Reindeer

Every night the reindeer gaping 

in the basement window. Slenderly. 

Legs flash past the lights, antlers hung 

like candelabra, a matter of faith. 

Their hooves move like spoons. 

Mouthful of mud. Mouthful of Armagnac. 

The sleigh is the absolute rhapsody, the last word in lunging, 

an epée plunging from a white glove.

The reindeer confuse weeping for wind, acorns for bells. 

Since they came, I mourn no more for my horselessness. 

They believe in the least of us. 

They nose unpretentiously through the nativity 

while I unscrew the base of the snow globe. 

They’ve been so patient. 

Now we go in.

the real article

Germany entered a linguistic and religious convulsion after the Family Minister yesterday said it doesn't matter which grammatical article you use for God, in German "der Gott." In an interview she was asked how she would explain to a young girl why people pray to "der Gott," with the masculine article, rather than "die Gott," with the feminine. She said it doesn't matter; we might as well say "das Gott," with the neutral article, or whatever.

First off I'd like to say I didn't learn all the articles for nothing. Do me a favor and stick with a system. I feel like I did when I learned Chinese characters before simplification became popular.

Second, in fact, if we're talking about New Testament Christianity, God is considered the father of Jesus, so even in a politically correct universe it's going to be hard to emasculate Him. If we're talking about some other concept of God, fine, but we'll still need to decide on an article if we're going to discuss that concept in German.

Third, although there sometimes seems to be a correlation between articles and gender identity, it's not consistent. A little girl is "das Mädchen," and a nursing infant is "der Säugling" (literally, "the sucker"). More often word endings determine which article a word gets, like most words ending in -ung are feminine. Or sometimes it’s a question of efficiency, like most rivers outside Europe just go wholesale masculine.

There are a slew of words that defy a non-German's preconceptions of what their articles should be. The moon, for example, is masculine in German, while the sun is feminine. The blackbird is feminine, so is a tin can, hell is feminine, so is a jacket, the air, and physics. Who knows why?

And now we come to my pet peeve among the German article assignments: cutlery. The fork, the knife and the spoon each get one of the three articles, but they are all wrong, starting with the spoon, which is "der Löffel," despite being curvy, beautiful and womblike. The macho, phallic knife is neutral. And then the thorny fork, neither here nor there, gets to be "die Gabel."

Citrus

It snows. It has snown. It snew.

Yesterday we put up the tree, and went easy on the ornaments. This morning my mother arrived from NJ. We spent an hour or so waiting for her to emerge, and passed the time watching other families/friends reunite for the holidays. Exiting the baggage area, the passengers from Miami mixed with those from Rome. They were mostly dark and bejeweled, and it was hard to tell who hailed from where, until they opened their mouths. 

Here at year-end I am cleaning out the stubborn gunk of recent reading experiences with John Banville's Kepler, the mathematician astronomer. Banville's prose works like a tonic, despite the book's being set in muddy, moldy middle Europe. 

* *

Tycho stirred and dealt his moustaches a downward thrust of forefinger and thumb. Kepler with plaintive gaze stooped lower in his chair, as if the yoke of that finger and thumb had descended upon his thin neck. 

“What is your philosophy, sir?” the Dane asked. 

Italian oranges throbbed in a pewter bowl on the table between them. Kepler had not seen oranges before. Blazoned, big with ripeness, they were uncanny in their tense inexorable thereness.

from Kepler

* *

Thanks to Colette Copeland for this linen collage.

Word Thursday

Well I have today off, which gives me plenty of time to think about the word ‘loincloth,’ which came up I don't know how.  

This word weds the filthy with the innocent. Since when has so much illicitness been paired off with such wholesome, well-washed stuff? 

Loins love company and thus ‘loin’ is usually pluralized, as in “the fruit of his loins.” I had a great time looking it up: “The front part of the hindquarters.” Oh.

We lose our puritan shame about ‘loins’ when it comes to sirloin and tenderloin. 

Cloth on the other hand was squeaky clean. Until this word happened.

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.

Mist

Overnight, when the supermarket is closed, a few lights are left on inside. One hangs above the produce, where the all-night mist machine keeps the deep greens and cabbage damp. The mist rolls thin for its scheduled minute, then the machine shuts off, and moisture flutes along the leaves. 

Because the mister is timed, the observer, like the produce, is caught in a cycle of predictable suspense. And it’s a question of time before everything loses its bloom, though it’s long been assumed that lassitude and apathy can be reanimated by ardor. 

Maybe that’s why there’s comfort in this contraption of great care, its airy irrigation, the bulb burning in an automatic Florida. The mist suffuses. The leaves respond with a sheen that fades a little with each suspended sigh. 

In the middle of winter one can’t help but stop to watch the fine mist fume and fall on the vegetables that have stopped growing, lined up in their last, noble poses.

Another reason I might not make it through this book

"The grenade went off, taking out the front of the Chalet, but Richards heard this only vaguely - the noise receding, fading to some impossible distance - as he experienced the sensation, utterly new to him, of being torn in half." The Passage, p. 241

I don't know, but is anybody else having a "vague" problem with this sentence? Is it odd that the feeling of being torn in half might be "new" to most people, not just "to him?" And not just new but "utterly new," as in, gee, I've never even come close to being torn into two pieces before. I mean, for it not to be new, you'd have to have survived being ripped in half once, right? Show me such a person, and I will give this sentence my blessing.

Song of the day: (the name of this song is) New Feeling (and that's what it's about)

Annual Checkup

Am I hard enough?
Am I rough enough?
Am I rich enough?

Tuesday has been rated PG-13

Brief nudity. 2 religious expletives, one bloody hell, regular use of damn.

A man claims to have seen people ripped "limb-from-limb."

A woman chainsmokes, but not the main character.

An undercurrent of aggression and a sense of foreboding but no outright violence. 

Some moaning is heard (off-screen).

One or two alcoholic drinks. 

May be frightening for younger viewers.

List season

I got word yesterday that Birdfeast nominated my poem Lines written in a Japanese noodle shop watching a building being demolished for a Pushcart. Ok, everyone knows that of the thousand kajillion Pushcart nominations that deluge the writerly world every November, approximately 0.00013% result in winners. But that's not the point. It's simply gratifying to have a publication you admire tell you your work is worthwhile, which is all the payback poets ask for.

Otherwhere, list season is upon us. Kids are making Christmas lists. I'm augmenting my wish list at Amazon and Etsy, even though I'm the only soul to see it. With November approaching its close, soon I'll have a list of 30 poems I wrote this month. And best of all, everyone's book lists. Mine almost never includes a book written in the current year. I leave that to the professional reviewers who get paid to spend days reading new books sent to them for free. Well, this year Jessy Randall's wonderful Injecting Dreams into Cows (published 2012!) will be on my list, so I consider my new dues paid.

Truth, be told.

The worst thing about money is I don't have any.

But just to be sure... ok, I have one euro in my change purse. And 50 cents.

Here's another two-euro coin. Ok, I have 3.50.

Yeah, yeah the piddly things.
Ok, I have 3.67 to be exact.

ID

Last night I was walking the dog in the park and a man recognized her and said she's usually out with your husband, the man with the French accent. I laughed, my husband being Italian.

One of the last times I got together with my father he said my hair gets darker every time he sees me. Was I doing something to it?

We all live under an assumed name. There is no deep stamp on us.

When I called our editing desk in London recently, the person on the other line said, oh it's you, I recognized you because of your German accent.

My husband addresses me by the name nearest at hand. Our daughter's, our dog's, his best friend's wife.

In the morning I take a pair of pants out of the drawer and wonder could these be mine.

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.

Friday fashion tip

Today I wore a bandage, which can be very fashionable. The point is to wear it where people can see it, so they wonder where you got it, how much it cost, if maybe they too might not . . . ?

The budget route is to wear a bandaid. In this season, beige is of course less in than white, but it's also sportier and at the same time more subtle. One is also less likely to suffer a so-called "wardrobe malfunction."

Most important in donning either of these accessories is remembering the element of mystery they bestow upon the wearer. Take heed, and decline comment.

Why I didn't 'like' your review

Because you kept saying how much the author was like you, which I was not interested in.

Because you wrote “Scarlett” when you compared the book to The Scarlet Letter. 

