Just a couple of quick notes since it's been a few days.
1. It's been a few days because I've been trying to get my TRASHionals category put to bed. I did, just now. YAY! I need TRASH in my life to get that twice annual adrenalin rush that comes from taking 1-3 days to do something that you should've done over the course of 4-6 months. I've missed that since leaving grad school.
2. Work is still great. Being downtown has been incredibly invigorating. I ran errands above ground today that I could've taken the subway for, despite blustery 30-degree weather, because I like walking around the city more than I dislike freezing my ears (and other parts) off.
3. I read Annie Proulx's Close Range. It's a book of short stories, all set in Wyoming, most of them contemporary (it's a 1999 book). Short stories are manageable for my rail commute, so that was nice. The stories were generally of a high quality, with a couple of fun brief interludes of gallows-type humor. I felt that Proulx successfully portrayed the subjectivity of an amazingly wide array of characters, linked mostly by a connection to a physical place that most people would gladly leave, but where her characters cannot help but stay for a variety of psychological reasons. I don't read many short stories or short story collections, so it's hard for me to put it to any qualitative standard. But it worked for me.
4. I listened to part of a CD today that "Bob Frankowitz" (I've got to remember to ask him about the alias) made when we took a trip out to see a tiny piece of the L.A. River that is not embedded in exposed concrete, followed by a trip into the heart of the River downtown where a homeless man gave us a guided tour. It made me openly long to be headed back across the country. Soon enough.
5. Saturday night DEK, Bill, Terri, Tom and I watched The Bourne Identity, finding particularly funny the numerous times in the film someone removes a jacket for no good reason. We laughed our way through the key bridge scene with Chris Cooper as a result, and probably missed key plot points. Afterward we played a game called Burn Rate. The idea is that each player is running a dot.com, and you try to run yours into the ground at a slower rate than everybody else. The last one not bankrupt wins. It's a bit confusing at first, (the rules are somewhat convoluted) but since everybody in the room has worked for a high-tech company, is married to someone who worked for a high-tech company, or has temped, we all related and a very good time was had by all. There's your mention, Tom...

Stupid French explorers.

I'm not sure how, and I don't mean this to disparage The Athletic Reporter (which you should all go read right now), but I just can't shake the feeling that somehow Joe Mulder is responsible for this.

So now I'm all depressed, not quite in a Francisco Cabrera-Dennis Gibson sort of way, but still fairly upset at last night's turn of events. It's some consolation that we got beaten by their best, but we prided ourselves on shutting down teams' best, and the 77-74 score suggests that they took the game to us and played it at their pace, not ours.

And I'm wondering what we're going to hear over the next few days about the whole Donatas Zavackas fiasco. He's a senior and gone, so it's not like the team will have him around a la Scottie Pippen refusing to go back into that playoff game, but this also makes me wonder about Howland's snap decision-making--just what does your tough-as-nails senior have to say during a Sweet Sixteen to get himself buried on the bench? I can't remember this much intrigue around a Lithuanian since the collapse of the Soviet Union led to the breakup of Boris Zhukov and Nikolai Volkoff. At least that I understood. Major geopolitical events are going to have serious ramifications on tag teams; that's just a part of life. But the Zavackas thing just baffles me. I hate to be the type of fickle fan who turns on a coach at the drop of a hat, but there is that school of thought which says that the coach who rebuilds the program is not necessarily the guy to get you over the top. So while it would be a short-term blow, a small part of me now thinks that Ben Howland taking the UCLA job would not be the worst thing to happen in the history of basketball.

As for The Bolsheviks, well, I hope that somehow, somewhere, they were eventually able to patch up their differences, and maybe they now roam their former homeland doing good deeds and then slipping off into the night. Or maybe they have desk jobs with WWE. Either way.

If you're anything like myself and Mr. Kidder (and thank goodness, for the fate of the world, few of you are), you will literally get a chill up and down your spine and probably do a spit take when you read this; what did it for us was, "No, Let's call it Shirley!!"

These are good stories and all, but vis-a-vis story #1, at what point do you lose your status as "guide"?

Also, I think Edward Said et al might have something of a different take on Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope.

Mostly, though, I just wanted to see if this site was accessible from work.

After three days of working downtown and commuting over three hours a day I would expect to be wearing down a little bit from it. This is not the case at all. I am totally invigorated by a couple of things--being back in a real, honest-to-goodness professional environment, and being downtown. I've been walking around town during lunch hours and on the occasional work-related errand, and I am finally really learning downtown Pittsburgh. I'm starting to understand which streets go where, what's on them, and where certain landmarks I've always known about but never actually seen are. More than that, though, the city (not Pittsburgh, per se, but the abstraction "the city") is in my blood and has been for a long time, and being immersed in it every day again has given me a vitality that's been missing for a while. Now, Friday morning after I stay up for Pitt's Sweet Sixteen game, I may be singing a different tune, but that's a different matter altogther. Right now, I'm just glad to finally be in a place where I can be at least a little bit content, at least for a little bit.

