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The sumup is here.
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O Emmanuel, you are our king and judge, the One whom the peoples await and their Savior. O come and save us, Lord, our God.
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I will not be posting over the next ten days, and I don’t expect I will be spending much time reading your blogs either. I want to spend a little time away, to visit with family and friends, to tool around Flint and Zanesville and New York, and not worry about the books to be read, stories written, or posts blogged.
As is typical, I feel like I’ve dropped the ball with this blog over the last several weeks (months). I’ve had such high hopes for it, not as a public forum (though I would like it to become a more articulate voice for all things Gothic and Funky) but also as an inconsequential but complete record of my own thoughts and day-to-day activities. I don’t know if I’ve expressed it here, but I really maintain two journals. One is very spare and written longhand: my personal journal, where I only write what I’m not comfortable sharing at large. The other is this blog, and I really hope to archive it as a record for myself in years to come and to share with friends and family in future times. That’s a lot of information to process, and while I’ve kept up the “daily” posts, and have written some on religion and politics, there are many things I’ve never gotten to:
BODY:
– December 8. The Immaculate Conception (~ “original sin” is something activated by our own sins, past, present, and future… if we find ourselves in grace the “originality” is irrelevant.)
– December 11. Gaudete Sunday (~ The limitation of God in choosing a single perspective is a necessary aspect of identifying with and becoming one with humanity. Our own limitations give our actions force, meaning, and relevance.)
– December 12. The Feast of the Lady of Guadalupe (~ God’s lack of a single ethnicity/race/gender is a doorway to all sorts of observations typically ignored by the status quo, with widespread implications in favor of universal salvation, and the common threads between religions/philosophies. As long as we are all seeking out…)
CONCEPT:
– Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Go see it. Not as good as #3, but just as viscerally and emotionally engaging.
– Brokeback Mountain. I haven’t seen it. Want to.
– King Kong. I haven’t seen it. Want to.
– Memoirs of a Geisha. I haven’t seen it. Want to.
– The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Watching it again.
– The Lords of the Rhymes. Download them. Awesome. Invokes the lyric “light up like a silmaril.”
– “Lazy Sunday” SNL. Download that, too.
EVENT:
– Alito.
– Bush’s spying on American Citizens.
– The torture fiasco.
– Ongoing drama between Delphi, GM, and the UAW. (I *will* be posting on this shortly).
– New York City’s three day MTA strike.
DIARY:
– Going Home. How home is home, how I’m relieved and excited to be going back to the midwest, if even for only a week. How I will be seeing family on all sides, and Sam, and perhaps the Crawfords and others. How to mwe, tall buildings and density is not my favorite substitute for pastures and trees, though there’s plenty of power in tall buildings and density. How I regret that there isn’t time for a trip to Chicago, and it’s been tearing me apart all month. Streets that I miss by name: Kenmore, Kenwood, McKinley, Gold, Brighton, Corunna, Miller, Court, Pierson, Flushing, 59th, Kimbark, 57th, Lake Shore Drive, James P. Cook and Robert T. Longway, 55th, 53rd, 51st, West Main, Maple, Dorchester, Ballenger, Friendship, University, Dort, Liberty, Ellis, and Beecher.
– Coming Home. How not home is home, how while New York can never be Flint or Chicago or Zanesville, it can be home for awhile, and maybe I can settle into that finally, a little. How I finally felt, during the last week, a small twinge of alliance to this place where I am living these two years. I was in the midst of the MTA strike, when I was walking about ten miles each day, crossing a vast windy river at several hundred people with some ten thousands of pedestrians. Later, a New York Times article discussed the media coverage of the event (as ideal, being a 24-hour coverage disaster with essentially now death or carnage) and observed that tantamount to public response to the events were the “objective” take of New Yorkers themselves, that is: “complete astonishment with their own resilience.” As usual, this city thinks quite highly of itself, which has always had my grudging respect. This time, the notion didn’t seem self-congratulatory so much as genuinely startled. There’s something adolescent in this response, something endearing. It was a response to which I did not roll my eyes, and with which I might even associate myself.
Keep walking, New York. You can see for miles and miles. You can see for miles and miles. You can see for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles.
Also, I’ve fallen behind in three blogs which I usually follow religiously: Tom, and Gemma, and Damien. They are wonderfully prolific and in-depth, which always challenges me during a busy week or month, but I strongly urge you to check in with them over the next several week, as they’re usually intense and full of brain-stretching brainfodder.
This is what I haven’t done.
Now I’ll tell you what I have:
I’ve maintained this blog more-or-less since settling in two months ago. I hosted my sister-in-law for Thanksgiving and visited my brother in Rochester for his recital, I’ve gone to church, I’ve worked at two jobs, I’ve completed all nine credits in my first semester at New School. I’m on track to keep my scholarship and get my MFA and Creative Writing teaching certification on time. I played a game of Risk. I hosted a ghost-story party. I went to Frederic Tuten’s innovative fiction workshops. And I’ve read these books:
– Peasants and other Short Stories, Anton Chekhov
– Paris Stories, Mavis Gallant
– The Chaneysville Incident, David Bradley
– Mao II, Don DeLillo
– A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro
– The Emigrants, W.G. Sebald
– The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
– Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
– This is Not a Novel, David Markson
– And thirty-nine workshop submissions.
I’m proud of myself this semester.
But not so proud to kick back for long.
I’ll be back in one week. Mark me.
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In the meantime, here we are, the day before Christmas Eve. Have a Happy Christmas, Hannukah, and New Years. The world is changing fast. It’s when we press the pause button and look at the lights, voices, textures in motion around us that we can really apprehend where and who we are. I’m looking forward to taking a few moments of stillness.
Happy Holidays to all!
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