So I’ve written a few love notes over the past couple of days - a continuation of the blog-stallment I began way back in June: “Love Notes/Notes on Love.” Love itself being a notion that I’ve been particularly willing to leave alone as of late, I hadn’t planned on or wanted to include any “Notes on Love” this time around - just the love notes themselves. But then I read THIS ARTICLE in the Atlantic, by Lori Gottlieb. It’s called “Marry Him!”

Since reading through Gottlieb’s diatribe a few times, I’ve cycled through a whole bunch of emotions - all of them being negative. It started in the first paragraph with something like vague boredom over an anecdote about surveying happily-complete families strolling through an idyllic park. Here we go again, I thought, another woeful tale of the unhappily single mother. But as the article continued, the increasing brashness of Gottlieb’s seemingly anti-feminist statements - “ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life . . . she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child)” - my boredom turned first into irritation, then ignited into anger.

“Every woman I know,” writes Gottlieb, “—no matter how successful and ambitious, how financially and emotionally secure—feels panic, occasionally coupled with desperation, if she hits 30 and finds herself unmarried.” What the fuck is this? I blurted aloud to my empty apartment, questioning no one in particular. Is she actually trying to convince me that I require a husband to be happy? I asked angrily, though silently this time. I was incensed. But before I could vocalize my opinion that Lori “Knock-Me-Up-Now!” Gottlieb didn’t know what the hell she was talking about, she preemptively retorted with a surprisingly catty comeback: “And all I can say is, if you say you’re not worried [about finding a husband], either you’re in denial or you’re lying. In fact, take a good look in the mirror and try to convince yourself that you’re not worried, because you’ll see how silly your face looks when you’re being disingenuous.”

I inhaled sharply through my clenched teeth. Anger curdled into a kind of nauseated, disbelieving woundedness.

I’ve since forwarded this article to my two fellow lady-AIR’s, both of whom were equally upset by it. Arielle replied, “How dare you send me this,” and asked, somewhat sarcastically, if I was trying to urge her further toward suicide. And Derya passed along Jezebel’s responses to the article (see here and here), one of which seems to be simply a lazy attempt to distract from the true issue at hand by bringing up Gottlieb’s struggle with eating disorders, and the other (though it made me feel slightly better) which in my opinion misconstrues Gottlieb’s argument (saying that Gottlieb encourages women to settle for men who are not good enough for them, rather than for men who they are not in love with). Anyways, the point is that the three of us have since discussed, in stereotypical female fashion, our feelings about the article. To rehash the whole discussion here, frankly, would be overkill, and I would like to believe that it would be granting Gottlieb more credit than she deserves. But, the moral of the story: there is not a single aspect of this article that fails to depress me. Not one.

I consider myself lucky to have grown up in a home with both of my parents, who (despite more than their fair share of ups and downs) are embarking on their fourth decade of marriage. And in spite of my intense shyness as a child, they somehow managed to instill a bit of aplomb in me, which, in my adult years, has allowed me a certain confidence in my pursuit of romantic relationships with men. For these reasons, I’ve always sort of assumed that things would eventually work out for me, at least romantically - that I was smart enough and confident enough to one day stumble into the stereotypical intoxication of “true love,” whatever that might be. I’ve always just assumed that I would be able to get married to someone who I was really in love with, if I wanted to. Well, what Gottlieb’s article forced me to consider was whether this belief might simply be deeply naive. What if I end up marrying someone I’m not madly in love with? What if I am actually the kind of girl who “settles” for a loveless, business-like marriage? What, I wondered after reading this article, if everything is not going to be okay?

Then, of course, I got depressed that Gottlieb had somehow tricked me into thinking like this at all. I returned to the mantra that I repeated so often last year, at times when anything in my life felt too serious: I’m 22! (In this context, I’m 22! translates to something like, I have years and years before I need to even consider getting married! and also, to a lesser extent, I don’t want to get married anyway!) But the final depressing reality that Gottlieb’s article illustrates is how little we can actually know about our future selves. At twenty-two years old, full of feminist ideals, what I really want to be able to say to Gottlieb is that she is wrong, that time is a non-issue, that I do not and will not need a marriage or children to be happy. But after saying this, behind my closed eyes I still see Gottlieb’s shrewd, middle-aged face smirking back at me. “You say that now,” I hear her say smugly, “but you will. You will.”

