Moo: Jane Smiley

"There were many people on campus who wore rags, went barefoot, played the recorder in front of Old Capitol, handed out leaflets, and drove VW buses with slogans about sex painted on the sides, but Elaine had done them the favor of ignoring them."

p. 243: The recorder as hippie sex-addict accessory.

Project(ile Vomit)

So I'm embarking on a project. Projects are important: something to make you feel as if you're locomoting through life rather than merely drifting along. Unfortunately, I'm too chickenshit to attempt projects of actual utility (forming a musical group, penning a literary novel, composting) so I've been forced to fall back on useless projects (hammering out two insipid romance novels, Master's thesis).

Trouble is, I finished the second romance novel last week, and I'm tired of writing them. There's only so many synonyms for smolder, after all, and my characters have a distressing tendency to get it on.

No, I'm ready for something new. Something thorny, pointless, and Sisyphean. Yes, my friends, I'm ready for Bach.

Some exposition:

1) When my favorite college coffee shop/music store closed down my senior year, I bought a cup of coffee and the Urtext of Bach's Inventions and Sinfonia for keyboard, this latter purchase being the kind of talismanic gesture people make when very frightened or very hopeful, like spitting when you hear the devil's name.

2) As of Friday, there is a small 1970s Rodgers electronic organ with full pedalboard in my dining room. This is not my fault.

3) Although I am a musician, I am not a keyboard player. My keyboard experience is as follows:

a) Age 6. Six months of desultory study with embittered graduate student on electric keyboard above local music store. I did not practice. Repertoire: Go Tell Aunt Rhodie.

b) Age 17-18 About a year and a half of piano study, w. heavy emphasis on theory, with very talkative harpsichordist. I practiced indifferently. Repertoire: Bach Prelude in F Minor, learned laboriously over six months, still the only piece I can play.

c) Age 18-19. Played short chordal patterns on piano for sullen keyboard monitors in an attempt to pass Music Theory. Success! Repertoire: I vi IV V I.

d) Age 22. Realized I had better dispatch undergraduate keyboard requirement. Conned a friend into teaching me organ, and thereafter spent every lesson gossiping shamelessly about other organists. No actual learning accomplished. Profoundly suspicions of pedalboard. My friend never teaches again, later moves to Sweden. Repertoire: Snark.

e) Age 24-25. Lit on brilliant plan to take two semesters of basso continuo as best way to obtain Performer Diploma without doing any actual work, plus enable self to accompany small, inept students w. out. shelling out for accompanist. Success! However, still cannot actually play keyboard. Repertoire: accompaniment for Go Tell Aunt Rhodie.

All of which leads me inexorably to the first statement of the theme of the post, in which I announce my intention to learn all 12 Bach 2-part inventions on the electronic organ. Rules:

1) I have until December 31, 2009 to learn all 12 pieces, but I can start now.
2) I will use only the first manual. I will not use the pedalboard unless I accidentally step on it while climbing on and off the electronic organ.
3) I am allowed to abandon the project if I like. It's my party; I can cry if I want to.
4) By "learn" I mean be able to play smoothly without stopping, even if my tempo for all inventions remains along of the lines of "dirge." Playing Bach agonizingly slowly on the electronic organ is historically informed insofar as a really bad keyboard player in the time of Bach, who had access only to an electronic organ which had traveled from the 1970s in a time machine, would play Bach agonizingly slowly on the electronic organ. Take that, Donnington.
5) I will not spill water on the electronic organ.

Wish me luck! I will be posting updates periodically. On to invention number 1, the C Major, better known as easiest keyboard piece in the world. Can I sight read it? No.

E.B. White Said:

"I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."

Damn straight.

On Decoration

I'm staring at the poinsettia on the dining room table. It's a small poinsettia: moderately healthy, inordinately red, more than a little insouciant. It was thrust into my hands as I was leaving a staff Christmas party. Protesting seemed futile -who spurns a potted plant?- nor could I, in conscience, heave a living thing out of the car window at 60 miles an hour. And Lo, it came to Pass that on the Friday before the Second Sunday of Advent, I took the thing home and plunked it on the table.

It hulks, the poinsettia. It casts a malevolent red shadow longer than its five or six inches warrant. Crouched next to the plant is the ear of decorative corn that came in my CSA share and which I tried, and failed, to eat. Even though it is Advent, even though Christmas shimmers in the shadows like some blind, deep-water fish, the poinsettia and the ear of corn are (and will remain) the only encroachment of the Great Dark Army of Decoration into my house.

