Odessa Nelson, who was majoring in musicology, who was recently engaged to one of the finest young men of the community, who was the sister of my best friend, died from a skiing accident on Thursday at the age of 22.
May she rest in peace.
Dec 25, 2005
Dec 24, 2005
'I count the holes they leave':
Wandering broke around downtown Detroit
The ice was working to slush in the afternoon rise to 33 degrees, slush slopping up around the sidewalk's lights like collars. Coming down the iced-up stretch coming off the two stadiums, Ford and Comerica, I passed a dozen bars, all of them expensive looking to a guy with just quarters in his pocket, and a liquor store and some restaurants advertising “cuisine” instead of food. Not a single coffee shop, though, not even a Starbucks where business people might pick up a soy cappuccino and listen to Sly and the Family Stone or something. Apparently Detroit doesn't drink coffee.
Sorry man, I said to a panhandler in the same brotherly jive he was using, I'm broke as hell.
Yeah okay, he said.
But hey man, you know where I can find a coffee shop?
Isn't that one across the street? he said.
That's a bar, I said.
Ain't they got coffee?
They got beer. I just wanna cup of coffee.
There's a hotdog truck front of the court house.
The hotdog stand was closed and anyway what I needed in addition to a cheap cup of coffee was a place to sit for a couple of hours while I waited for a friend to finish his interview and accounting house tour. so I kept walking. Set off in a zig-zaggy pattern crossing the street when there wasn't any traffic and accidentally following the trolley car calling itself the Detroit People Mover.
I ended up on the steps of a public library, Skillman branch, looking at the decorative stone work of stylized swastikas. I'd seen the design before, in a rod iron stair railing in a house in Grand Rapids built by a German woman in the '30s. They were a little embarrassed, when I asked. Said they'd been intending to replace it and said, a little accusing like maybe I was a Nazi for noticing, that most people didn't notice, because it was so stylized. Not that you can really stylize something that's as abstract as a swastika, but they were stylized in the sense of being muted. Racism without the garishness of being spray painted on the side of a synagogue
This the old library? a man on the street said.
Yeah, I said.
They got a baffroom?
Prob'ly, I said.
Lady at the front desk said I didn't need to check my bag but could she look and I showed her and she said nice bag like she wasn't looking for drugs or guns or bombs, but fashion. The children's section was empty when I went in, so I found a table with a green covered reading lamp by the books about turtles and penguins but was kicked out after a few minutes for not being a kid after 1 p.m.
I'd finished reading LeRoi Jones' play The Toilet when I fell asleep on the hardwood table, head down on my arm. Woke up with the cell phone buzzing around in a vibrating techno-death rattle on the tabletop, buzzing to say they were down at the accounting house and now I could go home. Over the aisle two men were asleep, one of them snoring and one of them smelling like he'd pissed himself. The man across the table from me didn't move, his white-bearded chin down asleep on his hands holding open the middle of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men.
Wandering broke around downtown Detroit
The ice was working to slush in the afternoon rise to 33 degrees, slush slopping up around the sidewalk's lights like collars. Coming down the iced-up stretch coming off the two stadiums, Ford and Comerica, I passed a dozen bars, all of them expensive looking to a guy with just quarters in his pocket, and a liquor store and some restaurants advertising “cuisine” instead of food. Not a single coffee shop, though, not even a Starbucks where business people might pick up a soy cappuccino and listen to Sly and the Family Stone or something. Apparently Detroit doesn't drink coffee.
Sorry man, I said to a panhandler in the same brotherly jive he was using, I'm broke as hell.
Yeah okay, he said.
But hey man, you know where I can find a coffee shop?
Isn't that one across the street? he said.
That's a bar, I said.
Ain't they got coffee?
They got beer. I just wanna cup of coffee.
There's a hotdog truck front of the court house.
The hotdog stand was closed and anyway what I needed in addition to a cheap cup of coffee was a place to sit for a couple of hours while I waited for a friend to finish his interview and accounting house tour. so I kept walking. Set off in a zig-zaggy pattern crossing the street when there wasn't any traffic and accidentally following the trolley car calling itself the Detroit People Mover.
I ended up on the steps of a public library, Skillman branch, looking at the decorative stone work of stylized swastikas. I'd seen the design before, in a rod iron stair railing in a house in Grand Rapids built by a German woman in the '30s. They were a little embarrassed, when I asked. Said they'd been intending to replace it and said, a little accusing like maybe I was a Nazi for noticing, that most people didn't notice, because it was so stylized. Not that you can really stylize something that's as abstract as a swastika, but they were stylized in the sense of being muted. Racism without the garishness of being spray painted on the side of a synagogue
This the old library? a man on the street said.
