Howl

On the way home today, after I got out of range of the sports talk station, I turned my radio to the local right-wing talk radio station to see what they were talking about. I disagree with almost everything they ever say, but sometimes it’s interesting to listen for a bit. This is the station in Charlotte that carries Rush Limbaugh’s show, if that tells you anything about what the station is like. Most of the local hosts lean a little more libertarian than Republican, though.

Anyway, today one of their more inflammatory hosts was filling in for the usual afternoon guy, and evidently the topic was about certain requirements that should be in place for welfare recipients. One of the two was drug testing, and fine, whatever, I don’t mind that so much because if the government is going to do the whole drug wars thing they might as well ask that people to whom they give money not use drugs. That’s not what got me so angry and made me change to another station.

As more callers called in, many of them said they agreed with the host on the “drug testing and birth control thing.” Since I didn’t hear the beginning of the discussion I didn’t understand what the issue with birth control was at first. But as the host began to talk I realized to my horror that she and the callers were saying that people on welfare should be required to be on birth control too, because since they can’t even support themselves they obviously can’t support kids too.

And this is the scariest thing I’ve heard in a long time. Setting aside all the moral questions in some circles about birth control itself (which is a complicated issue I don’t want to get into here), it sounds to me like what these people were saying is that poor people shouldn’t be allowed to have kids. They were saying that if you didn’t make a certain amount of money, if you were below the poverty line, then you shouldn’t be allowed the joy and experience of bringing a child into the world. You shouldn’t be allowed to create life and further the human race unless you have enough money.

Oh my God, forgive us. We don’t know what we do. We’re monsters and don’t even realize it.

I’ve only got about a month left in the semester. Five weeks I guess. But it’s getting busy enough that nothing exciting happens outside of school, which is why I’m not updating this as often. So: a quick update on school and then a poem I found a few days ago which I liked quite a bit.

Okay, school. In studio I’m working on a single-family house for the rest of the semester. Since that’s what I want to do for my career if I can, and the professor is letting us pick any building type on our site from the first half of the semester, I chose to do a house. I’m going to have to be more in-depth since it’s a smaller scale than the buildings everyone else is doing (community centers, retail, high-density housing, etc.) but I’m pretty excited about being able to do a single-family house for the first time in school.

My elective class is going really well and it’s easily my favorite class this semester. Our most recent project was to take photographs, and the ones I took ended up getting pretty great responses. I used one of my grandpa’s old cameras and it took really beautiful photos, and I think the set I came up with got across a concept clearly and attractively. I’m very happy with how it turned out, and I loved being able to do a kind of art I’ve done before and had some success with. There was a certain comfort in working in a familiar medium.

My other two classes are going well too. In one class we have to build a shadowbox based on an architect and an artist, and I chose Rural Studio and Banksy, so I’m working on how to put that all together. The way I have it designed right now has a pretty complicated Rockite pour, so hopefully I can pull it off. We’ll see. In my other class it’s all writing right now as I’m trying to revise and rewrite a couple previous short papers in preparation for putting together a pamphlet by the end of the semester.

Overall, things are cool right now. I’m going to live out in Los Angeles with my sister for two months at the beginning of the summer, hanging out and doing some research for a possible thesis topic. Also hopefully I’ll be working so I can have some food money. Anyone know a job I could get for two months out there?

Okay, so the poem I saw the other day. It’s called “October” and it’s written by a guy named Frederick Seidel; it’s part of a set of poems he wrote about each month. I know it’s not October right now (in fact Spring just started and it’s all pretty gorgeous weather), but I think it’s a really beautiful love poem and right now, as plants start to bloom and my part of the world wakes up from Winter, the world seems ripe for that kind of thing.

October

It is time to lose your life,
Even if it isn’t over.
It is time to say goodbye and try to die.
It is October.

The mellow cello
Allee of trees is almost lost in sweetness and mist
When you take off your watch at sunrise
To lose your life.

You catch the plane.
You land again.
You arrive in the place.
You speak the language.

You will live in a new house,
Even if it is old.
You will live with a new wife,
Even if she is too young.

Your slender new husband will love you.
He will walk the dog in the cold.
He will cook a meal on the stove.
He will bring you your medication in bed.

Dawn at the city flower market downtown.
The vendors have just opened.
The flowers are so fresh.
The restaurants are there to decorate their tables.

Your husband rollerblades past, whizzing,
Making a whirring sound, winged like an angel–
But stops and spins around and skates back
To buy some cut flowers in the early morning frost.

