You and me both, kid

Okay, entries have been a little thin this semester. Part of it's busyness, of course, but part of it is that I've been so much more enamored of others' words than my own. Lately, I've been encountering songs, poems, people, etc., that remind me of something either deep or superficial. This has always happened; it just seems more concentrated lately. On the superficial level, for example, a guy who looks just like my friend Andrew asked me for directions in front of MIT today. In the thick of my indexing project, I read the poem "Above the Oxbow" for probably the first time since I was thirteen and had no idea about the Summit House and the Connecticut River Valley, where the poem takes place - now those places are dear to me and already in the past.

I also keep coming across these phrases and songs that resonate with me on a very specific level. Sometimes it's in Sylvia Plath's journals; just before a birthday, for instance, she vows to herself to enter her second quarter-century in Boston and to live "to the hilt." (Here in Boston, I turn twenty-five soon.) Then there are the songs that have appeared on the radio and All Songs Considered, that I never heard before and made it onto my latest playlist: "Bottle Up and Explode!" by Elliott Smith, "Gray or Blue" by Jaymay, "To Be Alive and Alone" by Troubled Hubble.

The title of this post, however, comes from a line (which I think is correct; I consulted the resident expert) from a song to which I cannot stop listening: "Failsafe" by the New Pornographers. I realized I didn't really know what the word means, so (being me) I went to the OED, which describes it as a situation in which something "revert[s], in the event of failure or breakdown, to a condition involving no danger." Failure, basically, that is still failure, but causes a minimum of harm to all involved. It's an appropriate goal for me.

I don't know how to embed a sound file, and I couldn't find a video of the New Pornographers singing this song, but below is a version by the Choir Practice, which is the first version of the song I heard anyway.

I just have to say one more thing, because Clare said I should put it on the blog, and she's right. I just want to say that I am not making fun of the girl in the story; I just thought what she said was funny. Last week I was at the reference desk, and a student came in asking how to get to articles online. I asked her what databases she'd been using, and she said, "Someone told me a really good one was JSTOR." But she pronounced it "j'stor," like "je t'aime." It was, you know, the wrong emphasis on the wrong syllable. Which people like me find hilarious.

Sitting between Gutenberg and Confucius

I am blogging to you live - not from anywhere terribly exciting like SXSW or anything - but from the Bates Hall Reading Room at the Boston Public Library. After lunch downtown, I made myself come here and do a Power Point (ugh) for a presentation I have to do next week. Even the Simmons library is somewhat distracting at this point. This is the quietest place I know. Somehow, in this large urban library where there is often noise and chaos within and without, in this room people are serious about their reduction of distraction. There is no talking or eating or even loud typing. Also, it's beautiful. It's one of those rooms with names of authors and artists and philosophers engraved in gold around the ceiling...the title reflects where I'm sitting. I don't have a camera with me, so an image from somewhere else will have to do...wow, looking at it while being here is so postmodern. Also, depending on where I get a job, I may not be in Boston in a couple of months, so I thought I should hit my favorite places before graduation.

Here it is:

Indexing, the art of

Sorry it's been a little while. Spring break started on Friday, and I took much of the weekend to give myself a psychic rest before jumping back into work (both employment and school).

The big project I'm working on this semester (for subject analysis) is a subject index to the collected poems of Sylvia Plath. I spent the first two weeks or so doing background reading, including a book by G. Norman Knight called Indexing, The Art of. The title should give you some idea of the author's approach...this guy is serious about his indexing, and his indexing jokes. There are some pretty amazing metaphors, like, “Subheadings are the vassals of their headings and should always…have a close connexion with their lords and masters" (p. 54).

A few pages earlier, he writes, “In a ‘literary’ index…such elaborate headings add a certain attractiveness, and an index in narrative form can indeed become readable and in parts even exciting” (46). Hopefully, that's what this index will be...an amalgamation of what critic, poet, and indexer have to say about these poems.