To: Evelyn Glennie
From: Rachel Harkai
Re: my musical education

Dear Evelyn,

So I might be breaking the rules of writing to people I don’t know with this note. Though we don’t really know each other, we’ve met before. Do you remember? I was that little girl, nine or ten years old, who took the wrong door out of the women’s bathroom in Stetson Chapel, a building on the campus of Kalamazoo College, and stumbled unknowingly into your dressing room. I recognized you immediately from the cover of Rhythm Song, your first album, which was given to me by my father, a percussionist himself. I remember how, even at that young age, I was awestruck by your recorded performances - by the beauty of the folk-Hungarian song Czardas when given to the marimba, by the amazing swiftness of your rendition of Flight of the Bumblebee - and more profoundly by the musical talent you displayed in spite of your deafness.

I was an incredibly superstitious child, always ordering my life into patterns, stepping over cracks to avoid curses, believing that the things that happened to me - both good and bad - had occurred for some special and unique reason. But little did I realize at the time, how fateful our meeting would later seem when looking back on the path of my musical education. Not more than a year later I began studying percussion performance seriously, and though you had no knowledge of your teaching, recordings of your performances taught me so much of what I learned - the sound of precision, strong attack, a pure tone. I figured out Stout’s Mexican Dances mostly from hearing you play them through my stereo speakers, again and again. But most importantly, Evelyn, you showed me that a female could not only make a name for herself, but that she could become the most dominant figure in the male-dominated world of percussion.

Maybe you remember the second time we met, early winter 2003? In a public masterclass on the campus of Grand Valley State University, I played a fugue - the second movement from Bach’s Sonata for Solo Violin No. 2 in A-minor - on the marimba for you, in front a hundred or so other people. In what was probably the pinnacle of my musical career, you came on stage that evening and gave me a real live lesson. Strangely enough, the only advice I still remember you giving was on those same topics whose importance I had learned simply from the sound of your recordings - authority, accuracy, confidence.

I got to see you again recently - from more of a distance this time - during your performance with the Greenville Symphony last weekend. Though I used to play Drumming and Shadow Behind the Iron Sun regularly during my slots deejaying at the college radio station, I haven’t been listening to your albums much recently. Its been almost two years since I left the percussion section of U of M’s orchestra and, since I couldn’t afford to move my marimba south with me, I haven’t played the now-stored instrument since I came to Spartanburg. Even so, the familiarity of your playing rushed back at me with intensity and with nostalgia. I realize now that, though my appreciation of your musicianship still remains, this appreciation is different from what it once was. After finally abandoning regular musical practice - having forgotten those old concerns of form and technique - the opportunity to hear you play was no longer a kind of scrutinizing study, but now only an overwhelming wash of gratitude, indebtedness, appreciation.

A few days ago I put the concert’s program into my file cabinet, stashing it in a folder that holds the last vestiges of my musical career - a few newspaper articles, acceptance letters to some music conservatories, the autographed liner notes to your Greatest Hits album. At the very bottom, I found the yellowed ticket stub from that concert over a decade ago when I unknowingly stumbled into you, a woman I would later come to idolize. So I guess that more than a love note, I mean this to be a sincere thank you. Though I may have never had courage enough to tackle the reality of a career in classical music, the lessons you taught extended well beyond the musical realm of my life, encouraging me not only to move through my every endeavor with attempts at grace and confidence, but to always remember how much can be learned when we simply listen.

Sincerely,
Rachel

ANOTHER (LOVE) NOTE THAT I WILL NEVER SEND TO SOMEONE I DON’T KNOW

To: John Cage
From: Rachel Harkai
Re: Silence

Dear John,

Much like my love for Jonny Greenwood, my love for you began mid-way through my high school career. I was fifteen, a summer percussion student at Interlochen Center for the Arts, when I heard your Cheap Imitation for the first time. Strange, beautiful, and circular, your music seemed at once immediate and mysterious. How, I wondered, could the Imitations sound so simple, when the intention behind the notes seemed so opaque?

In Interlochen’s crowded basement music library, I listened to old vinyl recordings of your works - especially your percussion pieces - trying to understand the inspiration behind these songs whose sounds were so foreign to my classically-trained ear. And even though I always suspected your genius, I suspected it with a great deal of suspicion. This was, I think, because I was unable to understand your logic, the trajectory you had planned for the future of experimental music, your incorporation of chance. And admittedly, I still remain somewhat suspicious of your work - though today, years later, my willingness to more readily accept the unpredictable, the inexplicable, and the random, has transformed this suspicion into its own strange sort of love. I now love your music because it continues, with every listen, to truly surprise me.

