Household Opera

Trying to revive this blog, a bit.

Somehow I managed not to post anything here for two months. Partly I've just been busy; partly it's been a rocky couple of months. Nothing dire, I hasten to add, but there's been illness and death in my family, and personal angst of the mundane and unbloggable kind, and all that combined with what's seemed like an interminably cold, gray, rainy winter — not to mention the ever-sourer national mood, which seeps into everything, much like the miserable weather — has added up to a general grimness about the mouth and a damp, drizzly November in the soul. Which hasn't exactly been blog fodder.

But at least some of that has been changing: the sun is out, at last, and my favorite cherry tree on campus burst into full bloom this week. I went by it with my camera this afternoon, because the flowering won't last much longer. So here, by way of starting up the posting again, are some pictures. There'll be some words too, in a little while.

New Year's resolution: replace brooding with making

I've been dutifully writing Reverb10 entries for most of this month, but I'm not actually posting them because most of them fall into at least one of the following categories: 1) far too personal to share with the entire world, 2) far too mundane to share with the entire world, and 3) far too repetitive to share with anyone who doesn't want to watch me (metaphorically) pace back and forth across the same smallish patch of mental turf over and over. It's been a good tool for reminding me of which problems and preoccupations have been uppermost in my psyche of late, but that's not really matter for this blog.

However, several of the Reverb10 prompts did lead to a New Year's resolution of a sort, which I'm posting here because I want to be able to remind myself of it later. What I noticed, after writing my way through a bunch of those prompts, is that I spend far too much time pondering the things that aren't working in my current life, and it doesn't help solve anything; it just makes bad moods worse. I don't know how to get rid of the broodiness; it's probably innate. But I can tell when it's happening, and I want to do something to derail it.

So the resolution is this: When tempted to mope and feel sorry for myself, I will either make something beautiful, or read or look at or listen to something beautiful.* I want to replace my tendency to brood with a habit of making beautiful things. If I feel myself starting up the vicious cycle of ruminating over a bad mood, I will write something, or knit something, or design something, or, at a pinch, cook something more elaborate than I usually cook. If I don't have the time or energy for any of the above, I will listen to some opera, or pull one of my favorite poets' collected works off the shelf and start reading at a randomly selected page. And then I will blog about the results.

Unlike a lot of my New Year's resolutions, I might actually keep this one. Probably because it's not so much a resolution as a strategy.

* Or, perhaps, go somewhere interesting. Another thing that kept coming up in my Reverb10 entries: the UK trip was the highlight of my entire year, and I would love to travel a whole lot more.

A #Reverb10 photo post: Moment

I've been neglecting the blog again. Too many things I might blog about (fun with productivity tools; gender in social networks; the latest outcroppings of my commonplace book project; when all else fails, random favorite poems), too little time. But a bunch of people I know in the blogo/Twitterspheres are doing Reverb 10, and I've been playing along as I write my daily 750Words brain-dump. Most of what I'm writing probably won't see the light of day; it's too personal for my blog standards. But we'll see.

Today's prompt was "Moment": Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).

While it may be cheating a bit to post photos when specifically prompted to write a description — particularly when the photo doesn't really do either the view or the moment justice — this was a really damn fine moment, and I don't want to forget it.

I took this picture during the all-too-short Lake District segment of the Great UK Trip this summer, while standing next to the Castlerigg Stone Circle outside Keswick. The sun was just coming out after two days of rain and overcast, and it hit this valley just so. I stood there slack-jawed, staring at it for the longest time, surrounded by grazing sheep and picture-taking fellow tourists in equal numbers.

I could probably say any number of things about how my sense of landscape aesthetics has been conditioned by the same Romantics whose Lake District footsteps I'd been treading in. But mostly I couldn't shake the sense that I had, somehow, always known this place, and that my imagination had lived there for years, even though I'd never been to England or seen that view reproduced anywhere. At any rate, it lives there now:

There are some places that you just love at first sight, you know? Even if you only see them from a distance on a long walk where sooner or later you have to head off in the opposite direction. But someday I'm going back, and staying for much longer, and climbing those knobby hillsides every day. And if I ever develop a yearning for a quiet rural life, this is where I'm going when I retire.

