Crazy day in footie. I half-watched Chelski eek out a 1-0 win over brave Watford who battled hard but conceded a goal in the last minute. Man Ure mauled Blackburn and Liverpool ravaged the Arse by scores of 4-1. I also caught the first half of Valencia vs. Español which turned out to be a high-paced terrific affair, with Valencia winning 3-2. If I had way more time, I’d watch way more Spanish football.

There are a couple gaping holes in my story Thief of Hearts which isn’t quite ready for prime time but I’ll be posting it to my workshop’s message board in the next 24 hours. I did a last-minute swap with someone in dire need, which means I lose about four days of thinking about how to solve those problems. No great loss, and hopefully someone in the group will say something to help me move forward. That’s what workshops are for, aren’t they?

Holy cow, I don’t feel ready for my Spanish exam. Most of the Intermediate level wasn’t too bad but the subjunctive throws a real curve ball. It’s not that the verb patterns are hard to memorize, it’s that they’re hard to keep straight. Doing it in real time? Sheesh. Por ejemplo:

I want you to cut your hair.
Quiero que te cortes tu pelo

I wanted you to cut your hair.
Quise que te cortara tu pelo

If you cut your hair earlier, you would have more time.
Si te cortaras tu pelo más temprano, tendrías más tiempo.

If the US had won against Ghana, they would have continued in the World Cup.
Si los US hubieran ganado contra Ghana, ellos habrían continuado en la Copa Mundial.

I think those are all correct. Tell me if I’m wrong. But see how the verbs (in bold) flip and flop? Of course, this is true for English and in any other language but note that they don’t match up perfectly. For example, in English you need three words to express ”you would have.” In Spanish, the verb ending does all of this work. The single word tendrías means ”you would have.” It’s only complex and confusing because it’s not my native language. Comparatively, Spanish has fewer crazy rules about conjugations and sentence structure than English, so in that respect I’m glad I don’t have to learn it.

Current Mood: Fair to Middlin |
Currently Listening To - Beck - “The Information”

Ugh. Playing indoor has lost some of its luster now that I’m playing on two mildly sprained ankles. The ankle braces lacerate my skin and the right one makes my foot fall asleep. Ever tried to kick a soccer ball with a numb foot? Let’s just say it adds another level of difficulty.

This is what professional athletes have to contend with. I remember a story John Harkes told about spraining his ankle back in his days with Sheffield Wednesday. He should have been off it for two weeks but the physio told the manager something crazy, like four days. The solution was to numb it with injections but again, you ever try to play soccer without being able to feel your foot? But like Harkes said, if he said he couldn’t play he may have rotted on the bench and been sold at the end of the season. Of course, the pro’s paycheck helps ease the pain. Me? I get to pay for the pleasure.

/
European leagues resume play this weekend after the international break. Yay!

I’m about a third through Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and I like it quite a bit. It’s not at all what I expected and the novel’s voice reminds me of something Kelly Link might write.

I also started listening to Death in the Afternoon by Hemingway and, my word, it’s a bit good. It’s about Spanish bullfighting but also about Spain in general—the people, the culture, the countryside. If you don’t have a fetish for Spain it might not push your buttons, but happily I do have such a fetish and it’s great fun to listen to Hemingway describe places I’ve been and hold dear to my heart—the nightlife of Madrid, the April fair of Sevilla, the old-fashioned wooden bullring in Ronda. We’re planning a tentative trip to Spain next spring and it’s going to be very difficult to formulate an itinerary. So many places, so little time and the two areas I’m most interested—Andalusia and the Basque region—are on opposite ends of the country.

A bunch of us English students went out for drinks last Wednesday night after class to talk about the program, what we’ve been reading, what we’ve been writing, etc. The conversation swung around to our areas of interest, being one major and two minor areas, and how much it matters for Creative Writing PhDs (the general consensus is, not much.)

Anyway, one of my friends was talking with the chair of the Literary Studies program who told him that in order to really become an expert on a given branch of literature, you need to narrow it down to a ten-year period. Furthermore, many experts narrow it to two years. As in, “Hello, my expertise is in Modern British Literature, 1940-1941.” You can forget specializing in sweeping categories like “19th Century American Literature” and replace them with “American Literature, 1840-1850.” This discussion actually branched off a number of us complaining about how literary theory makes our eyes glaze over, yet that’s what the establishment has needed to do in order to justify their paychecks. Now apparently it’s that you need to have memorized every written word from a two-year period in order to be an authority on it.

