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January - March 2010 Dance workshop and some choreography to Gershwin Tuesday March 30, 2010 I led a dance workshop today for a group of actors--basic ballet center work and some modern. We had great floors, but no barres, no mirrors. And I choreographed a little piece on Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F, the agitated, frantic third movement. How to explain our movement? Think Balanchine meets Rambert Dance Company meets Fosse. Ah, the music, the music. Gershwin is so danceable. We danced, a whole room of us, sometimes in unison like a North Korean army. We waltzed big sweeps across the stage. We ran through each other. Our feet stuttered on off beats. We flirted with just our shoulders. We clasped each other. Dance is a language. Our vocabulary had all the delight of a child learning the word pterodactyl.
Skeet shooting Friday March 26, 2010 It's the kind of evening you want to sit in the sun with a bowl of cherries and listen to Prokofiev. I defragmented two poems that have been in slivers on my drive and on envelopes, scrap paper, margins. It took all day--nine hours or so. There's one more poem that's reeling like a skeet through the sky and I'm waiting for it to get into range so I can shoot it down. Appropriate enough analogy--the poem's on disappointment. Since you brought it up, here's the Cranberries' take on the subject. Man, that song takes me back. I think I still have the whole album memorized.
Trent Masiki's "A Curious Absence" Thursday March 25, 2010 I read an essay by friend and fellow writer, Trent Masiki, that was easier to read than it must have been to write. Every good writer needs courage, I'm convinced. Be warned: the PDF isn't the best, but the story is so genuine, it verges on archetype.
Grading Highlights 2 or How I Spent My Spring Break (but not Bach would be 325 today) Sunday March 21, 2010
Top row, third pile from the right, twenty-four essays deep, are some lovely, quaint sentences about Shakespeare's sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day"). The writer isn't an English major, but someone who clearly has a rich imaginative life cultivated through a history of reading. I'll give you the essay's very first sentence, then one near the end when the writer is genuinely surprised by her discovery (it's like the end of the Argerich performance [see Feb 19 and 22]): 1) Like a decorous Victorian dance, sonnet 18 follows a precise, formal pattern. 2) This dance of rhythm and rhyme ultimately turns the audience's expectations of a traditional love song upside-down. The sonnet ends entirely focused on the poet! After fourteen lines, we know nothing about the sonnet's original recipient: the color of her eyes and hair, her attire, lineage, passion, virtue or character. That you could claim to love someone and yet know nothing about him or her--it's criminal, isn't it?
A definition of culture Saturday March 20, 2010 From William J. Larkin, Jr.'s Culture and Biblical Hermeneutics: Culture is that integrated pattern of socially acquired knowledge, particularly ideas, beliefs, and values (ideology) mediated through language, which a people uses to interpret experience and generate patterns of behavior--technological, economic, social, political, religious, and artistic--so that it can survive by adapting to relentlessly changing circumstances. [...] There seems to be an anthropological consensus that culture is basically ideational; that is, the essence of a culture is its ideology or worldview rather than its observable behavior patterns. Ideology (meaning) is primary, while behavior (form) is secondary. (192-93)
2010 Census Friday March 19, 2010 I just completed my first ever census form in the US. Basically all it wants is my gender, age, and race. That's all I am here?
TV Interview Thursday March 18, 2010 This morning, fellow WCPA board member, Laura Menides, and I recorded a TV interview, Coffee with Konnie, to promote poetry events in central Massachusetts, and the interview stretched to include poetry in general. The host, Konnie Lukes, is the former mayor of Worcester, and she asked questions that a popular audience would appreciate. Do people still read poetry? What's slam poetry about? What's free verse? Times are rough; is there any pleasure any poetry? The show airs on WCCA TV (or streams live on the website) on Saturday March 20 at 1:30 a.m., 6:00 p.m., and 9:30 p.m., and Sunday March 21 at 5:00 a.m., 1:30 p.m., and 10:00 p.m. Now, here's the kind of thing that fascinates me about technology. After the interview, I came home and watched my mother at a funeral in Markham, which was being broadcast live over the internet. Her choir was singing and she was standing behind the soloist so she got quite a bit of air time. (I'm paving over death's field, I know. Can't get into it. Allow me?) I watched the whole funeral, but at a distance geographically and, consequently, at a distance emotionally.
