I needed a day off & I took it

It was a good day to finish Brenda Hillman’s Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire.

It was a good day to go with my son to a weight-lifting place he wanted to join, and did.

It was a good day to remove adverbs from sentences.

To inherit a book from my daughter. To listen to Bach. To find the shower gel I bought at the TJ Maxx near my mother's for $7 costs 71 euros in Germany. 

It was a good day to make tomato sauce & meatballs.

It was a good day to see my piece “See Also Fire” published at The Offing.

We could be heroes

A woman missing inside her home for more than 48 hours was found Monday morning when she emerged from the front door for work. It was unclear whether she’d been hurt or was deliberately missing.
She described the ordeal when she arrived at the office. The woman, the mother of two children, said she survived on food she found in the house.
“I could only eat what was left in the fruit bowl or the refrigerator,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if I was getting enough from all the different food groups, but I’ll look into what those groups are now more closely in case this happens again.”
Apparently the police were not involved in any search. The woman’s daughter came in at one point on Saturday, dashed upstairs to grab her phone and left again. The daughter couldn’t recall if she saw her mother during the 2-minute visit.
“I think I called out ‘mom?’ but I don’t remember if she answered,” the daughter said. “Wasn’t she just in her room?”
One neighbor recalled the woman going into the house on Friday evening around 8.50 pm, dressed in yoga clothes.
“I had no idea what was about to happen,” the neighbor said.
The woman said she didn’t consider herself a hero when she emerged from the house.
“There was one time when I wanted to drink cold water from the tap but at first only warm water came out,” she said. “I just kept running the tap hoping it would get cold.”
Luckily she was awoken by daylight on Monday morning.
“I was like, whoa, better get dressed,” the woman said.

Thanks for not much

I have so not gotten on the gratefulness wagon I have to avoid certain settings, since my failure to chime in would surely draw a collective frown. It's not that I'm not grateful, it's just that I don't want to join the latest emotional directive. It's like when everyone is reading the same book, and it’s The Da Vinci Code.

I understand gratefulness is supposed to boost your happiness hormones and all that, but why make a project of it. Yesterday, for example, I went home really looking forward to the two hours of the day when I would not be working. I was so happy I even smiled. What I felt was gratefulness, but I didn't have time to craft a hallmark card about it.

Anyway, in the thankfulness department, my semiannual give-thanks-to-a-teacher anxiety came to a head this week when a couple FB friends posted about teachers who changed their lives by recognizing their talents or inclinations. Then a Slate editor published a memoirette about his relationship with his 10-grade English teacher, who advised him well after school ended not to pursue lawyerdom, along with delivering other life-enriching lessons.

To confess, I've always felt kind of grateful to my 10-grade English teacher, a former nun who presided over our class with dry detachment. She swayed like a stork in her 70s get-up, a short bob and bell-bottom slacks. She was a humorless sort, but she had the idea of giving students an extra point for each book they read. So if you had 86 points, a B or B+, you could kick it up to an A by reading 4 or more extra-curricular books each grading period. She passed out a list of acceptable titles that I kept until my house burned down 10 years later. I was already a reader, since my dad demanded I read 10 books every summer, but reading now had more rewards. I read everything. I read also to please my teacher, though she was about as interested in me as in dryer lint.

One day I got up the nerve to ask her if she'd recommend me to take honors English the following year. She looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language. I didn't fit her picture of what honors English was. I knew who was in honors English and it's true I was not like them. Today they are housewives, realtors, or working payroll at a swimming pool chemicals company.

I was stung, it's true. As I said, I’ve always been kind of grateful to this teacher but lately I wonder what for. I’m grateful that she helped spark my interest in literature. But I am not grateful to her for anything else, not any later academic success, not my landing in journalism, not my poetry. I would like to thank her for taking an interest in me, but she didn't, and I managed anyway.

