An update

Things are a little less dark in Sweatshirt world. My department came through for me and found me a job as a teaching assistant at the last possible minute. I am really grateful.

It's amazing how much things can change in a day

After Monday I've gone from thinking that something would work out for next year to thinking that I'll join the vast ranks of unemployed PhDs desperate for work. I was rejected by around 18 jobs this year, and a postdoc -- I was rejected from job #18 and the postdoc on Monday. And as a free preview of next year, I was also laid off of my adjunct gig on the first day of classes Monday, with no warning, and after being assured by them that they needed me when I was offered other work. They actually couldn't be bothered to contact me, so instead they waited until I rode the bus almost one hour to tell me that they no longer needed me.

Scan that shit, but faster

Love the scan, but why can't it be faster. Try doing the multipage scan. Even with the autofeeder it goes slow as balls. What's the holdup? We have fax machines and copiers that scoot all that paper through, and all that information has got to be stored in that machine at some point. If you can gather the information that quick to make copy or fax, why not use the info to put it all in a little file. Where's the R&D? Where's the money pouring into faster scanning? Get with it, people. This is what people want. This is what I want. Forget your graphics and your audio cards, give me the fast scan. Get with it. GeezUS.

Mark? I'm not Mark

A guy named Alfonso at work responded today to an email I sent a week or two ago. His opening called me "Mark." I was tempted to respond, "Thanks, Alonso." I didn't. What disrespect. What outrage. No offense to Marks, but would any of them want to be called Matt?

Always make the first move

In high school there was a girl (well, many, but let’s keep it simple) who was out of my league. Good looking, lots of friends, lots of boyfriends, I stared at her a lot, I barely knew her. Just before graduation, I called her up and we became friends. 10 years later she tells me she really liked me in high school but thought I was out of her league. Thought that my lonerness was me being smart and seeing our high school class for the wankers they were (it was actually me being a wanker myself). The deepest kind of regret is seeing how clearly I deceived myself in circles on top of circles until I could talk myself out of anything, be scared of everything, and end up with nothing. I’ll never again have the same kind of chances to have reckless teen romance or to learn the hard and fun way things that I’ve now learned slowly and adultly. Always make the first move, never look back.

Followup Worries

Why does the microwave make everything soggy?
How do I know if economic theories are real or just a pack of lies? With things like inflation, fluctuating currency exchange rates, mutual funds, and airfare prices, how the hell would i know the difference?

Worries about wasted time

A budding little philosophical concern: among the things one loves to do, is there a difference between the things that are the foundation of a life, and the things that are done in absence of a real life.
For example, my dad loves all things horses, and horse related activity, such as riding his horse or making horse accessories, give him real happiness and seem to be building blocks of his life. For me, a few things I do give me genuine joy, likeplaying basketball, but they are more pastime than passion. What if most of my so called interests are things that I do to escape life, because I don’t have the passions to fill a life?
Books and movies are easy to see in this light.Whether or not I remember them or even think about them, reading books and watching movies are activities that simply take time, without much real participation on my part. To say I love books and movies is to say I love to spend a lot of time alone, devouring someone else's perspective on the world. And yet people seem to accept books as a serious and almost admirable interest. Same goes for travel, which is the more worrisome piece.
Travel is something that sounds exciting and passionate, but that's the danger of it. If I go to another country and just sit onthe stoop for a week, I’ve barely participated, but itstill counts as travel.
Clearly the idea needs some refining. Is it gross overanalysis to second guess whether the things I do are true interests or simply escapes?
And where in that spectrum does blogging fall?

back with Harry (part 2)

[Editor's note: Following the wild success of Howl's first post on this topic, he has generously agreed to take us deep into The Chamber of Secrets. Enjoy!]

When I started reading the Harry Potter books about five years ago, I had expected and even wanted to dismiss them. As an aspiring writer I generally prefer my idols to be dead: buried and rotted, the competition is far less threatening.

But while The Sorcerer's Stone seemed to justify some of my prejudices, The Chamber of Secrets stunned me into respect. This book is, in my opinion, a miracle of pace and plotting. It is the novel I most often recommend to other would-be novelists, and it is the single book in the Harry Potter series that I am likely to read a third time. (The only other full-length novels I've read three times are Anna Karenina and Emma.)

Beneath its action and humor, The Chamber of Secrets has the narrative skeleton of a mystery novel: nearly every chapter solves one riddle while introducing another, and most revelations manage at once to be surprising and logical. This book, I've argued, can serve writers as a compendium of effective storytelling techniques; and it was by these technical accomplishments that Rowling won me over, seducing me despite her own pulse.

But if The Chamber of Secrets is technically Rowling's most successful work, it still doesn't hint at the emotional power that will make her later books so formidable. This introduces a messy topic, though, one that will have to wait for later posts.

A question I will raise here, however, is how much the dominance of one art form, specifically film or television, can influence the creation and reception of works in another, specifically books.

For a while now I've toyed with the idea that many books, including some that I've written, are thinly-disguised novelizations of unmade movies or TV serials. I don't think this of the Harry Potter series, but I do suspect that its popularity owes something to how well Rowling's style, which is highly visual and unfailingly accessible, suits the sensibility of an audience weaned on film and television.

The Chamber of Secrets has plenty of cinematic moments, but the best one for this discussion occurs after Hermione has been Petrified, when Ron works up the nerve to sneak into the Forbidden Forest: he "looked sideways at the empty seat usually filled by Hermione. The sight seemed to stiffen his resolve, and he nodded." In Rowling, as in film and television, inner conflict usually plays out briefly and externally; in Bellow and Dostoevsky, by contrast, such moments of decision can last fifty pages, whole chapters in which characters rarely bother to move about the room.

It is worth remembering, though, that Dickens sticks to the tangible world as much as Rowling does. Film and television had no influence his writing, obviously, but the sensibility that they've fostered may partly dispose us to keeping him in print.

Also on the topic of art

I was recently privileged to be able to see the Whale's ratings of movies on Netflix, and I learned two lessons:

1. There is a movie called "He Died with a Felafel in His Hand"

2. This is not one of the Whale's favorite movies.

back with Harry (part 1)

In preparation for the release of the final volume of the Harry Potter series, I'm rereading the first six books sequentially and bracing myself for the sad and imminent goodbye.

Over the years the Whale, Sweatshirt, and I have repeatedly discussed whether art can be considered "good" or "bad," or whether it's a subjective mess--a question of taste--a debate in which the only truth you have is "I like this" or "I don't like that." I'm not going to extend that conversation here, except to acknowledge that the dialog is ongoing, and that people far smarter than us have also failed to resolve the matter convincingly.

That said, for me the Harry Potter books are among the most important to have been published in my lifetime; and I suspect that this is true for many others as well, especially for readers whose growing up has more or less coincided with Harry's. For us the seventh book has a lot to live up to: Rowling's characters have become our friends, and her imagined world serves varyingly (and sometimes simultaneously) as an escape from, a revelation into, and a critique of our real one.

The first Harry Potter installment, however, shows little of Rowling's achievement. It is a clever and breezy book, sometimes funny but never affecting. The six puzzles that Harry & co. solve to get the Sorcerer's Stone could have come from any Dungeonmaster's manual; the surprise unmasking in "The Man with Two Faces" is pure Scooby Doo.

The one scene that created a feeling other than amusement in me took place on the train to Hogwarts, when Harry and Ron become acquainted over Chocolate Frogs. This moment made me tear up: having read the other five Harry Potter books, I recognized it as the beginning of a friendship that will develop and strengthen over many hundreds of pages. My own loves, platonic or not, all started just this simply: from games and chatter came forces that would shape my life.

It is worth clarifying, though, that this scene meant something to me only as a prelude to better ones. I believe that, while charming by itself, The Sorcerer's Stone owes most of its significance to the other books Rowling has written; a mystic might say that this story has been retroactively improved.

Examples of this phenomenon abound, but I'll limit myself to these: The Hobbit steals weight from The Lord of the Rings, Hamburg-era Beatles are quaint only after hearing Rubber Soul, etc., Picasso's early, realistic paintings fascinate us largely in relation to his later, experimental work, and the "famous first lines," all of which are remembered because the books that followed them were worthy.

Comparison

The Book Thief is a lighter Tin Drum. I recommend both.

A compliment to The Tin Drum: a book with hardly a fraction of its genius is still a triumph.

Working Dreams

It's been a long time since my first working dream, a dream where a puzzle or problem has to be solved or worked out, causing some restlessness. The earliest versions were dreams about playing minesweeper and tetris, certainly caused by overdoses on both games. More recently, my working dreams are actually about work. I dream of work, or at least a work-like setting where work-like tasks are set before me, and my dream requires me to resolve the issue and complete the task. Last night, most of my dream had to do with a someone who had submitted a budget that was totally unreasonable, and trying to explain to them how to fix it. Granted, I'm at the tail end (I hope) of a week long cold, which itself contributes to restless sleep, but these dreams are sure signs that work's grip on me is too tight. Work and netflix are 80% of my time. How did this happen? Time to plan a vacation.

This Side Up

It's so nice to have a place to share and relive the most miserable and awkward moments of our lives. And to see how differently our misery unfolded. I spent a lot of adolescence believing if women could only see who I really was, they would love me. It turns out that was all backwards. Once I realized that my jokes alone were worth far more than the rest of me, my life changed forever. Instead of a trying to just be me, now I just try to be funny. The moral of this entry is: lose the ego, lose the shame, lose embarrassment, and remember that when you look back on your life all you will care about is the size of your conquests.

Weezer

I'm sorry to break with the poop motif already, but I have something much more serious to talk about: high school, when me, Howl, and the Whale used to sit around, feel bad for ourselves for not having girlfriends, and develop elaborate bowling-themed plans to get girlfriends (plans that were never instituted due to the reluctance of Howl).

I am grading papers in a coffee shop right now, and the Weezer song "No one else," including the lyric "I want a girl who will laugh for no one else," just came on the radio. I remember thinking that it really spoke to me in a profound way when I was in high school. I think that it had something to do with my belief that if I ever did find a girlfriend, it would be my jokes, rather than my confidence and smoothness, that would convince her to date me. And I also remember feeling bad that, despite my ability to make the girls laugh, none of them seemed to want to date me. It is clear in retrospect that I was going after the wrong kinds of girls in the wrong kinds of ways, but at the time it was extremely frustrating.

Now, as a 30 year old married man, I not really able to recapture that feeling again when I hear that song, and I am also not convinced that is a bad thing.

P.S. I encourage you to ask The Whale about his love interest that we nicknamed "a case of smallpox."

habits

On weekdays I do my pooping at the office.

This serves two purposes:

1. I save on toilet paper.
2. I have something important to do during my workday.