Indiana

Indiana / memories / photo / Thursday / Twitter / video — Comments Off on The cuffs were stained, and it got stinky
16
Feb 17

The cuffs were stained, and it got stinky

From time to time a student asks to interview me about something or other as part of a class project. I try to be a difficult interview, thinking maybe the word will get out and people will stop asking.

I don’t actually act like a bad interview subject. I try to be helpful while they’re learning their craft, but the thought always occurs to me: I could derail this. I could send this off in an entirely different direction. But they’re going to get that experience soon enough.

Today I got interviewed as part of a magazine writing exercise about the importance of clothes. It seemed an unusual topic, what clothes are important to you. So I thought, for whatever reason, about outerwear. This jacket, that coat and so on. I guess because it has been cold, I was thinking of the things that help keep you warm. Somewhere in there I mentioned this old denim jacket I had as a kid. Denim, which has made a comeback once more, was a big status symbol back then. And of course the interviewer seized on this as her topic.

I didn’t have a denim jacket for the longest time, because they were expensive and we didn’t have that kind of money. But finally, for Christmas one year, I got one. It was, I told my interviewer, an off-brand and it was probably about 15 minutes after denim was the thing, but I loved it. Loved it. I wore that jacket constantly. Day, night, overnight. And I suppose I just eventually physically outgrew it. But I remember the joy of the gift and the smell of the jacket. And it wasn’t a good smell, because I wore it constantly and I was a little boy. My mom had to wait until I went to sleep and then took the jacket off of me to wash the thing.

The interviewer asked good questions, as I imagined she would. Made me really think of my answers. It became an almost psychological exercise.

Afterward, I sent my mom a text, telling her about this interview. I figured she’d have a funny anecdote for me that I could pass along to my interviewer and we’d all have a good laugh. She didn’t remember the jacket.

In her defense, it was a few decades ago.

Also, when I was little, The Count always scared me. (I was a sensitive child.) But Brielle doesn’t have this problem. Plus, she’s adorable, and knows her stuff:

In the studio this evening, the sports show took over. David and Griffin are going places:

We’ll get to say we knew them back when. They do such great work. But you could say that about a lot of people around here.

And this:

history / Indiana / IU / memories / music / photo / running / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Ancient wisdom: Indoors shoulders gather no snow
8
Feb 17

Ancient wisdom: Indoors shoulders gather no snow

To break up my 11-hour day I went for a run. And just after we started jogging, The Yankee and I, we went by a window and saw snow flakes. And so being indoors was a good idea. Because I could look like this:

But we ran in this gym instead:

That’s Wildermuth, an intramural facility, where I ran eight miles tonight. From 1928 until 1960 it was the home of the basketball team. And, on this day in 1946, it looked like this:

I’m glad I never had to stand in line to register for a college class. I think my freshman year my alma mater was on their second year of phone registration. At an orientation session they plopped in a VHS tape and made us watch a corny — even by the standards of the day — video about how to sign up for classes. But that system only lasted a few more years. Before I graduated they were doing it all online.

Not in line, online. And that probably changed things, too.

Anyway, a few more views on my snowy walk back from Wildermuth to Franklin Hall, where a sports show was recorded tonight:

You reach a certain point with these sort of pictures where you think “Hey, more snow. Yeah, yeah.” And that is almost always just behind “I can’t feel my hands.”

And as an aside about nothing, we had gumbo for dinner tonight. So I washed the dishes while listening

A Louisiana boy singing Delta and soul blues while snow was on the ground outside.

It makes perfect sense while you’re standing at the kitchen sink.

history / Indiana / Monday / music / photo / video — Comments Off on Medieval Latin or 19th century America? Why not both?
6
Feb 17

Medieval Latin or 19th century America? Why not both?

After I parked this morning I walked by this tree on the way into the office this morning:

At lunch time, I saw this tree:

Different trees, of course. Different species, even. But they’re just a block away. That was pretty much the day, outside.

The sun was shining, probably for about 15 minutes altogether, this morning on my way into the office. At least I had those bright, pretty skies for the brief time I could spend outside this morning. It was gray later. I didn’t look for other tree fruits on my way out. We’d progressed to a full on misting event as day turned into evening. It rained tonight, so we ran the gamut.

Gamut is an old English word, stemming from medieval Latin. It originally had to do with a musical note, but turned into an expression that discusses the entire musical scale.

On my way to the car I was also thinking about this song:

That’s a cover on an album of covers that won a grammy for folk album of the year in the early 1990s. The song was written by Janis Ian. Janis Ian is still playing, some 50 years into her career. And she seems like a pretty hilarious grandmother on Twitter, too. She had 34 dates in 2015 and has four booked for this summer, according to her website. And, look, here they are, Ian and Griffith together, in 1993:


Janis Ian & Nanci Griffith – This Old Town… by Superpatri

Anyway, that song, for 20-some years, has seemed to me like every flatland piece of America in the 20th century.

Here’s something from the 19th century, December 11, 1889 in The New York Times:

That was the “then,” portion of the story. Which brings us to the turn of the century, William McKinley’s America:

“Thus a heterogeneous mass of people poured into this part of the Northwest Territory, good and bad being pretty evenly mixed. The Southerners were sound material, yet the bad among them were very bad indeed.”

Let’s discuss them!

“Today their descendants — many of them, at least — are the typical Hoosiers that one hears of in the newspapers. They carefully elude the refining touch of education and even as far as possible the census taker.”

If they’d just talk to the poor downtrodden census taker, we mean, he’s just some geek we found in Ohio, then everything else would be better off for those people in Indiana. Poor buggers.

“Down in some of the State’s southern counties they are at their worst.”

Ain’t that always the way, dear reader?

“In Brown County, an almost impenetrable section of hills, they are in their glory.”

Less than one percent of the state lives there today. But the county only reports a poverty rate of 11.4 percent, with 22 percent having at least one college degree. The arts and being outdoors getaway destination are the chief industries there these days.

“They would be as much at home in the mountains of Tennessee and Alabama as in the Hoosier hill ranges.”

Come again?

“They are indifferent farmers, and have no interest in the world beyond the hog quotations in the St. Louis or Cincinnati market.”

I could go plow that field, but whatever. ‘Didja you hear ’bout what Mertle’s sow said in Missourah ‘other day?

“But, as if to mark the difference, the adjoining county of Bartholomew contains a different people.”

Now, Bartholomew is about the same size, and a full 28 percent of them have college degrees and there’s an 11.9 percent poverty rate. Cummins Diesel is based there. Chuck Taylor, the sneaker guy, was from there, just like Vice President Mike Pence and NASCAR champ Tony Stewart. A popular cartoonist, a software CEO and the former president of thee National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues all call Bartholomew County home. In the 1900 census, taken in the months just after this article, Bartholomew was the mean population center of the U.S. Except that was probably incorrect because of those lyin’, census avoidin’ Hoosiers.

“They, too, are among the Southerners who came to Indiana, but they have kept pace with time’s advance, and are thrifty farmers or active tradespeople.”

Not at all like their slovenly cousins in Brown County.

“Similar contrasts might be pointed out in other sections.”

You go elsewhere the differences are the same. We suppose. We can’t be sure, so we’re speaking in generalities. Not like we have the Internet, yet.

“Even in going south from Indianapolis for a ride of an hour on the railroad one encounters the original Hoosier in his worst aspect.”

You get out of the city, God be with you. We’ve seen it. Have you ever been to Pennsylvania?

Hard to imagine exactly who The Times liked back then. Odd that so many people still think they have such a narrow view of things.

history / Indiana / IU / music / Thursday / video — Comments Off on Take me to the river (or the old canal)
2
Feb 17

Take me to the river (or the old canal)

Working at IU, I have a free subscription to the New York Times and other publications. I could read all of the time and not read it all. And that’s just in today’s world. I also have access to the Times Machine which is more than a century and a half of old news, and a reasonably decent search engine.

So I searched. And one of the first things I found was the supposed origin of the word hoosier.

This is one of the stories that gets around. Truth is, no one really knows where the word comes from. There are some scholars still working on trying to figure it out.

