Inspiration is a bitch.

Here’s the thing about Inspiration: it’s a fickle bitch and you’re best off not waiting around for it to show up. You have to ask it over, know that it will say yes and then not show up. You have to make dinner anyway and wash the dishes later. You have to smile when you see it at the park and make small talk. You have to behave like nothing ever went between you before every single time you meet face to face. You have to live your life with your eyes averted to their own purpose, never once lifting them to be in the service of something as fickle as that bitch Inspiration.

Every day I sweep the floor of my apartment. Because I live with cats, cats who use a litter box, litter which gets stuck in the fur of their paws (because that’s a pretty standard cat-feature) which then falls out all over the floor. Which is a sort of wood tile thing. And some of the tiles are loose, so it sometimes sounds like you’re walking over cellophane, only you know you can’t be because the floor is wood. Very – um – character filled. And not a little nerve-wracking.

In order to sweep the floor every day, I pick up and put into a box most of the toys that are scattered for the cats to entertain themselves. Ethel is fabulous at this. Boris is a grumpy gorging doofus face who is too good to play with anything in this apartment. He feels things deeply, was in no way consulted about this change of geography, is away from his BFF and his other favorite human and will spend the next few days up to a week being a grumpy gorging doofus face steeped in cat-apathy.

(Oh! Saw a funny: graffiti of “Anarchy” on a posted bill followed by “is fucking boring” and I smiled and wanted a camera.)

One of the toys is an ill-conceived ball made of hard plastic in two pieces that have been joined to each other along a ridge, not unlike an Easter Egg only with the seam protruding and glued shut to prevent all access to the bits inside that make a fun noise whenever the thing rolls around. On the wood floor. In an apartment with cement walls. I feel like this may be part of the reason that the Pharaohs were as special as they were. Damn cat toys.

Yesterday I picked up the hard plastic toy of headache from inside the box where it was used to great noise effect and I put in on a shelf with my Trilogy Tuesday ticket and my matchbook that says “I am fairly certain that given a cape and a nice tiara, I could save the world” (thank you, Danielle!). Ethel loves this toy. Ethel is just joyous in this place and will play with anything, and that includes the ball from hell.

And here’s where the Inspiration thing comes back in. It’s a crap cat toy. She knows this. She’s got this nerf type ball that she’s been carrying around in her mouth for three days that is way more interesting and fun to chase around. It’s quiet, like she is, and it sort of bounces off of things, and she can get her teeth into it. Hard plastic with noisy bits on the inside = not nearly as much fun. But, and here’s the kicker, she can’t get it off the shelf. She stares at it, bats at it, gets to roll around a bit and yet it will not make the 5 inch trip off the edge to the ground where it could then rule a miserable world until I finally just throw the thing away. (This is my trying to not exert my “I’m human and have opposable thumbs, so you’re just going to have to deal with it”-ness. I have authority issues. It’s a thing.) It teases her, without even meaning to. But she can’t have it. No matter what she does, it will not roll off the edge. And yet, she keeps trying to get its attention.

That’s how you have to be with Inspiration. Stay on the shelf with Lord of the Rings and kitschy happiness. Roll around and make your noise and don’t take the batting seriously. And you will be the most popular train of thought track in the creative atmosphere. Live your life and write your words and paint your pictures and do not be a bitch to that fickle bitch Inspiration.

I walked a lot today. Cherokee Street. At one end is Hammond’s Books, used books and antiques and a coupla cups of coffee and it’s been around for more than 30 years. 2 floors with 80,000 titles and a searchable website and a delightful owner. We chatted for close to 20 minutes and I told her what I want to do and to be and she smiled and understood and did not even blink about the quest to learn to preserve comic books (don’t get me started with that ‘but they were meant to be ephemera’ shit). It is the sort of place that invites careful consideration and is very like a way station from personal library to personal library – that kind of limbo of understanding where books have many levels of meaning and value and they are all accorded space in this place. But it is also the sort of place that does not invite too much pondering, or scanning and reading. It is known to itself. And you must take its opinion at face value. It has been around longer than most.

