"Waltzes are ever so nice," said Mrs. Maggs who had just returned and given MacPhee his slab of cake, "So old fashioned."
Strange to me it seems, to read, in a book I tend to think of as comically old-fashioned, the calling "old fashioned" of something. That I, perhaps, might also think waltzes "ever so nice" and "old fashioned" rather stresses this than diminishes it.
Many books from my childhood I will re-read and think I could not have understood them the first time around. I say 'think' rather than 'believe' because such a thing is typically unbelievable, which is the attitude that invariably asserts itself upon consideration of my childhood regard for the book in question. There are a few things I from time to time that I failed to realize -or at least remember the realization of- on my first readings: the politics throughout the latter part of Lord of the Rings, the sexual episode in Hero and the Crown. But I remember there being one book in particular I just could not fully wrap my head around; and rereading That Hideous Strength, I can see the cause. It's just such an adult novel. The first two novels are fantasy, and fantasy, being based on experiences one is not likely to have had, is far more accessible to children. Strength is about adult things, the kind of things of whick any explanation would be extremely long, fairly tedious, and still very confusing, but which most adult have experienced, the actual experiences typically being often fleeting and generally memorable, but not infrequently still very confusing. Things like relationships gone stale, careerism, and seeking independence through wrongdoing (though admittedly, this is one of the first thing children seem to discover on their way to adulthood). My difficulty, and much of my delight, in reading, is because this contrasts with my thinking of Lewis as a 'children's author'. A very good writer he is, in any case.
Reading Timequake, I think it's the most pleasant Vonnegut I've come across. Most of his novels come strike me as... well, it's like when the prettiest, smartest girl at the party is the one in the ugliest dress, a not-uncommon ocurrance in our current society. An exuberance, a thrill, a joy, and yet something so distasteful as well. Not so (so far) with Timequake. This book makes me want to be Kurt Vonnegut for a living.
I'm just not sure I have the stones to pull it off, though.
Before I left for work this evening, Lauren and I decided to have a little DIY night, where I'd teach her how to use a sewing machine and she'd show me how to lubricate my chain. When I got back, we started things out with a DIY whiskey-coke, and I made a balaclava for Lauren, and then she made ten more for some poor balaclavaless shmucks. While she did that, I cleaned my new bookcase, and then built it into my existing shelving apparatus in a way that is fairly unlikely to kill me in my sleep. Then we tackled the bikes; Lauren on Joe's bike, and me on Terrence, after she showed me what to do. And swore a lot. There was a lot of swearing when she was looking at my bike, the kind of swearing people do when they're kind of scared, when they're nervous. She apparently also thinks I should have working brakes. "I guess this could be pretty OK if you never change gears," she said more than once. But I scrubbed the rust off with a toothbrush and so forth and adjusted the derailleurs and now the Terrence is better than ever. Hoo-ray! Unwilling to stop there, I then broke the sewing machine back out to patch some jeans; after that, I finally used the whetstone I bought five years ago so I could sharpen my pocketknife to sharpen my pocketknife. It was our most productive night since the day she made noodles and chicken noodle soup.
Which means, of course, that the apartment is a disaster of a mess.
So I was updating Wallaby (the shiny iPod), and I made a playlist of all my traditional music. In my entire digital collection, I have 260 tracks worth. I have some 5000 tracks, total. Remove from consideration the 260 traditional tracks, and anything by my four favorite bands, and there are -exactly, if as it happens- 4000 tracks. Whoops, getting sloppy. Also remove all the "Real Men of Genius" tracks and The Better Boyfriends, now we have 3846 tracks. And only 260 of old-time, bluegrass, ballads, cajun, pipes, and so forth all put together. Pathetic.
I'm also struck that four groups comprise 3/20 of my music collection by volume -though far more by play frequency. I haven't done the frequency analysis on the traditional segment yet.
Tuesday, fifth week after Epiphany "I'm sorry, you have called a wrong number." -answering machine message
So I got the flu, then recovered just in time to go out and visit my mom in the suburbs, where I caught a cold, which I recovered from just in time for a bout of warm weather and the 49th annual Folk Festival. My mom was in the suburbs to house- and kid-sit while my aunt and uncle had a nice long just-the-two-of-them vacation. She told me at least three times how glad she was to have raised boys. She got some relief that weekend, as not only myself, but two aunts and an additional cousin came out all at once. The sisters all caught up and Kelsey and I did the iPod swap-critique thing, traded music recommendations, and talked about temporary hair dyes.
