… for Christmas. She’ll blog from there.

… at Christmas in Washington last week (she’s the blonde in the upper row).

The guy in front is Pat Monahan.

Click on the image – the setting is the National Building Museum – for a closer view.

***************

UD thanks Koneti.

I can’t recall the mental trail that got me there, but yesterday, for the first time since the 1970’s, I listened to Steve Goodman’s song, Spoon River.

I saw myself in the living room of the Evanston apartment I shared with two other Northwestern University students.

Goodman was a Chicagoan; he performed in Evanston all the time.

I saw myself sprawled in front of a record player. I must have been doing that thing I’ve done since I was five years old with music I like: Listening to it obsessively, for hours. In the windows of the room there was sunlight and snow.

I certainly learned the piece, since I sang along without hesitation yesterday, every word, every inflection, intact.

All of our lives were entwined to begin with.

The union’s preserved.

I tried to entwine with Goodman’s singing. I’m a good vocal mimic.

I thought of his early death, his leukemia. Cool Hand Leuk, he called himself.

The morning is heavy with one more beginning.

But his most famous songs were about evenings: This train’s got the disappearing railroad blues.

*********************

This, though, this moment of mine at the laptop, 2013, was high noon, the living room windows showing sun and no snow. The semester’s classes were over; grades had been entered.

The holidays meant UD could sit quiet and alone in her house and ponder and feel the flow of her life.

It was Goodman who made her feel this, who pressed upon her the specific depth of the river, and for this she was immensely grateful.

… Christmas in Washington.

(She’s the blonde.)

**************

Oh, plus: Turns out she’s

shorter than Charles Barkley.

**************

Backstreet Boys.

***************

Click on photos
for better view.

*****************

UD thanks her sister.

… at the Kennedy Center last night.

La Kid‘s the blond on the right.

Click on the image for a better view.

(Photo taken by Tony Bennett’s daughter.)

La Kid just made it back to ‘thesda from this, where she performed for Billy Joel, one of the honorees. At the banquet after the show, she hobnobbed with Joel, Tony Bennett, and others. I’ll run some photos tomorrow, after she gets some sleep.

****************

The final performance of the evening was Joel’s famous hit “Piano Man,” with the Kennedy Center audience singing along.

That was the one with La Kid in the chorus.

Rufus Wainwright performed — and Brooks, Bennett and Henley took us back to the ’70s with “Piano Man.”

… the Kennedy Center Honors and Christmas in Washington. She’s part of a chorus backing up various performers at both events. And, as ever, UD will provide breathless commentary on her kid’s experiences of rehearsals and events.

Here she is in 2009, showing up at 1:48 (long blond hair, glasses), backing up Sting as he honors Bruce Springsteen.

(I already know who she’s singing with, and who this performer is honoring, at this year’s Kennedy Center Honors, but I’m not allowed to say.)

… tries to liven up a dull Garrett Park Town Council meeting.

Taken by La Kid.

UD was at her desk at GW
(office hours) and saw
the pink-tipped clouds
and went to a better window
out in the hallway (she’s
on the sixth floor) and
it was some show.

Just in time for Halloween, this surreal photo from Austin, Texas, where this blog’s administrator (aka UD‘s niece) lives. It was taken this morning during a huge rainstorm, and shows, just south of the river, the city’s statue of Stevie Ray Vaughan.

La Kid, in Galway, with
a pinkhaired Irish friend.

La Kid is apparently a bat.
But I also think she looks
a little like Amy Winehouse.

… a clear October afternoon, and at one point a full sun was overhead and leaves were swirling down. I put down my rake and lay on the lawn to feel the sun and see the leaves swirling, and everything really was clear: the bright sky, each sharp leaf with red, green, and a bit of rot on its surface landing neatly on the lawn. You rake the leaves down to the street, and every few hours a green truck comes and carts them away, and this too is clear – a nice clear system of gathering and disposal.

Hyperclarified days are rare. This one made me think of Conrad Aiken’s poem, The Room.


Through that window — all else being extinct
Except itself and me — I saw the struggle
Of darkness against darkness. Within the room
It turned and turned, dived downward. Then I saw
How order might — if chaos wished — become:
And saw the darkness crush upon itself,
Contracting powerfully; it was as if
It killed itself: slowly: and with much pain.
Pain. The scene was pain, and nothing but pain.
What else, when chaos draws all forces inward
To shape a single leaf? . . .

Tree of trees!
Remember (when time comes) how chaos died
To shape the shining leaf. Then turn, have courage,
Wrap arms and roots together, be convulsed
With grief, and bring back chaos out of shape.
I will be watching then as I watch now.
I will praise darkness now, but then the leaf.

**************

The mind, as it turns forward in time, struggles darkly with darkness. I was thinking, all afternoon, about the deaths of people I loved, or loved and hated, or whatever. But anyway diving downward into that chaos which is my own hopeless reckoning with darkness. Not “convulsed with grief” – not courageous enough for that, but certainly wrapping arms and roots together and watching my thoughts.

Watching through the mind’s window whose insistence on seeing it through, seeing through it, makes “all else… extinct.” The effort of drawing up out of chaos, says Aiken, is painful, but there it is, the completed multifarious leaf, shining its edges against the lawn. Ultimately there are cracked walls and burst windows – a painful, earth-altering awakening. Generative, enlightening, painful.

The one black root… the black root: This underlies the clarifying and there’s no denying it. Chaos resumes after the epiphanies; but “remember… how chaos died / To shape the shining leaf.” The one thing and then the other; darkness, light. As you enter into chaos again – the chaos of every vague and grieving life – remember the natural pattern at play, the contraction and expansion. Let the chaos be, live with it, and eventually once again the light will break. Praise both: the darkness and the leaf.

… Margaret Soltan, Girl Reporter, there’s this.

… involving admissions, financial aid, and national rankings, for some time. Or so it appears. And because the campus newspaper, The Hatchet, has been aggressive in its investigative reporting lately (it broke the now-national need-aware rather than need-blind story), the university can expect its year-long string of bad news stories to lengthen.

These stories include – for good measure – the messy and mysterious firing of the business school dean, and another charge of system-gaming, this one alleging the inflation of GW’s endowment growth by its investment officers.

The investment story includes this yummy morsel:

[The whistle blower] also claims that she had previously “questioned [the Chief Investment Officer’s] ethics,” pointing to his private consulting services as a conflict of interest.

She said after confronting him about his monthly trips to the Bahamas for the private consulting, he announced that he would end his outside consulting services.

***************************

UD‘s student, Jacob Garner, with whom she’s working on his senior thesis about David Foster Wallace (Jacob just got back from the University of Texas, where he went – with GW research fellowship money! – to look at Wallace’s papers) notes in his Hatchet column that in fact GW had no reason to lie about its need-aware policy:

When you look at the actual issue – why GW needs to be need-aware – it starts to make sense. People will understand. So why lie?

GW’s endowment of $1.3 billion hardly rivals those of need-blind colleges Northwestern and New York universities, with endowments that stand at about $7 and $3 billion respectively.

Administrators are searching for ways to bring in as much money as they can, and being need-aware is an obvious way to increase tuition revenue. But administrators shouldn’t be lying about our admissions policies.

…one of my puffball mushrooms.

Hand-picked fresh for you
just seconds ago.

Click on the image for a
fuller sense of its human
brainishness.