Countdown Baby, and other things.

T-minus 10 days and counting to Molly's due date. Lots of folks have been saying that babies like to come out on the full moon. Here's to hoping that our little baby will be a werewolf then. Sue's been having on again off again contractions for about two weeks now, and we're both ready for Molly to just come out already. But, fortunately, the end is in sight.

Another fortunate end in sight is semester three of grad school. All around, this has been a really rough semester for me. My Extended Critical Essay drove me to the brink of insanity for several weeks, and with all the chaos of work, and baby, and sick cat, It's been awful hard to keep focused. But the end is near.

While the ECE did take up most of my semester, I have managed to finish one story, "Deconstructing Happily Ever After," as well as start two more. The latter two have been fizzling at the moment, but I think once all the dust settles from the baby and everything else going on, the both should pick up pretty fairly. The good news is that I'm rapidly closing in on completing all of the stories for the projected setlist of Not an Autobiography. I'm planning for 13 stories and I'm sitting at about 10 right now. With a good concerted effort, I may be able to push out the final three in conjunction to my Creative Thesis and use the whole book instead of just excerpts. We'll see, though.

Recently I finished reading Opium4. Great lit mag. If you haven't been to their site, check them out, http://www.opiummagazine.com I'm also nearly 2/3 through Maxx Barry's first novel, Syrup, which is a riot. Sue and the baby are enjoying it thoroughly as well.

On the Up and Up (with fingers crossed)

Despite being scheduled 2nd shift during a packet week, I successfully completed and sent my 33 page first draft of the ECE last Friday. And while the pressure's not completely off, I feel markedly relieved to be at least done with the drafting stage. For me, drafting is the pits. In a way, critical papers are kind of easier than creative pieces because you have to structure them very thoroughly, and such structuring leads pretty much in one direction: supporting your thesis and proving it. The lack of the creative spark in such composition, makes critical sentence slugging kind of boring after a few pages. While thinking up the things to say, and researching is very exciting, laying it all down is pretty boring.

But at least until I hear back from Louise, I'm taking a break on the ECE and working on some new creative material and getting back to reading non-research books. I'm currently about halfway through Barthelme's Forty Stories, some of which I really like, and other bits that are just a bit too quirky to really capture me. I'm also reading Rachel Harper's book out loud 1 chapter per day to Sue. It's a great book, and I'm really glad that it was picked for this fall's book in common for fiction. Our nightly poem is coming from the Poetry section of McSweeney's Quarterly vol 23--they do this big poetry chain thing where 10 poets pick 10 poems. Since I haven't read much poetry, I'm hoping all the exposure will turn me on to some more people. So far, it's been kind of lukewarm; Dave's book was much better in every way. I'm also looking forward to reading Lincoln's Melancholy, the new issue of Fence, Opium4, Democracy (Joan Didion), and Demonology (Rick Moody). If I get through that, I'll be about half way through the list of books that I considered for this semester.

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....