Author Archives: avr

Moments of War

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You know how I feel about moments. Like most things I write about, I’ve written about moments often. I can’t get over how just an eyelash of time makes all the difference; how all that is can so suddenly become what was or what could have been. It’s so unfair, and so thrilling. You can fall irrevocably, inexplicably head over heels in love in a moment. You can birth a child, a being that had existed only in theory, now forever both within and without a piece of you, in just a moment. Your last breath is exhaled, and then gone. Time splits seconds.

My teacher read us a poem today:

We Never Know

 

By Yusef Komunyakaa

 

He danced with tall grass

for a moment, like he was swaying

with a woman. Our gun barrels

glowed white-hot.

When I got to him,

a blue halo

of flies had already claimed him.

I pulled the crumbled photograph

from his fingers.

There’s no other way

to say this: I fell in love.

The morning cleared again,

except for a distant mortar

& somewhere choppers taking off.

I slid the wallet into his pocket

& turned him over, so he wouldn’t

be kissing the ground.

 

Man. That is intense. What an amazing description of a moment.

I t reminded me of another Vietnam poem, by Bruce Weigl:

The Last Lie

Some guy in the miserable convoy
raised up in the back of our open truck
and threw a can of C rations at a child
who called into the rumble for food.
He didn’t toss the can, he wound up and hung it
on the child’s forehead and she was stunned
backwards into the dust of our trucks.

Across the sudden angle of the road’s curving
I could still see her when she rose,
waving one hand across her swollen, bleeding head,
wildly swinging her other hand
at the children who mobbed her,
who tried to take her food.

I grit my teeth to myself to remember that girl
smiling as she fought off her brothers and sisters.
She laughed
as if she thought it were a joke
and the guy with me laughed
and fingered the edge of another can
like it was the seam of a baseball
until his rage ripped
again into the faces of children
who called to us for food.

These poems are so stark and vivid, so human and painful and so, so naked.

If you’ve never read The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, and you are interested in the poetry of war, get crack-a-lacking my friend. It’s hard to read, because it’s dense, but it is an unforgettable experience. I’ve never read anything like it, and can’t even begin to express my admiration for his work. Here’s what he had to say on the moment that the war shifted for him. Listen to it. https://soundcloud.com/theworld/writer-tim-obrien-on-when-his

Why is he smiling so big?

Words of Cheer, Words of Cheese

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It’s International Poetry Month! IPM is the brainchild of my friend Bonnie; she collects a poem a day from international writers and publishes them on her site with an intro and a reading – very cool! Subscribe and you’ll get a poem a day in your email, and then – POOF!- they disappear at the end of the month! Check her out here: http://bonniemcclellan.wordpress.com  Today’s poet is a sassy French minx who is very special to me – yeah, I know famous writers!

In honor of International Poetry Month, here are a few words about words:

“The picture of the universe shifts from tongue to tongue”  – Davis S. Thomson, linguist from his essay “The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: Worlds shaped by Words”

The inner voice and the social world are in endless dialogue; like form and content  it can – and should-  be difficult to tease apart”  -Poet Mark Doty, from the Introduction to The Best American Poetry 2012.

The “Ding-Dong Theory” “… [is] a theory of Karl Wilhelm Heyse… it maintains that the primitive elements of language are reflex expressions induced by sensory impressions; that is the creative faculty gave to each general conception, as it thrilled for the first time through out the brain, a phonetic expression…”    Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition, 1958

“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.” Edgar Allen Poe

“I can sum up what I’ve learned about life in three words: It goes on.” – Robert Frost

“…political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness…such phraseology is need if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them…where there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”  – George Orwell, from the essay “Politics and the English Language”, 1946.

“The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.” — GK Chesterton

“Icelandic ponies. Japanese cats on the Internet. Yawning puppies. Toddlers who give each other hugs. Goats climbing all over everything. Pink and green macaroons. Red pandas. Sparkly nail polish. Do you get where I’m going? Cute things. This cheese is so perfect and cute and delicious you just want to marry it. Or buy one and eat it.”  – Charlotte Kamin of Bedford Cheese Shop, describing the cheese Andante Terry Nocturne

 “The Lindsay Lohan of the cheese world, this pecorino has a tan, leathery exterior that surrounds a delicate yellow paste. With hints of herbs and the aroma of hay, you can almost hear the bleating of Lindsay up in the Italian hills. Pair with nicotine, Red Bull and an alcohol monitor.”  -Charlotte Kamin of Bedford Cheese Shop, describing the cheese Mastorazio, Madaio

“Big and floral in the very best way possible, this firm Sardinian sheep has the cool unaffected strut of Mick in his prime, Lou in middle age or Polly Jean* today.” – Martin Johnson, Gastrononmie 491, describing the cheese Calcagno.

“It is still made only at night, I am led to believe, as it was when I last visited the cheesemaker, and what I haven’t told you is Serpa’s texture and flavor are like sex. There’s just no other way to describe the effect this cheese has on me. Even though I barely remember sex.”       -Steve Jenkins from Fairway Market, describing the cheese Queijo de Serpa

A Parable

BY DR. ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

The cheese-mites asked how the cheese got there,
    And warmly debated the matter;
The Orthodox said that it came from the air,
    And the Heretics said from the platter.
They argued it long and they argued it strong,
    And I hear they are arguing now;
But of all the choice spirits who lived in the cheese,
    Not one of them thought of a cow.
Thanks to all two of you who helped me out with my assignment! As it turned out, I wrote four poems and didn’t have to turn in any of them!
BONUS:

Ode to the Midwest

BY KEVIN YOUNG

The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
—Bob Dylan

I want to be doused
in cheese
& fried. I want
to wander
the aisles, my heart’s
supermarket stocked high
as cholesterol. I want to die
wearing a sweatsuit—
I want to live
forever in a Christmas sweater,
a teddy bear nursing
off the front. I want to write
a check in the express lane.
I want to scrape
my driveway clean
myself, early, before
anyone’s awake—
that’ll put em to shame—
I want to see what the sun
sees before it tells
the snow to go. I want to be
the only black person I know.
I want to throw
out my back & not
complain about it.
I wanta drive
two blocks. Why walk—
I want love, n stuff—
I want to cut
my sutures myself.
I want to jog
down to the river
& make it my bed—
I want to walk
its muddy banks
& make me a withdrawal.
I tried jumping in,
found it frozen—
I’ll go home, I guess,
to my rooms where the moon
changes & shines
like television.

Source: Poetry (July/August 2007).

 AND: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179327

Can Someone Help Me With My Homework?

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homage to e.e.cummings and parts of speech

Legions of prepositions

Waves of from radiate

Without  invades

At   spat in the face of   om

Sacred in and out

I look to you

The wonder of if

Perchance

To go beyond

Taste watermelon mouth

Swallow purred pearls

Smell your shadows

Within and for

Amid

Beneath

Inside

Until

Verses of versus

And through

 

I feel the need to explain this poem, even to myself, so that I don’t forget what I think it means. First off, I wrote it in response to an assignment to write in a style imitative of e.e. cummings. As he is a master and I am a novice, this proved to be challenging. I read up on him – he has a fascinating biography- and his style, but I tried not to read too many of his poems, because they are intimidating. The fresh, surprising use of language and the almost aching beauty of some of his images make me want to quit before I start.

This website  http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/e-e-cummings was of great help to me. Some of the people who wrote about cummings’ works and style are themselves poets, so even their commentary was lovely.Their analysis also served to make me even more intimidated to imitate him. Here are some of the things they said about his style:

  • A Cummings poem is spare and precise, employing a few key words eccentrically placed on the page. Some of these words were invented by Cummings, often by combining two common words into a new synthesis. He also revised grammatical and linguistic rules to suit his own purposes, using such words as “if,” “am,” and “because” as nouns, for example, or assigning his own private meanings to words.
  • Mark Van Doren defined Cummings as a poet with “a richly sensuous mind; his verse is distinguished by fluidity and weight; he is equipped to range lustily and long among the major passions.”
  • M. L. Rosenthal wrote in The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction: “The chief effect of Cummings’ jugglery with syntax, grammar, and diction was to blow open otherwise trite and bathetic motifs through a dynamic rediscovery of the energies sealed up in conventional usage…”
  • “Cummings,” Richard P. Blackmur wrote in The Double Agent: Essays in Craft and Elucidation, “has a fine talent for using familiar, even almost dead words, in such a context as to make them suddenly impervious to every ordinary sense; they become unable to speak, but with a great air of being bursting with something very important and precise to say.”
  • Bethany K. Dumas wrote in her E. E. Cummings: A Remembrance of Miracles that “more important than the specific devices used by Cummings is the use to which he puts the devices. That is a complex matter; irregular spacing … allows both amplification and retardation. Further, spacing of key words allows puns which would otherwise be impossible. Some devices, such as the use of lowercase letters at the beginnings of lines … allow a kind of distortion that often re-enforces that of the syntax…. All these devices have the effect of jarring the reader, of forcing him to examine experience with fresh eyes.”
  • Penberthy detected in Cummings a “nineteenth-century romantic reverence for natural order over man-made order, for intuition and imagination over routine-grounded perception. His exalted vision of life and love is served well by his linguistic agility. He was an unabashed lyricist, a modern cavalier love poet. But alongside his lyrical celebrations of nature, love, and the imagination are his satirical denouncements of tawdry, defiling, flat-footed, urban and political life—open terrain for invective and verbal inventiveness.”

 

So, yeah. That’s mostly what people say about how I write, too. I now reside in a great, hulking mansion of insecurity – Daunted Abbey. Still and all, I’ve got to turn in something, and it has to at least take in some of the elements of his work into account. I fear my poem is inscrutable to a reader, but it does mean something to me. Cummings says not to worry so much about meaning or understanding, and that poetry is about process, not product, but that’s kind of ridic, right? Human being always try to make sense of things, to create a narrative that works for them so that they can deal with, and perhaps attempt to control life’s plot.

 

After you decide what my poem means or doesn’t mean to you, here is my explanation of it.

Legions of prepositions

Waves of from radiate  ­ – You know how when things – ideas, feelings, vibes, invective-  come from someone or something to you, or from you to someone or something else, it’s like waves radiating outwards? That’s what I’m talkin’ ‘bout!

Without  invades  – Stuff from the outside always works its way in to you, your mind, your body, your thoughts, your self-image

At   spat in the face of   om – These things that come at you spit in the face of your balance, your center, and knock you off your feet; and behold, a visual pun! The phrase “spat in the face of” splits the word “atom”, and what happens when you split the atom? I don’t know, because that’s science, but I think it leads to immense friction, chaos, and radical, unpredictable patterns. Whatever it is, it can’t be good.

Sacred in and out – According to me, the “om” is the sacred in and out, the breath, the circle, blah, blah, blah

I look to you – And when the om is shattered, the speaker looks to whoever ‘you’ is

The wonder of if – Because you offer possibility, opportunity, and…

Perchance – …the great maybe

To go beyond – The chance to go beyond oneself, beyond alone, beyond the day to day flood of things that come from the outside that trouble and disconcert

Taste watermelon mouth – The chance to connect in a delicious way

Swallow purred pearls – To hear and believe and internalize the lovely things said and heard when one is intimate and focused on another

Smell your shadows – Really, do I have to explain everything? Cummings wrote about doing it a lot. I guess you could say he wrote about his numerous and varied cummings…but probably you wouldn’t say that. I might!

Within and for – To be within another’s embrace and within your own head; doing  for someone else

Amid- Kind of a sexy word, don’t you think? Glide-y!

Beneath – Also sexy, but with a bit of an edge

Inside –  Ah, sweet mystery of life at last I found you! (This only works if you sing it in Madeline Kahn’s voice from Young Frankenstein)

Until – Uh-oh!

Verses of versus – After time, they go against each other

And through – And then, they are through the stage of each other, or instead of thriving in a mutual space they have broken through boundaries of each other and are now through – finito.

So… is that what you got from the poem? Does it make sense? Is it homage-y? Should I turn it in? This is time sensitive, so let me know!

Thanks!

 

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Today is the 5th of January, and here are five fabulous things I have discovered this month.

1. http://songreader.net/. This is the website where people can upload their versions of songs off of Beck’s new album, Song Reader. The album is only sheet music, so if you go to the website you can hear multiple versions of the same songs by  different people. I love the songs, I love the videos, I love the concept! Beck is so amazing! I love Beck! People are so creative! I love people! I have become obsessed with this site and find myself smiling like a baby at a ceiling fan at my computer screen, even though it’s a piece of crap and takes forever to download anything. Makes me smile like a baby, I tell ya.

2. A long time ago, the New York Times ran a graphic art serial in the paper’s magazine called “Building Stories”, by Chris Ware. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. It was about things that happened in the lives of people who lived in this building. The “happenings” were day to day things, just moments in time, but I was very moved by the stories, and one panel in particular resonated with me so profoundly that I cried and cried and never forgot about it.

Sometimes, I didn’t understand what was going on in the comics. I don’t think I ever thought they were funny, on account of they weren’t. Even when they baffled me, I liked them, because those little boxes of lines had so much to tell me.

Then I heard that Ware was going to collect them in book form, and finally I heard it was coming out, and then I ordered it sight unseen from Amazon for my holiday gift to me. Yay, me! How did you know? It’s exactly what I wanted!

Actually, it was even better than I expected. It’s not a book; it’s 14 discrete pieces that tell different parts of a story that has no beginning or ending. It’s not linear, and it jumps around in space and time, so you can enter or exit from any point. Some of the pieces are really big, like a full fold-out newspaper, and some are small, like folded streamers or love notes.  You never know what is about to unfold – literally and figuratively!- in front of you, and the pictures and words are so compelling that you get sucked right into the pages.

I am completely blown away and somewhat overwhelmed by the scope of this project, and  it will take me a really long time to go through it all. It’s very dense and detailed, and I find myself getting stuck on just one aspect of one panel, like how the snow falling in the picture looks so real, and the lights in the building seem so warm, and I am transported to when I lived in Wisconsin and sometimes the world was just so gray and muted, frost on steel, and looking in the picture I can feel the pain of my toes freezing into purple veined slabs under socks too thin for the season…the images are pretty darned evocative, I must say! Here’s the one I’ll start tomorrow: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/books/review/building-stories-by-chris-ware.html?_r=0

Both Building Stories and Song Reader let the audience/reader take part in the creation of the art; you get to bring something to the table, to add a little something to the feast. I think that is so special and, well, generous. It’s nice of the artists to let me manipulate the art, and I appreciate it! Thanks, gentlemen!

3. http://www.eugenerichards.com

Eugene Richards is a photographer, film maker and writer who has been published in tons of magazines and who has authored a bunch of books. His work is stark and arresting, and sometimes shockingly beautiful. It’s haunting.  Go to his site, and view the photos on slideshow, or Google Image him.

Damn. That’s some real slice-of-life stuff, no?

4. Speaking of super-dark, but oddly redemptive, I finished Colum McCann’s This Side of Brightness, which I liked a lot. Right at the beginning he uses the phrase “a cartography of darkness”. I think that’s lovely, don’t you? You should read it. There is one scene in it that is so fantastic, yet rendered so realistically and masterfully that I feel like I was there, even though it it something I never could have imagined.

5.  Photo by Steve Damascus

I like this poem:

Fog

BY CARL SANDBURG

The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
Simple. Nice. Ephemeral. I just discovered it.
So far, I love 2013! I have been inspired and intrigued! Happy tomorrow, Everyone!

 

 

In 2013…

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…May you have myriad opportunities to soar to new heights

…May you be safely out of harm’s way

….May the beat of your inner drummer be easy to hear and march to

…May the light always be easy to find and step into

…May you be animate and clothed

May true love always triumph, no matter what

Happy New Year, Everyone! I hope 2013 is a year of marvels for you all!

I know you won’t do this, on account of you just won’t, but if you have any New Year’s Wish pictures, poems, ditties, songs or suggestions for the universe, send them in! I’d love to see them! Peace, peeps!

Rolling Stoned

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Well, it’s 12-12-12. Hot damn! That is a string of highly similar numbers, if I ever saw such a string! Not only that, but today, somewhere, maybe even at 12:12, someone is turning twelve. Insane, clown posse!

So what am I doing to celebrate, you ask? “Enough,” you say, “Enough about catfish and other demon-scourge! Enough of jellyfish and the other immortals, like Bob Hartley and his everlastingly hot wife Emily! Let’s hear about you, AVR,” you clamor. “What are you up to on this fine day?”