And I forgot how good these poems are; I haven't read the whole book through since I first acquired it...I think for my fourteenth birthday, but I could be wrong. Take this stanza from the middle of "Tale of a Tub," which articulates so well the impossibility of escaping physical reality:

We take the plunge; under water our limbs
waver, faintly green, shuddering away
from the genuine color of skin; can our dreams
ever blur the intransigent lines which draw
the shape that shuts us in? absolute fact
intrudes even when the revolted eye
is closed; the tub exists behind our back:
its glittering surfaces are blank and true.

Looking back on this post, it's a little self-important and academic. Sorry about that; I'm getting all English major-y again with this project. I'm also producing poems at a much higher rate than I ever have while being in school (and not in a poetry workshop class): about concerts, the leap year, and the hallway at MIT called "the infinite corridor," among other things.

Quotations come from....
Knight, G. Norman. Indexing, The Art of. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979.

Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992.

The benefits of staying up late

The other night I was flipping channels restlessly about 1:30 and thought I'd go back to Conan O'Brien. Once I got there, I literally sat up in bed because I was immediately hooked by the guy with the ukulele on the screen. I didn't even know it was a ukulele, and it took me a painfully long time to come up with the title of the song - I was humming it a while before my brain fed me the words "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." Anyway, I was really struck by the performance; I can't put my finger on why. Apparently Conan was really into it, too, though - which only proves my theory that he and I should really hang out.

His name is Jake Shimabukuro, by the way. I had never heard of him, but that doesn't mean anything. Obviously.

Those we reach but can never touch

I read two poems recently that get at, if not answer, the sorts of things I've been thinking about lately, about how people relate to and love each other. I really love the first one, because it's not about a futuristic or even really a modern condition. It reminds me of Wallace Stevens' "Re-Statement of Romance," how the representations (including words) of things are never even close to what you wanted to express. And the phrase in the Rimbaud poem - "neither ardent nor timid" - really resonates with me. That's been true of me and of my life lately, and I feel like I should pick a side.


Science Fiction
by Les Murray

I can travel
faster than light
so can you
the speed of thought
the only trouble
is at destinations
our thought balloons
are coated invisible
no one there sees us
and we can't get out
to be real or present
phone and videophone
are almost worse
we don't see a journey
but stay in our space
just talking and joking
with those we reach
but can never touch
the nothing that can hurt us
how lovely and terrible
and lonely this is



Evenings
by Arthur Rimbaud
translated by Vernon Watkins

It is rest full of light, neither fever nor languor, on the bed or on the road.

It is the friend, neither ardent nor timid. The friend.

It is the loved one, the fond, neither tormenting nor tormented. The loved one.

The air and the world all unexplored. Life.

-Was it then this?

-And the dream breaks afresh.


Murray poem from The New Yorker, 28 January 2008
Rimbaud poem from LitFinder.com

From today, March is just two weeks away

So I posted this to my last.fm profile, because it's music-related, but I thought I'd post it here too. Valentine's Day is over now, I've gotten over the halfway point of this consistently malaise-filled month, and I think this list is kind of funny. I don't exactly think any of these ways about love, but I have at one point or another.

The line in the post's title is not true this particular February 14, but it is in one of the songs on my (highly anticipated) Valentine's Day mix. It's subdivided into sections, because I'm pretentious. This is clearly not comprehensive, also.

Part I: There Is No Love, Only Sex
Fuck and Run - Liz Phair
The Taste of You - Erin McKeown
Sin Wagon - Dixie Chicks
I Don't Love Anyone - Belle & Sebastian
Hey Ya - Outkast
Mr. Right Now - the Nields

Part II: Maybe There's Love, But It's Probably Fucked-Up
Leather - Tori Amos
Mary Kay - Jill Sobule
Lily (My One and Only) - Smashing Pumpkins
Divorce Song - Liz Phair

Part III: I Don't Quite Get Love But I Wish I Did
Last Kisses - the Nields
As Is - Ani DiFranco
February - Dar Williams
Love, Love, Love - the Organ

Part IV: I Want Love (Just a Different Kind)
If You See the One - Rebecca Katz
As Cool as I Am - Dar Williams
Polyester Bride - Liz Phair
I Want Love - Elton John

I think I'll pass on this one

So, the other day I was looking at library jobs, which I do fairly compulsively lately, and I came across a posting to be a librarian at the US Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay. It's really long, so I thought I'd post a few lines from it. Aside from a lot of standard library functions, there are these requirements:

The Librarian serves as and directs the overall library operation providing mission, education, and quality of life support to all base personnel, their families, and retirees. (Is "mission support" support for missions the personnel are sent on? Or is this more of a "mission statement" of the naval base?)

