Peripatetic

(Apparently, I should post pictures of my cats more often—it makes people comment. I like it when people comment. That’s a hint.)

Several days ago, I was going to parse that T.S. Eliot quote, but I’m not sure it would be appropriate to discuss the exact thought process that caused the quote to invade my head, so I’ll just talk about the poem a little as a springboard for a thorough pimping of the magnificent Lori Carson. The poem is called “Portrait of a Lady,” after the Henry James novel (though the poem bears no resemblance to the book). I can’t say it’s my favorite Eliot poem—that would be “Prufrock,” of course—but it’s a poem that meant a great deal to me and made me a little uncomfortable for years and years. It’s about a young man having a relationship of sorts with an older woman, though it’s never made clear how much older she is (I’ve always believed that she isn’t much older than the narrator, and the references to her being “about to reach her journey’s end” are typical of her exaggerated, overdramatic style). The woman is vaguely ridiculous; this comes across when you read the poem in the way she repeats herself and inserts parenthetical phrases and makes dramatic pronouncements, but it was made even more clear to me when I heard a recording of Eliot reading the poem. He doesn’t put on a female voice or anything, but he draws out the syllables of her dialogue, and there’s a distinct note of contempt in his voice. But the narrator is also drawn to her, and the most stunning moment of the poem comes when she kind of puts him in his place:

“Perhaps you can write to me.”
My self-possession flares up for a second;
This is as I had reckoned.
“I have been wondering frequently of late
(But our beginnings never know our ends!)
Why we have not developed into friends.”
I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark
Suddenly, his expression in a glass
My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark.

(That last line may be my favorite in the whole history of poetry, I’m not sure.)

It was written around the same time as “Prufrock,” but where that poem showed how prodigiously gifted Eliot was at 29, “Portrait of a Lady” shows that he was also still a young man, and a little bit of a callow youth. I have sometimes worried about bearing a resemblance to the lady in the poem—a little excessive, a little ridiculous—but I also love the poem. I can recite it from memory, having learned it (along with another Eliot poem—not “Prufrock,” alas, though I’ve tried, but one of the “Ash Wednesday” poems) back when I was a college girl who not only read but, worse, wrote poetry. (It was a bit of a cliché, Barnard girls writing poetry, but I couldn’t help it.) Nowadays, I don’t read much poetry, except when something in The New Yorker catches my eye or I pick up my giant volume of the great Paul Muldoon’s complete poems, but I still make sure I haven’t forgotten “Portrait of a Lady” by reciting it in the car from time to time.

I’d never read any criticism of it till a few days ago, so the preceding paragraph is my own interpretation, but I hunted around a little bit for some academic commentary on it the other day, and the consensus seems to be that the poem is about the impossibility of communication between men and women. (I don’t disagree with that analysis; that’s what “Prufrock” is largely about too, after all.) And that’s pretty much Lori Carson’s great theme too. (How’s that for a smooth segue? Heh.) Her songs are preoccupied—you could even say “obsessed”—with the pursuit of love and the failure of love and the transformative power of love, which is part (okay, most) of what I find so compelling about her songwriting. It’s her great theme. I’m sure she’s not as regularly heartbroken as her darkest songs suggest, though judging by the (highly readable and engaging) journal she keeps on her site, she does go through relationships pretty frequently. But whatever her romantic life is like in the real world, the version of it that is revealed in her songs is exceptionally powerful and moving.

She’s also a perfectly wonderful singer, a breathy but very clear and pure and strong soprano (with the minor caveat that she will occasionally slip into a sort of baby-doll voice, not quite Victoria Williams-like, but still potentially off-putting if you’re allergic to that kind of voice. But she doesn’t do it much, and she’s done it less and less as her career has progressed).

Lori holds a place in my heart because her second album, “Where It Goes,” was my soundtrack/security blanket during the year that my first marriage was falling apart. When I think of that year, the first image that comes to mind is me on the train ride from Park Slope into the city, listening to the first four songs on “Where It Goes” over and over and over again. (It was a while before I learned the rest of the record as thoroughly as those four songs.) It’s really an extraordinary run of songs (and very well sequenced, too). The first song, “Down Here,” is addressed to a lover who has died, and it’s wrenchingly beautiful:

“Down here itâ??s as you left it
Iâ??m waiting for the grey to clear
Donâ??t know what Iâ??m running on
But some time ago all hope was gone”

That’s followed by the upbeat-sounding (but heartbreaking) “Waking to the Dream of You,” which is about surviving the aftermath of a breakup and the advice that you get from friends who want to help you get through it. After that is a very passionate and romantic song about new love after old, “You Won’t Fall,” in which she promises,

“You can rest easy
Your beauty is clear to me
You wonâ??t fall
You wonâ??t fall”

I could quote the full lyrics from all four songs, because they’re marvelous, but I won’t; I’ll just quote the fourth song, which so perfectly captured how I felt that year—bruised and battered (emotionally, that is) from one major relationship ending and simultaneously hopeful and terrified and thrilled at the new relationship that was starting up—that I could hardly bear to listen to it, and I couldn’t stop listening to it. It’s called “Petal,” and it’s one of my all-time favorite songs ever ever ever.

