Each year was like that, eventful and full of changes, although the classrooms in the many various schools I went to were more similar than one might expect, with their blackboards and various vintages of desks, and friezes of capital and small letters on green lined cardboard around the top of the room. When I was eighteen, my courses at the university were required to fulfill both Depth (major field of study) and Breadth (liberal arts) requirements. The story I told the historian on Thanksgiving when I was eighteen was the whole sprawling summary, in which the details in depth are lost. But the changes were regular and rhythmic enough to hang a great deal of memory from.
So I could list the houses I lived in, or the schools I went to, like the warp threads strung on the loom of memory; and then find more events associated with those places, in fractal detail, as I consider each trivial item. As the shuttle passes across the established width of the weaving, it carries the weft threads which each contribute another line of pattern.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
7-Up
One of my Oldest Friends has proposed that we watch the movie 49-Up, which came out a few years ago (check!) and then to review our own lives, bringing together our accounts in some fashion. This documentary began a series of interviews with a number of British subjects, who were filmed every seven years throughout their lives to follow them through what turned out to be very interesting times. So we might compare our experiences at seven, fourteen, twenty-one, etc, and see what we learn. I am not too sure about fourteen myself – that will require some research to anchor the year to events as I recall them, what we call timebinding. But seven I find already well-equipped with memory hooks.
When I turned seven we were living at 41-B Beaconwood Road, which is right off of Beacon Street, the same Beacon Street that runs all the way into downtown Boston. But we were out in the suburb of Newton, Massachusetts, in a side-by-side ranch-style duplex on a cul-de-sac. It was located about a mile from the Newton Highlands stop on the MTA. My room had a piece of linoleum to cover the floor, a desk and chest of drawers that were purchased unfinished and painted pale blue.
Bozo the Clown, who had a popular children’s television show, was reputed to live in one of the nondescript houses across and further down the street.
My parents worked every day in the city, my mother as a textbook editor at Ginn & Company, my father as an Assistant Professor of English at Boston University. The MTA was a trolley out where we boarded the train, and still is, the stations little open shelters beside the train tracks, that becomes a subway somewhere in past Brookline into the heart of the city, where the cars screech into underground ceramic-tiled stations. The noise was horrendous. But in downtown Boston we might visit the Garden, where the swan boats floated magically on a pond, or the Commons. Most likely we would visit bookshops. It seemed possible that I visited every second-hand bookshop in Boston and Cambridge, as my parents were both students of English literature on the prowl for books. My mother spent her commutes reading British Victoriana toward her dissertation, including the complete works of an author named Israel Zangwill that she would later get an entire book out of.
I expected that I would be a teacher and writer like my mother. My parents said when I grew up I could be a Cliffie, and go to Radcliffe, and iron my hair.
That summer is most likely the one that we went on a number of vacation road trips. Our family had no car at that time, and thus depended entirely on public transit and on friends who did have cars for trips further afield. (It is also most likely that my mother was working throughout the summer.) My mother had a friend from Ginn named Ardis Osborne who took us on a family visit to New Hampshire and Vermont (not really much of a drive by Midwestern standards). We went to a sharp rocky beach on the cold North Atlantic, that was quite different from what I had been led in southern Texas to expect of a beach. We saw Walden Pond, and the Minute Man statue dedicated to “the shot heard round the world”. We visited Fruitlands, the farm where Louisa May Alcott lived when her father Bronson Alcott was devising a utopian community.
I spent a number of weeks in a summer school, where the children spent an inordinate amount of time sitting in an auditorium waiting for the busses to their neighborhood. I was in a class that was introduced to some colorful little wooden blocks, that had clear mathematical relations to one another in their lengths, although I was the only one in the class that apparently was able to grasp this fact. It was quite literally graspable, as much of the New Math curriculum of the time required, and the rods were still in use years later when I went to the School of Education (but rather expensive apparatus I expect). But I digress.
