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.

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.

*This thing about touching the ceiling of one’s cage stuck with me, maybe, because it reminded me of a thing I just read about in Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice. In it Schwartz mentions another book, called Choosing the Right Pond, by an economist named Robert Frank; the thesis of that book is that people feel happy and good about themselves when they’re doing well in comparison with whatever they consider to be their “reference group”—be that American fanzine writers, or dentists in Berlin, or whatever—and that therefore the trick to being happy is to choose an appropriate reference group, a ‘pond’ that’s not so big or fancy that you’ll never be able to be a ‘big fish’ within it. And while I’m slightly saddened by the implication that happiness is all about feeling like you’re doing better than someone else who’s doing worse, I don’t think I have to go out on too much of a limb to draw out what I get from this theory, and like, which is the idea that happiness is about finding a context in which you can inhabit an identity (‘I’m a bookstore owner!’ ‘I write a fanzine!’) that you like and that other people in your reference group are there to reinforce. Which brings us back to the lion and, a much better example, the bookstore: If the cage is community, or context, then yes, it seems right to me that happiness (if not always pleasure) is largely to be had inside.

(Image: QuirkyNYC)

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

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.

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.

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.

Thanksgiving in Fauquier County, at my parents’ place. Anna came down from New York. The turkey was smoked on the Weber. I made a terrific pecan pie, if I say so myself. The secret ingredient is orange zest. The recipe I used is here (“Old-Fashioned Pecan Pie,” Gourmet, 2009). Don’t bother with another pecan pie recipe, ever. For crust, I used the 2007 holiday pie crust recipe from Cook’s Illustrated. The one with vodka in it. It’s supposed to keep the crust tender, something about gluten. It creates a dough that’s probably wetter and mooshier than pie crust doughs you’ve known before. I will make it again, but this time I’ll know that 45 minutes in the refrigerator isn’t nearly long enough. I’d recommend cooling overnight before you try to roll it out. (Smitten Kitchen recaps the crust recipe.)

I found this video to instruct me on how to make orange zest. I find the guy in the video incredibly soothing, like to the point where I may go back and watch it again for a pick-me-up sometime when I’m feeling jangled.

There were eight people at Thanksgiving dinner, and conversation, of course, turned to food. I know it’s not just our family, and not just that Thanksgiving is a food-centric holiday: I can’t escape noticing that food seems to have become the default topic of conversation among most of the Americans I mingle with. It’s the thing you can always talk about—to the point where I actually wonder what people used to discuss at social gatherings before it was all about the wine, the cheese, where the meat came from, the merits of different olive oils, the nutritional density of kale. My mother thinks that people used to talk about politics more, an observation that releases from the station a somewhat saddening train of thought. Has politics, over the last ten to fifteen, become too depressing for people to at civilized gatherings to discuss? Certainly people who disagree about politics in this country can’t have a rational conversation about it anymore, and people who do agree just manage to make each other feel so upset that bringing up politics in a group can almost be a party-ruining faux pas. I like talking about food as much as the next girl, but this situation makes me uneasy, with its overtones of the late Roman empire.

But what can you do? We talked about food. I told a story about doing my Thanksgiving grocery shopping at Whole Foods. “Excuse me,” I had said to a store employee I found in the sweeteners aisle. “You probably don’t get asked this a lot, but do you sell corn syrup?” She looked at me like I was a Satanist. “We have brown rice syrup,” she said. So after Whole Foods, I had to go to the Food Lion to get some Karo for the pie. In order to prevent anyone else’s having to go through this ordeal, Anna and I are thinking about starting an artisinal corn syrup company. We’re going to call the product Maize Sirop. Not sure about a slogan yet, but we’re thinking something like “Handmade in Brooklyn, by pretty ladies in jeans.” Alison pointed out after dinner that Brooklyn has become the national locus of cultural mockery in this decade, the way that Manhattan was that locus during the ’80s. We can’t imagine why!

Seriously though, it’s interesting to think about this locus-of-mockery thing. It reminds me of a short article I once read, in Vanity Fair or something. It was by a guy who decided for the purposes of his column to try high-fashion dressing for a week. He borrowed one of those super expensive suits with the short, ankle revealing pants that were fashionable among dapper suit guys at the time. Writing about the experience, he observed that fashion, real high fashion, always involves a quotient of “fuck you” from the wearer to the viewer, a kind of purposeful in-your-face-ness that goes a step beyond any notion of simply looking good. I’ve since observed many times that that’s true when it comes to fashion. “Daring” is aggressive. And I wonder whether there’s something similar to be said for deliberate lifestyles, such as the artisinal-everything-obsessed one that’s the current locus of m.? I guess I’m trying to ask: is this mode of living, which is associated with Brooklyn and is often mocked, not simply annoying by accident, but annoying, to some degree, on purpose? Maybe lifestyle simply is fashion, so all the same rules apply.

Enough of that.

This was supposed to be a letter, right?

I’m staying in the home of the sister and her husband, in their spare room. It is, among other things, the first time I’ve ever lived in the same house with a dog. I never thought of myself as a dog person—really the opposite—but I’m surprised how much I’m enjoying the company of their Doberman/German Shepherd mix. I still don’t know much about dogs, but world, take notice: I am officially removing my name from the knee-jerk dog-disliker list.

