Shannon Writes...

High Line Park

I get my hair cut at Bumble & Bumble University. It's free, and they take, easily, 2 hours on my hair, so I am willing to put up with the somewhat draconian demands of the place (specifically, you can get your hair cut during the day on Monday. Or Wednesday.). Serendipitiously, the new High Line Park opened within a few weeks ago and an entrance is all of a half-block from B & B U. Since we're talking 10th Avenue and 13th Street, that's quite a coincidence. Anyway, after getting a haircut, I wandered over to the High Line with my new camera to see what it was like.

I liked it! It's an old elevated train track that's being slowly converted into a park. It will run all the way up the side of Manhattan to 34th street, eventually, although it's only to 20th street now. I love that they kept the train tracks in places.

I also love that the flowers are all wild flowers, such as might bloom naturally against abandoned tracks.

The added features, like the cement, um... boards?... are lovely too.

 

There are special nooks and crannies all along the way. I loved the wooden sunchairs, but didn't take any photos. However, this sort of theatre space got my imagination running -- site-specific theatre over 10th Avenue!!

 

This is a beautiful, exciting new space, and I was glad to be there to see it!

Banksy.

I do not know a great deal about visual art. I just know what I like when I see it. I've been following this guy's work for a while, although he is not terribly popular or well-known in the U.S. This video about his exhibit at a museum in England is a great introduction to his work, or, if you already know his graffiti (which is usually illegal, so you don't see his face in this video), a look into what he's doing now. Really worth a look!

School's Out! Now Get to Work!

School's out! This also brings to an end two extraordiary weeks of intense boredom for me, since I spent them at school for full days but without precious much of anything to do. I would pack books to be read and my laptop and my knitting, etc. etc., but by 2 pm every day, my natural rhythm would slow down and I'd be found sitting at my desk, staring off into space, struggling to stay awake. I participated in three meetings over the last two weeks. I consider them the best meetings I had all year, and I am sure this is due to both the subject matter and personalities involved, but also simply because I was so bored, I looked forward to meeting.

Anyway, all that's over now! All the faculty have been let loose into their individual summers, most of us departing in such a way as to exactly explicate our personal style throughout the year. I had hoped certain people would change, but that was not demonstrably true. I guess I could write "Tips on Being A Decent Human Being, Part II." : )

As I try to relax into summer today -- it's difficult, since the year has been so hard, I feel like I keep discovering small little ruptures in the fabric of my emotional health -- I also am aware of how much I have to do. The photo above (doctored with the "Illustration" effect from my new camera! Whoot!) is just the beginning of my To Do list. I have much To Get Done. I am eager to Get To It, though, and that may be the core difference between my writing career and my teaching career. No wonder I am thinking about how to make one superscede the other.

Also, it got hot! Didya notice? : )

Watching. Not watching.

I can’t bring myself to watch Neda die. There are many opportunities, as the video of her horrific death sprawls across the internet in more and more permutations. Whether I go to a newspaper website, or to facebook, or to youtube, I can click on the video of a gunshot ringing out and the 26-year-old Iranian woman collapsing in Tehran on Saturday. I have come upon stills of the video footage, and know I was see a pool of blood spreading across her chest, and, later, how she “appeared to lock eyes with the camera as she died,” according to the New York Times. I have seen countless movies in which people were shot and bled to death, even those rare movies in which young women did so. I have seen dead bodies, and gaping wounds. I raced out of Manhattan on 9/11. Clearly, this would not be my first experience with death captured on film. So why not this death? Because I do not want her death to be the only thing I know about Neda Salehi Agha Soltan. Indeed, just typing out her full name helps. Her first name, alone, Neda, is too intimate for someone I will never know. I want to know ordinary, every day facts about her. The London Times tells me that she was with her music teacher when she died, and I wonder what kind of music she studied. Was she a singer? Did she play the guitar or sitar or piano? I studied the cello for 9 years – could we have talked about classical music? When he spoke to the BBC, articulate despite his grief, I also learned that she had a fiancé. I wonder how they met? What they enjoyed together? What she first liked about him? How quickly he will adjust to life without his martyred fiancée? A website tells me she wanted to be a tour guide. I wonder whether she wanted to give tours in Iran, and whether that’s even possible? Was she proud of her homeland and its treasures? Or did she have another country in mind? In the photos published, she is a beauty, lush hair and warm eyes. Her smile is a bit dreamy, but her gaze direct and kind. There is no burqua, no veil, and I realize that I do not know if that is unusual or common in Iran. I just know that in the one photo I’ve seen, she is wearing a shirt similar to one I own, and it jolts me. These few facts, as random as they might be, help. I want to know who this person is, so that she becomes more than her death. I want to know the ordinariness of this woman, how she was human just like me. How her life had meaning and purpose long before it ended catastrophically. And, of course, I realize – I do not want her to have died. The random cruelty of it is too much to bear. She did nothing to deserve what eyewitnesses said was a clear targeting by Basij paramilitaries. Neda, a perfectly normal young woman, was outraged by the impropriety of a rigged election. She wanted the votes of ordinary people, just like her, to be counted. She protested, which should be quite ordinary, and gave her life for doing so, an extraordinary price to pay. In the end, that is why I cannot watch her death. It feels wrong to watch a stranger’s passing. But I will keep her extraordinary, unsought sacrifice in mind, for it seems that Neda Salehi Agha Soltan was utterly ordinary until she became, in the last minutes of her life, extraordinary. And she reminds me that we ordinary people, like her, must change our broken world.

