If You've Nothing to Hide, You've Nothing to Fear: Hogg, The Presets, and Violence

I know, I know, like this is a new thing. I woke up after vivid dreams to cough for about 45 minutes, then continued where I left off two weeks ago with James Hogg's The Confessions of a Justified Sinner and find it--again--especially timely. My colleague Mr. Sealy tried to teach Crime and Punishment a while ago to his freshmen (much to my great admiration) and I think that it could readily be taught alongside this much shorter novel, with its first-person perspective of a religious zealot who sees any means within his power to be justified and the "higher path," even though we as readers all see him as an agent of nothing but evil:

"But if it will be accounted unfair to take up a conqueror, and punish him in his own way, I answer: That if a man is sent on a positive mission by his master, and hath laid himself under vows to do his work, he ought not to be too nice in the means of accomplishing it; and, further, I appeal to holy writ, wherein many instances are recorded of the pleasure the Lord takes in the final extinction of the wicked and profane; and this position I take to be unanswerable."
So long as one can get a holy book to justify one's actions, one's accountability evaporates. Sheer insanity. It's the same argument used by those who shoot and bomb abortion clinics, then go home or to church to praise the God that supposedly put them on such a mission.

---

While shopping for books in the same shop I, not long ago was book-trolling with James and Mike and others, I found volume one (solely, unfortunately) of a scholarly edition of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, which seems to also touch on the same subject, in which the "poem" speaks of a "grumbling hive" where we have Swiftian representation of Society in which corruption works alongside with goodness to make the hive function. And some things don't change even today:

The soldiers, that were forc'd to fight,
If they surviv'd, got Honour by't;
Tho' some, that shunn'd the bloody Fray,
Had Limbs shot off, that ran away:
Some valiant Gen'rals fought the Foe;
Others took Bribes to let them go:
Some ventur'd always where 'twas warm,
Lost now a Leg, and then an Arm;
Till quite disabled, and put by,
They liv'd on half their Salary;
While others never came in Play,
And staid at home for double Pay.

This and the other works are fermenting toward the possible end result of some sort of essay.

In other news, I've run into the new release by the Australian group The Presets. For fans of the 80s, that decade is officially back, by the sound of this disc, and the Presets have a Cd that, at least initially, has all you could ask for. The music is spiny, angular, and actually has ideas behind it, aside from some bunch of newcomers out to plunder the vaults for suggestions of a Sound. Ultimately, the new CD sounds like a melding of the darker moments of Information Society with Nitzer Ebb fronted by the vocalist of Blancmange, the "Blind Vision" of which could point to the uniformity of purpose that seems to justify the universal ID card craze that has hit various country governments and which the Pet Shop Boys skewer in their most recent video, "Integral," with its pixellated representations of planes and eyescans. For an annual fee, you can wait in a much shorter line for the airplane, so long as you give the government a retinal scan and a DNA sample. The video, in it's tearpad pixellations, includes many subliminal scan codes that lead to documents that deal with civil rights issues and governmental invasiveness.

On repeated listenings for those who like their sonic background more sophisticated the Presets disc sounds a bit cheap and shallow in spite of all the sonic ideas that show up as the disc plays out. Some electro discs draw the listener inward with a great maze of interlocking sound, but this one tends to only skate along the surface. I'm entertaining thoughts of a brief discussion on visual rhetoric on the Presets' video This Boy's in Love, in which the violence of the video is brought into an entirely new context--that of the homoerotic--simply by being shown in slo-mo. It reminds me of a video I saw somewhere where a techno song is played over slo-mo video of people being punched in the face. Violence, after all, is what people pay attention to.

No Tents, No Cats, No Siding

I'm home. Dad left and is likely still on the road. The lawn isn't nearly as bad as I thought it might be, and I'm tired. I'm going to bed. And I can actually say, for the first time in two weeks, that it is, in fact, a bed I am going to.

'Night, all.

If Only...

...grandpa's house was three stories high. If it was, this'd be the view from one of the bedrooms. I snapped this while wrestling with the chimney a couple of days ago.

Today is my last day here in Colorado (and there was much rejoicing...)--I'll be on the shuttle by 6:15 in the morning tomorrow. I'm going to look in to having the bike shipped, but I might just leave it here. I seriously considered riding it all the way back to Indy on an epic trip, but thought better of it. With the lungs, etc., this just isn't the time to do it.

This trip certainly could've gone better. But the bike, the lovely beer from Ft. Collins, and the baby bunnyrabbits frolicking in the backyard have helped quite a bit. After lunch, Grandpa and I will go to see how much it will cost to ship the bike back, as well as the tent and sleeping bag. It'll be great to get back to my house, where I can resume my reading schedule and not deal with any siding for a while.

UPDATE:
The bike shipping would be over $100, with an additional $30 for the necessary crate, so it looks like the bike will be staying here in Colorado for the nonce. It appears we might actually be working on trim, but considering it's after 2p.m. I'm not sure how long Dad'll be working. Once we're done, I'm getting some Fat Tire, by g-d.

Fat Tires and Tiny Glasses

Today, partly stemming from needing some sort of exercise to get the lungs going, and greatly as an exercise in maintaining my sanity regarding working with Dad on a home improvement project, I decided to ride the Goodwill Bike all the way from Loveland to Ft. Collins, birthplace of the revered Fat Tire beer. The wind was practically nonexistent, the scenery was lovely, with the foothills of the Rockies to my left, but all that still didn't get me there in time for the last tour of the Brewery at 3:30. I arrived 15 minutes late, and had no choice but to sit in the crowded tasting area and get four samples of the various beers on offer. I sat next to two lovely ladies who became friends exactly 23.5 years before. One lived in Ft. Collins, and the other lived in Travers City MI, flying out to visit. This was her first sightseeing jaunt after landing and they both, in addition to being charming company, were kind enough to snap my picture. The red face ain't from the beer, folks, it's from being perched on a ladder for the past week. I officially have the weirdest tan lines ever. After cycling around the lovely downtown Ft. Collins has, and after the beer-tasting, I rode along the Cache de Poudre River (French for Powderkeg?) and snapped some pix of the massive cottonwood trees. From there, I pedalled, much parched and much fatigued, back home. All told, I cleared about 30 miles.
On the way, I found a brand new hat along the highway. Considering the sun and also considering how burnt my nose is (it feels like hamburger) I snatched it up and put it on. I now appear to be a fan of South Carolina football. Yay Cocks!

Sun, Surf, and Siding

The lungs are alternately worse and better. I bring the laptop into the tent every evening now so I can listen to music--the Bartok string quartets, lately--and hear something other than my sludgy lungs. This morning I actually woke up earlier than Dad did. My coughing woke me up at 7, I bummed around on the patio for another hour, enticing the squirrels to come closer and closer with my store of grandpa's in-shell peanuts. Sometime after 8 Dad makes an appearance, then disappears for another 20 minutes. Evidently the ladder-climbing is taking its toll.

I'm not sure if I am sliding into bronchitis or not--I still cough for about an hour to an hour and a half in the morning, but after that things seem to be better. Today was spent taking off all of the siding that we put on yesterday, adjusting things, and then putting it all back on again. We have one new sheet up. I'm not at all enjoying this siding application part of the program, and if I was to pick an after-grad-school job, the siding business would not be it.

