A Resurrection

I've been thinking for a long time (most of this year, actually) about how best to get back in the swing of posting bits of stuff on here, on a regular basis.

Mostly, it's been a process of figuring out what got me excited about writing short personal stuff like this in the first place, and understanding the connection, if any, I should maintain to something that seems both very brief and disposable, and also sort of static and permanent.

This is also mostly unimportant; it's certainly not the kind of struggle to dwell upon. Though it is important for me to think very seriously about the way I'm reflected in the things I write, for one thing.

It's also clear to me that the process of thinking like that, in a serious introspective way, about crafting communication, is energizing and healthy. It's also sort of what I'm about, in a professional/philosophical/political way. So there's that.

I think what I need for now, then, is only to identify and observe the "point" of putting stuff here, outside of making feel guilty for neglecting it. By "point," I suppose I mean the thematic/subjective/conceptual constraints of the thing.

And to get to there, I'll observe this: that Alaska and myself are not the same thing. But we (the state of Alaska and I) are also not complete opposites. We have some things in common, perhaps some things that even tie us together at this point.

So: at this point, that's what the material here will attempt to be "about"--exploring whatever it is that makes what goes on in my head either close or far away from what I think "goes on" in the "head" of the state of Alaska. What makes us similar and different.

Things that maybe fit within these constraints: coffee, the wilderness, education, politics, curling, agriculture, wine, bunny boots, the construction industry, furniture, Carlos Boozer, bear attacks, the Internet, Joe Strummer, and poker. Things that maybe do not: talk radio, bathing suits, Tony Dungy, muscle cars, TMZ, dog sweaters, and Pokemon (unless it regards Herman Cain).

What I hope and think will happen as a result is that I'll be more compelled by the opportunity to maintain some form of "personal" writing, which feels important and promising. The writing here also has the chance to be more clear, cohesive, and fun.

Incredibly, miraculously, the sunlight's back up here in a prominent way, and it does wonders to pull folks forward into new times and spaces. Again, it's that space--the actual, physical expanse, mmmhmm, but even more, the personal concepts of it and the awareness it creates--that predominates, in our experience, and our interactions, and our understanding of where we're at and the opportunities we're provided.

We're divorced here, in a very clear way, from much of the physical condition and circumstance that formed us. But awareness of those tangible and internal systems of influence and craft--those root systems and planing tools--is emphasized equally by our continual and exaggerated reliance upon their  impulsive and measured effects. We're driven by our craft and creativity and the need to place impact on the space we have, with the assumption that this space, the internal stuff and the external stuff, will offer along with our imprint its coded but apparent origins. Like outside, it's a question, of course, whether the space inside is under our control at all, but having lots of it to explore and wonder about doesn't hurt, and is also, for us, pretty productive and rewarding.

As promised, here's a small piece of our maiden snowshoe last week, complete with a 4pm-ish hazy sunset  through the trees. We're roughly a mile from our house here, and barely off campus--it's empowering, to me, that we're here up here in a world that allows and supports this kind of access to the deep and rough outdoors. Like I mentioned, we picked up these snowshoes just a week ago, and all it took was a trip to the University trails page and a ten-minute walk up the road before we were giving them a full workout.

I think I've said this here before, but the general spirit here seems one of resourcefulness; the tools and knowledge needed to survive within and engage the surroundings are readily available, and the lifestyle rewards heavily most everyone who seeks out them out. For the two of us, who take pleasure and satisfaction from our strength and resolve, and who strive to learn the variations and complexities of adulthood, it's a good place to be.

July 4th, 2010. Sauquoit, NY.

Sarah and I were with the Fiores for the 4th again this year, and it was about the best thing we could have done to wrap up our seven years in the Northeast. The weather was phenomenal, the party was phenomenal, and seeing everyone there reminded us once again how much we're going to miss being less than a day's drive from most of our closest friends.

It's a joy to shuffle through the hundreds of pictures we have from our last eight months, but as a break from this series, I'll mention the couple short hikes s42 and I have taken this week to break in our new snowshoes. The trails around campus here are excellent, through some pretty deep woods and not far from the house, and the -18° F temps yesterday added a crispy and fresh element that made things more adventurous. I think my insides, though, are still recalibrating to our climate since being back; I woke up a couple times Tuesday night worried appendicitis until I rolled over and felt the same ache on my left side too. Like most other weirdness here, I'm blaming it on either the dryness, the darkness, or the cold. Snowshoing pics this weekend.

