Monday, February 27, 2006
home for lunch.....
ok, so coming home for lunch is a bad idea.......for starts...i am sorely tempted to blow off the 1:30 pm meeting in danville that prompted me to come on home for a bite as it is on my way.......tempted because after my nice 2 hour nap yesterday my body thinks it needs a similar nap this afternoon.......oy......i am tired because i slept badly last night......what with my preferred pillows on the loveseat in plain view.....it was all i could do not to get up and switch them out.....as it was the supposedly floppy pillow has too much height.......i ended up throwing it to the floor at some point....making do with the pillowthatcameinabox and promised to remember my head.......i must have fallen asleep at that point....but did not awake refreshed at all.....curiously, i had 2 different dream sequences.....the first before i woke up and started fretting over the pillows involved a dairymart sort of place, and an argument with a guy who was filling his pepsi mega-cup with ice from the snocone machine.......as if i could care about that?!........and then post-pillow dreams focused on driving around in an unfamiliar neighborhood with a woman who was late for a dinner.....and when we got to the dinner she started having chest pains in the foyer.....and she turned and asked me if i could call her son to go and bring over her infant twin grandsons that she hadn't yet seen, just in case she didn't make it through her heart attack.......and then she calmly walked down the stairs to the dinner table and had a seat.......that was a curious detail in the dream.....the house must have been some sort of split level, as dinner was set up down the steps rather than up the steps......go figure.........and the business of twins that haven't yet been seen......i have no idea where that comes from in my backbrain regions.......the sequence might make an interesting short story if cobbled together by a clever author........speaking of writers and writing.......the quote of the day on my personalized google desktop was "I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street." - Virginia Woolf.....i like the way she thinks.............
Sunday, February 26, 2006
greatest hits.....
ok, so i did get a few openable gifts last evening.....a nice bottle of gewurtztraminer from andrew and michelle, and some neil youngs cd's......prairie wind....the one he made in earnest just before he had a brain aneurysym repaired....and a greatest hits cd.......wow...the greatest hits were just that.....carefully selected renditions of his best music....including a 10+ minute version of cowgirl in the sand.......and a version of helpless that i hadn't heard before......very nice.......we listened to it through before i wandered off to bed about 9:00 pm.....i was utterly exhausted....and wanted to get maximum sleep.....as i think i should continue to do now that i am 50......get lots and lots of refreshing sleep......though i get the impression that neil, who is much older than 50......is much too busy for such things as max sleep.......and he is making out just fine..............
more on brokeback mountain.....
ok, so......i do have more to say about the movie.......that i didn't get to say over dinner given that my mother was there and she made it clear that she wasn't about to talk about that movie.....there were touches that i found pleasing/telling about the cowboys....the movie begins with ennis carrying his few belongings in a paper sack.......and there is a critical moment late in the film when he leaves with essentials in another paper sack.......that was such a touching and tender tear-filled moment.......say what you will about the morality of love......that scene was one of genuine love......and supurb acting.....it also illustrated simply how ennis was a man who needed very little, especially with words to express himself, but what he did need he needed deeply......i was moved by the scene where jack shows up from texas after he learns of the divorce....and he gets all mad that ennis won't change his planned weekend with his daughters to go fishing with jack......ennis wasn't about to abandon his children as he himself had been left alone.....yeah,yeah,yeah...not abandoned in the same way....but left alone when he could have been there....ennis couldn't do that......i have seen a few other heath ledger movies.....regretable movies......but his performance was as fine as olivier in this venue......i believe he was a cowboy torn between love for his family and his way of life....and love for the love of his life.................and that would be a hard emotion to fake if you were just a marginal actor............
birthday card of note.....
ok, so....andrew's handwritten addition to the card he and michelle brought:
ok, so
ok, so
50 down
50 to go
that's my boy.........
ok, so
ok, so
50 down
50 to go
that's my boy.........
the morning after....
ok,so......the firm pillow fulfilled it's function to the max.....the floppy pillow had a tad too much loft but i did sleep well....still congested.......but it may be too early to tell as i should probably have the duvet cover dry-cleaned and the rest of the bedding washed until i pass judgement.......wonder if i could just beat the pillow down to regulation thickness before bedtime this evening?........
Saturday, February 25, 2006
firm and floppy......
ok, so......i ended up driving to lexington to see brokeback mountain by myself.....one friend was sick and the other couldn't go to the early show that i had to see if i wanted to get back in time for my own birthday supper.....and it worked out well...given that i intended to shop for pillows.....pillow shopping is personal and not intended for public view........especially after such a tragic film......linens and things in hamburg had an entire section dedicated to all things head-support.....feathers, poly, gel-cores, and all manner of fillings........i did find a pillow that came in a box that promises to remember my head.....i was mostly attracted by the weight and firmness.....so similar to my current heavy bottom feather pillow......and then there is the faux feather floppy pillow touted as the perfect thing for stomach sleepers.....it is truly loose and pliant........pricey but perfect........my trip home was made extra mournful by the simulcast of the met opera's performance of samson and delilah.....so very sad to listen to despite my lack of french skills.......and so my guests are leaving (andrew, michelle, grandma).....and i am emotionally spent...with being old, with having to break in new bedding, with the depressing film......with lex traffic......the good news.....my gift entails a trip to nyc to see museums during my middle child's spring break.....all i have to do is to pin down dates/times.......i always function better with a trip to look forward to....
from writer's almanac....february 25
ok, so....this from Garrison Keillor......on this my 50th birthday...
Poem: "When I am gone, recall my hair" by Edith Wharton from Edith Wharton: Selected Poems. © The Library of America.
When I am gone, recall my hair
When I am gone, recall my hair,
Not for the light it used to hold,
But that your tough, enmeshed there,
As turned it to a younger gold.
Recall my hands, that were not soft
Or white or fine beyond expressing,
Till they had slept so long and oft,
So warm and close, in your possessing.
Recall my eyes, that used to lie
Blind pools with summer's wreckage strewn.
You cleared the drift, but in their sky
You hung no image but your own.
Recall my mouth, that knew not how
A kiss is cradled and takes wing,
Yet fluttered like a nest-hung bough
When you had touched it like the Spring.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the "Father of Modern Pathology," Giovanni Battista Morgagni, born in Forli, Italy (1682). He's remembered today for his book On the Seats and Causes of Disease, published in 1761, in which he describes in great detail the results of 640 autopsies he performed on patients who died from diseases. It's considered one of the most important works in the history of medicine. Before Morgagni, it was still widely believed that diseases were caused by an imbalance in four human fluids called humors—phlegm, blood, gall and choler. Morgagni laid the foundation for modern pathology.
It's the birthday of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, born in Limoges, France (1841). He was born into a family of artisans. His father was a tailor and his mother a dressmaker. He showed an early talent for drawing, and so he was apprenticed to a porcelain painter when he was just thirteen years old. He might have spent the rest of his life decorating plates with bouquets of flowers, but he decided early on that he wanted to be a real painter.
He saved up his own money to take evening classes in drawing and anatomy. He didn't learn much from his teachers, but a group of his classmates introduced him to a new idea that art should try to be closer to life and free from past tradition. One of these classmates was Claude Monet and the idea they'd come up with would become known as Impressionism.
At the time, paintings were produced in studios and they were painstakingly sketched out before the painter even began to put any color on the canvas. But Renoir and his friends began to travel out into the countryside with their canvases. They were among the first professional painters in the world to paint directly from nature, painting straight onto the canvas.
The first exhibition of these Impressionist paintings came in 1874, and they created a stir in the art world, but many art critics thought they were ugly and amateurish. But they eventually caught on.
Renoir said, "In painting, as in the other arts, there's not a single process, no matter how insignificant, which can be reasonably made into a formula. You come to nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat."
It's the birthday of novelist Karl May, (books by this author) born in Ernstthal, Germany (1842). He was in prison when he began to read about American pioneers and cowboys and Indians and got the idea for a series of novels about the adventures of a heroic German immigrant named Charley and his Apache Indian friend Winnetou. As soon as he published the books, they became hugely popular, especially among German adolescent boys. His novels became some of the most widely read books in Europe.
May's novels are still incredibly popular in Germany. Many of his novels have been made into movies and TV shows, and in northern Germany thousands of people still go to see an annual festival that puts on plays based on May's plots.
It's the birthday of novelist and critic Anthony Burgess, (books by this author) born John Anthony Burgess Wilson in Manchester, England (1917). He had written several novels, none of which was particularly successful, when, in 1959, he began to suffer from severe headaches. He went to see a doctor and he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The doctor told him he only had one year to live.
Burgess wrote five novels in that following year, the year he believed to be his last. The diagnosis turned out to be incorrect. He's best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange (1962). It begins: "There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter."
I suppose i appreciate being born on the same day as Renoir than the rest....
Poem: "When I am gone, recall my hair" by Edith Wharton from Edith Wharton: Selected Poems. © The Library of America.
When I am gone, recall my hair
When I am gone, recall my hair,
Not for the light it used to hold,
But that your tough, enmeshed there,
As turned it to a younger gold.
Recall my hands, that were not soft
Or white or fine beyond expressing,
Till they had slept so long and oft,
So warm and close, in your possessing.
Recall my eyes, that used to lie
Blind pools with summer's wreckage strewn.
You cleared the drift, but in their sky
You hung no image but your own.
Recall my mouth, that knew not how
A kiss is cradled and takes wing,
Yet fluttered like a nest-hung bough
When you had touched it like the Spring.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the "Father of Modern Pathology," Giovanni Battista Morgagni, born in Forli, Italy (1682). He's remembered today for his book On the Seats and Causes of Disease, published in 1761, in which he describes in great detail the results of 640 autopsies he performed on patients who died from diseases. It's considered one of the most important works in the history of medicine. Before Morgagni, it was still widely believed that diseases were caused by an imbalance in four human fluids called humors—phlegm, blood, gall and choler. Morgagni laid the foundation for modern pathology.
It's the birthday of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, born in Limoges, France (1841). He was born into a family of artisans. His father was a tailor and his mother a dressmaker. He showed an early talent for drawing, and so he was apprenticed to a porcelain painter when he was just thirteen years old. He might have spent the rest of his life decorating plates with bouquets of flowers, but he decided early on that he wanted to be a real painter.
He saved up his own money to take evening classes in drawing and anatomy. He didn't learn much from his teachers, but a group of his classmates introduced him to a new idea that art should try to be closer to life and free from past tradition. One of these classmates was Claude Monet and the idea they'd come up with would become known as Impressionism.
At the time, paintings were produced in studios and they were painstakingly sketched out before the painter even began to put any color on the canvas. But Renoir and his friends began to travel out into the countryside with their canvases. They were among the first professional painters in the world to paint directly from nature, painting straight onto the canvas.
The first exhibition of these Impressionist paintings came in 1874, and they created a stir in the art world, but many art critics thought they were ugly and amateurish. But they eventually caught on.
Renoir said, "In painting, as in the other arts, there's not a single process, no matter how insignificant, which can be reasonably made into a formula. You come to nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat."
It's the birthday of novelist Karl May, (books by this author) born in Ernstthal, Germany (1842). He was in prison when he began to read about American pioneers and cowboys and Indians and got the idea for a series of novels about the adventures of a heroic German immigrant named Charley and his Apache Indian friend Winnetou. As soon as he published the books, they became hugely popular, especially among German adolescent boys. His novels became some of the most widely read books in Europe.
May's novels are still incredibly popular in Germany. Many of his novels have been made into movies and TV shows, and in northern Germany thousands of people still go to see an annual festival that puts on plays based on May's plots.
It's the birthday of novelist and critic Anthony Burgess, (books by this author) born John Anthony Burgess Wilson in Manchester, England (1917). He had written several novels, none of which was particularly successful, when, in 1959, he began to suffer from severe headaches. He went to see a doctor and he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The doctor told him he only had one year to live.
