books books and more books

at the end of last summer, the family gathered on the edge of Idaho and Utah to see my paternal grandmother off on her journey from this world into wherever we find ourselves after. 

from among grandma's things, I was bequeathed an old 70s-style woven and leather bag (I have vague memories of grandma toting her students' papers and homework sheets and such around in it, once). most weeks now, at my house, it is a perfect home to my choir music and a bit of spare lip balm. 

but before I brought it home, more or less just as my dad handed it to me, I found a highlighter pen and a few scraps of notepaper in the bag's many pockets. one little note was a list of medications. the other was a list, in soft, properly-formed cursive pencil, of authors and a few titles:  

G.G Vandagriff
Lynn Austin
Thomas Perry
Linda Nichols - Not a Sparrow Falls 
Chris Stewart - The God of War 
Ted Bell - Nick of Time 
James Kunstler - World Made By Hand, The Long Emergency
Angie Sage
Jessica Richard Draper
Beverly Lewis

and then, in pen at the end, written slightly larger, 

Diana Crawford

when I got home and had a minute, I looked them all up in my local library catalog. of the available options they had for me to put on hold, only one author seemed interesting enough-- James Howard Kunstler. I've read three of his books from the World Made By Hand series now.

they're pretty neat. not all that earth-shattering, as far as post-apocalypses go, but well enough written and engaging. against the premise of oil-shortages and societal collapse, we have a tapestry of colorful characters surviving together. every horse that is mentioned gets described specifically by breed. every antique piece of furniture is given all the fancy labels an auction catalog could ever ask for.  

did grandma ever read these too? I'm not sure.  

I do know we both liked making things by hand from time to time. 

maybe I'll get my hands on some others from her list, eventually.  

more recently, I've been poking around at the short list for this year's Tournament of Books. I got my hands on Bunny so that We Love You, Bunny would have more context. not sure I liked the first-- its ending was pretty interesting though-- and we'll see how much patience I can muster up for the self-absorbed and anxiety-ridden MFA student collective that seems to be narrating the next one. at this rate I won't have time to read anything else at all in advance of the tournament, but so it goes. 

at dear friend Angela's house last month I perused her library for just a few moments and was tempted by a pair of slightly chubby fantasy novels by Naomi Novik: Uprooted and Spinning Silver. they were just the thing to offset the stress and chaos of a new spring semester. good, deep historical fantasy with rich cultural flavor and complexity of character-- I loved them both so much. the second especially so. it would look gorgeous in a video adaptation, I bet.

so of course now I am in a serious obsession with Naomi Novik novels. the other day I finished, too soon, the audiobook of A Deadly Education-- the first in the author's Scholomance trilogy. I loved it so much I think I'm having withdrawals from the world and the voices and the magic of it. it was all so vivid and gritty and perfect. please let the second and third audiobook copies arrive quickly via Libby, please. 

on paper, the series didn't sound that interesting. it is more than easy enough to think we've had enough wizard highschool stories, yeah? 

I'm glad I borrowed it anyway. it is a darker take on the international wizard school trope, but not at all trite or twee or annoying. I found it thoroughly enchanting, with superb world building and expertly balanced first-person narration. we inhabit for 13 well-paced chapters a snippy, mixed-race protagonist named Galadriel (El for short) who somehow, despite being perfectly stubborn and rude to all her classmates, is eloquently self-aware enough with her narrational monologues to come across as relatable and even likeable. I kept thinking of this as Kuang's Babel meets Harry Potter meets Wheel of Time. maybe. not the most apt comparison, I'm sure. ah well. 

books are awesome.

what have you been reading lately? 

three sisters

over the past few months I've been devouring audiobooks on the weekends. I basically listened to Stardust in one long stretch on a Sunday, knitting and gardening and crafting and tidying the house as I did so. (in the meantime, my backlog of podcast subscriptions is somewhere close to 100 hours. trade-offs, eh?)

there was plenty of Tana French and a bunch more Barbara Kingsolver too. and then, friend Michelle recommended Alix E. Harrow's Starling House somewhere around the end of August. I loved this book, despite its few melodramatic tendrils of YA-ness, which honestly I cannot really fault it for anyway. the ending was excellent and poignant and deep and gritty. so, so good.

I'd heard of Alix E. Harrow quite a bit, so I somehow assumed she'd been around for many years and that I was super late to the fangirl party... but nope, her first novel was published only five years ago. (I just finished listening to that one too-- The Ten Thousand Doors of January. it's a most adorable and fun adventure indeed.)

by the grace of my library audiobook app, I ended up making my way through Harrow's novels in reverse order. her latest, Starling House, first, with its echoes here and there of Kingsolver's Appalachia, sketched in words as vibrant, shadowy, heartbeatingly real and more-than-real. 

then Libby handed me The Once and Future Witches.

a fairly trite title with many echoes of its own-- will we get any scraps of Aurthurian ledgend here? 

I wasn't sure what to expect but this story drew me in completely and I was marvelously invested in all of it pretty quick. the book rotates among the points of view of three sisters. eldest, middle, youngest-- maiden, mother, crone-- each with her own ferocious sense of how the world could be, if only... 

and there is real magic. witching. spellcraft bubbling all through this alternate New England at the end of the nineteenth century. so cool. the story as a whole pulls and pries and re-weaves so many other stories into itself. I loved it. and before long it made me think of my own sisters.

I have two sisters. I don't often consciously think about the fact that two sisters means there are three of us. 

I've given us epithets before though, not realizing the cliche of it. one of us is the fearless one. the popular one. the clever one. the pretty one. the smart one. the nice one. or at least it's kind of neat to boil our essences down like that, sometimes.

The Once and Future Witches leans a fair bit on this concept for its central three sisters, and to some extent for the other trios of women who show up along the course of the plot. Bella is the wise one, the scholar, the librarian, the eldest. Agnes is the strong one, the independent one, the middle child about to have a baby of her own. and June, the youngest, is the wild one: rebellious and untamable, and most naturally talented with witching. 

three witches. such a ubiquitous trope. three itself is practically a trope, right? the rule of three. beginnings, middles, and ends. it's a sturdy, solid, sustainable prime number, lending its lovely balance to three-legged stools, three-corner hats, three primary colors, and a bunch of other things. witches. sisters. bears. pigs. amigos. stooges. musketeers. branches of government.

does one of the three being wise mean the others are necessarily less wise? or does the beauty of one necessarily outshine that of the other two? cannot three sisters be more or less equally strong?

yes and no. maybe. maybe not. it depends on how you measure these things, I suppose.

of course I also thought of Pratchett's three witches-- Esmerelda Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and young Magrat. perhaps I should reread their books to see how his version of the trope look to my 20-years-older perspective.

what would my sisters and I do if we had magical powers? so many things, I imagine. our circumstances aren't so neatly intertwined and story-arced as those of the sisters in this novel, but I do like to imagine we each have our own ferocity for changing some little segment of the world. 

and I've got brothers too. four of them. how does that change the math and dimensions of the trope, I wonder?

