mended things

Days like this

2011-06-22T00:25:00.005-04:00

After eleven months, it almost seems beside the point to add to this blog, but--this is already such a trope of blogs, with their sudden advents and equally sudden disappearances--I'm going to write at least this much: I'm sitting on a patio in northern California, an airplane roaring past, and I'm thinking about these lines from Kim Taylor's "Days Like This": "Days like this / you look up at the sky above you. / Days like this / you think about the ones that love you." I'm looking up at the sky, red-black beyond the heart-shaped leaves of a nearby tree, and thinking of all the loved ones that--who--crowd into even the most prosaic, the least blue, of skies. It's June 21, neatly poised between a slew of family birthdays (some of them from people who, in Taylor's words, went before me) and my folks' anniversary, and I'm recovering from a long road trip before moving, with my guy, into a new apartment. It's a good time to feel in the midst, in the thick, of things. And people. (Is there a better word for what we are after we die? Or, even, while we're living?) This sky is full of the plaintive howl of the neighbors' dog--full, throaty--and the traces of what you might, in Italian, call i miei morti: my dead ones, although they're not only mine, and not--can I say this?--only dead. One of my grandmothers, very much alive and perhaps the most generous person I know, pressed cold pork sandwiches into my hand just a week ago; the other one lives on, instead, in the memory of a round canister of talcum powder (what else could it have been?) that sat on the back of the toilet in her modest central Illinois home: if I were spending the night, I'd take a bath before bed, and once I was dry she'd take what was, I guess, literally a powder puff and--gently--whack whack whack my delighted body with it, a cloud of fragrant dust rising around me. Am I making this up? I think of her husband, my grandpa, gone just a year this summer, when I think of that bathroom: I think specifically of the smell of old-fashioned soap (stuff like Barbasol and Safeguard) that lingered in the bathtub of that small house, rubberized butterflies stuck to the bottom to keep you from slipping.

These memory chains extend indefinitely. I'm not just, or even primarily, thinking tonight of the folks I've lost. I'm thinking of the folks--virtual, in some cases, but somehow also very much present to me--whose lives shape mine: family, of course--my very pregnant sister's body, full of a tiny creature she calls Rosalind, who kicks ecstatically for Diet Mountain Dew--but also friends and, even, the rare guardian angels of the internet, like Brian, the guy who co-writes my favorite perfume blog, I Smell Therefore I Am. And, yes, the guardian angels of the highway--I just drove 3300 miles to get here--and the workplace: women, mostly, who have made me breakfast and dinner, who have written the kinds of things that allow someone like me to keep his job, who--through casual acts of generosity--keep making the world a little bigger, a little more open, a little more benevolently mysterious. If every word that comes from my fingers--or keyboard, or mouth--amounts to nothing more than a kind of thank you, is that such a bad thing? Is there any other way, really, to respond to the ones who love you; to the world that, despite everything, loves you?

So: days like this--nights like this--you think about the hands that made you sandwiches or coffee, that once, long ago or yesterday, anointed your body. You think about those hands and about the sky that changes dramatically over 3300 miles but never goes away.

A hundred million miracles

2010-07-13T21:35:00.003-04:00

I've been quiet for a while. Not in real life--ask anyone--but here, mostly. And what has brought me out of my cocoon is, I kid you not, The Flower Drum Song. Why had no one ever told me that Miyoshi Umeki would break my heart? Or that "Chop Suey," channeled through Juanita Hall, would become at once an ode to American hybridity and a more poignant commentary on Hall's own embodiment of multiple racial identities? This, dear reader, blows West Side Story (its strict contemporary, cinematically speaking) out of the water.

It's not just that I'm partial to San Francisco. When Umeki's character, Mei Li, performs for the first time--in a public plaza, presumably near Market and Stockton?--she begins by inviting the passersby to hear "songs of ghosts, songs of love, and songs of misery." Tonight--it's past 10, and the air in this small town is so thick you could serve it as a foam in some big city restaurant--I wonder if there is any love song worth singing that would not also be in some way about ghosts or misery. Or not about them--that's my lousy paraphrase--but *of* them. Songs that come from, songs that are made of, songs that owe their very shape and substance to things like this: ghosts; love; misery.

But when Umeki starts to sing, she doesn't sing of misery. She sings of miracles. The song begins by evoking the continual becoming of the world: kids growing, rivers flowing; the kind of stuff you've heard a million times (a hundred million times) before. Maybe not right after a promise of ghosts and love and misery, but still often enough that you could be forgiven--but you could always be forgiven--for tuning out until the chorus, or at least the hint of a chorus that emerges when Umeki sings, for the first of many (how many?) times, "A hundred million miracles are happening every day." (I use Umeki's name instead of her character's because the thought of these lyrics is inseparable from the thought of her voice, just as the thought of her voice is, for me, inseparable from the thought of her cheekbones: a quality that she shares with Barbara Stanwyck--although what a difference between those voices, and those cheekbones!)

These miracles--these hundred million miracles--are relentlessly ordinary. Weather. Birth. Growth. Sunburn. It's as if these elemental processes, themselves dangerously close to clichés, were nonetheless more evocative, and less cliché, ways of saying the things that tend to get said, particularly in popular culture, under the signs of love or loss. The world of "A Hundred Million Miracles" is not that different a world from, say, the world of True Blood--to take a slightly less than random example from television--but it says this shared world's problems (and joys) differently. It sings them differently. Intimacy, it sings--Umeki sings--can be a question of whose blood gets in whose veins; but it can also surface in a sunburn, in the unexpected ways we are touched (and hurt) by the world. Heartbreak and sunburn have something in common.

I think that it takes guts to sing the connectedness of things. Umeki does this; so, too, do two other people I want to mention tonight. Earlier this summer, I was lucky enough to see Josh Ritter perform in Louisville--why don't I just live there already?--and to have my dad beside me during the show. My dad's a gentle guy, up for just about anything. And he loves music. Still, I hadn't expected that he would love this concert as much as he did (or as much, I should say, as I think he did). The moment when, without looking at him, I felt that somehow we were both connected to Ritter and to one another through an infinitely thin, infinitely strong thread (call it music, call it the world) was during a song, "Another New World," in which the speaker--the singer--tells of a trip to the "top of the world" in his beloved boat, the Annabelle Lee, which he'll chop up for firewood before the song is through. It's a song of ghosts and love and misery: of the dream of a "fine deep harbor ... past the ice" for a ship whose embrace is a lover's; of "another new world" beyond this one. The song's tragedy, in the end, comes from the refusal to accept this world--a world big enough for ice and, tonight, condensation on my water glass--as the new one; from the insistence that there must be yet another new world just around the corner, or beyond the pole. To get there, you sacrifice what you love most. The song, as I hear it, is an indictment not of wanderlust but of the stubborn incapacity to take the given world as given: to accept that it not only can be but is being made new, just as it is. We ought to be wary of anyone--I'm looking at you, evangelical pastors, with your all too confident accounts of the hereafter--who tries to sell us a ticket to another new world, especially when it becomes clear that the means of getting there (our ship, our love) is precisely what we'll be required to burn.

