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Somewhere along the line, I started blogging over at blogspot. It was long enough ago I barely remember why now, but I never got around to updating on the switch. Clearly this blog is pretty dead, but I still thought I should sound the official death knell. I still check in here periodically but if you want me you can find me over at http://equinoctial.blogspot.com/
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1. Finally saw Rashomon. I know the nesting doll structure, the story told from the different points of view was what was supposed to be amazing, but I was most impressed by the baby at the end. Theme and variation - the unexpected that jolted the narrative and allowed the film to end.
2. I'm tired of random carpenters and plumbers in the room next to my bedroom. I don't want to wake up to tiling. That said, I think my mother's new bathroom is going to be lovely.
3. I sounded really goofy when I was ten and trying to rock Belinda Carlisle acapella.
4. Devon is as wonderful as ever and he can still pick me up.
5. I'm too nice looking in public. Everyone in NYC wanted me to give them directions and take their pictures. Corollary: digital cameras are a pain in the butt because people can be rude and ask you to take their picture over and over because they dont' like how they are smiling 6. Never go to a "jeans" party with a bunch of beauty product publicists if you want to feel reasonably confident about your body.
7. I never realized Toxic would be so fun to dance to. Why is it that I can meet people in one night in NYC at some random loft, but I can't meet people in months in Bloomington? Espanol? No.
8. I'm not sure a terrorist zombie movie is such a good idea, in the end.
9. What's a strawberry moon?
10. Two days until Vermont. Farms, lovely Vanessa, scribbling.
11. I still love public libraries.
12. Mysteries written in the voice of the Prince of Wales circa 1900 are tremendous amusement.
13. An audio tape exists of my parent's wedding reception. My long-dead grandfather (mother's side) is speaking in Spanish to my then 14-year-old uncle (father's side). My father is so softspoken. Still the same rhythms of speech, thirty years later, but a slightly more Indiana accent. I've only listened to bits and pieces of it but the whole thing is a study in cognitive dissonance. There's lots of talk about Italian sausage and bringing in the beer in spite of the rain. It should make me sad, and it will, I know, but it's such a tremendous artifact that right now it simply makes me amazed. My father is 25 (!). But he seems just the same.
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Saturday, August 13th, 2005
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Bloomington assaulted me with its smells, its reckless undergraduate drivers and its naive earnestness as soon as I rolled in yesterday. Here are some other signs I was back:
*At the Vid (the Video Saloon, our local, for out-of-towners) last night a chick wandered up to my table of three, interrupting our conversation by thrusting a mason jar at us. The jar was topped by paper and contained a chrysalis hot-glued to a stick. She told us her friend saves the Monarch butterflies one by one. The little gold filament will be part of its wing. The coccoon will become transparent. Then she will let it fly away. She was sorry for interrupting but she just had to tell us, she said, it's the coolest thing.
*At the farmer's market I got an application packet for becoming an assistant leader for a Girl Scout Troop (don't get too excited, it will most likely go unfilled) and a free bottle of water stamped with "Jesus Christ offers you God's love as a free gift - just like this free water."
*Tonight I did the dance of eye contact with this dude at Laughing Planet. Fresh from NY, Boston and Montreal, I've been in the tunnel gaze of the city dweller, and last night I was chided for it, so I decided I should not just avoid his glance but attempt to be Bloomington-y and smile. He rewarded me by trying to pick me up via dropping the fact that he's visiting from Chicago because he knows the owner of 420 (as in, a pipe tobacco shop). My confused look didn't seem to phase him. Do I look like a stoner chick?
*When it storms in Indiana it storms. For the past few hours the sky has been lit up every few seconds, that's every few seconds, by lightening. For short periods there will be booming thunder or sheets of rain, and then that will stop, leaving the bright lights illuminating the clouds like a broken flourescent light.
Off to packing up all my worldly goods.
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Lilac, burnt rubber, manure. A motorcycle pulling something in its wake: a casket. Neither rider seems to be in mourning.