 

unknown or reknown

thinking about my grandmother lately, off and on, I sometimes puzzle over how close and also how distant she seems. her birthday is coming up in a few days.

this painting (well, this print of a painting) hung over grandma's nice upright piano for as long as I could remember. and now it hangs in my office/craft room/guest room. 

I feel so grateful to have inherited this art, and I do not care one bit that it is a relatively commonplace mass reproduction. the light and shadow and movement of it say something-- something too immediate for words. I don't think my sense of this is just nostalgia, though there are indeed decades of memories sprinkled on whenever I look at it. 

today I looked up the name and artist engraved on the little plaque, for the first time. Moonlight Sea. Peter Ellenshaw. he did a lot of these beautifully peaceful ocean horizon paintings, apparently. prints like mine seem to have been pretty popular in the '50s and '60s. 

before then, Ellenshaw also worked as a matte artist for plenty of old films, inncluding 1959's Darby O'Gill and the Little People and Mary Poppins too. did grandma know that, I wonder? I only know it because the internet and Wikipedia exist at my fingertips. 

but I'm sure my grandma had so many other ways of knowing things. 

it's funny what our brains remember or don't. or think we remember. 

this grandmother was the first person to wink at me, as far as I recall. the full conspiratorial meaning of it was likely lost on me as a child, but it felt fun and silly and made the moment into a story. 

my other memories of grandma are a montage of bright and faded. so many quilts for the chilly basement bedrooms. green grass and a clothesline. frozen whole wheat waffles. cereal on the top shelf of a gaping deep dark pantry. sitting on the cement steps for photographs. plastic toys on a thick, round, stripey rug. and her voice piping up if anyone looked at any corner of that piano--a little raspy but bright and cheerfully insisting-- 'play us a tune, won't you?' 

and usually someone would. 

perhaps the strongest, deepest memory I have of that house, just a stride or two left from the piano and its painting, is the narrow closet full of toys and games and books (among them, this old woven fairytale). 

maybe the closet still has books and toys in it. newer ones, if any. the whole house looks hugely different now from how it did when I was young. there are no photos of the closets in the listing... but a closet of games and books for visiting tourists could make sense, couldn't it? 

I find myself wishing that I knew more about what my grandmother thought of this painting. where did she get it? was it bought, or a gift? did she see the same things in it I think I see? would she have better words for its movement and shadow and light?

she would have been 96 this autumn. 

if I live that long, I'll get at least 56 more autumns (hopefully, anyway. I hope I always live somewhere with a proper autumn.)

.

in other news, there are twenty standard weeks until this little blog turns 20 years old.

and then what?

goodbye, January

since the eve of 2024 one month ago, it feels like so much has happened. some of it too fast, too soon, too painfully. 

the grief of losing the first little doggo that I ever really shared my longterm day-to-day life with... I cannot describe it. as much as I'd like to keep trying to, the feeling altogether and gargantuanly transcends words. the whole experience is impossible to talk about in any satisfying, accurate, indubitable way. "losing"? "letting go"? that we "had to" say goodbye? what kind of stupid, broken euphemism circus is this? everything about our language-cloaked expressions of such pain just feels utterly inadequate.

{ I suppose we can't have sunrises without some sunsets. }

{ and nothing lasts forever; dog-years are too extra short. }

it is probably irrational to think no one else could ever know what I mean, even if the words and metaphors feel so flimsy. it's not like I'm the only person to ever experience this sort of sadness. nor is this the first unexpected loss in my life. but it has been the closest and the sharpest. so far.

on new year's day I wrote something about how the world (a world so embroiled in hate and genocides and ugly senseless conflict!) is an absolutely crushingly horrific mess, how my heart hurts and hurts and hurts, and how this loss seems to prefigure and to threaten-- or, even more, to promise-- every other inevitable loss I will ever have to face for as long as I live.

it's one thing to philosophically observe, in general, that nothing can last forever. okay. of course. to confront and deeply feel it-- specifically-- as one solitary ending to the life of a inimitably cuddly goofy fuzzy little domesticated animal... that is different.

other aspects of this January were plenty normal, whatever that means. most of my activities seem to come with rather suitable words with which to sketch them into sharable imagery: going to bed early and sleeping in. checking out library books. reading and ignoring and sorting and replying to emails. seeing friends. enduring snow and rain and cold. demonstrating crafts at the museum. putting birdseed in the feeder in the backyard. talking with family on the phone. eating quiche. drinking tea. making soup. needing a haircut but not yet ever managing to go out and get my hair cut. sweeping the floor. running errands. craving hot chocolate. writing lists and syllabi and assignment sheets. spending money. making things. existing. 

{ eclipse shadows from October, 2023. Wesley's last weekend camping trip with us. }

sure, nothing lasts forever. change is nature. this too shall pass: all of these phrasings alternatingly as full of solace as they are of tragedy, representative of a fact more solid than perhaps any other so-called fact. death and endings are, from one point of view, more normal, more mundane, more irrefutable than any of the other relatively comfortable, unassuming, smoothly proceeding lifestuff I might casually document and remember about this particular month of the year. that's what feels so difficult and impossible about it.

the vortex of this heartache felt immeasurable, indescribably vast and infinite, from the inside. 

even so, from a day or two or ten beyond, it begins to shrink and fade. all future moments frame it into something more manageable.

but again the words seem to balk and fail me. "manage"? is that what we are meant to do with these feelings? this grief? is that actually possible? the stringy, endless paradoxes curl up inside of each other, confounding my basic little human brain with ineffability.

{ classic pug-under-the-table photo, new year's eve 2023 }

January, perhaps fittingly, seems so very long. all the transitions it spans-- all the shifting, deepening of the dark season, the post-holiday recoveries, the shiny new beginnings of a calendar year and of an academic semester-- all of that is a lot for 31 average winter days.

