Filed under: Record of Lived Experience | Tags: aporiae, conversation as derivative, conversation as ephemeral, dissonance, does the body die before the word, language as constitutive, language as representative, laughter as rupture, masoleum of lived experience, pedagogy, stand-offs surrenders and breakdowns, the relational, writing as mastery
We had a great conversation. And then something interesting, too:
PA–So you may want to rewrite your paper now. In light of what we’ve said. Since it seems we’ve come to some new understandings–you might be able to clarify, you know, and work towards that mastery.
JLRH–Actually I like this just fine I mean this was a conversation between you and me we had it, we were here–we know that–
PA–I mean, you never know–
JLRH–What is so important about the model of writing as mastery?
PA–It is so incomprehensible that you would say this–so entirely out of sync with everything else you’ve just said–that I would have to start and the beginning and repeat everything I’ve said all over again to demonstrate its importance to you– and with that, I leave you.
Get that smile off yr face.
JLRH
Filed under: Record of Lived Experience
THE anxiety sets in. Farina has come and gone, my mother is washing raspberries in the kitchen, I am ranking and prioritizing my winter skirts, and am worrying over how to take the front wheel off my bicycle. At some distant time in the evening tonight, I will be living in Woolman House in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. I will not leave. I will sleep there, I will wake, and it will begin.
Filed under: Introspection: regrets, Record of Lived Experience | Tags: Albert-Lüdwigs-Universität, amateur filmmaking, CALEDONIA, DOMOWINA, Freiburg, German Expressionism, Onkel Heinz, regrets, study abroad
Farina is coming down from the north. She will be my last visitor before taking off for the east. She is younger than the rest of them, so her parents will be coming with her. She is bringing along with her Onkel Heinz, the ghost costume that we made together over a year ago. Heinz starred, alongside Maria, Hans, Jürgen, Elsie, and Kaninchen, in a German neo-expressionist mash-up called Drehort Geschichteburg. Images follow.
Onkel Heinz dances with Elsie while K. looks on, recites Goethe--a casual midsummer's picnic
It is the first anniversary of our arrest. As such, there are two significant plans for the day:
1. To make supplementary anniversary treats, some of which may be vegan cupcakes executed with a combination of garbanzo bean, coconut, and quinoa flour, the rest of which may prove to be a homemade batch of agave-sweeted coconut milk ice cream.
2. To film, on location in CALEDONIA, short clips that would have made up the second segment of Drehort Geschichteburg. Or, to follow Heinz to several scenic run-down-Ohio locations, and to film short clips that could be drowned out in sentimental music with PSA-like banners scrolling somewhere across the lower frame.
My mind can’t stay too long with ghosts. I am thinking about a post that came from Bacchus, which invited written correspondence from the friends who would stay stateside while he made his way to Freiburg, Germany. I was supposed to be part of that envoy to Freiburg, only I made the decision to transfer, and squashed those plans. I have never been one to spend too long pondering the dust-trails hanging over the crossroads and caddyshacks shooting behind me as the wagon lurches west(east)ward, but this time, it is hard to imagine that I have made a decision that will benefit me. Whoever could imagine that I would turn down the adventuresome path? I exchanged my internship with DOMOWINA on the Czech-German border for teaching on Long Island, and I exchanged my year at Albert-Lüdwigs-Universität for a year at a snobby East Coast stone-row school. I thought, I now think, that my intellectual experience would continue to be jagged and uneven (had I stayed). I did not want to pay the $13,000 a year that living abroad would cost me. (Now I am paying something like $20,000). I did not feel that I would have learned enough in my years at Michigan, and did not trust that I could return with only one, and make a satisfactory case for myself to a graduate institution. I will have to do my best to make sure Stone Row pounds out the lumpen dough of my heart into something flinty and smart and sparking all the time. For now, I will evade my Two Chief Duties–
1. Practice French; take on-line French placement exam
2. Lernen mehr Deutsch; nehmen die deutsches Prüfrung
– and play some more with ghosts.
JLR
Filed under: Record of Lived Experience | Tags: Coney Island, diners, high school, John Williams, National Lawyers Guild, philosophy, Rotary Club, speaking, the Union, the University
Drove home from the great expanse of Long Island, which started to feel like a whole bunch of old suburb straining out into the sea. I left without every having visited the Rockaways, without ever watching another Woody Allen film, and, miraculously, without feeling much more of a specifically connected sense of place than I did in old Ohio. The only place that I have been that has not let down that special myth of placeness–the only place that has songs that stand up against the wooden planks and rusted, blinking signs that still line the well-loved streets–is Coney Island. I rode the orange line to the tip of Brooklyn four times to visit that place. The second time onboard, the Cyclone broke my right toenail. One evening Charles and I watched a red haunt-moon rise out over the ocean, and the beach glistened with bottles. Behind the bottles were hundreds of people, still scattered as cooly and contendedly as they were during the day. There is something terrible democratic–so democratic that it isn’t ironic and isn’t yet overdone to say so–about Coney Island: the city that sprawls into the gates-free amusement park, where one still can watch others get sick and pay nothing, and then that whole mess pounds and roars right next to the stolid and unmoveable sea. There is a beauty to all that stillness lapping against all that motion.
Carl came yesterday, from the North. Carl works for the Union, as I’ve said before, and has recently been promoted to head the student branch of the National Lawyers Guild at the University of Michigan. He is an outstanding man for the job. He speaks of his friends–Polyphenol and Stone and Carol and Mulvaney–and the strange split that evolves among law school students: those on scholarship can afford to go out and serve the public good. For the rest, pressure’s on to find a corporate job that pays. Stone is interested in public defense work on the borders, and Carl, of course, talks for hours about how the Toyota plant on the Kentucky border puts five feet of sand around the barbed-wire fences surrounding the factory so that the Union can’t come in to steal incriminating documents. Carl says that most can only take a decade of on-the-ground organizing, and then end up in padded offices somewhere. One such former rabble-rouser eagerly recommended to him a new campaign to get Toyota to capitulate (unionize): an ad with a picture of several fully-outfitted members of the Taliban riding around in a truck, with the slogan DID THEY GIVE THEM THAT TRUCK? Yep, that’s defamation, Carl said. Well can we still do it, Old Organizer retorted. Yep, that’s a sure ticket to the local courts, and then to the Federal courts, where they’ll smash us, because it’s Kentucky, Carl says. Carl once warned that he would write a book with me in it before I could write one with him. He begins his teaching career in the winter–he will be a graduate student instructor for a philosophy course on global justice with one of the few remaining political economists in the institution.
Speaking of the university–John Williams, lost American genius, penned several novels that have been re-released by the New York Review of Books. One, Stoner, has become my pet obsession of the last three days. It catalogues the life and times of a farmer-turned-literature-PhD. at the University of Missouri at Columbia. All of the politics and sadness that I would have hoped would be avoided by careful politicking at the University is there. Strangely, though, I have seldom (of late) felt myself so moved by a novel. The scenes in which Hollis Lomax, a nefarious character from some East Coast institution, proceeds to ruin William Stoner’s career, or to push forward his incompetent graduate advisee despite Stoner’s fervent refusal, rile up genuine anger. Stoner’s wife, Edith, is also unbearable. It is this strange combination of clear-cut victories for the brave and outspoken mind and terrible, pricey capitulations (the final loss of Grace, Stoner’s beautiful and once-noble daughter, first to her mother, and then to the anonymous bumbling fraternity brother who impregnates her) that makes Stoner’s plight so real. I anticipate researching this work further, especially in conjunction with the work of Walker Percy and the other somewhat forgotten middle westerners and Southerners who were producing quality American fiction in the 1940s and 1950s.
