A Throwing Up of Hands

Whelp, that's it for today. I've worked as long as I'm gonna work. I woke up at 9 today and set right off on heat stripping my back door so that I can repaint it so that I can put on a new storm door that the last big wind storm in March took off. Please note how all home improvement/maintenance tasks are interrelated with all others. Sequencing is important. Half measures, such as merely scraping the paint, generally only result in additional work, as the paint will do what this first picture shows within a year. Thus, a project I thought was done last summer still remains a project for this summer.
At any rate, around 3:30 this afternoon, I finally get close to being done. Since I've already got the original colors on the rest of the house, it was only a matter of seeing what the original owners put where. In getting down to the wood, it appears that the door was ochre with green trim, which I replicated:
I then came in, scrubbed down the bathroom which was covered with green and ochre paint, then had some tuna salad and cold water, then I deadheaded the peonies, during which task I called to inform the neighbor that her dog had escaped and was running amok in the neighborhood. I went back inside and wallowed about in Youtube for a while and, having done so, it appears my productive impulse has completely left me for the day.

Disaster Flicks: History Repeating

Netflix has brought another surprise, and therefore the potential for another roughly-written tangent. This time, it's the 1942 German movie Titanic. Precursor to the 1958 film A Night to Remember, and of course, that movie in which Celine Dion's heart will "go on." There's an obsession with what many still see as the worst maritime disaster in history. I remember, in Los Angeles, sneaking on board the Queen Mary after dark and roaming the decks. On the First Class deck were others within earshot who were legitimate guests in the onboard hotel. I ignored them at first, but then in listening, found that they were talking about the Queen Mary as if it was the Titanic, as if they had found themselves in a museum replica, or the ship itself as it was in the movie not yet released on video at the time: "Here's where they shot at each other as the water rose. Here are the staterooms where she must've slept."

Like Erin, I somehow am programmed to think that a new Netflix DVD is a "drop everything and watch this" priority, so I plugged it right in. As far as movies go, it isn't all that great, and it has less than sincere interest regarding period accuracy in costume or setting. The women's evening dresses look like they were from various contemporary productions of other movies--they certainly weren't what high society wore aboard ship in the years before the Great War. The set was improvised as well, with the location footage shot aboard a German liner, the Cap Arcona (below), the interior of which bears at best only the slightest suggestion of the Titanic's style. The movie shows its wartime politics fairly straightforwardly, pointing the finger of blame squarely at Bruce Ismay's--and especially British Business's--blind pursuit of money. The one German member of the crew (a fabrication) is the only person who realizes the corruption and appreciates the danger, but the wily Britons bring ethnicity and politics into the argument, quashing the officer's protests, saying that a German, obviously loyal above all to his own country, would do anything to keep Britain from breaking a transatlantic speed record. From that point, the rest can probably guess what happens. We all know about the shortsightedness regarding the lifeboats. There are moments that give one the suspicion that Cameron borrowed scenes from this film to add to his own--the raucous steerage dancing scene (here given a rather nipply treatment by a woman really named Jolly Maree in the credits), the intrigues and wranglings of the amazingly wealthy louts in First Class also get quite a bit of attention. There even is a scene where someone is locked in a room filling with water belowdecks which can't help but remind viewers of Cameron's movie. And there is a "blue diamond." But all of this falls away when one gets back to the ship used to shoot the scenes.
The Cap Arcona was a luxury liner that made the route to South America. By the time of the film's production, the ship had been sitting in Lubeck bay; the war made such a ship quite a target. For two years it had been a floating barracks, and Navy Kriegsmarine extras were used in the movie. As the war wore on, the ship became a part of the Final Solution, where thousands of prisoners from Neuengamme camp were marched to the ship and crammed on board. Lifeboats certainly were not a concern here, either. The British unwittingly contributed, spotting the ship on an air raid and not knowing who was aboard, bombed it. It burned and sank where it sat. For the Titanic, Leo DiCaprio represented one of the 1,502 dead. For the Cap Arcona, a smaller ship made to carry 1,300, no one's yet made the attempt to portray one of the over 5,000 who weren't rescued. In the movie, the ship goes down in miniature, the doll's house furniture swirling around the tiny stiff plastic potted palms. The footage has more screaming and chaos on deck than ever was reported by the Titanic's survivors; more a rehearsal of what would happen on that same deck less than three years later; the portrayal of a doomed ship on a doomed ship.