But I am writing this letter to your long-dead soul today, not about your music, but about your writings. In college I had the strange fortune of taking an essay-writing class with a writer who I imagine will one day be very famous, her work likely appearing in assorted anthologies of twenty-first century literary history. She spent a good deal of the course trying to illustrate the value that chance operations - a creative practice employed early on by your friend Duchamp, and later adopted heavily by yourself - might have to the writer. Though many of this professor’s students may have suspected her genius, I think many also believed that this woman was insane. Only now, over a year later, am I beginning to gather even the slightest understanding of what she was saying.

I picked up a copy of Silence - your first collection of writings - from the library last week. They read like the sound of your music - beautiful, circular, simultaneously dense and airy. Though many of your lectures and essays are forty, fifty, even sixty years old, they feel somehow refreshing to me, I think because of the authority with which they ask questions, unafraid of receiving no answer. These writings challenge preconceived notions of form and structure, asking the reader to experiment with the effects of timing, of repetition, and with the ways that we might literarily notate sound.

Your work, I would say, should in many ways be a primer to the young writer (and particularly the young poet), illustrating how form can effectively enhance content. How else, after all, should we talk about experimental music, if not through experimental presentation? Though I may never be smart enough to fully grasp the concepts behind your approaches, I say without hesitation that the challenge to understand them will, for me, be ever-inspiring.

Fondly,
Rachel

____________________________________________________________

In other news, Garfield Minus Garfield is the best thing I’ve seen in a while. Check it out.

So apparently I’ve become really bad at this blogging business. In an effort to rekindle my passion for frequent updates to this once-ebullient, though recently-dwindling (and still contractually-required!) blog, I’m revisiting a theme of some of my older entries - this time they’re all centered on music:

(LOVE) NOTES THAT I WILL NEVER SEND TO PEOPLE I DON’T KNOW

____________________________________________________________

To: Jonny Greenwood
From: Rachel Harkai
Re: There Will Be Blood

Dear Jonny,

You might not believe in love at first sight, but what about love at first listen? I’ve been loving you from a distance since that warm autumn afternoon, sophomore year of high school, when I heard OK Computer for the first time while riding home in a friend’s car. The attraction was immediate. During the following months I pooled my meager adolescent resources - money earned from teaching afterschool piano lessons, and Kazaa - to get my hands on every song you’d ever made. When I heard Kid A, it only got worse. Though I wouldn’t say my Radiohead-love has ever compared to the frightening obsession paraded proudly by many of your fans, I’ve followed the band’s music diligently over the years. And strangely enough, I feel almost as though it has somehow followed me around in return.

A few years ago, in summer, I camped somewhere unmarked in the middle of the barren Utah desert. Leaving the campfire at night, I wandered over a dune with a boy, searching for the source of some distant pulse we thought we heard. We finally found it by a lake full of hot water, where we swam in the company of a small colony of campers traveling the west in ancient conversion vans. They were blasting Idioteque.

But even though Radiohead has punctuated some of my life’s strange and poignant moments, I find that I have a hard time listening to their music anymore - even the newest In Rainbows - without feeling washed out by the angsty, high school feeling that I once succumbed to so often while listening to it (how funny now, to think of myself at fifteen, when I thought life was so hard!). And even though I often try to evade the nostalgic feelings supplied by those albums, their songs seem to resurface in my life again and again, always bringing me back to memories of those most inconsequential moments - the early escapes from school, Scrabble games played in the diner that burned down, the conversations I could have had, but didn’t, because we were listening in silence - moments that somehow became meaningful simply because of the your music’s presence.

I’ll admit, I wasn’t ready for Bodysong when it first came out late in my freshman year of college. Even after the depatures made in Amnesiac, and to a lesser extent Hail to the Thief, something about your first solo effort seemed too dilute for me to grasp. So it wasn’t until I started writing seriously, nearly two years later, that I added Bodysong to my list of regular plays. Though I wouldn’t say I considered it “background music,” I found it to be a good album to write to - lyricless, but engaging, though not too distracting to affect my work.

