the place for thinking

I've been a rotten blogger for months now.

I kept meaning to post something, but somehow never got around to it.

I was going to write something about my great-aunt (who's doing fine* now and my sister is living with her, an arrangement that seems to be working out for both of them).

I was going to write something about commuting, now that I take BART to work every morning.

I was going to write something about observing more black women with straightened and colored hair recently than I've seen (or noticed) for years.

But the thing that got me to open up the old Blogger account is Errol Morris' set of essays on Fenton's two photos of an empty road in the Crimea. He starts out trying to establish in what order a pair of photographs were taken and goes on into thoughts about war, about intention, about how you figure things out. Nikita Khrushchev even shows up (so to speak) in the second section. It's fascinating reading and I've taken to reading some of his other essays in his Zoom columns on the NYT website. It's a lot of food for thought and so it's getting late and even though I'm getting over an awful cold and should be in bed, I keep reading.

Because it's fun to think about this stuff.

I am rediscovering the pleasure of thinking about things that have no immediate use. I have always loved this. But I had sort of stopped for quite a while. Somehow having a job that, though it uses a lot of mental energy sometimes, is not overly intellectual has freed me up for the not-so-simple pleasures of thinking.

You would have thought being in academia would have done that. I think it does it for a lot of people. But it didn't do it for me. In part, I think it was because that was what I expected university life to be like (too many movies, probably). But I think it's also because this thinking thing has always been about fun for me and once something gets past the fun part to the work part, I don't so so well.

I'd say that mentally, I'm a sprinter rather than a marathoner. I have to trick myself to do things that take longer than 20 minutes** to complete. I have a lot of tricks now, switching between tasks, promising myself some sort of treat if I stick to it for another ten minutes, and so on to get things done. Often enough the tricks work and I end up spending an extended period of time working without feeling bored or trapped, but it doesn't come naturally to me.

So for me thinking is, at it's best, a ludic activity.

Which also might explain why I haven't blogged in months. It's felt too much like work and I hate working. But maybe it's going to feel like play again.

* well, as fine as you can be at 93+ years old.

** ok, I exaggerate, longer than a half hour.

thinking in black and white

I don't usually think about writing about race. For one thing, I wouldn't know where to start. Part of that is because I've been a progressive (and an academic manqué) and therefore my impulse is to place race among the array of power dynamics facing all of us. Throw in the multiplicity of race prejudice and I can't really think of anything to say.

But sometimes, things break through. The second thing was this post from Lower Manhattanite. I'd heard, read about the Jena 6 awhile back, but I hadn't heard about the sentencing. The chilling thing about LM's story is that 14 years ago is nothing, nothing at all.

The first thing though came completely out of the blue. I pay about as much attention to professional tennis as I do to professional golf, which is a little more than absolutely nothing. I'm guessing it's a big tournament and a little Googling uncovers that it's the U.S. Open. I was riding the BART into work a couple of days ago, something I'm still getting a kick out of, when I glanced over some one's shoulder and saw the sports page. On the page a headline that read something like "Henin beats Serena" something like that, I may have the verb wrong. I probably do. But the thing that has been bugging me for days is that Henin and Serena. The white player gets her last name, as is usual for athletes, unless they have some nickname thing going on. Serena, hell, they can just call her by her first name. There's this nearly ubiquitous use of women's names rather than their surnames in this culture that's bad enough. But it's the casualness of this racism, this seemingly completely unconscious condescension that floors me.

And you can bet that the writer would completely deny any racist intent if I called him on it too.

again and again

Yesterday I was watching Seven Samurai. I don't remember why I got it from Netflix. I've probably watched it about six times by now. It just keeps getting better and better. Once I'd finished watching it, I started to re-read "The Last Samurai" by Helen DeWitt. It's a wonderful book and reading it made me think about two things, the pleasures of rereading and why some books are so satisfying and others aren't.

For the latter, I'm not going to make some argument about high art. This summer I"ve been compulsively re-reading Terry Pratchett's Discworld series and Charles DeLint's Newford novels. You could probably make the argument that Pratchett's a genius, but I don't think the same could be said for DeLint. But re-reading both of them gives me a lot of pleasure. Part of the fun is they're both good at constructing plots. But once you get past the what-is-going-to-happen-next stage of reading, what is there?