Memorial Day Weekend--A Gameplan

Yep, the big early summer weekend and I'm planning on--actually planning--on getting some reading done. And reviews. I should probably write some reviews. I have 14 CDs of Joseph Haydn to review. I'm ass-deep in Haydn. I've even taken to ransacking J-Stor for articles that talk about his works. The trouble with writing reviews about Haydn (or Beethoven, or, especially, Mozart) is that there is little new that one can write about such people. Not being a music major, I have little to add regarding structure and counterpoint. For scores of the works performed, I went to the Purdue Library (where, unlike at the Indianapolis Library, which has a larger collection of orchestral scores, I dont' currently owe fines--thus the reason I end up buying books rather than checking them out), and found that they not only have the collected works of Haydn in hardcover, they have two different editions of the collected works of Haydn. I opted for the bigger-format edition, a couple of volumes of the Soviet issue of Shostakovich's symphonies for another review of a two-piano reduction of Shosty's 10th and 15th symphonies (the 15th being the basis for a poem written earlier this school year), and remembered that, during my Modernist Poetry class, I had been meaning to ask the professor about Modernist prose, namely Dorothy Richardson. Since no one reads Richardson's massive novel Pilgrimage and since I'd been wanting to read it for some time, I thought I'd look up the call number. I was in luck--the whole novel, in four volumes, was sitting in HSSE library. I walk to the area. In the whole practically empty library, someone is in the aisle. I scan through the call numbers. The one person is standing right in front of the Dorothy Richardson, no doubt looking for something else. Check that. She's looking at the frayed 1930s volumes of Pilgrimage. I introduce myself, feeling like I'm in some sort of cheap opening half hour of a romantic comedy film. Hi, you're reading Richardson too? Really? All the volumes? What are the chances of that? No one reads Richardson anymore. She wasn't sure if she needed to read everything. I had some at home. She had directed reading over the summer and for Fall semester, toward a thesis. She was pretty lucky--five minutes later and I'd have left with everything she needed.
I'm presently finding myself reading, then, two massive multi-volume novels this summer for no real reason than the fact that they're there--Jules Romains' Men of Good Will and the aforementioned Pilgrimage. I keep thinking that perhaps I should read something else, but that is what seems to have swum to the surface of the pile of books to read. The Romains seems to just go on without getting anywhere other than showing how even the most disparate lives intersect in some way, but that is something I already knew. I'll read through the climax of the series, Verdun, which is a good number of pages from where I am. So, to recap, this weekend will be Haydn, yardwork, and Big Novels of Some Obscurity.

Urban Archaeology--A Crap Photo Essay

Well, the car is on the blink, folks, which means I'm down to my bike until they get the car fixed, which evidently will be a bit longer, but more on that later.
I thought I would take advantage of the weather and the opportunity to flee the never-ending yardwork to take a morning bikeride through town. I brought along my camera. I've been interested in something I refer to as urban archaeology. The pothole that reveals the gleam of an Interurban rail, the trajectory far in from the street and parallel with the wall of a low brick house, which, now that one has the clue of the rail, reveals itself to be an old Interurban depot. Things like that.
Abandoned schools bug me, and there are quite a few of them in Indianapolis. Were quite a few of them in Indianapolis. 3 years ago there were four schools within a mile of my house. Now there are two. The brick that edges my walks is all from demolished schools. I find these buildings a metaphor for a current state of mind that I might go into later on. At any rate, in earlier times, there once was a town named Flackville. The town is no longer, and its main survivor, the school above, is not going to be around for much longer either. Situated on a busy street, it still has a higher profile than its neighbors, a decaying strip mall and an old bank-branch-turned-porn-shop.

