Happy go lucky

Last night Apparent Dip and I went to a bookstore (no surprise there, it’s something we do two to three times a week it seems). As the ever-insightful Emily has pointed out, books are like drugs, and I need a regular fix. I don’t always buy books when we go, but there’s something about walking between the shelves that rejuvenates me and soothes me when I’m stressed. Anyhoo, last night I picked up a copy of the new MLA Manual of Style (I’ve documented my nerdy love of style manuals before) and sat down with my tall Americano with a triple shot of espresso (my other drug of choice). And then it hit me. Here I was in a cafe reading through a style manual, which I picked up in part because it’s something I need for work/school. When was the last time I just randomly picked up a book to read? When was the last time I wandered through the shelves without having a specific title or author in mind?

My method of selecting books has changed dramatically over the years. As it should, I suppose, but I also miss the days when I was more random in my choices. I have fond memories of the public library in my hometown, where I spent a lot of time in the summers (because it was air conditioned and filled with books, what else does a girl need?). I would wander around the fiction stacks, completely oblivious to generic divisions, bestselling lists, etc. And I would find a book that looked interesting–usually one that was really fat with tiny print–and I would hide up in the children’s book section and read for what felt like hours (our library had this fake “train” thing upstairs–little cubbyholes with cushions where kids could hang out and read. I’d stack the cushions up against the doorway so no one could see in). In Fanny Herself (which, by the way, is partially based in my hometown), Edna Ferber has a great paragraph describing Fanny’s reading habits:

Fanny Brandeis had a way of going to the public library on Saturday afternoons (with a bag of very sticky peanut candy in her pocket, the little sensualist!), and there, huddled in a chair, dreamily and almost automatically munching peanut brittle, her cheeks growing redder and redder in the close air of the poorly ventilated room, she would read, and read, and read. There was no one to censor her reading, so she read promiscuously, wading gloriously through trash and classic and historical and hysterical alike, and finding something of interest in them all (41).*

This image really resonated with me when I first read it, and it continues to do so. I, too, used to read promiscuously, often to the point where one of the librarians would wag her head disapprovingly when I checked out books that she felt were inappropriate for my age (Nothing smutty, really. I just had delusions of grandeur and tried to read War and Peace when I was in seventh grade. I liked to carry it around with me–it felt solid and full of potential in my arms).

I haven’t really read promiscuously in quite a while. So last night I threw caution to the wind and picked up a book that I’d never heard of before, by an author I’d never read about. It’s a fat book, and it’s the first of two volumes, so I know that if I finish and like the first one, another fat book awaits. It contains the first two books in Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, The Jewel in the Crown and The Day of the Scorpion. And although I feel somewhat guilty that I’m not reading books that will patch the holes in my literary background for grad school, there’s a sense of excitement every time I pick this book up. There’s an adventure waiting for me in those pages. I have no idea if I will appreciate it when I look back from the other side, but for the time being, I feel like the younger Sarah is standing next to me and reminding me why I love to read in the first place. Now I just need to find some very sticky peanut brittle!

* Edna Ferber. Fanny Herself. New York: Grossett and Dunlap, 1917. Google Books.

Mercury must be in retrograde

[Warning: this is a post that begins with navel gazing and ends with boring drivel.  No pictures of London and Paris yet.  Or yarn.  Or cupcakes.  But all of that will come, I PROMISE]

So, I had every intention of posting last week, but then I had a health scare.  One relating to my previous crazy health thing.  It turns out I need to have surgery again.  It’s nothing too serious, because this time they know what they’re looking for, but it’s still rather unsettling.  Good news though: I will have enforced recovery (meaning: reading) time!  And although I will be recovering from the foggy joys of anesthesia, I’m a fast healer and relish any opportunity to not do much (I’m usually efficient in what I do because at heart, I’m the laziest person I know).

On the reading front, most of my time has been spent doing research.  I’m coming into the MA program here as a second year student, which means I have to choose three papers to revise and present in the spring.  I have two picked out and a third waiting in the wings (maybe).  Only I’ve discovered a problem: they’re crap.  I’ve blogged about my pathetic research method before.  Turns out that downloading and printing off journal articles isn’t quite the same thing as reading them.  Who’d have thunk it?  But I’m thoroughly enjoying Peter Marshall’s biography of “my man,” William Godwin, and I have a pile of articles that I can’t wait to get into.  Then it’s Edna’s turn (as in Edna Ferber–I have a bad habit of assuming close friendships with dead authors). After that, Aphra Behn might get a second chance to shine, but we’ll see about that one.

