State of the Estate

Life is busy, and by that extension, I'm guessing I can't complain. So here's a slice of the latest, freshest, bit o' life I can dish out. Straight from me to you. No lengthy emails, just straight bloggery at its logorrheic finest.

The Fam
We're all doing pretty ok. We're all busy as hell, but overall things are going as well as they can. Molly just turned 16 months, and she's not one, but three handfuls of cute. She can rattle off probably close to 10 different animal sounds, and has gotten very good at asking "what's that." She listens really well too (most of the time). She's very much in love with Nemo and Tinkerbell, though to her it's Memo and dinkdink (or something like that). Oh and don't think about eating ice cream unless you plan on giving her half.

Now that Molly's a little older and whatnot, Sue's been getting back into her art more. She's looking to expand and restock her holdings at a local art gallery, and/or start expanding onto etsy.com. Right now she's been buying up plain ole plates and painting them up with some really slick designs. She's also planning on doing some fabric art class with aunt Jeanie here soon.

Schoolin'
I'm teaching another full load this semester--100 kids this time, divided up 75/25 between composition and business writing. Now that it's nearly the end of the fourth week of school, I estimate that I've read and commented upon over 980 pages of student work so far, and that's taking only the minimum side of page requirements into account. That's a freakin' lot of damn grading. Fortunately, my kids this semester seem to be a good amount more attentive and serious than last semester, and that makes grading easier.

I also have several international students this semester, which is both humbling and really interesting. It amazes me that these kids not only can write well, but participate in class discussion just as fluently, if not more fluently than the rest of the students. While I'd love to think that someday I could subsist with my German or Japanese knowledge, I know I'll never approach the sort of fluency these kids have unless I'm living in one of those countries. Another cool thing about the international students is that they bring in a really diverse and worldly view on the types of issues we discuss; and these world views have done wonders for fostering our class conversation. While a lot of profs complain about having international students, I'm really enjoying mine, and looking forward to having more in the future.

Grant Musings
Since this is an ultra-random, catchall type post, NEA Grant applications are open now for Fiction/non-fiction. The deadline is 3/5/09. Here's the link: http://www.arts.endow.gov/grants/apply/Lit/index.html. I'm really hoping I can land something like this; it'd give me the time to write and finish Not an Autobiography without having to think about bills, and maybe a little on location travel research too.

Current Music
It's been a while since I've talked up my latest musical influences, so here's a list of things that have been consistently populating my Amarok Playlists:

• Blue Foundation--My wife's been spinning up the Twilight sountrack a lot lately, and I really dig the Blue Foundation Song on there....Now before I continue, y'all need to know that Sue's not one of the 800 million Twilight fangirls out there. Sue read Twilight long before it became harry potter rediculous popular; she even Emailed Stephanie Meyer back in the day some (and got responses). Anyway, Blue Foundation. Great band. Really nice ephemeral, trancy kind of stuff.
  
• The Ting Tings. I can't get "Shut up and Let Me go" or "Fruit machine" out of my head. Cha ching. Cha Ching.
  
• The Birthday Massacre--this band rocks. One of the best goth rock bands I've ever listened to. Excellent melodic female vocals backed by a great synthy dirty grind.
  
• Conjure One--another good ephemeral trancy kinda music. This kinda stuff is great to grade to.
  
• Fauxliage--see Conjure One's entry.
  
• Juli--She's German. I fell in love with their song on Rockband. Very good alternative rock sound.
  
• Oasis--loved em in the 90s. Still love em today
• "Love Spreads" by the Stone Roses--I forgot about this band and song, but Rockband again rescuscitated that memory for me. Back in high school art class, I borrowed this cd off of Mr. Humes. Great English band, and "Love Spreads" in particular rocks. Plus it's one of the few songs I can sing on Rockband without causing the paint to curl.
  

Writing
Ha! Not happening. Maybe Spring break. Maybe Summer. With 100 kids and a Molly, there just isn't time for much else.

Reading
I'm slowly chugging my way through Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism and Alan Moore's The Watchmen. For school I'm rereading D. Michael Abrashoff's It's Your Ship and Matt Mason's The Pirate's Dilemma.

Watching
Right now we're cutting through several TV series on Netflix: Jekyll (very good), Witchblade, The Lost Room (very good), and Miracles (ok--Sue liked it a lot). Movie wise, we just saw Underworld 3 (very good), Wanted (very good), Rocknrolla (I liked it; Sue didn't), and Death Race (suprisingly good). Molly's been all about Tinkerbell, Finding Nemo, Monster's Inc, Baby Einstein, and to a lesser degree, It's a Big Big World. We're about to relive our college anime-nerdness by rewatching all of Rurouni Kenshin.