And fun as that was, the folk festival was even better. Missing Friday night and half of Saturday (still fighting off that cold), I showed up on Saturday just in time to set up the party, my primary responsibility, and this year, also primarily my responsibility. The many congratulations and thanks I received seemed sincere enough to lead me to think it went well. I spent all of Sunday dancing and drinking and moving furniture, and running into people I had no reason to expect to see. First was Ellis Avenue Cyberling, the my extremely jaded trombonist deskmate from the Harris. He's a Sacred Harp singer, it seems, and one of the first people I saw as I walked in the door of Ida Noyes. Right at the end of the Irish set workshop, the second dance I went to that morning, I was waylaid by a Nancy Chang, which was not to be unexpected, and a Violette Green, which certainly was, as last I heard she was moving away. She was on her way into the middle-eastern dance workshop, so we didn't catch up until later, but we shared a dance and some conversation at the barn dance workshop, and it was all-in-all right pleasant.
After a brief lunch of cucumber and onion sandwiches, I made my way down to the flatfooting workshop, because heaven forbid -or at least, I forbid- that there be any dance I don't know how to do. An hour of chugging and so forth wore me out so much I'm still feeling it today, and I still could not master the Tennessee walking step, or even the basic. Thank goodness I have hardwood floors at home, ones that won't show wear from a little more beating-about. It was here that I crossed paths with Elizabeth, the redheaded midwife from Epiphany, who, as one forward young man observed to her later, was totally rocking those boots. This was recounted to me later as a worthwhile pick-up line; I have my doubts. Just missing the Scottish dance workshop, I met Elizabeth's friends and mopped the Cloister Club floor as Dot Kent began instructing newcomers about contra dancing. I finished just in time to be the example target in a lesson on how to ask someone to dance, which, by the applause, I must've done well. (What is that, the third time this post I've made sure to mention my lauds? What an ego on this one. And we haven't even gotten to the part where all the pretty young women tell me what a good dancer I am. Well, to be fair, a few had told me that already. But in any case:) I then set my weariness aside to dance another couple straight hours and with any girl who would have me, and even run into Allison, the girl who showed us the Bridgepartment and from whom we took over the lease. I gave a couple dance lessons and made some girls dizzy, tried to convince the free-workshop types to come to the concert and dance some more, and then got roped into cleaning up, just like always.
Both nights the concerts were great, the green room was great, and I went back and forth as I pleased, meeting musicians and undergrads, catching up with the people I hadn't seen since last year. Sunday night clean-up went as quick as it ever does, and I bought my two CDs and collected my purple T-shirt. Then, so many of our contingent being younger, and Jimmy's having no longer the tolerance towards smoke that it used to, we retired with what was left of our beer and other beverages to Moomers, the only Hyde Park apartment with a permanent stage. This party went even later than the one the night before, ending in a small, warm, and carefree singalong. In the middle, though, I saw a man play a crutch. That is, he took a medical assistance device for the pedomotively impaired, modified it slightly (though calling upon an impressive and occasionally frightening parade of tools to do so), referred to the bottommost end of it as a "mouthpiece", and made music with it. Mr. John Parrish, for so he was, was accompanied by Moomers' own Becca on the saw, and thus SAWCRUTCH was born. That's me standing in the background for the first half, with the struck-dumb grin on my face.
BOOKS! What wonderful things. Lauren has grand plans for some cardboard bookshelves, to be followed by a carboard couch. Or rather, a cardboard dais upon which floorcouch will rest, being then floorcouch no longer. This may not work.
