that is all.

Dear people who get to experience autumn:

Please shut up about it.

Thanks,

The rest of us.

I love Justinsomnia’s blog, and I’ve been reading with tremendous envy his recent chronicling of his hiking vacation through the U.S. Southwest. It…is…just…so…beautiful. And seems so much like a vacation.

T and I haven’t had a real vacation together–without family, without work getting sandwiched within it fairly noticeably–since our honeymoon in March 05. One of the hardest things about moving to where we now live is that there aren’t a lot of beautiful or interesting places to see within easy driving distance. I really wish we lived the kind of life in which we would pack up the two dogs, some camping gear, and some sandwiches and head out to explore, discover, and relax.

Instead, most of our time is spent reading, writing, grading, cooking subsistence food, watching tv, doing laundry, and taking care of other suburban household chores, like mowing the grass and changing the air filters. (As I type this list, I realize that recently T has really been in charge of all of these chores and household duties. He is incredibly supportive and generous with his time.)

It’s making me somewhat disgruntled, and I’m anxious for life to slow down just a little bit. And it should once I get back from this conference. I’ll be finished with my overload course, and my national conference paper will be done with. But I have a book proposal to face still and an unfathomable amount of grading.

I’m sick and tired of longing for a life that we don’t have. I suspect that, in fact, one basically has to decide to live that way–the spontaneous excursions to go out and see one’s local surroundings–and that I decide instead to focus on the little things that need to be done, almost in spite of myself. I worry that as I age I just become more humdrum, sedate, and bland, when really I don’t want to be.

I can’t really believe it took me so long to figure this out, but I think I know why academics blog so much, particularly during their busiest times–the academic year. It’s because we get sick of talking only to 18-22 year-olds all day. In addition, talking to these beings all day is often so bewildering and puzzling that we turn to the ether of the internets to look for some sense and guidance.

This semester, I’m teaching 3 first-year courses and one upper-division course. One of these is our first year seminar course, which is only half the semester, so it is almost done for the year. The students are wonderful, but I can’t quite tell how I’m connecting with them. I’m really proud of their end-of-term projects, which–without going into too much detail–they’re really putting a lot of imagination, scholarship, and work into. But all of this 18-year-old energy is draining. They’re nervous, anxious, tired, thrilled with independence, and paralyzed by trying to figure out who exactly they are. It’s exhilarating and maddening all at once. And I have to confess, this semester is the first time where I had that sneaking feeling of: “I wrote 300 pages about literary texts, criticism, and theory so that I could do this all day long?!?!” I’m really missing scholarly engagement right now, particularly since I’m not involved in a writing group here. So most of my scholarly outlet is T., which seems terribly unfair to our relationship. Fortunately, I have a major conference next week, MLA to look forward to, and a course release in the spring so I can put some good work in on my monograph. I really do like teaching; my upper division class is the biggest charge I’ve ever gotten from a job. And it has been really fun and challenging to synthesize on the spot all of the research I did in grad school and all the prep I put into exams.

Of course the other major event going on right now is T’s dissertation. Which he is one week away from finishing. Yip! I swear I’m more excited and proud about his diss and defense than I was about my own. I can’t wait to go back to grad school town and see folks and enjoy the fall—which is sorely, sorely lacking here, where it is still 90 degrees every day. Ugh.

Right now, a good friend of mine is off at a fundraiser, being held in the same town where I grew up, where he will see one of my ex-boyfriends from college, now living in my hometown, although he grew up and went to college in towns about 800 miles away. Life is so weird, and the paths it take us down are so surprising.

I’m sitting across from T at a coffee shop right now. And it’s that time of day that movie directors love because the light is perfect. And T is now laughing and wanting to show me something in a book he is reading about a poet. And our life is a blessing.

The students in my upper-level course this semester are currently engaged in a voluntary draft workshop while I sit up here and work on my grading. I’m catching snatches of their conversations and their ideas, and I am awed and impressed with their creativity and the level of their commitment. What a treat it has been to teach my first upper division course and to see bright students challenge themselves and learn.

They are rewriting a scene from one of the literary texts that we read and then using historical and literary analysis to justify their changes. Today they are working on the first part of the paper, which is the creative part. One of my students has inserted John Brown into a particular text. (He even read all of David Reynold’s recent biography of Brown over a weekend.) I just heard him read some dialogue from his scene, during which one of his Southern characters refers to Thoreau’s Defense of John Brown by decrying: “An idiot defending a crazy man…” Sometimes, even at the end of April, I love teaching.

