I've figured out that the kind of literary theory I like is formalist theory, and that formalist literary theory has been dead (in the academy, anyway) for about fifty years. I guess it does feel rather limited to want to talk about a literary text exclusively in terms of things like its structure, plot, characters, register, meter, allusions and so on; but then it also seems extremely stupid to want to talk about a literary text without giving primacy to these things. Before I apply to grad schools, I'll have to find out how non-formalist, so-called "critical" literary theory deals with the actual, you know, text.

I was just pricing a trip into Baltimore, seeing how much it would be if I drove the whole way versus if I drove to the Cromwell light rail station and took the train the rest of the way.

Mileage driving into Baltimore: 30.7, so round trip: 61.4. I get an average of 31 miles to the gallon, miles divided by mileage = 1.9806451612903225806451612903226 . . . or so. Times $2.75 (price per gallon), estimated cost of trip is $5.44. Well, actually $5.4467741935483870967741935483871, but who's counting?

Okay. So, with the same calculation, driving to and form the light rail station is estimated to cost $3.2467741935483870967741935483871 . . . and the round trip on the train would be $3.20, so the total cost of the trip is . . . $6.4467741935483870967741935483871. Exactly one dollar more than if I drove! To the, like, .0000000000000000000000000000000001 degree of similarity! What is that, a billionth of a billionth of a billionth? I'm not doing the math, I have to go catch the train.

I have been thinking about stories lately, and I perhaps finally know what I would like to do in graduate school. The thought process came from two things: Anne's senior language class, and comic books.

First, the language class.

Anne recently described a class discussion of Baudelaire's "L'Invitation au voyage" in which the students wasted time trying to make the meter absolutely perfect according to the rules of poetry they'd been taught. They also assumed that the rhyme scheme had to be interpreted in order to afford some meaning. Next they tried to figure out which country the poem was about, and the tutor said that some critics read it as Holland. There are canals in Holland, just like in the poem! And someone pointed out that Holland was very successful in trade when the poem was written, which was perhaps referenced by the oriental splendors? And also, that first line ("Mon enfant, ma soeur") is clearly setting up an incest theme. Or his sister is Holland. Political incest! And ennui! And by the end of the class, these idiots thought they had cracked the poem's code, or maybe just walked away feeling awed at the prospect of doing so.

She said that her interpretation of the poem, if it needed one, is that it was words of comfort for someone who was upset, maybe his sister. But stress on "if it needed one."

On to comic books:

Grant Morrison is just now completing a multi-year story told through several different comic book series . The story references the past seventy years of Batman comics, and is also self-referencing. (For example, the last several issues are version of a story he told two years ago, but several elements are reversed.) He is using the story to comment on and use the concepts of time, myth, story-telling, heroes, symbolism . . . pretty much the whole shebang. The narration is sparse, the story is dense, and pretty much everything included in the pages of the comics is there for a reason. Many, many things are left to the reader to figure out. It's so complicated that there are several web pages devoted to providing annotation. Incidentally, the story is really damn good, one of the best comics have produced.

So here we have two types of storytelling. One is straightforward, but bad readers believe they have been presented with a puzzle that they are surely smart enough to figure out. The other is actually a puzzle, and it actually does require smart and attentive readers to figure out.

My thought about grad school: I would like to study interpretation, and its misapplications. I would probably want to put the most effort into its misapplications: why do so many people think that poetry and fiction are codes that they have to investigate? Why do they believe that there is some mystic truth behind the poem or story, like an Easter egg behind a sofa cushion? The poem or story is just the sofa cushion and can be thrown down once they have found the Easter egg. I would want to study this phenomenon, why it happens and what effect it has.

Of course, most post-graduate study of literature is this very sniffing out made-up truths, so I probably wouldn't get any support if I tried to do this. Perhaps I'd have to come up with something more subtle.