A mile to the West is the Archive book store. Used books and no coffee that I could see. Local arts from local artists. Easily read book shelves. They’ve been open for a year and a half and are not feeling the stability of good support as yet. Not floundering, I think, but treading water to shore. I chatted with the woman who owns that shop for a good 20 minutes also. I enjoy the place and plan to return to sit and read and maybe someday buy a thing or five and then saunter home past the houses with carved bricks and rounded sides. As we spoke, she told me of Spiderwick and the story of the man who finds the world of gnomes and fairies and goes into it, leaving his daughter to grow up without him. He leaves also a book that says on it “Do not unseal” and eventually, as eventually it must happen, a child does just that.

Standing in the bookstore with sweat like waves and my water bottle too far to grab, talking of movies and stories and growing older and the shift that hits at 40, I suddenly was throwing words around a casket made of the roots of a tree that lives only in my imagination and on a very few pieces of paper. Spells and fairy tales and what it is to believe that there has to be something in someone sometime that will be curious or defiant enough to open the thing that has been closed, to move the thing that has been set, to follow the clues that were not left; without all of these there is no hope for the next chapter in any story. The magic needs a volunteer. I could almost not see through the image.

However, I was in the middle of a conversation, and in no mood for its interruption. I acknowledged Inspiration and continued my conversation and then the walk home and dinner of cardamom in rice and veggies and a hard boiled egg and still, I am not alone. Inspiration has tugged on my wrists and on my eyes and has things to say.

Treasures from my Reader feed.

I am never certain where to put the best of the best, but because it is just so, well, so -

This is the most surreal thing I have ever read. (and it wasn't written by Warren Ellis. go figure.)

Has anyone ever heard of or made or had this? It looks fascinating and quite pretty, but also there is vinegar in it, so I'm asking around for opinions.

PhD makes me laugh a lot today. (and yes, I am writing today for today and now, it is real-time today. for a little while, at least.)

Scatterwood continues to delight.

Three Panel Open is still on, and boy did Marley Zarcone bring it.

Coilhouse, as ever, shares the lovely and disconcerting in their piece on Leontine Greenberg. It is no secret that I have a huge culture crush on Coilhouse. They are incredible.

The British Library's science fiction blog has a piece about a novel about post-apocalyptic England that was published in 1885. Of particular note is the lengthy passage about how culture is transmitted in a world without a need or desire for books.

Christopher Wilson has been going through the massive amounts of photos he took while travelling a couple of years ago. I love all of them, but this one I love more because it is a picture of my friend and it captures for me the sense of isolation and calm self-knowledge that focused travelling can drop on you whether you like it or not.

Right. Enjoy, darlings.
It is a beautiful day.

Adventures in Disconnection

(I’m writing on my laptop, which is an entity unto itself (no internet) and post these the day after I wrote them. In other words, here ‘today’ is, for you, ‘yesterday’, ‘now’ is not now, etc. It is a fait accompli and there is nothing to be done about it.)

The grand adventure was a grand success! I have a new phone number. One that is snazzy and feels like a limerick in my mouth. Also, and this is the weighty part, it has an area code that my new city will understand.  Not that I will stay with my phone company for all that much longer – my general angst and disillusion at how awkwardly-served I am by the 21^st century customer service ideals is well-documented and does not need to be explored here.

Schlafly Library proved to be quite the treasure trove with every imaginable bus route pamphlet as well as a system wide map (I understand that these will no longer be printed. Grr.). Also, there was Nina Simone and Stan Getz, so, you know, that was cool.

This morning was for Mahler. Mahler always makes me think of Martha Nussbaum. If you do not think of Martha Nussbaum when you hear Mahler, that is because we have not read the same books, and there is nothing for it but to accept what I say when I say that it is a delightful and challenging association.

