from the homeward commute

Coming home on the crowded UBahn I am glad to find a seat. My knees, if I didn’t turn them slightly, would touch those of the woman across from me. She has firm legs, but lined with blue veins and blotchy. Over them she has put on a pair of low-sheen mustard-colored hose. This is really unattractive, but also fascinating, and I realize it's because clad this way those legs resemble my beloved Stilton cheese.

Bubbles

I recently finished a John Banville’s Kepler, and yesterday began The Infinities, which is first off remarkable for its beautiful deep eggshell blue cover. I’ve read some reviews by readers who find Banville pretentious (because of his vocabulary? because there are Greek gods hovering in the narrative?) but I think he’s marvelous. Take this passage, about a boy getting a clay pipe that blows bubbles: 

"At first he could not get the hang of it then suddenly did. The bubbles hesitated on the rim of the pipe-bowl, wobbling flabbily, then broke free and floated sedately away. They seemed to be rotating inside themselves, as if the top was always too heavy, and the iridescent surplus kept cascading down the sides. Sometimes two of them stuck together and formed a fat, trembling shape something like an hourglass only squatter. They were made of an unearthly substance, a transparent quicksilver, impossibly fine and volatile, rainbow-hued. They popped against his skin like wet, cold kisses."

Rioja

So glad it's Friday.
The Spanish wine I like was on sale.
I picked up two chunks of my favorite cheeses (Fontina & Stilton).
The next episode of Sherlock awaits.
And I'm very happy to share this review of Homebodies from The Rumpus.
AND I don't have weekend duty...

Word Thursday

The 2012 word of the year in America was hashtag, which is a good word in terms of sound and suggestion, even though what it denotes is a yawner. Soundwise, with its two tight /ae/s, it is like a dentist asking you to open wide, twice. In terms of meaning, hash evokes aromatic resins and potato products, while tag suggests it's for sale, used. Still, the hashtag itself, referring to the # symbol used on twitter posts, is kind of a sad comment as word of the year, I think. To use two more /ae/s, #flashinthepan.

Germany also had a word of the year: Rettungsroutine. Like hashtag, it’s a compound word consisting of Rettung, or rescue, and Routine, the same in English. Specifically it means going through the never-ending motions of rescuing the eurozone with summits, pep talks, bailout money, and warnings about austerity. 

Germany also had an “unword” of the year, which a jury of linguists chooses as the year’s worst or most unfortunate word. In 2012 it was Opferabo. Once again, it’s a compound word. (I guess it’s tough to get attention as a free-standing word anymore.) Opferabo literally means “victim subscription,” or “subscription to victimization.” It started with a weatherman who was accused of rape, who said that in society women enjoyed a sort of “victimization coupon,” their image as perennial victims being an ace up their sleeve that allows them to accuse men of abuse. 

The jury chose Opferabo as the eye-rolling word of the year because it stereotypes women as sly users trying to take advantage of a perceived disadvantage, while ignoring the fact that only a small percentage of women who are sexually abused or raped ever actually report it.

Walk on by

If it were my inauguration, Dionne Warwick would be singing Burt Bacharach. Actually singing, whether she felt like it or not. And my inaugural poet would be Charles Simic, who could just read from The World Does Not End. No need to write some pathetic occasional poem. The swearing-in would include plenty of swearing and my speech would not dream of tedium. I would wear a Jil Sander dress and modest heels when it was over I’d throw fateful word confetti from the podium and put a poster of myself up in my room.

Among the Familiars of Wittgenstein's Mistress

Artemisia Gentileschi, who was not taught to read or write.

Giotto, because he could draw a perfect circle, or at least it is harmless to think he could. 

Michelangelo, who did not wash and was thus probably hard to sit close to, though Kate later thinks this harsh and claims she would shake his hand. 

Anna Akhmatova, who is assigned a role in Anna Karenina. 

Marina Tsvetayeva, who kills herself. 

John Ruskin, who recoils upon discovering his wife (read: women) has pubic hair. 

Brahms, who may or may not have carried candy in his pockets to give to children, of which he had none of his own. 

Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, most famous for being from Mexico, where Kate’s son Simon/Lucien died. 

Karen Silkwood, poor Karen Silkwood. 

Samuel Butler, who possibly wrote The Way of All Meat. 

Clytemnestra, who kills her husband, but of course after he had killed their daughter to raise wind to fill the warships’ sails. That is, Clytemnestra murders Agamemnon, but understandably so. 

Beethoven, who could not do children’s arithmetic. 

Wilhelm de Kooning, who is Dutch, like Rembrandt and Spinoza, who may or may not run into each other at the pharmacist’s shop. 

Nietzsche, who cries upon seeing a horse being beaten. 

