October 2002 Archives

FREE DAY REPORT

*Our Headmaster, may he live forever, gave the school a Free Day today; on a Free Day, classes don't meet, and there's no evening study hall the night before. In short, we got the day off. I decided to use it wisely.

*My first decision was to stay up late in order to finish looking over the edits for The Verb To Bird. With any luck, I'll have made all the changes by Nov. 10th--wish me luck.

*With my 8:00 class cancelled, I was free to sleep in, which I did. The dog woke me up just before 10:00 by barking at the lawn mower next door. I'm frankly a little surprised that the lawn mower didn't wake me.

*First stop: the library, to pick up the checkbook from Kelly, and to see the various costumes worn by the librarians. One was in full UVA baseball regalia (spikes included), two others in the garb of medieval noblewomen. Kelly herself wore her pale-blue flannel pajamas festooned with yellow ducks, a pair of fuzzy slippers shaped like ducks, and a pacifier.

*Quick stop at Not The Same Old Grind for coffee (Valencia Orange blend) and a bagel while I looked at the Washington Post. Today, thankfully, they weren't playing their usual radio choice, which is a particularly annoying Christian rock station. I'm all for Christians getting to sing about their religion, but why does it have to be so bland? I mean, your deity kicked over the moneylenders' tables and suffered scourging and having nails driven into His flesh; is He really going to be upset just because you used a deliberate discord, or maybe a little feedback now and then?

*Big trouble: a new store has opened outside of town: the Red Barn Book Outlet. Oh, dear. I already owned many of the titles on their shelves, including books by Jim Crace, Katharine Weber, Caroline Leavitt, John Lanchester, Orson Scott Card, and Michael Chabon, but I could easily have spent hundreds of bucks there on stuff I don't have. Every book is 60% off the cover price, hardcover or soft, and teachers and librarians get an extra 10% off. Plus, if you buy ten books, the eleventh is free. I ended up with a very restrained stack: a hardback of Scott Weidensaul's The Ghost with Trembling Wings, plus trade paperbacks of Michael White's Leonardo: The First Scientist, Gene Wolfe's Free Live Free, Terry Bisson's The Pickup Artist, Michael Chabon's Werewolves in Their Youth, Jonathan Carroll's The Land of Laughs and Bones of the Moon, the Audubon Guide to the National Wildlife Refuges: Southeast, and two of Tom Tomorrow's This Modern World collections, When Penguins Attack! and the early-Nineties classic Tune in Tomorrow. Best of all, I found an out-of-print book I'd been coveting for nearly 15 years: Dougal Dixon's After Man: A Zoology of the Future, which I first saw in the old Hardback Cafe & Bookstore back in Chapel Hill. I was so happy I drove to Charlottesville.

*The drive was gorgeous; I took Va. Rte. 33 from Gordonsville to Ruckersville, and the fall foliage was spectacular--golden hickories, scarlet maples, and every variant of orange there is. The oaks aren't really turning yet, and the sycamores have already gone rather brown, but I think the color is at its height right now. I'm happy to have ANY color after the drought we've had this year, but this seems like far more than we could have hoped for. Right as I hit a long straightaway outside of Barboursville, the radio started playing "The Time Warp," and I sang along at the top of my lungs. Outside of Ruckersville, I saw a little old woman in a pale grey housedress mowing her lawn. And a few houses later I saw a yard that was alreadyfull of Christmas decorations.

*Atlas Comics didn't have that many new things that I wanted--I'm still trying to find issue #2 of the second series of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, for example--but I did snag something I've meant to own for many moons: Alan Moore & J.H. Williams III's Promethea: Book 1, a terrific science-fantasy/superhero comic with one of the all-time great supporting characters: the media darling known as Weeping Gorilla. I like Sophie and Stacia and the Five Swell Guys and all the different incarnations of Promethea herself, but you have to love a character whose raison d'etre is to mope around thinking such deep thoughts as "I hate my body," "Why do pets have to die?" "The garage thinks it's the clutch," and "Can we hear that Radiohead track just once more?"

*Lunch at the China King Buffet. It's huge, it's cheap, it's full of variety--chicken with black bean sauce, mussels in ginger sauce, bourbon chicken, lo mein, California rolls, egg rolls, General Tso's chicken, green beans, peanut chicken--but I wasn't that impressed with the quality. Not everything was hot, some things didn't seem fully cooked, and a lot of it was pretty greasy. For $5.99, maybe I shouldn't expect much, but I'd certainly hoped for more.

