The Summer Workshop Series, or, Summer Camp for Adults

After keeping this blog for the past two years, I still have not arrived at the meaning of The Weird. (Which is fine with me; The Weird is naturally inscrutable to some extent.) But even worse, I have not yet even attempted to parse the meaning of making which is The Weird's sister concept here.

The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that "to make" is a transitive verb with Germanic roots:

The word is associated with creation and the outcome of creative labor, especially labor done with the hands. Other definitions include artistic representation and composition, raising a crop to maturity, and mating.

In order to think about making, I have organized a series of workshops that explore a variety of creative endeavors and handmade crafts. I began by teaching a workshop on container gardening in which we got our hands deep into the dirt of making as a life-creating, life-sustaining activity. Like summer camp for adults, these workshops are fun social events, and force us out of our daily habits. I have loved being in the presence of open minds as a group of participants stumble their way through a new skill. Having to adopt the beginner's mind has been humbling for me, but also thrilling as I have been able to observe and participate in the making process. And like Ringo Starr, I get by with a little help from my friends who have taught workshops on bookbinding, home brewing, and crochet:

Journals made in Ashley Maher's coptic stitch bookbinding workshop

Ben Trumbo adds malt extract to the home brew; Dennis Hoppe pours the wort into 

a glass carboy for fermentation; labels for the Make It Weird workshop beer designed by Ben.

Happy people, about to learn how to crochet at Cate Williamson's workshop.

Bookbinding and crochet required particularly intense levels of concentration, while container gardening and home brewing were more lighthearted, conversational affairs. (The crochet workshop has made a crochet addict of me, but more on that in a future post.) If you would like to explore making during the summer that remains, please join us for workshops on poker, beading, and electronic music. Sorry, workshops are not currently open to the public, but if you are a friend of mine (or a friend of a friend), check out the remaining workshops here.

Leisurely Labor, Laborious Leisure

It’s May Day! The day before my birthday! The pagan fertility holiday! International Workers’ Day! And as I draw (sort of) nearer to the end of my career as a graduate student, I have been exploring career options, soul searching, and imagining what my life might be like  when my doctoral degree is proverbially in hand (but really hanging on my wall). In short, I have been thinking about labor: What is it? How is it compensated? What “counts” as legitimate labor in the world I inhabit? I have more or less decided that I do not want to follow in the footsteps of Professor X, but am still uncertain about what kind of labor I would like to engage in, or what I want to be when I grow up.

Labor: The word implies difficult work, putting a great deal of effort into something. But it is also the term for the process of child birth, suggesting that while labor is difficult and even painful, it is also productive, vital.

The carpenter labors. We know, because we can see the house he has built. We hear him driving nails, see his back bend beneath the weight of boards and bricks. We can quantify his work, and reimburse him with a paycheck. We understand the labor that others do by the products they create and through our imaginative empathy for their efforts. When we benefit from someone else’s labor, are we not grateful? Within that very sentiment, we acknowledge and affirm our own belief that labor is the not-fun, not-pleasant enemy of leisure. But are we right to do so?

Leisure: Free time, in the sense of being both unoccupied and unpaid. What we do at our leisure, we do for our own enjoyment, for the pleasure it brings us. These activities are their own reward, or so we are told.

But labor and leisure are a false dichotomy that is based on the way that others compensate us for our time. What if I write a magazine article, and I put a great deal of effort or labor into it, but I also enjoy that effort? Maybe the story I craft becomes a blueprint of narrative in my reader’s imagination. Perhaps I select and join my words in such a way that they are like irregular stones which are cemented together, forming a firm foundation upon which a literary image can be built. If I do this for free (like I do in this blog), is this a laborious leisure activity? If I get paid to write the article, is it leisurely labor? This blog: what is it? If you read it, and you gain some pleasure or insight from the text, are you not glad that you have read it? Are you not also grateful (as you would be to the carpenter) that you did not have to do the writing (or building) yourself?

Snow in Bloom

It's a cliche about Midwesterners that we love to talk about the weather. Although, when it goes from a sunny seventy degrees to a snowstorm in the space of a few hours, I think that is genuinely interesting. So I'm going to fulfill the cliche and talk about the weather. But this isn't a tale of intemperate change; this is a tale of The Spring That Would Not Arrive, and why that non-arrival is also amazing

This year, winter in St. Louis has been unexceptional. It has been cold, but not frigid. Snowfall has been rare, but we have had more than our share of cloudy days. Gloomy is a word that comes to mind. More than a few times in the past months I have found myself wondering if Fenrir The Wolf had finally succeeded in killing the gods.

Midwest Ragnarok with Train Window (2013)

The Spring Equinox came and went in much the same manner. While we waited for daffodils to unfold their golden faces, our consternation grew. We are hardy Midwestern people, but we have been ready to plant our gardens for several weeks now. The undergraduates at my university have been yearning to run barefooted through the quad, tossing frisbees and shouting, "COLLEGE!" But just when we had reached our collective breaking points, when we could wait no more, the weather gods came back to life, and produced a "bloom" of snow ...

... Proving that even the cruelest deities have a sense of humor. I might be in the minority opinion here, but I find this springtime snowfall to be magical. (Full disclosure: I like a cold snowy winter as much as I like a balmy summer.) For a few days, at least, the seasons fight back against the homogeneous empty time of the calendar, letting their frozen freak flag fly, so to speak. Two years ago we were graced with a similar late March snowstorm. It was amazing. I tell everyone about it. It was one of my favorite days of all time.

March Snow with Crab Apple Blossoms (2011)

Snow and ice clinging to those desperate blossoms is a rare sight, one that I dream about. It was such a delight to photograph them Also, and less poetically perhaps, I built a zombie snowman. Which is just plain awesome.

Night of the Living Dead Snowman (2011)