During Dad's first break I rode down to nearby Lake Loveland and walked around a bit in the perfectly chilled water, finding various stones of pretty colors to take home or lose or something. On riding back, we got the last of the stuff we had cut put up, leaving the odd cut-out sections at the top for tomorrow. This is thrilling news for the general reader, i know I know...

The bunnies are practically impossible to photograph, and in the pix I have, one can tell that it is a bunny, but not just how adorable they are. The temp reached 90, though humidity is only 10%. Dad indicated that he was pretty much done with stuff I'd be helping out with for the day, so I'm back downtown at the library. I'll probably have something to eat here (there's an old place called the Bum Steer or something like that--it has a picture on its sign of a steer's ass--which I might try after I tire of the internet. I've got my fantabulous issue 59 of Willow Springs to read, along with a back issue of Redivider.

Free Davo--Davo Free!

Davo's got wheels! Hot damn! On one of our multiple trips to the hardware store, Dad said from his place in the back seat (the siding flashing running from the dashboard out the passenger window made it impossible to sit shotgun) that we should turn in to the Goodwill store on Eisenhower to see if there is a bike my size that is available for purchase.

I wasn't all that impressed as I turned in to the lot--on view were a lot of bikes that had training wheels still attached to them. Bikes in shades of powder pink or blue that had decals of Dora the Explorer on them, etc. I put on the hazard flashers in the loading zone and jogged over to the front of the store to take a look. I wasn't planning to be there long. One of the bikes, a Mongoose (eh?) with 21 gears and a too-low (but easily adjustable) seat was there. My size. Chain a bit stiff, tires a bit low, but not in rough shape at all. I looked at the other bikes to see what the pricing was.

They appeared to have bar code stickers on them in various shades. I looked for a corresponding sticker on my bike. It was there, right on the handlebars--$10.99.

Really. Eleven bucks for a bike? Consider it sold. Asthma or no, this bike was getting to Boulder Drive somehow. There was no way for it to fit in Grandpa's sporty car, so Dad drove the car home and I pedalled around Lake Loveland to finally pull in to the front yard. With tires pumped up and now properly lubricated, it isn't as fleet of foot as my '60s Schwinn racing bike back at home, but it has a far more comfortable long-term posture. Once things were in order, I worked my way to Old Town Loveland and had a beer and read my book--sheer bliss. The ride back wasn't all that bad, considering the altitude and rheumy lungs, etc. I don't want to leave this bike behind in 5 days. I want to see how to get this bike home.

In other news, we have put up 3 of the 10 panels of siding that we've got. I'm lobbying to work on the lower level stuff (a/k/a not the top half of the chimney) first, so we've got all of the 9-foot-panel necessities out of the way. Dad and I spent much of the day cussing at the panels, the nails (mentioned in the previous post) and each other, but discovered that tiny baby wild bunnies have found the back yard a sort of sanctuary. The parent bunnies are nowhere to be found, but the little things will, in the afternoon, come out to nibble on the grass, and as soon as they do, everything becomes a scene from Bambi. They run rings around the base of the ladder and chase each other, etc., and Dad and I both have no choice but to laugh at each other and our struggle with substandard building materials. I'll work on pix of the little things soon.

Crap, crap, and crap

I'm feeling like crap, folks--no oxygen is getting to my system due to various reasons--I've resorted to Primatene for the first time in about a decade. The stuff allows you to breathe, but I feel like my chest cavity is being artificially expanded by springs. Which hurts. So, I still feel like crap, but each inhalation isn't accompanied by strange notes and bird trills.

We've moved on to replacing siding. It's my first time working on a new construction house, and I have to say I'm appalled at the crap quality of the materials. Constructed in 1987, the siding, which is made essentially out of pressed sawdust, has, from day one, been absorbing rainwater and swelling and falling apart. For no plausible reason, the stuff is put on with 20-penny (3-inch) galvanized nails, which is kinda the equivalent of using a nail gun to fasten an antimacassar to the back of a wing-back chair. Or using a .22 for wart removal. The siding is disintegrating, leaving one with crap everywhere and huge nails to yank out of the framework. For all my gripes about refurbishment, I'll take my 1926-built bungalow any day over a new-built subdivision home.

Well, the sun is down, and it's about time I headed back to my tent. Hopefully things won't be like last night, with a nearby outdoor wedding reception (with horrible outdoor live band) followed by 4 hours of rain. At least I know the thing sheds water now.

Congestion and Intervals

It appears that, with sleeping in the tent the first few cold and stormy days has brought on a cold, which, in addition to the altitude, the asthma, and the allergies, is doing a real number on me. The sun is slowly coming up, which I hope will warm things up quickly, as I'm not terribly warm here in the tent at the moment.

I brought along some review CDs to write up on. Perhaps, if I am able to get access to a bike, I'll do some review-writing at the library. Or perhaps at a used bookstore I found during my walk through the rain a couple of days ago. In light of things musical, I found this in my peregrinations of Cyberspace. I don't know much about this show, but given this snippet, I plan on searching it out...




Today we get plants to put in the beds and perhaps locate a table saw for the siding. Yay.

New Day, New Location, and Yard Maintenance

Moving my tent away from the bird feeders, as well as the change in weather, actually conspired to help me sleep in a bit today. Not to jinx it, but the neighbor's dog has not come out to plague me with incessant barking. The kitty chronicles continue--after the big asthma bustout of yesterday, my histamines are on super mega high alert, so now anything that could remotely be considered an allergen is something I'm responding to. Pollen? Check. Dust? With the wind, check. Standing in the house? Triple-word-score, baby. In addition to the lungs, I'm sneezing and have no skin under my nose anymore.
The change in weather has brought out a new feature of the tent--that of solar collector. With vent flaps open and all, temps would mount in the tent to rival a parked car in a sunny lot, as I found out after a brief nap.
We went off to a nearby nursery to check out plants to put in the now-cleared flowerbeds, and in my walking around the place, found the following planter, which I could swear I've seen on some blog or other. At any rate, it bears a very striking resemblance to Iraq War Cheerleader and Fox News fixture William Kristol. The consciously pot-like plant growing out of his head was a nice touch, I thought.
Dad appears to be good for work in the morning up until about eleven, then all action stops until 4. If this schedule holds, I'll be having a lot of time on my hands. I'm hoping I can get my hands on a bike so I can get some exercise and actually see something of this town. It'll also allow for marginally more exciting pix than i've taken so far.
In reading news, I'm about 10 pages from finishing The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz and I have to admit I really don't get it. He writes rather like Kafka, with that dreamlike unreality, but i'm not sure what he's satirizing, if he is satirizing. The short stories all interlock, rather like Kate Bernheimer's do, only without so much of a sense of trying to be fairy tales. There is arresting imagery, but I'm just not quite sure what it's all going to. It kinda seems to be about memory, kinda about the dead of the Lost Generation, and kinda about technology:

"It was not man who had broken into the laboratory of nature, but nature that had drawn him into its machinations, achieving through his experiments its own obscure aims. [...] According to [his father's theory], man was only a transit station, a temporary junction of mesmeric currents, wandering hither and thither within the lap of eternal matter. All the inventions in which he took such pride were traps into which nature had enticed him, were snares of the unknown."

This also seems to fit in, if I remember correctly, something similar spoken of in the James Hogg novel, which I unfortunately left at home..Illl have to check on it when I get back.

