I was born in this time zone, so maybe I’m meant to be here. Or, as someone said tonight at dinner, “I’m a blue and green person, not a brown and green person.”
I have lots of details to share (and great photos), but that will have to wait until I get back home. I fly out of here tomorrow at 2:00, and then on Monday morning, I leave for a retreat in the Ozarks.
Scene 1: An elevator at Coit Tower.
Random Guy. Elevator Operator. Me.
Random Guy: “Hey, is this a radio station?”
Elevator Operator: “Yeah.”
RG: “Which one?”
EO: “KOIT”
RG: “Oh, of course. Because this is the Coit tower.”
EO: “No, that’s a radio station. This is a tower.”
RG: “I know, but they have the same name.”
EO: “No, the station is K-O-I-T. The tower is C-O-I-T.”
RG: “Right, because all radio stations start with a K.”
Me, disobeying the prime directive: “Actually, all radio stations east of the Mississippi start with a W. Those west of the Mississippi start with a K.”
RG: “Really?”
Me: “Yeah.”
RG: “They’re not different in the South?”
Me: “Nope.”
Exeunt
According to Pitchforkmedia, Wilco is about to head out on tour in support of their new album A Ghost is Born, which you can listen to in its entirety online. They are scheduled to perform in Manchester (UK) on July 14 at Manchester Academy, a venue I passed twice a day last summer as I trekked between The Verdene and the John Rylands University Library. I should, in fact, be in Manchester on July 14 and will probably be staying only a short walk from the venue. So while their show in Columbia (MO) was cancelled, it looks like I’ll get to see them after all.
In other music news, I recently purchased Loretta Lynn’s new album, the Jack White-produced Van Lear Rose (iTunes), largely because I liked what I heard when she performed “Portland, Oregon” on the David Letterman show recently. I’ve picked what I think are the four best tracks (iTunes iMix), if you want to give her new music a try.
This morning we leave for San Francisco, where we will be staying at the Hotel Rex. Apparently, we will be close to Lawrence Ferlinghetti‘s City Lights Bookstore, a landmark of American literary history. It’s been twenty years since my last visit to the city. My junior year of high school was spent in northern California, a beautiful part of the world. Unfortunately, it was one in a string of bad years: four schools and three countries in four years. That was a long time ago, though.
William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition will be coming along as airplane reading. The very first page features this particularly nice passage:
She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct, that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.
The aforementioned graduation present will be, as Sheri suggested, cash.
I bought a print copy of the NY Times for my flight to Boston last week. One of the best sections of the Times is their food section. Last week, there was a great article by Julia Moskin entitled, “After Centuries, the Vegetarian Feast of India Finally Arrives.” Moskin writes,
With the arrival here of South Indian vegetarian staples like dosas and uttapams, samosa chat and idlis, Indian cooking in New York is finally reflecting how Indians eat in India. And that often means vegetarian meals at least twice a day, or an entirely vegetarian home kitchen. Indian restaurants outside India have rarely reflected the central role of vegetarian cooking in Indian life, or its varied flavors.
Ah, it is to laugh. Ten years after L and I ate first began eating about once a week at Udupi Palace in the DC area, the Times explains to its readers what dosas, uttapams, and idlis are. And KC has Udipi Cafe. Who says New York is the cutting edge?
The nicest part of ASECS 2004 was being able to catch up with friends from grad school. The University of Maryland English Department had a powerhouse group of eighteenth-century graduate students there for awhile, and I was as influenced by the remarkable group of peers I found in grad school as I was by my professors. A surprising number of us ended up in tenure-track jobs. Liza Child teaches at Trinity College in D. C. Leigh Eicke is at Grand Valley State University. Mark Pedreira teaches at the University of Puerto Rico. Eleanor Shevlin is with West Chester University. (There are several others who were at UMD with us, but they were not at the conference.) Sharing our experiences and exchanging advice helped me to put my own life into perspective. I feel fortunate.