Seolandbunes is swyðost cype monnum geseted . þær beoð weðeras acennede on oxna micelnesse . þabuað oðmeda burh þære burhge noma is archemedon. Seo is mæst tobabilonia byrug . þanon is to babilonia inþæs læssan milge tæles stadia . ccc . 7 þæs maran þe leuua hatte . cc . from archemedon . þær syndan þa mycclan mærða þæt syndan ðage weorc ðese miccla macedonisca Alexander het ge wyrcean. Ðaet lond is onlenge andonbræde ðæs læssan milge tæles ðe stadia hatte . cc . andþær micclan ðe leuua hatte . cxxxiii . 7an half mil
The colony is mostly occupied with merchants. There are sheep born there the great size of oxen that live up to the dwelling of Medes. The name of that dwelling is Archemedon. It is the greatest city after Babylon. Thence to Babylon from Archemedon is 300 of the lesser miles, stadia, and 200 of the greater miles, called leuua. There is great glory there, which are the works the great Alexander of Macedonia had made. The land is in length and breadth 200 of the lesser miles, called stadia, and 133 and a half of the greater miles, called leuua.
Friday, November 26, 2010
Sunday, November 7, 2010
place, religion, tea party
I think my worldview is being shifted by living in Lubbock, on micro and macro levels, but it’s happening slowly enough that it feels not like an epiphany, but more like getting more and more lost at night when you were sure you knew where you were just a minute ago, the hotel had to be around here somewhere, but then again it’s getting darker and you don’t recognize anything and you aren’t even sure if you’re walking in the right direction.
First of all, Lubbock is the most isolated place I’ve ever lived, and since I’ve spent the majority of my life in the western United States, that is significant. It’s “in the middle” of a lot of cities I’d like to visit (Albuquerque, Austin, Dallas, Oklahoma City)—but six hours away from all of them. Anything it’s “on the way” to is far enough away that nobody drives.
Secondly, I can’t remember if I’ve noted it before, but my neighborhood is divided into a grid, like any other neighborhood, except each block is cut through the middle by a dirt alley road thing. Mostly the alleys just go through people’s backyards, but there are some houses on them, and though I live just off a standard paved road, I’m technically on that dirt road, in a “back house.”
This means if I look in one direction, I’m part of a yuppie-ish university neighborhood, but if I look in the other direction, I live in a weird shack in the woods. If I walk through the dirt alley to school, I walk through a valley of dogs. I step over things that have been abandoned in the alley, like several different kinds of squash one day, once a chair, once a shopping cart, and of course beer bottles.
If I take the streets, I pass expensive vehicles, including one hummer that’s there everyday, and its partner which is there sporadically. The partner features a sticker that says “SECEDE” with the lone star logo. This is all one street above campus.
Also along the way, there is a sign on someone’s lawn that says “PRAYER: America’s Only Hope”
They’re big, important privileges, being able to afford living alone, and being able to walk to school/work, but even after living here for over two months, I still haven’t really developed a pleasant rhythm. I weigh the pros and cons of each direction every day.
When I choose the street path, I think about that prayer sign every time, even though I’ve exhausted new ways to think about it. It reflects how politically conservative this area is, and how religious. I also think it’s a very passive interpretation of religion—it’s one thing to humble one’s self before God, but that sign suggests that the “only” hope is to pray, and any kind of action beyond that is pointless. It reduces life to being trapped in a boat during a storm.
I have not stood on solid ground religiously since I was 12 or 13 years old. I have no faith or belief, but when it comes time for a typical bar session to rail on the religious, I get bristly and defensive.
Part of the reason I’ve always been sympathetic to religion, and especially Mormonism, is because of my mother. She pauses and looks up at the mountains. She hikes through them. She believes they’re a divine gift. She believes her people were led to that area, so they could appreciate that landscape. Of course, she doesn’t extend that line of thinking to acknowledge what a completely shitty job they’ve done of that.
In retrospect, Utah County is probably the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived. But one forgets that when living there because it’s a billboard, state street culture, and the most all of the landmarks are hideous—UVU, for example, looks no more attractive than the prison at point of the mountain—and they put giant hideous letters on the mountain for no reason. Utah Lake, in particular, was relentlessly polluted, the details to which I’m just now reading about in On Zion’s Mount, and it is a horrible thing to read.
