That penguin lady

Ambassador penguins (Aptenodytes terrae). Height: 2-10cm. Range: North America (!).

The Potters' Penguin Project entered its fundraising phase in May 2017 with the Greensboro Science Center's Tuxedo Trot 5K. The Tuxedo Trot raises funds for the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB), with which the GSC's African penguin exhibit has ties. E, S, and I set up a table and gifted joggers with penguins if they made donations to SANCCOB. We raised about $250.

In 2018, pining to have our downstairs shower back (where else does one store 2,000 penguins?), I finally got my act in gear and started actively fundraising for Earthjustice. Claymakers hosted several hundred penguins this past summer, and 200 found "forever homes" in exchange for donations. When the Durham County Pottery Tour rolled around in November, three other potters and I hosted subcolonies at our studios, and I hosted penguins again at my studio open house in December; consequently, another hundred and ten penguins or so have waddled off. Attempting to spread the penguin joy beyond the NC Triangle, I started a fundraiser for Earthjustice on Facebook, so a few penguins have traveled to new homes via USPS. Yesterday, I shipped 25 Ambassador penguins (Aptenodytes terrae) and ~$2,500 in checks to Earthjustice's San Francisco headquarters. Fly, little birds, fly (figuratively speaking, of course)!

Yet...Because this amazing community-building project created over 2,000 penguins, I am still living with roughly 1,650 of them. Let me bear witness: that's a lotta clay penguins. On the bright side, they drive home the point they were created to illustrate, that a colony loss of 150,000 penguins is a travesty. On the down side, I am surrounded by a lotta clay penguins. I would love to adopt them all myself, but then I would become "that penguin lady" who gives over her entire house to an outrageous number of stray animals, eventually requiring a visit from the Animal Protection Society or the Health Department.

Added to the penguin mix were three boxes of organ sheet music that I used to store at work but, having left that gig in early October, I've been storing under the piano. (Remember the Great Purge of 2012, when we cleared out the study to make room for the fabulous piano? See how empty the room was? Those were the days!) Plus, of course, we have pottery everywhere, because it was Pottery Tour and open house season. In need of horizontal surfaces, after Thanksgiving we installed some basic Ikea shelving along one wall of the study.

Voila! Room for sheet music, pots, and 1,650 penguins! Which brings me to today's adventure: rough penguin inventorying! I used to know which boxes contained exactly which penguins, but as the colony has moved here and there and back again, penguins have jumped from box to box, and it's hard to know who's where. Penguin inventorying means greeting favorite penguins again ("oh, I remember you!"). I try to keep the joyous reunions brief, reminding myself that I can't keep every adorable penguin that crosses my path. It turns out I remember most makers--if not individual makers, at least their teams--folks from the NCSU and Claymakers Make-a-Penguin events; area elementary-, middle-, and high-schoolers; summer campers, friends, etc. When the entire colony was exhibited at Claymakers in 2017, I was impressed that makers could pick their penguins out of a crowd of (then) 1,973--but not surprised. Because really, every penguin is an individual.

Want to give some penguins a "forever home"? Contact me or see our Facebook fundraiser for details.

A Tale of Six Books

Am I busy finishing A Tale of Two Cities? No--but I interrupt my literary slackitude to bring you a tale of six books. Seven books, actually, but only six of them mine, and none of them fiction, thank goodness. This is one of those rare stories in which real life imitates a novel.

Here goes:

During the Great Purge, I made a lot of choices, obviously, about what to pull from the shelves. Some choices were easy, some were hard, and some took serious nudging and emotional support from friends. In the end, multiple boxes of books and CDs went to the nonprofit "Friends of the Public Library," from where they will hopefully find their way into hands and hearts that will enjoy them anew.

One particular set of books was too special for such purging while simultaneously too good to simply gather dust on my shelf: Sir Donald Francis Tovey's Essays in Musical Analysis--cloth-bound hard-cover printings from the mid-1940s, in excellent condition, all six volumes. Tovey was a musical jack-of-all-trades--musicologist, pianist, composer, conductor, analyst, and editor. The Essays in Musical Analysis were collected from his insightful program notes for the Reid Orchestra at the University of Edinburgh. They're classics.

I had coveted these books when I was in grad school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1990s, but the copies I had seen in the local used books store was beyond my budget. I acquired my set when a fellow grad student bailed from the program; he sold me a ton of books, all of them highly desirable to music theory geeks, for a mere $200, including the Tovey set.

The books moved with me to my first teaching gig in Kansas, and then to my second gig at Duke in North Carolina. I followed my friend out of the discipline in 2003, and all of the other books eventually ended up in the hands of a later generation of grad students, but I kept the Tovey Essays through every baby-step purge. The Great Purge of 2014 was different: the books had to go, but were too special to just give away to strangers.

I offered to ship them to former classmates who had remained in academia. No one jumped at the offer; as one explained, "thanks Liz, but I don't need any more unread books on my shelf mocking me (as [our advisor] used to say)." Some voted for eBay, but I feared a buyer would split the set up. One friend agreed, urging "c'mon, Liz. Keep 'em. They're classics. Beautiful little time capsules (in more than one sense). Every time you sell a volume, a program annotator cries."