In their cases and in DeWitt's too, it's making a world that's so fully realized that a reader enters it like Alice (or Death) going through a mirror. It's not a matter of spelling everything out. That makes for tedious reading and gets in the way of the effect that I'm trying to describe. Theodore Sturgeon once wrote something about description to the effect that a writer needed to imagine every detail in a room, everything, but then she needed to leave out everything except what the character (or pov) would notice. Who knows how many writers can actually do that? But the point, I guess, is that the world (country, neighborhood, street, house, or room) that's written so so well imagined, even if not explicitly, that it's all there, ready. A reader is held in the imaginative world of the book.

When that doesn't happen, there has to be high style, great plotting, or something to make a book worth reading. Recently a friend recommended The Shadow of the Wind. The cover blurbs compared it to Eco, Borges, Garcia-Marquez. Do reviewers just pull this shit out of the air? Ok, there was a library in it and a mysterious character is a writer, but there the resemblance stops. A worse conceived book I can't imagine reading. I started to make notes on all the lapses of logic, failures of character development, and just plain stupid writing, but had to give up after half a chapter. It's the sort of thing that can embitter a reader.

But the worst thing about it (aside from being pretty tone-deaf though that could have been a translation issue) was that it was supposed to take place in Barcelona and I could never see the city. It's as though all the action took place in feebly illuminated corners of rooms or dark streets, surrounded by an impenetrable fog. Characters pop up in one spot, then merged into the fog to pop up at another. This is pretty bizarre when you remember that this is Gaudi's city. It's famous for it's beauty. And according to Google, it doesn't rain all that much there either. If a writer can't make a living place palpable, then reading them is going to be a chore.

This summer, no more chores.

translations

Last weekend I was reading the Pevar/Volokhonsky translation of The Brothers Karamazov. This is one of those books that I have on my lifetime read list. Somewhere, long ago, I got the notion that there are certain books that you have to have read to be a civilized person. Of course the list just gets longer and longer and there's no way that I'll ever get caught up, so I'll never get that civilization Brownie point, but I persevere because lots of these classic texts are fun to read*. For example, the best thing about The Brothers K is that all of the characters so far are completely insane. They go about ranting and raving and having these religious/philosophical conversations in the midst of some fairly sordid wheeling and dealing. Much fun. Part of the reason I chose this edition was an article in The New Yorker not so long ago about translation and translators. The P/V collaboration are supposedly more true to the Russian than the Constance Garnett ones that I'm sure I read in high school.

The Garnett ones are supposed to be characterized by a British, Victorian habit of slang. If so, it's not something I would have noticed as a teenaged reader. The world of Crime and Punishment (the single Russian novel that I'm sure I read in high school) was strange enough that if it was strained through some English vernacular, it hardly mattered. But the world of Pevear and Volokhonsky is definitely some where different again, not English, nothing I reconize except in some Gogol stories. This makes me think that it's probably a good translation.

It's odd, the effect of translation. If you don't speak or read a different language, you completely depend on the proficiency and agility of the translator. Douglas Hofstadter spends an entire book messing around with the idea of translation in one of his books. If you read a lot, you run into a lot of different translation of the same material. I expect that people who do this for a living (scholars and such) develop a neutral attitude towards different translations, not much minding variation unless something is dreadfully wrong or it's in their area of expertise. But as an amateur reader, the differences in translation can bring you up short. For example, a few years ago I bought the newest, bestest, most complete translations of Luis Borges, an old, old favorite of mine. Although I definitely think the language is crisper, clearer somehow, like a wiped bathroom mirror, there are things that bring me to a screeching halt as I read the stories.

For one thing Andrew Hurley, the translator, calls the story "Funes, The Memorious", "Funes, His Memory". Even though he has a completely reasonable explanation for his choice in the notes, this change just jars my reading funny bone. The original translations, even if they had flaws, are part of my mental picture of Borges. I read them before I was 25. I cannot remember at all why I began reading that copy of Labyrinths or even how I knew who Luis Borges was. But Borges is part of my mental landscape now and that landscape is made of imperfectly rendered paraphrases of his thinking.

But imperfect approximations are life. Right now, I'm feeling an imperfect approximation of a good sister. My younger sister had quit her job and given up her apartment because my great -aunt said that she'd be willing to have Michele come out and take care of her. What wasn't so clear was that Aunt Marjorie was only willing to do it for a short time and now has decided that she doesn't want Michele there at all. I have some responsibility because I was the got between who made a bad translation of what Aunt Marjorie wanted through the filter of what I thought she needed and the desire for a clean, elegant solution. So MIchele's life is a mess (again) and there's nothing I can do about it. And no matter what my rational mind says I feel guilty because in this 56 y.o. is still the little girl who loved her little sister and always wanted to protect her**.

