Thoroughly Loathing Thoreau

This is a rant. I need to let the venom out. If you are not interested in a bitch session about Thoreau, well, I completely understand. See you around the playground. The rest of you, put your crash helmets on.
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I spent some of my college years swimming in Walden Pond and cooing over the cute boys and quotes in Dead Poets Society. But it's almost 15 years later that I'm finally reading Walden, and my greatest fears are confirmed: Thoreau was a pompous prick.

Cliff's Notes on Thoreau read romantically enough: poor boy goes to Harvard, becomes gardener and hiker, hangs with Transcendentalists (Emerson) and poets (Whitman), builds small hut in woods, swears off belongings and high society for simplicity and clean living.

But for every beautiful too-oft-repeated quote in Walden, there lurks prep school pugnacity:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation (11)

I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of value . . . from my seniors (11-12)

 I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion (33)

  Philanthropy . . . is greatly overrated (63)

 I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life (74)

The best works are the ancients, and they haven't been translated (86)

 

with huge lumbering civility the country hands a chair to the city (93)

 Sometimes, when I compare myself with other men, it seems as if I were more favored by the gods than they (106)

 Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves (137)

  . . . his wife--every man has such a wife--changed her mind . . . (68)

Mr. Thoreau, would you like some cheese with your whine?

Does anyone discuss the hypocrisy of this book? And the dreamlike, unrealistic nature of his thought process?

It's all well and good to live a mile or so from Emerson's house. To undoubtedly dine with him regularly and discuss all things under God by Emerson's fire. But to then write bullshit such as, "a village of busy men, as curious to me as if they had been prairie dogs . . . I went there frequently to observe their habits" (134). Like he's so removed from humans.

http://colbysts.blogspot.com/2009/05/henry-david-thoreau.html

And maybe his bitterness toward women stems from the fact that his proposal was turned down? Yeah, Ellen Sewell turned him down after turning down his brother. Of course there's also speculation of his being homosexual, as indicated here. And he did meet one of his heroes, Walt Whitman, on Cape Cod, after all. Hmmm, when did Provincetown secure its reputation?

My issues with Thoreau go long and cut deep. It's like this:
"[I speak] to the mass of men who are discontented, and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot . . . when they might improve them" (17). And "The laborer's day ends with the going down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit" (59).

umf.maine.edu

Sure! Forget your wife, children, and bills. Mill girls, forget the 12-hour shift you just completed and the letter you just received from Maman, asking for more money! Better yourselves, damn you! Because surely after sundown you have plenty of time to learn Greek and thereby read the ancients who are spectacular but not yet translated.

He spends a lot of time building up and condemning blue-collar folk. He is saddened that the Irish are building a railroad, yet states that it would do the students of Harvard good to build their own dorms. Further, he prattles on about why no manner of job suits him, but maybe he could pick berries and with that meet his expenses (58).

And don't get me started on the asinine ant wars (180-182). "And certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment's comparison with this . . . for the patriotism and heroism displayed." Thoreau wrote this in Concord, MA, ~80 years after the Revolutionary War. About ants in his garden. 

http://www.sunjournal.com/state/story/876963

Two years later, the bum went back to town, to be with the other prairie dogs. His flimsy excuse is that he felt he "had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one" (252). Henry, Louise Dickinson Rich farts in your general direction, you fucking pansy.

If Thoreau were alive now, I believe he would have gone to Hampshire College. He would be that asshat who is 110% enviro, judging everyone, and graduating with a degree in frisbee. In sum, Thoreau was a hipster. Before being a hipster was hip. Ironic bastard.

zazzle.com

 

Millgirl's ass is better, and February proves amusing

I'm officially one step closer to Paris in April. Try on your best accent and say like the French, "Super cool!"

In other not exciting news, I played grown-up a week or so ago and attended Flight Night at the Wentworth by the Sea. A sampling of three wines, with foods to accompany, for $16. Not a bad date, actually. But I was there with colleagues, so romantic it was not. Still, a good time.

But my favorite thing at the moment is my celebrity valentine.

It appears that no one knows who Adam Goldberg is. He was in Saving Private Ryan, 2 Days in Paris, Friends . . . Still don't know? Well, he's this guy.

