Upon reading yesterday's post, people who know me and my dad may have found themselves wondering:
What about the Sit 'n Spin?
As well you might. Like my mother's quilts, though, the Sit 'n Spin deserves its own entry. Which you'll get.
In the meantime, I think we should all hit up Threadless.com (the source of today's image) and get them to start making shirts with this guy's submission. What could be sexier than a wordless Sit 'n Spin shirt?
I have long known that I have the coolest father who ever lived. Sorry, those of you who may think your dads get that title, because my dad has been holding it tight since April 1976. I was prompted to think about this fact some more this afternoon, on my way from the village post office to the village coffee shop for lunch. As I came down the steps of our humble p.o., rueing the fact that I conservatively wore my winter coat even though it's about 60 degrees outside, I heard a motorcycle engine rev and backfire. I looked to my left and saw a couple coming down the road on a modest-sized Harley--not one of the big hogs, but big enough to make some noise in my tiny town. I grinned, and the woman holding on behind the driver unclasped her right arm and gave me a big wave.
My father, you see, has harbored--and may still harbor--hopes of retiring from his career as an automotive innovator to the back of a Harley. He has hoped, against hope, to get my mom a sidecar so that they can go tooling around the country in mad biker style. I know he's not just talking the talk; he worked for a year or so at the local Harley-Davidson shop, helping repair bikes. He could not only rock the Harley but also fix it if it broke down.
But, Harley or no Harley, my dad rocks out.
In November 1980, a little album called Autoamerican debuted. You can do the math and figure out how old I was when my dad found me on the green carpet in our blue living room and said, "Come hear this." We went into the family room and sat on the floor--on the same rug that's now in my own living room--and I listened for the first time to Debbie Harry's sultry croon: "Toe to toe, dancing very close..." And then, suddenly, just when I thought the song was, you know, just some song, came the break: "Fab Five Freddy told me everybody's fly..." And then--it just kept getting better--we were hearing about the Man from Mars, and he'd eaten our head, and we were eating up cars (Cadillacs, Lincolns too! Mercury, and Subaru!), and bars (where the people meet!), and then we stopped eating cars and eating bars, and then we only ate guitars! Get up!
For someone whose musical taste had run to Free to Be, You and Me and Sesame Street (both of which I had in awesome vinyl that I spun on my FisherPrice portable record player like the DJ I'd still like to be, someday), this Blondie group was a revelation.
Things have just gotten cooler from there. At our first house in Indiana, we had six acres of wooded property, and so my father bought a used riding mower/tractor to use for cutting the lawn and vacuuming up leaves. Then, he also used it to cut an intricate network of trails through our property so that my brother and I could play in the woods without coming home covered in poison ivy or weird animal bites or woody abrasions. He kept the trails clear for us for the four years we lived in that house. I count them as one more reason my brother and I get along so well now; we spent a lot of youth-time running around making up stories and stuff, and, well, just running around. In those days, he drove a red Corvair, and then a big ol' Oldsmobile with a bass tube in the trunk (my brother can still rattle things with that bass tube, now that it's in his trunk), and he and my mom picked out an awesomely vintage Airstream trailer that we pulled behind the Malibu for years. This was years after he'd built a monster N-gauge train table in the basement, with a bridge and figure-eights. And that was years after he and my mom had let us draw with markers all over the drywall in the basement that was eventually going to get covered up with paneling anyway. (Note, those of you with children: I'm writing this stuff for you as much as for my dad.)
When my parents went out on their first date, on Bastille Day in 1967, my father's opening gambit was to hand my mother the button she had lost from her chartreuse leather coat months earlier. "Where did you get this?" she said. "My people are everywhere," he replied. Now you know how cool both my parents are. I mean, really: a redhead with a chartreuse leather coat? and a guy who manages to totally deadpan his way through giving a stranger back her lost button? I think my mom might still have that button somewhere.
You already know that my parents used to hide destinations from my brother and me. They also made sure that our Easter bunny, named E. Bunny, hid Easter baskets and left abundant and truly perplexing but hilarious clues for us everywhere. (I should also add that my father, from whom I got my particular sense of humor as well as my awareness of my periodic, blinding gullibility, once convinced me that the Cadbury bunny really did lay those eggs. I had protested that bunnies don't lay eggs. When the commercial came back around again--and I'm certain that we were sitting on that rust-colored leather sofa--he said, "Now just watch." Indeed, the rabbit clucked, got up, and had laid an egg. How could I argue with the evidence of my senses?)
I think my father was the first person to notice that I was becoming a night owl, back when I was in high school. Once, when his mother was about to visit us and was going to stay in my room, he decided that I shouldn't get bounced out of my bed. I remember his telling me that it was important that I should be able to stay up and do my reading and writing in peace. I also remember his coming into my room early some Saturday mornings, while I was still sleeping, and making a space for himself to sit down between me and the edge of the bed. Usually, it was around 6:30, which is late rising for my father. And he would talk to me, about anything and everything, until I was awake, though still drowsy, and would get out of bed and come sit with him while he redesigned or streamlined processes or invented machines with Anvil. I do like my sleep, but I like spending time talking with my father more.
One winter, I wanted very badly to drop out of college and become a burger-flipper (not out of anything like caprice, or reckless love, or anything exciting like that, trust me). My parents wouldn't hear of it and brought me back to school at the previously scheduled time. I did what I could to get them to stay as long as possible, but eventually it was just time for them to make the trip home. After I got myself settled back in to my room (that was the year I lived in the basement), I got myself ready for bed. When I slipped into my bottom bunk, I realized that somehow, without my noticing, my father had stuck a little slip of paper into the springs directly over my head--a sheet from his omnipresent pocket notepad, marked with his signature smiling face, a sketch I would have to show you in order to have you be able to envision it. (We used to draw this face, and bellybuttons, on fish and bunnies too.) I left that face to look down on me from the mattress springs for the better part of the semester.
One of the things I love most about my father is that he is the most fearlessly creative person I know. His visual sense is incredible; he started taking photographs and learning darkroom technique when he was about eleven, if I remember correctly, and even his early stuff is beautifully done. He is a mechanical genius; I have watched him create whole processes from start to finish, from scratch. He continues to innovate even in the face of opposition or (what's possibly worse) blank indifference. And he figures out ways to help people around him figure out their reasons for being here, the things that will ensure that they have something to love, something to do, and something to look forward to. My father taught me much of what I know about how to treat other people well, with dignity and respect; through the way he has always treated my mother (he had her at that button, you see), he showed me the worthy struggle and boundless joy a healthy, strong partnership can be.
Part of the reason I'm thinking about my dad today--I mean, other than the fact that I think about him every day--is that he always wanted me to be a Supreme Court Justice. He wanted me to be the first female Chief Justice, in fact. He still thinks that Constitutional law could be my field. (I think, actually, that psychotherapy could be. Sometimes we disagree about my future.) I don't know if he was right; I do know that he never tried to foist that dream on me, that he never asked whether a doctorate in English would really repay the effort. In other words, he made sure that I could be fearless and creative in my adult life--that I could find my own big dreams and carry them out. And for that, I wish him all the Harley-riding his heart desires.
He's that cool.
sources for today's images: 1) Solo Regalos; 2) Amazon.
In large part, I am a night owl because I like to be awake when others are not. I like to see other people sleeping, for one thing; there was that summer in Greece, for instance, when I could not sleep on our bus because I enjoyed watching everyone else lose consciousness. And I used to love to slip out of bed early when visiting my Chicagoan ex-boyfriend (before he was my ex-boyfriend, of course), so that I could be up and about while he was still gone to the world. I like to hear other people sleeping, having spent the nights of my teenage years reading novels and solving advanced trigonometry problems to the rough music of my family's snores. But I'll settle for knowing that others are sleeping, without actually experiencing their sleep sensorily.
Tonight, as if bidden, Orion appeared in my southern sky and beckoned me to leave the car in the driveway and walk back to the office after the television watching was over. The weather has been terrifically warm here today; this evening is something of a replay of those autumn nights just before the temperature dips low enough to chill. The moon is waxing, as well, so my shadow slipped along by my right side as I crunched down the road. When I came back out of the building a few hours later, the moon had wheeled to the southwest, and Orion had made his way westward as well. Orion was at my back the whole silent trek home, and the moon granted everything an impossible clarity--right down to the little orange dragon who's been sitting in a neighbor's yard for more than a month and whom I keep meaning to photograph.
To be a true flaneuse, I suppose I would need to be walking about in a street with others, or in a cityscape of some sort, lounging about a bit in the presence of strangers. But it suits me perfectly to be a solitary walker--and to be able to have my reveries without feeling exiled is to have the best of both worlds.
