Flash Syntax

Just past midnight, it started to rain. In my living room/office I have two large windows with a second floor vantage. The rain seems to blow straight against the windows, and I’m wondering what winter will be like. For now, I think the view is amazing. Right after I first arrived here, I watched the moon rise in one corner of these windows and pass its arc to the second, just before dawn.

One of the primary adjustments I need to make up here is that not everyone transacts business during the hours after midnight. I try to convince myself to go to bed earlier, but the night has always been so inspiring to me. That’s why I ended up being a photographer that worked primarily with flash lighting. During the day, it’s always hard for me to think.

During the day, everything always seems so fragmented and broken into small chunks. It’s hard to discern any syntax. Under the cover of darkness, things coalesce in more striking ways; you just see the part that interests you without getting lost in the endless procession of things begging to be attended to in the light of day. I think it is the blinding flashes of information arriving in small pieces, the staccato barrage, that makes it hard to create any meaningful syntax.

Thinking about all the old LPs I’ve been transferring, it seems that it is difficult to construct meaningful “units” to talk about these days. In the LP days, it was simpler—twenty minutes, and then you had to get up and turn it over. CDs tripled the duration, but the majority of musicians really didn’t do much with the chance at even longer listener attention. I get sick of re-releases padded with “bonus tracks” that usually just disrupt the elegant short stories that LPs used to create. In music, and in most things, syntax is the most difficult thing. It seems retrograde to revert to the same sort of “singles culture” which existed in the 50s and 60s, but that is precisely what is happening. Just buy the songs you like, and forget about any sort of larger message that a well connected cycle of songs can provide.

Of course, there are always exceptions, but for the most part digital music culture seems to go to two extremes—either they want to sell the single, or a multi-disc opus that wanders and falls apart because there just isn’t enough time to take it in at one setting. Retrospective releases fall prey to this. Just what is a meaningful unit these days? Single songs or the entire catalogue of an artist crammed on one disk of mp3s?

I don’t know. But it seems to me that the LP was an interesting middle ground, where you could spend twenty to forty minutes thinking about one thing. It’s hard to think about it too much right now, because the horizon keeps lighting up with brief flashes of lightning.

Settling In

I can tell now that posting during midweek is going to be a problem. Between the classes I’m taking and the classes I’m teaching, my time is pretty much filled. I’m very excited to be here in Minnesota. It is great being able to talk to other people about things I’m concerned about, things I’ve read, and have them be familiar with the books or issues. Arkansas was very isolating for me. But just the same, I have a lot of anxiety right now.

I’ve been transferring more old LPs to MP3. I’ve got most of the Gun Club catalogue transferred. I’m not sure why I can’t shake a sort of ominous feeling, akin to the Gun Club cover of the Creedence tune “Run through the Jungle” from the Miami album (same disclaimer as before, with the same stipulation that you click through from this domain). Tom Verlaine’s solo work is up next. I need something happier to push me through.

One task I’ve got to do tonight is write a “cultural history” of myself as an intro for a class. This sort of thing is hard for me, because it always turns into a literary piece. I suspect I’ll post it here. Conversations I’ve had this week have pointed me in some really specific directions for research, and I hope to write more about that too. However, there are reading outlines to do and other tasks that may delay writing here with any significant length.

I feel pretty relieved that my sporadic posting over the summer has dropped my traffic here enough so that I don’t feel as compelled to try to be consistently entertaining. I don’t, however, want to continue to vent frustrations here as much as I have in the past. It’s a weird time, so my posting patterns will probably be pretty weird for a while longer.

Dreaming

The last trip of the season is done. While I haven’t traveled quite as far as my partner (who added up the season’s travels at 22,000 miles) it seems as if there has been too little time to think or dream. Each moment when I wasn’t moving seems filled with nothing more than endless chains of pragmatic tactical decisions. On the road there are spaces for drifting off. But when you’re retracing the same miles, over and over, it seems more like you’re memorizing some sort of speech. Ft. Smith, Fayetteville, Rogers, Bentonville—St. Joseph, Lamar, Nevada, Kansas City—Des Moines, Ames, Story City, Clear Lake—and on and on and on.

Traveling south to north in the Midwest across a season gives you a certain perspective on seasons in general. The most consistent scenery is corn. When we began, the corn ranged from seedling state to adolescence. In the end, it changed from verdant green to dying gold.