That was a digression, maybe. I have a thing against sacrifice, against the romance of sacrifice. And Ritter's voice--quivering, growling, and here too, as with Umeki, I'm reading his werewolf-like face into the tone--is an incredibly powerful and persuasive instrument for exactly those romantic qualities that make sacrifice (especially self-sacrifice) so alluring. In his song, though, it's the beloved, not the self, who gets sacrificed in the end.

The beloved, here, is a boat. Is it silly to get this worked up about a boat, about the violence of destroying what we could easily, blithely call an inanimate object? Not if we take seriously these words from Todd Boss's poem "Things, Like Dogs," which begins narratively--"I came home last night to find that my / laptop had crawled up onto the table"--and turns, at the end of the fourth stanza, to reflection: "...it was kind of nice. / Kind of nice to know that things, / like dogs, grow fond and want / to be had, to be used, to be played." Everything coheres around that break, more present in the body of the poem than in the title, between "things" and "like dogs": that there is a line--but a line you can cross, or, better, a space--between the animate and inanimate worlds. Things are not dogs; dogs are not things. Theirs is a relationship of likeness, not equivalence. Moreover--sorry, that's the academic creeping into my voice--playing something is not quite the same as playing *with* something. (I do not play dogs, but, if I'm lucky, I sometimes get to play with them.) All the same, the poem raises the possibility that our treatment *of* things (and dogs) might open onto our treatment *by* things: the world wants to be useful; the world grows fond. We are handled--it is not, or not only, a surreal fantasy--by the creatures around us. We don't come first. It becomes even more violent, in this light, to think, in the terms of Ritter's sailor, of sacrificing the very world--the most loved and cherished embodiment of that world--that has made us possible, and to do so for the prospect of another one.

It's late. I'm misreading, or mislistening, I'm sure. But it is no small miracle that three distinct voices come together in agreement here: around the sense of the miraculous unfolding of the world; around the connections that persist across line breaks, between fathers and sons and singers; around the fact--the conviction--that this happens every day.

Possible dreams

2009-11-09T18:05:00.010-05:00

I've just finished listening, for the first time in months, to one of those records that will never let me go: Patty Griffin's Impossible Dream (2004), whose oscillation between hope and despair defined an important, though thankfully past, season of my life. God, that was several years ago now, and I am metaphorically in a different place, but oh, dear reader, I am literally in the same one, stuck in this hollow that tests the semantic field of that word, trees newly bare and faces (one by one, as I hiked this afternoon) closed down and cold. Listening to Patty sing about the places she wants out of, places she may even have chosen, is all my little heart can bear on this dark, dark evening.

There was a time when "Useless Desires" was my anthem; it would rattle the speakers in my car. "The weekend edition," Patty would wail, "has this town way overrated," and I would pass the co-op with my windows rolled down and make some poor lady's flax flutter. Tonight, though, I was raised up out of my reading by two songs toward the end of the disc: "Florida," an old favorite, where two girls drive down A1A "into the arms of Florida," and the refrain marvels at how "I still hang around here / And there's nothing to hold me," and, quieter but also more damning, "Mother of God," where the voice in the song admits, "When I was eighteen I moved to Florida / Like everyone sick of the cold does / And I waited on old people waiting to die / I waited on them until I was." That suspense at the stanza's end still makes me shiver. Until I was old? Until I was waiting to die?

I am not, God knows, anywhere near Florida; and I am not waiting to die; and I am not old, although I have a new little crease beneath my left eye that greets me each morning. I am caught between the voices of these songs; caught, too, by the preacher in C. E. Morgan's recent novel _All the Living_, who says, "I know you are despairing, too... What looks like patience tastes like despair."

But there is good news here. Tastes are not permanent. The coffee I've been drinking (which does not taste like despair) will fade on my tongue, if not on my breath, before I've finished writing these few paragraphs. But there is also, thankfully, better news than the fact that everything fades. Without stopping the car, without exactly alleviating the sickness that drives us on and away, there are other folks who show up on the A1A or the 101 (I love these highway palindromes) and share the song, make the trip easier. Sometimes they even, with their words or with their hands, hold us for a while.

I had the chance last week to spend some time with someone whose writing I've loved for a long time, and she was, small miracle, even lovelier in person than in print. As we walked through dead leaves on that grey afternoon, after she had spoken about the hands that held and, holding them, created the books of the past--a particular past, a medieval one, that nonetheless doesn't stop touching ours--it felt as though we could have been heading into the arms of Florida, or Texas, or California. But, wherever we ended up, there would be some hope of holding there: something to get us beyond the romance of patience and its attendant taste of despair.

That hope is what is implicit in the closing couplet of "Mother of God": "I get up every morning with my cup of coffee / And talk to the Mother of God." I do not talk to the Mother of God every morning, although I admire the puzzle of that genitive. (Which comes first? The Mother or the God?) If I talk to someone while I'm making coffee, it is, more often than not, my still-sleeping blue-eyed boy, three thousand miles away, who could only be compared to the Mother of God if I were to borrow Oscar Levant's line about Doris Day. (I knew him before he was a virgin.) Occasionally I talk to my imaginary greyhound, Lucille, who could easily be a remnant of an unwritten Lorrie Moore story. But I talk--this is the point--to someone, real or imagined, whose company is an index, a foretaste, pointing toward a new horizon, beyond but also, magically and mercifully, within the coffee cup. The world expands.

This is the antidote to the taste of despair. (Often, I admit, it tastes a little like wine.) It is prospective but not immaterial. My mom leaves a sweet or silly voicemail; some friends and colleagues, known and unknown to me, take time out of their busy lives to sit around a table with me and talk about something I wrote, words I could never have imagined touching them. Imagine the joy and the panic, the gratitude and the cup crashing to the floor, when the Mother of God talks back.

Desanitized

2009-09-20T13:32:00.006-04:00

I have rarely been made as angry by a church--or, really, by any institutional body--as I was this morning. This story will not take long to tell.

I'd decided to try our local outpost of the Congregational Church (which already required relinquishing, for a moment, my conviction that if there is no eucharist, there is seriously no fucking point) and I found myself, consequently, in the most bourgeois neighborhood of my little town, one of those neighborhoods whose exclusiveness is broadcast to the world by the serpentine, mostly sidewalk-free streets designed to be navigated only by those in the know. I already hated myself a little (and my town, unsurprisingly, a lot) as I parked my car and headed past the usual array of Subarus up to the door.

I know: it was not an auspicious beginning. But nothing could prepare me for what lay inside.

A phalanx of grey-haired matrons stood guard at the sanctuary doors--nothing out of the ordinary there--and one of them handed me a bulletin. It was, in fact, her companion who swiftly and innocently dealt the fatal blow. As I turned toward the entrance, she turned toward me, and I realized that she was cradling some kind of liturgical object in her hands. At first I couldn't figure out what it was. A chalice? A pitcher of some kind? It wasn't Maundy Thursday. Who, I thought to myself, could have predicted that congregationalists, of all people, would incorporate some kind of physical rite into their worship?

These thoughts were cut short by the woman's gentle, revolting question. "Would you," she asked, "care for some hand sanitizer?" It wasn't, in other words, a chalice that she was brandishing; it was an enormous pump bottle of alcohol-based disinfectant, the exact size and shape of bottles that might appear in the margins of a Larry Sultan photograph.

I politely declined her offer, even as it prompted in me the kind of rage I hadn't felt--righteous, religious rage--since the early days of hitting my head against holy homophobia. Is there anything less Christian, anything further from the Gospel, than disinfecting your hands before entering a church?

I cannot begin to tell you how my hands still tremble as I write this. I understand that Ithaca, my hallowed home, is a community currently swept up in a very clear paranoia, some of it justified, about illness. (It is not incidental that this illness is attributed, in name if not in fact, to animals whose reputation for dirt precedes them.) Still, when I saw the giant bottle of hand sanitizer, I thought--and how could someone at that church not have anticipated this?--of all the things that Christendom, and its complicit and corresponding institutions, has wanted to protect itself from. I thought of the dirty people, the gay people, the people with AIDS, the people too poor or too sick or too depraved to be incorporated into what so often passes for the body of Christ. I thought of how fearful we still are.

Don't touch me. I'd hate to catch whatever you might have. I can imagine nothing worse than your unsanitized hand.

What, I thought, would have happened if churches still commonly exchanged the peace not with a handshake but, instead, with a kiss? What would it take to clean our mouths? Would there be bars of soap to bite, the way there were when I was little and prone (as I am, alas, still) to swearing in front of my parents?

I want to write the kinds of sentences worthy of one of Flannery O'Connor's prophets, but I will turn to Mark 7 instead. This is, many of you will realize, the chapter of Mark's gospel in which Jesus most dramatically transgresses, at times in spite of himself, the purity codes that his opponents are portrayed as upholding. It is the chapter in which the Syrophoenician woman asks him to cast a demon out of her daughter and Jesus calls her a dog, relenting only when she talks back: "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs" (Mk 7.28, NRSV). It is the chapter in which Jesus spits as he heals a deaf man. It is the chapter in which Jesus affirms that "whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile" (Mk 7.18, NRSV). It is the chapter that the church this morning needed to remember; that we could all, Christian or not, stand to remember. Our business in this life, to the extent that we have a business or a task in common, is to resist the temptation to remind others that they aren't clean enough for us, that they remind us of animals, that they eat weird things. Our business in this life--and yes, I am preaching this now--is to talk back.

I walked out of the sanctuary during the announcements, barely five minutes after declining the lubricant-shaped bottle. The pastor was explaining the weekly washing of toys and the various other sanitizing procedures that the church was in the process of undertaking. I bailed. Any religious rite that begins under the sign of mass purification--of affirming not our communal dirt but our communal paranoia about infection--is no rite worth celebrating. A little later in Mark's gospel, merchants are chased out of the temple for less.

I am not prone to visions. Nonetheless, imagine this: at the moment I left the cold, quiet church, a pack of dogs--not a few, not fifty, but hundreds and hundreds of dogs, mutts and tripods and, come to think of it, pigs too, beautiful multi-colored enormous pigs--barged into that stale sanctuary. Border collies herded the screaming children; Saint Bernards pounced upon the matrons, scattering their plastic bottles. Mud was flung everywhere. Fleas--yes, even fleas--abounded. Perhaps some of the terriers were even under the weather; perhaps some of them were sneezing. Bulletins, tossed in the air by panicked faculty wives and mothers, were caught by retrievers and shredded and eaten and, if my vision was true, even pooped out blithely. Pigs squealed and snorted.

I didn't look back. I've learned from Lot's wife to keep on walking when you've left the burning city.

Tous les sens

2009-08-16T09:37:00.005-04:00

Instead of all the virtuous things I could do on a Sunday morning--getting ready for church, say, or heading outdoors for a hike before the sun really kicks in--I'm listening to a dirty French song. Specifically, I'm listening to Montréal's Ariane Moffatt whisper to her lover, "Je veux faire un puzzle avec ta peau" [I want to make/put together/construct a puzzle with your skin], before proceeding to this chorus: "Je veux t'aimer dans tous les sens." I want to love you in every sense. I'm blown away--or, better yet, disassembled--by the thought of the surface of a body locked, unlocked, and interlocked like so many scraps of scalloped cardboard. Moreover, I love the idea of loving someone, of wanting them and wanting to love them, not just in every direction but in and within each of the body's senses. What would it mean to trace the fissures and seams of a beloved body-puzzle with, for example, your nose? Or with your tongue, but not just your tongue; not even just your taste-buds, as though somehow a sense could be located once and for all in a given place; but in the diffuse--yet overpoweringly concentrated--radiance of sense, of senses, beyond them?

Somewhere a dog is barking.

I'm just back from two and a half weeks in Montréal, whose homely streets overflowed with beautiful people, and where I immediately felt, a little uncannily, and despite my lack of skinny jeans, chez moi. I found that city to be a puzzle in itself, its pieces not quite seamlessly proximate, even as I got a kick out of tracing and retracing its sidewalks. (What would it mean to tell a city that you want to love it in every sense?) There was something unexpectedly bracing, for me, about the familiarity of Francophone North America, where the buildings are straight out of the Rust Belt, even as the street signs and so many of the ambient voices at any given moment are in a language that seems neither exactly alien nor, obviously, in any immediate sense my own.

