Nay: Overcrowded yoga class Yeah: Poem accepted by Gravel Magazine
Acquired: It was a low-spend week. I bought a magazine. Discarded: Uneaten food gone bad
Visited: The mountains Learned: Most refrigerators are set at too low a temperature to keep meat until its ‘best by’ date
Ate: Blueberry pie Drank: Coffee, coffee, coffee
Word of the week: Small, as noun (the small of the back, the small of the valley, would you like to try a small) Pithiness: Language most shows a man: Speak, that I may see thee. - Ben Jonson
Failed: Rejections Succeeded: Finished a book review I’ve been promising
Regretted: Offering someone a thank-you gift who proceeded to treat me like shit. At the end of the shit session, she held out her hand to receive the gift, which I changed my mind about (I regretted the offering, not the withholding).
Realized: Spite is karma's handmaid.
Visited: Frankfurt’s Palmengarten, the local botanical garden.
Word of the week: Mazurka, a dark dynamic word that means Polish folk song Pithiness: The thoughts written on madhouse walls by their inmates might be worth publicizing. - Lichtenberg
One regret I have about not having been born a man is never being called a gentleman.
On top of regrets about being born.
Marlene Dietrich said of Meryl Streep: ‘In the old days such an ugly person would have played the maid, or not even have gotten a screen test.’
Everyone lives under an assumed name.
The character was described as having “abominable teeth,” which I misread as “abdominal teeth.”
In German the pigeon and the dove are the same thing, die Taube.
When you chose a name for your child, was it a name you once wished for yourself?
( luise gudrun josefina )
For years after Albert Camus died his car was housed in the garage of a mechanic he’d been friendly with. It was a 1955 Citroen that Camus had named Penelope.
I told them I didn’t care if he wrote like an angel. An angel wouldn’t write anything I’d want to read.
Everything holds up a mirror, while the mirror holds up a door.
‘Comme tout le monde je m’appelle Erik Satie.’ - Erik Satie
Last night at a concert I discovered one of my most longstanding misreadings. A countertenor was singing a raft of French songs, including Claude Debussy’s Prelude and Clair de Lune, two of his best known pieces.
The concert program included the lyrics and I was reading the actually kind of lame melodramatic texts of various songs (o my heart) and it was slowly revealed to me that the two Debussy songs were not from what I’ve long been reading as Suite Bergmanesque, but from Suite Bergamasque.
In other words, the songs weren’t a homage to the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman as I’ve been unconsciously assuming for about 25 years, but to a clownish dance from the Italian town of Bergamo. Since I never thought about the inspiration for the songs, or dwelled on any associations I made with them, I’d never corrected this abiding trick of the eye.
You’d think it would have occurred to me that Bergman and Debussy didn't have overlapping lifetimes. In fact they missed each other by four months - Debussy died in March 1918 while Bergman was born in July of that year - meaning the composer never had the opportunity to see Wild Strawberries, or The Seventh Seal, or even the first movie Bergman directed, To Joy.
Well, dear 25 years, it’s been lovely having Debussy’s Prelude evoke all those Swedish walks on the beach, and letting Clair de Lune call forth the light in the foghorn scene from Persona. In fact, I think I’ll continue to let it. It’s much more pleasing than an awkward Italian dance from a town best known these days for its rinky-dink airport, served primarily by Ryanair.
On a 1-10 scale, the past week gets a weak 5. No one died or anything. Nor did a tree fall on my car, but I don’t drive. The week didn’t win an award for leading actress, or screenplay, or original score. And I banged my elbow.
Saw: Birdman. I wasn’t crazy about it. And the popcorn sucked.
Learned: To properly pronounce sangfroid
Laughed: My own joke at work, which involved an English nursery rhyme peppered with German. That’s how desperate I was for humor. Cursed: Being 5 minutes late for yoga, meaning I was locked out.
