I tend to listen to CDs that I want to actually experience as albums in the car, since the house listening is all iTunes singles mixes. I didn't listen to much that was new this summer, but these made for good summer driving music:
Rain Dogs - Tom Waits
Plantation Lullabies - Meshell Ndegeocello
Tremendous Efforts - The Sadies
David Gilmour - David Gilmour
Gone Again - Patti Smith
Songs and Other Things - Tom Verlaine
West - Lucinda Williams
Emotional Legs - The Leaving Trains
Plus lots and lots of Bo Diddley, who is so summertime for me. Which makes about as much sense as my conviction that Gun Club and The Vines are fall bands, but there you go.
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s birthplace in Pepin, WI is only a couple of hours away from the Twin Cities. Yesterday afternoon was beautiful enough for a last short road trip. Mister Husband suggested heading over there, and so off we went.
There’s nothing original left on the site, and it’s certainly not in the woods anymore. The new Little House has a cinder block foundation and swallows in the rafters. It’s still a nice drive, though, and it’s interesting to see the lay of the land. It’s still pretty much in the middle of nowhere. The site closes when the snow starts and opens after the spring melt, and I can see why. The roads would easily be nearly impassable in the winters. If Pepin’s location is even remotely the same as it was in the 1860s, Pa’s trips to town would have been up and over pretty significant hills. Between seeing that and reading a couple of the books again earlier this year, I’m impressed by the level of physical fitness one would have needed to survive in a basic way on the prairie.
There are still Ingallses in Pepin, as evidenced by the headstones in the town cemetery. Some have already crossed over to Jordan, and some are preparing with highly reflective headstones. You don’t even have to go looking; there’s a huge headstone visible from the road.
(More photos at Mister Husband’s flickr account. Oh, and if you’re reading this in RSS you’re probably not able to see the PictoBrowser gallery at the top of the entry. If you’d rather, you can go straight to the flickr set.)
So I attempted homemade chiles rellenos for dinner, and it turns out they’re not all that hard to make. I ran poblanos under the broiler to blacken, stuck them in a bag for a few minutes, and removed the skin. Then I cut a slit, stripped the seed heads out (from the inside — you want to keep the stems), and stuffed the remains with queso blanco. I dipped them in this batter* and fried them up. (The batter is persnickety, since the egg whites deflate fast. Be quick.) Do them in whatever size batch fits your pan and keep them in a hot oven while you're frying the rest.
The sauce is two dried chiles nuevo mexico, reconstituted and whirled around with some of the soaking water, a small onion, and half a tomato. When the rellenos are almost done, fry the sauce in a bit of olive oil. Then plate everything. Serve with hot flour tortillas on the side.
I sort of doubted that there was any way to make these outside of a restaurant, but they turned out pretty well. I’ll definitely make them again.
*The rest of the recipe is just silly, but the batter works and the comments do a lot to rehabilitate the recipe itself.
If orientation starts this week, then it must be time for my annual navel-gazing “where did the summer go?” post. Evidently, I’ve had the urge to do this every August that I’m not hiatus: here’s 2006 and 2005, but no 2004 (moving across the country) or 2003 (moving across town).
Anyways:
Miles driven: +/- 5,000
Great Lakes viewed: 3
Little Houses visited: 2 (more on that later)
Conference papers delivered: 2
Machine-readable and searchable copies of 18th century Prefaces produced: 1, approx. 60 pages of 12 pt, single-spaced type
Articles written and submitted: 1
Courses taught: 1
Health scares: 1
Farmer’s Market trips: not enough
Swims: quite a few, and for the first time in years
Meals eaten with friends: pleasantly a lot
New friends made: 1, who sort of surprised me because he was an old acquaintance
Research conducted for 18c portion of diss: quite a bit but not enough
What would be enough: EVERYTHING. I MUST KNOW EVERYTHING.
Silly: you can’t know everything. You need to know enough.
Non-diss books read: 17
Caves walked through: 1
Museums visited: dunno. A bunch.
Digital photos shot: Approximately 2,000ish. There are 648 photos in my Summer 2007 set on Flickr, and I keep 25-30% of what I shoot, so that seems like a reasonable figure.
Rolls of actual film shot: one. But I bet there will be more.
New recipes mastered: none. WTF?
Coffees explored: Harrar, Peruvian, Peaberry. Not so fond of Peaberry, but lots of other people like it.
Here’s what it feels like happened: I did some research, I made some pictures. I swam some and slept a lot. I thought about stuff. I wrote. I saw friends, and I saw the city, and I saw some other places too. And now the days are shorter and the comforter is back on the bed and the Fair runs through the end of the week, and then that’s that. Onward to Fall.