I am buying them for you.
I am buying them for your blond hair at dawn.
I am buying them for your beautiful breasts.
I am buying them for your beautiful heart.

I got sick with some kind of virus for half my time there, so I didn’t get to see everything I wanted to. I don’t feel like I really got a good grasp of what NYC is like, so I’m going to have to go back sometime.

But I did experience a few parts of the city. Times Square is kind of absurd, it’s basically just a gigantic neon mall. Take it or leave it, whatever. The neighborhoods in Manhattan are pretty cool though; SoHo, East Village, the Bowery, etc. Those are all really neat, vibrant places that I could see myself living in.

The best part though, was Brooklyn. I’ll admit I only got to see a couple parts of it (part of East Williamsburg and part of Bed-Stuy), but I loved it so much. The whole vibe of the place is really cool and young and alive.

I definitely liked most of New York and wouldn’t mind living there for a while.

I am now in New Orleans, have been since yesterday morning, and I’ve fallen in love with another city. Of course everyone always says New Orleans is great but it’s a rather different thing to hear about something and to experience that thing for one’s self, isn’t it?

There seem to be three or more different New Orleanses: Poor New Orleans (Lower Ninth, etc.), Middle- and Upper-Class New Orleans (most of the housing, the Garden District, etc. ranging from areas which are quite a bit like East Nashville or Charlotte’s Thomas Street area to neighborhoods which are more like Nashville’s Belle Meade or Charlotte’s Myers Park), and Bourbon Street. Of course you’ve all heard what Bourbon Street is like (although there are far more strip clubs than I had thought there would be).

But even though there are these different areas of the city there is a mood that pervades the whole place. It’s a sweaty mood, buzzing with energy that starts in  the Upper-Class areas, builds in the Lower-Middle Class and Poor areas, and finally explodes across Bourbon Street like fireworks in its numerous neon signs. Starting as a sort of French-Caribbean-Southern Genteel thing, it reaches an animal ferocity on Bourbon Street, appealing to the basest and most human feelings inside us. There are of course different important elements of the human condition which need to exist, like wanting to help one’s fellow man and things like that, but the kind of ultimate human-ness which is so obvious on Bourbon Street needs to be acknowledged sometimes, I think. At the very least it needs to be seen as reality, and something that a person can allow and learn from and deal with.

Also, as a final word, my classmates and I discussed this a bit and it turns out that having a plastic cup of beer out on the street at any time of day in any part of the city feels like the most natural thing in the world.

Oh my dear holy God.

Tuesday we drove down through Georgia and into Alabama, stopping at Selma, that city of marches and bombings and speeches and history. We slept and then in the morning drove into what I swear is another world altogether.

You might know I’m a fan of Rural Studio, an architecture studio connected with Auburn University. Rural Studio does architecture in Hale County, Alabama, one of the poorest in an already poor state. Their work is beautiful and spiritual and perfect and everything I want my own architecture to be some day. They are the architects who inspire me more than any other. And I’d never seen their stuff in person until yesterday morning, in the middle of rolling hills and a huge sky and what’s called the Black Belt because of the rich soil but might as well be called the Poor Black Belt because of the people who live there. This is a place that stopped when Reconstruction stopped so many years ago. It is what you imagine when you hear of the Poor South. And it is beautiful and perfect and heaven and earth all wrapped up into one blindingly spectacular place. This place is affecting and it is communal, it makes me shout and dance and be silent and still.

A group of us were walking down the road from one Rural Studio to another, maybe half a mile. Two dogs from the town, surely dogs someone owns but in places like this every yard dog is also a community dog, followed us the whole way and when we got to a place where those of us on two feet were on a walkway above the ground the dogs whined and barked, wanting to be up with us.

Later we drove on to Biloxi to meet with a group of college students who are working with other schools to build housing for poor people in that area. They cooked us dinner and we sat out on a deck for the rest of the night talking about our architecture and what should be done and that sort of thing. And I began to feel like I’d known these people much longer than a couple of hours.

And I think that’s the sort of thing the Deep Dark South can do for a person. It can take someone who hasn’t been in a specific town for more than half an hour and make them feel like they belong here and they’ve always belonged here and every yard dog knows them. This Deep Dark South, so full of ghosts and beauty and palpable dampness, can inspire and renew and cause little catches in the throat when a person sees something so beautiful they can hardly believe it exists. It can make a person unable to speak about an experience until a day later.

(Which is why I’m only writing this today, after a good night’s sleep and some serious thought)