More miles on, I coasted through the quiet neighborhoods, most of the residents having gone to work. Indianapolis used to have its ethnic districts, evidenced by a few churches tucked away in between the houses, including this one. The original cornerstone showed, in weathered Gothic letters, that this building was originally a German Reformed Church, as one can tell from the architecture and the script of the year it was built, carved above the door.
Not far away was, evidently, the Slovenian part of town, complete with its own community center. Not far away was a quite impressive church and, across the street, an unused school building, with Slovenian folk motifs patterned in the brick and the terracotta.

I hit the Canal on my way back downtown and would have gotten some pretty good shots if I actually was able to understand my camera. In spite of me, I got a couple of hazy shots. All told, I covered 30 miles on the bike, and am already walking like an octogenarian. I'd do more yardwork tomorrow, but I'm gonna go to the Museum instead.

Brain Stem Death Test

Ever have those moments when there isn't a single thought in your head? When the best things you can come up with are half-baked at best? When your state of mind could best be summed up as "clotted"? I'm finding that yard work is good for those times. I've spent the past three days increasing my chances of basal cell carcinoma while digging up the insidious root system that my evil mutant devil-spawn of a lawn has decided to extend across the flowerbeds. But today it's cold and rainy. The flowerbeds are a pile of muck. I'll try to read, but more likely will end up spending hours watching Match Game 76 or the Gong Show on YouTube, both of which I vaguely remembered watching as a kid. Back then, I remember Chuck Barriss being funny, rather than shitfaced as these vids show. Either way, the results were occasionally brilliant.

I'll work on further cerebration later this week. Wish me luck.

The Mids of May (...ish)

Muddling Through, or The Man without Qualities in the light of current events

I will do my best not to re-reread Robert Musil's enormous beast of a novel (amounting to over 1700 pages), but having leafed through it in search of something that might be relevant to the Roubaud novel, I've found that practically each chapter in Musil contains enough ideas to spawn a novel of its own. While I waited for the bus, rode on the bus, and sat in the frigid breakrooms of the grey glass box I worked in, I read these characters' fascinating conversations. No one around me seemed to be having such conversations. Talk was of tax reporting or legal documentation or how best to reissue checks to shareholders. As if that was the most important thing to talk about. This in their free time. The office-dwellers became cardboard cutouts as opposed to a character who:
"gave his thoughts an even more general and impersonal form by setting the relationship that exists between the demands "Do!" and "Don't!" in the place of good and evil. For as long as a particular morality is in the ascendant--and this is just as valid for the spirit of "Love thy neighbor" as it is for a horde of Vandals--"Don't!" is still only the negative and natural corollary of "Do!" Doing and leaving undone are red hot, and the flaws they contain don't count because they are the flaws of heroes and martyrs. In this condition good and evil are identical with the happiness and unhappiness of the whole person. But as soon as the contested system has achieved dominance and spread itself out, and its fulfillment no longer faces any special hurdles, the relationship between imperative and taboo perforce passes through a decisive phase where duty is not born anew and alive each day but is leached and drained and cut up into ifs and buts, ready to serve all sorts of uses. Here a process begins, in the further course of which virtue and vice, because of their common root in the same rules, laws, exceptions, and limitations, come to look more and more alike, until that curious and ultimately unbearable self-contradiction arises which was Ulrich's point of departure: namely, that the distinction between good and evil loses all meaning when weighed against the pleasure of a pure, deep, spontaneous mode of action, a pleasure that can leap like a spark from permissible as well as from forbidden activities."
As an aside here, I find this rather interesting in light of the last election where the current administration used as a selling point their clear course of action as opposed to the Democrats indecisiveness. Action is, above all, the important thing. In the book, certain intellectuals and aristocracy in Austria decide on something called the Parallel Campaign, whose slogan is "Action!" The reader, not the characters, knows that WWI is looming.

"Ulrich stubbornly expanded on his point: 'What one needs in life is merely the conviction that one's business is doing better than one's neighbor's [...] --everything that can assure a person that he is in no way unusual but that in this way of being in no way unusual he will not so easily find his equal!'
Walter had not yet sat down again. He was full of unrest. Triumph. 'Do you realize what you're talking about?' he shouted. 'Muddling through! You're simply an Austrian, and you're expounding the Austrian national philosophy of muddling through!'
'That may not be as bad as you think,' Ulrich replied. 'A passionate longing for keenness and precision or beauty, may very well bring one to prefer muddling through to all those exertions in the modern spirit. I congratulate you on having discovered Austria's world mission.'"

