been so thoroughly confounded by 100 Years of Solitude.

The plot is clever and simple. Santiago Nasar is a rich young guy going about his morning when two brothers hack him to pieces. The time change from the first page to the last is maybe 2 hours, tops, beginning with Nasar getting out of bed and ending with his death a short while later. While there are plenty of flashbacks, all of which explain why Nasar gets killed, most of the book deals with explaining every minute detail of what was happening in the town where at one point or another everyone, including Nasar, knew he was going to be killed, yet it still happened.

It's a dark book, but also funny. No one takes the killers seriously. In fact, they're reluctant to do what they feel compelled to do. The humor is in the reactions of the townspeople to the brothers and their openness about the murder. They go around talking about it all morning, all but pleading with people to stop them.

Eventually, though, Marquez makes clear that he's discussing something very wrong and cowardly about human nature. There's a strange split between the language and tone of most of the book and the grisly violence of the murder. It reminds me of those car commercials on lately that seem to be stupid ads with people having silly conversations while driving, then there's suddenly a horrible accident and it turns out the ad is about car safety.

Marquez is perhaps more artful, if only because it's clear what he's building to all along, as in Life of Pi, where the whimsical tone is constantly masking something horrifying.

The last thing I want to point out is the cover. The copy I read had the cover you see here, with the bride holding a bouquet of eyeballs, with a large knife in front of her and what might be a cracked tombstone behind her. This is a terrific picture. It's fully symbolic of the story without giving anything away. It's comical but also very morbid, which fits perfectly.

Luck o' the Torgo

I've been hesitant about posting too much about my job search on this blog (though that hasn't stopped me). I'm perpetually nervous that posting something about a positive interview will jinx my chances for the job. Likewise, posting something negative about a place that might have wanted to offer me a job could work against me.

There's not much rational thought behind this. So I say screw it.

It turns out I married a Buddhist. If she can find inner peace, then maybe I can, too.

I just got off the phone with someone who thinks I may be overqualified for a position I interviewed for on Friday. I'm still in contention for that job, but now I'm also in contention for two higher positions with the same company.

After months of being too inexperienced, this was startling to hear. And nice. I wasn't really too inexperienced for those other jobs. They just got both my and M-N's resumes together, and they saw her five years of teaching history, English and theater at both boarding and day schools, single sex and coed, prestigious and backwoods Maine (and just maybe her skin color), and they thought they could lure her into jobs she didn't want. Then, when she rejected them, they gave me the kiss-off.

That's fine. She doesn't need to be the token black woman at any school anymore, overworked and shat upon. I'm gonna get a job.

Not Dead Yet

The best thing about having a cold or bad allergies is that day when you wake up not only feeling no worse than the day before, but actually feeling better, and you fully appreciate how fantastic it is to feel good.

That's my Sunday motivational message. It's not really motivational, but it is Sunday.

Have Resume, Will Travel

The job search goes on...

It's getting protracted to the point of being not just irritating, but stupefying. I've had about 350 interviews. I've flown to visit schools in Maryland and Pennsylvania (twice). I've turned down visits to Maine, New York and New Jersey. I have another visit this week, fortunately in-state. Yesterday I had a local interview for a job that may be in Pennsylvania, California or New York.

The worst thing isn't, ultimately, the interview. I hate more than anything else the vacuum after the interview when they don't even call or email to say they're going with someone else. We've had a few of these, some where we've had multiple phone interviews with a school and some we've visited and they never bothered to get back to us. How rude is that?

I think they're doing two things by not calling to reject us. First, they're awkward, mean people. The rejection call is not easy to make, so they just don't do it. This doesn't excuse the lack of a rejection email. That's far, far easier to do, but still, one school I had to email two different people to get a rejection email.

The second reason is worse. I think there are schools who don't reject us because they're waiting to hear back from their first choice candidate, which takes a bit, then they're waiting to get everything finalized, contracts signed, DNA tests cleared, paternity tests resolved, before rejecting the second or third choice people.

Either way, it's getting old. We had one school, a school we didn't even like, a school we'd possibly reject even if it was our only offer, tell us they'd decide by Friday, Monday at the latest. That Monday came and went, and a week's gone by since.

Well, if all else fails, maybe I can write a book about how to be a professional interviewee. I'm about to put "Teaching candidate" on my resume as work experience.

Head Cold City

I'm getting over a head cold, one I blame squarely on a school we visited and didn't particularly like. Last night, I realized I couldn't breathe out of my nose. It wasn't just congested and snoggily, it was a complete lack of air flow.

