| January 31, 2006 Last week I was introduced to the fun that is Dollar a Pound.
Well, technically I had been introduced to it before that, but I didn't realize it at the time. You see, the friend with whom I was running around Cambridge told me that we were going to someplace called The Garment District which I had seen ads for but had never been to. On the way she explained to me that it was a magical place where you could buy used clothing by the pound, and at that point I thought that this concept sounded vaguely familiar. Then when we went inside and found ourselves in a room with a giant heap of clothing in the middle of the floor my memory started working and I realized that the reason I knew about this place was because Rabi had written about it years ago. Blogging makes real life weird sometimes. But, anyway. Once you convince yourself that it is okay to walk all over all the clothes, because that is the only way to go through most of them, you can really get down to the business of trying to find something you like among all this crap, most of which is being sold by the pound for very good reasons. You can't go in there and tell yourself that you want a shirt, or a skirt, or a jacket, because there is no possible way to pull those things out of the pile with any kind of accuracy. All of a sudden you are shopping by color and texture, and when you find a color and texture you like you have to hope as hard as you can, as you disentangle it from the things around it, that it turns out to be an appropriate object to wear. I have been disappointed many times. I saw something that looked full of fun pockets and it turned out to be a coat sized for an eight-year-old boy. I saw sweaters that looked warm and well-made but inevitably had those scary giant turtleneck things. I saw thick corduroy which would have made a spectacular jacket but was unfortunately in the shape of pants. But the finds make it all worth it. I found a long, light brown, water-resistant coat with no buttons which just happened to fit me perfectly. I found a blue silk blouse which is a bit oddly cut but can almost certainly be altered. I saw a spectacular red-and-black Chinese-looking fabric from a distance and desperately hoped that it would be a skirt or dress. It turned out to be a hideous shirt, but once I had seen in my head what I thought it might be, I knew I could use the fabric to make the skirt I had imagined. It is really about shopping for potential clothes. When I saw the coat I knew that if I bought it snazzy buttons, it would be a treasure. (And I did -- these ones.) When I saw the ugly shirt with the pretty fabric, I knew that I wanted to give it a second life as something beautiful. When I go to Dollar a Pound, I see not only the potential for old, musty, half-broken clothing to be flattering and attractive, but also the potential in my own arms and hands to give these things new life with needle and thread. January 29, 2006 I have been rereading Wuthering Heights lately to see if I still like it anywhere near as much as I did in high school. The answer, for the record, is no, not really. It doesn't draw me in quite like it once did. Most of the time I find myself irritated at all the characters. But I am admittedly still a bit awed and impressed by the unbridled emotion that fills that world. Obviously it is completely ridiculous for these people to run around throwing violent fits and trying to kill each other and even dying for dramatic effect because they just can't get a grip on themselves. But now and then it seems like it would be a pleasant vacation from the emotionally restrained world that I am living in. Subtlety is all nice and elegant and stuff but sometimes it just doesn't seem to give enough play to what I am feeling.
For instance, one of my roommates moved out yesterday. What have I done to express my sadness? I have walked to CVS to buy school supplies. I have assembled all of my notes and assignments from last semester in a binder. I have figured out how to make the TV remote work again. I have fussed about in the kitchen, decided that I was too lazy to cook, and walked down Harvard Street to get takeout. I have meandered unevenly up the sidewalk, trying to find the shallowest way through the puddles, my glasses blurry with rain. There have been none of the overt displays of disappointment that you would think the departure of a good friend and housemate would deserve. Instead the heavy rain has had to serve as an all-too-cliche substitute for the wild fits and ravings that a reasonably melodramatic book would offer. But all in all, that's probably just as well. January 25, 2006 Mary Timony - "Dr. Cat"
It is the summer after freshman year -- a hard summer for me. I am stuck back home again after a year at Colgate, my first taste of independence, and it is hard to come back to Bridgewater. Most of my best friends and my boyfriend have all just graduated, and I haven't yet begun to figure out how to reconstruct my life at Colgate without them. I have even shut down the blog for a while. I have been struggling with the feeling that everyone thinks only political blogging is worthwhile and my personal writing is just silly shit that no one cares about. I have just found the new Mary Timony CD in a box from Amazon on my doorstep and I am listening to it as I drive the old green Caravan to Middleboro for some horseback riding. I've heard it before, of course, since Dave and I went to the Mary Timony concert early in the summer and listened to it in the car on the way there as well. It is becoming more and more clear that the mood of this CD almost exactly matches my mood this summer. On the way back from riding I would find it necessary to actually pull over into a parking lot and cry for a few minutes while "The Owl's Escape" played in the background. But now, on the way there, I am listening to "Dr. Cat", and as it goes into the instrumental bit I am entering the Middleboro Rotary. This rotary is just a plain circle with no traffic lights or even lanes, and cars just drift in and out as they need to. As I circle around, drifting towards the center, the rising notes coincide with my driving so that it feels like the van and I might take off flying at any moment, over the roads and trees and clouds to some far better place. Though I want to, I won't want you January 17, 2006 Sleater-Kinney - "Oh!"
