It's the waiting that gets me...

Christmas has landed at our house, and I'm glad of it, because I will be halfway around the world over the holiday and am indulging myself in vacuumed floors and sappy movies and family memories.

Except tonight. Tonight I am waiting in my office for the arrival of dinner guests. yes, it's hiding. of course, it's hiding. I'm a 37 year old English major who knits and watches TV shows obsessively on a regular basis, all of my friends live hours away and I have nothing (NOTHING) viable in common with most of my age group. I'm nervous. And hiding from my father's friends.

I never claimed to be a good daughter. I just make them laugh. And cost them money. And occasionally make soup. Oh hush, I make damn good soup!

Also, I avoid reading my Twitter page. It matters to know this. Because do you ever do that thing where you haven't read your last several months worth of blips and then decide that right now you absolutely have to take it all in without any kind of context - you know, just like everyone else sees you?

Me either.

Except that today, I'm hiding, and that means being ready to pounce out of the office and down the stairs at any moment, so as to be a responsible and respectful co-co-host of dinner and not embarrass my dad. We're not even going to go into how impossible it is for me to Not embarrass the people that I love. Ready-to-Pounce means no TV shows or games or long ass image threads of brilliant. It means five minutes maximum focused on anything. Which means Twitter.

I read my page.

I'm seriously considering locking myself in this room with the cats until dinner is over.

I wonder if my mom would bring me a cupcake ...

Harvest Feast and other autumn joys

My niece is upstairs communicating with her mother via Skype/phone/headphone/microphone 21st Century convenience technology. My parents, after my father made off with my brand new copy of Planetary (which I'm still reading, by the way), went to the grocery store because for some reason, we are out of sage.

I would use this time wisely and watch Castle online or read Lamb (again) or write letters or fiction or something interesting about the coming together of mountain goats on hillsides and wandering layered dreams of storytelling and houseguesting and friendship, if I were less distracted by the smell of cupcakes cooling on the stove.

This is one of those holidays that seems to bring out the most in people. Not the best, not the worst, just the most. I notice it more at Thanksgiving because I am not a huge fan of what goes on around Christmas and so avoid it as much as possible. Also, Thanksgiving is more important in our family, so I pay closer attention. To what? To the excess.

I see an excess of food, of nostalgia, of disillusionment and my absolute least favorite thing of the holiday: cleverly bitter snipes about history and myth-making that are intended to somehow relieve the sniper from any responsibility to act on the anger that fuels the bitterness in the first place. It is one of those weird privileged person things: happy smallpox day, happy steal the land day, happy oppress people day. Cracks like that do nothing to change the situation, which is very likely the whole point. I take issue with them because they do not remove culpability, they merely assuage guilt in order to make room for temporary gratitude.

But it's not temporary - most of the people that I hear making snide remarks are people that I've also heard be verbally grateful to people in their lives on days that have nothing to do with the fucking Mayflower. Is it too much to think that perhaps the guilt is the problem, that and an educational system that does not acknowledge how destructive the anger that comes from disillusionment really is? I am forever confused at the strength of demonstrably false myths of history.

Today, as every day, I live loving and beloved and for that I am grateful. The people that I love make good decisions and stay safe, and I am grateful. We have food to eat and good company to keep, and I am grateful.

And maybe, just maybe, it will be the same in March when the winter is too much, the house is too small, the world is too big and all of these contradictory celebrations and long-held traditions are nothing more than fodder for a bitter heart. Perhaps something like the warmth of today's sunshine the sound of my nieces' laughter and the smell of baking chocolate will live in a layer of memory that reminds me of the power of loving people with integrity, and slow cooked food.

This will be the story of this year, of this holiday, when we were all to be in one place, and could not because of blizzards and other circumstances. When my niece had to nap because the world invaded her head and pounded for no reason. When my parents when to the store for sage and I smiled on their return.

Happy Thanksgiving, you guys...

Here's something disturbing

so, I was watching more of The Big Bang Theory (because apparently, I love this show. (See, here's the thing: it's never a good idea for me to 'love' a television show, I lack attention span for pop culture, cannot remember lines that are funny or meaningful on only one viewing and therefore must watch everything of the show that I find interesting until it ends or I get bored. In the case of Deadwood and Carnivale, well okay so those were entirely determined by poorly thought out relationships, but they did sort of end before I stopped paying attention. (it occurs to me at this moment that this applies both to the shows and the relationships (and now morning is awful (but that is not the point))) Deadwood did have one more season, I will admit, but it was on TV, and I would have had to make time in my day to watch it and who has that kind of willingness to define their day around passive entertainment? Not I, said the bored unemployed poet who really ought never be bored because it is bad for her and annoying for anyone living with her. I enjoy fiction with set endpoints, because it is what happens between the beginning and the end that define the shape of the thing. (Happily, I called the end of LOST sometime in the middle of the second season and therefore did not feel badly about losing interest.) Also, that kind of story containment means that you get the experience of revisiting the whole thing and learning new stuff about characters and development and exactly how much you hate the people who nitpick in public or go all drooly over characters all the while thinking that it's the actor thinking that the actor is a person that is at all accessible in the real life of someone like a person who gets all drooly over a fictional character (this really could go on forever). It gets really boring and borders on the obsessive, so I avoid it. Like I avoid so many many many things - it makes me a boring conversation partner. I hate that. Conversation is an art form, it is a dance, it is something beautiful and filled with all manner of joy. It is not to be shat on with pointless gossip and constant references to things that are removed from the day to day randomness that is life.)) and then decided to write a blog, only it turns out that I don't really have anything to say.

Saturday Morning (and afternoon (and evening)) Cartoons!

First up, a whole show about how people who talk about stuff say things and what it means!



After the break, see it in action (given AND received (woo, baby!))!



More on the theme of The Value of Having Some Fucking Perspective, Folks!



Why actors shouldn't be President, presented by someone Living History As It Happens - gasp!



and, um, I like this group made of conjoined twins, so I put them in here, too. Because this is my Life Channel, bub.

Fun without StumbleUpon

Gormenghast

The Mapmakers and History House

Abduction is my new favorite word

"This procedure occurs in the decoding of known linguistic terms as well, when one is uncertain about what language they belong to. When someone tells me /cane!/ in an excited voice, in order to understand whether it is a Latin imperative («sing!») or an Italian holophrastic indexical proposition («dog!»), I must hypothesize a language as a frame of reference." page 40, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, Umberto Eco, Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1984.

(it should be noted that blogger does not like the symbols for absolute value. it thinks i'm trying to 'tell' it something. i find this beautiful. and fitting.)

Abduction - very quickly explained is the process of observing a Result and determining, finding or guessing the Rule that leads to the Result. In order to get to something like a Rule, Cases in which the Result can be verified must be thought of or studied. Well, that's not entirely true - Copernicus couldn't actually study the truth of the heliocentric universe outside of theory and "admirable symmetry (p 42)."

There is a huge amount for me to be excited about here, not least of which is that this is the first thing he's talked about in the whole book that has managed to make sense in the long term (i.e. after I closed the book).

Because it relates to how people learn each other, not specifically and I am sure that I'm taking this fashion for interdisciplinary studies far too far with this amateurish thought play, but isn't that part of learning too? If I have always been a professional then when have ever learned? I can't even imagine how dull a life lived without learning could be. It's better than drugs, kids. And the high lasts. And, yes, it is a high. Intellectuals: stoners without pot.