August, Adieu

Watched: The bouncing lamb

Saw: Uriah Heep on the plane from London to Frankfurt, decidedly wizened. One vaping on the plane - once a rebel, ever a rebel.

Ate: Beets, broccoli, raspberries, spinach, Stilton

Drank: Rosebud tea

Read: Still Life on a Matchbook Lid by Charles Wright

Listened to: Anita O'Day's Two for Tea 

Failed: After chatting happily with several colleagues, discovered broccoli between my front teeth in the ladies’ room mirror. 

Triumphed: Ate lunch on the steps outside St. Paul’s, defying all reluctance, self-consciousness, uptight Protestant work-ethic. 

Forgot: After 22 years without a dryer, how pleasurable it is to peel the delicate lint from the lint filter.

Learned: “sturmfrei,” the German word for the fun of having the house to yourself (for adolescents).

Missed: Luisa, my Italian daughter, who left for Sardinia for a month to take language classes. 

Observed: A tour guide on the streets of London foolishly shouting: “You are history! You are London!”

Realized: I love a few nights alone in a clean hotel. Own bed. Own bathroom. Own desk & chair.  Own nakedness. 

Decided: To sign up for some kind of salubrious movement course. 

Discarded: Old, unloved potholders.

Received: Moleskine bookshrine, compliments of husband.

Word of the week: Candescent, too much in the shadow of incandescent.

Pithiness of the week: “There is a species of bird which pecks holes in the thickest hollow trees, and it credits its beak with such strength that after each peck it is said to go to the other side of the tree to see whether or not the blow has gone right through it.” - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Daunt

After work Wednesday I headed to the traffic-tangled intersection of Ludgate Hill & Fleet St. to visit Waterstone’s, only to find it had closed. What a let-down. It was a convenient and close to my hotel, not really inspired as bookstores go but serviceable for a poor ex-pat like me.

Thursday my colleagues directed me to Daunt on Cheapside, up behind St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was a stroke of luck that Waterstone’s closed, because Daunt was rich and gorgeous and peppered with fabulous books. 

Near the entrance was a display including NYRB novels and novellas from the Melville House series. And the different thing about Daunt is it organizes much of the store by country. I was skeptical, but it worked. In the France section, for example, they had all the de rigueur French writers, plus novels set in France, plus history and diaries, etc. Ditto Canada, India, Eastern Europe, etc. 

I sat a spell beside Italy browsing the Leonardo Sciascia titles. I’d heard of Sciascia with his tactile last name, but was never drawn to him. Daunt had five of his books, three from both NYRB and Granta. The translations were identical, only the packaging differed. I shelled out the two extra pounds NYRB wanted for The Day of the Owl just to acquire that odd, hot/cool cover. 

(I’ve obviously become a slave to beauty. I almost don’t care if the book is any good. While in London I also bought a dainty glass teapot and loose rosebud tea so I can watch the pale pink buds floating, and smell the heady flowers. The drink is secondary.)

At Daunt, I also bought Penelope Lively’s Heat Wave, JG Ballard’s Crash, Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August, and The Everything Store by Brad Stone, a book about Amazon. The cashier told me he and his colleague had been discussing how much they liked the cover of Crash, and I had to shove The Day of the Owl up in his sweet young face.

Junghans

After surveying my younger (than me) colleagues, I acknowledge that - as suspected - half of them do not wear wristwatches. No, they rely on their cell phones to tell the time. Nor do they use alarm clocks, instead keeping their phones on the nightstand, set for 7 with their favorite ringtone, which changes capriciously. They don’t know what their favorite ringtone is. They don’t worry about batteries running out, or contracts expiring. Their minds are free.

I, on the other hand, am attached to my wristwatch. Sometimes I sleep with it on because it is so handsome. It’s not even self-winding - I must remember to jig the little knob back and forth to wind it. It doesn’t contain any apps; it doesn’t measure the temperature; it doesn’t store phone numbers, or know where the nearest Chinese restaurant is. It doesn’t do anything but tell time. I lash it to my wrist every morning like a sail to a boat, and no wind, no tidal wave, no change of fashion will remove it.