After yesterday's post, and still in the first few days of the year, I think it's appropriate to provide some retrospective this week, focused twofold on our very eventful year of 2010 and some of the public spaces we inhabited. For those of you that lived through all this with us, I hope you can have as much fun reliving these moments as I do. For those who didn't, I hope there are shots here that communicate a little bit of the enjoyment they represent to me.

Above are a few of the most excellent people in the world, outside the Old New Orleans Rum Distillery in East New Orleans. The trip I took with these guys to New Orleans was an unspeakably great moment, and impossible to forget, considering especially the summer it introduced. I really can't think of a more impressive way to have kicked things off, and I hope everybody had half as much fun as I did. Also, being reminded of the Cajun Tea* that Shye and Bill are flaunting here is gonna make me crave it for the rest of the day.

The summer that Sarah and I had was a hurricane of a time, and I suspect it may have been pretty miserable had we been without the amazing support and distraction from the amazing family and friends we're somehow lucky enough to have. Plenty more to come.

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*Cajun Tea

1.5 oz Old New Orleans Cajun Spice Rum
.5 oz Simple Syrup
Iced Tea (unsweetened)

Fill a highball glass with ice. Add rum and simple syrup, and then top off the glass with unsweetened tea. Garnish with lemon.

'Spread the word around.' -- Lynott

For my first appearance here in 2011, I'm offering a bit of an aside. It's a pretty minor story, and one that I remember now but am probably in danger of forgetting if I don't recall it here and type it out and explore a little about why it's stayed with me so far.

In Boston, during my first semester of grad school in the winter of 2003, I lived in the Allston/Brighton neighborhood, just south of the Charles River and between the campuses of Boston College and Boston University. Allston housed plenty of students and plenty of cultural mixing, and seemed to me a unique and fulfilling example of city resources together with a collegial and ethnically diverse community. Lots of my BC friends and colleagues lived close by, and we spent weekends on foot and on the T around the neighborhood.

During one late Saturday night in particular, a group of us stalled on the steps outside a friend's apartment building. We talked about our respective courses and profs, and probably what our semesters would look like in the new year. At one point, apparently, our conversation expanded to include a group of guys on the stoop next door, who were, we learned, visiting from Ireland for work or school or vacation or something else. We talked to them about a couple of things, but wound up very quickly discussing some of the Irish poets I was studying that semester and moved even quicker to the Irish rock music on which I'd focused much of my study during my final college semester a few months before.

We talked about U2 and Van Morrison, who are almost surely the most successful and popular Irish artists of the last 40 years here in the U.S. and around the world. Rather than aesthetics, though, it was far more interesting to hear from these guys about the cultural connotations such major global figures hold for their closer and more local communities. It's clear the Irish should feel a strong sense of pride for U2's generic and wide-ranging impact as well as the crushing and sophisticated art of Morrison (in my mind, one of rock music's two or three greatest singer/songwriters). And they do. But these guys also felt a pretty strong sense of malaise and resentment at the notion that 'Irish music' is reduced, on a large scale, to either these global stars or the scrubbed and disposable folk sing-alongs heard in theme pubs around the world.

I think it's a sentiment I understand. It's pretty unsatisfying to consider that, though awesome, Elvis and the Beach Boys and Bruce Springsteen might represent to the world the entirety of America's rock music over the last 50 years. So I was glad I could dig a little further with these guys, even if it meant losing the interest and immediate participation of my BC friends that night, about Rory Gallagher, the phenomenal Irish blues guitarist. And Thin Lizzy, Dublin's familiar and still vastly underrated 70s arena rock band that gave the amazing and brilliant and awesome Phil Lynott his stage. And while these examples still fail to fully capture the country's long and rich popular music culture, they certainly provoked a more genuine concern and investment from its young citizens and workers.

Finally, even more interesting to me is how and why our conversation that night has stuck in my mind since then, and why it might still be relevant. I'm sure part of it has to do with a misplaced satisfaction about specialized knowledge, and me being sort of weirdly proud about being able to have an intoxicated conversation with these guys pretty purely on their conceptual turf, and all of us feeling (hopefully) enriched by it. Another part, though, has a bit to say (I think) about open and public and inclusive conversation, a subject perhaps on all our minds this week. To enter a public space, with the assumption that safe and satisfying and enriching connections can happen, is a daily and natural activity for most of us, to the extent that we forget how much happens beyond our control. This week I'm reminded how limited and focused our individual scope and knowledge and political loyalties normally are, and at the same time, how big and broad we can cast our impact, in both positive and negative ways. In Alaska, in the winter, these concerns--exiting private spaces and interacting with a community--seem all the more relevant. For all the potential our natural and open and necessary public patterns offer, I fear we lose quite a bit by taking our public spaces and systems for granted. It's a week to consider what it means to go out in space with each other and listen. It's pretty sad to me that some people got punished for doing that.

