Bad fortune

"Now go to it!
It's ready to be pick!"

and on the back:

"Learn Chinese - Disease
(Bing)."

Fairy tale

Once upon a time, our friends were rock stars. Everyone played in a band. They named their band Beatrice, Cordelia's Dad, The Hollywood Indians, or B*tch Magnet. They bought glam-rock electric guitars. They wrote their own songs -- "Chili dog with cheese;" "Freddie is a liar (and a f***ing cheater);" "Now there's a dentist in the mall." They thought too much. They had to drink a lot, to compensate for all the thinking. They smoked bidis and cloves, which were taken for joints by wandering beat cops. And then, one by one, they disappeared.

Remy's favorite flavor

My poems Abundance and Grimes Grave are up in Blood Orange Review. Blood orange is Remy's favorite flavor of gelato. They didn't have it at Istria Cafe today, so he had lemon. Which is good, too.

6 degrees of humdrum

So, I've been tagged by Sarah (I think). I have to list 6 unspectacular things about me. Here goes:

1. I'm an outie. This may or may not be related to the fact that I was born with a hole in my stomach wall. It was supposed to close up as I grew, but it never did.

2. When I was little, I was deathly afraid of the muppets. Especially the two men on the balcony. I think they were critics.

3. I could eat eggplant at every meal.

4. I have never been able to drink 8 glasses of water a day. Four, maybe. If it's hot out.

5. I am the only one of six sisters (and our mother) who can throw anything away. Their idea of getting rid of stuff is to pack it up and mail it to me. Seriously, I've gotten packaged food from them that expired in the 80s -- and don't get me started on the box full of shoulder pads.

6. I can move both my eyebrows independently. But I can't wiggle my ears.

Okay, so, the rules:
1. link the person who tagged you: Sarah
2. mention the rules on your blog
3. list 6 unspectacular things about you
4. tag 6 other bloggers by linking them.

Six? Really? How about 1: Valerie.

My mother's basket is full of straw

I was reading about Kanga writings in a dictionary of Swahili proverbs, and came across this one:

Kikapu cha mama kimejaa ndago : My mother's basket is full of straw.

When I first read it, I assumed it meant "poverty" or "lack"-- "My family has nothing of value: no food, no money, no spun gold. Just straw." Actually, it means just the opposite. Straw is an important resource for many Swahili-speakers in Eastern Africa. Women use it to make a whole bunch of things, from floor mats to fans. So, a basket full of straw evokes a sense of plenitude, abundance, security. Your mother's basket is full of straw: what better fortune?

kaleidowhirl

The new issue of kaleidowhirl is up, and it has my poems Chorale and Curtis Pond in it. Yay! An awesome way to end the summer.

The mountain we climbed

They are the people of wings.*

*Russell Edson, Dark Friends

"A gift, a love gift"

I've come home to some lovely news in my inbox: my poem "Restless" is up at Juked, and Blood Orange Review is taking "Abundance" and "Grimes Grave."

Yay!

"There's just no accounting for happiness,

or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away."

-- Jane Kenyon

Sunrise City by Samantha Meeker

In the spring, we considered buying a flat, but I just couldn't do it. It had no Eastern exposure, and without mornings, I pretty much lose hope.

Irked

I was stuck in a waiting room recently, and had the misfortune of reading a "Women's Day" magazine. The editorial blurb went something like this: "It's summer! Take some time for yourself. Make that fish recipe you've been wanting to try; take up knitting; buy some new closet fixtures." Good God.

So then I started thinking about all the things women's magazines never tell us to do. Here's my top 10 list:

10. It's summer! Time to join the FBI so you can spy on your neighbors without probable cause (Hurry, before the Patriot Act expires!)

9. Nothing to do? Why not illegally download an old Disney movie? (Seriously; those films should be in the public domain already).

8. Tired of the same old same old? Experiment with Lesbian sex (You won't know until you try it).

Okay, that's as far as I've gotten. But I'm going to keep adding to this. Did I mention I'm irked?

Some salt with that

So I was thinking about pretzels, how they're really just a salt delivery system. Pretzels are salt licks for people. And then I started thinking about salt. Salt is huge. I'm thinking of the salt trade in North Africa; the role of salt in the Indian Independence Movement; the scene in The Crucible, where John Proctor tastes his wife's stew and, grimacing, adds a pinch of salt. And then I come across this.

See? Salt is huge.

I am remembering my father.

He died in 1989, on the fourth of July. All of the siblings - all 8 of us - were standing around his hospital bed. And there were fireworks going off outside. We could see them through the window.

I am thinking about my mother.

She's in the hospital. That's her, in the front row; the one with the skate key.

This Time

by Gerald Stern was overdue. I took a quick break and sat in an armchair by a window so I could read just one poem before I dropped it in the return slot. I opened to "The Dancing." I read it once. Again. Again. I took off my sandals. I looked out the window. I was so grateful, I walked off without my shoes.

I, too, shall arrange my books by color

Uljhan

This is a great Hindi/Urdu word that perfectly describes the day I had yesterday:

الجهن उलझन uljhan :

Entanglement. complication, intricacy, involution; perplexity, anxiety, uneasiness; twist, ply, turn, windings and turnings, maze; doubling (as of a hare); confusion, disorder, derangement, disturbance; embroilment, imbroglio; difficulty, embarrassment; discord.

Yup. That was my day.

Crisis averted

Better isn't always, um, better

I read a fascinating interview with Developmental Psychologist Gary Marcus, about his work on the mind as kluge. A kluge is a clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem - something cobbled together with the materials at hand (and frankly, that's how evolution works; it doesn't get to start from scratch. It can only select from available forms/mutations).

Anyway, one of Marcus's examples of the kluge-like nature of the mind is memory. Unlike a computer, which stores memory in logical and easily accessible places, our memories are stored all over the place. This makes memory recall wildly unreliable. "We pull things out of our memory using context, or clues, that hint at what we're looking for." When the interviewer suggested this form of memory may be key to creativity, Marcus replied that "a lot of what we think of as creative comes from the free association between our memories, and it's not clear that we would enjoy that if we didn't have the kind of memory that we have."