But books! When I went to the homelands for Christmas, I had a plan to unearth and subsequently re-read a couple series I enjoyed in my youth, but which I felt that either my then-adolescent mind had not, at the time, been fully adapted to understanding or at the very least to remembering with any clarity. Specifically, to re-read a series of books all ending in "-ware" by some dude named Rudy Rucker that a friend of mine had been raving about, and to then progress to CS. Lewis's Science Fiction Trilogy -less well-know, less child-friendly, but just as symbolically heavy-handed as the Narnia series- and then, if time allowed, such works of Tolkien as do not read like historical or religious texts. This was the plan, though the discovery of my own volumes of both of the latter (and the discovery that, hey, Drew has some pretty fun games for that there X-Box) allowed me to extend the re-reading plan into my triumphant return to Chicago. The latter two were also reversed, so that I actually read The Hobbit while still in the old basement, finished Return of the King during my recent nearly-weeklong bout of unhealth, and only got around to breezing through Out of the Silent Planet tonight. Somewhere in there I also gulped down Lloyd Alexander's The Book of Three to double-check that it is appropriate both in age-level and in ethical content for my young cousin; it will likely be some time before I can give her McKinley's The Hero and the Crown, the favorite book of my youth, but my eagerness to share delightful works of fantasy will not be denied.
But Silent Planet! Even more delightful (and so much shorter) than I remembered. A delightfully light tale, actually, though as I recall the series gets quite a bit more burdensome as the series progresses. It is also so very British! The villains say a lot of things like "White Man's Burden" and so forth, you just don't see that these days, and the generally tendency to be embarrassed about minor things while in the midst of trauma, and the embarassment of how innappropriate such a reaction is when there are much larger things at stake, I kind of adore it. But mostly I just cock my head and think to myself, "How very curious!" where I curious I mean hilariously foreign. But concerns of allegory and nationality aside, it really is a fun piece of science fantasy - for such it is. A long way from hard science fiction, though Lewis takes the occaision stab at explaining this or that. But how is there gravity on the tiny spaceship? Never addressed. This bothers me.
Enough rambling! I suppose I will move on to Perilandra and so on. And then? Well, I also found I own the latter three books of the Ender series by Card. I guess I'll have to pay my library fines and check out the first volume before I get cracking on those. And then more Alexander? Who knows.
Also I was sick this week, I may have mentioned. That sucked.
So the most hilarious thing to happen when I was in South Dakota for (most of) Christmas was the day Dylan decided to play a video game. He announced his intention by ambling downstairs, planting his feet, putting his fists on his hips, and and saying in a calm, level voice, "Drew, I want to play a videogame." The list of choices was quickly run down, with each offering rejected in turn. Eventually, Dylan was forced to concede that, OK, maybe he didn't want to play if those were all the options on hand. Drew replied, "Oh! There's always Rock Band."
So Rock Band was put into operation. I wandered upstairs, where my dad asks me what is up with all that hootin' and hollerin' down there. I try to explain it to him, but he decides he must see it for himself. So downstairs we go. My brothers, finishing up their song, hear my Dad coming down the stairs, and the same notion strikes everyone at once: Dad should totally play Rock Band. So Drew sets him up with the microphone, and Dylan tries to find a song old enough that Pops would know it.
Seeing my dad belt "Spirit in the Sky" was fantastic enough, but when we ran out of songs he knew, then the hilarity really started. I hadn't seen him have so much fun in years.
So on my way home from work I rode past a three-foot-tall tumbleweed. I almost rode into it, actually, since I really wasn't expecting a tumbleweed, much less one of such girth, to be in the southbound bike lane on Archer. But there it was.
Other notable things: Dr. Google (she has a doctorate in geneological studies) recently informed me that I was born in Honolulu in anno Domini 1906. Naturally, this came as a surprise to me, since a) that name is pretty much made up and b) also a sort of pun -though as neither was something I myself did, perhaps I should not be so surprised. I just made both (the name, the pun) a bit more coherent (only a bit). Combined with the fact that Arson Daily appears to have been a real man... well, I'm starting to suspect that either the world is even more awesome than I'd ever imagined, or someone is feeding fake census data into an Internet. Interesting, either way.