Because you wrote things like “gotta” and “gonna” instead of the proper words. 

Because you said “the author sits at his keyboard like a pianist about to tackle a symphony,” or some jackass thing like that. 

Because you said “utter uniqueness.” 

I didn’t read your review because your avatar picture showed you (?) breastfeeding your baby. 

Because you were “ready to kill” one of the characters. 

Because you forgot an apostrophe in the first sentence. 

Because you said this book was maybe not the wonderful gift to the world many people think it is when it is so.

Tactile Obituaries

"Like Sherlock Holmes, Heydrich plays the violin. (He plays it better than does the fictional detective, however.) Also like Sherlock Holmes, he conducts criminal inquiries. Except that where Holmes seeks the truth, Heydrich just makes it up." - Laurent Binet, HHhH

Yesterday was the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the day/night the nazis incited people in Germany to vandalize and burn Jewish shops and synagogues, and to attack Jews. The nazis were absolute maniacs, really. 

I wouldn’t have remembered the date (in fact I forgot) except this morning we went to take some photos of Frankfurt’s ‘Stolpersteine,’ and found a grouping with melted wax all around, and realized someone must have burned candles there yesterday in memory. Stolpersteine, which literally means stumbling stones, are somber, subtle plaques laid in sidewalks in front of houses of Jews who met their deaths at nazi hands. They’re tactile obituaries. You can see my small album of them here. 

As long as we’re on the topic, I finished the non-fiction novel HHhH and thought it was terrific. It’s hard to recommend to just anyone because it’s best to be a little familiar with the figure of Reinhard Heydrich and his assassination to appreciate. But even Wikipedia could equip a reader sufficiently. 

The story is horrible and serious, but the narrator/author navigates you through with a light touch. Believe me, I loved the book, but that would be my one complaint - while most of the time it worked well, the author occasionally erred on the side of the flip. 

As meta-fiction the author is very in the book, which pretty much goes ‘here’s this event I’ve been obsessed with my whole life, which happened in my favorite country on earth, and the two or three guys who are my heroes, who set off to kill Heydrich, the devil incarnate, and how they succeed, and it’s all worth it despite the horrendous consequences, and I’m going to try to tell the story while being extremely self-conscious about it.’ 

It’s surely hard to find balance with the meta-fiction approach, but there were times I thought he hit the wrong note. Like he didn’t know when to stop yapping. Anyway, I’ve probably just turned any potential readers off to this book. Oh well, it was great, and I’m happy to keep it all to myself anyway.

World you want

Four years ago a good friend came over in the evening and we planned to stay up all night watching the election. By 11 pm, it was only 2 pm in California, and with every half hour our struggle to stay awake lost more drive, and we were none the wiser on the election's outcome. This time I'm going to bed on time, and hoping for the best. A German colleague told me yesterday it really doesn't matter who's president because the president's power is quite limited, but even if that were true, it is important to vote if only to say what kind of world you want to have. 

Anyway, happy November. I insanely joined in the poem-a-day writing mania. So far my five poems have been -

Postcard to a Nemesis / Fitting Room Mirror / Tracks / Scant Snow / Salem

Today I'm shooting for a poem about tea, like one of my Tea Leaves fragments, some of which are in my chapbook. 

Oolong

On the sill, rain rubs the spoons.

It’s been raining for years

all afternoon.

Hache

Having just finished the book about the Heydrich assassination, I started HHhH, a "nonfiction novel" about the same thing, which so begins fabulously it reminds you why people write, why people read, and why some people bother to live at all.

In English, of course, the title is pronounced 'aitch aitch aitch aitch.' In German, however, it's 'ha ha ha ha.'

I find that kind of eerie.

The Hs stand for 'Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich,' meaning 'Himmler's brain is named Heydrich.'

at dawn how much i hate myself

It's not raining where I am. It's not snowing where I am. There's little wind and it's dark, and has gotten warmer since this morning, when frost encased the park I smashed through. In the book I'm reading I am still waiting for Heydrich to be killed (see previous post) but on the train home I got to the chapter called "Assassination," so hey it can't be long now. Also just around the corner is November, my birth month, with its own dark weather.

