covers

Last night I stayed up to hear Elvis Costello and Roseann Cash sing "The Butcher Boy" on Letterman last night. It's from the newly released Harry Smith Project, covers of the songs on The Anthology of American Folk Music. I've been thinking about covers a little lately because I'm currently obssesed by The Geraldine Fibbers' covers of "Jolene" and "Fancy."

The Costello/Cash perfomance was worth staying up for (ok, I was also reading) but their rendition of the song was a little anemic. Buell Kazee's is better, not because it's older, but because he seems to believe it where Costello and Cash just sing it. I know they're both performances, but the latter one is filtered through a (justified) reverence for Smith's work. I got The Anthology about five years ago and listened to it with a combination of recognition and surprise. I'd heard some of these songs performed by people in the 60s and later, but hadn't heard this source material before. Source implies originals, but really The Anthology is also a bunch of covers. Lots of the songs aren't original with the performers either. They're folk songs and ballads and blues that people were singing long before vinyl came along. For example, "Henry Lee" is a version of "Young Hunting" a Childe ballad, which means it could be as much as four hundred years old. But covers or not, there's something compelling about the music on original Smith collection that wasn't in the performance last night.

The covers I've been liking a lot lately, The Geraldine Fibbers ones I listed above and The White Stripes "I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself" work partly because they don't try to be faithful copies of the original. Jack White is completely overwrought in a way that the Dusty Springfield version suggests, but doesn't let out. The Fibbers' version of "Jolene", sung by a guy interestingly enough, is also not a xerox of the great Dolly Parton version. The one I'm really loving though is "Fancy". I can sort of remember the Bobbie Gentry version, but the new one is much more bitter, as it should be. There's a little quote from "Sympathy for the Devil" that fits perfectly.

So I'm not excited about the "Harry Smith Project" though I have it on my Netflix queue. I'm betting that there's going to be a lot of reverence and not much bite. I'm sort of looking forward to hearing Nick Cave do "John the Revelator" though.

education, higher

I was reading one of my favorite bloggers today. He's a wonderful writer, clever and thoughtful, who does the best poetry parodies. But he wrote something about feeling less than people who have BAs. This makes no sense, but isn't all that rare. I know other people who are accomplished, polished, but who still feel the lack of a diploma. I know I felt it when I went back to get a degree, a step that resulted in graduate school and teaching at my old job, but I realized yesterday that as much as I loved learning new stuff and much about being in school, the deference given to a degree, particularly an advanced one is nuts.

I write this as someone who has a PhD.

Alongside the real pleasure I take in discovering and understanding the new, I had a feeling that entering academia was entering this elite level of intellectual thought, of sophisticated conversation, of nuanced understanding. This wasn't the case where I used to teach, which was rife with careerism, narrow-mindedness, and, well, just garden variety humanity. The sort of world I thought I was going to join does exist to some extent in elite institutions and some small liberal arts colleges, but it's far from commonplace. Academia can give people the time (and money) to do the sort of thinking I envisioned, but its not a necessary condition for it to happen. The necessary conditions are curiosity, discipline, and some intellectual ability. That's it And people get BAs, BSs, MSs, MAs, and PhDs everyday without any of the three.

Ok, well they have to have discipline.

Still none of these things tell you much about the person who's earned it and don't constitute evidence of intelligence, skill, or ability. But we're conditioned to think that they do and that's a huge mistake. Worse, it makes us underestimate the real talents of people without them including, sometimes, ourselves.

rhinebeck, ny

Every year since 1998, on the third weekend in October, there's the NYS Sheep and Wool Festival. It's one of several fiber related festivals, conferences, what have you that go on every year. I've been knitting for about four years now and I've been to the California Sheep and Wool Festival at least twice and to the Stitches events three or four times. The Stitches events tend to be more knitter oriented, while the Sheep and Wool ones cover the ground from the sheep (auctions of the woolly beasts themselves and their fleece) to the finished products (lots of very beautiful yarn, clothing, and other things made from stuff that once grew out of an animal that turned grass into fleece and chops).

The other thing that I like about this festival is the crowd mix. There were a lot of people with kids. (This was advertised as a family-friendly event in papers across the tri-state region.) There were a lot of farmers and producers, people with hard-working, callused hands. There were some of the young, "knitting is hip" representatives from the blogosphere, but they were a much smaller proportion of the crowd than they are at Stitches. There were several people of color there, particularly as the afternoon drew on and people made the two or so hour drive up from NYC.

It was beautiful, especially on Saturday when the sky was a clear, cold blue. But even on Sunday when the day became overcast and grey, the turning leaves glowed against the fleecy sky.

We stayed at a B&B in Rhinebeck itself. The town was packed with people (mainly women) for the festival and a bunch of Jungians who were having a conference there. I didn't get to see much of the town, walking around one night to find a wine store (easy enough) and an ATM (also easy). All of Saturday and Sunday (we got there Friday night) were spent at the festival with a bunch of women, most of whom had come to Rhinebeck before. I don't know why, but knitters seem to be the kindliest, friendliest bunch of women you'd ever want to know. They get excited when they add a new convert. They'll share tips, tricks, equipment, you name it. And they make great dinner companions. We went out to the Culinary Institute of America on Friday night and had pizza (not your usual pie, the pear, goat cheese, and arugula was completely devoured) on Saturday.