A wilted tip from a head of lettuce, with six spines down the length of a lumpy, pockmarked, bulbous, vaguely pyramidal surface, round at the bottom and then coming to a point, the yellow green of dried grass at the bottom fading to white toward the tip, dull and waxy skin, wavy, as unpredictably formed as the bottom of the ocean. This is the gourd on the table next to me. A cross between an avocado and vomit. Like a miniature spaceship sent to harbinger the coming of the Great Old Ones. A seed pod for the forest of suicides. A three-dimensional record of everything in the universe, readable only by a race of aliens with a sense of perception I can't describe in language. A melted marshmallow that gained sentience and is forming itself into the object of its fondest desire, a starfish. A bad omen. Corporealized moonlight. The magical item sacrificed in the creation of the new album by The Fall. A carving made by a squid to represent its god. What's left of a prehistoric mountain that's been chiseled down by erosion until it is nearly nothing. Butterfly wings captured by a camera that records emotion as well as light.

Want to see it?

America

Anne and I just spent an hour and a half looking around Eastport for a bar or restaurant that was both playing the American League Championship Series and had open seats. They were all full on this crisp autumn Friday night, the Irish pub, the steakhouse, the boat-themed bar, the pizza parlor, the ribs restaurant. Who are these people going to bars just because it's Friday? I know, I know--almost everybody. But Greg is not almost everybody. I was going to see the game, because I don't have a television. They were there to feel people all around them, be seen in their fashionably stupid club clothes, drink watery domestic beers and eat like primitive humans. Can you tell that I don't like these people? Oh, and also, someone's ass was in my damn seat. I don't know which seat was mine, but somebody else's ass was in it. No justice.

Then, because we failed to find any place to watch the game, we went shopping for groceries. (That's logical, right?) And since we were hungry, and it's been more than a week since we shopped, we got a lot of food. Like, a lot of food. How much food? A lot of goddamn food. $175 worth, to be exact.

Our shopping list probably accounted for a fourth of that. It was great fun, though. We just went from one aisle to the next like a ship of fools, loading the cart with sale items and all those things we were hungry for, all the things we would have been eating had we found an open bar seat with a television playing the ALCS. I have long been a sucker for retail therapy. Kay Duffy once saw me shopping for books and CDs at the library--this is many years back now--and said, "you're like a girl, aren't you? You shop when you're sad." Yes, I do shop when I'm sad. I don't think it makes sense to say this makes me like a girl because, well, which one?

But anyway, this was the first time shopping for groceries has ever had the same therapeutic value for me. Usually I feel anxious in the grocery store, never knowing what to get, always feeling like I can never think of the things I want when it's one in the morning and I need something to get me through another 100 lines of translating; when it's a cold weekday and I want something hot for lunch; when there's no plan for dinner and nothing in the house is fresh.

But this time, I thought of all the things.

Granola bars on sale? Sure, let's get two boxes of them. We got three bags of Utz potato chips, and five boxes of cereal. Beans were on sale, ten cents less per can than they are even at Trader Joe's, so we got six cans. I got wheat germ and yogurt, like Xhuliana once offered me when I stopped by her apartment at 3 a.m. on New Year's. I've never eaten pork and beans before, but that sounds good, I'll get a can of that. Hot dogs two for one! Ballpark franks aren't the best, but would that really bother me as long as there are hot dogs? Bread flour on sale! Celeste frozen pizzas ten for $10! What about those mixed nuts, do those look good? Sure, let's get two pounds of them. And ooh, caramels and apples! And some pumpkin spice tea!

I think I'll send the receipt to Eric in Berlin. I'll write on it, "America, fuck yeah."

Now we're home, and the game is over and was just archived on mlb tv, and we're going to have home-made "chicken wings" made with chicken breast, and we've already had a Celeste pizza each. Sometimes life is good.

Hopelessness Vs. Shame

Still a world out there, I suppose. I have been doing a (very) little personal writing lately, but for the most part I still haven't acted on an obvious realization: I will only do all those things I wish I did (writing, learning another instrument, getting on a reasonable sleep schedule, seeing friends) if I . . . do them. If, instead, I sleep until 2 p.m. and then read baseball analysis for three hours, books for another two, do a translation job, and then watch a baseball game, I won't do those other things.