In the fall we moved to another house in Newton, nearer the Newton Centre stop, on Cabot Street. I went to second grade at the Cabot School, a few blocks away. Miss Robertson was the teacher (not Robinson like the Swiss family, but Robertson, get that right!). It was discovered I could win spelling bees, acing even hard words from the fourth-grade list like "kitchen". The classroom had a piano and a record player in it, and Miss R taught us to sing quite a number of Peter, Paul & Mary songs off their album. We learned "Puff the Magic Dragon", "Where Have All the Flowers Gone", and "If I Had a Hammer", but I will spare you the recitation. She also taught us a song about the Titanic, probably in preparation for the visit to our class of a very old lady who actually remembered the sinking of the Titanic – not that she had survived it, but she remembered the event.
There was a ship Titanic that sailed the ocean blue, and they thought they’d built a ship that the water could never go through! It was on the maiden trip, when the iceberg hit the ship, it was sad when the great ship went down. Long chorus of It was sad boys sad. The next verse contained non-historical material concerning the establishment of class relations on board, but concluded So they put the poor below, and they were the first to go. It was sad….
I was already reading better than any of the reading groups in the class, so for reading period they sent me down the echoing empty hallway to a special program in another classroom. The class there had free access to shelves of books, and the program was to read as you pleased. I took in a favorite book on Florence Nightingale, and lost it there.
Despite my peculiarities – my name was always cause for comment, It’s a boy’s name – I eventually began to find friends in the neighborhood. Marjorie had dark brown curls and lived in a very grand house, farther up the hill, where they had a black maid that I caught a glimpse of on one of my few visits. While I was still not sure what she meant by a black person, Marjorie confided in me that they were a different kind of people, who smelled funny. I cannot recall whether she mentioned that her own family was Jewish, although in retrospect that is quite clear to me.
I think it was that Christmas that my half-brother Christopher came to stay with us. Chris was very dear to me, although we were not strictly speaking related as he was my stepfather’s son from a previous marriage, and lived with his mother, but we had known each other since we were four and I put up with a lot from kids who made fun of such a thing as a half-brother when I told them I had one. We did not have a Christmas tree, but Chris and I made one in crayon on the back of a roll of wallpaper, lying on the floor in the hallway by the stairs as I recall, as that was the only floorspace big enough to work in. It was a very tall, narrow tree, two rolls wide, but not really very satisfactory as Christmas trees go. The wallpaper had been found in the attic. Other marvelous things were in that attic: a stack of ancient National Geographic magazines; a stamp collection featuring many stamps from someone’s wartime correspondence to Europe and the Far East, that I took with me when we left; a full set of Edwardian-era children’s encyclopedias, that I went about reading from cover to cover.
And then I turned eight, and 1963 began.
When I turned seven we were living at 41-B Beaconwood Road, which is right off of Beacon Street, the same Beacon Street that runs all the way into downtown Boston. But we were out in the suburb of Newton, Massachusetts, in a side-by-side ranch-style duplex on a cul-de-sac. It was located about a mile from the Newton Highlands stop on the MTA. My room had a piece of linoleum to cover the floor, a desk and chest of drawers that were purchased unfinished and painted pale blue.
Bozo the Clown, who had a popular children’s television show, was reputed to live in one of the nondescript houses across and further down the street.
My parents worked every day in the city, my mother as a textbook editor at Ginn & Company, my father as an Assistant Professor of English at Boston University. The MTA was a trolley out where we boarded the train, and still is, the stations little open shelters beside the train tracks, that becomes a subway somewhere in past Brookline into the heart of the city, where the cars screech into underground ceramic-tiled stations. The noise was horrendous. But in downtown Boston we might visit the Garden, where the swan boats floated magically on a pond, or the Commons. Most likely we would visit bookshops. It seemed possible that I visited every second-hand bookshop in Boston and Cambridge, as my parents were both students of English literature on the prowl for books. My mother spent her commutes reading British Victoriana toward her dissertation, including the complete works of an author named Israel Zangwill that she would later get an entire book out of.
I expected that I would be a teacher and writer like my mother. My parents said when I grew up I could be a Cliffie, and go to Radcliffe, and iron my hair.
That summer is most likely the one that we went on a number of vacation road trips. Our family had no car at that time, and thus depended entirely on public transit and on friends who did have cars for trips further afield. (It is also most likely that my mother was working throughout the summer.) My mother had a friend from Ginn named Ardis Osborne who took us on a family visit to New Hampshire and Vermont (not really much of a drive by Midwestern standards). We went to a sharp rocky beach on the cold North Atlantic, that was quite different from what I had been led in southern Texas to expect of a beach. We saw Walden Pond, and the Minute Man statue dedicated to “the shot heard round the world”. We visited Fruitlands, the farm where Louisa May Alcott lived when her father Bronson Alcott was devising a utopian community.