I had the best weekend and don't know how to describe it. It was a combination of the weather (fall, but not cold), the event (lots to look at, including sheepdog trials), the company, and some ineffable quality that I can't seem to come close to analyzing or bringing into words. I'm leaving out the silly jokes, the beautiful yarns, the sherry at the B&B, the lack of sleep, the eventual rain, the seven-year old son of a friend, lighting sparklers on the roof of an apartment on the westernmost edge of Harlem, and the tasty oddness that is Irish Black Pudding.

Oh and I bought a spinning wheel.

why conspiracy theorists flourish in the USA

Yesterday I was reading Crooked Timber and came across this . Apparently Newsweek does this from time to time. Now I don't believe that there's a small group of white guys running the world from the center of the earth. (I always picture a huge conference room with lava walls, like in the Incredibles, for this.) But there's no denying that there's some agreement that the US population has to be treated in ways different from the rest of the world. This is commerce of course.

I'm betting that some advertising manager decided that people simply wouldn't buy the cover with the real news on it. And s/he is probably right.

But we shouldn't have the luxury of turning away. The conspiracy theory part is that conspiracy theorists are driven by two things - a need for narrative and the sense that they're not being told everything. This Newsweek cover thing supports the latter fear nicely.

disappearing post

I thought I had written one a couple of weeks ago. I was having a reaction to writing a book and movie review last time around. Opinions are fun and I like my own, but reviews were not the reason why I started on this blog. I'm still not completely sure why I'm doing this, true, but reviewing stuff was not really the point, unless the book or movie or whatever snagged into something else, some broader association.

Well, that's what I thought anyhow.

I'm listening to Gary Burton and his band from the mid-nineties playing "Poinciana". This song must have been all over the place in the fifties, the way that Coltrane songs were in the seventies, the way that everybody and her sister has recorded "Yesterday" or "Louie, Louie" or tried anyhow. It's a cool jazz sort of thing and for some reason it puts me in the apartment I grew up in without missing a beat.

It's strange how evocative this single song is. It's not like songs that I've got some concrete memory associated with - like Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs and Englishmen album, that I mainly remember for going to buy it the very day it came out. I was still living at 364 Orange Road in Montclair then. It was the summer of 1970. I'd quit Howard and I'm fairly sure I didn't have a job. I also didn't have a car, so I bicycled up to E.J. Korvettes to buy the double record. I got the record, put it in my bicycle basket, nearly wiped out on the steep hills between the mall and our apartment, then danced to the whole record all that hot afternoon.

"Poinciana" is not like that at all. The chilly vibraphone melody's just like a time machine, not one of the ones that you can crawl into, go into the past to fuck things up immensely, and take pages (or hours) to fix (or not). It opens up a space of sensibility, a porthole of feeling. It feels as though I discovered something about music the first time I heard it and it's that discovery that echoes when I hear it again.

A little Googling shows that "Poinciana" has been covered twenty-four times and I'm willing to bet that the version I heard as a kid was the Dave Brubeck one. It was a hit for Bing Crosby of all people. Oh well.

working (and other) class

Last week Laine and I went to see Factotum, a movie based on Charles Bukowski's novel. The makers are Finnish, but the movie's main actors are American. Matt Dillion plays the lead, sort of a chunked up, burned out, older, alcoholic version of the character he was in Drugstore Cowboy, also without the sweetness. Lili Taylor and Marisa Tomei are also in it, both very good, very different from how I usually think of them.

I don't like Charles Bukowski's work. What I don't like about Bukowski is a lot of what I didn't like about the movie - the portrait of the self-involved artist, the misogyny. But I do like the way that the movie (and I guess Bukowski) showed that people who live on the borders of work, who don't have a lot of money, who don't have a lot of plans, who make bad choices, or just do fucked up things, have these complex lives. There's no valorization and there's no preachiness. This is also what's happening on John Doe's new album Forever Hasn't Happened Yet. But Doe is much better than Bukowski.

Maybe it's because there's not a lot of room in a rock song. Most of the songs are less than three minutes long and there are whole worlds there. My current favorites are "Hwy 5" with Neko Case, "There's a Black Horse" with Smokey Hormell, and "Ready" with Kristin Hersh. The first and last ones have some disaster or other going on. In "Hwy 5" someone is calling from jail, something bad has happened, the place where they're living is beat out, but the song jumps and soars. They sing, "Lights on the horizon/ Take me away." It's so American, driving away to that dream that's a tank of gas away. It's what made Chapman's "Fast Car" such a hit. In a just world, "Hwy 5" would make as much cash and get as much play, but it's too bleak, even as it's hopeful, for that.

"Ready" is about a dead junkie, but it's also about love and about friendship and about being young. Amazon.com (trying to be helpful, I guess) calls it a cautionary song. They're optimistic. No one ever stopped doing drugs because someone died in a rock song. Kristin Hersh sings backup on this. A couple of reviews have compared the Case duet to Doe's work with Exene, but for me, Hersh is much more like Exene, her harmony sounds like it could etch glass.

Ok, "Twin Brother" is great too. A poor, completely dysfunctional family, all captured in the conversation of a smallish boy who loves his brother. But this sort material is not that new for Doe or for X for that matter. What's on my mind about this music and this movie is how rare it is in most media for anyone except the middle-class or the wealthy to have full lives or be fully realized. Even though most people are too sensitive (or wary) to write about welfare queens, there's more than enough written or spoken about the black underclass or white trailer trash. But this stuff is always caricature, either for humor or moral instruction. There's no sense that the people written about are in any way as real as the writers or commentators. I think that's also why I liked "Hustle and Flow" so much, aside from Terrence Howard. The dreams of the poor are real.

