Vamos stays gone

The book “challengers” are going to get their way on keeping Vamos a Cuba, a children’s book, off the shelves:

Writing the majority opinion (PDF file), Judge Ed Carnes stated that the school board “did not ban any book [but] removed from its own school libraries a book that the board had purchased for those libraries with board funds. It did not prohibit anyone else form owning, possessing, or reading the book” and that “there is a difference between not including graphic detail about adult subjects on the one hand and falsely representing that everything is hunky dory on the other.” The cover of Vamos depicts laughing Cuban children dressed in the uniform of the nation’s Communist Party.

Oh no–children laughing in Cuba! The lies, the lies! Since when is “falsely representing everything as hunky dory” a legal basis for anything? But perhaps this judge has helped us find fit grounds for prosecuting a few mortgage brokers I met in South Florida in the years 2005-2008. Hmmmm.

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Airport Reading: How the Dead Dream and Revolutionary Road

Last weekend, I took a trip to south Florida to help my sister pick out a wedding dress. She helped me pick out mine, and somehow managed to make it be totally fun, and it was really important to me to be there to help her (what is more nerve-wracking than choosing the most expensive piece of clothing most of us middle class type people will ever wear?), and Expedia obliged me by having a very reasonable ticket available. The trip was great, despite the fact that I managed to haul an Iowa cold down to Florida AND bring it back with me. We ate sushi, hung out with Diego and Frida, watched 30 Rock on Netflix instant viewing, and best of all we found a beautiful dress right in her budget.

The trip had another highlight: reading. At the last minute, I decided to leave the work reading (which would have been excellent had I wanted to use my flying time for napping… open access metadata harvesting protocols…. Yawn) and most of the poetry (only Peter Gizzi made the carry-on cut) and take a novel with me.

Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream is a book I checked out from the library last September, after I had perused the Soft Skull backlist for potential collection purchases and realized that we already had it. And on top of my dresser is where it had sat until I put it in my bag to go to Florida. I left DSM at 4:55pm CST and had finished it just before landing in Florida at 11:30pm EST. I loved this book, and I loved the feeling of just devouring it.

The protagonist, T., is obsessed with money from a very young age. The kind of bizarre extremity of his devotion to literal, physical money was at first kind of hard for me to get into, but I liked the way his obsessive qualities developed as the story progressed. I appreciated his gradual transformation from an unintentionally ruthless land developer (he sees it as a game he is very good at winning and he is very young, but you aren’t really expected to feel sympathy for him, just accept that he is someone who hasn’t thought very hard about where the money he loves comes from) to someone who values the lives of animals intensely, perhaps above his own, but also without much reflection on why that is. I found this transformation believable in part, I think, because it was rooted in a much more universal kind of change—disillusionment. As he lives through his 20’s, he begins to see the fragility of human accomplishment and the fallible nature of human institutions. Money can build but it can’t restore. Nothing can replace the life of an animal. This novel also had one of the best endings I have read in a really long time. It managed a powerful sense of conclusion without overtly tying up any storylines or answering any questions about what is going to happen to T. I think Millett managed this by following the lunging pulse of her protagonist, even though it takes us somewhere that could not rationally be expected. And, by writing beautifully, and in a way that really enlarged my imagination of what it might feel like to be an animal. T.’s transformation is the conclusion, and we are sure that it is total, but other than that we don’t really know much else. Best of all, it’s the first of a trilogy, so there’s more to look forward to.

Having had such great fun gulping fiction on the way south and having neglected to pack a second novel for the trip north, I made a spur of the moment purchase at my departure gate’s book kiosk, one that offers a 50% refund if you return your book after you’ve read it: Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates, in a paperback edition with a fetching picture of Leo and Kate on the cover. I managed to tuck in all four hundred-some pages of rather large print before I had to board my connecting flight in Dallas (longish layover made more entertaining by the televisions tuned to some random station that featured viewer call-ins on Michael Phelps—I loved that at one point it went from a woman who said she was never going to watch the Olympics again to a woman who said that legalizing marijuana was the only way to save the economy—God bless my country full of nutcases). It’s a tightly written book, with a lot of closely-observed emotional moments that would probably hurt quite a bit to read if you were not feeling very enthusiastic about your marriage. I’m not particularly well-versed in domestic novels of the early 1960’s, but I can imagine that it might have been fairly shocking for some readers then. And it rather fearlessly goes right to the edge of a couple of questions that most fiction shies away from: what do you do when you have no particular ambition but do have a sense that you’ve shortchanged your own life (it seems like most of the time this urge is played as a midlife crisis or the result of some long-harbored but very specific ambition, usually artistic)? How do you honestly reconcile that what you do 8+ hours a day does eventually say something about you, that you can’t pretend you are just gaming the system to earn enough money to have this sophisticated and intellectual personal life—you are that person who works in that office? (Or the person who cleans the house, in this novel’s gender-defined marriage.) What do you do when you turn out not to be exceptional? It doesn’t quite dive into those questions, though; it dips its toe in and then decides to go back to the surface, where we only see our protagonists through the eyes of their erstwhile neighbors. I think this is meant to have a tragic effect, but I guess one measure of how each generation’s expectations of marriage and adult life changes is that I didn’t quite buy it as a tragedy, although I might have if I had lived in its time. But I think the world that Frank and April lived in has evolved, just like, thankfully, marriage has. I’ve seen the suburbs lit up by pain in a hundred crazy ways, in Six Feet Under and The Corrections and countless other takes on what happens to the weirdness of us when it’s compressed by the outlines of a life that doesn’t fit. Tragedy is too antiseptic for the reality that these stories have unlocked.