While I was in Oklahoma, my mother told me one of her dreams. She was driving in a car alongside my dad when the traffic became congested. My father was always impatient behind the wheel, and in his later years a bit crazy. Dad got frustrated and started driving on the sidewalk. They were moving along pretty well, until they ended up on a dead-end street. At this point in the dream, dad (and the car) disappeared. Mom went into a store to call the police to try to locate dad. It took forever to convince them to let her use the phone, but eventually they did. A plain-clothes policemen (described as a good ol’ boy by my mother) arrived and sat on a bench with some other men, talking and paying little heed to her distress. When my mother realized that she would have to tell him that dad was dead, she became even more afraid. She was afraid the policeman would think that she killed him, so she wandered off. At this point, she woke up with severe leg cramps.

Mom asked me what I thought it meant, and I withheld any of the obvious metaphorical explanations. Sometimes it’s better not to overanalyze things. My mother feels so fragile now, and with each passing month, seems more fragile to me. What was once comfortable and familiar gradually gets put away. The reason for the last trip of the summer was to get new carpet installed in my mother’s house. She cleared the nick-knacks from her furniture so that we could move it easily, insisting that she probably wouldn’t put them back. I had little to talk about besides moving stories, and though she sympathized, she swore that the next time she moved she’d take nothing but her clothes. The morning after the dream (the first morning after the carpet was installed) she said that her house felt like a hotel.

We went shopping that day, and mom seemed so pleased to just casually take her time. She bought my cousin Kathy a big purple purse with a K on it. We visited Kathy the day after, and took her to KFC where she discovered the miracle of soap dispensers. She was thrilled that she could push the lever and soap would come out. Sometimes, it’s the little victories that matter. Of course, she was also the hit of the nursing home when she came back sporting a new purse.

Having new carpet installed should have been a sort of victory for my mom. She had argued with my father for years about it, but he kept insisting that they couldn’t afford it—mostly though, his reason for deferring was the idea of asking for help (or paying) to have the furniture moved. My father never asked for help from anyone. He stubbornly did everything for himself, and disliked it when anyone blamed others for their own failings. He felt like people should take care of their own problems. When his strength and flexibility began to fade, he dealt with it by avoiding anything that required abilities he no longer possessed.

Driving south on this trip I was listening to PJ Harvey. When “Hair” came on, I started thinking about Milton’s Samson Agonistes. Right after I started my Master’s program in rhetoric, I sat in on a Milton seminar and was allowed to present that poem. It was a labor of love—I was not compelled to do it, nor did I even receive any credit for it—I just wanted to. I remembered the long conversations I had with a minister friend of mine about Samson. It was his contention that Samson was only a small part of a larger story, leading through degrees of human imperfection to the kingdom of David. The story of Samson is not really about hair, but about having faith in one’s inner voice. As Milton puts it:

Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail
Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt,
Dispraise, or blame, nothing but well and fair,
And what may quiet us in a death so noble.
Let us go find the body where it lies
Sok’t in his enemies blood, and from the stream
With lavers pure and cleansing herbs wash off
The clotted gore. I with what speed the while
(Gaza is not in plight to say us nay)
Will send for all my kindred, all my friends
To fetch him hence and solemnly attend
With silent obsequie and funeral train
Home to his Fathers house: there will I build him
A Monument, and plant it round with shade
Of Laurel ever green, and branching Palm,
With all his Trophies hung, and Acts enroll’d
In copious Legend, or sweet Lyric Song. (1721-1737)

The trophies on the shelves of my mother’s house are mostly the evidences of family, of caring for others. Only the most immediate of these remain. There are pieces of dreams and struggles that cannot be reduced to lyric song. I could not help but think, as I listened to the PJ Harvey song, of how shallow we make our legends—reducing a search for faith to locks of hair and blindness.

Thither shall all the valiant youth resort,
And from his memory inflame thir breasts
To matchless valour, and adventures high:
The Virgins also shall on feastful days
Visit his Tomb with flowers, only bewailing
His lot unfortunate in nuptial choice,
From whence captivity and loss of eyes. (1738-1744)

Trucking

Just as I was beginning to get comfortably settled in here, we’ve got to head out again today. Back through Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and then Oklahoma. I had hoped to write something more substantial before I left again, but such is life. At least I don’t have to drive the big truck this time.

