Daylight Savings Time, or, It’s Not Dark Yet, But It Soon Will Be

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There is a car that parks behind the bank next to my apartment building that has a strange bumper sticker that says, “It’s not dark yet but it’s getting there.” For months I have assumed that it was a cynical (and therefore accurate) commentary on the environmental mess we are in with climate change, superstorms, sea–level rise and what-have-you. All. The. Problems. (which our overbribed politicians ignore, deny and fail to lead on, of course).

Call me pessimistic, but I don’t see it getting better anytime soon. And it really needs to. But thinking about Daylight Savings Time made me Google the phrase and I discovered that it is actually the tagline for a Bob Dylan song that I have never heard (which is dark and cynical but more about human relationships than environmental disaster, apparently). Here is the final verse:

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I was born here and I’ll die here against my will
I know it looks like I’m movin’ but I’m standin’ still
Every nerve in my body is so naked and numb
I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from
Don’t even hear the murmur of a prayer
It’s not dark yet but it’s gettin’ there.

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In retrospect, I still think I was kind of right.

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Dylan, Bob. “It’s Not Dark Yet But It’s Gettin’ There.”

Psycho Sunday: Badass Women in Combat Gear #10

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So I have been noticing a pattern in my TV/Netflix watching lately: in addition to hot male leading actors and characters who love each other (Firefly, Bones, Agents of SHIELD, Castle), apparently one of my prime choice factors is Badass Women in Combat Gear. So I decided to do a countdown, or rather, a count-up, of my ten favorite BWCGs.

So Number Ten is Erica Cerra, Deputy Jo Lupo from Eureka (2006-2012). The show had an interesting premise: imagine that MIT was actually a secret town in Oregon, and much, much funnier. Then add a handsome and perplexed sheriff to keep people in order. And because of course a handsome white man with police experience who rides into town automatically gets the job of sheriff over the hot Latina deputy who is probably more experienced and right for the job, we also get Colin Ferguson, Sheriff Jack Carter. Now I have to admit that Ferguson is easy on the eyes, but for some reason nothing makes a SWAT uniform look better than Erica Cerra. And despite Lupo’s affections for Absurdly Large SciFi Weapons, the character was interesting and likeable, although because television is what it is, when she finally ends up with a romance, it ends up being with the third least attractive man on the show, go figure.

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The Weirdness of Precipitation. Also Umbrellas.

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So a friend has pointed out that I have been veering from the straight path of poetry and investigating all kinds of apparently nonpoetic things, and she is not wrong. At first I thought this was simply a result of my writer’s block, again, and to some extent it is. Then I thought about how I started this blog in part to figure out my poetics, that is, what the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics defines as “a systematic theory or doctrine of poetry” (Preminger 636). What do I think counts as poetry and where do we draw the line? Is it enough to “not be prose,” i.e., to have lots of short lines, some of which may happen to rhyme? Is it likely to have more elegant language and imagery than non-literary prose generally uses? Must it be beautiful? And what do we mean by beauty?

And then I realized that some of what I have been unconsciously doing is figuring out my aesthetics, which oddly enough, Preminger does not define, although he does include aesthetic distance and aestheticism, this last of which he seems to define as art for art’s sake, although he takes several pages to do it. I think for me defining one’s aesthetics is about defining what one as an individual, artist and nonartist, find beautiful and not. What draws you, as the bagpipes drew me before my mind had realized that my legs were moving? What repels me, as the sonorous, groaning organ does, even though it has great symmetry and harmony and All The Things, and can move other folks to tears for Very Different Reasons?

And I have been fascinated by our recent popular culture projects, because they have been drawing me in a similar fashion. Some of what I like is the smart juxtaposition between apparent opposites that we often get, the mixing of deadly serious and light wit, or dark, almost Gothic environments mixed with warm companionship. Or just high school students reading 500-year-old texts in an actual library to learn about the demons they are about to face. These tinctures in the story-telling of our time fascinate me, and I hope are teaching me about how to tell a more beautiful story, whether I do it in poetry or prose or some other way.

But for those who came for the poetry, here is a poem from last Monday when I got soaking wet about three different times.

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Suddenly the air

is awash front to back

with water, which once,

before today, used

to be ocean or cloud.

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And walksign people

scurry and slosh across

sidewalks become rivers

for a moment or two

too long for dry shoes.