(Can I say, though, how grateful I am for the patience and, even, the kindness I was shown by so many folks in Montréal who listened to and coped with and even, miracle of miracles, occasionally said encouraging things as I fumbled around with French? If part of the Twilight Zone effect of those weeks was waking up each morning in a city that looked--and smelled--a lot like home, another part of it was continually encountering French-speakers who were generous, accommodating even, with the compromises and distortions that accompany all appropriations of a new, or even an old, language.)

I spent much of this spring with Linda Gregg's poems. In one of them, "Maybe Leave-Taking," the speaker describes her fellow passengers on, I believe, a Greek ferry: "All the people / strangers, people I do not know. A truer sense / of being than lovers and friends." One of the things that kept me afloat in Montréal--that island city--was the sense that, in a bilingual place, divided and sutured by competing empires and their aftermath, there is no mother tongue, no authentic, autochthonous language: just idioms cobbled together as places and means of passage, ways of affirming solidarity among strangers. (I would, however, not exclude lovers and friends from this community of "people I do not know.")

While in Montréal, I read Michel Tremblay's _Le coeur découvert_ [The Heart Laid Bare], a novel about, among other things, the families that gays and lesbians make for themselves. The shocking thing was that, in 1986, at least ten years before the big debates surrounding "homoparentalité" in France, Tremblay was already engaging with what it meant to be a gay parent. He also bravely and, I think, delicately--it's a surprisingly light, almost breezy novel--articulates the complicated tissue of relationships that inform even, I would argue, the most traditional lives. None of us, in other words, has a merely biological family. Long before my life was saved, repeatedly, by a series of lesbian godmothers--and in this I'm not unlike Tremblay's protagonist, Jean-Marc--I had, as a kid, at least one "aunt" who was no biological relation to me and whose presence in my life was sustaining. She was and is, it's true, straight and married and an evangelical Christian, but that only goes to show that our notions of queer community need to expand to allow for these things, too. We need to let more people on the boat.

The last thing it occurs to me to say, on a late morning in late summer, is this: To love someone or something in all directions, in all of the senses, is to become exposed to what might derail us. The ferry may not bring us to Montréal (or Mountain View, or wherever we'd like to be); it might dump us off in Ithaca. Not every homecoming will be a glorious one. But to be more alive to the puzzles of those skins that surround us--and I mean leaves and streets too, and the bark of dogs and trees--is to drag some of the strangeness of the boat ride up onto the shore.

Pop optimism

2009-06-03T08:23:00.005-04:00

It has been over four months since I last wrote anything for this blog, and my apologies to anyone who follows it--does anyone follow it?--for having disappeared, or gently slipped into other modes of visibility, for a while. I returned to Ithaca last night from Italy, where I'd spent ten days reacquainting myself with a country I first encountered (and whose language I first fell in love with) fifteen years and nearly half my life ago. While I was there, I had time to witness firsthand the therapeutic value of a certain strain of pop optimism in the music that would play in heavy rotation on Italian television, specifically on All Music, a channel that suddenly, around 9 in the morning each day, at least in my hotel room, would become All Shopping, purveyor of a miracle (and, who knows, perhaps also musical) product called the Vibratone.

All Music plays, as far as I can tell, about fifteen or twenty different videos, about a third of them by Italian artists. The rest is the usual (although slightly Eurotrashier) stuff you'd expect from Vh1 in the early morning: too many pitch-corrected little girl voices singing about revenge and resistance over big 1980s arrangements. (Thank you, Sweden!) What was fascinating, to my inexperienced ear, was how much less cynical, how downright optimistic, the Italian popular music idiom is, in comparison to ours: where Lady GaGa (who is--does this matter?--Italian-American) sings about her poker face (and I love this song, even as I keep wondering whether it will ever be possible to make a dance anthem about a face incapable of hiding anything), Laura Pausini's new video makes an argument for obviousness as the ground of futurity: "what's there," she sings in possibly the most Heideggerian moment in recent popular songwriting, "is the most evident proof [comunque quel che c'è / è la prova più evidente]."

Don't get me wrong. This is an enormous ballad, and by every standard a colossal piece of crap, but I love it. Just as I love--to be honest, not quite as much as I love--Gianna Nannini's "Attimo," where the only out lesbian in Italian music promises, again in a future tense that we seem less eager to use, "In just a moment / I'll hold you [In un attimo / io ti stringerò]," just before asserting, with equal conviction, "Within just a moment / I'll lose you [Dentro a un attimo / io ti perderò]." (The chorus swells into a giant affirmation of this hope and this ambivalence: "Don't go away / before it hurts / Don't go away / without my life [Non te ne andare / prima che faccia male / Non te ne andare / Senza la mia vita].") At the risk of sounding every bit as sentimental as what I'm describing, I love the way these songs promise, and how Nannini's in particular acknowledges the risk of promising--and abiding with--something. (It also helps that the chorus of "Attimo" sounds a lot like Melissa Etheridge's "Come to My Window.")

What does this all amount to? Just the sense--fostered in part, I imagine, by jet-lag--that there's a place for promising in popular music, a place for acknowledging that hide and seek isn't the only game in town. Sometimes what's out there is the most compelling proof, the easiest thing to build a future on. To sing about a future isn't to claim to know what that future will hold; it is, nonetheless, to be committed to the idea of a future, to the idea of something or someone to hold on to. God knows that in the intervening "attimo" everything could change, but songs like these encourage us to place our bets on something, to come down on the side of holding or losing. I, for one, am determined to hold.

Homeful

2009-01-31T15:27:00.004-05:00

Today I have been grumpy, and I have also been thinking about my grumpiness. (Why, for example, do I want to take every loud child in every Silicon Valley coffeehouse and throw them all, one by one, methodically out the window? I don't want them to hit the ground, obviously; I want an angel ex machina to catch them first; but I would very much enjoy the sense of hurling them, possibly by the ankle, into the air.) My boyfriend observed, an hour or so ago, that I'm quick to say that I hate particular places or people; and that these statements occur as frequently on one coast as on the other. (I attempted to defend myself, poorly, by adding that I am also quick to express my love of particular places or people: this German bakery, for example, whose apple cake is currently stretching the boundaries of my stomach into, I'd say, my ribcage.) But what is it that prompts the quick dismissal, the sudden flare of anger at one's surroundings?

