Sara Ryan

Or rather, a meme I hope to inaugurate. I just got a copy of What It Is, and I find it as wonderful as I thought I would. Barry’s looking at the process of creating any kind of art — how we shut ourselves off from it out of fear, how we can open up to it again — and she includes a number of exercises. I tend to dislike writing exercises in books that are not entirely composed of writing exercises, because they take me out of the accompanying narrative — but this one was compelling enough that I went and got a notebook and did it.

The exercise: Number a page from one to twenty. Picture your elementary school while you rest your eyes. Write down the names of the first twenty people that come to you. 20 first and last names if you can.

When I did it, it brought up a lot of memories (as it’s intended to) and I decided to take it one step further: hence, the meme. Along with the names, write something you remember about that person. For purposes of the Internet, I’d say include only first names.  You can also modify it by doing fewer names, or choosing middle or high school. (But no fair doing middle or high school if you’re still in middle or high school.)

If you do this, let me know in a comment!

Here are my 20 (I did, actually, remember first and last names for all of them):

1. Tracy: We wrote stories together until she got popular. She had a stuffed dog called Orangy.

2. Tracy (a different Tracy): Made me stand where there were lots of mosquitoes, so she could have her toy Kermit the Frog catch them off my skin.

3. Mike: Was Toto in the Wizard of Oz. Made fun of me all the time.

4. Kara: We were the only girls who had Star Wars figures.

5. Altheair: I was in her group at Brownies and didn’t know what to say to her.

6. Margaret: I can remember her house almost as clearly as mine. We fought. I still think about her.

7. Adam: Asked “Are you a young lady?” when I was on a sleepover with his sister.

8.-9. Danica, Claudine: They were always together. I can’t think of them apart.

10.-11. Carrie, Christy: Sisters who were cruelest when everyone thought they were kind.

12. Laura: Taught me a dirty song while we sat on top of the monkey bars.

13. Tina: Was smoking by sixth grade.

14. Annie Bee: Loud and funny and sharp. I was scared of her.

15. Trina: She had perfect hair and penmanship and I was fascinated.

16. Jacob: Always had to explain Hanukah.

17. Kaisa: She took the story she was writing into the bathroom and wouldn’t come out.

18. Christa: I know she works in TV now, and that makes her childhood self elusive.

19. Jennifer: We picked up broken glass to make fairy wands.

20. Colin: He drew a puppet I made.

Background for this post: In the late fifties and early sixties, my father Richard Ryan published fanzines as a member of FAPA, the Fantasy Amateur Press Association. Members wrote about sf/f, each other’s zines, current events, and (as with all zines) anything else that crossed their minds.

I have copies of the zines he produced, and I hope, eventually, to transcribe and/or scan them all for The Fanac Fan History Project. The issue from which his piece below is taken, Bandwagon #8, was postmailed to FAPA 94. In January 1961, Dad was 30, living in Washington, D.C. and working for the Library of Congress.

I miss him.

Here’s the piece:

let us begin:

It had to be cold up there on the Hill, but when the TV showed the presidential party leaving for the Capitol my sense of history got the best of me. I walked the two blocks to the Capitol grounds, where the several thousand earlier arrivals were sitting and standing around in chilly attitudes. Most of the seven inches of snow that had been dumped on the city the evening before was still underfoot. The bystanders had rearranged it a bit in shuffling for position, and picked up a bit in shoes and cuffs, but the bulk of it was still there, crisp and powdery in the below-freezing temperature.

Both seats and “preferred” standing room had been sold, but there was plenty of space behind the ropes. I picked a spot on a little hump of snow, a few inches higher than the surrounding area. Individual figures on the platform a few hundred feet away couldn’t be distinguished; one citizen, evidently anticipating this, had brought a portable radio. The occasional announcements that something was indeed happening, somewhere, gave heart to us shivering masses as we waited.

For the better part of an hour on January 20, the nation was leaderless. Most of that time after 12:00 was spent praying the new President into office by the greatest assortment of religious functionaries assembled since the last Ecumenical Council. Cheers broke out, non-partisan I’m sure, when the preliminaries were finally over and the oath was administered to Kennedy. The best part of the proceedings was unfortunately the shortest, since Robert Frost had sun-glare trouble and couldn’t read his prepared statement — but he recited “The Gift Outright” from memory.

The Inaugural speech has been highly praised by most (except Max Ascoli of The Reporter, who must be extremely irritating to doctrinaire liberals). Though I thought many things were said that had long needed saying, none of them were surprising. There were cheers at the end, and then the fringes of the crowd started melting away as one final prayer began. I started to leave, and then waited; it seemed like the thing to do.

This is just to say that I have now experienced my first wrock concert, and the Remus Lupins did, indeed, wrock the house. Or rather, library. The funnest part was seeing just how incredibly into it the audience was, complete with Rowling-influenced fashion choices and signs. If you missed them, Portlanders, don’t worry, they’ll be back.

(Bonus: via chatting with a couple guys who said they’d been “half-dragged” to the show, I now know about MC Frontalot and Schäffer the Darklord. Warning: there are some seriously, seriously filthy lyrics. Hilarious, but. You have been warned.)

I didn’t come of age listening to WFMU. As a matter of fact, unless it was on without my knowing it at someone’s place sometime when I was within the range of its signal, I still haven’t listened (a situation I intend to remedy asap). But Best of LCD: the art and writing of WFMU-FM 91.1 still fills me with delight and nostalgia.

