Return, return

Alright, so now it is time to get a summer schedule started. I begin intern/teaching not this Monday but next. It will be The Moviegoer not No Place, Louisiana due to difficulties locating enough copies. I think a reissued edition will come out next year, which you can buy then. It is really an amazing, troubling, and quiet novel. Luckily, so is The Moviegoer, and may be more relevant to the course title ("Natives and Strangers") due to the strangeness of being a native.

My wrestling essay will make it into the pages of The Louisville Review this fall under the title "The Thrill of Choreographed Violence." Turns out it wasn't as autoportraity as I thought and is now more streamlined thanks to the wonderful guest creative nonfiction editor there. Linda and I got the chance to watch the Extreme Rules PPV live in New Orleans. If there was any doubt in my mind that wrestling is a perfect entertainment form, I believe it now.

This blog is rather aimless, but after visiting Louisiana this last week, I've finally decided what I want to do, what I want to really do. Linda and I are going to snag some PhDs if we can at Cornell and return to the bayou. There, we will create opportunity, not only for us, but for people in Barataria who right now can basically chose between offshore, the shrimpboat, or moving. And so it will be a private institution. Linda will run a school (I mean K-12, private, full imaginative education curriculum), and I'm going to run a cultural center. This will encompass and make possible a lot of my father's ambition (he wants a genealogical/Chauvin culture/Cajun industrial museum on Bayou Petit Caillou) in addition to mine. Hopefully one day it will be a think tank style institution that can do everything from granting postdoctoral ethnology fellowships to summer internships to coastal erosion and agricultural sustainability awareness to educating tourists and locals alike on the varieties of life in Southern Louisiana. In essence, if anything else, you'll see that here.

I'm back in Ithaca, but I realize that my heart's in Chauvin. And it will always be there.