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My Uncle Pat has collected Streisand memorabilia for some time now. I didn't know the extent of the hobby until I visited his new house and was given a tour of the Streisand room, which includes a dress from one of her movies, a hat from another, tickets from the Millenium concert. More items than I can remember. On this trip my Aunt Sharon met us at the restaurant with a present for my grandmother: roses from her garden in a small glass vase. I held them while we waited for our table. The insides were a mauve that shaded to fushia, then maroon. Sharon said they were Streisand roses, she'd designed them. When the first bloom they're red, then they turn pink, then purple from the inside out. When the horticulturists first presented them to Streisand, they had no smell. Barbra would never put her name on a scentless rose, so she worked until they got it right. Dipping my nose into the heart of a rose, I am overpowered by the smell. It's like a distillation of "rose," the platonic smell. Like rosewater, and I have to remind myself I'm holding something living, organic, from the earth.
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"Then we walked across town to the Valentine Drive-In Theater, where the marquee read CLOSED FOR THE SEASON. The lightbulbs had been unscrewed and the trailer was empty. Harmon and Nina were climbing a glacier in Manitoba." -- Mark Winegardner.
Indiana has 23 drive-ins, down from 120. More major highways intersect in the state than any other, so picture the pull-offs, the tired travelers, the white posts spread out in the remains of corn fields.
We meant to go to the Star-Lite, which we later learned is only five miles south of Bloomington, but we ended up at the Holiday, a 45 minute drive. What's wonderful is that we could set out, on a clear night in the Midwest, driving with the windows down, the sun blushing the clouds on our right, that we could pass limestone factories and giant boots and 24-hour diners, thinking we were headed for one drive-in and end up, anyway, without turning or adjusting, at another. That alternate universe feeling. We let the mulchy fresh air in and watched the little girls prance, as I did once, in pretty pink ruffled nightgowns. We watched kids dance in the back of pick-up trucks and families toss footballs in elliptical arcs over the screen. We asked the enormous vehicles not to settle in front of us please, and tried to guess the date of the concession stand commercials. Earlier that morning, I had navigated the longest underground river in the States, ducked my head under stalactites the color of clay and strained my eyes for the blind crayfish. On the way home, leaning to the window to measure the quantity of stars, the two experiences seemed to balance each other out.
Movies I've Seen at the Drive-In (A Beginning)
Snow White
Sleeping Beauty
Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid
Terminator II
Sommersby
Water World
The Matrix
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Wednesday, May 25th, 2005
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1. Ants are tenacious. Especially the little ones, holding fast to the stamen of a voluptuous white flower that fell from a flowering tree hidden from view. And though the flower desperately wants to be tucked behind an ear, ants do not mix well with human hair.
2. A lifeguard t-shirt is strangely out of place in the prairie, its wearer keeping watch over a sea of green.
3. Empty shoes next to a shallow creek are not necessarily an ominous sign. The water ripples gently over protruding rocks. The owner is nowhere in sight. The owner's socks are of the tiny white ankle variety.
4. Toddlers are the only ones who can look sweet holding their bums while shuffling across a field.
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Three Sightings
I
On the way to class we pass a man at the Sample Gates. He thrusts his hand out, holds a paper to us. Paula takes it but I look ahead, keep walking. He could have been a farmer, out of the corner of my eye I see plaid flannel, but instinct tells me I don't want to look at what he has to offer. When Paula opens the pamphlet I see a dead baby in glossy color. Paula throws the pamphlet away, but in class other people have pamphlets, from which they read and laugh.
II
There is something absurd about the protest, something off that I can't place as I see it down the road on my way to swim. When I get close enough I see the guy in the red cardboard get-up, realize he is dressed as a can of Coke. Across from him are the abortion protesters holding their signs with neon calls to God, dead babies blurs I refuse to look at directly, shades of fleshy reds and pinks.* They aren't shouting anything. They are silent. The Coke can represents No Sweat, the campus anti-sweatshop group. He and a few of his friends are facing off against the godly folk. They are shouting, and once I can understand it, I realize they are chanting "Hate Coke, not gay people." Gay people? I smile at the threads of protest coming together into what I can only see as performance art.
III
Later, at the bus stop, the evangelists file by. Their signs are broken down, toted under their arms. The women trail the men, wear long skirts that swoosh around their ankles. One woman holds the hand of a little girl who trots along blithely, feet bouncing off the sidewalk. The poncho she wears is green, patchworked, camoflauge.
*Why are the dead babies always white?
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You're the Tortured Intellectual!
Take What sort of Hipster are you? today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Personality Test Generator.</p>You're sensitive, you're emotional, and you wonder why everyone else in the world exists on a different plane. You cannot eat, breathe, or sleep without analyzing each action to death. You're usually sombre, depressed, lethargic, but you can be nearly glad from time to time. You wear whatever you can find on your cluttered bedroom floor. You carry books, notepads, reading glasses with you wherever you go. You have friends, but only a few who truly get where you're coming from. You frequent coffee shops, libraries, and the less crowded bars. You're obsessed with past people, past ideas, past lives. You wish you could die and be reborn as Jack Kerouac.
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Friday, November 5th, 2004
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Laurie Anderson, on "Born, Never Asked," sounds like Elizabeth Bishop reading "Large Bad Picture."
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Wednesday, November 3rd, 2004
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Spent the afternoon discussing S/M in Weimar-era Germany, as seen in Martin Sherman's Bent. We were all so down, Susan Gubar making snide remarks about moral values. We watched the part of the film where Mick Jagger descends on a trapeze as Greta, singing about how they'll eat you alive in Berlin. And now I know what I need to do. I need to open a cabaret and encourage the most lurid, decadent acts possible. Moral values my ass. Let's get pre-Holocaust.
Sigh.
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Tuesday, November 2nd, 2004
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for democracy. In spite of all our issues. The GOP challengers weren't at my precinct, and neither were there guerillas with machine guns. Instead, I walked a block down the street to the Methodist church and found a collage of older men with large silver beltbuckles, older women with bleached blonde hair, middle-aged hippies knitting, and young punk grad student types. I saw Britton and Paula exercising their rights. And for most of the wait I listened to a conversation between a Jane Austen scholar and a woman in tie-dye who has new knees and attends a book club where they've been reading Jane Austen. The conversation veered from literature to political responsibility, to what Ms. Magazine in the 70's called the "click" moment where the scales fall from your eyes, to body snatching and cornea replacements. These women each spoke a different language (metaphorically that is), had a different set of cultural and political referents, yet they stood there making the nowhere of the line into a new and vibrant space between them. I'm feeling scared about the results, but in many ways I'm also feeling more patriotic today than I have in a long time.
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Tuesday, October 19th, 2004
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Misty october night on bike. Damp air filming my face. It's quiet outside, only the sound of the rubber and the rain. The occasional car motoring past. It's quiet outside in a way that makes feel my solitariness. And everything I pass takes on the weight of the observed. The stringy-haired man with the thick glasses manning the door of the Video Saloon. The brief altercation downtown that sends words bulleting into space. The couple embracing each other outside in the front yard of some house, a long embrace, a swaying embrace. The paper lantern swinging violet light in arcs over a jack-o-lanterned porch. The spokes turn and make a noise. Two white cars pass, one after the other.
I think of the reading, Mary and Will. Mary quoting my favorite Hass line..."longing we say because desire is full of endless distance." Two anecdotes about mattresses. And the sound collage, a tape found on the road, the vistas shoot inward and I am in Portland and underground. And everyone is singing. Or banging some cacophony or whispering ghosts into flame. And the words are a hole I cannot climb out of.
The trees hang down their drapes of yellow across the pavement. This is a verdant mist, unlike the mists of Wellfleet. Like so many roads a car rocks across, valleys of mist that break into days of travel that lead to somebody's home. There are turtles that you can see by the lake up north with pink undershells, bright pink, Luke says. In Oregon there are deer that appear in canyons by boulders strewn and tents pitched warm. If you wake up to make the coffee.
At home the lights are out and the temperature is low. The light of the neighbors' house illuminates a bathtub and sink, prehistoric, hulking dinosaurs of porcelain in the wilderness of the front yard. A saw-horse slightly apart. Through the window you can see an electric guitar, leaning suggestively against the white wall.
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Sunday, October 17th, 2004
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Today is one of those days where I can count the small exchanges with live voices on one hand. It's books instead, from morning into the night. ZZ Packer telling me about race and difference, post-civil rights alienation. James Baldwin locating "negro anti-semetism" in the heart of Christianity. Flannery O'Connor and John Updike, those heavyweights, drawing me through faith and loss and grace. Too much in one day, so that my brain feels full. So that I forget to live in my body and wander about in the haze at the back of my head. So that when I get to the grocery store, and the vegetable tender tells me it was a beautiful day out, I have to pause for a moment, before telling him yes, that the night is beautiful too, that these new moon nights are so full of stars. And when we smile and move on with our tasks I feel a calm relief wash over me, simple and sweet as the mango resting in my palm.
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Tuesday, October 12th, 2004
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Really, really maybe I should not be a scholar. I'd forgotten how stupid I used to be, though Elissa reminded me the other day, staying up all night in college to push the thoughts through. But look at me doing it again, whee! Coffee. The empty bed piled with books calling me down for the hour that will turn into four. Occasionally, then, there was someone to doze in my presence, or others nearby managing the same extraordinary feats. Others whose rooms I could pad into softly, talk with small-ly in the wee hours.
The house is so much emptier and the stakes so much higher here. Maybe in a few days I will feel better about it all, but right now, nothing is making sense and the connections aren't seeming like fertile pathways. But then, maybe it's just the Holocaust. I mean, what's fertile about that?
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Tuesday, September 28th, 2004
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costs $1 a game. And $1 for shoe rentals. And there is a karaoke machine. But the song selection sucks.
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Sunday, September 19th, 2004
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including the kittens. There were five in the backyard today, frolicking. And a cat. Stalk, rustle, pounce. How distracting. 5 kittens!
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Tuesday, September 7th, 2004
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I love Library booksales. Everything is super cheap and musty and they have the old things no one else but you would want in the old, colorful editions, the kinds "they just don't make anymore." And everyone there has that slightly crazed flea-market look combined with that slightly crazed nerd look. It's so endearing. I browsed through old copies of the Atlantic to find Sarah and Josh, looked at funky old blender manuals and recipes for sourdough, almost bought a copy of Sade's Marat and desired every old Opera record there.
Here's what I did buy:
1. West Side Story Original Soundrack Record
2. Beatrice Kay sings GAY 90's (Cover has photos of Kay posing with bustle, parasol and boa, and dressed in drag on the cover with fake moustache.)
3. Here Comes the Tennessee Ernie Ford Mississippi Showboat (Includes such songs as "Waiting for the Robert E. Lee" and "Take Your Girlie to the Movies")
4. Jane Siberry, the Walking
5. Sweet and Spanish Lourdes sings American Favorites in Spanish (very excited about this one)
(now I just need to buy a record player)
6. Typing for Beginners, a self-teaching manual from 1957 with great dada text
7. Bulgakov's The Master and Marguerita
8. Wiesel's The Testament (appropos of my Holocaust class)
9. Durrell's Alexandia Quartet (1957 1st edition trade paperbacks with fabulous cheesy charcoal drawings of the characters on the front and Durrell's name in script. This has been on my list for 2 years thanks to Laurel, and finding them seems eminently serendipitous)
All of this for $2.35.
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Thursday, August 12th, 2004
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I like it when the sky opens when there's change afoot. I know that summer storms aren't exactly rare here, but still it seems significant, and a welcome farewell.
There's something about packing books I haven't opened since I unpacked them that makes me antsy. It makes me want to send them away on a happy journey to someone who will love them more. But I promise you, booklings, I will treasure you in the midwest. I will pour over your letters and memorize whole passages as I walk the dark streets of a night.
E and I get me tape, newspaper, brave the rain. Possibly a midnight screening of Donnie Darko, to cut the frustration of stacking boxes.
You never realize it's the last real moment with people until the moment is passed.
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equinoctial's journal