I feel less presumptuous than I could given that Eco uses examples of nonlinguistic signs to discuss an activity that he seems to regard as important to the understanding of language as method of communication. Friendship falls under the category of nonlinguistic, I believe.

I believe that friendship is a kind of relationship that is strongest when people pay attention to each other in reasonable moderation. No Stalky McStalkington. Also, none of that I Define Me As You nonsense. Neither of those approaches expresses affection, respect or love. I would even argue that those tendencies, along with other really extraordinarily bad relationship habits (many of which I've had) are not about the loved one but about the lover. There are at least two people in every relationship - if both are not involved, then there is no relationship.

I've been extremely fortunate in friendship to know people who are fully involved in their own lives, and so all of the learning of each other and the paying attention has happened over a long period of time. I can't think of a friendship in my recent past that has involved more than the most fundamental and basic explanation of personal codes and motivations. In other words: the work of putting a Rule to a Result has been slow and easy and occasionally even conversational and allowed conversants to learn as much about each other as we did about ourselves. Double Win Fudge, baby!

What always throws me for a loop is the dating version of that process: the assumptions that people make (informed or delusional (which are really the same thing (but anyway))) in order to define the person sitting across from or next to them. (What the hell is it about romance that makes assholes out of people? I'm not comfortable with the roses & rainbows version of romance and that was problematic for me for about, oh, a month this summer. Only, I'm really good at ice cream and long walks and sitting on the porch and wandering living conversations and if that isn't what connects your life to someone else's in the best possible ways, I pick no.)

When you say something about a decision you've made in the past, and someone then asks you what you would do in a totally different but somehow related situation and files that answer away in the third layer of Things Known About You? That's abduction - trying to find a Rule that fits your Result.

It's completely natural, and not a bad way to learn people. Unless. There are Rules that govern the behavior of people who fall into different categories, and all of those categories are associated with a specific set of personality traits. Recognizing what category defines a person most closely is part of how we as people, as humans, decide with whom to make friends, or who to pick up at the bar. Until you are outside of that bar or you meet someone whose life does not run according to familiar routines and suddenly those Rules and categories are meaningless and, in some cases demeaning. They become stereotypes and labels rather than heuristic devices.

Raise your hand if you have ever decided to just stop explaining yourself because it never sinks in anyway. Because it is impossible to avoid breaking someone's carefully constructed model of the world when you have to explain that much. And that's not usually fun to be around.

I'm over it by now, and have discovered a willingness to leave a conversation without rancor when necessary. I'm also lazy and prefer to use my energy according to my designs.

The people I feel the most for are the ones who are the poster children for Category, the ones whose behavior always fits the Rules. According to the 2 dice square thing that we were taught in school - those people are much rarer than the anomalies like us. (think about it - how unique is everyone that you know? how 'crazy' is your family? how many people do you know who are the only people you know who would say that thing or make that cake or put that spin on a thing? - we are not so unique, we individuals) What about someone who is entirely determined is going to elicit specific love and appreciation? Really - it's easier to love a weirdo than you might think.

There is something kind of lovely about not testing people's personalities in order to verify what I think of them. It is even lovelier to have befriended people who think of me what they will without having to test me (or each other) to validate their opinions.

Poet, heal thyself, with chocolate.

It's a lovely fall day in Maryville, MO. Leaves are finally falling off trees in acceptable numbers, my mother can't leave the house without a hat, and all of the mouth-breathers in town are much easier to spot as they have yet to change into pants and jackets, thereby assuring that their baby-making bits will shrivel up and cease functioning.

I love autumn. I love a season that is so fantastic that it has two names. I love knowing that in less than two days, it will be pitch black night at 1 in the afternoon because of the time change, and that by the time March rolls around, I will have lost the will to live in the sunlight entirely and have to be dragged screaming and inebriated into the light.

Because this is the season that is the setup for my springtime krazy fest. It's awesome to know me during April when I can't stop the lucid dreams or make complete sentences or keep from drooling at the sight of anyone without a shirt on. My friends totally earn their bribe money that month.

It is also the season of The Cold. The Cold that inflames your throat just enough to keep you from actually enjoying that cigarette, or wine or whiskey, or whisky, or pretty much anything that you would really like to be enjoying because the weather is on crack and there's nothing you can do about it. This one has also laid an egg just below my right eye and slightly out of reach of my right nostril. It's going to be disgusting when that hatches.

And so, on a trip out of doors and to the grocery store with my mother, I casually tossed in a bag of the only thing in the world that I know will make me feel better: Peanut M&M's.

Yeah, there's a story there. It goes like this: Summer Youth Group retreat thing leads to strep developing in my young throat while we head, as a family, to Isle Royale in Lake Superior where the only doctor on the island was on the other side of it tending to a hiker with a broken arm. (Later we learned that everyone breathing at the retreat got strep (because teenagers are germ-factories-without-hygiene) and all of them but me went to the doctor Right Away) I got on a ferry with my family, got to the island, went to the doctor's office (minus the doctor, of course) and then went to the c-store at the hotel to find something to help me feel better. I was 13 and chose to medicate myself thusly: Orange Gatorade, Peanut M&M's (the bigbig bag) and a work of unparalleled literature called something like Midnight Affair by someone called something like Alberta Nunn.  (I found it! Midnight Affair by Nan Ryan!)(It's a terrible book - no one read it)(Really, I'm completely serious. The sexual stereotypes alone are awful, add to them the cultural, ethnic and socio-economic ones and it's just a fucking mess of bad.)

That book stayed with me for the next 7 or so years, and I read it every time I got sick, sometimes more than once. Every page, every time. It was the touching and stereotypically horrifying story of a young woman half-bastard-pirate who falls in love with a slick Rhett Butler type named, no seriously this is one thing I remember perfectly: Hilton Courteen. Yep. Named after a hotel. *head shake*

Anyway, the thing was set in some mythically idyllic New Orleans and there was a costume ball and lots of random sweaty sex and a lottery and a storm and people died and the only gay character was also made of pond slime and driftwood, but you know, it was something to read.

Until. Until my father threw it away. The bastard. (He also threw away the jean shorts that were made of safety pins holding seams in place and the tennis shoes that were little more than the suggestion of uppers with soles made of squeaky mold, and okay so I get the point Now, but That's not where I'm going with this, so just stop reading here and get on with it!)

So. My Novel That I Read When I Feel Like Dingle Slime got tossed. Sad.

Orange Gatorade. It has no flavor. It is, in fact, utterly unredeemable and made entirely out of plastic (the bottle is just less liquidy). I am unrepentant about changing my consumer and consumption habits to fit my personal belief system and so have quit the Gatorade. It will always hold a place in my heart, along with Ultra-Strength Rave Hairspray and Pseudo Echo, as something that was good to have, but really there were better options.

The Peanut M&Ms are all the remain of that first terrible moment of ill. All that I can hold on to as part of my I Have No Insurance And So Must Heal Myself medical plan. Everything else of that trip has gone. Well, okay, so the Lake is still there and so is the island and the hotel, and Gatorade still exists, but Dammit! I slept for 36 hours while my family wandered about the wilderness and ooo'd and ah'd and oh'd at nature. Sleep and showers and the healing power of sugar-coated mediocrity got me through until we were back on the mainland and in a doctor's office getting diagnosed and then not running over the drunk guy lying across our path on Axe Murderer Highway.

Now the M&Ms are gone, and everything that I was going to write about today instead of this personal wandering has poit!-ed itself to a future date. There is tepid tea and the comfort of sleep. Oh! and something a little creepy and wonderful also:


Come Into My Parlour from Moog on Vimeo.

