I turned in my grades at 9:30 this morning. You can hear the sigh of relief from where you're sitting.

So, anyway, no more grading posts for a while. (But I might still link to other people's: see, for instance, this post over at Baraita.)

So now I'm getting Christmas shopping done, I'm finishing up reading The Two Towers, I'm mentally putting together track listings for a few themed mix CDs I'll be making this week, and I'm thinking (way too much) about my top ten CD picks for this year. And that's about it. Nothing more complex to report.

Oh, yeah, if you're still looking for unique gifts, I recommend checking out the 20 Things Benefit Auction. 31 nifty little objects for your perusal.

Monday, December 16, 2002
3:34 PM
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Time to supply some actual content, besides complaints.

The Guardian article about what various authors enjoyed reading this year caused me to think back about my own year in books.

Highlights included:

Ben Marcus' Notable American Women, which simultaneously manages to be a book-length experiment in syntax, a mass of inventive false histories, and an eerie, moving coming-of-age story set in a fantastic world. Riddled with masculine anxiety and heaped to the brim with cultural wreckage.

Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist. Like other books that see the true New York, this postmodern noir thriller feels like it's set in both a science-fictional future and a dusty, rotting past. The book has a verbal style that's unmatched by anything else I read this year, but it also manages to sustain an irreducible political core.

Short-story-wise, I've been enjoying the masterful, dense pieces in James Salter's Dusk, and the giddy, hyperreal American everyday depicted in Lorrie Moore's Birds of America. (Caveat: I haven't finished either of these books. I tend to pace myself when reading a short story collection that I really enjoy.)

I also enjoyed some genre classics that I only got around to reading this year: Interview With the Vampire and *ahem* The Two Towers.

Was there anything in particular that you enjoyed reading this year?

Friday, December 13, 2002
12:42 PM
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It is becoming increasingly obvious that my problem with working out these end-of-semester grades is not lack of time, but rather lack of willpower. I could do all the remaining grading (about 75 papers, for those of you who have been following the countdown) in about twelve hours. The only complicating factor is that for every hour of grading I do, I seem to want to take a twenty-three-hour break.

Thursday, December 12, 2002
11:47 AM
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Oh my yes.

I promise a real update soon, once grades for the semester are in. For now it is all I can do to hold myself together.

If you need something to do, go weigh in on this debate.

Wednesday, December 11, 2002
10:00 AM
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I applied for the grant.

I submitted Imaginary Year for the call for submissions of "information art."

I entered Another Chicago Magazine's Chicago Literary Awards contest.

Whew. We'll see if any of this effort bears fruit. It's worth noting that posting links in this weblog to things I hope to apply for has actually served as a good way to remind myself to actually apply for them. In that spirit, here's a link to a first book contest, held by Starcherone Books, publishers of "innovative, genre-bending fiction." Judged by Chicago resident Cris Mazza, who has an interest in the relationship between narrative and time, a relationship that Imaginary Year obviously addresses...

The apparatus that fiction cannot escape is, I think, time. Whether it's durational time, imaginative time, content time, defiance-of-chronology, hypertextual time (I just made that up), there's still an unseverable relationship between fiction and time. Linear narrative is not the only way to represent time. And we may actually no longer "represent" time in fiction but ... exploit it? reinvent it? change its geometric shape? But we don't deny it. As long as there's time, there's narrative -- maybe in some unrecognizable form.

I think I have a shot.

Friday, December 06, 2002
3:04 PM
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This week is your last chance to participate in my top-secret dream recordings project.

Follow the link for the relevant details. They are all the same as they were in September, except the deadline, which has been extended. New deadline: Friday, December 13th.

I have received enough recordings to proceed with the project, but I'd love a few more.

Labels: dreams

Tuesday, December 03, 2002
3:44 PM
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Thursday: Grade papers. Leave house for a few hours to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner at K's. Return home and grade more. Feel too bitter to feel thankful about anything.

Friday: Grade. Listen to CD after CD. Come up with a great idea for a mix, map it out on paper in obsessive detail between student drafts. Watch Star Trek II : The Wrath of Khan with K., eat slices of the pumpkin pie that she made.

Saturday: Wake up and lie in bed, still planning out mix CD. Grade. More pie; too much coffee. Midafternoon I make the mix. Grade. Grade. Head to Laura's: drink nice wine, eat fancy cheese, listen to grotty punk.

Sunday: Grade. Grade. Read bits of The Two Towers. More pie. Grade.

I've finished the stack of drafts now, and looking back, I have to say that I see plenty to be thankful for.

Sunday, December 01, 2002
9:36 PM
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