But I can't.


*This is not true of Henry James, who I've completely given up on reading, along with Faulkner. Some styles are just too uncongenial.

** I'm on the right in the photo.

the civil war is over

Fuck Shelby Foote.

I started listening to his immense (three volumes, more than three thousand page) work a little less than two years ago. I can’t remember why I wanted to know more about the American Civil War. Idle curiosity, probably. I also don’t remember why I thought the Foote work was the one to get. I think that it had good reviews on audible.com and perhaps I thought that three volumes meant that it would be comprehensive. I listened pretty faithfully until the war got to Gettysburg and I had to stop. It’s a brutal battle, a stupid one too. I’d had enough of war. I started listening again back in March just to be finished.

Now after I’d listened, up to Gettysburg anyhow, I rented a couple of the Ken Burns Civil War episodes. Shelby Foote is pretty prominent in the series. He knows a great deal about the different battles and the different players, particularly from the Southern side. Initially, this was something I liked about the books. As a Northerner, not the mention as a black woman, I never thought much about how the Southerners considered the war. As far as I knew, there was nothing good on their side of the argument, nothing at all. And although I don’t think there was any virtue in the decision to secede, the early parts of Foote’s book allowed me to understand a little of their point of view, messed up as it was. He also showed some of the machinations on the Northern side pre and during the war.

Foote seemed like a charming man in the documentary, wry, insightful. He probably was a charming man, being dead now and all. And if nothing else, through him I developed a great liking for Stonewall Jackson, religious maniac and general.

So why did I write fuck Shelby Foote? Because after all these hours of listening to his books, his Southern bias and subtle racism has driven me around the bend. Much of the end is a nauseating hagiography of Jefferson Davis, the megalomaniacal president of the Confederate States. Foote called Davis’ two years in prisons a martyrdom equivalent to Lincoln’s assassination and described Davis’ ironing (manacles on the ankles) as though it were an unthinkable punishment. He somehow managed to forget to mention that the ironing only lasted three days, unlike the years that blacks spent ironed and whipped and imprisoned under slavery. Foote’s inconsistent reference to African Americans as Negroes or blacks throughout the books also began to get on my nerves. Even though he started the books in 1958 when Negro may have been the best polite choice, the final book came out in 1974 and the persistent use starts to feel like a sneer.

And does he sneer. Any retreat by the North is a terrified rout. Any by the South, a strategic tactical ploy in the face of overwhelming odds. He makes little of Ulysses S. Grant as a strategic general, even though you can see Grant out-thinking the South from Vicksburg on. Foote smears Grant as a president, implying that he was as corrupt as the (truly) corrupt men in his administration, but manages not to mention Grant’s real commitment to black suffrage. He refers to Grant’s Memoirs as though they were a desperate attempt to make money. (Grant was dying of cancer as he wrote them and they did make a lot of money.) Foote passes over the fact that Memoirs are still highly regarded, still in print, unlike the work of Jefferson Davis. (And Grant was a friend of Mark Twain, who knew?)

Oh and that Reconstruction thing? All wrong. The worst of it was the disenfranchisement of ex-Confederate soldiers, not the brutal disenfranchisement of blacks when it ended.

Foote had nothing but praise for the Southern side. He praises Robert E. Lee, who basically screwed the South with the Gettysburg adventure. From the second Wilderness campaign on, he’s wearing down, wearing out Confederate troops. At times, Lee seems insane. The massacre in Lawrence, Kansas is not as bad as evicting people from their homes. Southern marauders? No problem.

Time for bed, more on this later.

this awful, awful war

I think that like many people, the war in Iraq is like wallpaper. It's somewhere there in the background and you don't' really think about it unless something changes, like someone moves a picture and you can see the difference between the faded and unfaded material. Or you look up and notice that part peeling away where you did that half-assed job of pasting.

But unlike wallpaper, we have to notice that in Iraq the unchanging fact is more and more people are dying every day. The government has decided to let in 7,000 lucky souls as refugees. But there are something like 3.2 million refugees or displaced people as a result of this disaster.