*Another beautiful drive back. North of Barboursville, I got behind an idiot who was carrying two unsecured plastic garbage cans in the bed of his pickup; both of them flew up and out at me. I avoided the first and bumped the second with the Volvo, but as I was traveling very slowly when it happened, any damage was suffered by the can. I frankly didn't see the point in stopping to see what damage the idiot had caused to be inflicted on his can, so I drove on. A huge flock of Canada geese was coming over the road when I got close to Somerset; I didn't even realize they were Canadas at first because they hadn't yet formed their V, but they soon assumed it and winged off toward the Blue Ridge. The sun was out now, and bright patches appeared on the mountains. Some of the maples were so red they'd become almost magenta.

*As I took the curve into Somerset, I saw a crow swooping repeatedly down on something--almost always the sign of a predator in the neighborhood. Sure enough, I saw it on a fencepost beside the road: a large Cooper's hawk, bending to tear at its prey. It was a big one, too, fully the size of the crow, slate-grey on top and barred with rust on the underside. It's the closest I've ever been to a Cooper's.

*The sun is setting now, and the west is getting purple. Time to make up candy bags and get ready for trick-or-treating. Tomorrow I'll be back to the grind, but for the moment, it's still a Free Day. Happy Halloween, everybody!

10:20 PM

I've been doing a lot of work in the theater shop this week, trying to help our technical director get the set ready for this weekend's main stage production, and I'm feeling pleased about it. I worked tech in high school and went to college with every intention of being a drama major with a focus on technical theater, but it has been some time since I've spent much time in the shop. I've had to scrape some rust off my techie brain--last week, for example, I made a nice policeman's nightstick, but for some reason I decided to paint it with black enamel-based paint, which meant that a) it took the better part of two days to dry, and b) I've still got small flecks of black paint staining my cuticles. I'm hoping that my brain will start working again soon.

I got started in tech mostly by accident. When I arrived at Chapel Hill High School in 1978, the guidance office screwed up my schedule and gave me two English classes--too many even for me--but no math, and an elective I didn't want. By the time they straightened out the mess, the only electives available were Batik, Basket Weaving, and Technical Theater, aka Tech. I knew one person, my friend Nan, who'd done Tech and enjoyed it, so I signed up. On the first day, John Thomas, the TD, handed me a hammer.

"See that table?" he said, gesturing to a rickety table cobbled together from two-by-four and plywood. "Break it up."

"What do you mean 'Break it up'?" I said.

"Break it apart and put the lumber in the storage bin," John replied.

I was hooked. Break furniture with a hammer for academic credit? Yes!

My life changed drastically as a result of my semester in Tech. I picked up my lifelong nickname, PC, because there were too many people named Peter working in the drama department--Peter Rogers (now on the faculty at Bates College), Peter Spruyt (now successfully acting in Hollywood), Peter Merten (whereabouts unknown), and me. I learned to drive a nail, a skill with which I have earned actual money, to operate a number of power tools, to design a light plot and hang the lights for it, and to set up and run a reel-to-reel tape recorder. (If not for the computer revolution, I'd be employable today.) But most important, I met a number of my dearest friends, including several future girlfriends, my children's godparents, and most of the people who would eventually be in my wedding party. If not for that scheduling glitch, I'd be a completely different (and probably unhappier) person today.

Alas, my plans to be a techie for life were foiled by the UNC Drama Department's policy toward freshmen. Well, there was one policy I agreed with completely: all first-year students pursuing a drama degree had to take Drama 64, a lab course that ran from 1-5 p.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays--a significant outlay of time, you'll note. The reason for this policy was simple: to impress upon the fledgling drama majors that theater was hard work. Most of my classmates were actors; they wanted the glory of appearing onstage, and they took tech because they had to. They complained all the while, but every day they confronted the fact that the glory they sought was earned on the backs of dozens of hard-working set designers, builders, lighting techs, sound engineers, and other techies.

I, of course, already knew all that; I didn't want to be an actor, though I'd performed in a number of plays by then. I wanted to spend my college career with a crescent wrench in one hand and a tape measure in the other. But UNC had a policy that frustrated me enormously: freshmen weren't allowed to touch the lights. At this point I'd been hanging lights for three years; I knew the different purposes of the different lamps; I knew how to design, cut, and install gobos (sheet-metal cutouts designed to cast silhouettes on the stage--prison bars, leafy branches, the Bat Signal, etc.); I knew how to put colored gels over the lights, and how to mix the colors to produce various effects; I knew how to hang, aim, and focus one light or an entire battery of them. I'd even designed the lighting scheme and hung all the lights (or "instruments," as we called them) for one show at CHHS, hauling each light up a thirty-foot A-frame ladder and preparing it.

