I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Richard Prince’s work. I love his sense of humor, but so many of the pieces strike me as 2 parts Ed Ruscha plus 3 parts pretention.
“My studio is the only place I feel good in,” he says. “There I’m fearless; outside I’m a mess. The editorial world, the square world. The studio is a hipper world where I can operate according to my own artificial reality.
That reality is primarily based on pleasure—as is most of Prince’s work. Although he’s been hailed for his “sophisticated critiques... of American consumer culture,“ Prince insists that his motivation is far more basic in nature. “Art has always made me feel good,” he says. “Anything I do, I hope it would make you feel good. It’s as simple as that. There’s no real mystery.”
I'm very busy subconsciously not writing about my grandfather. The result is that nothing else non-academic is getting written, either. In other words, one can expect that hodgepodge effect will probably continue for a bit.
ST. AGNES’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.
I just think that by the 23rd century, American men get to wear high heels and eye-liner, sit like sissies, and make pouty, kissy faces at other guys if they want--and also beat the hell out of giant killer reptiles.
From the newly-adored Gugeo, who found me via Sally, who makes the most awesome mix tapes ev0r. You know, the kind with 10 bands you love, 4 you always meant to get around to, plus 3 you never heard of — and the mix order makes all the known stuff sound new and the new stuff sound all kinds of intriguing. I’ve been listening to it all week.
you totally wish you lived in a house full of academics
Lately around here:
Him: Um, why did you leave the water running?
Her: What?
Him: The water you turned on five minutes ago.
Her: The water is running?
15 minutes after breakfast was served.
Her: Honey, did you know the stove is still on?
Him: Um. No.
Her: Good morning!
Him: Did you know you baked the new Le Creuset pan with all the labels still on it?
Her: I did not.
Him: Yes. Yes, you did. I was up until midnight scrubbing that off.
I love coffee... It’s not about the caffeine. I have largely renounced caffeine. I say largely because I know that the decaf I now drink all day isn’t entirely caffeine-free. My attachment to coffee is about the taste, and the smell, and the gesture. ...
These days, no one is “always there” with a coffee cup in his hand; nor is there anyone around with a cigarette. No decent person keeps the coffee pot brewing all day. No one would dream of drinking that much caffeine. No one would dream of sitting still all day to schmooze.
The only people who would are perhaps just the sort who might sneak out into the garden to smoke an occasional cigarette when their kids aren’t looking. Appealing people, I might be tempted to say. People who live in the grip of their passions. But suspect.
I’ve been slowly scanning old photos and moving them to an acid-free scrapbook. (This goes so slowly because there is nothing I hate more than putting stuff in the scrapbook. Except maybe killing bugs.) This particular one serves as proof that I’ve always been a dog person and always had articulated toes. That’s Starbuck, named after the hero of the original series. He and a rough collie named Sparky were my first dogs. They were awesomely patient, very empathetic creatures.
I made a course design. The catalogue title is “Emergent Technologies in Scientific & Technical Communication,” but I’m calling it “Web 2.0 in STC.” We’re going to be planning, writing, and media re-visioning a wiki on scientific, technical, and social aspects of the 35W bridge collapse. As always, the topic and readings attrition was difficult, but I’m encouraged that all three people who’ve reviewed the syllabus have said, “I want to take this course!” Hell, I want to take the course, since it nicely dovetails with my research interests. (I am not so accustomed to this feeling, since I’ve been mostly graduate-instructing service courses for the past five years.) We’ll see if I’m the only one who still feels that way in a few months, or if the students are still along for the ride. My predictor feels a bit off this time, but I’m hopeful: I have four grad students and seven repeaters out of the 20 registered so far. Anyway, if you’re interested in such things, the syllabus is here.
I also made this apple cake, substituting dried cherries and golden raisins for the cranberries because I had them on hand. It turned out to be a rustic and fabulous recipe. Too fabulous, in fact. I’m foisting half of it off on the well-metabolized Compatriot G so I won’t finish the whole thing. I’m sitting across from him right now in a coffee shop, and he has no idea that I have half a cake in my backpack. (Or that I’m blogging when I’m supposed to be Being Scholarly. But I am limbering up, dammit.) This fact amuses me inordinately.
