blahblahblahblahi'mthirtytodayblahblahblahwhatever.
what's important is that natalie got me this for my birthday.
rathergood's viking kittens (mind the volume controls, lads) are indeed mighty.
recurring reminiscence:
when i was a senior in high school, my early morning routine relied on my ability to orchestrate the following: driving a manual transmission (83 celica gt... sadly, my ride was no match for the many primer-grey monte carlos and cherry 'ros to be found in the senior parking lot) on a dark and two lane country road, smoking no less than three cigarettes during the 30 minute drive, holding on to my oversized but lidless coffee mug (we didn't have nissan stainless thermoi back then), flipping back and forth between morning edition and any number of punk rock allstars (senior year was all about sigue sigue sputnik, the misfits, and the dead kennedys), and avoiding getting nailed by any number of primer-grey cars barrelling past me at (literally) breakneck speeds.
all of this at 6 in the morning.
i finished reading something just now, and i want to experiment recklessly with a rubber-hammer-to-the-knee response. it's comforting to complete a book you like.
bobbie ann mason's family memoir, clear springs, may be guilty of rehearsing a familiar story, the history of sons and daughters who rush away from home as soon as possible and return years later afflicted with the compulsion to know the origin myths of their families and worlds. in this case, though, mason makes the problem of return and recovery a collective one, in which several generations of her entire family, very much rooted to its western kentucky space, learn to tell the story of where they come from. in that sense, this is a family story about telling a family's story. mason's dialogues with her aging mother, as both review the artifacts of the old family home, soon to be leased to tenants outside the family, structure an especially thoughtful narrative of archaeology, memory, and storytelling. regretfully confessing, "i have stirred up too much, too many imponderables" (271), mason attempts to respond to the vague distinctions between memory and invention:
i'm coming to understand how memories are imposed on the past and also how they get lost. we reach a point where we do not know whether we remember an actual event or an imagined one; we cannot remember whether a significant event actually happened. in studying a photograph, which is documented proof of our presence at an event, we analyze the event as if we had been there, when for the purposes of memory we had not, for it has vanished from the mind. so i come near to inventing these old great-grandparents and this mysterious grandfather, while being as scrupulous to known fact as my brain will allow. (271-272)that passage fails to explain much about the "impos[ition]" of memory, but it does catalogue the phenomenon of memory cues well. here, the memory becomes the symptom of the document, and not the more conventional other way around, in which an image is supposed to call up the authentic version, stored away in the mind.
mason simultaneously troubles and reaffirms the travel story in american history and life. early on, as she places her immediate family in the context of her ancestors' wanderings, she cuts down the romance of movement:
our ancestors had been lured over the ocean to america by false advertising--here was the promised land, literally--but once arrived, they had to clear rocks and stumps and learn to raise hogs. we inherited their gullibility. we wanted to go places, find out what was out there. my sisters and i didn't want to marry farmers; we were more interested in the traveling salesmen. (11)and yet, instead of simply doing away with the wistfulness of movement, she offers this explanation of going away and coming back home:
the way i see it, a clever cat prowls but calls home occasionally. the answer is the mingling of sunlight and shadow; it's ambiguity, not either-or. the best journeys spiral up and around--the journey of odysseus on the wine-dark sea or bloom in the winding streets of Dublin. in the zen journey, when you return, you know for the first time where you came from. we're always yearning and wandering, whether we actually leave or not. in america, we all come from somewhere else, and we carry along some dream myth of home, a notion that something--our point of origin, our roots, the home country--is out there. (280-281).an over-romantic explanation of the desire for return (she goes on, sentimentally: "in its inception, the idea of America was heaven on earth. now that dream is fractured and we're looking for the pieces"), but the inescapable work of "where i'm from" always determines the journey's point.
life-writing of most sorts relies on collective memory, and the memoirist always tells more than her own story. mason's good memoir makes that condition part of its point. writing who you are means that you write who they are, too.
as is unremarkably always the case, i've got several sorts of busyness asserting themselves from a few directions. right now, though, is the time for my passivity, time to take some things in.
my friends the claycombs squared themselves. now they are four.
my friends the rhodys will increase their number by one before long.
my friend brian is driving across the country, committed to a vastly appropriate homecoming. a west-coast soul has completed his east-coast moment, so he's driving from d.c. to seattle. given his checking-in phone call yesterday, i'd imagine he's somewhere in extreme western nebraska now, aiming for slc, utah.
i only know to say that bri has been part of our days for five or six years now and that, while a signficant absence has just taken root here, it's unimaginably good to see someone able to do what he should.
so it's good to watch for a while. the stagnant research, the uncorrected drafts, the questions about subjectivity in (and outside) blogs. all of it has to wait awhile.
npr made some mad cash today, when joan kroc's $200 million estate plans were disclosed. kroc was the widow of mcdonald's founder ray kroc.
i'm hoping they'll dedicate at least one line of the new stockpile to hire me as a professional listener.
you might consider this a footnote to chuck's post on a recent senate republican hearing on the "liberal" university.
i should mention that, having recently read joan didion's political fictions, my tolerance for "the system" is once again on the descent. i offer this as a futile excuse for the excess of sarcasm on the horizon. mea culpa.
by way of the washington post, i see that cbs is waffling on its miniseries, the reagans, now that republican national committee chair ed gillespie has notified the network of "conservative" concerns about the biopic.
the letter, and its accompanying supportreagan.com aren't terribly surprising, given the tenacity and size of reagan's army of admirers. what seems worth a moment's reflection is this passage from the rnc chair:
"If your series contains omissions, exaggerations, distortions or scenes that are fiction masquerading as fact, the American people may come away with a misunderstanding of the Reagans and the Reagan Administrations."
gillespie, we are told, suggests that cbs keep the masses straight with a regular crawl explaining that "the program is a fictional portrayal of the Reagans and the Reagan Presidency, and they should not consider it to be historically accurate. . . ."
as a vapid viewer, one of those uncritical couch-occupiers who has no use for second thoughts, i would like to thank cbs for its apparently impending decision to keep this disinformation out of my infotainment experience. i would also like to thank the rnc for helping me get the true story. now, when i go looking for biographies, i will have a better method for selection; i'll simply get the accurate one, so i won't have to waste my time with all that dangerous fiction. i'd also like to thank the house committee on unamerican activities and senator joseph mccarthy for all the good work they did to keep our nation straight. the last thing the infotainment industry needs is the wandering imagination of some "creative" writer who has not been taught the true story.
another race today. natalie's summed it up pretty well. i pretty much crashed across the finish at 41:45, 85th of 422 runners. tired.
at least i didn't run into any parked cars...
[edit to add: i wonder, is repeating an adverbial "pretty" in two consecutive sentences a sign of any sort of impending madness?]