Sneaking Poems Into Academia

Open letter to Taylor Swift

2009-08-12T22:43:00.002-05:00

Dear Taylor,

I think you're adorable. Your cute and blond and fairly wholesome looking. Furthermore, I really love your "Romeo and Juliet" song. I downloaded it, and I'm not even ashamed to admit it publicly. I unabashedly sing it in the car. I even play it despite the eye rolls it receives from my wonderful fiancee. It's super catchy.

That said, you are not a country western singer. You might try to argue that you're genre-bending. But we both know that would be disingenuous. A synthesized fiddle for 10 seconds on a track does not a Hank Williams song make. Lucinda Williams, Patty Griffin, hell, even Reba McIntire, these women are country western singers. You, dear heart, are a pop singer. And it's totally cool. There's no shame in that game. Embrace it. But let's just be who we are, and not put on airs. Cool? Cool.

Love and kisses,
Andrea

Vacay

2009-08-05T07:05:00.002-05:00

Oh beach. You get sand in everything, but your horizon is beautiful. See you in 12 hours.

Love,
A

2009-08-02T21:44:00.004-05:00

Let's see...this weekend sucked exhibit A, B, and C:

a. I get asked if I am pregnant at a baby shower. I'm not.

b. Paid credit card bill. Mounting debt seems insurmountable. Cry sheepishly to self.

c. I get a response from a story submission, which basically says we liked the story, but decided not to publish it. I am both uplifted that someone thought it was good and bummed that it wasn't good enough to publish.

Let's hope this week gets somewhat better.

Indecision

2009-08-02T13:58:00.007-05:00

(This?)

I seem to vacillate between wanting a very traditional, quiet suburban-raise-your-kids, have dinner at home kind of life and a batten-down-the-hatches, single, crazy, drink mint jullips in the afternoon, sleep with my students, writer-ly kind of life.

I don't know why these two things seem mutally exclusive, but they do. Kind of like being a Southerner or a Yankee.

Then again, I've always tended to think in binaries, despite my academic posturing.

(Or this?)

Captain Negativo

2009-07-30T14:38:00.003-05:00

So it's been a while.

I thought I'd take this opportunity to invite everyone into my negative space for just a moment.

When a former rival sends you pictures of her/his children on some social networking site, are you ever tempted to comment, "Huh. Wonder if she/he will end up being as big of an a-hole as you were."

Or is that just me having a terrible week?

Politically Incorrect Fantasy

2009-04-22T17:23:00.006-05:00

So, I've been wondering...does it make me a bad feminist if I occasionally daydream about quitting school to pursue the privileged life of the housewife? I do not say homemaker because that implies work; it suggests raising kids, educating and feeding them as well as cleaning kitchens and doing laundry and worrying about keeping a family sane, healthy and together. That sounds exhausting!

Nope. I fantasize about nannies and maids and Chanel suits and ladies who lunch and watching Dr. Phil at 3pm and working out daily so I have abs like an 18 year old and sipping martinis by the pool and the occasional charity ball and summer homes and skiing in Switzerland and Abercrombie and Kent African safaris and reading for pleasure and massages and expensive haircuts and furniture that didn't belong to my grandmother and dog walkers and apartments in New York and Birken bags and lots and lots of diamond jewelry.

Actually, I'm fairly sure this occasional daydream does not negate my good feminist standing. I am sure of this because I share this fantasy with my high school boyfriend Jimmy, who swore he would marry me, send me to law school, then live off my earnings. He often verbalized his intention to become a "country club wife," playing golf all day and lounging by the club pool. Ironically, though he is now married and I am engaged, neither of us are anywhere near nor on our way to becoming country club wives. He is a bit closer than I am, being the manager of a country club.

I, on the other hand, am not a member of any country club, nor plan on applying to become a member. In fact, the only club I belong to is the Graduate Women's Association. And, actually, I'm more than okay with that.

La la la

2009-04-14T23:27:00.002-05:00

I'm wasting time to take a break from writing about gender and Joyce. La la la...here, enjoy a cartoon!

Spring

2009-04-13T09:52:00.004-05:00

I love Texas springs. The new green on the oaks, the bluebonnets mirroring the dark blue evening sky, the Indian paintbrushes blooming a fire engine red.

That said, if all this stuff don't stop blooming, I might be the first person to die from allergies! At least that's what it feels like anyway.

Was it Poison who so wisely said, "every rose has its thorn?" Ahh, 80s hair band, you speak the truth.

Blogorific

2009-04-07T10:32:00.002-05:00

Sunday Confession

2009-04-05T21:12:00.003-05:00

I need to write more often before I only write Sunday confessions!

So, for today...I have a serious love jones for Reeses peanut butter cups. I realize they're terrible for you and everything, but something about that super sweet sugary peanut butter that gets me. I especially love the holidays--Easter, Christmas--because they make mega big peanut butter cups.

Even though I'm supposed to be on the wedding diet, I can't help but gobble up peanut butter cups every time they're made available!

Sunday Confession

2009-03-29T11:44:00.004-05:00

This morning, ill-advisedly, Randy and I forwent work and drank our morning coffee while watching Rachel Getting Married. The movie is phenomenal, and I would recommend it to anyone. It seemed fitting--we are a) planning a wedding and b) very familiar with Rachel's plight, if you know what I mean. Thus, we were able to double-identify with the movie. Besides wishing that I could have a cool Indian themed wedding complete with Carnival dancers and violin playing friends, I wished that this was simply my day. That we could watch the movie, putter around the house, maybe have some grown-up time, then walk the dogs. Instead, I am thinking of the papers I have to write, the stack of essays sitting to the left of this laptop that demand grading. Lately, I've been feeling better about school, generally speaking. It's going okay and, in any case, summer is only a month and change away.

But mornings like this, I miss the time I had with a job I could simply leave at work on Friday afternoons. I miss having time in general. I fantasize about quitting school to write, about getting an adjunct job somewhere, about having the time to go out to the movies. (I had wanted to see Rachel Getting Married the entire time it was in the theater, yet, could never find the time to go.)

I know this is all worth it, the work I'm putting into my professorial career. At least that's what I keep telling myself. Is it really though? I miss my friends. I miss seeing them and being fully there, not feeling guilty for what I am not doing while we are out to dinner. Professors I know talk about not doing any work after 5pm on weekdays and taking weekends off. Could this be possible? Or is that just like models who claim to eat french fries for every meal and attribute their rail-like figures to "good metabolism?"

A Texas poem for today

2009-03-24T14:10:00.003-05:00

Heart
by Catherine Bowman

Old fang-in-the-boot trick. Five-chambered asp. Pit organ and puff adder. Can live in any medium save ice. Charmed by the flute or the first thunderstorm in spring, drowsy heart stirs from the cistern, the hibernaculum, the wintering den of stars. Smells like the cucumber served chilled on chipped Blue Willow. Her garden of clings, sugars, snaps, and strings. Her creamy breasts we called pillows and her bird legs and fat fingers covered with diamonds from the mines in Africa. The smell of cucumber.... Her mystery roses.... Heading out Bandera to picnic and pick corn, the light so expert that for miles you can tell a turkey vulture from a hawk by the quiver in the wing. Born on April Fools’, died on Ground Hog’s, he pulls over not to piss but to blow away any diamondback unlucky enough to be on the road between San Antonio and Cotulla. Squinting from the back of the pickup into chrome and sun and shotgun confection, my five boy cousins who love me more than all of Texas and drink my spit from a bottle of Big Red on a regular basis know what the bejeweled and the gun-loading have long since forgotten. And that is: Snakes don’t die. They just play dead. The heart exposed to so many scrapes, bruises, burns, and bites sheds its skin, sprouts wings and fl ies, becomes the two-for-one sparkler on the Fourth of July, becomes what’s slung between azure and cornfield: the horizon. From Notarikon. Copyright © 2006 by Catherine Bowman

Sunday Confession

2009-03-22T11:43:00.003-05:00

I feel like I should write something light-hearted but the truth is, today, I am plagued by self-doubt. Lately, I've been wondering if I am a good enough writer to actually succeed in the scary, publishing-obsessed world of academia. Let me explain, or, at least, qualify my worry.

It's not that I haven't had my doubts about my ability as a fiction writer and/or a poet. I have at times. However, I have also written things that I know are good. How do I know? Because they feel right. Intuitively, at some prehistorically, preternatural level I can recognize that feeling as a kind of truth we rarely happen upon in life. Not everything I write creatively is good, but some things are. That does not mean they will ever be published or that I will be heralded as the voice of my generation. Sometimes, that, in and of itself, is a bummer. But at least I know. And it gives me some peace.

As for academic writing, I have no such moments of self-confident truth. Instead, I seem to rack up the B+s. That kind of writing does not come to me. Instead, I feel like some kind of antiquated hero, fighting her way through thorned bush and bramble, past fire-breathing dragon, hoping desperately that my kiss will awaken the sleeping princess of good idea and restore her to her rightful place--an academic journal. Only, I keep getting lost, my pants get caught in the brush, I scrape my fingers on branches, the fire-breathing dragon freaks me out so I hide a lot outside the castle walls. When I reach the princess, I can't decide if she's pretty or plain. My kiss is half-hearted or lackluster, my lips chapped from the struggle. She wakes up only slightly, utters a dismissive "B+ for you" and back to sleep she goes. I end up lugging her heavy body back down the mountain, and what to do with her then?

All metaphors aside, this is the first time in all my academic career - from Kindergarten through MFA - that I really wonder if I am smart enough or good enough to do what I want to do. This scares me shitless. Damn it, people may like me, but what good will that do if I have to submit my articles to blind readings?!?!

Why my grandma rocks

2009-03-19T11:11:00.002-05:00

I just opened this from my crazy, foul-mouthed, 92 year old Grandma Margaret. She's amazing!

The translation from Grandma handwriting into English:

Dearest Grand daughter;

Thanks for making me first of your good news! I loved sharing you and Randy's happiness with you. You will never have a better memory in life than your "First love!" Randy was special in making a special ring for a special girl!

I love you Andrea - Enjoy your life.

Grandma Margaret

*

AWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!

Happy News

2009-03-19T10:55:00.001-05:00

I'm engaged!!!!!!!!!!!

More details to come.

Love,
the bride-to-be.

The Poet Guy Clark

2009-03-11T13:49:00.003-05:00

He's actually a Texas singer/songwriter, but his lyrics are akin to poetry. And damn, can that man tell a story! He's old and world-worn and smokes and drinks. And if he wasn't already married and I wasn't attached, I'd totally fall in love with him. Anyhow, here's one of my favorites of his. I had to ban Randy from playing this in the car for a bit because it always makes me cry. But so good!!!!!!!

Let Him Roll
- Guy Clark

Well, he was wino, tried and true.
Done about everything there is to do.
He worked on freighters, and he'd worked in bars.
He worked on farms, and he'd worked on cars.
It was white port that put that look in his eye,
Grown men get when they need to cry.
We sat down on the curb to rest,
And his head just fell down on his chest.

He says: "Every single day it gets,
Just a little bit harder to handle and yet. . ."
Then he lost the thread and his mind got cluttered,
And the words just rolled off down the gutter.

Well, he was elevator man in a cheap hotel,
In exchange for the rent on a one room cell.
And he's old: years beyond his time,
No thanks to the world, and the white port wine.

So he said: "Son." He always called me son.
Said: "Life for you has just begun."
And then he told me the story I'd heard before
How he fell in love with a Dallas whore.

Now, he could cut through the years to the very night,
When it ended in a whore house fight.
And she turned his last proposal down,
In favor of being a girl about town.

Now it's been seventeen years, right in line,
He ain't been straight in none of the time.
It's too many days of fightin' the weather,
And too many nights of not being together.
So he died.

And when they went through his personal effects,
In among the stubs from the welfare checks,
Was a crumbling picture of a girl in a door,
And an address in Dallas, and nothing more.

And the welfare people provided the priest,
A couple from the mission down the street,
Sang "Amazing Grace," and no one cried,
'Cept some lady in black, way off to the side.

We all left and she's standing there,
A black veil covering her silver hair.
Ol' One-Eyed John said her name was Alice,
And she used to be a whore in Dallas.

So let him roar, Lord, let him roll.
I bet he's gone to Dallas, rest his soul.
Just you let him roll, Lord, let him roar
He always said that heaven
Was just a Dallas whore.

Just you let him roar, Lord, let him roll.
I bet he's gone to Dallas, rest his soul.

Deliciously wasting time

2009-03-09T16:23:00.003-05:00

I bitch a lot about being in graduate school, but, the truth is, I actually enjoy it. I like reading. I like talking about reading. I like teaching. I like talking about teaching. Even if I am incredibly busy, I am not required to be in a dull office from 9 to 5 five days a week. I have some freedom. The only thing I really miss is time.

This morning, on my first official day of spring break, still feeling slightly under the weather (some damn sinus/allergy problem leaving me with a brutal headache and the sniffles all yesterday), I curled up on the couch beneath Randy's unimaginably soft University of Texas blanket. Waylon draped himself over my legs like convalescent's quilt and commenced to snore ever-so-slightly.