I am also making a dissertation, as it turns out. All this time I’ve been feeling distinctly un-started. Thoroughly convinced that I’m unstarted, in fact. Then last week one of my chairs nicely said what amounted to, “Send me something NOW.” After silently panicking and hearing my internal voice squeal, “But I have nothing! Nothing!” I looked around and realized that I have 80 pages. There is no mathematical way in which 80 pages = Unstarted. Let that be a lesson unto me.
Temperatures will continue to fall to between 12 and 20 below zero
through daybreak. West-northwest winds of 10 to 15 mph will push
wind chills to between 25 and 40 below through the morning hours.
Wind chills of 25 to 35 below zero will continue during late Saturday
morning and Saturday afternoon as temperatures rise modestly.
Therefore a Wind Chill Advisory remains in effect for the entire
area of central and south central Minnesota and west central
Wisconsin until 6 PM Saturday.
I am fascinated, but not fascinated enough to go outside this time. The Art Shantys will have to survive another year without me.
I told a friend awhile back that I cook the way other people knit, and I notice more and more that it’s true. I’ve always cooked for a variety of reasons, but a shift has happened in the year since I’ve finished my exams: the cooking has become more important than the eating. Last week in Arkansas, when my parents and I finally arrived home after dealing with Grandpa’s ashes, I unthinkingly wandered straight to the kitchen, did the dishes, shooed away my mother, re-organized all of her canned goods, and then whomped up a pot of cream of tomato soup and three different kinds of melty sandwiches according to everyone’s specifications. When Mister Husband picked me up at the airport last Saturday, he asked me where I wanted to go from there. I just wanted to go home, and once there I cooked a huge breakfast of potatoes-and-onions, soy sausage, biscuits, and eggs over easy. Being busy in the kitchen is my way of being still. Quiet, useful motion stills the mind. And it’s a way of being together, of engaging with the larger world. All week, we’ve been trading off two-night dinner shifts, since both of us have so many ideas for meals right now. At Mister Husband’s suggestion, we’re trying to move away from the American model of food hoarding, instead shopping daily or every other day for the freshest items for that night’s dinner.
Cooking-as-a-way-of-communing also seems to have seeped into my friendships. C. ( a longtime foodie) and I have spent many Saturdays scavenging our ways through the cities’ Farmer’s Markets and specialty stores. And I’ve developed a habit of showing up at G’s house at 7 am on our writing days, long knives in tow, and elbowing my way into his kitchen. (He’s the crepe and granola king, though. I wouldn’t even presume.) It’s also how I kill time. Wandering around the airport while waiting, I drifted into a bookstore and back out with the new Bourdain and Pollan. I didn’t notice until later that all I had bought was food books. Before, some other nonfiction would have snuck in. Not this time, evidently.
I’m not a particularly fancy cook. I just putter along with whatever I think is interesting. It’s meditation and it's chemistry. Lately there have been a hundred pots of soup in the house, made by both of us: beef stew, posole, dairy-free butternut squash. We were talking yesterday about how soup is marvelous because of the building process: browning, sweating, boiling, simmering. You get to chop things in four different ways. You get to extract essences to make stock. On certain days, you get to blow stuff up. Whatever it is that I’m making, there’s a certain point where I start to wonder what would happen if I do THIS. Or THAT.
What the hell. Cleaning up isn’t what hard and I rarely have to throw things out. The problem is what to do with all the food. Two people can only eat so much, especially since we don’t always both like the same foods. And so I am already becoming an old Southern cook like my grandma, giving food away to friends and neighbors. I don’t know anyone else who does this anymore, but I’ve been foisting apple butter on everybody, taking the CSA turnips to my neighbor, hauling containers of soup down the street.
I like this. It suits me. And it’s becoming part of my larger process in ways I can’t quite explain yet. This weekend is a collaborative beef stew, two days in the making. I’m thawing bones to build the stock today, which I’ll turn over to Mister Husband. I cannot wait.
If you're a woman in the US between the ages of 18 - 44 and have used Plan B in the last year, please consider taking this survey. It’s a short series of questions about your experience obtaining Plan B, and the results will be used to help make the medication more accessible.
