words make everything better.

i win

2012-02-02T00:10:00.001-06:00

last week I received this plain little envelope in the mail:

it contained a scruffy, taped shut CD case, which contained a game, which was my very random prize from these semi-crazy people, which I won by virtue of having posted a simple little comment at the bottom of this article, which was lovingly and thoughtfully crafted by friend Chris, who probably rigged the whole contest just for a lark.

of my simple little comment (so far the first and only of mine to grace their little gaming website), the editors at RobotGeek said:

"Amelia’s comment appears to be the longest and most genuine comment to date to win Comment of the Week."

mhm.

they don't get many comments, it seems.

since I am not likely to ever, ever play this silly skateboarding videogame, I inquired among my acquaintances for someone who might own a Playstation 2, and then yesterday bequeathed the game to friend Shelley. she and her husband are nostalgic enough to want the old thing. and she promised me chocolate in exchange. perfect trade-off, I say.

star

2012-01-29T11:25:00.000-06:00

spring semester 2012

2012-01-25T22:13:00.000-06:00

classes will have been in session for one week tomorrow. it feels like ages. I'm already being chewed on by the demands of the semester-- readings, projects, readings, projects... it's extraordinary. it's beautiful. I am the luckiest grad student ever. the next four months are pretty much going to rock.

Instructional Development and Design, with Dr. Baehr
we have a humongous, fat textbook for this class, called E-Learning by Design. our focus is online and electronic learning environments and how those environments/experiences can be designed effectively. so far we've discussed various learning styles, recent technological developments, and some socioeconomic considerations that influence a designer's approach to creating online pedagogical resources. I'm really hoping we get into some hands-on projects soon. eventually we will get to create our own video tutorial. and our final project is supposed to be an extensive e-learning resource website of some kind. any suggestions for good tutorial subjects? anything you've always wanted to learn?

History of the Book, with Dr. Hawkins
this one feels a lot like a continuation of last semester's Bibliography. there are a few similarities, but a different focus. and no Dr. Snead, which makes me a little bit sad. but it's going to be a fun class. we talked this afternoon about what sorts of projects and presentations and activities we hope to include over the next few weeks. book binding. quill pens. paper making. manuscript. letterpress. typography. half of our textbooks are full of awesome pictures. the other half are fascinating discourse by people like Peter Shillingsburg. I love it.

Visual Rhetoric, with Dr. Kimball
my first online class. our virtual meeting tonight was quite cool. I scribbled down fascinating notes, questions, little doodles of a pipe. we talked about zoos as art galleries, and art galleries as zoos. frames, and frames framing other frames, and how easy it is to forget about the frame and let the representations of reality become reality. visual stimuli are so easy to assimilate and adjust to. Dr. Kimball (side note: Dr. Kimball is Dr. Hawkins's husband.) called our near-effortless adjustments "becoming naturalized citizens of the scopic regime." and that all of a sudden reminds me of this podcast about the design of banks. I feel like the questions behind the images I see in the world everywhere--who created it, when, why, how, and under what circumstances--all those questions add such an awesome mystery to every piece of visual information I’ll ever come across for the rest of my life.

beyond classes, I've started working two full-time days and one half-day at the Press, which is a different feeling than my shorter shifts last semester, but just as awesome. I've been doing a lot of copyright registration, tagging stuff for CIP, a little bit of image-wrangling, and a little bit of proofing/checking corrections. you all should go check out the 2012 Spring catalogue {pdf}. all but one of those seven brand new titles has had my lowly editorial assistant fingers in it at various points over the last few months. that's a cool feeling, no matter how lowly I might be.

tres

2012-01-22T11:24:00.000-06:00

attention all hardcore literary freaks

2012-01-17T18:17:00.000-06:00

the 2012 Tournament of Books is not very far away at all. The Morning News introduced the line-up just last week, and I was quite excited. ever since I heard about last year's tournament, I've been waiting patiently for news about the 16 chosen contestants, itching to see if I'll have time to read any of them as I follow along with the judges. listen up, friend Elsie--this is our chance to get all worked up about this competition even though it might be just as silly as any old athletic sporting event.

the list:

Nathacha Appanah, The Last Brother
Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
Teju Cole, Open City
Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods
Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers
Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding
Alan Hollinghurst, Stranger’s Child
Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones
Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife
Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table
Ann Patchett, State of Wonder
Donald Ray Pollock, Devil All the Time
Karen Russell, Swamplandia
Kate Zambreno, Green Girl

have you read any of them? I have not. yet. I stuck a few in bold that I think I do want to read. someday. soon, I hope. and as for the rest, their descriptions did not grab me. nevertheless--the best part of this contest, as I said last year, is reading a lot of great writing about reading a lot of great writing, even if I haven't read it. really getting into the experiences and judgements of other well-read, intelligent people makes me smile. it's going to be good.

did you know they really give away a rooster to the author of the winner? see:

"The winners of those matchups become the Tournament of Books finalists. Each will be read by the full complement of 16 Tournament judges, plus an additional jurist, and the resulting tally will yield us the 2012 Tournament of Books champion, and its author will be awarded/threatened with the presentation of a live, angry chanticleer."

there you go. books. live roosters. and this year, Wil Wheaton is one of the judges. why is that funny? I'm not sure. but it is, isn't it?

quest

2012-01-15T12:28:00.000-06:00

which we am I talking about, anyway? and when? and where?

solo

2012-01-12T17:46:00.000-06:00

somehow I ended up in this airport without a pen.

I've got books, notebooks, a journal, and a handful of napkins, but nothing whatsoever to write on them with. such unpreparedness is slightly tragic.

I'd rather be scribbling on paper than on the internet, but ah well. there's a little less than an hour til we fly from here to Texas, so I'm gonna use it for blogging. aren't you all glad?

the other week my dear Radiolab did a short featuring a similar but more artsy/designy podcast called 99% Invisible. podcasts are excellent for taking up the background noise while you're doing something with your hands but not with your ears (ex: sewing. more on my sewing projects next week). I've long ago caught up on Radiolab shows, so for this bout of sewing I blazed through a good third of the 99% archives. 99% Invisible is usually much shorter than Radiolab. one episode from several months ago was all about Design for Airports. go listen. it's enlightening stuff.

relatedly, from the blog Humans in Design (which I found through 99% Invisible), here are a few more interesting thoughts on the design of airports and such.

for my own brilliant musings on the glory of airports, look back about three years. the only thing that would make this airport (Oakland. it smells so lovely here.) better for me today would be somebody charming to share my travelings with.

brought to you by the letter Z

2012-01-10T00:26:00.000-06:00

the main character of this book I just finished is described by the blurber (yes, that is a true job-title, I promise) as "a quixotic renegade" and "delightfully oblivious." his name is Zeke. he is not perfect. he is not very smart. but I wanted him to have a happy ending. (I'll apologize in advance if I spoil this novel for any of you. I'm not trying to. but then I'm not trying not to, either. sorry?)

title: My American Unhappiness. I heard about this book on NPR. the author, Dean Bakopoulos, was being interviewed about it, sharing snippets and drumming up a bit of relevance. it sounded like a quirky and potentially fascinating read, so I read it. funnily enough, Zeke, working on his American Unhappiness project in the book, lies to people all the time about working for NPR, just so they will be more willing to participate and share the reason they are so unhappy. that connection amused me, just a bit.

the ending of this book was suitably heart-wrenching--page after page of disappointment and bogs of stupid semi-tragedies--but then the heart-wrench gets chewed into bits by a piercing, shiny ambiguity. I don't know if Zeke ends up unhappy or happy or if he finds what he's looking for or not. I guess I'm okay with that. I didn't dog-ear too many pages, but here are the ones I did (not counting the three-page section on the institutional slavery of Americans between pages 45 and page 48. that would've been insane to retype. I did read it aloud to my father though).

"My favorite sort of Facebook status update is the sort that is obtuse and unknowable. ... A good status alludes to some sort of emotion, some sort of yearning, but it doesn't offer any sort of clues..." page 179

"We love stories in which we are the protagonists in search of truth.... But my feeling is that we can cope with the increasing smallness, rapidness, and indifference of our changing, violent world only by seeing ourselves as noble characters caught in the struggle. We are all, as Turgenev so presciently said over a century ago, either Hamlets of Quixotes, and we must be these kinds of people if we are to endure." page 252

"What makes me so unhappy?
People walking away, dressed in winter clothes, the sky the same gray as their coats, the branches of the trees around them, black-gray and skinned." page 266

"As I drive among the streets of Livonia, so geared toward the life of family, of stable and easy domesticity, I live a fantasy life of regrets, missed opportunities. I imagine them as if they had taken flight." page 269

that penultimate quote wraps itself perfectly around the whole meaning and title of the story. why are you so unhappy? why are we so unhappy? is there anything to be done about it? will cataloguing our emotions make us feel any better?

count up

2012-01-08T12:34:00.000-06:00

wishing lists

2012-01-05T00:01:00.003-06:00

before the holidays, people make lists. wish lists. gift lists. lists for Santa. lists and lists and lists.

and then after the holidays, the lists change into to-do lists. but the items on these lists--they're not just any old to-do list items--

they're resolutions.

that word.

I keep thinking about it and breaking it down and trying to force its true meaning out from under the shape of that word.

the etymology of resolution:

early 15c., "a breaking into parts," from L. resolutionem (nom. resolutio) "process of reducing things into simpler forms," from pp. stem of resolvere "loosen" (see resolve). Originally sense of "solving" (as of mathematical problems) first recorded 1540s, that of "holding firmly" (in resolute) 1530s, and that of "decision or expression of a meeting" is from c.1600.

interesting. surprisingly meta, in a way. it's an old, old word, relatively speaking. and then there is its root, resolve:

late 14c., from L. resolvere "to loosen, undo, settle," from re-, intensive prefix, + solvere "loosen" (see solve). Same sense evolution as in resolution. Related: Resolved; resolving. The noun meaning "determination" is first recorded 1590s.

you can read more about all these etymological facts if you like. pretty fascinating stuff. the most basic pieces of a resolution are re and solution. something solved, but again.

my questions are, naturally:

if the problem has been solved, why are we solving it again? why do we need to re-solve it? has it somehow become un-solved? is it that the original, perfect state of things got broken and needs fixing? or is it just to make sure it all stays solved? or just that it needs to be reinforced somehow, and that January is a great time to do that sort of solution-bolstering? the etymology says "intensive prefix." maybe the re is not meant to be again, but just... moreso. really. especially. hmm.

maybe I ask too many questions.

things I'm planning to add to my grand list of resolutions:

more yoga
more sleep
more prayer
more writing
more adventure

if you expected more specific resolutions... well, then you don't know me very well, do you?

and happy new year

2012-01-01T11:18:00.000-06:00

surface area

2011-12-30T00:28:00.000-06:00

I can't remember the first time I read this trilogy. all I do remember is hearing about it and thinking it sounded full of bland archetypes floating around in some watery, boring plot. but then I picked it up. and its fabulous, twirly sentences whisked me away into Gormenghast, where nothing is watery or boring at all. it was friend Chris who told me about these books. in his words, is the most underrated piece of literature on the planet. "appallingly underrated," he says. and "It is literary masterpiece and a work of art. I don't think I've ever read anything else in which the characters and the setting have been painted so vividly."

not many books are worth owning, according to me. excluding the textbooks (which I may or may not keep), I can fit all the books I own onto one small shelf. His Dark Materials. 1984. The Chronicles of Narnia. The Phantom Tollbooth. and now this gorgeous paperback edition of The Gormenghast Trilogy. mm. (thanks, dear friend Chris. thou art most awesome.)

to judge me by my bookshelves, I might not look like such a great lover of books. really I'm just the kind who prefers to borrow them. it's easier that way.

lately I keep thinking about appearances. we all know that things aren't always as they seem. but that doesn't mean the split between what is and what seems is very clear-cut at all. things that seem true might be true, or they might not really be true, or they might be partly true, or sometimes true, or sort of true. relatively true. [flashback... hmm.] most of all, I wonder about how I must seem to all the people who are not me (such vanity is fairly normal, right?). I suppose I'll never know exactly. but maybe someday there will be a way to at least find out how much of the seeming is real and how much isn't.