I find this concept absolutely fascinating. The associative, webbed, multivalent character of our memories could be said to underpin human creativity. So to extrapolate, it is thanks to the very inefficiency of our minds that we write - and enjoy - poetry.

There's a kind of poetry to that, isn't there? That we can be sublime in our imperfection.

"There is a crying for wine in the streets;

all joy is darkened, the mirth of the land is gone."

I had so much fun this weekend

I forgot to feel guilty about not writing. Sunday night, we took the boys to see Nosferatu, with live piano accompaniment. What a blast. I wondered if it would be too scary for Remy, who is only nine, but I needn't have worried. We laughed more than anything. Being a silent film, everything rested on facial expressions, so the joy with which the main character does everything (in the first half of the film, that is) is just hilarious, tactile, 3-D. Knock, the Renfield character, is deliciously grotesque (oh, those eyebrows!) and the scene where Nosferatu carries his own coffin through the town is, well, about as bizarre as it sounds.

Other fun things we did this weekend:
1. Filled our window boxes with flowers
2. Made maple walnut ice cream (Faizan did that)
3. Framed an old transit map of Chicago
4. Stocked up on library books

"Funny,

I sometimes feel like a motherless child (trad)
too, unknown
black voice"

Franz Wright, Planes

Getting better

I feel six-feet tall in my new brown shoes -- like one of Helmut Newton's broads.
Still angry about the Brazil Nut Effect, but mollified by the addition of dried cherries.
It's a three-day weekend.
We are not going to Detroit.
We are not going to the Dunes.
We have no barbecue plans.
We don't even own a set of tongs.

Shikayat

I coughed all night.
This morning I spent 10 minutes looking for socks without holes.
Lowered my expectations and looked for socks with minimally-annoying holes.
It's May and I'm still wearing corduroys.
I was helping Remy tame his crazy hair and in a fit of pique, I picked up the shears.
I saw a picture of my mother from 5 years ago; something changes in the eyes.
I saw chicken bones on the street and wondered about Santeria.
What is it about numb extremities?
I think I have a tapeworm 'cause I'm still hungry.

Does it really take fewer muscles to smile than to frown?

Nope.

Armchair traveling

I spent a weekend once in an extraordinary house in San Francisco. The rooms were painted various shades of sherbet: orange, lime, lemon, raspberry. (When we were kids, we pronounced the word "sherbert," and I really resisted the removal of that second "r." Sherbert seems friendlier, somehow - agreeable, devil-may-care. Sherbet strikes me as curt in comparison).

The house was in Noe Valley, on a ridiculously steep hill. From the front, the house looked like a piton wedged into rock; from the back, it was propped up on stilts, just like Baba Yaga's.

I liked the weather in San Francisco. It wasn't hot and it wasn't cold, but you were always aware of the air - as if it were ever on the brink of some grand gesture.

Birthday by Chagall

"She will have big boomerang eyes

that will mow down the wheat like a windowpane
frosted
and starred from a revolver's bullet."

Benjamin Péret, Arm in Arm

Today is my birthday. I will probably be late for work. I will eat leftover plantain enchiladas for lunch. Then I'll read some prose poems by Charles Simic. There are unopened packages on the piano bench. There is a pineapple in the fruit basket because I like the way the scissory top looks. If someone makes me a cake, I'll eat it; otherwise, I'm making fruit salad.

It is too late not to have my name

Even though it's a quilt pattern.

And it means penis in Urdu.

Even though someone with my name writes bible stories.

And the two Rs together feel awkward, like a mouthful of gauze.

Even though my father called me Joe Pete. And also Annie Laurie.

Even though my in-laws tried to re-name me Sara Zahra.

Even though I would have made a good Ellie

it is too late not to have my name.

Plans for the weekend

"The journey with you into pain is what I long for"*

For some time now, I have been working on a longish poem, in the form of Letters to Antigone from her sister Ismene. Frankly, it's not going well. This has led me to wonder, yet again, if great topics -- ones with complex emotions, deep backstory, and over-the-top drama -- can often be a liability. Somehow, it's easier to write a really good poem about, say, a paper clip, or eating a sandwich on the Midway. Maybe it's because focusing on the ordinary forces us to root out the details, whereas great topics can mire us in abstractions.

I had a colleague who was doing her dissertation on memory and public history in India. Her field site was a village displaced by one of the country's infamous dam projects. For most of the year, the buildings and landmarks of the village were completely underwater; for a short time each year, the water would recede, and the buildings and roads would reappear. "Wow," I remember saying; "what a great topic!" "Yes," she said, "and therein lies the problem."

*Ismene, to Antigone

"provided that he sticks out his tongue

like a bellrope that you yank out
to the hilt."

Benjamin Péret, To Sleep Standing Up

Sheheryar is obsessed with Mexican artists. Diego Rivera; Frida Kahlo; Manuel Alvarez Bravo. Right now he is reading everything he can find about Remedios Varo. I am sitting on the couch reading Benjamin Péret. He shows me pictures and makes me read snippets. Suddenly, I come across Péret's name. I read closer. What? Varo and Péret were married? Talk about synchronicity! Now I am reading his book and he is reading mine.

"Souls burning in hell,

How exceedingly modest your eternal torments
Appear to me in comparison
To that of a firebombed city."

~Charles Simic, Medieval Miniature

I just got back from a reading by Charles Simic, held downtown at the Chicago Public Library. I am stupid with wonder. Wonderstruck. Frankly gaga. I was sort of hoping for a more intimate venue, but in retrospect, I think the basement auditorium was the right way to go. Every 10 minutes of so, another homeless guy would shuffle in with his bags and take a seat. It seemed fitting, somehow - like a Simic poem: part parody, part tragedy.

Misadventure

An instance of misfortune; a mishap. From Old French mes (badly) + avenir (to turn out) [from the Latin avenire (to come to)].

What a strange and wonderful little word. An adventure that went awry. Death by misadventure; it feels nobler than an accident, doesn't it? As if you were out there, carpe-ing the diem, when, woops! Misadventure. And really, it's a nice reminder that every adventure has a "mis" out there, waiting for it.

