6 October 2008

Of nostalgia and Rusted Root

Listening to music from high school is grand tonic for my tired heart. I spent a morning last week listening to “When I Woke” and set myself to the past.

Deer Valley, a YMCA family camp, and hearing the album for the first time. It was exotic and clearly something all the college-kid counselors had. I had to have it, too.

Rusted Root playing to a packed audience of Johnny Hop students: knowing I had been in on the secret for a good seven years before my peers clued in. Also, Ben desperately wanting to hook up with Liz Berlin, who, I assured him, was married, and her thanking him for his phone number by calling him “so sweet.”

Carpooling to the PMEA honors band practices with four boys from my band: Nate, Zach, Joe and Joe. Zach and I were in the front seat, after rehearsal, singing along to every song. With abandon. Halfway through the CD, he turned to me and asked, “Do you actually know any of these words?” I assured him I did not either, and we continued to sing.

Watching Wilco at the Pittsburgh Arts Festival for free, standing but feet away from Michael Glabicki.

Always the girl who danced with her arms in a time when no one else did: Evan Mayo-Wilson watching me dance to “Ecstasy” at Homecoming in ninth grade and saying that he could always find me in a crowd because I was the only one with my arms in the air. Oh, how I was in love with Justin then and cringed when my date asked me, “Do you think it would be a bad idea for us to go out?”

Seeing Rusted Root open for Jewel with Kelly at the Starlake amphitheater. The sound guy could have done a better job by using some good car speakers than he did with the amphitheater’s sound system.

Years and years of putting “Food and Creative Love” on every mix tape I made: for myself, for Eve, for Adam, for the man of the hour. I still believe that all I need is food and creative love.

28 September 2008

A list of small pleasures

1. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins. Seeing as how it’s the school year again, my reading brain has returned to a state of near collapse. To counter this effect I am rereading The Great Gatsby, which is beautiful but does not force me inexorably toward the end, because I already know the end, and The Hunger Games. Young adult dystopias are becoming quite a favorite around the house, here. The Last Book in the Universe, How I Live Now, and now The Hunger Games. It’s a fast-paced, easy-to-read, terrifying vision of exploitation of the poor and totalitarianism. I recommend it highly.

2. Freddy the fern. Jeff and I were at an A&P buying things that Trader Joe’s doesn’t have. I saw Freddy and just had to have him. He’s happy now, sitting next to Phil (the philodendron).

3. Rusted Root, Weezer and Rufus Wainwright. It’s like I’m listening to my bear blanket from when I was a kid. Comforting. Warm. Broken in.

4. Homegrown tomatoes, which will become Sopa de Azteca tonight. Or, my own bastardized version of it based on my memory of eating it at Picante and looking at their menu on the internet. We’ve also got corn, beans, and avocado waiting. Everything is better with avocado.

5. Lady Grey tea. With sugar and milk.

14 September 2008

My Own Private What?

Jeff and I spent last night watching My Own Private Idaho. Well, I watched and graded papers (ahh, the school year). The moment it started I knew I would want to watch again, just to take in the beauty. After finishing it, I wanted to watch it again in order to put the miscellaneous pieces together at least a little better and to take in the beauty.

For those of you who have never seen the flick, it involves Keanu Reeves speaking Shakespearean lines (apparently he’s Henry IV), River Phoenix as a narcoleptic homosexual hustler, Flea as the manservant to king of the hobos, and sequences of sexual tableaux that stand in for live-action sex. You know, your average film about hustlers, thieves and drug addicts.

Idaho is an early Gus Van Sant film, and the more I watch of Van Sant the more I think I love him. The movie was beautiful in the way of A Clockwork Orange, a movie to which it owes its aesthetic. Only, I didn’t hate it like I hate A Clockwork Orange. The perversions were charming, like the man who wanted Mike (River Phoenix) to be a little Dutch boy scrubbing his kitchen, and not deeply unsettling, like a giant phallic sculpture or cows that dispense drugged milk.

And Idaho is just a beautiful landscape, one which Van Sant uses liberally.

I actually want to go here, now. Maybe to hermit away for a year writing and reading and watching films from the Criterion Collection. Never speaking to 14-year-olds, no matter how severe their learning disability or emotional disorder. Relaxing. Drinking fine martinis and Boont Amber beer. Eating stinky cheese. An artistic good life.