It turned out there wasn’t a Flickr group for the Twin Cities Peanuts statues we have scattered all over the place, so I made one last Thursday night. As of now, it has 14 members and 82 photos. You should take a look — they’re a lot of fun, and there are quite a few statues in there that I’d never seen before.
Or, what happens when you turn a five year old loose with a Pocket Instamatic in 1981.
Lots of ass-high photography, for one thing.
I also immediately commenced documentary work. This is from a race in June 1981. Runners, and a bunch of people’s butts.
Incidentally, all that space kitty-corner from the Convention Center has long since been filled in by the Arkansas Times publishing empire and the River Market. The Clinton Library is waaaay on down the road. If you’re going to Feminisms and Rhetorics, this is the part of the city you’re going to be spending most of your time in.
I love that I so clearly set out to take a picture of the horse here — never mind the rider. The rider is incidental, and therefore does not need a head.
And beauty queens. With Farrah Hair. Perched on Trans Ams.
The full set is here, if you’re amused by this sort of thing. I must say, one of the most awesome things my parents did was keep me supplied with cameras growing up. If you’re a parent, get your kid an all-in-one, plastic brick camera when they’re still wee. There’s almost no way that could be a bad thing, and if you hold on to the results it’ll still amuse them when they’re 31.
I’ve been homesick for swamps the past week or so, so I went out and found some muck this afternoon. Snail Lake certainly isn’t a swamp, and neither are the marshes and bogs we have up here, but I felt better afterwards.
I took the camera along because I think I’m too dependent on that creamy Minnesota summer light. It’s easy to make photographs in that golden stuff. Today was cloudy, flat light, just like almost every damn day for the past week. So flat light and muck — I wanted to see what I could do with that. I made a lot of terrible shots, but there were a few that I think are decent enough to flickr.
So back in March I said I was updating stuff around here. And I ran around and stripped a bunch of code and then Ooh! Shiny! Other stuff! That, plus every time I do this I forget that I got no skilz and no patience when it comes to coding.
Luckily, Steve Himmer kindly saved me from myself. He cleaned up the general design, added in the banner at the top (more on which in a moment), re-installed the "Recent Comments" plugin, and added in collapsible categories and archives on the sidebar. The blogroll is also collapsible now, which tidies things up considerably. The body is wider, the better to display the photos. And he put up with me yammering in the background the whole time. Steve’s one of my oldest blog-friends, but he is also one of the most awesome.
Now, about the banner. It’s traditional for the blogeur to put their own work there, but I figure that this place already contains enough of me. (Besides, there’s more of me here and here and various other places.) What seems more interesting is to display the work of other photographers on a quarterly-ish basis. The first is Mister Husband, and not only because of nepotism. I would still be entranced if I stepped into a gallery and saw his work on the wall and had no idea who the artist was or what he was like. He’s just that good. I picked this shot as the first one because it works in the banner format, and because it looks like the Thinkery in my head this summer. This season I’ve been a little ramshackle and dusty, but happy. I have a couple of other folks in mind for the next two, and if they say yes then that’ll take it through to the beginning of next summer.
What else? Steve also re-coded the About page, and I’ve revised it to actually reflect the current state of affairs. I imagine I need to do some more work on it soonish. For the moment, I’m just basking in have a clean blog again. It’s at least as good as clean sheets. Maybe better.
If you notice any wonkiness, you’ll let us know, won’t you? Thanks.
Last year, my chiropractor pointed out to me that there are only about 10 weeks of reliable summer weather up here — 12 if we’re lucky. I’m always amazed at the prompt death of summer after Labor Day. There’s no dallying around with the season in Minnesota. We are on to the fall, ja! Oktoberfest! Polka polka polka! Which is part of why I love it here. Fall is my favorite season, closely followed by winter.
Still, I would like the remaining three weeks to behave as expected, please. It is our due. But yesterday, the high was 57. I wore a tank under a thick, hooded t-shirt to breakfast with C. She wore a t-shirt. After we finished, we went straight back to my house to put on sweatshirts and fleeces. We was cold. And today is more of the same. Last night I had to ditch the summer blanket and put the comforter back on the bed. I imagine it’ll be nice to have it again tonight.
Perhaps it will be fall sooner rather than later this year.
I finished revising the article yesterday and sent it on its way. Even if they're not able to use it, I’m glad I went ahead and submitted it. It’s encouraging that someone wanted to know more about what I had to say, but the big thing is that it finally got me over the hump of sending something out. It doesn’t seem like some mystical thing that Other, More-Grown-Up Academics do anymore. Now I’m thinking perhaps I can whomp this other piece into shape and get it out the door before the semester starts.
The writing, it proceeds. My personal internet ban is mostly working — I haven’t read blogs or flickr or anything else not-research related for two days now, and I’m keeping the AirPort switched off unless I absolutely have to look something up. I can see the end of this thing now. Blogging has become part of my process, though, and I’m compelled to pound out this fairly inconsequential post before I get back to 18c distributed authorship.
