Long Pauses

Category: Debris

  • London Trip 4

    We got back to Knoxville late Wednesday night, and for some reason I’m still feeling jet-lagged and out of sorts. Maybe it’s just the depression that sets in each time I return to the routine and responsibilities of “real life” after a great vacation. I came home with a couple hundred pictures and hope to get them sorted, cropped, labeled, and uploaded into Flickr by the end of the week. Until then, here’s a recap of our last five days.

    Friday, the 21st

    The pace of the week had started catching up with us by Friday, so after a late breakfast, we went back to our room, watched a little TV, washed some clothes, and napped.  We ran down the street for lunch and browsed the stores around Charing Cross and Oxford, but it was an otherwise uneventful afternoon.

    Around 4, we took the Tube to Clapham, a neighborhood a couple miles south of central London, where we met up with one of Joanna’s old friends. Andre’s parents lived next door to Joanna’s when she was in high school, and the two families have kept in touch over the years. We spent a really nice evening with him, his wife, and his brother. Andre and Katrina live in one of the tens of thousands of Victorian row houses that line the streets of London. Amazing ingenuity and foresight those Victorians had. High ceilings, beautiful moldings, solid construction — those houses still have a couple more centuries in them, I’d imagine.

    After a full week in London, we both really enjoyed the company as well. It was nice to spend an evening with friends, sharing a bottle of wine over a home-cooked meal.

    Saturday, the 22nd

    On Saturday morning we headed to Charing Cross Station, where we caught a train to Rye. Andre’s mother lives in The Ancient Town of Winchelsea in East Sussex, 50 miles south of London, and she’d graciously invited us to spend a day with her there. Before heading to her home, Francoise showed us around Rye. We visited the Lamb House, where Henry James lived, and we walked through its gardens. We ate lunch at the Mermaid Inn, which was rebuilt more than 70 years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. We went shopping (Joanna picked up some Victorian jewelry; I resisted the urge to spend way too much for a 1st edition of A Streetcar Named Desire). And I climbed the narrow steps to the top of the Rye Parish Church.

    Winchelsea is a short drive from Rye, close enough and small enough that I could see it all from the top of the Parish Bell Tower. Francoise’s home was originally built in the 17th century as the servant’s quarters for the adjoining mansion. After remodeling the place, she’s decided to put “Little Mariteau” up for sale. It’s a beautiful, storybook-like place with views of rolling sheep lands out the back and St. Thomas’s Church in front. It took us fifteen minutes to walk the whole of Winchelsea, not counting a long stop at the church. She then drove us down to the coast for a quick look at the sea and the rocky shoreline. Even on an impossibly sunny day in late-April the wind was biting.

    We spent the night with Francoise, who fixed us an amazing dinner and opened a bottle of wine and a flask of limoncello she’d brought home with her from a recent trip to Italy. Really a wonderful evening.

    Sunday, the 23rd

    We were back in London by 11:30 Sunday morning. You know how they say you can set your watch by the British trains? Yeah, that’s true. They mean that. I’m obsessive about being early everywhere I go, so I was feeling anxious when Francoise dropped us off just five minutes before our scheduled departure. It took us two minutes to get from her car to the platform; we waited one minute for the train to arrive; two minutes later we were on our way. Unbelievable.

    We had to be back by noon in order to check out from our hotel. As an anniversary present, my parents gave us three nights in their timeshare company’s London flat, which is located in Maida Vale. Rather than fight with our bags on the Tube, we took a cab over there, winding our way through the traffic caused by the running of the London marathon. Our driver was relieved to learn that we aren’t fond of Bush. (Bush’s name came up in the first five minutes of every single conversation I had with a Brit, followed soon after by a discussion of America’s absurd healthcare system.) He told us about a group of American businessmen whom he’d accidentally offended a few weeks earlier. He’d been touring them all over the city, and after his harmless Bush joke they’d spoken to him only once, to make a lame crack about America’s victory in the Revolutionary War. “Yeah, but only because we felt sorry for you,” he laughed back. “Why else, do you suppose, we would wear bright red coats and march in a straight line?” He must have told us ten jokes in as many minutes.

    After checking in, we walked down to a local grocery store, bought some food, and for the first time in more than a week made our own lunch. Amazing what a luxury that becomes. We killed most of the rest of the day relaxing. Have I mentioned yet that we were in England during the World Snooker Championship? Have I mentioned that the BBC covered it nightly and that I watched a lot of snooker? Because it’s all true. I watched a LOT of snooker.

    The only other noteworthy event on Sunday was a return trip to Covent Garden for another meal at Cafe Pasta. Again, the food wasn’t exceptional but the experience was pretty great. We were seated a few inches away from a man in his late-50s who spent the entire evening trying — and failing — to seduce his 30-something dining companion. It was like a free trip to the theatre.

    Monday, the 24th

    Maida Vale is northwest of central London, so we spent most of Monday exploring the area. First we headed up to the cemetery at Kensal Green, where Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, and William Makepeace Thackery are buried. Honestly, we didn’t see any of their graves, or the graves of any notable personalities for that matter. It was worth the trip, though. Joanna wanted to visit Antiquarius, so next we set off for King’s Road. We walked several blocks through Chelsea, grabbed some lunch at Pizza Express, and quickly realized that the trip was taking its toll on us both. We were getting tired — tired of walking, tired of the crowds, and tired of that nagging feeling that any moment not spent doing something significant was a moment wasted. We vowed to return to the flat earlier than usual that night.

    On the way back, though, we stopped off in Notting Hill. I wanted to check out the book and music stores there. We strolled up Portobello Road, which was a ghost town that afternoon, came back through Notting Hill, then walked east toward Kensington Gardens. The walk was largely an excuse to avoid the Tube during rush hour, but it ended up being a really nice experience. We didn’t go into Kensington Palace but we did enjoy the gardens. We found a park bench and rested our legs while bicyclists and joggers rushed by. We were back at the the flat by 7:30. I mentioned the snooker, right?

    Tuesday, the 25th

    Francoise’s daughter, Michelle, was in Spain over the weekend, so we got together with her on Tuesday. She met us at Oxford Circus, two blocks from where she works, and took us to Ping Pong for lunch. Fantastic dim sum. (In fact, we had our two best meals during our last full day in London.)

    After lunch, Joanna and I checked off the last two museums from our list. We walked down Charing Cross Road to the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery. When I asked Joanna what I could expect to see at the National Gallery, she said, “All of the famous paintings.” I wasn’t sure what she meant until I got there, looked at the museum guide, and realized, “Oh, this is where they keep all of the famous paintings.” Shuffling through those galleries was another overwhelming experience. There’s just too much to take in. We only spent an hour in the Portrait Gallery, which wasn’t nearly enough time. Stuart Pearson Wright’s paintings were some of my favorites.

    So, for our last night in London, we went out for a special meal. Can you guess?

    Two blocks from our flat in Maida Vale we found The Clifton, where I ordered fish and chips and a pint of Guinness, and I’ll be damned if it wasn’t the best meal I ate all week. A 10-inch-long cod fillet fried crisp in a light and sweet batter, the other half of the plate piled high with fries, and all of it washed down with the creamiest, richest stout a man can pour. Perfect.

  • London Trip 3

    We’ve been running around town at such a pace that when we finally do return to the hotel each night, I don’t have much energy left to write. Here’s a snapshot of the last few days.

    Tuesday, the 18th

    If I had only one day in London, I’d spend as much of it as possible at the Tate Britain. It’s Joanna’s favorite museum, too, for its collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. While she toured the Gothic Nightmares exhibit, I wandered through the contemporary arts wing. Some pieces I plan to write more about later:

    We spent four or five hours at the Tate before leaving to give St. Paul’s another try. However, we arrived there at 4:05, which, as it turns out, is five minutes after they admit the last visitors. (Read the guide book, then get on the Tube. Read the guide book, then get on the Tube.) So, we traveled back toward the hotel and spent an hour or so at Waterstone’s.

    Most sensible people would have just walked back to the hotel from Waterstone’s, but our feet were killing us, so we sunk into the mass of bodies that is the Picadilly Tube stop at rush hour and, for the first and only time all week, we got separated. It was like a scene from a movie. I told Joanna I needed to take a quick look at the map, and by the time I turned back toward her she was gone, engulfed by the tide of commuters. Honestly, I got panicky and even had her name sounded over the intercom, but by that point she was on a train headed north. I learned this a half hour later when we found each other again at the hotel. We spent the rest of the evening relaxing.

