Mad City United won again, this time 5-2. I again opened the scoring early in the first half, and again it had to be one of the most god-awful goals in league history. I shot from about 20 yards out (again, almost the same exact circumstance) but didn’t hit it all that well. The ball dipped at the goal line and the keeper, expecting it to bounce up into his arms, had to be mortified when it nutmegged him for a goal. Oops.

MCU played really well today with lots of fluid passing but we were a bit profligate in front of goal. We passed instead of shooting, and shot instead of passing. The opposition got only a handful of shots on goal and they were awarded two penalties (one pretty clear-cut, the other not so much). From the run of play they had made a shot or two, and scored on a corner with the last kick of the game to make the score seem somewhat closer than it was. On that same play, a dickhead on their team who was routinely going in with perhaps too much gusto decided it would be a good idea to shove me from behind as hard as he could to get open, and now my neck and back are out of whack. Had the game gone on another two minutes I likely would have found reason to return the favor. So it’s probably better it ended when it did. And I need to do more physical therapy on my right leg—it seems noticeably weaker in the last few weeks and I am having the occasional twinge of pain walking up and down stairs. Not good, not good.

Speaking of profligate strikers, can you believe Ars*nal surrendered their perfect home record at the Emirates to Hull City today? Hilarious. I was just starting to think that maybe, just maybe, they could actually be title contenders this year, but today offered a good dose of reality—they did not address their defensive problems on set pieces, they don’t deal well in general with physical teams, and as the season wears on and injuries come into play. They still play some pretty stuff when they’re on their game, but I honestly don’t see them being able to keep pace with Man Ure and Chelski.

This article on Spurs suggests why the club is always in a state of crisis, but Hubbard misses the real point: business has always taken precedence over the squad for at least the last decade. They have bought up every young player in England (and increasingly the continent) they could get their hands on with the intent of selling them. The Berbatov bit was a good piece of business, and the bottom line is that for all the talk of going fourth, Spurs have not bought any of the big-time, world-renowned players who would help them get there. The reason? It’s too much of a risk and doesn’t make enough business sense.

I skipped through most of Wisconsin’s loss to Michigan today. In truth, Michigan tried handing them the game about a half-dozen times but the anemic offense couldn’t seal the deal. Blowing a 19 point lead is ridiculous, and it’s this same ultra-conservative play calling that the Packers do to protect a lead that allows teams to get back in the game. Stupid, stupid, stupid and what’s worse is that losses tend to beget losses for Wisconsin, and that doesn’t bode well for next week’s game versus Ohio State.

Current Mood: Okay |

Google alerts has just informed me that Black Static #7 has gone to press, and it will be featuring my story “The Hodag.” Not to be a complete suck up, but the covers for Black Static have been unbelievable, and check out this creepy little number gracing the cover of issue #7:

Erm…can we say cool?

Current Mood: Quite Pleased |

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Every once in awhile you read a book that somehow warps your perspective. On everything. I’m about half done with Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String, which we’re reading for my restrictions & obstructions writing workshop, and I adore it.

I don’t know what it is—it’s certainly not a novel, but calling the individual “chapters” pieces of flash fiction doesn’t seem right either. All these chapters (rarely more than a page or two) do cohere under their section titles, but in a very strange way. Marcus is doing some semantic world-building here, creating a new world through warping language. I have a feeling I will be coming back to this book about a thousand more times in my life.

Enough about me. Here’s one entitled “Snoring, Accidental Sleep” as an example:

Snoring, language disturbance caused by accidental sleeping, in which a person speaks in compressed syllables and bulleted syntax, often stacking several words over one another in a distemporal deliverance of a sentence. The snoring person can be stuffed with cool air to slow the delivery of its language, but perspiration froths at key points on the hips and back when artificial air is introduced, and thus the sleep becomes sketchy and riddled with noise. It is often best to cull the sleeper forth from static communication by responding to its snores with apneic barks—sounds produced without air. The effect of the barks is to isolate each aspect of the snore sound by slowing down the delivery—riding the sleeper until the snore breaks into separate words. Decoders should sit on the bed and jostle the sleeper’s stomach. This further dispatches the clusters that often form when the sleeper speaks all at once (snores). The decoder is then better able to decipher the word blocks. When analyzed, the messages are often simple. Pull me out, they say, the water has risen to the base of my neck.

Put about 40 of those together under headings like God, House, and The Society and you have this book. I should also point out that each section also has a list of terms to better help you (?) understand the text. Terms like:

* shirt of noise Garment, fabric, or residue that absorbs and holds sound, storing messages for journeys. Its loudness cannot be soothed. It can destroy the member which inhabits it.

* Nitzel’s Gamble The act or technique of filling the lungs with water. The chance was first taken by the Nitzel in Green River.