“Iâ??ve been looking for it all my life
But never found it
I got used to being alone
I know how and I do it so well
Even if we learn to speak the same language
How long can it last
You know as well as I do
How it goes
The way it goes

You are the petal in the rose
But watch out for those thorns
You are the petal in the rose
But watch out for those
Iâ??ve changed my mind, Iâ??ve changed my mind
Iâ??ve changed my mind, Iâ??ve changed my mind

Iâ??ve been waiting for it my whole life
And so many times I thought
Hey this is it
Iâ??m ready letâ??s go baby
But it all led nowhere
Turned out wrong
And I still believe in it
But not much
I know Iâ??m strong enough to fall again
But isnâ??t it just foolishness
Knowing how it goes
The way it goes

You are the petal in the rose
But watch out for those thorns
You are the petal in the rose
But watch out for those
Iâ??ve changed my mind, Iâ??ve changed my mind
Iâ??ve changed my mind, Iâ??ve changed my mind

So, should we give it
Just another chance
Although I know the odds are against us
We know how to fuck it up
We do it so well
And even if we love each other so much
And plan our lives like we will stay together
Make a home and a family
Can we change the way it goes
How it goes?

You are the petal in the rose
But watch out for those thorns
You are the petal in the rose
But watch out for those…”

And then there’s “Little Suicides,” a song that Lori co-wrote with Anton Fier. They recorded it during her tenure with the Golden Palominos, and it’s pretty much a perfect song, one that kills me every time I hear it, no matter how many times I hear it, with its repeated theme of “Can’t I (/we) just be happy for a while?/It happens all the time,” and my favorite line, “If love heals anything at all/We should be flying.” Not to mention the chorus:

“All these little suicides
They hardly make a mark
I can take these funhouse rides
I’m a natural in the dark
I’m a natural in the dark
In the dark…”

Lori’s best records, I think, are “Where It Goes” and “Everything I Touch Runs Wild,” but her more recent work is worth paying attention to also. The most recent record, “The Finest Thing,” is all textures and soundscapes and might be best suited for people who are already converts, but it’s still worth picking up. And “Stars,” which came out in 1999, is seriously underrated. Still, I’d start with “Where It Goes” and/or “EITRW,” and go from there, if I were you. So go buy them, right now. You can find them used all over the place, unfortunately.

(It’s a little odd to be writing about Lori Carson when my head is still completely possessed by Patty Griffin’s most recent album, and especially by the song “Useless Desires,” which I listened to no fewer than four times today. They’ve actually got a few things in common musically, Griffin and Carson. But I came late to the party with Patty Griffin, and I can’t say anything very well-informed about her; I can only talk about how powerfully her songs have affected me lately. I’ve been a Lori Carson fan for a lot longer, so there’s more to say.)

Oh, and while I’m going on and on and on, I have an actual movie recommendation: “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” a new noirish movie that is both homage to and parody of the noir genre but is also an insanely clever and entertaining film on its own. It helps that the cast is so great: Robert Downey, Jr., whom I love and always root for (geez, if anyone ever needed evidence that addiction is a real, and incredibly challenging, disease…), is at the top of his game, and Val Kilmer is equally good, just note-perfect. I’d never heard of the female lead, Michelle Monaghan, before, but she’s one to watch—she handles a not particularly easy role with aplomb. The movie stops just short of being too clever for its own good, but it is very, very clever, and hysterically funny in places. I expect we’ll see it again when it comes out on DVD. Go see it after you buy those Lori Carson records.

I had ambitions for this weekend. Not very grand ambitions, just little things, like going to the gym and running a few errands—typical weekend stuff. But after sleeping unusually late yesterday morning (I usually wake up quite early on Saturdays, then nap around 1 p.m.), I woke up with a mildly painful sore throat and achiness and general rotten-feeling-ness, and as a result, I’ve been useless all weekend. I can’t afford to be sick at work (or away from work) this week, so I’m cutting myself a tiny bit of slack for my slothfulness this weekend, because if I can keep this from turning into a real flu, it will have been worth it (though those errands are going to have to get done sometime…).

My one moderately productive activity this weekend was taking some photos of the cats, which I’ve been meaning to do for ages because I just don’t have very many pictures of them. I’ve never done this catblogging thing before, and I know it’s supposed to be done on Fridays, but I’m winding down and getting ready to go to bed early, and I wanted to post something this weekend (again, I had such plans), so here goes.