Rarely are people completely hopeless or dreamless, no matter what their lives are like. I started out thinking about writing about this because I wondered why I like Doe's work better than Bukowski's (and I was going to throw something in about these graphic novels that I've been reading called "100 Bullets"), but it just occurred to me that I'm also probably writing about this because it's the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Bush is swanning around down there again and all the media are having these anniversary stories. Most of them are feel good, some are feel (sorta) bad. But I am furious that reporters have only been bothering themselves about what happened and has been happening in Louisiana and Mississippi because the anniversary has swung around. Where are the ongoing investigations of what FEMA has not been doing, about the recovery or not of New Orleans, about the riverside communities in Mississippi, about the fact that half of the population of NOLA left, but that that only meant a third of the workers? What about that look we had into the abyss? It's because poor people, no matter what color, simply are not real people, except in the odd piece of art.


*I have absolutely no idea what's going on in "There's a Black Horse". There's a photograph of a black horse. There might be a hanging. But it doesn't seem to matter, there's something going on and it feels like it's happening as the sun goes up on the high plains somewhere.

napa, sonoma, and mendocino

When I was a kid there was an ad for some wine, Gallo probably, that included the phrase "napa, sonoma, and mendocino." I heard is as a single blur "napasonomoandmendocino," no idea what it meant, maybe it was where the wine came from, maybe it was a type of grape. Who knew? I think I was probably pretty fuzzy on the concept of California when I heard the ads. Even if I'd known these are three big wine growing counties in the state, it wouldn't have meant very much. I think they're still the big ones although people seem to be growing wine grapes on every spare patch of sunny soil in California these days. I don't know why people who find monocultures of corn, soybeans, or cotton oppressive don't seem to have any problems with wall-to-wall grape vines. I mean, corn is sort of pretty, especially in late summer before the stalks get harvested and pooped looking. The spindly young vines, held up by aluminum stakes, well, not-so-much.

The mature vines were looking gorgeous this weekend. Laine and i went up to Sonoma for her birthday getaway. It's a tradition. We have to go someplace away from home, that has a hot tub in order for her to poach her way through her birthday. It's generally not a happy time for her.

By going to Sonoma this time, we've hit all the wine counties. And I like Sonoma the best so far, though Mendocino runs a close second. Napa, well Napa. The main problem with Napa for me it that the whole region is set out like a massive daycamp for grownups. There's stuff to do, there's stuff to eat, and there's stuff to drink. Lots and lots of stuff to drink. It's all expensive and the people working in nearly all the places we went into were pretty snotty. The exceptions were the excellent Sweetie Pie Bakery and the Ace hardware store in Napa where we stopped to pick up a starter chimney for the grill. Now it's true that we don't look like we have great gobs of money. We don't and we don't have gobs of money either. But most of the time when we're wandering around in places where people spend money, the retail folks treat everyone as though they're going to drop a couple of grand. It only makes sense. You can't always tell who's got money and who doesn't from how they dress. (Think Britney Spears for Christ's sake.)

But folks in Napa can't seem to be bothered.

It looks as though the people who work in the restaurants, wineries, vineyards, shops, and what have you all along route 29 live over in Sonoma - in places like Agua Caliente and Boyes' Hot Springs. Or they live in the working class neighborhoods at the south end of Napa itself. Which is another whole reason for me to prefer the Sonoma side of the street. I'm feeling the class warfare these days.

The picture is from St. Helena.

new job

My last day at the university was July 3rd. A week later I was working at a new job and I don't think it could have been more different if I'd thought about it. I actually didn't think about it much. I just sort of said yes.

I'm making signs for a Trader Joe's. I'm also organizing the sign team, giving them the time to get their shit together for when the big CEO shows up (mid-September), buying stuff so that things can get put away and not just shoved away out of sight.

I'm getting paid next to nothing.

I'm having a good time, but I'm glad I don't do this for a living. I've been having a good time with this job. For one thing, I'm close to anonymous. No one has asked me a single question, except whether or not I was a transfer from another store. I get the sense that being on the sign team is regarded as a prize for good behavior, rather than an index of any particular graphics talent. I tell them, "No, I'm not a transfer. I've just had a lot of grocery experience." Oddly enough, that's the truth. I've worked in natural food stores, for natural food distributors, and in cooperative groceries. So I know how this stuff works, if not the specifics of the peculiar Trader Joe's universe. One reason that I don't get asked a bunch of questions is that most of the people working the floor are in their twenties and someone as old as I am is simply not in focus. It's sort of refreshing.

I have told no one that I have a Ph.D.

The second thing I like about this job is that clarity of the task at hand. New product? New sign. Restocked product? Find old sign. I've been trying to eliminate the mis-spellings and really ugly signs as I go. I'm supposed to re-design the meat area, which is actually an interesting challenge.

The last thing I like about this is that I'm getting my confidence in my ability to make pictures back again. I still have some chops. Now I need some ideas.

new something or other, several days later

I had my last day at my university job on Monday. I went down for three or so hours to finish up, update the webpage, send some emails, pick some files. This was a long weekend, so there was hardly any one on campus. I didn't run into anyone. I turned in my keys and drove away. A turkey vulture was sitting on the dry grass by the visitors' center, eating something, probably a long-dead ground squirrel.

It was anticlimatic.