Grading Highlights Wednesday March 17, 2010 These highlights come from a batch of American Lit I (up to 1865) essays. One student rebrands Columbus: In a series of letters from Columbus to the Spanish monarchs, Columbus proves that he is as much a politician as an explorer. Call anybody a politician and his appeal, popularity, heroic potential takes a hit. How about thinking of Columbus as a producer, going from pocket to pocket to fund his trip, then hyping his discovery, maybe even calling the islands the next big thing? Here's another bright sentence from a student writing on fear-inducing Puritan rhetoric: Media is the United States' new religion. I may not agree, but the kid's been reading his McLuhan, eh?
Tenured Friday March 12, 2010 I am. It's official. Thanks.
The Onion: Nation Shudders at Large Block of Uninterrupted Text Wednesday March 10, 2010 Swift himself couldn't outdo some of these Onion writers. Here's an excerpt (irony noted): "I've never seen anything like it," said Mark Shelton, a high school teacher from St. Paul, MN who stared blankly at the page in front of him for several minutes before finally holding it up to his ear. "What does it want from us?"
Vocalise Monday March 8, 2010 Rachmaninoff's. Listen. In an unrelated context today, a friend said, sublimely: A voice is not nearly as important as what it is saying. The soprano says nothing, technically speaking. And yet, for the last twelve hours, she has been wise, sympathetic company. More poetry from the same friend: How is a laugh anything but fantastic?
"Look Here" Saturday March 6, 2010 Great title for a poem. Pamela Alexander got there first. Tonally, metaphorically, the funniest poem I've read this week, and it's right up there with the best break-up poems of all time (who's compiling that anthology?). I'm with the woman. The least her ex-"canoe-footed fur-faced / musk ox" boyfriend could do is say hello because
hello Look at the full poem, "Look Here," here.
Another barking dog Thursday March 4, 2010 Says Google, today's Vivaldi's birthday. A couple of days after Chopin (minus over a hundred years). In orchestra, we're playing something I can't play by him. I used to think that the aggressive viola part of the second movement, the largo, of the spring section of The Four Seasons, was a performance error. But I also felt that the mistake was so exquisite that it couldn't be due to sloppy conducting. Then I learned that Vivaldi was simulating a barking dog with those brilliantly assertive interruptions. The score I'm reading tonight actually says Il Cane che grida and Largo, si deve suonare sempre molto forte, e Strappato. It's all intentional. Oh, to have such a harmonically gifted dog.
The purest line today, from Camus Wednesday March 3, 2010 Albert Camus's The Stranger has my favourite subplot in all of literature: Salamano's dog, after years of abuse, runs away. Salamano is heartbroken, despite the front he puts up, despite the fact that the dog is no prize--scabby, bad tempered. We hear Salamano crying softly in the other room the same way the dog used to whimper. As he's leaving his neighbour's flat to face his new lonely life, Salamano says, "I hope the dogs don't bark tonight. I always think it's mine."
Musée des Beaux Arts Monday March 1, 2010 Today is Chopin's birthday. He would be 200. On Public Radio, I listened to Garrick Ohlsson give a concert on Chopin's original piano while in Haiti and Chile people are trying to get by after 7.0 and 8.8 earthquakes. It's the "while" that is problematic, syntactically above and in terms of suffering: how dare anything else happen while. What can I do? Out of a kind of respect, I'm not going to link to Auden's poem or to a note of Chopin. (Are you serious? This is your contribution?) Make one less thing happen while Haiti, while Chile.