What happens when we read

Very Like A Whale has a neat post on " Your favorite un-PC children's books." What do you do when you re-read an old favorite, only to find that it's, well, pretty problematic? Weak female characters, racist stereotypes, religious propaganda. Do we let our kids read this? And how did we survive it?

I, for one, am grateful my parents didn't censor my reading. Anything and everything was allowed, however grown-up, or, frankly, objectionable. Maybe that's why I don't worry too much about stereotypes and problematic politics in the literature my kids read. I'm holding out hope that what we learn from reading great books is not so much "manners and customs" or "social norms" as it is, well, empathy - that intangible thing that happens when we step into someone else's story and try to make sense of it. From what I understand, readers tend to identify with the main character of a story, regardless of race, gender, etc. Just as we are the subjects of our own self-narratives, so we place ourselves in the subject position when we read (that's why Indian children watching westerns identify with the cowboys). Our ability to switch between social categories in this process of identification is actually very interesting.

What I would like to spare my kids is the plethora of insipid literature written in the name of social change - those clumsily written stories that have nothing more going for them than that the princess rescues the prince. When it comes to change or progress, I'd wager that politically correct plot-lines have had way less impact on the world than, say, female literacy.

Still holding

My poem "Chair, Formerly Red," is up at qarrtsiluni.

Yay!

A Walking Fleetwood Mac Song

A few years ago, Sheheryar and I were playing Trivial Pursuit - the 90's version. He got the following question (and I'm paraphrasing here): "What Fleetwood Mac song did Bill Clinton use to great effect during his campaign?" The correct answer: "Don't stop thinking about tomorrow."

Okay. Makes sense. But frankly, I like Sheheryar's answer better:

"You make loving fun."

Don't you just miss Bill Clinton?

I wish all candidates had been required to use a Fleetwood Mac song in their presidential campaigns. I've got the perfect one for George W.:

"Over my head."

"You get kewpie doll notions

I bathe them in my blood
Dress them in the rags of my skin"

~Vasko Popa

I am reading Homage to the Lame Wolf, thanks to a recommendation from Sarah. Now I am reading it again. I eat it too fast, like an ice cream cone. I get brain freeze. Now I am reading it again. Small bites. I chew each bite twenty times.

I am agog. Also objects have attitudes.

Another thing I was wrong about

Texans are polite; they give you the benefit of the doubt. They get your coat and bag from the overhead compartment; they tell you the names of birds, like the white-winged dove, who says “Too wet to plow,” which means it’s a liar, at least most of the time, in dry-as-dust San Jose Mission, with the acequia a rusty trickle and the pockmarked millstone dead still.

Texans are hospitable; they steer you away from the vegetables and towards the rib-eye. Some Texans have a weight problem. Did you know that they also pull over and let you pass if you’re in a hurry? Most people would rather speed up and stay in front, even if they’ve got no place to go.

Texans don’t like littering. They have a slogan: Don’t mess with Texas. When I first heard it, I thought it meant don’t let the queers or the Jews or the uppity women in here, but it really means don’t throw your trash out the car window.

Sigh

The Memory Keeper's Daughter
The Bonesetter's Daughter
The Communist's Daughter
The Cantor's Daughter
The Parson's Daughter
The Horse Dealer's Daughter
The Gravedigger's Daughter
The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter
The Marsh King's Daughter
The Tiger's Daughter
Burger's Daughter
The General's Daughter
The Miller's Daughter
The Abortionist's Daughter
The Pirate's Daughter
The Captain's Daughter
The Ringmaster's Daughter
The Winemaker's Daughter

Somehow, it makes me sad.

Mood Music

Tonight, S and I went to the Harris Theatre for the final MusicNow concert of the season. It featured film music - Golijov's suite from Youth without Youth, and Philip Glass's suite from The Hours. There is something strange about a concert based on film scores; the music is hitched to some action, some narrative arc, that is oppressively absent. It reminded me of a ride I suffered through at a nearby water park. You're sitting on an innertube, pushed down a slide that is itself a tube - a pitch dark tunnel. There's no way of anticipating the myriad twists and turns, the changes of direction. It's absolutely nauseating. Not to say that the concert was nauseating, just, I felt manipulated. Film music is all about creating a mood, so there we sat, drenched in pathos, bleeding from the heartlace, not really sure why.

e.g. Fabio

I know why the cat lady had so many cats: she liked naming things.

Names are fun. Poe, Minor, Elias; Chuzzlewit and Pecksniff; the Captain and Tenille; Linwood, Hazel, Sprague. My grandmother's name, Mary Estelle, means "rebel star." (That is so cool). Then there are the Pakistani names that end in "ish," like Daanish, Naazish, and Beenish. (Beenish; that's a neat one). Bronwen, Cormac, Nicola; Xochitl (pronounced So-cheel), Santiago, and ooh, Alberto.

Novelists have it good. Yeah, that's the life - doling out names left and right. Romance novelists in particular, since they don't seem to be hindered by probability or good taste.

Is there anything better

than a used bookstore? The chain stores - and frankly, even the independent bookstores - have fairly modest poetry sections. But a used bookstore in a University neighborhood? Yowza. I browsed shelf after glorious shelf, and here's what I brought home:

Repair: Poems by C.K. Williams
The Star-Spangled Banner: Poems by Denise Duhamel
The Black Shawl: Poems by Kathryn Stripling Byer

Perhaps I'll bring all three on the plane. That's right, I'm making my escape, however brief, from this Chicago winter that will not end. I've got a book talk in San Antonio, so for three days, I can walk outside without socks. I'm really excited about it. I'm going to go paint my toenails right now.

Non ignara mali

I am working on a poem about a girl I knew in elementary school, and for some reason, Dido's statement to the shipwrecked Trojans keeps going through my head:

Non ignara mali, misereris succorrere disco.

So now that I've researched this, I realize I may have had the meaning slightly wrong all this time. Most translations go something like this: "Not unacquainted with suffering, I am learning to help the wretched."

But I always thought it was this: "While not ignorant of evil, I am learning to help the wretched." That's a very, very different statement - more interesting, I think; and more noble.

