A Time For...

I've never extended my domain in the blogosphere beyond the realm of personal anecdotes, travel updates, creative writing, or, occasionally, a brief review or two. I've certainly never used it to advocate for any sort of political or social cause, especially not with tacky, pre-fabricated slogans or images.

This post is an experiment otherwise.

I'm learning that, out of the many issues in this world that obviously call for our attention, it's sometimes necessary to pick and choose the ones that speak most clearly to our current experience and then to do what we can, even if that action is not what we would ideally prefer. The options that are available to us in regards to any issue, however shabby or incomplete, are nonetheless available to us as horizons of action and further learning. Perhaps more than I've realized in the past, virtue demands (along with truth, beauty, and our neighbors) an attention that is capable and willing to surpass just "looking" and engage our world with various forms of movement, whether this means speaking, making, sharing, destroying, or other modes of doing. So with that in mind, there's a chance I might be "doing some more things" with this blog in the future.

Open Ends

People of the South Wind (Section 1 and 2)

1
One day Sun found a new canyon.
It hid for miles and ran far away,
then it went under a mountain. Now Sun
goes over but knows it is there. And that
is why Sun shines—it is always looking.
Be like the sun.

2
Your breath has a little shape—
you can see it cold days. Well,
every day it is like that, even in summer.
Well, your breath goes, a whole
army of little shapes. They are living
in the woods now and are your friends.
When you die—well, you go with
your last breath and find the others.
And in open places in the woods
all of you are together and happy.

- William Stafford

*

My 3-day Greyhound adventure with Rebecca turned out to be a slow and moderately enjoyable stretch of time and country. We played cards (I lost horribly) and ate PB & J and watched Freaks and Geeks and, the next thing I knew, we parted ways all the way "back east" in Cleveland, Ohio—farewell eastern Oregon, Salt Lake City, Denver, Omaha, and Chicago! Upon arrival, I ate lots of treats and slept for about 12 hours before beginning the just-as-strenuous adventure of sorting through all of my boxes of books (some of which received some water damage just 2 weeks before my return! poor cookbooks...) and helping my parents to clean and revamp sections of their crumbly house. It's nice to feel useful after so much indulgent time doing my own thing, drifting connectionless 'cross the continent. Plus, in a week or two, I should have earned enough moolah to cover my first month's rent! So (I'm telling myself), things seem to be looking up, or at least horizontal, for the time being. A normal pace and some everyday concerns will be good for me in the weeks and months to come. Living is living—sounds good to me!

A Weekend on North Manitou Island

Friday

7:45AM
- well, after getting back from the farm at 10:OOPM, Brooks and I decided to stop procrastinating and pack our figure out menus and equipment and pack up for our end-of-summer excursion to North Manitou Island. as could be expected, things didn't come together as quickly or effortlessly as we half-expected, and so as midnight and then 2:00AM passed, our only real option was to stay up, depart for the ferry in Leelanau sometime before 5:00AM. it was my first time north of Muskegon, and I was amazed at how different and beautiful some of the drive was. things were definitely different than Grand Rapids, and at times it even felt like we had left the Midwest altogether. Brooks slept for a little bit before the sun came up, and we got into Leelanua with enough time to wander around for a bit. it used to be an old fishing village, so there are still wonderful traces of that left amongst all the craft stores and other tourist junk. at any rate, we decided to eat at the only place close and open, some cafe' named after a bird, I think, and are getting ready to head over to the ferry for departure. oh, and here's a copy of the weekend's menu:

Day #1:
breakfast - greasy breakfast and coffee at a diner by the ferry landing in Leelenau
lunch - hummus and pita, snacks
dinner - curried couscous

Day #2:
breakfast - omelettes
lunch - sandwiches
dinner - spaghetti

Day #3:
breakfast - oatmeal and goji berries
lunch - quiches from a deli in Traverse City (this item filled in post-return)

1:28PM
- we just went through "orientation" with a ranger, looked around the village a little, and then hiked about 3.5 miles to the cemetery for hummus-lunch and a break. there are lots of little stone crosses guarding graves from 1938 and earlier. we sat in a nice green clearing with brush and shrubs, small dunes, and the lake in the background, but other people that took the ferry over with us started showing up, so we fled the scene for less populated spaces.