Eight or nine years ago, I moved from California to Arkansas. I started out in a 17 foot U-Haul truck. Somewhere near Santa Rosa, New Mexico, a wheel fell off. Trucks don’t drive well on three wheels. I managed to get it oriented well enough to slide into the center divider without hitting anyone, or anyone hitting me, as it rolled over. Every since that time, when I drive a big truck I feel fragile. Trucks pitch you around in ways you never feel in a car. I completed the rest of the trip in a 30-footer, feeling as if I might roll over at any second. U-Haul’s slogan “Adventures in Moving” still haunts me. It wasn’t the sort of adventure I was looking for.

This time, it was a 25-foot Penske. I just couldn’t find it in myself to go U-Hauling any more. When I was forced to take a truck bypass I hadn’t counted on, I ended up cruising it through the narrow streets of a park near my apartment that I turned into by mistake. My partner, following in my car, thought I was showing off how well I could drive. It’s pretty easy to get used to a big truck, but by the time you do your trip is done. The Penske truck felt much safer— but not as safe as my little Ford car. The car also takes much less time to unload.

I managed to start reading again this week—mostly Quintilian and Hugh Blair, if anyone cares. The thoughts which I must lay aside for now mostly have to do with the role of memory. Mike Snider wrote an interesting post about memorizing poetry, linking some articles well worth reading. Memoria has been displaced from the canons of rhetoric for a long time now, and the reasons for this are complex. I was never forced to memorize much (other than the prologue to the Canterbury Tales in Middle English) during my trip through school. I always hated anything that was based in rote memorization. A major problem, of course, is defining memory and figuring out how it should be applied.

This week my partner commented—“Why is it that you can remember all the lyrics to songs you haven’t heard in decades and you can’t remember poetry?” I could have dodged the question citing my taste for 4,000 line monsters like Blake’s Jerusalem, but I think it’s more a matter of kairos. We remember songs, I think, because we connect them with times and situations in our lives that were important to us. Like most people, I suspect that even if I were asked to memorize anything in school when I was young, I wouldn’t remember it now because school just wasn’t that important then. Music, on the other hand, has always been important to me.

I had to repeat that to myself over and over while I was unloading the big truck. Two thousand LPs and cases of cassettes, not to mention the thousands of CDs made me question just why I haul all these mnemonic devices around with me wherever I go. Most of them are securely in place inside my head. Why do I need the polymer-binding substances? I suspect because they make me feel at home.

I hate the fact that now that they’re unpacked, I have to leave again.

Rest Stop

A variety of issues (fatigue being a major one, and an impending cold) have kept me from writing much and making my blog dissappear. Other issues include upgrading my ancient PC to Windows XP, learning enough about networking to set up the new place with an Airport Extreme and 802.11g cards. Just plain enjoying staying put after driving around 5,000 miles this month (with another 1,500 to go before school starts) is the central issue, though.

I’ll feel better once things are a little more unpacked; maybe then I can unpack myself.

iPack

Observations:

My new mac could be either the greatest packing assistant ever, or a serious impediment. It occurred to me that I could avoid having to spend days in silence by hooking up the mac to my amp and preamp, allowing me to pack everything else except the core components until the last minute. However, while packing up the audio CDs, it dawned on me that I didn’t have much of a selection on the mac. I then set about to ripping all my Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Meat Puppets and Minutemen into the little box. Several hours later, packing resumed.

Master’s theses are useful. While I had already foolishly discarded the two drafts of my thesis, my partner still had several draft copies left that needed to be dealt with. Shredded theses make excellent packing material. There’s something almost poetic about it, shredding up the irritating nit-picking and using it to line boxes. Or, maybe it’s the rite of passage thing. Any way you slice it, it’s still fun.

I wonder how I accumulated so many parallel printing cables? I must have at least twenty or thirty of the suckers. Not particularly useful, as I contemplate a completely wireless apartment. Given the limited space in the new apartment, I’m dreaming of flat-screens and a completely air-ported work space.

And then I wake up. Though it may not be unusual for some people, I am still reeling from having spent around $17,000 in the space of a month. Ack! To be fair, $11,000 of it was a car—it seemed to be necessity to have. “A man with a good car, needs no justification . . .” or something to that effect.