What's really gotten me going lately is listening to Chandrasekaran's "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" about the complete fuckup of the post war (dis)organisation and now today I discover this. First of all it looks as though the US government had been thinking about Iraq in less than friendly terms for years. But in the run up to the invasion the planning became a fucking *PowerPoint presentation. As the officers interviewed for "Fiasco" (my next listen) said

Lt. Gen. McKiernan later told Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks (Fiasco, p. 75):

"It's quite frustrating the way this works, but the way we do things nowadays is combatant commanders brief their products in PowerPoint up in Washington to OSD and Secretary of Defense... In lieu of an order, or a frag [fragmentary] order, or plan, you get a set of PowerPoint slides... [T]hat is frustrating, because nobody wants to plan against PowerPoint slides."

and

Retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich told Ricks (Fiasco, pp. 75-76) that PowerPoint war planning was the ultimate insult:

"Here may be the clearest manifestation of OSD's [Office of Secretary of Defense] contempt for the accumulated wisdom of the military profession and of the assumption among forward thinkers that technology -- above all information technology -- has rendered obsolete the conventions traditionally governing the preparation and conduct of war. To imagine that PowerPoint slides can substitute for such means is really the height of recklessness."

Jesus wept. So they didn't plan much, they completely disregard decades, hell centuries of experience, they drop what few plans there are, they steal everything that's not nailed down, put their cronies in positions of power, ruin a country, and we're supposed to just let them go on doing it.

Ok, I'm beat. Let's impeach the asshole.

*If you know me, you know how much I hate PowerPoint.

looking for work II

I think I should have mentioned that the second encyclopedia job was in DC and I was out in Virginia when the n-word incident happened.

But I was back in Jersey for the Smuggler's Attic job. I was in charge of the psychedelic section, the one with the little brightly colored plastic boxes, black lights, and posters. I can't imagine the same thing in a mall now. Selling that sort of drug paraphernalia (including screens and poorly made pipes) would likely get a place closed down now - or papered with unconvincing protestations that everything in the store is ornamental or for tobacco. (Who are these things fooling?) The store also sold heavy "Spanish" furniture, easily chipped enamel kitchenware, light inexpensive cotton clothes, and cast iron candlestick holders. The floor was this red, yellow, and orange shag that had to be raked free of detritus, including gum, every morning.


Seventh job, age twenty (maybe) working in a bookstore, I think it was Waldenbooks. I'd gone back to school, art school this time. All I remember about this was shelving poetry books when I showed up after having taken acid the night before.

[Wait a minute, just before the next one I worked like a day selling sandwiches in someone's brother's shop. I'm not sure that counts, but call it 7.2.]

Eighth job, age twenty two, housekeeper for a rich family in Nantucket. They raised Weimaraner dogs. I lived in a tepee that summer. I listened to the Watergate investigation as I cleaned because the old guy in the couple was a rabid Republican and he ranted at the tv set for hours. I cut my hand open rushing to do something or other. I had the scar for years, but it's just a trace now.
I met one of my best friends that summer.

Ninth job, age twenty-two, kitchen help in a Nantucket nursing home. I don't know about now, but back when I lived on the island, there were no, zero, not any jobs after Labor Day. Smart people had saved enough or had something to tide them over. I'd actually saved some money and was planning to go to Mexico and paint, but things sort of took a detour. I never left and this was about all there was for jobs come October. I rarely saw the people in Our Island Home, I sliced butter and put it on pats, arranged plates and shoved dishes into the dishwasher. I lasted two months, which was something of a record for summer people.

Tenth job, age twenty three, nanny for a rich family in San Francisco. Through some judicious lying and support from back East (thanks, Susan!) I got this job through an agency. Come to think of it, they'd probably have sent anyone short of an ax murderer out to the Hamm house. They'd gone through something like thirteen nannies in nine years, according to the nine-year old girl. Living in jobs are the worst. Unless you're out of the building, there's no way that you're off duty until everyone in the house has gone to sleep or passed out. I went out dancing a lot when I had that job, stumbling in at three, up at six-thirty for the kids' breakfast. But I saw La Jolla and Jupiter Island in Florida. I smelled my first swamp fire and had my first grapefruit from the tree, little brownish, greenish fruit, incredibly sweet.

Eleventh job, age twenty-three, cashier at Stanyan Street Foods. I don't think this lasted very long, because U can barely remember anything about it. This was my first job in natural foods, but not my last.