I am pleased/saddened to know that I am not alone in my frustration with the catalog at the St. Louis Public Library. It is not loved by the staff, either. Or at least the one staff member to whom I spoke this morning. I was curious. I did not love Horizon at LCL, but … Well, perhaps this is time for a different approach:

A library involves a collection of items – books, DVDs, CDs, maps, periodicals, links, etc. The nature of the item is not meaningful to me except that it be nameable, trackable and that librarians can discuss its contents and use. Library is as much about statistics as Biology. Only with fewer fetal pigs. In order to use Library, there have to be ways of talking about the collection that bring some semblance of order to what is by nature a totally chaotic entity – it is in its use that Library develops character (this is not an insignificant or unnoticed trait – consider how many writers of science fiction and/or fantasy have used Library to fuel or clarify ideas of chaos, probability, function, impossibility, eternity, and the like.).

How I learned that Reference Librarians are humans beyond all human reckoning was in watching them navigate their way through the reference collection or Google or city archives not by knowing what exact information would be on what pages (it is too dull to imagine what would happen in that case) but where the information is most likely to be found. Because materials had been collected, organized and listed according to a largely arbitrary but consistent system, it was possible to narrow the search field to some reasonably approachable size.

It is notable that the other major skill of Reference Librarians is in being asked questions and finding the way to answer those questions. If you ever get the chance to witness one of these interactions (as in, if you live in a place where the library’s Reference Desk has not been ‘blown up’ (no really, that is the phrase folks use (it’s not just me, right? That’s just tacky and thoughtless.))) I recommend taking notes.

The digression serves a purpose. In order to use Library effectively, it is necessary to know that all the items in the collection(s) are bound together in some way that eases search and recovery. Series titles are one of the simplest connective tissues I can think of outside of an author’s name. Specific subjects that reflect those series titles and fully searchable records are more time-consuming to build, but desirable.

The catalog at the public library here lacks these things. I learned today that it’s only been in place since April. Learning curves with technology spread out over an entire city’s worth of libraries during a time with the Central Library is closed for major renovation tend to take exponentially longer even than outside estimates. I gotta say, though, I miss ratings and reviews and fully searchable MARC records, and I miss being able to search by type of item (book, large print, DVD, audio book, etc.).

Relationships with libraries have become important to me as they relate to my interactions with the city or town that I’m in. The scattered feeling of looking at this catalog creates a relationship that is only partly there. It cannot be whole, because there is no way to see the whole or even the beginnings of the shape of the whole, much less enough connections to discern where the whole shape diverges into something other and more mysterious. The words that I use seem very fluid and metaphorical and they are that way for very specific reasons – Library is no fixed entity; catalogs are in motion and dispute; no one agrees on what Library is anyway.

My wanderings here must begin where they always begin – with the books. The books that speak of libraries and St. Louis, and even one that speaks of St. Louis libraries from 1927-1952 (definitely suggested reading). I let the shelves lead me and while I am frequently disappointed at the lack of options presented, I know the difference between a dead end and an infrequently used path.

Were I a different person, I might take this personally enough that Something would be Said or Done, or at least a Very Strongly Worded Letter would be in order. I would mail it to the local ice cream vendors and hair salons, knowing that their customer base would appreciate the total emptiness of the action.

When I’m co-boss of my own shared library, I’m totally suggesting we use LibraryThing or something very like it to catalog and search our library, although not for the checking in and out and sending to the bindery and stuff. That’s just crazy talk. Although, since my big focus seems to be classics and periodicals and pretty things, I wonder. Hm. I think this will require more concrete thought.

This evening is for tango music and lentil soup.

Be well, darlings.

Ambivalence and Opinion

Taking a cue from the Boris’s Cat Book of Coping, today has been productive in small and soft ways. Laundry provided me with a good, although not rigorous, cardio workout, as well as a closet filled with clean clothes. (Everything fit in the hanging shelves and on the hangers, btw. I was surprised, and very happy that I can still maintain a certain amount of control over my wardrobe.)