Monitors funding allocations, meets expenditure targets, and justifies unfunded requirements. (This last phrase intrigues me. I mean, I guess this is what public libraries do all the time, but I've never seen it laid so bare.)

The last line of the posting is:
Occupants of this position must maintain the privacy of official work information and data and demonstrate the highest level of ethical conduct.

Do I even need to say anything about that? I recognize that individuals and government policy are two separate things, but I'm just really curious about the librarian who would both subscribe to the ALA Bill of Rights and take this job.

That teenage feeling

Last night I went with a friend to see Neko Case in concert at the Calvin Theatre in Northampton. Someone else had told me she had the most beautiful voice he'd ever heard in person, and he was not kidding around. I've never heard anything like it. We were up in the second row of the balcony, and I was pretty much pinned against the back of my seat by this gorgeous wall of sound. And her songs are so sad, and funny, and real - the kind of truth that keeps following you and won't let you forget how uncomfortably close to you it is.

Anyway, it's like waking up the day after prom or something. (I didn't go to prom, but I'm trying to make a metaphor here.) I couldn't sleep; I don't want to do homework or even apply for this amazing job I saw an ad for on Friday. I'm thinking of roaming the greater Boston area with my iPod and being emo.

The library school student at a party

I've had a variation on this conversation a couple of times in the last couple of days. My friend Michelle and I are discussing laminating it on a card and handing it out at parties to preempt people. Not that we're bitter. Our working theory is that people don't ask these sorts of questions of, say, investment bankers because it's obvious why someone would want to be an investment banker (i.e., big piles of money). Librarianship, however, remains a veiled mystery to some, as you shall see.

OTHER PERSON: So, what do you do?
ME: I'm in grad school.
OP: Oh, for what?
ME: Library science.
(Pause.)
OP: You have to have a master's for that?
ME: To be a professional librarian, yeah.
OP: Huh. So what are your classes about? The Dewey Decimal System? [Melvil Dewey is invariably mentioned.]
ME: Um, not really. [I try to explain a class I'm currently taking and why I find it cool.]
OP: Well. How'd you get interested in that?
ME: That's a good question.
OP: Do you really like to read?
ME: Yeah, but that's not really why. [I try to explain access to and organization of information succinctly. This rarely works.]

Last of the pre-semester pleasure reading

Last night I finally finished What is the What by Dave Eggers. If you didn't know, it's a novel based heavily on the story of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the "lost boys of Sudan." There's really not a whole lot I can say about the book without trivializing the unforgivable things that happen to Valentino and other children. Eggers did choose an interesting and effective way to frame the novel, and the narrative is devastatingly paced - the way this boy's life must have been. Each event just punches you in the chest. It's difficult to say if I recommend the book, or if I liked it. Basically, it just made me think about the utter pointlessness of this (and many other) conflicts, the way people use each other for retaliation, for volume of destruction. It's despicable.

Switching gears entirely. A friend of mine came back into town recently and lent me The Bell Jar on CD, as read by Maggie Gyllenhaal. I was pretty excited; MG is one of my favorite actresses. I read The Bell Jar probably when I was about fifteen or sixteen, and it had a huge impact on me. Hearing it again, I realized how good it is, how well-written. There are those unmistakable Sylvia Plath metaphors, like comparing some fixture (a lamp, I think) to a "death's head." And Gyllenhaal is really great at the tone - there are times when she'll pause between words and it's perfect. She also sounds, a good deal of the time, like the recordings I've heard of Plath reading her poems - a low voice, dropping each word as if she couldn't wait to get it out of her, was a little disgusted by it. Plath, though, always sounds older, though she only lived to be thirty. Hearing Maggie Gyllenhaal is like what I imagine this young college-age Plath sounded like. It's pretty spectacular.