The new day thing. I was thinking that was the name of a Dylan song. I've been listening to Blood on the Tracks lately and I vaguely remember that about the time that album came out he had another with that song on it. As it turns out, the album New Morning came out in 1970 and Blood on the Tracks came out in 1975. I got the name wrong and the years are further apart than I thought. But I am at the beginning of a new section of my life, day or morning.

I have a new job, too.

chez panisse

It's Pride weekend and two friends from Seattle are in town. One of them had never been to Chez Panisse, so she made reservations for lunch. I gotta say it was disappointing. That was a surprise.

I've probably been to this restaurant about five times total, counting today. I first went with my then girl-friend back in the mid to late seventies. Then (voice quavering) you could cruise by on Monday and make a reservation for later in the week. The prices seemed high $18 - $25 for the dinners, but then we were both working at these jobs that didn't pay a whole lot and going out was a real occasion. Eating there was a revelation. I grew up never tasting an avocado or fresh mushrooms for that matter. I lived for a while with a woman who turned herself into a cook (nearly chef) by working her way through the Time-Life cookbook series. I had an idea about food being something more that the (sometimes very good) food I'd grown up with and Chez Panisse made those ideas real. The meals I remember best are a Rhône tasting menu and cassoulet. The tasting menu was amazing and the cassoulet almost killed us both (beans). I rarely had had food so good and so complete.

Today the food was just ok; the service was downright bad. I felt as though I was in a theme park for gastronomie. Talking about it later to a fellow food fan, I realized that CP has been a springboard or inspiration for probably hundreds (if not thousands) of restaurants. Now it's far from the only game in town. I've had better meals (and cheaper) in a bunch of other places in the Bay Area. I actually think I make a better berry crumble and ice cream than the ones I tasted today.

It's a shrine, an absent one if today was any indication. There were two standouts, to be fair. Carmen ordered a Californian sea bass prepared with spinach, peas, and wild fennel. Subtle , savoury, it was pretty perfect. I had an elderflower soda. that was a little citrusy, very bright flavor, great for this hot sunny day.

space opera

They've finally chosen the interim director. I sent an email off today asking if she'd like any changes in the agenda for the summer meeting next week and if she'd be around later this week to go over the files in my office.

So it's nearly done and I can start to look for a new job and spend the summer reading science fiction. I've been bingeing on two writers - Iain M. Banks and Lois McMasters Bujold. I found Banks earlier this year and have just about collected all of his science fiction books. He also writes straight fiction under Iain Banks. Bujold is a new find. They both write the style of science fiction called space opera, but reading them close together like this underlines the inadequacy of genre names.

Space opera is a pretty old subgenre. I guess it goes back to the so-called golden age of science fiction, the pulps of the thirties. Broadly speaking, space operas are usually about wars between planets, between cultures, between species. The science is usually pretty shaky, what with all that jumping of light years and cosmic weapons and all. The opera comes from the fact that there are these big battles and struggles between good and evil or known and unknown. Bujold is probably closer to the classic style (I'm guessing about this). She's got a hero, a bit flawed, but he overcomes internal and external challenges to succeed by the end of every novel I've read so far. He's got a backstory because the series starts with his parents. This is pretty straight-ahead escape fiction. Bujold is funny, a little clever. Her characters are all human or humanoid as far as I can figure out. The different planets have different cultures, all of which seem to be extensions or exaggerations of current earth societies. Barrayar is a patriarchal, military culture (though changing unexpectedly quickly). Beta is a liberal, progressive culture. Jackson's Whole is a sort of wild west, libertarian, science culture. I don't really know enough about the rest. Even though I've read Komarr, I'm not at all sure what differentiates the Komarrans from the Barrayaran, except that they don't seem to have the same sort of military hierarchy. There's just not enough information. Bujold sketches things in and then lets the reader's templates for certain sorts of characters, cultures, societies, etc. do the work. She's an easy read and fun in a mindless sort of way.

Banks also has wars and he has more than humans and he's an altogether different (and better) writer. What makes him better is that he doesn't let a reader go on cruise control. If you stop paying attention, he's going to trip you up. Well he's going to trip you up anyhow, but it's more fun if you're paying attention. Where Bujold is content to use received ideas about cultures and people for her books (there's something very unpleasant with an evil sodomite), Banks takes on the work of completely creating worlds, cultures, and beings very far away from where humans are in the 20^th century, even if the seed of the creations comes from now. For example, the Culture is obviously based on liberal socio-political values, but he looks at what that means when people (not just humans) are beyond money and can have everything they want. What is a society like when individuals really do have a great deal of freedom? Will democracy hold together? How? Is is ethical to do anything in a society's power in the name of freedom and individuality? He follows this line, these lines to some very uncomfortable places. He takes machine intelligence seriously, without assuming that they're either just like us (but smarter and without emotions) or our sworn enemies (a la The Matrix). They're colleagues, with their own agendas. And they are a lot smarter than we are.

Banks is funny, but cooler, darker than Bujold . He uses complicated structures to tell the stories. This is most obvious in Use of Weapons. He tells a story from two directions. Aside from being clever (it is), it enables a slow unveiling, an explanation that comes clear like a developing Polaroid. When I finished his books, I want to dive right back to the beginning, to look at what he did and how he did it.

