This Vanity Fair article by Kurt Anderson (Studio 360) addressing American nostalgia and the lack of a cultural turn over the past 20 years is electric. I can’t stop talking about many of the dots he connects, even if I don’t agree with them all. I was especially interested in the points about corporations controlling the distribution of culture at the end, his thoughts about Americans feeling unique and specialized in spite of our sameness, and his comments about a technology overload maybe making jeans and t-shirt culture really comforting.
Archives for category: chilly
Ever since I heard a story about someone’s mother pissing blood, turning up with advanced cancer and croaking I’ve been terrified to look into the toilet bowl after going. But tonight, I finally looked, and there was inky gray water, lake water, sort of slushing around, a tiny weather system inside of a porcelain cloud.
My grandfather started dying more than ten years ago. That’s when everybody first found out that he had lymphoma, the bad kind that takes you slowly. He’s been held together with scotch tape for the last few years, but somehow he and my grandmother have found dignity and a way to still drive an hour on Indiana state roads from their house on a lake to the nearest town where their doctors and extended family live.
I have a video of my grandfather and I walking across his property to the water I shot a few years back, before the weight left him. “Here’s where I’m going to build the dock,” he says on the video, pointing to a few tires visible through the surface. It’s that little stuff that’s kept him going, the thought of buying another place on Klinger Lake as a family summer home, of piecing together piers and harvesting.
He used to buy a new truck every year, and he had a string of Irish setters I’d see in the back of them over the years. Star, Misty. Then Gillie. When she died a few years ago my cousin Ross started to ask, “where’s Gill–” during the Christmas meal. He stopped himself, but anyone could have made the slip. Because she’d always just been around in one incarnation or another.
The very reason the weather starts here, is nursed along here, is work
As much as the things in my head I read or saw, was given rather than experienced
I’m really in the water, broth in sips, very much believing I exist
because of what’s around me, copper kettle
more than what I’m made of–an elevation of bones, hair, and teeth bound up and sung
is Gala Bent’s art on the cover of this week’s Stranger. I haven’t read the thing for months, sworn it off really. I finally have a reason to pick up a copy:
Last night I dreamt about a sort-of cabinet of natural curiosities. I was working in a store that had this large wooden case with lots of tiny drawers and shelves, and inside each one was something different. Snail shells, dollar store junk, bitter scrolls that taste like honey. Then I woke up and imagined a grand life’s work of building a cabinet like an ark around your whole living room and filling each drawer with something small and loving.
I found this letter to the editor about five years ago in the Muncie, Indiana Star Press. Now I never liked Bush at all, but this guy? He takes the cake.
Please, please read the last paragraph. I can’t believe it actually made it into print.
They comfort you all year long. Comfort them this holiday season.
I love this MoMA interactive site from their exhibition Paper: Pressed, Stained, Slashed, Folded. So simple it’s genius. Check it out here.
The very hyped reproduction of Jung’s Red Book, retailing for $300, is both overblown and out of range. But something about the whole process; discovering a hidden masterpiece from a vault in Zurich and the scanning and preservation of the work before publishing really appeal to me:
When you’re really pregnant, I mean maybe days away from the big event, your feet still look the same in shoes.
Some Christians say that Christ mysteriously hovers around the bread and wine (if you’re not, say, Catholic or Lutheran or Episcopal or Eastern Orthodox) but doesn’t embody it. But if you are Catholic or the like, you probably believe that Christ actually hops into each loaf and bottle after being blessed, literally embodying the elements.
I went to a Lutheran high school and got in a fight with Mr. LeBow, my history teacher, in the middle of class one day about this. Why shouldn’t any true believer be allowed to take communion with any church body? That confused me to pieces. It’s because, according to Mr. LeBow, if I did I might be damning myself as an unconfirmed member of his church that believes Christ isn’t a symbol in the wine and bread, but the actual bloody wine and fleshy bread. When he said that my cheeks turned red hot. I was an outsider right then, at that school, when the whole reason I took Jesus in my heart is because I believe he wants everyone in his.
And I still believe that if Jesus is real, of course he can swoop over thousands of stale loaves, millions of tiny pale biscuits each Sunday and make them body. And even though I’m sure he prefers turning wine into blood he can do it to tiny plastic grape juice cups, too. It’s like every Sunday a million miles of his veins and skin covers the whole planet, turning us into something else entirely cooler and more hopeful than we realize.
Drove through all kinds of weather to get to Portland Saturday. Once we arrived it was tame and gentle outside, quite right for hot chocolate, then even warm Halloween night.
Off to Portland for the weekend with high hopes of stopping at Sweet Pea for banana bread, brunch, something or another:
Being pregnant and considered “high risk” for catching swine flu and it, you know, killing me, my parents are so worried that I’ll contract the virus–the “high-knee” as my dad calls it–it’s become completely nutty. At dinner last night my dad changed his shirt after riding the bus, even though he had a coat on, washed his hands three times before the meal, and made everyone put a napkin over a loaf of bread before cutting.
It’s these sorts of antics that convince me I’m a goner. That irony will win, that of course the high-knee will be mine. Which makes me really, really want a blue knee high right now. Five weeks and counting.
weatherspoon 