Ah, peeps! Thank you for asking! I have acutely felt, of late, a void- nay, an abyss – that has broke under my feet and threatened to consume my soul; and the maw of oblivion is, indeed, my lack of opportunity to talk about myself, to elucidate my glories and to gloss esoteric about my vast cache of ideas and life gleanings. (My mom recently read one of my essays – yeah, I write essays! “Spouting some verbiage,” she commented. “Like an Orca,” I replied.)

So, here’s some of what’s been going on.

1. I’m in college. Did I tell you that? I quit my job, dyed my hair, and went to school to get my Masters. In debate. Master Debater. Just kidding. Already had my degree in that. Just kidding. Inappropriate. And TMI. Still, a girl gets lonely. Wait, what are we talking about? College. So who do you know that is currently in college and has a 4.0 GPA? Me! I made an “A”. That’s the highest GPA I have ever had. Let’s face it, that’s the highest GPA anyone has ever had. Doesn’t get much higher than that, nosiree, Bob! I have only taken one class so far. In that class I learned that you don’t HAVE TO do all the readings, and that truly, I am not a very good student, on account of my fair-to-middlin’ work ethic. But none of that matters, cuz my my bullshit is bedazzlin’ and I MADE AN A!!!!! Yay, me!

2. I quit listening to music. I don’t know how it happened. One day, I’m tap dancin’ in the shower, and the next day it’s nothing but Diane Rehm. It took my awhile, but then I realized; ain’t no sunshine in my life. Made me real – wah, wah – sad. But I didn’t get the music back until I watched a documentary on the Rolling Stones called “Crossfire Hurricane”.    I loved it. It was filmed right before the tour that celebrates their fiftieth year in the business. The documentary people went into a room and interviewed the Stones about the whole strange trip of their careers, but with no cameras. The interviews were then synched with archival footage and ephemera; it was so cool! (Did you know that ‘ephemera’ is plural for ‘ephemeron”, and that it probably is not the correct word to use here, but who among you is going to look it up in either of its forms? Not you, stinky shoe!)

I’ve been a fan of the band for years. My dad had some Rolling Stones albums, mostly early ones, and I discovered them when I was about twelve. It was the first music I found that was my own. Nobody told me it was cool; I just heard it, and it struck a chord. A D Major 7, I think. Anyway, I felt it was all mine.

My first real high school boyfriend was also into the Stones. His friend Jamie had a Trans Am, and we would ride around, getting high, and I would watch them pretending to be Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, preening into the side mirror and singing to me at stoplights. “I wonder what it is…C’mon, little baby…you make me feel all right…you make me feel…so GOOD! Yes indeed! I feel pretty good! I feel pretty good! I’m all right!”

When I went to college, my best friend ditched me and I was left to a dorm room all by myself. She joined a fraternity as a little sister and I didn’t know anyone, didn’t totally get the concept of higher education, and didn’t really know how to be by myself; I had always had my family around. Needless to say, I was floundering in sea of angst and insecurity. Whoa, whoa, woe, woe! I listened to “Moonlight Mile” from Sticky Fingers every night as I fell asleep: “Now I am sleeping under strange, strange skies/ I’m just about a moonlight mile/ on down the road…”

As I got older, the Stones remained a part of me. I’d bring them out when I was sad or happy, when I was cleaning the house or on road trips. But not too long ago – was it five years? Ten years? Who knows?! Some years ago, I went to a big Rolling Stones concert,  in a park, maybe at a lake. It was a big concert, with tons of people and a huge stage. I went with some great friends, including my best friend from when I was in middle school, Weenie, and it was in Austin, my vacation playground; good times!

Because the concert was sold out, you couldn’t park anywhere near it.We had to take a shuttle bus that dropped us off at the the edge of a grassy area and form there it was a long trudge; nay, it was a slog, a slog to a bridge, that led over a paddock to a prairie to a field to a huge wall of port-o-potties to a large grassy areas where all manner of old and infirm were slowly and deliberately making their way. I was enchanted.

Now, I quit smoking the ganja long ago. It’s not that I have anything against it, and I raise a lighter to those states that have decriminalized it. One day, I just lost the desire to smoke out, and that was that. But every once in awhile, on a few blue moon occasions, it seems like the right thing to do. And in that field, with kindly gray cotton candy heads nodding their grizzled encouragement and approval, smoke the ganj I did.

Here are some lessons that can be learned by toking it up after a long interlude of not getting high, from the point of view of the subject:

A. When one is high for the first time in a long time, everybody in the vicinity will want to know how the experience feels, as all those nearby may have forgotten what it’s like to be high for the first time. It is the duty of the newly-wasted to tell everyone else what’s going on, blow-by-blow and minute-by-minute. Tell them. They want to know. Say things like, “Wow, I don’t think I have ever been this thirsty in my entire life,” or, “Don’t you think ‘kizmit’ is a funny word?” or “Run? I can’t run! Running is crazy!”, or “When I get high, I think my eyes get squinty! No, really? Isn’t that weird! Look at them! They’re so small I can’t even see you! What? Open them? Oh, right!”

http://www.marijuana.com/threads/funny-things-said-done-while-high.190268/page-45

B. It is possible for two people to have a long, in-depth conversation with each other at a loud, rock and roll concert, that can last upwards of twelve minutes, with many meaningful back-and-forth exchanges, gestures, raucous laughter, and significant glances. After such a warm human experience, it is also possible to realize that one or both parties was unable to hear and therefore understand any of the discussion, but enjoyed it perhaps more than any other dialogue they have ever had.