Lows to Highs

Today began a bad day. A bust. The weather crap, cold, and a dismal rain. The night was really bad, with enough of a wind to carry off the tent, had it not been for me lying in it. By the time the birds showed up at 5:30, I was exhausted. A shower didn't help. The weather meant that no siding was going to get done, no yardwork, and the wind made sitting in the tent a stupid option. the lungs bothered me all night, to the point where I chewed an OTC antihistamine to help avoid an actual asthma attack. A day best spent indoors. Unfortunately it was not possible for me to do that at the house, so, after what all parties would consider too much deliberation, I found myself dropped off downtown in the rain. A cup of rank coffee later, I settled in at the City Library for a potentially very long long time in a chair in the Biography section. Luckily, they didn't have lock sleeves on their CD collection, so, after getting hooked up to WiFi, I listened to various CDs while typing emails.

Grandpa and Dad picked me up after noon, and we went driving up to Black Hawk, not greatly far from Estes Park. The rain had turned to snow at some point and I have the pix somewhere in my camera, which is in the house. I've run the weedeater extension cord out to the tent so that I might be able to surf the Internet without further pulmonary shutdown, so instead of a general picture of snow on pines, how about this?

Grandpa, ever the man to grease the rails toward Perdition, handed us each $20 gambling money and set us off on the slots. There was a point where I was actually winning at computer blackjack, but I think that was mostly due to the fact that I didn't know what the hell I was doing. Doubling Down? Splitting? What the hell, I'll try it. I got a free Fat Tire beer, which I figure was worth the five bucks I subsequently lost. My biggest coup was when I stuck in 50 cents in a penny slot and came back with almost five bucks. This, however, didn't make up for the $20 of Grandpa's, that I really hoped I'd make good on, considering how nice he was to get things rolling. We all did just as one would expect.

By the time we were through gambling (Dad and I hazarded a stint at the $5-bid blackjack table, which was very short-lived), the sun was on its way out. By the time we were back home from our picturesque drive back to Loveland, the skies were clear, and the weather tomorrow will be in the 80s and sunny. The wind has picked up, though, which took the tent and flipped it like a bug downwind. I've staked it in the yard, hoping that things are dry enough for me to not have soakthrough at 2a.m.

An Ent in a Tent...

Well, the flight, aside from a group of Satan Babies screaming the whole way to Denver, went fine, the bus ride went fine, and the cat-free accommodations are, well, out back. The birds are early on the scene--I woke up feeling like I was in the middle of a Hitchcock film at 5:30 am.

We set to work on the bushes not much later. My project is to convert this
into something that once again resembled a couple of bushes. tonight it's supposed to rain, then more rain, then cold temps in the low 40s, then temps in the 90s. Today there is a tornado warning, a snow advisory, and a flash flood warning all in the same county. Indiana appears to be having similar difficulties. Dad has salmon patties on the stove, and here's hoping that the rain won't blow under the patio roof tonight. The box said that the tent was a "3-person" model, but I'd say that the people they used to gauge the capacity were substantially shorter than I am. I'm sleeping diagonally and things work out fine.
Ok--I'm off to walk around the neighborhood to take pix of things.

Conversations with Satan and Other Ideas

"'you mean "everything is permitted"? Everything is permitted, is that right, is it?'"
--Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov--The Grand Inquisitor

I'm thinking of ideas for upperclassman/grad level classes at the moment and the James Hogg book is helping things along. It is, at times, typically a novel of the 1820s timeframe, and often much better than that typicality. It fits in quite well with timely discussions of religious radicalism. This from page 109:

"'Do you not perceive what mighty powers of mind [mysterious character Gil-Martin] is possessed of' said I, 'and also how clear and unhesitating he is on some of the most interesting points of divinity?'

'It is for his great mental faculties that I dread him,' said [Blanchard] ...He indeed pretends great strictness of orthodoxy regarding some of the points of doctrine embraced by the reformed church; but you do not seem to perceive that both you and he are carrying these points to a dangerous extremity. Religion is a sublime and glorious thing, the bonds of society on earth, and the connector of humanity with the Divine nature; but there is nothing so dangerous to man as the wresting of any of its principles, or forcing them beyond their due bounds: this is of all others the readiest way to destruction. Neither is there anything so easily done. There is not an error into which a man can fall which he may not press Scripture into his service as proof of the probity of...'"

More connections between novels. Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus has a civilized conversation with Satan at its heart, at the mathematical center of the novel. Brothers Karamazov has, technically, two, one at its center and one toward its end. Karamazov has a sort of boyish holy fool who intentionally throws himself down a flight of stairs. Gunter Grass's Tin Drum has a similar character who does the same thing to stay forever a boy. Tin Drum allows this character entree to a concrete hell, as does Mann's Faustus and we are back to the start of this circle. These, among others [Dostoevsky's Demons paired with Heimito von Doderer's Demons (unjustly forgotten); Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, with the first three volumes chronicling the same timeframe from different perspectives, with only the fourth volume as an actual sequel; large novels and structure--the linearity and gridwork of certain novels versus others: Anatole France's novels run in a line as if on rails, versus von Doderer's radial patterning of Demons versus the unfinished Man without Qualities which is a sweeping arch of a bridge into empty space. The open-ended angles of Andrei Bely's Petersburg.] Fodder for essays, maybe.

Confessions of a Justified Sinner

...which of course, is the title of the famous early 1800's book by Mr. James Hogg, which I've just begun, and which could easily fit in a college course regarding religious/ partisan/ political intolerance and what comes of it. At least from what I've gotten from my reading of the first 35 pages. What attracted me to the book was the commentary on its use of the double, which is something I've been rather taken with for almost a decade. A story about a double, told in double fashion, and twice-told as a bonus? Count me in. There appear to be a few too many political in-jokes for this book to work for my freshman class, but I'd recommend it for those grad students out there wondering what to read next. At least from what I've gotten from my reading of the first 35 pages.
Piety as profanity. The notion that "to the wicked, all things are wicked; but to the just, all things are just and right. [...] How delightful to think that a justified person can do no wrong!" From standing in the middle of a tennis court and thus ruining the fun for everyone, as the young Wringhim does, or active political pressure to deny citizens civil rights, or resorting to violence. Zealotry will have its way. I've read books that have had amazing first 50 pages (viz. Tropic of Capricorn and The Way of All Flesh), but I'm hoping this one will follow through.

Photo by Davo--Original sculptures in Indianapolis Museum of Art

Treehugging as Ineffective Brake

Back in high school, I was a bit of a nerd. I know this revelation may come as a shock to some of my readers. In the 80s, I was really rather unsure of myself, somewhat bookish, and generally in awe of the worldliness of others. To some extent, I've held true to form in these regards. So, in the '86-'87 school year, my senior year, I decided that now was the time to turn over a new leaf. I was going to be more social, more outgoing, and, in light of an impending year at college (the traditional "social do-over" transformation year for most people), I was going to get out there. I was going to do it. How else was I to make friends, establish contacts that I could treasure through my adult years and share stories with during class reunions?

So I did it. I joined the Science Club. All those people I'd only seen in the hallway, combined with some I knew from class, such as Astronomy with Mr. Smith, who ran the planetarium in the science wing, and who was in charge of the Science club. We organized all-night star-watching sessions, using the motor-driven telescope on the roof of the school, and, in mid-February, all organized a cross-country ski trip in Pokagon State Park in northeastern Indiana. This was a big deal--I was going out, without parents or family, with my new social contacts, for an entire day, and I was going to go tobogganing and even skiing. Though the toboggan run is one of the Midwest's best, after only one run down with the toboggan, a group of us decided that we should really get going on the skiing action. Once we paid for the special boots and skis, we referred to the map of the various trails and set off.

