The Dinnertray

Aging as History

Now listening to: The Sadies' "Darker Circles"

'specially: Track 7, 'Whispering Circles'

Fifteen years ago, both Rebecca Gates and Ken Stringfellow were playing in (separate) bands.  I recently saw a posting for a show they'd be playing together -- both are currently touring for solo careers that began some time ago.  I love that fifteen years ago, I was not expecting this show; just not thinking about it at all. Reading about it now, though, I have this thick, thick description of the event.

I had "Manos" by the Spinanes (Rebecca Gates' band with soon-to-be Built to Spill drummer Scott Plouf), backed by Tracy Chapman's self-titled album, on a cassette that I brought with me on a school trip to Australia.  I hear 'Spitfire' and think of bus or plane windows onto trees and clouds that looked unfamiliar just because I knew they were.   I remember listening to 'Please Return It' off "Amazing Disgrace" by the Posies (Ken Stringfellow's band) on extended, loud repeat while housesitting the summer before I left for college -- the joyous freedom of not having anyone around to be annoyed by my popsong obsession.

And now both bands are done*, and Gates and Stringfellow are playing solo shows, sometimes together.  I love that I have this extensive personal investment in this one event, that the time and energy I put into these bands, these songs, these artists has prepared in me a totally entangled reception of this event.  That wasn't the point at the time; I listened because, at any given moment under any given set of circumstances, that was what I wanted/chose to do.  Or someone else wanted/chose. History here isn't causal or contingent, it's the accumulation of discrete and overdetermined occasions that lead not to an event, but to a particular appreciation of it. An appreciation that I have because of how I spent my time, and how they spent theirs.

I'm old enough now that on my birthday, at least half my birthday cards make jokes about how women lie about their age.  I haven't done that yet - I may eventually, but I sort of don't like the thought of that particular lie.  In all my years I accumulate observations and responses, and I am the only thing holding all that past together. Which isn't important in any sense, but it's singular.  Without me doing it, it wouldn't happen.  Without all the time I spent sneaking Posies songs onto my college radio show (supposedly a folk/americana hour), or the the invitation emails I sent out that advertised a Spinanes-based party soundtrack, I wouldn't have this particular reaction to the combination of solo tours by Rebecca Gates and Ken Stringfellow.  And if that reaction didn't exist, it wouldn't be a loss to the world so much as a loss to me -- I love the sense of time I get from this whole process.

This isn't really about religion (Although, let's be honest. I've probably written more about music on this weblog than about religion. Sometimes tangentially, and sometimes to illustrate a point about religions, but still.), but it may be a nod to my approach to History.  I'll start a doctoral program at Northwestern this fall on North American Religions, and I think a big part of my first year is going to be familiarizing myself with history as a discipline and genre. And, as of now, my idea of history is more about appreciation of an event than determining its cause.

*(ETA) I stand excitedly corrected.  The Posies are not done and are 'bouts to release a new album.  Score!

Update

Now listening: Adele, "19"
'Specially: Track 4, 'Cold Shoulder'

I am not dead, but neither do I have a viable research proposal combining the work i want do do on Trinchard, post VII mass, traditioning, sacrifice, and the emergence/reification of the dominant religious form(s). So mostly I'm writing other things for the moment.

As a point of interest, however, i would like to point out that this blog, when examined by genderanalyzer.com, has a 59% chance of having been written by a guy.

Question Concerning Technology

Now Listening: Blind Pilot, '3 Rounds and a Sound'
'specially: Track 2, "The Story I heard"

Communication is a bit of a sacrament, or it can be. You lose some of that connection ("lit up, beyond question, with grace") when you know a thing without being given it. When your available information exceeds the conversation you can have. So do you press the conversation, force it to adjust to outside information, or do you let the nuances of that conversation open, or not open, at its own pace?

I like the latter.

In Praise of Lazy

Now listening: Whiskeytown, "Strangers Almanac"
Especially: Track 9, 'Waiting to Derail'

A week is barely time to get one's house in order, catch up on fiction and make new charts & tables of grammar points to prepare for summer language study.  It being all the time there is, though, it'll do.

I'm without my computer for the week, which keeps me on track, though; it's amazing how much more productive i am without constant internet access.  The first two mornings I woke up with an urge to check email, and had to distract myself with books and breakfast and a walk.  Going to bed it's the same: without email, facebook, online shopping, how do I know I've completed my day?