But back to the original quote:
"Indeed, whoever takes an unbiased view is likely to find that the negative aspect of morality is more highly charged with this tension than the positive: While it seems relatively natural that certain actions called "bad" must not be allowed to happen, [...] the corresponding moral traditions, such as unlimited generosity in giving or the urge to mortify the flesh, have already almost entirely disappeared; and where they are still practiced they are practiced by fools, cranks, or bloodless prigs. In such a condition, where virtue is decrepit and moral conduct consists chiefly in the restraint of immoral conduct, it can easily happen that immoral conduct appears to be not only more spontaneous and vital than its opposite, but actually more moral, if one may use the term not in the sense of law and justice but with regard to whatever passion may still be aroused by matters of conscience. But could anything possibly be more perverse than to incline inwardly toward evil because, with all one has left of a soul, one is seeking good?"

Negative Space--a literary pensee (are there nonliterary Pensees?)

I've been reading a novel lately by Jacques Roubaud called The Great Fire of London, which is essentially a progressively-constructed novel about everything other than the Great Fire of London. It's essentially a novel about writing. Which reminds me, in a sort of way, of a draft I read in memoir class, wherein all but the main issue at hand was addressed in the narrative. It seems a rather tall order, but I think it would be a very interesting writing project to write about everything other than the idea at hand, wherein the work forms a sort of mold, surrounding a void that is the actual point of the work. The idea would be there, perfectly formed, only in what the work is not. It could even be a topical subject, such as a project that could illustrate the current political situation, wherein all is talked about in detail other than the elephant in the room. The musical group Elbow have already done such a thing with the cover art for one of their recent slew of releases...though I can only find the positive space version of their cover art. The negative space is available in tiny form a third of the way down on this page, for the fugitive motel release.

L'Envoi...

The sidewalks are quiet...














The Mall is quiet...














The classrooms are chilly, yet sadly empty.

The Undergrads have all left...







..which means of course that West Lafayette turns back into a rather pleasant, sleepy smallish town full of bad Chinese buffets and pizza joints in need of delivery drivers.

Turn Down the Fun.

Ah, parties, they bring out the best in brilliant graduate students. The following smattering of photos is from the first annual Cuatro de Mayo party held on the Blomenberg urban estate. Dan came just as things were starting to get out of hand and was able to keep things reined in as the sole representative of restraint and poise. If one couldn't tell from his demeanor, the shirt makes it plain. Wherever fun appeared to be getting to a point where it might break the bounds of proper decorum and gravitas, he was there. I was rather preoccupied, but I do recall that he held forth in the book nook, perusing my copy of Everybody's Book of Epitaphs. Reports indicate he may have even worked at inciting a hymn sing later on in the evening.


As you can see, he had his hands full. Tadd wanted to help with the grilling. Here, the Mickey Mouse beach shovel makes another appearance from February. Luckily, cooler heads prevailed.


As night deepened, various denizens of the dark appeared.




Candles burned on the porch, silent movies played in the bedroom, cheeseballs and lemon bars were obliterated in the dining room, and the living room held all those who couldn't fit in on the "stage," as Dan named it. As you can see, he kept things at quite a reasonable level of jollity.

I'm glad so many of you were able to come down to Indy!

Feist--its at least a couple of words in one.

Earlier, a related post from another person in the Purdue program had mentioned Feist as an up and coming group.--they are that, and more importantly, they have this, and, more importantly, this. There is a certain sense of joy and cold interest in much of what they do which makes what they do damned interesting. It's something sadly missing from regular radio.

