Back Home Again

I guess I spent about $800 for the six days I was in Madison. Not bad for an international conference.

Highlights from my driver on the trip home:

"I'll pay for your sandwich [$5]; you pay for the gas. [$25]"

[After four hours of driving] "Are you sure you have to go?" ... "If you're not back in a minute and a half I'm leaving without you." [Seven minutes later. Car is running. I get in and the car is backing up before I've even closed the door.] "You know I almost left without you."

[For the only period (ten minutes) that we drove less than 10 mph over the speed limit] "I hate trucks."

***

Did I mention it was hot in the car?

I wonder when/if I might manage to get the $80 back for the bus that didn't go from Madison to West Lafayette?

Paper Attendance

When it was time to start my presentation there was no one in the audience. Five minutes later a woman from Singapore came and I gave the paper.

Madison Bikes

For whatever reason, bike riding is much more popular here in Madison than it is in West Lafayette. On State street (the shopping street) and around the campus there are a LOT of riders. There are also a few bikes painted red -- the school color. But they paint everything, even the tires, and do it sloppily. That seems to be the preferred way.

There are also several places that rent bikes such as yellow jersey. As most of you know, it's always better to buy and service your bike at a locally owned bike store than at a big box retailer. Can you imagine your derailer being adjusted by a teenager with vice grips?

There have been a lot of giant specialty stores that have pushed out independent retailers such as drug stores (Walgreens, CVS, etc.), book stores (Borders and B & N), even hardware stores (Home Depot). But I haven't heard of any super bike stores yet.

Stopped and Asked for Directions

I wasn't sure which building the sessions were in so I asked this older man who was finishing his lunch. He turned out to be the nicest guy. He showed me where to go, and when I asked him where I could find a phone he let me use his cell to make the call. He was a retired physician who's got a very active life working as a volunteer, keeping up his reading, and having a good time.

Meeting people like this restores my faith in humanity.

No Ride Yet

The woman who told people she would give me a ride home Saturday now says she might not even come to Madison. The rental agencies are all booked for Saturday as well. There are a couple more Purdue people here that I haven't talked to yet, so there's still hope I can make it home Saturday. But I am starting to wonder how I'll make it back home.

Update on Driving

We needed three drivers and could only find 2, so we contracted out and had a bus drive us here. Unfortunately, I was the only one who requested a return trip so there's no return bus. There is a group of Purdue people, and, supposedly, one person might give me a ride. I just don't know who that is yet.

New Bike

Yesterday I bought a new bike at my local bike store. It's a Schwinn. If you're my age, you'll remember when Schwinn was THE name in bikes. About once every ten years I've bought a new bike. One of my first was a Schwinn Sting-Ray. The new Sting-Ray certainly looks different than the one I had in the 70's.

I had thought about buying a Gary Fisher bike, but since they change models in the middle of the summer, that model won't be available until the end of August. So, who's the smart marketing guy at that company who thought people would prefer to wait until the END of the summer to get a new bike. I'll bet he thought new coke was a pretty good idea too.

Driving

There's a world Englishes conference here in West Lafayette now. The conference organizers arranged a van for all the people who want to go from it to the world congress of applied linguistics in Madison that starts on Sunday for $80. I signed up for this ride, now, because they need drivers, I'll be getting my $80 back and be getting paid $100 for driving a van there and back.

Apparently they still need one more driver. Could it be you? You do need to be on the Purdue payroll to qualify for this job.

In other news... If you're looking for information about the candidate for the upcoming seat on the supreme court by the vacating Sandra Day O'Connor, try looking here.

Favorite Lines So Far:

But he had been guide mentor and friend to unnumbered crops of innocent and lonely freshmen, and I suppose with all his petty chicanery and hypocrisy he stank no higher in heaven's nostrils than any other (Sound and the Fury p. 98).

And some details of Faulkner's bio:

Faulkner held a job as a postmaster in Oxford MS before he left the job. Clearly, he was not cut out for such work:

Here was a man so little attracted to mail that he never read his own being solemnly appointed, as one might say, the custodian of that belonging to others. It was amazing that ... any mail ever got delivered. Students often complained about the "slowpoke postmaster" who had difficulty finding their letters. Sometimes a whole ham would spoil in a box, undelivered to a student, stinking up the lounge (Parini, p. 63).

Later he did become quite serious about writing. In 1925, he took a trip to Europe.

He traveled to a village in teh Alps called Stresa, which he found "full of American tourists" and so packed his typewriter and bags and "lit out for the mountains." It seems worth noting that he would lug a typewriter on this journey, much of it on foot. This was before the days of light portables, so Faulkner's commitment to keep his writing career going apace seems rather startling. He was also carrying with him five hundred pages of blank typing paper (Parini, p. 86).

Word to Would Be Faulkner Readers

Of course, if you seem to be putting in more work than the amount of pleasure you get out of the process, you are right to think about another book. At the same time, once the work is put in, Faulkner does (begin) to pay off. If you are serious about reading him, take advantage of the resources rather than doing it all by yourself. Oprah's book club (create a free account and then log in) gives tons of material from world-class Faulkner scholars that will help you make it through and get more out of the reading. And Parini's bio of the author really helps. I started on the second section of Sound and the Fury a couple days ago and started to understand a lot of the parallels (and differences) with Faulkner's own life.