A girl can't always account for her crushes. There's something about his yummy, hairy, tattooed, angry presence that makes me giggle like a school girl. So I spent some quality time stalking him on YouTube because I wanted to hear him talk without a script. I caught a couple clips of him sparring with Craig Ferguson. He's got a dry sense of humor (which the commenters didn't get because they mostly thought he rode the short bus to the studio), and he's a fast talker (=smart/smartass). Then, suddenly, I spied, with my tiny eye--cowboy boots! Fuck me. I hate cowboy boots. So what does a person do now whenever she has any fucking thought going through her head? She becomes an asshole like everyone else and shares her upset with the universe. On Twitter. Without thinking there will be any repercussions. Thus ensued our tryst.

Damn. Adam Goldberg wears cowboy boots. Reassessing... #waningcrush

RT @nhmillgirl Damn. Adam Goldberg wears cowboy boots. Reassessing... #waningcrush http://twitpic.com/3zk9yi

  @TheAdamGoldberg Well played, sir.

And I'm the happiest fucking stalker in New Hampshire. 

Amen

"A fatherless girl thinks all things possible and nothing safe."

--The Company of Women

So far, 2011 is a pain in the ass

That's a literal statement.

About two weeks ago, on a Monday, pain developed in my right buttock. By that Friday, sitting became excruciating. I set up a doctor's appointment for the following Monday afternoon. But by Sunday, I had stopped eating and was feverish and nauseous. Not good. So, with Mom's help, I limped into the ER Monday morning.

What a long, slow day of poking and prodding; no fewer than six people spent quality time checking out my backside. And under the awkward florescent lighting, I was mortified. And scared. I kept thinking cancer and welled up pretty easily throughout the day. The nurses kept offering pain meds. But that wasn't it; the pain I could tolerate; the humiliation and fear were overwhelming.

Diagnosis: perirectal abscess about the size of a kiwi

Funny, in all my Google searches that week, abscess is the one word I never saw. Plenty of boils and cysts and other colorful things that come up with searches on "tenderness in buttock," "firmness in one buttock," "pain in buttock" . . .

So, in the ER at 9 a.m., diagnosed by noon, admitted at 4, surgery at 5, postop at 6, discharged at 9:30. Looking back, I'm not sure I should have been discharged. But I think my fierce attitude scared the young nurse on duty. I was a hot mess--barely walking, draining everywhere, and full of pain. She literally looked both ways down the hall and told my mother and me to just go.

I am now two weeks into recovery. The first week was a Vicodin blur. But I have vivid memories of removing the gauze. The surgeon had said, "There will be a lot of it, and it will hurt." What a fucking understatement. I stood in the shower for 30 minutes, intermittently tugging for 10 seconds, then holding onto the bar and breathing for 10 seconds, watching blood run down my legs and the tail of gauze behind me growing. I asked my mother to come into the bathroom to talk to me so I could focus on something other than the pain. The sensation . . . like pulling a dull sword through your ass at about a half-inch per minute. I was lightheaded with pain. The last tug almost brought me to my knees. I held the gauze up. It reached from my feet to my collar bone. That gauze was inside the wound. This open wound in my ass. I exclaimed that we should bronze it, or certainly a photo should go on Facebook. But Mom quickly put it in a bag and whisked it away. My body was shaking uncontrollably, my modesty and pride shot to hell. She prepared a sitz bath for me, and I sat in warm water, pulling a towel around me and shaking. I was humbled.

For days after that, I slept, mostly. Very little movement, very little eating. Loss of appetite is a peculiar sensation for a foodie. At the same time, I had to succumb to the fact that I was "unable" in many ways. Unable to do just about anything for myself. A horror to an uber-independent woman. My mother visited every couple days, calling ahead for a grocery list and taking out the trash on arrival. She kept telling me to rest, to appreciate the trauma my body had been through. But this is new to me . . . this inability to bounce back. And when I called to say I would be out of work a second week, I felt ashamed.

I'm feeling almost complete again. I've stopped taking the Vicodin because I would rather feel pain than cloudiness. I can sit with mild discomfort, and I can drive. I left my apartment for the first time yesterday, and felt both weak and victorious. It felt good to clear snow off my car, to use my body, to breathe fresh air.

The moral of the story is to never underestimate the importance of your own ass. Sitting is a beautiful thing. And no matter how hairy or puckered or weird you think it looks down there, embrace it. Love your little balloon knot, your dirty penny. Mine looks very different now. All hopes of being an anal porn star are dashed for me. But it's still healing. It's still draining. I'm not fully me yet, but I'm getting there. And I'm sorry there are no pictures to accompany this post, but, frankly, there's not one goddamn thing about this that you want to see.

