sinuses & psalms

Before saying anything else, I'd like to celebrate something very special in the life of this (neglected) blog: FIRST POST EVER WRITTEN OUTDOORS!! Namely, on my back porch. With my laptop plugged into an extension cord snaking out the back door, from which I had to unplug the oven and refrigerator in order to use. Luckily, the whole rotting food thing is good motivation for finishing quickly and taking a walk....

I drove home-home this past weekend (i.e. to my parents' house) for the first time since December. Despite having a horrible sinus infection that gave me swollen glands and partygirl voice, it was a really really good trip: I got to see so many home friends, and go to one of my best friends' sister's wedding (vineyard + sparklers + pig roast!!). It was also very good for reminding me that Iowa is so beautiful in late spring, and for making me think hard about home and homecoming and all of that for the first time in a long while.

I've been interested for a very long time in the connection between people and place; most specifically, in how landscape affects and shapes American consciousness.

long time traveling

Did I think it would abide as it was forever
all that time ago the turned earth in the old garden
where I stood in spring remembering spring in another place
that had ceased to exist and the dug roots kept giving up
their black tokens their coins and bone buttons and shoe nails
made by hands and bits of plates as the thin clouds
of that season slipped past gray branches on which the early
white petals were catching their light and I thought I knew
something of age then my own age which had conveyed me
to there and the ages of the trees and the walls and houses
from before my coming and the age of the new seeds as I
set each one in the ground to begin to remember
what to become and the order in which to return
and even the other age into which I was passing
all the time while I was thinking of something different
"The Furrow," W. S. Merwin (1997)

I've been carrying around this poem in my brain-pocket (side note: a quick Googling reveals that actual brain pockets exist!!) since April 23rd, when it was featured as Knopf's "Poem-A-Day" during National Poetry Month. Spring has always been my most restless and poignant season, and my most uncomfortable-feeling season as a result. If summer is a humid half-sleep, fall a tender sooty smudge, and winter a breath so clear it burns, then spring is a gray foal on a gray day lurching to its feet, hooves ready to leap up past the pasture and into the sky.

This year spring feels especially this way, mostly I think because I've spent 13/16 days of May traveling: the first 11 days in Europe (visiting wonderful expat college friends in the UK, Berlin, and Poland), and the past 2 days in my home state of eye-oh-dubyuh-ay for my sister's college graduation.

metaphorically speaking...

*note: part of this post was written last night before I accidentally fell asleep, so plz ignore any weird time jumping

An excellent jam-packed weekend is currently coming to a close as I sit in bed awkwardly typing this, a mug of tea precariously balanced against my solar plexus and my elbow on a stack of books + catalogues. My only wish is that it were warm enough to have the window open. But still! I do believe that Spring (when it's not making me sneeze/puffing up my eyes very attractively--due to, as I found out this evening, city landscapers' overuse of highly-allergenic trees) is waking me up. AND this coming week is bringing all sorts of bestie friends to me from all over the world! Have been feeling really alive lately, overall.

Have also been on a Nabokov kick--was reading his short stories for awhile and am now halfway through Speak, Memory (his autobiography). I'd been meaning to read the latter for a really long time, having had it recommended to me by multiple teachers and friends and random acquaintances, and now I understand why: it's fucking brilliant (for a variety of reasons I won't go into now, bc really, does the internet need another amateur book review?).

So yes, I'm loving Speak, Memory because it's a universal classic. But there is also something about Nabokov's writing that has always personally clicked with me; mostly, I think it is his lyricism and use of image, through which he somehow manages to dilate the reader's mind in a very precise way--each of his best metaphors I think can be seen as very tiny, carefully-chosen apertures that, when peered through by the reader, open (paradoxically) onto a breathtakingly-wide field of view.

spring fever

Have had traveling on the brain lately. It's hard to sit at my desk all week staring out the windows at the bright cloudless city. ESPECIALLY after I dragged my family to see the William Eggleston show at the Art Institute when they visited last weekend. Who wants to drive into the golden hazy 70s Clint Eastwood sunset wearing cowboy boots and a white tshirt? This kid.


In an effort at self-knowledge, I'm going to trace my fantasy road trip fixation to two root causes:
1) The incredibly annoying brouhaha surrounding the signing of the health care bill. (Sidenote: Robert Reich is not annoying.) WHYYYY are people so eager to complain about a complex piece of legislation whose actual nature they are willfully ignorant of?? I mean, I've been a terrible member of this democracy for the past few months and know next to nothing about what's going on, but at least I'm not an old codger at the age of 23 updating my Facebook status every hour with a new complaint about "higher taxes" that's obviously straight-up copy-and-pasted from the Heritage Foundation twitter feed.* Ah, America. How can it be that I love you in such an embarrassingly bone-deep way and yet am extremely irritated by you on a daily basis. Why can't you just be an epic Walt Whitman poem that involves me picking heritage tomatoes off the vine barefoot and backfloating lazily down the Shenandoah???
2) I've been way too materialistic lately and as a result have been very dumb about my spending. So it would be nice to get in a car with hardly any possessions and just drive away.