On the writing front, I pitched to my advisor the idea of expanding my short story Castleneff into a novel as part of a summer creative writing project. Getting grad credit for a novel I wanted to write anyway? It would be sweet indeed.

Current Mood: Numb From the Waist Down |

After yesterday’s whinge, I took a good hard look at my school workload between now and May 9th, the last day of class. It’s considerable. Two papers, a story, and lots and lots of reading. Strangely, I’m looking forward to the material. Having it spread over an additional six weeks would be nifty but there’s something to be said for pressure producing productivity. And alliteration.

On the good news front, I’m cautiously optimistic about the grand plan of finishing my MA this summer. All of the necessary parties have tentatively agreed to do their share which is a huge, huge plus because they’re basically volunteering their time to help me along. This means I get virtually no downtime after the semester ends but that’s okay. I’ve got my fingers crossed it all comes together.

As much as I complain about school, I really do quite enjoy it. I love hanging out with writers, my professors have been extremely encouraging, I’m reading lots of great stuff, and hopefully producing some good writing. All of the administrative red tape is just part of the package.

*Spain beats Iceland 1-0. Yay!
*England beats mighty Andorra 3-0 in a tepid display. Boo!
* Italy plonks Scotland 2-0. Boo!
* Norn Ireland beats Sweden 2-1. WTF?

Seriously Norn Ireland, W-T-F? They beat Spain and Sweden and now top their group. They should just cast David Healy in bronze right now. Dude has now sunk England, Spain, and Sweden with his goals. To quote the opening line from the Wikipedia entry, “David Healy (born August 5, 1979 in Downpatrick) is a ledgend/Demi God.”

Oh, and the US played Guatemala to a 0-0 draw that I DVR’d but will not watch, primarily because of this abortion of a jersey. This is what they’re wearing to the Copa America? Good lord, they’ll be laughed off the continent.

Current Mood: Stuck in Neutral |
Currently Listening To - Mississippi Fred McDowell - “Shake ‘Em On Down”

/
I had a meeting with the program advisor today and found out that I’m in the middle of the list for TA candidates. There aren’t as many positions open for fall as usual which means the odds aren’t in my favor. In any case, I won’t find out until mid-summer. This makes planning for next year difficult since only so many graduate credits transfer from the MA to the PhD and would potentially leaves me treading water for the fall semester. Or scrambling to try and finish the MA this summer, which would be fine for me but requires finding faculty (who aren’t compensated for summer work) to be both available and willing to sit on my exam committee.

It’s a gray, cold, and rainy day. I just finished A Farewell to Arms which is not an uplifting book. I had to park in the remote lots because there’s no parking on campus this early, and now I need to go back down to get my car because the shuttles don’t run as late as my 9:15 pm class. And to top it all off, Azerbaijan beat Finland 1-0 in Euro 2008 qualifying.

I’m irritated, grumpy and whiny. A pre-class beer in the Gasthaus might cheer me up. Or just make me sleepy.

Current Mood: Irritated, Grumpy, and Whiny |

Yay! Today I got an email from the library saying that Death In The Afternoon is now ready for pick-up, just hours after checking out Steinbeck’s 22-disc East of Eden. Add to that Winesburg, Ohio, which is currently on deck, and I’ve got plenty to keep my iPod full for the next couple weeks.

Commuting absolutely eats up those audiobooks though. I started A Farewell to Arms on the way down to Chicago Saturday and then again on the return trip, a little bit here and there while showering and making lunches, then again while playing frisbee with the dog this morning, and finally my drive to and from school. That leaves about an hour’s worth of listening left, which means it’ll end sometime early in my drive home tomorrow night. The section that sees Henry return to service followed almost immediately by the fiasco of the Italian army’s subsequent retreat has been fantastic.

I’m taking my exams (written and oral) for the intermediate level of my Spanish course later this week and early next, which means I’m about half-way through the course. Brother Todd and I have talked about this, but at the end of the first 12 weeks you think you’re practically fluent because you know 12 different verb tenses. At the end of 24 weeks you think you don’t know a damn thing because of the subjunctive.