The math that I just did on my phone is not so soft and not really all that small, either, so I am content that tomorrow will be a day of errands and bus rides and something like expedition. I’m off to get a new phone number! I’ve not lived in Nebraska for more than a year, so maybe it’s time to act like I’m committed to not living there. Maybe.

Matthew Battles challenges me to face the ambivalence I feel when faced the constant struggle we humans undertake to make impermanent things permanent. I’ve read his book about the history of Library before and am no less pleased this time through. He has a sense of the smallness of people in the vast arrangements of books and shelves and ideals that have defined Library to various people engaged in various forms of being a Librarian over the millennia. His style is easy and engaging and I, of course, love the bibliographies and notes he provides. Yes. I am a complete bibliography nut. It is where and when he talks of antiquity and the libraries that were built as destroyed that I get all emotionally involved.

Books are beautiful and they fall apart. They age and die and suffer injury as any other living or actual thing. Even granite is not eternal. I am often bemused at attempts to preserve that which may very well be in the damn way. At the same time, there are always those people who would just as soon nothing had come before them, not simply the incredibly powerful or persuasive, but the paranoid and simple-minded as well. Bombing libraries and blowing up statues and burning books and scholars: these are nothing more than the cruel attempts of the small to make themselves seem large.

It is a simple and pithy generalization. And it is an old one. It is as old as curses on scrolls against any who would do damage or commit theft. It is as old as uncouth jokes about marriage; as people in love believing that no one has ever felt that way before; as politicians spinning every syllable to achieve their desired ends. It is not as old as death, and that is where it becomes important to remember that we humans live very short lives. We do not have the gift of awareness of the experiences of every atom in our bodies, even though the science suggests that every atom in our bodies predates us by vastly long periods of time.

We are simply one of nature’s recycling mechanisms.

And yet. We can create artifacts of immeasurable beauty and power – and we can know that they are immeasurable because we cannot conceive of the way to invent the measure of them. We do this time and again – for tens of thousands of years we have left ourselves evidence of our own existences, our own abilities. Our ancestors created and our ancestors destroyed. It would be very precious to believe that there are any of us alive who are not descended from at least a few of both.

There are times, moments on the timelines where some other force stepped in, some force not made of human DNA, and altered the expected course of things. Vesuvius blew up and rained ash over Pompeii and Herculaneum. The destruction of life and the preservation of artifacts in one go. Were it not for the volcano, what could we know of these cities, of the people who lived there, of their architecture and habits and even of their reading materials?

People occupied cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde and then disappeared, the dwellings remain, their midden heaps remain, but what do we know of the people? That they climbed to the top of the mesas to gather food, that they were smaller in stature than people of the 20^th century, that they built kivas? I have listened to lectures from people exercising every ounce of caution and meticulous research to back up an act of sheer intellectual imagination to explain anything concrete and plausible about the people who would have lived there.

We do not have to make such leaps at Pompeii – many of our questions are different there – they are about how connected one city was to another; what trade routes may have looked like; what sorts of paints or glasses or ceramics were used. Nothing particularly astonishing, and yet it is all very connected to us because we can look around and see how we live that echoes something like a pan-human experience (if such a thing is even a responsible thought).

So what happens when the repositories of our current collection of human evidences come under attack from bombs or fires or floods or earthquakes or careless management or politically based rhetoric? Do we understand the importance of maintaining connection to the stories of our pasts, our arguments, our failures and our successes? Or do we chalk it up to the life cycle?

This is where my ambivalence ends.

Any attempt to narrow the definition of human existence to one point of view or one educational ethic or one philosophical bent or one theocratic ideal is an act of dehumanization. When the right to be challenged is denied, the right to solve problems is damaged. When learning is quantified, the ability to learn is compromised. When access to the stories of creation – all of the stories of every creation that we can catalog and share – is limited because of any authoritative human philosophy, the human experience is fundamentally altered to that of a termite wearing blinders.

The paradox of a volcano destroying a city and preserving a library is not particularly compelling to me. The story of the monk who used a silk thread to begin to separate the layers of scrolls one from another in order to provide reading material for those who came after him is.

