Fixed a grammatical error in yesterday's entry: from "if only the glass were half-full" to "if the glass only were half-full." The first sounds a little better to my ear, but as I used to drum into high school juniors when I was teaching ACT prep, DON'T TRUST YOUR EARS! They haven't a clue - the ears, I mean, but of course also the juniors.
I have been working on a villanelle for - what, two years, maybe - with the 'if only' motif: "you speak if only you are spoken to// and write if only I have written you." Ungrammatical too, alas. Ah, the rigors of iambic pentameter. Poems that can't get finished are signs that they SHOULDN'T be finished, probably.
Robert Bly has a new volume of international translations out. He has an interesting collaborative relationship when he doesn't know the language very well: he works with a translator and presumably that person helps with shades of meaning but then Bly works on the art of the poem in English. The review article gave a little snippet from Rilke translated by Bly and by someone else to showcase his poetics in the comparison.
One of my friends - let us call him A. - gave me a volume of Rilke a couple of years ago and I was so intrigued by the poems that I went off to find them in the original German. A revelation! - so far from word-for-word! Ridiculous analog: if I say "la porte est ouverte" and you translate "I feel a presence at the door" I think you are overlaying YOUR interpretation onto my words and I don't think it's a proper translation.
In short, issues like this are why I'm planning to study Polish: so I can read Symborska in the original. Despite all the post-capitalist gobbledygook I wrote in my fellowship application...
Got up; went to work; went to a meeting to confirm that I'll be teaching next spring; came home; read the papers; did laundry. Such is the quotidian routine of a Monday (also a Tuesday, a Thursday, and a Friday; I'm off on Wednesdays).
I started rereading "The Aspern Papers" by Henry James yesterday and I really am not loving it the way I have in the past. The narrator is so grasping and monomaniacal that I WANT him to fail in his quest. Perhaps I have more of a taste for the late novels now (which suggests that if I reread The Wings of the Dove I'll be really happy!).
No one seems to have written anything particularly new on "The Aspern Papers" in the last year or so; perhaps it's old ground abandoned by the seekers after post-colonialism and other post-whatevers. "Was James a (post)modernist?" What about space and place indeed? I am not moving very fast on my summer reading, and July Fourth is historically the day on which I despair that the summer is over and I've achieved nothing.
Sigh. If the glass onlyWERE half-full. But it just isn't.
So many things to do, so little time. We stayed up too late last night, but finally kicked our company out the door around 1 am. The evening started off with that roving, aimless quality that I can't stand, especially when I'm the driver and no one can decide what to do: we planned an evening of film noir at the local arthouse theatre, but SOMEONE got the dates wrong and the place was closed up (they have to rest up after the original Godzilla, apparently).
So we wrote off the $2 invested in the parking meter and drove to Uptown, circled awhile looking for a parking space; couldn't find one so parked in the garage; waited over an hour for the next showing of Fahrenheit 911; saw it in an SRO auditorium full of evangelical Bush-haters; and then went out for drinks and sushi.
As for the film - if you already knew that the current administration is incompetent and devious and manipulates the media to feed lies to the American people, then you won't learn anything from Moore's effort except some details that may have escaped your attention at the time. (Our friend J deserves the credit for this assessment; as usual he's right on target.)
You may also believe (as I do) that a documentary should be as objective as possible ("show, don't tell") in its portrayal of "truth" (whatever that is), rather than a mouthpiece for certain preconceived political opinions of its writer, director and producer. There were too many cheap shots for my taste; I want filmmakerss to respect, at least nominally, my ability to understand things in their true complexity.
Meanwhile I dreamed of something vaguely apocalyptic, but now I can't remember the details.
Related to the whole "what is truth" thing, I've been thinking about reportage versus evaluation, especially in the context of the notes I've been taking on my summer reading. Reporting the person's ideas is a different mental activity than critically evaluating them, but so often in research and writing, these two activities get mixed up and intermingled. Complicating this is the notion (and here I'm with the post-structuralists) that ANY reportage of an idea of another is different than the original idea - it is a partial truth; it uses different words and therefore is a slightly different idea; its context is different than the original.
