Peculiar Susceptibility

On Reading Myself

2011-07-07T17:10:00.004-04:00

I spent a lot of time reading when I was younger. I spend a lot of time reading now. It is probably not surprising that someone who writes also reads, also feels solace in it. I treat it right. I read attentively. I take notes. I study.

I don't think it's fair to say that I was raised just so. I think my parents actually kept the reins pretty lose and followed us where we went. I think that the part of me that is just so, is just that, part of me. Not an external thing. Not some causal relationship. Not some scar of time and love.

We all have ropes in us. They're held together by torque and when we try to toe them, they move. The rope I toe these days has to do with spectacle and self: ways in which I can stand to have people look at me and ways I can't.

Tonight I am reading some poems.

Sometimes you just need to kill it by force feeding it white meals.

2011-02-18T17:27:00.004-05:00

So, I'm scared of writing fiction. As the lovely and honest Abigail Ohlheiser pointed out to me a couple years ago, I am exposition-avoidant. I don't use it in conversation. I don't use it in writing. I also don't talk like most other people I know, which makes it challenging to construct convincing dialogue.

But when Brian Cook and I decided to make a vintage design and cooking project, it occurred to me that a period-appropriate story might fit well. So I tried.

And where better to start, I figured, than a story about murder by scurvy? Here it is.

Blood and pomegranate juice are not the same color.

2011-02-15T17:36:00.006-05:00

I have been slow to write here these days. When I started this blog, it was as a way to do poetry planning, loosely. Over the years, the way I've planned out these things has shifted. Oddly, I think, having digital platforms for composing has led to an analogue practice that I find really stimulating. Now, for almost every poem I write, I make a poem planning sheet. These are somewhere between notes and diagrams, between ideas and compositions.

They don't always give rise to poems, though, as in this most recent case, which became an essay on thenervousbreakdown.com. You can, and should, read it here.

"Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind"

2009-12-28T12:23:00.002-05:00

Some memories play over like good records. Today is grey; yesterday was grey. We're in the grey of winter and I've been playing over the time we lost Patrick in my head. I've been waking up with it in the middle of the night; I've been holding it with my morning coffee.

It was this time of year - a little before Christmas. Mom was pregnant with Nora. Earlier in the day we had gone up the Empire State Building with Uncle Bill. In the elevator we thought of names for Nora. Patrick and I, with uncomfortable ears, distracted ourselves with dinodahn names. We figured out, I think it was for the first time, that many names when paired with "Dahn" become dinosaur names. Irena Dahn. Carlotta Dahn. Umberto Dahn. Madonna Dahn.

My grandparents had an apartment in White Plains that grandpa used when he was in the city on business. It had what my child's mind perceived to be an extensive roof garden, multi-leveled and well-populated with nooks and topiaries. We left mom and dad, looking at stars, embracing at the edge of the terrace. We played hide and seek.

It was dark and large and I couldn't find him. I looked and looked and eventually interrupted my parents to enlist their help. We looked everywhere. We couldn't find him. I started looking over the edges of the wall; every time I looked over a new edge I was clutching my core in preparation for something I didn't want to see.

These past days when I've woken up in the middle of the night with this memory, it's been to the image of Patrick's little body at the foot of that building. And it's always with that same clutch in your core, isn't it, when you have to prepare for something you don't want?

He was fine. He had gotten lost and wandered inside.

He left yesterday to move to Paris. No one ever said dreams were subtle.

He's left the stewardship of his record collection to me. I'm hoping they get stuck in my head.

"What are borders and pieces of paper and different tongues in different mouths compared to desire, to heart?"

2009-10-27T16:07:00.005-04:00

(Image by Ben Gancsos)

I've been thinking a lot these days about integrated art forms and lenses, perspectives and approaches, and how these confluences shape the articulations we make.

This weekend, I attended a preview of The Parkville Project, a production of the new Bated Breath Theatre Company. The company interviewed community members, business people, and senior citizens. They reviewed historical documents. And they used this information to create a piece that combines creative movement, text, music, and photographic projections. The actors moved through the space and, in so doing, implicated the audience in the action of the play.

I was thoroughly excited by it. I wrote a little thing thing, here.

Braiding Media

2009-10-23T08:36:00.003-04:00

I've been thinking for some time about how paradigmatic shifts in media affect cultural production. Today I have a post up on Listen, Dammit about the Chicago band Califone's new film/album project All My Friends are Funeral Singers.

Making fun of neurotic writing habits

2009-09-07T16:00:00.003-04:00

Some people write postcards to their loved ones; I write postcards to my GP.

You can read about it at thenervousbreakdown.com.

On the geographical, on distance

2009-09-03T08:47:00.005-04:00

Since moving to Hartford, I've wanted to write about it. I've wanted to write about it in a way that doesn't feel earned. I often wonder how much I can really claim to be here. I spend time at work and at home - so that the moments of feeling in this place stand out:

walking during snowstorms

obsessive photography

being perched up high for the excellent Branching Out series

But, for the most part, I've felt fairly disconnected from an experience of Hartford that I could present to a general audience.

• • •

Last night I was watching Bas Jan Ader fall from a tree, fall from a roof, fall with a bike.

Gravity everywhere, even in tears.

• • •

I was thinking of sitting up in a tree with Jillian and her telling me about her climbing prowess and near disasters. It settled in that the moments that have been most meaningful in this place, many of them have been on walks with Jillian, cradled in branches with Jillian, wanting to swim in a river with Jillian, standing on a cliff with Jillian.

I feel like I'm losing part of my geography.

Photo by Faith Antion

But I'll write you stories about getting lost.

And I was calm as the plane went down

2009-03-24T07:46:00.007-04:00

Sometimes I wake up with a line of a poem stuck in my head.

I've been thinking these days about that space above the things on which we focus. Sometimes, it's the sky:

Sometimes it's the walls and ceiling of a natural history diorama:

Last night I dreamed that the plane I was in clipped the Sydney Opera House before it went down. We were hovering above that eminently photographable skyline identifier.

I've never been the kind of poet that writes from dreams. I write from research. I read. I visit archives. I look through photographs. Frankly, I don't know how to write a poem from a dream; I don't know how to make that relevant to a wider audience than myself.

But I like waking up with a series of words in my head that I trust to be a line of poetry.

Mute and hardly active

2009-03-04T10:22:00.002-05:00

Bird Specimens, Study Skins, originally uploaded by profholtz.

The past several days, I've had the distinct feeling of being mute. I feel as though I'm giving stillbirth to words.

I haven't written anything about which I'm content in longer than I can remember.

I need to be bolstered up and ordered by something, but I'm not sure what that might be.

I wish to curl up in a vast and obsolete cement ear.

2009-03-03T08:39:00.006-05:00

These days, I've been dreaming about Ireland, about the UK.
[Jillian Green doors everywhere.]

It happens a couple times a week and it's things as specific as basking in dappled aprication (the best way one can, I think) in some NUI garden in Galway, with the smell of it and every blade of grass making its way through my dress to my skin. It's as tangential as incorporating a street into another cityscape. It's been a room in a Cardiff of my imagination.

Tonight, it's my wish that my self-conscious will allow me to curl up in a vast and obsolete cement ear.

Hitch and turn

2009-02-09T08:03:00.004-05:00

Sundays are my favorite. It's the time of my week I allow myself a kind of stillness in the space of the day to contemplate and stretch and read and cook and do whatever it is I'd like. I suppose I'm conventional in that way.

I spent some time yesterday listening to the absolutely dreamy Solitude Trilogy by Glenn Gould. I also watched The Weather Underground, which of course makes me think about poetry. (Documentaries do that to a girl - all that carefully constructed and overlapping language, palimpsestic discourse.)

I have been really struggling with how to negotiate my relationship to poetry lately. I haven't written anything that I would consider finished or polished in far too long. I've been re-reading old work with disdain (I know this isn't that strange an occurrence, but that doesn't make it any more pleasant).

On the other hand, I can feel the influence of the kind of thinking poetry engenders in most aspects of my life more keenly than I have in some time. Yesterday, I worked on a sound project for hours - recording it, considering how best to score it. What I have in mind, could, indeed, read like poetry, I think, but it's footing there isn't secure. I'm picturing something that would owe a great deal to a Benjamin J. Mansavage Klein score: a layered thing that you peel back and reveal to yourself in shifting ways each time. Another possibility would be to set it up as telescopic web text.

The difficulty that this little sound project is so clearly a component of is my tendency of late to write very little that isn't part of a kind of closed circuit. I can imagine this being quite a lovely sort of new media, multi-disciplinary sound poem, but I am making it for a very particular audience: me and one other person. I've been feeling similarly about the Charcot poems, too. I begin to suspect that they comprise an entire book that I wrote to myself...or perhaps to multiple selves (a self of circa 1995-1999, a self at a specific future point, et al). My insomnia series is definitely not for public consumption, but it's a really compelling project, nonetheless.

When I was a teenager I was adamant that essays and poetry were close kin, that there is a kind of hitch of logic or turn of mind that occurs in both, when they are successful. I find myself, more and more these days, full of hitch, full of turn, but lacking a way of wedding those steps to some kind of appropriate means of public consumption.

Discovering strange little poetic moments on the Web

2009-02-02T08:38:00.004-05:00

I've done something delightful to my browser. Michael Day, an artist whose work I esteem in great measure, has put together an exhibit through Add-Art. Add-Art utilizes a firefox plug-in to replace all web ad content with art. Lovely.

Michael Day, Filter 5

So, for instance, yesterday, when I was looking up the last lines of "The Dead," I saw this:

I've noticed that having the ad content replaced changes the quality of the way I read on-line. It's more still; there are fewer moments in which I feel tugged in ten directions.

I've written a small bit of text to go along with the exhibition, which you can read here or here.

Pigeon-finity...

2009-01-10T21:31:00.003-05:00

Things I have learned this week:

reading about boredom does not always create enough intellectual stimulation to stave off boredom (Heidegger, I'm talking to you)
once you start researching boredom, you will never be able to use the word "interesting" without being self-critical
pigeons are commuters
Wordpress is really, really annoying

I have a new post up at TheNervousBreakdown.com. It's about superdoves. And boredom. Please take a look if you'd like.

The intimate mathematics of gravity on the body that has not slept

2008-12-25T13:40:00.003-05:00

This winter more than any other I can remember, I've redefined my relationship to snow, and to walking in it.

I haven't been sleeping properly this season - it's either been over-long and oddly ineffective (waking up with every muscle thoroughly drained of energy) or it's been totally absent.

I started a poetry series of little things that I write exclusively when sleep-deprived. I wrote another just now. Last night I couldn't sleep. I sprawled out and flipped through sundry books; I took other books off my parents' shelves (Connolly's selected writings were too intense, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - with another person's marginalia - was much too compelling); I paced; I looked at things. Eventually, I took a walk in the woods that surround may parents' house. The moon wasn't out, but the snow gave off the most gorgeous ambient light.

Someone had been cross-country skiing up there. I wonder how they were able to avoid branches.

I listened to the trees creak. I held onto their trunks when the wind made them sway.

I rested at the top of the hill, determined to wait until I heard an owl. I did.

And as I started to return home, I saw a coyote. It looked at me. I looked at it. We parted ways.

I came home and thought about things. Earlier in the night, I had heard my father murmur that my mother is so beautiful as he was falling asleep. What a privilege to grow up amidst a love as deep as theirs.

Who could sleep in the face of that?

"on its string. Birdlike, the almanac"

2008-12-13T00:50:00.006-05:00

What perfect timing, I thought, to come across this article about the discovery of the oldest known brain in Britain, just as the days for An Archaeology of Wonder are dwindling away.

One of the most beautiful things about the discovery, at least as far as I can tell from the articles I read, is that it's of no neurological import. This will yield no significant information about the human brain, itself remaining essentially unchanged, they claim, in the last 2,000 years. So then, it's an object of auratic wonder - that thing which has somehow (and here's what they're trying to figure out) bent the rules of time and decay.

No other soft organs but it.

It was Randy who suggested, when I enthusiastically declared that I was "SO going to write a poem about this," that I make it a sestina. Good advice. I'm in the midst of mapping it out. How appropriate.

My notes...

Wading ankle-deep in the bluebells

2008-12-10T08:50:00.004-05:00

I've felt so much like Leonard Bast these days.

I think it's partly that I'm writing about culture and class in various places, so there are obvious associations there. But in some more fundamental way, I have been either fighting or succumbing to the urge to walk off into the night for the last couple weeks.

Taken at 3:13 a.m.

Here's to not getting crushed.

On my magnificent good fortune

2008-11-30T01:22:00.005-05:00

Tonight, sitting in the 32-degree cold and rural dark outside of my sister's house, I saw three shooting stars.

"One for each of us," I thought. Nora, Patrick, and me.

I am extraordinarily lucky to have these people I so admire and love as my siblings and ballasts.

Good idea or lack of sleep?

2008-11-27T21:14:00.004-05:00

It could well be the lack of sleep that's behind this idea, but I am really taken with it.

One of the theories about what was so unnerving about hysteria in the 19th century was that it disrupted language, so that signifiers and referents would become blatantly unhitched in the mouths of the patients. This relationship to language was part of the reason I wanted to write the series of poems in the first place. What better than poetry to deal with this sort of fear?!

I've struggled off and on with insomnia for my as much of my life as I can remember. It wasn't really until I was older, though, that it started to make me panic when I couldn't sleep. As a child, it just seemed like one of those things that sometimes happens - and it allotted me time to myself that was still and quiet, something I've always already needed anyway.

I hardly slept at all last night, maybe and hour and a half - 5:30-7:00 a.m. It's 9:44 p.m. right now.

Halfway through this morning I had the idea to start of cycle of poems only written when extremely exhausted. Exhaustion unhinges my ability to use language (I can't tell you how hard I am concentrating now to write this!) just enough that interesting things begin to happen. I'm not certain that the poems from these cycles would end up finished in themselves, but they are certainly things I'd be hard pressed to come up with in other states.

So, here's the idea that makes me excited. What if I created a new section of the hysteria/Charcot book based on these insomnia poems? They certainly mirror the radical disjunction of the language the patients used (at least insofar as how it's represented in the medical journals).

It seems like a really good idea now. I shall have to put it to the test when I've slept.

"Old Suzy made me stand where I was and came over and brushed all the snow off of me."

2008-11-24T13:22:00.004-05:00

About a year ago now, I wrote a poem about Thumbelina and the early days of my parents' courtship. Today, I read this remarkable post by my beautiful friend Sarah. It's about Champlion's General Store - the place both my mother and I worked in our early twenties, the place my parents lived when they first got together, the place I learned how to start a fire in a woodstove, and the place I was cured of many, many ailments.

I'll be thinking of Bob a lot through this season.