I titled this entry "In Praise of Lazy", because I'd like to express my adulation for low-speed productivity.  Not inactivity, just not furious, driven, industrialized nations productivity.  The sort of quiet plodding best suited to life in a small tower on a midsize island, where you mostly eat bread and beer and produce, and write in notebooks while listening to casette tapes you made of college radio shows.  And every day, somehow, there's still time to wash dishes and sleep soundly and check the horizon for new kinds of sailing vessels, even while you're reading and writing and eating, which is all I do anyway, but here and now these things take up more time.

The beauty of city living is, honestly, the people.  Whom I love.  And I feel inhuman wishing for an island without them, wishing for solitude and focus.  I mean, I get why folks sometimes want to be quietists; but I also get why larger communities hold them in suspicion.  It's a fine line between self and others.

Symmetry and Empire

Now Listening: The National, "Boxer"
'Specially: Track 2, "Mistaken for Strangers"

There have been some beautiful sunsets this month. Beauty to break you. And whether their beauty or my breaking came first, I cannot tell. Post hoc is not propter hoc, necessarily.

At the coffee shop the other day I ended up sitting near a student of mine from a while back. We said 'hi', and then moved on to our own things. My thing was a book by a neo-traditionalist Jesuit disgruntled about the "diabolical feminine" bouncing around in the American church today (SoGoddamnAwesome.); hers? A conversation of undergraduate proportions. Drama, and punkrock, and new knowledge. The group spent like 10 minutes trying to remember how English does the subjunctive. It is not, we learned, by adverbs. Or by participles. It is by ... some other thing. My tongue was near bit off as the two of us (tongue and I) wrestled with the possibility of conversational intervention. I, and the book in front of me, won -- my tongue had to be content with the americano there on the bar (temperature, texture; we should be so lucky.)

It is finals. I am writing two papers. One proposes to examine 'Apostasy Within', the book I refer to above as Awesome (a completely reasonable assessment) through comparison to a couple of ethnographic treatments of refugee/victim communities - that is, groups (with individual experiences, but collective stories; individual sensations, collective explanations) who have been from their origins untimely ripped. I'm looking at the work of Liisa Malkki, and the Hutu refugees who escaped Tutsi massacres to settle in either towns or camps - camp settlers end up a little pissed at the town settlers who 'move on' to a certain extent from the collective story, who dissipate its centrality instead of repeating it into myth. Veen Das looks at the victims of partition violence in the India/Pakistan split, and then at the anti-Sikh riots following the assassination of Indira Gandhi. She talks about the difference between 1) finding 'everyday' outlets for pain in the creation of new stories and structures, and 2) repeating stories without authorial voice, without personality, stories recycled and recapitulated without character development that become the rumors that instigate mob violence. And I'm comparing that to neo-traditionalist American catholicism. Because I see symmetry, perhaps, in places that are not altogether obvious. That may not, altogether, exist.

Anyway, I'm not sure exactly what I mean by supplementing that 'symmetry' with 'empire' in my title above. Except that empire is not just about control, regulation, oppression, colonialist expansion. It's about structured relations, some of them hierarchical, some of them just based on contingency: on proximity and working together.

Tradition is my working term. It's about power, sure, but about connection too.

Also, I need to write something today on scripture, language, and conciliar documents/documentation. Eh.

Happy 2008

Now Listening: Red House Painters "Red Perspective"
'Specially : Track 5, 'New Jersey'

The new ipod puts the lock toggle in a different place than I'm used to.

I depend a lot, usually, on a certain tactile memory; I like to be able to flip my phone on, apply chapstick and unlock my ipod without checking up on my fingers, because then I don't have to stop paying attention to traffic, or conversation or whateverhaveyou. So this new ipod configuration is pretty annoying, even if the ipod itself? Is pretty.

If you've ever met me, or heard me tell the story about the time my dad tried to teach me to drive, you might be suprised at the idea that I have any sort of physical coordination whatsoever, but there you are.

This relates in no way at all to religion, politics, or the space between.

Happy 2008!

All kinds, they say

Now listening to : Band of Horses, "Cease to Begin"
'Specially : Track 1, 'Is There A Ghost'

I am after travels, finally, and a walk around wallingford this afternoon was lovely and familiar and full of grace. Or, my ipod was full of Band of Horses and Rogue Wave and Galaxie 500 and Arcade Fire, and Blonde Redhead and other things that soar, which is, operationally, the same.

In San Diego, I thought of paper topics (the place of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert in the history of Jewish and Catholic humor, respectively; the history of academic disciplines, the breakoffs and conjoinings, the context that makes inter-disciplinarity possible and disruptive; a comparative analysis of religion courses offered by each state as transfer credit from community colleges to 4 year state institutions; Cheshire Calhoun's moral failure as a supplement or interrupt to Judith Butler's negotiation of gay rights in the world of Islamophobia) and ate excellently (avocado tempura, breakfast sandwiches, whiskey sours) and got around via public transports (busing and footing and $42 cab rides to Clarmont). I spent time with lovely people and ideas, and though it was too smoggy to see Mexico, I feel I got my weekend's worth.