That side

There was a bus and subway strike today so I asked my neighbor if he’d take me to work. Turned out his office moved so he could only drop me at an S-Bahn station on the western edge of the city, where trains from out of town were still running in.

Neither of us knew the slightest about the geography of that part of town and he dropped me at a depot that was admittedly desolate. But I didn’t want to trouble him any more than I already had so I said no worries, I’d figure it out. It was near the station and he said there was a staircase that likely went to the train platforms. 

There was nothing there but wiring, fencing and steel beams and the little abandoned depot. I walked around it and found the staircase, a twisting rusted thing. It was my best possibility. 

The staircase was full of graffiti and pigeon shit and I don’t know why my neighbor’s wild guess that it might go the platform made me think it went to the platform. I got to the top and found myself on a narrow walkway that I soon discovered ran between train tracks, since a train whooped by and nearly took off my coat. I figured I’d keep going. There wasn’t much to go back to. 

It was a hike but finally I saw the end and indeed it seemed to lead to the platform. Unfortunately there was a gate. Nearing the end I hoped the gate was open but didn’t really expect it. I started to think about whether it was climbable, and whether I wanted the people on the platform to watch me with my office clothes and book tote and purse climbing a fence awkwardly and possibly unsuccessfully. Tough shit, I thought. But the latch turned and I made it through. 

On the other side, a sign said “No Public Entry, Access to Train Yard Only,” and even though I came from the no-sign side the first thing I thought of was Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.” 

As I went walking I saw a sign there: 

And on the sign it said "No Trespassing." 

But on the other side it didn't say nothing,

That side was made for you and me.

Colleagues who read

Pat was down-to-earth, frank, and smart. She was friendly but never tried to put a rosy glow on anything. She could turn my “I can’t talk now I have work” into an entertaining, 20-minute, largely one-sided conversation about her Ohio aunt’s miserable driving. A conversation she’s likely forgotten about Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier was for me what clinched our friendship. When she spoke German, her American accent made me afraid of my American accent.

And it was a most remarkable, a most moving glance, as if for a moment a lighthouse had looked at me.
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

Carl was guarded, and wary of co-workers in a “I’m only here to work” kind of way. I respected his space but it was difficult because he was the best-read colleague I ever had. Bolano, Houellebecq, McCarthy, Knausgaard. Despite his apparent ignorance of women writers, Carl was a magnet.

Where in this pukehole can a man get a drink? he said.
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

James was a dork in the best way - stupid jokes, elaborating into absurdity, puns, and intellectual fetishes. He was my mirror image, with a beard. He lent me his copy of the silly Portuguese Irregular Verbs, a must for Germanophiles and Germanophobes. 

Professor Dr Moritz-Maria Von Igelfeld often reflected on how fortunate he was to be exactly who he was, and nobody else. When one paused to think who one might have been had the accident of birth not happened precisely as it did, then, well, one could be quite frankly appalled.
Alexander McCall Smith, Portuguese Irregular Verbs

Frieda was not terrific at her job and I was her boss so there was that. But she was an easy-going and curious person. She was lanky and modest, a great smiler with an engine of a laugh. She got excited about story ideas at first, but wasn't great on the follow-through. We swapped a number of books and never agreed about any of them and I was sorry to see her go.

One benefit of summer was that each day we had more light to read by.
Jeanette Walls, The Glass Castle

Hans and I sat next to each other for years. He was a bubbly snob who drove to work because only riff-raff take public transportation. Most of the office disliked him because he barked, but I enjoyed his good points. His favorite book was Brideshead Revisted, and though I wanted to do him the favor, I never read it. I am grateful to him for introducing me to John Banville, whom I’d not heard of and who has since enriched me immeasurably. 