8:00PM
- we spend most of the afternoon hiking aimlessly around Dimmick's Point, skirting along the waterfront barefoot, riling up the hordes of seagulls. we crossed from the mainland to the side of the island open to Lake Michigan, which meant more active water and a lake-ier smell. however, we realized then that we were about to run out of water, so we were forced to cut back across the dunes to get to fresher water and less lake-slime-soup water. going back felt like a desert or apocalypstic wasteland, with rolling sands and shrubs and ancient telephone poles and fenceposts jutting out like dead trees or crucifixes. somewhat turned around with no sure trail to follow, hungry, and exhausted from our literally sleepless night before, we pitch tent in the first secluded clearing we find. I'm slightly disappointed by the lack of a stunning dune-top vista, but then again I don't need to always strive for such romantic settings, do I? we ate dinner and tried to play cards, but I annihilated Brooks (see score below). after Brook's forfeiture, we immediately passed out for what could have been hours or days, but was in fact only about a half hour. at any rate, waking up after that brief nap was surreal and mystical feeling--after exhaustion and waking up dazed in a clearing on an island, how did I get here? ah, this is wonderful.

and the squirrels! oh, buffalo squirrel!

Rummy 500

Brooks Ryan
50 215
+ 5 35
= 55 250
+ -5 80
= 50 330
+ 140 95
= 190 425
(BROOKS
FORFEITS)

Saturday

3:26PM
- lunch somewhere near Tamarack Lake/Pond. last night we ran around on the dunes and took beach pictures. bed at about 9:00, which may be the earliest I've had since I was a little kid. the coyotes seemed to be everwhere, or at least fast-moving along a wide circumference. from our tent, they sounded almost like neighborhood dogs, although wilder and a bit creepier. sqiurrels or bison (everything sounds bigger in the dark, from inside a tent) scampered around the tent almost all night. we slept through 5:00AM and 7:30AM alarms until about 10:30AM, which gave us a total of about 13 horus of sleep. by the time we got on the trail it was noon and just heating up. we hurried across the bottom of the island, discovering a huge patch of blackberries for a snack, got a nice dune-top view of the lake, and wound our way up the west side of the island, through wide, grassy clearings and past a few ruins of homesteads. we tried to cut through an unmaintained, but it ended in a clearing, so we decided to eat lunch and must now decide whether to backtrack a ways or blaze a trail through who-knows-what.

9:10PM
- in the dark, in the tent, nearing sleep, our trailblazing didn't go so well, so we were forced to backtrack to the main path and cover another 5 or so miles on the path that loops up toward Swenson's Place. we ran out of water mid-hike, but finally made it back across the island, pumped another load of water from the lake, and set up camp at a much nicer location than last night: on the edges of a clearing with a through-trees view of the lake, and just a mile down the beach from the village, the dock, and the gorgeous poplar trees that surround them.

Sunday

7:15AM
- we take breakfast on the beach, with the sun setting a fire into the water that stretches down to wear we sit with our oatmeal. the sun has turned from pink to fierce yellow as we waited for our water to boil. we are pretty much smack-dab in the middle of the island's slightly crescent shape. forward to our right is Dimmick's Point, where we slept two nights ago (it looks quite far away after yesterday's 14-mile hike), and beyond that I can make out the faint shape of the Empire Dunes on the mainland. to our left is the gorgeous ranger station, nestled right up against the shore and surrounded by the poplars. on both sides of us, the arms of the beach curve forward as if they were reaching back toward the rising sun.

9:30AM
- we made it back to the dock/village/ranger station by coming along some of the nicest stretch of trail we've hiked so far, with the lake coming through the thin trees on our right, quite varied foliage and plant life, and finally on our left, the remains of shackes, summer houses, and a school all sinking back beneath the tide of gravity, mosses, and roots.

back at the village, we've sat at picnic tables, waiting for the ferry to arrive. a pony-tailed ranger gave us some coffee and a bit of conversation. Brooks tried to teach me some German fragments, but as I don't do too well with speaking, I just tried to jot down a few key items:

10 Cool German Words, with selected helpful phrases (please forgive any inaccuracies, mispellings, or typographical deficiencies):
hugelish - hilly
essen - food
baum - tree
apfel - apple / abfel - trash
haus - house
bot - boat
katz - cat
strabe - street
tisch - table
schuh - shoe

Wie heisen sie schoener Frau? - What's your name, beautiful woman?
Wo ist du? - Where are you?
Sie ist meine Freundin. - She's my girlfriend.

after German class, we took care of some personal business in the outhouses (much better than digging another hole) and are trying to absorb the vibrant colors around us: the polarized light off the water, the flickering sun through leaves and branches. it's quite chilly with the wind off the water, which along with the first smoldering of orange and brown in the treetops, reminds us that it is indeed already the second morning of September. what a great way to begin not just a month but school year, with a whole new load of books and business lying just around the corner, just another morning or two from this one.

