A little update

What's in the hopper?


We're going to an Ingrid Michaelson concert in October for Lauren's birthday. And, Mark Twain Tonight! is coming to Boulder around the same time!


Fun for Lauren


Lauren is still kickin' it at Boulder Montessori School. Some days she loves it; some days she hates it.

She's auditioning for a play, Rabbit Hole, this weekend at Longmont Theatre. Everyone wish her luck!


School for Ryan

So, I'm three weeks into graduate school, and it's going pretty well. I think it's too early to tell whether or not I "love" the world of academia, but we will see.

My American Lit class is, of course, greatly interesting and relevant in relation to my hazy ideas concerning Whitman, metonymy, the American Myth, and the American re-remembering of the past, which I hope to eventually gather into something coherent. For next Tuesday, I will be leading the discussion on The Blithedale Romance, so here goes!

My Chaucer class has produced moments of inspiration, mostly due to the fact that the professor leading the class is currently writing a book on metonymy and recursion, both of which I find very sexy. Still, the minutia of the manuscripts and the paleography are things I'm struggling to attach to any personal zeal.

My Theory class is fresh and engaging, due in large part to my comparative ignorance of the majority of the subject matter. Every now and again, we are using Alfred Hitchcock and Wes Craven movies as illustrative models for specific critical theories, which is fun.

A final note


Anyone feel free to call us anytime. We miss everyone, so it would certainly be welcome.

Casa Bonita--Spanish for "what the f@ck!?"

Yes, this is the restaurant from South Park. The one of such hedonistic splendor that it drives Cartman to carry out an elaborate end-of-the-world hoax in order to lure Butters down into a bomb shelter, effectively taking his then-vacant spot at Kyle's birthday party (pictured below).

Yesterday, Lauren, Peg, and I traveled to Lakewood, Colorado, just outside of Denver, and discovered this outlandish Tex-Mex eatery right square in the middle of a very nondescript strip mall (Casa Bonita is flanked by a Dollar Tree and a Hollywood Video, though the creators of South Park portray it flanked by a 97 Cent Store and a Peter's Pit Stop). For a mere $14, one can purchase an All-You-Can-Eat Beef Deluxe Dinner, which consists of Grade F beef, stale tortillas, soggy tacos, and a generous helping of liquid cheese. But wait! If you think you're getting screwed, think again!

How about All-You-Can-Eat Sopapillas? How about daring cliff divers, wild gunfights, Black Bart's Cave, and a man in a gorilla suit!? Still not sold? Well, me neither, but it's off the bucket list!

I drove to Estes Park, and all I got was a broken heart

Lauren, Peg, and I took an exceedingly scenic drive to Estes Park, Colorado, along Highway 36 out of Boulder. Estes Park is home to the Rocky Mountain National Park Headquarters, The Stanley Hotel (known as The Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining), and several upscale ski resorts.

Needless to say, the drive was gorgeous--foothills turning into mountains, mountainsides covered in mature pine trees, and cool, crisp mountain air.Toward the end of the drive, I was beginning to fall in love with the area. The chill wind began to bring a drop in temperature, and the outside air just beyond the open window of our black Jeep smelled of strong pine trees, pure lumberjack towns where everything is simultaneously of the hip man and the everyman, and the cool breezes of Louisiana holidays. I find myself thinking, "This is where I want to live for the rest of my life!"

... And then, we arrived in Estes Park. There was never a greater congregation of all things touristy and hokey--Grandma's Mountain Cookies, Mrs. Something's Fudge Shoppe, and Mr. Something's Salt Water Taffy. As we slowly drove through the downtown area, a great feeling of loss began to swell within my chest. This place sucks!

Still, I know it's out there! Perhaps the next town over? Or the next town? Or the next town? I will find it! Who's with me!?

Either way, I think next time we'll stick with the National Forest--its bears, elks, and dirt--as opposed to the actual town--its fudge, caramel apples, and people-packed streets.

You ever feel as though you were born for greatness?

The Beau Jo's Challenge

This place is only a few hundred feet from my house. Rest assured, whoever comes to visit first, whether it be Dad, Jason, Shelton, Will, or Mark, he will take this challenge with me! The 14lb pizza!

Shakespeare Outdoors and Out West!

Last night (August 8th), Lauren and I went to the final showing of King Lear at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, which is largely held at the Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre on the university campus (pictured below). Typically, everyone enjoys a picnic out on the lawn beforehand (they even sell the Bard's BBQ), the artistic director delivers a brief talk before the beginning of the show, then you grab a beer and take your seat.

This performance of King Lear took place in the American West of the late 19th century, with King Lear portrayed as a larger-than-life oil baron à la Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (pictured below). At first, I was hesitant about this choice, seeing as how I've always thought the pre-Roman setting of the traditional King Lear wonderfully amplified the themes of bestiality and blindness. However, the "interpretation" was restricted entirely to the setting and costumes (making it a fresh, yet unobtrusive addition), and a stellar performance by John Hutton as King Lear anchored a solid, albeit imperfect cast. All in all, it was a compelling show, and we will certainly be back next year.

Call for pictures!

So, Lauren and I have this giant tackboard that extends the entire near side of our rectangular living area. Our plan is to put up photos, fliers, reminders, and notices (pictured below), but we are short on pictures to cover up this very large space.

That being said, we would like for anyone who is reading this to send us some pictures to put up on our tackboard, regardless of the date, quality, or contents of the photograph... whatever you think would look good on the tackboard. We want to blanket this thing in pictures of us, our friends, our family, our hometowns, etc! I'll put our address up here again:

Ryan & Lauren Garrett
135 S. 42nd Street
Boulder, CO 80305

How does a buffalo get everyday groceries? And where do they keep their dogs?

Well, it's really quite simple. Buffaloes who have money, or sometimes the ones who like to imagine they have money, go to a place like Sprouts Farmers' Market (pictured below), Whole Foods, or Sunflower Farmers Market.

Buffaloes who have no money, or perhaps the ones who have just realized they shouldn't have spent that much money at Sprouts on the previous visit, go to King Soopers (pictured below), which is owned by Kroger.

Either of these is actually a great choice, and even King Soopers has more variety than we have come to expect.

And yes, the view is even amazing from the grocery store parking lot!

P.S. This is Charlie's fancy doghouse in the backyard!

Our wish list

As you might have heard, we couldn't fit all of our furniture down the narrows stairs of the apartment. In response to this tragedy, we have started a wish list on our refrigerator (pictured below), which has obviously grown in its scope.

In the spirit of keeping our loved ones as involved in our out-of-state lives as possible, I will posting our wish list below, and we will strike through the items/services as they make their tenuous ways into our lives:

WISH LIST

Platform bed, since our box springs couldn't fit downstairs

Piano lessons for Lauren

Viola lessons for Ryan

Weber One-Touch Gold Grill (Katie bought a grill!)
Brinkmann Gourmet Charcoal Smoker & Grill

Two tickets to the Great American Beer Festival in Denver

Two tickets to the Colorado Shakespeare Festival

Futon for the office, since our couch couldn't fit downstairs

Fancy rolling office chair

Entertainment center, so we can replace the fragile end table that is currently supporting our 10-ton TV

Community Coffee Dark Roast

This just in: Lauren and I are accepting donations of Community Coffee Dark Roast sent to...

Ryan & Lauren Garrett
135 S. 42nd Street
Boulder, CO 80305

Yes, we need it!

We're here!

Well, as most everyone knows, we are in Boulder! We will be posting some pictures as soon as we get some. However, until then, we can tell you that Lauren has been hired as an intern at Boulder Montessori School (pictured below). She has a beautiful drive on the way to work!

If you want to check things out, they have a website at http://www.bouldermontessori.org/.

Saturday 07/17 Departure

Lauren and I will be headed out early Saturday morning. After we close up the U-Haul, we plan to stop by Harlow's for some coffee and doughnuts, and then we're headed to the Centennial State.

Since I need to have my vehicle inspected, we'll be driving through Austin (pictured below),

stopping in Abilene for the night at a wonderful Motel 6 (pictured below),

and making our way to Boulder on the second day. Here is our new address:

Ryan & Lauren Garrett

135 S. 42nd Street

Boulder, CO 80305

We're both really excited, and we look forward to putting up our first posts regarding our new life in Boulder!

Ryan's Fall 2010 schedule

I finally enrolled in my classes for the upcoming semester! As a full-time student, I'll be taking three different classes, each of them meeting once per week and lasting two and half hours. I'm excited!

Most of my classes will be in the Norlin Library (pictured below). The following course descriptions are taken from the department's website:

Introduction to Literatures of the United States: "American" Identity
Professor Mary Klages
Tuesday 12:30-3:00 pm


Is there an "American" literature? If so, how do we study it? What connections does literature have with an emerging and evolving nationalist identity? If not, how do we explore "literatures of the United States"? This course will use the American 1850s—a period of tremendous literary production, nationalist sentiment, political upheaval, and international diplomacy—as a case study to examine a variety of methods and critical perspectives relevant to literary scholarssip. These will include using archival sources, using digitized sources, applying different theoretical models and frameworks, and researching social and cultural contexts as modes of literary investigation. The course focuses on literary methodology as well as on important literary texts; readings will include primary works by Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Stowe, and Douglass and secondary works by Americanists from the past 50 years.


Contemporary Literary Theory
Professor Karen Jacobs
Wednesday 9:30-12:00 pm


This course is intended to introduce graduate students to the most significant theoretical movements that have influenced literary studies over the last several decades, with an emphasis on the ways in which the activity of interpretation has been conceptualized and practiced. Organized as a survey, the course will work towards a breadth of coverage, rather than undertaking in-depth analyses of any particular school. We will examine works drawn from structuralist, deconstructionist, and psychoanalytic theory; Marxist, historical and postcolonial theory; and feminist, racial and queer theory. We will intermittently apply these approaches to a selection of films and a novella.


Studies in Poetry: What good is Poetry in a Time Like This?: Poetics and Politics, 1790 to the Present
Professor Julie Carr
Thursday 1:00-3:30 pm


In this course we will read canonical poetics texts from the eighteen, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Poets philosophers, and scholars have long felt called to defend the work of the poetry against attacks of irrelevancy or elitism, to make a case for its political uses, or, in some cases, for its freedom from the practical demands of the political. We will examine these defenses and claims in their historical context, and will explore the explosive, contentious, outrageous, and sometimes deeply moving assertions that poets have made for their art and its place in the larger social and political spheres. We will begin with excerpts from Kant’s Critique of Judgment, move from there to classic Romantic texts, such as Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Keats’s letters, and Shelley’s Defense of Poetry. We will then examine key works from the latter half of the nineteenth century by poets such as Matthew Arnold, Charles Baudelaire, Mallarme, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Moving into the twentieth century, we will read essays by poets such as Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Langston Hughes, Charles Olson, Frank O’Hara, and Amiri Baraka, and works by philosophers such as Adorno, Kristeva, and Agamben. As we move closer to the present, we will study the claims of Language Poetry, and we will consider how identity politics, feminism, and queer theory have informed contemporary poetics. This will be a heavy reading course, and will require two papers.

Our new home in Boulder!

So, Lauren and I have squared away our home for the next year (possibly the next two years) in Boulder, Colorado. It is a well-lit, well-windowed basement apartment just south of campus.

About the place:

• 2 bedrooms/1 bath - We will probably turn one of the bedrooms into an office for Lauren's work and my homework. There are even some built-in shelves and a built-in desk in one of the rooms.
• 1,100 square feet - By Ryan and Lauren standards, this place is massive!
• Full kitchen - Though we are probably going to be using a meal plan for most dinners, it will be nice to cook up some stuff for leftovers, lunches, etc.
• Big, fenced-in backyard - This will be the love of both Charlie, our smiling black mutt, and my "Bobby Flay" alter ego. 
• Private entrance - Yes, much like a superhero's lair. 
• Tons of storage space - We don't have much to store, but I could hide inside one of the closets so as to spring out on any unsuspecting victims.
• Great access to public transportation - It's free, and it goes right to campus in a matter of minutes!
• Within a mile or two of Sprouts Farmers Market, Whole Foods Market, Sunrise Liquor and Market, Sunflower Farmers Market, Southern Sun Pub & Brewery, Dark Horse Bar, some crazy-good Nepalese restaurant, Walnut Cafe, a short bus ride to Pearl Street Mall, and who knows what else!

We're moving in July 18th! Pardon the mess. The current tenants are in the process of moving out.