Fin

"Carrot Nose" from Ewe & Eye & Friends
Stitched on 32 ct. linen, DMC floss

Whee! Just made it! I managed to get one last project finished in 2010. Not that I started it in 2010. But whatever.







I've been busy crafting this month. It was a tremendous feeling to make gifts, rather than buy them. I barely entered a store all month. One of my favorite pieces of handiwork was for a woman I work with whose name begins with F. I found this pattern on Flickr and couldn't resist.

For everyone else, I wanted to make an ornament. Something small and simple. Something I could work on while watching Netflix... So I flipped through a new book I picked up: A Rainbow of Stitches. I love everything in this book. Each chapter focuses on a color (green, pink, red, blue). It's mostly straightforward cross stitch, with some other types of embroidery thrown in. The pictures are great, and it has a modern and French feel to it. Yummy book.

I settled on a mitten in the red chapter. And I started stitching...and stitching...



About 20 in all. A perfect thing to work on with morning tea, or while watching TV.




Then I needed to figure out what to do with them. My first thought was to do something with felted wool.


But it wasn't a pretty sight, and I'm not the most precise crafter. Using that many pins per mitten didn't sound like a hot idea. And I'm sure whatever I was doing here I was probably doing incorrectly.



So I went through my fabric stash and looked for the tiniest print possible. I think this green is perfect. Next, I set up an assembly line of stitching, sewing, pressing, and assembling. It took a few tries to figure out how to work the thread in to create the hoop to hang the ornament. But once I got it, the project came together in no time.







All my little soldiers!

It was one of the most genuine gifts I've given. And I think this is something I will try to do each year.



Happy New Year, everyone. Hope 2011 brings brilliant surprises for us all. xo

Where I prove two things

1) I can't let go of things and 2) I'm correct.

So I'm reading Joyce Carol Oates' The Faith of a Writer. It's highly . . . academic. A little stuffy, but with some gems. One of them goes like this:

One thinks too of William Faulkner's composition of this greatest novel, The Sound and the Fury, which began as a troubling and inexplicable image--the vision of an unknown little girl with muddy underpants climbing a tree outside a window--and slowly expanded into a long story that required another story or section to amplify it, which in turn required another, which in turn required another, until finally Faulkner had four sections of a novel, published in 1929 as The Sound and the Fury. It was not until two decades later when Malcolm Cowley edited The Portable Faulkner that Faulkner added the Appendix that is now always published as an integral part of the novel.

"I am doing a novel which I have never grasped . . . . There I am at p. 145, and I've no notion what it's about. I hate it. Frieda says it's very good. But it's like a novel in a foreign language I don't know very well--I can only just make out what it is about." (89)

Aha!

I hear the sweet bells of victory and righteousness ringing. They sound nice.

While I enjoy analyzing a book as much as the next person, that can be exactly the problem. The reader always reads into the piece more than the writer intends. And while a writer's voice is a hallway into his or her psyche, it's only a hallway. And it doesn't always open doors that lie in the shadows. As I write, I think more about my duty to the reader, to making the words sound true. I'm not always sure where the story is going, and sometimes there is no story. But I reread and rewrite out of respect for the reader. Not because I need to make grand statements about life or relationships or the universe. I'm only opening the front door to my hallway.

Nuts!

This weekend, I fell into rapture with this blog: lilfishstudios.blogspot.com. Awesome photography, high regard for nature and the outdoors, and some seriously awesome crafting. While there, I came across her recipe for West African peanut soup. And holy shit--who can say no to a soup that requires six cloves of garlic and a jar of peanut butter? Not this girl. I quickly got to work.

First, the band of characters... EVOO, peanuts, natural peanut butter, broth, chopped tomatoes, brown rice, red pepper flakes, green bell pepper, onion, garlic. You can get the actual recipe here. Note: I did not use as much liquid as she lists; my Creuset can't handle that much. And I prefer a thicker soup.

Saute onions, peppers, garlic, red pepper flakes in olive oil...

While that's all cooking down, open all the cans and chop the peanuts...

After a while, you get a goulash-y soup going. I was worried that I should have put more rice in or used less liquid...

But then I added the jar of PB and the chopped nuts. As the soup cooled a little, it got gooey. Like, well, melted peanut butter. Mmmm

My favorite part has been sopping it up with crusty bread. It's seriously filling, and I have been eating half-mug-fulls at a time. It freezes really well, and it will be awesome to heat up on nights like these when the Canadian winds are sweeping in and bringing the first serious snowfalls and I just want to put on wool socks and pull the quilt closer around me.