But the policy was strict: freshmen weren't allowed to touch the lights. I made my case to the TD, but he refused to give me an exception. "Look," I said, pointing down to the various instruments awaiting a grad student's attention, "That's a six-inch Fresnell lamp; the concentric rings in the lens make it useful for short, soft-focus beams--usually from right above the stage. These over here are nine- and twelve-inch Likos; they cast long, tight beams, usually from the back of the house. Give me a wrench and I'll hang every one of them. You can watch me." But he wouldn't budge.

I looked at the twelve hours of lab time I was spending in the shop every week, twelve hours I could really use to keep up with my other classes, since I was taking over 18 credit hours at the time. I looked at the menial jobs I was doing: cleaning nails and staples out of scrap lumber, or spreading joint compound on canvas flats to make them look like stucco walls. I looked at the familiar, tantalizing instruments, held out of my reach by a fiat I considered arbitrary and unjust. And I quit.

I knew then that by dropping the class, I was giving up a career in theater, unless I transferred to another school. I still did a little performing in local productions, and I kept going to plays. In some ways I suppose I sublimated my theatrical yearnings by performing on my radio shift, or onstage with the various bands I joined during & just after college. But when I left the shop, I thought it was for good.

And now I'm back. Working tech is a wonderful mixture of the practical and the aesthetic. You have to measure, cut wood, drive screws, and hammer nails, tasks where success is tangible and easily recognized. At the same time, your contributions are beautiful and illusory, designed to fool the eye and draw the attention of an audience. It is simultaneously the most straightforward of blue-collar building project and the most impractical sort of castle in the air. I'm having a wonderful time visiting again. And I'm thrilled to have black paint all over my fingers again.

3:53 PM

My brother and his wife just got back from Paris, and that's started me thinking about travel. I was lucky in my youth to have parents who enjoyed travel and were willing to bring David & me along, so I'd managed to do a fair amount of traveling by the time I reached adulthood. It also helped that we had UNC's teams to lead the way to exotic locations; the basketball Tar Heels took us to New York for the 1971 NIT, to Los Angeles (and the thrilling La Brea Tar Pits) for the NCAA Final Four in 1972, to Madrid for a Christmas tournament in 1974, to Atlanta for the 1977 Final Four, and to Hawaii for the 1977 Rainbow Classic. The football Heels went to slightly less exotic areas--Atlanta for two miserably cold Peach Bowl losses (to Arizona State and Kentucky) and Jacksonville for two Gator Bowl victories, including the legendary Fog Bowl victory over Michigan. We did, however, manage to sneak off to Disney World on one Gator Bowl excursion, which made the place seem plenty exotic for our purposes. We also got to accompany my dad on his Marine-Corps-ordered trip to England in 1982, a trip which led to my continuing love affair with the island of Great Britain, where I returned for a year of college (1983-84), a honeymoon (1986), and a five-week course-and-family-trip (1999).

Dave was bitten by the travel bug even harder than I. He spent a semester in Italy in college, then spent four years in Japan after graduation. While there (and on the way home), he passed through Thailand, China, Russia, Czechoslovakia, and probably dozens more nations I've forgotten. He went to Africa and climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. He hung out on a hops farm in Czechoslovakia for a few days and struck up conversations with painters by the waterside in St. Petersburg. (He also took a lot of excellent photos; he's a terrific photographer, and it's a skill I hope he'll continue to develop in the future.) Then it was back to Italy after grad school, and off to Paris now that he's a married man. It's enough to make a guy jealous.

So where do I want to go? Well, Italy is the first target; Kelly and I have some research to do for a book we're working on, and with any luck, we'll get to it this spring. I'm also hoping to make it to California this summer; I haven't been there since I was nine, and I have literally dozens of friends there (including some I haven't actually met yet, but that's a technicality.) The Book Expo America convention is in LA this May, and that's a good excuse to go, but I'm most eager to visit the Bay Area, which I've never done. Here's hoping we don't get nailed by fire or earthquake while we're there; of course, if we can survive the East's forest fires, hurricanes, tornadoes and snipers, Cali should be doable.

