hey blog - once again, the negligent "Terrible Mother" returns to claim her own! so it's been forever, but i've been fairly busy and have actually produced quite a lot. yesterday i stayed in the LOC for hours focusing on this one very measured, finite task that i had to do, and while i couldn't find the event that i was looking for in miles of microfilm footage (eyes scrolling through it all until i became quite queasy and looked down and realized that i was exuding this sort of vegetable-soup smell, not a good thing for matin' - or maybe that was my vegetable-based pheromone cocktail at work, who knows), i churned out an essay that was, i think, pretty good at about 2 am today. everyhing sort of fell into place with it, because the topic was well-known, the essay had already been half-written in the first place, and the evidence was there. and i realized that working hard can be so satisfying when there are these finite, road-marker sort of goals lining the path. in the lack of the short-term agenda, academia seems like a lifetime of sisyphean sloughing through endless piles of paper as heavy as midwestern snow, which then proceed to pile up again, confounding the slough-er. so i think that in future i'm going to start sitting down, sorting, reflecting, and weighing more than consuming linear feet of information as if i was a tape recorder with a tapeworm.
now a word about the library. lately i've been walking there, as usual, and noticing the little metal cards attached to the foliage planted around it - heavy metal panicum and common box, not to mention a yellowwood that is apparently part of the legume family. then i enter the place, this time not the manuscript reading room, where the steel-cut bob lady rules all with her withering gaze and non-indelible sceptre, but the newspaper and periodical room, which is like the laid-back hippie counterpart to the manuscript room.
and well it should be, because for the most part these documents are preserved, so that you can touch them with greasy fingers and not worry about destroying irretrievable evidence. no, the newspaper room is not fastidious, and in fact the opposite: it's run by a cadre of eccentrics, including several who i initially thought were homeless people, and in fact they might be. it's an open secret that the newspaper room is a good place for homeless people to hang out during the day, to pee and check their email, and the aisles are full of limping, shapeless forms with dreadlocks and absent gazes. this, i feel, is right - clearly the library needs inhabitants, and they're enjoying it more than anyone else in This Great Nation.
then there are the researchers, another type of lost person, who stumble around with unkempt hair and baggy, ill-fitting clothes, but have the look of mania rather than defeat. they always request microfilm adamantly and scroll through it like housewives at a casino, sitting at the machines, pressing buttons, scribbling furiously in their rumpled notebooks as the lines squeal past. although the machines do produce a sort of screaming sound as the plastic whips through the reels, the screaming can be sort of soothing, if modulated correctly. or it can be maddening, as it was yesterday, when the man adjacent to me (a soft-spoken elderly person looking for kentucky newspapers, i heard him whisper to the librarian) kept jamming his finger on the button, jerking the film around, and producing the sorts of squeaks and belches that, i imagine, he also did. that was driving me crazy, i'll admit. but by then i'd been sitting at the machines too long and had become a raw nerve, the body equivalent of a lacerated eyeball, with red veins sticking out and the moisture stripped away, leaving a sort of dryness exacerbated by the friction of the quick-moving tape. nevertheless, this state seemed to be "good for business," as they say.
work ethic is important to me, as is control over the frames of microfilm as they slide past. modulating the speed of the thing is very satisfying, as is bringing the pages into focus by adjusting the gear above the lens. there's something very nice about turning on the machine, hearing it hum to life, stroking its innards and making printer adjustments, like a lowing beast. then the task of alignment, and the joy of flipping an image by turning a crank - who would've thought that the lateral motion, the flick of the wrist, could spin things that were upside-down into intelligibility? anyhow, sitting in front of one of those stereopticons is definitely comforting.
and i know that this is partly why the men with tousled long hair and untied, mud-caked boots and pants with holes in the crotch and a million bags come to this place. today i ran into one, with the usual accoutrements - thick glasses, messy blonde mane, rosaceous nose, military apparel - and he commented to me that he had come on a long bus ride, and he'd taken four bags with him - "one virtually empty," he kept repeating to me and to the ethiopian coatroom clerk, who looked at him with disdain - but four, nonetheless, because he needed those things but was not prepared to get on the bus with more than four. at this, the clerk perked up and mumbled something about how his back prevented him from carrying three. i smiled at them and made a short answer. everyone - including several of the middle-aged men standing in the reader registration line - was actually staring at this long, lithe, wide-eyed girl who spoke about her work like a burbling stream: "oh," she said, "i study feminism." the clerk said, "what?" and she said, loudly, "feminism," and then asked him where she should go for that. he said that he had no idea. she kept nodding her head like a horse (her long hair was extremely reminiscent of a horse's mane). anyhow, the whole thing was rather droll and convivial. a vignette, one might say.
