(?)
Rehabbing my knee is going well, sort of. The funny thing about rehab is that, like working out in general, pain and exhaustion are the way to health. Every two weeks my rehab regimen changes, getting increasingly more difficult. I made sizable gains in the first few weeks but things have plateaued since—which my rehab guy is just the way it always goes.

Happily, the sharp pain in my knee has disappeared for most of my daily activities. Stairs, carrying heavy things, etc. no longer bother me, and now we’re trying to get back to full athletic health, which involves more explosive movements and sudden stops.

What I find absolutely crazy is how my muscles adjusted to compensate for the injury. What I’m doing at this point is retraining my muscles to behave the way they should. Most of my current exercises deal with doing squats with resistance and I have to keep my bum knee from rotating inward. Those bad mechanics cause the scraping of bone on bone and produce the pain I feel when I’m coming out of the squat.

Just for kicks, I tried doing the same exercises with my good knee. No problem. My knee doesn’t want to dip inside at all. My right knee however rotates inward like its the most natural thing in the world. Concentrating on keeping it steady—which is the correct way it should function—causes discomfort and fatigue.

I wish I could reason with it. To explain that I understand that it had pain in the past but together we can make it go away, but we need to cooperate, to work together on this. To say all this stubborn resistance doesn’t help either of us, and now that the weather’s finally nice, wouldn’t it be better to be playing soccer and hiking?

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that.

Current Mood: Hard at Work |

Just a quick shout out to a truly exceptional project that my Creative Writing advisor headed up. It’s called “Poetry Everywhere” and it teamed up poets (some from UWM, others from elsewhere) with film students to create animated shorts that will be playing on televisions found in buses in Milwaukee and elsewhere around the country—Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles, and I can’t remember where else. Normally these TVs show commercials, weather forecasts, sports highlights, etc. And for awhile, every 15 minutes they’re going to be showing animated poems.

You can check them out here: http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=732872

It may not seem like much, but it’s really important. As someone who has had my stories illustrated by insanely talented people in the past, it is an incredible feeling to see someone derive some creative inspiration from your work. And the students who did the films were undergrads, if I’m not mistaken. It’s an amazing amount of exposure for everyone and I’m quite proud of my program. (no snickering in the back)

Check them out. Maybe on the bus somewhere…

Current Mood: Tired |

Wow. I didn’t expect Man Ure to field an under-strength side against Chelski at the Bridge, and I certainly didn’t expect them to lose. Title race on? Man Ure is home to West Ham and away to Wigan whereas the Russians are away to Newcastle and home to Bolton. You’d have to give the edge to Man Ure. I also wonder about potential payback from West Ham. Sir Alex and Alex Curbishley are awfully chummy and Man Ure played a severely understrength side against the Hammers last year when they needed to win to stay up. Will they return the favor? Stranger things have happened.

Things are going right down to the wire for the first time in ages. A result for Fulham means they now have two more games to try and pick up a point while hoping that Reading and Bolton lose out. Not draw, lose. Quite unbelievable. And the Champions League shouldn’t be half interesting either, now that it appears as though Man Ure peaked just a touch early and Chelski have grabbed something of a second wind with a string of big results. Interesting days ahead.

I watched some of the Chicago Fire vs. Colorado Rapids game and went to dinner just before things got interesting. Overall, I thought this game typified MLS—these teams were neither spectacular nor awful but lacked that oh-so-important bit of magical creativity to open the game up. It made me think that it’s time for the salary cap to double or go bye-bye. Three more quality players per side and it would have been far more interesting. There was lots of talent out on the pitch for both teams, but that talent was nullified by the averageness of the rest of them. Really, just a few more impact players—you’re talking maybe 20-30 spread around—and this league could really be something. That’s totally doable if the salary cap goes away.

Speaking of really something, I watched the Galaxy vs. Chivas USA derby match last night and my word—had any soccer skeptics been watching they might have been converted on the spot. David Beckham hardly put a foot wrong in the first half (although his performance fell off a cliff in the second) and Landon Donovan, despite what I feel about him personally, had a monster of a game. The Galaxy went up only to be pegged back, then went up again only for Chivas to equalize a second time. Then bang-bang-bang, the Galaxy dished a trio of goals in the last fifteen minutes and there was no way back. A crushing defeat for their rivals.