    Wednesday, the 19th

    After visiting five museums in four days, we decided to take a break from all the, you know, culture and, instead, went shopping. Joanna took off for Selfridge’s; I went browsing on Berwick Street. By my count, there are eleven record shops on two blocks of Berwick. I walked into every one of them but came away empty-handed. When I met up with Joanna, she’d had enough of that behemoth of a department store, so we got some lunch, took a quick stroll through Liberty, and then went to Hamleys, where we picked up a gift or two for our niece.

    My only request for the trip was that we take in at least one play while here. Our choice came down to The Crucible at The Gielgud or Endgame at The Barbican. Last week, The Crucible received Time Out‘s first-ever six-star review, but Endgame worked better with our schedule. Plus, it gave us a chance to walk around the Barbican, which is a blocks-wide landmark of 1980s prefab concrete construction. Not the prettiest thing to look at but fascinating, nonetheless.

    Endgame is being staged as part of the Barbican’s month-long celebration of the Beckett centenary. I’d never read the play, so I’m not sure how this production stacks up, but it certainly felt long. (It came in ten minutes longer that its scheduled 85-minute run, so I assume some of the pacing problems will be worked out by the end of the week.) Kenneth Cranham is great as Hamm; Peter Dinklage is less great as Clov.

    Thursday, the 20th

    On our third trip to St. Paul’s, we finally got in the door but decided against taking the full tour. We’d both taken it before and wanted to spend our time elsewhere. After a few minutes of gazing around the cathedral, we headed over to the Tower of London. It was my first time there, and I had a ball. We did the whole bit — walking along with a Beefeater and listening to his stories. It really is a remarkable place. I particularly like the occasional areas that are relatively free of signage and velvet ropes, the corners and stairwells that look much as they did eight and nine centuries ago. The Chapel of St. John the Evangelist in the White Tower is just astounding.

    We grabbed a late lunch on the way back then headed in different directions for a bit more browsing. Fopp, down on Earlham Street, has a fantastic (and surprisingly inexpensive) selection of CDs, vinyl, DVDs, and books. I swore I wouldn’t buy anything, but I came away with some DVDs: Sexy Beast and the 2-disc collection, The Work of Director Jonathan Glazer, both for a few pounds each, and Carlos Reygadas’s Battle in Heaven. A few minutes of shopping in another country and the strangeness of film distribution economies becomes obvious. The Reygadas film and Sokurov’s The Sun, both of which are still making their way along the festival route in the States, are available on DVD everywhere I turn over here.

    A little further up Earlham, I also found The Dover Bookshop, which sells only books related to graphic and web design. Their particular specialty is royalty-free images. I’m proud of myself for having spent less than 15 pounds there.

    Last night we finally made our way back to the British Museum. During our first trip there, we were both exhausted from the flight and annoyed by the tens of thousands of visitors who bumped and pushed us at every turn. Late on a Thursday evening, the museum is a quite different place. We had whole rooms to ourselves and took our time wandering through them. I can’t quite comprehend what it means to look at a human artifact from 10 centuries ago. My head just can’t wrap around that.

  • London Trip 2

    When we arrived yesterday at St. Paul’s, we discovered that it was closed to tourists. So after snapping a couple pictures, we headed south, taking the millennium footbridge across the Thames to the Tate Modern. For the last half-century the building that now houses the Tate served as the Bankside Power Station; fully renovated in the late-1990s it is more impressive than any of the pieces installed there. It is a massive structure — and I mean 4.2 million bricks massive.

    We didn’t stay at the Tate for long. Because it’s undergoing its first major re-installation since opening in 2000, much of the building is closed to visitors. We did take a quick stroll through the main collection, though. The painting I was most struck by was Naked Man with a Knife (1938-40), an early piece by Jackson Pollock. I don’t believe I’d ever seen any of the work he completed before he began pouring, dripping, and throwing paint. Naked Man is representational by comparison, a violent and frightening piece. Seeing it side-by-side (almost literally) with Summertime: 9A (1948) and Yellow Islands (1952) was helpful. Summertime strikes a balance between the two extremes: the dripped paint still finds a pattern and form there.

    When we left the Tate, we walked west along the river until we hit the National Film Theatre. From there we hopped back on the underground at Waterloo, headed north, and stopped for lunch in Covent Garden: lamb souvlaki at The Real Greek. Covent Garden was packed with people — too many, actually, for Joanna, who tends to get anxious in crowds. We browsed at a couple shops there before heading back to the hotel.

    Last night we walked again to Covent Garden for a great meal at a place called Cafe Pasta. By “great meal” I don’t necessarily mean that we had exceptional food. Instead, we had good food with great wine served by a charming waitress in an inviting room accompanied by pleasant music. Until this week, I don’t think I’d realized how quickly we eat in the States. For our first few meals here, I found myself becoming annoyed by our servers, who, for some reason, didn’t bring us our check within minutes of our finishing the last bites. Eating takes longer and is more of a social occasion here, as it should be. We’ve already planned our return to Cafe Pasta and this time we’ll be sticking around for coffee and desert.

    We spent most of today in South Kensington, wandering through the miles and miles (and miles and miles) of galleries at the Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The whole concept of “the museum” had never seemed so, well, Victorian until we stepped into the Natural History, with its macabre menagerie of taxidermied animals. It’s a very strange and discomforting place. We did get a kick, though, out of the human anatomy exhibition, which reveals, much too obviously, its debt to the kitschy charms of Alex Comfort’s Joy of Sex. Again, I liked the building better than its collections.

    The Victoria and Albert is another story completely. After four hours of near constant movement — and fast movement at that — I think we saw about one-fourth of it. I spent much of my time exploring their special exhibition, Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914-1939. It’s a really remarkable collection of paintings, drawings, sculptures, photos, models, posters, costumes, and furniture, along with a car, several films, cookware, book jackets, and — I kid you not — a kitchen. Anything and everything, really, that reflected the major and still-influential turn in post-WWI European aesthetics. (The NFT is hosting a film series as well.) I’ll never look at a Volkswagon Beetle or the London Underground Map the same way.

    I was also completely undone by the Raphael Cartoons. Unbelievable.

    When we left the V&A, we took a quick stroll up to Hyde Park, though by that time we were both exhausted from all of the walking, and so we didn’t manage much more than a twenty-minute rest on the stairs below the Albert Memorial. A nice view, on a sunny and surprisingly warm day, surrounded by skateboarders and kids playing street hockey.

  • London Trip 1

    We fell asleep last night around 9:45, fifteen minutes shy of my goal. I’d sworn I would make it until 10, but with only twenty minutes on the plane and a 30-minute nap in the hotel after we’d checked in, I was going on less than an hour of sleep in a day-and-a-half. Thirteen hours and a complimentary breakfast later, I think we’ve worked most of the jet lag from our systems.

    The trip was uneventful. Our flight went smoothly and arrived on time. I’d arranged transportation from Gatwick to our hotel, and, so, soon after gathering our luggage we were greeted by a middle-aged woman with a sign, who led us across the north terminal as quickly as her little legs would carry her before handing us off to one of her colleagues, another middle-aged woman who also walked faster than I typically jog. The very model of English efficiency, they were. Our flight, by the way, kept Joanna’s and my streak alive: we can’t remember the last time we took a trip together and didn’t run into some sort of celebrity. This time it was Pos from De La Soul, who’s in town for a week-long engagement at the Jazz Cafe.

    With two hours to kill before our room was ready, we dropped off our bags and wandered through the Egypt and Greece rooms at the British Museum. Three quick observations. (I’m sure we’ll spend more time there this week, when we aren’t delirious from sleep deprivation.) First, the sheer number of artifacts there is overwhelming. I think I would actually prefer there to be, say, ten Assyrian reliefs rather than fifty. It’s too much to process and, in a strange way, makes each one less significant. Relief, relief, relief, relief — okay, I get it already. Second, and on a related note, until seeing examples side by side, it had never occurred to me how remarkable it is that the style of writing/art remained relatively consistent in Egypt over the span of centuries. To my untrained eye, artifacts from 2500 b.c. were indistinguishable from those of 600 years later.