Yeah, I said.
They got a baffroom?
Prob'ly, I said.
Lady at the front desk said I didn't need to check my bag but could she look and I showed her and she said nice bag like she wasn't looking for drugs or guns or bombs, but fashion. The children's section was empty when I went in, so I found a table with a green covered reading lamp by the books about turtles and penguins but was kicked out after a few minutes for not being a kid after 1 p.m.
I'd finished reading LeRoi Jones' play The Toilet when I fell asleep on the hardwood table, head down on my arm. Woke up with the cell phone buzzing around in a vibrating techno-death rattle on the tabletop, buzzing to say they were down at the accounting house and now I could go home. Over the aisle two men were asleep, one of them snoring and one of them smelling like he'd pissed himself. The man across the table from me didn't move, his white-bearded chin down asleep on his hands holding open the middle of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men.
Dec 19, 2005
The revision and extension of my "death of God" paper, Speaking of God: Explorations in the possibility of theological language, is now up on the paper's page. It looks like Dr. Blum and I may be co-writing a longer piece based on this one.
Dec 13, 2005
The Ludwig papers:
1. Short summary of the Tractatus
2. Wittgenstein and the Dissolution Principles
3. Counting Wittgensteins
4. The Mind of Wittgenstein
5. Wittgenstein's Queer Problem
Well that was more writing that I realized, but I'm particularly happy with 3 & 5. I think. Some sleep might change my mind. It feels good to have all that written, anyway.
Dec 10, 2005
Speaking of tongues: notes on saints, confusions and cultures
Johnny Cash, Anthony of Padua, C.S. Lewis
The photo project, by Jeremy Huggins.
Johnny Cash, Anthony of Padua, C.S. Lewis
The photo project, by Jeremy Huggins.
Dec 9, 2005
Waiting for the final wave
It's not an ominous place. It's not the sort of place that just somehow sets you off on a line of thought of wonding about the end of the world, or how to spell 'armageddon.' It's a suburbia full of mostly nice old people and temperate weather, with mountain views and sea air and it's pretty much like a travel brochure, tinged with that sappy quaintness. All the old people are always moving there because of how nice it is and the only undercurrent of uncomfortableness they say they feel is a niggling concern for the almost final obliteration of the rural Northwest community it once was. There are only two dairies left. I guess they'll be there until their owners die. There's one for-show horse farm, an organic farm, some tourist-friendly lavender fields, and a rusted grain silo.
The silo is square, an ugly tin tower in the middle of town rising from the tile roof of a Mexican restaurant. The restaurant's painted up tastefully colorful but then the silo comes out of the roof like a hideous interruption, looking really weird with walls of dull tin ungracefully rising to the top with corrugated gables. It stands there towering with all the horror-flick animosity and ominousness of a monster rising from the sea.
Mr. Bodds owns the copy shop under the silo. Every day he drives to work in an RV. Every day he drives the RV fully loaded with canned foods and valuables and everything he'd need to survive and he backs it into the lot behind the silo so he'll be ready, ready to run. So he'll be ready to run from the tsunami wave. He's been predicting a tsunami for at least ten years now, writing weekly warning letters to the weekly paper citing a mixture of opaque apocalyptic legends from local tribes and scientific papers from out-of-work scientists who have short wave radio shows. Sometimes Bodds says it'll be an earthquake that sets off the tsunami, breaking that whole peninsula loose from the land and sinking into the sea, setting it loose to go crashing into Canada. Sometimes he says it'll be a planetary alignment disaligning the gravitational pull and pushing the water up into a wave wiping up the mountains. Always, though, every time, he says it will be total disaster.
He's got a big map on the wall, color coded for disaster. It shows the whole stretch of land from the Puget Sound to the Pacific, everything above the Cascades and below the Strait of Juan de Fuca is there and all of it's inked over in pink and green and orange and blue and each color is linked to water, how much water will wash everything away.
He sells survival kits but his plan isn't to hide out and survive. If you ask him what he's going to do, he's going to escape. He's going to run out to the supply-stocked RV and drive the two-hour road along the coast outrunning the tsunami's wall of a wave to the turn where the road sneaks down the side of the mountains going south.
People ignore him. They ignore his letters and survival kits and ominous predictions. They think he's a kind old man but little kooky crazy and they try to get his wife to make their copies so they won't have to talk to him. So he wanders around making copies and fantasizing and muttering everything will be destroyed, and it's kind of quaint.