Booyaka! Booyaka! Sunday February 28, 2010 I made my publisher's deadline. Booyaka! (Can we bring that word back? Not just booya, although I'll take booya if booyaka is too much.) The first three stories are revised and March 1 is still hours away. Booyaka squared. Remember how a few days ago I was excited about revising a story out of third-person limited POV into omniscient POV? Well, I revised it back to third person, because, texture-wise, omniscience was flattening out the story even though it was solving the problem of circulating information. So the problem came back. How can I get info to the reader if my main conduit has no access to the action? I'm still smiling at the solution. It completely transformed the narrative and the locus of action from being external and fact-based to internal and assumption-based. The texture is like the film Adaptation. And I can't help but feel like I've stumbled on to something major with this solution, a style that doesn't go as far as magic realism or surrealism, but it's definitely an alternate, layered, and harmonically dense realism. (Booyaka cubed. Writing about prison here could so easily turn into a miniseries, like the blogging obsession of December, and the Ravel fixation from a few days ago. So, knowing that, I started a little non-fiction piece on prison. Hopefully, it stays little, although I already have three pages of notes so far. I'd like to do it in under a thousand words and finish it by the end of spring break. Or at least one of the above.)
I was never in prison. I have no intention of going. When I wrote going a few days ago, I meant visiting to do a program. Saturday February 27, 2010 I have to say it so plainly because my mother is irked by the previous phrasing and gave me six minutes of phone lecture, according to the microwave clock, on its inappropriateness. And when I explained the larger project of that sentence--of activating stereotypes in order to debunk them--she said, Doesn't matter. Don't say it. So, there, I unsaid it.
After prison Friday February 26, 2010 Marktavian and I get back into his car, and he says, without having read Foucault, "Brother, I'm tired of white men looking at black men. I'm tired of being under surveillance."
Going to prison tomorrow Thursday February 25, 2010 That's misleading, but true. Explanation demain. No, explanation now. I'm going there to do a Black History Month Event. Last year, I did it for the first time, and when I came out, the world seemed more in focus. The prisoners were intelligent, articulate, attentive, inquisitive, eager to connect. They were like humans before the onslaught of technology. My intent is not to go in there to save them, to show them the way, to come out feeling noble, like some inspirational-made-for-TV-movie character. I honestly just want to see them again and hear what they have to say. What is the line that divides them from us? They are being punished visibly for something they've done. We are not, which is not to say we're innocent.
Transposing Wednesday February 24, 2010 Spent the snow day transposing a story from third-person-limited POV to omniscient narration. It was a good exercise, and it'll take a few more days to finish. If anyone ever writes etudes for writers, this should be one of them. I've been mulling over a challenge my editor, Robyn, set me regarding a two-handed story. This evening I think I got the solution. I haven't executed it yet, but the solution came with such authority that I think it's going to work. Oh for another snow day. (BTW [and hopefully the last of my musings on representation] Ravel was left handed, which is rarer in real life than among pianists. Still, I like to think of him as slightly marginalized in the world of dextrophilic? amodextro? dextramant? right-hand-dominated music out there. His marginalized left hand helped him experience the instrument differently. Sub position and world to that last sentence for the literary parallel.)
Undoing the representation knot Tuesday February 23, 2010 I didn't mention a pretty important fact. Along with Debussy, Ravel is at the front of a group of Impressionist musicians. That's why the mimesis of "Jeux d'eau" is so startling. In terms of representation, Impressionism liberates one to offer the mood, atmosphere, effect of a thing in place of its exact properties. It's suggestive. Time to close out our representation story arc. It seems all representation is a kind of metaphor--superimposing one system on another where they line up, the isolation of matching parts, the adjustment of relations in each system. This all might come across as too abstract and theoretical, but it's been intuitively practical in my recent fiction revisions. If the musical parallels are too out-there, then think of metaphor as a microcosm of the task of representation. Here's another exit. A colleague said today that she was reorienting her critical apparatus to pursue beauty. (This is how we talk in English departments.) And I said, I'm still interested in how things work. Not to say that I approach the Ravel piece as a toaster or radio to dismantle. Its beauty is not lost on me even after five days of scrutiny.
