C/Kain, Springsteen and Steinbeck

Today we (Thomas, Jimmy and I) were riding in the car, listening to "The Ghost of Tom Joad," covered by Rage Against the Machine. Thomas mentioned to Jimmy (my stepson) that it was actually a cover of a Bruce Springsteen song, which led him then to relate that it was based on a John Steinbeck character from Grapes of Wrath. Then he added that Springsteen was a big fan of Steinbeck, to which Jimmy replied that "that made sense" to him. Then Thomas went on about Steinbeck and Springsteen and mentioned that he had been wanting to play the song "Adam Raised a Cain" for Jimmy. Just then we pulled up to a red light behind an SUV with a logo from JACK KAIN AUTO SALES.

Security

Thomas just played me the Peter Gabriel album Security in its entirety today. I've never heard a whole Peter Gabriel album, although individual songs of his are among my favourites. Needless to say, I loved the album. As it was winding down, I got on my computer and opened my email. There was (among other things), an e-newsletter from Hannah Mermelstein (an activist and educator) which was titled, "Security." So, I was listening to and reading SECURITY simultaneously.

Weird.

Writers are lonely people

I suppose this isn't particularly revelatory, but incidents of its proof continue to abound, popping up constantly in my life, especially of late.

I first encountered this idea when I took Humanities 101 as an undergraduate from Michael Williams, a writer himself. He once mentioned in class (in the context of his own writing life and Tolkien's) that he believed that every writer must have had a period of lonely convalescence as a child which necessitated her withdrawing from the world for a time completely into herself, thus catalyzing the nascent writer within. For Prof. Williams, I believe, he broke his leg one summer, if I'm not mistaken.

Well, I took those words to heart and have pondered them since. And recently Thomas mentioned to me an article he read in some English journal a proposal of similar kind, "coincidentally." Furthermore, this idea has been especially on my mind because Thomas and I are reading Proust together--we're just about 80 pages into the second book of Remembrance of Things Past. At the same time, I'm taking a translation class in the Spanish Department this semester, and my homework this week is to translate some Julio Cortázar. In doing a little preliminary look into his background, I discovered this, just 2 paragraphs into his Wikipedia entry:

Cortázar spent the rest of his childhood in Banfield, near Buenos Aires, with his mother and his only sister, who was one year younger. He never saw his father again. His childhood home, with its backyard, was a source of inspiration for some of his stories. Despite this, he wrote a letter to Graciela M. de Solá (December 4, 1963) describing this period of his life as "full of servitude, excessive touchiness, terrible and frequent sadness." He was a sickly child and spent much of his childhood in bed reading. His mother selected what he read, introducing her son most notably to the works of Jules Verne, whom Cortázar admired for the rest of his life. In the magazine Plural (issue 44, Mexico City, May 1975) he wrote: "I spent my childhood in a haze full of goblins and elfs, with a sense of space and time that was different from everybody else's."

Qué casualidad... or not.

Henry Ziegland

Submitted by Thomas:

Henry Ziegland thought he had dodged fate. In 1883, he broke off a relationship with his girlfriend who, out of distress, committed suicide. The girl's brother was so enraged that he hunted down Ziegland and shot him. The brother, believing he had killed Ziegland, then turned his gun on himself and took his own life. But Ziegland had not been killed. The bullet, in fact, had only grazed his face and then lodged in a tree. Ziegland surely thought himself a lucky man. Some years later, however, Ziegland decided to cut down the large tree, which still had the bullet in it. The task seemed so formidable that he decided to blow it up with a few sticks of dynamite. The explosion propelled the bullet into Ziegland's head, killing him.

Open Ground

So. I posted this thing recently on my other blog about an amazing-looking farm/cooperative in Kentucky called Open Ground, which (in their own words) is:

"a grassroots educational and social service organization helping people positively affect their natural and social environments through procreative participation. Our programs serve the general population with a primary concern for people who are frequently left out - those who are marginalized for ethnic, cultural, or economic considerations, or who have developmental, physical, or social disabilities.
On-site programs include workshops, exhibitions, and socials designed to increase tools and opportunities for personal and cultural expression; they are inclusive, encouraging greater world community and ecological consciousness.
People come to:
- take a break, gain a skill, experience others, strut their stuff, earn PD credits
- learn with as well as from excellent facilitators
- listen and speak without offensive or defensive posturing
- laugh freely
- reconnect with the basics, breathe fresh air, listen to the river, talk to the stars"

After I posted this, my husband called me to explain the enormously weird coincidence. And then he posted this comment in response to my post:

Just for the record, let me codify the multi-levels of weirdness going on in here:

1. You just happened to get a message from Open Ground, which you just happened to post to your blog, and it just happens to be the farm my Dad bought twenty-five years ago.

2. I just happened to click on the link after I'd read your blog.

3. When I opened the link, I saw pictures and immediately said, "That's my Dad's farm"--even though there was not really anything there to suggest such an idea.