Music Music Music

I've mentioned to some that I might start putting more music stuff on this blog (and no, the Kylie post is not a hint of things to come), and I certainly will have ample material for such meanderings. Not only have I gotten the latest shipment of discs from Musicweb (which brings the number of discs I have for review up to, oh, something like 842), I also went crazy in the Jazz section of Half Price Books and now have a stack of Ellington and Django, and upon my return home yesterday, I found another package from Brian Burtt, who sent me no fewer than five symphonies' worth of CDs, plus a lute disc and a piano concerto! I'm going to try to get on the stick and send him some things in return.

So, I'm adding some music links to the web as part of my program of avoiding cleaning the house. One of my favorite sites on Soviet composers is devoted primarily to Shostakovich, but also gives some great information on a number of Soviet-era composers, including Myaskovsky and one of my faves, Alfred Schnittke. In looking around (I've not been there in a while), I was thrilled to find one of my reviews has shown up there from Musicweb. Which reminds me, I really need to start working on writing more. Busy busy busy.

I just googled myself (I think that's against the law in some states) and found out I've been translated into Latvian! Who knew.

Opportunism and Currying Favor

Now, not that anyone's been taking notice, but just in case you thought for a moment that Kylie Minogue hasn't been actively currying to the Gay disco scene's favor, I thought I'd check in with ya all.... I remembered seeing this vid in Berlin, just before breakfast, and it made me giggle. Not that I'm getting much into this sort of music, but, Kylie and Daft Punk were a big part of my last time in Germany. Not to mention, Kylie, in her big video, drove a rare car that my Dad had for a short while back in 1979-1980--my younger brother loved it more than I but the DeThomaso Pantera was a big part of our lives back in West Branch Iowa, back when "my Sharona" was a big hit. Erik and I hung out on the roof of the tin shed outside of where Dad worked on this car and others as he cussed. It's where we got our colorful language. Yes, the car we had was canary yellow, too. We drove it from Iowa to Nebraska for sale. It was late winter early spring. I remember it well... My sister and brother had most of the quality time in the sports car (and the subsequent lateral G's) as we drove down I-80. I was in the car rather seldom. It had a black interior, if I'm not mistaken. La La La...I just can't get you outta my head..Yep I'm old. It turns out that the costumes for the big vid are straight from 1920s Soviet expressionist stage costume trends, though I can't immediately find the links... My disco? Needs...me? uh...really? Maybe I'm just a big redneck, but I had no idea that support was so desperately needed. I rememberbeing inBerlin, waking up after too much beer, trying to get up for my next museum trip, blinking, and seeing this vid on the tv...She gets points for the french narration, but, computer]generated semaphores? Top hats? Wha? And discos need you? I mean , really--don't bars make money hand over fist? And how should I interpret the stars-and-stripes spandex? This modern world always throws something in to mess me up... Oh, here it is. This will mess most people up...Kylie, and George Michael? Twins??????

And then the end of the first chapter...

So, today, after furious grading and bookkeeping, I have finished all requirements for Purdue for the Spring semester. Now I have two days to clean the house for the upcoming GradPad GradStudent Cuatro de Mayo Party at my house. Charcoal must be gotten. Ditto vodka. I've got bigband and 80s for the playlist. A lovely butting of stylistic heads.

In other news, I have bought the latest Michael Chabon book, which is quite good, from various reports. I haven't read Cavalier and Clay (yes yes, I've lived under a rock for the last decade reading German fiction, so sue me...), so this'll be my entree to the writing of Chabon. Judging from the barely contained freakout of the fiction writers at the news that Chabon will be reading at Purdue next year, I assume he's a pretty damned good writer. I'll admit I was sold on the book (again a possibly painful admission) by the snappy cover art, by none other than Will Staehle, who has done some pretty impressive stuff for McSweeney's, which is a pretty damned impressive literary journal that all who love reading new stuff should read. The "Volumes held in a cover by magnets" issue was a must-have. Who else would publish a collection of Oulipian stuff in English translation? I mean really.
I'm in sensory overload mode. I've just finished a third of my MFA, I've got my house to clean and revamp for an upcoming party, I've got much, much much stuff to read this summer, and I've got a blue million recordings to listen to. Oh, yes, and I've got to write. and garden. and ride my bike more often. I';m sure this will all start coming together in the next couple of weeks. The woodwork, the windows, the painting, the plumbing, the car, the novel, the memoir, the poetry manuscript, the becoming a premier classical recording reviewer, etc. All a matter of time. Sure. And all from my front porch. It could happen. I'll put some water on for coffee.

