Quick summary of…

Quick summary of yesterday and today -- spent much of yesterday reviewing nonfiction, then did a brief reading (the opening of "Sister Mary") downtown as part of the Saving Face Festival. It was an odd venue for a reading -- the cafe in the center of a cultural center, a room lined with tables selling handicrafts, and quite a high level of conversational buzz. We had mikes, so we could speak over it, but still, it was disconcerting. Stayed to watch Mango Tribe perform -- great show, as always. (Brief clothing note: I wore that reworked dark red and gold Indian skirt, with a close-fitting black button-down shirt and a matching red dupatta (scarf), black boots, dangly gold earrings -- good performance outfit, I think. I'm having fun with these hybrid looks -- Indian top with jeans, and this, the reverse. :-)

Then came home and started assembling the plum pudding. The fruit had been soaking in brandy for four days; I added the cake ingredients and spooned the resulting batter into tins and started steaming it. For six hours. I went to bed around 2, I think. While the pudding was steaming, I spent an hour or two talking to Kevin, followed by movie-watching -- watched Iris, an interesting biograph of novelist Iris Murdoch contrasting her as a brilliant young woman with her decades later, facing Alzheimer's. That was good, but intense. Followed it with 13 Going on 30, which was emphatically not intense. Jennifer Garner is much fun to watch. Eventually, the pudding did finish steaming; I baked it on low heat for another half-hour, and then went to bed.

This morning, I spent about three and a half delightful hours on the phone with Ben Rosenbaum. In theory, it was supposed to be a story crit, but in practice, it was more of a conversation about our respective tropes, obsessions, and questions of at what point in your writing one might want to attempt various things. Sorry that's so vague -- it was a long and dense conversation, so very hard to summarize.

My Milwaukee interview is at 5:30, so now that I've had lunch (with a mini-fruitcake for dessert, yum), I'm going to spend the next few hours preparing. I've already reviewed my creative nonfiction; now to review critical theory, and think about what kind of lit. courses I'd like to teach, if I had the opportunity. Wish me luck!

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *