Heiress to a Small Ruin

My new chapbook, “Heiress to a Small Ruin,” is out! It was slightly delayed, but I like the February publishing date. I need more Pisces in my life. The poems are old and new. There are cigarettes and wine and household gadgets. The wonderful cover collage was done by Catherine Mellinger. 

The Quotidian Bee, a website that runs poems from new books and chapbooks, put up Airstrip Heart yesterday, one of my favorites. Thanks for reading. If you’d like a copy, you can order one here. They're $7, or about 29 cents a poem. Which is what? Two tall lattes? 

The poems: 

Salem - Airstrip Heart - Thrall - Seven Postcards from Solitude - Chablis, Amen - Headache, Amen - Heiress to a Small Ruin - Bloodshot Cartography - Clinic Lilies - Snapshot with Mica & Narcolepsy - The If Horse - Lines written in a Japanese noodle shop watching a building be demolished - I Will Now Eat a Loaf of Bread - Inebriate of Air - Self-Portrait with Lava Lamp -Hackers - Smoking Jacket - Nightlight Ghazal -Inksleep - Electric Singer

Some observations on my trip to France, from my semi-German perspective

First, France is more beautiful than Germany because its ancient buildings are still standing.

Also, France is more of a mess than Germany because its ancient buildings are still standing.

Germany looks more well off. I looked at the GDP per capita stats, however, and it’s not that much richer, #11 vs #13 in Europe. So why does France look rundown? Is it those ancient buildings, which are painfully charming but also slowly disintegrating?

We visited Semur-en-Auxois, for example, by reputation one of the most worthwhile villages in Burgundy. It’s enchanting from a distance, like outside the town walls or from one of the town towers. But close-up it’s sad. I say it reluctantly. 

Semur-en-Auxois

Ancient buildings hold 1000x more charm than any efficient modern structure. Ancient buildings pose 100 more problems, and need more care. 

France is more rural and less populated than Germany, which is relaxing when you’re driving through the rolling landscape. Germany has rural areas, too, but its uninhabited areas are often wooded rather than agrarian. 

It is also true that the French are not punctual. As my husband told the man who was supposed to meet us at 4 pm to let us into our apartment but showed up at 5.30, “Roland, la ponctualité est pas votre force.” This after Monsieur Roland was also an hour late for our meeting to return our deposit and reclaim our keys. In fact rather than being ‘just’ 50 minutes late, he was out in the street stretching it out to a full hour with a smoke break - we saw him. 

“Je suis désolé Je suis désolé Je suis désolé,” he protested. Désolé, my ass. 

It is indisputable that the French language is fabulous. I wish I’d stuck to my French lessons. 

Gorgeous place. The well-cared-for abbey of Fontenay brought me to tears. 

Also Proust and Satie and Apollinaire and Matisse. 

But fate has delivered me to Germany, where I am late for work, accompanied daily by Weltschmerz and Bach cantatas.

“Herr Camper related that when a missionary painted the flames of Hell to a congregation of Greenlanders in a truly vivid fashion, and described at length the heat they gave out, all the Greenlanders began to feel a strong desire to go to Hell.” - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Notebook G, The Waste Books

Wednesday off

I took the day off because my daughter had an appointment about a retirement account and wanted me along. In the course of the day we discovered she didn’t need this appointment. Since she doesn’t have a job and is just 18 she doesn’t quite yet need a retirement account. Yes, I've said in the past one needs to save for retirement and she should too but I didn’t mean now, and when I said I would contribute to her savings, I meant I'd regularly deposit a small amount in her savings until she is - someday - gainfully employed.

So all day we were waiting for 4 o’clock to roll around and at 3 our limbo ended with this revelation of misunderstanding, and we were relieved to be set free from an awkward appointment with a country bumpkin banker. We celebrated with a very buttery Croque Monsieur. I also did two loads of laundry, read 40-50 pages of Moon Tiger and a review of a biography of Penelope Fitzgerald, paid bills and filled the fridge with groceries.

In other news, I’m happy to say my chapbook, Heiress to a Small Ruin, has been accepted by Dancing Girl Press. It will be published about a year from now.

I think I could turn and live in the Vitra display window

On the ground floor of my office building there’s an upscale furniture store that sells cool, elegant pieces like the Eames chair and its splendid ottoman. I pass by daily and never see a customer inside. I assume they need sell only a single sofa every month to pay the overhead.

