>My appreciation of Ms. Dillard has swelled again, this time to only mildly obsessive proportions. Having scoured her self-maintained website and been left hungering for more, I happened upon this site, which nicely collects much of what the World Wide Web has to offer on the subject of Annie Dillard. What I found both pleased and disturbed me. Most disappointing was to read that Annie has basically declared herself retired following the publication of The Maytrees: no more books and no more public appearances (she had been faithfully doing two public readings per year for quite some time). So I guess I won’t ever get to see her read in person, which is a little upsetting. However, I did find some links to recordings of her readings, which I will need to parse out over time in order to keep me satisfied. I guess that I will also need to slow down on plowing through her back catalog now that I know no new books will be forthcoming. Regrettably, I have already read much of it.
All posts for the month March, 2008
annie dillard
Posted by sean on March 29, 2008
https://sd-stewart.com/2008/03/29/annie-dillard/
warmth, where are you?
Sluggish arrival of spring, protracted and torturous as it is, hammers away at my spirit. Never have I anticipated the end of the cold this much. And with this anticipation comes the simultaneous advent of allergy season. Soon I will pass many afternoon hours with head nodding uncontrollably at my desk, drool hanging from my gaping mouth, powerless against nature’s forces ravaging through my respiratory system. Awesome! Meanwhile I struggle to pry away the crust of creative inactivity that has hardened over me, leaving me a dull cistern of lukewarm life juice, sloshing and slopping all over my dried up mental flooring. I played a little bit of music with other people the other day. It felt good. Really good. I felt myself slipping away to a place I haven’t gone to in a very very long time. I need to get back to that place more often. I need to dust it off and spitshine it til it sparkles again.
Posted by sean on March 24, 2008
https://sd-stewart.com/2008/03/24/warmth-where-are-you/
beginning of the end
>Yesterday was my birthday. Thank you to the one or two people who read this thing who helped me to celebrate. We ate mock meat and chocolate cake. It was a pleasant ending to a day that had been very much like many other recent days: drab and predictable, with a sprinkling of trepidation. Going to work these days is like watching a slow-motion trainwreck. Every couple of days a couple of more people quit and head for more stable ground. The rest of us just cluster around with deer-in-the-headlights looks in our eyes. We are marked for the upcoming cull and we all know it. Those who care enough to stay on this sinking ship participate in the appropriate shady back-room soul-selling dealings necessary to retain some semblance of employment. I, however, can’t make myself care. Either we get the contract or we don’t. Even getting the contract doesn’t guarantee me employment past September, though, so maybe it doesn’t matter if we get it or not. I feel like this is supposed to happen. I feel like life should kick the chair out from under me; after all, I have been leaning a bit too far back in it. I deserve to be left hanging. What sways me these days, as usual, are words on the page and melodies in my ears. These things don’t pay the bills, but they move me in a way that work never has. As always, I look to the birds for some wordless answers to my vague unfocused questions. Their behavior, unlike mine, is strictly dictated by the harsh rules of nature. Survival of the fittest doesn’t apply to me. I can be rather unfit and still survive. Maybe it would be better if I had to physically struggle just to feed myself. Maybe then I wouldn’t have all these questions in my head…all this existential effluvia constantly choking my more rational thinking. Maybe when I lose my job I will become a hunter-gatherer.