The whole house was quiet. Outside, I could see the sky graying with rain. I could hear the muffled sound of Randy's voice in his office. The sound of the trees hitting the game room windows. To my left, on the coffee table, was stacked every Sunday issue of The New York Times since January 1, 2009. Or, to be more exact, every Arts & Leisure section, Travel section, Style section, Book Review and Times' Magazine. With no regard for chronilogical order, I made my way through the thin leaves of paper. My fingers blackened with print. I drank my coffee, listened to the hound snooze and felt naughty beyond naughty for letting the morning shift into the afternoon without having done anything "productive." I didn't clean the house like I usually do on my vacations. (If I didn't do it then, the house would never be cleaned!) I didn't read for school or fold clothes or write or knit. I just sat beneath the weight of the times, missing New York, happy for my nice warm, spacious house, feeling deliciously slovenly for enjoying the day go by.

Maybe, just maybe, I'll continue this luxurious derivation of duty to go see Revolutionary Road or The Reader by myself this evening. A diet coke, Reeses Pieces and a naked Kate Winslet. Can it get any better?

Confession #1

2009-03-08T20:58:00.003-05:00

My friend Nicole recently instituted "confession Thursdays" and encouraged her friends to do the same. Figuring Sunday is really the appropriate day for confessions, here we are. So what's mine? Well it's a two-fer.

Whenever I've been feeling overwhelmed as of late, I've indulged in my latest fantasy...wedding planning. For my wedding, that is. The one hiccup, I am not technically engaged. True - me and the live-in boyfriend are practically common-in-law spouses. We share finances. Dog ownership and raising responsibilities. We argue about loading the dishwasher, which seems to be a hallmark of marriage. The reason we're not official is that Rando wants to surprise me with the ring. I totally get it. And I am excited to be surprised. But in the meantime, I'm dreaming my perfect wedding. I'm perusing bridal magazines with my mom over coffee at Barnes & Noble. We're scoping out locations. I'm casually asking people about their weddings - what did they love? What do they wish they had done differently. I even have the beginnings of a guest list rigged up on excel. Randy knows I am secreting away bridal stuff. He just rolls his eyes and ignores it. There's confession 1.

Confession 2 is that I am ridiculously superstitious. Thus, I occasionally look askance at Randy and ask if he's planning to run away with Hooters girls because that would be my luck. I would be justly served by Murphy's Law for secretly planning a wedding pre-engagement. There you have it folks. My Sunday confession.

In the time between this Sunday's confession and next, if anyone has any wedding planning advice, do let me know.

For some weird reason...

2009-03-06T11:28:00.003-06:00

Whenever I am not receiving phone calls, or emails or comments on my blog, I semi-wallow in very mild self-pity, oddly repeating to myself the title of a Marquez book - No One Writes to the Colonel.

Minds are weird things.

On the highly successful

2009-03-04T11:06:00.003-06:00

Sometimes I wonder how many hard-working, high-achieving, fabulous glamatrons are driven to insane levels of success by some kind of childhood abuse or depression or trauma or psychotic tick or self-loathing perfectionism, etc. Guesses? Anyone?

Delayed spring

2009-03-01T11:51:00.002-06:00

There's something glorious about curling up in my green-walled library on a cold, sunshiney day, watching the dogs stand guard (those killer tabby cats are on the loose again!), drinking strong coffee and half dreaming/half reading.

Disconcerting Dream #2

2009-02-24T14:16:00.004-06:00

I dreamed that I was on my way to SMU's summer seminar in Taos. I had arrived at the airport. Upon my arrival, I learned that Obama had been shot. Horrified, I tried to rent a car, but couldn't. Instead, there was a huge pile of designer stilletto shoes through which a ton of frantic people were rummaging. I suddenly realized my feet were bare. I rushed to the box of high heels, picked out a ridiculous pair of white ones, 5" high, strapped them on my feet and began to run across concrete and blacktop, sobbing hysterically, cutting through the picturesque mountains so I could warn my friends at Fort Burgwin that Obama had been shot.

Weird.

Stop the madness.

2009-02-22T12:43:00.003-06:00

Seriously. No more people can tell me they're pregnant. I mean it!

Next thing you know, my 66 year old mother who had a hysterectomy when I was 6 will call me to tell me she's knocked up.

Speaking of Joyce

2009-02-19T11:32:00.006-06:00

Me at Sandycove tower. It was cold and wet. Still, it felt amazing. I wonder what else we did that day. Cordi, do you remember? Were we ever this young? It feels like a million years ago. It was only 9.

Eat your heart out Buck Mulligan!

Literary Crushes

2009-02-17T15:26:00.002-06:00

When I lived in London, I had this picture of a very young and dashing Joyce pinned above my bed. That spring, I went to the tower at Sandycove and saw the poppies at Howth. Rereading Joyce now, I can see why I had such an intense literary crush on him. But it would have been a terrible relationship. I can just imagine...every time you'd sit down after a long day's work, he'd say something obscure about the history of sitting down after a long day's work, then, "you didn't know that? Did you? Did you?" It would surely end with me knocking him in the head with an iron skillet.

You too can play Freud!

2009-02-16T15:24:00.004-06:00

So lately, I've been having these disconcerting vertigo dreams.

Last night, I dreamed that it was World War II. I had rescued my small child (apparently, in my dreams, I am a mother) and was ready to squire him away from the bombing. America was going to nuke Germany. We were in Germany. My dream-son and I. Hiding in the rural green. And the world looked like a map, flat, square. Only beneath it was nothing. Just eternity and blackness. The bombs were coming. I knew they were coming. Only, when they went off, they weren't bombs. They were words, written on a blank page, onomatopoeia words, rhythmic and terrifying: "Boom, wait, wait, Boom, wait, wait, Boom, next, next, Boom!"

And suddenly, the dreamkid and I were standing on a precipice and all around us was sheer cliff, and I knew if I headed toward the destruction to save anyone, we would fall. That the bombs had created a chasm around us. Over and over, my scientist father, who appeared quite suddenly, assured me, "No Andrea. The world is round. The bombing won't create a crater. The dirt and earth will replace itself. You will be fine." But I didn't believe him. I grabbed some rope and lowered it to the people below. My dreamchild disappeared. I yelled to the survivors, "I'm sorry! I can't come down. If I did, how would I be able to lift you up and save you?!"

And that's where I left it. Struggling to stay asleep, to believe my father, to believe that I wouldn't fall. But, instead, Randy shook me. "Don't you have to teach today?" he said. And I looked at the clock--I was an hour late. I barely made it to class on time. I threw on my pants, a shirt, brushed my teeth, applied deoderant and left the house with my hair in a pony-tail and my face unwashed. On the whole drive to school I felt unsteady. Unable to shake that sense of sheer drop, of delicate balance about to give way.

Now what, on earth, can that dream mean?

Countdown to Happy

2009-02-15T15:51:00.009-06:00

Just 24 days, 14 graded essays, one paper (on book theory), one presentation (on psychosexual drama in Joyce's Ulysses) and mundane household duties, Randy and I will be in Marfa.

Wandering the softly warmed streets, stepping into those sun-shielded galleries to look at the paintings, the installations, the photographs. We'll eat at Maiya's and Cochineal, drink Pelligrino by the fountain at the Paisano's patio. And read, legs tucked beneath us, at the Marfa Book Company, browsing the works of old professors and new friends. We'll sit outside, eat homemade biscuits and drink coffee and talk about Townes Van Zandt, cowboy poets and country hippies. We will have the opportunity to just be content.

And we'll drive down to the mountains. The one and a half hours in which the world turns foreign, more moonscape than land, all the while listening to Bach's Partidas and Sonatas for the violin. And, in the passenger seat, I'll put my feet up on the dashboard, note how tiny they are. We'll step out of the car and stretch our arms and yawn in the fresh air. And we'll smell the desert sage and watch for snakes. And stop, mid-hike, breath catching to look at how the short brush ascends the mountains. And everything will feel fresh and new and full of hope. And we'll cuddle in our nighttime apartment, listening to the artists laugh and the crickets sing. And we'll talk and I'll knit. And we'll embrace the comfortable quiet between lovers. And we'll forget the "have tos" and remember the idea of lucky and blessed. And pretend that this is the only world that exists.

Only 24 days, 14 graded essays, one paper, one presentation and numerous mundane household duties to go.

Happy V-day

2009-02-14T17:03:00.002-06:00

I came home to roses and chocolate. Randy is taking me to dinner and I'm spending the day cuddling with the puppies. All is well with the world.

The View from Dallas Hall Steps

2009-02-12T13:54:00.004-06:00

Yesterday, I was exhausted. I had slept uncomfortably, waking up every half hour or so to make sure what I was dreaming wasn't real, then falling back into fitfull darkness. After several strong cups of coffee I made it to school. Sat in my little windowless office with each one of my students, gave each young face half an hour of my time. Our faces close together, we poured over their papers, my purple pen's marks crying out, "don't change tenses" or "expand here" on the dull white of the page. I could feel their youth on them. What it was like to be that young, distracted, intense. When it was over, I wandered outside, felt the sting of my irises diminishing in the sun. Pools of coffee condensing. I leaned against the cold, stone stairway of our building, settled Ulysses on my lap, cradled the book with another book -- the annotatons to Joyce's epic. Class was in session. I could hear the whistle of a student sauntering late to his seminar. Smell the smoke of another kid's cigarette. I sat in the sun, closed my eyes, and pretended I was in New York. It felt so good that I almost believed that I could exist in this moment, this whole moment, forever.

With Monday, comes a second wind.

2009-01-12T18:12:00.002-06:00

I'm feeling much better...mostly due to the inordinate amounts of work I have to keep me busy. Given said work, here's a poem for the day:

I, Up They soar
by Inger Christensen
Translated by Susanna Nied

I.

Up they soar, the planet's butterflies,
pigments from the warm body of the earth,
cinnabar, ochre, phosphor yellow, gold
a swarm of basic elements aloft.

Is this flickering of wings only a shoal
of light particles, a quirk of perception?
Is it the dreamed summer hour of my childhood
shattered as by lightning lost in time?

No, this is the angel of light, who can paint
himself as dark mnemosyne Appolo,
as copper, hawkmoth, swallowtail.

I see them with my blurred understanding
as feathers in the coverlet of haze
in Brajcino Valley's hot-noon air.

From Butterfly Valley, A Requiem by Inger Christensen

Shared experience?

2009-01-11T22:32:00.003-06:00

Do you ever have weekends where you find yourself walking around in a perpetual state of heartbreak? If so, does this heartbreak cease by Monday?

The kids

2008-12-31T11:18:00.003-06:00

My dad just bought a video camera. He came over to film the Grand-dogs. Here are the admitedly slightly boring/adorable results.

Superwoman

2008-12-29T13:09:00.003-06:00

Whenever I have a break from school, I foolishly think that I'll be able to accomplish everything I've had on my "to do" list from 1996 to now. In fact, my office boasts two blackboards--one for school, one for writing. Each is full of my scratchy handwriting, enumerating my many tasks to accomplish. However, my body has other plans. For two days now, I've been waylaid by a cold. I can't help but think this is my body's way of telling me to take time off. My busy mind has gotten so bad that it kept running over things to do while I was getting a massage the other day. Must. slow. down. Any ideas?

Becoming Texas Again.

2008-12-27T17:43:00.003-06:00

Tonight Randy and I decided to take the dogs on a walk around the neighborhood. We've been very lax about walking them as of late, and both of us are feeling like neglectful parents. Just as we turned out of our cul de sac, coats buttoned up, dogs literally trying to run off their leashes, a woman hollered hello to us and waved us down. She asked, "Are you the woman who works at SMU? Which house do y'all live in?" Like a cat, my back went up. "Why?" I thought, "Who the hell are you? Are you planning to rob us or something?" But no. She had heard from our landlord that we were moving in and wanted to introduce herself, to tell us about her kids and welcome us to the neighborhood.

Thing is, I grew up in a VERY family friendly community. We never locked doors. Kids, spanning a range of ages, gathered together on summer nights to play kick the can or POW. We used every back yard, fenced, non-fenced. Knocked on neighbors' doors and asked for water if we were thirsty. Even the older couples without kids at home would feed us, house us, let us use their bathrooms. It was like living in a Norman Rockwell painting. At least on the outside. It was perfect kid-dom. Randy grew up in a similar community. We often talk about how much we want that for our kids--to have them play outside on their own all day, only coming in when the street lights come on. To be able to name every family in each house and to be welcome wherever they go. This is what we want. And yet, here, someone says hello, initiates exactly the kind of neighborhood relationship I dream about and what do I do? I recoil. Laughing, as we walked off, sensing my initial nervousness, Randy said to me, "It's okay babe. You don't live in New York anymore. Remember, you're back in Texas now."

And it's true. I am back in Texas. And it's not that New Yorkers weren't friendly. They're just guarded. And with good reason. It's funny. I spent 17 years in Texas and only 8 in New York. Why is it that the New York stuck so completely? Why is it so hard to get back to Texas?

