Alex Kudera's Blog, page 69

Grey is the Color of Hope 2

"What a mixed bunch we are: a Catholic, a Pentecostal, several Orthodox, an unbeliever. . . later we were to be joined by a Baptist. Yet we were always deeply respectful of one another's convictions. And God did not turn His face away from our small patch of Mordovian soil."

~~ from Grey is the Color of Hope by Irina Ratushinskaya

A Fake F. Scott. . .

"Fitzgerald's words, now often featuring a GIF of a beating heart or a ray of sunshine over them, feel like a letter of hope sent a hundred years into the future. His dark humour as bars close and he stocks up on, 'red wine, whiskey, rum, vermouth, absinthe, white wine, sherry, gin, and lord, if we need it, brandy', is the amusement we all need.

"The problem is that it isn't written by Fitzgerald, nor was it penned in 1920. The parody letter in fact first appeared a week ago on the humour website McSweeney's, written by Nick Farriella."

~~ from Olivia Ovenden at Esquire

Grey is the Color of Hope

"Natasha is from Leningrad. She is serving a sentence for producing a samizdat journal, Maria, which was devoted to feminist issues. The problems raised in this journal, such as the double workload of Soviet women--eight hours at work followed by five to six hours queuing for food, the horrors of communal kitchens, doing the entire family wash in a hand basin--were to appear in the official Soviet press also, but much later, in 1986. In 1982, when Natasha was arrested, talking about such matters was classed as 'anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.'"

~~ from Grey is the Color of Hope by Irina Ratushinskaya

in The New Yorker

Kate Folk, a Stegner Fellow and star of much more than literary twitter, has published her first story in The New Yorker. Although I'm out of articles and suffering under conditions of self-quarantine, I found the first three sentences of "Out There" to be engaging, and I wished that I could read more right away.

what passed for "normal". . .

"But my journey wasn’t just a financial awakening. I had learned about subsistence living in Arctic villages, and worked with a 74-year-old maintenance man who lived in his 1980 Chevy Suburban year-round. I began to bring into question what passed for “normal” down in the lower 48, especially when it often led to a lifetime of work, bills and Bed Bath & Beyond purchases. Out of debt, I felt for the first time that my life was my own, and that I could do whatever I wished with it."

~~ from "When Home is a Campus Parking Lot" by Ken Ilgunas

a pause in our programming for this message from our virus

"Even if there is virus in the inanimate environment, it's not going to jump off the seat and bite you in the ankle," says Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of medicine in Vanderbilt University's division of infectious diseases."You've got to touch it, and then touch your nose or your mouth. So it's those hands we have that are the important intermediary. And that's where I would put the emphasis," he said.Or turn to Johns Hopkins for the latest statistics on Global Cases. . . 

The McCandless Mecca

I enjoyed The McCandless Mecca by Ken Ilgunas. It's not quite a novella, or not by yesterday's standards, but it includes the Ilgunas humor and thoughtfulness I remember well from Walden on Wheels . It certainly made me want to read Into the Wild, even if author Jon Krakauer has already rejected the conclusions he offered in that book. From Krakauer's article in The New Yorker, I enjoyed learning that Chris McCandless had Nikolai Gogol on hand during his final days:

Taped to the door was a note scrawled on a page torn from a novel by Nikolai Gogol:

attention possible visitors.
s.o.s.
i need your help. i am injured, near death, and too weak to hike out of here. i am all alone, this is no joke. in the name of god, please remain to save me. i am out collecting berries close by and shall return this evening. thank you,
chris mccandless
august ?

Mind of Winter

Donating a copy of Auggie's Revenge to the University of Pennsylvania's Van Pelt Library reminded me of a Penn undergrad finding Fight for Your Long Day and reading from it at a university event. It was a thrill to find a video of his reading early in my life as a "published author."

"the wreckage of a profession"

The Chronicle's "The Disgusting New Campus Novel" was based on Kristina Quynn's peer-reviewed academic article: "Drudgery Tales, Abjectified Protagonists, and Speculative Modes in the Adjunctroman of Contemporary Academic Fiction."

In her academic article, Professor Quynn writes:

Kudera’s Fight for YourLong Day. . . reflect[s] the cycles of poverty and the effects of deprofessionalization on a highly educated workforce. Among academics, such fiction can hold an even more weighty and didactic purpose. In a recent interview Moseley asked Kudera about his decision to write Fight for Your Long Day. Kudera(2016: 124) responded that he looked around and decided, “I can’t believe theseare our lives.” Like victims of a disaster brought about by forces beyond our control, we identify with Kudera’s stunned disbelief as we survey the wreckage of a profession turned piecework teaching labor. This wreckage of adjuncting when represented in the story structure of the Professorroman, however, has no place to go, literally. There is no pathway for promotion, no promise of future job security, no innovating in or adding to scholarly fields or libraries of knowledge. Such tales do not progress. Nor do the protagonists—unless they escape the rubble.

disgusting drudgery?

The Chronicle's "The Disgusting New Campus Novel" was based on Kristina Quynn's peer-reviewed academic article: "Drudgery Tales, Abjectified Protagonists, and Speculative Modes in the Adjunctroman of Contemporary Academic Fiction."