The New Rambler

Greg and I have been discussing themes for Thursdays and Fridays, and we still welcome your suggestions. I don’t actually have themes for my days at the moment, but I thought they might be worth pursuing at least a day or two per week.

When I was in fifth grade, I was subjected, among other things, to a sex ed film in which the narrator informed us that if we just ate right and exercised, we wouldn’t have cramps! In class the next day, one girl noted that her mother said that was not true. I don’t remember who it was, but I would like to give her mother a placard that says No Fucking Shit. Today, despite my three days in a row of vigorous exercise and my diet of whole grains and vegetables and all that other stuff they say you should eat, was spent largely cursing God (when not cursing the county and the state legislature, but that’s another topic best saved, as JD Salinger once wrote, for when we’re both blind and drunk) and counting the minutes till I could go home and nap with a cat for a heating pad.

And this, as you may guess, is all by way of saying that, in addition to failing to exercise today, I have not much to say in general. The school here is on what I guess amounts to a basketball break — our high school girls team is at the state championship in Casper — so things are very quiet at the library. I am getting rid of some more old and decripit books. If you’d like a copy of a book about the history of manned space flight from 1981, just let me know. (People are often horrified by the idea that libraries get rid of books, but really, if you saw what I’m getting rid of, I think you’d be okay with it. Also, this is a small public library, not a major research institution. We are interested in having a) books people want to read and b) books that tell them how to do things. I am fairly sure that the Encyclopedia of Associations from 1996 and a dictionary of abbreviations from the 1980s do neither of these things.)

Pet your animals, if you have any, and they are the sort that take to petting, and stay tuned for more tomorrow.

wall of music

I’ve reverted to what I think is probably my natural state and become a night person here on my vacation. My grandmother says you should always go to bed and get up on the same day so that you don’t lose a day in between, and I have been abiding by that idea while I’ve been in New York City. So today I arose at a leisurely hour and ate up the rest of my yogurt and strawberries and most of the rest of my granola (my first host is a) vegan and b) only stays at her place part of the time, so I was trying to use up the non-vegan and spoilable food), and drank a couple stovetop espresso potfuls of Cafe Bustela and checked up on the internet and daydreamed and thought about my day, and, after a couple of hours, I got up and set out on it. I had to stop just a few yards away, though, to take a picture of a a dog in a window.

My first real stop was one subway stop down and a few blocks walk down to Grand Street and Doughnut Plant. I love doughnuts, so when I hear from multiple sources that there are good doughnuts to be had, I have to check them out. And oh my were they good. Well. I only had one. But it was good. It was a creme brulee doughnut — a small, deliciously flakey glazed pastry with a creamy center. So good. I would have bought every other flavor they had, except a) they are expensive and b) I try not to eat a lot of doughnuts. But this one was definitely worth it. No picture — it was much too yummy to stop and photograph.

After that, I headed back up town to the Museum of Modern Art. I managed to graduate from Vassar without ever taking art history, but I love art in general, and I love modern art in particular, and I have not been to MoMA since it was renovated. I was last there for a Jackson Pollack retrospective, and though I didn’t see any Pollack this time around, my response was the same. I walked from gallery to gallery with my jaw dropped, and it dropped a little farther each time I saw something that made me look twice, and then look again and again and again. I don’t really know how to explain the sensation, except that it is so wonderful and so overwhelming that I frequently can’t bear the thought of taking in any more, and yet I don’t want to stop. I had to, though, after about an hour. I stopped in one of their cafes and got some coffee and drank it and stared at the wall until I thought I could look at more things, and then I did, and it happened all over again.

MoMA is expensive — it always has been, so that’s not really a surprise — and I wish I could stay there more than a couple of hours, but I truly can’t take in more than that. Nowadays, in addition to their regular audio tour thingies that you can get on a rented device, you can also listen to all of them via their wifi network on your own wireless device, and so I tried listening to some on my iPod Touch. Only some pieces have commentaries, and they are marked with a little symbol on their sign to let you know. While I appreciate the idea of being able to pick and choose which bits you hear, with the iPod it was kind of inconvenient — I had to keep getting it out, waking it up, and typing in the number of the piece in question. And if you make a mistake typing in the number, there is no delete button — you have to reload the page and start over. After awhile, I gave up on the audio. The pieces are valuable and worthwhile, but my raw reactions were so compelling that after awhile I couldn’t be bothered to go through the rigamarole of dialing up the right clip and playing it.