I don't know if it really did feel longer for me this year, or if I'm only saying that because it seems like an appropriate thing to sigh into this semi-bleak and impermanent world. 

one month ago, as the cold moon began to wane and the spinning earth began to tilt just barely back towards the sun, our little old dog ate his last breakfast and went on his last stumbling walk and took one final car ride, sitting on my lap. I only knew him for half his life. I wasn't sure if I'd get along with such a beast at first. but we did get along, so well. I loved that pug and I'm glad he was here to share so much of the too-short day-to-day of my life for a while.

palimpsest

seasons of 90 days each. seems like plenty of time. one quarter of a full circle, fair time for each mood of the year.
what was I wanting to blog about?

paper and trees. loud noises and how to hear through them.  

-

I've been thinking a lot about my grandma. grandma Ashdown. she comes into my dreams

my coat pockets for the past two winters have held traces of that March funeral three years ago: a whole pecan my dad had given me. bottle of lotion from the hotel. baggage claim slips. 

-

this week the seasons tangibly tilted, almost all at once, one into the other. winter-spring chills are banished by the baking warmth of full-on spring. snow and freezing feel like the smallest of old memories from here.

there are new plants! phlox and day lilies and an easter cactus.

the last day of classes, yesterday. the whole semester at its boiling point, with only grading and emails left before it all simmers away.

for summer break? so many art plans.
and exercise plans.
reading and rereading,
writing and rewriting.
paints and puzzles and games. plenty of sunshine too.

I'd been thinking about all the roles from whatever Goffman theory of something or other... but I'd forgotten the words for it.

my other grandma was a teacher. she taught much younger humans than I get to teach, and I don't know how she had the patience. but if it weren't for her and others like her who somehow do, all the building blocks of reading and writing wouldn't be there for my students to use for anything more advanced.  

-

six years ago, riverside vows in the rain.

now? I must finish all this grading and work. then we'll go lay about in the sunshine. fix my bike. go camping at least 3 times. family reunion adventures in July. rent kayaks every week if we feel like it. 

-

I found this letter in the back of an old mostly-empty journal. it's a letter I never sent, for some reason. there isn't year with the date of Jan 22 in the corner-- but all evidence (the stationery, my careful handwriting and lack of capitalization, the turn of phrase and the doodles at the bottom) points to 2001 or thereabouts.

it is written to yet a different grandma-- step-grandma, if we need to be that specific. it conjures different memories. twenty-two years ago? when I was barely almost kindof a grown-up?

"grandma chesley:
greetings! all the family says hi and wishes you well. i decided that i would write this whole letter just because. [hearts] life's been crazy as it always is. i wonder when it will all settle down. anyway meanwhile i go on through all these crazy experiences, thinking all sorts of crazy things while in so many different moods. it seems like everything changes, but never the way people expect. i really really hope my life turns out well. most of the time it seems like i have no clue and won't amount to anything special. the things i care about can be so ridiculous and yet so serious... that's just more proof that life is a paradox.

for all the wrong in the world, the truth seems extraordinarily unbelievable at times. it certainly is hard to concentrate on the good and the beautiful when so many trivial matters lie in the way. i think i would give anything for an eternity of peace, and i guess that is really what we are reaching for.
[smiley, heart, flower, star, leaf, raindrop, rainbow]"

dear past self, it will not settle down. but you'll learn to settle yourself and settle into yourself. eternity may or may not exist in any meaningful way for these limited human brains of ours, but peace does, at least.

almost winter break

the stars in the winter seem brighter, or shinier, or at least more, possibly because there is more night for them to shine in.

yesterday, it rained and rained and rained all afternoon and evening. it began around noon as the barest mist of precipitation in the grey, chill air. at some point while I was teaching my last three technical writing classes of the semester, it intensified until all the sidewalks were slicked and slippery. 

today was the first fully cold-cold day of the season. 

a dusting of snow on top of Granite Mountain made it look a little like a delightfully craggy, if lopsided, bundt cake. 

(did you know that "bundt" is technically a trademarked brand name? I was somewhat astonished to learn this when I doublechecked my spelling just now. I guess it's like kleenex and google and velcro and all the other trademarks that have crept into the zone of regular old vocabulary for what was once the latest amazing innovation but is now just everyday stuff. the company still enforces its trademark over Bundt cake pans-- but you can call the cake itself a bundt cake without issue. thank goodness.) 

way up to the north, the mountains around Flagstaff have much more than a dusting of snow-- they look like they've been repainted altogether in a major revision to the horizon. the distant trio of sharp peaks seem to be layered with at least seven perfectly fine, perfectly white veils of silk. 

when will it snow here in the valley? my guess is not until next month. but it's hard to say. the nights are officially freezing. the skies have been grey all week. the chill wind and the bright sun are battling over the temperature of the air.

now that classes are over, we'll see if I can sleep in past the late sunrises and hibernate a bit more, as nature's signals have been directing us all to do for at least a month. 

what else? my other winter break plans include... 

- visiting my family and homeland to the north
- getting a neat haircut, and maybe some highlights or color or something to go with it
- reading at least ten books for fun
- watching all the longest versions of all the Lord of the Rings films
- baking several pies + some other sort of holiday sweets for the neighbors 

I did want to join a Christmas choir this month, but I'm still a bit too worried about a certain viral pandemic situation. and singing in a facemask doesn't seem like it would be feasible or effective. hopefully next year...?

in less fun (but still pretty fun) arenas, I also have research to work on (more podcast transcript tracking, among other things) and LibriVox projects to edit and finish (just 4 more sections of this to get done). and that is plenty. in fact, I should take some of my expectations about all that down a few notches. two pies will probably be plenty. 

we'll see how industrious I actually want to be during the nineteen or so days of de facto freedom I have before spring semester drags me back to the office. if I can plan all my Business Communication syllabi next week, I won't have to think about that at all until probably... January 10 or so. 