2 September 2008

A journey back in time

Because I don’t think Jeff and I have enough books in our house, I brought another big box of books home with me the last time we went back to Pittsburgh and Ohio. Oops. A lot of them are headed into my classroom library–The Secret Garden, Farenheit 451, a bunch of VC Andrews and Joan Lowery Nixon, some R.L. Stine–but some I couldn’t bear to imagine having ninth graders touch, take, and possibly lose. One such book is The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, by Avi. This was the biggest book in the world to me when I read it in fifth grade. And I have a distinct memory of circling all the words I didn’t know and writing them down in small handwriting on a small piece of paper. Unfortunately, that small piece of paper is gone. But the pencil circles are still there. (Click the picture to see it bigger, over at Flickr.)

In my mind, six to eight words were circled per page throughout the entire book. Not so much–it’s more like just for chapter 8. Not even all of chapter 8 now that I’ve looked again.

Some of my selections I find sweet–grievous, wont, contradict. I have, on various other pages, also circled: moreover, standoffish, naught, punctillious, and fatigued. To imagine I once didn’t know such words that I now consider so common.

Other words are still unknown to me: what is a futtock shroud? what does it mean to “holystone” a deck? what’s a clewgarnet? But I ask you, where if not this blog will I ever investigate this matter more fully than I did as a fifth grader. (It should be known that I never did look these words up. I just circled them and wrote them down). Excuse me while I utilize google, etc.

OK, so futtock shrouds appear to be the rope riggings on sailboats that let people climb onto the “top”. Umm, read the wikipedia entry if you want something clearer, because I can’t help you. If you holystone a deck, you scrub it with a holystone, which is a block of soft sandstone. Finally, a clewgarnet is a rope that holds the bottom of the main sail to something or other in the boat.

Who is this Avi person to put such complicated words in a children’s book! I love him!

6 August 2008

Playing with the Truth

I’ve noticed a trend in the books I’ve been reading recently: though they are clearly fiction, they like to suggest that they are, in fact, true stories. Not all the strategies for pulling this switcharoo are very successful, but at least one is.

Specimen 1: The Pigman by Paul Zindel. Before even page 1 comes The Oath:

Being of sound mind and body on this 15th day of April in our sophomore year at Franklin High School, let it be known that Lorraine Jensen and John Conlan have decided to record the facts, and only the facts about our experiences with Mr. Angelo Pignati. . . . The truth and nothing but the truth, until this memorial epic is finished, So Help Us God!

It is then signed by both the characters, fake signatures and all. Or, perhaps we are meant to believe that they are real signatures? Either which way, nothing makes me think a book is made up faster than an “oath” at the beginning written by the two narrators that proclaims all that follows to be strictly the truth. Also, the “signatures” remind me of the Baby-Sitters Club Super Specials where each chapter began with a diary page written by one of the main characters in her own handwriting. And I know those were made up.

Specimen 2: Cirque du Freak (ahem, yes), by Darren Shan. Once again, the book begins with an introductory note that tells the reader the story is “true”:

This is a true story.
I don’t expect you to believe me–I wouldn’t believe it myself if I hadn’t lived it–but it is. Everything I describe in this book happened, just as I tell it. . . .
One more thing: my name isn’t really Darren Shan. Everything’s true in this book, except for names.

Now if Cirque du Freak didn’t happen to be one of the least believable stories ever told–unlike The Pigman–this method of suggesting reality over fiction would be much more effective than The Pigman’s. You see, the name of the author of the Cirque du Freak series is Darren Shan. There is no author/narrator distinction, because they are the same person! Of course, he admits that he is not really “Darren Shan,” that the name is made up, which serves not necessarily to undercut the truth of the story so much as to create an unreliable narrator. I personally love the idea of the unreliable narrator, but I’m not sure that’s what Darren Shan had in mind when he set out to write a book about vampires and a giant spider. He comes so close to making me believe the story’s validity with the unreliable narrator thing, but ultimately, he utterly fails at making this fiction seem true.

Specimen 3: Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, by Mo Yan.

This is my favorite of the options for making me think a story is true, or at least based mostly in fact. The book is about a landlord who is killed in during China’s Land Reform Movement and is reincarnated as a donkey, an ox, a pig, a dog, a monkey and then a large-headed boy. Clearly, this cannot be “fact” in the strictest sense of the word.