It might be time to revise that poem with some detail from the Daily Campus article.

Amongst ourselves

2008-11-22T18:56:00.009-05:00

I've been thinking and writing a lot these days of home.

The other weekend, waiting for a friend in New York, I was very struck by the observation that even in the city I find myself surrounded by hay. It's not that there was hay pervading my childhood, but I've come to associate it with home, since they got the horses. Now the smell of hay - musty, grassy, and warm - makes me think of being curled up on the couch with my folks.

My father commented recently that I only ever write about the bad stuff. It gave me pause. It just really hadn't, I think, occurred to me to divide life into good things and bad things.

I've been working more on my Archaeology of Wonder essays lately. One is about the woods I grew up amidst - the methods my family and I utilized to navigate our relationship to it. The other is about the time, as a toddler, I almost drowned.

Here's how it came about. I was walking up my driveway with Melissa and Felisa on a recent visit from them. Felisa had never been to my home before, so I was telling her stories about the woods. As we passed by the pipe I was sucked through as a 15-month-old, I told the story that my family always tells amongst ourselves about how it happened.

It's a short story, really more of a skeleton of a story than anything. Something in its manner reminds me of the schematics of myths that are in Edith Hamilton's Mythology. I guess I had neglected to tell them the story before; they had a stronger response to it than I had anticipated. I figure that, since the primary mode through which I know this event is through our truncated little sketch of a family story, my response to it is mitigated by the way it's told.

It made me think about the soothing role of repetition. It made me think about narrative and trauma, and about how we might align ourselves to different narrative threads throughout our lives.

I know that the idea that I'm writing about this thing that happened makes my parents uncomfortable. I wonder if perhaps it is harder for them because the trauma of the event was post-linguistic. For me it was pre-linguistic, so any story I tell myself about it remains just that - a story, no more or less moving than a novel.

I have never had an interest in those wretched water slides though. I can't think of an amusement more horrifying.

"Jessica, you make a terrific hologram."

2008-11-05T12:45:00.002-05:00

I am working on an election poem. I know that sounds a little ridiculous, and I know that ordinarily this sort of poem would lurch dangerously close to Hallmarkism, but, my dear readers, we live in a world of talking head holograms!

Anything is possible.

Can we write election poems that aren't oozing with sentimentalism? Yes we can!

[Oh, dear...]

Cake and Cute

2008-11-04T09:34:00.002-05:00

I have a little election day essay up on TheNervousBreakdown.com. It examines cuteness, exploitation, Sarah Palin, race, and Shirley Temple. And cakes.

Please give it a read, if you feel so inclined.

"I would like to believe that there is a Paradise. Where one is always young and full-bladdered."

2008-10-22T10:10:00.002-04:00

Tonight I will go to my parents' house, and we will stand out by where Joseph and Natasha, two of the most generous dogs of my acquaintance, are buried and I will read aloud Eugene O'Neill's The Last Will and Testament of an Extremely Distinguished Dog.

Et j'ai crié, "Regardez, regardez!" Et alors, il a salué.

2008-10-16T09:03:00.007-04:00

More than anything else these days, I have been craving time to write. And I can see it in a lot of what I do.

Silent films look like photographs of hysteria patients.

I can see it in the way Andrew Bird looks like some illustration by Cruikshank come to life (although, I suspect there is far less vitriol in Bird's being than in Cruikshank's).

I can feel it in the way I read. It's shifted (as it does from time to time) from analyzing the text to analyzing how the author structured the text.

On Tuesday, I watched Man on Wire. There's a part in the documentary where the director splits the screen so that on the left, there are photos and footage of the construction of the World Trade Center and on the right there are photos of Philippe Petit as a child.

It's even seeped into the way I do my job. Last weekend I listened to Nuruddin Farah suggest that when we donate something, when we give someone aid, we are not doing it for the benefit of our beneficiaries. We are doing it for ourselves, because that person who needs our aid is a metaphor for ourselves.

self layered on self layered on self again

2008-10-03T22:26:00.003-04:00

What happens - I want to know - to a pearl that's not harvested.

I've set out a couple times to start my essay for the Archaeology of Wonder catalogue. Each time I do, I think back to conversations - specific ones - from the early days of my two most significant relationships. Such a strange feeling, this palimpsestic self.

It's always in Egypt that one forgets oneself in labor, overwhelming labor, body-bending and memory-arresting labor. And so it was for the heir apparent who, sent by his despot parents to fetch the pearl (this, some rite of passage), fell into it. The filthy clothes. The food of back-breaking work. The days so filled with it that they eclipsed his own legacy of himself.

Natural pearls are sometimes formed by a parasite lodged in the reproductive organs of a mollusk. The creature soothes itself, smoothes over the intruder with the very nacre that makes up its shell, does it again and again until there's a pearl.

So, when the son forgot his former self, it was as though that former self was an intruder that he covered and covered, calcitrated by each new situation of self.

"and if I remained by the outermost sea"

2008-09-22T00:06:00.006-04:00

I made it to the New Museum today for the last day of After Nature.

[by William Christenberry]

I had wanted to see it for some time for a couple reasons. First, it's an exhibition based on poetry. About time. So often the relationship works in reverse: poets write about museums and paintings and photographs and artists. And here's an exhibition that uses a collection of poems as a jumping off point.

Second, it's an exhibition based on the work of W. G. Sebald. I love his work. I save it up. I cherish it.

[by Brian Burkhardt]

Third, I think the exhibition ties in nicely to one Real Art Ways will be opening on Saturday, October 4. Archaeology of Wonder has work that punches you in the gut in a way that's similar to some of the work in After Nature. See for yourself.

[by Werner Herzog]

on writing; on not writing; on reading; on old and new beds

2008-09-15T18:45:00.005-04:00

When I started this blog, it was with the intention of cataloguing and developing my ideas for poems and poetry projects when they were at their most embryonic. I've been quiet for a while now. It doesn't mean I haven't been thinking.

[This is me reflecting. Sorry. Bad pun.]

I've been reading a lot these days. I've been delving back into Charcot territory. In a turn that probably deserves a poem of its own, I uncovered some articles I had copied when I was researching that series this past weekend when I was dismantling my old bed. Ever since I moved out of 5 Willard Street, I'd been sleeping on the same, hard, rickety twin sized bed that I used as an adolescent. Well, now, thanks to my lovely parents I have a grown-up's bed.

But back to the old bed for a moment - it's the one on which I lost my virginity; it's the one that supported me through any number of teenaged traumas; it's the one on which I was inclined to martyr myself (in a manner of speaking) after the dissolution of my last relationship.

And it was during the dismantling of this bed - this carriage-of-so-much - that I found the unfinished aspects of my hysteria research. Have at it, Freud!

So, in addition to the satyrical self-psychoanalytic poem (maybe it should be a limerick!) I'll write about this, these are the things I've been considering adding to the series:
- a poem for/on Ada and Byron
- a poem on hysteria in Restoration comedies
- a poem that (somehow) messes with the accepted structural elements of bourgeois respectability
- inasmuch as hysteria can often be imitative, a poem in which the sufferer bears symptoms that match the mercury poisoning her husband would have contracted from producing daguerreotypes
- a poem on Charcot on art (based on Les Demoniaques dans l'art)
- a poem on Linda Santo and her daughter Audrey, focusing on the attitudes of Audrey's body
- I think there ought to be something, too, about epidemiology in the book (I just haven't figured out how I want to tackle that...)

What do you think, Charcot?

wandering the narrows

2008-08-30T15:03:00.003-04:00

I feel as though I have been wandering the Narrows for some time.

It was a weekend filled with seemingly obvious conjunctions of Nature and the mechanical.

It was hot and I felt as though I was adrift in the belly of some mechanical whale. Me, some little modern Pinocchio, some Jonah.

"a feeling as infinite as an open accordion"

2008-08-17T12:22:00.006-04:00

Rosario, 2004. By Margarida Correia

During my last several conversations with my mother, she has remarked that I must be feeling nostalgic lately. I've been asking her to tell me stories from when I was a child - whether it's a story of some friend who fell and got a concussion, or whether she remembers my brother and I ever fighting (she doesn't). I've been wanting to know those little particular histories.

I spent yesterday by myself, doing a variety of things that would seem to support her charge (although she wouldn't call it an accusation, I find that I respond to it with a degree of defensiveness).

I opened up and dusted off my clarinet for the first time in 13 years. I played for hours.

I went to the ArtSpace tag sale, where I discussed Nancy Drew with a small girl and her mother. The girl, in a manner entirely reminiscent of my own experiences of family tag sales, demanded of her mother "You're not selling those, are you?! You said that they were ours!"

I opened one of the books to find a scene I remember from when I was a child in which Nancy disguises herself by coloring her trademark blonde hair with mascara (successfully, if you can imagine such a thing!).

I went to Integrity 'n Music, one of my favorite places to visit, where I was treated to the always-impressive Jackie McLean Youth Jazz Orchestra. I found there, among other things, Court and Spark - an album that was woven firmly through the entirety of my first two decades. I sang it through twice - I've always liked the way my voice bends around those songs. It was a sweet and pleasant hour-and-a-half.

And yet, I'm not sure it's exactly nostalgia that spurns these activities. It's true that I'm seeking to solidify my experience in the present and I know I'm concerned (me with my imperfect memory) with having some kind of document of my days. But I think there is something more to my impulse than the desperate grasping for proof of existence.

In Svetlana Boym's formidable The Future of Nostalgia, she traces a history of the malady. Nostalgia came into existence during a paradigmatic shift that effected much of the world. In the 18th century - that period of constant exploration, rapid colonization, and concerted nation-building - people responded to the universalization of experience, of space, and of time (think of the popularization of clocks, of the systematization of map-making) with a keen longing for the particular. As Boym suggests, "Nostalgia, as a historical emotion, is a longing for that shrinking 'space of experience' that no longer fits the new horizon of expectations" (10).

Perhaps what I'm feeling is not nostalgia alone, but something akin to Kant's ideal melancholy - that which enables one to be particularly attuned to the dilemmas of life.

Then again, maybe I do just want another chance to be seven, to thumb my way through a card catalogue, and to be aware of those moments through which I pass.

"as the flames rose to her Roman nose"

2008-08-12T23:30:00.006-04:00

Well, it's nothing like that summer I was 14 and we piled into some boy's car to watch So I Married an Axe Murderer at the Mansfield Drive-In. That summer it was The Smiths and cut off jean shorts and little kids' tee-shirts and Manic Panic. It was deciding to screw being tan for the first time. It was cars filled with older friends and it was singing arias in the back seat. It was mix tapes and humidity.

When you're 14 the colors that fill out your experiences are deeply saturated. When you're 14 this saturation is extended by a general oblivion to the world around you, so that, for instance, not knowing that you were going to the drive-in during the Perseid meteor shower and then seeing dozens of stars raining down, would probably result in you deeming the night to be among those that were your most magical.

But then, what's 14 for if not self-centered magic?

But tonight was good, too, in its own quasi-adult way. I worked late - till around 9; I went to the gym; I showered; I did the dishes. And then I packed up The Bear and walked down the block to the law school's soccer field. My block has an odd sort of mix of housing - there are longtime West End residents; there are wealthy, newly-arrived homeowners; there are the residents of the assisted living facility; there are people on Section 8; and there are renters (most of them law students). As I walked down the block, I noted one television, one unidentified ultraviolet liquid, four used mattresses, one stove, three adolescents getting the most out of the days before the curfew takes effect, two cats (not counting The Bear), and one couple sitting on their porch. I walked past the sublime Hartford Seminary and tromped out into the middle of the field. The grass was wet. I put The Bear down and stretched out, long on the wet earth.

And I waited.

And just when I had determined that there is probably too much light pollution in Hartford to watch a meteor shower, there it was - one perfect slash of the razor against the sky. And I loved it. And it made me gasp. And The Bear switched from purring to the little sound she makes when she's taking stock of her surroundings.

"we pass on // to another cellar, to another sliced wall / where poor utensils show / like rare objects in a museum"

2008-07-30T07:36:00.004-04:00

It makes sense. It makes sense if poetry makes sense to you. Or maybe it makes sense if you've oriented yourself - deliberately - toward poetry.

The three poets to which I was most drawn as a girl were William Butler Yeats, Walt Whitman, and Anne Sexton. Because of the nature of my reading habits (pulling things from my parents' shelves and delving), I only read one book by each early on - the cheap penguin Irish writers paperback that one or the other parent bought somewhere along the way for 25 cents, the gorgeous illustrated edition of Leaves of Grass, and The Book of Folly.

Each of these, in their own way, has a propensity for layering things one upon another. Whitman, of course, layers himself on everyone else. Sexton layers herself upon herself:

It is waiting. / It is waiting. / Mr. Doppelgänger. My brother. My spouse. / Mr. Doppelgänger. My enemy. My lover. [from "The Other"]

[I've sat like this for as long as I can remember - one leg snaking around the other - my own skin pressing on my own skin, fast with pressure.]

And Yeats. Well, Yeats, with his famously widening gyre, does it most transparently, doesn't he?

I can't help but think that, having oriented myself toward this kind of layering, I am somehow primed to suss it out in my life. And yet, it doesn't give rise to any less wonder each time my life folds back onto itself, all overlapping and resignified. Lessons, people, opportunities (missed and present) serve themselves up again and again.

And my response - always - is that quickening clutch of throat and that almost immediate impulse to think of gyres, of palimpsests, of pentimento.

[The Hay Wain, by John Constable]

I suppose that's the nature of pentimento - you make a choice, repent, cover it up, but then it slowly reveals itself under the façade you established, however meticulously.

"location-notes and love calls"

2008-07-21T16:17:00.006-04:00

When I read about the man who leapt over barricades on opening day of the Berlin Madame Tussauds' to tear off the head of the Hitler figure, the first thing I thought of was the woman during the Roman Empire who, locked away by her family because she was Christian, ate the icon that was in her chambers. Paint, splinters, gold leaf - she ate it in a fit of - of what? - significant longing? Fetishization? Faith?

Perhaps it happened or perhaps not.

I thought that we had been told of it in our Early Christian and Byzantine Art History class. Michelle and I took this course together as undergraduates with the estimable Jean Givens. Michelle has a more encyclopedic memory than anyone I have ever encountered since, so when she didn't recall that woman, locked away eating her icon, zealous in it, I was prepared to release the memory to construction.

At Wellfleet last weekend, I was walking with my mother along the same beach we had visited when I was a toddler. She calls it my Kermit phase because there was a certain frog-shaped beanbag without which I was loathe to go anywhere at all (including into the Atlantic Ocean, freakish or not!). Walking there, feet bare and legs sea-slicked from the kicking tide, I asked her if she remembered the whales that stranded at Wellfleet when I was a girl.

