"He was either going to hit someone or start a blog."

As I have done in the past, it's time to move on from this blog in favor of the next chapter. If you want to know what I'm up to in grad school, if you're interested in learning, bit by bit, what I did over the summer, then join me here. "Here" being, of course, my oft-referenced but never linked Academic Blog from college, which exists under--gasp!--my actual name. I'll be refurbishing it over the next few months. That is, it won't be All Spies All the Time, although I'm thinking there is still considerable room for those guys in my new life. Donald Maclean in particular may, at long last, get the literary representation he deserves.

So thank you! Having this as an outlet during my time in Chicago kept me writing, and saw me through a difficult time to a transformative one. Who knows what's next?

I'll see you there!

My Kind of Town

Puffy winter coats with fur-lined hoods. Bright yellow sweatshirt/peacoat hybrid. Chucks. Brunches at Owen & Engine and escapes to DeKalb. Fall walks downtown. Reading benches: River East, Lincoln Park, and Oz Park. 22, 36, 151, 8, Brown, Pink. Movies at the AMC, at the Music Box, at the Landmark. Rats. Ann Sather's cinnamon rolls. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter at Steppenwolf and a monologue for the ages. That feeling of knowing people are watching out for you. Walking slowly; learning swag. Getting called Princeton again. 11/11/11 at the cupcake place. Injustice; losing a friend. Robyn, Kanye, "Good Feeling," "Whip My Hair," "Feel It In My Bones," "Dust Bowl III," "Help I'm Alive," "Break On Through (To The Other Side)." Fear. Christmas lights softening a room. Snow on the trees outside. ZooLights and Christkindlmarket and chocolate-covered peppermint Joe-Joes. The lowest point; breaking down in hysterics on Lake Shore Drive and pulling off to take surface roads, still crying. The restorative joys of Cloud Atlas, and the staggering power of the Letter Game, immediately following it. Walks by the North Pond; heron spotting; loon searching. Friday pizza nights, Person of Interest, Arrested Development, and Elementary. Rediscovering springtime. Getting beaten down by winter, a once-favorite season. Sunburn at the Pride Parade and dancing at Ravinia. Car trouble. Internet trouble. Decision-making and follow-through. Friends who refuse to see you as anything less than who you are. Finding points of connection to a girl who is even shyer than you were. Baking powder as an air freshener. The universal in the specific and the momentous in the ordinary. Scandal and literal water coolers. Floriole and La Fournette and portable traditions. "Imma need for you to get it together." The architecture boat tour. The beer baron's house. Gino's East. Hanging way too many floors above nothing at the "Willis" Tower Skydeck. The Ferris Wheel. Getting creeped out by the H. H. Holmes Wikipedia entry on Halloween. Walking around on Halloween smelling the air and admiring costumes and eating M&Ms from a jacket pocket. Accidentally getting stuck in Cubs foot traffic. Dining a block from the Obamas. The Tribune Tower and stones from all over the world; a coolness test for guests. Growing up. Empathy. Self-analysis. Specialty drinks. Tacos. Deming, Geneva, Cermak, Washtenaw, 19th, Ogden, Roosevelt, Pine Grove, Lake Shore, Arlington, Orchard, Webster, Burling, Stockton, Larabee, Fullerton, Halsted, Clark, Lincoln, Sheffield, North, Damen, Michigan, Illinois, McClurg. Life-changing at the Duke of Perth and the Violet Hour. Mon Ami Gabi. The Purple Pig. The Burwood Tap. The Hopleaf. Tall, tall tales and professional lies. Other people's beloved plus ones. Dancing all night at business students' weddings. Green river. People watching in The Palmer House. Arguing with a taxi driver who won't go to 78th and Cottage Grove; "There's a Starbucks there. Relax." "I love running errands with a white person." "You're tougher than you look. We thought you'd be long gone by now."

“Only love could pick a nested pair of steel Bramah locks.”

Better late than never!

Beginning in April 2007, I started keeping a list of all the books I'd read the previous year. 2013-2014 was a good year for reading, continuing and refining my new trend of quality over quantity. (We'll see how this trend stands up against grad school for the next three years.)

Books
1) A Dance for Emilia, Peter S. Beagle
2) The History of Love, Nicole Kraus
3) Christopher and His Kind, Christopher Isherwood
4) Friendship of Convenience, Rufus Gunn
5) Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster
6) Kathleen and Frank, Christopher Isherwood
7) Dido and Pa, Joan Aiken*
8) Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
9) A Boy's Own Story, Edmund White
10) Good Kings Bad Kings, Susan Nussbaum
11) City Boy, Edmund White
12) In the Woods, Tana French
13) All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
14) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon
15) The Reason I Jump, Naoki Higashida
16) The Swimming-Pool Library, Alan Hollinghurst
17) The Arrival, Shaun Tan
18) Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote
19) Hymn and Cocktail Sticks, Alan Bennett
20) Pawn in Frankincense, Dorothy Dunnett*
21) The Days of Anna Madrigal, Armistead Maupin
22) The Light Between Oceans, M.L. Steadman
23) The Ringed Castle, Dorothy Dunnett*
24) The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson
25) The Raven Boys, Maggie Stiefvater
26) The Dream Thieves, Maggie Stiefvater

*re-reads
 

Top Five of the Year, in descending order

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon
The Days of Anna Madrigal, Armistead Maupin
The Dream Thieves, Maggie Stiefvater
Christopher and His Kind, Christopher Isherwood
Kathleen and Frank, Christopher Isherwood 


The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was this year's best because, finishing it, I could imagine myself great. I could see greatness in others. I could imagine ordinary people leaping tall buildings with a single bound. I've enjoyed a lot of books, but the ones that stay with me are the ones where I discover little pieces of myself. 

I wrote a little about Christopher Isherwood in my personal statement. Here is an excerpt. It was a really good year.
 

Early this year, partially in an effort to understand where I might be heading with my own writing, I immersed myself in the writings of Christopher Isherwood. Having already read Berlin Stories and A Single Man in college, I went on to read Lions and Shadows, Down There on a Visit, Christopher and His Kind, and Kathleen and Frank.

Lions and Shadows is the book I wish I could hand anyone attempting to write about people in their twenties. It's great to read about Isherwood, pre-Berlin, trying to find himself as a writer in places of little or no inspiration; struggling to reconcile his calling as an artist with the pressure to come up with a solid career; consoling himself with this friends while simultaneously comparing himself to them and always coming up short; feeling most confident at the beginnings of things, before they've had a chance to become complicated. This is the way to talk about your twenties: at a distance, with fondness, and with hope.

Isherwood is famous for his depiction of a European turning point, and is also well known for the candor with which he revisits his stories. Down There on a Visit revisits ground covered in Berlin Stories. Christopher and His Kind revisits both those works while peeling back the light veneer of fiction covering both of them. In Kathleen and Frank, Isherwood does something completely different. He steps, for the most part, out of the spotlight. He dispenses with fictionalization altogether. He attempts to tell the story of his parents in their own words, through letters and diary entries.

These are not the parents he described in his own writing. These people are multifaceted, deep thinking, and kind, and may have understood him a great deal more than he realized. In Kathleen and Frank, Isherwood comes closest to walking in another’s shoes. The place he describes in Kathleen and Frank is not somewhere you could visit; it is his childhood, through the eyes of others.

Past years
2012-2013
2011-2012
2010-2011
2009-2010
2008-2009
2007-2008

 

More than a mile

When it comes to the joy and necessity of walking a mile in someone's shoes, To Kill a Mockingbird does a pretty good job of explaining:

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view--until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”

Nonetheless, I personally prefer this quote from Joan Aiken's Is Underground:

“She thought about Penny teaching her to read. 'What’s the point of reading?' Is had grumbled at first. 'You can allus tell me stories, that’s better than reading.' 'I’ll not always be here,' Penny had said shortly. 'Besides, once you can read, you can learn somebody else. Folk should teach each other what they know.' 'Why?' 'If you don’t learn anything, you don’t grow. And someone’s gotta learn you.'

Well, thought Is, if I get outta here, I’ll be able to learn some other person the best way to get free from a rolled-up rug.”

There are worse reasons to do what I'm doing.

Replacements

This morning, I put a posting for my current job up on the Center’s social media pages. This afternoon, I submitted an application for the agency to receive another Project 55 Fellow. Full circle.

I’ve changed a lot and a lot has changed since I took this position. I’ve changed a lot and a lot has changed since I showed up on the first day of my fellowship. Finally, a lot has changed since I reached the end of my fellowship and, filling out the Project 55 exit survey, checked the box indicating no, no I would not recommend that they send another fellow there. Not in a million years.

There were worlds beyond my classroom. I knew this intellectually, but I finally realized it to be true when I arrived at my quiet desk with the computer and the filing cabinet and the phone extension. There are worlds beyond that desk, too, and over my years as a grant writer at the Center my involvement in projects and discussions beyond my job description have intensified. I frequently tell people that even on the days it frustrates me, I still like the job, because it's fascinating. Why do we do things this way? Why is she taking this so personally? Is this all nonprofits, or just us?

 
Adults are no more logical, no less fallible than children, but the adults I work with (generally) wouldn’t run at you with scissors, expose themselves to a classroom of their peers, or only respond to shouted commands. (Being me, it was this last I found most challenging and dispiriting.)

There are other things I love about the organization, too, that I didn’t get a whole lot of exposure to in my after school classroom: home visiting, bilingual immersion, the e-mails that happen behind the scenes when a family loses everything.