So, this is how it happens...

First thing I do today is wake up way too early.
Then I go back to sleep only to wake up way too late and dump myself in the bathroom for much needed hygiene action.
Toddy with rice milk and honey, yes? Yes.
And then, there is the internet.
In this order:
1) Facebook - to see how popular I am last night.
2) Twitter - to tell the world what my brain thinks and maybe even reply to other people's awesome even though I have no idea who they are, and/or everyone else has already responded because they are that well known.
3) Gmail - for Spam and the unlikely event of a pleasant email from friends who are, in actual fact, stupidly busy and anyway they call, so why write?
4) Google Reader - I love Google Reader. This is where my day actually begins. Comics, Blogs, Pictures and Quoted Passages passed to me with so little effort on my part that it is not entirely unludicrous. Something always catches my brain by the electric bits and I feel the overwhelming urge to tell Almost EVERYONE I KNOW about how someone not me wrote about Barbie or voting or shirtless hippies building islands that float about on plastic bottles that got thrown into the sea or public art. (I freaking love grafitti and public art and splattered paint and tape art and I even love Banksy)

Now, this is where The Daily Show comes in. Because, see, I've got my Facebook tab still open up there, so the (1) thing that happened to something that I did can validate me for the whole day. And, like everyone else, I've liked The Daily Show and so am invited to watch last night's episode in full! Whee!

I have such a reference crush on that show - they have excellent researchers and compilers. My brain wants me to make out with their research skillz. Madly. Over coffee. And maybe some pasta primavera (but only if it's from the Ren Fest at the Bellevue Berry & Pumpkin Ranch, cuz that was creepy good).

So, I'm watching last night's episode today, and two things happen: I remember why I don't interact with news media anymore (I hate them all and their total lack of perspective or history or sensible vocabulary) and I have a deep and abiding need to know a thing.

Here is the thing that I want to know: I want to know what the distribution of parties has been in Congress since the beginning of the country. Meaning: I want a map, or a table, or a pie chart of the party demographics of the 1st Damn Congress, and the 2nd, and the 3rd, etc., all the way to the 2nd Session of the 111th Congress. Because I am curious about just how much hyperbole and smoke-blowing-up-asses is afoot. It is entirely possible that all the of overblown rhetoric is  not entirely overblown. It's not probable, but it is possible.

And now I get frustrated: the website for The House of Representatives is mostly geared to the now, not the then. The Senate's website is similarly focused.
Okay, Library of Congress, then? Only the site is taking too long to respond today, and when I get to the place to search the Congressional Record, it only goes back to the 101st Congress.

My mother enters the dining room at this point and, like the totally self-absorbed ass I am, I start talking about how all I want to see is a map of representatives for each state. Google points me to GovTrack.us and their map. I've totally told Stumble about it. Because it is pretty cool.

Not cool enough. What I want looks like this: a timeline at the bottom with a dealie that tracks where you are on it as colors that represent the different political parties, move about slowly as the demographics of Congress are charted through time from 1789, on a map of the US.

Dear The Daily Show's research staff: please?

Also, um, could you, would you, write a book? You know, about how you find out stuff and things. I would totally read it. Probably I wouldn't buy it, because I am broke and poor, but I would suggest very strongly that my local library buy it and then I can check it out and read it and tell everyone that they need to read it to. And then you will have global respect, if not any riches or actual fame. But you could spread the message of "Do Your Fucking Research On An Issue, It Makes You Look Cool And Not Like A Blowhard."

Strange and lovely mornings

The night after my friends' wedding, I spent with My Name wandering in words through the weirdness of breaking up.

As both of my marriages have ended in divorce, and she's had several breakups as well, it seemed fitting that after a wedding, things would end. Happily, as neither one of us got married, we could be observers and therefore reflect rather than participate.

Because we both have this one golden memory of a mutual friend: one near perfect night shared on The Porch with conversation and song and poetry (I know, right!) and each other. It is a memory that I've sort of kept on a shelf with other memories of that person, hidden behind a screen of discomfort based on the end of our immediate acquaintance. It showed up in our conversation and she said "Yes! Oh, my god, that was an amazing night and I can't even think about it because it's like coated in this slime..." Bile of alcoholism and an overstayed welcome.

It is the blessing of good friendship that challenges me to keep memories for what they are: the imprint of a moment. Marriage and dating and commitment are all friendships of one kind or another, publicly acknowledged and privately confirmed. The act of being a friend is the real work of friendship.

Every friendship must come to an end, the end defined as the point at which both parties are no longer engaged in the act of the relationship. Everybody dies. Every relationship goes with it. I am no fatalist, nor am I all that pessimistic about love and relationships. They are more than vital and something I relish about living. I am completely in awe of the people who surround me and delight in verbal adoration whenever possible (this part is true and gets very annoying for many people. if you are one of those people, i suggest you keep me away from the tequila).

I have almost nothing good to remember about my marriages. There are no longer memories that spark joyful emotion or even a bittersweet smile. Everything is, to borrow from My Name, "coated in slime." Not because the marriages ended, but because of how freakin' long we took to get shit done.

There is so much damage you can do to a friendship between saying "It's over," and meaning it. That's where the slime and bile and fracturing happen. The worst part of healing is getting to the point where the crap on the outside of the memory isn't what you think about AND the sweetness and light of the memory itself aren't enough to inspire that one horrible, terrible, inappropriate thought: I still care, and wonder how he/she/they is/are doing. *sigh*

If you care, let it die.

Nothing in me would pollute the mental images and very real patterns of behavior I've built with friends over the years. They are not replaceable nor are they negotiable. They are also not stagnant. I trust these people to be who they are, and that means that we all get to be flexible and grow and stop and live. And when these relationships end, as they will have to, I like to think that they will be glorious to the last. Every story lacks a shape until the end.

I will, of course, be happy to forgo the hangover, if that is, indeed, an option...

How to make a city girl happy...

 

Beauty in Decay article at Wooster Collective

Chadwick and Spector's "Museum Anatomy"

 

ROA at NUART 

MUTO by BLU

Spoiler Alert from Jason Eppink on Vimeo.

Spoiler Alert

And, not from Wooster Collective, but one I found through DarkRoastedBlend: Locks of Love.

The picture of the leaves was taken by me. The flag eatin' grasshopper was captured in the act by Jeremy Brozek.

Weddings, Haircuts, Elevators and other natural disasters

It is official, my friends have been lawfully wedded to each other in the sight of The Capitol building and their families and friends for more than a week!

One of my favorite things about people that I like&love getting married to each other, is that the reception is filled with other people that I like&love.


And so it was that everything clicked and I got 4 inches cut off my hair by a best friend wielding a pair of dull scissors in her kitchen. It looked fabulous, which is handy, because if you are going to have long hair that hides your face no matter how you wear it, it really ought to flaunt itself, you know?

The reception was held on a top floor, so the only reasonable approach was via elevator. My parents arrived before I did and rode up with a nice woman who started chatting with them only to discover that I've been talking about her for the last 10 years because I used to work for her. And working for her was one of the best things I've ever been involved in (dear heaven I miss field work) and she'd even been at my last wedding. I love that. I love that this is a thing that happened.

Weddings are not a time for the married couple. I know this. We all know this. We all want to believe otherwise, but here's the thing: if you're going to throw a wedding, be as selfish as you possibly can because your happy day is an excuse for other people to get dressed up, see their friends, dance like their hips can take it and get honest. Which is fantastic if you dig your friends and they dig you, but otherwise, well, yeah.