Yes, amazing, I know.

I just always feel like reading is fun, and those other thing are work. And since my ambition has steadily shrunk as my twenties wear on, I have less and less impulse to do work to achieve goals. I keep thinking that since I'm mortal, accomplishments are of very limited meaning--to me or others. I don't know. I guess the world would be a very, very slightly richer place if I put in more effort and made a more productive use of all this leisure I've lucked in to. But the difference seems beyond subtle to me, beyond infinitesimal and into the realm of . . . no, actually infinitesimal covers it.

But at the same time, I feel like I can't keep going through life not doing anything. I can't keep wasting days, floating through time, looking up every now and again to see that I still haven't moved. I feel like I might as well not live if I'm going to live like that. This isn't to say that I'm feeling suicidal--merely that I don't know how I'll be able to live with myself, not that I won't be able to.

So I guess what I'm saying here is we're about to witness an evenly matched battle between hopelessness and shame. If you're going to watch, you'll have to be extraordinarily patient. I take my time with the best of them.

So there we were around 9 p.m. in the shoulder off of I-25, headed north, just before mile marker 240, with a flat tire and no cell phone. People used to deal with situations like this at call boxes along the side of the highway. Now they're mostly gone. Maybe New Mexico never had call boxes, I don't know.

Now the way to deal with this situation is get out of the car and wave your hands at passing drivers until someone stops and lets you use their cell phone to call a tow truck. That's just what your intrepid Greg did, only I didn't have to stand and wave, for my car was equipped with a cardboard sun blocker one side of which is stamped with a sign that reads "Emergency -- Please Call Police". The wind must have thought this sign was just the thing for its summer wardrobe, because it kept trying to rip it from my hands. Anne had to come out of the car and help me hold on.

There the two of us stood, facing on-coming traffic just a foot away from the road with a faded sign telling people to call the police, waving at the drivers as they passed as though we were trying to alert them to the fine parking opportunities in the desert lot to our left. Indeed, the parking was free, with convenient access to the scrub brush and jackrabbit warrens, but I guess nobody wanted to go there on this fine night. For ten minutes, car after car whipped past our charming tableau. They probably we were their entertainment on the road to Santa Fe. I bet they're still laughing at us now.

Finally, though, a sedan pulled over, and Anne and I walked over to tell the driver what had happened. The driver was a middle-aged woman with pushed-back hair, loose clothes and beads hanging from her rear-view mirror. She told us it was a good thing we had the sign and were waving, because once she had seen a man just standing by his car and she had passed him. Then just afterward, she had had a flat tire, and the same man stopped to help her. He had said, "why should I help you when you didn't stop for me?" Evidently he had gotten help from a tow truck, maybe with his battery or something.

Anyway, she gave me her old-style candy bar sized phone and I called AAA, bending down by her flashing turn signal to read the number on the card. Luckily, I was standing right next to the mile marker, so I knew just where we were stopped. The phone rang, and then went dead as though the call had failed. But then there was a loud double beep, silence, and finally a AAA representative came on, mid-sentence. She was hard to understand, and she didn't sound especially reassuring, but she said someone would be there in about forty-five minutes. They asked for my number, and I explained that my phone was dead and I wouldn't be reachable as I was calling from another person's phone. So now we just had to wait.

I gave the phone back to the woman, who was telling Anne about other times she had helped people by the side of the road. I thanked her, and she drove off.

Anne and I got back into the car and told each other stories to pass the time. The time sure did pass. Forty-five minutes, an hour, an hour and a half, and still no driver. What else was there to do? We got the sign back out, stood by the side of the road again, waved again. The wait wasn't so long this time. A blue Civic soon pulled over, and two college-age girls got out. Their car smelled of incense, and they looked like they were maybe out for a trip to a knitting club but had gotten lost. Blue jeans, sneakers, long brown hair, glasses, concerned faces. One of them, the larger one, gave me her cell phone, an old style just like the woman who had stopped earlier. My guess is that people with smart phones don't pull over to help people. People with smart phones don't do anything helpful, I bet.