Motivation

2008-12-26T15:53:00.002-06:00

I have none at the moment. Just FYI.

Happiness

2008-12-21T10:57:00.003-06:00

This morning, I woke up to hear Randy getting back into bed after letting the dogs out. The room was perfectly, just-this-side-of-cold, and I was gloriously warm under the covers. Bobosky came over to nuzzle my arm. I buried my cheeks in his fur and thought about getting up. When I finally did, Randy and I had our coffee in front of a roaring fire, the puppies curled up in our laps. We watched Sundance Channel's "The Drug Years" and giggled while repeating the phrase "dirty hippies" as often as possible. What will today hold? A trip to Barnes & Noble to return a book and peruse through wedding magazines. Perhaps a Bikram yoga class, where Randy and I can enjoy the heat and crack up at our complete inability to do the poses properly. Maybe even a movie later downtown, followed by coffee and scrabble.

My work is done for an entire month. Everything seems possible.

Winter arrives

2008-12-16T11:09:00.009-06:00

Now that the semester is over, I prepare the house for parties. I paint rooms, sweep floors, shoo the dogs off of furniture so cushions can be fluffed. Soon people will come. They will drink wine in a house where I do not drink. They will laugh, feel the smooth pool cue slide against their fingers, hear the sharp thwap of its tip hitting the 8 ball at the finish of a game. And soon Randy and I will attend other parties. Go to his parents' house, then my parents'. Catch up with family. The new year will come in suddenly, like it always does.

2009 holds so many promises--3 babies to be born. 1 grandchild. Somewhere in the house Randy hides the diamonds for my engagement ring. That too will be born out of grandmothers' jewelry, the love they had for me made material, to be carried next to a vein that runs straight to my heart.

And with all this done, why am I not happier? Why do I crave quiet and solitude? To lie naked in bed all day reading and reading and reading those books I've set aside for fun. To take not furious notes in. To simply seep into, like water back into the earth.

Perhaps it's this cold. The iced highways warn against leaving the house. What are you all doing on these cold days. So many lives behind those suburban doors, in those apartments I pass on the way to school. I hope you are snuggled beneath blankets, cuddled together on the couch, reading by the fire light.

In lieu of my own reading, I offer this to you blog readers...

Persephone the Wanderer
by Louise Gluck

In the first version, Persephone
is taken from her mother
and the goddess of the earth
punishes the earth--this is
consistent with what we know of human behavior,

that human beings take profound satisfaction
in doing harm, particularly
unconscious harm:

We may call this
negative creation.

Persephone's initial
sojourn in hell continues to be
pawed over by scholars who dispute
the sensations of the virgin:

did she cooperate in her rape,
or was she drugged, violated against her will,
as happens so often now to modern girls.

As is well known, the return of the beloved
does not correct
the loss of the beloved: Persephone

returns home
stained with red juice like
a character in Hawthorne-

I am not certain I will
keep this word: is earth
"home" to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably,
in the bed of the god? Is she
at home nowhere? Is she
a born wanderer, in other words
an existential
replica of her own mother, less
hamstrung by ideas of causality?

You are allowed to like
no one, you know. The characters
are not people.
They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict.

Three parts: just as the soul is divided,
ego, superego, id. Likewise

the three levels of the known world,
a kind of diagram that separates
heaven from hell.

You must ask yourself.
where is it snowing?

White of forgetfulness,
of desecration-

It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says

Persephone is having sex in hell.
Unlike the rest of us, she doesn't know
what winter is, only that
she is what causes it.

She is lying in the bed of Hades.
What is in her mind?
Is she afraid? Has something
blotted out the idea
of mind?

She does know the earth
is run by mothers, this much
is certain. She also knows
she is not what is called
a girl any longer. Regarding
incarceration, she believes

she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.

The terrible reunions in store for her
will take up the rest of her life.
When the passion for expiation
is chronic, fierce, you do not choose
the way you live. You do not live;
you are not allowed to die.

You drift between earth and death
which seem, finally,
strangely alike. Scholars tell us

that there is no point in knowing what you want
when the forces contending over you
could kill you.

White of forgetfulness
white of safety-

They say
there is a rift in the human soul
which was not constructed to belong
entirely to life. Earth

asks us to deny this rift, a threat
disguised as suggestion-
as we have seen
in the tale of Persephone
which should be read

as an argument between the mother and the lover-
the daughter is just meat.

When death confronts her, she has never seem
the meadow without the daisies.
Suddenly she is no longer
singing her maidenly songs
about her mother's
beauty and fecundity. Where
the rift is, the break is.

Song of the earth,
song of the mythic vision of eternal life-

My soul shattered with the strain
of trying to belong to earth-

What will you do,
when it is your turn in the field with the god?

From Averno by Louise Gluck

Quick Poll

2008-12-11T22:17:00.004-06:00

So, I'm writing this paper. I don't want to go into it too much because I'm lazy and...that's it. I'm just lazy. Anyhoo, I've been reading all this feminist criticism about porn.

I go back and forth on the "porn is evil" issue. Part of me thinks, "subjugation of women is bad. Period." Another part of me thinks, "women create porn. If it's self-expression and as long as it's the woman's decision, not made out of financial desperation or traumatic sexual abuse, etc then it's fine." Now I'm wondering, can a woman ever really make a clear, objective decision to get into porn/stripping/something self-exploitative. I really don't know where I come down on this issue. Readers, help me out. What do you think about porn. Potential feminist, liberatory act? Or a continuation of an ideology that seeks to keep women second-class citizens?

Grad school blues

2008-12-08T21:38:00.004-06:00

So.........here's a hypothetical.........

Say that I am doing worse in a class than I thought I was doing, and I'm not sure why. Let's assume that I work hard. I read. I speak in class. Other people do less work than I do, yet, as far as I know, I have the worst grade.

Hypothetically (of course) I would really like to think that the professor is being hard on me because I have potential. Kind of the ballet class argument. Ballet teachers always criticize the best dancers most and spend minimal time on everyone else. I doubt this is the (hypothetical) case. It could just be that I have lost the ability to tell when my academic writing becomes sucktastic.

Still, it could be true. Right?

PS - Congrats to Theresa and Ryan. We had a blast at your wedding!

Possibly my favorite poem ever

2008-12-02T11:46:00.002-06:00

Back when I was drinking I used to drunkenly read this to all my would-be lovers. Surprisingly, it always went over well. It seemed so romantic at the time. To be honest, it still seems romantic. Lee Young-Li, you are SO my literary boyfriend. I still can barely read the last line without starting to cry, just because this poem is so damn perfectly beautiful!

The City in Which I Love You
by: Lee Young-Li

And when, in the city in which I love you,
even my most excellent song goes unanswered,
and I mount the scabbed streets,
the long shouts of avenues,
and tunnel sunken night in search of you...

That I negotiate fog, bituminous
rain ringing like teeth into the beggar's tin,
or two men jackaling a third in some alley
weirdly lit by a couch on fire, that I

drag my extinction in search of you...

Past the guarded schoolyards, the boarded-up churches, swastikaed
synagogues, defended houses of worship, past
newspapered windows of tenements, along the violated,
the prosecuted citizenry, throughout this
storied, buttressed, scavenged, policed
city I call home, in which I am a guest...

a bruise, blue
in the muscle, you
impinge upon me.
As bone hugs the ache home, so
I'm vexed to love you, your body

the shape of returns, your hair a torso
of light, your heat
I must have, your opening
I'd eat, each moment
of that soft-finned fruit,
inverted fountain in which I don't see me.

My tongue remembers your wounded flavor.
The vein in my neck
adores you. A sword
stands up between my hips,
my hidden fleece send forth its scent of human oil.

The shadows under my arms,
I promise, are tender, the shadows
under my face. Do not calculate,
but come, smooth other, rough sister.
Yet, how will you know me

among the captives, my hair grown long,
my blood motley, my ways trespassed upon?
In the uproar, the confusion
of accents and inflections
how will you hear me when I open my mouth?

Look for me, one of the drab population
under fissured edifices, fractured
artifices. Make my various
names flock overhead,
I will follow you.
Hew me to your beauty.

Stack in me the unaccountable fire,
bring on me the iron leaf, but tenderly.
Folded one hundred times and
creased, I'll not crack.
Threshed to excellence, I'll achieve you.

but in the city
in which I love you,
no one comes, no one
meets me in the brick clefts;
in the wedged dark,

no finger touches me secretly, no mouth
tastes my flawless salt,
no one wakens the honey in the cells, finds the humming
in the ribs, the rich business in the recesses;
hulls clogged, I continue laden, translated

by exhaustion and time's appetite, my sleep abandoned
in bus stations and storefront stoops,
my insomnia erected under a sky
cross-hatched by wires, branches,
and black flights of rain. Lewd body of wind

jams me in the passageways, doors slam
like guns going off, a gun goes off, a pie plate spins
past, whizzing its thin tremolo,
a plastic bag, fat with wind, barrels by and slaps
a chain-link fence, wraps it like clung skin.

In the excavated places,
I waited for you, and I did not cry out.
In the derelict rooms, my body needed you,
and there was such flight in my breast.
During the daily assaults, I called to you,

and my voice pursued you,
even backward
to that other city
in which I saw a woman
squat in the street

beside a body,
and fan with a handkerchief flies from its face.
That woman
was not me. And
the corpse

lying there, lying there
so still it seemed with great effort, as though
his whole being was concentrating on the hole
in his forehead, so still
I expected he'd sit up any minute and laugh out loud:

that man was not me;
his wound was his, his death not mine.
and the soldier
who fired the shot, then lit a cigarette:
he was not me.

And the ones I do not see
in cities all over the world,
the ones sitting, standing, lying down, those
in prisons playing checkers with their knocked-out teeth:
they are not me. Some of them are

my age, even my height and weight;
none of them is me.
The woman who is slapped, the man who is kicked,
the ones who don't survive,
whose names I do not know;

they are not me forever,
the ones who no longer live
in the cities in which
you are not,
the cities in which I looked for you.

The rain stops, the moon,
in her breaths appears overhead.
the only sound now is a far flapping.
Over the National Bank, the flag of some republic or other
gallops like water on fire to tear itself away.

If I feel the night
move to disclosures or crescendos,
it's only because I'm famished
for meaning; the night
merely dissolves.

And your otherness is perfect as my death.
Your otherness exhausts me,
like looking suddenly up from here
to impossible stars fading.
Everything is punished by your absence.

Is prayer, then, the proper attitude
for the mind that longs to be freely blown,
but which gets snagged on the barb
called world, that
tooth-ache, the actual? What prayer

would I build? And to whom?
Where are you
in the cities in which I love you,
the cities daily risen to work and to money,
to the magnificent miles and the gold coasts?

Morning comes to this city vacant of you.
Pages and windows flare, and you are not there.
Someone sweeps his portion of sidewalk,
wakens the drunk, slumped like laundry,
and you are gone.

You are not in the wind
which someone notes in the margins of a book.
You are gone out of the small fires in abandoned lots
where human figures huddle,
each aspiring to its own ghost.

Between brick walls, in a space no wider than my face,
a leafless sapling stands in mud.
In its branches, a nest of raw mouths
gaping and cheeping, scrawny fires that must eat.
My hunger for you is no less than theirs.

At the gates of the city in which I love you,
the sea hauls the sun on its back,
strikes the land, which rebukes it.
what ardor in its sliding heft,
a flameless friction on the rocks.

Like the sea, I am recommended by my orphaning.
Noisy with telegrams not received,
quarrelsome with aliases,
intricate with misguided journeys,
by my expulsions have I come to love you.

Straight from my father's wrath,
and long from my mother's womb,
late in this century and on a Wednesday morning,
bearing the mark of one who's experienced
neither heaven nor hell,

my birthplace vanished, my citizenship earned,
in league with stones of the earth, I
enter, without retreat or help from history,
the days of no day, my earth
of no earth, I re-enter

the city in which I love you.
And I never believed that the multitude
of dreams and many words were vain.

From The City in Which I Love You by Lee Young-Li, Boa Editions, 1990.

Another Baby Born

2008-12-01T08:17:00.002-06:00

Congratulations to Nicole and Cody on beautiful Ava. I can't wait to meet her.

PS. Ava - your hand-knit present is coming soon. I promise I'll get it to New York before you turn 18.

Immaturity

2008-11-30T22:14:00.004-06:00

Tomorrow, I am presenting a seminar paper draft on women spoken word poets. I am arguing that due to the ephemeral and aural nature of spoken word, the overtly sexual and domestic imagery used by the poets to undermine gender stereotypes actually potentially reinforces them. I'm thrilled that I get to talk about living writers, and women at that. Even more exciting...

I get to say pussy in front of a room of academics who wrote on Bishop and Stevens and Eliot. I get to say pussy A LOT. Hee hee.

Secrets, Stupidity and Self-Expression

2008-11-24T14:36:00.007-06:00

So, I'm thinking of starting a secret blog. And yes, I know that announcing my intention to start a secret blog is completely inane. Where's the secret?

