The Thing About Chicago's South Side is: It Has a Great View Northwards

This evening, the sun was dipping low, the lake was touched with silver, and the view from the Point struck me as a prime photographic opportunity. So I hiked up my gym shorts and marched my frightened ass out to the lake shore at 57th street with a camera. The sound of Lake Michigan is insistent, robust; splashy. It is not like Lake Erie; that Lake has patience, a well-worn sense of time and the history that has played out on its shores. (This is distinct from the bland weariness of Lake Ontario--but one does not blame poor Ontario for its exhaustion, post-rapids and cataract. If you'd been through that sort of trauma, I'd let you just lie there, too. A boring Lake. But I digress.)

Lake Michigan twitches with industry. You can feel it when you stand ankle-deep on the shore: the waves insist, they are itching to move you, somewhere, anywhere, westwards, preferably. Ships steam across her and the Lake nods her approval: splash, splash. Go, move, do. Industrious urgency is in its very character, and this befits the lake-mistress of the great American city, Chicago. New York bustles, LA glitters; but Chicago cranks, chugs, whistles and stamps. Chicago needs a lake that can keep up. Ontario would be flat on her back after an hour. Lake Michigan wants more.

That said, I will miss Chicago and its fearsome semi-sexually voracious Lake. I cut my adult teeth on this city, felt its pulse and longed to be part of its workforce. And then I was. Nuts, bolts, rivets! How appropriate that my job here involved rusty hardware. But one year was enough. Now I look homewards, eastwards, to Lake Erie.

There they have grass, and trees, and sunlight. That Lake remembers. When one sits on its shores, one gets the impression that the Lake is remembering. It remembers the settlers, the immigrants, the ships, the clapboard houses that cropped up on its shores. It remembers barges, mills, factories, remembers when it urged young men westwards, when it was the fountainhead of western industry. Now Lake Erie sits back, and collects on the industry it sent west decades ago.

Waters from Chicago make their way eastward to Erie; in the end, all things come home. And so do I.

Lila, Green Child of the (Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center)

For my beloved Lila: someday, for your birthday, we will get you a green screen session. In fact your wedding should just be entirely green-screened. Think of the editing possibilities! There could be a YouTube contest: Lila in Space! The Light Sabre version! Prison Thriller! A Senate hearing on CSPAN-2. I could go on. Anyway here's the video that got me thinking:



It's "Over and Over" by Hot Chip. And of course, we would keep the version where everyone -- everyone -- is wearing a green spandex bodysuit. Are you reading this, Mrs. Fontes?

* * *

And now that I've gone and rewatched the Prison Thriller video, I might as well post this amazing Prison version of Soulja Boy/ Can't Touch This by the same crew of Filipino inmates:



Man, I wish I could dance like that. At a wedding, perhaps.

Today is Tuesday, June 17th 2008

Today I saw a caterpillar. It was thin, brown and patterned with blue. It moseyed on the sidewalk; I am not certain where it aimed to go. I watched it for several seconds.

Another observation: The entrance to the John Crerar Library at the University of Chicago is adorned with an arch made of fossiliferous limestone. It is not the gloriously fossiliferous type that comprises the columns outside Widener Library; in fact, it strongly resembles poured concrete from two feet away. But if you look from really, really close up (less than 1/2 inch), you can distinguish shell fragments, oolites and other fossiliferous objects. I love that word. I really only wrote about this so I could say it out loud a few times. Fossiliferous.

That said, I hate sedimentary rocks and think fossils are boring.

Volcanic rocks are exciting, though. Especially volcanic rocks from paradisiacal ocean islands such as the Cook-Australs, aka Thesis Islands. I have been writing about these islands a lot lately, but not on this page. More on that, later in the summer.

I don't have any good ideas for a title. And so, my title is just a statement of plain fact, regarding today. My brain is tired, what with all the writing about islands, and obvious things are bringing me the simplest pleasures. My toes are small. Tonight I will eat a Hot Pocket. Later I will drink a beer. A Newcastle, obviously.

