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Continuing our lame-duck, “let’s take advantage of NYC while we’re still here” campaign, Jenny and I woke up early today and trekked right back to the Public Theater to sit on line for Shakespeare in the Park tickets (this year’s show: Measure for Measure [Correction: Much Ado about Nothing (not sure what I was thinking here)]). The crowd was noticeably different from those that I’ve previously seen (and been a part of) waiting outside the Delacorte theater in Central Park…the line outside the Public Theater seemed mostly comprised of locals who live or work in the Village. We got there around 10:30 am and were maybe 20th in line, and when we got our tix around 1 pm we found that we’d be sitting in the fourth row, center. Sweet.

The production itself was one of the best stagings of Shakespeare that I’ve seen – nothing fancy, nothing that got in the way of the narrative and the language (though apparently the setting of early 20th-century Italy was supposed to connect with the Italian futurist movement, according to a throwaway comment in the program and a few random “manifesto” posters scattered throughout the entrances to the theater).

The cast was solid at worst, inspired at best, with particular standouts being Sam Waterston’s Leonato and the show-stealing bickering of Jimmy Smits and Kristen Johnston as Benedick and Beatrice (though I still slightly prefer Emma Thompson’s Beatrice, who was more sly and also at times more vulnurable, Smits’ swaggering Benedick was the best I’ve ever seen).

Naturally, it wouldn’t have been “Shakespeare in the Park” without at least one actor/actress who was never quite submerged in his/her part, and every time Dominic Chianese’s Antonio opened his mouth I couldn’t help thinking “Hee! It’s Uncle Junior!!”

All in all, an evening well-spent. Tomorrow, we continue sucking the marrow out of New York life: Restaurant Week…

No, literally. David Foster Wallace met George Saunders tonight at the Public Theater for a several-hour discussion of fiction, writing and teaching sponsored by HousingWorks.¹

I decided to go (and convinced Jenny to come with me) based on my appreciation for Wallace’s prose – he’s one of my favorite writers, and reading A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again was a revelation to me as I realized that his writing sounded like the inside of my 20 year-old head (an experience that’s only happened a few other times, most notably when I read Douglas Coupland for the first time). In person, he didn’t disappoint, seeming just funny and genuine and like the sort of guy I’d have hung out with a lot in college.

As much as I enjoyed DFW’s end of the conversation, I have to say that George Saunders more than held his own, and I can’t believe that a writer who’s this smart and funny hasn’t crossed my radar. Like, ever. I left with the desire to go buy a few of his books and if he’s anywhere near as engaging in print as he is in person, I’ll be a happy reader.

Their conversation ranged across the landscape of writing, and I wouldn’t be able to do it justice here because I was so enthralled that it didn’t occur to me to take notes until about halfway through, at which point I realized that I didn’t have any paper on me anyways (and wasn’t feeling nearly dorky enough to crack open the laptop and start typing away). One thing that particularly struck me, however, was the fact that both of these guys have teaching gigs, Wallace at Pomona and Saunders at Syracuse, and they kept referring to their students and seminars throughout the two hours. It’s clear that teaching isn’t just a day job to either of them, but at the same time it wasn’t obvious exactly how central being a teacher was to either of their identities. Regardless, I have to admit that I’m thoroughly envious of any student who gets to take a seminar from either writer.

All in all, this was the best Q&A I’ve been to in years, on a par with the
Evening with Kevin Smith that I went to at Cornell. While both events suffered from the unavoidable “poser-who-wants-the-validation-of-the-famous-guy(s)” sort of questions, in both cases the sheer coolness of the people on stage triumphed in the end. Without a doubt, this was the best two hours waiting in line that I’ve spent in some time.²

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¹ This may be the most hyperlink-rich sentence I’ve ever written.
² Speaking of which, here’s an interesting question – I show up at 5:15 and there’s no line, just a bunch of people milling around in the lobby of the Public Theater. I walk up to the table that’s obviously set up to dispense tickets, and ask the two guys standing in front of it whether they’re in line for the Q&A. “Nope,” one says. Immediately, a woman nearby walks over, asks us if we’re in line. “Sure, why not?” says the other guy. “Yup, we’re the line, I guess,” I add. The woman stands behind us, and within ten seconds, the entire population of the lobby (maybe 30 people or so) has coalesced into a line behind her. Hence the question – at an event like this where free tickets are being given out, how many people does it take to form the nucleus for a line, tipping the crowd from chaos into order?

First things first – if anybody in Ithaca is looking for a bed, futon, or any number of other miscellaneous things, I’m selling some stuff in preparation for the move to DC. Let the shopping begin!

Been back in the country for about a week and a half, and haven’t managed to fire up Movable Type and start blogging again…I think that while I was away, I got out of the mindset of blogging, and it took the better part of two weeks for me to start to get that urge back. That said, I’ve got a bunch of half-written posts that I’ll try to polish off in the next few days (if nothing else, it keeps me writing, which is a good thing in and of itself), so stay tuned!