My senior year in high school, we read a story--and I was about to say I don't remember what it is, but then I realized that I actually sought out a copy of the short story anthology (West and Stallman's The Art of Modern Fiction) after I graduated from high school, so now I'm trying to find the story for you--yes, this is it. We read Katherine Mansfield's "The Daughters of the Late Colonel," and what I remember about the story is, as you may be coming to expect by now, a particular cast of light:
She remembered the times she had come in here, crept out of bed in her nightgown when the moon was full, and lain on the floor with her arms outstretched, as though she was crucified. Why? The big, pale moon had made her do it.... She remembered too how, whenever they were at the seaside, she had gone off by herself and got as close to the sea as she could, and sung something, something she had made up, while she gazed all over that restless water. There had been this other life, running out, bringing things in bags, getting things on approval, discussing them with [her sister], taking them back to get more things on approval, and arranging father's trays and trying not to annoy father. But it all seemed to have happened in a kind of tunnel. It wasn't real. It was only when she came out of the tunnel into the moonlight or by the sea or into a thunderstorm that she really felt herself. What did it mean? What did it all lead to? Now? Now?I will admit to having lain myself down on the living room floor in my parents' house, under the influence of this passage, when I was in high school and the moon was full. It's one of those passages that must have claimed its own particular place in my neural pathways; I think that the image of that young woman lying on the floor, in the moonlight, must have shaped the way I conceptualized every moonlit walk home I took in college. Now, having typed it in for you, I also wonder whether it shaped the way Virginia Woolf characterized both Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse; Mansfield's story is copyrighted 1922, Woolf's novel 1927. But the strangest twist of all, to my mind: my allusion to Woolf's novel (which is my standby for allusions, yet another reason you should read it if you haven't already and you're planning to keep reading here) in the title of this post made itself the refrain of my walk home long before I started musing on other moonlights I have known, literary or otherwise. My Mechanischer Kopf works in ways I don't always understand. These kinds of sinuous-tenuous connections--the ones where causality matters so much less to me, at least for a moment, than sheer correlation--are the ones I love best.
On a night lit like this one last winter, I came into my second-floor study to pick up a book for bedtime. Because I knew where the book was, I didn't turn on the light. Looking down on my snowy, moon-silverblued yard, I saw a doe and two yearlings--the same ones, I felt sure, that I had watched growing up all summer--haunting my side of my neighbor's hedge. The doe and one of the yearlings passed along toward the backyard, but the other yearling stayed behind, chewing at low branches. Then, taking a few steps to her right, she suddenly, silently, reared up on her back legs and arched her neck to capture branches just out of her reach. I'd never seen a deer standing on its hind legs that way. She stayed suspended there for a few seconds, then ambled off to join the others.
Perhaps the great revelation never does come, but at least the small ones do.
(And you know I wanted a swell picture of deer in the moonlight to illustrate my last anecdote, but you try Google Imaging "deer moonlight" and see what you find. At least now I know where to get one of those shirts.)
source for today's image: REU program, N.A.Sharp/NOAO/AURA/NSF
And so we find ourselves at Thursday once again. And you all know what that means. If I were a betting woman, I'd already have my money down on Master P's clomping his way right off the show tonight. But between now and 8 p.m., I must do my best impersonation of this guy:
I discovered Raoul Hausman's "Der Geist unserer Zeit (Mechanischer Kopf)" ("The Spirit of the Age (Mechanical Head)") (1919) in an advertisement for MOMA's upcoming DaDa show, sometime during the break. Hausman was one of the Berlin DaDaists. (Sometime I will tell you more about why DaDa pleases me so reliably. It has to do with, of all people and places, Roland Penrose and the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh, not to mention the Spanish Civil War.) The Mechanischer Kopf lives at the Centre Pompidou, that wacky palace of enormous pipes and mystifying escalators and tremendous modern art, in Paris. And he's the best representation I've seen of what it feels like to craft syllabi, which I continue to do--though with a more pleasant expression on my face. These days of high seriousness are also days of high humor.
If you feel like feeding your own mechanical head--because I know I'm not quite holding up my end of the bargain today--hie your way to the Centre Pompidou's website and play with its online library. You'll need your rudimentary French (you know, the French in your brain that could still say, "Je voudrais un cafe, s'il vous plait," because you brushed it up with a crazy Bulgarian who tried to tell you that Julia Kristeva was only famous because of her husband.... oh, right: only a couple of us went through that, and one of us--not me, I'll add--took out his frustration by translating a story about howitzers as a final project) once you get into the searching, but I think you'll do just fine. If you look around enough, you'll find the source for today's image.
When I was in college, I had two dorm rooms: one was my actual, school-assigned room (my senior year, on the third of the east-facing side of a historic dorm, so that I had beautiful views of the sun rising every morning while I finished writing my senior thesis), and the other was the third floor of the building next door, the beautifully and aptly named Ascension Hall. The third floor of Ascension Hall is a reading room, replete with stained glass and hardwood floors and high, beamed ceilings. I moved in every evening after dinner and stayed at my heavy wooden table, beside the heater and the window, until security came to lock up the building and kick me out at 2 a.m. Some evenings I got lucky, and they didn't show up until 2:30. I was always the tiniest bit resentful that I was being made to go home; now I realize that had they not booted me out of the reading room every night, I would probably never have slept in my own bed. As it was, by the time I got home, the fraternity guys who lived below me were usually asleep, or at least quiet, and so I could either keep working or (as more usually happened) fall into bed for a few hours before getting up and starting the whole routine over again.
One of my favorite parts of the whole process of packing up and walking home was that for most of the winter, during the three minutes I was outside, walking from building to building, I could see the constellation Orion somewhere in the sky. Some nights, I think I actually talked to him. I have clear visual memories of the ink-blue vast of sky between Ascension and my dorm, over the trees that dot the slope eastward away from campus, and those tell-tale nine bright stars suspended there to my side. It wasn't long, my sophomore year, before I thought of Orion as my escort home, the figure that would be waiting when I pushed open the heavy wooden south door of Ascension, walked down the stone steps, and paced along the walkway to the room where my roommate lay sleeping already. (She left the light burning low for me, though. I always thought that was nice of her. That year, we lived in the basement, and our windows were like portholes, resting at ground level. You may remember this detail from my explanation of why I don't like reggae. Anyhow, the windows always glowed quietly, making it all the easier to bid Orion goodnight and go inside and down some more stairs. Going back to that subterranean room, after the loftiness of Ascension's top floor, felt like true descent.) When I found Robert Frost's line "I have been one acquainted with the night" during my senior year, I felt as though I'd finally located myself in verse.
What has always made seeing Orion all the more exceptional, to my mind, is that I generally can't see constellations. I, like nearly everyone else (I suspect), can pick out the Big Dipper. Sometimes I think I can see Cassiopeia's big W. But Orion is the only non-Dipper I'm truly confident I'm seeing, and every fall I wait for his reappearance on my eastern horizon. In Ithaca, one year, I saw him first in the southwest, as he prepared to sink below the horizon at dawn, when I had just shown up to wait in line for the opening of the Friends of the Library book sale. I was so excited that I pointed it out to the people with whom I was standing. One of these people, who was breaking my heart slowly but surely, then had to point the constellation out to the woman who, I found out later, was his girlfriend; she didn't recognize it, may not have known it at all. I held this fact against her. The silliness of that whole situation defied reason.
My inability to see constellations--which also, to my mind, defies reason--partners up with a couple of similar, and similarly galling, incapacities. Some power must be on my side this morning, because of the two that just popped to mind, the only one that's stayed around long enough to make it into words is that when I have gone shelling, I have had an excruciatingly hard time being able to see good shells. I want to have an eye for all things detailed, all things rare and collectible and deserving of vision, and when I can't see them, I feel inordinately frustrated with myself. I don't need to have anyone draw me an umbrella in the sky at a party. I'd like to be able to see the pictures others have seen up there in the firmament. I want to find the rare chambered nautilus, the lovely sand dollar, the once-in-a-lifetime seahorse. I don't want to forget the beautiful word. (Perhaps my encouraging students to recirculate dying or forgotten words has come from this longing; I don't want them to miss these things, either.) I feel slightly less alone in my frustration with constellation-seeing now that I know Thomas Carlyle felt it too; apparently he once asked, "Why did not somebody teach me the constellations, and make me at home in the starry heavens, which are always overhead, and which I don't know to this day?"
I thought a lot about Orion as I drove home last night, in part because I'm thinking I may be doing this late-night drive home through mid-Ohio more often, and in part because I realized that I haven't seen him yet this winter, even on my late-night walks home. When I walk home now, I'm northward bound; Orion seems elsewhere. More often, I'm driving home, skittish as ever about a half-mile walk along a dark street, even in my tiny village. The night before our last day of classes last fall, I broke my own record and headed home from the office at 3:30 a.m. It was about 15 degrees outside; I had wrapped my scarf around my head, babushka style, because I hadn't bothered to take a hat with me when I went to work in the afternoon. The whole world was silent, asleep.