Gross? Maybe. Also, a bit frightening. I'm a big fan of breathing and the prospect of not breathing irked me. Unfortunately, I'd finished off the Nyquil the night before, and all we had was cough syrup (and I didn't have a cough) and baby medicine. I contemplated taking a big dose of baby medicine, but didn't, b/c he has the same cold, and I don't want to pilfer his stash.

Then, at about midnight, I remembered we had some nasal spray. I hate nasal spray. I had prescription spray once, for allergies, and it was incredibly gross. You spray it up your nose, then it all comes dripping back down. The first thing you want to do is blow your nose, but if you do, you'll just blow out all the medicine.

I think they should come up with some sort of drain valve or spigot for allergies and head colds. Think about it. Ok, maybe it's best not to think about it, but I think it'd be a big seller.

Anyway, I sucked it up and took the spray, and I survived the night.

Speak the English good

This shouldn't be a surprise, but the facts are President Bush:
a) Sung the national anthem in Spanish in 2000
b) Now says it should only be sung in English
c) Doesn't speak Spanish very well
and,
d) Ok, do I even need to mention his English skills?

Fortunately, the new press secretary is a Fox news guy, and the Spanish word for Fox is Zorro (yeah, as in Antonio Banderas). And Zorro wears a mask (or so the title suggests). So when Bush robs the country blind...

(it kinda makes sense)

Why'd you do it, Michael?

Ok, nothing like finally having a decent episode of Lost to distract from everything else going on these days.

And the best part is that they seem to finally be thinning out the cast again.

I'm just glad that they haven't killed off Harold Perrineau yet. He's always been one of my favorite small-role actors. Yet he's always getting killed off. In Romeo + Juliet, it takes the whole damn movie to kill off Leonardo DiCaprio, but poor Mercutio only gets a few scenes (he does nail the death speech, though). And then in The Edge, which is a good bad movie, you have Perrineau, Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins out in the woods against a bear, and Perrineau dies first. How is that?

Ok, actually, I'd pick the bear against any of those guys.

But back to Lost, after a long, boring stretch, it seems to be on the right track again. Just in time for summer.

Where's my $134, 121?

What about me?

This is my new salary requirement.

It's sucking my will to live!!!

So we're driving home from Best Buy, where I used a gift card I'd had since Christmas to buy the new Pearl Jam cd and a meat tenderizer (yes, a meat tenderizer). We're in traffic behind a big Ford pick-up truck which has a back window plastered with stickers. There's "Bush 2004," Patriots, Red Sox, a confederate flag, more Patriots, two stickers of deer, a superfluous Ford sticker, more Patriots, a sticker with some smarmy pro-war/pro-kill 'em all slogan like "These colors don't run, they shoot nuclear weapons from a safe distance," more Patriots, etc.

Me: "That line of Patriots stickers is covering something"
Paxton: "Ra ra ra."
M-N: "Maybe it's a gun rack."
Me: "A gun rack? I don't even own a gun, let alone many guns that would necessitate an entire rack. What am I going to do with a gun rack? -- You don't like it? Fine. You know, if you're not careful, you're gonna lose me. -- Lose you? I lost you two months ago. Are you mental? Get the net!"
M-N (nervously): "I think this is my stop."

Hey, nothing's funny like an extended "Wayne's World" quote 15 years after the movie came out.

This, of course, led to us watching "Wayne's World" this evening for Little Dude's FIRST time, M-N's first or second time (maybe the first time all the way), and my 34th time (or so).

I'm happy to report that the boy loved it. Loved it. There's a ton of music in the movie, and he loves the tunes. He clapped along and even laughed at some parts.

And no, we're not that terrible of parents that we sit a nine-month-old in front of a movie. I actually was playing on the floor with him through most of it. He just stopped and grooved when a song came on.

Actually, now that I think about it, I guess a lot of parents do just sit their babies in front of TVs. That's the whole Baby Einstein industry. We had some of those cds people gave us, but we never got the dvds. I figure, when he's so small, looking at walls and carpet and lights on the ceiling are fascinating. He likes playing with lint. If I was still captivated by lint, I mean, more than I am, which I'll admit is probably an unhealthy level, anyway, I'd never watch tv.