Twelfth job, age twenty-three, handyperson for a woman who bought houses, rehabbed them and sold them. I think one of the houses that I worked on isn't too far from where I live now in Emeryville, though I couldn't find it for the life of me. It was a nondescript little bungalow, but the wainscoting in the bathroom was pure redwood under decades of paint.
Margaret Pillow, the boss, paid women less than she did the men she hired, but considered herself a feminist because she was hiring women in trade work in the first place. I'm not sure that attitude's all that uncommon even now. I made five dollars and hour, but I didn't always work. I had no car and walked everywhere.

looking for work

I might have been doing this seven or so months ago if I hadn't gotten sidelined by working at Trader Joe's. I made a couple of shaky attempts at finding a new job before I left CSUMB, but my heart, or perhaps my brain, wasn't in it. Now, by quitting TJ's, I haven't left myself much choice.

So I've spent today (from about ten-thirty) to now (about one-forty) trying to type out a list of the things that I'm good at , so that I can make a new resume and start really looking. Most of the time has been spent reading blogs and my email and feeling very, very tense. I know that this stupid on a cerebral level, but on those lower (say reptilian brain) levels, I'm terrified. I can't remember when I last looked for a job. I mean look at my job history:

First job, age sixteen, receptionist for my best friend's dad. I think he asked me. It happened to be the summer of the Newark riots. I didn't listen to the radio then much more than I do now, so I had taken two buses, wondering all the while why they seemed to be running so late, before I flagged down a cab. The driver asked me where I was from and told me that I'd better get back there. "All hell is breaking loose down here." But stupid and responsible, I persevered and got to the office just in time for Dr. Nichols to look at me in shock, toss me in his car and drive me home. I saw cops driving by. One held a rifle out the window of the car, his hand wrapped in a bloody bandage. I saw a tank coming up one of the big streets. I saw kids grabbing watermelons out of a store whose window had been broken in.
That summer, aside from the riot, I learned to file, answer the phone, and discovered that I really liked canned iced tea and tuna fish sandwiches for lunch.

Second job, age eighteen, selling encyclopedias door to door in NYC. I think I found this job in the newspaper. I remember going to some office near the Flatiron Building in Manhattan. They'd drive us to these poor neighborhoods uptown or in the boroughs. It seemed like the poorest people were the most anxious for their kids' futures, willing to buy these crappy (worse than World Book) encyclopedias. I got to feel so bad about it that I'd end up bobbling a sale that I could have closed. After a while, the team would get dropped off at different places, then meet up to spend the day playing handball and hanging out. They even had a field trip up to New Haven, not that I sold anymore books there.
This summer I started drinking coffee (black with three teaspoons of sugar) and smoking cigarettes (tried a bunch but settled down with Kools at some point). I went to a sensitivity workshop (I think in New Haven) which left me thinking that they're not quite bullshit, but easily gamed. I also started smoking hash that summer, so ended up (with a bunch of co-workers) too high to get it together to go to Woodstock. The day of the moon landing, it was raining with the sun shining and we were all dancing around in the street.

Third job, still eighteen, selling baby's bargain clothing at Bamberger's (long gone). Since I was making no money selling encyclopedias and college was looming, I got this job. My first for a big company and I guess my first in real retail. I had to clock in and ate lunch in the cafeteria, usually by myself because I was real shy. I saved up enough to buy a nice grey, imitation leather trench coat. (Hey, I was eighteen.)
Again a job that showed me how much most people care for their kids. The sun suit sets ten for a dollar were sort of depressing. So thin, so bright, so badly made.

Fourth, eighteen yet, doing phone sales. This has got to have been the worst job I have ever had and is why I'm usually pretty polite to telemarketers. The bosses had a phone list from who knows where that had all phone numbers by neighborhood, whether or not they were listed. That last part pissed off any number of people, who had no problem yelling at the people who'd interrupted them in the middle of dinner to sell real estate. I think it was real estate.
That was a bad one. There were I don't know how many of us working inside a smoky, windowless room that I got to on the bus, looking at lists of names and numbers.

Fifth, nineteen, selling encyclopedias again. Why didn't I learn? It's an easy job to get because no one wants to do it for very long and very few are any good at it. The guy who ran the office was a phenomenal salesman. He could have sold someone a set if he came to their door in his pajamas with a rubber chicken on his head. I think I sold two sets in a single day and then quit.
It was on this job that I got called nigger for the first and only time. It came from a couple of little kids in a yard. I wasn't afraid of them, exactly but it gave me the feeling that I wasn't very safe out there. In these door to door things, you get dropped out somewhere and hook up with your ride at the end of the shift. So you're out there all by yourself. Was coming back past their yard on my way to the pickup when a woman (I remember that she had dark hair, was on the smallish side) called out to me. She had a German accent. She made the kids apologize and said to me that she was trying to keep them from being like that, " . . but these people around here . . . ."

