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August 17, 2010 in My life, Places to go, Things to do, Thinking | 1 comment

New potatoes. Anyas. From my garden.

Although the project that has to get done is my thesis (which I’m slowly but surely plugging at…the dissertation calculator I’m using gives me 134 days, as of today, to finish), I’m as usual caught up in other things: writing a new book and thinking about making things out of cloth again. And actually making some things. I doubt I could ever do only one thing at a time, but I have a routine going that helps me really enjoy my work as I do it. I don’t use the internet before I’ve written at least 1000 thesis words (and, while I’m writing those, I’m also writing poem-words and doing translations). Usually it takes me from 7:45 until about 11 a.m. to do this. Then I finish whatever translation I’m doing and check it with the help of online translation stuff, have a cup of tea, and–lately–sew something.

The sewing is not much: some buttons on a cardigan, or darning holes in a sweater, or embroidering a label for adding to something I already own. But it’s nice to do. And it makes me feel almost like I have new clothes, which is nice, since I have no money right now and won’t for a while (end of grad-school stipend). I’ve been thinking a lot about the question of to buy or not to buy, but that’s for another post. I’m so tired now. Anyway, the newness of small things is a good newness.

The other news is the little list (disjointed and unbroken at the moment, but it will be fixed) on the sidebar of books I’ve read. I wanted to keep track of books I read for fun–not related to my thesis. So those are there. Feast your eyes. For the record, I’m just about to finish The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, and yes, I like it (I have a real fondness for spy-type thrillers that are heavy on the plotting/paperwork and light on the actual suspense/violence) and no, I haven’t read the other two. Maybe on the airplane?

Oh right, I suppose that’s another piece of news, at least for you Minneapolitans–I’ll be in 612 from the 21st til September 1st. So look me up.

why carelessness bothers me

August 12, 2010 in Theory, Thinking | 7 comments

When I see a mistake, like a French word misspelled, or the history of an object botched, on a design blog it gets on my nerves. And today I figured out why.

I know not everyone can speak several languages, has spent time learning about the cultures they are attracted to (much less lived in those places), and has the time or attention I have. But the kind of mistakes I’m talking about (no `in très, for example) matter to me because they reveal the lack of deep engagement with the material that I value, and they reveal the use of the language (or other cultural reference) for what it is: a sell. And that cheapens something I hold dear, and it threatens that thing, because it says that a superficial or merely referential interest in something is adequate. That’s like going to a dinner party and knowing what artisanal cheese is like, and then having your host serve Cheez-Wiz on crackers, with little garnishes that make it look like something it’s not.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the selling side of things. I didn’t stop selling things for any high-falutin’ reason; I stopped because I was going to the UK. But now, outside that economy for a few years, I really reflect on that choice. I have a hard time being dishonest, and I see some of the stuff that goes on in terms of selling as dishonest, or sometimes just careless (which is not much better). I didn’t want, and still don’t want, to sell anything, put anything out–and that includes my writing and my being in the world–that I can’t stand behind and say, yes, that’s me, I thought that through and decided it was something real and good I want to give you.

But the way our system works demands the new, over and over. And part of that will almost always be the commodification of images, ideas, cultural productions, and preconceptions. Which gives me pause. Because I’m not comfortable being told something is “Moroccan” just because it’s got some arabesque tracery on it. And I’m equally uncomfortable with the kind of visual feast that removes the question of why a dinner party in a former colony might feature dishes inherited from its colonisers. Yeah, I love the beautiful pictures. I do. And I sometimes envy the houses and lives I see online. But I want to think that what I engage with I engage with deeply–which might mean I’m not always jumping onto the next new thing, but also means I understand to some extent the histories and functions of what I love.

And it bothers me to see these kinds of errors in places where people go for what is essentially an education, because they show value put on a sell over a deep engagement with material (which is never as glamorous in the short term, nor as profitable).

I’m apprehensive to push publish, but I’m doing it anyway.

rummaging

August 10, 2010 in Beautiful object, Caught my interest, I found it, Link, My life, Places to go, Things to do, Thinking, Video | 1 comment

On a table in the rommelmarkt (weekly flea market) in Ghent. I took it for the box of rocks with labels and eyeglasses, but I like the black sheep, the texture of the knives all together, and the handles intruding from the right. Oh, and you can see me if you look; I’m wearing red.

