Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Autumn Playlist



Bear’s Den….............................................My Lair
Jesca Hoop…....................................The Kingdom
Bon Iver……......................................Brackett, WI
Ramona Falls…................................….I Say Fever
Beirut………........................................The Rip Tide
The Honey Trees…............................…Moon River
Nico…………....................................……These Days
Radical Face….............................…Welcome Home
Angel Olsen............................Some Things Cosmic
Mr. Little Jeans…....The Suburbs (Arcade Fire cover)
Lorde………...............................….…Glory and Gore
Antony and the Johnsons….....................Swanlights

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

The (End of) Summer Self

Everything and nothing happened this summer. I turned 25 and I taught a summer class at my university, but mostly I just struggled with my dissertation and felt guilty for every moment not spent struggling on it. Amanda Ann Klein said it best in her essay for Judgmental Observer: Academia conditions us to feel that when we’re not working, we don’t exist. It’s maddening and saddening, but perhaps the natural byproduct of a community of people driven enough to seek PhDs. My problem is that I’ve never been a particularly ambitious person. People who have known me a long time will probably laugh at this claim, but it’s the truth. I simply love learning (though less now than I used to).

Summer is a strange time for me. When the characters and rhythms of the university aren’t present, immediate, and ordering my life, I find it trickier to maintain the illusion that those characters and rhythms make sense in my life. They really don’t, but I have no plans to let that stop me.

I recently read a personal essay on The Hairpin (if you’ve never visited, you really ought to) that has stuck with me. In it, Taisia Kitaiskaia writes about the summer-self that withdraws from world, creating a kind of social vacuum where it may then grow large, swollen with its own intensity:

It’s like slipping outside of time—societal, human time. It’s in these slack summers that I feel most immortal, as unknown and useless as a god, unseen by any mortal eye and somehow full of a vain and hopeless majesty. I fill up more space in the room. Strange thoughts grow unimpeded.

Strange thoughts indeed. Here are some photos from this summer: