Pàrtaidh Nàiseanta na h-Alba

After a Florida-like election fiasco (ah bourach!), the Scottish National Party has won the elections in Scotland.

Tony Blair's venture in Iraq has pissed off the Scots so much that they threw his Labour Party out of power in Scotland for the first time, ever!

What's more, the SNP is the independence party of Scotland, and they will now have the opportunity to hold a referendum on becoming more independent from the auld enemy or seceding outright and dissolving the union of Great Britain itself. The referendum, according to new First Minister Salmond, will occur in 2009 or 2010. That means Blair's Iraq stupidity may lead to the end of Great Britain itself.

Biggest Irony: Tuesday marked the 300th anniversary of the Act of Union, which formed Great Britain by dissolving the Scottish Parliament (they got it back in 1999).

I know it's a weird fascination for me to have. My family got kicked out of the Highlands due to brutal English land laws exploited during the "--- Clearances" (which were named after my family, should you care to Wiki it) 200 years ago. My ancestor William emigrated to America through Canada in 1806. That was a long time ago. I shouldn't care so much. But I do.

And seeing Bush's lapdog humiliated to a degree beyond anyone's predicting over this stupid war is so deeply satisfying.

The Offer

So, true to their word, the private school called for me to meet with their headmaster two weeks to the day after my interview. I was prepared to regard the whole proceeding with disdain. And now I must eat tasty crow and pick my teeth with the quills.

Word must have gotten around about an inappropriate comment offered by one of the teachers when I was on the campus before, because the headmaster was prepared with a full-on demonstration, complete with charts (!), about how his school is progressive. Before he even showed me the contract or discussed the job offer in any detail, he gave me the full-court press. It was a private meeting, tete-a-tete, so it felt odd when he walked over to the easel and elaborated on their massive project ($5 million) to make the campus environmentally responsible. It was like sitting alone in the audience while a play is performed just for you.

Then came the vow that his school gives no merit-based scholarships (which I have always translated as affirmative action for white people)--only need-based financial aid, "because we have a responsibility to reflect the diversity of our city and open doors for the economically disadvantaged." I think that's an exact quote. They spend over $1 million a year on need-based aid, he told me. Holy crap, I thought at that point, now I can't just sneer and go home.

Next, we talked about my neighborhood on the West Side. He knew T's school. He knew it because his wife works with Somali immigrant women (some of whose children T teaches): she helps them to learn English and so become more independent in Buffalo. My head grew light; now I was taking the place seriously. We talked about other things, which I don't need to elaborate, but it was all extremely positive. Damn, he's a good administrator.

Then he showed me the offer, and I tried not to drool. The salary and benefits are as good as, and in some cases better than, the contracts for assistant professorships I've seen on other searches for college jobs. I mean, it's still a teaching job and not stock-brokering, but the numbers were a bit, well, startling. Somehow I managed not to sign it right then and there.

He said the Board wanted to "respect my Ph.D. and university teaching experience." Hell, the university didn't respect my Ph.D. and university teaching experience.

When I left that meeting, clutching the contract (which the headmaster had signed), two of the other teachers were there. They expressed their embarrassment over their colleague's remark at the previous interview and wished me a warm welcome.

Now the contract sits here beside me on the coffee table. T has joked that I should sign it before they take it back.

Yet, a passage from John Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist keeps going through my mind. Gardner talks about a number of different jobs a novelist might take while writing--night clerk, forest watchtower-sitter, etc.--and then specifically names teaching as "too demanding" a profession and thus harmful to writing fiction. Hm. But then I recall that a very successful writer, some of whose work I admire very much, taught at this particular school once. Mm-hm.

Who am I kidding? I know I'm going to sign this thing. Crow is pretty tasty, and less filling than you might guess.

Bourgie Nights

T and I registered for our baby shower last night. Eek.

It took 3 hours. Eek, eek.

Negotiating the ambiguous area between acquiring things one needs and hoarding instant junk is tricky. Going bourgie triggers a nervous response for me; I've devoted much of my life to thinking about possessions and how to keep them from possessing me. I grew up, you see, in a place where people acquired all sorts of stuff--vineyards, mansions, jet airplanes, etc.--and nobody seemed particularly happy about it. Many of the children with whom I played seemed quite, if you'll pardon the expression, fucked in the head.