But still, everywhere else. My parents’ house is at the base of Mt. Timpanogos, and the mountains in Utah County are more stark and outstanding than the ones in Salt Lake, or in Denver or any other city I’ve visited. The willow tree in my mom’s backyard. Even the lake, from a blue distance, or when it freezes and it’s quiet and you can walk out onto it, or when it’s night and empty and you’re 20 and still a virgin with a beautiful girl on the docks.
Anyway, I can see why my mom thinks that place was made with her in mind, and I can see why she thinks it’s holy. She backs it up too. And she’s my mom, for fuck’s sake, so I cannot indulge anti-Mormon rants.
---
The Laundromat I use is stocked with Christian tracts, and even though I always bring work to do, I inevitably end up reading them while my clothes spin. I love them. They are creative and relatively well-designed. Although they’re all ultimately about eternal salvation, they know how to limit their immediate focus to one particular pamphlet. So, they’ll have one Bible story summarized. Or a poem about the dangers of drinking. A list of different verses indicating that swearing is a bigger deal than you think. I find this adaptation to be very sweet:
“As she looked upon the tree with it’s beautiful fruit, she thought it must be good for food, and eating of it would bring wisdom. So she took some fruit and gave also to Adam, they both did eat of it. Immediately they felt very strange in their hearts. They had never felt this way before. They knew now that they had done something very wrong. They were both ashamed of themselves as they thought of their disobedience. Fear came into their hearts as they thought of meeting God. So they hid themselves among the trees of the garden.”
In another, called “The Room,” a believer recounts a dream of his, which he believes was transmitted to him by the Lord for a reason. In the dream he is in a room full of old-school library filing systems. Each cabinet of files is labeled.
“The titles ranged from the mundane to the outright weird. ‘Books I have Read,’ ‘Lies I have Told,’ ‘Comfort I Have Given,’ ‘Jokes I have Laughed At.’ Some were almost hilarious in their exactness: ‘Things I’ve Yelled at My Brothers.’”
When he opens the cabinets up, each card lists some event from his life. He has to account for them, and then Jesus shows up and signs his name to each of them as well. “’No!’ I shouted, rushing to Him. All I could find to say was ‘No, no,’ as I pulled the card from Him. His name shouldn’t be on these cards. But here it was, written in red so rich, so dark, so alive. The name of Jesus covered mine. It was written with His blood.”
That one is a little much, the image of Jesus making his way through the dusty library, signing endless cards, reminds me of Kafka, and one of the few stories of his I like in which Poseidon is crunching numbers and feeling especially bitter that people depict him as riding around with his trident all day.
---
I admit that didn’t really care when the midterm election results came in, which was a little unusual. Part of it is the fact that they weren’t surprising. Part of it is that I’ve been very busy and self-involved lately. And part of it, admittedly, is that I’m interested in the narratives of politics, and sometimes am able to distance a story from its inevitable repercussions. I find it interesting that Sarah Palin, who doesn’t disguise having basically no qualifications, and in fact seems to disdain the notion that someone should be “qualified” for major public office, has a following, for example.
Likewise, the tea party, which sometimes seems like the Dada “movement” to me, because it doesn’t seem to be founded on the desire to enact concrete policies. The infamous “keep your government hands off my medicare” sign is an example of this, but I see that sign as indicating less the ignorance and hypocrisy of tea-party people, and more that the tea party movement is one founded on emotion. The signs at the rallies make no sense, and it doesn’t matter; they are meant less to provide rational protest, and more as an outlet for contradictory feelings. I’m not saying those feelings aren’t harmful, or founded in myth and delusion.
In a comparison my friends when I was a teenager would love, tea partiers kind of remind me of senseless, late 70s British punk rock, which was clearly enraged by the lack of future for young people in England, but didn’t exactly articulate ways the course could be reversed. My friends used to critique this kind of music, and preferred punk that was “positive” and had a message, not just brainless screaming. I didn’t and don’t agree with that, and greatly prefer the latter. And I would have voted for Iggy Pop or whoever back then, regardless of qualification; I still probably would, actually.
