Monkeysquirrel

Pulphead, Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan

2012-01-18T11:55:00.007-05:00

For months, Amazon.com has not shut up to me about John Jeremiah Sullivan's book of essays, Pulphead. Every visit to that site has shoved it in my face: the casual Windows Paint-made script of its cover page, the washed-out, gritty sentimentality of the photograph. Somehow, Amazon’s algorithms, or whatever you call them, had determined that it was the perfect book for me, the one I was destined to meet and fall in love with, the book that would make me happy.

I don't even remember ordering the book itself, but yesterday, it came in the mail, and on the same day I got a notice from the library that it had come in for me after I’d placed a hold notice for it. True story. I don’t remember doing either, but here the book was, so I took a day off from reading George Eliot and started into the first essay, “Upon the Rock," a pretty hysterical account of driving a 29’ RV to a Christian-rock festival in remote Pennsylvania.

It’s a story full of characters—mainly a small, odd group of male concert-goers from West Virginia who spend their time going frog-gigging, antagonizing the festival security guards, and talking about their faith. Because of their gregarious West Virginia goofiness, they come across as easy people to make fun of, and Sullivan does, quoting them to let them make themselves look silly:

“I was born in Louisville,” I said

“Really?” said Jake. “Is that on the Ohio River? . . Well, I know a dude that died who was from Ohio . . .”

When he does this, gets to come across as though he’s not a mean guy, he’s just letting these people speak in their own voices. But he’s choosing which quotations to include, and his choices usually create humor at their expense.

Sullivan comes across as a person of complicated faith here. One interesting passage for me is his recollection of a time he calls “his Jesus phase” in high school, something he remembers when he sees that aging Christian rock band Petra has taken the stage. It’s an interesting story, and it feels more like he’s pondering a subject for a future essay rather than treating it fully here, which is either sloppy writing or an interesting glimpse inside the narrator’s relationship to his subject.

In the end, Sullivan comes away as more in awe than he does bemused. After describing a sense of “sneering machismo” that most American males saunter around with in public places, stadiums, males, etc., he observes the following:

“In the three days I spent at Creation, I saw not one fight, heard not one word spoken in anger, felt at no time even mildly harassed. Yes, they were all of the same race, all believed the same stuff, and weren’t drinking, but there were also one hundred thousand of them.”

I am feeling an urge now to get a Lilly grant so that I can rent an RV and hit festivals all summer and meet people. I should get started on that.

Eric Baus

2012-01-09T22:45:00.006-05:00

"Here is how to hand a glass deer a beetle." from "Glass Deer."

Oh, this guy and his poems. The newly released Scared Text is Eric Baus's third book and maybe my favorite and I can't even begin to speak about it. It is full of lines like this, lines that seem to make such perfect sense to themselves. "Oh," I think, "so that's how you hand a glass deer a beetle. I need to remember this."

The poems themselves feel matter of fact, so poised in their delivery, even when they are depicting moments of miniature, impossible violence:

There are several kings in a single fox. They haunt one another's brows. They hunt their brains for a broken stinger. A crown of hornets fleeces their phlox.

from "Hornet Fleece." I like the way "hunt" echoes "haunt" here. It makes me think the voice is mis-hearing or mis-reporting something, but doing it with confidence. That confidence helps make the all the fantastic action here seem plausible and even likely, which is pretty magical.

Baus and I actually went to the same high school, not at the same time, but we had the same teachers, both experienced the passionate maelstrom of Mr. Rusk's English class. How nice to know that our town can give birth to such, I don't know, difference, maybe. It is more than a little inspiring to me.

Currently

2012-01-09T22:25:00.003-05:00

Some recent purchases

". . . they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under them but among them and they rode at once like something jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing." All the Pretty Horses (30).

As much as I think about re-reading The Savage Detectives, it's All the Pretty Horses that I seem to open up and browse the most. I open it and pretty soon I am reading it out loud, usually some passage like this, with stars in it, glum cowboys nearby. Right now I wonder about the repetition of "thieves" here. Is it awkward? Could he have chosen a different word the second time? Sometimes I like to think that it's evidence that the narrator is trying again, trying to get it right, but that doesn't really fit with the tone of tragic omniscience the narrator usually carries in this book. It's not the voice of a consciousness that wouldn't get it right the first time. But anyway, I'm glad to be back in this book again.

2011-11-13T20:18:00.009-05:00

Someday I want to outfit one of these with some shelves, make it an ice-reading shack. I'll drag it out on Burt Lake and start spending some nice alone time there. When sportsmen knock on the door and ask if I'm getting any bites, if that is indeed what they normally say in these situations, I will nod and tell them "you have no idea." If they ask why there isn't a hole in the floor of my shack, I don't know what I'll do. Maybe read them some Kenneth Koch. Or nod, give them an unnerving smile, and answer "exactly."

2011-09-12T06:27:00.000-04:00

Currently

2011-08-26T07:41:00.005-04:00

Edward Abbey

Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey
Between Parentheses, Roberto Bolano
Any Human Heart, William Boyd
Beautiful & Pointless, A Guide to Modern Poetry, David Orr
The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey, Trenton Lee Stewart

This week: 388 pages
Last week: 446 pages

Sentences of the Week:

1. "I'm in the stifling head of the trailer opening a can of beer, barefooted, about to go outside and relax after a hard day watching cloud formations." Desert Solitaire

2. "When a nonspecialist audience is responding well to a poem, its reaction is a kind of tentative pleasure, a puzzled interest that resembles the affection a traveler bears for a destination that both welcomes and confounds him." Beautiful & Pointless

3. "Larrain photographs a parked car and it seems to be going more than sixty miles an hour." Roberto Bolano, Between Parentheses.

I read mostly from Any Human heart this week--up until I realized that finishing the book would kill him--and as much as I enjoy the book, there are not a lot of stand-out sentences to my ear. So William Boyd gets shut out again this week.

Edward Abbey is not as consistent a writer, and he seems self-conscious about it almost, but there is some fun variety here. In this week's winning sentence, he's referring to his job as a caretaker at Arches National Monument, where his main duty appears to be passing the time.

2011-08-25T20:36:00.004-04:00

I'm not sure what you call this season we're in now is, but it's my favorite.It's not really summer anymore. The evening light has changed and there is a cooler air, like summer left a door open by mistake and let in a nice draft.

Telling June Apple that she's read enough Peanuts for one day.

Hammock reading makes this particular kids book somewhat more bearable.

Catherine continues to work wonders with the cutting garden.

Any Human Heart

2011-08-23T06:08:00.003-04:00

This book still feels like something of a guilty read for me because I'm not used to reading things in which so much happens. I'm just ripping through it, though, sad that it's almost over but also sad, I'm realizing, that, because it is written in the first-person style of a journal, the end of the book means the end (death) of Logan Mountstuart.

He's a sad, pill-popping mystery to himself, Logan is, but I still care about the guy. Ominous how his new year's entries for the late 50's say "need to cut down on the booze," and his early 60's entries are starting to say "need to cut down on the booze and pills."

2011-08-21T08:15:00.007-04:00

A peek inside June's new indoor reading yurt.

Flower Buddha happy in the Zinnias and Gomphrena.

new n+1.

Compared to The Believer, n+1, as I understand it, is supposed to be similarly omnivorous and, I don't know, "youthful" or something, but more willing to look critically at its own generation. I think some people believe The Believer and stuff coming out of the Dave Eggers empire in general can be too pleased with itself or too willing to sit back and just be a cheerleader for whatever cleverness their friends have submitted. n+1 is supposed to be more serious, and I do find myself laughing much less frequently than I do when I'm, say, browsing Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

Toward this goal of seriousness, the issue that came yesterday, no. 12, includes an attempted take-down of the taste-setting music site Pitchfork. Richard Beck, the cheeky so and so, gives P4k a "5.4," and tries to explain to us why we should not like it either. But it's an unconvincing piece, and I don't think it is at all honest with itself about its own ambivalence. Anyone who goes to that site is ambivalent about it. Much of the good new music we like we heard about there, but we worry, at the same time, that we are too dependent on it, that it is too popular, as if we can only maintain our indie cred if we know when to jump ship just before it loses its cool.

Beck seems to be arguing that this has already happened, but he can only throw a mish-mash of hand-wringing complaints at it. He accuses the writing of being too sloppily exuberant, but also concedes that that is the nature of the genre. He points out that no critical stars have arisen from the site, but also suggests that this anti-star feel is a conscious strategy on their part, and may be part of the reason for their success. He accuses them of being "king-makers" (as if Pitchfork were more responsible for the success of Arcade Fire than Arcade Fire themselves) and suggests that we are all missing out on more challenging and novel music as a result. Ultimately, he blames the music itself, arguing that we should "pursue a musical culture more worth our time." Go for it, Mr. Beck. But until that happens, you and I both know that we'll still be reading Pitchfork every day and agreeing with much of what they say.

