My head abounds with thoughts like. L and I took some final steps away from each other over the past few days. We reaffirmed an old promise that is the product of our being the closest people in the world to one another, but aside from that reaffirmation we are parting. For however long.

I need to go outside and open up my eyes and tend to my heart so there will be fewer posts here for the next little while.

If you have love in your life, reaffirm it today. You'll feel better you did.

Love

So I decided that the newly stretched and primed canvas would be part of my Love project, and I started getting recordings for it. It's the project from this post. I've already gotten a handful of recordings, and more people promised me recordings and I just haven't gotten to them yet, but if you're reading this and you're interested, drop me a comment or an e-mail, regardless of whether or not you expressed interest earlier.

This is turning out great.

Bikes and Books

Ha! I decided to put L's front wheel to good use and I bolted it on the the Raleigh after a truing. Picked the bike up to put it back on the wall, and the balance point is radically different. The old wheels are just so damn heavy. What a solid wheelset. (I'll give 'em back if she wants 'em. Just no use in their collecting dust.)

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So I've been reading some damn good books of late, and I have some solid recommendations.

+ Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities might go on for about ten too many pages, but the sheer beauty of the book far outweighs that. One of the most beautiful things I've read in a long time. Perfect, too, for that wanderlust / city v. country thing that's been going on in me for a while now.

+The Raw Shark Texts were phenomenal in every way. A book as much about love as it is about linguistics, I've described it as the Phantom Tollbooth for adults, and I'll stand by that.

+Neuromancer by William Gibson. It's been a long time since I last read sci-fi, and this was a wonderful sort of welcome home. All the pulp of a film noir, plus bragging rights to most of the concepts behind the Matrix. A quick and extremely enjoyable read.

Also of note, I read the title story out of George Saunders Civil War Land in Bad Decline and enjoyed it a lot. Hilarious, even if I felt it's ending to be a bit abrupt. And to feed my need for the southern states, I just started Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

Storytelling

Sick, today, with a fever, and had to make a 4.5 hour run back from New England. Got a speeding ticket at the bottom of a hill at hour 4. Now, getting speeding tickets is a pretty phenomenal feeling. But you haven't lived until you've been pulled over with a fever.

Also, check this out. This is the race series that mattio and others have been busting ass to put together. It will be my coming out to the world of less-than-official bike racing.

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At the last get-together of the Hudson Valley Naturalist Society, we sat around over breakfast talking about the books we were read as kids. I don't know why, but after talking books with Leah and her family this weekend, I've started thinking about what it is to read aloud to another person. It definitely occupies a special place in social interaction... I can still remember many of the books my parents read to me, and the profound effects they had on me.

I can still remember lines like "How many trucks can a tow-truck tow? one, two, three, four, I don't know!". I still think that book is responsible for some of my Marxist tendencies.

There was a girl I had a thing for a while back, and it never came to be anything, but after a long night of talking she used to say "Read something to me."

When I was in the hospital for two weeks last year, L, even though we were separated, came to visit me day by day, and would sit by my bed and read to me. I don't remember exactly what she read (I was half-or-less-conscious. I'm pretty sure it was Millay) but I remember her cadence, her soft voice and her light drawl like it was yesterday. It was the singular most comforting thing I can recall from that time.

Leah makes fun of me that part of our flirtation was reading Bukowski to each other, passing Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit back and forth until we had thoroughly convinced one another of our neurosis.

I read a story once, ages and ages and ages ago. I remember precious little about it, just that there was a couple in it who would read to each other while they made love. I think they named a kid so conceived after one of the characters in what they read.

There's a whole 'nother thing to be said about reading socially in the sense of passing books around among friends, or reading something that you've written to someone you care about. But theres something here about telling other people's stories, wanting to hear what others have said in a voice that you can put a face to, from a face that you know.

I think that storytelling is among the few fundamental human activities. It's how we build our aspirations, our expectations, our measures of ourselves in relation to our ideals, its how we fall in love and its how we ease ourselves from pain. That we tell not only our own stories but those of others implicates the whole human society in our interactions and tribulations, in our project of being human. If stories help make us who we are, then when we read those same stories to others we not only tell them what we are, we show them what we are. Transmitting to them as we received.

Among the things that struck me the most working in New Orleans was the sense of oral tradition. It was a very similar shape to all this.

Fables of the True Things of the

To whomever's been posting lyric fragments here under "Murmur about the True Things",

You're beautiful. Don't ever change.

Young women with the baby fat
still on them, smelling of milk.
Against that, her bravery--
striding out of bed in the morning,
her years, her children underfoot,
her blue eyes flashing warning.

"I could make some of these guys very happy,"
she said, looking up from the personals
in the New York Review of Books.

You read to her of war,
devastation, gut-chilling
insecurity, and her blue eyes
waver, and she sleeps
like an American child.

"Is this a peak experience?"
she said, sliding down beside him,
her blue eyes laughing at his desperate age.

Sound of surf through the dense fog.
Moisture streaming from the screened windows.
"Where are the beautiful love poems?"
she keeps asking him.

