D/J

2011-09-15T12:34:00.000-07:00

I have a row of sand dollars drying out on our balcony in Ballard, they remind me of ripening pears on a Moscow windowsill from a Sam Abell photo I saw a long time ago. Beautiful white discs of time, seasoning. A long time ago I collected sand dollars outside of Lincoln City, in Oregon, on a trip to see Uncle Lee and Aunt Mary, it was hard to find the ones that weren’t broken.

Now we live in the Northwest and can see Lee and Mary pretty much whenever we want. We saw them a couple of weeks ago when they were celebrating their 41st anniversary. We stayed at the Thunderbird Hotel in Aberdeen, ate at diners and restaurants famous for wild blackberry pie and as respectable environments for the wives of loggers. We didn’t stay in Aberdeen long enough to get a sense for the depression that Kurt Cobain must have felt when he grew up there, instead we went to the Olympic National Forest and looked at huge Douglas Firs, giant Spruce that have stood in pretty much exactly the same space for 5 or 600 years.

Lee came to gab rather than look, so we spent quite a bit of time talking Segway tours in Berlin, language learning techniques, the purposes one might put advanced study of Chinese culture toward, the prevalence of gluten allergy among Gingerichs, future trips that would involve speaking Spanish, going out to the coast where museums tell the story of seamen lost and found. Mary quoted poems from her childhood, picked ambitious trails, spoke out against polyester, sought out mythical gardens. We went to the coast where we spotted driftwood like giant geckos poking up through the mist. Lee drove, I navigated. We played juvenile tricks on the women. I ate most of a giant cinnamon roll. We had a good time.

2011-08-14T10:22:00.000-07:00

Ai Weiwei
The original Xinjianger

On our way back to Seattle we flew through New York, saying hi to friends like Harlan, Marilyn and their passel of small girls, meeting for coffee and American Chinese food with old supporters like Gulnar Kendirbai and Morris Rossabi. We also had a chance to stop by Ai Weiwei’s exhibition of photos of an estranged man in New York City at the New York Asia Society.

For those still in the dark, Ai Weiwei is a great Chinese Surrealist and social critic. During a time of punk without punk like glasses without lens and friendship without friendship like tai qi without feeling is pervasive across China. Ai Weiwei is a last great noble cat with the poise and beautiful flowing beard of a dynastic sage. He is quiet, thoughtful, conscious. He smashes priceless Han urns and builds Olympic stadiums as a master chef would craft rare Yunnan delicacies. He knows that the Chinese game is rigged toward those close to the powers that be. He’s a crafty, serious player.

Ai Weiwei is from Xinjiang (the New Dominion) in Northwest China where his father Ai Qing, the most famous poet of the twentieth century in China, was sent to clean toilets during the Great Leap Forward. He lived in a beige house made of desert clay in the beige army garrison Shihezi (石河子), a town built from nothing but water from the Heavenly Mountains and the sweat of thousands of farmers and herders on the high desert 100 kilometers from where I spent the past year. It was there that he learned how to use his hands and think about how to use them. As he says: “I’m grew up in the desert, so the images that I choose to take or not take somehow reflect my conditions back there. There’s still a choice before you push down the button. (Coming from the desert) means you don’t have equipment. You don’t have a sense to record anything. It’s a very simple life -- it’s only what you see and what you can remember when you open your eyes and before you close them.”* Looking at his pictures from his 11 years in New York City where he went three years after his family was rehabilitated to Beijing following the demise of a senile Mao Zedong, I can imagine that in the US he learned to speak his mind and try on ideas. It’s hard not to see a strange style in his straight-ahead appearance, a 20 year-old wearing his traditional Chinese cloth shoes, his olive green double-breasted People’s Liberation Army winter duster in the steel jungle of Times Square, in the junkie wasteland of the Lower East Side, in MOMA trying on André Breton, hobnobbing with Allen Ginsburg and great Chinese purveyors of “Northwest Style” like Wang Meng and Chen Kaige who also started from the beige earth of Northwest China.

Eventually Ai went home to bury his father and start an art renaissance in Beijing. He began to write what he felt. Ai Weiwei was just released from prison after three months of hooded confinement as close to spiritual death as is physically possible. I can imagine that he must have thought about what it felt like for his father a maroon in a Chinese desert, cleaning toilets, digging out a home for free thought with his bare fingers.

*From Ai Weiwei: New York 1983-1993, “Interviews,” Trans. Stephanie H. Tung with Alison Klayman, Chambers Fine Art, Beijing, 2010, pp. 40-41.

Photos from Ai Weiwei’s Google+ account

For more on Ai Weiwei.

2011-08-03T15:49:00.000-07:00

seattle america

one year later, some things that we just love:

the way the bass fruitbat sings high

record stores

whale watching

public tightrope walking

public fires (/w dog)

2010-08-03T06:11:00.000-07:00

the kyrgyzstan stills:

The Heavenly Mountains

Apart from the food the best thing we've experienced in Kyrgyzstan is the extreme beauty of the Western Tian Shan mountains. A few days ago J. and I headed up into the backcountry in a 1950s era all-wheel drive Soviet mini bus piloted by two greasy Russian twins. We carried a tent, half a tank of propane, a giant tea pot -- all of which were rented from a little Kyrgyz girl who spoke perfect English nervously to me. We also had a key supply of nuts, yogurt, Kyrgyz bread, Russian pickles (turns out Russians are the king of pickles! Am I wrong?), and a giant log of smoked cheese.... We were on our way to Altyn Arshan, home of fabulous herds of horses, cigarette mad nomad boys, Russian mushroom pickers, and crazy city folks with tons of stuff in their kits. The quintessential feature of the place, of course, was the piping hot springs which sent us into shock for several hours every day (so good, so hot, Russians are the kings of hot springs. Am I wrong?). We camped up a the river in a little grove of trees and set off for one of the nearby glaciers early (this means 9:30 am). It was fabulous walking through those pastures through herds of semi wild horses and dogs, listening to the marmots call, bear track spotting. We didn't make it to the glacier but we had a great time, totally alone in a wild country, dreaming of nothing but being there.

2010-07-12T04:06:00.000-07:00

the China
stills: Part II (Romantic Tourist Version)
July 12, 2010 My nose is peeling from a hard hike up Mt. Kongur to a massive glacier at about 4500 meters. The dark comfort of a dung heated yurt has never been more inviting. We've bused through the sands of the Taklamakan in searing heat with air-conditioning blasting like a Uyghur action movie gone terribly wrong. We survived the filth of Hotan hotels on and on because we were so intregued with how Uyghur medicine works, how carpets are made, how small pebbles of jade change hands and what reading Arabic means to people. We've observed Uyghur jokers at the zoo and cool cats doing the mukam in Yarkan. We're collecting artifacts of the Old Town in Kashgar. We sat for hours in an old stone fort in the High Pamirs thinking about why Potlemy mentioned the place over 2000 years ago and why Tajiks look so noble. We stayed in a stone yurt swaping glances with an old Kyrgyz gentleman and remarking on the 7500 meter mountains all around, and how hard 20 year-old Kyrgyz women work. We're still in China until Wednesday when we will possibly try our hand at Kyrgyzstan.

2010-07-03T13:46:00.000-07:00

the China
stills: part 1

June 16, 2010 J and I spent the past few days in a 7 person yurt playing scrabble and admiring the strong backs of the Kazak family who we replaced. We climbed on mountains and rationed toilet paper and spoke about past lives and other places, but not too much since that place, on the banks of a jade lake was too good for music. the week before we wandered the deserts and oases with Zach/Mary turning lazy afternoons into sunbaked walks and crazy chinese tourists into ciphers from another planet. the food was good and the families seemed strong. the week before that week was spent on all night rants and rambles through various eastern cities, long mornings in pagodas and balconies, on river banks in bamboo forests hunting for small adventures and breathing silvery air.

2010-05-31T06:25:00.000-07:00

China Bound

At the risk of using all the wrong fonts, here's guest post #5. The last we heard from our fearless blogger he was hunkered down in a park in Shanghai with his old college crony burning little bits of plastic. I have spend the past weeks reacquainting myself with variations on the Stoltzfus profile and remembering what kind, honest faces my friends have.

We spend our 5th anniversary half a world apart re-exploring our previous lives. I can't really remember what we promised each other in the park except that it involved the most traditional mennonite vows we could find. What we said is less important to me than what it means to wake up next to a person in the morning realising that he will always be unknown to me but that (amazingly) he has chosen to wake up beside me every morning. What it means is that I have a suitcase full of books and a backpack full of clothing and expectations for a good year.

I'm excited to go. For extreme anti-socialites like myself, it is nice to know that a smile and a few unintelligible social pleasantries will suffice (few expect eloquence from an immigrant). It will be the chance of a lifetime to lose myself with books, paper and pen and whatever other regimens I construct for myself. For once, my long term goals will involve taking on such monumental tasks as that needlepoint of Darren the Viking.

I am excited to go, but to be honest, if Darren decided he was going to spend the year in a sewer you'd probably find me donning my wet suit.

2010-05-08T13:56:00.000-07:00

TOURING

The Fannie Mae Collection

2010-05-05T19:33:00.000-07:00

THATS ALL RIGHT

At the Center of the Western World

We're on the road, traveling the number 2 straight across the country 50 miles south of Canada. The roads are straight and the trucks we see are dirty. In Eastern Montana the single finger flip wave is a popular way to greet neighbors.

The land is dotted with interesting conglomerations built over time out of machinery for another time and smaller world. The towns are leaning like abandoned barns, but they are still strong. The signs tell us to watch for game crossings.

We stay in lodges, consort with the locals in places like Stacey's Country Kitchen and drink black coffee from grizzled rancher/oil driller types. At night the trains freighted with a miles of unknowns rumble by. I love it.

2010-04-25T19:51:00.000-07:00

MT RAINIER

Was too bright for us

It dazzled our dull minds "to desperate enthusiasm" just like John Muir said it would when he climbed it in 1898. The next time we come back we will have spikes in our shoes or at least webs on our feet and we will not let 12 feet of snow stop us from gaining the so-called Muir Snowfield. Instead, this time, we started our climb down in the deep forests hiking with the birds until we found our own private variation of Muir's "newborn world" where we could watch the mountain make its weather and the ground squirrels freeze in time.

We love these mountains and these forests. They sharpen our dulled minds and make the world new with actuality. They make us note the wind and water and variations in the noisy hum of the earth at work. We'll miss these most when we're gone. But the mountains are good where we are going too.

Saying goodbye to Seattle is like saying goodbye to a good friend. We know we'll see these logging camps again and we'll miss them when we're gone.

2010-04-18T23:32:00.000-07:00

WORRYING

Mt. Teneriffe Again

Today we tried Mt. Teneriffe with a fresh head of steam, in search of empty minds. No luck. A snow bank at about 3000 feet. J. “pulled a muscle.” We stopped and looked at Mt. Rainier instead.

Right now life is not about hiking or that someone broke into our car last night and stole mostly nothing. It’s about a year in a back water town called Silver River just south of Inner Mongolia, about reading suitcases of books, writing on a schedule as though for only the best of publications, and playing cards in noisy tea houses.

We love Seattle, but right now my mind is set on leaving this studio apartment life and endless planning so that we can sleep. Incredibly, J. says her latest research shows that worrying does the brain good: “it keeps it active … and makes baby brain cells.” Today we stopped and looked at Snoqualmie Falls and I said, “Man, I want to go down that in a barrel.”

2010-04-11T23:47:00.000-07:00

RHUBARB AND LOGANBERRY

Moments of bliss this week.

2010-04-04T19:49:00.000-07:00

MARCH

Like a Slug on an Apple

We spent the last month watching Twin Peaks and reading David Lynch instead of Virginia Woolf. It made sense to us since we spent so much of our time in and around the Double R Diner in North Bend, WA -- hiking the mountains and generally bringing the hype with Aaron M. from our Kafka class. We tried camping out on the Peninsula and left the tent door open so everything got soaked. We saw gray whales migrating and enjoyed ourselves in the rain. They're selling rhubarb at the farmers market now and we love Seattle.

I picked these songs for the March.

We took these pictures for the same.

2010-03-28T19:09:00.000-07:00

CULTURAL
Spelunking

I’ve been following two photo blogs a lot lately, “The Blue Hour” by Brian and “This is Naïve: Miscellany of a Girl’s Life” by Tommy. Both of them live in London and take melancholic pictures of evocative objects and scenes. They take a lot of pictures of food, British food.

So I was really happy to eat at Smith today and try their “Full English Breakfast” while J. and her old Canadian friends had their fill of the best poutine in Seattle and round after round of perfect coffee in narrow brown mugs. A Full English Breakfast involves 3 eggs fried, ham, baked tomato, house-made sausage, baked beans & fry bread. It is big enough for two and the beans are the best. A perfect understated breakfast in a dark cavernous room surrounded by taxidermy and odd portraits of American presidents.

I like it so much when objects are presented in a simple but particular and thoughtful way, when designs evoke cultural history, when the mystery of composition carries the viewer, or in this case the eater, through to a new appreciation of texture, atmosphere, and the actual colors of abstract ideas. That sort of thing.

2010-03-22T13:16:00.000-07:00

NORTH SHORE

Outside the Cocoon

We go to the North Shore because it’s wild and cold and the atmosphere is electric and wet. It’s an absolutely unforgiving place where things, giant trees, abandoned tin cans, are pounded smooth. We saw stone-crusted gray whales and ratty bald eagles and thought that sunny days and purple flowers are nice but not the same as Edmund Burke’s sublime which is found in “terror, obscurity, power, vastness, infinity, difficulty, magnificence and darkness.”

We are always looking for things that “unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life.” Walking in the blinding rain with your chin tilted to the wind using the Pete Seeger method you feel something like this.

Out here in the pre-verbal world things seem slow and uncomplicated, just brute elements really, but then when we laugh and swoop along, back to our future and past, things get very fast and there is music in the air pushing us on.

2010-03-14T21:18:00.000-07:00

BRUNCH
We Want a House With a Porch Too

Today we went to one of those vegetarian brunch places where they frame limited edition signed copies of Michael Pollan’s “eater’s manifesto” inside the main entrance over basket woven chairs comfortable enough to sit in for hours. This Café Flora is in a part of town we don’t get to much, so we were especially gawky. And when we tried to find parking we ended up next to a deep brown cedar-shingle-sided house on the edge of town, with a cedar shingle fence around what seemed to be an intimate courtyard. A Subaru station wagon with a “War is Terrorism” bumper sticker was parked in the lane. We spent the next ten minutes deciding that we wanted a house just like it. A house with a broad and deep front porch just like the one Brian Snyder says is worth a lesser-used body part. A house with a children’s garden so Olivia will not go bananas when she comes for meaningful visits.

We’ve tried to make the best out of our hole in the ground, but it’s not a place to invest more than a few cheap pictures and manufactured statues of repurposed junk. Someday, eventually, we’ll have a beautiful wood house next to a hip brunch place too, just like all our friends.

Growing old together, J. and I will cave in and find a family dog when our kids move away for the “college experience” and I’ll sit on my porch with the dog listening to birds and muttering about the way the voles are tearing up the yard. Later, in the afternoon J. will shrewdly power up the Drone with tears in her eyes.

2010-03-07T21:24:00.000-08:00

HARD NOT TO

Go to China

I hardly ever write about China even though it is the main thing I think about and think around. Now after 7 years of not living in China I’m going back. Just three days ago I talked to my friend Chad in Shanghai about the possibility of chatting up the owner of a wood-fired tofu factory in Fujian at 2 in the morning and sniffing rare Oolong Tea in the Wuyi Mountains during the last week of May. I’ve done this “talk of China” thing with Chad since we first noticed each other in an Asian geography class in McGilvery Hall and talked about Daoism through three pots of tea in his chaotic house. Hilariously, I moved in that night and spent the rest of the year sleeping on his couch.

