Goats everywhere

I had been listening to Robinson Crusoe on my mp3 player and, while on the elliptical at the gym, had just heard the part where he tames a baby goat. Then I got into my car and headed down the highway. The car in front of me was a red Tacoma, and I saw an animal face in the rear window. Now I'm seeing goats, I thought to myself, believing it must, of course, be a dog. But at the red light, I came closer. No, it really was a goat, staring straight at me! Only in Pixieville, do we take our goats out for a morning spin!

Listening to this classic novel, which I have not read before, is a good way to get through it, as I do find some of the details and repetition (why does he tell the story and present the daily journal that says the same thing?) a bit boring. But it is an important book for me to read in terms of literary history and my interest in literature and geography, and is filling in some missing pieces. Most of my sense of the novel comes from my knowledge of the Elizabeth Bishop poem that refers to it, but now I also see how Life of Pi builds from it. I didn't know how much Defoe dealt with Crusoe's spiritual condition, and questions of God's providence. (So far, in greater depth than The Shack!) I'm also intrigued by how he comes to think of his dwelling as "home." I haven't yet come to the part where he meets Friday, so more comments to follow, if I can figure out how to get the rest of the book onto one of my players, now that I am a mac person and my pc isn't even hooked up enough to use.

old dog

They say it is good to break habits: it keeps the mind supple and prevents mental deterioration. So this switchover from PC to mac must be extending my capacity to rant about them young people for at least another three years. I am amazed at how seamless my interface with my keyboard has been. The habits so strongly ingrained that switching keyboard shortcut strokes is agonizing. The only real shift I am struggling with is using the Command (or Apple) key instead of the Control Key, and for other features, the Alt (or Option key) instead of Control. Control! Interestingly, I do feel like I've lost control. Macs determine for you what it is you want to do. If you have already made your own determinations, their choices seem a bit creepy, at times. But I am discovering some cool things. I will accomplish this and teach my hand/brain interface new tricks.

Nightmares wrapped in dreams

We climbed the stairs at the museum to see a featured exhibit: the display of an arm that had been severed from its body. This was a political statement. But I worried it would cause nightmares. And to prove it, I could see them. This woman dreamed of her daughter’s arm being severed. Then she was an arm, waving goodbye.

Don't get out much

Doing all one's work online can lead one to do strange things, such as sit on the sandy floor of an attic-like bookstore, near people who smell like their dogs sit on way too many of their clothes, to watch some one-act plays, the final one being Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. I had forgotten that I was a character in a Beckett play. Any of his plays. Back in New York, I remember seeing the Public Theater’s production of Happy Days, in which a woman named Winnie rooted around in her purse for things, while sitting on top of a garbage heap. After that, the man I was seeing at the time aptly referred to my purse as my "Winnie Bag." In this play, Krapp first deals with his filing system and has some things fall of his desk. That is a day in my life. Then he listens to a tape of himself talking on his 39th birthday. While I do not have tapes, I have my diaries, and while I have not made a ritual of retrieving them, I know they are there, awaiting me. In fact, just today I had an idea about a story culled from the letters a beach bum I met in California when I was eighteen wrote me for a while. {Funny that I think first of taking someone else's words. But I am curious as I try to remember what on earth that drifter had to say in so many letters.} I realize I have reached the point where the accumulation need not continue. Now is the time to shape the material into something. But I feel dread, like Krapp, who felt disgust at listening to his younger self, yet then proceeded to speak again into the tape recorder. He is so pitiful and so typical. One doesn’t want to just pronounce alone in one’s room. One must record: imagine a listener (the listeners he actually has, because he is a character in a play; the listeners we don’t have, but imagine because we write). I blog, therefore I am! The imaginary listener gives some meaning to the meaninglessness: the confrontation with one’s washed up dreams of grandeur.

I don't even know who the actor was, but he was good. The performance was free, and very low budget, but that in no way matters to a Beckett play. As far as I know, this was it: the whole performance. All the work, all that talent, for a room of about forty people, to see once.