C. It’s fun to dance, especially if you are in a big crowd where everybody is having a good time. Part of the fun is that there is no right or wrong when you dance. All you have to do is just feel the music and let your body take over. But wait! What does that mean? Feel the music? Which part? The bass line? The drums? Heavens to Betsy, am I supposed to be feeling the back up singers or the guitar solo? Am I dancing a melody? Was Melody the name of the drummer in Josie and the Pussycats? Why am I thinking about this? And what am I talking about, let my body take over?! How? Which body part? My hands? Am I fist pumping to the piano? Do I look like I’m at a Dead show? That would really piss me off! Does my body have to piss RIGHT NOW?  Are my feet supposed to move AT THE SAME TIME as the rest of me? What does it mean to ‘keep the time’? What time is it? Isn’t it time for me to NOT be high anymore? How do you dance? It think her name was Melanie, not Melody.Who knows? She didn’t dance anyway. She was the drummer. She got the beat! Wait, am I still moving?  Am I just standing still with my head in my hands in the middle of a huge field full of old hippies because I can’t figure out dancing? Is everyone watching me? Where is the bathroom? I wish I could unstick my tongue from my top teeth so that I could ask someone to dance me over to the port-o-potty… 

D. If one is at a concert and one gets confused about dancing because one is too high, one should calm oneself by trying to relax and just listen to the music, especially if the music has always been a source of pleasure and comfort. There…that’s better.You know this song! You know all the songs! I’ll bet you can tell which song this is from the first five notes! Try it!

And that is when smoking marijauna ruined the Rolling Stones for me. I started really listening to the music and discovered that many of the Stones songs kinda sound alike. I mean, they have hundreds of tunes; some are bound to be similar. But here’s the thing – I never noticed before. I was so disappointed. And then it was just not the same to me. I felt like I’d lost a friend.

Until I saw Crossfire Hurricane. Damn! That is one good documentary! And while a lot of Stones songs sound the same, lots of them don’t. Yay! Welcome back, you dear old bastards! I missed you!

3. I started listening to music again! There is so much great music out there! Right now I have Herbie Hancock, Divine Fits, Diana Krall, Pleasure Club and Tom Waits in my cd player. I’ve been dancing in the living room, and guess what? It’s easy and fun!

 Me, in the living room. If it was 1978. And I was someone else.

  This is one of my favorite movies of all times. Here are a couple of interesting facts: Gene Kelly had a fever of 103 (Hot blooded!*) when he did this scene, and he had to be wet for so long that his wool suit shrunk!

*If you can link this reference to the band Foreigner, you are cold as ice! Well played,  70’s dork!

4. I’ve just started reading two good books. The first is This Side of Brightness, by Colum McCann. You know how much I love him! I’m only on page 97, but, as always, the simple poetry of his writing is equally as fascinating as the story he is telling. This is an early novel, from 1998, and it’s interesting to see the stylistic things that have changed or remain in his more recent books.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/04/05/reviews/980405.405mccull.html

The second is by William Gay – that’s his name, don’t wear it out! It’s called i hate to see that evening sun go down, and it’s a collection of short stories. (He didn’t capitalize that “I”, so neither did i!) I’m really enjoying it, though it is pretty darn dark. So far the characters are all Southerners with sad, dusty lives, but the narratives are all really well laid out and compelling. I’m all sucked in, and I love his style.

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2012/02/remembering-william-gay.html

5. I haven’t been watching much tv, but I did catch the 12-12-12 concert that was on to raise money for Hurricane Sandy. I liked it. The Who was my favorite band. They said “Fuck” twice. Kanye didn’t say it once. Pussy.

6. I saw a really good documentary called The Flat. It’s about this guy who finds out all of this weird stuff about his family when he helps his mom clean out his grandmother’s apartment after the grandmother’s death. In addition to that, it’s about how people  accept/acknowledge/understand information while simultaneously and subconsciously rejecting/forgetting/denying it; what Orwell called “doublethink” in 1984, and relationships, and ripples of time.

Here’s a trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z94u_5qLxXU

It’s not what you expect!

Also, if you didn’t get a chance, watch Beasts of the Southern Wild. It’s about families, too, and mythology, and creating narratives that help us to make sense of the world.

So, there you have it! Me this week! Pretty fabulous, right?

 

NOTE- I started writing this on the 12th, and planned on finishing it in a timely matter, but that didn’t happen. When the massacre at Newtown happened on the 14th, I didn’t feel like writing.Today, a week later, I’m still upset, but it’s Frank Zappa’s birthday and the end of the world, so I thought I’d go ahead and finish it up.

Live good lives, everyone. Tell people you love them. Be happy. Be nice. Peace to us all.

 

 

Here Kitty Kitty!

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In the history of humanity, there have been countless examples of brave people, some trained for combat,some ordinary citizens of all ages, genders and ethnicities, who unflinchingly face formidable enemies who threaten life or liberty. I am reminded of this as The United States remembers the 71st anniversary of Pearl Harbor, an attack which saw Americans of all stripes rushing to protect our borders from enemy invasion.

Well, folks, it’s happening again. We, the people of Earth, are being attacked from an enemy invader, one that is smart and creative, that shoots low under the radar, a species so tricky it has lived in our midst, according to fossil records, for at least 30 million years, all the while gaining our trust, keeping quiet, staying out of our way – but, plotting, always scheming, dreaming of that day when they will rise en masse from the murk and the mire, the silt and the slime, to establish themselves as the genius genus that has outlived, out-adapted, outfoxed all others – are you frightened? Be afraid! For far too long we have ignored them, despite increasingly horrific signs, and it is time, people, TIME, I tell you, to make a stand against the fearsome catfish!