    Third, there’s something disturbing (but also interesting, theoretically) about the numbers of people who, rather than looking at artifacts in a museum, instead look at the small LCDs of their digital cameras and camcorders. The experience seems to only become meaningful to them when mediated by technology. Are they more interested in capturing the experience than in the experience itself?

    While Joanna took a nap yesterday afternoon, I took my first stroll down Charing Cross Road. It does my heart good to know that somewhere in the world, on one city block, one can buy a new copy of Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time in three different book stores. Used copies can also probably be had. Foyle’s alone carries four titles by/about Abbas Kiarostami! If it weren’t for the shitty state of the dollar over here, I would have had to buy another carry-on just for my haul from that one street.

    Today, Easter Sunday, much of the city has closed shop, so we’re going to head toward St. Paul’s. I’m not sure what we’ll end up doing, but it’s wonderful to be in a city in which I could see any of the following:

    • Hawks double-bill, Bringing Up Baby and To Have and Have Not (Curzon Mayfair)
    • Armenia double-bill, Ararat and The Genocide in Me (Curzon Soho)
    • American ’70s double-bill, Cabaret and Annie Hall (Curzon Soho)
    • Rivette, L’Amour Fou (National Film theatre)
    • Modernism double-bill, The Crowd and Metropolis (National Film Theatre)
    • Contemporary double-bill, The Beat that My Heart Skipped and The Consequences of Love (Phoenix)
    • Polanski, Repulsion (Ritzy Cinema)
    • Classic double-bill, Le Mepris and Black Orpheus (Riverside)
    • Haneke double-bill, Code Unknown and Cache

    Two great meals so far: gyoza and yaki soba at Wagamama; pizza at Strada.

  • An Important Announcement

    [Note: If you make it through this entire post, you’re a champ. It’s here, more or less, as one more document in the archive of my life.]

    Long-time readers of Long Pauses will know that, after nearly five years and countless redesigns, two elements of this site have remained relatively unchanged: the Mirror-inspired Flash animation and the About page. Nearly three hundred visitors read “about” me last month. They read that I’m a “doctoral candidate in 20th century American literature” and that I’m at work on a dissertation about the American Left and literature of the Cold War. I’ve always taken a certain pride in that description, assuming — or hoping, at least — that my credentials would lend a measure of credibility to my opinions, whether on art or politics or whatever.

    Today I’m pleased to announce, finally, a change to my About page, though, honestly, it’s not exactly the one I’d daydreamed about for so long. Earlier this week I officially notified my committee of my decision to abandon my dissertation. On May 1st, just a few days after Joanna and I return from our trip to London, I will begin a full-time job as a web designer at the university, and I’m damn eager to get started. I’m especially excited about my new title: Artist.

    To tell the full story of this decision takes several hours and as many stiff drinks. At some point, it requires that I reveal the details of the deaths of my mother- and father-in-law and the capital murder trial that followed a year later. And then I have to talk about the shockwaves an experience like that sends through one’s life and the effects of grief on one’s attention span. But, for now, I mention all of that in passing only to suggest that my main reason for making this decision is because what I most crave right now is what a young academic career (at least in the humanities) is least able to provide: stability.

    There are other reasons, of course. For starters, English has never been the perfect fit for me. The two chapters of my dissertation that I completed are, I think, well-researched and well-written, but my analysis floats too casually between literary criticism, political philosophy, cultural studies, and historiography, never slowing to apply the requisite rigor to any one particular area. As a result, I’m proud to say, it’s quite readable. But it’s too superficial for academia. It’s not a dissertation. I suspect that, had I to do it all over again, I might have gone into a Media Studies or New Media program instead, but I would have likely run into similar problems. I’m not an academic writer, it turns out. (One benefit of abandoning my dissertation, by the way, is that I can now focus my efforts on other, non-academic writing projects I’ve wanted to start for years.)

    But stability is the big one. Of the seven people in my doctoral class, only three finished. One seems to have found a dream job, one is (last I heard) teaching at a community college, and one is working as the managing editor of our department’s literary journal while she pursues the job market. If I finished my degree and went searching for a tenure-track job, I would, as a 20th century Americanist, be entering a market in which my application would be thrown into stacks of hundreds for each of the fifteen or twenty available openings. Typically, job offers come to my colleagues only after a year or three of adjunct lecturing, years characterized by heavy teaching loads dominated by sections of freshman composition and too few benefits (salary, health care, marketable experience). Even if I were offered a job, it would mean moving to whatever town the college happened to be located in, followed by years of padding the c.v. while looking for a better job. And then there’s the battle for tenure to look forward to.

    That last paragraph, I know, is not news to many of you. I’ve exchanged quite a few emails over the past few months with friends and mentors, including many Long Pauses readers. Some are former academics, some are happily tenured or soon-to-be, and some are in just the position I’ve described: overworked and anxious but eager to find that perfect position. I’ve written that paragraph mostly for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the state of the academy in the humanities — for people like my friend (a researcher and Ph.D. in physics) who, when I told him Saturday that I’d decided to shelve my dissertation, stood awkwardly silent for several seconds before finally cocking his head to one side and exclaiming, “I don’t understand. What do you mean you’ve quit?”

    Joanna and I made this decision together three or four weeks ago — the evening I was offered my new job, actually — and we’ve both been breathing easier since. What gets too often overlooked in discussions of young academic careers is the burden of spending one’s twenties (and now often one’s thirties as well) with little assurance about the practical matters of one’s future. Few young academics get to choose when their “real life” will begin, or where it will take place, or in what kind of institution it will be spent — all factors (really, really important factors) that highly educated workers in other professions take for granted. Joanna and I have discovered, much to our surprise, that we like living in Knoxville, and also that the instability of my career ambitions has prevented us from planting our roots here as deeply as we would have liked. If we’re breathing easier it’s because, for the first time in our ten years of marriage, we know where we’ll be a year from now, maybe even five or ten years from now.

    I have never, even for a second, regretted pursuing my Ph.D. Doing so allowed me the opportunity to spend six years (four years of graduate coursework, two years of studying for and passing comprehensive exams) reading, researching, writing about, and teaching the great literature of the English language, along with philosophy, history, and critical theory. I got to spend three years — intermittently, I’ll admit — chasing a line of inquiry through four decades of political, cultural, and aesthetic development. I even got to see something I’d written make its way onto my bookshelf. My ways of thinking have been changed radically by the experience, and I’m genuinely grateful for it.

    Any disappointments and frustrations I might have with the current state of the academic profession will always be tempered by my great love for academia, generally. I could make more money, and would likely work on more interesting projects, if I pursued a web design job in the private sector. But much of my present excitement and anticipation stems from the fact that I now know I will likely spend the rest of my career driving each morning to a university I’ve grown to love. (Plus, as a staff member I get to check out books for a full year! It’s the small perks that matter the most, right?)

    Thanks to everyone who has offered guidance and support over the last weeks, months, and years. I do appreciate it.

  • A 10th Anniversary Card

    I met Joanna in the back seat of her roommate’s car. We were driving up to Atlanta for the weekend, and — truth be told — I was pissed off about being there. I had a crush on the roommate, see, and had been thrilled when she offered to give me a ride. I don’t remember much about the drive, actually, except that the roommate kept playing a Spin Doctors CD and flirting with the guy in the passenger’s seat, and that my companion in the back seat spent most of her time listening to classical music on her Walkman. I also noticed, for the first time, just how beautiful Joanna was.

    The next day she grabbed me and asked if I wanted to go for a walk. We were staying in a hotel near the Perimeter Mall, and she was bored senseless by the other people in our group. It was one of those evangelical retreats we were on, full of singing and fellowship’ing and meaningful discussions. Joanna had no patience for any of it. Still doesn’t. I mean, she sings from time to time (when no one’s around to hear), and she’s a devoted friend with a sharp and witty mind, but she has zero tolerance for pretense. None. Makes her crazy.

    So we escaped to the mall, doing for the first time all of those things we’ve done a thousand times since — telling our stories, trying to make each other laugh, carrying on whole conversations in nothing but sarcasm and irony. She made me wait in Banana Republic while she tried on clothes, and at one point a salesman, assuming I was her boyfriend, gestured toward me and said, “She looked great in that suit, didn’t she?” When she came out of the dressing room, I felt nervous for the only time that day. I wanted to tell her that, yes, she did look beautiful — in the suit, I mean — but there was too much at risk. I could cross a line and screw the whole thing up. Instead, she beat me to the punch, made a joke, and put me at ease. The story of my life.