Failed: The moths are back. Succeeded: Drafted a poem; received an acceptance
Regretted: My desk calendar. Every day there’s a new photo, and 55% of the time it seems to be a selfie, and god knows we’ve had enough of that. Dreamed: My father was taking a bath in a shed in a rural setting. He got all contorted and was shouting for help. Luisa and I were nearby but I said he was just making noise and didn’t need help but Luisa went and helped him get out of the tub, exasperated with me.
Acquired: A rose-scented candle Discarded: A purple poncho
Ate: Risotto Milanese Ingested: A mouthful of exhaust smoke
Word of the week: Flummox, a well-built verb with an unconventional ending.
Pithiness: "We spend our time envying people we wouldn’t like to be." - Jean Rostand
Two stand-out experiences I had on my trip to America had to do with public interaction, and how much friendlier, open and trusting it is than in Germany.
The first took place in a ladies’ fitting room. I came out to look in a larger mirror and found - not unexpectedly - strangers commenting on each other’s outfits in a way unimaginable in Germany. Friendly and helpful and possibly not altogether honest comments. I asked the fitting room attendant if she thought I had the right size, but it didn’t matter whether I needed advice - it was just refreshing not to feel you must stay closed up inside yourself, to make contact with people, even in a banal retail setting. In Germany in contrast, privacy starts with avoiding strangers.
In the second case, my mother and I had just seen a movie we had differing opinions on (Whiplash). We stopped at the ladies’ room, where there was the usual backlog of ladies. But everyone in line was talking to the others about the film, whether they liked it, how intense it was, what a fantastic jerk one of the characters was. Except for my mother and me, the ladies were strangers to each other as far as I could tell. You’d never strike up a conversation with a stranger standing on line in Germany, much less engage in a large, inclusive conversation, superficial as it may be.
I can’t lie and say I don’t miss that. I miss it all the time. It makes life more pleasant; you feel less isolated, less invisible. You are invited to participate in an exchange. This can also go too far sometimes, as with the well-off American man in front of me on the plane, who needed to interact with the duty-free team for over a half an hour about which watch looked best on him, then which one to buy for his wife as well. Blabbity-bla.
And of course I returned to Germany this morning to news of a road-rage murder in Nevada, a 16 year-old executing his family then being killed in a shoot-out with police in Kentucky, and another deadly shooting at a Walmart in Mississippi. You can’t have it all.
Reading: Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
Listened to: Le Tourbillon by jeanne moreau
Laughed: Bible Verses Where The Word “Philistines” Has Been Replaced With “Haters”
Learned: “Humility” and “humiliation” come from Latin “humus,” aka dirt.
Failed: Went to the Christmas Market, but it wasn’t open.
Triumphed: My chapbook “Heiress to a Small Ruin” was accepted by DGP and will be published next winter. I almost didn’t send it in.
Dreamed: of an encounter with a Jehovah’s Witness
Realized: Sugar drenches everything
Watched: Memento, a poorly executed psycho thriller
Observed: The introverts seem to have stopped talking about how introverted they are.
Ate: Falafel
Drank: Chai tea, coffee, wine, sparkling water
Bought: very little
Did without: very little
Pithiness of the week: "There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us." FH Bradley
Word of the week: Desuetude
“Even when she had to give an armchair, silverware, a walking stick, she looked for ‘old’ ones, as though, now that long desuetude had effaced their character of usefulness, they would appear more disposed to tell us about the life of people of other times than to serve the needs of our own life.” (Swann's Way)
Watched: Das Weisse Band (The White Ribbon). #great
Discarded: A blouse I loved but didn’t suit me. I would have continued to let it hang in the closet as if I might someday wear it, but apparently I wore it enough to get a stain on it. Saved the buttons and threw it away.
Received: A letter from Sardegna with a small seashell from my Italian daughter.
Word of the week: Mosaic. That's what I wanted to tell the tour guide who talked about "the interesting pebble arrangement." But I didn't.