She became the line
he had in his head
just before sleep, that
he thought he would retain
and now it's gone.

--"Blue Eyes" by Harvey Shapiro

I drank at every vine.
The last was like the first.
I came upon no wine
So wonderful as thirst.

I gnawed at every root.
I ate of every plant.
I came upon no fruit
So wonderful as want.

Feed the grape and bean
To the vintner and monger:
I will lie down lean
With my thirst and my hunger.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay

Just stretched my first canvas last night/this morning. I didn't cut any of the wood pieces, I bought them, but I assembled the frame and stretched the canvas over it myself. It was a great feeling, downing a beer, blasting some electrified bluegrass (a la Gillian Welch) and firing away with a staple gun to create something that I'm going to use to create something else. Made me think about the Marxist alienation explanation I was asked to write after I alluded to it in the Hegel ramblings below... Maybe I'll get to that after all.

Work's been kinda ridiculous, as I've somehow been deputized the IT person, still responsible for all of my writing, still only really getting paid for the writing / minor office work. Trying to convince Elias to start up a design firm with me when he hit's Brooklyn in order to fund an extended stay outside these city walls.

Speaking of which, I'm putting tire to road this weekend and hanging out with Leah up in the newer of the Englands. When I get back I'll stop whining and make some of those substantive posts I've promised.

The Second Collection

Hot off the digital press, here is the second collection from the second meeting of the Hudson Valley Naturalists' Society. It includes the revised version of the story I posted here. Unlike the last collection, which I set, this one was wonderfully set by a dear friend who managed to capture (one of) the (many) spirit(s) of the event.

Without further ado,

The Hudson Valley Naturalists' Society Book Two


enjoy.

Mild Concern

So I'm at work, talking my boss through our new web project, and I feel something in my back pocket. I reach back, pull it out, and its a clean, finely machined hex screw, like you would find on new bike parts.

So now I'm wondering, what did I forget to put a screw back into?

Cairo and Cathay

I'm playing virtually all of the roles in Edna St. Vincent Millay's "To the not Impossible Him" right now. Unfortunate.

Plan has been, for a little while, for Elias to move down here from rural New England and for us to get an apartment together in Brooklyn. We're hoping to be moved within a month and a half. At the same time I have my recurring fantasy of loading up the volvo, tossing a guitar, a case of books, a case of whiskey and my life savings in the trunk, strapping the Raleigh on top, and rolling on down to the foothills of the Great Smokey Mountains. L and I spent an anniversary in the Blue Ridge once, and I fell secretly and instantly in love. Talking to Jay last night about the great heroes of Chapel Hill (the inimitable Archers of Loaf, of course) just solidified my belief that I can have the best of both worlds.

Elias has informed me that when we move in together, he would like to try to have contra dances in the apartment, if we have a room that is suitable. Maybe it's the fact that I'm really beginning to dig bluegrass guitar in every way and I've been looking for an excuse to break out the mandolin; maybe it's a backhanded homage to L who must have spent a collected six straight months of her life trying to convince me to contra dance; or maybe its a creative repression of this wanderlust, the way Freud's society is borne of thanatos.

Either way, I guess I'm still trying at the best of both worlds.
My dear, if I should ever travel.

So, had a show tonight, didn't really tell anyone. First time this year, as me and the rest of Maxwell's Demon have spent the past few months recording. We always talk alot about how great it is to play live... It's soooo great to play live. To bring people out on a Tuesday night, make them happy and hang out with them afterwards... its one of the simplest and strongest joys I know. And I felt like a damn good guitarist tonight, despite multitudinous technical fuck-ups that I'm sure no one noticed.
Rode to and from the show on the newly equipped Raleigh. Absolutely fantastic, but I'll save the gushing and the geekiness until I can find a functional camera (apparently frozen and totally broken look a lot alike.)
Rode back to Brooklyn with mattio (who's a bandmate) and Mara, a bike mechanic and an absolutely fantastically solid drummer from a band we are friends with. She hung out with us the whole night. As we crested the Williamsburg bridge, mattio and I were screaming songs at the top of our lungs. It is so amazing to know that as you grow in life you can still make new friends as you continue to cherish the old. As Jay and I unloaded the Volvo (after he drove along side me shouting garbled obscenities) we realized that this music thing is one of the best things we could be doing. We kicked around for the umpteenth time the idea of touring the South, mostly (again as usual) after talking about how the Archers of Loaf are the heroes of Indy Rock (Mara had a great line earlier in the night... "There used to be this thing called 'indie rock'...")

Oh man. I need bed. But the world needs more indie rock.

mmm... every time I go to bed smelling of bike grease and sweat I know it has been a good day.

Many wonderful things happened today, including concurrent and un-connected contact from two ex-crew-mates of mine from New Orleans, both of whom gave me very good news. I also solidly made an awesome new friend, spent quality time with one of my oldest, and I finished most of the necessary work on the Raleigh. Also managed to be super-productive at work.

Tomorrow I'll write more about everything, especially the two crew-mates.