In the end, he sounds just as conflicted and unresolved about this as we all are, but unaware of that ambivalence or even dishonest about it. He also could have acknowledged the Pitchfork spinoff, Altered States, which attempts to fill in some of those eclipsed musical corners he complains of, but maybe he didn't know about it.

Most importantly, though, Beck's single article had me thinking more than any five issues of The Believer put together, and that's why n+1 is worthwhile.

UPDATE: Reading this over, I really sound like a blowhard. "Go for it, Mr. Beck"? What was that about? I still think that this article doesn't quite explain to me my own ambivalence toward its subject like I wanted it to, but the author deserves more credit than I give him here. I guess the snark bug took over when I was writing.

Currently

2011-08-18T21:59:00.006-04:00

Any Human Heart, William Boyd
Beautiful & Pointless, A Guide to Modern Poetry, David Orr
The Great Frustration, Seth Fried
The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey, Trenton Lee Stewart

This week: 446 pages

Sentences of the Week:

(1) "Our job was simple: get the monkey in the capsule."

--from "Those of Us in Plaid," in Seth Fried's The Great Frustration.

(2) "There are several things in this passage that seem interestingly right to me, but there are several things that are interestingly wrong as well."

--Beautiful & Pointless

(3) "Oh for a world that contains Cynthia Goldbergs!"

--Any Human Heart

A decent crop of sentences this week, but the winner by far is the hilarious Seth Fried, and if I wanted to be totally fair, he could probably have taken all three spots this week. I've even read these stories out loud to the kids and they get it; Birk keeps repeating this line about the monkey. It's the first line of the story, and maybe one of my favorite first lines to any story I can remember, though, honestly, I can't remember all that many.

Birk, Birds

2011-08-16T20:56:00.004-04:00

Birk and June Apple at the A.C. extension garden a few nights ago. This looks like an album cover to me for some reason.
Decided these frames weren't quite right at our neighbor Barb's garage sale. She did have the exact kind of old popcorn popper I use to roast coffee beans, though, and gave it to me for free. I usually spend around $50 on ebay for them. Good old Barb. First time I ever met her.And for an anniversary present tonight, C gave me a t-shirt she made out of this drawing I did a few weeks ago. New favorite shirt!

2011-07-08T10:21:00.003-04:00

I spend too much time looking at other peoples' houses on the internet, and sometimes I see one that is so beautiful it almost feels like a cruel hoax.

It's less about the house than it is the imagined life of solitude and no plastic toys on the floor and solitude.

In my own experiments this summer, I have figured out that solitude is found early, when the garden is still cool, not too late to water a corner or two. And not playing music or Radiolab podcasts around the house can extend this period of peace well into the late morning, when the pressure of errands starts to impede.

2011-06-04T12:20:00.001-04:00

Our kitchen fox has gone all Anglophile on us lately. Stiff upper lip and that sort of thing, don't you know, what what. And the wolves keep dropping spoilers. I keep threatening the eraser, but isn't doing much good.

2011-05-28T07:36:00.005-04:00

before.

after.

I love a nice walk up the street to Caliente. I get to pronounce the words papa relleno and ropa vieja and tostones, trying to communicate to the smiling owner that I, unlike most of her customers, know a thing or two about Spanish. But I know nothing, nothing, except that I like Cuban sandwiches and that I will read every last article the internet ever makes about drug violence in Mexico.

This issue of the Paris Review starts with a meandering and kind of self-indulgent piece by the late Edouard Leve, but I love it. It is so hard sometimes to know whether or not I should love something I read, and I found myself questioning myself as I read this one. "Should I really be liking this as much as I am," I will ask. And I never answer myself, but instead answer in the imagined voices of friends. I try to imagine whether Catherine would put the book down or read it in two days. If there is a part of me that suspects I'm being taken in, I imagine Joseph bestowing his inimitable "Ugh," Or if it is good in a way I can't describe, I imagine him giving it a gentle, thoughtful nod with his chin as if he's thinking about Pynchon. If I'm trying to decide what it is about the language that attracts me, I think "what would Dawn say"? It's amazing how little I participate in the formation of my own judgment.

quick update.

2011-05-19T20:53:00.005-04:00

5 min. ago, the street outside my office during a sudden hard rain storm during the sunset.

During the day, about to turn the under-used herb garden into more of a cuttings garden.

And the dog, somehow, lives. And is pretty happy, actually.

And meanwhile I am in one of those phases where all I want to do is read a long John McPhee book about anything, just read him telling me about the regular Joes he meets in his travels around, this time, Alaska. It's so relaxing. I finished The Leopard recently, too, and I miss the prince a little bit and his untended gardens with their parallel lives. It's striking to me how much that novel reminds me of Faulkner's Hamlet/Town/Mansion trilogy, with the Snopes family standing in for the classless and conniving and ineluctably rising merchant class of Italy.

It's that nice part of the school year when all of your planning is pretty much done, the day-to-day obsession with the question that never leaves: "what else can I do to avoid boring these poor students to death?" There is a momentum to this part of the year, and we all feel it, students and teachers both. Or, I don't know, maybe I'm the only one who feels that way and everyone else thinks things are dragging on; I've never bothered to ask.

But for me, the summer has started in my head, it's true, because the worrying about planning is what invades the rest of my life the most. Now all I do is ration the grading that needs to be done each day, enjoy these last couple of weeks with students I will never know this way again, and then go home to think about my garden and read. And plan for our awesome trip to Spain that is going to be so awesome.

So that's where things stand.

2011-04-24T20:59:00.004-04:00

From a fun tumblr called Outdoor Sanctuaries.

O, I haven't been here much lately. It happens in spring. One of the nice things about winter is the way it forces you to narrow your focus. Instead of inside and outside things, you can only do the inside, for the most part. The spring happens and, as I said to my friend Clare the other day, I see all these perennial weeds popping out early and I feel like my laundry has been scattered about the yard. All I want to do is be out there doing the yard laundry.

I need to start a demanding book of some kind is what I need to do. I'd been avoiding a novel because anything I started would have lain mute in the shadow of Adam Bede, so I went to anthologies like the new Pushcart, short and funny memoirs like Scott Carrier's odd ramble Running After Antelope and this other one I forget, plus some other stuff like Mark Doty's The Art of Description and Michael Schmidt's Lives of the Poets. And they are okay, but without some novel going at the same time I feel a little directionless.

So today was warmer than they said it would be, and I was able, after a hearty Easter brunch and a damp egg hunt, to do enough yard laundry to ease my conscience, take the whole family to the driving range, and then come home to start The Leopard. I can already tell it was the right thing to do. The prince has an overripe garden outside, and even the decorated walls of the palace itself are described like a something growing out of control. It feels a little familiar, that is. And now, to go read myself to bed.

2011-03-11T20:11:00.002-05:00

O, elementary school. It does not change, cannot be changed. Our first family science fair. Second place for attempting to discover what will happen if you put sugar in different bottles of things and shake them. Based on the first place ribbons I saw, it is clear that the science fair judges of today have a distressing lack of experimental spirit, awarding only those projects that answer questions we all know the answers to: yes, potatoes and lemons still light bulbs, you can still make crystals with a crystal-making kit, heavy things still sink.

Second place is reserved, it must be, for the questions that grown ups can't answer and are afraid to find out. And this is why the ribbons are red. The judges are looking in the wrong places.

Next year I will bring my own special ribbons--I think they will be black, maybe with an unblinking eye in the center--to award those projects that leave me cold and trembling, the ones that I hurry by, with results that have been slowly sliding down their cardboard boundaries all night and pooling on the folding table below them or that explain their research in a 10 point font named "Scrawl." Until next year.

We learned a lot about the Civil War.

And the book is alive and well.

2011-02-28T20:27:00.003-05:00

With luck, this will be my last George Eliot post for awhile. Managed to complete Adam Bede this weekend in a torrid session of reading during a rare extended period of silence at home. And the thing is so dang good. Reader, I cried. I'm not sure I was quite ready for the turn the plot takes after Hetty's fate is resolved, but it's still done so beautifully you just don't care. And to drag out the suspense a little Eliot even parades the whole cast of the Poyser farm out for one last ensemble piece at a dinner; we get to meet the bit players in mini-portraits at the table. I had been wondering why we hadn't seen more of the common laborers on the farm, since Eliot seems to love training the lens on them so much. I wish she didn't wait so long to do it here. But at least this last supper scene lets us savor for one last time the phenomenon that is Mrs. Poyser, who might be, of all the Eliot characters I can remember, the one with the quickest, most biting, most creative wit. And then there is a wedding and then it is done.