What we soon learned is that the ski trails and the hiking trails intersected, and we found ourselves no longer on a beginner ski trail, but on an Advanced trail titled The Devil's Tooth, which is supposed to be hard to walk on. We, in little time, had to resort to climbing up the inclines on our hands and knees in the snow. We were surprised to find actual roads in our path, which we clacked across briskly. We found ourselves lost, the map unhelpful, until we realized that we had not only crossed county roads, but also a highway. We weren't even in the park anymore. After well over 18 miles of skiing, we exhaustedly flopped at sundown in the ski lodge and turned in our skis, finding that we were over an hour past the deadline for signing out--there were search parties out to find us. I remember us looking confusedly at each other, but most of us were too tired to care. All I could think of was the fact that we had been miles from nowhere, with the high temperature 15 degrees, crawling up wooded hills. Once at the top, the trails down were steep and winding. We went in order, giving a number before we shoved off that represented the number of trees we estimated we'd hit before we got to the bottom. We tried to schuss, but were too inexpert. Most would head straight down, crashing through bare saplings before clipping something far more substantial. The skier would then disappear in a cloud of tossed snow and branches before coming to a rest with a call: "I'm alright."

Today's my 39th birthday, and I'm finding that birthdays are more and more like this field trip of 22 years ago. I keep hearing from folks that some birthdays are worse than others. One sets off on skis down the hill, hearing that 40 is the Big One. The Tree looms somewhere on the slope, and there always seems to be the hope that one can steer around it, but when one gets to 39, that's when one realizes that you're gonna hit that tree. 39 is the Bad Birthday. 35 is a bad birthday too, because it can be rounded to 40, which is only ten years from 50, which, if one rounds again, is 100. One is Old. But 39 isn't a matter of rounding. It's a concrete confirmation of what most of us dread. Up to a certain age, things stay static: there's the old'uns and the young'uns. Past that, one, insidiously, gets a sense of both--the inadequacies of those younger and the growing concerns of those older. The day stays the same, but the presents are different. First, it's toys, then clothes perhaps (which are always a real drag), then, perhaps, a bike, a stereo, a car. Then cards with checks, then cards with notes, then cards. Then the increasing realization that that slope has a river at the bottom of it, or, like the chocolates in that famous scene on I Love Lucy, there is an end to the conveyor belt. There's lots to do, but what to do first? Clipping the trees doesn't slow one down a bit.

So past a certain age, it seems things turn from endless horizons to an increasing urge toward prioritization, an undercurrent of What One Should Be Doing. I'm not working on a Bucket list by any means, but I'm becoming increasingly aware of how much time I've wasted up to now worrying about things that don't matter. Therefore: a focus, or at least a goal to focus, on the things that matter. That, and to get these damnable windows reglazed before I turn 40.

Sun on Stones

"We must go and see The Pilgrims at Emmaus together. Why was I talking about the picture? To throw some light on this idea of testimony of mine. The pilgrims in the inn are witnesses to a great event, a presence, as yet hidden from the rest of the world. They will have to testify to it together. Even if they had not known each other before, they would become great friends. According to my idea, it's always rather in that way that you make friends with anybody. You are present together at a moment in the life of the world, perhaps in the presence of a fleeting secret of the world--an apparition which nobody has ever seen before and perhaps nobody will ever see again.
"It may even be something very little. Take two men going for a walk, for example, like us. Suddenly, thanks to a break in the clouds, a ray of light come and strikes the top of a wall; and the top of the wall becomes, for the moment, something in some way quite extraordinary. One of the two men touches the other on the shoulder. The other raises his head and sees it too, understands it too. Then the thing up there vanishes. But they will know in aeternam that it once existed."
"You think that friendship depends on something like that?"
"Depends on it--perhaps not. Springs from it. I've just taken a case where the then to be attested to is the humblest kind of thing. The Pilgrims is the supreme example. And that's why, too, you have so little time to make even a small number of friends--friends whom you may lose, but whom you can never replace."
"I don't quite see the connection."
"It's quite clear. Even supposeing that in the whole of our lives we have a chance like that at Emmaus--I mean the chance of stumbling upon an extraordinary presence, which deserves to be attested to in aeternam--at what age shall we have it, old man?"
"That suggests that it's very exciting to be the age we are now and to have the next few years before us..."
"It is indeed."
"But you were saying something about love...Dont you agree that there's something similar to the case of love?"
"You mean love that is love and something else--when friendship doesn't come in as well? Love is so much more bound up in itself, born of itself, so much more shut up. Lovers turn toward one another. Friends turn to something which is neither of them."

--from Quinette's Crime, Jules Romains.

photo file from abc gallery. Original, Rembrandt, at the Louvre

New Connections and Robert Musil

"The mind has learned that beauty can make things good, bad, stupid or enchanting. The mind dissects a sheep and a penitent sinner and finds humility and patience in both. It investigates a substance and observes that in large quantities it is a poison, in smaller quantities a stimulant. It knows that the mucous membrane of the lips is related to the mucous membrane of the intestine, but knows too that the humility of those lips is related to the humility of all that is saintly. It mixes things up, unravels them again and forms new combinations. Good and evil, above and below, are for it not relative ideas tinged with scepticism, but terms of a function, values dependent on the context in which they appear. It has learnt from the centuries that vices may turn into virtues and virtues into vices, and actually regards it as sheer clumsiness if one does not in one lifetime succeed in turning a criminal into a useful citizen. It does not recognize anything as in itself permissible or impermissible, for anything may have a quality by which it some day becomes part of a great new relationship. It secretly has a mortal hatred of everything that behaves as through it were established once and for all, the great ideals and laws and their little fossilized imprint, the hedged-in character. It regards nothing as firmly established, neither any personality nor any order of things or ideas. Because our knowledge may change with every day, it believes in no ties, and everything possesses the value that it has only until the next act of creation, as a face to which one is speaking changes even while the words are being spoken."

--from The Man without Qualities by Robert Musil

Suzanne Vega--Quiet Indictments

This can't end up as a blog entry. This, I think, will be longer than most will be willing to read for a blog entry. The reasons for typing this were brought on by the fact that it's once again cold and gloomy and chance brought me to it in web surfing. I was called back to an album that I got, not entirely by accident, but rather because I had signed up for that goddamned Columbia Music Club membership and I needed to fill out the 10, 15 or whatever free (plus extortionate shipping) discs that were part of their introductory membership.

It was Suzanne Vega, fer godsakes--her 99.9F album. I was never a fan of folk music, folk rock, or coffee-cafe music, and I thought that that "Luka" song, at the time, though earnest, was somewhat embarrassing. The strange new lives given to "Tom's Diner" while I was in college--Remixed by the faceless DJs DNA, or by others, re-ordered so that the Duh-da-duh-das scatted out the "I Dream of Jeannie" theme were rather fun, and gave out a sense that she wasn't taking herself as seriously as "Luka" let on. so I went ahead and ordered 99.9F, not knowing at all what it would be like.

What her then-new album turned out to be was a rather mindblowingly unified collection of songs that explored, in deadpan fashion, the hysteria and fear of the previous seven years of the AIDS crisis. Not that AIDS is ever mentioned over the course of the twelve songs on the album.

