Seasons Change

The seasons are changing and I welcome it. There is a distinct cooling in the air, pumpkins are starting to sprout on front porches, and costume stores are on every corner. Haunted houses are being touted. The leaves are changing from the chameleon green to the more natural red, yellows, and oranges. The days are getting shorter. My sweater doesn't seem so out of place now.

We are deep into the fall semester, papers are starting to come due and research is being quickly done. Freshman students, eager as always to please, take big topics and try to squeeze them into two page papers. The success is debatable.

Speaking of debates, the election season is winding down, or heating up, I guess it all depends on your way of looking at it. Soon we will have a new president and a new set of problems.

Autumn has arrived and in it, I revel.

Maryland, Again

A whirlwind trip to Maryland, done. It was a quick weekend. As I look back at it, I think I spent more time in the car going and coming back than actually on vacation. We went to the mountains of Western Maryland. We go there a lot, more than we should probably, but to hell with it, that's my "homeplace" as the oldtimers used to call it.

The leaves were just starting to turn from their thick green to their fire reds, oranges, yellows. The maples were the furthest along. The air was clean and in the mornings and evenings crisp.

It felt good like it always does to go "home."

Traveling with Steinbeck

Taking a break from reading. I'm re-re-reading Travels with Charley, by John Steinbeck. Its one of those books that never quite got the notice his other books like Grapes of Wrath, or Of Mice and Men recieved and that's too bad. Almost sad, really.

Those other books are good, great even, but there is something about them doesn't really resonate with me. That is particularly true with Grapes of Wrath. Maybe the themes are too big, or maybe my brain is too small. Either way, I feel awash in the prose and somewhat buffetted by them. Not so with Travels with Charley.

Travels with Charley is, as far as I am concerned miscast. One usually finds it in the amongst the fiction of Steinbeck. It is not fiction, but a travelogue. In the early 60's Steinbeck decided to become reaquainted with America. He figured, and rightly so, that since he wrote about America and the American experience he should get to know America. So he had a small camper built on a pickup truck, got his standard sized Poodle, Charley and set off to rediscover his country. Or as he put it:

One of my purposes was to listen, to hear speech, accent, speech rhythms, overtones and emphasis. For speech is so much more than words and sentences. I did listen everywhere. It seemed to me that regional speech is in the process of disappearing, not gone but going. Forty years of radio and twenty years of television must have this impact. Communications must destroy localness, by a slow, inevitable process. ...with local accent will disappear local tempo. The idioms, the figures of speech that make language rich and full of poetry of place and time must go. And in their place will be a national speech, wrapped and packaged, standard and tasteless.

Reading Travels with Charley is like looking at a backwards mirror. I do find it to be a modern day prophecy. When I read Travels with Charley I have to do it in small doses, a page or two, sometimes just a paragraph. Reading the book almost fifty years removed from the actual writing has the feelin of literary archeology.

I have a strange affinity for Steinbeck. I'm not sure why, maybe it has something to do with the fact that he and I share a birthday, granted his was 72 years before mind and he was dead a full seven years before I made my squalling appearance, but for some reason Steinbeck's words resonate and rattle my brain cage when I read them. Full discloure: I tried, but have never gotten through East of Eden, if there is a heavier handed book I have yet to meet it.

There are passages in Travels with Charley that stick with me, particularly those rare occasions when I am traveling. I usually get whacked in the head from Steinbeck when I am in a motel. I make it a point to leave nothing behind because of something he writes about when he stops in Chicago.

There is an audio recording of the book, but it is only on audio tape; trust me, I have looked for it on cd. The book is read by Gary Sinese. Sinese's gravelly voice really captures the prose and the rythym of the book.

So, I shall go back to 1960 and drive with John and his dog Charley and rediscover America. I wonder what I'll learn this time.

If You're Happy and You Know It...

I have gotten rather spoiled quickly by my new job. If for no other reason than I have annoyingly regular schedule. I'm not complaining at all, actually. It is nice to be able to go to work at nine or ten and able to come home at five or six, seven on Tuesdays. It's nice to have Friday evenings off, if I want I can do something, I haven't done much with them, though. Its nice to wake up on Saturday look at the ceiling and say "I don't have to go to work today." Saturday night, I usually go to church, mainly because I don't like going to the "contemporary service" they have at my church every other week and I have a hard time remember which week they do it.

Sunday is a great day. If I'm not in church, I just kind of bum around. Right now, I'm in my pajamas, listening to NPR and drinking my second cup of coffee, they just had a story about a singer I've heard of, but never heard before. Ira Glass is now introducing This American Life.