Incabinate

I love this word. It means exactly what it should mean: to enclose in a cabin; to confine. Winters in Vermont would occasionally render us incabinated. I remember one year, the snow was so high, we asked my mother if we could jump out the second story window into the snowbank. She said yes, but only if the dog jumped first.

Damn that lily-livered dog.

Once were orphans

When my parents used to go on vacation, they would drop the little kids off at St. Joseph's orphanage on North Avenue. I have such vivid memories of the place - the little white metal beds, the giant stone bathtub. When I was 4-years old, my parents went for a 2-week trip to Uruguay, so off we went to St. Joseph's. I remember the nuns wouldn't let me sleep with my big sister Hope; all the kids were separated by age and gender, so Hope was in a different room. But at night, she would come and find me, and we would sleep together in that tiny metal bed.

My brother David stole a doorstop from the orphanage. My mother didn't find out until years later, and she was too mortified to return it. Turns out it was actually an artillery shell, probably from nearby Fort Ethan Allen. I assume it was an empty, as opposed to unexploded, shell, but who can tell? As far as I know, it's still sitting there, stopping the door in my parent's library.

"suddenly the sea

is green and lust is everywhere in a red cravat,
leaning on his walking stick and whispering,
I am a city, you are my pilgrim,
meet me this evening. Love, Pierre."

Lynn Emanuel, Inspiration

Chop Suey

We spent Saturday morning exploring the Edward Hopper exhibit at the Art Institute. Wow. After an hour, though, I thought my eyeballs would explode. Apparently you can have too much of a good thing. Nearly every painting begs for a long look, and the colors are so saturated, it's a little bit like staring at the sun. It took a whole lotta huaraches and sugary beverages to bring us back down to earth.

A Better Place

They are cutting ice on the lake again. You can hear it crack when the chisel breaks through. A groan, like a bone being set in the trenches. Or a cow birthing a dead, misshapen calf. Futile pain.

When people tell you it’s a kindness, what they really mean is “Your sorrow is tiresome.”

They are building a causeway to the islands, a giant dock you can drive on from here to South Hero. So no one has to drive on the ice anymore. Remember when a truck broke through one winter? We thought we’d swim out to the wreck come summer. But he was only hauling hay. No point diving for wet grass.

“She was too good for this world” sounds an awful lot like “She had it coming.”

People used to get stranded on the islands. Too much ice for the boats, not enough for sleds or trucks. They’d hunker down with their provisions. Wait for a freeze. Or a thaw.

The old ladies say, “At least she never had to grow old,” but what they mean is, “Thank you, God, for sparing us.”

Next autumn, I’ll take the causeway to the islands. The Jamaican apple pickers will be there, stripping the orchard as fast as locusts, their arms flying like mandibles. Then they’ll stretch out on cots in the bunk house. They’ll change into crisp whites and play cricket on a grassy airfield, a green rug unfurled between the trees. Halfway through, they’ll stop the game so a plane can land. A little red thing. Flimsy, like wind-up tin.

You were going to have a house here. You were going to park your airplane right here, up against the cortlands and the mackintoshes. Next to all the other single-engine crafts that could be taken for farm equipment, if not for the yellows and blues—and words like “Angel” and “Osprey” on the nose (because nobody names a tetter. Or a harrow).

People who say “She’s gone to a better place” must not know about this one.

Curtalax

or curtle ax, if you prefer; either way, it's a lost word that means cutlass. I'm going to go out on a limb and wager that we've got a whole bunch of English words for weapons that are quietly disappearing (or slinking away in shame). It reminds me of a class I took with the venerable C. M. Naim on the Urdu Marsiya. Every week, we'd translate sections of a marsiya as homework; in class, we'd take turns reading and sharing our translations. What an exhausting experience. Urdu seems to have about 500 words for "sword," and the average marsiya pretty much uses each and every one. The only book I opened that winter was Platt's Dictionary.

Flat-bed with a side of bacon

For the longest time S. confused IDOT with IHOP. When he'd see an IDOT (Illinois Department of Transportation) tow truck pulled over on the highway, he'd wonder at the strangeness and the beauty of middle America, where stranded travelers are rescued by the famous purveyors of breakfast confections. And wouldn't the world be just a little bit nicer if that were true? The stranded, the broken down, the rear-ended. God knows we could use some pancakes with that tire iron.

That happy thing, a perfume critic

"I once sat in the London Tube across a young woman wearing a t-shirt printed with headline-size words ALL THIS across her large breasts, and in small type underneath “and brains too.” That vulgar-but-wily combination seems to me to sum up Trésor. Up close, when you can read the small print, Trésor is a superbly clever accord between powdery rose and vetiver, reminiscent of the structure of Habanita. From a distance, it’s the trashiest, most good-humored pink mohair sweater and bleached hair thing imaginable. When you manage to appeal to both the reptilian brain and the neocortex of menfolk, what happens is what befell Trésor: a huge success."

From Turin and Sanchez, Perfumes: A Guide. You can read all about it in the New Yorker.

Faugh!

interj.

1.

An exclamation of contempt, disgust, or abhorrence.

I looked for "faugh" for so long - that was way back in the days before the internet, and I was too lazy to hie myself to a library (oh, how things change). Of course, I was spelling it "fa" (actually, faaaaa!), so that may have had something to do with it.

Growing up, when I played with my siblings or my friends, if one of us did something wrong (said a swear word, broke a known rule), the others would all point their fingers and say "Faaaa!"

I began to suspect this was some kind of regional expression when I left home for college, said "faaaa" to my classmates in jest, and found that no one had the first clue what I was talking about.

Not long ago, my sister called me, all excited, having discovered, at long last, the origins of our beloved "faugh"; apparently, it's a Shakespearean-era exclamation of disgust or contempt. We used it for shaming purposes, I guess you could say, so I think it fits.

I am left to ponder the sad fate of endangered interjections everywhere. Welladay! Some of these are just too good to let go.

