on monday i planned to pay my first visit to the tulane library, followed by reading at the fairgrinds (a review of my library bounty). becca called and said she was coming in town, so instead i went to the library, met becca at fairgrinds, and talked to her for two hours.
it's very cost-inefficient to take dance class at both tulane and the CAC studio - i have to pay tuition at both. but the studio doesn't offer modern. and i'm coming to find that the benefits of paying one credit hour's worth of college tuition are worth the extra $80 per month.
for one thing, it really does work out to $80 per month - that's my $25 application fee to the school of continuing studies and one semester's tuition. my modern IV class is four days a week. at your average dance studio, four classes a week is over $100 in monthly tuition. at tulane, in addition to my excellent dance class, i have a current student ID (AKA discounted admission to any number of things), and because i'm in the dance department, i get free admission to all the master classes offered through NOBA (the new orleans ballet association), which would otherwise cost 10 dollars per class. i get 15 dollar rush tickets to all NOBA performances, which are dance concerts by nationally renowned companies; the cheapest tickets are normally over thirty bucks. last week, i went to another free four-day master class series sponsored by NOBA, and because of my participation in that class, i got 5 dollar tickets to the dance concert by the trey mcintyre project. i was in the third row. that ticket normally would have cost 55 dollars.
all of these perks are thrilling to me, but right now what i like best is my unfettered access to the tulane library. before i went to spain i worked in acquisitions at the LSU library, where i discovered that university libraries have an outstanding selection of contemporary literary fiction. i would read a NYT book review of don delillo's falling man, and a few weeks later, going over the latest library orders, i'd see falling man was on its way. in fact, every book reviewed by the NYT was automatically ordered and shipped to the LSU library. it was glorious. finally i checked my amazon wishlist against the library holdings. of the 95 books on my wishlist at the time, the library had 79 of them. talk about kid in a candy store. i actually got a stomachache.
so monday, at the tulane library, i checked out:
-- elizabeth mccracken's an exact replica of a figment of my imagination (memoir)
-- sherman alexie's the lone ranger and tonto fistfight in heaven (short stories)
-- russell edson's the tunnel (poems)
-- ben lerner's the lichtenberg figures (poems)
-- betsy lerner's the forest for the trees ("an editor's guide to writers")
-- andrei codrescu's new orleans, mon amour: twenty years of writing from the city (essays)
i almost walked out with frommer's (or maybe fodor's) new orleans 2008. i was surprised they had it; i found it near the codrescu book, in what i guess is the 'new orleans' section. turns out it's not for circulation. i'm going back maybe tomorrow to read it. (this made me think of breton's second-to-last blog post about reading a D.C. guidebook.) i need more fun things to do.
when i brought the frommer's/fodor's down to the circulation desk, i realized that i had accidentally grabbed the 2005. why do they even have that thing in the stacks? can you think of a travel edition more irrelevant than the new orleans 2005? seriously.
i left the library with my wilco bag swinging. (the guy at the circulation desk was nice; then he offered me a plastic bag for my books. like it was the grocery!) it had been drizzling and i lost my umbrella, so i was wearing my yellow purl beret and a thrift-store trench coat. walking among the tulane students, i felt like something out of a brightly colored les miserables. it's nice to be older. i still feel like a weirdo but i care so much less. and i had a tote bag full of books. i felt greedy, and giddy.
at the fairgrinds, becca gave me a big hug. i'd been a sad hermit all week, so we had a lot to talk about. she said, "you know, i didn't know how you would look. i thought, actually, that you might look pretty bad. but you don't. you look really cute."
.
several weeks ago, i had an incredibly tedious fight with brett about a maude maggart CD. in fact the fight was "about" something more abstract, but for brevity's sake: maude maggart is fiona apple's older sister, and she's a caberet singer. she's got four albums out. one of the albums, i was telling brett, is all gershwin.
brett says, "gershwin?" like he can't believe someone would bother to do an album of all gershwin tunes.
"what?" i say.
he says, "i mean, i just don't know why anyone would do a whole album of gershwin."
so i start saying, sort of defensively, that gershwin wrote a ton of well-loved and wonderful songs and he's totally worth devoting an album to and, furthermore, it's so right up my alley.
some context for this conversation: our musical tastes do overlap, but where he goes off into country music land with the support of, it seems, the entire cool kid population, i veer into musical theater and women singer/songwriter territory and am mocked.
with this in mind, he backpedals furiously, because he doesn't want me to feel like he hates my taste in music or something. no he didn't say gershwin. no he's not surprised, of course he can see why someone would do a whole gershwin album. but i hate it when he backpedals, especially when he directly contradicts what he just said two seconds ago in utter sincerity. so we fought about that. for a long, long time.
the other day, i was making up my christmas list to give to my mom, and i put maude maggart's debut on there. i looked at her other three CDs - one is a live album, which i want but i'll get to later, and then there's that album of irving berlin tunes.
ugh, i thought. a whole album of irving berlin?
last night, driving back from the family thanksgiving feast, i realized my error. it was too funny not to tell brett, so i called him.
.
wednesday night i was going to watch amores perros, my latest movie from netflix. instead i sat on the sofa and read the entirety of the mccracken memoir. for a snack, i had a granny smith apple and a glass of white wine. it was delicious.
.
yesterday we had thanksgiving in st. bernard. before katrina, my aunt kay and my grandparents lived in the same tiny subdivision, in houses that my grandpa designed. now my grandparents live in baton rouge (they stayed there after katrina) and my uncle tim lives in their old house in arabi.
this has been a fact for at least two years. but every time we meet at uncle tim's (now whenever we do family stuff in new orleans, we do it at his house), i have a hard time remembering that mimi and grandpa don't live there anymore. the house in arabi still feels like their house.
so yesterday i parked my car in front of the house and as i'm crossing the lawn, i'm thinking about this stuff, how weird it is that i can't seem to get it through my head.
much later, after food and wii rock band, i was standing in the living room talking to my cousins. i looked up and saw on the mantle a framed picture of cullen, my uncle tim's kid. it must have been his senior picture; he was in his jesuit letterman's jacket.
i thought to myself: what gross favoritism!
then i remembered, again. it's not mimi and grandpa's house anymore.