I also wonder how long I can keep quoting obscure songs every time I blog something. O Well.

Jerking Back and Forth

During the transition, I managed to make my blog disappear. Sometimes it seems like you can either live life, or record it—but never both at the same time.

There are a lot of little stories I’m trying to save up to write later. But, who knows when that will be. My partner and I drove to Minneapolis last Friday to take some shelving, a futon sofa, our television, and her car to the new place. We got the new place wired up with cable, though one of our neighbors has a wifi network that I poached to remove the 194 spam comments I received while we were there.

Somehow I didn’t feel like writing after that. We just took care of business and drove back. Now it’s big truck time. The sad part is that our new 3 bedroom place is around 20% smaller than our current 2 bedroom. It’s sad to look around and say “we’ve got to leave that behind.”

Some things are best let go of. Other things, well, it’s just a damn shame.

Boxes

It has been hard to think about reading or writing lately. I don’t feel the same drive I’ve had for at least in the last six or seven years, and I don’t really feel like I have much to say. But it’s an eye of the hurricane type of feeling—a sort of calm between storms.

The boxes o’ books count (the downstairs ones anyway) has passed fifty. But there’s another box I took out of my old Ford Escort that I finally got the courage to move from the center of the living room floor to a station on top of a pile of book boxes that I keep thinking about. There’s a story behind it that I want to write a part of.

I moved 1,664 miles from California to here around nine years ago. It marked a separation, and only slightly later, a divorce. The laurel I grabbed for turned to a crown of thorns. I was left with nothing—no car, no job, no place to live. I had no choice but to beg a ride back west around 180 miles to father’s house. He supplied a down payment for a car, and cosigned the loan. I had come to Little Rock to build a new life for myself, but instead, I only succeeded in tearing myself down. Before I returned to Little Rock, I decided I had to build something. I’d didn’t feel that I had the luxury of being crushed, and my father’s antidote for stress had always been work. I thought it might work for me too.

I went out to the garage and started looking at the scraps. I thought that I might try to fashion a toolbox for the new used car. I’d been trying to teach myself how to cut dovetail joints right before I left California, and started working on some pine. My father was a quiet man; he never made me feel bad about my recent, catastrophic failure. He never said much really. After I’d been hacking away with saw and chisel for a few hours, he just came out into the garage and said “I think you need a handle.” He picked through the woodpile and found an old axe handle. He took a measurement of my rough-cut pieces, and then chucked the smooth handle into his lathe. As I put the toolbox together, some of the dovetails in the softwood broke—but it held together pretty firmly. The handle was perfect and snug.

“Just fill in the broken spots with glue,” dad said.

Building something from scraps helped me a lot then. I drove back to Little Rock the next day. Within about three more, I had a job. A month later, I moved into the apartments I’m moving out of now. Since then, I built a lot of things in my head but nothing quite so physical as this box. Building things makes a difference.

By the end of the week, I’ll be traveling back that 180 miles, and then another 650 miles straight up north. North is a direction that I haven’t tried before. There is no time for building now, only packing. But maybe once I get there, I can try to build something again. I have another new used car, and a bunch of boxes.

Many Miles to Go

I had intended to write and photograph a little while I was here in Minneapolis, but for some reason I just never got around to it. I spent a lot of time driving around in circles, writing absurdly large amounts on checks, and then staring at maps again. All in all though, it was pretty fun. I think I’m going to like it here. It’s just the getting here that’s the problem. I shouldn’t have figured out the mileage— I have around 4,000 miles worth of driving to do in the next few weeks. So, blogging is probably going to be fairly slight.

At least we can throw away all the apartment guides now. We found a good place with plenty of space for books (we were worried about that, given the size of the collections we’re dealing with). Now the only problem is the loading and toting of all our crap up here, and ferrying the cars. This move, though it seems shorter and simpler than my move from California to Arkansas, is actually more complicated. But I’m glad we made a trip, unencumbered, to just cruise around and check the place out before I have to navigate a big truck around.