She didn't, not particularly, and I started to question my memory again. For her, the first thing she thinks of when someone mentions Wellfleet is that trip we took, she and I together on the bus. For me, I think of the whales and how I heard, somewhere along the way, that rescue workers touch them near the big, inky eye to see how close to death they are.

When my father was a boy, they beached here, too, fifty of them at once.

We stood there together, dad and I, on the deck of the cabin he had visited since he was a boy. We took turns with Grandpa's binoculars. I insisted that, in Grandpa's honor, we always bow our heads through the strap before looking at the boats. "Brown-nose," my father said, but I knew he appreciated that I knew the way Grandpa would have liked things, just so.

so much depends on synapses, on sea slugs

2008-07-16T08:49:00.005-04:00

It's impossible to start a poem with that phrase anymore.

In the 1950s, at Hartford Hospital (the site - decades later - of my siblings' births) Dr. Scoville made an accidental discovery about memory. He was trying to curb a patient's seizures. This, from Lauren Slater's Opening Skinner's Box:

Based on this last assumption [that memory was diffuse, without locale, scattered like widely sown seed over the whole rind of the cortex], Scoville had no hesitation about removing Henry's hippocampus. The operating room was cool. Henry lay awake on the steel table. Because there are no nerves in the brain, such surgery was performed with the patient completely conscious, only a local anesthetic to numb the skin of the scalp. Swoosh went the shot of lidocaine. A moment laster Henry must have seen Scoville coming at him with his hand-cranked drill, and then two holes were bored above each of his open eyes, and into these holes Scoville inserted a small spatula, with which he jacked up Henry's frontal lobes.

The operating room was quiet. Nurse, hand me this. Nurse, hand me that. But otherwise, no sound. Scoville was looking into Henry. He was looking under the hood of Henry's brain, and how beautiful it was beneath the cortical coral reef, in the brain's interior capsules, where pyramidal cells are shaped like hyacinth, in complex cones, where neurons are tiny but dense. Into this nether region Scoville now inserted a silver straw. Scoville slowly threaded the silver straw deep into Henry's pulsing brain, and then - there - he suctioned out the pink-gray seahorse shape on either side, the entire hippocampus now gone. Inside Henry's head, a great gap appeared, a ragged hole where something once lived.

What did Henry feel as Scoville sucked out his hippocampus? He was, after all, wide awake, thoroughly alert, and the hippocampus, although no one knew it at the time, is the seat of many of our memories. Did Henry feel his past leave him in a single suck? Did he feel the entrance of forgetfulness, like a cold thing coming in or was it more a sensation of sliding: your lover, your qualms, the cats calling beneath the porch in summer - all dropping down into nothing?

It was this accident that gave rise to the experiment on sea slugs through which we learned about the work synapses do for us.

One of the first phrases I associate with moving to Hartford is "build your synapses." When Robyn and I lived together, we would occasionally take meandering drives and learn new paths through Parkville and Frog Hollow and Asylum Hill. This activity was something she called "building synapses."

The other day, I withdrew from whatever social engagement I had arranged (a bad habit of mine) and sludged through some old vhs tapes to find a film I hadn't watched recently. I used To Catch a Thief as a comfort film for years - if I was sick or sad or lonely, it was one of my standards, like something you hum to yourself to quell your nerves.

I let it play through. When the 1994 World Cup footage I had taped over came on, I let that play, too.

There was something comforting about the sounds of it. I let it play and it let its soundtrack waft through my little house, heretofore unfamiliar with the fragmentary phrase construction of sportscasters.

Bits of memories came back to me about that tournament: that red-headed US player; their horrible uniforms; my dad's temporarily reassigned attention from baseball to soccer that summer; that the US team did better than people had anticipated.

And then - did I remember this or did I return to a spot vacant of particulars and inscribe a memory there - I read about Andrés Escobar and it was familiar and I felt, for a moment, the fascinated repulsion of an adolescent. It was easy to feel things in high contrast then, easy to slough off complexities.

Yes - it was this very game over which I taped a Hitchcock movie. This goal is covered up, leaving only muttered half-sentences of the end of the game. Would the sports casters have known? How eerie to watch this footage knowing what would follow, knowing that Escobar had, in a way, set into action a series of events that would give narrative structure to his life. It was rent, suddenly, from the complexities and undefinables of any-life and thrust into narrative significance - something like sea slugs, significant for the meaning we have plied from them after the experiments.

Snag Breac is ainm dom.

2008-07-08T00:53:00.005-04:00

I've been dreaming of birds most nights.

Last night it was that I picked this up and unfurled and refolded it again and again. It was white in the dream.

The night before - I fully acknowledge that this is grandiose, but when if not in dreams can we be grandiose, eh? - I dreamed that I discovered a new kind of falcon.

Don't laugh.

It was a peacock falcon and it was beautiful.

I willed myself into dreaming a gannet's plunge in the early hours of the morning.

I dreamed I protected sundry kittens and the puppies of lost friends from eagles.

I dreamed I was on my back, again, shirt damp from the spongy ground that surrounds the foundation of L. M. Montgomery's house, after I had retreated from the dives this bird's mother took at my head.

"time's rolling smithy smoke"

2008-06-25T08:24:00.002-04:00

We made the signs for the Separatist Road celebration. This was a task that, I think, I, Sarah, Patrick, and Josh undertook years ago - maybe 15 years ago. As I was explaining the project to Jillian and Faith - who the key players were (Mena and Robert were to have staring roles in the signs; and Nora for nostalgia's sake), the kind of humor ("only a jerk would park on the corner!") that we were aiming at - I felt this rush of gratitude for the extended family my parents shaped for us.

There are so many other things running through my head, but I think I'll just leave them, for now. How lovely - for sign-making to be significant!

[Also, a very happy birthday to my brilliant and beautiful friend, Sarah!]

"and let thy feet milenniums hence be set in the midst of knowledge"

2008-06-22T12:05:00.005-04:00

I had just said to Jillian that I communicate better when conversation occurs through some medium. Later, I told another person that it's easier for me to talk when I'm holding a book in my hand.

So, it was a delightful challenge when someone asked me why I have cried (repeatedly) at the British Museum and I struggled through several media to explain myself.

I wanted to touch it so badly. The feeling was almost irresistible. I think it must have been a combination of the heat, my isolation (I hadn't talked to anyone in a week, at least), and the enormity of the museum. I could almost see the statue breathe, and I started to cry.

My first response to the question was to explain what I find ideologically problematic about the discursive structure of the museum. I rambled my way around some issues, in particular, that I have with the representation of African "art objects" during modernity, namely that their presentation of cultural and ritualistic artifacts would seem to suggest that African modernity did not occur. I meandered around the idea that display and possession are linked, and that it can be difficult for people to be aware of how the desire that engenders shapes their responses to what they see.

This was a thoroughly incorrect answer to the question, but I didn't figure that out until the next morning.

Books create in me a feeling of comfort and support that it is difficult to imagine going without for very long. I almost always carry a book (sometimes as many as five) around with me. And so, when I got back to my house, I curled up on the couch with The Bear and stacked all my museum theory around me. [I realize the defensiveness of a position like this. Living in a city like Hartford, with its fierce and unapologetic anti-intellectualism, has made me not insensitive to the image of the intellectual protected and shrouded, even blinded, by books. What I actually feel is something distinct from this image, though.] And so it was with comfort that I thumbed through books thrice-read, with thrice-scripted marginalia.

I found this:

once removed from the continuity of everyday uses in time and space and made exquisite on display, stabilized and conserved, objects are transformed in the meanings that they may be said to carry: they become moments of ownership, commodities.

- Spencer R. Crew and James E. Sims

It is reading exactly this kind of thing (combined with an upbringing darned through with Marxism) that makes me a bit indignant and irreverent around museums:

I came up with a formula that I imagined summed up the reasons behind my lachrymosity:
1. See Sims and Crew quote.
2. The observation of resituated and condensed culture.
3. Experiencing some degree of wonder at the incandescent unfamiliarity of the objects.
4. Experiencing horror (or something like it) at the combined semiotic and actual (physical) wounding of the objects.
5. The (again) irreverent and automatic (bratty) perception that the collectors, and the museum itself during certain eras, were pilfering bastards. [I realize this is a harsh judgment, and one that is the result of consuming a fair number of incendiary conversations throughout my life about ideological apparatuses...]

"Good," I thought, "I've neatly wrapped up and contained the precise reasons for crying at the British Museum." I should know by now to be wary of good, to be wary of neat. I spent much of the very early hours of this morning reshaping what I had thought via text message - a rather astounding mode of composition!

I've talked before about the deceptively simple clarity with which ideas come to me in the very first moments of waking. Salman Rushdie mentioned it the other night - that writing happens best in the early moments of consciousness, before the paper, before emails, before any of it. It was in these collected moments of clarity that I realized I hadn't answered his question at all - not even remotely. Here's what I thought it was this morning:

When we enter a place like the British Museum (especially now with its new, kind of postmodern vaulted atrium) I think the smallness of our bodies in the face of this gargantuan repository of culture and history (the high ceilings, the vast and encyclopedic collection) cognitively primes us for tears.

And that was it. And, in another way, that wasn't it at all. As I mulled this over - after coffee, after emails - I noticed a half-knot forming in my throat (a sure sign, if ever there was one, that there is more going on than what I am putting into words). I had been thinking all week of that summer I lived in New Jersey, remembering (I had chosen not really to think about this time critically) all the remarkably foolhardy choices I made that summer, shaking my head, slack-jawed at the shape of those months.

They are aspects of my mother's particular means of problem-solving: isolation and unfamiliarity. She encouraged me to leave Connecticut that summer I chose New Jersey and she encouraged me to go away that summer after I finished my graduate program (a phrase that I use, decidedly, as a euphemism for another period of my life that I ended abruptly at around the same time).

So it was that with these intentions (seeking anonymity, removing myself from places on which I had impressed memories) that I headed for Europe. It was after about three months of isolation, of minimal conversation and interaction, of intensive writing and research, that I returned almost ritualistically to the British Museum. Day after day I would enter through the atrium, and each time the lightheadedness would hit me almost instantly. And, at some point during my meanderings, I would feel the undeniable clutch of throat that precedes tears.

I think part of it was that the world doesn't seem quite so enormous with another person bearing witness to your life. When you have had that and then, for whatever reason, you remove yourself from it, the scale of things seems to explode, so that even a pill, netted in its systematized place, can seem too grand to comprehend.

discoveries are usually exciting and problematic

2008-06-15T11:50:00.003-04:00

I have been meaning to frame this memory cloth for years. I got it when I was finishing grad school. The William Benton Museum of Art had been engaging art that relates to human rights and, as part of that initiative, they had about a hundred South African memory cloths on display. I've written before about some of the things I found particularly compelling to study (cultural representations of collective memory and trauma in postcolonial contexts). For those of you who read this regularly, you are already familiar with my creative interest in memory. Besides engaging these interests, memory cloths are the visual representations of verbalized narratives. And, well, I'm a sucker for all things ekphrastic.

I hadn't framed it yet, because I wasn't certain how to deal with the narrative element. The cloth came with a narrative, in the words of the creator, printed in - I'll say it - ugly, ugly arial. I felt as though it should probably be hand written for the purposes of display - the little, impersonal rectangle that came with it was out of the question. But I didn't know what kind of paper I should use or whether my own hand writing would look right. For that matter, I wasn't entirely convinced that applying my own handwriting to another's voice was something I wanted to engage in this context.

[The Bear was curious, too!]

I pealed back the cloth from its board and my heart fluttered right up into my throat when I saw it: she had written it out - in her own hand!

I understand that there's a degree of romanticization occurring here. But I can't help it - there is something about the fact of another person pressing ink into paper that thrills me to my very core. It's not written to me, obviously; it's a much different sensation than what happens to me when I read a letter from a loved one. This has to do with language and time and indisputable indexicality.

for the briefest turn

2008-06-10T08:23:00.003-04:00

From the Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress)

For just a moment, just a hint of a moment, really, I forgot my grandfather had died. I know it makes no sense. He died seven years ago, but, as I was reading in Atonement of a tank attack in France, I had the sudden, very strong urge to talk to my grandfather about World War II.

I'm not sure he would have engaged the conversation - I'm not sure I actually would have properly initiated it - were things other than how they are.

"all sorts of benevolent irregularities"

2008-06-07T14:49:00.009-04:00

Many things happened yesterday.

Today, I sat on my couch, legs curled under me, blinds and windows down in an effort to block the 93-degree outside, the regular crank (at around 120 bpm) of the ceiling fan the only soundtrack, and I read it over and over, aloud:

Nevertheless the winter wears on and death follows death. I've tried it, and know how the narrowing-down feeling conflicts with the feeling of life's coming to a point, not a climax but a point. At that point one must, yes, be selective in one's choice if you see what I mean. Not choose this or that because it pleases, merely to assume the idea of choosing, so that some things can be left behind. It doesn't matter which ones. I could tell you about some of the things I've discarded but that wouldn't help you because you must choose your own, or rather not choose them but let them be inflicted on and off you. This is the point of the narrowing-down process. And gradually, as the air gets thinner as you climb a mountain, these things will stand forth in a relief all their own—the look of belonging. It is a marvelous job to do, and it is enough just to approximate it. Things will do the rest. Only then will the point of not having everything become apparent, and it will flash on you with such dexterity and such terribleness that you will wonder how you lived before—as though a valley hundreds of miles in length and full of orchards and all sorts of benevolent irregularities of landscape were suddenly to open at your feet, just as you told yourself you could not climb a step higher.

from Three Poems by John Ashbery

And I keep coming back to it, butting my head against it like some obstinate 3-year-old: I am terrified of the narrowing-down process. I want to remember the things - more than that! - I want to catalogue, make a record of the things that to me are somehow or other divine.

I find, as my panoply of experiences grows, that most often the concepts I thumb my nose at are the very ones that I come around to accepting sooner or later. I push hard against things. I interrogate them for as long as my endurance possibly allows and then they either break or I believe them. It's a sinister metaphor - but I am generally not very sinister at all, so I will allow myself this image. And I will push, today, against the idea that we must accept the choice to "leave some things behind."

So:

Things that happened yesterday:

Connecticut sped by me (or I sped by it, really) in its high green glory. It is the green of these trees that I miss whenever I am away during summer. I missed it on trips to Kansas or Colorado. I missed this green in that greenest of places (or, at least, it's recognized for its greens): Ireland. The last significant trip I made on a bus was from Galway to Dublin in 2006. I rode that bus across the sparsely treed island immediately after an unhinged man spit in my face. He spit right in my face and it smelled like dip and whiskey-pickled rot. There was a teenager and her mother waiting for the bus, too. Later, they apologized for not trying to help me.

