And Today's Headline Is...

HETEROSEXUAL, CHRISTIAN, OMNIVOROUS PARENTS PUT BABY IN MICROWAVE--NATION DIVIDED: CAN WE TRUST OMNIVORES TO CARE FOR CHILDREN? SHOULD STRAIGHT CHRISTIANS BE ALLOWED TO MARRY?

GALVESTON, Texas (AP) -- A woman blames the devil, and not her husband, for severely burning their infant daughter in a microwave, a Texas television station reported.

Eva Marie Mauldin said Satan compelled her 19-year-old husband, Joshua Royce Mauldin, to microwave their daughter May 10 because the devil disapproved of Joshua's efforts to become a preacher.

"Satan saw my husband as a threat," Eva Mauldin told Houston television station KHOU-TV.

A grand jury indicted Joshua Mauldin last week on child injury charges after hearing evidence that he placed the two-month-old in a motel microwave for 10 to 20 seconds. (Watch cops react to burned baby )

The infant, Ana Marie, remains hospitalized. She suffered burns on the left side of her face and to her left hand, police said.

Police said Joshua Mauldin told them he put Ana Marie in the microwave because he was under stress. Eva Maudlin denied it.

"He would never do anything to hurt her. He loves her," she said.

She is hoping to be reunited with her daughter, but Child Protective Services is working to have the parental rights severed.

Pronounced "Ah'-Sha"

I'm reminded more than once lately of one of Nietzsche's more catchy aphorisms. "It takes more courage to make an end than a beginning. All poets know that." I'm probably quoting him badly since the last time I read Zarathustra was when I was 18 and that's, well, many years ago now. Anyway, I've been, indeed, in the wells and caverns of the revisionist blues. Granted, I've been pretty lucky so far. I can only hope that my next four (gasp) chapters go over so well. I'm currently in the process of finishing up revisions of my second chapter. The first is already heavily revised and currently circulating with my committee. The quote above is applicable because I'm discovering that writing conclusions to chapters is a bigger bitch than I ever realized. I think I'm really bad at conclusions to begin with, and usually I end up doing some sort of verbal equivalent of the spastic jumps that really annoying man-child does on MAD TV. I hope to christ one of you gets that reference. ("Look what I can do!") I'm currently trying to tack on an at best subjunctive and at worst half-assed conclusion that gestures toward the argument I'll make in the next chapter, which I haven't written yet. I had a feeling that you all would be really riveted by this account of my revision process, but it's mah blog, so whatevah.

When I'm not slogging through my own prose, the summer is lovely. I've been getting work done, spending 30-40 hours a week smiling at strangers at my other job, working out at the gym (13 miles today! AND it felt great), and watching Dark Angel. There is still much work to be done, as there always is, but I always appreciate the winning combination of warm weather and no teaching! I'm also, perhaps as a way of distracting myself from the more difficult library books patiently awaiting my attention and which are much more pertinent to my next chapter, reading a bit more into the oeuvre of the deeply problematic and endlessly fascinating H. Rider Haggard. My dearest niece doesn't know if yet, but she's definitely getting She and Ayesha: The Return of She for her birthday this year. What a fun writer he is! I'm currently reading Allan Quartermain and it's cracking me up. Haggard is deeply obsessed with imaginatively penetrating (pun intended) the wilds of various non-European spaces. He's mostly into Africa, though the second She book mostly takes place in Central Asia. His rugged, manly, great white hunter protagonists go on the most brutal, exhausting, and excruciating quests before discovering--as they must--white people lording power over non-white people and white women threatening to destroy civilization as we know it. Herein are contained the great remaining mysteries of the world. Like I said, he's a great story-teller, and he completely cracks me up.

As a reward for bearing with this perhaps tedious exposition, here's some artist's rendering of the endlessly fascinating Ayesha.

Here, I'm pretty sure she's bathing in the eternal flame that gives her her immortal youth, beauty, and mysterious ability to rule superstitious minds (read natives) through terror. Make no mistake about it, her love kills mere mortals. In the world of Haggard, many mountains contain such a flame. The novels are finally unclear, though, about whether Ayesha power comes from Isis, to whom she was a priestess in her regular lifetime, or Set--the Egyptian version of the Devil.