Recent cultural inputs have been decidedly lightweight. I’ve been like a hermit crab, reading things that I pick up from my environment. I page-turnered my way through a trashy novel about a White House staffer whose girlfriend has an affair with the president, and enjoyed it immensely despite or even because of its crappitude. I read Jonathan Ames’s Wake Up, Sir, which is higher-quality, and hilarious, but still a fast read. Music-wise, I’ve been driving around in the car a lot lately, which means more radio. The only songs I seem to want to listen to are songs about being in the club, and/or songs with Auto-Tune. Luckily I’ve located a whole station that specializes in them! TV-wise, Andrew is into the show Sons of Anarchy, but for me it hasn’t taken, yet.

I decided, though, that my serious cultural project for the winter is going to be boning up on the history of hip-hop, because I have a 15 to 20-year lacuna going on. A lacuna on its way to becoming an abyss. Yeah, I had “Straight Outta Compton” on a mix, and I know at least some of the words to “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” and I grin every time I hear the line “win the Superbowl and drive off in a Hyundai,” but my overall knowledge of the musical form that has more or less become synonymous with “popular music” is pitiful at best. Maybe Andrew’s purchase of the Yale Anthology of Rap is what inspired me. Anyway, Andrew and Alison and Anna all put in some time over T-giving weekend helping to devise me a syllabus. Here’s what it’s looking like right now:

Public Enemy – It Takes A Nation Of Millions; Fear of a Black Planet
NWA – Straight Outta Compton
Dr. Dre – The Chronic
Snoop Dogg – Doggystyle
Kanye West – The College Dropout, Late Registration
Eric B + Rakim – Paid In Full
De La Soul – 3 Feet Hight + Rising
Jurassic 5 – Quality Control
Jay Z – The Blueprint, The Black Album
50 Cent – Get Rich Or Die Tryin’
Li’l Wayne – Tha Carter III
Missy Elliott – Supa Dupa Fly
Black Star – Mos Def + Talib Kweli are Black Star
Wu – Tang Clan – Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)
Dr. Octagon – Dr. Octagonecologyst
Ghostface Killah – Fishscale
Warren G – Regulate
Nas
Dungeon Family – the origin of Cee-Lo Green?
Tupac – ?
Deltron 3030
“More Money, More Problems” – the one song is deemed all the Puffy I need
Rum-DMC – “Xmas in Hollis” & “My Adidas”
MC Lyte
Blackalicious – Blazing Arrow
Cypress Hill
EPMD
Big Pun
KRS-One
Common

I think that’s about everything for now. More Charlottesville thoughts later, maybe. I just had my beloved Canon SD-1000 repaired, so perhaps I’ll be taking some pictures. Tonight there’s apparently some kind of light show at UVA, to demarcate holiday time at Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village (the first time I heard that phrase, I thought it was a joke, but it’s not, it’s the historical name).

Photos from bsbarnowl, WayTru, Jukie Bot, Jukie Bot, and Jukie Bot, on Flickr.

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.

+ The ‘sprouted couch‘ that graced the cover of issue 6 might be the most iconic ReadyMade project ever. At least, people who are wracking their brains about whether or not they’re familiar with the magazine sometimes produce an ‘aha’ moment in which they say, “Oh, that was the magazine with the grass couch!”

+ There have been a lot of cool home features in RM, but this one about a group of kids who bought and converted a public building in Anacortes, Washington, was especially far-out. The related project is also great (keep your hands away from those whirring blades, tho).

+ Personally, I have a weakness for most of the more heavy-duty, furniture-type projects that have graced the magazine’s pages, even if I’ve never built any of them. The whole “Inner Space” series from Issue 8 was remarkable. Industrial-strength dresser? Yes.

+ Okay, maybe Edgar Blazona’s Modular Dwelling is the best-known ReadyMade project of all time. Paper plans have been out of print for years, but now for the first time they are available online. You can build one in your backyard…and if you live in a perfect climate, you might get some use out of it!

+ Box-spring wine bottle storage, by my pal Jason Wachtelhausen, who I met for the first time, years later, in real life, having no idea he was a RM alum.

+ To be honest, I often used to skip the long features in ReadyMade, but now I’m glad that they existed. This first-person article about leaving San Francisco to live and remodel in a tiny town in Texas probably speaks to a widely shared ReadyMade reader fantasy.

+ When I have windows to dress, I may want to dress them with these curtains.

+ Creating built-in shelves by doing surgery on your walls?

I’m looking for people who have taken antidepressants during their teens or twenties and are willing to share their stories. (Everyone who makes it into the book will be anonymous.) I’m interested in all kinds of experiences: long, short, positive, negative, mixed.

If you’ve got a story to tell, I’d be so grateful if you would drop me a line by email with the basics—your name, your age, a few lines about you. We can take it from there. I am happy to share a little more about the book if you like, too.

Please feel free to forward this link far and wide. Thank you!

One of the projects that I liked enough to want to attempt myself someday was the black pipe furniture that Mike Perry and his office-mates built for their new workspace in the Monti building in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

(Building A Desk from Michael Perry on Vimeo.)

In a cheaply ironic fashion, my year of covering the DIY world left me with little time to make things on my own. But I’m changing gears now, getting ready to shove off on an almost year-long writing and research project—and getting back into the swing of working in my own space, too.

In the course of rearranging home to make room for this mental project, I finally took on a physical one: I designed and built my own desk from ¾-inch black plumbing pipe and a section of Ikea Numerar countertop (solid oak version).

Part of the inspiration was the need for a desk that would fit into an odd space that was constrained by a radiator. Done!

In the final tally, it took five trips to hardware and plumbing stores, one trek to Ikea, ample opportunities to remember how ridiculously heavy solid oak is, several anxious moments with a wrench, and more money than I would have guessed in the beginning, but this is it. It’s done. It’s sturdy. I love it. And I’m already planning design updates. (Made the center bar too high. It could have been an ideal footrest.)