I'm Sad and I'm Lonely

I've been listening to lots of old folky music recently (I spent most of Saturday reading and listening to Pentangle), and just came across this guy Derroll Adams. He was an American musician who spent most of his life in Antwerp, recording creative music and hanging out with a young Scottish kid named Donovan. Listening to Adams's music now, it's easy to see how much Donovan was influenced by him. But before I digress (which in truth means that I should probably get back to my job), here is a piece of Adams's music for you to enjoy. Or cry about, depending on how temperamental you are.

Oh, and I finally finished Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City on Saturday. The whole thing is written in the second-person, which was mainly why I picked it up. While I give the author major praise for such an ambitious undertaking, I was wholly underwhelmed by the novel's characters, plot development, and quality of writing. It's a hundred times better than any novel I could write, but that still doesn't make it great literature. But, you know what? If you're intrigued, give it a shot. The novel isn't earth-shaking, but it's a quick easy read, and probably a pretty effective reminder of why the eighties weren't so great. Or so I've heard from my elders.

- "I'm Sad and I'm Lonely" by Derroll Adams and Jack Elliott, from Riding in Folkland (1966)

Experimenting

I found a dirt-cheap (and admittedly low-caliber) wide-angle macro lens on Amazon last week, and have been toying around with it recently. It's a lot of fun, and makes me want to take photos of everything, especially because Wellesley and Boston are so darn lovely in the summertime. It's gratifying, too, because even if I don't have time to sit down and write, I can just bring my camera with me and take incidental photos. There's a tiny sense of productivity and accomplishment in that.

Here are a few excerpts from the last three days.

South Station, track two

Sunset over the Pru, the ugliest building in Boston

The South End

Crocodile Tears

Recently I've become interested (probably too much so) in idioms and their historical origins. Call it boredom or listlessness or whatever else strikes your fancy. The point is, language is cool.

Case in point?

The phrase "crocodile tears." It's generally used to refer to a display of emotion that is superficial and inauthentic. But the phrase doesn't seem to have been a popular English-language metaphor until Shakespeare began using it in his plays. Imagine that. Beforehand, the phenomenon had been referred to in a fourteenth-century publication called Curious Creatures in Zoology by Sir John Mandeville (who is his own interesting little mystery of identity). He wrote:

...In that country...be great plenty of cockodrills, that is a manner of a long serpent, as I have said before. And in the night they dwell in the water, and on the day upon the land, in rocks and in caves. And they eat no meat in all the winter, but they lie as in a dream, as do the serpents. These serpents slay men, and they eat them weeping; and when they eat they move the over jaw, and not the nether jaw, and they have no tongue.

You can imagine how the wealthy educated classes might have read this and found it peculiar. So fast-forward to Shakespeare's time, when he's writing all these plays and trying to spice them up with little cultural-/world-references to seem smart and experienced. Needless to say, the masses who saw Shakespeare's works loved them, and took countless linguistic usages from them, including "crocodile tears," which became much more popular in the sixteenth century.

As for the actual biological truth of crying crocodiles, it seems that they occasionally shed tears after eating their prey to shed any excess salt in their systems, but this is a purely physical response. Crocodiles don't actually feel remorse for eating creatures, I don't think.

Finally, just for kicks, here's a political cartoon drawn by Bernhard Gillam, depicting Ulysses S. Grant crying over the persecution of Russian Jews to try and persuade voters to elect him to a third term:

-Taken from Puck Magazine, 1882

Welcome to the Working Week

- "Welcome to the Working Week" by Elvis Costello, from My Aim Is True (1977)

I share this because I'm beginning to learn that this whole nine-to-five business is kind of bullhockey. I love my job, the people in my office are generous and communicative, and I feel like I am doing something meaningful and fulfilling. The difficulty, which I've realized most people live with on a day-to-day basis, is coming home at 5:00 p.m. and being too tired to do anything except sit around and maybe read. Work is tiring, even sedentary office work (not to mention hard manual labor). Maybe eventually, I'll find a really cool job where I can work different hours and not sit in an office all day.

This week, I will try to channel that jaded fatigue into productivity, and will do my darndest to post more here.

Additionally, I saw this really awesome aerial sculpture on the Rose Kennedy Greenway last night. It's called "As If It Were Already Here" and was designed by an American artist named Janet Echelman. Though I took quite a few photos yesterday (I'm trying to take at least one every day), the only photos I have of the sculpture are from my cell phone, and here they are.