I was prompted to grab the camera when I saw Maisy, the queen, who is the smallest animal in the household and the boss of all of us, posing elegantly in the sun. Maisy is a lynxpoint Siamese mix, but since (like the other two) she’s a rescue cat, I don’t know how mixed she is. She’s dark for a Siamese, even a seal lynx, but Siamese cats’ points will darken up if they’re exposed to too much sunlight and heat early on, which is a distinct possibility for a street cat in Missouri. She’s got sort of a snub face that keeps her from being classically beautiful but does not prevent her from being the queen. Here she is in all her regal splendor.

Yes, I am the queen. You may admire me…for a moment.

Maisy is always ready for her closeup.

Inhibitions are for wimps.

Jasper, the big boy and the only cat who is allowed outside (because he’s mostly content to stay within ten feet of the deck, whereas the other two would wander), was enjoying the gorgeous Indian summer day while Maisy’s photo shoot was going on. He’s a little harder to photograph, because if you sit down with him, he immediately wants to be in your lap. And I do mean your lap, not just my lap. Jasper loves you. The fact that he probably hasn’t met you yet is irrelevant.

He’s the most even-tempered cat I’ve ever met, which is surprising given his rough past as a street cat (he has buckshot in his side from when some waste of sperm and egg used him as target practice) and less neurotic than most Siamese, though not entirely neurosis-free. He’s a blue-point, probably a mix given his large, sturdy frame, but again, who knows. And he has the biggest blue eyes in the world. He looks a little irritable in these photos, which is just because the sun was in his eyes, I think.

Is that an empty lap I see there?

Is there a reason you’re not petting me?

Liam, the fluffball kitty, was feeling a little camera-shy this weekend, so I wasn’t able to get any daylight shots of him. He’s actually the beauty of the family, though you can’t really tell here. He is most likely a Siamese-Himalayan mix; he has the splendiferous Himalayan coat but not the flat, smunched face that purebred Himmys have. He’s a lilac point, the most delicate of the four main types of Siamese coloration, with a few little lynx-y stripes on his head and sides. He’s also certifiably insane and has been since birth, as far as I know; when he was rescued from a high-kill shelter in southwestern Kansas, the rescue people named him Bounce, because he literally bounced off walls. And still does. But it’s a lovable kind of insanity.

Why are you pointing that thing at me? (Note the resplendent tail, which is nearly as big as the rest of Liam.)

Here you can sort of tell that Liam really is the beauty of the family.

And there you have it—my cats, the creatures who own my heart, who bring joy to my life every day, who are the best company in the world, and who, I hope, will be with me for a record-setting length of time.

PS: So no one wants to play my parallel-universe-career game? Hrmph. Fine. Be that way. I’ll get over it.

this is me:

http://www.overduemedia.com/archive.aspx?strip=20051026

(It’s true—despite my love for my job, not to mention its salary and benefits, there’s a little part of me that wishes I were a cataloger in a public library. But it’s a very little part.)

(I’m running up against the deadline for a big project at work, so I’ll be working tonight and tomorrow night and all weekend, which means I’ll probably be blogging a lot. I got home this evening and took out the laptop, and it was still warm from when it had been plugged in at work 20 minutes earlier. That’s how I know I’m working hard, I guess…So I decided to treat myself to a bit of goofing off before getting to work.)

I don’t have the will to parse that Eliot quote and/or write about Lori Carson just now (especially because the female singer who is currently occupying my head is not Lori Carson but Patty Griffin—soon I’m going to need some kind of antidote for having “Useless Desire” from Patty’s most recent album running through my head in an endless loop, but right now, a day and a half into the loop, I’m still enjoying it, if “enjoying” is the right word for a song that tears me up as much as that one), so…here’s something more lighthearted that popped into my head the other day:

If, in a parallel universe, you could do something for a living that you are not, based on your skills and experience and natural abilities, actually able to do in this universe, what would it be?

