Household Opera

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.

Job-hunting and New Year's resolutions

In a little over six months, cross fingers and knock on wood, I'll be finished library school and have another master's degree to my name. And, since the average job search takes about six months, I'm kicking off my post-MSLIS job search in earnest with the new year. I've put together an online portfolio, I'll be asking for resume advice and doing a bit of networking at ALA Midwinter (good thing it's in Philly this year; no travel or hotel reservations required), and I'm armed with an ever-growing list of areas where I have library work experience. So far I'm cautiously optimistic, as far as I can be without triggering superstitious fears of jinxing the process.

Wherever I end up for my next job, I want it to be somewhere where I can stay for a while. Ever since I decided on librarianship as my career path, I've been planning out my life in one- or two-year increments: a year at UVa that became two years, then a year at Swarthmore that became two. It's been a very good three and a half years in terms of gaining experience and meeting people and getting to know my new profession from the inside. But it's also meant that I haven't felt like making any long-range plans that would require my being in the same place for longer than a year or two. Which is an odd disconnected feeling, and I sometimes worry it's becoming a habit.

So my New Year's resolution (or one of them, anyway) is to start breaking out of the habit of thinking "but I won't be around long enough for that," and to start thinking of ways I'd like to settle, once the future becomes a little clearer.

The laundry-cart people: an autobiographical interlude

It's college move-in season everywhere, and anyone who's spent any time in academia is probably thinking of this time of the year, not January, as the real new year. The freshmen arrived last week at Swarthmore, and over the last few days we ushered all of them through the library in slightly dazed groups. My Bloglines feeds are full of posts about the return of the students. I've been thinking about a bit of personal history.

My dad spent the latter half of his life teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, across the Schuylkill River from where I now live. Some of my early memories are of visiting him after my parents split up and my mother and I moved to Baltimore, running around the campus and sliding down Claes Oldenburg's Split Button sculpture. On one of these visits, right around this time of year, I noticed large numbers of students trundling their stuff toward the dorms in what looked, to my eyes, like giant laundry carts. I said something about "the invasion of the laundry-cart people," and, for years after that, the Invasion of the Laundry-Cart People was a standing joke between my dad and me. I'd ask if the laundry-cart people had arrived yet; he'd report that he'd spotted the first wave of the invasion on Locust Walk. And so on.

I'd almost forgotten about the Invasion of the Laundry-Cart People until a few weeks ago, when my walk through Center City took me by the Moore College of Art. I heard voices behind me and saw a couple of students and their families, with that returning-to-campus look about them, pushing — you guessed it — giant laundry carts full of dorm-room furnishings. I don't think I'd even seen those carts for at least twenty years. I think they may be a local phenomenon; maybe the schools around here rent them from the same supplier.

It was a lovely moment: it wasn't exactly like getting the past back, more like a small reminder from the universe that everyone's life is made up of echoes and continuities, linkages that go forward as well as backward. I wonder if, decades from now, I'll still be watching students with their carts on their annual end-of-August run.

Happy new year, everyone.

Long-range, castle-in-air travel planning

I already blogged about planning to submit a talk proposal for a conference in Belgium next May. Not long after that, it occurred to me that I've also been wanting for ages to go to the Pratt Institute School of Library and Information Science's summer institute in Florence. Which, if they offer it again next summer and it's around the same time of year, would be shortly after the conference in Ghent. Either would be a completely fabulous reason to travel; I'm thinking about applying for both, if I can swing it.

Of course, all of this is contingent on a billion factors, including how much time I can take off to go gallivanting around Europe, whether I get accepted as a conference speaker and/or summer institute student, whether Drexel would apply the Pratt course as a credit toward my MSLIS, and how fast I can save money, because European travel ain't cheap, even if I were to youth-hostel it all the way from Ghent to Florence.

But still: if I can manage either, I'll be ecstatic. If any of you have ideas for the budget-conscious Eurotraveler, please feel free to chime in!