Burgess wrote five novels in that following year, the year he believed to be his last. The diagnosis turned out to be incorrect. He's best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange (1962). It begins: "There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter."
I suppose i appreciate being born on the same day as Renoir than the rest....
hypocrits.......
ok, so i have to weigh in on the big issues......so here it is on the eve of my big day........for the united states government to withhold all monetary support for the legally elected and democratic hamas party in palestine......because they are a terrorist faction....but agree to the takeover of 5 eastern american ports by a dubai company....despite the detail that the 9-11 terrorists were funded through dubai and may have had training ties there............seems a but much to swallow............lets revisit the facts.....we want democracy in the middle east except when we don't like the winner....and we have disdain for terrorists except when they want to run our ports...............well, if dubya says i shouldn't worry (my pretty little head) about port security.........
Friday, February 24, 2006
random olympic moment......
ok, so my friend gail did not meet me at the hub this afternoon at 3:00 as planned.....turns out she quit earlier on......and was not able to make another plan with me.......i did happen to run in to david's parents....a pleasure in that i do not run into them often....and they are such fine folks......these days i appreciate people that i have known for a long time......i recall meeting them at the home of mutual friends when andrew was a baby...and before david was born......but i idgress from the games......i ended up at home before i had intended to be home....and decided to walk on the treadmill.......an activity pleasantly interrupted by birthday greetings from my second born......and when i turned ont he television it was for the ending of the women's 30k cross-country freestyle race......30k=about 18 miles.....byw......and in the lead pack were women from russia, the czech republic, poland and norway....and they all looked just exhausted.....and the woman from poland looked to have the advantage over the favorite from russia and allthesudden the czech willed herself ahead and over the line......and then she collasped onto the snow, followed by the czech( for silver) and the russian( for bronze)...everybody was down.......and then......a little bundle of pink toddled out to her mom ( the gold medal winner)as she lay upon the ground....as if to say....mamma...its over....let's play.......it was a tear-jerker moment........turns out the russian also is a newish mamma.......such a touching bit of reality for friday afternoon television that i won't soon forget.............
music to munch by......
ok, so i am really enjoying my newish sets of songs that i play on my pda while i eat my lunch......which today, for those who keep score, was leftover couscous, stuffed grape leaves, feta, and cucumbers in sour cream and onion......the artic monkeys were first up.....with fakes tales of san francisco.......i like this song.....it takes me back to vintage david bowie.......suffragette city or the like......lots of energy, intriguing lyrics, and some reminiscent phrasing.....gosh, but that song came out in 1976.....i can recall once knowing the lyrics.....i am trying to spent the day feeling 49 to its fullest before facing fifty in the morning.....are there lyrics to feeling 49?......i have a bit of time left on my lunch hour....maybe i could come up with a few lines....
Thursday, February 23, 2006
putting two and two together......
ok, so.....i had an epiphany of sorts this afternoon in my thursday county.....the environmentalists were chatting with the front office folks about the epidemic of bedbugs seen in lexington....and the conversation turned to what to do about such things in one's own home....and the specifics were discussed...such as the statute of limitations on bedclothes, including mattress and pillows.....and the suggestion was made that pillows should be replaced every 2-3 years...if for no other reason than the dust, dustmites and other varmits that are attracted to human dander.....yeach!.....and then it dawned on me......i have been using the same down pillows for longer than 2-3 years........to be truthful....i am still using the same pillows (one firm feather pillow and one floppy feather pillow.....floppy goes on top...got it?)......since i left home for college.....and probably longer than that.....so we are talking a minimum of 32 years.....omg....this could explain my constant congestion and sinusitis.......maybe i am just allergic to my favorite pillows......breaking away will be tough.....my floppy pillow is so necessary for sleep that i take it with me when i travel......it has been transatlantic more than most people i know.......but i am willing to seek out replacements if it means that i can breathe easily again.............
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
miscarriage.....
ok, so my book club came to a vote at a high point in the conversation....how many women present had suffered a miscarriage?........and 5/6 women present had done just that.........women that not on my radar for such loss............so much more in common that i thought previously..............stories to share aside from book club, obviously.................the woman present who had never miscarried was actually the oldest to conceive and the oldest to deliver.....her first and only pregnancy.........who knew?.................but back to loss.......there was discussion of what the other children had said after loss.......i recall both of our sons asking me about the baby that didn't come home from the hospital.....,much simpler than sara who miscarried at 20 weeks......i had no idea..........abortion is one thing, but the trauma of miscarriage is more to the point of a woman's existence..........
entertaining interlude.......
ok, so i left my pda's rhapsody music program playing when i took the stairs to warm up my pasta and chicken/sundriedtomato sausage leftover lunch to the second-story kitchennette microwave.....and as i came back into my corridor the refrain from a mountain goats tune was playing....'i'm going to kill everybody in this room'.......luckily...nobody else was in the building.................few of my work acquaintence would understand..............
positive body image......
ok, so.....the winter olympics are good for my soul......because i see msyelf in the women competing more often than not........on the women's speed skating events...in downhill and slalom.....in bobsled........in cross country......rugged, endurance-oriented females are built for strength.......with appropriately designed hips, thighs....etc.....frail women are selectively eliminated.....by death or disqualification.......
book club......
ok, so book club went very well....mostly because the foods we served are part of our usual fare.......hummus, stuffed grape leaves, couscous, sauteed spinach with onions and garlic, cucumbers in sour cream with scallions, marinated baked fish fillets.........the book seemed to take a back seat to the meal....not our intentions.....lamb is a brilliantly irreverant take on jesus aka joshua's life between the scene at the temple when he was 12 and his baptism at age 30 or so........we did discuss the middle east's conflict with regards to islam and the portrayal of the holy one.....and decided that the portrayal of jesus as blond and blue eyed is just as profane........a small group of us will travel to lex saturday to see brokeback mountain........in summary......a grand evening with good friends............
more mea culpa.....
ok, so i completely forgot to wish a fellow february birthday person happy birthday a while back.........for the record she is the oldest 19 year-old i know........one of these days i will cry uncle and offer to pay you to help me figure out my playlist problems..............but i still hope to navigate the maze that is music management on my own............hope you had a great day.........
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
angst abated.......
ok, so......the meanest mamma around has been in a decided funk since christmas....when an untranslated letter turned up in amongst papers that were being sorted.....a letter from my cousin in lambsheim...the one we visited on our grand roots tour.......and when my eldest read it out to me with his college acquired skills...i was horrified....that he was saddened that we(read this as I) had not kept up correspondence and if he did not hear from us he would assume that something was terribly wrong.....and well...you know the rest...the letter was dated more than a year ago.....more than 2 years ago......and it must have come when my life was in flux....and when i had nobody to translate......and it was set aside and then forgotten.....i have been in a state of semi-despair since andrew read the letter aloud.....and that moment comes back to me at times when i am otherwise self-flagelating.......and then i walked out to the road to get the mail this evening....to find not just a letter from lambsheim...but a 50th birthday card.....omg......andrew must certainly have written to let them know that i am feeble and forgetful......the contents of the envelope...both card and letter are auf deutsch.......so i will have to wait for my eldest to translate again.........regardless.....i am overjoyed that we have repaired the breech......and that my old-world relations do not think ill of me.......life is good.....well, except for the turning fifty part......but turning 50 is better than the alternative.......
Monday, February 20, 2006
still in a state of regret......
ok, so i am more than 48 hours since i mistakenly deleted downloaded music from the desktop that i thought was correctly transferred to my documents file.....each song seems to be in said documents file but none will agree to be imported into any of the available music management programs.....and thus i can play them only one at a time rather than in a playlist......and i feel like i should be able to figure this out....think scarlett o'hara int he classic scene where she thrusts the dirt up to the sky and declares that she will never be hungry again.....i will make this music play......just not on this day............because i am old and need my rest.....maybe tomorrow......
answering machine.....
ok, so the message on the answering machine...on this president's day when i worked and most of the nation did not......cayle, this is courtney.......you hadn't called me today, but if you do call i cannot talk to you on the phone because i have lost my phone priviledges....so don't call....see you tomorrow........being 13 doesn't get any more confusing than that................
Sunday, February 19, 2006
completion....
ok, so in addition to cleaning my kitchen and making a mockery of cleaning up my harddrive.......i also finished tom wolfe's tome my name is charlotte simmons.......a cuationary tale of a backwoodsy yet brilliant girl from appalachia who earns a fullride shcolarship to an up-east school that seemed all too familiar......one can guess the trials and tribulations before opening the book.....the culture clash, the gap between her modest bank account and that of her roommate.......the temptation to dumb herself down to gain acceptance....the loss of her academic focus with all the distractions that college has to offer......and all that before sex, drugs and rock and roll come into play......most interesting was the portrayal of college sports on an other wise competetive campus......charlotte finds herself in what she thought was a high level french literature class, only to discover that the book is being read and discussed in english because the tiny band of students are all athletes and need the credit to fulfill a foreign language requirement.......and the basketball player she meets in that single class (before she transfers out into a real fr lit class) is the crux of much of the plot line......i did laugh out loud when said basketball player finds keys to a new (leased by a rabid booster) suv in his pocket after the first practice ..i always wondered how that all worked out...every player at osu had a nice car........i must admit have several painful flashbacks as i read this book.......wolfe either talked to people i knew, or i wasn't the only person who had unpleasant collegiate experiences.......maybe what i found most difficult to read was wolfe's descriptions of the fictional dupont students and their parents (read this as mothers......).....it is one thing to suspect that (your?) children feel this way, and yet another to see it in print....in some respects i felt sorrier for the parents (mothers) of the characters than i did for the characters themselves.......this is not a book that i would recommend to anyone who has not the leisure time to devote to a book thicker than any of the harry potter installments......nor for anyone who has children in college.......
Saturday, February 18, 2006
clean sweep......
ok, so this p.c. desktop is completely covered......with icons from downloaded songs........and i fully understand that the time has come to clean house......but the proper how-to eludes me.......in the past, i would simply open one of the music-management programs, like windows media player et al.....and ask its library to search the harddrive for new songs.....and the library then include those downloaded songs and i could then delete the desktop shortcut.......simple, huh?......but clearly something has changed ir i have completely forgotten how i did it last time....because these songs do not show up in the library.......i have been able to make each go to the palm....one at a time rather than in a playlist.....and this is some consolation......i'll letcha know if and when i figure this out..................
rivers cuomo
ok, so i spend saturday mornings looking for interesting pieces to read.......in places like the nytimes, the washpost, salon.com, slate.....among others......sometimes travel sites, though i refrain from that sort these days given my state as a parent with 2 children in college.....personal travel doesn't seem to fit into that formula for the time being...but i digress.......i was particularly drawn to this article about rivers cuomo....from the band weezer.......i must admit that the only weezer song i can halfway recite is undone-the sweater song.......but i am familiar enough with the band's history to want to find out if cuomo has returned to harvard, as was his intention when he dropped out the last time just short of graduation.......at 35, and after much musical success, he is living in a single harvard dorm room without a refrigerator and without overnight guests......working to finish his english degree this spring......he remarked that he is really good at reading a book then writing a critical essay about the work.....and just which works did he choose to discuss with the reporter for the nytimes?......jane austen and the bridge that her work represents between the 1700's and the 1800's.....who knew that rock stars could be closet austen fans?............speaking of the closet...turns out the cuomo uses his tiny closet for 2 rounds of meditation daily......curious, in that his monastic surroundings seem plenty stark for proper contemplation..................wonder if one could get a copy of his senior thesis after he graduates?........i would be interested in what he has to say about my jane............an addendum.....i must say that i am impressed, from a maternal point of view, that this 35 year old is finishing his degree....finishing what he started...finding closure for himself and possibly his family....there is much to be said about completion.......