My next stop was at the Barnard Library to see the zine collection that is run by my friend and first New York City host Jenna. I’ll probably write up more about that and about the other libraries I visited on my librariany blog, so here I’ll just say that it was great to see a collection I’ve heard so much about.

My day concluded with many, many subway rides back to Jenna’s place (1 to S to 6 to V), packing up and cleaning up, and a longer ride on the F out to my friend Meg’s place in Brooklyn, where I’ll be staying for the remainder of my trip. More on that, and more, will follow.

Teen: You’re walking?
Me: Yes.
Teen: Where are you going?
Me: Home. It’s four blocks from here.
Teen: Wow, four blocks is a long way to walk in the rain.
Me: [jaw hits ground]

People in my town, upon learning that I walk from place to place, tend to regard me, kindly, as mentally ill. Of course, I am mentally ill, but I the cause, I think, has more to do with genetics than with my chosen form of transportation. If anything, I probably don’t walk enough: most days I walk the four blocks to and from the post office and back, and while I suppose this is more walking than some Americans do — quite a lot more, at least in the rain, to judge by the conversation I had this afternoon — it pales in comparison to the amount of time I spend sitting in front of a computer. I thought about that as I was walking home, and so when I got home I thought it might be a good time to go for an actual walk, one whose purpose was simply to walk, not to get from place to place. It was drizzling slightly, or trying to, and turning cold, which meant the golf course would likely be empty, and so I changed into boots and layered on my rain gear and off I went.

(Yes, we have a golf course in my town. 351 people, 9 holes of golf. The course is laid out over a ridge and its surrounding lowlands just south of town, and in addition to the nine holes, it has a great many home sites, most of which remain unsold and none of which have been built on yet. I will rue the day someone does build out there, as I tend to regard the place as my own private nature preserve, but I’ve been informed that, due to bureaucratic tangles of which I remain happily ignorant, it will be a long, long time before anyone builds there.)

I walked for over an hour, mostly up on the ridge, keeping away from the roads, which are all named for surrounding mountains and formations: Phelps Way, Irish Rock, Pinnacle Rock, etc. I am reminded of what Billy Collins says about the naming of subdivisions: that Pheasant Run and Deer Creek are not descriptive but elegiac, honoring the creatures that were displaced so that development could occur. The mountains have not yet been displaced, of course, but some of them have been mined and drilled, and others will surely follow.

When I got home, I pulled a tome off the shelf and sat down to reread Thoreau’s “Walking,” which seemed to me to be the thing to do. I thought about copying out a few paragraphs and leaving them in conspicuous places around town, but doing so would undoubtedly be a further indication of my mental illness, so I did not. The funny thing to me is that for as odd as my walking is considered here, I am, according to Thoreau, no kind of walker at all. Happily, Thoreau wasn’t completely convinced that he was much of a walker himself:

It is true, we are but faint hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, neverending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, — prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again, — if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.

I have read a number of the currently popular genre of book, the “I went and did this thing for a year” book. There are a great many of these about — years without shopping, without buying anything made in China, living as if it were 1900, living according to the Bible, getting all your food locally, making everything in Mastering the Art of French Cooking — and one is tempted to think of something so trendy as a new idea. But of course Walden was the original “I went and did this thing for a year” book. Thoreau even foreshadowed our current concerns about the accuracy of nonfiction narratives — he actually lived at Walden Pond for two years, but he condensed his experiences into a year for the sake of the narrative. And, as Thoreau detractors are wont to point out, he cheated — he ate half his meals at his mom’s house, or Emerson’s house. Thoreau doesn’t include that, but I doubt he would apologize for it: the point was to live deliberately, and he felt he accomplished that. If you want to get hung up on exactly how he did it, go read the chapters on Economy and bean planting again. Edward Abbey also neglects to include the wife and two children who were living with him during most of the period recounted in Desert Solitaire, which seems egregious in some ways. But including the things they left out would make Thoreau’s narrative, and Abbey’s, more like the current crop of books, which are forever agonizing over the rules and whether they are sticking to them.