The bad news? Many of the earlier novels are out of print in the US. But British Orbit has been printing them and they're luscious looking. The British sometimes to a better job of their genre fiction. Arrow Press has new editions of Georgette Heyer's Regency novels with wonderful period covers. These are a necessary counter to the awful, horrible, sacrilegious mess that Harlequin's been putting out for the last couple of years.

expressions and attitudes

Laine and I went up to stay in the gold country, up in a vacation cabin by the Stanislaus National Forest. We didn't go alone. We went with a couple that we've known for a couple of years, Teri Mae and Katie. I guess we met them as friends of friends, mutual friends, something like that. Katie is an adoptee, as is Laine, and they used to walk around Lake Merritt and talk before Laine and I moved over to this part of town. We've mainly seen them at parties at their house and at games nights. They're both considerably younger than we are. They're planning to get married next year.

I mean MARRIED. They've planned this whole thing with their folks coming out from Boston and Ohio. They're going to have a reception of more than one hundred people. This is getting married like straight people. Maybe this is a generational thing, but I don't have any great brief for getting married, though I definitely think that queers should be able to get married and spend a fortune on it if they want to do it. But it still seems odd to know lesbians who are doing it. Like I said, it could be generational. I've know couples, lesbian couples who have been together for ages, who would laugh at the idea of spending all this cash and time for a wedding. There would probably be some muttering about heteronormarative behavior from the ex-separatists. But the marriage isn't the issue. It was the weekend.

Oh, there were lots of problems. Katie is a person who's not easily satisfied. She's also highly competitive. Now I'm not unfamiliar with the urge to compete. I'll be the first to admit it. But games are just that, games. They're nothing to get bent out of shape about. It's great to win. It's a drag to lose. But the point of a game is the play and the company. For Katie, it's more than that. She won't play a game after she's lost at it. She needs to play games she knows she can win.

That was bad enough. I won't go into all the small ways that she let us know she was not having a good time. The thing that really got me thinking was how she treats her girlfriend, Teri Mae. If you asked them, I think they'd say that they have a butch-femme relationship. That's not all that unusual, really. Laine and I have a b-f relationship, though it's not particularly marked, meaning I'm not a hard butch and she's decidely on the tomboy side of femme. Still the category is a useful one. It sets out certain ideas about gender identity and display. But I suspect that Katie identifies as butch because she thinks of masculinity as the winning team. Certainly the active, aggressive team. She slaps her partner on the ass, grabs her, runs her hands over her tits in the quasi-public space of the four of us. I gotta say I didn't much care for it and I don't think it's being butch. I think it's being a brute.

My idea of being a butch has developed over the years. If one concedes that gender is societally determined and that certain styles and gestures are assigned to different genders, then (in some ideal world) we can choose what gendered behaviors best fit our internal pictures of ourselves. The reality, of course, is that this is not a perfect world and that the choice of gendered behaviors brings some funky socio-political baggage and a whole set of unsavory assumptions about what it means to be a woman and what it means to be a man. Choosing b-f identities in this landscape means that the best you can do is to be thoughtful and avoid the tar pits of gendered behaviors as we perform these roles to greater and lesser extents.

I have always wanted to be a gentleman. Also, truth be told, I like the way that masculine desire can be modeled as active and direct. [I guess that's agency, but I also suspect this model is an artifact of when I grew up. I don't think it's "natural" or particularly inevitable, but we make our selves up out of the available material.] The whys of this? Who knows. Maybe I shouldn't have read "The Highwayman" at a early age. There's no telling why anyone ends up with the sexuality s/he has, why certain things are erotic, why certain roles seem to fit, why some people are attractive and others aren't. I am a butch because I don't completely feel "like a girl", whatever and however that means.

But as I watched Katie this last week, I also realized that in my head being butch is connected to some default behaviors and attitudes. At one point the lights in the cabin and all the houses around there went out. There was a note about this possibility in the long post the owner had sent out, so it must happen with some frequency up there. Katie was freaked out. It turns out that she's afraid of the dark out there in the country. She started wittering about the flashlights -- there were supposed to be two , but we only found one -- about the Coleman lights -- turned out to be a bad idea, no ventilation to speak of inside -- about what PG&E had to say about when the lights would come back on. All I could think was, "What a baby!" Butches are supposed to be brave, you see. This is not to say that non-butches aren't. That's laughable. But I had this (previously) unexamined belief that once you claimed the role, there are things that you should and shouldn't do and freaking out about the dark in a well-populated part of California is one of the shouldn'ts.

Wuss.

We had a nice time in the dark, watching the fire and talking. Once the lights came back on after a couple of hours, Katie wanted to play another game. I said no thanks and went up to bed.

The picture is of the approach to Bridalveil Falls in Yosemite.

getting the car towed away and other endings

I wrote a couple of months ago about my car not running. It sat in the driveway from December until two days ago, long enough for mold to accumulate under the wheels. I finally got it together to have someone come and tow it away. I had a brief hope, not really, that someone would be willing to pay something for the non-running carcass of a 1991 Chevy Corsica. But in the end, I called junker service I found online and on Thursday, sometime after noon, a guy came by, took the title and took the car.

It was my dad's car. My father died back in 1998. In January. He died of a heart attack, but it would probably be more accurate to say that he died of years of drinking too much. He died in his favorite chair, the last of a series of recliners that sat in the living room of the apartment I grew up in. The location never changed, The chair was well positioned in front of the tv set and a nice distance from the speakers. My dad probably had two great pleasures as he aged, music and movies. I have his reel-to-reel tapes of 78s and his videos of movies that he caught on cable. He liked things like Shogun, the complete Smiley series on PBS, Forrest Gump (though he bought that), My Fair Lady (mainly because he was a big fan of Henry Higgins, uh, Rex Harrison), practically anything with Cary Grant in it, and movie musicals. My dad loved movies. He told me years ago about how he'd gone to some matinee as a kid and that he liked the movie so much he stayed and saw it three times. My grandmother was wild, worrying about what might have happened to him. I see him, a small boy happy, sitting in the dark, watching the fantasy unroll in front of him.