(Also, photo galleries of Ecuador and the Galapagos are on the way once I get the last batch of scanned pics back from RiteAid)

Well, my half-composed post on the various commencement speeches I’ve heard in the past two weeks will have to wait, because I’ve spent the past 24 hours in a frenzy of packing and apartment logistics. The good news is that I’ve got a backpack packed that’ll last me for the next two weeks, a camera bag that’s jammed with an absurd amount of equipment, and a lease signed on an apartment in DC.

It’s kind of crazy, really – just over 24 hours ago, I saw a post on Craigslist that fit Jenny’s and my ideal specs to a tee (with the exception of the need for street parking, which isn’t a deal-breaker). I sent an e-mail, the owner called within a few hours, we chatted. Today, Jenny and I asked our friend Vidya (our local apartment scout) to go check the place out around 8 pm, and in the meantime the apartment owner e-mailed us a copy of the lease and the co-op rules. Around 9 pm, Vidya called and said “It’s great. Take it.” And so we have.

Come July 15th, Jenny and I will officially be shacked up together in a large 1-bedroom apartment at the corner of 17th and Church, just off of Dupont Circle. We’ll be just about two blocks from the Red Line, seven blocks from the Orange Line, and three blocks from a Whole Foods.

That settled, we’ll be catching a plane to Quito this afternoon, where I’m bringing nothing but clothing, cameras, and a copy of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. See you in two weeks…

Massive amounts of work. Then, Jenny’s graduation. Then, more massive amounts of work. Finally, this past weekend, my own commencement at Cornell:

Not that I’ve actually defended, of course, but it’s close enough that Cornell let me walk in the commencement ceremony this year rather than wait until the next one. All told, I had one Girlfriend, one Mom, one Dad, one Father, one Father’s Wife, one Sister, one Sister’s Boyfriend, two Grandparents and two Quasi-In-Laws (Girlfriend’s Parents) in Ithaca for the weekend, which work out better and more smoothly than I could possibly have imagined.

More to come on graduation speeches, dissertation breakthroughs, and the irony that I’m traveling to another continent only to risk running into Donald Trump…at the moment, though, I need to run to buy a ton of film and a pair of trekking pants for my trip.

One of the many things preying on my mind these days is housing – which neighborhood in DC to live in, how much to pay in rent, and the big question on everyone’s minds these days, to rent or to buy?

Looks like I’m not the only one – several of my favorite post-academics have been blogging about real estate. Laura over at Apartment 11D just bought herself a fine home outside the city, while Erika at Apartment 401 (different blog, different building, different city) has been mulling the same question.

Right now, renting seems the way to go – we’re only planning to be in DC for 2-3 years, and the rental market is soft right now while the real estate market…well…isn’t. Not even close.

So, I’m apparently a bit behind the curve here (or maybe I just ought to stop reading political blogs compulsively and add some more techie ones to my daily circuit)…seems that the eagerly-anticipated Movable Type 3.0 is out, at least in a Developer version. Meanwhile, all hell has broken loose over the licensing structure (just check out the Trackbacks to Mena Trott’s announcement).

I’ve been using Movable Type for the past year, and have been quite the little MT evangelist, even convincing Cornell’s Academic Technology Center to install it on one of their servers for a course I taught this semester. Looking ahead to the work I’ll be doing at George Mason, I’ve been thinking about ways to stretch/adopt blogs into the work of the Center for History and New Media, and Movable Type has been my default CMS, simply because it’s what I know best.

For myself, there are a few problems with the new MT licensing scheme, and like most of the people raising a stink, they center on the number of authors/number of blogs permitted by each license. I totally understand the rationale for limiting the number of blogs and/or authors covered by a personal, non-commercial license – they’re trying to bring individuals into the Typepad service, and don’t want one person with technical skills setting up blogs for dozens of his or her friends when they otherwise might subscribe to Typepad. That’s totally cool, and while I myself have been known to set up a blog or two for a friend, I can respect that.

However, here’s my concern, about which I’ve seen precious little discussion – educational/academic uses (Weblogg-ed, for example, has nothing, and the best posts I’ve been able to find are by Shane Nackerud, who’s running the UThink initiative at the University of Minnesota). For example, I’ve been planning to launch a couple of group blogs on the model of Terra Nova to focus on a few of the research topics in which I’m particularly interested. Figuring up to a dozen authors, this rapidly becomes unaffordable, especially considering that I wouldn’t necessarily have any official funding for such a project. Moreover, there’s the question of CHNM – if, say, we wanted to add a blog-like function to the tools available for historians, it now seems substantially less likely that Movable Type is a viable option.

Now, while concerning, these issues don’t seem to be such a big deal in the immediate, practical sense: as best as I can tell from rooting around through various discussions, the licensing is on the honor system and these limits aren’t hard-coded into the software. If anything, though, this is a wake-up call for me, a reminder that while the code is visible, Movable Type is by no means open source software. Six Apart has every right to do what they like with the code, and charge whatever the market will bear. They can stop passing out the free beer whenever they like, and nobody really has a leg to stand on to complain.