Speaking of anime, how I wish Netflix were around back when I was in college. I watched so much anime at such a terrible quality, because that's what we had--I saw all of Kenshin for example via TERRIBLE Real Player Rips. And I put up with it. Anime nerds today have it way too easy.

Well that's enough rambling. I have to finish grading persuasive memo revisions.

Louisville, Kate Nash, and a smattering of random

So residency is here again, and though it may be futile for me to blog about Louisville since most of my readership is either currently here with me or recently graduated, but WTFN (as in Why the Fuck Not), right?

Although it's only Saturday, and I'm sure I'll be tired and cranky by Thursday, Residency looks to be very very well laid out in terms of planning and sluffing and overall interest in what's going on. Workshop this res for me looks to be particularly good--I really enjoyed all of the pieces, and they were all very thematically different. AND, I get to be workshopped first. Shut up.

Sue, Molly and the fam are due in Thursday and Friday. I'm a little sad that they'll all miss my readings and lectures

• Lecture: Structural Screwity: A Brief Guide to Reading and Writing Experimental Fiction
• Tuesday, May 27 @ 1:30 PM ELC Lectorium
• Reading: from "Deconstructing Happily Ever After" (2008 Kentuckiana Metroversity Contest Winner)
• Thursday, May 29 @ 1:30 PM ELC Lectorium

But, since the first thing everyone said to me at Residency went like this: "Hi Drew, How are the baby and Sue? Got any pictures?" I think everyone will be generally happy to see them, and I'll be happy to see my wife and baby (which I already miss terribly). Win-win.

On to new musics:
Thanks to the wonders of my favorite online radio, Pandora, I've found several new bands and other musical type groups that I'm very much obsessed with lately. Kate Nash is at the forefront of this new wave in my musical tastes. Kate's music reminds me a little of Bjork, a little of Anna Nalick, a little of the Dresden Dolls, and a lot of none of them. She has a very [for me] unique sound and sings in a lovely cockney. Her songs are pretty bawdy, and very story-esque. Normally I can't hear lyrics for shit, but because she uses the cockney accent, and because her instrumentation is pretty simple, her lyrics shine out. I first got hooked on her music with the song "Merry Happy," but since I've bought the album, nearly every track is fantastic. My favorites include "Foundations," "The shit song," "Birds," "Dickhead," and "Pumpkin Soup." I guess Kate also won best breakthrough artist in england for last year. I hope she sticks around, because I thoroughly love her music.

I've also, thanks to Pandora, been finding a number of more instrumental bands that I really dig: The Section Quartet (like Apocalyptica, they redo rock songs with their strings.), The Last Cord (very dark instrumentals), Matmos (kinda weird, but also good), and Tom Waits (probably some of the most miserable music I've ever heard. I love his voice and the misery).

Ok I guess that's it. I lied about the smattering of random. I'm sure you don't mind.

Can you get high off of psychodelic rock?

Probably not, but I've been listening to one of Pink Floyd's earlier albums, Ummagumma, lately, and man, for as atypical as it is, I love it. Last week, while I was working 2nd shift, I popped the Studio disk in and went for a couple of midnight walks, and it was a great experience. The album is just such a break from everything that I normally listen to that I'm really connecting to it in different ways than I normally would. It's also cool to notice the groundwork for a lot of Pink Floyd's later works within this album. It's some crazy shit. Crazy good shit.

Over the last few weeks we had our two baby showers, and they were both very wonderful. Our parents (especially Sue's dad) went way out of their way to help us bring the families' first grandbaby into the world in style. Molly "Marzipan" Lackovic has more clothes and blankets and toys than I do. All thanks to the loving, doting grandparents. Having the families come together like this really ramps up the whole excitement factor. And speaking of excitement, I present 2 anecdotes: 1. My mom shakes and shivers like a little kid getting candy whenever she see's Sue. Then she immediately dives for the belly and starts talking to Molly. My teeth rot out every time. 2. We went to Baby's R Us the other day to pick up a couple of things that we didn't get at the shower, and the lady said to Sue, "I thought you had the baby already. I haven't seen Chuck in a few days." Yes, the lady at Baby's R Us, knows Sue's dad's name on a first name basis. And as a 3rd (unannounced) anecdote, Sue's mom has been making constant excuses to come up and visit. I believe she's coming up this weekend to help Sue "clean house." Yeah right, she wants to spend time with the baby. Point is, everyone has baby fever, and it's great. Molly's setting up for coming into the world spoiled to hell, and while I'd rather her not to be so, I don't think I have much choice right now. All I gotta say is our parents are awesome.