I spent a number of weeks in a summer school, where the children spent an inordinate amount of time sitting in an auditorium waiting for the busses to their neighborhood. I was in a class that was introduced to some colorful little wooden blocks, that had clear mathematical relations to one another in their lengths, although I was the only one in the class that apparently was able to grasp this fact. It was quite literally graspable, as much of the New Math curriculum of the time required, and the rods were still in use years later when I went to the School of Education (but rather expensive apparatus I expect). But I digress.
In the fall we moved to another house in Newton, nearer the Newton Centre stop, on Cabot Street. I went to second grade at the Cabot School, a few blocks away. Miss Robertson was the teacher (not Robinson like the Swiss family, but Robertson, get that right!). It was discovered I could win spelling bees, acing even hard words from the fourth-grade list like "kitchen". The classroom had a piano and a record player in it, and Miss R taught us to sing quite a number of Peter, Paul & Mary songs off their album. We learned "Puff the Magic Dragon", "Where Have All the Flowers Gone", and "If I Had a Hammer", but I will spare you the recitation. She also taught us a song about the Titanic, probably in preparation for the visit to our class of a very old lady who actually remembered the sinking of the Titanic – not that she had survived it, but she remembered the event.
There was a ship Titanic that sailed the ocean blue, and they thought they’d built a ship that the water could never go through! It was on the maiden trip, when the iceberg hit the ship, it was sad when the great ship went down. Long chorus of It was sad boys sad. The next verse contained non-historical material concerning the establishment of class relations on board, but concluded So they put the poor below, and they were the first to go. It was sad….
I was already reading better than any of the reading groups in the class, so for reading period they sent me down the echoing empty hallway to a special program in another classroom. The class there had free access to shelves of books, and the program was to read as you pleased. I took in a favorite book on Florence Nightingale, and lost it there.
Despite my peculiarities – my name was always cause for comment, It’s a boy’s name – I eventually began to find friends in the neighborhood. Marjorie had dark brown curls and lived in a very grand house, farther up the hill, where they had a black maid that I caught a glimpse of on one of my few visits. While I was still not sure what she meant by a black person, Marjorie confided in me that they were a different kind of people, who smelled funny. I cannot recall whether she mentioned that her own family was Jewish, although in retrospect that is quite clear to me.
I think it was that Christmas that my half-brother Christopher came to stay with us. Chris was very dear to me, although we were not strictly speaking related as he was my stepfather’s son from a previous marriage, and lived with his mother, but we had known each other since we were four and I put up with a lot from kids who made fun of such a thing as a half-brother when I told them I had one. We did not have a Christmas tree, but Chris and I made one in crayon on the back of a roll of wallpaper, lying on the floor in the hallway by the stairs as I recall, as that was the only floorspace big enough to work in. It was a very tall, narrow tree, two rolls wide, but not really very satisfactory as Christmas trees go. The wallpaper had been found in the attic. Other marvelous things were in that attic: a stack of ancient National Geographic magazines; a stamp collection featuring many stamps from someone’s wartime correspondence to Europe and the Far East, that I took with me when we left; a full set of Edwardian-era children’s encyclopedias, that I went about reading from cover to cover.
And then I turned eight, and 1963 began.
Monday, January 14, 2008
Basement Studio Space
In another part of the forest, I recall the first basement studio I had. Now that I think about it very hard, it was not years later as it seems at first, but just the following spring, because it was in the house we lived in on Brooks Street for only a few months before moving back to the co-ops. I had dropped out of college, soon after beginning my fourth semester. My second-floor room in the co-op would have green walls and wine-dark drapes.
In that basement on Brooks Street, a very normal dirty utilitarian cement basement, I made an enclosure of second-hand drapes, which I got cheap from St Vincent de Paul, and dyed a rich wine-color in the wringer washer. Two of my roommates got very mad about that, because they were in the habit of washing their nursing home uniforms in that washer every night and had them both dyed pink as a result of my project. But they didn’t actually complain to me about it, but to their boyfriend, who talked to mine, and you can see why we only lived there for a few months with that kind of communication going on. Entire volumes of interesting incident occurred during those few months, approximately February to May.
