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Tuesday, June 14, 2005

Housekeeping

First things first, a hearty round of applause and thanks to John McGowan for his terrific guest blogging.  Yes, I know that some of you already thanked him, but I can’t hear you, people.  That “assault on democracy” series last week was worthy of a Koufax nomination, in this humble blog’s humble opinion, and I intend to nominate it myself when nominatin’ time rolls around in December.  I invite you to join me.

In fact, John’s guest blogging was so above-and-beyond (more than one person wrote to me and said, “I was wondering how your blog got smarter, until I realized that someone else was writing it,” and I take those remarks in the best possible way) that I’ve decided to offer him what was once known, in the late-Carson era of the Tonight Show, as a “permanent guest host” slot.  We’re still working out the details, because he’s got his own blog to tend to, and I haven’t quite offered to change the name of this blog, but we’ll come up with something.

Next, a second round of thanks to everyone who’s wished me well over the past month.  I’ve been mending slowly but steadily; I still have a clumpy ridge on my right side and still can’t play hockey, but I have now healed sufficiently to resume playing my bizarre Felix Krull impostor version of golf, in which it is difficult to tell whether I am a competent player just messing around, or a complete hacker who gets lucky on every fifth shot.  Late Sunday afternoon, Jamie and I went out to a course we’ve never seen before, one of those nestled-in-the-rolling-hills things about 25 miles east of us; Nick and I had played nine holes at PSU on Friday, during which we were continually reminded that for whatever infernal reason, the Penn State courses grow their rough to the point at which you can neither see nor get your club on the ball if you miss a fairway by five feet or more.  (Also, I just have a thing about public courses with greens fees higher than $30.  It’s not right, I tell you.) So I went looking for a new course, and despite the fact that this one is long and hilly with plenty of blind shots, fired a 42 on the front nine with two mulligans (uh, justified on account of the fact that I have never played there before) and three hideous three-putts (excused on account of the fact that I have never played there before).  As for the Felix Krull part—and you really should read the novel one of these days (Thomas Mann’s last published work), not least for its description of Krull’s attempt to play tennis—I hit a 295-yard drive (slightly downhill) on the sixth just after skulling a delicate chip into the next county on the fifth.  Oh yeah, and then celebrated the drive by clumsily pushing a wedge way right of the pin and three-putting.

But enough about my golf!  It is now time to blog about someone else’s golf.  Annika is a goddess.  All hail the Sorenstam Era.  May she cap off the LPGA Grand Slam this year by beating Vijay Singh 5 and 4 in a challenge match at Winged Foot.  You go, girl.

My surgery did have one nasty side effect, however, in that it has left me with a tragic inability to shave.  Opinions around here are divided about the result of this surprising development, but Jamie likes it, so it’s staying for a while.

Oh, one more thing about health matters.  I’m still not cleared to lift anything heavier than twenty pounds.  Every so often I insist to Janet that this stricture was meant for mere mortals, and not weight-training, beard-wearing hockey players like me, whereupon Janet suggests that I sit down and STFU.  As a result of my recent experiments in weightliftinglessness, then, I have discovered some surprising things about what does and doesn’t weigh twenty pounds:

Things that are far too dangerous to lift:

Laundry baskets
Groceries
Lawn mowers
Garbage cans

Things that are surprisingly lighter than twenty pounds:

Golf clubs
Hockey equipment bags
Drum kits
Beer kegs

Just some handy physics facts to keep in mind next time you’re laid up!

Next thing next.  Although we’ve done another little site redesign—as Kurt says, “it’s Easter in June!”—I have to do more blogtending in the “essays” section.  I haven’t yet added the last couple of essays I’ve published in public venues in the past six months, like the review essay on affirmative action in The Nation and the Schiavo piece in the Sunday Boston Globe, and I also haven’t added more recent things that just came out in PMLA (two weeks ago) and the New Keywords book, edited by Tony Bennett, Larry Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris.  For my severe laziness on that front, I apologize to the four or five of you who occasionally check out the “essays” section.  I can’t post the New Keywords items on this site, but I’m happy to say that the publisher (Blackwell) has made available one of my seven essays as a “sample entry” on the website dedicated to the book.  The entry is on “experience”, and for those of you who might be wondering what it was like for me to try to write a 1000-word essay on one of the most important items in the Raymond Williams word-hoard for a project that’s meant to update Williams’ lifelong work, I assure you that it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in this business, and that I screwed it up royally and repeatedly.  But I’m reasonably happy with the end result, or I wouldn’t hyperlink it here, now, would I.

Last but not least, I spent a great deal of time in late May and early June wondering why it is that none of the blogosphere’s major women writers seem to take extended hiatuses like mine.  Where, I ask, are all the hiatusing women bloggers?  Do they simply have more stamina than us guys?  Has evolution rendered them more adaptable to the arduous craft of blogging?  Or, as I read somewhere in the New York Times recently, is it just that they’re more competitive?

Posted by Michael on 06/14 at 10:41 AM
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