Day 22 – Favorite book you own

I'm afraid my answer here is unavoidably sappy. In 10th and 11th grades I had an English teacher who I really liked and looked up to, and also a teenagey obsession with Hamlet -- and one year she gave me a book of Hamlet criticism as an out-of-the-blue Christmas gift. Poem Unlimited, by Harold Bloom, inscribed to my "happy future scholarship". Of course, since I didn't actually pursue that line of scholarship, I don't know things like 'where it is situated in the body of criticism', but I enjoyed reading it and have cherished it as a sentimental physical possession, even as I grew out of my Hamlet obsession.

Honorable Mentions go to:

- Another book that I was given as a surprise present, but told not to mention on certain parts of the internet. ;-)

- The Knot-Shop Man by David Whiteland. It came out shortly after Harry and I finished one of his earlier projects, Planetarium (more commonly known in this journal as 'the best thing on the internet'), so despite the expense of being four hardbacks in a small print run, we decided we had to buy it. Then, Harry being who he is and Davide Whiteland being who he is, and they both being in London at the time, Harry arranged to pick up the parcel from him in some elaborate detective-costumed exchange in a museum, rather than getting it posted. Which is just awesome, as is the book.

( Upcoming Days )

Kalea is back in Scotland for like three days, so today we're making a long-planned day-trip to St Andrews, and the weather looks like it's going to be awful. Gusty, cold and drizzly all day long. However, looking at the weather, I was amused to see the temperature forecast jump up a degree for every leap north made on the map. Edinburgh: 11 °C; Leuchars: 12 °C; Dundee: 13 °C.

Oh hey it's the book meme! But first, a riddle for you: What has eight fingers, two thumbs, and decided to do a page-a-day meme during the busiest month of the year? This guy lady! Now back to your regularly scheduled pontificating:

Day 10 – Favorite classic book

Apart from taking a rather literal meaning of 'books from ancient Greece or Rome' (in which I am woefully under-read), I have no idea what the boundaries are for the proposed set of 'classic books' from which I am supposed to select an answer. Indeed, although there's a great deal of overlap in proposed sets of 'the classics' of literature, the only thing that anyone really seems to agree on is that nobody agrees about what exactly makes a book a 'classic', and even on the rare occasions when a group of people agree on a definition, there's considerable disagreement about which books qualify. So I am a bit stuck. Also, it's 1:30 in the morning.

Anyway, as tempting as it is to answer "I reject the premise of this question", I'm gonna stick an imaginary pin in a mental card catalogue go with Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, for what I assume are all the usual reasons. Good story, influential and important, deals with heavy shit while being actually quite lighthearted and funny, etc. (More importantly: unlike a few other possible candidates, it doesn't look likely to come up as an answer to later meme questions.)

( Upcoming Days )

In non-book related news, it's been getting cold again, and the buddlejas have lost almost all their purple, and reverted to looking like long brown corpse-fingers poking over the sides of walls. What was that 'summer' I was talking about a few weeks ago?

After an overnight drive down from chilly Massachusetts, I am back in North Carolina for a week, and oh my goodness it is lovely. Not just because the weather right now is comparable to a warm summer day in Scotland, but to be back among the trees at what must be their most beautiful time of year. I've written at (possibly excessive) length, in the past, about how much I miss being around trees all the time. It's hard to describe most of the time, but with their added aspect of seasonal beauty, it suddenly seems easier.

Autumn trees are lovely everywhere you go, of course, but in many places they're a view you come upon exceptionally: pretty little stands of trees on suburban lanes and in city parks and gardens. The UK countryside is stripped almost bare. Here, though, you can look in any direction, anywhere you go, and unless you are looking at some particular human edifice, or the ocean, you will be met by a stunningly beautiful array of orange, yellow, and dark red leaves, picked out by the dark green of loblolly pines and the light green of deciduous leaves that have not yet turned. Everywhere you look. Even in the awful awful suburbs, most of the time.

Even in the awful awful suburbs, though, there are little forest parks. The city of Raleigh has exterminated nearly all of its woodlands, but on the grounds of its newly remodeled art museum, it has put down trails and interspersed art installations among some of its remaining trees. My dad and brother and I went and walked around them yesterday. It was very pretty, although most of the installations were unremarkable -- with two exceptions. In one, the artist had painted designs inspired by European floral patterns (as usually seen in cloth) onto the pavement of the paths, and according to the sign, beneath the final obscuring coat of paint they'd written out the names of all the invasive species of plants now local to the area.

The other was more remarkable, if somewhat less thought-provoking. Named the "Cloud Chamber", it was a low hut set under a fairly open stand of trees, small and round, with nothing inside except three benches set against the white-painted walls. We entered by ducking through a small door, and upon closing it found ourselves in what seemed like total darkness, but for a pinprick of light coming in from the peak of the roof. As our eyes adjusted, though, we began to see the shadowy impressions of leaves and branches on the walls, which brightened and sharpened as our pupils dilated further. They were the branches high above, refracted down through the tiny hole like the exposure in a pinhole camera. It was, to put it simply, really, really cool.

