Raining Cats and Dogma

Though the deluge of books is slowing, I'm reaching the point where even digesting the titles of those volumes arriving at my office is like drinking from the proverbial firehose.

Today, Foucault's second volume of The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure, arrived alongside Bakhtin's Dialogic Imagination and collections of plays by Martin McDonagh and Bryony Lavery. When will they be read? Will I ever get to them for more than a cursory perusal, even though every single one of them seems important and worth a read?

Bird by bird, I suppose, word by word, page by page.

Posted by at 11:09 AM | Permalink

I've just picked up (among the stacks of books that have been arriving) Sarah Kane's Complete Plays.

For those who haven't heard of Kane, she's the playwright who burst onto the London scene with the harrowing and shocking Blasted, a play that earned her British tabloid press for its violent and quite frankly disturbing imagery. All accounts, however, suggest that this reaction to Kane's work was (as it frequently is) overly simplistic, and the body of work that she produced over the next 4 four years bore out a fierce intelligence deeply concerned with at once, representing love and pain in brutally honest fashion, and simultaneously pushing "recklessly" as the book's intro notes, at the structures of theatrical representation.

Her work culminated one might say in 1999 with her suicide and posthumous production of 4.48 Psychosis, a theatrical rumination on the interior landscapes of madness.

Mind you've yet to read anything other than Blasted, but as I sit down with the volume of five plays, I prepared for dangerous reading, readin that will almost certainly claw at my comfort. Of course this effect is almost certainly amplified in production, but I am looking at the volume with trepidation. Dangerous reading, indeed.

Posted by at 11:02 AM | Permalink

So today, I got up at 6:15 with the kids, took them downstairs to watch Sesame Street, and showered in the downstairs bathroom while Ann got a few extra minutes of sleep.

Ann had a doctor's appointment early, so I shuffled the kids off to their new daycare center. Reason one why this is right: the new daycare costs almost 1/3 what we were paying, provides them lunhc and has a wonderful resident dog (a certified therapy dog, no less) with whom the kids are already in llove.

Ann and I met for breakfast at Panera after her appointment. I asked her what she missed, and we talked bout these things for a bit--you have heard it before from me, of course. By 9:30, I was on my way to campus.

By ten, I was in my office, working on revising an article that I sent off today (Woohoo!), and prepping for class tomorrow. I ran into town to get lunch, but otherwise spent five straight hours working on a day I wasn't teaching. Reason two: this job is going be one where I can do my job, meaning teaching, research and service, not commuting over an hour each way, or doing enough service for three people. Also not planning another job search is awfully nice.

At three I got in touch with Ann who was going to pick up the kids. She was going to take them to get some frozen yogurt and then to a local community playgroundwhere I would meet them. So after I arrived, and they toddled around the very cool space they have there, we walked over to the little pavilion that overlooks the Monongahela River, and the public boat launch. We watched some boats cruise up and down this gorgeous river (I remembered how much I love fresh water), and went over to the little picnic area and fed some ducks (including the ugliest duck I have ever seen--I cannot identify it in any of the online guides). As we returned to our cars, Lilah held my hand all the way up the walkway.

It was a beautiful, sunny, late summer day in the river valley, where we could feed the ducks and watch the boats, and play with the kids before going home. I had worked well, left the kids in competent and affordable daycare, and had a lovely place to enjoy with my family before we went home to dinner. That why this is good.

Posted by at 9:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Some quick updates: The crib tent worked! on Saturday night, Lilah went to bed with only one minute of crying (!), and woke up only once, at 4:30, and was back asleep within ten minutes. Naptimes are now back in place (and she is catching up on some sleep here), and the grown-ups are finally back on a path to restedness.

Also, the article is now a complete draft. Even though it is technically due today, I've gotten a short extension to edit it down to the max length, so the next few days can be devoted to getting it into shape, and, oh yeah, designing those syllabi.

School starts in a week here, and I am looking at assessing my summer. Certainly a major move can account for much of the time spent, but the fact that I've drafted a complete article for a collection that already has interest for a major press, am in process on a book collection proposal that already has the interest of a series that is under contract from a major press, and have two article in revisions that I am fairly optimistic about means that this summer must be considered something of a success for its research dimensions.

The light at the end of the tunnel? That's the school year. I love being in front of a classroom, and am really looking forward to teaching literature once again. So on the ides of August, I'l raise a metaphorical glass to the last real marker of this new beginning.

Posted by at 10:15 AM | Permalink

Before we moved, our little girl Lilah, was having some intensifying sleep problems. She had been sleeping through the night from about 6 months through about 15 months, but after a series of winter colds and flus, started relying on us to soothe her back to sleep. It didn't help that we were offering bottles of milk.

As the move approached, and things in our old palce were definitely more topsy turvy, the problems got a little worse (more than one wake-up was not uncommon), but we didn't want to do anything drastic just before the move, since the move was going to change everything anyway.

Well, Lilah had been here about a week, and though the move itself was tough on Both the kids' sleep schedules (and Ann's), but everything was starting to settle back down. Half the time she woke up, she could cry herself back down, and really nasty screaming incidents were decresing rapidly.

