Lusciousity

Have you noticed how there just isn’t one first day of school anymore? This probably isn’t a new development in the history of school, but I’m feeling it this year as I gather up my schedules and my notebooks and my one and only kind of black pen that I like. School in Broward and Miami started Monday, school in Palm Beach started Wednesday (and so did D’s teaching career), my one university starts Saturday and my other one starts Tuesday… how are we supposed to feel part of a grand rush to the classroom with such scattered entries into the months of homework and pencil shavings? As a child, I always imagined that as I went to bed on the night before school, I went to bed with children all over the country, getting ready to venture into a new year. I had a mythical sense of life like that. Of course, it wasn’t true even then, but it seemed true. It seemed like at least children all over the state of Michigan were sharing in a single night of excitement and dread before reporting to a new teacher and a new locker. There was none of this changing the date by three or four weeks every year depending on how many hurricanes we think we’ll have or how pissed off we are that there’s no time for family vacations, none of this one county going back before the other. There was endless planning of what I would wear, and re-planning, and knowing that it wouldn’t help anyway and I’d probably look like a dork no matter what, and instead looking forward to a new year of book reports and spelling tests. Most years I could barely sleep I was so excited.

I guess the good news is, no matter how many different ways the start of school gets deflated by random start dates and a lack of crisp fall air, I’m as pumped as ever, and more this year than last as D ventures into the land of the sixth grade and I look down the long cold barrel of perhaps my last ever year of school… but I’m sure I’ll find a way to keep that from happening. An addict always gets her fix, right?

I’m going to rewind a couple of key luscious points made early in the life of lusciousity:

All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well– Julian of Norwich

And when we can’t see how it will be well or it is utterly impossible to believe that all shall ever be well again:

Life takes lusciousity– The Editors

Lushes, of late I have been gripped by life’s uncertainties and have too often allowed that to distract me from finding the gushing, lip-staining fruit of every moment. So for today, another too familiar day of aftermath and regret, I want to share with you this piece by Naomi Shihab Nye and a thought from Christine Apter the yoga teacher: this world has so many bad things, but always also there are good and better things.

You will love the Ray Bradbury short story “There Will Come Soft Rains.” It is a haunting short story about our technological future. I was thinking about it last week when a coworker and I were discussing the relative merits of robots in our lives. Coworker was pro-robot, especially the Roomba. Me, well, I think I am pro-robot, because I do hate to see Asimo fall down, but do we really need more beings/things to do our work for us?

Anyway, to fulfill the nostalgifying requirement I have set for myself in my Tuesday blogs, I’ll mention that I first read that story during my brief stint as the only student in my English independent study sophomore year of high school. I call it a brief stint because within a week of starting my sophomore year at my regular public high school, I found out that I had gotten last minute financial aid to move to the performing arts high school I eventually graduated from. But one of the reasons that I think I might have been okay even if that had not worked out is that the teacher who I was assigned to was clearly going to let me push ahead as far as I possibly could. He assigned me three short stories to read in a week; I of course had to read them in one day. He assigned me a book the next week; again, finished by my next class meeting (I remember the book, it was the classic A Separate Peace). So it looked like I might finally have met my match. But then, right when the leaves had started to turn and I had started to accept the school year rhythm of getting to school at 7am and riding the short bus to the math and science center after lunch, I got the call that turned me into an oboe player for the next three years. Funny how you think things are going to turn out, and then the way they actually do.