So yes, in answer to the question you must be pondering, after 7 years of not living in China I’m going to live there with Chad. And since we both speak Chinese (sort of), and both still solipsisticly study Chinese culture, it will be fun to plan escapades inside the pictured red roofed tea house tucked away in the Wuyi mountains.

That’s right, Jenn and I are both going to China for the next year: we took our visa pictures and eyed some tickets. We’re going to travel everywhere, sleep on the steppe, read dense books, joke around in bazaars in childish Uyghur, find new ways to mangle Chinese, and play cards with new friends. Like everyone else we’re going to try to find our own way, but, dangerously, we’re going to do it in China. And so the excitement is building.

2010-02-28T12:31:00.000-08:00

FEBRUARY
A month of cool drizzle and new birds

We finished reading Kafka as though he was bursting out of his little corner in Prague by growing old as a sage and strange as an animal. Jennifer turned 30 and felt like she would now grow into her skin. We climbed Mt. Si behind Seattle and still felt like youngsters trying to prove that we're not oldsters. We watched difficult movies with our friend Aaron and talked about them for hours in forgettable places around town. We ate crepes and talked about the future. We celebrated the Year of the Tiger and made awkward conversation. We played scrabble. We paid our taxes. Now we are going to read Virginia Woolf and buy airplane tickets.

I mixed these songs for February.

And these pictures too.

2010-02-21T17:54:00.000-08:00

FIRST
Mountain

Since Seattle is in full spring now, we decided it’s time to start climbing. Mount Si, a little mountain that gives first time mountain climbers 3200 feet to climb, was our first project. It’s only 30 minutes from our back door behind a little town called North Bend where David Lynch filmed Twin Peaks so it made sense to give it a try. Rumbling and grumbling in shirtsleeves we realized pretty quickly that we’ve lost whatever mountain legs we had.

At the rocky mountain top we sat and ate our big apples from Yakima and tried to ignore the idle chatter of the runaway gym bunnies on the other side of our boulder. There were strange tame birds there who ate whatever we had in hand; a hotshot airplane pilot circled the peak in a sharp bank while likely giggling. To the west flatlands stretch out to Bill Gates’ invented cities of Bellevue and Redmond, and farther still to Seattle. In the deep horizon hard-packed drifts of snow still filled out the shadowy places on the Olympics. Down below, the squared green fields were sprinkled with black dots which represented cows likely sunning themselves in the same hazy light we ourselves enjoyed. To the south, the white mountain named Rainer still stood like a sharp exception to the mundane world of trees, animals and cities.

On our way up I told Jennifer that maybe popular Mt. Si would become our new mountain since it is so available. She said she wasn’t ready to betray her past commitments. When we were at the peak looking south, it was plain that only the tallest of mountains would do.

2010-02-14T12:42:00.000-08:00

OUR

Year of the Tiger

Our pleasures are the greatest known to humans: finding new hardcover books, repeating out the fantastic turns of words we find, listening to our headphones in a coffee shop while casting about secret smiles and occasional notes.

Like survivalists storing up durable goods for the long run, we only buy hardcover books. These are not books for a collection like someone who might buy decorative spoons but the key wit of key names which will be read repeatedly until they seep back out like music and laughter in quiet places. We repeat the lines we find as though we might be violins in the void, hoping that they will cause someone, maybe ourselves, to jump up, ruffling our hair in the brief instant before we bruise our heads on the ceiling. We speak only in the first person plural because we share everything in common: the joy of our trade, singing along stupidly, jocular jostling bellies, languid eyes and other harmless missiles.

Jennifer smiles at the coffee shop, upstairs where we can watch the silver sky, when I begin to gesticulate while caught in the throes of a treatise on Chinese ecology or Uyghur vowel harmony. It’s the writing and the music that makes me gesture, because these two combined make us concentrate and forget a bit about the heavy rudeness of world and the hard work of asserting our spiritual existence. We’re listening to the same music simultaneously on separate headphones so Jen writes me notes about the music on the back of her scientific charts. Mostly: I love this or I love that. I love Jennifer because she sits with me for hours and laughs at the things we like. I’ve known her since she was a beautifully blank-faced girl of 23, seven years later we get along better, more kindred souls than amateur miners of illustrated ideas. We are beginning to break into an elegant trot.

2010-02-07T15:25:00.000-08:00

THE NEED
To Catch Up With Nature

Someone must have poisoned our dreams because we woke up this morning with a need to hike. It could be that the warm sunshine yesterday or a new wool shirt or the way we talked about how much we wanted to go camping made us want to do it. Anyway it seemed unbearable to spend another free day of our lives in our dingy manufactured cave: a big breakfast with coffee and a long hike was just what we needed.

Out on the trail there were lots of signs of old mining shafts, domestic animals and squalling babies. We passed lots of tired little hikers and thought about how someday we will be hiking with our own little family. We talked about sustainable living: how Chinese farmers used to turn old clothes into felt which they used to make shoes. And we liked the way the old mining shafts and waterways on Cougar Mountain can be part of a man-made wilderness which is catching back up with nature.

Today seems like the first day of spring, but we think it’s just the way the winter is in Seattle. There is so much water and so many bursting clouds that it’s hard for things to die. Anyway, the trees are blooming, showing us newness and beauty.

2010-01-31T22:28:00.000-08:00

JANUARY

A Cold and Wet Month With Bright Days

Here in the Seattle swamp I turned 28 and Jennifer gave me books for our library. We watched Tiny Vipers and listened to the Whale Bones. We went to the zoo and watched the apes for hours. We looked at pictures of Puget Sound loggers and Chinese salmon canners at the Henry Gallery and went to the shore and electrified our faces with the cold wind and water. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians were suddenly crushed to death. We ate perfect wood fired pizza and drank a lot of coffee and read a lot of Kafka and talked about his reasons for living.

I made these pictures for our new photo blog.

I picked these songs for January.

2010-01-24T22:06:00.000-08:00

GUEST POST #4 BY JENN

Happy Birthday Darren

Friday night Darren and I slid into a Tiny Vipers induced trance. Perhaps it was the tenderness with which she played her guitar or the swaying trees projected on to the screen in the background. But this Sawdust Mountain inspired event got me to thinking about how we’ve begun to sink our teeth into this space.

Mount Rainier looms over our every move. This time of year it is layered thick with snow - completely surrendered to the cold. I never really heard the low hum of a mountain until last summer when we climbed our way over molten rock up to the glaciers. When diagnosed with terminal illnesses in our old age we will coerce our children to abandon us on its slopes.

A short drive away, the Hoh rainforest is our magical kingdom in which we consistently expect magical things to happen even though they consistently don’t. They say the air is so thick with nutrients here that many plants nearly forgo the soil as they subsist almost solely on what they gather from it. Last time we were there the salmon were rotting in the streams and the moss was dripping down on us from a carpet in the sky.

King of all this is the Pacific Ocean – an unbridled mess of energy and force. We can’t help but gape at the waves charging us and the driftwood littered about like the plant equivalent of whale bones. We are entertained for hours by the barnacles, starfish and “skimmerfish.” It is in places like this that Darren is able to muster up all his poetic forces to call me his “little dribble of hope” (honestly).

I have of course been connected to many places in the past – the first being the rocks, lakes and trees of Northwestern Ontario. It’s a place where a person who likes to be alone can easily achieve their goal. I think it’s hard for most of us to envision a childhood apart from the landscape in which we were formed. I imagine my children having a place to hunt lizards and turn over turtles and keep logs of the culinary likes and dislikes of specific backyard anthills. These days, my thoughts most frequently turn to the small plot of earth that holds a kind and gentle friend who would have flown far if she hadn’t fallen.

Haiti hits a person like a tidal wave with its energy and smells. There’s something so strong in its atmosphere – maybe born of oppression and struggle and the sheer determination to survive and laugh another day. I am tied to a small circle of land on which the houses of our neighbours are strung like pearls. Good, hardworking people who called me Little Horse as I completed another loop on my bicycle. I hope the atmosphere of Haiti is rich in nutrients to get its inhabitants (the brick I call my sister included) through these unimaginably hard times.

New York was hard and cold. Its mountains were manmade and prone to collapse at the whim of whoever was steering the airplane. But when I found the Indian Rock Caves I thought my soul would explode. Somehow a small space at the tip of Manhattan has managed to shake off high-rises and even harbor an eagle or two. And down a flight of stairs in a basement in Queens is a very capable mom of two funny little girls who gives humanity a good name every time.

I guess NW China will be next with its deserts and flaming mountains. Who knows after that, but I am finding that I am increasingly tied to this 28 year old collection of cells and sentiments known as Darren T. Byler. He is, as 16 Horsepower would say, my mobile home.

2010-01-17T13:20:00.000-08:00

DEATH AND SUFFERING
By Way of Apocalypse

The day after Haiti’s earthquake I ran in Ravenna Park trying to clear my mind. I ran under the high bridge where I always run to avoid people. There in the ditch was a guy about my age in a gray jacket and dark pants just lying there like he was sleeping in a twisted wreck. There was a second bearded guy down there too, smoking a joint. I asked him what happened – he pointed up at the bridge and asked me if I wanted to smoke. I ran back up the hill into a girl with blond hair and a purple Huskies sweatshirt. She must not have had her headphones turned up too loud because when I told her she needs to run around the bridge on the other side since some guy jumped off the bridge and the police have it all blocked off down there, she said right away: “Oh, I don’t want to see that.” But when we got to the other side she wanted to stop and look, she said, “ They’re taking pictures of this guy, is he ok?” “No" I said "he’s dead” and I ran.

I didn’t want to see the pictures from Haiti this week either. I can’t wrap my head around the speed of these death falls. 50 seconds from the appearance of life as normal to just another corpse lying on the street, blocking the street, in the back of a truck, waiting to be dumped.

But the story in Haiti after the apocalypse of course is not that simple. There are people alive, pinned and wounded – twitching right now like animals trapped by god and human history. In 1989 only 63 people died in an earthquake the same size in San Francisco. Haiti since it’s invention has had a century of compensating France for its loss of a slave colony, nearly a century of American Jim Crow, and decades of dictatorships, ridiculous wealth distribution, and trade and emigration embargoes. We really have no excuse for what we have done to the least of us – we shouldn’t be able to look these strong and shining people in the eye. They still want to live and love their families, when we've so often given up in the shadow of our armaments. I hope the images of dump trucks filled with jumbled bodies lining up to dump their humans into the earth will be seared into our brains and give us strange dreams for a long time.

2010-01-10T21:19:00.000-08:00

HOLIDAYS: PART 2

Rain Forest Marine Florist

What we did with our Christmas Money

Jennifer says this tree looks like me, that she knows we will see elk (or at least "the spots where they live"), that she know how to take pictures like an impressionist, that the beach is the boundary of a continent and that's why it's exciting. She also started learning to lose at Checkers and (gasp!) Take One this weekend. Nothing else to say: Perfect Holidays.

2010-01-03T13:00:00.000-08:00

SNAPSHOTS
From Around Town for 2009

2009-12-27T20:43:00.000-08:00

HOLIDAYS
Taking Them Over

Christmas is the time to play exotic forms of Dutch Blitz late into the night. It’s when we listening to David Sedaris criticize the poor performances ubiquitous in elementary school pageants and have the excuse to buy truffle oil and try it out on any sort of bread and pasta we have. We can also buy really expensive pâté.

The day after Christmas is when we can stop listening to Christmas music and realize it is a relief, or that the new music we just received is really good! (Although coming home to a snarling Bob Dylan still wouldn't be bad.) We can also go to our favorite restaurant and eat the finest things found and made for the mouths of humans. This time around at Spring Hill, we had the best of December’s mussels from Totten Inlet (!), hen-of- the-woods over cheddar grits, potato croutons in a fennel puree, quinoa with subtle peppers and the most decadent burger known to me. According to Jenn “if it’s subtle it has to be good.” Except for the beef-fat fries, she says those are bold and flavorful and “I’m going to be mad if we don’t take them home. I don’t care if they’re going to be soggy, I’m gonna eat them.” Strong words for a vegetarian.

Christmas is the day when you realize who your good friends are and why family is important. You realize that you like it when your presents are a “big hit” and that you managed to give someone whose life is really full a little bit of extra joy. And it doesn’t stop, next week after all the hustling and rustling is over we can go to a cabin on the coast and listen to our good music, watch the waves and read Kafka for hours. Life is good when you make your own traditions.

Photo by J. Brownell

2009-12-20T16:38:00.000-08:00

GESTURES
Towards Always Vanishing Authenticity

Like everyone else we came to Seattle for the coffee and the old books. Old books without the feral cats they seem to attract (we have an allergy for that). Coffee without the corporate signs of global brands. Old books with hardcovers and perfect brittle pages. Coffee in big glass steins in an old brick building that has seen many lives which therefore makes its latest transmutation so interesting.

The coffee shop we finally rested on is in a block of buildings built in 1909 (a couple of years before Great Grandpa John stopped by) when Seattle was young. These days it is in an alleyway a few blocks down from where we live facing new apartment buildings behind a blank wooden door. It was used for a lot of things over the years -- as a store, restaurant, a bank branch, and a funeral home/mortuary -- before becoming the first espresso bar in Seattle, the proving ground for Starbucks. People that come here, artists, poets, intellectuals, hangers-ons, read Walter Benjamin or (like us) Franz Kafka and talk about village life in South Korea. They are the sort of people Annie Dillard writes about: "They are a people of profound beliefs. They treat cancer with tea. They have come here to abandon society to its foolishness. They believe in wood heat, unpasteurized milk, and whales. To everyone they are unfailingly helpful."

A few short steps away in our same alleyway is the best used-bookstore in Seattle. Best because they have the finest collection of mass market hardcover books from the 1940s and 50s and they play only the finest operas. All of the Victorians, all of the early American literature are there -- the rare books are on display in special cases. These books feel good in your hands and look good on the shelf and we're excited about taking them home for Christmas where we will transmute them into prize possessions.

"Can't you just smell the dead people?" Jennifer asks as she eyes the strange drain in our favorite morgue turned coffee shop.

2009-12-13T14:13:00.000-08:00

NOTES
On the Catalogue

"...There is no end to the making and selling of things there is no end to the making and selling of things there is no end... Man, it occurs to me, is a joyful, buying-and-selling piece of work. I have been wrong, dead wrong, when I've decried consumerism. Consumerism is what we are. It is, in a sense, a holy impulse. A human being is someone who joyfully goes in pursuit of things, brings them home, then immediately starts planning how to get more."

I’m not as confident as George Saunders in The Braindead Megaphone where he reverses his position on consumerism and instead pines for it. It’s the selling part I’m not sure about (since it seems so easy to promote all sorts of falsehoods when selling is the purpose of making), otherwise though I think making and finding are two of the highest joys available to humans. Nabokov says without a hint of pretense in his book of strong opinions: “my pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.”

We found a few new things this week: trundled sewing machine (White Rotary, Patented April 18, 1911) which folds into itself, Noguchi lamp (which I know is really a derivation from IKEA but it’s the original idea that counts). And all sorts of Christmas gifts which we cannot mention . . .

About the sewing machine Jennifer says: “I thought it was just a table at first and then I thought the top might open and then I thought it might be a sewing machine and then it was. It’s so beautiful! We’re so lucky! I'm going to sew like crazy!"

