![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
She was given to fits of semi-precious metaphors
I had several professors at Brandeis who changed my life: Lenny Muellner, Cheryl Walker, Andrew Swensen, all amazing. But Luis Yglesias might have been the person who changed my life in the most fundamental way: he taught me that I was a storyteller. I was taking a class with him in the spring of 2000, second half of my freshman year; I'd gotten to know him in the fall, when Professor Walker recommended me to him: "He knows more mythology than God." And one day, in mid-March, he asked me if I'd like to tell a story from santería—the fusion of Catholicism and Yoruba myth that we were studying along with other facets of the Caribbean; a religion that Luis had grown up knowing—and because what I knew of the stories did fascinate me, I agreed. I didn't have the first clue what I was doing. I didn't think I had the first clue. He lent me a book with the most godawful purple prose you could imagine—I remember asking him if I had to tell the stories using the author's language, and in horror he told me no, definitely not, use your own voice—and I picked a few stories about the triangle of Oshun, Shangó, Oggún; a few about Elegguá, the trickster, too; and I'd run them over in my head at night, sometimes before the mirror in my dorm room. I'd never formally told a story to an audience before. I sang; I knew how it felt to have that silence in a room, that attention focused entirely on you. But I'd never done it with spoken words. I'd always thought I was only good with songs and printed words: other people's tellings and stories that I wrote. And I learned, that afternoon, when I told about the love affair of Oshun, the sweetwater queen, whose two faces are the flirtatious sexpot and the Virgin Mary, and Shangó, who is lightning and thunder and drums, the loverboy whose other face is Saint Barbara, that I could tell stories. And I loved it. It's now one of the skills I count among my regular repertoire—classics, writing, singing, storytelling—and I don't know if I ever would have discovered this, if it hadn't been for Luis.
So on Sunday was Luis' seventieth birthday party at Lily's On The Pond, the fantastic restaurant up in Jaffrey, NH that his wife Suanne co-owns, and you can bet I was there. Along with people I'd never before and people I hadn't seen in years: other professors, former students, old friends and family, and it was lovely. I had to get up at six in the morning to catch a bus from New Haven up to Brattleboro, VT where Peter Gould lives—Luis calls us his bookends, because Peter was there in his first year of teaching at Brandeis and I was there in his last; and we perform together, so we had to work out something for Luis' party that night—and then at seven in the morning on Monday to make it back to New Haven in time for the lecture that devoured my life all last week, and it all worked out. Even with the sleep deprivation. Even with the snowstorm. I need more weekends like this in my life.
Below are notes about the day that I wrote down for myself and another person, Sunday night at Peter's house. Cut for extended reminiscent description. For stream-of-consciousness, I rather like.
We were at Lily's On The Pond, which is the restaurant that Suanne, Luis' wife, runs with her partners: a low-beamed, hardwood-floored, warm and slightly archaic restaurant where I had venison for the first time in my life, after my father and I had climbed Mount Monadnock for my birthday in 2000; it's where a mill once was, and the eponymous pond is still out back. There's the room out on the porch, where Peter and I usually perform for Christmas parties, and the main room, which is more than a little like an eighteenth-century tavern (in a good way), and the bar, and then this other room where I'd never performed before, because usually the doors are closed; nothing miraculous, it's just a good space to put tables for fifty-odd people and I think not much used outside of such functions. There was a screen set up, where the twenty-minute home movie of Luis' life through photographs and music was projected; I loved the soundtrack of "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" for the Total Loss Farm years, and "American Pie" for Suanne. They're an incredible restaurant. I'm only sorry they aren't holding a Burns Night this year, because I actually eat their haggis.
