mileage

Austin, Texas, I feel like writing you a love letter. Our time has passed too quickly, like those lightning bugs I chased down a hill in Florence a year ago. Sighs all around. But it's not too sad, really, because I'll be back soon and a lot. And who knows, maybe UT will act smart and post a job search next year...for a history professor well-versed in all things southern and revolutionary.

Right now I'm back in nomad-mode, prepping for another epic roadtrip across the South. This means:

-finally tossing these dusty boxes full of random paperwork and forgotten items I will probably never miss.

-getting better gas mileage because, revelation, they've been hanging out in the trunk of my Highlander for a year.

-spending as much time as possible with Miss Eleanor. She's getting tall. And she's talking. And she's starting to play house and hold my hand when we walk and snicker with real irony in her little eyes. I will miss her so much.

-on the topic of mileage...getting as much out of my last few weeks here as I possibly can. I've got a metaphorical last tank left for now, and I need it to last and be great. Every day I continue to meet people here who amaze me. Just when I think I've set a new standard for great people in my life...boom, it gets shattered and one-upped again. Austin is like that.

More to come as I move back Georgia-way, renew my deep-South roots, and continue to battle my rounds with twenty-something angst.

xo

History is boring...

...according to my dad. Well, according to him, the kind of history I write is boring. Today he threw a zinger of an opinion at me that WILL make it into the introduction of my dissertation (err...eventual book, you'd better believe it). Here's what I jotted down from the exchange:

[I was sitting on the patio of a nondescript coffee shop when the reality of this book project sunk in deeper than it ever had before. I sat across the table from my father, who is not just one, but two, generations older than me. He is from hearty stock. His ancestors journeyed slow like molasses over the last couple of centuries, starting in North Carolina and eventually packing it in along the piney woods corridor of North Louisiana—where oil replaced cotton as King in the early twentieth century. He won't listen to my reasonings, but I remain convinced that so many of his relatives have lived into their nineties because the Reed family patriarchs taught their offspring to eat food raw and fresh from the earth. To this day, my father bites into an onion as if it were the juiciest of green apples.

A visitor in a modernized and liberal city, he sat in Austin on this April day quite frustrated with his daughter's penchant for writing what he deems the “boring” history. He is a tried and true conservative old-timer in a technologically-driven and youthful world, a baby-boomer whose parents ate shredded cabbage during the Great Depression. I remain forever frustrated by his stubborn inability to see the historical and cultural connections between then and now. Why he cannot understand that his family represented the very demographic that government-funded programs helped from the doldrums in the 1930s, that baffles me.

But something he said this afternoon struck me as surprisingly astute. After asking how “my paper” (i.e. my dissertation) was coming along, he shook his head with a smile when I replied, “Well. Right now I'm writing about the actual paper-making process and the workers in the mills in Georgia.” I huffed and puffed, of course, and demanded to know why that was so funny.

He answered quickly. “You write about poor people, not interesting people.”

There. There it was. The hitch that breaks off for all of us historians trying to make a name for ourselves with students and with a public that always wants the sensational (and often white and often wealthy) over the quietly triumphant. “How is poverty boring?” I replied, passion in my voice. “How is the era of the Great Depression possibly boring?” I was shocked at the blunt nature of his final reply.

“The Great Depression is not boring. But in the South it...was. In the South it was. If I read about the Great Depression, I want to read about Wall Street stock brokers jumping out of windows in New York City.”

In that moment I became more convinced than ever before that American culture teaches a lot of us to imagine ourselves as more...elite than we actually, um, are. It's why every romantic comedy takes place in some upper-middle-class house that looks like Pottery Barn vomited all over it. Or why some politicians can get away with selling tax cuts for the wealthy to the...poor. (Does that make any sense?) And, relevant to my career, it explains why the popular history on the front shelves of Barnes and Noble is still covered in white wigs and white Whigs and World War II cannons. People want the exciting, the heroic. They also want the whitewashed, the neat historical packages.

What I write about is actually everything my dad's family went through in the South...first rural poverty, then the hope of industrialization and modernization, and then, and only then, some level of middle class-esque prosperity. I fear he's lost touch with some of his roots (even though he's still eating them). Har har.]

Bargain hunting...

...for books. Life along Lamar (well, almost along...I have to jump up a block or two from my house to be ON the street) has taught me several little rituals for my life here in Austin. One of them involves jumping in my car at 8:30pm on random Sunday evenings, headed for HalfPrice Books, even though I know they close at 9 and will be slightly irked by my presence. Also I usually get tacos on the way home.

