One Man's Meat

I finally finished E.B. White's One Man's Meat, and now I don't know what to do with myself. I was really sad to leave it. I dreaded the last page and made a little "Awww . . ." sound as I turned to it. I wanted more!

I've been reading it at lunch time over my sack lunches and cafeteria salads. White's essays on country life are so calming, so rejuvenating, and he somehow made subjects like patriotism and World War Two and freedom feel immediate and fresh and important. His essays created a truly quiet space in the middle of my work days; they seemed to clean out my brain for a little bit, sort of smoothing down its rough edges before I took out my notebook for my mid-day writing session.

Finishing a beloved book is a sad event, and also an exciting one. I get to choose a new book now, with a great deal of apprehension (will it live up to White's essays?) and a little bit of hope (could it possibly be even better than White's essays?!).

I think that I'll stick with essays at lunch time. They seem suited to the noon-hour. Poems, which are all impression, emotion, and instinct, seem right for foggy-headed mornings, and novels are purely evening fare, with their human camaraderie and thrilling imaginative leaps. But the honesty of non-fiction, the way that essays inch their way from fact toward wisdom, is steadying and filling, sort of like a turkey sandwich on whole grain bread.

So what's next? Hmmm . . . here are the possibilities:

1. Walter Benjamin's Illuminations
2. Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem
3. Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk
4. Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self-Reliance and Other Essays
5. Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
6. Marilynn Robinson's Absence of Mind 

Any suggestions?

Anita Blake, Vampire Hunting Feminist Badass

I just finished another Anita Blake novel. This one was Cerulean Sins, and by God, isn't that title laughable? And the cover art . . . sheesh . . .

Cerulean Sins

But don't let's talk about it. Anyway, this is book eleven out of nineteen in the series. The books have--like all novel series--gotten worse and worse as the series wears on. They've become increasingly melodramatic and sexually gratuitous and repetitive, but I can't quite give them up. I think it's because Anita Blake, the vampire hunting heroine of the novels, is such a fantastic character.

Now, you all know that I love me a good vampire series, and I don't mind their conventionality: the main character is almost always a woman who is somehow embroiled in vampire culture. She's always both afraid of and attracted to the vampires, and she always becomes involved with at least one Vampire Boyfriend who's usually very old and seductive and dangerous and really good looking. And usually he has really long hair.

Gary Oldman as Dracula from Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Brad Pitt from Interview with a Vampire.

Jean-Claude, Anita's long-haired Vampire Boyfriend.

The Anita Blake series follows this pattern just like the Twilight books and the Sookie Stackhouse/True Blood novels. But the difference between Anita and characters like Bella Swan (Twilight) and Sookie is vast. Typically, the "heroine" of a vampire novel is a victim, an innocent who stands in for the reader. She's constantly put into great danger by the vampires, but she is also is seduced and loved by them. She survives in the vampire world largely by luck and the protection of others, not because of her own abilities.

But Anita is no victim. She's known as "The Executioner" because she's an officially licensed vampire hunter. She takes care of her own bad guys and doesn't fall to bits every time someone tries to take a bite out of her. Bella and Sookie are both protected by their Vampire Boyfriends, but Anita spends more time taking care of her friends and lovers than they take care of her. Both Sookie and Bella spend their novels crying and running away and huddling in a corner while the big, tough male vampires do all the talking, but Anita assumes that it's up to her to save the day. And if a vampire tries to eat her, she just shoots him. Her self-reliance makes for a refreshing change of pace.

She's part detective, part necromancer, and part assassin, but there's nothing victim-like about her. In fact, thought the novels, she doesn't worry about getting killed so much as she worries about losing her faith and innocence. She worries about becoming a hardened sociopath too ready to take a life, and this internal conflict is far more interesting than the ones in other vampire novels. 

To be honest, the Anita Blake series has jumped the shark so many times that, every time I read one of the novels, I find myself thinking, "Well, this is going to be it: no more for me!" And then the book always ends with Anita being a total badass and raising a hundred bloodthirsty zombies or staking some big scary vampire or shooting her way out of trouble, and I just can't stop myself from going back to the library for just one more: it's a pleasure to read about a female character who is tough, capable, funny, and complex. Besides, let's be honest, who doesn't love a good zombie massacre?

Anita killing some zombies.

Gaaaaahhhhh! (An Update)

So, since last Saturday, I've been packing, driving, camping, driving, packing, moving, unpacking, driving, cleaning, and shopping nonstop, and I am pooped with a capital P!

I had a fabulous Memorial Day weekend camping with my family, and I'm just getting settled into my new apartment, and this has all been great fun, but I haven't been on my computer at all. However, you can expect the following next week as I start getting back on track:

• pictures of my new place
• why thrift store shopping is awesome
• why I love "The Farm"
• and why Anita Blake is the best fantasy novel heroine ever.