Magnetic Paper Writing and Somnambulism

I've been working feverishly away on my papers, my revisions, and my research, and perhaps it has been due to overmuch reading of dense texts, but right now It's been rather like I've been using magnetic words for refrigerator poetry in composing my term papers. My Wallace Stevens paper is in the can, my craft essay on Didion is all over but the final paragraph, I believe, and now I've just got revisions to complete and boy won't that be fun. The term papers will be graded once I get to school tomorrow. I've not got much on my mind at this moment other than that I will be looking very much forward to the cessation of academic activities on Wednesday.

To counteract that impulse, and as a parting thought before I plunge back in to another Word document, I came across this while I was working on secondary sources for the Stevens paper...This from Rene Daumal's An Appeal to Consciousness, found in his book You've Always Been Wrong:

"A man wakes up in the morning in bed. Scarcely on his feet, he's already asleep again. Going through all the automatic impulses which make his body get dressed, go out, walk, get to work, go through the prescribed daily routine... In order to wake up, he'd have to think, 'All that agitation is outside of me.' He would need to perform an act of reflection. [...] Man does not spend a third of his life, as they say, but nearly all his life sleeping in this true slumber of the mind. And it's easy for slumber, which is the inertia of consciousness, to catch man in its traps; for man, being naturally and almost irremediably lazy, might indeed be willing to awaken. But since the effort is repugnant to him, he would like that effort once it is put forth to place him (and naively he thinks it is possible) in a permanent or at least lengthy waking state. Then wanting to rest while in his awakening, he falls asleep. Just as one cannot will oneself to sleep, since willing, in whatever form, is still an awakening, one can remain awakened only if one wills it at every moment.
And the only direct act which you can carry out is that of awakening, of becoming conscious of yourself. Look back on what you think you've done since the beginning of today: this is perhaps the first time you've really awakened. And it's only now that you're conscious of all you've done as a thoughtless automaton. In most cases people never awaken even enough to realize that they have slept. Right now, go ahead and accept, if you wish, this sleepwalker's existence. You will be able to behave in life...without ever awakening any more than just enough, now and then, to enjoy or suffer from the way in which you sleep. And it might even be more convenient, without changing anything in your appearance, not to awaken at all.
And as the reality of mind lies in its activity, the very idea of 'thinking substance' being nothing unless that idea is thought in the here and now, this sleep--this absence of action, this privation of thought--is truly spiritual death."

Now Dave, no napping. You've got things to write.

God and Politics

It's the end of the semester, so I'm being lazy and making this response to Brian's blog work double-duty as a blog entry, with minor adjustments.

It was Sunday and I'd just finished reading other blog posts about the politicizing of Christianity and thought it interesting (or perhaps not)to mention; as soon as I began reading the post Brian had on his blog, the Jehovah's Witnesses were knocking at my door, reading from Titus. It had something to do with education. The blog entry reminded me of what I found so tiresome about going to church when I was younger--the explication of texts was always the same. It actually became part of the reason why I wanted to write--to find new ways to describe things that surround us. The work has been done before and the comforting phrases that sound good just end up being meaningless as the weekly repetitions grow. Why couldn't people find new ways of saying things? Why the stereotypes? And most annoyingly, why all this arguing using circular logic to prove things that really are, at base, a matter of faith? The missionaries on my porch said the same phrases the same way, as anything else I'd heard. The visit was brief, but cordial. The Witnesses gone, their pamphlet in the kitchen wastebasket, I'd gone to look up Titus. 2:2 was the verse the little girl read with her Mother there to provide moral support: "teach what is consistent with sound doctrine." I read further past the stuff around verse 9 telling slaves to be submissive to their masters and not talk back, etc but what I found interesting in light of the events and readings of the morning, as well as what Sherman Alexie spoke of on Thursday, was further on in the book: "But avoid stupid controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels about the law, for they are unprofitable and worthless. After a first and second admonition, have nothing to do with anyone who causes diversions, since you know that such a person is perverted and sinful, being self-condemned." For such people, perhaps less of a focus on legislation and condemnation and more of a focus on what their faith really is to them would be more of a draw. It certainly wouldn't hurt trying.

