As soon as we arrived, we walked into a bar full of friends while the storm raged on outside, and I woke early to watch the snow still falling heavily, blanketing the town with an additional layer of quiet. It wasn’t my first Snowpocalypse, but it was still startling to see the fabulous Severine standing in the snow piled higher than her knees.

We ventured out on Saturday morning through Friday’s snowfall into the brightness of downtown, to the Pavilion that looked like a landing spot from the future.

Somehow, the chalkings on the Charlottesville wall survived the drifts,

and Severine and I walked the length of the Mall,

blinking at the whiteness of the snow and the curiously mod shapes of iced lights,

to meet up with Eric, Ben, John, Will, and Dan (watch closely to see Ben’s glasses transition, Sara joined us later).

The beloved Christian’s Pizza was among the few restaurants open and served as the gathering place for Charlottesville news (I am eating a pesto-artichoke-feta slice and a pepperoni with local Starr Hill Jomo) as busy as the entrance papered with flyers.

With a foraging trip to Market Street Wine to talk Grecian grapes with incredibly helpful wine researchers, we proceeded to while away the hours in a big hotel room,

before venturing out that night to Zinc. On the way in, thrown snowballs whiffed; inside, excellent versions of confit with cassoulet, onglet frites, onion soup gratinée, and brussel sprouts with lardons were brought out to the long table at the center of this bistro.

Stories were invented, a Famous Professor stopped by, and we adjourned to decanted wine in a municipal building with a ceiling of possibilities.

I departed Charlottesville around noon on Sunday, when skillful strangers unearthed my car and help push the vehicle toward the road. I find it difficult to leave this town, particularly when close friends convene for holidays, and I am surrounded once again by brilliant literature geeks of the first order.

For the days of this week though, I’m circling further South…

Related posts:

1. the great portland snowpocalypse
2. charlottesville and courses
3. kthread reads: love is a mix tape

Dar Williams refrains filled the cul-de-sac, and the wireless networks were named “TJistheman”, “PabstBlueNetwork”, and “moonbaker” (the last, perhaps belonging to a baker at Mellow Mushroom pizza near campus).

I thought about how hard it is to leave this place, and the first time I heard the author’s name of the book I was reading, Love is a Mix Tape. Rob Sheffield, like me, was once in Professional English Nerd School at the University of Virginia. Now he’s a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, so perhaps we’re the same type of academic flake. Charlottesville formed us in many ways, but we had to leave the field to use what we learned here.

The best explanation I’ve found for why this particular track of graduate school remains a ludicrous idea happens on page 90 (I will say knowing how to survive on $14k a year is a useful skill in any economy and also that I have close friends who I do not doubt will be successful at this):

My friends and I assumed that we would soon be tenured professors, which is an excellent life goal–it’s like planning to be Cher. You think, I’m going to wear beads and fringed gowns, and sing “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” on the way to work every morning, and then one day, I’m going to get a call saying, “Congratulations! You’re Cher! Can you make it to Vegas by showtime?”

I know I channeled Bob Mackie when I dressed to teach class.

The music scene was different when Sheffield lived in town and the highlight of the summer was the Pavement show, but there are still a few people from Charlottesville who make music; I’ve bought eggs at Dave Matthews’s farm, watched Carbon Leaf rise to national prominence, and wished for better sound in Satellite Ballroom for Dave Berman (of the Silver Jews).

And there are places to buy records like in that book everyone references to talk music and record store culture, but an elegiac tone elevates Sheffield’s book from what could be a trivial subject. Like the wind that whips around town in winter months, the prose reveals a narrator smarting from the death of his wife and the included music must be intimate and loss-y.

MP3s buzz straight to your brain. That’s part of what I love about them. but the rhythm of the mix tape is the rhythm of romance, the analog hum of a physical connection between two sloppy, human bodies.

The dialogue between the two, Rob and Renée, flickers at that wonderful level that will never translate for a mainstream blockbuster audience:

“Where are you parked?”
“I walked.”
“What’s a catachresis?”
“A rhetorical inversion of tense, kind of like a transumption. Let’s go.”