Then, last month, I saw There Will Be Blood. From the very opening notes of the film’s soundtrack, I was dying to know what composer had scored it. When the end credits finally flashed your name, all I could say was, sheepishly, “Of course.” I’ve listened to the film’s soundtrack probably ten more times since picking it up last week, not as background music, but as an activity in its own right. And I like it more and more with each listen. Something about it feels already familiar to me, maybe because I am beginning to hear in it the qualities of so many great composers I already love - that lyric violin of Samuel Barber, the percussive dissonance of Shostakovich, perhaps a bit of Stravinsky’s strange humor, and obvious homage to Morricone.

We all know I’ve always had a soft spot for men who could write good music - and I don’t mean decent lyrics slapped on some I-IV-V chords - so even though I may keep trying to grow out of Radiohead, its becoming clear that the beauty of your solo work has the potential to evolve with me for a long time. (This is starting to sound like a marriage proposal, isn’t it?) Well don’t worry, I know you’re already spoken for. And frankly, I don’t think even my angsty sixteen-year old self could deal with your emo hair. So keep it up, Jonny. I’ll keep listening.

Love,
Rachel

But I love you . . . After all, what’s February without love, heartbreak, and a few good covers thrown in the mix? Here’s the monthly music blog - enjoy!

Also, this blog officially surpassed 10,000 visitors last night! Epic!

Edward! You’re 24! We’ll celebrate when I get over to Ukraine in summer!

I couldn’t find any embarrassing pictures of you so . . . За здоровье!

Everybody else check out Edward’s awesome blog about foodz.

“Above the capital’s madness
I raised my face,
stern as the faces of ancient icons.”

-Vladimir Mayakovsky

twinners!

First things first: you should all go see ‘There Will Be Blood,’ if for no other reason than to submit to the awe-inspiring expressions of Daniel Day Lewis’ oil-slathered, but beautiful face. Second, books this week were: David Mitchell’s ‘Black Swan Green’ (an amazingly well-crafted and oh-so entertaining British bildungsroman a la Catcher in the Rye, but set in the early 1980’s) and Oliver Sacks latest ‘Musicophilia’ (a fascinating examination of the physiological reasons for why humans exhibit so many strange attachments and aversions to music). Third, in the spirit of the season:

PRELUDE

“So much life we cannot have or find or repeat yet so much we had and found.”
– Dean Young

From the kingdom of second chances
we inherit February,

king-sized and defective.
Long winter draws my number

underneath a sickle moon,
so I leave my short slip in the closet

until its brocade becomes buffalo plaid.
To imagine living here was no different

from what became a real life.
Now, in the parking lot

of wishful thinking, evening,
may we empty, simply, our desire.

The smart thing I did was gifting
everything I cherished.

When you’re as dumb as I am
good things happen to you.

Well, I’m back in Spartanburg. Nicholas, Derya, and I returned from the Charlotte Airport late yesterday evening and, even though its a little chillier than normal down here, the weather felt almost temperate in comparison to the brutal, blustering cold that blasted through my five days up north. After four nights spent in my sleeping bag on the sofa of Emily’s storm-windowless living room, my well-heated apartment felt positively toasty, even at room temperature. I readily admit to having been very vocal about my dislike of cold weather in the past, so anybody who knows anything about me probably won’t believe me when I say it (i.e. Rachel: “I miss winter.” John: “You HATE winter.”), but I think living in a slightly warmer climate has helped to bring me closer to my northern, hinterland roots.

I probably should have realized this attachment sooner in my Spartanburg stay, during those Southern summer days that, to a native-Michigander, seemed far too beautiful and rare to be spent inside a climate-controlled room doing work. But coming from the cool, cloudy north - a place where even a modicum of temperate weather has people peeling off hats and jackets, tossing frisbees and “tanning” on blankets strewn across the open, grassy spaces of campuses, and speeding around town on bicycles practically unclothed - it took me a while to realize that here, a thousand miles closer to the equator, beautiful weather is nothing out of the ordinary and definitely no excuse to shirk obligation. Here, the sun comes out every day.

This in mind, I think its not so much that I miss winter, but that I NEED winter. I need to feel that vital struggle against the cold, even if only for a short time. Otherwise, things seem too easy. Though this appetite for difficulty might seem strange, it is a desire that I will admit resembles that triumphant feeling of suffering through the struggles of the creative process - of having battled against something and won. I can’t help but wonder whether South Carolina’s colder temperatures have been related to my recent surge of creative output. With a handful of essays in progress and a notebook-full of poem series’ in the works, I’ve been having to slow myself down just to focus on one thing at a time.