I was lucky, the one time I needed it. Living in Minnesota, I just walked into the Walgreen’s a block away and that was that. Had I still been living in the South, I doubt that would have been the case.
Wikipedia roundup (catching up, part 1: the NYT-heavy edition)
(Much Wikipedia news catch-up is due after the holidays and the impromptu trip. Bear with me.)
The NYT reports that Wiley & Sons "Black Gold: The New Frontier in Oil for Investors" plagiarized five paragraphs of the 2005 version of a relevant Wikipedia entry. The publisher is much more upset about veracity than copyright issues: “Wiley’s concern is not over copyright trouble,” Mr. Godwin said. “They want to represent their work as scholarly work. Their name is on the line in terms of scholarly ethics, more than the copyright issue.”
NYT fan-boy interview of Jimmy Wales. Favorite movie/prized possession/morning routine/etc/etc/etc. Throwdown quote: “Wikia.com ... is meant to take on Google by creating a search engine where all the editorial decisions are made by the general public and all the software is open.”
The Official NYT piece on the Wikia Search launch. “Like Wikipedia, Mr. Wales plans to rely on a “wiki” model, a voluntary collaboration of people, to fine-tune the Wikia search engine. When it starts up Monday, the service will rank pages based on a relatively simple algorithm. Users will be allowed and encouraged to rate search results for quality and relevance. Wikia will gradually incorporate that feedback in its rankings of Web pages to deliver increasingly useful answers to people’s questions.” Also included: some discussion of susceptibility to manipulation.
A Rocketboom interview with Garrison Keillor in which he discusses Wikipedia as a standard writer’s tool. (It’s also an excellent demonstration of his prescient grasp of developing media distribution channels.) I’ll be teaching with this.
I flew back to the tundra yesterday morning. Today, I’m groping my way back to semester prep in a wandering and stumbly way. Last week was intense and elemental: the first time I was with someone as they died, the first time I held human ashes in my hands, a shift to being with my parents in a familiar yet quite different sort of way. It’s hard to turn away from all of that and back to figuring out which week my class will cover industry applications of Facebook and if that comes before or after social tagging. But one does what one must do.
As always, the southern land pulls at me in unexpected ways. I still don’t know the answers to the questions I was asking in this entry three and half years ago. The landscape I was raised in is so poignant each time I return to it, and this bit of that old post is still true.
I would not be surprised to find that I am made of river silt and humidity, coming as I do from the Arkansas river valley. The thought of tiny whiskered catfish moving slowly through my depths seems natural rather than freakish.
Eventually, I might know what all this means. But not today.
My grandfather was transitioned to hospice care in mid-December, so when my parents called Friday morning and suggested that I hop a flight home that night, I did. Remarkable things happened, and I am immeasurably thankful that I was here for them.
We were with him when he passed away last night. The whole experience was at once so simple and so enormous that I cannot write about it. But there are two things I know for sure:
1. We really are bits of light, and we go out, or perhaps go on to other things. What’s left behind is a husk.
2. Sadness is not in order for this death. Not because he was a rather complicated man — which he was, until his last few days — but because he is no longer suffering and we are glad of that.
2007 turned out to be the year I busted out with the camera. I learned a lot about photography in the process, and that was good. But, more importantly, I discovered the camera as a way of knowing. It’'s all the usual things — a way of forcing yourself to look, a way of remembering things so you can come back to them — but it’s also been a way of learning things I didn’t know about myself. Strangely enough, the little five-photo Flickr badge on the sidebar was part of that. As I dumped photos into the account (never less than 40 a month, as it turned out) and they began to cycle through the badge, I started to notice that they were the photos of someone who is much happier than I ever notice that I am, or perhaps give myself credit for being. Figuring that out brought about some smallish yet fundamental shifts. I will always love dark humor and value cynicism, but it turns out I rather like operating from the assumption that I am a fundamentally happy person rather than a fundamentally melancholic one. Who knew?
So these aren’t my best photos from last year. Instead, they are representative moments from the months. 2007 was a good year, probably much easier than 2008 forecasts to be. And it let me learn some things that now lead me to think that while this coming year is full of Big Grownup Things, some of which are very difficult, it won’t necessarily have to be an unhappy one.