I'm in that rosy period where you remember the book and the characters and you can think about it actively and productively and even authoritatively if you are in such a mood. It won't be long, though, before the particulars will fade and I will remember only broad outlines of things and then I will forget even that and only remember that I loved the experience of reading the book. It will turn into pure feeling. Hopefully, I will have room in my life for a re-read by then.

The last couple of days, I've been easing my way through the Patti Smith memoir of her life with Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids, on recommendation of Sarah Jane, and it's a fun glimpse into 70's NYC. My favorite moments are the scattered impressions she provides of fellow residents at the Chelsea Hotel. Harry Smith, in particular. It reminds me of my days living in the dorms at IU, to be honest.

My other first impression is that Smith got taken for a ride by Mapplethorpe, who feigned an emotional connection to her until he could find a male lover with more money. She just seems so naive that it's hard to believe she made it at all there. But she did.

2011-02-24T16:19:00.004-05:00

Another snow day. I've been reading Adam Bede to Smokey today and we are trying to finish it today or tomorrow, but that will be difficult because for lunch I went to my favorite sketchy Mexican restaurant that no one else in my family, except June, will visit with me to eat as much as I could with the $8 I had on me. I was able to eat way too much and still leave $1.50 on the table, so, anyway, I'm now very sleepy as a result. Smokey is, too, as you can see.

I am a little disoriented with A.B. right now, what with Hetty's sudden pregnancy and apparent infanticide and all. Was I supposed to know that she was pregnant? Should I have been able to infer that from the desperation of her quest to Windsor in search of Arthur? I'm used to feeling this way when reading Faulkner--stupid, that is--but usually Eliot's talky narrators keep you pretty well filled in on things. I'm hoping that this all ends up as one big mistake, for Hetty's sake, but this does not feel like a hopeful book to me, so I'm trying to keep my expectations modest.

It's interesting what time has done to the relationship between the high-class classlessness of Arthur and his "Most likely to have no prospects" milk-made Hetty. At the time it was written, I'm sure Eliot intended this relationship to depict the cruelty and carelessness of the class system as represented by Arthur and his father the squire. Arthur is the bad guy. Today, though, it's a little bit easier for me to see him as a victim of class as much as Hetty is. I mean, I think if it weren't for his "station" and all, he'd be with her, and, dopes the both of them, they'd have just as much a chance at making it as anyone, I suppose. I'm not supposed to, but I think Arthur is just as tragic a figure as I'm sure Adam is going to turn out to be.

2011-02-22T09:33:00.002-05:00

Oh, so that's where I left them. Actually, this reminds me of a hairy bushwhacking experience I had once on Vancouver Island.

via paradise express.

2011-02-12T10:51:00.008-05:00

A friend of mine de-friended me on fb the other day because of a comment I made to one of his many humorous status updates. His was a witty pro-Kindle provocation, and I responded in what I thought was a similar spirit, but in defense of those of us who still think that the old fashioned book has benefits that can't be reproduced by an lcd screen, back-lit or otherwise.

He must have taken it differently, though, as I found out during an awkward exchange when we crossed paths irl recently. The best, most painful, part of our conversation can be paraphrased as follows:

Me: "So, did you leave fb?"
Him: "er, no."

I guess my comment came across as irked rather than good-natured ribbing. I take the blame, though, in my defense, my comment did employ irony and self-deprecation in an attempt to signal my peaceful intentions. What remains to be negotiated is how we are to act when we see each other at our daughters' dance classes. Or if his wife takes their daughter, do I have an obligation to tell her, before we engage in pleasantries, that her husband has de-friended me? I would write a letter to The Ethicist about this, but Randy Cohen has been replaced, and I don't know if I can trust the new guy yet.

But at least I am still the friend of the book. Just look at The Leopard up there. I tried to start reading it late last night, but ended up just contemplating the spartan elegance of its cover for a few minutes before falling asleep on the couch.

The paperback of Adam Bede I am slowly rationing to myself lately is just as pleasurable to look at and hold. I've decided that one of the critical advantages that books have is their depth of field. They can pose for photo-shoots, for heaven's sake. They look different depending on the light, they have profiles, they can even be coy.

Just look at Hetty here, for example--it took me a lot of shots to capture this expression on her face. She is not the most cooperative of subjects. Whereas the Kindle is all about cooperating with, accommodating, the reader, pragmatism above personality. Who needs friends like that? Unless I am sneaking one into a wedding ceremony, my books are always too big for my pockets. They make me hold their hands, cause me to drop packages as I dig for the house key. By far, these are among the most unaccommodating relationships that I have.

2011-02-06T11:50:00.002-05:00

Sheehey makes #1 Play of the Day!

As a school, IU does not dunk a lot. We just are not dunkers, never have been. Back when John Laskowski did the color for IU games and someone dunked, he would actually say "Baston with the dunk shot." Yes, "Dunk shot." Las, former IU player, expressed the general attitude of IU toward on-court flamboyance. I think I can remember every interesting dunk by Calbert Cheaney, Alan Henderson, Jared Jeffries, DJ White, there were so few.

But in our last two games we've had a couple of good ones, and this one by freshman Will Sheehey is so fun. As ESPN guy says "Indiana loses, but who cares?"

2011-02-03T15:31:00.002-05:00

Today's roast cooling by the window

Three snow days really depleted our coffee supply, so I had to spend about an hour in the basement today roasting at the same time that I was putting a new ball valve on this ugly stretch of leaking PVC pipe. I think I fixed the leak, but it's one of those repairs I'm reluctant to go down into the basement to check on because I just don't really want to know. I'd rather let the basement fill with water than fit pipe again today.

Igloo.

2011-02-02T17:48:00.001-05:00

If you have the gift of a snow day, or two, you have to have something to show for it.

June Apple reading some Wallace Stevens. "Hey, this is at my reading level," she said.

snow diary

2011-02-02T09:57:00.002-05:00

Tried to put together a diary of yesterday's snow day, but it was more difficult than it sounds.

5:00 Awake, wondering if school was closed.
5:01 Awake, knowing school was closed, wondering when I lost the ability to sleep in.
5:45 Give up, go downstairs to read Adam Bede.
6:30 Make coffee, decide that Billy Bragg would be the soundtrack of the day.

And it's pretty much a blur from then on. I know that at some point I surprised myself by figuring out how to play Bragg's "The Saturday Boy." I know there was a protracted game of charades. And I know that I did not make any igloos because it was too windy and that the mail-woman skipped us because I didn't even try to shovel.

So here is day #2, and I hope it ends just as blurry. Really like the idea of weeks that have extra weekends built inside them.

Grant money fun.

2011-01-30T20:52:00.003-05:00

So the parents' club was kind enough to grant me some money to buy a few clever little portable audio recorders. The classroom now boasts three Tascam DR-07 recorders that we can use to make podcasts, record interviews, spy on people, whatever. I spent some of this weekend practicing with one, making my daughter read poems into it and making disappointing home recordings of me singing Bill Callahan songs.

But here's one of June reading a poem that is something like 1300 years old, assuming I'm doing the math right.

POL Winners

2011-01-25T17:56:00.004-05:00

Congratulations to today's winners of the HHS Poetry Out Loud competition:

1st: Sahand
2nd: Priya
3rd: Greg

It was great fun to see, and I'm glad I wasn't the one making the decisions. It took the judges awhile simply to narrow things down to their top 5-6.

In the event that Sahand cannot represent HHS at state finals, we will look to Priya and then Greg to carry that honor. Again, thanks for coming out today, everyone.

2011-01-24T17:50:00.000-05:00

Portlandia

2011-01-24T12:57:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I kind of wish I had cable, but not enough to have cable.

2011-01-24T11:56:00.004-05:00

June, while watching the most recent PBS version of Sense & Sensibility: "This is a good movie. Does it ever end?"

the risks we take for our art

2011-01-23T12:36:00.002-05:00

Look at all this Tilapia! I had a bad feeling when I took this yesterday morning, in an empty Hispanic grocery while picking up some chorizo and limes--I just knew that someone would not be happy about me snapping away in there, but I thought I could get away with it, what with all my experience shooting "street."

It went all wrong, though. I rushed the shot, so it's not even that interesting, and I still got in "trouble" with the owner, who approached about five minutes later and asked me who gave me permission to take pictures in the store. "No one," I said. "I just liked the fish." Neither of us knew what to say after that heated exchange, so I bought my small sack of Mexican groceries from him and took my daughter back out into the nieve that was filling the Saturday morning streets.

Ariel on Fallon

2011-01-20T18:04:00.003-05:00

Song of the year from the album of the year. My eight-year old walks up and sings the opening "Na Na Na Naaah" when she wants me to sing it with her. This version doesn't kick it like the album track, but it's fun to watch his glammed-up group.

