Composing Dreams

The Millennium Series

2012-02-05T10:56:00.004-05:00

Steig Larsson's trilogy was a fun set of books to read. I didn't want to put them down. Kevin and I read these aloud to each other on our vacation to the Florida Keys:

But enough about vacation. You came to read about the books. Instead of a raving review, I've made some lists. My wrist hurts. So here you go.

Things I liked so much I wish they were mine:
Characterization of Blomkvist & Salander
Adventure/Plot Development in Dragon Tattoo and Played with Fire
Feminism
Hacker crimes
Investigative Journalist as the protagonist but the book didn't feel like a book about a writer
Description of people

Things I liked less:
Plot development in Hornet's Nest
Characterization of Berger, Palmgren, the guys in the Section (not enough!!)
Description of place

These books felt like crime novels, to be sure, but I did forget that they were trying to be titillating and get into the story. I felt like Larsson did a nice job of making Salander more accessible as the books went on, so that people could empathize with her more. I liked her from the beginning, but I did see how she could be hard to pull for, because she made such cold decisions.

Overall, I liked the books. I liked the movies, too, for the record. I thought the Swedish ones were well done, and I loved the woman who played Salander. I did think that the woman they chose to play Berger was all wrong in the Swedish films. I eagerly anticipate the US releases for the second and third films. I love watching movies after I've seen a book. I did wonder whether the Swedish films made all that much sense to those who hadn't read the books, though.

Here is a picture of the southern Lake Superior Shore. K and I are headed that way in a month.

While I am excited to revisit the Porkies, I'm not sure where I'm going next with 12-12-10. I am proud to have completed two full years of the project. 10 more to go! Maybe some feminist texts or nonfiction. Maybe even poetry. Don't worry, I *DO* read poetry almost every day. I just don't buy a book and write about it once a month. Lately I've been reading literary journals and looking through their online content, like Virginia Quarterly Review, and etc.

Today, I have to go grade. Boo.

Chocolate Breakfast

2012-01-26T10:42:00.005-05:00

I hope the re-design doesn't hurt your feelings, winter. I still love you. I just love geese, too.

Today I am going to bake something, read something, and apply for a job. I'm going to grade some reading responses.

Koko is going to sleep in the bathroom sink.

Should I cut my hair?

Happy 89th Birthday Grandma June!

2012-01-20T11:08:00.003-05:00

Part One:

Today is my Grandma's 89th birthday: What an amazing, strong, inspiring, loving, funny, quirky, loyal woman. I'm so proud I was raised partially by her!

Part Two:
I have this idea for a nonfiction book about the wedding industry. But I think I need to stop researching for it for a while because I think I am starting to make Kevin think I am pushing for us to get married. It is just impossible not to think: "I would never do it like that!" when I am watching these TLC shows, looking at these pinboards, making my own pinboard, doing calculations, and reading these etiquette books/wedding essays, etc.

Part Three:
Do you people like the band Monsters of Folk? I think I like them.

Winter without the doldrums

2012-01-18T10:17:00.004-05:00

I am sitting here with a cup of french-press coffee and pondering the cold.

In upper Michigan, it seemed like we knew a thing or two about cold. In Kentucky, it seems like my body knows nothing about cold. I mean, I feel cold right now. It's 25 outside. And last night, that was the overnight low. This is January! Come on. 25 is a balmy January day, in my not-so-distant past life. From that life, I have muscle memory: I know to dress in scarves, long-johns, mittens, boots this time of year. I want to ski and snowshoe. But here, I want to use "25 degrees" as an excuse to bundle. I know that's a poor excuse when I've seen -25 in my life once or twice. I've certainly seen weeks here and there between 0 and -10. That's when it's too cold to snow. Here, it's too warm. There's no snow on the ground, no snow in the air, not much wind to speak of--I don't need mittens or a ski hat. I hardly need sneakers. It got up to 59 yesterday and there was a furious thunderstorm and a little tornado. The sirens here are called COWS: community outdoor warning systems. They started going off, and I thought, "Come on. I left Oklahoma!" But after the storm had spent itself, the pressure dropped, the sun came out, and it got spectacularly cold in a very short period of time. It felt like winter for a little while. The heatless sunshine is enough to let me close my eyes and imagine the sparkle of light on white, on ice.

I've taken to wearing my kromer anyway, as I want to feel like it's some kind of winter.

I had a spectacular cafe latte

2012-01-17T14:55:00.002-05:00

...at this little coffee shop called "Spencer's" in downtown on Friday.

The barista made the foam heart and I got all mushy. I sat in silence, sipped my unsweetened, skim-milk frothy treat in what seemed like reverential silence. I even chose a table close to the door so I could feel blustery winds as each new customer entered. My drink smelled good, it was warm in my hands, and even that horrible paper cup (I guess they didn't hear me say I'd be imbibing on the premises?) couldn't deter me from enjoying something sensual and private.

The only thing missing was a girlfriend. Kevin was good company, of course, and quite a sport while my eyes waxed poetic about the joy of lattes, but there's nothing quite like meeting a girlfriend for an indulgent treat at a coffee shop and a little gabbing.

I am not a coffee drinker, as most of my friends know, and when I do drink coffee, I take it black, with a little cold water to make it more instantly drinkable so that the caffeine works more quickly. I love tea. I have a table in my small kitchen devoted to tea, my teapot, and my electric kettle. But once in a while, I can get behind the idea of a warm latte. Call me a sucker for the froth, the foam, the lightness of milk in espresso on my tongue--I don't care. I'll be back to Spencer's. I still (will always, melodramatically) miss Babycake's in Marquette, of course, but Spencer's was a pleasant escape and provided a lovely respite on a snowy day.

Wading in the shallows

2012-01-16T22:53:00.007-05:00

For Christmas, I got something I have been asking for since I hiked a ridge in a 38-degree, 40mph wind thunderstorm wearing short sleeves and torn pants and torn boots and when a tick dug its little nasty head into my scalp this past summer: a beach vacation.

We did some kayaking and snorkeling in the ocean by the place we were staying.

I went to the Southernmost Point in the continental US. My uncle and my boyfriend took southernmost pisses.

Kevin and I watched several sunsets, sunrises, and one moon-set. This one was pretty romantic--we walked a mile down an oversea bridge and watched the sun set while we ate sandwiches and drank beer.

Back in Bowling Green, I've begun life as an adjunct. I don't want to get up at 5:30 tomorrow so I can be ready to teach at 8:00. Boo. Next time someone asks me what time of day I like to teach, I need to qualify "morning" with "late". I like my job so far. I like the textbooks. I wish I were teaching technical writing. I have one over-full class and one under-full class, so things even out. I'll also be teaching another class that runs only half the term, if it fills up some more.

Today, Kevin and I went thrift-shopping and came home with a $6 urn for our utensils, a $12 coat-hook/shelf for our coats, and a $30 bookshelf so we can cut down on the boxes of books sitting around the house. Books are great. Boxes of books taped shut are not so great. It's starting to feel like home.

Edit on Tuesday at 10:25AM: I forgot to say that we stayed at some property with a bunch of my family and it was really really nice. I loved seeing them and am really thankful that they invited us down for the holidays!

Altared

2012-01-03T16:01:00.002-05:00

December 12-12-10

I read a number of books in December, actually, but I'll write January about the Millennium series, as I am still reading book two.

I also read something called Gap Creek, which was really good.

So in December I stopped at a going-out-of-business used bookstore and picked up four or five books. One of them was a nonfiction collection called Altared: Bridezillas, Bewilderment, Big Love, Breakups, and What Women Really Think About Contemporary Weddings

and I read it in a few days. I suppose it was a sort of research for a collection of essays about the American wedding industry that I want to write myself.

While I found most of the book to be a little TOO heartwarming, I did enjoy the neuroses these women freely discussed and poked fun at. I especially enjoyed one woman's tale of her obsession with comparing etiquette books to find the rules because she felt inadequate to the task of planning a wedding. Overall, this book reinforced some things I already think about the wedding industry:

We tell women that the union they're about to celebrate is all about the bride.
We tell people that they have to spend a bunch of money to have a nice wedding.
We focus more on the wedding than on the marriage.
The indie and vintage wedding trends are commercialized to the point that their original intent is lost (save some money, still have an elegant, personal celebration).

Those three things kept coming up in both essays that were painfully self-aware and in others where I surmised these messages despite the authors' failure to note them.

I could go on with a manifesto of the things that I think are wrong with the wedding industry and culture, but I'll spare you.

Read it if you want to laugh a little at the humor in this sacred day or to think about your own feelings toward weddings and why you have them.

Not the best written pieces, and mostly entertaining rather than informative or introspective. But it was enjoyable.

I don't need a parachute

2011-12-08T22:02:00.005-05:00

When Hansel and Gretel's dad and stepmom first led them off into the woods, Hansel left a trail of pebbles to find his way home. The breadcrumbs on his second trip didn't work so well, you know, since the birds ate them.

The old witch first wanted to eat Hansel, but got greedy and decided to put Gretel in the oven, first, while Hansel was still in the fattening-up-cage, and Gretel saved them by knocking the old woman into the oven instead.

When I go into the woods, I don't build a fire and lay down beside it to sleep. Except when I went into the woods with Kevin and we went to this yurt and ate delicious seafood chowder and snowshoed around the Porkies.

But the Metaphor Wood, the one where I'm lost and it's going to be years before I get out, (Thanks, Nick Flynn), that wood makes me feel like Hansel and Gretel. I'm wandering, sure, but I know I'm running away from the candy house. Hunger doesn't mean much, really. It's the cold, the alone, that is frightening. But when I am cold and alone on a stone rock face, when I watch the sun rise and set on the mountains around me, my vantage point from the top of the mountain makes the animals in the meadow look like ants. So I guess I'm not that alone. I have ants. I have elk. The scent of the elk will lead me to a stream, to the safer copses of trees. The elk want to lead me through the wilderness, if I will just follow their trails. I am going to conquer the Raggeds, no matter how many times I have to dream my way down that valley and flap my wings back up that hill to solve the problem of how.

Just hold onto me, I'll hold onto you.

My things are all packed up. But my apartment needs to be cleaned. Next week, I will live in Kentucky.

The Hunger Games Trilogy and Nathaniel Hawthorne

2011-11-30T16:45:00.005-05:00

November 12-12-10

How do these two pieces fit together?

Collins's Hunger Games trilogy, which is comprised of The Hunger Games, Catching Fire and Mockingjay, is a futuristic science fiction dystopian social critique aimed at young adults. It offers a political and social critique of American culture via a totalitarian government and their sadistic Hunger Games reality television event. I think that networks could probably successfully make this reality show. It fulfills the same human mob love for violence that the gladiators did. I liked Katniss, generally, and found her character to be believable, if not altogether relatable. I was PISSED OFF about the end of the series. I didn't want her to end up living with/in love with the person she ended up with. I also was mad about one of the characters who was killed off. I thought that person would be untouchable, but they weren't. I guess that means the book was successful in hooking me emotionally, which is the mark of a good young adult novel. I read all 3 books in less than 48 hours. They're very plot-driven.

Nathaniel Hawthorne. I read The Scarlet Letter in high school, but that doesn't count. I didn't even remember the plot, really, so this was a fun adventure. I thought the book was funny, if a bit too pedantic. I liked the feminist bent I saw this time around, and I liked Hester Prynne quite a bit. I still don't understand the ending, but I think that is why the book is so intriguing to scholars and readers--the knowledge of human nature Hawthorne exhibits is expert.

So I thought the books shared female protagonists whose societies placed them under extreme duress for little more than being human beings while at the same time denying their very humanity and who came to very puzzling conclusions about their worlds and what their places in those worlds ought to look like.

Read all four of these books if you haven't done so already. Your life will be better. There will be fireworks and cups of tea with cubes of sugar. And lots of prisms on the wall. I swear.

Also, I have read way more than 24 books over the past two years, but these for-fun reviews are still fun. What should 2012 be dedicated to? I think Crime Novels. Or Memoirs. Or ebooks. What do you think?

Someone Like You

2011-11-13T15:15:00.006-05:00

I woke up at 5 this morning with this song in my head. I didn't hear it at the bar last night, which was a country bar on the strip called The Outlaw, so I don't know where it came from.

I was thinking about my best friend in high school and college and how I still really have a lot of love for her even though we rarely talk. I don't think the story I want to tell is about her, but, rather, it reminds me of her because she was epically bad at learning Spanish in high school.

Anyway.

In high school Spanish, someone in class couldn't remember ¿Por qué? when we learned interrogatives. So we came up with this sentence to help her: "Why are you a por qué pig?" so that whomever it was could pass the test.

And now that strikes me as really quite funny. I love puns.

Also, Adele is stunningly gorgeous in that video.

Weekend Waster & Other Natural Disasters

2011-11-08T17:56:00.005-05:00

Cynthia posted about how she wasted her weekend, and wanted people to share their own stories to make her feel better. I can oblige, as I often waste my weekends. I try not to think of it as "wasting" though, because I think it helps me work harder when I actually do work.

I have a habit of working for really long stretches without a day off and then of taking off several days at a time. I go on "I need a mental health day" binges. Binges, people.

This weekend I felt that I had defended my thesis (well, read from it, anyway), and so I deserved some time off. I binged.

I wrote about Friday already... I stayed at home all day and enjoyed myself.

I should have applied for jobs, graded papers, and sent out work. I also should have finished revising my thesis, uploaded things to this online server for OSU, and gotten paperwork in order to have people sign. Instead, I ordered my cap and gown, which was good, and dreamed about moving.

Saturday: I woke up sort of early, and was hoping to get out of town and go shopping, but that did not transpire. Instead, I shopped online and went to see a movie. It was called In Time and I went to see it because I think Amanda Seyfreid is beguiling. The acting was bad, the popcorn was sad, and the storyline was so/so. It could have been a pretty interesting 20 minute short film.

I came home and had several hours in which to work, so I actually did a little work, but mostly I looked at news stories and chatted online with my friend Amelia and possibly skyped with her for a while and we braided our hair in pigtails for each other to illustrate how young we looked. Yeah, Saturday!

Oh, there was a football game and that was loud and my neighbor yelled at me about a spot in the parking lot and I was upset. I hate being yelled at. I drank some bourbon.

I experienced a gigantic earthquake, 5.6!! And that was pretty fun. NO. It sucked. I got scared and some stuff fell off my shelves and a glass broke. I think it broke because of the other glasses falling on it, but still. I had earthquake damage. I stood in a doorway with my laptop, because I was afraid my house would fall down. It was shaking for about 90 seconds. I started counting after the glass broke, so I'm not sure. Then there were several aftershocks.

Sunday: I slept in until the crack of 9am. Time change! Woo! I went for a little run in the afternoon. Yeah, running! I read tabloids on the internet. I read about how I am apparently not eating enough calories, and that that is why I have been working out for 8 months 5-6 days a week and not losing any weight. I walked to the grocery store and picked up some fresh fruits and vegetables. Yum. I had an epic salad with romaine lettuce, tomatos, peppers, smoked salmon for dinner. I also had bread.

Around 3pm I decided that I probably wasn't going to get any work done and officially granted myself a day off.

I thought about packing to move, but did not. I put some laundry away that had somehow gotten left behind when I did laundry on Friday.

I watched an episode of Caprica, which is my favorite TV show of all time.

Monday: I woke up early, determined to get some work done. I picked up my house a little bit, hand-washed some laundry in my sink, pulled the sheets off my bed and put on clean ones, stacked up some books to take back to the library, worked on a rubric for a paper that is due in December, emailed people about things (Thanks, Superstition Review! for taking a poem for the next issue!), wondered whether I was supposed to have lunch with my friend or not (I didn't, so I don't know if I was. She never called me to say come over or whatever), did situps and pushups (I am exciting. I know.), and finally sat down to work.

Nope. I read people's essay, story and poem pubs online. I christmas shopped online. I made lists. We had an epic thunderstorm with hail and an earthquake aftershock (4.2 or 4.7 or something) during the storm.

Tuesday, however, I really did have to get back to work, and I graded a bunch of paper proposals and extra credit assignments. I also taught 2 classes and sent scolding emails about turning in papers. I still have half of those papers left to grade.

Stay At Home Fridays

2011-11-04T13:12:00.003-04:00

Koko is sick and tired of me working. See? She is sleeping on the table where my computer usually sits. I am staying home today, not going in to the office or computer lab or, (horror) library. It is a good day to do the things that make me a human.

I need more rainbows and flowers and less wind and computer-screen-time in my day to day. I am the sort of person to whom small things bring great joy. This is why I have prisms in my windows and a geranium and several flowering plants in my living room. Each plant has a name, a history, and attitudes.