So, it was with pleasure that we rode the elevator up to the 20th floor with the happy couple. Because I love them. And also because I knew I would speak all of 15 words to them (combined) all night, and was happy they got to be pleasant ones before the drinking.

There is a bubble around happy people, even people as open and generous as my friends. It was nice to share for a while.


One of the pictures that did not get taken lives in my memory. It is a table surrounded by my parents and most of my closest friends. They are chatting and laughing and happy. It is the best gift friends can give to each other - the happiness of loved ones. I am glad that people that I like&love keep getting married to each other.

And, oh, how many hugs were there, and how happy was I to get them. And the honesty seemed easy and right, and the elevator became a gentle space-filled hug.

I have only gorgeous memories of the wedding left, because all of the sliding-off-makeup ones floated to the top and blew away in the fierce and demanding autumn winds.And they were fierce. Which is sometimes the way it has to be when the world doesn't quite get what it is supposed to look like.

Seasonal shifts are some of those wonderfully shifting thresholds that can take forever to cross. We've now had two frosts, and the hibiscus and my father's roses are still blooming. Impossibly pink in a red and brown and dying world. I love this time of year. Especially when it takes a while, none of this blink and you've missed it and now it is time to rake nonsense. This has been going on for a month or more.

Every street in this town, and every town that I've driven through has its glowing trees, the ones that changed first and brightest and then the leaves left after a couple of weeks and different trees have changed all to yellow or faded orange, or even dark purple. I drove through Stanberry and saw the road lined with young, trimmed trees gone the color of an orange crayon. But the grass is still green, and there are not enough bare branches to settle my eyes.

Going out on a limb

Which, believe it or don't, is not where I'm usually headed.

I've been thinking too much lately. Too much, because it's gotten even more in the way of doing than usual. The part where there isn't all that much to do is entirely beside the point. Why? Because people with their own businesses always have something to do. Homemakers always have something do (the part where a home is a business is completely relevant here). Writers really do always have something to do. Artists, scientists, academics, athletes, non-profit organizers, activists and even domesticated critters always have something to do.

So the part where I just can't find the time to do the things that are around me all of the time? That's the part that involves this: the experience of actual experience, no boundaries, no bullshit, just life.

And wouldn't you know it? That's the place the heartbreak starts.

I've had a premonition of deja vu yet to come: an unsolicited daydream of a conversation completely within current parameters that has not yet happened, but that I've already dreamed, years ago.

I've had repeat deja vu before, and it's a helluva wake up call, especially to someone who is so totally convinced of her own internal locus of control. Which does seem a tad wonky in light of the whole "sometimes bits of my dreams come true in totally awesome and easily approached except in conversations ways" thing. I've never really examined that particular paradox.

I pick preparing for the GRE now, thanks.

More predictable.

Big Crazy Idea (the letters)

It is a completely normal thing to hear me to rail against most any kind of nostalgia, whether it is in my presence or just sort of out there in the world. The Good Old Days is a phrase that I loathe and would not mind seeing eradicated from the world entirely (only to see it resurface as the name for an underground waltz punk big band).

Modern medicine is good. Ibuprofen is good. Sanitation, yes. Communications technologies are impressive and wonderful. Technologies that allow us to read and understand the words and languages of the past, and therefore challenge us to reconsider our presence not as the end all be all of everything, rather as part of continuum of incredibly stupid creatures who occasionally manage to create or develop or express magnificence.

I take from much of the nostalgia that I hear that people wish for a simpler time, when there were not so many decisions to make, and children were better behaved and played outside and families congregated around dinner tables and people took care of each other. I will not explore every avenue opened by those statements, but I will tackle one: The one of extended time spent together. The one about quiet and unrushed conversations. The one that I heard quite a lot right before I moved away from Lincoln.

"Letters? I love getting letters!" "You mean, like handwritten or typed and mailed through the Post Office, letters?"

There was a conversation around a living room about getting letters that started when I explained my Big Crazy Idea (letters) to people who did not know me that well, and who have at least two decades on me. They did not seem to believe me, and I didn't pursue it because they then went on to talk about how it felt to get mail. Mail that wasn't bill, that was meant specifically for the person opening it.

The point was made that email feels ephemeral, even if you have written and sent a letter, getting it via email makes it feel somehow less permanent or meaningful, whereas even the most trite statements carry an air of importance when written on a piece of paper and stuck in the mailbox with a bribe for the postman (stamps).

I knew two years ago that I was going to leave Lincoln, and that the group of friends that I was part of would be geographically separated, probably for the rest of our lives, barring visiting people or vacations together, or those adult types of relationship maintenance. The importance of those friendships in my life for the last several years cannot be overstated, and I realized that if I did not make some action to preserve them, it was likely, however sad, that they would fade.

I love writing letters. I love getting letters and responding to them. I love the act of sitting down with a typewriter or pen or computer keyboard and thinking about one specific person for an extended period of time. And the opportunity to share that experience is part of the joy and also the gut-wrenching tension of writing and sending letters to people. It is personal and it is intended to be that way. Individual and instant.

My letters have been labeled self-indulgent. It was a fair label, coming as it did from my second husband who received letters from me almost every day one summer as I was out in the field studying thistles and learning about dehydration and exhaustion and the wonders of corn on soft tacos. I learned some years later that he had not even opened almost half of them. It makes a certain degree of sense if you know him. I do not pretend that it is okay. I choose different recipients now.

I used to have a limit to how many letters I would send to someone without getting any response at all. And then I started this project:

I write and mail letters every day. I have a schedule and a wooden recipe box full (almost) of addresses pasted to card stock. I keep track of them, and record the dates on which I sent the last letter. They go out to new acquaintances, friends both recent and long-term, and people who may as well be family for how long I've known them.

Responses are beautiful and they make me smile, but they are not required and do not change my need to stay in touch. I am a difficult person to love or to know in even the easiest circumstances. Being away from almost everyone that I love and enjoy is hardly easy. Writing is as much a habit as it is self-expression and must be maintained as such even when it seems there is little to write about.

To be honest, I have not written every single day. Up till now, I have occasionally skipped a day and then made up for it one the next, that kind of thing. And I haven't written a letter at all for a week. (It had been a difficult sort of week.)

Guilt is an emotion I reject out of hand. We do not get along and while I am mercenary in almost everything, assuaged guilt is vile and empty in my world and I would rather have chocolate or a massage or The Ink Trilogy, thank you. Therefore, everyone on the schedule for last week will be moved to this week, beginning tomorrow, and I will endeavor, at least until December 15th, to write every single day. It is not like I don't have the time right now.

I say this and then realize that I have picked a week full of long, detailed letters filled with passages copied out by hand and fiction of caves and wordal wanderings about insect wings.

The connectedness of things

I have never really experienced the world as a place that is getting smaller. To me, it is a place that is surprisingly large and entirely unconcerned with me and my actions. I have always lived in one relatively tidy community or other, with never more than four degrees of separation between me and everyone known by everyone I know. Lincoln was fantastic for that - there are about 2.5 degrees there - the .5 is the coffee shop that serves as your social network hub.

One of the things that we, as a family, did this weekend was pick up a dining room table from an antique store in Brownville. We put it up, my father polished it, and we borrowed the kitchen table chairs to sit at for dinner with a guest last evening. My parents even pulled out the Spode for flatware. It was lovely.
 