Friday, February 17, 2006
showtime.....
ok, so i thought i might go see a movie tomorrow, what with my daughter otherwise engaged and my spouse working.......matchpoint is at the kentucky, and brokeback mountain is at the regal.....but i really want to see tristam shandy and the location nearest to my zip code is in a chicago suburb.......rats......the local theatre is showing glory road, but i am not enough of a basketball fan to commit my movie time slot for that sort of film......mrs henderson also seems intriguing, but i have read mediocre reviews of that film and i thought judi densch was miscast in pride and predjudice.......i am still working on my bookclub menu...must be middle eastern...i have couscous, stuffed grape leaves, hummus....pita bread and olives....grapes......just need one other thing.....maybe some nice feta from wild oats........that settles it...road trip to lex in the am....to see a mystery movie and to buy cheese....sounds like a plan.......
my name is....
ok, so i am reading my name is charlotte simmons, the tom wolfe satire that is thicker than any harry potter book........so fat, the only action has been for the brilliant but backward charlotte to graduate from her backwoods high school and for the great white hope basketball player named jojo at the fictional ivy league school dupont to receive an suv from a rabid alumni fan.....that part sounds familiar...at least considering osu's troubles with alumni who illegally provide luxury vehicles to players and even to their parents on occassion.........it is supposed to turn cold this weekend.....so i might just hole-up and read............
Thursday, February 16, 2006
who knew?
ok,so i have lived the past 24 years of my life 9 miles down the road from a shaker stronghold...and never knew the things printed in this new yorker piece.......
SHINING TREE OF LIFE
by ADAM GOPNIK
What the Shakers did.
Issue of 2006-02-13 and 20
Posted 2006-02-06
Weary old faiths make art while hot young sects make only trouble. Insincerity, or at least familiarity, seems to be a precondition of a great religious art—the wheezing and worldly Renaissance Papacy produced the Sistine ceiling, while the young Apostolic Church left only a few scratched graffiti in the catacombs. In America, certainly, very little art has attached itself directly to our own dazzling variety of sects and cults, perhaps because true belief is too busy with eternity to worry about the décor. The great exception is the Shakers, who managed, throughout the hundred or so years of their flourishing, to make objects so magically austere that they continue to astonish our eyes and our sense of form long after the last Shakers stopped shaking. Everything that they touched is breathtaking in its beauty and simplicity. It is not a negative simplicity, either, a simplicity of gewgaws eliminated and ornament excised, which, like that of a distressed object found in a barn, appeals by accident to modern eyes trained already in the joys of minimalism. No, their objects show a knowing, creative, shaping simplicity, and to look at a single Shaker box is to see an attenuated asymmetry, a slender, bending eccentricity, which truly anticipates and rivals the bending organic sleekness of Brancusi’s “Bird in Flight” or the algorithmic logic of Bauhaus spoons and forks. Shaker objects don’t look simple; they look specifically Shaker.
Yet what the Shakers thought they were doing when they made their boxes and ladders and clocks, and why we think what they did was so lovely, remains something of a mystery, despite a booming market and the books to go with it. How did a sect so small make objects so sublime? Did they know what they were doing when they did what they did? Or were they doing something else, and doing this other, better thing on their way there?
The Shakers’ early inheritance is English, and began with a strange visionary figure, Ann Lee, born on Leap Day in 1736. She was a woman who, in her lifetime, travelled, so to speak, from the world of E. P. Thompson to the world of William James—from a povertystricken and embattled sectarian North of England millennial religion to the new world of American self-made faith. At a time when Manchester was slowly becoming the industrial hell that, a hundred years later, Engels reported it to be, she was reared with seven siblings in a hovel, and her more luridly Freudian biographers suggest that hearing her father impregnate her mother again and again left her with the revulsion toward sex that distinguished her faith from competing millennial visions. Illiterate, visionary, charismatic, she took part in the swirl of “enthusiastick” sects that emerged at the time, dissenting from the Anglican Church and expecting the Apocalypse; in fact, the name Shakers was given originally to a subset of the people we know as Friends, the Quakers. The Friends and the Believers—those following Ann Lee—seem to have been mixed up by the authorities, if not by themselves, into a porridge of dissenters.
After a career as an amateur sermonizer, Mother Ann, as she was known, was thrown into prison, in 1772, for disrupting the Anglican Sabbath. There she had a vision that she was the second coming of Christ; she also began to believe that sex was the root of all evil. The idea had a genuine edge not so much of feminist rage as of women’s pain: she had lost her four children to illness, and came of age in a working-class world in which constant pregnancy was a prime source of suffering. Her anti-sexual ethic was not so much anti-pleasure as anti-pregnancy.
In 1774, she and her husband and several followers emigrated to America and, after a brief stay in New York, formed a community just north of Albany. It was only then that the Believers began to emerge as a distinct cult with a distinct cult practice—a religious sect gathered around a single charismatic figure. People used to think that the Shakers recruited mostly from the poor and unhoused, eager for even a chaste roof to shelter under. It’s now clear, though, that a cross-section of the American population, rich and poor and in-between, joined them, for the usual mixture of reasons. And a regular intake of orphans and abandoned children gave the Shaker colonies the slightly misleading appearance of family. (There was a regular intake, as well, of people who wandered in for food and shelter in inclement times—“winter Shakers,” they were called.)
Mother Ann’s early followers shared her belief that she was a reborn Christ. She represented the fulfilled and completed Christ—her presence made the Messiah now sexually complete, both man and woman. Her latter-day followers tried to tone down her messianic pretensions, but they were clear, and outlasted her life. In an 1827 letter (published in 1985 by Stephen J. Stein, a Shaker historian), a young Kentucky Shaker, William S. Byrd, of the famous Virginia Byrds, admits that many “scof at the idea of Christs making his second appearance in Ann Lee” but then adds defiantly, “The same Christ that dwelt in Jesus of Nazareth, appeared the second time in this female, the spiritual Mother of all the new creation of God.” Much as St. Augustine lent some of his sense of guilt and morbidity to early Christianity, Ann gave her neurasthenic desire for order and hyper-organization to all the later Shakers. Crowded poor people learn to hate disorder with a passion that for the wealthy is only a pastime; Groucho Marx, to take another important American spiritual leader, was so appalled by the chaos of his tenement childhood that, it was said, for the rest of his life he hated to have one kind of food on his plate touch another. (Whenever we see a fanatic appetite for order, there were probably once six kids in one room.)
Ann Lee became wildly controversial, and was attacked several times—and once, it seems, sexually assaulted—by gangs of local men. One of these beatings may have been the cause of her sudden death, in 1784. It was left to her disciples, particularly Joseph Meacham and Lucy Wright, to organize the Believers into fully self-sustaining celibate but coed communities. They spread quickly, and through the end of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth the Shakers became American icons, establishing colonies in the Massachusetts towns of Pittsfield and Harvard, and then throughout New England and as far south as Kentucky. Still, even at their height, around 1840, the Shakers were never very many: perhaps five thousand true Believers altogether. During Ann’s lifetime, the shaking of the Shakers was already legendary, not to say notorious: they would expunge the old Adam by evenings of violent dancing and rhapsodic writhing. After the establishment of the communities, the thing became more formalized: a regimented after-dinner trembling, like line dancing at a sock hop. But what the dancing represented—a sublimation of, rather than an invitation to, sex—was apparent, and undisguised, and attracted the attention of visitors from Thoreau to Charles Dickens.
So far, so weird. How did they begin to make beautiful things, and why did those things take the form they did? There is no straight line between belief and building. Both Quaker and Shaker styles came of age in the early nineteenth century, at the time of a general neoclassical revival throughout Europe and America, when linear, stripped-down, right-angle schematics were everywhere. If the Shakers were going to make objects at all, those were the kind of objects they would make; it’s not as though they were imitating the Nymphenburg rococo in that other utopian colony down the road.
Yet the Shakers made specifically stylish things, where others didn’t. As a fine recent anthology, “Quaker Aesthetics,” has shown, the Friends, apart from a general tendency toward the plain and suspicion of the fancy, had no real style separate from that of their fellow-Americans. They wore more or less the same clothes and used the same furniture as everyone else. (They just disapproved of their own use of them more than other people did.) So why did the Shakers have a style of their own?
Most of the elements of Shakerism are common to orders and sects: the Dervishes whirled, Dominican monks renounced the flesh. What seems distinctive is, first, their feminism and its insistence on coed monasticism, which made much of the sexual while also denying it. Theirs was a genuinely radical feminism. Shaker communities, though not specifically matriarchal in rule—there were plenty of male elders, too—were among the few American communities of nearly perfect sexual equality. There is even a sense, perceptible in the letters and other writings, that this made a Shaker colony a welcome place for “effeminate” men—a surviving letter reveals a code of homoerotic innuendo that is as easy to decrypt as pig Latin.
What also distinguished the Shakers was their odd join between violent anti-worldliness and thoroughgoing commercial materialism. Monks and monkish communities have, of course, sold goods to the world for a long time, from medieval cheese to Moonie cappuccinos. But the Shakers, faced with the need to support large communities, worked particularly hard to manufacture things for money. Many of the objects that we think of as archetypally Shaker—the long oval boxes with their lovely triple folds, the clean brooms and chairs—were designed and made largely for outside sale. With most tribes and sects that we look to as artistic innovators, the line between cult object and commodity product—between the true African fetish and airport art—is, if often far from sharp, at least tenable. It wasn’t with the Shakers. Shaker style was a commodity almost as soon as Shakerism was a cult. Contrary to Thomas Merton’s romantic assertion that each Shaker chair was made as though no other chair had been made before, Shaker chairs and other wooden objects were made in semi-industrial conditions for a growing middle-class market.
It is here, ironically, in the need to make things to sell to other people, that the first stirrings of a distinct style begin. This is not to say that the objects were made insincerely, or that Shakerism in design was a scam. The built-in cupboards and chairs and ladders constructed only for other Shakers, in Shaker communities, are made in the same spirit as the things for sale. The point is that no line was drawn the other way around, either: what was made for sale looked like what was made for sacred. The urge to make consumer goods is, after all, one of the keenest spiritual disciplines that an ascetic can face: it forces spirit to take form. An ascetic drinking tea from a cup decides not to care what kind of cup he’s drinking from; an ascetic forced to make a cup has to ask what kind of cup he ought to drink from. By the mid-nineteenth century, “Shaker” had become a brand name.
Skeptics said that the work was a form of self-coerced indenture: the Shakers could make more objects more cheaply because, as one defense of the Shakers puts it, artisans “were free of distractions” and “freed from financial worries,” and, as a critic would say, were not free (or chose not to be free) to sell their skills at their true value on an open market. As Michael Downing documents in a richly human book about American spirituality, “Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center,” the Zen community in San Francisco in the nineteen-sixties and seventies similarly produced excellence and exhaustion in equal measure. The Zen community could draw on underpaid cooks to run the Greens restaurant as the Shakers could draw on unpaid artisans to make their clocks; the proportion between beatitude found and skill exploited was left to the maker to figure. The enterprise gave the Shakers a curious double existence as a scary sect and a solid brand. And the Shaker brand was gold. “When a man buys a kag of apple sass of you,” the humorist Artemus Ward wrote approvingly, around the time of the Civil War, “he don’t find a grate many shavins under a few layers of sass.”
But if that helps explain why they made so many boxes, it doesn’t explain what made the boxes so fine. Some insight into what the Shakers were doing and thinking comes from the rare occasions when they were making art objects properly so called—visionary drawings. These were produced when, from the eighteen-twenties to the eighteen-fifties—around the time of the Second Great Awakening—the Shakers, within their already spiritualized environment, went through a kind of spiritual reawakening of their own.
