John Edgar Wideman

After reading DAMBALLAH, his book of Homewood stories, I decided to post some photos of what those locations look like today. At the corner of Homewood and Hamilton I asked an older man if he remembered where the A&P used to be. He was initially suspicious of me--a white guy, with a toddler in a stroller, taking pictures at that corner--but when I told him I was doing some research on Wideman he told me that he knew Wideman. He rattled off the names of all of Wideman's siblings and told me, "you know he was a Rhodes Scholar, don't you?"

Cassina Way, 7400 Block

Cassina Way, 7400 Block
Originally uploaded by Mantooth.

"Lizabeth has learned the number Seventy-Four Fifteen Cassina Way and knows to tell it to a policeman if she is lost."
"Lizabeth: The Caterpillar Story," DAMBALLAH

WWI Memorial, Homewood Library

WWI Memorial, Homewood Library
Originally uploaded by Mantooth.

"She turned left at Hamilton, the street where the trolleys used to run. Then past the library where the name of her great uncle Elmer Hollinger was stamped on the blackened bronze plaque with the rest of the Homewood veterans of World War I."
"Solitary," DAMBALLAH

westinghouse park ped bridge

westinghouse park ped bridge
Originally uploaded by Mantooth.

"At the top of the hill a footbridge to the park crosses the railroad tracks."
"Solitary," DAMBALLAH

Westinghouse Park

Westinghouse Park
Originally uploaded by Mantooth.

"It was Westinghouse Park because the great man had donated it to the city."
"Solitary," DAMBALLAH

Hamilton and Homewood

Hamilton and Homewood
Originally uploaded by Mantooth.

"Mr Strayhorn where he always is down from the corner of Hamilton and Homewood sitting on a folding chair beside his iceball cart."
"Tommy," DAMBALLAH

breakfast at afterwords

breakfast at afterwords
Originally uploaded by Mantooth.

he looks happy here... but chanted "all done all done all done" throughout the meal.

headshot

headshot
Originally uploaded by Mantooth.

One of the nicest things about Pittsburgh—at least, when one gets sick of the city's provincialism—is that it's only four hours to Washington, D.C. We're hoping the boy becomes a Senator. Not the really corrupt kind. The sorta corrupt kind. George Soros, are you listening?

The National Archives

The National Archives (Archives II, in College Park MD) couldn't be farther from a Kakfaesque nightmare of massive bureaucracy. Considering just how immense it is, the institution is remarkably user-friendly and the staff actually seek researchers out to help them. Still. I found myself sitting in a room, a very amiable archivist and I trying to figure out whether or not a particular file would be in the National Security Council or State Department files, and I looked over and saw the four large binders that held the CATALOG for the files on the "Three Mile Island Accident." Four binders, with hundreds of pages each, just with the names of the relevant documents. And how much business does the government conduct every day? It was like a brief glimpse into the infinite abyss.

Then I got my files and sat down across from two bug-eyed, sweaty guys looking into the Kennedy assassination files. Aaahhh, back to the real world.

Mississippi

I like Mississippi. It's green, Oxford's a great town with a great bookstore, there's the blues and Faulkner and all that. I'm not one of these Yankees who dismisses the place because of its Jim Crow past.

In all of the celebration of the conviction of Edgar Ray Killen for the 1964 Neshoba County murders, though, there's a lot of talk about how Mississippi is finally getting beyond its ugly history. But I haven't heard anyone reminding us that the state is still represented by Trent Lott, who said on at least two public occasions that he wishes that Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrats won the 1948 election. And does anyone actually think the real power in the state isn't still held by the same folks who have always had it?

Like Faulkner said, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."

Teeth Marks

So the boy has discovered how to pry the lids off of his disposable sippy cups. All of a sudden they're not so cute in their multicolored plastic innocuousness. Especially when their contents are all over the new carpet. What stinks worse—soy or organic milk?

I notified both my dissertation directors today that my book is finally out. One knew; he is an advisor to the press (nepotism, anyone? hell, he owed me, story for later). The other didn't and was very nice and cursory with me, as he's always been. I liked him when I was working with him, but I still burn remembering how he put me in my place soon after I graduated. I came back to his office, just stopping by to say hi, now I'm a fellow Ph.D., a colleague you might say, and he made me wait outside of his office door with the rest of the undergrads. Slights like this would get a Sicilian killed... eight years later. I'm sure the worst I'll do is retrospectively grumble to myself about picking up the check when we have lunch at a conference sometime... eight years later.

I still like both of them in that strange father/teacher/colleague/friend/acquaintance way you get with dissertation directors, but I wouldn't hesitate to say that they taught me how NOT to deal with dissertation students. Now if I only had one or two...

The boy and the wife and I are off to D.C. in a couple of days for a joint work trip. Grandparents are flying out to take care of the boy, which is lovely of them. They're anxious, and I don't blame them. Fortunately, he saves the worst for us. Maybe he won't take a bite out of grandma's leg like he does to the wife. I'm looking forward to a good run around the mall and Jefferson memorial, a visit to the barbecue festival at the Capitol, and some Ethiopian food. The only Ethiopian place I've found in Pittsburgh, a nice little yuppified place in East Liberty, serves bland fare. And I've only found good BBQ in one place here (Wilson's, in the Mexican War streets). Wilson's ribs were good, and his sauce quite spicy, but I need some brisket and sausage to go with the ribs.