This is where deep-breathing and relaxation techniques come into play. You can’t learn a language overnight and a lot of this is done via time and repetition. No matter how badly you want to learn it now. ‘Tis a good lesson, probably.

A good friend disparaged the Clash’s Sandinista! this weekend. And I had just been considering waxing poetic on how great that 3-album set is on this very space. Don’t get me wrong, Sandinista! has its warts but it’s still fantastic and completely underrated. My vote for the Clash’s most underrated song ever is “One More Time.”

I have a whole “how the Clash transformed my life” post brewing but you’ll be spared it. For now.

Current Mood: Full |

My spring break ends today and I’m already counting down the weeks to the end of the semester. It wasn’t much of a break. I went nowhere and couldn’t afford to take any time truly off, where I did absolutely nothing. I got a bunch of stories sent out, wrote a pretty long one, and revised some others. I read a couple books and a bunch of short stories. I went to Chicago for less than 24 hours. I got a lot of sleep.

The wife is finalizing a trip to Costa Rica for next December. We’ve also discussed a summer trip that would take us from Madison to Winnipeg and onto Calgary and Banff/Jasper National Parks. I wish we were doing these things tomorrow.

Travel is a bit of an addiction. We keep saying that we’re going to do a relaxing, do-nothing beach vacation, but we never do. We somehow find ourselves eating bagel sandwiches outside a dirty truckers’ motel in Kearney, Nebraska looking at a map and trying to decide what to do next. And that’s the way we like it.

Current Mood: Blah |
Currently Listening To - Wilco - “Sky Blue Sky”

I just got back moments ago from Chicago dropping off cousin Hobbes. Brother Todd and wife Stephanie come home tomorrow from Argentina, which means we’re back down to one dog and one cat. We love watching cousin Hobbes but 170 lbs. of dog (90 for Hobbes, 80 for Athena) is a lot to manage.

Thank God I didn’t wake up early Saturday morning to get down to Chicago in time to pay a $20 cover to watch England vs. Israel in Euro 2008 qualifying. The game ended, by all accounts, in a dead-boring 0-0 draw.

Is there anyone who didn’t think Steve McClaren would be an awful choice for England manager? I thought he was a ridiculous appointment since his club record is abysmal and he was the right-hand man to a manager that was hounded out of the country after the World Cup. Did the FA really think he would turn England (who had to be one of the dullest teams in Germany this past summer) into world beaters?

Got about half-way through A Farewell to Arms on the round-trip journey, and I can’t figure out the title because Henry gets wounded in the legs.

Anyway, I’m enjoying it but I’m not finding it as engrossing as either For Whom the Bell Tolls or The Sun Also Rises, and not just because it takes place in Italy instead of Spain. There’s a lot of couples’ chatter/banter in AFtA that I find more cloying than in his other work, and it’s this kind of “I don’t want to tell you darling/ tell me/ but I don’t want to tell you/ but I want you to tell me/ then shall I tell you?/ please tell me/ perhaps I will” dialogue that I can do without. Quite often there’s a lot going on between the lines and Hem will slip in a line like “I didn’t mean to make you cry” so the reader understands that the small talk is masking emotions, but other times it drives me crazy.

I’ll finish The Wild Shore tomorrow and the more I read, the more I like it. Robinson has a way of twisting and turning the story so I keep finding myself surprised without the story feeling contrived.

It’s 80+ degrees today. That’s about a 40 to 50 degree temperature switch in a week, which freaks me out.

Current Mood: Bushed, But Must Read |

Awhile back, I wished for titanium breakaway ankles after getting a second-degree ankle sprain playing footie. In the deep recesses of my mind I thought it might be a good idea to buy not one but two ankle braces, considering that I’ve sprained both my ankles several times over the years playing footie. They’re both more that happy to roll over at a moment’s notice.

Which brings me to Exhibit B: the right ankle, which got cranked on today. I rested for ten minutes and tried playing again but I got a sharp pain behind the knobby part of the ankle bone any time I kicked the ball with any velocity. If you’re familiar with this kind of ankle brace, you know that it slowly shreds the skin on your Achilles tendon and on the top of the ankle. Moleskin offsets this somewhat, but only somewhat.