Conversation turned, as it inevitably does when dining with a family, to stories of that family's history. We talked about my father's now deceased horrifying aunts. And we talked about my youthful collisions driving my parents' boat of a car. We clarified family myth that we could not possibly be descended from Samuel Johnson, as he has no issue. Turns out the real family myth is descent from Ben Jonson. Mythical genealogy turned to more researched information including the highly suspect reality that my sister and I are very likely qualified to be members of The Daughters of the American Revolution. It is an honor I would not normally pursue, but that I have a niece, and that niece may, in fact, benefit from membership in such a weird organization. I keep hoping that we were royalists, not because I am not a patriot, but because it would save so much paperwork.

Bozo Sapiens recognizes that today is the day of The DAR's formation, and reminds readers that for all of their helmet hair and traditionalist fundamentalism, they have done important things for women. (not excluding providing yet another excellent example that sex does not determine ability to be a bone head)

When I graduated from the 8th grade, I was given an award for good citizenship from the DAR. The award was given to a boy and a girl, and the young man who received it was someone who was just a really nice person. Genuinely a nice person to be around. They didn't tell us we were to get the award, and I have no idea where it is now. I never really thought of it as legitimate, not in my case anyway - because I wasn't very popular, I didn't participate whenever I could get away with it, I never did my homework and was kind of creepy, in that way that highly (almost pathologically) individual adolescents are.

The world is not any smaller than it was before.

The Poet thinks of community

All of this talk of libraries and how important they are to the communities in which they live has taken place without ever thinking of an underlying question: I have not yet taken the time to articulate exactly how I define community. To be honest, it seems hardly appropriate to take that responsibility on myself. The world in which I live is populated and changing. I acknowledge the clade - slightly modified for a social group whose common ancestor is more likely to be Biological Sciences or The Coffee House than a trilobite. Similarity does not necessitate contact, particularly not the continued contact over time and life changes that are, to me, indicators of the presence of community. 

Indicators, oblique and suggestive as they are, do much to define an event: the health of a pasture (leadplant); the presence of a city (population, population density, architectural diversity) or an empire (colonization, mono-language). 

Thinking about what defines community and all of the communities in my world inspired me to put together a list of similar indicators:

Geography: some defined site (web or corporeal) that is shared or is, as the horrible Library 2.0-ians have it, a destination. That destination is part of the community, and occasionally defines it by name.

Characteristic: an inside joke, shared attitude toward beanie babies, common belief system.

Artifacts: pamphlets, tattoos, you could make the argument for memories, behavioral patterns, obelisks.

Self-referential definition: membership in a community defines someone as a specific kind of person; the community's members define the present and future course of that community.

I have no personal evidence to suggest that a community must only be created or must only happen "organically" (as if organic growth is not deliberate, but I digress).  Time is a factor: time to develop relationships, time to earn/gain/pick a name, time to grow into an entity, however difficult to define. And members must share in the life of the community: events must be attended, the community must be referenced and perpetually re-defined (particularly if the definition is one that isn't supposed to change), the burden of obligations to the community must be justified.

All of the indicators that I've thought of and about require involvement and time. People have to maintain communities in order for them to continue, and if they do not continue then they remain social or political or work or neighbor groups.

I live in a town that has been around for about 150 years. There are artifacts of its earliest US history on every block, and everyone goes to church. What church is almost entirely defined by family and/or profession. I could spend days talking about everything that isn't being done to provide for a sustainable future as an independent community. I could spend just as much time talking about what is being done. There are more empty store fronts than full ones on the square, more than half of the restaurants in town are franchises, and the only grocery store is a Hy-Vee.

And yet, they all know each other. There is a fairly regular system of stratification that places you first at or not at the university, and then working or not working. They all eat at the crappy food places and at all the good food places and they all know Fred at the Hy-Vee (to be fair, there are few people who spend more than a few hours in Maryville who do not know Fred at the Hy-Vee). So, it may not be a self-sustainable community right now, but that wasn't the question, was it?

And on the much less serious side: I think a real community has its own indie self-assured love song:



And also: secret twitters at the ALA Conference. I love a good professional conference.

All communities need an underground to prove that the foundation is sitting on something.


*thanks to C and to A for the brilliant links, btw*

The Love Blog for October 8

I almost wanted to call it the "Luuurve" Blog because you know how happy I get about Freakangels every week and all.

Then I remembered all of the Other stuff I've got open on my toolbar up there for sharing and thought that perhaps this is not the time to get all squishy.

I've been doing limited research on just how much it's going to cost me to get into graduate school for this mythical job that I want to make happen (and, oh, it will, believe me. (even if I hafta carve it out of some micromanager's ass)). PhD confirmed that my brain is configured for it, so really, it's just a matter of picking, right? Right?

If the book didn't have a bit of mold, this would be far more exciting news: McGraw Hill has an entire series of books on Library Education and they don't suck! The footnotes are subtle and stay at the foot of the page, and the bibliography is enough to make out with. Seriously.

I'm working back to up my 100 pages a day of not-light reading, which makes very little sense as in less than a month, NaNoWriMo begins and I've got this big crazy idea in mind that means I'll have 2 weeks to write 50K words. If the writing and the crazy did not bring absolute joy, this would not even begin to be an idea, much less an incredibly possible one.

Libraries do not exist in vacuums, they are constructed. They are, in fact, one of the few social constructs that work against the standardization of humans that so many other social constructs require and create. They are, as has been discussed frequently of late in my clade, indicators of community, of the growth and health of a city or any other more socially defined group (because I weigh economy more heavily in my understanding of 'city' than of a social group). Issues of community, its definition, difficulties and how it is perceived keep cropping up in my Google Reader. (While I do not believe it is appropriate for this to exist to the exclusion of all other feed readers, I really do love my Google Reader. I feed it good things and then they show up every day - in great numbers of braingasm!)

Anything but social network self awareness, please!!! The British Library has a fairly large number of regularly updated blogs. The map showed up on facecrack yesterday, and on this blog that I read and enjoy: Growing Knowledge: The Evolution of Research. The exhibit opens on October 14. So. When do we leave?

Speaking of social networks, a beloved OL friend writes a fantastic review of the NewTwitter. He is also fantastic snarky and writes a webcomic called PitchBlack. You go read now.

There will be tea and more to talk about when you get back.

You're back? Good. Because this is where it gets interesting. (-er.)(yeah, that's not a word.)(*shrug*)

Two people contemplating the same sort of solution to a jointly witnessed problem hardly defines a meme. It does, however, lead to the kind of focused thought and conversation that makes it possible to go from a texted conversation about one person not wanting to own a bookshop to the desire to go and visit private libraries in far-flung (from the middle of the US) and exotic places to writing down a big crazy idea only to find David Byrne writing my soundtrack in photographs and bicycles. 

We're going to take a moment for me to be just happy that David Byrne is in the world. And by in the world, I mean IN the world, dammit.

My idea is not the same as my friend A's idea. She would have a privately run public library. It is worth noting that both of us started thinking along these lines because we believe that our colleagues at the library and those patrons who do not wish to be customers formed a kind of community, and that group was and is being disrespected and disacknowledged. I do not know that there is something inherent in the world of library and librarians (who are different than bibliophiles and very much not the same beasts (and I do mean beasts) as bibliomaniacs) that is cohesive, or if this is an experience that is shared by members of a variety of workplaces. Libraries have been around for a few thousand years. Librarians live in their timeline.

And then, Detroit came back into the conversation.

It seems that A and I are in good company with our little ideas. The Public Professor writes about a guy who is working in Detroit (seriously, this all showed up within a week of each other) to get folks to grow gardens. Brilliant! Food and work and a sense of belonging and contribution. You really ought to read more there. Some good stuff. And more on social networks.