I promise, I'll be writing again soon. In the meantime, wish me a full night's sleep--I sure as heck need one!

A Book By Any Other Cover

Once I've started reading a certain copy of a book, I can't switch to a different copy in the middle of the process. It doesn't matter if the two editions share the same exact content and same exact page numbers, once I've switched, the reading experience is ruined for me. If I manage to finish the book at all (sorry, One Hundred Years of Solitude, you didn't make it through the transition!), I do so crankily, feeling out-of-sorts and cheated for having to hold some stranger of a book in my hands.

I can even feel copy mourning long after I've finished reading a book. When I thought I had lost my first copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (the copy I had read at least three times) . . .

 . . . I went out and bought a new copy, but I didn't even like to touch the thing, with its matte cover and Photoshopped Prague:

I sold it to a used book store just as soon as I got my old copy back.

And then there's Middlemarch: I was only halfway through it when I had to return my copy to the public library. I considered buying a copy of my own that I would never have to return to anyone, but I couldn't find the same Modern Library edition. I almost panicked.

It's not that I'm so very much in love with Modern Library editions. It's true that this copy had a nice hard cover, a decent dust jacket, and Biblically thin pages (which I love). But more importantly, I worried that I'd run out of steam on the fat novel once I was holding some cheap paperback in my hands (I almost lost The Brother's Karamazov that way).

The body of a book means something to the human brain, or at least it means something to my brain. If a book does not provide some sort of sensually pleasing experience (soft, floppy pages; a pleasantly inky smell; alluring cover art; etc.), I have a poorer relationship with it. No matter how intellectual of a process reading seems to be, the way a book is constructed will always color how it is read. It's kind of like poetry: no matter how good the ideas inside a poem are, it's hard to love them without a startlingly beautiful image to plug those ideas into reality.

I know that I would never have finished Middlemarch if I had switched over to the Penguin Popular Classics edition:

I'm pretty sure that its pages would have been rough and pulpy, but the cover is obviously the worst part: the Penguin copy looks old and dull and, let's admit it, drenched in the sort of thing that collects in the main characters' chamber pots. No one wants to read a book with that lurking in their subconscious.

This is why I've spent so much money on slightly nicer copies of books that I could find cheaper elsewhere, and this is why I've hesitated to buy a Kindle or a Nook or a Sony Reader: if all e-books have essentially the same feel to them, some part of me wonders whether the content will all start to feel the same, too.

This is also why I drove to the public library one town over just to check out the exact same Modern Library edition of Middlemarch. And it was totally worth it: my brain was never distracted by pulpy pages or a flimsy cover. It was just me and my idea of Middlemarch, getting down to business.

Life at KU: New & Old

I've been working at KU for two weeks now. It's constantly strange to me how much I still remember about my old surroundings, even though it's been four years since I was a student here. But I've spent so much time here that life at KU is still second-nature to me.

But there are plenty of differences, too. Here's what I've noticed over the last few weeks:

Old:Walking everywhere.
New: I still walk all over campus and downtown Lawrence, but I don't blend in anymore. I'm obviously different from the students swarming the sidewalks. My clothes are more professional, my "luggage" is different (now I have a red leather purse instead of a tattered khaki messenger bag), and my face is obviously that of a twenty-something. I'm not going to get mistaken for a freshman anytime soon!

Old: Camping out on campus.
New: I still spend my free lunch hours on campus. Fortunately, my memory for KU's public spaces (lunch tables, study areas, etc.) has proven surprisingly strong. I still know where I can go for a quiet hour on my own. But I'm no longer squatting in hallways to study or nap or scarf down a To Go lunch from the dining hall. Now, I'm eating home-made veggie sandwiches and writing during my lunch hours.

Old: Those damn hills!
New: They're still everywhere, but now my old lady hip hurts when I trudge up them.  :(

Old: KU email and Blackboard.
New: I'm still checking the same sites, but now I'm using Outlook to check my email and using the faculty section of Blackboard. I'm also trying to figure out Microsoft Access to manage my databases, considering Google Wave to collaborate with my boss, and learning how to update the department's website with Adobe software. I'm way, way more tech savvy than I used to be!

Old: Feeling baffled by the University's vast, complex, and highly specialized bureaucracy.
New: The bureaucracy's the same, but now I'm supposed to understand it all! In the past, I showed up at my advisor's office and asked for help when I was lost. Now, I'm expected to help lost graduate students figure out how to navigate the University. Ack!

Old: Constant school-related anxiety.
New: I'm pretty nervous about learning how to do my job well, but I'm not worried about classes or finals or studying any more. That is one major perk of being a staff member instead of a student: no finals week ever, ever again!