It kind of reminds me of last weekend. We went to a party up in the Live Free or Die state. "Pyroman" provided the fireworks. He spent the entire day setting them up. The introduction began before dark. He stood on the platform he had built, in a vinyl, boxy like costume. He began dancing in a robotic fashion to “Relax, Don’t Do it” playing on a boom box. (Interestingly, a search for that song title turns up the lyrics on “One Hit Wonders.” It’s kind of a theme here.) . Fireworks shot forth from his arms. He was a living fireworks display! He turned around, and his back presented a spiral item that spun and spewed white light. He stepped back and forth, no major dance moves, but it was clear that he was in bliss: dancing in the showers of sparks. When you thought he was done, two big blasts of fire and smoke that went up behind him, like the ones that appeared before the Wizard of Oz. What a delight to see an artist at work, focused and rejoicing in his creation, temporary though it may be.

Repurposing

Don't you hate that word--repurposing? I do. Nevertheless, that is what I will do. Rather than start a new blog, I will continue this one, though it no longer contains the ramblings of a crazed parish administrator, but a deranged online adjunct college professor. Contain your excitement.

Guess what's back in style?

The Jerusalem Post provides some information I don't hear much of in US media:

On Tuesday, Hamas legislators marked the Christmas season by passing a Shari'a criminal code for the Palestinian Authority. Among other things, it legalizes crucifixion.

Hamas's endorsement of nailing enemies of Islam to crosses came at the same time it renewed its jihad. Here, too, Hamas wanted to make sure that Christians didn't feel neglected as its fighters launched missiles at Jewish day care centers and schools. So on Wednesday, Hamas lobbed a mortar shell at the Erez crossing point into Israel just as a group of Gazan Christians were standing on line waiting to travel to Bethlehem for Christmas.

Time is strange and all that

Everytime someone says "only 10" or "only 9" more days till the election, I think, "what election?" That's in November, this is only October. October what? I can't believe how autumn is slipping past.

Today we had a reminder of sunshine and warmth. I had no idea how much it rained during the night, and didn't know that was why there were strips of leafless areas down my driveway, until, on my run, I saw the stream roaring by. I ran in a tank top, and then went into a sunny spot in my backyard and stretched in the sun. I even felt too hot to lie there in shavasana! The birds were very active. Why do that blue jay's feathers seem a much brighter blue than in the summer?

Those ads for some phone that features Google are aimed just at me: all those random questions you want answers to right away! Fortunately, I'm usually close enough to my computer.

Today is a day of recuperation after the academic conference it was mandatory for me to attend at the local college where I adjunct. They have to appease the accreditors by assuring them they are making sure all the adjuncts are toeing the line. So I had to listen to them proclaim as recent discoveries the facts about online teaching that I am practicing every day. I kind of feel dirty.

it's the space between

I grew up listening to vinyl. One by one, I added to my record collection, and played my favorite albums over and over. Now there was a thing this technology would do. Any little scratch in the vinyl would cause it to skip and the record would repeat a musical phrase over and over again. Sometimes you could stop it by stomping hard on the floor, but mostly you had to get up and tap the needle arm. It would reach the point that the skips became a part of the song. To this day, there songs from Janis Joplin's "Got Dem Old Kozmic Blues Again" that startle me when I heard them blasting right through the place where it was supposed to get stuck.

In the same way, record listeners grew to expect that songs would come on in a certain order, after a three or four second hiss of silence. That was their proper order. Some musicians created albums with this in mind. Some people still prefer to listen to music this way. I have to admit, I am not one of them.

That was always the appeal of radio, after all. The fortuitious playing of the song you really liked, or needed at that moment. The juxtaposition: both those songs mentioned pumpkins and it was like totally mind-blowing!!!

I tried listening to an old mix tape I had made (it was in the car and there was nothing but commercials and pledge appeals on the radio) and found myself listening just to hear what the next song was, rather than to enjoy the current song. I realized it then. It's the juxtapositions I like. The connections. The links I make in my own mind, when one song comments on another and turns it upside down. Does that mean I'm just an unreformed modernist, shoring fragments against my ruin? Or too post-modern to bother actually listening to a simple song?