I'm Watching You, Somerville

There's nothing particularly voyeuristic about looking at things that are on display, right? I mean, if someone hangs a picture on the wall, and you look at the picture, that's not, like voyeuristic? What if the picture is in their house? What if they painted the picture, and it's in their house, and you have never met them before? What if you are deeply excited about being in their house precisely because you've never met them before, and thrilled by their picture because you know that they painted it? What about that?

This is the joy that is Somerville Open Studios. Of course I'd like to yank some pictures and put them on my blog, but the website made it impossible. So click the link and look at Joe Keinberger, Dana Pearson, Tova Speter, and whomever else catches your fancy. Now imagine that Joe is sitting on a stool, reading Henry Miller, while Tom Waits plays in the background, and you are walking around his attic room at Little House Studios (which is in one of the oldest, and tiniest buildings in Somerville, another artist told me), staring not only at his paintings and illustrations, but at the table where he makes them, the paints and pens he makes them with, the masking tape he uses to keep them steady, the window he looks out of when he's thinking, and the posters he's put on the wall to remind him of who he is and what he likes. I understand that might cause some shy people anxiety, because they would be unhappy having to create interactions with paint-smeared stranger after paint-smeared stranger.

But not me. I have no anxiety about this situation whatsoever. I only have a nearly fever-pitch curiosity.

In some apartments, artists had roped off a few rooms where, presumably, they put most of their furniture in order to make room for their Open Studio set-ups. We walked in their front door and through their living room, looked at their work, and then turned and went back out. In other places artists spread their art through many rooms, or a few artists used one apartment together. In one place, I walked through a bedroom, looked at art in a living room, in a dining room, and then in the kitchen, where mint-green walls set off bright paintings of flowers very nicely. In another place, a hoard of the artist's friends had dropped by, and were drinking wine out of glasses (unlike the rest of us visitors, who sucked the proffered 2-buck-chuck out of plastic cups). The friends were cooking something that smelled like cinnamon rolls in Heaven, and while I sorted through a pile of matted photos, I listened to them chat, and then I meandered into the living room, and picked up a handmade doll off the coffee table, and put it back, and then thanked them, and left.

"I wanted to be invited to that party," I told my friends Aaron and Karine. They agreed. "I want to be invited to all these parties," Aaron said. "I feel like all these people should already be my friends."

I liked artists who put out cookies or carrot sticks for visitors, and noticed that many people bought the same snacks: green grapes, chips and salsa (a sale at Costco maybe?). I loved Carolyn Marsden, who makes awesome "woven photographs" which I simply cannot describe, and who also made tiny cupcakes for visitors, and stood genially in her adorable living room, with her T-shirts, paintings, and photos, chatting with us. She had a haphazard stack of books right by the door. It wasn't a sculpture, but I'd become so used to looking at everything in the home as an art piece, I noticed it as if it was.

And this was part of the great inspiration: going into artists' homes reminded me of how wonderfully important it is to personalize, to change, to mark up the things that I live with. Sometimes I imbue my own objects with a permanence of character (decided by their manufacturer) because I paid money for them. I don't always paint on my furniture, or draw on my shirts, or sew extra buttons, or glue extra rhinestones, or hang extra fabric, and so on. But sometimes I remember, and when I can treat my stuff with that kind of loving, creative attention, I live better, write better, feel better. I want original art in my house--mine and other people's.

It was a delight to visit Vernon Street Studios as well, although after the warm and sensory joy of being in various homes, making my way through the maze of studios there presented stark contrast. I wondered if viewing those artists as having more success (i.e., having commercial success as an artist enough to pay/qualify for separate studio space) chipped away a bit at my enjoyment--I wasn't getting to peer into the places where they sat at the end of the day, where they drank coffee and read the paper, where they napped after the "real" job before the painting, where they drank wine with friends. I loved much of the art I saw there, but the experience was quite different--more like a museum. (I love museums! I just also truly love seeing people's homes, and therefore some reflection of themselves. And I especially love museums that seem to capture both elements of display and secret personality--like the Isabella Stuart Gardner, or historic homes, or weird places like Museum of Jurassic Technology.)

I imagine that participating in Open Studios is exhausting for artists, especially shy ones, and I'd like to offer up my gratitude to everyone who was able to let me in to see them, and their work. I wish I had a gabillion dollars to support them all.