I am not a decorator. This is a bedrock kind of character trait, buried down deep with introversion and hot-headedness and sensitivity to noise. When I was growing up I refused to wear anything but buttonless, zipperless, of-a-piece clothes in solid colors, which caused my southern-belle grandmother to frown at her DAR membership card and grumble about elves.

I have lived a lifetime of white walls, bare windows, and furniture I dragged off the curb. It's not that I am especially clean or tidy or austere; rather, my decorationlessness springs from some soul-deep laziness, some profound disinclination to go the extra mile or the extra millimeter. I eat out of the pan so as not to have to wash dishes. I do not make the bed. When I walk, I cut unhesitatingly across greenswards and parking lots and flowerbeds, seeking always that sweetest, shortest line.

Most of the time, I am resigned to this particular facet of my personality. After all, a thousand poinsettias didn't save Martha Stewart from having to wear an ankle bracelet, and those of my neighbors who put up elaborate, ghostly displays in their yards for Halloween have to take them down now. IN THE SNOW.

Still, this morning as I traipsed past the Christmas tree sale at the big, old neighborhood church, I felt in my soul the barren pang of the Undecorated. It was a blazing, frozen morning. The men dragging Christmas trees out into the churchyard sported jaunty red noses and ostrich plumes of breath. Someone helped a young mother heave a tree onto the back of her truck; a hale, behatted young man marched off down the street with a six-footer tucked beneath his arm. Toward the middle of the yard, two wizened men threw branches onto a fire; the air filled with the mingled scents of pine and smoke.

What is missing in me, I thought, that I don't want this in my life? That I'm not frantically figuring out how to squish a Douglas fir into the back of my Plymouth Acclaim, that I neglect to make room in my heart for green, for glitter, for a tree-topper that flashes "Merry X-mas" like a disco ball drunk on peppermint schnapps?

Hunkered in the steeple's shadow, I wondered if I lacked something important. If I was born without some flourish, some essential grace of humanity, like a baby born without toenails. By then I was already cutting across the churchyard, hands in my pockets, the wind slapping my cheeks into bloom.

Salt Pig!

Oooo.

64 Questions More Than You Wanted to Know

1. What's your name?
Anne with an e. WITH AN E, DAMN IT!

2. What is your favorite thing to wear?
Fuzzy slippers.

3. Last thing you ate?
Chocolate. Off of my fuzzy slippers.

4. One place you will NEVER eat?
Chuck E Cheese. There's not much more terrifying.

5. I say 'shotgun,' you say:
Cars are evil rattletraps.

6. Last person you hugged?
Myself.

7. Does anyone you know wanna date you?
Um. Do I know any polygamists? Hi polygamists!

8. Would you date anyone you met online?
Alex Ross. Hi Alex Ross!

9. Name something you like about your physical self:
My hands are pretty.

10. The last place you went out to dinner?
The Runcible Spoon. Mmmm. I had a black russian: pumpernickel w. roasted veggies, cheese, and special sauce, plus garlic mashed potatoes.

11. Who is your best friend?
Superlatives box you in.

12. What time of the day is it?
9:09 PM.

13. Who/What made you angry today?
Turn-signal abstainers. The turn signal is a beautiful thing.

14. Baseball or football?
Boring and boringer.

15. Ever gone skinny dipping?
Yes. And again.

16. Favorite type of food?
Cheese. Is this a rhetorical question?

17. Favorite holiday:
Thanksgiving. On the minus side: enforced gratitude. On the plus side: food.

18. Do you download music?
How do you work this computer thingy?

19. Do you care if your socks are dirty?
Yes.

20. Opinion of Chinese symbol tattoos?
Pain is bad.

21. Would you date the person who posted this?
Would I date John Green? Um. Well, he is pretty nerdy. Also married. Also kinda cute. I'm going to stop answering the question now.

22. Has anyone ever sung or played for you personally?
Yes. This is an unavoidable hazard of music school.

23. Do you love anyone?
Yes. Multiple folks.

24. Are colored contact lenses sexy?
No.

25. Have you ever bungee jumped?
Hell no, we won't go.

26. Have you ever gone white-water rafting?
What is this, purgatory?

27. Has anyone ten years older than you ever hit on you?
Yes. But not with very much conviction.

28. How many pets do you have?
The cuddliest pet of all: my imagination! (Oh God I need a kitten.)

29. Have you met a real redneck?
I live among them.

30. How is the weather right now?
Cold; flurries.

31. What are you listening to right now?
That zzzzhhhh the heater makes.

32. What is your current favorite song?
Eh? Song? Is that like a sonata?

33. What was the last movie you watched?
The Sex and the City Movie, in an attempt to cure pre-birthday depression. The movie sucked. I still felt old. Those girls do nothing but buy shoes.