The disc was a departure for Vega, with lots of synthesizer and concrete noise. Without even knowing what the subject of the first song was, titled Rock in this Pocket (Song of David) one gets a sense of gravity "What's so small to you/ is so large to me/if its the last thing I do/ I'll make you see." In the late 80s and early nineties, the idea was to let shame take over--after all, those affected had done something horribly wrong--and to let those in control just leave things alone. Quarantine had been mentioned, by more than ill-informed politicians, but by those as close by as those who share my family name--put them all on an island and let them fuck each other senseless, and let them die, they said. And it wasn't once that it was spoken. And I may be wrong, I may be extending things, but I'm willing to say that at least some of them who spoke it then feel today that it was a shame, a missed opportunity, that their plan wasn't put into action back in '84, which was before they'd ever heard of the issue, anyway. "Pale as a candle and your face is hot," Vega sings in the title track, "...and if I touch you I might get what you've got."

A relative was in his residency at Riley when Ryan White was undergoing treatment and I was there when this uncle mentioned that he double gowned himself and triple gloved before entering the room. I'd heard that the disease was sexually transmitted, but gloves and gowns? I as a high school student knew little about the transmission of the disease--and though the conversation didn't blame White for any of his health issues, it certainly didn't exculpate those civic-minded people in society that, unknowing that they were infected, donated blood. But I hear the voice of White as well as quite a few others in one of the singles from Vega's album: "I think you might want to know the details and the facts/ but there's something in my blood denies the memory of the acts/So just forget it Doc/ I think it's really cool that you're concerned [...]/cos blood makes noise/ and I can't hear you in the thickening of fear."

And without even wanting to, I'm swept up in the starkly, clockwork-bluesy "In Liverpool," setting indicator aside, uses Victor Hugo's love story of Notre Dame as illustration of a character who dies for love. As the luckiest of us do.

The characters are there, Esmeralda seems to be the singer at times:

I'll be the one who sings for my supper
You'll be the monk whose forehead is high
He'll be the man whose already working
Spreading his memory all through the sky...

At the time I hadn't read the novel, but now that I have I think the juxtaposition is ingenious: that French Novel about illiteracy and desire and this new thing that so many people didn't understand--

"...the boy in the belfry he's crazy
He's throwing himself down from the top of the tower
Like a hunchback in Heaven
He's ringing the bells in the church for the last half an hour
He sounds like he's missing something or someone that he knows he can't have now
And if he isn't I certainly am.

If that isn't chilling enough, Vega tucks in, among the compressed percussion:

Homesick, for a clock that told the same time
sometimes you made no sense to me.
When you lie on the ground in somebody's arms,
you'll probably swallow some of their history.

Many people in the United States my age and five or so years older are dead now and no one talks about them. They have vanished. Simply gone. At best, a square of a very long blanket marks their being, their having been.

Several years before I'd gotten Vega's album, back in the last years of my undergraduate degreee, the work of Diamanda Galas, who was, for me, really out there, who started out as an operatic mezzo, whose brother died of AIDS in the early years of the epidemic and saw such things first-hand, composed a Plague Mass, with spirituals and shrieks, with conversations between patients and doctors "What time is it? / How much time do you want?"

That mass remains, for all its shock and blood and noise, a chilling indictment. We do not take care of our own. They aren't our own if we disown them. The character in Vega's "Bad Wisdom" says, in a meter most often left to limericks and comic verse:

Mother the doctor knows something is wrong
Cause my body has strange information
He's looked in my eyes and knows I'm not a child
But he doesn't dare ask the right question.
Mother my friends are no longer my friends
And the games we once played have no meaning
[...]
Mother your eyes have gone suddenly cold
And it wasn't what I was expecting

When I was high school age someone I still know, and who was smart enough to know better, told the following joke to me, thinking it funny, which I'll paraphrase.
A man with AIDS walks into the doctors' office and complains of various symptoms. The doctor listens sternly and prescribes a diet of oranges, grapefruit, and salad, and to see him in a week.

A week later the patient comes back, complaining of severe diarrhea. The doctor hears this with a serious expression and nods. "Change your diet to lettuce and peaches only and see me in a week."

A week passes and the patient comes back, exhausted, saying that the symptoms are worse than ever. He can hardly leave the bathroom. The doctor nods. "Good," the doctor says, "perhaps now you know what an asshole's for."

Such dismissal of suffering. These were the jokes circulating in 1987. These were the things I heard from people I have to admit I still care a lot for today.

I'm not at all sure where this post is going. It isn't a blog entry, certainly. It isn't a record review for an album released 16 years ago, which, if it were, is rather tardy. It's this realization that, through a 99-cent CD and a visit to a man incoherently trying to recover from a fall not discovered for three days and that, in reading various blogs, that many my age aren't alive now due not only to the toughness of a disease but also due to stupid priggishness, that something should be written, or said, or something. "What kind of rule," the final words of Suzanne Vega's album ask, "can overthrow a fool/ And leave the land with no stain?"

Further Reading Further

"There is one passage in the Odyssey where it speaks of two gates, one of horn and one of ivory. Through the ivory gate false dreams pass to men, and through the gate of horn go the true and prophetic dreams. And there is a passage in the Aeneid, in the sixth book, which has provoked innumerable commentaries. Aeneas descends to the Elysian Fields, beyond the Pillars of Hercules. He speaks with the shades of Achilles and Tiresias; he sees the shade of his mother, he wants to embrace her but cannot because she is made of shadow; and he sees, moreover, the future greatness of the city he will found. He sees Romulus and Remus, a field, and then in that field the future Roman Forum, the future grandeur of Rome, the greatness of Augustus; he sees the whole imperial grandeur. And after having seen all of this, after having talked to its contemporaries (who, for Aeneas, are future people), he returns to the world of the living. What then occurs is quite curious and has never been well explained, except by one anonymous commentator who I believe offered the truth. Aeneas returns through the gate of ivory and not through the gate of horn. Why? The anonymous commentator tells us: because we are not in reality. For Virgil, the real world was possibly the Platonic world, the world of the archetypes. Aeneas passes through the gates of ivory because he enters the world of dreams--that is to say, what we call waking."

--from the "Nightmares" of Seven Nights
Jorge Luis Borges

--painting: Claude Monet. Charing Cross Bridge,
Indianapolis Museum of Art,
permanent collection

Gaffes at Home

Honestly--does Hardee's want me to devote a summer's worth of blogging to them? They seem to be telling me that they do. First it was the Jalapeno Thickpurge (which was displayed on their sign for almost three full weeks), and now this.

Gaffes on Tour

When I was still in High School, I remember my mom talking to me about early teaching experiences she had back in 1966-67. I can't quite remember what grade she said she was teaching at the time, though I do remember looking at the school yearbook she showed me--mom with a blond French twist, her broad smile, the students' black-and-white postage-stamp-sized pictures, the girls' cat-eye glasses--perhaps it was fourth or fifth grade. Mom was teaching the Religion portion of the school day and she asked the class "What is Salvation?" A boy's hand shot up after some thought.

"Salvation is an Army," the boy said.

Mother tried to clarify her question and re-posed it. "So, what is Salvation?"

"Salvation is an Army," came the boy's reply.