Tonight, I went with Puck and his friends to the downtown. Curley is moving to California for the fall, so the boys went out to bid her a short adieu. The boys were not Puck’s usual group of friends. Two were members of a prominent local high school band, The Days. Canno is the frontman, and is short and hanger-shouldered with bones in the crooks of his bikeseat-leather jacket. Lini is kind-hearted, homosexual, and sports a Japanese haircut. He only recently returned to the States from a Rotary-sponsored trip to Japan. Nick didn’t speak much; had broad features. Augustus will be significant in the theatre someday. He has the uncanny ability to lie and create sympathy with a high degree of verisimilitude. He is beak-nosed with wide, convincing teeth, and a chest flat enough and small enough of give him the aura of widened, overgrown boyishness. We ended up at the Cordlight Rose, discussed small matters of philosophy, and ordered pie and french fries.
I am strangely attracted to the prospect of being a mentor. I spoke to Canno about philosophy, about his searching questions of theology and ethics in the world, and about old blues. I recommended The Anthology of American Folk Music. I fumbled to explain the importance of the continental/analytic divide, but found that I was not convincing. Neither of us were articulate. How long and far it has been and I have come since I thought that all things had precise meanings that I was put in the world to discover.
JLR
Filed under: Record of Lived Experience | Tags: Balkan brass bands, breakfast, Flash animation, Giorgio Agamben, Herman Melville, I.D. 2008 Annual Design Review, John Berger, John Tytell, noble obtuse narrative, self-betterment, sleeping early, the Hamptons, the Olympics, the Recuerdo principle, the Watson Fellowship, Thomas Nagel, Young People For
Early seven o’clock in the Hamptons. I fell asleep early, while we looked at old pictures of ourselves and jeered and alternately supported the latecoming spirit of Patriotismus für unserer Land that seems to strike us in this barren decade when we watch the Olympics. We were waiting for a train of Host’s friends to arrive from somewhere. I took a nap–as I always do–which involved a panic-struck observation that the clock really did give a six o’clock in the morning reading: I did not wake back up to greet the train.
I am abandoned in a sleeping house, and don’t feel comfortable using the pool, so I will tell the stories. After No dragged me back to the city, and after our divorced-couple battle involving the throwing of the paper sack (mine) and a defeatist attitude regarding my completion of said mythic journey to the Hamptons (No), we met with No’s love Malagasie and her sister Clip at Parsons-at-the-New-School. Clip had some sort of exhibition of work from a two-week portfolio-building class she had taken. Clip and Malagasie started neighing and rubbing necks and giving long horsen glances at No and I’s many bags and haphazard airport dress, so I volunteered to sit on the round, rolling, cushioned benches with the stuff while No and the sisters went to see Clip’s art. I ended up standing by the door to the exhibition of animation. Two sessions were running: Junior and Senior. Because I was wearing my Authoritarian Brown Dress, I happened to look like a docent; and, in my reduced, travel-anxious state, I took considerable pleasure out of managing the space in the tiny and overcramped showing room, by helping newcomers find spots, and by generally and fairly permanently occupying the space just in front of the hinges of the door. I was impressed by the quality of the flash animation videos that the students produced–one in particular involved a man with a head of garlic, and some sort of an emotional (anguish? conquest? love?) scene with bread and a subtly anthropomorphosized tomato. The Junior class, as far as I could tell, were responsible for storyboarding a character, and then completing a set of fundamental Flash tasks with the digitized sketch of said character. The basic tasks involved rotating, walking, the bounce-and-stretch (imagine what a Jigglypuff would do if dropped into a screen and allowed to accelerate towards screen’s bottom), the fly/run, and the morph. The morph demanded that students sketch by hand the intermediate stages between two objects, thus completing the illusion of a morph–Flash normally takes care of this process, so the results were fairly impressive. The most memorable (and the only that I remember) was the cat-breadloaf morph. The Senior class’s assignment involved these basics (which were gathered in one film, called “Experiments”) as well as a more sophisticated final project. The students were given a single uniting theme for their various expressions: a mouse must run into and out of the scene. The resulting film, despite the variety, possessed considerable contiguity. In one of the frequent anime-style mouse-fighting scenes, the tiny mouse rotated his slit-eyed head in a gesture of defiance against the flaming-haired anime warrior. The gesture was delightfully urban, and adequately communicated the come-hither sass required to initiate physical skirmishes on the modern-day anime battlefield.