 

{ these two images are very old scans of very old Christmas card sketches }

late autumn in the desert

I am in between roadtrips at the moment. tomorrow we set off east, north, to the cold windy scapes of Chicagoland. I hope the trip is smooth and not too exhausting. the holiday time with in-laws will, I'm sure, be festive and cheery and very much worth the two-day drive.

last weekend, taking advantage of our Veteran's Day day off, I took a short, sweet roadtrip up to St. George. I stayed with friend Chalice for a few nights, ate some great food (including cheesecake crepes and almost-too-spicy basil chicken ramen), and joined my sister to hike or rock climb or something. I wouldn't find out exactly which until I got up there.

first, we spent the morning leisurely hiking around Confluence Park, enjoying the morning sunshine glinting all over the the bright blue Virgin River. it was such a gloriously nice day.

next was the more rigorous bit. we set out with ropes and harnesses to rappel down into a slot canyon and canyoneer around boulders and through puddles. it was a beautiful spot-- Red Cliffs National Conservation Area. I had never been there, never done anything like rappelling, but so it goes when one signs up to tag along for unspecified outdoorsing. 

as it turns out, it was awesome.

{ photo taken and shared by one of our canyoneering companions who brought their phones along }

 

hopefully I get to do some more of it again someday. beautiful rocks and autumn foliage. strenuous exercise. gravity. adrenaline. scraped and muddy shins.

 

much of this adventure reminded me of my final spring break as an undergraduate, years and years ago. the Red Cliffs isn't far at all from Zion National Park. the steep climb out of Yankee Doodle Canyon reminded me just a little bit of the last few yards up to the top of Angels Landing, sans the helpful chains.

the whole canyon loop we followed is less than a mile long, but keeping our socks dry from puddles and taking time for so many photographs slowed us down considerably. the sky was darkening by the time we even found the way up and back to the road. the moon, a nearly perfect half-moon, peeked down at us and pulled thicker and thicker layers of darkness out over the whole sky. it got cold in a heartbeat. 

 

the next morning, I drove home again, on mostly empty highways, first under star-strewn pre-dawn black and then alongside a peachy pale sunrise that just so softly outlined the shine of Lake Mead as I raced across Nevada. Arizona welcomed me back again with more traffic and more sunshine, more desert, more cactuses. 

 

tonight, the moon is a soft fuzzy circle of shine, like a gauzy flower all aglow. tomorrow, perhaps she will see us off at our early departure toward the north-east.

smoke and sunbeams

last week the first cold snap of this autumn season came to town, frosting across everything and showering the night with hailstones.

the chill in the air has since then become less snappish. we're used to it now. the mornings demand scarves and layers and a brisker pace when we walk the little pugs.

last weekend there was a camping trip. it was glorious-- we had such a lovely time. I was so refreshed and grateful for all that time in the woods. we didn't go far, just a 40-minute drive up into the mountains. for both nights the moon was so bright, so round and brilliant behind the tallest pine trees, that it felt like someone was shining a floodlight through the southeast wall of our tent.

during our explorations Friday night, Hamilton and I met the most gloriously gnarled, fat, wise and beautiful juniper tree. my googling has led me to believe it's probably an alligator juniper, aka a checkerbark juniper or Juniperus deppeana. someday I will learn more about dendrology and have more to go on than too-cropped google images or what Wikipedia says.

anyway, she was most gorgeous: grey smooth trunks wrapped in thick scabby layers of bark, reaching out with such balance and grace, her whole being angled just so against the rocky ridge, all shrouded in green sprigs of pokey starlike juniper leaves.

{ that's her, my new favourite tree, on the right. }

that evening as the light faded, we ate the most traditional of camping fare, tin-foil dinners. mine was salmon on top of potatoes, carrots, onion, and red pepper. Jeremiah's was fake-chicken with all the same veggies plus plenty of cheese. tin-foil dinners are my family's tradition. it was great fun to introduce them to my husband after all this time.

once we'd set up camp there was nothing to do but sit and enjoy it all. I found myself quite enchanted by a small stone just across from the campfire-- red lavarock pocked with bubbles. where it sank into the pine-needles and dirt, there was a wisp of greenery twining up, little round frilly leaves bobbing lightly against the dark red. those colors and textures-- lava and leaves-- kept drawing my eye. but I didn't take a photograph.

early Saturday, we watched the sun climb and climb over the mountainside and up through the tall pines. its bright beams streamed visibly through all the boughs and needles, glinting around spider webs and clouds like sunbeams do. the angular softness of them mixed in with the swirling campfire smoke. that image enchanted me too. and the phrase for it-- smoke and sunbeams. 

perhaps I'm pretty easily enchanted. 

places and possibilities

thinking about going places. far away places.

nearby places have their charm... but running errands is mostly tiring; walking the dog is lovely but routine.

summer and travel go together most years. or they have in the past, anyway. lately it seems like so long since I've gone anywhere new just to see what's there and what it looks like.

as i reread some of my old journals, it seems astonishing how much I traveled even just five or six years ago. so much back and forth home for holidays, random cities for conferences or helping friends move, and a few weeks-long adventures for studying abroad. it seems like half my journal entries back then were prefaced with "notes from [insert name of airport here]." 

 

there are many reasons for the relative lack of travel these days, of course. there's a pandemic still wandering around mutating and spreading. small, short, careful trips seem best. we also just bought a house, so it's everyone's turn to come visit us now, to see what's here.

here is pretty beautiful, I must say. we have an ancient volcano overlooking some very fine walking and biking trails. we have (unlike last year, during which this rainstorm was practically the only one) an almost-nightly pattern of refreshing monsoons feeding into a bunch of glorious greenery. we have cool mornings and a very serviceable set of patio furniture. and a fire pit too, for roasting things and for cozy evening ambiance.

last week Jeremiah's aunt and uncle stopped by for a night on their way from west to east. they brought a handsome dog named Herschel with them and we had a grand time showing them around, catching up on each others' lives, and playing a bit of mahjong.

who else wants to come visit? we can teach you mahjong if you like. or we can hike up to the top of Glassford Hill and have a picnic.

what else? 