The November issue of Thrush came out today, and I have three poems in it, along with a number of fellow poets, including Margaret Bashaar and Sandy Longhorn. The first of my poems, Palisades, is a sea poem. The second, Ceraunoscope, is a self-hate poem, and the third, Self-Portrait with Lava Lamp, is exactly that. 

I'm off now to walk the dog, who can hardly wait.

Passive Aggressive Anticipatory Schadenfreude Post

I’m reading a book about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the blond SS monster with his hook nose and disturbingly feminine hips, who strove to be one of Hitler’s inner circle, if not Hitler himself, and maneuvered to become the Führer of Czechoslovakia, plotting the deaths of many, mass deaths and slavery, and squelching the culture and national identity, and this reading is a prelude to reading another book about the same assassination, meta-fictionalized (HHhH, it’s called), that I picked up at the book fair, and the more I read about the vanity and self-promotion and political posturing, the bragging, the putdowns, the boasts and merciless determination the more I realize if you want prestige it is best to find a way to get invited to events attended by those with power and to continually TALK ABOUT YOURSELF IN CAPITAL LETTERS & bring the conversation back to your supposed accomplishments and ambitions whenever possible, and I think of some people I have known, and I look forward to (twice experiencing through reading) Heydrich’s assassination.

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.

Believers

As a nonbeliever, I never wanted to have a Thai massage but somehow there I was. The room was darkened and smelled of warm peppermint. I was told to remove my clothes and put on a pair of baggy knee-length pants that, in my Puritan discomfort, I had to make fun of alone. I lay down on the massage table, heated from beneath. A lady no bigger than a cat came in and crouched beside me. I was belly-down and as good as blind. I said the woman was small but did I mention she had two enormous hands and something like 16 or 17 fingers? And she was not a cat but a kind of demon weaver. My skeleton was her loom, my muscles threads, and she went to work to make my backside into an unimaginable tapestry.

Mica

The eyelid browses down 

like a tunnel wall collapsing 

in a mudslide and all 

the automobiles and spitfire drivers 

slam softly into 

the crucified for slumber’s sake one man 

no other way around this 

brown blur with black in it 

litter of nickels, 

and dimes

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.

What we can learn from machines

I fought with a machine today. It was the automatic door of a small shuttlebus taking visitors around the Frankfurt Book Fair.

It was raining gently and crystal and the air was cool October. I was wet and tired.

I’ve known many ferocious machines in my life, better left unchallenged. My fight with the shuttlebus door was more like wrestling a child. I knew it wasn’t going to hurt me; I felt the give in its shoulder.

The door resisted for a second, then understood, and let me inside.

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.

Sleep struggle

I thought "I am a rippled strip of bacon, undercooked."

I thought, "there are two small dogs yapping in my kneecaps."

When I pressed the alarm clock button to light the clock face and see the time I noticed how soothing the pattern of the adjacent tissue box was.

A few minutes later I pushed the button to figure out why.

(Because the pattern of leaves is very like decorative Matisse.)

I thought about Abraham Lincoln's melancholy.

I thought about how it's nearly impossible to find a book concerning Abraham Lincoln that doesn't include his picture on the cover, or at least his silhouette. Or hat. 

I thought, "those are pearls that were his eyes?"

I thought about trichinosis, more the word than the disease.

I thought I would never remember some of the things I thought so I got up to write them down.

I wondered if Happiness really is the best Revenge.

Haven

I spent $78.30 on books today at Bookhaven, my favorite used book store. I like used book stores because even though I go with a list, something great always jumps out at me, or something apparently great since I don’t know until I’ve read it. I found books from my list that made the last cut. I found books on my list that went to the 'no' pile (this time), like Samuel Beckett’s I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On. I found books I didn’t know I wanted but it turned out I did. Of course some books on my list weren’t there, like Liz Jensen’s Ark Baby and Richard Ford’s Canada, which, yes, I left behind in Frankfurt. Here’s what I left the bookstore with:

Old Filth by Jane Gardam. This has been on my list a long time, and last trip I didn’t find it at the Strand in NYC. This is a novel about an 80-year old character Sir Edward Feathers, nicknamed Old Filth, Filth being an acronym for Failed in London Try Hong Kong. I must admit part of the charm of this book is the title.