Another retiree moved in last month. Gray-haired and from California, another one in a town full of people seeking this temperate zone, a pleasant place to pass away. He has gray hair and a beard he's let grow and he's like everybody else. Except for the sign. He walks up and down the street with a handmade sign lettered in black electrical tape. COMING, it says, in capital letters, The tsunami is COMING to the Northwest. They had a picture in the paper and my mother clipped it and sent it to me and he doesn’t look crazy. He's smiling and he looks like someone who likes to laugh when his grandchildren open Christmas presents.
So the other day someone was asking what I was going to do, when this was all over. I said grad school if I can get in and he said what if you don’t and I said journalism. But that's a finicky field too and hard, you know, can be hard to get into so he said so what if you don't do journalism and I thought about last options and about the ominous shadow of that ridiculous silo.
Street prophet, I said, taking a drink of water. Apocalyptic street prophet.
It's not an ominous place. It's not the sort of place that just somehow sets you off on a line of thought of wonding about the end of the world, or how to spell 'armageddon.' It's a suburbia full of mostly nice old people and temperate weather, with mountain views and sea air and it's pretty much like a travel brochure, tinged with that sappy quaintness. All the old people are always moving there because of how nice it is and the only undercurrent of uncomfortableness they say they feel is a niggling concern for the almost final obliteration of the rural Northwest community it once was. There are only two dairies left. I guess they'll be there until their owners die. There's one for-show horse farm, an organic farm, some tourist-friendly lavender fields, and a rusted grain silo.
The silo is square, an ugly tin tower in the middle of town rising from the tile roof of a Mexican restaurant. The restaurant's painted up tastefully colorful but then the silo comes out of the roof like a hideous interruption, looking really weird with walls of dull tin ungracefully rising to the top with corrugated gables. It stands there towering with all the horror-flick animosity and ominousness of a monster rising from the sea.
Mr. Bodds owns the copy shop under the silo. Every day he drives to work in an RV. Every day he drives the RV fully loaded with canned foods and valuables and everything he'd need to survive and he backs it into the lot behind the silo so he'll be ready, ready to run. So he'll be ready to run from the tsunami wave. He's been predicting a tsunami for at least ten years now, writing weekly warning letters to the weekly paper citing a mixture of opaque apocalyptic legends from local tribes and scientific papers from out-of-work scientists who have short wave radio shows. Sometimes Bodds says it'll be an earthquake that sets off the tsunami, breaking that whole peninsula loose from the land and sinking into the sea, setting it loose to go crashing into Canada. Sometimes he says it'll be a planetary alignment disaligning the gravitational pull and pushing the water up into a wave wiping up the mountains. Always, though, every time, he says it will be total disaster.
He's got a big map on the wall, color coded for disaster. It shows the whole stretch of land from the Puget Sound to the Pacific, everything above the Cascades and below the Strait of Juan de Fuca is there and all of it's inked over in pink and green and orange and blue and each color is linked to water, how much water will wash everything away.
He sells survival kits but his plan isn't to hide out and survive. If you ask him what he's going to do, he's going to escape. He's going to run out to the supply-stocked RV and drive the two-hour road along the coast outrunning the tsunami's wall of a wave to the turn where the road sneaks down the side of the mountains going south.
People ignore him. They ignore his letters and survival kits and ominous predictions. They think he's a kind old man but little kooky crazy and they try to get his wife to make their copies so they won't have to talk to him. So he wanders around making copies and fantasizing and muttering everything will be destroyed, and it's kind of quaint.
Another retiree moved in last month. Gray-haired and from California, another one in a town full of people seeking this temperate zone, a pleasant place to pass away. He has gray hair and a beard he's let grow and he's like everybody else. Except for the sign. He walks up and down the street with a handmade sign lettered in black electrical tape. COMING, it says, in capital letters, The tsunami is COMING to the Northwest. They had a picture in the paper and my mother clipped it and sent it to me and he doesn’t look crazy. He's smiling and he looks like someone who likes to laugh when his grandchildren open Christmas presents.
So the other day someone was asking what I was going to do, when this was all over. I said grad school if I can get in and he said what if you don’t and I said journalism. But that's a finicky field too and hard, you know, can be hard to get into so he said so what if you don't do journalism and I thought about last options and about the ominous shadow of that ridiculous silo.
Street prophet, I said, taking a drink of water. Apocalyptic street prophet.
Dec 6, 2005
Cyberpunk googlezon
An interesting piece of cyberpunk video concerning current dystopian fears about the information age, about the internet, the media, corporations, capitalism, and ourselves.
Aside: There is, I think, a very common very bad reading of futuristic literature, both utopian or dystopia. Rather than reading it as predictive of the future, as a genre akin to prophecy, it's better read as a projection of now. This allows us to move past the too simple debates about why such a future will or will not happen, and gives us interesting insights into what an era thinks of itself. It's more akin, really, to horror flicks, in that you temporarily buy into the over-the-top story, let yourself go with the exageratedness of the genre, and later look at the substrata of fear.
(via Will Farnham from Japan.)
An interesting piece of cyberpunk video concerning current dystopian fears about the information age, about the internet, the media, corporations, capitalism, and ourselves.
Aside: There is, I think, a very common very bad reading of futuristic literature, both utopian or dystopia. Rather than reading it as predictive of the future, as a genre akin to prophecy, it's better read as a projection of now. This allows us to move past the too simple debates about why such a future will or will not happen, and gives us interesting insights into what an era thinks of itself. It's more akin, really, to horror flicks, in that you temporarily buy into the over-the-top story, let yourself go with the exageratedness of the genre, and later look at the substrata of fear.
(via Will Farnham from Japan.)
Dec 4, 2005
Kenneth Lee Boyd, who murdered his wife and his father-in-law, who confessed to the murders but said he didn't know why he commited them, and who had an I.Q. of 77, died of lethal injection on Friday December 2 at the age of 57. He was the 1,000th person executed in the United States since the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the death penalty in 1976.
May he rest in peace.
May he rest in peace.
Dec 1, 2005
Ed Peterson, an amateur botanist who spent 40 years searching and re-searching the deserts, fields and mountains of Southern California for wildflower seeds, who collected and cataloged 20 pounds of seeds a year in an attempt to preserve California's wildflowers, who could predict where in the Santa Monica Mountains a particular clump of flowers would grow, died in his sleep on November 14 at the age of 100.
May he rest in peace.
May he rest in peace.
Nov 28, 2005
The last days
To do by next Wednesday (posted here, in order of worry, so you'll know and I'll stop listing everything to myself in my head):
Write 30 - 50 pg thesis on the possibility of a linguistic solution to the mind body problem.
Latin midterm.
Write and present a 10 - 15 pg paper on Wittgenstein.
Write 10 - 15 pg paper on Plato. Canceled.
Philosophy comprehensive test.
GRE test.
Finish Death of God paper (for now).
Begin filling out grad school applications.
To do by next Wednesday (posted here, in order of worry, so you'll know and I'll stop listing everything to myself in my head):
Write 30 - 50 pg thesis on the possibility of a linguistic solution to the mind body problem.
The good news is it's raining.
Nov 27, 2005
The high scaffold, Thanksgiving '02
The snow was swallowing our car, the lights playing out a lulling snowflake vortex and I was trying not to fall asleep. The girls in the back were talking Sunday school curriculum, comparing and getting excited about the holiday weekend and going back to their church at home and seeing people, the old Sunday school teachers. They were comparing Sunday school teachers and songs and just because I'd had it with everything I decided to teach them the original version of Jesus Loves the Little Children, the version before it was nice and before it was multi-racial and before they sang it in church. The version with scaffolds and dead people and a revolutionary sentiment.
Whether on the scaffolds high or the battle fields we die... I put a brogue into it, staring into the snow trying to find the lane's lines and trying to not look in the back seat at their clean faces in scandalized silence.
It'd looked like I wasn't going to get out of town at all, that Thanksgiving, like I was gonna have to cook a turkey in the dorm microwave and eat it in my beige brick room. I'd called a guy who'd given me a ride before, out to my Uncle's. He said he was taking all of his laundry home and just didn't have any room in his soft topped jeep, but I suspected it was the trip-long unfriendly silence we fallen into 20 miles into the trip after I'd said I was reading Ginsberg for break and he'd said, but wasn't he gay?
So I called these girls I didn't know and asked them for a ride. The carpool of fundamentalist sophomores going to Jersey and Pennsylvania, going to a house in Harrisburg as a hub and the girl who had the car, who was driving, said yeah come along. Then she called back an hour latter saying, you can still come if you want to but you need to know that some of the girls don't want you to come. They're uncomfortable. I'm not going to say yes and then no, but just so you know.
All of their bags were in the trunk, when I got there, so I stood my bag on end between my legs in the front seat, my knees against the glove box, and we set off on the turnpike in the fall, me staying silent so's not to be left behind at some truck stop. It started to snow. With the snow came the cars spun out silly down the embankments and the driver saying she was getting tired and the back seat singing hymns I'd never heard and refusing to take a turn driving.
When we got there I stood aside for the hustle of coming home, holding my bag. Everybody's parents and siblings were there in a driveway of lined up vans and the dog was barking and jumping and running around in circles. When I finally asked if I could get a ride they said it was out of the way even though they knew I knew it was about 12 miles that they wouldn't take me.