The Voice

Finally, here's a copy of the paper I wrote for my linguistics class about "The Voice," the phonological expression of me and my friends' high-school sense of humor, interaction, personality, and reality even. I'm not sure what my prof thought about the whole thing, but I guess I feigned mastery, intelligence, and confidence enough to get an A-. Also, completing this project brought a lot of closure to that whole stage of my life, a good mix of rememberance and farewell-to. So in that personal aspect, it was definitely worth the undertaking.

some notes: 1) the title is supposed to be substantially over the top, 2) please ignore the academic B-S, 3) the interview excerpts are the best

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“The Voice of Reason, the Voice of Irreverence, and Other Very Human Articulations: A Case Study in Adolescent Slang, Identity, and Personality”

Ryan Weberling
Professor W. Vande Kopple
English 334--Linguistics
April 27, 2007


Introduction

Beginning in the freshman year of my high-school career, those in my immediate peer group developed a mode of interaction centered on a system of slang we developed and utilized, dubbed “the Voice” by those involved with and affected by it. The Voice, as such, was more than just a lexicon of slang, but involved semantics, style and function, mannerisms and non-verbal commu-nication, and especially, as indicated by the name it was given, phonology or, more broadly, the intonation of the speaker’s voice. In this paper, I will provide a brief overview, history, and analysis of the system we used. The content will arise primarily from interviews carried out with those who were in-volved with the Voice, with occasional reference to relevant sources and ideas. However, the main effort of this project is to convey, through one limited case study, the extent to which people’s language, specifically the unique ways in which individuals and groups speak, affects identities, personalities, and relationships.

Overview and History

How was this mode of interaction developed, and how did it spread? “It all started when two of us were picking beans in my family’s garden,” recalls Nathan, one of the original speakers. “My dad was making us pick these beans, and we were really angry about that, and we just started making fun of stuff. I believe the first phrase was ‘beans, beans, beans... what are we gonna do with all them beans?’” The nature of these beginnings already reveal the commonplace capacity of language to demarcate boundaries, to establish space for restless juvenile identities, and to express otherwise restricted sentiments. As Teresa Labov notes, “Adolescents make particular use of the second characteristic in using slang to differentiate themselves from adults” (340).

This way of speaking soon caught on with others in the social group at church and school, at first remaining limited to those in the immediate sphere of contact. Soon, though, it began to permeate into other related groups and demographics. Two interviewees recalled the spread of the Voice:

Nathan: There were some people that picked up on it that might be more expected--younger brothers, girlfriends, and so on--but there were other cases, some people we had marginal contact with, like at coffee shops or church that we’d see once a week or once a month, but we came known by it, and these other people even started doing it.

Derek: People older than us, like college students, started doing it as well. But the weirdest was when our parents started trying to imitate us.”

Nathan: I think that’s when we started to realize that it had gone too far...and that was the beginning of the challenge to get rid of the Voice. We would make bets and pay each other a dollar or two if we slipped into using it again. It was hard not to.”

The Voice, or the social dynamics created by its use, had a dramatic influence on those who spoke it. John, who was part of the first generation of speakers, recalls his experiences:

There was a group of us who didn’t even look like we’d be friends, but we could relate with [the Voice]...[and] it contributed to tying us all together more than almost anything else. It defined our life for almost three years. And it still does, in a small way. When we get together, we still do it. When I meet new people, I tell them my sense of humor is based on this weird thing we used to do.

Although use of the Voice was at first spurred on and incited by members of the group at every possible occasion, it soon began to dominate the group’s interactions to an undesired extent. Again, John recalls this shift:

"It was a sense of humor we all agreed on, and it ended up controlling us...It’s not something we could just fluff off. It was some sort of psychological... addiction. We couldn’t kick it. We needed to have an alter-ego to be funny, to relate. When it got to the point where we couldn’t get ourselves or each other to stop doing it, that’s when realized: some people our age did drugs or had sex... well, we had the Voice.
It turned against us. There was no way to get angry with each other. You couldn’t get upset because as soon as you brought an issue up, others could invoke the Voice to completely shut you down. There was never any arguing or fighting and therefore no real resolutions, because the Voice made getting mad seem ridiculous...we couldn’t have any emotions, even if we got really excited, the Voice would just cancel it out...On a positive side, it kept us from getting too serious, but it wasn’t healthy to not be capable of dealing with each other. Everything just got made fun of.”

All of the original speakers have since graduated from high-school and moved on to college or various other post-high-school pursuits. Since then, though, the Voice has been transmitted at a substantial level through two high-school “generations” (that is, two sets of students four years apart, such that one set is graduating when the younger set is entering high school). There have also been observations, much to the disbelief of those initially involved, of isolated occurrences of use by those as much as ten years younger than the original speakers--the equivalent of nearly three such “generations.” This staying power continues to reflect on the inclination or even the necessity for young people explore the entirety of their surroundings, whether linguistically, relationally, or critically.

Analysis

On a more technical level, of what did this system of interaction consist? Nathan explains, “It’s hard to understand or explain to other people, but I think for us who experienced it, it was such a clear, noticeable thing.” What began as a loose imitation of Southern dialect shifted drastically into a wide range of variations. Interviewees mentioned such variations as “pompous,” ”playful or joyful,” “violent,” “sour and grumbling,” “depressed,” and most prominently, “sarcastic” and “awkward.” This wide range of descriptions makes sense in light of the fact that the majority of interviewees noted their use of the Voice as a means for displaying emotions and personalities.

The Voice itself was characterized by an intonation that was varied but always recognizable. Derek describes it as such: Everyone had their own take on it, but it was always a continual thing...There are other people I’ve met at college who have their own crazy voices or jokes, but there’s a difference between just ‘a voice’ and ‘THE Voice.’” Non-verbal communication had as much of a defining quality as intonation. Speaking in the Voice required a large, crucial vocabulary of gestures, facial expressions, and mannerisms.

“It was so many things combined together: facial expressions, voice intonation, body posture was crucial, hands in the pockets and lips protruding--and the most important part was the delivery, raising the head and then slamming it back down, like an elephant.” You had to frown until the two points of your lower lip are as far down as possible, hopefully getting down to the chin line, where you’re making this Godfather-like, old Marlin Brando look--an old, haggard, moaning and grumbling face.

As flourishing young speakers, we certainly took advantage of what W.F. Bolton describes as the “productive” and “arbitrary” nature of language (Bolton, 62-62). We possessed the social and creative energy that Felix Rodriguez asigns to our demographic: “Of all social groups,” he writes, “the young are the most prone to the use and renovation of slang and unconventional language. They exhibit great social dynamism and are receptive to changes in fashion: in clothes, look, style, and also in speech.”

Our lexicon, as it were, expanded and was formed by a process of bricolage drawing from various sources in pop culture, inside jokes, and everyday experiences. A large portion of the phrases we adapted could be included in the category of “non-propositional” language specifically in Van Lancker Sidtis’ categories of 1) conventional expresions, 2) expletives, 3) indirect requests, and especially, 4) pause fillers (Van Lancker Sidtis, 3). On the other hand, though, many of the terms, phrases, and ideas were assembled into an informal and fluid lexical collection with nearly infinite semantic applications. There was a way of, John explains, of “turning lines from movies into phrases. If you used the Voice for the delivery of a line, it could be applicable to anything, and it would become something totally different, with totally different meanings.” Nathan agrees, recalling, “On one hand, it was just a goofy thing...but we could use [the Voice] whenever, to express almost anything with these phrases.”

Several examples stand out. One instance of a “found phrase” that found wide use and application is “razzle dazzle,” which was taken from a popular basketball video game. The phrase, originally used to highlight slam dunks, was employed in its new context as a greeting, an exclamation, a curse, or quite regularly, to mock political figures. The term ‘Puffy Biffalo’, a coinage supposedly based on sound symbolism, “stood for anything that was laying on the ground, Cheetos snack food, and trees--or it could be used as an insult.” A more systematic feature of the Voice was a naming process of adding an “-o” suffix to proper names and titles. For example, speakers Derek, Nathan, and Stephen became known as “Debo,” “Nato,” and “Stevo.”

Many items were created out of the immediate social context. “Southern style,” once used as a reference to the quality of one family’s hospitality, became a descriptor for any action that needed to be done in a bombastic manner. An example of functional shift is the use of the word “pamcake”--first used to describe the singed but under-cooked, soggy-with-cottage-cheese breakfast creations of one of our mothers--as a verb meaning roughly, “to embarrass oneself” or, more generally, “to make a mess of a situation.”

It is also helpful to consider the Voice in terms of its style and function. The Voice fits well the “casual” and the “intimate” categories of Martin Joos’ styles of conversation (Daniels, 50). Casual language, in Joos’ terminology, often features ellipsis, or “the shorthand of shared meaning,” and slang--the expression of these meanings “in a way that defines the group and excludes others.” Likewise, the intimate style contains language that is “personal, fragmentary, and implicit,” “a kind of language which ‘fuses two separate personalities’” (Daniels, 50). In comparison to these considerations, many interviewees noted the capacity of the Voice to establish their identity within and without the group, and a few also described the Voice as a sort of character or “alter-ego” that emerged from the group and could be taken on.