On the consequences of tolerating bullying

(Possible trigger warning for discussion of bullying. Also, this post contains considerably more of my guts than I usually spill on this blog. Just so you know.)

I've been reading the flurry of reportage about bullying and queer youth suicides partly with a sinking heart (has it gotten suddenly worse lately? if these are just the cases we're hearing about, how many others are going unreported? was it this bad when I was growing up?) and partly with a grim sense of well, this is nothing new and also Christ on a cracker, does nothing ever change?

I had it easy, compared to so many others. I was taunted nonstop during half of third grade, most if not all of fourth and fifth grade, and to a lesser extent sixth and seventh grade. In eighth grade I was considered extremely weird but left alone. By the time high school rolled around, I had a few friends and a little social niche, and the bullying stopped, though that may have been because I'd gotten better at not drawing attention to myself. By around age 16 or 17 I'd started to suspect that maybe I liked girls a lot more than I liked boys, but I basically postponed that line of thought until I went off to college, where the atmosphere was a lot more accepting.

I was only beaten up once, during the height of my bully-magnet years. Nobody yelled homophobic slurs at me or spat at me or told me I should die. The phrase "that's so gay" hadn't even entered the vocabularies of the elementary school set in 1985; I don't think many of us even knew what it meant. My mother stuck up for me, and so did some of my classmates on occasion. I read voraciously, and because of that, I knew that the world was a much larger and more interesting place than my school. The children's librarian at our local branch library was an early ally who showed me great and unvarying kindness. Much as the bullies messed up my head, I knew there were some people who didn't think I was a freak who deserved all the bullying she got. I never tried to kill myself. I was one of the lucky ones.

But again and again, in the stories I've heard people tell, it comes back to this: adults standing by and doing nothing, or saying "What can you do?", or blaming the bullied child for bringing it all on him- or herself.* Which all sounds hauntingly and enragingly familiar.

My 5th grade teacher told my mother that the bullies had to be reacting to something that I was doing; that it was my fault that they tormented me every single day. I remember how the same teacher turned a blind eye to everything they did, and the one time I tried to fight back, she scolded me. (Mrs. Tate, should you ever happen to read this: I've never forgiven you for that.)

And you know what we all learned from that? The bullied, the bullies, and all the bystanders? That people in general weren't trustworthy. That there was no such thing as justice. That adults were on the same side as the bullies. That if you were different in any way, there was something wrong with you, and your best bet was to hide, keep your head down, and withdraw from people as much as possible. That last lesson took me years and years to unlearn.

When schools do nothing to stop bullying, when people shrug this behavior off as no big deal, everyone suffers. We make the world a vicious place where people think empathy and kindness are not a necessary part of everyone's moral compass, but weaknesses to be mocked and dismissed. We turn ourselves, in short, into a nation of assholes. And then we wonder why our culture is so messed up, in so many ways.

This cannot go on. If you truly believe it's all right to teach that lesson in schools, then you might as well just start poisoning the cafeteria food and have done with it.

I don't feel like I can tell every young queer person that it always gets better, even though there are plenty of ways it most likely will (chief among them: not being required by law to spend five days a week surrounded by tormentors). I still think the It Gets Better Project is a really good idea, though. Because the more of these stories are out there, the more likely it is that kids going through the hell of high school will realize they're not alone, and the harder it'll be for everyone else to pretend this problem doesn't exist.

And if anyone reading this is wondering whether it does indeed get better: mean people don't disappear when you graduate from high school, but what does change is your ability to control your own life. In the meantime, you're not alone. Check out the Make it Better Project or the Trevor Project. And know that there are lots of us out here who are trying to change things for the better. Your life is valuable, no matter what anyone tries to tell you.

