& + ; = <3!

At this point tomorrow I am going to be sitting around nervously biting my nails and doing frantic last minute packing and trying to stay up in hopes that I will be so exhausted at not having slept at all that I will then sleep all the way to JFK, sleep at JFK, and then sleep all the way to Edinburgh. Short of getting hammered, this is the way to do it if you hate flying as much as I do. I just need to conk the fuck out.

Anyway, a few things before I head off into the land I've been longing to get back to since August of last year (if there was ever such a feeling as "coming home" to a place one has never been to before, then that is exactly what I felt last year when I stepped off the plane and into Glasgow, and I still am unsure as to why):

01. I WILL NOT have my laptop with me. The thought of it getting stolen and then having to either A) shell out bucks for a new computer in the fall to begin prospectus-ing or B) prospectus-ing entirely by hand because I'm too broke actually gives me nightmares. I don't know why people would want a janky Dell laptop that is over three years old now, but still. Maybe it's because of all the ridiculously cheesy pop music I've amassed on it? I'm not sure. Anyway, the point is that internet will be scarce and I will be unable to write as much as I wanted to this summer. I do intend to try to steadily update the blog I started -- http://koreabomination.wordpress.com/ -- and that is probably where the most stuff will be posted whenever I get free time and a computer with internet access into my greedy little hands, so check that out for The Merry Adventures of Yumi in Scotland 2009. For all intents and purposes, the LiveJournal will probably be defunct this summer.

02. I WILL be keeping a paper travel journal -- Wifey bought me a red Moleskine (I know, it's so pretentious but I love these damn notebooks; I use their planner and their journal and then reporter notebooks and everything else) so I will be taking along a gluestick and just pasting everything in there, writing ideas and such down, and just all around keeping track of the thirteen weeks or so that I am gone. It will be a messy project, but it will be a project of love. And yes, you don't even have to ask -- I do have a digital camera (yay for the family saving up to buy me one!) and I will be taking massive amounts of photos. Mostly of cattle, I'm pretty sure.

03. I WILL NOT check my ucsd email account. Well I mean i will sporadically, but in all likelihood I will try and stay away from it so that I am not inundated by grade complaints and reminders of books I should be reading this summer. As such, please address all email correspondence to stopcallingmeyummy@gmail.com, as I will try and check that one a bit more regularly. And yes, that really is my email address, and yes, I did start it because apparently two basic syllables next to each other are impossible for most people to pronounce. I don't know. You tell me.

04. I WILL be getting a pay-as-you-go cellphone as soon as I can in Scotland; I really didn't want to but the look on my umma's face when I told her I intended to not have any means of technological reach-ability and on my appa's face when I told him that I would be traveling alone (with the exception of ten days in Ireland with Nicolette) convinced me otherwise. I will try very hard to get one that provides good, cheap texting so that I can text you adventures as they happen (according to Amanda and Wifey, I am remarkably good at multi-tasking). So if you get a text message from some crazy number that says something like "OMG HORNED BEAST CHASING ME AND I DON'T MEAN YOUR DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD!!!", it's probably me.

I always told myself that once I passed my Qualifying Exams, I would do something completely out of character and stray far, far from academia for a bit of time, as I haven't left this world since I entered it in 2001 as a banana slug and tumbled headlong into my literature courses. And I passed the exams. And I think packing up hiking boots and my copy of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and ratty old jeans and plenty of SPF moisturizer for my face and flying thousands of miles to one of my favorite places in the world where I can breathe free to be a farmer sounds about right, don't you?

Norcal folks, I will see you when I get back on September 21st. And Socal peeps, I will probably drive down on September 25th or 26th. Be ready to have me talk your ear off over dinner and, if Amanda and I get our way, over drinks while dancing up a storm and being scolded by the bouncer at Bar Dynamite. Hell yes for traditions!

Much, much love to everyone.

Yumi Pak: 

B.A. in American Literature, UCSC (2004)
B.A. in Women's Studies, UCSC (2004)
M.A. in Literature, UCSD (2009)
C.Phil. in Literature, UCSD (2009)

I'm now A.B.D. (All But Dissertation) and on my way to the Ph.D.

It's amazing how the same act can be so completely different.

am i j.g. now?

Nicolette and I went to Influx today to plan the Ireland leg of Summer 2009; I drank a cup of iced coffee and as a result find myself suffering from insomnia. I think during the qual process, no matter how many hours of sleep I got per night I would still be exhausted; sleep didn't provide a respite from stress so much as it just extended it. I would go to bed snuggled up to my copy of Gender Trouble and wake up with a deep groove in my cheek, yawn, put on my glasses, and go back to reading about performativity while half-asleep. My snuggle buddies for the past two months or so have been Foucault, Butler, Gopinath, Kim, Williams, Steinbeck, Toomer, Brundage, and a motley crew of authors. I loved them, and love them still, but I just wanted my bed/head to myself for a while. Now that writtens are done I find myself sleeping less but resting more; I'm sure right before the orals I will find myself once again in that place of panic. But here's to adding more letters after my name on June 5th.