IFF Boston Makes Me Good and Uncomfortable

I saw two documentaries at the International Film Festival this weekend. The first, The Linguists, is about guys who hunt down and document dying languages by interviewing their last remaining speakers. Although I had some difficulty with the organization--editing, I guess--the content was mesmerizing and I was thrown into that very delicate and wondrous field of questioning: what about our thinking can we learn from our words? What similarities are there, really, in human experience, if our languages are so different? Or are they not so different? Who decides the criteria for these questions?
At one point the linguists found out that a nearly extinct language they didn't know much about had a counting system of base 12...oh no, base 20...oh wait, BOTH base 12 and base 20. It was the most complicated counting system they'd encountered, and their visible glee was infectious. And also, I wondered...how does this arise? Is it totally random, or does it have some origin in the natural world? What's the meaning of some groups using base 10 (that's us!), others using base 12? Or is there no meaning at all? I need to read more, obviously, since I imagine there are reams of pages already attacking these questions. It was exciting to be plunged for a few moments into the field. The Q&A included both the director and one of the linguists featured in the film, so we got some really interesting answers about the state of the research in addition to stories about the making of the film. I felt not quite smart enough to "get" what was happening, which is actually kind of a pleasurable experience for nerdy little me.
I also got very invested in a conversation I had with friends afterward, in which we struggled with the problem of white Euro/American scientists traveling to post-colonial communities to "preserve" culture. Despite the ostensible scientific intentions of the linguists themselves, the practice appears to skirt just on the edge of an "imperialist nostalgia" that very much disturbed my friend Katie. (Imperialist nostalgia, if I can butcher/borrow a definition, involves people mourning the passing or transformation of what they themselves have caused to be transformed. It's about the conquerors wishing they could still see the quaint little dance shows the natives used to do, before they all got killed, then rushing out to ask the native grandmas to please teach everyone those dances, the way they used to be...my apologies to Maria Koundoura, in whose kick-ass class I learned the term.) So, how do we understand two American scientists hunting down languages that are going extinct due to colonialization, then simultaneously "giving" the recordings of the language back to the speakers (in forms they can technologically support) and also archiving the languages at major Western universities? It sounds totally awesome and heroic, and also, brings up these very sticky questions about how to non-destructively engage communities that have been involved in complex colonial relationships. None of that, really, was discussed in the film--that's why I like education and my friends!
The second film was called "Sex Positive," (don't try to get into the website, you'll be "Forbidden," which is a hilarious language coincidence). Sex Positive chronicled the sordid and very strange history of Richard Berkowitz, one of the pioneers of the safe sex movement. You can read more about the film and Berkowitz in an article by Jim Duncan here. What I'd like to address is actually a very strange moment that happened during the Q&A. As it turns out, the filmmakers are a ridiculously adorable, young heterosexual couple who got turned on to Berkowitz as a subject because the female partner has known him as a family friend her whole life. In fact, prior to the film the two of them knew little-to-nothing about the field of sex research, safe sex campaigns, the gay community circa 1979, and so on, and don't consider themselves AIDS or safe-sex activists. They originally wanted to make a film about Berkowitz being a former S&M hustler, like, uh, anybody would. They changed their tune a bit, and cranked out the movie in less than a year. There was a palpable tension to the questions, once viewers realized this. It seemed as though nearly all of us in the audience (and I include myself, as a sex educator and writer) had some background in the "field," and we expected poor Daryl Wein to be One Of Us. Maybe he is now, sort of, but it was clear by the total relief on his face when people started asking him about his next film (a narrative, and nothing whatsoever to do with sexual politics, safe sex, or AIDS) that he never intended to make his career be about this subject matter. I was reminded of how often people who engage in works that address these issues are turned into talking heads, mouthpieces, Sex Expert on what-have-you, even if their actual field of expertise is only overlapping, or neighboring. It's a very compelling reason for some, I expect, to steer clear of including explicit sex in their movies and books, to steer clear of having gay characters, to never once try and ask questions about gender. I admire people like Jeffrey Eugenides who can write Middlesex, and still, in general, be regarded as a great literary fiction writer, without getting pigeonholed into being Someone Who Writes About Sex and Gender. It's all so tricky, and makes me grateful that I get to write manuscripts, not marketing or promo material, where much of this categorization and labeling gets done.

A Litter of Small Failures

In the past two weeks I have had a continual bout of failing: failing to blog at my promised once-a-week pace, failing to stay healthy, failing to work on my novel for the promised number of hours, failing to call people back, write people back, finish projects, take care of business, clean up, work out, and so on.

Today I gave my students a hand out, of which I had made over 100 copies, that has an incredibly conspicuous and confusing word out of place--nothing Freudian or funny, just "Fair" and "Good" switched on a grading continuum.

I'm doing my darndest to maintain that aplomb I see in people I admire, that grace in the midst of what is actually floundering. But I think, frankly, that it's harder for me to accept a string of small failures than some large, grand one. I like things to be large and grand.

Anyway, one small failure in particular I'd like to discuss is my recent bout of hating to play the game Scrabble. Keep in mind: I am of a certain language-loving ilk, and many of my kind also are avid crossword players, Scrabble afficionados, Word-of-The-Day enthusiasts. Somehow, I hate these things. I love language, yes. I hate crosswords. I hate Scrabble. I hate word-games that force me to divorce meaning from the words I love so much. With the exception of Tony, who has recently admitted to also hating Scrabble, but not crosswords, particularly, I am quite alone in this general disgruntlement, among my writer-friends, as far as I know.

So. In an effort to try and re-enter this land of word-play (Maybe I'm missing something of deep intellectual importance! Maybe it will improve my memory! Maybe I can expand my vocabulary! Maybe I don't like words enough after all!) I agreed to play a game of scrabble with four friends on a recent Friday evening.

I made them agree, however, to play a new version, which I coined "Sharing Scrabble." In this version of the game, every word that you put on the board you must then incorporate into a story about yourself. If you have no personal connection to the word, you make one up. For the most part, this aspect of the game was a pleasure for me--there's nothing like eliciting confessions from people I care about.

But I still hate the rest! It takes so long! I don't understand the gleeful triumph of winning! I don't like points, especially when I don't really know how to get them! I don't know enough Greek letters or archaic adjectives to even compete with the weird Scrabble-vocabulary of my friends! And I would rather just listen to them talk about their lives, or books they've read, then find out they were hiding "Qi" somewhere in their little wooden hands.

I will say that I had a small personal triumph, in the face of my crushing loss (at the game, and at liking the game) in the moment that I laid the word "pudenda" on the board.

If I don't like Sharing Scrabble, I don't think there's any hope I'll be converted to the plain-old version, even the speed version. I'm ready to claim that there's no enlightening or constructive value to the game for me. I'm almost ready to say there's no enlightening or constructive value to the game at all, just to elicit some outcry and justification.

Why is this game so beloved? Is it like Coca-Cola (Beloved even though it is morally and nutritionally bereft)? Or is it like soccer (Beloved for reasons I feel compelled to understand, even if I never feel an affinity for the game itself)? In other words, is this my failure to appreciate something that deserves my attention, or does the culpability lie with the Scrabble-players, who could and should use their word-power to more creative ends?