Also I want to thank all of you who went out and bought a copy of Alligator Juniper. I really appreciate you for taking the time to do so, and I totally didn't expect it to happen. If you still want to read the story, and don't have the money, let me know and I can send it to you.


Thankfully, work's been a lot less demanding of me lately (they actually hired someone to take care of all the tech support I was doing on the side for nothing), so I've been able to spend more time working on automation and a potential lead to have said automation rolled out to other call centers (which has been talked about for about 3 years now). So we'll see where that goes.

Otherwise, we're finishing up our baby classes tomorrow, and entering week 34 of the pregnancy. September 30 is the due date, but we'll take her as soon as she's ready to come out as a healthy baby. She's been moving a lot lately...and it's like world shifting moves; the kind that you can see from five feet away; the kind that make you think of the chest-bursting aliens in Alien...or the one from Spaceballs that pops out and starts singing (I like the singing better).

I'm currently working on last minute edits of my ECE, and, more importantly, the 3rdquel to "(Un/Re/I )Do" -- all about how Johnny loses his job (poor guy).

Dave has encouraged me to start reading and writing more poetry, and I've been doing a bit of both as time permits. I'm going to end today with a poem. It's still pretty early in its lifecycle, and I'm still early in my learning cycle, so suggestions would be great:

First Words

I don't yet have a voice
for these words spun in darkness.

Fluid filled, I speak
bubbles enriched with life.

I am complete. Unborn
within you.

Right now, you
are my world, and

I leave my mark
on your ribs.

I gotta baby on the way

In case you haven't noticed from before, my wife and I are expecting to have a meeting with the ol' stork here in September. And though the drudgery of my gloamish job along with the stress of throwing together a 25-40 page masterpiece of critical writing have really been sapping my excitement for this upcoming event, I'm still really excited for the whole shebang to get on with the shebanging.

The due date is still pretty firmly the end of September, but Sue's fairly confident that the Ides of the moth sounds much better and I have to agree. Sooner than later, as long as sooner is a safe time for sooner to happen so that she won't have to hop onto a respirator or spend any unnecessary time in the hospital (Molly: when you decide to emerge, do so in a healthy state of mind. K. thx. bye.). In any event, that means Molly will be either a Virgo or a Libra. Sue's a Libra, and well that works good with me...but two balancers in the house may lead towards some headbutting (good thing I have that archery thing going on with the saggitarius bit...so I can snipe from a distance).

In all truth, I really don't know much of anything about astrology, so I'm really babbling, babbling more as a foregrounding to the lovely background images of the baby's room that we've taken pictures of. It's truly a wonderful mural, painted of course by Sue. So take a look.

In other news, as I've mentioned, I've been crunching away on the ole ECE, and after reading seven books of research and rereading The Age of Wire and String, I'm thoroughly ready to move on to something else. It's definitely one of those "I've conceptualized the paper, but I don't really want to write it" moments. I'm sure you all know what I mean.

Musically, I recently picked up Jill Tracy, Emilie Autumn, Buck Tick, and Tre Lux. Jill, Emilie and Tre Lux are all goth-vein stuff of varying levels of angst. Buck Tick was actually for Sue, and it's a Malise Mizer kinda sounding gothy J-rock band. It's pretty good, but that album lacks in consistency--about half of it is harpsichord darkness, and the other half is ska/Dick Dale kinda stuff...really off putting if you ask me. Tre Lux, a solo album from one of the girls of Switchblade Symphony is all cover songs of popular music...Weird in a gothy way. "Yellow," "Blackhole Sun," and "Karma Police" are among my favorite covers on the album. Sue hates Tre Lux. She says the girl's voice sounds like a cat being skinned alive...yet she likes Switchblade Symphony, which sounds about the same....go figure. Jill Tracy is pretty much a spooky piano. It makes me think of the flamenco dancers' music along with a little Addam's family and Elvira all jumbled together. Odd but interesting. Emilie Autumn is a very Dresden Dollsish type with lots of piano/harpsichord and violin work. I particularly love "Gothic Lolita" because it makes me think of the Harajuku goth scene as well as Nabokov's Lolita (which the song is probably based off of). The album is smart, angry, and very dark.

Head filling, or amorphous ideas freely morph

So I'm well into my ECE research these days. I recently finished John Barth's excellent essay/nonfiction book called The Friday Book, as well as rereading some of my old timey favorites from Lost in the Funhouse and Labyrinths. I've also bookmarked a number of interesting looking articles from the library's databases (and downloaded the pdfs for casual reading). Oh and I'm picking through Barthelme's 40 Stories (and loving it.)