Thanks to the financial support of the Oleander Review and U. of Michigan’s graduate English program, I had the chance to read some of this new work - specifically some poems and (GASP!) another piece of short fiction - last Thursday evening at Shaman Drum Bookshop in Ann Arbor. We had a staggering turnout, and I was thrilled to see the faces of old friends, boyfriends, and professors peeking through the crowd. My most sincere thanks to everyone who attended.

While in Ann Arbor, I hit up all the old favorite places: mornings were spent perusing the shelves of Shaman Drum, where I picked up some David Mitchell, a copy of Grace Paley’s Collected Stories, and (finally) my own copy of Leonard Michaels so I can at last give the Spartanburg Public Library their loaner copy back. In the afternoons I sipped coffee at Ambrosia, ate lobster bisque from Le Dog, and nodded my headphoned-head to new music found in the bowels of WCBN. (Side note: Though I’m loving The Magnetic Fields’ newest Distortion, I realized I might not ever love another album more than their earlier 69 Love Songs, and even though I’m a huge fan of Cat Power, I think her newest Jukebox should have probably been titled Muzak, since I doubt it will ever make it out of my speakers as anything other than background ambience).

My friend and mentor, Ray McDaniel, gave me an advance copy of his forthcoming book of poetry, Saltwater Empire, which is just stunning. I maintain that Ray’s poems are some of the first I turn to when I need to be reminded of what a poem should look and sound like (for example, Through the Shotgun House, with Violins). I spent happy hour drinking Bloody Mary’s at Zanzibar, and evenings downing Bell’s beer at Ashley’s and Old Town. I got to spend nearly the entire visit with some of my favorite people on the planet (Vlad, Jordan, Justin, Emily) who introduced me to the wonders of Guitar Hero and combated the cold with me by guzzling hot toddies and showcasing some stellar dance moves.

That being said, Ann Arbor is a great destination for infrequent visits, but also a town that I realize I am glad to have escaped from so quickly after college. It is not the city itself that unsettles me anymore - the place is rife with intelligent people, great restaurant, bars, and venues to provide whatever form of culture you might desire. I am instead unnerved by its transience. The buildings look the same, the streets are unchanged, but each school-year brings with it an entirely new population of people. Walking down North State Street (basically, memory lane) was, more than ever, a reminder of all of those now-blank spaces where people used to be. For much of my first few months in Spartanburg, I think I imagined myself - like the protagonist of Kieslowski’s film La Double Vie de Veronique - as having an “other,” my own Weronika, who was still carrying on in Michigan, living out the day-to-day details of my old life and waiting for me to return. But now, having visited Ann Arbor again, I think that too many people and pieces of my old life have gone elsewhere for me to live comfortably in that space anymore. I looked for my Weronika, and was glad that I did not find her there.

The worst part of my trip was that bad weather and car trouble kept me from seeing my Mom and Dad, but aside from that I had an excellent time, probably the highlight of which was my return to the Living Writers Show, not as host this time, but as a guest. After racing straight from Detroit Metro Airport to the radio station, I arrived only a few minutes before we went on-air, so things were a little on-the-fly. But I had the opportunity to read some of my nonfiction, as well as a new poem, and talk with the editors of Oleander Review about the gritty details of starting a literary journal from the ground up. You can check out the interview on my website, or just listen to it here:

Reading new work to an audience last week has me primed to make some revisions and to keep creating more new stuff. I know the blog has been a little sparse recently, so, I’m sorry for that. But I’ve been trying to cut as many distractions as possible out of my life . . . less blogging, less movie-watching, maybe even less sleeping - less energy put into places that yield indefinite return. So if my presence here seems a little scarce, trust that my effort is being spent on the endeavor that matters most to me right now - my writing.

As much as I’ve been digging the latest dancy tracks from Justice, Chromatics, M.I.A. (of course), and Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, mid-winter has put me in a pretty mellow mood. On that note, here’s this month’s bloggy mix:

I’ve been reading a lot of poetry this week - Matthea Harvey’s latest, lots of Alice Notley, Joe Wenderoth - and writing a lot too. To satisfy my ever-growing obsession with New German Cinema (German New Wave), I’ve been plugging along on poems about the work of Wim Wenders, among other things. I’m headed to Michigan tomorrow (AGAIN) to give a reading at Shaman Drum Bookshop in Ann Arbor on Thursday, January 16th at 7 p.m. It should be a good time and I’m looking forward to seeing a few familiar faces. Maybe I’ll see some of you there . . .