Oh, the long, loooong basketball off-season

The period from April to October is a bleak one for college basketball fans, and I need a fix of Tar Heel glory at just about this point in the long annual slog to the beginning of the next season. So (thanks to starks23 at YouTube and Sportz Assassin at Fanhouse) I give you a compilation of clips from Michael Jordan's first game ever at UNC. Oh, the infinitesimal tininess of the uniforms! Oh, the lean boyishness of number 23!



Now, bear in mind what an honor and a risk it was for Dean Smith to start Jordan in his first game as a freshman (Smith was notoriously reluctant to start even his most talented freshman), and take a gander at the boldness of his play. We not only see his first rebound, but also his first assist, his first shot (a miss, but a brave one) and his first basket, all in fairly quick succession.

The year is 1981, and by the end of the season, this team would be national champions. There is some thrilling play in these clips, not only from "Mike Jordan," as he is called by the announcers, but also from Sam Perkins and James Worthy.

~ ~ ~

I spent another day at the UCLA library today, having found that there is a much more convenient bus from D's apartment than the one that stops a mile's walk away. Genius! I wiled away the day with Derek Walcott (in his printed form, sadly, not in the flesh), moseying through Ti-Jean and his Brothers and taking breaks with David Copperfield and Carson McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The day also began with great news: I am getting an ARC of Ana Castillo's The Guardian through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program. I was quite despondent not to have received a book in the first round of the program, but persistence paid and I got one in the second round. No news yet when the third round will start, but I can't wait to get my hands on The Guardian. The blurb describes it temptingly: "Eking out a living as a teacher’s aide in a small New Mexican border town, Tía Regina is also raising her teenage nephew, Gabo, a hardworking boy who has entered the country illegally and aspires to the priesthood. When Gabo’s father, Rafa, disappears while crossing over from Mexico, Regina fears the worst."

Now, I must return to watching John Ford's The Searchers, since my Netflix have been sorely neglected this week. I will indulge in some Monument Valley muddy morality while dining on an heirloom tomato and avocados. Bliss.

Things are just walking in my door of their own accord

Despite the fact that I am at D's apartment rather than my own, books just keeping leaping out of postal carrier's bags and into my hands. How odd! How I am going to transport them back to the east coast at the end of the summer (especially given the fact that I arrived in Los Angeles with two suitcases filled with library books and paperbacks - for work! - a month ago), remains something of a mystery. Does anyone know if there is a patron saint or god of bibliophilia (or biblioholism) in any religion? Because I need someone to appeal to for miracles now and then.

What has arrived in the last week? Well, let's see - I was alarmed by McSweeney's brush with financial peril, and (as a matter of civic duty, you understand) marched over to their online sale and made a couple of minor purchases: a ten-issue pack of The Believer (a magazine I had never read before, but always been intrigued by) for $19, and a copy of Noisy Outlaws, Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren't as Scary, Maybe, Depending on How You Feel About Lost Lands, Stray Cellphones, Creatures from the Sky, Parents Who Disappear in Peru, a Man Named Lars Farf, and One Other Story We Couldn't Quite Finish, So Maybe You Could Help Us Out, which includes stories by Nick Hornby, James Kochalka, Neil Gaiman, Jeanne DuPrau, Jonathan Safran Foer, and a dustjacket that is an unfinished story by Lemony Snicket. You scribble an ending on it, fold it into an envelope along the convenient dotted lines, and mail it off to be judged by some nebulous entity. I will have to add NOBaSOTTAaSMDoHYFALLSCCftSPWDiPaMNLF&OOSWCQFSMYCHUO (as it is known, for short) to my August reading list. Meanwhile, if I enjoy my ten issue intro to The Believer, perhaps I will subscribe next year.

A couple of days later, my anxiously awaited copy of The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook (origin of the delicious red velvet cake recipe) finally arrived, and D and I immediately plunged into an argument about the ridiculousness of using white vinegar to make (eastern) North Carolina style barbecue (see also pig-pickin'). Really. It was the worst argument we have had since disagreeing about the definition of the "procedural" genre. Anyway, let's just say I am unwholesomely excited at all the new ways the Lee Bros. offer to incorporate buttermilk and lard into my weekly diet.

