spring break cincinnati!

My friends and I are such nerds that we drove to Cincinnati last weekend to CRASH A CONFERENCE. The panel was on fat and sex - interrelated topics that my friend Sonya is working on. We rocked the one panel we attended, asking the incisive questions that the discourse lacked, and then flounced off in our fluttering skirts like some kind of Western heroes who bounce into town, stir things up, and seconds later are in the wind. It felt good to put my MA work to some use. While at the Hilton, we poked our heads into the Hall of Mirrors - the hotel where the conference was held was attired in lovely art-deco garb, down to the arches over the conference rooms, each of which embodied a different Greek style - and admired the baroque excess.

After we left we went to a vintage store called Casa Blanca where the owner, Hollywood, who seriously doubled for Hollywood from Mannequin - aw yeah, 80's conspicuous consumption in its heyday - styled us in absurd getups that involved neckties as scarves and underboob belts. Then we ate ice cream that Oprah says is the best ice cream in the country. I've also eaten the red velvet cake that Oprah says is the best red velvet cake in the country. If only I could eat them together, it would be like being at an Oprah birthday party.

real live girl

My friend Tanya makes fascinating video art that explores the borderlands between the public and the private. In a culture obsessed with reality and authenticity (see my Peggy Selzer post), her work manages to both exist autonomously as art and to self-reflexively critique the modes through which we perform and embody our lives. One of these days I will ask her whether I can write the essay on her art that I have brewing in my head. All this to say, Tanya's uploaded a bunch of her videos onto this website: http://tanyabezreh.blip.tv. Some of them are recordings of live performance pieces she's created and some of them, like the DIY Holiday Musical, are self-contained "films." Go check out her stuff if you get a chance. She also blogs. Whether or not you think analytically about media like I do, you can appreciate how cute and endearing Tanya is, and admire how her work manages to be both joyful and candid, whimsical and analytical. p.s. I stole that image from Tanya's website.

student knits her own ferrari!

In researching for my paper (looking up ana voog, the original 90's back-in-the-day life as art camgirl, now crochet-artist), I came across this story. Please admire.

he is risen

This is the phrase I always think of at Easter, the phrase my mother always dyed on her eggs. I always made elaborate puzzle ones, ones that looked like dawn, trying to outdo my artist father. I didn't dye eggs this year, or do very much Eastery. It snowed, big papery flakes. I sent out some submissions, trying to get back into the writing game after a year of being more of a scholar than anything else. But tonight Vanessa and I went ahead and made an Easter meal. Orange roughy, asparagus and the requisite lambcake. Anyone who's ever Eastered with me knows the wonders of the lambcake. I took some pictures for your touristic or nostalgic delight, depending on what side of the line you fall. I'm wishing you all rebirth and a joyous spring.

Here's the asparagus:














The simple plate:














Grandma Loverde's lamb mold:














And the lamb, frosted with Vanessa's favorite frosting, confetti-filled. We decided it was a disco lamb. Usually the lamb is standing, hanging out in a bed of Easter grass. This year's lamb is lazy. It's made with strawberry cake mix, so it looks pink inside. This is no homemade cake. Crazy storebought kitsch all the way:

if april showers bring may flowers, what do may flowers bring?

Sasha put this image up on Facebook recently and I can't get over it. Partially because I transformed this event in a story, and now it's a new thing. So these little kids here aren't real, in some ways. And partially because Dan is a lawyer now. But also because it's not just the fact that we're kids that makes this time seem so much more innocent now. We're in the end of the oughts. The decade is starting to take shape. "These are globalizing kingdoms now." This is the Wake Up the Earth Parade, by the way.

12-step list in the second person even though you are skeptical of the second person

1. Walk into your friend's warm apartment that smells like hot chicken and tomatoes. Accept dinner. Accept jazz. Accept wine. Accept the view of the night sky. Don't feel like you need to swing in the hammock. Accept the dictionaries with the illustrations of beaked rodents and alcoves.
2. Discover the 6-year-old unheard mix from Portland. Listen to it and think about sad, rainy Portland in sad, rainy Indiana. Remember that cycles are liberating and not merely circumscribing.
3. Stop the car by the side of the highway when the wiper bolt comes loose and the semi blinds you with rain. Stand to the side of the car and allow the rain to soak you. Rain always stops, eventually.
4. Don't bother to flirt or look helpless. Just ask for a wrench and the toolbox and helper will come along.
5. Drink Kentucky bourbon in Kentucky. Don't worry about the empty ice trays.
   
6. Think again about becoming a Quaker. Think about sitting in silence for an hour each week. Think about silence.
   
7. Be gracious when given the slice of pot pie that most looks like pie. Be gracious about having friends who will feed you warm, comforting food.
8. Act incredulous at the bar brawl that nearly breaks out. Hard rockin blues bands need bar brawls more that bar brawls need hard rockin blues bands. Act incredulous at the song that attempts to use "hammer, nail and screw" in a catastrophe of mixed metaphors. You need to be surprised more often.
   
9. Listen to the sounds of the forest for a few minutes before reading the sign that tells you the experience of forest immersion is simulated. Learn that the forest sounds are all coming from the mouth of a multi-lingual artist.
10. Eat oatcakes with fresh blackberries. Be honest, again.
11. Put on the Funk Mix and feel the Funk deep where it is meant to be felt.
    
