Katherine Sharpe | a pilgrim’s blogress

I’d been here since Monday, but it was Friday night in some room in the Gray Center that Reed College started to crystallize for me again.

On the West Coast, I remembered, rock music had just made sense.

It had been a few months since I’d gone to a live show. And I’d almost forgotten that I spent a few years of nights off watching bands play, in weirdly lit rooms on campus, at moderate volumes. Forgot that I’d felt connected to them, that the exchange had often seemed almost spiritual. Forgot that I’d used to love rock and roll so much that just thinking about could make me feel like I was going to choke.

Walking around tonight on the Gray Center/S.U. porch, I remembered some things about Reed.

About how, outside of class, milling around in the rain while trying to look cool was the essence of what we did.

A life of damp porches and concrete redoubts.

How it was always slightly cold, how nobody ever dressed sexy. How it was a weird way to live, maybe, but it was our way.

How I’ve complained before about Reed’s one-track academic mind, its surprising lack of respect for creativity. And yet, at 1am in the student union, in the midst of a Talking Heads/Tom Tom Club/glo-stick dance party, it was impossible to deny that this place had regularly supplied one with moments of transcendence. And still did.

How I loved those days when they were happening. How I think that must be the most important thing.

Pix: Love Butt in the Gray Center, 6/10/11; S.U. dance party.

Dorky confession: Every time I think of something I will do when I finish writing this book, I add it to a ‘note’ I’ve got going on my iPhone.

Most of the things I’ve missed this year are humble. I miss reading things that aren’t related to my topic. Oppressive lockdown from fiction! l miss being able to hang out with people without the nagging sense that my project is waiting in the next room, tapping its impatient foot. Most of all, I miss the feeling of having an empty space in my mind where the passing spore of some new interest could catch and grow.

That’s all going to change soon. There is lots still to be done but the biggest deadline is so close now I think I can almost see past it, into the world of petty pleasures that I need to believe awaits…

Things I’ll Do When I Finish Writing This Book

1. Start a real writer’s notebook, per Joan Didion
2. Read A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
3. Sleep unrestrainedly
4. Get your new dress altered
5. Train up to running 10 miles
6. Get one of those horrible foam noodles and actually do the I.T. band thing
7. Perform a headstand, sans wall
8. Buy new glasses
9. Go see a movie in a movie theater
10. Cook!
11. Read Freedom
12. Obtain new music
13. Read Infinite Jest
14. Read the King James Bible
15. Reunite with old friends
16. Figure out how to use post-1999 gym equipment
17. Buy proper inside-the-ear headphones so you stop drenching your beloved Sennheisers while working out
18. Fall asleep w/o thinking about the progression of your chapters
19. Spend time doing nothing
20. Start paying attention to the news again
21. Enjoy summer in New York
22. Enjoy summer in California
23. Enjoy summer anyplace else you can get to
24. Blog more

Photo/Flickr

On Friday night, I attended a reading by Al Burian at Book Thug Nation in Williamsburg. Burian is touring in support of his new zine, the long-awaited Burn Collector #15.

It was a good time. The tiny space filled to standing room only. Anna and I got seats, near a standing guy whose leather motorcycle jacket squeaked loudly when he shifted his weight. And while I’d have been more than happy for a chance to see Al Burian, whose personal essay-type stylings inspired me back when I first lived in New York, not so many blocks from the little book-lined room where the reading was, during my own transition into grown-up life and my still fondly remembered forays into personal blog writing—while I’d have been happy just for a chance to see him in the flesh and hear him read a couple pieces from the new zine, he smashed expectations and put on a real show, speaking extemporaneously to the full room about topics like happiness, freedom, toothache, the Unabomber, Berlin, rock and roll, regret…happiness being the refrain, the thread that tied it all together. He’s showmanly and funny, self-deprecating yet intense.

Favorite moment (I didn’t take any notes, so I hope I’m getting this right): he was talking about Aristotle’s concept of happiness, which is more about ethics than hedonics. Does happiness = maxing out on pleasure, or is it something more total and complex—maybe even something that takes place on a time horizon that the pursuit of mere pleasure can hardly conceive of? (Great Burn Collector 15 quote: “for Aristotle, life is pass/fail.”) From there he got to talking about our Jeffersonian rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and wondering about the relationship among them. The social compacts that make up what we call civilization extend life, but may curtail liberty. And where does happiness fit in, relative to either? Does happiness belong to the lion who lives hard & dies young on the savanna, or the one who lives to a ripe old age, performing for circus crowds and caged to the last?

Here he stopped, and gestured around the room, at the bookshelves that lined the walls from floor to ceiling, at the hand-lettered signs and the simple cashier’s desk. He’d stumbled on a plausible, even convincing example of the premise he was trying out, that happiness is a result of accepting and excelling in and dominating, fully inhabiting one’s cage, rather than making yourself sick wondering what’s outside it and how you might get there. I’m not sure I agree with this, and I have a feeling that Burian’s still trying it on for size, too, but the moment I liked so much was when he invited us to look at the room and said, “I mean, this bookstore is a cage for Aaron and the other people who work here. But maybe happiness for them is touching the ceiling of this cage. Maybe happiness is looking at this shelf”—he directed our group gaze to a pair of tall plywood shelves on casters, which I’d seen being cumbersomely rolled out of the middle of the room earlier to make space for the audience—”and knowing about it, and how heavy it is, and saying, god, this bookshelf sucks!”

