Asides

Ten Four Ten Four Pigpen, looks like we got ourselves a convoy.

Jenny’s looking for traveling songs. If somebody were skilled enough to splice that C. W. McCall intro into the early snare-drum loading-up scene from Aliens that gets every military detail so right and concludes with Hudson crowing, “We’re on an express elevator to Hell — goin’ down!” into the extended version of Ministry’s “Jesus Built My Hotrod” and from there into Iggy Pop’s “Repo Man” — man, those’d be some left-lane passing tunes.

I ain’t a trucker no more, and I’m old enough that I usually stay to the center on the freeway these days. But today, I’d bought Mac OS X Ten Four and put it in my bag, and I heard C. W. McCall on the radio on the drive home, and I was on the mountain road and:

Well, I had to put the hammer down and open up them cylinders and feel old Isaac Newton’s heavy abstract ancient hand push my guts backwards as I pegged it up to 100 through them turns.

Drive safe, Jenny, and don’t cut off no truckers, unless you’re a long-haired friend of Jesus in a chartreuse microbus. And in your collegetown destination, the index-finger wave from the steering wheel is a fine thing.

I’d been reading and writing a lot, trying to gather my thoughts for a longer post about labor, about class, about students, about economics, but Donna’s helpful comments have got me revising those thoughts some, so that longer post will likely wait a day or two. Still, it’s April, a good enough excuse for the poem that follows, after which it’s time to shine the boots and then to bed.

The Hand

Mary Ruefle

The teacher asks a question.
You know the answer, you suspect
you are the only one in the classroom
who knows the answer, because the person
in question is yourself, and on that
you are the greatest living authority,
but you don’t raise your hand.
You raise the top of your desk
and take out an apple.
You look out the window.
You don’t raise your hand and there is
some essential beauty in your fingers,
which aren’t even drumming, but lie
flat and peaceful.
The teacher repeats the question.
Outside the window, on an overhanging branch,
a robin is ruffling its feathers
and spring is in the air.

A troubling narrative in six stanzas, composed of sets of sentences taken from J. Madison Watson’s 1876 National Elementary Speller: A Critical Work on Pronunciation; Embracing a Strictly Graded Classification of the Primitive and the More Important Derivative Words of the English Language, for Oral Spelling; Exercises for Writing from Dictation; Prefixes Affixes, Etc., Etc.

Image from a woodcut by Andreas Rosenthal.

Note the affinity of those articulate sounds.
Observe his agility, or activity.
Range your artillery on that gentle acclivity, and summon the city to capitulate.

The respondent made a laconic speech in favor of his remonstrance.
After taking the narcotic, I was unconscious.
I saw a large quantity of halibut on the quarantine grounds.

Her shyness and the dryness of his remark verified the report.
Her betrayer delayed his return.
His boyish freaks destroyed my enjoyment.

Rescind that prolix law.
Omit the quadrille.
There will be an eclipse of the sun within a month.

The scene is imaginable, describable, and comparable.
The question is debatable, and the decision reversible.
The fire is singeing that valuable dress.

There is a monstrous lobster in the hogshead.
I saw some holly in the forest.
I often offer a volume to the scholar.

Following the lead of many, many others, I’ll offer one of my favorites, from my favorite poet, Mark Strand.

Eating Poetry

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

 
There’s another I’d offer, one for the girl at my school upon whom I harbor a quiet crush, but those are best kept private and close.

As someone who’s taken an abiding interest in the Tarot — American and otherwise — I decided I’d go and see a fortuneteller yesterday.

She was younger than I expected a fortuneteller might be, shockingly pretty, with a leonine mass of red curls and not much patience for my spineless academic equivocations. She passed me her Tarot deck — not a Rider-Waite, I saw — and, after I cut the cards and handed them back, set out a slightly altered Celtic Cross: three cards on the vertical axis, five cards on the horizontal axis, with an additional four-card vertical column on the right. Each card, in its position and relation to other cards, represents an aspect of the circumstances and fortunes — past, present, and future — of the querent.

My results?

Read more

The weather — with the winter’s wretched snow and winds and this past waterlogged weekend — has finally broken. It’s supposed to be up to 60 degrees and sunny tomorrow, which means that when I get home from campus, I’ll have the chance to take M.R.’s old wooden swivel chair out on the back deck and begin the pleasant tactile labor of refinishing.

M.R. was my dad’s dad. I don’t remember him at all: he died when I was a year old. His initials are my dad’s and my own, but he never used his full name, Montgomery Roger. (I like the tradition of those initials and the common middle name, and I hope I might extend that tradition — “Morgan,” I think, has a nice sound to it, plus that added gender-indeterminacy factor.) In fact, when M.R. was dating my grandmother, she finally told him that she wouldn’t marry any man she couldn’t refer to by name — so he told her to call him “Pete.” In family folklore, he’s still M.R.; when the house he built where my cousins Zach and Toby now live creaks and settles at night, Zach says it’s “Old M.R. walkin around.” I do see him as restless: as a child, he witnessed the murder of his own father in an alcohol-fueled fight over a woman, and from most accounts, he was a man with a lot of troubles on his mind. They’re troubles I’d hope to distance from my own personal history, but it’s a funny thing about family and history that you can’t distance yourself too much, since it’s that history that informs who you are, that grounds you. So I want to keep those things close, as well.

Hence the chair. It’s a heavy, beautifully dark and curved and simple old thing, from when he gave up farming and set up a tag and title business. Tomorrow I’ll take mineral spirits and fine 000 steel wool and clean it up, working (gently) down to the original finish. Then it’s softer superfine 0000 to apply a couple coats of the BriWax red-tinted combination of beeswax and carnauba, polishing with the grain in small circles, and finally using a clean scrap of flannel wrapped around index and middle fingers to buff it out to a deep gloss.

Like Collin (and many, many others), I’m a big fan of the mix tape and its modern reincarnation in the mix CD. I hadn’t ever thought to do a date-based version, though — the stuff I tried to put together always either consisted of songs I thought a certain person would like, or else relied upon commonalties of genre or mood or what-have-you. So, inspired by Collin, I’ll offer a (mostly) iTMS-available CD’s worth (i.e., a little less than eighty minutes) of what I’ve been listening to lately — although I’ll point out that I don’t read Pitchfork or other music publications, and so I suspect my musical tastes as expressed here are far less hip than those of others.

1. Feelin’ Bad Blues, Ry Cooder.
2. Rock ‘n’ Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution, Roxanne Morgenstern.
3. Save Me, Aimee Mann.
4. Close My Eyes, Shivaree.
5. Stem / Long Stem / Transmission 2, DJ Shadow.
6. Microphone Fiend, Fun Lovin’ Criminals.
7. Tiny Cities Made of Ashes, Modest Mouse.
8. If You Want Me to Stay, Sly and the Family Stone.
9. Dancing Barefoot, Patti Smith.
10. Slippery People (Live), Talking Heads.
11. The Set-Up, Boss Martians.
12. Remedy, The Black Crowes.
13. Mother One Track Mind, The Soundtrack of Our Lives.
14. Cherry Bomb, The Runaways.
15. Ain’t So Cool, Les Hell on Heels.
16. Tobacco Road, The Nashville Teens.
17. Radar Gun, The Bottle Rockets.
18. Rush, Talib Kweli.
19. Desperadoes Under the Eaves, Warren Zevon.

And, finally, I’ll note that I haven’t included my favorite song ever: Joan Jett’s cover of Iggy Pop and the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” Which, when played on my car stereo, often results in my mashing the accelerator to the floor and making devil horns out the moon roof.

Runny nose, can’t stop sneezing, congestion, sore throat, achiness: I’m miserable. And to top it off, little Zeugma’s under the weather, too; can’t keep anything down, as soon as she eats something, she’s off into a corner of the apartment to whoops it up.

And the cold medicine isn’t doing anything for me except making my head foggy. I’ve tried to work through some stuff from Shadi Bartsch on performativity and doublespeak, tried to work out some ways my CCCC presentation might be fleshed out into my dissertation’s Chapter 5, tried to apply some stuff from Thomas De Zengotita to weblogs and rhetoric and subjectivity-production, tried to think about how work I’ve done in the past with Barthes and Derrida might line up with some of the stuff from Derek’s CCCC presentation about weblogs, reading, and audience — nothing’s working. Dumb and thick-headed and my ears hurt when I try to take a breath through my nose. It’s the worst thing about being sick: this feeling of stupidity and helplessness manifests a physical analogue.

As much as I like to cook, it’s often difficult to find the motivation when you don’t have someone else for whom to do it. But nights like tonight remind me why it’s OK to eat alone: I improvised a spicy Thai-Cajun barbecue-curry with fresh catfish, Ancho chilies, watercress, fresh basil, black beans, and lots of garlic. And man it came out good.

It’s late Sunday night and I just got home. Rumor has it that the girls got into a little trouble while I was away, but they’re happy to see me, and continue to follow me from room to room, I suppose making sure that I don’t get out of their sight again. And from their interest in my bags, I’m getting the message that they’d like to help me unpack.

Unlike my many colleagues, I neglected to take any pictures at CCCC, but I’ve got a few more pages of notes on some of the presentations I went to that I’ll type up and share, and the social side was fine, as well. The best part of the whole trip, though, had nothing to do with the conference: last night, in Berkeley, I went out to dinner with some of my extended family on my mom’s side to this funky, raucous Italian restaurant with terrific food, and I’m looking at this really pretty kinda pixie-looking woman and I know it’s J who I haven’t seen since we were both fiction writers in the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh five years ago and 2600 miles away — but here, in an Italian restaurant in Berkeley? And so I finally ask, and she’s like, “Mike Edwards? Is that you? Ohmigod!” So yeah: small world. I was super happy to see her again and we traded email addresses and it was about the best way to end this year’s Cs that I can think of.