We arrived at dia:beacon and it seemed as though it was going to be rude to eschew the guided tour. So I went. I went with Barbara and our guests and I let Kirsten lead me.

It happened first when I stepped into the On Karawa room. I knew his work already; I had studied it - I had even handled it during my internship at the Wadsworth. It had never particularly effected me before. Maybe it had to do with the space they dedicated to the work at dia; he had an entire room (probably 600 square feet) with about 30 canvases. Maybe it was seeing that many of them together. Something clicked; my throat cinched; and I got it. Staring down mortality - a nice fit with Ashbery (whom I had started reading that morning).

We volunteered to read them out loud. As our mouths pressed out the Sol Lewitt instructions, our voices would sometimes overlap and sometimes synchronize. The instructions were absurd, specific, and ridiculous. And there was I, barely able to hold in my laughter at times. Our inflections lined up occasionally; other times we just missed each other. There was a general tone of sarcastic school marm (how I imagine I sound when I read the instructions for the evaluation forms my students end up having to proctor). [Oh, Sol, we miss you!] The thing of it is, the fact of the fun of it never stops being surprising.

I climbed over and through and around George Trakas's Beacon Point. I stomped on it and splashed in it and abraded my knuckles against its sundry surfaces. I photographed it the way you might macro the skin of a new love, as if by desperate and magnified documentation you will not lose this feeling, this utter and speechless thrill of discovering new crannies and convexes. I didn't want to leave it, ever. I could have slept, curled against one of its posts, fingertips dangling into the grey-dove Hudson.

But it was hot and humid and there were other people (and my job) to consider. And so, I elected not, after all, to sleep with the pier, but to return to the museum. I thought I knew that the only way I really wanted to experience the Richard Serras was to be alone in silence, folded like some embryo against them.

Alone was not an option. I could hear other people and their sounds. I took to it anyway. I stretched my arms as close as I could to the steel. I stomped and tip-toed and listened to my own breath reverberating in the space. And when I got to the center, I laid down on the cold, cold concrete in savasana, the warmth and humidity of my flesh slipped away, absorbed into the floor. I sang - I really sang - for the first time in years. I let unfurl in pianissimo Se Tu M'Ami and it soared and swelled into the high ceilings of what was the loading dock of a Nabisco box factory.

Then it shifted. I finished the aria and just breathed. At the other end of the gallery someone started cooing a Mourning Dove's call. He did it thrice before I reciprocated, the inverted call. We repeated our respective positions, as much claiming territory as making overtures to each other. And before I realized I had decided to be complicit to improvisation, there we were, writing each other. Leaving only very temporary indexes of an intimacy anonymous and irreproducible.

I want it to be clear that by this point I had wept four times. If you have not read Pictures and Tears by Jim Elkins, you must.

As we drove east into Connecticut's center, I saw so many hawks. They soared and soared and played and wobbled. And I could not tear my eyes away. I'm certain that the woman sitting behind me must have thought I had completely lost the plot. She did not stay for the group photograph we all posed for outside the bus. She smelled like Goldschlager - in a good way.

There's more:

I met Salman Rushdie - I will write more about this on The Absurde Round Table (I think it's a more appropriate forum for such musings), but for the moment I will describe the point at which I wept during his talk. He had just finished identifying himself as "crow number one." He was using it to suggest that the political situation that followed the release of The Satanic Verses was more signifier than significance. In a manner not dissimilar from most artists I've encountered, he redirected the topic from biographical occurrences to the research he conducted for his newest book, The Enchantress of Florence. Much to my delight, he took his time describing his research and the way that sometimes the uncanniness of the real trumps anything we might invent. He cited an event of which he read when the lions (who were meant to be released in the square where they would cause an entertaining spectacle of gore) were too bored to maul anyone. And the people were upset. Not only were the people upset, but the historians were, as well, enough so that they recorded this upheaval in mass recreation into the bank boxes of posterity, just waiting for us.

And then, there was one last push to the day. I went for postcolonial literary giantess to retro badass babes. Real Art Ways was hosting the Connecticut roller girls and screening the documentary Hell on Wheels. I squirmed during the film. I took about a hundred pictures after. And then, I had that instant flash of heat and sweat and the next thing I knew I was gripping the green room toilet.

I'll admit it. There is a part of me that hopes my sudden illness was a kind of Stendhal Syndrome (something I promise to adequately describe in a future post - there's a surprising paucity of material on the web about it...). I think you should probably judge me for this and I think I should have been much more hesitant to so readily admit it.

I went home and swaddled myself in the familiarity of handed down silk pajamas and the Gwyneth Paltrow Emma. What comfort was mine!

"another, and truer, way"

2008-06-06T07:56:00.003-04:00

It's raining again this morning and I stayed in bed far too long, luxuriating in the sound of it and then luxuriating in some poetry. [Times like these I wish for everyone that they have some time in a quiet bed on a June morning to read poems.]

I had picked up John Ashbery's Three Poems for no particular reason but that it was by my bed. It occurs to me that the technique of leaving out - actually composing and then removing text, negative space left behind in the poem - is one that would be particularly well-suited to the personal history and poetic prosthesis series.

I'm off now, to dia:beacon to fight valiantly the urge to wrap my body around and into some Richard Serras.

Later, I'll meet Salman Rushdie. [Right now, you can imagine me swooning all over my office...]

Still later, I'll surround myself with roller derby girls. [Still more swooning...]

There's a part of me that longs for some modern form of Stendhal Syndrome.

repetition and wonder

2008-06-04T08:20:00.007-04:00

It's a rainy June morning. I kept the windows open last night, so there's a cool, wet breeze coming through to my living room along with all the sundry sounds of rain. It feels like England.

My neighborhood, Greencroft Gardens, right off Finchley Road, NW6

The house in which I lived in South Hampstead was on a quiet block near the Freud Museum. Women pushed prams most mornings, regardless of the weather. The clear plastic awnings that covered the children were speckled with a hundred rain drops, miniscule demi-worlds to capture a million-some details of the neighborhood's skyline. I always wanted to take a photograph from within there. The slate walks turned the deepest grey-brown in the rain and the modest trees smelled more like trees.

But, now, I am in my native Connecticut. The leaves on its stunning trees are now completely open. The Velvet Underground is on the record player and I am thinking of home. I'm thinking of things that we do over and over and return to with wonder. If wonder is the feeling of astonishment - that's not quite it - the feeling of our selves being thrown into a position from where we can no longer depend on our own significance in the face of some object, some occurrence, then how does it relate to something we do ritualistically?

For myself, I'm thinking of the woods, of the course I tend to track through them. Decades before my parents put in the riding ring, before any proper trails were established by Joshua's Trust, I would wander through the woods - so thick that the air looks green - and perch on boulders or test my balance on the edge of a cliff. I repeat these tests, these reveries regularly.

The people to whom I bring up Gilles Deleuze, tend not to have very positive responses to him. But I'm wondering if I could use something about what he has to say about repetition and pair it with Stendhal's description of what happened to the body-in-wonder when he was in Florence in order to hazard a guess about how ritualistic wonder works.

I think of the maps my father made me - my father, the map maker; my father, the poet - he would hide something for me in the woods and make a map, filled with fanciful names and "100-year Sugar Maples"s. He would stain the paper in tea to "age" it and he would burn the edges. He would make, in short, a world of measurement and wonder.

I'm trying to collect stories about how people approach wonder. Do you photograph it? Do you make videos? Or do you sit - so quiet - and watch?

It caught me by surprise, like a word...

2008-06-01T13:30:00.007-04:00

I have a bit of a fraught relationship with academe. I question my motives in toeing its edges; from the time I was quite young (even, perhaps, as young as six) I understood - not in these terms, but I understood nonetheless - that being a member of academe, being part of an intellectual elite, can in effect make ones class status secondary to the work one produces. The idea was intoxicating to me.

I finished my masters degree in the midst of a very deep depression. I was questioning my identity, reevaluating the extent to which I took my identity for granted. I was overextending myself - taking a double course load (four courses to the standard two), working a double assistantship load (teaching a course to freshmen that was part of a human rights pilot program, while also being a research assistant to a scholar and artist I admire more than I can adequately express), directing a poetry and graphic design project on a volunteer basis, studying for my exams, applying to PhD programs, and doing extensive departmental committee work. I realize that this is, in many ways, a typical academic workload, but it was a lot for me to take on in the context of having just ended the most significant relationship of my life (a relationship that, for many, many years I believed would be the one that would carry me to old age).

I left for Europe as soon as I had submitted my grades for that final semester. I left with the intention of giving a conference paper in Galway, spending a two week retreat in Co. Donegal during which I would complete a draft of my manuscript (historically-informed poems on Charcot's hysterics), and from there traveling to England with no fixed plans to return. I wanted, desperately, to find some anonymity, to have the space with myself I saw as necessary to figure out what would come next, to re-situate myself to my own positionality. It was from the Holburn branch of the London Public Library that I wrote to my would-be PhD advisor at UCLA, declining his offer of admission. Writing that letter was difficult. Very difficult. It meant, at least temporarily, surrendering an idea and a hope and a plan I had had for myself since I was a very little girl.

Today - sun shining across my floors, cat basking in the window, coffee in hand - I finished reading Colum McCann's Zoli. And, in what seems almost momentous to me, when I sat down to write about it, what followed was the most scholarly thing I've written since May 2006. Admittedly, it is half-raw and only the very beginnings of an idea that would be properly researched in an academic context, but it kind of thrilled me. I miss it so much. I miss it. I miss it at my very finger tips and in my mind's heart.

I think this is beautiful

2008-05-30T18:27:00.002-04:00

I want to be a simulation of a cape.

...even if I was a cape of chain mail.

Natasha, my tractor

2008-05-26T16:15:00.007-04:00

Natasha, about whom I only feel very slightly guilty for calling the best dog ever, loved moving rocks.

Natasha, swamp monster

Within the first year we had Natasha we began to become concerned that hunters might mistake her for a deer - the way she moved through the woods, bounding and leaping over fallen trees, stone walls; the color of her coat, that kind of tawny caramel - and so we tied surveyors tape to her collar.

The dogs who come to live with my parents have quite the life - there's a large property with hills, streams, swamps, and obstacles of all sorts around which for them to roam. There's a menagerie of other animals with which they can play (sometimes this playing is more savage than others. To wit, in their first year with us the puppies killed Nora's bunny Jack. At some point the dogs killed a cat they found in the swamp - although, our parents only admitted this to us about a decade after the fact. And then there was the Great Bullfrog (Jerky) Massacre of 1997-2003. The dogs particularly enjoyed catching the big bullfrogs that lived in the swamp the beavers left behind. They would kill them, bring them up to the yard, let them dry for a few days, and then nomnomnom on them.)

One of Natasha's favorite, and most peculiar, pastimes was to run up the hill in the woods and hunt rocks. Big rocks. Rocks that were underground. In another life, she might have been an expert truffle hunter, but as it was she lived with us and found us rocks. She would sniff them out, dig them up, and push them down the hill with her snout so that the yard was often littered with rocks bigger than her head.

More often than not, you'd find Natasha in the yard licking and gnawing on one of her rocks.

She's covered with rocks now. I know it serves a practical purpose - we wouldn't want anyone digging her up - but I like the literal inversion of the tables, her beneath and them above. Weight pressing down and up. I visit here at the end of my runs and walks and hikes, some awkward demi-Heathcliff. (Don't worry - I don't actually exhume her.)

I know that there are many practical reasons my parents had for wanting a tractor - leveling and repositioning land for the riding ring, driveway maintenance, others that don't come to mind - but I like to think that they were inspired by Natasha's tireless rearranging of large rocks to do the same.

My parents went "tractor shopping" on every weekend for at least a year. It was part of what they do together as a couple. They have a whole routine of morning errands that usually incorporate feeding the bunnies at my mom's daycare center, picking up the paper from the general store, buying food for all the animals, and (at that point) tractor shopping.

During this tractor shopping year, my parents became increasingly convinced that I should marry the tractor salesman. It always kind of mystified me that they were seeing the same tractor salesman with such regularity that they could decide that he'd make a good son-in-law. But there you have it, they're very particular shoppers, my parents. They also have a penchant for selecting spouses for their children - the tractor salesman for me, the horse dentist (or, anyway, it's some man who has an equally esoteric equine-related job) for Nora, some linguist on TV for Patrick. They're regular Mrs. Bennets, my parents.

The urge to wed me off seems to have subsided along with the actual purchase of the tractor. They seem to be delighted by (in possession of minor injuries following) tractoring. To me, it seems as though they just move things around recreationally (although, arguably, my parents have a very labor-centered notion of recreation). (In full disclosure, I should admit to a deep abhorrence for lawn equipment dating back to the time in middle school that Sandy Mann showed me the toe he mowed off his foot. So, it's quite possible, I suppose, that the moving of things my parents do with the tractor is totally necessary, but that I am just too undereducated in the ways of lawn equipment to understand what's going on.)

At any rate, I prefer to think of the tractor as a kind of homage to Natasha.

In addition to being one of my favorite things to watch, this video shows rocks, do-it-yourself construction projects, and Natasha with surveyors tape.

heft and hold shut your eye

2008-05-18T12:40:00.000-04:00

Something changed for me the first time I looked at my world through a video camera. I've never been particularly good at remembering exactly when things happened. Sometimes I can piece it together based on cornerstones (many events in my life, for instance, are divided between Before Nora and After Nora), but really my memories are all kind of conglomerated.

I think this is partly why things like museums, archives, and libraries enticed me from a pretty early age - this notion of documenting things to tell stories to others, yes, but to your later self seemed like a good prosthesis to me.

It was my friend Sarah's dad who taught me first how to use a video camera. Cameras then (circa 1985) were heavy. It wasn't the easy eight ounces of metal and circuits and cables that comprise today's digital cameras—it was still the age of the Big. In the mid-eighties one wanted a ghetto blaster, not something called a "nano." It was Cadillacs and Jeeps, not smart cars and mini coopers. No. These things required a bit of muscle and a certain grasp on the skill of stability.

From a very young age, I watched classic movies, those films of the 30s, 40s, and 50s that some how or other always ended up telling the story of how to be a woman: when to demure, what contexts in which one should not wear one's gabardine, how to serve a Manhattan.

I can only imagine it was from one f these films that I got it into my head to walk across and back the room with Webster's Collegiate Dictionary on the crown of my head. I usually took some kind of a teetering, tentative sort of a path across the floor, arms never coming to a complete rest at my sides before they would leap back up to the edges of the book. In retrospect, it probably wasn't the best volume to have selected: it was heavy, thick, hard-covered, and, most importantly, its binding was broken, which made it slide around unreliable, some Buster Keaton spoof. But, at the time, it was the choice; I wanted desperately for it to lend a certain gravitas to the activity. You see, I was earnest even then. I was very keen to be taken seriously.