*does this actually exist? if so, kill me now, and then please send me the link

Vandercookin

In order to not become crazy, I like to fill winter up with things to do. Last year I took a ballet class at an amazing Gothic-church-turned-dance-studio and a course on the history of neurology and psychiatry (how does a professor make even lobotomies boring?? it's possible). This year I just finished taking a letterpress class at the Center for Book & Paper Arts, during which I learned how to set metal & wood type, mix ink, operate one of these babies, and cut paper with a giant guillotine(!!). Luckily it was so fun that I didn't even mind waking up multiple Saturdays at 8 or ingesting mass quantities of lead. There is something so zen about working on art early in the morning: in this case, the creaky floorboards and the sharp smell of metal and mineral spirits and the clatter of turning presses mixing with the clattering el down the block. You can just zone out and drink your tea and MAKE STUFF for hours on end (that is, once you've learned enough through trial and error to stop constantly fucking up).

I'm not very good at painting or drawing or sculpture, so thank G-d that I live in the 21st century and can therefore HARNESS TECHNOLOGY to create art. And by technology, I mean pre-World War II technology, i.e. bulky darkroom equipment, toxic chemicals, and 1700-pound presses chockfull of ball-bearings and gears and bolts--the kind of stuff not featured on gizmodo or hawked by Steve Jobs. For me, at least, there's a lot to be said for the physicality of photography and printmaking, and for the ability of the average person to understand the technology behind them. And there's something very, very beautiful about using basic physics and mechanics--a box with a tiny hole cut in it, containing a silver-coated plate--to create something as completely non-utilitarian as art.

I could go on for days and days about my embarrassing mystical feelings about loud clunking things, or things that make your hands dirty, or microscopes, or petri dishes full of agar, but let us save a little something for future posts, shall we? Instead, here are some fun publicity photos I recently took of my roommate Alisa as her performance alter-ego, Plucky Rosenthal. Some of them are blurry, but you know what? Making them was FUN. And perfection is sooooo annoyingly 21st century.





Technology sidenote: my ipod earbuds are breaking for the zillionth time (gahhh Steve Jobs x2). Does anyone have suggestions for a relatively inexpensive pair of quality headphones (preferably over-the-ear)? I have to listen to this song on repeat until the end of time...

Alma y Sueños

Last year, for various reasons (mostly because I lived in a neighborhood with a lot of Dominicans, and because I was completely useless helping even 1st graders with their bilingual homework at the tutoring center), I decided that I wanted to learn Spanish. So--obviously--I went to the public library, and instead of checking out something like Spanish for Dummies, I brought home a copy of Pablo Neruda's Cien Sonetos de amor.

Neruda is known for his plain/airy language, so I figured reading him would be a good way to pick up some basic vocabulary using the facing-page translations (Spanish on the left, English on the right). Plus, Spanish love poems are hot, right? (Especially when whispered into the ear of Twilight's Robert Pattinson playing young Salvador Dali!!)

Anyway, as with other library books, I began reading it on the train each day during my 30-minute commute. And almost immediately, it became my favorite commuting book ever: because jammed into a dingy car packed tight with half-asleep strangers, occupying my crumb-laden, repulsively-upholstered seat, all I had to do was begin to read and I'd be immersed in this crazy, luxuriant passion, completely unbeknownst to anyone else on the train. "Kiss by kiss I travel your little infinity,/your borders, your rivers, your tiny villages"--oh la la if only that lady with the bad perm knew what I was reading, hoooo boy! Or else I'd imagine leaning over slightly toward the bearded dude next to me, whispering
Perhaps you did not know
that before I loved you I forgot your kisses
my heart was left remembering your mouth
and I went through the streets like one who is wounded
until I understood that I had found,
love, my territory of kisses and volcanoes.
Yeah, he'd probably stop looking up the stats from last night's Red Sox game on his iPhone for that one.

So while I admit that I learned remarkably little Spanish from this venture (though there's no way I'll ever forget two of Neruda's favorite nouns, "alma" and "sueños"--both obviously useful when making small talk at the bodega), it was still way more than well worth it.

And if you'd like--because it is Valentine's Day, after all--I am now offering up a DIY version of the experience that you can recreate in the comfort of your own home (or train car, should you be lucky enough to have a smartphone)! First, look up (or print off) this poem--one of Neruda's best-known, and one of my favorites. Next, should you not currently be in the act of commuting, you can then play this video and pretend that you're on the Orange Line, somewhere between Green Street and State Street, and it's February, and gray, but inside the heart of Neruda it's a tropical hothouse that's bursting with the beauty of the body and el lenguaje español....