* If you don't think teachers can intervene in any meaningful way, I suggest that you read this post. If you don't think kids take cues from the bigotry they hear from adults, then please listen to the first story on this show from This American Life. And then I refer you to several posts about what happens when nobody does intervene: this one from Center of Gravitas, this one from Kate Harding, this one from Seanan McGuire (hat tip to various Facebook friends for the last two).

All the lonely people, where do they all belong?

This is going to be a fragmentary post because my thinking on it is still disconnected. Sometimes I get thoughts and words stuck in my head and blog to get them out; if I'm lucky, the fragments amount to more than self-indulgent navel-gazing, and make sense to someone else reading them. (In other words: Probable navel-gazing ahead. You've been warned.)

I've been thinking about loneliness a lot lately. Not long ago I realized that my joy in all things aesthetic depends on my being able to experience them with other people who also care about them. For better or worse, I've always bonded most closely with people when we can talk about books or art or music or theater or film, and lately I've really been missing that. The great thing about my trip this summer was the superabundance of both beauty — landscape, art museums, architecture, Mozart masses, amazing city streets — and good friends, and the elusive sense of being completely at ease in said friends' company. But it also reminded me of what's been absent from my everyday life.

I think of that 2006 study that suggested that Americans have fewer confidants than they used to. The findings have been disputed somewhat. But it rang true when I first read about it, and it rings even truer now.

(Several people have told me recently that New Englanders aren't all that friendly. Neighbors don't know each other, they say; it's hard to form deep friendships. I hope that's not true; but, though I've made a few friends since I moved here, there's nothing like the network I had in grad school, or even my smaller circle of friends in Philadelphia. My closest friends all live at least a hundred miles away.)

It's hard to separate all this from the general malaise of right now: the worry about whether we're ever going to pull out of this recession, the grim collective mood, the outbursts of panic-fueled bigotry, the lines from Yeats's "The Second Coming" popping unbidden into my head at odd intervals. Laura at Apt. 11D posted a particularly vivid account of this state of mind: anger combined with the increasing awareness of social networks fraying, and then fraying some more.

I want to do something to improve the lot of all us lonely people (cue "Eleanor Rigby"), even though I know, realistically, one person can't do very much. But that's part of the problem. I'm feeling rather acutely like just one person at the moment. How many other people out there are feeling like just one person in a world of acquaintances and strangers, I wonder?

And what is one to do?

At any rate, if you've read this far, Reader, thank you for listening.

Of wanderlust and long-distance walking

The topic of "life lists" came up at my knitting group yesterday, and I realized that inasmuch as I have a life list, it's more of a travel list than anything else. Yes, I suppose I'd like to go bungee jumping or hang gliding or skydiving at least once, but I don't think my life will be incomplete if I don't check those particular experiences off. And there are a lot of things I'd like to learn — it would be lovely to revive my Italian, and maybe learn another dead language or two just for the hell of it, and I'd really like to learn to play the cello at some point in the nearish future — but really, a lot of my non-career-related personal goals boil down to "travel through a bunch of interesting places, preferably on foot." I don't particularly care about climbing X, Y, and Z famous mountains; I just want to go off on an epically long walk.

Blame it on John Keats. I read a couple of biographies of him at an impressionable age, and decided early on that I wanted to recreate his and Charles Brown's 1818 walking tour of northern England, Scotland, and Ireland (documented with gorgeous photographs in Carol Kyros Walker's Walking North with Keats, another book I came across when I was in the middle of my early Keats phase). Lately the long-walk impulse has returned, in spades. Some months ago I read an article on the Camino de Santiago, which convinced me that a long-distance hike across the northern end of Spain should be high on the Things To Do Before I Die list. (Give me my scallop-shell of quiet!) And then there's been the planning for my travels in Scotland and England this summer, which won't be long enough for any really extended walks, but will at least allow me to spend a couple of days in the Lake District tracing Keatsian and Wordsworthian and Coleridgean footsteps.