2011-01-19T06:34:00.002-05:00

Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, Melted clock, Cass Technical High School, from The Ruins of Detroit

2011-01-18T21:59:00.000-05:00

This is not my road, but it reminds me of some roads I've been on. Oh, roads.

2011-01-17T21:37:00.003-05:00

This is not me, but it reminds me of some trips to Canada. Oh, Canada.

This looks beautiful.

2011-01-17T20:15:00.000-05:00

I still haven't finished Triplets of Bellville, even though it is about biking and is funny, but this new one by the same director, Sylvain Chomet, The Illusionist, is even more attractive. Pixar and whatever other studios we have here that do animation don't care enough about being pretty. Though How to Train Your Dragon really has some nice chiaroscuro moodiness to its settings.

Marner v. Bede

2011-01-16T20:32:00.001-05:00

Have you ever gone into your local independent bookseller looking for a copy of George Eliot's Adam Bede but had to compromise by buying the only Eliot they had in stock: a flimsy, already-yellowing, $4.95 copy of Silas Marner? I know, right?

Silas Marner is kind of a wrench in my works for Eliot, I think. For one thing, it's short. For another, there are fewer than twenty characters to keep track of. You want Eliot to be long, you want it to dominate your waking thoughts, you want to have to make or scour the internet for maps that will help you remember who is who. Marner's book doesn't do any of this.

To make matters worse, every time you are seen reading it, someone is bound to quote the stern and motherly teacher in A Christmas Story ("When we last left Silas Marner . . ."). It's a great movie, and that scene will make me laugh more knowingly next time I see it, but still, Catherine could have noticed that I had stopped smiling after the fourth or fifth time (I exaggerate).

What bothers me the most about Marner's story is how moralizing it is. It has a happy ending uncomplicated by regret or loss. Not only is money unable to by happiness, but it turns out that crime cannot pay. sigh. Was Eliot cashing in here? Trying to write a slim, triumph of the spirit pamphlet to make a quick shilling? I have to wonder.

There are moments, though, that give me what I came for, usually isolated vignettes showing off Eliot's ear for language and eye for how our language comes between us as much as it helps. I love this scene, for example. It is set in the local drinking establishment, and describes the initiation of a reticent and grudging debate among the customers by the ale-house owner, who is anxious to break the silence and get something started.

At last Mr. Snell, the landlord, a man of a neutral disposition, accustomed to stand aloof from human differences as those of beings who were all alike in need of liquor, broke silence, by saying in a doubtful tone to his cousin the butcher--

"Some folks 'ud say that was a fine beast you druv in yesterday, Bob?"

The butcher, a jolly, smiling, red-haired man, was not disposedto answer rashly. He gave a few puffs before he spat and replied,"And they wouldn't be fur wrong, John."

After this feeble delusive thaw, the silence set in as severely as before.

This kind of exchange and dry narrator's commentary is the kind of thing that makes me laugh out loud and look around the room for people to read it to. The debate that follows is hilarious in its understatement. At least it is to me.

And so here I go into Adam Bede now. I don't know if it's a rut or a lack of imagination on my part, but I can't imaging reading anyone else right now. It's a long one, and sad, and will take me a long, long time to read, but that's exactly what I'm looking for.

2011-01-15T10:14:00.003-05:00

The image is fuzzy because I took this in low light, but I just got this new drawing of Marie and David's back from the frame shop. I'm so glad they let me have this one. Such a brave little fawn. Sometimes, if I'm wasting time daydreaming or watching some poorly-chosen Netflix, I'll think to myself, guiltily, "I bet Marie and David are at home making something cool right now."

Charlie at Northside Gallery did another great framing job for us. It is nice to know that I "have a framer." I would like to have a tailor some day, too, but I don't think I can say that that has happened until Mr. Gogos learns my name. Going by that rule, I have the following:

a framer
a mechanic
a librarian
an exterminator

Not the most impressive list, maybe. At least I don't have a lawyer.

2011-01-14T19:23:00.008-05:00

I'm so sad that Trish Keenan, the voice behind Broadcast, has died. I listened to this band so much this year . . . her voice feels kind of passive and removed but somehow is still bright and comforting.

If, in the Truffaut version of Fahrenheit 451, Montag's wife were watching a version of MTV on the wall screens, it might sound something like this.

2011-01-11T19:06:00.001-05:00

Going out to shovel my neighbors' driveways.

Easy way to pick up some quick cash.

2011-01-11T18:00:00.000-05:00

2011-01-10T23:06:00.003-05:00

On the way to Dance Collective for the beginning of the new semester.

At the library, after discovering we were a week early for dance class.

In the stacks.

Today a student asked, jokingly, how I can "live" without a cell phone. I think if I had a cell phone this Saturday, I would have called home and said "there is no dance class," like I needed guidance or something, and Catherine would have helped me out. She would have said "well, you could get some bread flour on your way home," and we would have gone home. Instead, we were on our own. We didn't know we needed bread flour. We went to the library.

2011-01-10T22:57:00.001-05:00

The possibility of snow.

Good-bye, Christmas tree

2011-01-10T22:03:00.001-05:00

You were pretty good, for a tree. I remember when we went to the farm to pick you out and you were standing there in that field playing it cool like you didn't really want us to cut you down. But it was so cold I could tell you really did want us to bring you inside our house, where it is just a tiny bit less cold, but just as drafty.

And now I miss looking out that window you always are looking out, so goodbye to you. Don't shed too many needles on your way out the door.

Rly, tho, great tree this year. I would have kept her going until April except that our old-timey bulbs get like super-hot and I'm pretty sure she almost caught on fire once or twice. I am not going down in a Christmas tree fire, I know that much.

2011-01-07T17:37:00.003-05:00

Here's a picture of the moment I decided to start following The Sartorialist again. Somehow, I had drifted away from it. Maybe I lost the link, or maybe I consciously stopped following it this summer when I decided to spend less time online and more time onlife. But then today, one of my other favorite sites, The Online Photographer, run by my good friend Mike Johnston, had a video of the guy behind T.S., and it reminded me of how fun that site is to browse. The guy walking toward the camera in the image here is the photographer behind it all, and he has made a cool job for himself, walking around, taking pictures of the beautiful people.

It's odd that I follow that site at all, I guess, because I don't think of myself as highly fashion conscious, but at the same time I do tend to read about stuff that I don't actually "do," like video games and chess and surfing. Oh, I wish I could surf, though--surfers seem like they've got life all figured out.

2011-01-07T07:19:00.000-05:00

2011-01-06T22:49:00.003-05:00

I'm so glad that I live only a few hundred yards down the street from Caliente. When I've had a bad day getting lost in a shopping mall parking lot, I can go there and eat more Cuban sandwiches than any non-Cuban needs for a little over $7 with drink. And the lady who owns it, she's so friendly and has this perfect rolling accent I can barely understand . . she's like a mother figure who helps make the day seem right again.

2011-01-06T22:19:00.002-05:00

I got so lost in Coventry today. It just makes no sense back there. I need someone to draw me a map so that, if I go to the Aboite library, I can find my way back to something that looks like an actual road.

2011-01-05T20:19:00.001-05:00

Who knew? I had no idea. I bet Maffey knew. Makes me want to go dig around some of our statues downtown this weekend.

2011-01-04T20:37:00.003-05:00

Birk just asked me to draw this bunny that he saw in a new book I got, and I did, and it ended up kind of cute.

2011-01-04T19:15:00.002-05:00

I don't know why I watch IU Basketball these days.

I'm just that kind of fan.

2011-01-03T19:18:00.001-05:00

Burt Lake during winter break.

Quote

2011-01-03T12:11:00.005-05:00

A great line from Dorothea Lange: "A camera is an instrument to help people see without a camera."

And then I thought hey, you could insert the word "poem" for the word "camera" and it works just as well.

The Lange quote is from this Dyer book. Great photo book by a non-shooter.

2011-01-03T12:00:00.000-05:00

Songs of 2010

2011-01-03T10:24:00.003-05:00

Tame Impala, "Lucidity." This album is kind of poppy for me, but I played it a ton this year, especially when I was driving around in our bug convertible. It was just a summer lease, and that made it sweeter. The kids seemed to understand that it wouldn't be long before the family would be back to normal, trucking around in old Subarus, so they made the most of their time in their car seats, rarely fighting, hands shielding their eyes, listening to this album or Animal Collective's Fall Be Kind on our way to Wing Haven Nature Preserve or, more likely, Target.

Resolved

2011-01-02T20:51:00.004-05:00

I can't remember what I resolved to do last year, but I'm pretty sure I did it. Building on that success, then, I'm moving forward with something bigger and more life changing: a multiple year resolution. Even though my friend Mike, who builds things for a living, says that this project could be hammered out in a weekend, I think it's worth at least three years worth of planning and saving and mistakes and deferring.