I made the call a second time, only I was diverted to AAA of Portland. The recorded message was much easier to hear, and more logically sequenced. The man who came on sounded like he actually cared. His voice was pleasant, he used monosyllabic words, and he was going to solve my problem if at all possible . . . which, as it turns out, it wasn't. "Oh, New Mexico. Sorry. Let me transfer you to the New Mexico branch."

The phone rang again, went dead again. A few seconds later, the loud double beep. The man who came on sounded like maybe his mouth was full of slowly dissolving flour. I explained my problem, and he said, "Wait, mile 240? We sent the driver to mile 140."

"I'm standing right by the sign," I said. "It's 240."

"Well, we'll get that fixed for you, sir. We'll contact the driver and tell him to turn around. He passed you already, so it will take a little longer. He'll be there in about an hour."

As you can imagine, this just instilled me with confidence. I gave the phone back, and heard the end of the girls' conversation with Anne. They were indeed driving to Santa Fe from Portland, but I didn't catch why. I suggested they go back to Portland and thanked them, and we returned to the car to wait.

We had a few more stories to tell each other as the hour approached midnight and one day approached the next, but we were interrupted when a car pulled up behind us. I got out and saw it wasn't the tow truck, but rather a highway patrol car. The officer told me to wait back inside my car. He sat in his driver's seat, door open, looking up my license plate number I guess. Then he came over and I explained why I was pulled over by the side of the highway with my hazard lights on. Not that he asked.

"Oh, I'm sorry, " he said. "Say, you didn't happen to see anybody walking around out here, did you?"

"Just me, and the people who stopped to help."

"Oh, well, I got a call about suspicious men walking to meet each other by the side of the highway. You didn't see them?"

"No, sorry."

"Well, okay. Do you need any help?"

"We have a tow truck coming, I hope."

"Okay. Well, I'll be back in about an hour, so if you're still here, I'll get you some help."

"Thank you."

He drove off. And half an hour later, the tow truck finally came. The driver, whom I will call Loki, came out wiping his eyes and sniffing. He looked about 19 years old, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, with styled blond hair. He looked at my tire, said it was beyond repair; checked my spare tire, which had been destroyed the last time I got a flat and thoughtfully put back in the trunk without my being told that it was now unusable; and asked where I wanted to be towed.

"Santa Fe? Shit. My friends told me I should come out here. They said I should have just stayed home. Santa Fe. Well, I can take you to Santa Fe, but I'd have to charge you. About $79 dollars. Or I could take you to Bernalillo, for about $7, and you could could get a hotel. The price would be about the same for you. I'd recommend Bernalillo."

I thought about it while he filled out a job sheet. "Bernalillo is probably better."

"Okay then. I tried to call you guys, but I got a woman. She was all like, 'They're still there?' I guess you've been out here a while, huh?"

"Jesus. I told them that wasn't my phone."

"Yeah. Also, they told me you were at mile 140. I saw you here, though, and assumed they'd gotten it wrong."

"Yeah, I called back and they said they would change the number. Goddam."

"Well, I'm glad you weren't at mile 140. That would have taken forever. Let's go." He hooked my car up to his truck and told me driving it up there wouldn't hurt the tire. I was, of course, extremely reassured. Then he hopped into my car and drove it up onto the ramp. Anne and I got into the cab, and Loki pulled to the left, onto the division strip. "Usually I'd take an exit and turn around, but shit, no one's out here now anyway. Sorry for cursing, by the way. I'm not supposed to curse on the job. I've been up for a two days. I drank like 20 Rock Stars in a row tonight, and I'm gonna be up until Tuesday. My girl wants to go out on Tuesday, but I'm just gonna tell her to forget it and sleep for two days."