2009-12-06T16:02:00.000-08:00

REPORT
From the Urban Craft Uprising
Although Seattle may not be one big craft show like Portland, it puts on a pretty good effort. Enough to get Jennifer pretty excited. Here she is excitedly scribbling little ideas (written in OT code) into her notebook:

1. Make Viking Darren needlepoint
2. Embroidered handkerchiefs
3. Make little book bags
4. Make funny cards
5. Scarf stiched w/ sm

2009-11-29T16:28:00.000-08:00

THANKSGIVING

The Lie Lacks

It feels like the lie lacks truth of a certain sort. Thanksgiving is when we are to remember only the good, or if need be, the bad through the working of good. Yet even if Thanksgiving is really a social mask for maudlin positive thinking, it does possess a certain flower, a feeling of warmth and joy that finds its root in good food (stuffing and pickled beets) and games (dominos and ping-pong) elevated to the position of ritual. I don’t care how many rotten apples are involved; hot apple cider is undeniably good.

We went to Portland in the rain to see my Aunt Mary and her jiving husband Uncle Lee Gingerich. Mary’s brothers Stan and James were there with their wives telling jokes and responding to jokes with lines they forgot were first written by Credence Clearwater Revival. We learned of James’ deer ‘horn’ collection, of how to kill a cougar with a bow and arrow. We heard stories of bar fights during the Vietnam war which ended on their head two stories below the balcony on which they started. We heard about how one little boy chopped off the other little boy’s fingers as a scary joke turned non-fiction next to a narrow river at a place called “Sweet Home.” We were informed that an evening of Bible study was to be cancelled for the Oregon St. vs. Oregon football game this weekend.

So far we don’t have so many stories of physical suffering to dwell on and rehash on Thanksgiving. Maybe we’re just learning how to tell Thanksgiving stories which ring true, like corroding cast-iron bells. That offer responses to life filled with laughter in the dark. But we know we like these stories of survival filled with pell-mell passion and misunderstood longing. We like Thanksgiving dinner with its overabundance of brown and dark red foods set on a long Amish-made table as a way of contradicting the lack of family experience that exists the rest of the year. Sitting around an Amish-made table playing Mexican Dominos for hours makes you forget about the rain.

These amazing pictures were made by: Lisel Jane

Top left image by: Lottery Monkey

2009-11-22T11:39:00.000-08:00

POETIC TIME
Mentors and Tormentors

On Friday we went to see 54 year-old poet Mary Karr read from her funny new memoir against the depression of her mother’s drinking which made her try to drink away her own depression and find an oblivious tall rich man, about her relationship with David Foster Wallace, her love for Don DeLillo and Robert Hass for their coolness, and about saving light moments and beating out a more human time from the drudgery that normally counts as life.

I told Mary Karr that I’m a big fan of Robert Hass too, and asked her why she likes him so much and she looked us in the eyes and quoted this poem which it turns out was her first poetry column for the Washington Post:

By Mary Karr, Sunday, March 2, 2008;

To take up this column, kicked off 12 years ago by my mentor, Robert Hass, is to inherit my poetic father's former post. However flattering it may be to follow him, his shadow feels daunting.

Harold Bloom argues in The Anxiety of Influence that each writer struggles against influences in an Oedipal fight to slay overbearing patriarchs. But Hass taught me that dialogue with one's historical betters is more privilege than threat. In poetic ancestry, an alleged tormentor may make the best mentor -- and vice versa.

In this poem, young Hass crosses that campus near where his hero Randall Jarrell had translated his own patriarch, Chekhov. Jarrell -- a tennis player famous for charm -- captured the misery of housewifery in the effortless '50s. "Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All . . ." He later shocked everyone with his suicide. By cross-dressing in Jarrell's angelic tennis garb, Hass questions the faux ease of academic life and the perils of inherited habits: Old Dominion

The shadows of late afternoon and the odors
of honeysuckle are a congruent sadness.
Everything is easy but wrong. I am walking
across thick lawns under maples in borrowed tennis whites.

It is like the photographs of Randall Jarrell
I stared at on the backs of books in college.
He looked so sad and relaxed in the pictures.
He was translating Chekhov and wore tennis whites.

It puzzled me that in his art, like Chekhov's,
everyone was lost, that the main chance was never seized
because it is only there as a thing to be dreamed of
or because someone somewhere had set the old words
to the new tune: we live by habit and it doesn't hurt.

Now the thwack . . . thwack of tennis balls being hit
reaches me and it is the first sound of an ax
in the cherry orchard or the sound of machine guns
where the young terrorists are exploding
among poor people on the streets of Los Angeles.

I begin making resolutions: to take risks, not to stay
in the south, to somehow do honor to Randall Jarrell,
never to kill myself. Through the oaks I see the courts,
the nets, the painted boundaries, and the people in tennis
whites who look so graceful from this distance.

Even Los Angeles -- city of cool -- sounds like lost angels, and the Californian Hass vows to honor his ancestors with a distrust for any false charm or inherited boundaries. That's what this column's for. That's what I hope to live up to. (Robert Hass's poem "Old Dominion" can be found in "Praise." Ecco. Copyright 1979 by Robert Hass)

2009-11-15T18:29:00.000-08:00

RARE FORMS
Of Jennifer

Jennifer was in rare form yesterday – bouncing off the front passenger car seat because she had tried to drink all the coffee in my big black clunky mug shaped with the impression of a hand (the one Mary Roth-Yoder wanted as a wedding present). We stumbled over each other into the movie theatre to watch Matt Damon play the seamy informant in a giant corn syrup factory like a weak representation of a Nobokov/Kafka story: malevolent brainy protagonist lost in layers of legality and corruption with a seedy mustache, secretly sexiest man of the year. We sat in our favorite chairs in theatre no. 4 of the “crusty” Crest Cinema Centre where movies tickets are cheaper than popcorn and were happy (most of the popcorn eaters were not loud or too far away to ruin the movie). Jennifer rocked in her chair and spoke of having a footrest.

Jennifer was in rare form today – bounding out of the YMCA she said she “feels so powerful” after lifting weights which she admits “are not that heavy.” Like she “could punch through walls!” She says her pre-exercise days were actually not that different, but she likes these days better. Given a choice, she would choose against grand narratives, and want to see her past as unconnected to her present (just like, Vendela Vida, coincidentally). Nope, now she is walking fast as though low-blood sugar was a faint illusion that has never haunted her like a bad dream involving a strange man and her mom and a place she used to live before . . . (sorry, dream reports are sometimes vague, in another time and place Jennifer would be known as Gennavieve, Queen of Vague). (Interesting side note: Mary Roth-Yoder’s brother-in-law and his wife just had a baby named Gennavieve. Congratulations Zeb and Lisa!)

Jennifer was in rare form last weekend – when we sat down at Spring Hill for dinner. Spring Hill, which was brought front and center to us, by the Dillsburg, Pennsylvania foodie Shayne Edmunds, was last year’s 3rd best new restaurant in America according to Bon Appetit. And no disappointment either. As a steak man (who practices a rare form of carnivorous asceticism), I tried the wagyu and it was in rare form with perfect char, accented nicely with some sort of mustard sauce, potatoes a couple different ways (creamy, fried, crispy). Chard and bacon. Jennifer tried the vegetable tasting platter and loved every form of perfectly seasoned cassoulet of beet, radish, arugula, and potato she tasted until it was gone. She says she will surprise me by taking me back there for my birthday, but she doesn’t know that I might surprise her first. There are a lot of holidays between now and January 20th – the anniversary of George Bush Jr.’s return to the mountain bike trails of his Texas ranch and (perhaps not coincidentally) my birthday. So many more chances for Jennifer to charge after her favorite things.

2009-11-09T19:54:00.000-08:00

CELEBRATING
Songs, beards and other forms of Anti-Gravity

Jennifer said as we were getting our weekend of wild celebration started on Friday night that she thinks beards make men look kind. Something about an obscured face makes the stranger focus on the quiet eyes, on not talking too much, on listening and thinking. This weekend we heard a wild man from Portland named McDougall sing a wild row of train songs to a mean claw hammer banjo, we heard David Bazan howl into the void, all solitary beards. And we listened to ZZ Top who have been growing their beards together for 30 odd years, odd years of cattle running across the stage, refusals to be interviewed, and a guitar made out of a plank from Muddy Waters’ Delta shack.

Jennifer said that the sound of the Phillip Glass Ensemble breathing when they play Symphony No. 3 and the sound of their bows on the strings underneath the music is what makes the music seem human and true. Over the past few weeks my friend Shayne Edmunds has been feeding us a steady stream of CDs which he calls things like “possibly the best album ever recorded.” Shayne collects vinyl LPs of old rhythm and blues (scratchy recordings which fuzz and pop with electricity like unique objects too hot for a phonograph needle) and turns them into CDs for people like us. One of these CDs was ZZ Top’s First Album, a first rate blues record, played by a man who learned the old songs on the knee of his family’s cleaning lady down in 1950s Texas.

Jennifer said the weight of her nearly six-digit student loan didn’t seem real until she saw that little train of zeros in the bottom right column of her 30-year payment plan on our computer. She thinks society is a giant black octopus that drapes itself over our heads and sucks life from us. And she thinks she just spent the last three years paying the octopus to let her go free. So we celebrated reinventing ourselves as debt free people for this weekend, and talked about beards, the way the scratchy recordings make music better and not from a factory, ate the finest known food in Seattle (food that tasted better because the menu told us what farm it came from on the West Coast) and danced around the second -hand furniture in our living room like primitives who had just discovered fire.

Here is ZZ Top going down to Mexico from the orginal LP just for Harlan.

And another one (beard-free Conor Oberst this time) just because I like it.

Photos from Zach Ramey and this place.

2009-11-01T15:07:00.000-08:00

THE SCANDAL
Of Seattle’s Golden Breeze

Last night around nine o’clock we went out to an all night coffee shop and tried to read Nabokov and study Uyghur. But we only got through a few sips of our decaf chai and the street was flooded with naked pumpkin-headed men deliriously flapping by. Then they were gone and we were wondering if we saw them at all. Did we see that golden breeze like a streak of laughter down the street? We think we did. And the pictures from the Naked Pumpkin Run (NPR) of Seattle prove it, but they don’t show the surprise which makes such a costume a timeless treasure.

I also saw through the window of a tavern a sad dinosaur sitting in the corner of the bar with his beer, his legs crossed. Another short moment in time where the weird seemed true and the strange seemed natural. A lonesome dinosaur in a world of human freaks.

We didn’t dress up last night like a pirate or a gorilla, but one of these years Jennifer will be a mini whale and I will be a David Lynch teddy bear and we will laugh ourselves to sleep because the world is funny.

2009-10-25T18:39:00.000-07:00

PECKING
Like Two Birds in a Leek Garden

“Well that’s another piece of Seattle culture we can put in our pockets and take home,” Jennifer said as we walked out of the Seattle Bookfest admiring the purple slouch-sock boots of the woman walking in front of us through the front gate of the Columbia City Event Center which is a reinvented elementary school. Seattle Bookfest people feed on nostalgia for old general stores and lost tribal myths. They say they look not for streams of consciousness, but for little splendors to emerge from chaos (“it happens more often than you might think”).

We ate our dinner to the faint tinkle of Billie Holiday overlooking the leaf strewn street, watched carefully by the Frenchman at the Thomas St. Bistro (ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice). Looking up from my corner of that small place I could see myself reflected in the small round mirror across the little room and again in the reflection of the small rectangular mirror above my head, then again in the round one (and in my antique silver spoon). Outside on the street the Space Needle and the Sound were like an old man slowly falling asleep in a very comfortable chair.

If it were possible to be whoever we wanted to be in Seattle maybe I would be Imogen Cunningham and Jennifer would be Morris Graves. Then I could write (as they wrote about Morris):

Now she comes from the Pacific Northwest:
A thin figure with alarmed eyes.
She is shy and skittish, aloof yet (you suspect)
ruthless in her opinion.
She is birdlike, on the horizon,
receding, private, mobile, and migratory.
She has the willful steely sentiment of a bird:
its fierce capacity to survive.

Imogen and Morris who haunt the Seattle Art Museum and the steep streets like Thomas St. give us reasons to keep looking at the landscape for the details which shiver our spines. To look around like Nabokov and think “a good laugh is the best pesticide” (and imagine that Nabokov’s laugh sounds like Regina Spektor).

Self-Portrait by Morris Graves. Photos by Imogen Cunningham

2009-10-18T13:20:00.000-07:00

LIKE MICHAEL CHABON
Heedlessly Following Passions

The best fans of an art are those that are inspired to action. For these fans who we call amateurs (if not nerds, geeks, or groupies), art is not just pretty or fascinating, but stirring. And this is life at its best according to Michael Chabon – a Berkeley father of four. No one ever disdains the passion of the amateur athlete, the amateur writer, the amateur musician (we adore it to the point of destroying it). Such amateurs are the best critics, the only critics that matter. The cold professional or lazy blowhard doesn’t count when it comes to real life. Real fans are like John Updike writing Ted William’s swing into poetry, a video store clerk making movies like Quentin Tarantino, or like cultural critic Slavoj Zizek – a former post-Marxist politician who I’ve heard characterized as an excited drunk friend who doesn’t understand personal boundaries.

Michael Chabon says he had so many kids so that he could finally have his own fan club for comic books and 1980’s British Sci-fi TV shows. He and his wife are the stars of their amateur family and his kids are the fans – amateur critics who play along because they still believe their show is the best. There are lots of ways of pointing out the unreasonableness of this way of thinking, but summarily dismissing that negative work for a second, I think Mr. Chabon is a fan of the real, the surreal, the hyperreal, whatever, and feeling moved: Being creative rather than reactive is a much better way to live (better absolutely Deleuze says).

It was raining on Friday when Michael Chabon came to town. Matthew Coate wrote that he “thinks comfort is not comfort except in contradistinction to a chilly autumn rain.” And this is how I felt while I listened to Michael Chabon on the local radio show and as I listened him talk to Terry Gross in Philadelphia, but I couldn’t help myself, I’m a fan, an amateur writer even, and Michael Chabon wishes he could have been David Foster Wallace’s friend, he misses his kids when he is gone and his wife loves him best. I know its lame and I have no connection with Michael Chabon, I’m just a fan and he made me get out of my floral print chair and ride a crowded wet bus through the lancing rain like a bleary-eyed man after his first cup of coffee. I rode through the rain like cold water streaming down my face to see Michael Chabon and join his fan club.

SO, CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO SOME AMATEUR MUSIC I MADE HEEDLESSLY WITH MATTHEW WENGER.

pictures are mostly from michaelchabon.com except the one of him and his wife and the one of the book which are by Will Harper (?) and organizingthesoup respectively.

2009-10-12T22:24:00.000-07:00

2 POEMS

Pale John Byler

John Muir said the lumbermen of Puget Sound were doubtful in color, slow of speech,
as if partly out of breath in 1918.

It was the hard work of surfeit destruction that trained their brains, the war for human nature,
moving giant trees over mountains like Werner Herzog in a rain forest slogging along in resin stiff pants

the conquest of the useless.

This is the foppery pale John Byler caught himself in riding the hard rails all the way West

after what Muir called the rare "free roamer of the wilderness ... in contact with free nature in a thousand forms, drinking at the fountains of things"

Pale John Byler, an Amish flâneur wanting to live the tilted hat life before he died from his asthma in flat Iowa a dirt farmer and family man not hardly 40.

Robert Hass says in his poem “Iowa, January”

In the long winter nights, a farmer’s dreams are narrow.
Over and over, he enters the furrow.

Wild John Byler as a fresh flâneur from Middlefield Ohio (on left) next to a forest friend at their logging camp near Seattle, Washington, (woo-hoo!) c. 1920.