Here's a story for you: I screwed up a little at my MFA reading because I realized I wasn't looking up enough and, so, when I looked up at the end of one of my favorite poems, I inverted the words and said, "for coyotes climbers eat."

Ha, ha.

The backs of my hands are bruised.

A Face in Every Window by Han Nolan

2011-10-29T11:30:00.005-04:00

After a few weeks of talking communes and making plans with my friend Amelia, she sent me a book by her favorite YA author called A Face in Every Window, in which a family wins a house and the mother lets anyone and everyone move in.

The inhabitants of the house/commune are all trying to find themselves, I guess. I thought the book could have done more with some of the issues it brought up, but the central theme was executed flawlessly: Order and chaos as experienced by a teenager trying to figure out why the adults in his life are just as unpredictable as his peers at the same time as he comes to terms with his grandmother's unexpected death.

I loved a scene where JP, the main character, has his friend Bobbi walk out into a stream with her shoes on and stand there listening to the water on either side of her until she felt like it was coursing through her so she can draw strength from the water like he has done.

She opened her eyes. "What am I supposed to hear?"
"Stay there." I backed up. "Now try it." She closed her eyes again, and I said, "Listen to the water. Listen to the sound on either side of you."
"Okay," Bobbi said, waiting.
"Doesn't it feel as if the water is running right through you? Like you are the water? Listen."
"No, it doesn't feel--"
"Just stand there and be quiet for a few minutes."
I moved awy from her and took up my own spot, behind her, and waited, watching her.
"Hey, yeah. Yeah, I do. Wow!" Bobbi said. "It's washing right through me. I feel so--so powerful, like all this water is rushing through me."
"Told you," I said, thrilled that she could feel it, that I could show her a moment of discovery, the way Mam used to with me.
"It's great. It's like that song we used to sing with Sister Patricia, remember? 'Roll on, Columbia'--about the Columbia River?" She opened her eyes and looked at me. It was the nicest look she'd ever given me. Her smile was for me, truly for me this time--a thank-you smile.

I hated how Bobbi served as a foil to JP instead of being a full-fledged character in her own right. I felt like with such a diverse cast, the book could have done a little more with some of the more visible secondary characters. It deals with too many issues (Abusive relationships, religion, homosexuality, infidelity, etc.) by not dealing with them, and that left me disappointed.

But I think it's successful because JP does learn to accept his family for whomever and whatever they are and for whatever they might become, so in that sense, it was well done. I like YA lit because I find that it can deal with emotional issues candidly.

Communes, science, cooking=win. Building relationships, being a non-asshole: so/so. Overall, three and a half stars out of five. I would read more books by Han Nolan. But I probably won't read this one again.

I had a dream last night

2011-10-25T15:38:00.004-04:00

So I go through phases with regard to dreaming. Sometimes, I have weeks of horrible nightmares from which I wake up with "the despair" and/or wake up breathing hard and sometimes crying. Sometimes I have really lucid dreams, which are cool but confusing because I wake up thinking I actually HAD that conversation with so and so. Usually my mother, Kevin, my brothers, my close friends. And I don't know why they don't know what I am talking about, because I remember the conversations very clearly. My favorite category of dreams, though, have been coming to me lately: the surrealist dreams. Larger than life berries, teeth falling out and turning to corn (a recurring theme), teacups the size of cars, talking pets, having babies, etc. So, I thought I'd share two of my more memorable recent dreams. [Edited on Oct. 26.]

Dream One:
I am walking in the woods in upper Michigan with Kevin. Our path takes us along the bottom ring of a steep hill. As we round a corner, we come upon a raspberry bush the size of a tree with branches that are each as big around as one of my arms, and 10m long. The bush is dangling from the top of the hill/cliff down over our pathway. As we reach up and pick some berries, we realize that the berries growing on the bush are the size of apples. Each of the drupelets is the size of a concord grape. We each eat one berry and then take the seeds back to camp to roast them. My mom is at camp, and as we tell her about the berries, the dream changes.

Dream Two:
I am riding my horse, Ember, bareback with no bridle. I am so in tune with her and she with me that all I need to do is apply the slightest pressure with my thighs to get her to turn either direction. We're at a slow lope, and she's skimming us smoothly across a field under a beautiful full moon. We stop at a clear spring to drink and I dismount to wash my hands and then we both go swimming in the pond. Later, when I take her back to the stable, someone walks up and tells me they need her for some sort of paying customer to ride and I tell them no, that nobody can ride her but me.

This one was sad because I woke up and realized that my horse died last year.

So much of my dream life is played out in the landscape of my childhood. I wonder if that is the case for other people. If so, it makes childhood so interesting in the ways our brains work in terms of problem solving. Can we ever come to the same types of decisions if our main problem solving technique (dreaming) is so vastly different and unpredictable? I guess so. But I like thinking about it.

I should have been a scientist.

My poor eye. It has done/ so much looking.

2011-10-22T12:26:00.003-04:00

(title is from Meditations on a Moth by Megan O'Rourke. If you scroll down, the poem is printed below her bio on that website.)

Do you remember being young enough and lonely enough to make friends with complete strangers? I met this girl last night who was so afraid to be alone at the poetry reading I was attending, that she simply sat down and started talking to me about her family and about how she draws inspiration from TV shows to write fiction about serial killers. Really charming. It might just be friendliness, but it seems more like a primal form of desperation.

My fridge is looking bare, but I don't want to go grocery shopping yet. I was trying to wait until next week when I will get paid. So for the week, I have two eggs, some pasta and sauce, a tin of sardines, some frozen bread, peanut butter, honey, and powdered slim fast. Oh and a couple of apples. I love apples. Looks like sandwiches and pasta for me! I can do sardines and olive oil on the pasta one night and tomato sauce the rest of the week.

I love the challenge of planning and eating meals without going shopping when it seems like I've eaten nearly all the food in my house.

Things I am looking forward to:
Nov. 2--my thesis defense
Nov. 18--going home for Thanksgiving
Nov. 25--going to Kentucky to see Kevin!!
packing up my stuff
having a car
Dec. 16--graduation
Dec. 17--leaving Oklahoma
Living in Kentucky
Christmas in Michigan
AWP

Things I am not looking forward to:
grading
saying goodbye
job applications
moving and unpacking my stuff
getting rid of furniture I am attached to
trying to cram two people's accumulated things into the space that is comfortably filled with just one person's stuff

this is just to say...

2011-10-16T14:35:00.006-04:00

Part One:
I have eaten the ...

I don't know why that WCW poem has invaded my thoughts so pervasively during the last week or so. It isn't nostalgia for writing homage poems in Jamrich during Mark Smith's class, the lights dim, Cynthia and I scribbling in notebooks beside one another, desks in a U around the room... It's just there. Rattling its self-imposed braincage.

Part Two:

Sometimes I look around me, literally and metaphorically, and have no idea where I am or how I got here. I'm lost, and I got me here. (Re-read the section I posted from Flynn's the ticking is the bomb .) My question is: How long do we get to feel lost? It seems like it's alright to feel that way for a while, but that there is pressure on me to have a plan. To know which side of the trees the moss is growing on and to know which way the elk went to track their scent. But why, when we admit this lostness, do some people think we have to be happy about it? I am fucking lost in the woods. It's frightening. Sure, I find that I am more productive and more rational and more "me" when I don't feel much at all--when I'm even-keeled. And, I guess, some people call that happy. But I don't feel happy, or very even-keeled, so why do you want to force me to pretend? Right now, I'm below the middle mark. And that's okay because it won't last forever. I will have to stand up and find food and find a way to keep warm at night. It sucks. But it won't last, and I will be someone else when I get out of these woods. I will be changed.

"it is/infertile, and endless somehow."

2011-10-14T16:44:00.003-04:00

It's Friday October 14, 2011. Lately, my life has been chaotic, but all the chaos is in my head.

Here are some things I have been thinking about:

Some cultures have women change their names when they get married and others do not. The "why" question is really intriguing to me. In the United States, I think we do it from a holdover of the idea that patriarchal lines should determine family structure... So when a woman gets married, she is passed from one patriarch to another, and must change her name to reflect that. It's pretty cool when people create new last names for their new family, but that's not legal or easy in many states. I also think it's cool that in countries like Spain, kids get their last names based on the first of each of their parents' last names and women don't change their names to reflect that they've married. Ex: John Smith Jacobs and Karen Fagan Emerson have a daughter named Cathy Smith Fagan. Of course the first surname is from each person's father, so it is still sort of patriarchal, but one wouldn't change one's name because one's parentage doesn't change when one gets married.

I need to get a new suit.

This wine is delicious.

Being in graduate school is not an experience I'll repeat. It was basically just like high school. Undergraduate was better, somehow.

Why do people think it is impossible for one person to love two (or three or ten) people romantically at the same time? Sure, it's ill-advised because of our monogamy-obsessed, soulmate culture, but people are way too uptight. There are many people who have so much love to give. Why shouldn't they give it to more than one person at any given time in their lives?

The poem "Second Bearing, 1919" by Claudia Emerson (available online at son and foe) gives me shivers down my spine.

Tallgrass to Bluegrass Part 2

2011-10-01T21:26:00.001-04:00

(Presque Isle Lighthouse/Breakwall: Marquette, MI ... Fall 2007)

When I return home, I pay my respects to Lake Superior. On our trip this past spring, I pulled over on the stretch between Munising and Marquette (one of my absolute favorite drives in the country) to run down over the dunes and jump into the water. It was cold. I couldn't feel my feet, getting back into the driver's seat, but the sand between my toes put a smile on my face.

I was talking about Lake Superior recently with a friend who has never seen her. I tried to explain the beauty, the reverence. I concluded that people who love Lake Superior love her with a devotion that borders being religious.

Who wouldn't, having lived a block away from her shores?

And in the winter in Grand Marais... The ice mountains were huge. I slide down one like it was a sand dune. We climbed so many. It is so white that pictures were hard to take.

Part of the reason that I have never felt settled here, that I've never called Oklahoma, "home," is that there is no water. I never valued the Great Lakes (or the small ones) so much as when I looked around me and realized that the closest thing I had to a lake to sit beside was a dammed up river that had flooded a park.

In Kentucky, when I get there, there is even less water. I walked by a river one day with Kevin, in a park that depressed me even more than Boomer Lake did when I first visited Stillwater's answer to the need for jogging trails. The park I have in mind in Bowling Green had a gravel path and crossed a river right at its outset. It was a loop in a lot that had been mowed. Maybe 1/4 mile all together. I noticed the vestiges of a homeless encampment under a bridge. It was named after a senator who'd gotten some sort of pork into a bill to pay for a monument to himself. I don't have pictures.

I do have a few places in Bowling Green that I love already, though, lest you think that all I do is complain about every place that isn't Michigan. (Michigan is awesome. But other places are nice, too.) For me, Kentucky is going to be about bluegrass music, about rivers, and about caves. The Lost River Cave in Bowling Green can be a little homelike for me. I love the blue holes and would love to take a riverboat tour of the cave sometime. Mammoth Cave National Park is just 40 minutes away by car. Kevin has been paddling at a lake we found out about by attending a Sierra Club meeting. I run in the cemeteries and in a little park with a little league field and a 1/4 mi trail and a jungle gym. It's cute. It's close to the house. I like it, but it's not Presque Isle. It's not my dad's fields or the pond and creek I grew up swimming and fishing in. But, it will suffice. It has to.

The realization that I'm not going to be apart from Kevin for much longer is starting to get me excited. I saw this the other day and thought it was great inspiration for a birthday package... I love to send little home-made care packages. But guess what!? I will BE in Kentucky when it is Kevin's birthday! Maybe I will send something similar to a different friend. But I am starting to realize that this is really going to happen.

If I had more pictures of Oklahoma or Kentucky, I'd post some. I have some pictures of Mammoth Caves and Lost River floating around in my digital storage, but can't seem to locate them right now. Soon.

Whoa, Wednesday.

2011-09-21T20:23:00.007-04:00

Remember how I used to draw comics in 2006ish? Well, I don't have photoshop or a drawing tablet anymore. But I can still express emotion through pictures. Enjoy.

I planned to wake up early, do a bunch of productive, adult things and function like a normal member of society.

Instead, I spent most of my time feeling sorry for myself and thinking in Hulk-like language and then I toughed up and went for a run. Now, I've got to finish grading papers or else. Notice that there is no dinner in panel 2. Le sad.

Introducing "Tallgrass to Bluegrass"

2011-09-19T10:33:00.009-04:00

In honor of my impending transition from a tallgrass prairie state (see above) to the bluegrass and horse racing and juleps of another, I've decided to write little snippets on here.

Part One: Boomer Lake

I generally go jogging and walking at a city park called Boomer Lake. Boomer Lake is essentially a dammed up river with man-made inlets and coves. When I moved here from the shore of Lake Superior, I cried. The closest I get to waves is when a boat drives by in the early morning or when a breeze picks up. The lakeshore is tiled, since they made the lake anyway, so there is no sandy beach or shale playground. I used to spend my time with this:

and she brought me great joy. I, along with many people I know, feel a connection to Lake Superior that is spiritual, cultish, and borderline insane.

Boomer Lake, on the other hand, is an object, not an entity. Still, it brings me calm. It brings me herons, bitterns, ducks, canadian geese, once a trumpeter swan, many small song birds, once a huge snake, frogs, crickets, beetles, large hairy spiders, and people. Many many people jogging with their dogs, pushing strollers, talking on cell phones while running (will I ever be in that kind of shape??) and the occasional buzzard, hawk, fish, or turtle.

The lake doesn't quite freeze over, because the winter doesn't get cold enough here. Canadian geese stay all year long. I used to see those geese and feel more at home. Now I feel sadness. I see geese that are missing out. Geese that should be summering in places like Tahquamenon and Big Bay. When it was 110, 115F this summer, I looked at those geese and wondered what the hell they'd done with their instincts. But then, I looked at myself and wondered the same thing. When I moved here, I went from lake to cowboy. From fierce, untethered nature to the tamest of lakes. These cowboys had subjugated everything, it seemed.

The best gift Boomer Lake ever gave to me happened this week, as I begin preparing to leave:

A live armadillo is something that few people I know have seen: there are plenty of roadkill armadillos, but the ones in town tend to be quite shy. It was cute. It had inquisitive eyes and a pinkish face. I wanted to pet it. Of course I didn't. Leprosy, and all that. But I accepted this man-made lake's gift and took joy from it, freely, without judgment. I am ready to move on.

I'm pleased and excited to go from rodeos to races. From tallgrass to bluegrass.

From waves of grain to caves and rivers.

Feminism, Babyfaces, Ani, and Make-Up

2011-09-13T17:22:00.002-04:00

I don't wear make-up and, to most strangers, this makes me look younger than my age, which is in my mid-twenties. Earlier this week I called attention a post wherein I argued with a woman who didn't believe I was a graduate student. Another incident I remember: being asked if I had my driver's license yet during the summer between undergrad and grad school by a friend's cousin--okay, so the friend in question was quite a bit younger than me, but still... I was offended because I'd just graduated from college. Now, I sort of laugh at it.

But I do often apologetically make people feel less awkward for insulting me when they assume things like I'm in high school or that I'm getting my undergrad degree by agreeing or asserting that I have a "young-looking face", when I explain that I am 5 or 10 years older than they think I am. Also, whenever I go out with my friends and I'm not wearing make-up, everyone but me gets into a bar or gets a drink with no ID-checking. Bartenders and servers ALWAYS check mine. Even at the liquor store on the corner by my house where I go at least once a week and know the employees by name, I get my ID checked regularly. It's good, I think. BUT if I have make-up on, it's about 80/20 that I will NOT be asked for ID in the same situations. (The 20% that I do still get asked, I'm wearing a t-shirt that doesn't show cleavage.)

So I recognize that those are sort of specious arguments, but I sort of think I hit on an interesting conundrum while talking about all this with a friend of mine.

If make-up makes people assume that women are older, more mature, more adult, why is that? Why do (young) women have to cake on a mask to be deemed grown-up by strangers? Is this similar to men with facial hair? Maybe.

I guess some teenagers aren't allowed to wear make-up, or something. I don't know. But I just want to know why it makes young women look older. Is it a mark of puberty like facial hair? That's screwed up and weird, if so. Even the idea of wearing make-up as a rite of passage is weird. Oh hey, you're a woman now, you can cover up your face and try to look different than you really look.

So why don't I just wear make-up if I want to be treated seriously as a person with two graduate degrees and quit complaining? Well, I'll tell you why. Yay, it's my blog and I can do that.