So, I'm interested in keeping my own impending child from also being fucked in the head.

Undeniably though, we will use the tiny clothes and the pad for the cradle and many of the other items on our list of 43 things for which we registered at (gasp) Babies 'R Us. But when I clutched a pair of miniature Chuck Taylor All Star sneakers, it was out of that false consciousness of consumer rapture against which I try to maintain a certain guardedness.

Around the age of 22 I decided books and films were the only material things I'd allow myself to indulge in buying regularly and with little restriction. And I have. This self-imposed rule has worked for me, and it has restricted my forays into spastic bourgieness. When I impulse buy, it's almost never anything but books or DVDs now, and I suffer little to no buyer's remorse.

But now I sense the rules are changing. The kid will want things. Worse, I will want to buy things for the kid.

A professor friend of mine, who teaches the Bible as literature and was herself once a nun, told me she could not lead a spiritual life (meaning, for her, an ascetic life) because she knew she took too much pleasure in material things to ever give them up. She lives in a big, beautiful house with marble everywhere. I don't know her kid, but he doesn't seem fucked in the head.

Still, I think it's necessary to regard temporal things with a certain contempt in order to have good character. And yet there I was, in a hideous crackerbox store in a hideous suburb, firing away with a scanning gun at bar-coded merchandise with the expectation that friends and relatives might spend their hard-won money buying some of it for us. And what does a baby need sneakers for, anyway?

My god though, those mini-Chucks are so cute. I gotta have them.

Cormac Mac Airt

No word yet on when the Cormac McCarthy interview with Oprah Winfrey will take place. (Sweet jesus, did I just write that sentence?)

I still can't believe The Road has garnered all this praise (the Pulitzer Prize, mainstream celebrity, etc.) when earlier, better novels didn't. It seems sort of like Scorcese getting the Best Director Oscar for Faithful Departed when he directed Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull all over twenty-five years ago. I guess McCarthy's old and those in literary officialdom decided they hadn't celebrated him enough.

He won the National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses back in 1992, and I thought that strange as well. Blood Meridian was published only seven years before, and it was a masterpiece on the order of Absalom, Absalom!. I remebered ATPH as a good novel, and less demanding of the reader, but not as one of his very best. No Country for Old Men, I thought, was better than The Road in certain ways, and I couldn't understand why it won nothing, wasn't on bestseller lists, etc., even though it was published just a year before The Road.

Then I started reading ATPH again (and I'll probably cycle through the rest of the border trilogy) just for comparison with the present Road phenomenon. Holy crap. Listen to this:

"Bye and bye they passed a stand of roadside cholla against which small birds had been driven by the storm and there impaled. Gray nameless birds espaliered in attitudes of stillborn flight or hanging loosely in their feathers. Some of them were still alive and they twisted on their spines as the horses passed and raised their heads and cried out but the horsemen rode on."

Those are just a few sentences buried in a paragraph a third of the way into ATPH. Having read the novel before, I know that the weird image of the birds perfectly foreshadows all of the awful shit about to happen to the protagonists, and even why it will happen. And those are magnificent sentences.

And so I am reminded--even when a McCarthy novel is not his best, it's better than just about anything else. And, in time, I can forget about the Matt Damon movie.

In time.

Carpe Diem?

I didn't tell you about the interview I had last week with the prep school. You may remember from a previous post that they had considered me (without my knowledge) for a teaching post a couple of years ago, and they tracked me down through the English department last month. Anyway, I agreed to go in for a series of interviews on Tuesday. It was weird.

On the way there I nurtured fantasies of a Dead Poets Society sort of gig (but without any student suicide and subsequent firing). You know, eating my lunches in a posh, mahogany-panelled room in between classes in which I found new ways to inspire my students by standing on furniture. That all seemed ok, I figured, if I got paid enough.

Well, I arrived and discovered no one had put much planning into my visit. The chair of the department had sent me an e-mail Monday afternoon--less than a day before the interview--informing me that I would teach a class on The Scarlet Letter. Good thing I reread it (a couple of years ago).

