It's summertime and I'm beginning to feel it. I haven't had an original thought in weeks. I've been living off sentences from the books I've been reading. This past week it was Gaudy Night, academic English women, lots of Elizabethan quotations. It didn't help me make small talk with my farming relations in Minnesota.
We took our last family car trip last weekend, up to the Northwoods to visit the cradle of our family's civilization. I always go up there feeling for some subconscious connection with the past and I end up looking confusedly at the white birches and wondering where I fit in. My relatives are like people I read about in books--waking up early to do the milking, going out at night to shoot coons and coyote. I'm amazed by them, but I can't feel the connection between our worlds. The milk and coffee, though, are plentiful and good and if that's our only connection, it's good enough for now.
Spent the second half of the weekend in Minneapolis where I hung out with an old roommate whom I almost didn't bother to get in touch with. Her enthusiasm about seeing me made me ashamed of my reluctance. And I don't know where that reluctance comes from. It's laziness, really, and it usually strikes during the summer when I'm getting used to doing nothing. It's that horrible feeling of being in a dream and knowing it's a dream, but being unable to get out of it. I can't even get up the motivation to research all the ideas that keep coming into my head. And that, for me, means I'm far gone. Help me, I'm stuck in summer. My brain is dying. I saw the name "Bjorklund" on a gravestone in Minnesota and I had to think for awhile to remember where I had heard the name "Bjork" before. What the hell? And I don't have the academia coming to my rescue this time, got to grow up and face the world, like Harry Potter.
Posted by linnea at August 3, 2005 12:39 AM | TrackBackYea, we hate summer, too. We were just saying "summer has got to end!"
Linnea, I totally know what you mean about the Northlands and the relations. It's surreal. So disconnected from their kind of life, yet somehow you always end up joining in sidesplitting laughter over coffee and homemade cookies. And I love the long walks up there, down abandoned roads (they're probably logging roads, but to me they're abandoned). I wish I could see how Aunt Grace fixed up Gramma's old place (you know, with plumbing and everything).
Posted by: Jeannette at August 3, 2005 11:38 AMSomewhere in Gaudy Night, Harriet Vane makes the observation that "she fell into that annoying habit writers have of considering how they would best fit what they have just experienced into a story."
Loose quotation based on memory, but I thought it rather funny because...well, it struck a little close to home.
Posted by: funkefreak at August 4, 2005 11:09 PMYou saw the Gretch? How excellent!
Linnea, I got my hair cut way way short again. Except it wasn't by a Vietnamese named Tran. I paid more this time...I really like it, though.
Posted by: tuggy at August 5, 2005 11:59 PM