Hot.

Even narrating Renée’s “big, messy, epic” life, the author finds room to celebrate that forgotten classic music video “Justified and Ancient”:

a few pages to brood on quibbling couples shopping in the middle of the night at Wal-Mart (173), imagines gonzo names for chain restaurant carb offerings (175), and insists that the songstresses run away from the “Magic Man,” a troubling song I’ve always avoided too (199).

Inexplicably, you leave parts of yourself in Charlottesville. For me, it was the first time that I had a group of friends, a whole group, that mixed and mingled and was largely, incredibly cohesive. My role was to throw parties and feed those that sat on the chairs by the kitchen and, through that, to heal the parts of me that I stayed in Charlottesville to repair, to remember.

The book echoes that sort of affection for the place while voicing a big love for a woman who changed the author. The narrator closes with a meditation on strong women in rock during his tenure in Virginia, wistfully hoping they still exist in pop music. He talks about Renée’s sewing, and how the clothes she made (often to wear at shows at Toyko Rose) fit her body as it became more like the women before her.

And so the mix tape playlists that begin each chapter add explanation to this real woman’s actions rather than reduce her (or the author) to a series of lists, ranked in order. This was a true, I’ll-love-you-even-and-especially-when-your-hips-spread love. Like a really good album, that kind of relationship nudges forth nuances each time you listen closely.

Related posts:

1. kthread reads: mrs. dalloway
2. kthread reads: the wonder spot
3. kthread reads: outliers

And I drive with friends out to the country. On Saturday night, we drove to Will’s place to cook together in his apartment inside the post office.

In the sleepy town of Esmont, we toasted to Ben’s new job in California (his work is brilliant) over a celebratory meal of duxelles (I pronounce this incorrectly in the video below) inside tenderloin that Will cooked perfectly.

I sautéed baby kale so tiny it can be eaten raw from Roundabout Farm (if you live in the area, consider their CSA), roasted new red potatoes, and puréed an improvised soup with leeks and jerusalem artichokes for the first course.

Like me, Will enjoys converting friends to a particular food—his arugula salad with lemon dressing, pecans, and Parmesan curls swayed Ben into liking the included fennel for the first time.

In a rhythm sharing his kitchen, the crickets hummed outside the screen door as Will poured a custard filling over the apple slices I arranged in his pâte brisée. Will moves lightly in his kitchen, but is a serious cook, as the tart attests.

After the tart, yoga postures, and wine, we sat picking favorites of four cheeses—Will favored the local Grayson cheese from Meadow Creek that Charlottesville’s Feast stocks, Ben liked a raw milk goat tomme, Tricia the St. André triple crème, and I’ll look for the Stoneyman hard cheese from Everona Dairy again to grate over homemade pasta. Jeremy remained much more interested in the tart (smart guy), working on a second slice.

We took the winding roads back to Charlottesville under a sky dark enough to see stars, and I went to sleep (my friend Helen graciously let me borrow her house while she traveled this weekend) planning another visit to these people I miss and place I still dream about…

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My friend Laura texted earlier from North Carolina, her current location on a roadtrip across these Unites States, and as she unapologetically perseveres in her Tom Cruise obsession (evidence: Laura and Tom), I had to roadtest this cheese for her.

Verdict: about the intensity I’d jump on a couch for. What’s your favorite cheese right now?

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Last night, I sat with vintage dresses draped across my lap, remembering the moment the bottom seam came loose on the brown velour, thinking about the scene in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway where Clarissa Dalloway sits in her drawing room mending her party dress, recalling the instance of the tear.

The silvery-green dress folds spill over her while she stitches and sorts through the morning’s moments, completely mistress of the room and the household being polished and primped in anticipation of her guests that evening.

All of a London June day somehow fits in Virginia Woolf’s crisp text, and even the doors are about to be taken off their hinges as Clarissa strides into the book’s opening pages and the morning, exhilarated with the day’s possibilities. Her thoughtful musings interrupted with the bombastic Hugh Whitbread’s, “Where are you off to?” She deflects breezily; “I love walking in London,” and carries on toward the shops, reveling in even her errand run.

