The Word of the Week is:

Calibrachoa, which is the scientific name for "A Million Bells." (Could there be a better name for a flower?) A member of the petunia family, calibrachoa blooms in cascading trumpets of violet, blue, pink, red, magenta, yellow, bronze (!?) and white. Wow. Somebody bring me some!

Three Tragedies by Lorca

Read "Three Tragedies by Lorca" over the weekend: Blood Wedding, Yerma and Bernarda Alba. It is amazing how prophetic Blood Wedding feels--the mother mourning the death of her husband and elder son at the hands of an enemy family, a fate Federico Garcia Lorca was to share, albeit at the hands of the Falangists, who murdered hundreds of people during the Spanish Civil War. At the end of the play, the mother's younger, and only remaining son, is killed, and she sends all her well-wishers away:

"I want to be here. Here. In peace. They're all dead now: And at midnight I'll sleep, sleep without terror of guns or knives. Other mothers will go to their windows, lashed by rain, to watch for their sons' faces. But not I. And of my dreams I'll make a cold ivory dove that will carry camellias of white frost to the graveyard. But no; not graveyard, not graveyard: the couch of earth, the bed that shelters them and rocks them in the sky."

There's a saying I used to hear in Karachi: Ghore bechkar sote hain; Having sold the horses, we sleep. I immediately thought of this when I read the above passage. What an extreme and tragic example of having nothing left to worry about.

Alec Kolodny Gets a New 'Do

When I was 8 years old, my mother brought home a bizarre and slightly grotesque terra cotta planter. Basically a hollowed out sculpture of a human head, my mother claimed it was the spitting image of an old, beloved neighbor from the Burlington neighborhood of her childhood. From that moment on, the planter--and the series of plants it came to hold--was known as Alec Kolodny. A large nose, protruding ears, a charming mole on the left cheek. We loved Alec Kolodny.

If I remember correctly, Mr. Kolodny's first hairdo was a Boston Fern; very loose and frondy, it gave off a rasta vibe. Every year or so he'd get a full hair transplant-- one year sedge, one year a jade plant, one year spiked aloe (now that was strange).

When I went home a few months ago to visit my parents, I was happy to see Alec Kolodny in his usual place on the windowsill in the living room. But I was shocked to see that his lustrous, live tendrils had been replaced by not-so-subtle silk. All I could think was, poor Mr. Kolodny. No more hair-club-for-men; it's a fake ficus toupe from here on out.

Still Drowning

When F. was little, we spent some time living with my parents in Vermont before heading to Karachi for fieldwork. F. was three at the time. He had gotten mad at S. and me for some reason, and informed us that he was going to "run away, fall in the pond and drown." (Clearly we had told him over and over not to go outside without us or he could fall in the pond and drown; be careful or he could fall in the pond and drown; wait for us or he could fall in the pond and drown). Anyway, a little later, we were sitting in the car, my parents in front, S. and F. and I in the back, and I asked F. if he was feeling any better. His answer: "Nope. Still drowning."

My parents have gotten a lot of mileage from this story. But here's my point: last night, S. and I were remembering this, when it occured to us that R.--our 8-year old--has never gotten mad at us. Ever. Yikes! Maybe he's saving it all for puberty.

I finished The Mercy Seat

and I compulsively make my list of favorites:
(In no particular order)

1. Monologue of Two Moons, Nudes with Crest: 1938
2. Anima Poeta: A Christmas Entry for the Suicide, Mayakovsky
3. Of Politics, & Art
4. February, The Boy Breughel
5. November 23, 1989
6. A Grandfather's Last Letter
7. Aubade of the Singer and Saboteur, Marie Triste
8. Comes Winter, the Sea Hunting
9. Thomas hardy
10. The Pennacesse Leper Colony for Women, Cape Cod: 1922
11. Coleridge Crossing the Plain of Jars
12. The Circus Ringmaster's Apology to god
13. Penelope
14. Hummingbirds
15. The Everlastings
16. An Old Woman's Vision
17. Several Measures for the Little Lost (I love this title)
18. Pictures at an Exhibition
19. To A Young Woman Dying at Weir
20. The Elegy for Integral Domains
21. Arkhangel'sk
22. Danse macabre
23. New England, Springtime
24. Chemin de Fer
25. New England, Autumn
26. Thomas Merton & the Water Marsh
27. Revelation 20:11-15
28. A Depth of Field
29. The Photographer's Annual
30. The Clouds of Magellan (Aphorisms of Mr. Canon Aspirin)

