Plans almost daydreams

Today is the last day of July. Last night I sat on the staircase with my aunt, who is visiting from Wisconsin. There was a cacophony of jazz in the living room, a sudden swell of voices over the bass and guitar and piano; we held an atlas between us. We plotted a course southwest from Detroit and the Canadian border, through South Bend, where friends of my aunt's family live, and west toward Chicago. My Thanksgiving comes a month early this year, and we thought, Why not take advantage of it?

These plans are almost daydreams; their actualization pends time and money. But I find them comforting right now, when I am beginning my last month at home and am preparing to venture away from my home town of 9,700 to a city of 2.48 million. I love adventures, but I also love to belong, and I am going to miss my family, especially in the middle weeks, after the excitement of the first days has settled into routine but before I have truly begun to find my feet. Thus, I count the making of these small, unactualized, plans among my blessings. My new home is far away from the Pacific Northwest, but it is within shouting distance of my Midwest kith and kin.

Summary of an assignment

My penultimate day at the Writing Center. The students trickle in, haggard after the birthing of so many summaries. They come bearing bundles of white, sheaves of ink-mottled paper. I am trying to be patient, but these papers try my patience. When I am a professor, I will not assign chapter summaries for books that I have written; it is a recipe for unoriginal, deeply frustrating writing. The students are afraid of writing honestly (and half the time they don't understand what is being written), while the professor is ready to take offense at hints of ignorance or criticism.

I realize, of course, that saying "when I am a professor, I will/won't do x" is like saying "when I am a parent. . ." Become a real parent, a real professor, and theories explode. One is left holding the tattered corners of unthinkable reality.

Still, I reserve the right to gentle, constructive criticism: the chapter summaries were a bad idea. (And the frustration touches all parties, I am sure: professor, students, peer consultant.) What about requiring brief (1-2 pages) summaries followed by "so what?" pieces? Encourage the students to reflect on the information read. Challenge them to explain why it's important to contemporary economic theory and what happens when theory meets practice. Or replace the summaries with questions that target essential elements of the chapter: How does this chapter relate to larger problems in economics? In what way do principles a, b, and c influence conclusions x, y, and z? Why are these ideas important for understanding theory q? Which of the strategies described might one employ in America's current economic situation?

Seriously, either of these two routes to the assignment (or a combination thereof) would have better chances of success than a straight-up regurgitation of the assigned text. And by "success" I mean a modest degree of illumination (on the part of the students and the instructor) and, hopefully, the avoidance of an early death by severe ennui (on the part of the students, the instructor, and the peer consultant).

Listening

Fruto Sagrado 20 Anos (Banda Fruto Sagrado)

A friend surprised me with this album last night. Fruto Sagrado is a Brazilian band whose name comes from John 15:16. I am told they play primarily hard rock, but 20 Anos is a recap of their favorite ballads. The producer of the album has also produced some of my friend's albums, and he autographed my copy of 20 Anos, which delights me. I do not speak Portuguese, but I really like the sound of the language, and I have been promised translations of the songs, eventually. Until then, I continue to enjoy the words, which I cannot understand, and the sound, which I love.

p.s. Look them up on Facebook under "bandafrutosagrado"; they have a couple songs posted!

Newly acquired

Yesterday, in a fit of decisiveness, I canceled my GRE and returned my GRE prep book. Then I went to a new and used bookstore and spent the money I got from the return on four new authors. I had decided that I would rather spend my remaining month at home reading than preparing for a standardized test.

Our friend from Brazil has told us that we have too few South American authors on our bookshelves. To remedy this, I bought a book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a book by Carlos Fuentes. Fuentes actually hails from Central America, but I think that even the attempt to stretch my book horizons southward ought to count for something. I also went east, to Vladimir Nabokov's Transparent Things, and then returned home with Henry James. One of the best things about books, as I learned the year my sister and I did world history, is that the four corners of the globe can fit in a single paper sack.

Listening

Seldom Seen Kid (Elbow)

Favorites:
"The Bones of You"
"Grounds for Divorce"

Wind turbines along the Columbia River Gorge (July 2010)

There are lists and lists (and metalists)

Ever since I started reading Umberto Eco's The Infinity of Lists (IL), I have been overcome by the enormous variety of catalogues that populate our daily lives. Lists are everywhere.

There are, Eco says, lists that take the form of collections (ch. 11, "Collections and Treasures," IL). I found one of these lists in the opening pages of Annie Dillard's An American Childhood, where Dillard recalls her father's obsession with accumulating copies of Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi:

In 1955, when I was ten, my father's reading went to his head.

