Every appointment has been moved to last week

Listened to: Audio book of The Dogs of Riga, a Henning Mankell book
Read: More Proust

Saw: Gladiators battle, or at least some serious guys dressed as gladiators
Watched: Thebans, an opera by Julian Anderson

Laughed: Fakely
Cursed: Genuinely

Nay: Homesick
Yeah: Poem accepted at One Sentence Poems

Acquired: Labello. I blow through a lot of money but don’t seem to acquire much.
Discarded: A German guide to bike tours in Ireland

Visited: Roman-Germanic museum, Cologne
Learned: Oedipus had four children, two of whom killed each other. Kind of a bad family situation there all around. 

Ate: Cinnamon buns
Drank: Starbucks products 

Inside: Yoga, a little too close to the guy in front of me’s feet
Outside: Pushed a shopping cart full of beer across a lawn along the Main River, accompanied by a colleague holding an umbrella over my head

Word of the week: Wafer (if the wafer of light offends me - charles wright)

Pithiness: "It’s easier to help the hungry than the overfed." - Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach


Thanks to Valerie Roybal for permission to use the image

We could be heroes

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

The Sneeze

I caught a cold. I thought I could fight it with vitamins. And coffee. But I succumbed. I have a headache, a sore throat and two eyeaches. Not to mention unwashed hair. 

I looked at a diagram showing what happens when you sneeze. It showed the nose, mouth, eyes, chest and lungs. And the “sneezing center in the brain stem.” That’s a place. 

But really, doesn’t the whole body participate in sneezing, even the hair? Usually there’s some tilting at the waist or great full-body shudder. The shoulders pull up in a shrug. The considerate also use a hand to cover the mouth and nose, hopefully equipped with a tissue. 

Anyway, having a cold is a good way to get out of doing a whole bunch of stuff I don’t want to do, like sitting through a four-hour opera. I am its prisoner. It would be a lie to say there’s no pleasure in it.

“Despair itself, if it goes on long enough, can become a kind of sanctuary in which one settles down and feels at ease.” – Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

“At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.” – Erica Jong

Week that was

Drank: Chamomile Tea

Saw: Two people helping an elderly woman walk against the wind
Disliked: My lingering cold

Read: "The Orphan Master’s Son" by Adam Johnson 

Watched: Doubt with Meryl Streep & Philip Seymour Hoffman

Composed this note for the ladies’ room: 'Who keeps wadding kitchen paper towels together and stuffing them into the bathroom stall toilet paper roll with the toilet paper? Is it some harebrained attempt to 'save' paper, in this case paper that someone took too much of, and then forced on anyone who had to use the bathroom?'

Laughed at: This epic battle

Ate: Ciobar, Italian hot chocolate that’s more like hot pudding in a cup

Listened to: Robert Coover read Italo Calvino’s story “The Daughters of the Moon”

Bought: "Katz und Maus" by Günter Grass, which my son needs for German class 

Learned: Americans are split on whether to pronounce 'mayonnaise' as "man-aze" or "may-uh-naze"

Enjoyed: Hot bath with camphor and eucalyptus

Pithiness of the week: “If you run after two hares you will catch neither.” - Erasmus

I'd also rather walk 10 mins to the next stop than sit waiting 15 mins for the next bus

I’m glad to be from a planet that didn’t know heroin was snortable.

I stayed home again. I spent days under the lurch of sore limbs, head like a bucket of rocks and oil. Although better this morning, it was only in comparison. I thought of the expression “feeling human again” and reminded myself to question all set phrases because what are physical pain and suffering if not human? 

Not to leave out the other animals. 

After reading news the other day about the unfortunate who was strangled to death when her scarf, and then her hair, got caught in escalator steps, I dreamed I was a rescuer who carried scissors in her purse.

Escalators are one of my peeves, or rather escalator riders. Escalators were not invented to make you lazier, but to make you faster. You hasten your journey by walking up them instead of taking them as an invitation to stand still. You get a pass if your leg is broken or you are over 60. 

