Spider Stories

Orson Scott Card was one of my favorite novelists in high school, and I still fondly return to a number of favorites by him including Enchantment and Ender’s Game. These novels, which I discovered around the same time I started devouring Neil Gaiman and Buffy the Vampire Slayer changed the way I thought about the fantasy genre from lame, badly-written Tolkien rip-offs to something fascinating, inventive, and unique.

I’m very disappointed to find out today via America Blog that not only is Orson Scott Card a Mormon– a group I’m increasingly skeptical of post-this video (though admittedly it was put out not by the Mormons but by another group of Christians and is denounced by the Mormon church) and post-Prop 8– but a Mormon who actually is a rampant, aggressive homophobe who is a top leader in the National Organization for Marriage. Orson Scott Card apparently thinks that because the government does not share their anti-equal marriage anti-gay sentiments it is actually, full-on the “enemy” of good homosexual-hating Mormons everywhere who should change governments “by any means necessary.”

Suddenly I’m thinking Orson Scott Card’s fiction is so good because he’s living in a fantasy world, and a very dangerous, deluded one.

For shame.

It’s been a while since I wrote anything good enough to share. I wrote a letter poem to a friend of mine who is about to graduate and he said he liked it and he’s one of my favorite writers ever, so I’ll put it here. It might not be as good or make as much sense when someone other than who it’s about is reading it though.

I’ve been trying to write this off and on for over a year and the other day I thought up the last stanza and it made everything click.

To Adam

You tested yourself on the iron bar stretched
Between two pillars at the old Slovenian church
Doing pull ups as if they were not new and oddly easy
As you tested yourself against the newfound intoxication
Of a girl waiting back home.

You wrote poems, pulling the words out
Of the Italian landscape and your sister’s sorrow
As easily as you pulled your body against the bar
But with all the force of Sikes striking Nancy
Down in a broken wood flat on London’s west end.

You sat on the edge of a pool table spilled
With sun gently touching the leg of a girl made
Out of light and flowers, like freshly cleaned quilt.
You told her religion is a veil or a candle.
She is the gentle counterpoint
To the unspeakable places
exposed stanza by stanza, line by line
In all our hearts.

The Everlasting Monday

Thou shalt have an everlasting
Monday and stand in the moon.

The moon’s man stands in his shell,
Bent under a bundle
Of sticks. The light falls chalk and cold
Upon our bedspread.
His teeth are chattering among the leprous
Peaks and craters of those extinct volcanoes.

He also against black frost
Would pick sticks, would not rest
Until his own lit room outshone
Sunday’s ghost of sun;
Now works his hell of Mondays in the moon’s ball,
Fireless, seven chill seas chained to his ankle.
-Sylvia Plath

Yesterday was divine. I went to a neighborhood brunch and drank many mimosas while chatting with my history professor and then went and played volleyball during a brief break in the rain while wearing the most ridiculous outfit of tye-dyed boxers, a ratty tye-dyed tshirt and black galoshes. Then my roommates and I baked Ghirardelli brownies and watched terrible movies and shared poems we wrote after freshman year. Ridiculous and awesome.

I spent about five hours at what I think is my favorite coffee shop in Chattanooga: Pasha’s, which has the irresistibly cute slogan “Coffee with authority.” They serve tea in adorable super-tall ceramic mugs with built-in loose leaf tea baskets and have both Turkish coffee and halvah (cold hazelnut coffee), which seems pretty unique. I finished off my two final papers for the semester, wrote three poems, went for a walk in the nearby graveyard, and sent a proposal to a conference on a whim.

The three poems are what excite me the most. I haven’t had the time or creative energy to write much in the past couple years which makes me sad. But I had a sudden spurt in the past couple days and it’s made me want to return to reading poetry, which I regrettably often don’t have the patience for. A couple that have struck my fancy today:

Drag up false, Edwardian sentiments, and I remember my maternal grandmother from Vienna. As a schoolgirl she gave roses to Franz Josef. The burghers sweated and wept. The children wore white.
-From “Candles” by Sylvia Plath

In human closeness there is a secret edge,
Nor love nor passion can pass it above,
Let lips with lips be joined in silent rage,
And hearts be burst asunder with the love.

And friendship, too, is powerless plot,
And so years of bliss with noble tends,
When your heart is free and known not,
The slow languor of the earthy sense.

And they who strive to reach this edge are mad,
But they who reached are shocked with anguish hard –
Now you know why beneath your hand
You do not feel the beating of my heart.
-Anna Akhmatova

Some of my photos from the first day in New York I posted in my teaser post, but here are some more with a little account of what I was up to. We started out going to the Brooklyn Tabernacle for a Sunday service which was awful. I had only wanted to go because I heard it had a great gospel choir, thinking that meant it would be like that great scene in the Blues Brothers with James Brown as the reverend. Instead it was a boring very contemporary service and I ended up sitting next to someone who smelled like a cat box. Also, the preacher kept saying that the South had not invented gospel and that Southern churches are not as diverse as the big inner-city Tabernacle because Southern churches aren’t integrated. Um, what?

After got back to Manhattan we ended up wandering over to China Town to explore.

One of my roommates was on a mission to score some sketchy “faux” Tiffanies and sure enough we managed to find someone who helped us out in that regard. We went to the Mahayana Buddhist Temple and got some lunch at a wonderful place called Noodle Village where we feasted on dumplings and cuttle fish ball soup. Although now I’ve seen a picture of a cuttle fish I feel bad having eaten it. But it was TASTY.

Now anyone who knows me knows I have a great and undying love for Sailor Moon so I was delighted when I saw her peeking out at me from a rack full of adult-sized outfits completely different from this little child-sized jacket. I’m sad it’s too small to fit me or I totally would have gotten it!

We tried hiking over to where the guide book said Mark Twain’s house was, but has long since been bulldozed for a giant apartment building. We were pissed when we only found a plaque attached to the wall after walking forever and ever, but we saw a lot of neat stuff along the way, including the melted bicycle in the picture from the teaser post and a really cool store whose significance I realized only while looking it up for this post– Patricia Field’s shop in the Bowery. Unbeknownst to me, despite the fact I’m a twenty-something American woman who watches a fair amount of TV, Patricia Field is a designer who is best known for creating Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City as a fashion icon and who did the costumes for Devil Wears Prada. I’m floored considering the pretty huge difference between how much I love everything in that store and how much I love the outfits on the show and the movie.

What I love about big cities– you never know when you’ll turn a corner or cross the street and run into fun, fabulous interactive art like this nifty spinning cube.

Speaking of clothes, we accidently walked up to an H&M and the roommates HAD to go shopping. I can’t quite get on the H&M fangirl wagon. Everyone I know LOVES them and can’t wait to make it to a major metropolitan area to pop in and buy three bags worth of cute, cheap goods but their stuff just doesn’t work on me. I have tried and tried to have a torrid relationship with H&M because everyone raves about them and when I tried the clothes on they are just a little bit off. Maybe I’m shaped funny, who knows, but it doesn’t help my love for the store or my self-esteem that H&M has the only dressing rooms in the world than can make me look like I have a muffin top in my underwear.

Here are two ensembles I tried on. I really wanted to splurge on this sweet-heart topped jumper/mechanic outfit but everything I loved about what the neckline did for my top half I hated about what it did for my bottom half.

This dress was so perfect on the hanger, but on me I suddenly had double D’s and swimmy wing triceps. I had imagined floating around like a mystical Grecian goddess in it, and it just wasn’t fitting right. Still, I had to capture the glamour of shopping in NYC, and I think these shots got a good idea of what I wanted the clothes to do that they didn’t in 3D.

Though I was defeated by H&M, my roommates made out like bandits and stocked up on summer essentials. I waited outside and chatted up a couple Arabic hot dog vendors who were convinced I was British, apparently because I didn’t sound American to them. There was enjoyable people watching as I sat on a fire main eating my good New York hot dog, and eventually the vendors packed up and moved on for the night, leaving me to wonder how far away the depository for the carts was and what the ins-and-outs of the hot dog vending industry might be. All I know on that topic I learned in A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. If you haven’t read it you should, and I’ll be back in a few days with a continuation of my New York updates.

So since I went to that Telepath concert so much has happened. I went to New York City, met Mark Noll when he came to UTC, passed my the defense for my senior thesis, helped organize an English conference at my school, went to a formal dance, and celebrated passing my thesis with a modest amount of Patron and a couple terrible games of pool.

Here’s a few shots from the New York trip to tempt whoever stops by into returning for a fuller New York post that will show up shortly.