"balls! fiddlesticks! havers! heads up! horsefeathers! rats! spells! begone! behold! bingo! blast! blimey! bother! bullshit! crazy! crikey! damnation! the devil! doggone! god! good! goodness! gracious! grand! hell! honestly! indeed! look! nonsense! silence! so! sod! soft! son of a bitch! son of a gun! upon my soul! up with! upsy-daisey! well! woe! no wonder!"*

*Vladimir Ž. Jovanovi, The Form, Position and Meaning of Interjections in English

Elder child experiments with short form

I think he meant these as a joke, but I was utterly charmed:

Bubbling snot blobs
oozing, spreading, destroying
out of broken nose.

If gopher break fridge,
skin a big banana slug.
Feed it to boxers.

Super Mario
eat the chimpanzee of life
bacon baby butt.

Don't keep your eyes peeled
they will become mushy.
Barney is a fish.

Money is like cheese.
The evil frappuchinos
need to find a face.

No tag-backs, and the tree is base

Okay, Sarah tagged me. This is fun:

How to play:
1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

As it would happen, I keep all my current library books on a shelf on my computer desk, and the nearest one is Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami. I haven't started reading it yet, but here are the requisite lines:

"That afternoon I decide to go into the woods. Oshima said that going too far into the forest is dangerous. Always keep the cabin in sight, he warned me."

Ooh, that sounds good. I may have to read this book next.

Slight problem: I've got no one to tag! That is so sad.

the poems themselves perform feats of derring-do*

I am love, love, loving Richard Garcia's collection The Persistence of Objects. I have a mad urge to quote each and every one of his poems just to show you (dear reader) how extraordinary they are. Since I can't do that, check out the first stanza of this sestina, entitled "Not Bad for a Hermaphrodite":

"The poem was scrambled during transmission.
Previously, it had been tied to a gate and disemboweled.
Some said it was a hermaphrodite
whose secret name was suspected of being an anagram
of a supernatural being, a quadriplegic
God, fond of anyone who dressed Goth."

Transmission, disemboweled, hermaphrodite, anagram, quadriplegic, Goth. Sounds like a dare, doesn't it? And yet, he pulls it off. Hooray for his poetic feats of derring do!
I love this book.

*Pulled from John Mcguire's pull-quote on the back of the book

"How about Barbizon, I said.

How about a tall, yellow
butterscotch coop
at the Balmoral Hotel
in Edinburgh? Now
that's something you could
dive into and come up
with a mouthful of feathers
all aflutter. No, she said, Ashes
of Roses, you know
the clinking of a tea set
on a Mexican veranda?"

Richard Garcia, Ashes of Roses

You can read the whole poem here.
(Art by Dan Amell).

"At dawn, when the first buses leave,

...their great wipers arc
like women bending through smoke

to burdens, singing terror, singing pity."

Lynda Hull, Love Song during Riot with Many Voices

White City: Poems by Mark Irwin

I have mixed feelings about this work. Some of the poems are real gems; others have me scratching my head and wondering, "Is this the same person?" I think I'm just more moved by certain forms and topics than others, and while I love much "nature" poetry, it's fatiguing to read one after the other. It's more than this, though. Irwin seems to approach the natural world through the lens of loss - ruin, development, civilization as devastating, etc. I understand. I spent the first 18 years of my life living on a hill farm in Vermont. But I look at cities and see hope and possibility. I have deep affection for the built environment, for technologies and kitschy things, pop culture and public spaces and the everything-all-the-time of cities. So while Irwin is probably best known for his nature laments, I like him best when he's writing about freeways and hotels and imagined cities. Here are my favorites:

White City; Two Panels; Autumnal; I Hesitated; Ruins; Sparrow; Someone.

Verloren

This is my favorite German word. It means lost. It feels more lost-like, to me, than lost itself. Maybe this is because it sounds like "forlorn," which makes verloren the felicitous carrier of this other, more targeted meaning. After all, lost can refer both to an existential crisis and a sock, but forlorn has a more limited range of reference. It is dark; wretched and wrenching. Verloren, for an English speaker, gets freighted with multivalence. In actual German usage, though, (naturally), verloren has to make room for socks.

Reading Celan

I want to express how much I love this collection. I have been reading it for a long time, which is unusual for me. I am impatient. I want to stand at the end of something so I can look back and tell myself about it. But with Celan's work, I have resisted this impulse.

At times, in some of his poems, there is a simplicity that is deceptive. You could race through them and elude their impact. They are intense. The "simplest" pieces I've read six, seven times before the wind gets knocked out of me.

So much of what he writes takes up language - the naming of things, speech, the written word, silence, illegibility. He approaches it alternately with longing, resignation, and aplomb. Much is "unrepeatable," words are "lost," "Unwritten things, hardened/into Language, lay bare/a sky." Writing is an audacious act, maybe God-challenging. It is hopeful and hopeless, triumph and failure. But it feels as if language is more all-encompassing than this, as if, for Celan, language is a metaphor for humanity - the universality of it, and its contingency or particularity. Scripts, letters, mother tongues, Babel. I have just begun to unpack this. It is so rich.

I love the often chant-like quality of his poems, the turning back on itself, the "you, you"s, the "we, we"s, the refrains - all of it like playing with the materials before building. Or perhaps like dismantling the scaffold as you climb.

I have so much more thinking to do about this, but for now, I list my very favorites (the master list of loved ones is just too long):

The Secret of the Ferns; The Last Flag; Nocturnally Pouting; Speak, You Also; Argumentum e Silentio; Low Water; The Straitening; Psalm; The bright/stones; Anabasis; Everything's different; In the air; On the white prayer-thong; The Juggler's Dream; Give the Word; Well-digger; Wolf's-bean.

Looking forward to steroid psychosis

Remember that elephant that was sitting on my chest? He stood up.

Post in which I am Frustrated about Airways

Air in, CO2 out.
Gas up the cells.
Keep liquid at a minimum.
Stay within the frame of the body.
Color scheme: translucent.
Muscle engagement: minor.
Autonomic process. Write that down!
Fresh scent optional
but appreciated.
N.B.: Never twitchy
or inflamed.
One job:
air in, CO2 out. I know
you can do better than this.