    We got married at the Baptist church in her home town. Baptist, rather than Presbyterian, because it was the only one big enough for all the guests. It was one of those big Southern weddings like you see in the movies, with eight or nine bridesmaids and a reception in the back yard of a yellow Victorian house just a block away from the town square. We were married within walking distance of the tree where Boo Radley would have left surprises for Jem and Scout. (I mean that literally. Harper Lee and her sister Alice sent a nice gift.) It was a perfect day. We all woke up terrified because of the rain — my already-exhausted mother-in-law got on the phone and tracked down the biggest tent this side of Ringling just in case — but by early afternoon the sun was shining and the grass had dried out.

    Ten years later, this is what I most remember about our wedding. I remember Bryan, one of my groomsmen, sighing and telling me, sarcastically, that he hated me after seeing Joanna for the first time in her dress. I remember requesting that everyone remain seated while Joanna came down the aisle so that I could have a clear view. I remember her laughing and crying, laughing and crying as she walked toward me — almost six feet tall in her heels but still a good four inches shorter than her father. I remember shaking hands and smiling for pictures and eating cake and never wanting to be more than a few feet away from “my wife.” I remember the pack of little girls who walked up to her and asked if she was a princess. And I remember the perfect moment of silence that greeted us as we drove away from the reception, alone together for the first time that day.

    The accepted wisdom is that marriage is hard, that it requires “work” from both partners. But that’s never been my experience. (Granted, living with me is no piece of cake.) Life is hard at times — and we’ve experienced the ugliest it has to offer, believe me — but marriage? As far as I’m concerned, Joanna is the only thing that makes the shit and the boredom and the ugliness worthwhile. I’m still not sure why she grabbed me that day or why I’m the one who gets to share life with her. To say I’m grateful wouldn’t come close to expressing the mystery of it all.

    Happy Anniversary, Joanna.

  • A Post About London

    On March 30, Joanna and I will celebrate our 10th anniversary. The idea of it is utterly absurd. Only old people have been married that long. And we’re not old. Certainly not old enough to have shared a home for a full decade. And certainly not old enough to have spent more than a third of our lives together.

    I’ll write more about marriage and anniversaries next week, but for now I’m excited to announce that, in celebration of The Big Ten, Jo and I have booked ourselves a flight to London. We’re not especially spontaneous people, so this is all slightly terrifying. Last week, a friend sent us a link to a British Airways deal, we talked about it for a day or two, and then we made our reservations. Twelve days, eleven nights, taking off three weeks from Friday. Crazy.

    When I was fifteen, my parents took my sister and me on our last big family vacation together before Laura left for college. It was one of those all-inclusive, “see Paris and London in a week” kind of trips. And I loved every second of it, mostly because of the pack of students — all girls from a high school in Syracuse — who were part of our tour group. Seeing London and Paris was great too. It remains my only experience of Europe.

    When we were undergrads, Joanna spent a summer in London and knows the city fairly well. We’ll be spending the first eight nights of our trip in her old stomping grounds — Bloomsbury, directly across the street from the British Museum. The last three nights will be in Maida Vale, three or four miles northwest of there.

    There are many, many advantages to living in East Tennessee, but high culture ain’t one of them. Which is why I like to travel once or twice a year to metropolitan centers. We’ll inevitably see some of the touristy sights, but I’m eager to step off the beaten track.

    So now I’m seeking advice and recommendations . . .

    • Museums — Along with the big ones (the British, the Tate), where do we need to go?
    • Restaurants — They say London has the best Indian food in the world?
    • Theaters — Where can I see hard-to-find films? Can I take a risk on any particular drama companies?
    • Shopping — What are the must-browse book and music stores?
    • Live Music — Any favorite clubs or live venues?
    • Day trips — I’m thinking a day in Oxford would be fun. Other suggestions?

  • Pass Me the Hammer, Norm

    I’m fighting the urge to buy a house down the street. It’s been on the market for several months now, and, after finding pictures of it online, I can see why. It was built in the mid-1970s and stands now as a testament to the design sensibilities of the era: cheap wood paneling, shag carpet, textured wallpaper, and yellowed linoleum by the yard. Potential buyers must run screaming from the place.

    The problem is that I spend way too many afternoons watching shows like Flip This House and Property Ladder. No good can come from it. Every time I drive by that house, I daydream about ripping up those carpets and restoring life to neglected hardwoods, tearing out the paneling and putting up clean drywall, replacing the linoleum with tile, and selling the place for a nice little profit.

    But I won’t. So, instead, I’ll keep making daily trips to House Blogs, my latest discovery and time-waster. It’s a community of blogs that monitor the progress of home restoration projects — kind of like crystal meth for wannabe-fix-it-men like me. My favorite site so far: This Old Crack House.

  • Best Christmas Presents

    Joanna still tells the story of the first time she visited my family at Christmas. Although she had come from an upper middle-class home, she’d never seen so many presents under a tree. In fact, they weren’t just under the tree. They were under and around and near the tree. They were piled in corners on the opposite side of the room from the tree. On more than one occasion I’ve opened a small present to find a note telling me to look in my parents’ closet, where I would find . . . another present. The first time she opened gifts with us, Joanna sat there giggling, delighted and maybe just a wee bit embarrassed by the pile of loot that surrounded each of us. That’s Christmas in the Hughes house.

    I know that story isn’t exactly in the spirit of Christmas charity, but here’s the thing: my family has never been especially wealthy. We open a lot of presents on Christmas morning because my mother loves to give. She does it year-round and in any number of ways, but Christmas is like her Super Bowl. The first or second week of November we start getting notes, asking for ideas. One of these years, we’re all going to respond promptly and she’s going to get to fulfill her Christmas wish: All of the presents will be bought, wrapped, and in the mail by Thanksgiving. She will check off her checklists, take a deep breath, relax for an afternoon, and then, if I know my mother, spend all of December buying more gifts.

    Yesterday we got a sweet Christmas card from my parents. Included in it was a check for each of us and a note warning us to be on the lookout for some packages. I feel guilty about the check because I know that writing it deprives my mother of some of her fun. And I know I’m responsible for the check because I’m so horrible at offering suggestions. My mother, the gift-giver, has gotten a son who’s a terrible gift-getter. Jo and I were talking about this yesterday, and I’ve realized (to my embarrassment) that I’m not good at getting gifts because I take so much pleasure from shopping. I like to browse and to research and to make informed decisions. Like, I’m actually really excited about the check because I know I can go to the Disc Exchange and spend a guilt-free evening hunting for more gap-fillers. I wish, for my mother’s sake, that I could somehow wrap up that experience, put it under our tree, and open it in front of her.

    And so amid the mad dash of last-week Christmas shopping, here are . . .

    The Five Best Christmas Presents I Ever Found Under the Tree

    1. Millennium Falcon — An easy #1. Fully assembled by Santa (dad).
    2. Legos, Legos, Legos — I have too much pride to admit how old I was when I stopped getting legos for Christmas.
    3. Daisy pump-action BB gun — A Christmas Story has made it a cliche, but . . .
    4. Marvel Variety Pack — In ’83 or ’84 I got a pack of twenty or so Marvel comic books. For the next three years, all of my allowance found its way to the register at Twilight Zone comics in downtown Annapolis.

    5. My boots — Eight or nine years ago, my mother surprised me with a pair of Timberland boots. I say “surprised” because I’d never mentioned wanting a pair, nor had the thought ever really occurred to me. So, for the record, let me now state that THESE ARE THE GREATEST BOOTS EVER! If you see me any time between, say, November 1 and March 1, chances are I’ll be wearing them. I bet I’ve worn them for at least 10,000 hours.

  • Now in Widescreen

    Screen capture of Long Pauses Version 8

    Welcome to Long Pauses (version 8.0). Consider this redesign a usability study. The centered, two-column blog format has become the industry standard, so to speak, but I’m not sure if it best mirrors how I actually interact with this and other sites. I seldom click through the long list of links (scroll, scroll, scroll) on other blogs, for example, but I click through my own collection of “daily reads,” um, daily, and so I wonder if having them collected in one spot, out of the way of the main blog content, will positively affect the user experience.

