Household Opera

Department of small culinary miracles

It's a little embarrassing that the La Dominique crepe cart has been in business right next to Drexel's Hagerty Library for four months already and it took me until today to discover it and try their crepes. One can get crepes made with buckwheat flour and a greater range of fillings at Beau Monde Creperie down in Bella Vista — but at La Dominique, you get to watch while the owner makes your crepe by hand, steaming vegetables under a little lid on a grill and pouring batter onto a round crepe-sized cooking surface and decorating everything just so. And then you go off to sit down outside with a fabulous lunch. And it's right next to where I go to classes.

Now I'm already regretting the fact that I'm only going to be at Drexel for another month or so. To make up for lost time, I'm going to try as many of La Dominique's crepes as I possibly can.

Wardrobe advice bleg

[Warning: I'm going to talk about clothes for this entire post. If you're looking for serious intellectual content, you may want to look elsewhere.]

I just won a small academic award from the iSchool. The prospect of a minor financial windfall, combined with the prospect of an "economic stimulus check" from the feds, has gotten me thinking about upgrading my wardrobe. Of course, one of the nice things about being a librarian is that one generally gets to work in places that don't hew to a strict dress code; all the same, though, one does want to defy the cardigan-wearing, ultra-dowdy, bun-haired librarian stereotypes. Or at least I do. And if all goes well with this job search (touching wood as I type, which is a bit awkward), I'll be starting at a new workplace in the fall, and that seems as good an occasion as any to reassess my clothes closet.

Trouble is, I suffer from Don't Like What Anybody Sells Syndrome. A lot of women's clothes in my usual price range seem chintzy and badly made, and even when I contemplate laying out extra money, I never seem to have any luck. Whenever I go out looking for a specific thing, it always turns out that Madison Avenue has decreed that what I want is out of style. (Example: last year, when I wanted just a plain white button-down shirt, I couldn't find anything that didn't have ruffles all over it. Or pleats. Or puffs. Or bows.) And don't even get me started on shoes.

So, Reader: where does one go to find professional-looking but not stuffy women's attire, without breaking the bank on bespoke tailoring or designer labels? I like black (goes with everything!), with the occasional colorful shirt, and I like my clothes to look reasonably fitted. I prefer pants to skirts, and I think there ought to be a law against pants without pockets. Ann Taylor is all right, up to a point, but their clothes often strike me as a bit boring and more corporate-looking than I'd like. Any advice, people of the internets?

Ghosts in the stacks?

Personally, I think the alleged ghost in the New Paltz library is a bug crawling over the security camera lens. But the video's still kind of eerie to watch. (Paging agents Mulder and Scully!)

In which I finally get to breathe a bit

Over the past couple of weeks, I've had two campus-visit job interviews and one phone interview in the space of eight or nine days. I don't know exactly when the Great Job Search of '08 will end, but I should know more next month. Most of it is unbloggable at this point, but I've been a bit surprised to discover how much easier it's gotten for me to be "on" all day when I'm being interviewed. I still want to collapse and sleep for twelve hours afterward, but being interviewed isn't the big intimidating energy-drain it was the first time I tried it.

Other things I've learned: interviewers' questions are much easier to answer with several years of relevant experience plus most of an MLS under my belt; I've lost all vestiges of the fear of public speaking, if indeed I was ever afraid of public speaking; and ironing my interview-day shirt in the hotel room the night before the interview is a surprisingly calming thing to do. Polishing my shoes has the same effect.

Last weekend was for interview-prepping. This weekend is for decompressing, getting my suits dry-cleaned, doing a bit of knitting (a clever collapsible baby hat for a friend who's having a baby this summer), catching up on homework, watching bits of Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica, and seeing the final Met HD broadcast of the season (Donizetti's La Fille du Regiment). Also, on the recommendation of Kristine from Serendipities, I'm reading Scarlett Thomas's The End of Mr. Y, which is kind of like Robert W. Chambers's The King in Yellow meets Being John Malkovich (a cursed book that supposedly kills its readers, a plot that involves portals into other people's heads), only more British and with a lot of quantum physics thrown in.

Catch you all later. I may even have time to blog a bit more in the next few weeks.

My conference paper, let me show you it.

Since several of you who read this have asked about it, I wanted to point out that the Questioning Authority conference proceedings are now online, and you can get to my conference talk from the page with the rest of the papers from my panel. The slides should go up too, at some point. If not, I'm going to be putting the whole thing in my online portfolio anyway, and will supply the link when I have time. (Translation: probably not this week or next.)

Job search status update: In-person interview #1 was yesterday, in-person interview #2 is on Tuesday, and phone interview #3 is coming up a couple of days after that. I'm hoping I'm not a complete zombie by the time the end of next week rolls around!

Not dead. Just resting.

I'm glancing back in during my job-search-madness-month hiatus to say: Hello, blogosphere, I've missed you! I'm still busy, still neck-deep in readings and assignments, and prepping a couple of job talks while getting ready for another phone interview. But I'll try to post intermittently while the rush is on.