We must live in the 21st century or something.

Edited about an hour later: Just in case it is possible that I wasn't riding a larger wave, I hopped over to Whitechapel and found this: Detroit Lives, part 1 of 3

Yes. 200 white kids on bicycles. Sometimes it is good.

It ain't the same as walking, but...

Driving through town today, I saw that fall is really going to happen here.


Yesterday, as I walked home from the University Library (with Volume I of the 1980 BBC Version of Pride & Prejudice clutched in my hands (yee!)), I looked around. Carefully. Like I had something to see. And the world showed me beauty.

The old Wabash Train Depot, sitting abandoned just north of the Teak House (I know, there are Greek letters that designate the actual name of the fraternity, but I call it the Teak House). Boards nailed across windows, visible holes in the floor, old and new brick in narrow and wider windows become garage doors or bricked over remnants of something that used to be there, only differently. The platform is still present in the flattened earth out front of the building and the old tracks are now an 8 foot wide walk used by students and other wildlife. I am naturally terrified of everything, and although most of the time that can be avoided or even removed from the equation, I was not inclined to do much exploring without an accomplice a companion. There is an ineffective lock on one of the garage doors, and a missing board on one of the windows. Through the gap it is possible to see that there is still glass in some of the boarded up windows and there is still some woodwork and the ticket seller's window. What more is there, I do not know, but oh, what a lovely thing to think of restored, or better, re-purposed. I imagine leaded glass windows everywhere. But that is because I always imagine leaded glass windows everywhere. It is like a disease, more aptly described as a filter.

I saw a tree made of branches like impossibly jointed arms all dripping with yellow.

A squirrel and I had a silent conversation at a distance. The squirrel in the tree, me on the ground. Solemn and curious and each on our ways somewhere other.

There is a bird's nest in a lowish branch in the tree across the street. I noticed it because if you stand very still and watch very closely, and do not allow your mind to lie to your eyes, you will begin to see the leaves change color, from green to variegated yellow to fully yellow bunched around round and spiked seed pods that look like nothing so much as, well, spiky seed pods.

Driving is not a sport for leaf-watching, and it would not have been an issue had I not driven down Buchanan and seen the most beautiful tree in the county sitting innocent and glowing and brilliant and inviting right out front of the house that I adore.

The fall that I got my first divorce, I lived in an apartment in a house on a corner where four maples grew. Every leaf on those trees turned yellow, almost on the same day. They coated the yard and filled the tree, and became light bulbs on the gray rainy days of autumn in central Illinois. I would sit on the steps to the sidewalk for hours, just to stare at the dark brown bark of the tree and the golden impossible light of the leaves.

I have been waiting for this day for weeks: the day that I see that the world is changing and now I can explore its alterations and have something to see.

Also, I applied for a full-time job.
Fingers crossed.

The Cat prefers the knitted rug to the sun beams

It is a slow morning, now barely morphed into afternoon and I won't really notice the time shift until evening when the walk takes me to work again. I do not mind late nights or weird hours. They leave me a bit off-center with nothing but the number of hours between one duty and another and a list of possibilities in between to define what the day becomes.

Right now the world is silent in the house and muffled through the windows and I am jealous of its movement and crisp air and sunshine and errands. I have an errand to run and may turn it into more than one, just for the sake of the fresh and the fall.

I've been writing lots of letters and find that I crave the moments of silence and thought to think of what to say to this person or that person, to have a conversation, no matter how one sided, that is thoughtful and concise and specific, or maybe wandering and filled with words of moments long since passed.

I have been sleeping longer these last few days. Noticeably. I believe that the excitement of extended conversation with a beloved friend and the realization that I must do this more often with different people probably lead to a certain amount of that sleep. Well, that and the damn cricket that chirped all friggin' night long and inspired tremendously deep sleep the next night. Stupid loud mouth. Rather: loud legs.

Something begins to settle into the silent parts of my psyche. Deeply felt joy and self-expression, and something about Haircut Day at The Antiquarium. Of course we were there. Of course. It goes like this:

I met my friend Aubrey for the weekend in Brownville, NE. We stayed at the apartment of a mutual friend (thank you, Cin, you are awesome). We each had something very specific to talk about with the other, and we also had a (as in one) specific place in the area that we wanted to go and sightsee. There are requirements when you visit Brownville and those must be accomplished in and around all of this.

We talked libraries. We talked cave adventures. We found the graveyard and drank some wine. There was lunch and there was an apple and there were salami and cream cheese roll-ups and granola bars and fruit juice. I bought a cookbook with showy soup recipes and we sighed and gasped over the desk and the type left from the newspaper that was there when Southeast Nebraska was the place to be. We strolled. We followed a map, and stopped at the statue of Gov. Furnas and showed a bit of honor and then made the point that it may not have been the best idea to plant a bunch of trees on the prairie. Which is not a place of trees, but of scrub and yucca and wild rose and lead plant and bluestem and thistles and nighthawks and poppies and gut-sucking assassin bugs. And wind. Oh the blessed wind.

The parking area at The Antiquarium is kind of undetermined. The approach to the building allows you think that perhaps it is a lie, that it is closed, that it is really closed, that there is nothing in that almost nondescript brick face. That lasts about 5 seconds until the nose of the car reaches the top of the driveway and you see that there is, in fact, a party going on. Kind of all of the time. The cars are just lined up that way, like they are staying for a while and maybe you need to know someone to be here. And we do. They are the books.

The end of the story is a foregone conclusion: Aubrey bought a book about a library and I put on hold a book about cartographers. I will buy it next weekend when we take my niece to this place and warn her than the cat looks nice, and he is, and he bites.

The beginning of the story is a hug from the universe that we got as we walked in and looked around and saw a man sitting in a chair with a cape over his top half because another man was cutting his hair. Well, it was Haircut Day at The Antiquarium, you see. Tom's barber from Omaha comes down once a month and anyone who wants a haircut that day has to leave Omaha to get it. Nobody buys any books, but everyone gets their hair cut. Oh, and someone brought some wine. We stuck around long enough that it got opened. Shiraz. With conversation.

The cats roam around and I am soft and lightly pen-scratchy for a while longer. There are leftovers of pasta with prosciutto and books to be returned to their library from mine. Now I watch the sun beams and settle comfortably into my chair.

Stillness considered

The semantics of stillness confound and frequently frustrate me.
Calm, Still, Relaxed, Chill.
Zen and Relaxed are not the same thing.
It is possible to take life not personally while still in motion.

One friend acknowledges the undeveloped ability to stop,
another asks what I fear.
Legitimate responses, and worth considering.

My current result is this:
I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to make of myself.
One day that self made herself known and made it quite clear that she had things to do.
I could stop worrying, and just be still.

I learn stillness in small increments and define it gently.
As any skill, these things take time.
Time at the whim of a feline,
Time at the side of a telephone,
Time shared in chairs reading different books in silence.
As any life skill, it changes everything subtly.

Subtlety is defined as the set of all things that are not defined as me.

It is a skill.
Fuck.
I kind of like not having that one...


(not a poem, just written with lots of space so that I see what the words say)

Til now, I had never known love

This image is of the back of the stage at one end of the main room of The Antiquarium in Brownville, NE. Map cases. Art. Wood.

There are whole areas that smell vaguely of stained glass studio and a room with a typewriter from some time in the Dark Ages that my fingers twitched to touch, to use, to bring to life for them.

