or, not so much

Fire up your browsers and edit your bookmarks - from here on out, I'll be posting at http://www.tenpointtype.org.  Although the design is untouched, and very much will be changed, as and when I find time.  On the other hand, this brings together, for the first time, all of the content of the first two years of tpt and the second incarnation here on blogger. So, enter phase the third.  Must finish grading fricking Troilus papers. 

Take that, domain thieving bitches

Lady and gentleman, boy and girl, tenpointtype is back!  I felt the odd impulse this morning to see whether the original domain, tenpointtype.org, had become available, and lo, it was so.  I let the domain lapse, very consciously, shortly after I moved to New York, in early 2005.  I hadn't been writing much (I'm still not, of course, but that's not the issue), I was totally broke (I still am, but that's temporary), utterly miserable (not so much), despondent and despairing (again, not so much) and just not interested in publicly whingeing in a non-stop fashion.  Clearly, evil cyber-thieves have automated clients set to discover domains that are not renewed promptly, so when I let the original tenpointtype domain lapse, it got snapped up by parties unknown.  And there was no way in hell I was going to buy it back from the domain kidnappers for $100. So I let it sit, and there things stood, until this morning.  But now, in an idle moment (read: WAAAAAAAY too much work, ever more creative procrastination and work-avoidance), I discovered TPT was available. I've registered the domain, set up a year-long hosting with evil corporate domain hosting people (which next year perhaps I'll switch to someone reasonable, but I was in a hurry), and, well, that's all she wrote.  I don't imagine I'll spend too much time working on the site in the near term future (although I've downloaded WordPress already....),and will continue to whinge here. But it feels like a victory, nonetheless, so I thought I'd share.  Hmm. Shower, grade, write. Sigh.

cyclics

Last day of class, tomorrow.  And my reward? A shitload of papers, followed by a shitload of finals, on Tuesday.  If I handle it right (i.e. punish/reward myself sufficiently), I should have it all cleared off my desk by this time next week, so I can abandon the paper I was working on today (*waves cheerily*) and turn to the one I haven't written (*waves warily*) before then turning back to the one I was working on, etc.  The turn around is brutal - a single week of spring break, and then the new quarter, and in that week the two talks and two classes to prepare.  Yes, of course it could be much much worse, and to the one of you who I know reads this with her 4-4 teaching load, yeah, poor little rich kid, etc., but hell, it's my blog and I'll whinge if I want to.  Last year I taught Fall and Winter, and had spring off - I went to England last April, to look at the books (and drink of the pints, if my increasingly saturated memory serves aright).  An email exchange with the friend who probably will never receive the letter, and a friendly reminder that her shit doesn't stink.  And a thought, unexpected, that if I stay here until they've decided they won't make me leave, I'm playing it safe.  Never been my strong suit, safe, even if it's been my weak point (if that makes any sense, and I think it does, if you know what I mean and I think you do).  Why not shove my head in the jaws of a hostile institution halfway through?  Although I should probably finish this book of mine, in that case, and get it out the door and perhaps a polite review or two.  Or, fuck it, burn the shit.  Admit that I have less control over my life as "successful" than I ever did whilst betwixt and between and in the cracks.  And reassert that control by redefining successful.  Or just admit that I'm annoyed I finished the Scotch.  "I'm out of Chivas," he said to a room full of construction workers, staggeringly slightly.  Not me, fools.  Him. To quote M., as N calls him, "Only to read childrens' books / only to love childish things, / throwing away adult things, / rising from saddest looks."

djhazzzz

May 28, 2007.  The last time I listened to Coltrane's Africa/Brass album.  199 times, I've listened to the opening track of Pat Metheny's "A Map of the World", morning music (yeah, still, Tone, and it's still your fault. I've eliminated the album from my "most played" playlists.) April 1, 2007, the last time I listened to Arvo Part's Berliner Messe.  I used to fall asleep with that album playing every night in the late spring and summer of 1994.  So much to read, so much to listen to, and I'm feeling burdened by the limitations of my work.  What should be intellectual freedom is instead the burden of a book unwritten, of promise yet to be fulfilled, the sword of Damocles dangling ominously, yet described in triplicate and its severance a process well documented and funded by the Great State of California.  I've somehow come to associate my not-listening-to-jazz (in favour of a wave of indie/shoegazing over the last few years) with not-being-done-with-my-book and not-being-more-productive.  I'm not sure why, as I've been stupidly productive, of late, despite the two unwritten talks in the next 5 1/2 weeks scaring the living fuck out of me.  The bigger audience, 1st week in April, likely the less important talk than the smaller-but-everyone-is-someone audience, 3rd week in April talk.  Sigh.  Back to Mrs. Mandlestam, having dabbled in some of Osip's poetry, this evening, and another fine glass of the fine invention of Glenmorangie  aged in Burgundy casks.  Delightful.  