So, anyway, Ximen Nao, the murdered landlord, is one narrator and the other is Lan Jiefang, who is related to Ximen Nao but I won’t take the time here to explain how. But Mo Yan–the character? the man?–also lives in the tiny Ximen village with the various animal incarnations of Ximen Nao and the man Lan Jiefang. And the two narrators do this thing where they quote the stories of Mo Yan (and/or make fun of him) to supplement their tellings of the story. This is my favorite instance:

Mo Yan, always ready to deceive people with heresy, is in the habit of mixing fact and fantasy in his stories; you can’t reject the contents out of hand, but you mustn’t fall into the trap of believing everything he writes. The times and places in “Tales of Pig-Raising” are accurate, as are the parts dealing with the winter weather; but the head count of pigs and their origins have been altered. Everyone knows they were from Mount Yimeng, but in the story they’re from Mount Wulian. And there were 1,057 of them, though he gives the number at something over 900. But since we’re talking about fiction here, the details should not concern us.

This is just so wonderfully cheeky. Mo Yan wrote himself into his fantastic novel about reincarnation and acknowledges himself as an unreliable story-teller. This genuinely makes me wonder how many of these characters were real people: how much of each was made up and how much based on the people Mo Yan grew up with? It doesn’t make me believe anymore in the fantastical reincarnation aspect (though I think I do believe in some sort of reincarnation, just not the sort where a character can remember every life and also his encounters with Lord Yama of the underworld), but it does make me wonder how accurate a history of Northeast Gaomi Township Life and Death is. This method–acknowledging that some elements are fake and/or fiction while at the same time insisting on the truth of certain aspects, makes me believe in the truth of the story.

The Feast of Love, by Charles Baxter, does something similar. The novel has a character named Charlie Baxter, which highlights the artifice of fiction at the same time as it makes you think that perhaps these characters are real people. So cool. I’d quote it but I leant it to Joanna.

Ironically, it is the unreliable narrator and/or the use of meta-fiction techniques that makes me believe there is truth to be found in a work of fiction. A blatant statement that claims the entire story will be true rings false for many reasons, not the least of which is the fracturing of truth that came along with post-modernity. How many of you would say, in writing, that everything that you write is the absolute truth? Do you have that much faith in your ability to give an accurate rendering of events in which you took part? It’s too boastful; it makes me doubt the sincerity of any such claim. Once the capacity for error is conceded, however, all that follows is cast with a certain dubious truth that I am all too anxious to embrace.

16 July 2008

absorption pt. 2

Continued from here.

If Herbert is consciously involved in the play and pull of history and morality on an obviously macro level, Tomaž Šalamun engages with those things on the level of pure consciousness and his own awareness of the mind at work. Šalamun’s mind at work is the framework upon which his poetry is based. He makes, in print, the associative leaps that everyone does, but he is interested in those leaps as contributing to his work.

They’ve blocked our radio.

In freedom, everyone’s eyes will shine.

We’ll smooth out foil chocolate wrappers
and roll them up again in tight, tiny balls
for other continents.

Bombs kill grasshoppers, too, if they fall on a meadow.

It seems to me that he is every bit as interested with the pitch and rock of consciousness as it affects history and day to day life, but presented in the personal, microscopic frame of reference that each person is responsible for. (I should also say that both of these writers are very funny, but in that way that I have noticed that Eastern Europeans are, with a sad, wry smile that bespeaks the weight of serious and long-endured history.)

Herbert shares the long view, inviting you to look over his shoulder as he points to moments in the past, and following his guiding finger, traces the arc of history over what is happening now, allowing the reader to lay the past over the present to see that the two are embarrassingly (and encouragingly) similar. Šalamun places the reader squarely in the center of his head, with neurons firing all around her like mortars and shows the spot where each sparks hits and catches fire to another, creating the twine of thoughts, twisted and frayed, with each thread its own, yet always connected (even if tangentially) by awareness and consciousness, displayed with frustration and glee.