And one last thing in this incredibly boring post: I LOVE my new research buddy Zotero.  Love it.  Because it’s free.  And I’m cheap.

What I learned on my blogging vacation

• I have no patience–seriously, I had envisioned a long, long time away from the blog. The result? A frickin’ week (unless you count my trip to Europe and then it’s something like two-three weeks).

• I still need to find some sort of balance between writing on the blog and writing for work. I do believe my work suffered last semester because I spent way too much time writing/reading blogs. No more! I’m going to go for one post a week I think (I know, I know, that’s the rate I was writing at last semester as well, BUT, this time I vow to write once a week and not feel guilty if I don’t write any more than that).

• I have a problem with guilt. Oh wait, that’s nothing new. What do you expect when I come from a Catholic-Jewish background? It’s like a doubly-potent-guilt-trip laser beam is constantly aimed at me. Oy.

• For a while I tried to figure out what kind of blog I was writing. It’s not really a book blog. It’s not really an academic blog. Oh wait! The answer’s in my blog name: Loose Baggy Monster. I’m not a fan of Tolstoy for nothing!

• I have no patience. Thought it was worth repeating.

Anyhoo, I think I’m back, and coming up will be a post with pictures! of London! and Paris! and the books I bought while I was there!

Like a bad tv show…

Well, Paris and London were amazing.  My high school French came in handy, I ate nutella crepes, I walked around two amazing cities, and I decided that being parted from my computer was actually pretty great.  So for the time being, I’ve decided to re-prioritize things a bit.  I have a lot of writing projects on my plate at the moment, and I need to make sure my energy is headed in the right direction.  So the blog will be on hiatus for an indefinite period.  But I’m sure, like the bad tv shows of my childhood, I’ll be back in the future.  And I might pop in every once in a while.  And I’ll continue reading other people’s blogs, albeit much less than I used to. So ta for now!

London Calling

It is now less than a week before I board a plane for my trip to London and Paris.  You know what that means…the all important question arises: What books do I bring with me?  I don’t want to bring too many because I have plans (oh so many plans) for shopping while in London (I get to go to Persephone Books!).  But in the meantime, I have a plane ride to get through…

Apparent Dip and I are reading Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk, so I could bring that along, but the version I have is a hard-cover Everyman edition of the entire Cairo Trilogy.  Do I bring it and read the rest of the books?  Do I bring Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate?  All of a sudden the number of books that I just have to read has skyrocketed.  I’m hoping to finish Victor Serge’s The Unforgiving Years, before I leave, because I hate bringing along books that are already in progress (I always finish them too early in the flight) and because it is haunting me.  I started it last night before bed and it was the first thing I thought of when I woke up.  Or perhaps I should bring along Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy?  By the way, can anyone explain to me why I seem to be obsessed with novels set around WWII?  And I apparently love those epic/multi-generational tales.  I don’t call this blog Loose Baggy Monster for nothin’.

As you can see, I am horrible when it comes to making a decision about reading material on flights.  Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated…

I’m free!!!

Well, after an all-nighter last Thursday (I am getting waaaaay to old for those I’ve discovered), I turned in that last paper and the semester is over!  Well, it’s almost over.  It won’t feel like it’s behind me until I get that last grade sometime today or tomorrow.  Then I’ll have closure.

But I’ve already rebounded after a weekend of sleeping and drinking wine and knitting (of which I hope to have pictures soon, I swear, because it’s pretty lace that I’ll never wear but can’t seem to stop knitting).  And I have started my next projects.

PROJECT THE FIRST: I bought a filing cabinet!  And manila folders!  And I’m sooooo excited to get my articles organized–I’m practically drooling.  Because yes, I am a filing nerd.