The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek. I also looked for this at the Strand last trip but no dice, so I left with Wonderful Wonderful Times instead, which was intense. This is about a piano teacher who becomes entangled in crazy sexual relations with a student. I don’t hope everyone dies at the end but they probably do.

The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright. Another one from the list. About Al-Qaeda in the run-up to 9/11. Won the Pulitzer for non-fiction.

Recyclopedia by Harryette Mullen. Poetry. Not on the list, just found it on the shelf and browsing proved promising so voila.

In a Landscape of Having to Repeat by Martha Ronk. Ditto above. Never heard of her until today.

Little, Big by John Crowley. From the list. Off the beaten track. Has the potential to disappoint. Fantasy fiction. Here’s hoping.

What a Carve-Up! by Jonathan Coe. From the list. I’ve heard this political novel is very funny. I need that.

Plainsong by Kent Haruf. From the list. I’ve seen some rave reviews. It has the potential to be a goody-two-shoes community novel but maybe that’s ok?

Morte D’Urban by J.F. Powers. Another from the list that I wanted because of the strength of various reviews. It’s a comic novel about a priest, but the priesthood is comic to begin with. Won the National Book Award for fiction the year I was born.

The Stories of J.F. Powers. Not from the list, just saw it, loved the cover, decided I haven’t done enough stories this year, paid my money and left.

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.

long days

The best thing about my mother's apartment is the setting, butt-up against a small stretch of woods. The deer come to the edge with their gestures of the feminine. The crickets are so many they seem to roar. In my jetlag I'm awake before dawn. I sit at the back window and have this all to myself, this enormous throbbing that has no end-point or goal.
*
A lot of experiences find no real end.
*
As a small child my best friend was the daughter of my mother's friend Louise. We spent days together, slept in cribs and cots together, tumbled around in the backseats in the days before car seats. When her family moved to Pennsylvania I was sure she would remain my dearest friend. But I saw her only once or twice again, and she'd begun a separate life, playing sports I didn't play, making friends with strangers, and my feelings of affection for her became an onus and embarrassment I still can feel.
*
We are much more comfortable with the 'clean break,' not the ragged thread that seems to disappear only to stitch back up into the fabric somewhere far off.
*
My mother mentions the time your sister went to live with your father. When was this, I say, because she is making it up, or exaggerating. When she was about 15. I don't remember that, I say. That must have lasted all of three days. It was a long three days, my mother says.

Fall reading

At the turn to autumn I finished Elfriede Jelinek’s Wonderful Wonderful Times and began Richard Ford’s Canada. You couldn’t find two more different worlds, though they take place at nearly the same time in history.

Set in post-war Austria, what struck me about Jelinek’s book was the down-spiraling dynamic and the feeling no one's in control. As if there weren't even a narrator. The manic title, Wonderful Wonderful Times, with its exaggeration and sarcasm, heightens that impression. (The German title is the more sober Die Ausgesperrten, meaning 'the outsiders,' or 'the barred,' and is in part a reference to Camus' The Stranger, alluded to many times.) 

Canada is controlled. The past tense helps. The narrator lets you know ahead of time what is going to happen. He is sane. He establishes his trustworthiness. He downplays and explains, or at least seeks explanation. 

Jelinek does none of that. Disgust, hopelessness, delusion all tumble across the pages. And despite the lack of humanity, things still turned out worse than I expected! (Thank you, realism.) A good book to end a summer of rain, atomic sunshine and temperature swings.

I got interested in Canada after some online friends read it. Years ago I enjoyed Independence Day, but decided Ford was another white American suburban guy I didn’t need to do more of. Then about 5 years ago I read a short story of his that was so fabulous I felt like a snake that shed its skin. 

I didn’t have a compelling reason to read Canada now except a colleague offered to lend me her copy. Then I noticed Ford would read in Frankfurt in October so my colleague and I got a bit excited and bought tickets and I knew I had to read it before that, and I knew I was going to the states for a week any minute now and I really didn’t want to lug the book back and forth (since it’s my colleague’s). 

I gave up today on finishing before I leave. I will be lugging it. Over Canada.