So, I had some degree of practice at stability. Nonetheless, video cameras then were heavy and unwieldy. You had to heft them up onto one shoulder and hold your neck just so, pressing one eye shut and the other to the viewfinder. It was a lot of coordination for a 6-year-old to manage.

Bob Cook was a natural teacher, storyteller, and community builder. These roles are perfectly exemplified in the way he taught me to use a camera. It was a method of connecting with people (could he tell how shy I was?) that seemed easier than holding a conversation. It was an initiation to and well-defined role within a group (documenter), a role that he often gave to any newcomers we happened upon. It was a way to approach our lives with a narrative orientation.

I've been recording things more these days. Clips are short (a drawback of digital recording) since I don't have an external hard drive and the quality is poor, but I have wanted keenly since Bob's death to make a better record of my days.

Here's Patrick at Real Art Ways the other night:

Here are the sounds of the majority of the spring evenings of my life:

"I can't get out."

2008-05-08T10:44:00.005-04:00

I've been seeing these darlings all over this spring. When I walk down the block each morning to my car, they hop along side me, the social little things. (Of course, this perceived sociability could have something to do with my neighbor's newly seeded lawn...)

the birthday card the beautiful and talented Jillian Vento made me, called "Still Lost Pet Bird Finds a Crown"

If you read these musings regularly, you may remember Still Lost Pet Bird. I still think about her everyday. I thought about her this morning as I was reading Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey:

I was interrupted in the heyday of this soliloquy, with a voice which I took to be of a child, which complained "it could not get out."—I look'd up and down the passage, and seeing neither man, woman, nor child, I went out without further attention.

In my return back through the passage, I heard the same words repeated twice over; and looking up, I saw it was a starling hung in a little cage—"I can't get out—I can't get out," said the starling.

I stood looking at the bird: and to every person who came through the passage it ran fluttering to the side towards which they approach'd it, with the same lamentation of its captivity—"I can't get out," said the starling—God help thee! said I—but I'll let thee out, cost what it will; so I turned about the cage to get to the door; it was twisted and double twisted so fast with wire, there was no getting it open without pulling the cage to pieces—I took both hands to it.

The bird flew to the place where I was attempting his deliverance, and thrusting his head through the trellis, pressed his breast against it, as if impatient—I fear, poor creature! said I, I cannot set thee at liberty—"No," said the starling—"I can't get out—I can't get out," said the starling.

It works because we wonder ourselves into it

2008-05-01T13:41:00.002-04:00

by Faith Antion

It keeps making its way to the surface, these days, some or other configuration of the idea that our sympathies can be gained (as viewers, as readers, as spectators in the world) when we sense a kind of transfiguration or threat to the human body.

I touched on it weeks ago, when I tried to suggest to my students that part of what's at work in Dorothea Lange's photos of migrant farmers (at least for me) is the immediate queasiness I feel when I see another person's bare feet in dusty dirt. I can't help myself - my throat instantly constricts and I grab the nearest glass of water, the closest bottle of lotion.

by Dorothea Lange

It reared its head again, this idea, as we were discussing an excerpt of Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes. In it, Barthes starts to investigate the structural elements of several photographs from rebellion-torn Nicaragua. I decided I wanted to find out what would happen if the students looked at a long series of photographs of their choosing. For whatever reason, a bunch of the students ended up looking at photos of people with deformities - a child with its brain encased in a thin membrane that is an outgrowth of its scull, children with limbs that grew backwards, men so emaciated by Chernobyl-induced cancer that the students wondered if what they saw was a trick of the camera. We wanted to, or at least I wanted them to, establish a system that would account for the responses we feel to bodies in pain (even as I write this I'm aware of the complexities of creating such a system, of manufacturing such a "we").

Kooza contortionists - where do their organs go?

I think there's something to the idea that when we combine the sympathy we feel for other human bodies with the threat of injury we imagine to our own that results in a very compelling kind of fascination and repulsion.

• • •

As a note (I wonder if this is at all interesting), this post has been sitting in my drafts for days and days, weeks, really. I've really struggled to let it go because it feels unfinished. There's a lot I still want to say about regarding other people's pain or potential pain that I can't quite properly verbalize at this point. But I've decided just to relinquish this post. What the hell - it's a blog; I can always come back to the idea again later.

sometimes it's just hard for words

2008-04-04T13:59:00.008-04:00

by Katie Taylor

It's been happening for about a month now, this disconcerting sense that I am losing my easy grasp on whatever fibers those are that connect my intended meaning with the expression of it that follows.

I am constantly doubting that anything I say or write makes sense. Emails and conversations are littered with "Does that make sense?" and "I'm not expressing it well" and "Do you understand what I'm trying to say?" And people respond "yes" or "no" or "I think so," but it doesn't leave me feeling any more assured that I've felted language and meaning together properly.

And another disconnection: I know this happens—I understand it intellectually. I've written about it, language dissolving when experience bursts its seams. Think about Toni Morrison in those school primer passages in The Bluest Eye. Think about Finnegan's Wake or Septimus Smith. Think about The New York Trilogy.

But I find more and more as I accumulate experiences that intellectual understanding does not prepare you for experiencing things during whatever present in which they occur. They're separate forms of knowing.

by Fay Ku

I was reminded the other day of the concept of the un-thought known. It's a term from psychoanalysis (if I understand it correctly) that refers to the knowledge a child accumulates that is never consciously given to her and that she doesn't knowingly receive. It's not a kind of knowledge that we can take stock of and it functions extralingually.

I keep hoping that maybe knowledge works a bit like a hybrid engine, with one part kicking in for the other when necessary. Maybe my un-thought known is picking up the slack these days.

boundaries

2008-03-26T09:17:00.002-04:00

Growing up as I did, the daughter of a surveyor, it is perhaps not surprising that I regularly wonder about borders and boundaries.

The forest in which Nora, Pat, and I grew up is filled with surprising stone walls - stone walls where no foundation or house is nearby, stone walls that the Joshua's Trust trails now traverse.

I've had debates in suburban backyards about whether or not property boundaries are real (nb. do not try to have this argument with an existentialist, even one well-acquainted with stone walls and hedgerows, unless you are prepared to give up a bit flustered).

In my days teaching daycare, I enjoyed watching the various methods 3-year-olds have for negotiating boundaries - rule bending, side-stepping, and loop-hole-finding at its best.

These days, I've been wondering about where the self starts and stops. Sometimes I feel the fixed perimeter of this corporeal husk so palpably. I feel amazed that I don't burst over the seams of my body. Other times, it seems comforting to reject the "hereness" of our bodies.

What keeps one fragile force from another? That's what I kept wondering last night as I was watching Caribou at the Iron Horse. It was easily the best concert I've seen this year and, as they sat, drum kit to drum kit, face to face, I couldn't help but marvel over all those sounds - those overlapping indexes of self - and where it all starts and where it all stops.

the hectares of my heart

2008-03-18T08:08:00.002-04:00

I look at this picture of my mother and I think she is probably the most beautiful woman I've ever seen.

Today my mother has officially spent half her life as a mother. She was 29. She had lived in Hawaii and Tucson and sundry locations across the Northeast. She had been married and divorced and married again. She and my father owned a house in the middle of a forest they loved. She had found a career in a field that utilized her degree (granted, that field did not and does not pay a living wage). She had and has great legs.

It's hard not to measure oneself against that.

you can't take it with you

2008-03-16T18:33:00.004-04:00

I do not have great chronological mastery of my memories. They tend to flash before me like so many birds. Sometimes they sit still, wait long enough for me to take a good look, to take in the tawny spectrum of their feathers. Other times they undulate in the sky - their swarming dance not unlike the pull and recoil of algae in a tidal pool. Still other times they dart across my field of vision so fast they are the merest suggestion of a being.

"A beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists. All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt." - Susan Sontag, On Photography

The photograph I've placed above was taken by a woman who was on her last visit to her dying mother. In the same batch, she has posted the last photograph she took of her mother. Her mother is in a hospital bed, in the photo, with tubes - oxygen and something intravenous. She looks frail and tired (as one would). The woman notes, in her caption, that her mother was at an excellent nursing home, where she was pampered.

About a month later, after her mother had died, the woman returned to Honolulu with her brother. They climbed to the top of the highest hill in the city, where their parents wished to scattered, and took this photograph of the site:

I think there was a pretty significant paradigmatic shift that came with the popularization of photography. It seems to me that we know better how to negotiate our experiences through this medium.

I remember three things mainly about my grandfather's funeral: (1) it was surprising to see my father, my uncle Freddy (from the other side of the family), and Bob Cook standing together; (2) the room smelled musty and I was concerned that I would sneeze inappropriately; and (3) my grandfather's hands were harder than I'd expected and cold. I don't know if I would feel differently now about his hands if I had photographed him, but my impulse is to guess that I would, to guess that the thing would grant me aesthetic distance.

• • •

Later on the day of my grandfather's funeral we sat on my aunt's porch and Bob Cook gave my little cousin Robby things to throw into the chiminea - scraps of paper, receipts, a soda can, a hard boiled egg.

"a sparrow at night don't mean it's morning."

2008-02-26T00:49:00.003-05:00

by Jillian Vento

My parents’ house, the same house in which I grew up, is situated half way up the highest hill in our town. We lived in the midst of a dense deciduous forest. Patrick and I would play in the woods or down the hill in the stream that went beneath (and sometimes flooded above) our driveway.

The driveway itself is an old Town road. Woodland cuts North up through the trees and across the hill on which my house sits, snug amongst the Sugar Maples. The old Woodland continues beyond my house, gets lost and obscured in the woods a bit, and then emerges as an active, if unpaved road several miles out.

When we were young, Pat and I (and, later, Nora) were sent outside a fair amount. We would meander our way through the woods, to the swamp or to the stream. We would wander up the hill to the cliffs. After some time, we would hear it: the simulated owl’s hoot that one parent or other would let out, expecting us to echo back. It was our honing mechanism.

The woods are filled with sounds. It’s a tightly packed euphony: trees that creak in winter under the weight of ice or snow, animals that scamper through last autumn’s dead leaves, wind through trees and over rocks, water carving its way down the hill, and the owls.

Even as a child I was enamored with the owls. When, in Twin Peaks, various characters warn the “the owls are not what they seem,” rather than feeling alarmed by that kind of sylvan scopophilia, I felt comforted by the idea that these birds could be nocturnal sentinels.

One of my father’s favorite tasks is filling the bird feeders in the yard and off the porch. After he’s funneled the feed into the containers – some of them wooden, some of them copper and glass, some plastic and wire mesh – he stands back on the porch and surveys the field. He points out the woodpeckers, the blue jays, the sparrows. He pelts the occasional squirrel with a snowball.

My father protects those precious creatures. I mean precious in the sense Catholics mean it when they talk about the precious body or the precious blood. I mean that material form that takes on the qualities of the miraculous. Birds.

Impossibly crossed feet. Impossibly hollow bones. Impossibly delicate babies.

I suppose part of it started when we lived in the house on Storrs Road, by the lake. It was on the second floor of an early 19th-century farm house that had been converted in the 70s to apartments. We had a small porch and long stairway that we lined with flowers (a magnificent fuchsia that year) and tomatoes and basil. The sparrow built her nest in the eve of the small overhang that covered our doorway. In the mornings and evenings we would avoid opening the door very much at all so as not to scare her off. You would stand in the kitchen and elicit in me peal upon peal of laughter by imitating the babies.

It's still too sad to represent properly. After several days and no plaintive cries from the nest, I asked you to look in, to bury them somewhere. I couldn't even stand to look. And you did it for me.

I'm working up to something, here, but I can't just yet.

Polaroid RIP

2008-02-16T09:49:00.004-05:00

I never owned Polaroid camera. We had other things at my parents' house: a cute and dear brownie camera, a nice 35mm Canon, even sundry cheap point and clicks for my siblings and me. But there was something about Polaroids that didn't suit my mother's photographic inclinations. She's never said as much, but I think there was something she considered crass about Polaroids - their indulgence of instant gratification (although, I think what actually happens here is more subtle and complicated...), their room for captions, their smell, even.

But I liked them. I liked the smell (my mother and I often differed in our olfactory judgments - she wondered how on earth I could possibly like the smell of gasoline, for instance). I liked the tension between quick gratification and delayed pleasure that those moments spent waiting for the image to emerge engendered. I liked the look-shake-look pacing of it all.

And I liked the kinder, more impressionistic image that resulted. This could have had something to do with my poor eyesight. I still remember how alarming it was when I first got glasses (at 7) and the world became sharp. All of it turned promptly from soft and indistinct to sharp - the things I saw and the headaches I had. Trees suddenly had individual leaves; signs had words on them; sounds in the woods had animals dashing. Still, this vividness sometimes seemed to me to be utterly overwhelming. In the woods, I would sometimes take my glasses off and rely on the suggested messages of my poor eyesight, rather than the firm dictations of the world through my glasses. When I could see the disappointed expression of a parent, I would take them off and a furrowed brow would blur. Maybe there was something appealing about the vagueness of Polaroids.

by director Andrei Tarkovsky

There's a lot about Polaroids that make them poignant. In their popular form, they're one-of-a-kind. They're not little gems in the same way Daguerreotypes are, but they are singular. Even when you can peel back the jacket of a Polaroid and press and press and press, it fades a little each time, or you move it as you press and it smudges. Or the paper wrinkles. At any rate, there are endless opportunities for punctum. They change in your hands. They're used as tests for proper photos (I can't help but feel an affinity with anything so used for practice).

20x24

What I can remember of it

2008-01-22T22:16:00.000-05:00

The first figure skating tests I proctored were in UConn's old ice rink. It was exposed to the elements except for a boat-shaped roof and metal bleachers that were not, on that day, filled with the people that might have done better to block the wind a bit.

I had a knack for it - teaching children how to skate - because I worked hard (very hard) for every skill or jump or edge or spin that I mastered. I taught in those days in exchange for ice time. I spent a couple hours with the very little ones - toddlers, usually - who were always wrapped in bundle upon bundle.

The very first thing we taught them was how to fall.

Earlier this month, I stopped home for my brother's birthday (and for Jane Austen on PBS). I was standing at the woodstove with the dog and my mother said, in an off-handed way, "Chris Bowman died."

They called him Bowman the Showman:

When Chris Bowman skated this program, which is still a joy to watch, I was actively training as a figure skater. Very actively. Everyday actively. Going home and training more actively. Reading USFSA rule books actively.

I would read for homework standing with the arches of my feet pressed against the base of the desk. I had bunk beds at the time. I slept on the top bunk so that, before I went to sleep each night, I could drape my spine over the edge until its bend would approximate 90 degrees.