(sigh) Titanium breakaway ankles…

I finished Philip K Dick’s Minority Report and Other Stories yesterday and thoroughly enjoyed it. Second Variety clearly inspired The Terminator movies as well as maybe some of the inspiration for Alien. And The Eyes Have It it a terrific little story that every aspiring writer should read. It’s like the Delany articles on how to read science fiction, only in reverse. The story’s narrator freaks out at all the floating body parts in the book he’s reading: “his eyes followed her across the room,” or “she gave him her hand,” or “he took her arm.” Funny stuff.

I’m also 75 pages into Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Wild Shore which takes place in a post-apocalyptic Orange County. The story is doing what it needs to do to pull me along but I find the strongest part of the book is the sentence-level writing. There’s a certain enviable ease to it. Robinson doesn’t belabor descriptions but he still manages to create a very realistic world.

This is something I can learn from. I often find myself trying to achieve lofty, poetic heights with each sentence when in reality all I want, to paraphrase Jeff Ford, is “to just tell a damn story.” The flowery descriptions are like a sauce; it’s good in the right amount, but too much overpowers everything else on the plate.

Current Mood: On Ice (Again!) |

Faithful readers may remember me celebrating ordering a number of audiobooks through the university library system last week. Well, I’m now finding the flaw. I requested eight books and none of my requests have been filled yet. Do the requests get canceled due to lack of interest? Dunno. I bet I’ll get them eventually but I’d best put in my requests early, especially considering how quickly I go through books.

I did manage to find Winesburg, Ohio available through a weird temporary download system via the Madison Public Library. (There’s a whole kvetch related to this—the files are WMAs and thus do not work with iPods, which I’m sure is yet another Microsoft market strategy that does nothing but annoy consumers—but I won’t get into it.) Happily, I found Farewell to Arms and Red Badge of Courage at the public library as well as Pat Barkers WWI trilogy of Regeneration, The Eye In The Door, and The Ghost Road. I read the first book a number of years ago and really enjoyed it so I thought I’d give the others a shot as well.

In a bout of narcissistic self-googling, I stumbled across Jeff VanderMeer’s announcement of the Weird Tales redesign and some nice words said about my story “Working Out Our Salvation.”

And now I’m wondering about that big ‘A Zombie’s Love’ given top billing on the cover. Is…is that referring to my story? My initial reaction was, “Nah, there must be another zombie story in the magazine.” But now I wonder. I guess I won’t find out until I get my contributor’s copies. But if that is referring to my story…holy shit.

Played indoor today and just let me say Oh My God. I didn’t even have that great of a day but the teams were so evenly balanced and everybody on both sides really knew how to play. It was absolutely, positively nuts. So many good passes strung together, and the pace! Footie, when it’s played right, is ethereal.

Anybody else catch the listening party for Wilco’s new album Sky Blue Sky? I hate to say it, but it didn’t do much for me. My expectations couldn’t be any higher coming off of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born, which I’ve had on heavy rotation for years (they’re great writing albums.) In fairness, it took awhile for the last two to grow on me as well and maybe that’ll happen with Sky Blue Sky, too. And I’m sure if you looked, you could find a torrent of the album out there somewhere.

Current Mood: Gassed |
Currently Listening To - Beck - “The Information”

Moments ago I just finished my story Thief of Hearts, which came in at an unedited 6500 words, 2200 of which I put in tonight. It takes place in a futuristic Granada, Spain.

Does it all work? Maybe not, but I sure did get a kick out of writing it. It needs a lot of work and I was trying really hard to come in under 20 pages because it’s for my writing workshop (it finished at 22) but one thing’s for sure, and that’s that it was written from the heart. It’s supposed to be dark and funny (there are several torture scenes) but mostly funny. As of right now, all I care about is that I wrote a story that’s heavily laden with Spanish references and the emotional climax is a flamenco dancing scene. There aren’t many stories I know with that claim. Whether that’s a good thing or not remains to be seen.

And God, am I jonesing for a trip to Spain now.

Current Mood: Bedtime |
Currently Listening To - Various Artists - “Flamenco Highlights From Spain”