1. I don't like to wear make-up because I don't like what it does with my skin.

I came from a non-make-up wearing home, didn't really play dress-up with it, and while I do own some:

mascara (brown)
eyeliner (gray)
eyeshadow (light brown)
lipstick (red, bought for a halloween costume and sitting in my drawer waiting to be used and thrown away)
face-powder (really really really white)

I rarely wear makeup. I sometimes give excuses: yeah, it makes me break out or I get horrible rashes from lipstick (seriously, I do), but I wouldn't wear it anyway.

Confession: I wear mascara every couple of days because I have blonde eye-lashes and look freakish if I don't stain my eyelashes every so often to make them visible.

2. I don't want to take that much time to get ready when I want to leave the house.

I have no idea what many other women go through with regards to a daily routine that includes cover-up, face-cream, foundation, lip-gloss, lip liner, eyebrow pencils, eyebrow waxing (admittedly not make-up), eye-liner, wet vs dry eyeshadow, multiple shades of eyeshadow, blusher, bronzer, lipstick, lip conditioner, etc. Seriously. Typing all that tired me out. And I'm sure I missed some.

(So don't think I am judging you for your choice to wear make-up... I'm not. I'm just questioning as to why people feel that they have to wear it and what it means when someone does wear it.)

3. I think make-up sends a message that people's faces somehow aren't good enough as they are, that people need to try to make themselves more attractive to others by covering up their own skin. It sends that message to me: I wear make-up to look nothing like myself. (see this youtube video.)

It encourages women to feel badly about themselves. Most men don't need make-up to be taken seriously or to look dressed up or well put-together. Sure actors and politicians wear make-up, but I'm talking my brothers, my boyfriend, my colleagues. These guys don't have to put on make-up to come to work or go out. Why do women do it??

I get that people wear make-up to feel/look beautiful, but to me it feels like reinforcing someone else's idea of what beautiful is supposed to be. It feels like performance. For who? Men? So we cover up our faces to make men think we look pretty? Seriously? Sure, sometimes I am fine with putting on someone else's face and going out for an evening. But really, I am happy with my skin, I like my eyes, lips and don't see the need to change them... or to enhance them, really, aside from the pesky freakish blonde eyelashes. I know, make-up that is done well enhances. But what is the point? To attract a mate? To make others feel more comfortable that I live by the same rules as most of them?

--
This is kind of a non-sequitur. But I am going to talk about it anyway.

Over the weekend, I discovered this awful Glamour Shot picture of me from age fifteen or sixteen. I mean, look at this shit. I look about 25 and like I am ready for a wedding or, as my friend Jill said, a prom that Jason Vorhees will attend.

Okay, maybe I don't look 25. But I don't look like me as a teenager, either.

I look like I'm trying really hard to be someone else. Why is the message that I have to hate who I am to look pretty or glamorous or whatever? What if I am not a pretty girl? Huh? (I love Ani.)

I see some faces that are made-up and that look very pretty. I see some girls who feel more confident in make-up and thus seem prettier. I just don't happen to be one of those girls. I put on make-up and I look like I'm trying to look like anyone but me. So I'd rather not wear make-up. Why does my lack of weathered skin make me look like a child to people?

Because I'm not putting as many chemicals on it. Because I use sunblock. These things make it all right for strangers to make assumptions about my age or maturity level or education level? What I am getting at is that culturally, it marks me as younger-looking in a group because I don't cake my face and line my eyes and lips with gunk and chemicals. This pisses me off, readers. PISSES ME RIGHT OFF. Seriously? I look like a kid because I choose to take care of my skin with facewash and face moisturizer and carmex and salicylic acid?

I am a proudly bare-faced woman who loves herself, her skin, and doesn't need to hide those things or enhance them.

Teatime on Monday

2011-09-12T15:29:00.005-04:00

(because I recently read that every successful blog posts pictures with their posts...) Home on the Range. I think this was taken when Amelia came to visit me in January of 2011.

I am writing at tea-time on Monday. This December I will finish my MFA in poetry at OSU. I couldn't be more pleased. I got to work pretty closely with Lisa Lewis, and I plan to do more of that in the weeks to come. I've already begun sending my poems out to book contests, so we will see what transpires. I am hopeful. And afraid. And a little ready for rejection.

So that's what's up with me.

I've decided to add a little structure to my final semester. My schedule currently looks like this:

Monday: poetry?; look for jobs; make (dream about) vacation and/or life plans
Tuesday: Teach, Teach.
Wednesday: paperwork (most of it is done.); read
Thursday: Teach, Teach, audit a class because I'm bored
Friday: Read, Go shopping, Clean house, Walk around outside.
Weekend: See "Friday"; also maybe grade things.

And, as I haven't done much blogging lately, I thought I could squeeze some time into this incredibly busy schedule (cough, sarcasm) to do so. There are many topics I simply won't write about and put on the internet. In the years since I started this blog, I have become a different person. Oh, past Sarah. What were you thinking? You were very emo. Seriously, but at least cryptically so. (Please don't see 2005 in the archives.) I do miss the person who made comics, though. Those are actually pretty funny. Please, DO go click on the 2006 archives.

Also, I think the lady who drew this picture about how she felt her education was letting her down knew what she was talking about. Reminds me of the whole Huffington Post majoring in debt campaign? And the ongoing story...

But then, there's the young woman who drew this picture of her dog when he died. I still know her. Sometimes pets are your family. I've never gotten over his death. I've been so afraid of getting a dog since then. I think I am finally ready, five years later. But I'm still afraid. I don't think a dog will ever love me the way Chewy did. (And lest I seem narcissistic, vice versa! That's why I haven't gotten another dog. Hello ferret, cat.) And that's okay.

Ohhh and the woman who drew GIN CHICKEN... I guess I still am this person. But I am a more grown-up version of her.

Finally, I love the one who was outraged on an airplane, here.

Also, what happened to 2007? I must have been a real emo sack of weird, to have deleted the entire year from my archives. Good for me.

Anyway, I may have returned to blogging on a semi-regular basis. I have a few things I want to write about that aren't books I'm reading.

Hi, internet.

the ticking is the bomb

2011-09-11T11:44:00.004-04:00

by Nick Flynn

Another memoir? How much can this guy have to say? WRONG.

the ticking is the bomb weaves together these stories: of a man preparing for fatherhood, a man lost because of himself, a man trying desperately to both become and not become his parents, a man who abhors torture (think Abu Ghraib) in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, a man who is looking at something that everyone else is claiming isn't there, a man searching for answers from anywhere they're hiding.

This was even better than another bullshit night in suck city.

I found the opening, just after a sort of prologue, "a field guide to getting lost" to read like a prose poem. Probably the poet in Flynn. It is certainly prose. It ties complex ideas together and succinctly opens the topic of lostness for the memoir.

Flynn opens "a field guide to getting lost" with these words:

Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasn't happened to you yet consider yourself lucky. When it does, when one day you look around and nothing is recognizable, when you find yourself alone in a dark wood having lost the way, you may find it easier to blame someone else---an errant lover, a missing father, a bad childhood. Or it may be easier to blame the map you were given---folded to many times, out of date, tiny print. You can shake your fist at the sky, call it fate, karma, bad luck, and sometimes it is. But, for the most part, if you are honest, you will only be able to blame yourself. Life can, of course, blindside you, yet often as not we choose to be blind---agency, some call it. If you're lucky you'll remember a story you heard as a child, the trick of leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, the idea being that after whatever it is that is going to happen in those woods has happened, you can then retrace your steps, find your way back out. But no one said you wouldn't be changed, by the hours, the years, spent wandering those woods.

When I first read this, I read it again. And again. I breathed these words. I became these words. Here was someone who knew what I was going through. Who had been there. Who maybe was there, as he wrote the words. So, on the fifth page, I was hooked. I read this book in an evening. And I'm re-reading it again now that a week has passed so I can pick up the nuance, the expertise of how it is woven together so tightly that the words themselves hold water.

Some other things I loved and have pondered, agreed with, in which I have found a soul who can voice things mine can only feel:

"I wasn't used to calling love something that didn't involve disaster" p. 17

"Moe, it seems, is forever trying to carve his way into someone else's body." (re: 3 Stooges)

"It was how we made it through our days, wrapped in gauze, frozen like Walt Disney, waiting for some scientific discovery that would make it possible to wake up again, one day" p. 50

"All living things have shoulders." p. 90

"Only those who have never lost anyone believe in the undead." p. 261

Yes, it's a book about torture. About Flynn's unborn child. About being lost. About finding one's way.

another bullshit night in suck city

2011-09-11T11:39:00.003-04:00

by Nick Flynn

funny, sad, insightful. Did I mention funny? Read it. If you've come across Flynn's poetry, be assured that his prose has the same cynical, earnest, sad, hopeful voice.

Read it. Now. Read it again. Etc.

-s

Some Hemingway to love

2011-08-20T11:12:00.001-04:00

Along with Youth
by Ernest Hemingway

A porcupine skin,
Stiff with bad tanning,
It must have ended somewhere.
Stuffed horned owl
Pompous
Yellow eyed;
Chuck-wills-widow on a biassed twig
Sooted with dust.
Piles of old magazines,
Drawers of boy’s letters
And the line of love
They must have ended somewhere.
Yesterday's Tribune is gone
Along with youth
And the canoe that went to pieces on the beach
The year of the big storm
When the hotel burned down
At Seney, Michigan.

The Poisonwood Bible--Barbara Kingsolver (July 12-12-10)

2011-07-19T20:40:00.002-04:00

So I finally read The Poisonwood Bible.

I purchased this book in what seems like another lifetime. I was browsing thrift shops with Amelia in Saginaw on some weekend down to visit my old friends and my previous life from before I moved to Marquette. Amelia's friendship, then, in that place was very asynchronous. I guess she was the only friend I had left there, but she was never there while I was there. And now she's gone, too.

Anyway, I picked this book off of a shelf in a thrift shop and recalled a high school teacher telling me to read it. I think she wanted to scare me off from some sort of latent evangelism that I might still have lurking in the recesses of my subconscious. In a prescient moment for her, I would never be a missionary or a missionary's wife. The gospels I spread are the Gospel of Academic Prose, the Gospel of Grammar and Joseph Williams Gospel of Clarity and Grace. All good and well. Sometimes I offer the ten commandments as the end commandments: Thou shalt use MLA Formatting. Thou shalt not use the second person to address thine readers. Thou shalt/not...

So the book. Right, my purpose in blogging here is not to make private jokes.

The Poisonwood Bible is funny. It's sad. It's the sort of fiction I've been digging. When I don't read short stories, my favorite form of fiction, I read these epic family sagas. While The Poisonwood Bible is not Blonde or even The Corrections, I do appreciate the detail with which the characters grow from children to women to women. There are women, and there are women, to borrow a construction from the book.

For me, the mark of a good book is not wanting to put it down. As a kid, I used to stay up, nights, reading stories in my bedroom long past bedtime. I found myself suffering the same inclination with this. I started it on Sunday, took some time off to teach and go to class and have a drink on Monday, read until I fell asleep last night, and finished it today. This was no easy accomplishment, as its 543 pages contained the voices of five women, all of whom were the main characters in their own stories and minor characters in others.

I can see why it met with popular and critical success. I thought that much of the book read like the most beautiful prose poetry; I'll quote from the beginning to illustrate what I mean by that comment.

Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened. First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glid of snake belly on branch. A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. This forest eats itself and lives forever.

The first few times I tried to read this book, I didn't make it past the first chapter. This time, I made it past that chapter because of how beautifully the prose is written and stayed with it because of how compellingly the characters are done.

Finally, as much as I'd love to ruin the reason for the title, I won't. Suffice it to say that it delighted and saddened and made culpable every character and especially me, the reader, to "get" the reason for the title.

So yes, it's still worth reading, all this time after it was written.

Tonguecat by Peter Verhelst & White Teeth by Zadie Smith

2011-06-10T15:23:00.003-04:00

Tonguecat is translated from Dutch by Sherry Marx

I read these books mostly simultaneously. I began Tonguecat in Kentucky and continued in while I was on the road to MI. I didn't want to take a library book out on Isle Royale with me, so I took White Teeth.

Tonguecat enters into the fray with a story that entertains both types of lies we tell ourselves as societies and uses mythological/fantastical elements to write a witty, poignant tale of progress and decline both personal and national for all characters involved. Each chapter tells the same story but a different version of it through first person narrative from different characters. Verhelst manages to make each main character sympathetic, despite the horrors they inflict upon others. While trading in dreams, carrying fire and strawberries under their tongues, and seeing with cats' eyes, these characters convey the harshest, most beautiful social criticism I've read in quite a while.

The final passage in the novel begins, "I ask myself how long it will take before we are overrun by those knives. Until they have worked their way through us like bamboo shoots." The last words of the novel are a quote by Hakim Bay: "We welcome the return of Chaos, because with danger the possibility of creating comes closer."

The fabric of a kingdom unwinds itself around a revolution and the fabric of the novel and that of the reality within the novel unwind until, at the end, sentences are incomplete, some poetry is quoted, and then after a blank page, the above H. Bay quote leaves readers to their hopefully changed selves.

White Teeth came into my sphere a few years ago via word of mouth from someone whose opinion did not carry weight with me. I didn't read it. In the intervening years, people whose opinions I *do* respect have read and recommended the novel more times than I'd like to count. So I broke down and read it because KCA had a copy of it at his house and he'd recently joined the ranks of converts preaching about the book.

My feelings were mixed as I began, because I still had that bad taste in my mouth of someone who has decided NOT to read a book and who changes her mind unwillingly. It took me a while to begin to like the book, but by the time Irie, Magid and Millat were characters in their own rights, I really started to dig it. My favorite section of the novel was the end, as Hortense became a more fully fleshed out minor character and as Chalfenism was at its most rampant amongst all the characters. I'm not sure I love the way Smith ends the novel, but I did like FutureMouse(tm) and the press conference on New Year's Eve. The amalgamation of events leading up to the press conference were fun and funny. I was most surprised at how damn funny the book was. I continually laughed aloud at different sentences Smith had penned--too funny to pass up. In the postcolonial genre of novel-writing, she takes serious issues of class and native identity and tells a story that makes us laugh and cringe. (Take, for example, the school board member who had taken the self-test in the pamphlet on racism and discovered that she was not, in fact, racist...)

The anthem that the book carried most fully, "go back to your own country," was made more complicated, laughed at, cried over, bled over, and mulled over so often in the book that it took on a life of its own. Irie even wanted to go, with Hortense, by the book's end. And if these characters and their children were confused, what about Irie's baby? Wow. Just, wow.

Both of these books dealt with social issues, and in very different ways. As fantastic as Tonguecat was, White Teeth was realistic. As horrifying as Tonguecat's scenes of violence were, so funny were White Teeth's scenes of awkward family life.

Go read both of them. But probably not together.

28 Day Blog Challenge Canceled

2011-06-10T15:22:00.002-04:00

I am sick of the prompts and don't feel like answering anymore of them.

Sorry, friends who were probably sick of it anyway! ;)

28 Day Blog Challenge Day 21

2011-06-07T14:09:00.002-04:00

Would you rather not be able to use your phone or your email?

Well don't most people get their email on their phones these days?

I don't. But I would choose email. There are people I communicate with via email that I do not communicate with via phone. Those whom I speak with only on the phone, I could conceivably email.

I've thought about this quite a bit, because I was thinking about disappearing, and how one would do that. I listened to an NPR TTBOOK segment in February as I did some errands about how to disappear completely. Disappearing 101.

The required components: false trails, cash cash cash, prepaid cell phones, an email address your family would also have access to via sharing a password and never sending the emails, only saving drafts.

Notable quotes from the podcast if you can't listen:
The book is: How to Disappear: Erase your digital footprint, leave false trails, and vanish without a trace.

"Tabloids are like the CIA."
"It's actually really hard to disappear."
"The average person, you can find bits and pieces of the and use that information to locate them. If I find your mother in Des Moines, I'll be able to pretext her and find out everything about you."
"Don't think you're going to get a new identity. It's ridiculous."
"The information always leads to where you're at."
"We all leave some sort of information behind that catches us."

The only thing about disappearing is what does the person do for a job? If their credit report can be accessed illegally, how can they use their social security number?

Anyway, back to the question: I'd rather give up my phone number, which I have had since I was a teenager, than give up my email address. Also, the way the question is phrased, I think one could use others' phones or use pay phones. So definitely give up the phone.