Blessings, beloveds.

Day the first

One of the random and always unexpected side effects of efficient and effective unpacking is the sense you have on your first full day alone in your new house that you’ve been there for almost a month already, and shouldn’t you have found that job by now, and isn’t it laundry day, and why haven’t you got a trash can for the bathroom yet?

The part where it is Monday is no great help. Monday brings with it the sense of getting around to doing things: phone calls and appointments and ironing and accomplishment. It’s bad enough that it is also the day that begins the working week in whatever way it damn well pleases, but it shows up at your door with a bag of toys and tells you that you have to play with them all by 1 pm or the week is worthless and you might as well call in useless and never leave your bed. And we – we silly creatures – we listen!

Humans have no sense of when to just shift their expectations. None. This is why we spend gajillions of dollars letting alien life forms shaped as familiar looking human beings motivate and inspire and organize us. They are the beings who understand how to change perspective. Not we fragile, ego centered, water sensitive little things. Oh, to revel in a hangover inducing constantly shifting kaleidoscope of human interaction and points of view. Obi Wan would shit himself in bliss.

I’ve unpacked just more than half of my boxes and things (when the hell, by the bye, did I acquire so much clothing?)(who the hell wears that much stuff?)(where am I going to put it all?!?) and while I’m enjoying the sheer randomness of my book arrangements and the ability to get to all of the books that I brought with me, there is something lurking under the surface that has been bubbling for the last 24 hours or so.

What’s with the stupid decisions we make? Not like buying a house or getting married or having kids or picking one career, no. I mean like having three cans of Cream of Tartar or 30 safety pins in no container or still moving around the plant hanger bracket thingies that got left when the last husband got kicked out. You know, the really stupid decisions. I own a bungee cord that has the diameter of a bloated fly. It is tucked away in a box that also holds extension cords and adapters and wonderful sorts of truly practical and used items. I didn’t throw it away. I was in shock and decided to just repack the useless with the useful and walk away from the whole thing like it never happened.

Living in an apartment, especially when it is decided that this will be a not permanent arrangement, has freed me up to make some interesting calls about just how much of my sentimental keepsake kind of stuff I’m going to keep around. It’s not getting thrown out, that’s just crazy talk. There is room now in the file drawer for new files. Also, there is room on the book shelves in case I buy a book sometime in the next 12 months. One book.  Yeah. That part’s going to suck.

Waking up this morning to curtain covered windows and books on shelves and a table just waiting for me to sit at it with tea and a journal and some breakfast and a delightful book (that hasn’t been checked out since 2003. Which is a crime, if you ask me. I’ve read the book before, and find it informative and gentle and humorous. Other people should be reading it as well. But there is no place for me to add a review and encourage other people to read it. Perhaps I will just suck it up and throw reviews up everywhere other than the library’s catalog. But that would be far too reasonable.) was kind of unnerving, and has lead in no small part to the general sense of pressure expressed above. Even though I know (a lot) that today is my first full day of the rest of my life. It is not possible to get everything done RightNow. And it shouldn’t be tried. Gentleness is advocated by the cats and friends and sometimes even other people. Patience is what it is usually called. But Gentleness allows me time to clean the apartment and use the time I have as I will find joyful and rewarding.

Last night’s entertainment involved not closely watching a Sherlock Holmes mystery on the TV. The tape played some of the sound and most of the picture. Not enough to be watchable, but it got me thinking about the kinds of things that the stuff in one’s home says about how time in it is spent. Informationally speaking, of course, not with value judgment or to determine how handy you will be at distracting Aunty Lydia from the dessert table during the annual memorial to Uncle Biff’s monumentally ridiculous attempt to bake a cake from scratch on a pontoon boat during a water-skiing show (The cake fell. So did Uncle Biff). But, like how predictable you could be to someone of a Sherlock Holmes/Sheldon Cooper/Hermione Granger brain in case of disappearance or boredom.