We had not intended to go into the museum itself, but ended up going in briefly, towards the end of our visit. I hadn't been in since it was remodelled, and it was weird to see the collections of paintings and statues I'd grown up visiting and was so accustomed to seeing in their older, more traditional settings set around the new, very modern, brightly lit, open-plan museum. I was also interested to see a new collection they'd added (a "generous donation from the Hearst family"), which consisted of several artifacts of various antiquity from western and central Africa -- interested not just in the objects themselves, but in how they were displayed.

It seems customary for most American and European museums, when displaying items whose specific origin is unkown, to merely list the geographic and temporal origins of the piece. These provided this information, but on every single piece, using the same format as the info cards accompanying the modern paintings and sculptures, in the space for the artist's name they'd written 'Artist Unknown'. Explicitly displaying each piece, then, not as a cultural artifact but as a piece of art, the work of an individual, albeit an uknown one.

I was reflecting happily on this* when I turned the corner to find a display of the museum's older collection of ancient Greek and Roman statues, and saw that they had not been similarly labelled -- their info cards merely stated the name of the statue and what was known of its geographic and temporal origins. This is, of course, quite usual, as mentioned, but in a museum that was making such and effort to mark out the forgotten artists in its other collections, the double standard was jarring. Is it simply that "everyone knows" that a marble statue will have been sculpted by an artist, and thus the fact of the artist's existence, and our ignorance of their identity, need not be mentioned -- yet the artists themselves are a forgotten element in the shaping of the captured artworks we've looted from the places we've conquered? Probably so. But I can't help but think the point would've been driven further home by including the 'artist unknown' label on the pieces of murky European antiquity, and not just African.

* Though with qualifying thoughts about the veneration of 'the artist' and concepts about "what makes art art". 'Art' as 'item produced by an artist' (as opposed to, e.g., and artisan or lay person), for example. But that is another story.

Well. It's been a while.

I went to America and visited family, which was nice. Harry came too. Will expand this later (with actual thoughts), but that is not the point of this particular entry.

Right now I am back home again. I got off the bus yesterday evening to find a city that seemed made of air, and all of it moving. I pushed and fought and struggled home through it, dragging my suitcase, exhausted and sweaty and kind of needing to pee, and for that half hour hating everything and wondering why I live here. And then I came in and Jen was making salsa and Oli and Nice Daniel were holding some kind of band practice, and I remembered.

Then I went to work today and it was still light when I left at 7, and I felt all full of joy even though it was raining. And I've just had a shower and I even like this flat again, for a little while. It's icy cold in winter (and autumn and spring and I suspect also summer) and full of mice and surrounded by noisy neighbours, but it has the loveliest shower.

And I was thinking, while in that shower, about the heaps of work I need to do for my internship; about how when I got this internship I thought "hey, it's all work on the internet -- that'll be great, I spend loads of time on the internet already so it'll be super-easy!", but it turns out that work on the internet is still work; and have since come to the conclusion that it's an eminently bad idea to have work in the same medium as most of your leisure time, becuase (at least for me) they then get all blurred together and I procrastinate even more.

And then I thought "wait a minute: am I a Montessori kid or what?" -- maybe a cheesy way to put it, but it was all in my head because both my parents and like everybody on my mom's side of the family are Montessori teachers, so having just visited them it was all fresh in my mind -- anyway, the point is: there is no difference between work and play. Montessori intentionally blurs these boundaries, with many of the learning materials being collectively called 'works' and often individually called 'games' or something similar, and having a play-like structure (e.g. early math 'works' include things like 'the stamp game', 'racks and tubes', 'the binomial cube', etc.) It's not all perfect and rosy, of course, but at a basic level, it is pretty hard to train kids into self-directed learning if you can't get them to want to do stuff.

I used to be like that, always wanting to stay inside and play with the science kits or do more square root problems (on the 'pegboard') instead of playing outside where I would be obliged to run around in the uncomfortable heat. Then, somewhere along the way, all these external motivations started coming in. I got praised for my work, and then graded for it, and within a year I was doing it for the grades, and not for its own sake, and I discovered that I am actually a master procrastinator. Now I just have this pile of stuff that I need to get done, but I have managed to create a 'work' box in my head and I can't get it out of it.

Growing up, the idea of this holiday always bothered me. Something about a day of feasting devoted, even according to its own mythology, to celebrating the initial generosity of a group of people who were later systematically exploited by the very people they'd helped just never sat quite right with me.