Someone recently found my blog by searching for the phrase “tenure paranoia.”

How awesome is that!

I am trying to piece through Melville’s “I and My Chimney,” which I am working on for a paper to be delivered at a conference on domesticity and rural America. Unsurprisingly, Melville’s story is incredibly puzzling and bizarre. Most critics read it, I find, fairly straightforwardly, equating the narrator’s voice with Melville’s. The argument basically goes that the narrator, like Melville, is surrounded by women who don’t understand him and refuse to leave him alone. He and Melville are both trying to defend patriarchal control (which the chimney represents) and ward off domestic reform (which the wife represents).

Yet, given the unreliability and instability of Melville’s narrators during this period of his career (the 1850s), I find such equivalences unconvincing in the extreme. True, when Melville lived at Arrowhead, he lived with women who didn’t understand him, and he often complained about them. However, in many letters, he seems (unlike, say, Hawthorne) to embrace the labors involved with running a rural household. Perhaps he is embattled by women, but he does seem to envision himself as the master of the domain and wishes that the women would treat him as such. The narrator of “I and My Chimney” instead is situated in an odd power position, repeatedly referring to himself as the willing and dutiful “subject” of his powerful, king-like chimney. (I realize how strange it sounds to talk about a chimney as king, but it’s Melville. You can almost count on stuff like this.) If the narrator is supposed to be expressing Melville’s point of view, then what did Melville voluntarily and pleasantly subject himself to? Yes, like the narrator, he is defending his desires against the women who try to control him, but the narrator’s willingness to abdicate his head of household position seems completely unlike Melville. Thus, I find this autobiographical reading unsatisfying and, in truth, explaining very little except for Melville’s misogyny, which he seemed capable of expressing without turning his narrators into himself.

Though “king,” the chimney in the story is clearly destroying the house. Not only is the whole thing falling apart, but also because of the chimney’s position (a huge structure rising through the middle of the home), the entire home resembles more of a fun house than a communal domestic space. Not only is the house incredibly partitioned because of the chimney, the narrator relates that people continually get lost in the maze of doors that ultimately force them to walk in circles round and round the house without being able to get out. (“Going through the house, you seem to be forever going somewhere, and getting nowhere. It is like losing one’s self in the woods; round and round the chimney you go, and if you arrive at all, it is just where you started, and so you begin again, and again get nowhere.”)   I think Melville is interested in this notion of “getting nowhere,” but I don’t think he endorses a space that keeps people lost in the woods.

I do think Melville is deliberately creating a foolish and perhaps even stupid narrator. Just because his wife and daughters are insufferable does not mean that the narrator is, therefore, valorous or estimable. That kind of duality between narrator and environment overlooks the complicated positions of the narrators in works as varied as Moby Dick, “Bartleby,” The Confidence Man, and “Benito Cereno.”

I think instead that the narrator and his wife both are adherents to a property-based notion of identity. In other words, they believe that if one controls property, then one controls (or owns) oneself. Throughout Melville’s fiction, he seems skeptical if not downright critical of possessive indvidualism, as initially articulated by Locke and later reconceptualized by CB Macpherson. In this way, I think the short story relates to my project. Melville’s narrator in “I and My Chimney” believes in the certainty of status-based relationships and the subsequent hierarchies created by them. In the case of “I and My Chimney,” this order should look like king (the chimney) on top, then feudal lord (the narrator), then wife, then children. This view completely denies the wife’s claim to a reform view of marriage and domesticity. She believes that the house should be the women’s domain and that controlling the house allows her to fulfill the role of the proper nineteenth-century wife. As critics have rightfully indicated, Melville seems deeply critical of her. But I think he is deeply critical of the narrator as well. Both seem adherents of false systems.

I just finished evaluating a very, very bad group presentation. Though I try not to drink on weekdays any more, I needed a glass of wine to get through this one.

This week, two days only though it’s been, has already been incredibly crappy. Some disturbing professional stuff went on (one item of which I plan to post on soon), and the air conditioning in our “new”-ish car is dying. This probably means that we will sell the newish car and hope for the best out of our very reliable but rather old Nissan.

Two somewhat positive events did occur among all the crap, though. I found out that one of my favorite students from last semester will be the RA of my first-year seminar class’s dorm. (First year seminar classes live together in their dorms.) It was great to get to chat with him over lunch today as we strategized how to incorporate the course material with cool programming events. It makes overloading in the fall seem not AS terrible.

