I'm smart enough to know that on the biggest day of my conference, I'm not going to have time to give you a full report, or anything like even a small report. And so, a report on Aberystwyth graffiti.
"Don't take a picture of my television!" said the owner of the chip shop where my flatmates and I stopped so that one of them could buy fried cod for the walk to the wine bar on Tuesday; this television was on the side of his building. "It's a lovely television," I told him. I'd already taken the picture. I was fairly certain he was kidding, though there's often no way to be sure.
I've seen three pairs of these eyes here. One was in town on the way to the wine bar. One was in town on the way home from the wine bar; one of my flatmates noticed it and said, "Hey, another pair of your eyes!" A third pair graces the back of the labyrinthine building that houses the university library and several major departments.
There's a tattoo parlor called West Coast Tattoo. My first response was to laugh. My second was to take a picture. My third was to think, well, yes: we are on the west coast. There's nothing between me and North America right now besides Ireland and a lot of Atlantic.
The rain was so hard this morning that when we came back up the high hill from this seaside town, we were soaked to the skin. This meteorological development was a small disaster, given that we had a free morning in a beautiful place. Even had I carried the camera out for our mid-morning ramble, I wouldn't have wanted to take it out of its case to shoot things like the ruined castle on the beach, or the sad students surveying the shore.
I'm pinning my hopes on Friday afternoon, now. Tonight the sky is almost red, suggesting that tomorrow might be almost good weather. But I will be inside all day, speaking and chairing and asking questions and being convivial, and so it will not matter so much to me if tomorrow's weather is beautiful. Friday is another story.
And in the meantime, more images of what I passed in order to get to where I am.
I am perched near the Atlantic; I am looking toward home.
I paid my £2 for a cappuccino just so that I could sit in that window with the stone arch above it, there at the far end of the bridge, and take some pictures for you.
From the spa to the seaside: the trip took about five hours but was beautiful almost start to finish. I took pictures all along the route, but it would seem that the borrowed computer on which I'm typing isn't going to recognize my memory stick, and so you will have to wait a bit longer to see what things looked like. [Ooo--operator error. Fixed! Ooo, kind of. Internet Explorer: you suck! I will fix this jumble of images later.]
I have about three hours before the next stage of my journey begins, and so I am off to move silently through this strange town, taking more pictures and finally seeing the inside of its Abbey.
One of the peculiar things about Bath is that so much of its city centre was built at roughly the same time (in the eighteenth century) that it has a strangely uniform look: long avenues and terraces of Bath stone, strong and simple lines decorated with grand neoclassical flourishes. For this trip, I've stayed on the top floor of a townhouse in the famous Great Pulteney Street, with a lovely and strange view of the top floors across the way.
Already today we've had sun, cloud, pouring rain, and more sun--weather far more changeable than in Cambridge, a thing I always forget about what it was like to live in the southwest all those years ago.
On the front of the Abbey, angels climb up and down ladders on either side of the west windows. The angels appeared to a bishop in a dream. What a dream it must have been.
Just before dinner here in Bath, I learned that a dear friend of mine--who is also a dear friend of many of you--lost her father this morning. This loss is one of the most difficult I can imagine, even given many months of advance warning and even given the gratitude she feels that the considerable pain of a long illness has now ended. If you know her, then you also know how to reach her. Even if you don't know her, if you believe that sympathy and strength can be transmitted from well-meaning people to those in emotional need, I'll make a rare request of you: please send some strength and peace in the direction of her and her family. She is such an excellent person that we all have a lot to thank him for.
My paper is finished and, though it was five minutes too long on my first run-through, should be all right now, given the amount that I proceeded to trim. It barely seems as though I'm saying anything at all--and yet I'll be talking for twenty minutes.
And now I am being beset by what we might call an intense lack of interest in packing, one that I might appease by simply going to bed. Long ago, I stopped believing in packing-related disasters. For nearly every trip, there's some small group of make-or-break items without which the trip is useless. In this category, for this trip, I'd place: my paper, my train tickets, my medication, and my wallet. Pretty much everything else is icing. Icing on a very tasty cake called going away for a little while. All of my destinations involve water, this time around, which means that I'm a happy woman.
The weather did not look this way today, by the way, which no doubt has something to do with my utter lassitude.
Rarely has a piece of writing come so quickly to me; rarely has swift writing left me feeling as though there's still so much to be figured out: how to make the argument stronger, how to bring the whole thing in under the time limit, how to make my audience as interested in this material as I am. Now it's time to sleep on it--after I eat my little chocolate cake and watch my silly movie.