My father's reading during that time, and for many years before and after, consisted for the most part of Life on the Mississippi. He was a young executive in the old family firm, American Standard; sometimes he traveled alone on business. Traveling, he checked into a hotel, found a bookstore, and chose for the night's reading, after what I fancy to have been long deliberation, yet another copy of Life on the Mississippi. He brought all these books home. There were dozens of copies of Life on the Mississippi on the living-room shelves. From time to time, I read one. (p. 6)

Dillard's father's collection is not actually listed, but it populates the bookshelves (and our imaginations) implicitly. Yet another kind of list deals in excess (ch. 15, IL), and this sort can be further subdivided into lists of coherent or chaotic excess (chs. 16 and 17, IL, respectively). A list of the coherently excessive variety deals in the "superabundance" of items that are nevertheless unified by a common theme. A list like this appears towards the end of Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, during a series of increasingly intense hallucinations suffered by the eponymous main character:

Mr Suttree it is our understanding that at curfew rightly decreed by law and in that hour wherein night draws to its proper close and the new day commences and contrary to conduct befitting a person of your station you betook yourself to various low places within the shire of McAnally and there did squander several ensuing years in the company of thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees. (p. 457)

The list of low-lifes presented at the end of the excerpt was, strictly speaking, unnecessary. McCarthy could have simply said that Suttree fell in with bad company. But then he would have deprived himself, and us, of the rich and rhythmic collection of unsavory characters that follows.

This next passage from Joan Didion's Where I Was From verges on the excessive, but probably falls in the category of what Eco calls a "practical" (as opposed to a "poetic") list (ch. 7, "There Are Lists and Lists," IL). Practical lists, he argues, "have a purely referential function," they are finite, and "they may not be altered, in the sense that it would be unethical as well as pointless to include in a museum catalogue a painting that is not kept there" (p.113). In the spirit of the practical list, Didion presents us with a comprehensive (but finite) account of the lengths to which the federal government went to irrigate California in the mid-1900s:

Reclamation of the tule lands has been a war, for those waging it, in which no armament could be too costly, no strategy too quixotic. By 1979. . .there were 980 miles of levee, 438 miles of canal. There were fifty miles of collecting canals and seepage ditches. There were three drainage pumping plants, five low-water check dams, thirty-one bridges, ninety-one gauging stations, and eight automatic shortwave water-stage transmittors. There were seven weirs opening onto seven bypasses covering 101,000 acres. (pp. 22-23)

Notice that, in contrast to the lists in Dillard and McCarthy, Didion's list is a closed one. We might be able to imagine other names to add to McCarthy's list, or other editions of Life on the Mississippi to add to Dillard's father's collection, but there are no other levees, canals, ditches, pumping plants, dams, bridges, guaging stations, or transmittors to add to Didion's list; she has itemized them all.

Other lists, both literary and everyday, present themselves. The Mirrors of Engima, by Borges, explores 1 Corinthians 13:12 by means of a curious series of inversions and translations that looks like nothing so much as a list of the possible ways of reading the passage. On my bedroom wall I have a poster covered with this year's birthday cards--a coherent visual list. My ceiling is filled with postcards, pictures, and posters from my travels--a catalogue of the places I have been and will be going to. This blog is itself a kind of list, a collection of various thoughts that I have worked out over the last few years. And, deliciously enough, this blog post is a list of lists (so now there are metalists as well).

I read a review of Christopher Nolan's new film, Inception, in the New Yorker that criticized him for being too fascinated with the mazes and labyrinths of his own imagination (to the detriment, the author argued, of the human interest side of the story.) I think that this is a fair criticism, but I can also understand why Nolan is absorbed in his mazes; it's the same reason I indulge myself in all the practical and poetic infinity of lists.

From the chapbook: "a new kind of education"

Excerpted from Father's Arcane Daughter, E.L. Konigsburg, pp. 45-46:

We talked about the world, and we discussed life. We exchanged thoughts and borrowed opinions, but only long enough to consider them and decide if they were good enough to belong to us.

And I had begun a new kind of education. History and geography were no longer subjects; they had become subject matter, subject matter about which I could have conversations with Caroline. I had to know my material to be able to discuss it with her. Being able to talk intelligently about what I had read had become a new kind of accountability, far more difficult than getting A's.

Caroline was the first person I had ever known who had read deeply and seriously out of interest and enthusiasm and not simply to pass a test.

And she was not like certain relatives of mine who gave me books as gifts--books that I knew they had never read themselves, but ones that were Good Books, and that they wanted me to associate them with. There were more people who knew what to read than there were people who read. Caroline was not like that. There was a great deal she had not read; she had not read a lot of the Good Books. But she had read a lot.