I said to a colleague today my wish is to get a position inhabiting that display window tucked beside the entrance. I could sit beneath the lights there, showing the deep-pocketed how stylish solitude is. 

As you see in the picture, the current display is all black & white - a little bit of pine ringing the stools and trolley, a Tapiovaara chair poised attentively in the corner like a fragile animal.

I think I could abandon all I possess and sit there with a book, tapping the ash of a cigarette onto a black saucer. 

I wouldn’t brood or fret about the future. I wouldn’t obsess about sins I committed half my life ago. I could turn my back on Israel and Palestine. I’d be glad to drink a glass of sparkling water with lime to jolt the color scheme, or import some black-eyed susans from what until then I’d called my backyard. 

B for Beguile

I finished The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and enjoyed it inordinately. I have now traveled the Brontë trinity from A to E and hope to read Villette (C) and Agnes Grey (A) this year, too.

In looking at my own volumes of Brontë books and those on Amazon etc. my only disappointment is the very unimaginative book covers the Brontë books are slapped with. About 85% of the time it’s a dim 18th century painting of a woman in a cloak or voluminous dark dress. I’ve also seen a couple goth cartoonish covers, and some that look like Harlequin Romances. Yuck all around. There must be more to these stories than clothing and landscapes.

For Jane Eyre I found the Penguin Drop Cap series of hardcovers, which uses the author’s last initial in fancified, illustrated typeface. I do like that. It’s bold. You can see the cover Of Jane Eyre and the 25 others classics in the series at this link. Unfortunately I don’t need another copy of Jane Eyre. Or do I?

Penguin makes a gimmick of it and suggests you check out your initial, and the author quote on the back of the book. Mine would be S for John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. Too bad I’m not a Steinbeck fan. 

My favorite design among these is the D for Dickens’ Great Expectations, which I’ve read twice, followed by the Q for Ellery Queen's The Greek Coffin Mystery, which I’ve never read. Can an elegant Q convince me?

While I’m at it I also like E, G, J and L! It looks like the whole alphabet would cost more than $500 new, so better just to spell your name, or your favorite four-letter word.

If I had an e-book reader I could have started Villette this morning, since it's free on e-format at Amazon. In fact I do have a Kindle on my home computer and downloaded it, but I won't be schlepping that with me on a plane to New Jersey tomorrow. No, as usual when I'm about to embark on a trip, I'll be lugging a many-million page tome, this time Juliet Barker's family biography The Brontës. 1158 pages, not counting the introduction and middle bit of illustrations.

Stargazing in the Library

I was thrilled last week when Passages North accepted The Inner Rodent, an essay I wrote based on my misreadings. I’d never submitted non-fiction before, and the essay was accepted within a day. It’s up on the site as part of their “Writers on Writing” series.

I should be braver. But I am tired. I should write more. But I don’t have a lot of time. 

If you click on the link you’ll see the squirrel is my mascot. Which is cool, because the squirrel is my mascot. 

Fall has descended, and today we had a table at a kids’ flea market, where we sold piles of action figures, jeans, some t-shirts and books. Carlo and I played good cop/bad cop, him being the kindly negotiator and me being the take-it-or-leave-it guy. We made 155 euros, enough to pay for groceries and the kids’ allowance.

Fees

I figure if I have been turned down by a journal two or three or more times, I am going to have a slender chance of winning its poetry contest. I appreciate journals get revenue from charging a fee for their contests, and that’s fine. One could also subscribe. But to enter a contest in which you have little chance of winning and lots of chance of tying up some of your best poems for months seems a waste of time and money.

Elsewhere in $poetry$ land, I have given in and subscribed to Duotrope. I stopped when they began charging, but find that it’s motivating to see which journals are answering submissions, who’s got a call out on a theme, where “people who submitted to this journal also submitted to.” Until two days ago I hadn’t submitted anything for going on 90 days. 

This was a very boring post. To spark up the experience, listen to my brother read about bikes in this short animation.

Sonntag

the swaying pines of the neighbor’s yard, the gloom of their green,

the purlieu of dust, a close inspection of fingernails, parcels of money for allowance, lunches and tutoring, 

the stoic pose of the radiator, the aftermath of caffeine, 

a spent tube of handlotion, hours of go-nowhere evaluation, the patron saint of long silence, a stack of CDs, 

vines of dead wisteria, the busy noises of other floors, 

stray sheets of paper, a crumbling copy of Alice in Wonderland, a wave of fatigue, beloved jar of buttons, the poison of feeling secure, 

the click of the dog’s claws, melodrama of teenagers, the shape of the keyhole, an almond, the key, 

bathtub of blue water, landscape of mussed bedding, the vague passage of time, the damp of washed hair, the smell of soap, of toast, of pencil shavings, 

an empire of bookshelves, the deepest of breaths, 

the chance of good luck, of ill luck, the dire lack of sun, the sweep of a sleeve, the fur-grey of February,

Altitudes

Some elevators assign the underground floors an identifying letter. Some designate those floors with negative numbers, as if going underground were a kind of subtraction.