I understand that in him because I love movies too. There's a lot I don't understand about my father and that I never will. I think, when I look over the movies he collected, by buying or copying, when I see his Calvin and Hobbes collection, the Pogos, and the other odds and ends that I've kept after he died, that he had a hard time figuring out how to be a man. He wanted the authority of maleness, but he wasn't attracted to being a brute. We watched The Wizard of Oz every year when I was a little kid. My sister and I loved it, but he did too. I think he was essentially gentle and liked being silly, but felt that wasn't ok for a man, especially a black man of his time. He was a geek before there was a name or a place for it. I think he'd have been happier growing up now. I miss him.

He died not long after I got my PhD. He was so proud of me. When the tow guy took the car away, I was trying to remember different drives in it. Although I was reaching for times after my dad's death, I remembered one time before he died when I was finishing up on my doctorate. I had to drive to Princeton to get a signature. He offered me his car, although I hadn't asked for it. I drove down to Princeton and back to Ithaca on a rainy day, listening to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. It was a kind thing for my dad to have done. It was his constant and unobstrusive support that I remember now. A support that I didn't appreciate enough at the time and that I wish I'd thanked him for back when he could have heard it.

At the end, the car had more than a hundred sixty-three thousand miles on it and oil was leaking into the engine. I got it the semester after I started the job at XXXX university and now that the job is at an end, it's only right that the car is going, going gone too.

some things never change

That's a repeated line in the last two Matrix movies. It sounds dumb in the movies (in the midst of some outstanding dumbness), but it occured to me today as I was listening to The Incredible String Band, preparing for a class (long story). I still like this stuff. I especially still like 'Ducks on a Pond", which was one of my favorite songs back in the day when I thought I couldn't be friends with anyone unless they also thought the ISB was the best band ever in the world. "Ducks" is long, over nine minutes. It's full of loopy British associations. It sounds completely home-made. It's such a hippie piece of work and I just love it. Here are the lyrics:

Ducks on a pond, ducks on a pond
Very pretty swimming round
The lion and the unicorn journey very far
The answers are the question, sir
The lady soothes the lion's fur
Meek as a lamb he follows her
Wherever angels are

Sing me something
I asked the ice it would not say
But only cracked or moved away
I thought I knew me yesterday
Whoever sings this song

Greetings on you kings in the sky
Who'll buy me a mynah bird
Play me a magic word
Speak of hopes with thoughts absurd
Thoughts floating by
Little ducks, pretty birds
Clouds across the sky

Moving pieces on the plains of Troy
Carving faces on the rocks of joy
Pretty lady washing the tiles
Soapy pictures like crocodiles

Chilly winds blowing
Lovely spring coming soon

I wear my body like a caravan
Gipsy rover in a magic land
Misty mountains where the eagles fly
Lonely valleys where the lost ones cry

I had a little letter full of paper

Inky scratches everywhere
Always looking, looking for a paradise island
Help me find it everywhere

Peacocks talking of the colour grey
Awaking soundly in darkest day
A howling tempest on a silent sea
Lovely Jesus nailed to a tree

Mad as the moon when Merlin falls
Silver castles and silver halls
Taking lessons from the piper's son
Learn to play while the world is young

Boys and girls come out to play
The moon doth shine as bright as day
Leave your sorrows and leave your sleep
And join your playfellows in the street
Come with a whoop or come with a call
Come with a goodwill or not at all
Up the ladder and down the wall
A ha'penny loaf will serve for all

Following my fortune now the Holy Grail is found
And the Holy Bread of Heaven it is given all around
Farewell sorrow, praise God the open door
I ain't got no home in this world any more

Poor as the birds but to give their song away
Gathering possessions round to make a bright array
Dark was the night, praise God the open door
I ain't got no home in this world anymore.

Now I completely understand why the young me liked this - such visual images, weird British references, and some odd, just odd Christian thing going on. Even though I'd stopped being a Christian when I was sixteen, I could still parse the imagery.

The things that never change are hard to see when I look in the mirror and see someone very much other than my 17 (or so) year old self. But responding to something that touches you, even when you can't completely identify why, that thoughtless, immediate reaction - whether it's love or hate - that's something that never changes

principle

I carpooled down to work as usual this Monday. We spent the first half of the ride talking about the driver’s history course. She’s working on getting students to think about how history is presented in different contexts. She’s working with museums right now. She has a reading—I forget the name of the author—about how museums present information. The main case study was the uproar about the Enola Gay exhibit that the Smithsonian wanted to do a number of years ago. The curators wanted to show the consequences of dropping the bombs on foreign policy and the civilian population. On one side, you’ve got the historians who used primary sources from the time period that suggest that maybe, maybe, we didn’t have to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the war. On the other side, there are veterans' organizations and miscellaneous folks who believe that the bombs ended the war months earlier than it would have and that we shouldn’t ever feel anything resembling remorse for killing all those non-combatant folks. I’m exaggerating, but still. . . .