Don’t get me wrong, the football wasn’t always of the highest quality (Guzan’s error on the eventual game-winner was ridiculous) but the fans were jacked up, the pace was insane, and the challenges were flying in hot and heavy. If this is what true rivalries can add to the league, then put another team in New York ASAP, please.

I’m so far ahead of the game for finishing out the semester that I’m beginning to get suspicious that I’ve forgotten something major.

Current Mood: Good |

I have mentioned this before, but I have to give a shout-out to my professor who assigned a review of scholarship. The idea is that before you set out to write a paper for a conference you should know what’s been done already. So you collect as much information on your intended subject as possible and see what’s been written. Doing this is a lot of work but it also helps answer some important questions, like if someone has already published the paper you were planning to write and, more importantly, finding what about the topic hasn’t been sufficiently covered.

In my case, I found out that lots of critical work exists on the early part of Louise Erdrich’s career but it really tapers off after 1994. So instead of focusing my paper on Tracks, a novel that has a billion articles written on it, I will shift my attention to her more recent work. That body of existent critical work actually helped me put my paper in context of the larger discussion about Erdrich’s work, and next week I need to present my paper topic to the class. The review of scholarship practically wrote my outline for me, and writing the paper summary was a snap. Once again, it’s this kind of project that makes grad school fun. Instead of feeling like you’re floundering trying to come to grips with massive theories, this review helped focus my attention to a specific issue that has yet to be sufficiently addressed. In short, this is not only what good academics do, but it also shows how they do it. Brilliant.

Also, a good friend of mine is doing her preliminary exams this weekend. Her rationale was entitled “Modern Fantastic Literatures (19th and 20th Centuries): Emphasis On Magical Realism,
Slipstream, Science Fiction, and Fantastic Poetry.” She’s got lots of literature in translation on her reading list, and the prelim committee members were very enthusiastic about her take on the topic. This is all good news for me, since I should be doing a very similar thing in about 18 months.

Current Mood: Things are Looking Good, Despite the Rain |
Currently Listening To - Elliott Smith - “Either/Or”

Every now and then it’s good to give your dog a shout-out on your blog, just in case she’s reading. Below, Athena and I watching the sun set over Lake Superior. Candidate for best dog in the universe.

Current Mood: Okay |

I registered for Fall 2008 classes today but it was kind of silly. First of all, if I don’t get a TA position I’ll only be taking one class. If I do get a TA position I need to take two but I don’t know what times, so I figured better safe than sorry and I registered for three. I’m actually signed up for three with one pending approval, but I’ll be dropping either two or three of these classes regardless. Brilliant!

Oh, and did I mention that an overwhelming number of the classes are scheduled on top of each other? Yeah, on Wednesdays 4 of the 5 classes are scheduled to meet at the same time. And the vast majority of classes offered to grad students are on Tuesday afternoons so there’s something like 8 of 10 classes that conflict on Tuesdays. Doubly brilliant! Ah, grad school…

Anyway, the classes I’ve signed up for are:
Fiction Workshop: Electronica - promises to be not just another workshop
Rhetoric of Technology - part of the professional writing curriculum
Fiction Workshop: Novella - I’m almost certainly dropping this one
Modern Literary Theory - I’m almost certainly dropping this one too, although it would be handy

Word on the street is that the prospect for TA positions is “looking good” but nothing definite yet. Realistically, this probably means there are 3 or 4 positions opening instead of 1 or 2. But you tell me whether things are “looking good” when there are about 9 or 10 people needing these positions. I have to believe that I’m on the short list for 2nd year Ph.D. students but, as ever, there’s no guarantee of anything.

I’m never slow to bag on MLS but I have to say I was pretty entertained this past weekend by San Jose vs. Colorado. Good stuff. But do you know who I can’t stand? (if you read the post
title it should give you a hint.) That’s right, Landon Donovan.

If you watch this whole video you’ll get a great idea of the kind of player David Beckham is, but if you FF to about 1:40 or so you’ll see what a dick Landon Donovan is too. Yes, he’s being fouled by the defender, but homeboy shakes his way free and scores on a awesome diving header. Instead of celebrating, he stands over the defender and shouts at him. For about three seconds. They don’t show it in this clip but then he tries to get in his face again before going to the center circle. Dude, you scored a great goal. You beat the defender. Now shut up. Scoring is your response. Now, really, shut up.

