Earth Day, Patagonia, and the World's Diverse Passions

Happy Earth Day, everyone! I completely forgot the holiday, but it's a happy coincidence that I bought a new Electra quick-release wire basket for my bike last weekend and a Patagonia messenger bag this week. Both I plan on using for environmentally friendly offices. I'm going to use the wire basket for conveying groceries from my local farmers' market and books from my library. It looks cute on my bike and is soooo fun to use!

The Patagonia bag is extra-special to me. I've wanted one since college. Patagonia makes high-quality camping, hiking, and bicycling products in an extremely earth-friendly way: they fund a lot of great causes, and pretty much everything they sell is either completely recycled or completely organic. They're a fantastic company, and I can't wait to tote my work computer around in their bag! I'm calling it a Happy New Job present to myself.  :) 

Finally getting a Patagonia bag is a big deal for me; their stuff is expensive (in part because it's meant to be used for decades without falling apart), so it's exciting to finally be able to afford one and to placate a consumerist fetish that I've been nursing for a long time!

Buying my bag got me thinking about people's unique proclivities and passions. Patagonia is an old one for me, and it's a passion that is unique to my geographic location, my class, my social situation, my values, and my temperament. It comes from being a former Enrivons member and a KU graduate and a Lawrence resident during the early 2000s. It's symptomatic of who I am and where I come from, just like my passion for bookstores and literature and education and vintage clothes and granola and pickles and who knows what else! Our loves and desires are created by more than just ourselves--they're organic outgrowths of our unique personal contexts, as well.

This has been on my mind as I learn about the students I'm involved with as an advisor. The personality types common to each of my academic programs are so distinctive from each other and often quite different from my own. Each day contrasts my values and understandings--those values and understandings unique to my background in the study of literature, writing, and the creative process--with those of my new co-workers and advisees.

I suspect that my job will be a great one for studying human nature and the variety of human passions. Whether it's service, professionalism, creativity, or knowledge that my students seek, I find it refreshing and fascinating to experience, at least for a few minutes at a time, how these lovely people perceive the world, themselves, and their career paths.

How Way Leads on to Way

I've been away. You may have noticed.  :P

My new job has taken a lot of adjusting to these past few weeks. I like the work, but traveling back and forth has eaten up much of my free time, and I'm still getting use to it. On top of that, my poor, lovely, stubborn mother has been in the hospital with an unusually nasty strain of pneumonia. She's back home and feeling better now, but I was worried for her. So, dear blog, I'm sorry, but you just haven't been a priority.

But since I've last visited, I've been reading a lot and enjoying my Netflix subscription and trying (trying!) my best to take it easy in my time off. I've been in a particularly fun sort of reading/television watching path--it's one of my favorite things about being out of school and being able to direct my own reading. I choose books with perfect freedom and whimsy, and I never run out of new strands of interest to follow. Each new book I read has the potential to sling me off into some new interest that I never expected to love. In reading as in life, as Frost puts it, "way leads on to way."

Most recently, I've been loving all things Sherlock Holmes, which I never in my life thought I would be interested in. I used to think that I didn't like mystery novels or crime stories, and police detectives in tweeds smoking pipes seemed like the dullest thing possible. But here's what happened:

• I watched that fantastically witty Doctor Who episode where Agatha Christie solves a real-life murder mystery involving a giant space wasp. (Yes, that episode is as awesome as it sounds.) -->
• Curious about Christie, I read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express, and Death Comes as the End. They were great--very clever and well written and British and astute. -->
• Thinking that I now liked old-fashioned British mysteries, I rented the new Sherlock Holmes action movie with Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law. I surprised myself by really, really enjoying it. -->
• Intrigued by the eccentricity of Holmes in the movie (drug use, bizarre fits of melancholia, a deep and curious jealousy of his friend Dr. Watson, etc.), I spent some time researching Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle on Wikipedia.  -->
• Curious about Doyle's writing and the oddity of Holmes as a character, I read two of the Holmes novels (A Study in Scarlet and The Hound of the Baskervilles). They were fun, easy reading, as clear and fast-paced as if they'd been written in the late 20th century, not the late 19th. -->
• Because I enjoyed these novels, I decided to read Laurie R. King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice (which features Holmes in later life, living in semi-retirement in the 1920s and 1930s). -->
• King's version of Holmes was fantastically appealing, even better than the original! On top of the typical Holmes-style plot lines, there was a brilliant feminist female sleuth to keep Holmes in check (Mary Russell!) and a romantic sub-plot and really cool flapper clothing. So I read the next two novels in the series (The Monstrous Regiment of Women and A Letter of Mary) and loved them. -->
• Finally, I took Netflix's suggestion and started watching the Granada Sherlock Holmes series from the 1980s and 1990s with Jeremy Brett. I loved it and spent a good chunk of this weekend watching Holmes chase down Professor Moriarty and a dozen other amateur thieves and murderers. I never, ever thought I'd have an opinion about Dr. Watson as a narrator or the nattiness of Victorian-era men's clothing, but now I do. So yay!

So what's next? Inspired by King's Mary Russell novels, Downton Abbey's portrayal of pre-World War I Britain, and Ishiguro's conflicted post-World War II butler in  The Remains of the Day, I'll probably track down some more great modernist British literature. But who knows where I'll end up next?

Goodness, isn't reading fun?  :D

Terror and Pain and Other Awesome Things

So, BIG HUGE FANTASTIC NEWS: I started a new job this week. I'm still working at the University, but in a different department with far more responsibility and freedom. It's a distinctly grown-up feeling job, with nicer clothes and an incredibly hectic Outlook calendar and a steep learning curve and a lot more pressure.

Obviously, this is a huge step for me career-wise, but it's also frightening. Terrifying, in fact. But I keep reminding myself to breath deeply, to trust myself, and to trust the search committee that thought I was right for the job.

I also keep reminding myself that a yoga instructor once told my class that "Pain is good. Pain is just the feeling of your life force actualizing." Of course, she told us this as we were sweating and trembling at least three minutes into an arm-aching balance pose.

I keep telling myself the same thing this week: If pain is just my life force actualizing (!), then maybe terror is just my life changing, expanding, moving forward before my mind can wrap quite comfortably around all the changes.

So that's my philosophy and my hope for the next few weeks. I'll let you know how it all turns out.  :)

Howl, Howl, and Howl

What sound does a working woman in her mid-twenties make the morning after her first softball practice in two and a half years?

Why, how did you guess?

Softball practice was fantastically fun yesterday, but I'm paying for it today. I'm having trouble opening doors, people--I mean, lifting my arm, turning a knob, and stepping forward hurts. Who knew that throwing a ball and crouching for grounders and darting across a muddy field for an hour and forty-five minutes could do that to a body?

In less painful news, I finally saw Howl this weekend. Howl is a "biopic" about the obscenity trial that followed City Light's release of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems  in 1956, but the movie was nothing like what I expected.

I thought the movie would be a typical biopic in the style of Walk the Line or Lean on Me or Braveheart: conventional and predictable and utterly sentimental. Instead, the obscenity trial that the film is supposedly about serves as little more than a backbone for the 84 minutes of poetic action, a mere cage of plot line over which the filmmakers draped the central components of the film: the interview scenes with Ginsberg (played by James Franco) and the poem itself (which is read by Franco and beautifully animated). Really, the poem is what gives the movie all its heart and soul and interest; I wouldn't have minded a 45-minute movie with nothing but black-and-white scenes of Franco reading Howl in a Village bar spliced with bits of that lovely, vivid, frightening animation.



I was especially fond of the animators' portrayal of Moloch, the poem's "villain" (see above).

Once I got past expecting an actual plot to appear, I really enjoyed the movie, and I loved it best for reminding me of how much I used to love Ginsberg. He's one of my favorite 20th-Century poets, and I've read a ton of his poems and interviews. (In fact, the first poem I ever published was very Ginsberg-inspired, with long lines and stacks of lists and happy over-the-top joyful cosmic hysteria). He was severely out of vogue at my grad school, so I hadn't read him in years, but in 2004, I pretty much wanted to be Allen Ginsberg.

