Relocation

Image.

I've decided to give Tumblr a try. See me over there for a bit; I may be back here later.

Qball

Image via rlr77

Provo is a marvelous place to be in the summer, or it was in 1996, anyway. There was no traffic, and because of the wonky way landlords collect rent based on the school season, it was much cheaper to live in the summer. Rent was collected per person in the apartment, not per unit, so it was not uncommon to have 6 people per apartment, which is how I lived for a couple of years at the Reeg. But in the summer, fewer students = your own room for 4 months. So Michelee and I lived in 1996 with two other girls, one of whom had a boyfriend named Butch, fought with them over the thermostat, wrote bad (me) and good (Michelee) poetry that we faxed back and forth to each other at our respective Carol's Copy Centers (me in Orem, she in Provo), and hung out with cute boys, sometimes at a squeaky clean pool hall on 5th West called QBall. (Not that often, though, because it was like $6 and that was a fortune.)

I'm a pretty terrible pool player, but the actual playing wasn't really the thing that was awesome. I wrote a poem about it which I will never share, because college English major summer poetry is best hidden away forever, but it was about how annoying my name is, the point at which people in my life make the transition to Lis, and how at Qball one time, that was monumental. (Except not.) Michelee had a crush on a boy who played jazz trombone, whom we called "the boy," and I really wish I still had the poem she wrote about him, on shiny roll fax paper, because I want to go back, relive it all again.

3 Sixty 5

I joined a group of 75 strangers shooting and posting one photo per day for 365 days over on Flickr. I think it will prove to be daunting round about day 158, but in the meantime, it's been really fun. That's my day 1 photo.

Handwriting

Go here and download lots of handwriting fonts for free, some terrible (like that one: Pea Summer Sweetness), some pretty cool.

(Thanks to Zoe for the link.)

That gleam in your eyes

Everyone thinks their family's kids are the cutest and funniest, whether their own birthed children or nieces and nephews. But seriously, I believe I can say without prejudice that my niece KG has a terrific habit that she's sure to lose soon enough, so thank goodness for video and the internet to preserve it.

In preparation, you'll want to refresh yourself with this little bit of Sleeping Beauty:



In June, visiting Neck, JG, and the kids, I took Baby Bubba outside on the patio to rock him to sleep because it was 72 degrees with a breeze and that, combined with the sounds of Fountain Valley traffic, really seemed to calm him. KG joined us with her swaddled baby and sang a little lullaby. (I'm sorry to say that I appear, quite unshowered after lots of time in airplanes and the bed, and with a silent laughing maniac smile.)



Sleeping Beauty herself would fit right in to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir circa-1982 with that deluxe vibrato, but she stays pretty well within her range. We can't quite figure KG's interpretative three-octave jump, but then who am I to deny her artistic license?

West Virginia, mountain mama

Back in March we drove to Detroit (can I get a Go Heels?) and wound around the West Virginia mountains, through two tunnels and Charleston, along the rivers for awhile. It was cold, and snowed off and on, which frankly made the whole scene that much more alluring. Like most states with a reputation, I imagine there are a great many tax dollars at work to make that stretch, anyway, attractive and non-hillbilly, to play against the type with which the whole state is saddled. I'm a sucker for a good bridge, and cities and towns along rivers. I like to imagine earlier times when coal was king, when the towns bloomed on the water in the shadow of industry.

Montgomery

Richwood

South Charleston

On a whim, I went there this weekend to revisit that curiosity. I stayed in the Marriott in downtown Charleston, which was strangely cheaper than Holiday Inn Express, even. I'm a real dork when it comes to how much I love hotels. I still remember the first hotel I ever stayed in: the Handlery in Union Square in San Francisco. I was 13 and I had an acid-washed purse and pink jeans that I wore proudly, heaven help me. It's an old hotel, and was being remodeled. The whole family was there, which means a lot of little kids, but the only reason we stayed there was that our friends the Leisters were there for business and we were together. I'm sure it was nothing short of a nightmare to haul 5 kids and their junk through a lobby under construction, to pay for parking in the deck, and endure the eccentricities (Donnie's worst nightmares) of a small, old, downtown hotel in 1989. But I didn't care, because I felt so urban and cool, sitting in the wide windowsill listening to the jazz coming from the club across the street until late at night, and the ever-present honking. I loved it. Had it been just our family, we would have stayed in some 2-star Best Western in Alameda for sure, as we always did. We have stayed in some seriously terrible motels on family trips, which is understandable; we required two rooms minimum and we were definitely on a budget. I'm clearly trying to make up for feeling deprived of hotels.

