Big News

I've just been offered a book contract with Routledge. It doesn't seem remotely real yet, but apparently it is. They bought my proposal hook line and sinker: "There's much valuable material in this project...cogent exploration of Jonson's writings, and the complex shape of his career. A fine combination of historicist contextualization and critical reading." That's what they think. Suckers!!! Mwahahahahahahaaaaaaah.

I feel as though the celebrating that I should be doing is impossible to achieve in Nowhere, WI. What, oh what will I do?

I need some music suggestions

So for this Shakespeare class I'm teaching, every class period has theme music, a song that has some significance to the play that we're discussing. So for Twelfth Night we had "Melancholy Baby," for Midsummer Night's Dream we had Pink Floyd's "Brain Damage," and for Hamlet we had Everclear's "Father of Mine," and the Pixies' "Where is My Mind?"

I'm getting tired, and I need suggestions. I have one more class on Coriolanus, and five on Winter's Tale. Well, I figure I'll use "The Bear Necessities" for one of the Winter's Tale days.

Any suggestions?

Divine Retribution

She was crying about Il Papa dying, and I think she may have used the word "tragedy;" I don't recall. At any rate, I overreacted. Not snappily, not with anger, pique, or even flippancy, but still, I could have been more considerate. "It's not as though he was a teenaged Bangladeshi amputee suffocating in his own filth after watching the murder of his parents. He was an Octogenarian who had lived a fulfilling life of creative writing, soccer, mountain-climbing, and priestifying. No sex, but lots of fun. Then, as the richest and most powerful man on the planet, he spent nearly three decades living in the most offensively opulent wealth, with an entire order of nuns dedicated to attending to his every personal whim, with millions loving and obeying him, believing that we was the infallible mouthpiece of Christ on earth and that he would spend the eternity that awaited him after his universally bewailed death in incomprehensible bliss. That's a pretty good run. Whatever you think of his tangible effects on the world (thumbs up to passive defeat of totalitarianism; thumbs down to reactionary stances on women's issues), you can call his passing sad, but tragic? No."

After the above harangue, I spent a few days feeling smug, then a couple feeling unaccountably melancholy (see sources of stress below), and one day I went to my mailbox and greeted the red Netflix envelope with glee, thinking' "Ah, yes, this will pick me up!" What movie to I get? The Passion of the Christ. Touche, Karol.

Madisanity

"We always want to live somewhere else, no matter where we are," said my friend the owner of a Madison coffee shop this morning. I thought about that. I'm not sure that's true. For the eight years I lived in Madison, I was almost never struck with the urge to live somewhere else (except of course when I was at the ugly end of a transatlantic LDR, but that's extenuating circumstances). When I'm at home in Nowhere, I think "Golly, I'd like to be back in Madison, where restaurants are not only open on Sunday but might sell you roti and dal." When I'm in Chicago, I think, "Wow. A real City. I can be all urban and cool and pretend I know where stuff is and...watch it, asshole! -- See now in Madison the cab drivers don't drive like attack dogs."

So maybe Madison is my ideal sort of place. A city, but only sort of. I was there today, taking a much needed break from the sort of stress that makes me stare terrified into the middle distance, eyes glazed, shoulders twitching, in the reverie that comes from trying to remember what my next deadline is and who I'm meeting and what I'm prepping and when that pile of papers has to be read. Instead, I chatted inanely with my friends J & A, making the sort of pseudo-clever word games that are our wont, watching and discussing Battlestar Galactica reruns, sitting silently by the lake, playing frisbee (or "frizzed bee" as J likes to call it). I spent time in a real library today, found my dissertation on the shelves (hooray!), and did some low-impact research. I also had breakfast with my former dissertation director at an ungodly hour, and managed to get advice on several professional fronts.

One such question, and one that none of you may share with my colleagues at N.C., is the issue of whether I am going on the job market this fall. They do love me here, and collegiality is nothing to sneeze at, but neither is salary and location and professional opportunity. I figured out that if I worked 40-hour weeks (which is, of course, figuring a little short), I'd be making $11.30 per hour (after taxes). While this is comfortably more than minimum wage, of course, it does make paying off the loans that got me this prestigious Ph.D. a bit of a long slog. I'm not wishing I could buy more stuff, I do like this place, and they're really happy to have me, but this consideration does give me pause.

Sorry bout the hiatus

Hi. Amidst all the little scufflings in my life lately--Why don't my students know what "by gosh" means? Why are all my papers due at the same time? Why do people invite themselves to my home and then walk around with coffe mugs full of pureed broccoli? (long story)--emerges a big thing. The Consortium of Podunk Liberal Arts Colleges (COPLAC), of which Nowhere College is a member, has appointed me to direct their London Program in Spring 2007. This means I get to go live in London, teach a course on drama and the city to students from all over COPLAC, see lots of plays, sweep up after the students, do research at the British Library, see my friends, and generally have a difficult but very rewarding and fun time.

The COPLAC president pointed out that they've never before considered the application of a first-year faculty member, so this is something of a big deal. Either it's because I'm impressive, or because I'm one of the lowest paid professors in COPLAC. Probably a combination of both. I'm celebrating anyway.

Last weekend M. and I went swing dancing at a Knights of Columbus in Milwaukee. Why, you ask, would we do such a wacky thing? Well, because the Doctor Teeth Jive Band was playing their first Chicago-area tour. They're a swing band from the West Midlands (yeah, I know, the middle of England isn't traditionally a hotbed of jump jive) fronted by the towering white mountain of lyric-spouting former linebacker that is my good friend S.S. It was torrentially fun, though since they were playing for an actual club of swing dancers, the crowd was much more into the music than the mastery of S's performance. The boys have really come a long way since I saw them last, and have apparently become one of the premier U.K. swing acts. Two CDs, lots of demand. And S's voice has improved immeasurably since he stopped singing for a Death Metal band.

Got up at 4:30 today to grade freshman papers. Good golly. But I'm nearly recovered enough now to start grading the twenty-two Arthurian Legend papers that I have to finish before 6:30.

I'll be fine. I can sleep tomorrow. April is the cruellest month, that's all. I wonder if Eliot was grading papers when he wrote that? I swear if I see a poem described as "unique" one more time I will insert a large garden gnome in the offender.