The Hermit Sphere

Is there anything more to add?

posted by Greg at 9:11 PM

From Virginia, with Lovers

In the attic of an 1812-era house my dad owns, two turkey vultures were hatched this past spring. He has been photographing them throughout the summer. The image at right is the best shot yet. The bird cannot yet fly, but has been venturing to the window ledge for the past week. Dad suspects he'll take off within a fortnight. Dad also tells he how he's taken to hurling carcasses into the attic for the birds to eat. "Last week I picked up a deer that had been hit by a car," he said Sunday. "I dragged that thing up the stairs, then I thought: I can't throw this in the attic. It will stink for months! So I dragged it back down to the side of the road. It took the parents two days to find it." That, kids, as they say, is great television!

posted by Greg at 4:57 PM

A Catalogue of Sabbatical and Work

This week was our anniversary. Wednesday we ate at an overpriced/underrewarding restaurant. We've had bad luck with restaurants lately, and I'm beginning to suspect the problem is the gourmet expectations of our Midwest town. La Casa, on which I reported last week, was this week named runner-up in the "Best Mexican Restaurant" category of the yearly "Best of" survey taken by our "local" arm of the Gannett Company, the Iowa City Press-Citizen. True to Gannett style, the survey is generally atrocious. This new place had promise at least in conception: the menu changes daily to feature a cosmopolitan dish, and its walls are adorned with saints. Sadly, the saints gave no blessing to the food. Kathy had a summer vegetable dish with too much cheese; I had a grouper sandwich which would have been okay had the fish not been breaded and fried. They sat us next to the kitchen door (the ignominy!), and a man near us, whose party accosted our waitress mercilessly, refused to turn off his cell phone.

Then yesterday we took a drive. I declared the weekend a vacation (hence no church this morning—presumably, I'm somewhere other than here; somewhere was supposed to be camping, but the heat precludes that; then somewhere was to worship in a new place, but worship times are not often listed correctly in the Yellow Pages, and we missed our chosen church by an hour), and we went northeast to the Effigy Mounds National monument. One of the more interesting state parks in Arkansas is the Toltec Mounds State Park state park on the Arkansas River. The mounds rise a hundred feet in the midst of a cypress swamp. The park rangers give guided tours which discuss the prehistory of the Arkansas valley. The Effigy Mounds are something entirely different and, I believe they are older than the mounds in Arkansas. Formed in the shape of creatures the Mounds overlook the upper Mississippi River. The park is immaculately maintained with wood chip trails that loop through the mounds and an intact old growth forest. We saw a bald eagle and many turkey vultures. I am confident in saying that the federal government still can't seem to figure out how to represent Native Americans honestly. We watched a 15-minute video before we hiked to the mounds. The video's argument was that 18th- and 19th-century Americans misunderstood the Indians they met on the Plains; Americans' greed for land and natural resources was justification enough to purge the land of its inhabitants. That is all true enough, but then, in attempt to redress those misconceptions, the video dragged up the Noble Savage from his pastoral grave: even still in 2005, if Natives can't be disease-ridden drunks who overrun the land and are allergic to civilized life, they must live in complete, peaceful coexistence with the land and with each other. No jealousy or strife exists in prehistoric American paradise. Which is all stuff we've heard before. Why is it so often okay to trade one oversimplification for another?

Much of what we do lately is avoid the heat that is plaguing southeastern Iowa and Illinois. It is in fact the hottest summer since 1988. Today we expect temperatures of 104° F with a withering heat index. Worse, it's the driest summer on record. The drought is horrendous in eastern Illinois, but it's bad enough here. All our grass died a month ago; it's been all I could do to keep the climbing roses alive. It's not for summers like this that we decided two years ago we could live without air conditioning. As I write, I am shut in the office, window fan at its highest and in reverse: when there's nowhere else for the fan to draw its air, it sucks cooler air from the basement and first-floor apartments below us. For the longest time Kathy argued that having the fan on reverse was useless, and to my chagrin and ridicule, she still disbelieves most of my theories about temperature maintenance; but at least with the office she can feel the air exhausting from the vent.

The rest of my time is spent seeking work. I received word Wednesday that I'm into the second round of deliberation for a job as a writing consultant here in Iowa City (I have to submit a work sample); yesterday I submitted an application for administrator for a writing center in Ohio. I dream of being through as a proofreader: it's drudgery, and because our pace is determined by how fast those who make the changes can keep up, we have to drag our feet because those people cannot keep pace. So while I'm at work I craft beautiful cover letters to bare my soul to prospective employers; I plan all sorts of projects on which to work in my spare time; I dream of reading The Brothers Karamazov straight through. Two years ago I started it, but had to put it down because my time for course-planning was running short, and now I've picked it up again fully intent to finish. I fear it's a while yet before I'll get around to Harry Potter because after Dostoevsky, I have Stap's Birdsong and Kroodsma's The Singing Life of Birds to enjoy, and if fortune is with me, I may need to take a crash course in writing center administration. Kathy, on the other hand, will probably start reading Potter next week. (Not to worry: She averted her eyes when Chris opted to be a spoiler.)