This all comes as I’ve been sketching out a redesign for my own site (I finally figured out an answer to the question that Jay Rosen asked me a few months ago when I met him at NYU – “Oh, you’ve got a blog? What are you trying to do there?”), and have been finding Movable Type somewhat limiting – I can kludge together lists of links/photos/ideas/etc. as separate blogs under MT, for example, but that’s kind of a pain. I was toying with the idea of migrating anyways, and now with this reminder that I’d be investing time and building expertise in a system that won’t necessarily be available (or at least not affordable) for future projects I’m wondering whether now might well be the time to jump ship. Textpattern seems the next logical choice, but again, it’s not a purely open source program, and thus subject to the same problems down the road (though its creator insists it’ll remain free for noncommercial use, I’m wary until I see the Creative Commons license in print) – plus, it’s not clear that the same development community will form around Textpattern, and plugins like mt-amazon or mt-blacklist are as vital to my use of Movable Type as the CMS itself. Meanwhile, there’s WordPress, which gets a thumbs-up for being open source but which is also still kind of clunky (particularly the fact that you can only run one blog off of a given installation).

In short, there doesn’t seem to be an ideal alternative, so I’ll probably stick with my current install of Movable Type for the moment (not like I’ve really got time to seriously go mucking around with porting to a new system anyways). I have no doubt that Mena, Ben and the rest of the people at Six Apart are good people, but it seems like my non-profit, academic interests might be diverging from theirs, which leaves me looking for another CMS to which to hitch my wagon.

A few weeks ago, I found out that my cousin Josh had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. He had a seizure one day at dinner and was rushed to a hospital, where the ER docs found nothing visibly wrong. A followup visit with his primary care physician led to an MRI, however, which turned up a 2 cm mass on the left side of his brain.

A little backstory: Josh is a fixture at my parents’ annual Passover Seders, and he’s infamous for a particular seder several years back when he knocked back too much wine and picked up my parents’ camcorder – the video he shot (among with his running commentary) is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. Thus, it comes as no suprise that he’s decided to tackle this challenge with a sense of humor, naming the tumor “Earl” and starting up a Brain Blog to keep friends and family up to date on events. He’s a hell of a guy, and this is now one of the first blogs I check when I start up my computer in the morning…

So, I returned most of my checked-out books to the Cornell library last week.

For those of you who haven’t written a dissertation, I can’t really explain how big a deal this is: some of these books have sat on my shelves for upwards of three years, thanks to Cornell’s six-month checkout term for graduate students and online renewal system, and I’d really grown to think of them as mine in a certain sense. There was a definite sense of saying goodbye as I lugged 110 books in milk crates to the library, but as I emptied the last one I didn’t have the feeling of closure that I expected.

See, up until a few months ago I thought that I’d defend my dissertation, go to graduation, then spend a few days in a flurry of activity as I packed up my Ithaca life and headed for the horizon. Recently, however, it’s begun to dawn on me that my transition from graduate school to “what comes next” isn’t going to happen in anything remotely resembling a clean break. Instead, I’m looking forward to a several-month-long smear from one life into another, marked by a series of transitory steps and a whole lot of miscellaneous debris.

Initially, I’d hoped to get my defense out of the way by Cornell’s May commencement, so that the ceremony would mark the official end of my time there. Instead, my defense is set for July 26th, and while I’ll still put on the gown and walk at the May ceremony, it won’t quite be the same. Originally, the hope was that I’d have defended by the end of May so that the trip to Eduador and the Galapagos would give me a feeling of distance from my dissertation and graduate student life in general, but now I’m in a position where I’ll have to come back and spend another few weeks working on dissertation revisions.

There’s also the matter of where I’m living. When I drove down to DC last week I realized that I would only be in Ithaca three more times: once for commencement, once in June to discuss the final dissertation draft with Ron, and once for the actual defense at the end of July. I’ll spend most of the rest of the time at Jenny’s place in Brooklyn, until we move down to DC sometime in mid-July (provided we find a place by then, which is a whole other topic). Again, no real moment of closure, just a series of transitions.

As for what I’ll be doing, I’ve got a bunch of freelance work lined up from when I didn’t know if I’d have a job or need to start building a freelance career – now I won’t need the work as badly, but I’ve already committed to the projects (plus I know I’ll enjoy the programming and design work). It’s strange – I’ll probably have the final dissertation draft in by the time I move down to DC, but I’ll still be doing freelance stuff after the move. Even more, I’ll move to DC only to then have to return to Ithaca for my defense and last-minute fixes, then rushing right back to DC to start at George Mason on August 1.

I’m really not complaining, honest – I’m incredibly lucky to be in the situation in which I find myself, and I know it. I’ve got a job lined up, I’ve got freelance work to tide me over until then, the end of graduate school is within reach, I’ve got an amazing girlfriend who loves me enough to move to a different city and start a new life with me.

It all just feels strangely anticlimactic.