You can write, but you can’t edit…

I was walking down the street the other day, when my bike had a flat. It’s almost unheard of that I’d make the walk in to work, since the bike ride takes just about 10 minutes. However, at this time of year a morning walk can be really wonderful. There are puddles and sunshine and there’s that good old crisp fall air. In a poetic mood, I drafted this poem in my head:

The trees grow from golden pools
or red skirts dropped to their ankles
in lust last night

And immediately thought of posting it to my faceybook page, where just the night before I had posted:

The late night laundry/agitates in the basement/soap in a dark tub

and

warm from the dryer/knits, delicates, and denim/so many colors

As I believe I’ve mentioned before, I generally believe that the poetry that I write mostly in my head doesn’t do so well once it’s written down, and even those verses that translate to physicality fairly well don’t always last for me. Almost as soon as I had written the little tree ditty down, I realized that what sounded lovely in my mind was really trite/derivative/uninteresting. Nice to think, but not so necessary to share. (I do realize the irony here.)

On that line of thought, and what with walking into work, where all I do all day is edit, I pondered for a moment the fact that much of our communication these days is unedited. I imagine that was always the case – kind of like buildings that were designed by architects, communiques that were edited must only make up a small portion of documents, and an even smaller portion of all communication. Kind of interesting to just ponder for a moment all the communication in the world. But, I digress. While this has always been the case, now we proudly share these mostly unedited thoughts in a public and fairly long-term manner. I don’t wish to make this another post about the problems of our modern world, but I couldn’t help but thinking that editing is sorely missing from our world. I am excited and interested by our vast new opportunities for self expression – I’m here, aren’t I – but I wonder what we loose when we don’t review, rewrite, and on occasion, censor ourselves. In particular, what are the political implications to this manner of comporting ourselves?

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On a different note, I’ve failed recently. I intended to write something wonderful for Blog Action Day, and to participate in 350.org’s giant day of climate action. In fact, I begged off the first one and casually ignored the second to go watch a Ducks game. If I’m not taking climate action, who is?

I have succeeded, on the other hand, in enjoying life a good bit more than I was before. I’m sewing and making other projects. I am cooking delicious food, going out with friends, reading books, and actually finishing my portfolio. I’m trying to capture the lovely sunny moments before it all goes grey for months on end.

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A final note on two recent Harper’s articles: this month’s Notebook and September’s article “Dehumanized.”

In this month’s notebook, entitled “The Cold we Caused,” Steven Stoll returns to the theme Mark Slouka wrote about in September. Stoll sums up Slouka’s position quite well, despite the fact that he’s applying his criticism to climate change rather than what happens “When math and science rule the school.” Stoll says, “By confirming the human role in climate change, and by declaring a warming world injurious to the public good, the EPA has swung a club against perhaps the grandest capitalist conceit of the twentieth century: that society forms part of the economy, not the other way around.”

On reading Dehumanized, I was certainly convinced by Slouka’s statement that we cannot forever argue for the humanities based on an economic basis, but that we must be able to find other values useful in our society. Slouka’s call for a return to the civic, the political, and the societal concern struck me as important, but difficult to undertake, as any paradigm shift is. Yet while reading Stoll’s article reinforced Slouka’s position, it also made me consider that this argument seems particularly applicable while our economy is in shambles. I wonder to what extent the downfall of the economy influenced this perspective, or revealed this truth, and to what extent that same downfall might allow us to approach these seemingly intractable problems in a different way. Could there be some sort of progress on these matters?

Mail Room

There’s a rumor going around that Eugene is going to lose a post office.  Not just any post office, but the one I go to, University Station.

No big deal, right?  There are other POs in town, even quite nearby.  In fact, I now live closer to the main station than to University Station.  No one is going to be prevented from sending and receiving their mail, in no small part because, as Obama recently reminded us, there are many private companies now willing to take part in that transaction who are “doing just fine.”  Yep, “it’s the post office that’s always having problems.”

Be that as it may, I would be greatly saddened if University Station is closed.  Fundamentally, I think that every university should have a mail room.  In fact, it surprised me to find that the University of Oregon had a post office, not a mail room, when I arrived, but I guess there’s a matter of scale that makes the mail room at Oberlin viable, and that at Oregon a post office (Though perhaps the problem lies somewhere in that inequality).

The mail room of a university or college serves its students tirelessly, providing a stable address for those orbiting campus.  It is a place for paying first bills.  It’s where really good things happen when you’ve been away from home for a while – a care package arrives, or just a postcard, when you thought you had been forgotten.  It’s a portal to a place far away.

Amongst the little cubbies or up at the window, you have the sense of really being in a physical place.  You see the postman heft a box of letters dropped into the slot for the 1:45 pick up.  You’ve written on paper with pen, folded that paper, tucked it into an envelope, and licked the envelope closed.  Now you lean against the counter with the envelope in hand and ask for stamps.  You look in the folder proffered – you select from the objects at hand.  You’ll drop your letter in the empty box, they’ll wheel it out with the 5:30 mail.