As always, thank you for reading this!

No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti

I heard this song covered by live performers at least three times in Spain, during all of which the audience passionately sang along. My lovely host mom Carmen, who explained to me many aspects of Spanish pop culture, said that this was the music her generation loved.

The band who originally recorded this track, Los Ronaldos, formed in Madrid in 1987. The lead singer, Coque Malla, has also embarked on a seemingly successful solo career, and he rerecorded this song by himself in 2009. The title means "I can't live without you," approximately. If somewhat unoriginal thematically, the lyrics are also very impressive. One of my favorite verses is:

Yo me quedo para siempre con mi reina,
Su bandera,
Ya no hay fronteras.

Me dejaré llevar a ningún lugar.

My translation skills are far from apt, and I think the Spanish is so much prettier, but the rough English equivalent is below:

I stay forever with my queen,

her flag,

there are still no borders.

I don't let myself go anywhere.

I rather like Coque Malla's acoustic rearrangement, so here it is for you to experience and enjoy. Fair warning: I'm not entirely sure what's going on in this video, but the music's what really matters, right?

-"No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti" by Coque Malla, from La hora de los gigantes [The Hour of the Giants] (2009); originally released by Los Ronaldos on 4 Canciones [Four Songs] (2007)

Buckroe, After the Season, 1942

I've been encouraging myself to read more poetry recently, so this is a poem by the American poet Virginia Hamilton Adair, who died in 2004 after an unusual career and somewhat doleful life.

"Buckroe, After the Season, 1942"

Past the fourth cloverleaf, by dwindling roads   

At last we came into the unleashed wind;

The Chesapeake rose to meet us at a dead end   

Beyond the carnival wheels and gingerbread.

Forsaken by summer, the wharf. The oil-green waves   

Flung yellow foam and sucked at disheveled sand.   

Small fish stank in the sun, and nervous droves   

Of cloud hastened their shadows over bay and land.

Beyond the NO DUMPING sign in its surf of cans   

And the rotting boat with nettles to the rails,   

The horse dung garlanded with jeweling flies   

And papers blown like a fleet of shipless sails,

We pushed into an overworld of wind and light   

Where sky unfettered ran wild from earth to noon,   

And the tethered heart broke loose and rose like a kite   

From sands that borrowed diamonds from the sun.

We were empty and pure as shells that air-drenched hour,   

Heedless as waves that swell at the shore and fall,   

Pliant as sea-grass, the rapt inheritors

Of a land without memory, where tide erases all.

-Virginia Hamilton Adair, from Ants on the Melon (1996)

Living in a Fishbowl

My first week of summer work has ended, and I'm extremely excited. Being able to help welcome so many new students to Swelles feels really rewarding, especially since my own first-year transition was anything but smooth. I want to emphasize the inevitability of flaws, and to help the newbies see that the perfectionist culture that tends to exist here isn't necessarily healthy or realistic.

One of the warnings I received when I accepted this position, though, was that people would be paying a lot of attention to us. Because my co-coordinator and I are in charge of helping plan orientation from a student perspective, we're supposed to be the faces of the program, in all its favors and flaws. Which means that people will be scrutinizing us. Closely.

I didn't really realize that fully until yesterday, when some anonymous soul posted unfair (and untrue) criticisms of me and my co-coordinator online. The comments were quickly deleted by their author, and now I find them funny more than anything, but I was a little taken aback when I first read them. People seem to feel most comfortable putting other people into neat little boxes and categories as they see fit, oftentimes without considering that an assumption that they make about someone might not necessarily be true.

This is all getting very vague and obtuse, and I promise that one day I'll sit down and write an organized and meaningful post, but I felt a need to be a little indignant for five minutes. This summer has really been fantastic so far, and I'm content and eager to see how it develops. It'll be a wild ride, and I'm ready to see exactly what that entails.

If you've made it this far, thank you!

Here In My Heart

So I just discovered this musician named Elyse Weinberg, and she's really good. She never hit it big, but her music influenced a lot of newer artists, like Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney and Quasi fame. This song is from what is probably her most famous album, Elyse. It was released in 1968, and even features Neil Young on the track "Houses," so if you're into that kind of thing, check it out. Her website is here if you want to learn more.

- "Here In My Heart (Underneath the Spreading Chestnut Tree)" from Elyse by Elyse Weinberg (1968)

A Note on Keurig Cups

During reunion weekend, we drank a lot of coffee. Instead of coming from a drip machine, however, most of our coffee came in single-servings from a giant Keurig machine.