The late eighties and early nineties were when I was first trying to grope my way into underground art & culture; going to Common Language Bookstore for Dykes to Watch Out For and Hothead Paisan, watching Spike & Mike’s Sick & Twisted Animation at the Michigan Theater, braving the casual contempt of comics and record store clerks, putting in my first several hundred hours of hanging out in coffeeshops reading zines — and there’s something about this anthology that takes me back. The graphic design, the colors, the deliberately unpretty art style of many of the comics, the overall insider outsider sensibility.

When I read pieces like the ones in this anthology back then, I always used to worry that I wasn’t really getting it, that there were codes and in-jokes I’d never decipher. And yeah, I still feel a bit of that, the feeling that if only I’d listened to the right stuff, everything would make some terrific, unprecedented kind of sense. But now I’m a little less concerned with whether or not I qualify for membership in the secret club, and more pleased that at least we can all read the meeting minutes.

A page from Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World, the stain nicely illustrating the concept he’s about to consider. (It’s the only page in this library copy that’s stained…)

Sighted at Last Thursday. I miss the Clown House.

Excerpted from a series of email exchanges, with a Helpful Illustration and a Poem. Why? Because wombats.

carapace_green: Article found today on PubMed while I was looking for a particular article on D. discoideum: FAITH M. WALKER, ANDREA C. TAYLOR, PAUL SUNNUCKS (2007) Does soil type drive social organization in southern hairy-nosed wombats?
Molecular Ecology 16 (1) , 199–208 doi:10.1111/j.1365-294X.2006.03131.x

I highly recommend printing it out and keeping a copy in your handbag/glove compartment/external brood pouch. Just in case.

thisisnotanlj: If it ISN’T soil type, then what DOES drive their social organization? I read the abstract, and I think this is the setup for a novel: “If sociality is driven by constraint rather than advantage, patterns of spatial and temporal distribution of animals within and among groups may show indications of avoidance or even antagonism, and ‘making the best of a bad job’ via positive kin associations to offset the disadvantages of high-density living.”

Like Watership Down with wombats.

ms_anthropy: It also sounds like every family reunion I’ve ever been to.

Helpful Illustration:

Poem:

I think that I shall never combat
A poem lovely as a wombat
With arms raised like a Walla-Walla
To some marsupial Valhalla

With baby mouth ardently pressed
Against his Mom’s in-pocket breast.
Poems are made by fools and dingbats,
But only God can make a wombat.
– H. V. Ingham, used by permission

Actually, different.

It delights me that this exists. Though it’s too bad they had to cut “My God, what have I done?”

From my spam filter:

Wedding Rings Class Rings Pearl Harbor

What’s the funniest and/or oddest spam you’ve gotten lately?

Do you have any?

I’m gonna update my FAQ. (Where F=”at least twice.”)

I’d never been to an outdoor rock festival before. As far back as the first Lollapalooza, I remember being jealous of friends who went, but somehow, I never got it together to attend one until yesterday. The Sasquatch Festival, at the Gorge.

Steve and I went with friends whose musical knowledge and experience with such events utterly dwarfs ours. So we prepared the only way we knew how: by buying Extreme Rain Gear.

During the drive, we began to think that we’d successfully propitiated the gods via the aforesaid purchases. The temperature rose, the sun came out, and by the time we arrived at the Gorge, it seemed like kind of a hassle to lug it all.

Sidebar: oh my god, the Gorge. It is awesome in both the original and modern senses of the word. I didn’t take any photos, but let me just say that if you have an opportunity to go to any events held there, do it.

Anyway, we did lug the gear, in backpacks, despite the sun. It was pleasant to lie in the grass and use the backpacks as pillows while we listened.

At the end of Vince Mira’s first song, when everyone within earshot rushed the stage, I got a little choked up. The audience kept exchanging looks of astonished delight throughout his set. I had never heard of him before. He is sixteen, sounds uncannily like Johnny Cash, and was apparently discovered while playing for tips at Pike Place Market. My favorite parts of the set were his originals, and when he sang a verse of “Ring of Fire” en español. The link above is to his MySpace Music page. Click it, people, and if you can, see him live.

By the time Modest Mouse came on and Isaac Brock mused, “I can’t decide whether or not I want the weather to turn to total bullshit,” we were grateful for the gear. We put on our jackets and our rain pants and spent the rest of the night looking like a couple of flyfishermen who’d wandered up from the Columbia.

The rain, and the knowledge that we had another hour’s drive to the hotel, led us to flee during R.E.M.’s set, although what we heard was great.

This morning I was sort of wishing we’d decided to go for the whole three days. So many more great bands. We were discussing how when you get festival t-shirts you ought to be able to check off or circle the bands you actually saw. “Yeah,” said Michael, “and there should be a thumbs up/thumbs down option, too.”

But it’s good to be home. Maybe we’ll do all three days next year.

P.S. For the excessively curious, here are all the bands I saw. And they’d all get thumbs up on our hypothetical festival t-shirts:

• Beirut*
• Ozomatli*
• Vince Mira with the Roy Kay Trio*
• M.I.A.
• New Pornographers
• Modest Mouse
• The Breeders
• R.E.M.

*= bands I hadn’t heard of before