From this list, I was hoping to pick a FAVORITE favorite to memorize, but I'm hopeless at narrowing it down. I think perhaps Penelope lends itself best to memorization, but what I really want to do is memorize the first stanza of Anima Poeta, the final stanza of Thomas Merton, a bunch of sections from the prose poem The Clouds of Magellan--and so on.

Wow, what a brilliant collection. I have learned so much from this.

The Word of the Week is:

Zimbelstern:
a percussive feature of some pipe organs, a zimbelstern is basically a star-shaped wheel of bells. Well, that's a poem right there.

No one writes to the colonel

Yes, I do feel a bit like the colonel when I look at all the "zero comments" tags under each post. I suppose it is time for me to share my blog with my friends. Why have I hesitated? Well, see, my friends are all really mean. It's okay, I like it that way. In fact, I've made it a point, at this stage in my life, only to have mean friends. They're just a lot more fun. I will take a lot of guff for this site; the fun part will be giving it back. K, K, D: bring on the pain!

This is why I love shape-note singing...

Where else do you get to sing words like "sublunary"?
Here's a verse from Kingwood:

The grave is near the cradle seen,
How swift the moments pass between,
And whisper as they fly.
Unthinking man, remember this,
Though fond of sublunary bliss,
That you must groan and die.

Just the kind of pick-me-up I need on a Saturday morning.

I Love Naked People!

Oh, how I miss the land of my birth.

I Love naked people. You never have to worry that they might be carrying a gun.

The best of all possible forms

I have a longstanding argument with a number of very close friends, as well as with my sister, over the extent to which the myriad components of the human body, and human “traits,” have actually been selected. My friends, and my sister, argue that “if we’ve got it, it has a purpose”—meaning, at some point in our evolutionary journey, it was adaptive; it gave us an advantage in the whole game of survival and reproductive fitness. They vehemently dispute the idea that some traits may simply hitchhike along with other, specifically desirable ones, making them neither adaptive, nor maladaptive, but “spandrels” (incidental products of evolution that have no function).

Well, of course, natural selection does not really work at the level of the gene; it works at the level of the organism. Dalmations, bred for appearance and stamina, often suffer from genetic deafness—a trait that came along with the specifically selected traits. My friends argue, not without reason, that under more natural conditions (presumably in the wild), deafness would be so maladaptive as to be selected out. Okay, fair enough.

Here’s where we really part company. My friends and sis (henceforth referred to as "they") believe that, after all those years of evolution, the human body/form is pretty much perfectly adapted to its environment, by which they mean “the African savannah.” One friend even follows a “Paleolithic diet,” eating only those things that would have been available on the savannah (i.e., no grains other than rice, no dairy unless raw, no legumes). They argue that long life and great health will follow from adjusting our diet and lifestyle to best mimic the conditions for which we are so adapted.

Here’s my problem with all this:

1. Natural selection does not care about perfect health and long life. You only have to live long enough to reproduce; the more surviving offspring you have, the more your traits/genes get passed on. Biggest causes of death now—heart disease, cancer—figure well after the game of reproduction has been fought (and won or lost). (Disclaimer: Some people argue for the Grandma hypothesis--that organisms with “grandma” caregivers are more likely to survive to reproduce, making longevity, in a roundabout way, adaptive. I’m on the fence with this…)

2. There is no such thing as perfectly adapted; evolution is a compromise. A peacock’s tail makes him more attractive to mates, but more visible to predators. It’s always a tradeoff.