I have warned you repeatedly about fish in general, but do you listen? NO! Not even after I posted a really long video of the finned foe walking casually down an urban street in Anytown, USA. That’s right! You can read! I said walking! They were just a’strolling past the homes of your grandparents, your children, your beloved high school teachers, and what did we as a nation do to stop their little Catfish Pride parade – nothing! You didn’t even watch the video I posted, did you?  Catfish fossils have even been found in Antartica. This picture comes from a blog that has lots of catfish lore. https://ferrebeekeeper.wordpress.com/?s=catfish. Great info, but you just prefer to remain ignorant, right? Oh, Humanity! Will you never learn?

“Catfish?” you ask, mildly. “They don’t hurt anybody! They are our delicious little friends! Why you wanna talk bad ’bout the kittens of the sea?”

You are, of course, a fool. Some catfish are poisonous, and their venom can be fatal.Here are a bunch of striped eel catfish, probably attacking something lovely, like a seahorse or a starfish.  These guys are small and cute, but in asshole infiltraitors (did ya dig my double entendre spelling?!), size doesn’t matter. The small Candiru are said to be parasitic, and have been found in women’s vaginas, where their spiky spines penetrate the walls. They have been rumored to swim into the urethra in a man’s penis, up his pee stream, even though they can be up to six inches long – Ouch! Got your attention now, don’t I?! Once up in there, they feed off the victim’s blood, leaving bullet sized holes, and from thence they continue on; Animal Planet reports that human corpses have been found in the Amazon filled with fat, insatiable Candiru.  http://animal.discovery.com/fish/river-monsters/candiru-catfish/

They contrast nicely with the Mekong Giant Catfish, which can reach 650 pounds. These guys are just big ol’ toothless herbivores, and they are critically endangered, so I feel a little better about them. I’m keeping my eye on them, though, because here’s the thing: Catfish are amazing. They are an incredibly diverse species; one out of twenty vertebrate species is some type of catfish, I shit you not. Many have poor vision, but Lordy Lou, how they have developed all the other senses.

Catfish can smell certain compounds at one part per 10 billion parts of water. They can taste with their entire body; that’s right, their whole bodies are covered with taste buds. They are like swimming tongues.They have eight barbels, or whiskers, for “hearing”. They also have additional hearing apparatus, but the whiskers sense vibrations travelling through the water. Because of a bunch of super powers that I didn’t really understand, but which the intrepid catfish researcher will come across if she delves further than the Wiki-entry, the catfish can hear higher and lower frequencies than most fish, so much so that they can use their straight up and down whiskers to hear people walking on the shore line – O-M-G!!! They can even detect seismic activity, so that when the Apocalypse comes, who do you think is going to be the first species to take advantage? There will be all kinds of catfish raping, looting and pillaging! They have electroreceptivity, pressure sensitivity, fringed testicles (ooh, fancy!), the ability to growl menacingly, telekinesis, good credit ratings and advanced degrees in weapon-making. They are, in short, unstoppable.

But stop them we must! This time they have gone too far! According to a story I heard on PRI’s show The World, catfish who live in the Tarn River in Southwestern France have taken to attacking and eating pigeons on a small island in the river. This in and of itself is not so bad; pigeons are our enemies also, and are disgusting. The thing that makes this story such a nightmare is the way the sly catfish has adapted to its surroundings. First off, catfish are nocturnal and pigeons are, um, dayturnal, so the wily catfish has altered its internal clock to catch the pigeons unaware. They hurl themselves up out of the water, with 80% of their bodies on land to catch the birds and pull them under to eat them (with some nice Chainti and fava beans, usually). This is especially impressive when you consider that, being bottom feeders, catfish are naturally negatively buoyant, which means that they sink, rather than float, due to their gas bladders (gross!) and their big-ass bony heads. Imagine the force, or tork, or springload, or whatever you call it, that they have to use to get so much of their body up and out of the water! Incredible! They are huge; they range from 3-5 feet. That’s a catfish as big as me, people! In fist to fin combat, I really don’t know who would win! But here’s the most terrifying thing of all; the catfish were introduced to the area by idiot fisherfolk in the 1980’s. That means it has only taken them 20 odd years to adapt and dominate in a new environment.

Yikes! Now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of their global community! We must fight these clever aquatic – or should I say “amphibious” – terrorists! As Winston Churchill once said, “There is nothing to fear but fear itself.” That doesn’t mean you should dismiss fear as being no big deal; nay, just the opposite! Fear is the root of terror, horror, angst, trepidation, foreboding, panic, and consternation! I’m scared people, and I WANT YOU, to do something about it right away! Now arm yourselves and get out there! The free world depends on you!  

  Don’t really kiss him. He will eat your face off. Bastard.

Attention, Time Fighters!

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Woohooo!!!  I am pleased to inform you of a fascinating phenomenon from a phylum of funky hydrozoan called Turritopsis dornhii. (On can only keep up meaningless alliteration for so long!) A hydrozoan is a small invertebrate like a jellyfish. This particular species defies death; it literally refuses to die. When it is under stress, it reverts from any stage in its life cycle to its earliest life form, a polyp, and then starts the whole cycle anew. Damn! Tell me that’s not cool! There’s going to be a big ol’ cover article in the NYT by Nathaniel Rich this Sunday*. I sure hope Nutria, cockroaches, rats, Snakehead Fish, Burmese Pythons and Sarah Palin don’t read it!

* I know this because I am amazing.Never doubt me again, or I will use my vast psychic skills to ruin your life.

Here’s a mini article to hold you until Sunday. I like how they manage to sneak Upnapishtim, Gilgamesh, and Nietzsche into this piece. A song:

NYT! You so very/ Literary

Heavy pieces/ I can’t carry

Flocks of words/ Like migrating birds

Oh so pretty/ ‘cept when they are shitty!

