House of Books

Yesterday I visited my grandparents' house in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. They live in a farmhouse that is over a century old with two barns, an enormous vegetable garden, eight cats, a couple kittens and two very enthusiastic dogs. This was my first real visit in about 10 years.
In this house the walls are made of books, the fire roars in winter, and art covers all spaces where books are not. Floors creak and there are gravestones holding up the water pump in the basement. And not a thing had changed since my last visit when I was thirteen years old--except my grandparents themselves. My grandaddy is frail, in his own world. My grandmamma is concerned with feeding us. Both are intelligent, sharp witted and adore each other. I see my father and his five siblings growing up in this house, curling up in the many corners with blankets to read, painting in the dining room, sewing in the hallway.
Growing up, there was an extremely strong emphasis placed on reading. For every birthday and Christmas we were given books...on my fifth grade birthday I received a first edition copy of Wuthering Heights.
Oddly, I never thought about the connection between my grandparents and my love of reading.

Driving in the car with my aunt later that evening we were discussing a new person in our family. She said to me, "I am concerned about him because he does not read books." I laughed. How strange! A lack of reading is a major character flaw? And yet, I kind of agree. After all, people who don't read don't seem to hold my attention for long.

Lost Art

So I have a problem:
William Gass.

William Gass' book The Tests of time has forced me, beyond my expectations, to re-evaluate the way I look at the practice of writing. Indeed, as a former Waldorf child, I do value the art of writing: the sound of fountain pen against paper, the liner under my blank white sheet so that I write straight, the constant smell of white-out, and the feeling of satisfaction after completing an entire dictation without messing up once...and thus I feel bizarre writing my thoughts on a keyboard. I read the beautiful sentences that Gass has composed, and I cannot help but obey his pleas. Where did the personality of our sentences go? Times New Roman eats the flavor of our words, spitting them back at us like pre-chewed food for the masses (His image). Suddenly I am torn--I love my blog and the instant beauty I can achieve with the sameness of the type and I also hate this sameness, the polished and mediocrity of my pre-made template picked from 8 or so others when I signed up.

And what am I to do? Write my thoughts and scan them, somehow, in order to keep my small chunk of cyberspace? Let it go? Or delete everything and pretend Amaranthine never existed (and a part of me loves the irony of that).

I do realize that Gass' book is exactly what he was preaching against in that particular essay. And I do realize that this is the age of internet communication and I am simply doing what others are doing. But I crave subversion! This feels like dead air and broken windows. How can I make my empty house occupied? Or at least haunted...

oh, the oddness

Today, on the night of the Hunter's Moon, I was given my first Blood Orange of the season.

Eye Candy

1920's girls make me wish I was born in another decade.

Three

Pyre

Three burning bonfires blowing
    smoke up straight, almost invisible,
as we pass by fast on the train.

I search hard for the people
    who started those fires.
Look for the bottles of gas,

kerosene, lighter fluid—there is
    nothing. Where is Dido, isn’t she
the one who burns on such huge,

quiet, flames?  There are no
    people, only emptiness. The train
rushes past so many piles of lumber,

dark with age and the wetness that turns
    trees almost black, unburnable
in my woodstove. But those three

piles burn and no others.  Vandals,
    workmen doing their jobs?
There is fire in Brattleboro,

on the outskirts, some nameless,
    dirty lumber mill.  The silence
inside the train blocks out

the birds, or maybe they have fled,
    terrified of the smoke, as I would
be, if I walked along the tracks

searching for bent pennies or stray,
    rusty nail spikes to give to my brother.
And I would half-expect

to find Dido among the ruined
    wood, burned alive for some man
that loved her but couldn’t stay.

The flames rise with no purpose or intent,
    wasting a warmth that could be given
freely to so many hungry, cold

hobos or wanderers in the night.
    And I smile inside as I imagine
the train whistling by hundreds

of tiny camps surrounded
    by so many travelers and strangers
no longer cold.