Here is my tentative answer. I, like so many of us, have multiple homes: not in the sense of owning property, thank God, but in the sense of having many emotional and geographic centers in my life. And many homes frequently threaten to feel like no home at all: no place that feels, once and for all, like the definitive place, the place of places. This is generally not a problem, or one, at best, that lingers under the surface of larger problems. But, after five weeks of living away from the place I'd usually call home, in another place I have also occasionally called home, this homelessness (or, wait, shouldn't it be homefulness?) cuts a couple of ways: the California suburbs have attracted my passionate attachment and disaffection again, even as my sense of never ultimately being at home anywhere has increased with the weeks spent wandering these long, wide, sun-saturated streets.

There are a couple of things worth remembering, I try to tell myself, in the midst of the low-level anxiety that accompanies the extended experience of living somewhere you feel at once drawn to and repulsed by. First: it is a quintessentially Christian predicament to be at once continually displaced and essentially at home everywhere. (Whether this is consoling depends, I guess, on how you feel about Christianity.) Second: as exhausting as it can be to have your rhythms challenged by someone or someplace else's, it is also refreshing to be reminded that those rhythms can change. It's like discovering that you've been carrying around muscle groups whose flexibility has remained untapped; and then, all of a sudden, you stretch for some reason, or maybe you duck to escape something--a bird, a baseball--and they're right there, holding you up or out or down, sustaining you and taking you by surprise.

This is what homefulness would name: the abundance of places that call out to us, challenging our sense of ourselves not with the threat (or the promise) of the exotic but, instead, with the familiar, asking us to come to terms with the people we once were, or the people we continue to be for our loved ones as well as our frequently unloved neighbors. Homefulness would articulate some of the excitement (but also the weariness) that attends most of our experiences of the holidays: not, however, as an occasional event but as a daily fact of life. It's a blessing to have so many homes; to imagine San Antonio Road, flanked with olive trees, descending into the wintry landscape of upstate New York, or winding through the Hoosier National Forest; but this continuity also means never quite escaping the multiple, not always congruent demands that these places make on us, the demands of families and friends, saying, here, stay a while, make yourself at home. It is impossible to be entirely at home, under these circumstances, but there is no denying that there are far worse invitations; and making oneself at home is always also to adjust oneself to someone else's surroundings, to acknowledge, implicitly at least, that my home is also yours, or at least unthinkable without you.

Pretty music

2008-12-19T20:16:00.005-05:00

I'm between trips, as usual: having gotten back to snowy Ithaca from rainy California, I've traded one kind of cold for another, at least for a day or two. As I type, the plastic Christmas tree on the dining room table, inches from the computer, is quivering, its small round ornaments and surprisingly sharp little lights suddenly alive. Patti Labelle sings, "Don't rush to give me a present / Your presence is enough for me / Stay at home, I'll be happy." She's reminding her lover that the trappings of the holidays are insignificant in comparison to love, and she's singing these lines over the sinuous strings and crisp percussion of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis (and their collaborators), and there is, right now, no Christmas album I could possibly love more, as these chords modulate and then, with the strings soaring, explode: "It's going to be a Merry Christmas," Patti sings, and how could it not be?

I was listening, about an hour ago, to Mary J. Blige's 2005 album, The Breakthrough, which I don't listen to much, mostly because it's too long and the gems are buried toward the end of the disc. But I encountered the same crackling, shimmering sound on "Can't Get Enough Love," another Jam and Lewis (and Wright and Avila) production, and thought, damn, this is... Pretty. Like, really freaking pretty. The stacked, super-produced harmonies; the vaguely asiatic waterfall-trickle on the keyboard that emerges halfway through the chorus, if you can even call it a chorus: "This is true / I can't get enough of you." It's a seductively gentle arrangement for a statement of such conviction. So much of what's on pop radio right now (and I include R&B radio in this verdict) is extravagantly ugly, showing off the robotic dissonance that a vocoder can produce in lieu of the human voice, and although I'm at pains to say how, for example, Janet Jackson's voice is different when she sings 2007's "Enjoy" (Jam & Lewis again), since Jackson is not exactly getting by without technology, nonetheless there's a warmth, a delight in euphony, that cascades across those plinkety-plinkety piano lines and compressed background vocals: "Just keep on doing it / Until your heart's content." There's even a chorus of giggling children, and I don't care; it's that lovely.

Jam & Lewis are famous. I know only their basic coordinates (time with The Time in the late 1980s, Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation, Blige's knockout "No More Drama," a recent move from Minneapolis to L.A.) but what strikes me as most important, right now, is their audible commitment to everything that glides and glimmers in a love song. It might still be possible--they've been saying for two decades now--to hope for beauty right at the heart of the most stalwart clichés. Right in the thick of them.

Rejoice

2008-11-16T09:58:00.003-05:00

The leaves are mostly gone. Not gone, actually, just somewhere else: they're on the ground now, not on the trees, and, sure, that's obvious, but it's also something I repeatedly forget. What we can't see isn't necessarily absent; it just may be elsewhere, or otherwise, than it was. Rosie Thomas, this Sunday morning, is whispering her version of "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel," with a new, minimalist melody, and--is this even possible?--more melancholy than the original. But, no, melancholy is wrong; melancholy means refusal, resistance, and this is a song about rejoicing, even if that hushed, slightly trembling voice at the beginning of the song--before a whole chorus of Rosies joins in toward the end, with the traditional melody as a counterpoint to the first few verses--seems to doubt, seems a little reluctant to rejoice, or to tell anyone else to do so.

There's something presumptuous, after all, about telling others to have a good time, to be happy. (A community of bloggers I occasionally follow has recently been the site of hot debate around this very question: is affirmation alienating?) But this command--rejoice!--is, nonetheless, at the heart of the advent hymn, and what might save it from falling into the trap of, say, the service professional who tells you to enjoy your meal or your movie--and whose own lack of enjoyment is probably embedded in the command--is its audience: after all, the hymn is set up as an entreaty to the one who's coming, as a kind of summoning spell, and "Rejoice!" marks the turn from Emmanuel to Israel, marks the turn from what (or who) is being waited for to the community doing the waiting. In other words, this is an equivocal rejoicing; it's something that initially seems to be demanded of the very cause for rejoicing (what would it mean to tell Christ to rejoice?) and only subsequently, almost belatedly, opens onto the folks whose waiting will be suspended by joy. It seems less presumptuous to tell someone to rejoice if the cause of joy is also subject to that imperative--if, to be frank, he's got to be at least as happy to see you as you are to see him--and if joy itself is unthinkable without waiting. There is no immediate rejoicing, no rejoicing alone or right now, but neither is it infinitely deferred. Israel mourns; it isn't melancholy. The leaves aren't gone; they're at the base of the trees, as some snow starts to fall--just a stray flurry, or, wait, are those more leaves?--and more will be coming. Always more.