I did not buy anything. I took my father there on Sunday. He bought a 2 volume set of Plutarch's Lives. He told me that I had made an impression on my previous visit on the proprietor (a bare-foot and amiable Tom), who described me as self-affected (or -effected, I am not sure which). He continued to say that I knew what I wanted to do and didn't need anyone to help me. Wrapped in my tweed and scarf clutching scrap paper to my chest as a blanket, I believe the description is not unkind, but correct. My parents agree.

There is a kind of similarity about places and people who show love to each other through the medium of books. It is the spaces that I love: the specificity in a reading area; the smell of contemplation; the muffled sounds of trafficked floors and the deliberately random conversations. Everything you can see is alive in a place that loves the life of books and book-people. Every book is a conversation and when you open it at random or on purpose, the conversation invites response. It is the same with the people who care for collections of books.

There is a difference between a life that is spent living and one that is spent collecting. A room with a bunch of books is not the same as a room that is a library. I worked with books that were treated as objects, as commodity, and never could internalize it. Library is the world of books that makes sense to me. There is some kind of order, it doesn't even matter particularly what kind of order as long as order exists. Collections and sections exist, as to interactions between those collections and sections and their curators and their interactors. Intra-Library networks.

I love the smell of bookshelves. I love that I know someone who smells the differences in dust as chocolate or lemon custard. I love that I argue with someone about what exactly defines a library and that there is someone else whose definition matches mine exactly. I love that there is someone in this world whose life is like the one that I want to live.

That all paled the moment I walked fully into The Antiquarium. There is a soaring of spirit that happens with love. A kind of smile that is only partly on the lips, the rest of it living in lungs and spleen and leg muscles.  A challenge and contentment. The possibility of Life.

A beautiful thing about loving the spaces of books is the 's' at the end of the word. Plural. Unconfined. Possible.

I live in a town with a used book store like a used book store. It is jarring. I come from a city with two used book stores like libraries, the most comfortable and accommodating way stations for books and their likers and their lovers. A Novel Idea and Bluestem Books changed my way of thinking about bookshops entirely, and for the better. The Antiquarium showed me a way of my future.

It is good to fall in love again.

Big Crazy Idea (the two-th)

November: National Novel Writing Month, is just over a month away. Tonight and tomorrow and probably the next day as well will involve writing short stories based on photographs taken by one of my favorite photographer/Muses; they begin the reconnection with the stories of a larger/longer work (see below). Tonight and tomorrow, the next day and probably month will involve writing a long short story arc based on a little idea in my brain for my other Muse who will draw my voice in my absence.

I was thinking: wouldn't it be fun to write the 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo and then take the time to edit them together with the other 60,000 words I've already written of the same novel (really, I love this story. it is never going to not be in my brain. I hope.) and craft something like chapters? I do not mean that it will be fun to edit the thing, mind, I mean letters. I mean to send my writing out to people deliberately as shareable object, as art.

Now that I have quite the small stash of plantable and other sorts of gorgeous paper (paper that is not for the insides of journals, mind, but the outsides of insides that are meant to hold the ends of good decisions, or bad decisions well written), I have the means to create little books of small bits of fiction.

But what's the fun of just sending these things out into the world (of a very carefully chosen audience made entirely out of the people that I love (not a very small number, I know, but still))?

What I'm thinking is a reading. Something involving lots of tequila (for me and my ego) and friends and chapter indicators drawn out of a hat (or a mixing bowl)(or a frog) and chapters read aloud.

So.

Beginning November 22 and ending December 10 I will send chapters of my novelthing of fairytales-sort of through the US Postal Service to people whose addresses I have and who actually want to be involved in this. I do not care what state you are in - Skype is our friend. I do not care how long I have known you.

If you opt to get a chapter: 1) please be willing to share with other people, but only other people that you are going to be able to find later (readings don't work when there's nothing to read); 2) please be happy to read whatever chapter you have when it comes time to share.

I would like to wait until Spring to do something like a reading, though, as the plantable paper will need to be planted after the reading, and that is the kind of thing that spring is very good for.

Let me know if you are In. I am not interested in conscripting participants into my activity. I believe in consenting adults only.

The Friday Love Blog

These make me happy. They really do. And also:

Singing out loud at the grocery store. It sounds better than normal, but different than in-the-shower better than normal. I wonder if it has to do with the part where, like dancing in the grocery store, it's not that you can't do it, it's that most people just don't. When Wil Wheaton is Boss of the World, I'm going to start a grocery store chorale. To go with the dancing.

Porridge Papers, the papermill and letterpress store of amazing and possibility. Where are also employed some of the most creative and wonderful people I've met yet. And that's saying something, because, really, I've met my friends! Anyway, they have a blog, they've been on TV, they've made plantable paper for someone in ENGLAND (which is not the same place as Nebraska) and have opened a second location in Brownville, NE (where there is a regionally famous flea market this weekend (hint hint)).
Also, they are sending me a sack so that I can buy a 5$ sack of scrap paper, even though that sale ended last Saturday. My heart goes awwww right here. Right at this moment where a business I support in my words and my heart makes it that much easier for me to support them with a few dollars. You need to friend them on Facebook and then spend lots of money on very big orders of sparkly scented seed-filled paper! Scented!

You know it's love when Freakangels makes you smile on a skip week.

I've been away for a while, but Hannelore and Faye win.

So do the Book Reviews at Unshelved. Yes, the comic is good, too. Of course the comic is good. My heart is a librarian. Sheesh.

Me and LibraryThing, we got a thing going on.
It's cool.

And thanks to AirTreks (those stinky travel people), I now have a new blog to read that reminds me to spend my time well, not just because I can. The Traveling Savage. I love this name. Love it.

Normally, Veronika von Volkova shares of photographs and images that speak more than a thousands of words (not always SFW). Today, she also shared teh cutest travel arrangements ever.

Next week, I will have a new thing to share with all you. But it will take a week to set up and all of that, so be patient, darlings.

And yes, more Big Crazy Ideas on the way.

Big Crazy Project Idea (the one-th)

K Street Power Plant in Lincoln, NE sits at the intersection of 9th and K. My grandfather worked there. My father has memories of visiting him and of the noise and the heat and the boilers that dwarfed houses and also of orange soda that he drank as a treat on those days in that hot place.

The building is filled with boxes of stuff that the city of Lincoln is saving against the time when it will need to know that Mr and Mrs OffTheirRocker decided to home school their children instead of committing blasphemy by allowing someone not God or themselves to do so in 1985. According to the 1998 Annual Report of the Library/Archives Division of the Nebraska State Historical Society, "This space will accommodate the acquisition and storage of state, county, and local government records, as well as security copies of government microfilm."

I have a better idea.

The K Street Power Plant Foundation, a community based privately run library and art space. The library's collection features mostly periodicals, classics, comics, graphic novels and webcomic based publications and collections.

The periodicals collection specifically and deliberately includes every issue of Foreign Affairs, History Today, Biblical Archaeology Review, any title in the classics, literature, urban studies, libraries, geosciences and titles collected from the offal of libraries whose collections are cut in the name of "better customer service." We, of course, encourage all private citizens and university departments to do the same; to house these collections and make them available as they can.

The Librarians have a soft spot for comics and comic artists and so have amassed a collection that appeals mostly to them. They have diverse tastes. Supporting individual artists is part of the function of strong communities, and in this world of the internet and globalization, community is no longer defined solely by physical proximity. Forum proximity does make a difference, and many of the artists whose work is on the walls, or has inspired the Steampunk themed interior design, particularly of the main reading room and its balconies are known to The Librarians personally or through one of a few very specifically chosen online fora.