The deep freeze is here in Fairbanks, for the extended winter season. Consistently and clearly, we've been at 20 to 30 degrees below zero for the last two weeks, and concepts like movement, and clarity, and strangeness, have been squarely in our minds and breaths.

It's not really desolate here, at least not with the same connotations I think the term normally carries. The cold and ice and snow cover are almost exclusively gorgeous, and display colors and feelings that are varied and vivid. It's blue, as in the picture above, taken at about three in the afternoon, and pink and silver, and deep, dark green and charcoal. Relief, in its senses similar to both solace and contour, is a prominent idea.

Awareness of temperature and climate is also very clearly discriminated for me. My memories of temperatures this low, from the upper plains and Sandhills of Nebraska and South Dakota, include stinging winds and blowing snow, and temporary, limited confinement to vehicles rushing to warm and secure but anxious living rooms and fireplaces. Here though, the cold and dark are sustained, and still. Walking out, with others, into a late morning or afternoon of permanently frigid air, toward normal destinations and tasks, is tough to describe, but it is, ultimately, a confident and reassuring act. It's unique and stark and severe, but this weather lends the community a resolve that's weirdly comforting. And it doesn't feel all that mean.

That's a whole big bag of hops. It's always a little exciting to be presented with a surplus of specialty ingredients like this one, but it was about the only 'real' ingredient we used during the course of the six-week brewing and fermenting class I finished up last week. Most other constituents in our brews, such as dried malt extract and yeast were prepackaged or treated. The class, a basic one, both made it clear that beermaking is a pretty accessible chore and suggested the craft in most consumer brewing comes from additions, rather than modifications, to the cores and types of ingredients we used.

Hops aren't grown in Alaska, obviously, but there are plenty of Pac NWers here and they seem to have brought their tastes with them. Our Oregon and California friends have it awfully good, beer-wise, but we're not dry up here. We miss Dogfish and Sam, but beers from brewers like Stone, New Belgium, and especially Deschutes keep us plenty happy. And the Silver Gulch microbrewery up the road in Fox has some excellent beer and food choices on occasion.

Leave it to me, though, and you'll have delicious Hoppy Cabbage and Radish Ales from TanaNate Brewdogging in late 2011. Look out. 

Pictured above is something called 'Starvation Gulch,' an annual event at UAF featuring five or six house-sized structures built of transport pallets collected from businesses around the Fairbanks area. Like Halloween, it seems to be an event placed strategically on the calendar to mark the day(s) we all unpack boxes of gloves and hats and scarves, in addition to commemorating... not much else. No charities, no causes, no explicit historical context.

Big fires though. Like, 40-50 feet high, and not just one. In fact, the closest I could get to any sort of legitimacy for the University's seeming participation and promotion of the event was the inconspicuous and necessary constant presence of the school's fire department and Student Firefighter Program, a noted development and training unit designed to aid the surrounding community when dealing with extreme and unstable climate conditions.

So: it was a big deal, an event students were discussing and anticipating a week or two in advance. And, to be honest, it lived up to the hype, in a really primal, spectacular kind of way. It was, y'know, charming in how simple it was. 'Here, look - a bunch of really, really big, really hot fires.' Not completely unlike July 4th, though more unapologetic, if that's possible.

We're still here, I assure you. We haven't been eaten by bears, or wolves, or Joe Miller. Quite a strange and transitional time recently, it seems like for everyone here.

The run-up to Halloween kind of makes people anxious, I gather. Seems like folks approach it as the last real 'moment' before things get really hairy and life changes for the frigid and everyone heads inside.

But there's snow here already, and it's nighttime until ten in the morning (which is nice, since it lets me feel pretty ambitious no matter what time I get things rolling in the a.m.). So, again, we're building some kind of artificial boundary between the sun and the ice, when we all know it's a pretty explicitly gradual move.

Plenty of mountain shots to come; UAF Faculty Development took us on a trip through Denali National Park last weekend, and there was plenty to see and document. Mountains. Lakes and streams. Bears. Wolves. Mountain goats and Lynx. Very sweet.