I wrote this in 2006, revised it in 2007 and again try to give it new life. This piece always comes back to me when I'm in this mood: slightly grumpy, verging on sad but for no discernable reason. I think I'd like to just be alone for awhile, be in the quiet until this headache is gone and then play my cello--which hasn't been touched since August--forget anything associated with work, friends, family, just be dead as far as the outside world is concerned. This morning I woke up at 7:30 despite the fact that I'd gone to bed at 3am...maybe I'm just tired.

Apparently all I do is review books...

Seduction and Betrayal by Elizabeth Hardwick

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
Hardwick is a gifted critic, and I did enjoy her book a bundle. Keep in mind that Seduction and Betrayal is soley focused on examining female authors, and the wives of some famous male authors. Because of this, it seemed repetitive sometimes, although there were some stand out essays such as her pieces on Plath, and Fitzgerald's wife Zelda. The long title essay is also one of the better works in this collection.


View all my reviews.

Vonnegut

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Vonnegut is one of those author's that everyone knows about even if they haven't read any of his work. Cat's Cradle, I think, is one of his most famous novels. His diologue is some of the best written (in my humble opinion). After just having finished it seconds before typing this, I must say that it was a sincerely enjoyable read which will probably have me thinking about religion, science, and midgets for the next month (at least). And I keep having the urge to say to people, when the context is right, "See the cat? See the Cradle?"






View all my reviews.

Starting September...

I am enrolled in this course at UVM:

Survey of Literary Theory and Criticism
Robyn Warhol-Down

This seminar introduces graduate students to a range of vocabulary, methodologies, and approaches that circulate in literary and cultural studies today. We will begin with excerpts from texts by Marx, Freud, de Beauvoir, and Foucault that have set the framework for much of current critical theory. Then we will survey major approaches from “New” Criticism and Structuralism; through such politically and historically based methods as “New” Historicism, Feminisms and Gender Studies; to such Post-structuralist ways of reading as Deconstruction, Psychoanalytic criticism, and Post-colonialism.
To ground our reading of theory in practical criticism, we will read literary and popular-culture texts to use as case studies. These will include Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and variations on the same story, including Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, and the Bollywood film Bride and Prejudice.
In order to expose seminar members to a range of perspectives on critical theory (and to introduce them to a variety of faculty members in the Department), we will have guest speakers on most class days. UVM English faculty will talk informally about theoretical approaches in which they have special expertise.
Each student will be required to present a 20-minute oral “prolusion” (a close reading of a brief passage from one of our texts, taking the approach of the theory being read for that day), a 20-page annotated bibliography on a chosen theoretical methodology, and a 20-25-page seminar paper using that methodology in making an argument about one of our literary, theoretical, or pop-culture course texts. Students will also be required to do weekly writings answering a specific question about the assigned reading, to be collected as a Critical Log.

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

My review

Everyone has been raving about this book and my mother finally leant it to me, and I finally read it, and here I am not so pleased with Miss Niffenegger. Overall, the plot was unchanging, without any kind of momentum, and solely about marriage. Now, I have no problem with marriage, weddings, babies, ect...BUT I must admit that I am uninterested in that if there is nothing else to complicate it. Yes, I understand that the protagonist time-travels which makes their situation special, but it almost exacerbated the marriage-story because it meant that Clare (the wife) never had another choice. And speaking of Clare, who could have been the most interesting character in the book, was written like a china doll. She is an artist, she has red hair. She is worried a lot and wants a child. The author offers no depth, no character development, no hook to grab on to. Ultimately, I would describe this as a failed love story.


View all my reviews.

One Year

Today I have had this blog for one whole year! To celebrate, I darkened all the colors. Maybe I'll add a new picture tomorrow if I can get internet access...

Landscape escape

I've moved only next door, but my life became swept up in a cyclone of amnesia-inducing experiments and lots of vodka drank on a brown corderoy couch and chased with cranberry juice. Clothing litters my bedroom floor (confetti), my cat drapes himself on the cool linoleum of the kitchen and misses his friend. I am still frozen. There are no stories in my veins, no thoughts that raise my hackles. Willow is rooted in an uncomfortable bed of stagnant soil. Or maybe willow is rooted too comfortable in the rich soil of Burlington, and the lack of challenge is fuzzing art into sleep. Tomorrow I will try my hardest to go outside and take some pictures before work. The sun and the solitude are both necessary, as is solitude at night. Tonight I'll shun the world and soak in a bath, listen carefully to the Tom Waites album "Alice" that was a gift from a friend. Maybe the darkness will lift and my blood will stop clotting and sticking underneath my skin.