28 Day Blog Challenge Day 20

2011-06-06T12:48:00.000-04:00

20. Be forgotten or hatefully remembered?

Forgotten.

I'd like to be invisible, so people couldn't see me at all to even remember me.

But then, why do I write? Not so that people remember me, but so that my words might have some impact on their lives?

I know many people who would rather be hated than forgotten. But I would rather never be noticed, I guess, than hated. I really hate when people hate me. I pretend not to care, and sometimes I don't care, because I don't see the point of expending that kind of emotional energy on a lost cause, but if someone has been my friend, it really does upset me when he or she is no longer my friend.

28 Day Blog Challenge Day 19

2011-06-05T12:46:00.000-04:00

19. Have a mansion in the middle of nowhere or an apartment with 10 friends?

I pick middle of nowhere. But I don't need a mansion. That sounds like a lot of work. I'd like a house in the woods where I can have a garden and a little family and drive to town on weekends to do some shopping. But an apartment with 10 friends sounds like a sort of hell. All the fighting and the emotions and the sleeping around and swapping partners: Big Brother all the time!! Unless the apartment with 10 friends in Valhalla, in which case, I accept.

28 Day Blog Challenge Day 18

2011-06-04T12:43:00.000-04:00

18. Give bad advice or take bad advice?

I rarely take what I think is bad advice. Actually, people don't really give me advice very often, and when they do, I can usually tell that it is either good or bad and act accordingly.

On the other hand, it is really difficult to ever give good advice, because we very rarely have the whole story to look at from the beginning.

28 Day Blog Challenge Day Seventeen

2011-06-03T12:40:00.000-04:00

17. Know it all or have it all?

Know it all.

--one wouldn't necessarily have to tell others what one knew
--one would be able to have what one wanted, if in fact, one still wanted things because one could excel at any job one chose
--having "it all" would mean that one could lose "it all" by making a bad decision or by being ill advised or informed, while knowledge is only lost via death, brain trauma, and disease.

28 Day Blog Challenge Day Sixteen

2011-06-02T12:38:00.000-04:00

16. Fly when you fart or pee when you laugh?

Haha, like levitate?

Did a middle school boy write these questions? No, seriously. Did one?

I guess fly. Peeing would be messy. And people wouldn't want to admit that you were flying or hovering, so they probably wouldn't realize what was happening. Also, I generally leave the company of others when I need to pass gas, so it would be a private setting, whereas I often laugh around other people, and that could be pretty awkward to explain.

28 Day Blog Challenge Day Fifteen

2011-06-01T12:32:00.002-04:00

15. Always lose or never play?

I have adopted a "never play" attitude with regard to board games and video games, because I hate them. I do like to win, and when I have won, it has been nice. I don't like to lose, but when I have lost, it hasn't been that bad. I hate the act of playing board games because they annoy me and it feels like a supreme waste of time. It's such a first world activity. Like, I have no problems or things to talk about or think about so I am going to indulge in a fantasy competition with these people that is based around a piece of cardboard with some plastic pieces or a screen and a controller... I don't find board games to be useful or productive at all.

I'd rather not play, not because having no chance to win would sap me of my desire to play, but because I don't see the need to manufacture the feelings of competition and rivalry between people that we already have for much more real situations.

I think of games like fighting, and I don't see why people want to fight when they ought to be having a good time with each other and enjoying each others' company.

On the other hand, I do love to play cards so much that I would keep playing even if I would always lose. I'd also probably say that most gamblers would (do) keep gambling even if they always lose. The love of the game, we say, is greater than the love of winning. Many cliches would fit here. But for some reason I only feel that way about some games. Games I actually like to play in the first place.

28 Day Blog Challenge Day Fourteen

2011-05-31T12:31:00.000-04:00

14. End hunger or hatred?

If you end hatred, don't you get much closer to ending hunger as well? Whereas if we all have enough to eat, we can all still try to kill each other. If we all love each other, we want other people to not starve. So end hatred.

28 Day Blog Challenge Day Thirteen

2011-05-30T12:23:00.002-04:00

13. Be able to hear any conversation or take back what you said?

I am not sure I understand the question. What does that mean--would I rather be able to hear anyone else's conversations? As in, I could decide that I'd like to know what my grandma is saying to my mom right now and an auditory version of Belle's magic mirror from Beauty and the Beast would play it for me?

Take back what I said -- is this a repeating thing, like I could go back in time and re-say something? If so, I pick that.

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to rehearse what you meant to get across? Communication is so difficult to begin with, the ability to retract something and have reality change so that you did not actually say it seems to be much more enticing than to be able to hear other people say things that aren't meant for your ears and then to probably say things you would like to take back as a result of having heard those conversations. I find that everyone has a persona all the time, and that those personas are in flux depending on who we are talking to at a given moment. I'd rather not know how people are when I'm not around. My perceptions of them are based on the way they are when they're around me.

On the other hand, one could possibly save the world or hear a conversation that would let them get rich, and that would probably be enticing, but the first thing I thought of with this question was interpersonal relationships, so I'll stick with that interpretation.

And so, even though I can see how people would like to have the ability to overhear any conversation, I think I'd like to have the power to take back things I've said.

28 Day Blog Challenge Day Twelve

2011-05-29T12:17:00.001-04:00

12. Have pom-poms for hands or glow sticks for fingers?

Wait, what?

The ridiculousness of this question has left me without an answer.

See you tomorrow for something else.

I was going to post a picture of some glow sticks here, but I couldn't find one I liked.

Also, I am on Isle Royale, so these posts are going to be updating automatically for a few days.

28 Day Blog Challenge Day Eleven

2011-05-28T12:15:00.000-04:00

11. Always say what’s on your mind or never speak again?

Never speak again.

I entertain way too many thoughts that I do not wish to share with anyone, let alone have to say them all the time. It would be oddly easier to be a teacher who never spoke than to be one who had to say whatever she thought.

I think most of us would freak everyone out if we oralized our inner monologues.

28 Day Blog Challenge Day Ten

2011-05-27T05:25:00.000-04:00

Would you rather find true love or 10 million dollars?

I think I'd pick love because finding that much money would most likely mean you had to give it back.

Even if I got to keep some of it, I think I'd still pick true love, if that even exists.

I'm not convinced it does. I think love exists, but true love is probably a myth. A fairy tale. And if I could have a fairy tale come true or live in a myth, that would be pretty rad. I'd also probably end up in a nuthouse. But I'm on my way there anyway.

28 Day Blog Challenge Day Nine

2011-05-26T05:23:00.000-04:00

would you rather live in Antarctica or Death Valley?

This is so easy. I would much rather live in Antarctica. The isolation and the cold both appeal to me. I would love the challenge, the beauty, the fierceness of nature. I would be lonely, but I suspect that most people who want to live on the bottom of the world are sort of lone wolves like I can be.

28 Day Blog Challenge Day Eight

2011-05-25T05:03:00.000-04:00

Would you rather be blind or deaf?

Blind.

I love to look at things, but I think I could adapt.

I'd feel trapped if I were deaf but could see everything happening. Like life were a movie with no sound. It seems like it would be more dangerous to be deaf, because people can generally tell who is blind via a cane, a service animal, etc. However, people who are deaf often look just like everyone else, and I'd know that people were shouting at me even though that didn't make a difference.

I've wondered what it would be like to be mute, too. Might be the most challenging. And least, I guess.

So that's my eighth day.

28 Day Blog Challenge Day Seven

2011-05-24T17:00:00.002-04:00

Would you rather have a beautiful house and ugly car or ugly house and beautiful car?

What a materialistic question.

I'd rather spend money on making a home that I really liked than on a car. I don't care how people judge my car, I care how happy I can be in my living space.

28 Day Blog Challenge Day Six

2011-05-23T04:52:00.002-04:00

Would you rather lose your legs or lose your arms?

This was actually one of the questions that made me choose this set of questions.

How intriguing. If I must choose to lose legs or arms, there are several considerations I'd like to make. It's good that I am thinking about this in case I ever have to fight a knight to cross a bridge (think Monty Python).

First: which is more important to my survival? I can't hold a weapon with which to fight without my arms, but I can't run away and save myself without my legs. The main detriment to losing both of one's arms would be that one also loses both of one's hands. Hands are probably more important to my survival than feet. I eat with them. I clean myself with them. I communicate with others with them.

I could feasibly have a wheelchair and my arms would be able to wheel me away as well as fight and take care of me. Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (the AFR) managed to be quite deadly in their chairs.

So arms are more important to survival.

Second: which is more important to my vanity?

I don't think that I'd like to be in a wheelchair, but I would definitely not want to need someone else to wipe my ass or feed me. I don't think I could adapt to doing those things with my legs, either. Some people, who are born without arms, can learn to do amazing things with their feet, but I am not a child, and I am considerably less flexible than I imagine I'd need to be to be able to eat and clean myself with my feet.

So, arms are more important to vanity, as well.

Answer: Lose the legs. Then, I can still hold a sword.

28 Day Blog Challenge Day Five

2011-05-22T04:48:00.002-04:00

Would you rather be trapped in an elevator with wet dogs or three fat men with bad breath?

Wet dogs.

a) the dogs could dry and no longer be wet and

b) the breath would only smell worse as time and body odor soured the air.

I'd rather not be trapped in an elevator at all: I don't like the psychology of elevators.

28 Day Blog Challenge Day Four

2011-05-21T04:43:00.002-04:00

Would you rather be called a racist or a traitor to your country?

Of course both are bad. I love people more than I love national borders, though, so I guess I'd rather be called a traitor. Maybe I could be a traitor because I decided that the values of my country were contrary to my own values. Furthermore, at least whether or not I was a traitor could be up for debate, and maybe it wouldn't be true. However, when someone is called racist, there's usually a really good cause for calling them that and I hope I don't ever do something or say something that is so insensitive and rude to deserve to be called a racist.

These posts are pretty short. But I guess that's alright.

28 Day Blog Challenge Day Three

2011-05-20T04:30:00.000-04:00

Would you rather hold your urine forever or have an uncontrollable bladder?

I don't really want to write about this at all, to be honest. I think the topic is distasteful.

I assume that the uncontrollable bladder means you'd have to wear a diaper or have a catheter? I don't know. I think this question sort of sucks. If you hold your urine too long, your bladder will burst, and you will probably die. I don't really want to die of a urine leak in my body. I want to die in battle so I can feast in Valhalla with my ancestors. Therefore, I think I'd choose the uncontrollable bladder. At least I'd still be alive and able to fight.

But then again, maybe the point is that most people would rather die than not have control over such an important bodily function.

I've heard it said that children can be picky eaters and can be difficult to potty train them because they only have control over what goes in and comes out of their bodies and when adults try to interfere in these processes, the children freak out. Not having control over one's need to urinate is a pretty big taboo in our society.

Well, that's all for today. Hopefully tomorrow's question is not as ugh.

28 Day Blog Challenge Day Two

2011-05-19T04:34:00.000-04:00

Would you rather eat a bar of soap or drink a bottle of dishwashing liquid?

I think both would probably make me really sick. I'd go with a bar of soap, though, because I think it might be less digestible in solid form and if it was the kind of soap I use, at least it would be made from pretty innocent, if non-edible, ingredients.

But drinking the dishwashing liquid would probably be easier, because you wouldn't have to chew it, and you could just plug your nose and chug. I still go with bar of soap, because it is less soap to ingest overall.

Gross.

28 Day Blog Challenge Day One

2011-05-18T04:29:00.001-04:00

Would You Rather live without music or live without T.V.?

I would much rather live without T.V. I currently do not pay for cable or have an antenna hooked up to my TV. I do watch DVDs on my T.V., and I watch episodes of T.V. shows on my laptop, but mostly I would be much more productive if I did not do that. I get obsessed with T.V. shows and end up watching entire seasons compulsively.

I'd rather listen to music and be able to get things done while the music played.

I'd give up music before I'd give up the internet, though, which is not the question at all.

28 Day Blog Challenge

2011-05-17T04:29:00.000-04:00

I was inspired by my friend Amelia's 30 day blog challenge to find my own 30 day challenge to do. But I found a 28 day challenge instead. So here we go.

1. Live without music or live without T.V.?
2. Eat a bar of soap or drink a bottle of dish washing liquid?
3. Hold your pee forever or have an uncontrollable bladder?
4. Be called a racist or a traitor to your country?
5. Be trapped in an elevator with wet dogs or with three fat men with bad breath?
6. Lose your legs or lose your arms?
7. Have a beautiful house and an ugly car or an ugly house and a beautiful car?
8. Be blind or deaf?
9. Live in Antarctica or Death Valley?
10. Find true love or 10 million dollars?
11. Always say what’s on your mind or never speak again?
12. Have pom-poms for hands or glow sticks for fingers?
13. Be able to hear any conversation or take back what you said?
14. End hunger or hatred?
15. Always lose or never play?
16. Fly when you fart or pee when you laugh?
17. Know it all or have it all?
18. Give bad advice or take bad advice?
19. Have a mansion in the middle of nowhere or an apartment with 10 friends?
20. Be forgotten or hatefully remembered?
21. Not be able to use your phone or your email?
22. Be rich with an unhappy job or make less money with a job you like?
23. Be able to read everyone’s mind all the time or always know their future?
24. Eat a handful of hair or lick three public telephones?
25. Be schizophrenic or have amnesia?
26. Talk like Yoda or breathe like Darth Vador?
27. Marry a vain person or a person with poor image?
28. Eat 30 pounds of cheese in one sitting or a bucket of peanut butter without water?

epithalamiums and stations of the cross

2011-05-16T15:46:00.005-04:00

I got a Kentucky driver's license today. Bureaucracy is never fun, but I guess the whole process was relatively painless. I look like a chubby chipmunk in the picture, so that's pretty much what I expected.

Part One: Poems and Epithalamiums
Isn't it strange how when you learn a new word or concept, it starts popping up all around you and your world is flooded with that new thing? For me, that thing is the epithalamium: the poem for the bride to hear during her walk from her ceremony to the bridal chambers. I've read countless of these since one appeared on Verse Daily last week.

One that I quite love comes from Bob Hicok's book Words for Empty and Words for Full. It's a short poem, so I'll quote it entirely:

Epithalamium

A bee in the field. The house on the mountain
reveals itself to have been there through summer.
It's not a bee but a horse eating frosted grass
in the yawn light. Secrets, the anguish of smoke
above the chimney as it shreds what it's learned
of fire. The horse has moved, it's not a horse
but a woman doing the stations of the cross
with a dead baby in her arms. The anguish of the house
as it reveals smoke to the mountain. A woman
eating cold grass in Your name, shredding herself
like fire. The woman has stopped, it's not a woman
but smoke on its knees keeping secrets in what it reveals.
The everything has moved, it's not everything
but a shredding of the anguish of names. The marriage
of light: particle to wave. Do you take? I do.

Isn't it beautiful? I love the movement from bee to house to horse to woman to smoke to secrets to light. "Do you take? I do."

I do. I love reading a poem and wishing I had been the one who wrote it. For me, that's the bar I set. I want to write a poem that is as good as this one. As the others that I've been posting on my blog. A poem that other people wish they'd written. I hope I never write a perfect poem, though, because then I'll have to quit.

Part Two: Stations of the Cross or the Via Dolorosa
The woman is doing the stations of the cross with a dead baby in her arms. I'd say a religious figure's name as a curse word, but my meaning might be misconstrued. (Bad joke, I know.)

When I was in high school: how old? Fourteen? Sixteen?, we, the youth group, put on a Good Friday service at my mom's church. It was to be the beginning of a tradition. I stood (maybe I sat, perched on a stool like a poet in a club) in a corner in a the dark church and recited my lines. I dressed in all black and wore a skull cap to hide my blond hair. We only wanted my voice to carry, like a ghost's. The candle-lit service hid who I was, and if I forgot any lines, who'd know but me? There were four of us, one at each point on the compass rose, and we were supposed to say our lines out of sync, like a round, only with four voices lamenting the fourteen stations of the cross. We didn't call them the stations of the cross, though, because we were in a Baptist church. But the stations of the cross they were, and meditate upon the way of sorrows we did do. The service closed with a rendition of a Sandi Patti song called Via Dolorosa.

When I read that poem and thought about the stations of the cross, the fourteen steps Christians consider and meditate upon each Lenten season that begin with Jesus Christ's condemnation to death and end with his burial, I remember the smell of Gap's Om candles (that's what we used for light/mood), and I remember thinking the writer of the song was confused or that the Via Dolorosa was in Central or South America. I mistakenly thought the title was Spanish, not Latin.