 * *

From a Guardian interview:
In the book, Canada becomes a sort of promised land. There is a line: "Canada was better than America and everyone knew that - except Americans." Is that how it feels to you?
"I never had much conceptual idea of Canada being better. But whenever I go there, I feel this fierce sense of American exigence just relent. America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummelled by other people's rights and their sense of patriotism. So the American's experience of going to Canada, or at least my experience, is that you throw all that clamour off. Which is a relief sometimes."

Pop quiz for autumn

Is it okay to water plants with seltzer?

What smells better - lavender or bacon? 

Implications aside, do you like watching forest fires? 

What is a good book to read in autumn? 

Earth, wind, fire, water. What’s your suggestion for a fifth element? 

What do you hate about umbrellas?

The home country

The home country was getting comfortable on the couch.

After the commercials, it switched to the recliner because of the end table for its drink. 

“What’s for dinner?,” the home country wanted to know. 

“Sauerbraten mit Bratkartoffeln,” I said, wearing my irritable checked apron. 

There was no acknowledgement. The home country gets pretty wrapped up in its shows. 

“I’m thinking of taking tomorrow off,” it yelled into the kitchen. “Or maybe just calling in and pretending to be sick. Whaddya think?”

Groan, I intoned into the oven. 

The home country had no concept of “fair warning.” It just blurted out decisions and ideas and expected the world to be happy about it.

Q: Describe what you publish in 25 words or less

A: Tweetable humanity.

Joanne Merriam, Editor of 7x20 (Seven By Twenty)

A: words and sometimes dots
Shannon Peil, Editor of amphibi.us 

A: crushing, blissful snark 

Andrew Toskin, Arts & Letters director of Autumn Letters

A: Literary mutinies 

Laura Roberts, Editor Black Heart Magazine

A: Odd & cranky writing 

Frederick Barthelme, Editor of Blip Magazine

A: Things that boil nerves. 

Sebastian, Editor-in-Chief of The Boiler

A: Spiny, sharp & succulent. 

Sara Rauch, Founder & Editor of Cactus Heart 

A: Top shelf stuff, 90 proof 

Russell Streur, Barkeep of The Camel Saloon 

A: Almost dark/almost light. 

Lisa Marie Basile, Caper Literary Journal

A: Cleanliness and craft 

Anthony Blake, Executive Editor of A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

A: Philosophical time bombs
Christine Gosnay, Editor of The Cossack Review 

A: Poems, Feral & True
Marc Beaudin, poetry editor of CounterPunch Poets' Basement

A: Noir coloratura letters
Adam Henry Carrière, Publisher/Editor of Danse Macabre

A: soul balm
Catherine Keefe, Managing Editor dirtcakes

A: Writing that pops
Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Editor Eleven Eleven

A: A literary peepshow.
Travis A. Everett, Founding editor of escarp

A: eggs cracking open
Mel Bosworth, Managing Editor of Flash Fire 500

A: Waffle-rocking Lit
Danny Goodman, Editor-in-Chief of fwriction : review

A: Pure, shiny awesomeness
Barrett Bowlin, Associate Editor of Harpur Palate

A: Idle hands plus pencils.
Mike Miller, Editor-in-Chief of High Coup Journal

A: Grit, blossoms & sparks.
Chris Hutchcroft, Editor of Misjudge Your Limits

A: dead things, live things
Michael Quinti, Editor-in-Chief of MOLT

A: Rich sound, wild skill
C.J. Sage, Editor-in-chief of The National Poetry Review

A: Love/Death/Evil
Rusty Barnes, Editor of Night Train

A: Crapht.
Editor of NOTHE, Editor of NOTHE

A: Bite and Fizzy-Pop
Jack Little, The Ofi Press Online Literary Magazine

A: fine words on real paper
Greg Lamer and Robin Sontheimer, Rabbit Catastrophe Review

A: Brevity. Word Daggers.
Joseph A. W. Quintela, Editor of Short, Fast, and Deadly

A: Trapdoors to inner worlds
Carli Castellani, Artistic Director of Status Hat Artzine

A: Antinews
Khakjaan Wessington, Supreme Overlord of Toylit

20-minute story

This takes 20 minutes, a long time on the internet, but is very enjoyable and engaging, especially if you've read Paul Bowles' "The Sheltering Sky." I read it last year and admired but also hated it, and I appreciated this storyteller, Edgar Oliver, recounting his trip to Morocco to Paul Bowles' bedside.