Posted by sean on March 20, 2008
https://sd-stewart.com/2008/03/20/beginning-of-the-end/
fridays
Fridays are invariably weird days for me. The primary reason for this is that I do not work on Fridays. Ever. Which isolates me from the majority of society that does work on Friday. A typical Friday for me transpires thusly: rise anywhere from 7:30-9:30 AM; make coffee and breakfast then eat and drink leisurely in front of the gigantic windows in the living room; sometimes then I’ll shower so that I feel like I am more formally starting the day; after that I often start some laundry and then dick around on the internets for awhile; for the past couple of months I’ve been doing some pro bono indexing for an organization whose board I’m on so I usually work on that for a few hours in the afternoon; at some point I begin to get incredibly stir crazy and so I force myself out of the house, usually on the pretense of checking my PO box down the street; if I’m lucky there’s something in there other than junk mail for the previous renters (today there was a zine from Kurt; thanks, Kurt, even though you have no idea that this blog even exists); if I’m feeling really brave I then ride my bike over to Whole Foods and get groceries (this happens very rarely); or I might go to Whole Foods to get quarters for laundry (I like to use them as my bank since the closest branch of my bank is farther than I feel like riding just to go to the bank); back at home, I might do some more indexing, finish laundry, or if the weather is really nice like it was today, go running; between five and six is when my sweetheart usually gets home and so then we attempt to plan our evening. By this point in the day, I am usually feeling and often acting somewhat insane, but bless her heart, she takes it all in stride.
The main thing about Fridays that usually makes me so crazy is that I hardly talk to anyone. Today was unusual in that I went to the bike shop and talked for almost 10 minutes to a guy I know who works there. Beyond that my interactions with people today have been limited to my request for quarters from the Whole Foods Customer Service person. You would think that I could somehow fix this problem, but most people work on Fridays so I’m kind of screwed. That’s why most of my interpersonal contact on Fridays comes from some sort of retail exchange.
This happens over and over and over again like clockwork every Friday. I’m hoping that the warm weather will help things because then I will just go ride a metric century on my bike every Friday, come home, eat like a horse, then go to sleep at 7 PM, which is when the typical witching hour begins.
Okay, before I go try to figure out what to do with myself this evening I just wanted to mention one other thing. I used to have a blog on Xanga, and I must say I liked Xanga better than I like Blogger. Sure, the place is overrun with preteens, but at least they sometimes randomly comment on your blog and you can have some fun back-and-forth with them. No one on Blogger seems to randomly comment on blogs. I think part of the reason for this is that it’s almost like it’s set up to keep you isolated from other bloggers. You can’t search the damn site; all you can do is hit that stupid “Next Blog” button, which inevitably pulls up some Cyrillic gibberish or maybe some Eastern European mom’s photo page for her kid. And you can’t subscribe to other people’s pages like you can on Xanga, so how are you supposed to easily get back to other pages? I’m certainly not going to bookmark every freaking Blogger page I might like. I guess I could do the RSS feed thing but that’s not as good as having subscriptions built into the site. I originally thought that moving to Blogger would be a good thing; I somehow had this perception that it was a more grown-up type of blog site, but now I just think it’s kind of lame. I think I just miss the interactive quality of Xanga. Anyway, I just had to get that off my chest.
Posted by sean on March 14, 2008
https://sd-stewart.com/2008/03/14/fridays/
falling down the memory hole
>I often think that a good memory is more of a plague than a boon. With crystal clear pictures of the past, it becomes too easy to play those slideshows over and over. How much easier it would be to stay in the present moment if instead there was just a warm blankness backing up to the right now. There would be no comparisons to make, no regrets, no sense of lost time, no feelings of inadequacy, no hammering on the same old themes over and over. Everything would seem new and exciting.
Well, maybe having no memory at all would be bad. My friend posted an article on his blog awhile back about a guy who was in just such a position. It was kind of sad. But I often wonder how differently people’s memories work. Not everyone’s can be ready to project that detailed slideshow at any moment. Maybe I just wish I didn’t remember things so clearly and explicitly. I’d be satisfied with vague recollections, I think.