The highway felt like that last night; I killed my brights as I slipped through Centerburg and Mt. Liberty and Bangs, figuring that even if the people in those houses nestled up against the road are used to mid-night street-roar and light-flash, I could do my part to help them keep sleeping--particularly because, I'm coming to realize, I may take my abilities to sleep like a rock a bit too much for granted. In Centerburg, all the stoplights had been turned to flashing yellows; people still had their Christmas lights up, and I saw the dog-sized wire-and-lights fake deer that I find so funny (because last year, when my parents picked up a pair for our yard in Indiana, our dog was utterly perplexed by this inanimate thing her own size but with none of the smells she expects from fellow animals). One house also had one of those outdoor projectors, a latter-day magic lantern, projecting "Let it Snow" onto its side. I kept waiting for everything to add up, but instead I think I'm supposed to be suspended in a happy, slightly discombobulated anticipation for a little while longer, getting acquainted with the night in a new way, relearning my landscapes yet again.
Today's postscript: I read myself to sleep last night with more Standage and, aptly enough, came across this very sweet anecdote from Thomas Edison's diary:
Even in my courtship my deafness was a help. In the first place it excused me for getting quite a little nearer to [his second wife, Mina] than I would have dared to if I hadn't had to be quite close in order to hear what she said. My later courtship was carried on by telegraph. I taught the lady of my heart the Morse code, and when she could both send and receive we got along much better than we could have with spoken words by tapping out our remarks to one another on our hands. Presently I asked her thus, in Morse code, if she would marry me. The word "Yes" is an easy one to send by telegraphic signals, and she sent it. If she had been obliged to speak it, she might have found it harder. (qtd. in Standage 142)I feel as though David Brooks, who wrote an amusingly befuddled "what are the kids up to these days?" column about online communities for Sunday's Times, ought to read Standage's chapter on love over the telegraph wires and the kinds of online communities that sprang up when telegraph operators suddenly found themselves all connected on the job. People played chess and checkers, told dirty jokes, hooked up with fellow operators, helped other non-operators hook up (and even get married) online--lots of the kinds of things that happen in these systems that Brooks thinks might be a sign that we "kids" might not be growing up, or some such thing. Amusingly, within the last month, I've also watched as a blogger on another site I frequent has blown onto the scene and started chiding longer-standing bloggers about the fact that they're blogging rather than getting out into the world and meeting people; it's a little appalling, really, and provoked my ire one time when she got snippy with someone whose stuff I've really enjoyed reading. Mainly, what all this is adding up to is that, as usual, things are more complicated than they at first appear--and none of us may be doing any new things at all. I don't love the Barenaked Ladies, but I think that one song (despite its annoying "woo hoo hoo!" hoots) espoused a philosophy of history that might not be all wrong.
sources for today's images: 1) Hubblesite; 2) University of Oklahoma's History of Science online exhibitions; 3) MIT's Nuclear Reactor Laboratory (image by W. Fecych); 4) an online 1895 atlas.
This afternoon my brain is multi-tasking, whether or not I want it to: I'm building syllabi, trying to trace out the throughlines that will make all this material comprehensible to the kiddoes who are preparing to return to this little academic village, and today that means I'm reading about the development of telegraphy. You may already be able to sense the way connections will start to proliferate. It's a bit mind-boggling, really (and I don't need a Freudian genius to tell me why I just slipped and typed "mind-blogging"): once telegraphy really got going--which took awhile, even once the technology had been worked out (which took its own while), since people at first thought of it as a spectacle, rather than an everyday-useful phenomenon--networks sprouted like strange plants, across oceans, between countries, between cities, within cities, within buildings. I'm loving the hopes that people had for the telegraph; by 1880, Tom Standage tells us in The Victorian Internet, 100,000 miles of undersea cable were connecting the world, and people were prognosticating peace as a result:An ocean cable is not an iron chain [wrote Henry Field, the brother and biographer of Cyrus Field, one of the great financiers of telegraphy on the American side of things], lying cold and dead in the icy depths of the Atlantic. It is a living, fleshy bond between severed portions of the human family, along which pulses of love and tenderness will run backward and forward forever. By such strong ties does it tend to bind the human race in unity, peace and concord.... it seems as if this sea-nymph, rising out of the waves, was born to be the herald of peace. (qtd. in Standage 104)
But my favorite detail, so far, is the pneumatic tube system designed in the 1860s to relieve blockages at major exchange points:Consider, for example, the path of a message from Clerkenwell in London to Birmingham. After being handed in at the Clerkenwell Office, the telegraph form would be forwarded to the Central Telegraph Office by pneumatic tube, where it would arrive on the "Metropolitan" floor handling messages to and from addresses within London. On the sorting table it would be identified as a message requiring retransmission to another city and would be passed by internal pneumatic tube to the "Provincial" floor for transmission to Birmingham by intercity telegraph. Once it had been received and retranscribed in Birmingham, the message would be sent by pneumatic tube to the telegraph office nearest the recipient and then delivered by messenger. (Standage 99)
The mental image this passage offers me nicely figures not just the way syllabi in general come together but also the strange and intriguing ways my classes always seem to map onto one another: telegraph networks link up to neural networks link up to networks of writers, publishers, and readers link up to intratextual networks of characters and plot events link up to intertextuality itself, and on and on. As a bonus gift, I also get to wish that there were a commuter rail network--not even anything as racy as pneumatic tubes, just plain old trains--in central Ohio, so that I could be transported down to Columbus for my dinner and movie tonight without having to drive myself there and back--because, well, driving is too slow, and too attention-consuming, when what I want to be able to do is sit and look out the window at the winter fields (the occasional one turning green with winter wheat) and daydream about what I'm on my way to. Because my brain assuredly won't stop multitasking when I hop in the car later, I'm sure I'll still be daydreaming, but its lion's share will be checking the rear-view mirror, not the herds of moseying cows at the side of the road, and on the way home the deer-checking will certainly require everything I've got.
Oh. Oh no.
As my craazy goddess friend would say, Oh. Holy. Jesus. I just googled "herd of cows" to make sure I was using the correct group-name (I have been laughed at in the past, I am sure, for misusing words like "flock"), and Hit #5 was a blog where the following post landed this guy on my list. And so, today's postscript (or post-script?):
MY IPOD IS A GLORIFIED HERD OF COWSGood Lord. I have never once thought of my iPod as a second dick. I feel fairly confident in saying that I wouldn't think of it as a second dick even if I had a first dick. I'll let you count the number of things sheerly wrong with that post, but I suspect that my favorite is the blithe assertion "in fact I am so rich that I could afford three iPods." Yeah, big spender!
I bought an iPod recently, but I never listen to it. Music is a substitute for action: deeds are my music. The only reason I have it is that otherwise people would think I couldn’t afford one, when in fact I am so rich I could afford three iPods. It just hangs from my belt like a second dick, a badge of status like cattle to an African tribe. Me big chief.Since I bought it last month I have had more than 800 women.
Little did I suspect that I would write today about M. H. Abrams. At about 2 a.m., I narrowly escaped the seductions of late-night posting. "I know!" chirrup-cackled the devil who crawled inside my sleepily slow brain and prepared to get to work. "It would be terrific to write about being a night owl! to write about staying up late even when you're really tired! to write about not having a set schedule in your life!" Fortunately, I was so drowsy that it was far easier to close the computer and stumble off to bed.
Then, this morning, as I struggled to force myself to get out of my flannel bed-cocoon, I found myself obsessed with trying to remember a three-syllable phantom third term in a catalogue that the cotton industry used as its jingle years ago: "The touch, the feel, the ________ of cotton." Now, I'm thinking that there's probably no third term at all, but while I was half asleep, I ran over and over the jingle, and the best I could do was "genius." But not just any "genius." I'm talking "genius" the way girl bassist Tina Weymouth falsettos it in the Tom Tom Club's "Genius of Love": "He's the gen-ie-us of love" is how it goes. I neglected this song for years--right up until this winter, in fact. I even fast-forwarded past it when I finally got around to seeing the DVD remaster of Demme's Stop Making Sense (1984), on the principle that any spin-off could be no more than the bastard child of the Talking Heads. Ah, how the mighty fall.
(Perhaps appropriately, given that I've wandered to the Tom Tom Club, a band formed around a rhythm section, and "Genius of Love," a paean to the great funk and soul rhythmists, my house has suddenly started rocking to the beat of roofers who have finally--after a three-month "break"--returned to replace the gutters on my house. First, the old gutters, with their accumulated wealth of probably fifteen autumns and their completely rusted-out bottoms, have to be taken down, and apparently these roofers' strategy is to pound them down. I fully anticipate seeing something come through a wall or a window before this operation is complete. But the condition of my house, and of the gutters in particular, is a story for another time. Meanwhile, my bed is dancing like a quarter-driven Magic Fingers operation.)