Long-term? The Galapagos Islands. Australia. New Zealand. The Caribbean. The Everglades (while they're still there.) Scandinavia. Africa. Costa Rica. The Amazon. Acadia National Park in Maine. Big Bend National Wildlife Reserve in Texas. Vancouver. Alaska. Ireland. Tahiti. And last but not least, Antarctica.

So if anyone's got a place to stay, let me know.

5:15 PM

Weird, but true: after years of anonymity, I've seen my face sketched for national consumption twice in the past two weeks.

The first such drawing appeared in The Readerville Journal, where Tim Bowers' caricatures of Paul Clark and me grace the top of page 20; Tim's pen-and-ink sketches are clean and iconic, distorted for comic effect. Then yesterday, Paul Dry Books sent me a .jpg of one of Grant Silverstein's illustrations for The Verb To Bird. Grant's illustrative style is very detailed and organic; in his etchings (which I've seen only online), every object is filled with fine lines and curves, as though you were getting a glimpse of the molecular chains making up the substance. There's exaggeration in some areas, but the distortion seems more expressionistic than comic. This drawing in particular looks almost like a work by Durer--a very odd thing to say about a picture of yourself.

And that's basically the weird thing: seeing my own face rendered by these artists, using these drastically different approaches, is completely unlike seeing my face in the the way I usually see it.

Obviously, most of us see our faces in two places: the mirror (by far the most common) and in photographs. I'm also used to seeing my features reduced to something simple and cartoonish, however, because I've done self-caricatures for decades. For the last ten years or so I've drawn a cartoon of myself and the family for our Christmas card. I don't know if it's great art, but it's certainly a chance for me to render on paper the features which give a viewer a shorthand version of my face: glasses, beard (most years, anyway), large jaw, small nose, dark wavy hair. When I saw Tim's drawing for the first time, my reaction was "I don't look like that!" What I soon realized, however, was that it looked like me, rather than like my self-caricature. Grant's illustration, too, uses the same source Tim did (the photo of me, taken by my friend Sarah R., that graces the bio page on this site) to produce a drawing that looks like my whole face, rather than like the big elements of it that I'm used to focusing on.

It makes me wonder what it must have been like to sit for a portrait in the old days, before photography, before mirrors were cheap, regular, and plentiful, when your only idea of your own appearance was what you could see in an uneven pane of glass or a still pool. When you have no idea of how you look, how do you carry yourself? Would a beautiful woman, ignorant of her own beauty, be more or less beautiful to those around her? And what did Lisa Giaconda think when she finally persuaded Leonardo to let her have a look at that plank he'd been painting on, when she finally saw the smoky outlines of her own face, the faint and immortal curve of her smile?

5:21 PM

LBJs

*No matter how many times I listen to it, I am transfixed and hypnotized by Radiohead's "Let Down." I love the OK Computer album dearly, from the grinding guitar-cum-cello intro of "Airbag" to the plaintive echoes at the end of "The Tourist," but somehow whenever I get to the chiming strings and chirruping synthesizer of "Let Down," I always want to interrupt the album in order to play that song again. Just gorgeous. Send Thom Yorke & Co. to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame now and let's be done with it.

*Speaking of Radiohead, I've noticed that the elevator down the hall has a bell that sounds exactly like the ringing guitar note that opens "No Surprises." Whenever I walk past it and someone's coming down in the car, I'm tempted to burst into song: "A hearrrrrrrt thaaaaaat's... full up liiike a laaaaaaaandfiiiill..." I'm just happy it's not the opening note of something like "I Touch Myself."

*I've been re-reading Douglas Coupland's Microserfs for my summer reading group discussions, and I've suddenly realized that Legos are more than just a reflection of the tech worker's obsession with creating analog forms from binary bits. The entire novel is a work in Lego, a collection of short blocks of text that together form one of Daniel's daily journal entries; the entries form weeks, the weeks chapters, and so on. It's so obvious now that I can't believe I didn't pick up on it the first time. One more good reason to re-read your favorite books.

And yes, I have my personal Jeopardy! categories on this site's biography page in tribute to Coupland.

*If anyone's wondering, the other books I sponsored for discussion this summer were Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, Alan Moore & David Lloyd's V for Vendetta, and Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett's Good Omens. So far all seem to have gone over pretty well; I think the biggest surprise for the readers was V for Vendetta, which was clearly far more complicated and engaging than they'd expected a comic book to be.

