I’ve come late to mysteries, but this is the summer I seem to have discovered them, in particular, mysteries in translation. It’s partially because Chuck buys a lot of books at yard sales and discovered these two guys — one of the things we have in common is houses full of books. We’re both also really happy not to turn the TV on in the evenings, and to read books. It’s been lovely, especially since I feel like I’m still sort of in recovery, and that I’m rebuilding my stores of energy for whatever is going to come next. So…
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So far, so good on the unemployment thing. While it’s never ideal to be the one voted off the island, I find I don’t miss the job at all — I miss the people I worked with, but I don’t miss being chained to my desk from eight in the morning until six at night; I don’t miss the anxiety of thinking someone might send you an instant message while you were getting a cup of tea and then decide you’re slacking; I don’t miss being treated as an incompetent by my manager, and I’m beginning to get over the…
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Well, it finally happened — the layoff genie landed on my shoulder last Thursday. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, however, it was quite a shock to log in for that meeting and see an unfamiliar name on the call — an HR person. Nine years I’ve been at that job, and frankly, the past several have been pretty unpleasant. But it was a good job in a bad economy, and so I stuck it out until they decided that they don’t need editors any more, or they don’t like remote workers, or whatever corporate algebra goes into deciding who to vote…
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Craig and I survived the PhD program at the University of Utah together — it was a terrible time for me, a program that wasn’t a good fit, and in general, an experience that taught me that academia wasn’t a good habitat for me. But Craig, Craig was maddening, a provacateur by nature, but he was also one of the truly kind people I met at Utah. His loss, which is chronicled here at the Salt Lake Tribune, is immense. He was an enormous talent, a poet just hitting his stride. There’s a lovely rememberence here by his friend Michael…
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So, my new sweetheart (who needs a blog name, the Carpenter?) hasn’t had cable these past few years, and isn’t really a tv person. But because he tends to work late, and we eat dinner late, neither of us has the energy for a whole movie. But it’s too early to go to bed, and so I’ve discovered the wonderful world of TV series on DVD. The Carpenter has never seen the Sopranos, or Deadwood, or Rome, or even Planet Earth — all of which are now rotating through my Netflix queue. Can I tell you how much fun it…
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Things have been a little crazy — work is work, life is good and I’m sort of just enjoying living it without the self-consciousness of blogging. But there are a few things I’ve been meaning to link to — First off — my friend Craig Arnold, who I went to grad school with at Utah, is missing in Japan. He was researching volcanoes and went missing last week. He’s an award-winning poet (author of Shells and Made Flesh, teaches at the University of Wyoming, and has a teenaged son. It’s all very upsetting — if any of you would like…
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FaceBook is a funny thing — I have deeply mixed feelings about it although I do like being in a sort of everyday casual contact with lots of old friends. On Saturday, when I was in between garden chores, I checked in to see what was happening and my old friend Sean O’Grady had posted Jim Houston’s obituary in the New York Times. I had no idea he’d been ill, and was just shocked that he’s gone. Jim was a tall, gentle man who you could count on to give you a true reading of your work. The very first…
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Way back in my youth I worked in New York for a company that repackaged magazine material into cookbooks — our biggest client was Gourmet Magazine. So I’ve watched with great interest as Ruth Reichel has taken that hoary old magazine, run by women from the suburbs who at least in the late ’80 were still known to come to work in plaid skirts and knee socks (knee socks! I remember my shock that grown women would go out dressed like old girls — oh, and in blouses with those big floppy bows that women wore in the ’80s in…
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There’s a vigorous and healthy debate going on in the blogosphere about school lunch. Congress is gearing up to revise the Child Nutrition and WIC act, which includes the school lunch program, and the forces of Hope and Change have ideas. (Click through to the actual essays linked, my summaries necessarily oversimplify.) Alice Waters started the debate on the NY Times Op-Ed page, advocating that we double the lunch subsidy from $2.17 to $5.00. She also, no surprise, wants a program that works with farmers to get organic local produce into schools, and advocates rebuilding school kitchens. This suggestion, particularly…
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As I noted, I sat outside and read this weekend. Tinkers by Paul Harding — months ago my friend Anna told me about this subscription program that Powells Books in Portland runs, Indispensible. Every six weeks they send you a little box with a book and some other stuff in it. This was my first shipment, and it had Tinkers, a video magazine by the McSweeneys folks, and a poster by a comic book artist. So, there I was with a lovely afternoon and a new book — a first novel that like many of my favorite books, isn’t particularly…