Kevin Kling: Unraveled

16 July 2025: I went into Kevin Kling: Unraveled knowing just about nothing about it--and I am really glad I did. It's one thing to be moved, delighted, and entertained. It's another thing when you completely didn't see it coming. I'm grateful to have another work of art that reminds me of goodness, light, storytelling, and just the simple beauty of living and doing your best.

Before the show started, I was talking with the guy sitting next to me, a friendly and smart guy. He lives in MA now and is, if I heard him correctly, is in town because of a screening of a documentary he worked on. We talked about Shepherdstown a bit and I said it's just a "gem" of a place. CATF is another facet of that gem.

We love a good mutter...

15 July 2025: "'A girl's best friend is her mutter,' observers [Dorothy] Parker, playing on the traditional notion of a girl's dependency on her mother while suggesting that she hide her defiant thoughts through the muted indirection of muttering" (57).

I don't know much about the very witty and cool twentieth-century women writers that Sabrina Fuchs Abrams writes about in her book, but it is a lot of fun learning about them. (Another text for the "Year's Work" essay...)

Work Cited

Fuchs Abrams, Sabrina. New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century, The Pennsylvania State UP, 2024.

Hoffman's brick of a book

14 July 2025: Spent some of the day working my way through an 800-page book that I need some sense of for the Year's Work essay. There is no way to "cover" everything in it--we spend about a paragraph on each work, if that--but I am grateful for skills I learned way back in my undergrad work to get a sense of a book and its arguments relatively quickly and accurately. 

The book's title gives you some sense of its scope and size: Perspectives on Values the Network of Satire and Humor, the Tragic and the Absurd, the Grotesque and the Monstrous, Play and Irony, Parody and the Comic Mode. I mean, come on...it's also very German--like those huge words we laugh at--in that it is about exactly what the title promises.

The author, Gerhard Hoffman, turned a manuscript in shortly before his death in 2018. Hoffman was one of the leading scholars of American Studies in Germany and, according to the book's preface, written by a former student, he transformed the field. So this text--this absolute brick of a book--is a sort of magnum opus. A team of folks helped get it into print, including Hoffman's wife (who died in 2020). 

The book is huge and sweeping and just awe-inspiring in its scope. For me, it's almost too much--too much to take in, too completely at ease with its terminology and philosophy, and overwhelming for a reader. But that says more about me as a reader. 

Yet I did my best and carved out some notes and thoughts for that single paragraph. 

I am not sure how many of his arguments will stick in my brain, but I know I will hold onto the story of the book's journey to publication. Every bit of it is quietly moving. 

"joyful rigor"

13 July 2025: Another great episode of Vibe Check this week. I loved Saeed talking about the "joyful rigor" of writing. And even segments about shows I don't watch (like Love Island) are still so interesting and fun. 

Still places to be found...

12 July 2025: I've lived in this area since 2007 and it's still really cool to "find" new places. A few weeks ago, Amy went to the Pennsylvania Dutch Market in Hagerstown for the first time. She said it was worth checking out. We went this afternoon and it was cool; good people watching and lots of good food--both groceries, etc. and food to eat there. Not the most thrilling "special thing" to do on a weekend day, but still fun and definitely worth it. 

"Superman is the angel of our best nature"

11 July 2025: I saw Superman last night and really enjoyed its open heart and its faith in goodness and simply doing the right thing. Walter Chaw says it all so much better than I could--and does so much more. Check it out. 

Here's the piece's ending: "This country made a promise to me once–and the promise I made back to it, before I got so sour, is that I would care about others. That every life mattered to me, that making peace mattered, that standing up for the persecuted was not only my duty but also my absolute privilege. And, in particular, that I would not turn away from my responsibility in mourning. Blessed are those who mourn: they haven’t forgotten how irreplaceable every single life is. Blessed are the merciful, and those who are poor and hungry for fucking righteousness. Up up and away, motherfuckers, time to fly."

"Two Men Arrive in a Village"

10 July 2025: Listened to Edwidge Danticat read this Zadie Smith story on the New Yorker Fiction Podcast today while I mowed the lawn. So good and sadly, eternally timely. 

Fall syllabizing...

9 July 2025: Spent a decent amount of time today working on my ENGL 346: American Fiction syllabus. I haven't taught this one--a course on the novel up to 1900--since 2019. This time, because Percival Everett is going to be at the F. Scott Fitzgerald Festival, I am shaking things up, starting with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the moving on to James. It's a funky way to start (I usually go chronologically--and it meant dropping a couple of other books), but maybe that will make it fun in new ways.

Staying close...

8 July 2025: She always stays especially close after a thunderstorm, even after she comes out from under whatever chair in which I am sitting or desk at which I am working. 

"Replicants"

7 July 2025: Working my way through the latest season of The Bear. It's good (duh), with moments of absolute greatness, but continues to perhaps take too long and retreads familiar ground. 

But, man: the first scene of "Replicants," in which Kate Berlant (in a one-off performance, I think?) talks about her love, frustration, anger, and profound sadness towards her addict brother? I am adding it to the canon of texts that feel so sadly right to me.

I was already thinking about Ryan today, after hearing that a friend lost her sister to an overdose...

Back at it...

6 July 2025: Besides some emails, I haven't done any substantial academic work in over a week. It has felt bizarre. Got back to it today, working my way through a book for the "Year's Work" essay. Rest assured, my co-worker also reported for duty. 

Her little paw on the book prompted me to take the picture. "I'm on it," she seems to be saying, both literally and metaphorically, of course.

Nine!

5 July 2025: Eric sent me this picture from Isla's pool party for her 9th (!) birthday today. I am glad to see she put this silly little bag that I sent her to use on the one day is it relevant. 

My goodness, is time flying! Colin turned 21 this past Tuesday, which also blows my mind. 

Independence Day

4 July 2025: The bad guys can't take the Fourth of July or patriotism away from us. 

Did the day right: town parade this morning, low-key afternoon, and a night at the ballpark complete with fireworks.

(Amy took the picture of the back of my head; I kind of like it even though I said, "look at all that white hair!)

"Tired of Love Poems"

3 July 2025: 

"What we tire of is that we never tire of it.

How it guts us. How it fails, then reappears.

Because what is the bird compared to you?"

Saeed Jones read Megan Fernandes's "Tired of Love Poems" on this week's Vibe Check and I really enjoyed it. That was before the awful news about the dumb bill passing and just more and more awfulness closing in everywhere. 

I read the poem again this evening and I am thinking about it still, glad for the reminder that we never tire of love (even when it is a big risk, when it hurts, or when it ends badly), and that love feeds hope, and both keep us going and fighting. 

Home again!

2 July 2025: After a good trip, it is lovely to be home with my girls. Jo was literally bouncing off the walls with excitement and Veronica couldn't help but come down, be seen, and do some staring that I will describe as "not-so-secretly glad to see me."

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

1 July 2025: Today's return to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery moved me more than ever before and it's hard to explain why--at least quickly. 

But I found myself crying standing in front of the tiny marker that just says "Henry," Louisa May Alcott's stone and the American flag she earned working as a nurse in D.C., Hawthorne's family group, and, of course, Emerson's rock. 

The pens, pencils, and little notes left by others get me every time, but even more this time. They are little offerings of gratitude and connection. 

So much in our country seems broken right now, on the day that stupid "big beautiful bill" passes in the Senate. 

These writers, though? They point us to a better way. And they made me who I am--the kind of person who wants to help shape that better way for everyone else. 

There they all are, at eternal rest together, but their words live on. It's corny and cheesy, but it's beautiful and left me wiping my eyes on the Authors' Ridge today.