Me, I think I’d be an industrial designer. In the real universe, I have no skills whatsoever when it comes to the visual arts (okay, I’m a pretty creative doodler, but somehow, I don’t think that counts). But after years of working on children’s books at a publishing house where the bookmaking process was way more hands-on than anything most editors ever get to experience—the company had its own camera-stripping department, among other now-obsolete things, and I used to do paper layouts by hand on resin-coated paper with FPO photocopies of photos, and pick colors and typefaces and stuff like that—I developed a really strong design sense (which turns out to be a good thing, since my current profession requires a certain amount of design skill—or a lot of it, depending on who you ask; in fact, there are people in the field right now who are claiming that it’s inseparable from design, which makes me nervous, because I have “I Am Not A Designer” tattooed on my forehead. In invisible ink.). And I love good industrial design. Ever since I’ve known that there was such a thing as an industrial designer (which I don’t think I found out until I was in my late 20s—I led a sheltered life, I guess), I’ve thought it would be an amazingly cool thing to be. We looked at a couple of design exhibits at the slightly disappointing renovated Museum of Modern Art recently, and the stuff in the permanent design collection wowed me, as it always does. In the current universe, I could never in a million years come up with anything as cool and brilliantly designed as the iPod, or even as cool as the little colored-plastic-circle bookmarks that they sell in the MoMA store, but I’d like to think that I could imagine them—that the problem is one of lack of technical skill rather than lack of imagination. It’s possible that I’m fooling myself about that, though. Anyway, I’m not sure that being an industrial designer would be the exact opposite of what I do now, or what I’m capable of doing; I suppose the polar opposite would be manual labor of some sort. (Or maybe the real polar opposite would be making information harder to find and more confusing, if we want to be literal about it.) Nonetheless, being an industrial designer is something that the actual me is incapable of, so I think I get to be one in a parallel universe.

So what would the paralllel-universe you do for a living?

(that is, the list of records that I need to remember not to forget when the end of year best-of lists roll around, as they will any day now):

Low, “The Great Destroyer.” One of the most improbable records ever to show up on a list of mine, because for many years, I loathed Low (and justifiably so, I think, though others will disagree, and have disagreed, with me vehemently on that topic). I mean, I am not mope-averse, don’t get me wrong. I love Iron and Wine (though I understand why many people don’t), I’m a Death Cab for Cutie fan, and the semi-mopey Dolorean (about whom I really need to write something extensive one of these days) are among my current very favorite bands. But Low weren’t just mopey, they were wrist-slittingly mopey—not meaning that their songs were so sad that they made the listener suicidal, but meaning that you’d willingly slit your wrists just in order to not have to hear them anymore. And then they made “The Great Destroyer,” which is largely upbeat and poppy, and what isn’t upbeat and poppy is lush and evocative. Totally different from anything I’ve ever heard from them before. It won’t be in my top 5, but I’m pretty sure it will make the top 10…which currently has, as usual, about 15 records in it.

I thought of about four other shortlist candidates earlier this week and can’t remember them now. Which is proof that I need to keep the shortlist going.

I have a lot swirling around in my head at the moment, and I’m also posting this to remind myself that I want to write a bit later about what I could do if I could do something that my own skills and natural abilities would make it impossible for me in the real world. But speaking of T.S. Eliot, as I just was in a reply to a comment on my last post, this is running through my head right now, and later on when I’m not on a borrowed dial-up connection, I will elaborate a bit on why. Eliot is my favorite poet, and “Prufrock” is my favorite poem, pretty much, but there’s a less well known early Eliot poem that more or less defined me for many years, for reasons I will try to explain in a later post. Anyway, this snippet of a stanza:

“Not knowing what to feel
or if I understand,
or whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon”

is possessing me right now, and maybe writing it down will exorcise it temporarily. A partial explanation that will also serve as a pimping-of-the-week for the very wonderful singer-songwriter Lori Carson will follow later this week, I hope.

(Note: “faith” in the subject line is the lowercase-f kind. There will be no mention of Faith Hill—arguably the most egregious example of All That Is Wrong with Country Music (or at least the most famous one), in this post, or indeed, any other that I will ever write. I promise.)

Someone on one of my e-mail lists posted a link to a quiz recently that focused on religion and spirituality. I’m an Internet quiz buff, I freely admit; I know that most of them are poorly constructed and fuzzily conceived, but they’re fun, and harmless fun at that. So I always take them whenever someone posts a link to them. On this one, my results classified me as “spiritual”—80 percent spiritual, to be exact, but also 60 percent “reason-oriented,” and—perhaps because the quiz seemed (based on the way the questions were phrased) to have a slight bias toward fundamentalist Christianity—they had reason at the opposite end of the spectrum from faith. Which I guess makes sense in a way, but then again, I consider myself both a believer in logic and reason and a person of faith, so the results bugged me a little, even though I know it was just a dumb badly constructed and probably biased Internet quiz.