He pulled onto the other side of the highway and flipped on his CD player. The music was a descendant of rap-rock, like Korn but even worse. "I'm not supposed to play this stuff on a job, but I'm gonna fall asleep without it." The first song was about some mix of drugs and sex. No, really. "Aw, this one sucks," Loki said, and skipped to the next track, a ballad sort of number about some sort of mix of drugs and sex. It began to rain. He read a text message (on his smart phone), started writing one back and said, "Hee hee, it's raining and I'm speeding and texting at the same time. Perfectly safe."

Soon Loki took an exit for Bernalillo, and as he came off the ramp approaching a stop sign, he said, "see that stop sign there?"

"Yeah?"

"You were supposed to say no!" He went through it without stopping and soon turned onto a small Bernalillo highway. A pickup truck wouldn't let him in, and he shouted, "Come on, fucker, I'm merging here! Jesus."

Finally, he dropped us at a hotel, and in the parking lot he decided he wouldn't charge us, because didn't want to fill out the paperwork. He backed my car down so I could pull into an empty space, but before I had gotten into the car, a van pulled up and took the space. "Stupid," he said, whether at me or at the van driver, I don't know. Then he got back into his tow truck and roared into the night.

Anne and I got a room, and walked to a tire shop the next morning to replace the flat. As soon as it was ready, we drove to Santa Fe and made it to the library just half an hour after I was supposed to open the place. Not bad, all things considered.

I've made a list of things to write about, and I'm going to try to write a blog a day about them.

Back at the end of July, Anne and I drove down to Albuquerque to watch an Isotopes game on a Friday night. Friday was my one day off from the library over the summer. I worked six days a week, and the only reason I didn't work on Friday was because the library closed early enough that one of the full-time librarians just added a little extra to her shift rather than have me come in for two hours just to lock up.

We had been planning to go to a game all week, and I wanted to look up the players on the two teams to see their stories and their statistics, but of course I neglected to do it until the day of the game. I wanted printouts of the statistics, because there was no way I was going to remember who everybody is. I kind of think of baseball players as existing in more senses than one. They are people, born at a certain time in a certain place, with faces and accents and body types and personalities; and they are a corporeal form of their numbers, incarnations of their triple slash line. When a batter comes to the plate, I find it much more enjoyable to watch if I know who they and the pitcher are at least in this second sense, and if I know about them as people, well, even better.

Anyway, the printer in the house was running out of ink, and I didn't want to drive up to the St. John's library, which is in the other direction from the highway. Instead, Anne and I went to the public library by the house, the one that has the same feeling walking in as a public pool I went to growing up. The parking lot is stretched along a low brown-brick building with tall, reflective black windows. The strips of land by the curbs are full of clumpy grass, maybe a few bulb flowers and prickly bushes. There are posters on the outside walls near the entrance that must have been printed in the mid-seventies, and there's a shady courtyard between the library and an attached building that nobody's ever in.

I printed out the stat pages, read a few stories about each of the players, learned who was a prospect and who had been in the minors for fifteen years, and then we left. On the way out I saw a man who frequently used the public computers at the St. John's library, a man with scruffy dark gray hair and a big mustache, always smiling, always dressed in light-colored office clothes. He saw me and smiled, and I waved at him. Why do I mention this? It was the first time I had ever seen someone I met in the library, outside of the library, and I'd been working there for four years. I kind of imagined the non-college library patrons as being generated by the atoms in the air around the doors every time they came in, and then going back to the earth when they left. So no, they exist, they have homes and families, they shop and go other places around town, even if they are the weirdest collection of people outside a circus that I'll ever see. Just if you were wondering.

We drove to Albuquerque then, just as the sun was settling down after dinner with a nice drink and checking to see if anything was on television. We paid the parking lot attendant his $5, walked to the stadium to buy our tickets, found our seats just to the right of the left-hand batter's box about ten rows up. The game started, and the Isotopes pitcher--one of the only genuine prospects on the team, a 24-year-old named John Ely--proceeded to give up more hits than a boxer with no hands. With only one out, the Iowa Cubs just kept circling the bases like bears in captivity. Ely's ERA for this game so far was 108. (Seriously.) Then suddenly from a spotless sky, rain began pouring down, as though the sun had finished its drink, and then eight-thousand more, and finally it had to rush to the toilet to . . .

