More Michigan

I know there has been a high photo-to-text ratio here lately, but summer photos tend to speak for themselves.

Cousin Sarah, with Dilly Bar

June, tree

Birk: Lord of the Flies trainee

Michigan

Cousin Henry's poker face

Cousin Will, up a tree

June. Windy day at Sturgeon Bay

Austen countdown

Pride and Prejudice sure seems to get most of the attention, but to me, it's not in the same league as Sense and Sensibility. The narrator isn't nearly as sharp, doesn't have the same wit, despite the famous opening line. Elizabeth just doesn't do it for me quite the way Eleanor does and Sense has more sweet suffering, I think.

So here is my ranking as of today:

1. Sense and Sensibility
2. Emma
3. Pride and Prejudice

I won't let myself read another one until next summer, so this ranking may hold for awhile.

Wrapping things up

4th of July in tiny Sugar Hill, N.H.

Hitting the Franconia library's book sale on the way out of town

Freakish booth at this creepy flea market I visited in Vermont

This last photo . . . wow. I can't believe people sell this stuff out in the open like this. I don't even know what to say.

Camp

The sleeping loft/study/changing room

The closet

Tent art

Andy Goldsworthy does these cool "rain shadows" when it starts to rain, but you can imagine my surprise when I packed up my tent today and discovered that it had the same idea. Such an inspiring, arty place this part of New Hapshire.

At The Frost Place

Driving through New York

Driving through Vermont

Shara McCallum's great reading on Monday night

Lunch break.

Visiting Brian and Deb in Chautauqua

The grounds

The hall, where I got to see them play.

Their land. I have land, but now I want more.

"Daddy jump!"

Cool rain storm.

Epic Parenting

The wife, back there in third place.

And after, happy.

With C's bike race taking up a little under two hours on a tough course under thundering clouds today, we both thought that it might qualify as an "epic" ride. But just as epic, I realized, would be my parenting assignment: to keep two kids who'd been up until 11:00 the night before happy in the rain. Fortunately for me, kid saviors in the form of our friends the Floyd children (B refers to them as "my friend Floyd") showed up and made my job a simple thing.

C had that special kind of happy vibes you only get after two hours of racing your bike around. You can see it in her eyes here. I was jealous all the way home.

Some early summer scenes

Chamomile

Coreopsis

Dog, bath.

New book store cat

New raised bed.

Like Abe Lincoln

We had, like, no power from six until well after midnight last night. It gets dark. How are you supposed to read? Cath started Cormac McCarthy's The Orchard Keeper by flashlight, but I switched to the iPod and then switched to putting J back in bed when she got up and walked down a pitch-dark hallway and stairs to tell us she was "scared."

Final Moments

2:33

2:34

2:35, and it's all over.

Here are most of my student assistants from this year. Zan and Pavan are missing. I'd never agreed to having an assistant before Nathan and Erin (not pictured) convinced me last spring. Thanks to all of you for teaching me that there are more important things to do during my prep period than actual prepping:

watching The Office on Hulu
Pitchfork.tv
coloring
practicing the cursive "z"
Slushee wagers
brainstorming ideas for AP Comp papers
waltz lessons along to Gillian Welch's Revival
getting ideas for funny things to say and do to students from Teri
trying not to tell you I knew Teri won the writing contest
getting Joe and Nathan into Collins LLC
deciding which days to go to the P4K Festival
Wii
trying to get Teri to go to IU
trying to make you all want to be English majors
and so much more.

To the Graduates

Well, HHS graduates, the flowers are out and congratulating you. Even the tiny Chamomile and Chives in my herb garden are doing their best. So when you pass something blooming that seems to be celebrating your passage from being someone who plays Nintendo at home into someone who plays Nintendo in a dorm room, be sure to say to it "thanks, it feels good."

If you take any lessons away from your time in my classroom, let it be these:

1. Blue .07 Pilot gel pens are the best.
2. Dogs are better than cats, but cats are better than nothing.
3. A comma-splice happens when two main clauses are joined by a comma.

Summer Survivor

I have decided that I am going to live this summer like it's one long, personal episode of Survivor where I am the host as well as both tribes and I give myself little challenges and compete for a million dollars against myself. Because I am both tribes, I will conclude each challenge by bad talking myself and saying what a back-stabber I am and stuff.
Tonight's challenge was to read the new Dean Wareham memoir while playing all three Galaxie 500 albums in a row. And I did it. I won the challenge. I now get immunity from something.

I don't know how long it takes to play those albums, but I read only 84 pages in that time. I am so slow. The book is a fun read, I suppose. He's got some funny stories. I like hearing about Kramer (not the Seinfeld Kramer) the most. I wonder if he has a book.

Galaxie 500 is just so awesome, though. That first record still kills me. This is one band I feel like I found all by myself and never shared with anyone else b/c nobody else knew about them. My friend Catherine in Bloomington did, but I think that was it. I remember once I told her I liked some e.p. that Damon and Naomi made after G500 broke up and she said she didn't and it embarrassed me because I thought she was cool and had cool taste. She was so right though, now that I think about it.

It's past my bedtime, but I need to go see if there is Youtube video of my school's senior prank yet.