Cynical in tone and apostrophe abuse

There's an element of this hobby that is quite self-indulgent, I think. I really like the freedom of being alone and choosing the schedule based on light and where the road takes me. My goal is to approach these places with an appropriate balance of voyeurism and appreciation for the "other," but even that is potentially problematic, because I never want to be judgmental or superior (unless there's bad grammar; then all bets are off). And there's a risk that by looking at people and businesses and towns from this perspective -- the search for aesthetic -- I can oversimplify their lives and experience. Ideally, the search for beautiful and interesting things -- and translating them into the correct aperture, shutter speed, and composition -- is inspired by a purely artistic instinct and an attempt to present something in a new way, not that I feel entirely up to the pressure of creating pure art. I haven't yet worked out to what extent I feel okay about my invasion of their space with the proper balance of all these goals. I sense that if I did this in California, for example, I would feel more or less evened out, but beyond that I start to question my permission to be there.

I do think there is a safe zone, though, and that is nature. Really talented photographers with serious equipment and an intense obsession with light can make nature photography, and by extension the subject, new and appealing to even serious bums. I had a lovely drive to the southwestern edge of the Monongahela National Forest, which is just levels of the green transcendent beauty that is the entire state. I started a hike to the Cranberry River but since there wasn't a soul around and my survival skills are nil, I decided the 10 miles to the river might not be the smartest choice. Nonetheless, the 45 minutes I spent in the forest were very good in the way that 69 degrees, fresh air, and copious ferns always are.

More photos (+coal) on Flickr.

Dog

So I find myself in primary physical custody of this pit bull, Indy, for going on six months now:

He is primarily a PIA but sometimes I really like him, which is confusing. I am lately a disciple of Cesar Milan and often in the course of his shows on NatGeo he says, "A family without a dog is incomplete." To which I say: No Way, but then I don't come from dog-loving people. My mom likes them; I think there might have been a dog named Rusty in her past life but don't quote me on that, and she isn't scared and will generally pet most dogs. She says, "Hey, fella," something I daresay she picked up from Grandpa T. I hear his voice in my head when she says it, and that is a happy moment of childhood dog relations, mixed in with all the holy terror and screaming. My dad is, I think, tolerant-ish. He could take them or leave them; his family never had one, as far as I know. I don't know if dog ownership is common in Germany like it is in America, but they emigrated not long after World War II, and they had bigger fish to fry once they arrived.

We had other pets: hamsters (gag), which escaped a lot and ran around the drop ceiling in the basement, help us all, and one my dad accidentally kicked down the stairs to his or her death. We also had a couple of bunnies (gross), and some cats, two of whom, Panther and Sophie, we inherited. Panther came with the Fresno house, and he was more like a barn cat who ruined window screens to be let in to the garage to sleep and poop (why we had a litter box when he spent his days roaming around, I'll never know. I fully ascribe to the controversial cat-owning theory that the world is your litter box), and I know my dad, anyway, generally ignored him until he got old and started peeing in the air intake of his car. It will show you how much I really cared about Panther when I say I can't even remember if he was put down or died of old age.

But don't judge! I've kind of reformed from my ambivalent upbringing. I like animals more or less, more if they don't smell too terrible and are Waco:

less if they are golden retrievers with really disgusting ear problems. I'm terribly fond of our barn cats, particularly old fatty Rooster.

(What I really like is posting pictures of Boozie.)

I've drained a few cat abscesses in my day, and that's grosser than cleaning up three barfs worth of sickness in the back seat from the dog. And the joy they bring you is supposed to make up for all that, I suppose, but I'm still working on that particular emotion. What I have is light fondness, and a weird and surprising loyalty that manifested itself when someone whom I judged wanted Indy for his pitbullness responded to my "Free to a Good Home" flier at the BP and had their child call me at 10 pm. I said no way, or rather I made Robbie do it.