OK, 57.

Goodbye January

It wasn’t a great month. Nothing but poetry rejections. I fell on an escalator and gashed my shins. I ate too much, including apples. And at the end I got a cold with a sore throat and a painful cough, each one like a bullet being shot both from me and at me. So much for the apple-a-day theory. 

I called in sick yesterday and lay completely wiped out in bed. A headache made it impossible to read, so I listened to two New Yorker fiction podcasts and picked the duds. Later I was able to read a little of the book I recently began, “The Orphan Master’s Son,” and even 100 pages into it I’m not sure what this book is trying to do. The effusive blurbs make me think I’ve missed the boat. Oh, and it won the Pulitzer Prize. 

So being sick sucks, and let us hope February is a step up from January, which is always too damned long anyway. 

Oh, here’s a good thing: Kathleen Kirk sent me her chapbook Interior Sculpture, a collection of poems about the sculptor Camille Claudel. Kathleen is a terrific poet and the poems work wonderfully. Thank you, Kathleen, for the bright spot.

From Ariane to Zabergau

For about 5 minutes on New Year’s Day I had the insane idea to eat an apple a day this year in the spirit of the old adage. The biggest obstacle to such a resolution is that I don’t really like apples. They're not altogether unappetizing, but bad experience has turned me off because it is too easy to get a mealy one. There is little worse than taking a bite of an apple and having it go all grainy in your mouth. Horrible.

But I do like a firm apple, and as a word person I’d love if there were more varieties with romantic and evocative names available. This great article mentions the Blue Pearmain, Pound Sweet, Wolf River and Black Oxford. I would try those just for the bragging rights.

If I could get my hands on them. As in the US, in Germany supermarkets offer the same ubiquitous varieties ad nauseam:  Pink Lady, the two Deliciouses, Granny Smith, Fuji, Braeburn, Jonagold, and Royal Gala. If I could drive I could get out to the nearby orchards and get other kinds, but alas, I am not licensed to access unusual apples.

Still, as of today I’m signing up for an apple-a-day January, and will see how it goes. Today I’m doing an Elstar, originally a cross between the Golden Delicious and Ingrid Marie apples. I am not brave enough to bite right into it, but will be using a sharp knife. 

Threshing song

The past was a hectic time. It was full of kings and beheadings, word coinage, and tunneling out of prison. Dynasties fell. It is believed the ball came before the wheel, the egg before the deviling. There were wars that went on for years and more years; there was a lot of sex, food left uneaten, bookburnings, and tribal and disco dancing. Rules were made up, then changed (read: broken). People got born by the billions.

The invention of the telephone was followed by a lot of senseless and overlapping jabbering. Statistics established average intelligence. Wires crossed, and obesity rode the airwaves. Many flea markets ended with more junk unsold than sold. Dump trucks lugged some surplus to the ocean, which solved one problem while fathering another. 

The past keeps adding up. Some days when I’m struggling with what on earth to make for dinner, I’m glad when it's behind me.

Snowstorms defy interpretation

I often struggle to differentiate plague from plaque - orthographically, of course. I do abhor poor dental hygiene. I do joke about ‘bubonic plaque’ to get my kids to brush conscientiously. Still, while bad dental care may be epidemic, it never wiped out millions of lives. Nor does it have to be contagious.

Misreadings sometimes come from skimming a text, instead of actually reading. Or they can be a kind of Freudian slip - the mind insists it sees something that the eyes, on second look, prove to be something else. Or sometimes you expect to see a certain word, so you do. The brain won't have it otherwise. 

Scanning my blog the other day I read “Unbelievable in Stores,” even though I’d written the post myself and knew it was “Unavailable in Stores.” Unbelievable and Unavailable have such similar architecture. And it's true that mistakes make life more interesting. Here are some other misreadings of the past weeks: 

How rodent the artist remained despite basking in adulation. 

