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!