Though bounded by the “leaden circles in the air” as clocks chime the hour and increments between, Clarissa radidates “on waves of that divine vitality.” And like the flowers in the flower shop, Woolf’s beautiful phrases wait for us to admire, inhale, and gather up as we walk from one basin to another with Clarissa.

How fresh like frilled linen clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays the roses looked; and dark and prim the red carnations, holding their heads up; and all the sweet peas spreading in their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale—as if it were the evening and girls in muslin frocks came out to pick sweet peas and roses after the superb summer’s day, with its almost blue-black sky, its delphiniums, its carnations, its arum lilies was over; and it was the moment between six and seven when every flower—roses, carnations, irises, lilac—glows; white, violet, red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in the misty beds…

If Clarissa repeatedly mentions her lack of knowledge, gesturing at a life experience limited by class, sphere, role, that combined with the nearness of death throughout (especially appropriate in this post-war novel) brightens the shine around her small triumphs and actions connecting people, one to another. While Virginia Woolf stated Mrs. Dalloway’s double is the doomed war veteran Septimus Smith, Clarissa’s opposite is zombie Lady Bradshaw, who infects others with her stupor as she entertains.

Our heroine Clarissa pours out courage, quietly affirming the extraordinary capacity to give and forgive as we press on into our days, buying the flowers, mending the dresses ourselves. And she is the perfect hostess (a role she both embraces and refuses), standing at the top of the staircase welcoming and wishing us safe passage.

As Peter Walsh, the old flame who truly sees her, notes, she perseveres; “there being in her a thread of life which for toughness, endurance, power to overcome obstacles, and carry her triumphantly through he had never known the like of.”

Your thoughts on, favorite moments in Mrs. Dalloway?

Related posts:

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2. kthread reads: love is a mix tape
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About a week ago, I was sitting in a large room in Budapest’s Novotel Centrum, stunned.

Like the fireworks I watched Friday night from a rooftop at George Washington University in D.C. with my good friend and fabulous cook Laura Hertzfeld (display below; thanks, as always, L),

my understanding of global blogging conversations was being exploded as I listened to fiery bursts from the mouths of impassioned activists and advocates from around the world.

I was attending the 2008 Global Voices Summit, a project that my current employer, the Knight Foundation, funds through a contest called the News Challenge for new ideas in local news delivery.

Global Voices cofounder Ethan Zuckerman (find his thoughtful blog posts here) confirmed my sense that was a conference to be experienced in person (though you can watch the conference video archive and read the liveblogs), echoing what my friend David Sasaki, who leads a project called Rising Voices within Global Voices, had told me about the importance of showing up for this community gathering (click the image from David’s Flickr stream below for more of his wonderful photography).

A matrix of interlocking projects, Global Voices and its associated efforts aggregate blog entries, often with images and video, from networks of authors, some of whom are expatriate bloggers, many of whom are exclusive to Global Voices.

With my academic literary background, I used to associate ‘expatriate authors’ with moveable European feasts and endless mountains and rivers of the twentieth century. I now think of individuals like the Global Voices Summit speakers who chronicle events in areas other than where they reside—in some cases because they were imprisoned or their safety endangered in those regions.

What was once a label for American authors registering moral protests, usually of preference rather than imperative, ‘expatriate’ bloggers take on a very real cosmopolitan ownership of their grassroots reports that, as Ethan suggested at the summit referencing the Reverend Wright incident in the Obama campaign, target specific groups and spread beyond intended geographic and temporal audiences into texts referenced by transnational communities of practice.

To draw this down to a personal level, I’m thinking about the spidering effects of online interactions right now in my dissertation research on local networks of food, currency, and shelter.

Two months ago I moved to Miami, and I now happily build online community during the day for Knight Foundation and reside in a magic cottage.

What I didn’t realize when accepting the job was that my new locale is a ‘food desert’ as far as local produce.

