I Can See Your Tracks

This is the quintessential adolescent summer album. The first time I heard it, I was in the car with my parents, driving on Highway 24 from Lawrence, Kansas to Platte County, Missouri. I'd bought a copy at Love Garden when I was seventeen and my lovely parents were willing to listen to it with me on the drive home. It's remained one of my favorite albums, and I encourage you to listen to it only if you specifically enjoy softly energetic, folk-influenced, contemporary pop music.

While I love to reminisce, I should cut this short, for fear of becoming too sentimental or missing my train into Boston--I'm going to Spectacle Island today to read and spend time with my dear friend Adeline. Until later, dear reader!

- "I Can See Your Tracks" by Laura Veirs, from July Flame (2010)

The Sad White Birch (and Paramecium Pond)

This tree fell during Hurricane Sandy my first year. In typical Wellesley fashion, there was a funeral with music and poetry readings. The rest of the photos are of Paramecium Pond, the birch's quiet resting place.

And yes, I acknowledge that this tree is an inanimate object and was never sentient. I just think it's pretty.

Good night, sweet prince

Trying

On Photography

In case you were wondering, renting a dunk tank is substantially cheaper than renting a light-up dance floor.

Rental prices aside, I do feel like I'm learning a lot in my job. And if you know anyone who wants to hire me to write things like meeting agendas or poems about corn, please don't hesitate to send them my way. I'm a little serious.

Anyhow, today is Friday, which means cat-sitting and potentially napping after I renew my library books. I've been reading a lot of stuff for my thesis, which is empowering because I feel really smart and accomplished, but also challenging: I'm in the middle of Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others and just finished her article "On Photography," which makes me question (though only slightly) my aims in taking photos.

In the piece, Sontag argues that all photography is an act of exploitation and voyeurism, and that taking a photo is a way to passively control and encourage a series of events. Her main focus is seems to be war photography, and how great photographers like Robert Capa and Warner Bischof committed morally questionable acts by choosing to photograph conflict rather than intervening. She also makes the claim that photography is also dishonest as a form because it contends to be absolute truth, when in reality it's only a subjective glance from a human perspective. Furthermore, each viewer imposes her own meaning on any visual she sees, regardless of the photographer's intentions or the situational context of the photograph itself.

While I think she has some valuable points, I do think that the idea of photography as objective is problematic on a social level and is not inherent to photography as a form. People are the ones who put labels like "objective" on pieces, and the form cannot be entirely blamed for how it's perceived by a mass audience. It's crucial that photojournalism exists: it's a way of making the "news" (however you choose to define it) relatable and human. When one sees a tangible visual from a war halfway around the world, for instance, it's a little harder for that person to ignore or mindlessly support the war. Those visuals urge the viewer to contemplate, from a moral viewpoint, the situations captured on film (or digitally). Consider the Vietnam War, and how its public support drastically shifted as images poured into television sets in living rooms across the U.S. People couldn't hide from it any longer, and began to voice their concerns with what was seen as unjust and misplaced violence and conflict.

Then again, I wasn't born until twenty-one years after the U.S. withdrew its forces, so I'm probably not the foremost authority on public opinion of the Vietnam War.

One of Horst Faas's images from the Vietnam War (December 1965)

España (Buenos Recuerdos)

Here are some shots, fired from a Minolta Freedom K Focus-Free camera. They were all taken in late January, using Lomography 400 film.

Salamanca

On the bus

Madrid

Toledo and the Tagus River

Burking

Last night, I got locked out of my room, so while I was waiting for someone to come unlock my door, I began reading the only book I could find: Webster's World College Dictionary, Fifth Edition. The most memorable entry I found was on the verb "burke," which means "to murder by suffocating so as to leave the body unmarked and fit to be sold for dissection."

This intrigued me a lot, so I looked again, this time in the O.E.D., which gave a bit more context: "To murder, in the same manner or for the same purpose as Burke did; to kill secretly by suffocation or strangulation, or for the purpose of selling the victim's body for dissection."

As it turns out, burking comes from the acts of William Burke, who was a serial murderer in Scotland in 1828. Together with another man named William Hare, Burke would kill people and sell the corpses for dissection to Dr. Robert Knox.:

Hare, the more evil of the two men, suggested a further stroke of business, namely, to inveigle unknown and obscure wayfarers into the lodging-house and then kill them. During the following months they, assisted by their wives, murdered at least fifteen persons, their method of proceeding being to invite the victims into various homes, make them drunk, and then suffocate them in such a manner that no signs of violence appeared on the bodies. The corpses of all these were sold to Dr. Knox’s school of anatomy for prices averging from 8 shillings to 14 shillings.

-From the Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 07, by George Clement Boase

Knox claimed that he knew nothing of the Willies' crimes, but most people think he was full of hooey. Regardless, the men all gained notoriety, and Burke's name became a part of common English usage before and after his execution in 1829. Hare evaded sentencing and, though no one truly knows what became of him, it seems likely that he hid and waited out his days for fear of recognition and public harassment.