At the other end of the basement was a shelf full of cardboard boxes, that I was told contained chemistry glassware, and one box of lithium: the kind Mr Roberts in tenth-grade chemistry class donned protective goggles and apron to explode in the black chemistry sink, by putting a little bit of it in water. Explosive lithium. In the basement. Right. The people we were living with, or should I say, the person who organized the house we were living in, also from time to time organized a lab for MDA production – what in later years became MDMA. In my Chemistry for Mankind class we had a mimeographed handout diagramming the chemical structure of MDA, a sort of amphetamine with strong hallucinatory effects, which made for good trips because of the speed. The chemist used to come around to the house in the evenings to watch Kung Fu on the television. I saw him years later at a WisCon, coming down the grand lobby stairway, and he had not changed much. The person who organized the house was nicknamed Milo, as in Milo Minderbinder from the novel Catch-22, and he was full of exploits. Years later, again, as a suburban housewife, I saw his name and photo on the evening news when he was convicted of attempting to poison his wife -- one of the roommates. We had danced at their wedding, and ridden in the limo. Another of the roommates now sells insurance, and I ran into her with considerable astonishment at her father’s retirement party. We did not discuss the house on Brooks Street.
The studio was supposed to be a sewing studio. There was a sewing co-op on State Street,The Silver Thread, and it had given me the bright idea of going into business as a seamstress, sewing hand-made clothing, as I had learned to sew on my mother’s machine and made all kinds of things, clothing and patchworks and stuffed toys. I had a second-hand cabinet machine that my boyfriend Peter bought me, there in that basement. I did in fact use it later to construct about half of the Frostline sleeping bag kit that Peter Rabbit ordered so that we could go hiking the Appalachian Trail or some such (although that never occurred), that then lay packed in two cardboard boxes at various locations for thirty years. Now I have a different machine, a Kenmore portable that I bought for $40 from a friend, and mostly use it for mending and alterations. Last year I finally discarded the unfinished project, which mice had got into at some point, and made pillows from all the sealed coded packets of down and sleeping-bag stuffing.
In that basement on Brooks Street, a very normal dirty utilitarian cement basement, I made an enclosure of second-hand drapes, which I got cheap from St Vincent de Paul, and dyed a rich wine-color in the wringer washer. Two of my roommates got very mad about that, because they were in the habit of washing their nursing home uniforms in that washer every night and had them both dyed pink as a result of my project. But they didn’t actually complain to me about it, but to their boyfriend, who talked to mine, and you can see why we only lived there for a few months with that kind of communication going on. Entire volumes of interesting incident occurred during those few months, approximately February to May.
At the other end of the basement was a shelf full of cardboard boxes, that I was told contained chemistry glassware, and one box of lithium: the kind Mr Roberts in tenth-grade chemistry class donned protective goggles and apron to explode in the black chemistry sink, by putting a little bit of it in water. Explosive lithium. In the basement. Right. The people we were living with, or should I say, the person who organized the house we were living in, also from time to time organized a lab for MDA production – what in later years became MDMA. In my Chemistry for Mankind class we had a mimeographed handout diagramming the chemical structure of MDA, a sort of amphetamine with strong hallucinatory effects, which made for good trips because of the speed. The chemist used to come around to the house in the evenings to watch Kung Fu on the television. I saw him years later at a WisCon, coming down the grand lobby stairway, and he had not changed much. The person who organized the house was nicknamed Milo, as in Milo Minderbinder from the novel Catch-22, and he was full of exploits. Years later, again, as a suburban housewife, I saw his name and photo on the evening news when he was convicted of attempting to poison his wife -- one of the roommates. We had danced at their wedding, and ridden in the limo. Another of the roommates now sells insurance, and I ran into her with considerable astonishment at her father’s retirement party. We did not discuss the house on Brooks Street.