A spiritual reawakening within a community already drawn taut by spiritual aspiration must have created a strenuous atmosphere. Visions and ghosts came down, and the Shakers, chiefly women and young girls, made “gift drawings”: the drawings were gifts from above, not gifts to another. For the most part, they are conventional folk art—except for several by a Shaker woman named Hannah Cohoon, who lived in the Hancock community, and who was a kind of Emily Dickinson of drawing. Her four surviving signed drawings show a concentration on a single form rather than a chatty, anecdotal all-overness, quite outside the normal round of folk art. One of them, “A Little Basket Full of Beautiful Apples” (1856), is among the key drawings in American art, with a tonic sense of abundance—all the apples just alike, each with its rub-on of rouge, like blush applied by an adolescent girl—allied to obsessive order. Another, the famous “Tree of Light or Blazing Tree” (1845), shows us a vision seen in a dream: a tree with each leaf embroidered with fire, part of the normal Shaker iconography of the tree of life but also alarming in its overcharged richness. Cohoon’s intensity was concentrated not on transcendental images of saints or God but on homely American objects, picnic tables and baskets of apples.
This way of imbuing the ordinary with a sense of the numinous is at the heart of the Shaker aesthetic, by far the best extended account of which can be found in “The Shaker World: Art, Life, Belief,” by the art historian John T. Kirk. Kirk argues that there are Shaker specificities, and that they reside in a series of simple design moves that are independent of the neoclassical run of the time, making a unique combination of slenderness, tenderness, and boxiness. Shaker ladders and chairs and tables tend, first of all, to be improbably long, attenuated. There was a practical reason for this: communal living demands long tables in large buildings. Things grow long naturally in dormitories. But practical necessity is always the lever of creation; the line between practical necessity and aesthetic impulse is not merely fine but nonexistent. (The last thing in the world Michelangelo wanted to paint was a ceiling. Once up there, he saw the celestial possibilities.) This constant attenuation—a pulling out of chair legs and table lengths—is one of the things that make Shaker design so seductive, in the most direct way. For attenuation in art inherently has two meanings: long, slender things are chic, as with every fashion model, and they are spiritual, as with the figures in Chartres or Blake’s flamelike personages.
Shaker objects are also unusually repetitive: Kirk calls these Shaker formats “tight grids,” and they infect everything the Shakers made, a last long lingering echo of Mother Ann’s hatred of the collapsed and squalid mess of the one-room home. Everything in the Shaker world, from brooms to villages, is laid out in rows, grids, tightly packaged and formatted. (The insistence on the villages’ grid planning was even formalized in the Shakers’ “Millennial Laws” of 1821.) The grid plan of a Shaker village is unlike the seemingly similar neoclassical grid plan of, say, Quaker Philadelphia, where the regular spacing allows a rational calm to fall over the streets and squares. The plans for Shaker villages are, instead, tight and surprisingly asymmetrical, with long straight main streets and side streets that jog off abruptly at odd intersections; like Shaker furniture, Shaker plans can accept asymmetry if it is dictated by practicality. Shaker plans look less like something drawn up in an Enlightenment encyclopedia than like something sketched by a seer with an Etch A Sketch, lines sprouting and kicking out at odd but angular angles.
One sees the same principle—apparent rationality inflected with an underlying obsessiveness—in the prime Shaker objects. In an amazing midcentury case with cupboard and drawers made by the carpenters in the community in Enfield, Connecticut, two doors, above and below, mismatch, while two central drawers are broken up arrhythmically into smaller parts. It is like a cupboard in Morse code, stuttering out one half and two shorts. That Shaker box, similarly, bends around, and each element has a logic to it—the copper tacks to prevent rust, the beautiful embracing swallowtail fingers to keep the box from cracking—but it has none of the “that’s that” shortcut simplicity of folk objects; instead, a kind of underlying delirium infects it, an obsessive overcharge of finish, the sense of a will to perfection investing an otherwise humdrum object. “Trifles make perfection, but perfection is no trifle” was a Shaker motto. “God is in the details”—but the details have to provide evidence of God.
The Shakers were ascetics without being Puritans. They didn’t object to color and comfort, even as they rejected ornament and luxury. (Many of the objects that look ascetic to us have simply lost their original paint.) A wonderful chair in the Hancock village is made to lean back: a rocking chair without rockers, at perpetual tilt. Yet all these elements—the flat grid patterning, the acceptance of asymmetry, the tolerance for the drumbeat repetition of similar elements without an evident hierarchy of form—add up to a simple idea: Shaker design, while reaching toward an ideal of beauty, unconsciously rejects the human body as a primary source of form. To a degree that we hardly credit, everything in our built environment traditionally echoes our own shape: we have pediments for heads and claw and ball feet, and our objects proceed from trunklike bases to fragile tops. Repetition and the grid are two alternatives to design that refers to classical perspective space and the roundly realized human body. They reappear in twentieth-century art through the Cubist desire to make playthings that snubbed their noses at perspective, and the Teutonic urge to make a new language of pure form. Once you have got rid of the body as a natural referent for design, and no longer think “pictorially” about objects, grids and repeats begin to appear as alternative systems, whether you are in Japan, Montmartre, or Hancock. The love of asymmetry, which seems to us so sophisticated, involves a violation of the same taboo, since symmetry is the essence of human beauty. All Shaker design implies a liberation from “humanism” of this kind. When we make objects that look like us, we unconsciously are flattering ourselves. The Shakers made objects that look like objects, and that follow a non-human law of design.
One sees the pattern clearly in the evolution of the casement clocks—what we call grandfather clocks—made by the Youngs family of New York over three generations, in and out of the community of Believers. The clocks of the elder Youngses, Seth and his son Benjamin, as described in Glendyne R. Wergland’s “One Shaker Life,” are in the manner of Greek columns, with strongly articulated bases, long shafts, and “heads” with clock faces. Over time, the clocks that Benjamin made became more narrowly “neoclassical”: the bases simplified and their moldings reduced, the clock-head narrowed in size, the clock’s lines made neater and more geometrical. But Isaac Newton Youngs, the grandson, was reared as a Shaker, and the clocks he made became as reductive as a refrigerator case, with the sides of the clock neither tapering nor swelling, and, telltale sign, with a knob on the clock face as well as on the clock body to allow the worker to adjust or repair the inside: the allergy to putting a functional element on an object’s “face” was overruled, because the artisan was not thinking of it as a face. In each case, the clocks got not merely simpler—though they did that, too—but progressively less figural.
This doesn’t mean that the Shaker objects are “inhuman” in the sense of being cold. They aren’t cold. The brooms and clocks and boxes create an atmosphere of serenity, loveliness, calm certainty. But these are monastic virtues rather than liberal ones. We miss the radical edge of Shaker art if we don’t see that it is not meant to be “humanistic.” (As much as the Moonies ever have, Shaker communities worked hard to exterminate individuality: people dined together, slept together, and even, in Hancock, were buried together, in a single common grave marked “Shakers.”) Most religious objects, from Baroque Catholic baldachins to Hindu temple ornaments, are worldly but immaterial, made with immense sophistication in order to make the ordinary physical world seem to vanish in a smoke cloud of spirals and twists and flames. Shaker objects are, like Zen Japanese ones, unworldly but material, far from sensuality but solid as a rock. They annihilate the body, and leave us timeless form to tell the time with.
The Shakers waned as swiftly as they rose, and by the early twentieth century they were as much a relic cult as a living force. They existed in order to be in decline: the Fall and the Paradise are about the same thing. (There is evidence that the Shakers themselves, even by the end of the nineteenth century, lived in conventional rooms with ordinary objects.) In this way, though, Shakerism—the enthusiasm of the Shaker design, and the accompanying cult of box and broom—is not merely a nostalgic invention. Rather, it has always been a nostalgic invention: the nostalgia was there almost before the experience happened. After their first blooming period, the Shakers existed to be remembered. But at the same time consumer-goods Shakerism, which led to catalogues of Shaker chairs, cloaks, and baskets, continued to accelerate, until Shaker shopping was a major occupation, and this is a phenomenon of the late nineteenth century, not the twentieth.
The Shakers, then, did not simply survive as a path to purity never pursued. Instead, they permanently defined a curiously American composition, played in the blue key of E: enlightenment, entrepreneurialism, and exploitation all in counterpoint, with a half-heard chord of illicit eroticism. The attempt to make monastic communities that will be simultaneously asexual, industrial, and fully integrated into the entrepreneurial society around them—that will do good and do well—is so deeply embedded in our history that it recurs again and again. As Downing documents, its latest incarnation has been the Zen experience—which is uncannily like the Shaker experience, and which also involved the implantation of a slightly misunderstood alien dogma, and an immense outpouring of American spiritual yearning, a taste for commercial prosperity on the part of its leaders, and an inability to figure out what the hell to do about sex. As the Shakers made a revolution in American objects, American Zen made a revolution in American cooking, giving vegetarian food dignity. And, when the communities went into crisis, first the plates, and then the food, were what was left.
We should, perhaps, feel disappointed by this descent from the spirit, but some of us may wonder if the spirit has greater gifts to give. Food and boxes are not ethically neutral; they radiate their own aura into the harried lives of people who own them, even if only as aspiration. They were elevated, not debased, to become bourgeois amenities; they passed from the realm of false belief to the realm of spiritualized form. A forthcoming book, “Selling Shaker: The Promotion of Shaker Design in the Twentieth Century,” by Stephen Bowe and Peter Richmond, discusses, with a good deal of detailed analysis and some fine mordant humor, the slow process by which Shakerism continues to creep into the American marketplace, as Mother Ann’s purities become the playthings of Oprah Winfrey. But a sneaking, not quite justifiable prejudice infects the study, in the authors’ implicit belief that believing that Mother Ann was God and sex evil was intrinsically a higher-order activity than just liking to own Shaker boxes. This belief feels more Puritanical than Shakerian. Surely the aesthetic contemplation for other purposes of objects first made for cult use is more or less where the idea of art begins—the Shaker work counter in the hands of Oprah is, in this sense, not very different from the Renaissance altarpiece in the hands of Bernard Berenson—and, after all, Shakerism crept into the American marketplace by way of the American marketplace, where the Shakers placed it. In American art, the line between the goods and the good is a fine one, and doesn’t benefit from being stared at too hard or cut too finely. In a commercial society, the membrane that separates spirit and store is always permeable.
Yet the blazing tree remains alight. Kirk ends his fine book with a slightly naïve inquiry into the relation between Shakerism and the objects of American minimalism, and shows that the formal elements of the two—the grid, the repeated element, the entire anti-humanism of the approach—rhyme if they do not repeat. Look-alikes aside, what most connects the minimal art of Judd and Serra and Stella with their very improbable predecessors is their fanaticism. The moderns are uncompromising, too: only this box now and now this box again. That same uncompromising fanaticism gives life to what might otherwise be mere Teutonic austerity and pedantic insistence. The violence done to natural form, and to the humanism it implies, creates a serene result with a perceptible violence just beneath.
American art benefits from the fanatic, as American writing does not: the visual arts threaten to disappear back into the big jumble of things we see and own unless they are marked by some kind of extremism. Writers may be Friends, but artists are Believers, or they are not much. The twin legacy of Shakerism is true to the twin roots of the Shakers’ vision: they remain both as a model of wild-eyed and unreal renunciation and as makers of simple good things. The shining tree of life is a tree of light that illuminates the way for believers. It is also on fire, and can only be consumed.
SHINING TREE OF LIFE
by ADAM GOPNIK
What the Shakers did.
Issue of 2006-02-13 and 20
Posted 2006-02-06
Weary old faiths make art while hot young sects make only trouble. Insincerity, or at least familiarity, seems to be a precondition of a great religious art—the wheezing and worldly Renaissance Papacy produced the Sistine ceiling, while the young Apostolic Church left only a few scratched graffiti in the catacombs. In America, certainly, very little art has attached itself directly to our own dazzling variety of sects and cults, perhaps because true belief is too busy with eternity to worry about the décor. The great exception is the Shakers, who managed, throughout the hundred or so years of their flourishing, to make objects so magically austere that they continue to astonish our eyes and our sense of form long after the last Shakers stopped shaking. Everything that they touched is breathtaking in its beauty and simplicity. It is not a negative simplicity, either, a simplicity of gewgaws eliminated and ornament excised, which, like that of a distressed object found in a barn, appeals by accident to modern eyes trained already in the joys of minimalism. No, their objects show a knowing, creative, shaping simplicity, and to look at a single Shaker box is to see an attenuated asymmetry, a slender, bending eccentricity, which truly anticipates and rivals the bending organic sleekness of Brancusi’s “Bird in Flight” or the algorithmic logic of Bauhaus spoons and forks. Shaker objects don’t look simple; they look specifically Shaker.