Happiness is building a cage to your own specifications and then living in it, abiding by its annoyances, even delighting in them, because they’re your annoyances. Discuss amongst yourselves.*

Burian is touring with Aaron Lake Smith, who writes the zine Big Hands, and started the evening out by reading an enjoyable short story (highlight: the bit about a middle-school boy in North Carolina who convinces his parents to redecorate his room so that it looks like a New York City apartment á la Taxi Driver and similar films). Big Hands and Burn Collector are both available from Microcosm, the terrific indie press and distro that also used to distribute 400 Words, way back when.

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I’m excited to have my first piece in Scientific American Mind. “Hyper One Day, Gone The Next: Changes in ADHD,” which touches on the work of scientists at Columbia studying the persistence of the ADHD phenotype from year to year in the same individuals, can be found in the March issue. The researchers studied a sample of over 1,000 kids for several years and found that in many of the children, ADD symptoms appeared to be more transient than often believed.

(Online, there’s a ‘Get the rest of the article’ link, but what you see is the whole article.)

I think it was Slavoj Žižek who wrote once that no product ever lives up to its fantasmatic promise.* I remember reading that a few years ago and thinking “Yes! That is so right! Well observed, Slavoj Žižek, and well said.”

A little while later, though, I found myself thinking about the pleasure that beloved objects sometimes bring, and making a mental amendment to this nostrum: no product ever lives up to its fantasmatic promise except that every once in a while, a product exceeds its fantasmatic promise, smashes right on through to the other side and becomes more useful and more dear than you would have ever thought possible.

During and after the late-winter New York City blizzard of ’10, it pleases me to report, my winter gift-to-self—the L.L. Bean Signature Bean Boot, Women’s (Size 8)—became the latest product to instantiate for me this rare but wonderful potential of commodities. Thanks L.L. for the shoes, and thanks Slavoj for the means to grasp and express the rare completeness my consumer satisfaction.

*I guess it was in The Puppet and the Dwarf.

Alison found a gem in the New York Times obituary for Elaine Kaufman, owner of Elaine’s restaurant in New York:

After an argument with her, Norman Mailer vowed never to return and wrote her an unflattering letter. She scribbled “Boring” across the top and sent it back to him. A day or two later, he was back.

I have nothing against Norman Mailer, but I think that now I revere Elaine.

Earlier this week I sent off two chapter drafts, and since then I’ve been taking a little elusive ‘me-time.’

Actually, I was supposed to get back to work this morning, but I’ve been feeling an itch lately to blog. I don’t know why. Is it an itch to remember how to write something that is more casual and conversational than an article or a book chapter? A wish for a minute or two away from My Topic? Whatever it is, I’m going to go with it. The freelance life has its detractions, and I may as well compensate by taking advantage of the biggest benefit (which is sometimes also a detraction)—there being no one to look over my shoulder when I goof off.

I’ve been in Charlottesville for three weeks, meaning that I’m halfway through what I had decided would be a Jane Austen-esque length of time to visit. Although, perhaps sadly(!), I didn’t come here to chase around soldiers from the Napoleonic Wars. I came here to work on the book, far away from the vast/vulgar/meretricious distractions of the city where I usually live.

So here’s the halftime report.

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Happy December! We all have a month of office holiday parties, etc., to look forward to before starting to think about New Year’s, but in case you’re already eager to put 2010 to bed, I do have a little “How Did You Get That F&%*ing Awesome Job” interview with Lori Raimondo of the Times Square Alliance, who helps to produce the world’s best-known New Year’s Eve extravaganza, in the current issue of ReadyMade.

The rest of the issue has more pre-holiday appropriate fare, including the inevitable gift guide (except, where are the prices? Perhaps they’re in the print magazine, which I haven’t opened yet?) Online, I discovered and enjoyed this slideshow of variations on the pipe shelving unit. Is there nothing that can’t be built with plumbing pipe? I went over to my brother-in-law’s sister’s house the other day—she and her husband are both architects—and noticed that the suspended open shelving in her kitchen is made of galvanized plumbing pipe, and looks picture-perfect. And I am still quite happy with my desk.

I’ve also been slowly adding stories and projects from ReadyMade‘s ten-year archive to the website. It’s fun to return to the early issues, especially when I notice the names of people who wrote for ReadyMade in the early 2000s and have gone on to publish widely elsewhere (shout-outs to Jacob Ward, Ethan Watters—whose new book about the exportation of American concepts of mental illness to the rest of the world is near the top of my to-read stack at the moment—and Lisa Selin Davis, among others). It’s also been fun to re-stumble across items that I loved the first time around. Here’s a sampling of personal favorites.

COMPLETELY SUBJECTIVE HIGHLIGHTS FROM READYMADES 1 THROUGH 15:

+ the Meat Cart Bed from issue 1 was aspirational for me, circa my last year in college—a symbol of the bohemian NorCal loft life that I wanted to track down and make my own.

+ I still want to make a Sweater Blanket someday

+ This short story of sorts, to my knowledge the only fiction that RM ever published, still read as sweetly as I remembered it. (Who’s MJ Deery, and where is she now?!)

+ Speaking of the loft life, I liked and like this place from issue 2. It’s stunning, but the furnishings truly don’t look expensive. I imagine it gets chilly and drafty in there on cold San Francisco nights, but I guess that’s why we have design magazines. I still covet the sub-flooring coffee table.

+ I’ve been fascinated by the Rural Studio in Alabama ever since reading about it in RM 4.

+ Still cute: the Scrabble bulletin board.

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