I have recently become anxious (since the 2007 is now more than halfway over) about the limited amount of time I have left to read books for my "Year of Down Under" Challenge (not to mention the NYT Notable Books Challenge!), so I ordered a copy of Patrick White's Voss, the book which is most often cited as THE classic Australian novel. It arrived yesterday, and will also go on my August "to read" list.

Yesterday. The same day on which, in other news, I finished the latest in my Year of Down Under Challenge (YODUC?), the very unpleasant Alice Springs by Nikki Gemmell. A review to come soon, I hope. I have been working pretty hard on the dissertation lately, and cooking up a storm, and D and I did see the latest Harry Potter movie (meh), so I am vigorously adding to the backlog of unwritten posts while simultaneously using up all the energy I could use to write about things by actually doing them! Boo to me!

Pair-bonding and matrilateral cross-cousin marriage

I suspect, given my plans to see the new Harry Potter movie this afternoon and to make another attempt at the sublime via baking a red velvet cake, I won't have time to get out a review today. Which is too bad, really, because the list of needful posts is stretching around the block at this point. Last night, for instance, I finished the stunning Tehanu, which Ursula K. Le Guin believed at the time would be the last of the books in her Earthsea cycle, and which is my favorite yet. I am going to be hard pressed to keep the next book, Tales from Earthsea, on the shelf and out of my hands until August, when it will make an appearance among my reading goals. We also finished the final (sniff!) episode of Slings and Arrows last night, and, although this third and last season of the show was my least favorite, I think the writers and cast did an unusually good job with the tricksy task of making an end of a serial form.

The night before I finished (after a solid year of reading it) the amusing but somewhat repetitive pop-anthropology tome Watching the English. So I thought, in lieu of a review (I feel like I should have done something worthier of Gilbert and Sullivan with that rhyme), I would leave you with Kate Fox's account of her introduction to the rituals of marriage, from Watching the English. Now, a bit of context: Fox is the daughter of a renowned anthropologist, so she came by her analytical nature early and honestly. Also, those of you who know me personally know that I am absolutely fascinated by and fundamentally cynical about weddings and the institution of marriage (in other words, I cry regularly at weddings and would travel any distance at all to attend a friend's, but have a steadfast political opposition to having one of my own*), so this tale all but leaped off the page at me:

And even if nobody makes a drunken exhibition of themselves, and nobody is offended by the seating plan or the transportation arrangements or the best man's speech, someone is bound to do or say something that will cause embarassment. At the first English wedding I ever attended, I was that someone, although I was only about five years old. My parents had decided that my sisters and I should have some understanding of the important rite of passage we were about to witness. My father told us all about pair-bonding, described the wedding customs and practices of different cultures, and explained the intricacies of matrilateral cross-cousin marriage. My mother took it upon herself to explain the 'facts of life' - sex, where babies come from and so on. My sisters, aged about three and four, were perhaps a little too young to take much interest in this, but I was riveted. At the church the next day, I found the ceremony equally fascinating, and during a moment's silent pause (possibly after 'speak now, or forever hold your peace'), I turned to my mother and asked, in a loud, piercing whisper, 'Is he going to put the seed in now?'

I was not taken to any weddings for quite a few years after that, which seems a bit unfair, as I had clearly grasped the essential points, and only go the chronological order of things slightly mixed up. (373)

* In related news, this snarky article about the New Victorian phenomenon, as the author calls it, tries to get at the question of why my generation seems to feel so much more pressure to conform to traditional family structures so much earlier in life than our parents did. Why do some of my quite iconoclastic friends, for instance, feel a desire to have a highly conventional wedding? Why do those who want to defy convention face such extreme opposition from their families and friends, even when their parents had untraditional weddings and/or marriages? Why do so many people (including some new acquaintances and total strangers) feel they have to right to tell me that I am going to "have to get married one of these days," with an expression of great anxiety on their face, or even (sigh) to advise me about my ever-decreasing fertility (!!!) ? Ok, rant over. For now.