The second was that we watched Out of the Past last night—another film that will be included in the film noir summer course. I hadn’t seen the film before, but had read raves about it. Still, I was skeptical, largely (and admittedly unfairly) because all I knew about it was that it was the basis for the 1980s film Against All Odds. Yes, that one with the annoying Phil Collins theme song. I knew I was being silly but couldn’t help my resistance to it. Well, I’m here to tell you that it is now one of my favorites of the entire film noir universe. It’s certainly the darkest film I’ve seen from the classic noir period; almost all of the characters are deeply and disturbingly flawed and also unable to connect with one another. In addition, like all classic noirs, it has a series of plot twists and complications. However, this film manages to have a sufficient amount of those turns to get across the idea that the universe is incredibly murky and convoluted without making you, the viewer, completely lost (a la the masterful but utterly bewildering The Big Sleep). Finally, shot for shot, it is truly gorgeous and provoking. Add to all of that excellent performances by Robert Mitchum and a very young Kirk Douglas, and you get a spellbinding movie. We loved it, and I expect will be owning it soon.

My thoughts are with GC and all at Virginia Tech.

I recently finished Rob Sheffield’s book Love is a Mix Tape. Sheffield is a freelance music writer and critic for Rolling Stone. This book is in part about his love affair with music—and music from the 90s in particular—but just as much it’s about his relationship with his former wife, Renee, and how that relationship developed via the medium of the mix tapes. He chronicles about ten years of his life through mix tapes—from meeting Renee, to first being married, and eventually to her very sudden death and his subsequent period of grief.

The chapters are structured around different mix tapes he and/or Renee made during this ten-year period. Each chapter begins with a reprint of the j-card from the tape, which is a really nice touch and complete fun for mix geeks. I was particularly psyched to see that one tape included the Grifters “Cinnamon.”

It’s one of those books that you can get through in an afternoon—or, as I did, you can pick it up and put down, finishing it in about a week. It was much more touching than I thought it would be. It resonated with me in part because Sheffield is not that much older than I am, so we have a lot of the same musical touchstones. And of course, I’ve crushed from afar, fallen in love, and rallied through breakups all via the mix tape. Sheffield does a particularly good job of narrating what it’s like to discover someone through music and how people who love music share this thing they love with the one they love.

More interesting to me, though, was the way Sheffield really captured the beauty of the mix tape. There’s something tactile about the mix tape, particularly the idea that you have to sit down for at least 90 minutes and think about the person while you’re making the tape. And then, when the tape is received, the other person can’t just quickly move through the tracks, like on a CD mix. S/he has to sit through it and listen. While I had thought about that before, I hadn’t thought about how much I miss having two sides of a mix and all the strategy behind this more in-depth sequencing (particularly the difficult choice of the first song on side two). Sheffield also reminded me of how amazing and cool it was to be able to record in really manual, diy ways. He talks about incorporating room noise and recording from the radio. Tape-making was a bit like the phenomena of found writing. On a tape, you leave a mark of yourself behind—for good (personal expression) and for bad (poor sound quality, weird quirks, regrettable missteps).

I also really appreciated Sheffield’s book because he was able to write about a different kind of masculinity. He writes at length about what he loved about living with a woman and how he gladly incorporated Renee’s sensibility into his life and how he cherished their partnership. It doesn’t sound like he’s trying to prove a point about his open-mindedness. Instead, he really is one of the first writers I’ve come across who seems even remotely like my own husband, and thus the relationship he describes resonates with me, even though I am not 1/4 as cool as Renee.

There’s also, obviously, the voyeuristic fascination of someone’s wife dying so young and the trauma that comes along with that. I’ve read in some places where other readers didn’t like the second half of the book because it was too mournful and sad. I found it interesting to have someone address what it really feels like to lose someone you love so much—which is a sort of irrational fear that crops up in my life from time to time. It was particularly interesting when he talked about the only other time he ran into a male widow his own age and how they traded notes about their very similar experiences, which are eerie and sad and all too believable.

I should be running, so I’m going to close this mini-review out. But if you used to make a lot of mix tapes and/or if you miss the oddly wonderful years of the early alternative music boom, I really recommend the book. It’s nothing earth-shattering, but I must admit it’s hung around with me now for quite awhile after finishing.

I’m even thinking of hooking my tape player back up into our stereo system, something I haven’t even bothered doing since we moved.