Charley Harper

Last Sunday, I went to a Charley Harper Retrospective with my friend, Karen. Harper was a Cincinnati wildlife artist whose career started sometime in the forties and ended when he died in 2007. I'd seen his work around town a lot--on posters for the zoo, the Hamilton County Park District, the Cincinnati Nature Center. It's fun and colorful and frequently has a sense of humor. A few years ago, I went to an opening at a gallery where a friend and former student worked, and they had several Harper prints for sale. I bought two, and I love them. Here they are.






The retrospective was fun. As we wandered around the gallery, I could really see the way he used shape and color in similar ways from work to work. I was just wandering the web, and I found this: When once asked to describe his art style, Harper replied, “When I look at a wildlife or nature subject, I don’t see the feathers in the wings, I just count the wings. I see exciting shapes, color combinations, patterns, textures, fascinating behavior and endless possibilities for making interesting pictures. I regard the picture as an ecosystem in which all the elements are interrelated, interdependent, perfectly balanced, without trimming or unutilized parts; and herein lies the lure of painting; in a world of chaos, the picture is one small rectangle in which the artist can create an ordered universe.” Have a look:



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Here's What's Needling Me

Tonight I did something I've never done before: I asked my doctor to photograph me. I guess I should explain. First, the back story. In 1993, I watched my then husband, Mike, get a spinal tap. I didn't see the needle go in but when he was done, the neurologist held the enormous syringe up and said this, "before they see it, some people think spinal fluid will be bloody or cloudy, but it isn't! It's as clear as water.". I looked at the needle and at the fluid and the floor beneath my feet started to feel spongy. I felt the room start to spin, and in a second, the doctor and nurse were on either side of me, escorting me to a table in the room next door where I (thankfully) did not actually pass out. Poor hubby was in the other room; he'd just had the spinal tap, but I was the one stealing the attention of his health care providers.

A few short months later, I was sitting on an exam table in a doctor's office. I'd had a stabbing pain in my foot that wouldn't go away: a neuroma. "a steroid shot will fix that," the orthopedist said. I agreed, and for the first and last time in my life I watched. He hit the nerve in my foot like hitting a bull's eye, HOLY CATS that hurt, and then he kind of jiggled the needle around in there for a few seconds. Sometime at the start of this procedure, I stopped breathing, and by the time he finished, I had turned green and felt the room start to sway. For the second time, I was escorted to a small exam room and made to lie down until I recovered.

These two episodes triggered my needle phobia. I can still get shots and have blood drawn, but I'm a nervous nelly about it, and every single time, I'm asked, "are you okay?" or "are you breathing?". I must have the look of terror on my face. Today, though, I looked my fear in the face: I had acupuncture. I'm going to try a few weeks of treatment to see if it helps my knee and hip pain. Even if it doesn't, the good news is that the room didn't spin today. Of course, I think my doctor thought it was hilarious when I asked him to photograph my knee, but I was feeling pretty proud of myself. I think I've reached some new blogging low point by posting photos of a medical procedure, but what the heck.






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新年快乐

I'm missing China right now! A prosperous and lucky year of the dragon to all of you.






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Too Much

I've got too much of a good thing right now. A lot of good things, truth be told. In a previous entry, I wrote about the fact that I'm co-leading a study abroad trip this summer. Every time I've done this, I've had this worry: will we have enough applicants to travel? We have a cap of 24 students, and the college has some rules about the smallest number of students we can take. In 2005, they let me travel with only six, but that was a real exception to the rules; in 2007, we took 18 students. At that time, that was the second biggest group to travel in the program's history. We just closed our call for applications, and this year, we have 30! I'm thrilled, of course, but also concerned about the idea of having to reject six of them. Luckily, we have a good, experienced team to make these decisions. Still, I hate to break hearts over this, and missing out on a first trip to Europe could be heartbreaking.

In other "too much" news, I'm absolutely overloaded with work I enjoy. Crazy, huh? Somehow, I've managed to get myself involved with a heap of college and university service that I actually like (service on committees is a job requirement, and often, I think, we feel like committee work sucks the life out of us). I don't know how it happened, but I really like the people I'm serving with, and I feel like the service is important. There's just too much of it. Every committee I'm on right now is doing something that requires me to read dossiers full of documents, folders full of applications, big piles of CVs, etc. This is definitely too much of a good thing.

Too muchness has touched my personal life this month, too. I'm doing physical therapy three times a week, and I love that it's making me feel better (big news on that front: I can walk without listing to the left now. Small progress, but it makes a real difference in my hip and knee pain). On the new thing front, I started pool PT once a week. I go to the pool at the Y near school, where the PT clinic rents a lane, and my therapist has me do lots of pool walking and squatting and deep water scissoring. I love it, except that it's at noon on Wednesday. It honestly feels decadent to leave work for two hours to play in the pool, even if the playing involves a doctor's orders.

I'm sure you've seen through all of my silver lining talk here to the real issue. I'm busy as can be, and that is not a new thing for me or anyone else I know, for that matter. In spite of it all, I'm making time for fun and some relaxation, so it's all going to be fine. Besides, it's way better to have too much of a good thing than a whole lot of nothing.