Yet what the Shakers thought they were doing when they made their boxes and ladders and clocks, and why we think what they did was so lovely, remains something of a mystery, despite a booming market and the books to go with it. How did a sect so small make objects so sublime? Did they know what they were doing when they did what they did? Or were they doing something else, and doing this other, better thing on their way there?
The Shakers’ early inheritance is English, and began with a strange visionary figure, Ann Lee, born on Leap Day in 1736. She was a woman who, in her lifetime, travelled, so to speak, from the world of E. P. Thompson to the world of William James—from a povertystricken and embattled sectarian North of England millennial religion to the new world of American self-made faith. At a time when Manchester was slowly becoming the industrial hell that, a hundred years later, Engels reported it to be, she was reared with seven siblings in a hovel, and her more luridly Freudian biographers suggest that hearing her father impregnate her mother again and again left her with the revulsion toward sex that distinguished her faith from competing millennial visions. Illiterate, visionary, charismatic, she took part in the swirl of “enthusiastick” sects that emerged at the time, dissenting from the Anglican Church and expecting the Apocalypse; in fact, the name Shakers was given originally to a subset of the people we know as Friends, the Quakers. The Friends and the Believers—those following Ann Lee—seem to have been mixed up by the authorities, if not by themselves, into a porridge of dissenters.
After a career as an amateur sermonizer, Mother Ann, as she was known, was thrown into prison, in 1772, for disrupting the Anglican Sabbath. There she had a vision that she was the second coming of Christ; she also began to believe that sex was the root of all evil. The idea had a genuine edge not so much of feminist rage as of women’s pain: she had lost her four children to illness, and came of age in a working-class world in which constant pregnancy was a prime source of suffering. Her anti-sexual ethic was not so much anti-pleasure as anti-pregnancy.
In 1774, she and her husband and several followers emigrated to America and, after a brief stay in New York, formed a community just north of Albany. It was only then that the Believers began to emerge as a distinct cult with a distinct cult practice—a religious sect gathered around a single charismatic figure. People used to think that the Shakers recruited mostly from the poor and unhoused, eager for even a chaste roof to shelter under. It’s now clear, though, that a cross-section of the American population, rich and poor and in-between, joined them, for the usual mixture of reasons. And a regular intake of orphans and abandoned children gave the Shaker colonies the slightly misleading appearance of family. (There was a regular intake, as well, of people who wandered in for food and shelter in inclement times—“winter Shakers,” they were called.)
Mother Ann’s early followers shared her belief that she was a reborn Christ. She represented the fulfilled and completed Christ—her presence made the Messiah now sexually complete, both man and woman. Her latter-day followers tried to tone down her messianic pretensions, but they were clear, and outlasted her life. In an 1827 letter (published in 1985 by Stephen J. Stein, a Shaker historian), a young Kentucky Shaker, William S. Byrd, of the famous Virginia Byrds, admits that many “scof at the idea of Christs making his second appearance in Ann Lee” but then adds defiantly, “The same Christ that dwelt in Jesus of Nazareth, appeared the second time in this female, the spiritual Mother of all the new creation of God.” Much as St. Augustine lent some of his sense of guilt and morbidity to early Christianity, Ann gave her neurasthenic desire for order and hyper-organization to all the later Shakers. Crowded poor people learn to hate disorder with a passion that for the wealthy is only a pastime; Groucho Marx, to take another important American spiritual leader, was so appalled by the chaos of his tenement childhood that, it was said, for the rest of his life he hated to have one kind of food on his plate touch another. (Whenever we see a fanatic appetite for order, there were probably once six kids in one room.)
Ann Lee became wildly controversial, and was attacked several times—and once, it seems, sexually assaulted—by gangs of local men. One of these beatings may have been the cause of her sudden death, in 1784. It was left to her disciples, particularly Joseph Meacham and Lucy Wright, to organize the Believers into fully self-sustaining celibate but coed communities. They spread quickly, and through the end of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth the Shakers became American icons, establishing colonies in the Massachusetts towns of Pittsfield and Harvard, and then throughout New England and as far south as Kentucky. Still, even at their height, around 1840, the Shakers were never very many: perhaps five thousand true Believers altogether. During Ann’s lifetime, the shaking of the Shakers was already legendary, not to say notorious: they would expunge the old Adam by evenings of violent dancing and rhapsodic writhing. After the establishment of the communities, the thing became more formalized: a regimented after-dinner trembling, like line dancing at a sock hop. But what the dancing represented—a sublimation of, rather than an invitation to, sex—was apparent, and undisguised, and attracted the attention of visitors from Thoreau to Charles Dickens.
So far, so weird. How did they begin to make beautiful things, and why did those things take the form they did? There is no straight line between belief and building. Both Quaker and Shaker styles came of age in the early nineteenth century, at the time of a general neoclassical revival throughout Europe and America, when linear, stripped-down, right-angle schematics were everywhere. If the Shakers were going to make objects at all, those were the kind of objects they would make; it’s not as though they were imitating the Nymphenburg rococo in that other utopian colony down the road.
Yet the Shakers made specifically stylish things, where others didn’t. As a fine recent anthology, “Quaker Aesthetics,” has shown, the Friends, apart from a general tendency toward the plain and suspicion of the fancy, had no real style separate from that of their fellow-Americans. They wore more or less the same clothes and used the same furniture as everyone else. (They just disapproved of their own use of them more than other people did.) So why did the Shakers have a style of their own?
Most of the elements of Shakerism are common to orders and sects: the Dervishes whirled, Dominican monks renounced the flesh. What seems distinctive is, first, their feminism and its insistence on coed monasticism, which made much of the sexual while also denying it. Theirs was a genuinely radical feminism. Shaker communities, though not specifically matriarchal in rule—there were plenty of male elders, too—were among the few American communities of nearly perfect sexual equality. There is even a sense, perceptible in the letters and other writings, that this made a Shaker colony a welcome place for “effeminate” men—a surviving letter reveals a code of homoerotic innuendo that is as easy to decrypt as pig Latin.
What also distinguished the Shakers was their odd join between violent anti-worldliness and thoroughgoing commercial materialism. Monks and monkish communities have, of course, sold goods to the world for a long time, from medieval cheese to Moonie cappuccinos. But the Shakers, faced with the need to support large communities, worked particularly hard to manufacture things for money. Many of the objects that we think of as archetypally Shaker—the long oval boxes with their lovely triple folds, the clean brooms and chairs—were designed and made largely for outside sale. With most tribes and sects that we look to as artistic innovators, the line between cult object and commodity product—between the true African fetish and airport art—is, if often far from sharp, at least tenable. It wasn’t with the Shakers. Shaker style was a commodity almost as soon as Shakerism was a cult. Contrary to Thomas Merton’s romantic assertion that each Shaker chair was made as though no other chair had been made before, Shaker chairs and other wooden objects were made in semi-industrial conditions for a growing middle-class market.
It is here, ironically, in the need to make things to sell to other people, that the first stirrings of a distinct style begin. This is not to say that the objects were made insincerely, or that Shakerism in design was a scam. The built-in cupboards and chairs and ladders constructed only for other Shakers, in Shaker communities, are made in the same spirit as the things for sale. The point is that no line was drawn the other way around, either: what was made for sale looked like what was made for sacred. The urge to make consumer goods is, after all, one of the keenest spiritual disciplines that an ascetic can face: it forces spirit to take form. An ascetic drinking tea from a cup decides not to care what kind of cup he’s drinking from; an ascetic forced to make a cup has to ask what kind of cup he ought to drink from. By the mid-nineteenth century, “Shaker” had become a brand name.
Skeptics said that the work was a form of self-coerced indenture: the Shakers could make more objects more cheaply because, as one defense of the Shakers puts it, artisans “were free of distractions” and “freed from financial worries,” and, as a critic would say, were not free (or chose not to be free) to sell their skills at their true value on an open market. As Michael Downing documents in a richly human book about American spirituality, “Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center,” the Zen community in San Francisco in the nineteen-sixties and seventies similarly produced excellence and exhaustion in equal measure. The Zen community could draw on underpaid cooks to run the Greens restaurant as the Shakers could draw on unpaid artisans to make their clocks; the proportion between beatitude found and skill exploited was left to the maker to figure. The enterprise gave the Shakers a curious double existence as a scary sect and a solid brand. And the Shaker brand was gold. “When a man buys a kag of apple sass of you,” the humorist Artemus Ward wrote approvingly, around the time of the Civil War, “he don’t find a grate many shavins under a few layers of sass.”
But if that helps explain why they made so many boxes, it doesn’t explain what made the boxes so fine. Some insight into what the Shakers were doing and thinking comes from the rare occasions when they were making art objects properly so called—visionary drawings. These were produced when, from the eighteen-twenties to the eighteen-fifties—around the time of the Second Great Awakening—the Shakers, within their already spiritualized environment, went through a kind of spiritual reawakening of their own.
A spiritual reawakening within a community already drawn taut by spiritual aspiration must have created a strenuous atmosphere. Visions and ghosts came down, and the Shakers, chiefly women and young girls, made “gift drawings”: the drawings were gifts from above, not gifts to another. For the most part, they are conventional folk art—except for several by a Shaker woman named Hannah Cohoon, who lived in the Hancock community, and who was a kind of Emily Dickinson of drawing. Her four surviving signed drawings show a concentration on a single form rather than a chatty, anecdotal all-overness, quite outside the normal round of folk art. One of them, “A Little Basket Full of Beautiful Apples” (1856), is among the key drawings in American art, with a tonic sense of abundance—all the apples just alike, each with its rub-on of rouge, like blush applied by an adolescent girl—allied to obsessive order. Another, the famous “Tree of Light or Blazing Tree” (1845), shows us a vision seen in a dream: a tree with each leaf embroidered with fire, part of the normal Shaker iconography of the tree of life but also alarming in its overcharged richness. Cohoon’s intensity was concentrated not on transcendental images of saints or God but on homely American objects, picnic tables and baskets of apples.
This way of imbuing the ordinary with a sense of the numinous is at the heart of the Shaker aesthetic, by far the best extended account of which can be found in “The Shaker World: Art, Life, Belief,” by the art historian John T. Kirk. Kirk argues that there are Shaker specificities, and that they reside in a series of simple design moves that are independent of the neoclassical run of the time, making a unique combination of slenderness, tenderness, and boxiness. Shaker ladders and chairs and tables tend, first of all, to be improbably long, attenuated. There was a practical reason for this: communal living demands long tables in large buildings. Things grow long naturally in dormitories. But practical necessity is always the lever of creation; the line between practical necessity and aesthetic impulse is not merely fine but nonexistent. (The last thing in the world Michelangelo wanted to paint was a ceiling. Once up there, he saw the celestial possibilities.) This constant attenuation—a pulling out of chair legs and table lengths—is one of the things that make Shaker design so seductive, in the most direct way. For attenuation in art inherently has two meanings: long, slender things are chic, as with every fashion model, and they are spiritual, as with the figures in Chartres or Blake’s flamelike personages.