This is the only way another creature can be known: on the surface, that's where there is depth.
John Banville, The Book of Evidence

Barbara and I are friends in any case and since they moved her desk opposite mine she has noddingly endured many of my book gushes. She lives out of town and thus only ever really shops at the train station, where she found a crappy bookstore that at odd times has some good English remainders. The other day she sent me an email from the shop: “I’m in the bookshop and they have The Luminaries. 5 euros. Should I get two?” Yes.

It is a feature of human nature to give what we most wish to receive.
Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

202

Happy Charles Dickens’ birthday.

I was lucky to add The Pickwick Papers to the asset side of my reading equation last month, a buoyant, rich and very funny book. As Dickens’ first book, you see the seed of some of his later work here: the interminable law suits (Bleak House), the beloved relative in the debtors’ prison (Little Dorrit), the finger-wagging spirits (A Christmas Carol), and more. 

This book was the favorite of both Fernando Pessoa and Giuseppe Lampedusa, and such high-brow admiration made me a bit afraid of what it would be like. I’d also heard there wasn’t much of a story line, so I worried. Would there be a plot? Would there be characters to follow? Wouldn’t it suck if I didn’t like it? 

I worried for naught, for though the narrative is somewhat liquid, running off on various tangents, there is a plot to frame it, and the characters are marvelous, especially --as anyone who’s read it knows -- Sam Weller, Mr. Pickwick’s servant. Mr. Pickwick himself radiates benevolence, and as always with Dickens, the outright melodrama of it all is like a little kindling in your hands. 

Dickens is a great observer, and his scenes and dialogues can be hilarious. Take, for example, Sam Weller’s father’s explanation of the character of pike keepers:

"Wery queer life is a pike-keeper's, sir."

"A what?" said Mr. Pickwick.

"A pike-keeper."

"What do you mean by pike-keeper?" inquired Mr. Peter Magnus.

"The old 'un means a turnpike keeper, gen'l'm'n," observed Mr. Samuel Weller, in explanation.

"Oh," said Mr. Pickwick, "I see. Yes; very curious life. Very uncomfortable."

"They're all on 'em men as has met vith some disappointment in life," said Mr. Weller senior.

"Ay, ay?" said Mr. Pickwick.

"Yes. Consequence of vich, they retires from the world, and shuts themselves up in pikes; partly with the view of being solitary, and partly to rewenge themselves on mankind, by takin' tolls."

"Dear me," said Mr. Pickwick, "I never knew that before."

Hey, me neither! But now I do. 

Like Pessoa, I can now say that a great tragedy of my life is having read The Pickwick Papers, since I can never read it for the first time again.

Midweek

Sunny and cold enough to see your breath this morning. First turtleneck of the year: teal green. Found a moth hole later, not too difficult to conceal. 

Yesterday I forgot my book on my desk when I left work and have now done the work-->home & home-->work commute without it. I know the emptiness of trains, and the anxiety of not knowing what to do with myself. 

“Feel? Let those who read feel,” wrote Fernando Pessoa.

Some Paintings from The Map and the Territory

The Journalist Jean-Pierre Pernaut Chairing an Editorial Meeting: The expressions of Pernaut’s staff, listening to the directives of their charismatic leader with a curious mixture of veneration and disgust, had not been easy to render.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology: The Conversation at Palo Alto: Jobs ... seemed paradoxically an embodiment of austerity, or the Sorge traditionally associated with Protestant capitalism. There was nothing Californian in the way his hand clutched his jaw as if to help him some difficult reflection. 

The Stock Exchange Flotation of Shares in Beate Uhse: Reminiscent of the expressionist period, we are very far from the scathing, caustic treatment of a George Grosz or an Otto Dix...His traders in running shoes and hooded sweatshirts, who acclaim with blasé world-weariness the great German porn businesswoman, are the direct descendants of the suited bourgeois who meet endlessly in the receptions directed by Fritz Lang. 