My need to find this missing and possibly non-existent third term from the cotton advertisement--for now, I think I finally remember that I was always dissatisfied with the metrics of that jingle: "The touch... the feel... of cotton" always felt as though it needed more, as though the jingle-writers just gave up and said, "Well, we can just slide on into 'of cotton' and nobody will notice"--finally propelled me downstairs to make my morning coffee, collect some books for coffee-time in-bed reading, and grab the computer for some morning googling. No dice on the jingle. But when I tooled over to The New York Times, I found M. H. Abrams peering sagely out from the book section's sidebar. After 43 years as the general editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Abrams has handed that job over to Stephen Greenblatt, and so yesterday the Times ran a story looking back over his career and the anthology's development.
I remember first finding out who Abrams was. Throughout my first semester at Cornell, I kept seeing this hale and hearty--he really epitomizes the phrase--man walking the corridors. At the beginning of the second semester, he introduced a guest speaker, in his entirely compelling, slightly gravelly basso voice. I would pay to listen to Abrams read the phone book, I tell you. After the talk, my now-temporarily-Floridian friend and I cornered the director of graduate studies and said, "Who was that man?" "Oh," she said, off-handedly as always, "that's Mike Abrams." "Oh," we said. As she walked away, we looked at each other and mouthed, "Mike?!"
His full fiirst name is Meyer. He is 93. You wouldn't know it. You can hear him reading Gerard Manley Hopkins, my favorite poet, here. You will love it.
I would love this post to say something profound about Mike Abrams, but these gutter guys have pounded down my concentration just as resolutely as they have removed the ruined remains of the gutters. And the man outside my window yodels out a few misremembered bars from "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" or practices his auctioneering every once in awhile, generally right after he's hollered an instruction to one of his coworkers. And so I will just tell you this story, which the Times article also tells:
In the 1950s, Abrams received a paper about Candide and Rasselas from a student and was sure it was plagiarized. He called the student in and quizzed him about the paper; within a short time, it was clear that the student acutally had written the paper. The student? Thomas Pynchon.
One of my proudest moments in grad school came when I sat on a faculty panel with Abrams, discussing the history of our department. I had done archival work and talked about the earliest days, the earliest sages. Where I left off, Abrams's institutional memory picked up; his first senior colleagues had known the last people I talked about, and so he could carry us from the early twentieth century up into the time when the next panelists joined the faculty. Star-struck is precisely the word for what I was.
Walking the halls with M. H. Abrams and, in that first year of grad school, A. R. Ammons made everything we were doing seem that much more serious, even sanctified, in large part because of the boundless high and frank good humor of both men. In the halls, and in the mailroom, they were just Mike and Archie, doing their work, being their selves. A revelation.
sources for today's images: 1) An online LP seller; 2) The New York Times.
A fractured night's sleep, someone else's suffering, and the last gasps of my fast-moving cold have conspired to leave me flat to the couch and feeling like this guy (courtesy of Max Ernst), which means that you'll be hearing more from me tomorrow.
source for today's image: DaDa Online.
Two of my friends are in town for a wedding (whose reception is going on right now, in fact). Nearly five years ago, two of my other friends got married in that same church, and I was part of the ceremony. One of the things that I find interesting (and sometimes saddening) about weddings is that they leave me reflecting on my social continuity--or lack of it. Of all the people with whom I graduated, I have only maintained contact with one woman--my OhioanIowan friend with whom I drove 600 miles to see a prairie--and even with her, I have been doing a poor job of late. In fact, the past six months have seen me lose touch with many of my good friends, for no real reason other than a busyness that leaves me wan and wasted when I look up from my books. Somehow it seems as though I should be able to recognize that keeping up long-distance friendships will help keep me from getting so fatigued. And yet, like so many things, not being in touch becomes a vicious cycle.
The March before my OhioanIowan friend's wedding, I decided to make her a thousand paper cranes. She planned her wedding for a couple of years, in the interstices of her days as a high-powered consultant, and so she amassed a possibly unprecedentedly tall stack of bridal magazines. Perusing one of these magazines during my spring break visit that year, I discovered some picture of a woman standing under a tree hung with origami cranes, and inspiration hit. (Are you figuring out that I get smacked around by inspiration pretty regularly?) I had learned to make cranes the September before, on a trip to Japan to meet up with my father, who was finishing a six-week business stay in Hiroshima. And so I collected a few packs of paper and got to work. I folded while talking on the phone; while eating dinner; while visiting friends; (and this one is my favorite) even while flying on airplanes. I left the final step--folding down their wings and giving them a little tug so that they become discernible as birds--undone so that I could link them in lines of ten and pack them in boxes of 250. I finished the last ones about ten days before the wedding, by which time my mother had also gotten in on the act, cutting me a plethora of wrapping paper squares when I started to run out of raw materials. We hung the cranes everywhere at the reception hall. I was so proud--probably overproud, possessed of a little too much braggadoccio. I haven't yet figured out how to be at weddings (or a lot of other functions, for that matter) without drawing attention to myself in some dramatic way.
On the way back to Gambier yesterday, I saw my first Vs of geese this winter. At first, I didn't recognize them as geese: the first V I saw was in the process of reforming somewhere over the southbound lanes of the interstate, while I flew up the northbound about twenty minutes north of King's Island and still a good forty minutes south of the Hell Commandments billboards. As they rearranged themselves and slipped back into pattern, though, I knew what I was watching. Canada geese are my favorite birds, hands down (to the point where one of my most excellent Gambier friends brought a terrific coffee mug, decorated with stylized Canada geese, back from Canada for me this summer). I love them even though they're overpopulating and becoming a nuisance in golf courses, parking lots, and subdivisions everywhere; I hardly blame the geese for this problem. In grad school, I used to love watching the geese track up and down and back and forth across the lake all winter long. One afternoon, after a seminar let out at 3:20, I was talking to some friends when the largest formation of geese I've ever seen flew overhead. It must have had at least a hundred geese in it. When I lived in Rochester, I loved the drive to Ithaca because of a twenty-minute span during which NY-89 tracks along the northwestern edge of Cayuga Lake. Not only was the lake always breathtaking--I think it will always be the lake against which I measure all other lakes--but often there were several gaggles of geese hanging out on or about the lake, up in that upper corner. I was never quite sure why they were all there, but I loved to see them.
My mother taught me that geese fly in a V because they pick up each other's slack; if one gets tired, it gets moved back in the formation so that it can rest up, and if one falls behind or gets injured, another drops out and stays with it. A few years ago, I watched geese stream by against a full moon, forming and reforming their V, with a person I thought I would be with for a lot longer than I was; the next day, he was picking up the sounds of migrating gaggles long before I, and I read this as a trustworthy sign. My active narrative imagination had gotten me into trouble before, has done it again since, and no doubt will do it again in the future, but at least now I grasp the myriad ways the pathetic fallacy really does fly my life.
This past October, visiting my Brooklynite friend, I walked in Prospect Park with her and her wonderful small person. She brought along a small tub of corn to feed to the geese who live on the pond, some of whom I had seen flying past me, at eye level and in close range, the previous afternoon as I walked home from some bookshopping and culture-gulping in the Slope. The geese were intrigued by the corn, but it sank too quickly to be of much use to them, alas. The baby, however, was delighted by what he saw. I have pictures where I can barely see his face and can still tell, from the position of his eyelids, that the hidden bottom half of his face is an enormous, baby-toothy grin, probably framing a chortle. Later, after climbing slides and swinging gates, we stopped to watch an Orthodox Jewish family feeding some other geese. This time, I took pictures: picture after picture, as though to make up for the Cayuga geese I was never able to catch, as I sped toward what still felt painfully like home, that winter I lived in Rochester. This picture might be my favorite, even though some of the others were framed more neatly, &c.:
The picture makes me think of lines from the end of Elizabeth Bishop's "At the Fishhouses"; I've quoted these lines elsewhere in the past month or so, which suggests to me that they're hovering not far from the surface of my mind:
The water seems suspendedMy Brooklynite friend sent me a Christmas present that must have arrived just after I left town; appropriately, it's another picture of the small person, smiling as though he knows something's coming just around the corner. She also sent a scarf that marries my two favorite things--a silky print and a stripey knit--and a new thinking cap, replete with sequins, but if she's reading I want her to know that the picture is the real present, and I am so lucky. She's only one of the people I'm wanting to make more contact with as this new year takes off.
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
And now, speaking of getting in touch, I'm about to videoIM with my father. Tres exciting!
sources for today's images: 1) How to fold a paper crane; 2) News-Medical.Net; 3) a trainspotter's online journal; 4) yours truly.
My mother and I have matching paper hats (though mine is yellow and hers pinky red), from our leftover Christmas crackers. The dog is sleeping on the couch behind me, with her feet pushed against my shoulders. My mom is also sleeping, intermittently. The fire is dying down. The dancers were mostly terrific and Dancing with the Stars remains my favorite show.
My last night at home is lovely.