Sixth, nineteen, working in The Smuggler's Attic. This was a Pier One sort of place in the Willowbrook Shopping Mall in Wayne. New Jersey. I got the job because the guy who was hiring had up a side that said only people over twenty one could work there. I bullied him into hiring me.


I think I've procrastinated long enough. Time for a nap, I think. More on Smuggler's Attic and my job history later.

music, music, music

On the left are my mp3 players. The monster on the far left is an iRiver iHP140, 40GB player. I bought it about four years ago. It's been just about indestructible, except for getting the display bitten by a golder retriever puppy, but it's showing its age. The hard drive's audible and the data base function hasn't been working correctly for a couple of months now.

On the right is the (I have to admit) elegant iPod Nano (4GB). With this amount of memory, I have to change my playlists just about every day, rather than just dumping everything into the player. It means a more planning. I tend not to get around to listening to new things I've downloaded for a while. This is not necessarily a bad thing as I find I'm less critical of music once I've had it around. The Decembrists are a good example. I hated them the first time I heard them. But after a few months, I found that I liked some of the songs, though the lead singer isn't, well, much of a singer. I just started playing them to go along with this post, but I think I'm back to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who was a fabulous singer.

I have music on the brain for a couple of reasons. One is we've actually go out to hear people perform, The Dixie Chicks and "West Coast Live", to be specific. I liked the Chicks show fine. It was balanced on some odd boundary between bluegrass and pop/rock. The lead singers has a fine country-style voice. Their songs, although genuine (this isn't a band designed by Clear Channel) don't seem to have a lot of depth to them, despite (or perhaps because of) their appeal to our emotions. I'm not a big country music fan, but there's a lot of it I do like. The songs that really work (old-school style) are these direct little vignettes, like "Jolene" that seem to come from some real person. It's not that Dolly (who wrote it) has to have been the woman singing to Jolene, but she has clearly imagined that woman thoroughly enough to make her real. The songs that seem to work(new-school style) are a bit more abstract. I don't know exactly what's happening in Neko Case's "Star Witness", or John Doe's "There's Black Horse" but like the photos of Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, or Larry Clark, I don't need to know exactly what's in front of me to appreciate it. The music of the Chicks seemed to rely on my being a bit on board already. I'm not sure why this is a problem for me. Maybe because there are no surprises?

The West Coast Live show, on the other hand, was all surprises. There were The Bobs who've been around, with some personnel changes, for ages, but I'd never heard them before. Excellent singing and even more excellent senses of humor. Then there was Oakland's own Interfaith Gospel Choir (a fragment of them really). Finally there was Chirgilchin - A Tuvan group, who had Laurie Anderson along with them. She, much to her credit, hung back and didn't let the impresario (guy with the mic) make her the center of things. That throat singing is a marvel and watching them doing it, instead of listening to a recording, didn't make it any less of a mystery or less beautiful.

I finally got "The Harry Smith Project" dvd and sat through the whole damn thing. God, it was awful. Not uniformly, there were some good performances. But for the most part, what a mess. I am a big fan of "The Anthology of American Music" though to be honest, I didn't hear it back in the 60s. I bought the CDs sometime in the late 90s after reading Greil Marcus go on about it for the umpteenth time. I sat down, poured a glass of wine and listened to the whole thing in one night. I don't love all of it, the sermons and old Cajun stuff don't move me. But the rest of it? I can see why it set people on fire when it came out. These commercial recordings have so much energy. I don't think that we respond to the music because the performers have lots of realness points (being from the hills, the South, being poor) but because they're good and as they sing, even as they sing songs that were old when the were born, they're singing as though the song was being made at the moment it came out of their mouths. The people performing on the "Project" let you know with every note, every look, every pose, that this was old music, this was important music and that you were in fuckin' church. Even when they twisted it as Dave Thomas did to "Fishing Blues" it was still a sort of obeisance.

The last music thought before I go off to make cornbread is that they've been playing a lot of 70s and 80s music at work lately. Someone is very fond of a Fleetwood Mac Greatest Hits compilation. Much to my horror, I could easily sing along to 90% of the songs. And the 80s? I know an embarrassing number of pop songs from the decade, though if you asked me the names of any of them, I couldn't tell you to save my life. I think we have a song sponge in our heads that just sops up lyrics and hangs on to them. So when I'm 100 years old and senile, don't know my own name, I'll still be able to sing Venus by Bananarama.

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.