Peter and I sang "Winter Thyme" with a new verse that we'd written for Luis ("Oh, ye cold lights in the heavens, both the greater and the lesser / Shine your bounty down on our favorite professor"), he sang "Wheel of Fortune" and told the accompanying story that he's made up himself, and I did a version of Joan Baez's "Diamonds and Rust" that probably had the verses rearranged a little, but no one seemed to mind. Concertina accompaniment, but only on the first two songs; mine are always a cappella. And afterward, when almost everyone had gone home and only family members and old friends were drifting around, Peter had his concertina out and he was playing "Come All Ye Tramps and Hawkers," mostly to Luis and another one of his old students and a little to himself, and this man I'd seen at the party but didn't know—he'd been seated next to Suanne, which meant that he was likely an old friend, but I'd never met him before; a slight, dark man in a red sweater, maybe my father's age or a little younger, with a scribbly, beaten-in face and missing at least his four front teeth—was leaning against the wall between us, and he started to sing along in a shy, soft, husky voice. Just the verse that ends with "And if the weather please me fair, I'm happy every day," he sang it over a couple of times, and I had no idea who he was.
[He turned out to be Fenwick, technically Mark Fenwick, but no one in the world seems to call him Mark; he lived on the Total Loss Farm with Luis and Peter in the 1970's, and now I want to see if I can commission a greenman from him.]
So; I've checked my e-mail on Peter's ancient iMac, and now he's reading the New York Times, Mollie's reading a paper in Spanish, and I'm typing this. Peter's made me some herbal tea—at least, it's hot cider steeped with homegrown sage, homegrown mint, and homegrown ginger, so it's sort of tea-like. It doesn't taste much like anything I've ever drunk before, sweet and mustily green-sour and I associate the flavor, actually, with old leaves. It makes my mouth burn a little. The taste gets up into your sinuses. There's a sediment at the bottom of the mug that I should drink and not think about too hard.
Their living room has rugs done in geometric patterns—from Oaxaca, Peter tells me; but in one case, an unfolded red sleeping bag—hanging in all the windows, to keep in the heat. The house is a hundred and ten years old, the same age as his Lachenal concertina that he bought in England, with its keys of whale ivory; two-floored, heated with woodstoves and it's full of small shifts and creaks and wind-noises, iron-pipe-and-brick noises, timber groans like a ship at sea. And full of space, big open woody rooms, filled with shelves and books and oddments. From where I sit on a sagging, slightly seat-broken couch upholstered the color of old terra-cotta, I'm looking at a Defiant stove on a platform of bricks (about a foot and a half from me, so I'm very warm), an unvarnished wooden table piled with newspapers and photo albums, Peter in a Nakashima wooden chair, in a black alpaca sweater and one of his kerchiefs around his neck, Mollie in an overstuffed chair that's almost the same maroon-purple as her sweater, and a fourth slat-backed chair that's occupied only by the leopard-print hat and fuzzy gold-brown scarf Peter's mother left behind went she went upstairs for bed, and that doesn't include the piano with its own colonies of stuff—a menorah, photographs, speakers for the seriously archaic record player next to Mollie, dictionaries, a charcoal sketch of probably Peter, et cetera—or the computer off in a corner behind me, with a gigantic inflatable red rubber ball for the user to sit on instead of a chair, or the handmade chest-of-drawers in the other back corner, and there's some kind of vine growing up and over and down the doorway that leads into the library. All sorts of carpets on the floor and you can still see how worn the floorboards are beneath; a jaguar mask over the nearest door. Colorless Christmas lights still strung across the central beam, cut-tin angels dangling in space. A curtain of beaded stars in the front doorway. The stairway runs up to the second floor with very narrow steps, washed sky-blue, sponge-printed, and there are more Christmas lights tangled around the rail. On either side of the staircase, I can see through into the kitchen, which is more wood and clutter and another stove, the wall over the sink plated in paint-glazed ceramic tiles, and all the same high ceilings, all the raw strata of the house decorated with photographs and paintings and pottery and people's jackets.