Yesterday our President made a speech in Israel that made a lot of people mad. The main thing government officials got bent up about is that Bush broke an unwritten rule of form that one does not criticise members of the American government while on foreign soil. What upset others, and should be a bigger deal, is that Bush, in his speech, managed to confuse the idea of appeasement with the idea of diplomatic discussion, which Chris Matthews pointed out in his trainwreck of a discussion with Kevin James (where did he come from?) and Mark Green. It's about 9 minutes, but worth watching:



Chris Matthews has certainly not had a spotless record at pointing out bullshit when it came up on his show, and Kevin James certainly didn't make the Neville Chamberlain reference, but perhaps this will mark the beginning of a change wherein in order to be a political commentator we will get more than a couple of phrases designed to do damage to someone's campaign or policy at the expense of actually answering the questions and participating in a dialogue. What reminded me of my mother's teaching experience forty years ago was Kevin James' unvarying (and illogical--the question wasn't what he thought Neville Chamberlain was but, simply, what did Chamberlain do) response to Matthews' question. As was mentioned in the clip. When you're in a hole, stop digging.

Back to Windows

Now that the party is done with and cleaned up from, I'm back to tearing windows apart. It will be the kitchen first and then the bathroom. The problem with both is that, since I won't be varnishing the woodwork, I have to figure out what colors to paint both rooms. At least with painting rather than varnishing, I take a week off of each piece of woodwork. Not that reglazing the windows doesn't take two weeks alone for the glazing compound to properly set anyway.

Am 40 pages into Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier and, though it fits my page length parameters, it won't be on my teaching list for Fall semester. I'm still up for suggestions from all of my fives of readers!

The Plow that Broke the Plains...

...was drawn by two oxen, or at least a mule, and I am but one overly-educated human. Still, though, I have managed to peel the sod off of a 12' x 12' section of my side yard for a completely functional Bush-Administration sustenance garden. After lunch (which, by the way is actually healthy for me--how long will Davo go without a Big Mac?), I'll go and buy some food-to-be at the garden store and plant it before mowing my lawn.

Regarding things literary, I'm still working my way through as many novellas for possible inclusion in my Fall '08 advanced composition class. Michael Chabon's The Final Solution stands a good chance of being on the syllabus. For all of my fives of readers, I would love to have your candidates for top five short novels to teach to an advanced Freshman composition class. I'm looking for works that a freshman'll get, but that'll be challenging, will encourage discussion of cultural/social issues that exist today. I'm also looking for stuff that'd be in print, but not easily Cliff's Notes-able, if you get my drift...Just put 'em in the Comments for this blogpost!

Currently on the list for consideration:
Notes from Underground --Fyodor Dostoevsky
A Lost Lady --Willa Cather
The Final Solution --Michael Chabon

Mission Accomplished, or, Well, One Bush is Gone, at Least...

Woke up this morning and headed right outside to continue on the uprooting of the outtacontrol firebush. The hole I dug ended up being about 4 feet deep by 8 feet in diameter. The Bush has been ousted, though at the end, I couldn't even make my arms movet to rake the last of the dirt back into the hole. The actual gardening will have to wait until Monday, perhaps. The weekend will involve some travel and--it is my sincere hope--some quality reading and writing time, as this summer is crunch time for me. Organize and write. That's about all I have money for at the moment, anyway...

So, after a bath that would have cooked pasta, I'm reacquainting myself with the music files on my hard drive. Tomorrow I might do something inside the house--it's been so long since I've spent quality time here that the bottle Holly and I had for New Years (Toad Hollow's Amplexus it was, and mighty nice) is still in the wastebasket in the Library. In fact, the outer rooms of the house are a time capsule of winter break or Spring Break--an empty teacup, my uncle's handwritten email address from a visit months ago. For the last semester especially the only time I went into the outer rooms was to turn on the thermostat. It was starting to gain the creepiness of an abandoned house with art that stared at one from the walls. It will be nice to dust things down and open the windows and let some light into the place.

[pic of a real car found in Ballard, WA parking space, during my Christmas trip there to see Pez--those of my readers from American Funds now have a real project to aim toward regarding all those disc investments....]

And the Summer is Off..with a Squish

Well, it's my first full day of summer break and I find out that due to some paperwork confusion on my part, my student loan to get me through the summer has not come to fruition, will not come to fruition, which leaves your faithful blogger with damned little to get him through the summer, meaning that he'll either have to dip into the mutual fund for another grand tax hit, or get a menial part time job, which will take out a chunk of his last summer of available time to work on his thesis before the school year starts up again.

With that lovely bombshell dropped this morning, I thought it best to get out in the yard to get something productive done, and set to work on digging the stump of the firebush out of the yard.

It turns out there is a rootball on that thing tight enough to make my spade pretty much useless. I've been digging a moat around the thing and am hoping to get under it, cut the main roots, and roll the whole mess out of the ground, which'll leave me with a good start on a swimming pool next to the driveway.

Groceries are up, gas is, in spite of Bush's "not being aware of" such a possibility a month ago, pushing $4, and the cars and people in the area around my neighborhood keep looking shabbier. I remember hearing voters getting interviewed on the radio four years ago. Several mentioned that they had voted for Bush so that "he would have to clean up his own mess." That sure didn't work. The person you'd love to have a beer with, for those of you who have been in bars recently, have a tendency to leave you with the bill on occasion.

A month ago, I heard a primary voter discussing the merits of the two Democratic candidates state that he was for Barack because Hillary didn't seem very nice, and he was certain that if he sat down across the table and had coffee with her, that he wouldn't like her at all. After the past four years, one would think that the public would have learned that beverage-based conversation is not the basis for choosing the leader of a country.

Capuccino, anyone?

The Bear is Dead

My final paper has just been handed in, which means that it's almost time to bid farewell to the Hallowed Halls of Heavilon for another summer. My Creative Writing undergrads have kinda dropped the ball on the portfolio deadline, however. This leaves me rather displeased, as it's cutting into my Summer Time. Grades Shall Be In Tomorrow.

And then I will go home and play in my garden.

Negative Space

Hey all--Still needing to graqde papers, collect portfolios, finalize grades, and write a 20 page paper, but I thought I'd update.

One of the novels we've read is Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf, wherein the main character is never really actually present. The novel forms a sort of world with a Jacob-shaped hole in it. It's an interesting concept for a novel and one which appears to work for other art forms as well.

James here in my grad office twigged me onto the Garfield minus Garfield website, which republishes the generally yawn-worthy Garfield comic, only with the animals edited out. The result is a grand improvement on the strip. Click on the link and see if I lie. April 2 was a good day.

It was someone in my house...it was a dangerous freak storm...

...it was, um, an earthquake? I snapped awake before 6 this morning for some reason and listened. shortly after I heard the sound of someone walking across my kitchen floor. As the hairs stood up on the back of my neck I realized that the house was making noises, that there was a stranger noise from outside. A storm? I was still groggy and thinking if the house was making all this noise in a storm I was in trouble. By that point I realized my bed was jiggling like a jello-mold salad. In my not-awake-state it briefly crossed my mind that a storm was raging and that the people who had broken in were shaking my bed. It wasn't until I woke up a bit more that I realized it must've been an earthquake or perhaps a powerful explosion somewhere. Sure enough, on the radio this morning, Indiana got a 5.2 earthquake. I haven't checked the basement, but I don't see any new cracks in the ceiling or other such damage. The chimneys dad and I worked on held nicely.
This marks my second Hoosier earthquake. The first one was a really amazingly unlikely combination back in 1986 when our house got hit by a tornado on the same afternoon as the earthquake. I believe the two events were separated by less than two hours. One nice thing about last night's earthquake is that, for about a half hour, it actually convinced the mockingbirds to shut the hell up--they've been singing all night (listen! I'm a Robin! listen! I'm a Blue Jay! listen! I'm a car alarm!...") and driving me nuts. Well, off to the Great Outdoors and then to my paper-writing.