Because I am a bit of a planner, and because I did not care to look like an ass in front of a room full of students, I worried over the lesson. I spent the evening looking at crucial chapters and planning a discussion before going to bed. Then I awoke at 3 AM and neurotically rehearsed said lesson until the alarm rang at 6:30 AM.

So, after my unpleasant night with Hester Prynne, I arrived at the sprawling, 25-acre campus and jauntily strode to the main office--it was 8 AM, sharp. The chair of the department introduced himself and then promptly dropped me off in a colleague's empty classroom where I could wait. And wait. I guess they weren't ready for me.

45 minutes later, he retrieved me and thrust an itinerary into my hand. When we set up the interview, I was told I would be there from 8 AM until noon. The itinerary showed meetings until 2:30 PM. Sigh.

If only I had known that the itinerary was not real. Some of the meetings would be moved around, and one would be cancelled. I still had to roam the campus until after 2 PM, awash in confusion. I've seen more organization in single-celled bacteria.

Anyway, I met with the whole department for a chat in an enormous room which did, in fact, have mahogany panelling. I liked the younger people. There was an old-timer, as well, who has been teaching at the school for 34 years--after having a previous career at another school in New England! He is a great big guy, broad-shouldered and well over six-feet tall, but can best be described as doddering.

The only remotely Dead Poets Society-esque moment came when I taught. I gave a lesson to a group of sophomores, and they were excellent. They were, in fact, better than any college students I've ever had. Of course, the tuition at this high school runs about $12,000 per year more than my former college students' tuition, so they'd better be good. In fact, the students should probably have valets following them around, brushing off their sportcoats and carrying their books for them.

Later on I met the Head of School. Apparently she had decided to hate me before we met. I sat down in her office, and, after saying "hello," she asked me what I could possibly know about teaching in an "independent prep school" anyway? The hostility in her voice was disconcerting.

I replied that I helped to design and found a high school in California. (A damn fine college prep school, in fact.) In the middle of my sentence, though, she waved her hand dismissively at me and muttered, "Yes, yes; I read your resume."

Okey-dokey.

Somehow, I managed to struggle on. It turns out she's moving to a new job in Southern California. To the same ultra-rich town in which I grew up, in fact. She started to warm to me, which made me feel creepy. The conversation got around to the California state senator who wanted to hire me as a campaign advisor and sent me packing for graduate school in terror over the offer. At this point, the woman seemed genuinely impressed that I'd turned down a political career for academics. Things were going swimmingly.

Then the chair of the English department walked in and said I had to get to another meeting. The Head of School made the same sort of dismissive hand sweep that she'd used on me just ten minutes earlier. "Get out," she said to him, "I knew you were lingering out there!"

Then, with him standing just outside the open door directly behind me, she inveighed against him. Railed against him, really. "I hate lingerers!" she said. "He's a lingerer--always hanging outside my door! Don't you hate that type?"

I thought, "What the hell am I supposed to say?" I said nothing. You might say I felt uncomfortable.

Then it was back to lunch, eating a prepared meal in the panelled room and listening to my potential colleagues making jokes about the students. This time, they were discussing the giving out of awards.

Again, I sat silently.

By the time I got home, I was sick. I mean truly, physically sick. I spent three days with the flu. Coincidence? You decide.

Well, there has been no mention of money--but it would have to be more than the typically poor private school pay for me to give up my writing life and teach there. Harumph, I say.

Dead Rat

I located the source of the odor in our basement. For the last two weeks, I thought it was due to the mold that flourished after our tenant's hot water heater ruptured. No amount of bleach seemed to clear away the stench.

Then, last night, T was collecting the laundry when she noticed a bizarre, highly viscous drizzle from some insulation in the ceiling. She told me about the drizzle (it had the approximate color and flow of rubber cement), and I went down into the basement for what I realized would be a nasty job. I put on a mask and gloves and pulled the insulation down.

I now know the meaning of the word "miasma;" I feel what it means in the center of my being.

Because I Love You

This video appeared briefly on YouTube and has since been yanked. It is one of the best uses of the Internet I have ever seen: storage for a public access TV program from Atlanta.

Let Alexyss Tylor's zen-like ramble about sexual power wash over you as it appears to wash over her mother. I found two still-active links here

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2007/04/another_excitin.html

and here

http://www.glumbert.com/media/power

Go. Watch. You'll be glad you did.