Oh yes, and how.  Perhaps this summer I’ll try updating thisdarkqualm a bit more often.  I need to spend the summer sending out and prepping a couple articles, revising the diss, and getting a book proposal together.  But lately, I’ve been apartment hunting.

Not apartment hunting in connection with a tenure-track position in some interesting metropolis–rather, hunting for an apartment here in Champaign, again, since my landlord has decided not to renew my lease.  There’s a sad story here, actually:

Having at last finished and deposited the diss, I decided, with some strong encouragement from the family, to attend the UI commencement ceremony.  Surprisingly, I shared the stage with pretty much everyone in the department who collected a PhD.  Ceremony is back.

It was all very nice.  But when I arrived home, there was a surprise waiting.  My parents had brought our family’s two dogs to visit, and we left them in the apartment during the ceremony.  My landlord (see previously) had apparently, during one of his random wandering about sessions, detected the presence of one or more dogs in the apartment.  This caused him to post a notice of eviction on my door, which I discovered on returning.

A few days later, he explained that he’d forgo legal eviction procedures (not a small mercy, given Champaign’s vicious tenant laws, that permit virtually any landlord to dump his tenant’s property on the lawn in 10 days, should he feel his lease agreement has been violated).  However, he explained that he was still intent on not renewing the lease in August.  Which brings us to today.

By last week, I had narrowed my apartment hunt to two places.  One was a fantastic old upstairs unit in the downtown area–perhaps the last really inexpensive such place to be found.  The other was a smaller but nicely remodeled space, just a block or two from downtown Champaign.  Sadly however, this weekend, following a lengthy negotiation, the amazing apartment was withdrawn from consideration (the renter decided to renew her lease), while the backup apartment was simultaneously leased to some unknown person.

So, I find myself spending time combing various regions of the internet, and jotting down numbers on the “FOR RENT” signs scattered across the city, looking for just one more reasonably habitable apartment to inhabit for just more more year.  And each day I meander through a few tiny unbreathable apartments, some complete with sullen tenants, almost all in embarrassing states of dilapidation. Sort of a drag.

Tomorrow, however, I’ll be headed to the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, and perhaps hanging about in Hyde Park.  Should be a nice break, before resuming my hunt for an apartment so lovely and inexpensive that it makes Champaign seem like Portland Oregon, or some beautiful Italian village.

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through
  narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?
Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

Perhaps I should know better than to post this, since my local internet provider has been  purchased by Comcast.  But this is really just too precious:

They arrived en masse some 90 minutes before the hearing began and occupied almost every available seat, upon which many promptly fell asleep.

It’s kind of a neat new trick for American corporate media: if they can’t manage to create a somnolent audience by airing, say, Jay Leno or Jimmy Kimmel five nights a week, they can always just have one shipped in, when really needed.  The special forces of the United States of Whatever.

It’s often kind of tragic, working at Cafe Kopi.  So many doomed 1st date couples within earshot.  The couple next to me:

She: “That shop was the only place I could go to feel better.  So many times I would walk to the counter, and the person would ask me, because she recognized me, how I was doing.  I’d say, ‘So much better, now that I’m here.’”

He, a minute later: “You know I appreciate stories about life for what they are.  But I can’t really, like, remember lots of little details about my life and things.  Do you like to grill?”

She: “Like, food?”

“It’s a multibillion-dollar industry that gives investors incredible financial incentive to see you dead.“

Capitalism brings a new blessing.

Ok, so the MLA “parenthetical style” of citing sources is very annoying; however the MLA Handbook does provide some guidance on how to use footnotes as well.  Here’s an example of citing something from an edited collection using MLA footnote style (this example lifted from a random website):

Carmen DaSilva, “Life Insurance as a Tool for Estate Planning,” Death and Taxes: Beating One of the Two Certainties in Life, ed. Jerry White (Toronto: Warwick, 1998) 57-71.

This is ok, I guess.  But what if you’re citing a book, and not an article that’s in an anthology?  Then your citation becomes:

Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

This is really quite annoying, since it forces you to run together titles in a way that’s potentially confusing, especially if both of them contain commas.  I guess this would be less of an issue if one underlined titles as MLA seems to prefer; however no one does that anymore.  Why can’t one simply insert an “in” between the titles, as Chicago Style is wise enough to do? 

MLA Style—still living the typewriter revolution.

Grrr.

is in ALL CAPS.

Well, I’m back from MLA. It was fun.  I snapped the picture above waiting for an interview.  As it turned out, I would have been well-advised to rehearse my selling points, rather than recording the strange spectacle of MLA interviewees arrayed around the periphery of the hotel courtyard, as the suites opened and closed admitting and discharging fresh PhD’s and cleaning personnel. 

We’re taking this year’s MLA as a learning experience, which indeed it was.  By this time next year, I hope to have two or three placed articles, and a couple more conferences, and generally to be a much more a serious candidate.  I’m encouraged by the response to my materials this year—we’ll have to see how things turn out next time ’round.

Anyone planning on being in Chicago this weekend should drop me a line.  We can go inflict some justice or something.

Ok you may now find me as part of the Facebook evil empire.  Resistance, it turned out, was futile.  It usually is of course.

A couple of good things happened yesterday.  First,through the glory of Ebay I received my small marble bust of Ludwig Schwanthaler (picked up in lieu of this beautiful but wicked thing). 

Also Friday, I successfully defended my dissertation.  This turned out to be a really interesting and pleasant experience.  After a bit of proofreading and some very minor changes, I should be able to deposit the diss sometime next month.