It’s hard to imagine anything like Walden getting taken seriously today. Try to imagine a chapter excerpted in Harper’s or The Atlantic Monthly. It’s too sincere, and, as Lionel Trilling pointed out, sincerity got trumped by authenticity a long time ago.

It has always been my desire to live closer to the roots of things, to learn by going where I have to go, to get there by my own means, and while I do not deny the genetic and biological underpinnings of mental illness, I’ve always felt as well that the things I want — to live closely, to take my waking slow, to walk upon the earth and not the pavement — are not an expression of my illness by a desire for health.

There was a piece in The Nation a little while back that began, “Like most people, I know too much about celebrities. Take Paris Hilton, for example.” [Geeky librarian note: searching "paris hilton site:thenation.com" gets a surprisingly large number of hits.] Indeed. So do I. While there were a few years in Iowa City where, by dint of shopping mostly at the Coop, I managed to avoid knowing very much about anyone in the tabloids, those days are gone.

My library, like many libraries, receives People magazine every week. I get the mail and set out the magazines, so every week I get whatever celebrity news is on the cover. Usually I can leave it at that–oh, someone’s getting married, someone else is getting divorced, and someone, somewhere, is always pregnant or thought to be. This week’s cover said “BRITNEY’S MENTAL ILLNESS.”

The article has various doctors positing that Britney Spears may have manic depression, also known as bipolar disorder. As an armchair psychiatrist (my friend and I once diagnosed all the characters in Winnie the Pooh), I’d say that’s not a surprising conclusion and not at all unlikely. The article even did a reasonably good job of describing the illness–not everyone’s manic periods are so stereotypically full of sex, drugs, and rock and roll–but then not everyone has access to quite the same scene as Spears, and People is trying to sell magazines, not serve as a psychiatric primer. And then there’s my favorite statement in the article: “Troubles have plagued the paternal side of her family tree as well: Her grandmother Emma Spears shot herself to death at 31; Jamie has battled alcohol problems. Still, says Britney’s former dance teacher and family friend Renee Donewar, ‘I’ve never heard anyone talk about there being a history of mental illness in her family or making a big deal about it at all.’”

Ms. Donewar has apparently not picked up on the inherited nature of mental illness. Family history of suicide? Check. Alcoholism? Check. Feeling like life is meaningless and/or going out of control? Yes, Houston, I think we have a problem. You’ll all be glad to know, though, I’m sure, that Dr. Phil has met with the family.

I didn’t start writing about this intending it to turn either snarky or sentimental: my intention was neither to make fun of Spears nor to elicit sympathy for her case, though I can well imagine both reactions occurring, perhaps even simultaneously.

What I was thinking about instead is bipolar disorder and how little we understand it or any of its cohorts in the DSM-IV, and how ill-prepared our society is to deal with its ravages. Kay Redfield Jamison discusses her spending sprees in her memoir An Unquiet Mind, noting that “money spent while manic doesn’t fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss.” How do you handle that sort of thing? How do you get out of the debt that mania has put you into? What do you tell a child with a parent in such a situation? Jamison is lucky enough to have a family who could afford to pay off her debts and a profession lucrative enough that she was, in turn, able to pay them back, and one presumes that financial problems will not be a part of the picture for Britney Spears.

What I’m asking, really, I suppose, is how one perceives the mentally ill people who are not famous or rich or glamorous or even pretty? I’d like to think that somehow the examples of the famous would create more sympathy in the world, but I suspect that they merely create more headlines.

This hasn’t been much of a “what I’ve been up to” sort of a post–what I’ve been up to is work and cross-country skiing and exercise class and making terrible pumpkin muffins–but it is sort of a “things I’ve been thinking about” post, which I guess will have to do.