4. When I couldn't find any information to confirm that it was my Dad's farm, I clicked on the "Our Facilitators" link and scrolled down and recognized Don Boklage's name. (Why would I remember the name of the guy who bought my Dad's farm twenty-five years ago? You know me . . . I can't even remember the names of some of the students I taught last year!)

Cue the music. Feels like stepping into the Twilight Zone.

Karen Dalton

So. About 13 months ago, I bought myself an iPod. It was about 3 days before I was to leave for Spain for 5 weeks, and I thought it a more space-efficient way to take my music along on the journey. My good friend, Luke--music aficionado/expert extraordinaire--very thoughtfully gave me 4 CDs FILLED with MP3s to upload to my iPod to take along. I attempted to upload them before I left, but discovered on the plane, to my dismay, that I hadn't uploaded them properly, so couldn't play them.

In the intervening year, I never bothered to re-upload them correctly, once I learned how to do it. Well, this summer I have started uploading all the random CDs that have been lying around all year, languishing as they wait to become part of the iPod canon. I listen to NPR every morning while I make coffee and do dishes, before I start uploading. This Saturday morning on Weekend Edition, NPR featured a little known folk singer from the 60s called Karen Dalton. I was really taken with her voice and intrigued by her biography. I thought, "This seems like the kind of woman Luke would know; I should ask him for a copy of an album" (she only recorded 2).

About 3 hours later, as I uploaded albums into my iPod, I came across the MP3 collections of random stuff Luke had given me last year. And you'll never guess who the 3rd artist on the first CD I uploaded was...

That's right.

Karen. fucking. Dalton.

You can check out the NPR coverage of her here.

Smash it [the banana] up

Do weird things like this ever happen to you?:

You're making cookies and entering CDs your friend gave you into your iTunes. You are currently uploading a band called the Damned, of whom you've never previously heard. Suddenly, they begin singing a cover of "Smash It Up" by Offspring. At that precise moment, you realize that you are smashing bananas to put into the cookie batter.

It's a weird, weird, wild world, my friends.

Chiapas

I wrote this last semester and just got to posting it now:

i just had a weird moment of synchronicity.... This morning i was hanging out at Sunergos, and some customers, the baristas and myself were talking about Chiapas, Mexico (because we were all enjoying that particular brew...mmm!). We did some internet research and found out it is a coffee-growing region of Mexico.

Just now, as I was researching for my anthropology class on a TOTALLY unrelated topic (class in America), an article about coffee growers in Chiapas turned up on an article search. I had previously never known that Chiapas grew coffee; and now, TWICE in one day....

V for Vendetta, Elizabeth and M I T

So, I think it might be one of my unofficial New Year's Resolutions to try to post more "coincidences." My trouble is that I rarely write them down for later posting as they happen, so I end up forgetting them by the time I'm online again. Here's one my friend, Elizabeth, sent me back in November.

I just wanted to tell you something - so, this weekend late at night, I caught a large part of the middle (I think) of V for Vendetta on TV, which I haven't seen. Then, this morning as I'm walking through the labyrinth of MIT buildings, I see all these V face stickers stuck on posters, the head of the woman representing the women's bathroom, etc. I thought, well, that's a coincidence. Then I realized it was November 5 yesterday, and that's probably why - and THEN I remembered in the movie how they kept talking about there not really being any coincidences.

The November 5th thing is Guy Fawkes' Day, for those of you who are not anglophiles. And for those who ain't seen the movie or read the comic, the character V dresses up in a Guy Fawkes costume to perpetrate his anti-fascist schemes.

Pretty weird. But monstrously so.

Rockwell and Santa Claus

I had the weirdest moment of synchronicity this week. During my archaeology class on Thursday Dr. Hale had mentioned his views on the Santa Claus myth and how it sets up this societal schema in the United States wherein blind belief = good and praiseworthy behaviour. I liked this thought, and was pondering it later on my way home; as I did so, I was listening to a podcast I had downloaded of last week's episode of a show on NPR called "On the Media" from WNYC radio. They were interviewing a guy called Richard Halpern who teaches English literature at Johns Hopkins University. He just published a book called Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence, in which he focuses on the art of Rockwell to talk about the American Innocence mystique. He posits that Rockwell was actually subversive in his paintings, and rather than upholding the idea of innocence and Americanism, he challenges it in subtle ways. It's an interesting idea; I'm hoping to get the book.

Anyway, the oddest thing was that the interview used as a focal point this painting by Rockwell. It depicts the discovery of the
falsehood/nonexistence of Santa on the part of this little boy and shows his subsequent shock at the realization. Professor Halpern, however, had doctored the painting to reveal photos of the torture and abuse at Abu Gahreb instead of a santa suit, as in the original, in order to draw parallels to the American public as a whole.

It was a striking juxtaposition not just because of the truth of Halpern's doctored version--that Americans have such short attention spans about what is done in their name and their lack of ability to think critically about the government--but especially because we had just been using the Santa myth to discuss that very problem earlier in the day during class! What a coincidence.

If you're interested, the interview with Prof. Halpern is short and can be found online (along with a picture of the altered Rockwell painting) at: http://onthemedia.org/transcripts/2007/10/05/02