simmer

A low boil, even, on the back burner.  The realization, after some basic maths, that come late August (which, admittedly, is a full 5 months away) it will be 15 years since I met a friend. An ex-friend? A friend past? South African lawyer friend.  Tuesday passed (or Thursday. Is it bad that I've forgotten even the specifics of the "day" that indicated things had gone too far without resolution? Is it indicative of some friendship carelessness, or worse, some fundamentally self-involved issue?)  To be honest, I don't really care. I suspect there's a gesture to make.  Not that anyone in New York seems to be talking to me at the moment, although I'm unclear on what I've done (other than being a self-involved drama queen, but, surely, that's not new.....) or how I've offended, or even if....Maybe things just fade, and then faded, fade again, and my own tendency to reminiscence is a liability rather than an asset, a ball and chain rather than a claim to a more thorough understanding.  Anyway, a gesture. A letter, a mix CD, a Stoppard play.  Handwritten, perhaps, rather than typed or emailed.  Packaged and sent rather than Amazoned.  Not because it even matters, to some extent, what her reaction is (although, of course, that's not quite trivial).  Mostly because I'm feeling my bright and shiny future seems to have lost just a bit too much of my past, and that there's value, there, beyond the dark and dismal, and to the happy bits that happened, too.  So many people have loved me over the years, and I them, and it feels that I'm in touch, I'm connected, with so few of them.  That pains me.  I never meant, never expected, things to end up that way.  South African Lawyer friend, I know you don't read this, which makes it easier to let you know that there is, someday sometime soonish (post April 18, most likely) a letter coming your way. Although if you forget my birthday, there may be a brief delay while I forgive you, yet again.  

ooops

"Now I'm where I want to be and who I want to be and doing what I always said I would and yet I feel I haven't won at all."  (Eb - E - E - Eb - E - E).  Or something.  I've got a bad case of the "oh shit" blues.

But, in better words than mine, "It is clear that, crushed as it was, my 'self' had survived and needed only a short breathing space to come into its own again - it is particularly active in old age when a certain peace of mind has been achieved, but before the pain of past years has died away.  Later, the pain too no doubt goes and gives way to senile complacency, but I have not reached this stage yet.  Then it will be too late to write - pain acts like a leaven for both word and thought, quickening your sense of reality and the true logic of this world.  Without pain you cannot distinguish the creative element that builds and sustains life from its opposite - the forces of death and destruction which are always for some reason very seductive, seeming at first sight to be logically plausible, and perhaps even irresistible.  I feel my pain keenly now, and am going to write about myself alone." --Nadezhda Mandelstam.

Hackneyed

OK, so sometimes I get well behind on the New Yorker, and even the NY Times.  Moreover, I'm not a consistent reader of the Bestseller lists, as they mostly depress me (or make me mad, or envious).  Plus I'm rarely that interested in reading titles solely because of their best-selling status.  ANYWAY, as I was saying.  NY Times Book Review, Best Sellers, Jan. 20, 2008:

4) World Without End, by Ken Follett...Love and intrigue..blah blah...Kingsbridge....blah blah...medieval English catehdral town.

7) People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks....A rare-book expert...blah blah...secrets of a medieval manuscript.

8) Shadow Music, by Julie Garwood....In medieval Scotland....blah blah.

and an honorary mention for

14) The Venetian Betrayal, by Steve Berry....A former Justice Department...blah blah...the tomb of Alexander the Great....blah blah.

GET OFF MY LAWN!!!!

Of meerkats and plagiarism

Ah, copy, paste, and google. You have radically altered the landscape of plagiarism.  Indeed, you have opened fascinating questions about originality, and perhaps blurred the boundaries, some, as fair use and copyright and the exactness of digital reproduction battle it out in a landscape not even vaguely imagined by Benjamin and his art of mechanical reproduction.  The trifecta of google, copy, paste has made it infinitely easier to translate (trans+latio, to bear or carry over or across) materials from one context to another.  At the same time, of course, the classic arms-race model of students vs. teachers (it's not really oppositional, of course, but the ethical question of plagiarism is an important one.  Plus, we wrap our courses and our exams in a sort of shrink-wrap honor code: cheating will be punished, and enrolling in our institution constitutes immediate acceptance of this.)  has made it infinitely easier to discover when materials have been lifted. (Sorry about the nested parentheses. I'm under-caffeinated, and trying to keep this vaguely comprehensible).  Anyway, I had a student a few years ago who attempted to copy-and-paste some materials from Wikipedia into a 5-page paper on Philip Larkin.  Not the sharpest of kids, the impassioned denunciation of Larkin's opposition to be-bop and the implicitly racist judgement of Larkin as a white jazz critic on a natively black art form....well, it was clear my charming student didn't write it, and was a no-brainer to find on the web.  (I love me my 'statistically improbable phrases', even if I use them heuristically, they work well enough.)  Revise and resubmit (I would've kicked him out, but I was leaving the school in weeks, and I fought the decent fight, but the good fight eluded me), only to discover the annoying little shit submitted a SECOND paper employing google-copy-paste, this time, at least, it was relevant to the paper and the analysis of poetry that had been assigned, and, to his credit, was the second google result on Larkin rather than Wikipedia as the first result.  All of which is to say, meerkat journalism makes for really awful dialogue in romance novels.