Shaker objects are also unusually repetitive: Kirk calls these Shaker formats “tight grids,” and they infect everything the Shakers made, a last long lingering echo of Mother Ann’s hatred of the collapsed and squalid mess of the one-room home. Everything in the Shaker world, from brooms to villages, is laid out in rows, grids, tightly packaged and formatted. (The insistence on the villages’ grid planning was even formalized in the Shakers’ “Millennial Laws” of 1821.) The grid plan of a Shaker village is unlike the seemingly similar neoclassical grid plan of, say, Quaker Philadelphia, where the regular spacing allows a rational calm to fall over the streets and squares. The plans for Shaker villages are, instead, tight and surprisingly asymmetrical, with long straight main streets and side streets that jog off abruptly at odd intersections; like Shaker furniture, Shaker plans can accept asymmetry if it is dictated by practicality. Shaker plans look less like something drawn up in an Enlightenment encyclopedia than like something sketched by a seer with an Etch A Sketch, lines sprouting and kicking out at odd but angular angles.
One sees the same principle—apparent rationality inflected with an underlying obsessiveness—in the prime Shaker objects. In an amazing midcentury case with cupboard and drawers made by the carpenters in the community in Enfield, Connecticut, two doors, above and below, mismatch, while two central drawers are broken up arrhythmically into smaller parts. It is like a cupboard in Morse code, stuttering out one half and two shorts. That Shaker box, similarly, bends around, and each element has a logic to it—the copper tacks to prevent rust, the beautiful embracing swallowtail fingers to keep the box from cracking—but it has none of the “that’s that” shortcut simplicity of folk objects; instead, a kind of underlying delirium infects it, an obsessive overcharge of finish, the sense of a will to perfection investing an otherwise humdrum object. “Trifles make perfection, but perfection is no trifle” was a Shaker motto. “God is in the details”—but the details have to provide evidence of God.
The Shakers were ascetics without being Puritans. They didn’t object to color and comfort, even as they rejected ornament and luxury. (Many of the objects that look ascetic to us have simply lost their original paint.) A wonderful chair in the Hancock village is made to lean back: a rocking chair without rockers, at perpetual tilt. Yet all these elements—the flat grid patterning, the acceptance of asymmetry, the tolerance for the drumbeat repetition of similar elements without an evident hierarchy of form—add up to a simple idea: Shaker design, while reaching toward an ideal of beauty, unconsciously rejects the human body as a primary source of form. To a degree that we hardly credit, everything in our built environment traditionally echoes our own shape: we have pediments for heads and claw and ball feet, and our objects proceed from trunklike bases to fragile tops. Repetition and the grid are two alternatives to design that refers to classical perspective space and the roundly realized human body. They reappear in twentieth-century art through the Cubist desire to make playthings that snubbed their noses at perspective, and the Teutonic urge to make a new language of pure form. Once you have got rid of the body as a natural referent for design, and no longer think “pictorially” about objects, grids and repeats begin to appear as alternative systems, whether you are in Japan, Montmartre, or Hancock. The love of asymmetry, which seems to us so sophisticated, involves a violation of the same taboo, since symmetry is the essence of human beauty. All Shaker design implies a liberation from “humanism” of this kind. When we make objects that look like us, we unconsciously are flattering ourselves. The Shakers made objects that look like objects, and that follow a non-human law of design.
One sees the pattern clearly in the evolution of the casement clocks—what we call grandfather clocks—made by the Youngs family of New York over three generations, in and out of the community of Believers. The clocks of the elder Youngses, Seth and his son Benjamin, as described in Glendyne R. Wergland’s “One Shaker Life,” are in the manner of Greek columns, with strongly articulated bases, long shafts, and “heads” with clock faces. Over time, the clocks that Benjamin made became more narrowly “neoclassical”: the bases simplified and their moldings reduced, the clock-head narrowed in size, the clock’s lines made neater and more geometrical. But Isaac Newton Youngs, the grandson, was reared as a Shaker, and the clocks he made became as reductive as a refrigerator case, with the sides of the clock neither tapering nor swelling, and, telltale sign, with a knob on the clock face as well as on the clock body to allow the worker to adjust or repair the inside: the allergy to putting a functional element on an object’s “face” was overruled, because the artisan was not thinking of it as a face. In each case, the clocks got not merely simpler—though they did that, too—but progressively less figural.
This doesn’t mean that the Shaker objects are “inhuman” in the sense of being cold. They aren’t cold. The brooms and clocks and boxes create an atmosphere of serenity, loveliness, calm certainty. But these are monastic virtues rather than liberal ones. We miss the radical edge of Shaker art if we don’t see that it is not meant to be “humanistic.” (As much as the Moonies ever have, Shaker communities worked hard to exterminate individuality: people dined together, slept together, and even, in Hancock, were buried together, in a single common grave marked “Shakers.”) Most religious objects, from Baroque Catholic baldachins to Hindu temple ornaments, are worldly but immaterial, made with immense sophistication in order to make the ordinary physical world seem to vanish in a smoke cloud of spirals and twists and flames. Shaker objects are, like Zen Japanese ones, unworldly but material, far from sensuality but solid as a rock. They annihilate the body, and leave us timeless form to tell the time with.
The Shakers waned as swiftly as they rose, and by the early twentieth century they were as much a relic cult as a living force. They existed in order to be in decline: the Fall and the Paradise are about the same thing. (There is evidence that the Shakers themselves, even by the end of the nineteenth century, lived in conventional rooms with ordinary objects.) In this way, though, Shakerism—the enthusiasm of the Shaker design, and the accompanying cult of box and broom—is not merely a nostalgic invention. Rather, it has always been a nostalgic invention: the nostalgia was there almost before the experience happened. After their first blooming period, the Shakers existed to be remembered. But at the same time consumer-goods Shakerism, which led to catalogues of Shaker chairs, cloaks, and baskets, continued to accelerate, until Shaker shopping was a major occupation, and this is a phenomenon of the late nineteenth century, not the twentieth.
The Shakers, then, did not simply survive as a path to purity never pursued. Instead, they permanently defined a curiously American composition, played in the blue key of E: enlightenment, entrepreneurialism, and exploitation all in counterpoint, with a half-heard chord of illicit eroticism. The attempt to make monastic communities that will be simultaneously asexual, industrial, and fully integrated into the entrepreneurial society around them—that will do good and do well—is so deeply embedded in our history that it recurs again and again. As Downing documents, its latest incarnation has been the Zen experience—which is uncannily like the Shaker experience, and which also involved the implantation of a slightly misunderstood alien dogma, and an immense outpouring of American spiritual yearning, a taste for commercial prosperity on the part of its leaders, and an inability to figure out what the hell to do about sex. As the Shakers made a revolution in American objects, American Zen made a revolution in American cooking, giving vegetarian food dignity. And, when the communities went into crisis, first the plates, and then the food, were what was left.
We should, perhaps, feel disappointed by this descent from the spirit, but some of us may wonder if the spirit has greater gifts to give. Food and boxes are not ethically neutral; they radiate their own aura into the harried lives of people who own them, even if only as aspiration. They were elevated, not debased, to become bourgeois amenities; they passed from the realm of false belief to the realm of spiritualized form. A forthcoming book, “Selling Shaker: The Promotion of Shaker Design in the Twentieth Century,” by Stephen Bowe and Peter Richmond, discusses, with a good deal of detailed analysis and some fine mordant humor, the slow process by which Shakerism continues to creep into the American marketplace, as Mother Ann’s purities become the playthings of Oprah Winfrey. But a sneaking, not quite justifiable prejudice infects the study, in the authors’ implicit belief that believing that Mother Ann was God and sex evil was intrinsically a higher-order activity than just liking to own Shaker boxes. This belief feels more Puritanical than Shakerian. Surely the aesthetic contemplation for other purposes of objects first made for cult use is more or less where the idea of art begins—the Shaker work counter in the hands of Oprah is, in this sense, not very different from the Renaissance altarpiece in the hands of Bernard Berenson—and, after all, Shakerism crept into the American marketplace by way of the American marketplace, where the Shakers placed it. In American art, the line between the goods and the good is a fine one, and doesn’t benefit from being stared at too hard or cut too finely. In a commercial society, the membrane that separates spirit and store is always permeable.
Yet the blazing tree remains alight. Kirk ends his fine book with a slightly naïve inquiry into the relation between Shakerism and the objects of American minimalism, and shows that the formal elements of the two—the grid, the repeated element, the entire anti-humanism of the approach—rhyme if they do not repeat. Look-alikes aside, what most connects the minimal art of Judd and Serra and Stella with their very improbable predecessors is their fanaticism. The moderns are uncompromising, too: only this box now and now this box again. That same uncompromising fanaticism gives life to what might otherwise be mere Teutonic austerity and pedantic insistence. The violence done to natural form, and to the humanism it implies, creates a serene result with a perceptible violence just beneath.
American art benefits from the fanatic, as American writing does not: the visual arts threaten to disappear back into the big jumble of things we see and own unless they are marked by some kind of extremism. Writers may be Friends, but artists are Believers, or they are not much. The twin legacy of Shakerism is true to the twin roots of the Shakers’ vision: they remain both as a model of wild-eyed and unreal renunciation and as makers of simple good things. The shining tree of life is a tree of light that illuminates the way for believers. It is also on fire, and can only be consumed.
the a.c.........
ok, so it truly pained me to turn on the air conditioner on my way home from work despite the stuffy heat inside the honda......because to do so in february seemed like yet another sign of the end of days, with surefire global warming at our heels..........we have had so many of late....like the ohio state buckeyes ranked number 12 and in contention to win the big ten, while the u of k wildcats cannot buy themsleves out of the basement of the s.e.c.......certainly a sign that all is off kilter with the universe......all things seems bleak this particular weekend....the annual visitation of the birth mother......who will perform disneyland mom tricks for 4 days, then drive away for the rest of us to bring our daughter back into the real world.....every time this visit comes around the hints are there...for us to host the visit.....given all the empty bedrooms.....i am grateful that my spouse has as many or more reservations about such an offer......and thus the visit will revolve in/out of mimi's house down the road.......i always fix one big home cooked dinner for us all to share......there will be less of us this year, with one out of state and the other out of town and otherwise unavailable.......and so the task left to do is to schedule this event.......friday night?.....saturday evening....sunday after church?.......classic avoidance behavior keeps me from making a plan.......at least the weather will be nice...............
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
hyphens.....
ok, so i was amused to discover that the men's moguls was won by dale begg-smith from australia.......what a marvelous hyphenated name........
a long line for the millions....
ok, so my gas light blipped on this morning as i crossed the tracks in h-burg.......and so i made a mental note to stop for a fillup on my way home....and to take a chance with a second powerball ticket....what with the pot 250 million.......i had already stopped on monday afternoon after picking up cayle.....as is my custom....but i consider an empty tank to be a burning bush sort of sign from god to invest a tad more in my monitary future......as did the others in the line at the register......5 deep as i came in through the pump-side door at brookside......my numbers look good, but then they always do.......just before somebody else wins cayle's horse......that is how she considers the cash prize......if somebody in iowa wins....she proclaims that somebody in iowa is riding her horse...............ah well........somebody has to win, eventually it will be me.....if only for $4 for correctly choosing the winning powerball (last digit.....)....it could happen................in my dreams............i was amused to read a time article last week about women and their money.....and there was a statement about how a startling number of baby-boomer females have less than $10,000 in any sort of retirement account.....thankfully i am not beholden to the numbers to put food on the table in my golden years...........
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
lost and found......
ok, so.......on saturday evening i received an early birthday gift from a friend, as well as the loan of a tom wolfe novel......and when i arrived home i had neither....not good, considering that i lost my new umbrella recently.......and so today i was delighted to find both.....sequentually......the gift and the novel were in the far rear seat of the minivan we shared with friends......now that their eldest drives nobody sits back there....and thus it went undiscovered til tuesday......the gift was nice lotion.....which i plucked from the bag to take to work......and placed with my purse in the backseat of the honda.......when i got to work the purse was there....but the lotion was nowhere to be found.......and it was then that i got down on my hands and knees to reach deep behind the drivers seat.......and eureka...there was the lotion and the umbrella........gentle readers......this is a benign recitation at best.....to those who are not yet in the lost never to be found stage of life......let me be clear...such a small thing as finding an umbrella raised my spirits and lifted my step for the next 9 work hours....and that is no small feat in public health........