Thank you Arts & Letters Daily

Here's a really interesting article about marriage, thanks to Arts & Letters Daily. It touches on a couple of questions I was wondering about after reading that Lillian Rubin book.

That's all.

Want to help me with my homework?

So, this spring I'm taking a course in subject analysis, which is...just what it sounds like, I guess. It includes the concepts of indexing, abstracting, and determining the "subject(s)" of a work, whether that work be a book, website, painting, etc. There's a big old project due at the end of the class, and I need to decide what I'm doing it on in the next few weeks.

From the assignment description:
"Examples of projects include databases (using any database management system), subject indexes to collections of Web resources, modified or newly developed thesauri, single-item indexes, and so on."

I found two examples of what people had done in the past; one was an index to a novel, the other a thesaurus (or controlled vocabulary) in the area of typography.

Why am I talking about this? Because I can't decide what to do. I was thinking about doing some collection of poems or letters, maybe a small archival collection (though I'd want to have more access to it than M-F 9-5). It has to be not already indexed, obviously. So, if any of you wonderful people out there have resources you need subject-analyzed or indexed, just tell me, and it could be a win-win situation. I'll come up with something eventually, but it would be cool if I could actually do something useful.

That's all for this afternoon. I lied again about writing about Dave Eggers! An entry on him will be forthcoming, as will discussions of my other courses (which start next week).

Just friends

So, I said quite a while ago that I would write about a recently-read book, Just Friends by Lillian B. Rubin. Rubin conducted interviews with 300 people about their friendships, following up by contacting the people participants named as "friends." (There was a recent episode of This American Life, "The Ties That Bind," that also addressed the question of what we call "friends." It was really good.) I've had the book for awhile, but I'm glad I read it now, because I've been thinking a lot about human relationships: love, marriage, friendship, sex, and romance - and how all those things intersect. The idea, for instance (pretty common in our current society) that one person should fulfill all of these roles and needs for another one - is that harmful? Is it putting too much pressure on one person and relationship? I'm not sure.

Two short passages from the book address this question:
1. "The belief, so common in our society, that the new mate will satisfy all our needs makes it easier to set friends off to the side, to diminish their importance in the immediate afterglow of marriage when such expectations are highest." (118-119) (Rubin found that later on in marriage - or after divorce - friends seem more important again. All of these findings are, of course, highly generalized.)
2. A quote from a participant: "Just like there isn't a perfect friend, there isn't a perfect husband or lover. That's why people need both, and if they don't have them, there's going to be trouble." (141)

All right, I can totally understand that. But what about these ways we define our relationships with other people? I started thinking about this when I was flipping through a Christmas present, The Girl's Guide to Everything (which I think will be most useful for the car and financial advice). The "friendship" section, however, had a little sidebar that I can't quote exactly (not having it at hand), but it was something like, don't get confused or alarmed when you make a new friend and get really excited about her, as if you're falling in love. You're not gay - it's just the flush of new friendship. Talk about labels. One participant in Rubin's study, a psychologist, said, "I suppose there's a sexual tinge to every human relationship of any depth or intensity...." (105) - and I'm more inclined to agree with that. This is probably going to sound idealistic or foolish, but I think a day is coming when in order to have a measure of peace or happiness, we're going to have to admit that some of these set-up dichotomies (male/female, straight/gay, friend/spouse) are not exactly representative of people's real lives and experiences.

Okay, congratulations on reading all those really muddled thoughts. It's a huge question, obviously, and this book is just one perspective from one discipline. I also just want to say that I don't think monogamy (or marriage) is wrong or outdated or naive. Arrangements or denials of love depend upon the people in them.

Next time, less soapboxing, more Dave Eggers and Adam Felber. I promise.

It's starting to get a little political in here.