    I’ve also decided to publish only the most recent post on my front page. I like the idea of having a single white page to write on. It better reflects my own conception of Long Pauses, which should be considered a journal or a diary, a workspace for immediate reflection and experimentation. (Each time I redesign Long Pauses, I spend the first two hours convincing myself that graphics, colors, and columns aren’t just distractions from what really matters — the words. But then the wannabe-designer in me takes over.) To aid navigation, I’ve created a drop-down menu in the content area that will direct you to any of the ten preceding posts.

    I suspect that one downside of the redesign will be a slight reduction in the number of reader comments. Once a post drops from the front page, readers will be less likely, I assume, to continue old conversations. Or maybe not. I’m eager to find out how/if the interactions change. For what it’s worth, I’ve turned on email notifications for the first time, so I’ll always know when someone has posted in the archives. I promise to do my best to respond.

    One thing that bothers me about the redesign, though, is that it includes a simple, three-column table, a major no-no in CSS design. It’s there for one reason: Internet Explorer for Windows, which is still the browser of choice for most Long Pauses readers and which can’t seem to solve its floating div problem. I tried every trick in the book, but couldn’t make it work to my satisfaction. Any CSS guru who wants to tweak my code will forever have my gratitude.

    I just looked at the redesign for the first time on our office G5 with a 30-inch Cinema Display. I like it. Feedback, as always, is greatly appreciated.

  • Happy Thanksgiving

    Happy Thanksgiving

    This is probably the best photo I’ve ever taken. Last year we invited over for Thanksgiving dinner some of the friends we’ve made through our English as a Second Language class. Joanna and I provided the turkey, mashed potatoes, corn bread, butter beans, and a couple bottles of wine; they brought the dumplings, seaweed wraps, ceviche, and shrimp fried rice. I love that this photo managed to capture all fourteen of our guests (plus the top of Jo’s head at the bottom of the frame), and I still enjoy looking at the expressions on their faces.

    We’re still not sure exactly how many we’ll have tomorrow. At least thirteen, maybe as many as seventeen. The pumpkin pies (my first) just came out of the oven and look and smell like they’re supposed to. Awesome.

    Happy Thanksgiving.

  • Catching Up

    It’s been way too long since I’ve rambled about the banal details of my day-to-day life.

    Last Friday, five minutes or so after finishing my paper, I hopped in the car and drove to Atlanta for the SAMLA conference. There’s nothing like an opening-night reception to remind me of just how little I’ve evolved socially since the 7th grade, when I would spend both hours of every Friday-afternoon, middle-school dance with my back pressed against a wall, drinking punch and watching Motley Crue and Cyndi Lauper videos on the front-projection TV. Fortunately, conference receptions come with free drink tickets, so that’s something. Also, the reception was held in the same room as the bookdealer displays, which was nice. If I happen to make my way to a party at your house some night, and if you happen to lose sight of me, chances are I’ll be found standing alone in front of your bookshelf and/or CD/DVD collection. Browsing. Given a choice between thumbing through your books or making small talk in a room full of strangers, I’ll take the books. Every. Time.

    While sipping my second glass of wine, I did my best to affect the look of someone waiting for that old friend I had arranged to meet — you know, staring intently across the room, even rocking forward onto my toes from time to time for a better vantage — but apparently I failed miserably. Midway through my glass, a young woman made a beeline for me, introduced herself, and told me she was alone and had decided to talk to me because I was so obviously also alone. And thank god she did. I’m not socially inept. I pride myself, in fact, on being a decent conversationalist. Not shy, but introverted. A one-on-one conversation, instigated by the other person — that’s where I shine. We chatted for about twenty minutes, then I left to grab some dinner at the Thai place connected to the hotel. My pad thai, by the way, smelled like a horse stall. This is the second time I’ve ordered pad thai while attending a conference (the other was in Boulder) and received a meal that reeked of hay and horse. Am I missing something?

    The conference panel was a lot of fun. Chuck paired my paper on In the Bathtub of the World with a presentation by two faculty members at a small liberal arts college, where a group of in-coming freshmen had recently made a documentary about their transition to college life. The presenters were especially interested in the “real” lives of people coming of age in an era of total media saturation, and they seemed to equate the power of autobiographical storytelling with “agency.” Their presentation complimented mine well, I think, and led to a thoughtful and friendly discussion afterwards.

    By the time I got home Saturday afternoon, Joanna had already left on a short trip to Nashville, leaving me bored and alone with the house to myself. Remember what I was just saying about my propensity for browsing through shelves? Yeah, I spent almost the entire evening at the local new/used indie music store, quite literally browsing through their entire inventory. I picked up three CDs:

    Tiny Cities by Sun Kil Moon — Okay, it wasn’t until I got home that I discovered that this is a collection of Modest Mouse covers. Not that it would have mattered much. At this point, Mark Kozelek could put out an album of improvised readings from the phone book and I’d buy it. If I could sing like that, I’d never talk.

    Goo by Sonic Youth — I first bought Goo a week or two after it was released in 1990. I bought it then for two reasons: 1. David Fricke gave it a 4-star review in Rolling Stone, and from roughly 1987-1992 I shaped my taste by reading every issue of Rolling Stone from cover to cover. 2. Late one night I caught the video for “Kool Thing” on MTV (can you imagine?). I just sat there for four minutes and six seconds trying to make sense of what I was seeing and hearing. I’m not sure when I sold my copy of Goo, though I suspect it was probably some day in 1993 or 1994, when I, like, really needed that new Widespread Panic album. Yep. Anyway, I’ve been meaning to rebuy Goo ever since I watched Irma Vep and had my mind blown again, this time by “Tunic (Song for Karen).” Sunday night, as soon as Joanna got home, I took her out to dinner just so we could drive around town listening to “Tunic” really loud.

    (Edit: I just found a nice collection of photos of Sonic Youth and Cat Power. Kim Gordon and Chan Marshall. Be still my beating heart. Oh, and also new videos from Chan and Bonny ‘Prince’ Billy — both from Truckstop Media.)

    Blow Up (Original Soundtrack) by Herbie Hancock (also featuring The Yardbirds and Tomorrow) — What a find! And for only $7.99! This album is top-to-bottom great, but “The Naked Camera” is two or three steps beyond great. After Joanna’s parents passed away last year, we bought this absurd house in a community where we’ve lowered the average age by a good decade or two. In January we’ll be hosting a “gourmet club” party, and I’m already working on the 5-CD mix of music that will be shuffling randomly throughout the evening. Most of Blow Up will make it. “The Naked Camera” might be side 1, track 1.

    Let’s see. What else?

    Yesterday my car got booted by the fascists from a local wrecker service. They extorted $75 from me despite the fact that I had, as a matter of principle, paid my $3 for all-day parking. The thieving bastards. I don’t know how they sleep at night.

    Oh, and we’ve officially launched the website for the up-coming NEXUS conference, hosted by UT’s Graduate Students in English. I have to say I’m rather proud of the site design. If you shuffle through all of the title images, you might notice I’ve dropped in an allusion to my dissertation: the Angel Bethesda statue that features prominently in Angels in America. The topic this year is “Religion and Nation,” and the committee has scored a keynote address from John D. Caputo. Academics out there, be sure to check out the call for papers. (Hey, The Weblog gang, I’m talking to you.)

  • One of Those Political Posts

    A few days ago I watched the episode of The West Wing in which President Bartlet is inaugurated for his second term in office, and it reminded me of something I hadn’t thought about in years. On January 20, 2001, I was at a hotel in Pigeon Forge, TN, attending a retreat with other men from my church. I remember the date because that morning, during one of the small-group sessions, someone interrupted to turn on a TV. We all watched as Bush took the oath of office. Several men in the room began to pray. Others smiled and offered “Hallelujah”s. I muttered under my breath, “Thank God. Finally an end to eight years of peace and prosperity,” and my friend poked me in the ribs. I was the “liberal” of our group. He’d learned to expect and even appreciate my snark.

    In the years since, I’ve come to feel increasingly alienated from evangelical culture, and politics is an important reason. I used to write about this a lot more on Long Pauses, but I grew tired of my own voice and my own hypocrisies. Too much finger-pointing. Plus, the results of the 2004 election broke my heart. I’ve felt more than a bit defeated and hopelessly cynical ever since. It didn’t help when, a few months ago, I ran into one of those old friends and noticed the “W: Still the President” sticker on the back window of his car. I just don’t get it.