Summary and Conclusion

Why is it that this bizarre mode of communication spread so far and endured so long? I believe such a phenomenon as the Voice could occur because there is a vital interaction between language and both individual and group identity. “[Our native language] is the code we use to communicate in the most powerful and intimate experiences of our lives. It is a central part of our personality, an expression of who we are and wish to be” (Daniels, 56). The same considerations that apply to native languages or dialects are relevant to the slang of social groups, especially of youth for whom language is an exciting avenue for the expression of their maturing ideals and self-concepts.

The interviews I conducted were very revealing as to the motivating factors and the forces that drove speakers of the Voice to such extremes. “We were in a humorless town, where the constant jokes and conversation were just degrading women and getting drunk,” says one interviewee. “I think the Voice developed as a way to disconnect with that, an escape.” This fits well with the assessment of Felix Rodriguez, who explains that young people “may use slang as a countercultural tool, as a weapon against established authority and conventions” (247). Many interviewees agreed with the idea of the Voice as part of the struggle against established norms and expectations:

"Part of it was the way we looked at our high-school culture, our city and surrounding context, and so much of what we saw seemed ridiculous. The Voice provided an escape. We saw so much we thought was pointless or absurd--high-school drama, sex and drugs, the drive for a good career. It helped us establish our place in the world. We couldn’t make fun of certain things, things about ourselves or just unmentionable or taboo things, and the Voice was this objective alter-ego we could use to do that.”

Thus, the Voice was crucial to establishing definitions, evaluations, and boundaries amongst individuals, the group, and the surrounding components of society.

The most profound effects of the Voice, however, were on the individuals in the group and the dynamics that existed between them. It was an important part of growing up and learning about ourselves and each other. “[The Voice] was a way of putting a face on our awkwardness as teenagers,” John confesses, “because if we could make fun of it, then maybe afterward we could ignore it.“ He then goes on to explain the way that the Voice affected the friend relationships of his adolescence:

"[The Voice] was one area we could always relate to each other on. It was definitely part of trying to fit in with each other, and the Voice helped me, at least, because as much as I wasn’t like you guys or didn’t fit in, I could catch on with the way you guys talked and actually be close to you guys, to my peers."

Such an intimate connection to and dependency on language is not uncommon. It is in fact, the nature of most peoples’ relationship to the way they speak. It was more dramatically noticeable in this case, though, because it occurred within the microcosms of family, church, and high-school-subculture.

The Voice instantiates the “three general effects of slang that distinguish it from other types of vocabulary: informality, group identification, and opposition to authority” (Rodriguez, 250). The Voice is unique and serves as a valuably revealing example for study because of the small scale on which it occurred. Its existence and function communicates the vital connection between the language of adolescents as a means of self-expression and the formation of their personalities and identities. It speaks also of the dependency of human beings on their own unique modes of communication and the profound desire to speak one’s own langauge and still be understood.


Works Cited

Bolton, W. F. "Language: An Introduction." Language: Readings in Language and Culture. Ed. Donna Erickson. 6th ed. Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1998.

Daniels, Harvey A. "Nine Ideas about Language." Language: Readings in Language and Culture. Ed. Donna Erickson. 6th ed. Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1998.

Ebel, Connie C. "Slang, Metaphor, and Folk Speech." American Speech (2003): 151-61.

Labov, Teresa. "Social and Language Boundaries among Adolescents." American Speech 67.4 (1992): 339-66.

Rodriguez, Felix. Rev. of “Slang Sociability: In-Group Language among College Students,” by Connie C. Eble. Journal of English Linguistics 26.3 (1998): 247-65.

Van Lancker Sidtis, Diana. "When novel sentences spoken or heard for the first time in the history of the universe are not enough: toward a dual-process model of language." International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders 39.1 (2004): 1-44.

Mid-Winter Mid-West Mini-Tour w/ The Winston Jazz Routine

Akron, OH @ The Lime Spider
New Philadelphia, OH @ State Bird's nest, garage and recording studio
Columbus, OH @ Milo Electric
Kansas City, MO @ The Brick
Kansac City, MO @ The Record Bar
Fayettesville, AR @ Blu Martini Lounge
Memphis, TN @ Newby's
Kokomo, IN @ some people's basement

---

In all honesty, it was a relatively short and undramatic trip. Those are hardly negative characteristics, though, and I couldn't think of a better way to spend a week and a half away from school. what follows are some brief notes, summaries, excerpts, etc.:

1) playing music and travelling with 3 of my good friends--they were wonderful company in spite of illness, sleep deprivation, and hours together in a cramped and stinky van. it's nice to find other humans--or to realize there are connections between people--that distance, time, and changing lives cannot touch. it provides a sense of security. it makes life more meaningful. the universe seems to make just a little more sense when you can sit down and converse with an old friend as if you didn't live hundreds of miles apart and see each other infrequently at best.