Monday, February 13, 2006
standing o
ok, so i couldn't help but to stay up and watch.....beyond the snowboarding...beyond the 500 m speedskaters......and til the bitter end, when the chinese pair attempted a bold move.....and after falling brutally...got up and finished a magnificent program......to the point that the russian pair who won the gold could only stand sullenly and bask in the glory that was not really theirs to claim......although i knew what was to unfold......words on the screen could not convey the emotion of the moment.......the chinese pair limped away with the silver.....ask folks in 2 weeks and 2 years who they will recall from these games.....and the chinese silver medalists will be the standout......not the gold medalists who skated stiffly and without passion.................but the pair who had the gumption to continue on without any hope of reward.....for nothing but the love of the sport.......had i been the judge they would have claimed the gold despite the fall........wow.......it was a performance that had to be seen to be believed.......
cheatin' on-line......
ok, so.......i really don't feel like staying up til 11:00 pm to watch the pairs skating finals.....so i looked up the results online......and now that I know who won I can go to bed early and maybe kick this cold........yeah, yeah, yeah....i really would rather watch the performances............but at this point my eyes are so watery i cannot focus well anyway............
Sunday, February 12, 2006
ok, so this guy named estill from norway stumbled in a pile-up of crosscountry skiers at the beginning of an 18 mile pursuit race.....and though he was dead last leaving the 'stadium', he passed 75 or so racers to work himself back up into contention for a medal......he ended up with the silver......an incredible acheivement considering the odds of a comeback under those conditions..... i awoke from my couch-potato slumber just to watch his race.......wow.........
a blizzard in my brain......
ok, so sometime between cayle's birthday lunch and finishing the dishes i came down with a cold......with the aches,fever/chills, nasal congestion/drip/sneeze and mental fog that comes with it ......glancing at these symptoms now i must be the epicenter of the bird flu.......i have no intention of being sick......now that i have actual sick time i feel that i must mete it out most miserly.....just in case of genuine disaster........but i will be going to bed early tonight....maybe.....going to bed right about now.........
forward this email to the next 6 people on your list...
ok, so my email box had 2 forwarded messages this morning......the kind that have already been forwarded by numerous others......and both with the directive to go ahead and forward the thing yet again in true chain letter fashion......but the mm doesn't do forwarding very often....only in cases of true merit....whereupon the original message was so bloody brilliant that no one who received the cunundrum message could doubt my intentions.....this hasn't happened yet, to my meager recollection, but i'm not ruling it out........i do regularly forward news articles that i have enjoyed to people who might not have seen the piece online.....and i enjoy receiving those articles that friends sometimes send to me......but these tend to be ever so much more interesting than animated cats dancing about or urban legends about divorced wives getting revenge or misinformed warnings about marketers using up ones cell minutes with unwanted sales calls......on thursdays a co-worker goes through her maibox and forwards this sort of mail to the rest of us.....and on fridays i systematically delete them all unopened......mostly because i have found that they tend to cause the system to freeze up after failed attempts to open them up.....and so i deleted both forwarded messages without the slightest regret......
lex, yet again.....
ok, so i was in lexington for the 4th time in 6 days.....for a dinner gathering with friends.......we drove up with 2 other couples....and had as good a time on the cartrip as we did at the party....we brought along a mix that we made of recently downloaded music, but the discussion of u.k.'s loss to vanderbilt was center stage and the likes of imogen heap took a backseat.....ah well........and given that we are all getting older......we collectively left early so we could get to bed at a reasonable time.....which is either boring or righteous, depending on your perpective.......we did sit up and watch the finals of the 5000 men's speedskating....the guy from texas who used to inline skate but switched to the ice is really impressive to watch.....and then we watched the russian pair do their short program......absolutely stunning.....so sad about michelle kwan dropping out of the olympics with an injury...but it is better to let the alternate take her place rather than to really bomb in competition.......
Saturday, February 11, 2006
one last thing before i go to bed.....
ok, so.....gregor samsa......free downloads are available......so soothing.......
Friday, February 10, 2006
pavarotti
ok,so......i stayed up til midnight just to hear pavarotti sing........and while i did enjoy the spectacle.....especially the acrobats on the grid that eventually formed a dove.......i thought that the tenor summed it all up......in italian...a language i cannot understand, but one with words that bend so brilliantly in song......i suppose having invested so much time in the opening event, i might as well watch every waking moment of coverage...................
open container
ok, so i had the day off...thanks to working over earlier this week......and after having coffee with my spouse at the hub downtown.....and renewing my driver's liscense......i picked up my daughter and my mother and we had a ladies day out......which would have been much less stressful had my mother not gotten into my car with an open mug of iced tea...not quite full enough to actually spill, but just enough to worry me......she owns numerous mugs with fitted lids......but chose to take the chance of spilling this beverage all over a vehicle that is so far in decent shape with regards to food residue.......and to make matters worse.....she never drank from this container....so i was obsessed with watching it slosh all the way up and all the way back from the big city......until she noticed it at the last minute when we unloaded her purchases....'oh......i forgot all about that tea......'.....oy
Thursday, February 09, 2006
more on the grammys
ok, so didja know that senator barack obama won a grammy last night?.....here is the chicago tribune's tribute.... U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) won a Grammy award Wednesday evening in a category rarely made for a politician: the best spoken word.
As the awards were announced at the ceremony in downtown Los Angeles, Obama was finishing his work day in Washington. He accepted the honor with humility and humor.
"While it is rare for a politician to speak for hours on end and be given an actual award, it is very flattering to win a Grammy," Obama said in a statement. "But, I can assure you I'm not thinking about quitting my day job."
Obama painstakingly recorded his autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," over a combined stretch of about 15 hours in the sound booth.
Hours before he won the award Wednesday, Obama was focused on the business of the Senate and modestly predicted he would not win the Grammy.
"I'm going after some tough competition," Obama said. "You've got George Carlin, Garrison Keillor and Sean Penn reading Bob Dylan's biography {ndash} that's the favorite right there. I'm the dark horse."
Obama beat out other nominees, including: Keillor for "The Adventures of Guy Noir," Al Franken for "The Al Franken Show Party Album," Sean Penn for "Chronicles--Volume One (Bob Dylan)," and George Carlin for "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?"
Obama is following in the footsteps of Sen. Everett Dirksen of Illinois, who won a Grammy in the best spoken word category in 1967 for "Gallant Men."
As the awards were announced at the ceremony in downtown Los Angeles, Obama was finishing his work day in Washington. He accepted the honor with humility and humor.
"While it is rare for a politician to speak for hours on end and be given an actual award, it is very flattering to win a Grammy," Obama said in a statement. "But, I can assure you I'm not thinking about quitting my day job."
Obama painstakingly recorded his autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," over a combined stretch of about 15 hours in the sound booth.
Hours before he won the award Wednesday, Obama was focused on the business of the Senate and modestly predicted he would not win the Grammy.
"I'm going after some tough competition," Obama said. "You've got George Carlin, Garrison Keillor and Sean Penn reading Bob Dylan's biography {ndash} that's the favorite right there. I'm the dark horse."
Obama beat out other nominees, including: Keillor for "The Adventures of Guy Noir," Al Franken for "The Al Franken Show Party Album," Sean Penn for "Chronicles--Volume One (Bob Dylan)," and George Carlin for "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?"
Obama is following in the footsteps of Sen. Everett Dirksen of Illinois, who won a Grammy in the best spoken word category in 1967 for "Gallant Men."
the grammy's
ok, so we stayed up and watched most of the telecast......from madonna.....to........bruce.......at least bruce was what i considered to be the apex.......devils and dust....in his best bob dylan posturing.........marvelous.........i did enjoy christina aguillara and her glam rendition of a song for you.....which was a leon russell tune once upon a time.....done with herbie hancock.......and gosh........paul mccartney popping up everywhere was strange......and u2 was flat.....much as i respect the work that bono does to end world hunger.....when his bono vox is off....it is way off.........and coldplay was awlful......ouch.......the only album in contention that we actually own......is allison krauss...which won.........she is so precise it is hard to imagine a collection of her tunes not succeeding......i especially enjoyed john legend singing his own composition everyday people along with his own accompiament at the piano......
ok, so i have full confidence in the notion that john mccain will run for the republican nomination in 2008.......and if he is the candidate i will consider voting for him.......mostly because i see him as centrist and not right wing.......and partially because he is an adoptive parent.....and maybe because i think that a war veteran may be the only person who can get us out of this middle eastern mess.......a war-evading asshole got us into it......let me rephrase.......a rich-preppy sort who didn't want to put his own life on the line got us into this war......and only a true hero can see us through....unless a fine dem. example of the above comes through........
ok,so this film won't be coming anywhere near me......but i wish i could see it....here is what was said on slate.com...t seems ironic, but it is true, says Jonathan Demme, who directed "Neil Young: Heart of Gold," which is now playing in U.S. theaters.
The term "family film" is associated with Disney and Pixar and huggable stuffed toys. Young's song "Needle and the Damage Done" speaks to heroin addiction, and he will forever be linked to 1960s and 1970s anti-war protests with songs like "Ohio" from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. And since then, the 60-year-old has only grown in stature to become a standard bearer for angst-ridden teen rockers.
Yet, in "Heart of Gold," the Canadian-born Young and Demme have created what they term a "dream concert" of songs from his recent "Prairie Wind" album and older "Harvest" and "Harvest Moon" records that conjure spirits of country-and-western music's past and harken to a simple life in the North American heartland.
"It puts me in touch with some deeply felt, old-fashioned, powerful ideas about what America stands for, what the family stands for, what friends stand for," Demme told Reuters in a joint interview with Young. "There's a complete absence of cynicism. I think it makes you feel good to be human."
"Heart of Gold" is a concert, but don't call it a "concert film," its makers said. Young, his bandmates and friends like Emmylou Harris sing and play 19 songs, but each tune was elaborately staged over two nights in Nashville, Tennessee's Ryman Auditorium 4 -- the first home of the Grand Ole Opry.......
for the record.......4-way street is one of the first substantial albums i ever purchased, if you kindly overlook the monkees when i was in the 6th grade......i was thrilled to be able to see firsthand neil young's handwritten lyrics for heart of gold...on a napkin....in a display case at the rock and roll hall of fame in cleveland......nobody else in my 'party' was as moved.......but then again......their favorite song of all time isn't...cowgirl in the sand.......which neil sings best on....four way street.........
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
that would make a great short story.....
ok, so andrew and i had a wonderful supper at natasha's cafe......a nice end to a mostly tedious 2 day workshop at the marriott griffin gate.....i had a middle eastern combo appetizer with hummus, tabouli etc...and andrew had the stuffed grape leaves....seems he really likes the ones i make better......who knew?.......and then i had yet another appetizer...the smoked salmon with lemon caper roulade.......and andrew had a chicken curry wrap.....which we washed down with a nice crisp white from spain......i haven't eaten out in a while...forgive me the menu rundown.......it was good to get out, and good to catch up with my eldest.....and even better to connect with stories of everyday life that would make good fiction if they were not so very true.......