So the lines are pretty clear on this one, right? Historical evidence versus popular sentiment, evidence wins. But then she tells me about some other exhibit that got closed down. It was called “Back of the Big House” and it was about slavery in the USA. In this case, it was the largely African American staff that worked in the Library of Congress who objected. As far as I can tell from the ride down, (now backed up by some judicious Googling) the employees did not like the exhibit, though it had been shown without comment at five different locations before it got to the LoC. The link suggests that the complaint may have originated in a labor dispute, but I couldn’t find any more detail online. At any rate, this show was also cancelled and eventually moved to a different venue.

Now you’d think that the same rules would apply here. Historical evidence and expertise trump popular sentiment, yes? No. In this case, my colleague thought that the feelings of working people should be taken into account.

Once she said this, I lost all interest in the conversation. This is something about talking about race with some people that makes me just nuts. It doesn't matter how friggin' crazy an African American's idea is, it gets cut slack by some well-meaning white liberal, who would be all too ready to jump down the throat of some old white dude. Now why are the feelings of African American workers more important than that of WWII vets? Got me, but my suspicions are that the feelings of black folks are considered more legitimate than those (presumably) old white soldiers). Legitimate? Why legitimate? Legitimate because we are no threat, because we have no perceived power, whereas the old white dude is emblematic of patriarchy, of the government, of their father for all I know. At any rate, he's someone to be struggled with and we are a people to coddle and condescend to. We are treated like children.


More about my soon to be ex-employer. As I was looking for information about the LoC exhibit problem, I came across this on an academic history blog:

Please. It is just plain pitiful that a graduate of XXXXX will never have had an opportunity to take a course in European history or much of any other history for that matter. God knows what other opportunities they will have missed while being filled with "Global Studies" mindsuck.

Oh dear. You know my colleagues have been telling me that our model is admired in other institutions, but maybe that's just not true. It turns out that the professor that wrote this is a political conservative. Nevertheless, he's not completly wrong about the role of ideology in instruction here.

carless

My car stopped running about two months ago, during winter break. I'm guessing that's when it stopped. I didn't try to drive it until the end of January, when I needed to go to campus. It turned over, but it wouldn't catch. This sounds like something trivial, probably is, but it's the last straw. Things have been going wrong with the car slowly over the last couple of years. That's not surprising. It's 15 years old. Has has over 165 thousand miles on it. It's been slowly dying for some time. There was the new water pump, then the cracked manifold, then the head gaskets. There have been a series of tires. It's been broken into and the CD player stolen. Then the heater dropped dead. The engineering geniuses at Chevy have designed the car so that it will cost $500 to fix the heater, but about 3/4^ths of the cost is labor, just getting at the heater. Then finally there's been a mystery leak, not a problem much of the year here in California. Unfortunately, however, it's the wet season here and the car has become a mold factory.

So I've been riding to campus with other commuters. I can walk to my classes and any meetings on campus. I usually bring food down from home, but one day I had to get to the local Safeway and Blockbuster. A trip that would take about forty minutes took three and a half hours. There's waiting for transfers; there's walking to where I really needed to go from the bus stop. There's the long loopy out of the way routes that buses have to take. The people who ride the bus are teen-agers, a couple of elderly people. Maybe they look a little poorer than the people than people in cars, but not so's you'd really notice. But clearly, like me today, they've got more time than cash or have to make time because they don't have money or can't get a car for some other reason.

Cars are a plague for all sorts of reasons: the endless appetite for petroleum, the isolating influence of these mobile private rooms, the island lives of the suburbs, but life in lots of the US, especially California is impossible without them. Or if not impossible, difficult and taking tons of time, time that most of us don't feel we have.

Because there's an upside to being on the bus, once I gave up the notion of getting done quickly. I took a look around. There are these amazingly individual plantings on the nearly identical houses in Seaside. There's the ocean breaking away in the distance, there's Monterey looking like a small pretty coastal town. There's the fog and the small shops, Mexican, Vietnamese, and Chinese, sprinkled among the big boxes that dominate Sand City and Seaside. I like the bus. I only wish that it were a less neglected way of getting around.

The default assumption is that we all have cars or if we don't, we should.

soup

Last weekend I made French onion soup*. This is my way of creeping back into cooking after basically retreating into heating up and taking out since mid September. This soup was one of the first from scratch things I learned how to cook. I bought Julia Child's French Cook cookbook. This isn't the two volume version with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholt. No, this was the little paperback based on the tv show. As I remember, the recipe is different in the paperback. I think that it calls for thyme or bay leaf or something. In the Mastering the Art version (the one I use now, I've got both volumes), the soup is basically onions, beef broth, a little salt, a little sugar, a little flour, and some vermouth. The trick is waiting the carmelization process out. When I first made the soup, I'd stand over it, worrying the onions along. Sometimes I'd just not be able to stand it another minute and dump the broth on the not-quite-golden onion slices. The soup always came out ok, but never as good as it can be when the onions get good and browned. So now, I find other stuff to do while they're in the pan. I read. I fold clothes. I wash dishes. I swing back and check out the pan and give it a stir every five or ten minutes. After a while, it's ready to go.

I know things about cooking now that I simply couldn't have at 20 or whenever I bought that little paperback. Some of the things I know, I know because of that book (soon covered in grease and gravy and egg and who knows what). But many of the things I know, I know simply because I've been cooking for a long time now. It's sheer practice, making mistakes, learning to think my way around fuckups or missing ingredients. My skills are the result of both theory (any new recipe) and practice (every dish executed).