Ah, the Lure of Dead Languages

If you've a yen for dead languages, but aren't in the mood for Virgil and co., you can read all your old childhood favorites in Latin. Here's a sampling:

Winnie ille Pu (Alexander Lenard, 1960)
Fabula de Petro Cuniculo (E. Peroto Walker, 1962)
Alicia in Terra Mirabili (Clive Harcourt Carruthers, 1964)
Domus Anguli Puensis (Brian Staples, 1980)
Ursus nomine Paddington (Peter Needham, 1999)
Quomodo Invidiosulus nomine Grinchus Christi natalem abrogaverit (Tunbergs 1999)
Regulus (Augustus Haury, 2001)
Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis (Peter Needham, 2003)(also available in ancient Greek!)

and my personal favorite, Cattus Petasatus (Tunbergs 2000):

Cur sedetis?? inquit ille,
Ludos vobis dabo mille!
Cattus, etsi sol non lucet,
Ludos vobis huc adducet!

"For all we know

that's how a God is reached, in whose
bright synaesthesias of sympathy a blood
need not be red, if spilled as speech..."

Heather McHugh, Spilled

Montivagant

This is a "lost" word from the 1600s that means vagabond -- or to be precise, a wanderer of the hills and mountains. I like it. It reminds me of my favorite Urdu word: avaragardi, which means vagabondage; roaming and rambling. I don't know why, but it makes me happy to say it.

Ainadamar

On Thursday night, S, K and I went to see the opening of Ainadamar at CSO. Wow, what a production. Of course Dawn Upshaw was incredible; she always is. But it was really Kelly O'Connor, in the pants role, who blew me away. She plays the part of Federico Garcia Lorca, and you wouldn't think that would work, but it does. I don't think I've ever heard a woman sing that beautifully in such a low register. And to look at her - this slim, dark-haired, slightly "fey" young woman - you'd never expect such depth and resonance.

Jessica Rivera as Nuria was spectacular, too, as was Jesus Montaya, the arresting officer whose calls of "entreguenlo" from offstage right were absolutely chilling.

And now, thanks to some freakish cold virus that came out of nowhere, I've completely lost my voice. Oh, well, it gives me an excuse to seclude myself for the weekend and do nothing but read and write.

Run, run, run, run, Runaway

Sadly, I am going to have to stop reading Runaway - short stories by Alice Munro. I hate it when an author that I love becomes famous, and everyone starts saying, "Oh, I read her stuff; she's not that good." Yes, she is that good. But this is not her best collection. Perhaps I'm also not in the right frame of mind for it; I'm sort of punchy and revved up. Maybe I need something mean and sarcastic.

Well, I just checked Peter Carey's Theft out of the library.

That might work.

New England Baked Beans

I am making baked beans. It is very late in the day to be making baked beans, but who cares? The oven does all the work.

I am very picky about the beans I use. I really only like Jacob's Cattle Beans, and you simply can't find them here in Chicago. In my Vermont hometown, a neighbor down the road grows them - has for as long as I can remember.

Every summer, my parents send me a big box of Jacob's Cattle Beans, divided into quart-sized zip-lock bags. I am down to my last two. I can buy them off the internet if I get desperate, but that just feels wrong. Where I come from they're just beans - a dollar a bag. According to Amazon, they're an heirloom bean -- "gourmet." That makes me smile. How, exactly, do you make baked beans gourmet? Cassoulet, you say? Well, sorry, but that's farm food. And if the French can't make it fancy, who can?

"We're lost

in Burroughs' loveless Soft Machine
with tongues alack
for love."

~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Holiday Inn Blues

Ambages

Winding ways, indirect proceedings; dark or obscure language; ambiguities.

CHAUCER Troylus v. 897 (c.1374) If Calkas lede us with ambages, That is to seyn, with dowble wordes slye.

WHITTINTON Vulgaria (1527) 2 Tendre wyttes with suche derke ambage be made dull.

SCOTT Wav. xxiv (1814) Partaking of what scholars call the periphrastic and ambagitory, and the vulgar the circumbendibus.

"And vanished in the emptiness of a bell."*

I just finished reading Hands Behind My Back: Selected Poems by Marin Sorescu. I really hate having to return this to the library.

Here are my favorites (VERY favorites in bold):

Hide and Seek
And Everything Slips Easily Away
Apparition
The House
Burglars
Glimmer
Spiral
Orbit
I Can't Pass Onto Anyone
Signs
Passport
Fire and Water
Laurel
Pure Conversation with a Chinese Character
*Fossil Hittite
Cognition
Good Advice
Laocoon
Used Bookseller
Poisoned
Minus the Sea
The Mountains
With their Fingertips
The Match

Not a Still Life

S. and I went to a MusicNow concert at the Harris Theater last night. Overall, it was fantastic; Esa-Pekka Salonen was conducting, and the final piece was his own composition - "Catch and Release." Hands down the best part of the program.

The first piece, on the other hand, pretty much scared the bejeesus out of me. Titled LautLeben (loud life), it was composed by Rolf Wallin, in collaboration with Sidsel Endresen, who is apparently a well-known Norwegian vocalist. The piece is orchestrated entirely with Endresen's voice. Computer manipulations of her voice are piped into the theater, and she improvises along with them. Oh, and there's also a video - mostly geometric, patterned things coming and going on a big screen.

But oh my god, what that woman does with her voice. It's like everything I ever imagined about demonic possession. Bones ratcheting; reptilian things hatching and dragging their viscous bodies along the floor. The twitching, the sudden guffaws and wails. It was terrifying.

Gorgonize

To affect as a gorgon; hypnotize; petrify.

Gorgonize. I like it, but it should really mean "to get organized by scaring the shit out of everyone in your house." Well, that's how I'm going to use it.

"It is no longer a question of balance and yet

we dance to keep from falling."