And my biggest problem with this is:

3. Natural selection does not really mean survival of the fittest. It means elimination of the unfittest. We like to think of nature as “red in tooth and claw,” where only the truly magnificent specimens can survive and pass on their genes, but for most periods of human (and early human) history and prehistory, conditions were not so dire. In any given generation, the norm is that only the very worst will not survive to reproduce. So to make it in the game of evolution, you only have to Not Suck. Thus, we do not have the best of all possible forms; we just don’t suck. We have fallen arches and lower back problems because the benefits of being bipedal outweigh the costs (benefit: it leaves our hands free; cost: fallen arches and lower back problems).

It’s interesting; I think for Enlightenment thinkers, this notion of the perfectability of the human form was the consolation prize for giving up on a notion of god. Maybe this wasn’t the best of all possible worlds. Evil was real. Nature was the mover and the shaker, not a benevolent creator god, and nature was a cruel and indifferent master/mistress. But, that very cruelty--the harshness of existence and the improbability of survival--ensured that humans were honed, over millenia, to something close to perfection. But it just ain't so. Oh, well; so much for consolation.

A rat is a rat is a rat...

Are rats and squirrels so different?

We tend to think of rats as vile, germ-ridden pests--oh, the horror, were we to find one in our home! They skulk around dumpsters, eat garbage, make a home in the sewers.

Squirrels get a better rap. They nest in trees, frequent parks and tree-lined streets. Sure, sometimes they dig up the seeds we've planted, or eat the food we've put out for the birds, and on occasion, you do hear about squirrels in the walls. Annoying, nothing more, right?

But if you honestly look at a squirrel, they're just as tiny-mammal-creepy as rats, with their busy-monkey claws and twitchy tails. In Hyde Park, they hover in the trees and shout at passersby. I'm convinced that one of these days, a rabid squirrel is going to jump on someone's shoulder and tear out the jugular with its cartoon teeth.

I had a friend in Pakistan who hated birds. Found them absolutely repulsive. Pigeons were always roosting on her window sills, on top of air conditioners, under the eaves. She used to leave empty eggshells on the ledges, to keep them away, which apparently didn't work. She said that pigeons were just rats with wings.

Well, squirrels are the rats of Vermont, I'd say. My parents are always capturing them in have-a-heart traps, and transporting them miles away, across rivers and brooks, and letting them go, to become someone else's problem. They felt pretty good about this solution until one day, they pulled into their driveway only to discover a women leaning out of her station wagon 10 yards up the road, releasing a whole family of squirrels from her own have-a-heart trap.

So what's my point? I think the only thing to do is reconcile ourselves to rats. If we can do that, we can probably handle squirrels and pigeons and anything else we choose to describe as "rat-like." And according to a clerk at Petsmart, rats make great pets. They eat what you eat. They're smart. Who knew?

"Our clayey part"

I am reading/re-reading too many books at once. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (okay, I just finished that one). Moby Dick; Dead Souls; The Mercy Seat (well, that's poetry, but I'm reading it straight through like a novel); The Sun Also Rises. Enough already. I am going to bracket everything else and focus on finishing Moby Dick. I am always inspired by Melville's language--such vigorous verbs and nouns, descriptive without being florid. Some of my favorite quotes:
"a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into eternity";
"it's a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians"; "Because no man can ever feel his identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part."
My list of must-reads is obscenely long. People have to stop writing good books! At least until I finish all the old ones.

"Necklace, drunken bell

for your hands smooth as grapes."

Yesterday was my birthday, and I am giddy over my new gifts--one of them, a huge collection of the poetry of Pablo Neruda (hence the above quote from "So that you will hear me.") Other loot:
And Her Soul Out Of Nothing, by Olena Kalytiak Davis
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Mohsin Hamid
The Master Letters, by Lucie Brock-Broido (no more hoarding the library's copy!)
Ainadamar, an opera based on the life and death of Federico Garcia Lorca, by my favorite composer, Osvaldo Golijov. Yay! A friend and I have already purchased tickets to see it at CSO in February of 2008.
Finally, the boys made me some homemade bubble bath/body wash, from a recipe they discovered on the internet. They also made my cake. My birthday wish: a plot for the upcoming Script Frenzy.