seven months
Add comment | January 4th, 2009
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Twenty things I haven’t managed to blog about
1. My steady path toward baldness
2. O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma! (including election day, the open letter I should’ve written to Thalia that night or the night after, some Red State-Blue State political thoughts that congealed thereafter, missing Chicago all over again [yawn], etc.)
3. The Greencup Book and Zine Fair that the husband helped organize
4. My participation at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville
5. Thalia’s fondness for crumpling, slapping, raking, caressing, groping, mouthing, and otherwise gettin bizzy baby-style with PAPER
6. My sad struggle with the ol’ paltry milk supply; the formula guilt corollary
7. Studs Terkel passing away
8. Requisite mooning over affection for seasonal change with too many adjectives, floweriness, etc.
9. Annoying preoccupation with Facebook
10. Return of menses. (Wah.)
11. Did I mention I am slowly GOING BALD???
12. Working mother ho-hum hmmms/blah blahs
13. Peanut butter, love for
14. Diet Coke, growing addiction to
15. Things that are too top secret to blog about anyway
16. The acceptance of a short-short story by Quick Fiction (out soon!)
17. The Wire; specifically, the penultimate episode of Season 4, which absolutely devastated me
18. The weird and not so winning store that opened in my neighborhood
19. Thalia-speak, Thalia this, Thalia that, i.e., Mamagush
20. Picking. hairs. off. my. arms. shirt. baby. desk. keyboard.
Add comment | November 17th, 2008
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Why did David Foster Wallace have to die for me to rediscover his work with fresh eyes?
(And other predictable sadnesses.)
Add comment | September 23rd, 2008
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Because it must be noted, because he must be mourned.
I am pretty certain that I don’t need to tell a single person who reads this thing that David Foster Wallace apparently committed suicide last weekend. And I don’t know that I have anything worthy to add to the public outpourings of grief and remembrance. But I feel like I must acknowledge his passing, the mark he made on American letters. I taught Wallace’s essays on the Illinois State Fair and a Carnival cruise many times, each time marveling at the wit and brilliance of those works, each time frustrated by students who only groused, “These readings were too LONG.” DFW might have found it funny, certainly…
I am saddened, greatly—more saddened now than I was upon hearing the news Saturday night. Todd came in the room and announced, disbelievingly, ”DFW hanged himself.” And I got chills, but the both of us reacted, at that point, otherwise oddly numbly. Over the past few days, though, I’ve had time to really think about what a world with no more DFW writing will be like, and to think about what his work meant, what he gave us, his literary stature and significance in this brief sliver of time that I’ll occupy on this earth, myself.
But: A confession. I have some guilt to absolve. It’s strange, but just the weekend prior Wallace had been a topic of conversation. I’d been in need of a book to read recently, and had picked Consider the Lobster off our shelves—I own it but have never read it. Paging through it, I decided I wasn’t in the mood for DFW’s particular brand of supersmart smart-assedness, after all. And this time it was me grousing to Todd: “You know, he’s really kind of a turd sometimes. Why would he get an assignment from Rolling Stone and then write a piece long enough to fill up the whole magazine, turn it in, and get miffy when they don’t run the damn thing?” Etc. And I repeated my grievances to a friend visiting from out of town the weekend before this last, Wallace’s last.
I’m ashamed and thinking differently now, of course.
Maybe I’d been poisoned a little by the anti-intellectualism that clots the American air these days, the stupid fear and loathing of the “elite,” of smart people with—gasp!—big fat resumes. Or maybe I was just being stupid myself, honestly.
I’m sorry. And now I’m ready to revisit his work, ready to be blown away again. I just wish it hadn’t taken a tragedy, a fucking loss of the author himself, to get me there. But that kind of irony, that’s the kind of thing DFW might have spun into story so well. And to think we lost him in the midst of this baffling, in part terrifying, election. One’s stomach clenches, thinking of the Wallacean reflections on it all that we’ll never get to read.
That is all.
Far superior and personal remembrances and memorials up at McSweeney’s. Sounds like they’ll be posting new ones for some time.
Add comment | September 16th, 2008
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The end of leave
Today I walked up the back stairs and into that perenially new-smelling building, destination office, for the first time in three months. Some ten minutes earlier I’d said goodbye to my daughter and handed her over to a smiling woman who promised me she’d love it there, in the infant room; it’d be good for her. Yes, my eyes were wet as I logged in to my work e-mail, and yes, they stayed that way for a while.
The day before, my last day of leave, Thalia rolled over (well…mostly; she can’t get her rolled-on arm out from underneath her yet) for the first time. Bittersweet. How many first moments am I going to miss, separated from her for eight hours a day, 40 hours a week? Indeed, how many moments, first or otherwise. That last day, we did it up right. We went to the park—something it was too hot and ozone-alerty for us to do almost all summer. We museumed. We ate banana pudding. (OK, I ate banana pudding.) We played and played and played. I sang songs. I watched her sleep. I tried to stay away from my home computer.
At work today, I must admit I gave no small portion of my attention to the day care’s webcam, on which I watched a jerky, grainy version of my baby flapping her arms and legs. I’d dressed her in a recognizably rose-colored kimono onesie so I could be sure to tell her apart from any other baldy baby in the room. The webcam technology isn’t great—what you see is choppy, and a few spots of the room aren’t covered by the three cameras —but I felt like someone had handed me a golden key. To see my daughter there, on the internet, getting a bottle while I dutifully pumped: It was surreal and wonderful and sad all at once.
“It’s so hard at first. But it gets easier.” I must have heard that a dozen times today, and I know all those kind people are probably right. It gets easier, and you don’t cry at drop-off, and you quit watching the webcam; you’ve got way too much to do. It gets easier. But I’m not sure I want it to.
2 comments | September 4th, 2008
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The soundtrack for TWGDOYPR
Up now at Largehearted Boy: My Book Notes piece for TWGDOYPR. Rock on!
Add comment | August 27th, 2008
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