On staying connected

In just over three (gulp!) weeks, I'm moving out of my apartment and putting my things into storage. Then there'll be some much-needed downtime with my family in Baltimore before I move to Philadelphia, with a long weekend trip to Vancouver for a friend's wedding at the end of July. In between, I have to wind up the last loose ends at work, finish packing, find an apartment in Philly, fill out a ton of change-of-address paperwork, and recruit a few strong people to help me carry furniture and boxes down the stairs. (I'm using a container moving service, which is going to save me money but which requires a certain degree of work.) It's all rather nerve-wracking, but I keep reminding myself that in a month I'll be done with Phase 1 of the move and doing the tourist-on-summer-vacation thing, however briefly, in the Pacific Northwest.

And somehow I managed to avoid feeling sad about all the friends I'm leaving behind — until now, that is. The last time I moved, most of the people I said goodbye to were also either moving elsewhere or planning to. It's somehow different when you leave a place where most of your friends aren't similarly transient. I've promised everyone that I'll come back and visit, next year, to catch up. I've got an e-mail address book full of addresses and a raft of numbers programmed into my new cell phone. And I don't doubt that I'll stay in touch; but there's a difference between e-mailing someone two hundred miles away and e-mailing someone you'll eat lunch with next week.

There've been a couple of threads on Crooked Timber recently about this paper on social isolation in America; one of the authors' key findings is that "the number of people saying there is no one with whom they discuss important matters nearly tripled" since 1985. (They examine responses to the question "Looking back over the last six months — who are the people with whom you discussed matters important to you?", focusing on the number of confidants that the respondents reported in 1985 and 2004.)

I can think of quite a few people I've discussed important matters with over the past six months, but many of them are geographically remote. I have the kind of widespread social network that the authors of this paper describe in their conclusion. It's certainly likely that some of my closest ties would be closer if we lived in the same city. Still, I'll take the long-distance connections where I can.

This is why I'm glad that I already know people in Philadelphia and in adjacent states. I hope that wherever I end up going after I finish my MLS, I won't have to be a nomad.

My big news

As you may have surmised from the hypothetical location question I posted recently, I'm moving. And now that plans for the move are officially underway, I'll spill the beans. I've decided to go for my master's in library and information science, and I'll be starting as a new MLIS student at Drexel University in the fall. So I'll be moving to Philadelphia at the end of the summer, assuming that all goes well, I can find an apartment, and my stuff doesn't get lost in transit. (You know, the standard moving worries. Having gone through the process within recent memory, though, I'm a lot less nervous about it than I could have been.)

Two years ago, if you'd asked me whether I wanted to add another set of letters after the end of my name, I'd probably have looked at you with a squirrely expression and said "Er..." I was gun-shy about further education at that point, and I wasn't sure I'd want to keep on the path I'd started on. Two years later, I've had a chance to confirm that yes, I do want to be a librarian when I grow up, and that compared to the six-year-long Ph.D. haul, a master's degree program of a year or a little over a year looks eminently doable. I've had enough time to decompress that I'm actually aflutter with anticipation: I get to go off and learn new things! Whee!

Working at UVa has been fantastic in terms of getting my foot in the door and getting to work with a lot of really fabulous people in the process. I'll miss them all. (Including the ones who are reading this. Hi, all of you! I promise to send postcards!) I'll miss Charlottesville, too, especially the glimpses of the mountains that you see everywhere you go, and the Downtown Mall, and the architecture. But the prospect of living in a big city again is making me all gleeful. I'm already deep into thinking about neighborhoods to live in, navigating SEPTA, finding part-time work, and squeezing in the occasional flying trip to New York on the Chinatown bus.

So: Starting in September, I'll be chronicling a whole new set of adventures. Wish me luck along the way!

The lamp in the spine

Yesterday I returned from a whirlwind out-of-town trip for a dinner with my friend R. and our mutual friend W., a reunion of sorts: it was the first time in nearly a decade that we'd all seen each other at once. There was much catching-up and exclamations of "You look exactly the same!" and "I can't believe we're all sitting at the same table again!" The dinner was fantastic, too (ceviche with squid is my new favorite thing ever). Incorrigible English major that I am, I thought of what Virginia Woolf called "the lamp in the spine" in A Room of One's Own: "and thus by degrees was lit, halfway down the spine, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow." I thought of it because back in our student days, one of our favorite eateries had a line from the same chapter — "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well" — painted on the wall. Did they remember, I asked. They did.

