a real lulu

 

Dear Lu/Lou

A song for you, for today.  I also offer you this fine essay on hierarchical power and disappointing people (a minor hobby of mine).  It could also be thought of as an essay on seeking approval.  I know you know you shouldn't, but if it is the only praise you ever get, how can you not?  

I can see it so clearly, sometimes: I was doing a thing, making a noise, trying something, and there was a Man; he'd say: smile more, he'd say: keep it down, he'd say: you are doing it wrong, he'd say: you could be great, if.  

The thing I guess to try to keep in mind, is that we have been constrained, just like mice in a maze- sniffing along corridors, always moving forward, but we don't realize that there are no real choices in narrow channels.  We don't see that we have been conditioned.  It's a bit painful, really, to realize it, to notice it.  To see yourself bumbling unwittingly through time and space.  But if the walls of our mazes remain invisible, how can we ever follow anything but that same conscripted path?

How to: do nothing.

 

Dear Friday,

We haven't had an episode of Your Girl Friday in a mustelid's lifespan!  Your Girl, for this Friday, is Jenny Odell.  She will gently rustle you off of your somnambulistic treadmill and into awareness.  Unless you don't read the book and in that case, well, you are taking your chances, that's sure!  Check out her conceptual and very interesting artwork on her website; click on the 'projects' button.  And, I think, if you were a very lucky one, you might have taken a class from her at Stanford (I applied there, for grad school, but along with 11 other places, I was rejected.  Let's say I almost got to go, shall we?). 

You can be almost as lucky as her students, just by reading her great book, How to Do Nothing!  Inside this wonderful book, we are invited to "...inhabit somewhat fuzzier of blobbier ideas: of maintenance as productivity, or the importance of nonverbal communication, and of the mere experience of life as the highest goal." 

I love blobbier ideas, and I love this book.  Ms Odell cites interesting examples from philosophy (Epicurious), art (David Hockney, Barnett Newman, Henri Rousseau), and scores of fascinating writers (Donna J. Haraway, Rebecca Solnit, Ursula K. Leguin, Emily Dickenson); plus, there is birdwatching as a practice towards observation, awareness, and belonging: and then, "Eventually, to behold is to become beholden to."

An image from Jenny Odell's project Satellite Collection.

PS  Yes, the racoon is not a mustelid, but a procyonid. Your mustelid can be a badger, a skunk, a weasel, or even an otter.  So, I have skunked you with my misuse of mustelid, and I weasel out of it, here on the PS, and I am badgering you to read Jenny Odell's book How to Do Nothing, because you otter!

PPS  Oh, yeah, and there is this; your song for today!

ain't got no cigarettes

 

Dear Cluttered Desks,

I know! it isn't even really what I mean:  I know how you are; you are covered with great things!  Little things, pretty cancelled stamps, stickers, a piece of egg blue velvet, and the notes!  The lists!  The cards and letters!  The photos, the doodles, the pens and the paper.  I love you, cluttered desks!  I know that what you are is evidence of doing and living and making and thinking.  What more could I want from you?  Only a little more space.

So I cleaned you... um, I restacked you and discarded some of the paper treasure.  There was a lot!  And, you know I have another desk!  Plus, let's not forget the half of the kitchen table I took over because you had no room for more.  There will be more tidying, but not right now.  Right now, I am going to give you the song I found trying to find the song that I made the two and a half inch torn paper note on.  The note said: 

Moon Cookies

Nature Boy

Nancy King

Glen Moore

Hopefully, later, I will remember to ask my friend for the Moon Cookie recipe, and maybe, someday I can find Nature Boy recorded by Nancy King and Glen Moore; for now, have this fine song for today!

PS  
Nature Boy is a great song, for anyday, and here are two other versions for you:  One, and Two.

stumbling sound

 

Dear Radio Dodo Listener,

Oooh!  Today your song is this wonder: Nimetön.   And you don't even have to be the seventh caller!  Just push the button, Max!  ecord label (We Are Busybodies) website describes jazz collective Oiro Pena as "...a mix of lo-fi spiritual jazz, experimental, and avant garde musical forms."  What's not to love in that description?  

PS  The internet says that 'nimetön' is Finnish for nameless, innominate; and, ring-finger.  The connection between the two meanings, nameless and ring-finger, is so tenuous that I am skeptical about the translation.  I say, check with the Moomins, or your Finnish friends, just to be certain.

 

That is all there is.

 

Dear Godot,

I have your song for today!  It's actually everyone's song, really, but Existentialists will be the most delighted.  I just heard this for the first time today, and I wonder how I could have missed such a song; happily, many fine singers have not missed it, so you can have several nice versions!

Leslie Uggams

Peggy Lee

Diana Ross

Cristina

PJ Harvey

Chaka Khan

Debbie Harry & Billie Eilish

additional space

 

Dear Y'all,

Yes, I am thinking of you!  I still have to tell you about two books I read, but you know how it is, things keep coming, clocks keep ticking.  I am reading another book now; and there is a part about space and time; and that made me think on space.  Well, let me be more precise.  In my reading, I tripped on a thought from my own mind; it happened when I was re-reading a sentence, trying to 'know' it, to feel it, to internalize it.  Of course I wasn't even sure what the sentence meant.  And there was a song on the radio, a song that sort of drones/expands/continues, like many songs I am fond of and insert a little pause in my mind's endless rattling.  So this little stumble, and wondering if a person I know would like this book, caused me to consider a thing a woman I know used to say when she was leading our monthly group centered on anti-racism.  She felt, and I am not here to dispute it, that our systemic, learned, invisible-to-us, racism needed to be addressed somatically; or to put it the other way, anti-racism needed to be embodied individually.  To facilitate this embodiment, we would begin with various meditative practices.  

All this preamble, all this context, just to tell you that what she said often during our meditative preparation was: open your consciousness a little wider, make a little more space for even this; this new grief, this new atrocity, this new information.  She said there was ample space for these feelings to fit in our crowded brains.

Now I have heard a lot of these kinds of instructions, and you have, too: imagine the liquid gold flowing and filling yourself as a vessel, breathe in the positive and exhale the negative, let thoughts float on by as if clouds.  Not much of it has been worth remembering and certainly not worth repeating, but this one, an invocation to make more room for things, make space for difficult thoughts and feelings, this seemed very useful to me.  I often feel very small when I am overloaded, over extended, and grasping, and like I need to cram things, or get rid of things, or bar any further things from entering and this phrase suggested that I just needed to notice that there was plenty of space for everything.  Rooms and rooms, acres and miles of space.

PS  Have another version; let me know which you prefer; write to me and leave your note in the usual place; the oak bole by the dry riverbed.

music for another Monday

 

diagram of how we see an infinity mirror

Dear Monday,

You know I love you, don't you?  We all heap the disappointments of the past upon Monday.  It's as good a day as any, dies lunae, Moon-day, Monday is!  Our weariness with the tired story of history, of our own repetition is not inherent in Monday.  Poor Monday is the scapegoat of the week.  My own, personal, big bad day of the week is usually Sunday.  I like to save Sunday for a Sunday Snit.  Which is a thing you are entitled to when you observe a workweek.  I am all done with that, thank you very much.  But, for Monday, please have this wonderful Arvo Part composition: Spiegel im Speigel, which is the mirror in a mirror of the infinite reflections.

PS  Learn a little more, on Wikipedia.  Yes, I have issues with representation on Wikipedia, and some bozo took down my contribution within days, but I also use the holy hell out of it, and I am a monthly donor.  You can be too, if you want to.  Wikipedia is flawed, but it is also kind of ours, in a way that Google, Amazon, Meta, etcetera, will never, ever be.