34. Do you wear contacts?
Yes.

35. Where was the last place you went besides your house?
Work. Bleh.

36. What are you afraid of?
Heights. Airplanes. Worms. Vampires. Storms. Disease. Love. Scorpions. Elevators. Other people. Famine. The future. Safaris. What am I not afraid of?

37. How many piercings have you had?
Two.

38. What further piercings do you want?
None. Ignorance was bliss.

39. What's one thing you've learned this year?
Chocolate and bacon, combined, launch a no-holds-barred assault on sublimity.

40. What do you usually order from Starbucks?
No.

41. What Magazines are you reading?
The Atlantic. The New Yorker. Newsweek. Indianapolis Monthly. O: The Oprah Magazine. How is it that I manage to be both lowbrow AND snobby?

42. Have you ever fired a gun:
Do Nerf guns count?

43. Are you missing someone?
Yes.

44. Favorite TV show?
Freaks and Geeks!

45. Do you have an obsession with WoW?
What the heck is WoW? Wooing Ocelot Widows? Wonderful Orange Windows? Help me out here, folks.

46. Has anyone ever said you looked like a celeb?
No. Though an ex-boyfriend once told me I looked like the pre-pubescent girl peeking out of the woods in Braveheart right after her family gets slaughtered. I probably should have taken this as a sign.

47. Which celeb do you look like?
Gilbert Gottfried?

48. Who would you like to see right now?
See, like visuals only? See like talk? Too much wiggle room here. Also that should be "whom." Probably more indicative of my personality than my answers is the extent to which I've gone around tweaking the grammar of the questions.

49. Favorite movie of all time?
I'm not really a movie person. Possibly, despite all my pretensions to intellect, my favorite movie is "Elf."

50. Do you find yourself loved?
Yes.

51. Have you ever been caught doing something you weren't supposed to?
Yes.

52. Favorite smell?
Snow.

53. Butter, plain, or salted popcorn?
No. Popcorn is freakish. I might lick the salt off, though.

54. What's something that really bugs you?
People who don't recycle. People who drive SUVs. People who lie to scientists for cash. I have a whole list. Wait, where are you going?

55. Do you like Michael Jackson?
I have a third-grader named Michael Jackson whom I see. He is a very nice young man.

56. Taco Bell or Burger King?
Enough with the Sophie's choices!

57. What's your favorite perfume?
Anything that smells of vanilla. Or roses. Because I am lame and conventional. Also I always feel as if I am being emotionally manipulated when I smell perfume, and that makes me cranky.

58. Favorite baseball team?
So you take the boring little white ball and you stick it up your boring...

59. Ever call a 1-900 phone number?
No.

60. What's the longest time you've gone without sleep?
Possibly 20 hours? Sleep is a mistress with whom you don't trifle.

61. Last time you went bowling?
A year ago. I miss bowling.

62. Where is the weirdest place you have slept?
On the floor behind a small pipe organ.

63. Who was your last phone call.
Miyo. Hi Miyo! You don't read this blog, but hi anyway!

64. Last time you were at work?
4:05

65. What's the closest orange object to you?
The "Publish Post" button on my blog. Uh-oh.

Read it and Weep

I just heard an NPR commentary by author Ann Patchett (Bel Canto, The Patron Saint of Liars). I have a kind of schizoid fondness for Patchett; she repels me even as she pulls me in. Today's commentary I didn't mind. Patchett, in the course of speaking about a book-loving friend of hers, proposed a special category of books: "Books I Read for Men." These, she admitted, tended to be thorny, tortuous, and LONG.

AMEN! I wonder if each of us has, secreted somewhere in our hearts, a list of Books We've Read for Men (or Women). Below, an expurgated version of mine:

The Unbearable Lightness of Being
A Clockwork Orange
Still Life with Woodpecker
The Brothers Karamazov (ATTEMPT)
Shogun (most of it; unfairly thrust upon me when I was puking my guts out and couldn't lay hands on anything else)

Ugh! Feel free to pass along a few of the dragons you bearded in the name of love.

Still, I don't want to seem too negative. Reading is reading, whomever you do it for. And reading for love (or lust, or friendship) is a generous act, a way of sharing, if only for a few hours, your mental space with someone else. Besides, the Kundera wasn't all that bad.

Patchett asserts: "A friend with whom you can read -and reread- The Ambassadors cannot be replaced." Sure, I have people in my life who love me. But I find it sad -almost unspeakably so- that I have no one in my life at the moment who would read a book for me. Or better yet, with me.

Sniffle. I'm taking applications!