Tonight, the second season of Dancing with the Stars premieres on ABC--and I'm completely willing to give them that bit of unasked-for, uncompensated publicity, because I love the show that much. I love it so much that I'm staying in Indiana through tomorrow morning just so that I can watch this two-hour show with my mother, while we eat a pizza and drink too much wine. Semi-drunken reality-show-dance-watching with one's mom? with a fire? and a sleeping (or begging) dog? In my world, that's pretty much the apex.
Because of the show, and probably because of my impending traveling (and subsequent return to all those pressing matters like creating syllabi, reading assigned works, and revising articles), I'm feeling pretty scattered this morning. Thus, what you're going to get from me today is a snappy piece of verse I picked up yesterday, when my mother and I cracked into the three-DVD set of Wonder Woman episodes my parents gave me for Christmas. Now, I have long had a huge thing for Wonder Woman--enough that my Brooklynite best friend, upon coming into my Ithaca apartment for the first time, said to me, "Wonder Woman holds a talismanic power for you, eh?" Whether it was the Pez dispenser (a gift from one of my college friends, at the beginning of our senior year when I was trying to do basically everything), or the 11" posable doll, or the calendar, or the little picture on my bathroom mirror that tipped her off, I never knew. And I have also long known that Wonder Woman was one of my favorite television shows when I was a child. But it's been decades since I watched it, and I realized as episode one started last night that I didn't remember it at all. So imagine my delight--especially since I just rolled off teaching a poetry course and a course on feminism--when these theme song lyrics came flooding out of my parents' television:
Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman!
All the world's waiting for you,
and the power you possess.
In your satin tights,
Fighting for your rights
And the old Red, White and Blue.
Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman!
Now the world is ready for you,
and the wonders you can do.
Make a hawk a dove,
Stop a war with love,
Make a liar tell the truth.
Wonder Woman,
Get us out from under, Wonder Woman.
All our hopes are pinned on you
And the magic that you do.
Stop a bullet cold,
Make the Axis fall,
Change their minds, and change the world.
Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman!
You're a wonder, Wonder Woman!
I dare you to find my favorite couplet. You know you want to. And you absolutely know that I did my Lynda Carter dance in the family room throughout the song, which has this fantastic proto-disco thing going.
It turns out to be a terrific show, by the way, though I don't imagine myself bingeing on it the way I did with, say, Freaks and Geeks or Wonderfalls, both of which I watched in six-hour bouts. Somehow, I always thought it was set in the 1970s, but it's actually a WWII show (hence the patriotism), which means that you get caricatures of Nazis everywhere. And the invisible plane alone makes the show worth checking out. Plus, Cloris Leachman plays Wonder Woman's mother. But what all this love also means is that I'm now expecting a lot more from Joss Whedon's film than I would have otherwise...
(You can find audio of the theme song pretty easily using that master brain Google; I linked it up with this post for about five minutes before I started feeling really dubious.)
sources for today's images: 1) Art.com; 2) a random site that somehow got linked up with another random site.
I am getting sick, which was inevitable, really, given the way I've been sleeping (not much) and the amount I've been traveling (too much). In the past couple of years, I've become more vigilant about washing my hands while traveling (even if I'm only traveling across campus), but it's just not possible to keep oneself protected while flying and taking subways. And so I enter day two of having a vaguely sore throat and possibly slightly swollen glands--of feeling that something is coming, but that I'm not sure what it will turn out to be.
Twelve years ago, at right about this same time of year, I had similar symptoms, only my throat wasn't vaguely sore; it was virulently sore, vituperatively sore. On Saturday morning, I told my mother that if my sore throat kept up, I wanted to go to the doctor on Monday; I was supposed to head back to school only a few days later. On Sunday evening, we finally thought to look at my throat, and we were both horrified. On Monday morning, the nurse said, even before she did the throat culture, "If this isn't strep, then I've never seen strep before." (Later, my grad school doctors would tell me that it had probably been mono.) By Thursday, I couldn't wear a turtleneck because my neck hurt so much; that night, an emergency room physician prescribed painkillers and I received my second penicillin shot of the week (they were both in the hip; for some reason, getting shots in the hip almost made me pass out). And later that night, my fever finally broke and I was able to get some sleep for the first time in days.
One thing I remember from the aftermath of that strep/mono/whatever experience: thinking that my mom should have thought to look at my throat on Friday, when I first started complaining about its hurting, but that I also should have thought to look at my own throat. Somehow, I sensed that I had slipped into a period when I was neither a child (when she would automatically have checked my symptoms) nor an adult (when I would have to be responsible for--if not enjoy--my own symptoms). Sadly, it would be a decade before Britney Spears sang the song that captured my predicament. In the meantime, all I got was time, a moment that was mine, while I was in between--and it was just enough to get me really sick.
And it was also just enough to give me a chance to think back on childhood illness, since I couldn't do much of anything else. (I tried reading The Woman Warrior for the first time during that illness. Let me tell you: don't read that book if you're even possibly having feverish visions, because the reality shifts of "White Tigers" will freak you out.) And so I remembered, perhaps in hallucinatory homage to Kingston:
When I was a girl, and obviously not yet a woman, I used to get tonsilitis all the time--as in, twice or three times a year all the time. For some reason--I suppose, because the repeated bouts weren't really dangerous--the doctors decided not to take my tonsils out, which was really okay with me, since surgery never really sounded like much fun, even when my mother explained how anesthetic worked and told me that the anesthesiologist would tell me to pretend I was flying an airplane until I fell asleep. And so, every few months, my throat would start to hurt and sometimes I'd get sick to my stomach, too, and I'd be consigned to the sofa in our family room, to cover up with the brown and orange zig-zag afghan and, later, the red, black, and grey quilt my mom made in 1981 or so. The sofa was a rusty-colored leather, the perfect length for a six-year-old, and from it, I could easily see the television. I have a pretty clear memory of undertaking my first story-and-film comparison project during one of these illnesses, since HBO kept rerunning a production of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Littlest Mermaid." (My IMDb search turns up nothing that could have been the film I watched. I find this odd, and not a little troubling.) One thing I loved about that production was its pathos; its ending was uncompromising, just like the ending of the Andersen tale.
But the best thing about being sick--the thing that made it all worth while, as I waited for the penicillin or amoxycillin to take effect and kick the infection's ass yet again--was the hot Jell-o. My mother (who was, as you may already have figured out, taking a hiatus from teaching to raise my still-toddling brother and me) would cook up the Jell-o, which in my memory is always raspberry or cherry, but instead of refrigerating it, she would just let me drink it out of my orange Tupperware cup. I think that she will tell me, later on today, that she only fed me hot Jell-o once. And maybe she did. But in my memory, it happened every time I got sick. And when I lay in my bed twelve years ago, feareful and rueful about the fact that some angry infection had been allowed to gallop all over my immune system just like the barbarian armies in that weird book I was reading, the hot Jell-o took on mythic proportions. It became a sort of magic potion, a ruby elixir that had ensured my safety, my mother's guarantee that my good health would return within 48 hours, that there was nothing to worry about, that causes were known and cures were being effected.
I thought a lot more about the hot Jell-o and the mystery strep/mono/whatever back in the fall, when (as some of you know) I had a cough that had neither a diagnosis nor a cure. I started coughing during an academic event in California in early August; by late August, I was still coughing, and hurting as well. The week before we started classes, I spent my evenings lying on the couch with a heating pad pressed against my upper back, at the spot where it felt as though someone was slipping a knife into my lung every time I coughed. On the second day of classes, having had a chest x-ray the day before, I coughed in mid-sentence and lost my voice for a few minutes, which seemed to startle my poor students, to whom I'd said nothing about my ongoing illness, since the cough seemed to be letting up a bit. By late September, I was back on steroids and antibiotics and a hard-core anti-acid drug, as well; that cocktail seemed to do the cough in.
But I was left thinking--and I'm thinking today, for reasons that I hope are apparent, if not obvious--about things that happen to us for no apparent reason, about how scary it is not to be able to look back to causes and, in turn, to think ahead to cures. The hardest thing about the autumn cough was that everything seemed to be fine: the chest x-ray was normal; my lungs didn't sound gurgly and the cough was always dry; I had no fever. And yet I kept coughing, and hurting. As illness goes, this one was low-grade, a blip on even my radar, an annoyance and a worry but not (as far as I knew or know) a real threat of any kind. I didn't seem to be infecting others; God knows there was enough time for me to fell the whole campus, the way it dragged on. And so the doctor just kept throwing things at it, and eventually, the stubborn thing seemed to just give up.