Unknown Smiley Vernon

The grandpa I never knew exists in stories I think I heard
He grew up on a farm in Iowa waiting for his mission to come knocking like a board member
He grew up on his farm in flat corn-fed Iowa a shy small man who never knew his father, wild John Byler,
He went to church only when he could be on time
He was waiting for his mission

The mission came like a stern man with combed hair and sent him to a dirt church in northern Minnesota
It was a frozen sod farm carved from trees with an outhouse at the end of a cold path of snow
where Smiling Vernon unleashed
Let his hair out wild like a crazy banshee in his moldering shack full of boys of curly hair
Singing to his brown cows his own made up songs

My grandpa Smiley Vernon who died while singing in his sleep, went door to door like a Mormon on a mission
Like a Mormon missionary up and down the Little Fork River named by Fur Traders against Indians
only he was a crazy Mennonite (not an Amishman) who never knew his father, natty Seattle Byler,
not a shy man on time or not at all
but a man on a mission, no question

once he found a way to make his own songs he was Smiling Vernon
loved by all until his heart quit early
He was the grandpa who never knew his dad, the asthmatic lumberman,
A shy man until he found his mission
Then he sang a new song for his cows and ate bananas by the box

2009-10-02T22:41:00.000-07:00

GUEST POST #3 BY JENN
Our Hovel

According to Google's favourite dictionary a hovel is "a small, wretched and often dirty house." Our studio apartment here in Seattle is small. It is in fact often dirty. I'm not so sure about the wretched part. I suppose you can see for yourself. Here are some pictures from behind our door open there on the ground floor.

Right inside you will find the lady of the house. This is what happens when Darren finds a floor lamp on the street without a shade. You know, one thing leads to another. She freaked me out a lot at first when rounding a corner. Marilyn, we forgot to give that little monkey puppet to Eve. Sorry.

She always has the glow associated with a heart healthy diet (quality quaranteed by Kroger Oats)

Here's Darren in the kitchen with his culinary inspirations (Disney's Pocahontas, Gorbachev in a Louis Vuitton frame of mind and Kenneth Cole's Sikh representative).

There are no casual Fridays in this household.

In this exhibit, we attempt a blend of the ancient and modern, near and far (I've always thought my great grandmother was pretty).

Just around the bend Darren's great grandfather provides our ancestral connection to the land here by sowing his wild oats on a logging team in Washington state. Check out how big that tree stump (residual limb) is beside him.

While we're looking at the pictures anyway, this woman (on the right) pretty much captures how I feel during our frequent excursions to the YMCA.

Sufjan Steven's smiling family greets me first thing every morning. I think the baby is actually normal, it's just the way the paper was folded.

Here's one of our favourites from Found Magazine. I had never thought of Jesus as a forlorn schoolgirl before. Perhaps it's a classic case of constructing God in your own image.

I really love our bathroom. It makes me hungry for Easter eggs every time.

But you might want to watch your step on the way out.

On my way to work this week, I've been listening to an audio book by Alain de Botton who suggests that we decorate our living spaces with whatever our lives are lacking. For example, urban people who obsess about redwoods and whales and midwesterners with comfortable, calm routines who scatter 9/11 memorabilia (urban, chaotic landscapes) all over their houses. I'm not sure what our apartment says about us (I'm not even certain I want to know). But this is what happens when we drive across the country with what we can fit into our car and then try to construct a space out of what we can rip from magazines and scrounge from street corners.

2009-09-28T20:41:00.000-07:00

TRIP PART 2
In Red Brick Small Towns

Last week Matthew and I made a makeshift song in his living room on a quiet street in Lewisburg Pennsylvania. The song, a study in 8 channels of perfection, rides on the simple brilliance of an old Donovan song about the colors which we love best, the colors which attach themselves to objects and run through our minds like old songs which cannot be erased. Our song was an experiment with nature and our life set to the games of language or an experiment with language and song set to nature and our life in it. And though it will not stand up as an absolutely creative way of making value, right then it was all wonder and color and experiment which is what life is when it is fun.

Matt and Olivia are becoming old friends who organize our lives around their visits or when we visit them. We schedule our own festivals and fill them with rituals. It sounds bizarre. But what we do is have intense discussions about creating joy or scraping our lives like open wounds. We listen to recordings of poets reading their poems and go to restaurants in order to review them according to what they do. We go to small town art museums to find new ways to experience the way objects find meaning. We hike after waterfalls like small children chasing soap bubbles and try hard to imagine that what we are doing is an adventure. And we are proud when one of us runs 26.2 miles so fast!

On our holidays the world fades a little, and for a few days what rises are late night documentaries and morning coffees which stand as the only things which matter. We sit perfectly still like bright fruit in a world without fruit bats and enjoy ourselves enormously. We even fight like sullen raccoons, hackles rising, only to realize that the problems we see are only chances and what matters are the possible endings of the marathons and not their epic beginnings which are never true. If we think about it long enough we realize that when you hold a black paper up to the sun it will “glisten in its minutest points with the most vivid colors” just like Goethe said (and the sun which is friendship in this bad metaphor will be filled with new magic).

2009-09-22T15:41:00.000-07:00

TRIP PART 1
Eve and Eden are Growing Up

Here are some pictures of Eve and Eden in their little apartment in Queens where they live with their parents -- filling their lives with joy and noise. We walked with them to the Asian market for bubble tea, cooing Chinese grandpas and pointing at wriggling fish. They cried as we left, a visit far too short.

2009-09-14T08:52:00.000-07:00

SNEAKING
Up On Mt. Rainier Like Explorers

We spent the night in the shadow of Cougar Rock watching the camp fires of other tribes and talking until we were dizzy. In the morning the sound of Chinese children yelling like bells as their father watched impassively from his position next to the out-houses drew us out of our sleeping bags and into the clear bright light. Granola! And we were on our way up the mountain standing like a god before us and not like a rear admiral’s last name.

The last weekend of bitter cold rain made me think that summer had drawn its curtains. Another veil rent! Mt. Rainier was clear and roaring still trying to shed its glaciers. We climbed as high as we could, explorers, noting the chipmunks and marmots until we found a deserted valley perfect for disappearing into ice caves or sudden rock burials. Nothing but weird clicking bugs buzzing through the thudding water and rocks and sky at 7000 feet.

As we turned the corner over the last ridge before the Muir Snowfield we saw the whole thing as a 7000 foot wall of white cracked open with blues and grays melting and shifting before our eyes. It was making its own weather and we were its followers. We followed it with sideways glances all the way down into the suburban blight which is Tacoma, listening to the crème de la crème of CCR as we slowly shot back into the relative safety of cell phone range.

2009-09-06T13:21:00.000-07:00

FRAMES
Our Clear Space

If you walk out of the iron gate of our apartment building and look to the left down the long alleyway strewn with mattresses and broken toilets, you can see a quarter-inch of silvery lake framed down below. The tree there, from that scenic spot, has bright green weirdly spiny inedible fruits this time of year. It’s raining today, the end of summer, and that means the egg room at the Henry Art Gallery down the hill will have it’s cover on. I wonder if Jennifer will still feel like she’s “in the womb of the earth, like you could step right out of the ceiling into the universe” if she were to visit today. There is something about the sky seen through nothing but a frame that makes you want to stay and watch.

The Skyspace, Light Reign, also known as “the egg room” by Jennifer, was designed by the MacArthur Genius James Turrell (all the MacArthur Geniuses we know about are good people: Meredith Monk, Holmes Morton, Robert Hass, Trinh Minh-ha for example). “Turrell’s work is meant to be taken in slowly, quietly, and over time,” according to the Henry Gallery Website. And this is true. As Stanley Kunitz, put it, he can’t imagine trying to paint the sky when looking at it is so much better. When we went to the Henry the other night we kept going back into this room to look at how the sky had changed.

It rained today, cold hard rain conjured by the sea and the new season which gave our Seattle summer a number. We sat and watched it fall against the trees making them sway. Jennifer says Seattle is “just our speed.” I think she likes the way the girls with red hair at the record stores and Senor Moose tell her they want her new used shirt, she likes the way panther sightings close down the nearby parks, the giant trolls that live under the bridges, the way the rain makes the trees sway and give us space to breathe without realizing it. It’s a little like what Robert Hass describes in his poem, “The Problem of Describing Trees.”

No. There are limits to saying,
In language, what the tree did.
It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us . . .
Mountains, sky,
The aspen doing something in the wind.

Photos by Jen Graves and M.V. Jantzen

2009-08-31T14:50:00.000-07:00

CAMPSONG

Here We Go

Nothing like camping with the Bylers. Picture this: Jennifer perched for whatever reason on a small piece of firewood, my brother and I propped up on rolled up sleeping bags against the wheel-well of our Dark Red Mistsubishi car which resists every attempt to be nicknamed telling stories of regrettable but fortunate heartache around a flickering fire under a giant thousand year-old Sitka spruce next to a river, deep mineral gray from the glacier 17 miles up-stream. When the stories of heartache were finished we talked about food, about politics, about not caring and being happy. We slept late and moved slow out to the beach where the giant logs of driftwood are piled slowly rotting for a thousand years.

We spent the afternoon on an old skinny log for no apparent reason, we were thinking that Dustan would go swimming but it didn’t happen and eventually we made our way down to some sea stacks and arches where waves pound on and on in little carved channels washing over the little pools of anemone and star fish and crabs. An old woman told me that I “sure am sure footed,” but I didn’t climb the craggy cliffs like Dustan and instead we squatted over the little pools and looked for a long time.

Dustan did eventually swim for a little bit and we disrupted some really amazing rock sculptures which were impossible to put back together no matter how hard we tried. We ended up at a little local restaurant in Port Townsend eating poutine and fruit de mer until we were stuffed and happy. Then finally waiting for the ferry to take our car back home we saw a big 4 foot sand shark under the street lights in the shallows of the Sound and Jennifer did not believe us, but this, and not all the other lies we told, is the truth.

2009-08-25T09:02:00.000-07:00

GENERAL CAPTION
Aquatic Adventurers
There is something amazing about swooping into a wall of fish. Fish that make you feel as though you are in a National Geographic submarine peering into a deep blue wilderness. Fish that feel like rocks that don't move, fish that look like rocks that move. Fish that look like nothing wild you have ever seen, fish that look like illustrations from a book. We wandered into a wall of fish last weekend with Dustan my visiting brother and we stared at them until they shut the place down. Dustan and I are going back today.

all photos of our Seattle fish by scott beale of the laughing squid

2009-08-17T15:48:00.000-07:00

NATURAL
Year of the Goats

According to the Chinese Zodiac Jennifer was born in the year of the monkey and I was born in the year of the rooster. This seems strange as I have long thought of myself as an agile goat or spitting camel sorting through trash and digesting dirt at the site of a future community garden. Nope, I’m a mature rooster, a fourth-shadow iron rooster born at the tail end of the 1981 lunar year for Chinese peasants. On the positive side, this nature means I am “very observant: His mind is cautious and skeptical, and with this perceptive gift, Roosters make excellent trouble shooters, detectives,” but I like to “be noticed and flattered.”

We got a membership at the YMCA a few weeks ago and now J-Bird is constantly having me feel her muscles and tell her how much they have changed. Today on our way to a vegan lunch buffet she said, “I can feel my abs all over” and then told me the long story of how she came to know that abs was short for abdominal muscles (she at first thought they signified something obscene). A monkey not only grunts in the gym and demands constant feeding, but according to the Chinese bestiary, “monkeys are fun and loving persons who are always cheerful and energetic. They are very clever. Monkey-types possess acute psychological perspicacity which enables them to read people like books.”

Jennifer is making a CD of her favorite music for our friend Matthew right now. The point is to make him feel a little less sad that his sister died last week. Actually the point is to try to say that we care about him by giving him a whole bunch of songs like flowers which are sad and profound and feel like real life: which is always catching up with nature.

2009-08-10T13:50:00.000-07:00

MUMBLE

Two Fish Under a Rock

We went to the Seattle Asian Art Museum Saturday to look for paintings that would give us poems. We found a few: a painting of a white heron in a tree of green paint bent over against the wind, rubbings of the 16 Lohans with Chinese characteristics – wild eyebrows and tired feet. It was inevitable that the museum and its park designed by the same brothers who designed Central Park would give us back our peace of mind. Giving the material its due we walked to the top of the water tower and looked at the Sound spiting silver clouds at Seattle. Back down under the trees, Jennifer thought she could see through a white coy to it’s spine in the clear dark brown fish pond. We under-appreciated the black sun sculpture by Naguchi because it was crowded with American Born Chinese (ABCs my Chinese teacher says).

Still thinking of the cold mountain we were on, we went down Capitol Hill in search of books and coffee. We stumbled into Second Place Books, a dirty warren of feral cats and cigarettes chain-smoked. Stuck in the literary anthologies was a 1965 gem of Chinese literature translations: Gary Snyder’s Han Shan/Cold Mountain poems and Arthur Waley’s Li Po among others. All of which were carefully annotated with flowing pen strokes by Deb McKnight, the former owner. We took it up the street to a coffee shop and looked it over learning from Lu Chi that the “shapes of tame animals by the sudden shining forth of a tiger are illuminated.”

We read well to what sounded like Beethoven, drinking coffee perked by a man with a mohawk to improve our minds and change our writing until we were ready to walk steadily back to our car – on an improvised path once again to Cold Mountain.

We wanted a good place to settle:

Cold Mountain would be safe.

Light wind in a hidden pine –

Listen close – the sound gets better.

Under it a gray-haired couple

Mumbles along reading Chinese Classics

For ten years we won’t go back home

We won’t even remember the way we came.

Photo above by Lopolis

2009-08-04T07:47:00.000-07:00

QUIET
Friends Meetings Against Anxiety

Yesterday we went to our weekly circle, where quiet as Quakers we sit, waiting for the Light, as is true to their tradition. Women outnumber men 3 to 1, mismatched shades of green against beards; talismans of keys and mini-flashlights cradled between the broad breasts are matched in equal number by waist-length beards. We are like Annie Dillard here seeking solace, we are like John Updike trying to participate in a tradition in a place where it doesn’t seem too strange, even Soren Kierkegaard tried this. Giving the mundane it’s beautiful due, we sit here thinking, letting the heaviness seep down in our bodies while our brains float higher in their fluid. Outside the Quaker meeting-house, a light-filled smoke lodge, a peace park flutters little flags for bikers, electric buses, and travelers. The boats on Lake Union filtered through the trees blow their horns, which are not rams' horns, and the weather seems perfect. On the veranda wall, next to the rack of newsletters called Gleamings, is a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods."

This is the third time I’ve seen an Emerson quote in the past three weeks, the first in my mom’s living room above a flowery tea pot and stacks of the New Republic (I forget what it said), and the other at last week’s art musuem: “Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience." These thoughts make me want to forgive Emerson (but not Ben Franklin), a little, his invention of the American religion of self-reliance. Perhaps his intent was less Darwinian and more meditative, more engaged and less self-interested, than I previously gave him credit. Perhaps like Nikos Kazantzakis his interest was a "process theology:" the metaphysics made out of what people value, collect, and create through deep attention. Which brings me to Simone Weil’s most often clichéd remark: “absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”

We went to Discovery Park last night traveling myriad trails and saw three raccoons. Down on the rocks of the North Beach, Jen summoned all her powers against pleasure boats and for Orcas. We sat for hours doing nothing but inhaling our breath and staring with absolutely unmixed attention at the Sound. And still no whales. We made new myths intricately weaving our actions into their potential ones. Still nothing. Jennifer blamed me for lack of faith since Weilian prayer presupposes faith and love. I told her, the new myths were not sound, they did not sound true. At last two seals appeared as a reward for patience. As we left, the sun misshapen by the opaque Olympics, Jen whispered in the enchanting forest, “I’m glad we didn’t see them, because they seem more mysterious that way.” And we went home and listened to Blitzen Trapper (who we saw on Friday down by the Orca mural) sing about how to be wild and sure.