It was in the early 90s that my mother and her friend Holly took me to see the Stars on Ice tour. Holly was the adventurous one of the three of us, convincing us to sneak down to some unoccupied third-row seats. She also convinced us to go backstage without passes.

At that point I was already almost my full height. (I grew fast and early and coaches were always muttering things like "You'd better hope you don't get any taller" or "drink some coffee - stop growing.") It was backstage, meeting these people that I realized how short they really are - and how doomed my already dubious skating aspirations were.

It was the edge of an era for skating. They were about to do away with the very practice that gave the sport its name:

I was not a showman. I loved figures. They played to my obsessive streak. (In case it's not clear from the clip, you're expected to skate exactly in the rut of your last run, presuming, of course that your last run was perfect. I spent hours and hours practicing this, establishing the muscle memory of a perfect arch.)

Despite my desire to be a showier, more physically adventurous skater, this is the program I remember best.
Torvill and Dean "Oscar Tango":

[Just a quick aside: how could you possibly think, as a commentator, that it was a good idea to yap through that program, which was so clearly about hearing blades on ice? Just let the Brits be postmodern.

The roof of the old UConn rink - now renovated into an ugly arena - gave the place strange acoustics. I knew all the boys who used to drive the zamboni, so they would let me on the ice at the end of the night, after it was cleaned for the next day. I would go out to the center, do a couple figures, and then stomp my blades. The whole place reverberated with the sound.]

You'd think, with all that practice falling, and with all that practice negotiating perfection, that life, now, that all of this would be easier.

settling

2008-01-08T23:26:00.000-05:00

I have a bit of a fraught relationship to New Year resolutions. As a young girl, I would resolve to be more kind (a totally unnecessary goal) or to work harder at school (again, I was already earnest enough as to render this completely silly). By the time I started taking Latin (I was ten), I would mutter things like - "New Year resolutions are irrelevant - they're based on the Julian calendar, which is arbitrary and impirialistic." I spent much of high school not eating, thereby making extraneous any kind of resolution about dieting.

[When I imagine my earnestness as a child, I sound something like Marjane Satrapi imagines she sounded:]

Last year, I decided to revisit the idea of resolving myself to something. I went against my character, though, and decided to resolve to do something that would make my life more joyful: it was to see more live music. [Some quick highlights: Santogold, Neko Case, Aa, Wolf Parade, Band of Horses, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Cat Power, Shearwater, Grizzly Bear, Okkervil River, The National, Feist, Richard Thompson, Carl Blau, Ian Thomas, Camera Obscura, Duran/Schloss/Mitri, Yo La Tengo, Bill Callahan, Sir Richard Bishop, Richard Buckner, Damien Jurado, Ladybug Mecca, the Mountain Goats, Vic Spills, Burnt Sugar, Modest Mouse, The Winterpills, Mates of State, the Drones, Saul Williams, et al, et al, et al.] For what it's worth, it worked. It made my life feel more full; it created a context in which I found myself able to revel about beauty and creativity.

I thought I would continue the practice of making a resolution that would result in the sense that I lead a more complete life. I had been making all kinds of grand proclamations over the past two weeks not settling in 2008.

settling clerks, clearing deposits with systematic zeal

I thought to myself, and I may have repeated to others, that in 2008 I will not settle for acquaintances that are unsatisfactory. I will not settle - or pay a rent in - a city in which I don't want to live. I will not put myself into situations that are not fulfilling (and certainly not into situations that are derogatory). I will not be complacent in the face of my own mediocrity.

But it dawned on me, as I was looking at the etymology of "settle" for this entry. I haven't reconciled myself in 2007. To wit:
- I wanted to be a more active poet, so I created a writing group, I started a blog, I made a couple dozen submissions, I attended every reading I could schedule in, I talked with writers every chance I got, I read voraciously, I drafted a book. I DRAFTED A BOOK.
- I was uncertain about the career path I am taking and so I made arrangements to teach college courses, I have actively researched other possibilities, and I have found other aspects of my life around which to center my identity.
- I felt incomplete and underdeveloped returning to Connecticut. [Stalling, here, for time before an embarrassing confession...] Looking around my house, which I have inhabited for just shy of a year, I notice that I have not settled. Not in the least. I have neglected to get the two or three additional bookshelves I require. I haven't reupholstered the couch. I have art and mirrors leaning against the walls on which they would look best hung. (Truly, they're placed exactly below where they ought to hang; all it would require is a hammer and some nails - I've got those; I even know where they are.)

What, then, to do but to build off this restlessness, this reluctance to set false roots.

And so: 2008 is the year of (still) not settling. Not, at least, until I find that with which I can reconcile myself, content.

to stand on something vaguely sinister

2007-12-22T13:09:00.000-05:00

Like, I imagine, any person that holds a degree in Art History, I go to museums when I travel. I've found that the larger the museum, the more alarmed people seem to be when they watch me walk across a Carl Andre. I've made a ritual of it. I search out the modern/contemporary wing and I walk across the tiles. I'm sure other people must do it (do you?), I've just never seen it.

Maybe one of these days, I'll curl up in a ball atop one.

Each time, this act produces a knot at the back of my throat. Each time, I end up crying later in the day. I think it has something to do with the tension between minimalism and post-minimalism. It has something to do with Ana Mendieta, whose work I love and who is conspicuously absent from many of these museums. (The week she died, protesters held banners demanding "Where is Ana Mendieta?") And it has something to do with museums, in general, those odd refactories of cultural memory.

The most recent time, I was in Chicago, at the Art Institute. I was listening, on repeat, to Westfall, by Okkervil River.

"more weight"

2007-12-21T01:34:00.001-05:00

I still remember the first time I read The Crucible. I'm not sure exactly how old I was, but it was at some point before my sister Nora was born (which would make me younger than 10). I was in my new bedroom. The addition my parents had put on the house was unfinished. (It was only recently that they told me, frankly, that they had run out of money before the addition was completed. I, again, to be frank, have no idea how they had money for an addition in the first place, but there you have it.)

The room had that feeling of a space - the hollow of a rectangular prism - empty of experience. Ripe for potential - I suppose it could have been, but to me it felt just blank. And so, it isn't surprising, in retrospect, that I might carry books into such a room as a youngster.

On of the first nights I spent in that room my parents were still participating in the wine tasting group. I was young enough then to lurk about, crawling under the table and kyping dregs from everyone's glasses. Well, after that, I crept back to my new room at the cold end of the house. (My parents' house is heated, primarily, by a woodstove at the opposite end.) I turned on the lights, as yet uncovered by fixtures, I curled up on my mattress (on the floor, then), and I opened an old, musty copy of The Crucible.

And Giles Corey said "more weight." He died slow, that way, in order to preserve property. He could have died fast in the noose, but instead he died a Christian, slow and able to leave the farm to his sons. "More weight."

Pressed like grain.

Made meal of.

When I close my eyes and imagine myself, I still see (watch me measure my own body like some 19th century anthropometrist) the 5'8"/118-pound body I inhabited for so many years. And so, it is with complete alarm that I heard, tonight, my friend Anthony say, "Don't you dare ever - EVER - lose weight."

GIFT: a handkerchief of my own sewing; my poison

2007-12-19T22:05:00.000-05:00

The Real Art Ways holiday staff party was last night. It had been a very, very long day and it was with dread that I anticipated attending it. Regarless, I had baked an Italian Almond Cake for it the night before and picked and wrapped (quite well, I think) a little cadeau for the Yankee Swap.

My plan, intitially, was to attend for an hour or so, and then to duck out before the Yankee Swap, to which I was having an increasingly visceral reaction, occurred.

The etymology of gift is lengthy and overlapping. In several northern European languages the word means "poison." In others it means "that which is given," "dowry," and the like. But my favorite was the language that combined the two meanings: Faroese, in which gift means both "poison" and "married." I had to think about it a bit. The connection between "gift" and "married" is pretty clear: a woman's dowry was a donation of sorts to the man she would marry, therefore, metonymously, she was a gift.

But poison?

It took me some time to work this out, but here's what I've come up with:
In The Gift, Marcel Mauss characterizes gifts thus: "In short, [the exchange of gifts] represents an intermingling. Souls are mixed with things; things with souls. Lives are mingled together, and this is how, among persons and things so intermingled, each emerges from their own sphere and mixes together. This is precisely what contract and exchange are." If we take Mauss at his word, then, the exchange of gifts is a corruption of the soul.

From here, a small jump. The more common etymological connotation for the word gift is "dowry." If we consider what it might mean for a woman to make a gift of herself, that is (drawing again on Mauss) intermingling her soul with her self-as-object, we can begin to see a light in which marriage is poison.

In the end, I stayed at the soirée for some time. I love the people with whom I work - they are talented and smart and viciously funny. And there was a very nice sparkling rosé. I gave the giftling for which I had swapped to Barbara after the game had finished. It made me feel better. (But was I, in a way, bribing myself to stay in so doing?)

[Mostly unrelated, but interesting tidbit...Best definition of "gift": a white speck on the finger nails, supposed to portend a gift.]

things that repeat, things that reel, things that repeat

2007-12-15T00:39:00.001-05:00

It could be that watching five hours worth of films in a day could make one regard her existential crisis with some degree of bemused dissociation.

My lovely brother Patrick and I watched two films today: No Country for Old Men and Control. At the first, we sat behind two middle-aged couples. The women sat next to each other and made little disgusted noises throughout and the men sat together occassionally giving such enlightening expository commentary as "buckshot" or "he's gonna throw the case over the fence" or (my favorite) "he's bleeding" (after the character was shot).

At the second we sat seperately.

At both, I did that thing where I continue watching through spread fingers.

There were a lot of things about which I was thinking but couldn't really articulate well at the end of Control. There's the difficulty/ies I have with artist biopics - that they use this medium to represent real people pretending to be other real people. There's the discomfort I feel when illnesses (and particularly, for some reason, epilepsy) are represented.

by John Waters

In the spirit of repetition, I've made a bullshit theory elsewhere that works of art can corral a viewer or reader in through flattery. Coetzee alludes to Kafka, you recognize it and you feel very clever. You know your Joy Division b-sides, they begin to play, you feel as though you have encyclopedic knowledge of indie rock (nb. tongue firmly stuck into cheek).

POZA, at Real Art Ways

I've been thinking a lot lately of cycles - cycles onto which we try to impose meaning and cycles that we try to ignore. Wake up brush teeth exercise shower dress contacts in feed cat clean litter leave apartment lock door open car drive to work sit at desk put fingers on keyboard repeat. Birth, menstruation, pantoums. Remembering, recognition, representation. (I really ought to look back into sentences.)

It's all going to be fine.

sustenance and cycles

2007-12-11T01:30:00.000-05:00

This is life - and this is as meaningful as it gets.

Last weekend, unable to sleep, I moved my furniture around. There's something satisfying about being a woman alone in a house with heavy furniture and deciding to heft it all about with my own weight and no one to help me. In the end I decided I liked it better how it was before, but that I should leave some small change in the arrangement to make all the effort worth it.

Since I've lived in this apartment, I have slept in the narrow, hard twin-sized bed of my childhood. It creaks under my weight. It threatens at every turn to fall apart. I wake up every morning with a sore back. Until last weekend I had the bed against the wall. At a certain point, I discovered that if I pushed a pillow up against the wall and nestled my back into it just so, it began to approximate the feeling of being held.

Well, I've pulled the bed away from the wall.

This is a lengthy excerpt, but warranted. From HD's Trilogy:
"There is a spell, for instance, / in every sea-shell: // continuous, the sea-thrust / is powerless against coral, // bone, stone, marble / hewn from within by that craftsman, // the shell-fish: / oyster, clam, mollusc // is master-mason planning / the stone marvel: // yet that flabby, amorphous hermit / within, like the planet // senses the finite, / it limits its orbit // of being, its house, / temple, fane, shrine: // it unlocks the portals / at stated intervals: // prompted by hunger, / it opens to the tide-flow: // but infinity? no, / of nothing-too-much: // I sense my own limit, / my shell jaws snap shut // at invasion of the limitless, / ocean-weight; infinite water // can not crack me, egg in egg-shell; / closed in, complete, immortal // full-circle, I know the pull / of the tide, the lull // as well as the moon; / the octopus-darkness // is powerless against / her cold immortality; // so I in my own way know / that the whale // can not digest me: / be firm in your own small, static, limited // orbit and the shark-jaws / of outer circumstance // will spit you forth: // be indigestible, hard, ungiving. // so that, living within, / you beget, self-out-of-self, // selfless, / that pearl-of-great-price,"

Collected Visions

2007-12-03T19:55:00.000-05:00

When I was teaching, one of my favorite essays to use was Marianne Hirsch on postmemory. I liked the difficulty students seemed to have with it—they would grasp to certain parts and seemingly refuse to understand others (the section that describes the film Hate, for instance, always seemed to generate trouble).

I asked my students, each semester, to contribute to Lorie Novak's formidable Collected Visions project. They could submit snapshots, if they liked, but the main thing I wanted was for them to utilize the database (of approximately 3,000 family photographs) to create essays. It was my hope that this project would help them suss out the concept of postmemory. Sometimes it worked; sometimes it didn't.

So, I have two aims in posting this. One is to spread the word about Collected Visions. The other is to keep it here, next to other images, ideas, resources, etc., that will help me with the prosthetic memory project.

Book Binding

2007-11-30T13:32:00.001-05:00

In Studies on Hysteria, Freud and Breuer discuss a mother who recorded her daughter's "fits" with supreme dedication. It made me wonder what kind of a book the mother would choose in which to write. Would the journal start on loose paper that she would then envelop between the pages of a book? I like the idea that, eventually, she would bind her own book, finding other people's creations inappropriate vessels in which to record the rants of her own creation. I've started a short series of poems within the Charcot manuscript that explore this.

Books make things - words, objects, thoughts - precious. I opened my copy of Mrs. Dalloway to find a passage recently. Aaron had used the copy to study for his PhD exams. It is well-worn. We have both read it several times and it is bespeckled with lovely, combined marginalia. I turned to page 139 (something Aaron had marked with a post-it) and there he had layered in the single wing of a Luna Moth.

When I was a girl someone (my mother? my grand mother? Shandra and Michelle's mother? some book?) taught me to layer violets into the pages of books. I did so religiously. At that point though, really, all of the books were technically my parents'. There are still volumes I leaf through on visits to them - browned, flattened, dry former flowers flitting onto my lap. At a certain point, enamored with the local herb farm Caprilands, I began to layer in sprigs of herbs. The musty and earthy scents of those books are intoxicating.

Caprilands colored my imagination for some years. They had various gardens (one Shakespeare-themed!) surrounding the early 19th-century farmhouse in which they sold fresh and dried herbs, Victorian recipe books, flavored honeys. Cats and sheep and chickens wandered the grounds. We - I usually went with the twins - would end each visit with a cup of tea. I liked mine to have the petals of former flowers, some remnants of which would always drift free of the wire ball in which they steeped.