Loosening the representation knot Monday February 22, 2010 First, Martha Argerich's tempo is fine for Ravel's "Jeux d'eau." I realized over the weekend that she was competing with the tempo at which I heard the piece initially, and first impressions of music, or anything really, come to be the standard against which all other adaptations, appearances, performances are judged. That aside, I'm still revising fiction. On Friday, I claimed that Ravel offers some serious technique pointers for artists in any genre who are concerned with representation, though I said it in far more cryptic terms. You don't see it. How does an artist turn one thing into another? Manoeuvre [Maneuver, if you're American] 1) 0:03 to 0:14. In the theme, Ravel gives us representation for realists--mimesis. The piano part sounds like water. As an example of transference from one medium to another, natural world to music, it's flawless. (Little fact: Ravel sometimes would transcribe sounds that he heard from birds, say, into notes.) Manoeuvre 2) Identify the common material between the two media. Ravel's lucky in this case, because both water and the piano make sounds. (The transference would be easy also for a landscape painter because he's attempting to render a visual phenomenon in visual terms.) But water and piano make different sounds. Problem? Manoeuvre 3) 0:28 to 0:32. Understand that the limits of your medium are sometimes the result of convention and in order to represent poignantly you have to enter an experimental space with your medium, instrument, or craft. In these four seconds, you see Argerich crossing her left hand over her right, taking her left hand into unfamiliar, and potentially risky, territory. The piano is capable of making sounds like water once you invent a new way to play it. Manoeuvre 4) 0:53 to 1:03. There are many ways to represent one thing. Three times we hear the same motif repeated. Each time it's shaded differently because the tools used to represent it change: first, the left hand crosses over the right to make the motif possible; then the left hand returns to its traditional position; then the right hand catches it. The right hand plays it only after the pioneering work of the left hand. What was initially experimental becomes absorbed into the "acceptable." Manoeuvre 5) 1:04 to 1:08. Maybe we expect to hear that motif again, but Ravel only gives us a fragment of it, an echo. The representation moral: sometimes the best way to represent is only to suggest, to evoke, and trust that the audience will complete the sketch, rhyme, idea, image. In love, don't you sometimes complete your partner's Manoeuvre 6) 2:00 to 2:23. Pick salient elements to represent. This is a turbulent section of music, and we could get caught up listening to many things, but Argerich keeps us focused on that high melody. Even the ornamental runs upward don't distract us. She has a sure sense of purpose, of foreground and background. Manoeuvre 7) 3:09 to 3:20. Notice how pure the theme sounds when it comes back. It sounds washed. Scrubbed. This is representation by juxtaposition. The turbulence of the former passage gives dimension to the theme. If you get stuck, represent the opposite of the thing you hope to represent. Manoeuvre 8) 4:41 to the end. Look how long the right hand behaves itself and stays within the borders of its house before finally getting the chance (4:51) to run beyond. Set against the experimentation of manoeuvre 3 are restraint, control, discipline. The excesses of Modernism are tempting when it comes to representation; sure we can stick a recipe or an IM chat transcript into a novel. That's bonafide, authentic representation, right? Not quite. Manoeuvre 9). The smile. There's a line to be drawn between reproduction and representation. The suddenness of the ending, the right hand's escape and the left hand chord, registers this difference for me. If Argerich were satisfied to reproduce "Jeux d'eau," then that smile would be one of recognition; i.e., she recognizes this ending, this version of the piece. But, in fact, Argerich has accomplished something much more significant than reproduction. And she knows this. Look at how she tilts her head and returns to the physical world. She's surprised.
Representation knot Friday February 19, 2010 I'm revising short stories these days. How does an artist turn one thing into another? Ravel knows the answer. It's somewhere in "Jeux d'eau."
Argerich, as usual, prefers a tempo on the brisk side, as if she's splashing through this piece in cold water. But she's got the answer too, somewhere in that performance.