Emma, my white cat, just knocked something off my dresser-- my wallet.

I just poured my third cup of coffee. I'm going to the gym later on today.

I got involved in Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University. It hasn't been easy. Its not easy, its a lot of work, but I'm learning somethings that are helpful. I'm working on my thousand dollar emergency fund. That has been harder than I thought it would be. Its coming along, but slower than I had hoped, but even the tortoise got to the finish line, right.

I'll be paying off JCPenny next month.

Things are going well. Yeah, I am blessed.

Bobbleheaded Talking Heads

I've been listening into the debate between the bobbleheaded politicians we have to pick from this evening. I'm not actively watching it, but I am sort of listening to it. One thing comes across clearly. Neither bobblehead McCain or bobblehead Obama like each other. They really don't.

I think I'm gonna watch a movie.

Researchin Fool

I love research. I really do. I think that's part of the reason I got into the whole librarian thing. I can help others research and when I have some downtime I, too, can research topics that interest me. Lately, I have gotten re-turned on to Confederacy of Dunces. I just reread the novel and I was totally blown away (again) by what a good, well written, funny, tour de force it is. It is a shame that its author, John Kennedy Toole, went the way of Sylvia Plath, and most recently, David Foster Wallace.

The last few days, okay the last two weeks, I have been doing some indepth literature review on what has been written about CoD and its author. At present, I have a big TIMELIFEBOOKS bag filled with books that in some way or another pertain to CoD. I have two dissertations as well as a small, but steadily growing stack of printouts of articles that have been written about the book and its author. I have also mined the works cited of said dissertations, looked for the resources those authors cited and found, ordered and otherwise tried to acquire those sources. I have ordered another dissertation that I will hopefully be able to peruse at some future date, and then photocopy and mine that workscited page.

Thank God for GoogleScholar and the variouis online databases I am able to access from work. I am sure that being able to use those has helped keep my interest and curiosity up. I doubt very much I would have dug through printed resources, but then again, maybe I would have. I can be tenacious when I want to be.

I think more than anything it is the search. Yes, the information is good, but the search for the information is what realy gets my burners going. John Kennedy Toole's personal papers, manuscripts, etc are housed at Tulane University. Anyone want to take a roadtrip to the Big Easy?

Maybe in the back of my mind somewhere there is a thought of using this research as a the beginnings of a masters thesis for a masters program I haven't even looked into, applied for, let alone started course work for. I'm a glutton for punishment, I guess. Let's call this research "personal edification" and leave it at that for the time being.

I can justify doing this research in another way. It forces me to use databases in the library that sharpens my skills with database searching; I can in turn use those skills I've learned to help students with their research questions.

On the Wall

Today's weather is blissful. The softedge of autumn has made a subtle appearance. The sun is hot, but the air that breezes through campus conteracts the late summer rays of dear Mister Sol.

I ate my lunch this afternoon outside. I prefer to do that, it gets me out and about, I can take a short walk and I can see what's happening on campus. While I was working on my masters, I was only on campus on Fridays and when I was on campus to work on an assignment it was often in the evening. So, I wasn't able to really see what happens on campus during the week. The answer: not much. IUPUI is a commuter school. Of the 25,000 or so that are enrolled probably 99 percent are commuters.

After I ate my lunch I went back to the library to deposit my plastic Kroger back on my desk and grabbed the book I'm currently trying to get into. Its not going well. I took myself and said book outside again and sat upon one of the low walls. I leaned against a lightpost and tried to read. My after-lunch-slow-down mental capablities had a hard time keeping up with David Foster Wallace (yes, I'm a ghoul. He hanged himself over the weekend and I decided to check his bookout of the library). The sun was shinging in my eyes, too.

Classes must of let out while I was sitting upon my wall. Suddenly the walkways were awash with pedestrians jocking for position, most with backpack shells strapped to their backs. I feared for anyone who decided to become an eddy in the bipedal stream, disaster might have struck.

Eventually, my attention was caught by a orange flowers in the flowerbed adjacent to my wall. I think they were daisies, but I don't know if daisies come in orange. Yellow, yes, orange, I'm not sure. I noticed in the flowers (daisies) a microcosm of life. In this case: butterflies and honey bees. They worked in tandem. The butterfly would flit from one flower to another and the honey bee would buzz along side. I found it to be almost refreshing to watch this small ecosystem at my feet work itself. The butterfly would alight upon a flower flaps its paperthin wings two or three times and the move to the next.

In some weird way, it struck me as beautiful.