I worry about what will happen when electronic devices become more popular than books. Will we lose what is intimate, what is precious, about reading and writing? There's a potentially bright side to this, though. As gadgets begin to replace paper, we will start to see people celebrating that filtered, flattened, and dried pulp. At the Paper/New England opening I had a quick chat with the lovely Michael Shortell about book art. They plan to exhibit some soon. I will be there. My heart will flutter a bit higher in my chest when I look at it.

Secrets

2007-11-26T18:21:00.000-05:00

I've been kicking around the concept of secrets this week. My thoughts range from the personal (wondering about the secrets my family keeps vs the stories we tell) to the social (considering the phenomenal Post Secret).

The OED tells me that a secret is used in decribing "feelings, passions, thoughts: not openly avowed or expressed; concealed, disguised; also, in stronger sense, known only to the subject, inward, inmost. Hence said of the heart, soul, etc." (It's got a ton of really fun entries and is worth looking up for those of you who are into definitions.) It strikes me here that, if it is indeed the case that secrets describe feelings, etc., we hold close to our hearts and souls, we might need secrets to construct our identities.

In the spirit of experimentation, here are a couple secrets:

(Former) Secret 1: When I took this picture I was glad for the tears and the mascara and the tissue and my camera because I thought it made a good representation of the moment.

(Former) Secret 2: I took this picture, focusing on the aesthetic pleasure the rows of cut grass might create, because I was spooked by my surroundings. I was about a mile from the cottage in Ballyshannon (where I was staying alone). Up the street from where I was standing to take this was a trailer. Its front lawn was bounded by rusty barbed wire and there were runs from each front corner of the structure. One held a scraggly cur, the other a scraggly horse. Despite the fact that I felt utterly foolish being so spooked, I took off quick as I could back to the cottage.

I admit it: both of these secrets are totally banal. Even so, for some reason, I was very reluctant to write about either of them in a public way (even in the very limited way that I have here). So, I wonder in what ways I can tease out this tension between telling and not telling in my poems. It seems to me, too, that secrets could find their way into the prosthetic memory project.

Thoughts, anyone? Guidance? Suggestions for further reading?

Some sparrow, some special gem

2007-11-20T00:28:00.000-05:00

I saw it plastered (or stapled) all over Hyde Park on my last trip to Chicago.

I was in the city for the wedding of the first friend I ever made. I was returning to a city which had held a degree of symbolic potential for me. I had constructed Chicago as a place to which I could go to be freed from tethers - all of the expectations I had established and crushed and resculpted into simulacra of their prior selves during all the years I had passed in Connecticut. Chicago was a place where suddenly it didn't seem to matter to me that I don't have a PhD. In Chicago it didn't matter how I acted in high school. Personal history seemed to fall away in the face of this city, nestled in the middle of the continent and away from the sea.

Still lost pet bird.

When I was a teenager I thought I wanted to be an opera singer. My house was filled with the flutterings of vocalise. I would walk in the woods behind the house and sing arias off the edges of the cliffs.

There was something terrifying and addictive about singing at that level. You are at once vulnerable and celebrated. You make a thousand exhibitions of your own unique self - of your voice and the ways it is beautiful and distinct.

These days, my voice has lost its flexibility and its range. It's no longer lithe enough to dance across runs, soft palate strong and arched. I rarely sing anymore ever. I reserve it for children (Brahms for Leah; Handel for Aidan; Fauré for Laura), or the car, or the empty woods.

I had been so scared that my voice wouldn't be exceptional that I forced it - deliberately - into dormancy.

Still lost pet bird.

Saltpeter

2007-11-09T14:37:00.000-05:00

Until somewhat recently, Saltpeter was a smell-with-no-name to me, that part of the remnants of fireworks that seemed to singe the inside of my nose.

When I was a girl, it was my father on every July 4th who would position himself at the dampened Volleyball court where he and Bob would set off fireworks. I knew from early on that what they were doing - these men, one my father and one a father figure - was illegal. I can only assume that it was the general affability of Bob and Merrill that caused the Town fire department to turn its back on the display. And I knew it was dangerous, although I probably imagined it to be more risky than it actually was. I was a reader and I think that's part of the reason I was such a dramatically-inclined little person, always playing out the worst scenarios I could imagine for every situation in which I found myself.

After we had all sung the anthem (usually followed by John Prine and Phil Ochs), after we had oohed and ahed our way through the display (me with my fists balled, nails into palms), my father would find me and pick me up and his hands smelled of saltpeter.

I've been meaning to write more about saltpeter (from which the Salpêtrière where Charcot worked took its name) for some time. The week of Guy Fawkes Day strikes me as the perfect time to do so. In 1999 on November 5, I was perched at the top of Primrose Hill with my mother and brother. We were drinking mulled wine and I was desperately hoping that none of the embers from the fireworks would fall into the Regent Park aviary.

I've had a poem milling about in the recesses of my mind that would weave together several quasi-histories of saltpeter. One is that administrators of places where lots of young men cohabitated (British public schools, naval ships, prisons) packed their meals with the stuff in the hopes to fend of excessive onanism and homosexuality. Another thread of this poem would link fireworks in Paris to the more martial history of the Salpêtrière (it was a gunpowder factory before it was a hospital). The final strand of the poem is saltpeter's use in hoodoo, which removes the substance from its typical aggressive context and uses it for self defense.

by Renée Stout

I know. This sounds scattered, but I think there's a way of looking at each of the threads in relation to supression and sexuality.

In order to avoid knocking off people's hats...

2007-11-02T15:34:00.000-04:00

It's hard to say with what frequency I become stir-crazy. I've alluded to it here before, but it's struck me again, now. It was yesterday, in fact, that it started. I can't fully explain how I made the leap from some vague kind of dissatisfactions to knowing - knowing - that I have to go off somewhere on my own.

And almost as soon as I identified the feeling - not, in some ways, dissimilar to the fantods - I knew where I have to go.

Nauset beach. I haven't been to the Cape in at least a decade. And here I am, 28 years old, living by myself, working in the arts, writing - and above all, at this moment, longing to put my body into the freakish Atlantic. (It could have something to do with the talk on Sylvia Plath that I'll attend on Sunday...)

A kind of strange video. The soundtrack consists of SP reading "Daddy."

This morning I went with my mother to surprise my father at the 40th anniversary banquet for the Connecticut Association of Land Surveyors. Earlier in the week Kathy, who runs CALS, had called to say that Dad is receiving an award for distinguished achievement and service. CALS has only given this award to two other people in its 40 years.

My father is (to understate matters) a diligent worker. He has worked in that old Victorian on North Main in Manchester for my entire life - starting in the basement (which has twice caved in as the result of reckless drivers smashing into the foundation) moving up to the gloriously sunny second floor, where his current office is perched among the turning leaves of a sugar maple.

My memory of my childhood is episodic. (I'm sure, as I get further into this new book, I'll be writing a lot more about this.) I remember the first time someone crashed into the building's foundation, balancing my way down the stairs to my father's work space. They were uneven and shallow. Normally I had the aid of the brick wall to my left as I went down them, but the force of the impact had caused the wall to crumble in, leaving brick-dust and flakes of the brick-colored paint they used on the wall coating much of the stairwell - as though some wind storm from Georgia had blown through the place.

The office was lit by a set of long, humming fluorescent lights that cast a kind of industrial green pallor over the place. I was an easily distractible child and, at times, the hum of those lights would wash out my ability to conjure anything other than their presence to mind. Along the wall ran a long drafting table on which my father made maps. I ran an index finger tip across the surface of the table. I turned my hand over to regard the impression the dust had made on me, smelled it. It smelled like that room, but concentrated.

I love the beach in fall, in winter, during a storm. That love, I suppose, comes from my father, who would (still does, I imagine) wake up in the dead of night to go to the shore to fish. He used it as a place for himself and, when we were there together, we were both able to be quiet about things.

It seems to happen in November that, for various reasons, I have found myself heading for the shore, certain that the thing to do - the primary thing to do - is to dip my skin (and all of my self in it) into the ocean. Just to see, I would tell myself. Just to see what it is my body would do. In prior years, I've been desperately sad on these occasions. This year, I feel melancholy.

It is this feeling that makes the beginning of Moby-Dick so hypnotic:
"Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me."

I wrote it years ago - "the sea was our apothecary" - I feel it in my marrow each year.

Histories and Prostheses

2007-10-27T11:31:00.000-04:00

I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me yet. In the wee hours of yesterday morning, after the cat had started her autumn routine of waking me up at 5 am for food, I knew (with the certainty that one knows things in the early morning) what my next book of poems would be.

Had I continued my graduate education, I would have written my dissertation on cultural representations of memory in contemporary African literature and art. I was interested in instances in which we need to represent—even construct from time to time—collective memories. It seemed to me that, at times, we focus these collective memories on the experiences of individuals, rather than groups. So, the memorializing that happens around, say, the horrors of Apartheid, gets represented in individual testimony (Sue Williamson's Can't Remember, Can't Forget), descriptions of torture (as in JM Coetzee's novels), etc.

Sue Williamson. Can't Remember Can't Forget (installation view).

Perhaps it's not surprising, given my academic inclinations, that the poetry I tend to most enjoy reading is poetry that investigates individual histories. I'm thinking here of Natasha Trethewey, Marilyn Nelson, Eavan Boland, Seamus Heaney (at times), Elizabeth Alexander, et al.

When histories get reoriented to be primarily about an individual (rather than a group, or nation, or culture, for instance), they lose some of their facticity, they start treading close to that most unreliable of faculties, Memory. Histories, conventionally, are meant to be fairly solid claims about things and places and events and people. Again, conventionally, there's meant to be some degree of objectivity to it all. Memories, on the other hand, are radically subjective, shifting, fluid cognitive representations of things.

Poetry is another one of those unreliably subjective things. When history, then, finds its way into poetry, the polar relationship between the subjective and objective begins to crumble. That kind of crisis of polarity interests me. As I was thinking about it, it occurred to me that poetry can serve as this prosthesis for memory, whether they're individual or collective memories (hence the abundance of memorializing poetry).

The new book will be a collection of poems that perform that function: poems that have a prosthetic relationship to memory, both collective and personal.

I'm really excited about it.

Wall of prosthetic faces for injured veterans of World War I.

Clumsiness

2007-10-26T09:14:00.000-04:00

I'm clumsy. In this case I don't mean gauche (although it's a lovely word and I am certainly capable of gauche behavior or accessorizing or decorating from time to time). I also don't mean unwieldy (although some of my exes may disagree). No, what I mean is that I am, quite simply, ungainly.

A couple months ago, I started a sticky note that lists incidents of clumsiness.

There was the time I burnt the inside of my left arm - this is embarrassing - while putting late night tater tots onto a plate.

There was the time I cut into the palm of my hand using, yes, a large kitchen knife to cut open an english muffin. (Sensible, wasn't that? I thought, at the time, that I was being very efficient, not dirtying another dish.)

There was the time that I swung my knees into my desk drawers when rotating in my chair. (There is a tally of seven next to that item.)

There was the time, last week that I was peeling apples Pat and I had just picked at Crooke's Orchard to make applesauce. I got just about through the whole couple dozen before the knife slipped, with no insignificant force, into the tip of my middle finger. It's mostly healed at this point, only I seem to have played with ink when it was still an open wound, thereby inadvertently tattooing the tip of my finger.

But there's only so much one can fit on a sticky. And my desk has already become what Melissa calls "Pink Explosion" (see above).

I started the sticky because at a certain point my proclivity for accidental minor injury struck me as poetic. There's something inescapable about incidents of clumsiness. They scream "Be here!" when one would otherwise be going about one's life with a certain amount of disassociation. I think poetry can do the same thing (although it tends to leave less permanent marks on one's body).

Caddis Fly Larvae

2007-10-17T13:53:00.000-04:00

Periodically, during the past several months, I've returned to this video.

I really have a hard time putting into words the way I react to this project by French artist Hubert Duprat. It's totally mystifying to me. Yes, there's a whole canon of theory on which I could draw to talk about these larvae. But I really don't like to respond to them with something as easy as theory. It ends up feeling very utilitarian.

The truth of the matter is that I really love the way certain things confound my intellect.

Painting it red...

2007-09-26T17:09:00.000-04:00

“Why have we every reason to believe that Adam and Eve were rowdies? Because…they both raised Cain.” — The St. Louis Pennent (May 2, 1840)

So, I don't think I would ever had guessed that "raising Cain" was first used in St. Louis. I certainly wouldn't have guessed it's as young a term as it is!

I have what I think has shaped up to be a really rather lovely poem about the phrase, about St. Louis, and about immigration. Let me know if you'd like to read it.

Plant Porn!

2007-09-17T14:08:00.000-04:00

Jonathon Keats is making porn for plants and I am writing a poem about it. The artist has recorded acts of "gross pollination" and plans to not only show the film in galleries and art houses, but to project the images onto lackadaisical plants to get them...going.

I drafted what, to me, was a very funny poem last night – it's cheeky and irreverent. But it's not a real poem yet; for the moment it's just fun word play.

I'm about to dive into plant "anatomy" research. I'm about to renew my familiarity with those Mapplethorpe tripychs. I'm about to revisit books on obscenity and art.

looking for a new england

2007-07-26T14:29:00.000-04:00

The years I spent with Aaron helped me understand exactly how much of a New Englander I am. Although I had lived abroad (and in New Jersey) before I had met Aaron, there was something about those years, about traveling to the Midwest, that solidified my understanding of exactly what it might mean to be a New Englander.

Aaron grew up in the exact center of Kansas, which, he is fond of saying, is the exact center of the continental United States. As a boy he was so sure of this that he imagined the President sent two planes careening across the country on the Fourth of July to cross paths over McPherson ("there's no fear in McPherson"), Kansas, their grey plumes superimposing on the map an X. McPherson, in some ways, is not unlike Storrs. It has a somewhat awkward combination of rural and suburban areas. It has a small college in the town and is nestled among Wichita, Topeka, Hutchinson, and some other Kansan cities. In other ways, of course, it is drastically different.

Aaron was raised by, quite possibly, the only couple with leftist leanings in the entire town. Let us not forget, Kansas is a red state (a fact that caused me no small amount of anxiety upon my first trip there). Had I known, at the time, what I know now, I would not have been so anxious. The conservatives in McPherson are not nearly so confrontational as those who are members of my extended family. (Or, at least, I can't see the ways in which they're confrontational.) He was, although in many ways privileged—upper middle class, white, male, able bodied, intelligent—part of a minority. I wonder (I have not asked) to what degree he hid or tried to streamline his parents' beliefs while growing up. In some ways, he needn't have tried very hard: his father and grandfather and aunt were all part of the town's most prestigious law firm. His uncle was a very successful business man. There is a certain amount of prosperity and small town history associated with the Bremyers. That should have shielded some of the eccentricities of his nuclear family.