other highlights of the library walk: one day, i saw a low-flying hawk. i had come from the police station, where all these people were cooking up a fish fry. i bought two fishes, i was enormously hungry, but then after eating one i was fully and gave the rest to a homeless man who sleeps in this granite corner and keeps his sweaters in the nearby newspaper box. i actually just put it down in his pile of pilly woolen blankets and ran off. anyhow, the fish was good, the macaroni and cheese even better. and then i saw the hawk (see photo): amazing, so close to me, speckled brown and cream-colored, with an unmistakably hawkish beak. definitely a pro-war sort of bird. and i noticed that a woman was also staring up at it, and i wondered why more people weren't (probably because they were, to quote that magnetic fields song, "Washington, DC," "doing something real"), and she and i exchanged a few words about the hawk, which she called "Lady-Hawk." she said that she recognized it from the native american museum, which was just adjacent to its perch. i noticed then that she was like a solid black wall in her down coat, one of those women who look like pillars, possibly like Lot's wife, just impenetrable forces of solid, continuous flesh. (Note: there are men who look like this too.) And she had a long dark streaked braid. something very friendly about her aspect.
One more note about a recent encounter: so, i went to thanksgiving in this out-of-the-way suburb of DC, invited there by my friend from Chicago, who is also a person who "[does] something real." first i took the train, and then i got on a bus, which was a very strange-looking 'short bus' with a sort of fake-vintage prow. very odd. there were practically no people on the bus, except for the driver and this lady of indefinite ethnicity, though i'd hazard a guess and say that she was filipina or latina. she was going to work (which i intuited to mean cleaning a house, since she got off the bus in the middle of rippling suburban berms and other landscaped formations that dipped and rose gently, covered with a receding grassline), and we chatted about the economy for a while. she said, "is obama going to fix this or what?" the driver observed that he was shocked that the wheaton mall hadn't even bothered to open on thanksgiving, owing to a low turnout. half of his day, he said, had been spent picking up and dropping off people who were trying to go to the mall and disappointed to find it closed. A half-day trucking frustrated would-be shoppers. Then he and i got into a long and rambling discussion about Obama, which became so interesting that we both forgot to look out for my stop, and i had to cycle back on the short bus as it went back the way it had come. this was very pleasant, though, and i sat in the closed-up bus and marinated in the warmth of the sun streaming in and the flowing juices of my horrible, horrible cold, which had made me into a florid and stinking virus-spewing disease carrier. the busdriver told me to drink robotussin and go to bed, and he even offered to give me some of his, but i said that i was fine. but i wasn't fine - my nose was like a snot-volcano, and my head felt hazy in that certain way that lets you know that yes, you are sick, in the way that the papers are telling us that yes, we're in a recession. i was self-diagnosing at that point, and it felt reassuring, in a way, to be able to do that, backed up with copious material evidence.
And okay, to segue into thanksgiving: it was really nice, despite the fact that i was sick. first of all, i spent time with my friend, who i adore. A great lady, as they said of Eleanor Roosevelt. then there was the other company - it was this humongous, multi-family event, with three different mashed potato concoctions, something that George Eliot could've devised. Half of the people present were politicos in high places (including one of the main authors of the 9/11 commission report and his wife, a member of the obama transition team up for a sexy post), and then there was a lawyer for the democrats, something with the housing and banking commission or some such, and then two lit professors, a radical leftist history prof (ohoho was he ever the best! loved that old crusty rabble-rouser), this lesbian of color who runs a famous blog about LGBT and social justice stuff, and then assorted others. halfway through dinner, a bevy of congresspeople arrived, with their pert, wifey wives, including extremely well-preserved old ladies with frosty coifs, pearls, and expensive leisurewear. clearly it would have been amazing to be healthy for these people, but i did manage to avoid touching them and, i'd like to think, spared them the grief of future infectious disease. also, there were children running around everywhere, a good sign. these children had golden curls and soft little kitten faces, everything you'd expect of children. there was a baby who looked, as i commented, like the "essence of a baby." there was nothing of the shriveled old man about him, that's for sure. and two of the children were named after famous black people's last names - ailey and ellison. no joke. one of those was purposeful, the other accidental.
also, there was this weird guy who was sort of unplaceable. i kept trying to figure out how he fit into the family. he and i actually ended up talking a lot, and he told me that he'd met famous musicians like john prine, steve gutenberg, and minnie riperton. he also told me that he'd met his wife when he stopped to pick her up as she hitchhiked across the USA. hm. he kept reciting john prine lyrics to me, because i told him about my incidental encounter with prine through a former lover, but it was making me sort of uncomfortable, so i changed the subject. i do remember, though, through my foggy haze, that this guy was taken by the fact that john prine had been able to truly understand love from a woman's perspective even before feminism really got going. i don't know if i bought that. anyhow, at some point i found myself semi-passed out on the sofa, full of food that i hadn't been able to taste because of my clogged passages, and he seemed to be in the same state, dorsal fin pointing up. another time, he saw me eating a piece of cheese and said "i see you," and i felt sort of creeped out.
hm.
one last point before i move on: i realize how important the olfactory is to life-processes and the enjoyment of life. food, sex, it's all better with the sense of smell. taking smell away is a really egregious thing to do. another egregious thing would be taping someone's mouth shut when his/her nose was clogged by a bad cold. that would, i think, amount to a mild form of torture.
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