At the end of the evening W. said she thought we had all ended up happier than we used to be, and I was a little startled to realize she was right. This is a sad time of year for me; it was just over a year ago that I lost my father, and I have a feeling that early May is never going to be the same. And yet, and yet. To sit across from people you've known for years, laughing over the simple fact of being there together, lighting the lamp in the spine with good food and better company, is a reminder that some things continue — that, whatever happens, there will be more moments like this. Before we dispersed, we promised each other that we'd all come back and do the same thing again. And that, in itself, is enough to keep the lamp lit.

Efforts at speech

At the funeral, everyone kept telling me that I look like my dad. The odd thing is that neither he nor I could ever spot the likeness. I remember how we once talked about family resemblances and he said that he didn't think I looked much like either him or my mother, and that probably I'm the spitting image of some ancestor from another century, but we'll never know. My eyes are definitely my mother's, but the rest of my features are harder to identify.

But now, I'm seeing resemblances all over the place. My tendency to worry and fret and be pessimistic comes from my father's side of the family (not just him, but generations of Scottish Presbyterians). But he also gave me my taste for movies and theater and visual spectacle of all kinds, and a lot of my sense of humor comes from him as well. My love of language is from both of my parents, jointly; my mother's family is full of Scrabble-players and makers of terrible puns, and she read to me every night of my childhood until long after I could read on my own. My father told me long, elaborate stories when I was growing up, and when I was too old for stories he talked about books with me and gave me his back issues of the New Yorker. My wavy hair is like his, and so (according to family friends) are some of my characteristic hand gestures.

It's hard to tell how much of us is in the DNA we get from our parents and their parents, how much is in our upbringing and the circumstances that shape us, and how much is random or inexplicable. One of the things my dad's friends gave me was a sheaf of research he'd been doing on the Scottish side of his family; he'd gotten all the way back to an ancestor born in 1771 in Lanarkshire. Someday I may go there to see where my great-great-great-great-grandparents came from.

I think I'm starting to see now why people have children. It's as if somehow, if you can see how your parents and grandparents continuing, even in something as small as the shape of an eyebrow or a tilt of the head, you haven't completely lost them, even if you'll never see them again. And you hang on to that, because you have to.

It's still difficult to write anything, but when I think of where I got my fondness for spinning words together, it helps, somehow.

Resurfacing

There will be posting here again, I promise. There for a while, it felt like I'd lost the ability to put words together; every time I tried to write a sentence, all that came out were little staccato phrases, short, stark, void of everything that sounded like me. Thankfully, that hasn't lasted.

While I've been not posting, I've been making arrangements for next year. Back at the end of April I was offered the chance to stay on for another year here at UVa, and I've decided to take the offer. Which is a huge relief, because I just couldn't handle more job searching and then moving this summer. Instead, I'll get to stay where I am for the time being, carry on with a couple of ongoing projects, and work with some very interesting people I didn't get to work with this year, as well as some very interesting people I did get to work with. Stability seems to help.

Oh, and I'm going to ALA in Chicago at the end of the month. Anyone want to meet up? (Tangognat?)

On silence

This is very hard to write, much less post. But you're probably wondering why there haven't been any posts here lately, so I thought I should explain why.

You may remember that I mentioned an illness in the family several months ago. The family member in question was my father, and there for a while, we had a lot of cause for optimism. But last weekend, he unexpectedly got worse, and a week ago today he slipped away, very quietly, while I was still thinking he'd be all right. I hope that none of you out there ever have to receive a predawn phone call from a hospital.

Nearly everyone loses their parents at some point in their lives, but I wasn't expecting to lose one of mine before I turned thirty. I've been away attending to administrative matters and helping to arrange the funeral, which was yesterday. I would say that it provided some sense of closure, but I'm still numb.

There aren't any more words. There will be, eventually, but now I can't write anything else. In large part because writing it makes it more real.