There is one fact I have found in my life to be very central to who I am and what I'm here for. Mountains. I was 16 years old before I saw a mountain, and when I did I felt like a resting metronome. Peaceful, done with a hard day's work. "Found it!" I spent hours taking pictures of graveyards on mountainsides (in North Carolina in the snow). I have never been good at the cold, and thus don't think I really appreciated how much I NEED mountains intermittently until I moved to Spain when I was 22.
Right now listening to a song I can't stop listening to for whatever reason- "Nerves of the Nightmind" by Fronteir Ruckus. It will surely go on my August mix.
Back to mountains. When I was 21 I packed a backpack and went out to explore the place where I spent my preteen years-- Ascot, England. From there I traveled all over Europe with a friend for the summer. I fall in love with languages and this particular summer I became twitterpated with Catalan. (I remain twitterpated, but nothing compares to the lust I feel about words, verbs, sounds when I first fall in love with a language and do not yet speak it).
Segway-- I have always been interested in world markets, capitalism and language. What languages become economically beneficial to speak? What other reasons to languages have for surviving. Catalan was an obvious choice for these reasons, that and it is the most beautiful language I have ever head. I speak Spanish...and hearing a romance language with so much of what I love of Spanish...sound so...French, and in love...floored me.
I came back to the United States from this trip in love with Catalan and determined to learn to speak it. That is a bit difficult in Gainesville, Florida. There was a course in Catalan I, so I enrolled..my love grew...and rather than join the Peace Corps or go straight to graduate school in Development Studies I packed up my things, sold most of it, and moved to Catalonia-- to a mountainous island called Mallorca.
It was there I learned the power that mountains have in my life, and the person I can be when I'm around them. There were nights I talked friends into putting me on the back of their motorbikes...with Chopin's nocturnes blaring in my headphones as performed live by Claudio Arrau...(he wrote some of those IN Mallorca)...I asked them to go as fast as they could, winding..through narrow mountain valleys, around corners, the moon shining brightly on the water.
I had only lived in Kansas, Chicago, and Florida. never around mountains, never around such natural beauty. It became my goal to find this beauty in my country when I moved back.
My research became focused on language activism during the Franco regime (it was illegal to speak Catalan, physical punishment, jail, etc, and yet...the language thrived) and gender. I critiqued existing literature for crediting public activists for the survival of Catalan when clearly only the rich (afford bail) and public figures (read: male at the time) could engage in that activity. To me what language theorists can garner from that epoch is how the everyday decisions of mothers, parents, workers to use and teach their progeny Catalan were deliberated. I can become intensely interested in anything I immerse myself in-- as everything to me is complex. Especially things that seem simple.
I lived there for two years, and found out my father had terminal cancer. My father and I were very, very close. He was given 6 a frightening prognosis and I returned to the United States immediately. I had earned (while there) a degree in language teaching, and gained teaching experience. I found a job as a teacher in Florida, and walked with him through that final stage of life...and as soon as he moved on applied to return to school to pursue my dream-- a PhD. Starting that with high hopes.
I currently have a crush on Quechua and Aymara. I have chosen to pursue words in the former, as Aymara is not spoken as much in the mountains (as is Quechua). The Andes are the mountain chain I currently stalk, but I have plans to travel to just be, write, listen to music, hike in Tennessee if I can find someone else who is interested. I want to fall in love with my country the way I am in love with others.
One huge landmark for me in this quest was my first visit out west (right before I moved back to the US. Big Sur, California changed my life. Listening to the Beach Boys at the Henry Miller Library while reading Tropic of Cancer...waiting a Philip Glass show. Later to walk home along cliffs, waves crashing below..in the dark, huge moon. This is the closest thing I found to racing on motorbikes listening to Chopin in this country thus far. I seek to top it. constantly.
I have a video of some pictures from that summer.
I have so much to respond to in your letter, but need to go on a date with my corgi. sorry if this as not the best response, but you can trust it to be sincere!
oh- we listen to this american life on the hikes. it is great.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Good bye, why-poe-lark.
T Hatch says, 'round every corner
by: p:ano
'round every corner
I'm as good as my word so....
'round every corner
there's a good life and there's monsters
and they're all dancing together
they do the madison, they do the foxtrot, they do whatever.
by: p:ano
'round every corner
I'm as good as my word so....
'round every corner
there's a good life and there's monsters
and they're all dancing together
they do the madison, they do the foxtrot, they do whatever.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke to Kappus Letter 7
Letter Seven
Rome
May 14, 1904
My dear Mr. Kappus,
Much time has passed since I received your last letter. Please don't hold that against me; first it was work, then a number of interruptions, and finally poor health that again and again kept me from answering, because I wanted my answer to come to you out of peaceful and happy days. Now I feel somewhat better again (the beginning of spring with its moody, bad-tempered transitions was hard to bear here too) and once again, dear Mr. Kappus, I can greet you and talk to you (which I do with real pleasure) about this and that in response to your letter, as well as I can.
