Rooted collybia plus a leaf perfectly
bifurcated between brown and green.
Click on the image for more detail.
Just taken from UD‘s woods.
Yes well there was ol’ UD yesterday afternoon walking in the rain to her class at 1776 G St (finally an address UD can remember). Right hand, umbrella; left hand an Urban Outfitters bag in which lay the MacBook Air GW just gave her and fifteen blue books (midterm). As she passed the World Bank, the loudest, most armored-car-strewn security operation she’d ever seen – and you see them all the time in Foggy Bottom – came blaring out of the Bank and onto the street. A staggeringly enormous black vehicle led the parade, flanked by nervous guys on triple-wide scooters and then sidewalks full of men whispering into phones. Pretty much all of us stopped to gawk. Even the veterans among us found this display noteworthy.
It was Malala. When the Taliban’s itching to put another bullet in your brain, this is how you go home after you give a speech.
Congressional progressive caucus; against the government shutdown. If a crazy person with a gun shoots me, I become an icon of the far left.
Maybe Bernie Sanders, only Senator in the caucus, will engage me in conversation.
“Any chance you’re a Vermonter?”
“No, but I’m an old friend of Peter Galbraith’s.”
“He’s not popular in the State Senate.”
“Tell me about it.”
The nutty right has royally fucked the country; I will stand with the nutty left against it. I will stand in the rain (it’s raining) and scream crazy shit with the crazy ass progressive caucus.
I don’t know what the p.c.’s platform is. I’m sure I’m opposed to most of it. But a student in my mo/pomo seminar told me about the rally, and I’ve been spouting off in class about postmodern political passivity (in my weaker moments I tell myself this blog, this daily attack on corrupt elements of the American university, constitutes…) and… I dunno. Sometimes there’s no unpacking motive. I’m on the train. I’m going.
Maybe they’ll cancel it due to inclement weather. Optimal outcome. I get points for going without having to listen to the crazy ass progressive caucus say dumb shit. Without having to worry about Our Polarized Nation.
UD‘s wearing her uniform (boots, jeans, black turtleneck, scarf). The other day she attended a meeting of GWU’s highest administrative team, and the contrast between their suits and her jeans was stark. Thready old hippie UD. Representing the humanities faculty whether they like it or not.
**********************************
Postlude. Wow, it’s wet out there. Chilled damp UD takes her place on the red line train back to Garrett Park. She carries a red sign with white letters that read
END THE SHUTDOWN!
Capitol trees, bushes, and grasses trembled beautifully around UD as she walked from Union Station to the rally. One tree in particular, planted in circular groves on the grounds of various buildings, had a complex birch-like peeling bark (maybe the tree was a river birch?) and a thick coat of reddening green leaves with black berries. Blue jays shrieked and crows called out from lamp tops. Panicled pampas grass was paired with humpy mums – not a good look.
Employees at various federal entities streamed in to a park at the foot of the Capitol. They banged pots and chanted WORK NOT HURT. One of them gave UD the sign. T-shirts were also available, but who was going to put one on over her poncho? The rain flooded down, and the air was cold.
One guy tromped through the crowd trying out various chants. “We’ve got a Norma Rae,” said one attendee to another, and they laughed.
Police and their dogs were everywhere. At one point a bunch of them converged on an oddball wearing sunglasses, but he was just an oddball.
“Are you on furlough?” a reporter asked UD.
“No.”
He walked away.
***********************************
Jesse Jackson spoke. He sounded drunk and old. He offered a halting potted American history. We won in 1862… and… uh… in 2012… Now it’s 2014 and we won’t forget… He didn’t even bother coming up with one of his famous rhyming couplets.
… is back! It’s hooting like mad in my backyard.
Here’s what they’re saying along G Street Northwest, Foggy Bottom — bits of conversation UD heard just now as she walked to her class on James Joyce.
She has a big butt, yes. She’s always had a big butt. But she’s in good shape – almost as good as I’m in. She’s a pretty girl. But the butt yeah.
Two GW students, male and female. Female is the speaker. Both students are in summery gym clothes and are in extremely good shape.
“No, that wouldn’t be true of everyone who’s covered. That’s not how coverage works.”
Well-dressed DC bureaucrat outside World Bank building to another well-dressed DC bureaucrat.
“It was a real lesson for me. A real lesson, man.”
Worker in front of a delivery truck to another worker.
“You like hip-hop?”
Directed to UD by a guy selling cds.
It’s not sose you’d notice. Yet. Metro’s as busy as ever. On the train, an anxious man in an expensive suit bit his fingernails, and two schoolgirls fiddled with a set of drumsticks.
The man who stands at the top of the Foggy Bottom station warbling about Jesus warbled.
The gloomy interns at the GW Hospital Starbucks kept their heads down, as always.
On the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, UD‘s friend The Dean repeatedly sang out her name as she, the same hazelnut latte in hand as ever, waited to cross the street. She’d seen him last night at a reception for our dean’s list students and he’d been all deanly, but here he was done up in bright yellow and straddling a bicycle.