I can’t wait to read another novel…. what’s next?

Long overdue pics from the Iowa: State Fair edition

The very first thing we did upon D’s arrival in Iowa in August was take a trip to the Iowa State Fair.

Our goal: only eat food on a stick. (Or, a drumstick, as the case may be.)

Can’t skip the corn dog:

These enormous turkey drumsticks were amazingly delicious:

This beer brought to you by the Budweiser Clydesdales:

This is a cow:

But is it an Americow? We’d have to check the passport to be sure:

You can’t kill the rooster!

February is the choose your own superlative month*

Ah, Bradley has hit just the note I needed to re-open the gates of blog world to me. See, even though he didn’t write me a recommendation letter, I am one of those people he is talking about–which I haven’t been all that forthcoming about on this blog, as I usually become the silent type when it comes revealing things I’m trying to do in my life, and when 90% of what I think about outside of work has to do with something I am hesitant to reveal, that does tend to cramp the blogging. I am a PhD applicant waiting to find out if I am going to become a PhD student. So, for me, February has gotten off to an anxiety-ridden start. My summer strategy of just not thinking about all the potential for heartache in my life has started to fail me, and I find myself having palpitations every time I open my email or the mailbox. During January, it seemed that I was still a pleasant ways off from hearing anything, but now it feels like open season, and worse, it feels like every day that passes is one day closer to doom. One more day that School X was not so excited about my app that they decided to email informally ahead of sending a letter (this happened to one of my friends last year). Advised against padding my list with “safety” schools, I applied to fiercely competitive programs (I know they all are, but I think these especially are). So, the chances of me not getting good news are pretty high. Actually, higher than the chances of getting good news if you go strictly by probability.

Added to the stress of the waiting “game” is the stress of applying for new librarian jobs as the end date for my one-year position nears. Added to this stress is the stress of knowing that I might have avoided this had I been able to commit to taking an extension on the current position, but as I was gripped by a now or never fervor, I told them that I was applying to grad school and couldn’t make any promises. So, I might get no thick letters AND have forced my husband and myself onto the worst job market in our adult lives so far.

I have to keep reminding myself of one very important thing: I signed up for this. All of this. This is the preferable alternative to letting my fears about the future continue to boss me around. At least I’ll have tried, and if I fail, I think I’ll be able to approach my current career path with a more open mind.

And of course, I didn’t start this process without plans B, C, and D. Although my determination to enter the PhD admissions lottery may end up costing me another year in my current job, there’s a good chance it might not. And there’s a decent chance that if I’m not working here, I’ll be working somewhere else–maybe not as awesome, but somewhere in a library. There’s still positions that haven’t been canceled, and at least I’m applying to them with a year of professional experience rather than as a new graduate. And if I find out that getting rejected by all of my ambitious graduate program selections still doesn’t settle the question, I would not rule out a re-do next year with a more realistic list. At least I won’t have to take the GRE subject exam again!!! (Which, by the way, I rocked. I rocked it almost to the level that I feel it might work against me, like “well, clearly she studied for this thing way too much, what a loser, she should have worked on this writing sample more instead”–but don’t worry, I did work on the writing sample rather obsessively.) And D is finishing his graduate work in accounting, so if I don’t find something, maybe he can find something. And if neither of us can find something, at least we live in Iowa, where 400$/month rent is not unheard of and we can both get jobs at McDonalds to hack that and walk to McDonalds if necessary.

But keeping my eye on all of those positives while I take enough deep breaths to put one foot in front of the other sometimes threatens to take all my energy. And I haven’t even begun to address all of the other things I need to be concerned with now that I no longer have MFA thesis revision as an excuse, like actually submitting stuff places. Oooph.

*The title of this post is blatantly ripped off from the title of a mix CD that AH sent me a couple of springs ago. Which proves there is only one tried and true method for surviving months such as this one, and that is having friends. Good friends who make you mixes, listen to you rant on Gmail chat, don’t freak out when you have a borderline insane Facebook status message because they know you are mostly joking or know that you have a right to be a little unwell once in a while, advise you to mix yourself a drink, and most of all never hold back on sharing the crappiness and coolness of their own roller coaster months.