The studio was supposed to be a sewing studio. There was a sewing co-op on State Street,The Silver Thread, and it had given me the bright idea of going into business as a seamstress, sewing hand-made clothing, as I had learned to sew on my mother’s machine and made all kinds of things, clothing and patchworks and stuffed toys. I had a second-hand cabinet machine that my boyfriend Peter bought me, there in that basement. I did in fact use it later to construct about half of the Frostline sleeping bag kit that Peter Rabbit ordered so that we could go hiking the Appalachian Trail or some such (although that never occurred), that then lay packed in two cardboard boxes at various locations for thirty years. Now I have a different machine, a Kenmore portable that I bought for $40 from a friend, and mostly use it for mending and alterations. Last year I finally discarded the unfinished project, which mice had got into at some point, and made pillows from all the sealed coded packets of down and sleeping-bag stuffing.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Design 101
The summer between my first and second year of college, after I had moved from the slab dorm into the co-op house, I took an art class. That is, an Art class, in the Art Department of the UW, the first Design prerequisite class for all the other art classes. Nearly every day I walked up and down State Street to the bunkerlike Humanities Building and went upstairs to a cement classroom without windows. Often it was open so the students could work there on our projects, which was good because my room at the co-op was too small for a desk, although sometimes I worked there on the floor.
The teacher gave us a list of acrylic paints to buy, the primary colors to mix others from, yellow red and blue, with white and black, and then also a tube of purple, because, he explained, you will see it is hard to mix a good purple from red and blue. That was a mystery. It was true, and it still is, although I have since learned that is because the particular red and blue he had us buy do not make as vivid a secondary as certain other reds or blues. We mixed color wheels, or something like that, as we had mostly been doing in primary school art classes with cheap seven-pan boxes of watercolor. We made some geometric designs with related shades of a single color. I painted a very gray impressionistic landscape of the willows overhanging Lake Mendota from the rocks, maybe with ducks; it was so bad I destroyed it soon after. I made a number of collages that I still have.
Collage on purple box
It was not a Drawing class, and as I recall we didn’t do any drawing. Not a painting class either, really, and we didn’t use watercolors or oils or pastels. I’m thinking over all these things because of the reading I’ve done recently on art curricula of the last few centuries, and where my training fits in. My previous art classes had been the kind where the art teacher comes around to the classroom once a week, and tries to get everyone to exhibit their innate genius in the format of some medium and project she has already worked out in detail: crayon drawings with resist, linoleum block printing, papier mache masks, macramé hangings. I had spent one month in a high school art class trying to draw in pencil a still life that seemed to me entirely dead, and the teacher never satisfied with what I had done. But mostly I had avoided art classes because, I thought, I was not enough of an artist.
I guess I took that summer class to test this assumption, as a sort of lark. As larkishness goes it was not much fun. For our final projects I had a fairly weak collage, because I was resisting the part of the lesson where you abandon the original content of the photo or object, and was composing surrealist pastiche from the work of professional photographers and advertising designers. One girl in our class was going to be an Artist, though. I could tell because she had made a large soft sculpture out of dozens of gloves.
The teacher gave us a list of acrylic paints to buy, the primary colors to mix others from, yellow red and blue, with white and black, and then also a tube of purple, because, he explained, you will see it is hard to mix a good purple from red and blue. That was a mystery. It was true, and it still is, although I have since learned that is because the particular red and blue he had us buy do not make as vivid a secondary as certain other reds or blues. We mixed color wheels, or something like that, as we had mostly been doing in primary school art classes with cheap seven-pan boxes of watercolor. We made some geometric designs with related shades of a single color. I painted a very gray impressionistic landscape of the willows overhanging Lake Mendota from the rocks, maybe with ducks; it was so bad I destroyed it soon after. I made a number of collages that I still have.
Collage on purple box
It was not a Drawing class, and as I recall we didn’t do any drawing. Not a painting class either, really, and we didn’t use watercolors or oils or pastels. I’m thinking over all these things because of the reading I’ve done recently on art curricula of the last few centuries, and where my training fits in. My previous art classes had been the kind where the art teacher comes around to the classroom once a week, and tries to get everyone to exhibit their innate genius in the format of some medium and project she has already worked out in detail: crayon drawings with resist, linoleum block printing, papier mache masks, macramé hangings. I had spent one month in a high school art class trying to draw in pencil a still life that seemed to me entirely dead, and the teacher never satisfied with what I had done. But mostly I had avoided art classes because, I thought, I was not enough of an artist.
I guess I took that summer class to test this assumption, as a sort of lark. As larkishness goes it was not much fun. For our final projects I had a fairly weak collage, because I was resisting the part of the lesson where you abandon the original content of the photo or object, and was composing surrealist pastiche from the work of professional photographers and advertising designers. One girl in our class was going to be an Artist, though. I could tell because she had made a large soft sculpture out of dozens of gloves.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Petit digression
It must have been in the spring semester before, the teacher for my second semester of French Lit was a Professeur Smith, and what most amused me to learn from him was how to speak French with a totally flat American accent. His accent horrified me, every lecture. I knew it was getting into my brain. It might spoil my properly rolled glottal R's that I had picked up early enough to get them right. I might not know any grammar at all, but pronunciation was a specialty of the conversational method I had learned in high school.
At thirteen I had joined a class that had been meandering through French instruction for three years, taught by the head of the university foreign language department. Every day for an hour, from the moment M. Durette entered the room, only French was spoken. We watched filmstrips and listened to recordings, ecoutez et repetez, listen and repeat, repeat endlessly, in the darkened room, blinds lowered, our metal desk-chair units banked in two rows on each side of the room, and he explained the illuminated pictures, in voluble French. Within a month I had begun to pick up what he was going on about. Le petit train est arretee a la gare. And curiously, I was able to write French from his dictation and spell rather well immediately.
Then after the charismatic M. Durette, I had two years at Whitewater High School with the dynamic Mme Flanagan, as well as six weeks in summer of European travel with a high school group that she chaperoned. What those teachers gave carried me through a long way. But not much past Professeur Smith.
At thirteen I had joined a class that had been meandering through French instruction for three years, taught by the head of the university foreign language department. Every day for an hour, from the moment M. Durette entered the room, only French was spoken. We watched filmstrips and listened to recordings, ecoutez et repetez, listen and repeat, repeat endlessly, in the darkened room, blinds lowered, our metal desk-chair units banked in two rows on each side of the room, and he explained the illuminated pictures, in voluble French. Within a month I had begun to pick up what he was going on about. Le petit train est arretee a la gare. And curiously, I was able to write French from his dictation and spell rather well immediately.
Then after the charismatic M. Durette, I had two years at Whitewater High School with the dynamic Mme Flanagan, as well as six weeks in summer of European travel with a high school group that she chaperoned. What those teachers gave carried me through a long way. But not much past Professeur Smith.
El Proximo Paso
My son has now just finished his first semester of second year of college, and liked only some of it. He took Chemistry, and Anthropology, and Precalculus, and Psychology, and Spanish 301 -- El Proximo Paso -- because he took lots of Spanish in high school and traveled a bit. He moved into off-campus housing instead of the dorms, and is learning about bachelor squalor and paying bills. What we used to call sophomore year. It continues to surprise me, as it has since he was born, how always I compare his experience to mine and find myself reflecting at every age on the differences between us. It is like having two children, the real one and the ghostly one of my memories.
In my first semester of sophomore year I took Chemistry for Mankind (not for science majors), and Economics, and third-semester French Lit. I took lots of French Lit because I had to take some lit classes and was able to take them all in French, because I had taken French in high school and picked it up quickly and had traveled a bit. But I never lived in the dorms. In my first year at age seventeen I lived in grad student housing on Spring Street, which shocks my son who tells me what a slum that area is now, a single room in a slab of international style private dormitory that was possibly ten by twelve feet including the closet. But I digress. I was talking about the first semester of my sophomore year.
My third semester, following Early & 17th Century, and 18th-19th Century, was 20th Century French Lit. We read L'Etranger by Albert Camus, L'Immoraliste by Andre Gide, Sartre's Les Mouches, some mimeographed copies of selected surrealist poetry, and some Beckett and Genet in Panorama du Theatre Nouveau. We read de Beauvoir's Memoirs d'une jeune fille bien rangee (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) and I wrote a three-page biographical paper in bad French that concerned the correspondences (as another poet had it) between my emotional states and the local weather, during my family's move to California when I was in high school.