Pithiness of the week: The art of not reading is extremely important. It consists in our not taking up whatever happens to be occupying the larger public at the time. - Schopenhauer
Pithiness of the week: “The US dumbing-down that is seizing Germany more and more is one of the gravest consequences of the war.” - Albert Schweizer (seen on the wall of one of my husband’s Italian students, an 80-year old former nun who lives in the woods)
Decided, sort of: It is not such an ignominy not to have read The Iliad.
Ate: Meatballs & tomato sauce
Drank: Tonic water with lime
Realized: So many areas hit by war - Ukraine, Iraq, Israel - I will stop cursing the too-frequent sound of construction in the city.
Dreamed: I was watching a housetop swell and glow green and explode itself of its whirling shingles, only to grow them back and start again, and again.
Word of the week: “Dinnertime,” a word like a small bell tingling.
Pithiness of the week: 'A lot of people are afraid to say what they want. That's why they don' t get what they want.' - Madonna
Realized: In 1900s Paris what a woman needed most of all was a good hat
Dreamed: I was at a camp or vacation spot with a group of people I only vaguely knew & when I woke up in the (dream) morning they were sitting in a semi-circle waiting for me to empty the dishwasher & fold the laundry & I was like I already have a family & began angrily throwing their clean clothes into a pile on the sand.
The sky today was imported from Holland, a nearly neon blue full of ship-sized white clouds that made me think the “Milky Way” moniker had been wasted on a phenomenon less worthy.
I can’t complain about the German weather this spring. Yesterday was like a valentine - a warm breeze, buckets of sunshine, and everything budding. I had the day off, and headed off downtown in a pair of sandals I unearthed from the bottom of my closet. This was fairly daring for early April in Germany, I admit, and I was paid back by having them both self-destruct, pretty much simultaneously, as soon as I got off the UBahn.
My daughter was coming to meet me anyway, so I asked her to bring socks and sneakers from home. Hell if I was going to pressure-buy shoes I didn’t want for the sake of not walking in the style of Marty Feldman’s Igor. She got a dress with the money I would have had to spend to continue perambulating in the style of myself, but I stopped at the blouse that looked like a paper towel.
I saw Blue Jasmine over the weekend, the semi-new Woody Allen movie with Cate Blanchett. It’s the first Woody Allen movie I’ve seen in a long time. Aside from Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which I watched on a plane, I haven’t seen any of his movies since 1994.
The movie owes a lot to A Streetcar Named Desire, but knowing that isn’t crucial. Having read/seen Streetcar might enrich your viewing, but not having seen it shouldn’t bother anyone.
Wow, I thought. NO redeeming qualities. Was it really true? Did I feel better about my husband’s disliking her now that a reviewer confirmed she was a worthless person? Sort of. Still, I would like to point out that 1) she’s gorgeous, and 2) she has great taste in clothes. Last I heard, those were qualities worth having, as selfish and delusional as one might be.
I finished Little Dorrit. It took me over a month, but it is long, and I had a couple projects going. It never struck me as one of Dickens’ most famous, and I was thinking it might be so-so, but it was wonderful. Everything you want from Dickens - humor, well-drawn settings, colorful characters, orphans, villians, penalties to the bad and rewards to the deserving. And, man, there is a lot of deserving going on. I cried all over it.
To my surprise, Time Magazine rated Little Dorrit as Dickens’ 3rd best book. I don’t know the judge’s credentials, but I am glad to see there are some on the list I’ve yet to read. Before I’d ever read Dickens my favorite was Oliver Twist because of the 1968 movie, which I saw as a small child and adored. It surprised me that the book is only #10. Bleak House, #1, made me roll my eyes occasionally, but I read it in 2000, a year I spent in a very bad mood. Great Expectations, #2, was the first Dickens I ever read (9th grade), and I re-read it some years ago and do think it’s marvelous. I love that Dickens always has some mysterious secret going. Little Dorrit was not an exception.
Here’s the list, and the order. 1) Bleak House 2) Great Expectations 3) Little Dorrit 4) David Copperfield 5) Our Mutual Friend 6) A Tale of Two Cities 7) The Pickwick Papers 8) Hard Times 9) Dombey and Son 10) Oliver Twist.