I haven't bought a Kindle yet. I'm tempted. I'm such a nerd among nerds that the idea of having that much literature at the touch of my little fingerpads...harumph, I guess I'm simply delaying the inevitable. HalfPrice reminds me why I am, though. They have me back in the bookstore, hunting through bins of forgotten paperbacks, saying a little prayer that I'll find a novel that will change my perspective about something. Or one that might just move me. It's not time yet for all these words to be in some Wi-Fi ether.

I'd given up on that experience during grad school, oddly enough. All my books for comps came from Amazon. And novels...I didn't have time for many novels for a good four years. But I'm back now, dog-earing and underlining.

Here's what I stumbled upon last night for three dollars. I'm usually good at spotting winners, via covers and blurbs on the back, even if I know nothing about them or the author. The New York Times says this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/27/books/review/ORourke.html?pagewanted=2

Edgelands

Long time, no see, my bloggy friends.

The Guardian recently reviewed a new book by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons called Edgelands. You can check out the full review here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/19/edgelands-farley-symmons-roberts-review. But here's the most explanatory excerpt--

The zone goes by different names, few of them complimentary. Victor Hugo called it "bastard countryside". The landscape theorist Alan Berger called it "drosscape". The artist Philip Guston called it "crapola". And the environmentalist Marion Shoard called it "edgeland", which she defined as "the interfacial interzone between urban and rural". The edgelands are the debatable space where city and countryside fray into one another. They comprise jittery, jumbled, broken ground: brownfield sites and utilities infrastructure, crackling substations and pallet depots, transit hubs and sewage farms, scrub forests and sluggish canals, allotments and retail parks, slackened regulatory frameworks and guerilla ecologies.

For starters, this is what I spend my academic days writing about. This book is about edgelands in modern England, but the concept in my case applies to between-spaces in coastal and piney woods Georgia--places where trees are grown and hauled out on dusty trucks by southerners who are guided and misguided by an urban economy and culture. My edgelanders are people like writer Janisse Ray (b. 1962), whose Ecology of a Cracker Childhood documented her days growing up in a dump (literally), raised by parents who existed on the fringes of modern society by collecting its car parts and other random artifacts. Luckily she escaped from Baxley, Georgia, for college and graduate degrees and publishing houses. But she went back as an adult and tried to call attention to her people, some of whom were slipping through the cracks.

This blog really isn't about anything academic. I just had to set up the concept. One of Farley and Symmons' goals is to remove the stigma from edgelands. I guess I want to do the same for the edgelands in our own lives.

A good friend sent me the link to this book a couple of weeks ago, and ever since I've been formulating a theory. If edgelands are where a city caves in on itself (and/or discovers itself through its lost souls, as these authors suggest), then aren't the metaphorical edgelands of our relationships, jobs, or periods in our lives, aren't they where we find both our own flaws and victories? Isn't the middle ground where we discover the most about ourselves?

Think about it. Say you end a relationship, or a friendship. Say you leave a job. Or lose a family member. That part of your life has deteriorated, and often quite suddenly. There are things, once vibrant and living and breathing, that fall to ruin both physically and figuratively. If that part of your life was a city block, it got blown up. Or shut down because of a bedbug infestation. So you start wandering other places, but your brain and your heart may still be rooted in the darker place. I don't want to get too deep here. Sorry. But you see what I mean? You're faced with either dealing with a broken and dank infrastructure that still works (but is ugly) or packing it all up and starting fresh somewhere else. And that usually has to happen slowly, whenever it happens.

I'll be blunt. I think it's been important for me to FORM this theory because I am very much aware that I'm in an edgeland of my own. Not a dusty one. I'm on a newer freeway...but one that leads everywhere and nowhere. My infrastructure is a suitcase. Literally. Anyway, I truly believe that the people I've encountered even in the most nomadic and transitional spots in my life...well they've taught me the most. I may run the risk of sounding all hipster here, but honestly I've learned more about myself during late evenings at a dive bar with a Shiner in hand (having abandoned writing for the day and unabashedly aching for a little laziness) than during those days that my academic efforts are straight as an arrow.

You can't live well in an edgeland for long. Edgelands are edgelands because the black and white exist somewhere else, somewhere we reach for. But cheers to them, because they make us who we are.

Here's a Decemberists' take on an edgeland of sorts--the transition into summer. I cried listening to this song this morning. Because this summer will take me, in many ways, back home to a home that will look so very different.

"Here's a hymn, to welcome in the day, heralding a summer's early sway. And all the bulbs all coming, to begin. The thrushes bleating battle with the wrens, disrupts my reverie again. Pegging clothing on the line, training the jasmine how to vine, up the arbor to your door...and more. Your standing on the landing with the war, you shouldered all the night before."

[This blog is dedicated--without any ironies or any winks--to someone who will know who they are. And they're (you're) just wonderful.]