Much love, right now.

The Hegel Thing

OK. we're going to try the Hegel Thing. Earlier this summer, I was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a dear friend. We'll call him David, and he is a good friend of L's from school, an all around brilliant dude who refuses to accept that he's one of the brightest people in any given situation. We were aimlessly drifting through the Greek & Roman wing, and we came upon a very early example of a sacrificial offering to the gods--a little copper statue of a person. The conversation it sparked went along much the same lines as what follows.

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OK. so. Hegel. hmm. not really a blogable topic. This will be woefully inadequate, but lets focus on the Master / Bondsperson dialectic in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

For Hegel, the Kantian separation of the self from the external world is lacking. The objects in the world around us are, as in Kant, things other than ourselves, but it is not until we can recognize this that we can, in opposition, comprehend such an entity as our self. The objective world and the subjective world necessarily inform one another, and so the Kantian separation becomes less useful.

Here's the important part. To confront an object in the world is to understand it as something other than your self. One moves beyond one’s self to approach the object. Thus a basic, purely negative notion of “self” arises. In turn, this self is able to then understand the object as an externality. The object is thus understood instrumentally, and the consciousness alienated from its object and dimly aware of the boundary that is it’s subject-hood—there are things in the world beyond its subjectivity.

Lets put that in less pretentious terms. You're walking along. You see a rock. You know this rock is not you. How? well, you pick the rock up and you throw it as far away as you can.

What happened?
Well, you're still standing where you were, unchanged. The rock is somewhere else, out of sight, or broken, or what-have-you. Point is, you've established yourself as other-than-the-rock. You don't know what you are, per se, but you know what you're not. Not rock. With me so far? Also important, you have power over this rock-thing. You have abilities, namely the ability to control the fate of a thing that is Other.

Hegel goes on to describe how in a social context we encounter another human, don't recognize that that's what we are too, but we see them throw a rock of their own, and realize that they, too, have power over others. They are other from us, so we must be other from them, oh shit - they can do to us what they did to the rock, we better do it to them first -BAM!- power dynamic, enter the whole history of western civilization stage left.

But lets focus for a second on an upshot from this that Marx in particular latches on to. Our ability to affect the material of the world around us is the crucial first step to realizing our self-ness. To actualizing, as we pretentious people like to say. Its only a few steps from there that creating things (and here's where we get into early Marx's materialism) is a crucial part to being human. Think about it for a second. If you've ever made a work of art or built anything, you have taken raw (or at least more raw) materials from around you and organized them in a way that created a product in line with your intentions. And I bet you felt pretty bad-ass. You can scoop some ore out of the ground, and forge and mix and bend and bang it into gears and pipes and chains and make yourself a bicycle. You can turn trees into houses. You can grind up flowers for pigment and paint something that expresses an emotion you had no word for. (of course we no longer get to do every step of that process, and thats Marx's alienation, but that's a whole 'nother blog post, chill out)

Ok, so are you with me so far? Important point is that making things out of the world around us is how we inform ourselves of what we are.

Now think back to this artifact David and I were looking at in the Met. It's a raw copper statue of a little person, that was made by a person in order to be offered to the Gods. Think about that.
It's saying, "I know what I am. This is what I am and I accept it." It's signing the Hegelian contract, so to speak. It's telling God / The Gods that you get it.


How cool is that?

Materialism

Just got off the phone with Leah and we were talking about Hegel and hellenistic offerings to the deities. I'll post about that later, because its a big thing I stumbled upon with a good friend a while back and have been meaning to write a paper about it (grad school?) and it'll probably do me well to hash it out here before God and everyone. But that's for later.

I was just looking at bicycle components idly online, and I realized how god damn expensive the sport is. It's phenomenally expensive. My dream bike is the Felt F75, and it's an entry level modern racer. It costs $1500. Then you look at time trial / triathlon bicycles, then you look at the upgrade for those bicycles (100 dollars to shave 8 ounces off of your rear dérailleur, anyone?) and you begin to realize, at the "upper" levels, this is a rich kid endeavor. $4000 for a bike that will be raced on the weekend for sport. Then a commuter for all other days. I wondered aloud to Malcom the other day how people stayed race-fit in the winter, and he said flat out "It's become a rich boy sport. You go spend the winter training in San Diego." And while that makes me feel a little more proud about riding 1979 British racing steel instead of my much coveted F75, it makes me feel even more gratitude to the bike scene in this city.

Looking at the Raleigh hanging next to me on the wall, looking at the parts I've added and replaced over an ongoing series of upgrades, I realize that I've gotten maintenence parts from Malcom for free rather consistently, a free set of clipless pedals from a cat I'd never met before, a saddle, rear hub and countless other parts at cost from my dear friend mattio and a set of really wonderful brakes for very little cost. In my experience, the people who ride and race bikes in NYC have been so unceasingly generous. I've heard "I'm just glad someone can use them" countless times as people I barely know give me beautiful parts to build up my bike. In a sport of $4000 carbon frames, that's a really phenomenal generosity to feel. So, thanks NYC.