    Bush was elected on the promise of restoring “honor and dignity” to the White House, which, let’s face it, wasn’t an unappealing idea. I was as disgusted as anyone by Clinton’s personal behavior, by the 24-hour media shitstorm, and by the very real political fallout. So I wasn’t all surprised when Bush’s call to do away with the lying and the scandals that had disgraced the last few years of Clinton’s second term struck a chord with most evangelicals I know, particularly because that call was coming from someone who spoke their language, who had a bona-fide Christian testimony, and who promised to protect the “sanctity of human life.” (That Bush had an unimpressive pre-Presidency track record when it came to eliminating scandal was a point I soon gave up arguing with friends who supported him.)

    I’ve always had a begrudging respect for the political skills of the Bush administration. They play the game so well. They say they’re fiscal conservatives, then, with a Republican Congress in their back pocket, they explode the size of the federal government and deficit. “Support me on my big issues,” he seems to have promised House and Senate leaders, “and I won’t even threaten to veto a spending bill.” And he hasn’t. Not surprisingly, the amount of pork has more than tripled under his watch.

    Congress was more than willing to return the favor when Bush asked them for the right to declare war. With one eye on their home states and the upcoming midterm elections, they grabbed his cooked intelligence with both hands, hoisted it up onto the stump, and sounded a few more cheers for fear-mongering. “Mushroom cloud, you say? Mushroom cloud! We must do something! And do it today!” To hell with his campaign promise to never “nation-build.” Bush and his boys wanted this war, wanted to reshape the Middle East, wanted to re-engage America’s permanent war economy, and, boy, if you got in their way — if you questioned their motives or diverted from the War on Terror narrative they were writing — boy, you were fucked.

    Even though today’s announcement had been predicted for most of the week, I was still stunned when the indictments were read. I had to watch for five or ten minutes before I could accept what was happening. I’m not crazy. What a sad and pathetic week in the life of a sad and pathetic presidency.

  • Still Thinking Randomly

    Right now, I’m supposed to be at the Coeur D’Alene resort in Idaho, chairing a panel on Literature and Religion at the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association conference. But I’m not. I’m in Knoxville, where, by the way, it’s in the mid-80s, which is way too hot for mid-October, for real. I had to cancel the panel because all four of my panelists were forced to withdraw due to cuts in departmental travel budgets. All four! If you’re not in academia, I’m sure you don’t care. But this is a fairly serious trend, I think.

    Instead, I’m working on another conference paper — this one to be delivered next month in Atlanta, which is an easy drive, and thank God for that. I’m not sure yet exactly what I’m going to say in my paper, but the good news is that it’s forcing me to read Sculpting in Time for the first time in years, and it’s also given me an excuse to play more with this idea of theorizing boredom. On several readers’ recommendations, I just checked out Leo Charney’s Empty Moments, along with some Bazin stuff I’ve been meaning to read. The paper is about Caveh Zahedi, more or less. I think.

  • Random Thoughts

    • I’m about one-third of the way through Season 4 of The West Wing, which makes me sad for two reasons: first, because I’m soon going to have to say goodbye to Sam; and, second, because I only have about 15 more Sorkin-scripted episodes to go. I still haven’t decided if I’m going to watch the other seasons.
    • Heavens be praised! West Knoxville has a new Thai/Vietnamese restaurant, and it’s damn good. In the weeks leading up to TIFF, I was almost as excited by the prospect of eating great pad thai as I was watching films. Little Bangkok is just as good and it’s only three miles from my house.
    • And while on the subject of food, last night I dreamt I was working for George W. Bush — not in the White House but at some hole-in-the-wall business in Texas. In my dream, he made me go buy burritos for the whole staff, and he was a real dick about it.
    • The receptionist at the end of the hall was just playing Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” on her radio. Now I’m useless for the rest of the day.
    • A few years ago, some friends and I threw a surprise party for Joanna. The coolest present she got was a life-sized cardboard cutout of Legolas — the perfect addition to our Orlando Bloom-themed party, which was all about pirates and elves and horses and my then-31-year-old wife’s Peter Pan syndrome. Anyway, our kitten Claire recently discovered Legolas and seems to think he’s a god of some sort. (Joanna also thinks he’s a god, but that’s neither here nor there.) We know this because Claire has developed a habit of stealing away large wads of toilet paper and leaving them as an offering at Legolas’s feet. It’s incredibly cute and pathetic all at once — again, kind of like Joanna.

  • A Girl and a Gun

    It is, I concede, time to pull myself out of my post-election funk and face up to the fact that I harbor the richest contempt for something like sixty million of my fellow citizens. (How’s that for healing?)

    That is how George Fasel began his first post at A Girl and a Gun. He became one of my Daily Reads a month or two later. Like I wrote in the comments there, as saddened as I am to hear of George’s passing, I’m also feeling strangely inspired and encouraged by his example. He and I exchanged a few notes over the past few months, and I always enjoyed his curiosity, humor, and generosity of spirit. I had no idea he’d been a writer, historian, professor, film critic, and PR executive. I didn’t know he was 67 years old (in my imagination, every Blogger is my age, give or take), and I certainly didn’t know he was fighting cancer. What a loss.

  • Pile

    I’m not a slob. Really. Which is why I grabbed my camera this morning. I wish I could say that I had doctored this photo or had carefully arranged my bedside table for dramatic effect, but this is what I woke up to. Sad but true.

    A brief catalog of items:

    • Alarm clock, lamp, mostly-empty bottle of water, several mechanical pencils (I like mechanical pencils), a bag of Sun Chips, and one dime. Oh, and a remote control. My only justification for having a bag of chips in the bedroom is this: Joanna has been recovering from a bit of a health scare this week, so we’ve spent a lot of time in bed, watching the first season of The Muppet Show on DVD. And sometimes a guy just needs some chips.
    • The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby — A free gift with my birthday-present subscription to The Believer. Things I’ve learned from the first two essays: Hornby named his son Lowell in honor of Lowell George, so apparently I’m not alone in thinking Little Feat is the great, unsung American rock band; Hay-on-Wye, “a weird town on the border of England and Wales that consists almost entirely of secondhand bookshops,” should be on our list of destinations when Jo and I go to England next summer; and, like Hornby, I am also horrible at remembering details (and even whole plots) from the books I’ve read — “I can’t tell you how depressing this is.”
    • Claire Denis by Judith Mayne, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye by Andrew Robinson, and a Summer 2005 Film Program from the National Gallery of Art — A week or so ago, during a trip to Maryland, I caught a screening of Pather Panchali at the NGA. Nearly everyone in the standing-room-only crowd seemed to enjoy themselves as much as I did — everyone, that is, except for the man directly to my right, who apparently thought a dark, air conditioned room would be a fine place for a nap. Anyway, I picked up both books at the giftshop in the underground walkway between the east and west wings of the Gallery.
    • The Public Burning by Robert Coover and Loon Lake by E.L. Doctorow — I finished rereading The Public Burning yesterday. It and Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel are the focus of my next chapter, so these are both work-related, I guess. Coover’s novel is a monster — easily my favorite of the postmodern “doorstop” novels (as my friend Ethan once described Infinite Jest). I started Loon Lake a few weeks ago, got about thirty pages in, and lost interest.
    • Libra and The Body Artist (book on tape) by Don DeLillo — DeLillo has written several of my favorite novels (Underworld, White Noise, Americana, The Body Artist), which is why it’s so odd when one leaves me cold. I’m a third of the way through Libra, a (meta)fictional account of the Kennedy assassination, and it’s just not doing anything for me. I had the same lukewarm response to Mao II and Cosmopolis.
    • Arthur Miller: A Critical Study by Christopher Bigsby — I’ve said enough already about this one.
    • And on the bottom shelf: Catalogs from TIFF 2004 and SFIFF 2005, America: The Book, and an old issue of Home Theater magazine.

    Anyone else got a pile?