Photo by He Who Shall

2009-07-27T20:25:00.000-07:00

FEELING
Art in Seattle

The mechanical woman in our GPS keeps telling us “you have arrived” in such a flat emotionless voice that we are starting to believe her positivism. Last Friday as we drove home under a crescent moon our windshield filled with rain like tears, an orange sky, the Olympics stretched out like a homemade slinky right in front of us. We spent the evening at the Bellevue Art Fair looking for art that was true in its own quiet way: tree trunk sculptures, transparent glass figures with haunting expressions and missing brains, rubber skins molded by human mouths, alternate universes for miniature aliens made of gold, and more Nick Cave sound suits, since as Deleuze says: “Art preserves, and it is the only thing in the world that is preserved.” The Bellevue Art Museum, is Seattle’s Brooklyn Museum, only without the large obsession with Hudson River School paintings. We like it a lot.

Otherwise, Seattle is “waging a war on cars” according to Elizabeth Campbell, a local anti-biking mayoral candidate with a gift for noting positive developments. “They put in bikeways that get in the way,” she said, referring to current city planners. We tried out some of those bikeways a bit last night (walking our bikes down hills that were too steep). We tried not to get in the way and yet be brave like actual travelers. And we did fine, all the way down to the Gasworks Park, a retired oil refinery, where the ducks hide their heads in their feathers, little Chinese girls flap like birds, and kites fly high.

We watched a couple struggling to sail a little yacht in Lake Union and squinted when the sunlight reflecting off of the buildings downtown was too bright, over-exposing our eyeballs and making everything light. Thankfully, we might not have our own yacht or our own bicycle built for two, but we have two bikes and we can ride them together just fine, funny helmets or not. Next weekend we are going to throw a Frisbee at the park up 15th Avenue and admire the little redwood grove by the stream and the dogs which howl in harmony with emergent sirens.

"Preserve" by John Grade and "Untitled (woman in lace)" by Judy Hill

2009-07-21T20:14:00.000-07:00

BRIGHT IDEAS
Coloring Outside the Lines

My old home in Ohio seems to thrive with children these days: nieces and nephews now, who fill the old space with new worlds and clear sounds. Walter Benjamin tells us that “because children see with pure eyes . . . it is something spiritual. Children are not ashamed, since they do not reflect what they see.” They do not need yet to fit their experiences into categories of feeling and judge them moral or not like Kant, so each experience, each imagination is brand new and full all the way down. They can paint like Edvard Munch and Paul Klee without knowing, they can burn their way through classic literature without interpreting.

Our friend Oliva tells us that “the only reason we give things to children is so we can borrow a bit of their joy.” We take children to the zoo to watch them enter animal worlds, we give them baby puppies so they can enact free-form cuddling and other slightly inhumane stunts, we give them small blankets which they call “bweebies” or some such thing so we can enjoy watching them stroke the special corner on their faces and protest any infringement of their ultimate property. We tell them stories which they take to be true and true absolutely. It’s enchanting in its simple sympathetic magic: dams in a creek like a hyrdrologist, tee-pees in the backyard like a wildman, barnyard noises, and wrestling matches for cheering spectators like little men; and we give ourselves over to it hoping a little piece of it will sink into our own souls.

The Chinese word for experience, jingyan, implies a test of woven fabric which produces a warp or fraying. For the Chinese, experience, produces an object and a subject that has been changed by time. Last weekend I spent 20 minutes looking at hand tools at an Amish hardware store thinking about my friend Harlan who restores thrifted Old World chisels and planes hoping that authentic work will offer a trace of meaning, will give up a space for telling the story of the tinker, the weaver, the scraper and carver. He handles his tools like a child with precious toys rescued from rusty trash and the world of plastic. One time when Harlan’s daughter Eve (the mother of nature I guess in Hebrew) was smaller than she is now he told me that he wonders at what she is seeing in her yet un-reflective eyes. I imagine it was something like what the Surrealist Franz Hessel said about the philosophy of the flaneur: “We see only what looks at us. We can do only . . . what we cannot help doing.” This is what children are good for: giving newness and grandeur to the mundane, showing us objects wrapped in stories back their truth.

2009-07-13T15:03:00.000-07:00

ON BEARDS
In Seattle

I’ve liked Iron and Wine ever since my friend Danielle and her husband Devin introduced it (along with many other things) to me a few years ago after an evening of stories of Tibetan adventures and Japanese pancakes of potato, onion and cabbage covered with wasabi mayonnaise (I think). Devin mentioned that he liked the sensibility of singers who play their own instruments and do their own harmonies. Individualists, I think now, who treated their vocation like Kierkegaard (one true thing) and wrote like Nietzsche, thinking all the time that existentialism and extreme facial hair was cool. Sam Beam said as much last night about his songs of graffiti on the gates of heaven and sour milk flowing into the mouths of rivers and a general manifesto calling on unity for the “beards of the world.”

Now we live in Seattle and I still like Sam Beam’s Iron and Wine, his singular poetry and voice. He is a cheerful man with a wedding ring, hair split down the middle. A short man with smiling eyes and a small mouth which tilts back for the high notes. His songs and guitar are quiet and dense with precise images and thunked arpeggios. He rings around his words and weaves them, worming into your brain like a true thing you didn’t know. He is an original man.

So now we live in Seattle next to a vegan clothing store, we own a GPS, and bake our own marinated tofu. It’s a good and simple life and we work our endless days into texts, spoken and caligraphied, and housebound invalids who are still valid. We live from farmer’s market to farmer’s market, polish our debts like shackles and chains, and enjoy our occasional creeks and cradles. Once in a while we see a man or woman king, a maker, who makes out new ways of being strong and active and cheerful. It's cherry season, what else can we want?

Here are some music videos said to make tears.

Photos by Oslo in the Summertime and KM Photography

2009-07-05T19:46:00.000-07:00

Waqas Ahmed
JEN SAYS
We’re going to live in Port Townsend Someday

About 20 years ago in a little town in the pines 100 miles south of here Kurt Cobain told us where bad folks go when they die. Bad folks “go to a lake of fire and fry, and we don't see them again until the Fourth of July.” Last night we made our own quiet campfire between huckleberry trees right where Juan de Fuca’s Strait meets Puget’s Sound and listened to the rockets and crackers hiss and scream all around us, like devils set free to writhe and wail in their senseless fire. Echoing from Mount Baker to Mount Rainier a succession of loud farts were loosed to roam the woods, suck up the air, and scare the deer.

Jennifer thinks we crawled out of the water right at Discovery Bay in Port Townsend. She thinks the seaweed looks like salad, the driftwood looks like fruit-shaped rocks. We sat on the rocks and collected cobwebs and read fantastic poetry while drinking at Better Life Through (BLT) Coffee – admiring the Amish cheese they advertise on their menu, the perfectly bruised fruit at the Co-op Grocery.

So far we don’t feel like we’re from the Northwest, but we do see lots of things we like and dislike. There are plenty of reasons to produce rage like Kurt Cobain’s: bad folks with no jobs, deep cold like you feel no where else, listlessness, Navy bases, boredom, rusting killing machines, senseless noise at campgrounds, lethargy, tyrannical landlords, dirtbikes, dirty boots, and the list goes on. But we’ve been here long enough to watch the snow melt on the Olympics and apply for memberships at the Seattle Art Museum. We’ve walked the old growth forests in the mist and rode our bikes along bluffs high over the Sound. Its wild country for our tastes and that suits us just fine.

2009-06-28T16:46:00.000-07:00

BREMERTON FATHEAD
Or The Things We Liked at the Seattle Art Museum

We were talking, explaining the day: the art museum, the small nosed woman writer.
Talking in level tones about poorly spoken questions,
Andrew Wyeth and his Japanese browns and greens,
writing heart truth and creative facts,
when the lesson in how to build a stone wall happened along.

Why are you so mad? I ask.
The ferry rolls as the Sound pushes in on the lights of Bainbridge Island.
When I say aboriginal it means pulsing auras in weird colors baking under the burning December sun.
Not women weaving baskets away from the prying glances of missionary men hacking totem poles into firewood between grunts, as missionary’s daughters think.
It doesn’t matter and it’s all the same British empire,
But I still must push my point of view: you’re the provincial and I’m the smarty pants.

Of course I’m captive to your moods, and like Philip Lopate I try to gentle you out of them.
He says this is done out of laziness: “it saves me the trouble of having to initiate emotions on my own.”
In my bones I am a laconic Amishman avoiding conflict, building the peace through avoidance.
So I say I also liked the bulging suits made out of thrift store sweaters
and you smile and start to meet my eyes again
to rescue a perfect day from my heavy elbows.

The fat girls of Bremerton say loudly that it is against the Amish religion for Amish people to use soap.
We smile down at the floor between us
for no reason since these girls have no knowledge of anything other than their own cheap fatness.
I think Philip Lopate is right about the laziness of placation.
but sometimes your moods point to my own unapologetic thickness
my lack of graciousness and true humour.
I give you my shirt as we walk off the boat together into the shivering cold of the rest of our lives.

Andrew Wyeth. Aboriginal Art. Space Suit made of thrift store sweaters by Nick Cage. Seattle Ferry by Hillary H.

2009-06-23T17:20:00.000-07:00

PICTURES
Mostly by Dallas
Of tall little boys, dapper mennonites, becoming good ol boys in Chattanooga, and how we look at them, so bright and shiny armed with knives and chock full of new powers.

2009-06-15T15:28:00.000-07:00

GENERAL CAPTION
Victoria, British Columbia

Last weekend we crossed the Strait of Juan de Fuca under low clouds with a sharp eye for whales. Only 3 or 4 showed us their breath and none of them were too close. J and I went to Victoria hoping to break out of a bad case of active boredom and headaches or the monotony of social planning: where to live, what to eat, what movie to watch, how to fight off the crush of domestic banality. Unaccustomed to spending money, Victoria turned out to be a pretty but uninteresting town for us: tightfisted edgy weekenders. There was much ado about the culture and architecture of the British Empire: high tea, steep roofed hotels. We were saved only by the street performances, the coffee shops, the spongy lawns and park benches which were good for heated discussions and sprawled out reading, and the lacerating wind on the ferry ride back home.

2009-06-08T15:58:00.000-07:00

SITTING
Cheerfully

I left the ring of trees only to swim across the lake.
After a few days of watching the sun,
thinking about nothing in particular,
everything in general,
I started to guess at the birds that called.
It feels good to string food from a tree that has claw marks in it.
A doctor’s son feels proud to make a fire for comfort
and listen to the coyotes howl to each other like it’s music.

I decided that rather than despair at the meaning of existence,
look for wonder on the far side of tragedy;
cast my dice for infatuation on the other side of boredom,
hope for new worlds beyond this one.
This is the risk, this is the shuffle:

Reading existentialism for the past few months has forced me
Awkwardly, to slink into this position:
Bald eagles gliding over glassy lakes make a spot feel right.
Also, bullfrogs and raccoons are fine company at night.
No need to wait to be dissatisfied to start in a new direction,
but being unhappy (tragedy, what else?) does make action appealing.
Re-action even more so;
So, start from burning joy.

The sky was forty shades of blue where the trees met the water
and our sun slowly fragmented.

2009-05-30T21:50:00.000-07:00

COMMUNAL
Walks with Richard

Richard from #7 came over a few days after we moved here and asked us if we wanted to go on a walk with him. We were eating and tired right then so we said maybe another time. Richard sort of snorted, dismissed us with a drop of his hand, and stomped off toward Belfair State Park.

The next time Richard asked me I was in the middle of a chirpy pilates video. Eager not to disappoint I answered the door right away, asked him to wait a second while I ran upstairs and put on some pants and away we went. We talked over what he calls the “dismal science” (economics) as we slowly ambled down the road. Turns out that Richard, who is a fierce supporter of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of salvation by free markets and invisible hands, blames the Chinese for selling off $700 billion of American treasury bonds in 2007 in a mad scramble to buy up oil companies and the like and dominate the world system. He thinks our currency will soon be worthless. Richard is a MIT physicist who worked most of his life at Boeing – the big employer around the Sound before Bill Gates invented Microsoft and after the big trees were all cut up and shipped out. He walks for his health and to see the birds, the shifting alluvial deltas at the end of Mission Creek, and the quiet ponds which reflect the big clouds. We talk of salmon, and floods, and boy scout sing-a-longs in the Olympics in the 1950s.

Since his retirement Richard has been receiving visions which have given him the answers to all the major problems which Einstein and Hawkings couldn’t solve: things to do with quantum mechanics, string theory and the like. He’s writing up these new theses and submitting them to refereed journals. So far, like most physics papers, none have been published. A surprise storm rained on us the last time we walked, and we got pretty wet. Richard gave me a high-five when we got back.

2009-05-26T22:28:00.000-07:00

PANNING
For Aluminum

I agreed to write this post under the influence of 4th anniversary sentimentalities. “Will it be sappy?” Darren asked. “Of course!” I replied. Last weekend we sat around a campfire and watched the sap sizzle. We talked about how grumpy we’d been with each other since our (self-titled) aluminum anniversary. “That’s just because we only have a bachelor’s degree in marriage,” Darren said. “We’re just switching programs to start our master’s program now and it’s always a little rough transitioning to a new program.” As for me, I plan to take this thing on to the PhD level here in a few years. Imagine what life will be like when we can actually start practicing!

It’s strange to think back to the beginning – when the first thing I noticed was a pair of eyebrows across a crowded room. We fanned our feathers for a while in an attempt to impress one another with all we had read, seen and done. Then came the big first Valentine’s Day fight when all hope was lost and I fled back to my NY friends - declaration of singlehood in hand. That is until the next day when Darren won me back with a few simple lines over e-mail. That’s what keeps this show on the road. I get hoppin’ mad and swear up and down that I’ll never give him the time of day again and then he gives me a look or a light touch on the shoulder and I’m a bowl of mush.

“The nice thing about the rest of our lives is that we have a whole lifetime of weekends ahead of us,” Darren commented on our drive out to camp in the Cascades. I agreed and wiped what looked like a grasshopper leg off his glasses as we hiked up the trail dodging steaming mounds of unhealthy looking bear dung. An hour later he tenderly reached over and plucked “leftover cricket butt” off my cheek. You have to admire the kind of guy who would stick around a girl with cricket hindquarters mashed up on her face – or at least the kind of guy who would make that sort of thing up.

In the end we let the campfire go out on its own with admonishments from Smokey Bear ringing in our consciences. It was dark and the night was cold and I thought I heard bear noises behind me. What followed was a very long Blair-Witch-Project-esque night in which I shot up with every creepy night noise, clapped my hands and commanded those bears to “Get out of here!” in my sternest Grizzly Man voice (but that didn’t work out so well for him then did it?). But it was Darren who would venture out to retrieve a torch from our smoldering fire and state once and for all that there was nothing beastly in sight. And then he woke up in the morning and cooked me breakfast too.

Darren recently graduated with his master’s degree from Columbia University with a 4.0 GPA (actually it was higher than that but he won’t tell me how high). I have a feeling that he’s going to score even higher when we wrap this program up. How’s that for sappy?

2009-05-18T17:22:00.000-07:00

HAPPY BIRDS
In a Borrowed World

“We haven’t seen any wild animals other than each other all day,” Jennifer said midway through our 10 mile walk along the glacial blue Hoh river. The night before we had spied on a herd of elk browsing the fine green offerings of 140 inches of rain, but today we saw only the traces of men and bears and ambiguous paws. A temperate rain forest like this one is a glorious junkyard of plants draped over plants feeding on each other and the air. It is rain and melting glaciers on higher ground which fill the air with background winds and secret little rushes like a distant toilets always flushing. Every shade of green and brown is present but difficult to take account of because this world is so wild and unexpected.