"You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a

sunflower!"

Watching Howl made me pull out my copy of Ginsberg's Selected Poems: 1947-1995, which (according the the receipt I found in the book) I bought from The Raven Bookstore in 2005. I reread my favorite sections of Howl (the "I am with you Rockland" section and "Footnote to Howl" with all its holy holy holy holys) and flipped through to see what poems I had marked back in 2005. It made for a lovely evening, actually.

I would definitely recommend Howl (the movie) to anyone who's read the poem and, while I'm at it, to anyone who hasn't read the poem. I believe that Franco reads the entirety of the poem over the course of the movie, and the filmmakers do an excellent job of getting to the heart of what Howl (the poem) is all about. They also did quite a good job of portraying Ginsberg as the complicated figure that I always imagine him to be: a poet, a revolutionary, an unloved lover, a square, a Beat, and an all-around brave and joyful human being.

Eat, Pray, Love

Honestly, I was hesitant to read Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. It was just so damn popular--so popular that it spawned a Julia Roberts movie (an outcome that, I think, many a writer would dread). C'mon, I thought, how could Eat, Pray, Love turn out to be anything other than cheap tourism and stories about tiramisu and hunky Italians and faux-spiritual enlightenment and steamy tropical romances?

 Fortunately, I was wrong. My mom convinced me to give Gilbert a chance, and I'm so pleased that I pulled one of my local library's fifteen copies of this memoir off the bookshelves. It's a lovely piece of writing and self-exploration, a breathtakingly honest and cleverly written chronicle of Gilbert's sojourns in Italy, India, and Indonesia.

Gilbert's memoir is not literary-ly ambitious but personally so: She's writing the type of confessional non-fiction that holds very little back, and so a reader's enjoyment of the book hinges not on whether or not you like the story, but whether or not you like Liz Gilbert, Narrator. And though I did occasionally find her neuroses irritating, I really, really liked Liz Gilbert: I admired her emotional and spiritual bravery (both as a traveler and as a writer), even when I didn't necessarily "get" her.

Of course, this is how most personal essays and memoirs are meant to be. For example, E.B. White's One Man's Meat isn't brilliant because of its stories (in fact, I don't remember any sort of "plot" anywhere in the entire book) but because of the richness of White himself. It's the same with Gilbert's book: despite the way the memoir was marketed (as a sort of chick lit/humor/travel memoir hybrid), Gilbert's writing is so rife with personality and literary references and carefully crafted scenes that she places herself squarely within the tradition of classic personal essayists. Even when there wasn't much action going on (especially in the Italian chapters), Gilbert's voice, her obvious intelligence, and her wide-ranging literary and spiritual references make this book rich and worthwhile.

I ended up reading this very quickly and with great pleasure and found myself marking favorite quotes again and again. Here are a few that stuck with me, even after I was done:

"But I felt a glimmer of happiness when I started studying Italian, and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt--this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight."

"Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don't you will leak away your innate contentment."

 "But what I have come to realize is that, when the patriarchic system was (rightfully) dismantled, it was not necessarily replaced by another form of protection. What I mean is--I never thought to ask a suitor the same challenging questions my father might have asked him, in a different age. I have given myself away in love many times, merely for the sake of love. And I've given away the farm sometimes in that process. If I am to truly become an autonomous woman, then I must take over that role of being my own guardian."

"My thoughts turn to something I read once, something the Zen Buddhists believe. They say that an oak tree is brought into creation by two forces at the same time. Obviously, there is the acorn from which it all begins, the seed which holds all the promise and potential, which grows into the tree. Everybody can see that. But only a few can recognize that there is another force operating here as well--the future tree itself, which wants so badly to exist that it pulls the acorn into being, drawing the seedling forth with longing out of the void, guiding the evolution from nothingness to maturity. In this respect, say the Zens, it is the oak tree that creates the very acorn from which it was born."

 And, finally, one very, very lovely bit of language:

"I walked home that night feeling like the air could move through me, like I was clean linen fluttering on a clothesline, like New York itself had become a city made of rice paper--and I was light enough to run across every rooftop."

All quotes taken from Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love (Viking 2006).