In short, I've been doing a frickin' lot of reading. To what end? Well, therein lies the story:

Originally, I went to residency all fired up on writing an ECE about Metafiction and authorial intrusion and the historiographic implecations of said tactics as exemplified via three stories: Lost in the Funhouse,(Barth) Theme of the Traiter and the Hero, (Borges) and The Story (Amy Bloom). Well the more I got to thinking about a thesis statement, the more bulletholes I found in the whole process....Yes, all of it works, and a good chunk of it can reflexively relate to the other stories, but 1. I couldn't think up an arguable position to justify what I wanted to talk about, and 2. there is actually four metric fucktons of critical essay data concerning the historiographical implecations of metafiction out there already....This cannot do. So,

After a brief meltdown, Sue and I got to talking and she made me do one of those mindmapping charts (of which I proclaimed I hated [until I tried doing it]), and I came up with some interesting thoughts. Namely, that I really need to actually spend my ECE talking about what Ben Marcus pulls off in the vein of metafictive authorial [albeit indirect] intrusion within The Age of Wire and String. And so, as gears change, I'm hoping that I'm onto something as I embark onto the beginning of rereading that wonderful wonderful oddity of a book.

In other news, I've recently picked up the following music:

• Buck Tick -- (for Sue actually) It's a gothy/Industrial J-Rock band that has moments of Rockabilly-ness interspersed between harpsichords and classic goth platform boots.
• Oasis - Be here now and Masterplan - I used to love Oasis; then I forgot about them for a while. Recently, I've been back into them a lot. The Song "The Masterplan" is one of my top ten favorite songs of all time.
• Emilie Autumn -- She's a sort of cross between Android Lust, The Dresden Dolls, and My Ruin. Lots of great harpsichord and string work in addition to gothy beats and occasional screaming.

I'll end with some pictures from Louisville....

Beware the Ramblesnatch

Ahoy! (did you know that Alexander Graham Bell originally wanted us to say that instead of "hello" when answering the telephone?....Now you do).

Yeah, I haven't bloggered in a while, so you might want to take a gander and only read the headings that look interesting, that way you won't have to read too much of the logorrhoea babble snapping from the Ramblesnatch's mouth much in the same way Error gives birth to and eats her children.

Publishing News
Not a whole lot going on right here except for a trickling stream of dismissals...but hey, at least GlimmerTrain and Playboy took the time to send me a letter. I like getting mail, even if it's a "sorry, this isn't what we're looking for" type letter. I did however send five stories seventeen ways on Friday of last week, so my fingers are crossed that something will stick somewhere.

Residency Prep
Can't wait. I like Dave Harrity's countdown in his post. Since today's the first, it's down to 24 days, and once those worksheets come ramblin' in, those days will dissipate like a fart in a windstorm.
Speaking of the residency and all it's glory, I'm going to be driving down this time, and by that I mean to say that my beautiful wife and forever companion and really good friend, Sue (the Queen of all Foxes) will be accompanying me for this residency. We're both very excited, and we're planning on rolling into Dodge a day early so I can show her the sights and sounds of 4th street (or should I say Fourth Street [since none of you ever seem to abbreviate...{long winded southerners}]). So yes, Sue will be coming down for fun entertainment, and now that the sick days of the 1st trimester are over, she'll be up for plenty of eating and merriment in general.

How Goes the Pregnancy?
Glad you asked. Sue's doing wonderfully, and she's been very glowy and happy. We're both glad that the days of all day morning sickness are over, and now I'm spending more effort reminding her to take it easy than anything else. She's been painting a beautiful fairytale forest mural in the baby's room (I'll post pictures after we get all the crap out of the baby's room), and also lots of general cleaning and nesting. We're planning to raise somewhere around $50,000 next weekend when we have our yard sale, so that'll give us some very nice bling for our trip down South.
We still don't know if it's going to be a boy or girl, but we're going to find out on May 9, for sure. I'll be sure to post results and more pictures if we have them. Again, I'm pretty sure we'll be holding a contest for the-most-creative-names-for-our-baby-that-we-won't-use at residency. So have a list ready.

