Misadventures of the Monster Librarian

No one at the Farm has had as much impact on my music-cation as TSO . He introduced me to all of the bands/artists listed below, and who knows who all else. Today as I am preparing to leave I am thinking back to my summer in grad school; TSO came for a visit that took us up for a long weekend around Traverse City, hiking Sleeping Bear Dunes, and all the way back to Detroit for a Ben Gibbard concert. How different our lives are 7.5 years later. Thanks TSO for all of these folks: The Postal Service Ben Gibbard Death Cab for Cutie She & Him Fleet Foxes Blitzen Trapper Dar Williams Gillian Welch Ingrid Michaelson Iron & Wine Madeline Peyroux Matt Nathanson Damien Rice MIKA Nickel Creek Regina Spektor Rufus Wainwright Sufjan Stevens

For a while B1 & B2 were living in the Buffalo area, which put them about 1/2 way between me and the Farm, and made for a couple visits and a memorable New Years Eve carpool to the Farm. On one visit B1 & B2 introduced me to Joe Purdy (some of his music was featured on Gray's Anatomy). Kinda forgot about him until just now, totally ordering some of his music when I get back to work!

I have never met someone who loved Bob Dylan as much as ValleyGirl. A year or two younger than me, I always thought of ValleyGirl as an old soul. When we met I hated Bob Dylan, hated hated hated, until one day something got into me and I liked him...a little bit, at least.  And while I will NEVER be in love with him the way she is, I will always have a soft spot for certain Dylan tracks, this one in particular. I can't help but picture ValleyGirl simultaneously strumming her guitar, playing harmonica, and singing "Oh Sister."  

Many are the gifts of Farmers. Wayne, the head of the Farm department, always mystified me with his ability to rattle off stanzas on command. Filthily clad in jeans and flannel, gnarled hands, smelling like cows and manure or haying season, Wayne would show up for breakfast--always late--and occasionally surprise everyone with a poem or two. I didn't even know Updike wrote poetry until Wayne shared this:  "Hoeing" I sometimes fear the younger generation will be deprived   of the pleasures of hoeing;   there is no knowing how many souls have been formed by this simple exercise. The dry earth like a great scab breaks, revealing   moist-dark loam--   the pea-root's home, a fertile wound perpetually healing. How neatly the green weeds go under!   The blade chops the earth new.   Ignorant the wise boy who has never rendered thus the world fecunder. --John Updike  

Sweet B1 and I spent so much time together; before B2 and her married, before sweet Everett came along, we were housemates. And in that time she shared many wonderful poems and poets with me. On a car ride into town one weekend afternoon, B1 recited this entire poem, and I fell in love with it on the spot.      "How to Like it" These are the first days of fall. The wind at evening smells of roads still to be traveled, while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns is like an unsettled feeling in the blood, the desire to get in a car and just keep driving. A man and a dog descend their front steps.The dog says, Let’s go downtown and get crazy drunk. Let’s tip over all the trash cans we can find. Thi s is how dogs deal with the prospect of change. But in his sense of the season, the man is struck by the oppressiveness of his past, how his memories which were shifting and fluid have grown more solid until it seems he can see remembered faces caught up amon...

My Farm housemates and I read the entire Chronicles of Narnia aloud, something I'd never managed to read all the way through in my childhood, and I absolutely fell in love with the series, and particularly with Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  Writing about Eustace Scrub on New Years Day feels right, because if ever anyone needed a new beginning, it was Eustace Scrubb . This passage is about Eustace, who, through his greed, was turned into a dragon and was unable to return to his human form. “Then the lion said - but I don't know if it spoke – ‘You will have to let me undress you.’ I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it. “The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the p...

Amos, TSO, B1, and I all lived together in a big old Farmhouse for a while, and though we had our moments, I think we all loved it. When Amos left us for American University in D.C. I think we were all a little heartbroken; Amos made and mailed to us a soundtrack for our time as housemates, and 10 years later I still listen to that playlist. One of my favorite songs, and the one that always makes me think of driving home to the Farm is Aimee Mann & Michael Penn's take on The Beatles, "Two of Us." Enjoy! And Happy New Year! Hope you all are with the ones you love.

I was introduced to so much stuff when I lived at the Farm; this amazing 5 years of my life where pop culture fell away and I was stuffed with things I'd not yet really experienced: folk music, scores of poets off the beaten track, novels I'd never heard of. I'd like to pretend that I didn't fight it tooth and nail at first, but eventually, it started to stick... And now I miss those days of sitting around and reading poetry aloud, or listening to a song with a friend and really hearing it. So, in honor of my Farm-cation (Farm education) I will post things I met and fell in love with when I was living in New England, over this next week while I'm at the Farm. I head out for my 11 hour roadtrip tonight, so will begin today. Thank you, B1 for Sharon Olds: "I Go Back to May 1937" I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, I see my father strolling out under the ochre sandstone arch, the    red tiles glinting like...