The same reality problem comes in with reporting of direct experience. My other friend J (there are a lot of them) was telling me yesterday about her fieldwork, and how she got a different perspective on the place she's been for the last several weeks than a reporter would who would go there for a few hours to gather material for a feature story. You would automatically think that J's perspective, gained over several weeks, would be more nuanced, more complete, and therefore "better," but she was reflecting that her personal relationships with the people over time might influence what they would tell her (trying to please, etc.) and so her perspective might be biased in different ways.
This whole post-structuralist attitude is so different than the way I was trained intellectually in the 1980s. In my work on the Western Front, for example (which I'm trying to write up now), I automatically assumed that the spirit of the place was THERE, an intrinsic characteristic of the trenches and memorials that my specialized training would allow me to discover. I could get away with this pre-poststructuralist thinking at Salem State College, where my professor, ten years or so my senior, came also from the same intellectual tradition.
But here in the shifting sands of poststructuralism in Minnesota, my world view is outdated and suspect. I am not sure that it is possible to graft old data seen through an old lens onto new epistemologies - but I think I ought to try, at least. Worst case: the article will be rejected.
I'm reading Yi-Fu Tuan's book Space and Place, which hints at physiological bases of spatial organization. (He's looking for human universals too, so you know the book preceded all the Post-Whateverisms that natter on about contingent and situated and partial truths.)
The chapter I read yesterday on space and time got me thinking about why traveling is so disorienting. In the past week, we stayed two nights with my sister-in-law, one night with friends (Bunk beds! I got to sleep on top!) and two nights with my parents. We have stayed in all these places before, so we know where the light switches are and how to turn on the shower and where the power outlets are for all our little gizmos and such. And yet, I came back to Mpls having lost my toothbrush and toothpaste, never having found my shampoo when I needed it, and never having hand lotion on hand (so to speak). Unusual for me - I am quite good at micro-managing "stuff" to maintain the semblance of the Order of Home.
What I'm getting at is the body's spatial memory - how certain acts are so ingrained into how the body moves that a change of location completely dislocates all those acts. Thus the having-to-think about those acts takes mental effort that otherwise is expended on "higher level" activity and this is one reason (there are others) why traveling is so exhausting. Think of when you rearrange a couple of things in your kitchen and for several days you automatically reach for where they WERE rather than where they ARE. That's the old spatial memory.
Add to this the dislocation of being in our old house but without our old stuff in place. So I could automatically reach for light switches (the memories may be supplanted but they can be uncovered and used when circumstances require) and my feet exactly knew how to navigate all the stairs.
Freud, in thinking about trauma, suggested that all memories are THERE - but just buried and sometimes repressed. What's intriguing to me about these spatial body memories is that they are completely out of conscious mind. You walk into a room where you haven't lived for 2 years, and your hand automatically reaches for the light switch behind the door. You can't see it - and you are not even directing your mind to think about where it is - your hand just goes there.
I am not being very articulate about this. I have to think more about how it relates to experienced space - particularly in emotive content. (A concept that is thought to be completely bogus at the moment: a legacy of the Post-Whatevers. But nevermind - the tide will turn and spatial meaning will be all the rage again. That's where the new materialism is headed, surely.)
We're back in the Great Midwest...where the people are friendly, city officials return phone calls, and passers-by say hello in the street. We embarrassed my sister-in-law by chatting up store clerks and people in elevators - very un-New England! Out there such behavior doesn't mark you as a rube or sap, but a CRANK.
Today's word of the day (www.yourdictionary.com) is 'epistemology' - how curious to have my daily life intersect with the life of my mind.
So. We had 1 1/2 days in the State of Insanity - all family, then a night out with our friends in MA, and then 4 days of scrubbing, scraping and painting at our house. We barely made a dent: when we move back we should allow a month of solid work to get it ready for re-occupation.