Basically, the plan is to build a house like the one you see in the picture up there. This one is Michael Pollan's, and he wrote a book about the process of building it, an 8' x 13' place behind his house that he uses for writing and daydreaming, as he puts it. I had the idea before I knew that he did, but after I knew that Mark Twain and Roald Dahl did. So it's kind of original to me, a little.

My story started with the idea of a small wood stove. I wanted a place where I could go just to light a small fire. I wanted to tend it, to walk into the room and say "stove's running hot today" or "stove's not drawing too well today." After thinking about the little house that would hold this little fire, I realized that I have almost an acre of land here in the city that for years has been used mainly to hold the branches that fall from my trees after wind storms. And then the word "reading shed" came to me.

So that's where I am now. Mike told me about Pollan's place, and it's front runner for inspiration right now. I don't know what the plan is, though. I guess my resolution is just to talk about it all year long, basically. And then who knows what 2012 will hold in store.

2011-01-01T11:02:00.002-05:00

First poem I read in 2011:

Seeing the Year Out

Want to know what the passing year is like?
A snake slithering down a hole.
Half his scales already hidden,
How to stop him from getting away?
Grab his tail and pull, you say?
Pull all you like--it does no good.
The children try hard not to doze,
Chatter back and forth to stay awake,
But I say let dawn cocks keep still!
I fear the noise of watch drums pounding.
We've sat so long the lamp's burned out.
I get up and look at the slanting Dipper.
How could I hope next year won't come?
My mind shrinks from the failures it may bring.
I work to hold on to the night
While I can still brag I'm young.

Su Tung-Po

2010-10-31T10:00:00.007-04:00

This is the earliest I have ever started wanting it to snow. A few friends in far-off, more easily romanticized parts of the country have already had theirs, and even though a fair number of our trees are still what you would call "pretty" with color, I think we need to get on with it. It feels like we are behind here, which we usually are.

And I keep saying the last lines of this Michael Burkard poem to myself and to Catherine:

A star reports
to another star.

Reading lines like this that are pretty but removed feels a little like looking through a window at snow.

Lake Winona trails

2010-09-26T08:17:00.003-04:00

Fall riding season is here. Fast, dry trails, no bugs, color in the trees, you're not sweating like crazy. Is there anywhere where this is the only season? Maybe Marin County, I bet. They get all the good stuff.

Ode to the Maggot

2010-09-23T19:19:00.003-04:00

Instead of grading papers tonight, I made this.

Windows movie maker is a real pain to use. I wonder what else is out there.

2010-09-22T22:29:00.004-04:00

Peter Maysles's home just went up in one of the coolest Selby's I've seen in a long time. I think I like to live in a neater space than this, but that's partly because the things I tend to accumulate around me are not as interesting as the things these two gather around them.

I know Maysles directed Grey Gardens, which also happens to be the name of my back yard, but I'm not sure what else I should know him for. Now I know him for his house.

The M.I.A. lives.

2010-09-11T10:38:00.004-04:00

I feel so lucky to know some of the people I know.

2010-09-06T08:49:00.002-04:00

Going to set up dinner in the woods with some friends today. It won't look quite this cool and scruffy, but I can pretend.

from one of my favorite new tumblrs, hippy kitchens.

recently

2010-09-05T10:44:00.008-04:00

A new occasional feature here, based on an idea borrowed from Nick Hornby's column in The Believer, a magazine I want to like and occasionally try to. Documenting the last two weeks:

Purchased:
A larger than normal haul in the last two weeks, what with the Little Professor's closing sale coinciding with a delivery from Amazon.

Charles Simic, Sixty Poems
Zadie Smith, Changing my Mind
Modern French Poets, Fowlie, ed.
Tony Hoagland, Donkey Gospel
Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness
Hayden Carruth, Reluctantly
Paul Eluard, Love, Poetry

Read:
Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness. Oh, I'd been waiting for this book to be released for so long. Part of the Graywolf Press "The Art of" series of tiny books. I think that tiny books are going to save print literature because they are so pleasant to have in a pocket or hold open in your hands which now feel like giant hands. Young's book is just one long manifesto, complete with outbursts of capitalized words and a somewhat tangled, digressive argument that convinces through its fervor, wide-ranging poetic illustrations, but, somehow, its even-handed clarity, too. Like his poetry, it makes you brace yourself a little before diving in--it's like I want to be "up" for the intellect I'm about to try to follow, and following requires re-reading for me. Without any section breaks or chapters, it feels a little to me like the way David Lynch releases his films on DVD as a single "track" to discourage experiencing it in fragments. I'm only halfway through and can't really comment on the book itself yet, but my reaction is a little mixed so far.

Zadie Smith, Changing my Mind. Essays. Read a interesting short one about her take on Middlemarch. Learned that it frequently named England's "favorite novel" when polls about such things are conducted. Must be one really literate country, that one. If I were to conduct a personal poll, I think it would be in my top five.

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas. This book is so easy to put down, but when I spend a little time with each new section of a story in it, I inevitably become engrossed and finish it. So creative, this one, and disorienting just because of how different the interlocking narratives are, but they're also all familiar genres, and that helps you re-settle yourself every time it changes from one to another. The title of this book may be my favorite thing about it, but the stories are good fun, too. Not sure how the Wachowski brothers (The Matrix) are going to be able to recreate it.

Brian Jacques, Mossflower. Reading this to the kids right now. A fair bit of killing, but lots of cuteness, too, and some big words, and plenty of opportunities to read funny British accents.

Tony Hoagland, Donkey Gospel. He's so fun. Like eating popcorn.

Melville, Moby Dick. Haven't read this since college, when it went on to haunt my twenties. Only a little bit in, but I'm hoping to read large sections of this one out loud this time through.

Interesting reader-made "map" of the stories in Cloud Atlas.

2010-09-03T16:21:00.001-04:00

Fireflies!

playa roosta

2010-07-19T17:34:00.001-04:00

UPDATE: I erased this ten days ago, and I miss it.

questions answered

2010-07-14T09:57:00.002-04:00

I had access to a bracelet making machine the other day so I made one designed to help me navigate this perilous world. Now, whenever I am in a tricky situation of some sort (which happens several times a day), all I have to do is consult my "What would Hunter S. Thompson do?" bracelet, and the path is clear, kinda.

In other news, I am half way through my abbreviated summer vacation, and it has been great. It's short this year, but I ended school already looking forward to fall, so I'm not feeling any dread. It helps that I'm teaching great classes this year: AP Lit, Etymology, and for the first time in two years, Comp. I love that class.

Today, I think Hunter S. Thompson would water the flower boxes, build a bike-repair stand in his garage, drive his kids to the dentist, and try reading some more of David Mitchell's surprisingly funny Cloud Atlas, a book he would have read about in the three million recent reviews of Mitchell's new novel.

2010-07-07T11:13:00.002-04:00

Back from the lake, and it is supposed to be hot, so I am engaged in the seasonal puzzle of how to keep a house that has no air-conditioning cool enough that we do not begin hallucinating too badly. I have a system, and it works pretty well. But nature is always trying to crack my system, and I must stay on my toes.

38th Indiana Fiddler's Gathering

2010-06-26T20:20:00.008-04:00

The glow things were reasonably priced.

People were jamming until 4 a.m. by our tent but the kids slept through it like the champion sleepers they are. And then I had this great breakfast burrito. There were lots of trees around us.

We were on the Tippecanoe battlefield, which I think had something to do with Indians. I'm about to remind myself on Wikipedia.

My friend Dean, picking until 5, back at it at 9.

Kids were mainly into running with other kids, but sometimes they sat down.

And then we were tired. A graduate of Indiana University, it is my sworn duty to disparage West Lafayette and everything related to it, especially for its supposed ugliness. But I have to say, the drive there was so nice. There are gentle hills that have rivers fitted between them with names like "The Tippecanoe," and the rivers move with a purpose that almost suggests a consciousness on their part that they are rivers and that there is a power in that. The rivers where I live don't behave that way. They need to be reminded which way is downstream sometimes, like they would rather seep outward, creep up their soaked banks, or just wait until August to dry out completely.

new panda bear

2010-06-26T17:30:00.002-04:00

First day of summer

2010-06-15T20:47:00.003-04:00

One of Jim Harrison's handsomer poses (on the right).

So, it's the first day of my "short" 8-week summer and it felt right to start it with a Jim Harrison novel, True North. I like it for its trappings. Lots of its sentences contain the words "Lake Superior" and also many names of upper peninsula towns that I know from driving around those parts. The dim-but-sensitive narrator is always naming the fishing streams he's driving to, too, and I don't really fish until I read a book that has fishing in it so maybe this summer I will. All of the ideas this book tries to carry along with it tend to just fall out of its pockets, but I'm really enjoying the whole "I did this, and then I drove here" looseness of it all.