A couple of recent finds added to the sidebar. And today I’ve been listening to Flanders & Swann, a cabaret duo from the 50s. Very funny, sometimes very dated, and VERY English. You can find some here.

recently lighter

August 9, 2010 in I found it, My life, People to see, Places to go, Things to do, Thinking | 4 comments

Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule. (Buddha)

Spent time in Ghent at the end of last month with Zach and Jonathan. So much fun. So much fun. These guys are two of my favorites and it was lovely to see how well they got along. (We’ll get another trip in August when I go home for my brother’s wedding–all three of us will go up to the North Shore of Lake Superior.) The bright green maple is outside a gallery; the beds are in one of the city museums, this one in an old convent. The exhibit was about the summer camps that socialist parties set up for children, where they would learn things like hygiene (brushing teeth), manners, letter-writing, how to play games, etc.

It was the city-wide Gentse Feesten (Ghent Festival) while we were there–lots of music, salsa dancing, busking (saw a couple of kids playing the Amélie soundtrack on a clarinet and an accordion), walking around, people, food food food, beer, fireworks. And it was sunny and hot the whole time. Great.

two-headed fox

August 1, 2010 in Art, Beautiful object, Caught my interest, I found it, My life, Places to go, Thanksgiving, Theory, Thinking

I’m trying an experiment with how I use the internet–and my computer more generally–that has to do with directing some of the energy (not necessarily the time) that I otherwise spend on it and the (sometimes negative) affect it brings into actions other than either repression of that affect or redispersal of it. I generally try to avoid just plain aggression (or moves that couldbe perceived that way, although obviously I’m not 100% successful) and passive-aggression, especially online where it’s rife and compounded by the nuances of communicating exclusively in text, but that means sometimes that energy/affect gets directed inwards and it keeps me from working or feeling good. So far, so useful and invigorating.

I think being done with the conference also has to do with the uptick in energy I have–I just feel like I have so much more headspace now. Room to have ideas. Not that this has been particularly helpful in terms of Finishing My Thesis, but I’ve been writing a lot. And the conference also helped me remember that I’m a writer first–and that part of my thesis is questioning the norms of the academy that to some extent devalue other ways of knowing and of transmitting knowledge, arranging them hierarchically.

When we were driving through Normandy, we came across this yard full of the inhabitants’ art. Arrangements of old toys, dishes, wine bottles, shells, bottle-tops, tiny furniture. It was otherworldly or other-time-ly. The image of this two-headed fox/cat thing has stuck with me (there’s a 2-second video of it in motion on flickr if you click the photo) and what it leads me back to is the unifying weirdness of everything I saw there (and unifying normality, which was part of the weird). My thesis is the two-headed fox/cat, but it’s only one (small) part of all I do, want to do, am, and want to be. Ah. Is that called perspective?

snippings

July 28, 2010 in I found it, My life, Theory, Thinking | 2 comments

The coast at Cap Gris-Nez, where we spent a day last week: fog, mist, lighthouse, bright ocean, hearing French, yellow abutting blue.

Blake: Exuberance is beauty.

June Jordan: “What Walt Whitman envisioned we, the people and the poets of the New World, embody…. New World does not mean New England. New World means non-European; it means new, it means big, it means heterogenous, it means unknown, it means free, it means an end to feudalism, caste, privilege…. New World means, again, to quote Walt Whitman, ‘By God! I will accept nothing which others cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.’”

Derek Walcott: “I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer”

Muriel Rukeyser: “A poem does invite, it does require. What does it invite? A poem invites you to feel. More than that: it invites you to respond. And better than that: a poem invites a total response.”

Got anything for me?

love & mercy

July 27, 2010 in Link, My life, People to see, Song, Thinking | 2 comments

How could I possibly say it better? This song is the red brick building you lived in off Main Street in downtown Eau Claire and the first time I walked into your room how you hadn’t even cleaned it because we’d known one another since we were 15 and 17 and so what did it matter. And the flour on your apron and your shoes. You’d just come from your job at Sammy’s Pizza. And the movie theater across the street and every movie theater in memory for us, somehow in my memory it is either July or January all the time, we are struggling through snowdrifts or running into waist-high water in Lake Nokomis, singing Beach Boys songs and Badly Drawn Boy and Feist and The Arcade Fire, going somewhere fast. I conflate albums. I conflate years. I forget when it was that I saw you walking through a hallway that now does not exist and the light from the windows almost whited you out.