Yet elevators do more than elevate. 

In my dreams the elevator also travels horizontally, taking me not only to the floor I want but also to the right area of the building. 

In the car, the most confusing buttons are those meant to show ‘door open’ and ‘door close.’ These glyphs require focus, and it’s a trick figuring them out in time. 

And yet don’t you hate those people who saunter to the elevator, texting or scanning their phones, while you’re holding the door for them, as if their priorities took precedence over all others? 

Even if time is not money, it is like money. After investing more than a minute waiting for the elevator, it’s like throwing it away to opt for the stairs.

People stopped complaining about elevator music when it morphed into elevator advertising. 

This person: he rushes to the elevator as the doors are closing, then holds them open so his straggler friends can wander in. 

The walls of my office’s elevator car are mirrored, and the lighting reveals every wiry grey hair, every facial hair, every wrinkle, dry patch and blemish. It makes for an interesting trip. 

Some decades ago as the world began to go gaga for sensor technology, elevators were summoned with buttons activated by the warmth of the finger. This proved a disaster when a fire broke out, and the heat of the flames delivered the elevator passengers right to the danger. 

In case of fire, fire rides the elevator. 

This person: the physically fit young man who takes the elevator from the lobby up one floor. 

In Germany, it is proper etiquette to say goodbye to the other passengers when you exit the elevator, and to reply in kind to their goodbyes if they exit first. 

When the elevator arrives with no one inside, it’s like a gift.

On a tear

I gave up on a book yesterday. Except in cases of truly terrible writing, it always seems a betrayal. Or an insult. Or a waste of money. In this case I abandoned Herta Müller's The Hunger Angel, which started out well. But after some pages in the labor camp, I grew fatigued. For days I hauled the book back and forth to work, but always found something more interesting to do than get down and read. I haven't abandoned it completely, just for now; I think I may have had enough "bad old Europe" in books recently.

Instead I picked up Kent Haruf's Plainsong, set in eastern Colorado. I saw it recommended on Good Reads and found it used in Philly last month but didn't know the plot. When I started to read it I thought it might as well have been written in 1952, but I looked in the front flap and it was 1999. It is enormously engaging, and my reading cramp has dissolved.

Just yesterday a German colleague asked me what "to go on a tear" meant, and that's exactly what I did on Amazon for other day, shopping for books for my son. It's difficult to find books that appeal to him, much less that he'll stick with. He loved the James Daschner 'Labyrinth' series, so much so that I convinced him to read the third book in English instead of waiting who knows how long for the German translation to come out. Anyway, I found six books for him, in German no less, and am even more excited to receive them than I would be if I'd ordered them for myself.

Money talks

One day my friend's car battery dried up, so she approached a man in the parking lot to ask if he could jump the battery. She had cables in the trunk. He said yes, but when he opened his hood he said he'd just bought the car and wasn't sure he would do it right. So he went over to two house painters eating lunch in a nearby van, and asked them if they could lend a hand, which they did. When they were done, the first man asked if they wanted to be paid, and they said no, and left. He, however, told my friend that he wanted to be paid for helping her, as he'd worked as an agent. She gave him $10.

There was a lawyer who worked at my friend's office, who specialized in estates. He was very well off and brought a lot of money into the firm but didn't work there long. While he did, once a week he could be seen throwing bags of trash out in the dumpster behind the office. This let him avoid paying for garbage service at his home.

Another lawyer at my friend's office, another successful and wealthy man in his late 40s/early 50s, one day complained to his father that the family had spent more money on his sister's college education, who'd attended an Ivy League school. He calculated that his mother and father had spent $39,000 more on her education than his, as he'd gone to a school with a lower profile. He felt he was owed that money and told his father as much. The father gave it to him. My friend knows this because the father, who frequently drops by the office, whispered it all down for her.

