On the weekend of September 3rd, Wifely Kate, sis-in-law Emily, and I visited the Durham Farmers’ Market in North Carolina. According to its website, Durham Farmers’ Market is an all-local, producer-only market with 64 vendors. It’s held in the Pavilion at Durham Central Park (501 Foster Street), Saturdays (8am – noon) and Wednesdays (3:30 – 6:30pm), rain or shine.
Part of the Pavilion
We were very impressed by the market’s park location, with its inviting lawns and protective pavilion. The location gave the sense that Durham values its local farmers and food. I really wish Fort Worth’s wonderful Cowtown Farmers Market could get a nicer spot.
The Starlite String Band gave the Durham Farmers’ Market some soundtrack. The Missoula farmers markets had musicians, too. Music really adds to the experience, I think; hearing it is one of my favorite parts of going to farmers markets.
In my experience, farmers markets are fun, positive places. Wifely and I’ll continue to visit them when we travel. Thanks again to Emily for hosting us in North Carolina!
Last weekend Wifely Kate and I visited her sister Emily in Durham, North Carolina, where Emily’s attending graduate school at Duke. All three of us really like Durham; it struck me as a very genuine place, organic in development and a bit gritty — in a good way; the definition of “gritty” that means “tough; showing courage, resolve.”
Durham seemed as if it’s been there a long time, memories spread through and nurturing, and as if it will remain there a long time, sturdy.
Main Street. Public domain photo; others by me
As of 2008, Durham has a population of around 230,000, says Wikipedia. The area’s quite educated, and we were glad to see a lot of signs for cultural events — music performances, lectures, gatherings — as well as indie bookshops such as The Regulator (I mentioned it in an earlier blog post) and also nicely named bars:
Red bricks make up many of Durham’s buildings. The sky was very blue and beautiful. As we walked past the former Lucky Strike plant, Emily suggested this shot:
And of course the Camp sisters made the trip all the more fun:
Dangerous Duo
I’ll try to post about the Durham Farmers Market soon.
Wifely and I are visiting her sister in North Carolina. In Durham, at 720 Ninth Street (ZIP 27705), there’s an independent bookstore called The Regulator Bookshop (Twitter; Blog). We only checked it out for a bit, but long enough for me to snap two photos that in my mind establish The Regulator’s coolness beyond doubt.
No History Here, Zip, Nada!
Yah, that’s a poster for William Gibson‘s (Twitter; Wikipedia) new novel Zero History. Gibson’s probably most famous for leading science fiction’s cyberpunk subgenre (“high tech and low life”) and for his debut, game-changing novel Neuromancer (1984); he’s also known for coining the term “cyberspace,” for writing the short story on which the film Johnny Mnemonic (1995) is based, and for his most recent set of related-but-standalone mainstream novels: Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), and now Zero History. It must have been something, reading back in the eighties, to parse neologistic sentences about characters “jacking in” to “cyberspace” and using “microsofts” … If you think science fiction is irrelevant, that it’s about aliens with creases in their foreheads, you aren’t reading Gibson. From Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988):
There was a trode-net plastered across the guy’s forehead; a single black cable was lashed along the edge of the stretcher. Slick followed it up to the fat gray package that seemed to dominate the gear mounted on the superstructure. Simstim? Didn’t look like it. Some kind of cyberspace rig? Gentry knew a lot about cyberspace, or any way he talked about it, but Slick couldn’t remember anything by getting unconscious and just staying jacked in… people jacked in so they could hustle. Put the trodes on and they were out there, all the data in the world stacked up like one big neon city, so you can cruise around and have a grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn’t, it was too complicated, trying to find your way to a particular piece of data you needed. Iconics, Gentry called that.
This afternoon, while the sisters went out a-sistering, I parked at Mad Hatter Bakeshop & Cafe to finish some work toward a schoolteaching certificate, my copy of Spook Country on the table. Another customer turned out to be a serious Gibson fan, eagerly awaiting Gibson’s Duke book-tour stop, and we talked science fiction for a while. Whenever I meet another fan of serious science fiction, I feel like we’re sharing a vast secret, as if we’ve been studying the same grimoires: we might not understand what’s going on with this crazy future-present, but at least we know that something’s going on — something on the order of the creation of cities, as Gibson once put it. We acknowledge the present with a realism it seems others don’t. It seems like so much contemporary lit-fic (literary fiction) hides in notional 1970s Raymond Carver settings that don’t confront our world of today.
Random Gibson infos:
My foodie wife and I are asking writers about their food preferences; in answer, Gibson tweeted: “@douglaslucas Japanese, Japa Dog, Lebanese street, Hainanese chicken rice, Montreal smoked meat on rosemary and rocksalt bagel…” (Here’s Susan Orlean’s answer; Peter Straub’s.)
There in Seattle I asked Gibson two questions; if I get the chance to go see his Austin book-tour stop this month, I actually don’t know what question to ask! I’ll come up with something interesting, no worries. But I feel comforted to know that at this point I don’t particularly have pressing questions to ask an awesome artist; I feel quite confident with my own knowledge right now.