The thing is, I want to write about some things that are not suitable for potential stoppers-by. For instance, things that I don't want my students to know. Or my professors. Or my extended family. I like the idea about being able to write without self-censoring. On the other hand, why not just keep a diary? (Because my mother read my diary when I was 14, and it scarred me terribly. Never again will I keep a tactile book with my secrets hidden beneath the pillow-top mattress of my bed.) Is it ego that compels me to post my secret feelings somewhere? Why does it need to be read? And how does it get read if no one knows it exists?

I considered letting a few people in on the secret. Maybe John E., Ryan and Nicole. Possibly Dina. See what happens from there. Then again, what if someone slips and identifies me? What if I slip and identify me? Why am I so worried what people would think and hence insist on a secret blog? Why do things always have to be so complicated? Why is it that when I google secret and click on image, I either get Victoria's Secret or that cheesy Oprah book?

Sugar Ban

2008-11-18T10:58:00.005-06:00

Yesterday, I emailed the bf to inform him that I wanted to cut refined sugar from my diet. Between painting houses, teaching, reading, and the Annual Graduate Student Early Thanksgiving, we've been eating terribly. Pie for breakfast, leftover Halloween candy for dinner, Wendy's spicy chicken sandwiches, Papa John's pizza. Shameful. Anyhow, we've both been feeling like crap lately, which I am attributing to the sad, sad state of our diet. Hence, the sugar ban.

His reply was:

"I am all about cutting out sugar, but how is that going to work out with your chocolate addiction?"

How indeed.

Fear of Falling

2008-11-14T12:03:00.004-06:00

I took ballet from age 5 to age 15. Legend has it, my parents enrolled me in ballet classes because I was so prone to walking into walls and tripping over my own feet. They hoped it would instill me with some physical grace. It didn't much work.

Instead, I can easily come up with a dozen or so massive and embarrassing moments of klutziness. Once, in England, I was descending glass stairs in a very shi-shi club. I was wearing black knee books, a short skirt, a sweater that just rested on the edge of my shoulder. Just as the thought, "Man, I am looking hot tonight" flittered through my mind, I lost my footing and fell toppling down the stairs. Another time, on my way to work at Random House, I slipped on a curb and landed on my side in a puddle of dirty snow-melting slush. I spent my first 15 minutes of work trying to wipe the mud out of my dress pants. At the NYU CWP Christmas party, I was dancing with a friend of mine when my heel caught on the hem of my dress, and we both went crashing onto the dance floor in front of the ever-hot Serge, on whom I had an enormous crush. Recently, in front of my 5 classmates, my ankle faltered and I skidded onto the concrete sidewalk, skinning my hands and elbows.

Now, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, as I make my way across the Rotunda of Dallas Hall towards my classroom, I see my students. Some of them are cuddling up with new girlfriends before class, others texting while walking, their eyes glued to their blackberries, some running, their arms overflowing with papers and folders. I walk slowly in my kitten heels, all the time thinking to myself, "don't fall. don't fall. don't fall."

Take my advice

2008-11-09T19:37:00.003-06:00

What ever you do, no matter how terrible the color is, do not, I repeat, do not paint the molding on your walls. Especially if the molding, like ours, is ridiculously ornate. The new bedroom now looks beautiful, but only after I cussed, sweated and strained every muscle in my body. Not too mention the paint fumes I inhaled.

What's worse, we still have my office, the halls, the guest bedroom, the library, the dining room, the game room and the laundry room to paint. Anyone want to come over and help? I'll be your best friend!!!!

Best. Song. Ever.

2008-11-05T23:28:00.001-06:00

Damn it Gillian! Will you release your new album already?!?! Sheesh!

Thank You America

2008-11-05T09:09:00.002-06:00

I am so happy and overwhelmed. I actually cried for the entirety of Obama's speech last night. For the first time in memory, I am actually hopeful about our collective futures. Thank you America for renewing my faith in our country.

Dream

2008-11-04T10:11:00.003-06:00

Taking a cue from Nicole, here's my latest non-pregnant dream.

(I should say first that I went to bed late, after working hard on a paper. When it became apparent that the paper would in no way be ready for its Tuesday due date, I asked for a one-day extension. The request was granted by the very kind Dr. Carr.)

Last night I dreamed that Dr. Carr was screaming at me for turning in my paper late. He kept saying, "I'll give you the extension, but you're a terrible grad student. This better be the best paper I've ever read!" To be fair, the real Dr. Carr would NEVER say anything like this. He's one of the most fair, professional professors I've ever had. Nevertheless, the dream Dr. Carr was brutal. After my verbal flogging, I realized that I hadn't voted. I realized that all my liberal friends would be furious because McCain would win by one vote. During all this, my mind kept thinking, "should I paint the library Kelly green?" It kept repeating Kelly green, Kelly green, Kelly green over and over again.

While I think I am handling this very stressful time fairly well, obviously my unconscious feels differently.

Happy Halloween from Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber

2008-11-01T10:54:00.000-05:00

Simply Brilliant!

2008-10-29T14:48:00.004-05:00

My students are working through the "Values" section of our course. We've been reading various articles on whether or not torture is ethical. We've read articles both for and against using torture. On today's quiz, I asked, "What is Abu Ghraib?" Several students wrote the following answer:

"Abu Ghraib is an old prison turned into America."

So true!

Sign I am growing up

2008-10-26T22:52:00.005-05:00

So R. and I have been desperate to take advantage of our crumbling economy and buy some stock. Not only would we be (hopefully) adding to our future retirement, we would also be doing our part to rev up the stock market. The only problem is that we have NO liquid cash. We have two cars that we really need, two crazy dogs and a whole lot of books. Other than that, we have everything put into R's new business, which, I have no doubt, will be successful. Still, new businesses are always big on initial costs, and it takes a little while to repay the initial start up investment.

Anyhow, this weekend, R. mentioned he had a "ring fund" set up to purchase my engagement ring. I thought for a minute and said, "Screw the ring. Let's invest it!" So, we're looking through the family's jewelry collection to find something that will do for an engagement ring. The bf, very sweetly, kept insisting that we buy the ring. But I'd rather see the money in the market, and when the market goes up, woohoo! We have a down payment on a house! That plus R.'s business will provide the funds for a bigger, better ring than we could buy now. And I like the idea of wearing something my mother or grandmother once wore.

I can't believe I'm being so rational! Who knew?

Hearts on Fire Repertoire ring, don't fret. We may not be spending the $15 K on you now, but hopefully, it won't be long!

Why my students rock

2008-10-25T12:29:00.003-05:00

Lately, my students have been cracking me up. We've recently segued into the values section of the syllabus, gearing up to a paper where they have to write about their own value system. To present idealism to the kiddos, I did a whole song and dance, complete with light effects and audience participation, about Plato's "Allegory of the Cave." We drew pictures. We acted it out. We discussed all types of idealism. When I asked if the students could think of any contemporary works based on the idea of Plato's "Cave," I expected someone to mention "The Matrix" or "The Wizard of Oz." Instead, one of my offered up the example of Dave Chapelle's White Supremacist sketch. Then, doubling over in laughter, he recounted it for the class. Ah...Plato and Dave Chapelle. Priceless.

Yesterday, we discussed materialism. I had them write down two commercials they had seen for something they really wanted to buy. I got all sorts of responses, most of which, I anticipated. Girls wanted make-up, shoes. Guys--beer, cars. This led to a discussion about the gender bias of marketing. Then, one of my best students, a super smart guy's guy said, "I really, really want the Swiffer 360!" When I cracked up, he shrugged and said, "My dorm's super dusty!" To which I replied, "I too enjoy the Swiffer family of products."

Oh, students....you steal my heart!!!!

What ever happened to the Great Pumpkin?

2008-10-24T10:32:00.002-05:00

Winter, Tangerine Spritzer and Marital Spats

2008-10-23T16:22:00.009-05:00

A poem to celebrate all three!

After the Movie
By: Marie Howe

My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing about the movie.
He says that he believes a person can love someone
and still be able to murder that person.

I say, No, that's not love. That's attachment.
Michael says, No, that's love. You can love someone, then come to a day

when you're forced to think "it's him or me"
think "me" and kill him.

I say, Then it's not love anymore.
Michael says, It was love up to then though.

I say, Maybe we mean different things by the same word.
Michael says, Humans are complicated: love can exist even in the murderous heart.

I say that what he might mean by love is desire.
Love is not a feeling, I say. And Michael says, Then what is it?

We're walking along West 16th Street—a clear unclouded night—and I hear my voice repeating what I used to say to my husband: Love is action, I used to say to him.

Simone Weil says that when you really love you are able to look at someone you want to eat and not eat them.

Janis Joplin says, take another little piece of my heart now baby.

Meister Eckhardt says that as long as we love images we are doomed to live in purgatory.

Michael and I stand on the corner of 6th Avenue saying goodnight.
I can't drink enough of the tangerine spritzer I've just bought—

again and again I bring the cold can to my mouth and suck the stuff from the hole the flip top made.

What are you doing tomorrow? Michael says.
But what I think he's saying is "You are too strict. You are a nun."

Then I think, Do I love Michael enough to allow him to think these things of me even if he's not thinking them?

Above Manhattan, the moon wanes, and the sky turns clearer and colder.
Although the days, after the solstice, have started to lengthen,

we both know the winter has only begun.

From The Kingdom of Ordinary Time by Marie Howe.

Expert Political Commentary

2008-10-22T12:30:00.001-05:00

Here's my nephew's take on the presidential race. I love seeing them indoctrinated so early!!!

I Have a New Nephew!

2008-10-21T10:23:00.006-05:00

World, meet Oliver Thomas Brewer.

Ollie, meet the world!

(Ollie with big brother Sam and Daddy)

Who Would Jesus Pick

2008-10-20T08:20:00.004-05:00

for his dissertation advisor if he were a Ph.D. student in SMU's English Department?

Seriously. Who?

Celebration by Sabotage

2008-10-19T16:46:00.005-05:00

It has officially been a year since I quit smoking. How did I celebrate? By smoking three--yes three--glorious cigarettes at the English Department party last night. Do I feel guilty? Yes. Was it worth it? Damn skippy!
There's something wonderful about sitting on a screened-in porch, surrounded by friends and brilliant professors who you would usually be afraid of, but who, in this specific situation, are more charming than intimidating, and discussing literature, life, opera and love. It's so nice when your fantasy about graduate school actually becomes a momentary reality. But don't worry kiddies. I left the pack there. I figure 3 cigarettes every year or two won't ruin my new healthy lifestyle.

Besides, cigarettes are so attractive. They remind me of a very, very hot, seemingly dangerous, enigmatic, irresistible, slightly abusive rock-star boyfriend. Sure he's cheating on you and telling you that you could stand to lose a few pounds. But when you see him on stage, when your making love in his Lower East Side apartment with the windows open and the fall air coming in, the world is glorious. Of course, you eventually have to break up with him. But every now and again, when you're engaged in your fairly staid, conventionally happy life replete with deadlines and dinner parties, you remember the feel of his leather pants against the palm of your hand and think Damn! I wonder what he's doing now.

Since I'm working on my Elizabeth Bishop presentation

2008-10-14T18:06:00.003-05:00

I've always felt a kinship with Elizabeth Bishop, partly because of this poem. I guess I was a weird kid too. Is there any other kind?


In the Waiting Room
- Elizabeth Bishop

In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited I read
the National Geographic 
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
--"Long Pig," the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo's voice--
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't.  What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I--we--were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.

I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world.
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
--I couldn't look any higher--
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.

Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities--
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts--
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How--I didn't know any
word for it--how "unlikely". . .
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?

The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.

Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.

From The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop. New York: FSG, 1984.

Avoidance due to exponentially accruing shame

2008-10-13T22:27:00.004-05:00

I am an avid list maker. One might even call me a frantic list maker. I have lists for school-work that needs to be done. Lists for presents that need to be purchased. For books I want to read. For wedding dress designers I like. For poems that need to be written. For places I want to visit. For languages I want to learn and musical instruments I want to be able to play. For -- well, you get the point.

One of my most frustrating, ongoing lists enumerates the many people who I need to call and/or email. Usually, these are friends who I think about often, but with whom I've almost lost touch. (Cleyvia, Paula, Irini, Liz...the list goes on for quite some time.) This is due to selfishness. Or rather, to an inability to mutli-task. Between work, school, Randy, life in Texas, not drinking or smoking myself into oblivion, my days are full to the absolute brim. Yet, I refuse to believe that growing older and busier means letting go of people with whom I was once close.

The problem is that the longer I have gone without writing or calling, the more guilty I feel for not writing or calling. The more guilty I feel, the less likely I am to write or call. In this scenario, a phone call acknowledges how shitty a friend I can be, how bad I am about keeping in touch. I'm not sure exactly what I expect if I do call. A verbal stoning? An ad in the Times revealing me as a crappy correspondent? I always relish a call from an old friend. Still, the list grows and grows. Why do we do these things to ourselves? Seriously. Why?

Phew! Only 99 Days Left...