“Twice in one day I see you!” he said.
“Well,” said UD, “stretching the concept day…” She looked him, a fellow ‘thesdan, over. “You do this every day? You bike in from Bethesda?”
“Yep.”
“Jeez. You make me feel like a lazy good for nothing. How do you avoid traffic?”
“You can take the Crescent Trail all the way in.”
“Jeez.”
“Somebody asked me: Do you like cycling? I said No. This is just the way I happen to get to work.”
… is the headline of UD‘s latest reporting for the Garrett Park Bugle, her hometown newspaper in Maryland.
.. and busy all night celebrating my kid’s
… 23rd birthday.
Am now too tired to post.
See you first thing in the morning.
… in the LA Review of Books.
On a mild sunny Saturday morning, UD has gone out to her deck to discover a two-foot long, fully intact (except for a vertical rip near the head) garter snake skin.
Looks kind of like this.
I found the image here.
She’s drying it now (big storm yesterday) on the same outdoor table that holds a massively thriving spider plant UD picked up hours after it had been abandoned at Garrett Park’s last plant swap. She had no idea what it was – just a sad green potted thing – but she thought she’d haul it home and water it and see what happened. Five weeks later it looks like this. (Scroll down to the fourth photo.) Or, you know, not quite that amazing, but getting there. And of course UD is particularly solicitous of this plant because she rescued it, because it was a foundling.
… performs at Maryland’s
Renaissance Festival last weekend.
Her husband is behind her, waving.
Click on the image for more detail.
… featured a smart classroom in which you write on the walls! Dat’s right – no black or white board — just take the marker on the podium and scrawl all over the walls! What’ll they think of next.
Yeah, GW offered the same deal to English professors but we turned it down. Too showy.
My aunt, who loved and wrote poetry, lives, post-stroke, in Brooke Grove. UD has inherited her poetry collection – three boxes of hardbacks which UD‘s cousin delivered to Rokeby Avenue yesterday afternoon. Today – a very quiet Sunday – UD unpacked them, glancing at their spines and setting them in little piles on the dining room table.
In the background as she worked, Philippe Jaroussky sang, repeatedly, Sposa Son Disprezzata — a song UD has fallen for and is trying to learn. Can she become a brilliant countertenor by listening to Jaroussky night and day? She’s giving it the old college try.
She’s got the music (follow along here) and has spent a lot of time, this weekend, at the piano, desperately seeking the calm lyrical mastery she notices Jaroussky and, among females, Cecilia Bartoli, have hold of. In place of the sustained, emotionally intense line, the subtle and thrilling lift from piano to forte and back down to piano on raaaaaaaaaaaaanza, and the poignant catch in the voice as the plaint picks up, UD cannot help noticing that her own performance features a paint-by-numbers pedantry. Hers is a patchy stomp-through in which the singer struggles under the weight of musical signage in this after all quite easy to play piece (at least in my version).
I try to slow myself down – part of my lack of calm lyrical mastery is my anxious tendency to speed things up – but it’s not working. I remind myself to be a Buddhist about it for God’s sake, to get over myself and get in there and be in the moment and let the fucker unfold etc. But it’s like I’m a thirteen year old doing a piano recital.
*********************
Anyway, my brain runneth over with this music, which I guess is reward enough – the swirl of its sounds as I mow the lawn… as I wake from a midday nap…
When I’d piled all the books, I went out to the deck with The Oxford Book of English Verse.
With my weary-of-life aunt in mind, I found myself reading aloud Swinburne’s Garden of Proserpine.
… I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.
… There go the loves that wither,
The old loves with wearier wings;
And all dead years draw thither,
And all disastrous things;
Dead dreams of days forsaken,
Blind buds that snows have shaken,
Wild leaves that winds have taken,
Red strays of ruined springs.
And then, toward the end, there was the stanza Richard Rorty found himself repeating as he lay near death. He was, he said, “oddly cheered” by this verse, which he “had recently dredged up from memory.”
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
Rorty writes that
neither the philosophy I had written nor that which I had read seemed to have any particular bearing on my situation. I had no quarrel with Epicurus’s argument that it is irrational to fear death, nor with Heidegger’s suggestion that ontotheology originates in an attempt to evade our mortality. But neither ataraxia (freedom from disturbance) nor Sein zum Tode (being toward death) seemed in point.
In point, rather, and even comforting, were
those slow meanders and those stuttering embers. I suspect that no comparable effect could have been produced by prose. Not just imagery, but also rhyme and rhythm were needed to do the job. In lines such as these, all three conspire to produce a degree of compression, and thus of impact, that only verse can achieve. Compared to the shaped charges contrived by versifiers, even the best prose is scattershot.
The slowly shaped charges of the baroque aria (if you’ve read this blog for any time at all you know of my Purcell fandom) possibly have the same sort of function for UD – compressed comfort.