I have obviously figured out a few things between then and now, but I am still haunted by that song's melody because of the emotional experience I had in a dark room listening to a cacophony of teenagers heralding darkness and sadness. We were supposed to leave the congregation feeling depressed so that they would meditate on death and feel more joy come Easter Sunday when the church celebrated the resurrection. I guess it worked, because they never let us do another Good Friday service.

When Hicok references the via dolorosa in his poem, I am unable to look for anything but sorrows. I like the song, but I hate that it intrudes on my reading of a poem. But anyway, the point I am getting at is that the song reminds me that I'll never be the ideal reader for anyone but myself, and nobody will ever be the ideal reader for me except, well, me.

Sometimes, we just miss references and there's nothing anyone can do about that. But poetry (art, literature, music, etc.) can still touch us, even if we realize the value in a way that the author did not intend. No need to lament. Just take, just do.

I like Wednesdays

2011-05-04T15:45:00.004-04:00

What do I like about life this week?

1. I took a few days off from my 12-12-10 challenge this month (May) to read poetry. I haven't been reading enough poetry. I was reminded of the poem "How We Memorize" by Annie Pierson Weise and I have been memorizing it.

2. Also, this verse daily pick by Gregory Fraser is just... a poem you must read if you haven't already done so.

3. My newest project involves reading The Poetic (aka Elder) Edda, a collection of Norse epic verse translated to English... I'm way into this. I spent an hour in the library yesterday picking out books. I sat on the floor like a little kid reading through them. I also found a novel by some Dutch guy (Peter Verhelst) called Tonguecat. So I will be reading it.

4. Friday morning I will be driving to Kentucky. I started to type Michigan and now Kentucky doesn't seem quite as exciting.

5. I am really pleased with this essay I am working on. It's called "How to Cook Engagement Chicken and Stay Single."

That is all.

Poetry Friday

2011-04-29T10:59:00.002-04:00

I should be doing work today. It is the end of the semester and I have a major project due at 5pm.

I graded papers and am now reading poetry. This month, I am an exclamation point.

Read this poem, because I fell in love with it.

In a Beautiful Country
by Kevin Prufer

A good way to fall in love
is to turn off the headlights
and drive very fast down dark roads.

Another way to fall in love
is to say they are only mints
and swallow them with a strong drink.

Then it is autumn in the body.
Your hands are cold.
Then it is winter and we are still at war.

The gold-haired girl is singing into your ear
about how we live in a beautiful country.
Snow sifts from the clouds

into your drink. It doesn't matter about the war.
A good way to fall in love
is to close up the garage and turn the engine on,

then down you'll fall through lovely mists
as a body might fall early one morning
from a high window into love. Love,

the broken glass. Love, the scissors
and the water basin. A good way to fall
is with a rope to catch you.

A good way is with something to drink
to help you march forward.
The gold-haired girl says, Don't worry

about the armies, says, We live in a time
full of love. You're thinking about this too much.
Slow down. Nothing bad will happen.

The Pale King

2011-04-22T11:05:00.002-04:00

I highly recommend that you read The Pale King. I can hardly do justice in any sort of review, personal or not, so I thought I'd talk about a few of the highlights of the book.

Chapter on masturbation.
Lane Dean showing back up into the world and not Sheri.
Levitation.
Horrible disfigurement.
Anxiety.
Marital problems.
Mental noise.
Notes in the end from DFW's notes on the manuscript.

One thing about Wallace's writing that I've always loved is his way with characters. When I read, his characters come to life in a way that others characters simply do not. Reading the end of The Pale King would have been a let down, but it ended on such a strong note that I could hardly feel sad. The book was clearly unfinished, but maybe that was for the best.

In other news, I feel like Rip Van Winkle must have felt before he went to sleep, so I am going to put this machine away and go outside.

Next up: I might read A Private History of Awe by Scott Russell Sanders for the month of May. Or White Teeth by Zadie Smith. I am currently reading Lydia by Scott Russell Sanders. I always read too much when I'm really busy at the end of the semester. It helps me deal with stress.

Blood Child on a Sunday Afternoon

2011-04-03T15:13:00.007-04:00

Maybe a rough draft of a prose poem.

... you must've missed it.

Opals

2011-03-19T17:23:00.001-04:00

I've always enjoyed the iridescent insides of clam-shells. In that sense, I really like pearls and opals.

I'm going to do some research into pearls and opals and I'll be sharing that here over the coming months.

This ring looks similar to one I've been wearing for years:

and my favorite ring is a black pearl that I left at my friend Amelia's house once when I visited. I buy myself jewelry to remind me that I care, to be true to myself, etc. Also, I like things that are shiny. But I am conscious of their origins, too. So I'll be looking into jewelry, rings, opals, pearls to see what I can see.

The Mysteries of the Kitchen

2011-03-16T15:14:00.002-04:00

I love to cook. Flour in my hair? Egg on my favorite shirt? Carrot juice staining my fingernails? Yes, please. I have made grandma's pasties, cookies, cakes, pasta, juice, Thanksgiving Dinner, from scratch. I rarely use recipes, and then only for a barometer of what to do. I find that trying to follow a recipe, for me, usually ends in disaster.

Going with my inclination has about an 85% success rate. Sometimes the things I concoct are merely edible, but usually they're pretty good. Sometimes, in the case of my stuffed peppers and stuffed squash recipes, they're delicious enough to eat once a week or once every two weeks with only slight variations. (This last time I incorporated broccoli into my quinoa stuffed peppers because otherwise the broccoli would've gone bad and, really, nobody wants to just sit around and eat steamed broccoli for dinner, even if they like broccoli, which I do.)

2010 was the year of the bean for me. I cooked beans. A lot of beans.

2011 is the year of, strangely enough if you know me, meat. I hate to touch raw meat. There have been days in my kitchens, when, I'm ashamed to say, I have literally gagged at the prospect and/or reality of having to hold, in my hand, another creature's muscles that I mean to ingest. Raw meat disgusts me on a primal level. I dislike the textures, the residues. I imagine that my dislike for the tactile experience of raw meat has more to do with imagination than anything else, though. I don't usually have a problem with the textures of cooked meat... Which is even weirder: stringy, spongy. Overall, I guess I hate(d) touching meat because I spent years conditioning myself to not want to eat it.

I ate meat as a child. From the animals we raised and butchered on the farm, my mother cooked roasts, swiss steak, hams, turkeys, chickens, pork chops, pork sausages; and from the dead animals we dragged home, venison roasts/steaks/stews, squirrels (only once, and my grandpa had to grill them), rabbits, trout, bluegills, perch. I ate meat.

I liked it. I think a certain way we prepared venison (pan-fried, small pieces in flour breading) and hamburgers (onions, soy sauce for seasoning) were my favorites. But, for the first fifteen or so years of my life, I ate any kind of meat except processed meat. I refused hot dogs and the bagged $0.49 bagged super-thinly-sliced lunch-meats my mother purchased from a young age.

I ate meat, but I wasn't really on board with the ways we got it. I went hunting with my dad, I saw cattle slaughtered, and I watched my family Although I cried when my cats got killed, I refused to participate in chicken slaughtering days (headless chickens and whirring plucking machines? No thank you sir), I think it was the day I bawled my eyes out over a pig I'd raised for 4-H who had to be sold at auction for someone to eat that really nailed the coffin for me eating meat. I experimented with vegetarianism, with veganism, etc. for about ten years. Sometimes I'd go months without meat, sometimes weeks.

The thing that never worked for me about being veggie-only was that it was just too extreme. I've settled on a "I eat meat once a week or once every two weeks and more when I am visiting my boyfriend" routine that seems to work for me. I know the arguments for and against meat. I cook vegan and vegetarian meals in the interim. I bake vegan cookies and cakes. Sometimes I use eggs. But not all the time. I like eggs. But I like other things, too.

I have some particularly annoying food allergies, so being vegetarian or vegan would mean that all my protein had to come from beans or mushrooms, and I do like those ingredients, but I get bored.

Anyway, as a kid, I ate meat every day.

When I quit trying to join an extreme lifestyle that just wasn't for me, I approached meat with extreme caution. I'd been learning to cook in those non-meat years and I'd forgotten everything my mother taught me about cooking meat.

I didn't own a meat thermometer. I didn't know the simplest things: how long does one thaw a turkey before cooking it? Why do some people put their turkeys in plastic oven bags?? Did I need to do that? (Yes.) But mom didn't! (You don't have her spectacular roast-pan, either.) How long must one cook a roast in the oven? What keeps a roast from getting dry? Does one actually need to braise a roast before inserting it into a crock pot? What does 'braise' mean, anyway? (No, it will still taste fine. I made one yesterday and well, I didn't braise it.)

I mean, before I started thinking about eating meat once in a while, yeah, I had the skill to take a package of hamburger from the farm and make some delicious hamburgers. Steaks? Grill. Venison steaks? Marinate and grill or broil.

But these days, I'm embracing a new adventure. One where it's okay to eat meat once in a while; when I do eat meat, though, I want it to be more than just edible.

Spring is Broken

2011-03-14T12:05:00.005-04:00

Here I sit, in a brown Ikea chair in a mostly dark apartment in Kentucky on a cold and cloudy Monday in March. A mixture of loose leaf Earl Grey Creme and Tippy Assam in my "Shakesperean love quotes" mug from the Unemployed Philosopher's Guild and a pair of borrowed slippers on my toes. I'm easing myself into the massive amount of work I saved up for myself to complete over Spring Break.

I can do it, I told myself tens of times, when I have all that free time in Kentucky. When Kevin is at work. Of course, now that I'm here, I'd rather be shopping (my town doesn't have a Target), or sewing (I've got a few projects in mind), or writing poetry (I actually have to do that sometime, and soon), or revising poetry, or singing/playing music, or ~~baking cookies~~ (Kevin is asking for ginger cookies). But instead I have ~~bout a hundred pages worth of student work to look through,~~ an essay of my own to revise heavily/finish writing, ~~some classmates' essays to read and comment on,~~ a database to wrangle into shape, a report on said database's content to compile, emails to draft to potential readers to bring to campus next year, and ~~a few chapters on technical editing to read,~~ an editing project to begin, research to do for a presentation on blogs and editing for the technical editing class. But first, I wanted to write down some thoughts I've had about some books I'm reading that aren't for school.

I'm reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig and Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon. Both books are enjoyable. Chabon is witty and balances the profound with the lighthearted in such a way that he engages me emotionally in a way not many memoirists are able to do. I have been thinking about the concepts he raises w/r/t raising children. I love this line: "Childhood is a branch of cartography."

In Zen: it has always been the opposite of zen. I have always struggled with this book. I first tried to read it at age 19. Then at 20. Then 21 or 22. Then 23. Etc. And more than once a year. But I never made it past the initial pages because I thought it was a)overly complex in the way he set up his conceit and b)frightfully boring. This time, I thought, I just read another book I've always tried to read and failed, so I'm going to do this and like it. And I am doing it. I am liking it. Maybe I'm ready for it now. Maybe I'm more open to this study and usage of rhetoric than I could have been at age nineteen. In the section I just read, he wrangled with the ideas of how technology and humanity need a new form of reasoning to interact and maintain peace of mind and with the concept of Quality. I think the answer to the two questions is closely related and maybe the same. That is, Williams Style conventions might aid comprehension or make writing more palatable for some, but they are rules that are tacked on after the fact. Post Hoc. The essence of what is being communicated either has or does not have quality. But what is quality? How is quality writing the same as technology or a machine? You have peace of mind about it. How does one get peace of mind? He or she tests the writing or the machine he or she has built and finds it satisfactory. So what causes satisfaction? Quality. What is quality? It's all in your head. Maybe I will revise this or further expound when I've thought about it more. But I wanted to share a brief snippet from the book:

Another time, Phaedrus was upset about some failing students. Walking home with DeWeese under some trees he had commented on it and DeWeese had wondered why he took it so personally.

"I've wondered too," Phaedrus had said, and in a puzzled voice had added, "I think maybe it's because every teacher tends to grade up students who resemble him the most. If your own writing shows neat penmanship you regard that more important in a student than if it doesn't. If you use big words you're going to like students who write with big words."

"Sure. What's wrong with that?" DeWeese had said.

"Well, there's something whacky here," Phaedrus had said, "because the students I like the most, the ones I really feel a sense of identity with, are all failing!"

While that is tangential at best in relation to my musings on the concepts Pirsig addresses, I think it is quite funny.

Anyway, I think I'll read Love Wins by Rob Bell for April's 12-12-10 project. My brother goes to Rob Bell's church, Mars Hill, and he tells me the book is a good read but that he's sure it will be controversial. It's been getting a lot of press lately, so I'm interested to read what Bell has to say. My brother is an intern/resident/on staff at Mars Hill and as such, he got to read a galley copy of the book, but he and his wife purchased a copy of the final book at the church's release party. I think he was surprised I was interested. But I think the question of a loving god and of how that concept or being can coexist within a theology that lauds the teaching of and definite existence of hell is one of the things that pushed me away from organized religion.

So,anyway, I'm off to knock some things off of my to-do list. And then to make a delicious dinner.

A poem that spoke to me this morning

2011-03-07T06:37:00.002-05:00

I just read this poem by Dorianne Laux and fell in love, so I thought I'd share.

ANTILAMENTATION

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.
Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don’t regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering
any of it. Let’s stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

Happy Monday, and yes, I am posting on my blog at 5:38AM. For real.

This self publishing millionaire

2011-03-01T22:04:00.003-05:00

So I've been reading/hearing a hubbub about this girl who writes fantasy coming of age novels who's become famous and who's making millions off of ebook sales.

I wonder how many people I know have considered doing something similar. I've thought about writing young adult fiction, but I'm not sure I am a good enough fiction writer. But I wonder if, through social networking and personal branding, it wouldn't be a viable thing... you know? I'm sure there are people who self-publish through the kindle and the nook whose work doesn't sell, but this just goes to show that there are people whose work does sell.

And for all the griping people are doing, this girl's writing can't be much worse than Twilight, right?

Anyway, I have always loved and always will love sci-fi. Perhaps I should find myself a pen name and start writing about aliens and cylons.

But I'm not going to tell you people my sci-fi pen name, because then there wouldn't be a point to having the pen name.

Also, #engl5593 is getting to me; this blog entry needs a style sheet.

Quotes of the Day

2011-02-28T14:39:00.003-05:00

So, literary and reading-friendly friends, for the first half of the semester, I gave quotes of the day about writing/being creative in the class I'm teaching. The problem here is that a) I've run out of quotes and b) my students noticed and requested more quotes of the day... Any suggestions?

Thanks!

She Has Never Known by Linnea Johnson

2011-02-27T08:42:00.000-05:00

I first read this poem last Sunday and it's been rattling around in my brain all week. I thought I'd share it here. I hope I'm not violating any copyright laws, as I've attributed it to Verse Daily... To be sure, I won't post the whole poem. Read the first stanza, and if you like it, click through:

She Has Never Known by Linnea Johnson via Verse Daily

She has never known when to leave well enough alone,
when to take the charm out into the marketplace
and buy groceries with it: celery for a week's soup,
scrap meat for her dinner. She has never learned, for instance,
to buy millet for cakes. She refuses to learn this, buying it instead
for the bluejays, for the shy cardinals, even for the grackles
which peck at her ears as she will sit in the snow to talk with them.
Her hands know only to warm the ice from her peach tree, her plum,
even the mulberry which grows wild as she does
in the weed patch she calls her yard.

--

I love this poem for a myriad of reasons. It's got to be about me, which means that I think it's a good poem. This is what my adviser meant when she told me to have more emotion in my poems, I think. She wants to have this reaction and doesn't. Okay. More work to do on my mss.

It's tea-time on Sunday

2011-02-20T18:37:00.004-05:00

...and for the first time in days, I'm coming up to breathe. I don't know what's up with me. I don't know what's down. I walked 3.5 miles around Boomer Lake listening to Arcade Fire and arguing with myself. Aloud. The arguing. The listening was done passively, iPod style. I've been thinking about a lot of things lately. Here are some meditations on some of the things in my head, if only for the sake of getting these things out of my head and onto a screen.

1. I've been considering a break from the web for a year. I'd still check email, because I couldn't do my job without it. But I wouldn't visit any websites, read any news, publish any blog entries, stalk my friends on facebook, make witty (ok, not so witty) observations on twitter, etc. In essence, I'm thinking about going analog. I think I might reserve the right to use some websites: the library & financial aid websites at my school, literary journal websites for contests, etc. But I'd only use them from public computers at the office, and reserve my laptop solely for writing and teaching. I feel like I need a break. Something's got to give. There isn't enough time to play music, write poems, and read all the books I want to read when I have to watch a youtube video online and look at the huff post for an hour or so. There are better ways to de-stress. Without backlighting.