I've been teaching this summer. small sections of Technical Report Writing over two six-week terms. it's been mostly fun. but I'll be glad for a few weeks' break between summer and fall classes starting up. maybe we'll go camping. maybe we'll squeeze in one more tiny, careful roadtrip. or throw one or two more dinner parties. or just sleep in more and read all the books. 

my other activities for summer have included daily morning walks with our restless little Hamilton pug, pulling weeds out of our rock-covered yard, potting and re-potting succulents (new and old), tending to a dying basil plant and a thriving tomato plant (many thanks to my dad), taking a few bike rides, committing to bits of yoga, baking too much for two people, and reading outside as often as I can get away with.

oh, and I'm running a little game of Dungeons and Dragons-- a pre-written adventure entitled Curse of Strahd. there haven't been any dragons in it yet, but there might be. it's proving quite interesting and entertaining. ostensibly, I am using this set of published ideas to create a backdrop of tension and danger mixed in with meaningful story and fun rewards for the players who roleplay in the foreground of it all. from the first few sessions though, I've felt like my role is equal parts creator and observer. the player characters are out there on a stage that I threw together, putting on fascinating and rich performances for us all. I hope I get better at it so I can keep doing it and find out what happens next.

in other news, I want to soon blog properly about Braiding Sweetgrass and all its lovely messages about paying attention to nature. I should also finish reading and taking some more organized notes on a few books about collaborative writing pedagogy. there is a conference talk to prepare in the next two months, and always more scholarly books to read. one on my mind this afternoon is Against the Romance of Community, the pdf of which is sitting around in at least three digital folders somewhere, waiting with its few scattered annotations for me to get back into it. 

I know it's kind of cheesy to use books as a stand-in for travel, but ah well. if Scotland and Paris and Germany and London and Beijing are out of reach for the next long while, at least I can read and re-read about everywhere else. everyone else. all their connections and intricate influences on one another.

 

and because I needed an excuse to type it all out for myself here, I'm going to include these paragraphs from near the end of Kimmerer's book about indigenous wisdom. this chapter is called "People of Corn, People of Light," all about the marks we are leaving on the earth through our ways of being, our ways of knowing, and our stories.

"Many Indigenous peoples share the understanding that we are each endowed with a particular gift, a unique ability. Birds to sing and stars to glitter, for instance. It is understood that these gifts have a dual nature, though: a gift is also a responsibility. If the bird's gift is song, then it has a responsibility to greet the day with music. It is the duty of birds to sing and the rest of us receive the song as a gift. ....
"Other beings are known to be especially gifted, with attributes that humans lack. Other beings can fly, see at night, rip open trees with their claws, make maple syrup. What can humans do?
"We may not have wings or leaves, but we humans do have words. Language is our gift and our responsibility. I've come to think of writing as an act of reciprocity with the living land. Words to remember old stories, words to tell new ones, stories that bring science and spirit back together to nurture our becoming people made of corn." (p. 347) 

I promise I'll blog more about this lovely book one day soon, blog-all-dogeared-pages style. and if you've read it too, let's have an impromptu book club about it so I can hear all your thoughts. wouldn't that be fun?

completely, partially

my latest LibriVox contribution-- The City of Din, by Dan McKenzie-- surprisingly made its final journey through the prooflistening stage rather quickly this week, and I am pleased to announce that it's been officially catalogued here for all the world to enjoy if they so desire.

the most unique part of this audiobook is that our pug Wesley has a role in it. in the middle of section 2, Mr. McKenzie is discussing whether to categorize dogs as noisy or not, and he re-enacts the inner monologue of a man trying to sleep while a dog barks somewhere out in the neighborhood. rather than boringly intoning the word "bark" myself, I conveniently captured some of Wesley's insistent barks and used those instead. it took a lot of editing work, but I think it was worth it.

LibriVox relies on the Internet Archive for the bulk of its hosting needs. everything on that LibriVox.org page I linked to above is really pulled in from Internet Archive, where it's all displayed a little differently.

the Internet Archive is undeniably awesome. you probably agree, right? I hope so.

unfortunately the organization is dealing with a pretty awful lawsuit at the moment, one that has some terrible implications. this thread from author Cory Doctorow goes over the issues concisely and forcefully. there's been quite a lot of talk about the lawsuit all over twitter, lately. I very much hope that these greedy print publishers don't succeed in wrecking the Internet Archive's plans for facilitating free circulation of digital books. what an awful world it would be if we had to pay greedy corporations for even the most temporary access to any of media at all.

in all my researching and theorizing about the Internet Archive and similar projects, I've more regularly thought of it as what it has named itself-- an archive. a collection. a carefully stored pile of carefully gathered and curated and digitally infrastructured content. 

libraries are that, too. what's the real difference between a library and an archive? well, some archives are a little more closed-off to the public, but other than that, nothing. they are both, like so much else we humans are about, places to keep things.

sometimes I also think about these digital archives as communities, too. they are collections of things--artifacts, manuscripts, whatever... but those collections of things don't just happen without people. that's what my dissertation was all about: people working together to build archives by building tools that help them build and maintain and expand the archives. LibriVox is a really cool example of that.

I have gotten to know some of the other people who work with LibriVox, a tiny bit. some of them I feel like I know from studying the history of the site and listening to all of the old podcast episodes. some I have interacted with more closely on various projects. it would be fun to meet some of them someday, as I've done with other internet friends. who knows if that will happen or not.

two years ago I read the closing sections of this L. Frank Baum story, Phoebe Daring. the project had been initially started on LibriVox in 2015 as a solo, by a reader who worked on dozens and dozens of LibriVox projects but died before she could finish this one. when the community learned what had happened, they opened her project up and ten of us completed the recording and prooflistening work for it.

thinking about that makes me wonder what I'll leave unfinished. who will finish it. ideally I'll have several decades to keep thinking about that question.

this week, as I approached the end of this month of blogging, I kept coming back to the concept of ...well, I guess of incompleteness. but that word feels overly negative. what I was really thinking of were partly-complete things. partly-done, partly-finished. parts. partialities. my mind has been more or less fascinated lately by the idea of everything always being partial.

in some sense, that can be a negative thing. the partial nature of so much can leave me so unsatisfied. so paradoxically full of what isn't there or what I haven't collected.

in another sense it's comforting. there's still more. it isn't over yet. we have some space to add and grow and keep going. that's the side my wondering wants to be on the most.

July, however, will be complete after today. utterly in the past, over, done, gone, irretrievable. and my month of blogging will be, too. that, at least, is something finished. how I'll look back on everything I've posted in another year, or five years, who knows? but from here, it's done. perfect enough because that's what we (the royal we) decide to call it from this precious, precarious vantage point of now.

Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright lines?
those curves, angles, dots?

No, those are not the words, the substantial words are in the
ground and sea,

They are in the air, they are in you.