But he's so hyper, this is the main problem. He's never bit any humans around here, and heaven only knows what the first couple years of his life were like before he found his way to the Ranch, but among his jumping, spastic behaviors is this super annoying need to have his mouth on you, licking, nipping (in an attitude of love, the dog groomer swears) but I prefer to not be anywhere near the business end of that strong jaw, and I mostly don't want someone else to get freaked out by it. When I first checked out Cesar's tips for training, I fancied myself a good student of his method, because it's primarily based on the idea that a dog is a dog, not a person, and to treat him like one goes against his nature and instinct and leads to confusion and bad behavior. I'm saying, you would never see me kissing any dogs on the lips, right, so I decide I have the correct amount of detachment to run with this idea of becoming his pack leader and making him submissive to me.

Which is all well and good, but it is hard. Cesar takes this pit bull named Daddy to a bunch of his house calls on the show, and I get inspired/devastated by watching his incredibly calm, obedient nature. Indy has made some serious improvements, especially on walks, where he has stopped pulling and stays at my side, and he will sit and wait for me to give him permission to eat his food. Last night when I fed him it was late and dark and I didn't have time to do a calming walk or blue squeaky bone chasing activity, so I just ditched it all and fed him, and he was an absolute basket case, the opposite of everything I had been trying to teach him. So tonight I took him for a long walk, thought I had tired him out enough to get him to walk calmly beside me without the leash, and instead he took off like a lunatic. I cannot for the life of me teach him to come when called, so he ran around the pasture with the horse mamas and babies a couple times and got nearly to Nick Adams's property line before he listened to his better angels, I guess, and noticed that I was calling him in my happiest, most excited voice for five minutes straight to get himself back to me stat.

I love the small victories, but I feel like I carry around a big SmarteCarte full of dog-fearing, dog-hating baggage that never quite gets me over the hump to the patience and love he really deserves. So, despite my fondness and tenuous attachment, I still want him to find a home with someone who will.

In the meantime, I am pit bull pack leader, and don't you forget it.

Road Trip Days 3 & 4: Antiques and the Confederacy

A few years ago, wandering around Savannah with my friend Sydney, we happened up on the now-closed gallery of Jack Leigh, a marvelous photographer who has passed away. He is most famous for his shot of this statue from the Savannah cemetary, immortalized on the cover of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The woman who ran the gallery told us that they had to move the statue because people would, like, picnic on it, and of course it was someone's grave marker. Anyway, Jack Leigh is marvelous, became a photographer idol that day. She suggested we buy The Land I'm Bound To to choose what prints we would like to buy. I bought the book, and one day I would love to own this one photo of a room, bed, mirror. Maybe one day when I have a spare 1000 gs.

That photo above is my attempt to channel the wonder that is Jack Leigh. I don't believe I came anywhere close, but I do like the idea of playing with light and dof in the way he mastered. The room at the Sheraton downtown Chattanooga was such a contrast to America's Best Inn, I considered canceling the rest of the journey and staying put right there. Instead, I wandered around Chattanooga in the rain, had brunch at the Blue Plate

and rode a free electric shuttle back to the Sheraton, where I reluctantly checked out. Chattanooga, despite the Riverfront area which is quite revitalized with the right kind of things to bring families (childrens' museum, aquarium, the shuttle), suffers from the same problem of so many cities of its size and vintage - empty large buildings and a semi-depressed downtown. I try to imagine what these cities must have been like in their heyday, and I wonder things about how important it is to preserve a downtown when the exodus to the suburbs all but makes its necessity obsolete but for select occassions like weddings at the hotels, and visits to the more flashy and pristine Riverfront. There were a handful of indie bookstores, though, which I heartily support.

Good things were in my future: Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, which is just like you'd expect, and someone will sell you this saggy offensive bikini:

and antiques, of course . . . so many antiques. From there to Mt. Airy, the way is lousy with antiques stores and flea markets, along with great piles of rusty crap outside falling-down buildings. I got to wondering about why we love old things, especially rusty old signs, chipping paint, semi-broken furniture. I believe that, among other reasons, we like things with interesting textures and colors, we like anthropomorphizing the object and imagining how many people before us have been involved with it, and we like things which are the predecessor for new, shinier things we can buy at Wal-Mart. We like the idea that a Coke cooler was once an interesting and unique object that was manufactured in the USA by our grandpa's friend, taken on a picnic with Coke bottles and potato salad inside, and that it has lasted who knows how many years languishing in someone's barn until it was rescued by the proprieter of Treasure Potts in Fancy Gap to be sold at an arbitrarly high price to a Yankee on his way to the beach.

I feel that way about old buildings, especially, which is why I am tempted to take photos of every bit of chipping paint and rusty metal I can see.



Also, I am pretty sure I found Mater


and I love Mountain Dew, but seriously


Once the roads turned NC shoddy bumpy and the end was near, I passed the Star Lite Motel in Mt. Airy

and whammo, I was taken back to a summer between 4th and 5th grade when I went on a little nature expedition of some kind in Middle Utah called Summer Science, on a school bus with Mr. Shaw. When he announced we would be stopping at the Starlite Motel for a bathroom break, the veterans started snickering knowingly, as you do when you're 10 and you know the secret an extra year teaches you. Turns out it was a grove of juniper trees, pick one for your private moment, and join us back on the bus. It's so weird, it's hard to believe I'm remembering it accurately, but I don't have a fact-checker I can remember. Was Shannan there? It seems likely, as we were inseparable. I must say that, despite the cool retro sign, the Star Lite might not have been much of an improvement over a juniper in the desert.

The rest of the photos on Flickr and FB.

Road Trip Days 1 & 2: A study in extremes

Outside Cabarrus County Convention Center, Hwy 49

I recently watched Pride & Prejudice with the director's commentary turned on, and the running idea is the quest for perfect shooting light. It's sort of vital in a movie like that, because it's all about making you fall in love with England along with Mr. Darcy, and illuminating your actors' faces at the swelling romantic moments. I think the film is quite successful, but I take his point about being obsessed with natural light. Since taking up my new hobby, I am also a little obsessed. I planned this weekend for good lighting; the weather is not cooperating and it is mostly overcast and rainy, so it's hard not to feel like I'm missing every fantastic shot.

It has, nonetheless, been a nice two days of roadtripping so far. Yesterday I took a long route to Athens after work, via 64 & 49 to avoid traffic and see what the waning evening light had to offer.

Junkyard near Badin Lake, NC

It's hard to take good photos at junkyards, I think, especially from behind a fence. There are so many interesting objects but they blend together and muddle the background. The front row of cars is incredibly rusty and waiting for someone to make them come back to life.

Also there was lumber.


When I got to Athens, I learned that what $32 per night buys you is not the funky and retro Bulldog Inn . . .

(fun with Crosshatch filter)

. . . but something else altogether - the kind of place where people end up with their heads bashed in by the lamp on Law & Order. The less said about America's Best Inn the better; I was awakened all night by mysterious noises from left and right. I left gray Athens early without fully appreciating its certain myriad charms just to wipe that night away and get on the road to Milledgeville, where Flannery O'Connor spent her last, lupus-filled days.

It was her most prolific time, writing-wise, even as her health declined. With her mother and her birds for company, she wrote for 3 hours each morning in parlor at Andalusia, a room that also contained her bed and bookcases.

Today, the preservation society lets the house sag a little, lets the paint chip, and the plaster crack, and they've preserved a lot of the furniture, the kitchen sink, a collection of her childhood books.

Unlike Flannery, I lack the prose to say how much I loved being there, imagining her walking slowly with her crutches, tending to the four dozen peacocks wandering around the farm. I went to her grave after; there was a little burst of rain that subsided as I drove to the cemetery. Her plot is unassuming, and she's buried next to her parents. Each of her family's stones has that symbol at the top: IHS, which evokes their devout Catholicism. It stands for the first three letters of Christ's name in Greek, meaning something like "in this sign you will conquer."

Someone had left a note on a hastily torn-out planner page under a rock on her stone. I was nosy and opened it up but the rain had long-since washed away the ink. I suspect that whatever they wrote wouldn't have adequately expressed what they meant. Admiration and respect for someone long gone are difficult to say out loud.

More photos on Flickr & Facebook.