Before we arrived in Alaska, as we were making plans and coming to terms with such a big move, Sarah relayed a couple of times the truism she'd heard from a UAF colleague: that in Fairbanks, we'd never forget our location on the globe. There are plenty of reasons for this... our weather shifts dramatically and rapidly, daylight hours are first abundant and then rare and precious, and access to amenities can never be taken for granted. But the mountain above, Denali, is perhaps the most dominant and dramatic reminder of our unique position and landscape. One hundred and twenty miles away, the mountain is plainly visible from Fairbanks on a clear day, and the closer one gets, the more intimidating and surreal the vision becomes. It's a monster.

Yo y'allz, sorry I've been off the grid for a hot minute, but I'm back in the blogging game now and ready to drop some skillz.

I'm gonna stay on the 'time' tip for a bit, since it's really what's made it difficult to get into the site for the last week. I've had plenty to say about concepts and adjustments to schedules, but all those changes really make it tough to imagine the wedding and reception were just a couple short months ago. The kind of changes and experiences we've seen since then make me wonder whether the kind of 'standardized' scales we use, with little exception, are always effective and useful in the way we want them to be.

Bakhtin, for example, wrote about the 'chronotope' as a way of distinguishing linguistics and narrative characteristics according to ideas about time and space present in the culture from which stories originated. The notion that respective temporal and spatial adjustments can both characterize, and result from, unique communal experience, is especially resonant to me now, after months of upheaval and readjustment. Quite literally, spending weeks and crossing countries when traveling leads to 'big' feelings and expressions, and translating these signals back to daily patterns and charges is a process that deserves attention.

This whole thing should sound at least slightly familiar to anyone back in the varied rigors of a school's semester after a summer of more scheduled and leisurely daily work, or to those preparing again for Saturdays and Sundays now consistently full of student activities or regular yardwork or college and pro sports on TV. I suppose this is about habits, too: how long does it take before speedy- or expansive-seeming behaviors begin to feel 'natural' or normal? Still working to establish effective personal rhythms and itineraries here, I wonder exactly how flexible and adapted our sensibilities can be, and how influential our adjacent cultures and lifestyles end up.

Chesterton: "The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land."

There are stronger forces than culture. Maybe.

We experienced some pretty abnormal-seeming places on our way here, including plenty of Canadian towns on the Alaska Highway that appeared to be little else than bouquets of eateries and lodgings collected around the vital fueling stations and washrooms.

Driving the Alaska Highway through sparsely populated areas of British Columbia and the Yukon can add up to revelations about important things like space and time. It's odd and sort of refreshing to experience the marriage of modern roads and vehicles with much older ideas of isolation and long-distance travel. Pace and distance are largely undefined, left for individuals to scale and log. Infrastructure carries a different meaning, something both leaner and more extensive.

Along with new and more robust ideas of geography, we've stepped into time that is more fluid and tonal. Since the heavens leave us with progressively little from which to map our daily structures and limits, we strive to grow new or newly apparent qualities, termed maybe something like "mental rhythmic rigors" or "temporal biopower."

In other words, if you're ever writing about the "Heroes" song and album by David Bowie, don't forget the quotation marks.

The joys of Silly Season in Alaska. Enjoy Singin' Sam's Web presence here. As you can see, he loves punctuation.

First day of classes down (for me anyway; s42 is finishing up with her grad students now). And along with a liberal use of apostrophes, I'm preparing for lots of everything. The undergrad population at UAF is notably diverse; it's fantastic. My Tu/Th Technical Writing course ranges past the 18-35 demographic and past the North American continent. It includes hockey players and musicians and a mother of seven and a veteran of Alaska Pipeline construction.

There's a open spirit of learning at UAF, and it's a pleasure to have students with wide interests and experience, with whom to build a semester of progressive writing and discussion.

Tomorrow: Academic Writing about the Social and Natural Sciences. Whether they indulge as willingly as technical writers in nostalgic Neil Diamond quotes? We shall see.

As Matt Damon says: yeah I'm a doorman. To the SKY.

Some of that slammin' wine we drank up, this bottle courtesy of the Sedgehammer. On Sarah's July b-day.

During our Napa honeymoon week, we had so much vino that it took me at least two weeks afterward to break the habit of swirling everything (water, soda, coffee, milk) around in its glass to aerate it. It was a delicious and incredible experience. I'll have pictures and words to share about this for the rest of my life.