You see: I have copied out your sonnet, * because I found that it is lovely and simple born in the shape that it moves in with such quiet decorum. It is the best poem of yours that you have let me read. And now I am giving you this copy because I know that it is important and full of new experience to rediscover a work of one's own in someone else's handwriting. Read the poem as if you had never seen it before, and you will feel in your innermost being how very much it is your own.
It was a pleasure for me to read this sonnet and your letter, often; I thank you for both.
We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.
It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time ahead and far on into life, is - ; solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent - ?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.
But this is what young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. . . . : And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come. And loses the vast distances and possibilities, gives up the approaching and fleeing of gentle, prescient Things in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come; nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment, and poverty, and the escape into one of the many conventions that have been put up in great numbers like public shelters on this most dangerous road. No area of human experience is so extensively provided with conventions as this one is: there are live-preservers of the most varied invention, boats and water wings; society has been able to create refuges of very sort, for since it preferred to take love-life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are.
Whoever looks seriously will find that neither for death, which is difficult, nor for difficult love has any clarification, any solution, any hint of a path been perceived; and for both these tasks, which we carry wrapped up and hand on without opening, there is not general, agreed-upon rule that can be discovered. But in the same measure in which we begin to test life as individuals, these great Things will come to meet us, the individuals, with greater intimacy. The claims that the difficult work of love makes upon our development are greater than life, and we, as beginners, are not equal to them. But if we nevertheless endure and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in the whole easy and frivolous game behind which people have hidden from the most solemn solemnity of their being, - then a small advance and a lightening will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us. That would be much.
We are only just now beginning to consider the relation of one individual to a second individual objectively and without prejudice, and our attempts to live such relationships have no model before them. And yet in the changes that time has brought about there are already many things that can help our timid novitiate.
And one more thing: Don't think that the great love which was once granted to you, when you were a boy, has been lost; how can you know whether vast and generous wishes didn't ripen in you at that time, and purposes by which you are still living today? I believe that that love remains strong and intense in your memory because it was your first deep aloneness and the first inner work that you did on your life. - All good wished to you, dear Mr. Kappus!
Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke
Rome
May 14, 1904
My dear Mr. Kappus,
Much time has passed since I received your last letter. Please don't hold that against me; first it was work, then a number of interruptions, and finally poor health that again and again kept me from answering, because I wanted my answer to come to you out of peaceful and happy days. Now I feel somewhat better again (the beginning of spring with its moody, bad-tempered transitions was hard to bear here too) and once again, dear Mr. Kappus, I can greet you and talk to you (which I do with real pleasure) about this and that in response to your letter, as well as I can.
You see: I have copied out your sonnet, * because I found that it is lovely and simple born in the shape that it moves in with such quiet decorum. It is the best poem of yours that you have let me read. And now I am giving you this copy because I know that it is important and full of new experience to rediscover a work of one's own in someone else's handwriting. Read the poem as if you had never seen it before, and you will feel in your innermost being how very much it is your own.
It was a pleasure for me to read this sonnet and your letter, often; I thank you for both.
We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.
It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time ahead and far on into life, is - ; solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent - ?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.
But this is what young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. . . . : And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come. And loses the vast distances and possibilities, gives up the approaching and fleeing of gentle, prescient Things in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come; nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment, and poverty, and the escape into one of the many conventions that have been put up in great numbers like public shelters on this most dangerous road. No area of human experience is so extensively provided with conventions as this one is: there are live-preservers of the most varied invention, boats and water wings; society has been able to create refuges of very sort, for since it preferred to take love-life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are.
Whoever looks seriously will find that neither for death, which is difficult, nor for difficult love has any clarification, any solution, any hint of a path been perceived; and for both these tasks, which we carry wrapped up and hand on without opening, there is not general, agreed-upon rule that can be discovered. But in the same measure in which we begin to test life as individuals, these great Things will come to meet us, the individuals, with greater intimacy. The claims that the difficult work of love makes upon our development are greater than life, and we, as beginners, are not equal to them. But if we nevertheless endure and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in the whole easy and frivolous game behind which people have hidden from the most solemn solemnity of their being, - then a small advance and a lightening will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us. That would be much.
We are only just now beginning to consider the relation of one individual to a second individual objectively and without prejudice, and our attempts to live such relationships have no model before them. And yet in the changes that time has brought about there are already many things that can help our timid novitiate.