   -- Walt Whitman, "A Song of the Rolling Earth"

steep

this is the sun-smeared peak of Thumb Butte, towering magnanimously above the Thumb Butte trail where we hiked today. thickly pine-scented, steep, and more mountainous than the other trails we've ventured on thus far. it is a popular trail so we weren't the only hikers, but nevertheless it was gloriously peaceful to be up there.
   

the steepness of the trail got me thinking about how I used to hate hiking. I hated being dragged on family excursions to the canyon or the wilderness. I hated the heat and dust and the blisters. I hated feeling slow and out of shape and generally less-cool than all the other girl scouts. I would have much rather been left behind to read books or make art under a tree or at a picnic table.

it was a superficial hate, though. why else did I keep agreeing to go on all these church-sponsored and/or girl-scout-badge-earning hikes?

I went because I find it pretty easy to prioritize novelty and being included over my own usually very individual, isolating interests. as introverted as I can be, I'm a social animal like all the rest of us humans.

so in 2006 when a group of very cool people organized a week of hiking in Zion National Park, I happily and luckily let myself be included. and that's the week when I realized I didn't actually hate hiking as much as I thought. the snow and sun and sandstone changed my mind.

I wrote a little about that week here. I don't have photographs (though some do exist in digital form now) of those hikes. just journal entries.

and I only have a few photographs of these Arizona hikes. a few seems like enough. for now.

here, looking out from Thumb Butte trail at some of the northwest expanse of Prescott National Forest.

and here, a post-rainstorm shot of Willow Lake.

wonder + a survey

with most of this year in quarantine and isolation mode, it seems unthinkable that it can feel so overwhelming. what's so overwhelming about staying home all the time?

of course there are a billion valid answers to why things are overwhelming for me or for anyone right now. the world is a mess. we moved thirteen hundred miles across the country. I barely know what my work life will be like when it officially starts next month.

the good news? nobody in my family is sick. we have what we need, for now, to stay safe and comfortable. the worst of my immediate, concrete complaints involve dishes in the sink and headaches that won't go away. that's plenty to be grateful for, really.

instead of blogging so incessantly about myself today though, I'm going to point to some stuff other people are doing (one past, one present).

this one is from artist Austin Kleon, twelve years ago. I saved it as something worth remembering during my graduate school journey.

thing two is a very neat project my brother-in-law Ruben (he has a blog too, I recently discovered) is involved in. the team is working to develop a universal remote control that's accessible to people with cerebral palsy and/or other disabilities that make it hard to handle a typical remote with tiny buttons. 

their first step is gathering input from their eventual users. so if you know anyone or know anyone who knows anyone who could benefit from such a universal remote, share this survey with them.

the project page makes a pretty excellent illustration of professional collaboration to benefit a non-profit. I might point it out to my future students in technical writing and business communication as a useful example. it'll be especially cool to see what they post about their progress and final product, once the two month sprint is up.

summer is for being outside

they call this piece of geography The Granite Dells. from a distance, the rock formations look like orange mounded towers guarding the water, huddling together in confident solidarity.

we currently live less than three miles from this gorgeousness. every time we drive within view of it I gape at how striking and beautiful it is. how grateful and happy that view makes me.

on Wednesday we went wandering around some of the trails out there. there were lizards scurrying about, and we saw a few rabbits. also a disc golf course, but that's not as cool.

someday we'll find a canoe to borrow and spend a day out on Watson Lake, hopefully not getting sunburned.

someday we'll plan a weekend of camping somewhere out here in this beautiful desert, whenever the National Parks decide to open their campgrounds up again.

family pieces

last month, there was a funeral.

it was the first of my grandparents' funerals that I've been able to actually attend.

I worried for a minute about the cost, the time, how I'd find a substitute for my undergraduates. and after that I worried a little about the risks of traveling by air during what has now become a rather more alarming global pandemic.

but being there last month felt more and more important than any of those worries. I'm glad they didn't stop me.

in the week leading up to this family gathering, my aunts and uncles asked us to write down some of our memories. mine are flickery at first, like an old-school slide projector. the more recent ones are smoother.

my very earliest memories of Grandma and her home and that whole side of the family are of the basement with seemingly endless bedrooms. every corner of that basement was made up to welcome a whole bundle of little grandkids. there was room for all of us, it seemed like. I remember so many bookshelves and books. under the stairs, along the hallways-- books everywhere. on my own bookshelves now I have a book that I must have "borrowed" from Grandma at some point. The Best Known Works of William Shakespeare--pages of Elizabethan drama in double columned layout, in a tattery black cover. I devoured most those plays as a teenager. how grateful and lucky we were to have grandparents that lived right down the street from the Utah Shakespeare Festival.

I remember tagging along with Grandma to a summer writing group on the SUU campus at some point between college semesters. I was trying to write some good short stories. Grandma worked on poems and song lyrics and things. it felt like such an honor to be included in that.

we talked about family history, too. before I went off to study abroad in England in 2003, Grandma gave me a folder of family trees and other history, so I would know what names to look for if I had a chance to explore the areas our family came from. even though I never did make it to any cemeteries or archives or genealogy centers in Kent, I loved having those stories and names anyway-- hints at memories and lives that predate me and everyone I know.

last summer Jeremiah and I were able to visit and spend two or three days with Grandma, playing cards just like always, doing puzzles, singing a few songs, sitting out on the porch in the mornings and late afternoons. she was as welcoming and lovely and serene as ever, though the house was so much quieter and calmer than it was when we are all little grandkids. I'm going to miss those visits. the house.

the idea of Grandma not being there at all anymore-- all her things boxed up to be given away, all the space so empty and different-- it's still a little unreal.

 { 1928–2020 }
 
just a few months ago, I wrote Grandma a postcard from Prescott, Arizona. I was out there for a job interview (for a job I later was offered, and accepted). I hope it put a smile on her face when it arrived.