Anyway, Nicolette and I booked our hostels for Ireland, and then I came home and booked mine for Scotland. I'm excited to go back, and for real reals this time, as opposed to a brief week. A friend of mine asked if I was running away, and I don't think I am. I think it's more that I need distance from both Castro Valley and San Diego; I need distance from the self that I have so carefully cultivated over the years. And so I go -- my flight leaves on June 17th and I fly back to the States on September 21st.

I got new glasses, and I am so fucking blind it's kind of sad.

I've returned to my short story wriiting, and to Hemingway's mandate that I write that "one true sentence."

In the meantime, the novel languishes on my hard drive.

In perhaps the most surreal news, Anth is returning to San Diego. For grad school. At UCSD. In the Literature Department. Yeah... no. I think had this happened last year I probably would have trembled and gotten really drunk and written pages upon pages of negotiating my feelings and all the tragic shit that I was so fond of (oh, I'll be honest -- a part of me is still so fond of that tragic shit. I can't help it. It's like delicious marshmallows that taste like tears and sacrifice), but this year I gave myself two days to get over this idea and then moved on. He's coming. There's nothing I can do about it, except hope that I don't run into this boy who obliterated all rhyme and reason in my life. It helps that my heart doesn't want to hammer itself out of my chest whenever I think of him anymore. I don't blame him for how I felt, per se, but because I do not want to blame myself, I don't know who else can take the blame. I don't want to punish myself for the way I felt about him, but secretly, inside, I still do, a little. It's inevitable. See what I mean about the tragic bullshit? I finally make San Diego into a place that isn't filled with the memories of the two of us so I can go to CLICS and the beach in La Jolla (although I still refuse to drive on Genessee. I can't do it), I finally get to the point where I can read Dictee and screen Hedwig & the Angry Inch and not feel like I'm caving under, I finally accept that he wasn't who I thought he would be, and then he saunters back in. So one more time, I give. I bend.

Lame.

Steady updates from here on out, at least until I leave for the summer and the land o' charm. Expect the usual rambles sprinkled with liberal doses of panicking about my future in academia and whether or not I will ever meet and breed for a nice Korean (doctor) boy. Doubtful.

I missed you, my darling LiveJournal; it's wonderful to be back.

california, i hate you today.
im moving my ass to fucking iowa.

my writtens are done.
my oral is june 5th.

im taking the next three days off.

written one begins in one hour and forty minutes.

ack.

that makes me feel super nasty, and not in the sexy way.

i really like heavily masculinist works by heavily masculinist authors.

in other news, i cant wait until quals are done.

written one: W, may 20th 11:30 - 3:30.
written two: F, may 22nd 11:30 - 3:30.
orals: F, june 5th 11:30 - 1:30.

fucking terrified, folks. make it or break it.

i dont know what to do with the news that he is moving back to san diego.
to be a grad student.
at uc san diego.
in the literature department.

i know that my heart doesnt belong to him anymore, but some part of me still does.

i dont know what it is im feeling, only that i dont like it.

oh my god, LOVE.

LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE!!

here are some music recommendations:

01) the decemberists, the hazards of love. the decemberists might not be your cup of tea -- theyre prog rock and this one is a concept album in which a narrative unfolds over the course of about an hour. i think its beautiful and well-done, not as close to my heart as 2006s the crane wife, but still wonderful and kind of weird in places.

02) lady gaga, "paparazzi." this single is everything a pop record should be: lush and cheesetastic. im a fan of lady gaga in general (how catchy is "poker face"? seriously!), but even if i wasnt, id be listening to this song on repeat. all im waiting for is the music video.

03) antony and the johnsons, the crying light. again, another album that isnt as good as the one that precedes it -- i am a bird now ranks as one of my favorite albums of 2008 (i dont remember if it actually came out in 2008, but that was the year i listened to it over and over again. god so good) so its unfortunate that they had so much to live up to. antonys voice remains as startling as ever and youll either swoon to it or hate it. i personally find his voice totally, totally heartbreaking. *sigh*

04) keri hilson feat. lil wayne, "turnin' me on." there is something about this song. is it the slinky, lithe melody that skips along just a bit before the bass cuts in? is it lil waynes hilariously awesome rap? is it keri hilsons purposefully jumbled delivery of her lyrics? i dont know, all i know is that ive been obsessing over this song for a while now.

05) the knife, the knife; silent shout; deep cuts. all of it. the only album of theirs i dont have is a soundtrack they produced, but all of their songs are uniformly delightful or awesomely weird. i still remember that sean called and asked, "have you heard of this band, the knife?" and then i talked his ear off, as id been listening to them for over a year. "we share our mothers health" is one of the creepiest songs ever recorded and the music video is brilliant as well. love this band. must someday see them live.