It is sophomore year and I am in my room at Cutten. It is bitterly cold outside but the sun shines brilliantly through my window, glinting off of the snow. It is near the end of the fall semester and I am working obsessively on both a paper on Egyptian hieroglyphics for Origins of Writing and a chunk of Aristophanes translation. It is too much, but I am having one of those days when I feel like everything in the world is within my reach and I can work for hours and focus and accomplish anything I like. Sleater-Kinney's new album One Beat is on rotation up at the station and I request "Step Aside" every chance I get, but one can only call the station so many times in any given day. To continually get my S-K fix I have therefore downloaded the three songs they have on their website: "Burn, Don't Freeze", "All Hands on the Bad One", and "Oh!" Sometimes I work in my room at my desk in the brilliant light, and sometimes to escape the lure of internet I hole up with my computer in the dark ethernet-free study room across the hall. But the sun and snow and their energy have somehow imprinted themselves on my eyes and I can feel that they are there, even in that dank windowless room. And I play those mp3s on a loop in whichever room I am working in, and somehow the sun and snow have imprinted themselves on them too. When I first heard "Oh!" I thought that it sounded like a good driving song for a summer day, but in my head it has always attached itself to that bright snow, and now I always feel that cool brilliance about it even in the heat of summer. Nobody lingers like your hands on my heart and January 11, 2006 So my endless January to-do list included memorizing poetry, as a sort of tool for getting it back into my blood as well as an attempt to improve my memory, since the little compositions that I make on the fly each day while I'm doing other things hardly ever make it to paper. Yesterday, the first day of this resolution, I flipped open my Norton anthology (incidentally, try typing anthology when your fingers are REALLY used to typing anthropology... it doesn't go well) and found myself on the page with the beginning of Eliot's "Little Gidding". I remembered going over it in class once, though I didn't remember it particularly clearly, so I haphazardly chose the second stanza as the day's lesson, and read it over a few times, in my head and then aloud. Then I left the book open to the page so I could come back to it later.
When I came back later and read it again it began to seem very, very familiar, and not just because I'd been reading it over and over. It sounded suspiciously like something I'd written -- not that I'd used the same words, but the same format, in a sense: If you came to a place by such-and-such route, description of place, if you came to a place by any route, overarching statements about place. It was uncannily similar, but so unlikely -- "Little Gidding" had played such a small role in my poetry education, and I had paid it so little attention -- in fact I remember reading it for the first time in class as we went over it, and never again afterwards. But I looked at the date that I created the poem on my computer, and it was the semester I took that class, and late enough that it could have been after we did Eliot. Of course it terrifies me a little that such parallels could occur without my knowledge, a bit like Helen Keller's "Frost King", though admittedly a different sort of thing, since poets make these little nods to each other all the time, it seems. All the same I wish I were aware when I was doing it. I wonder if poets are often surprised by these parallels so heavily footnoted in anthologies. I always suspected poets to be a skeptical bunch, endlessly amused by the connections drawn by critics with too much time on their hands, knowing perfectly well that they had intended no such thing in their writing. But now I wonder if sometimes they open these anthologies and note these connections and think "Wow, I guess I was making a reference to Yeats, though I hadn't really thought about it before." In another sense, though, it is just another example of how difficult truly creative thought is. Everything has been said before, done before, tried before -- there are just too many generations of human history standing before us and too many daily influences on our lives for anything to be really original, as Mark Twain said himself with reference to that whole Helen Keller fiasco. That is why I called this blog Age-Old Songs, after all. Still I'm here and still I'm singing these same old age-old songs... January 10, 2006 As I left work last night, I was struck by an uncanny familiarity of smell. It was cool, moist, comforting, and even somewhat wild. It reminded me of...Colgate? Yes, it was the smell of Colgate on a cool, wet, late-autumn night. And yet, it was in Cambridge! The city and the wilderness aren't so different after all. At least, as far as my nose is concerned.