Oh, Manichean Delirium! Angel? or Angelheart?

One of the Many Signs of the Apocalypse

Or at least this should be. I felt sort of, vaguely, validated when I saw this site for the first time. Validated not so much in the general sense as in my feeling of horror when Red Lobster aired a commercial featuring a tracking shot of lobsters scampering rapidly across the ocean floor to the soundtrack "Nowhere to run to, baby....nowhere to hide." This from a former seafood lover. Anyway, for your perusal and comment, my friends, I offer this. If you dare.

Who's the biggest loser?

I am, of course. And not in that lame, reality tv way.

I attempted the Master Cleanse this week. Ten days of syrup, lemon juice, and cayenne, supplemented by a quart of salt water first thing in the morning and some wonderful, cramp-inducing laxative tea. I tried and failed. To my credit, my generous friends B and Q assure me, I made it almost two days on the "lemonade." I like to think of myself as a ~fairly~ hardcore person in that I rarely do things half-assed, so I'm still feeling pretty lame for not being able to make it even two complete days on this cleanse. Some people do it for 40+ days. After something like 43 hours, though, I got absolution from the two people closest to the process, and dove into a rice cake. Exquisite. Then B made delicious tacos with brown rice, beans, red peppers, and his famous guac. I feel human today for the first time in two days. Most, but not all, of the online info I got about it exclaimed about how much energy the cleansers had. How light and clean they felt, how acute their thinking was, and so on and so forth. I felt like my calves were full of concrete, and I had almost no energy. My head felt like it was stuffed with hot, wet, cotton balls. Fully seed-of-doubted, I decided yesterday afternoon that I was going to the gym. After all, the master cleanse is supposed to be enhanced by exercise. You're supposed to exercise while doing it, though that sounds counter-intuitive. Anyway, I really really value my time on the treadmill. Saturday I ran fourteen miles and lifted weights. Add a hot shower, some soft clothes, and a good meal to that and I call it heaven. Yesterday, I went to the gym, hopped on the treadmill, and started to walk. I thought I'd be able to do at least a slow three miles, maybe at 5 (I usually run at about 6.5). I couldn't even run for a minute. I was immediately fatigued and felt like I was going to fall over. Then I tried to lift weights with approximately the same result. All I really wanted to do was stare into space somewhere warm. A bit teary-eyed, I fled the scene of my humiliation. That's when the absolution and rice cake episode began.

Thus endeth the fast. I completely suck. I AM the biggest loser. But I can think clearly again, and I think this might be a ten mile day.

Oh Bleeding Nun, Bleeding Nun, Wherefore Art Thou, Bleeding Nun?

The latest stop in my sort of chaotic, researchy wanderings has included some plays by that most eminent of the Sturm und Drang persuasion, Friedrich von Schiller. The focus of my inquiry has been thwarted, though. I read, or thought I read somewhere, that the famous Bleeding Nun episode from Lewis's The Monk was borrowed from The Robbers. After reading all of the plays in the collected volume I picked up from the library, though, I'm disappointed in this regard. Not a single bleeding nun to be found amid the thwarted, young heroic barons and mistakenly murdered and wrongly imputed maidens. Not one. However, I've discovered something that Schiller does do remarkably well. Have this for a sample:

"I have been told that the great never know what misery is; that they fly from the knowledge of it. But I will teach the duke what misery is; I will paint to him, in all the writhing agonies of death, what misery is; I will cry aloud, in wailings that shall creep through the very marrow of his bones, what misery is; and, while at my picture his hairs shall stand on end like quills upon the porcupine, will I shriek into his affrighted ear, that in the hour of death the sinews of these mighty gods of earth shall shrivel and shrink, and that at the day of judgment beggars and kings shall be weighed together in the same balance."

And this from sweet Louisa, daughter of the town fiddler and prized primarily--as is typical of the logic of this kind of romance--for her artlessness and innocence. I still want my bleeding nun, but I see what the big deal is.