It does make the still packed boxes that much more intriguing to me, pretending that I can see my life objectively – truth be told, though, we’ve all known those moments of re-definition when stuff that’s been yours and then has been in a box suddenly returns to you and we all know how disconcerting it can be to see the things of your life as if on a list of characteristics. I like opening them and wondering just what inspired me to put that cake pan in with the typewriter and why are there so many scarves in with the shampoo and will I ever actually need those movie ticket stubs?

It is probably best that this is a thought that simmers and occasionally vanishes altogether. There are still boxes of bits and ends and old magazines and lengths of fabric to deal with in something like a rational manner. And now that I know where the Cream of Tartar is, I can avoid buying more.

I should probably see if I can find an alien life form to help.

We sightsee, therefore we are.

Turns out, St. Louis is fantastic for seeing stuff.

The St. Louis Art Museum is free and will be hosting Monet's Water Lilies starting next month. Fridays are free, but you have to have a ticket, so I'm going to get on that pretty darn quick.

Learning a place without a constant online feed means that I've finally found a use for my constant need to pick up any piece of literature with a pretty picture on it that I can. Not surprisingly, the most useful item so far has been the Bike/Pedestrian map of St. Louis. It is a good size and has very complete information (with the single exception of one way arrows). I am look forward to taping it to my wall (my walls are made of concrete. Every apartment in my building is in its own concrete shell. Take that 'pocalypse.). I feel that there will be a tour of the restaurants in my neighborhood for the purpose of collecting every menu within a mile of the place.

Which covers a pretty wide area. I was impressed. And will be walking quite a bit, I think. The bus will be used - muchly, as will the MetroLink, but walking is the preferred mode of transport. It doesn't require gas or waiting or a pass, and outside of needing new shoes it doesn't take any special equipment. Legs are awesome, yes?

We also visited the Missouri History Museum and were exhausted by the time we got back to South grand, so Mama treated to sandwiches at Mokabe Coffee. I had a Reuben. It was of a good size and quite tasty.

Today we found and wandered around Soulard Farmer's Market. I will totally go back there - it is a year-round market and what we saw of the produce was beautiful. The prices seem right and many people have eggs. Ah, farm fresh eggs. Life is good.

Kakao saw us purchase one Sea Salt Caramel and one Chili Caramel. The inside of the Jeep watched us inhale them very slowly over about a block.

Tomorrow we head north to get the rest of my stuff, and with blessings and good weather and a good bit of Moving Karma Luck, I'll be moved all the way in by the time Sunday noon rolls around.

There's more, but not for now.

Hunting phone books

Today may not bring a phone book into my house. I would like it to. I would also like it to bring a phone call from the library saying that while I am deeply overqualified for the job, they need someone reliable to put the books on the shelves RIGHT NOW and can I please start Monday. Which, of course, I can.

However, today may very well bring a new city map into the house and will definitely involve something in the way of culturing.

We're going to museums. The Missouri History Museum and maybe even the St. Louis Art Museum. Also, the Visitor's Center that is close.

All three of these are in Forest Park (I'm not linking like usual as I have less than 20 minutes on the computer and I get wordy.) which is yet another beautiful place to be in this city. I know that cities all have places that are not beautiful and are not desirable, but there is a lot here that is distractingly fantastic.

Between my parents and I, we are providing me with bus transportation for the next several weeks, so I can float about the city in the autumn at will.

I will find a librarian and see if I can get one step closer to that phone book.
Without the internet at home, there is a whole set of reference materials that are just not so easy to come by anymore, but that are no less useful than they were before we shared brain cells via fiber optics.

So. St. Louis. I'm totally here.

and I really like my apartment. I'm not comfortable saying that I love it, because that may be  jumping the gun a bit, and we all know how that's worked out for me in the past.

(for those of you who don't know - just guess)

Um.

That's all, really.

How you know the people you love love you, too

They share with you ridiculous wonderfulness:

Prime Cuts of Unicorn Apron




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