Asimo is the name of my new robot friend. You can see him do a jog here, but what makes him luscious today is heart-panging reverie he sent me on this afternoon when I watched him fall down here. Even though I know he is a robot and therefore just a machine, watching him turn his head toward the audience quizzically yet pluckily while he faces the stairs in front of him made me want to leap through the YouTube screen, back in time, and right up on stage to catch poor Asimo before he fell. See, I feel that he knew the stairs were too much for him, but because he is a loyal robot and he knew we were all watching he tried to do it anyway and ended up a curled up ball of hurt robot just because he didn’t want to let us down. This really got to me, almost but not quite as much as watching the animated movie The Brave Little Toaster once brought me to tears and marked me for life as one who felt true pain for the brave little appliance, throwing himself into the garbage compactor at the crucial moment just to save the mean vacuum cleaner who would clearly never put his skinny metallic neck out for anyone. I still think about the brave little toaster, and now I’m going to keep thinking about Asimo too. Some people have told me I am too sensitive, and they are right, but I just can’t keep myself from worrying about the innocent machines among us. We are a long way from A.I. or I, Robot, but I’m one of those ones who will be passing around get organized petitions and promoting robot solidarity when the time comes.

It’s Halloween, so when the whole world wants to tell you boo! I am going to tell you luscious! instead. There are many luscious aspects concerning Halloween. Pumpkins, pumpkin flavored things, brave costume wearing in grocery stores and college cafeterias, remembering reading Ray Bradbury stories late at night, the way I just remembered that mom let us eat all the candy we could in one sitting the Saturday after Halloween and then took the rest away (for herself! I found out later, but one year I got wise and defeated her by wearing a long sleeved shirt with really baggy sleeves and tight wrists so I could slip extra candy into the sleeves when she wasn’t looking and every so often excuse myself to “go to the bathroom” and assemble a stash under the covers of my bed large enough to see me through the long Halloween-less months to come). I’m also thinking about a NY Times editorial today by Neil Gaiman, in which he talks about why we like to scare ourselves and why the best ghost stories are always about being alive instead of dead. And so tonight, since that’s what I am, I’m raising a glass and wishing that I’d gotten home from school in time to give away some candy to trick-or-treaters.

“… he’s a smooth operator, smooooth operatooooor…” Yes, you guessed it, my Melville prof has emailed Sade’s “Smooth Operator” as his Moby Dick song of the day. What do the low key vocal stylings of a British chanteuse have to do with the great white whale? Beats me! But with a nice chilled glass of white wine, a week of work to forget about, and comforting memories of listening to the easy listening station as I tried to fall asleep for my mandatory afternoon nap in the mid-80s, it is all good. “Coast to coast, LA to Chicago…”

I’m going to out myself as a lover of folky acoustic songs with heavily poeticized lyrics here, but the song going through my head nonstop today is Dar Williams’s “Southern California Wants to Be Western New York.” I think it’s something about the cooling down weather and the ubiquitous flavor of pumpkin. Check out the lyrics below and substitute “Western Michigan” for Western New York and “Southern Florida” for Southern California and I think you’ll get my drift.

There’s a part of the country could drop off tomorrow in an earthquake,
Yeah it’s out there on the cutting edge, the people move, the sidewalks shake.
And there’s another part of the country with a land that gently creaks
and thuds,
Where the heavy snows make the faucets leak in bathrooms with
free-standing tubs.
They’re in houses that are haunted, with the kids who lie awake and
think about
All the generations past who used to use that dripping sink.

And sometimes one place wants to slip into the other just to see
What it’s like to trade its demons for the restless ghost of Miss
Oglivey.
She used to pick the mint from her front yard to dress the Sunday pork,
Sometimes southern California wants to be western New York.

It wants to have a family business in sheet metal or power tools,
It wants to have a diner where the coffee tastes like diesel fuel,
And it wants to find the glory of a town they say has hit the skids,
And it wants to have a snow day that will turn its parents into kids,
And its embarrassed, but it’s lusting after a SUNY student with mousy
brown hair who is
Taking out the compost, making coffee in long underwear.

And southern California says to save a place, I’ll meet you there,
And it tried to pack up its Miata, all it could fit was a prayer,
Sometimes the stakes are bogus, sometimes the fast lane hits a fork,
Sometimes southern California wants to be western New York.

Tempe, Arizona thinks the Everglades are greener and wetter,
And Washington, D.C. thinks that Atlanta integrated better,
But I think that southern California has more pain than we can say,
Cause it wants to travel back in time, but it just can’t leave L.A.