2) heading south to escape (or so we thought) the harsh winter--what really occurred was maybe one or two days that were noticeably warmer than a Michigan winter. In fact, as I stood on a front portch in the frigid, gusty wind on New Year's Eve, I heard of unseasonably warm and pleasant weather descending upon my friends in Grand Rapids.

3) seeing places I've never seen--learning that towns in southern Indiana and Illinois have some of the most startling, interesting, and weird names I've ever seen (St. Elmo, Glen Carbon, Paris, Lebanon, Brazil, Teutonville, and my personal favorite, Spiceland); driving across the Mississippi River, sleepless at 7AM with the sun glaring in the rearview mirror; watching a scenic valley in Arkansas turn from soggy, foggy dusk to glowing, gorgeous utopia after a long and sleepless night of internal wretching; finding a disgusting urinal, the size of a bathtub-turned-sideways and filled with broken beer bottles and soggy cigarette butts, and soon discovering that the commercial establishments surrounding Newby's in Memphis, TN, have some of the most horrible bathrooms I've ever set foot in; witnessing several acts of near-domestic violence just by walking a few blocks in search of a decent toilet; and finally, revisiting the dismal land of Kokomo where I lived for three months at age five.

4) meeting new friends--I can officially announce that, after witnessing the relentless and remarkable, almost miraculous, generosity we encountered on this trip (notably Nathan Reusch, Aaron Clark and the people at Main Street Cafe in KC; the brilliant and astonishingly friendly Minus Story; Ann and the guy who got our van working in Indiana)--yes indeed, there is some hope left for humanity. We also had the opportunity to learn from and hopefully also to challenge a group of street preachers in Fayettesville who thought it was a good idea to hold up signs like "He Who Committeth Sin Is Of The Devil" or "Whoever Sleeps With A Divorced Woman Committeth Adultery" outside of the bars along Dickson Avenue.

5) seeing old friends--all sorts of friends and family in Ohio (good ol' John Frankenfield and Steev Richter and Jonathon Hape and Nick and Megan and Angie and Joanna and Natalie and the Adam Glass), the talented and hospitable New Philadelphians... Philadolphins, Nathan and Mike and all sorts of others in KC, etc. etc.

6) encountering new music and art--music via Minus Story, Olympic Size and Comrade; Danny Gibson's intelligent and unconventional posters and prints and who-knows-what-else; and bang-a-rang Thomas Park's photography

7) eating good food--the Broadway coffee shop for espresso and the Korma Sutra for Indian food in KC, Mrs. Phillips homemade carry-out for on the road, loads of spaghetti at Aaron's house and nearly every other stop, extra-fluffy pancakes by Aaron's mom and our kind host in the Middle of Nowhere, Arkansas, and last but not least, some of the best cookies I've ever had at Ann's in Indianapolis.

All the above, along with countless details and thoughts and exchanges, coalesced into a vivid and sustaining exploit. In hindsight, I see that it's mostly the small details that were most meaningful. An unexpected but exciting note in the middle of a song you were nearly bored with, someone's kind remark after playing, a light-hearted conversation over spaghetti or a serious talk on the verge of sleep, finding bright moss on a rock and a small waterfall in the woods--these are the things I'll remember for years to come. Sleeping uncomfortably in the back of a van or sitting around to read for hours because there's nothing else to do is hardly the stuff of movies or memoirs, but it's the stuff of real life being pursued down new and exciting roads. I'm glad to have taken the trip. I wouldn't trade that week and a half for anything.

---

compliments to the wonderful Thomas Park for making us look nearly attractive in these photographs:






fun in the photobooth:



polaroids I haphazardly captured:


the State Bird Basement | Coby after a rude awakening


visitors from afar (Columbus) | relaxing at the Main Street Cafe (KC)


a wonderul place to spend an afternoon | after playing at The Brick (KC)


where Minus Story is recording their new album (KC) | the nicest venue we played at (KC)


Derek on bass for "The Sower" | Caleb is a wonderful drummer


intro to The Sower

in conclusion, some digital fragments of a beautiful poster (the handiwork of genius Danny Gibson):

every gentle air, pt. 2

The re-release of Every Gentle Air, Pt. 2 is now available for purchase from The Record Machine's online store: merchline.com/therecordmachine/. The original edition was a run of 100 hand-painted CD-Rs (yes, with acrylic paint) that came packaged in hand-made booklets with hand-sewn green seed pouches. How handy. Overall, the project included contributions from over a dozen musicians, sound people, artists, writers, helpers, and friends. This new edition has professionally-done packaging and CDs and one more song than the original. Copies are $10. You can sample a trio of the songs here: myspace.com/everygentleair. Perhaps you'd like to take a closer look?