I listen to this song like it is summer and church and ice-skating and high school and first times traveling anywhere all in one. This one, too. Thank you for that.

“How deeply and passionately most of us live within ourselves. Our attachments are ferocious. Our loves overwhelm us, define us, obliterate the boundaries between ourselves and others.”

-Paul Auster, True Tales of American Life, xvii

first things first

July 23, 2010 in I found it, My life, No.22, Thinking

…it’s summertime.

satisfaction

July 10, 2010 in Link, My life, No.22, Thinking | 3 comments

Sweet-peas blooming, very dark purple and blue. Blue, pink, red-and-white, red, and white anemones. Poppies and ‘wildflower mix’ springing up all around my fluorescent-pink roses. Tomatoes growing and onions growing and rhubarb growing (magically resurrecting rhubarb!) and beets growing and potatoes growing and brussels sprouts growing (to the chagrin of the Belgian, who thinks they’re disgusting) and cauliflower growing. In pots, seedling bok choi and radishes and onions and poppies (seeds collected from Ypres, Ghent, and Nottingham). And geraniums and basil and cilantro (which they call, all of it, not just the seeds, coriander, here). That is satisfying. And so are the cleaned beds where I have planted lilies-of-the-valley, more hydrangeas (two at the front of the house are flowering, dark electric blue and purple and bright pink), and more sweet-peas. The azalea someone left is valiantly trying to stay alive.

Above us while we ate dinner out in the yard tonight there were a dozen swallows peeping and shrilling. Une hirondelle fait pas un printemps–one swallow doesn’t make a summer. But the growing vegetables and the flowers I’ve planted, and the feeling of settling in (this is the first place I will stay for longer than a year since 2004) and the many warm and sunny days–that feels like summer.

I made a cherry cake with dark chocolate chips for an event recently.

This is happening next Thursday-Sunday. I’m proud, excited, anticipatory, a little nervous!

Feeling very lucky that one of my best friends has taken a month to come and stay with me–talking about future options and ideas, and beginning to shape a plan. Ok, I don’t know what will happen, but I have some things to think about and work towards. First on the list is finishing the PhD, which is torturous right now. Anyone up for helping? (ha!)

sky/angels

July 8, 2010 in My life, Thanksgiving, Thinking

The verb is singing. Sometimes it has been love and sometimes it has been persist. Today the singing stretches through almost everything. Occasionally threaded thin, but there. When I see the bright faces of the buildings in Gent. At the first emergence of train into London air fogged and flecked with dark. The trace of northern Paris from an exiting tunnel. Singing is a single thin filament or an orchestra. A textile made of metal, stronger than it looks.

Thanks for your words.

before I change my mind/ or you drop the line/ at the end of the night

July 7, 2010 in My life, Thinking | 6 comments

I am having a hard time right now. I don’t know what I am going to be doing or how I will be paying my rent. I don’t have a ‘normal’ relationship (because we live in two countries) where you can just go out together whenever you want, you know each other’s friends, you’re part of the same group. I miss many of my friends with whom I’m no longer as close as I was. I’m angry at someone who mistreated me for a long time and confused about what ‘love’ means if treatment like that is possible and baffled at how I could have let it go on for so long and scared that I won’t feel ‘normal’ again. I miss being around people who love art and writing and who are committed to their art and can talk about it in the way I am used to. I feel like I’m losing a friend and I don’t really know why as she won’t tell me what’s going on. I’m stressed about the conference that I’ve organised and although people are helping, a number of volunteers have kind of dropped out and I don’t want to bother people. It can be very lonely sometimes (despite my fierce enjoyment of being alone, sometimes I don’t want to). It has been an extremely difficult four years and I’m tired and there is not really any reprieve in sight.

I do appreciate that I’ve had loving and caring friends and my amazing family around me the whole time. And I have a beautiful place, space and time to make things, and a bit of professional success. I do know these things. and I’m grateful for them But the other stuff came to the top and I wanted to get it out.