12. It doesn't matter how long since you've picked up a paintbrush. Minute by minute tells you what to do. You need long strokes, long wordless strokes.
    

look at me

The good people who are running IR's blog have posted my book review of Chris Abani's The Virgin of Flames. Go check it out.

In other news, minor fiascos aside, I am still on the road. Next stop, Lexington.

problems with using a semi-large purse as a grocery sack

you may end up carrying an avocado to the bar.

wind it up and let it go

On the walk: pinwheels in multiple yards, spinning in the wind; the cemetery streaked in light; bright morning stars are shining; a tinsely homemade arch; the Triple Deuce, crayon scrawls all over its door an old school out-of-office message for the band that inhabits it; a line of t-shirts and sweatshirts, from grey to yellow to blue, emblazoned with the name of a carpentry business, hang-drying in the sun; Sonya's house, no one home, little skully canvas shoes waiting on the landing; kids playing basketball; the arc of a swing up towards the sun and down to the river to pray; that same blue hearse whose owner I now know by sight; saturated colors on houses; fake flowers scattered across my lawn.

this is for my mamma

One of my favorite things about youtube is that I can find clips of old children's shows I used to watch and regional PSAs. I recently stumbled upon this Sesame Street gem. I still get the ditty in my head every once in a while, and my mother swears that whenever she needs to pick up three things at the grocery store, all she has to do is sing it in her head and she remembers. A handy mnemonic device. Watching it again, I'm really interested in the styling of the mother - do rag, apron, fancy shoes. Also, I wonder how many kids are sent solo on errands like this these days. Finally, doesn't it make you miss hand drawn animation? Watch and tell me what you think.

when i come home, if i come home

I dropped Vanessa off at the airport this morning and now I can't sleep. She accidentally arranged her flight for super early so we were up at 3:45. Things look strange from this side of morning, after an hour of sleep. I nearly got into a terrible accident when a car decided to cross the highway right in front of me. On the way up we saw many bedraggled things by the side of the road, including a coyote or fox.















It's supposed to warm up this week, but I still feel winter everywhere.

Look how the meager lights try their hardest:















Look how unforgiving the sky has been:















Can you see my disapproval?

scandal, thy name is Selzer

I spent too much time today reading up on the story of Peggy Selzer alias Margaret B. Jones, the latest hoax memoirist whose publishing deal has hit the fan. I happened upon the Times "Homes and Gardens" profile of Jones's house last week, and like 2/3 of the commenters responding to news of Selzer's comedown, I definitely felt like something was rotten in the state of Denmark. I'm not sure if it was Selzer's bourgeois aesthetic, the lack of a photo of the pit-bull tattoo she bragged about, or the idea that anyone raised in S. Central would refer to any part of Eugene as a "ghetto," but the story reeked of, if not fraud, the Times' fetishization of a certain iteration of the Horatio Alger myth.

On the one hand, I want to respond to the hordes asking why Selzer didn't just publish her memoir as fiction by pointing to the current craze for the "true story" evidenced not simply by the canonization of the memoir as the literary genre du jour but by the proliferation/success, on one side of the culture gap, of reality television and the gossip press anointing successive bad-girl saints of the hour, and on the other side, of Michael Moore's opus and This American Life. It certainly would have been a lot harder for Selzer to publish this book as fiction, although clearly multiple alternative routes were available to her, from the Adrian Nicole Leblanc style reportage of Random Family to the Dave Eggers' fictional biography style of What is the What? Still, I do believe the publishing industry deserves some scrutinizing for this one.

And yet the author in this memoir scandal warrants, I believe, almost more scrutiny than James Frey. And this is because of the attitude behind this comment: "For whatever reason...I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to...I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. Maybe it’s an ego thing — I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.” Instead of working to provide a forum for the voices of those who really could use it, Selzer took the money and the acclaim and appointed herself spokesmodel for a group of people about whom she seems to have had very circumscribed contact. Clearly, in order to create this public of a persona without thinking she would be recognized, Ms. Selzer must have erected some kind of elaborate delusion/denial framework. Yet it seems like a shockingly blatant example of cultural appropriation at its worst, and I suppose it's a good thing that it imploded so spectacularly. I only hope the dialogue in the wake of this scandal veers more in the direction of scrutinizing what/whose kinds of stories are getting traction in the publishing world than in the direction of "I could have told you her use of the outdated 'homegirl' gave her away."

i also spent some time in the warm sun

Today I went to my first ever college basketball game. I saw the "Lady Hoosiers" (I find the "Lady" part kind of a questionable prefix) whoop the asses of the Penn State "Lady Lions." No matter how impressive the players were, I persist in being equally impressed by the athletic stunts and sharp claps of cheerleaders (seriously: three level pyramids, multiple midair somersaults culminating in basket drops, coordinated rows of back flips). Bucking recent trends, the Hoosier cheerleaders wore remarkably chaste uniforms, all 50's sweaters and hair ribbons. The band did a cover of "Welcome to the Jungle." I chatted with Tracy about her wedding plans. Abdel clued me in on the reasoning behind some of the fouls - the only team sport I ever played in any kind of organized fashion was soccer. And there were some pretty nice plays on the court too. They even let the little 5'3" player on at the last minute. Also, it was interesting to see what a family sport women's basketball is; I couldn't keep track of how many little tiny girl were thronging to slap the hands of the players. All in all, it was a good way to spend a Sunday afternon.