The other night I woke up in the dark of a hotel room and, for a long moment, had no idea where I was. I knew I wasn’t at home. If I was, there would have been cats and another human in the bed. But beyond that — a blank. The weird thing was, this wasn’t alarming. Rather, it just seemed like an interesting development. I lay there, in the soundless black, unmoored from time and place, and was unbothered. Is this, I wondered, what it’s like to die? It’s not so bad.
I’m in Des Moines for work, and the air smells like lilacs. Inside the Iowa State Historical Society Museum, murmurations of third-graders flock from one gallery to the next, as the tenured professors and grad students at my conference chat each other up wearing T-shirts that announce “America Needs Historians” and “Black History Is Iowa History.” Outside, the gold dome of the state capitol glows in the afternoon sun. Down the street the same T-shirt company hawks shirts noting that (Iowa governor and antiabortion ghoul) “Kim Reynolds Is Really Bad at This.”
The academics tell me about grants rescinded, crippling funding cuts to New Philadelphia, the first town founded by a free Black man in the United States, now a National Historic Site, and to the Lincoln Home in Springfield. It does not make sense that support of the Lincoln Home has been deemed unaligned with the federal government’s funding priorities, but it seems that’s the reality we have to work with.
On my way to dinner, teenaged girls holler at me from a passing car: “Lesbian faggot!” I suppose this is the reality they have to work with, to understand me — short hair, glasses, increasingly androgynous, estrogen-drained presentation a silent protest of the Trumpification of female beauty. It’s unsettling but also, weirdly, interesting.
On the drive out here I listened to the audio book of Sinéad O’Connor’s memoir, Rememberings, read by herself. In the introduction she explains that she has trouble remembering much of her life, piecing it all together, because she wasn’t terribly present for it. After her first album came out, she says, “I went somewhere else inside myself,” and didn’t come back to herself until her 50s.
“I was very young when my career kicked off,” she says. “I never had or took the time to ‘find myself.’ But I think you’ll see in this book a girl who does find herself, not by success in the music industry but by taking the opportunity to truly and sensibly loose her marbles. The thing being that after losing them one finds them, and plays the game better.”
She also says, with a laugh, that she’s writing the book out of “a desire to not have the ignorant tell my story when I’m gone.”
A former colleague, a deft writer and master of his craft, died earlier this month, and the ignorant have been left to tell his story, mangling facts and mishandling language. Once upon a time this would have at least merited some snotty tweets on my end but now it’s all beside the point. I don’t know how to save all the knowledge that is being lost. On top of the archives being erased, the histories being dismantled, the institutional memories tossed out with the trash, there are the PR-addled journalists, the AI-addicted students, the rot coming from within and without.
I’m suspecting that we’re all, nationwide, not present right now. We are losing our collective marbles, floating out of time and place. Perhaps when we find them again, we’ll play the game better.
A few good things I read this week!
I loved this John Cameron Mitchell (of Hedwig fame) op-ed in the NYT on why “Today’s Young People Need to Learn How to be Punk.”
Muscles are having a real moment, and I am here for all of it. I haven’t read Casey Johnson’s “A Physical Education” yet (I’m reading Bonnie Tsui’s “On Muscle” right now) but that’s up next. In the meantime, enjoy this great Defector interview with Johnson.
The NYT (I know, I know) is on a roll with the dance stories lately, providing me ever-more evidence for my campaign to convince the world, or at least a literary agent, that dance can save the world. This piece, on Axis Dance Company, an integrated group of both disabled and non-disabled dancers, and their use of assistive technologies in choreography, really gives a sense of the wide world of possibility out there once you break out of the ballet mindset.
And, of course, three different people sent me the link to this story, on the Chicago-born explosion of early bird dance parties for women. In addition to this my friend Naomi hosts “Granny Dance” parties at the Rainbo,a nd there’s another irregular event in Evanston in this vein, so even if they’re not all getting the Style Arts section workup, there’s probably one happening by you too.
Last: If you’re in Chicago this week please join me and the Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail on Thursday, May 22 at Middlebrow Bungalow, 2840 W. Armitage, 5:30-7:30 to celebrate the release of Berries for Bloomingdale: The Serviceberry Cookbook, a community cookbook celebrating the tenth anniversary of the opening of the Bloomingdale Trail. My friend Bonnie wrote it; I helped put it all together. It’s adorable! Copies are $15 and all sales benefit the FBT.
I enjoyed this immensely. Thank you Martha! And being a woman whose life work was modern dance, with my choreography showcased by my NY city dance company - a long time ago- late 1970s - 1990, I appreciate your shout out to ‘dance.’ It’s nice to know I’m not alone in my belief that dance and dancing can change the world.
that's an arts section writeup, not a style section writeup