(modest) 

The bakery was well known for its French parasites. 

(pastries) 

February saw uninterpreted snowstorms. 

(uninterrupted) 

Gutsy winds fanned the wildfire. 

(gusty) 

France condoms attacks on wine students. 

(condemns) 

The plane had to make a memory landing due to engine trouble. 

(emergency) 

Leaders voweled to defend the euro. 

(vowed) 

She touches up her blush and apples lipstick. 

(applies) 

Authorities say at least 25,000 humble bees have died in the lot. 

(bumble)

Unavailable in stores

I have this great burn on my wrist. I got it on the weekend, and, as often happens, when my wrist touched the hot grill, I didn’t think much of it. I didn’t realize at first the damage I’d done. Too late I went to the sink to run cold water over it.

The burn festered overnight Sunday into a glorious slash-like mark, and because I didn’t bandage it, the wound has since then been functioning as a kind of second wristwatch. On the right arm, the red gash, on the left, the watch. Throughout the day, I look at both of them. They tell two different kinds of time.

As you can see, the burn saved my outfit today. I went to work all in black, which I regretted on the way to the train, also because it’s warm. But when I turned up my cuffs, I had this colorful, hard-won accessory.

Anatomy

All these years keeping fairly skinny from carrying big books around.

Now my ribs called. They want to break up.

Just 40 minutes on the train total every day, and the back must bear a fat library & a notebook, pens & documents. 

And sometimes the ears never remove the earphones, meaning paper is not engaged.

The right elbow wants answers. 

The neck and shoulders cannot offer boundless hospitality. 

Still, there’s a lot to be said. About being prepared. Say for example I was stuck in a tunnel for two hours.

Would two big books sustain me? Very probably. 

Would you choose between these two? Not happily.

Cowering in Place

I enjoy when someone invokes the German language as a sure source of the right word, as in, “I’m sure the Germans have a word for it.” Sometimes they do, and if they don’t, usually one can be manufactured handily.

Despite my job as a part-time German, I invoked the language today with the same hope when I experienced the fear I suffer once or twice daily: the fear of standing up - whether from throwing something away or picking something up - and bumping my head against an open cabinet door.

(Banging your head against an open cabinet or cupboard door, by the way, is one of the reasons people swear.)

Anyone who has stood up only to smash their head against the edge, or worse, the corner, of a cabinet door knows that this fear serves a protective purpose.

As far as I know there is no German word for this fear. But let’s create Dooferunfallangst, or Aufstehenderkopfstossangst. Actually, German asks too much of us here. Let’s go with Fear of Hitting Your Head against a Cabinet Door upon Resuming an Upright Position.

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.

Long stretches, and short

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tears, who needs them

Cedar smells better than lilies, and does not sicken the audience as it fades.

Camus suffered from tuberculosis for years on end, an ailment compounded by heavy smoking, but a car accident killed him within seconds.

Exercising one's willpower over a bad habit just for the sake of saying so is exchanging one weakness for another.

In the barracks of Russian labor camps, those who had memorized stories were the most prized inmates.

What could ever be objective about choosing between the last names Motherwell and Frankenthaler?

I considered learning Spanish to read Garcia Lorca, but if I pursued that line with consistency I'd also have to learn Portuguese to read Pessoa, Polish to read Szymborska, Serbo-Croatian to read Vasko Popa, Russian to read Akhmatova, etc. etc. und so weiter.

The bulb throwing its dim light down the steps like grey fur.

Misread "abominable teeth" as "abdominal teeth."