Then, when I was fourteen, I went to a hippie school who I thought might take a similar viewpoint to mine, and maybe boycott the whole affair, but instead they made an even bigger fuss over Thanksgiving than any other group I'd yet encountered. Their view of it was more abstract; not much to do with the history of the holiday, and a lot to do with being thankful for various things. It was essentially a harvest festival, which made a lot of sense for a community that grew most of its own vegetables.

My next school (which, incidentally, also produced a lot of food for itself) took a similar view, and by this time I was happy enough to go along with it -- but since graduating, I've slipped back into my old views of things. It helps that I've spent every Thanksgiving since graduation in the UK. I just can't separate the holiday's meaning from exploitation and genocidal wars in my mind, and so I've mostly done my best to ignore it.

All the same, I've been feeling the lack of a harvest festival. Especially here, where by November it gets SO DARK SO EARLY, and the sun rises so late. They say that mid-winter holidays like Christmas are important because of the light levels and the turning of the year and such -- and to keep people's spirits up through the cold dark winter -- but I find November far bleaker than December. Sure, December is the darkest month, but it's also the month when things start to turn and become light again. November is just a rapid decline into darkness.

That, and I'm homesick. I miss my family, and I miss the food of the US at this time. I've been having cravings for gourds that simply aren't available here -- the vast arrays of heirloom squashes and such that are so readily available back home. Pecans. Sweet potatoes. Sure, the latter are available here, but they're somehow not quite as nice when divorced from the context of family and feasting. It seems like there ought to be some sort of celebration happening to stave off the cold and darkness. Maybe not Thanksgiving, but something.

I guess I've fallen out of the habit of updating LiveJournal. I guess it's probably another of those lost habits that I never gave much thought to, but turns out to have been good for me, like reading for pleasure or eating regular meals. But... what do I write? My mind feels full and empty, like a dusty attic: piles of information all packed away in half-organised trunks and boxes. Overfull. Inaccessible. I stub my toes trying to get at things.

It has been raining for two days now. I've been living inside the internet, checking from the underside for the tendrils of What Next -- flats, jobs, internships. I've been hunting and hunting, but only applied for a few. I need to stop taking it so personally when they turn me down, to see each rejection it as a "learning experience". I'm reading Overqualified to console myself. It's helping, a little.

I turned in my dissertation on the 17th. I turned in my final essay last Wednesday. So while I am not quite free as a bird -- I still have classes and tutorial readings, of course, and later there will be exams -- I am not nearly so stressed as I have been most of the year. Also, my sister is visiting, and we've been going to Halfcut and plays and things for the last few days of the On the Rocks festival.

The days have been gorgeous, too -- today is chilly, but I will forgive it. The weather is always a bit changeable at this time of year. Spring here seems almost as long as winter, brimming up in fits and starts in late February then dipping and wandering up and up until we pass the equinox, and the weather begins a slow but steadier warming turn. Right now we're entering yet another phase of blossoming. In our scruffy little garden this means another flush of daisies, along with phlox and something thick little bell-shaped things that may or may not be some sort of bluebell. Elsewhere, lilacs have started blooming, joining azaleas and violets and big red tulips, and several other garden flowers I can't identify. Along the burn, the trees have all turned white with blossoms and are dropping petals everwhere. Yesterday morning I saw a pair of ducklings nestling under their mother, the first I've seen all year.

On which note, you should all check out this comic, which is the sweetest thing I've read in a long while.

I cannot abide a heavy wind. Not a wind like today, with all the little trees and bushes blown halfway upside-down, and smaller plants and grasses just holding their roots for dear life. It's terrible to try to move in it, having to fight all the time just to keep going on your own trajectory -- like you're swimming through the air, but without any of the grace of actual buoyancy. Even inside, it drives me crazy. It gets into my head, whooshing and buzzing around the corners of the house, creeping into all the cracks. I can't concentrate with all this hollow, sibilant, constant but erratic noise rushing around the house all the time. It sets my nerves on edge.

Too, I can't seem to figure this wind out. It's actually fairly common, here, to have these driving winds that go on for hours and often days at a time. But while, back home, a heavy wind was an almost certain indicator of Big storm a-comin' -- or, indeed, simply occured during said storm -- around here it seems to indicate nothing at all. Just that it is windy. I've been trying to figure out the weather patterns here for the last three years, and I am about ready to give up.

I suppose that, despite my 3 years of paying attention to the local weather and learning its ways, something in me is always waiting for the other shoe to drop, in a wind like this. It keeps me uneasy, anyway, and I hesitate to go out lest I get caught in it. Or possibly that's just an excuse for my increasing reclusiveness. It was certainly a factor in my decision not to go to Dundee today, after all, where I had planned to attend a philosophy talk that may or may not have pertained to my dissertation. Then it was all of my reason, having decided against leaving town, not to go to our local campaign group meeting instead. I am spending more and more of my life secluded in my house. And I am okay with that. But I am not sure if I am okay with being okay with that.

