Dispatches from the Coasts of Tenure

I turn in my tenure file this week.  I'm trying not to let it overwhelm me: I've done good work, I think, and the university seems positive about it. Nonetheless, it's proving a fair-to-middling-surreal, soggy June.

Here's what it looks like: two days ago, I made Stinging Nettle and Green Onion Pancakes, watched terror-frozen bunnies out the window with Grind Their Bones to Bake My Bread*, and worked on my tenure file. 

I can't help but feel all three activities are bound by a single dream-logic.

*Have I mentioned our two new(ish) cats, Grind Their Bones to Bake my Bread (a calico) and Yet (pictured below)?  More on them post-tenure-file, I hope.  

This picture is part of the same nightmare cycle of dream-logic. 

This picture is part of the same nightmare cycle of dream-logic. 

Today, testing out my computer's ability to take dictated notes is proving to be an exercise in Dada. Consider this passage from Baudelaire, elaborately embroidered by Mountain Lion: 

"For the perfect plan, for the percussionist spectator, it is menstruate to set up house in the heart of the multitude, I need the end and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the Internet."

The original: 

"For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite."

After that, the dictation program point-blank refused to go on. Perhaps because it was experiencing an epiphanic spiritual crisis, having replaced the infinite with the Internet.

Some days, I know how it feels.

The kindly beach, the vain struggle, the devout consummation

February 14, 2013: The Valentine's Day reunion with D

... as the sunwarmed earth is longed for by a swimmer
spent in rough water where his ship went down
under Poseidon’s blows, gale winds and tons of sea.
Few men can keep alive through a big surf
to crawl, clotted with brine, on kindly beaches
in joy, in joy, knowing the abyss behind:
and so she too rejoiced, her gaze upon her beloved,
her arms around him pressed as though forever...

It's been eleven happy years; I wouldn't trade them. Now: reunion, nostos, odysseys end with journeys' meeting. What is love? 'Tis not hereafter; present mirth hath present laughter. What's to come is still unsure.

We met in Washington as the midway point.  He's come ​from Honolulu via six weeks in Los Angeles and Raleigh, gathering our belongings in both places.  The LA household has been shipped to Washington, where we're picking up a load of my furniture and childhood belongings.  After a week of sorting, tossing, and packing, we'll clamor into our UHaul and begin the long road north.

For the Valentine's Day Reunion, I celebrated perversely by wearing my 80s-style, off-the-shoulder t-shirt with Darcy's first proposal to Eliza Bennet scrawled across it, unattributed: ‘In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.'

Dan looked at it thoughtfully and finally spoke: "Is that an old-timey version of 'Call Me Maybe'?".


Things I've found while sorting through my childhood belongings. 

Also, a board game called 'By Jove!' about ancient mythology, some dozen novels I began and abandoned before the age of fifteen, and an M.C. Escher puzzle with no lid (to show you the entire image), and possibly only some of its pieces. In other words, the portal to madness.

The groom is a part of the outfit, of course, rather than having independent personhood. #VictorianAccessorizing.


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​Childhood excavations continued: soliloquizing pillowcase.


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​Yes, I wore this as a child. Yes, my grandmother got it for me (in Kashmir, where they were staying on a houseboat made of teak). And yes, it's coming to Farfara.

​My mother: "In the course of packing up for Nova Scotia, Sycorax has just relived her entire childhood. Unfortunately for D, he had to relive it as well."

The Goddess from the Machine

At brunch today, by way of explaining the paper I'd just delivered at a conference, I told my grandmother in great, gruesome detail about the plot of both the stage and film versions of SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER, complete with my best Katharine Hepburn impersonation: "Sebastian always said, 'Mother, when you descend, it's like the goddess from the machine."

When I got to my description of Sebastian's Euripidean death, she exclaimed in a Violet Venable voice: "Oh, *Sycorax*, really. Where do you FIND these plays?".

When I had finished my vivid plot summary/reenactment, there was a brief and pregnant pause. Then, suddenly: "Wait. Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams were gay?"

If only Gore Vidal had been there to parse the question with her. His answers always defied mere plebeian yeas and nays. 


Over carved roast and horseradish ("You'd think I'd learn my lesson," she murmured, her face one vast contraction of fire), we got down to family history, never her favorite topic.

I: "You never knew your grandparents?"

Nonna: "No."

I: "Why not?"

Nonna, bluntly: "They were all DEAD. Mostly."

I: "Um. Most of them were dead, or they were mostly dead?"

Nonna: [shrug]

After a moment: "My parents moved to Oklahoma City shortly after their marriage for my mother's health. Oklahoma was considered to be quite a wholesome climate then." My grandmother rolls her eyes.

I take the bait: "What was wrong with her health?".

She makes a gesture like she is batting the question aside. "She probably had tuberculosis or something. I had an aunt who died of consumption." Thoughtful pause. "She lived in Arcadia...."

"Even in Arcadia, there is death." I say sententiously.

"It didn't mean anything to me at the time."

I hum my assent: "It was just another of those gorgeously classical place-names that are strewn about the American country-side. Like Athens, Georgia."

"Yes?" She raises her eyebrow, first sign of a challenge. "Name another one."

"Well, I can't think of another one right now. But you know I'm right."

Pause. Regroup.

"My mother was one of the first women in Oklahoma to get a driver's licence. She bought a yellow Apperson Jack Rabbit, and had a driving suit made all in yellow to match it." Slight smile. "She was quite a fashionable woman, my mother."

​Dea ex Jack Rabbit

​Dea ex Jack Rabbit