stormdog | (no subject)

I finished a rough draft of my report on the Montgomery Cabin Site and emailed it my professor for comments. This is a huge relief, and I feel like my long-scattered brain is coming back to me.

I've felt a little too excited to get to bed. I have a deep need to actively appreciate and use some of my own time. I ended up catching up with folks online a bit, then listening to music and doing some picture editing. You'll have seen the one-room schoolhouse shots in my last post.

A while back, I downloaded a big chunk of Woody Guthrie's music to listen to, and hadn't had time to listen to it. I feel very satisfied at having downloaded some of his work, given that in regard to "This Land is Your Land," he wrote:

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”

A company called Ludlow Music claims to own the copyright to "This Land Is Your Land." I hope the absurdity of this position in the context of Guthrie's intent is clear.

Anyway, I started listening to some of Woody's music in earnest for the first time tonight and was a bit moved by it. I think my emotional response comes more from seeing the music as a window into a historical period that's been much romanticized (partly through the work of Mr. Guthrie I suppose!) but which was really a rough time. It also gave birth to some amazing public service projects through organizations like the WPA, and government funding of artists (again, like Mr. Guthrie). I very much enjoyed listening to "Oregon Trail" and thinking about it's social and historical context.

Then I listened to "Roll On Columbia" and I was struck by a bolt out of the blue. I thought of the amazing engineering feat that is the Grand Coulee Dam, and all the river work done on the Columbia, which made me think of visiting a Mississippi lock and dam last weekend. I thought of the shuttle Columbia and Diana Gallagher's "Fly, Columbia!", performed by Leslie Fish on Minus Ten and Counting before that terrible day in 2003. I thought of the way the astronauts aboard her were pioneers in some ways like the Okies who were fleeing the Dust Bowl, giving up something they knew for something new and dangerous. This isn't a perfect analogy of course; the Okies had much less choice, and were fleeing rather than exploring. Too, some of the things Guthrie glorifies in "Roll On Columbia" are not things to be proud of; conflict with Native Americans, and their displacement by the dam reservoir. At the same time, it makes me think of the great idealism with which science and technology and engineering sometimes seem able to fix anything. Even though they never live up to that promise, they still do grand, positive, beautiful things sometimes.

Meh, I'm getting too tired to attempt eloquence.

Anyway, my car's name will be Columbia. It's an homage to many things, both good and bad, because you can't have one without the other. May we find new trails together.

The first two songs I play on the way to Chicago tomorrow have been chosen for me. *smiles*

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Here's a picture for the day before I crash into bed.

This is how I usually wear my hair for school. I was often doing it while driving, too, to keep it off my back and from being damaged by rubbing between me and the seat. I should get back in that habit.

This hair stick was a gift from a dear friend of mine in Michigan,

red_ceilidh.

Hair Stick - Pic-a-day 1 August 2013