It has taken me a while to appreciate both of these writers. Herbert, because of the scope of his writing, and because I don’t have the education he had, and thus a lack of reference (which I am endeavoring to rectify); Šalamun, because of the fact that I don’t live in his head and didn’t understand that the first time I read anything by him, it was necessary to simply absorb the words, without attempting to assign them cohesion and linearality, because that’s not the way he is meant to be read. It’s a little like the first time I listened to Machine Gun by Peter Brötzmann or Playthroughs by Keith Fullerton Whitman–I simply didn’t know how to hear them, on their own terms, as artistic statements, the way the artists insisted on listeners engaging with them. It takes time, and sometimes, especially as a younger person, patience was not something I possessed as an audience.

This is an exceedingly long-winded way of engaging with the Oppen quote at the beginning. I don’t really think that very many artists possess that “pragmatism of art” that allow their very beings to be constant fodder for art. On the contrary, with very few exceptions (maybe Jorie Graham? or Anne Carson?), the process of art is turning what we think on a daily basis, with no thought toward artistic creation, into the personal expression of our art. Each of us is the only person capable of thinking what we think, as our perceptions are clouded by our pasts are influenced by our genetic make-up, making us uniquely qualified to give voice to our thoughts and feelings. These two artists spent (are spending) their lives examining the way their thoughts existed in the world and figuring out how to turn them into art, and making that investigation crucial to the art itself.

16 July 2008

absorption pt. 1

In his first daybook (ca. 1963-64), George Oppen wrote the following:

At least two kinds of devotion. The devotion to art, a sort of pragmatism of art which refuses to think anything that will not contribute to poetry. The other is a devotion which tries to makes poetry of what the mind, the free and operating mind thinks can knowor must know–and is going to know.

I have been thinking about this quote often, as I have been rereading Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito and reading for the first time Tomaž Šalamun’s A Ballad for Metka Krašovec. My thinking is that the second devotion is what most of us who write ascribe to, since the vast majority live in the real world and have things happen to us and do things involving other people that, by necessity, have nothing to do with our art. Having the thought, I feel shitty is not a thought that by itself contributes to a poem–as a line it won’t break well, spondee/trochee does not have a particularly pleasant meter, etc. But it is in the writing it down, the parsing it for how it sits in the world and lives in our heads, that we understand it and make it into art, allows us to know something about ourselves and our relation to the world that we did not know before. Oppen also said, “I write to find out what I’m thinking.” I dig Oppen, in case you hadn’t caught that.

I give this information as a lead in to talking about the books by the above Central/Eastern Europeans. I have been trying to find a copy of Mr. Cogito for the last three years. It went absurdly out of print almost immediately upon its printing in 1993, and I have, until recently, not been able to find a copy of it for less than $100, which has kept me from buying it. But I finally did (also could return Joel’s copy) and proceeded to devour it over our vacation. Mr. Cogito was a kind of “psudo-persona” that was and was not Herbert. Most helpfully, Mr. Cogito allowed Herbert to laugh at himself in a way that being an aging Pole, post-WWII and deeply committed to art and philosophy in the time of brutal Communistic dictatorship would not generally allow. But it also allowed Herbert to exist, at least artistically, at any time in history and relate the themes he understood to be omnipresent across time and space in his poems. One of the great joys of the poems is that, unlike many other poets, there is no real dividing line when Mr. Cogito starts and Herbert ends, which gives the poems a verisimilitude that is difficult when the reader know that the writer is writing about someone else’s thoughts and feelings. In these poems, it is often as if Mr. Cogito is Herbert’s astral twin, whom Herbert envies and pities, but whom he also understands completely and whose experience Herbert loves because he cannot be every place he wants to see and cannot live to see what happens in person.

Herbert is deeply rooted in the classical education, referencing Plato, Spinoza, Caligula, Gilgamesh, as well as all kinds of myths and stories. I spent most of my time reading the book with wikipedia open in front of me, so I could look up the references and be able to follow the literary and historical plane upon which Herbert exists, since it is not a plane familiar to me. To that end, I have been starting to fill in the serious gaps in my classical education (yes, I know there is no such thing as a classical education anymore, but when have I ever been mistaken for someone who doesn’t believe there is value in the esoteric?). I read the Epic of Gilgamesh, which I enjoyed quite a bit, though I think the word epic is perhaps slightly outmoded, since it is only about 40 pages. It is lovely and sad and made me appreciate Suzanne Gardinier’s new long poem that I heard snippets of at the SLC Poetry Festival this year. I am going to try to read some Greeks, perhaps actually read some Ovid, since I should have when I was an undergraduate and didn’t, because, to no one’s surprise, it isn’t easy and at age 19 or 20, I couldn’t imagine why the hell I would possibly want to spend my time reading poetry written 2000 years ago by a dude telling some stories that, if I wanted to, I could find on the internet and the pertinent information would be provided for me. There are days I want to punch my 20 year old self.