I had already taken Psychology, which was supposedly my major, a beginning course that had put me off by being all about neurology and visual perception, instead of about symbolism which was what I was more interested in at the time.
So now I have to dig through old notebooks and journals to find what would have filled out my twelve to fifteen class hour credits for that semester. Memory is tricksy. I find that was the semester I also took my first Spanish course.
In my first semester of sophomore year I took Chemistry for Mankind (not for science majors), and Economics, and third-semester French Lit. I took lots of French Lit because I had to take some lit classes and was able to take them all in French, because I had taken French in high school and picked it up quickly and had traveled a bit. But I never lived in the dorms. In my first year at age seventeen I lived in grad student housing on Spring Street, which shocks my son who tells me what a slum that area is now, a single room in a slab of international style private dormitory that was possibly ten by twelve feet including the closet. But I digress. I was talking about the first semester of my sophomore year.
My third semester, following Early & 17th Century, and 18th-19th Century, was 20th Century French Lit. We read L'Etranger by Albert Camus, L'Immoraliste by Andre Gide, Sartre's Les Mouches, some mimeographed copies of selected surrealist poetry, and some Beckett and Genet in Panorama du Theatre Nouveau. We read de Beauvoir's Memoirs d'une jeune fille bien rangee (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) and I wrote a three-page biographical paper in bad French that concerned the correspondences (as another poet had it) between my emotional states and the local weather, during my family's move to California when I was in high school.
I had already taken Psychology, which was supposedly my major, a beginning course that had put me off by being all about neurology and visual perception, instead of about symbolism which was what I was more interested in at the time.
So now I have to dig through old notebooks and journals to find what would have filled out my twelve to fifteen class hour credits for that semester. Memory is tricksy. I find that was the semester I also took my first Spanish course.
Sunday, January 06, 2008
Forward Into The Past
How we got to Thanksgiving dinner in the historian's house was more than likely on the bus. My boyfriend Peter was a bit of a transit nut. As I later lived in that neighborhood I still remember the routes, either the A or the C that ran south down Mills and out Park Street, but at the time I knew Madison no further south than Regent Street. All the busses still ran down State Street then though, and from Gorham and State we probably took the A bus that went west on Regent to Speedway and out to West Towne. From Regent we walked up Adams Street, which made something of an impression on me, being my second dad’s name and all. The Haygood’s house was and is a Victorian gingerbready sort of house on a corner, with a bay window in the front parlor and a dining room through an archway behind that, large kitchen in back and stairs up the side to the upstairs, like so many others. The family was the kind that collected all their children’s friends and kept them more or less out of trouble. I had been taken up by the children of the comfortable middle class. And a good thing too. This was not the first or the last time I was to wish I had gone to West High School.
It was the first semester of my second year at the UW. I was taking Chemistry For Mankind, and a third semester of French lit, and living at Solveig House, the first co-op house I lived in. It had once been a fraternity, and has since become some kind of fraternity once again, a big Prairie School rooming house at 420 West Gorham. We lived in a large melon-orange colored room at the front of the second floor. Peter had been living way out on the west side, and bicycling in all summer to his job off of State Street on Gorham, so the location was much closer to his work.
My first room at the co-op had been a tiny sectioned-off room upstairs at the rear of the house, with views onto the parking lot and the co-op house next door. It was right next to the bathroom though, and sufficient for my needs. After being invited to dinner in the co-op dining room in the basement, I had moved in that summer, applied a coat of white paint to my walls, and made sunny yellow curtains out of an Indian bedspread, borrowing the use of some friend's sewing machine. Peter’s first room had been on the lower floor, and very little larger than the waterbed he installed in it. He was an early adopter of such technologies.
His work was at a company called Management Data Systems, and without any college training he had more or less taught himself forms design, when his brother-in-law’s company had found itself awash in paper and needed some systematic control. He took me in to his office and showed me his technical pens and drawing board, and the climate-controlled room through the glass where the mainframe computer was housed. This was back in punch-card dinosaur days. The building MDS had remodeled and moved into, he told me, had previously been a dance hall called The Factory, where he and some of his friends had worked, that went bust when Otis Redding crashed into Lake Monona and the big concert was cancelled.
It was the first semester of my second year at the UW. I was taking Chemistry For Mankind, and a third semester of French lit, and living at Solveig House, the first co-op house I lived in. It had once been a fraternity, and has since become some kind of fraternity once again, a big Prairie School rooming house at 420 West Gorham. We lived in a large melon-orange colored room at the front of the second floor. Peter had been living way out on the west side, and bicycling in all summer to his job off of State Street on Gorham, so the location was much closer to his work.
My first room at the co-op had been a tiny sectioned-off room upstairs at the rear of the house, with views onto the parking lot and the co-op house next door. It was right next to the bathroom though, and sufficient for my needs. After being invited to dinner in the co-op dining room in the basement, I had moved in that summer, applied a coat of white paint to my walls, and made sunny yellow curtains out of an Indian bedspread, borrowing the use of some friend's sewing machine. Peter’s first room had been on the lower floor, and very little larger than the waterbed he installed in it. He was an early adopter of such technologies.
His work was at a company called Management Data Systems, and without any college training he had more or less taught himself forms design, when his brother-in-law’s company had found itself awash in paper and needed some systematic control. He took me in to his office and showed me his technical pens and drawing board, and the climate-controlled room through the glass where the mainframe computer was housed. This was back in punch-card dinosaur days. The building MDS had remodeled and moved into, he told me, had previously been a dance hall called The Factory, where he and some of his friends had worked, that went bust when Otis Redding crashed into Lake Monona and the big concert was cancelled.
Saturday, January 05, 2008
My life has been crowded with incident.
So much so that even now that I have settled down to live in the same town for what is at last more than half my life, one thing leads to another in my thoughts, off in all directions. When I walk past a certain blue house at Grant & Adams, on the shortcut from Park to Monroe St, it reminds me of how I sat after Thanksgiving dinner in that dining room when I was 18, and entertained the party for an eternal moment as the father, a historian, asked me for more detail and prompted me to continue the account I had begun in answer to the simple question of how I had gotten to Madison from my birthplace. When I drive by, I have to hold the memory in reserve. My local hippie boyfriend had taken me to that Thanksgiving dinner with the family of his heart, from his years at West High School. No one had ever listened to me tell the whole thing through, so until then I had only my private grandiose suspicions that I even had a story. My spouse can still be surprised by things I recall, places and events I can tell of that he has never heard.
Likewise, every time I drive past the Shopiere Road exit near Beloit, on the interstate south to Chicago, it reminds me of a colorful story from my far too interesting past, 1983 or so. Once I entertained a friend as we drove back to Madison with the tale, and a few months later on the bus to O’Hare I wrote it all out, but I am still looking for those notes. Oh look! Here they are buried in a 2001-2005 travel notebook, from when I was last on my way to Potlatch in San Francisco. Hyperlink should go here.
Already behind, well into the first week of January 2008, in the middle of my life, and seeming lost in the middle of wood, that Thanksgiving dinner seems as good a mark as any from which to begin. Unlike the Red Queen, I do not run as twice as fast to make progress, but plod along as usual. The nature of my medium will pile each episode onto the last to scroll into a structure like that movie Memento, a series of forward-moving sentences that leads to the beginning of the previous, or last, depending on how you look at it. For the amusement of my friends, I will attempt to recount some of the story of how I arrived here.
Likewise, every time I drive past the Shopiere Road exit near Beloit, on the interstate south to Chicago, it reminds me of a colorful story from my far too interesting past, 1983 or so. Once I entertained a friend as we drove back to Madison with the tale, and a few months later on the bus to O’Hare I wrote it all out, but I am still looking for those notes. Oh look! Here they are buried in a 2001-2005 travel notebook, from when I was last on my way to Potlatch in San Francisco. Hyperlink should go here.
Already behind, well into the first week of January 2008, in the middle of my life, and seeming lost in the middle of wood, that Thanksgiving dinner seems as good a mark as any from which to begin. Unlike the Red Queen, I do not run as twice as fast to make progress, but plod along as usual. The nature of my medium will pile each episode onto the last to scroll into a structure like that movie Memento, a series of forward-moving sentences that leads to the beginning of the previous, or last, depending on how you look at it. For the amusement of my friends, I will attempt to recount some of the story of how I arrived here.
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