Five-Day Film Festival Thursday February 18, 2010 Tonight, I was a judge for the Five-Day Film Festival at the college, which is basically a challenge for student filmmakers to make a film in five days. Imagine the stimulants consumed, the friendships destroyed, the equipment broken. You gotta love Comm(unications Media, with a concentration in film or video) kids. I'm going to do some translation, just to see how these films sound in book terms. They're short films, so they wouldn't be novels--more like short stories. So you be an editor or agent, and I'll be the author pitching my plot to you. Ahem. The first short story is historical fiction. Abraham Lincoln manages to kill John Wilkes Booth, gets branded as a coward, and all history since April 14, 1865 gets rewired. Jump to 2010, when Lincoln manages a Carrie-like resurrection from the dead (complete with fist through the mud) and must adjust to modern life (think Encino Man). The great-to-the-xth-power grandson of Booth tracks Lincoln down for revenge, then--what? you want me to stop there? All right, how about a silent short story where an OCD man sharpens knives, loses his best friend to Russian roulette, then constructs a cardboard substitute? Or a bowel-heavy hunter finds sweet outdoor release in a redhead and a roll of toilet paper? Or, let's just simplify, sandwich talks to man? However my pitch makes them seem, the films were fun. Entertaining. Lots of that youthful buoyancy et joie et recklessness.
Lizard Lounge Poetry Night, 13th Anniversary Sunday February 14, 2010 Last scene, well after midnight, was of Iyeoka running soundlessly down the middle of an empty side street, through wide tracks of lamp light, like Cinderella.
As usual, one wishes to be the other Wednesday February 10, 2010 There is a kind of poet who comes with an activist's spirit--full of courage and honesty and an indignation at injustice that makes him straight up OT prophetic. He is chemically and magnetically superior to you. He also emits electricity. And there is another kind of poet who prefers not to drive at night and can barely hold your eye in conversation and he loves words not so much for what they can do, but what they can make. Is this second kind of poet, in his quaint wood shop, even worth finishing this sentence for?
Six days of playing the violin Monday February 8, 2010 And I am the master of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." I totally own that song!
A day with no details Friday February 5, 2010 Wrote all the morning. Played violin all afternoon.
You know what they say about the word assume Thursday February 4, 2010 I was on a Black History Month panel today. Went well, though I had a moment of surprise during the moderator's introduction. Here's the take away message: when someone asks you to do something, it helps to find out what that something is. For example, not that this happened to me or anything, a sensible question would be, What's the topic of the panel? Duh, you say. Don't duh me. Here's another pearl of wisdom: read the poster on which your name appears before showing up at an event. Just sayin'.
Poets are adorable Wednesday February 3, 2010 Poet stands up during a meeting, incensed, and says, "Why would they do that to us? That's... that's rapacious!" Same meeting, after listening to some negative feedback about an event, another poet looks over the back of her chair, zeroes in, and says, "I'm interested in the word insulting."
That you can make a life for yourself anywhere Tuesday February 2, 2010 is the answer to the question of Massachusetts. That has been the answer since 1620, when a lusty pilgrim hopped on to the shore and replied, We can do this. We can survive. It's an awfully Canadian answer, I realize, and not even contemporary, but "Canadian" c. 1972 when Atwood came out with Survival. Where's this coming from? Tonight, for the first time, I played in the Fitchburg State College orchestra, and discovered a whole new community--the best kind, where people of various skill-levels, backgrounds, ages are brought together because of a common interest. We played such fun music: Queen (Queen!), the Simpsons theme song, Led Zeppelin (!), some Elton John. Plus there's lots of classical stuff in the repertoire too. Vivaldi. I (don't) play violin. That's what I hold on my shoulder. But by the end of rehearsal today, I could pick my way through pieces with lots of open strings. I have next to no technique, but I helped make music in the, our, group. Piano is such a solitary instrument for me, as I said during the interview with Jonathan Blake; I never play if there's an open ear around. But being in an orchestra, surrounded by the wormy rhythms, having your own little team of (don't laugh, okay?) third violins, makes you feel like you can make a life for yourself anywhere once you tap into the right community. A church, an orchestra, a bowling league, a book club, a yoga class, a car pool. Dr. Hildy Schilling from Behavioral Sciences is the conductor, and at a Christmas party last year, she told me all about her alternate life as a musician and invited me to join her orchestra, because, as it turns out, my story isn't so unfamiliar: boy has always wanted to play violin but couldn't because, you know; boy gets older and treks to Ottawa with a buddy; boy and buddy espy violin in store display window; boy and buddy inspect their pockets and decide to continue to Montreal instead; boy and buddy wax nostalgic; boy and buddy return to Ottawa, eat at McDonalds while waiting for the store to open, then surge in and buy the violin; boy and buddy return to the GTA and realize they don't know how to play violin; violin sits in boy's closet for eight years. Enter Hildy and her carpe-diem-you-can-do-it talk. Boy learns to play.