1. I don’t wear Outside Clothes when I write. Instead, I tend to wear things that are made of cotton and feature elastic and drawstrings. Compatriot G called mid-day Friday to let me know he'd be over shortly to drop some things off, and I said, “Fine, as long as you don’t mind seeing me with wet hair and in my pajamas.” He replied, “Oh, it’s nice that you’re having a good, relaxed day, then.” He sounded surprised and a little suspicious, since he knew I was on deadline. I hastened to explain that I was not having a good or relaxed day at all, since I was writing. So: everyone doesn’t write in their pajamas? Really?
2. For me, trying to get where the writing needs to go involves a lot of fidgeting. I sit down, I read the screen, I read the text I’m working with, I get up and go get a drink. I come back, I write a sentence. I get up and go straighten the bathroom cabinet. I come back and write two pages. Then I go make lunch, then I come back and look at the screen in disgust, then I take some laundry downstairs, then I come back and write some more. Whatever. It works, more or less.
The trouble with all this fidgeting is that the apartment is small, and set up so that most of my movements take me right past where Mister Husband is working. If I’m in the kitchen, I’'m rattling around right behind his head. If I’m fiddling with laundry*, I’m walking through his workspace in the living room, out the front door (bang), down the two short flights of stairs outside our door, into the laundry room directly beneath us, and then back (stomp stomp stomp bang). Basically, if I’m anywhere but in my study, I’m where any person with normal hearing would be able to hear the fidgeting. He bears it well, but I can’t blame him for being irritated. And I also can’t blame me for occasionally fidgeting, because it’s what I do.
I think that couples who live in a small space and put up with either or both of them researching and writing in that space should get a special award. Preferably cash money.
*I actually quite like doing laundry. I don’t like not having a washer/dryer in the apartment, though. That’s one of the first things I’m fixing after I finish this degree.
I have a horrible, awful Internet addiction. I don’t think this is news to anyone. It’s particularly bad now, since I’m procrastinating mightily on finishing this article.
The only solution that I see is to unplug entirely until it’s done. So here goes.
I spend a fair amount of time lately trying to figure out what makes a photograph work or not work. Hell if I know. I keep coming back to this one from breakfast a couple of days ago. I’m certain that its companion doesn’t function, but this one perplexes me. I’m still not sure why, but perhaps if I put it here and look at it for awhile I’ll figure it out.
By the way, this is taken from the perspective of the Mickey’s booth that appears at the end of A Prairie Home Companion. There’s nothing there to acknowledges that this is the one, which makes it even better. It just happened to be unoccupied, so that’s where we sat.
Last night was Patti Smith at the State Theater. I was prepared for intensity and awesomeness, but not for the depth of emotions that some of the songs stirred for me. I hadn’t realized, I guess, the extent to which Gone Again is one of those few albums that have somehow taken up residence inside me. You know how that happens sometimes: with most music, you bring yourself to it but it remains outside of you, something you press yourself up against for awhile. Maybe you revisit it, maybe you don't. But a few albums are a permeable barrier, and they transform you into one too, and eventually the music crosses over and into and down to the depths of you, perhaps behind your heart, perhaps to the left of your liver. And maybe after awhile you forget it’s there, but it never really leaves.
I had forgotten about Gone Again, although I never forget about Patti. It isn’t her all-time best record, but it is rich and strange and honest. I listened to it constantly after it came out in the summer of 1996, on into the winter and through to the next summer. Then as now, I did most of my album-length listening in the car as I drove to work. That commute was about 30 minutes, through swamps and over the wide, slow Arkansas River. Last night, during an amazingly primal, drawn-out version of Beneath the Southern Cross, I was suddenly 20 again, driving through the waters and scrubby trees at dusk. I was deeply discontented at that age, wary of the corporate job I was stepping deeper and deeper into, wondering if I would ever manage to leave Little Rock. Patti was a voice from an unknown spot out in the wide world, someone so foreign who knew things that I had never touched. Which is as it should be, given the fact that that album is entirely about death and loss and the life that comes afterwards for the living, about becoming a widow and losing close friends. It’s not an album for a 20 year old, but it was the right thing for me that winter.
I also never realized how much winter twilight figures into my memories of other songs of hers. The winter that I began seeing the then-Mister Boyfriend, I had hauled Easter out of my dusty stacks and was listening to it again. I studied all day and then headed over to his apartment most nights. It was often twilight when I pulled into the lot, and through a fluke of timing “Because the Night” was often on. Hearing it last night put me right back in the lavender dusk, sitting in my car and feeling a wee bit nervous, watching the last streaks of orange leave the sky before I went in to the apartment.