Such are our days. We are not without worry; nor, however, are we desperadoes.

posted by Greg at 4:41 PM

finishing harry

mb and i finished the latest harry potter book last night. i found it really engaging but not nearly as optimistic as most of the earlier installments. are any of you reading this?

posted by Chris at 12:37 PM

The Halo Brace

I learned yesterday that, on July 5, my grandfather broke his neck pulling the cord on his garden tiller. Why did I only learn it yesterday? Because he only learned it Friday. That Tuesday he was in his garden, and he tilled for about fifteen minutes, but his neck began to hurt more and more. So he went inside, and my uncle walked on his back to try and readjust his spine. When that didn't work, they went to the chiropractor, who took X-Rays, adjusted him, and sent him home; he returned to the chiropractor on Wednesday and again on Thursday, and when nothing helped he went to the doctor proper, who gave him a pain killer and said it would be all better come Monday. Nothing was better Monday, though as he says, "I told myself I was better," and he endured the pain until Thursday, July 14, when finally he returned to the doctor who said Papa could be admitted to the hospital or have an MRI. Not wanting to spend any time in the hospital, he opted for the MRI, which happened Friday. An hour after they called and told him to go to the emergency room now. Which he did, and that night they outfitted him with a Halo brace, which he will wear for the next three months. I spoke with him this morning, and he's in good spirits and very thankful the chiropractor didn't make a quadriplegic of him.

If you've met my grandfather (I know Chris and Mary have) then you know he is an active man: those three months will be excruciating. No more garden, no more working at his shop; even reading will be hard, since he can't nod his head in any way and must hold any book up to be level with his eyes. When I talked with him he kept switching the telephone off accidentally because he was having trouble with the headgear. So this afternoon I've been looking up ways to live with a halo. What kind of products make living easier? Are there good book stands or telephone headsets? I haven't found much yet, but I just started. What I did find, as one often does when one burrows into specialized territory, is an excruciating, but instructive review of Million Dollar Baby. There's much that art and advocacy have in common, but the review illustrates the kind of problems that occur when meshing the two together. A film that was more medically exact probably would have been at times more excruciating to watch, but also might have concluded more hopefully than MDB does. Storytelling and "accuracy" are not mutually exclusive; nor, however, are they always beneficial to each other.

posted by Greg at 2:59 PM

White People's Mexican

If I may be crass, I may also be celebratory; if I may be woefully uninformed, I will count Jeremy to inform. There is something wicked in the CNN headline, "Unborn babies carry pollutants": Do the babies carry the pollutants to the bathroom, or the mall? I know children are difficult to police, but shouldn't their parents be more responsible and forbid their children from carrying pollutants until they are at least 14? The story itself, unfortunately, is a sinister reprise of Silent Spring, in which Rachel Carson exposes baby birds that were shot through with pesticides in the 1950s, and it stresses that babies carry pollutants passively, or put another way, babies are polluted. The Environmental Working Group, which put out the report on which the story is based, apparently tests baby blood a lot. ("Tests baby blood at lot," sounds eerily like "Tastes baby blood a lot," doesn't it?) But polluted babies is not what I wanted to write about when I sat down this morning, and even though they're more interesting than my actual subject, I must be on to it. What I write about instead is another kind of pollutant which is disturbing and toxic in ways entirely different than fœtal mercury: White People Mexican food. Kathy and I had the worst dinner of nearly four years' marriage last night. It wasn't a poor mealin fact, it cost us $20and we've had poorer: I remember scores of nights that veggie burgers and popsicles were our entire subsistence. I remember eating at Dixie Café because it was the only place in Searcy, Arkansas we could find vegetarian sides that were substantial enough to make a meal of. But last night we said, Why haven't we ever eaten at La Casa? Iowa City has several good Mexican restaurants, and not twenty miles away is West Branch, which has the largest per capita immigrant population of any city in Iowa. There we can eat in a converted bank, for about $14 between the two of us, burritos laced with fresh garlic and tomatoes, and we can drink a Negra Modelo in peace. After dinner we may go home, or we may go to the New Strand theater, where for $3.50/ticket we saw for the second time Star Wars, not because we wanted to see it again (wasn't it bad enough the first time?) but because we were enjoying time with friends. Above all, to eat Mexican in Iowa City is also inexpensive. Often we get away from El Ranchero, including the tip, for $11. But we had never been to La Casa. No one in fact ever talked about it. And we learned why. It's White People Mexican food: we ordered two "Sanchos," basically a loosely-wrapped burrito drenched in Velveeta (or just as bad, melted American). It pains me to admit how bad it was, because I have White People Mexican food in my family. My uncle, then my grandparents, owned two fast-food Mexican restaurants in Searcy in the 1980s. The restaurants were called (eerily, coincidentally) El Sancho's. I do not wish to disavow my past in order to write; however, if I must, I must. The shallowest thing one can say, but one of the most directly-affecting, about continuing Latin immigration to the United States, is that at least the food will be better.

And with that, I'm off to work!

posted by Greg at 9:34 AM

first feeding

i have heard the cries of the people clamoring.

In the pic you can see what we are up to...this and planning courses for the fall; fretting over an article published in colonial latin american review because its title sounds like a paper i've had for 3 years but been sitting on because i am a procrastinator and fundamentally distrust my ability to say anything new, which i haven't read yet; finishing my bogota, colombia conference presentation, which they want by july 15th, a month before the conference; and taking care of a 4 1/2 month old who is now exclusively wearing clothing for 6 month olds, and though she's got chubby thighs, it's just that she's really long

posted by Jeremy at 3:12 PM