Letters of Wreck

7 October 2002

Woooooo! The Twins won! And they have home field advantage for the league championships, and for the Series if it comes to that. All right. Poor Mr. Hocking. The first time he came up to bat in this game, Timprov and I started chanting, "MVP! MVP!" to mock him. And then he did all right. He did well, in fact. So...sorry, Denny. And sorry for your celebratory injury, too.

David Ortiz was quoted after the game as saying that Bud Selig "is probably crying right now." Gosh, I hope so.

By the way, those of you who follow baseball may have your own theories about why the Brewers stunk this year. They may be about team members, or they may be about Selig's karma, but all of them are wrong unless they include the key factor, and that would be: Mark's parents. Seriously. We discovered this last week. Mark said, "Why does the baseball suck everywhere I lived?" He was born in Chicago. Lived in the suburbs of Detroit for awhile. But! Then he went to Gustavus, and the Twins, going to the league championships and all, clearly do not suck. And he moved out here, and the A's have been in the playoffs three years running. And the Giants are still in the playoffs right this very day. No suckage there. But! While Mark was moving around here and there, his parents moved to Tampa Bay and Milwaukee. See? See what I mean? They're the baseball bogon emitters.

Just stay in Milwaukee, dear ones. Please. I suppose you could move to New York or Atlanta, too...but that'd be a pain to drive to, so Milwaukee is good.

I called my grandparents' house when the Twins won, and I hope nobody had any intention of wiretapping that line, because my mom picked up the extension after Grandma answered. It would have been so confusing for the poor Feds if they had any reason to listen in on it. "Who's talking now?" I doubt that there have been very many phone calls with that much similarity of timbre and sentiment. It amused me.

In non-baseball news, I'm writing up my purpose statement for the ASF grant proposal, so that I can send it to the folks who agreed to do letters of rec for me. I hate purpose statements. It has to cover everything under the sun in 500 words or less. I also have to have a project description of approximately three lines. And I have to figure out what sample scenes I'm sending the people who are writing letters of rec, and what writing sample I'm sending the ASF people. 15 pages. Grrrr. What are they going to find out from 15 pages? Precisely nothing. Okay, well, maybe they'll find out whether I can write sentences. Wooo, sentences.

Once again, I really, really hate being judged on something that seems pretty tangential to what I'm doing. I do understand it in this case: they can't just read the whole book for everyone who wants their money, and I wouldn't want them to judge it by the rough draft if they could. But it's still frustrating.

I'm also going over Mindy's letters and essays for her business school applications. I think I'm going to print those, though, because I'm trying to minimize computer time again/still. I'm trying to make sure that I have specific objectives on the computer, and that I leave it alone when I'm not doing something I specifically want to be doing. And I have plenty of scrap paper to print on.

(I think I'm going to have scrap paper for the rest of my life, because just about the time I finish using the scratch from one novel and a few short stories, I write another novel. I think we've had a supply of scrap paper since I finished Fortress. Cuts down on my use of notebook paper, that's for sure.)

So yesterday wasn't quite so much of a reading day as Saturday. Still, I read plenty. I finished American Exorcism, which was really interesting and I do recommend it. I read M. John Harrison's Signs of Life, which I didn't like at all, because I couldn't care about any of the characters. I started into Charles Nicholl's The Reckoning, a nonfiction work about the murder of Christopher Marlowe. There are plenty of interesting tidbits in there, mottoes and minor characters I definitely want to find out more about. I've gotten three title ideas from it so far, not to mention further things to poke at for research. Oddly enough, the death of Christopher Marlowe is interesting in this one book, but I'm not going to get obsessive and read everything I can find about it. If you have a well-done book, fiction or non, that you'd like to recommend on the topic, I'm definitely open to reading it. But it's not going on my library list as a generalization. What is going on the list is a complete set of Marlowe's plays, or at least the ones I don't own -- I'm suddenly in the mood to read or reread them.

Elizabethan England seems remarkably like Nebraska sometimes: only one city to speak of, but a few more with pretensions, and if you don't know somebody in your general socio-economic circumstance, you're likely to know an acquaintance within no more than two or three degrees. Messy for historical detective work, from the looks of it.

I'm not dizzy as I was yesterday -- whew! -- but I still don't particularly want to eat much. But the Tylenol seems to have knocked out the headache I woke up with. Ah well. Things could be worse. Couldn't they always? Perhaps not always. But often.

Back to Morphism.

And the main page.

Or the last entry.

Or the next one.

Or even send me email.