Tacoma was, as ever, like closing my eyes and turning on my fingers.

Seattle is now, and cold, and caffeinated; and my apartment is a mess of things temporarily set aside (while I hunt for this book to write this section about it, and drop this bracelet onto that coffee table because the jewelery box isn't on the way from the door, and leave the nutella jar by my bed in case I want it again).

I'm anticipating a month of visits and visitations, and exchanges. And musical accompaniment. And every once in a while at least the intention of an entry here.

hobgoblinstancy

Now listening: Dinosaur Jr., "Bug"
'Specially : Track 7, 'Budge'

But only because I haven't come to a real decision on Billy Joel's "The Stranger" yet. You can't rush things from the 70's. The 80's tried to do it, and look what happened there. INSANITY.

Other Oceans

Now Listening : The Hot Toddies, "Smell The Mitten"
'Specially : Track 11, 'Ocean'

When I think 'ocean', I don't at all think beach. When I think of 'beach', my first thoughts are of sun and sand and parasols, and none of those are things I associate with the ocean. If I have 'ocean' in my head to begin with, and then think 'beach', then my thoughts are rocks and mist and spray and walking.

School begins next week in earnest; the importance of this, right now, pales in comparison to the connotational possibilities of 'ocean'.

Naming of Parts; of Passages (It is not -only- a Number)

Now Listening : Dismemberment Plan, "!"
'Specially : Track 12, 'Rusty'

(First off, have you watched the whole "Prisoner" series? Do you get the apesuit thing? Can you please pay that knowledge forward? Thanks.)

A tendency towards naming.

Sure, it could signify the desire to enclose - foreclose - pieces of the outside world. To own by knowing. To establish the specific ground over which one enjoys the sole hermeneutic right. In Joss Whedon's audio commentary to the season 4 Finale episode of Buffy, he talks about the gendered distinction - of businesslike and hierarchical men who name things, and natural and egalitarian women who do not. Whedon's 'men' name to colonize Heidegger's clearing, making and using a technological efficiency - all light to see by, none to illuminate. Whedon's 'women' live in the clearing, allowing it its own development, its own light-ening. It's the conundrum: how could one philosophical concept be tapped for both national socialism and ecofeminism? Revelation is always causing problems.

So it (naming) could be a way to (de)limit the outside world.

But if one names things, not to build a fence around them, but to affix capricious internal developments to the solidity of the physical - is that an option? The self is always fuzzy; others always distinct. If naming is not to own the clearing, but to own a passing emotional state of one's own by setting it up in the clearing. A thought/theme/meme which can best be comprehended and maintained by an externalization, an association of it with something in the world by use of a coordinating name -- like naming a child, instead of a landmass. The child will grow up and away, and you know that; that's why you give it the name. The child will take what was in the name and carry it forward into the future. Develop it, but also preserve it. Development is always in continuity with any origins. This is a tautology.

If you're going to go around gendering the mehanics of naming, I'd far rather associate my own (female) gender with this second kind of naming, instead of the passive 'openness' from before. Of course I'd rather it weren't limited to 'women', but that's beside the point, since gender isn't the operating variable here; creation is. Which is easy to associate with the female, 'specially if you're a humanities type of kid; but that association is a text different from the text it's purporting to interpret.

I've been missing, lately, studying literature. In a literary mode. It's a methodology that gets dismissed by, and thereby lost to, most students. It seems impractical and luxurious, because narratives aren't materially productive. They're personally productive, but only if a person reads/hears/interrogates them, and only elites do (or, so go the snotnosed kids).

I really, really, disagree. I think the fluidity of naming - of talking about, even - gets lost on those who don't accomodate literary agendas. Naming is not just something we do to pin down objects, to leave them lying and pinned and done. Naming is (also. sometimes. in potential.) a means, not only of subjects coming into comprehension (holding. understanding) of themselves, but making their subjectivity useful (materially. as a new material/substrate.) to the outside world. Statistics look cleaner because we are, all of us, ideologically habituated to think of the cleanliness and perfection of mathematics as 'obvious'. That, too, is a narrative; and fine, as narratives go. But not always a trump card. There are four suits in a deck of cards - and some games, I hear, where the trump card changes with the hand.

Speaking of which : who's up for a poker night? Shoe Money Tonight.