That said, I brought this theory up with B the other day and she pointed out that the tea party is not just aimless expression, but is actually well organized, and they do have candidates, and intensely homophobic, fuckwad candidates at that. Touche.
First of all, Lubbock is the most isolated place I’ve ever lived, and since I’ve spent the majority of my life in the western United States, that is significant. It’s “in the middle” of a lot of cities I’d like to visit (Albuquerque, Austin, Dallas, Oklahoma City)—but six hours away from all of them. Anything it’s “on the way” to is far enough away that nobody drives.
Secondly, I can’t remember if I’ve noted it before, but my neighborhood is divided into a grid, like any other neighborhood, except each block is cut through the middle by a dirt alley road thing. Mostly the alleys just go through people’s backyards, but there are some houses on them, and though I live just off a standard paved road, I’m technically on that dirt road, in a “back house.”
This means if I look in one direction, I’m part of a yuppie-ish university neighborhood, but if I look in the other direction, I live in a weird shack in the woods. If I walk through the dirt alley to school, I walk through a valley of dogs. I step over things that have been abandoned in the alley, like several different kinds of squash one day, once a chair, once a shopping cart, and of course beer bottles.
If I take the streets, I pass expensive vehicles, including one hummer that’s there everyday, and its partner which is there sporadically. The partner features a sticker that says “SECEDE” with the lone star logo. This is all one street above campus.
Also along the way, there is a sign on someone’s lawn that says “PRAYER: America’s Only Hope”
They’re big, important privileges, being able to afford living alone, and being able to walk to school/work, but even after living here for over two months, I still haven’t really developed a pleasant rhythm. I weigh the pros and cons of each direction every day.
When I choose the street path, I think about that prayer sign every time, even though I’ve exhausted new ways to think about it. It reflects how politically conservative this area is, and how religious. I also think it’s a very passive interpretation of religion—it’s one thing to humble one’s self before God, but that sign suggests that the “only” hope is to pray, and any kind of action beyond that is pointless. It reduces life to being trapped in a boat during a storm.
I have not stood on solid ground religiously since I was 12 or 13 years old. I have no faith or belief, but when it comes time for a typical bar session to rail on the religious, I get bristly and defensive.
Part of the reason I’ve always been sympathetic to religion, and especially Mormonism, is because of my mother. She pauses and looks up at the mountains. She hikes through them. She believes they’re a divine gift. She believes her people were led to that area, so they could appreciate that landscape. Of course, she doesn’t extend that line of thinking to acknowledge what a completely shitty job they’ve done of that.
In retrospect, Utah County is probably the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived. But one forgets that when living there because it’s a billboard, state street culture, and the most all of the landmarks are hideous—UVU, for example, looks no more attractive than the prison at point of the mountain—and they put giant hideous letters on the mountain for no reason. Utah Lake, in particular, was relentlessly polluted, the details to which I’m just now reading about in On Zion’s Mount, and it is a horrible thing to read.
But still, everywhere else. My parents’ house is at the base of Mt. Timpanogos, and the mountains in Utah County are more stark and outstanding than the ones in Salt Lake, or in Denver or any other city I’ve visited. The willow tree in my mom’s backyard. Even the lake, from a blue distance, or when it freezes and it’s quiet and you can walk out onto it, or when it’s night and empty and you’re 20 and still a virgin with a beautiful girl on the docks.
Anyway, I can see why my mom thinks that place was made with her in mind, and I can see why she thinks it’s holy. She backs it up too. And she’s my mom, for fuck’s sake, so I cannot indulge anti-Mormon rants.
---
The Laundromat I use is stocked with Christian tracts, and even though I always bring work to do, I inevitably end up reading them while my clothes spin. I love them. They are creative and relatively well-designed. Although they’re all ultimately about eternal salvation, they know how to limit their immediate focus to one particular pamphlet. So, they’ll have one Bible story summarized. Or a poem about the dangers of drinking. A list of different verses indicating that swearing is a bigger deal than you think. I find this adaptation to be very sweet:
“As she looked upon the tree with it’s beautiful fruit, she thought it must be good for food, and eating of it would bring wisdom. So she took some fruit and gave also to Adam, they both did eat of it. Immediately they felt very strange in their hearts. They had never felt this way before. They knew now that they had done something very wrong. They were both ashamed of themselves as they thought of their disobedience. Fear came into their hearts as they thought of meeting God. So they hid themselves among the trees of the garden.”