Goodbye, house

I'M MOVING. Expect pictures starting Monday or Tuesday. I'm only moving next door, its not a huge deal, but I am very excited anyway.

Block

Writers block has gotten at me again. All I've written in the past 30 days is one crappy unfinished poem and reviews on the books I've been reading. Can't tell if this block, lock, wall (imagine a wall constructed of books in foreign languages surrounding you and high enough so that you cannot see out) is from the stress associated with moving, or because of cabin fever...or both.

On another note, Saturday I saw Iron Maiden! And Mastodon, and a ton of other excellent and glimmering metal bands at the first ever Montreal Heavy MTL festival. Really, it was magical.

Love,
Willow~

Under the Sign of Saturn

Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays by Susan Sontag

My review

Susan Sontag's collection of appreciations inspires me to read more, and to write better. I love the way she is able to say interesting and un-cliche things about authors that seem "untouchable" to regular people like myself. I'd recommend the title essay "Under the Sign of Saturn" first, as it is the most accessible.


View all my reviews.

June

June is an important month in the yearly cycle.

It is the halfway point in the calendar.

It is the beginning of Summer.

The Summer solstice and my favorite Sabbot is the 21st (Litha).

Irises and roses are beginning and about to POP open.

Thunder and Lightning Storms...

Question, help!

Why does this blogging program/website un-format my poetry? why can I not indent and have line breaks? Does anyone know how? Help help help.

Atmosphere

My apartment is cold cold cold. Burlington is cloudy and a little chilly but my house is dank. It amazes me how much atmosphere matters to me, especially when I need to do homework. Should I turn on some music, turn the heat on, and tidy up the clutter? Go outside for a walk and ignore my work, attempt to find something for Mother's Day? Drink more coffee? Oh, the options! I find myself constantly displeased with the atmosphere of this particular apartment. I think it has something to do with the computers on the table. Maybe it's time to pull the carpets up...maybe it's time for change...

Falls

Water...I went to Southern VT to see the sights and visit with my mother. My chest is sunburned and my head is cleared.

Cabin Fever

Today I was walking to work and the sun was shining, I was sweating a little under my jacket and the breeze was a tolerable temperature. It was all quite blissfull. Then, while strolling under a tree, white things began to fall upon my head. At first I thought there something coming from the tree, and then I realized that this was HAIL. Actual, real hail on a perfectly lovely sunny, blue sky day. It was pretty.

Now, I am sitting at my desk at work, all of the nurses are irritable, and apparently I look "tired" (I'm not). Day five is always the hardest. There is only so much a girl can take and microwaving macaroni and cheese (smelly fake cheese no less) is not what I want to be doing with my time. My mood is pretty grumpy. Can you tell?

Burlington is stagnant. My job is stupid. Creativity has been zapped.

My brother sent me this Calvin and Hobbes. It is alarmingly true:

Love,

Willow~

In Memory...

Prayer for Remembering

Full moons bring apples fallen from dark trees.

Dark trees leave shadows for the sun to find.

I find small gnomes in tree-hollows, mossy.

Underneath the roots there lives my Mother

filling Herself

with leaves.

She grows upward into birds’ nests woven.

She never sleeps but brings us new surprises:

aurora, snow-scapes, honey bees and stars.

Goddess, allow me to always see your

beauty. Allow me to understand your sounds

of constant

awakening life.

Forgive my broken spirits when I’m blind

to the comfort in your snow blankets. Deep

whiteness echoing greener grass than black

summer nights, forcing stars to fight the street

lamps. Forgive me for doubting your laughter

during melancholy

sleepless nights.