J.M.W. Turner, who has himself tied to a ship’s mast so he can experience a storm from that perspective. 

Odysseus, who does the same for a different reason. 

Sappho, whose poems were shredded to stuff mummies. 

T.E. Shaw and Lawrence of Arabia, who are never seen together in one place. 

Winston Churchill, who has an English name. 

Vincent Van Gogh, who tries to reform a prostitute. 

Bruegel, who depicts snow in one of his paintings, specifically, a snowball fight.

Bertrand Russell, whose grandfather met George Washington.

Softening

Cold without snow is like nakedness without nostalgia.

Just the unmitigated shock of freeze/age without anything to dress it up.

You go outdoors/into the mirror and think, I'm not coming here again until someone lends me a fluffy coat!

Some people say snow absorbs some of the cold. I think it just makes it easier to bear.

I am glad to have plentiful flurries this morning, a consolation amid minus temperatures and Germany's eternal grey.

**

With a picture from summer: here is an interview with me on chapbookery conducted by Laura Madeleine Wiseman.

The big turn-on

Snow makes excellent natural lighting. Every night I walk my darkbrown dog into the park nearby, and even on the open field she is concealed by the dark. But the weather turned a few days ago and we were lucky to get plentiful snow. Even if there's no moon or stars, the snow lights everything from the bottom up and the little landscape and its shapes are easier to make out - the hedges, the basketball net, the swings and trees. And of course the dog is easier to find. And she loves snow.

I thought I remembered a Hawthorne story where light shines from below a town square (?), creating an ominous atmosphere. But the snowlight isn't ominous, just pretty, and reveals everything is where it's supposed to be.

The Next Big Thing, or small

As I mentioned last post, Kathleen Kirk tagged me to write about The Next Big Thing, a questionnaire for writers on a project or book.

What is your working title of your book /story/project? 

Inksuite 

Where did the idea come from for the book? 

In general, from reading. I’ve written a number of poems about books and reading, and a couple years ago when I was reading a stiff hardbound copy of Madame Bovary (?) or The Line of Beauty (?), it occurred to me that the “Note on the Type” at the end of the book was longer than the author’s thumbnail biography, and more interesting. I loved that – it was so full of LORE. So I set out to write some poems on imaginary typefaces, too. 

What genre does your book fall under? 

Bibliophilic poetry. 

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? 

Donald Sutherland would play the imaginary typographer Robert Crèvecoeur. The nuns in Sognidhia would be played by Winona Ryder, Keira Knightly and Natalie Portman, who all resemble each other. Daniel Craig would make a good Thomas Hardy. 

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? 

It will be published by Dancing Girl Press this year.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript? 

It was never written as a manuscript. It came together piece by piece with separate poems over years. Some of them were published in 2007, maybe 2006. A couple others were published this month. 

What other books/poems would you compare this story to within your genre? 

Nothing comes to me immediately, but some other poems on books would be - 

“I Was Sitting” by Juan Ramón Jiménez 

"Every Morning after Killing Thousands of Angels" by Tamura Ryuichi

“He ate and drank the precious words” by Emily Dickinson

“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” by John Keats 

Who or what inspired you to write this book? 

I had a number of poems mentioning books or a specific book or writer, and then I got into the typography poems. I also was writing a poem called Inksleep, which is still under construction, and the word Inksuite came into my head and it seemed too good a word to waste. 

Other than that, the poems’ inspirations include the Russian gulag, Wallace Stevens, Chinese cabbage, Roget’s Thesaurus, Jude the Obscure.

What else about your book might pique the reader's interest? 

There will be a killer collage by Emmanuel Polanco on the cover. 

Links to some of the poems: 

Book of Hours Ghazal 

Bedside Books  

Typeface #54 & Typeface #68 

Tagged by: Kathleen Kirk 

Tagged by me but not obliged to follow through: Charmi Keranan 

Laura E. Davis

I was supposed to tag five people, but being too busy for so much admin, I couldn't. So, instead, here are some other writers tagged in this project: 

Donna Vorreyer 
Margaret Bashaar 

Cynthia Reeser

lines in the cold

Two of my poems are up at The Bakery. Today’s is Fitting Room Mirror, and is about just that, and yesterday’s was Lines Written in the Cold, which is appropriate because it is ice-crashy cold here. I hope you will read them. 

I’ve been tagged by Kathleen Kirk to do the blog meme The Next Big Thing about a project I'm at work on, which I’ll put up later this week. You can read about Kathleen's project here. I’m supposed to tag five folks, but as an underachiever, I will have an even lower single digit.

Verfremdung

Sometimes after a poem is published I get the feeling film actors describe about being uncomfortable watching their own performances. It that has little to do with whether or not the poem/performance succeeds, but with being confronted with yourself, and knowing the meeting is taking place in public. This is especially true if I've recorded the poem. Who ever really enjoyed the sound of their own voice?