Royal Pain

Well, it's news to me but it's National Read a Book Day. That makes it a good opportunity to mention how much I'm enjoying Bring Up the Bodies, the sequel to Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I think most people know these are novels about Thomas Cromwell, Chief Everything to Henry the VIII. I have never read much about English royalty, but these are great, and I found the prose a good antidote to much of the overwritten, stylish stuff I read this summer. My only complaint is I'm reading a borrowed copy and have to slap my hand when I pick up a pen to mark something or underline. 

Other good books I read this summer were David Markson's Vanishing Point and David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. With the latter I did complain about the writing sometimes, though, despite the strength of the story. I mean you must take offense at sentences like, “Warm snowflakes settle over Orito’s skin, whispering as they melt.” You must. 

When I bought my computer, it came with a free Kindle app. I've been loading that up with freebies, I admit, but at the same time nothing compares to an actual book, and besides the intimate relationship the reader can have with each, real books are the best way to make a room inviting and interesting. Whether they're lined up nicely on shelves, or stacked at the edge of a table, or traveling from room to bedside, or whatever. Just like I sometimes need a pen in my hand to think with, I need a book in the room to stave off an empty panic. 

Inebriate

It was September, cool oozing from the wildflowers.

To be kind, you wished the leaves would fall in water. 

A little absinthe, and I felt like one of those roses revived with aspirin. 

***

thanks to Fleurografie for the two-headed bird.

Delta of Venus

Our neighbors were an older couple, Herr and Frau Hierse. He had Parkinsons and a troop of carepeople. She was stalwart and fit and made sure he got out every day. At first he could walk, slowly and with help. Then with help, and shuffling with a cane. Then with a caretaker on each arm, his wife supervising. Finally in a wheelchair. Through the wall, I heard how well she played piano. She was kind to our kids. One day over the fence she told me they hadn’t had children because she found out after they married that she had kidney problems and needed dialysis. The shocker came when she died of an aneurism, and he was left with the carepeople, and no longer came outside. Eventually he moved to a nursing home and a year ago he died, leaving no heirs. The house stood empty until this week when all the furniture, rugs, lamps and knick-knacks found themselves on the curb, to be picked through by scavengers. I was one. I found a box of books, and learned more about them in a half hour than in 8 years of being their neighbor.

Akimbo

I have two poems up at A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. The first is "Thrall," a poem that languished in my unfinished file for a long time. To end it, I changed the word in the first line that was irksome and replaced it with "thrall," and made that the title.

The second is "Bud," which in contrast is a poem I wrote quickly and was happy with early on. I  was glad, too, because I'm not really known for nature poems. OK, I'm not really known. Useful expression, though, and democratic, and as fitting for an artist known for her brush stroke as for a neighbor known for his philandering.

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.

Lodgings to remember

A tidy room in the soot and collapsing labyrinth of Naples where I sang “On the Street Where You Live” in the marble bathroom because I was infatuated.

A powdery flowery hotel room in Paris with two double beds and a TV on the bureau where my friend Carle and I watched Saddam Hussein crawl out of his hole.

The Silver Saddle motel in Santa Fe where I stayed twice - first on my maiden voyage to NM where I met a rancher from Telluride who asked to come in, and second with my friend Amy on a road trip from eastern Kansas to Taos.

The Hotel Manin in Milan where I lived with my husband and two toddlers for six weeks in utter misery while we looked for permanent quarters.

Stranded in Japan in the smallest room imaginable where you could touch the opposite walls with your arms outstretched and the only place to keep your suitcase was with you on the bed.

In Vienna in an attic room of the Hotel Regina, a dim room like a maid’s quarters with a slanted roof but very pleasant in the grey rain all quilted and muffled and far away.

The beautiful Hotel Bad Schachen on Lake Constance where I was for work, unfortunately. I attempted writing a poem, which failed, and didn’t try again for more than 10 years. 