*Jennifer The inability to see. Partial blindness in regards to hands. To jennifer is to feign blindness. The diseases resulting from these acts are called jennies.

I am quite positive that this book isn’t for everyone. But if you read these and found them strange, dense, and fascinating, then consider buying the book. I turn pages in a state of wonder, and that’s no mean feat.

Current Mood: Happy |

We’re having student conferences this week (15-20 minutes per student, 20 students) in lieu of classes, so I arranged the appointments on Mon-Tues-Fri so I’ve had Wed and Thurs at home and man, has it been lovely. The difference between driving three days a week versus four is pretty significant and I’ve gotten a lot done with that extra time. It’s amazing how getting just a little more sleep and getting a little more time away from driving reaps generous rewards in terms of alertness and productivity.

In case you hadn’t noticed the trend, check out my “Current Mood” history for the last couple weeks:

9/22 - Current Mood: Zzzzzzzz |
9/17 - Current Mood: Pretty Goo…zzzzzzzzzzzz |
9/14 - Current Mood: To Continue a Theme, Tired |
9/13 - Current Mood: Victorious but Beat |
9/12 - Current Mood: Pleased |
9/12 - Current Mood: Okay, But Tired |

I’m really enjoying the teaching and I think the students are learning, which is a good thing. The course on composition teaching theory is pretty frustrating at times since practically everything we read is counter intuitive (and is not how any of us were ever taught). The general theory is that the instructor must constantly push against being an “authority” (on anything, really) and always push the students to explore, struggle, and discover on their own. Again, generally speaking, any sort of directive or qualitative remark (i.e. “You should change this confusing sentence”) closes down ways of thinking, limits possibilities, and reconfirms hierarchies of student/teacher and novice/expert.

Of course, running against this is the fact that most of us instructors are twice as old as the average freshman and have learned a thing or two ourselves about reading and writing given that we are all, you know, Ph.D. students in English. While in theory I appreciate the idea of making these students to struggle to figure out how they can write better, I also think it’s silly to pretend that 1) an institutional student/teacher hierarchy doesn’t already exist (and will exist as long as teachers submit grades) and 2) that sometimes a student will be helped more by just being told something straight-up rather than always redirecting them into avenues of flailing and frustration.

I also feel that a lot of this theory we’re reading is to keep us honest, so we don’t stand before the class and expound Writing’s Necessary Truths from on high. But often it sets you to feel as though nothing you’re doing is “right,” even though I also understand that this frustration and struggling to come to terms with how to teach college composition is also part of the comp program’s master plan: make the student question, reassess, find his or her own way of making meaning. Only in this instance, I am the student.

Just because I recognize this doesn’t mean I have to like it though, or even buy into it.

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I’ve been putting in some serious work trying to develop a book list for my preliminary exam, which looks like I will be taking next fall or spring. Originally I intended to do Modern Fiction as my major area and Native American Literature and Slipstream/New Wave Fabulism/New Weird as my minors. A few things have changed.

First, I wanted to focus more on world literature so I included a mess of Latin American writers along with a few Asian and African works that all loosely fall under the umbrella of “magic realism.” That meant booting some of the American and Europeans. In addition, as I’ve been reading Brian McHale’s excellent Postmodernist Fiction I’ve learned that a lot of the books I like comfortably fall under the even broader category of postmodernist writing. Then a faculty member suggested that the “slipstream” minor might seem to similar to the major area, and that I should consider a minor that takes advantage of my computer/web skills and my interest in visual aspects of storytelling.

The “new” minor looks to be something along the lines of Visual Narratives, Hypertext, and Textuality. This means looking at non-traditional books like House of Leaves and A Humument, e-texts like Patchwork Girl and Afternoon, A Story, and probably some graphic novels. Overall, this possibility excites me.

Anyway, that’s a long post to make up for weeks of relative inactivity.

Oh, my O-30 team Mad City United leaped to the top of the league with a 3-0 win last Thursday, putting us at 3-0-0 on the season with a +13 goal difference. Alas, I wasn’t there since it was a weeknight game, but I’m looking forward to this Saturday’s match after a week’s layoff.

Current Mood: Good (and not that tired) |

…followed closely by sleeping, then sanity.

No, I don’t want this space to become a complaint list for how cross-eyed busy I’ve become with school and the admin job and the driving and how I’m failing to accomplish everything I want to get done in a time frame that allows me to take the occasional breath.

But tragically, there’s little else to talk about.

Current Mood: Zzzzzzzz |

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That’s pretty much how I feel right about now. Just beat. This semester is going to be very rough if the first three weeks are any indication of what’s to come. Teaching comp 101 is taxing work with 24 students, although that number has now dropped and will drop some more as students find out that I’m really not kidding—at all—when I say if I don’t get an assignment within a week of its due date that I won’t accept it, and hence they can’t pass the class.

It may sound draconian but the premise is pretty simple—I’m hired to teach them composition, not scramble to figure out who has turned in what and the assignments build, so without turning in assignment 2.1 you really can’t get at what 2.2 wants you to do. A week is plenty of time to get a single assignment in, and I’ve even taken the extra step of emailing them the day before to say “if it’s not in today, you’re not able to pass.” Comp 101 strongly encourages students to work out multiple interpretations of a text; sadly for these students, these emails are one case where there’s not a lot of room for creative interpretation. Strange too how these “warning” emails are met with silence, yet the “sorry, you now have to drop” emails are responded to within hours.

Overall the teaching goes really well. The majority of the students are motivated and hard-working, and those folks make it a whole lot easier to get to the interesting stuff rather than bookkeeping.

But the pedagogy course is going to be a lot of work and the project assistantship is like a bottomless pit made of time-sucking antimatter. In theory, I’m supposed to put in 10 hours of teaching and 10 hours of program support. Perhaps not surprisingly, the first couple weeks have been skewed by about the power of ten. Considering I’m being paid around $8/hr for this work, let’s just say I’ll be finding new ways to prioritize tasks and cap the hours spent working so I have some free time to do things—and things that arent’s driving back and forth between Milwaukee.

Things like eating. And sleeping.

/ /
I took a break to watch the last 20 minutes of Man Ure vs. Villarreal and about 10 minutes of it was top-notch stuff.

I did think it strange that Derek Rae was going all Castilian on us with his pronunciation of Santi Cazorla as ca-THOR-la. Doubly strange that Argentinian Ariel Ibagaza got the plain ol’ anglicized iba-GAZ-a. It could be that Derek Rae knows something I don’t, but I also doubt that he would pronounce Zaragoza as thera-GO-tha, which would be, you know, consistent.

Current Mood: Pretty Goo…zzzzzzzzzzzz |

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You know you’re getting old when you have to force yourself to stay up to watch a 9:30 kickoff. I watched the Badgers play at Fresno State in a bar and it was all I could do to keep from falling asleep in the second half. There were a lot of similarities between that game and the one today between the Packers and the Lions.

One, both Wisconsin teams had near-catastrophic collapses in the second half. The Packers’ was much more alarming, and in fairness, much of Wisconsin’s problem stemmed from a badly blown call. But their porous D didn’t help, nor did the questionable WAC officiating. Instant replay had a big hand in both games. In the Badger game, the referees somehow overruled a catch/fumble decision in favor of an incomplete pass, even though the replay seemed to be crystal clear. In the Packers game, Aaron Rodgers surely stepped out of bounds when scrambling for a first down. It’s these kind of situations that make me rethink the use of replay in soccer.

Both offenses were incredible when on song, and abysmal when out of sorts. The highs and lows are somewhat alarming, as is the fact that both defenses completely fell apart for a quarter of each game. Still, wins are good. We’ll take wins.

I’ve gotten around to watching most of US vs. Trinidad & Tobago and I still refuse to be impressed. T&T looked so god awful that I think most pub teams could have turned them over. While the US never looked rattled, they never looked silky smooth either. They should be better than this.

Brian Ching showed once again that he’s up to par unless the team is playing hoof and hope, and Heath Pearce has got to be one of the most frighteningly average defenders in recent memory. He offers virtually nothing going forward and has not looked all that comfortable against these tiny CONCACAF opponents. God help us whenever we play strong, fast teams. If I was a manager facing the US, I would tell my team to attack that flank every time down the field. Worse, DaMarcus Beasley put in another pretty rotten performance, although he did get a (lucky) assist. Still, why is he straying offsides so much?

Thus far, Bradley has been more Sampson than Arena. By that I mean he’s sticking with tried (and tired) US stalwarts rather than turning the roster over. Lest we forget, Sampson qualified the US very early for the 1998 World Cup and went on to a shockingly bad tournament performance. In contrast, Arena’s squad struggled mightily before 2002 and then went on to one of the most successful World Cups in American history. It’s still early days, but I wouldn’t be reserving my tickets for South Africa just yet. The US will be there—that’s practically guaranteed—but that’s a long way to travel for disappointment.

Current Mood: To Continue a Theme, Tired |

Mad City United won by a convincing score of 8-1 today on a gray, rain-soaked morning. The field was actually not in too bad of shape and we managed to pass the ball pretty well (obviously) despite the conditions. I did not play all that well, but did manage to score a goal (the opener and almost the game-winner) and chipped in with two assists.