I also wonder how much of me and my point of view depends upon other people. sometimes I feel completely tied up in the way other people think, or what I imagine they'll think, or what they seem to be thinking. is that a flaw? my current thoughts (or are they justifications?) compare the relationships between my personality and everyone else's with the relationships between words in a dictionary. just like words get used to define each other, your perspectives and their perspectives and the whole world's perspective all get used to define mine.

as long as I'm aware of all this mushy relativism, I should be able to handle that, right? depth perception. books and covers. second impressions. mhm. vivid or watery or whatever else it seems at first, the book or the word, the person or the situation will usually have more to it. don't stop reading.

tied with bows

2011-12-25T13:11:00.000-06:00

merry christmas everyone!

montage

2011-12-22T17:03:00.001-06:00

since I am apparently (despite having finished the semester more than a week ago) too busy and distracted to compose a real blogpost, here are a few selected photographs transfered from my cell phone to this blog, from way back at the beginning of the semester, all the way up until this most recent monday. almost all of them are crooked. that's how I take pictures. so what?

and do they really need captions? okay, alright, I'll give them captions.

looking west from the library windows. can't remember which floor.

an interesting fountain at Holden Hall.

the archway through the administration building.

an ivy-covered gazebo next to the library.

the Lubbock Temple at sunset.

the tower of the English/Philosophy building

this gigantic puddle appears any time it rains in Lubbock.

streetlights. not sure which street. or when. or why.

Christmas lights at temple square. gorgeous, eh?

4

2011-12-18T13:03:00.000-06:00

and it's plain to see

2011-12-15T02:08:00.000-06:00

last weekend there was a Christmas talent show at church.

for the past few years, every time there is a talent show, I've thought it would be cool to find a fellow Dr. Horrible fan and sing the duet from Act II, just for kicks.

the week before our talent show, I was talking with friend Jake about this thought, and we tentatively expressed an interest in such a performance, maybe, possibly, if the craziness of the end of the semester would permit.

thankfully, it did. we found an instrumental track. we practiced. we polled everyone we knew for costume ideas.

friend Jessica even stood in as vocal coach.

friend Danielle donated a perfect lab coat. Jake taped together an awesome pair of goggles. I donned my best hippie-chic skirt and a pair of fingerless gloves, stuck a photo of Captain Hammer in a frame, and there we were. Billy. Penny. (no, I didn't dye my hair red, but I really almost wanted to.)

friend Justin may have got our performance on film along with the rest of the talent show, but I haven't got a copy of it if he did.

here's the original track. you can use your imagination, eh?

lo

2011-12-11T09:36:00.001-06:00

last days

2011-12-07T23:58:00.001-06:00

today was the last day of classes. was it not just yesterday that I found out about this crazy moving-to-Texas idea? even four months ago my worries were centered in a completely parallel universe. I never could have guessed that today I would be here, at the top of the last week of my first semester of graduate school.

on the horizon for me now are (in no particular order):

poetry recitation
sunday school lesson #34
editorial assistance
bike retrieval
dinner here and there
pages of review, reflection, and definition
after-church potluck
wagon-loads of returned library books
evaluations
card-giving and well-wishing
Japanese food
last-minute readings
suitcase stuffing

and then...

airport lounging
arriving
reunion, rekindling, reminding
and hopefully some dancing.

nephew the 4th ought to be arriving any day now, also. exciting stuff, all this. and that's not even counting Christmas.

[post script: Frank Chimero's phrase for this eclectic list-based stuff is "thought shrapnel." I like that. he's been posting a fair bit of it himself lately.]

123 then what?

2011-12-04T09:15:00.000-06:00

maybe "Identity Borrowing" would've been more apt

2011-11-29T17:50:00.001-06:00

today I finished putting together a twenty-page essay for English 5340, which I decided to call "Hannah Wolley and The Gentlewomans Companion: A Case of Seventeenth-century Identity Theft." an excerpt:

"Passages from this particular text have been referenced and re-contextualized again and again, far more than any other work by this prolific female writer. But if a close study of the text and its contexts reveals that she is indeed not responsible for the text of The Gentlewomans Companion, then who is? Is our modern habit of ascribing the majority of textual authority to an author or even a set of authors adequate when so much shaping of the text can be done by editors, agents, publishers, printers, marketing departments? So many contextual factors influence the final form and meaning of a text, but it seems many of these realities are often overlooked in favor of more salable points such as authorial reputation, the ethos of well-known names, and pertinent authoritative biographical details. The case of Hannah Wolley and The Gentlewomans Companion sheds light on how valuable the reputation of an author can be to publishers and scholars alike."

and to accompany this string of scholarly inquiries, a few quotes from class tonight:

Dr. Hawkins on the guilt-inducing effects of studying Bibliography as thoroughly as we have done: "You'll find yourself being warped by this class."

Dr. Snead, referring to one possible outcome of a class on Jane Austen jointly-taught by four literature professors with different period focuses: "Or they'll see that historical periodization is an invention of the Institution. It's useless!"

tuesday evenings are the coolest.

hebrews 12:1

2011-11-27T12:01:00.000-06:00

I'm not just saying this

2011-11-25T22:36:00.001-06:00

yesterday was the tenth Thanksgiving I've spent away from home. for some of those I've been abroad in countries where they don't exactly celebrate this holiday. for some I've been with various extended family, which is lovely, but for most of them I've been lucky enough to get adopted by extra-hospitable people who don't mind fitting an extra chair around their table. someday I'll pay all that hospitality forward, I promise.

this year I am thankful for Texas. doesn't Texas have a great flag? so simple. bold. I like it.

I never planned to spend much time in this gigantic state, but since moving here three months ago, I've discovered just how cool it is. inexplicable, really.

I'm also super grateful to my genius brother's dear fiancee and her parents who temporarily adopted me for Thanksgiving this year and introduced me to the wonder of real green bean casserole. it's been a lovely weekend. and tomorrow we are going to gallivant around Fort Worth for a bit. art museums. famously talked-up mexican food. maybe the zoo?

I hope all of you had a most fabulous Thanksgiving. cross your fingers for me that I survive the last three weeks left of the semester...

schism

2011-11-20T12:23:00.000-06:00

xv xvii xxii xi i xxii xiv xxxi

2011-11-16T10:25:00.000-06:00

one month from today, there will be theaters showing this film.

after all this, we needn't to go into how much of a Sherlock geek this silly girl has always been. I can't explain it. I just adore him, even when he's forced by ridiculous screenwriters to face shallow, ridiculous villains peeled straight out of a Dan Brown novel, as he was in the last film.

anyhow: with any luck at all, I will find myself comfortably seated in one of these above mentioned theaters, thoroughly giddy with anticipation.

any of my dear friends back home care to join me? I promise not to squeal one bit.

for the nephews (part two)

2011-11-13T16:37:00.000-06:00

costs

2011-11-08T22:33:00.001-06:00

this is the price tag that came with the brand new bicycle wheel I bought the weekend before I moved to Texas. it was tied around the frame of the wheel with a little bit of white string. yes, I save random things like this. price tags often have a really cool blend of style and functionality that just seems interesting to me.

attached to the same bicycle wheel was this warning sticker, wrapped neatly around one of the spokes. back when my dad and littlest brother and I replaced the old bent wheel with this shiny new one, I cut off the sticker and tucked it into my pocket. two days later, I traveled with it and the little price tag (and the bike of course) all the way from the mountains through the desert, down to the windswept plains of west Texas.

I hardly have time here, as a graduate student, to ride that bike anywhere.

but I do somehow have time to contemplate the bits of technical communication that came with my bicycle's new wheel. in 5371 yesterday, we were talking about ethics. there is a lot to talk about where ethics and communication are concerned. despite the fact that stereotypical tech. writers create documents that don't often get read, technical communication really does make a difference sometimes. the example we keep reading about is the Challenger disaster in 1986, where a technical report somehow failed to convince the people involved that there might be a problem with the space shuttle. that's a pretty extreme example, and even in that case, there is no easy way to think about the ethics of it.

for most of class we just asked questions:

-what interests are we (should we be?) serving as technical writers?
-who decides what is ethical ("good") and what isn't?

-how might we fill in the gaps between what is/isn't legal, ethical, or valuable?

-how far do our ethical responsibilities as technical writers extend?
-how much risk of miscommunication (there will always be at least some risk) is acceptable?

I love questions.

about my little bike wheel warning sticker I can ask plenty more of them. when was the decision made to include these warnings? was it just because some lawyer told them it would be a good idea? who actually wrote out these paragraphs, and how many drafts did it take before they settled on this version? they can't really expect me to thoroughly inspect the front wheel every single time I go for a ride, can they? my new bike wheel didn't come with a manual--are they assuming I have one for my bike as a whole? what other assumptions are being made here? and has anyone ever really died from a mis-adjusted bike wheel?

for the nephews (part one)

2011-11-06T16:36:00.000-06:00

revise or remix

2011-11-02T23:22:00.000-05:00

so for 5371 (Foundations of Tech Comm) and 5387 (Publications Management), I get to write book reviews.

for some reason, the art of the review seems to be an extremely crucial thing to learn as a graduate student. we had to present a review for 5340 (Bibliography) also, though that was a group project, and not written. Dr. Hawkins gave us 7 minutes to talk about an online edition of our choice. my group did the Rossetti Archive.

that was fun. and our presentation went quite well. 7 minutes, 21 seconds. and I even got to talk a bit about the geeky web-design stuff I love so much. cross-browser compatibility, XHTML, javascript. mm. the cool moment was showing this screenshot to a bunch of literature grad students.

yes, I am trying hard to reinforce the idea they've all got about the crazy tech comm people. it's fun.

my other two classes are not lit. classes. they are full of the technical. and I've got six weeks or so--amongst all my other projects and research and essaying--to read and review the following two books.

for Kelli, the 5th edition of Technical Editing, by Carolyn Rude and Angela Eaton. we've read a few articles by Carolyn Rude already, and so much that she says impresses me. Dr. Eaton works here at Texas Tech, which is just a neat connection.

also, I love editing. I think this book will be great. many thanks go to the editors of Communicator, an ISTC journal who sent me this, my very own copy.

for Dr. Still, I've got this. it's called Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age, by Kenneth Goldsmith. he teaches a class all about this at the University of Pennsylvania, apparently. sounds quite fascinating.

this one, I had to request from the far away land of Arizona. U of A was kind enough to lend me this copy all the way til the end of the semester. so nice of them. I've just read the introduction so far. the rest of it, I can already tell, is going to be extremely interesting. (note to self: take a few notes on this stuff for the alien-girl story.)

other news from my little planet of grad school:
-got an A on my 5371 midterm. go me.
-met with Dr. Snead today to talk about the mystery of Hannah Woolley. need to start drafting...
-spent an hour in the Letterpress Lab cleaning out old rusted trays and weighing drawers full of type. so awesome.
-finished editing that index about wine thismorning. learned a lot about grapes. fun fun.

and now, for a semi-irrelevant postscript:
this article and this comic were both published today, the 2nd of November. that is called timeliness. or something. (is tongue-awareness even a thing? really?)

dress up like a daffodil

2011-10-30T17:37:00.000-05:00

or a super hero, or an elf. or anything.

you might call it mortadella, but that's not the same thing

2011-10-26T11:22:00.000-05:00

way back, I came across this insane thing its creator calls a 'cult appetizer.'

completely awesome.

right?

don't tell me I'm the only one who thinks so. surely I'm not the only one who upon seeing photographs of that absolutely fantastic arrangement of bologna, cream cheese, and processed orange goo, simply knew that she'd have to create her own version of the masterpiece. I couldn't not.

I used mashed potatoes (because we had some at the time) and not ranch-flavored cream cheese. and I used a handful of actual cheddar, not any of that aerosol nonsense.

also: who needs crackers?

this version is warm, the bologna on the verge of crispy, the cheese nicely melted. it's reminiscent of my childhood. mum used to pile mashed potatoes on single slices of bologna, cap with a bit of cheese, and bake the 'mountains' in the oven for a few minutes. I always loved that. mm.

this version just has a few layers. a sedimentary bologna mountain, you might say. so lovely. I'll have to make it again someday.

in the meantime, to continue this mini-celebration of how wonderful bologna truly is: here, at the bottom of this duet of superbowl party appetizers, you will find a most beautiful fried bologna sandwich, just in case you also love this specific type of over-processed lunchmeat.

there are at least a few of you who do, aren't there?

lower case a

2011-10-23T17:33:00.000-05:00

fourth and flint

2011-10-21T23:06:00.001-05:00

I am in the middle of editing an index for a book about Texas wineries. when the book is ready to be published, it'll come out with our spring season--just a few months away now.

there are also checklists on my desk for two manuscripts that still need copyediting. those won't come out till next fall. right now they're waiting on our production department to approve all the artwork. (after the copyediting comes the indexing, the design, the typesetting, the proofing, the printing, the binding, the shipping, and so on. it all takes forever and ever.)

in my inbox are instructions for prepping one of our clothing/textile books book for the compositor and tagging it for a CIP request. this one is right behind the winery book, I think--set to come out sometime in the spring.

earlier this week I did a bit of research for a Finnish fellow who's working on a book about Route 66, and then spent a few days sorting invoices for the finance department, while they all worked on very important royalty-related stuff.

in the short not-even-two-months-yet that I've worked at the Press, I've coded a handful of manuscripts to be sent out to freelance editors, proofed dozens and dozens of pages, sold a few books at the cowboy symposium, met and/or emailed a couple of authors, watered some plants, answered the phones, made plenty of copies, sent a few packages, and compiled a humongous spreadsheet of manufacturing costs for all the books we've published from 2006 up to now.

now I'm editing an index. it's quite fun.

tidbits I have learned so far, from all these various assignments:

given long enough to sit on a shelf or in a file, rubber bands start sticking to paper, and breaking apart, and being useless.

the press saves every tiny thing in files associated with each book it publishes. every email, every draft, every decision, every review, every order, every shipment.

there is a town called Pittsburg, Texas.

copyeditors charge about $3.50 per page.

hardcover books are usually called 'clothbound'--that seems like a thing I ought to have known before, somehow.

we still use terms like 'compositor' and 'typesetting,' even though it's all digital these days. we also still use words like 'manuscript,' even though none of it's handwritten anymore. hrm.

I'm sure there's a lot more. I wish I could tell you all about these forthcoming books, and how interesting they are, even when you're only skimming through to add type codes, or jumping around checking the references for their indexes. it kind of boggles my mind that I am an impossibly thin slice of the pie chart of effort that goes into producing these published works. I get to see them all in different stages of unfinished, so far. and when a box full of any of these titles finally shows up in the office, each copy all shiny and shrink-wrapped, that will be a pretty cool day.

strike

2011-10-16T16:26:00.000-05:00

you shall not need to butter your plates

2011-10-11T22:36:00.000-05:00

for 5340 (yes, all I'm ever going to blog about for the rest of the year is grad school, just in case you were curious), I've chosen to research a seventeenth-century cookbook called The Queen-like Closet, by a woman many scholars cite as the first to have made a living writing books. neat, eh?

I was telling friend Chris the other day that this means my food-blogger-wannabe status is about to be intensified. I bet if they'd had blogs in 1670, Hannah Woolley (or Wolley, if you like that spelling better) would have been great at blogging. can you just envision the titles to her posts? the full title of the cookbook I'm studying is: The Queen-like Closet or Rich Cabinet Stored With All Manner Of Rare Receipts For Preserving, Candying And Cookery. Very Pleasant And Beneficial To All Ingenious Persons Of The Female Sex. woah.

here is her recipe for sugar cakes, as copied from the second edition of The Queen-like Closet, as transcribed by the people of Project Gutenberg. if you have a pound of sugar that needs something done with, I dare you to try it.

To make Sugar Cakes.

Take a pound of fine Sugar beaten and searced, with four Ounces of the finest Flower, put to it one pound of Butter well washed with Rose-water, and work them well together, then take the Yolks of four Eggs, and beat them with four Spoonfuls of Rosewater, in which hath been steeped two or three days before Nutmeg and Cinamon, then put thereto so much Cream as will make it knead to a stiff Paste, rowl it into thin Cakes, and prick them, and lay them on Plates, and bake them; you shall not need to butter your Plates, for they will slip off of themselves, when they are cold.

see? doesn't that read just like a recipe some enterprising young food blogger would post--including the wacky spellings? [searced--in case you are too lazy to put up with google thinking you mean "searched" when all you need is a seventeen-century definition of a word you've never heard of--means sifted.] it's so interesting to think about the evolution of recipe formats, and how there are so many different ways to write them. some people like the story-like instructions. some people like step-by-step details. and you are always free to write them however you want, as long as they make enough sense to be followed. hm.

alright. in an effort to make time for blogging this month, I'm going to include a short list of blogposts to come. any requests for which ought to come very next?

-things I've learned from working at the University Press.
-more photos of tech campus and environs
-additional food-blogger-wannabe nonsense (this time featuring bologna)
-the debut of writing group: texas edition

floats

2011-10-09T16:25:00.000-05:00

the myth of objectivity

2011-10-04T23:44:00.000-05:00

hegemonies.

our conversation in 5371 yesterday didn't really start with hegemonies. it started with the idea of challenging dominant forms of discourse. scraping away at the prevalence of a certain perspective. shifting the weight away from certain ways of looking at things. digging past the black and white to celebrate a bit of gray. it was all really thought-provoking, in more ways than I can plug into this little blogpost tonight.

we'd read two articles from our textbook Central Works in Technical Communication: "Teaching Discourse and Reproducing Culture" by Carl G. Herndl and "Taking a Political Turn" by Nancy Roundy Blyler, all about how current research methods and teaching practices tend to skim the surface and leave out so much context. these two authors with odd names advocate a critical approach to research and pedagogy--one that makes sure to consider perspectives that might normally get marginalized or glossed over.

we tried to think up examples--dominant modes that so insidiously pervade our everyday lives that we hardly ever think about them. grades. euclidian geometry. base ten mathematics. taxes. gender norms. punctuation. these are constructs we function within almost unquestioningly, like they are too big, too encompassing, too everywhere to even see. and in failing to consider does that mean we're missing out on some different way of evaluating our work? some different way of looking at the world or making calculations or organizing sentences?

maybe so. but I know I kept asking myself, 'is this always the case? is the dominant form always in danger of crushing other just-as-worthy interpretations? does the status quo always need to be questioned? what if this way of looking at things is dominant for a reason...?'

when I brought my questions up in class, classmate Tim readily countered 'of course,' and went on to say that there is always someone thinking something crazy. and by 'crazy,' I'm sure he means 'different,' and in that case, yeah, no one's ever going to think the exact same way as everyone else. we're not meant to. but as some of our other classmates added, if you start questioning and fighting against every accepted system in the world, life gets chaotic.

so there's a balance. we don't want breed anarchy here... but neither do we want to walk around like parrots with blinders on. we just want to get our hands a little muddy, I guess. we need to stop pretending like anyone--professor or scientist or theoretician--can be completely objective when teaching or studying or writing anything. it's good to seek out a few totally unusual other-ways-of-looking-at-things. see what there is to learn from accepting as much of the crazy, not-so-black-and-white context as possible. be critical.

re- re- re- and ex-

2011-10-02T09:22:00.000-05:00

happy general conference weekend.

collection, recollection, and collation

2011-09-29T00:12:00.000-05:00

{ the following blogpost has been excerpted and revised from the reflection chunk of my third bibliography assignment--tracing seven printed versions of a certain poem and collating any variance between them. you might find this all very fascinating, or you might not. }

when E. E. Cummings came to mind as a potential subject for our collation assignment, I anticipated finding a really unique, oddly set poem to work with, in order to explore how different editors and publishers handled the strangeness of this poet's work. unfortunately, most of the really interestingly set Cummings poems were a little too short or a little too scarce to be of much use. “you shall above all things be glad and young” is relatively normal-looking, for Cummings, so I wasn't able to see how any really unconventional poetic forms translated from version to version. but even still, I think that because Cummings's poems do tend to be so unexpected and don't always follow traditional forms, his editors have needed to pay closer attention and go to greater lengths to set them precisely as Cummings wanted them set, weirdness and all. whatever the poet's intent behind the odd layout of his poems, that intent seems to have carried enough power to keep later collections of his poems very consistent with original versions, despite the challenges of arranging them exactly right.

originally, “you shall above all things be glad and young” was published in 1938 in E. E. Cummings' Collected Poems and was later included in several different collections. because most copies of this poem share a common (and fairly recent) copy-text, they seem very stable, with practically no variance whatsoever. I did notice differences in how the title is displayed, depending on the layout and design of the book overall. aside from the titles, I found no other differences between my chosen copy-text and each of the other print versions I was working with. the single web-version I looked at had one stray space between words where the print copies did not, and it also displayed a handful of lines in italics or bold, presumably for emphasis.

it surprised me to see just how often some of these poems were reproduced in different collections. and in most of the versions I looked at, there were no explanations or clues to the editors' reasons for republishing Cummings' work at all. I had to wonder what would prompt George James Firmage or anyone else to put together a new and different arrangement of these poems. how did they decide which to include, and what kinds of outside factors influenced those decisions?

I used to think that editing merely involved the fixing of errors and preparation of a text before it got published--something almost superficial, like the “polishing, or purification, of an existing text” that Shillingsberg explains in his chapter on Critical Editions. I'm realizing now that editing can be a hundred other things. an editor can be just as involved with the creation of a text (or collection of texts) as any author--just in a different way.

---

three small related asides:

I found this recording of the poet himself reading aloud "somewhere i have never travelled,"

when I read Cummings, I do not read him so calmly. it's almost strange to hear such frolicking lines read in such traditional tones.

this woman has one of E. E. Cummings' poems hanging on her living room wall, which is cool.

I've just finished (for fun and not for bibliography class), the Firmage edition of Cummings' 73 poems. these were unearthed and published posthumously. poem 4, SONG, is one of the loveliest, and here is just the very first stanza.

but we've the may
(for you are in love
and i am)to sing,
my darling:

you'll have to go find the collection yourself to read the rest. and when you do, try reading all his poems out loud, and fast. that's the best way to experience the giddy rush of unpuzzling them for the first time.

bulletin doodles

2011-09-25T16:59:00.000-05:00

and also a closeup:

the place they call tech

2011-09-22T08:04:00.000-05:00

somewhere on my rather splandled list of things to do sometime this semester (or this month? maybe this weekend? sometime.) is walk around campus taking photographs. lots.

so far all I've got are these.

the student union building, also known as the sub.

and the east half of the english & philosophy building. I am in this building a lot, as you might imagine. off in the distance you can see the the library. I wander through that building a fair bit too.

a little chicken of sleep

2011-09-18T10:41:00.001-05:00

manipulating narrativium

2011-09-13T09:16:00.002-05:00

it's always cool when you can find little bits and pieces of the same idea scattered all over the internet in convenient, linkable snippets. thank you, Mr. Davies. that bookmarked quote you posted was a reminder of all these thoughts I needed to put together for this blogpost.

a few weeks ago, on my 900-mile drive across the deserts of Utah, New Mexico, and Texas, I kept myself awake and entertained with large doses of public radio. this was near the last week of august, when the news kept switching back and forth between a lot of american political blathering--in preparation for the presidential elections next year, I suppose--and the Libyan revolution. can you guess which was more exciting to hear about?

as I listened to all these journalists telling and re-telling and re-telling again the story of this far-away rebellion, spinning out small updates every few hours (the sizzling red rock of southern Utah turning bleached and muddy as I drove south into a desert lightning storm) and slanting toward new perspectives as new information came to light (the impossible emptiness between so many hazy New Mexican mesas baking stoically under all that cruel, cloudless blue), I started wondering.

these journalists, they're telling this story before it's finished. they're spinning this plot out of events that haven't reached a conclusion. the telling of the story is happening in almost the same moments the story itself is happening in. how does that influence the way it will end?

can the confidence of one journalist who really thinks those Libyan rebels are going to successfully take control and change the world... can that tip the scales? if reports of that success are being made before that journalist truly realizes exactly how not-over-yet the battle is... does that make presumed success more likely, even though there's still so much fighting to do?

I don't know. I just remember listening to all this, feeling as if I were hearing it as it happened, and noticing the story changing little by little every single time. the events in Libya, and new information about those events, changed the story. that's the way we're used to things going.

but there is also power in stories, even if it's only in your head. things that go on in your head tend to have at least a small effect on what goes on outside of your head. so as long as the story hasn't found its ending... maybe the way we're telling it can give it one.

rags to start with

2011-09-11T12:30:00.000-05:00

I am missing friend Jessica's farewell today and I'm pretty upset about that. she's off to Canada (by way of the missionary training center in Provo, that is), and I wish I could be back home to see her off. a phone call and a blogpost will have to do. good luck Jess!

working on

2011-09-08T10:48:00.000-05:00

for 5340, my new friend Monica and I are working on a detailed descriptive bibliography of this book, which was printed in 1610. I also get to somehow create a facsimile of its title page. yep, the whole thing is in portuguese.

{ thanks, Monica, for the nice photograph }

my case study for 5387 will focus on one or the other of these online publications:

this is all the busy-ness I was hoping for, and then some. wish me luck remembering to eat and sleep and trim my toenails while all this fascinating academic entanglement is going on.

sidenote: I was afraid Texas wouldn't have a real autumn, but this week has been delightfully chill, and I love it.

furrowed

2011-09-04T12:23:00.000-05:00

virtual cork

2011-09-02T13:21:00.000-05:00

I guess I should tell you, I am notebooking things in tumblr now.

Ira Glass on Storytelling.

the latest addition over there is this very video, which I found via Veer. (oh go ahead-- by all means praise my use of all those alliterative Vs.)

of course, I've still got the old (mostly) reliable google notebooks too, but this new tumblr thing will get filled with the best of the everything. quotes and snippets and stuff I want to remember. so. if you find that you're into the same quotes and snippets and cool stuff that I generally am, you are completely welcome to subscribe to my new notebook.

and while I'm here talking about virtual places to tuck random information you may need for something someday, just in case, perhaps-- there's also this. if you want an invite, I'd love to send you one.

a review of my classes: grad school edition

2011-08-31T11:20:00.000-05:00

today is wednesday, the last day of august. six years ago on this exact same date, I posted this exact same post... but not really, because that was then, and this is grad school. I'm taking three courses, not five. I'm in Texas where it is exceedingly warm, not in Utah, where it snows three feet every weekend. so many things are different now. there are some freaky similarities though. I've got some killer financial aid. I have fabulous, fabulous roommates. and one of my professors is Kelli Cargile Cook.

so. now that I've been to at least one meeting of each of my classes, I can give the internet a brief report. I know you are all still solidly interested.

Bibliography & Research Methods, with Dr. Ann Hawkins (and Dr. Jennifer Snead)

these two make such an interesting pair. they teach really well though. we dove right in to some hands-on paleography, which was awesome. a colleague and I got to read a copy of a letter written by the then Princess Elizabeth, who was imprisoned in the Tower of London at the time. that Elizabeth I has really good handwriting. for our first assignment in this class, I get to transcribe, as perfectly as possible, this scribbly page.

Foundations of Technical Communication, with Dr. Kelli Cargile Cook

oh, it's exciting to have a class with Kelli again. she is wonderful, and she sets high expectations. this'll be an overview sort of class, and I'm still not sure how it'll fit in with my other work. but it will. it's called foundations of tech. comm. for a reason. there will be lots of writing, which will be lots of fun.

Publications Management, with Dr. Brian Still

in this class, we've been discussing the impossibly wide definitions of the words 'publication' and 'author.' at the moment, it's lots of theory, but any day now we'll be getting just as much practical experience as we have with bibliography so far. we get to learn XML. we get to write some real book reviews and collaborate on our own online publications. one of our first assignments involves doing a case study of a serial publication. I'm thinking I might pick one of the magazines I blogged about way back here. A List Apart might be perfect, since they've got so much information on their site about how they began and how they've evolved.

I may write more about these classes at some point. I'm sure there will be endless interesting stuff going on. what I'm not sure about is if I'll have time to blog about it all.

do i need a haircut?

2011-08-28T12:26:00.000-05:00

everything looks academic from here

2011-08-26T23:45:00.001-05:00

I bought a copy of Field-Tested Books close to a year ago. the great coudal partners was having a deal of some kind, and I was just after a few free fieldnotes notebooks or something. I ordered it, they shipped it, etc. etc... the book and its attendant notebooks came in the mail, I slid them all out of their box, added them respectively to my shelves of books to read someday and of books to write in someday, and have hardly touched them since. except maybe to scribble song lyrics in one of the blank fieldnotes.

that is, until today.

for my Bibliography & Research Methods class, I have a long list of articles to read, nine of which must be finished before our first meeting on Tuesday. the history of books, the history of the writing of books, the history of the production of books, and the history of the study of books... it's all incredibly interesting. I'm starting to look at books in totally new ways.

what I've been reading about how bibliographers attempt to study the reception of published texts reminded me of this book I bought however many months ago. it is, in essence, a neatly compiled catalogue of various specific readings of specific texts, in specific places, by specific people. and since so far I've gathered from my prerequisite readings that studying the receptions of most texts is pretty tricky, I find the idea of these recorded 'field tests' really interesting. normally, people don't keep detailed records of the books they read and when. the only hard data a bibliographer usually has to go on are whatever reviews survive and the general tide of book sales. but this field-tested idea... that's something else. the field tests are not reviews or criticism or analysis of books themselves... they are mini-bibliographic studies. lovely vignettes outlining precisely where the life of a certain book and the life of a certain person have intersected.

so cool.

I'm adding Field-Tested Books to my long list of readings for grad school. it totally fits. and it is about time I actually read some of the books I happen to own, right?

zucchini monsters

2011-08-23T18:55:00.003-05:00

friend Shara gave me this giant zucchini from her garden.
so beautiful, isn't it?

now, I should tell you that since these photos were taken, the poor zucchini has been mercilessly shredded and baked into cupcakes.

I used this recipe for the cupcakes and they turned out very well. I also made a batch of oatmeal-nut-zucchini cookies. I can't remember where I got the recipe I used for that one. sorry. I mangled that one enough that it probably wouldn't be worth recommending anyways.

and here, for everyone's future reference, are a few more zucchini recipes I really want to try:
zucchini-wrapped-quinoa-sushi. | zucchini fries! | zucchini pasta. | zucchini fritters. | zucchini soup. mmm.

PS. so far I am loving this Texas adventure I'm on.

if

2011-08-21T14:32:00.001-05:00

leave it unpolished for now

2011-08-18T16:26:00.001-05:00

I had a beautiful draft in the works, comparing All's Well That Ends Well with The Cardigan's Lovefool, and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat with Wilco's Summer Teeth.

blogger decided not to save half of my work on that draft. I hope I have time to get back to it, sometime. my blogging schedule is going to change drastically, I expect. grad school is about swallow me whole. one week! I've got lists of books to buy. essays to dissect. but before all that, nine-hundred miles to drive.

it's tradition now, isn't it? I'm about to go on a long trip, and when I get to the end of it, I will have an even longer list of things to write about here.

first, shakespeare and the musical.

then, zucchini monsters.

those two were really supposed to be this week. I hope they don't suffer from lack of relevance once I finally get around to writing them.

I've also got posts about memory, slippers, and responsibility. what those half-formed thoughts might morph into during the coming months, I have no idea. wish me luck. I'm on the brink of a whole ocean of panic this weekend. if I fall in, will you be there to throw me a rope?

2011-08-14T10:28:00.000-05:00

there should be an award for this

2011-08-12T13:51:00.000-05:00

I've always liked beans on toast. 'always' as in 'since I first encountered the dish,' I mean. beans on toast is simple. it's cheap and warm and flawless. it's english. what's not to love?

you'd think there wouldn't be much beyond the beans + toast = beans on toast equation to be learned about this lovely concoction. it may be one of the most basic recipes in the universe.

but there was so much I did not know.

one night, five hundred and twelve days ago*, during a drizzly spring weekend in Nottingham, my love for the unassuming simplicity of beans on toast was stretched into something more like an obsessed adoration.

I have my dear friend Chris to thank for all my beans-on-toast-related enlightenment. it was in his lowly kitchen where he combined three slices of toasted bread with a beautiful 13.7 ounces of heinz baked beans in tomato sauce, sprinkled a generous amount of english cheddar on top, and tipped the whole thing up over the edge of amazing with a dash of garlic pepper.

sadly, these photos are not truly representative of Chris's magnificent culinary creation. first of all, I don't regularly eat three pieces of toast in one sitting, slathered with beans or not. secondly, do you realize how tricky it has been for me to recreate his version with any degree of exactness? they just don't sell the right english cheddar cheese in your average american grocery store. finding heinz baked beans is hard enough, honestly. and I've simply been too lazy to scour the spices aisle for garlic pepper.

but I can manage an alright approximation, even if Chris will scowl (stubbornly) with disapproval when he hears that this is mozzarella.

anyway. have I waxed poetical enough about this? if you haven't tried real beans on toast, go out and do your best to find a store that sells heinz beans. once you've got that, the rest will come together easily enough. in the meantime, the award for most supremely delectable and gorgeous beans on toast will hang on Chris's wall until the end of time. unless anyone else in the universe thinks they can do better somehow. I doubt it.

---

*note: of course I haven't been keeping a tally of all those hundreds of days all by myself. do you imagine I could count that high without going rather insane, even with pen and paper? no. but my brain does remember the exact weekend and its date, so it was easy to calculate how long ago it was with this very handy website. there. disclosure over.

one-two-three, one-two-three

2011-08-09T19:53:00.002-05:00

I have fallen in love with dancing lately.

real dancing. not just the stand-around-making-it-up-as-you-go-depending-on-how-the-beat-makes-you-feel type of dancing(though that's alright, too--not saying that kind isn't fun).

I'm talking ballroom dancing. waltzes. swing. salsa. tango. the cha-cha.

I especially like the cha-cha.

there is a dance studio in town. it looks a bit like this:

{ picture borrowed from one of the Ballroom Utah photo albums }

I've been to this place a bunch of times now for dancing lessons, and once for swing night. why did I not seriously learn to dance sooner? I could've been really good at it by now. as it is, I have learned the salsa from Corey (with whom I got to dance the most fabulous cha-cha ever), some fancy waltzing from Seth, and a bit of old-fashioned swing from a handful of random people who were at the studio last friday.

one of those random fellows was named Scott, and as he was leading me through a very basic Charleston, he said, "don't be afraid to follow yourself. you're doing pretty well already." I had stopped in mid-twirl, frozen and unsure of what I was supposed to be doing and where my feet and hands should be. obviously it messes both of you up when you do that. no one can even pretend that you're dancing any sort of dance if you aren't moving.

his advice in that moment still makes me smile. there was a compliment buried in it, of course. but that's not the reason I will always remember that dance and those words. is it bizarrely sentimental of me to twist them out of context and apply them here to life in general?

in my waltzing lesson last month, I learned that great dancing takes thorough physical confidence. despite the fact that I'm the girl, the follower, the one who gets spun and twirled and dipped, I need to give my partner, the leader, something to work with. I need to push back. I need to make sure every inch of me is exuding an I know how to waltz vibe. there needs to be a little friction. pressure. cooperation. flexibility. fearlessness becomes a foundation for all of these other things. if you don't move, nothing cool will happen.

I'm not going to belabor the metaphor here. life. dancing. yep. all I'm hoping is that all these dancing lessons will somehow infuse me with the courage to start following myself. even if I have to fake that thorough confidence, I'm pretty sure the proper footwork will get drilled into my head eventually.

turn turn turn

2011-08-07T02:32:00.000-05:00

it isn't really too much

2011-08-02T20:59:00.000-05:00

there's a chubby paperback book open on my knee. my left elbow is gently leaning right in the middle of page seventeen, holding the book open while I type. and yeah, there's a folded green scrap of paper there to serve as a bookmark, but it isn't worth closing the book. I am going to get back to the short story any moment. it's called "Elegy for a Young Elk," by a Finnish fellow named Hannu Rajaniemi. it's a science fiction story. very futuristic, full of jarring, unexpected events like cyber-esque women raining out of the sky and monsters consisting of old rusted automobiles attacking you as you walk down the street. there are also pigeons.

I am going to go back to reading it any moment. there's an email I'm trying to finish. and a few conversations I'm in the middle of. and this, of course.

earlier today, my genius brother (who is always linking to fascinating articles by Dave Pell) linked to this fascinating article by Dave Pell. it's a clever mesh of action movie and thoughtful blogpost. you should read it. laugh. come back and finish my much less clever rambling about science fiction anthologies later if you want. it's okay.

I will tell you, since for some reason I'm still talking about it, that the paperback on my knee is 537 pages chubby. Mr. Rajaniemi's "Elegy for a Young Elk" is the first of twenty-nine short stories that make up volume five of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. maybe I need to read Jonathan Strahan's introduction to this book more closely, because nowhere have I seen any mention of what year they're talking about. anthologies like this are interesting things. what makes this Jonathan Strahan so certain that he picked the absolute best science fiction and fantasy of the entire year? what if he missed something? why did he only choose twenty-nine stories? isn't that a strange number? did you know that the Greek word from which our word anthology stems actually means garland, or bouquet of flowers? interesting.

anyway, I am only on page seventeen, technically. however: I did also flip to page 73 to peek at Holly Black's contribution. I was sucked right into Cory Doctorow's on page 215 and almost finished it. there is one story called "The Care and Feeding of your Baby Killer Unicorn" on page 393 which I just had to take a quick look at. I realized that I've read a novel by that author once. maybe I should go looking for its sequel. we'll see.

I will get back to "Elegy for a Young Elk" very soon. hopefully my attention will stick, and I won't have to turn back to page fifteen to re-figure out what everything means. the next short story, all the way on page 21, is by Neil Gaiman. I'll let you all know if I make it that far. there are a lot of other books I'm in the middle of right now. but none of them are open on my lap right this minute, so I should be able to handle this. my brain feels a bit like several bouquets of flowers are being crammed into it, dozens of stems and twigs and blossoms at a time. none of the arrangements stay looking how they're supposed to look. almost none of the flowers can escape being irreparably squashed. leaves and petals are falling out. pretty soon no one will want to use my brain as a centerpiece at all.

2011-07-31T13:23:00.000-05:00

open and overflowing at the same time

2011-07-28T22:15:00.003-05:00

it would be lovely to have one day just to sit in a sunny room with a large table and a sewing machine, with a stash full of fabric and notions, beautiful paper and sharp scissors. I could spend hours cutting up magazines and gluing paper together and throwing paint around. a day just to make stuff. mm.

it would also be lovely to spend a week simply stocking up my kitchen and experimenting with food. I want to learn to make sushi. I want to try making ice cream sandwiches and cheese crackers and soups of all kinds. I'm sure there would be lots of baking in there too.

and if I knew I could count on my brain to focus, I'd love a month of perfectly sunny days for spreading out under a tree somewhere, notebooks piled all over my picnic blanket. I'd write and doodle and plot from noon til night every day. who knows how many stories I might finish? (more likely, I'd start sixteen new ones, and forget all about half the poor unfinished things I already have in progress.

life gets in the way of easy, open days like I'm imagining. instead of spending time deep in the creative veins of crafting and cooking and writing, I read, I clean, I rush to work and back, and I spend far too much time soaking in this giant puddle that is the internet.

my realization over this past week has been: I don't like having so much free time to waste. I want to be busier.

grad school will grant me that wish, I expect.

and until that crazy dream becomes reality, I'll need to engineer my own busy-ness. sign up for things. make some schedules. expect more of myself. move the bar up a few notches. start waking up for sunrises (hint: don't go back to sleep, either). dig a deeper well of discipline. fill every moment.

none of the moments will ever come back again. you've got to stuff as much as you can into them while they're in front of you.

um.

2011-07-24T13:50:00.002-05:00

not a raven, just a writing desk

2011-07-23T19:20:00.001-05:00

these are the books I pulled off the shelves of the non-fiction section yesterday. if I'd had more time, I may have pulled off even more. fortunately, friend Jen and I were about to run away for a very random lunch date. I have enough to read.

I kind of want to make a full-size version of something like this:

{ photo borrowed from somewhere in this mess of dollhouse miniatures }

or this one (it's a little more normal-looking):

after all, one cannot rearrange furniture that does not exist in one's house. and since I've been in this empty new house for three weeks and a bit, this existential problem has started bugging me. in another week or so all the belongings from our former house will be sent down here, and then I will have plenty to arrange and rearrange. I am looking forward to that, yes.

but learning a bit of carpentry and building a writing desk of my very own would be awesome, wouldn't it? we'll see, I guess. first I'll read a few of these furniture-making books. then I will think about form and function and hardware and types of wood, make a hundred sloppy sketches and fiddly little diagrams, and figure out all other such preliminary stuff. then maybe dad can teach me how to use his table saw. or whatever saw you'd want to use to make a desk.

how to make a crown of leaves

2011-07-20T19:47:00.000-05:00

it's July. there are long, empty summer days to fill. spending them as much outside as possible is crucial. spending them outside plucking leaves from bushes so you can make a lovely garland for your head is optional, but just in case you ever feel like doing just that, here is a little tutorial.
I learned how to make leaf crowns from an old, red, hardcover book we used to have. it was full of enlightening activities for young people, and it had a section on photography, a section on sewing, and a few sections on outdoor crafts like this. crowns made of leaves. I know you're itching to make one, right? at the very least, you must be itching to teach your daughter or your niece or your kid sister how to make one. they're fun, I promise.

to begin, gather a bunch of beautiful green leaves (actually, they needn't be green. just alive enough to be flexible. dried out leaves will probably crack, break, and/or fall apart).

lilac leaves are some of my favourite to use, and that's what you see in my photographs, but any leaf with a decently long stem will work. how many leaves you need depends on the size of your head and the size of the leaves. you can always pick more if you need.

start with two.

gently pull off the stems of each leaf and be careful not to tear the main part of the leaf. you could use scissors here for a perfectly clean cut... but a sharp fingernail works well enough. keep the stems handy--we are going to use them in a moment.

as you go, you'll layer each pair of leaves like this, so the tip of one leaf covers the base of the next. note that this is a view of the underside, so it looks the wrong way around. I find it easier to work from the back. you of course can do things however you want, once you've got the concept down.

holding both leaves together, make two small slits with your fingernail (unless you really feel like breaking out a craft knife or something like that). be sure to cut all the way through both leaves where they overlap.

here's where you'll need the stems we removed from each leaf. use each little stem as a pin to sew the leaves together. go in from the back so the ends of each stem don't stick out on the front.

keep adding more leaves, using the very same process.

here's how it'll look from the front. I have heard of people hooking little flowers in where the leaves are joined, but I haven't tried that myself. someday I might get to that level. I'll let you know.

when your chain of leaves gets long enough, do a few fittings to test how it will look on your head. once you're pretty sure it'll fit, join the tip of the last leaf over the top of the base of the first leaf. connect it with the last little stem, and there you have a lovely little crown.

this one turned out a little bit large for me, but it stayed on for the most part. if yours is too big, there is always the option of taking out a leaf. or finding someone with a bigger head. or starting over. I suppose, to avoid such mishaps, you could always measure your head beforehand and approach this little outdoor craft with some kind of scientific precision, if that's your thing. I'll leave that up to you.

don't laugh at my slightly goofy grin here. instead, notice the lovely lilac bush in the background. thanks to it for a few handfuls of leaves, and extra thanks to friend Shara for playing photography assistant. somewhere in a box, I think, I have a picture of the two of us wearing leaf crowns we made way back during my first year of college. those were the good old days, eh?

where is the map?

2011-07-17T13:48:00.001-05:00

the shakespeare project 2011

2011-07-13T13:35:00.005-05:00

last year, for what turned into a 2010 shakespeare project, I started in March and steadily made it all the way to September, one play each month. this year, summer didn't come quite so soon. I missed the month of May, sadly, but June was full enough of Shakespeare opportunities, and July is looking to be overflowing with them also.

June 4 The Merchant of Venice by USP

June 11 Romeo & Juliet / A Midsummer Night's Dream from grassroots shakespeare

all three plays were very well done outdoor performances. I wish I could have gone down to see the grassroots shakespeare performance of As You Like It, too, but it didn't happen. I am looking forward to seeing All's Well That Ends Well in August, though. these little acting companies that do so much Shakespeare in the summer are wonderful. I hope they never die.

this week, (starting this very thursday, in fact), friend Allison, friend Mandy, and I will begin our Shakespeare Festival indulgence with Richard III. and then for friday and saturday we'll again sit through (somewhat more professional-grade) renditions of that most comical of all romantic comedies--A Midsummer Night's Dream--and that most tragic of all romantic tragedies--Romeo & Juliet.

adding to these three a performance of The Tempest in Midvale and a children's theatre version of The Taming of the Shrew, I'll have eight altogether (that's one more than last year, unless you count the slight cheating I had to do for october) in only three months. how's that?

patriarchal

2011-07-11T19:48:00.003-05:00

once upon a time, I took a bunch of photographs out in my dad's garage. these are just a few of them.

the garage is not where the family vehicles live. there are too many tools and things in there to fit any cars in. instead, there are shelves and shelves of camping supplies, boxes and boxes of random hardware and scraps of leather. old furniture and bicycles hang from the ceiling. cabinets. toolboxes. buckets. an anvil. a forge. lots of rope. isn't there a lathe in there somewhere? pliers and hammers and vices and clamps and knives and screws and glue and bolts and pipe and saws and sandpaper... it all takes up space.

the garage is probably where you will find my dad when he isn't at work, sleeping, or on a camping trip. the radio will be on. (actually the radio is usually on in the garage, even when dad isn't out there.) the doors will be open. he'll spend whole afternoons fixing things or moving stuff around or carving or hammering or working on some project or other.

my dad collects wood just as veraciously as I collect blank paper and empty journals. he has a few hundred long, straight tree limbs that he's saving to make walking sticks out of. there are logs and planks and boards and weirdly-shaped scraps. walnut and pine and birch and oak of all kinds. the entire garage is practically full of wood. my dad can tell you exactly where he got each piece.

other stuff collects in the garage, too. I don't even know what these round things are, but if they weren't so thick and heavy they would make an awesome pair of clocks, I think. wouldn't they? maybe I'm crazy.

don't ask me why or where or when I got on such a clock-making kick, but now I joke with dad all the time about making clocks out of some of the junk that ends up lying around the garage. seriously though: old circular saw blades = brilliant clock faces. yes?

I took these photographs at least two years ago, and now almost none of this stuff is in our garage anymore. it's being packed up and moved, little by little, into the giant shed behind our new house. that is where all the tools and camping supplies will live. that is where sawdust and wood shavings will begin to pile up. and that is where we will find dad from now on, carving eagles out of whale bone or crafting feathers out of rawhide, at least when he's not at work or sleeping.

squiggly

2011-07-10T13:41:00.000-05:00

suddenness

2011-07-06T18:49:00.004-05:00

last week I threw all my possessions into boxes and moved precisely 4.2 miles around the corner. my zip code changed by one measly number.

I'm 3.2 miles closer to work now. there is a garage and a basketball hoop and a tree full of wind chimes. and we have a sunroom. but I'm going to convince everyone to call it the conservatory. is that okay? who doesn't want a house with a conservatory in it? we could stage our own live-action version of Clue now, couldn't we? dear littlest brother: let's.

a picture of our conservatory. there are my little jade plants again. just behind them is a pot of houseleeks. I hope I don't kill them. maybe I should replant them outside somewhere. maybe they don't deserve to be trapped in a terracotta pot.

I wouldn't call this new house just another terracotta pot for my life... but some people might. I've been replanted so many times now, it hardly matters anyway.

my zip code has changed by one measly number, right at the end. will that be good enough? will this slight rearrangement suffice to soothe my restlessness? or will I remain beset by rather crazy urges to run away to Baltimore? or England or China or Idaho or Canada or New York or wherever?

better questions might in fact be: will I still, despite this perfect opportunity to start over and redraw the map I'm supposedly following, be afraid to do all the things I really want to do? will there still, despite this chance to re-evaluate and resolve, be a million what ifs doing their best to hold me back?

4.2 miles is not very far. I don't think it's far enough to kill the what ifs.

2011-07-03T13:40:00.001-05:00

google minus

2011-06-30T12:15:00.009-05:00

everyone and their yapping newborn puppy has been posting screenshots of google+ over the past few days. it's not that I feel left out, really-- it's just that I'm going to use 'everyone else is' as an excuse to blog a bit about google too. but not about new google stuff--I haven't been invited to join the new facebookesque google+ thing yet. I just wanted to gush randomly about google notebook, which was sadly discontinued way back before I even got home from Canada. maybe it's weird that I still use it now, but oh well. I love my google notebooks.

as most people know, I'm rather incurably addicted to notebooks, and I have at least one for everything you would ever want to take notes on. in my life, of course the internet needs its own notebook. and who better to host such a bottomless notebook than google? according to their lovely about page, their mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. notebooks are perfect for that! and naturally, internet note-taking calls for internet notebooks.

I mainly keep eight google notebooks. four of them are devoted to various novels-in-progress. one is purely for recipes and food-related links, another for listing and organizing the 100 things I might want to do with my life, and another houses the results of my informal survey (which I will someday blog about in more detail, I promise). lastly--though actually it was created first, long long ago--there is the one labeled EVERYTHING, which comprises a very long list of quotes, pictures, thoughts, links, and other randomness. that one is my favourite.

in google notebook, just like with real notebooks, the one I last looked at shows up on the top of the pile. just like with real notebooks, I can occasionally tear things out and stick them somewhere else. just like with real notebooks, most of the time they sit untouched in a nice, neat stack in the corner. only rarely do I find myself with a reason to pull out any of them for more than a split second. usually I'm either pasting in a very quick quote and its reference, or I'm frantically scrolling around looking for a recipe I'm sure I must have copied in at some point.

the best part about google notebooks is they are incredibly easy to edit, add to, and rearrange, unlike some other less-cool google applications. so I'm glad that even though google has given up on developing their notebook thing, I still get to use it. hopefully it will keep working for a long, long time yet.

any suggestions for a back up plan, just in case google notebooks ever dies completely?

and other artists

2011-06-28T12:24:00.001-05:00

Mr. Kershisnik (or more likely, whoever built the artist's website) makes it really hard to even link to my favourites of his paintings. I really would love to point specifically to the several enigmatic and interestingly-titled compositions that caught my interest the other day when I went traipsing through all 23 years of his gallery... but his site is all gooey and vague with php, so the links don't really copy-and-paste well at all.

Kershisnik's style didn't thoroughly please me right away--his art has such a mushy, almost washed-out look--but the more I looked, the more I grew to appreciate whatever it is that must be behind the way this guy paints. he has a way of looking at things that seems very different. but different in a way that seems very familiar. but not familiar enough to be boring.

here are a few of his pieces that I liked enough to dig their static urls out of the source code: lovers running, one and two. spoon trick. the rain. I originally read about Brian Kershisnik over at Mormon Artist. they didn't put titles on the paintings they featured in the magazine, but I'll tell you I love the couple dancing on the small island, and also the bottom one with the girl saying I can never do it when someone is watching. there's something like an echo between certain sets of his paintings. themes, I guess. spoons. lovers. gazing. dancing. flying. I think it's cool.

speaking of artists, I am now going to mention my friend Brendan Clary, who kindly doesn't make it so hard to link to his stuff. he's even got a facebook page. how 2.0 of him, eh? this guy happens to teach pretty killer sunday school lessons and throw very neat, spontaneous parties. most impressive of all, he can paint splendid portraits, like this one. and lovely landscapes. one of my favourites of his is this view of the Jordan River Temple. I love it so much, for some reason. someday I will get my hands on a print of it, to hang on my wall. maybe.

and to round out this trio of painters, I absolutely must include Elsie Boyer. dear Elsie--she and I are great friends. she won't mind me including a copy of one of her paintings, I hope. I feel like I need at least one image to brighten this rambly post about art.

I also really like this one. Elsie's got a blog with all her best work, called embers of art. check out her painted bottles. I keep telling Elsie she should paint on the glass of an empty frame for me. that would be cool. in fact, when I head down to her part of the state in a few weeks, I may just have to cart along some empty frames from the thrift store, and officially commission her to create something marvelous. okay, Elsie? okay. awesome.

flora

2011-06-26T16:38:00.001-05:00

in addition to

2011-06-19T13:36:00.001-05:00

a medley of past junes

2011-06-13T09:10:00.003-05:00

you may have noticed an absence of writing here lately.

I am busy.

and for the nearly entire month of June, I will be hopelessly, gloriously busy working as a counselor to dozens of teenaged girls.

so if you are by chance craving the tangled tang of my strung-together prose, you are welcome to consult the following short list of old blogposts. all of them were originally published in June... just not this June of 2011.

seven stories is just right, an ode to southern california
story ammunition, all about magazines
observations on..., from that day I spent at the airport
the world is quiet here, for the love of reading aloud
hinted at, even though back then I hardly knew anything
waterslides and spoons, or alternatively, ease and beauty
absolute/absolvent, on the nature of truth, words, and me
traffic, which includes a few weird band names
philosophical grammaticality, a sort-of-review
guide and stay, about people, places, things, and change.

that should tide you over, eh?

non-monetary

2011-06-12T13:33:00.001-05:00

hairy

2011-06-05T11:05:00.000-05:00

delta

2011-06-04T14:01:00.002-05:00

I was thinking about that Ghandi quote as I biked to work yesterday. you've heard it, I'm sure. it's probably on a thousand bumper stickers and a thousand fridge magnets and a thousand little plaques on a thousand office desks all across the world. it goes like this:

"be the change you wish to see in the world."

and as I was thinking about that idea, the questions I kept looking back to were:

what change do I wish to see in the world? what does it look like?

I'm sure all of us have things we wish we could change about the way things are and the way things work. I wish there wasn't so much noise. I wish I didn't have to sleep so much. I wish it was a tiny bit easier to travel great distances and see faraway places.

but are those changes something I can embody? are those changes anything I can do anything about?

and more importantly, what would the consequences of those changes be?

I wonder what Ghandi hoped we'd do with those words. we he thinking we could each envision a perfect world and then live as if we were already a part of it? what kind of change did he imagine we could become? did he even have a specific sort in mind, or does he trust the masses of people who quote him to latch on to a type of change that will be for the better?

be the change.

he didn't say make the change. he didn't say initiate the change. this isn't just an action, or even a series of actions. this is who you are. it's everything.

I'm going to keep coming back to this.

painstaking needlework and such

2011-06-01T19:39:00.003-05:00

none of the following were on my list of things-to-blog-about last week.

does that matter?

the list is pretty amorphous, and to it I have recently added some random works-in-progress, which probably don't deserve all this attention quite yet.

this embroidery/hand-sewing project has been and will be unfinished for a while. I've been working on it intermittently for months and months. but I'll let you know if it ever gets done.

and here is a hint at a project I haven't even started working on properly. but I'll write more about it... sometime. in the meantime, be curious.

this one, a very fuzzy and wonderful scarf (yeah, I know it's summer. so what?), I am right in the middle of. I began the thing with borrowed crochet hook, and I have yet to locate my own hook with which to continue. isn't that beautiful yarn? thank you, littlest sister, for not wanting it, so I could have it.

I haven't told you all about this, have I? it's... I don't even know yet. it doesn't count as literal needlework, but it is definitely painstaking. I've been revising The Plaid Identity for writing group lately. for some reason. it's a fun story, but it needs so, so much attention. the blogs I keep setting up for the monstrous thing haven't really helped motivate me to work on it much... but for now, there is the beginning of yet another spin-off (remember this little pirate one?). maybe it will amuse someone while I work on all my random unfinished projects.

PS: happy first of June.

2011-05-29T11:03:00.000-05:00

fade-resistant

2011-05-26T14:06:00.002-05:00

once again I am on the very brink of a roadtrip and once again I have a long list of things I wish I had time to blog about. prizes. suddenness. my dad's garage. apologies. Brian Kershisnik and other artists.

what is it about preparing to travel that adds such urgency to everything you do? so many things today have a last-chance vibe. it's like if you happen to forget your toothbrush, the world is going to end.

it isn't. there are places you can buy a new toothbrush. and even if there aren't, your teeth will probably survive until next tuesday. just stop eating so many peanut M&Ms.

anyway. before I run off for the long weekend, I do have time to blog about a very nice 5,500 word commencement speech.

earlier this month, the person behind one of my favourite voices (his name is Robert Krulwich, one of the radiolab hosts, and yep, he has a blog) addressed a few graduating journalism students. a fellow named Ed Yong posted the entire text of Mr. Krulwich's speech over here. and he says some very cool things. the bits I liked the best talked about love.

"What you love can differ, but the love, once it comes, that feeling of waking up with a kind of eagerness, a crazy momentum that pushes you into your day, an excitement you realize you don’t ever want to go away… that’s important."

and

"If you can… fall in love, with the work, with people you work with, with your dreams and their dreams."

love. love is the best motive. hold on to that when the rest of you feels like panicking, okay?

beyond the periphery

2011-05-24T14:22:00.003-05:00

the word zoom is an onomatopoeiac sound that indicates swiftness.
that's what wikipedia tells me. swiftness. motion. speed. rushing.

to take myself as quickly as possible from this place where I am...

...to a place farther away. somewhere else. changing my position.

and my perspective. (do you see the interstate, right on the edge?)

you can zoom in. or out. around. past. (there is the copper mine.)

is there any preposition that doesn't work? (and look, the salt flats.)

go fast enough, and you might get lost. (wow, that's the west coast.)

far enough, details get lost, too. (but then you can see Greenland.)

and maybe there's something out there you never even considered.

google's map starts tiling the surface of the planet so it repeats in a strange kind of scrollable loop. I know that isn't really what the earth would look like from such a distance. but seeing it that way is interesting. it could be wallpaper. it could be an endless chain of hand-crafted continents around the neck of some gigantic cosmic personage. it could be the artistic result of that gigantic cosmic personage dipping this lovely spheroid in greenish bluish ink and rolling it across the floor of the universe.

this fascinating map tool gives me one way of pinpointing my current location and moving myself little by little further and further away, until that single point gets blurred among so many other points and I am forced to reconsider what it is I'm looking at.

I need to learn how to zoom out of my own head, sometimes. does google make a tool for that? they probably do.

2011-05-22T11:01:00.000-05:00

temporary tempo

2011-05-20T15:07:00.003-05:00

once upon a time five years ago, I blogged about pandora and how cool it was. those four stations have morphed a bit since then, and I must confess I hardly listen to them anymore. Mraz Cake Radio has become Flogging Mraz Death Cake Radio, and I'll switch over to it if I am in the mood for some wild and upbeat stuff sung by men with wonderfully unique voices. but other than those rare occasions, you'll probably find my pandora set to the Sufjan Park Album station. along with Sufjan Stevens and The Album Leaf, it plays a great deal of Wilco.

all three of those musical groups remind me of last summer. lots of phone calls. castles of innocent (but somehow still pretty selfish) hope.

pandora.com is still a great way to discover new and suddenly favourite songs. right this minute it happens to be playing a song called 5 Years Time by Noah and the Whale. I like it despite its repetitive pop. the lyrics have just enough poignance.

now we're back to Sufjan. it's the trumpets he throws in his stuff that summon that cheerful pop vibe, I'm thinking. most of this station is more mellow. some with soft, soft vocals and some with long, slow, bare instrumentals. (me? listening to music without words? what? I know. it's weird.) pandora is good at mixing all of this just right. it even gives me Simon & Garfunkel. lovely.

in another five years, I'm sure I'll have a new handful of custom radio stations. but maybe one of them will dig back in time and play some old, unforgotten track from The Strokes or Bob Dylan. I can see it. someday, somewhere in the future, I'll listen to some old track from The Album Leaf and I will be once more right in the middle of this rainy spring, facing all these dissolving aspirations.

if you have a moment, dear audience, listen to one or two of these songes that my life has been marinating in lately. I'm putting links to them here just for you, and also to form a sonic time-capsule for myself, so I'll always be able to come back and listen to these softly mingled flavors of my past.

One Wing, by Wilco
Window, by The Album Leaf
Chicago by Sufjan Stevens

note to self: you need to actually buy some of The Album Leaf someday. it would make the most beautiful and perfect yoga music. even better than the Iron & Wine you use now.

marvels of adventure vs. clarities of home

2011-05-17T20:31:00.001-05:00

here is the second round of this blog-all-dogeared-pages thing I've done once before. this time it's a nonfiction book called The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars, by a former colleague (he was the editor of Isotope back when I was one of his happy, grateful interns. that counts as colleagues, right?) of mine called Christopher Cokinos(look, he has a website).

reading a book by a person you know (however slightly) is a little bit layered. there are memories of that person waving at you from behind the words, which can be a little distracting. to say the least, it makes the book into a different experience. I loved it, though.

this post's title is adapted from something Chris mentions near the end of his meteorite-memoir: "The marvels of adventure are nothing beside the clarities of home." it is a sentiment that weaves all his homesickness and longing into a solid inequality--home wins. wherever your heart is triumphs. but later he revises his thoughts. the marvels of adventure and the clarities of home both have a place, and they need each other. such balances (and imbalances, also) are what life seems to be all about.

here--and I think I will let all these quotations speak for themselves this time--are all the other notable bits I have taken the liberty of retrieving from The Fallen Sky:

"It's reassuring, though, to be reminded that sometimes the beautiful does lurk." pg 67

"We can view the world scientifically while keeping in mind or heart these enduring metaphors of a sensual sky. Metaphors are like the movies. We go to them suspending our disbelief so we can be swept up in a fiction that enlightens. We've made the sky a kind of body to remind ourselves of function, of necessity, of ardor. Perhaps in doing so we give the sky itself a kind of immortality that we ourselves lack; we invest the sky with timelessness as recompense for our own passages." pg 138

"'Bliss' is a more interesting word than 'success,' I think, but success is an ever-talkative critic that can spur us to do more than we think we can." pg 203

"Walking, I stared into lit apartments the way I would stare at lit living rooms and leafed-out trees glowing like green brains from streetlamps, all those years ago when I went on long walks in my humid college town in Indiana, where I first mistook novelty for passion, stoicism for wisdom." pg 347

"...the south pole is less a pinnacle of exploration and more a weirdly moving testament to the human need to carry itself, its entirety, to every farthest point." pg 383

"...the deepening blue of the sky that colored belief and disbelief, that dared me to say that i was here and that a single life could come up against this like ice flowing into formations, the massive sweep of hese mountains and time and that a single life could follow some hunters of shooting stars and become one by driving across the sky's double..." pg 430

"... to speak one's feelings may be terrifying but it's infinitely preferable to the alienation that blossoms from long-held silence." pg 433

I need to find a copy of Chris's other book, Hope Is the Thing With Feathers. I am sure this Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds is just as finely written and passionately researched as his Intimate History of Shooting Stars.

hmm. what would I decide to passionately research and write about, I wonder, if I were to write a non-fiction book? by all means, start giving me suggestions.

start

2011-05-15T10:56:00.007-05:00

art projects

2011-05-11T01:30:00.006-05:00

the inimitable Ms. Katie Edwards, whom I met approximately three years ago in Canada, was rather obsessed with sharpie markers. she had quite the collection--every imaginable color, every possible width--and it was impressive. we did some fun stuff with those markers, not least of all decorating hard-boiled eggs at easter.

last week, in my trademark, experimental what-can-we-do-to-make-this-junk-look-awesome-somehow style, I took a quartet of old and useless CDs and gave them sharpie makeovers.

the red one sort of looks like muscle tissue... or blood... or something.

I like the black one best, I think. it was first, so it doesn't suffer from the hrm-I-need-to-make-this-one-even-more-unique overkill vibe.

and maybe this one is the ocean. waves. seaweed...

I wish my green sharpie hadn't been so streaky and weird, or that one might have turned out better.

all four together might represent the elements, eh? fire. air. water. earth.

anyway. speaking of sharpie art projects, there is a graffiti artist named Jona Cerwinske who was commissioned to take a handful of black sharpies to a brand new white lamborghini. here is what she did with that combination:

{ photos borrowed from flickr. }

beautiful, hm? if I ever end up with a white car, I think I'd be really really tempted to do something like it.

[ post script: blogger had suffered some craziness last wednesday, so the original of this post--the one that had comments--got deleted. but they finally stuck the old comments back. yay. ]

happy mother's day

2011-05-08T11:14:00.001-05:00

{ I searched all over for the black and white photograph that should accompany this re-posted bit about my mother, but I could not find it. so you get this sketch instead. everyone can debate in the comments if they think it looks like her or not. }

there is a large black and white photograph of my mother and I. I am somewhere around two years old. she is making bread, cradling the telephone on one shoulder, and carrying my soon-to-be first brother. I am eying the camera and wearing a shirt with the word hawaii on it. my hair is short and I look, like I usually look in pictures of me under the age of six, like a boy. the curls of the phone cord are stretched out between us. the bowl she is using is the same yellow plastic bowl that has always existed in our kitchen.

this photograph was taken by my uncle. I don't know why I like it so much, but in my mind it is an iconic thing. my mother on the phone, mixing bread dough. and me standing there, our eyes and faces so similar. really her eyes are brown and mine are blue, but you can't tell in this photograph.

I haven't always been close to my mother. it is my father that seems to match my temperament more exactly. it is my father I've always wanted to be more like. my mother has just been there, mixing bread dough, talking on the phone. I've taken almost everything about her for granted because she has, like that yellow plastic mixing bowl, always been there. and so much about her is ingrained in me. the thick brown of her hair is the same as mine, though she keeps hers short. the shape of her chin is my chin, though she smiles more readily than I do. her voracious reading habits are my voracious reading habits, though she prefers nonfiction.

or maybe I don't know my mother that well. I love to look at pictures of her from before she was married. her hair was long then. she wore lovely dresses. she looked thoughtful.

I don't know if I'll ever be making bread and talking on the phone at the same time with a two-year-old at my side. the world I am in is not the world my mother lives in. but somehow I feel like everything I am is contained within her, just as the earth is contained by the galaxy. whatever I am it is just a little speck of what she is.

{ originally posted June 21, 2007 }

not-so-frameless

2011-05-06T08:02:00.047-05:00

it's too late to do much about this idea, but I think it would've been cool to have kept a scrapbook of sorts, just full of photos from every room I've ever slept in.

I guess it wouldn't make a ton of sense, but projects like that rarely do.

since it would not be practical to go back and re-stage all my old bedrooms for photo-taking, the most I can do is sift through any photos I may happen to have already and put them somewhere with dates and notes and whatever else I feel like including. example: above is the room I slept in for the last half of 2006, in a middle-of-nowhere house in a town with a population of 271 people. yes, that is a poster of Jack Sparrow. familiar essentials are strewn on the bed: books, water bottle, pens and pencils.

really when I think about this potential collection of photographs, I think about the windows of these rooms, each one nothing more than a bit of glass between my inner life and the rest of the world. they frame that outside world in a such a solid, comfortable way. that's why they've all stuck in my memory, I guess. you get used to the way things look through those windows. that tree and those sand volleyball courts-- or that narrow back garden and the corrugated tin roof of the shed-- or the wide, shady sidewalks and carefully planted flowerbeds with pink and purple pansies.

but not all of them stick quite so well. not all of them were rooms that I stayed in very long. that's why it would be nice to have pictures.

I guess I should be grateful I have the few random pictures I have. these bay windows with the orangey curtains look out on a faraway March. there was a couch underneath. a handful of awesome people let me sleep on it for a couple of nights. they also taught me a bit about how to play cricket. sort of.

I don't know why I took these pictures at all. I didn't have this project in mind then, I don't think. maybe I just liked the light. the hedge. something.

even if it's too late to photographically catalogue the windows of all the rooms I've ever slept in up til now, I guess it's not too late to start such a project. and if all the miscellaneous projects I assign myself from time to time didn't tend to fade away into nothing (example: shakespeare project--though I may revive it for the summer, if I can), I might be more inclined to try it.

i am that girl. or i could be, anyway.

2011-05-03T10:43:00.013-05:00

someday, when I grow up, I think it would be really awesome to perhaps run my own design, advertising and interactive studio in Chicago, as an ongoing experiment in web publishing, design and commerce.

okay. it needn't be in Chicago. in fact if I set up such a studio in Chicago, I would be in direct competition with the original ongoing experiment that is Coudal Partners. which would not be very cool of me at all. and yes, okay, I may as well admit right now that I copied the last half of my first sentence from their tiny 'about this site' blurb at the top of coudal.com. and maybe that wasn't very cool of me either, but I don't think they'll mind.

Coudal Partners is one of those websites I can never remember discovering. it's just always been there, feeding me random interesting links and thoughts and ideas. they make notebooks. they host layer tennis. they put together really random (some not so random) videos from time to time. basically, they do whatever they feel like, and if it doesn't work out, they try something else.

I guess that is what everyone does, in some way or another. keep trying things until they click.

Jim Coudal, the guy in charge of this studio in Chicago, said something very cool in this SXSW presentation. I always want to remember it. he said:

"--hire the girl that can write. Because being able to write is a sign of an organized mind, and writing is a tool that is not usually learned well late."

I'm not going to start claiming that my mind is what anyone else might call organized... but I will say that I can write. and that is important. I should probably find some meaningful things to do with that skill, one of these days.

once upon a time I heard an interview Mr. Coudal did here, with some guy named Dan Benjamin. it should be really inspiring to listen to the unconventional ways some individuals get away with making a living, but usually it just makes me a little jealous. so many things do that. seeing people who manage to do awesomely creative stuff every day is something that should ignite a lot of scintillating hope, but so often the sparks just sit there, pointlessly smoldering. I have no one to blame for that but myself, I guess.

open

2011-05-01T15:25:00.000-05:00

circadian

2011-04-27T19:26:00.004-05:00

sleeping is boring.

I've always thought so. which is not to say that I don't enjoy sleeping, once I get there. curling up with blankets and pillows is lovely. dreaming is often unfathomably interesting.

but there are usually hundreds of things I would rather be doing, if I could get away without sleeping. I could read so many books. write so many stories. learn a new language. I could talk on the phone or doodle on postcards or go for midnight walks and study the stars.

if this five-foot-tall flesh-and-blood shell of mine didn't need to sleep, would I really use all that nighttime any more effectively than I use the daytime? of course I would hope so. maybe it's for the best that I usually don't get a chance to find out. thankfully, I don't often deal with any serious insomnia. lately I have been waking up at random much-too-early times, which could be a symptom or a cause--and I have no way of being sure which--of the slightly crazy moods I've been swinging between for the past week. maybe the two reinforce each other. I guess I can at least hope they both stop eventually.

out of everything else on the long list of things my flesh-and-blood shell needs to be happy, sleep is one of the least complicated to get. it costs nothing, takes practically no effort, and requires no help from anyone else. normally, given a bed and a book and a few minutes to hum myself into a drowsy relaxation, I have no trouble falling straight into a soft, steady unconsciousness.

waking up can be harder, especially if I've made no definite plans for the morning. since I don't work until the afternoon, it's so easy to let the world drift on while I stay in pajamas reading and journaling and staring out the window. this morning I pulled back my curtains to a brilliantly sunny backyard. the trees by the fence are just starting to produce delicate little clumps of popcorn. the whiteness of them against the perfect spring sky was simply captivating. in fact if I had not been so captivated, I might have bothered to take my own pictures.

maybe tomorrow.

{ this photo borrowed from one of the many kind souls on flickr. }

it's supposed to be an even more brilliantly sunny day tomorrow.

eggshell realities

2011-04-24T14:23:00.003-05:00

two years of sunday scribbles and nobody has offered me a book deal for this amazing series of sketches. heh.

happy easter to everyone.

some very official mail

2011-04-19T12:01:00.002-05:00

not the greatest picture, I know. but there they are. my actually official on-paper GRE scores. 710 on the verbal, an identical 710 on the quantitative, and a lovely 4.5 for the writing.

so:

if...

unless...

as long as...

some days this plan B seems pretty close. I can see the lofty edges of it against the bright, unreachable sky, and I can almost touch the smooth and flawless ivory stones at the base of the tower.

other days, I can't see anything. I could blame the weather. or my smudged spectacles. but it doesn't really matter the reasons. it's plan B. and the future is inscrutable.

in my very first post about grad school (not counting this ancient one, anyway), I said:

this all might be very pointless.
I'm going to do it anyway.

with every might, there is also a might not. I just have to swallow them both and keep walking. there will be stars to shine on whichever path I end up taking.

curtsey

2011-04-17T13:49:00.002-05:00

everything looks a little blurry right now

2011-04-13T10:36:00.005-05:00

my best self, she is cool with the blurriness. she is perfectly poised on the rim of uncertainty. she's telling the rest of me to breath deep and trust.

wish

2011-04-10T13:48:00.000-05:00

curly brackets

2011-04-08T15:35:00.003-05:00

last month, most of the world was a bit obsessed with basketball, and I was a bit obsessed with The Tournament of Books.

it started one month ago yesterday, and the final match took place just this Monday. the winning novel was a book I happened to have on my shelf a while back, actually: A Visit From the Goon Squad. I didn't get around to making time to read it then. but now I think I must, just because of what everyone said about it as they judged the final championship.

of the sixteen books The Morning News chose to be part of this rather geeky tournament, I have only read one: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. (it was a weird book. not an unenjoyable book... but definitely weird.) looking over the line-ups from the past six years of the tournament, I'm realizing I am not as well-read as I ought to be when it comes to contemporary literature. six years, sixteen books each, and among all of them only a tiny handful of titles I even recognize? that's just disappointing, right? well. there are a lot of books in the world. no one can read them all, no matter how hard we try...

but I have added a few of this year's titles to my 'to-read' list. in a world where I had nothing to do with my life besides read, I would add them all to my 'to-read' list. but for years now I'd had to admit to myself that not every single piece of printed matter in this universe is worth the time. sadly.

for me, reading a lot of great writing about reading a lot of great writing is infinitely more entertaining than watching ten people rush about throwing spherical objects into hoops and whatnot. how could it not be? I am a writer. I am a reader. this is my element. I may just go back through the archives and read every match commentary by every participating judge in the Tournament of Books, all the way back to 2005.

and I was telling friend Angela just yesterday, in fact, that I think I should write more about books. not that I'd ever call myself a real book reviewer or anything... but it's pretty fun to distill a piece of writing and one's thoughts about it into words. maybe if I get good enough at it, someday I can be a judge for a future Tournament of Books. would that not be really awesome?

{ image copyright The Morning News Tournament of Books }

amelioration

2011-04-05T20:24:00.002-05:00

on Tuesday, March 22, somebody googled the phrase what word will make everything better, and not surprisingly, the greatest of all search engines happened to point that somebody to this wonderful blog of mine. whoever it was didn't stick around. for all my writing about words and what they mean to me, I guess it's not immediately obvious that anything here has any practical application. my ramblings are not very helpful. (semi-random fact: the day before this happened, a completely different someone found me by searching for backwards pocketwatch reminder quote. sadly, that person didn't stay long either...)

words make everything better, so I say.

I really believe that, you know.

but which words? they've got to be the right ones, don't they? random words hardly constitute proper communication, and when I say words make everything better, I am really saying that communication will solve all your problems. communication is the answer. communication is essential. a lack of communication means everything starts falling apart. not being able to talk about things means not being able to fix them.

although... not all communication requires words. and sometimes, no matter how many words you use, communication fails. maybe there's too much noise. maybe there's nobody listening. maybe you don't mean what you say.

so maybe the secret isn't just words. there's a lot of stuff behind the words that make them powerful. communication takes effort. patience. understanding. that's why it can be so wonderful when you take time to make it work. when you and whoever you're talking to can give and take and build and rejoice. to make things better you need a few people to want them better. and then you just have to keep wanting it, and keep doing and saying whatever it takes to get there.

there isn't one single word that will ever automatically make everything better. sorry to say so, random googler, but I am not a magician.

can I say anything about what the right words might be? or how we might be able to sort them out of our lexicons and use them properly and recognize them when we see them in the world around us?

yes. I could say a million things about that. maybe I will have to start documenting moments in my life when words have made something better. I could start with songs. I could hint at a handful of crazy relationships. I could talk about my job.

any situation...

any collection of stories...

they need the right words. and the words need meaning, and they need authenticity.

one of those things you can get from a dictionary (more or less), and one of those things you can't get anywhere else but inside your heart.

---

PS. for your information, I have revised my about page. and no, I don't think I will always tell you when I have revised my about page. it changes randomly, much like its subject tends to do.
also, I posted over here today. lovely old photographs. mm.

just walk

2011-04-03T12:43:00.000-05:00

sure as the most certain sure

2011-03-31T19:41:00.041-05:00

earlier this week, as a break between quizzing myself on analogies and quantitative comparisons, I dipped myself into Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. yes, yes, I do know that they shelve poetry in the nonfiction section. does that make it boring? no. it doesn't. not all nonfiction is boring. just most of it.

anyway--I started with the famous 'Song of Myself.'

Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much?
Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
— Walt Whitman

it's proud stuff. there are a dozen other sections I would love to quote. I took the title of my post today from part 3, line 12. I love the beginning of part 5 and all the poignant images in part 8. you start to get this idea of the poet encompassing all things--somehow on the inside and the outside and underside of every little smidgen of the world, taking time to marvel and wonder and question. and he writes all of it down in this lengthy, sensual free verse, just so the rest of us can put out our fingertips and touch at least one thin layer of what it feels like to be so full.

the whole poem makes me want to go sit outside in a big empty field and spend the afternoon looking at things, digging around in my heart to find a place and a description for them all.

how long would that take me?

I came across this today. it's a guy named Austin Kleon doing what he calls talking to a previous version of himself. Mr. Kleon quotes Goethe: “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.” and then he talks about shaping and fashioning our own selves in the creative work we do. "In my experience, it’s in the act of making things that we figure out who we are." that's quite a beautiful, cyclical idea. I am shaped and I am shaping, all at the same time, in discovery of who I am and what I mean. in creating something new I can sort of recreate myself? all the the blank paper I surround myself with, and all the stories I spill onto it, all the scrawling lines and curls in the margins... all of that together becomes a frame for everything that is me?

and all Whitman's proud vision? all his rolling mesh of observation and introspection? that is a frame for who he was. and it still is, even though he died in 1892. I guess whatever we spend time creating will leave behind a shadow of who we have been. that's what we're all doing here, after all. we are creating ourselves.

an impossibly amazing person told me recently that the person I am is easy to see in all my sketches. I've waited my whole life to hear someone say that to me and for it to be really, deeply true.

was it?

back and forth, up and down

2011-03-28T20:27:00.000-05:00

I am going to ace the GRE on thursday.

yes, that is the story I'm telling myself. I'll adjust the definition of 'ace' later on if I must. cross your fingers that I won't need to.

and once that gargantuan standardized test is overwith, I'll be facing a slew of other things to check off this disorganized list of mine. I've been waiting and waiting and waiting so long for so many of these things. and it's hard to tell which things I can do more than wait for and which things I can't. none of it's easy. every week there are things you've learned to count on and suddenly those things change. or they disappear. or get complicated. or stop making sense. or move out from under you. or just get forgotten.

{ image by this kind soul on flickr. }

it's easy to get scared. anger and fear can drag themselves through you as if you were nothing. doubts can carve holes in you like you were made of soap. and what can you do? there are a million things you can't anticipate. a million things that won't be anything like what you expect (even if you were once exceedingly sure about them). and a million things that you just don't know. and maybe it's impossible for you to know them.

my dad told me this weekend that those million things should be exciting. they are a million things you get to find out. a million things you get to learn.

{ image by another kind soul on flickr. }

I resolved back in January to be a little more excited about life. I guess I wanted to hold on to the sense of optimism I'd come across so unexpectedly last summer, and I figured that filling my head with things to be excited about (even the smallest of things: yoga class. the brilliant view from this quiet little library. learning the lyrics to an awesome new song.) would do something to keep it alive, even if just barely. has it worked? maybe.

the word optimism is related to the word optimum, which means the best possible. to see the best possible world in the world that you're living in... that's quite a skill. sometimes it takes a lot of patience to find bright, happy things in this dreary world. sometimes it takes effort to change your perspective and refocus on all the good things instead of the things that are missing or lost. it takes patience, and determination, and faith, before you can take the brutally unchangeable circumstances you're given and envision something wonderful and worthwhile happening in spite of them, or even because of them.

{ and this one is also from yet another kind soul on flickr. }

almost everything is temporary. so even if right now you can't see anything at all anywhere that could be called the best possible, you can imagine a moment in the future where everything is different, can't you? a future where you've found some answers and made some decisions and vanquished some demons. even if nothing else changes, you can change. you can keep looking up. you can say something. you can move. you can pray. you can write. you can give. you can turn around. you can run. you can adjust a few definitions, adjust a few expectations. you can wait. just don't ever give up on finding the best possible.

I know it's out there. I just hope I recognize it when it gets here.