Now, I've never been the biggest fan of Keurig. Maybe that makes me an elitist snob, but it just seems so impractical and wasteful to me. While I was working this weekend, one of my friends mentioned to me that the inventor of Keurig cups has since renounced his creation, and that set me off on a wild Internet-reading adventure.

The short of it:

John Slyvan, one of the original inventors of the Keurig cup back in 1990, envisioned Keurig machines as simple office installations, saying that his coworkers all had different tastes and that no one was willing to pay for coffee: "it was like the Mafia – you had to go around and extract money to pay the coffee guy...it was like my full-time job some days." So Slyvan stepped up his game and decided to create a way for all of his coworkers to get their preferred brew in the morning. So he and his roommate at Colby College, Peter Dragone, got together and began making the violently wasteful and overpriced cups.

Twenty-five years later, Keurig is still going strong. The machines are often sold at a loss with the expectation that the expensive single-serving cups will garner enough revenue to compensate. But Slyvan has since reconsidered his machine, calling it "kind of expensive to use" and saying that "I feel bad sometimes that I ever did it." The cups are neither recyclable nor biodegradable, and the cups are approximately five times more expensive than traditional drip coffee.

Now, I'll probably continue to drink Keurig coffee. As sad an excuse as this is, there are Keurig machines for students and faculty to use in most offices here at Wellesley. Although it would be more environmentally friendly to buy my own coffee, it's easier to pretend it's not an issue and to instead just take the K-cup coffee I get for free. I have no plans to buy a Keurig machine, ever, but I'm not going to turn down free coffee. Maybe I have weak morals, or maybe I'm addicted to caffeine, but it's true. And I acknolwedge that people like me are the reason why there are islands of trash in the ocean.

For now, I'm set in my ways, though maybe I'll cut back on my coffee consumption soon. And I'll certainly think a little harder the next time I make myself that single-serving cup of coffee.

Settled

Reunion weekend has ended, which means that this morning I moved into my new digs for the summer. Being the easily-distracted spirit that I am, I got most of my stuff put away before deciding to start work on a puzzle on the floor, so there are bits and pieces of Grant Wood's American Gothic all over the hardwood next to and underneath my bed. I also went to Savers for the first time today, which is a northeastern-U.S.A. thrift shop with lots of cheap stuff. It was incredibly difficult not to buy everything, but I managed to be moderately adult and buy only the necessities (a skillet, a pan, and other grown-up cookware items).

I could write a big long reflection on how reunion was (fascinating and reassuring to meet alums doing world-moving things with their lives and maintaining their friendships through decades), or how it feels to be back on campus and starting my summer job (surreal and peaceful and full of responsibility in the best way). Instead, I'm feeling lazy--go figure--so I'll conclude things here. My heart is full and happy, and even though it's always hard to say goodbye when leaving a place, I'm content to have the opportunity to perpetually explore and travel. There's a little piece of my heart here in Wellesley, just like there is in Córdoba, and in La Jolla, and in Platte County, and in so many other places, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Galen Stone Tower, November 2014

Number two

Reunited (A Little Lost)

My frenzied life marches on without respite. I'm back at Wellesley, working the alumnae reunion and generally goofing off. It's a lot of fun, but I'm still a little out-of-sorts. The alums are all fascinating, and I'm glad to have an opportunity to interact with them. I even got to meet the big sister of my Wellesley big sister (at Wellesley, during first year, every student receives a "big sibling," whom is an upperclass student interested in being a mentor/friend/good influence on a younger student). The whole thing has filled me with warm fuzzies and a feeling of extreme luck.

But because I haven't taken a lot of photos recently, here is a great little song by Arthur Russell, a wonderful musician who worked with the likes of Phillip Glass and Allen Ginsberg. He died from complications of AIDS in 1992, at which point he was still fairly unrecognized and poor. As is often the case, his music has become exponentially more popular since his death, with lots of re-releases and demos and alternate takes finally seeing the light of day, including this recent one, Corn.

I want you to hear this.

- "A Little Lost" by Arthur Russell, from the posthumous album Another Thought (1994)

Boston

After an insanely short and sleepless stay at home, I'm on my way back to Swelles for the next nine months. It's been a crazy week of car wrecks, old friends, and cute animals. Though I may be exhausted (what else is new?), I'm ready for a new adventure. Bring it on, summer.
 

Lawrence, Kansas