  • An Explanation

    The reason I haven’t been posting lately is … well … it’s because, apparently, I’m getting dumber. Everything I write — even simple notes and emails — sounds unbelievably obvious and unnecessary to my ears. I chalk it up to some combination of the following:

    • The Heat — I live in the South (sort of) and it’s late-July, so I know it’s supposed to be hot, but good lord, I would love to make it through one day without changing my shirt. How am I supposed to write when I could be drinking beer IN THE POOL?
    • Home Renovations — We are now entering, like, month SIX in our roof, kitchen, and laundry room-a-go-go, and the smell of drywall dust is getting to me. Actually, it’s not so much the smell as the lung-lining misery of it all. Apparently, sneezing is your body’s way of saying, “I hate you.”
    • Performance Anxiety — There’s nothing like sitting down to edit a chapter of your dissertation only to discover that you have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ORIGINAL to say about, oh, about anything, really. Makes a guy want to jump right onto the Internets and prove his stupity to an even larger audience.
    • Anomie — In general.

    And what’s especially maddening is that I actually have four posts in the works — four posts that have the potential to be pretty darn interesting, each and every one. There’s the post about Joe Pernice, The Smiths, homophobia, and the weeks I spent at an evangelical summer camp. There’s the one about that book-on-tape version of Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist (read by Laurie Anderson!) that I picked up for $6 at Books-A-Million and that only confirms my deep, deep love of that strange little book. There’s the one about “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” and how Sufjan Stevens has written a parable that rivals the good Samaritan. And, finally, there’s the second installment of my Great Films thread, wherein I talk about how great the last 50 minutes of Paris, Texas are and about how Some Like It Hot would probably be a lot funnier if it weren’t so depressing.

    I may or may not ever get around to writing any of these.

  • In Praise of Rob Lowe

    Last night I finished watching the second season of The West Wing, and I’ve come to the conclusion that Rob Lowe (with Aaron Sorkin’s help, obviously) turned Sam Seaborn into one of the greatest television characters ever. There’s an episode near the end of season 2 in which Sam discovers that his father has kept “another woman” for going-on thirty years; meanwhile, in typical Sorkin fashion, Sam’s hurt and disillusionment play out onscreen in a separate story involving a former victim of McCarthy-era hysteria who Sam once idolized and who Sam discovers, much to his regret, was, in fact, a traitor. What so impressed me about the episode is that, even during the final, most emotionally-rich scenes, Lowe never slips into scene-stealing TV actor mode. He never for a second drops Seaborn’s wide-eyed, choke-back-your-emotions-at-all-costs demeanor. Sam consistently answers complicated questions with “yeah” or “okay,” but always manages to invest the words with very particular emotions. It’s great writing and great acting.

  • Speculate Away

    So I assume you’ve all heard that several former American hostages are claiming that the president-elect of Iran was one of their captors in 1979. Well my wife, who is a forensic artist, got a call today from a booking agent at Fox News, who invited her to appear as a talking head on one of their live shows, using her expertise to prove or disprove the claims.

    Isn’t that a riot? After considering it for an hour or two, she politely declined their offer. We looked at the then/now photos and decided that the only claim she could honestly make is, “There is nothing in these photos that would confirm without a doubt that these are not photos of the same man.” But we figured that the nuances of any sentence that employed a double-negative construction would be lost in the white noise of cable news. Isn’t it amazing, though, that a news producer would think a Google search and a pre-interview phone call would be enough to establish someone as a credible source?

    Reminds me of a clip I saw on the Daily Show a week or two ago. During their coverage of the Michael Jackson trial (I think), the host of a show on Fox News discovered that some story was about to break but he had no details. He then turned to the other members of his panel and said, “Well, we don’t know what’s happening exactly, but it must be big. Speculate away!” As Jon Stewart says, cable news has now officially become a bunch of guys with a camera, talking.

    I don’t know what I’m more proud of: that Jo was asked or that she declined the offer.

  • Just a Question

    Every day, it seems, the NY Times online leads with a headline like, “Suicide Attack Kills at Least 22 in Iraqi City of Kirkuk.” Many of us who opposed the war did so, in part, because we feared that destabilizing Iraq would provoke a civil war that would prove a humanitarian crisis worse than even Saddam’s regime. I wonder how American sentiment toward our role in Iraq would change if we admitted that the civil war has already begun?

  • Miscellaneous Whatnots

    Our coffeemaker broke. I can hear it in the next room, panting and wheezing, making all of the noises that coffeemakers are supposed to make while percolating. But there’s no drip. And I’m getting a headache. Damn caffeine addiction. And I should add that this is a new coffeemaker, a replacement for the $10 Mr. Coffee machine that reliably dripped for more than a decade. We bought the new coffeemaker on a whim. That’ll show us. Never walk through the kitchen appliance aisle at Target when you’re craving coffee and have a credit card. This is one of those days when I really hate living in the ‘burbs. Ah, to be able to walk a block to the corner coffee shop.

    En lieu of, you know, content, here are a smattering of things that I enjoyed reading this week:

    From Jen Lemen’s interview with Karen Neudorf:

    In strange times, people may need to use different words to breathe new meaning into something. And sometimes people have to live the meaning back into old words in order to make them breathe again. ‘Magazine’ is a word, an idea that the Beyond community of readers and contributors are trying to live new again. The magazine format is an amazing way to be collaborative and imaginative and engaging — all in an incredibly portable package. And creating objects, deliciously tactile objects that can get lost in the world — behind couches, in coffeeshops, left lingering in odd places — is an important part of the way art surprises and finds us.

    From Girish’s remembrances of childhood:

    Grandpa traveled a lot, and we saw little of him. Once, when I was five, he took us out to the ritziest restaurant in town. When he asked Papaji what he’d like to order, I blithely interjected, as my parents watched in horror: “Beer!” My grandfather’s eyes narrowed, he fell silent, and it is said that he was always a little suspicious of poor, abstinent, clean-living Papaji from then on.

    From the San Francisco’s Chronicle’s coverage of Roxanne Messina Captor’s decision to “step down” as director of the SF film festival. This paragraph could run unedited, I think, in The Onion:

    She was hired in 2001 on the strength of her Hollywood connections. Interviewing for the job, her first running a film festival, Messina Captor stressed her experience as TV producer, director of the feature “A Clean Kill” and dancer in the movies “Xanadu” and “One From the Heart.” The latter was directed by Francis Ford Coppola, whom Messina Captor referred to at the festival dinner as “my mentor,” although she was unable to get him to any recent festival events.

  • Things To Do Instead of Blogging

    Remodel your guest bathroom. Strip wallpaper. Apply three coats of joint compound, sanding between each coat. Roll on a coat or two of primer, then two coats of paint. Paint the trim. Pull out the old toilet, countertop, and sink. Replace all of the plumbing and all of the fixtures. Sand down the old cabinet, then prime and paint. Ideally, your wife will do the hardest parts, particularly the parts that require patience and attention to detail.

    Clean out the garage. You’ve been in that house for almost a year now. Isn’t it time to get at least one of the cars in the garage? Plus, there’s a really good chance that you’ll be bringing more stuff home after your next trip to Alabama.

    Reformat your hard drive. Be sure to do it three times because you’re an idiot. Spend four hours reloading software. F—ing viruses.

    Run. A Lot. Like, 25-30 miles a week. But first get a new pair of Asics Cumulus because Nike really screwed up the Pegasus with that redesign, and, I mean, you’ve got enough knee problems, right?

    Get that grant project finished. I know it’s boring. I know it feels like work. But you’ve got $3000 coming to you, and that laptop won’t pay for itself.

  • Selling My Soul to Blogger

    Welcome to Long Pauses version 7.0. For those of you who were kind enough to critique a rough draft of this redesign and are wondering why the hell it doesn’t look like what you saw, well, that was version 6.0, which I decided, after a two week break, that I hated. It was kind of you to not crush my spirit by saying that you hated it as well.

    Warning: The rest of this post will be filled with dork-speak. People who blog are, by their nature, archivists, and posts like this serve to capture a significant (relatively speaking, of course) moment of development. I found several such pages while digging through the archives and enjoyed revisiting them.

    The Outside

    The large image at the top of the page is a still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, my favorite film and the film from which I also grabbed the running woman that has, in some sense, served as a logo for the site. I’ll be changing the image frequently, using stills from whatever I’m watching to extend the long pauses metaphor. I got the idea after staring and staring and staring at that image of Lynn Carlin’s face.

    How do you like that image link? It is a hard-won compromise, and I’m really pleased with it. I wanted to remove as much of the clutter as possible from the main content area, while also keeping screen captures that reinforce subject matter. As time allows, I will go back to my old film responses—those that used to be supplemented by small stills—and add context-sensitive pop-ups.