Irina Souiki Monday February 1, 2010 is a knock-out genius of a photographer. Her photograph is on the cover of You Know Who You Are; her image is the wallpaper for Cuff's computer; her work inspired Jared to create the dazzling inner title pages. It was the first time that I actually heard a sound when looking at an image. The sound is of having your head submerged in bubbly water. In English, it sounds like gulgoo-looba-looba-glooba. Roughly. Here's her site. Here's her photostream on Flickr. Check out the I love TO album (because who doesn't? [unless you're Canadian and not from Toronto]). Her photos of abandoned objects are a dialogue between environmental decomposition and photographic composition. Great art like Irina's gives the viewer a sensation of transcendence. With Irina's photographs, the experience isn't spiritual but rather a heightened physical transcendence, as if I were watching the world through dilated pupils or had exchanged my visual sense for a hawk's or an eagle's. The images seem to do some occipital lobe rewiring. They raise the intensity of vision from seeing to perceiving. And she's president of an innovative charity called Picture the Cure, where you can buy a print and have the proceeds go to the Canadian Cancer Society.
Sledgehammer Sunday January 31, 2010 Should my correspondence with Jim ever become a subject of public interest (please, foo'), I want to footnote this sentence, "Sometimes I feel like I'm writing with a sledgehammer to make sure I connect with the reader's jaw," by saying that I do not endorse the abuse of ye gentle readers. When a writer thinks too much of the audience--too much--he finds himself shouting and shocking, waving his arms over his head in a giant X pattern instead of trusting his inner acupuncturist.
Watching TV in Durham, New Hampshire Thursday January 28, 2010 I'm in Durham overnight for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, and I guess I should write something about theater, but what I have to say on that front is more or less positive and predictable. What has the most emotional urgency at this second is this hotel room, which is also predictable, except there's a flat-panel TV mounted on the wall instead of a clunky tube TV on a swivel stand. When I watch TV in a hotel room I feel like a 1950s girl, home alone on a Saturday night eating ice cream from the box. Tonight the programming is especially bad, a Leno-style show with an overhyped audience and a host whose enthusiasm hollers first season, don't cancel me. The show's heavily scripted. That's what's bothering me. The show's scripted for the host, the guests, the audience, and my enjoyment is also scripted somehow--all my senses say, this is funny. Except it's not. It's predictable. And I understand that the television aims to be a point of personality in an otherwise sterile room, but its eagerness to make me happy, to befriend me, has crossed over into obsequiousness, and I find the force of its pleasure-pushing offensive.
Interview with Jonathan Blake airs today on What's the Word Wednesday January 27, 2010 Today part 2 of my interview with Jonathan Blake airs on WCUW 91.3 Worcester, or you can pick up the stream at the website, wcuw.org. I couldn't listen live because I was teaching World Novel, but Jonathan sent me a CD, with bonus jazz tracks on it, so I'll post it in the media section of this site once the technology cooperates. It has been a naughty child for the last two days.
The most photographed barn in America Tuesday January 26, 2010 What you're looking at is a JPEG of Joseph holding his phone on which is displayed a photograph of a monitor at Indigo bookstore on which is displayed by book. In other words, you're looking at a photo of a photo of a monitor with my book on the screen.