Today: 1146 words (plus some more that I had to delete, alas).
I'm writing a conference talk about a man I've discussed twice already this year, and many more times than that in the past. I know this work inside out, and I know much more about it now than I did a year ago. And yet, frustratingly, the fact that I know more about it now doesn't mean that my audience this week will know anything about it at all--which means that I'm in the process of trying to sum up a lot of knowledge in a very short time, and with too many illustrations.
But really, can one ever have too many illustrations of a manuscript? Because I keep answering that question in the negative, I keep packing away at this narrative I'm going to tell.
Tonight I ventured back into the dining hall for the first time since my friend left on Monday. I haven't been avoiding the dining hall this week; I just haven't been here. Had I been here, though, I would probably have been avoiding it, simply because I've been thinking that all my dining companions have left. And yet this evening I discovered that that's simply not true.
And so I came back from dinner feeling as though more work was a distinct possibility, and three hours later, I was still at it when the fireworks began. But I was starting to flag, and the show--over beside the river, I think--reminded me that it would be just fine to stop for now, and that in the morning things may be simpler, as they usually are in the morning.
It's easy to forget that it's a holiday if you're not in your own country on Independence Day. But I am turning that way, bit by bit. I don't know whether it's going to feel like home when I get there. In some ways, this place doesn't feel like home either. This particular place, yes. The larger place within which my particular place is situated, no. It seems just possible to me that I have entered a moment in my life where my mind and heart will feel homeless, peculiarly without proper place, for awhile.
How much cultural activity can one person pursue in one day? I took this picture outside the National Theatre today--standing in pretty much the same place from which I'd taken the one I showed you Monday--after I'd done my manuscript research in my favorite library, and after I'd seen Corin Redgrave perform Oscar Wilde's De Profundis (as edited and prepared for the stage by Wilde's grandson). Ninety minutes after I took this picture, I was sitting about fifteen feet away from Guy Maddin, listening to him talk about his filmmaking career--and even a little bit about his new film, which I'll see tomorrow. On the train ride home, I transcribed the four pages of notes I took while he talked.
And then I was back home.
And every single thing I'd done today counted as being on the job, because every single thing was either for an upcoming conference or for an ongoing writing project or for an upcoming course--or some combination of at least two of those things. "Do you get a bit of a lie-in tomorrow morning?" my cab driver asked as we sped through the midnight-empty streets of Cambridge. Oh, do I.
I learned something important in Piccadilly today:
Fortunately, even if there's only one sale, there are still many CCTV cameras. I count three in this picture--and those are only the ones out in plain view. I suppose if you name a company "The Money Corporation"--or, you know, if you're just in charge of any British company or building or streetscape--you spend some time thinking about security.
On sunny days, the sun is high and clear by the time I wake up in the morning. Sometimes, in fact, it wakes me up well before it's time for me to get up--something that has always happened to me when I've been in the United Kingdom during the summer. At 3:30 this afternoon, we were in the midst of our first full-on almost-hot summer day, kissing the lower 80s with not a smidge of humidity. The light was so bright that it seemed to be stripping the air back and cranking up every color, particularly in places like my favorite Fellows Garden. And so, though I began the day feeling hollowed out and a bit forlorn, by late afternoon I was largely back to my regular wide-eyed doings. And by the time I'd done some sunbathing from inside my flat--the late afternoon sun coming in the door was that bright--and by the time I went to the yoga class wherein I held my feet up in utterly unexpected postures, one might say that I felt clarified. I'm still not sure why I'm walking through these little trials by fire--these demon freaks sent to test me, as my beloved Brooklynite once said--but every time I pass another one, it turns out to be a strange relief that it's over.
Tomorrow I'll celebrate by taking in more cultural products and events than even I can quite imagine consuming in one day--from a manuscript to a play to an interview.
Things today went off largely without hitches, until something burst into flame (or smoke, anyway) at King's Cross rail station just as I emerged from the Underground. This bit of drama didn't set my day back--I still got on a good train home--but did make it interesting.
I should have "There's so much more to tell" tattooed onto my body somewhere. It is so true a thing. What a day--just for instance--today was.
Photographs don't seem to be agreeing with Le Bloggeur tonight, so you'll have to wait until tomorrow for even a glimpse of what I saw today: my eyes are so heavy that I can't hold them open much longer. [Tuesday morning: there it is!]