I want to make friends with Caroline.

Empty house

Chesterton and I are both tired. Tired from driving home and the long parade of wedding festivities and family. This morning we have the house entirely to ourselves, so we sit together on the couch and watch the morning fog slowly dissipate to reveal browning fields and the pale blue of a midsummer sky. The iPod is on shuffle, and I reflect that I have a strange and impossible taste in music. I have no respect for the good and the bad here: my iPod plays country, pop, German, folk, rock, jazz, and classical--not in that order. It sounds to be on a country kick right now.

I have a lot of chapbook entries that I want to write because my reading has been progressing apace. But this will require pulling books off the shelf that I just put back, and I am not sure I have the motivation for that yet. Today I need to unpack my suitcase, clean my room, go to the post office, go to payroll, and go to work. I also need to resume studying for the GRE, which I decided to take once more, and which is now just one month away. If I have time, I will read my latest book (Joan Didion's Where I Was From), and in the evening I'll go running; if I am feeling adventurous, I will drive to the next town and spend time with my brother. I am hoping all of this will keep me busy until my family comes home. It's too quiet here without them.

There was a wedding

"Great work is done while we're asleep"

X

Whatever is foreseen in joy
Must be lived out from day to day.
Vision held open in the dark
By our ten thousand days of work.
Harvest will fill the barn; for that
The hand must ache, the face must sweat.

And yet no leaf or grain is filled
By work of ours; the field is tilled
And left to grace. That we may reap,
Great work is done while we're asleep.

When we work well, a Sabbath mood
Rests on our day, and finds it good.

(Wendell Berry in A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, p.18)

Reflection on the Alphabet Soup Kids

I am trying unsuccessfully to read Wendell Berry over morning coffee. My youngest sister, wise beyond her years at eleven, observes the title of my book and says, "'Fidelity' is one of my favorite words."

"Do you know what it means?" I ask.

"Oh yes. I learned it when I looked up butterflies in my nature book."

This puzzles me and I say so; she tells me that there is a kind of butterfly that goes by this name, fidelity. "Such a beautiful word," she says again.

My siblings are smart cookies. I like to think I learn by osmosis, and so I try to spend as much time hanging out with them as possible. From my youngest sister I learn the names of clouds, trees, flowers, and the small creatures that thrive in our field and woods. Another sister is an artist with a gift for the shapes of bodies and faces and the spread of paint, which is something my forays into sketching could never begin to approximate; from her I learn about colors and how to realize the imagination. My sister the musician speaks eloquently about the inner workings of musical compositions and the history of the discipline, teaching me what it means to pursue something with perseverance and passion; music, I now know, is a lot of work.

And my brothers. Science brother solves our sewing puzzles with cosines and tangents on the weekends and during the week he experiments with semipermeable membranes in the lab. Someday I would like to know something about science and math, but this too takes work (and as I said yesterday: There are still so many novels to read.) From my youngest brother, the handyman in the family, I learn what it takes to build decks and repair cars, but also (more importantly) how to be graciously, abundantly generous. He treats his friends like royalty; they are lucky to have him.

My aunt used to call us the Alphabet Soup Kids because our names are alphabetical (A-F, ending with G). But the name is also appropriate because we are so diverse. We have such different talents, enthusiasms, and goals. And all these differences, some of them more dramatic than others, are mingled with so much kindness and so much love. Today I am grateful, both for this gift of diversity within the home, but also for my awareness of it, and for my family's faithful endeavor to mindfully cultivate the blessing we are for each other.


















Here we are + Dad + dog. And my mom is taking the picture. So here we really all are.

Listening

I've been on a house music kick for the last couple of days. A friend recommended Télépopmusik, a French electronic trio, to me, and it hits the spot. I think it would be really good writing music (if I were doing any writing this summer, which, thankfully, I've so far avoided.)

Beach Day

From the top of the dune at Cape Kiwanda (March 2009)

I am going to miss this.

From the chapbook: trains and trolleys

I have been slowly reading Cormac McCarthy's Suttree. It is the best book I have read in a very long time (which is saying something because I read a lot of books, and they are often quite good.) The thing I like most about McCarthy is his ability to breathe life into description and make the same beautiful (but grim) scenes even more beautiful (and grim) with each imagining. McCarthy's characters in Suttree also travel a lot, by train, trolley, car, boat, and their own worn feet. The traveling scenes are my favorite because of the way he incorporates the movement of the vehicle, the sullen beat of outward circumstance, into the rhythm of the characters' inner lives.