Saturday mornings Wifely Kate and I go to the Cowtown Farmers Market (Twitter) for much of our week’s groceries. Kate looks at tomatoes and squash, and I eat free samples and look at Kate.
Beautiful Day, Beautiful Girl
The food at this market is grown locally; the vendors, who’re actually informed, can tell you about what you’re purchasing, how they grew it, what goes well with what, and so forth. Like many in the Fort Worth of my background, I grew up on Brinker Inc. & SpaghettiOs & Kraft. But! Even here, there’s arugula and okra and all sorts of real food. Pro tip: food is often an acquired taste; try alien food (asparagus?) several times, across several days, and you’ll grow to like it. Everyone admits beer is an acquired taste, right?
A Good Sign
Cowtown Farmers Market is on the Weatherford traffic circle: 3821 Southwest Blvd, Fort Worth TX 76116. Wednesday and Sunday, 8am to noon.
They sell fair trade organic coffee & tea. Kate told Rupert I prefer bold coffee, whereas she prefers more mild stuff, so he suggested their Black & Tan blend, designed to please all palates. After a good smell of the package, we bought it — I’ll let you know how it turns out, okay?
This post would be remiss without a shout-out to Artisan Baking Co. (Twitter), which makes great bread that feeds me frequently. And the various cheeses from the happy goats of Latte Da Dairy cannot be forgotten!
The antique store was great, I love visiting little towns with Kate, antique-ing is a wonderful way to experience history and culture and motif-laden objects, but c’mon, this lamp is ridiculous. It was $10 on the SALE! table, and I wonder why.
This lamp has been the (ostensible) subject of some fights recently, so we’re trying to figure out what to do with it. Feel free to leave your own aesthetic evaluation in the comments. She says if enough people are anti-lamp, she’ll consider getting rid of it!
Lifting heavily from an apparently trustworthy Wikipedia entry, I’ll tell you that this picture captures me at Weeping Wall, “a geological formation found along Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park, in the U.S. state of Montana. It is a natural waterfall that seeps out from the side of the Garden Wall, and is fed by runoff from snowmelt.” The waterfall is near Logan Pass, a highly elevated point of the Continental Divide with a visitor center and trails and the like.
Stopping along Going-to-the-Sun Road (on my way to the Sun!) and climbing up to the waterfall was one of my most favorite moments of my family’s recent 10-day vacation to Montana, which is an amazing state — it was my first time there. The waterfall’s water was so clear and bubbly as to be white in color, and it was very, very cold, too. But cold or not, I didn’t pass over the opportunity to sit on a rock there and rest with my feet in the water.
Wifely Kate, who’s terrified of hypothetical zombie attacks, pointed out that the locale would be a good place to hide in a doomsday situation. You could obstruct the narrow Going-to-the-Sun Road with a boulder, you’d have water, and if you could find food somewhere, you could survive … until winter.
Note also the hat I’m wearing. I can’t remember where I got it, but it in all its faded glory gives the sigil of the Rebel Alliance from Star Wars. Nobody in Fort Worth (except one of my brothers, actually) has ever recognized the symbol. But about three people in Missoula did — Missoula is Montana’s green/progressive town, an excellent place with microbreweries, farmers markets, freecycle bikes, great indie bookstores, the University of Montana, and more. Currently medical marijuana licenses are legally available to out-of-staters who have $150 and a half-passable excuse. I didn’t partake, of course, though were I equipped with $150, a license might have been a good souvenir.
I loved Missoula (and Montana!); I plan to post more about some of my experiences there soon.
WHY does soap have to be so complicated? The other day my wife handed me some alleged body wash that apparently claims as its primary function “exfoliation” — or “moisturizing” — or some other ludicrous buzzword. Look, soap marketing people, here’s what I want when I take a shower:
Stuff to shampoo my hair
Stuff to condition my hair
Stuff to clean my face
Stuff to clean my body
I do not need or want to infuse my hair or any other part of me with complexities, I don’t care about the bottle texts’ creativity, I just want to wash off, okay? Though…I admit…this might be fun to try out:
Caffeinated soap
P.S. I blogged this while about 30,000 feet over New Mexico and Texas!
Deciding on a sticker or a wall hanging or even a T-shirt takes me a long time. I have to intuit whether the motif-y object will influence me the way I want. When I saw this red sticker, though, I decided in only a few minutes that it belonged on my laptop (my constant companion!) as a reminder for how to live life. You have to take risks, but first — some backstory.
Recently I’ve been cleaning out a closet, partly so wifely Kate can put her work clothes there. Cleaning out this closet entails dealing with old CDs, always a weird nostalgia trip. I ran across in one box the Japanese release of Megadeth’s 1999 album Risk, and the sticker was inside the case, waiting probably a half-decade for me to find this use for it. Glad I hadn’t throw it out. When I look at the laptop now, I really don’t view the sticker as connected with Megadeth — just as an independent artwork.