Things that are making life easier right now:

• short-sleeve weather and sunshine
• getting back in touch and/or staying in touch with friends old and new
• the GTD greatness that is Remember the Milk (I can feel myself relax a bit every time I check off a task, and I can text-message it if I remember something urgent while I'm away from my computer, and it allows both tagging and Boolean searching — what's not to love?)
• a few cherry blossom branches in a vase in my living room, which, hopefully, will come all the way into bloom at some point
• Capogiro outdoing itself yet again (latest favorite gelato flavors: chrysanthemum tea and dark chocolate with candied orange peel, and I can't wait to try the green mango with chili)
• having done my taxes early this year, for the first time in, like, ever
• the prospect of a vacation week in early May — granted, I'll still have classes to go to that week, but sleeping late and lazing around the house will be such a relief!
• weeding my book collection and my clothes closet, and getting rid of my backlog of New Yorker issues

In which life gets really, really busy

Spring quarter at Drexel — a.k.a. my very last quarter of library school — started this week. I've got ten more weeks to go, which seems like no time at all. But during those ten weeks, I'm going to be working, taking two reading-intensive courses and a job practicum, continuing my job search, going for a job interview (and hopefully a few more after that), thinking about the logistics of moving to wherever I end up moving to, spending at least one day this month as a prospective juror (and if they select me, who knows how many more), revising my Questioning Authority conference paper... and maybe also finding time to sleep, somewhere in there. Maybe.

So if I don't blog all that often between now and mid-June, I hope you'll all understand. But I'm thinking this will be a good quarter to practice my speed-reading skills and cash in some vacation time.

[Update: Make that two job interviews. This is going to take some schedule-juggling, but it's exciting.]

Calling all technogeek book historians

One of the good things about this weekend's conference was discovering common interests with fellow presenters. During one of those common-interest-finding conversations, I had an idea: "Wouldn't it be neat," I said, "if there were some kind of working group for people who work on both the history of the book and what's happening with digitization and new media?" "Will you start it?" said my interlocutor, who, like me, is interested in both of those things [hi, J., if you're reading this!]. And, really, the more I think about it, the more I think it ought to exist, if it doesn't already. Because there are just too many interesting parallels (information overload past and present; how eighteenth-century periodicals were the blogs of their day; early modern remix culture; etc. etc.) to pass up.

So, in the spirit of "'someone should...' means 'I will'," I'm going to look into starting such a group. I've already started thinking of people who've done relevant research, and organizations that I should check out — SHARP and the Institute for the Future of the Book, to start with, and maybe ACH, and I probably know at least a few people who might be interested. The question is, what might such a group want to accomplish? And how might it organize?

I'm going to be pondering all of this in my copious spare time. In the meantime, Reader, if you're interested, or if you know of other people already doing something along these lines, leave me a comment or send me an e-mail.

Conferencing, day 2

The main conference day is finished, and my paper went well — various people told me afterwards that they'd liked it. I think it benefited from being on a really good panel on a day of interesting and lively talks. I'm impressed that the conference organizers made everything go like clockwork, with good food appearing at the right moments and moderators keeping panels from running over (always a hard thing to do, if other conferences I've been to are any indication). Because we were a small group, and because most of us are still students, the whole thing had an appealingly low-key vibe, almost an "unconference" feel. And I've definitely met people I want to keep in touch with after we all disperse tomorrow.

Anyway, I'll post a link to my paper once it's available online, which it will be soon. I'm now crashing hard. Catch you all later...

[Postscript: This was always one of my favorite buildings when I lived here. I used to walk by it just to look at it and imagine living there. I walked by it again this evening, and it's as beautiful as ever. Thank heaven for Flickr, because Googling "that one yellow house on Division Street" wouldn't have gotten me anywhere.]

Ann Arbor variations

(Title of this post stolen shamelessly from a Frank O'Hara poem, in case you're wondering. He got an MFA here in between sojourns in New York.)

So here I am in Ann Arbor for day 1 of the conference I'm attending; the papers are all being delivered tomorrow and Sunday morning, so today was mostly about meeting the conference organizers and some of my fellow presenters. We had a lively dinner and happy hour, and now I'm contemplating getting out my paper and going over it again. But first, blogging.

In some ways it's very strange to be here, because the University of Michigan was where I went for my literature Ph.D., and I haven't been back since I left in 2004. In fact, my very first visit to Ann Arbor took place more or less exactly eleven years ago — which made me feel positively ancient when I realized how long it had been. When I got into town, I squeezed in a couple of hours of visits with people from the English department before I had to run off.

I found myself thinking the kinds of thoughts that everyone probably thinks on revisiting places where they once lived: first, detached amusement at how little has changed (a reshuffling of a few shops and restaurants, and most of the people I knew have moved on, but the town itself is much as I remember it). Then, a wave of nostalgia (expressed by uncontrollable babbling to fellow conferees: "And I used to walk this way every morning! And this is the street I used to live on! And this place sells fantastic scones!*"). Then, a strange sense of every place being overlaid with seven years' worth of memory and associations, like geological strata, to the point where I half expected to run into my younger self rounding every corner.**

I'd be lying if I said I didn't sometimes miss the person I used to be when I lived here — or, more accurately, the people I knew and hung out with when I used to live here. But all three of the old friends and mentors I saw again today said the same thing: "You look good. You look happy." And they're right. The person I used to be is still in there, but grown calmer and more confident and much less melancholy, and leaving the old life here had a lot to do with that. I suspect that this weekend is going to make me think a lot about how to find the through-lines from then to now. Getting back in touch with a lot of people I've lost touch with, for a start.

All right, enough navel-gazing for one night. (That was a lot of navel-gazing, I realize. I could blame it on having just come from happy hour, but really, it's the nostalgia talking.) Tomorrow, actual conference-related posting.

* And fantastic bread, and cheese, and brownies. If I have any time at all on Sunday, some of that bread is going home to Philadelphia with me. Too bad their delicious sherry olives wouldn't survive the plane trip without leaking.

** That overlay of associations on places is something I want to write about, someday. Not sure how yet, but it ties into other spatially-themed obsessions of mine. Perhaps it'll end up as research with some sort of poem cycle or memoir-thingy on the side.