I wish I'd called to share the news about the job-- it meant we'd be moving 16 hours closer! we could've reveled in that prospect, enjoyed the happy thought of seeing her more often. but in between the job offer in mid-February and my official acceptance at the end of the month, she passed on.

as empty as her absence leaves us, there's still plenty of family in sunny southern Utah. it'll still only be a six hour drive from where we're moving this summer. there will still be reunions. and family will always include Grandma.

affection, safety, and a puppy

I learned just today that the German word halten can mean in English to hold or to stop.

this seems profound for some reason. the sentence in my Duolingo German lesson was "die Eltern halten ihr Babies (the parents are holding their babies)" and when my first instinct was to translate that verb as are stopping, I figured I should check the app's hints for it first. they did show both options, but the context seemed to call for are holding instead. depending on the age of one's baby, there aren't that many things you need to or can stop one from doing, really.

if I stop to think for a moment about the same range of meanings in all the history and senses of to hold in English, does that make the whole thing less profound?

the word's etymology is a long one. some snippets that resonate this afternoon:
"to contain; to grasp; to retain"
"to possess, control, rule; to detain, lock up"
"to foster, cherish, keep watch over"
"to keep back from action"

all this potent potential meaning curled up in to hold. and then there are all these phrasal verbs, too: hold back, hold up, hold out, hold off, hold against, beholden to...

to be held as a parent holds a young baby is to be safe. comfortable. cared for. right?

to be held is also to be restrained. controlled. and to be restrained isn't usually considered comfortable, though... right?

or is it?

maybe it is.

paradoxically.

in a "limits are possibilities" sort of way.

I don't remember when exactly this photo is from. September 2016 when we went to the National Zoo? probably. it's been sitting on hold in a blogpost draft for at least three years or so.

to hold also has a sense of continuation. to hold a note. to hold your position. to uphold a ruling. to have and to hold.

sometimes all of that isn't comfortable either. but sometimes it is.

I've been doing this year's 30 days of yoga. it's wonderful even when I don't think I have the time or energy for it-- alternating movement and holding, centering body and mind and breath so all is balanced. not always easy. but it is enough.

I am enough. now is enough. I hope.

in other news-- last week we added to our household a new puppy.

his name is Hamilton.

or, if you're feeling extra fancy, Hamilton Chidi Chewbacca Chesley Alonzo. he's already learned to come when called and to sit on command. Wesley's still warming up to his rambunctious, half-tamed puppy energy, but they're getting along pretty well so far.

what good pugs.

Thanksgiving retrospective

this week, we are baking and eating and family-ing in Chicagoland. Chicago itself, over to the east of here, has a famously wonderful city flag. the state of Illinois... not so much. its flag is okay, I suppose. it could definitely be uglier.


last Thanksgiving, we stayed down south in our current Louisiana home. its state flag is pretty distinctive, so it would probably win a flag contest against Illinois any day.

how would Louisiana's fare against Indiana? or Texas? (I never did look up Rhode Island's state flag when I spent Thanksgiving there in 2013. it's actually quite well-designed. possibly more beautiful even than the Texas flag.)

anyway.

family-ing in Chicagoland over the last six days has involved late nights playing Rocket League, grocery shopping with grandma, tons of reading (I finished The Subversive Copy Editor and In Watermelon Sugar in the last two days), and endless football games on the television. right this moment, it's the college variety: University of Utah Utes v. the University of Colorado something-or-others. (Buffaloes, the internet tells me.) 

I am more or less ignoring the football and poking at bits of work. budgeting work. emails. edits. to-do lists. the husband is napping on the couch next to me, murmuring nonsense in his sleep. the dogs are lounging (except when they're fussing mildly at each other). we'll eventually have one last dinner of leftovers, re-pack the suitcases, and get ready to drive home tomorrow.

there are two more weeks of the semester. so much to be thankful for. 

I am especially glad for time to rest, for the hospitality and coziness of family, for memories and togetherness, and for all the places (remembered and imagined and inbetween). 

this decade has had a lot of big, wondrous stuff in it. how much I've seen and learned and changed since ten years ago. you too, probably.

now how much more learning and growing and living can we fit into December?

back and forth-ness

I pulled my high school journal out of its place on the shelf last week, to look back at what I wrote on September 11, 2001.

it's a half page of earnest printed penmanship, phrases like "live in infamy" and "dumb terrorists" smushed together in an account of an event I didn't understand.

I opened this old blogpost draft today, in the mood to blog, not sure exactly what about. perhaps it will be a sequence of thoughts, some from the past and some from the now, juxtaposed as if on shuffle mode. that's often how my brain seems to work anyway: non-linear, constellatory, like a small racquetball inside a hollow dodecahedron or something.

1
I've noticed lately that my vocabulary, at least when I'm standing in front of a classroom full of students in Louisiana, has opened its arms to "y'all." the southern, folksy "y'all" hasn't displaced "you guys" entirely as my collective second-person greeting, but it's obviously gaining ground. I can't decide if I like it or not, but at least it feels fairly normal.

2
I need to read some more Joanna Russ.

3
these two podcasts turned out to be in conversation the other day (and by 'the other day' I apparently mean about a year ago). according to my notes, I listened to this one, "The Oddest Thing in the Universe" by Reasonably Sound, first, and then, from the BBC's Infinite Monkey Cage, "The Human Voice." why language? how? apparently we human beings had all the physical capabilities for speech long before we used them to communicate in spoken words. spoken language is a strange, purposeful biproduct. maybe I should re-listen and see if the two episodes mean any more now that I'm almost finished reading Gretchen McCulloch's Because Internet.

4
I've taken to putting all my old collection of mp3 music files on shuffle every so often, just to see what comes up. here's a list of what did:

Jack Johnson - Posters
Good Charlotte - The River
Blumfeld - Heiss die Segel
Peter Fox - Schwarz zu Blau
Ben Kweller - Run
Eve 6 - Girl Eyes
Andrew Bird - Hole in the Ocean Floor

when did I acquire Andrew Bird music? I don't remember. I do remember that the German stuff is from friend Yvonne, the rest from miscellaneous acquaintances in college.

5
in April 2016, I went to a musical about music (Once) all by myself. just before the second song--which sounded so familiar to me somehow--there were a few lines of dialogue I had to write down. I wrote them on an empty edge of the program. I wrote them down again in a sketch book. and I wrote them down here, too. the moment in these lines is so strangely memorable:

- are you breathing?

- yeah, I am.

-you won't die if you play this song with me.

and then she plays. they sing. he lets himself pick up the guitar again. his life is changed.

6
I've joined the community/campus choir that just started up last week. the director keeps talking about a particular rendition of one of the songs in our repertoire. was my youngest brother a part of that choir in 2014, or not yet?