Canons


Continuing from yesterday's discussion/post. I found Kirby's book. Here's the relevant quote from Edmund White:

I am in favor of desacralizing literature, of dismantling the idea of a few essential books, of retiring the whole concept of the canon. A canon is for people who don't like to read, people who want to know the bare minimum of titles they must consume in order to be considered polished, well rounded, civilized. Any real reader seeks the names of more and more books, not fewer and fewer.

The notion of a canon implies that we belong to something called Western Civilization that is built on a small sacred library and that that library is eternal and universal and important in the way no individual reader can ever be. I would say that every part of such an assumption is misguided. ... Even the hierarchy inherent in the concept of a canon must be jetissoned. ... the canon, even among the most conservative readers, shifts from one generation to the next. Look at the Harvard Five-Foot Shelf of Classics, once considered definitive. Few people today read Charles Dana's Two Years Before the Mast or Whittier's poetry, but for my grandparents such books were unquestionably canonical, as was The Pilgrim's Progress or William Dean Howell's The Rise of Silas Lapham (quoted in Kirby, 1998, xx-xxi).

Kirby goes on to say that every person interested in the study of comparative literature -- or, I would submit, canon formation -- should read Nussbaum's book Cultivating Humanity: A classical defense of reform in liberal education. (1997, Harvard University Press). Nussbaum, in my experience is a facile mind worth spending time with.

Doctor Visit

Marta had the 15 month check-up which included a shot and a blood test. There's nothing quite as sad as holding your own child down so someone else can inflict pain.

She weighs 23 pounds and is now at the 50th percentile for head circumferance, weight, and height for her age. She also clearly demonstrated to the doctor that she has stranger anxiety. He says that all children hate him from 15 to 24 months.

One More Thing

Thanks to Paul for the challenge on that last post.

Books
I suppose it was inevitable that I would end up writing answers to book questions here at some time or another.

How many books do I own?

No, I'm not going to count them. Since we just moved, my wife was happy to remind me she thinks I buy too many books. There are eight full bookshelves in our apartment now.

But that doesn't count spoken word files (almost 200) I have on my computer, including This American Life episodes (last week was quite interesting), books from audible, and CDs from the library.

What's the last book I bought?

In paper -- Parini's bio of Faulkner and Faulkner's Light in August. They also are my current reading.

From audible, Assassination Vacation.

What's the last book I read?
Ones I finished recently include Al Capone Does My Shirts, Holes, The Twenty-One Balloons. All highly recommended.

What are the five books that mean the most to me?

Is this a trick question?

Books that I've read more than once or keep returning to include:

The Adventures of Augies March, Lonesome Dove, Singer's Collected Stories, The Thurber Carnival, Jeff Smith's cookbooks, Roger Ebert's Great Movies, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Ways with Words, Jihad vs. McWorld (and the original article in The Atlantic Monthly), Lombardo's translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, (check this page for good study guides) and, finally for idea challenged readers, John Kirby's The Comparative Reader.

In the latter book, there's a nice chapter that comments on the "canon controversy", for lack of a better term. He quotes someone (the book's in a box now, so I couldn't check the name) who points out that lists of classics of great books do not present a list of all the books one needs to read to be qualified or sufficiently educated in the humanities; rather, they offer starting points for people putting together a lifetime reading plan. Kirby's book is a great resource for people looking for lists of classics and great books, of a wide variety of sorts.

Scary Blog

This guy's blog is still up. Now take a look at this NYtimes article.

Passions and Pastimes

Lest I be accused of being an effete academic for spending my time on William Faulkner -- even if an unemployed one -- I would say in my defense that I have been concentrating my free time on movies as well. Vertigo and Bullitt are the two most recent acquisitions on DVD. Regarding McQueen, the star of the latter, it's amazing how much interest there is still in his life even after being dead 25 years now. The SE DVD of Bullitt includes a 2005 documentary about him. And there are at least two comprehensive sites devoted to his life and its related images and aritifacts here and here. (Neither is endorsed by the estate of McQueen as far as I know). In addition, McQueen's image has now been resurrected to be in a tv commercial for the 2005 Ford Mustang and in a billboard (in southern CA) for a watch company.

I did also get a nice biography of Faulkner -- thanks for the recommendation, Oprah -- that is easier to read than the novels. But it provides a lot of background and makes you want to read and re-read the better ones.

I've also been listening to Lalo Schifrin's soundtracks from Bullitt and Cool Hand Luke lately.

Vowell

Started reading Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacaction recently via audible. If you aren't familiar with Vowell, you might also check out her book Take the Cannoli. My favorite line from Assassination Vacation so far:

You know that game where every movie is related to Kevin Bacon. Well, you're the same. Every conversation with you is just one breath away from talking about a presidential assassination.

Vowell was also the voice of Violet in The Incredibles and a regular contributor to This American Life. It's odd to think of Vowell as a superhero though. She's allergic to wheat, among other things.

I also started The Sound and the Fury and am trying to read along with Oprah. Isn't it amazing that someone can actually have such an effect on the public that you can now buy Faulkner at Wal-Mart and at Target. I'm glad to see that Oprah can get people (large numbers at that!) excited about reading great books.