Music and Books
Since we're in our between-semester-time-off, I've had a chance to 1. spoil myself and buy seven cds and 2. Read some non-required reading. I want to talk about that for a bit:

1. Scarling - "So Long, Scarecrow" - Scarling, a band made up of Jessika (the former singer of Jack off Jill) and some other talented people, has been a favorite of mine for about as long as I've been on Pandora. The entire album has a very consistent wall-of-sound/noise-with incredibly-melodic-vocals feel to it. Lots of distortion and girly-goth angst.
2. theSTART "Initiation" and "Death via Satellite" - theSTART has a very edgy rocky punk sound with a great female vocalist
3. Hungry Lucy - "To Kill a King" - A while back, I fell in love with the song "Alfred" from her CD "Apparitions," but aside from that song, I wasn't keen on the whole album. However, Sue really likes Hungry Lucy, so I went ahead and picked up "To Kill a King," and it's an incredibly consistent downtempo-sort-of-ethereal-goth-darkwave-thing (with the exception to the three or four remix songs [which I could probably do without]). I'm just finishing my first listen through right now, and I'm very happy with this CD.
4. Nine Inch Nails - "Year Zero" - While I might not be an "original" NIN fan (I jumped on the bandwagon with the "Closer" album), I've been enjoying Trent's music for a long time, and aside from two tracks on "With Teeth," I was sort of let down by the last album. "Year Zero" seems to make up for that letdown of the last album. It feels like a sort of going-back-to-the-roots-of-industrial-rock cd with lots of sampling and vamping and heavy fat beats. At times, while rolling in my Honda, I feel a little bit like I'm in a ricer with all the Bass in this album, but it sounds Very much like a NIN album, but it doesn't sound rehashed or boring to me either. I'm very happy. On a side note, listening to it today, I began to wonder if Trent tries to Sing like David Bowie, or if he just sounds like that nowadays...either way, I can hear a little bit of Bowie in his vocals this time.
5. Android Lust - "The Division" - Android Lust is described somewhere as a sort of Female version of NIN. The girl was born in Bangladesh and like NIN, she's the primary musical vision for the group. The music is very synthetic/industrial with samples of moaning and screaming at time. Visceral, angry, female vocalist, awesome.
6. Kelli Ali - "Psychic Cat" - Kelli Ali was the original lead singer for one of my favorite bands, The Sneaker Pimps. She wasn't an original member of the band, and eventually, the band kind of wrote her out of the band. However, fortunately for me, Kelli continued making music. "Psychic Cat" sounds similar to the Sneaker Pimps' debut album "Finding X" and I'm particularly a fan of her song "Speakers."
7. Joey Goebel The Anomalies - Ok. I'm done with music. I want to talk about this book. I'm sure all of you know Joey. If you haven't read any of his books yet. Do it. Stop reading this post. Stop looking at Pr0n on the intarnets. Get out of your house. Buy his books. Make him a famous man. Because he's a fucking genius. I read this book aloud to Sue as a sort of nightly bedtime story thing, and the book was entertaining as hell, yet deep. Real, yet funny. Depressing, true, and solid. When reading it, I couldn't help but project Weseley Willis' speaking mannerisms to Luster Johnson's dialogue, and goddamn if Joey didn't intend it, then well Weseley's ghost must have been flowing through him when he was writing. In some parts, Sue and I laughed until we nearly cried. Indeed it was a Harmony Joybus ride. And immediately after finishing it, I grabbed his 2nd book Torture the Artist and put it over at the bedstand. We started it last night, and it's shaping up to be just as wonderful.
8. McSweeney's Quarterly Review #23 - I'm not finished with it yet, but there's a story in it by Wells Tower. He's phenomenal. If you happen to get a chance, read "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned." It appeared in the Anchor Book of New American Short Stories Edited by Ben Marcus. Wells has a way with really drawing you into the characters and doing things in weird shit situations. Sue actually hated the Wells Tower story in this particular issue of McSweeney's, but It reminded me a lot of my dad's camp and some of the folks that live up there all the time.
9. Steven Millhauser The Knife Thrower and other Stories - John Seay, a former Spalding student, turned Law student friend of mine recommended this to me. The whole thing is a bunch of Magical Realism type bits, and there are a couple of real gems in there. This is the first collection of stories I've read that relies so heavily on Magical Realism, and it kind of rubbed me the wrong way in that I felt overloaded with the "suspend reality for this one, ok?" motif. They were all well crafted, and Millhauser is excellent at using a 1st person plural narrative, but all smashed together, it kinda felt like a little too much too fast.

What I've been writing
Not an Autobiography has been moving along pretty smoothly considering the slowness of semester 2's beginning. I'm up to seven stories, and I have two very strongly identifiable selves, the beginning of a 1st person self, and secret plans of somehow trying to unite Johnny and Clare's paths. The last couple stories I've written focus heavily upon the nature of the Gloaming, aka, the deplorable condition of my locale of employment. I spent most of the last three months actively trying to find another job without much luck. So for the moment, I've given up and turned to spewing my aggression into fiction, and it's helped.

And thus the Ramblesnatch eats itself, ending the post.