January 9, 2006 Every household of roommates comes with its coincidences, whether about phone numbers or birthdays or pets. While my current situation does have its share of birthday- and pet-related coincidences, the main one is that we are all left-handed -- something which one of my roommates noticed on the first day we were all in the same room together, as we sat in a circle on the floor signing our leases. It is probably not something I would have noticed on my own for weeks or even months, but she is an ever-alert southpaw-spotter, always pointing out lefties in supermarkets and on commercials as well as in her own home.
Convenient though this is in some ways (for instance, I can operate all the scissors in the apartment), it also has a way of breaking down the excuses I've developed for my own incompetence. When I was growing up, anytime I had trouble with some manual task that the rest of my family had no difficulty with, I blamed it on being left-handed. But now when I have trouble with the can opener or the saran wrap cutter, my excuses are silenced as my roommates do the same thing easily and without complaint. Now what will I do? Apparently I am and always have been just clumsy and fumbling at a whole variety of tasks, without anyone to set me straight about the reasons for these problems. January 5, 2006 I think I am going to write a series of posts describing the moments that have been preserved for me in music. Occasionally as I am listening to music I am struck by the fact that it brings me back to a very specific moment in time, generally not ones that I think of as significant in my life, but often which are somehow beautiful in their simplicity and insignificance. It is the striking detail and precision of these moments that I want to record in words, because I know that the more I play the music, the more these associations are likely to wear off. Any moment longer ago than breakfast that I remember with any amount of clarity is a lucky coincidence in itself, so as long as these memories have made it this far I feel like I should nurture them into language which may keep them just a little while longer.
For now I'm just going to try to lay out the music which has impressed itself on specific chunks of my life. I'll start doing specific song posts sometime soon. Spring 2005 semester: Jethro Tull, Original Masters I can remember what music I was into for most of college, but for the most part the tangible associations only go back about a year. That's why I want to start keeping track now, before they all slip away. A few weeks ago when Cynthia and I were getting non-metal knitting needles on Newbury Street for her plane flight (since the Transportation Authority's website still said that baggage screeners could take away your knitting needles if they felt like it), we passed a little restaurant with the words "Tapas" and "Sangria" on the windows, which caused Cynthia to run around in circles with excitement for a while. And so it happened that just a few nights ago I found myself there with both my old roommates ordering about half a dozen little appetizers. Tapas is one of those Spanish words that I will never forget since I learned it in roughly Chapter 2 of my first year of Spanish -- it means small dishes, like snacks or appetizers. The menu at this restaurant was, of course, not in Spanish, and it offered all kinds of things that I never learned how to say in Spanish at any level -- for instance, the rabbit and duck which turned out to be Cynthia's and Maggie's choices. But my dismay at their unusual animal dishes completely faded away when the waiter brought out my patatas bravas, looking just exactly like they always did in the pictures in the Spanish textbooks. I always chose them whenever we had those Spanish class conversations in which we had to order ourselves food, and I always wondered what they tasted like. Now, roughly ten years later, they were sitting in front of me. And they were delicious.
In other news, I called Cynthia later on to tell her that I had found a tapas bar much closer to my apartment that we should go to sometime. Unfortunately she misheard me and thought I said "topless bar". But that is another story entirely. |
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