Jesus in New Orleans (and San Francisco, and Saint Louis, and Ithaca)

2008-10-21T20:54:00.004-04:00

"The road's been my redeemer," Karin Bergquist sings on Over the Rhine's 2004 album Ohio, and I wish I could sing that line a little more confidently, back in suddenly wintry Ithaca after two weeks of travel. (It was 39 degrees when I parked my car half an hour ago.) I love airplanes until I have to sit in one and nervously ascend, praying as hard as I ever pray, surrounded by fellow travelers I can't help hating a little when we're on the ground--everyone in SFO Sunday night looked shady, from the greasy-haired guy in the leather Mickey Mouse jacket who farted in front of me in the security line to the disheveled gentleman who abandoned his luggage for so long they had to make an announcement--but whose vulnerability becomes inseparable from my own once we're suspended in that narrow tube in the sky. If Jesus can be a woman drinking Bloody Marys in a New Orleans bar--as Over the Rhine would have it--he can also be a flatulent passenger on a late night flight; or, two weeks earlier, the impossibly young woman who came over to my table, ten minutes before closing, at the Culver's Custard in Corydon, Indiana, to offer me a sundae that someone had made and had no use for; or the surprisingly calm, tattooed bartender at the City Diner in Saint Louis who thought I'd just moved to town and gently suggested that I return on a weekend, late, to see the scene. Even the pale Portland kids in their peg-leg jeans. Even, tonight, the atheist father of one of my closest friends, as he reached across my legs to adjust the seat in his Porsche after I asked if he'd take me for a ride, touching my knee with a respectful, businesslike tenderness to make sure I wasn't hitting the dashboard; his dark brown eyes, liquid, inquisitive, so much like his daughter's. These are some of the folks I think of when I consider that redemptive road.

California songs

2008-09-28T10:03:00.004-04:00

Rain is making the leaves shudder this morning: they're still mostly green, although a few close to the house have gone yellow at the tips and, beyond the end of the driveway, an entire treetop is orange. It's an early fall, even by these standards, and I'm listening to Peter Bradley Adams sing about leaving Los Angeles, his slightly mannered, breathy voice joined, in the second verse, by Sarah Siskind's lilting harmony line: "And we made our peace with lonely nights / And you healed our broken hearts." Wistful songs about California get me every time. Does any other place inspire so much dreaming and melancholy? I know from my six years of living there that it can be a profoundly disconnected place, profoundly solitary, as folks pursue their happiness in relative isolation from and disregard for others; but it's also a place where blue takes on a thousand new meanings, where no one apologizes for their pleasure, and where a kind of blithely superficial friendliness does (it does, my east coast friends, it really does) go a long way. And coming back east after that feels inevitably, I think, like failure; even if you know it's the right thing, at least for now, to do.

Denison Witmer returns to this sense of opportunity lost or relinquished in at least two songs about California: the first, "Los Angeles," from the 2006 re-issue of his first album, Safe Away, has him singing, in short, slow phrases: "I'm your / Lost happiness / Up in your / Los Angeles / Sky." And, as with Adams' reminiscence of a city he's taking flight from, here too it's all about the sky: compromised and toxic and vast and, in the warm, oblique early-evening light that, even now, can make my throat tighten a little, so full of promise. But that promise--and this is why it's inevitably with wistfulness that folks sing of the place, at least since Joni Mitchell swore, "California / I'm coming home"--that promise comes at the end of the day, not at the beginning. California's is a crepuscular beauty. It's a promise that's already fading. That's why I find it so damn poignant and true.

That may also be why I'm thinking of it now, in our crepuscular mid-atlantic season, a fall that seems to be arriving at least a week or two early, and with an uncharacteristic burst of bright color, maples blushing all along these hills.

Damaged anyway

2008-08-23T10:24:00.003-04:00

This is a familiar feeling: the first morning back in town after another cross-country excursion, less awake than I should be at this hour, the drone of bugs in the trees louder--the leaves closer, the air thicker--than I'd remembered. Mindy Smith is singing, in those clear, almost shrill tones of hers, about how she needs a hurricane to straighten out this place, but I'm not really looking for devastation and renewal right now, unless it's the kind of sudden shift that takes place in the song just before this one, on 2004's One Moment More, where the "little things that seem to be getting me today" suddenly become the "little things that seem to be saving me today." Things get to me all the time, but this also means that I am gotten by these things, and to be gotten proves, linguistically at least, that I'm made and unmade partly in relation to what's around me. And this is, possibly, how to be gotten and to be saved are of a piece: the fractures that open up when I'm annoyed, say, or hitting my head against the same old walls--or having it jostled by the woman behind me on the plane yesterday who was keeping, I swear, her entire life's possessions in the grubby seatback pocket--can, if I don't get in the way, heal into something slightly new. I was shocked to find, as I walked to my car late last night, that the world I was returning to, a world I'm deeply ambivalent about, felt as if it could save me a little. As if it had been trying, and I'd been--chalk it up to narcissism, the ease of resentment, habit--steadily saying no. And it took a few weeks away, lots of highways and airports, to make the fractures momentarily visible and, like these slender trees, a little closer than before.

I've just finished reading Sara Miles' account of her sacramental experience of distributing food to the poor in San Francisco, Take This Bread. I bought it at Women and Children First, an exceptional bookstore in Andersonville, on the north side of Chicago, and took it with me on my trip out west. The book contains several scenes in which annoyance shifts into gratitude, when the narrator looks out at the occasionally psychotic or more ordinarily damaged folks around her, and before she knows it she's not, momentarily at least, pissed off anymore but instead, or in addition, blessed by these strange lives that surround hers. Those scenes also echo this passage from one of Dorianne Laux's poems, "It Must Have Been Summer" (in her latest collection, Facts About the Moon), where the speaker talks about the afternoons when, as a child, a teenaged girl would invite her to suck at her breast: "She meant me no harm, her long hair / sweeping my sun-bruised face, / and all of us damaged anyway." In each of these cases--Mindy Smith's hurricane, Sara Miles' church full of the poor, Dorianne Laux's suburban living room--damaged is what we are "anyway" but also what allows us to be remade. Or, in other words, as much as it makes me cringe to write it, to be saved.

Secular and inconsolable?