I do not make New Year’s resolutions as a general rule, but I do often have sort of new year projects. Some of those start in September, since, as everyone know the year actually starts in September (or at any rate, it does if you went to school for 27 years), and some start in January.

My projects last year were “stay busy so as not to get depressed” and “get some kind of hold on your finances”. The former led me to learn cross-country skiing, join a funky women’s exercise class, and start studying karate. As it turned out, working full time is enough of a time suck that those things kept me very, very busy, and keeping track of all my expenses took care of any spare moments. (Of course, I didn’t let any of this cut in on my sleeping, reading, or cooking habits, not to mention my talking on the phone habit.)

This year’s rather peculiar project is “try to look better.” This all started because I realized that (especially after gaining ten pounds over the summer) I had only about six outfits I could wear to work. That’s enough to get me through the week, and usually that’s enough for me, but some of them were pretty sketchy as work clothes. For instance, I’m not sure how cool it is to wear jeans with paint on them to work, even if it’s sort of inconspicuous paint. In any case, my whole presentation was starting to make me feel a little self-conscious, the way I felt in junior high when I had nothing but white socks (sensible enough, since those were the socks I wore at camp in the summers) and people asked me about it all the time. Nobody was asking, “Why are you wearing jeans with paint on them and a hoody to work all the time?” but I felt like they were.

Thus my winter break (translate: holidays off, five days of vacation time, and a day of unpaid leave) got dedicated in part to the whole “look better” project.

I braved the stores at Oakbrook after Christmas and came out with three articles of clothing that cost about $20 each, which still seems like kind of a lot to me. (We used to say that Goodwill was ruining us for Ragstock: “Yeah, but is this dress really worth five bucks?”). I’ve accepted that I may not always be able to find everything I need used, and so I was okay with that, mostly, but when I got to Iowa City, I hit up The Second Act, which is a pretty nice consignment store. There I got a pair of pants, a dress, a sweater, and several shirts all for about $40. I’ve been wearing my new clothes to work every day this week, and so far I’m pretty happy with them.

The other part of project “look better” was getting a haircut. My friend talked me into going to her fancy hair person, and I’m not even going to tell you how much I paid for a haircut, save that I was semi-able to justify it because of all the years I cut my own hair. Tragically, I didn’t manage to take a picture on the day I left the salon, or even on the day after. By days three and four it was looking not quite as good, but still okay. But by the time I got back to Wyoming and washed it with the fancy shampoo and dried it in the directed manner (I had explained that I don’t use hair dryers, so I was told to twirl it in sections and let it dry that way), it looked exactly the way it had before I got it cut. I’ve since been able to improve things a little, but it has been one of the more disappointing experiences of my life.

I know all these people who have fabulous, long-lasting relationships with their hair stylists–my mother has been getting her hair cut by the same person for over twenty years!–but I’ve never seemed to manage it. (I know, I know–cutting your own hair for the better part of a decade is not the way to make friends with your hairdresser.)

On the whole, though, I’m more pleased by this “look better” project than I thought I might be. I have a lot of weird hang ups about consumerism. I generally regard it as a bad thing, but it’s sort of like I have this relationship with consumer items that anorexics have with food. You need food to eat, and, unless you are either in the Garden of Eden or a really excellent dumpster diver, you do need to buy some things. I think that my figuring out that it’s okay to buy things is maybe a little bit like the struggle of someone with an eating disorder to see that eating some food is healthful and natural, but I may be wrong about that.

So that’s that for now. Incidentally, one of my other projects is “write more about what’s happening in your life,” and since I have this under-used blog space, it seemed like the place to do it. I apologize for the probable lack of political content in these posts, but if you’re interested in the goings on out here, there will, I hope, be more to follow.

Yesterday I bought a pair of exercise pants. They were $31.45, including tax, from the discount store. Those of you who know me will know that I rarely pay so much for any article of clothing, particularly one that I can’t wear to work.