Introducing a dream come true...

For years I've been planning something I always referred to as the "mixtape project." A week ago, I made it happen. I gave it a cyber home.

Simply put, it's a space for people to post (through me, as a narrator and moderator) their "ultimate playlists"--the group of songs that define them, that they love, that lift their spirits, anything. Anything goes. I've already had great response, and on top of my guinea pig post I've already added two new playlists from old friends in Athens, Georgia.

Best case? This becomes a living, breathing webspace where people interact, learn. Worst case? People get introduced to new music outside their comfort zones. Win-win.

Please visit:

http://www.ultimateplaylistproject.wordpress.com

[I jumped over to wordpress because the layout there is so stellar. Sorry Blogspot :(]

ring toss

I've worn the same gold and onyx ring on my right hand for eight years. It's the ring my dad bought for my mom the day I was born (which makes it quite possibly the only material item that literally celebrates my birth). My entire childhood I saw her gesturing wildly (for, she always gestured wildly) with it on, burning a visual into my head that seemed best memorialized by taking it over myself. I get at least two compliments a day on this ring, from baristas at Starbucks or women in the grocery line at Randall's. It looks nothing like anything anyone wears, nothing like something you could pick out of a case at the department store. It's fancy and glaring and original, just like she was. People never believe me when I tell them I haven't removed it in almost eight years. I haven't. I shower with it, work with it on when I shouldn't (shout out to line cooks at the Steeping Room for fishing it quickly out of a box of lemons a few weeks ago, whew). It traveled with me around Italy. I've always said that if and when I get married, I'll melt the band down and wear it as my wedding ring.

Two nights ago I dreamt that after a series of long conversations (with a man I couldn't identify come morning), I decided I must remove it. I remember feeling startled in the dream. The next morning I woke up with a naked finger. It lay rather innocently on my bedside table, ceremoniously removed during, apparently, a fit of sleeping-moving. I had to be at work at 7am that morning. I was flustered and upset about it and decided that just in case the universe had some major message for me...I would leave it off at least temporarily.

It's strange to think how such a minor adjustment could make me feel different about myself. A regular customer of mine at the tea house noted the ring's absence yesterday. As I was putting a casserole in the oven last night I almost forgot what had happened and was fearful for a full ten seconds that I'd dropped it in the dish. I have small hands, and they look so bare now. I've been going on and on this new year about making small changes in my life to feel happier. Maybe letting go of this one thing for awhile is symbolic of that.

My sister had interesting insight into the whole thing as well. She sees the bigger picture, always. "Maybe," she said while folding laundry, "just maybe it's not about the ring at all. And maybe it's not about anything you've actually been through recently or have been worried about directly. Maybe it's a sign to let go of how you've always processed things, to let go of the things you worry about within yourself."

Bam. Maybe. I don't know. But that ring does symbolize loss. And maybe wearing it equated dwelling on it, dwelling on things about myself defined by that loss.

I'm in my post-ring era. For a little while a least.

cold snap

It's uncomfortably cold here in Texas this week. Blackouts are rolling around Austin like a pinball. I'm chugging coffee like it's beer. Our cat is nesting under a comforter as I type. It's so weird.

Sunday, in contrast, was the most beautiful day any of us had seen in awhile. I was outside with my dad, my sister, and baby Eleanor that afternoon sporting my favorite sunglasses and a smile that could have conquered anything. Indian summer is what it felt like, something out of a novel, some day in the life of a loveable character within which he or she realizes what the next chapter of their life might be. That day dug its heels into me deep. It was clarity I didn't even know I was asking for.

It'd be silly to imagine that the cold snap which immediately followed was just for me, to wake me up and jolt me upright, make me pay attention to everything around me. But it does seem odd that such sea changes have happened in my tiny little life alongside such drastic changes on the thermometer. I like it because it feels like a movie somehow. It feels important. That makes me smile.

Either way, it got me thinking about the word "snap." Walker Percy has great things to say about language...notably that all you have to do is repeat a word (even one you use regularly) over and over for it to suddenly sound odd and/or powerful. Percy claims that we let words rule us. We think about ourselves and those around us in direct relation to the words we employ. Words randomly placed...they are like songs on a mix-tape. They're windows into the truth. "Snap," I decided, perfectly exemplifies this dark, cold week here in Austin, TX. Thousands of people woke up in the dark this morning, snap. I stubbed my toe on a freezing cold bathtub edge, snap. Pull you coat tighter, snap. Say goodbye to something you absolutely loved, snap. Whether it's the weather or a feeling or a moment. Snap.

Cheers to words and trying to find the right ones.

Stay warm, Spring is coming soon.

xoxoLA