2. [here yesterday, gone today] ...on moving
3. [here yesterday, gone today] ...on procreation and whether or not one should do so.

4. I am planning a super exciting awesome fun vacation. To Russia. I'm going to ride a train for seven days and see Siberia. At least, I really want to do so. Maybe even around the time of the 2014 Olympics. I was thinking I wanted to go before that, but I might wait until after they're over so I can tour the Olympic village. Those are always pretty cool deals. At least, the one I've seen was really neat, architecturally.

5. The UP200 was this weekend and I missed it!! :( But I heard that they had to end in Wetmore on the way back due to terrible snow conditions. Two years ago when KCA and I followed it, we were headed to the Y to sit in the sauna and warm up after three days of being outside... We drove through an epic snowstorm on a closed stretch of 41 between Munising and Marquette because we'd gotten through before the road was closed. We watched some dog sledders come through in Deerton and then we got back into Rozinante and headed for the finish line. I hung my head out the window to look for the taller-than-the-car snowbank that marked the side of the road, because we couldn't see anything to tell us where we were at on the road. We made it. In Marquette, the sun was out. A small crowd gathered, and we watched dogs and mushers who were more tired than the two of us jubilantly crossing the finish line, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, etc. apart. There was an exciting race where one musher passed another, but mostly, it reminded me of other long races I'd seen: cross country. One or two members to a pack and the healthy competition makes both parties run better.

I'm still waiting for the ashtray to lead me astray

2011-02-18T16:31:00.002-05:00

Well, I was pretty dismayed to hear that the House passed a bill that will defund Planned Parenthood.

It isn't like I can go to one in the college town where I live, anyway, because I live in a Red state that doesn't really have PPs, but I stand with PP for a myriad of reasons, one of which is that they offer healthcare and information/empowerment to low-income-high-risk women (and men, and teens) who might not otherwise have access to things like HIV tests, cancer screening, pap smears, birth control, etc.

So, today, I signed the petition to say that I stand with Planned Parenthood.

The Stones of Summer - Dow Mossman

2011-02-13T11:00:00.003-05:00

I've finally finished The Stones of Summer by Dow Mossman! I think the book was very underrated... I can't believe it received so little attention. It did get on my nerves at times, but that may have to do with the fact that it is quite long. I spent the first couple of days reading it very diligently and then I sort of gave up for weeks. In the interim, I re-read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard and Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence. I'm also reading for classes. I've basically been reading, cooking, going to class, and sleeping.

So... What's my book choice for the month of March? I'm thinking about it. My plan is to choose something from my bookshelf's "to read" section. The section includes about 20 books, and I want to get through all of them this year before I move to Kentucky. I'm planning on reading Nicholas Carr's The Shallows, but I don't know when. I have to borrow it from Kevin, and he's teaching from it this semester. I might read it on my spring break, though, and that is in March.

In other news, which I just tried to spell "noose", I haven't been leaving my apartment lately. My house is a cave and I've gone into hibernation until summertime. Then I'll hibernate until moving time. And then, I'll go back out into the world again to make websites, teach people grammar, and write poems.

Another me, another you, another happy ending

2011-01-23T21:18:00.004-05:00

So I've been in the mood for a change lately... I've been restless, staying up all night scribbling in the snow and wandering my apartment. I've been reading everything and spending too much time on the internet. I wrote a poem last night, first one of the new year, really. At least, I wrote a draft. Tonight, a sestina, I think. I'm writing essays for a nonfiction course, which is weird. Anyway, for my big change...

I had 11 inches cut off of my hair & I will donate it to Locks of Love :

I love it.

That is all.

The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove

2011-01-17T12:51:00.003-05:00

I read "Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto" by Maile Chapman in January. I think I already wrote about it somewhere. Maybe actually in the 12-12-10 post. I thought the descriptions of Finland were mystical, dark, and alluring. Nature was very emotional and sexual, almost. I didn't think as much of the story-line. I didn't like how it was plotted, and it seemed impossibly slow moving without being suspenseful until there was an orgiastic spasm of activity and murder and disappearance. The aftermath was muddled, and spoke in circles.

I'm reading "The Stones of Summer" by Dow Mossman right now, for February's 12-12-10... I'm in the second section. I like it, but I don't see how this book has been described as one that changed my friends' lives. I hope I do see it. I feel dumb saying that.

After Mossman, I think I'll move to nonfiction. I'm thinking of reading The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. Suggestions? I love Annie Dillard and David Foster Wallace as essayists (and fiction writers, but that's beside the point). I also like Joan Didion.

I'm writing about my maternal grandmother for my creative non-fiction class. It's weird, I think, to try to be objective while writing a profile about someone you love so deeply. But I respect her a lot, so it is actually pretty fun to write about her life. Maybe when I am happy with some of it, I'll share it here.

I'm keeping a totally boring blog for my style and technical editing class here.

I am starting to get excited about finishing coursework, but that's not a good thing: I am going to have to work really hard this semester to keep my 4.0.

Now I'm going to go write a sonnet. Happy Monday.

Muscles Seizing Up

2011-01-05T11:46:00.005-05:00

I'm sitting inside my apartment with my feet basking in the sun beside my cat and I am incredibly thankful for everything in my life.

I am protected from the cold front that's making its way toward my current town, I have a bed to sleep in, food to eat, and I can pay my bills on-time every month.

I know what I want to do with my life, at least for the next five years, and I think it is something that will help other people. I can't ask for anything more than that.

---
To toot my horn, I have some good news to share.

First, I am pleased to say that my poem "Cows Eat Their Afterbirth #1" (some of you may have read it as "Calving") will appear in the 2011 Moon City Review.

At the OSU English Department meeting this afternoon I was awarded the Harry M. Campbell Scholarship in English Studies (this goes to one MA or MFA student in the department each year).

I'm also incredibly grateful, despite the two trips down dark stairs in a powerless lecture hall these earned me, to report that my poem "Slaughter" won the Academy of American Poets Prize at OSU this year and that my poem "Mt. Zirkel Wilderness" took 3rd place in the Arrington Creative Writing Scholarship in Poetry this year. Congrats to Jessica Glover, who took first prize in the Arrington Scholarship and to those others who placed. I'm sure the competition was stiff!

Gregory Corso

2011-01-04T20:22:00.000-05:00

I think I've posted this poem before as text, but it's still one of my favorite Beat poems and I think it addresses an issue I've been thinking over for a few years now pretty directly and insightfully. Therefore, listen to Gregory Corso perform his poem, "Marriage" and have a pleasant Wednesday.

Also, my first prose book of 12-12-10 for 2011 is going to be Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto by Maile Chapman.

This blog is awake. It's barely breathing. I think I can resuscitate it. My schedule this semester will be different, I hope, and more structured but less hectic. Here's to hoping. I love writing letters to people.

-s

the water is still here

2011-01-04T13:43:00.004-05:00

I make decisions like MDOT fixes roads. Take, for example, the US-2 detour in the UP. The bridge is out --- there's no clear path from here to the place that I want to be (do I even want to be there??) --- so I have to make that right/left turn and slow down while I drive through someone's neighborhood, even if I don't want to slow down or leave the gorgeous Northern Lake Michigan coastline. I make detours that seem counter-intuitive, but I end up getting where I ought to go.

I'm in still water. That is, the water has smoothed itself out and no current or movement is discernible. That doesn't mean that the water isn't moving, though. I'm cooling my heels in a river in Oklahoma for another semester. This time I am teaching creative writing and acting as a research assistant instead of teaching two sections of composition. Then I'll spend my summer teaching composition one. Then I'll move to Kentucky but still be a student at OSU until I finish my thesis.

I could keep treading water and stay in Oklahoma for another year and work on my thesis and things would probably still work out alright. I would find another job. I’ve been living this long distance relationship for two years already. We could do it for one more. I could keep my Teaching Assistantship and not have to go to any classes while I taught two and wrote. I suppose there's a small chance, even now, that I will change my mind and do just that. It wouldn't be the end of the world. I would have some time to work on publication and job applications without taking classes. I wouldn't have the distraction of cooking and recreating with KCA. I wouldn't have much external distraction at all, actually.

There are personal and professional positives and negatives to either decision (OK or KY). I’m sometimes tempted to do what I think is easier, and stay here until I graduate. However, KCA is one distraction I legitimately want in my life.

I can teach a couple of classes in Kentucky and not take any and focus on writing and publishing and applying for better jobs. I don't have to be in Oklahoma to do those things. I do have to be in Kentucky to be with KCA, though. If I am going to choose between Oklahoma solitude and Kentucky togetherness, I’m going to choose Kentucky. I know there will be plenty of solitude there, too. There will be jobs, different than the one I have in Oklahoma, but jobs that pay my bills nonetheless. If I were tweeting this post, I’d hash-tag this dilemma as a #firstworldproblem… Do I stick it out and spend another year at grad school or move to live with my SO and finish grad school via email and skype? However, it’s really a variant on a pretty simple human problem that’s been around since we figured out how to keep ourselves warm and fed: what will make me happiest? And beyond that, what is happy?

If I had to ask myself if I was happy I'd mean it when I said, "I have no idea." I feel an emotion I call happy some of the time. I feel one that I call depression at other times. I get angry, frustrated, sad, and lonely. These things aren’t tied to me being in Oklahoma or any other place. I felt those emotions in Michigan. I have felt them on vacations. I have felt them here. I even felt all of those emotions in KCA’s presence. I know that being with him in Kentucky is not going to make me stop having emotions. It’s not a move toward delusion. It’s one toward excitement, toward running rapids together and holding tightly to our kayaks.

There is probably never a sustained period of time in any one human's life when she/he can truthfully say that she/he is happy with where she/he is, who she/he is with, what she/he is doing, etc. We have hope and fear to temper contentment and joy. There is an emotion called happiness. But I don’t think it can/should be a default feeling. I'm not moving because it will make me happy to move.

I want to leave Oklahoma because I’m going toward something, and also because I’m going away from something else. However, I’ve already begun going away from that something else and I’m still in Oklahoma, so Oklahoma shouldn’t take it personally. It’s not you, it’s me.

Something self-indulgent

2010-12-25T10:10:00.002-05:00

I saw this quiz on my friend Amelia's blog and figured I'd share my answers with the internet, too.

What did you do in 2010 that you'd never done before?
Boot-skied

Did anyone close to you give birth?
My friends Stacey and Jason had a cute-as-a-button little girl named Beatrice, but nobody in my family had a baby.

Did anyone close to you die?
I did attend a funeral.

Which countries did you visit?
I did not leave the US during the year of 2010, even though sometimes traveling around inside it feels like going to different countries.

What would you like to have in 2011 that you lacked in 2010?
I'd like to see my family for Thanksgiving and eat my mom's turkey and mashed potatoes in 2011.

What dates from 2010 will you always remember?
I am actually really not very good at dates but I can give you a few moments:
On Isle Royale, finally making it to the top of the ridge and sitting on some rocks to eat GORP and stare at the island and my lake off in the distance.

North of Buff pass when we boot-skied down the side of a mountain on a day hike (the way down was life-changing but the way back up later when the sun was starting to set was um, discouraging.

This hike in this wilderness area called Ragged where we saw a grizzly bear and a porcupine and then Kevin broke his hand. Unforgettable. The aspen groves had names and dates from the 1920s carved into them. It was shangri-la.

What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Finishing literature coursework for this MFA. Next semester I have a CNF class and a class on technical style and editing. Then a summer poetry workshop and my coursework will be done and I will just have the thesis left!

What was your biggest failure?
The time I gave in and said something that had been on my mind but which I should have kept to myself.

Did you suffer illness or injury?
Yes, my neck was injured for a few weeks this spring and I couldn't move my head or upper body without severe pain.

What was the best thing you bought?
A ferry ticket to Isle Royale.

Whose behavior merited celebration?
Yours.

Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
BP's. Sarah Palin's. My own.

Where did most of your money go?
Rent, Bills.

What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Canoeing Buffalo National River. Getting a poem in Best New Poets. Isle Royale. Mt. Zirkel. Spending Thanksgiving/Birthday with Grandma June.

What songs will always remind you of 2010?
None, my memory doesn't work that way.

Compared to this time last year, are you:
i. Happier or sadder? Calmer.
ii. Thinner or fatter? Same
iii. Richer or poorer? Same

What do you wish you'd done more of?
Write. Read. Listen to Music. Look at the stars. Go for walks at night.

What do you wish you'd done less of?
Complain

How will you be spending Christmas?
Hanging out and driving around the South/West visiting family with KCA.

What was your favorite TV program?
Caprica: You should go watch it!

Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
Nope. I reserve hate for pretty severe situations.

What was the best book you read?
The Corrections, hands down.

What was your greatest musical discovery?
I'm going to have to say The National's newest album, High Violet. But that wasn't a discovery so much as a long-awaited event. So maybe Dawn Landes, even though I knew of her before this year because I started to listen to her stuff a lot more this year...

What did you not want and get?
A plantar's wart on my little toe.

What did you want and not get?
More publications

What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I hiked a mountain, picked up my Grandma at the airport, and took Grandma and her sister out to dinner at an italian joint in Scottsdale.

What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
If I had won a chapbook contest! But I did get some very nice rejection notes/encouragement to try again so that was good.

How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2010?
I am still wearing that red flannel shirt every day.

What kept you sane?
I think getting 8 hours of sleep a night has really helped.

Which political issue stirred you the most?
Oil Spill. Also the tea party is pretty scary.

Who did you miss?
I missed a lot of people. Doro the most, though, because I haven't heard from her in about a year now.

Who was the best new person you met?
This woman who was at the bar with us at Louie's the other night takes the prize.

Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2010.
There are some people you should trust.

Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.
"Up on the sun, this time tomorrow
Fly, walk, or run, but this time no sorrow
First stop, Jackson, next stop, Shangri-La"
-M Ward Shangri La from Hold Time

Tight Rope

2010-12-16T09:50:00.003-05:00

I'm toeing the edge of this tight rope from my platform and thinking about walking out onto it. Let's string one up between two trees and practice falling all day long.

I don't want to complain so I guess there isn't much to say. I really like this song by the band Earlimart, and I thought I'd share it here.

something I find beautiful

2010-12-06T21:42:00.001-05:00

I have always been enamored of dancers... probably because I lack the coordination and grace to be one. I was pretty dismal when my parents put me in dance class as a kid, but I've always admired those who do it professionally.

Babies without tails

2010-12-06T14:45:00.004-05:00

So I read a ploughshares post about a book called Babies without Tails and I thought it was a great title. I need to come up with a better title. For some reason I've been struggling with assigning titles I like to the chapbooks I've been sending out. If anyone would like to help with that, I'd be down.

I've been reading this semester, like always. I have read quite a few pieces of quality fiction, not limited to Freedom by Franzen, Love in a Dead Language by Lee Siegel, and American Pastoral by Philip Roth. Those come to mind. I know there have been others. As far as the 12-12-10 thing goes with books of poetry - I'll update you. I haven't been doing well at posting on these things, but I have been reading.

August - The Late Wife by Claudia Emerson --- A: this book rocked & I found myself wishing I could crawl inside every line and wear it.

September - Vivisect by Lisa Lewis --- A: this book was tight, and I loved it for all the reasons I loved her other work. The playfulness of the narratives and language is something I admire, and it's one of the reasons I came her to work with her!

October - Killing Floor by Ai --- A+: in homage to Ai's birthday, I read her book. I love the freshness of her earlier work, and the grotesqueries are shocking. I was full of awe while I was reading this.

November - You know, I'm not sure what I read in November. I have been reading a ton of Christina Rossetti, so I suspect that I decided to write about that. I am writing a paper on a sonnet cycle entitled Monna Innominata by Rossetti, and I think it's some really tight stuff, for a pre-raphaelite woman/victorian. B+ --- I don't wish I'd written it, but I do love the texture of the lines.

December - Floating City by Anne Pierson Weise A+: I am still reading this but I love love love it. I wish I had written this. The imagery, the craft, the sonics --- it's everything I am trying to do. It's a Walt Whitman Award winner, and it's easy to see why.

Next year's docket of books, which will be my second year doing it, will be prose. I'm taking suggestions, so if there's something I should read, let me know! I will continue to read lots of books of poems, but I think I need a break from trying to read an additional one a month, because I am currently reading one a week for school and that has cut into the time I reserve for reading stories.

Other news: I've written about 23 pages worth of poems this semester... that's a whole chapbook! So now my task is to separate the poems I have into several manuscripts and to start sending more than one manuscript out.