By about this time tomorrow, d.v., I will be on my way back from London. I will be coming back without the friend with whom I will have gone there, the one who has, in some manners of speaking though very much not in others, been here all along. I will find myself all but alone where my little community so recently was.
Today, nearly seven miles of walking: to Grantchester, to Trumpington, to Byron's Pool, through field and fen. He spouted poetry; I took pictures. It was as it has been, since the very beginning.
The more I try not to think about it, the worse it feels. In yoga, the more you try, the more difficult it is. I am in the process of trying to incorporate this wisdom into my daily practice. Let it happen. Let it happen; work through with it. Let it happen, and let it go.
In this dream, I have suddenly and finally decided--without any deciding when it comes right down to it--just to embrace him and be done with it, and to my great surprise, he is thrilled and everything is as lovely as lovely can be. Until someone turns up to give me the paperwork that I will need to figure out a way to complete in order to prove that I am Jewish. She is confident that I will be able to initiate and successfully complete this very necessary process. She is friendly about it, and yet I know that there will be no messing about with this woman, or this process, or this culture. And then I turn out to have a cancer in my left breast, not so far from my heart.
All day I find myself wondering whether I should tell anyone in particular about this dream. It would seem to be an unwise course of action. To my mind, so many things seem to be going unsaid, in these last days, and yet to try to start saying them would be to risk finding that it's only in my own mind that all these shadow conversations and unplayed scenarios happen.
It turns out that the internet will, in fact, be out all weekend, leaving us to lament both our disconnection from the web and the very fact that that disconnect feels so utterly lamentable. Disconnects are lamentable, to be sure. But this one, just as surely, is not.
By the time I arrived home from my day-long excursion to Bury St. Edmunds yesterday, our internet was gone, vanished in the night just as the one-car train that had swifted us home. I went to bed hoping that things would be different by morning, but they weren't.
In this dream, I am flying to Australia--by way of Alaska--and many of my friends are involved. Cambridge friends are there, and non-Cambridge friends. The airports are also train stations, and we have to negotiate strange turnstiles and barriers. Layovers are peculiar. At one point, the plane itself seems to be driving us some distance down a road. When I wake, I remember joking with my seatmate during my first flight home from England, back in 1995, as our plane taxied for an unimaginably long time: "Perhaps we're driving to Newark?" All along in this strange train-plane flight-drive, I am trying to make my way back to the part of the plane reserved for people who want to sleep, rather than to rave all night. Eventually I make it--right about the time my alarm starts going off. In real life, that is.
When I am finally awake, I realize that today I should book a plane ticket home. And so, after lunch, I do it.
Fifteen minutes into the call, as I hold the line and try not to let myself be mesmerized by the strange computerized music loop to which I am repeatedly being subjected--because I feel certain that it's giving me some kind of message I should resist--I wonder just what kinds of calculations the head office is having to do. "Hello?" shouts the British phone agent after my second spell of holding. "Yes, I'm here," I say. "I'm just waiting for the office," he explains. Then he explains some more, or thinks he does: "So I'm waiting for them. And you're waiting for me." "Yes. That's fine," I reply. The computerized music loop begins again: dramatic tones build and build, a bassline kicks in, it suddenly goes quiet, it starts over. Drama: quiet: drama. I imagine their numbers going up and up: let's charge her £500! No, let's charge her £800! No, she'll owe us ONE THOUSAND POUNDS.
"Hello!" Paul the phone agent finally shouts. "All right! It's going to be £306.20." He pauses, as though I'm going to protest. I am relieved enough that I hand over my credit card number, which he has to ring through twice--once for the ticket, once for the ticket change penalty.
And then I am booked to return home, to my places and my people, in just over six weeks. And just as this place started to become real when I started to find out who would be here with me, it starts to become unreal as those people leave, one by one. I will be one of the last hold-outs.
When I read and took notes on an article that I thought was new to me, only to find that I'd actually read it a month ago (though, to be somewhat fair to myself, in a different anthology), I decided that it was an especially good idea to spend the rest of the afternoon in one of my favorite places in Cambridge, taking pictures of its angles and rounds and objects. Unfortunately, the house is only open during the afternoon, making it impossible to spend an entire day just watching the light move through the place. "Is this your last visit?" the woman minding the house's door asked me today. "I hope not," I replied. Kettle's Yard is the kind of place some people fall deeply in love with; I am one of those people; people who love Kettle's Yard find ways to get back there, one way or another.