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Only the dry ones, those

who planned ahead,

stay anywhere near dry

carrying their nylon roof

on a stick.

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Preminger, Alex, ed. Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1974.

The Butterfly of Regret

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According to Wikipedia, “Chaos theory is the field of study in mathematics that studies the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions—a response popularly referred to as the butterfly effect.[1]” So if a butterfly flaps her wings in Singapore today, Boston gets a hurricane a few days later. Or something like that.

I think of this today in part because the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) had not one but two or three Total Screw Ups (TFUs) yesterday, causing several of my colleagues AND several of our clients to be stuck underground in Central Square Cambridge yesterday for a Very Long Time Indeed in the morning and even more hilarity in the afternoon, both times when the humidity content of the air was about 200%, i.e., it was pouring rain like the ocean was coming at us sideways. And, yes, I got drenched both times, thank you very much. I can’t wait to see how the MBTA is going to handle winter, as the Farmer’s Almanac is predicting a winter as bad as this past year’s or worse.

So, in the interest of keeping my part of next winter relatively less stressful, I just went with my colleague Bob to get my flu shot at MIT Medical’s impressively organized Flushottapalooza (my term, not theirs). The longest part of the process was finding a pen to fill out the form. Everything else went swimmingly, which is surprising because a) I am used to things run by the MBTA and b) there was absolutely no ocean water in the building.

I know. Right?

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“Chaos Theory.” Wikipedia. 1 Oct. 2015. Web. 1 Oct. 2015.

When Even Page 51 Doesn’t Work

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So there I was on Wednesday morning, at work at MIT. I had no clients (because, duh, beginning of semester), no access to the Internet because of the new computer not being finished “setting up,” and two blessed hours when I could, theoretically, work my blog. Because Writing Is Easy, a thing you can do without a whole heck of a lot of technology, if only you have ideas.

Which I did not, in fact, have.

So I thought, no problem, there is the old Page 51 trick. I will look at a book or four on my shelf and see what the first sentence on page 51 is, and then I will have something to write about!

Living with Honor: “It better accepts another character of that taproot: the power of fertility.”

Bossy Pants: “When we got home I was sent to play outside so my father could shampoo the rug.”

Poetry and the Visual Arts: Page 51 is completely blank. It doesn’t even say 51.

Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life: “Like Wilde, Dorian has a home that is a product of his creative vision, filled with things that are both decorative objects and works of art.”

All of which is kind of depressing, because not only have I not found anything interesting to write about, I have also realized what a weird bookshelf I have. Sigh.

Technology Makes Life Easier: NOT

So there I was in my little office at Northeastern University, lamenting the extreme oldness of my shared computer and how it takes roughly ten minutes just to boot up. And the following day I was in my little office at MIT, lamenting…you get the picture. English departments are pretty much by definition never the first to get the fresh fruit of the technological boom that is the twenty-first century, alas.

And then, hooray hooray! I find out that we are getting brand spanking new (as opposed to second hand from a fancier department) computers at MIT! Woohoo!

Except it’s never that easy. The New Mike from IT (as opposed to the Old Mike from IT—I think it’s like how all barbers are named Bud) came in and switched the computers and set my mail up and all that stuff back on Monday and I come in on Wednesday and I can no longer access anything that I was accessing on Monday: not my mail, not the Writing Center online scheduler, not Safari (btw, yuck; I much prefer Firefox as it has a much, much better bookmarking system, etc.).

I can still use Word, thank the gods, but that is pretty much it. And I can drink my Protein Zone shake/smoothie thing because, again thank the gods, breakfast still isn’t computerized.

Not yet.

Instruments that Speak to/for/against Us

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I started out Roman Catholic in the 1970s, which was a mixed time for Catholic hymnody. On the one hand, the conservatives who still hadn’t gotten over Vatican Council II (1963-7) still insisted on the organ (and thankfully we didn’t have one of those arrghanists who play at half speed and twice the loudness!) and on the other hand us younger/more liberal crazy kids wen to the so-called “folk” masses with guitars and hymns that had actually been written by somebody who wasn’t dead. (You can clearly see into which camp I fall, yodeling.)