I'm busy, like always, and just wanted to post on here for a break. I miss this blog, and maybe I will do better at keeping it up in the coming year. I always tend to blog more when I have more to do, but this semester seemed so busy I didn't have time to procrastinate.

Finally, I had a poem in the Best New Poets anthology, and it came out! So go buy a copy at Barnes & Noble, your favorite small bookstore, or Amazon.

On Soul Mates...

2010-09-13T15:15:00.003-04:00

After reading a recent Washington Times article about the percentages of married people who believed in soul mates, I thought I'd give my two cents here as to why I think this concept is probably the single-most culturally damaging item in modern society.

The idea that you will eventually meet someone, fall in love with them, and be happy with 100% of who they are 100% of the time is either incredibly overwhelmingly stupid or super-duper dark creepy shit evil.

It's stupid because most partnerships don't last. They're based on false premises and untested beliefs about one another and/or about human nature, marriage/commitment, or based on lies about what each party expects.

But soulmates are a whole different thing. A soulmate is destiny. It's perfect because it is a choice that is made for the two parties, and which they succumb to. It's a very disturbingly passive picture of "love."

So is it evil to sell this vision of romance via holidays, movies, songs, stories, etc? YES. It is a really horrible thing. It perpetuates the idea that love should be easy, and that feeling attracted to an attractive person will allow you to overcome all odds so that you may be happy together forever.

Let's look at the underlying beliefs necessary to a large portion of modern culture believing that there is a perfect person out there for each and every one of us...

First culprit on this list: Christianity. I can't comment much on other religions, so I don't think that would be a good use of my time to think about them here... In the Christian West, which is a mindset more than a region and whose ideology pervades mainstream US culture, society has moved more and more toward "love marriages" and/or toward "God's perfect mate" for one another. The practice of praying to find your future spouse and for their purity, etc. is not only accepted, it's encouraged. Whether one prays to someone called God, or to someone called Fashion, the Bar, a Dating Website, etc, people engage in acts of hope that they will find the "right" partner. We used to have matchmakers, now we've got Match.com. We used to marry for security and stability and family reasons and now we marry for love... This has encouraged people to put off marriage or to reject marriage out of hand until they're convinced they've found "the one."

The main problem I have with the concept of finding the "right" partner is that for most of us, there are as many options as there are people in the world. We just need to be at the right point in our lives w/r/t maturity and to make a decision to be with someone and stick with it for better or for worse, etc. I think that most, if not all, divorces could be avoided if such an astounding number of people didn't believe that there was ONE PERFECT SOULMATE out there for them. As soon as things start to go wrong, they realize they didn't marry their soulmate, but instead they married someone who is actually different from them and who has different needs and desires and they freak out and get a divorce. After all, if they didn't marry their soul-mate, how can they live happily ever after and in love?

Creepy creep town. So every relationship is doomed, if the participants believe that.

The second part of believing in soul-mates is pretty much just as insidious and creepy:

For soulmates to be a real thing as the article describes them you'd have to believe this: Love is something that is not only AWESOME and SPECTACULAR and MYSTICAL and INEXPLICABLE and UNDEFINABLE, it is also this mysterious desire to lay down your life for another being, it's everything that I Cor. 13 talks about, but mostly, on top of all that, it is a feeling. Rather than live out the concepts of what love is with effort, the message is sent through many channels that if one is truly with their soulmate, they will derive intense happiness and good feelings from being patient and kind and longsuffering. Feeling Feeling Feeling. Did I mention longsuffering? That means suffering. But the "feeling good" aspect is the message that I think society projects. In that frame, love is a feeling that makes you like someone so much you'll be the perfect definition of love just out of desire to see them smile. How many songs have been written? Poems? Books?

Conversely, anyone who has ever loved someone knows that love is an action you carry out every time you talk to, interact with, or even think about people. You love them or you don't: you shouldn't have to tell those you love, because if you love them, they'll already know. You'll do things to make them smile & to make their lives easier. Basically, you can love in many different ways, but wanting to have sex with someone is not the same as loving them. Buying them a present or sending them a Valentine's day card is not the same as loving them. Making them smile when they're down, cheering them up when they're discouraged, encouraging them when they're frustrated, cheering them on when they're doubtful... those are the ways to show your love. Those who believe in soulmates might be confusing feelings of romance with love... love is selfless, not selfish. But if both partners aren't acting selflessly toward one another, one of them is going to burn out.

So to sum it up: Someone somewhere decided to sell love as a commodity and packed it up inside a box of desire. People bought into it and decided that if it was real, it was easy, and that anything that hurt their feelings sometimes or required effort on their part was not real love. Unfortunately, that's actually the opposite of love: it's selfishness. And hey, who doesn't like to feel googly-eyed and twitterpated? It's just not the same as love, that's what I'm saying.

This could've been more well-written, and the logic is probably as solid as swiss cheese, but it's a rant. & as rants go, I feel fine with ending this one this way:

I don't believe in soul mates because I think that's a lazy way into and out of a relationship. I think that every relationship takes work. People can be more or less compatible, sure, but even those who are most compatible will have to work to keep a relationship going past the one to two year 'honeymoon phase' we hear about from psychologists. Relationships are work. And both people have to want to do that work for the relationship to, well, work!

-sw

The Unbeliever & Storybox by Lisa Lewis: July/Aug

2010-09-11T18:02:00.003-04:00

I'm going to combine my July & August installments of the 12-12-10 commitment because I am frightfully behind in actually writing about it and this project is something I'm passionate about & want to follow through to the end.

The Unbeliever won the 1994 Brittingham Prize in poetry and was published by UW Press in Madison, WI.

The characters in these long narrative poems are searching, people who are troubled, and people who, like the title suggests, simply don't believe.

Frankly I found the stylistic elements a bit boring after a while, and ended up reading just one poem a day so that I could sustain my interest. Is this because I come from a consumer culture? Because I'm in GenY? I don't think so, but I guess that argument could be made. I just like variations, and this book does one thing really really well. It felt like I was reading really beautiful sounding short stories, in some cases. However, even though the poems are similarly constructed, the subjects are anything but boring. The imagery is breathtaking or heartbreaking, who can tell the difference in a really good poem?

Narratives are artfully suspended as new characters arise and as old characters' musings go on what seem like rabbit trails. The reader who trusts Lewis enough to stick with each poem all the way is rarely disappointed by the last few lines.

My favorites were "Red Tulips" "Eclipse" & "The Drive." You can read some of this book on Google Books, so I suggest that if you want to see any of the poems, look it up there!

---

Story Box is a chapbook by Poetry West.

The poems in this reflect a sassier, more mature Lewis. The title poem is one of my current favorite poems. I like the length of each poem that makes it feel like an experience rather than a poem. I'm immersed in these poems in a way that I wasn't with The Unbeliever (or Silent Treatment, for that matter). The imagery is stark, the line breaks are adept, the narratives enthralling; overall the book is just, as my friend Jen would say, "bangin."

Near the end of the poem:

"If you want to pretend none of this happened
You break the box, memorize its contents, pour
Gasoline, strike a match and stand back, rush back,
To the year you were seventeen, or I was..."

And the final lines:
"That girl is lost. Her body is lying like paper
In the grass, a box beside her, she's reaching for it,
She should've burned it. She never wanted you
To know, but as with all forms of knowledge
And all beginnings, stopping strictly
Demands never starting, never the first idea."

I also enjoyed "Travel Plans for Social Outcasts" and "Coupled."

For Sept: Late Wife by Claudia Emerson

news, news, news

2010-08-10T18:26:00.008-04:00

I attended the nuptials of Casey Thayer and his lovely bride Leslie Thayer (nee Kuhn) on July 30 in Madison, WI. The bride was lovely, "but the groom was absolutely radiant," according to Kevin Avery . It was a nice ceremony with a super classy reception. The food was great. The company was great. The band was amazing, and the lemon I stole from my table was very pleasing in the glass of iced tea I had today as well.

On a more me-me-me note, I'm pleased to report that Claudia Emerson has selected my poem, "A Bawl-Ass Remembers Her Childhood" to appear in the 2010 incarnation of Best New Poets. I'm pleased as pie to have my poem in this anthology with 4 other NMU alums... that's right, 10% of these poets came from NMU. It's a great place, and I wouldn't be where I am today as a writer if I hadn't studied there. In fact, there are many hot, snowless Oklahoma winter days when I've wished I were still in Marquette, MI! But I've learned and grown tremendously at OSU, too, so it's good to know that it was time to move on.

I've been wildly less productive in Kentucky this month than I was back in May, but I feel very relaxed and *dare I say it?* perhaps ready to take on my final year of graduate coursework and TA duties. Despite not producing anything I'm willing to call a poem, I have 1/4 sheets of paper spread out on the living room floor with poems on them, I'm trying to figure out the order of a chapbook manuscript so that I can send it out to a few more competitions. I sent the manuscript out in May, but haven't heard much, so I threw out a few poems and added a few and am trying to give it a cohesive narrative. So, if you are good at putting together books, you should come over. Bowling Green's not too bad a drive, is it?

After all that, I STILL know a secret that I can't tell anyone, but it's a happy one and I am all bubbly about it. Alas, it is not my secret to tell.

Mayweed by Frannie Lindsay

2010-08-10T16:13:00.002-04:00

Mayweed won the 2009 Washington Prize. I picked this book up at AWP in Denver, and have been meaning to read it ever since then. I think that several of my female colleagues at Oklahoma State University should submit to this contest, I recognize a may aspects of their aesthetics in this work. I got the book to see what the Washington Prize might be looking for, as I should be submitting to book contests in a year or two.

First, I'd like to say that I love the poem "The Music is Going Great in Both Directions"

a few lines I wish I had written:
"she would stop as if she had caught herself
dying and thought it impolite"

"...say Lord I'm struggling
as if that declaration were a fragment
of riverbed rock being pulled loose,"

"she told me I was the nicest cauliflower
she'd ever played..."

The juxtapositions in the poem are wonderful. The subject matter is treated respectfully, but it's allowed to be as funny-weird as the reality of the situation would undoubtedly be.

As for the rest of the book: it's just not my thing. There are few turns of phrase that I wouldn't edit, the imagery is unappealing to me, I don't think that much attention was paid to the metrics, and on a superficial level: I hate the section breaks because of this unreadable font that heads each one. I do like the quotes she's chosen to start each section, quite a bit. I wonder if that was part of the mss she sent out, or if those were added after. It isn't that I don't like the book, I just wouldn't have written any of these poems in the way that she did it, and it made it hard for me to gush about the book.

I recommend you pick up a copy of the book yourself from Word Works publishing.

This concludes my "June 2010" installment of the 12-12-10 project.

Summer 2010

2010-08-07T18:18:00.010-04:00

I owe myself a couple of books of poetry and reviews... I'm currently reading Mayweed by Frannie Lindsay for June's installment of 12-12-10... Then I'll buy some more books. I've had a fabulous summer of non-computer related fun. Here are some pictures to tell the story for me:

The Poet's Cat did not want me to leave, so she slept on poetry-related things & clothes & luggage on my bed. Note her size relative to my pillow:

I interviewed for a job on the eastern end of the state in a small town called Cumberland, KY (which I did not get, but I am just happy to have had a first interview so that next time I am less nervous and more articulate and do a better teaching presentation). On the way back to Bowling Green, we made a detour and hiked to the historic Cumberland Gap and then up to the Tri-State Peak where we got to stand in KY, TN and VA all at the same time. Here's the view:

In June, K and I journeyed to MI and saw friends and family. We also went to Isle Royale. Here you see Kevin in my favorite birch grove:

...and a lady's slipper orchid we saw on our first day's hike:

... and the view from the Ojibwe lookout tower:

... and wood lilies:

... and at Moskey Basin looking out from the pier (this one is part of a 360 panorama I took):

... and Scoville point:

... and the moose we saw:

... Kevin and I & Tobin Harbor:

---

Then we went to Colorado.
Rabbit Ear Pass (hiked to the Ears):

Frost on our tent, camped on CDT north of Buffalo Pass:

Stormclouds rolling by to the east after we got hail and snow:

View from Scarp Ridge, my second favorite part of Colorado:

Halflife by Meghan O'Rourke

2010-05-31T12:48:00.006-04:00

I came upon this book inadvertently and decided to read it for my 12-12-10. And, I made it by the end of May, miraculously.

The book has some really high points and some really low points for me. O'Rourke is a poetry editor at the Paris Review, which is pretty banging, and I'm sure she was expected to produce something amazing for her first book. W.W. Norton published it, for goodness' sake. She didn't win Yale Younger or NPS, but I think she very well could have done. The book engages the reader, entices them, confuses them, and soothes them. Overall, I'd give it 4 stars. I liked it. But I didn't love it. I loved some parts of it and it won me over by the end.

First, the things that annoyed me:

1. Most of lines don't resonate musically, which is a matter of personal aesthetic, but which is really important to me. This woman is a poetry editor for a major magazine. You'd think at least some of her work would be motivated by a sensibility toward sonics that goes beyond rhyme and slant rhyme and assonance and consonance. She's got plenty of that. I'd like to see some attention to rhythm and speed. Many of the lines seem ill-broken to me.

eg:
"Bring me to your childhood room, where
the old captains never flinched, and push me to the floor."
(from "Thermopylae" )

I hate that line break! Why does it end on 'there'? Why is the second line so long? There are only 4 long lines in the poem... did she think about the way it read or the syllabics? I mean, the "push me to the floor" part is very strong. Why is it tagged onto another line?

Bring me to your childhood room
where old captains never flinched,
push me to the floor.

Those would be my linebreaks if this were my poem. I do this so that lines one and two have the same number of syllables and line three is shorter: it packs a punch.

2. The use of "ing" words. I can like a gerund when it's carefully placed and thoughtfully considered but I felt like the verb tense was being used for whole stanzas and poems to justify its inclusion once in the poem... in my book, that's bad. It slows down the lines, it annoys me, and it forces me to read the lines in the poet's voice instead of allowing me to invent my own.

eg:
and I thought I could see her, the swag of her hair, the jaw,
the fearing, but I barely saw, I went sliding down the river

from a house in which it was sweet to sleep,
and the cool of the sheets

was never cool enough, and the imprint of the bedded bodies
diving, at once, took the shape of two geese.
(from "Descent")

I think it works in the final stanza. but in the first one I've quoted here, I think fearing and sliding are poorly placed. Throughout the poem (the book, really) there are just too many gerunds for my taste. They slow down the poems for me. Why not "the fear" ?? "I slid down the river"?

3. Section two wasn't my cup of tea, aside from part IV, which I rather liked, nor was the 3 line poem at the end of section four. I feel like such poems are lazy, not avant garde or experimental. When William Carlos Williams did it, yeah, it was edgy. Now, not so much. Anyway the poem, "Westport Cemetary" seemed like an addendum to "Two Sisters," which makes up the rest of the section, and somehow it cheapens the strong ending of the poem.

---

On the up-side, the subject matter and strangeness that crop up more than make up for the parts I didn't like. I sort of skimmed those negative craft issues and finished the book with positive emotions.

A few lines I really liked:
"I, I was the snow that fell too soon,
before the ground had frozen enough to catch me
and make me stick."
(from "Two Sisters, The Lost Sister VIII" )

"Everything natural to us must be learned.
The broken laugh, the branching glance,
the wood beneath the green, embarking skin."
(from "Hunt" )

And I thought it began and ended really well:

Halflife's first lines (which I like but which have more line breaks I don't like):
"My poor eye. It has done
so much looking - at the sky, at the dark-fretted
trumpets in the frescoes of the Chrysler Building,"
(from "Meditations on a Moth")

Halflife's last line:
"They want to be used." (from "Knives of Light")

So there you have it. Check back in a couple of weeks for the June installment. I'll be reading a book I picked up at AWP that won some contest I think my friend Jessica should enter -- I'm excited to go through the poems and dissect what makes this contest tick. Editors judge, and their aesthetic looked pretty reliably the same.

the heartbeat of a lark

2010-05-26T13:24:00.001-04:00

On Monday May 17, I was fortunate enough to go to a Josh Ritter concert at the Brown Theater in Louisville, KY with KCA. Josh Ritter is, hands down, my favorite musician. His joy while singing is infectious. The audience at the Brown was a little hesitant to engage in the show the way Ritter wanted, but eventually we got people up off their chairs to sing along, much to my relief. (Also, we had 3rd row seats, in the orchestra pit. It was spectacular despite the fact that there was no general admit section or standing room.)