I'm going to come back in a day or two and write about the new year and everything that's meant, as well as about the book I'm reading (Just Friends by Lillian Rubin), but for now, this:

I am reproducing the below editorial by Gloria Steinem in full because I'm pretty sure the NY Times takes down their links after a few days, and I found it really interesting and wanted to share it. Ms. Steinem and I might not support the same candidate, but I think she makes a lot of excellent points, and answers the questions that spring to mind when reading ("I'm not advocating a competition for who has it toughest"). It's interesting to me that one thing that "worries" her is that young women have this sort of backlash of hoping "to deny or escape the sexual caste system." While this isn't my personal reason for not supporting Hillary Clinton, I know the feeling. It's like (some, not all) young feminists are so tired of being shot down (the "we're all equal now" counter-argument) that they can't rustle up the outrage that the situation of women - even in this country - should provoke.

Women Are Never Front-Runners

by Gloria Steinem

THE woman in question became a lawyer after some years as a community organizer, married a corporate lawyer and is the mother of two little girls, ages 9 and 6. Herself the daughter of a white American mother and a black African father — in this race-conscious country, she is considered black — she served as a state legislator for eight years, and became an inspirational voice for national unity.

Be honest: Do you think this is the biography of someone who could be elected to the United States Senate? After less than one term there, do you believe she could be a viable candidate to head the most powerful nation on earth?

If you answered no to either question, you’re not alone. Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House. This country is way down the list of countries electing women and, according to one study, it polarizes gender roles more than the average democracy.

That’s why the Iowa primary was following our historical pattern of making change. Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women (with the possible exception of obedient family members in the latter).

If the lawyer described above had been just as charismatic but named, say, Achola Obama instead of Barack Obama, her goose would have been cooked long ago. Indeed, neither she nor Hillary Clinton could have used Mr. Obama’s public style — or Bill Clinton’s either — without being considered too emotional by Washington pundits.

So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one? The reasons are as pervasive as the air we breathe: because sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was; because anything that affects males is seen as more serious than anything that affects “only” the female half of the human race; because children are still raised mostly by women (to put it mildly) so men especially tend to feel they are regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman; because racism stereotyped black men as more “masculine” for so long that some white men find their presence to be masculinity-affirming (as long as there aren’t too many of them); and because there is still no “right” way to be a woman in public power without being considered a you-know-what.

I’m not advocating a competition for who has it toughest. The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together. That’s why Senators Clinton and Obama have to be careful not to let a healthy debate turn into the kind of hostility that the news media love. Both will need a coalition of outsiders to win a general election. The abolition and suffrage movements progressed when united and were damaged by division; we should remember that.

I’m supporting Senator Clinton because like Senator Obama she has community organizing experience, but she also has more years in the Senate, an unprecedented eight years of on-the-job training in the White House, no masculinity to prove, the potential to tap a huge reservoir of this country’s talent by her example, and now even the courage to break the no-tears rule. I’m not opposing Mr. Obama; if he’s the nominee, I’ll volunteer. Indeed, if you look at votes during their two-year overlap in the Senate, they were the same more than 90 percent of the time. Besides, to clean up the mess left by President Bush, we may need two terms of President Clinton and two of President Obama.

But what worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex.

What worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations.

What worries me is that male Iowa voters were seen as gender-free when supporting their own, while female voters were seen as biased if they did and disloyal if they didn’t.

What worries me is that reporters ignore Mr. Obama’s dependence on the old — for instance, the frequent campaign comparisons to John F. Kennedy — while not challenging the slander that her progressive policies are part of the Washington status quo.

What worries me is that some women, perhaps especially younger ones, hope to deny or escape the sexual caste system; thus Iowa women over 50 and 60, who disproportionately supported Senator Clinton, proved once again that women are the one group that grows more radical with age.

This country can no longer afford to choose our leaders from a talent pool limited by sex, race, money, powerful fathers and paper degrees. It’s time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers. We have to be able to say: “I’m supporting her because she’ll be a great president and because she’s a woman.”

December Part Three: We Know Not the Smallest Fraction of What There is to Know

I have three things to write about, and they don't exactly go together, so I'm going to write about them in three parts.

On Wednesday at lunch, I started Joan Didion's memoir The Year of Magical Thinking. I finished it at 10:30 at night. The memoir is about the year after her husband died, and I didn't notice till I was halfway through that there were some blue letters in the otherwise black-lettered title: J O H N, her husband's name. For some reason that made me sadder than anything else.