Thumb Theater

I treated myself to a mac, and it is a lovely machine, clean and easy. But I am having a terrible time without Word. Apple has many programs for writers (too many) - Pages, iA Writer, Ommwriter, Text Edit etc - but it is difficult to make the transition. I almost gave in and bought Word yesterday, and even now I wonder why didn't I, but the Apple store convinced me to come in for a Pages class. It is not hard to use, but I want to save things in Word, or send them in Word, and I have run into one obstacle after another. For example, the computer accepts my password for some applications, but not others, so I can't set up my mail account. I only have one password! Then there's the question of where the hell are my files when I save them. MUST FIGURE OUT.

I was hoping to write more, not spend the evenings feeling defeated.

So, ironically, for now I am back to writing poems exclusively on paper. Page after page of the same poem with a slight change in each new version, like those flipbooks you hold in one hand while flipping through the pages with the thumb of the other to see a horse run, a head turn, or a star explode.
Kind of defeated the purpose of the new computer.

Happy Valentine's Day. I heart Word.

More flipbooks:
Break dance
Close up
Louis Vuitton

All the names

We got to see the 9/11 memorial in New York last week and it was stunning - very solemn, the colors sombre and dark. The typeface for the victims' names is indeed Optima, something I was wondering about in a previous post. It works well. The fountain is gorgeous and the water turns a mineral green at the bottom of the pool, which empties into a true abyss - you cannot see the bottom of it. I, and the whole family, thought it was beautiful.

What struck me afterwards, however, was how much in contrast it seems to stand to the rest of America these days, or at least the northeast coast. The shabby houses along the bus route to NYC, all the infrastructure falling apart. You see clearly that millions of dollars have been sunk into the memorial, and rightly, and yet it is sad to so much else neglected.

The memorial is very close to Occupy Wall Street, and we headed over to have a look. It was underwhelming, to be honest, and of course a number of vendors (capitalists? opportunists?) set up shop selling t-shirts and falafel on the sidelines of the demonstration.

A note on the type

We spent the weekend on the Rhine, including the preposterously cute town of Unkel, and the once-grand/now-tawdry town of Remagen. Among other things, we went to an art fair where I spent an imaginary 10,000 euros on jewelry.

On the way home, to ease the fear that I’m wasting my life, I pulled the old trick of reading in the car until I ALMOST felt sick, then resting, and resuming. I’m reading The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst. My daughter asked me what it’s about, and the plot is truly not that interesting: gay 20-year old staying at the house of a rich English parliamentarian. But it is excellent writing, which expunges all shortcomings (if the lack of a plot is a shortcoming.)

I am lucky to have picked up a hardbound copy of this book somewhere (Borders sell-out?), with its beautiful cover and its heavy paper and dust jacket. During one of my non-reading intervals in the car, I just fondled it and was glad it was mine, glad I could underline and write in the margins should I want to. E-books be damned.

What struck me funny was the half-page "note on the type," Bembo, three times longer than the author’s biography. Bembo is 600 years older than Hollinghurst! It was born in Venice! The typography note turns into a homage, and an anthem for those who love tangible print on real paper. Ok, computer-screen print is also in some font or the other, but you could just as well mark it and change it to comic sans. People!

rumpelstiltskin

In bed I like to sleep on my stomach with my left foot/calf extended off the side, blanketless. For the fresh air. I call this snorkeling.

At work I get lunch vouchers worth 5.50 euros each and when I use one to buy a 2 euro sandwich I get 3.50 back in cash from the sandwich man. I call this spinning straw into gold.

At my desk I chew my nails, crack the sides with my incisor then peel them free in a nice, clean curve. This is known as mulling the great horizon

and it reminds me how yesterday I was going through the automatic revolving door that I hate and it occurred to me that teething and seething have more to do with each other than just a lot of phonemes.

I've failed at triumph

I thought The Diary of a Country Priest was one of those books that comes with a “guarantee.” But of course no book comes with a blanket guarantee. Still, I’d read only glowing reviews and boy was I ready for a “triumphant experience.” But on p. 26 I couldn’t make heads or tails of what I was really reading about. On p. 54 the voice of the innocent and well-meaning young priest began to irk the shit out of me. On p. 55 I skipped ahead to see if anything would ever actually happen to dilute all the fluffy introspection and it didn’t look promising. On p. 64 I took the kitty to the well and drowned it.