I bought them for several reasons. Partly I bought them because I could–having at long last paid off the last of my credit card debt (to which I have been contributing several hundred dollars a month for several years), I suddenly have a little bit more money, and so buying things that seem frivolous is a possibility. (I bought two CDs the other day, too–used, of course, but new to me.) Partly I bought them because I am, on occasion, a victim of fashion. But mostly I bought them because, although it is possible for me to wear my too-small sweatpants or my too-streched-out biker shorts to go run on the elliptical machine at the Rec, it’s not particularly comfortable. It doesn’t make me think, “Oh, how I long to wear clothing that doesn’t fit me well so I can go burn calories!” (The too-small sweatpants might, I suppose, be a motivation, but they’re also hot and a little too short even when they’re not too tight.) The new exercise pants do make me feel that way.

Of course, they also make me feel silly. I’ve always believed that exercise was something one shouldn’t set out to do–it was simply something one should acquire in the course of the day. In the days when I walked dogs for three or four hours a day, or when I taught one or two college classes a semester and had many hours to walk everywhere, that wasn’t difficult. But now that I work eight hours a day in a library, the only real excercise I get during the course of the day is a little bit of lift that barge, tote that bail when we move books and AV materials from one library to another.

I’d love to be one of those people who gets up and goes out for a morning jog, but (aside from my total lack of desire to do anything so strenuous in the morning), I can’t run–it’s too hard on my back. And walking enough to get real excercise takes hours. Enter the elliptical machine. Enter the dark Satanic mills. Enter the excercise pants. Enter my seduction by capitalism. Oh well.

From last night, posted tonight. I thought I might expand upon it, but no, this is all there is:

Every now and then, it dawns on me that Garrison Keillor is going to die, and that I will then have to live the rest of my life without Prairie Home Companion. (I have similar feelings about Gary Trudeau and Doonesbury, but they’re not quite as intense, probably because my acquaintance with them is a decade shorter–I started reading Doonesbury in grade school; PHC I probably heard in utero.)

That Trudeau’s show is not as good as it once was–that it could never be as good as “Snow Home” was when I perhaps four (if, in fact, I heard it live–I could swear that I did, on the old radio that I moved to my office at my first job, on which, for reasons that seem baffling even now, I listened while at said job to all of the Clinton impeachment hearings)–is of little matter. It may, I suppose, make it easier to say goodbye in the end, but I doubt it.

What follows is partially prompted by a discussion over at the Hermits’ place and partly simply my own muddled musings.

Once to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some great decision, offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever, ’twixt that darkness and that light.

[full lyrics & music]

I was told not too long ago that this hymn was removed from The Hymnal 1982 not because it refers to “man” (not humans, or souls, or men and women, or what have you) but because of a theological issue: there is no one time in our lives that we must choose between good and evil–we are called to do so constantly.

Of course, I think Lowell’s lyrics acknowledge that: the choice goes by forever, after all. I am not a theologian or an expert on hymns, or much of anything else.

The hymn comes to me at the moment partly because it is a great favorite of mine–we sang it at my camp long ago, and it shows up in The House with a Clock in its Walls, and Martin Luther King Jr. quotes it several times in his speeches and sermons. It comes to me also, though, I think, because I’ve been thinking lately about moments that occur once and moments that occur again and again.

The incidents at Virginia Tech remind most people of the shootings at Columbine High School, which took place eight years ago today. They remind many also, I suspect, of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which took place twelve years ago this week. For those of us with a connection to Iowa City and the University of Iowa, the thing that comes most to mind is, I suspect, the physics department shootings in 1991, which, bucking the April trend, took place in November, on All Saints Day. Some may recall the many other school shootings in this country–Red Lake, Minnesota; West Paducah, Kentucky; and on, and on–killings that get less ongoing attention but that were no less devastating for their communities. And any act of sudden violence cannot help but bring to mind the attacks of 9/11. One doesn’t equate these things–one can’t–but they come to mind, and one realizes that evil does not happen simply once.

One also realizes–or some, at least, also realize–that we tend to pay more attention to the tragedies that are sudden as opposed to those that are ongoing. We lose sight of the ongoing killings abroad in favor of the one-off sensations. We barely even register the things that kill more slowly: poverty, homelessness, hunger, addiction, oppression.