The book has relaxed me pretty well, actually, because it is stressful, starting a long summer vacation. You, or I, feel like it has to be planned out and ordered to find the perfect balance between things that should be done and the things that you want to do. But after sitting around reading most of the day I'm okay with the possibility that, come mid-August and school, I'll be fine if my summer is just a bunch of loose threads, pointless drives, half-hearted projects.

a lot of pictures

2010-06-06T14:34:00.002-04:00

The chicks are gone now, off to chicken school. I was a little sad to see them go but they were not sentimental at all about it. I don' t think they even recognize me.

The Catalpa is the most useless and annoying tree ever made, but June made these shoes out of its leaves so now I have mixed feelings about it.

Finally, I think the Globe Thistle is going to bloom this year.

The Garden Typewriter is rusting.

I can't believe how far ahead everything is this summer, like four weeks it feels like. The plants are going to get bored by the end of July, wondering what to do next.

2010-06-02T22:17:00.004-04:00

Often when you are wasting your life on the internet, you come across things other people do that you wish you could do. A prior generation would be inspired to try to do these things. Now, though, we just put links to them on our blogs or tumblrs. I don't know what it is about this woman's style that I like. The colors, mainly, I guess. But the sketchbooks on her site are the kinds of things that make me want to draw for an hour and then quit, disappointed. Her site.

2010-05-31T20:09:00.003-04:00

One of the daily battles for chicken supremacy in our bathtub this Monday evening.

2010-05-30T14:15:00.004-04:00

Okay, then. Just finished Middlemarch, sitting here on the porch at the lake with the breeze and the sound of the waves. So lucky.

So I probably like Mill on the Floss a little better than this one, but it's close. There are some chapters in Middlemarch that affect me in ways I just don't know how to write about. The scene where Ladislaw walks to Dorothea's church and sits through the service simply hoping to make eye contact with her and fails even to get that, the resigned reconciliation of Lydgate and Rosamond, and all of the scenes depicting various species of provincial ignorance. It's all too much.

We were listening to the Wind in the Willows audiobook on the drive up here and I was taken at how much it reads like a George Eliot kids' book. Grumpy animals pottering about, grand authorial asides, and a diction that, though meant for children, sees no reason not to use words like "paroxysm" with regularity. These days, the kids section at any local Borders makes it look as though children's literature is full of options, but it's all so bad. I read what June brings home from book fairs and it seems like something designed so that the kids might one day aspire, if they keep reading all their Magic Treehouse books, maybe, to manage Harry Potter. I think I've decided to only read stuff with the kids that is over their heads and fun and serious. If you are not disoriented, your reading list is not challenging enough. That will be my motto.

But now I might leave the 19th century for my next books, but gently. Re-reading Wallace Stegner, for example. Angle of Repose or Crossing to Safety.

You finished your book, now throw me a stick.

If I had a building

2010-05-27T21:05:00.005-04:00

Here's a distant shot of the historic freight depot that many think is about to be torn down this weekend. "Historic" is a relative term, I guess. I mean, I don't know if any famous freight ever passed through here or if Kerouac ever rode by it with Neal Cassady in a boxcar, but the fact is that, compared to a lot of what we have left in this town, this is our history. It's near a downtown that keeps threatening to become a destination, is right across from two of our most beautiful urban parks, and is about 100 yards from our ever-expanding greenway and a skate park that is so cool I can't stand the fact that I never got into skating and only donned the haircuts for a few years.

It may go down, though, because the current owner doesn't, publicly, at least, appear interested in entering a dialogue about possible uses. But if it goes down, I hope it's not without some noise. If this is the kind of thing you care about, join the Facebook group or go to the web site and sign the petition. It's a pretty non-confrontational, responsible group of people running the group--friends of mine, radicals only in the sense that they see value conservation.

I see an old building like this and can only think of the businesses I would run there. I mean, look at its length. What would you do there? It looks to me like nice place for a family restaurant and brewery. Maybe some cool apartments or studios running along the back there. Great land for some kind of community gardening (um, unless it's a brownfield). Maybe an indoor skate park so that in the winter the skaters I teach don't have to be so glum all the time.

Anyway, do consider contributing to the noise that just might make a difference here. It would be a real waste of potential to turn this old place into one more corner of rubble. We have enough of those.

2010-05-27T08:03:00.004-04:00

Cool apartment. I like all their stuff, the way they just have it there, in their place, and the casual way they sit there in the middle of it, with the sincerest form of feigned indifference. I wish I could feign my indifference like this.

Unhappy Hipsters would have something snarky to say about this picture, but (a) their credibility is damaged by the odd definition of "hipster" that they seem to be applying, and (b) they probably live in a dump. And (c) snark is the lowest form of internet speech.

2010-05-24T22:32:00.001-04:00

assignment

2010-05-17T08:19:00.005-04:00

Earlier this school year, one of my students, Nabia, schooled her class, myself included, in the possibilities of an often overlooked program called Windows Movie-maker. It's another one of those programs that makes me think "I'm sure there's a much better form of this for Macs," but she showed us that it's still cool enough to play around with and make some great movies.

Anyway, I copied Nabia's idea and assigned it as an option for one of my classes, a class that is based on independent reading, to make trailers for one of the books they read that semester. This video here is a sample I made for a fun read called The Dart League King.

It represents about three hours of time, and could use another hour. The inter-titles could be written more succinctly and the timing is off, but still, I like it, and I'm excited to see what students come up with for their books if they choose this option.

In the back of my mind, I'm a little bothered by one problem or blind spot this trailer approach has--it's emphasis on selling the plot of a book rather than its style and voice. There is nothing "wrong" with reading primarily for plot, but as a teacher, I feel like it's partly my responsibility to interest people in caring less about "what happens" and more about enjoying the "how it's told" part. This is complicated, though, because it's a mystery to me, most of the time. I don't know where to start when explaining why I love The Savage Detectives, a long book where nothing happens, or the Laura Ingalls-Wilder book The Long Winter other than to say that when I read them out loud, it feels good. Maybe some kind of read-aloud contest between literary and popular fiction might allow a class to make some observations and a dialogue.

Speaking of The Long Winter, which we are shoveling through a chapter or two a night . . . Birk heard a weather report with a lot of rain in it this morning and said "Dad, it's The Long Thunderstorm, get it?" One of his rare non-Scooby Doo or Andy Griffith Show allusions.

2010-05-03T08:49:00.006-04:00

Damon, Naomi, and Dean

Drove to school and then drove right back this morning because I could tell that I was about to have a re-match with the stomach flu I thought I beat this weekend. So I have just a little bit of time before I'm incapacitated and have to get a few things done, some grading, some ideas about how to set up my AP students before the big test on Thursday (could be one of my best classes, I'm starting to think), but Pitchfork has this big article about Galaxie 500, like really long for the internet, and what am I supposed to do, not read it?

Their records feel like not soundtracks but actual emotional documents of my life back when they came out. And the more time passes, the greater they sound to me, and I don't think it's just nostalgia that is doing that. I wonder if I am running out of the ability to have new bands or whatever affect me like Galaxie 500 did and still does, because it doesn't happen very often anymore. It's like my heart is spoken for.

2010-04-25T21:49:00.001-04:00

Banksy.

2010-04-22T22:12:00.004-04:00

Just spent a long two weeks or so re-reading Dubliners, of all things. How does that take me two weeks? The book is so tiny it fits in your back pocket with room to spare for a copy of Lunch Poems, but still, I just couldn't finish the thing off.

It all started when I picked it up and read "The Dead" and I suddenly remembered how great that story is. I think I like any story that includes people shaking rain off of umbrellas as they climb creaking wooden stairs, but this reading really got me for reasons beyond overheated and smokey coziness of the rooms it takes place in. That end, I think it's pretty beautiful and sad and I don't think anyone should disagree with me on that.

But so I took my experience with "The Dead" as reason enough to re-read the whole collection, and . . . man, it just didn't happen for me. The stories almost feel dated now, much more so than people who modeled themselves on this book, like, say, Hemingway's short stories, which only get better with time and I'm not just saying that because I'm a dude, because I am anything but a dude's dude. I'm saying it because Hemingway, young Hemingway, short story and parts of Farewell to Arms Hemingway, is about as good as we get. So I was surprised at this time through Dubliners. It wasn't anything like what happens when I re-read "The Three Day Blow" or "The End of Something" or this one where about him and Hadley skiing somewhere in Europe.

And I doodled that picture of Joyce at school one day last week while I was trying to lesson plan.

2010-04-14T10:06:00.007-04:00

Really charming article in the New York Times yesterday about a father and daughter who read out loud together, every night, from some young age until she went away to college. Every night! She would be out with friends on a weekend and she'd be like "oh, we have to stop by my house before midnight so I can read with my dad." Totally worth a look if you have a son, daughter, or parent.

