Yesterday a bunch of grad students drove up into the mountains to have lunch with the job candidate. The restaurant was okay, but kind of a diner, and we missed breakfast food by five minutes, which many of us were pretty bummed about. Decent meatloaf and mashed potatoes, though. (Wanted pancakes and orange juice and eggs!) It was a good talk; I like this candidate a lot, and will be happy if he comes next year. I liked the other one too, for different reasons, so it's really a win-win situation. I like win-win situations. If I were smart, I would try to engineer more of them in my life. Jed's got a friend whose name I'm forgetting who specializes in that kind of thing. Seems like a pretty good way to live, if you can manage it.
Afterwards went and picked up some books I needed and office supplies. Someone on one of the lists I'm on mentioned something she called a 'portable office' -- a little box with compartments that she took to conventions so that she'd have her own tape and stuff, so she wouldn't have to run around begging tape from the con organizers to put up her flyers. Seemed like an excellent idea; I now have a little plastic box with several compartments, filled with scissors and tape and paper clips and push pins and business cards and pens and markers. I'll just keep it in my closet and chuck it in my bag whenever I'm going to a convention. Of course, now that I've told y'all about it, I bet I get people coming to mooch my push pins at the con. :-)
I'll be at Potlatch next weekend, for you Bay Area folks. Registration at the door is $40, and it really sounds like it'll be a fun little con. There's an auction of cool stuff on Sunday to support Clarion West too. Since it was CW that convinced me to take my writing seriously (really Beth Meachem and Tappan King at CW), I'm happy to do something to help support it. I hope to see lots of you there; I'll be ringleading a panel (on diversity) and running an algonquin discussion (on Strange Horizons). I'm getting very excited about the con -- and I get to see Jedediah! :-)
In additional to the portable office, I picked up some photo paper, so I may spend a little bit of today trying to see what kind of images I can print. I'm told that Photoshop can be used to make grainy pictures less grainy, but I don't think I've figured out how yet. Any tips would be very welcome. I also bought two books, Carol Emshwiller's The Start of the End of it All and Partha Chatterjee's The Nation and its Fragments. The Emshwiller is for Strange Horizons; we're thinking of possibly doing an author focus on her for the end of April. I read the first story -- very surreal, but definitely cool. I'll be reading this off and on over the next week or so. I'd like to finish it by Potlatch so I can loan it to Jed or David then. The Chatterjee is for my history course, of course; I read the first chapter last night but got too sleepy to continue with such dense stuff -- I'll continue it (and hopefully finish it) today. I read Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs instead; interesting. There's a comment near the very end, on the nature of gender relations as connected to sadism/masochism, that I'd sort of like to discuss with y'all -- but I think it would lose a lot of its impact if you hadn't read the rest of the (very short) book first. So go read it, okay, and tell me when you're all done. :-)
Anyway, here's the plan for today:
- write Sticks review for Chris
- read Breton's paper and revise her grade
- do grading
- do SH contracts and checks
- catch-up on writings (Stockton points, close readings of "Malevola" and "Cloud")
- read Chatterjee
- read Deleuze's "Coldness and Cruelty"
- Asian SF book proposal
- Carol's - makeup session
It's dangerous having a digital camera, y'know? Or at least it's dangerous for your friends who are trying to sleep. :-)