Houses are so sad-looking when someone has vacated - all the dust in the corners; little bits of debris too pathetic to move or sweep up; dirt where the furniture was, scrapes on the walls; nail holes from pictures. We had thought of grabbing a mattress from the garage and camping out there, but the state of the place made it too depressing to think about.
On a good note - lots of my seeds germinated while I was away. I had them in pots, in plastic bags in the kitchen - a regular mini-greenhouse.
I may drive to work - I ache so much everywhere that biking or walking would be a hassle.
Such anxiety about tenants. Better not to think about it.
Ok, it's all set: cab comes at 5:30 AM tomorrow; flight airborne at 7:11 am; we arrive in Boston around 11 something.
Two days in CT (aka the State of Insanity) and then 3.5 days cleaning up our house. Call us, people: we have cell phones. We won't even make you paint or wallpaper!!!
I must go superintend B's packing. "Ten minutes max," he said. Liar.
I discovered yesterday that I had lost a HUGE section of geographical writing on Richard Symanski's rant-book, Geography Inside Out. This is because I am a technological moron.
See, the laptop loses stuff when the power goes out, even though you have saved your work and the laptop has gone into inactive mode. Inactively it runs through all the battery power and then it disassembles whatever documents are open, EVEN THOUGH THEY'VE BEEN SAVED.
I know this from painful experience - I lost my syllabus last winter, and B almost lost a paper that was due the same day he was working on it. But naturally when the power went out on Monday afternoon, I didn't even think about the laptop.
We are thinking of flying to Boston tomorrow to fix the upstairs bathroom in our house before it (it is to be hoped) gets rented. It's slightly more expensive to fly than drive but when you consider that it takes 4-6 days to drive there and back, plus the wear-and-tear on the old cars, it may well be worth the extra expenditure.
I'd prefer to wait until next week, when the current tenants will be out and there's a greater possibility of meeting prospective tenants, but the last-minute deals are what they are. So we'll see.
Cool and damp and threatening-looking today. I may splurge and drive to school.
Today I rode my bike to work (“new” (to me) bike purchased for $15 at a garage sale last weekend). I think that the last time I rode a bike was in 1974 or so. The truism is true – one doesn’t forget how to ride a bike – but I’m a little wobbly and unsure.
When did cycling get so snobby and high-tech? B. and I stopped in a bike shop in Uptown last Saturday to inquire about tire pumps: the cheapest one was $30 and the clerk was having a fantasy about his next “ride” and wasn’t really interested in being helpful. Clothes; accessories; high-level maintenance: it’s all too 20th century and precious. One used to get on a bike and push the pedals with the aim of getting from point A to point B. Now cycling has become like skiing used to be: it’s all about the gear.
Yeah, I used to walk to school, a few leagues away, uphill in both directions, major drifts. Please excuse my curmudgeonliness.
Whereas it takes me 24 minutes (oh, I’m nothing if not precise!) to walk to school, it takes about 10 minutes to bike. It would be shorter but for all the traffic signals. I am not comfortable enough yet to be a scofflaw and cruise through the reds, so I “waste” a lot of time at red lights. Ah – the wind in my (short) hair; the click of the rear wheel encountering an encumbrance; my sandal (what!? No bike shoes!?) hitting the derailleur: it’s all about speed. Or, at least, my low-speed version thereof. You would not think that the savings of 15 minutes (or a half-hour per day) would be so significant, but psychologically they are.
My sister, when we used to ski, would urge me on: “Speed is your friend.” Terminally cautious, having lost my nerve at an early age, I’d visualize head-on collisions with trees (think of that Kennedy) and slowplow my way down the slope. Even now, I sometimes dream at night of steep ski-slopes beyond my ability – and hope I can control the snowplow in my dreams. Speed, indeed! Who won – the tortoise or the hare?
Yesterday we drove through Tangletown (a part of Minneapolis where the grid goes all squirrely because of a slight hill) and saw an arbor with a "free" sign at the curb. We turned around to get it, and the people working in the yard came over to talk with us.
The man said we could have the arbor but only on condition of taking a tour of his garden. So we did and it was beautiful and all done by them - small shrubs predominated, with some perennials for color, and a real focus on foliage texture and color: very sophisticated.
We stayed for about a half hour and learned all about them and told them all about what we're up to. There's a trust in and respect for other people that is very appealing in Minnesota. I think such an encounter would be quite unlikely in New England, where people tend to be suspicious of others and immediately to fear the worst in any situation. That's the way I am, anyway - should I ascribe it to my upbringing or just my intrinsic personality?
People seem to care for their own gardens and lawns more than in similarly affluent neighborhoods elsewhere. Is this Midwestern frugality, or homage to their agricultural heritage, or just plain delight-of-summer?
Man, I am wildly categorizing. I'll stop now.
Brian's cousin and her husband and her mother and her daughter are in Tanzania - we've been getting the emails, sort of a travelogue.
Before I started this doctoral program in geography I couldn't have told you where Tanzania was. Now I know two women from there. One is researching kin networks in domestic help in Dar Es Salaam. She was a little embarrassed to say that she had two "girls" as domestic help while she was doing pre-field work there last summer. For anyone who fantasizes about THE life with domestic servants doing all the work, just dip into any part of the four-volume set of Virginia Woolf's diaries: More trouble than help.
Unlike all the other women in my family, I refuse to have domestic assistance of any sort. I would not like someone cleaning my house (it's a control thing) and also there's the dynamics of power and I don't like that either.
My house is as clean as it is depending on time and inclination, and although I can't escape defining myself in part on the state of my housekeeping (some gender notions die a slow and painful death) I am always trying to ignore those sexist notions.
It is approaching winter in Tanzania. Why did they all go there now, I wonder?
Our friend L. came over for dinner last night before he left today for 10 weeks in China. He brought his schleffera so that I can abuse it.
It's ironic that such a plant aficionado as I am should be so inept at even keeping houseplants alive, much less nurturing them so that they thrive. Mostly I forget to water them, that's the first thing. Then: repotting, fertilizing, etc - way beyond my short attention span.
Anyway, L said that in China there is no bread. In the south they eat rice, but not so much in the north. I want to know more about this - I thought pretty much every culture had some version of bread. Does that simply reflect my unremitting Anglo-Eurocentrism?
Cold and rainy today: I whiled away the afternoon reading a kiss-and-tell book about censorship in academe starring, in less than flattering roles, several members of my department. The author has been accused of being a nutcase, and this might well be true. But he is saying some rather thought-provoking things about the nature of "scientific" inquiry, especially in geography.
I think his argument reflects the insecurity of the social sciences; they want oh so badly to be as scientific as the natural sciences. But the human mind and heart and body don't reduce to "facts" and stats so easily, and sometimes I wonder if social scientists are trying to force a mode of inquiry that really doesn't suit the knowledge being sought.
On the other hand, one would be well advised to avoid the sweeping poetical generalizations that he uses as examplars of what's wrong with some of the Big Names in cultural geography. On the third hand (it's a spidery sort of argument!) I question his reliance on talking to people as the primary means of gathering data. As anecdote such information can't reliably be generalized, and as statistic can you ever get a large enough sample to answer questions like "What is New Orleans like?"?
I've strenuously avoided my research job all day. I'll have to get up early to work on it before the meeting. Maybe I'll spend the extra dough and drive to school tomorrow to work on it - or maybe B will drop me off. We still haven't trucked the bikes over to get air in the tires.
I finished reading Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August on Monday night, and last night I made some notes about the two major battles of August 1914 that occurred on the Eastern Front. Then I started John Keegan's book on the First World War, which I've read some parts of previously. (Let's hope Professors Matchak and Mauriello aren't reading this: they assigned the WHOLE book when I took History 796!)