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
lexington......
ok, so i spent the day at a workshop in lexington.....the 1st of a 2-day meeting......and i rode up with a local health department director who happens to be my neighbor....in the bmw he bought on ebay.......nice vehicle......i did ok the the trip up, because i sat in back....but on the way home i sat up front.......and i had my eyes closed most of the time.....as he drives fast with the trust that his breaks will stop this car before it attains impact with the vehicle ahead.......i did check out the front and side airbags......luckily.......i had already planned to drive by myself to morrow, so that i can eat supper at natasha's cafe with my eldest.......i tried to eat there once, after tosca's recital with honestlyold and imgoingdowntown...but it was completely booked with something like a wedding reception...so we ate elsewhere.....the menu as posted online looks yummy....very middle eastern.....all i have to do is to keep awake through tomorrow's breakout sessions....so that i make our rendevous ontime......i suppose the day would have gone smoother had marriott at griffin gate had wi-fi.......
on going to bed early......
ok, so......i was in bed and likely asleep last evening withing 30 minutes of coming home......granted...i didn't get home until nearly 9:00 pm.......I do a support group in Anderson County on the 1st monday of the month......and all the way home all i could think about was going to bed......i barely looked at the book that came from amazon.com......that is possibly the true measure of fatigue.....when one is too tuckered out to read.....and so this morning i feel somewhat refreshed.......but humming the little ditty from wilco...when you wake up feeling old......even going to bed early cannot trump oldness.....
Monday, February 06, 2006
mormons against the creationists?
ok, so this from slate.com.......Opponents of evolution are meeting unexpected resistance in Utah. The state senate narrowly passed a bill requiring teachers to tell students that scientists disagree about the origins of life, but some key Republican lawmakers are fighting it. Supporters' views: 1) If some scientists dispute evolution, we should say so. 2) The bill isn't religious; it just about "not overstepping what we know." Opponents' views: 1) God has no problem with science. 2) Mixing faith and science will corrupt faith. 3) Mormons, being a minority, should beware religious majoritarianism. 4) Mormons, believing in progress and spiritual transcendence, have no problem reconciling a higher future with a lower past. Question: If creationists are telling kids to respect dissent regardless of its evidentiary merits, aren't they the new softheaded pluralists?....ok, so i have not idea what that last question means.........but i do think it is humerous that the mormons would take the anti-creationist tact.......
Sunday, February 05, 2006
taking chances with gravity......
ok, so i moved the reference section of books to shelving in the back room.....including encyclopedias, dictionaries, and young scientist books and the like.......all hardbound and heavy....to make room for all of andrew's literature and philosophy books he has deposited in the guest room for the time being......mostly paperbacks......and this has potentially shifted tremendous weight toward the downhill side of this abode......i jest, but should you hear that our house slid toward the lake, blame our voluminous reading material.......i didn't take the time to really organize it all.....or to take my feminist/female lierature upstairs to my own shelves by the loveseat....which would require a sorting through of that area......and i have lost interest in moving any more books this afternoon......i did take note of titles that i could read for myself from andrew's collectionb.....gravity's rainbow, anna karenina, several by nabokov and herman hesse that i hadn't heard of, daisy miller, several by turgenev.....ah well......just not today...........
Friday, February 03, 2006
bleak house....
ok, so i once read bleak house because my freshman english seminar guy....said it was the thing to do......and i believed him......and i had a hard time reading the book.....more so than great expectations.....or a christmas carol......or......david copperfield......or any of his other works of literature......bleak house......i may yet have that copy......not engrained to memory...not taken to heart like moby dick......i read that great piece of fiction on whim as well......but the whim of a 4th grader who desires to read aloud a great book.....yep.....i'll take a chance on that...and so we read....andrew and i....for weeks.....until the term leviathan rolled off my tongue.....and i came to see the scene at the boarding house with quiqueg (sp) and his harpoon snagging the steak off the supper table as the epitomy of slapstick humor....and we finished and i thought i was done with epics................and yet there is bleak house...on pbs.....on sunday nights....and i have not watched...mostly because i am watching.....desparate housewives.......a sham of a series if ever there was one.....how sad for charles dickens...to lose market share to such an insipid foe.....................and then there is gillian anderson.....she of the sci-fi genre......who comes back to the screen in this piece....again.....i am so sorry that i need my sleep and do not watch much television after 10:00 pm........i promise i'll catch the dvd version..............
fey
ok, so i came across the descriptive....fey while seeking additional information on downloadable songs.......a combo called belle and sebastian...a tune called another sunny day....the term fey was used to pin down their sound..........i looked it up again...just to make sure.....fey is not your everyday word...not the kind of adjective thrown about in ordinary conversation....it means.....fated, bewitched, unlucky, one whose fate is known or prophesized....again....not the sort of word one reads in the local paper...or the lexington paper....maybe the nytimes.....or a classical novel......but having had a bad experience today with words.....misspelled words.....misspelled author's names.....i am twice shy about these things.....and so fey hits home ever so much more this evening..........we watched a video from the library....the truth about cats and dogs.......a wonderful film to watch with one's spouse and 12-year old......they both rejected to the lighthouse, the woolf novel i will watch on my own tomorrow.......nothing fey about that story.....as i recall it is the story line once described by my personal physician as involving squiggley little hormones.......and so i have not had a complete physical since.......tragically, should i contract some fatal condition......it would never occur to my doctor that i failed to seek medical assistence because of his callous attitudes.........
my umbrella......
ok, so i am most put out about the loss of my umbrella.....a vibrantly striped yet dimunutive affair that i purchased aftewr christmas and never used......and there is the definitive question.....is an umbrella that one bought but not used your umbrella.......or is it still under the ownership of the maker until opened......does possession begin at purchase or use?.........i am really bummed out about this loss......i can remember looking at it in the back seat of the honda when i arrived at lincoln county on thursday....but they disavowed any knowledge when i called today enquiring.......i really want this umbrella back......it went with my orange michael kors coat....the coat i dont' wear often because it is so very orange.......and without the umbrella how can i ever wear the coatr again?...................
soar throat lozenges.....
ok, so some right-wing pregnant bimbette attempted to add nasty comments onto this blog from her perch in reston, virginia this afternoon......mostly belittling my misspelling of jane austen....my sidebar has been up so long i hadn't really noticed.....and i have corrected the error....curiously, the mean-spirited wench found my blog whilst hunting for soar throat lozenges safe while pregnant.......i presume she is still hunting under soar...........hah!....poor spellers who live in glass houses shouldn't throw jibes.....or some similar variation on wwjsay..........
Thursday, February 02, 2006
ok, so this from the onion..it may not be true but is funny......and may end up having some truth to it after all
the majority leader.....
ok, so the newly elected majority leader is from the great state of ohio......and is most maliciously remembered as the gut who passed out tobacco lobby checks to cronies on the house floor....once upon a time....he apoligized.....and i suppose this vote tells us that all is forgiven and forgotten......
how many times?
ok, so......today was my thursday day...at my loaner county.......and the discussion about my child's plane ticket brought up detaiuls about my life i really did not want to disclose....such as....'have you ever been out of the country?.....'.....yes.....'where to?'........'well, france, and switzerland, and belgium and holland and germany and austria and spain and england and wales amd leichtenstein'......'all at once?'........'well, no.....over several visits'.....so which was your favorite place....?'.......'paris, of course...'....'so how many times have you been to paris?'........at this point i knew that to tell the truth was just too much.....so i breezed through a rapid recitation of assorted family trips and school trips and friends trips......without actually adding up the segments flown.......or even owning up to the segments flown....but it was still enough that my thursday workmates looked at me with doubt......is she making this all up or telling the truth..................?..........not that it matters...but it does seem a bit far fetched to have folks that have never left these borders believe that somebody who works with them weekly has traveled to paris 11 times.....let alone without a real grasp of the language........
on speaking russian......
ok, so today was my lincoln county diabetes support group......and the topic was disaster preparedness......for which i was not nearly prepared as i should have been.....i completely forgot the potential for an evacuation of that entire county should there be a leak in the bio-weapons supply depot in madison county...right next door.....oy....but i digress........my cell phone rang as i was presenting....and my precocious group wanted to know who i put on hold.......corellia my favorite travel agent with a quote on stephan trip home and trip to st petersburg.......and wouldn't you know......one of my support group crowd was a russian eavesdropper during the cold war....he learned russian at boot camp well enough that he was assigned to listen in on radio communications.............small world....he told me he regrets that he never actually ever got to go to russia.....and he told me this in english.....and in russian.......
memoirs of a geisha....
ok, so i read with amusement a piece on line about how china has decided not to allow the showing of memoirs of a geisha in country.............how is this possible in a country where the pirated dvd is already on sale in shanghai?.................
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
the loaded gun.....
ok, so my friend mildred boggs was laid to rest in the small cemetary on north buster pike in mercer county today.......and since she is the only person that i have ever/will ever fall out over a loaded gun............it is worth recording the incident for posterity......mildred lived across the road with her husband emmett from our friends dick and margie.....who later became cayle's foster parents and who divorced within a month of her adoption......i say across the road in the most polar of terms.....they lived on the uphill side....and the boggs lived on the downhill/lakeside........downhill being the operative word......he had retired years before from the ashland area of ky to live a quiet life of fishing....and more fishing...presumably from some work involving chemicals or petroleum......and mildred was his multi-talented spouse......the kind of person who could have/should have been a hippie....the sort of free spirit that one wondered if her mind had ever been altered chemically, if not for the fact that she was 75+ ........she painted, she gardened, she wrote haiku, she baked treats, she repaired bears, and she believed in fairies......i came to know her when andrew was a toddler and stephan was a baby....and we would walk to visit with one in the backpack and one grasping a hand....their cabin was mostly one large room, with 2 bedrooms and a bath off on the road/nonlakeside .......many, many visits....with teaparties that included her many stuffed bears......she talked to her bears as if they were real.......ala pinochio....i helped with her gardening.....which really means that i helped to fight back the tide of nature.....i have several plants that i can track back to her...za lovely oriental yellow holly bush, for starts......and several watercolors of sunrises/sunsets.....and maybe a haiku or two in notes she sent......and all was well until my boys were old enough to wander from our sight while we chatted......not perfect, mind you....there had been a few gasps and comments on my part when we stayed long enough into a saturday afternoon for a u.k. game....and both emmett and mildren referred to players using the n. word........at first i was just surprised....and thought maybe they forgot they had company....but later on i realized that neither cared if overheard......and then there was the gun incident......when we were watching a uk game, and drinking tea....and one of the children (i honestly cannot remember which) wandered into mildred's room....certainly looking for her stuffed bears at their own tea table.....and mildred leaped out of her seat and started screaming that maybe ______would find the gun under her pillow.........what gun?.....the gun i keep under my pillow......you keep a gun under your pillow? is it loaded?......of course it is loaded.................your children cannot come here if they cannot keep out the places where there are loaded guns...............how many loaded guns.....several.............omg.......i packed up the kids and we walked home..........looking back.....i am sad that i let the n. word slide and only broke off our relationship over the gun thing........and so.....a woman that i have not spoken to in maybe 17 years has passed away........and i am sad that we never made peace with our differences.....i did walk up there the very next christmas, with both boys and a gift.....and she peeked out her window to see who was there....and then only came out with her slop jar to throw onto the compost pile.....and told me that i/us that we could take out gift and go home.....which we did..................again....so sad she has passed...so sad we never made peace...........
taking notes.......
ok, so i am humbled to note that i have started to take notes......while i listen to music during lunch.....i have so many new songs and unrecognizable artistes that i have taken to dragging out the sticky notepad from my desk to make a record of memorable tunes.......just to be able to keep track....not so far as to call it a scorecard....but there are clear faves thus far.......the ark, with a tune called this piece of poetry is meant to do harm.....i liked ti even before i caught the name.......and then there is liz durrett's the mezzanine.....twin atlas with three loves and an oldie...wilco's when you wake up feeling old...songs that i downloaded off of cd's we have here at the house......i didn't listen to the whole thing.....i selected randomly, or by a catchy song title.....kind of like how i bet at keeneland.......and win so infrequently.....i do like the wilco tune, despite its clever title.......i do wish that i had more mountain goat picks......my willy-nilly selection process which yielded pale green things......i implore the lyrically-gifted of my aquaitance to stear me toward something more.........or less......organic........ah well.....i am not the only one in this household who has caught the new music bug......my spouse is really into imogen heap......and was excited when i showed him how he can listen to excerpts off amazon's website...should he want to invest in more than our freebie download.........
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