Here's another photo of the same. If you look carefully, you will also see the reflection of the camera in the display of his phone.
I find this wildly amusing. When we were in Europe--Naples, I think--we were trying to figure out which side of the street to stand on to get the right bus. Our Lonely Planet maps were useless, but inside the bus shelter there was an enormous, detailed map. Obviously we couldn't vandalize city property, smash the glass and take the map with us. So Joseph whipped out his camera, focused on the zone we wanted, and, boom, problem solved. A photograph of the thing is sometimes as good as the thing itself. (Except in the case of this book.)
For policy makers who think they are making our lives better Friday January 22, 2010 Can one small group make decisions for another, more diverse group? I had dog-eared this page in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale: Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some. (211)
Glykon Thursday January 21, 2010 Dr. Daniel Sarefield, a history professor at Fitchburg State College, gave a [apply British accent] thoroughly enjoyable lecture tonight as part of the Johnsonia Cultural Series, titled, "Snake Cults, Charlatans, and Burning Books: The Incredible Ancient Rome of Lucian of Samosata." The title's a bit sensational, sure, but Dan packed so much history into the talk that the audience felt more educated for having gone. Basically, Dan told the story of Glykon, a snake god invented by a phony prophet named Alexander, who exploited the gullibility and superstitions of folks in the second century (AD) Roman empire. Basically Dan told a story. I think that's why the talk was so successful. The power of a sequential narrative, even with its many tributaries, can keep one attentive. Hayden White would have been proud with such a bald acknowledgement of history's dependence on narrative for effective communication. And for a good twenty minutes after the talk, I just got a thrill out of saying Glykon with the same tone one might say Skeletor--a good villain name. Glykon, Glykon.
Finishing Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale at O'Hare Airport Sunday January 17, 2010 I am nearing the end / of the novel. I am at gate B7, waiting for my connecting flight. I am reading chapter 45, where Offred is plaintively bargaining with God after narrowly escaping danger, after seeing her future in three women hanging from hooks. Here she finally sees herself scaled in relation to her government: I know this can't be right but I think it anyway. [...] I want to keep on living, in any form. I resign my body freely, to the uses of others. They can do what they like with me. I am abject. I feel, for the first time, their true power. (286) And maybe it's the security check point across from me, or the desolation of the empty baggage carts and belts waiting in the fog, or maybe it was the double security screening at Pearson, the instruction to swish my fingers inside my pants and provide a sample--whatever it is, I think, O God, and I feel their true power.
What straight-talking Atwood might say as she attempts to comfort us Saturday January 16, 2010 For a best friend, Margaret Atwood's "A Sad Child": You're sad because you're sad.
Read the rest here.
Hard driven Thursday January 14, 2010 Thanks to Joseph, I'm now the owner of a new external hard drive with which I can quell my anxieties about tapeworms destroying all my computers and storage devices simultaneously in a kind of cyber apocalypse. I have now done the equivalent of diversifying my portfolio by backing up laptop files on my USB and external drives. In fact, I've backed up the flash drive on the external drive. Now should I back up the external with another hard drive? Is this anxiety the run-off of 9/11; i.e., we can no longer feel secure despite all reasonable efforts? Religion steps in at points like this, after one has done one's best, because it satisfies the what-if? what-if? fears with chill end-of-Matthew-6 analgesic.
x 4 Wednesday January 13, 2010 if you count Ryan Atwood from The OC, which I've been watching--not my finest moment, admitting this--faithfully over lunch on City TV for the last few weeks. Studying my own pattern, I'm convinced now that people watch soap operas for comfort--comfort in seeing the same characters every day, year in, year out; comfort in knowing that this relationship only requires an hour of your time; comfort in knowing the characters demand nothing of you while offering a semblance of friendship; comfort in simultaneously having the security of familiarity (the characters, the time slot) and the unpredictability of plot.