Ah, Spring!

Annoys me. Or, rather, it predisposes me to annoyance. I friend of mine from some years ago recently blogged about how Spring makes her feel...lascivious isn't quite the right word...randy might be. You know,

"The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies."

(NB: no dolphins splashing in the above, queercat)

For as long as I can remember, though, I do get the characteristic Spring Fever, accompanied by itchy palms and feet, the irrepressible desire to open windows and just BE in outside spaces, the longing to flee. What accompanies it, though, is not the desire to spawn with strangers, but a sudden and deep distaste for the flesh explosion that particularly comes along with warming weather in previous cold climes. Everyone who teaches can identify, I'd imagine. You suddenly come face-to-ass with all that flesh-ness previously hidden under $90 sweat pants and Ugg boots. And, it really isn't just that. Winter brain fog melts into Spring anxiety. At the moment, for example, I'm incredibly annoyed that, while I recalled all three volumes of Edward Long's 1868 History of Jamaica, the library only held Volume 2 for me. I, of course, checked it out and went merrily home, believing that the three had been surely collected in the one quite imposing tome I had received. As it turns out, this isn't the case. Really, though, this is my fault, and this is the place at which curmudgeons--whether Spring feverish or not--go bad. Had I been paying attention, I would no doubt have stumbled home weighed down with all 2000 odd pages of the thing. Instead, I sit here grumpily writing about undergraduate skin folds and the idiocies of library search and hold functions. Clearly, I need a life.

Still, I remember being a freshman (since none of you knew me then, let me paint this picture for you: extremely doughy, long and crazy red hair, facial piercings, chain-smoking, with that mushroomy look one gets from spending virtually all of one's time in a tiny dormroom slogging through the Bible and really anything else that made me feel a little bit less like I was wasting my life) and hating all the healthy hippies with their frizbee and their dogs, making happy homes on the campus quad at the first hint of Spring. Maybe my annoyance is vestigial, but I don't suppose it really matters.

The Horror...The Horror

I realize that this post should really be entitled, Domestic Antics, part 2, but that didn't really work out so well. The complete lack of privacy during that little trip, complicated and improved by my beloved nephews who have no sense of personal space or time (bless them) rendered further blogging while in the thick of things impractical if not impossible. This means I'll leave you with the image of me stretched out on makeshift bed amid a tumble of laundry in the middle of the night, starving, and doing my best to ignore the inevitable squeaking of the poor hamster's wheel. I, Abject. Suffice it to say, it was lovely to be there and lovely to come home. The intervening eight and a half hour drive through a snow storm that stretched from Virginia to New York was not lovely. When I finally got here, the entire front of my car was covered with a thick crust of ice. It took a whole day of sitting in the sun and my strenuous efforts with an ice scraper to get it off. My ocd was tweaked with satisfaction, though, at the sight. billy, perhaps, can sympathize.

Since then things have been non-stop. My students are alternately adorable and terrifying. The weather is, by turns, lovely and crappy. People seem to be in the collective state of denial generally brought on by winter's death rattle. B, of course, in particular. Two weeks. Christ. Who ever heard of two full weeks of vacation in the middle of the semester? I'm telling you, Buffalonians are soft. In Montana, they never cancelled school no matter how bad the weather was, we only got one week off during Spring semester, and almost nobody went to college or left the state. So there.

I'm sort of on tenterhooks--not that I know what these are--this week. I'm getting ready to hand two very rough chapters in for comments, so I'm officially in self-flagellation mode. Writer's remorse, maybe? Brief periods of placid self-assurance are continuously swept away by a moment of horror in which I think suddenly of the worst thing that could be said to me about my project so far. With an effort, I quell the panic, and sink once again into comfortable denial. Okay, fellow writers, this would be a good moment for you to come clean about your own writerly loathing and, maybe, self-destructive behaviors. Surely, I'm not the only one, right? Ummm. Right? The above picture of one of my favorite horror villains is intended to give you the appropriate, visceral, organ-cringing sensation just in case you don't sympathize.