The Librarians also believe that knowledge of the thought patterns of the past and present lend foundation to the thought patterns of the future. Work of Greek and Roman and Arabic and Byzantine and Mesopotamian and Indian and Chinese and Japanese and so on thinkers have been collected for perusal and nibbling and discussion. Seminal works in different genres have been collected in duplicate or triplicate where possible.

The Librarians do not feel that it is appropriate to expose curious minds to tripe and dreck and would therefore appreciate it if you would keep your suggestions that they include more vampire romance, girl mysteries and crackpot conspiracy histories to yourself. This is a private library. Membership can be revoked based on just how stupid The Librarian thinks you are that day. They are trained to maim. Be aware, and be thoughtful.

This is a privately run library for several reasons. We felt that it would be prudent to allow the city to learn us as we learned them, that would be slowly. That relationship ought to be kept as positive as possible, therefore we felt that it was better for us, situated as we are in a very tense little city, to place limits on who could interact with our collections. We decided that anyone over the age of 16 could become a member without parental consent, thereby reflecting the policy of the public library system. Given the more, eh, naked or violent or heretical or downright ridiculous nature of some of the material in this collection, we realized that we were not suffering by imposing limitations. Sometime avoidance works. We call it deflection.


We also chose to manage this privately because of our need for control. We wanted control over everything that came into this building. We wanted to choose it all individually and with purpose. We wanted to be the only ones dictating where the radiant heating would be, how many solar panels we expected, where the glass forge and the kiln would go downstairs, how much gallery space, how much studio space and how comfortable the upstairs apartments would be. We wanted to make sure that the designs for the leaded glass windows that face 9th Street would be left to their creator to design and to us and our friends to build and install. In short, we wanted to be The Queen.

It is written into our mission statement and our bylaws that this Foundation has as one of its long term goals integration with the Lincoln City Libraries. Twenty years seems a good time to determine what role the Power Plant will play in this community and how well-funded it will manage to make itself.

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The windows facing 9th street all leaded in a design created by a local artist and crazily talented person (already chosen).

The main reading room with a second floor walkway around the outer perimeter, heated by radiant heat and active solar, cunningly designed to keep the sunlight off of the collections and the artwork. The floor warmed with rugs and computer stations for webcomic viewing and research and creating. The old boilers in pieces holding us all in to a huge open space. The desk attended by two qualified librarians and a volunteer or intern. Always with the power to revoke privileges for the day or for the ever.

Apartments (two) at the top of the building to be used by artists in residence, rent as work - 20 hours a week in the library or in a gallery, doing outreach, organizing something that we just don't feel like doing, planting the rooftop garden, teaching a child to draw, that kind of thing.

Studios for rent at reasonable rates to those who make it past us (the jury) and our peer group of advisors (who also know stuff).

Gallery space and small show space for theater, music, 2D and 3D art.

Collaborate with other galleries and venues during Lincoln-wide music and arts events. Collaborate with the university to provide alternate and creative spaces for conference presentations and events. Invite local organizations to hold fundraisers in the space on a sliding scale. (They provide the catering and the decorating and the tables and chairs, we just do space. Unless we like them and they are active and nice people and not likely to show up and piss us off. (We are sensitive to this.))
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No idea how much it would cost. Never did get my hands on the blueprints. Don't even have a reasonably good picture of the place to shove in people's faces when I get all tangential and have to prove how brilliant and community minded I really am. Really. I am.

The city entertained bids to turn the building into condos about 8 or 9 years ago. Well, Mayor Seng acted like she was entertaining those bids. She denied them just before it was point of no return. The money would have to be physical and present and the proposal damn tight.

Patience and practice and faith.

It is still The K Street Power Plant. We power the creative.

Allow me to state my reasons ...

My quest for graduate schools is, yet again, proving to be a challenge. Preservation and Conservation of Texts falls into the same category as Archives Management, and every program wants to make me a leader in the field of records management.

I do not want to be a leader. I have never wanted to be a leader. It's work and it involves administrative stuff. No. Really. But thanks for the opportunity.

I missed a phone interview yesterday with a woman who may just have every qualification that I want to have (including the part about working to restore and repair library bits). There is frustration, and there is time.

It is no longer a story of discovering my life's goals and interests. It is story of what skills need to be developed, what experiences gained, what understanding and resources discovered in order to achieve those goals and live a life that is involved and communicative and active and creative.

Libraries exist in several planes: the physical collection of materials - of books and artwork and photographs and maps and directories; the physical catalog of information that is stored and accessible in that physical collection - Librarians and card catalogs; the aether based collection of materials - digitized works of literature, reference works and artworks; and the aether based catalog of information; and the physical and aether presences of the library itself - the places where people go, the destination.

All of these presences and functions relate to the function of Library in community as a resource to meet immediate needs (entertainment, job seeking, completion of assignments, paying bills) and as it meets longer term community needs, needs that relate to the definition of a community, to its legitimacy in the larger world, to the survival of a community in times of need and emergency whether it such an emergency is caused by nature or humanity.

My personal goal is to become a person who is a trained academic librarian, and a trained bookbinder and a trained restorer and repairer of books and other texts. Librarians provide support to communities in chaos, and yet there are few who provide support to them.

Time spent behind the front desks at various government supported institutions, universities and libraries, taught me that people have the most incredibly varied sets of questions. I have witnessed the difference between a question that can be only partially answered by the person behind the desk, and one that can be fully answered. That difference usually lies in the training and abilities of the person behind the desk. Administrative encouragement also plays a large role.

I do not believe that I would have learned to be as brave and persistent in following up on questions were it not for my supervisor at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln who believed that every person who called, even the people who called by mistake, had valid questions and those questions ought to be answered if we could. If we could not, we had the responsibility to get that person as close to an answer as possible. It was a tremendous lesson in public service. It meant that I interacted with people for longer as I learned what they were asking, what I could do to help them. It meant that I began to see conversations as more than small talk. I learned to understand the nature of questions.

At the Bennett Martin Branch of the Lincoln City Library, I witnessed the power of parsing questions into easily (or at least directly) answerable segments. That was the place that taught me about the power of loving your job. I have never worked in an environment that was so administratively negative or micromanagerial in my life. I have never seen such talented and dedicated and competent people so disregarded and marginalized. I had never been witness to the destruction of departments and collections and careers.

And yet, I loved my job. I was happy there. The three years that I worked as a shelver, and the 12 or so months that I was employed as a temporary Library Assistant II changed my life. I respected and enjoyed my co-workers. That was the place that showed me the person I want to be. I realized that I would not be able to be that person, with that set of skills, without further training and that would only be found in graduate school.

A short stint in the Binding Department of UNL's Love Library, a history of making leaded glass windows, jobs making pizza and sandwiches, work dissecting thistle heads and working on thistle crew, reading the Ink Trilogy by Cornelia Funke and the One Book, One Lincoln selection from 2009, The People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks, as well as a life long love and pursuit of ceramics and knitting and crochet and cooking: these are my inspiration and motivation to learn bookbinding and book preservation. A sense of the world as my home, and my place in it as requiring community involvement leads me to seek out an academic foundation in the history of libraries and their destruction and restoration and repair. It also leads me to build a history of volunteerism and to pursue a career in being present where libraries are damaged by human and natural causes. To be an aid to recovery and survival with two competent hands, a good sense of humor, and an even better sense of the place of library in the world and in human history.