2008-10-12T18:16:00.002-05:00

"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure."
- Mark Twain

Strep Throat Confidential

2008-10-09T08:56:00.004-05:00

I felt a little under the weather on Monday night, then Bam! I woke up on Tuesday morning with 101 degree fever and a tortuously sore throat. Randy drove me to the doctor who gave me antibiotics and ordered me to go home and sleep. Which I did. For an obscene amount of time. I think I was up and about a total of 4.5 hours in a 36 hour period.

Anyhow, yesterday, I was still feeling awful but could no longer sleep. So Randy came in to check on me, heeded my whining to "Turn on the TV," handed me the remote and went back about his business. I'm gone a good deal of the day. Between work, my commute, homework, grading and my after school activities, my TV viewing is limited to Lost, Dexter, and True Blood. Yesterday, however, I discovered High School Confidential.

I was seriously riveted. It's a documentary that follows a group of girls in Kansas for all 4 years of high school. Dear God! The pregnancy scares (and pregnancies)! The parties! The fretting about boys! It's all so intense. I'd forgotten. The amazing thing about the show was that it didn't feel hyped up for dramatic effect. God knows being a teenager is dramatic enough. Watching the show, I suddenly wished I was back in Brooklyn, hanging out in Nicole's living room on a rainy day, watching the entire run of High School Confidential, eating massive amounts of junk food, drinking tea, and shaking our heads.

"Was it really like that?"

"I think it was!"

Memory and Wallace Stevens

2008-10-06T12:18:00.005-05:00

I am rereading Wallace Stevens for my poetry class. To be more specific, I am rereading the same copy of Wallace Stevens that I read in college. I thumb past pages I dog-eared at 20, sneak peaks at the notes in the margin. Beside "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" I wrote "nothing exists independently." In the margin next to stanza II of "Sunday Morning," I scribbled, "What good is an abstract God?." Underlined the couplet, "She dreams a little, and feels the dark / Encroachment of that old catastrophe." What a strange experience it is to witness the tumblings of my own young mind from a distance. The handwriting still bears that rushed slant it did back then. The book smells the same, feels the same in my hands. Yet, it has browned along its edges. The black type against the pale paper pops from the page. I don't remember it being so vivid.

I wonder where I was when I read this? Sitting in Riverside Park with Cordelia, dreamily watching the runners spring by? At the library, alone, warmed by the mustiness of the old books, listening to the feet padding along below me? Who was I dreaming of then? What did I think that year would bring?

Now, I read in bed, surrounded by two gloriously misbehaved dogs. They nuzzle into my back, curl around my legs, fitting me to this adult form. In the other room, Randy calls to the TV, curses the Cowboys back into their game. I lie still, occasionally looking out the window at the graying horizon. The poems make more sense now than they did before. As if I can intuit their meaning. As if they have drawn a hesitant, almost invisible picture on the wall of my mind, waiting for age to shine the image into full existence.

Mr. Stevens, thank you for so perfectly bookending my twenties. We'll talk again in another 10 years.

Anecdote of the Jar by Wallace Stevens

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Nerd Alert

2008-09-30T22:46:00.005-05:00

I admit it. I am currently obsessed with Lost. I blame my office mate Austin.

Part of my obsession derives from the huge crush I have onthe two male leads--a big, fat, entirely middle-school type boy band esque crush. In fact, just tonight I turned to Randy, my Lost co-addict, and said, "Sorry sweets, but I have the major hots for Jack and Sawyer. In fact, in a perfect world, I would love to..." He cut me off with a semi-sarcastic, "yeah, yeah. I don't want to hear it." I just smiled and returned to my knitting.

PS - I'm still not sure who I want Kate to end up with. Usually, I'd go bad boy and thus choose Sawyer. But Jack, with his pill-popping and boozing, isn't looking exactly like the nice guy anymore. Too tough to call...

PPS - I told you. Total nerd.

Sigh

2008-09-29T18:24:00.005-05:00

Well, I wanted to post something positive after my long-assed, self-pitying rant. But I have a paper due tomorrow, am stuck on the train and in a foul-foul mood.

I will say this...
Thank you to the commenters on my last post. Y'all did make me feel MUCH better. Though, I must admit, I still think of the pregnant posse and start crying. Albeit less often.

(These are not my pregnant friends. They are random preggos. My friends are much cuter.)

Dena - I would be your lesbian girlfriend in a second! You know, if we weren't straight.

Craig - You are a good cousin. Thanks for reminding me that while I may be broke, but I do still have some freedom.

And Ryan, Rye-guy - A compliment to my writing always cheers me up. I forgive you for getting married before me. I may even toast you guys at the wedding though I am not making any promises.

In other news, Tina Fey is my hero. Thank you for showing Palin as the ignorant, narrow-minded, unqualified VP candidate that she really is! (Seriously people...a breath away from the presidency. Republicans, PLEASE remember that when you vote! McCain is one thing, but Mrs. "I'll get back to you later" is quite another.)

Hell is a baby shower in Texas

2008-09-21T13:14:00.014-05:00

Get ready folks. This entry is a doozie.

It's a common misperception that hell is an otherworldly place full of fire and brimstone. I'd like to correct that notion right now.

Dear, loyal, sweet (three) readers, hell is very different. I know this from personal experience. See, I've been living in hell for about a month now. My bills get sent to hell. I receive my phone calls in hell. How did I end up here? What awful life decisions landed me this new miserable home? All very good questions. To truly address these questions would take a book, not a blog. Instead, I'll do my very best to give you the briefest description of what hell really is.

As several of you know, the boyfriend and I decided to move out of our housea month or so ago. We needed a bigger place and thought we could probably do better price-wise. So, after looking all around Fort Worth, we found what we thought was a lovely house. It was bigger than the South Adams place and had an incredible backyard, perfect for two ADHD puppy dogs. We payed our money. We signed the lease. We did a walk-through with the landlord. All was well. Or so it seemed. However, when we actually moved into said house...turns out the landlord had "forgotten" to disclose some major problems. What could be so major? Oh...just black mold growing on a closet wall (previously hidden by the landlord's ironing boards and boxes), a broken window (hidden by a well-placed armoire), exposed wiring (Yep. You guessed it. Hidden). When we addressed these issues, the landlord had a fit. So, given no other choice but the obviously horrendous one, we contacted a lawyer friend, cancelled our rent checks, put all of our stuff in storage and broke the lease.

We then settled in at my parents' house. We have since looked at EVERY rental property in Fort Worth. Two we loved. But someone got to them sooner. One we applied for. All was well, until the landlord decided us unmarried youngins weren't "good enough" for the schmancy neighborhood in which the house was located. The bf and I seethed over the letter we received from her and did our best to reassure ourselves of our future wealth and worthiness.

Living with one's parents at 30 with one's 38-year-old boyfriend--this alone is not hell. But let's add the following. In fact, let's do this in the second person because it's a little too close to home for first person.

Okay reader, imagine you are a 30-year-old unmarried woman living in sin with your boyfriend in Texas. Not cool, socially liberal Austin, TX. Nope. Old-school, bible-belt Fort Worth, TX. Everywhere you go, your friends, your parents' friends, teachers, doctors, and strangers ask you when the wedding will be. You say, "I don't know."

When you show up to a dinner or an event without your boyfriend, they ask, "Where's your fiance?"

You reply, "We're not engaged."

Even the evil landlord who screwed you out of your house tells your boyfriend, "You're fiance is an uppity bitch." Um...okay crazy. WE'RE NOT MARRIED!!!!!!!!!

And it's not because you don't want to be married. You and the ole' bf have discussed marriage at length. It's what you both want. In fact, you are practically engaged already. Practically instead of actually because this is conservative Texas, and he is a conservative Texan. Thus, he insists on proposing with a ring. You think this is very sweet. Endearingly sweet but a little annoying. Only because you would at least be able to answer the "fiance" questions without cringing and dying a little inside. However, this little death (not the good orgasmic kind) has no foreseeable end-date. The truth is that neither of you can afford a ring. Since you're both total fuck-ups who have made some obviously poor life choices, you are both broke. Add to your rocky pasts your entry into graduate school and his launch of a new business and broke don't even begin to describe it. Also add the detail that even your friends who seemed the most commitment phobic (Yeah, Ryan, I'm talking about you) are now happily in love and marrying by the end of this year. You suddenly realize that among almost all of your friends you are the sole unmarried person. This realization starts to feel like some sort of statement on your worth as a person.

Still, this alone is not hell.

Now, let's say numerous friends start contacting you to tell you they're pregnant. At first this is awesome! (Yay Nicole! Yay Amber!) Then it starts to be less awesome. In fact, you can point to the exact moment when this becomes rather sucktastic.

After a long day of teaching and learning, you meet your two best high-school friends for dinner. You arrive late, a conference with a student having gone way over time. They ask how you are. Instead of saying, "shitty and overwhelmed" and bursting into exhausted tears, you launch into the most comedic monologue you can muster. "Oh, you know, we're homeless, I've gained 15 pounds out of sheer stress, and I think Prof. B hates me. The usual. yadda, yadda, yadda." They laugh. Then, during a little break in conversation, just as you spill green curry onto your white dress shirt, one of them turns to you.

"Well," she says, "I've got some news."

"Cool," you reply, honestly not seeing what's coming.

"So," she says, "I'm pregnant."

Then the other friend, following on the first friend's heels says, "and so am I."

It is as if a bomb has been dropped. You're not sure why this has same effect as a swift, unforeseen punch to the gut. Then it occurs to you - what they've said is "we're pregnant." What you've heard is, "Unlike you, we're pregnant and married and homeowners and financially secure." To their credit, they would never point this out. In fact, you get the impression they're tempering their excitemtent out of kindness for you.

"Oh," you say, gulping back tears."That's great."

You pull yourself together because the truth is, you are happy for them. You are very happy for them! This is their day. They deserve to glow and discuss baby stuff in acronyms you do not understand. You love them. They will be great mommies, and you want them to enjoy this time as much as possible. And as their friend, the least you can do is delay the self-pity until post-dinner and ooh and aah and rub bellies. And you do.

You wait until you get back into your car, until you see their cars pull out of the parking lot, then you lean over your steering wheel and sob. You continue to sob for three days at any moment in which you are not either a) teaching, b) in class, c) reading, or d) forced to actually participate in being social. You tell no one about the baby/homeless/married misery because it feels so pathetic, until finally your boyfriend, sensing that something is wrong, hugs you and says he loves you. Then it all comes pouring out. You feel bad for this because you know he will feel bad that he is unable to give you the ring, the house, the baby. He knows it embarrasses you to be so far behind your peers, and he thinks this is partly his fault. You try to convince him it's not. Then you figure it's best just to stop talking about it. So you keep your mouth shut even after several more close friends call you to tell you the exciting news: "I'm pregnant!!!" You sit holding your cell phone and think, "Seriously? SERIOUSLY?!?!" and wonder what horrible thing you did in your past life to warrant this all happening at the same time.

Still, this alone is not hell. Hell is really the addition of today.

It's being signed up by your mother to host a baby shower for someone you don't know when you have a cold and ridiculous amounts of reading to finish (Gertrude Stein--Seriously! SERIOUSLY!?). Still, you think you can handle it. You need to stop thinking of yourself. This is all not about you. Besides, you have just begun to see the humor in the pregnancy bonanza. You even managed to go to the yarn store and buy supplies to begin the laborious process of knitting the 10+ baby blankets/sweaters, etc. you will need to complete in the next 6 months. Yet, when you wake up this morning, you lie in bed for 30 minutes really, legitimately trying to sink into the mattress and become fused with springs and fabric and foam. When you finally get up, you hold it together enough to help your mother cook and to decorate the table with pooh-bear plates and rattle/bottle/teddy bear confetti. You put on make-up, straigten your hair all before the guests show up and the belly-rubbing begins. An family friend enters the house, takes one look at you pouring punch into the punch bowl and tells you, "You look older." At that, you retreat to your father's home office (homeless, remember?) and try not to cry. Instead, you write a very pathetic blog entry about all of this, thinking that if you can get it all out, reread it, you will see that it is funny. You will see that you are blessed (even if you don't feel that way). You will stop being chronically humiliated and self-bashing and buck up. You will see that you are swimming in an Olympic size pool of self-pity, and you will force yourself to put on your big girl panties and suck it up.

Sadly, this doesn't work. You reread this post and debate whether or not it's too bleakly personal to publish. You think you might as well. If you have second thoughts tomorrow, you can always delete it. You are still trying not to cry. Your throat hurts. Your sick of being at your parents house. Your sick of losing rental houses to other people, of being insulted by landlords, and you think if one more girlfriend calls you to announce a pregnancy, you might get in the car and just leave. Where? Who fucking knows. Just somewhere that is not here. You don't want the three people who read this to tell you not to feel bad. You feel bad, and you are honestly doing your best to feel better. And every person who hugs you and tells you that things will be okay just makes you feel rawer and more exposed. You desperately want to go back to sleep. You wonder why you quit drinking. Why (WHY OH GOD WHY) did you quit smoking. But you hear your mother calling you. It's time to bring the presents to the fat lady who is glowing at the center of the room.