It made Jennifer do strange things: like try to stand on her hands and climb on top of gigantic rotting stumps. She skipped starting with her left foot and at one point volunteered to crawl on her belly through the empty space in the roots of a big cypress as though she was a nurse tree. She sat in a sacred oak grove and leaned her head back to look at the moss upside down with her chin in the air and she said she loves to do this. She argued with me about the name of the director of a French film we saw about nymphs who lived in a forest like this one (The Romance of Astrea and Celadon by Eric Rohmer). When I ran ahead a bit and waited for her on some giant fallen trees stacked like toys she said the woods seemed creepier when I wasn’t there, every sound a cougar or a bear.

If we were animals we would never leave this place we decided. At night in our tent we read out our nightly poem by Gary Snyder in the fading light and wondered how a flimsy construction of nylon made in a factory in China and sold to us for less than 20 dollars could make us feel at home in such a wild place. Next time we hike into the Olympics we won’t bring the tent we decided. Jennifer put the tent away while I made breakfast in the bright sunlight.

2009-05-10T17:38:00.000-07:00

NOTES
On a Strange Land

It seems we wake up earlier every morning. Too absentminded to close the blinds the sun streams in electrifying the pines which from our floor level mattress and the luxury of 400 thread count linen seem to dominate the world of our window. Up now, there is smoke on the water burning a blue heron into a black silhouette. This landscape, this air, this sea, is permanently strange to me (at least for these two months). There is no left over sentiment or latent memory of the sea from my childhood in Ohio. This is all new to me. Every day I note the tides, I remark on the deep salt breeze. Jennifer thinks she sees whales out there.

Out in the forest under the pines I run after the tracks of deer. I’m thinking hard about the Seattle Marathon in November so today is my nine mile run for the week. My sister Sheri is 16 this week which leads to ruminating on the importance of mobility when trying to learn the rules of modernity as a 16 year-old Mennonite. I think of my mom’s declaration that I was not mature enough to drive, and how this was echoed in whispers by worried preacher’s wives and weepy widows throughout the concerned community. It turns out, the state revoked my license for a year, the preacher’s wives gave up, and the widows kept praying. I doubt Sheri will need to go through this as it appears she reads Melville and quotes Proust for fun: both good ideas more important than testing the practice of modern Mennonites.

After seven miles of chasing deer, crashing through the brush like a white man, dodging puddles and streams like a rabid dog, I hear the motocrossers who own this State Forest every weekend roaring my way: suited star troopers on their Japanese motorcycles. I dive into a bed of giant ferns away from the snarls. A bear! The lead driver yells through his helmet. Where? Right here! They drive a little closer, I wave, smile weakly. Yeah right. A bear. I’m a disappointment. I run on foot over foot now, ignoring the little flashes of pains here and there. Out on the road a dog barks: here comes another, down by the Sound back in the big cedars I startle a couple of sea ducks and the sound of it and flash of green makes my heart leap in my chest again.

2009-05-01T19:51:00.000-07:00

JIVING
Last Week

Last week we drove down to Portland to visit my Aunt Mary and listen to Uncle Lee spin out tales of computer geeks and old Kalona cronies. Denying any hint of privation, they showed us the luscious Columbia River Gorge: waterfalls over chiseled layers of basalt and fluorescent moss like an Islamic palace in Granada that I saw in an art history book only better and more wild. We ate at a cottage at the bottom of Multnomah Falls, watching the green rain, and telling stories of Mennonite roots (pronounced “ruts”).

Last week I remembered my Aunt Mary is quiet and thoughtful. She works at an alcohol and drug rehab clinic for lost souls and she cries every time she watches Susan Boyle sing her song for cynical Britons. Lee and Mary are trying to stay young with a basement full of exercise equipment. They study at learning German, watch honest movies starring crazy old Jack Nicholson (“he follows the beat of a different drum” according to Uncle Lee) and talking about the country legends they have seen and outlived. We ate perfectly made wild blackberry pie twice and there was still enough left for a paper plate ride home with us. I’m glad we gave Lee a chance to eat desert and get generous with the A&W root beer.

Last week I heard a Russian Literature professor from Louisiana State talk about Dadaism on Seattle public radio: how it outlasted Stalin and thrives in times of woe. He said Dadaists always have a party “at least in their minds.” They are less concerned with politics and final outcomes then with jiving and dancing around things and problems and making new poems and new places. As Gary Snyder the poet has said regarding his Beats: “it’s about character, it’s about style.” I thought about this and how my Uncle Lee drives a city bus while jiving with strangers and eating sandwiches of jam and peanut butter ground in a self-serve grinder; how his bohemian friend follows the creed “Keep Portland Weird” by barking like a dog in public to people he knows; as we drove home on Interstate 5 listening to Dan Reeder make a mess of it and trying to sing along.

2009-04-24T16:20:00.000-07:00

WILDLIFE
Jennifer’s Big Scare

We spoke in hoarse whispers to each other, frozen in place by the sound of rustled leaves and broken branches. Behind the thicket of brambles, a scene from a Lee Friedlander picture, we saw the big ears of the deer and then another and then their mother. The deer didn’t notice us at first, but we could only do the barely breathing statue dance for so long. Inevitably, its ears pricked and it froze too, watching us with black eyes. The stand-off lasted until the desire to browse became overwhelming. Back to the marshy plants, then a quick jerk, as if we might push its nose into the drinking fountain like boys in early puberty. The song and dance cycled around for a few more minutes, until eventually I edged my camera out of its bag and took some pictures. We stood there for an hour hiding our passive-aggressive non-resistant rage at passersby that didn’t realize it is magical to watch wild animals and that one should discipline herself against jokes and the sort of contemptuous spoken language one might resort to while watching Celebrity Apprentice.

We were on the edge of a salt water marsh within sight of our apartment on a lazy weekend morning. It’s a place like Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge where sandpipers, surf scoters, red wing blackbirds, killdeers, barn swallows, and pairs of mandarin ducks have the general run of the place and fill the air with flutters and songs. Jennifer tried to whistle like a black bird to get it to answer like her mother Edith would have given the same conditions.

As we were reluctantly leaving our deer and following our stomachs home, we heard some wild snarling from the brush and our deer came running towards us, bounding to within a few feet of us in a rush to get away. After listening to the screams on the Internet as soon as we got home, Jennifer is pretty sure it was a cougar. I’m not sure about that, but here in the timberland where the ravens fly so close you can hear their wings rustle the animals are still in charge of nature. When the early sun makes the mist dance across the salt water and the wind sinks deep into your skin outside our front door, it seems wild and wonderful outside and all you want to do is watch.

2009-04-19T18:46:00.000-07:00

READING
The Old Women of Belfair

Last Thursday the Page Turners had their monthly meeting. They schedule their discussions for the third Thursday of every month from 10-12 A.M., so it was little surprise that they turned out to be people with flexible schedules. I ducked into the library meeting room of varnished pine as 3 after ten, a dozen old women and an old white-bearded man named Don were milling around finding their name tags and filling their mugs from home with weak coffee. After some adjustment to the idea they made me a name tag and inquired as to my make and model, and intentions. Since the novel for today was set in the Qing dynasty of China (Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See), I propped myself up as a scholar of China and its cultural mysteries (rather than as a visual illustrator as some poorly informed know me). We talked foot-binding and wife-beatings, Muslim comparisons abounded, the youngish 50 year old with straight brown hair across the corner from me offered sagaciously that fashion as a disciplining force is universal and that women who wear 1000 dollar shoes in New York and LA will slice their big toes in order to get the right fit. Don told of a Chinese friend of his who was married by parental arrangement back in the 50s to a “stunning” young woman (“that worked out ok”); he told nervously of the millions of Chinese graduates who will swamp our “dumbed-down” American professionals.

We talked about feminism and how women couldn’t wear pants to school in the 60’s (except during finals week). We ate freshly baked coconut bars and thought about how nice it would be a Chinese grandparent and have our children wait on us hand and foot. I was the expert for facts, figures and anecdotes. I oversimplified and provoked points off to the side and straight down the line and the old woman with the gnarled walking stick next to me (Mabel?) wished she was anthropologist too. The youngish fifty year old next to me, whom I liked, but not as much as my own little bobcat, Jennifer, wondered that perhaps I could write a book about the old women of Belfair.

As far as I can tell the old women of Belfair like to be independent, they like to read and wear Birkenstocks, they like the birds and sea and they regret the way those who built their town and named it did so by pushing the natives onto the reservation down at the bend, reducing their potlatch grounds to picnic parks and their shores to summer homes. They let the Mexicans “do a good job” in tending their yards “even though they are Mexicans,” and they care deeply about the world and about ethical living. Muslims and Asians are pretty far away and about as close to real as what they see on TV. They are strong of heart and with serious prodding they are willing to change. Next month we read Grapes of Wrath.

2009-04-14T21:02:00.000-07:00

HOPE
That Albatross Has Really Big Wings

I’ve spent the past few weeks designing a personal curriculum for my next couple months here in the dregs of Hood's Canal. I’m hoping that with a teapot in hand and Che Guevara finger puppet (courtesy of the Wengers) on my finger I will be able to begin to “render visible” in the words of Paul Klee the workings of a practical philosophy. This is an ambitious provocation as it will require thought experiments, interventions, reflections and certainly concentration which in Senator Stevens' tubular world of libraries and high-speed Internet seems less and less possible. I’m going to have to read with an agitated, underlining and commenting pencil the works of Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Fredric Nietzsche, Soren Kierkegaard, not to mention their practitioners Michel Taussig, Liu Xin, Rebecca Solnit. As digressions into the material poetic world I’ve mapped out readings of John Muir, Terry Tempest Williams, Pico Iyer, Mike Davis, and online lectures with David Harvey. The point here, again Paul Klee, is not to “undertake analyses of works because we want to copy them or because we suspect them.” But rather, “we investigate the methods by which another has created his work, in order to set ourselves in motion.” (Notebooks, V. 1: The Thinking Eye p. 99 in The Essential Foucault, vii)

Today I made my first run through the Tahuya State Forest on the hill behind our retirement community. The place is fantastic, all silver trees and mossy branches with tiny muddy tracks right through them in disorienting quiet. It will be the perfect place to spend a week among the stones when May comes with the warm dry weather. Until then I’ll be here at my fake oak table listening to music from the Folk Alley in Kent, Ohio, breathing in my Dragon Ball Jasmine tea and trying to “stop regarding as superfluous something so essential in human life and human relations as thought.” (Michel Foucault from “It it really important to think?” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, p. 155)

I’ll make vegetarian food "as good as Berkeley" for Jennifer every evening and steam up the car with her at the drive-in on the weekends, but otherwise I plan to be here watching the water and the thousand dancing birds or in the silent pines, thinking and running. Hopefully writing this down will give me some will to power, some “set (myself) in motion.”

2009-04-09T14:49:00.000-07:00

GENERAL CAPTIONS

Solo Drive from San Francisco

April 3, 2009
Didn’t hit my stride until the big valley of Ukiah: too much traffic and too much worry about the bike bobbing back and forth uncertainly behind the swaying ship. Then finally J. Fogerty and his Creedence Clearwater Revival in pure energy channeled into voice and guitar. I let out some little yips and starts to celebrate that the trip has finally begun.

Up into the Jackson Demonstration State Forest where the streams flow blue and as true as liquid ice. I’m lying in the pine cones of some big Ponderosa on the edge of a redwood grove. It’s getting dark fast under the canopy, sinking cold into the ground. Quick thought for J. in New York facing the music. The stream babbles on.

Settling into Belfair, Washington

April 8, 2009

Set on starting good habits, J. flashes through her Chinese flash cards reciting the tones in an increasingly frustrated rocking way. We’re sitting on 2 dollar chairs in our 1950s apartment watching the tide sweep away. We’re out of the city and into the pines. This is the quiet and simple, the volunteer fire department pancake breakfast, monthly book club at the library, grandmotherly landlords and neighbors, tales of leaping salmon 300 steps from our screen door.

The air is clean and cold, the mountains a distant and rugged white presence, the shellfish cooked, locals are ample and friendly. We like Washington just fine so far. Out across the sound a skinny man in a black suit rides on a board under a giant kite, cutting a little white gash out toward the marshland and bird reserve. This is a nice spot that man told me.

2009-03-28T14:28:00.000-07:00

GRIEVING
For Saniyah

I hate taking death calls. I don’t know what to say. There really is nothing. There are no metaphors to help describe something so immensely sad, no obvious parables to offer. The only thing I can think to uncertainly ask is: what happened, what time, what place, what was the color and temperature of it? I already know all the likely answers: sudden, grim neighborhood, blue and cold. The world is suddenly shocked into focus, and this is all I can ask.

I was blithely planning our evening (off to Nomad Café for a poetry reading), when the cell phone blurted to life and told me of death. The afternoon vanished, the future retracted into the present. I’ve decided that the best thing for me to do in times like these is to listen to Shostakovich’s String Quartets (really only number 8 over and over again) until the world and life seem circumscribed by hopeful, tremulous movement, followed by violent overtures, and sad retreats. The sad cello answered by an even sadder fiddle weeping in C minor. Melancholy, tears, and a world in black and white with overtones of sepia.

Saniyah died this week. Hearing the news from Marilyn, one of the most emotionally empathetic people I know, made it harder and easier. It made me feel like weeping and embarrassed that I was not; that I was too numb to cry. Saniyah was a quiet little girl who liked to smile and play with her mother’s face. She was born in a dysfunctional world with arbitrary international borders, fractured families, and uprooted classes of people. She lived at the top of rickety, narrow stairs; she had a one-year old birthday party with a piñata and birthday hats; she had a mother who thought the world was her; she had a lot to live through and a lot of reasons to live. She always seemed like a reasonable little girl, easy to hold and easy to love. I’ll miss watching her grow into a beautiful woman, a little braver than the world she was given, making us proud to have known her.

2009-03-24T14:43:00.000-07:00

NOTES
About Poetry and Place

Breyten Breytenbach, whose name is as interesting as his poetry, wrote: “One travels through many lands and one’s words go with you as swift, half-tamed birds, and at night they return to warble what they have eaten.”

The other night in a moment of clarity, I paused at the front door of our apartment building on University Avenue and noticed that the Ghanaians had painted their restaurant in national colors – from white to red, green, and yellow – and that Quaker Oats had put up a new billboard that said “Go Humans Go.” Funny how things that were once wonderful in their difference to the conventional now seem quotidian. The Lhasa Salon and Beauty Tek that flank the Ghanaian Restaurant have become normal, regular parts of the topography of the place. Yet now as I stood there braced against a young tree next to the parking meter ticket machine, it seemed once again strange. Even more estranging was the pacing of eminent anthropologist Paul Rabinow’s ubiquitous teaching assistant (the one who has a Ph.D in both theology and anthropology) as he softly shushed his new born baby while his cooing wife entertained guests in the Salvadorian place twenty steps from our backdoor. Gaymon Bennett (I’ve since found out that is the TA’s name) broke into a lullaby, but the baby kept wailing.

In January moving from New York to a new environment seemed impossibly good. I was actually surprised a month or two later that living among yogi naturalists and dreamy anarchists in a peaceful and quiet neighborhood didn’t necessarily mean that I would never be grumpy. Even space so perfectly organized did not necessarily guarantee my satisfaction.

Last night J. and I stalked Joanna Newsom and Gary Snyder up in the Nevada County Sierra. We wanted to see what sort of place could produce the poetics and practice we like to emulate. Nevada City is a mining turned wining and dining town not far from John A. Sutter’s mill where gold was noticed back in 1848. The town sparkled with truth in sharp greens and greys, the downtown a march of old brick and hard-wood buildings tight and square with stenciled signs. The scent of sourdough bread and wet ponderosa pine filled the air when we were there, eating local Cajun food while listening to Jonny Cash. In the bathroom of Ike’s Quarter Cafe we saw signs of Woody Guthrie, a dislike for neckties, a band of thirteen year-old local rock stars called “13” and known as the “best band in the galaxy.” The food was expensive and local and the toilet seat was made of wood. The place was like the poetry Robert Hass, our poet laureate, prefers: “poetry is a late night coffee shop: it makes you feel truth and social belonging.” Driving home for the last time out of the foothills, I put my hand on the back of J.’s head as close as I could to her brain and pointed out Mount Diablo and Mount Tamalpias rolling back on opposite sides of the San Andreas Fault and San Francisco Bay. We were floating home like two Canadian geese, I was hoping she would chatter and chirp like an excited four-year old chickadee as she sometimes does; instead we listened to Peter, Paul and Mary and thought about what it means to be happy and how maybe a nice place is like good poetry: it prepares the ground for a strong politics and just society, and it makes you understand just a little the naiveté of cynicism.