Dapper lads (Burke and Hare, respectively)

I wonder if people will ever begin using other serial killers' names as verbs. I could really see "Gacy-ing" catching on for the act of masquerading as a scary clown...

Swell

I shot my first black-and-white roll recently, after receiving lots of advice to practice with it. It's more difficult, I think, but the challenge is fun.

This is Wellesley.

Thanks for all the laughs, Jewett walkway.

Lost in Córdoba

Somewhere near San Lorenzo, early March.

Full Circle

A year ago today, my dad and sister and I set out from our house in Platte County, Missouri to drive across the Western half of the continental U.S. We wanted to see, to explore, and to visit our other siblings (and niece and nephews!) in California. I won't recount the entire journey, because it's already preserved on this here blog, but a year's distance has given me a clearer perspective about that trip, and how lucky I've been to have the experiences I've had in the last twelve months.

The world is such a big place. As I get ready for my senior year of college, that knowledge is seldom lost on me. But I can't help but feel wildly excited to leave, if only for the chance to continue exploring. I can barely wait to see what's in store.

An admittedly "enhanced" view of Wyoming

Five O'Clock World

This is how I feel about Wednesdays.

Maybe I'll spend my lunch break napping by the lake.

-"Five O'Clock World" by The Vogues, from the album Five O'Clock World (1966)

A Midwestern Summer

So James Tate was a poet who died last Wednesday. I don't really know where to start this post, but that concrete fact seemed as good as anyplace. He was born in Kansas City and did the whole college thing--including a stint at the Iowa Writers' Workshop--before eventually becoming a professor at UMass Amherst in 1971, where he stayed until his death.

Tate and Gordon Cairnie, one of the founders of The Grolier,
as captured by Elsa Dorfman in 1965

His writing has been strangely present around me since then. I hadn't read a single Tate poem until last week, when my dad e-mailed me his obituary. The next day, I went to a poetry reading by Nick Flynn at the MFA. Flynn, whose work I admire quite a bit, was one of Tate's students back in the day, so he read a poem that he'd worked on with him.

Not that any of this holds special meaning or significance. I'm aware that it doesn't, and that I have an extreme inclination to over-interpreting symbolism. But the connections were there, and I am a sucker for both poetry and Kansas Citians.

Here is a poem by Tate. Some of its imagery reminds me of simple hot summers in Platte County, where we'd go near the river to swim and to put pennies on the railroad tracks. With nothing better to do, thinking we knew everything, we'd sit and wait for freight trains to come by and blow loud wind, impossibly close, in our hair and ears.

"Success Comes to Cow Creek"

I sit on the tracks,
a hundred feet from
earth, fifty from the
water. Gerald is
inching toward me
as grim, slow, and
determined as a
season, because he
has no trade and wants
none. It’s been nine months
since I last listened
to his fate, but I
know what he will say:
he’s the fire hydrant
of the underdog.

When he reaches my
point above the creek,
he sits down without
salutation, and
spits profoundly out
past the edge, and peeks
for meaning in the
ripple it brings. He
scowls. He speaks: when you
walk down any street
you see nothing but
coagulations
of shit and vomit,
and I’m sick of it.
I suggest suicide;
he prefers murder,
and spits again for
the sake of all the
great devout losers.

A conductor’s horn
concerto breaks the
air, and we, two doomed
pennies on the track,
shove off and somersault
like anesthetized
fleas, ruffling the
ideal locomotive
poised on the water
with our light, dry bodies.
Gerald shouts
terrifically as
he sails downstream like
a young man with a
destination. I
swim toward shore as
fast as my boots will
allow; as always,
neglecting to drown.

-From The Lost Pilot (1961) 

(Side note: The weekend was, in short: marimba music, cameras, cleaning, and sweet old dogs. Mondays are killer, but I'm trying this new self-imposed bedtime thing. Maybe I'll finally establish some semblance of routine.)

Thanks for reading this, dear friend.

Dark Matter

I just found this clip in which the GZA raps about space in a classroom, because he thinks that maybe kids will respond to music. I personally find the notion crazy--why on Earth would a bored kid unchallenged by her education feel moved by hip-hop? Sarcasm aside, I think the idea is creative and overdue and likely to be effective. If I ever have kids, they will most certainly be listening to science raps on a regular basis.

The album Dark Matter, which inspired this clip, is due out in the fall of 2015. Until then, he's touring American universities to discuss the relationship between art and science, as well as working with New York City public schools to revamp education through the use of music.

Things in New York

And here is my weekend, in visuals.

Fireworks from Gramercy Park (or something like that; my NYC geography isn't tops)

Forever a tourist, sometimes with a bad lens

Out on the Weekend

This is my favorite holiday song.

I'm spending the weekend away from technology in New York, so until next week. Happy birthday, America!

- "Independence Day" by Elliott Smith, from XO (1998)