PROJECT THE SECOND: I’m getting a couple of summer reading lists together.  One comprised of fun books and another of books in my field that I need to read ASAP.  There’s a good chance I’ll be able to petition to have all of the grad courses I’ve taken as a non-matriculated wannabe transfer over, which means: I’m halfway through my English M.A.!  That means, GRE again this summer (ugh!) and getting my butt in gear for Ph.D. program applications come fall.  While I really don’t like this process, it does give me more excuses to file things, so that’s a bonus.  Ooooh, I’m thinking some sort of color-coding might be necessary to fool me into thinking I’m enjoying the whole deal…

PROJECT THE THIRD: I have four writing projects I want to work on this summer. 1) Revise a paper from this past semester.  2) Revise/rethink/completely rewrite a paper from my first semester as a wannabe.  3) Start research for a fun creative nonfiction project.  4) Write a fourth paper for my old advisor in history.  And somewhere in there, I need to raise $1000 for an accordion.

PROJECT THE FOURTH: I need to get some language skills back.  I want to start teaching myself some Yiddish, and I need to refresh my French and German.  And if I can get to it, my Russian as well.  I need to see if our crappy library here has any audiobooks in foreign languages.  Sometimes just listening to a foreign language and blocking out English altogether helps.  When I was taking a translation course, I discovered that I could only listen to Russian books or classical music while translating.  English broke the spell.

So, I’ll be back soon with book lists I’m sure, and pictures of lace, and other fun stuff.  In the meantime, I am going to surround myself with lovely pens, manila folders, and articles…

The process of writing…

…is like getting sweat from a stone.

I’ve recently read a number of posts about the process of writing and it’s made me think a bit about my own “process” (I don’t remember where, exactly, but if I find the posts, I’ll put up the links). Actually, “process” is rather a polite term for the caffeine-induced, anxiety-wracked haze that drives most of my writing. I have a confession to make: I am a binge writer. I have tried to work in a more methodical way, hammering out a bit at a time, but it just doesn’t work for me. I’ve tried outlines, pages of notes, anything to prevent me from writing everything in a mad dash at the end of the semester (ok, not everything–for example, I don’t actively sit my butt down in my chair and write every day, which I really need to start doing). But luckily for me, I am just starting my the next stage of my graduate work, so there is time to improve. I need to rethink and retool my process. It really is quite pathetic that I am 31, have been in grad school far longer than I care to remember, and still write like I did when I was 21.

So, here are the promises I’m making to myself for next semester. It may not work perfectly, and I’m sure I will still struggle, but it’s a start.

FIRST: I will try to write every day. My current schedule for research papers looks a bit like this: 1) think of topic. 2) Check out every single book I can find that pertains to said topic. Download and print out articles. 3) Start a binder dedicated just to the materials I have on this topic (I include printouts of the books I’ve looked up at the library so that I don’t repeat myself and I write notes about whether the books are applicable or not–at least, I do this in an ideal sense. It doesn’t always work out that way). 4) Read/skim the pertinent materials. 5) Get wrapped up in the everyday work of the semester and forget everything I’ve just read/skimmed. Not such a good method. Thus, promise number two.

SECOND: I will try and be more methodical about my reading. I will read Inter-Library Loan books first and take notes. That way, I can order them again near the end of the semester if necessary, but will not find myself clutching the book feverishly as the librarian on duty tries to wrestle it from my anxious grasp.

THIRD: I will accept the fact that I am a binge writer and plan accordingly. In other words, I will try to stage/induce the binge a bit earlier in the semester. In order to do this I have a rather devious plan. I am always on the ball in the beginning of a semester and I have little trouble completing the reading ahead of time. But, like the silly person I am, when this happens I sit back and twiddle my thumbs instead of reading ahead. Because really, why would I do that? So, new goal: when I’ve finished ahead of time, I will immediately pick up (and read) the books from the end of the semester. Sneaky, eh? That way, in the last month of the semester I can schedule a writing binge, skim over the books I’ve already read so I’m ready for class, and not be up at four in the morning the day before a paper is due, dashing off gobbledy-gook that only faintly resembles complete sentences.

If I can keep these promises, there is a chance that I will find myself in a wholly new frame of mind at the end of my semester. Will I still be stressed out? Of course! If I wasn’t the people who know and love me might think I had a lobotomy (I prefer to think that my neuroses make me lovable. Did I mention that I am borderline delusional as well?). But I will hopefully not be in the state I’m in right now. When I emerge from the dungeon of my office (I have to use my imagination here as my office doesn’t actually have doors, and it’s aboveground, and freshly painted) …as I was saying, when I emerge from the door-free and quite lovely dungeon that is my office, I often feel like a younger, female, beardless, and not-politically-oppressed version of Dr. Manette in A Tale of Two Cities. Except that I can’t make shoes. But who knows? Check back on Friday and I just might have figured out how to get sweat from a stone.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it…

…is to help me procrastinate! See, it’s crunch time in paper-writing-ville, which means 1) there is nothing interesting happening in my life (not like there really ever is, but it’s worse than usual right now) and 2) I don’t want to write the papers that are the cause of nothing interesting happening in my life. So how about some random/weird facts about me?