Faith is something I don’t talk about a lot, and it troubles me a little that I don’t even think about it as much as I used to, but it’s definitely something I possess. I believe in God, unlike many (most?) of my friends. I am purely a secular humanist type in orientation; I believe in science, I believe in evolution, I do not believe that God created man in His image. (Furthermore, and especially because I live next door to Kansas, I am a devout Pastafarian.) And I believe, ever more passionately, in the necessity of the separation of church and state. But I believe in God. There have been times in my life when I’ve wished I didn’t, because the belief doesn’t really make sense when paired with the rest of my worldview. But I think that’s what faith is, what the Kierkegaardian (I was a big Kierkegaard fan back when I still read things like philosophy) leap of faith is all about: I believe because I am incapable of not believing. For me, believing is very much like knowing; it’s something that I feel—not in the frequently misused sense of that word, when people say “I feel” when what they really mean is “I think,” but in a literal, physical way. I’ve even tried not to believe, to abandon anything like faith, but I can’t. It’s not something I can choose to do.

Nonetheless, I’m okay with the fuzzy term “spiritual,” because in the sense in which the quiz used it, it implies that belief is important to me and is an essential part of who I am, but organized religion is not. And that’s completely accurate. I sometimes wish I were part of some sort of religious community, but I don’t know which one I’d join, exactly; if I had kids, I’d raise them in my family’s religion, which is Judaism, but it’s just me (since my husband, raised Methodist, doesn’t believe in God), and I find myself drawn to aspects of several religions: Catholicism, which I investigated pretty extensively when I was in college, and some of the more liberal/socially conscious Protestant denominations (Quakers, Episcopalians, Congregationalists) appeal to me, as do the basic tenets of Judaism. But I figure I’m probably never going to be a religious person exactly, except in my own very personal way. I used to think of myself as a seeker (in the Pete Townshend sense), when I was younger and did a lot of religion-shopping, but now I’d just call myself a believer. I wish I paid more attention to that aspect of my life, as I used to; I used to pray nightly, and now I mostly do it on planes. (That’s an oversimplification, though semi-serious.) It’s been on my mind lately, though, and maybe I will start focusing on it more again, both because just exploring it, and attempting to reconcile it with my decidedly godless-commie-secular-humanist views, interests me, and because it brings comfort and hope to my life, which I occasionally can’t generate on my own.

Sam Phillips—the female singer, not the Elvis guy—is also a believer, and someone who examines her own spirituality and faith regularly, which is one of several reasons that I adore her and wish more people loved her music the way I do. She was raised in a moderately observant Episcopalian family, but somewhere in her teens, I guess, she became more serious about religion; I don’t know if she would have described herself as born again, but she was definitely a Christian. She recorded a few contemporary Christian records under her given name, Leslie Phillips (Sam is a childhood nickname, I guess), at least one of which, “The Turning,” is very good and still widely available. Somewhere along the line, she broke with organized fundamentalist Christianity, but she is still a believer, a seeker, someone who seeks to find truth and meaning through God, I guess. (I’m saying “I guess” a lot because I’m obviously not fully comfortable writing about something as intimate and personal as religious belief on behalf of someone I don’t know, based only on what I’ve read in interviews and, especially, what I’ve gleaned from her songs.) Listening to Sam often helps crystallize my own thoughts about faith and belief, because she writes so eloquently about it. Her most recent record, written in the wake of her divorce from her husband of quite a few years, the fine musician, songwriter, and producer T-Bone Burnett (who has also been part of, and then separated himself from, fundamentalist Christianity), begins with the line, “I was broken when you got me,” which I suspect she is singing to both her ex-husband and to God. That line has been resonating with me (to use a phrase I detest but seem unable to avoid) recently; it makes sense to me on some gut level that I can’t quite explain.

Musically, Sam is a true original. The two great records that she released while she was married to T-Bone (there are several, but there are two in particular, “Cruel Inventions” and “Martinis and Bikinis,” that are nearly perfect) were produced by him, and they’re full of elaborate, Beatles-y arrangements, so they’re a delight to listen to on a purely musical level even if you pay no attention to the lyrics. Her two equally great recent records, “Fan Dance” and “A Boot and a Shoe,” which were not produced by T-Bone, are almost the polar opposite, striking in their spareness and understatement.

And then there’s Sam’s voice, which is also totally unlike anyone else’s sound. She herself has compared it to the braying of a mule, which is unnecessarily harsh, but it’s true that it’s not a conventional voice by any stretch of the imagination. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a wonderful, listenable, affecting voice; it’s just kind of odd, but in a powerful way. It’s instantly recognizable, and when a Sam song comes up on the iPod, I get chills right away, because I know it will make me happy or just make me feel.