I really haven’t liked Twelve quite so much. I advance-ordered it, listened to it a couple of times after it showed up, and then got distracted. I’m not the only one who felt this way, and I really hoped that she wouldn’t be playing much from it last night. It turns out, though, that several of the songs work much better live than they do on the album — “Smells Like Teen Spirit” being one of the best examples. Followed by “People Have the Power” and interspersed with a classic Patti rant about complacency and war, it becomes more than the sum of its parts.
She gives an excellent show, and I would see her again in a hot second. Most impressive is her ability to read a crowd and bring the band along to adapting to the circumstances of the venue and the vibe. This crowd was wildly appreciative — they clapped for dimming the lights, they clapped for her taking her hat off. But they were Minnesota Polite, and their politeness was exacerbated by the venue, which provides theater seating all the way up within five feet of the stage. Everyone remained politely seated and clapped nicely. I’ve never seen a rock audience so well behaved, and it clearly drove her nuts. Eventually, she left the stage as the band played and then appeared out in the audience, dancing in the center aisle and then running up to the edge of the stage and pounding along with the band. After the audience saw that they had her permission, they came up to the edge of the stage and communed. The Minnesotans, they don’t wish to be seen as unruly. Never mind that they were there to see a fabulously unruly woman who is happy to prove that 60 is not at all too old to be flinging mic stands and playing Rock n Roll Nigger.
I didn’t go to the Farmer’s Market once in July. I got so in the habit of going with C. that when she was out of town, I forgot take myself over there. The deeper meaning of this is that I missed an entire month of tomatoes, a month I'll never get back. And I am a woman who spent all spring longing and waiting for the first tomatoes so show up, who occasionally caved and bought stupid $5 greenhouse heirloom tomatoes because she just couldn’t stand it. The only thing left to do is try to make up for lost time.
As I was buying the yellow tomatoes, a woman next to me asked what they tasted like. My best answer is golden, lower-acid and more mellow than reds, but still unmistakenly tomatoes. My Sainted Grandma started growing them when I was very small, and I’ve loved them ever since. I turned one of these into a tomato sandwich the second I got home, and then set to work converting the romas into marinara sauce. Onions and olive oil into the pot, then eventually half a head of garlic, then the tomatoes. And then I got out the mezzaluna.
I rarely use the mezzaluna, but it does a great job on herbs. I get sentimental whenever I have it in my hands, since it was one of the first things Mister Husband and I bought together when we decided to set up housekeeping. Rocking the blade across the wood, I can’t help but remember those early shopping trips, which were all about kitchens and hope. That’s what this post was really about, although I felt the need to be more oblique at the time.
The world begins and ends at the table, in the kitchen. And maybe love begins there, too.
Since then, we’ve bought furniture and art and stocks together, but I think most of our serious household investments have been made in the kitchen. We even gave each other a pro-grade KitchenAid as a wedding present, even though it’s really too big for an apartment kitchen. That was two years ago now. Two years of marriage, four of living together, and nearly five since I walked into a Queer Theory seminar and wondered who the guy with the ponytail was.
I finished the summer teaching on Wednesday night, and calculated and uploaded final grades yesterday. And then I took a day off, more or less. I had an appointment with The Physician in the morning, in which I was informed that I'm entirely healthy. (This is happily coupled with the fact that my spouse is feeling much better after some medication adjustments. Back story here.) Then Mister Husband and I went off through the cities, tracing our way through a road system that is entirely broken not only by the bridge collapse but also by construction season. Getting anywhere in this town is going to be rather interesting for awhile. But we were never lost, and scooted through a few new-to-us neighborhood that we're going to have to come back to. Used bookstores have been pillaged. Paper Source has been visited. Shrimp, scallops, crab legs, and beer have been consumed. I am (gasp) proceeding through the last of the Harry Potter, despite my rant last week. The fridge is full of fresh corn, tomatoes, eggplants, and champagne grapes.
I am ready to soak up the last five weeks of summer. That also means appreciating having a lot of empty hours for research. Article deadline in 10 days. Another article that I’ve been twiddling around with for almost two years now, and I really want to get out the door before September. Conference paper due in October. Several days of archival research to do, at least. (Probably more than that, since some of it involves some issues to do with attic Greek, which I am unlearned and painfully slow at.)
August is generally my least favorite month, but I keep reminding myself that this August is all time, and it's time I don't have to sell my soul for. I'm determined that it will be lovely.
We were not on the 35W bridge when it collapsed. I was amazed to come home to so many emails in two inboxes and in Facebook, and so I wanted to let you all know we're alright. I was teaching and Jeff was erranding on this side of the river. He's been glued to the TV for hours, but I was oblivious until class was over at 9.
I don't know yet whether anyone we know was there, and my heart goes out to all the people who were.