Grown to be exported, sitting on docks and hangars beside imported organic vegetables from Mexico and South America (that the Whole Foods franchise near me stickers ‘local’), it seems sustenance of the vegetal varieties easily crosses borders and food miles pile up in a nonsensical mad tea party ride of whirling exchange (a model that needs to be discarded like the statues deposited in Budapest’s social Disneyland, Szoborpark, that I visited recently with author and blogger Antony Loewenstein):

Intended consumption for these foodstuffs remains far from production areas, and the creators, disenfranchised expatriate farmers, we might say, have little ties with the communities where their greens go.

With my beloved local food culture gone missing, a deep sense of longing has emerged for the farmers’ markets that brightened my weekend mornings for the past five or so years.

This past Saturday, I felt buoyant as I returned to the Charlottesville, Virginia farmers’ market, to sellers I know and farms I continue to support.

Freshly dug potatoes and berries I’d never seen before, wine berries, from Planet Diversified;

the first tomatoes from Radical Roots;

peaches and blackberries that wouldn’t last the day

(we shared them at an afternoon picnic)

all reminded me of the ephemeral nature of consumption, be it literal and from the soil or juicy words from those who work around tenuous low-bandwidth connections.

Like the charcoal grill Laura and I veered in and out of alleys in Mt. Pleasant to pick up from grillmaster Cameron this weekend,

we are all, perhaps, chasing down/modifying online tools upon which to set our prose, flip our marinated arguments beside other composed lines of thought.

As we walked back toward Laura’s apartment at the end of a long day of celebrating, I stopped to watch teenagers setting off sparklers between cars.

Far from the bombastic anthems and expensive fireworks we had gaped at earlier, this DIY model is the one I intend to explore—come back for more kthread on how community cred is quietly replacing trumpeted transactions and svelte intervention models are illuminating packets of change…

Leave a comment after the jump–

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In recognition of Captain America’s return to Charlottesville, we deemed this past Saturday America Day II: Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through.

Like last year’s first America Day, we determined to spend the day doing very American things; this time, relating to music.

(Follow the rest of the adventure after the jump–)

Keicy, Jordan, Dana, and I began the day with a visit to Dave Matthews’ farm, Best of What’s Around, for fresh eggs and a lesson about chickens from Matthew and Suzanne Holt.

As the rest of the hipster musicians dragged product through their hair and arrived at America Day HQ, we took a few band pictures on a bridge (no troubled water in sight) and headed off to a small town. (Ben’s parents live in this same small town.)

Delighted, Nina and Laura discovered a bike a fan had left for them in downtown Waynesboro.

Then we all looked for (caffeination and) non-obvious books about music at Stone Soup Books;

Jordan chose Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia, I chose Puff the Magic Dragon, Laura found a book with scores and woodcuts titled My Pious Friends and Drunken Companions, and Jeremy located a Johnny Cash biography by his wife.

We detoured to Ben’s grandmother’s house to visit and she graciously pressed homemade sweet potato pie on us, fueling our journey to Wright’s Dairy-Rite in historic Staunton.

Nina, owner of alternative label of Hoss Records, evaluated our options on the jukebox before seemingly everyone in the diner surprised me with a chorus of “Happy Birthday.”

Riding milkshake sugar highs, we followed a slightly akimbo Statue of Liberty pointing us back to Charlottesville for American Idol karaoke (after Laura accompanied Dana on the guitar piñata),

And in fantastic leggings, Steph crawled the VIP booth at Escafe and directed us to a party at Kiki Bar’s closing night.

A few hours later, the shimmering continued as we toasted Easter with wild hibiscus flowers opening in flutes of cava,

biscuits with butter and jam, carrot cake, croissant pudding, rainbow chard, roasted lamb, potatoes, aioli, iberico ham,

and eggshells dusted with gold and silver that, peeled back, yielded solid chocolate fillings.

With gold dust on our fingers, and locals in the know, we shall have music this year wher’er we go…

For more pictures, see Laura’s Flickr set, my Flickr set, and see the video in HD on Vimeo.

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