You can have the couch, the Harrisburg girl said, if you don't mind the dog. If you can't figure out the ride to your Uncle's, we're having a bunch of people over. So I slept on the couch. I had $3, a stack of books, a change of clothes and a short couch in a town where I didn't want to be. I was too broke to buy a train ticket and anyway they were making you buy them a week in advance, because of Al Qaeda.
When I woke up the sun had lit up the snow in a cold glare and the house was empty. The girl and the mother and the dog and the little brother who looked at me suspiciously, all of them were gone and there was just a note, answer the phone if it rings. It might be my dad who's a truck driver.
When the phone rang I tried to remember their last name but couldn't. I found it on an envelope in the trash but I couldn't figure out how it was pronounced so I just said hello? A big voice loud over truck noises said, so you must be the guy my daughter brought home from college.
It's not really like that, I said.
I'm sure, he said.
The snow was swallowing our car, the lights playing out a lulling snowflake vortex and I was trying not to fall asleep. The girls in the back were talking Sunday school curriculum, comparing and getting excited about the holiday weekend and going back to their church at home and seeing people, the old Sunday school teachers. They were comparing Sunday school teachers and songs and just because I'd had it with everything I decided to teach them the original version of Jesus Loves the Little Children, the version before it was nice and before it was multi-racial and before they sang it in church. The version with scaffolds and dead people and a revolutionary sentiment.
Whether on the scaffolds high or the battle fields we die... I put a brogue into it, staring into the snow trying to find the lane's lines and trying to not look in the back seat at their clean faces in scandalized silence.
It'd looked like I wasn't going to get out of town at all, that Thanksgiving, like I was gonna have to cook a turkey in the dorm microwave and eat it in my beige brick room. I'd called a guy who'd given me a ride before, out to my Uncle's. He said he was taking all of his laundry home and just didn't have any room in his soft topped jeep, but I suspected it was the trip-long unfriendly silence we fallen into 20 miles into the trip after I'd said I was reading Ginsberg for break and he'd said, but wasn't he gay?
So I called these girls I didn't know and asked them for a ride. The carpool of fundamentalist sophomores going to Jersey and Pennsylvania, going to a house in Harrisburg as a hub and the girl who had the car, who was driving, said yeah come along. Then she called back an hour latter saying, you can still come if you want to but you need to know that some of the girls don't want you to come. They're uncomfortable. I'm not going to say yes and then no, but just so you know.
All of their bags were in the trunk, when I got there, so I stood my bag on end between my legs in the front seat, my knees against the glove box, and we set off on the turnpike in the fall, me staying silent so's not to be left behind at some truck stop. It started to snow. With the snow came the cars spun out silly down the embankments and the driver saying she was getting tired and the back seat singing hymns I'd never heard and refusing to take a turn driving.
When we got there I stood aside for the hustle of coming home, holding my bag. Everybody's parents and siblings were there in a driveway of lined up vans and the dog was barking and jumping and running around in circles. When I finally asked if I could get a ride they said it was out of the way even though they knew I knew it was about 12 miles that they wouldn't take me.
You can have the couch, the Harrisburg girl said, if you don't mind the dog. If you can't figure out the ride to your Uncle's, we're having a bunch of people over. So I slept on the couch. I had $3, a stack of books, a change of clothes and a short couch in a town where I didn't want to be. I was too broke to buy a train ticket and anyway they were making you buy them a week in advance, because of Al Qaeda.
When I woke up the sun had lit up the snow in a cold glare and the house was empty. The girl and the mother and the dog and the little brother who looked at me suspiciously, all of them were gone and there was just a note, answer the phone if it rings. It might be my dad who's a truck driver.
When the phone rang I tried to remember their last name but couldn't. I found it on an envelope in the trash but I couldn't figure out how it was pronounced so I just said hello? A big voice loud over truck noises said, so you must be the guy my daughter brought home from college.
It's not really like that, I said.
I'm sure, he said.
Mannequin's I've known
an ongoing series in a weird legend
1. Gertie, in the bathroom of a resteraunt in Pollard Flat surprising patrons.
2. Jane, in the window of the Washington coffee shop where her swimsuit caused some Christian conservatives to avoid the place.
3. Rita, in the back room of Hillsdale's coffee shop and art venue, missing a torso.
an ongoing series in a weird legend
1. Gertie, in the bathroom of a resteraunt in Pollard Flat surprising patrons.
2. Jane, in the window of the Washington coffee shop where her swimsuit caused some Christian conservatives to avoid the place.
3. Rita, in the back room of Hillsdale's coffee shop and art venue, missing a torso.
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