Anyway, the tarp came out, ten people running to spread it across the field, rolling the base for the largest Ho-Ho in existence. We were not under a roof, so we got up and went to the concession stands. The rain came down like somebody was pouring the entire ocean from a gigantic helicopter above the stadium. We stood in place next to a hundred other people, filling the walkways and the stairs, moving over the few inches available to us as people passed by, turning one way and then another trying to find a little more space.

We were standing near a beer stand where a group of ten people were chatting and laughing as though they were at a barbecue party. Every so often one of them would throw up his arms, a beer bottle in one hand, and shout, "ehhhhh!" And the whole group would follow his lead and let out a cheery "ehhhhh!"

The rain fell. The public announcer tried to say something but the speakers sounded like they'd maybe been colonized by ants. The stadium played rain-themed songs like "Who'll Stop the Rain?" and "Thunderstruck", and then they played them all again. "Ehhhhhhhh!" People shouted to each other to meet them by the ice cream stand. One woman told another how she had been planning to take her jacket but her husband made fun of her, and she was going to tell him, "See?"

Then the rain stopped, and the grounds crew ran around between the two dugouts with giant brooms, pushing the collected water down a set of stairs and presumably toward a drain. The big screen showed the Loony Toons baseball clip where Bugs Bunny single-handedly beats a team that looks like it's made up of Chicago gang thugs, pitching and then running to catch it himself, playing all nine fielding positions, making the final out by racing across town to the top of the Empire State Building to catch the furthest-hit ball of all time.

An hour went by this way, and then finally the P.A. came on, and it was possible to understand him. The ants had cleared out because of the rain, I guess. "The umpires have canceled the game due to unsafe field conditions. As it says on the back of your ticket, since this was not a complete game, you can take your ticket to the box office to receive a ticket of equal value for a later game." We went to the box office, got tickets for the following Friday, and started driving home. About ten minutes later, we heard a squeaking sound, then a staccato rumble, and the car became difficult to control. Anne pulled onto the shoulder, keeping an admirable sense of calm despite never having had this experience before. I went around to the side of the car, and of course found a flat tire.

My cell phone, meanwhile, was back at the house, charging. I'll continue this story tomorrow.

Fifth of July and two neighbors are setting off fireworks, the loud kind, sounds like a gun fight in a parking garage, two people ducking around the concrete pillars, pop pop pop, pop pop! The occasional rocket launcher, oil drums exploding, shotgun blasts. I can't see any of them. so maybe there really is small-arms warfare going on out there.

Elliott Skinner, tutor emeritus, just came in to the library to pick up some inter-library loans.

"How are you?" he said.

"Good, how are you?"

"I'm fine."

He stood for a second, just looking at me, so I felt like I had to say something else. "I was never good at answering that question."

"Which one, 'How are you?'"

"Yes, that one."

"It's such a common question, you know. You just figure out something to say in advance."

"Nobody ever told me that," I said. This is true.

"Nobody? Yeah, sure, maybe you make a little list, like 'okay,' or 'whatever', and you just go through it." He thought for a few seconds, and then started telling me a story, as he does every time he come in.

"One time, when I was in graduate school at Princeton--maybe I told you this story already, but--Richard Rorty was walking down the quad, and I saw a friend of mine coming onto the quad from the street. They were about to walk up to each other, and I saw Rorty--who was extremely shy--looking around trying to find some way to avoid meeting him. But my friend kept getting closer, and finally he was right there. And he said, 'Hello, Professor Rorty. How are you?' And Rorty stood there, going 'ahh', and my friend walked on. Half a minute later, Rorty was still standing there frozen, hand to his mouth, like he was thinking of what to say. So, you know, you're in okay company."

Then he walked over to the chairs to look at his new books.

Listening to music from 1966 all day and translating, translating . . .

Revolver, The Who Sell Out, Aftermath, Face to Face, Blonde on Blonde . . .

and translating, translating . . .

250 lines in one day is too much. Leonard knows it.