There was something else I was going to mention, but it was unrelated. Ironically enough, I’ve now forgotten what it was…
Posted by sean on March 13, 2008
https://sd-stewart.com/2008/03/13/falling-down-the-memory-hole/
>winter
>I’m tired of winter. I’m not sure what ever possessed me to move back to an area of the country where winter actually exists in its traditional form: cold temperatures, unpleasant precipitation, bleak dark days. All of these characteristics work against me. I need sunlight and I need time outside to do physical activity. I do not enjoy doing this activity in the cold and dark, so I frequently skip it. Then I feel sluggish and depressed. I get cranky and think dark thoughts. My house is drafty and cold, which makes it uncomfortable to be in. This is not what I want my house to be like.
What else is going on? Not much. Daylight savings. Bleah. It messes me up, although I like having some daylight at the end of the day in which to exercise outdoors. Soon it will be my birthday. I feel old numerically, but not necessarily physically. I guess that’s good, but it’s still a little scary. I’m reading this book, and there was a quote that appealed to me…to paraphrase: we get old and our bodies begin to fail just when we’ve learned how to use our powers. It’s nature’s cruel joke, I suppose. Bodies are such weird things. People are so obsessed with them, and yet they are really just useless husks covering what really matters inside. And I don’t mean our organs; I mean our intangible insides. But it’s ridiculous how wise and experienced older people are, and how our Western society casts them aside. What right do we young idiots have to turn our backs on our elders? This is not so in other cultures. In other cultures, elders receive the utmost respect that they deserve. In America, old people are seen as a burden; they are not perceived as having much to contribute and so they are ignored. How much better we would be as a country if we listened to those who have lived through many decades and seen what mistakes have been made throughout history. Perhaps they could guide us back to more sustainable, less wasteful days.
Well, I guess I went off on a tangent there. I better stop now.
Posted by sean on March 11, 2008
https://sd-stewart.com/2008/03/11/winter/
a long ramble
Last night I did a reading with China Martens (The Future Generation), Al Burian (Burn Collector), and a couple of other people whose names escape me (sorry!). I hadn’t done a reading since last summer. This one went much better than the last, I think. It occurred to me that maybe I should do readings more often. It also occurred to me that maybe I should promote my zine more than I do. I have always been bad at self-promotion. It goes against my nature.
After the show, as I rode my bike toward home through the narrow city streets bathed in orange street lamp glow, I thought about how insular my life has become lately. It used to be that this was a common occurrence: attending some event, often paired with frenetic social interaction, and then riding the streets late at night in the silence, breathing in the air around me and feeling the pedals move me forward. This doesn’t happen so much anymore. Because there is always the push-pull within me: to hibernate or throw myself out in the social fray. It has always been there, and I expect it always will be there. Sometimes I think I forget how much control I have over my own life and my own experiences within that life. Sometimes I definitely forget what’s good for me and what is not so good for me. I am forever scrambling to balance what needs to be balanced. Dropping little experiences here and there on either end of the scale, trying to keep one side or the other from crashing to the ground.
But do I miss the constant repetition of those nights? The more than occasional sense of futility at their end? What was my motivation? To stave off loneliness? To kill boredom? To seek a mate? Certainly these were factors. Of course now I have found a mate, and no longer feel the cold breath of loneliness wafting over my neck. So that’s two motivating factors that are now crossed off the list. I would not say either that I am often bored anymore. However, I think I can say that I am under-stimulated. It is after nights like last night that I realize this. When I am bound tight and deep in the monotony of the day-t0-day is when I am not even aware of this chronic under-stimulation. But brief flashes alert me to the fact that I am not creating enough; I am not exercising those channels of release that I need to keep free and clear. They are clogging with the effluvia of complacency, and that is something I do not want to happen. I think that people easily use the excuse of aging as a way to remove themselves from the uncertainty and spontaneity of the more erratic lives so many of us have lived in years past. It is an alluringly simple excuse to give when we don’t want to face the facts that we have become complacent; that we no longer seek out the necessary stimuli to keep us questioning, to keep us creating, and to keep us living lives of exploration.
Well, I don’t want to stop exploring.
Posted by sean on March 7, 2008
https://sd-stewart.com/2008/03/07/a-long-ramble/
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