2008-07-10T09:22:00.004-04:00

It's been nearly a month since my last post. In the meantime, I've been to Mount Rainier, Portland, San Francisco, and now, nearly a week after touching down on the east coast, I'm starting to settle back into Ithaca again. I've got coffee here in front of me, and on the stereo a mix I made last night for a woman I work with. In one of my first posts I wrote, however briefly, about the exquisite contrast between what Chris Pureka sings and how she sings it; there's something similar going on, I find, in Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins' "Born Secular," where Lewis sings, "I was born secular and inconsolable," and no one believes her, not for a second, at least not me. Maybe it's the way the twins come in with their carefully stacked harmonies--somewhere between 1960s pop radio and the kind of evangelical singing I expected, and missed, in the churches of my youth--and maybe it's the way Lewis sounds just like a Christian visionary when she says that God gives, then "takes away / from me." That feeling of destitution, of being abandoned, is as old--and as questionably secular--as the Song of Songs.

Not that I would want Lewis to tell me how religious she was, or how much consolation she found in God, no matter how much I really do think that "What a Friend We Have In Jesus" is a breathtaking song. Lewis's song is hopeful in spite of itself, and this irony is no small thing, especially given the hopelessly unironic alternatives: the self-congratulating crap that passes for Christian music on evangelical radio stations like KLOVE, for example, or the no less earnest atheisms of Tori Amos's "God" or, forgive me, Allison Moorer's "The Duel." These last two are, to be sure, complicated songs; I'm not doing them justice. And of course I believe in a God present at the heart of every atheism, a God who, in more traditional language, is even present in the heart of hell, whatever hell is. (This is what I take away from Dante and the Apostles' Creed.) But the gaps that inhere within what we sing are more forceful than any attempt at seamlessness, at staying on-message. As I write this paragraph, I realize that I'm as guilty of trying to say just one thing (instead of two or three or an indeterminate number of things) as any of these other folks.

Last fall I found myself walking away from a concert with a woman I know, and she started talking about Emmylou Harris, about how much she loved her music, despite how "Jesusy" it was. ("Jesusy" is an orthographic challenge: writing it, I can't help thinking of the Argosy Casino, on the Ohio River near my folks' house, and how someone maybe once thought that it should resemble, but not too closely, the ship Jason and the Argonauts sailed away on: it wouldn't be another Argos; it would just be Argos-like, "Argosy.") To me, the trace of Christianity in Emmylou is in the grain of her voice, not the lyrics of her songs, and I'd almost say the same thing about Julie Miller, even though her lyrics tend to be more overtly religious. (Both voices hover on the brink of despair and exasperation, only to come swooping back up--or down--when you least expect them to.) But I am a sucker for the Jesusy, if not always for Jesus. To the extent that I can speak of my faith these days, it's not happening in church, where I tend to pop in about thirty minutes late, grab communion and leave. Part of that might have to do with where I am: even as a fake southerner (born in, of all places, Illinois), I don't quite know what to make of sober Yankee religion; even as a fake Californian (but is there anything else?), I can't quite accept how little room there seems to be, in this liberal little town, for folks without families in front of the pulpit, and for women behind it. Part of it, too, might have to do with the ironies of Lewis's song, and how they speak more truthfully of the ambivalence that haunts every hope worth its name. The closest thing to a religious experience I've had in recent memory was watching Karin Bergquist bang on a cookie sheet in Louisville, Kentucky, as my little sister sat beside me and I chewed on a bourbon-glazed ice cube.

What, then, would it mean to be something other than secular and inconsolable? The best I can hope for these days is that somehow, in the midst of my occasional fits of despair (oh, you know, about the usual things: whether this is the right place, the right job, the right life), the Watson Twins, or Julie Miller, or Emmylou, will suddenly swoop down to harmonize with me as I gripe and wallow; and that their sudden burst of song will open up some crucial distance between what I'm saying and how, in spite of myself, it's being said.

Uprooted

2008-06-11T15:02:00.002-04:00

In preparation for the third part of a seemingly endless root canal that has, I hope, finally come to an end, I bought one of those little miniature IPods--the ones that sell for fifty bucks--and tried, the following day, to drown out as far as possible what was happening to me in the dentist's chair. Three and a half hours later, I had learned a few things: my patience for dental ordeals is exhausted by the end of the second hour of tugging and scraping; Rosie Thomas's sad, exquisite "Bicycle Tricycle," with its ambivalence about the past ("I won't look back / I've been here before"), is just too maudlin for someone whose hopes of chewing with both sides of his mouth have just been drastically--if, with luck, temporarily--reduced.

I never thought I was someone for whom music could be too maudlin. I've never loved Morrissey, it's true, but I found the Joy Division movie (Control) haunting. Give me Emmylou Harris's live rendition of 'Songbird' or even one of the spare piano ballads from Tori Amos's Boys For Pele and I'm as happy--to quote my friend D.'s mother--as a pig in shit. Likewise, I love Rosie Thomas for the tension between her usually melancholy songs and her comic alter ego, Sheila Saputo. But she couldn't console me in that dentist's chair.

Now I'm on the other side of the country, having put the little music player to use on my flight from Chicago to San Francisco, and I'm wondering how to account for the ways we console ourselves, as well as the ways we open ourselves to consolation from others. Of course I prayed pretty frequently at the dentist's and in the airplane, but the only times it seemed to do the trick--to open the window onto something else, something that would resolve or suspend my fear--were when I turned away from myself and, briefly, toward the folks I know who are having a tough time right now, a tougher time than a sore jaw and a sudden taste for soft foods. One of my grandfathers went under the knife yesterday, as did the close friend of a close friend of mine. I have no access to what they may have been feeling--God knows, they could have approached their medical ordeals much more blithely than I approached mine--but what I do know is that thinking about them, for a fraction of a second, was what drew me out of my own narcissistic trepidation. Is fearing for others the only way out of fearing for ourselves? Or--to put it more charitably--is hoping for others one way of rediscovering hope for ourselves?

Rosie Thomas's recent collaboration with Denison Witmer and Sufjan Stevens, These Friends of Mine, seems to support this: there is something that happens chorally--when voices lend themselves to other voices--that can't happen when we're left to ourselves. What brings me hope right now (but this could just be the Advil kicking in) isn't the reckoning with an individual past (even my own recent individual past) so much as the affirmation of a community where we can momentarily forget ourselves by being present, even at a distance, to others.