Me and my buddy

I have a new friend. His name is Nikon D60, and though he is low-end, in terms of DigiSLRs, he is quite satisfactory. I'm just kind of sick of myself so instead, if you feel like it, you can look at the photos I've been taking around this wonderful state of mine. That one above is my favorite, taken on Franklin Street.

I always liked the word alluvial

Dogey went to Fresdoggy-dogg recently and saw some remodeling to our old house. We are all depressive sentimentalists, so to make it more sad for us all I'm posting this low-budget video I shot during the last Christmas at 1441 W. Alluvial. It will undoubtedly only be 5:29-worth of interest to my family and maybe my BFF Erin, but here it will live for when anyone wants a good cry.

This is the Christmas where Trav spent most of the time on the phone with Delta looking for his luggage. I didn't pick up a thing; it's in a state that Marge would probably object to having filmed, but it's accurate. The house is good, but honestly the best part is little Buddy and the raccoon potholder. There's a great moment where I'm walking down the hall and Pops turns off the light. He is famous for that. Jessie has highlights. Owie's a little baby. There's some random Christmas music blasting, and someone is always doing dishes - that night, it was Heff. Marge & Pops' bathtub looks especially grotesque in bad video. And Trav is not actually, you know, on the pot.


Fresno House from Alisa Muelleck on Vimeo.

Short Story: "My Widow"

There is a big overlap in friends, blog readers, and book club, so many people I know will have read this one already, but it's . . . oh my. T.C. Boyle is a weird dude & really great writer, with an amazingly prolific body of work, full of diverse characters and places. "My Widow" was the most horrifying story about animals in the house I'd ever read, until he topped himself with "Thirteen Hundred Rats" in 2007, and then . . . well, I have a personal problem there, so "My Widow" remains high in terms of the visceral, if one step lower in the terror department.

I like this story for the same kinds of reasons I love Flannery O'Connor: there is a mastery of using the grotesque for its own inherent power, and not for shock value. Done badly, the grotesque is inserted to cheaply stun rather than be the means of moving the story and slowly building the sense of place and character, which this story accomplishes in spades. There is no escaping the widow's house once you've joined her there.

It is always impressive when writers do an unconventional narrator well and without pretension (for the opposite, see: The Lovely Bones); Boyle here uses a dead husband, watching his beloved widow from heaven or thereabouts. She is very old, has dementia, lives in a house going to ruin, and is surrounded by dozens of cats. The narration is loving and tender, not without a few wry jabs now and then, though they are filled with fondness and sympathy for her loneliness and advancing helplessness. The story is structured into sections with cryptic titles, and reads like a series of observations, which works well from a dead narrator who seems old himself. I don't sense that he is omniscient as much as able to observe her actions, and when he tells us what she's thinking, the sense is that he knows it not because he is dead, but because he was her husband. It helps the story stay far away from the supernatural or the maudlin, which is why the structure works so well at establishing the horrifying sights and smells of the widow's cavelike existence. Though it isn't chronological, the list structure still contains a definite passage of time, a closing-in of cats and decay, a building sense of dread and sadness.

"My Widow" also seems to be unavailable anywhere Google can find it, so you can either locate the February 12, 2001 issue of The New Yorker, read it in Boyle's After the Plague, or ask me in the comments and I'll send you a .pdf toute de suite. If that all seems like much too much hassle, let me tempt you with the opening paragraph:

"My widow likes cats. No one knows exactly how many cats inhabit the big solid old redwood house I left her, but after several generations of inbreeding and depositing fecal matter in select corners and in an ever-growing mound on the mantlepiece their numbers must reach into the thirties, perhaps even the forties. There are cats draped like bunting over every horizontal surface in the house, and when they mew in concert for their cat chow and their tins of mashed fish heads, the noise is enough to wake the dead, if you'll pardon the expression."

It's hard

When you sneak in the office for a rare late-night nap out of the cold and there's just so little room in the fat cat inn.

New things

My new Room & Board Metro sleeper is now appropriately accessorized, with gorgeous new pillows in Michael Miller Ginger Tile in Caribe & Anna Maria Horner Volumes in Rose made by my sister Bean, and soon to be joined by this trendy but lovable chair from Target. It will live where you see the sliver of a tan chair on the left. Farewell, purple phase.

Twinkle lights & sunset on the Haw