The Connecticutian

So I’m not quite sure what my deal is… i have this blog, and I never seem to write on it. I’ll try to be better. In the wedding realm, Amy Sun got married last week, and she had her wedding at The Pond House Cafe in Elizabeth Park. It was a great ceremony and reception. They had a really fun DJ, too! Sujal and I have made no headway on our own plans, though many people have made some good suggestions after they looked at my last post.

School has begun in full swing, and already I am consumed with work. I am ecstatic that school has started, yet it never ceases to amaze me how quickly the whole cycle of being constantly behind kicks in. I have wonderful kids this year, as I did last year. One of my co-workers is teaching four preps this year, which is crazy, and me with my three preps this semester — I’m going nuts as is. Of course I’ve chosen to teach a book I’ve never taught before in one of the classes that is NOT new. It’s The Sun Also Rises which I read in high school and college, my favorite Hemingway novel. It is such a first novel, and I think that’s partly why it is my favorite. There’s a whole pool of people out there who believe that first novels are usually the best by an author. i think I may fit into that group. So many authors seem to retell their story. Beckett actually purposefully did this in his trilogy: Malloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. Being well aware of the fact that so many authors just seem to retell the same story, he says outright that that is what he is doing. Aside from that, there are supposedly only so many plot-lines and they are merely recycled. It’s funny — sometimes I will watch a movie and think how mundane stories can be, even the somewhat more interesting stories. Sometimes I am almost bored by them, and yet at the same time, stories are what give me purpose. Literature is what I have. Perhaps this is a reflection on my state of mind rather than stories themselves. Reading stories is somehow different. I think the speeding up of a story in a film cheapens the story. Perhaps Beckett was getting bored by stories in some ways, too, which was maybe why he sought out to emphasize their repetitiveness. Perhaps I just want to be able to compare myself to Beckett. Anyway, The Sun Also Rises is a novel I really like, though I have never taught it. So I am dreaming up wonderful, and I mean wonderful, curriculum by the boatloads.

Finally, I had a social event on Friday. I went out for the first time in forever. I went to a Karoake bar here in West Hartford. I continue with my belief that CT is just a bizarre place. In some ways it reminded me of my grad school days hanging out with the poet MFAs at the WWII Club, their Friday night karoake. I suppose that was the case simply because it was karoake. In other ways it was this whole Connecticutified experience. And hmmmmmm, what does that even mean? I think that will be musings for another time. My old roommate, Roger, used to call me a contrarian. I think that may be so. I think I love to hate the place I’m in. Granted I never hated Noho, but maybe that’s because others there did. I do recall hating Minneapolis, where I lived with Roger. And now I feel nostalgia for the Twin Cities, though I know I do not miss the -25 degree winters. Brrrrrrrrr.