How Dave Probably Shouldn't Write Poetry

I saw that Brian Dunn had posted his version of this on his blog, so I thought I might follow suit:

I’m still not entirely sure how I write poems. This could be a false statement. I do know, from the look of general concern that clouds the faces of some of those I talk to about how I write, that I must have one of the worst writing methods on the planet. I’m not particularly good at keeping secret my jealousy of those who have the discipline and control to be able to devote two hours a morning (for some reason, they always write in the mornings) toward writing and they plug away at it, each day, as the sun comes up. Plath did it. Jacques Roubaud does it. Thomas Mann did it. Methodical method. Efficient and helpful. Mornings, for me, are much better suited for input than output. In a previous life, I would read complicated novels in the morning and write notes and reflections in the evening. When I wrote at all. Even now, my writing is sporadic, spotty, uncertain, iffy. On more than a few occasions the fear of not having something for workshop was what got the poem out, had me tapping violently away at an overworn greasy computer lab keyboard. These events, as with others not quite so frantic, are generally accompanied by rough notes that I’d written at some earlier point, almost always written in the evening or night, almost always put to paper in a restaurant or bar. I've tried libraries, but there one isn't in the middle of people talking, or getting annoyed with each other; they're all there for other reasons than discussion or food or breakup. So I sit, waiting for food, or perhaps with a martini. Gin is not particularly good at wetting a stopped fountain pen, but is occasionally good for loosening various musings that may be of use later. I have an assortment of postcards in my bookbag, which I often write to people if I find myself having difficulty getting started...writing to others necessitates having to think about recent events, things seen, thoughts that have struck me in some way or other. So, restaurants and bars, and always alone: for some reason I need that sort of atmosphere. Sitting in a public place, yet removed from it, with conversations and movement all around. This may be the reason for the “detached 'I'” feature found in most of my stuff from last semester. It may be a defense mechanism or crutch, too, for that matter.

Poetry came when I was a sophomore in high School, when I happened upon The Mirror by Plath in the literature anthology we used. The mirror reflecting the pink wall opposite it and the woman’s face, in whom an old woman rises closer to the surface every day, “like a terrible fish.” But this is a misquote, now that I think of it, now that I walk over and pull the book from the shelf. The mirror is "the eye of a little god" which then becomes a lake, over which the woman agitatedly returns. The mirror is what has that unsettling power invested in it. The power isn't in the woman's face... "In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman/ Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish." The power of this image, this surprising power given an inanimate object was a thunderbolt to me. I started reading Plath, hiding in the magazine room during Study Hall, then moved to Anne Sexton. I began writing overly gloomy, doomed poems in which everything had gone irreparably wrong.

I gradually got better. I wrote in college, but in my senior year something scared me somehow; some terrible fish had risen too close to the surface and I shut down the operation. No more writing. Just notes, observations, ideas. More often than not, I wouldn’t write those down at all; would put them off for later, which meant that they were forgotten, usually. That engrained habit, years of suppressing ideas, has been difficult to break. It’s extremely easy for me to not bother, to discount. It should have been no wonder, then, when I discovered one day that all of my favorite writers have repression as a main motif.

Perhaps because of all this, for me, poems come up, like some strange plant, or buried stones pushed up though brown grass by frost heaves. My memory works much the same way. Images and events come up, like submerged logs in a pond. If an idea manages to be insistent enough, to nag, to finally badger me out of procrastination, I end up writing it down. Survival of the most persistent. Lately, that’s changed. I’ve started to realize how many ideas I’ve got and routinely squelch. More timid ones are finding their way to paper. Rough notes, more often inspired by prose rather than poetry.