It is remarkably easy to write off other people’s suffering. It is equally easy to judge the mourning of others, to believe that the woman who does not cry at her mother’s funeral or the man who does not seem affected by the school shooting that happened in his town are in some way not fully human or humane.

I do not believe that the choice between truth and falsehood is one we make only once, but I do believe that there is for each person one great tragedy–one thing that happens that defines your understanding of sadness. That thing may have already happened to you, or it may yet be coming to you (but make no mistake: it will come). It is one of the great comforts of my life, actually: as a friend once said, the great wheel of tragedy leaves no one untouched. Eventually it swings around to everyone. I try to remember that in a charitable way when someone says something appalling to me, but mostly, I must admit, I remember it in a more gleeful fashion. Oh, just you wait, I think. It’ll happen to you, too.

———–

I started this post a day or two ago but didn’t finish it, and now I’ve forgotten where it was meant to go–if, in fact, it was meant to go anywhere–I call this ramblings for a reason. Suffice it to say that I am always struck, at moments of great national or international tragedy, by how randomly tragedy strikes us, and how peculiar and personal our reactions to it, or our lack of reaction, must always be.

Once upon a time The New Rambler was entirely composed of things I wanted to write about but lacked an outlet for. I still lack an outlet, other than this, but I seem to be rather busier now than I was then. So instead I offer partial list of topics, to be updated as I see fit. . .

Busy Being Free: Freedom and Responsibility in Rock and Roll, 1965 to the Present (or possibly the mid-1970s)
starting with “Like a Rolling Stone,” with its salvo “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose,” and continuing through such classics as “Me and Bobby McGee” (“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose“), with particular attention to the works of Joni Mitchell in songs such as “Cactus Tree” and “All I Want”

Men in Rock
simply because I’m so sick of reading articles about Women in Rock. “Men in Rock” would be both a celebration and an exploration of the role of masculinity in rock and roll, beginning, I suppose, with Elvis and ending perhaps with Prince, particularly during his “the artist formerly known as Prince” phase

The Romance Writings of Edward Abbey
an examination of the works of Edward Abbey and how they do (and do not) fit into the conventions of romance and erotica, with possible digressions to consider the concept of the romance of the wilderness in the American mind and the works of other writers, such as Terry Tempest Williams, who explore the erotics of place

I’ve been listening to the new Dar Williams album pretty much non-stop, especially since I got my computer back from Apple. (They even slapped a new keyboard on–my cat had clawed off several of the keys, and they don’t pop back on the way you think they might). I have a stereo, but it, along with most of my other possessions, is in storage–hence this whole computer listening thing. Luckily, unlike my father, I am not that fussy about sound quality.

I am feeling a little guilty because my copy of the album is a copy (though not really guilty, because, as much as I love Dar Williams, I am less than pleased with the music industry) and somewhat more guilty because I’ve realized I like her covers on this album better than her original material. I’m particularly taken with the version of “Comfortably Numb” she does with Ani Difranco.

I was once trying to explain the nature of Pink Floyd and the attraction they hold for certain males of junior high age (and up, come to think of it). I finally said that they had a song called “Comfortably Numb.” That seemed to do it. I always found it overwrought, but I love this version. Perhaps I’m just relating to Dar’s stated intention

The song is a commentary on who we are in the aftermath of the last election, no matter who you voted for. On one level it is about a dream which seems to have died in our society and the ultra convenient numbing I am witnessing these days.

Or perhaps I’m just down. The sun shone today, and on Friday, but other than that it’s been unrelentingly gray here for weeks. I had no idea before I moved to the Chicago area that it really ought to be called–in the winter, at least–the Gray City, not the Windy City. I have one of those fancy lightboxes, and I use it from time to time, but it’s just not the same. The other day I asked a woman here in the suburbs when she’d last seen the stars. “Last night!” she said. “I have glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling over my bed!” It’s kind of like that. Or, as my college friend Theo once said of File Maker Pro, then the reporting system for Campus Patrol: “it’s like a vibrator–it gets the job done, but it’s not the same as the real thing.” Well, perhaps it’s not quite like that. . . but you get the idea.