It perhaps goes without saying that Didion's writing is almost perfect. The way she describes grief pretty much is: the way irrationality becomes your state of being, the way other people simply cannot understand. Didion doesn't offer comfort or wishful thinking; she doesn't believe in God or an afterlife. But for some reason I felt better...more informed, maybe?...about death after reading the book. I'll let it speak for itself for a couple of passages.

One of the ideas she talks about is, basically, that every death is sudden:

In each of those long illnesses the possibility of death had been in the picture....Yet having seen the picture in no way deflected, when it came, the swift empty loss of the actual event....Each of them had been in the last instant alive, and then dead. (p. 149)

She also talks about the absolute void of no longer having someone around:

I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say comes as naturally as breathing. Yet on each occasion these pleas for his presence served only to reinforce my awareness of the final silence that separated us....We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know. (p. 196)

Finally, the way she starts the ending to the book is perfect.

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.

Let them become the photograph on the table.

Let them become the name on the trust accounts.

Let go of them in the water.

Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water.
(p. 226)


All excerpts from The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. New York: Vintage Books, 2006.

December Part Two: Illicit Collection

I have three things to write about, and they don't exactly go together, so I'm going to write about them in three parts.

Before the semester ended, I read this short story by Sherman Alexie called "The Search Engine." (I'm actually not quite sure why it's called this; I'll have to think about it a little more.) The second scene in the story takes place in the library, where Corliss, the protagonist, is looking for a book. I include excerpts here.

She endured a contentious and passionate relationship with the library. The huge number of books confirmed how much magic she'd been denied for most of her life, and now she hungrily wanted to read every book on every shelf. an impossible task, to be sure, Herculean in its exaggeration, but Corliss wanted to read herself to death. She wanted to be buried in a coffin filled with used paperbacks. (p.5)

This is pretty much how I feel when I walk into a library or a bookstore; I want to read every book. (Well, maybe not every book.) There's an inescapable sense of despair, too, that I never will.

Later, Corliss goes to check out the book:

The librarian was a small woman wearing khaki pants and large glasses. Corliss wanted to shout at her: Honey, get yourself some contacts and a pair of leather chaps! Fight your stereotypes!
...
[Corliss asks how many books never get checked out]
"We're talking sixty percent of them. Seriously. Maybe seventy percent. And I'm being optimistic. It's probably more like eighty or ninety percent. This isn't a library, it's an orphanage."

The librarian spoke in a reverential whisper. Corliss knew she'd misjudged this passionate woman. Maybe she dressed poorly, but she was probably great in bed, certainly believed in God and goodness, and kept an illicit collection of overdue library books on her shelves. (pp. 7-8)

I really like this passage, for many (perhaps obvious) reasons. Does it matter, for instance, that most library books are never checked out? Maybe, maybe not. Also: it seems true that librarians have a hard time remembering to return library books. If I move back to Louisville, it's going to be a problem, because I still have fines on my LFPL card.

Let me also just say for the records: I don't even own khaki pants or large glasses. As for Corliss's other speculations about this librarian, I won't get into them. I won't, for example, make any unsubstantiated claims that librarians are really good in bed compared to those in other professions.

Excerpts from "The Search Engine," in Sherman Alexie's book Ten Little Indians. New York: Grove Press, 2003.

December Part One: Wait! Wait! Don't Judge Me

I have three things to write about, and they don't exactly go together, so I'm going to write about them in three parts.

First of all. Last night I went to a taping of Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me (the NPR news quiz...if you didn't know). It's taped every Thursday night in Chicago, and every time I've been in town I've tried to go...this time I actually planned ahead. And I thought you might like to know some of the gory details.