This, kiddies. This is hell.

Looking on the bright side

2008-09-17T21:10:00.004-05:00

This is a reminder to myself that we may be temporarily homeless, but at least we have each other.

For Love
by Robert Creeley
for Bobbie

Yesterday I wanted to

speak of it, that sense above

the others to me

important because all

that I know derives

from what it teaches me.

Today, what is it that

is finally so helpless,

different, despairs of its own

statement, wants to

turn away, endlessly

to turn away.

If the moon did not ...

no, if you did not

I wouldn’t either, but

what would I not

do, what prevention, what

thing so quickly stopped.

That is love yesterday

or tomorrow, not

now. Can I eat

what you give me. I

have not earned it. Must

I think of everything

as earned. Now love also

becomes a reward so

remote from me I have

only made it with my mind.

Here is tedium,

despair, a painful

sense of isolation and

whimsical if pompous

self-regard. But that image

is only of the mind’s

vague structure, vague to me

because it is my own.

Love, what do I think

to say. I cannot say it.

What have you become to ask,

what have I made you into,

companion, good company,

crossed legs with skirt, or

soft body under

the bones of the bed.

Nothing says anything

but that which it wishes

would come true, fears

what else might happen in

some other place, some

other time not this one.

A voice in my place, an

echo of that only in yours.

Let me stumble into

not the confession but

the obsession I begin with

now. For you

also (also)

some time beyond place, or

place beyond time, no

mind left to

say anything at all,

that face gone, now.

Into the company of love

it all returns.

From Selected Poems of Robert Creeley. University of California Press, 1991.

Why Walt Whitman's poetry sucks

2008-09-16T12:55:00.004-05:00

This is for all you Whitman fans with whom I've been arguing all week about why I hate his poetry.*

Case in point:

"I hear the trained soprano....she convulses me like the / climax of my love-grip; /
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies"

- Whitman from Leaves of Grass, Penguin Classics edition, p. 59, lines 602-604

versus

"But no Man moved Me--till the Tide
Went past my simple Shoe--
And past my Apron--and my Belt
And past my Bodice--too--"

- Emily Dickinson, poem 520 from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

*I realize I will probably take crap for this assertion. Still. I stand my ground. No sir, Walt Whitman. No sir!

Myth me baby!

2008-09-13T11:47:00.003-05:00

When I was little, my mother eschewed traditional fairy tales for Edith Hamilton's Mythology. I adored those magical bedtime stories. I loved hearing my mother read about girls turning into trees, about Gods falling in love with people, about snake-haired women and flying horses.

As several of you know, I am currently working on a collection of poems. Without giving too much away (I'm superstitious after all), let's just say I'm recasting the occasional myth to suit my own purposes. So far, I've used Persephone, the Cumean Sybil, Lazarus--a Christian myth if you will, and Portia, which I guess is not so much myth as history. In any case, you get the point.

So, small contingent of readers, would you like to help play muse? What are your favorite myths and stories? If I use one, I'll give you an acknowledgement if the collection ever gets published. Which is sort of tantamount to saying, "when I win the $300 million lottery, I'll buy you a pony!" Thank God hope springs eternal.

The Dangers of Google

2008-09-12T07:56:00.004-05:00

Okay. I want admissions here. Who else, on ever-so-rare occasions of nostalgia, googles their ex-boyfriends?

I don't do this very often. When I do, it's usually late at night. Perhaps one of my exes has mysteriously appeared in a dream the night before. Perhaps I've heard an old song on the radio that reminded me of them. Or maybe I've just been feeling a little melancholy or curious or masochistic. Whatever the reason, I hover over my computer screen so no one else can see if they walk in, and I type those dangerous letters into google.

What do these illicit searches yeild? What are these gentlement up to?

Well one has a name so common, google yields no results. Another, enjoys facebook. He puts up pictures of his lovely wife and two young children. One has made an independent film. I can't tell if it looks good or terrible from the preview posted on youtube. The ex whose absence as a friend I miss the most, well, he teaches at UT just 3 hours South from where I now sit.

Why do we do this? What am I hoping to find? I certainly don't want any reconcilliation. Maybe I just want to know they're doing well. Maybe (and this only applies to some) I want them to know I miss them. As if in the great wide world of the world wide web, they'll sense that I am sorry and shoot me that ole' email--"Hey! Long time, no talk!"

Dearest readers...what are your stories of google spying/snoopery? Please tell me that you too indulge in this odd reverie, this ressurection of past ghosts.

Something to keep in mind...

2008-09-11T19:03:00.002-05:00

Why Regret?
by Galway Kinnell

Didn't you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?
Weren't you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
Wasn't it a revelation to waggle
from the estuary all the way up the river,
the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,
the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?
Didn't you almost shiver, hearing book lice
clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old
Webster's New International, perhaps having just
eaten out of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
What did you imagine lies in wait anyway
at the end of a world whose sub-substance
is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?
Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
Didn't it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
broke open and the imago, the true adult,
somersaulted out and took flight, seeking
the swarm, mouth-parts vestigial,
alimentary canal come to a stop,
a day or hour left to find the desired one?
Or when Casanova took up the platter
of linguine in squid's ink and slid the stuff
out the window, telling his startled companion,
"The perfected lover does not eat."
As a child, didn't you find it calming to imagine
pinworms as some kind of tiny batons
giving cadence to the squeezes and releases
around the downward march of debris?
Didn't you glimpse in the monarchs
what seemed your own inner blazonry
flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren't you reassured to think these flimsy
hinged beings, and then their offspring,
and then their offspring's offspring, could
navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,
to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,
by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?
Doesn't it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

from Strong Is Your Hold. Galway Kinnell, 2006.

It's not 106 degrees anymore!

2008-09-08T09:03:00.004-05:00

I love the fall. It is far and away my favorite time of year. I love that first cold snap--feeling the weather shift from unbearable muggy heat to sweet inviting warmth. I love watching the leaves change into blood reds and sharp golds in the Northeast. I had never seen leaves that color until the October of my freshman year of college. (We were driving from Columbia to Harvard for a weekend debate tournament. Yes, I am a nerd. I sat in the back of the van stoned by those colors, colors so bright they shouldn't even exist in nature. Colors so unreally brilliant they should be reserved for crayons and acrylic paints. That fall trip to Harvard, I met the man who would become my first "real" love. He kissed me on a patch of green lawn outside a beautiful ivy-wounded Harvard building. And in the cool fall morning, we held hands on the way to breakfast.)

I even love the way the leaves change in Texas--how they transform seemingly overnight from heavy green to paper-thin brown. I love harvest moons. I love watching the Texas countryside get dotted by fat bales of dry hay. I love how it gets dark at 6:30 in the evening.

I associate fall with gossiping underneath the bleachers of high school football games, with trick-or-treating, with new school clothes, with light sweaters and homecoming dances. I associate it with the Norman Rockwellian elementary school carnival held every fall in the town where I grew up. You could win homemade cakes at the cakewalk, get your face painted, eat cotton candy till your whole body was sticky sweet with sugar. I associate it with returning to college in New York, with excitement, with love, with all things new.

So yay fall! Welcome back. I've missed you so much! I can't wait to find out what new things you'll bring to me this time around!

Moving

2008-08-29T08:39:00.005-05:00

Although the photo above is not a picture of our house, it does look incredibly similar to the chaos at Chez Luttrell-Keeth the moment.

Next time we move, I think we'll just do this. Start working out now kiddies...I expect y'all to heave our pier and beam onto your shoulders! Raise High the Base Boards Blogreaders!

Threats to My Compartmentalizing

2008-08-26T18:29:00.014-05:00

I visualize my brain split down the center.

One side is all ergonomic organization. The chrome well-designed, well-lit side. With it I analyze, store those Freudian concepts, those brilliant observations about historical and cultural connections to things literary. This is the science side. The side where logic sets up shop. It yearns to inhabit the thing, to see how it works. It wants to make it clear.

Then there's the other side. The dreamy, hesitant, hazy side. The soft sadness which creeps in. It files away whole poems, repeats them silently in the car, during a fight with my boyfriend, in class while the sun obscures my computer screen. With it, I narrate the world without stop. This is the shadow side. The side where memory strains to be heard over the day to day. It longs to link the thing to the world, to see how it fiction becomes true. It wants to keep it obscured.

(Pic a la Gregory Crewdson)

A wall divides the two. Porous to some extent, but a wall nonetheless.

***

This semester I'm taking a class on 20th Century poetry. I really like the professor. I like the poets we're reading. I even like the classroom we will occupy on Mondays between the hours of 2 and 5pm. But there's a problem - What we're studying I've studied before in a wholly different way.

I've written imitations of William Carlos Williams' poems in a guided attempt to let his voice seep into my own. Heard Kenneth tell his anecdotes about Ashbery and O'Hara. Talked art at the Cedar Tavern. Frequented the Nuyorican, judged the spoken word contests, seen Sarah Jones transform herself into the neighborhood drunk, the teenager in Spanish Harlem, the old lady on the stoop on Eldridge street. I've heard Beau Sia's CDs and grumbled when the poet's imagery turned sexist. Poet after poet relegating women to the role of mother, to sons, to the world as a whole.

I sound snobby. Don't get me wrong. I've been blessed to see/hear/do these things. I would love to study these poets again. I was lucky to read them once, and I'd be lucky to read them again. It's just that this class demands my wall be breached. It asks that I move these poets from memory and subject them to logic. To take away from them that which makes them deeply personal to me. It's part of my life I want to keep mysterious, shadowed. To see these poets in terms of aesthetics, to turn them steel-cold, not only breaks my heart, it makes me feel like a fraud. What could I possible say that doesn't feel like betrayal? What side do I belong to anyway?

All this in mind, I panicked. Emailed one of my favorite professors, the man with the thankless charge of looking after us Ph.D.s. I kept thinking, "I have to change classes. I can't do this. It's too much to ask." I didn't say this exactly, just, "can we talk schedules." The panic lasted until conversation turned to the Wasteland. And I fell in love with language again, with hearing it read aloud. "I can do this," I thought. "It can't be so bad." And I went to bed wavering between panic and determination.

When I saw the professor today, he said, "are you alright." "Yes," I said. "Just a mild freak-out. I think I'm over it now." He almost walked away, but (because I never know when to shut up, when the situation demands I keep myself to myself and stop being the 'emotional over-sharer') I said, "It's just...I don't know if I can write critically about these poets. I studied them creatively, you know. It feels too weird. I keep thinking, 'What am I doing with my life?!"

He thought for a second and said, "You're getting your Ph.D. and becoming an academic. This will be good for you. It's important. You need to learn how to teach this stuff this way." I listened to what he said. To exactly what he said. Still, what I heard was, "Give up the dream. It's this or that. Stop trying to have it both ways."

I ask myself (almost everyday) would I still be getting my Ph.D. if I was guaranteed publishing success? I think I would. I love the reading, the idea that I could make thinking a job. To do both would be ideal. To be a Mary Gordon - brilliant, talented, slightly scary in my fabulousness. Why are the academy and the writer's so at odds?!?! Each studies the other but seems to dismiss it at the same time. Why can't I have it both ways? Why is that so very much to ask? Are the too really that different?

If I were given to prayer, I'd light a candle to the patron saint of having one's cake and eating it too. If, indeed, she does exist, I hope she will tell me things will be alright. That I'm talented enough to write and smart enough to survive the academy. Tell me things are still up for grabs. Keep my memories shrouded from view, my logic hard and sharp as jagged rock.

And just that simply, Andrea falls in love with Joan Didion

2008-08-19T00:32:00.008-05:00

Why I Write
by Joan Didion
Excerpted from The New York Times Magazine, December 5th, 1976

"During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with abstract.

In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the bevatron up the hill. When I say that I was wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron you might immediately suspect, if you deal in ideas at all, that I was registering the bevatron as a political symbol, thinking in shorthand about the military-industrial complex and its role in the university community, but you would be wrong. I was only wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron, and how they looked. A physical fact.

I had trouble graduating from Berkeley, not because of this inability to deal with ideas--I was majoring in English, and I could locate the house-and-garden imagery in "The Portrait of a Lady" as well as the next person, "imagery" being by definition the kind of specific that got my attention--but simply because I had neglected to take a course in Milton. For reasons which now sound baroque I needed a degree by the end of that summer, and the English department finally agreed, if I would come down from Sacramento every Friday and talk about the cosmology of "Paradise Lost," to certify me proficient in Milton. I did this. Some Fridays I took the Greyhound bus, other Fridays I caught the Southern Pacific’s City of San Francisco on the last leg of its transcontinental trip. I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in "Paradise Lost," the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote 10,000 words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco’s dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits into a grayed and obscurely sinister light. In short my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus. During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn’t think. All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.

Which was a writer."

I don't know whether I want her to adopt me or cuddle me or write me long letters or just take me for a long ride up the Pacific Coast Highway. We could smoke cigarettes and talk about psych hospitals and politics and, I don't know, the way Southern California smells like ocean, honeysuckle, new paint and car exhaust.