UPDATE:
11:15 a.m., and my lamp is still wobbling--evidently an aftershock. I was sitting here at the computer when my chair started moving under me, and the bookcase swayed. It lasted perhaps 15 seconds, all told. Evidently the mockingbirds are used to this now, as they started right back up singing as soon as the shaking stopped.

UPDATE of UPDATE:
The 11:15 aftershock was 4.6. The mockingbirds are napping, and I think I might follow their lead. Avoiding D.H. Lawrence in such tectonically-active times is hard work.

A New List for Those Who Love Them

1. A rewrite of my Mann/Lawrence paper, as my Prof didn't like the first one
2. The still - unwritten Berryman/ Schnittke paper
3. A 9-page paper on my poetic drift this semester
4. Revisions on my pieces for the semester
5. Grading 15 final papers
6. Critiquing 2 short stories
7. State Taxes, on which I'd been holding out until I got more money in the bank, cause if I owe for Federal, I sure as hell am gonna owe for State
8. Reading an ass-high stack of LitCrit.
9. Attempt to be in a good mood in spite of items 1-8

One thing might help with my state of mind and that is Lemon Jelly. The music outfit, not the condiment. Overheard this song on KUOW whilst staying with Pez over Christmas and remembered upon returning to check if they had a video. And they do, in which it appears Alexandr Solzhenitsyn has an acid trip:

Preliminary Tax Situation--2008

It's interesting --well, not interesting, actually--in the past 12 years never have I earned so little, yet owed so much. Not since I worked in Russia have I earned the AGI I'm currently reporting, yet instead of a refund, I actually owe the Federal Government money. Color me pissed. In addition, I was notified of my "economy stimulus" payout a/k/a The Bribe to All Citizens the Government Cant Afford, and in spite of all I've just mentioned, I don't even qualify for the full $600. I certainly hope those jerks in their Hummers (who would name a car after a blowjob?) enjoy their economic stimulation. I, for one, have already spent it--on rent, gas, and utility payments. Thank god I won that poetry award, which won't even cover my mortgage payment and gradpad rent payment for the month. But I sure as hell have to report it as "income" on my taxes for 2008. Bitter, party of one?

1. 15-page paper on D. H. Lawrence and the suppression of desire.
2. 20-page paper on John Berryman's Dream Songs and a connection with form and tone in the music of Alfred Schnittke
3. Rereading aforementioned Dream Songs
   
4. Taxes
5. Grading 8 papers
6. Critiquing 2 short stories for workshop
7. Critiquing 8 poems for workshop
8. Writing 2 poems for workshop
9. Laundry
10. Week's plan for English 106 and 205
11. Critiquing 17 poetry portfolios and typing up suggestions
12. By Wednesday
13. Oh, and writing a thesis-reading introduction
14. You get the idea
    

As of this evening...

The Hardee's sign is still as pictured in my previous post. I'm wondering how many Jalapeno Thickpurges they've managed to sell in the meantime.

I've got much to write about, but nothing well-formed enough to make it sound at all intelligent.

Went to teach class this morning, then went to a local auction where I bought a small end-table for around $50, then came home, bought a small amount of groceries, memorized a poem about oral sex for class on Monday, and read 50 pages of a book. Overall, a day that fits in the "Not at all bad" category. I attempted to eat Mexican while reading Gertrude Stein and, well, it was easier trying to keep the salsa on the chips, quite frankly. I get the fact that Lucy Church is actually a church building and that there are various characters which could be the saints that inhabit said church (the characters are named John Mary, James Mary, and Simon Therese, among others) but then I get to passages like this:

In place of strange.
Complicated horses now. Horses now cow now complicated horses now. Horses now horses and a cow now. Complicated horses now.
It is torn in between and shells egg shells it is best as yellow peaches with a rose rosy rosy green.
Lucy Church an advantage Lucy Church made by it being with them it is attempting with them attempting with them. And might it be that that good good good if if it is not a bee or a wind a bee is from there and the wind is from there and so sheep so sewn so seated so when and then then so so much as much as withdraw.

And at that, I just have to turn to my plate of chips and refrieds and munch on that. I've found a book I need to send someone, I've got 14 papers to grade, as well as a number of other household tasks to do. Complicated horses now. Complicated now. Now. Not a bee or a wind. Complicated horses. Now.

The pic is from Berlin, very near Potsdamerplatz, the strange preserved remnants of a hotel where all the bright set sat. The dining room where Chaplin had breakfast, where Dietrich ordered eggs, now exposed to air, enclosed in glass and avant-garde architecture. The scarf gone, the coat still worn, the cold not the same but back, now there, now waning.

There's Truth in Advertising...

After my 75th nap of the week, I went staggering off to the neighborhood grocery store to get a bit of food (yogurt? no--they don't have my brand, haven't had it since yesterday) for the rest of the week (vegetables? Nix--Mondo expensivo and all from Chile), so I don't starve (shark-shaped fruit snacks? Check--and for only a dollar a box. I'll take two, thanks...). And as I near Hardees I see their improvised sign. On closer examination, the P was modified to be a B using sharpie pen, but that alteration all but vanishes once backlit. The wind has carried off the ending R, so what you have is a perfect description of Hardee's latest burger. I wonder how long it'll be before they notice. I ran home to get the camera so that all of my ones of blogreaders can enjoy the moment with me.

I am good for little else than reading and napping still; here's hoping I can scrape it together for the remainder of the week, as I have serious shizz to do. In the interim, I nap and try to make sense out of Gertrude Stein, who makes sense occasionally, then doesn't make sense at all, then comes up with a gem of a line. For example, one paragraph from the opening to Lucy Church Amiably:

This altogether makes a return to romantic nature that is it makes a landscape look like an engraving in which there are some people, after all if they are to be seen there they feel as pretty as they look and this makes it have a river a gorge an inundation and a remarkable meadowed mass which is whatever they use not to feed but to bed cows.

and a page later:

No history of a family to close with those and close. Never shall he be alone to be alone to be alone to be alone to them to lend a hand and leave it left and wasted.

But more of Stein at a later date.

Virulent Mayhem and Administrative Ignorance

Well, this morning was certainly a new low in the illness department. I was reduced to rolling around on the bed for hours, squeezing my skull in the hopes it wouldn't come apart due to sinus pressure. Any worse and for any longer and I was going to stumble to the car and hit the hospital. Things have lightened up significantly since then, but I've been up all of 5 hours so far today. And going to the drugstore across the street was a lovely experience, what with having to show all that I.D. just to get Sudafed, then having to use the stylus thingie to sign an electronic screen certifying that I'm gonna use the Sudafed for congestion control and not to concoct anything in my basement that'll keep me up the three days. When I'm sick, I'm super-anal about being an agent of contagion and had brought my own pen so as to sign the credit card receipt, but no, I had to grab the germy stylus and add my own pathogens to it for any other subsequent signers to catch.

After waking up from nap No. 3, I grabbed my cloth bags and headed to Kroger for some food, as I'm fresh out. As I was walking under the gas station canopy toward the grocery store, I noticed the current price of gas. Now, it was only a week ago that Bush, at his press conference, said in that can-it-with-questions-like-that tone that he "hadn't heard" of projections that gas was going to top $4 a gallon. It's been a week since and I see that regular here is at $3.49 and diesel is at $3.80. He's from an oil family, his family is a big player in the global Oil game, and he comes up with something like that? "Interesting..." he says, "hadn't heard that..." It's certainly gonna be a long time until January if this is how he's gonna be for the rest of his administration.