1. I saw Peter Sagal while we were in line to get into the auditorium. He looks like he's lost some weight, and he had a really nice coat on.
2. The auditorium isn't that big; I guess there were about 500 people in there (that's what the house manager said).
3. Carl Kasell is not amused. He was so professional the whole time while Peter and the panelists (Roxanne Roberts, Charlie Pierce, and Adam Felber) cracked up. Once in a while, Carl would smile, and you'd know that was a good joke.
4. They taped almost an hour and forty-five minutes worth of show - it will be interesting to see what ends up in the edited one-hour-long version.
5. After the show, Peter, Carl, and the panelists all roamed around the lobby. I met Peter and Adam Felber - and got Adam's novel Schrodinger's Ball signed. Adam Felber is kind of cute in this music-geek kind of way. The not-my-job guest was Herbie Hancock, and Adam was totally rapt, and asked about this specific keyboard he'd played.

Basically, it was an NPR dork's dream, and I think I may have creeped out Peter Sagal by telling him that my roommate and I looked up pictures of NPR personalities online this summer. What more could I ask for?

Quick, the year in twenty words or less

Quick update. I'm starting my winter break tomorrow, and I promise I'm going to write about libraries and books - specifically about a passage about libraries in a short story by Sherman Alexie. So STAY TUNED.

But for now, dear readers, I thought I'd share with you a little compulsive exercise I underwent. I was flipping through my journal and realized that each month of 2007 really could be summarized in a couple of words. It's an interesting, if somewhat simplified, thing to do; I recommend it. So to give you even more of a sense than you already had of what the year was like, here you go. The year in review as far as books and music go will probably follow at a somewhat later date.

January: hope
February: upheaval
March: stress
April - mid-May: leaving
end of May - June: revolution
July: evaluation
August: uncertainty/longing
September: truth
October: being taken care of
November: punctuated equilibrium
December: complicated

Three (hopeful?) thoughts

I'll really do anything not to work on my final presentation, it seems. I just wanted to post three quotations I've come across today; in some way, they each center around the "maybe" feeling I talked about yesterday. Combined, I feel like they should unlock a question for me. Perhaps when I have more time to think. In any case, they're interesting.

1. "I'll think of it as needle and thread.
Or a breathing remnant
restored to a living cloth.
Or scissors
trimming lament
to allow for everything I don't know."
-Li-Young Lee, from "Little Ache"

2. "The happy ones are almost always also vulgar;
happiness has a way of thinking
that's rushed and has no time to look
but keeps on moving, compact and manic...."
-Patrizia Cavalli, from an untitled poem, translated by Geoffrey Brock

3. "...only realization gives indubitable proof of what is possible."
-Simone de Beauvoir, from The Second Sex


Quotes 1 & 2 come from the December issue of Poetry(Volume 191, Number 3).

Quizás, quizás, quizás

It's been over a month since I posted, and I probably won't write a lot even now. The semester is crashing to a halt, and I've got presentations and papers to pull together. I've really loved my User Instruction class, but I'm having a hard time investing myself in a "hypothetical" instruction, rather than trying to fill an actual information need.

Please note, before I forget, that I've added a new blog - Monitor Mix - to my sidebar. It's an NPR blog about music written by Carrie Brownstein of the band Sleater-Kinney, and it's really enjoyable.

It's consistently cold now in Boston, but in this beautiful way. You stand outside, and the trees and air are sharp and delineated, and the sunsets are vivid enough to stick to the back of your retinas. (Retinae?)

Last Christmas was surrounded by Dave Eggers, Rilo Kiley, New York City, Regina Spektor, and Strangers in Paradise. This one is shaping up to be more like Neko Case, Rochester (NY), Girlyman's album Joyful Sign, and whatever books I'm lucky enough to read during the break. (Candidates include Sherman Alexie's Ten Little Indians and Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. I'm also thinking about re-reading The Time Traveler's Wife. You know, if I feel like ripping out my insides.) Last winter this word "hope" kept popping up; this year, it seems to be "maybe."

I bought that album, Joyful Sign, when I went to see Girlyman at Club Passim a few weeks ago. I love it, and many of the songs are catchy and happy, but there are a couple of lines (below) that stuck out uncomfortably for me. It's one of those moments in a poem or song when you think - oh crap. Is that me? Is my basic nature to be cruel or uncharitable or resentful? It's hard to say.

“Maybe I’m cruel just like I seem to be…
maybe I’m mad and wild
underneath all I try to fit”
-Ty Greenstein (of Girlyman), “Easy Pearls”