Editors seem to have awoken from their holiday slumber. In the past two days, I've had a poem accepted by Fugue, two others accepted by The Bakery, and a rejection from Agni. My holiday slumber, on the other hand, continues. But for those who were worried, my calendar arrived. 

Meanwhile I have a short serial prose poem up at Saudade called "Re-Reading Guide to Hardy." I'm a Thomas Hardy fan, and Jude the Obscure is my favorite.

1854

It's supposedly Sherlock Holmes's birthday, who, like Jesus, was a Capricorn.

I don't know who arrived at this how. 

I don't know if there's a party to be had somewhere serving cocaine and opium. 

I take that back. Vice is hardly Holmes's defining characteristic. (NB: Capricorn's weakness is "too much work and not enough play.") 

My husband bought the complete Jeremy Brett series for Christmas, which is my absolute favorite. We've been watching an episode here and there since the holidays. Sometimes the overacting is quite funny, like the fisticuffs in "The Solitary Cyclist." The one we saw last night, "The Crooked Man," was a disappointment because Holmes does not figure out one thing. Rather all is explained to him. That was a rip-off, Holmes-wise.

I know the expression "Elementary" is Holmes's most famous linguistic legacy. I don't add "my dear Watson" because last night Watson said it to Holmes, rather sarcastically. But the best and most sarcastic expression born of Holmes is "No shit, Sherlock." Of course it is not uttered in any of the stories, yet even people who have never read (or seen) a Holmes story know and use it. I have even heard a German colleague interject it, in English, into a conversation in German, filling me with secret literary delight.

the year arrives like a shipwreck

Once again the year began with January, and it did even though the calendar I ordered has not yet arrived to reassure me.
For days I have suffered the nuisance of fireworks and firecrackers and the voluminous trash they abandon.
As if a shipwreck's ruins were strewn far from sea.
But the noise is tapering off so I feel we must have made some headway into the month.
Once again the year began with worrying. My daughter called with some news that I would have liked to discuss further, but I took the call on a colleague's phone and could not pursue it. Back at my desk I decided I might be making too much of it. Which may be true. Yet I was soon besieged with the worry that I wasn't worrying enough, which is a kind of meta-worrying. I put aside the problem and focused on worrying in the right proportion.
Are people who tend not to worry doing a better job at life, or worse? One is often told "don't worry, be happy," but the phrase "a lack of concern" suggests negligence.
To support me in my many doubts I got a notification today saying, "We can inform you that your calendar "Dickens' London" has been shipped. The estimated delivery date is January 7." I was glad to hear this, although I won't get a discount equivalent to 7 days of calendarlessness despite the delay. At least when I open it I will know where&when to begin.

Wussy Riot

To be honest, I don’t like New Year’s Eve at all. I don’t like staying up late. I don’t like drinking alcohol after, say, latest 11 pm. I don’t enjoy toasting and kissing and pretending to be having a good time. By 11.15 I start to feel spiritually sick, not to mention physically exhausted. If I wanted to see all those people, I’d see them at a saner hour. I don’t know why I’m too much of a wuss to bow out, but, you know, people get bent out of shape if you don’t play along. It’s like when married people congratulate you on getting married, or people with children congratulate you on getting pregnant. Break out the champagne and get to work.

I do like starting a new year. It is nice to make an appointment, however contrived, with the optimistic impulse. This year as always I promise to eat more broccoli. I may even join a weight-lifting studio, because when I consider my arms, my abs and my back, I face the fact that I'm a wuss in many departments.

Where I was

By far the literary sensation of this year was David Markson, whose books Vanishing Point and Reader’s Block I adore. I ordered Reader’s Block first and it was sent to my mother’s house, so she read it first and also became an enormous fan. She said he appealed to her because she “spends a lot of time alone.” There is a small leap in the logic of that, but I get it.

In fiction, I loved Wolf Hall, and much enjoyed Plainsong and The Stone Diaries. Little Dorrit was a high point for Charles Dickens, but not, for me, THE high point. And while parts of it were a squishy, salt-water slog, I was glad to read Moby Dick. Two other very good novels were Sacred Hunger and Visitation.

A great experience was reading the non-fiction account of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by Callum MacDonald, followed by the meta-fiction/non-fiction on the same topic in HHhH. 

In poetry, I was happy to find the poetry of Lesle Lewis on poets.org, whom I’d never read before. I finished her lie down too and started her Landscapes I & II. I write poems similar in form to these, so it was good to experience how she does it, although it wasn’t the most exciting poetry I’ve read this year. 

My expectant forays into horror didn’t pay off, with Eutopia asking too much of me with its unholy hillbillies and The Passage being such a commercial sell-out it made me hate myself for reading it. 