No and the sisters eventually came back, and No assumed his turn with the baggage. But, before I could resume my free wandering (exploding a can of seltzer in my face in the meantime), the sisters decided to take the subway back to Bushwick. They had originally approached No and I, stating that we seemed to have “free hands” (given our preponderance of baggage). This was not true, but No decided to remove some of his baggage to Malagasie’s apartment so that we could travel on to the Hamptons relatively unencumbered. This is how No abandoned me in a highly fashionable place just before the pouring rain came down over New York Town.
As No left, I wandered through I.D.’s 2008 annual design review–I was pleased to see the SquishyBowls from GuyotDesigns, among the great company of a reversible-squishy drain plug (it can be “popped up” for easy gathering of sink debris), Nike’s mock-vintage Portland Runner (produced to advertise the launch of the Nike vintage running shoe line), and a beach-chair back that sticks into the sand.
Without No, I started to read the Critical Animal Studies articles that Bald Grad Student had uploaded for our Critical Theory Club back at Old University. I had never attended Critical Theory Club, but had eagerly requested and bookmarked all of the readings, since that first day when BGS flagged me outside of Sava and asked me about my (nonexistent, preemptive) dissertation. BGS has eagerly solicited my commentary before the 28 August meeting (in which Un chien andalou will also be viewed) so I thought that I would do my best to make good on old commitments by reading the texts. (However, I have just been reminded of “Ideology 101,” an online course through the Progressive Academy Online, through Young People For–I’ve let my work lapse since the first week! Goodness! How the moral sins do stack like chips of black against the sun!) Anyway: the first reading was John Berger’s “Why Look at Animals.” I will include, as a subsequent post, the complete content of my notes on the reading. BGS also included Thomas Nagel’s “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” (a piece on consciousness and the mind-body problem, as far as I can gather) and big sections of what looks to be Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal. After pushing my computer to 8% battery life, I ducked into a fashion show opening, and ate many little plates’ worth of olives, roasted red peppers, and strangely pungent pepperocinis. I then took up John Tytell’s Reading New York, which I purchased in hopes that it would inform my “Poetry of New York City” course. I only took it with me because of a promising tale of Tytell’s youthful deflowering at the hands of an older siren named Frauke (a masculinized and shell-feeling mouthful of a transformation of my own German professor’s name), which I found when flipping through the book several days ago. The read was terrible: several prominent sentences, indicating Tytell’s gross amplifications of common erroneous tropes or manners of thinking, marred what otherwise was a Noble Obtuse Narrative. Another post on the Noble Obtuse Narrative to follow. Just before the section on Melville (which I found quite useful–my mystical sentiments toward Melville, birthed by Professor Squabble at the Ohio State University, and encouraged by some side reading on Hawthorne in Maine, have been heighted), foil trays of hor d’oeuvres which might have been hot were marched past me to the fashion show wing. I followed soonafter, and found a tray of dosa-wrapped samosas next to a tray of spanikopita (inedible). After four of the samosas, I detected some meat-textured lumps in the otherwise delicious curried vegetable filling–in stark testimony to Critical Animal studies, I waved the suspicion away, and thanked heavens for the versatility of lentil texture. I went back for five (or six) more samosa, and waited out the rain, which had begun to pour over the huge flat glass-paneled ceiling of the waiting area of Parsons. More Tytell, and my fatigue grew, so I called No to make more plans. He said that I could come and nap in Bushwick, but I didn’t want to pay the fare (my newfound Recuerdo policy–see entry to follow), so I took more olives, more pages of Tytell, and eventually wandered back to Union Square for a round of farewell falafel.