I've been meaning to post since at least the tenth day of Christmas, but I am lazy? Also busy, or I was. I went to my parents' for a solid two weeks, pulling in Christmas Day and New Years. I say my parents', but I really mean my mom's, since, well, my dad moved out, more or less voluntarily. But he came over every day while we were there to see us, which was nice, but crazy awkward. This is the result of an unfortunate string of events that I've already processed quite thoughoughly some time ago, but have not previously been at liberty to discuss in a public manner. Since I deplore keeping secrets almost as much as I love learning them, getting this matter out in the open is a relief to me, as I was certian to mention it casually at some time in the future or very recent past. Other than awkward parental issues, my time in the Dakotas went swimmingly. H.S. and I played through Halo 3 on co-op, Shaina and I harassed at work pretty much everyone she knows with a menial job, I actually got along with my brothers (especially Drew, which, for the record, has not typically been the case these past... oh, six years), and I got to kick back and play some of the recently released video games to which I'd been looking forward. Those did not live up to my expectations, sadly. And, phoneless, carless, and cash-strapped as I was, there were a few people I could not get in touch with, a few events I was unable to attend, and a few gifts I was unable to purchase. But I was satisfied nonetheless.
More recently, and more locally, I have had some things to do as well. Not to say I've done them all -the grand re-reading campaign of the holiday season has continued only somewhat abated through my return, as it happens- but I spend a lot of time meaning to do them. Lauren had covered the kitchen in gold foil while I was gone, and the living room with suitcases and bags of various sorts. I spent the first week mostly frowning at these two rooms, being early to work, and trying to defrost the potato stew I made before leaving town. In the former two I was quite successful. Then Lauren came home all in rush, chided me for heating the apartment above sixty degrees, failed to really explain the kitchen by trying to distract me with lamps and mirrors, and at my request cleaned the living room. The space afforded by this cleaning she promptly took advantage of by -suspect me of exaggeration if you must, but I warn you that if so you will be in error- covering most of the living room furniture in aluminum foil. She then covered all of the foil in homemade egg-noodles (at which point a lot of things made a lot more sense to me, such as statements along the lines of "Look out, I'm going to cover the whole apartment in egg-noodles!") As the noodles dried, she used the one square foot of un-noodled counterspace in the kitchen to chop vegetables and fungi and chicken bits and throw them in a giant pot. At about this point I went to bed, since there was nowhere to sit, nowhere to set anything, nowhere to shuffle around looking confused, and therefore I knew all I was going to do for the rest of the night anyway was read Tolkein in my bedroom. And I figured I might as well do it beneath several blankets, even if it was only seven or so in the evening. But lo! Within the hour Lauren had freed the living room and kitchen from noodles, suspending them with chicken and veggies in a large (we're talkin volume = surface area of living room, here) pot of what could be called a thick soup, but might more succinctly be described as "gravy". Thus was I awoken to Lauren calling me out of bed to eat chicken noodle soup with herself and a recently-arrived, polo-wearied Joe. It was some of the best soup I'd ever had.
And that was just one day. I've also been... well, that was pretty much it. No, lies. I spend twenty-four straight hours partying in clothes I'd gotten over Christmas. It went something like train, masquerade party, Jimmy's, masquerade party, Moomers' couch, bus, check e-mail, Stanko, bangers and mash with same, six-way Settlers with same, home. It's times like this I sort of wished I still lived with Brian, so when I came back from such an event, I'd have someone to cluck "And where have you been? Aren't those the same clothes you left in yesterday night?" and so forth at me when I finally stumbled in. Also, an adorable kitten. But enough of the past!
As if I haven't gone on enough already, I'd like to mention the present briefly. Though my scanner is giving Asbestos the silent treatment at present and I can thusly offer no proof of such, I've been trying to do Hourly Comics Month, which has proved, in many ways, somewhat harder than No Shave November. If the reader is not familiar with the former, well, there is a day, February the second as it happens, when many webcomic artists, gifted amateurs, and schmucks like me try to draw a comic every hour of the waking day on the subject of what we were doing in the past hour. Some, such as the Day's founder, Chicago resident and comedic genius John Campbell, choose to do this for the whole month leading up to the Day. I have attempted, and generally failed, to do so as well, but I have scratched out a few scenes from my hectic life, and I mean to share them. Just as soon as I finish coding up a fancy-pants way to display them. And maybe finish coding up the fancy-pants poetry section, which I've been tapping at on and off for over two months now.
I'm not really a new-year's resolution kind of guy, you see.
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