Running today: took the boy in the jogging stroller to the library and the hippie co-op. He's getting heavier. We were out for an hour. I'm still psyched about breaking 45 min. in the 10K this weekend.

The freshman comp class began yesterday. They're an interesting bunch, half seniors who put things off. I'm hoping to get them all tickets so that we can all attend a play together (one of the plays we're reading). I like doing things like this, but it irritates me more than it should when they say they're going to show and they don't. I have to remind myself I was far worse than that when I was in college—and I actually CARED about what we were doing in class. The play is the only text we're reading that's not in our theme: writing about Pittsburgh or writing by Pittsburgh writers. I started Wideman's DAMBALLAH today and the story "Daddy Garbage" just had me wondering what the corner of Hamilton and Homewood was like in the 1960s. Was there really a snow-cone cart there? These days, it's the place where my 8 months pregnant wife almost got herself a beat-down for walking down the street at 11 in the morning.

A Summer's Reading Log, pt. 1

I just finished my extra summer job at the university library--my responsibilities were to go through the "Fiction" collection and cull it in preparation for its integration into the general LC classification. The university had about 10,000 volumes in the collection, and foolishly entrusted me to be the one to say what should be kept, what should be tossed, and what should be put into a "Pop Fiction" collection.

The collection provided a fascinating, if heavily slanted, picture of the university as a whole. We're a Catholic school, emerging from a long history of being run (in every sense) by priests, and so the collection had a lot of Victorian-era inspirational boys' stories, second-rate Horatio Alger stuff for the most part. A bunch of saints' lives novelizations and "stocks and stones" kitsch (bonus points if you get the reference there). An interesting bunch of plantation literature--Page and his imitators, THE CLANSMAN, THE LEOPARD'S SPOTS, like that. And as the books got newer, I discovered that either the clergy or someone on the faculty bought every Cold War international-intrigue thriller on the market. Lots of complete sets of Victorian and Edwardian popular novelists, thirty-three volume sets whose last checkout date predated the Korean War. Beautiful books, many of them in great condition. I even found an autographed Gorham Munson.

The best part of this job was finding dozens of books I'd been intending to read but never got around to. I had been working my way through J.M. Bury's 1900 HISTORY OF GREECE, which I was liking, but I'm on a fiction kick after browsing many thousands of titles in the process of vetting the collection. Sabina Murray's THE CAPRICES was impressive--it had the current academic fascination with identity but didn't dwell on it to the extent that Ph.D.-crack like Jeanette Winterson does. I wasn't entirely convinced by Murray's touch with the grit of war, but really what the hell would I know about that. It wasn't clever, though, and I mean that in the best possible way--it wasn't self-satisfied or gimmicky.

I also worked my way through HOW LATE IT WAS, HOW LATE, the Scottish novel by James Kelman. I had been intimidated by the reports I'd heard that it was entirely in Scots dialect--which it is--but after a few pages it wasn't difficult to hear. It reminded me of how listening to Willie Nelson records makes one start to talk Texan without consciously trying. I didn't like HOW LATE as well as I did Murray's collection, but I did think he did a great job of characterization. It wasn't particularly well plotted, which I'm sure wasn't the point, but still.

Another Booker Prize winner, Coetzee's DISGRACE, was really great. Tough--not hard to read, but hard to take. I hate the word "lapidary"--it gets used too often by pretentious book reviewers who don't want to say "Hemingwayesque" but who, like me, feel that one should show not tell--but it seems that this book deserves the term. Affectless. It made me want to read more Coetzee.

Currently, I'm working through Naipaul's A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS. I still don't know what I think of it. I'm impressed by Naipaul's certainty and control. He's a fine stylist, especially for what he's trying to accomplish (a realist novel in the old style with an objective narrator). I'll read pretty much anything that takes place in a foreign country, as anyone can tell from my list above, and Naipaul explains Trinidad well without making much of an effort too. I know it's reductive and probably just racist to immediately compare Naipaul to George Lamming--I know Lamming is from the Bahamas but I couldn't tell you how far apart the Bahamas are from Trinidad, it's probably the distance from Saskatoon to Guanajuato--but because I'm an ignant American I immediately compare the two. I prefer Naipaul, although Sir Vidia would probably scoff at my faint praise.

Looking forward to reading and teaching Wideman's DAMBALLAH. Living a few blocks from Homewood makes that neighborhood interesting, and we're thinking about sending the boy to school up there.

Also just finished Gerald Graff's PROFESSING LITERATURE. It's amazing. As I think about my next book, I'm looking to him as a model of how NOT to overload a narrative with the massive amount of research he's clearly done. My first book suffers from that, I'm afraid, and since this next one will involve more research (by orders of magnitude, I fear), I don't see how I can avoid that.

Slippy Boy

IMG_0667
Originally uploaded by Mantooth.

Toddlers are also slippery--I don't recommend dangling them over the railing at Niagara Falls.

Do you think Wolfgang Puck has been here?

IMG_0640
Originally uploaded by Mantooth.

it turns out toddlers like pizza--even pizza from a chain "ethnic" restaurant in Niagara Falls, Ontario.

We were very excited to see that the lexicon of foreign culinary terms printed on the placemat included ropa vieja--our fave Cuban treat--but when we asked the waitress if they had that she looked confused and said in her best Canadian, "Um, that's from our Orlando location, eh."