I’m going to eat some breakfast and then write a little about Šalamun.

9 July 2008

Let’s talk about bureaucracy

I have been thinking a lot about bureaucracy of late. Though it may seem like a somewhat dry theme to most, for me it is the most interesting thing going on in my recent (and, uh, not so recent) media consumption. I have said it before, though perhaps not in writing, that watching The Wire has taught me more about my job as a teacher than anything in my teacher preparation classes. And this realization hit me when Jeff and I were watching the first, maybe second, season–not while watching the fourth season, which was the first to explicitly address public schooling.

What makes The Wire so very fascinating is how it depicts bureaucracy as generating both internal and external conflicts. Bureaucracies become characters in and of themselves. And The Wire does not treat bureaucracy as a structure limited to government: the drug families and gangs are just as bureaucratic as the police department as the public schools as the DA’s office as the city government of Baltimore. As each of these bureaucracies butt up against one another, so do the characters, some of them playing different roles in conflicting bureaucracies concurrently.

Each character in the Wire-verse gets caught between his or her ideals/integrity and the political necessities of what is the truly magnificent machinery of his/her primary bureaucracy. The turning points, the moments that make you cringe as a viewer, are those times when someone has to compromise his methods or compromise his goal for the sake of playing the political game required by working inside gargantuan systems of hierarchical human beings.

I bring up The Wire before “Brazil” because I find it instructive in parsing Terry Gilliam’s vision of bureaucracy run amok. If you haven’t seen “Brazil” yet, I highly recommend it. The screenshots in this post are filched from the film and give only the slightest hint at the insane visual display that it is. I’m not even certain I would have realized “Brazil” as bureaucracy per se had The Wire not primed me to see its sordid effects in every institution of our modern lives.

“Brazil” is your classic dystopian vision of the future, a la 1984 and A Brave New World. Check out the number of people it takes just to organize the records in the shot at the top of the post to get a feel for the extent of specialization and bureaucracy it depicts. What makes “Brazil” such a distressing vision of the future is that there seems to be nobody in charge. The movie is black comedy of the best kind, it is dark and almost completely absurd–it is the lack of figurehead that gives the situation its absurdity.

As Sam, the main character, tries to navigate the bureaucracy, he is pretty much completely unsuccessful. I myself wonder if what renders him incapable of getting anywhere is that the bureaucracy is so entrenched and complicated that there is, in fact, no one in charge. There is only bureaucracy, either in form resembling an ouroboros or a flattened pyramid/brick wall.

Ultimately in the world of “Brazil,” the bureaucracy fails and ducts take over everything with no one capable of fixing them (see screenshot above). Things don’t turn out much better in The Wire, where it appears that even if you make a breakthrough, the victory is isolated and the bureaucracy will remain essentially unchanged, as though you cleaned up one room of ducts but millions remain.

This is how I feel as a teacher–one woman in a bureaucracy gone mad with excessive levels of political maneuvering and employees falling in straggling lines beneath an ambiguous leadership figure (is it the principal? the chancellor? the national government?)–like I’ve entered a school where the ducts, the internal workings, are the primary focus and prevent us from doing the real work at hand. All this becomes that much more heartbreaking when I think of the students. I don’t care that much if I am eaten up by the political machinery, and I keep my nose clean enough to save my own skin, but what happens to the kids is much like what happens to Sam’s apartment up there with the ducts spilling out all over. The people whom we should be serving have no one to serve them because we are all caught in the intricate workings of bureaucracy.

11 May 2008

Notes on life

My ass has been solidly roundhouse kicked by my job, but I am still up and fighting! There are only about five teaching weeks left. I can totally do that! Yeah!

Anyway, here’s a short list on what’s been going on in my intellectual life, which has been a little meager the past couple months.