2009-03-15T15:21:00.000-07:00

matteo dudek

ATTEMPT
Great Failure

Matthew Wenger who might remember with me that we have only seven generations before Mennonite history is reduced to myth (or at least this is what they say in Africa about African history), recently told me that I have a “voice” when I write and that it has gotten “gentler” since we moved to the livable West Coast. For three years I have attempted to restrain the vapid impulse toward callisthenic verbosity (inspired in the first resort by Jorge Luis Borges) and tried in a very small way the practice of alienation defined by J.M. Coetzee as “inner emigration” to a world of marginality where one can finally speak both within and to a culture such as “Mennonite.” Operating from the position of a surely lapsed member of Country View Chapel (a problem space located next to the Amish Door Restaurant in Wilmot, Ohio); the son of a Mennonite lay bishop (not to mention a career-path shaping professional), I’ve been projecting back to Mennonite readers (I assume), in a language that is not easily assimilated, three cryptic paragraphs every week.

It’s been a failure as Slavoj Žižek would frame it – expression is always such; but at times it has been a glorious, feverish failure, pencil to paper urges, the sort of passion that would make Rainer Maria Rilke smile (or at least that’s what I’m told). It’s been a self-serving failure sometimes, like Ayn Rand or George Orwell at their worst. And it has been a failed attempt at cultivating mindfulness, as the mundane still appears boring more often than not. The writing life has failed many times to construct meaning out of the hyperreality of current experience: I remain an often overwhelmed but rooted individual floating around in time and space like a water lily. Sometimes, though, I feel like I’m on the cusp, pushing at something provocative and evocative, and that’s when writing is great, and the degree of failure is the best.

Yesterday Jennifer and I drove the winding roads of North San Francisco Bay with no real purpose. It felt like the countless Sunday afternoon drives I took down County Road 2 southwest toward Maysville out of Mount Eaton or on the dirt stretch between what we referred to as “the Dump Road” and Kohler Road down by Rodney Stutzman’s old place (where I trapped frogs and dug for black diamonds as a 12 year-old). When the melancholic light was right (at around 5 pm) and if I was lucky a dramatic thunder storm had just swept through, the Amish-Mennonite landscape of southern Wayne County seemed just about perfect. It was green and quiet, the air sparkly, just birds and me and the occasional cow. I was saying goodbye, moving to the city, away from the simple life toward a utopian community “out there.” On my aimless silent drives by myself, I think I was trying to orient myself with the Mennonite landscape. I was trying to see it for what it was; as a natural system not as a function of me. I can’t really see California in the same way, because we don’t know it well enough (after all it is the third degree of separation from my Mennonite roots), but it was still nice to say goodbye like that, we’ll miss it a little when the show here is over and all we will remember are the bright lights of good feelings and near misses.

2009-03-09T11:55:00.000-07:00

BIG CATS
Stealthily Stretching Out

Driving fast like a fast car in slow-motion in a Porsche commercial down sweeping roads in the green Sierra foothills we listen to Joanna Newsom split glass in Nevada County: the sheared rock of Yosemite towering behind us a muted roar in our minds against the crystal blue sky. After an extended conversation about money and its inevitable decline, Jenn and I sit in silence for a few minutes thinking about becoming adults, the siren call of the wild against our bipedal human nature and its proclivity to procreate or at least surrogate.

When we reach the alluvial plain of the San Joaquin Valley variegated by millions of sweet almond trees and huge piles of ripe manure mounded next to milk-making factories, a little squabble ensues over the proper integration of our IPod with the stereo of our dark red car. Dark thoughts dissipate now as Rufus Wainwright wails in his unabashed way now in our long swerve around the spinning blades of hundreds of windmills down towards Pleasanton.

Our 48 hours in Yosemite had been filled with clear moments in air so clean it left “an aftertaste of granite in your nose,” Jennifer thought. We watched a bobcat stalk mice, mule deer browse grass, and small clumps of third-world tourists investigate the scenic spots. We listened transfixed to frogs sing in an interlooping rounds of other-worldly under/overtones and worried only slightly about the future of our lives; that is, imagining the possibilities and being creative. As we sipped coffee out of heavy glasses at our spa/yoga retreat/hostel surrounded by pictures of bugs, we thought a slow morning, sleeping late buried in blankets like giant cats was more important that a guided tour – even if Ranger Jack gave you free snowshoes.

2009-03-01T20:55:00.000-08:00

A.GRINBERG/DB

PROWLING
With the Menno Panther

Following in the footsteps of Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, and Gary Snyder who inaugurated the circumnavigation of Mount Tamalpais, San Francisco’s holy mountain, this weekend we prowled around with Olivia Wenger, the original Menno Panther. We were trying to forget all our trials and make our own way as confused individuals. Along the way we paused to venerate special trees, honk on some grass, absorb the geography, and dwell on the human ecology of being friends on a particular mountain.

moss on a tree

jennifer speculates while the menno panther smirks

small hip break on the ascent

giant ferns cascade like cataracts on the cataract trial

worshipful mood sets in

small mennonite women recline on the west face of mt. tam

jenn lies down on command as olivia looks on

jenn tries pathetically to honk with grass

jenn smiles modestly while darren succeeds 9 times in honking

olivia has a good time

darren hugs a purple tree like a young girl on a practice date

a painfully posed picture at the summit pagoda

2009-02-22T10:00:00.000-08:00

STORY
Harlan's Haircut

Harlan cuts his hair 13 times per year. Each time he brings his greying beard or goatee (however it may be manifested) down to a (#1) greying stubble. He attaches combs measured to the millimeter to his electric trimmer and systematically sweeps through his hair, filling a dust-pane nicely in less than 5 minutes. Relative to most men, Harlan is highly efficient and self-sufficient. Give him some well made tools and some hard wood and he will make you something with dove tails and tongues and groves all held together by polished wooden pins or something. Or give him some average looking tiles and he will turn them into odd assymetrical forms set in carefully balanced patterns. As we can see in this picture though, Harlan will not be satisfied with his succinct haircut without Marilyn’s help. None of us would be satisfied without help from others. When we reach the limits of self-sufficiency (which is often) our helplessness and frustration drive us to seek satisfaction from others. All of us, even Harlan - the classic independent man, need help. It seems as though we can either be intrigued with or resent life for doing this to us. In the end, we can become more or less competent, but not less helpless.

Last weekend we flew into New York on a Jet Blue airplane, we slept in late on an air mattress enjoying the natural gloom of a subterranean apartment, we played helplessly with Eve and Eden, practiced our Spanish with them and let them satisfy our desire to laugh and cling to instinctual words and actions. We crammed into the Barnharts’ ageing teal Honda hatchback and laughed at each other, talked about what we thought, what we saw or didn’t see, and why we imagine we do what we do. We didn’t need to wish for the desirable to happen we just had to wait for it to occur.

We have friends who fill out certain needs in our lives that are hard to define but easy to feel. Traveling and observing the world, living a well-balanced life alone in the sunshine is very fulfilling in ways – but it remains incomplete at least for now. We still need friends with which we share funny stories and quirky dreams and who call us uncle and aunt when they talk about us to their children.

2009-02-16T15:24:00.000-08:00

NESTING
Like Babushkas

Since we moved to California a month or so ago Jennifer and I have started sleeping on the same schedule up in our loft on a mattress which we removed from our sofa in sleeping bags made for camping in sub-zero weather. Sometimes though when I get enthralled with the last bits of Top Chef (which I watch while Jennifer takes her shower) she manages to get up there ahead of me. She falls asleep fast these days slipping towards dreams about handing out ice cream or maybe drugs like Nurse Ratched in her nursing home.

The rituals of falling asleep are largely a part of our bodily unconscious. We brush our teeth, shower or not, floss or not, put on comfortable clothes or take them off and gradually reverse the process of awakening without structure or plan (this is sort of the whole point of falling asleep). The owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk, or so Hegel said; we think a bit about our day and worry about the next. And sink under consciousness into an ocean of sleep where the light sources grow dim and fractured. Now that Jennifer is entering into her 29th year I’ve started to inter-view her during these risky liminal moments between consciousness and sleep when the night is lit with fireflies or stars from the day just past.

When I rustle into my sleeping bag beside her she murmurs a contented sigh and flops out her arm without fail: whacking me in the head because I’m trying to pull up the stuck zipper. I usually ask her what she is thinking about and she says something about the nursing home or one of her friends: Bethanie, Olivia or Marilyn. Sometimes I ask her to tell me a joke. And she tries, really hard, mumbling something unintelligible. I tell her I didn’t understand her and she tries again, making me laugh harder, which makes her realize that she is the joke and then she whacks me again, this time on purpose, and turns over burrowing into her bed looking for the clock which beeps that horrible sound at 6:30.

Our physical experience of the world affects in a direct way the way we live and are in the world. For instance as M. Taussig has recently pointed out, though all of us know the earth spins we also all know in our bones that the sun rises and sets and that those times are special times for spinning out metaphors, drinking away our sorrows, and lying in bed with those we love. I like Jennifer a lot right then, more than ever really. It’s sort of like what Urie Sharp used to call “muscle memory” when we were singing in the choir, we realize what we naturally love and should do as we drift off to sleep, not thinking, not planning, not trying to remember the right words; like Balanchine we “hear the dance and see the music” and know somehow that right then we are living in the best of all possible worlds.

2009-02-09T12:20:00.000-08:00

Wonderlane

FLOPPING
In the Sun Like a Seal
I’m sitting on our magical Guatemalan blanket the color of Peruvian gold on a beach of small shells and miniscule stones listening to the on-going thudding roar of most of the earth. Jennifer is lying on her stomach beside me in red and purple plaid reading an old issue of the New Yorker and poking at small hopping insects the color of the ocean of sand around us. In front of us is California’s largest coral reef which offers silent rippling pools for hermit crabs, sea urchins, and deathly still jelly fish. A little nut is rolling across the sand toward us pushed by the wind from China.

I’m taking a little break from reading Julia Kristeva’s journal About Chinese Women circa 1974. We brought with us as we usually do on weekend excursions into California’s flora and fauna a crusty loaf of San Francisco Sour Dough, some cheese from Monterey and bright green apples. Other than the occasional shriek of sea gulls and surprised children, the ocean is the only sound. We’ll lay here for the afternoon and be glad that Olivia is coming to see us in a few weeks giving us an excuse to come back.

On page 12 Julia Kristeva offers me the term jouissance as a word for which there is no suitable English equivalent. Instead there is a definition which announces the simultaneity of organic and symbolic, material and ideal, pleasure of the speaking human subject. For a slightly confused Marxian Anarchist (not to mention Mennonite Humanist) such a term makes me wish I was French. But I’m not, I’m an American man sitting with my legs crossed on a beach watching the world roar and spin around. “Do you wish you were a sea lion or a seal and could live here forever?” Jennifer asks. “Yeah.”

2009-02-02T12:24:00.000-08:00

MARSHALL ASTOR

KAO SHI
Stress Time
I just sat through an hour-long dictation from my purple-haired Chinese pedagogue. I sharpened 5 pencils just in case. Hours and hours of memorization and hand-numbing finger cramping were also involved. My Cantonese and Fujanese speaking classmates didn’t seem too excited about the test. They had been writing these characters since they were 5 year-olds after all. Only the three white people, as they call us, seemed tense.

Chun Laoshi was nice today. She wasn’t too insulted by our ignorance or overly shrill. She waited for me if I gave her a panicked look, and repeated what she just said with only a slightly abrasive scolding.

My characters might be a little rushed and sloppy, but I think I got them right otherwise (dui rather than bu dui like usual). I’ll find out tomorrow, when the grapes of wrath will be flung at all of us I’m sure. It made me feel a little better when my Cantonese speaking classmate who sits next to me muttered, “I did terrible on that!” and showed me his half blank paper.

So I know I wasn’t the worst in the class, and that makes this white boy smile a little.

2009-01-24T23:45:00.000-08:00

BERKELEY
It’s Special

I was 27 years old when Barrack Obama became president of the United States. I stood with 10,000 Berkeleyans and listened to civil rights activists talk about the historicity of what we were watching on the big screen TV in front of us. The Chinese women next to me cried when the band played the Star Spangled Banner; the locals hissed when Dick Cheney rolled down the red carpet for the last time; the middle aged woman behind me muttered “thank-you” when a rainbow-colored man yelled “Queers too!” to Rick Warren’s affirmation that God made all things. We clapped and yelled and people exchanged hugs and rang bells and we had a new president.

I still think of our time here in San Francisco as a chance to enact another in our series of youthful feuilletons of heady atmospheres: pot-smoking hippies, bushwacking backwoodsmen, tree hugging ecologists and eventually Chinese interrogators and Turkic-Muslim interlocutors. Yet, despite the long-term avoidance of serious labour which underscores our decision to move here – we are also learning or relearning how to live with each other and the world.

For instance here in Berkeley – the epicenter of American Leftists – people take civil society so seriously that they avoid jay-walking – it seems that in their eyes the laws of the community are laws they themselves created rather than laws which were imposed on them by an impersonal man in an office somewhere downtown. Also, I’ve started mopping the floor every Friday, making me more like Jennifer than ever before. Jennifer started parallel parking (if the spot is big enough) and drinking coffee every morning and running with me every Saturday (on the downhills). It seems we are increasingly joined at the hip and walking in sync.

2009-01-19T14:16:00.000-08:00

JDZ

HIKING
Happy animals

“You’re like an agile goat,” Jennifer suggested, as I sprang onto a narrow wooden bridge 45 minutes into our 7 mile descent of Mount Tamalpais on our weekly Californian hike. We were walking through groves of gnarled purple trees on steep hard mud trails by cascading streams surrounded by giant ferns. We ate our bread and cheese and bright green apples halfway through the climb in sunshine that made us peel off our long-sleeved shirt/sweater and drink our water out of Jennifer’s longsuffering glass bottle.

We met more big dogs and their tall outdoorsy owners than apartment-sized dogs and their little owners and we talked about what kind of dog we would want to have if we were wanting to have a dog. I would like to have an old one with extra skin that made him look sad and content to lay around in the sun and hoarsely bark on command. Jennifer says she would want a dark little dog with dark eyes and short hair that likes to sniff things and say nothing (something like the lab puppy we saw). Jennifer says she thinks I would want a bull dog. But then she said she said that only to hear me protest.

I do that too. I told her that when we get to bridges on the path we are like two pigs at a little trough rushing to get at it. She didn’t think so. Yesterday when we rested our sore feet by sitting around in the Golden Gate Park botanical garden and then watching the sun set on a bluff overlooking the bay and the bridge she said we had a perfect weekend. I tried not to think about our lives with tired clichés involving time and the ocean, or trees and light, systems and poetics, futures and histories, and just sit there close to Jennifer and be happy.

2009-01-13T13:04:00.000-08:00

FUN TIMES
In the Shower

In our new apartment in Berkeley we have a glass door on the shower that is perfect for scaring people. Jennifer and I do it all the time. Not that either of us has ever been really scared by the other but it makes us laugh every time. Maybe if you come visit us we could scare you too!

Jennifer drives herself to work now – enjoying the attention she gets from old obese men whose catheters hurt and our squealing alternator belt.