In another, called “The Room,” a believer recounts a dream of his, which he believes was transmitted to him by the Lord for a reason. In the dream he is in a room full of old-school library filing systems. Each cabinet of files is labeled.
“The titles ranged from the mundane to the outright weird. ‘Books I have Read,’ ‘Lies I have Told,’ ‘Comfort I Have Given,’ ‘Jokes I have Laughed At.’ Some were almost hilarious in their exactness: ‘Things I’ve Yelled at My Brothers.’”
When he opens the cabinets up, each card lists some event from his life. He has to account for them, and then Jesus shows up and signs his name to each of them as well. “’No!’ I shouted, rushing to Him. All I could find to say was ‘No, no,’ as I pulled the card from Him. His name shouldn’t be on these cards. But here it was, written in red so rich, so dark, so alive. The name of Jesus covered mine. It was written with His blood.”
That one is a little much, the image of Jesus making his way through the dusty library, signing endless cards, reminds me of Kafka, and one of the few stories of his I like in which Poseidon is crunching numbers and feeling especially bitter that people depict him as riding around with his trident all day.
---
I admit that didn’t really care when the midterm election results came in, which was a little unusual. Part of it is the fact that they weren’t surprising. Part of it is that I’ve been very busy and self-involved lately. And part of it, admittedly, is that I’m interested in the narratives of politics, and sometimes am able to distance a story from its inevitable repercussions. I find it interesting that Sarah Palin, who doesn’t disguise having basically no qualifications, and in fact seems to disdain the notion that someone should be “qualified” for major public office, has a following, for example.
Likewise, the tea party, which sometimes seems like the Dada “movement” to me, because it doesn’t seem to be founded on the desire to enact concrete policies. The infamous “keep your government hands off my medicare” sign is an example of this, but I see that sign as indicating less the ignorance and hypocrisy of tea-party people, and more that the tea party movement is one founded on emotion. The signs at the rallies make no sense, and it doesn’t matter; they are meant less to provide rational protest, and more as an outlet for contradictory feelings. I’m not saying those feelings aren’t harmful, or founded in myth and delusion.
In a comparison my friends when I was a teenager would love, tea partiers kind of remind me of senseless, late 70s British punk rock, which was clearly enraged by the lack of future for young people in England, but didn’t exactly articulate ways the course could be reversed. My friends used to critique this kind of music, and preferred punk that was “positive” and had a message, not just brainless screaming. I didn’t and don’t agree with that, and greatly prefer the latter. And I would have voted for Iggy Pop or whoever back then, regardless of qualification; I still probably would, actually.
That said, I brought this theory up with B the other day and she pointed out that the tea party is not just aimless expression, but is actually well organized, and they do have candidates, and intensely homophobic, fuckwad candidates at that. Touche.
salt flats
When I lived in Salt Lake City, sometimes after work I would take my car west on I-80 toward the salt flats. I-80 changes from semi-urban Salt Lake City to wide open nothing pretty fast, and ten minutes from the freeway entrance there is only space, divided every so often by Wendover billboards that read, The Streamline of fun is minutes away! The bright Gotham City lights of the nuclear storage facility in Tooele fire up once the sky starts to dim. After Tooele, the road keeps moving alongside Great Salt Lake, not far from the shore. The water levels vary, and sometimes the water is high enough that it swamps the telephone poles on the side of the road, but usually several feet below the shoulder. After the lake are the salt flats—quiet white plains of salt that stretch nearly to the Nevada border. Despite being from Utah I never really thought about them until the last few years I was there, yet I think that I-80 drive is the landscape that cuts me up worst of all when I think about my home state, which I spent pretty much the whole month of October doing. Some of the worst times out of my life out there, but still, if the sun is in the sky, the salt flats light up. It’s similar visually to when the sun shines on feet of snow, except the salt doesn’t melt but just continues to heat up and glimmer all day. If the moon is up, the ground glows. If you head back between the two, when the sun’s heading down but its top layer is still visible, you can fly back over Great Salt Lake, part of the orange-pink light in the sky.
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