Yet another beautiful poem.

I really love reading Mason Dixon Knitting. The women who write it, Kay and Ann, are very funny, very warm and really into knitting and quilting. (Their books are excellent too, and one of them is listed to the right). Kay's beloved husband recently passed away, very unexpectedly, and I have been mourning with her and readers of her blog. Today she posted a poem by ee cummings, which he wrote about his dad. It's an amazing poem, and I'm happy to direct you to their site to read it today.  

The End is Near.

School ends on Friday. This Friday. I thought this day would never come.

If you work a regular job, the kind that lasts all the livelong year, you probably have very little sympathy for what I am about to say, but it's my blog and I'll say what I like: I really thought that this year was never going to end. It has been a long, hard year, with lots and lots and lots of heartbreak. I cannot even list all of the sad, upsetting, heartbreaking things that have happened this year, but it's been a doozy. Any year that begins with your grandmother dying is not probably going to go well. A few of these heartbreaks have been the relentless kind too -- having to daily deal with the same disappointment, unchanging, stangnant and sad. Every day. Yuck.

And worst of all, I find myself really struggling right now -- working very hard to stay connected to the people I love (or the people I need, or who need me), and not just sort of slip away into a grim grayness.

So far, though, I have managed to do it. This is not a recipe for avoiding depression -- I know that many people who suffer from it would gladly do anything to get out of it -- but perhaps it is a recipe for dealing with a big dark cloud looming over one's head. I told my friend Rachel one time when she was struggling that sometimes we have to be our own parent, and step in to take care of things. This is what I am doing now. I am listening carefully to what I want and feeding that want if it sounds ok (yes to French fries, yes to visiting with Roo for an extra hour, no to buying more books when I have 50 unread books here, no to drunk texting - or it's equivalent for me, tired texting). I have been working out, even when I do not especially want to (I only get to listen to my favorite podcasts when I work out). I have been preparing food for myself and eating it slowly. I have sought out others' company. I have given myself permission to cry when I want to cry, be angry when I want to be angry and laugh when I want to laugh. The only thing I am not allowed to do is force my feelings on others. I am writing. I am watching So You Think You Can Dance on TV. I am going to sleep regularly.

And I am waiting for grace. Which may be coming in the form of the formal end to the school year.

Reading.

Yesterday, I did something I haven't done for ages -- I sat and read a book the whole way through. The book was Up the Down Staircase, which I needed to read for my www.visualthesaurus.com article, going up next week. I certainly didn't have to sit and read it in one day, but there wasn't anything else to do. I was at school, I had accomplished my work for the day (nay, for the year), there were no students around, no one on faculty seemed to need my help, and, so, I read. Just kept my nose down and kept going.

Overall, I'm not a big fan of the read-it-through-in-one-big-go technique, because I think you miss a lot that way. But this was my second time through on this novel, and I found whole sections that I had no recollection of, so I'd have to say I read it more carefully, if quickly, this time than I did when I last read it, presumably more slowly.

The last book I read in one complete go was Alice Walker's The Color Purple, about 5 years ago. I had in on the train home from Johnstown back to New York, and I just kept reading. I remember, I would put it down, think about switching to knitting or listening to music, and then I'd just snatch it back up and keep reading. I just wanted to be in that world.

I'm writing a novel now, and that's the feeling I want my readers to have -- of being a part of world that isn't theirs, but, since they are with the narrator, they belong. That's a good goal to keep in mind, actually. I think more writers should think about their readers, and less about what important things they want to say.

"The Impertinence of the Thing"

I read this poem in my morning poem book (A Year in Poetry Edited by Thomas E. Foster and Elizabeth Guthrie, which I adore) and had to post it here, I love it! It's by John Mole.