No, really, I jest! I love you NYT! Without you, how would I impress my friends and colleagues, particularly those who are illiterate? 

 

And I think to myself…

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What a wonderful world!

Hello One, All! How’s it hanging? I, for one, am practically giddy with the joy of the season. Besides my birthday,Thanksgiving, is, by far, my favorite national holiday. Of course, when you consider the other national holidays – Memorial Day, Labor Day, Presidents Day, Arbor Day, Sunday – it doesn’t look like Thanksgiving has any real competition, except of course from me and MLK, but that’s beside the point. Thanksgiving is a day when no matter who you are or what your background, you’re encouraged to kick back, eat something delicious, and contemplate the good. Sometimes we don’t have time to do that, but the good is out there, and just thinking about it makes you feel better. If nothing looks so great right now, you can think back to a time when you were happy, or you can look ahead to what might be. Try to wrap your head around this technical explanation, my laypeeps: Good is good! Take as much as you can, and stuff yourself with it!

I was feeling particularly gleeful at last night’s pre-Thanksgiving celebration. Pre-Thanksgiving starts out with a long walk at the lake, so I can look at the leaves and wave at ducks and people on bikes. My trusted sidekick, Atticus, trotted along next to me, looking for new kinds of poo to sniff, and hoping that just for one moment I would relax my grip on the leash so that he can hurl himself into the brown-green water and try to swim from one shore to the other. I’m grateful for Atticus, even though he can be an asshole. The other day I went out to dinner and he got out of the backyard. When I came back about four hours later, he was waiting up for me on the front porch. That boy knows where his kibble comes from; he ain’t goin’ nowhere! I’m thankful he loves me and I have him to love back.

So I go to the lake, and it’s beautiful, even though in my neck of the woods it’s not all that much of an autumnal orange-red-and-gold tapestry, because it’s 80 degrees here. The leaves are like, “Oh, shit! I didn’t even have time to change, and now it’s too late!”, before they leap from jazz-handing in the breeze to an eternity as mulch. (Note to self: don’t let this happen to me!)  (I did NOT take this picture, though I wish I could say that I did! My friend Jill saw it on Pintrest and sent it to me. Kudos to the photographer, whoever you are! I’m grateful for art and beauty that just finds you by surprise.)

After the lake I made a big, fat meal, a pre-bounty cornucopia, a real gorge fest to stretch my stomach muscles for the Thanksgivingathon. Atticus got a little leftover salmon, some trout, and two hunks of sweet potato. That’s some real fine eating. ( I appreciate all kinds of food, and I love to eat, and I’m really glad I don’t have a 2 foot long parasite coiled in my bowels that forces me to eat things like muskrats or ants.)

As can be expected, I took to the couch immediately after eating. Oh, who am I kidding? I ate laying down! Believe it or not, I have not been able to watch near enough tv lately. ( I’m thankful for tv and especially my dvr. I love my friends and family, but they are nowhere near as reliable and loyal as my tv pals, whom I will never forget nor forsake. I’m talkin’ to you, Joey! I don’t care what they say about you! My love for you will never be moo!)

So, I watched an ep of Parks and Rec, just to prime the pump, if you will, and then finished a documentary about Ethel Kennedy (what a life!), and then tucked in for Parenthood. Ah, Parenthood! You make feeling sad feel so good! I cried and cried, even though it wasn’t all that sorrowful; sometimes you just gotta let it out, even if you don’t really know what it is. (I’m thankful for generic and slightly nonsensical advice that could make relative sense in numerous, disparate contexts.) You can’t end pre-Thanksgiving night with your tear on, so I decided to cheer up with an ep of Teen Mom. Those wacky young mothers! They still act like kids! They’re so crazy – sleeping around and blowing off rehab and going to jail and stuff! Lifted my spirits right up! But the coup de grace (I’m grateful for my ginormous, super-classy vocabulary!) transpired (did you catch that? I could have just said ‘happened’!) when I switched to unrecorded “live” programming and caught my very favorite episode of one of my very favorite, “dead” shows, Bob Newhart. (Were you expecting some Jerry Garcia reference when I said Dead show? You don’t even know who I am, do you?!)   

NOTE: I searched high and low to get you a video clip here, either from the episode I’m about to talk about, or of the theme song and opening of the show, “Home to Emily”. Everything I came up with was lame. Either the intro was incomplete, or had only audio (which rocks – dig that driving trumpet, man!), or was from the second Bob Newhart Show, which just wasn’t the same. Anyway, I couldn’t do it. You’ll have to find it on tv and watch it yourself. Do it! It’s totally worth it! In the meantime, pretend I did find a really perfect clip of the opening where Bob, wearing that checked sports jacket, answers the big, fat push-button phone, and a beat after he says “Hello?”, like “I wonder who’s calling? This could be something good!”, the drums kick in and then the horns start and it’s all exciting, but nothing’s really happening; it’s just Bob going to work, a little man in a beige overcoat and hat on a gray street, or riding the train, or taking the elevator, and then it slows down, kind of contemplative, and the day starts, the doctor is in, and those minor relationships that make up the bulk of a life, with the guy at the end of the hall, or the receptionist or the kid at the checkout, those relationships become layered, so that they become solid and real, grain of sand to pearl, and you know that at the end of the day, but this time when it’s darker and colder, Bob will be reversing the trip, a little more slowly, weary and tired this time, but the drums will kick in again when he gets to the door of his apartment and it swings open and there, like a sunflower in a long yellow skirt, and you can almost smell the home scent of pot roast curling around the door jamb, there beams Suzanne Pleshette to welcome him home to Emily  – pretend like you’ve just seen that!

