Shameless Self Promotion

All,

I found out last week that I have passed my doctoral exams and am now "ABD"

Hope all is well.
KJ

p.s. I spoke with Blaine a couple of days ago and he is doing wonderfully!

Happy Belated Birthday

To Rose!!

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday Elizabeth! (did I get it right?)

Shipwrecked

I am the emotional wreck I suspect you'd all anticipate me being upong hearing the news that my father finally lost his fight with cancers.

In the end, it wasn't the cancer, per se, that won out: his lungs pressed against his sweet heart, causing an unusual rhythm which refused to be soothed by medication. And by all accounts we say: "how lucky" because his most recent cancer typically results in a dreadful, slow and painful death and instead of experiencing that, he went gently, in his sleep. And up until his death he was conscious, alert and his charming, delightful self.

But I didn't mean to come here and share that. I meant to come here and share that after ten days with my extremely conservative family I received an anti-immigrant e mail from my brother and my response suggests to him that the author of the original e mail is perhaps not asking pertinent questions and I pointed him in the direction of Foucault.

I figure, in context, that qualifies today as a good day.

I take what I can get.

Doube R dreams

Apologies for inserting “Ghostmodernism” and then failing even to lurk on the blog while it set in motion the whirr of brainmachines. Without invoking Betelgeuse in triplicate here, I seem to recall the phrase coming to me as I was performing something of a survey of the field of criticism on Cyberpunk texts and realized that even the most current work oddly regards these texts to be the contemporary cutting edge. But, more significantly, I disappeared due to a preliminary exam preoccupation—the UCDavis approximation of the Comps—though here we read a specialized list (20th century American for me), the exam is an 8-hour at home open-book format with a choice of 1 of 2 essay qs in the am and the same in the pm, and with written comments on the results letter. Unlike some PhD programs, this is unlinked to the Prospectus/Dissertation for us, so now I’m in the process of writing my Prospectus and forming my committee, and YIKES!!!! outlining my next 2 years’ work and essentially “myself” for the purposes of applying to jobs.
Adjacent to all of this, Min and I spent 2 weeks in Shanghai in June 2007—still the best city on Earth! (Anne knows what I’m talking about.) And this winter we had an outstanding time in San Diego—though not Shanghai, a highly recommendable destination by our accounts. Nothing quite as ghostmodern as spending the evening of Christmas Eve/my birthday with Shamu performing in front of a massive screen-display yule-log fire and a live Sea-World choir singing Holy Night! Shamutastic!

Now, some long unfinished business: The Twin Peaks marathon was never convened, but I’m wondering if anyone in the area would be interested in geeking it up one summer in the next 1-2 years at the Twin Peaks Festival in Snoqualmie/North Bend? We could enter the costume contest collectively—need I say more to tempt you?

http://www.twinpeaksfest.com/

What up, yo? Is the Seattle contingent assembling sometime soon? My January opened up a bit.

Can you believe...

...this is the little girl who crawled around on her blanket in the big group TA office??
(Jim, Olivia and Rose at Rose & John's home)