I also caught the Premier League highlight show on Sunday and my question: what the hell has happened to Kasey Keller? I read in the Fulham match report that he made a hash of the second goal but the first was incriminating enough. He left his near post wide, wide open and Jermaine Penant managed to score at a bad angle due to Keller’s atrocious placement. And yes, the second goal was just a joke.

What happened? Keepers are one of the few positions where players get better with age. Look at David James. But the last time I saw Keller with the US National Team he looked tentative and not at all himself. His displays with Fulham have been nervy but this past weekend featured the two worst mistakes I’ve ever seen Keller make. With guys like Tim Howard and Brad Guzan coming up, Keller’s time in the spotlight has already gone. But geez Kasey. Get it together man.

Current Mood: Feh |

/
I am cautiously optimistic about the weeks between now and the end of the semester. As long as I keep going at the same pace (taxing) I should be a-okay. I may even finish early-ish, which would be good considering we leave for vacation before the due date for my last paper.

I’m finishing The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich today. I didn’t know how I was going to squeeze this 350 page book in, but it happened that after my heavy week I had some breathing room due to the fact that the other books for the course, Lone Ranger and Tonto and Wild Indians, were both relatively short and could be knocked out in a few days.

The reading for my paper on Raymond Roussel has been surprisingly slim. Roussel’s How I Wrote Certain of My Books and Raymond Roussel: A Critical Study are both pamphlet-length works, a total of 150 pages between them. Foucault’s book on Roussel, Death and the Labyrinth, is only 186 pages but is, well, Foucault. Roussel is fascinating but it’s extremely difficult to explain his method in brief. You can read about it in the third paragraph of the Wikipedia article if you’re interested.

And finally, I got some good concrete info on how to draw up my reading list for my preliminary exams, which it seems like I will be taking sometime in Fall 2009 regardless of whether I get funding this year or not (no word on that situation yet). Anyway, for this exam I need a major area (covering ≈50 texts) and two minor areas (≈25 texts each) and then about 20 books on criticism (roughly 10 for the major, 5 each for the minors). Most Creative Writers do 20th Century American Literature for their major and whatever (drama, ethnic lit, specific genre) for their minors.

I’m about 85% sure that my major is going to be Modern Literature (19th & 20th centuries) with a strong international flavor, along with Native American lit and New Wave Fabulist/New Weird as my two minors. By doing it this way, I can put authors like Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Franz Kafka, Haruki Murakami and Isabelle Alleyende in my major list rather than in my minor list under the too-broad heading “magic realism.” The Fabulist/Weird category can then be populated by folks like Jeff Ford, Kelly Link, Jeff VanderMeer, et al. It also works to my advantage as “fantasy” or “sci-fi” have a stigma whereas “New Wave Fabulist” sounds edgy and hip. The name changes and the content more or less stays the same. Marketing at its finest, no?

The best part is that putting together draft lists has actually been fun and I really look forward to digging in. The academic advice I’ve received over and over is that you need to focus on what you’re interested in rather than what you think you ought to be studying. That keeps you energized and motivated and therefore increases your chances for success. Sounds good to me.

Current Mood: Fine |
Currently Listening To - Elliott Smith - “From a Basement on the Hill”

/ /
I finished Wild Indians and Other Creatures by Adrian Louis yesterday and loved it. One of our articles this week is our professor’s 1996 interview with Louis for Native Americans and I found this exchange amusing, for absolutely no reason whatsoever:

NA: Who were some of the teachers [at Brown] there that you learned from?
AL: I studied fiction writing under John Hawkes and poetry mainly under Michael Harper and James Schevill. I also worked with R.V. Cassill in fiction.
NA: Did any of them make a strong impression on you in any particular way?
AL: No, not particularly. I guess their writings never really impressed me that much. But what impressed me was that they were writers. They were living writers. I was able to see how they dealt with things and I found that helpful. As far as learning how to write, I don’t think I learned anything while I was at the writing program. Where I learned a lot was studying under people in the regular English department. By studying literature, I learned a lot more than I learned in the writing classes.

I’m also busy reading up on the life of Raymond Roussel, who seems to have been just as quirky and nuts as his writing. Reading about Roussel, his aesthetic and his penchant for writing aggressively unclassifiable work, is fascinating.

Yep, it’s pointless to make any more predictions about the way things are heading in England. Man Ure’s draw (and near loss) to Blackburn means next weekend’s fixture against Chelski is more likely than not the title decider. And Bolton’s win coupled with Fulham’s loss means that the bottom of the table is just as muddled as before.