But now I hear they’ve got a theme park planned, designed to make you
gasp and say,
Oh, I bet that crumbling mill town was a booming mill town in its day,
And the old investors scoff at this, but the young ones hope they’ll
take a chance,
And they promise it will make more dough than Mickey Mouse in northern
France,
And the planners planned an opening day, a town historian will host,
And the waitresses look like waitresses who want to leave for the west
coast.

And they’ll have puttering on rainy weekends, autumn days that make you
feel sad,
They’ll have hundred year old plumbing and the family you never had,
And a Hudson River clean-up concert and a bundle-bearing stork,
And I hear they’ve got a menu planned, its tres western New York.

Harking back to a birthday past spent in the upside down world of northern Brazil, I got to thinking today that October offers us a flavor that is largely absent through winter, spring, and summer: pumpkin! So for the next couple of months I’ll be going out of my way to get as much pumpkin in to my life as possible, starting with today’s pumpkin scone at S-bucks and culminating in the traditional pumpking pie on Thanksgiving. I’ve got some orange vegetable love to report!

As for that pumpkin scone, it was very yummy. Moist yet substantial, sweet yet not overwhelming, and happily coated in a thick layer of pumpkin frosting. The best part is that it is just one pumpkin treat in a whole fall lineup that S-bucks has devised to help us celebrate the harvest season. I can’t wait to get back for the pumpkin spice latte or pumpkin cream cheese muffin hook-up.

Technology has done a lot to enable us to integrate funky cool music into every nook and cranny of our hypermediated lives: iPod, iTunes, Pandora, gotta love it all. There is, however, something missing: cover art and the multi-sensory experience of flipping through album covers to find what you are looking for. There’s a couple of technological aids to relieve this problem that I just thought I’d mention in case you are hankering to get more album art into your life. First, as you probably know, is the new iTunes software that puts cover art into your music library so that you can see it as a song from the album plays. I hear it is really cool, but alas I have not downloaded it yet so I can’t personally vouch for it. Here is what I can personally vouch for, tool number 2, Sabadaba. This is a link passed on to me way too long ago by Diego, and only recently perused. I should have gone there long ago! This site is a fantastic collection of information about Brazilian albums in the 60’s and 70’s, with special attention to archiving cover art images. And I don’t know about you, but everything about Brasil pretty much says luscious to me.

How did I come around to thinking about this topic on today of all days? It all started when I thought up the idea of passing along some Marisa Monte albums to friends, and I remembered a long ago day when Daniel and I had only been dating a little while and he showed me some MM liner notes that were, well… check out this cover art image yourself to get my drift! Good thing MM was safely living in Brazil at the time, or this here future wife might have been more than a little intimidated by her, um, talent!

Today marks my dive back into the eternally confounding, illuminating, and generally epic pages of Moby Dick. I unexpectedly fell in love with this book back in my undergrad days, in a challenging but rewarding sophomore year class called American Fiction. Looking back at the reading list, we covered a lot of ground: The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, and a lesser known but wonderful novel about Russian immigrants called The Bread Givers. Oh, and of course, MD.

There are many thoughts that one has about MD after reading it, so I’m not going to talk about the book, at least, not right now, but instead I’m going to focus on what I remember about where I read it. First off, the class was in the seminar room of a place called Sunset Cottage, a big old house with swollen windows and slamming doors that is home to the entire English department at Kenyon. The seminar room was the perfect place to spend having your brain whipped into shape by Prof. Smith, with floor to ceiling built-in bookshelves, enormous windows, and a door that closed so imposingly that you never ever showed up late for class. The other place I remember doing most of my reading was in the third floor of the humanities building known as Ascenscion Hall. The middle of the third floor was devoted to another imposing and scholarly reading room with one important addition: fluffy furniture of all varieties. You had to drink your coffee before you tried to read anything there or you would find yourself asleep in no time at all. It was to this room, well-caffeinated, that I settled in for the late late night marathon reading session that brought me to the end of Ahab’s chase and but alas not really any closer that “ungraspable phantom.” Of course us English majors like it that way.