pulling up the stakes

Yep, Missives has moved. Come see the new pad!

Why hello baby!

DC may not have gotten everything is was supposed to in certain areas, but it definitely got its full alotment of semi- and non-functioning people with mental health issues. Interestingly, there appears to be an almost even divide between men and women who fit into this category. For some reason this week has been all about crossing paths with people clearly in need of something (one would suspect anti-psychotic medication in most cases). The men have all been mainly of the bath-needing/public urination variety, while the women have been chatty.

Walking home from the gym earlier in the week the woman who is usually stationed on a park bench close to the sidewalk in the little park on Columbia Road where she curses out people who aren't there while drinking a fair amount of beer was up, walking purposefully down the street, and seemed to be having a moment of self reflection as she yelled:

That's right, that all she do, all day!
Sittin' in the park
Sittin' on a bench
Yellin' at people
Cursin' people out
Cursin' an' yellin' at women and men
Drinkin' beer
Drinkin' too much beer
That all she do!

She seemed quite angry about it and had a cadence not dissimilar from a riled up preacher, or James Brown.

Then on the bus yesterday a woman wearing a rather oddly assembled outfit involving stretched out, baggy, black tights, sparkly slippers and random, mismatched shirts and skirts got on and sat down a ways down the bench from me. She was very taken with the baby being held by the woman between us and she began to sing to the baby a completely tuneless song that went on forever and made very little sense. She seemed to be making it up on the spot and sewing it together from a combination of memories and everyday objects that came into her view. She declared repeatedly to the baby, "I love you! I love you! That's right, I love you!" The woman holding the child seemed angry about it rather than alarmed, though she'd seemed angry before the crazy lady had gotten on the bus, so it's hard to tell.

The woman and baby got off at 14th street and a whole new group of people piled on. The crazy lady greeted every one of them in turn, "Why hello! Good morning! How are you!" Until a man in his late thirties stepped up, earphones in his ears, tuned out from the world, he missed it when she gasped and yelled, "Hello! Hello! Hello! Why hello, baby! I love you! I love you!" He trucked right past her, oblivious, and sat down at the back of the bus. The woman lept up from her seat and ran back to sit across from him, leaning towards him to declare repeatedly, "I love you, baby! Yes, I do, I love you, baby!" The man continued being oblivious (or pretended to be) until the woman was much to up in his face to ignore. He pulled his earphones out and said something to her in a low tone. "Yes, baby, I love you!" she said.

Then the bus pulled up to my stop.

how did I get here?

Periodically I have one of those days where I repeat to myself, like an evil mantra, eight and a half years of graduate school... as in eight and a half years of graduate school and I'm cutting bloody sandwiches. That would have been what I repeated to myself this summer as, sleep deprived and stressed out, I went at forty sandwiches from Subway with a plastic knife. Did I mention that my hair is, literally, still falling out from that week?

These are the days when, in the moment I'm not mumbling to myself about the number of years I spent in gradaute school, I spend the day singing Once in a Lifetime by Talking Heads.

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself-well...how did I get here?

And you may ask yourself
How do I work this?
And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife!

And you may ask yourself
What is that beautiful house?
And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway go?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right? ...am I wrong?
And you may tell yourself
My god!...what have I done?

I tell you, if I woke tomorrow in that beautiful house in a job where people don't pee all over the front steps with such abandon that it requires an entire bottle of bleach to stem the stench, I would not look that gift horse in the mouth. Though I would wonder if I found myself behind the wheel of a large automobile with a beautiful wife, and might very well declare she was not mine.

*sigh* Eight and a half years of graduate school. What the hell? I thought I'd get awarded a tweed jacket with suede elbow patches and a pipe for finishing. Instead, I'm right back in Bushwick.

It's for you

It's for you
Originally uploaded by birdcage.

I started re-reading Camera Lucida a couple of days ago, and today I had to put it down... I was a little spooked at how interesting I found it. I read a lot of Barthes when I was writing up. Not that I figured out how to incorporate any of it into my dissertation.... he was passing out of favor and it seemed like an easy way to make an impossible task more impossible, though I thought a lot about his essays on photography, and especially about Camera Lucida. It's a problematic work (Margaret Olin has a brief but insightful article in Monuments and Memory in which she points to discrepencies in Barthes' assertion of punctum in two of his images, for example).

But discrepencies or no, many of the issues and ideas that he raises in his rather lyrical description of his interaction with his recently deceased mother by means of the medium of photography made a tremendous impression on me. I thought of many ways in which I might have incorporated some of these ideas into my dissertation, but worried that they would all end up being picked at, with the trends of academic thinking, and my own issues with regards to theory (it is not my area of expertise and felt very much like an uncovered chink in the armor). But in teaching and listening to the ways in which my students responded to photography, among other experiences, I realized that some of what Barthes is talking about speaks to the way in which most people react to photography. Consider this description:

I call "photography referent" not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph. Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse combines signs which have referents, of course, but these referents can be and are most often "chimeras." Contrary to these imitations, in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past...... what I see has been here, in this place which extends between infinity and the subject (operator or spectator); it has been here, and yet immediately separated; it has been absolutely, irrefutably present, and yet already deferred..."

I read it and I remember what fascinated me about the historical photographs that were the visual focus of my dissertation: they are indisputably the past, a record of a moment that occured at some point before now, and they bring that moment forward, compressing time, as if the moment rides into the future where it insects with my hands as I hold the image. And yet, what, exactly, was the moment that was captured? For the images I was examining the moment they captured was a constructed one: yes, it actually happened at a point in the past, but the images were akin to capturing on film a production of a play (or at least this was the argument I made), and despite being a construction they were conveyed to their audience as something closer to reportage.

It was something at work (a program that needs a reading about monuments and preservation, which prompted me to return to my dissertation readings on monuments, place, and memory) that brought me back to Barthes. It isn't the first time I've contemplated writing something on the questions that engaged me in the first place... but it has started me thinking. I'm just not sure I'm ready for it yet.

c'mon, grandma!

I overheard this sad exchange yesterday while I was walking home from work:

Older woman with walker, huffing and puffing to keep up with two kids, one around thirteen, the other around eleven, wearing school uniforms. Only the younger of the two kids spoke.

Kid: Come ON, grandma!
Grandma: (huffing) Now you slow down... you gonna have to wait... I gots to stop to buy me some-
Kid: NO! We ain't stoppin' at no liquor store!
Grandma: Oh yes we are. I gots something to get.
Kid: Come ON, Grandma! I gotta get home! We ain't stoppin' at the liquor store. (Pause. Then pleading.) I hafta get home to do my homework!

Grandma ignores him, pushes walker, huffing, towards the liquor store entrance. It made me want to cry.