Two Dreams--

Same night:
In a large gymnasium. There are other folk around for some event or other. As people talk below of the persecution of people in Middle Eastern countries, I find myself way high up, tightrope-style on a metal electrical conduit. I am close enough to the cement slab ceiling that I am steadying myself on another conduit that runs along the ceiling, pinching it between my thumb and the side of my forefinger. People talking intently far below me. I manage to get to the wall and, with the same pinchlike hold, slide down a conduit to the gym floor. I keep mentally reminding myself that I'm traveling soon and need to make arrangements. When am I going? Around the 15th? Have I put off making arrangements for too long? Not quite, but I need to make arrangements soon, right after this engagement, which people are slowly gathering for, whatever it is. The whole gym is brilliantly lit rosy orange-pink from the high-pressure sodium bulbs along the ceiling.

---

It's warm and I'm in bed. I wake up perhaps an hour or so before sunrise, perhaps more. I roll over and look out my two bedroom windows--which have been open--to the neighboring house. The neighbor, who has been gone for a while (or have I been hearing her in my sleep and therefore has she just left?) has left some lights on: through her window I see mundanely-framed objects; a lightswitch, half an arched doorway to the hall, half a pictureframe. Something motivates me to go outside and inspect--is there someone out there that shouldn't be? I'm still thinking about the need to make travel arrangements. I walk along the north side of the house. The neighbor's house looks recently-vacated--the light inside still on, the silence seeming somehow fresh, somehow recently-instated. The neighbor's car (an Escort, European-style, with extra-large headlights) sits in the parking lot behind the house. In fact, the parking lot extends all the way to Euclid street for several lots where houses used to be. How long have the houses been gone now? The lot all well-lit by high-pressure sodium vapor security lights. I hear barking behind me. Rounding the corner of the house by the front porch is Samson, our dog back in the '80s. He thinks I'm an intruder. I call him Winton (the neighbor's dog's name, whose house I just discovered no longer exists). I correct myself and call him by his right name but he's already recognized my voice. Before the dog's bark, before I turned around, I could see the stars above, all clearly visible in spite of the lighting, in that way that a pre-dawn winter sky is bright and icily clear. Leo had wheeled around and was about to head under the horizon to the northwest. And the song playing as soundtrack to both dreams? An ever-repeating opening half of "Deja-Vu" by Dionne Warwick.

Im so very...

...happy to have gotten a cold on my first official day of Spring Break. I just can't tell you how happy. Well, I could, but I'm sticking to the positive.

I've paid my mortgage, am thusly poor, and have the rest of the day to try to read and do things when I'd really like to scoop the insides of my skull out with a spoon.

Everything is So Dangerous That Nothing is Really Frightening

...so saith Gertrude Stein. And it's true. Looking back, most of our recollections of childhood and adolescence will have us wondering how we ever survived this long. I'm comfortably into double-digits as far as near scrapes that come to mind. And those are only the ones that one evaded back when we were young and stupid and didn't know what else was going on in this great wide world. One result of this is to react the way Stein does in her quote, or another is to work on insulating oneself from possible harm, and to keep an eye out for nascent threats. Based on my rather non-scientific observations, the latter reaction tends to result in spending most of one's time looking out for the start of a bad trend, for ulterior motives, for things that might point in a dark direction, any of which could result in having to take decisive or evasive action. After a while, such a focus tends to make one more than a bit on the cagey side. One looks ahead, as in chess, two moves, four moves ahead, and with each jump further ahead in time, the possible moves that act as threat are squared, then cubed. After a while, you're jumpy as a caffeinated hare and just as frozen as all these perceived threats close in.
Lots of such people exist. I'm sure you know the sort--they find gated communities attractive, drive as big an SUV as possible because they're safe (though they put drivers of smaller cars at greater risk of injury), they go to jobs they don't like because the money isn't bad and the benefits are good, they spend most of their time cultivating the company of people they don't like and who don't like them, generally out of an idea that such networking will be beneficial regarding one's social standing.
If there's one thing I've been unlearning, it's just such a habit of fearful squinting so many moves ahead. It's a habit I've gained over the past 15 years; of doing silly things like trying to get on in offices and trying to play things their way. While I was doing so, I found myself walking more and more into the middle of things that I actually was wanting to get away from. Rather than gaining independence, I was more and more tied to the opinions and whims of people that didn't know what language people spoke in Scotland or that the main job of our President is to uphold the Constitution, not do whatever it takes to make it more comfortable for us to get cheaply-made knickknacks made in Indonesia just like those ones they used in Trading Spaces. And at 38, I'm too old to have people like that always around thinking up new ways to make my life uncomfortable. I've got crap to do.
Speaking of Stein, while at the bookstore today (I'd gone out simply to take some Auden back to the library and suddenly I'm at Half Price) I found two rare Stein novels, evidently republished not long ago by Dalkey Archive: the never-anthologized Lucy Church Amiably and the behemoth and not-published-since-1934 (and then only in abridged form) The Making of Americans--all 925 pages of it. In her inimitable way, she writes in a letter to Carl VanVechten, that
Lots of people will thinkmany strange things in it as to tenses and persons and adjectives and adverbs and divisions are due to the french compositors' errors but they are not it is quite as I worked at it and even when I tried to change it well I didn't really try but I went over it to see if it could go different and I always found myself forced back into its incorrectnesses so there they stand. There are some pretty wonderful sentences in it and we know how fond we both are of sentences.

This passage alone is a good example of Stein's hatred of the comma.

Much reading tomorrow, methinks.

Not that You'd Know it Here...

...but it's Spring Break. 4 inches of snow so far, though it should still be falling for the next seven hours yet. My ThingsToDo list is outta control. But hey, I've got some groceries, my bread machine, 1800 books, and a can of cashews. I may actually be most of the way through my reading list by the time the rescue crews manage to come down the chimney.

Actual mental activity might return by tomorrow. Until then, I'm off to bed. If I never see an Elizabeth Bishop poem in the meantime, I certainly won't mind.
The picture above isn't of my neighborhood, but that of one of my poetry profs in West Lafayette. My car was parked between the two pickups. For some reason I got a ticket, with a given reason that I was in a 2-hour spot. Please note that there is no sign anywhere near the parking spot indicating that. I contested the ticket, and the ticket lady--no doubt an embittered soul (whose only feeling of power rests in jabbing orange envelopes into people's windows so that they freeze and cannot be removed without tearing, leaving half of the envelope stuck underneath the weatherstrip to fall into the window mechanism--not that I'm at all bitter about that), informed me that she would not waive the ticket, in spite of photographic evidence that there was no sign. This leaves me only one further option, which is to go to court to fight it. If I can get ticketed here, where can't I get ticketed? Also, please note that the two trucks--which were there at the same time, got snowed on, and were there the following morning when I took the pic don't have tickets. Grr.

Wrestling the Bear

Hey all--I'll post more sometime after I get these zillions of things done. Even though I teach how to write term papers, such writing doesn't come particularly easily to me, and have two papers due this week which I want to have done by Tuesday. I have some other research I need to work on for my year after graduation. The Sycamore Review bash was lovely, as was the party afterwards, though they did little to forward progress on aforementioned papers.

Later, taters...