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Music and Maturity

When I was a kid, I had this idea that being grown up was marked by two things: paperback books that were small--you know, that grown up book format, not the oversized Children's style paperback--and owning a record collection. I really aspired to these things. When the scholastic book order came one year, maybe when I was in seventh grade or so, one of the books looked exactly like a grown-up novel, and I can clearly remember sitting on the front step at home, reading and just dying to have someone notice that I had my nose in a book that was clearly not for kids.

Music was kind of like that to me. My older siblings had record collections, and I remember a house filled with music growing up: Joan Baez, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, The Beatles. And then there were my brothers, Chris and David, who formed a series of bands that practiced in our basement, amplified music rattling the pictures on the walls. Owning my own music seemed like a clear way to identify myself as grown up and cool. I started with 45's, and my very first one was "Good Morning Starshine" by Oliver, circa 1969. I would have been ten or eleven when I made that momentous purchase, and I remember playing the thing over and over again. My first album was The Monkees by the group of the same name. Yes, I was deeply and truly in love with Davy Jones, and I loved that album nearly as much, until my brother, David, was reading the liner notes one day and propped the whole album, record and all, against a heat vent on the wall beside the couch. By the time I found it, the album was warped. I was crushed, but I never replaced it. I just moved on to James Taylor and Jim Croce and Gordon Lightfoot and Harry Chapin and Elton John and every other version of a singer/songwriter I could find. In 1978, I was in my parents' car, driving to class one day, when I tuned in to a station from London, Ontario, just across the lake, and I heard a song called "Wondering Where the Lions Are," and I was addicted. Bruce Cockburn has been one of my number one favorites since that day thirty plus years. I like to refer to him as my second husband. Its just a matter of time until he finds me and proposes. Have a listen:
ago.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4FEn-ZKdDg

I received an Amazon gift card for Christmas, and I bought myself some new music that I've fallen in love with this week. I was driving home from Christmas in Erie, and I tuned into the fabulous World Cafe, just in time to hear an interview with a group called The Decemberists, an indie folk-rock band from Oregon. They played two songs, and I bought the album as soon as I got home. It's one of my new things for January. decemberists.com/

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Vermin

I have a sneaking suspicion that I have mice in my basement. Or maybe mouse--I prefer the singular. I haven't seen a thing, but there's this tiny hint of an animal smell down there that makes me think mouse. Of course, I think mouse, because thinking rat or--what? Monster?--is way too scary. So today, I'm heading to the hardware store for something to eradicate the potential problem. I like to think of myself as a person who wouldn't hurt a fly, and maybe I am, but I would SO hurt a mouse. They can live happily in my backyard, but they are not welcome indoors. It's inevitable, though, right? If you have a basement with a door to the yard, you're going to get a critter at some point. New thing for January? Mouse murder. Yikes.




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Bike

I just completed my first new thing of the new year: I have purchased my first piece of home exercise equipment. I am the proud owner of a soon-to-be-delivered Stamina 15-0200 InTone Folding Recumbent Bike.



I'm not especially excited about this purchase, but I have been told that I have to quit walking everyday (bursitis in the knees and hips: my unwelcome new thing), so hello new bike. I figure I can park this baby in front of the TV and peddle my way through an hour long episode of something or other. Who knows? Maybe I'll enjoy it.

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Winter Quarter Jitters

Happy New Year! Happy Winter Quarter! Today is the first day of the quarter at my university, and that means I have lots of new students. My usual first day jitters are ramping up, and from the emails I've read this morning, so are my students'. One student is concerned that the book she ordered online won't arrive in time; another student is anxious to switch from one class to another; a third student is worried about a scholarship essay she has to write and needs advice. My little world is swirling with anxiety.

I'm a little worried about the new lit class I'll be teaching starting today. The class falls under our Topics in Literature designation, but my topic is a bit undefined. Well, to be honest, it's not undefined at all--it's just that if I were to label it honestly, nobody would take the class, so I renamed it for "marketing" purposes. My original idea was to use four contemporary novels where the authors play with interesting or unusual narrative techniques. I ordered the books, planned the class, and then students started to ask me what I'd be teaching this quarter. When I mentioned the topic, their eyes glazed over, so I needed to repackage it. Sadly, I'm not convinced my repackaging works any better. The thread of a topic I've settled on involves these issues: truth, memory, identity, and (hold onto your hats), life's meaning. I'm using two American and two Canadian novels, and I've chosen the profoundly silly title of Truth or Consequences in Contemporary Literature. Of course, I intend to talk a lot about narrative technique. As far as I'm concerned, storytelling (or narration) is profoundly connected to our ideas about what we believe to be true, how we remember important events, who we believe we are, and how we make meaning of life. So there: I'm all repackaged!

I've taught a couple of the books I'm using this quarter in other classes, but two of them are new. In fact, I'm doing something I love to do, but on a bigger scale. I love to teach at least one short thing that I've never taught before--or better yet, that I've only just read. I like the way it makes me so much more of the community of readers and learners gathered in my class, and my students LOVE it. They seem to like seeing me grapple with the ambiguities in a text just like they're doing. I think that doing this allows me to model critical thinking and critical reading more effectively, since they can really see the way I have to work to support my conclusions, how their observations help me make my own meaning, and so on. This quarter, I've chosen a Carol Shields novel that I read one time, fourteen years ago. I remember that I loved the book, and I remember that it fits my topic, but other than that, it'll be pretty new to me.

Time to get ready for school now. My jitters are telling me I need to get upstairs to choose a first day outfit, so off I go.

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