Other disappointments were The Cat’s Table, which I gave up on despite my love for Michael Ondaatje. I thought Room was schlock, but then again I should have known. I also didn’t like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Worst of the year was Caitlan Moran’s How to Be a Woman, which my daughter asked for and I thought I’d skim first. Oh well, Thérèse Raquin also an eye-roller.

1. Barefoot Gen (Jan)

2. Moby Dick by Herman Melville (Jan)

3. Moby Dick in Pictures by Matt Kish (Jan)

4. Thirteen Designer Vaginas by Juliet Cook (Jan)

5. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon (Jan)

6. Vivian Maier: Street Photogapher (Jan)

7. Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (Jan)

8. Broken Sonnets by Kathleen Kirk (Feb)

9. The Tin Drum by Günter Grass (Feb)

10. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (Mar)

11. Hokku Notebook by Jack Spicer (Mar)

12. Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth (Apr)

13. The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields (Apr)

14. Reader’s Block by David Markson (Apr)

15. Eutopia by David Nickle (Apr)

16. The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenmann (Apr)

17. Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress by Carlos Phillips Olmeda (Apr)

18. The Tanners by Robert Walser (Apr)

19. Frank O. Gehry: Outside In by Jan Greenberg (Apr)

20. Thérèse Raquin by Emile Zola (Apr)

21. The Garden Going on Without Us by Lorna Crozier (May)

22. The Nervous Filaments by David Dodd Lee (May)

23. Room by Emma Donaghue (May)

24. Selected Poems by Paavo Haavikko (May)

25. Poema by Maurice Kilwein Guevara (May)

26. In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson (May)

27. Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck (May)

28. Purr by Mary Ann Samyn (June)

29. Short and Sweet: 101 Very Short Poems (June)

30. Autobiography of a So-and-So by Maurice Kilwein Guevara (Jul)

31. Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens (july 13)

32. Nocturnes by Kathleen Kirk (July)

33. Vanishing Point by David Markson (July 18)

34. Ice by Anna Kavan (Jul 26)

35. The Ninth Life of Louis Drax by Liz Jensen (Aug)

36. Foe by JM Coetzee (Aug 7)

37. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Aug 12)

38. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (Aug 27)

39. Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (Sept 12)

40. Wonderful Wonderful Times by Elfriede Jelinek (Sept 19)

41. People are Tiny in Paintings of China by Cynthia Arrieu-King (Sept 22)

42. How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran (Oct 5)

43. Canada by Richard Ford (Oct 13)

44. Coeur de Lion by Ariana Reines (Oct)

45. lie down too by Lesle Lewis (Oct 22)

46. The Killing of SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich by Callum MacDonald (Oct 31) 

47. HHhH by Laurent Binet (Nov 10)

48. Horoscopes for the Dead by Billy Collins (Nov 17)

49. Plainsong by Kent Haruf (Nov 22)

50. The Passage by Justin Cronin (Dec 10)

51. Injecting Dreams into Cows by Jessy Randall (Dec 12)

52. The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje (Dec 13)

53. Braiding the Storm by Laura E. Davis (Dec 23)

54. Kepler by John Banville (Dec 23)

55. Underwater Dogs by Seth Casteel (Dec 25)

56. Ark Baby by Liz Jensen (Dec 28)

Who got which books

We used to do more books at Christmas, then came Amazon gift certificates and hefty charges for overweight bags on most major airlines. Still, some books did change hands.

From Carlo I got Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers, the book Fernando Pessoa considered his constant companion. “One of my life’s greatest tragedies is to have already read The Pickwick Papers,” he wrote. This tragedy awaits me.

From my mother I got Best American Short Stories 2012, and read Edith Pearlman’s “Honeydew” right off under the Christmas tree, a story about an anorexic girl that tied up unexpectedly tightly. Here's the first page. 

Luisa got an Ernest Hemingway book called Fiesta in the German translation. When she asked for it, I was concerned she'd picked some obscure, disdained Hemingway that would turn her off to him forever (which may be inevitable anyway), but in fact is The Sun Also Rises. Searching for an image, I found Fiesta is also the Czech title. 

Luisa also got The Orange Girl by Jostein Gaarder, best known for his book Sophie’s World, which she’s gone cultish on. She also asked for and received Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism, because that’s the way she rolls.

Luisa got Miles the Hugo-winner Ender’s Game. He also got the crazy adorable book of photographs Underwater Dogs. 

For my mother I got Pete Dexter’s Deadwood and Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me for no other reason than I am in line to inherit them. 

And Carlo got a book from the Städel called Alte Meister, or Old Masters, featuring the museum’s rich collection of very old paintings. 

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.