Ostara

This weekend I am re-starting, re-birthing ideas and my body. Leaving for NY with some friends to go sit outside in a little black box on top of frozen Lake Ontario. Yesterday was Ostara, the Sabbot of Spring, when the Goddess circles back to her maiden form and the earth yawns and opens her sleepy eyes. I spyed crocus stems poking out from the almost-frozen dirt as I walked to work, and the trees are taking on that purple haze of buds. Still, it is bittter cold. Ice in my hair.
I've been practicing my cello and my fingers are getting quite callused. I like them like that.

Random Poem Attempt for Ostara

Swelling buds but still unable to burst.
We shiver in anticipation and in ice.
I imagine sugar dripping from maples
and sap spilling from buckets.
I want to slip my tongue inside
the tree and slurp out the sweetness,
just barely not water, the tall
tree tapped for clear blood,
her blood, mother's milk
for her roots, leaves-to-be,
rare sugar for farmers, who thank
the forest in black boots and old
coats, boiling down the liquid
for hours and hours. Syrup from sap
transformed with heat, laughter,
and always smoke.

Books

My reading list for Bread Loaf is sitting next to me on the table. There are 15 books on the list total for two classes. Currently, I am reading too many books, and won't ever be able to finish anything if I don't knock some of them off.
So....
I am going to try to finish:
Under the Sign of Saturn Susan Sontag
Necklace of Kisses Francesca Lia Block
Nobody Knows My Name James Baldwin

BEFORE I start on this monster list.

Essay #2 (The Last One...)

James Baldwin and American Identity Issues

James Baldwin’s address “Notes on a Hypothetical Novel” speaks about the American identity. In order to speak about the problems with this American identity, Baldwin frames his points within the idea of writing a novel using his own life for examples and inspiration. Baldwin begins by telling his audience “We’ve been talking about writing for the last two days, which is a very reckless thing to do, so I shall be absolutely reckless and pretend that I’m writing a novel in your presence” (141). Why is talking about writing reckless? Is it because writing allows for an intimate connection between reader and author, and so writing is a sacred practice that enables people to cross over social and class barriers that otherwise would be blocking their paths? I think this is the reason. In the 1950’s when segregation was still a serious problem, writing could be the link between groups of people that may have very little contact with one another. In this essay, I think James Baldwin is asking his readers or listeners to put down their walls and rethink the American identity, as it blinds them to their actual, personal identities.

Baldwin paints the American citizen as confused about his or her place in the world, talents, and class status. He pushes the readers of this piece to see that we are not who we imagine ourselves to be, “…to try and find out what Americans mean is almost impossible because there are so many things they do not want to face” (151). This is particularly true of segregation and civil rights. Many white Americans probably believed that they were supporters of African-American rights and freedoms but in reality, did nothing to allow other people to see this. People cover up their true selves using class, race, education, and gender stereotypes as their means. Soon, it will become easier to believe the stereotype that one has painted for the world than to reach deeper and pull out one’s personal and private beliefs. In “Notes on a Hypothetical Novel” the most memorable quotes was:

There is an illusion about America, a myth about America to which we are clinging which has nothing to do with the lives we lead and I don’t believe that anybody in this country who has really thought about it or really almost anybody who has been brought up against it—almost all of us have one way or another—this collision between one’s image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish. (153)

Baldwin urges his readers to break down who they thought they were and become who they really are. Is this a positive action? For the most part, I would say yes. But I also think that some people pretend to be better people than they truly are. In this case, it seems important to work on merging the self that one pretends to be, and the self which one really is. And why is this confusion an American trait, as Baldwin claims it is. Clearly we can look to our history and see that America was created (the idea of America, anyway) by people who believed so strongly in their own religion that they were forced to move from their home to a new physical space on order to safely practice those religions.

And then things become complicated. As race enters the picture, our “all- encompassing, all-inclusive” American identity falls to pieces. For America is a “melting pot” of people who have been at odds against one another for as long as “Americans” have existed on this piece of land. It is strange to look at the history of this place and feel as if we have accomplished much in the way of protecting or even respecting human life. But I also do not want to become that tacky American who hates America. I do not hate America. I am, however, at odds with my American identity and I don’t know whether I should be embracing the person I think I am to improve myself, or throwing that person away in order to become my true self. As a Vermonter, my exposure to racial diversity has been limited, and I am ignorant of much of the slang and rhetoric of minority groups. I am very possibly naive to prejudice and just how much prejudice there is left in the world. But I am not racist, and I seek to learn as much as I can about culture and identity…because it interests me, and I can feel it making me grow.