Everyone is trying to figure something out, though, I suppose.

We were figuring out a sports show tonight:

And I watched this documentary on the history of music in Memphis. And if you like music, the history of music, or the South, or just watching joyous people do things they enjoy …

That is a film worth your time.

books / Indiana / Thursday / video — Comments Off on Without a doubt, irrefutably: snow
5
Jan 17

Without a doubt, irrefutably: snow

Woke up to snow. Watched it, off and on, fall all day. Little flakes, big flakes, sticky flakes. Here’s some shots from the office:

Classes start back next Monday. People are starting to trickle back into the building, the ones that aren’t sick with something anyway. There’s a lot of that going around, which has been the case since before Thanksgiving. This is a new old building, one side of which you see at the beginning of the video, but it might be out to get us, in a biological sense.

But the snow! Isn’t it lovely! Tonight it will actually get cold. Tomorrow we’ll be between 0 and 5 degrees and wearing heavy jackets. But, today, the snow is full of that magic that wipes away doubt and impossibility and dirt and the decay of autumn. Tomorrow, or the next day, the snow will be its own doubt and dirt.

I canceled my XM subscription today. Two representatives tried very hard to upgrade me or reduce my bill or extend me this or offer me that. But I just don’t spend that much time in the car right now and the reception to their transponders is blocked on about 20 percent of my route. The quality has been in decline ever since the Sirius-XM merger, while the price has almost doubled.

I really only listened to the 40s station anyway.

We’re watching West Wing, about 15 years too late.

I feel like, after tonight’s episodes, that we might have already watched the best part of the show. But last night we were here:

Tonight we got here:

And I think I see what everyone likes about the Charlie character. He’s not a bad character, but I think this is about first impressions — and binge watching. When you met him he was that young kid, who thought he was there to be a messenger. And then you learned his backstory, which was heartbreaking and then he was frozen in amber. He’s a humble sort, but never in over his head. And so he became the precocious child of the show, even as a young adult.

It probably hurt him, then, that he’s in a room surrounded by talented, accomplished people and has a paternalistic lead. Now, it is supposed to be four years later. But, really, for us, it has been just a few months. He’s still that boy, still precocious, which isn’t fair to the character. He’s not a boy, we haven’t allowed for that evolution with time.

Some things about binge watching are antithetical to character evolution.

Would you rather we discussed books?

If you like sports, or baseball, or books about sports, or just good research and writing, I’d suggest Bottom of the 33rd. It is about the longest game in the history of organized baseball, a Triple-A struggle in Massachusetts in 1981.

It featured Easter, 40-degree temperatures, Wade Boggs, Cal Ripken Jr., Bruce Hurst and maybe the best hitter you’ve never heard of. The book covers two clubs, owners, communities, broadcasters, managers … it is difficult to imagine how did not get included, so complete is the research.

The writing is incredibly crisp. I don’t read a lot of sports books, but this was written by a New York Times columnist and it shows in his love of the craft.

I’m also about halfway through The Adventure of English. This is the companion book to a BBC series on the language, told as a biography, almost of a living person.

It’s a slog, but its a good read. You have to really want it, I think, really appreciate the power of language to find this book interesting. It’s poetic in places, and it is as dense as a technical manual in others. Halfway through, though, and Shakespeare just retired and the study of the language has moved to the Pilgrims, landing months late and at the wrong spot, and the meeting, either by “chance or through God’s providence,” with Squanto.

Tisquantum, you might recall, helped the pillaging Pilgrims survive that first harsh winter. He was perhaps the only English-speaking native for hundreds of miles around, and arguably the most fluent English speaker on the continent. How fortunate for them that he was in the next village from where they came ashore. Now, the book is moving into the American Colonial period. I just learned that of the 13 colonies only two were derived from native terms. Connecticut, for example, stems from Quinnehtukqut, which the Internet tells me means “beside the long tidal river.”

I think the best part of the book is that, while it is talking about the power of the language to evolve, it stops in 2011. So some of these words from the 2011 additions to the OED may be in there, but surely not all of them, surely not the word “posilutely.”

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