1. I lost my ability to read smart, intelligent literature for awhile there and read a bunch of books from my classroom library. I read The Outsiders, So B. It, and Sister Spider Knows All. Interestingly, both So B. It and Sister Spider Knows All revolve around a young woman who does not know anything about her mother and engages in a grand search to discover whatever missing details there are to be found. And of course The Outsiders has orphans for main characters. What’s up with YA fiction and the lack of solid parental figures?

2. I watched a bunch of movies based on classic YA books. Holes, Tuck Everlasting (the one with Alexis Bledel), and The Outsiders. Holes and Tuck Everlasting are fabulous. The Outsiders was the worst piece of dreck I’ve seen since watching Across the Universe. Actually, we watched both of those movies in the same weekend. It’s amazing how a movie can be full-feature-length and feel like it’s moving so quickly and be so incredibly unsatisfying. The lack of character development in both of those movies was astounding. I do NOT recommend them.

3. I am reading Night by Elie Wiesel with my 10th graders. I also read Lord of the Flies for the first time ever. Reading them at the same time was eerie and instructive. People en masse can be terrifying. Also, holy shit! Holy shit! is what I say to the end of Lord of the Flies. And oh yeah: many of my students do not know what the Holocaust is. Ahem. This makes teaching a Holocaust memoir somewhat more challenging. Boy howdy do I know more about it now, though.

4. I finally finished reading Modern Love by Matthea Harvey. In my eyes, Ms. Matthea can do no wrong. She wrote these poems in two series called “The Terror of the Future” and “The Future of Terror” that are both haunting and whimsical. Only Matthea. Also, her poems about Roboboy were pretty awesome. Click here to read “Dinna’ Pig” (scroll down), a poem from Modern Love, and get a brief but fantastic taste of the brain of Matthea Harvey.

6. The Wire. I broke down at Borders yesterday and bought the fourth season. I simply cannot wait the couple days between disks that Netflix requires. For those of you who still haven’t watched The Wire I say for shame! In the fourth season the show stretches its tentacles into the public school system, which makes it that much nearer and dearer to my heart. It’s also become that much more heartbreaking because you watch kids get sucked out of school and onto the corner. Ugh, but in the best way.

7. I am hooked on Grey’s Anatomy.

28 April 2008

evil music

I left the house today to learn about my new job assignment. Today is one of the april days referred to in the childhood ditty, and remarkably crappy. While doing the dishes, I decided to put on Kiss It Goodbye’s only lp, called She loves me, She loves me not…. Understand that when I first developed my own taste in music to the point of having to seek out stores that would sell records from places like Victory Records, I wanted to listen to things that would be the aural equivalent of getting whiplash from being hit in the head with a brick. My friend Casey was very into Rage Against the Machine, and when we would drive to soccer games, that’s the sort of thing that he would want to listen to, whereas I wanted to listen to Deadguy’s Fixation on a Co-worker or whatever-the-hell-tripe Earth Crisis was shouting about at the time. Straightedge as I was by simple default, I wasn’t interested in the message of going vegan and hitting people who weren’t with bats. I’m paraphrasing, of course.

But really, Deadguy was where it was at. I was listening to a lot of punk music concurrently, but So-Cal punk, with harmonies and a tempering of anger with melody and, from time to time, some hope. Deadguy was the first east coast hardcore band I got into, and from the word go, there was something new and troubling about it–and who could resist such weight and sludge coupled with what sounded like true bitterness and rage about nothing in particular? Sure, there was the song about having a crappy office job, another about some girl that done someone wrong, but it is only now, actually thinking about it, that it strikes me as extraordinarily existentialist, even wallowing in serious nihilism on occasion. They were singing about how unbelievably fucked up it felt constantly, simply to be alive and conscious in New Brunswick, NJ in 1995. And the guitar sounded like a garrote and the vocals were a rope fraying itself into its constituent bloody threads. It was really just the thing to get me through the last couple of years of high school. If I remember correctly, it was really the first record that really gave my parents pause.

And now, as I listen to it again, I’m not sure it was evil, but it certainly sounded it. Today, at 29, when I have the wherewithal and the means I didn’t really have in high school to burn down a whole town, I could totally talk myself into burning down just one house. I suspect, in a couple of years, by the time we have kids, I won’t even be able to be talked into the one. Man, I’m getting old.