oh, right. the internet is forever.

I’m not the sort of person who can put an incomplete thought down in perpetuity. It makes me a terrible blogger; I lack the swagger. There’s a definite tension between the impulse that I have to communicate some ideas in this medium and the shyness that accompanies the permanence of the internet.

What I’m saying is this: people know better than to ask me to update the blog more, but when I see that people are using the blog as intended–actually reading it–I’m filled with a serious sense of inadequacy.

the power of lists: moby-dick, album-a-day, and the man who taught me that writers have rhythm

I have in my life, for reasons various and innumerable, derived great pleasure from the practice of list-keeping. While one could say with some confidence that my organizational style is generally more, uh, stylistic than organizational (a phrase I first heard from this entry’s titular man), I am fastidious when it comes to the enumeration of the banal details of, well, basically everything.

This is why, even though the album-a-day project was less than successful on the blog front, I have a tidy record of all of the albums I enjoyed in this capacity for the duration of the M-Dick hiatus (available upon request, of course, but not to be shared here otherwise; what purpose would that serve?).

This is why, after months of false starts and broken promises (they’re just like pie crusts!), I fell back in love with Herman Melville.

This is why I know that Jay Hepner will be missed.

album-a-day: “the grey album”

Today, I managed to write nearly a page of fairly solid scientific-sounding stuff, thanks to Jay-Z, the Beatles, and the man who brought them together: Brian Burton.

album-a-day: “teen dream”

Since it broke one hundred degrees yesterday, I spent most of the day sitting in an air-conditioned coffee shop trying to write about stem cells, half-watching Grey Gardens, and listening to Beach House.

album-a-day: “anytown graffiti”

The album of the day was Pela’s “Anytown Graffiti”.

the moby-dick sort of hiatus: album-a-day

Well, the title sort of says it all: Herm and I are taking a break. It isn’t your fault, and both of us still love you very much, it’s just that I’m in the throes of writing my thesis proposal and Melville, well, I get the sense that he doesn’t really care that much about what I do, you know?

Regular readers will not notice a difference in posting frequency, so I’m not really going to apologize.

Until after my defense (mid-August), I’m going to try to approach the blog a little differently.

moby dick: believing in things you cannot see (chapters 17-21)

In the forty five minutes that I listened to my local radio station this morning, I heard eight times that it was going to be over one hundred degrees today, ran myself two cold baths (in which I drank two hot cups of coffee), and attempted to digest the significance of the former governor leading the current governor in the gubernatorial race (approximate margin of error for polling: three percent). This week is proud to present the Charm City with the season’s second heat wave, and as an impoverished young graduate student living without central air, I have a limited number of comfortable options. Ideally, I spend as many hours as humanly possible away from the death trap that is my apartment: work, the movie theater, the gym, and my car have all seen record hours in the past few weeks. When I have to be inside (as I am now, of course), I sit directly in front of my window unit, turn all of the lights out, play my morale-boosting summer anthem as loudly as my laptop permits, and try to drink enough sangria to pass out and stay passed out until the next morning, when I will have to take another cold bath or two so I can get enough caffeine into my body to brave the terror that is outside again.

Life would be kind of different if I were pursuing employment on a whaling ship.

moby-dick: Ishmael just wants to emote ’til he’s dead (chapter 16: the ship)

Reasons why I am slightly typing-impaired right now:

1. I have had a huge glass of a bold malbec (the boldest in the store, according to the clerk, and I always believe clerks, having once been one that no one particularly seemed to believe).

2. The air-conditioning in my apartment has been running since four o’clock this afternoon, and yet the temperature on my futon (read: right next to the window unit) is still eighty seven effing degrees Fahrenheit.

3. When attempting to steam some vegetable dumplings for my evening meal, I managed to give myself some impressive second-degree burns on my right hand, which is currently drenched in spray analgesic and swathed in gauze.

4. I am listening to my newly arrived Destroyer vinyl reissues and the NPR recap of the Kagan confirmation hearings at the same time, which would be challenging under normal circumstances, but, given reasons 1 and 2, has deteriorated into a tragic mash-up of misguided patriotism, civil libertarianism, and impossibly convoluted metaphor. (I propose that all future Supreme Court nominees be subjected to a round of the Destroyer Drinking Game, since our current confirmation proceedings make approximately as much sense and are far less entertaining.)

However, my lovely and patient readers, nothing, not even the melodious riffing of Nina Totenberg, could distract me from what I’ve read today. And that, as you may have already ascertained, was another chapter of Moby-by-
god-Dick.

moby-dick: Melville and Me (chapters 14 and 15)

Spring is speaking up in flowers: tulips up in the square, honeysuckle up on the overpass, peonies up on my bedside table. I, true to form, am taking advantage of the moment of blossom to make resolutions: I’ll eat breakfast on my stoop, open the windows in the apartment, paint my toenails green, plan road trips out of state. Since it’s spring, I will sleep, buy, and be angry less. Since it’s spring, I will make sangria. Since it’s spring, I will update the blog more.

Obviously, lately, I have not been in the mood to listen to Ishmael whine.

why journal?

I picked up the idea of journaling from my grandfather, who would write up a summary of his daily activities in a checkbook-sized planner every evening while he watched the news, thus collecting each year in a discrete, vinyl volume. His records are highly personal and simultaneously clinical: they provide what is no doubt a highly accurate portrait of his life without coloring it in. I, of course, labored over each slim year. As soon as I realized that the records existed, I made it my mission to consume them all. I could read a decade in his life while everyone in the house was sleeping; I could hold two in my hands. What does a child expect to find (or make sense of, for that matter) in the catalogues of her family members?