I have over-compressed my day: in between the discovery of my forgetfulness and my photographing odyssey through Kettle's Yard, there was a lovely interlude of hanging about with my favorite Lexingtonians, the smaller of whom held out her Frog Book so that I could read it to her transatlantically several times.
Tonight, while I'm going through yet another bout of being sick--and can I just say that it would be both a lot more titillating and not a little more terrifying if I were in a position to be thinking, "Two spells of sickness in three days... um... am I...?"; but it would take a true miracle for a Small S to be involved in my having lost my dinner--I'm going to take advantage of someone else's having posted a blog meme. And am I a sell-out of my own blog's attempt at aesthetic principles if I embed some YouTube clips for you? Probably. But remember what Whitman says: I am large. I contain multitudes. (Just not that kind of multitude. I swear that's not why I'm throwing up.)
Ahem.
By the Rules of the Meme, I'm now supposed to tell you the Rules of the Meme, which are that after I've told you the rules, I tell you the seven songs that are shaping my summer.
If I could just follow the rules, things would be easier. But grad school helped me cultivate the part of me that used to provoke the following conversation with my father:
Papa of Someday-Dr. S: Why are you so contradictory? Someday-Dr. S: I'm not!
Which is to say that I apparently need to do this My Own Way. Here, then, are seven songs that have shaped some summer of my life, and that have awesome, awesome videos. Which you can watch right here, thanks to the magic of YouTube. And I do mean magic. This afternoon, I found a video someone has posted that sets scenes from Joe Wright's Pride and Prejudice (2005) to the B-52's "Dance This Mess Around." We may watch that on the first day of one of my fall courses, if it's still up.
Without further ado: songs that kick ass, or have kicked ass, in the summer. Tomorrow, if I've stopped being sick for no apparent reason, I'll actually write something for you. (Ironically, tonight's post was going to be about how yoga leaves me feeling as though my body is all working properly and proudly, something I especially felt when I was able to do a half-lotus and grab my left toe by reaching my left arm around my back.)
(These are in no particular order.)
1) Talking Heads, "Burning Down the House." (Summer shaped: Um, all of them since it came out.)
2) The New Pornographers, "Challengers." (Summer shaped: 2008.)
3) R.E.M., "Driver 8." (Summer shaped: 1989.)
4) Junior Senior, "Can I Get Get Get." (Summer shaped: 2007.)
5) Bananarama, "Cruel Summer." (Summer shaped: well, this one is a cheat, because it never really shaped one of my summers, though it seems to me that it was always in the background--probably because Bananarama kind of always was in the background, and I did love them a lot in 1987. They make it in! Also, hello, New York City!)
6) Sufjan Stevens, "To Be Alone with You." (Summer shaped: 2006.)
7) Kate Bush, "Wuthering Heights." (Summer shaped: 2004. Now, you have to know that I didn't really know Kate Bush's music before that summer, and that I listened to her a lot while I was moving into my house in mid-Ohio. You also have to know that this video might be one of the classics of all times--a video in which so many things are going so wrong that it's wonderful--and that that has even more to do with my putting it in here than anything else.)
8) (Bonus!) Luscious Jackson, "Ladyfingers." (Summer shaped: 1999. "It didn't come easy to me either / from the freezer / to believer / in love / in love." Yeah. There's maybe no song that says it so well for me, now that I listen to it again.)
Oh, there are so many more. How, for instance, you might ask yourself, can there possibly be no Beastie Boys tracks on here? But these should get you started for now. Bless your big technological heart, YouTube.
(A postscript on Wednesday morning: I can't leave the Beastie Boys out. Here's your second bonus, "So What'cha Want," summers 93-94. In 1993, Beavis and Butthead said "GarDEEnya," and my brother and I died laughing. In 1994, I put this track on a mixtape, and my brother and I drove around our Indiana town feeling way cool--probably way cooler than we were. "I got news for your crews: / You'll be suckin' like a leech.")
And if that leaves you wanting more, go visit summer 2004. Good times.
After dinner--but before one of my newer neighbors started cooking something that smells so delicious that I have had to close my window, lest I should start desiring a second meal--I took the camera and strode out to the fields beyond the college, making up for not having had a ramble since Saturday. The temperature continues hovering in the high 50s and low 60s here, and things are fairly quiet out in this little corner of ours. Rabbits heard me crunching along the path and fled as though they were certain I was coming for them. Giant birds waited until the last possible second to take off. The sun was still high, even though it was after 8 when I headed out.