*My sons have taken up musical instruments, the trumpet and the cello. So far I haven't gotten to hear them play much, but I'm very happy that they picked instruments that aren't too squeaky. The beauty of a well-played violin or clarinet is stunning, but you have to listen to many years of badly-played violin or clarinet before you get to that point. The trumpet may be loud, and the cello's notes may be easily muffed, but at least they won't make my fillings ache during these early days. And besides, it's fun to have two new instruments around the house. That gives us trumpet, cello, guitar, piano, harmonica, dulcimer, pennywhistle, and one not-really-playable Nicaraguan-made toy marimba at home. If I ever get my synthesizer and drum machine back from the recording studio my friends own in Chapel Hill, we're going to be able to make an awful din.

*This is going to be a busy weekend. Grades and comments are due Monday at noon. I have a technical rehearsal for the black box play on Sunday afternoon. I'm chaperoning a trip to King's Dominion on Saturday from 1:00 to midnight.

I think I'll catch a nap tomorrow.



11:01 PM

OOOOOOOOoooooooooooooo....

You know that sound you hear on the Fourth of July after a really cool firework has gone off? That's the noise I'm making as I clutch my copy of The Readerville Journal in my hand. This is one great-looking magazine, folks. There's the spiffy cover shot of Jeffrey Eugenides to start, but there's also a loving concern for detail shown in every layout, every design element. It's admirably clean and balanced, with colors that draw one's eye without startling it. I'm also excited that the magazine has a regular feature called Ode to a Lesser-Known Genius, and that the debut features John Crowley, whose Little, Big I recently read and greatly enjoyed. I like the typography, the binding, Karen's editorial, Kelly's book review... All in all, this is a wonderful periodical.

Of course, I'm biased in that it contains the first installment of our new column, Loose Canons. And yes, I'm one of several contributors whose caricatures grace the pages: Homer Banks, Bard Cole, Caroline Leavitt, and M.J. Rose all get the same treatment Paul and I did, but only our picture has us using weapons. Well, actually, Bard's (wonderful) column shows him armed with a longbow and a pen, but Paul and I have artillery. It's a funny drawing, done by Tim Bower, who also rendered Bard and Homer, although in the spirit of full disclosure I must admit that at first glance I thought it looked like Paul and I were doing something really juvenile with matches and methane.

In any case, those of you who still haven't subscribed to this little gem can click on this link right here and still get the debut issue, sure to become a collector's item.

Not that you should quit checking in here.

12:36 AM

Well, here I sit, STILL without a copy of The Readerville Journal, quietly gnawing on my own liver to pass the time until my copy arrives. I must say that my condition hasn't been improved by reading the accounts of various Readervilleans who traveled to NYC to distribute the magazine at the New York Is Book Country festival. It sounds like our two dozen or so volunteers not only handed free copies to about 12,000 people on Sunday, but also had a wonderful time socializing with one another in the process. Ah, well. I'm still hoping to get to the West Coast to meet some of the Readerville crew at this spring's Book Expo America in Los Angeles. We'll see how that goes.

Meanwhile, October has begun, and I'm a little bummed. I'm bummed because I love October. In many ways it's my favorite month. It's got Halloween, which any right-thinking person welcomes as an excuse to dress up as some(one/thing) else and eat candy with no reservations. It's got plenty of football every weekend, which offers me the chance to kick back for a few hours and enjoy America's contributions to world culture: pageantry worthy of a Busby Berkeley movie, barely-restrained and balletic violence, and the comforts of instant replay for those too apathetic to pay attention the first time. October is also the peak of migration for southward-headed birds, offering many a fascinating spectacle for those who still feel a thrill at the sight of a column of grackles heading down the Shenandoah Valley. The first of October is when the best apples I know, the Staymen Winesaps, come ripe and appear in roadside stands all over this part of Virginia. And as of October 15th, college basketball practice begins, and my heart starts beating along with the sound of leather smacking against hardwood across the southeast.

The only thing is, to have a really good October you've got to have fall, and this year the weather's just not cooperating. The high today is in the eighties--again. How can you call it October without cool, crisp weather in which to crunch your teeth into a Winesap? October shouldn't be muggy, for crying out loud. And worse, for all the humidity, we're still looking at a drought, despite the two rainy days we had last week as a result of Isidore's breakup over the southeast. Because of the dryness, the odds are good that the legendary fall colors of the Blue Ridge this year will be brown, brown, and brown.

Bah, humbug.

4:29 PM