In my small town of five hundred, there was an African drum in every house and a great hunger for textures and colors and rituals from other places. It is because of this odd community that I learned anything about peoples other than the backwoods artists and laborers that make up Saxtons River. Thus, I cannot call myself racist, because I am not…I am a white girl from Vermont rather than one who can claim a strong attachment to the identity of an American. And although I have traveled, I identify less and less with other Americans that I meet. Maybe because America is so large, or so fractured, or so full. I am uncertain of how to remedy this dis-attachment to my own country, but I suppose it would begin with working on what America means to me.

A Temporary Halt in Willow-things

So I slipped on the ice and fell backwards onto my right hand, and in the process dislocated my wrist. The specific bone is called the "lunar bone" or something similar. I spent the night of the total lunar eclipse in the Emergency Department staring at the "how to disinfect equipment properly" sign. The doctor put me in a splint.

Here is a list of things I cannot do in pictorial form:

Dishes...

Weaving...

Spinning...

(love my drop spindle)

Knitting...

Celling...

Pity me, pity, all my favorite things have been taken away from me. Six week healing time, but I am going to be optomistic and hope for less.

Essay #4...which I am not proud of (about Knitting)

Knitting and Writing

The best method for knitting a hat is to use five double pointed needles rather than the round needles (which are really just two regular needles joined together with a strand of plastic). Wooden needles are ideal, for what is the point of holding synthetic, uncomfortable materials in your hands for hours and hours and hours? My favorite type of hat to knit is a fisherman’s cap with a ribbed brim that flips up to adjust with the dome part of the hat knit in stockinette. Knitting hats is one of my favorite items to knit because they are swifter than scarves, and keep one warm during the bitter cold months of Vermont winter.

When I was thirteen the principle of my high school taught me how to knit. The new knowledge allowed me to sit quietly in class without fidgeting, which was a new experience for me. Knitting also gave me an outlet for frustration, instead of sulking, I could knit a pair of mittens. Thus, needlecrafts became a coping skill, a way to stay focused, and a source of joy through creativity. There is nothing like creating something to give away.

Writing serves a similar purpose for me. I write poetry as a way of working through difficult emotions, or to express joy, anger, etc. Writing has been associated with textile crafts for thousands of years. Even the word text comes from the Latin texere which means “to weave.” Even the language can be interchanged, we are able to “spin a tale” or “weave a story.” Although it was accidental that writing and textiles became my crafts of choice, I do not think that the two art forms are unrelated themselves. Working with both fibers and words are so comparable to me, that creating a scarf is almost the same as writing a poem. Both the scarf and the poem are unique, they will both inevitably carry mistakes, and both can protect me from the world.

For the holidays this year I was given a loom and a drop spindle. My mother took me to the woodcarver who made my spindle and his wife showed me how to twist the soft wool roving into thread that is stronger and softer than I could have ever hoped. Holding the spindle correctly was awkward for a moment, but once I got the motion and rhythm, I was able to spin the undyed sheep wool into a half ply of yarn. In order to make a full yarn that one would knit, crochet or spin with, one needs to spin two single plies and then twist both of those together. Writing poetry has progressed in much the same way. Every year I learn a little bit more about twisting the words, spinning them into something else in order to create something completely different. My Latin instructor told me once that words are not definitions, they are ideas, and that phrase has stuck.

Strangely, texts and textiles have continually connected and related themselves to each other throughout my undergraduate and my graduate career thus far. As a double major in English and Classics I was able to learn about the importance of weaving to ancient cultures, as I was also learning to unravel Latin and Greek texts and weave them back into English translation. For my honors thesis I wrote about the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty who pricks herself on a distaff and falls asleep for a hundred years. This past summer I studied at Oxford through the Bread Loaf program and focused on writing essays that would hold texture and meaning and color for the reader in a way that I had never experienced before.