I started my Chinese class this week. Chun Laoshi is a drill sergeant. She screams at us when we makes mistakes – but only because we are wrong and we are in class. She’s actually really a nice person after class – jokey with a purple-tinged buzz-cut. She’s just an overbearing grandmother who screeches and calls us bad names. Our books are all in traditional characters so I’m scrambling trying to keep up. It’s good.

We’re really happy with our lives here. Now we just need to stop spending money.

2009-01-08T20:15:00.000-08:00

CALIFORNIA
We’re here

We’re subletting a studio apartment in a city of ageing hippies. The other day while perusing aisles of organic guacamole and bins of granola an ageing white-bearded man asked me how to get plastic bags in the bulk food section. I showed him where they kept the bags, and he said “cool, that’s cool man!” He tottered toward the checkout counter using his shopping cart as a walker – his cane hooked over the cart handle.

Berkeley is full of hybrid cars and long haired women on bikes. We live to the left of a Tibetan restaurant, over an Indonesian-Singaporean restaurant, next to a Salvadorian papusaria. We get up at 6:30 every morning and drink dark roast coffee, peel local oranges, and eat them with our granola. I’m teaching Jennifer how to drive herself to work so we take our time getting her there. By 8:15 I’m running under gnarled branches dripping in moss, past young Douglas Firs (which are only a several hundred years old and high), saying “g’ morning” to regular dog walkers and breathing in the morning fog.

Jennifer works at a nursing home. She says her patients are “low level” performers so she spends most of her times doing heavy transfers and helping her patients keep their pants on. We like California a lot.

We like to have long evenings together, watching Chinese TV, eating good food, and picking at each other’s noses.

2008-12-26T12:24:00.000-08:00

We left Kev and Val in New York.

ROADWAY
Snuffles

It’s been more than a week since we left New York and our friends. We U-Hauled to Ohio where we left our books and bought a Mitsubishi car. We left my family in Ohio with their still un-opened gifts and left-over Christmas cookies and cheesecakes. We left our jobs and apartment and our consistently hectic life and traded it in on a massive honeymoon suite ($49.95) at the Roadway Inn in Eau Claire, Wisconsin just a couple hours from Kevin Mast’s hometown.

Right now we’re in Sioux Lookout, Ontario catching up on odds and ends and Jennifer’s family. I’m trying not to be allergic to the family cat Boswell, and Jennifer is trying to find us a place to live in San Francisco. In between these fun tasks, we play games and I try to get reactions from Jennifer by insulting her and looking at her cards.

We’re sleeping nine or ten lethargic hours a day and I never even dream of staying up all night. The granola we eat in the morning is not the same granola we used to eat in New York, but it’s not bad (and there are little frozen blueberries). Driving a dark red family car whenever we want makes us feel like we are living too well, but that’s not a bad feeling either.

We didn’t cry when we left New York. Maybe we should have, but we didn't.

2008-12-07T23:53:00.000-08:00

SMILING
With The Talker

Mr. Pabi brought me and my books home from work on Saturday in his brand new Kia SUV – which seemed to be his pride and joy. I had two five foot stacks of annotated library books in my locker at work which never ceased to produce exclamations and incredulity at their sight by my co-workers. Mr. Pabi seems to be one of them most easily impressed. A recent citizen of the United States, Mr. Pabi lately of Ghana never ceases to smile and say Wow! when he sees me and shake my hand.

We listened to “Shout to the Lord” on our way to my apartment, and talked about how unhappy he is as a lifetime security guard. “I have a passion for criminal justice,” he says, “But it appears I am too old.” Mr. Pabi wants to work for the U.S. government, but to find a federal career in criminal justice you must be under 30 years old. Although becoming a citizen inspired quite a bit of flag pin wearing and general bouncing about, Mr. Obama, who after Jesus is the next best thing, took things to a whole other level. I thought Mr. Pabi's face would split in two the first time I saw him after the election. "We did it!" he smiled, incredulous with happiness.

Mr. Pabi says he has acid reflux and so he watches what he eats – only vegetables he says. His eyes are bloodshot, he stumbles a lot, his zipper is always down, and whenever he can sneak one he catches a nap in between watchman assignments. Mr. Pabi is soft spoken and hard to understand -- all you notice at first is the big smile and the extra handshakes at the beginning and end of conversations and chance encounters. When he’s not dressed in his security guard uniform, Mr. Pabi is a dapper looking man. If you would see him walking the streets of Manhattan on the way to his immigration law class he would want you to think “Who is this man! Wow! . . . Whoa! I’ve got to meet him! . . . Wow!” and so it goes.

Create your own visitor map!

2008-11-30T04:43:00.000-08:00

AHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Two more weeks of this

I slept late today and messed up Jennifer’s dinner plans. I don’t normally sleep more than 6 hours so I thought I would be safe. Nope. The boss told me I would be missed and congradulations on moving to California. Jennifer says we’re “stepping out into the unknown.” I have to think inside “not really.” Steven Curtis Chapman sang about this more than 10 years ago: ‘Saddle Up Your Horses’ and ‘Go West Young Man.’ Malicious Christian rock songs. We’re handing out our furniture like it’s Black Friday and we are a Wal-Mart in Long Island (a location known for its singular enactments of stupidity) – Just trying not to get trampled. The world seems to get even more sad and chaotic as the weeks go by.

John the tall old Mormon Indonesian with the bad knees and the flatulence was mugged until his whole face was huge and puffy and his money was gone while he was riding in an empty car on the 6 train at midnight on his way to work the other day. John is 74 years old and he has thick white hair like the grandson of the owner of an overseas Chinese tofu factory. He likes John Denver and Britney Spears and collecting broken figurines which he glues. He gives me glutinous rice wrapped with tin foil sometimes and he likes to go swimming in the public pool down at 23rd street. I haven’t seen him for a week now.

I think when we get to California I’m going to make a little circle with stones down by a river and live there for a week like Johanna Newsom. I’m not going to do anything but read Chinese poetry in Chinese, do fanciful etimologies, and eat seeds. That’s probably just a fantasy, but it’s a pretty good one. And it feels good to write it down. One summer when I was 21 I drove in my black truck to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and lived like a solitary nudist for a week under some pine trees. Not sure if that’s completely true, but it’s a pretty good memory.

2008-11-22T23:23:00.000-08:00

RITE
Of Glaring Quiet

“Come out and show us your comeliness again, “ Jennifer said in between syncopated claps, putting words to our understanding of the banality of the contemporary pageantry of classical music appreciation. The Capuçon-Angelich Trio, an ensemble of extremely talented young Frenchmen with burnished fiddles from the 18th century, fierce haircuts and wicked black shoes had just finished up Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2 in E.Minor, Opus 67: A fantastic whirlwind of drunken pageantry, ethereal dancing, relentless death marching, and of course melancholic reflections high in the clouds over a stilled field of stark, naked trees and stones as fall turns to winter.

Jennifer says I can do whatever I want with her when she dies. Except stand her on her head like an acrobatic yogi in full Mennonite dress, or allow a professional disemboweler to disembowel her. She thinks it would be good to save her ashes until I’m dead too then we can mix them up and scatter them to the four cardinals or maybe into the dead wind whistling over Shostakovich’s field – I think the Hunger Steppe in Western Kazakhstan might work. She wants me to play a recording of Quartet No. 6 and say nothing. Just the music. Then I can hand out programs which detail her life in all its small pleasures. If I’m dead – then she will get Matthew to do all this. “I love Matthew and Olivia,” she says. Presumably because she knows she can trust them with her dead body.

“I don’t know why anyone would play anything other than Shostakovich,” she said. “He must have really lived.” And I agreed. Haydn and Mendelssohn seem a bit trite, a bit disengaged from real life. Now I’m listening to John Fogerty, and thinking about moving on with life in a drunken drama of reckless passion – so that the long moment of utter silence at the end of the movement will be completely pregnant with meaning right before the ludicrous clapping starts.

2008-11-15T21:40:00.000-08:00

HORIZONTAL
Images from the Archive

09.18.2007 Northern Ontario. MERLE AND EDITH BURKHOLDER CROSS THEIR ARMS

08.03.2008 Gatlinburg, Tenn. RICHARD KING AND NOLAN BYLER ENJOY COOL AIR

08.03.2008 Gatlinburg, Tenn. WOMAN IN MID-STREAM

08.02.2008 Gatlinburg, Tenn. NOAH AND HIS GRANDMA IN THE VAN

07.26.2008 Museum of Natural History, New York. GENE AND AMY

07.26.2008 Museum of Natural History, New York. AMY TALKS EXCITEDLY

07.26.2008 Museum of Natural History, New York. STUFFED ANIMALS STARE

07.26.2008 Museum of Natural History, New York. GIRL ON A LEASH

07.04.2008 Slate Run, PA. LITTLE COUSINS

11.01.2008 Inwood, Manhattan, New York. IN ORDER TO FILL IN SOME APPARENT LACUNAE MATT TAKES PICTURES OF DARREN: ONE OF THE NICEST THINGS A FRIEND HAS DONE FOR DARREN IN SOME TIME.

2008-11-09T22:33:00.000-08:00

NOT REALLY
A Cricothroidotomy

This weekend I experienced something like what Olivia experiences every Saturday after an exhausting week of fixing children and their parents from across Big Valley: the depression of the feeling of ironic insignifiance which follows a period of intense anticipation and experiance. Not that I performed an emergency cricothroidotomy, or stuffed an eyeball back into someone’s face, or saved some small child from an early grave as my high-flying relatics probably have this past week. My life is not so regularly exciting so the occasional event requiring any sort of extended orchestration in real time just makes me anxious.

On Friday I put together an event which required four of my favorite academic authors to bus, train, and fly across the country to discuss some questions I’ve been emailing them for the last few months. So I dawned my best yellow shirt and matching tie with faintly Islamic designs and trotted down to Columbia University and introduced myself in person: Darren Byler, second year graduate student, small-timer of the first order.

It went really well – over 100 people from at least three states and the District of Columbia squeezed into a room with enough seats for 70. Even the first Uyghur to immigrate to America 40 years ago was there. We took two hours to talk our way through Uyghur history, culture, and politics – and then another sweaty hour eating Uyghur polo (pilaf) and samsa (dumplings). We had Uyghurs in dopas (skullcaps), Chinese officials from the UN, nervous human rights activists, and the occasional Yalie graduate student in there.

Back to my Olivia-like experience. When it was all over and the chairs were restacked, I was exhausted and cranky and disappointed. I spent weeks of my life putting this three hour event together – burning my life force for one short evening of frantic delegating and careful speaking. It was really nice to get some hearty Uyghur handshakes afterwards and it was nice to get to know the eminent figures in my field of study. But right now I’m just exhausted and depressed. Olivia usually feels better a couple hours into Saturday so maybe the good vibes will start rolling in soon. Right now I’m sitting in church listening to Rich Swartz talk about world religions (Christianity turns out to be the best one, he says) – so I’m thinking like a Hindu for the moment, just working the dharma.

2008-11-06T22:49:00.000-08:00

BUSY PHOTOS

From the Old Brown Armchair

2008-10-27T02:45:00.000-07:00

PENNSYLVANIA
Real Quiet

We ended up waiting for the bus home from Reading in New Hunan chatting up a pony-tailed Fujianese over stir-fried tofu. Central Pennsylvania is an interesting place to observe the trees and silent twisting roads and spend time with friends for a weekend. We went to bed early and slept late, ate well and laughed a lot.

It seems as though this is McCain and Palin country. Experience matters and if not that then a friendly “you guys are neat” or “ain’t that cool” from a high-energy evangelical will fill the pews or the stereo speakers. A man named Reiff with an excellent comb-over told us at the Evangelical Free church that God is unchangeable, and that we should all vote on November 4. A man named Doug told me that he isn’t a rascist. “If there was a black boxer from Pennsylvania fighting a white man from Ohio I would root for the black man – ‘cause I have more in common with him,” he said. The same would be true if both the white and black man were from PA he added, he would vote for the white man because he has more in common with him.

This afternoon after church and some perfectly baked pizza Jennifer and I and Gene and Amy went for a hike through some fantastic rock formations on a ridge overlooking rolling Appalachia in browns and oranges and reds. We dodged black-bumper Mennonites and tried not to step on velvety green moss and I poked Jennifer a lot just for fun. New York seems a lot farther than 3 hours away up there in the woods with Jennifer scrambling over rocks, aiming low to be safe. When we were upstairs in Gene and Amy’s house brushing the spinach out of our teeth, she whispered, “I like to think of this as our country adventure!”

2008-10-18T21:46:00.000-07:00

STYLE
Normal Life

This semester I am sitting in on a course with the great M. Taussig – anthropologist extraordinaire. He’s teaching a course on fictocriticism: the anthropology of estrangement. His basic point is that if we expose ourselves to things outside of what we consider normal we are able to see how what we consider normal is just as strange as what we at first consider strange: we are no more reasonable than any other strange people. When we understand this we become enchanted by “the normal” and we can potentially “make culture” through a careful telling the story of our own collective estrangement.

The class is fantastic not only because M. Taussig wears a different exotically woven shirt to every class, and tells wonderful stories of extreme behavior full of snorts, sarcastic reflexivity, and half-closed eyes (for concentration) – but because he tries to reinvigorates the world at large with electric mystical knowledge.

Last Tuesday I went to hear one of my favorite writers, Philip Gourevitch, down at Columbia and who should I see loafing in the back but the great M. Tuassig. Philip Gourevitch was talking about literature and terror (Abu Gharib, Rawanda), about how there might not be any common humanity, and about how the human story might be more about “making the other conform to my story of reality by any force necessary.” Philip has a “pessimistic view of history” grounded in the way “blood makes the fiction real.” But despite this tragic way of life he still has a firm trust in a style of life and writing that prefers the beautiful, the good sentence, the careful composition abstracted from the muddle of everyday power politics and re-presentation re-production. He believes in telling his own story just like M. Taussig. I’d like to try that lifestyle too; as I loaf along the backcloth of Chinese and Uyghur cultural history, through the streets of Foucault’s San Fransico, and the pines of Gary Snyder’s Northern Cascades with my normal wife Jennifer/

2008-10-15T18:18:00.000-07:00

FRIENDS
In Strange Places

Jennifer and I just came back to the city in a Bieber Bus full of strangers. We spent the weekend with people we once knew, but that was when we were different people. Now our friends are parents of smiling children, they own houses, run companies, can lots of apple pie filling. We’ve all changed and grown and become adults who think differently about how we fit in our worlds and what our worlds are.

We went to a flea market in Southern Ohio last weekend. It was full of white people selling Chinese things and making fudge for each other. Rows of consumerable knicknacks and collectable dustcatchers as far you could see. All my favorite brands of fun: Nascar, scented candles in interesting shapes, porcelain deer antlers with “Indian” beads, rings of pickled bologna. Harlan Barnhart would have liked the old tools here and there, but I have no eye for them. They just looked like sad pieces of junk to me. Sarah Palin had stopped by that small town last week and told the locals that she feels their pain: dead-end jobs that recently dead-ended, dead-beat dads that recently got a little bit deader down at the Manhattan Lounge. It’s a sad world of Vietnam Vets and methamphetamine. Zeb and Lisa and Josh and Terri are living right in the middle of it and trying to disrupt the toilet bowl spiral all around them. And that’s a good thing.

Shannon, my sister, and Rich just bought a house in the new buyer’s market. It’s a three-story antique mansion with floor-length mirrors and windows of filmy glass, slanting hardwood floors and heavy wrought iron doors in three layers of brick and ornate plaster. It looks like thousands of square feet of hard work, but if anyone can turn it into a treasure they can. It’s nice to have a museum in the family. I hope it can be brought back to life as a strange place in a very familiar world.

2008-09-29T00:23:00.000-07:00

STRANGE
Frames