Hunting and Pecking (and processing)

I am bumming K's internet right now, and will post some photos once I have my own on Monday, so will write a quick note:

I am hot on the tail of a few jobs. I've not yet given up on PP or the academic positions for which I've applied (it's not yet time to give up), and I have also found a couple of editing jobs (full-time and with benefits, yeah!) and a couple of jobs at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. My goal is to get the cover letters et al out tomorrow and this weekend. Monday, I will submit my resume to a temp agency Eric recommended as part of a back-up plan.

Tomorrow I go in for my new Washington driver's license and then on a hunt for a good parka with a hood, so the rain stays off my poor glasses and hair (which, in its dampness, rails against my constant flat-iron pruning).

K and I had a long talk today about me starting a local reading group. I brought it up to him and he offered to build me a web site, with grand visions of me starting a writer's reader's blog, to have my friends and strangers submit discussions and responses to books, and to eventually develop it into broad rather than simply local. I love that he not only encourages me in these directions, and fans my whimsies, but takes it a step further by suggesting parameters that I had not before considered.

But what form would this reading collective take? While I hate to sound elitist, I would want the group to be folks who don't want to sit around and read crap and say things like, "I thought it was good." My friends are, obviously, good examples of what I would want the demographic to look like: radicals, book nerds, free-thinkers, critical thinkers, and socially conscious arty types. I told K that if I put an ad up for a reading group on craigslist, perhaps I could say something about feminism and being queer-friendly, and that might cut down on the racket who might otherwise respond to the post.

What I initially envision is having a physical reading group that meets in person but also posts on the blog, and also having a virtual reading group that discusses via blog posts--and then combine the whole mix and choose books that relate thematically and/or topically, which would then rotate every 3 months or so. For instance, months 1-3 might be books about monkeys; months 4-6 might be books on avante garde filmmaker bio's; months 7-9 might be books on historical literary clusters (i.e., transcendentalists, beat writers, lake poets). You get the idea.

I am certainly far from the first person to conceptualize such a meeting of the minds, so I'm trying to figure out a unique contribution to cyber-literacism....

Home is slowly feeling like home.