Few subjects have received as much attention as the First World War. Obviously it was a cataclysm in human history, so scholars want to go back and make sense of it through hindsight. What's interesting to me, though, just from reading these two books (which were authored more than 35 years apart) is that the events are so complex and the motivations so ambiguous, that there is a whole range of answers to the "why" questions.
Tuchman is interested in the military tactics and how the personalities and the personality interactions between various commanders shaped those tactics. Keegan thus far (I've only read 50 pp) is interested in broader generalizations.
I'm sure I'll have more on this in the days to come. I am hoping that the next time I'm in Poland, I'll be able to visit some of the Eastern Front and see what's what. If there is anything left after all that's happened since. One doesn't read about memorials on the EF the way they've been so prominent on the WF. Why, I wonder?
Last night B tried to set up the wireless network. He was never able to get it working at our prior apartment, but his hair cutter (!) gave him some tips, so he decided to try again.
When/if it works, it will enable me to run IE and Outlook on the laptop, and print from there too, so we won't have to be sneaker-netting all the time and have a bazillion copies of every document all over every storage device.
It worked, sorta, but was really slow and the signal kept dropping AND only one computer could be on the Internet at a time. No good, so he called tech support this morning and they ran him through all sorts of arcane settings, and it worked well.
Until he got off the phone - same thing: only one computer can be on at a time, and then you have to reboot them to reset. So it's back to tech support.
Bottom line: I won't be moving my internet and email files off the desktop anytime soon. In the meantime, though, I should be archiving my spring semester files and getting rid of drafts and duplicates.
Man. I hate reading other people's techy blog entries. I apologize for this one.
More like nightmares, of course. B told me that he had a dream that he was running from Bush administration officials, in winter, on a snowmobile that then turned into a dog.
Quite a few months ago, I dreamed that I was striding with Dubya through the front yard of the house in which I grew up, and the soil was all a sickly pink (!) and pockmarked and there wasn't a living thing growing in it and he kept telling me that it wasn't polluted at all, and I wanted to believe him because he was so charismatic but I couldn't - it was obvious that the soil was so completely poisoned.
How many Americans have Dubya starring in their nightmares??
Today is my mom's birthday. She is 82. Happy Birthday, Mom! (No, she doesn't use the Internet, although it may have piqued her curiosity when B helped her organize and schedule her Florida trip online at Christmastime.)
Just before I woke up, I dreamed that my boss at the college-test-prep-company was running a comedy night, and I'd signed up for a stand-up spot. I went to tell her I was dropping out of the line-up, but she wouldn't let me, so I had to do my three minutes onstage. (For those of you who don't know me, I am NOT funny. Sarcastic, yes. Funny, no.)
Well, the crowd liked me, they really did. So much so that I was one of a handful of comedians called back to do an encore. And all of it - even the opener - was improv, not a single prepared joke or riff.
Sometimes the funniest things are those that are unintentional. Take the movie "The Day after Tomorrow" - please. It's the campiest thing ever - and I don't really think they were going for camp. It's not just that it's bad science, or no science at all; it's not just that the characters are stock figures interacting in stock ways (see http://i-girl.diaryland.com/040602_76.html for a hilarious analysis); it's that the complete rejection of the logic of time-space-causality as organizing concepts of reality sends it right over into camp. Need to walk from Philadelphia to Manhattan in a howling blizzard through 25-foot drifts? Yeah, that should take a day or two. Or turn on the grill in an abandoned Burger King? Even though all the other utilities on the planet are frozen solid, the BK gas line still works fine.
I saw the movie with some climatologists who were all prepped to critique the science. How disappointing for them: there was no science to critique!
I finished reading the Gellhorn bio last night. Yesterday I googled its author, Caroline Moorehead, and what a lot of vicious comments about Gellhorn! People are really so mean-spirited.