• I used to be on the dance team in high school. That’s right, I once wore a cheerleader-like uniform and danced during half-time at football and basketball games. We were officially known as a “dance and drill team,” but there were no drills to speak of…unless you count the fact that attending practices for said team was akin to the pain of sitting in a dentist’s chair with a cavity. Given my Russian classical ballet training, I was a dance snob, and I was used to working really hard during rehearsals and class. The dance and drill team practices were another world: it was like herding cats, but less organized. Fun fact: at my Wisconsin high school, when the basketball games ended, the gym floor would fill up with people in the crowd who would all dance to the beer barrel polka. Good times!

• I twiddle my thumbs. I didn’t realize I did this (or that anyone really did this) until Apparent Dip caught me. Now I notice it all the time…

• I’ve played some interesting instruments in my life. The piano will always be my first love, but I’ve dabbled with other instruments as well. In middle school I desperately wanted to play the flute, so I took up with…the oboe. Yeah, not sure how that one came about. I had braces at the time, and I can tell you (and Queen Mother can back me up on this one), playing the oboe with braces is not a good idea. I can only describe the sounds I made as something along the lines of a dying-cow-simultaneously-giving-birth. It.was.bad. That did not stop me from trying to teach myself to play the violin years later. I think this might be one of those times when the short temporal duration of my renaissance-woman dabbling is a blessing. I have also been known to play the hammered dulcimer. Next up: the accordion.

• My OCD tendencies really come out to play when I eat. Some examples: when eating a bag of M&Ms, I separate all of the candies by color. I then proceed to eat them from least to greatest. Sometimes I start on the other end of the spectrum, and when I’m feeling really crazy, I might go by odds/evens. When eating Lucky Charms cereal (which I haven’t for years, sadly), I would leave all of the marshmallows until the end. I would then proceed to eat them in order of least to greatest. Peanut butter cups, swiss cake rolls, vegetable-tofu stir-fries…they all have a ritual involved with eating them. As a result: I.eat.very.slowly.

• I’m not afraid to take risks with my personal appearance. When I was in the field for my geology major, I essentially spent an entire summer camping in New Mexico, Wyoming, and Oregon. After the first ten days without a shower, I decided that hair was overrated. The group I was with stopped at a hotel one night (we were ready to mutiny when we arrived at a campground in the middle of a thunderstorm to discover that the showering facilities were broken) and Apparent Dip, with the aid of a trusty beard trimmer, shaved my head for me. I have fine hair, but a lot of it.  The beard trimmer took a while, but I ended up loving it. I felt so free!  However, walking around logging country in Oregon as a woman with a shaved head in an Earth First! t-shirt was probably not the smartest thing I ever did.

• For a while in college and the years immediately following, I couldn’t donate blood because of various piercings and tattoos. I’ve had my nose pierced five different times (I kept having to take it out for various reasons and it closed up too quickly). Apparent Dip went with me once to get my nose pierced and he learned a valuable lesson: if you have a queasy stomach, DO NOT look at photo albums in a piercing/tattoo parlor. I no longer have my piercings, but I’m seriously considering another tattoo this summer.

Ok, time for me to get my no-longer pierced nose to the grindstone yet again. Oh, and as a follow up to the last post: the blisters have healed, I can walk again, and I think I seriously drove up the stock price for triple-antiobiotic ointment!

Summer has apparently arrived

Is it the warm weather that makes me say this?  The sudden presence of sunshine after a long winter of gray skies?  The fact that the two weeks generally allotted to spring in this area of the country have now passed?  The fact that I spend most of my time on the porch running away from bees? (I’m not allergic, exactly, but I do swell up around the site of the sting, often to comical effect).  No, the reason I know it is summer involves something far less appealing than green grass (or, if it’s our previously leaf-covered lawn, a green substance that looks suspiciously like endive), budding trees, and tulips.  My feet are my barometer.

