i came, i read. . .

The Spill the Beans reading was fun, and I had a chance to compete with loud line chatter and cash-register chiming, so that should help prepare me for all future obstacles. Which at the moment seem too overwhelming to consider. . .

Life is good, but insomnia isn't?

Insomnia, in fact, is not always so bad although it's better for those days when there's no teaching the next a.m. I can report that I finished grading a stack of essays earlier in the day and even did some light editing of Cartoon Bubbles after the reading. And a sliver of memoir excerpt will run at Atticus Books on March 19.

And so it goes.

"No Returns" in Romania

I'm very pleased to report that Dr. Daniel D. Peaceman, the international emissary to all things whole and healing, chose "No Returns," an excerpt from The Book of Jay for inclusion in the second annual Contemporary Literary Horizons anthology. As rough draft, it has already appeared here.

On the topic of Dr. Daniel's global excursions, I happened to find Philly's own Don Riggs smiling back at me from a Tunisian blog by poet, teacher, and translator Chokri Omri.

willing to work? able? qualified? the usual questions remain

Here's another article about American companies recruiting overseas to find capable workers--in this case, in manufacturing jobs. Together with all the article's comments below, you a get sense of the strongly divergent discourses surrounding the issue. Are Americans being ignored? Is the pay too low to attract "qualified" Americans? Are we sending too many of our teenagers off to colleges and universities and not enough to trade schools? Are we unwilling to work? Do we blame corporations, our government, or ourselves?

I don't know, but I do know that during economic booms in America, such as the late nineties, urban school districts routinely recruited abroad because the college educated Americans who would be qualified refused the work. The teachers would come countries like India, Austria, and Romania-- places where English is not the first language, but you can find a math or science teacher who speak it well enough. I suspect that the school districts were grateful to have these teachers, and yet, it could still be the case that Americans with educational certification felt ignored.

And now, we're hardly in boom times from the perspective of most Americans. We have the usual mush of positive and negative economic indicators, and from the hog slaughterhouses of North Carolina to Silicon Valley's rewarding tech economy, the multiple questions and perspectives remain, and not even a Cyrus Duffleman can offer a unified thesis.

Yeah, you had to bring that guy into it. You've got nothin', Kudera. Go back to your hole and grade papers.

LATE BREAKING NEWS: 227,000 jobs added in February and January numbers revised upward! Unemployment stays at 8.3%, gas snuggles close to $3.50 a gallon in SC, and everything remains the same, and yet will be fine.

america 2012

If you're interested in America during 21st-century election years, you could watch this video from Oklahoma, or check out a copy of Fight for Your Long Day.

The Ivy Bookshop added for Saturday, March 24

We're still waiting on a time, but we've added The Ivy Bookshop to the famous 2012 Goodman-Kudera book tour. So this is what we know right now:

March 24, Saturday, time TBA, The Ivy Bookshop (with Eric D. Goodman) 6080 Falls Rd, Baltimore, MD 21209

The Ivy Bookshop is under new management as the charming and savvy Berliners have come down from Manhattan to fight for Indy store freedom.

egg man

I thought I'd recycle some old content in case my current students make the mistake of showing up at the Less United States of Kudera. We are, after all, on the eve of teaching Chris Offutt (but I haven't yet decided what to teach the retired "egg man"). I have a feeling if this is my sample, I'd never make it as a Spark Notes writer although I like to believe I'd improve given time and pay. These paragraphs were originally written in haste for an online version of my contemporary literature class during the summer of expectation (Yiyi was born near the end of the second semester). And, well, here they are:

Chris Offutt’s The Same River Twice, like Paul Auster’s “Portrait of an Invisible Man,” is a memoir with a compelling narrative structure. In this case, unlike Auster’s fragmented approach, where paragraphs and even sentences stand alone as their separate scenes or sections—at times, almost like epiphanies or aphorisms—Offutt has two main narrative strands—a past and a present—that intertwine and then merge toward the end of the book. It seems possible you can compare this narrative approach to a movie you have seen or perhaps another book. Thomas Pynchon’s V—yes, that is the full title—famously introduces us to the same narrative strategy, and if you look at a V as an intersection between two lines, you can see Pynchon’s title alludes to the dual narration. Unlike Pynchon’s novel, in Offutt’s memoir, the author is the main character in both strands of narration. In any memoir, thus, the writer is also the “protagonist” although Offutt uses honesty, self-effacing humor, and humility to create a likeable “I” more than a self-absorbed narcissist.

Offutt’s Title: On page 54, Chris Offutt elaborates on the origins of his title. “You can’t step into the same river twice” is an aphorism you have probably heard before. It comes from Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic philosopher who lived and thought before Plato and Aristotle. The saying literally implies that because the water is always moving, whenever we step into the river, we are stepping into a distinctly different part of the water; we are never in exactly the same water. As a metaphor applied to our lives, our current experience with anything from our past—parents, cities, towns, old algebra textbooks—cannot be completely the same as our previous experience with that person, place, or object. Maybe you have had this experience of returning to a favorite place or film and being surprised or disappointed by the changes? For a film, once you have seen the entire film, your second viewing cannot be the same as your first because you will remember more and more of the film as you are viewing it a second time.

Chris Offutt’s next paragraph on the top of page 55 offers an ironic twist to Heraclitus’s “deep” idea, pointing out that for Offutt’s practical neighbor, “the river is always the same, moving past his house, providing food.” I enjoy the way Offutt mixes low- and high-brow philosophy, humor, and anecdote; it is exactly when he approaches pretentiousness that he brings us back to earth (sometimes literally). For your further contemplation, consider this saying also attributed to Heraclitus: “Water flows through a rock.” Yeah. What is the “deep” thought under the surface of that one?