I could quote Sam’s lyrics for days on end, but there are a few songs in particular that get at her concept of faith in a particularly concise and thought-provoking way that I’ll quote briefly here, because I’m in the mood to. The song that made me a Sam fan—I read a review that described it in detail and quoted from it, and I was so intrigued by it that I went out and bought the record (on cassette; this was back when my first husband and I could only afford a few CDs a year, and if there was a record that we weren’t both going to listen to, I’d buy it on prerecorded cassette to save money and listen to it in the car) without ever having heard a note—is “Lying,” which is on “Cruel Inventions.” She wrote it partly in response to Sinead O’Connor’s “I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got,” and the last verse, which addresses that song directly, goes:

If I said I don’t want what I don’t have
And all the answers are in love
If I said I believe in myself
And that’s enough
I’d be lying…

Then there are two from “Martinis and Bikinis” that have a way of coming up on the iPod whenever it’s the exact moment when I need to hear them. One is maybe her best song, an irresistibly catchy pop song called “I Need Love,” and the first verse is pretty stunning:

I left my conscience like a crying child
Locked the door behind me, put the pain on file
Broken like a window, I see my blindness now
(and then the chorus:)
I need love, not some sentimental prison
I need God, not the political church
I need fire to melt the frozen sea inside me
I need love

I find myself singing the second verse a lot when I’m commuting in wretched I-70 traffic on my way to and from work:

Driving into town, tired and depressed
Like a flare, a streetlamp sent an SOS
Peace comes to my rescue
And I don’t know what it means
(followed by the chorus again)

Then there’s the song “Strawberry Road,” which people tend to think is a reference to “Strawberry Fields Forever,” but which actually came from some Eastern religious reference that Sam read. She envisions it as a sort of physical locus of faith, I guess (there’s that “I guess” again):

The strawberry road where the dream fades
Is down between our longing and desire
The strawberry road where our hearts break
Into love

It also contains one of the most beautiful lines in any song I can think of, and that’s the one that tends to pop into my head most often. I’m not quite sure what it has to do with faith, specifically, but it’s tied into it somehow—I feel that, too. It also sums up the way I’ve lived my life at certain times, so it has a special poignancy for me:

You censor longing
And organize beauty
Because you’re afraid you want it more than
Oxygen or light
You can’t get there
With your morals
Or without love…

I have a feeling this post isn’t making much sense, but it’s been fulminating in my head for a couple of weeks now, and this might be as close as I can get to articulating it. And now I need to go listen to some Sam.

(She’s not a huge star by any means, but she tends to inspire tremendous devotion in those of us who do love her. In that spirit, I think, a list friend whom I’ve never actually met recently sent me a live recording of Sam that someone had sent him. He’s never actually seen her live, and it’s one of the great musical gaps in my world that I never have either. I think that if I did, I’d be almost too overcome to bear it, and I’d probably spend the whole show barely able to breathe; that’s what happened to me the first time I saw Iris DeMent, who—as I said a few posts back—has a post of her own brewing in my head.)

I’ve been kind of boring lately here, I think, so I’ll try to post something less esoteric and more entertaining next time. I think I’m going to try to finish up my Replacements tales pretty soon, because I need to stop having those be my main distinguishing feature; they’re old stories that I’m tired of hearing myself tell, so I’ll finish them up here and then retire them.

So I’m pretty used to the idea that I, and the music-crazed types on the various music-related lists I’m on, are way more passionate about music than most people my age—hell, most people, period—are. And by “most people,” I mean not only those folks for whom music is, at best, a pleasant background at work or in public places, but also people who still buy a few CDs now and then and listen to their old records fairly regularly. The people who make up the majority of my world are in a whole different universe of music fandom.

I’m not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing; it just is. Sometimes I wonder vaguely about whether my continued involvement in the music world, as a fan and as a Twangfest organizer, is a symptom or maybe even a cause of my not being a real grownup, but mostly I just accept it: this is how I am, and it’s how the people on the e-mail lists are. We’re not music fans, we’re music weirdos.

This morning, I experienced a classic example of my music weirdo status. I’ve been listening to the iPod on the way to and from work all week, because NPR is pledge-driving (my commute isn’t really long enough for me to fuss with hooking up the iPod, so ordinarily, I just listen to NPR, but I can’t hack the pledge drives), and when I got to the parking lot at work, the live version of “Maggie May” from the indescribably great Faces boxed set, “Five Guys Walk Into a Bar,” was just starting up. It was just past 8:30, which is when I’m due at work (though it’s never a big deal if I’m a little late), and I should have just turned the car off and walked the block to the office, and of course, I’ve heard “Maggie May” more times in my life than I could possibly begin to count. But this was the live version, which had never come up on the iPod before, and I had to hear it, all five+ minutes of it, because it sounded so perfect and I couldn’t miss it. So I sat there in the car and waited for the song to finish. I couldn’t do otherwise.

And as I turned off the iPod and got out of the car, I thought, yup. Music weirdo.