First, I need to apologize for short-changing Nathaniel West--his complete opus runs 421, not 321 pages. As penance I read Miss Lonelyhearts, which isn't the worst thing you could do if you have 75 spare minutes. It's about the guy who writes the "Miss Lonelyhearts" column for a New York newspaper, but while he took the job as a lark, he finds himself completely broken down over time by the realization of all the real tragedies people pour out to him. Suffice it to say, it's not exactly a pick-me-up.

The new gig started today. I am working for _____ doing _________. Since it's a law firm, there are confidentiality agreements out the ying-yang. Suffice it to say I'm helping to manage documents for a case with over 1,000 bankers' boxes of documents. The pay and the work itself are better than anything I've done in a long time. It looks like the commute is about an hour 45 in the morning and slightly less coming home. That I could do without, but over half of that is spent on the T (Pittsburgh's subway/trolley thing), so at least I can read or nap for parts. My schedule is flexible, so I'm experimenting a bit this week with different start and end times, but if I take a Major Test Prep Company class in the near future, I may be starting at 7 at least one day a week. That would involve getting up at a time that starts with a 4 and contains an "a.m." Very not good times.

Also, you may notice I got all of 6 Sweet Sixteen teams, which sadly enough is not a personal low. In 1992 I got four, though I did correctly pick the Dookies that year, before I realized they were evil. The alma mater is doing very nicely, though, so I do have something to continue to pull for.

Finally, DEK and I saw "Star Dates: Kim Fields" while flipping through games on Saturday. It's as entertaining as the Dustin Diamond episode, and perhaps even a little more so--and I don't say that lightly. But it contains perhaps the single worst date anyone has ever had anywhere that didn't involve amputation or restratining orders. It does lose some points for having a second date that wasn't particularly funny at all, but which was worth sitting through just to see the bad first date preening during the credits. If you have 25 minutes to spare and it's between this and reading one-third of Miss Lonelyhearts, choose E!

One thing I got into in graduate school was the burgeoning field of visual culture, and conversely the culture of vision. It wasn't the best book, but the most mind-blowing book I read was a short little thing by Johnathan Crary entitled Techniques of the Observer. What blew my mind were the parts where he described a transition roughly located in the early 19th century, when scientists (or perhaps more accurately, natural philosophers) started realizing that sensory information is not simply received but is processed within the body, and that processing is subject to manipulation. In short, vision is subjective. Crary, an art historian by training, points out that this discovery was traditionally credited to Impressionist painters, but he instead credits it to early physiologists who first became aware that the process of observation itself affects the thing being observed.

While it's a cool book that I'd recommend to anyone, all of this is really a long-winded prologue to something I noticed a few months after moving back to Pennsylvania from L.A., which is that I see differently now. In Los Angeles, I learned to constantly look up--everything in L.A. has a backdrop, whether it's the Santa Monica Mountains, the ocean, palm trees against the horizon, or what have you. Taking in the scenery always means looking at the backdrop in addition to looking at the ground level.

Since I've been back home, I see all of the familiar landscapes in a new light, largely because I now look higher against the horizon. I notice creek beds previously unseen, I see the backs of buildings through tufts of trees, I notice a hillside in a background where I previously only saw foreground, etc. This effect has been especially pronounced since about mid-November, when all the trees shed their leaves. In many local towns and along byways I am continually surprised by a glimpse of something in the distance that I have never seen before, or never seen from that angle, or which is much closer than I ever realized. The rolling hill topography of the area and ample tree cover hides these scenes eight months a year, even if you know what to look for.

So while I am tired of heavy coats, cold fingertips, and digging my car out of snow and ice, I feel at least a twinge of ambiguity as I look forward to this spring, because the trees are threatening to bloom, regrew their leaves, and steal away these precious glimpses I have finally seen for the first and what will likely be the only time, since I plan to be far, far away the next time the leaves fall. Spring represents renewal to many, and I feel that I am emerging from a kind of winter hibernation in my own life, hoping that good things begin to blossom for me as I shake off what feels like a deep slumber. But though I am not a poet and I rarely think poetically, the passing of winter has left me with a touch of the elegiac...

Nathaniel West must be the only major American novelist known for multiple works whose "complete novels" collection could be contained in a 321-page book with biggish type. I read Day of the Locust over the last couple of days. It reminds me of the joke about the woman who complains that Shakespeare "wrote in cliches". All of the observations about Hollywood (the place and the metaphor) in this book seem like old hat if you've read a lot of hard-boiled fiction and seen a lot of self-referential movies; at some point, though, you realize that what your reading is in many ways the ur-text for all that material. No one in this book is nice, or likable, or happy; things don't start well for anyone and they don't end well for anyone; and no one today can read a book with a main character named Homer Simpson and not be completely distracted by this fact. However, it's short, it's a nice study in individual and group lives of quiet desperation, and thus it's worth a look. I may read one of two of his other novels (there are 4 total) if I get a spare hour.

If you're going here, make sure not to wear a beret in your hair.

Now I'm starting to understand; this is what "supporting our troops" means. (Courtesy of Eschaton)