And one more thing: Don't think that the great love which was once granted to you, when you were a boy, has been lost; how can you know whether vast and generous wishes didn't ripen in you at that time, and purposes by which you are still living today? I believe that that love remains strong and intense in your memory because it was your first deep aloneness and the first inner work that you did on your life. - All good wished to you, dear Mr. Kappus!
Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke
Monday, April 26, 2010
Today I'm getting into....
It came out last week, and I was excited to hear that after four years they have finally released another full length. I am still working out how I feel about different tracks, etc, but on the whole I can say I love the album. I take that back, I have loved the song "This Time Around" for months. Anyways...Minimalistic, somewhat repetitive, post-punk, shoe-gazing nerd out. Where was this in my teenage years? honestly. hate to love it as much as I do.
I love that one of the tracks, "Heaven's On Fire,: samples a Thurston Moore quote in the beginning:
Reporter: People see rock’n'roll as youth culture and when youth culture becomes monopolized by big business what are the youth to do? Do you have any idea?
Thurston Moore: I think we should destroy the bogus capital process that is destroying youth culture.
Friday, April 16, 2010
the glory of an open lens
Because of some things happening in my personal life, I have been encouraged to learn more about photography, long exposures, and for the sake of sass, the benefit of keeping one's own lens open- *ahem.*
Here are some artists I have become particularly interested in.
Dean Chamberlain.
Chamberlain was born in Boston, MA ( a very neat town—I visited only last weekend!). He has focused his artistic energy on photography since age 15, and on light painting since his twenties. His unique lighting effects and (super) extended exposure times have attracted me to his work since I first learned about light art/photography. He has truly revolutionized portraiture—his models sitting for up to five hours as he paints the space around them with carried and projected lights of myriad colors, widths, shapes…creating almost mystical images around them. His technique was described by one of his exhibitions as "Painting With Light Through Time and Space."
Toby Keller
Using light to interact with the landscape.
Toby Keller is based out of Santa Barbara, CA that works for the Turning Studio, and owns Burn Blue Photography in Design. Though his other work is remarkable, his light photography/light painting attracts me (the total photo layperson) the most because of the way seemingly artificial light interacts with the natural in his work. Free flowing forms of light seem organic, almost like pure energy, and interact with rocks, the sea, mountains, etc. Keller takes what is already perfect- nature, and makes it seem supernatural almost with energy displayed as ribbons of glowing light.
Cenci Goepel and Jens Warnecke
This duo create stark images that highlight the ghostly, ethereal quality of natural beauty. These images grab me because their technique seems to make the illuminated, often rigid but fluid forms (like liquid metal?) seem to blend in with their backgrounds in a way that makes the landscape look as though it is from some alien planet rather than our own.
Eric Staller
Urban Light Play
In the latte 70's Eric Staller created long time exposures done at night in New York City. These have been exhibitied world wide. Exposures were several minutes in length.
more to come!
Here are some artists I have become particularly interested in.
Chamberlain was born in Boston, MA ( a very neat town—I visited only last weekend!). He has focused his artistic energy on photography since age 15, and on light painting since his twenties. His unique lighting effects and (super) extended exposure times have attracted me to his work since I first learned about light art/photography. He has truly revolutionized portraiture—his models sitting for up to five hours as he paints the space around them with carried and projected lights of myriad colors, widths, shapes…creating almost mystical images around them. His technique was described by one of his exhibitions as "Painting With Light Through Time and Space."
Toby Keller
Using light to interact with the landscape.
Toby Keller is based out of Santa Barbara, CA that works for the Turning Studio, and owns Burn Blue Photography in Design. Though his other work is remarkable, his light photography/light painting attracts me (the total photo layperson) the most because of the way seemingly artificial light interacts with the natural in his work. Free flowing forms of light seem organic, almost like pure energy, and interact with rocks, the sea, mountains, etc. Keller takes what is already perfect- nature, and makes it seem supernatural almost with energy displayed as ribbons of glowing light.
This duo create stark images that highlight the ghostly, ethereal quality of natural beauty. These images grab me because their technique seems to make the illuminated, often rigid but fluid forms (like liquid metal?) seem to blend in with their backgrounds in a way that makes the landscape look as though it is from some alien planet rather than our own.
Urban Light Play
In the latte 70's Eric Staller created long time exposures done at night in New York City. These have been exhibitied world wide. Exposures were several minutes in length.
more to come!
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
"dance me through the panic til' I'm gathered safely in"
I have been listening to a lot of Leonard Cohen at work. Amazing.
(quote from "Dance me to the End of Love." I especially like the live version)
Monday, April 5, 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
