I hope that you can see that this is a jellied salad. Do you see it glisten? Do you require a close-up to understand that these beans and mushrooms and pimiento strips are one solid, glistening mass? Okay!
See how the Ceramic Mushroom Family has gathered to show their children what happens to bad little mushrooms.
1. They feel depressed. Their ADD causes chaos in many aspects of their lives. They loose heart with failure after failure.
2. Some feel like they are capable of so much more. Even though their disorganization causes many failures, they still maintain a sense of what could be. They are often creative and intelligent. But, they are unable to harness those qualities and focus them on goals, and they are frustrated.
3. Others feel incompetent. They internalize their chronic disorganization and resulting failures.
4. Still others feel like fakes. Some are able to compensate and have good professional lives. But they break down at home. They are unable to take care of basic things like errands and bills. Still others have to spend inordinate amounts of extra time and effort and end up feeling like they don’t meaure up to co-workers.
5. They feel immature. They are not able to reach the normal goals of adulthood due to their disorganization.
6. They feel overwhelmed.
Because Ellen Willis is one of my primary subjects, I was at Harvard the week I got the call from the librarians saying that her archives had finally opened. Spending time immersed in her life is a strange and powerful experience. I got to know her in a really sincere but completely imaginary way, making an intellectual and emotional connection to her as I read each document in her boxes and boxes of personal writings. It’s a feeling that’s hard to capture, the intense and immersive relationships that historians have with our subjects. It’s really like you’re conversing with them sometimes as you read and respond to their ideas and recreate their lives using their own memories.
Here are some clips of Ellen’s notes for her “Dylan” article. Notice that she had to get the lyrics for herself by listening over and over to the songs (which she preferred to do while lying on the floor with a speaker on either side of her head). Sometimes, she gets them wrong; usually not. Some of her ideas and scribbles are here, too. They’re the best part.
