I’m the DEPARTMENTAL CHAIRMAN!
Pretty fast rise to the top, eh? I mean, I’ve only been here 18 months, and I’ve not even made partner yet, and they named me, ME, chairman.
Never mind that there’s only two of us in our department. I refuse to not feel honored. (And my partner refuses to not feel relieved.)
This means that I’m the one who gets to drive down to LA four times a year (at least) and I’m the one who gets the blame if our stats start sucking and I’m the one who has to decipher all the administratorese that gets emailed to me. But hey, that’s what the stipend is for.
So that makes two chairs in our family (my sister chairs her high school’s English Dept). Pretty soon we’ll have a dinette set.
D.
Today, I finished The Shadow Year: A Novel by Jeffrey Ford. I wanted to read a good fantasy, so I checked out the World Fantasy Awards site. Noting that their 2010 award-winner was China Mieville’s The City & The City, which I liked a great deal, I decided I would trust them for another fantasy. Hence The Shadow Year: A Novel, which won their 2009 best novel award.
Setting: a small town in Long Island, late 1960s. Well, I thought, this should be fun, since I was the protag’s age at that time, too. And yet the moments of resonance were rare: a reference to Bazooka bubble gum (which did indeed cost a penny), occasional mentions of commercials which were on TV at the time. Despite Ford’s efforts to create a rich setting, with regard both to the town and the time, it all felt flat to me.
Plot: the unnamed protag is the middle child of a dad who works three jobs and a manic depressive mom who drinks herself to sleep every night. His younger sister is disturbed (and psychic!) and his older brother is cool, brave, and generic. There’s also a generic bully and a generic mean teacher and a host of generic loonies. Conflict arises first in the guise of a mysterious window peeper, then in the form of disappearances, murders, and a sinister man in a big white car. The brothers set out to unravel the town’s mystery and inexplicably never tell their father, who seems a reasonable sort, nor their grandparents, who are also cool and brave and nearly generic (they and the drunk mom were the only ones in the novel who came alive for me).
Gimmick: the older brother has built a simulacrum of the neighborhood on a model train platform erected in their basement. Movements of their neighbors, the peeper, and the sinister man in his big white car are eerily reflected by changes in the positions of their counterparts in the miniature town.
THEME! THEME! THEME! Why, loss of innocence, of course, which is telegraphed with a bullhorn at the end of the novel’s first paragraph:
. . . . Taking a cast-off leaf into each hand, I made double fists. When I opened my fingers, brown crumbs fell and scattered on the road at my feet. Had I been waiting for the arrival of that strange changeling year, I might have understood the sifting debris to be symbolic of the end of something.
Really, how big a dumb ass am I? I read that paragraph before I ever bought the book, and yet I still bought it. Jeez.
What’s wrong with it: oh, imagine any Twilight Zone episode written by Rod Serling. Got it yet? Smarmy. Rife with predictable ironies. Ultimately moralistic — and two-dimensional.
I’m thinking of reading Jeff Vandermeer’s Ambergris novels. Has anyone here read him? Or do you have any other fantasy recommendations to make?
D.
All I wanted was an easy recipe for tonkatsu sauce, and what I found was the OCD answer to the question: The Great Tonkatsu Sauce Shootout, wherein the author taste-tests one home-made recipe and nine products, and tests different types of pork (cheapie off the shelf versus pricey Kurobuta) and tests pig’s lard versus Wesson oil as a frying medium.
This guy has read too much Cooks Illustrated.
Nevertheless, with his advice I did throw together a decent tonkatsu sauce made up of ketchup, plum sauce, light soy, dark soy, and Worcestershire sauce.
D.
There were a scant few open spaces in the parking lot tonight — much worse than usual. And a lot of new faces inside.
“When does the New Years resolution crowd disappear?” I asked the gal at the front desk, the one who scans my tag.
“April,” she said, and to my surprised expression, she added, “They stop showing up right after tax time.”
And I realized, I’ve been doing this almost continuously since 2004 or 2005. That’s when I decided to stop making jokes like, “No one ever got injured sitting on their couch.” I used to make it to the gym maybe twice a week, and at best I’d spend an hour there. Now I’m there anywhere from three to five times a week, and when I have the time I’ll be there 90 minutes, sometimes two hours. I’m still fat but that has a lot more to do with how I eat, not how much I exercise.
It’s mean-spirited of me, but I’ll be glad when the resolution crowd dissipates.
D.
so I keep wondering what to do about that. We pay to get it cleaned, and part of the year we pay to heat it, and except for the time I tripped and fell into the hot tub, we have yet to use it.
If I turned it into a giant salt water tank and stocked it with brightly colored fishes, I could go snorkeling in my own back yard. Lots of folks are converting to salt water swimming pools; I’m not sure I understand the pros and cons, but I gather the salt water pool doesn’t require much in the way of chemicals.
And then this photo-diary over at Daily Kos showed me the light.
I used to look forward to New Years Day for one reason and one reason only: one of the local stations would show Underdog for an hour. I think it must have been a special two-parter. I remember it was always the same episode, and it was something truly epic, like: Underdog loses his power. Or, Sweet Polly Purebred nearly gets iced. Something like that.
Lying in bed this morning (dragging ass), I tried to recollect the words to the theme song. I didn’t do too badly — I remembered most of them.
The little guy whose head is shaped like a rotten molar tooth, that’s one of the bad guys, Simon Bar Sinister. The wolf is (if I remember correctly) Riff Raff. I had to check the Wikipedia article to remember “Riff Raff,” and it turns out most of the episodes were multi-parters. I recall that Underdog was a notorious pill-popper, but what I didn’t know was that the network had a problem with that:
For many years starting with NBC’s last run in the mid-1970s, all references to Underdog swallowing his super energy pill were censored, most likely out of fear that kids would see real medication that looked like the Underdog pills (red with a white “U”) and swallow them. Two instances that did not actually show Underdog swallowing the pills remained in the show. In one, he drops pills into water supplies; in the other, his ring is damaged and he explains that it is where he keeps the pill – but the part where he actually swallows it was still deleted.
Aside from Underdog, New Years Day held nothing for me. As much as the Rose Parade bored me* (watching it on TV, that is — far be it from my folks to take us to a parade), college football was worse. So by about 10 AM, long after Underdog had saved it for Sweet Polly, my day was already going to hell.
D.
*But just wait another couple months and our city would throw its annual gala, the Camellia Festival, wherein we would prove that we could make floats like the big boys in the Rose Parade, only, say, 1/100 scale, and with camellias and not roses. Thing about camellias? After you pick them, they turn a lovely shade of brown.