I'm thinking about soup because I have to develop next semester's class on writing and writing is a lot like cooking. It's theory (the nuts and bolts and widgets of written English) and it's practice (every written communication). But since I'm trying to teach students how to write sort of formal prose, I have to figure out how to write the recipes . . .

Oh, forget this metaphor. I'm having the worst time trying to think about this class. The soup was great. Also great is Harold Pinter's Nobel speech. This man can write. My students, well, some are sort of interested in writing. But I'm having this incredibly hard time getting the writerlyness about writing across to them. For one thing, there's this whole problem of patience. Some find it difficult to understand why someone would write something that's fifty pages long, when you could say the same thing in a paragraph. The point that fifty pages make possible something that a single paragraph doesn't is probably the root of my failure to communicate.

* I made gingerbread too.

epiphany

When I was an Episcopalian, from 13 to 16 years old, I had this great pastor who invited members of a youth group out to his house in Upper Montclair and talked about theology and chess. I am a bad chess player. I learned when I was in 5^th grade and have never gotten any better. I'm not a great theologian either, but I remember still this one thing I learned from those discussions - epiphany.

Now according to the dictionary, once you've gotten past the feast of the Magi, epiphany is "the revelatory manifestation of a divine being". But my pastor called it "the outward sign of an inward grace". I think that epiphany applies to many things, not just grace and I've been having a number of them this week. First, the continued devolution that is this university. The Academic Senate voted not to do anything in response to the Chancellor's mandates. This is not so good as the Chancellor is not a forgiving sort of guy and is likely to do something about this refusal. To make matters worse, according to the Provost, the school is going to have to pay back something like one and a half million dollars through failing to meet enrollment targets. To make things even worser, 49% of the students who come here leave without a degree. And, the worstest part, the ones who stay here are harassed by instructors. This last is from my buddy the ombudswoman, who further went on to say that the many complaints that come to her are caused by the same five or six faculty members, time and time again.

Great.

But the epiphany came when I was walking across campus to get some lunch. It must be hunger awareness week or something right now. On the middle of the lawn at the center of campus was a cardboard and duct tape shantytown. I didn't know it was a shantytown until I saw the sign. It didn't look all that much like anything. So anyhow, as far as I understand it, students who want to bring attention to thee important issues live in these shantytowns for the week, but these were empty by sundown, with only a couple of posters and the boxes were gone by midday the next day. That is this place. Full of borrowed good intentions, but with never the heart or head to follow through.

The other epiphany was about golf, but that will have to wait.

extremes

Today was too long by about three hours. Part of the problem was an academic senate meeting. I've been the senator for my college for going on three years now and the nasty bits of the sausage-making that is getting people to discuss issues and make decisions has become tiresome.

Today's meeting there were presentations from two of the academic vice presidents. These women aren't directly connected to the faculty-teaching side of things, but they were giving information about the dire state of the campus and what we should be thinking of doing about it. I may have mentioned that the place is falling apart?

Their presentations were the sort of bracing talks we needed, but of course someone managed to turn it around to their political perspective in less than 30 seconds. So what that we're the worst school in our system for students transferring out? It's not our fault. The problem is that the tuition is too high! Yeah, that's it.

Uh huh, sure it is.

So I drag myself out of the meeting and off to class. This is my rambunctious section and we're slogging through a book that I know less than half of them are reading with anything like attention. One of my better students starts off with this wild-assed theory about why African-Americans are better athletes than whites. Something about different rates of evolution in humans.

Oh dear.

Well, I was tired and I was cranky and I called his theory wacky in front of the entire class. After about ten minutes he left and I have never felt so bad in a classroom all the time that I've been teaching. I got through the rest of the class and went straight to my office to write him an apology. At the end of my next class, he walks in, waits for the students who have been hanging around to leave and then we have a good talk.

He's having a hard time these days. His parents are splitting up. He's been helping his dad move to Salinas. (His mother doesn't know.) He just broke up with his girlfriend. And he's pretty sure that he doesn't want to be a business major. He really just loves music, but doesn't see how he's going to make a living at it.

We talked for quite a while. Although I'm the last person on earth to tell someone to stay in college, I think that college is the perfect place for a guy like him. He's curious. He likes struggling with new ideas. He's not particularly shy about putting his opinions out there. He's thoughtful. He works hard. Not to mention that he's thinking about dropping out to join the Navy and this is a bad time to be in the Armed Forces. He should be having a good time in school now and not worrying about what he's going to major in to pay off the debt he's accruing as he goes to school.

Our system sucks.

This is one of the things I like about teaching. Just as sitting through the meeting before class is one of the things I hate. The latter makes me tired. The former makes me feel useful and it's nearly as good as doing the classroom work.

shuffle - I

One big problem with having my mp3 player on endless shuffle is that I rarely listen straight through a CD or album.  I hear things in bits and snatches, one great song and then onto something completely unconnected.  Of course this is also like having God’s very own radio, spinning between genres and time periods as though they were all the one.


Things catching my attention this week:

• The Staples Singers – New Home


• Billie Holliday with the Mel Waldron All Stars (including Lester Young) - Fine and Mellow


• Joao Do Vale – Estrela Miuda


• Gil-Scott Heron - Winter in America


• Richard and Linda Thompson - Calvary Cross


• June Tabor - Lay This Body Down


• Sonny Rollins - Tenor Madness


• Hilary Hahn - Bach Violin Partitas


• James Brown - The Big Payback