I walked as far as I believe I'm legally allowed to walk (though the farmer whose field is usually gated off would seem to have left his gate open so long that grass has grown up all around it--suggesting that I could probably have claimed ignorance had I wandered down his deep-rutted road and been found out), and then I started back, the lowering sun over my left shoulder. By the time I made it into the field closest to the college--the field from which my friends and I waited for the moon last week--I was walking back into the sunlight itself, and even in the late evening I could feel my shoulders warming. I turned to take yet another picture of the slowly setting sun, and that's when I realized that the whole field of low grass behind me was woven with spider webs, filament after filament laced over the land. And they were all glowing, all a-spark, golden-green and backlit by the sun.
In a sign of something, today I tried packing one box of clothes, just to see how much I could fit in that box that brought my quilts and sweaters to me last fall. As my friends leave, I start thinking about how I'm going to leave--the mechanics, that is, of getting these things out of here and back home. Soon I will be at the post office, packing ridiculously light boxes of books so that they qualify for the printed matter sent-by-sea rates. The only time I really think that something like the Kindle is a good idea is when I need to ship or carry books long distances. (Then again, if they made something like a Kindle that looked even slightly cool, I know myself well enough to know that I'd probably want one.)
Then, looking at someone's Flickr stream of pictures taken from a car on a highway, my brain went haywire, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. White lines, car on right side of line: car passing? Which is the slow lane? If I work hard, I can figure it out: if people pass ("overtake") on the right here, then the slow lane must be the right back at home, and we must pass on the left. But it's been ten months since I've driven a car, and my body has taken over the reverse directions necessary to do things like cross the street or look out the window during cab rides here. It was no problem to drive when I returned home in 1996, but that year I'd been home at Christmas and had driven then. I'm anticipating a set of startles when I return this time: both that my body will immediately know what to do, behind the wheel of the car I've been driving since that last return, and also that I won't be able to believe that it still remembers, when my intellect seems not to--for now anyway.
So go my days: from the sublime to the banal, in barely an hour.
Then there was that one day when, having been guts-being-forcibly-turned-inside-out-and-wrenched-from-my-mouth ill all morning, I spent the whole day dozing in bed, drinking a lot of ginger ale and (once the ginger ale started staying down, because my stomach was finally convinced that whatever toxin was in there had finally been purged) eating a few crackers, and watching Singin' in the Rain and then, for the first time in more than twenty years, Ghostbusters. And that day, partly because the very thought of coffee was utterly nauseating, by the time the sun went down, though still before the sky was even nearly dark, I was tired enough to clock out for the night. And no one minded that I didn't write very much that day--didn't even tell (for instance) the story about the father of one of my best elementary school friends, a man who used some technology or another on his brand new VHS VCR in, oh, 1985 to silence every instance of the word "shit," so that his young son (my little brother's age), could tell you proudly how many times they said the "s-word" in Ghostbusters. In my mother's retelling, it's always the "f-word"; I suspect that she remembers it that way because the very idea that it was better to emphasize a four-letter word than to have your child saying it seems so ridiculous that it would have had to have been a very, very bad four-letter word to prompt such action. But this man's wife once threatened to eject me, then only a nine-year-old Miss S, from a birthday party after I proclaimed that a dumb pop-the-balloon game we were playing sucked. Which, by the way, it did. So, the fact that the gleeful utterances her husband suppressed were only of "shit" isn't that surprising, after all.
Oh, childhood. So many memories come back when I watch the movies with which we were collectively obsessed in the early 1980s. Watch Ghostbusters now and you'll be amazed by three things: how gorgeous Sigourney Weaver was; how every male character lit up a cigarette (and often cracked open a beer) every time there was any pause in his labor; and how they busted all those ghosts without any access to mobile phones.
I'm hoping to manage coffee and toast first thing tomorrow morning.
* * *
A Ghostbusters postscript: Not until this post's comments started coming in did I realize that the title I chose wasn't an obvious allusion to anyone except someone who'd just rewatched Ghostbusters and thus reexperienced its theme song. If you care to follow up, it's at about 2:56 in this video. The video itself--with its celebrity cameos and Times Square dancing at the end--makes me wonder whether Ghostbusters, out in 1984, was the first movie to exploit the music video as marketing strategy. I'm guessing that it's not: it seems as though three and a half years (January 1981 to June 1984) would have been a long time to wait for this particular cross-media phenom to take off. But you can definitely see it happening there in the video.