The other night I went to Rhythm and Brews where Telepath was playing. They had been described to me on the way over as “New Age hiphop,” a description which I could only envision as Enya with cornrows rapping about Selkies . It turns out that Telepath is better described as world music electronica– hot thumping dance beats linked with swirling synth sitars and Arabic riffs. It was great dancing and the crowd was enthusiastic. When it got too hot to keep up my old belly dance moves, I started snapping pictures of the other concert goers. Usually I find concert photography is hit or miss– too often the pretty lights just don’t translate to photos that are worth anything besides a record of the night. I think a few of mine turned out better than other pictures I’ve gotten at concerts, though, so I’ll share. It’s up to you, dear reader, to decide if they’re just a record of a fun night and a great band or if they’re something more.

I’ve moved my blog off of Chattablogs and here onto my personal website, Spider Stories. I started this website in high school to showcase my art (at the time I was going to be a genius artist/comics writer when I grew up), poetry, and photography. For now, I’ve got the blog here and we’ll see what pops up next…

First off, Slumdog Millionarewas a freaking fabulous movie. It had everything– tragedy, comedy, suspense, true love, and a single Bollywood dance number. The cinematography was inspiring and the soundtrack kept you wired the whole time.

It was also very strange seeing the Indian slums outside of the pages of National Geographic. There was one beautiful shot from above the corrugated metal roofs of children running through the streets, and it kept cutting away to a the same moment of action from higher above, showing just how vast the slums are.

There was another moment that felt especially foreign to me– a part showing people working on a giant trash heap in a dump picking through the garbage to fill giant sacks with anything that could be ameliorated or sold. For a few seconds, I was struck by how different that experience is from that that I am lucky enough to have, and that most everyone I know is lucky enough to have, by the difference between life in America and life in India. But then I remembered that a few days ago I had seen an abandoned house, the final contents of which had been splayed out all over the front yard to be picked over before the bank’s agents cleaned it up for foreclosure sale. Crowds and crowds of people drove or walked up to pick through whatever the previous family had left behind– broken desk chairs, dirty pillows and sheets, old bags, an exercise ball, some televisions from the 1980s. Poverty is poverty, and while the motives of the people picking through the trash may have been somewhat different, and though the scales of poverty are numerically divided, the images were so similar it was hard to shake.

Slumdog Millionare was so much the sort of story we love to hear in America– the story of someone who starts out with nothing gaining everything, and touching a community in the process. Perhaps it was also the telling of the story of the American dream in India that put the image of the trash pickers (and so many other moments in the movie, for that matter) in close proximity to the stories and images of poverty in the West. We have more in common globally than we like to think, or often assume. Perhaps that is why Slumdog has gotten such rave reviews here in the States– we see that we have in common an archetypal story of rags to riches and also many things in common we need to work on so that rags to riches stories can become a mythological literature of the past.

A girl I knew in middle and high school (but, sadly, mostly lost touch with) is attending Oxford University for grad school. Every time she posts pictures on Facebook, I get a little ping of envy because she is living in a city I have come to really love and will probably not get to see again for a long time. Also, in the interest of complete honesty, despite my massive objections to GPS and the culture there, I have a wee obsession with old, traditional schools, whether it is John Irving’s depictions of New Hampshire boy’s schools or A Separate Peace or Rory going to Yale on The Gilmore Girls or grand old schools like Oxford and Cambridge.

To get to the point of my posting, the Oxford scholar I am acquainted with posted some lovely shots of Oxford in the wintertime. I wish I could stay there long enough to see the city and the surrounding countryside during all seasons– the snow is too picturesque for words. It’s probably ten kinds of uncool to borrow a couple of her photos and post them here to share, especially since I’d prefer not to out her by using her name in photo credits, but I can’t resist since I post sporadically about my own Oxford adventures. Both are shots I have my own summer equivalents of somewhere– I believe the first is from the cloisters at Magdalen college and the second is along the Oxford canal, where I spent many a pleasant summer afternoon reading and watching the locals bicycle, stroll, boat, and goof off. It’s bad enough not being there, but on top of it we are having almost spring-like weather here in Chattanooga again, and have had almost nary a flake of snow to mark the occasional cold snaps all winter. Proper snow on such a backdrop as Oxford is enviable indeed. I wish I could see “my” manor house out in Yarnton all dressed up in winter white.

EDIT: A-HAH! A little Googling and Flickring found me some shots of Yarnton in the wintertime. A pretty sight indeed!

And here’s a cool one of the heads at the Sheldonian– I love how the snow clung mainly to their hair and beards. It’s like they’ve been colored in.