(And in the ten minutes it took me to write this I got an email from a friend inviting me for a coffee, so ok, that helps, too.)

youth’s a stuff

July 1, 2010 in My life, People to see, Poem, Thinking | 5 comments

What is love? ’tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;

What’s to come is still unsure:

In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty!

Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

(William Shakespeare)

* * *

When we were twenty-one and twenty-two, you gave me this poem, and other things (nights in the architecture studios; bike rides through thick snowfall; a taste for silly songs and country music; orange-blossom muffins left on my bike rack while I was in class; snuck-in lectures on geography and architecture; a mirror you made yourself; the definition of ‘whimsical’ after a walk across the Washington Avenue Bridge; the stars on very cold nights on the northern plains). And we were sure we would always be walking through Minneapolis, maybe even together, or riding our bikes somewhere in the city, watching the sun set from my balcony just off Fourth Street. I was writing poems about forsythia (blooming in May outside the architecture building). You were building models and dreaming about skating over frozen lakes. Neither of us knew what a miracle it was to meet: once at a Model United Nations party (I was just a friend of a member), and I had a boyfriend; then, nine months (and a breakup) later, in the Williamson Hall bookshop. It no longer exists (instead, undergraduates navigate the shiny, Barnes-and-Noble-like new bookshop in Coffman Union, from which the couches I slept on between classes have also disappeared). And no one has tied notes to my handlebars or so deftly tracked me since.

get rid

June 21, 2010 in My life, Thinking | 4 comments

This was in France, when I really could fit all my clothes on one (very tightly packed) clothesrail. Several heavy suitcases from the US later and I’ve got a little dresser and a closet full of clothes. And I love them. I don’t buy a lot of clothes, actually. And most of the stuff I do buy is secondhand. But what I buy I love and it hangs around for a long time. And though I wear mostly the same things over and over (I have three copies of one smock which is really my ‘uniform’!) I like having things around for special and also because they remind me of where they came from, who I was when I bought them. More attached (emotionally) to clothes than books.

My love for my clothes is like my love for my house. They represent security, settledness. They can also sometimes feel like the heaviest burden, on those days when I would like to pack one bag and leave where I am (forever) to have adventures. I struggle to get rid of them. I don’t want to lose the physical mnemonic they provide. But I also feel weighed down by them, and sometimes guilty or uncomfortable because I have so many (although I suppose I should clarify that ’so many’ is about 4 pairs of trousers, probably 20 shirts, 8 blouses, 5 smocks, a handful of dresses, and a bunch of skirts, plus petticoats, socks, tights, etc.; I’m no Imelda Marcos!).

So I am going to try to get rid of them–many of them, ones I don’t wear a ton. I think I will post pictures here and at flickr, and if you love something and comment on it, I’ll send it to you for the postage price instead of bringing it to a charity shop. Part of what makes it hard to give things away is that I really take care of my clothes and love them, and I have a ahrd time thinking of them belonging to people for whom they might be just another disposable object!

for the record

June 9, 2010 in My life, Thinking, making | 2 comments

This is not a marketing tool.

My life is my life is my life. I will try not to cheapen it by living it somehow that doesn’t feel like it fits the highest ideals I have. I will try to listen to you when you talk and give you my full attention. I will try to be gentle and remember that everyone has hard battles to fight. I am here for me but it’s nice to have you here, too. I don’t want to sell you anything, although sometimes I sell things. There is no ‘lifestyle’ available for purchase.

If you aren’t happy in your life you can change it. If you want something, you can work for it. There is actually not much stopping you in most situations. Just takes courage and/or crazy. Go valiantly toward the things you actually want. Don’t settle. Trust me, Reader, I wouldn’t sell you a line.

I love these fields in this very humid mist.

June 7, 2010 in I found it, My life, Places to go, Theory, Things to do, Thinking | 3 comments

“I do not write from my lost life alone, any more than I dictate every term by which I do write.” -C.D. Wright, in Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil.

Good to remember no choice is set in stone (thanks, K.). And for all the fluster I feel about the end of the PhD approaching it’s good to know I do love Belgium, and it is pleasant to rediscover the privacy of being somewhere where I have to concentrate to understand and can therefore allow the language to flow around me without interrupting my thoughts or asking for my attention.

“Uncommitted people do not hold my interest, period.” Same source.

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