Here's one:

The door clattered and hushed shut and the trolley lurched forward. The pale domes of light in the clerestory waxed more yellow. The seats to the front of the streetcar were vacant. . . . With the heel of his hand Suttree cleared a small window in the frosted glass and peered out at the few figures receding along the walks. Fellow citizens in this bewintered city. A passing rack of hot neon washed his own sad countenance from the glass. He leaned his head against the cold pane, watching pedestrians toil from pool to pool of lamplight, trailing wisps of vapor, bent figures, homebound. He could smell the old varnished wood of the sash and the brass of the catches. The trolley slowed, surged forth again. Cars passed below, a rumpling sound of tires over bricks. The buildings dropped away. They were going by a frozen mudflat, lunar, naked, spoored with fossil dogtracks. Under the billboard lights small sprawling mica constellations.

The lightwires slung past in shallow convections pole to pole and the loneliness rode in his stomach like an egg. (pp. 177-178)

I have never heard anyone use the word "bewintered" before, but it works and I love it. And that "rumpling sound of tires over bricks" coupled with "the lightwires slung past in shallow convections?" Delicious.

Here's another:

He rode handcuffed through the winter landscape to Nashville. It is true that the world is wide. Out there the open ends of cornfield rows wheel past like a turnstile. Dark earth between the dead stalks. The rails at a junction veering in liquid collision and flaring again silently in long vees. His forehead to the cold glass, watching.

They went on through the long afternoon twilight with the old carriage rocking and clicking and a rain that blew down from the north cutting long tears in the dust on the windows. Barren fields falling away desolate and small flocks of nameless birds flaring over the land and against the darkening sky like seafans stamped from black sheet iron the shapes of winter trees against a winter sky. (p. 439)

Can you hear the poetry in that last line: "seafans stamped," "sheet iron" and "the shapes of winter trees?" Again, McCarthy knows what he's doing.

Weathering

The sun has come out at last and with it the heat. Today we are bracing ourselves for 97 degrees--a modest affair for our California friends, a moment of some import for those of us in the Willamette Valley. I have never been so grateful for a hot day. It simplifies my life dramatically: In the morning I can put on clothes that I know will be comfortable through the whole day; I don't have to rummage through my closet for matching sweaters; I can sit outside and read during my lunch break without having to worry about the sudden chill of a passing cloud; inside I am happy as a clam in the moderately cooled Writing Center facilities.

In the evening of yesterday, sitting under a mild night sky, I texted a friend: Why am I moving someplace cold? I love this weather. And he said: Don't you *like* the cold? And I said: I do. But I don't like being cold in it.

Which is exactly the truth.

I am resistant to the demands of the weather (my resistance betrays my frequent lapses of practicality and a common good sense.) I live in Oregon and still don't own a rain coat. I buy summer dresses when I know that I will have only a few weeks to wear all of them. I insist on leaving my sweaters at home because I hope against hope that I won't need them--despite the fact that the clouds are lowering and rain is striping the window panes.

I will have to wise up. I may need to buy another, warmer coat, sturdier shoes, cozier sweaters, gloves. Someday, when I am not in Oregon anymore, I will buy a rain jacket.

Blue time hunter

in the spirit of McCarthy


My cat is on the prowl tonight. Laced with feline desire for other fur and tiny, muted screams, his movements are lascivious, almost. He slinks slim-backed and striped through the lanky weeds, pauses to stretch and unfurls his claws, lays low-bellied against the ground until stripes and hay mingle in catless anonymity. Somewhere in that grass a creature is sucking in its last small breaths, chattering numbly across the crumbled earth. Streamers of cloud pale in the sky, night blows heavily through the trees, and in the last blue moments of the evening, Tsar, prince among cats, pounces. He rises up bearing something writhing between his jaws, and he stalks, regally, around the corner of the house and out of sight.










When he is not hunting, my cat listens to music on my dad's Bose headphones. We adore him (and his brother, Rajah.)

Movie redux

Now that I'm not in school anymore, I have time to watch movies. This is what I've been watching (in no particular order):

Ballets Russes. A documentary describing the birth and development of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, beginning in the 1930s. I don't know much about the world of dance, but I've been wanting to watch this for a few years now. The interviews with the original dancers are the best part of the film--such kind-hearted, good-humored, but deeply poignant reflections on their years with the company.

Following (Christopher Nolan; 1998). Set in London, about a man whose obsession with following people escalates into series of increasingly sketchy activities. Highlights: the remarkably unreliable narrator and the black and white cinematography.