My current project is weaving a plaid scarf on a rigid heddle table loom. The process involves beating the heddle into the warped thread, which pounds the loom against my chest. Sometimes I feel as if I will bruise there. Strangely, this does not stop me, but I get a kind of satisfaction from the idea that my craft leaves a temporary physical mark on my body. Just like when you are learning to play an instrument and you finally see a callus build on your fingers. I will continue to study writing, to try new types, to create and to encourage other to create. This year I started the Burlington Poetry Journal with two close friends. I don’t know what it will turn out to be, but the process has been incredible and I am looking forward to the next edition. It doesn’t seem possible to stop writing, and as most of the English grad students I know, I desire to make my living from my work. But first I need to learn how to knit a sweater.

Desire...

Free People has put out their new catalog for early Spring. I think Free People is an amazing brand and I would recommend their clothing to anyone. The quality is extremely high and the designers are fantastic. I love the dark colors with the gypsy/1960's inspired cuts and shapes.

Here are some things I especially desire:

Kenzo is a high fashion brand which has released some of the same sort of styles for this year. I learned about the designer through Lula (girl of your dreams) magazine. Which you should read if you don't already.

Also, I think that the best jewlery to pair with this gypsy look would be leafy:

Essay #3 (About Crazy People)...Yes I am skipping #2

Creativity and Crazies

For weeks she had been screaming. The cries came from the room closest to the door, which is always locked, and always she cried out the same thing: “Help me.” Inside my glass cage I was safer than the nurses from potential threats, but the screams cut me still. Katherine was a patient at the hospital when I was still new and unfamiliar with what “crazy” people do. Eventually, she began to walk up and down the hallway, clinging to the railing, her long black hair hanging grossly down her back, she was always dripping drool. Yes, she did scare me, especially when she groped to my window hunched over, spittle drizzling down her chin, asking me, “Did I want a ticket to the show?”

Catatonia is a strange thing, and it is even stranger when this absence of just “being there” is undercut with bizarre, terrifying schizophrenic hallucinations and the inability to control the body’s natural functions like bowel movements.

Since beginning my job at the locked psychiatry ward of a hospital, I look at the mentally ill in a different way. It is difficult to see those who are screaming, tearing at their skin, talking in tongues, or urinating on their pillows as people. When humans are not acting like humans, something makes us recoil from them, both in fear and in disgust. Katherine was the first “crazy” that turned back into a person right in front of my eyes and she changed the way I viewed mentally ill people, and forced me to acknowledge that I needed to change my view in the first place.

It seems as though Zelda Fitzgerald was not viewed in the light of humanity, but rather as a fragile “thing”—according to Elizabeth Hardwick’s essay. I don’t want to assume that Hardwick’s miniature biography is the complete truth, and I would like to believe that F. Scott Fitzgerald did wish the best for his wife, but that little was known of mental illness during the 1930’s. Is it possible that the mentally ill were treated not as human, but as subhuman creatures that needed to stay out of society’s way as much as possible?

One day, I was sitting at my secretary’s desk, dealing with the usual administration, and Katherine sauntered up to my window. She was walking straight; her hair was not stringy but brushed smooth and luscious. She had hazel eyes that were clear and sharp. I opened the window and she smiled that full, warm smile of a woman who has spent her entire life caring for others. She was only the day before a creature living in a person’s body. Now she was telling me I looked lovely, and about her education at Columbia University, about her beautiful children all grown up and doing work for their communities. She was married and worked as a Pastor at her local hospital.

Creativity is something that we all have, and as human beings we are constantly creating things, from art to children to clean space, safe space, all numbers of things. Zelda’s creative energy intimidated her husband, possibly because the energy of a schizophrenic could be seen as subhuman, or inhumanly intense. Some of the artwork and writing I’ve seen at the hospital has been unsettling. Some of it has been beautiful; some of the artwork has been given just to me and is hanging on my wall. If Zelda had been allowed to create as freely as she had desired, what would she have made for herself, and her audience? The nurses will often discourage patients from drawing sexually disturbing pictures especially if they depict staff members. Are the two comparable? Every time that a person is told to stop creating that thing, are we unknowingly hindering the birth of something that will be truly genius?