I changed my mind. I think, given an engaging, intellectual post for them to fill, I would certainly send another fellow. I think that, sitting where I’ve been sitting for almost two years now, they’d get that view of the big picture that can be so essential to understanding why you’re doing what you’re doing. I e-mailed and explained, and today I submitted the application.

I’ll be gone by the time the Fellow arrives. I’m wrapping up here at the end of May, the better to spend all of June in Paris with the Aged Ps before starting the MFA (final location decision pending--watch this space!). I want to make sure we’re in touch, though. I want to be able to tell them about my experience, and I want to hear about theirs. Because as much as I hated every other minute of it, I will always be grateful for my crazy, miserable, eye-opening fellowship year. It made where I am today--and where I’ll be next year--possible.

"I went out the front."

I was a junior in high school. My grandparents were visiting. The five of us decided to go catch a movie and grab dinner.

The movie was Capote, and it left me stunned.

We sat in the front row, and the whole time I was watching, I just kept thinking, "This is so good, this is so good, this is so good, this is so dark, I can't believe I'm watching this with my grandparents, oh my goodness, this is so dark."

The movie hit me hard because, at the time, I was also trying to write something based on a real-life story with no conclusion. I thought I knew what the most dramatically satisfying outcome would be, and it was the one I would never have wished on my characters, let alone their real-life counterparts. Watching Capote (brilliantly embodied by the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman) wishing for a speedy conclusion to In Cold Blood really shook me. He knew what a speedy conclusion would mean for the murderers he'd befriended. Befriended. That was another thing. More and more and more shades of dark, dark grey. I could not believe I was there with my grandparents.

The credits rolled and we sat through every single one. The lights came up and we filed out of the theater in silence. What now? I wondered. What could we possibly  do now?

"That was good," said my grandfather. "What's for dinner?"

I trailed behind everyone next door to the restaurant. ("He'll get an Academy Award," my dad was predicting. Everyone was nodding in agreement.) Was this my first brush with a conflicted, sympathetic, difficult protagonist? I doubt it, and I doubt that the crime itself threw me, although that certainly was a doozy, even for the seasoned Masterpiece Mystery and forties film noir consumer I was even then. Whatever the reason, this was one of the first movies I felt right down to the soles of my feet.

Roger Ebert had this to say: "The movie In Cold Blood had no speaking role for Capote, who in a sense stood behind the camera with the director. If "Capote" had simply flipped the coin and told the story of the Clutter murders from Capote's point of view, it might have been a good movie, but what makes it so powerful is that it looks with merciless perception at Capote's moral disintegration."

And I wondered, at age sixteen, whether any work of art would ever be worth that much.

So the movie got to me, but what stunned me was that "What's for dinner?" When I tell this story in person, this is where I inject the humor. "'What's for dinner?!?'" I say. "How can they be talking about food? I AM SHAKEN TO THE DEPTHS OF MY SOUL."

(I say it in all caps, just like that.)

I can point to Capote as the moment when I realized that no two people ever watch the same movie.

More than that, it would be impossible for me to watch the same movie today that I watched nine years ago. But I will never forget this particular line, "It's like Perry and I grew up in the same house, and one day he went out the back door and I went out the front," and I will never stop citing it all the time, and I will always love the movie. It's beautifully shot and well written and, yes, amazingly acted.

I'll be watching it again tomorrow.

Desert Island Discs

Today was our third of (presumably) four days we've had off of work in 2014 due to dangerously cold temperatures. Not going into work has been especially good news for me, since my aging Subaru is completely, 100% frozen, and I don't want to risk my delicate Irish skin on the El in this weather. So I've been hunkering down and catching up on the reading, writing, and podcast-listening that has gotten away from me in the past months.

One of my favorite podcasts to drop in on is the long-running Desert Island Discs, a staple of British culture. Its premise is that each castaway has to choose eight pieces of music, a book, and a luxury that they would take with them upon being exiled to a desert island. This morning, I listened to Hugh Laurie's selection, and thought that it was high time I made mine.

Music
1. Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, Ralph Vaughan Williams
2. The Bagman's Gambit, The Decemberists
3. Non, je ne regrette rien, Edith Piaf
4. Night and Day, Fred Astaire
5. Heart in a Cage, The Strokes
6. Feeling Good, Michael Bublé
7. El Tango De Roxanne, Ewan Mcgregor, Jose Feliciano, and Jacek Koman
8. Help I'm Alive, Metric

Book
Oftentimes, castaways will ask for "the complete works of Dickens." This seemingly counts because each castaway is automatically presented with The Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare. So, along those lines, I am going to ask for The Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett. This is a series that would bear up under the extreme scrutiny resulting from an English major being marooned on a desert island.

Luxury
I would ask for a computer with a magically long-lasting battery, for writing the masterpiece that will eventually arise from listening to so many inspiring songs on repeat.

Thank you for tuning in.