Regarding the content of my poems, I first wrote from drastically darkened personal experience, but quickly moved to dream imagery and possible juxtapositions to things in real life. This semester, though, everything’s gone ass-over-applecart, and I’ve been throwing just about anything at the paper, just to see what sticks. So my method is hardly a method. It happens, and as I ease more into this thing I’m doing, I hope to find something that works best…

Reading and Writing and Dead Grass

Happy Easter, peeps!
I spent almost all of yesterday online, putting electronic comments on my students' final paper drafts, emailing them back, etc. Not all have complied with getting drafts sent out by Friday evening, which makes things more difficult for them to have a polished final draft. I also got a rubric out that shows how I will be grading said final drafts, started looking at poems for submission to lit journals, and deciding which journals to potentially send to. Today I'll continue that, compose cover letters and assemble the separate packets, each formatted according to the whims of the various editorial staffs, and continue reading Joan Didion, which I read until 2 this morning.

The pic adequately fits my mood. The weather is cold, windy and gross, and the warm-up promised on Monday has been moved off at least another day. All of which makes Davo unhappy. Oh well...it keeps me indoors and working on things I need to be working on. The bread turned out fine, which means I have material for sandwiches. The laundry is almost done. It could be worse.

I have tea on the stove. I've got the 6th symphony of Tabakov (who has one of the angriest-sounding requiems I've ever heard) on the stereo. Bread and Nutella. A day of typing like a crazy thing on the computer. The Year of Magical Thinking is an excellent somber read. A book-long essay that explores grief, which, as the various scientific journals she includes describe is a phenomenon that comes in waves. The book follows suit, with a calm, quietly persistent return to December 30, 2003 to revisit the events around that almost-dinner with her husband in the living room. This from Chapter 3:

"It was deep into the summer, some months after the night when I needed to be alone so that he could come back, before I recognized that through the winter and spring there had been occasions on which I was incapable of thinking rationally. I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome. In my case this disordered thinking had been covert, noticed I think by no one else, hidden even from me, but it had also been, in retrospect, both urgent and constant. In retrospect there had been signs, warning flags I should have noticed. There had been for example the matter of the obituaries. I could not read them. This continued from December 31, when the first obituaries appeared, until February 29, the night of the 2004 Academy Awards, then I saw a photograph of John in the Academy's "In Memoriam" montage. When I saw the photograph I realized for the first time why the obituaries had so disturbed me.
I had allowed other people to think he was dead.
I had allowed him to be buried alive."

Well, with that, off to read, type, and write.

Cold Snaps and Yma Sumac

Greetings, all. The weather is miserably cold and the tulips pictured earlier here are frozen/thawed/frozen masses of pulp. My furnace is back on in spite of my vow two weeks ago that it wouldn't come on again this season. I've awakened from a lovely 4-hour power nap and have bathwater, laundry, bread machine, and stereo all going simultaneously, as I have things to catch up on. It crossed my mind that I could save time by reading Joan Didion while bathing, but I thought it too great a risk to hold a library book over bathwater. The hard drive seems to be in the mood for Motown and the strange strange world of Yma Sumac--her vocal stylings are quite different from the norm.

Classes are gearing down, save for the fact that I have term papers coming in on Wednesday to grade, a term paper on William Carlos Williams' Paterson due on Thursday, and revision portfolios due the following week. Aside from that, I'm finishing up. I'm hoping to have a substantial part of my essay on Didion done by tomorrow evening, though I have 200 pages to read yet. I'll get my State tax return taken care of, and compile poems to send off for journals.
Speaking of poems, one of mine got honorary mention for Purdue's Literary Awards. No money, which would have been nice, but I got a nice letter. I need to get more writing done, though, this semester and summer. The stuff I have that I actually kinda like amounts to a slender stack indeed. Must write more...must write....more. At least the weather is no temptation to get outside.

Efflorescences with Figured Bass of Peeling Brick

It's officially Spring, so that means that there has to be at least one picture--I think it's a requirement in the Blogger Terms and Conditions--of tulips. This is the artsiest one I could come up with. I'm no Mapplethorpe. Kristen's here (YAY!) but not for long--I'm taking her to the airport in a couple of hours.

The day appears to be living up to Spectacular status and I hope to re-commence working on that stack of annotated bibliographies on the porch.