Tag: sherlock-holmes

462: “The Height of My Ambition” (Katherine Addison)

                “The height of my ambition at the moment is to make it into bed.” -Katherine Addison, The Angel of the Crows

                I read somewhere that snoozing in the morning doesn’t actually help you get up more rested. I can’t remember the source (probably somewhere I wandered online, and probably not reliable), but the idea was that slipping in and out of sleep doesn’t bring you into REM for that deep rest. So I set out to stop snoozing in the morning. To get up as soon as I woke up. A few years later that changing habit came up in a conversation with my therapist, who said, “Well, but I love that time in the morning. Especially with my partner.” And I was like, huh. I love that time too. The warmth. The skin. The half-awake togetherness, dreams messing around nearby like kids who know it’s time to stop playing but also know it’s still time for playing.
                So I like Katherine Addison’s play with ambition. The ambition to make it into bed. To stay there for a good long time. My to-do list for tomorrow is long-ish, and today’s was long-ish, but maybe I’ll add in a “height of ambition” that’s playing veo veo with my partner (“I spy with my little eye,” in Spanish) or saying hello to the bushes I hurried by today. Touching their textures. Ambitions of a moment, an hour, an afternoon. Some friends and I once spent several years compiling a list of words that are animals and actions (fly, of course, and badger, ferret, duck, ram, wolf—horse if you allow “horse around,” and we disagreed on “shark”). We could’ve googled it but that’s cheating. What a lovely ambition of the moment that was.

by Azlan

461: “Whom To Ask” (Katherine Addison)

                “So many things are a matter of knowing whom to ask.” -Katherine Addison, The Angel of the Crows, p. 305

                One of my favorite things about being in graduate school (and running away from graduate school to meet organizers, activists, librarians, gardeners, poets) is talking to so many different people who think so deeply from so many different perspectives.
                I wonder if one of the reasons scholars/experts get a bad rep in the United States is that there’s this cultural assumption, this pressure, that an expert should see everything. Understanding everything. Like Sherlock in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or House in House MD or (yeah, deep cut) Vin Diesel’s Riddick in The Chronicles of Riddick. A bunch of wild unpredictable shit happens, and then Riddick says, totally seriously, “That was my plan.” In the movie we’re supposed to believe him. In real life someone told me “There’s no one stupider than someone smart and sure of himself and outside his understanding.” I believe that more than Riddick. I’ve met lawyers with the most bone-headed takes on linguistics. Linguists with the strangest misunderstandings of language teaching. The list goes on and on. I don’t mean that you can’t learn about linguistics by studying law. I’m sure you can. But anytime someone is sure that their perspective captures and overrides everything, I think back to Riddick.
                So then there’s this delight. The delight of looking at a community garden and talking to an ecologist, and another time a farm organizer, and a gardener, and a birder, and an entomologist, and a local poet, and a painter, and people who are so much more than their one profession. Asking what they see. Sitting with it, and sharing our questions about what our eyes still hide from us.

by Azlan