The drive back will start tomorrow; I’m hoping it will take a little less than the fourteen hours it took last time to get to Oklahoma (around 750 miles, but much of it is on less than perfect roads). Then, after running some errands for my mom, it will be another 2 1/2 or three hours to Little Rock (180 miles). I suppose I’ll be due for an oil-change before returning to ferry the other car up here, perhaps leaving next Wednesday. I’m just thinking out loud here, because I’ve been horribly uninspired writing-wise. I suppose it’s slightly better than blogging my breakfast.

Most of the real “content” I could post is nestled on my hard drive in Little Rock. But it’s been really great having the little 12″ mac for the trip. Of course, I underestimated how bleary my eyes would get with the constant driving. It’s not conducive to staring at a screen after hours of staring at the road. I feel very out of touch, since I haven’t taken my usual two hours or so of reading blogs each day. I had some thoughts, but I think they got lost in the cornfields along the way.

Right now, I’m still processing the incredible sort of quiet there is up here. One has the tendency to want to whisper in stores. Of course, I’ve mostly been touring the suburbs, finding the places I’ll need to get essentials when I start setting up the new place. But people are nice in a very odd, almost passive aggressive kind of way— “You will be nice to me or else!” unlike the Southern “You will be nice or we’ll ignore you completely” method. As a guy from a “rude” state (California) I find all this niceness really fascinating.

We arrived in Minneapolis during the pride celebration, which drew 400,000 people though we didn’t attend any of the festivities. There were lots of rainbow vehicles at the hotel. It’s nice to think that this is a liberal place; I’m looking forward to the change. The weather up here has been beautiful too, while it is flooding in Arkansas and Oklahoma. I’m not looking forward to driving back into it. Hopefully, it will let up before we get there.

If I were smart, I’d probably just announce a hiatus. But rather than doing that, I suppose I’ll just announce “Beware: inanities about moving ahead!”

On the road again

I’m surprised that driving long distances still doesn’t bother me. I really like it, actually. It took around fourteen hours to drive from Pocola, Oklahoma to Minneapolis. I’m still kind of wired, so I thought I would just jot down some thoughts.

I’m amazed just how much I hate Missouri. Every time I drive through it, I say to myself “If I lived here, I’d move” (apologies to any Missouri readers). I just find it really depressing, and it goes on forever. One of the most interesting things as I made progress northward was the way that the corn got shorter. It was around five or six feet tall in Missouri, but by the time I hit the upper part of Iowa, it was barely a foot or two in stature. I’d never been to Iowa before, and it all seems rather pastoral. It’s hard to explain the difference in “feel” between Missouri and Iowa. I know it’s irrational, but for some reason it seemed like the “children of the corn” were lurking between the stalks in Missouri, while in Iowa it just seemed like people were scary friendly. Too many years in California, I guess. Excessively friendly people make me nervous. I’ve never adjusted to that part of living in the South either.

When I crossed the border into Minnesota, the air just seemed better to me. In Arkansas, the temperatures are approaching the nineties with 80 percent humidity or so. I turned the air conditioning off after I crossed the border, and never had to turn it on again. The weather was just, well, pleasant. I can hardly remember the last time I thought weather was pleasant. I think I was on the California coast. The year-round humidity of Arkansas has started to bother me more as I’ve gotten older. I’ve lived with heat my whole life, too. I’m really looking forward to the change. I actually like cold. Everyone seems sure that the arctic temperatures up here will make me change my mind. I don’t think so, but I’ll soon find out.

There is so much I’ve got to get done in the next few weeks. I’ve been deluding myself, blogging along and continuing my research. It is very hard for me to stop researching things. But now, there is the matter of getting a mailing address— I can’t buy any more books until I get a new one. That’s what I drove up here to do. If I can manage that, then I get to drive back and finish packing stuff up. Then I get to drive up here again a few more times. I’m pretty sure I’m going to love Minnesota— good thing, since I’ve committed myself to being here for a while.

The only weird thing about traveling so long (from Little Rock to Ft. Smith yesterday, and then to Minneapolis today) is the feeling of being disconnected. I’m very glad I bought the little apple. It’s relaxing to get caught up a little (thanks to wifi) and unwind. I was particularly glad to find Raymon’s link to the piece on Ed Rucha. It’s funny, but I was thinking about him when I drove past the Spam Museum just south of here. I always liked his huge painting of the Spam can at the LA County Museum. His 70s picture books were a big influence on me too. Rucha was a true innovator in the realm of word-pictures.