So I put the books aside on the roll-top desk in the living room. Two months later, I was cleaning off the desk (we clean in our house largely by moving piles of stuff from one location to another) and decided the time had finally come for them to move on.

I had heard about a relatively new used-books store downtown. I've never been there, because, as you know, either I dislike reading or I'm too busy slogging my way through A Tale of Two Cities to buy more books. Whatever. I went to the bookstore's website, saw that they were in a historic city-center building with pressed-tin ceilings, and thought that folks who appreciate old urban architecture and old books might understand the emotional investment I had in a Tovey set I had barely read but nonetheless still cherished; perhaps they would be interested in them.

I started drafting an angst-filled email inquiry and wanted to accurately describe the condition of the books. They were in excellent shape for 70-year-olds, but I recalled that they did have some markings inside the front covers. I opened one volume to confirm that, and saw the Ex Libris plate, dated 1948--itself an antique. All six books had the same plate and date. I didn't recognize the previous owner's name, but thought it might be of interest, so I googled it. The search engine returned a few links, with More Familiar Name often included. Additional googling followed, plus a closer inspection of the pencil scrawlings inside the covers, where I found More Familiar's name written in cursive.

More Familiar is a former colleague of mine at Duke.

The books had belonged to More Familiar's first wife, a scholar in the performance practice movement who died, too young, in 1974. She had been a teenager when she put her Ex Libris plates in the books. More Familiar had taught in Madison for a few years in the 1970s before coming to Duke.

I emailed More Familiar and asked if he'd like the books. He wrote back that he had consulted volume VII just the week before and was wishing he had kept the rest of the set. I hadn't even known there was a volume VII.

So there it ended: the Tovey collection that was too good to randomly give away, too good to split up, and too good to sit unread was happily reunited with More Familiar, 1000+ miles and 40 years after he and the books had parted ways.

The Great Purge

A friend named this photo "The Emperor's New Piano":

It's a beauty, no?

About a year and a half ago, my mom reached her limit. She and my dad had been nudging me since about 1998 to move the family piano from their house to mine. Between the two of them, my dad was the more persistent verbally. He died in early 2012, but he would be pleased to know my just-do-it decision-making mom finally achieved what he was never able to. To encourage the transition, she generously helped us get the piano refurbished.

Just before Thanksgiving last year, The Piano People (Urbana, IL) declared their work complete. Shipping was postponed until after the holidays, by which point The Piano People were having difficulty locating a moving company in Durham that could receive and deliver the instrument. This gave us time for the long-delayed Great Purge.

For better or for worse, I don't have a photograph of the study pre-Purge. What's deftly omitted from the post-Purge photo above are two bicycles and some large rolls of bubble pack. What you also don't see--because they are no longer in the room--are the futon we had since grad school, a desk, a printer cart, and a table. These had all been providing horizontal surfaces for Stuff, so moving the furniture out for the piano meant clearing shelf space for keeper Stuff, plus folding and putting away 75 cubic feet of laundry that we had been storing on the futon instead of in our dressers.

Clearing the bookshelves meant finally saying farewell to the academic detritus I hadn't been able to part with during the Lesser Purge of '11--the books I was still clinging to because they had offered glimmers of light in my previous incarnation as a depressed music theorist. Goodbye books: a Recovered Academic lives here now. Ten years out, and I'm healed.

Cookbooks, gardening books, travel books, textbooks, unused scores... The purging process was slowed by time spent imagining how much better and more interesting I would be if I dedicated myself to actually reading and studying all the books on the shelf.

I willingly parted with some gems, including a 25-year old German textbook that built a lesson, in Chapter 3, around the vocabulary words "der Kassetterecorder" and "funkelnagelneu":

Gisela: "Ist der Kassettenrecorder neu?" 
Susi: "Ja, er ist funkelnagelneu." 
Gisela: "Und hast du auch Kassetten?" 
Susi: "Ich habe fast 20 Kassette. Was hoerst du gern? Culture Club? Styx? Duran Duran?" 
Gisela: "Ich hoere nicht gern Rockmusik, sondern lieber Klassik. Hast du nichts von Beethoven oder Brahms?"

Gisela: "Is the tape recorder new?" 
Susi: "Yes, it is brand spankin' new." 
Gisela: "And do you have tapes too?" 
Susi: "I have almost 20 tapes. What do you like to listen to? Culture Club? Styx? Duran Duran?" 
Gisela: "I do not like to listen to rock music, rather classical. Do you not have any Beethoven or Brahms?"

Thankfully, I have a blog, so though the book has moved on, I can continue to revisit that dialog.

We also bid adieu to about 25% of our CD collection. Goodbye Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Messaien, and you other bitter Brussels sprouts of academe. I admit it: I never liked listening to you. (Well, OK, Wozzek has some freaky redeeming value, but I'll rent it on DVD if I ever miss it--which I'm sure I won't.) Other choices were a little harder. Goodbye, Bach's Weihnachtsoratorium and Matthäus-Passion; you were too long for your own good.

The futon moved across the street, the desk moved into a hall, the printer cart moved into the basement, and the table moved...into the middle of the living room...to hold boxes of purged Stuff. We'll get rid of them this week, I swear.