Clawhammer Season

When the trees fill out is when I usually start to feel like playing banjo again. I would probably be a lot better if I played year around. But anyway this is the first time I've looked around YouTube for things to play and I came across this great video. The song is nice, but my favorite part is the dogs wandering around. Wait for the part when the third lab wanders in and stares at the guy for a few minutes before sitting down to scratch an itch.



What kind of world would it be if everyone had to own three Labradors? I think we would all be a lot more mellow. I remember when we lived in Evansville, everyone grew tomatoes. You could walk up to any stranger and say "How are your tomatoes doing?" and you would be friends, even if they voted for different people than you did, and most of them did.

How much better would the bond be if you could go up to anyone on the sidewalk and say "How are your Labradors?" I think it would be pretty nice.

Today's Reading

Annie Clark

Great article in the Sunday paper about the recent wave of "one man (and woman) bands" and the ways that technology has allowed them to develop some kind of movement in reaction to what the author calls the "conservatism" and "sparseness" of recent indie music. It features interviews with the guy from Final Fantasy, the guy from Panda Bear and the guy from St. Vincent, Annie Clark. These people seem like they're having a lot of fun, all obsessed with their cables and software and whatnot.

Maybe a lot of the appeal of the article is seeing bands like Ariel Pink and Animal Collective mentioned in a newspaper. It's also cool because I just had a student hand in a research paper/ profile about this exact same phenomenon, but on a local level.

It is a dangerous thing to read stuff like this on a sunny Sunday morning while you are inebriate with Sunday breakfast and the first good pot of coffee you have made in a month. You think of new hobbies. You want to buy a MacBook Pro, whatever that is, and plug a guitar into it and then start surfing the web for samples you can loop and then put it all together into your own private soundtrack for summer. I would put funny stickers on the laptop and sit on my bed as I fiddle knobs, all with a furrowed brow signaling to my wife "I am busy defining a new genre of pop at the intersection of dance-hall reggae, George Jones, bicycles, and YouTube."

But that will probably not happen. Whatever I do this summer, it will probably involve mowing. Maybe I will spend the summer mowing and looking for a new, indie-approved, MacBook-enabled method of gardening worthy of Readymade or Make.

I Want to Believe

Goodness. I just scored four tickets to see MBV in Chicago this September. Could this be the biggest show in the history of the world? Yes, I think it could.

Back when I spent a semester in London, losing 20 lbs because I spent all my money riding the Tube around and seeing bands and none on food except for the occasional fish and chips which always sounded better than it tasted, my only real regret was not getting to see this band. They played like four straight nights before Loveless was released. It was my last few days in town and they all sold out before I could get tickets.

Since then, Loveless re-wired my brain in some way. It's my most immediate connection to the sublime. It's times like this that I wish I didn't traffic in hyperbole so frequently because it has dulled my ability to express how much I love the really significant stuff.

What's kind of cool is that technology has maybe progressed enough that they will be able to get the live experience closer to what they did in the studio so that Shields doesn't feel the need to just crank up the volume and kill us all with decibels as a plan B.

Never thought this day would come, so I'm kind of excited.

Cramer Imitation

Untitled (Scary Back Yard) #5

The best I could do in my own yard. Worth a try, anyway. I think I will spend today on the other, brighter side of the house, planting the stuff I got from the Botanical Conservatory's plant sale last Thursday.

Gustav Cramer

Untitled (Woodland) #56, Gustav Cramer

With the rain and with all these things climbing out of the dirt in my garden--I think they're called "plants"--I can definitely feel my state of mind switching over into the spring mode. I'm always surprised at how one day you see mud and leftover winter out your window and then the next day you see withering Daffodils and Peonies about to go off.

But I love having more garden than I can possibly handle. It's the way it should be. I've seen this guy Gustav Cramer's pictures a couple of times now on places on the internet and it's pretty great for the way it expresses that threat that nature carries to do fine without us. In his woodland series all the woodlands look they're places happy to be finally left alone. That's how I see it, anyway. Something about them reminds me a little too much of my own backyard.

Is this dog deaf?

The Smokey, with pile of sticks.

So I tell my wife by email this morning that she has been right all along: The Smokey is deaf. I confirmed it last night by using the "treat test" on her, yelling "wanna treat?" pretty loudly but while standing out of her sight. She had no clue.

I was only a little sad about it at first except when I would work myself up by saying "now she can never hear her masters' voices again." I told my 5 year old about my fears and she says "It's okay, Dad. You can just use sign language to talk to her."

So after school today, I come home and try the "treat test," and Smokey gets up and looks at me all excited--the expected treat response. She passed the test! So now I don't know what to think. I guess I'll just go on thinking what I usually do: she is old and will die sooner than I think so love her while I can. You have to have a little death at hand to love something the way it deserves. She's barking to get in now. I will demonstrate my love for her by not making her wait.

God, that dog is annoying. In and out all day long.

IN OTHER NEWS, Monkesquirrel endorses Voting over Not Voting. What a fun day to be a Hoosier. We've got all the attention for once, and it matters. All I will say here is that I changed my vote at the last second, while standing at the machine. Not an experience I am accustomed to.