I do know, simply based on this alone, that she is a kindred spirit. Quick! Someone send my broke ass some money so I can buy her books! Lobby my professors to give me some free time so I might read them! Can I pray to Joan Didion to rescue me from all this academia? It's 12:43 am, and last night I only slept 3 hours. I'm still exhausted. All this academia leaves me no time to write.

Listen Joan, I know you've had a rough few years, but I swear I'm a good listener. I apologize for not reading your work until now. But it was on my high school AP English Exam, and your name in type had such negative institutional connotations. I promise I will read your books. Just promise me you'll talk to me about writing. Just talk to me until I forget how busy life gets. Just for a little while it would be nice to not be so ambivalent and so young.

In honor of the English department dinner party I am attending this evening

2008-08-17T10:33:00.005-05:00

Drunken Memories of Anne Sexton
by Alan Dugan


The first and last time I met
my ex-lover Anne Sexton was at
a protest poetry reading against
some anti-constitutional war in Asia
when some academic son of a bitch,
to test her reputation as a drunk,
gave her a beer glass full of wine
after our reading. She drank
it all down while staring me
full in the face and then said
"I don't care what you think,
you know," as if I was
her ex-what, husband, lover,
what? And just as I
was just about to say I
loved her, I was, what,
was, interrupted by my beautiful enemy

Galway Kinnell, who said to her
"Just as I was told, your eyes,
you have one blue, one green"
and there they were, the two
beautiful poets, staring at
each others' beautiful eyes
as I drank the lees of her wine.

From Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry by Alan Dugan

I have now officially become a Natalie Portman fan

2008-08-15T22:31:00.001-05:00

This is amazing! It's Devendra Banhart's video for his song Carmensita. I have watched it at least 4 times.

PS - You Tube you are redeemed!

It was 107 degrees in Fort Worth today

2008-08-15T21:53:00.001-05:00

So, to commemorate the misery, I found this gentleman who blatantly rocks. I also appreciate his ability to find the silver lining in this heatwave which has reached near inhabitable levels.

Joy, Death and Floating

2008-08-11T22:00:00.005-05:00

I was a weird kid. I would even say I was borderline macabre. I would like to blame this on my parents, and, in part, that blame is well-founded. My mother told me the plot of Hamlet as a bed-time story. My father had me believing that Jesus Christ Superstar was an adequate representation of the bible. According to our family, Judas was made the real sacrifice, not Jesus.

My Grandmother is obsessed with death to the point of the absurd. She recently threatened to die unless my cousin or I do something "interesting" (read "get married" or "have children.")In any case, sometime around the age of 6, I had a good friend, an acquaintance and a family member all die right about the same time. This lead to a freakish obsession with death on my part. I thought about it all the time. What would it be like? Would it just be blackness like my parents said? I took to thinking about death during everything I enjoyed. This may sound depressing, but actually, it was sort of life-affirming. During my bath I would think, I could be dead now. I could be experiencing nothing now. Eating a great dinner, I'd think "thank God I'm alive to have this dinner."

This is all leading up to a little moment I had today. I was at the pool of my Aunt's condo complex in South Padre Island. One of my dearest friends was next to me reading a trashy novel. My boyfriend and her boyfriend were deep sea fishing. Both she and I were looking forward to their return as we had planned to make an elaborate meal with whatever they caught. From the pool I could hear the rhythmic roll of the waves. I could see the sea grass green against the perfectly pale blue sky.

I laid floating in the water thinking, "I could be dead now. I could be where I do not feel this warm water, do not hear Shelly turning the pages of her book, the cry of the sea gulls." It felt so simply wonderful to be alive. Then I thought of my friend Christina. Two years and four months ago she took her own life. "She should be here with me," I thought, "feeling the air in her lungs make a buoy of her, watching the wind push clouds across the sky." But whatever that other is that I used to imagine, she is there and not here. It's still odd and so deeply disheartening to think that she is no longer here.

She died on my birthday, and that irrelevant serendipity of date makes her bound to me in an indescribable way. As if we were different sides of the same coin. I miss her terribly in a manner that strikes me as both ineffable and mysterious. It suprises me how much I miss her. How often I think of her. How often I imagine what she would be doing now if she were still alive. It's not something I like to talk about. Writing about it is different. But even this feels like a scratch on some unknown surface of loss. I realized today that my worst fears are coming true...I am forgetting her - the tenor of her voice, the way her perfume smelled. Or maybe those memories are just as true as they ever were. Perhaps, that fear is just the shadow of her absence. Knowing what memories I have are all I'll ever have of her. How would she feel, I wonder, to know when I feel most alive I think of her death? That in those moments of rare, simple being she reminds me to enjoy it for her sake as well as for my own? That she is there with me, feeling the giddiness of floating to the sound of water? It would be happy to think so.

Lists of 10

2008-08-08T10:10:00.012-05:00

10 Things I've Forgotten:

1. How to play Gin
2. The theories of Adorno
3. To pick up milk on my way home

4. My first Brooklyn zipcode
5. The exact number of feet you're supposed to signal before you turn
6. What my Grandpa smelled like
7. That guy's name
8. The gift for 2nd marital anniversaries
9. How to read music
10. How to be worry-free

10 Things I Remember

1. The taste of wet reeds after playing the clarinet
2. How my high school boyfriend smelled (a wonderful mix of Drakkar Noir and Marlboro Lights)

3. Not to end a sentence with a preposition
4. To write my thank you notes
5. The song my Grandma used to sing me when she said good night
6. How to change a diaper
7. "When You Are Old" by Yeats
8. What getting a tattoo felt like
9. How to get from my dorm in Hampstead Heath to King's College via London transit
10. How much I love you

Feel free to add to the list with your own forgettings and rememberings

Because I love Louise Gluck and because it's hotter than hell

2008-08-06T09:49:00.002-05:00

A Myth of Devotion
-Louise Gluck

When Hades decided he loved this girl
he built for her a duplicate of earth,
everything the same, down to the meadow,
but with a bed added.

Everything the same, including sunlight,
because it would be hard on a young girl
to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness

Gradually, he thought, he'd introduce the night,
first as the shadows of fluttering leaves.
Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars.
Let Persephone get used to it slowly.
In the end, he thought, she'd find it comforting.

A replica of earth
except there was love here.
Doesn't everyone want love?

He waited many years,
building a world, watching
Persephone in the meadow.
Persephone, a smeller, a taster.
If you have one appetite, he thought,
you have them all.

Doesn't everyone want to feel in the night
the beloved body, compass, polestar,
to hear the quiet breathing that says
I am alive, that means also
you are alive, because you hear me,
you are here with me. And when one turns,
the other turns—

That's what he felt, the lord of darkness,
looking at the world he had
constructed for Persephone. It never crossed his mind
that there'd be no more smelling here,
certainly no more eating.

Guilt? Terror? The fear of love?
These things he couldn't imagine;
no lover ever imagines them.

He dreams, he wonders what to call this place.
First he thinks: The New Hell. Then: The Garden.
In the end, he decides to name it
Persephone's Girlhood.

A soft light rising above the level meadow,
behind the bed. He takes her in his arms.
He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you

but he thinks
this is a lie, so he says in the end
you're dead, nothing can hurt you
which seems to him
a more promising beginning, more true.

From Averno by Louise Gluck, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007

It's 107 degrees in Fort Worth

2008-08-04T10:56:00.002-05:00

Due to the heat, I am incapable of normal adult functioning. Come 2:30 I need a nap! Perhaps the new house with its stellar central air conditioning will combat this lethargy!

Open letter to you tube

2008-08-03T11:33:00.004-05:00

You suck!

(This comes after spending way too long trying to post an awesome video to this blog only to have it NOT work. I will retract this sentiment if and when youtube decides to function.)

Fighting the lure of self-loathing

2008-07-30T18:21:00.004-05:00

Why can't this be the epitome of beauty? Seriously! Check out this pic of Marilyn. She has hips, her thighs touch, she has a bit of a tummy. Yet, she was the penultimate sex symbol. Why can't this still be the standard body image? I hate being a woman sometimes. I just saw pictures of me in Taos, and I look e-nor-mous!!! I wish we American ladies could just accept ourselves for who we are. I am well with-in the healthy range of weight for my height. And yet, here I am thinking, "I'm so fat!!!!!" Feeling like I want to crawl into an oversize sweatshirt and hide in a seriously darkened corner. I am fantasizing about weight watchers and fearing my swimsuit like it's some torture device specifically designed to humiliate me. Part of me strains towards confidence. I want to say, "this is how I look. I am curvy and beautiful and have nothing to hide." Then I watch TV, browse the newsstand, see 18 year old girls with super-flat stomachs and think, "Ah! I must never eat again!!!" This is not okay. Skinny does not really look good on women. Case in point...

Luckily, I love food and so always do end up eating. What to do about this state of things? How do we come to so loathe our bodies in this country? Why can't we just love ourselves simply, like we love other things?

For my lover, on his birthday

2008-07-24T22:15:00.003-05:00

When You Are Old

- W.B. Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

From The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

Business Trip

2008-07-20T21:44:00.008-05:00

Well, I'm off to SMU's campus in Taos with these people for a week and change.

Hopefully, we won't have killed each other by the time I get home. Wish us luck! I'll let you know who got short-sheeted at English Camp when I get back.

Calling all friends and editors

2008-07-18T16:10:00.003-05:00

I'm nearing completion on a new version of "Down in the Well," the Bull-Rider story I started at NYU. I'm hoping it's far better than it used to be. Anyone dying to read it and give me their take? C'mon. Ya know you want to! If for no other reason, read it and offer suggestions out of pity for the author. I have a brutal inner-ear infection and am totally dizzy. I have a definite "please God make the room stop spinning" thing going.

Because Hank Williams and Steve Earle sing the contents of my heart

2008-07-17T11:58:00.008-05:00

A Wife Explains Why She Likes Country
- Barbara Ras

Because those cows in the bottomland are black and white, colors
anyone can understand, even against the green
of the grass, where they glide like yes and no, nothing in between,
because in the country, heartache has nowhere to hide,
it's the Church of Abundant Life, the Alamo,
the hubbub of the hoi polloi, the parallel lines of rail fences,
because I like rodeos more than I like golf,
because there's something about the sound of mealworms and
leeches and the dream of a double-wide
that reminds me this is America, because of the simple pleasure
of a last chance, because sometimes whiskey
tastes better than wine, because hauling hogs on the road
is as good as it gets when the big bodies are layered like pigs in a cake,
not one layer but two,
because only country has a gun with a full choke and a slide guitar
that melts playing it cool into sweaty surrender in one note,
because in country you can smoke forever and it'll never kill you,
because roadbeds, flatbeds, your bed or mine,
because the package store is right across from the chicken plant
and it sells boiled peanuts, because I'm fixin' to wear boots to the dance
and make my hair bigger, because no smarty-pants, just easy rhymes,
perfect love, because I'm lost deep within myself and the sad songs call me out,
because even you with your superior aesthetic cried
when Tammy Wynette died,
because my people
come from dirt.

From One Hidden Stuff, Barbara Ras, Penguin, 2006.

On the subject of scarration, tattooing, and high point...

2008-07-12T22:27:00.010-05:00

The title of this post refers to the subject on which Mike and I will present in Taos. He and I have delved into Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and have come up with some academically appropriate and, might I add, brilliant observations of the meaning of tattoos, race, and gender in the book. The assignment got me thinking about my own scant experience with tattooing.

What no one tells you when you get a tattoo is that the process is completely addictive. True, I have an addictive personality. First I fell in love with cigarettes. A short time later, booze. Having recently bested those nefarious habits, I moved onto Starbucks and Central Market almond butter.

(On a side note, my clean living occasionally weirds me out. I think about that song, "Goody-goody two-shoes" by Adam Ant. The lyrics are as follows:

"You don't drink, don't smoke, what do you do?"

Indeed. What do I do? Read? Daydream of NYC? Imbibe Starbucks? Fantasize about tattoos? Are my days as a badass gone forever? But, I digress...)

I love tattoos. There is something primal and ancient and honest about them. An image permanently inked onto your body serves as a marker of who you once were. It is a hint at your unspoken secrets. People may ask what it means, that tattoo on your shoulder, on your hip, on your back. And you can give them a brief explanation. But that explanation is never wholly true. It never discloses what only you know.

When I catch my back in the mirror I wonder at the intricate colors on my skin, now as much a part of my body as the scar on my pinkie I used to tell my right from my left in kindergarten or the arch of my toes as I trace them against the silver faucet in my bathtub. And then, there is the act itself. That brief pain, impossible to describe. Not the dull ache of a wasp's sting. Not sharp like a paper cut. First, the tiniest bit of blood wiped away by the artist's hands. Then the days after...Covering that section of skin with lotion until the scab heals, and miracle of miracle, you have become the palate for your own mysterious art.