Until last Tuesday. One of those nasty screaming incidents--the ones where she wakes up just completely disconsolate--was going on, and suddenly, the monitor seemed to be losing strength. Her screaming seemed to be getting softer, and then, it wass much much louder. As if it were coming toward us.

Yup. Lilah had learned to hop out of her crib.

Since then, every time she woke up, she leapt out of her crib and charged out of her room. There were some attempts to do the silent return to sleep thing, but neither Ann nor I was prepared to put the child back in her crib shreiking over 100 times in one night--which is what various sleep books had suggested we might need to do.

So over the past nine nights, Ann and I have been taking turns soothing her back to sleep, which initially consisted of holding her and listening to music, and then putting her in her crib when she fell asleep. But she was now growing gradually getting so over tired, that her sleep was getting lighter, and half the time we'd lay her down, she'd wake up, wail, and pop out of the crib after us.

The problem was escalating, not diminsihing. Some nights it would taker 2+ hours to get her sound enough asleep to put her back down, and by early this week, she was waking up at 4 am and not going back to sleep. Monday, she skipped her nap entirely.

Last night, we put her to bed at 7:30. She slept in her crib until midnight, at which point she woke up. I was on duty, so I soothed her back to sleep for about an hour, when I was able to put her back down. mind you she was asleep for most of that hour, but not deeply so. I was decidedly not asleep.

She woke up at two, and wouldn't let me put her down again. I (like Ann the night before) ended up sleeeping with her on the floor next to her crib. It was that bad.

We have been at various times completely hopeless. Lilah is practically gray from overtired, and it is a testament to her winning personality that she isn't the crankiest child alive. even after a longish nap this afternoon, she looked as if she has just risen from the dead and was going to eat our souls (which were pretty used up as it was).

But alas, today, our new crib tent arrived. We ordered it last week, and it was supposed to arrive Wednesday morning, but instead it came this afternoon.

I did a dance. three or four actually.

When Lilah woke up from her nap, her brother and I greeted her, and we all played in her room while I installed the crib tent (and a new monitor system).

The plan: zip her in and let her cry herself down. This method has not worked in the oast but we have caved too quickly for fear that she would wake Collin, who sleeps like a champ. But hings have been so bad, that she's waking him up anyway, and this seems the only remedy.

We expected to go in and soothe verbally only after 5 minuites, then 10 minutes, 15, 20 30, and that the increasing intervals would give her space to fginally fall asleep, but we expected to have to wait for the 30 minute gap to hear silence. But after 30 minutes total at bedtime, she fell asleep. on her own. with no one buyt her in the room

I did another dance.

Tonight may be a bit of a long night, but neither of us can expect to have to sleep on the floor next to the crib of an otherwise perfectly healthy child who refuses to sleep in that crib.

Three nights of gradual weaning from the verbal soothing will lead to no visits until morning by Sunday night, at which point much of this should be resolved.

And then, I will do another dance. and then sleep the sleep of the dead.

Posted by at 9:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Just had that moment where the argument finds its point right where you least expected it. Turns out there's an uncanny correlation between disrupted narrative beginnings in drama and the theatrical equivalent of second person narration: theatre that seeks to involve the audience in some more direct and active way.

Another note about this article: one of my best textual analogues for a disrupted beginning is the children's book The Monster at the End of this Book, in which our protagonist, Grover, of Sesame Street fame, actually appears on the title page, and mutters "This page is so boring." But on the next page we find him asking increduclously, "What did that say? Did it say there would be a monster at the end of this book?" at which point he tries to convince the reader not to turn pages, getting increasingly exasperated as we do. Of course the punchline is that Grover himself is the titular monster, and everything is ok, but this book is soooo interesting in terms of its narrative features: it uses the paratext as part of the plot, it employs second-person narration in a very compelling way, it relies on the materiality of the text (even as it ficitonalizs that materiality: Grover ties up, nails together, and brick over pages, only to have the reader continue to turn pages).

Problem is, The Monster at the End of this Book, ain't no Ulysses, and I'm currently struggling over whether to actually use it in the article. It's such a good example, and I can't think of anything more reputale that works quite the same way, but it hardly has the ethos.

Posted by at 3:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This place is way ahead of the curve on the scheduling front: I've already got my schedule for Spring (which may not actually be ahead of anything but my own experience).

I did not, as was possible, get any graduate courses, or even any upper-division courses.

Remember this is the "2" half of the 3/2 load, so what I got was The Brit Lit II survey I'll be teaching this fall, and a course called "London Theatre Tour" which is exactly what it sounds like: we meet once a week through the semester to discuss texts in a performance context, familiarize ourselves with the London Thetare scene, etc, and over Spring Break, we spend a week in London. Seeing theatre. All week. For me, paid for by the University. I am soooo loving this job right now.

(Claire, if you're reading, I may need to consult with you on setting up a course for the Spring theatre season this far in advance . . . It'll likely be tricky).

Posted by at 9:35 PM | Permalink