Dionisio Martinez, Dancing at the Chelsea

The Magic of Place

The Big Bent-Covered Hillock
The Big Rock Face at Twisted Gully
The Tongue of the Black Cape
The Norseman's Channel
The Reef of the Jura Men
The Pass of the Yellow-Rattle Pool
The Glen of the Baglike Plain
The Skerry of the North-Facing Creek
The Shelter of the Miserable Women
The Temple of the Glen
Fair Malcolm's Fishing Rock
Red Archibald's Fishing Rock
Bald Kenneth's Daughter's Fishing Rock
The Fishing Rock of the Crabfish's Heel
The Well of the Speckled Thicket
The Well of the Red Trickle
Foul Puddle
Foul Harbor
The Little Terrace at the Head of the Dike
The Lifting Stone
The Pierced Stone
Fever Rock
McPhee's Standing Stone
McPhee's Black Gully
McPhee's Hiding Bed
The Foot of the Birch Wood
Extremity of the Speckled Point
Red Angus's Field
Gray Samuel's Boat Pool
The Corpse Island Eddy
The Island of the Scalasaig Women
The Periwinkle Cleft
The Little Black Waterfall
The Pool Between Two Pools
The Little Loch of the White Calf
The White-Rumped Extremity
The Lady Cave
The Danger Cave
The Ruins of the House of Boisterous Angus
The Ruins of the House of Duncan of the Gold

- John McPhee, The Crofter and the Laird

Still Reaching

When my sister H. was in her second year of college, she moved from the dorms into a (not-a-sorority) house on campus. The house had a damp, dark basement with one little window up at ground level. When she came home the next summer, she stored a number of things in the basement, including a tiny seedling she'd given up on.

In September, when she returned to school, she found that the plant had sent a shoot up - and not just up, but eight feet up! That little seedling had stretched all the way up to the window, looking for light. I suppose for all those weeks of darkness, it thought it was still underground. When the shoot reached the window, it grew leaves. What a strange sight that was, the slimmest of stems, eight feet tall and unbending, topped by three, understated leaves.

My sister took the plant under her wing - rescued it, the way she used to rescue toads from the window well. The next summer, I helped her move her things back home, and I got to spend the entire six-hour drive with the plant on my lap (over my shoulder, around the bucket seats. "Don't bend it!")

I understand how she felt. It's impossible not to feel protective toward something so hopeful.

"An immense stillness everywhere

With the trees always bare,
The raindrops coming down only halfway,
Coming so close and giving up."

Charles Simic, Great Infirmities

Rater's Anxiety

I've opened an account on Goodreads.com, and I'm slowly entering books and adding my two cents about them. So here's the problem: I have rater's anxiety.

If I disliked the book, that's easy; 2 stars. If I hated it, or it was terribly terribly written, it might even get 1 (that hasn't come up yet). If I liked it, thought it was okay, 3 stars. Here's where the trouble starts: if I really really liked, maybe even loved it, it gets either 4 or 5 stars.

Of course my favorite books get 5 stars - The Master Letters, The Mercy Seat, Never in Anger, Pieces of the Frame. But then along comes Wislawa Szymborska's View with a Grain of Sand. I think it's a 5-star book, but I don't love it as much as I do my favorites. Do I give it an objective 5, or a subjective 4? This is maddening, which probably says more about me than about Goodreads or the classificatory process in general. I can't help it; when it comes to books, I really want to tell the truth.

Circumbendibus

It's like circuitous, only Seussical
and more syllable-y.

Life is a Cabaret

Saw Cabaret at the Theatre Building last night. F. was playing a waiter and a custom's official, but his big moment was the solo in Tomorrow Belongs to Me. Took R. with us as well, despite the "Mature Content" warning. Yes, there were, as R. put it, a lot of "butts and crotches" in the show, but as Fraulein Schneider says, "So vat?" It was a brilliant production - lots of Fosse-like staging, with the kit kat girls posed around the set like pieces of furniture (and with their torn stockings and bruised faces, their status as chattel was nearly complete). It was powerful, it was sad, it was a riot, and the Pineapple Song was not to be missed.

"Clay tablets wail:

--These are bad times, the Gods are mad,
children misbehave and
everybody wants to write a book."

Miroslav Holub, Nineveh

No Rhyme or Reason

Why am I annoyed by rhyme in English language poetry, and not, say, in the Urdu poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz? The above image is taken from Faiz's poem Shaam (Evening). I've never found an English translation that I care for, but here's the final verse and a half, transliterated (sorry, no diacritics):

Ab kabhi shaam bujhegi na andhera hoga,

Ab kabhi raat dhalegi na sawera hoga.

Aasmaan aas liye hai ke yeh jaadu tute,

Chup ki zanjir kate, waqt ka daaman chhute,
De koi sankh duhaai, koi paayal bole,
Koi but jaage, koi saanwali ghungat khole.

The sounds in this poem are exquisite. Musical, hypnotic. They give me chills.

I guess I'm not annoyed by all rhyming English language poetry. (There's Shakespeare, after all). Maybe I've just read too much bad poetry. Maybe all the good rhymes in English have been taken. (But I don't believe that, do I?)

Maybe historical distance gives me permission to enjoy rhyme. Maybe I'm predisposed to view form in contemporary poetry as phony and forced. Thing is, when rhyme creeps its way into a piece on its own - as incidental rhyme, or near-rhyme, or assonance - I find it very pleasing. Ironically, the one form I actually enjoy when employed by English-language poets is the Ghazal, made famous by the Urdu poet Ghalib (but this form uses repetition rather than rhyme...)

Hm. Curiouser and curiouser.

Melancholia=Muse?

Here's the pull quote from an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

"We’re in danger of losing a major cultural force, the muse behind much art, poetry, and music. We are blithely getting rid of melancholia..."

Nothing new about this warning; we've heard it all before. Anytime it looks like people in the Western world are finding new ways to actually be happy, critics start lining up to tell us why it's a bad idea. This suspicion of happiness has a long backstory. For much of European history, happiness was a non-issue. Humans weren't the center of the universe, nor were they the appropriate focus of intellectual or artistic contemplation. We were too low on the food chain in the Great Chain of Being. It was all about the divine. Original Sinny and all, we were products of a notorious Fall that pretty much sealed our fate.

Enter the Enlightenment, and humanity takes center stage. Now we're asking questions about epistemology, moral development, social life, and our place in the "natural order." (No, God's not gone, but that's another story). Meanwhile, global exploration kicks into high gear. While Hume and Locke are philosophizing in their dens, sailors, explorers and missionaries are encountering new worlds from the South Pacific to the arctic and beyond. Travelogues written by these erstwhile ethnographers are bestsellers. People can't get enough of them. Why?

Simply this: they offered a vision of - yes - happiness. What a shock for the guilt-ridden, self-punishing Europeans to see an alternative to the daily, dirty, relentless grind of labor, of conflict and class division, of scarce resources and fierce competition, of stern gods and abject sinners. Of course, the worlds they encountered weren't perfect, egalitarian paradises; but they were different enough to suggest to the travelers that misery wasn't universal, and therefore might not be inevitable - that happiness might be attainable in this life, and not simply the next.

Well, suffice it to say that happiness gained a few champions, but misery had a whole bunch of defenders. You can read the entire history of intellectual thought from the Enlightenment to today through this lens: can we, and do we deserve to be happy? For example, Freud sees misery as a psychic inevitability; Marx sees misery as a consequence of capitalism and the alienation of labor (presumably, happiness is possible in an alternative socio-economic system).

So what does any of this have to do with melancholia as muse?

It's part of the same debate. Misery's defenders tend to present said misery as not just inevitable, but necessary. Thus, Freud sees thought - as well as artistic production, indeed, all the treasures of civilization - as the product of want. All our unfulfilled desire (unfulfillable, remember; we can't, after all, go back to the womb) gets redirected, sublimated, into creative expression. We create things - poetry, novels, the Taj Mahal - because we're miserable. Happiness's champions (Schachtel, e.g.) have dared to suggest that we create art despite our misery, or only when we are free enough from need to be able to view the world as something other than an extension of ourselves and our needs.

Oh, I could go on and on. The association of melancholia with muse just pushes my buttons. I think when miserable people write beautiful poems or make brilliant films, it's because they've transcended or bypassed the misery somehow. It's a hopeful step, isn't it, to put words or images on paper. Guess that places me on the side of happiness.

Art(sy) for Art's Sake

I just finished reading The Museum, a play by Tina Howe. This is one of those works that could appeal to people on both sides of a very fractious divide. On the one hand, those people who are suspicious of, or unimpressed by so-called "conceptual art" could read this and feel vindicated. On the other, aesthetes enamored with said conceptual art could read it and have a good laugh at the philistines who schlep through galleries saying "My 5-year old kid could draw this."

The play is entertaining enough - lots of rapid-fire banter, a huge cast of walk-on characters. But by around page 40, I began to ask myself what, exactly, I was supposed to be getting from all this. Ironically enough, cue Chloe Trapp, a curator who enters with a patron to conduct a private tour. As she enters, she explains to the patron the significance of the pieces. All the other characters on stage are transfixed, and gather around the curator to hear more. "I'm so grateful!" the patron says. "Oh, we're all so grateful!" says another.

The play works because it's not really about conceptual art; it's about the difficulties of communicating across particular lines of difference - the tragic (but also comic) way in which we often seem to talk past each other. The museum is loud, cacophonous. The exhibit is titled "The Broken Silence." Language difference and disorder is a central theme here. My favorite scene is the final one, in which the deaf-mute parents of the artist Zachary Moe stand reverently in front of their son's paintings (canvases painted entirely white). Here is what they say to each other in sign language:

MRS. MOE. Remember the drawings he used to make as a child?
MR. MOE. The sketches he did of all his toys in his nursery...
MRS. MOE. How wonderful they were, bursting with life...
MR. MOE. Noisy with life!
MRS. MOE. Remember how he'd make the walls shake when he wanted something?
MR. MOE. And how they shook! He shouted with the voices of a thousand men!

Finding your Inner Fish

Neil Shubin, a Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago, has written a book on our convoluted evolutionary history. It's called Your Inner Fish. Very crudely, when you are "designed" to swim in the ocean, then "modified" to thrive in streams, then treetops, then the savannah, and now cubicle farms, there are bound to be any number of glitches. Illness, chronic disease, pain; we owe it all to this history. We are like the used cars of the animal kingdom: lemons, lemons, more lemons.

You can read a great excerpt from the book here. Art above is by Allen Carroll.

The Poetry of Outlandish Guesses

I read something interesting on, um, Damn Interesting. Apparently there's a condition called Charles Bonnet Syndrome, in which gradual loss of vision (eg. from macular degeneration) prompts the brain to "fill in the blanks" - to guess, if you will, at what the eye is no longer quite seeing. This causes people to have wild, fanciful hallucinations. Faces will peer out of lampshades, gargoyles lurk in hat racks. It seems we are so hardwired to recognize faces that when we stop seeing them, the brain lowers its standards to allow for anything remotely face-like to be interpreted as "face." The result? An ever present entourage of "phantom people." I quote:

"These phantom people normally wear pleasant expressions on their faces as they loiter in eerie silence, and they make frequent eye contact with the viewer. Curiously, a great number of these imaginary characters are described as wearing hats, sometimes along with elaborate costumes."

Diego, I hardly knew you

S. drew this with white charcoal and conte on black mitientes paper. It's based on a photo by Edward Weston (we were fortunate enough to see a signed print at the Art Institute last summer). I love the lines, the crayon strokes, the tooth of the paper. They give the image an entirely different feel - one that's powerfully alive, and striving.

At the National Museum of Mexican Art, you can see a few pencil sketches by Diego Rivera. They are tossed off, it seems, with the loosest of hands; and they are wonderful.

New Year's Resolution 3

"I [will] romp with joy in the bookish dark."

Eating Poetry, Mark Strand

New Year's Resolution 2

"I [will] look for the L
In my name in places of light, lucky,
The good ending of tenderly."

The Letter L, Lucie Brock-Broido

New Year's Resolution 1

"I [will] plant my syllables in light.
Let them multiply there."

Reset, Elaine Equi

"A Hunger" for endnotes

Lucie Brock-Broido writes quite possibly the most exquisite endnotes I've ever seen. S. gave me "A Hunger" for Christmas, and I have been devouring the poems and savoring the endnotes like gin-soaked olives from the bottom of a martini glass. It's the insight you gain into the life of the poet that's so delicious. It reminds me of that section from a popular entertainment/celebrity magazine: The Stars are Just Like Us! They go grocery shopping (cue photo of George Clooney with a shopping cart)! They play with their kids (cue Reese Witherspoon on a playground)! I wish more poets did this (or did it this well).