Each of my tattoos announced itself to me over time. For years I imagined where it would go, what it would look like. Only once did I almost get talked into an image outside of myself. A lover who proved to be quite unrequited (even now I occasionally dream of him, wake up frustrated with my unconscious for betraying me, for bringing up a history I am happy to forget) suggested we get something patriotic - an eagle holding the American flag, the statue of liberty, a re-declaration of our Americanness. It was two days after September 11, and we were sitting on a lonely stretch of East Coast beach. We both had only recently moved away from New York. That week, however, is a different story entirely. But as to the tattoo, I seriously thought about it. I almost said yes, just to please him. Truth be told, I might not have regretted even that tattoo. It too would have marked a time and place. Reminded me later of bullets I dodged, how much I've changed and the ways in which I haven't. But, I said no. Left my body to be marked by its own enigmatic whispers.

As for a new tattoo, well, I have half-heartedly promised my boyfriend and my mother I will get no more body art. Two are quite enough. Still, I find myself looking at the delicate skin stretched taut across the inside of my wrist and forearm. Or the side of my small foot. That blank space begging to be filled. A pomegranate perhaps. Or Christina's name. Two images etched into my heart that need no outside explanation.

This makes me giddily happy!

2008-07-10T14:41:00.001-05:00

Something about this makes me love the world. It even got a write up on the NY Times!

To the creator of this video, Matt Harding, sign me up! I like to travel, and I like to dance!

Recognizing happiness

2008-07-06T21:15:00.004-05:00

I first heard the amazing Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali at the Dodge Poetry Festival in 2002. I had just started my MFA at NYU, and the world felt thick with language. On an Indian summer day, Cordelia and I made the daring excursion out to Jersey. (It was Jersey after all! It meant taking a bus over a bridge and everything!!!) There, among the starched white paint of a reconstructed colonial village, I drank in the voices of Mark Doty, Amiri Baraka, Brenda Hillman, and my literary boyfriend, the easily quotable Li Young Lee who signed his Book of My Nights to me: "to Andrea, sister, pilgrim, under the stars," thus forever melting my heart.

In the late afternoon, among writers young and old, all equally plagued by heat and mosquito's, I sat in an amphitheater fit for a revival and heard Taha read his poems in his deep, scratchy Arabic. After Taha finished each poem, Peter Cole quietly read the English translations, standing slightly behind Taha, seeming shy and embarrassed.

Taha read the following poem that day. Since then, I have traced its last line over and over again silently with my tongue, repeating it with a closed mouth. Cordelia thought the poem was sadness beyond sadness. I agree. And then I don't. Can't we see it the other way? Happiness, so precarious, so ephemeral, is so much more precious to the bruised, broken soul. It is unrecognizable compared to the rest of the world's easy contentments. The poem may not wear that meaning on its jacket like a name tag, but I choose to imagine the sentiment as the velveteen lining brushing against the back of one's wrist. Then again, I'm always surprised by how vividly I am attracted to sadness in literature.

Warning
- Taha Muhammed Ali

Lovers of hunting,
and beginners seeking your prey:
Don't aim your rifles
at my happiness,
which isn't worth
the price of the bullet
(you'd waste on it).
What seems to you
so nimble and fine,
like a fawn,
and flees
every which way,
like a partridge,
isn't happiness.
Trust me:
my happiness bears
no relation to happiness.

From So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971-2005, Taha Muhammad Ali, Copper Canyon Press, 2006.

What I do instead of writing

2008-07-05T13:06:00.004-05:00

I knit baby blanket after baby blanket for the freshly born or soon-to-come babies of beloved friends. I slip the soft yarn through itself, over slender sticks of wood. It's softness tears at the flesh of my fingers. I think of babies. Of my friends having babies. How the part of them I once knew will be slowly subsumed by a life of otherness. How those babies will replace us all. Dash madly under an awning on a rainy New Orleans afternoon and kiss their college boyfriends in full view of the Southern world. They will drink wine and eat noodles covered in squid ink at cafes near the Brooklyn Promenade on sunny sweet afternoons. They will get mad at their mothers. They will forgive their mothers. They will break hearts and be broken and rebuild themselves again. And we, their predecessors, their creators and biggest fans, will become the casual observers fate demands us to be.

The yarn lays in piles all over our house. Pale pinks, sky blues, yellow-inexplicably the neutral. Bits of yarn lay over books, homework, sometimes, even over this computer at which I now type. It grows thick like algae, hiding all I mean to do. I knit because I fear time - the time I do not have to write. But it's me who creates the moments I lose, intricately wound, tight as shut eyes, thick as metal chain. I avoid wondering what I am so afraid of. What keeps away from what I love best.

But my mind is always writing. Always narrating. It mourns for what it forgets to put down on paper. I do not cook or clean. I knit. So something is made and accomplished in the busyness of this white hot summer made hotter by the wool in my lap.

A day in the life of Latin declension...

2008-07-02T21:52:00.001-05:00

This is frighteningly close to how I feel.

Christians, Lions, and babies, oh my!

2008-06-30T06:20:00.003-05:00

This is the playskool Roman coliseum. It allows your children to happily reenact the killing of slaves, Christians, and Jews by a lion OR a tiger! It even includes a little Nero to decide who lives and who dies.

If that doesn't seem distasteful enough for you...you could purchase this conquistador figurine.

Perhaps these toys are no more horrible than the cowboys and Indians action figures we played with when we were kids. Still, I can't help but think...

Really, playskool? Really?

The Warm Brown Mama

2008-06-28T23:44:00.006-05:00

It's 11:44 pm. I've spent the evening quietly alone, doing laundry, half-watching TV while working on a baby blanket for a friend. The summer rain has cooled everything down, and I'm feeling dreamy. My minds fixated on ideas for that short story. And I decided to make myself cocoa before going to sleep. Whenever I make cocoa, I do so the old-fashioned way. The pot on the stove full of milk, a splash of vanilla, pinch of salt, sugar and that glorious dark chocolate. Drinking cocoa always makes me think of this Anne Sexton poem. I was borderline obsessed with her in high school after someone told me I wrote like she did. I haven't read her poems in years, but cocoa always brings her back to me...

The Ambition Bird
-Anne Sexton

So it has come to this
insomnia at 3:15 A.M.,
the clock tolling its engine

like a frog following
a sundial yet having an electric
seizure at the quarter hour.

The business of words keeps me awake.
I am drinking cocoa,
that warm brown mama.

I would like a simple life
yet all night I am laying
poems away in a long box.

It is my immortality box,
my lay-away plan,
my coffin.

All night dark wings
flopping in my heart.
Each an ambition bird.

The bird wants to be dropped
from a high place like Tallahatchie Bridge.

He wants to light a kitchen match
and immolate himself.

He wants to fly into the hand of Michelangelo
and come out painted on a ceiling.

He wants to pierce the hornet's nest
and come out with a long godhead.

He wants to take bread and wine
and bring forth a man happily floating in the Caribbean.

He wants to be pressed out like a key
so he can unlock the Magi.

He wants to take leave among strangers
passing out bits of his heart like hors d'oeuvres.

He wants to die changing his clothes
and bolt for the sun like a diamond.

He wants, I want.
Dear God, wouldn't it be
good enough to just drink cocoa?

I must get a new bird
and a new immortality box.
There is folly enough inside this one.

From The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton, Mariner Books, 1999.

Damn you Pixar

2008-06-27T15:57:00.005-05:00

Something about this movie makes me deeply depressed...

For the last few months, I've seen previews for Wall-E every time I've ventured to the theater. It looks excellent. I'll admit that.

But when the opening shots of Wall-E wandering around an empty Earth appear, my heart clumps up in my throat, and I pretty much want to find the nearest hole to climb into and sit rocking in the fetal position. I think it's because the voice over says something akin to "Wall-E's a great robot, but he's lonely." The image of a sad-eyed Wall-E flashes onto the screen confirming his monumental loneliness. That coupled with him jetting around the dark emptiness of space propelled by a fire extinguisher - it's just too much. Have you ever noticed that sometimes simple human loneliness is far more heart-wrenching than epic/romantic/familial tragedy?

Needless to say, I will not be attending the movie. At least not without taking serious amounts of Prozac first. Perhaps I'll see this instead...

It seems much more uplifting.

Adventures in the Second Person

2008-06-25T22:34:00.009-05:00

Tonight, as you drive home from Dallas on a highway glassy with reflected lightning you suddenly notice that the rain smells metallic, like blood. And you think you could use that detail somewhere, in that ghost story story you've been wanting to write, the one with the fantastic title. But it occurs to you, as you're narrating to yourself, that you have no time to write. It is 10pm. You've been up since 6 am. The rain pounds against the car, and the wheels lose their footing from time to time. Still, that metallic rain.

What you've wanted to do all day is write. It's what you've wanted to do all summer, all year. But Latin takes such vivid concentration. Those declining nouns and adjectives. You can't steal the five minutes to scribble ideas in margins. You're beginning to think that Ph.D. does not stand for Doctor of Philosophy but rather acts as some ancient acronym for "You will be thoroughly exhausted for six years straight. You will be so tired that you constantly hover between tears and hysterical laughter. You will have no life other than this." Which is all well and good, but you could be writing. Perhaps you would have more time if it wasn't for that other program you were in. But you know that the other program is what is keeping you out of the nut house. So dropping it is no solution. You wonder if you had all the money in the global pool of money, would you still be doing what you are doing now?

The rain does not let up. You cannot move your hands from the steering wheel to turn the radio channel. Probably you would still get the degree. Mostly because you like to learn. But you imagine, in the tons of money situation, school would be divested of its urgency. You wouldn't feel so guilty all the time. When you are writing, you think "I should be doing homework." When you do homework, you think "I should be writing." You stare at the muddled lights of the car in front of you. If you had all the time in the world, what would you do? Probably sleep. And knit. And after catching up on those two activities, then you would write and read. And yes, you would still get your Ph.D. for all the sleeplessness it entails.

The car slips against the wet road again. You think back to that year you lived in Austin, how Diana and Cordi came down for your 23rd birthday. Cordi was sick, but you and Diana wanted to hear a lecture given by your mother's oldest friend. It was raining then too. On the way to the church in North Austin where she was speaking, you lost control of the car. Spinning out, you calmly turned the wheels into the spin. Diana screamed, but you said in your every day voice, over and over, "We're alright, we're alright, we're..." And you were. Despite almost hitting that light pole. It wasn't until you turned your car around and drove onto the highway, that your heart started pounding and the panic set in. Unable to breath, it was you who whispered "Oh my god," stuttering on the words like a record skipping across the same refrain. Diana put her hand on your shoulder to calm you down, but the panic stayed all night. You wonder what way you could make the metaphor work now? Is that what will happen? In six years, will you suddenly have the time to freak out?

The lightning in the sky is beautiful. You are almost home. You think how much better life would work if things were guaranteed. If someone could promise, "you are a good writer. You will get a job. You are smart enough to write a dissertation." You remember overhearing one of your women professors saying, "You can have it all. Just not at the same time." You think this is unacceptable. You imagine if you were a man things would be less complicated, more assured. You think of what Doctorow said to you and hope it's true. You will be the same writer at 45 as you were at 25. There is no rush. It occurs to you all that the people you are most intimidated by are the same ones you would choose as your mentors. Which is why you're having so much trouble choosing an adviser. The people you'd choose scare the shit out of you. Your shrink could have a field day with that notion.

Your mind is wandering again. That metallic rain smell seeps into the car, softens your skin. You are too tired to work on the story. You will write this instead. Knowing it is so much more ephemeral than fiction. Less important. There is less room to be important. You will leave out half of what you wanted to say. You will shut the computer down, crawl into bed with your man and your puppy, and dream of conjugating Latin.

Latin Dictata

2008-06-24T21:15:00.006-05:00

Someone once told me that the first phrases you learn in a language are particularly significant.

For instance, my parents moved to Peru in the 1960s, speaking only French and German. The first sentence they learned in Spanish could be roughly translated as follows:

The bus is broken.

When our family friends, Paula and (the late, great) Bob Finnell moved to the foothills of Mt. Kilimanjaro, the first sentence they learned was

The lion is eating the man.

As for me and Latin...well...I will simply offer up the following sentences taken directly from my Latin textbook:

Only the gods do not grieve.
Do you (pl.) judge his death good?
The brothers were fighting about the fertile land of that (man).

Doesn't quite give you a warm and fuzzy about the birthplace of Western culture, now does it? Of course reading this just makes one feel worse.

Addendum/Oops!

2008-06-24T15:32:00.004-05:00

Just to correct any misconceptions, I did not mean to imply that The Georgia Review sent me a rejection willy, nilly. I am positive I probably sent them some poems and forgot to log it into my excel spreadsheet. Oh yes, I have a spreadsheet for such matters...

Thanks to David for checking in. 'Twas very nice and also nice to hear from an individual person on a lit journal's staff. On the upside, The Southern Review told me that my Lazarus poem was "wonderfully imagined." I think that's a complement. Though I could be wrong...

Set record straight? Check.

Back to Latin. More soon.

PS Who's checking this thing anyway? I thought it was just Dina and Nicole!