In particular though, that week provided roughly ten more chapters in the big book about why we have the single best collection of friends in the entire world. I'm not sure there's a word for the kind of time we had in California, and so much of the unique experience is thanks to the people we had around us. 'Joy' is good, but it's a little too vague. 'Indulgence' is a favorite of mine, but it implies a kind of submission and gluttony that, while most definitely present during the week, were not the focus. 'Ecstasy' sounds too dirty. 'Celebration' is getting close, for no other reason than it binds the experience tightly to so many other great events shared with these folks and others from the past.

To put it another way, there's a Napa poem in me somewhere that I'll work on for years and never get quite right.

Crossing into the Terminal Range, Canadian Rockies. August 9.

Notions like shift and change are redefined here. Driving through the mountains, temperatures regularly swung 50 degrees over the course of a few hours. Daily and weekly rhythms, during and since the trip, have seemed both essential and completely inconsequential. We've alternated between large crowds and complete isolation so often that it's hard to say which feels more familiar.

More than anything, these new measures of change have prompted resignation, and quick acceptance. We build and consult new gauges. We haven't abandoned thermometers and calendars; rather, they're bigger. And a different color maybe.

Wanted to get into this yesterday but didn't really have a chance...

From wildlife refuges to Friday night football, there's a whole lot in Fairbanks that's familiar to someone who grew up in the rural Plains. There are parties out in the woods. There's a generous helping of lumber yards. Everyone knows what kind of bacon to buy at the store.

Howevah.

Remarkably, the seclusion we experience here leads to some pretty stark differences from similar-sized rural cities like Rapid City, South Dakota or Grand Island, Nebraska. There are things like expressways and industrial parks. Falafel is easy to find. The Saturday morning farmers' market is likely the best we've visited outside of San Francisco.

It's a bit of a surprise, but juxtaposed with a rural confidence and pragmatism are diverse and abundant resources.

Doubtless these characteristics will be even more greatly appreciated in another 8 or 12 weeks, when good sense and Thinsulate are not luxuries, but requirements.

"It is the artist who is truthful and it is photography which lies, for in reality time does not stop."
--Auguste Rodin, 1878

Rebroadcast this week, the "Time" episode of Radiolab* covers the event that prompted the Rodin quote above, the Leland Stanford/Eadward Muybridge experiment that leapt camera technology and techniques forward and prompted the accelerated development of motion pictures in the late 19th century.

The thing is, though Rodin can be excused for defending his craft against new and threatening competition from photographic images, there's little in my mind to distinguish theoretically the striving realism of Rodin's sculpture from the selective and crafted photographs produced by early, complexly constructed camera equipment.

A hundred and thirty years later though, I've got a picture machine that fits in the pocket of my dungarees and also rings the switchboard operator and also plays my phonograph records. Admittedly, consumer technology has removed much of the artistry and craft from our visual production, and this is almost definitely something to lament. Qualitative change, it seems, can happen gradually.

But: if I had to assemble a stable tripod and step under a big black hood thing, or if I had to purchase and replace emulsion film after every 24 shots, this laptop certainly wouldn't contain more than 2000 images from the last three months alone.

Costs! Benefits!

So! While not every photo you'll see here belongs in a gallery, just about everything worth posting will reveal and illustrate some "real" and "reliable" experiences now etched on my mind. And that's something.

Above is a herd of bison, some as big as the car we're driving, leisurely crossing a busy British Columbian section of the Alaska Highway, which stretches the roughly 1500-mile distance from Fort Nelson, BC to Fairbanks, AK.




*Listen to the episode, from Radiolab's first season, here. Then listen to the 35-odd other episodes they've produced since 2005. It is time well spent on learning.

Hi all.

We're here, in Alaska. And I'm here, on the Web.

The Web is a crazy spot, obvs. Now, and here, you'll likely see me construct an amalgam of a personality that in some major ways is likely to be more reliable and genuine than any I've had before.

In other ways, it will be "built" and "considered" and artificial... because I hope for an unpredictable and dynamic and unfamiliarly merged audience. But more, because of how I imagine interaction taking place here, hopefully between me and others. More likely, between me and the virtual space.

A blog is smaller than Facebook and Twitter, tools whose limits seem harder and harder to locate. Advantages of owned spaces are their real and imagined and intentional and unintentional limits, all of which can prompt some important things like imagination and creativity.

So here's hoping those are things that happen here.

Thanks for visiting. Comments are open. Come back tomorrow.