I will admit that this story made me cry. Or no, tear up a little. This happens more frequently ever since I became a parent. Before, I only used to tear up when dogs died--both fictional and non--and during that scene in The Sound of Music when the dad comes in singing "Edelweiss" and all the kids are like "dang, dad's singing."

2010-04-05T18:05:00.010-04:00

Tony Hoagland is pretty funny and that is enough for me to like a lot of his poems but he is also smart and has a great ability to write about poetry in a way that makes me think "yes, I agree." I had that reaction when I read this thing he wrote about Dean Young I wish I could find on the internet and I'm having it all the time now when I dip into his essay collection Real Sofistikashun that I would not have found had Joseph not pointed out to me that there were books below my eye level when we were at Hyde Bros. the other day.

There are a few varieties of the "yes, I agree" response that you can have when you read. One of the good ones is where someone has said something that you have consciously thought in the past but had thought you were the only one. And reading this person makes you feel understood and less lonely for a few minutes, even if you didn't know that you were lonely.

Another good kind is where someone says something that you didn't even know you had felt it until you read him saying it. His or her words cause a secret panel to melt inside of you and it reveals some unrecognized feeling that had been there all along. This happens a lot, if you read a lot, and it is one of the best things that can happen to you. A long time ago this happened to me a bunch when I read Richard Ford's Independence Day. Something about Frank Bascombe and how he was always "seeing around" his feelings. Relating to him should depress me but it doesn't.

An example of the former variety happened as I read one of Hoagland's essays a few days ago. He's describing surrealist poetry:

In the Surrealist aesthetic, imagery has virtue to the extent that it exhibits freedom, and art is "reliable" to the extent that it trusts in the revelation of process. The poem is an action, not an object, and its architecture is a series of moment to moment jolts and explosions.

I have thought, like, exactly that same thing for a long time. It works for things other than just surrealist poetry, too, I guess. That idea of the poem being an action, an enactment, is what gets me, and let's me read differently. The surrealist poem is less an object with a rhetorical purpose than a document of a life lived in a certain way. You could argue much contemporary poetry is that way, but I might argue that this modern tendency owes itself to Breton and the surrealists.

Anyway, writing about this makes me think about one of my favorite poems from the last Beloit Poetry Journal. I hope it's one Dawn voted for. I am going to steal it, I guess. If it's not okay, she will let me know.

Old Men

Your carnation-white flesh
Lives off scrawny birds
And thereby catches fire

You old men, sing slower
In the shifting wind
And let the sun crumble
Between your fingers

The blue-feathered sleep
Has the teeth of death
And the voice of lime

This is already a long post, so I will let "Old men" speak, or not, for itself. But it's beautiful whether or not.

2010-04-04T21:47:00.002-04:00

Coming back to Eliot after reading the new John McPhee book for a couple of days has me lost again. Thank you, Internet, for this great map. I can't make any sense out of it, either, but it's reassuring somehow.

2010-04-03T10:08:00.009-04:00

In the interest of taking credit for every single one of my kids' accomplishments, I can't help but note the influence of Tu Fu, whom we have been reading in Kenneth Rexroth's 100 Poems from the Chinese, on her recent writing. Here is Tu Fu:

Rain

Roads not yet glistening, rain slight,
Broken clouds darken after thinning away.
Where they drift, purple cliffs blacken.
And beyond -- white birds blaze in flight.

Sounds of cold-river rain grown familiar,
Autumn sun casts moist shadows. Below
Our brushwood gate, out to dry at the village
Mill: hulled rice, half-wet and fragrant

And here is one of June's, from the "poem book" she has been typing into the computer lately. It's nice:

The breeze and the wind brushed through my
hear as I fly a red kite.
The fall air is cold but I’m worm
in side.

I think June's compares well, considering that Tu Fu had a 1000+ year head start.

good luck with this one . . .

2010-03-31T09:39:00.010-04:00

Watanabe, Naoko, and Midori

Just read that a movie version of Murakami's Norwegian Wood is being made, to be released in Japan this December. This makes as little sense to me as making The Road, or maybe as little as turning any novel into a movie. Sarah Dessen or Judy (Julie?) Picoult books do make sense, I think, as movies--so much sense that they could probably skip the book stage and go straight to the theater (not hatin', just sayin').

But Murakami? I know people are kind of divided on his value as a writer, but I've always really liked his detached style and the way it makes the mild absurdities of his stories seem almost normal. It's nothing like the way Marquez will do it, spinning these baroque-ly unreal settings and pretending that they are a part of the normal universe while still kind of winking at the reader "isn't this all just so gorgeous?!" I like Marquez; he can just overwhelm me sometimes.

Murakami is different, though. With him, you'll read about a man standing in a well for hours on end or a logo for a whiskey that eats stray cats and you have to decide for yourself just how weird it is. It will not feel that weird at the time, but it will later.

So, the main point here is that I don't see how any movie can achieve this effect without using a lot of voice-over straight from the novel. You can tell from the still picture above that the director probably told the Watanabe actor to use the "thousand-yard-stare" to express the floating wonder he carries around. That might get old. Maybe the best thing about the movie version is that it will get me to re-read a book I liked ten years ago and still remember fondly.

2010-03-28T12:40:00.007-04:00

It's raining so it's perfect for Middlemarch, which lately is starting to feel like a joyless Northanger Abbey. The first few sentences in of this book are always confusing for me as I have to pose questions to myself like "who is Mrs. Bulstrode's niece?" and "have I met any of these relations of Mr. Farebrother's before?" After a re-read sentence or two, I either answer a few of them them or push on with my slightly tempered bafflement intact.

I'm reading this one slowly, but one part I keep remembering from the Ashbery article I read a few days ago is how he read poetry quickly and prose slowly, with more consideration, and I think I do that too, so that is one way I am like a famous poet.

Today, there was some action, though, as Dr. Lydgate's cruel and thoughtless courtship of Rosamond suddenly exceeds his control, and, in a moment of surprise intimacy, he ends up engaged. A lovely line in there describes how "flirtation was shaken into love" or something like that. This book might seem, to the outward eye, as slow-moving at times but what I love is the way Eliot documents the private movements--the dramatic shifts of public regard in general and also the individual expectations and disappointments--all these things happening out of sight but revealed with Eliot's careful voice.

That word, "expectation," too--that's one of my favorite expressions right now. Men here have to be careful not to hold eye contact too long with a woman or risk there arising "an expectation" between them that they will have to answer for. Every step here is so fraught with social dangers.

so it turns out that I am probably not going blind

2010-03-26T18:34:00.009-04:00

but it felt like a close call there for a couple of weeks. Being told you have a rare disease of the retina, an actual thing that starts with somebody's name and ends with the word "disease," and then being told to come back in two weeks to make sure that it isn't something even worse, well, it is not the doctor routine I have grown accustomed to. Try forgetting about it for those two weeks . . it doesn't work.

And of course something about your anxieties calls out to the universe, which in turn declares it "Universal Blindness Week." Everywhere I looked it came up. I read to the kids and Mary goes blind in By the Shores of Silver Lake. I pull out Dubliners from a shelf and Joyce stares back with his eye patch. George Eliot describes something really bad as "spreading ominously like a disease of the retina." I read that one and yelled out "Are you kidding me!!?" It wasn't. Eliot may delight, but she does not kid. I did walk right into the Joyce one, though, only myself to blame, but still, where were the books about happy things? Maybe I don't own any.

Ultimately, the news was pretty good yesterday and so I can scale back my emergency plans to create a memorized Noah's ark of poetry. Or maybe I should do that anyway.

2010-03-19T21:06:00.006-04:00

Birk showing us "how Chinese people sit" at Mahnin tonight during our pre school carnival meal. It was a great meal, but not quite long enough because by the time we were done eating, the carnival was still going on.

So we spent an hour at school, squeezing around excitable children, casting nervous glances at the school fireman, who did not seem concerned enough about the way the cotton candy machine filled the halls with sticky smoke.

Even though this is an elementary school, I always, always learn a lot just by reading the homework on the walls. I will never smoke again, for example.These things are rarely cute enough to not be entirely draining, but they come so close. Most of the games are crafted by parents from Tupperware in basements and are all versions of scams I never pay to play when professional carnies roll them in for the annual Marshmallow festival, but this money goes to something important. I'm not sure what, exactly, but it's something for the schools.

My kids lost most of the games they played but everyone walks away with candy, which is good because the Valentine's day candy just ran out.

i could live here

2010-03-16T17:33:00.002-04:00

my house looks a lot like this sometimes, actually. A little less Wes Anderson, though.

2010-03-14T11:11:00.007-04:00

Joseph came over on the train this weekend and it rained. He came to the house on Saturday and told me that the raspberry bushes I had just bought would be devoured by squirrels. Then we went out to lunch. This place used to be a used car lot, then it was vacant, then it was a taco shop, and now it sells Burmese food for cheap. These windows are great for looking at rain while you eat.