Earlier this afternoon, we visited two houses to pick up a cradle that Peter made originally for his first nephew, that has since made the rounds of forty-eight families in Brattleboro: whoever needs the cradle can have it until it's time to pass it on to the next child. The first house, we went up steep, twisting stairs into a second-floor apartment with brilliant, riotously colored, Caribbean-influenced paintings on all the walls; took the cradle down carefully, but I didn't once slip going down the stairs backward. The second had once been a church, now the home of a very pregnant painter originally from Germany and her thin, braided, nervously intense husband, and all its floors were hung with curtains to create room-spaces. On the second floor, their bedroom window was a cathedral arch; and a trapdoor and ladder led up to what had been the steeple, where there's a hammock in the summer and always a view down the scantily-wooded slope to the rivercourse, which was swollen with snow-melt and tearing itself white over the boulders, and still much lower, Peter told me, than it had been two days ago. The sky was that pale-blue clarity of winter, with a few mare's tails of clouds twisted finely across it; I thought of the underworld sky from The Cuckoo, the white road. This house doesn't need words, it needs photographs: I can't do it justice. I think Mollie's fallen asleep.
This is what I love. I do love Latin and Greek, I love Classics, I wouldn't even have applied to Yale if academics didn't make me happy, but this is where I feel most right: singing, storytelling; performing. Even informally, even three songs thrown together between the second and third courses and performed while dessert's being set out, unceremonially, not all the words right, it doesn't matter: it feels like home.
And of course, coming back, there was a blizzard. What was fine, dry, flour-sifted snow in Vermont had turned into sodden, heavy, clotted-windshield snow by western Massachusetts, so that I made my train in Springfield by ten minutes and it took an extra half-hour to reach New Haven. (Of course, there was no snow in New Haven. There was only miserable warm rain and then humidity. What's wrong with this city? Is a little winter too much to ask?) I arrived on campus with forty-five minutes left before I had to deliver my lecture, which of course I'd been revising on the train-and it went fine. I improvised about a third more than I'd expected, but never too far away from the written paper; and since I had five minutes left over afterward, I told my class the story of Sedna. They seemed to like it. I was very pleased.
In other people's news,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
greyselke's dig has made CNN. This is seriously cool. time_shark's "The Journey to Kailash" will ensure that you never complain about your own in-laws again. And this is both mine and others' delight: Matthew Cheney's 2005: Some of the Goods includes truepenny's Mélusine, Holly Phillips' In the Palace of Repose, SFPA's The Alchemy of Stars: The Rhysling Award Winners Showcase (yay, time_shark!), and my own Postcards from the Province of Hyphens. All is coolness.
So on Sunday was Luis' seventieth birthday party at Lily's On The Pond, the fantastic restaurant up in Jaffrey, NH that his wife Suanne co-owns, and you can bet I was there. Along with people I'd never before and people I hadn't seen in years: other professors, former students, old friends and family, and it was lovely. I had to get up at six in the morning to catch a bus from New Haven up to Brattleboro, VT where Peter Gould lives—Luis calls us his bookends, because Peter was there in his first year of teaching at Brandeis and I was there in his last; and we perform together, so we had to work out something for Luis' party that night—and then at seven in the morning on Monday to make it back to New Haven in time for the lecture that devoured my life all last week, and it all worked out. Even with the sleep deprivation. Even with the snowstorm. I need more weekends like this in my life.
Below are notes about the day that I wrote down for myself and another person, Sunday night at Peter's house. Cut for extended reminiscent description. For stream-of-consciousness, I rather like.
We were at Lily's On The Pond, which is the restaurant that Suanne, Luis' wife, runs with her partners: a low-beamed, hardwood-floored, warm and slightly archaic restaurant where I had venison for the first time in my life, after my father and I had climbed Mount Monadnock for my birthday in 2000; it's where a mill once was, and the eponymous pond is still out back. There's the room out on the porch, where Peter and I usually perform for Christmas parties, and the main room, which is more than a little like an eighteenth-century tavern (in a good way), and the bar, and then this other room where I'd never performed before, because usually the doors are closed; nothing miraculous, it's just a good space to put tables for fifty-odd people and I think not much used outside of such functions. There was a screen set up, where the twenty-minute home movie of Luis' life through photographs and music was projected; I loved the soundtrack of "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" for the Total Loss Farm years, and "American Pie" for Suanne. They're an incredible restaurant. I'm only sorry they aren't holding a Burns Night this year, because I actually eat their haggis.