Then I found the National Trust Book of Long Walks in England, Scotland, and Wales on an expedition to the Book Barn a few weeks ago, which gave me even more British itineraries to dream about. (The length of the Welsh border! Hadrian's Wall! As much of the Scottish Highlands as I can possibly tramp across!) I've just put in an interlibrary loan request for John Hillaby's Journey Through Britain, which narrates an even longer walk, from Land's End to John O' Groats. I don't think I'll ever have the time to do something like that, but at the very least, I can read about it.

And that's just a couple of countries in Europe. There's a whole world out there. Readers, do any of you share the long-walk wanderlust? And if so, where would you go, if you had the funds and the time?

A New Year's revelation

I started writing this post on New Year's Eve, at the end of a decade that started with Y2K panic and only got weirder from there. I'm not going to write a year-in-review post, much less a decade-in-review one, and I'll post a longer wrap-up of the highlights of MLA 2009 in a day or two. For now, I just wanted to share a thought (in the way that I used to do on this blog all the time; New Year's resolution #1, stop neglecting the blog). Here goes:

MLA got me to thinking—particularly after some very interesting comments by Laura Mandell, in the "Collaboration in the Digital Humanities" panel, about how Renaissance people don't really fit in the modern university—about a not-quite-paradox of academic life. When you decide to be an academic, you choose a discipline and a field and a specialty, and chances are you stick with it for the rest of your working life. You may branch out into related specialties, but plenty of scholars' research interests stay remarkably stable over the course of their careers.

At the same time, you can expect your personal life to be profoundly unstable: no settled place to live until you get tenure somewhere you want to be, which, nowadays, is looking vanishingly unlikely for most people pursuing academic careers (at least in the humanities). You may adjunct in multiple places at once. You may migrate from job to job for years, picking up and moving every time you start to settle, keeping up with the people you're closest to only long-distance.

What I realized was that I want precisely the opposite: a reasonably settled personal life, in a place of my own choosing, with a community of friends and neighbors who aren't perpetually transient, and whom I can invite over for dinner. And I also want the freedom to move from one research area to another without the pressure to devote my entire career to becoming one of the world's foremost experts in early modern British lyric. I've had serial research obsessions ever since I was a child; in retrospect, I'm not sure why I ever thought a life of specialization in a single area would suit me. In short, I'm a Renaissance person still in search of my 18th-century salon.

I'm immensely grateful to have found a job that allows for the pursuit of serial research obsessions. There are few better places than a library for a curious Renaissance person to wind up. As for the other half of the picture, I'm working on it. As I said to a friend (who, alas, lives too far away to come over for dinner) at MLA, I'm making the settled personal life part of my five-year plan for the first half of the new decade. By the time I hit 40, I want to be rooted among people and places I love.

Autumnal dreaming

I went to see my family in Baltimore for Thanksgiving weekend. The day after Thanksgiving, we went for a walk up and down Roland Avenue, one of the main north-south streets in Hampden, where I spent most of my childhood. Just as we were leaving, I remembered my camera. I took a bunch of pictures, and one in particular stood out. Through a gap between the houses near 38th Street, a yellow ginkgo tree stood out against a dark cloudy sky:

You can't see it, but one end of the Johns Hopkins University campus lies between the houses in the foreground and those tall brick apartment buildings in the background. My mother and I moved to one of those buildings (the Ambassador, which also featured briefly in a Homicide: Life on the Street episode) during my first couple of years in high school.

It's far from the best picture I've ever taken, but I've been staring and staring at it since I got home and uploaded it to my computer. There's something about the light that I managed to capture — that oblique late-fall light that you see at three or four in the afternoon this time of year, not yet winter sun but getting there — that brings back every fall from those years in Baltimore. The shortening days with the golden hour stretching earlier and earlier into the day, the somber sky and the last bright leaves, another school year well underway, another Halloween retreating into the past, the promise of snow somewhere in the near future. The little rowhouses transformed for a moment. And the unimaginable farther-off future like those buildings in the distance, with their windows glinting in the late-afternoon sun.