Risk album cover
About that album, however: with it Megadeth tried to get away from their same-ol’ same-ol’ bellocisty and incorporate some fresh ideas from techno and other musical territory. Aging, they’d realized life wasn’t all about aggression, and further atempts to bring forth art that spoke only of hostility rang false to them; but, on the other hand, they (and, I presume, their biz overlords) wanted to still please the angry-teenager fan base. Trying to please everyone made the new elements sound unsure, just poor compromise. Not a brave enough risk.
A 1999 live version of Risk’s opening track, “Insomnia,” which is quite good, I think:
Alternate music for the frailly eared: the best recording, to my taste, of a particular Bach piece that made it onto the Voyager Golden Record.
Megadeth’s demeanor in the live performance above suits the angry young adults they once were, but in 1999 they were nearing their forties, and by that age I think it’s definitely time to have sequestered anger for release only when absolutely necessary. See as contrast artists such as Sting, whose long career has evolved through many styles, attitudes. Artists can’t force themselves to create once-agains of their past art; they’re no longer the same people. Unfortunately for 2010, Megadeth, currently out of tune with themselves, sound like such parodies of their youthful selves that I won’t embed a representative video. I must clarify, however, that I really enjoy most of their music, including Risk, and I wish that love to be noted.
Judith Butler has a passage about the necessity of taking risks, written in the context of ethical theory (emphasis mine):
… we must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human.
Generally I interpret — maybe wrongly — that Butler quote in terms of small and difficult interpersonal interactions. You’re having a longstanding quarrel with a friend, for instance, and you’re not sure what you should say the next time you see them. The real trick is, in the actual moment of interaction — when what [has formed you] diverges from what lies before [you] — simply to risk yourself despite the context of uncertainty (what will happen?) — at moments of unknowingness — to risk making yourself vulnerable — to become undone in relation to others — and try to do whatever the right thing seems to be, fear be damned, consequences subordinate to honesty.
Sometimes I feel I’m not living up to the need to take risks with my own creative writing. Probably that’s just my self-criticism module out of whack, but who knows, maybe it’s trying to tell me something. Here’s perhaps my best story ready to go out in the mail (as multiple simultaneous submissions) once some certain literary magazines open up their fall reading periods:
“Flares” ready for snail-mailing
When I wrote this story, I wasn’t at all concerned with grand ethical notions of risk. In fact I just wrote, wrote, wrote, laying down words like so many bricks on a path across a few months(!). Now I write faster, in more mature ways, even, but few other works of mine quite affect readers as intensely as this one, I don’t think. So maybe, likely, it was just good luck: every so often as a fiction writer you create a 10-out-of-10 story, not an 8-out-of-10. Goes with the work, maybe. But I wonder how I can push myself harder to take risks, to say vulnerable things well…
This is what to do with the remnants of vines you chop out of crepe myrtles. Those vines were so overgrown, by the way, that they effectively destroyed my hedge clippers — by the end of the afternoon, I’d wound up swinging the clippers like an axe.
Several times during Kate and I’s wedding & honeymoon trip, I asked taxicab drivers in NYC and DC for marriage advice — partly because, like Perot & Obama both, I’m all ears for suggestions; also, partly for the sake of amateur anthropology and since I simply like talking with people. The more unusual the person, the better. The more you feel you understand things well, the more you have to cultivate the attitude that other people might actually outsmart you; and, strangers are often the ones who give you best insights.
However, I don’t think I’ll be taking this one taxicab driver’s advice, which he gave as I stepped out of his cab: that Kate and I need to have children immediately. I replied that we were considering maybe one or two children sometime about five to seven years from now, and he hollered that Kate and I need to output one within a year. It focuses things, he shouted, driving off.
When I rode from St. Mark’s Bookshop (I purchased the rest of Paul Park‘s Roumania Quartet, but wisely left Jung‘s awesome and awesomely expensive Red Book to peruse at local libraries; also, St. Mark’s had a great poster that graphed USA economic inequality — this too I refrained from purchasing, partly because such a purchase seemed ironic splurging) — when I rode from St. Mark’s Bookstore toward Cafe Lalo, where Kate was waiting, a Senegalese taxicab driver poured all sorts of advice into the backseat. “Put water in your mouth!” he advised. “If you are angry, if you are about to speak hastily, put water in your mouth instead! Hold the water in your mouth until it cools your anger!”
Citing the numinous wifely wisdom that causes husbands to tremble, he also said Kate was always right about everything. On this I respectfully disagree. =)
But I do agree with his misleadingly callous-sounding comment that spouses shouldn’t have too high expectations of one another. Because no spouse can fulfill every need for the other; if one spouse isn’t into, say, heavy metal or shoes, the other can share that passion with his or her own friends instead. Plus, if the one spouse does check out a metal band or scrutinize some shoes, it’s a bonus for the other, not the fulfillment of some needy requirement the other has. And that way, with a good marriage, each constantly receives bonuses instead of feeling disappointment at failures to meet unreasonable expectations.
In DC (where we honeymooned) the taxicab drivers were tenser, less prone to talk, and busy listening to political news. The diverse taxicab experiences in both places, however, made me hope even more to be able to approach the world someday such that I genuinely feel that everyone, even the most problematic (mean-spirited, or obnoxious, or …) person has something to teach me.
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