06) massive attack, mezzanine. for "inertia creeps." which i love. still.

im not dead, just busily prepping for the exams (june 5th, 11:30 am).
and i havent been jerking off for the past six months, either -- wanna see what ive read?

heres my bibliography for just the qualifying paper.

Bibliography

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

 

---. State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.

 

Allen, James and Jon Lewis, et al. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers, 2000.

 

Apel, Dora. Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004.  

 

Baker, Jr., Houston A. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987.

 

Barnard, Rita. “Modern American Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism. Ed. Walter Kalaidjian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 39 – 67.

 

Borshuk, Michael. “The Language of Jazz as American Culture Becomes Modern.” Introduction. Swinging the Vernacular: Jazz and African American Modernist Literature. By Borshuk. New York: Routledge, 2006. 1 – 19.

 

Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880 – 1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

 

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

 

Dos Passos, John. “Against American Literature” (1916). Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Ed. Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. 334 – 336.

 

Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.

 

Esteve, Mary. The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

 

Foley, Barbara. “‘In the Land of Cotton’: Economics and Violence in Jean Toomer’s Cane.” African American Review 32.2 (1998): 181 – 198.

 

Ford, Karen Jackson. Split-Gut Song: Jean Toomer and the Poetics of Modernity. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2005.

 

Foucalt, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.

 

Goldsby, Jacqueline. A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006.

 

Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

 

Grant, Nathan. Masculinist Impulses: Toomer, Hurston, Black Writing, and Modernity. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004.

 

Gregory, James N. “A Century of Migration.” The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 11 – 42.

 

Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “Who Set You Flowin;?” The African-American Migration Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

 

Gunning, Sandra. Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890 – 1912. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

 

Harris, Trudier. Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

 

Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

 

Jarab, Josef. “Modernity, Modernism, and the American Ethnic Minority Artist.” Introduction. Race and the Modern Artist. Ed. Heather Hathaway, Josef Jarab and Jeffrey Melnick. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 3 – 15.

 

Kodat, Catherine Gunther. “To ‘Flash White Light from Ebony’: The Problem of Modernism in Jean Toomer’s Cane.” Twentieth Century Literature 46.1 (2000): 1 – 19.

 

Markovitz, Jonathan. Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory. “On Memory and Meaning.” Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. xv – xxxi.

 

Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture. Trans. Libby Meintjes. 15.1 (2003): 11 – 40.

 

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

 

North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

 

---. Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

 

Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.

 

Pfeifer, Michael J. Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874 – 1947. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

 

Rusch, Frederik L. “Form, Function, and Creative Tension in Cane: Jean Toomer and the Need for the Avant-Garde.” MELUS 17.4 (1991 – 1992): 15 – 28.

 

Sanders, Mark A. “American Modernism and the New Negro Renaissance.” The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism. Ed. Walter Kalaidjian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 129 – 156.

 

Scruggs, Charles. “Jean Toomer and Kenneth Burke and the Persistence of the Past.” American Literary History 13.1 (2001): 41 – 66.

 

Scruggs, Charles and Lee VanDemarr. Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.

 

Sollors, Werner. “Four Types of Writing under Modern Conditions; or, Black Writers and ‘Populist Modernism.’” Race and the Modern Artist. Ed. Heather Hathaway, Josef Jarab and Jeffrey Melnick. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 42 – 53.

 

Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics: Culture and Countermemory: The ‘American’ Connection 17.2 (1987): 64 – 81.

 

Toomer, Jean. Cane. 1988 ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988.

 

Turner, Darwin T. The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1980.

 

Walker, Alice. “The Divided Life of Jean Toomer.” In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. Philadelphia: Harvest Books, 2003. 60 – 65.

 

Wardi, Anissa Janine. Death and the Arc of Mourning in African American Literature. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003.

 

Whalan, Mark. Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America: The Short Story Cycles of Sherwood Anderson and Jean Toomer. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2007.

 

Zagrando, Robert L. The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909 – 1950. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980.

yep -- this does not include everything ive read/am reading for my lists.

and now you know why im tired all the time.

i made this!
i altered it a bit, adding mushrooms and pinenuts, and substituting onions for shallots.
oh, and instead of bacon i used pancetta.
and instead of fresh angel hair pasta i used spaghetti.

it was easy and delicious.

like your mom!!

oh sedgwick... i wish id had a chance to tell you how much your work meant to me,
how much your work revolutionized my way of thinking and living.

rest in peace. you are one of the best.

lately ive been stressed with quals-balls, so ive taken to cooking.

ive made:

carrot-parmesan risotto;
cream of broccoli soup.

i plan to make:

rosemary potato pizza;
arugula pesto pasta;
easy shepherds pie.

for those of you who live alone or like to cook, ive been taking recipes from:

http://blog.cookingwithtraderjoes.com/ -- everything available at trader joes!;
http://www.marthastewart.com/food -- dont laugh, she has good recipes!

that is all.

and now back to the terminator. awesome.

26!