Her personal life was colorful, and there's lots to disparage, for those who are so virtuous that THEY haven't made mistakes or treated others badly. Nevertheless, the strength of the bio, I think, is in showing her abiding commitment to writing about political injustice as it played out in the effects of wars on civilians and her constant outrage at the wrongs of the world. How depressing to think that writing about such things, bringing them to the consciousness of decent people, will make a difference, and then to find out, again and again, that it doesn't.
I've marked perhaps a dozen passages in which Moorehead writes about the intersection of fact and fiction and the problems with journalistic objectivity. I'm a post-structuralist (at least on this ground) so I don't believe that true objectivity is possible: all "truth" is partial and situated. I have never thought before of bringing in the post-structuralists for this - but it's possible. Donna Haraway would be the best, I think.
Speaking of objectivity, I don't think I've mentioned that I have a new part-time job: I'm the Research Assistant for my department's 10-year strategic plan. The problem with plans of this sort (and planning generally) is the tension between the ideas of the full group affected and the ideas of the "experts" writing the plan. In city planning, for example, the conventional wisdom is that public participation is critical; the plan should be a reflection of the ideas of the masses. But typically, "the masses" have ideas for the future that the planners consider impractical or unsound and those ideas get sort of discounted in the writing process. I hope that we will give credence to the ideas we collect from our "masses" in this plan, but I've already noticed that committee members preface questionable data with statements like "Well, I'm sure everyone would agree that..." So it remains to be see how "objective" this plan will be and how well it will reflect the collective esprits of the department.
Yesterday was perhaps the best day I've had yet since moving to MN, because.....(drum roll)....we went to the ARBORETUM!!!
It was sunny and sometimes warm and, because it's rained more or less every day for the last month, lush and green. We saw all the demonstration gardens and took the tram ride along the drive. Next time I'll stroll through the park itself and look more at the trees.
It's a pity that it's so far from Mpls; it takes at least 40 minutes to get there, so you can't be popping over for a half-hour every week. But that distance protects it, I suppose; it's not overrun with humans.
The terrain is different out there in Chanhassen, too. Lots of relief, gently rolling hills. That's great for arboretum design: it creates lots of microclimates as well as lots of design opportunities. Being there, I wondered why I have "given up" landscape architecture. Partly budgets, probably: it's frustrating to design on a shoestring when you know how much better the site could be if you could only afford MORE. And then the impoverishment of design for public spaces - by the time you consider traffic patterns and microclimates and the limitations of your public works maintenance crew, the plant palette is limited, indeed. I did some cool stuff for the school department, but public schools are all but impossible to do anything wonderful for because of the intensive use and severe lack of maintenance.
This just sounds so defeatist. Landscape architects should THRIVE on the challenges of tough sites and tougher clientele, right? But maybe, instead of looking at the supply side (landscape architects) we should be looking at the demand side and asking why Americans don't have better public spaces. Part of it is lack of design understanding; part of it is budgets that are devoted to other priorities (like imperialism masquerading as saving the world for democracy).
I'm ranting now, so I'll stop. If you live in the Twin Cities, go to the Arboretum.
What's that bright yellow thing in the sky? Sun, you say? What's a sun?
Yeah, it's finally sunny again, and on my day off no less. I am feeling a little guilty for not going into the office since I just had Monday off, but the joy of sitting here relaxing is overbalancing the guilt.
We don't yet have a routine for these summer days, which is unsettling. I work 4-5 hours a day at school, then the rest of the time is free-form. Today I'll probably get started on painting the kitchen; B is getting somewhat antsy about that. I've adapted to the less-than-optimal conditions (as we feared I would): the big cardboard boxes of kitchen things and even the two-tone, two-Bandaid brown colors aren't annoying me as they did at first.
Still, it seems a waste of sunshine to spend the day indoors on a ladder. Maybe the arboretum? Then painting, if I promise? Carpe diem, you know? And the arboretum isn't just a joyride; it's a research trip to learn about native plant communities in order to plan for and plant an ecologically sustainable backyard. Ah, the pleasures of rationalization....