Ah, yeah! That’s the goods! What a great show!  Anyway, this particular episode is called “Over the River and Through the Woods”, but we afficianados just call it “Moo Goo Gai Pan”. You can call it “Over the River and Through the Woods”. So, Emily goes out of town, and Bob and Jerry are watching the football game with a big jug of something, and every time their team scores they drink – sort of like the classic game of “Hi, Bob!”, which is kind of ironic, considering. Mr. Carlin and Howard/Major Healey come over, and they’re all sad sack, but then they get all drunk and order Chinese food…it’s so funny! The jokes are right up my alley; lots of puns and wordplay, the kind of joke that’s kind of not funny and a little stupid; that shit just makes me want to pee myself! (I’m thankful I have bladder control, but also, I’m thankful that they make Depends that you can barely see, and also that my backyard has big privacy hedges!) I’ve tried all day to describe it to people, but they don’t get it. I watched part of it three times (thank you dvr!), and laughed each time! I’m grateful for things that make me laugh!

Speaking of Bobs I am thankful for, I’m glad my friend Robert is here from England. Like Newhart, Robert is hilarious, but with an accent. We went out the other night and within ten minutes, he said, ” I have two great ambitions. One is to find a dead body while walking a dog, and the other is to survive a plane crash.”  While this is a great conversation starter under any circumstance, it is even more meaningful apropos of nothing and in Brit-speak. I really admire his depth of thought and attention to detail. I mean, while it would be cool to find a corpse, how much better would it be to have that happen with a dog by your side? That Robert is a sodding genius! (The English say “sodding” instead of “fucking”. Also, sometimes they just say “fucking”, but it sounds like “fecking”. I’m happy I know some other languages, so that I can tell people what I think in a global arena.) I am so very thankful for my fantastic friends, who inspire me and make me think and smile.

Speaking of making me smile, I am grateful for people who go out of their way just to do it, and by ‘do it’, I mean make me smile, and not necessarily because I’m having a good time while doing it. Duh, dirty bird! One of my cousins – I’ll call her AIA, sent me this Thanksgiving text:

Do you think that when Kai Ryssdal wants to ‘do 69’ with his significant other he says, “Hey babe, let’s do the numbers?”

I totally understand if you are not laughing right now; it’s not because you’re stupid – though indeed, you may be; I don’t know who reads this blog!- it’s because that little gem was specifically made for me, to appeal to my sense of humor. Not only does it revolve around my current boyfriend, Kai Ryssdal, but it also has numbers, but no math – man, I love that! I am incredibly thankful for people who ‘get’ me. All twelve of you.

So all that was just pre-Thanksgiving. Yesterday I got up early and sang along to the Violent Femmes and the new Diana Krall cd and made mashed potatoes for thirty people, which is more difficult than it sounds, even though I was given very explicit instructions. “Just   make   plain   mashed   potatoes. Just plain. Maybe with butter, but that’s all,” my cousin JC said. (I am so thankful for my cousins! I have a lot of them, and they are all wonderful people! I am lucky that they are not just family, but friends, also. I must have been pretty fantastic in my past lives to deserve to be born into this one! Homage, family! Even though only a couple of you will ever read this, I salute you all!)

So I woke up and walked Atticus and set out to make a huge batch of twice-baked, rosemary infused, mashed potatoes with roasted garlic. And a little bowl of plain mashed potatoes, butter optional.

I probably should have looked at a recipe for twice-baked, rosemary infused, roasted garlic potatoes before I started, but I figured I could suss it out, and after four pounds of potatoes and two hours, by golly, suss I did! Those spuds were delicious; garlicky, creamy, Clooney – Rosemay Clooney that is! I knew they would steal turkey thunder and Brussels sprout bravado, and next year, I would be trusted to make whatever I wanted, however I wanted to make it. Oh yeah, and then I made a little bowl of plain potatoes, just so people could compare and fully comprehend what plain taters aspire to be.

On the way to the car, the bag with the sturdy handles that I used to carry out the potatoes de resistance broke, and the glass bowl that held them shattered. I wondered how small a shard of glass had to be to pierce esophagi, even those pre-coated with creamy spud salve. Pretty small, I think. I had to dump the whole delectable dish in the end. I still had the other mashed potatoes, even though I hadn’t really given them the time or attention that Thanksgiving fare deserves. I also had a bottle of red wine and a bottle of white. They ought to help soften the low potato blow.

But even for this unfortunate turn of events, I am grateful, as I learned a valuable lesson: I like my mashed potatoes like I like my men: simple and lumpy. With skin. Yum.

Happy Thanksgiving to everybody. I hope you have many things to appreciate. May you be living in a state of ataraxia, which is a real word. Look it up. As always, please know that I am eternally grateful for those of you who care enough to follow my adventures even though I’m not on Facebook. Thank you for keeping up with me. For those of you who stumble unawares into my web, I’m glad you are here, even if it is only for a moment. Who knows? Maybe you will end up sticking around. Maybe when serendipity and possibility call, you will answer the big,  push-button phone and say, “Hello?”, thinking, “I wonder who is calling? This could be something good!”, and one day we can be thankful that we found each other.

Here are some things to be thankful for:

Hills to roll down……………………………….. and rock and roll that never dies, even if it ages

                          

Sunny days …………………………………………………          and nights that light up

       

Things that are much bigger than you……………….. and things that are way smaller.

MWAH!

Atraxia- A state of freedom from emotional disturbance or anxiety. I knew you wouldn’t look it up.