Ach! If only I lived near a (English) library I’d run so much less risk of wasting money on books. The back cover says $15.95! I checked my order though, and thanks to Amazon, I paid “just” $11.48 for The Diary of a Country Priest, so I feel a few dollars better already. Plus I ordered it along with The Shadow of Sirius and Blood Meridian, both of which paid off. Sirius cost $10.88 but was really worth about $17.89, and Blood Meridian cost $10.20 but was easily worth $13.86. So actually I only lost 81 cents in this deal, which I guess I could toss in without regret for shipping and handling, making this personal failure easier to swallow.

I’m returning to this century now. Nice to see you.

goldfinger

When I still lived in America, it was my job to ensure that the square footage of wall-to-wall carpeting accounted for a minimum of 18% of all geographic surface area, not including Alaska and Hawaii. I went all around the country in my donkey cart measuring this. I liked to start in hotels, virtual layer cakes of carpeting. As I gained experience, it got so I could calculate everything in my head, without using my ruler. I just multiplied the number of floors and subtracted the bathrooms. Throw rugs and orientals, popular in the nicer hotel lobbies, didn’t count. This was a job to be done barefoot, to connect with all textures – the high or low pile, woolens and shags. In homes and convention centers, churches and offices, I went around on all fours with my ruler and my recoiling fiberglass measuring tape. I saw carpeting the color of corn and of ruby and every shade of beige. I saw shoes, and sandals holding painted toenails. Sometimes I pocketed a sprung button or key. I found the pits of fruit under couches and spied mucho chewing gum under movie theater seats. I saw coffee stains, red wine and juice splashes and puke and dried peas and I was enriched by the presidents’ faces I saw embossed on a million lost coins and I know wall-to-wall carpeting isn’t the only thing that makes America great.

reply all

I was at the social security counseling center today. I'd come armed with documents. I had diplomas and birth certificates. I had proof of previous unemployment. I had my American accent and German grammar. I had my residence permit, the deed to my house and all my teeth. Pay stubs. I had my high school transcript. I had the approval for two maternity leaves. I had trouble explaning Italy. I'd had trouble understanding Italy, though there was a shop on the other side of the Via Manzoni that just clicked. I’d brought a picture of me in a bikini. The counseler asked me about my husband. I tried spelling that. Damn, he wasn’t making it easy. He asked me if I was an artist and I asked why that. Because I was wearing the same socks and underwear as yesterday? I don’t change that quickly. Even as we spoke I was racking up brownie points. I didn’t tell him about the poem in my bookbag about a pornographic spatula, and he wasn't bright enough to ask.

alone in the evening with a moleskin

The NYTimes ran an article yesterday about why you should feel guilty about buying used books on the internet. It’s the death of bookstores, some say, and deprives authors of their income.

I’m finding it hard to get on the moral high horse here. I’m afraid in these days when a new paperback can top $20, I travel the pre-read road. I appreciate the implications. But while I don’t go scavenging the woods for food, I do like frugality.

And recycling. I also buy used cars, bikes and clothing and don’t feel terrible about the engineers and fashion designers who aren’t cashing in. Re-selling means the original purchaser is recouping some of his outlay, part of which paid the retailer.

Of course writers should be rewarded for their work, just like teachers, nurses and home healthcare aides, but they also need to be realistic. And, as a poet who writes with little hope of publishing industry profit, I know most serious writers are in it for more than money. Many actually hope to enrich their readers. And we all do a lot of worthwhile reading for the price of an internet connection already.

I feel sorrier for the bookstores. Maybe booksellers should, like used car dealers, buy up all the used books for a pittance and re-sell them for more. Or maybe, like the mayor of beleagured Philadelphia, we should just close some libraries. You can read books for free there whether you paid your taxes or not!

My mother and sister visited for Christmas and the first thing I did was unload books on them (mom: Katherine Graham’s Personal History, Ben Bradlee’s A Good Life, Rick Bragg’s All Over But the Shouting, Richard Slotkin’s Abe and the Civil War novel The Killer Angels; sister: Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss, Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha). This gave me great pleasure. I would have given them more but I was trying to find things they’d like, and I didn’t mind parting with. Also my sister gave me a book for Christmas that she’d just finished – Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant. I was delighted, and unconscionably guiltless.

There isn’t much difference between giving books away and buying them for a dollar on the internet, or for $5 at a used bookstore for that matter, except that internet transactions, I presume from the NYT article, are taking place on a way larger scale. I believe it.

three faces of eve ascending

sickorich
stinking/filthy rich
rich as Croesus
loaded
money to burn
well heeled
well to do
affluent
well off
>middle class<
working class
making ends meet
down at the heels
broke
down and out
church mice/not a bean to rub together
po
wolf at the door
dirt poor