Past forty, a lyricist

Unsung, prone to self-pity

And troubled by the dead

Weight of every

Line, each further from my best,

I think of young Joyce just

Happening to pass through London

On Yeat's birthday, or

(Was it?) expressly come

To do what must be done

When the time arrives

In all poets' lives

Which was (ie) to make straight

For the Cavendish with W.B.

Sat ensconced in state

Correcting proofs while sipping

Luke-warm jasmine tea

And not expecting anything

At all like this considering

The eminence of already distinguished gris

He might reasonably

Have assumed -- Well, Joyce

(Says Oliver Grogarty) knocked on Yeat's door

And in readiness was

Clearing his thin voice

With bat-eyes narrowing

Behind their lenses when

Yeats, his sight already

None too good either, in that familiar sing-

Song called Come in!

 

Then turned to the young blur

Suddenly framed there

and heard What are are you, sir?

To which I'm forty

He replied, and presumably thought he'd

Appear quite grand, quite mezzo del cammin

To the young fellow who would not come in

But who explained simply

You are too old for me

To help, I bid you goodbye said he

And went, leaving W.B.

(Says Gogarty) amazed by the impertinence

of the thing, but good for Joyce

Say I, sound sense,

And good for the old peacock too

Because there is nothing like a witty

Exchange between the greats

(Bravo Joyce and Yeats!)

To reduce a poet's dull self-pity

To absurdity.

And so, being older

That either was then,

Let me laugh with one

Now the other

And now with both men.

Cooking.

I've been kind of kitchen focused lately. My bedside reading is Nigella Lawson's Feast, for at least the third time. I can see now that her casual, funny style has influenced my non-fiction writing a great deal. I love her matter of fact humor. Also, I've been actually cooking, too, which is not something I always do. I seem to go through periods of take out and assembling (vs. cooking) then cycle back to actually using heat to make food. I just cooked this Summer Vegetable and Chicken Hash, from the new issue of Martha Stewart Living last night. It's really good! I was trying to make something vaguely healthy and vaguely reminiscent of Alice's Teacup's Chicken/Potato Hash, which I had a hankering for. This isn't really that similar, but still good. Also, I must say, it takes not-yet-peak summer vegetables and makes them tastier, no doubt because of the oil and heat. Yum!

I also baked cookies for the kids last night. One of my students requested white chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies for her birthday back in April, so I found a recipe and made them. This has turned out to be possibly the best thing I did for my class all year. They absolutely love them and have demanded them for the last day of school. NOTHING ELSE -- certainly not something easier or less-time consuming to prepare -- was acceptable. I thought I was going to be out tonight (as it turned out, I've had a fever and been languishing away at home all day) so I made them last night. They are delicious. But never, never again in the summer humidity. The things you do for love, right?

In the Midday Kitchen.

I just had lunch. It was pretty simple -- a handful of walnuts (I adhere rigidly to consuming a handful of nuts before all meals at home), a half of a cheese quesadilla with tomatillo sauce, pico de gallo and chips, some watermelon and "ghetto brittle." Perhaps the only thing remarkable about this meal was how much the people I love were with me while I made and ate it. I wore an apron that Kiri made me while preparing the pico de gallo, using a recipe that's based on one her sister, Mara, explained to me a few years ago. I cooked the quesadilla in a pan given to me by Roo, whose brother works in the factory were it was made. The walnuts made me think of the big jars (covered with wax paper, then a lid, for some reason) of walnuts in my mom's "downstairs refridgerator." [My mom used to make gentle fun of Mum-mum's gigantic spare freezer... a freezer that probably held 3x the amount of food her tiny self could possibly consume. But now my mom has her own spare fridge/freezer. I look eagerly forward to the day when I have a spare in my basement!]. The watermelon made me think about sitting on the back porch with my parents and deciding to try watermelon for the first time a few years ago (an impulse that paid off, both in that I loved it and in my dad's wide-eyed expression of wonder that I would suddenly decide to start eating something I'd detested for 20 years). The "ghetto brittle" was a brilliant medley of saltines, butter and chocolate given to me for my birthday, at my demand, by Ryan and Gordon. As I ate, I read an article about San Antonio, which made me think about Justin and Kate, and how much they must miss Arizona at times. They lived there for 2 years. I visited only two times, and I miss it! It also made me think about Magda, who was there about a year ago, to my envy and how we talk about going to Texas together.

It's a quiet late Spring day, and I'm alone and sleepy in my apartment, but I'm not lonely. In fact, I am full.