Atwood x 3 Tuesday January 12, 2010 So much of my mental life seems to revolve around Margaret Atwood these days: I'm still rereading The Handmaid's Tale; I'm prepping to teach Atwood first in World Novel since 1914 in a week; yesterday I got word that an article I wrote on Atwood's The Door will be published. (That sentence could have gone bad real easy: an article I wrote on Atwood's door... Like Luther's 95 theses.) And there are other pieces of good news over the last few days that have now gone the way of a digested mint--that not-so-fresh minty aftertaste. How quickly good news gets absorbed.
Why hasn't Margaret Atwood won the Nobel Prize yet? Thursday January 7, 2010 C'mon people! Behold: There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it. (Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale, 24) This is Offred remembering the words of Aunt Lydia, an indoctrinator of the state's reform policies. She's an ideology pusher. Atwood's presentation of the religio-political, woman-crushing dystopia is the best argument against it. The first time I read the novel, I was content to believe that it was set in the near future. Now I realize it's set now. Fifteen years before the war on terror, Atwood, with characteristic precision, had already identified its moral crossroads. Do you want to be free to carry gallons of your liquids, gels, and aerosols on to a plane and risk being blown to bits? Or do you want to be free from air-terror and do without your hairspray? that's flippant, without your privacy then? Atwood's vision of the time formerly known as the future is not any more operatic in scale than the present reality of "naked scanners" and terror threat levels and "the Department of Homeland Security."
I think Tuesday January 5, 2010 Cody Kucker, former student, current MFAer in Alaska, and future mitochondrion of American poetry, had tucked away in his email to me an astute observation: In a magazine I was reading the other day, of the 10 poems it had in its review, 7 had the phrase “I think” as a stop in the narrative for the poet to say “I think” and I find it sad that we need to be so loud with the fact that there is thinking occurring. And I'd add that the loudness of I think in poetry, in essays, is a way of the writer asserting his existence on an audience whose inclination is to minimize it, at least minimize the internal/mental parts of his existence. For the writer, I think is shorthand for Descartes's cogito ergo sum [I think, therefore I am]: I think. I'm not dead inside. I matter. Well, that's what I think anyway.
Language of the New Poetic Economy Monday January 4, 2010 The three points of the NPE (New Poetic Economy; it just sounds more political as an acronym, like NDP or PC) come with linguistic corollaries. For example: 1.i. Proposition 1 embeds presences (roles, transmission) into poems. The poem of the NPE is preoccupied with tone (rather than the voice solipsism of the last few decades), because tone marks an attitude toward the reader, subject, self (i.e., tone is relational while voice is speaker-centered). The NPE approves of apostrophe, address, shout out, and, on a finer level, the conjunction and preposition because they indicate relation. 2.i. Proposition 2 demands a language beyond language. The NPE poem is situated at the demilitarized border between language and thought. In that zone, the idiom may seem personal, but the subjectivity of the idiom belies the universality of its appeal. Like music. Even though we might not be able to read it, we get/feel/understand it through other channels. 3.i. Proposition 3 partners with both the medium and language of technology. The NPE recognizes a world of tech-literate people looking for some poetry in their first language, poetry that respects their newly reconfigured environments and identities as a result of technology without forgetting their immigrant status.
Plan for the new poetic economy over the next decade Saturday January 2, 2010 The poetry I'd like to read and write over the next decade has these three cultural priorities (couched in the economic language of the moment): 1. It invests in relationships. 2. It admits and will emerge from our spiritual bankruptcy. 3. It forges new and sustainable partnerships with technology. Of course, each poet has his/her own project and an audience is made up of unique individuals, so I can't prescribe a unilateral solution. I'd encourage poets to embark on their own plans of reparation. Reparation? Poets have failed readers. Since the early twentieth-century, we've bullied and intimidated and over-indulged ourselves and become aristocratic. How do we become relevant again? How can we persuade Joe the electrician to stuff a rolled-up collection in his pocket? The new poetic economy begins with an apology. |