    The images link is controlled by my Cascading Style Sheet, which is a thing of beauty. The entire site is now built from CSS—no more nested tables, no more Dreamweaver templates, just a single Blogger file and a single styles page. I would guess that, in the process, I have eliminated 10,000 lines of code, and the entire site validates, so no more worrying about cross-platform compatibility.

    I’ve also customized Google’s search tool, which is a pretty efficient way to search Long Pauses. I’ll use it even if no one else does.

    The Inside

    Redesigning the interface took less than a day. The hard part was feeding hundreds of pages of old content into Blogger. But now that the work is done, there are several benefits. Site management is the big one. Commenting is the other. Except for the front index, every single page in Long Pauses now allows commenting. Been looking for an opportunity to mock the horrible writing in some of my earliest film responses? Now’s your chance.

    I toyed with Moveable Type for a while and also considered switching over to Blogger’s internal commenting tool, but I decided to stick it out with the Blogger and HaloScan combo. Mostly I just didn’t want to sacrifice the old comments, which are as essential to the spirit of this site as anything I’ve written.

    Please let me know if you run into anything that looks broken. Thanks.

  • Temporary Hiatus

    Long Pauses is going on a temporary hiatus. Someday I might write honestly here about everything my family and I have endured over the past twelve months. Doing so now would be a mistake. The emotions are still too raw. Over the next two weeks, one more phase of our trial will be brought to an end, but, unfortunately, we have to get through the next two weeks first. Long Pauses has been a much-needed retreat for me this year, and I genuinely appreciate the small community that has gathered here. If you’re of the praying, thinking, good-vibes-sending variety, we would appreciate your prayers, thoughts, and good vibes.

    Thanks.

  • Home Again, Home Again, Jiggedy-Jigg

    I’m sleepy. Since December 23rd, Joanna and I have been home for three days, the rest of our time being spent carving a cross-section through the states, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. A mostly chronological catalog of cities in which we have recently slept, eaten, and/or pumped gas: Lexington, KY; Dayton, OH; Monroe, MI; Ann Arbor, MI; Vandalia, OH; Chattanooga, TN; Birmingham, AL; Knoxville, TN; Purvis, MS; Baton Rouge, LA; New Orleans, LA; Mobile, AL; Atmore, AL; Monroeville, AL; Montgomery, AL. The high temperature was somewhere in the mid-70s, the low was around 7. We got stuck in 20 inches of snow in Dayton and ate beignets at Cafe du Monde. All in all, a good but exhausting couple of weeks.

    Except for a couple comics I borrowed from a friend, I didn’t get a lick of reading done, and I only saw one film, A Life Aquatic, which the more I think about, the more I hate. So pretty to look at. So devoid of life.

  • Confidence Man

    A new poll reveals that 70 percent of Americans now believe that any gains we’ve made in Iraq have come at an “unacceptable” cost, and 56 percent now believe the conflict was “not worth fighting.” Poll numbers are poll numbers, of course, but these seem significant if only because they suggest an interesting trend. A real majority now question the validity of the policy that most clearly defines the Bush administration. (And if Bush can call his margin of victory a “mandate,” then I can call 56 percent a “real majority.”)

    Also headlining the front page of The Washington Post website are breaking reports of 22 dead in an attack on a U.S. base, Dana Milbank’s coverage of Bush’s elusive tactics at yesterday’s press conference, and a report of Bush’s confidence in his Iraq policy. What interests me is the juxtaposition of stories — the images of death and destruction jutted up against Bush’s “confidence.” Reminds me of another president.

    Back in January, after reading Jeffrey Alexander’s The Meanings of Social Life, I predicted to a co-worker that the 2004 election would be a repeat of ’72, when Nixon won re-election with 60% of the popular vote despite the Watergate scandal. From my response to Alexander’s book:

    In November 1972, just four months after the Watergate break-in, 84% of voters claimed that the scandal did not influence their decision on election night. Two years later, the event had taken on such symbolic significance that Nixon was forced to resign. “Watergate could not, as the French might say, tell itself. It had to be told by society; it was, to use Durkeim’s famous phrase, a social fact. It was the context of Watergate that had changed, not so much the raw empirical data themselves” (156). In his thoughtful analysis, Alexander explains how Watergate, as a symbol, came to transcend the world of petty politics and to touch upon fundamental moral concerns, thus polluting the executive office with the counterdemocratic code. This process was greatly influenced by the ritualizing experience of the televised hearings and by the release of Nixon’s taped conversations. “By his words and recorded actions,” Alexander writes, “he had polluted the very tenets that the entire Watergate process had revivified: the sacredness of truth and the image of America as an inclusive, tolerant community” (169).

    As an example of how the Watergate context had changed, Alexander reminds us of Nixon’s infamous line, “I am not a crook.” In ’72 those words would have comforted Americans and reinforced their sacred faith in the presidency; by ’74, after the tapes and after the hearings, Nixon’s utterance of the word “crook” only reminded voters of their growing suspicions. Nixon had lost control of his rhetoric.

    I was mostly joking when I mentioned all of this to my co-worker a year ago, but I’m starting to wonder if there might be some truth to it. In the last month, Bush has given America’s highest civilian honor to George Tenet, the man who most on the right scapegoated for his “slam dunk” on Iraq intelligence. He’s nominated a petty criminal for the nation’s top security position. And he’s repeatedly emphasized his support of Donald Rumsfeld. I think we’re reaching a point when Bush’s statement of “confidence” will be read quite differently from how it’s intended.

  • Popular Frontiers

    If we’re thinking in terms of travel metaphors, podcasting is like teleportation. Here, then there. Nothing in the middle, no journey, nothing to see along the way–just the destination. The radio is like taking a walk through a city or across a country. Static is the place where there isn’t much–abandoned buildings, fog, cotton fields forever–but the absence has a presence. There’s sound in the silence, like the wheel grind and tape hiss in a Mountain Goats song. You might stumble across something mysterious or horrifying or unknowable along the way: a murder, a circus, a stabbin’ hobo, a funeral, a church service, a demagogue: something that has the possibility of taking you out of yourself and making you experience the world in a new way rather than something that simply validates and affirms the perspective you already have. There is no danger that you’d ever have a confrontation with something as weird and alien as The Conet Project in a podcast.

    I’d love to think I’m at least partly to blame for one of my new daily reads, Popular Frontiers.

  • Right Back Atya

    Right Back Atya

    Karen Hughes will, I assume, deny that this is the real President Bush.

  • Some Kind of Perspective

    For the last few months, during my weekly English as a Second Language classes, I’ve been teaching stories from The Best American Short Stories of the Century, a better-than-average collection edited by John Updike. The stories give us an excuse to discover new vocabulary and American idioms together, but much more importantly, they offer context. We began the semester with Benjamin Rosenblatt’s “Zelig” and talked about the turn-of-the-century immigrant experience. We read E. B. White’s “The Second Tree from the Corner” and discussed where the things of true value might be found in our lives. We read Mary Ladd Gavell’s “The Rotifer” and debated whether or not any of us truly has the power to effect positive change in another’s life. Not surprisingly, I had much more to learn from my students than they from me.

    Last night we discussed James Alan McPherson’s “Gold Coast,” a story about an interracial couple set in Boston during the late-1960s. I began the night by drawing some comparisons between the America of 1968 and our current climate. “Because of the civil rights movement and President Johnson’s escalation of our military involvement in Vietnam,” I told them, “many Americans really wanted change.” I told them a bit about the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that year and about the riots that broke out in so many urban areas. I reminded them of the assasinations and the rise of groups like the Black Panthers, and, because the story addressed the topic directly, we talked a bit about hippies and “limousine liberals.” And I told them about how Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey by nearly a million votes, even though 56% of the population voted against him. “America was deeply divided,” I told them. “Kind of like now.”

    And then one of my Mexican students reminded us of the 1968 Olympics that were held in Mexico City, where only ten days before the games opened 267 students were gunned down and more than 1,000 were wounded during a protest at the Plaza of Three Cultures. And then two of my South Korean students told us of their government’s secret decision to send troops to Vietnam despite the public’s protest against such a move. And then one of my Chinese students, a remarkable young woman who exudes joy like no one I’ve ever known, said, “Yes. The same in China. During the Cultural Revolution.”