But there was the spectre, haunting: what if it hadn't given up? What about the things that never do turn around--or, worse yet, seem to turn around but then, cruelly, don't? What about the narrative that has no logical beginning, that unfolds only in a pattern of relentless inexplicability, a progression of ceaseless, causeless pain? Despite all modernist and postmodernist interventions--and I don't think I bash these -ists and -isms lightly--we seem to be wired for some pretty stock narrative trajectories: the cataclysm, the agony, the (sometimes miraculous) relief, the (sometimes logical) explanation. My father called home from his business trip this morning to tell my mother that he'd heard a West Virginian family member--whether she was a widow, a bereaved mother, or a devastated sister, I don't know--saying on television, over and over, "I'm gonna sue. I'm gonna sue." "Can you imagine?" my mother said to me after she got off the phone. Though translating someone else's furious, inchoate grief is always presumptuous, I took a stab at it: "Someone's gonna tell me why. I'm gonna make someone tell me why."
sources for today's images: 1) PicassoMio; 2) a French site of common recipies; 3) the news release of a culinary history center's opening at the University of Michigan; 4) AdClassix.com.
I'm reading Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857) and have just encountered a terrific moment. In 1850, the half-Scottish, half-Creole Mary Seacole travels to her brother Edward's hotel in Panama. Upon arriving in Cruces, where she encounters (among other fascinations) women returning with their husbands from successful bids in the California goldrush and consequently "in no hurry to resume the dress or obligations of their sex," Seacole also finds that her brother hasn't been able to save her any proper sleeping space; he's rented out his own "private apartment" to a trio of female travellers who are able to pay richly for "so exclusive a luxury." At first, Seacole is pissed off and exclaims to her brother, "What am I to do? Why did you ever bring me to this place? See what a state I am in--cold, hungry, and wretched. I want to wash, to change my clothes, to eat, to----" When Edward just shrugs, Mary settles in "to watch the strange life [she] has come to." At bedtime, though, she turns to her brother again and asks for somewhere to sleep. Once again, he proves ineffectual, leaving her to take matters into her own hands.
Here's where it gets fun: "stripping the green oilskin cloth from the rough [dining] table--it would not be wanted again until to-morrow's breakfast--[I] pinned up some curtains round the table's legs, and turned in with my little servant beneath it. It was some comfort to know that my brother, his servants, and [her manservant] Mac brought their mattresses, and slept upon it above us. It was a novel bed, and required some slight stretch of the imagination to fancy it a four-poster; but I was too tired to be particular, and slept soundly."
Right on!
source for today's image: MovingHere's Migration Histories.
I've just gotten home from a day with my brother. Those of you keeping score at home have already figured out (or already known) that I have one brother; he is three years younger than I. We enjoy a tremendously fun relationship, a fact that makes me happy. Part of the reason our relationship is as strong as it is: a phenomenon called the mystery trip. When faced with the mind-mess that is a mystery trip, one has little choice but to bond with one's confusion companion.
Because it's late, I'm not going to be able to remember the first mystery trip that I can remember--or, apparently, how to write the sentences that I can write. But I'll offer one of the most famous ones, by way of illustrating how deep my brother's and my shared (I slipped and typed "scared" just now) skepticism was, as a result of the mystery trips. One summer day, while we were living further south in Indiana than my family does now, my parents packed us into the car for a mystery trip. We set out on US-50 east and drove for a couple of hours. Eventually, we found ourselves in the King's Island parking lot. My brother and I refused to believe that King's Island (the nearest big amusement park, near Cincinnati, OH, for those of you who haven't had the privilege of visiting its 1/3 scale Eiffel Tower or its wide range of scream-inducing thrill rides, of both wet and dry varieties) was actually the destination. Not until we were actually going through the gates did we really feel secure in what we were being told.
I realize that these turns of phrase could make our parents sound monstrous, which they're not at all. I don't know whether there was a higher pedagogical purpose to the mystery trips, or whether they just allowed our mom and dad (who were, after all, only in their mid-30s at this point) to indulge in some creative orchestration of suspense, disbelief, delight, and finally blissed out satiety. The two chief components of their artistry: surprise, fear, and a ruthless efficiency. The three! three components! Ah. The actual rules of mystery trips (and yes, we're allowed to talk about them):
1) People being taken on a mystery trip can ask any questions they want of the people organizing the trip.
2) The people organizing the trip can opt to answer any question truthfully, falsely, or not at all.
That's pretty much it, really. In the hands of a cruel person, such rules could open up chances for humiliation or manipulative idiocy. In the hands of my parents, they made it possible for the four of us to make it to an amusement park in the Malibu without either of us kids' knowing what was up. And being a fan of a good surprise's pay-off, I started using these rules to create mystery trips for others pretty much as soon as I could drive.
I organized my first mystery trip for a guy named Dave with whom I was madly in what I thought was love for years and years. Dave and I went to our high school's winter formal together our senior year. (There's so much more to be mentioned there, from the self-abnegating way I asked him out to the coughing fit I had in the car to the marvelous dinner that the three guys in our six-person party cooked beforehand to the nutcracker ornament, painted as a soldier, that I slipped him when he walked me to the door, in solidarity with his decision to go to West Point. [Another friend of ours had just given him Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun, a move that appalled me and that I was seeking to mitigate somehow. I don't know whether my mom will have known before this moment that I swiped that soldier from our Christmas tree in order to give it to him.] But perhaps that sketch will suffice for now.) He had had a close relationship with our eighth grade English teacher, and I was pretty sure that these two hadn't seen each other for years. And so the day after the dance, I picked Dave up in my ubersexuelle Toyota Previa and drove him over to this teacher's house. Many surprised outbursts ensued. The three of us then hung out for the afternoon, catching up. And then I drove Dave home and didn't hear from him. My imagination runs pretty fast and is pretty creative, and so I'm sure you can imagine that I had seen this narrative unfolding in a different direction. I believe that this mystery trip taught me not to organize mystery trips unless I was actually doing it for someone I knew--not just someone I wanted to know. As a getting-to-know-you gambit, it's a little heavy. (Unless you're sure that the other person wants to get to know you. An addendum: when I stumbled out of bed this morning, my mother told me that my father used to take her on mystery trips when they were first dating. They celebrated their 35th anniversary this year.)
One of my favorite mystery trips is the one my excellent OhioanIowan friend and I took the summer after I finished grad school. I was staying with her and her husband in their new house south of Des Moines. She was working during the days and bumming around with me at night. Because I was going to be in town over a weekend, she commissioned a mystery trip. We had gone on one before, the summer that she was doing consulting work in Manhattan and living in Chelsea and planning her wedding; that time, the day after she found her wedding dress at Kleinfeld's in Brooklyn, we walked along 23rd Street until we hit Fifth Avenue...and ran into the Gay Pride Parade. The planned goal had been to see the Flatiron Building, but this was a pretty good surprise. Encountering surprises while on mystery trips: one of the side benefits for everyone involved. And then I had thought we would wander down to Washington Square Park to see the Washington Arch, which I thought would happily remind her of the Arc de Triomphe in her beloved Paris; there's surely a connection to be made between it and the Ohioan Eiffel Tower, if only I weren't so sleepy. Though we ended up having to take the subway down there because it was hot and she was exhausted, it was still an effective enough surprise that she commissioned another mystery trip three years later.
To facilitate my planning--because she is a consummate planner--she left me with a short stack of tourism materials when she left for work the first day after I got to town. Flipping through the materials, I found an image that looked wonderful to me:
This otherworldly landscape is part of the Loess Hills Scenic Byway in western Iowa; it's the Broken Kettle Grasslands. I set my heart upon our seeing this vista--this very one. I wouldn't rest until we saw it. And so, that Saturday, we got into her husband's car, with its full tank of gas and a set of CDs and our cameras, and we drove west, and then north, and then around on lots of gravel roads, and we took 300 pictures until we found almost this very vista, just as the sun was about to go down. If I remember correctly, we drove about 600 miles that day. We saw a windmill; I ate some Danish sandwich whose horseradish sauce involved lemon gelatin; we spent time in three different states. I would show you what the grasslands looked like through my (camera-aided) eyes, but those pictures are in my own house, where I am not right now. So, a postscript will follow soon enough.
Yesterday, the inspiration for a mystery trip struck again. I have been wanting to see the movie Capote for quite awhile, but one of the tricky things about living in a tiny rural town is that seeing most movies requires a lot more advanced planning and logistical work than it did when I lived five minutes' walk from the nearest arthouse cinema. (sigh.) This year, I've started figuring out that interesting things can happen while I'm en route from Indiana to Gambier, and so I'd been checking around to see what showtimes might coincide with the times I'm planning to be passing through Cincinnati and/or Columbus later this week. And then it occurred to me: my brother loved In Cold Blood when he read it during a junior semester in London. He loved it in a way I've never known him to love a book. Thus was the mystery trip hatched.