We met our host, and Vincent, the driver, took us all the way to the Princess Diner in the Hamptons, where he called and got directions to the house that I now sit in. I am still not burning where I am–at least not with anything other than hunger. I am excited about two things: about the Watson Fellowship proposal in world theatrical practices and rituals that Our Host has been describing to me (and the potential that I have, in the next year, to develop a similar specified and diversified grasp on What It Is That I Would Like To Do With the Rest of My Life), and–goodness, I’d almost forgotten the other–the Balkan brass band that apparently exists at Swarthmore. I will need to find an appropriately battered mellophone or marcheable horn before I leave Columbus. Towards breakfast and my darkening skin, with distended belly and yellow eyes, with skin in need of a brushing from above–
JLR
Filed under: Record of Lived Experience, Uncategorized | Tags: arugula, coup-de-grace, hunger, needing something, Parsons, planning, the Hamptons, vacation
No and I have finally arrived at the Hamptons–or, more specifically, at a nice, clean-looking house down a reddish stone driveway some miles to the North of Southampton. A truckbed on which several oversized fiberglass vegetables perch is parked (and looks permanently parked) next to a neighboring barn. A local grocery store sells admittedly gourmet chocolate bars for $8.99, traffic is terrible, and Our Host’s mother did once float through the pool while exclaiming “Host! Did I tell you about my jewels! 40 karats of gold and 20 karats of diamonds and rubies and–!”–but otherwise, no clear sign that we are anywhere other than anywhere else in America.
This comes after a day of ill-will in the city. I was stranded under a platform with several rough-faced gentlemen at some stop between Nowhere and Howard’s Beach, Queens. I spent another good portion of the day dragging No’s guitar through the city streets. And then, I pretended to be a very persistent connoisseur, and attended (and re-attended) the opening of a master class on fashion design at Parsons-at-the-New-School, especially in time for the warm samosa hor-d’oeuvres. Problem was that No drastically miscalculated the time that Our Host would be arriving at JFK from Minnesota. I thought that I had asked No to confirm our plans repeatedly, in the already loud moments that filled our frantic final night of moving from Frost Hall, but it seems that I was not insistent enough. With only enough time to run, we left Locust Valley on the eleven o’clock train, and hurried to Jamaica to take the air train to JFK. It was only after we had purchased our tickets that No said that he really didn’t know when Our Host would be arriving. I pressured him to call her–to call her parents, or to call Malagasie, who might know something about her flight. Turns out we didn’t know a thing about this flight: not the airline, not the arrival terminal, and not the time of arrival. Four impatient train arrivals/departures later, we still sat on the smooth benches, and No told me that he had screwed up. Our Host wouldn’t arrive until eight o’clock. So he convinced me that we should go back into the city. I agreed, but only after he had agreed to pay my airtrain reentrance fee. And after I had gotten into a loud verbal argument with an MTA worker. And thrown the remnants of my bag lunch into No’s face. I think that I like planning.
Also, No is standing next to me now singing an auctioneer-style song: “This shit is making me die is making me die is making me die is making me.” Malagasie is behind the shuttered door responding “No thank you,” “No thank you” at any of the peaceful intervals. We played the fishing game for an hour, and then I washed greens with Our Host. Now, we may be going into town. For dinner I will be having eggplants with basil and tomatoes, and an arugula salad with fennel. They will be having breaded eggplant stacks. Something is always wrong in my life when I am ravenous for things to consume, for places to travel, for folks to meet. I want to burn and whistle right here where I am.
More in a bit: on Parsons, the rough unbearableness of John Tytell, the driver named Vincent, kiss-kiss people/my raw encounter with American wealth, and how much I am looking forward to the voyage home.
JLR