A Significant Place

Another short assignment, this time to describe a significant place, paying special detail to specifics and concrete realities than can help individualize the scene and make it vivid and believable to the reader. My description ends with an event, but hopefully that's acceptable because a place is usually not significant unless something happens there.

---

"The Donut Pond"

There was once a playground behind my church, and in it stood a large wooden structure, a tower. I often found myself climbing up its rickety steps late at night, my shoes dew-soaked and my hands gripping the rails loosely to avoid splinters. Its wood rubbed rough under my hands as they passed over its cracked and faded grey surface, except for where there were blotches of softer greenish moss and mildew. I would push my pen and journal into my pocket and use both hands to hoist myself up to the topmost beam of the tower. The beam supported a pole beneath it, the kind for kids to wrap their arms and legs around and slide down to the mulch-covered ground below.

My legs would dangle off the beam, with nothing between them and the ground fifteen feet below. To my right lay Grace Fellowship Church, my church, nestled low to the ground like a monastery. It had tan, stuccoed walls, reddish doors, and a prominent frame of dark lumber. Directly before me and to my left were our two small ponds, filled with the memories of several decades’ worth of baptisms and summer camp canoe races. I had participated in both. Behind the ponds was a soccer field that stretched out and ended in a gravel road. Running along the entire length of the road was an edge of woods that circled around the ponds on my left, the church on my right, and closed in on the hill behind me like a great curtain.

I would sit atop my tower at the numerous summer camps or winter retreats my church hosted or during spontaneous times of introspection that led me wandering through the grounds near my church. Journals were filled there, love letters composed, tears shed, curses and questions and praises called out over the waters of the pond. The scene was constant and reliable over the years--the hard line of treetops all around me, the welcoming red doors of the church building, the moon reflecting off the pond water.

I had changed over the years, though--often as a result of time spent on top of that tower. Two summers ago, just weeks before I moved away for college, I heard of plans to tear down the playground. I joked with friends that all twenty years of my faith would collapse along with it. Then, in the last few days before leaving for school, some friends and I had a campfire in the woods near our church. We went to gather wood from a stack of logs and scrap wood, and there I found pieces of the faded grey lumber. These were oddly drier than everything else in the pile, and so we hauled them over to the fire and burnt them up. Everything outside the ring of firelight faded to night, and my shoes became soaked with dew. I felt my insides turning to ashes at what I had done. But as I sat and warmed my hands over the smoldering playground equipment, another tower, made of smoke, billowed up past the treetops and disappeared into the sky.

Two Poems: A Focus on Audience

The assignment was to write two poems based on the same event, one for a close, personal audience and the other for a more general audience. I'm not sure if I actually did that or if I just changed who the poem was addressed to.

---

Mother, do you remember
when you hugged your brother?
Grandma Wiseman was dead,
and rain fell between the gravestones.
Our umbrellas kept us dry,
but your tears wet each others’ backs.

Just a child then, I looked to the ground.

*

Grandma Wiseman was born
before airplanes or world wars,
when the world’s odometer had just
rolled into a fresh century.
She died after another millenium
had been marked out with three zeros,
with airplane crashes and Hiroshima
as well-known milestones.

Father pulled the Honda off the dirt road.
He appreciated the pastor’s soft words,
mother the selections of Scripture.
My brother and I stayed silent in the backseat.
We drove on to the memorial service,
the numbers on the dashboard
counting off the distance.

"When The Night Comes Falling From The Sky"

the following is a "personal essay" i wrote several weeks ago for my Craft of Writing class. there's a lack of subtance and the emotions are too overbearing. my professor said there's no coherent flow to the piece as a whole, and no, i don't know where the idea to use all the Bob Dylan stuff came from. in hindsight, i feel like i didn't manage to express what i was attempting to express. blah blah blah.