It's midnight: the witching hour. It feels like it, too, since we've just watched a David Lynch film, all cuddled up on the floor, propped up on giant hippie pillows and nuzzling under the Our Lady of Batik sarong. I like this house.

It's Kalea's place, technically -- a top-floor flat in one of the taller buildings in town -- but she just got back yesterday. Harry and I have been living here for two weeks already, pottering around in a weird sort of domesticity. He's been my housewife, asking me about my day and offering me cups of tea when I come home from work, making me dinner. He even showed me how to use the washing machine.

From the windows in the kitchen and living room, I can see the roof of the top-floor flat I lived in last summer. It's very close, if one were to fly, but by the roads it's a few minutes' walk, separated by several flights of stairs. Down and then up again. Last summer, when Kalea lived alone in this flat, and I lived mostly alone, or with a succession of mostly-absent, transient flatmates, I thought of us as two eagles, or similar great solitary birds, nesting above the town in its eastern curve (the social and architectural 'top' of the old city, nearest the castle and ruined cathedral), surveying it from our lofty aeries.

In reality, it's only this flat that actually surveys the rooftops of the town. Last year my view was of a sweet little garden on one side, and Younger Hall -- the ugliest building in town, a great hulking monolith chiseled into painfully clashing chunky-victorian and neo-classical styles; the Reichstag of St Andrews -- on the other. It blocked the north side, so, it being summer, we never got to see the sun rise or set.

It does both of these in the north at this time of year. It comes up early in the northeast, swoops up around the southern peak of the sky and then back down into the northwest. Dusk lasts for hours, slowly tapering from a pale blue-grey to a dark one. Looking south, there is some illusion of night, especially if it is cloudy. But looking north, the horizon moves imperceptibly from the last gloom of twilight to the first stirrings of the pre-dawn glow. Even now, in the darkest part of the almost-night, I can see the yellow salvo of the coming morning.

Friends, Comrades. Another year gone. Another year, another year, another year, spinning on and on in the constant, subtle decay of the Earth's orbit, slowly slowly dwindling out on a scale so huge that to any being on its surface it seems infinite.

In this cosmological spirit I decided--around the time of the Autumnal Equinox, when I was buying my tickets home for the end of this year--that I ought to stay in Scotland for the Winter Solstice. My friend was planning a party, and I haven't properly celebrated a solstice in years. So I came to be in that frozen darkness, admiring the frost-sparkling ground and the intoxicated, sparkling company. Left at 7 am with a sleepy Daniel, and (at 8:46) finished watching the sun rise in magnificent, magnanimous red splendour from the window of the train, rushing off to Edinburgh to fly into those pinkening clouds.

Where, after wheeling through the new-morning-wet, Sunday-empty little grey city, trying and failing to find an open cafe and feeling a bit ridiculous dragging a floppy, wheeled duffel bag, florid inner monologue turned to panicked terror upon reading the departures screen: BD57 to Heathrow, Cancelled. A heavy Scrooge of a fog had settled over the city of London, and planes were having trouble landing; all flights either delayed or cancelled.

( How I got home. Cut for length and frustration. )

My one solace throughout all of this was my book, read openly in the hours-long queues and endless waiting in terminals: The Monkey Wrench Gang, a novel by rockstar-mountain-man eco-Anarchist Edward Abbey about a small troupe of dynamite jockeys harrying industrial "progress" in the American Southwest. I took great comfort, through all the indignity of the airport, the bag searches, the stroking and groping of the Female Security Officer, the shouting and shoving and the disorderly queues, that somewhere, somewhere out there, there might be (there are) people, flesh-and-blood-and-heart people, fighting the good fight, clawing the machine for all they're worth, getting in under the skin of the great complex organism of industry.

I thought about this a lot, because when you're alone for that long, surrounded by strangers, you have a lot of time to think. I thought about beaurocracy, and the breakdown of The System. (The trouble with Heathrow is mostly that it's poorly organised, but also that it's simply too damn big. And they want to expand that monstrosity?) Watching men and boys die at Branagh's Agincourt, I thought about war and technology and futility, the skewed priorities of men, that fierce loyalty which is so admirable and yet so damning; those poor noble fools. 'The Shawshank Redemption'? I thought about Anarchy. That great Ideal. But how are we ever to get there? I've always thought it was one of those things that people could handle just fine if they were raised in it--never bought those bullshit 'human nature' arguments claiming it's impossible--but, of course, we're not raised in it. We are born, we live, we die in the prison of the state. We are all 'institutionalised men'. And if we get out, what then? Will we die like Brooks, despairing and alone, in a brutal world of all against all, or will we gang together, supportive, and feel "the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain"?

Roll on, 2008.