Perhaps it’s a relic of things past, but I think that’s why it’s so valuable.  There’s no scrolling through options, imagining the shapes and sizes and weights of things.  Here, things are measured, they’re displayed in their corporeality.  Keys are turned and doors are opened, objects are filed and sorted.  That’s not to deny the electronic scale or scanner, but it is to say thanks for the man behind the counter, wearing his blue ringer polo shirt, affixing that label to that package.

I think students need to have a place so connected to objects, since many times they’re living a life so overstuffed with ideas.  They need a place that is neutral in the way that government places are; where freedom of speech is practiced in a dramatically different way than in their classrooms.  They are lucky to have a place devoted to their physical connection with those far away, and a place that so effortlessly combines responsibility and spontaneity.  When all of that is at the heart of campus, it becomes an important place for chance meetings or reality checks amongst the craze of finals; when it’s that convenient it doesn’t take away time from studying or socializing.

Against the realities of the federal budget, my fondness for and belief in the importance of University Station will probably weigh naught.  Yet, for that foreign student, or for the man in the blue polo, I’m hoping that my thoughts are worth more than their weight.

a thought or two or three

I’m almost done with this term of school, and moving in to the final stretch of my Masters.  Pretty amazing.

I just read Tim Eagan’s Typing Without a Clue and thought of all of the writers I knew at Oberlin, “trying to say one thing well and true.”  I wonder who will buy a book by Joe the Plumber, and what it says about our culture that his book can be published as a money maker.  To me, if you want to write something for other people to read, you write a blog.  If you have literary ability, if you write about something greater than your opinion and you write about it well, then you write a book.  I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Eagan that we should reward the latter with the cultural status of publication, and I appreciate his suggestion that merit should have everything to do with that decision.

I’m getting ready for Christmas – I just had a good idea for a present, and I’m thinking about my wish list soon.  I’ll hope to update it in the next few days.  I’m also going to look for a dress for Tina’s wedding, which is exciting!

portfolio of my dreams

I am making a portfolio for getting a job this summer. I started out with great difficulty, and I now have eight pages that I’m very happy with, but that I just realized won’t print the way I expected them too. No worries, should be able to work around that easily, but it’s kind of poopy.

It’s always exciting to hit the print button on something like this, even when you know it’s just the black and white rough. This semester has been so heavy, it’s really come down to moments like this – hitting the print button at 1:24 in the morning to see the draft of the thing that you want to have looking beautiful by Wednesday at 12:00 – that I’ve had to learn to savor.

Making a portfolio is lovely in a way, because you get to reexamine your work and cast it in a new and different light. What did you want to say with that project, what were you learning? So far, this portfolio is about fabrication, concept, system, and observation. I’d love verbs, but I think I’m okay with these nouns. Looking at my projects with these nouns, I’m seeing new patterns emerge – for one, my delight in pattern that I never would have said that I possessed – I think it’s the joy of something orderly yet a little off-kilter.  I see the desire to make something exciting happen in section and the attention to detail that means something quite different than I always thought it did.

Attention to detail is now a mode of thinking about construction – carefully choreographing how materials dance around each other. Where will they kiss, where will they float past, where will they collide, where will they nestle? I always thought attention to detail was in the way one would precisely staple one’s paper; I never thought I possessed it (which, looking back, I’ve always been fairly precise with my stapler, at least when I thought it counted). I’m sure now that I do have it, in droves.

So, will the square format 11×11 set of plates get me a job? I never thought I’d make a square format portfolio, so I hope it doesn’t reflect poorly on me, as I thought it might (for no apparent reason, other than thinking that it maybe says you’re a square). I hope so – I’m going in with the recognition that it’s a work in progress.

I’ll let you take a peek.

Facebooked

I finally gave up and joined Facebook.

I’ve been holding out for years, but since the people that I see every day in studio kept asking me, I could no longer ignore it. I’ll admit, it’s a lot of fun, and it reminds me of just how many people I’ve met in my life.

Talking to a friend recently about all of the relationship upsets that we’ve heard about this term, I couldn’t help but muse that the proliferation of people that we’ve met in our lives makes steady relationships much more difficult for our generation. We know a lot of wonderful people – we also know a lot of people that can’t live up to our composite of all of the wonderful people that we’ve met. We’re moving around all the time, which makes it difficult for us to comprehend being set in one relationship with one person (even if that doesn’t necessarily mean in one place, it implies it).

So, just musing on the fact that I’ve taken a small step away from being here. I’m also, now, being everywhere, with everybody, at least until I get tired of it.

BTW, Studio is pretty intense, in part because everyone else is kind of freaking out about what a short time we have left. I’m just slogging along, continuing to design. Haven’t decided what media I’ll use, but I’m imagining I’ll be hand drawing, perhaps in pencil (I’d like to use some color, so I’m not sure that I won’t switch to ink; but I did some more tone rendered drawings earlier in the semester, and I really liked the way they looked).

No matter the intensity of studio, I’m planning to take Thursday off and relax with friends.

Here’s an image from this summer - it’s the drawing Michael and I did of the smoke sauna in Kiljava.