The Beijing dormitory I had to walk 3-4 miles to get to in the bitter cold in shoes too small in a relationship of unreciprocated love which my superhuman efforts failed to change. 

The Presidential Suite of the Watergate Hotel where due to a hotel flub we were upgraded to expansive living quarters and a panoramic view and what struck me most at the time (I was 11 or 12) was the phone installed next to the toilet. 

A motel on the Canadian border on the way to Montreal where I stayed with a boyfriend I didn’t love anymore and indeed he too appeared very weary.

Get your kicks on Autobahn 6

Saxony was a surprisingly interesting place to visit. We stayed in an area called “Saxon Switzerland,” which is hilly and full of impressive rock structures, as well as the Elbe river, which famously flooded ten years ago. We saw some great sites I didn’t know existed, including the Bastei and the Königstein Fortress.

I cock an eyebrow whenever someplace claims the fame of another, e.g. “the Florence of the north” (Dresden), or “Little Venice” (London has one, so does Sweden, not to mention the cities of Treviso, Chiogga, Vrobska, etc.), or the personally painful “Mainhattan,” the New York-wannabe nickname for Frankfurt (am Main). It’s lame to rely on resemblance to make a place sound worthwhile. Without exception, the area making the claim is not going to measure up. 

Why the area we visited is called Saxon Switzerland I do not know, and not to ruin the experience I will not inquire further. I’ve been to Switzerland. It’s mountainous! Stunning! Expensive! And riddled with kitsch.

Homebodies

Having happily made it to Saxony, largely offline, I missed the chance to say my chapbook, "Homebodies," was out at the very moment it happened.

Yup, it's out, and at $5 very inexpensive for 20-something poems, including 'Steam' and 'Ambien,' and prose poems about wines, teas and Monopoly tokens. There is also a ghazal and a homage to Francis Ponge.

I consider myself a homebody, something I was convinced of again today when I returned from a short vacation and was relieved to find I had not been robbed of my books or computer or silverware! Like police homicide outlines, all the crap I left on the floor was just where I left it, and the papers lying around because I don't know where they should go were still lying around, thank God. 

Anyway, the little totems and other subjects of this chapbook revolve around the home, whether it's a horror of a toothbrush standing up in its cup, or the transformation promised by the toaster. You can order it here from Hyacinth Girl Press.

The cover art is by a Chattanooga-based collagist named Hollie Chastain. 

vacation bookbag

People Are Tiny in Pictures of China - Cynthia Arrieu-King
Selected Poems - WS Merwin
The Ninth Life of Louis Drax - Liz Jensen
The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa
A Visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan
Charles Dickens - Jane Smiley
What Narcissism Means to Me - Tony Hoagland
Atlantis - Mark Doty
Foe - JM Coetzee
The Wind Blows through the Doors of my Heart - Deborah Digges
One Hundred Poems from the Chinese - Kenneth Rexroth (ed.)

Elastic language

Who knows if we’ll make it to Dresden. First Carlo broke his arm, so he can’t drive. Then one of the friends we’re going with offered to drive our car. Then the doctor wanted Carlo to stick around for physical therapy, which he was able to delay. Then our car ended up unrepaired in a locked lot after the mechanic came home to find his wife dead, and himself, not unexpectedly, incapacitated. 

Will we, in 2-3 days time, get our car repaired? Or will we pay for a vacation rental we never see? I’m considering asking the hospital to induce me into a coma for a week instead. I might come out more refreshed. 

On the upside, I have some dynamic poems out today in the new issue of Glasschord. Dynamic because that’s the theme of the issue, and submissions were in some way supposed to embody “dynamics.” I have a prose poem about the piano called Counterpoint, and two poems about the imaginary typefaces Cascade and Abbing. The poems are going places, even if I’m not.

If you are a writer or artist, check out the themes of Glasschord’s upcoming issues - funk, for example, and commerce. The thing about themes is thinking “outside the box.” Still, the guidelines leave plenty of room: 

FUNK 1) a style of music perfected by James Brown 2) a dejected or fearful mood 3) a musty, overwhelming odor of organic origin 4) that sweet that nasty that gushy stuff