But let me put the easy difference of politics aside for a moment. The thing that surprised me most, that pricked me to attention, was the degree to which I was made uncomfortable by the friendly, familiar greetings of strangers. Aaron and I would be driving around town and the overweight man mowing his lawn would pause, wipe the sweat from his brow (depositing some grass clippings and, one imagines, some chiggers), squint his eyes, and wave. "Do you know him?" I asked, brow pursed, trying to hide, somewhat from the mowing man. No, he didn't. That's just what they do there. They say hello to people they don't even know. Even when they're all sweating and in the midst of less than pleasant chores.

My heart was pounding in my ears. I couldn't even look Aaron in the eye. What was going on? I looked down at my hands to see that I was madly clutching at the skin between my left index finger and thumb. I looked past my hands to see that my legs were pressed, firmly, together. Why was I having such a strong reaction to this small act? I let it pass.

But the greetings continued. Walking down Main Street, people he didn't know said hello (and he responded with apparent reciprocation of their enthusiasm). We went for a stroll around the park near his aunt and uncle's home. I looked up. About 100 feet away a person was walking in the opposite direction, toward us. I trained my eyes back down on my feet. "Come on, Megh. Say hello to the person," Aaron said to me. I was grinding my teeth and I had started to hold my breath. "I'll try," I muttered. I looked up, offered my most stoic and salty New England nod of the head acknowledgement, and mouthed the syllables "hello." I tried.

I thought about it, a lot, that night in bed. I tried to recall people who had said hello to me like that, who had waved. There was the old (octogenarian) blind man who used to sit on the stone wall in front of his house by the road and wave his cane at passing cars. There were the drunk men I would sometimes encounter in bars as a child, sipping on my Shirley Temples. There were the down and outs in Willimantic who would try to par out advice to little girls. There was the occasional very old person, who more often than not would say "God bless you," not hello. But I always thought they were up to something. There was the Viet Nam vet who had always struck me as shell shocked; he walked the streets around campus and would, shaking, wave his walking stick at passing cars. There were the letches.

But it isn't standard practice in New England to greet someone with whom you're not acquainted. Even with acquaintances, more often than not a nod of the head will do; no need to stop what you're doing and have a conversation. It seems to me that New Englanders tend to foster this illusion of isolation, of privacy. When someone threatens that illusion by being too forthcoming with unsolicited conversation, we tend to read the behavior as, well, crazy (or, at the very least, highly exceptional). We look on it as very suspect.

I'm not entirely sure why this is the case. I have a couple theories, though. (Aaron used to always be amused by the theories my family tends to come up for things, and then present as hard and fast beliefs. They rarely are the result of any kind of authority on a given topic. In other words, we're a family of hucksters, we're bullshitters.) A possibility: New Englanders, historically, are predisposed to a certain degree of austerity. Given our propensity for being alone and working or thinking (or, at times, glowering—a facial expression I perfected as a youngster), as New England becomes more densely populated, as our forests are carved into by developers, we need to pretend that we're more isolated than we are; we need to bolster up the illusion that we don't have all these neighbors swarming about.

There's nothing really, fundamentally wrong with being friendly. I decided I would test out Midwestern behavior in Connecticut for practice. I go for a lot of walks. On my walks, I try, now, to say hello to everyone I encounter. The only people who seem to appreciate it are the residents of the assisted living homes on my block. They are expert porch-sitters, so I get the opportunity to say hello to each set several times per day. They are, almost without exception, enthusiastically friendly in return.

"You're a lawyer of Capitalism; I'm a lawyer of Communism. Let's kiss."

2007-07-24T21:16:00.001-04:00

I am really rather fond of the poem I've written about the American Exposition that was on view in Moscow in 1963. I've sent it out for potential publication, but if you'd like to read a draft let me know.

animals

2007-07-23T14:43:00.000-04:00

Lately, I've felt the need to tell people about animals. Here's a quick list of recent animal correspondences and communications:

1. In Northampton, eating pizza after Cat Power, I interrupted a perfectly normal conversation to point out a bird carcass:

2. This year, for my annual Battle of the Boyne poem, The only thing I could think to write about were the Red Deer in Enniskillen. Usually, the poems have to do overtly with politics or familial history, but not this time. Nope, all I wanted to write about was staring down a captive deer in Enniskillen.

3. Last night, I wrote a message to Martyn. All it said was "very loud owl outside."

4. Also last night, I interrupted Melissa's schemes to get me rich so that I could tell her about the white dog wolf thing that I nearly hit on the drive over. I stopped the car. The thing was unscathed. I rolled down my window to tell it to get out of the road and go home. It circled my car, approached the window, and then—paws on the window sill—stuck its face in, smelling my left temple and ear. It got down and sauntered off into the woods.

5. At the pet store the other day, I saw something quite alarming. Some of you know that I have a near-paralizing fear of dead fish. I opened my car door and was about to step out when I saw one of those little baggies in which they package sold fish. It was on the hot pavement. There was water in the bag, but there was no fish!

how little or

2007-07-12T15:05:00.001-04:00

how much can a body hold?

I am a really really bad person

2007-07-10T13:32:00.001-04:00

So, Cat Power has a bit of a reputation. I'd had a dream about her a couple nights ago, so when, after quitting my job, I looked on my desk calendar and saw "Cat Power Pearl Street 8:30," I thought: "What could possibly be more cathartic than to see a pretty woman break down in public about her occupation?"

I went. It's lucky I'm an atheist; if not I would be concerned about the special corner of hell that is surely reserved for people who want to watch public break downs.

Well, she was fantastic. She did an incredible cover of "The Dark End of the Street," and while it seemed a bit grandiose for her keyboardist to introduce her as "the best living soul singer," she was really breath-taking.

There's part of me that will remain steadfastly dedicated to the Cat Power of What Would the Community Think. The early work negotiates the hysterical so deftly. And I have to appreciate any musician who, when a certain one of their songs is on repeat and blasting, makes my mother question my well-being.

But blusey Cat Power makes me swoon.

on having both things

2007-07-03T13:18:00.000-04:00

I hadn't realized it. I thought that I had read enough cultural theory to give up the polarized thinking and structures that are built into how we approach the world.

These days realizations happen like so many wine glasses slipping through my fingers into the sink.

I spent the morning trying to unpack the disappointment I've felt lately in the men I encounter. Having this overriding disappointment in some ways is ensuring that I can place myself in a position of superiority. Not very generous. I kept thinking how I'm disappointed when men find me attractive, and that I'm disappointed when men tell me I'm smart or (recently) "brilliant." It makes me feel as though they're constructing me, not really looking at me, polarizing me.

When I started graduate school, my mother's mother sent me a photograph of her great aunt, who was one of the first women to earn a graduate degree from Cornell. My great, great aunt earned her Masters in Classics. My grandmother told me in the note that she remembered conversing as a girl in Latin with her great aunt, the spinster.

My mother's mother didn't have a job outside of the home to which she bore twelve children. She told my mother that she had wanted to be a nun before she got married. Polarization.

This is my familial legacy: women who raise families, spinsters who engage their intellect. Of course, on a conscious level, I recognize that this is extreme and that there are a thousand-some degrees of compromise, but I wonder to what extent my disappointment takes its root in fear. Am I still scared of having to give things up?

Did that refrain of my grandmother's—you're too smart for your own good—sink in?

Amelia Earhart

2007-07-02T20:30:00.000-04:00

I start my days like this:

1. I realize that I'm awake and try to hold onto those first thoughts of the day (lately they've been ideas for course syllabi). I try not to write during these first 15 or so minutes of consciousness, but just to think, to be available to my thoughts. (This is not to suggest that my thoughts are particularly grand, just that I like the exercise of respecting the process.)
2. I make my bed.
3. I feed the cat.
4. I turn on the kettle.
5. I read the New York Times (or, at least, parts of it).
6. I write.
7. I reluctantly drag myself from my desk, away from whatever I've been writing, in the the this-and-that of my day.

In today's New York Times the editors noted that 70 years ago today, Amelia Earhart's plane went down. I've been thinking about her all day long: about how surprised I was that she had a husband, about how beautiful those last moments staring into the blinding sun must have been, about how people might have read her independence. I wondered if she really ever picked lemons with William Randolph Hearst. I wondered if she downed her plane intentionally. I wondered if it was all too beautiful to bear.

Her husband spoke calmly from the Oakland Airport, where he was waiting to meet her, of how the empty fuel tanks would make the plane bouyant.

Daguerréotypomanie

2007-07-01T18:58:00.000-04:00

When Louis Daguerre announced the invention of the aptly named daguerreotype in January 1839, it quickly became a matter of State in France. Scientists, Artists, Politicians—everyone seemed to have a stake in what photography's uses would be. François Arago, a physicist and member of the French Chamber of Deputies, engineered the purchase of the process by the French government. It fit into his picture of how France could secure world-wide economic supremacy.

Daguerre had become obsessed with capturing the images in camera obscuras. Camera obscuras—in the Latin, "dark chambers"—were mainly used as tools for drawing naturalistically representative images. For this purpose, they usually took their smaller form:

But they also exist as room-sized chambers in which one can sit and watch an image of the world go by:

Daguerre's obsession is an interesting idea, one that strikes me as profoundly sad—fixing moments in time, disallowing their passing.

The beautiful Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art has in it a room sized camera obscura. I was visiting the museum with my friend Mark Williams this winter. We stepped into the room. It takes some time for ones eyes to adjust, but then, there it is, an image of Ridgefield, with its prams and golden retrievers, flags and stonewalls, painted upside down on the wall.

I don't know how to say this. There was something about it. Some kind of convergence of variables—being in this museum, founded in my mother's hometown when she was 14, being in that small space, being somewhat prone to liking camera obscuras over photographs (with which I have a possibly unhealthy obsession anyway)—made me not only certain that when I have my dream house it will have a camera obscura room, but equally certain that I will have lots of sex in it.

There you have it; I fantasized about photography's precursor.

dance dance immolation

2007-07-01T18:24:00.000-04:00

I've been batting about the idea for some time now to write a series of poems on the topic of immolation. It's a fairly broad topic, but I had, until today, assumed that it would be generally somber in tone.

I was interested in contrasting protest immolation:

with sati (a Hindu mourning tradition that involves the immolation of new widows):

As I was doing research this morning, I stumbled across something called Dance Dance Immolation! Apparently it's a version of the popular dancing game, only instead of losing points for bad dancing, you're met with a blast from a flamethrower. Granted, participants wear fire-resistent gear, but still. Flamethrowers blasting at your body!? Wonders never cease.

Goodness, me. Now I have a dance dance immolation poem dancing through my head. I'll post a draft later this week.

I DO care about the polar ice caps, part 1

2007-06-30T15:14:00.001-04:00

I love roadtrips.

I think the strangest complement, but one by which I was completely flattered, was (about six years ago, now) when Aaron told me that I look beatific. At the time, I was certainly feeling very very happy, but it was not what I would have categorized as beatific.

No, I didn't feel beatific then, but I have.

The first time I remember feeling beatitude was when I was twelve. My family took a trip to the Cape. We arrived, almost having certainly driving what would become my first car (a great little '88 VW golf, standard, with one of those crank open skylights). My father used to press down the wind guard on the roof when it was open; the sound drove my mother nuts.

(A digression: we had a complicated arrangement of seat assignments, all relating to what ones access to music choice would be. For instance, the middle back seat was the "veto seat," seems fair enough, right? The two other back seats would swap suggestion duties. The front passenger didn't have much of a choice—unless dad was sitting there and a Yankees game was on the radio. The driver got to present a catalogue of choices—unless it was very late, in which case she or he had totalitarian power over the music selection.)

So. We arrived on the Cape. We unpacked the car. It was early evening. I was standing on the beach. A storm rolled in. It was raining, hard—that kind of hard that stings your skin when it hits. I stood in the rain. I did cartwheels in the rain. I laid myself down on the wet sand and let the rain hit me, whincing occasionally. That was the first time I felt it.

I felt it on the drive, through an ice storm, to Montréal on December 26, 2005.

I felt it over and over in Donegal last year (almost exactly a year ago).

I felt it on the trip to Farm Sanctuary this weekend.

[Much more on this soon...]

And I felt it, driving on my own from Farm Sanctuary on a spontaneous trip to Niagra Falls.

[Leg up, windows down, singing, and allowing my hair to become a bird's nest of knots.]
[Much more on this soon, too...]

getting my feet wet

2007-06-30T15:02:00.000-04:00

I've been trying consciously for about a year now to figure out how to live alone with myself. I spent a fair amount of time in my own head as a child, so in that sense I'm accustomed to my own company. I read books (which seem to me to offer these congresses of minds that can in their own delicate and intricate ways be precious). I went for walks. I sat and thought silently.

In other ways, I have never, until this year, really tried to live alone. It is an absolutely novel activity for me to endeavor to take care of myself primarily rather than other people—mom, dad, Pat, Nora, Aaron, John, Rebecca, et al et al et al—even if I didn't always do a good job of it. So. Here I am. I find for the first time that, really, there's no escaping me.

I make myself my tea at night—mint with a dash of rose water and a dash of orange blossom water. I take walks and runs. I take baths with all manner of fancy, smelly, emollsifying ingredients. I cook meals—yes, they're big enough for two, but they're all exactly what I want to eat. I write. I read. I spend aimless hours listening to music and thinking of not much at all. It's taken a lot, though, to figure out how to be this kind to myself. I still can't trick myself into believing that I deserve it. But the good thing is that I manage to do any of it.

The other thing I've realized is essential to being alone is travel. My friend Barbara reminded me this year that forgiving people is a kind of gift to yourself (rather than to the forgivee). I've started, this year, training myself to forgive people. I built in a system of rewards. For every event, every person I can forgive, I allow myself spontaneous travel.

Most recently, I took myself to Niagara Falls. It was totally unplanned. It was through the generosity of my brother (thanks Pat!) that I went at all. (I think the exchange went something like this: Me - "Pat. I want to go to Niagara Falls." Pat - "Oh yeah? That's neat. When?" Me - "Today." Pat - "Huh?" Me - "Today. Right now. I want to leave within the hour. Can I please please please borrow your car?" Pat - "Om, okay. Remember that it needs gas.") It was amazing; I let the water mist and rush over me. I felt correct in my skin.

And I got myself some kitsch at The Maid of the Mist Gift Shop. It's a heart-shaped porcelain necklace. It's got a little painting on it of the falls. In magenta, it says "Maggie"—the closest name I could find to my own. It's not dissimilar from the kind of necklace my father would have given to me as a child.