Why you cannot sing 'Dem Bones' in German

The Scheitelbein's connected to the Hinterhauptbein
The Hinterhaupbein's connected to the Schläfenbein
The Schläfenbein's connected to the Unterkiefer
The Unterkiefer's connected to the Zwischenkieferbein
The Zwischekieferbein's connected to the Gesichtsschädel

ach nein, it just don't flow...

less usual delusions

A variation of delusions of grandeur are delusions of grammar, that is, the fixed belief that one’s language abilities are far superior than other people's, even infallible. In addition to grammar, the deluded person believes his spelling and punctuation are irreproachable. Dressing in robes or crowns is a symptom, as the patient may consider himself “the king” or “Jesus” of grammar, or chief of the grammar police. Patients obsess about perceived offenses in books, correspondence and newspapers, as well as in verbal interaction with others. This malady often leads to a complete loss of manners, as well as an obscure illness known as ‘denial of the dictionary.’

Elsewhere, closely related to delusions of persecution/paranoia are delusions of parsecution – the belief that other people – vaguely identified as "they" - are paying overly close attention to every word you say, that is, they are parsing your sentences. These parsecutory delusions often lead the sufferer to swear silence, or alternately, to use made-up words and bizarre syntactical twists to obscure the true meaning of their statements (e.g. "Withholding it stampedes, therewith spears taking tapwatery wonder," which means “Spanish agents are aggressively poisoning my tap water.”).

Pain is inevitable and hard to describe

It was like a tightening that threatened to burst.
It was like an awful crushing.
It was a severe, piercing tingle.
Aching. Searing. Cramping.
Like my arm had been ripped open and an alto started singing.
I've never been stabbed in the neck, but it was as if that happened.
Clowns blew hot air on it.
Acid crackled in my capillairies.
A vice put the squeeze on my right eye.

Ghost Fragments

When I try to speak French, Italian spooks me,
less the form than the mood of it, the flighty rise and ebb.
*
People talk about phantom limbs, but rarely of the phantom itch.
The itch occurs, but what’s under it?
*
At the Salvation Army there’s a ghastly rack
of coats, the line-up of might-be ghosts
*
I know a slender woman haunted by her former heavy self.
The body has been exorcised; the spirit will not let go.
*
The song in my head this morning, a song I didn’t know I liked.
*
The typewriter, too, is not extinct. It lives on
in street work, factories, rivers, in feet descending stairs.
My father’s boxy black one.
My electric Brother.
*
in love, the ghoul of hate
*
When I was in high school, a boy in the next grade
was decapitated by a train, stumbling home drunk
by the overpass. Charlie. Everyone knew the story.

I can’t go through that part of town without thinking of it.
As if I'd been there. And it’s not Charlie who haunts
that part of town, but what happened to Charlie.
*
The parts haunt the sum.
The choir in the ostrich.
The goon in kangaroo.
*
the past / the smell of lavender / a stroke that stays in the bones / trauma /
fog / exhaust trapped in the atmosphere / abortion / childhood /
perfume / regret
*
We’re all haunted by Auschwitz, even the deniers.
We all stand here shoeless in the Polish snow.
*
to say nothing of graveyards
only the dead really give up the ghost
*
As a noun, “haunt” refers to a place a man can frequently be found.
He occupies it, fills and inhabits it, seeking
something he’ll never come home with.

(in response to Dave Bonta's post at Via Negativa)

Serve your Notion

I went to the dentist this morning. I always like going to the dentist because I become representative America. The first thing he asked me when I came in was "so, what do Americans think about the European e-coli outbreak," as if we'd have some special opinion on it. Anyway, I told him we were widely opposed to e-coli, and if it were to occur on our own soil we would have congressional pre-approval to declare military action.

This was a follow-up visit to have a crown installed, which was fitted two weeks ago. At that time, it was all about Strauss Kahn and the American justice system. Was the perp walk actually necessary, my dentist and his assistant wanted to know. Not only is it necessary, I said, it is therapeutic. It is also democratic, and there are people who aspire to it, who practice it at home. "Necessary" seems hardly the adjective, I said, "essential" is more like it.

I am really happy to be able to serve my nation in this function.