Tootsies, dogs, call them what you will, I have a love-hate relationship with my feet.  I love them because they get me to and from campus, they help me exercise, and they provide an excuse for me to get a foot massage from Apparent Dip while watching movies.  However, I have not always been very nice to my feet, and I think I’m reaching a point in my life when they are exacting their revenge.  You see, I was a ballet dancer from the time I was three until roughly sixteen.  During that time, I went on pointe, lost toenails, gained blisters, and had to get excruciatingly painful treatments of liquid nitrogen (in which the entire base of both feet were swabbed with the stuff) due to some icky things I picked up from various dressing room floors.  I occasionally treated my feet to a soak, but mainly as a means to getting me dancing again, as soon as possible.

So now, fifteen years later, my feet are getting even with me.  They’re pretty sneaky about it too (it helps that it takes me forever to remember the lessons of the previous summer).  Once the weather gets warmer, I don’t like wearing shoes if I can help it.  I prefer being barefoot at home and I prefer sandals to anything requiring me to wear socks.  So my feet fight back with blisters.  A lot of them.  And whereas bleeding in/through one’s shoes was considered lucky in ballet (seriously, there was a whole ritual involving pointe shoe ribbons: before performances we would deliberately poke ourselves lightly with our sewing needles as we were sewing the ribbons to our tights in order to bring luck), bleeding through one’s super cute new sandals is just icky and painful and ruins a perfectly good pair of shoes in the process.  And whereas my feet would toughen up with every season while I was dancing, they absolutely refuse to do so now.

The result of all of this: I haven’t been able to work out on the treadmill for a week because of the pain.  I’ve hobbled through the mile to and from campus, but today I think I might need Apparent Dip to go back and get the car for me.  Oh, how the mighty have fallen.  However, I also think this is my body’s devious plot to immobilize me and force me to get my papers written.  At least, that’s what I’m telling myself as I prepare to sit on the porch while soaking my feet (and writing gibberish that will hopefully coalesce into a concise, persuasive argument).

I just hope the bees aren’t out today.

Random again

This will be a random post, I’m sure. I think my brain has decided that logic is for the birds and therefore has declared a moratorium on any kind of fluid writing. I apologize in advance.

First up: Running. I bought a knee brace but I don’t think I’ll be able to use it. My knee has gotten used to not having a PCL and isn’t quite ready to leave its crazy moving-all-over-the-place ways. It actually hurts with the brace on, whereas before I didn’t notice anything untoward. So knee-brace-free it shall be. However, I have discovered that the knee is the least of my problems. Breathing is kind of an issue as well. Although, really, perhaps breathing is overrated. I have never been this out-of-shape before, and I’m not enjoying it one little bit. But the only way to go is up, right? Baby steps…

Second: I have discovered two books that I just have to have. No really! They twisted my arm, bullied me, you name it. I tried to resist, but found that I couldn’t hold out. The first book that captivated me is The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective. Mr. Whicher was the detective investigating the Road Hill murder in 1860, in which a young child’s body was found stuffed in a well. Whicher suspected the killer lurked amidst the family members (and he was later proved correct). The murder horrified England, and it also inspired a wave of “detective fever” as Wilkie Collins describes it. Indeed, this case–and Mr. Whicher in particular–is seen as the inspiration for many sensation fiction novels (such as Collins’s The Moonstone and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret). Last week I read Collins’s lesser-known anti-vivisection novel, Heart and Science, and at this point in the semester my brain is craving more mysteries/sensation fiction. This looks like the perfect book to dive into once my final paper is turned in.

The second book I’m interested in is Pearl S. Buck’s Peony. I am ashamed to admit that I have never read The Good Earth, but Peony is one that I can’t pass up (I discovered it through Nextbook, which has a review essay by Jennifer Cody Epstein here). Ezra ben Israel is the son of a Jew and a Chinese Concubine. He is married to a Jewish woman, and their son, David, has been raised as an observant Jewish youth who is, nevertheless, firmly rooted in Chinese culture. I cannot wait to get this in my hands!

Finally: I joined a couple of academic associations this weekend. How nerdy is it that I practically jumped up and down when I realized that one membership would allow me to claim a discount at Oxford UP? Oy.