Fulham have got Man City away, Birmingham City at home, and finish away at Pompey. They can take no less than six points from these games to have a hope of survival. I bet they only get four max and have nothing to play for on the final day. Hope I’m wrong.

Current Mood: Fine |

/
Right, so I had my workshop-resistant story workshopped yesterday and, guess what? It went over like a lead balloon. So at least I got that part right.

Those who got the Borgesian drift of it liked it, or at least gave it a favorable read. The majority however felt manipulated, irritated, and didn’t ever get to the point that it’s a story that pokes fun at fiction writing, writers, and academic workshops. Maybe these folks who didn’t like it just didn’t think it was funny, but more to the point I think many of them didn’t know that it was supposed to be funny. For example, there’s a line towards the end that says if you (the reader) didn’t like the story, then you should reconfigure the story to suit your personal tastes and start over. Someone underlined that sentence and wrote in the margin, “Is the writer is blaming the reader here?” Um, yes? There’s another section where the story claims to be perfectly suited for a graduate fiction workshop and someone else wrote, “This would never work for publication,” missing the fact that I would switch that line to “X magazine” each time I submit it.

A more cutting critique is simply saying, “That didn’t work” or worse “That wasn’t funny.” However, “This is not allowed” is the very point of the metafiction, so yeah. I do accept the fact that this story has a long way to go before I can ever send it out, though. Even if the story works on the level I want it to (and I’m reasonably sure it does) the overall comments about the language needing to improve were understood. But, as my buddy said, “You’re not going to nail a Borges-style story in the first draft.”

Truer words were never spoken.

In better news, I rocked my review of scholarship. I was a little nervous having never done one before (basically you dig up as much recent scholarship on a given topic as you can then present it in a paper—it’s like an annotated bibliography only organized by topic and read as a continuous narrative) but the professor said it was well-done and he learned something having read it. So yay.

Current Mood: Okay |
Currently Listening To - Blind Lemon Jefferson - “Blind Lemon Jefferson”

First off, what’s with my bad luck with iPods lately? First, mine dies. Then after Amy graciously allows me to use hers, iTunes (in a delightful fit of whimsy) decides to format the $#@%* thing. This glitch has something to do with a wider computer problem I’ve had since a problematic installation of Audacity, a WAV splitting program, that worked twice and then caused total and complete system failure. No blue screen of death, just straight to reboot. This somehow reset some programs like Firefox and iTunes back to their first-install state, and for some lovely reason iTunes decided it really, really wanted to sync the iPod automatically. Since there’s way more music in my library than the 4 GB iPod can hold, iTunes figured that the next best step would be to format the device and start over.

Needless to say, I would have put that option a little further down the list. Annoying? Not hardly.

/ /
With one month left in school, this is the point that I look at my schedule of project due dates and determine that it cannot be done. Yet somehow it has to get done, and somehow it always does.

My story “Writing Machines” is up for critique in about 90 minutes. I’ve gotten two thumbs up so far but we’ll see what the larger group has to say. With no plot per se, no main character, no dialogue, and an ending that literally blames the reader if s/he doesn’t like the story, it’s a fair bet that it may confound some people. An evil part of me hopes so.

I read The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven last week and have to say that it disappointed me. I haven’t read any Sherman Alexie previously and, having now read the collection that helped propel him to stardom, I find myself agreeing with a lot of his critics. As I said in class yesterday, I would much rather reread Landfill Meditations in an attempt to wrap my brain around what Gerald Vizenor is up to rather than reread Alexie’s pretty straightforward stories. I also tie these two back to some of the critical reading I did on utopia and dystopia. For me, Vizenor is the king of Indian Utopian thinking and, based on this one collection, Alexie is the reigning dystopian writer. This may well turn into a conference paper down the line…

This week I’m reading Adrian Louis’ Wild Indians and Other Creatures and I ab-so-lute-ly love it. It’s funny, it’s clever, it’s dirty, and it’s magnificent. I read just about everything today in the following terms: I wish I could write like this, I’m glad I don’t write like this, and I think I could write like this. Louis falls in this last category and, for a writer eager for to experiment with a variety of styles, it’s pretty exciting stuff.

Current Mood: Busy |
Currently Listening To - Eddie Vedder - “Into the Wild (Soundtrack)”