Katherine never drew any artwork, and if she wrote, I never saw anything. She left the hospital with her husband, wearing one of the nurse’s sweaters because her husband, in his excitement at taking her home, forgot to take her jacket. She told me I was sweet, and wrote down her address for me. I never did write to her, thinking that the long interruption in her life was memory enough.

Even now I see people shrink away from “crazies” on the street. They might be dangerous after all, which is true. But I see passers by looking at these people as if they are not people, but a suspicious and troublesome type of animal, or is the carrier of a contagious disease. Neither of which is the reality. I am sincerely grateful that Katherine was able to teach me to treat all people like people. And I hope that F. Scott Fitzgerald did not have to learn this lesson as I did, but recognized the humanity in his wife, even as the schizophrenia did its best to mask it.

As Promised...Essay #1 (About Collections)

Strange Revelations in my Closet

Reading “Unpacking My Library” forced me to reconsider my possessions and the order in which I keep my possessions. Benjamin says that “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories” (60). Each article of clothing in my closet, folded in my dresser, and in one case, hanging on my wall, strings together my life so far like clothes hanging to dry on a line. Everyone has a collection of some type, and as much as some would hate to admit it, clothes are the most memory steeped of all the objects one could own.

“The period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership—for a true collector the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object” (60). I used to work for a woman who bought and sold antique clothing to fashion designers, Hollywood productions, and famous musicians. I have a blouse from 1890 with embroidery done in those awful Victorian sewing factories where little girls got their hair caught in machines and died prematurely from inhalation of textile dust. I find myself out and hunting for a new article every time there is a big change in my life, or a moment worth noting. The bright turquoise mini skirt—one of my most colorful acquisitions—marks a moment of lucidness that I had rarely experienced before then.

By giving our memories shape, texture, and physical space we are able to create order out of memory—and thus, order for our emotions. What I think that Benjamin was getting at, was that books, or clothes, or whatever one happens to collect is a way for us to possess our memories. Photo albums and scrap books also serve to this end—people need physical manifestations of memories. I still own my prom dress—it is in my closet at my mother’s home in Southern Vermont. The dress is black and red striped and backless. I will probably never wear it again, but it marks the memory of graduation from high school as well as my unexpected recognition as Prom Queen. We all have these strange relics saved and stored in safe places. There might be a box of photographs under a bed, or a collage of magazine cut-outs hanging in a dark, less traveled hallway. Some people track their lives with music, some with their own writing. Each of these cases are examples of people claiming their memories—giving birth to their emotions as tactile objects. For what else are memories but strings of emotions lighting up spaces in time for us to replay?

Walter Benjamin ends his essay with “..ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them” (67). We collect our memories, little pieces of ourselves in the form of objects. My closet is a disorganized timeline of my life since the eighth grade, proof that I have experienced change, loss, happiness and sex. In this way I am able to live in memories, and also grow within them. When I grow out of a piece—either physically or mentally, I put it aside until it can be of use to me again. Right now I wear the same brown woven scarf almost every day—it is a mark of growing up and accepting the idea of adult responsibilities. It is more than possible that I will need to pack this item away at some point when it no longer suits my mood or style.

School

I have pretty much been sucking at writing. Writing anything. In the past month I've produced one poem and one post in here which was really just an excuse to put up a picture of my knitting. In order to remedy both of these problems I am vowing to post my creative non-fiction homework. Maybe once I start writing again on a regular basis (because I have to), it will loosen my brain and I will also be able to write some poetry.
Maybe?


In any case, the books we are reading for class are:
Illuminations Walter Benjamin
Under the Sign of Saturn Susan Sontag
Nobody Knows My Name James Baldwin
Seduction and Betrayal Elizabeth Hardwick
The Tests of Time William Gass.

Hat-ing

So I knitted up this hat for my mummy as a holiday gift. It is made of chunky baby alpaca from Cascade Yarns and it certainly was delicious to work with. The hat came out thick and warm and it fit mum well.