The Brown is a gorgeous building. The stage set featured a number of large incandescent lightbulbs that were easily the size of basketballs, probably larger, and which had red coils glowing inside. These made for an interesting conversation piece for the first band, and for a killer show with JR's band! When Josh Ritter sent his band off-stage and ventured to sing in the dark whilst playing his acoustic guitar, I all but swooned. The man has talent, but the most important part of the JR concert experience is that he genuinely wants his audience to be participants in music-making, not spectators. The concert seemed like 2-3 hours of sustained joy, to me. I couldn't help but smile more broadly each time I caught glimpse of the smile on his face. I couldn't help but sing along in a quiet harmony, even when I barely knew the words to the newer songs. It was an experience. It reminded me that I used to make music, and that when I write, I strive to make music without instruments or even voice. Poetry, in its modern incarnation, uses each reader as an instrument with which to make a new poem, a new song, a new meaning from one set of words that signify one or more things and which are set to some sequence of rhythm, line, rhyme... The good poem is as good as the reader through which it flows, or as good as the ears who hear it.

While I think Ritter's songs are punchy and have artfully crafted narratives, I hadn't before thought about the craft of his lyrics as critically as I might, being a poet. The song "Another New World" invokes Poe's lovely "Annabelle Lee" in ship-form. What interested me during the concert is that after someone got on stage and read a truncated version of the poem set to the melody of one of Ritter's other songs, I couldn't help but wonder whether or not the song "Another New World" mimicked the formal elements of Poe's poem. I am inclined to say that it may, but I haven't taken much time comparing the two, so I'm not making an expert conjecture.

I am holed up in Kentucky, waiting out a storm, writing about writing. It must be a result of the muscle relaxer and the mysteriously injured back I'm nursing.

Cupcake

2010-05-25T08:29:00.001-04:00

I've been drinking Cupcake wines recently and I find myself really digging on them. Their cabernet sauvignon and sauvignon blanc are a great buy: complex flavor and vibrant zing for a low price. I am a commercial, but I am a short one.

I watched Julie/Julia today. I think I may be the last person on the planet to see that movie, but hey. I pay for Netflix, I may as well wait until things I want to see are on there. I don't think it was as great as I thought it would be, and it left me wanting to cook. I love cooking. I want to be a writer, too. But I don't want to write a cookbook. Or a book about cooking. Although some cooking poems might be brewing... mixing metaphors with a wooden spoon like the best of 'em. Anyway, I rate the movie a C+ for general sappiness and predictable plot. It was engaging at first, and then I realized I knew the ending already and just kept watching because of the food. I am fairly certain that the movie's entire purpose was to heighten sales of the Julie/Julia book and of Julia Child's cookbook... It almost worked on me, but I resisted. In protest, I am having a peanut butter and honey half-sandwich and a cup of yogurt for dinner tonight.

My life is pretty (non)exciting right now. The biggest things happening to me are that: (a) I still cannot get a tan (never have been able to), and (b) my neck has decided to mutiny. I have extremely limited mobility and very angry muscles. I think there is a strained tendon or some wrenched discs or ??? The newest development is that the neck has enlisted my left shoulder in its quest for world domination and now it hurts to move my arm, too. I didn't sleep much last night, but didn't get much done either.

This week will mark the end of my vacation in Kentucky and the beginning of an epic two month road-trip to Michigan, Colorado and everywhere in between. We're hoping to get out of here on the 1st or 2nd of June and head north. We'll camp. We'll visit family and friends, and we'll walk around carrying exorbitantly heavy bags on our backs. I can't wait.

To ensure that my blog does not function as a glorified to-do list, I will instead regale you with the tale of my first jump from black rocks.

I went with Alison Spaude, right before she had surgery. I was terrified. I almost didn't do it. I was standing in the hot August or September sun on the edge of something I hadn't known I wanted. It was the UP. I had just moved to town for grad school and I was making a new friend. I was embarrassed of my white skin, of my fear, of what I was about to do: there were people sunning themselves passively, and I hated the audience. I watched a boy try to goad his girlfriend into jumping. Undergrads, probably. She was afraid. I was afraid. Alison and I stood, walked up and down and found a likely spot. I don't know who went first. I think she did. I was thinking of chickening out. I saw these shapes under the water and imagined breaking my neck. I started to hear my mother's voice and thought about how she'd worry. The sunlight played on the water. It was late afternoon and I could feel the sweat trickling down my neck. I hesitated. I took the step. My sinuses felt the impact first. It was COLD. As I swam to the rocks to climb up and out of the water, I felt exhilarated. But I didn't do it again. I wrapped in my towel and we hiked back to her car. Or my car. Or our cars. I don't know why, but those details are gone. I only remember my bare feet on the hot rocks. The cold water closing its arms around me like an old friend. The horrible sinus pressure and the fear when I snuck a peek and opened my eyes underwater... I wondered if I'd be able to swim to the top, as I'd sunk myself pretty deeply.

Around the same time of my life that I jumped off at Black Rocks, I was told that in your mid-twenties, your brain finishes developing. Apparently that was this woman's explanation for the reason I was able to jump: I didn't have a fully developed sense of self-preservation. Funny thing is, I don't remember being afraid to die, but I wouldn't be afraid of death now, either. I was afraid of disfigurement, of not jumping far enough from the cliffs, and of having to explain it all to my mother. You're never too young to develop a healthy fear of your mother's angst and worry...

;)

If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting by Anna Journey

2010-05-24T20:07:00.002-04:00

In this debut collection, Anna Journey more than once manages to astound me by writing the poem I wish I'd written: I even accept moves from her that I spurn from 99.9% of poets. She writes about writing, great. Give me more, please.

Her sense of the line is exquisite. The book is littered with lines like:

"... I'm made

of so many girls I can't get them all
drunk at once or they'd mutiny. Dear underworld, I'll sit here

all night with my selves jumping out
like gin from my tipped cup..."

(from Letter to the City Bayou by Its Sign: Beware Alligators)

and

"...My mother
has given her knuckles to the boy on the schoolbus --
the groper who's* hand was a salamander
on her thigh's shy hem..."

(from He has given his face to the waters of the lake)
(*I believe it would be whose, but I could be wrong.)

The book's real strength, I think, is Journey's bizarre, strange, awesome titles. I want to take all of them and cradle them in my hands. They're tactile, unexpected, and almost all incredibly fun. Have I exhausted my supply of positive adjectives? Nope. I liked this book, pure and simple.

I know this is nearly a month late, and that I'm probably not so great with the follow-through when I say I'm going to do something, but I read the book by the end of April. I loved it. I've just been so damn jealous of it that I couldn't write about it. If my first book is half this good, I will be ecstatic.

Next up (for May, will be done by mid-June, haha):
Halflife by Megan O'Rourke.

Her prose on Slate is great and I've heard good things about the collection.

you just haven't seen my good side yet.

2010-04-15T12:54:00.003-04:00

...I've been working on this series of ~~miscarriage~~ poems for so long that I have to come up for air.

Tried to write a poem about the younger woman using the clitoris as a metaphor and how this desire for perpetual youth is sort of creepy. Instead I have a poem that includes astronomy, physics, Zeus, postcolonial deterritorialization feminist theory, swans, and canoes. I think that in fifteen lines, that'll about do it.

I am currently reading "If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting" by Anna Journey, although it's going very slowly. I think it's me, not the book. In fact, I highly recommend the book.

I am distracted/distractable lately.

I feel like This:
(As if you can't tell, this is by Shel Silverstein)

"I cannot go to school today"
Said little Peggy Ann McKay.
"I have the measles and the mumps,
A gash, a rash and purple bumps.

My mouth is wet, my throat is dry.
I'm going blind in my right eye.
My tonsils are as big as rocks,
I've counted sixteen chicken pox.

And there's one more - that's seventeen,
And don't you think my face looks green?
My leg is cut, my eyes are blue,
It might be the instamatic flu.

I cough and sneeze and gasp and choke,
I'm sure that my left leg is broke.
My hip hurts when I move my chin,
My belly button's caving in.

My back is wrenched, my ankle's sprained,
My 'pendix pains each time it rains.
My toes are cold, my toes are numb,

I have a sliver in my thumb.

My neck is stiff, my voice is weak,
I hardly whisper when I speak.
My tongue is filling up my mouth,

I think my hair is falling out.

My elbow's bent, my spine ain't straight,
My temperature is one-o-eight.
My brain is shrunk, I cannot hear,

There's a hole inside my ear.

I have a hangnail, and my heart is ...
What? What's that? What's that you say?
You say today is .............. Saturday?

G'bye, I'm going out to play!"

the poet's cat

2010-03-29T23:58:00.002-04:00

This is Koko, my inherited housecat from the Poet Ai's pride of lions.

She is 10. She is a siamese/tabby. She drinks from the faucet and from my glasses but never from her bowl and only eats dry catfood.

It's one in the morning and I can't sleep at night

2010-03-26T02:13:00.002-04:00

I was privileged enough to participate and spectate while a group of amazing ladies performed and read and displayed their artwork at a gallery in downtown Stillwater this evening. (I read a few poems, yay queer and women's arts festival: happy gender awareness week, etc).

This has been a difficult week for the creative writing department of which I am a part... The poet Ai passed away unexpectedly in the early hours on March 20, 2010 from an illness. The students and staff from the creative writing and English dept. spent countless hours archiving her papers and books so that they might be donated to the Library of Congress. It was great to be able to help out with the project, of course, but I am glad it's over, too. Also, I adopted one of Ai's many cats, a 10-yr. old tabby/siamese named Koko. It has been an emotional week for all of us, and I know others would echo my sentiments when I say that it doesn't seem real. It will be impossible to fill her shoes, but I'd assume that within the next two weeks, Okstate will open up the search for a new poet to teach in their PhD/MFA program.

This is not what I set out to blog about, but I suppose that since I have a somewhat literary readership, it'll suffice. The poetry world has lost an irreplaceable writer, and her loss is mourned far and wide.

Pleasures & Problems

2010-03-17T15:10:00.006-04:00

I bought three books this week:
If Birds Gather In Your Hair for Nesting (Anna Journey)
Radical Homemakers (Shannon Hayes some random woman, recommended by one of KCA's friends)
E: Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson (published by Fall River in a friendly sea-foam green dust jacket)

I'm currently writing the stilted lines of my first poem over spring break (oh, motivation, where did you go?), reading a book from the 1970's on pregnancy and motherhood, and drinking a cup of Irish Breakfast Tea, in a nod to St. Patrick.

I've been considering options for future study, work, and writing over and over again --- no matter what I'm doing, my mind strays to the future and how it will be changed by the decisions I make now. I know, I know. I'm in my 20's. I'm going through things that every person goes through. I don't know why I am having such a hard time with it. I just am. Angst is part of my genetic makeup, I suppose.

Anyway, this book ("Pregnancy & Birth: Pleasures & Problems" by Christopher Macy and Frank Falkner) is hilariously outdated, and offensive at best. Here are a few quotes for you to laugh at along with me:

"...some women make precisely this distinction in their thinking [biological/social femininity], although they are not necessarily conscious of doing so. To the group of women [...] studied 'feminine' meant young and sexually attractive. Motherhood and femininity did not go together for these women, nor did motherhood and sexual attractiveness. In fact [...] the more 'motherly' a woman, the less 'attractive' she is, and therefore the less likely to marry and have children. On the other hand, the more psychologically unprepared for childbirth, the more likely a woman is to enter into a contract, marriage, with the probably outcome of having children. (Interestingly, men in this study did not make a similar split in thinking about themselves. To them fatherhood and masculinity meant the same thing.)"

"Femaleness culminates in motherhood, while femininity actually leads away from it."

"Almost all women studied reported a moderate or strong desire to be held. (There is a hint that black American women feel the desire less.) [UMM What?] Those who denied that they wished to be held did so with such vehemence that the investigator, Marc Hollander, feels that this 'aversion' thinly covered a desire so strong that the women had to repress it."

COME ON, Dudes. You are in "bat-shit" territory. Racist and sexist, throughout this book. But interesting nonetheless, because one of the poems I am writing is of a first-time mother-to-be in the 1970's. Research is fun (ny). I don't think they deal with sexuality at all, that is, they're only concerned with heterosexuality, but I'm prepared for any offensiveness they have to offer me, by now.

That's all, folks. Time to go listen to a Virginia Wolff novel (Night and Day) on podcast and write my poem.

You were once a lioness

2010-03-06T11:39:00.005-05:00

My apartment is always like a sauna, but there is a guitar-string sculpture named "The Girl With Curious Hair" hanging on my wall. My tires may have gotten slashed, but I needed to start investing in new ones anyway. My office may be in an attic with no windows, but it's cold in summer and warm in winter. There may not be any real winter here, but I did get 2 months of my favorite weather (cold at night and 40's during the day). I may not have many friends, but the ones I do have are great. I may have to teach 2 classes while taking 2 classes, but I do have a bitty health insurance plan. My students might be low achieving, but it isn't their fault: the schools let anyone with a HS diploma substitute and anyone with a BA teach. I may have worse allergies here than anywhere I've ever been, but my green leafies seem to like the sun coming through the window. My poetry teacher might despise me, but I am writing some of the best poems of my life.

Are you all right?
I am.

Beauty Breaks In - Mary Ann Samyn

2010-03-05T11:50:00.000-05:00

Once again, Samyn bewitches in these 55 poems... 55 because the 54 individual poems that make up the book should also be read as one long poem. The book is a journey which must be undertaken with enough time to appreciate her thoughtfulness, her risks, and the mystery and nuance that inhabit her poems. In Beauty Breaks In, Samyn's style remains as quirky as ever as she demands readers enter her strange, impossible world of elegance, sorrow, and wit.

Favorite poem in the book:
Ply Me with Something Please
or
I Want You to Scream It
or
Her Sun Was Blue, Her Tree Was Green, Her Line Was Very Straight

Lake to Cowboys

2010-03-02T08:05:00.000-05:00

I was thinking about MM's old blog and her sojourn from the great lakes to the cornfields of the breadbasket and I decided that I have moved from the great lake state to the great* cowboy state.

While I've been hating pretty hard on Oklahoma, it hasn't been ALL bad. Actually I think I could like living in this state. I'm just not there yet. After all, there are supposedly bison in the western regions. Perhaps I'll move away from Stillwater and commute a few days a week. It's starting to sound like the only viable plan.

So, in honor of the Lake to Cowboy decision, have a photo:

*This reflects the opinion of the inhabitants, not that of the author or publisher of this blog.

Andrew and I at Cafe du Monde, 2007

2010-03-01T08:18:00.000-05:00

Andrew is such a cutie-pie!

Christmas 2003

2010-02-28T08:47:00.000-05:00

Yes, that is a pink limo.

What can I say? We were happy.

Family, Mouse, House 2003

2010-02-27T09:04:00.001-05:00

This is the farm from the sky...

Old farmhouses get mice... even next to Mom's shiny blue bowl.

Family at Thanksgiving

My dad and I... 2003

2010-02-26T08:58:00.000-05:00

I look like I'd just woken up. It was his birthday, if I recall correctly.

Interruption

2010-02-25T14:33:00.004-05:00

I'd like to interrupt my regularly scheduled programming to say that I have finished "The Displaced of Capital" by Anne Winters, my February 2010 book of poetry of the month.

The first half of the book was emotionally gripping. I fell for the narrator. I loved her. I cried when Pepita died. The second half, that connection was gone. As I flailed around, I felt like the imagery wasn't as interesting and I just wasn't able to get as "into" it. The word choices were interesting and mostly I feel like the aesthetic behind the workings of these poems is very different from my own. My verdict is that she is a poet's poet.

Rating:
***

UP 200 Feb. 2009

2010-02-25T08:01:00.000-05:00

One cold, cold February night watching the sled dog racers go by...

Kalee and Denise, 2005

2010-02-24T08:37:00.000-05:00

Two of my favorite people. I also dyed my hair hot pink. Yes. We were awesome.

:-D

We're in the US and Canada... 2003

2010-02-23T08:52:00.001-05:00

Me, Joni, Doro

Mom and I at Tahquamenon ca. 2002

2010-02-22T08:47:00.000-05:00

We used to have a camping-in-the-leaves tradition at Tahquamenon. We'd hike from the lower to the upper and back to the campground in a day. It was a nice mother-daughter thing to do. Autumn is my favorite season, and I can't think of any place I'd rather spend it than at Tahquamenon.

Brendan, 2005

2010-02-21T08:31:00.000-05:00

This is the first in a string of photo-posts chronicling the past few years. Some will be cute, some will be silly. Some will be melo-dramatic. Enjoy.