In theory I understand a friend who finds the idea of anything less grand than an organ being an affront (I guess) to God’s grandeur. But let me tell you a story. Sometime about ten years ago I was in a Catholic church in Boston that in fact did and still does have an arghanist of the kind I described above. But to this particular Mass, the pastor had invited some young men from an orphanage in Haiti to come and speak to the congregation (and collect money, natch). I don’t remember what the processional hymn was but the two young men had their long drums suspended from their necks and were drumming away behind our singing—that is, until they reached the altar, when they stopped and the organ picked up the accompaniment. Well, I say, accompaniment, but in fact I found myself drowned out. As a female in the Catholic Church, I had felt that way before from time to time, but only metaphorically. But that experience—of the big, loud, low and therefore symbolically male voice of the Organ drowning out not only my female voice, but also the “voice” of young men whose country had been colonized by the western church—that was probably one of the last times I set foot in a Catholic church as a Catholic.

Now I am mostly happily Protestant—Episcopalian (we have women priests! and bishops! and gay priests! and bishops! Ask Me How!)—but I still get that icky feeling when I hear organ music, like somebody’s voice is being drowned out and nobody is even noticing except me. They invented the piano for a reason, people!

And I think about this because one of my Facebook groups, Scottish Clans & Families, had a post about how you know you have Scottish blood when the pipes speak to you like no other instrument could. And I started thinking about how we identify ourselves not just with things you can see, like pictures or desk toys, but also with things you can hear. The organ fills me with moral outrage. Bagpipes make me cry (in a good way, but I am also an old softie). Last summer at the alumni reunion at Middlebury, they had a piper standing just below Mead Chapel playing for an hour before the big convocation. On the other side of campus, I heard the music and immediately moved in that direction, in tears, like there was some big emotional switch in my bone marrow that the fellow had turned on from a quarter mile away.

I’m not quite sure if I have a conclusion about all of this, unless it is “humans are weird.”

Constructing Identity

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Well, it is hard to believe it but the MIT Writing Center has been in its “new” location in Kendall Square in Cambridge for more than a year: a hot summer, followed by an interminable grey fall, followed by nine frigging feet of snow, a fair spring and a mild summer. The welcome difference between our current digs and the old grey bullpen in the late and not lamented Building 12 is that we all have our very own desk and computer and file cabinet With Wheels (and I know this because I personally put on all the wheels myself). This may not sound terribly impressive to folks who A. only have one job and B. have had their Very Own Space for like always, but when you are functionally somewhat itinerant having your own space is, scientifically speaking, way cooler.

Even back in the bullpen you could tell who was working at which desk based on whether the books on it were about nuclear proliferation, environmental ethics, Percy Shelley or opera, but now that we can accessorize a bit more, the differences are much clearer. My office mate (Shelley) has a Sherlock Holmes calendar and other Holmsian pictures, bookmarks, etc. I have a painting of red bamboo, a GreenPeace poster, a Fu dog bookend and, on my file cabinet, a maneki-neko clock amid a miniature Stonehenge that I bought while at an alumni reunion at Middlebury College. Layers upon layers.

It’s a bit like the way, back in Catholic school, although encased in plaid uniform and everybody wearing the same shoes, we found exciting shoelaces, with hearts or whales or rainbows, to assert our individuality.

The Block of the Writer, Redux

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So there I am, sitting with my Brilliant Colleague, Rebecca, complaining about how I don’t have ideas for either of my blogs, this one or the one that my cat, Musashi writes, primarily for my parents and my other Brilliant Colleague, Pamela. And Rebecca told me to write about that blog for this blog. So brilliant.

It is an odd thing, writing for such a small audience from the point of view of someone I love very much and will never really know. He’s a cat. He probably doesn’t do a lot of linear thinking, and the idea that he would spend his summer writing (with a purple crayon) a novel about pirates does seem a little silly, especially because, as a tuxedo cat, if he were to enter the Great Philosophical Argument: Pirates vs. Ninjas, he would most likely come down on the side of the ninjas.

And yet, and yet…

It also helps the storytelling process that Musashi, as a writer, has a Somewhat Less Than Puritanical attitude toward spelling. For example, he is still not convinced about silent h’s, such as those in words like “might,” and so he does without. He is okay on the g because of it having a tail, but the h, not so much.

And then it is simply a matter of retraining my point of view downward by about four and a half feet or so, and adding fur and irony.