Ferdinand Desroches, Horse Butcher and Claude Vorilhon, Bar-Tabac Manager: if Martin began by looking at two washed-up professions, it was in no way because he wanted to encourage lamentations on their probable disappearance; it was simply that they were indeed going to disappear soon, and it was important to fix their images on canvas. 

Aimée, Escort Girl: A fulfilled young woman, both sensual and intelligent ... treated with an exceptionally warm palette based on umber, Indian orange, and Naples yellow. 

The Engineer Ferdinand Piech Visiting the Production Workshops at Molsheim: The wide V-shaped formation of the small group of engineers and mechanics following Piech on his visit to the workshops recalled very precisely ... the group of agronomists and middle-poor peasants accompanying President Mao Zedong in a watercolor reproduced in issue 122 of China in Construction, entitled Forward to Irrigated Rice Growing in the Province of Hunan! 

Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the Art Market: The night itself wasn't right: it didn't have that sumptuousness, that mystery one associates with nights on the Arabian Peninsula; he should have used a deep blue, not ultramarine. He was making a truly shitty painting. He seized a palette knife, cut open Damien Hirst's eye, and forced the gash wider; it was a canvas of tight linen fibers, and therefore very tough. 

Michel Houellebecq, Writer: Martin probably chose to portray him in the middle of a universe of paper neither to make a statement about realism in literature nor to bring Houellebecq closer to a formalist position ... Without doubt, more simply, he was taken by a purely plastic fascination with the image of these branching blocks of text, engendering one another like some gigantic octopus.

Same old busyness

The war is scheduled for next week.
It will be a short war, possibly bloodless.
And on the weekend
there will be dancing.

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.

a star nailed the evening

It was a misty, cool day. Just before leaving for work I remembered a colleague asked me to bring her something to read, so I spent an extra 15 minutes choosing some books for her. I'm glad I seized on that short leisure since it turned into an overlong workday. I took her Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre, which Werner Herzog is making into a film, No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, The Bell by Iris Murdoch, one of my all-time favorites, and Skylark by Dezso Kosztolanyi. My colleague was happy, and so was I. Picking out something I thought she’d like was a pleasure, but even better was coming home this evening and finding a short review of my chapbook at the beautiful Escape into Life. Thanks, Kathleen Kirk! I'm glad Kathleen found some of my poems 'hilarious' because - stuck in a foreign country - I often feel I'm laughing at my jokes alone.

nada

I read through the work email that piled in during the couple hours I was tied up. It wasn’t much. Mostly I just hit ‘delete.’

A little later I was trying to recall why I felt buoyed by a vaguely positive feeling. Wasn’t there something good in my email? I went back in and poked around. 

There was nothing bad in my email. That was the good thing in my email.

Moving Sidewalks

Busy two weeks. First I took a Bildungsurlaub, a German institution that allows employees to take an extra week of paid vacation studying something for their personal or professional development. An industry has grown up around it with all kinds of this and that, most with a shiny certificate at the end. It does have to be approved by one’s employer, but they also need a reason to say no. Anyway, long story short, I did a week of online journalism courses - at my mother’s house in NJ. 

I came back and did some coverage of the Frankfurt book fair, which was fun but also time consuming without too much yield. I’ll have to think it over better next time. One thing I did was put together a slide show of the best book covers I saw. Like any reporter I did a lot in advance - in fact I had a list of books I hoped to find, and wrote blurbs in anticipation. But not one of those books was there! I had to start from scratch, navigating acres and acres of space. 

I hope my routine returns to normal now. I did go back to the fair for pleasure. One of the highlights was seeing Richard Ford, whose “Canada” I just finished. I met a woman born in the same hospital as me. I talked to various people and came away with seven great books. Six of those books were handed to me free, including two Fence books, put into my hands by Rebecca Wolff herself. Fence shared a stand for 4-5 other poetry/literary presses, including Red Hen, and the funny detail was that, unlike most other stands, instead of a bottle of water there was a bottle of Jack Daniels on their table.