Peter and I sang "Winter Thyme" with a new verse that we'd written for Luis ("Oh, ye cold lights in the heavens, both the greater and the lesser / Shine your bounty down on our favorite professor"), he sang "Wheel of Fortune" and told the accompanying story that he's made up himself, and I did a version of Joan Baez's "Diamonds and Rust" that probably had the verses rearranged a little, but no one seemed to mind. Concertina accompaniment, but only on the first two songs; mine are always a cappella. And afterward, when almost everyone had gone home and only family members and old friends were drifting around, Peter had his concertina out and he was playing "Come All Ye Tramps and Hawkers," mostly to Luis and another one of his old students and a little to himself, and this man I'd seen at the party but didn't know—he'd been seated next to Suanne, which meant that he was likely an old friend, but I'd never met him before; a slight, dark man in a red sweater, maybe my father's age or a little younger, with a scribbly, beaten-in face and missing at least his four front teeth—was leaning against the wall between us, and he started to sing along in a shy, soft, husky voice. Just the verse that ends with "And if the weather please me fair, I'm happy every day," he sang it over a couple of times, and I had no idea who he was.
[He turned out to be Fenwick, technically Mark Fenwick, but no one in the world seems to call him Mark; he lived on the Total Loss Farm with Luis and Peter in the 1970's, and now I want to see if I can commission a greenman from him.]
So; I've checked my e-mail on Peter's ancient iMac, and now he's reading the New York Times, Mollie's reading a paper in Spanish, and I'm typing this. Peter's made me some herbal tea—at least, it's hot cider steeped with homegrown sage, homegrown mint, and homegrown ginger, so it's sort of tea-like. It doesn't taste much like anything I've ever drunk before, sweet and mustily green-sour and I associate the flavor, actually, with old leaves. It makes my mouth burn a little. The taste gets up into your sinuses. There's a sediment at the bottom of the mug that I should drink and not think about too hard.
Their living room has rugs done in geometric patterns—from Oaxaca, Peter tells me; but in one case, an unfolded red sleeping bag—hanging in all the windows, to keep in the heat. The house is a hundred and ten years old, the same age as his Lachenal concertina that he bought in England, with its keys of whale ivory; two-floored, heated with woodstoves and it's full of small shifts and creaks and wind-noises, iron-pipe-and-brick noises, timber groans like a ship at sea. And full of space, big open woody rooms, filled with shelves and books and oddments. From where I sit on a sagging, slightly seat-broken couch upholstered the color of old terra-cotta, I'm looking at a Defiant stove on a platform of bricks (about a foot and a half from me, so I'm very warm), an unvarnished wooden table piled with newspapers and photo albums, Peter in a Nakashima wooden chair, in a black alpaca sweater and one of his kerchiefs around his neck, Mollie in an overstuffed chair that's almost the same maroon-purple as her sweater, and a fourth slat-backed chair that's occupied only by the leopard-print hat and fuzzy gold-brown scarf Peter's mother left behind went she went upstairs for bed, and that doesn't include the piano with its own colonies of stuff—a menorah, photographs, speakers for the seriously archaic record player next to Mollie, dictionaries, a charcoal sketch of probably Peter, et cetera—or the computer off in a corner behind me, with a gigantic inflatable red rubber ball for the user to sit on instead of a chair, or the handmade chest-of-drawers in the other back corner, and there's some kind of vine growing up and over and down the doorway that leads into the library. All sorts of carpets on the floor and you can still see how worn the floorboards are beneath; a jaguar mask over the nearest door. Colorless Christmas lights still strung across the central beam, cut-tin angels dangling in space. A curtain of beaded stars in the front doorway. The stairway runs up to the second floor with very narrow steps, washed sky-blue, sponge-printed, and there are more Christmas lights tangled around the rail. On either side of the staircase, I can see through into the kitchen, which is more wood and clutter and another stove, the wall over the sink plated in paint-glazed ceramic tiles, and all the same high ceilings, all the raw strata of the house decorated with photographs and paintings and pottery and people's jackets.