Alas, the only cinemas playing Capote anywhere near here were the Esquire and the Mariemont, in Cincinnati, and the Keystone Art Cinema (or whatever it's called) in Indianapolis. And the only times we could go were after he finished working--at 8 p.m. And so we were going to go over to the Mariemont for a 9:30 show... until he suddenly had his days off switched and we were able to go this afternoon. Everything went off without a hitch; even as we walked up and down Ludlow Avenue, outside the Esquire (which had the better early showing, plus the added bonus of being somewhere I'd driven myself before), he had no idea what we were there for. (Something that makes mystery trips extra fun is fielding guesses about and offering red herring possibilities for destinations. Today's lies included: we're going to see my ex-boyfriend! we're going to see the historic tower tree in Greensburg! we're going hanggliding! we're going to a casino! we're going to Lexington to surprise my friends there! [That last started to feel like a good option, actually, since it would have multiplied the surprises all around, particularly for a couple of small dogs with curly tails, but when the time came to decide between I-74 and I-275, we stayed the course...]) Movie-going, Thai-food-eating, and mall-ratting ensued. One of the best elements of the day was that a couple sitting one table over from us at Thai Cafe, in one part of Cincinnati, showed up at a Barnes and Noble, in a whole other part of Cincinnati, when we were also there, a good three hours after dinner. We had called this one as a first date, based on the level of awkwardness happening in the restaurant (e.g., the girl wore her coat the whole time; the boy told ridiculously inane stories, bad enough that my brother wanted to slip them both notes--one to tell him to get better material, and one to wish her luck). But when we saw them at Barnes and Noble, she seemed happier and he cooler. Best of luck to them, then.
By the time we made it back to my brother's house, we were incomparably well prepared by our own road trip to watch one of my favorite movies of last year, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Alas that I was too tired to stay awake for everything from the stoned cheetah ride to the climactic hangglide to the Slider Palace itself.
And alas that I am just too tired to write you a lovely conclusion this evening. But, rejoice! I acquired a truly stunning book about Joseph Cornell while on the trip today, and thus you're likely to get some meditations on what's inspiring this Cabinet's development, sometime soon.
sources for today's images: 1) the totally phat-with-a-ph Southwest Ohio Amusement Park Historical Society; 2) a Polish site; 3) America's Byways (go see the Loess Hills!).
(The irony of not illustrating this post is not lost on me. I'll give you a soundtrack, since you won't get a picture: imagine Sister Sledge's "We are Family," even though only my brother could say he's got all his sisters with him, and we've never been known to get up and sing, much less tell others to do so. What's important is that everyone can see we're together, when we walk on by.)
In my family, New Year's Day involves two rituals: taking the family picture and taking down the Christmas tree. For the second year in a row, this year we had no tree to un-decorate and remove from the house. In part, I attribute this dawning tradition to the one-two punch of my college's late semester's end and the Academic Mayhem; for about a decade, I've generally been the prime mover in my family's Christmas decorating, the one who picks up the tree or decorates it once it's in the house, and if I'm not home until Christmas eve (or later--last year, weather stranded me in Gambier until the 26th), then the tree doesn't happen. Two years ago, the tree migrated to my brother's house, where we decorated it using his ornament collection. (Suddenly, I realize just how far this set of stories could digress; for now, I'll just say that my brother and I each have a collection of Christmas ornaments that our mother built for us from the time we were babies, giving us at least one or two ornaments a year. This year's ornaments are, appropriately enough, a glass bird with a lusciously ethereal pink tail feather and a chef-fish replete with moustache. The first time I had my own Christmas tree, a Fraser fir I cut northwest of Ithaca in 2000, I learned I had enough ornaments to cover an eight-footer.) Two years before that, my brother and I acquired the family tree at Lowe's for $5, getting what the English would call good value for money. We pushed that thing in the trunk of my car and drove it right home, feeling mightily proud of ourselves.
Now, one of the reasons for having a lovely Christmas tree is to be able to visit all the ornaments on a regular basis. My favorites (from my own collection) are a Loch Ness monster I acquired in Inverness, Scotland, a decade ago, and a Wonder Woman brandishing the Lariat of Truth. I put these two together every time I put up a tree: Wonder Woman lassoing Nessie. But the Christmas tree's other raison d'etre is to be the backdrop for the family Christmas picture. We have these pictures dating back to 1979, my brother's first Christmas. A few years ago, my brother and I put them all together in an album for our parents, and I (an archivist at heart) learned the pleasures and puzzles of attempting to date photographs through the netherworld of the teenage years: I was startled to find how much 1990 looked like 1991 looked like 1992. Past pictures are scattered all around my parents' house: under the glass top on the desk in the kitchen is one from my second year in grad school; on the desk in one of my mother's quilting rooms are the ones from my first and fourth years there, as well as eighth grade; in most of our computers are two or three from the years since we've gone digital. I can date the pictures most reliably by my own hair: long one year, short the next, extremely short, longer again. And I can remember: that one, the goofy one (we always do a gag shot or two) where my father is getting ready to stick his finger up my nose, that's the one we took in my brother's new house, the year I had so many job interviews and saw the Pacific for the first time and came back from the Mayhem so exhaustedly keyed up that I barely knew what I was doing while I cooked us a new year's dinner, still wearing the clothes I'd flown home in from the west coast. In the early pictures, my brother and I hold the favored toy of the year (always with our initials on the contents tag, if we had matching ones, so that we wouldn't fight over whose was whose); in pictures from the years we had pets, we hold them (even though, in one case, we didn't have that new cat for long after Christmas, since she kept using the plants and the carpet as her litterbox and wouldn't eat). And for the past eleven years, we've struggled to hold down the mass of wiggly dog who's now dream-twitching and snuffling in her sleep alongside me on this bed from my childhood.
Last year, we opted to take the family picture outside, in front of a pine tree in the yard. That worked out pretty well, even though I sort of scared a neighborhood kid who came riding down the road on a chopper-style bicycle when I called a couple of Beastie Boys' lyrics from Check Your Head's "Professor Booty": "My chrome is shinin' just like an icicle; / I ride around town on my low-rider bicycle." I know I had a good reason for it.
This morning, because we had no tree once again this year, we had to decide what to use as our backdrop. I proposed using our front hall, with its open staircase, to impart some mad Brady Bunch style to the 2005 picture. We decided to pose in front of one of my mother's quilts instead. (I am still going to tell you about my mother's quilts.) My brother set us up, and we took the pictures.
My brother has been in charge of taking the family picture pretty much since he became a professional photographer (I know I've mentioned his skillz before; they deserve the z: they're that cool). He has carried on my father's legacy of catching tremendously silly and generally unflattering candids before the actual portrait-taking begins; both of them maximize the silliness of these shots by simply not announcing them ahead of time (this year, I bore the brunt; sometimes I share it with my mom). But he has also followed in my father's practice of capturing us all just as we are, each New Year's Day. The 27 pictures we now have are a startling record of our continuity and our change--our tininess, our growth, our fashions (or lack thereof), our braces, our glasses, our hair, our jewelry. Every year, we all look happy to be together--except the dog. Every year, the dog looks miserable; she hates cameras, and she hates being held on two laps for the duration of several photographs. This year she peed on my leg to let me know how little she appreciated an eleventh year of this nonsense.
My family is not big, and we are not big on rituals. I am reminded of these two facts each year when we take the family picture on New Year's: we make this ritual anew in our own four-person-and-one-dog way, year by year, and I cherish our simplicity.
I ushered in the last day of the old year by sleeping off my Academic Mayhem exhaustion well into the afternoon; it was a bit like returning from a foreign country and needing that first night's sleep to be a good twelve hours or so. Even the dog found my sleeping dull and deserted me.
Because I don't have much to say that's meditative or profound tonight, and because I did most of my year-in-review writing back on the solstice (thereby inaugurating what's been about ten days of year-end thinking), I'll just wish you all a happy kick-off to the new year. May your first night's sleep in 2006 be delicious.
source for today's image: the DHD Multimedia Gallery.
I spent a lot of time today in tunnels. I have always loved tunnels. When I was very small, my extended family lived in Detroit, while my nuclear family lived in Buffalo, and we took the shortcut through Ontario to get from our house to my grandparents' east-side bungalow. We often left Buffalo in the evening, after my father came home from work, which meant we arrived on Cadieux Road right about the time the 11 o'clock news wrapped up and my grandparents started thinking about bedtime. As we drove westward through Ontario, I did a lot of sleeping. But I always woke up for the Windsor Tunnel, with its yellowy ceramic tiles. I don't remember much about the tunnel besides those tiles. I do remember that the first time I went through the Lincoln Tunnel, it plucked up my vague recollections of my first tunnel.
For the record, I am not a Freudian; I side with Nabokov on how to think about a child's love of tunnels and enclosed spaces. Because I'm away from my library, here at my parents' house with the family dog (asleep with her head on my foot, dreaming and stretching and sighing), I can't quote from Speak, Memory for you. (If it were possible to upload a handful of books to one's mind and thus be able to rattle them off effortlessly, I might choose Nabokov's revisited autobiography as one of mine. God knows it's already done its share of shaping the way my mind works.) But the scene I'm remembering, in case you want to remember it too, is the one where the young Vladimir (with a relative's help) creates a tunnel between the family's sofa and the wall and feels, when he crawls into it, as though he's crawled back to some primitive place in the human heart. Then he takes a potshot at the way Freud and his disciples (with their belief in "crankish embryos"--that, I think I remember correctly) would interpret this experience. Unfortunately--or perhaps fortuitously--I can't remember what it is that he does decide it means.