But the moral of the posting is this: "Wayne's World" is still funny. But I think it's getting too obscure to throw out references here, like "If he were an ice cream flavor, he'd be pralines and dick" or "Why is it that if you kill a man in the heat of battle, it's called heroic, but if you kill him in the heat of passion, it's murder?" or "What do you do if every time you see this woman, you think you're gonna hurl? -- I say hurl. If you blow chunks and she stays, she's yours. But if you spew and she bolts, it was never meant to be."

No, I still think that's funny.

[For this, the image loader works...]

Little Dude gets Little Cousin

On Sunday afternoon, Little Dude became an older cousin for the first time when Dominic Michael was born out in Albany. I guess, technically speaking, I'm also an uncle again. That's cool, too.

I'd like to post a picture here, but the image loader on this blog is spotty. Well, let me describe what he looks like from the pictures I've seen: like a newborn, wrapped in those hospital baby blankets (the white with blue stripes), eyes closed, seemingly unsure of what he's gotten himself into.

If he's like Little Dude, he may spend some time fretting that he had a good thing going on the inside, where he didn't have to chew his food or sleep alone, and he could breathe underwater (which is a cool observation I nicked from a Dean Young poem).

But eventually, he'll dig being on the outside. There are better toys here. And he can refuse certain foods. Try that with an umbilical cord. Ok, don't really try that. That would be weird.

Book Report Special: Excellent Women vs. Grendel

I was going to review Barbara Pym's Excellent Women, which I finished on Friday, but then I picked up John Gardner's Grendel, and polished that off over the weekend. It occurred to me that I could break literary ground by reviewing the two together. They're both about the same thing, really.

Pym's novel concerns a church-going woman in post-WWII England. She has some wacky but mild-mannered adventures in a very Jane Austen sort of way. Quite a bit of tea is consumed.

Gardner's is the same, just switch "church-going woman" for "man-beast of unusual strength and thoughtfulness." Also, maybe Jane Austen doesn't match. And switch "tea" for "human blood." Or mead, if you're talking about the Danes.

I immensely enjoyed both novels. I was encouraged to read Pym after a great lecture in January by my friend Susan, who used the term "Pymish" to describe the narrative style. It's very British, often silly, but also melancholy. Excellent Women is quite tightly edited, with a keen attention to detail and character. She doesn't pander to her readers in any way, but isn't snobbish, either.

I'm always fascinated with the British obsessions with formalities like tea time. Pym both plays along and around these traditions, poking fun but not condemning. That's a difficult task, but she pulls it off well.

Her protagonist, a certain Miss Lathbury, seems destined to become an old spinster. Her prospects for marriage have long since passed, and her desire for the three potential husbands in the story is muted. It's the type of book where you want the character to find happiness, but you also recognize that for her to get married would be entirely inconsistent with the book, and therefore that can't happen.

Grendel is a book I've been meaning to read for years. I'm a big fan of Beowulf and I love Gardner's reversal of the story. There's so much pretension and posturing in the original epic, it's great to have the humor and silliness in Grendel.

A few aspects of the writing bothered me, though. First, Gardner loves metaphors to the point of distraction. Take this, for example: "It's good at first to be out in the night, naked to the cold mechanics of the stars. Space hurls outward, falconswift, mounting like an irreversible injustice, a final disease. The cold night air is reality at last: indifferent to me as a stone face carved on a high cliff wall to show that the world is abandoned." If you strip away all the figurative language of those lines, you'd have: "It's good at first to be out in the night. The cold night air." Ok, so that's no good. I'd prefer a balance somewhere in between.

Also, modern-day profanity shows up in just a few spots. I found this distracting and unnecessary. I'm not against profanity, I just didn't think it fit in this book.

My only other problem with Grendel is the dragon. About midway through the book, Grendel visits an old dragon to discover the meaning of life, and the dragon goes on for a few pages spouting philosophy. I felt this was a cheap device, a way for Gardner to sound off and sound intelligent, but in fact it just turned me off of the writing.

All that being said, it was quite good. The way Beowulf enters at the end is handled very effectively. Also, the portrayal of Grendel's mother is excellent. Gardner definitely made a strong companion to the original.

I haven't really addressed the two novels together yet, so let me close with this: if Barbara Pym had written a parallel novel to Beowulf, it would probably be from Grendel's mother's point of view: Miss Grendel. She would mope about in her cave all day, frightfully bothered by the firesnakes, only occasionally venturing out for tea with cucumber and human head sandwiches. She might have a passing fancy for Hrothgar or Unferth, but ultimately both prove too brutish and un-Christian. There might be a minor scandal when her her son eats his way through a village, but these things happen.

I think it would be a terrific read.