Of all the many (and somewhat unexpectedly) wrenching, horrendously painful things about the breakup of my first marriage, one of the worst was leaving my dog behind. My first husband and I got the dog when she was a four-month-old puppy, in April 1991. When we split, there was no question that I would get our one surviving cat (my Tim, the best cat I’ll ever know, about whom I hope to be able to write someday; he died shortly after I left my husband, and I miss him every single minute), and that my ex would get the dog. She wasn’t entirely a one-person dog; she adored me and protected me and considered me the alpha dog in the house. But Eric was her person, and there was no way I could have even considered asking to take her from him. But leaving her behind was incredibly difficult; I still can’t talk about the last time I saw her, a year or so after we’d split, because it’s just too painful.

He wrote me today to tell me that he had had her put to sleep, because it was her time to go. She was nearly 15, so she had a good long life (and a very happy one). But I’ve never stopped missing her, and now I’ll miss her even more.

She was a happy, delightful, funny dog—a beautiful and typical example of a wonderful breed, the Keeshond. As an animal lover, I’m a big believer in mutts, and adopting shelter or rescue pets, but because we were bringing a dog into a household with two adult cats, we decided to opt for the predictability that you get with a purebred. I’m a cat person first and foremost, and I wanted to make sure we found a breed that wouldn’t herd, hurt, or (accidentally or deliberately) kill the cats. We also wanted a dog that wasn’t too huge, since our house wasn’t, and we didn’t want a little yippy dog either. (I’m somewhat more tolerant of little yippy dogs, at least some breeds of them, than most people, but I still didn’t want one.) And we wanted one that wouldn’t need too much exercise but would enjoy a good long walk on a regular basis. It also needed to be able to tolerate the climate in Minneapolis, so Italian greyhounds, for instance (a breed I adore), were out.

So I did a ton of reading, and we went to a whole bunch of dog shows, looking at breeds we’d liked in pictures, talking to breeders and owners and finding out about the dogs. We thought briefly about a Borzoi (gorgeous, but too big, and the ones I met seemed sort of aloof), and seriously considered the Vizsla and the Schipperke—fine breeds both, but neither was quite right. I was sold on the Keeshond pretty early on; they were so beautiful, with their wolfish faces and their glorious fur, and they were bred primarily for companionship rather than hunting or herding or pointing or whatever. Eric thought they were a little foofy, till we were at a show and he saw the Kees that had just won its group competition leap up into its owner’s arms and give the owner a kiss on the nose. He was sold right then and there, and we set about finding a Keeshond puppy.

The one we found was Diane, named (by her breeder) for the character on “Cheers.” (She had siblings named Woody and Norm.) We didn’t change her name, because we figured she was used to it already, which in retrospect was silly—over the course of her lifetime, she answered to at least a dozen different nicknames, and we could have changed her name at any time. But we didn’t, and the running joke was that her real name was Dianewedidn’tnameher, because whenever we told people her name, we had to add the disclaimer that we had nothing to do with it. She was a show-quality dog—in the odd little corner of the world where Keeshonden (that’s the proper Dutch plural) can be famous, her father and grandfather were both very famous—and as a condition of our getting her, her breeder had the option to show her for a while, but as it happened, Diane had some fairly serious eye (actually, eyelash) problems, which made her unsuitable for breeding. Which was fine with us, because that meant she was all ours. (It also meant that we only had to deal with her going into heat a few times. Female dogs in heat…yeccch.)

She was my first dog, pretty much. My family owned a dog, briefly, when I was about four years old, but he wasn’t my dog, one I chose or helped to raise. That was Diane, who was and always will be my first dog.

I wasn’t sure we’d survive our first summer together, though. We took her to puppy kindergarten at a place that used the then-standard nylon choke-correction collar method, which works well for many breeds but not for Keeshonden, who need positive reinforcement and encouragement. They can be stubborn, and they respond much better to gentle coaxing and outright bribery than they do to corrective behavior, as we later learned. So she wasn’t doing very well in obedience, and I was finding it frustrating to try to train her—and Eric and I argued nearly every time we took her to obedience class. On top of that, Sophie, my female cat, quickly learned to love the dog, but Tim didn’t, so Tim would be aggressive toward the dog, which would make Sophie attack him, which would make me mad at Sophie, and none of us were very happy. Worst of all, Diane picked up fleas, and our house became infested before we realized it. Diane, Tim, and I all turned out to be wildly allergic to flea bites, and Diane and I were scratching ourselves bloody every day (I still have scars on my legs from that summer). It was a tough summer for all of us, though I can kind of laugh about it now.