I’m playing center midfield and that entails a lot of running, tracking back, getting forward, etc. My goal came when I got the ball in acres of space, wound up, and hit a long-range effort. After it left my foot I thought “That’s destined for the top corner,” but it dipped down towards the keeper. He lunged for it and tried to catch it instead of punching it over. It skipped off his hands, hit the post, bounced off his head, hit the crossbar, rebounded off his thigh, hit the post, came off his elbow, and landed on the line, rolling away from him. He dove to swat it away but it had just barely crept over the line. 1-0 on my first league goal, and certainly nothing to write home about.

The team we faced did not track back well, which meant lots of midfield space. This meant you could carry the ball and dish it off as the last defender approached, or hit it wide for crosses. Once the defense was split, it was pretty easy pickings for the strikers.

That’s twelve goals in two games and only two against. Not bad. Alas, we play another top team on Thursday night and it looks like the squad will be pretty depleted due to the 5:45 kickoff. I will be stuck in Milwaukee, but I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed that we go 3-0-0 on the season.

Really, I can’t tell you what the hell is going on in England at the moment. Man City now has more money than God and Robinho looked pretty damn handy for the first half against Chelski, but the Russians just had too much quality. You have to think that they’re the odds-on favorite for the title.

It tickles me to no end that Man Ure lost to Liverpool 2-1, but I’m not ready to say that this result, along with the Ars*’s 4-0 clubbing of Blackburn, has drastically changed the title picture in this oh-so-long season. For my money, I’d bet Liverpool will rack up a couple of hapless draws against the likes of Wigan or Fulham and not realistically be in the race by New Year’s. Ars*nal may have found their form over the last two games, but the squad is so thin—even just a few injuries to their starters will be a massive headache.

What can you say about Man Ure? I dunno since I didn’t watch the game, but reports universally claim that Liverpool dominated the last hour of the game and were deserved winners. My suspicion is that Man Ure will be hard to stop once they get rolling, so the big question for me is whether Chelski will slip. Based on the early impact Scolari has had on the team, my guess right now is ‘no.’

The relegation scrap should be interesting too. I thought Stoke and Hull were clear favorites for the drop but it may be trickier than that. It’s way too early to tell, but the squads that came up look just a bit handier than I—or virtually anyone else—gave them credit for.

Things are never dull…

Current Mood: Victorious but Beat |

Hey! The new Graveside Tales anthology entitled The Beast Within is coming out soon, and it’s already gotten a few positive reviews from early reviewers. Happily, Stephen Studach of HorrorScope mentions my story “Of Silver Bullets and Golden Teeth” under the heading “stories that make this assemblage worthy.”

And that’s always good.

Current Mood: Pleased |
Currently Listening To - Bob Dylan - “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”

I finished reading my first audio book of the academic year, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water For Chocolate—and don’t let the post title fool you, I did listen in English, not Spanish. I thought it was okay.

I am planning on plowing through a lot of staples of Latin American magical realism in the next year, and Esquivel (Mexico) is definitely on that list. Without any doubt, all the book’s highlights are sections that prominently feature the supernatural goings-on that define magical realism, but if you take those parts away then the book is a pretty standard story. I would have appreciated more twists and turns, though I did like some of the weird compressions of time that Esquivel employs.

The novel’s subtext bothered me though. Tita, the protagonist, is very critical of the family tradition that says the youngest daughter must take care of the mother until her death, and thus cannot marry; however, she isn’t critical at all of “giving her heart” to either of her suitors, both of whom “want her to be his.” Esquivel doesn’t trouble the concept that women belong to men, and Tita’s central concerns don’t go further than 1) facing a life without a man, and 2) choosing which man to give herself to.

Granted, historical conditions may not have allowed for many other options, but Esquivel could have portrayed Tita as being conflicted or upset regarding the narrow avenue of choices available to her. Worse, the truly self-sufficient woman in the novel is Mama Elena, who is seen as gruff, unforgiving, and generally nasty. Even Tita’s sister who ends up being a leader in the revolutionary army is always mentioned alongside her captain-lover.

Getting away from gender, there are some other ugly things going on. As if in punishment for her severeness, Mama Elena is crippled and therefore helpless and dependent in her last days. One of Tita’s sisters is punished by becoming overweight and cursed with bad breath and flatulence. Another sister, who is of mixed blood as her mother had relations with an escaped American slave, winds up being a prostitute. While it’s not prominent, the suggestion here is that a person gets paid back for their “nature,” as though all disabled are weak, as though being overweight equates to being a glutton, as though being a crossblood automatically dooms one to a none-too-pleasant destiny.

Again, the story takes place in the late 19th century and I have no doubt that these biases existed—but the book was published in 1989, and I prefer contemporary authors to challenge these biases rather than reconfirm them.

Current Mood: Okay, But Tired |