It's a mood I associate with the endless reading I did at the time, the trips to and from the public library as the evenings got darker and colder, and, a few years later, reading F. Scott Fitzgerald and T.S. Eliot and any number of others. Around the time my mother and I moved to the Ambassador, which you can just see a bit of in this photo, I was reading The Great Gatsby at school and starting to forage through the "serious" bookshelves at home. Looking at the gold tree and the far-off roofs brought a bit of Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams" (another school reading from those years) to mind: "Fall made him clinch his hands and tremble and repeat idiotic sentences to himself, and make brisk abrupt gestures of command to imaginary audiences and armies. October filled him with hope which November raised to a sort of ecstatic triumph." And even though Fitzgerald's hero strikes me as kind of irritating on rereading it twenty years later, I remember the feeling. It hasn't entirely gone away, either.

All those years in the Midwest made me hate November, which was always drizzly and gray and signaled the start of another endless, dark, depressing winter. But I think I just rediscovered what I always loved about it.

New Year's resolution

I have plenty of things I'd like to accomplish in 2009, but I'm not framing them in the form of resolutions because I've made a meta-resolution not to make any more resolutions that I won't enjoy keeping. I just don't have time to guilt myself out. So the goals go on my to-do list instead.

I'm just going to make one New Year's resolution this year: I will try to be more embodied, in as many ways as possible. I doubt anyone who knows me would be surprised that I live a lot in my head. My brain, and not my senses, is usually my first point of interaction with the world. I don't see my thinkiness as a problem to be fixed, or a failing to apologize for; but it does mean that I can let myself get sensorily deprived if I'm not careful. It happened a lot when I was working on my Ph.D. I've gotten much better about paying attention to my senses as well as my cerebral cortex, but I think I need reminders every so often.

So, among other ways of being more aware of living in my body, I'm going to try to:

• continue cooking from scratch, eating less processed stuff, and eating with more attention and pleasure;
• open my eyes and look around when I walk around town, and take more photographs;
• listen to music, preferably while knitting with the softest and most visually appealing yarn I can afford;
• maybe sign up for a few yoga classes at the nearest studio, because when I used to do yoga, it was great for getting me out of my head;
• visit New London's small art galleries and just stare at what's on the walls, slowly;
• actually get out to the weekly wine tastings at Thames River downtown;
• have flowers in the apartment more often;
• get enough sleep, and pay attention to my dreams whenever I can remember them.

I'd include "wear perfume every day" on the list, but I already do that, thanks to the geniuses at the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab. It's kind of a self-indulgent resolution to make, I know, but it's also a way of trying to engage more with the world, and the more I look over the list I've just made, the more connections I see with building community where I am, which is also something I'd really like to do on a larger scale.

Did you make any New Year's resolutions, Reader? What are you trying to do more (or less) of?

Birthday, end of library school, changes afoot

Yesterday was my birthday. I'm 33, an appealingly palindromic number (I've always liked multiples of eleven). I didn't get to do anything yesterday evening, because I had a class to go to; thanks to the quarter system, my birthday always falls right around the crazy pre-finals weeks. (The University of Chicago is on the quarter system too, so pretty much all of my college-years birthdays fell into the same pattern. Instead of drunken carousing on my 21st, I had exam cramming with a short cake break. Though I'm sure my liver thanked me for it.)

But I didn't care, because this weekend is absolutely the last I'll ever spend working on MSLIS-related projects; everything is due by the end of next week, and as of the 14th, I'll officially be a librarian. And these past couple of weeks have been marked by all kinds of good news. It's not all bloggable yet (watch this space for further announcements), but suffice it to say that 33 is looking like it'll be a good year. I'm in such a good mood that I don't even care about the looming term paper or the group oral presentation next week. Somehow or other, it'll all get done.

And then, when the end-of-term madness is over, I'll finally have time to blog regularly again. In the meantime, I'm going to see the Wilma Theater's production of Eurydice with a friend this evening. Catch you all again before long!