   { the pinboard on the wall of my office }

elevate

earlier this week we drove in my little blue car through several mountained places, between majestic canyon walls, into valleys and out of them again, up and down, back and forth, out across the plains, down and down and down. toward home. inexorably away from vacation-time, back to regular life (whatever that means).

the elevation here in Louisiana is 118 feet above sea level. that's not even 40 yards. not even half a football field above sea level. no wonder our backyard becomes a giant puddle every time it rains.

last week, miles and miles west of here, I was no less than 4,000 feet above sea level at all times, and sometimes almost as high as 8,000. we hiked. we picnicked. we chased nieces and nephews around and took family photos. 

and then we had to leave.

I imagine I felt every foot of the descent as we drove, this time. every mile of it.

by the time we crossed into Texas on Tuesday, I was starting to feel as flat as the stretching llano estacado plains. one part of me was eager to be home again, ready to work and finalize preparations for fall semester... but most of me was already really missing the mountains and family.

it might be another full year before I see my family again. that span of time didn't used to seem so long. being several thousand feet below and almost fifteen hundred miles away didn't used to seem that far really, either. but now it does. 

I'm trying let gratitude keep me lifted up, even though it feels pretty depressing to have left all the relatives and mountains behind us. I'm really lucky and glad we were able to travel so many miles and make so many good memories this summer. so lucky.

I guess now it's time to anticipate the next family gathering. and in the meantime, work, write, teach, and try to do some bits of good in the world.

as a postscript, I've got a few decently good things to show off about lately:

publications!
a reworked version of one of my dissertation chapters is now officially an online article in a special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly. you can read it here if you like.

a collaborative article I've been working on with some Purdue Polytechnic colleagues has also just been accepted for publication in the Journal of Technology Studies. not sure when it will come out, but that's another exciting thing to anticipate.

presentations!
I got to be a part of a twitter conference last month. it was pretty different, but also fun, to share my scholarship for a new audience on such a platform. I hope people liked it. the thing still exists in its original twitter thread and here in a "twitter moment." it's always cool to talk about LibriVox, I say.

and speaking of LibriVox, my most recent LV contributions have been to an early twentieth-century feminist novel called With Her in Ourland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. it's incredibly interesting stuff, and some of it seems relevant now, a whole century later.

next on my list of things to record for LV: City of Din by Dan McKenzie. I've got the 100-page text split up into suitable sections and now I just need to start recording them. soon, hopefully...

images, tendencies, and commandments

the local public library is doing free Monday night yoga this summer, led by one of the proprietors of this local yoga place that I haven't yet visited.

I've been to Monday night library yoga twice so far. it's nice. last week, I lay there and breathed and thought a bit about about my ideal self.


{ image borrowed from this kind soul on Flickr } 

past versions of my ideal self have taken various shapes and sizes and attitudes. but one thing seems to always happen when I think about this future maybe-barely-realistically-attainable person. I think about what she looks like. 

draped over an armchair. surrounded by books and children in a sepia-looking library. wearing comfy (but very stylish) grey loungewear. surrounded by plants, accompanied by a fluffy orange cat and a cup of tea. dressed in homemade and perfectly-tailored dresses. slender but not too tall of course. curly (not frizzy) hair in a perfect messy bun. the perfect pair of glasses on a thoughtful face with a flawless complexion.

why is most of what I think about when I think about her centered on what she looks like? dresses like? what her body is shaped like and how her hair is styled? I picture her in short bursts of vivid-- with this kind of dress. that kind of toned abdomen. a certain kind of skin.

why don't I think half so much about what she does? how she spends her time and energy?
I do think about that too. but it's less easy to fixate on. visuals are easier. for some reason actions don't print themselves so firmly on my thoughts. they don't fit into the short bursts.

why not?

{ favourite oatmeal-chocolate-chip muffins } 

I’ve read so many blogs that have praised Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project. Smacksy is the one that comes to mind most readily at the moment but I'm 76% sure I've seen the book mentioned by at least twelve other bloggers, too. 

maybe I'll read it someday. (probably not really though)

for now, I'm skim-reading Rubin's blog. which I came across not long ago, as one does, via another blog entirely, when a fellow-academic on twitter linked to this handy blog about building robust academic writing habits, in that post, under habit #6, there was a link.

this link: The Four Tendencies Quiz.

academic writing habit blogger, Dr. Katelyn Knox, advises that knowing what your tendencies are when it comes to meeting expectations (whether your own or other people's) is helpful for knowing how to nurture good habits.

so I took the quiz, and at the end I was supremely interested (though not really surprised) to learn that I am a Questioner.

of course I am. I would have to be, eh? (I suspect that most of my family members are also questioners-- we like to understand the reasons for doing a thing before we're gonna set out and do it.)

now, I know very well from skim-reading the rest of Gretchen Rubin's blog and website that she is using this quiz and her blog and her online presence generally to sell books and to book speaking gigs and such. and books with titles like "The Happiness Project" pretty much always sound hokey to me. it seems sales-pitchy, snake-oil-y, just a little bit. "buy my book! be happier!" yeah, okay.
but I'm also not unconvinced that there is value in these ideas. the knowledge that I tend to Question before I commit to any course of action or acquiesce to any expectations about how I should do things is kind of eye-opening, however much it also confirms what I already know about myself. it seems like there’s something to it. something insightful, something that feels mind-expanding and practical. it’s not The Answer or The Solution to anything-- no silver bullet-- but it is a starting point, perhaps.

elswhere on Rubin's blog there is a post about writing custom personal commandments for your life, as aspirational guideposts or whatnot. maybe this is hokey and maybe it's helpful. it can be both at once.

the first custom amelia commandment that came to mind was "always whip your own cream," which is an easy one, but also a synecdoche for my general preference for homemade and handmade stuff. if there is ever a plastic tub of cool whip in my kitchen, it will not be because I wanted it there.

it's kind of fun to try thinking of personalized commandments. I could probably articulate a few unconscious ones I follow already, about word usage and getting enough sleep and such.

maybe "take photographs of your old beat-up shoes" is another one I could formally adopt?

{ black flats from Goodwill }

{ polka-dot flip-flips from a Ross in Hawaii }


last week while I was laying in savasana at the end of yoga practice at the library, letting my thoughts drift, I thought of one more custom commandment: refuse the numbness. I guess this one is also shorthand. it's about a deep hope that I'll always be able to be surprised by things, to be affected by things instead of jaded and uninterested. that I'll always be able to listen to the universe sending me messages about itself, about me, about everything. it's easy to let default mode take over, but I don't want that. I want to always be looking for connections, finding things to care about, practicing sensitivity to the world and what I can do in it.