Temp

As it falters the elderly brain switches into a kind of dreamlife where scraps of memory are repurposed, elaborated and reinvented. Haunting, repressed events and experiences from the past resurface in a different guise, people are assigned new motives or confused with other people, and time springs its linear lock.

My stepfather, who turned 87 this month, increasingly engages in reminiscence, reconstructing the past and floating his versions of it. When I saw him in April he asked if I remembered the summer I temped as a receptionist at his office, and how on one day we put my desk out onto the front lawn so I could work in the sunshine. Try as I do I can't remember this, and it is unlikely it ever happened. A receptionist needs above all to answer the phone, and in those days, before the cordless and cell phone, it would have been impracticable. And yet the power of suggestion is strong and I strain to remember what he seems so sure of. Maybe we got the desk out the front door near the entrance and were happy with that? I am kidding myself.

Now five months later, he continues the story and takes it further. Now the desk is not on the lawn but we've dragged it up into the sparse, hilly woods across the road. With the building on Rt. 206 near Somerville, I'm basically ensconced in the peaceful green of the Duke Estate, which was private in those days. This is an impossible and lovely story I wish were true, only better, not the story of a summer temp but a permanent position, that I could go to such a job every day, typing and answering the phone, and didn't have to leave the woods for the world.

qwerty

The other day I was getting ready to go home and asked myself if I'd learned anything that day and the truth was I hadn't. In the nick of time, a colleague came over and starting telling me about a guy with a fliehendes Kinn, which is literally a fleeing chin. I'd never heard the expression and thought it must be a pronounced chin that looks about to leap off someone's face. Wrong. It's the opposite, what we'd call a weak or receding chin, a chin practically swallowed by the neck.

In my 20 years of "learning German" the fun never seems to end.

One of my recent favorites was Katzentisch, or cat's table, which I learned literally about 2 weeks before I heard of Michael Ondaatje's book, "The Cat's Table." In German the Katzentisch was a table for cats to eat from, but eventually came to mean a separate table away from the main action, including a kids' table like those installed at family holidays. We have a desk at the office for reporters visiting from other bureaus we call the Katzentisch. How I've often longed to sit there, and be transformed.

Anyway, what I learned today has nothing to do with specific words. Rather, I read that the first typewriters placed the letters in alphabetical order, "causing the keys to jam easily." It was unclear why alphabetically-arranged keys would jam. I found out it was because letters that are frequently paired, like S/T, or G/H, were near or neighboring, and the bars would get tangled in the carriage. Thus the letters were rearranged into the QWERTY pattern, and so they remain though few people use typewriters anymore, and those swinging typebars were eventually replaced in electric typewriters by a typeball. Even my Blackberry uses QWERTY, though I don't see the practical purpose anymore. I guess we veterans of typing class refuse to give it up, rather like yards, feet and inches.

Pet shop

long day. after work I dropped in to buy something for stella at the pet shop but the line was long and the lady at the front had many jackrabbit questions so i ducked back to watch the mice trot the wheel, and to stand in front of the aquarium wall for a while, communing with the fishes, and the fish despite their very unpresumptuousness all had long german names, like Schneckenbarsch, and their eyes caught the lamplight, and they swam slow, wondering, teeming, and it was the best thing that ever happened.

Long stretches, and short

Study links cat litter box to increased suicide risk
Study links dust to glacial melting

Study links low IQ to racism, right-wing beliefs
Study links juvenile arthritis to pet store dogs

Study links motivation to finger length
Study links Hitler's genocidal tendencies to playing violent board games

Study links owning a dog to feminine appeal
Study links narcissism and Facebook activity

Study links bestiality to penile cancer
Study links flowers to increased productivity

Study links night shift to breast cancer risk
Study links flaming water to fracking

Study links masturbation to prostrate cancer
Study links rural suicides in China to stress

Study links hair relaxer to early puberty in girls
Study links smoking to hot flashes