Memento (Christopher Nolan; 2000). The Following turned me on to Christopher Nolan, so I watched Memento. I tried to watch it and scrapbook at the same time, and then realized that I was going to have to make a choice: work or watch. Eventually, I got around to watching the whole thing. It was good. I think that the conceit of the film (the patch-worked memories) could really easily turn into a gimmick. But Nolan does it right. I'm going to watch Inception when it comes out next week.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. This is another one that I've been meaning to watch for ages. I actually watched it before Memento, but it strikes me, now that they're side-by-side here, that they have some similarities (the most obvious one being nonlinear plots). I would pick Eternal Sunshine over Memento if I had to make a choice; I liked its emphasis on individual moments and experiences in the characters' lives.

Spiral (Moore and Adam Green; 2007). Of all the movies I've watched recently, this one is hands-down the best: a thought-provoking, and at times trippy, exploration of jazz, art, and the disturbed mind. Highlights: the cinematography (there's a shot of a street corner diner that looks like it's straight out of Hopper's Nighthawks and another scene is shot from above, looking down on a sea of black umbrellas and brown and ochre foliage); the dialogue (don't miss the quote about jazz masters that comes about 1/2-2/3 through the film, and there's another really good one about reality and the mind at the very end); the mind-bending plot (I thought I had it figured out, and then I didn't, and then I did and didn't.)

[Requisite warning: Memento, Following, and Spiral are not for the faint of heart.]

"It was, finally, just me and my bookshelf."

Nathan Schneider writes "In Defense of the Memory Theater:"

But eventually, inevitably, I moved on from the plenty of universities to a string of tiny New York apartments. My little library came with me. In the months that followed, after a countdown of email warnings, my off-campus access to the University of California’s online databases went dead. . . .

It was, finally, just me and my bookshelf. At first it wasn’t even a shelf at all, but piles of books scattered around my room on the floor, as orderly as I could manage and as high as they’d get before tumbling. The collection I had was a good one—largely unfashionable theologies, seductive philosophies, and my prized bestsellers from the 1970s about ancient alien gods and futures unrealized—but so much was missing. I was in New York to write and to think, and I would find myself turning to those stacks in desperation for a connection, a memory, or the loosest association. What suddenly became most evident were the absences, the missing books I could hazily remember having read and digested, yet which would need referring to again. They had turned, terrifyingly, into phantom limbs.

From the travel journal: EuroCup 2008

Two different days, two different outcomes for Germany; I'm hoping for a story like the first tomorrow.

****

8. Juni 2008

The Joker was packed to overflowing. Chairs filled the middle of the room; people sat on the floor, shoulder to shoulder, in the front; and the back was a swamp of churning, twisting, turning, screaming fans.

We watched the first half of the game in H.'s room, but finally gave up because the streaming was so bad. Then on our way back to our rooms we thought we'd try the Joker again and were in luck! Two of us wormed our way into the center of the mass, jostled from all sides, sucking in our breath, trying not to trample feet or elbow stomachs.

Contingents of Polish students in red and white were scattered the room. They started chanting; the Germans struck up a chorus; voices, shrill and excited, battled above the sounds of drinking, the roar of the game, and the commentary blaring over the loudspeakers. With Germany's second and final goal, the Joker erupted: arms pumping, feet stamping, flushed cheeks, open mouths, a deafening roar; the Poles buried their faces in their hands.

We won the game 2-0. . . . The crowd poured out of the Joker, shrieking. Even now, 20 minutes later, the noise hasn't let up. Drunken songs of triumph and belated cheers are spilling from open windows and balconies across Waldhaeuser Ost. Car horns are blaring--screaming at each other through darkened streets. It's 11 o'clock, but Germany is wide, wide, wide awake.

30. Juni 2008

We made a last pilgrimage to the Joker on Sunday evening at 8.45pm. We bought the requisite beers (they were out of Radler) and watched the final game of the Euro2008.

The atmosphere of the game was lacking from the very beginning. The Joker was full, but not packed, and Bordeaux and Gus weren't there. Presumably everyone had headed to Stuttgart for the public viewing.

Then there was the game itself: Spain demolished Germany (1-0) with a single Tor made in the first half of the game. None of our players were in top form (we hadn't even been sure if Ballack would be able to play because he was recovering from an injury)--and everyone agreed later that Spain deserved the trophy. (There is also the fact that Spain hasn't even made it to finals since the 50s or 60s.)

The game came to a close in morbid silence. A few Spaniards celebrated, but the rest of us collected our belongings, pushed out the door of the Joker, and headed back to our rooms. The only really good thing about the game was that I was able to sleep afterwards--sleep to the silence of the disappointment blanketing the city.