My humble apologies for a spaced-out post. In the vein I've been following on Facebook and elsewhere, I'll end with a delightful snippet from E.M Forster's A Room with a View:

Conversation was tedious; she wanted something big, and she believed that it would have come to her on the wind-swept platform of an electric tram. This she might not attempt. It was unladylike. Why? Why were most big things unladylike? Charlotte had once explained to her why. It was not that ladies were inferior to men; it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored. Poems had been written to illustrate this point.

There is much that is immortal in this medieval lady. The dragons have gone, and so have the knights, but still she lingers in our midst. She reigned in many an early Victorian castle, and was Queen of much early Victorian song. It is sweet to protect her in the intervals of business, sweet to pay her honour when she has cooked our dinner well. But alas! the creature grows degenerate. In her heart also there are springing up strange desires. She too is enamoured of heavy winds, and vast panoramas, and green expanses of the sea. She has marked the kingdom of this world, how full it is of wealth, and beauty, and war--a radiant crust, built around the central fires, spinning towards the receding heavens. Men, declaring that she inspires them to it, move joyfully over the surface, having the most delightful meetings with other men, happy, not because they are masculine, but because they are alive. Before the show breaks up she would like to drop the august title of the Eternal Woman, and go there as her transitory self.

Ah, Forster: witty proponent of egality in Joy, Life. Goodnight,

RP

Things that Resonate

First let me say, Orangina: the Champagne of orange juices.

It's a weird run here, chucks. I've got two weeks left in Chicago. The furniture is gone from the ol' apartment, Casey is in Morocco, it's just me, a camping chair and the cable televizions. I am watching CSI as I type; it is awfully quiet without the TV on.

But the acoustics! Who knew this apartment was so damn echoey. I sneeze; the building rings with the rage of my respiratory reflex. It is as though I have shattered the sanctitude of a temple I did not realize existed, until I broke its stillness with my thoughtless fits of allergic hypersensitivity. It is dusty without the furniture here.

Speaking of resonance, I find myself bursting into song these days. Any place with promising acoustics, I try on for size: quietly, if I must; resounding, if I may. Deeply, richly, robustly, if I am drunk. (It seems to me that I sing well, when I am drunk. This feels like tautology, but it is too late for me to work that out properly.) I digress; location-location-location. Bathrooms, bathtubs, banks; all hold promise, some deliver on it. The public aspect of publicly bursting into song has yet to hit home; there is glorious anonymity in wandering a big city alone. Though I must say: good acoustics make me happy, but other people who notice/enjoy good acoustics make me even happier. (This is an invitation for you all to belt out a tune in my presence, should you wish to do so.)

Another topic: Some of you have noticed that my Facebook page has become a repository for E.M. Forster quotes. Truth. I have confessed to some already, and here I make a general statement: A Room with a View -- a novel, a 176 page comedy of manners and societal mores -- is the fountainhead of a good deal of my personal philosophy. I recommend it.

Let me first say: I do not identify with Mr. Emerson, certainly not with Lucy, nor with anyone else in the novel (though in Freddy Honeychurch, I declare a favorite). Rather, I appreciate the fabric, the environment of this story. Below the romantic current, there rests a riverbed manifesto against repression, restriction, the rubbish that cumbers the world. ("The rubbish that cumbers the world." E. M. Forster. A Room with a View. Hayes Barton Press, 1908. Chapter 13. I quote this book constantly, naturally. I lost the reflex long ago to make "air quotes" with my fingers.) This world-cumbering rubbish seems particularly appropriate food for thought in the present day. Though we speak freely about sex, bodily functions, and the letter "S" (stomachs), confusion, conflict, and willful self-deception abound as strongly today as in any other period of history. Though society as a whole may never move beyond the rubbish, as individuals, we would all do well to see across it.

Alright, that's enough philosophy for tonight ('"I say, what about this bathe?" murmured Freddy, appalled at the mass of philosophy that was approaching him.' Chapter 12. Echoes in my head). Spike has switched from a CSI marathon to a thinly-disguised infomercial for unnatural male enhancement, and I think this is a signal for me to wrap things up. Since I have made heavy use of quotation marks in this post, I will end with a sign we saw on the bus today:

"Do not drill here"
Electrical wires

I leave it to you to puzzle out the rationale there. Farewell, and goodnight,

-RP