Though I hadn't planned it, writing about Nabokov's tunnel carries me along to another of my early tunnels, formed by a long series of four-person tables in the childcare area at Transit Lanes, the bowling alley where my mother league-bowled when I was young. While she played--and it knocks me down to think about how she was just about my age, now, when all this was happening--I hung out with the other three- or four-year-olds in this long room at the back of the alley, with a woman who, in my memory, wears a blue blouse and a small black bouffant, and whom I love. And one thing we did, sometimes, though I can't remember whether we were supposed to do it, was crawl under these long tables--think Joel Barish under the kitchen table in his memory--an undertaking made fascinating by the harlequin coat of chewed gum that covered the tables' undersides. I have a vague memory that we were allowed to race around under the tables on our hands and knees (though maybe only for a limited amount of time each day) but were strictly forbidden to play with the gum. I almost certainly wanted to spend all morning fingering those palpably bright colors.
Indeed, it's the juxtaposition of darkness and color, the quick switch from dim to bright, that makes me love tunnels. I suppose they let me pursue my love affair with speed and light in a particularly powerful way. (I believe I've illuminated that love of light here.) So you can imagine how much I loved today. For one thing, I got to leave the Academic Mayhem, thereby officially ending my fall semester, but also remembering what I figure out every year, which is that what looks as though it will stretch on long enough so that I can see everyone I know and have a cocktail (or two) with them, or eat lovely Thai noodles that take me back to Ithaca, or do the things for which I miss living in a city, or spend an adequate amount of time prowling through the stacks of new books that publishers have brought to the convention--well, this time that seems so long vanishes just as suddenly as it slams upon us. In fact, being at the Academic Mayhem is not at all unlike hurtling through a tunnel: you slam from your regular life into this startingly bounded and directed period of time, a time and place of close demarcation and relentless forward movement, and then suddenly you slam back into the light of the rest of the world for another year. The fact that the Mayhem ends on December 30 always leaves me feeling the old year kissing the new year hello, wearily, gratefully, a little wistfully.
But first there's always the last-day flurry: the last-minute breakfasts, coffees, lunches, embraces, confidences, promises, purchases, resolutions. And today's last-day flurry saw me scurrying off down the subway line with a badass friend, off for gastronomic delight in a bookshop cafe of note, before scurrying back for a lunchy confab (or, for me, a second experience with Cuban coffee) with a crazy goddess friend. And then scurrying back underground for the subway trip back to the airport. As the best of them do, this subway route shot us into a mid-afternoon sunlit river crossing, before we pushed back underground (yet again, for me) for the last few stations.
(The first time I visited my dear Brooklynite friend at her home, back in 2002, she told me to take the Q; there's still little I like more, as subway trips go, than the climb up into the light, after Canal Street, to the Manhattan Bridge. Even the T's red line as it crosses the Charles before plunging headlong into Kendall Square doesn't get me the way the Q does.)
Today's crossing was of an entirely serene variety. Sometime, perhaps I'll write up my thoughts on vertical and horizontal cities. Today I was leaving a horizontal city, the bridges low to the slow lapping river, the landmarks mostly holding fast to the line between land and sky. The most vertical experiences I had during the Mayhem, in fact, involved the titanic escalators that chug subway passengers in and out of stations, down to darkness and back up to light. Next time you think about Orpheus and Eurydice, particularly if you think Orpheus was a weak sap for having had to look back and make sure she was still there, imagine yourself leading a loved one onto those slow-soaring, high-scraping escalators in Porter Square, or King's Cross, or Dupont Circle (which is apparently the third-longest escalator in the world). And now imagine not being able to double-check that your loved one made it on with you and is hanging on to the railing and hasn't stumbled and will be with you when you reach the light. Just imagine it. You'd have lost her too.
The last tunnels I went echoing through today were jetways. On final approach, after the sun had gone down, we flew through snow (though on the ground it turned out to be rain) that came thick and fast and parallel to the plane. It streamed back the way I remember imagining my hair would during take-off, the time I flew to Detroit with my father when I was four. "Watch," I said to him (so excited, too, that I was getting to play hooky from nursery school). "When we go fast, my hair'll go fwooosh!" Picture my dramatic hand gestures, for full effect. My hair then was no longer than it is now, which is to say that it was short. And obviously I didn't grasp the vagaries of velocity. But I know what it was I wanted to be feeling, even if I couldn't have explained it then: that rush of air and light, that force and hurtle, that rocketing out of my regular world's rounds.
And now, home, the fatigue. I don't ever want it, but tonight it feels sweet, some darkness after the garish rush of the week. May the dog be my sleep muse.
sources for today's images: 1) ironically, CelebrateBoston.com; 2) publicity materials for The Lauren, a Condominium; 3) moi (please note, if you haven't already, that it's the same photo as on day one, just reversed).
Waking in darkness. Stale air. Dreams about detonations. Digable Planets. Hotel coffee. Sleeping roommate. Grading. Balance bar. Grading. Grading. Phone-talking with parents. Showering. Dressing. Book hall. Book hall! A famous person with whom I have bowled. Book hall! Hurrying. Interviewing. Interviewing. Interviewing. Interviewing. Ruminating. Meeting up. Metro. Walking. Dining on Thai food. Walking. Planning breakfast. Metro. Finding a friend on a subway escalator. Drinking. Cackling. Drinking. Laughing. Arguing. Tiring. Packing. Sleeping.
My writing yesterday was happily truncated by the arrival of, as I mentioned, friend after friend in this oversized hotel room. The real bright side of this Academic Mayhem is getting to see people I haven't seen in a long time--and getting to see them not just because I've made a date to meet them in a hotel lobby but even because I'm just walking down a street and hear someone familiar calling my name. Last night, a car pulled up in a hotel driveway, and there was a friend hanging out the passenger window, hollering for me. The critically savvy term for such a confluence of interpersonal agency and desire is, I believe, awesome.
By the time my plane was on final approach into this fair city yesterday, I had had several adventures in ranking and rankness. I boarded the plane right on time--first in my boarding group--and settled into my seat with the work I needed to do during the flight. As boarding came to an end, a woman came to the edge of the bulkhead and asserted that she was supposed to be in my seat. I produced my boarding pass to prove that I was supposed to be in my seat. A stand-off brewed. And then the flight attendant appeared and said to me, "I've got your seat right here." Fortunately, she didn't say it like that. And when I obediently got out of my seat, I found myself relocated into first class.
Right next to a kid who was already getting drunk, at 9:30 a.m. He immediately told me that he'd had his beer and his shot in the airport bar but hadn't had time to go back out through security to get his smoke. I turned back to my work; he went back to talking to himself. About an hour later, I ordered a coffee, and he requested a bourbon, straight up. Remember: 10:30 a.m. The flight attendant said, "Are you 21?" "I'm almost 22!" he said jubilantly; she carded him anyway. He tried to get another couple of airplane bottles of Jack Daniel's as we were getting ready to land; she told him that that wasn't acceptable. After she turned around, he tried to shake himself out, as though psyching himself up for whatever awaited him in the city.
Though he wasn't on his way to the Academic Mayhem, he embodied a response to it that I've seen (and felt), many a year. As the plane gets ready to land, everybody comes to a little more attention; by the time we hit the hotels, we're all settled in to our baddest-ass badass academic personae (and yes, that shout-out is for you, and you know who you are). For me, this year, the persona gets to be more fun than in past years; I'm enjoying being more laidback and smiling more than a lot of the people passing me by. But, though it's a little thinner than in years past, there's still a steel rod in my spine when I'm here, an awareness that this whole part of the city is a panopticon for the next three days: I don't know who's watching or listening to me, and the people around me don't know who's watching or listening to them. Yesterday, I saw a person I'd only seen on an internet personals site--he walked past, and I thought, oh wait, I know you...oh, wait, I don't know you...oh, wait. Hm. I also saw about 40% of the luminaries in my field. And about 70% of my good friends. It'll be that kind of week.
Part of what makes this convention fun is the nametag check. Everyone wears a 3"x4" nametag, with name printed in perhaps 14 pt. type, and so everyone walks around multitasking all the time. Here are the tasks I'm doing all at the same time: looking for people I know because they're my friends; looking for people I know because they're colleagues; looking for people I know because I love their work; looking for nametags to put more names and faces together; looking for people who are only looking at the nametag at my breast, totally bypassing my face.
Fortunately I have a good friend (someone to drink Cosmopolitans [me] and Shirley Temples [him] with), the iPod, and an assortment of ribald songs that we can deconstruct. My friend thinks that he has just figured out, with the help of a 90's dance song, why I've always liked men with big noses. I think we'll leave the morning at that.
source for today's image: an Italian drink recipe site.