At first, Joseph and I talked about funny things and then my friend John came in and we talked and then he met and interviewed a pleasant Burmese gentleman who was on crutches and I didn't ask but I think he was some kind of victim of the political violence over there. After that, Joseph and I talked about serious things, like school reform and I think escrow accounts.

Then we went to Hyde Bros. I saw my friends Sue and Jeff there who of course were buying all the cool books that I never would have found even if they had given me a full day's head start. At first, Joseph thought it looked like there were "fewer books" there, like the book store equivalent of going back to your old school and not being able to get over how tiny the lockers look.

But we ended strong. It helps to look at the bottom shelves that you usually skip. I won a few good things:

Yusef Komunyakaa, Dien Cai Dau, in which a prior owner has written "Crazy Shit" on the title page. If that alone weren't worth the $3.95, it also has "Camouflaging the Chimera" and "Tu Do Street" in it. It has "Facing it," too, but I haven't liked that one ever since I watched a national Poetry Out Loud finalist recite it a couple of years ago.

Charles Wright, Selected Later Poems. It has poems with titles that reference Li Po and and southern place names like Chickamauga.

Donald Justice, Collected Poems.

Tony Hoagland, Real Sofistikashun, a book of essays and the first one is good.

So anyway, a good day. And today I will read some of these and go to a five year old's birthday party and also go outside to continue construction of the world's lamest-looking cold frame because that's what back yards are for. If my neighbors don't like it, it will be my mild revenge for them hiring someone to cut down one of my trees without asking me.

2010-03-13T00:01:00.003-05:00

I'm still reading nothing in particular, but that's okay. I enjoyed as much George Eliot as I could today at the doctor's office until the eye dilation drops kicked in, but tonight I jumped from reading about building a cold frame in my back yard to some of a Keats biography to grading essays about All the Pretty Horses to remembering this John Ashbery profile from a New Yorker that came out like five years ago and of which I had dim memories of enjoying. So I find it on their web site and print it and sit down to read it at midnight and I'll be gosh-darned if it doesn't start out like this:

He read the newspaper. He dipped into a couple of books: a Proust biography that he bought five years ago but just started reading because it suddenly occurred to him to do so, a novel by John Rhys that he recently came across in a secondhand bookstore--he's not a systematic reader.

How funny is that? This article was calling out to me across the years--well, five of them--because it knew something about my state of mind right now. So, this is what I'll be reading for the next half hour or until I fall asleep, I guess.

3.9.10

2010-03-09T22:24:00.006-05:00

Seems like this place is turning into a kind of reading log or something. Hope that's okay.

Somehow I left Middlemarch at school today so I had kind of a listless paging through of various books I couldn't quite commit to tonight. Middlemarch has such a different feel compared to Mill, and I miss the smaller canvas, I think. Eliot as narrator is much more/ too willing to stand on stage here and dictate. I looked forward to those moments in Mill because the interruptions feel like polite asides, but there are pages of dictum in Middlemarch with nary a paragraph indentation to rest the eyes. Still, Rosamond is amusing and I look forward to the Fred/ Mary courtship, too.

Because Talking Heads are in my top 1 bands of all time, I like bikes, and it is such a pretty book, I spent twenty minutes with David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries tonight, too. If it ever comes true where you get to invite any 10 people you want to a dinner party, he would be one for sure. The problem with this book for me is that his prose matches the kind of flat effect of his real-life voice, too. Or is that "affect"? I think it is. Anyway, it was a pretty book to hold for twenty minutes, reading about the different cities he's ridden around in. My favorite brief chapter is his account of riding from inner Detroit to the suburbs, which sounds insane for a number of reasons but which now strikes me as an essential ride that I must undertake. I've always loved Woodward Ave. in Detroit for the same reasons he suggests, basically that this route is a kind of core sample of the city, or a museum or a time-line. It's so sad, but it's hard to look away. I will probably come back to this book.

first pedals

2010-03-06T16:56:00.003-05:00

45 degrees today and sunny and so I made it out for my first bike ride of the year. The legs were more tired than they had any right to be. Thanks to my father in law for the hand-me-down flip camera.

Bright Star was not all that bad.

2010-03-06T09:39:00.005-05:00

Bright Star was not all that bad. I planned for it to be, but it was not. I mean, most movies are bad the way most poems are bad and also the way that most parts of even the movies and poems that I like can be bad, too but still be good enough. Campion's version of this relationship and its setting is a little too self-consciously beautiful sometimes, like in the picture here, but then the dresses and hats that Fanny wears are so ridiculously gorgeous that it is okay. I mean, those dresses. I've watched a fair number of period dramas but don't remember ever being this drawn to a movie's wardrobe.

The guy who plays Charles Brown is over the top, and the Keats actor guy does a lot of acting with his eyeballs, but he is also quiet and I like the way they show him spending so much time just lying around waiting for inspiration, worrying about finding a subject. Those scenes seem more true than the readings of the actual poems, which, even though they are shot in fragments to feel casual, still feel like set-pieces rolled out to fanfares.

So on my personal movie scale of Avatar on the low end up to "not bad" at the high end, Bright Star earns an "I really like the dresses and the lying around parts."

special purpose

2010-03-05T17:53:00.006-05:00

Watching this video, it's like, finally I know what I'm supposed to do with my life next. I'm guess I'm kidding, but really, what these guys do is a kind of found poetry with with beats. They hang out, dig around in thrift stores for oddball vinyl, and then sample it into some new patchwork. My favorite part is like twenty minutes in where their compositions start coming together for them and you can feel it happening. I know no one sits around for 29 minute videos anymore, but it's really cool. I'm just saying.

EDIT: The video this links to is no longer the one I had originally, which is too bad. It was cool.

2010-03-02T19:36:00.005-05:00

When Dawn is done with her book about re-reading books I hope she writes one about that time that happens between when you finish the reading of one and commit to the next. Something needs to be said about that. When you're in the middle of some weighty project like The Mill on the Floss, even if you're loving it, every other spine on your shelf catches your eye and sparkles with the glow of what might have been, but as soon as you're done with the Eliot, all of those other books disappear on you, or their shine does. There's this listlessness.

I almost fell back into re-reading The Savage Detectives, just hit the first few pages and I almost got sucked in, but somehow this George Eliot momentum sent me to the used bookstore to get a nice $7 copy of Middlemarch and now I'm fifty pages in and mainly concerned how much Dorothea pales in comparison to Maggie. It's not fair to Dodo, and I'll get over it, but Middlemarch will have to make its own way out of The Mill on the Floss's shadow, if it can.

The marriage proposal letter that Dorothea receives from Casaubon cracks me up, though:

"Such, my dear Miss Brooke, is the accurate statement of my feelings for you; and I rely on your kind indulgence in venturing now to ask you how far your own are of a nature to confirm my happy presentiment."

No, Dorothea's not making a mistake at all here. They'll be great together.

2010-02-15T21:47:00.002-05:00

Squid himself picking up his gold keys (I almost wrote "god keys"!), one of which he won for the portrait of me in his glasses, above. He made the thing with a set of toy watercolors! Kid is going places.

2010-02-10T09:54:00.004-05:00

I think the rule has to be that you always hope for the snow day. Even if you know you will pay for it, that it is going to eat a day of your summer on the back end. When the summer gets here, that day would have been anticipated, planned for, already lived. The snow day, though, is the closest thing we can get to literally making time. It is just a plain, unexpected, unburdened day that you can fill or not and nobody will care. Snow days are like the stem cells of days. So that's my new philosophy, anyway. Never wish away snow.

So for Tuesday's day I spent some time in the morning watching the poor people driving to work and then settled down near a window and read The Mill on the Floss in the snow-reflected light for a long, long time. For a mid-morning break, I briefly read my way through some of the talky disorientation that is John Ashbery and even liked some of it but before long I had to see if Philip was able to sway Maggie's mind one way or the other and went back to the big book.

"Is this my favorite book?" I keep asking. It is for now. Each character is too big to hold more than one in your head at once and even when I try to single one out I don't feel like I can see around him or her entirely. It has been all about Philip for me for the last day or so. The awkward balance of his early relationship with Tom might be my favorite section of the book so far. And he's got the most sensitive mind of them all, like when he's talking about how music changes him and says that if the change would only last, he "might be capable of heroisms." You turn the page and a year has passed between his visits with Maggie and it feels like a year, you know what Philip has been feeling, and what Maggie hasn't, without the narrator sharing a single detail.

I don't want it to end, but I also feel a pressure to finish the thing before I stumble on the ending by accident while poking around the internet. I just had a close call a few minutes ago. The internet is just one big spoiler.