When I fall

2008-06-08T22:43:00.004-04:00

We're in the middle of a heat wave, and all the windows in the apartment are open, even though it's nearly 11pm. The music needs to match the density of this unseasonable air: so I'm listening to Lizz Wright equivocate beautifully, after telling her lover she wants to stay, "What if the water's cold / when I fall?" She's enmeshed in this textured Craig Street production that makes me think of the first modern jazz cd I ever bought, Cassandra Wilson's Blue Light 'Til Dawn, also produced by Street. I came across it in a mall in Columbus, Indiana, after my first year of college. I had no idea who Cassandra Wilson was, and it was impossible back then to listen to cds in the store before buying them; was it the cover photo of Wilson in rapture that did the trick? Lizz Wright's voice is warmer, a little less mannered than Wilson's, if also a little less supple. And I'm fifteen years older, thinking about the first lyric on Blue Light 'Til Dawn--"You don't know what love is / Until you learn the meaning of the blues"--and how I had no idea what love was then.

Comfort

2008-06-05T22:27:00.003-04:00

I grew up in a part of the country that revels in comfort food. Several parts of the country, actually, but all of them united by a love of sweet tea; or was that a familial love more than a cultural one? (A friend's eyes lit up this morning as she talked about the tea she grew up drinking, the sediment of sugar in the bottom of gallon jugs.) Likewise, there's a kind of music that does the kind of soul-sustaining, basic work of sweet tea--or, for that matter, bacon--and tonight I found myself craving it. Musical comfort food isn't bubblegum; it has nutritional value; it's the kind of stuff that goes down easy while nonetheless putting you profoundly, not just superficially, at ease. Tonight it's Over the Rhine's 2005 album, Drunkard's Prayer, with Karin Bergquist's lilting, boozy voice assuring someone, "Put your elbows on the table / I will listen long as I am able." The song is overwritten by now--Karin and Linford, this is your fault, I'm afraid--with the history of a marriage's near dissolution and miraculous recovery. I can't not hear that narrative when I listen, but I also hear something else: the idea that when we talk, we're likely to be doing it at a table, in private or in public, with something caffeinated or alcoholic or more substantial (say, food) to keep us going; and that this--the coincidence of our bodies across the most elementary kinds of needs--happens whether or not our relationships are thriving, whether or not love is even the main thing on our minds.

Tonight I saw a friend (another friend, one with no relation, geographical or otherwise, to sweet tea) looking more exhausted than I've ever seen her--a long story--and I kept wondering how she even had the strength to raise her pint glass up to her mouth. But there we were, at a bar, buffeted by wave after wave of women--entire softball teams, I'm not kidding--and she kept managing to raise the glass. And there was some slim comfort in the mechanics of the gesture, in the rhythms of our bodies as they did nothing special but just kept on effectively keeping on, almost in spite of the substance of our conversation. It's that kind of bodily comfort that resonates for me, right now, with the comfort I take in Karin Bergquist's voice, as she sings "I'm looking forward to looking back / On this day," because it's not really the meaning of the words that matters--although clearly it does, clearly my friend must be looking forward to looking back--as much as Karin's voice, scooping and wheezing and opening those vowels out just when you thought they could only snap shut. Those vowels are addressed in a way that can't be reduced to the words they add up to: they are physically directed, present, sustained toward the listener. Sort of like a friend's body when, in the absence of consolation, all it can do is show up, keep company, raise the glass.

The mix cd as art form, token of friendship, and all around good thing

2008-06-01T21:27:00.005-04:00

I'm listening to the third track on a CD my friend K. made for me a couple of weeks ago. It's Rilo Kiley's "The Good That Won't Come Out," with Jenny Lewis's world-weary delivery set against an ironically buoyant arrangement that becomes, toward the end, incredibly lush and loud. And what's beautiful, besides the song's abiding optimism (the good, after all, is there, even if it usually refuses to come out), is that this same friend did, not long ago, "fall down drunk in the street," just like Lewis sings. (It was, actually, more like stumbling onto a sidewalk while tipsy.) So it's a handy mnemonic device, even as the song also, I think, suggests that these embarrassments are redeemable and, in fact, that remembering them collectively--which is also to say, reminding ourselves that we've all been there, or will be soon--might be our best means of redemption.

Another friend, J., in town for the summer, made me another mix CD yesterday. Five songs, all of them by singer-songwriters, and one in particular is haunting me, Chris Pureka's "31 and Falling," which manages to sound a lot less cynical than the lyrics would have you believe: "God damn my wasted time," she sings, but what the words don't tell you is that her voice, at this precise moment, starts to soar.

These two songs are as different as the friends who gave them to me and the coasts they come from. Still, both songs revived my sense that the mix CD is more than just a nostalgic gesture; it's a vital way of connecting folks we care about to songs that capture some important part of us: guilty or embarrassed, melancholic or hopeful. Better yet, it's a way of taking the contradictions and compromises in our own lives and opening them to those in our friends' lives: when J. put a song about a ten-year anniversary on the CD she made for me, it was a window into my relationship as well as her own. In these kinds of ways, it's possible to hear other voices singing within or alongside those voices that are literally on the record.

So it's a reasonably lonely night in my isolated little town, and I'm taking some consolation from the company that these voices provide: the reminder that the world is bigger, and thankfully smaller, than it may sometimes seem.

Broken things, mended things

2008-05-31T21:52:00.000-04:00

This blog, even if it lasts only a month or so, is meant to be a gesture of gratitude. Specifically, it's about the songs I'm grateful for. It's also meant to be, in its clumsily bloggy way, about the folks whose own writing about music has touched me over the years: everyone from Thom Jurek on allmusic to Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist's tour diaries; and, of course, those poets and prose writers whose sense of where language stops and music takes over tends to leave me feeling overtaken as well. Right now I'm listening to The New Frontiers' album from last year, Mending, which is where the title comes from; or half the title, anyway, since the other half comes from Julie Miller's "Broken Things," a song that says, "You can have my heart / if you don't mind broken things." As the ice crystals from this glass of rosé finally melt--I accidentally left the bottle in the freezer while I went for a bike ride--Nathan Pettijohn is singing, somewhere between petulance and conviction, about a similar kind of provisional possibility: "If we learn to pray like Jesus / will he come?" And that's the place I want this blog to occupy: the place where we, whoever we are, learn to take the broken things and the mended ones, where we hold them in and as the songs we sing (and listen to, and sing along with), and where our radical hope never gets beyond radical uncertainty: where Jesus stays behind the question mark. That's a tall order, I admit, for a few paragraphs on a computer screen.