---

"When The Night Comes Falling From The Sky"

We walked uphill towards the far end of the clearing, and found ourselves atop the ridge of a naturally-formed hillside ampitheater. A huge outdoor stage lay below where we stood, facing us. The friends we were visiting explained that we were on the abandoned grounds of an outdoor music festival, untouched since the 1970s when The Beach Boys and Bob Dylan had filled the surrounding hills with the waves and winds of rock and roll. For decades, it had lain hidden away like the ruins of a forgotten temple.

We climbed onto the stage, which was littered with squares of stage platforms that rolled on rusted wheels. Straining together, we maneuvered one of these pieces out from under the awning of the stage and stretched out on it, on our backs, under the stars. The moon was just a sliver that night, we had left the glare of man-made lights in our dust miles down the road, and our backs pressed against ground that Brian Wilson had once tread. For all these reasons, the stars seemed brighter, closer, and more numerous than ever before. What had always seemed just a few sparkling stones strewn across the heavens was then a thick, glittering dust that coated over the glassy dome of the sky. For a while we forgot everything, forgot all of our subterranean homesick blues, and became lost in the mystery of the firmament spread out around us.


*

I’ve been reading a book, “The Gifts of the Jews,” by a guy named Thomas Cahill. It talks about how people in ancient times understood the universe. To them, Cahill explains, the sky was the realm of the gods, literally populated by the dieties of their religion. They transcribed supernatural dramas and truths from the stars and based their agricultures, governments, religions, and personal lives upon the movement of lights in the rotating sky-dome. Of course, now we know better than these ancients, and their worldview seems bizarrely naive. We know that the sun is not really a flaming chariot that drives over our heads and crashes into the sea at the end of each day. We know better than to offer sacrifices to heavenly bodies or to structure our society after the constellations.

And yet, we have not escaped the heavens and their influence. The sun truly is the source of our planet’s life, and the moon reaches down even through our atmosphere to churn up the tides of the ocean. On an even deeper level, the heavens have remained the quintessential picture of mystery and beauty, whether in art, religion, or secrets whispered between lovers. As Cahill notes, the sky “is still our principal metaphor for limitlessness and transcendence,” a metaphor used to convey the mysteries of our human experience.

I wonder, then, if the scientists who have unmade the supersitious beliefs of the ancients and purged the sky of deities are all that different than the priests of old. With diagrams and equations, astronomers and physicists try to describe mystery and immensity from a distance that is almost unimaginable. They peer out through telescopes to search the dark void for light and matter, or they sort through notebooks of calculations bent on a task similar to that of a monk or a poet. They seek to describe and communicate to us ideas and visions that are so incredible we could not imagine them on our own, and with their help we finally begin to visualize and comprehend a universe that exceeds our expectations and imaginations. They are seers, or see-ers, just as much as priests or poets.

And so Bob Dylan, a seer in his own rite, said it like this:

Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of you.
You were trying to break into another world,
A world I never knew.
I always kind of wondered
If you ever made it through.

*

The next summer, Katie and I were on our way home from visiting the same friends and again found ourselves near the festival grounds. We pulled off through a field and into the same clearing. We parked and walked over the ridge of the hill to find the stage still there, still sacred. We remembered the intensity of the stars the summer before and looked up to a similar spectacle, this time with the full face of the moon also shining down on us. To our right was one of several abandoned, shed-like buildings we had seen the year before, and in the moonlight we saw that it had once been some sort of concession stand or ticket booth, with an awning extending out from a large window that covered most of its front. Edges of plywood surrounded the windowframe, but the main panels had been knocked out. We tried to see into its interior, but the moonlight from above revealed nothing past the windowframe.

As we examined the building, the sense of beauty that had filled the night shifted to an atmosphere of childish mischief and fright. We were sure the building was haunted, that someone or something lived there in the shadows. We dared each other to creep up to the window, and both accepted the challenge, snickering but becoming genuinely nervous. We made it to the window but still couldn’t see anything inside. Pieces of broken glass lay about our feet and seemed to catch the reflection of the stars.

On another dare, we stepped together over the damaged windowsill into the dark, our legs stretching to find the floor. The soles of our shoes crushed onto shards of glass and sent our pulses surging, but we held our breaths and took several steps into the dark, onto creaky floorboards, and halted. Our eyes were beginning to adjust to the darkness, and we could just make out each other’s faces when several winged creatures, birds or bats, dropped down from the ceiling and flapped out of the window. We both screamed, leapt back over the windowsill, and ran to the car. Katie plunged the keys into the ignition, and whipped the car around through the grass and back down to the main road, both of us laughing at ourselves and overwhelmed with a strange sense of excitment. We had approached something unknown. It was just a shed, yes, but our imaginations had been overwhelmed by the mystery of it all, and so it felt as if we had, for a brief moment, broken into another world.