Desperately Seeking Salem

Before we moved to Salem, we moved our entire household, sans cats, into a 10 x 10 x 10 storage facility in Ames, IA, pulled the door closed, locked it up, and hit the road.

Our stuff sat there getting chewed on my rats for six months while we figured out what we were going to do with our lives and where those lives might be lived.

Adam dealt better with departing from our things that I did. For one, he has always harbored a deep distrust of material possessions and makes daily attempts to limit accumulation (often imposing this little quirk on me — who says a girl is allowed only one shampoo bottle, one conditioner, and one bar of soap in the shower caddy?).

The initial liberation I felt at letting go of my things quickly changed into a depression of the dispossessed. While I also try to limit how much I accumulate — I’ve thrown out half my life three times moving back and forth between the United States and Germany — I have discovered how important it is for me to be able to make my own meals, sit in my own reading chair, and gaze admiringly upon my own tchockes. When temperatures dropped and I realized I left my favorite sweatshirt in storage, I felt truly lost.

But like all great tragedies, my attitude towards my stuff was about to go through a real transformation.

The Oregon Council for the Humanities gets this. The council just sent out the latest issue of its quarterly magazine Oregon Humanities, and it’s a real doozy — a serious and fascinating look at the politics of stuff.

The first thing you might notice is that the issue’s cover image includes a precious hand-drawn image of a product called  “Emily’s Birthday Beers.” It also contains some deep, long-form explorations of the meaning of stuff in American society, including:

Our Disenchantment with Stuff
The Physicality of Consumption
Why People Collect Stuff
Hoarding
Praise for Materialists (for good balance)

Needless to say, this issue – free to you! just send them an email! – is probably the most widely accessible themed nonfiction magazine I have ever come across.

It struck me as particularly timely since I have spent the period of our country’s recession moving house, keeping house, losing house, and finding house — and all the stuff that comes with said home.

Within three months of putting our stuff in storage, I forgot what I owned. Not that I forgot my possessions temporarily, I actually forgot that many of my possessions even existed.

Within four months, I stopped worrying that a tornado might sweep through Iowa and wipe out the storage facility.

Within five months, I started wondering if we shouldn’t just sell it all and become world travelers.

Well, that didn’t happen. Instead, within six months, we moved to Salem in the middle of a snow storm, got jobs, and started paying down our now Staypuff Marshmellow Man-sized student loans.

When our stuff finally arrived from Iowa via some really shady movers, it was more than enough Christmas for us both. Bedspreads and tape dispensers and bendable Kermit the Frog plush toys! Files and wall art and a ceramic Francis of Assisi!  And most fondly, spices, utensils, yogurt makers, spaghetti bowls, beloved coffee cups, and twenty boxes of books.

Losing our stuff and getting it back half a year later reminded us that we love what we have — we just don’t need much more of it.

The August issue of Salem Monthly is out! That means that publisher A.P. Walther has biked the issues all around town and you are likely to find one at many downtown locations and some strange ones. During my first trip to Breitenbush Hot Springs, I actually found one at a townie diner in Detroit, OR.

Yes, the influence of the monthly just keeps spreading.

I think it has much to do with new editor Eric Howald, who took up the paper’s first-ever full-time editor-in-chief position last February. Since Eric took the helm, the writing has gotten better, the stories have gotten juicier, and the whole paper has taken on the kind of alt-weekly feel that I’ve always yearned to be a part of.

In the new issue you will find such glimmering highlights as:

• A story on Salem’s Top Tweeps — When I posted about the top Tweep story last weekend, the online version hadn’t yet included the list of other 9 top Salemites frittering their days away on Twitter (count me among them). You can read the rest of the feature by downloading the PDF at the end of the article.

• Eric Howald’s story on efforts to preserve a dying language at the Siletz reservation, “Every two weeks, a language dies.” The story also features the work of Salem’s own Gregory Anderson, Executive Director of the Living Tongue Institute and star of the documentary, The Linguists.

• Sara Rassmussen’s story on Salem’s Etsy presence, “Salem artists connect, reach wider audiences via Etsy.com.” Sadly, it doesn’t feature my new favorite Etsy artist from Salem, DancingMooney, but it does offer a nice intro to the site’s community, if you haven’t heard of it yet.   For a broader, national shakedown on the meaning of Etsy for American culture at large, be sure to read the New York Times Magazine killer feature story “Handmade 2.0.”

• But the real drama going on is in the comments section of a story about the Roxxy’s move into Lefty’s Space on State Street –  a piece that appeared on February 1, 2009.  The comments section has become one of my favorite places in the world, a complaint section, a receptacle of dirty laundry, a seedy digital stomping ground where the real, unofficial story of the Roxxy is being played out in barbs of a few sentences. Prostitution! Lines of Coke! And the only thing I’ve been able to verify myself — HORRENDOUS SERVICE!

I’m heading downtown to pick up my copy today. Say what you will about the wastefulness of print. I’m kind of thrilled of the idea of someone out there using my Tweety birdy story to line the bottom of their birdcage.

My quest to prove that Salem has a literary culture — and not just a scrap-booking culture — continues this month with my Salem Monthly profile of retired printer Lee Schrunk, called “Playing with Type.”

Schrunk entertains groups of people — mostly students — in his basement museum of early 19th century antique letterpress equipment and products.  Lately, he has seen an upswing in interest in his privately-funded hobby museum, so much so that he believes that a “minor letterpress renaissance” is afoot.

I’m not really surprised.

If you’ve ever had the chance to make your own documents using letterpress, something I did one lucky day last spring while at the University of Iowa, you know of the thrill of setting type — the minute attention to detail, the challenge of designing a document before setting the type, the exultation of pressing ink to paper, the sheer ecstasy of pulling a fresh print off the press.

We MS Word processors have clearly lost something in the process of printing words, even if we gained speed and efficiency.

Also, as computers and automation have stripped our lives of some of the more authentic connections we have to physical work, younger people have clearly been seeking out opportunities to do actual hand-crafted work, however outmoded or time-intensive it may seem. The exploding interest in letterpress is simply an outgrowth of that trend.

The above image shows Mr. Schrunk holding the largest piece of type he owns, the letter “E,” most-used letter in the alphabet.  (Incidentally, Ernest Vincent Wright once famously wrote a novel, Gadsby: Champion of Youth, which omitted the letter “e” entirely. Cheap trick).

Here is Mr. Schrunk displaying a facsimile of a page from the Gutenberg Bible, a project he is doing with some visual arts students at Chemeketa Community College.

Mr. Schrunk’s whole house looked like this — deep, dark reds, a celebration of old stuff that can still be used. If I hadn’t been visiting him with my own purpose I might have spent hours exploring his collections.

Weeks after I visited him,  in the trendy Belmont district of Portland, I ran across a jewelry store that was selling individual pieces of type at 50 cents a pop. Man, do I love it when someone’s personal treasure, accumulated out of sheer obsession over decades and at a price that can only be imagined, enters the spotlight of popular commerce.