Earlier this afternoon, we visited two houses to pick up a cradle that Peter made originally for his first nephew, that has since made the rounds of forty-eight families in Brattleboro: whoever needs the cradle can have it until it's time to pass it on to the next child. The first house, we went up steep, twisting stairs into a second-floor apartment with brilliant, riotously colored, Caribbean-influenced paintings on all the walls; took the cradle down carefully, but I didn't once slip going down the stairs backward. The second had once been a church, now the home of a very pregnant painter originally from Germany and her thin, braided, nervously intense husband, and all its floors were hung with curtains to create room-spaces. On the second floor, their bedroom window was a cathedral arch; and a trapdoor and ladder led up to what had been the steeple, where there's a hammock in the summer and always a view down the scantily-wooded slope to the rivercourse, which was swollen with snow-melt and tearing itself white over the boulders, and still much lower, Peter told me, than it had been two days ago. The sky was that pale-blue clarity of winter, with a few mare's tails of clouds twisted finely across it; I thought of the underworld sky from The Cuckoo, the white road. This house doesn't need words, it needs photographs: I can't do it justice. I think Mollie's fallen asleep.
This is what I love. I do love Latin and Greek, I love Classics, I wouldn't even have applied to Yale if academics didn't make me happy, but this is where I feel most right: singing, storytelling; performing. Even informally, even three songs thrown together between the second and third courses and performed while dessert's being set out, unceremonially, not all the words right, it doesn't matter: it feels like home.
And of course, coming back, there was a blizzard. What was fine, dry, flour-sifted snow in Vermont had turned into sodden, heavy, clotted-windshield snow by western Massachusetts, so that I made my train in Springfield by ten minutes and it took an extra half-hour to reach New Haven. (Of course, there was no snow in New Haven. There was only miserable warm rain and then humidity. What's wrong with this city? Is a little winter too much to ask?) I arrived on campus with forty-five minutes left before I had to deliver my lecture, which of course I'd been revising on the train-and it went fine. I improvised about a third more than I'd expected, but never too far away from the written paper; and since I had five minutes left over afterward, I told my class the story of Sedna. They seemed to like it. I was very pleased.
In other people's news,
greyselke's dig has made CNN. This is seriously cool. time_shark's "The Journey to Kailash" will ensure that you never complain about your own in-laws again. And this is both mine and others' delight: Matthew Cheney's 2005: Some of the Goods includes truepenny's Mélusine, Holly Phillips' In the Palace of Repose, SFPA's The Alchemy of Stars: The Rhysling Award Winners Showcase (yay, time_shark!), and my own Postcards from the Province of Hyphens. All is coolness.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
Usually there are more opportunities. This isn't something I just discovered—this is an integral part of my life that I've had to set aside most of this year so that I could focus on academics. I've always sung. When I was at Brandeis, I was regularly mistaken for a member of the Music Department, even though I only ever majored in Classics. (I was getting two degrees, so most of my credits were going toward the dead languages; I had an excuse.) I used to perform semi-regularly with Peter at Lily's On The Pond; singing and storytelling. My first year at Yale, I was in an opera at the School of Music. This year is the first time in my life since I was twelve that I haven't been at least taking singing lessons: and I miss music terribly. So this weekend was very good for me. That balance—writing, singing, academics—keeps me sane. I needed it.
no subject
What's wrong with this city? Is a little winter too much to ask?
In New Haven? In an age of global warming, when my Dad´s getting cranky when he was XC skiing in Quebex in slush? Yes.
How do you home-grow ginger?
no subject
I know, I know. But I'm still dying for proper snow. I need winter, not zombie autumn.
How do you home-grow ginger?
I haven't the foggiest.
Storytelling
One of the happiest moments in my life was when I read a bit I'd written--straight from the half-formed stories of the people of one of the novels that lives in my head--to my required-for-English-majors-class as an assignment, and just knew that this was where I wanted to be.
The better moments were after, the teacher asking: "Is that from...somewhere?" and being shocked when I said, "no, it's just mine." And the classmate who ran after me up the steps of the campus center:
"That was great! You should write novels."
"Yes; that's what I want to do!"
We both grinned at each other. It was so marvelous.
It's the only thing I've ever felt which was as good as a good day writing.
Re: Storytelling