But pretty soon, we got rid of the fleas, and Tim learned to tolerate the dog (though he loved to occasionally stand up on his hind legs and box her face with his paws—I wish I had a photo of that), and we started working with the local Keeshond expert at Keeshond-only obedience, which Diane and I both loved, and she turned fairly quickly into a well-behaved (though still impish) girl. And sweet and funny and charming and loveable, all 45 fluffy pounds of her. It’s a cliché, but it really was hard to be in a bad mood when she was around. Tim—like all my cats since—was a Siamese, or a Siamese mix, and cats of that breed are somewhat doglike in their devotion to people, so I was used to being greeted at the door by someone who was happy to see me…but even Tim wasn’t quite as expressive about it as Diane. Keeshonden carry their tails curved up onto their backs, so when they wag their tails, their entire back half wags along with the tail, which is very entertaining and endearing. They’re good-tempered, happy dogs, and being around her made me happy.

Most of the time, that is. I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t sometimes get annoyed with her, or that I didn’t occasionally resent having to walk her when it was -20 degrees out, or that the ubiquity of her fur didn’t sometimes get to me (I used to find Diane hairs on the inside of my clothing when I was out of town and hadn’t seen her for days), or that I never got angry when she misbehaved (which she didn’t do very often). But because of her sweet nature, and because she really did end up being very well trained, she was a remarkably easy dog to live with, and more important, a remarkably enjoyable one. I loved the fact that we could take her cross-country skiing with us—Eric even figured out a way to hook up her leash to his waist and let her pull him, which, with her sled-dog ancestry, she loved to do. Her first winter with us was the year that Minneapolis got 28 inches of snow on Halloween, and it’s one of my favorite memories of her: she wasn’t quite full grown yet (and she was only 15 inches tall at the shoulder even when she was full grown), so she was like one of those little mushroom toys with springs—the ones you push down and then they pop back up—she’d disappear into a snowdrift and then come bouncing out of it, only to disappear and reappear again. She thought it was the best thing that had ever happened ever.

And when we moved to Park Slope in 1998, I looked forward to taking her to the big dog run in Prospect Park every day, because she was a sociable dog, and when she got to the park and saw all those dogs (as many as 100 or more on a nice day, and usually at least 40 or so even in bad weather), she thought that was the best thing ever too. She was a boundless, furry, huggable container of joy.

There’s a Keeshond rescue group not far from where I live, and I know of others around the country, and someday, I’ll have Keeshonden in my life again. But there will only ever be one Diane, and I’ll miss her forever. Rest in peace, my sweet girl. You’re always with me.

I am so hopelessly overwhelmed by depression today that I can only think/work in little dribs and drabs, so it seems as good a time as any to make a list I’ve been meaning to make for a while: the Don’t Forget list. We’re heading into that part of the year when best-of lists will be on my mind, and there are some records that I’m afraid I’m going to forget to include. Most of them will be in the “honorable mention” category rather than the actual top ten, but I still don’t want to forget them. So far, the list includes:

1. Bloc Party, “Silent Alarm.” Not exceptional, but good solid indie Britrock that is relatively free of pretention and bombast, unlike a lot of the indie stuff that seems to be so popular these days. (Can you say “Arcade Fire”? I knew you could.)

2. British Sea Power, “Open Season.” A likely low-top-tenner, so I probably won’t forget it; it just came out so early in the year that I’m afraid it will slip my mind. Ironically, BSP may be eclipsed by their cousins Brakes (Brakes’ lead guy used to be in BSP), whose record has much of the same oddball charm combined with echoes of Echo and the Bunnymen and their musical cousins…although I’m listening to “Open Season” right now and thinking that it’s really a great album that may deserve to rank higher than Brakes after all. Hm.

3. Chatham County Line, “Route 23.” (I need to quit thinking that this record is named “Dear 23,” which is an old Posies record. Chatham County Line do not sound like the Posies, to say the least.) I’m generally a little dubious about rock bands who decide to start playing sort-of-bluegrass; I’m not a bluegrass purist by any stretch of the imagination, I just usually find that rock bands can’t pull off the transformation very well. But Chatham County Line aren’t actually a bluegrass band, really, and they have no trouble throwing bluegrass elements into their sound, which I’d describe as Americana if I didn’t loathe that ill-defined, kiss-of-death term so much. They are not yet a great band, in my snooty opinion (IMSO?), but they’re getting there, and though I haven’t spent a whole ton of time listening to the whole record, I’m always glad when songs from it come up on the iPod. The singer’s voice isn’t necessarily the type that usually appeals to me, but as it turns out, I like it a lot. Good songwriting, too.

4. The Wrights, “Down This Road.” The Wrights should be getting played on country radio, and despite the fact that the husband half of the duo is Alan Jackson’s nephew, they’re not. I liked this record a lot when I first got it; haven’t beeen drawn to listen to it a whole lot since then, but it will be somewhere on my list.

There are more records to be added to this list, and there’s a corollary list, Records I Need to Spend More Time With, but this brief start will do for now. I’ll add more as they pop into my head.