Probably only Svenja Will Appreciate This. Maybe.

Yes, it involves twitter. I'm sheepish, okay?



The link he provided pointed here:

This Kind of Thing Can Lead to Colbert

Things Keep Blending Together

It's a sign of my aging brain, perhaps, or maybe of something in the world at large. But things keep blending together.

Several months ago a Mary Gaitskill novel merged with a memoir by A.M. Holmes as I read them both, becoming some kind of hybrid in my mind.

Now I am reading Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel "The Year of the Flood," which describes a fragmentary, broken civilization of the near future.

Today I read Edwidge Danticat in the New Yorker, talking about her family in Haiti, and I can't separate the two worlds. They are too similar. It's a little unnerving.

An excerpt:

Everyone sounded eerily calm on the phone. No one was screaming. No one was crying. No one said “Why me?” or “We’re cursed.” Even as the aftershocks kept coming, they’d say, “The ground is shaking again,” as though this had become a normal occurrence. They inquired about family members outside Haiti: an elderly relative, a baby, my one-year-old daughter.

I cried and apologized. “I’m sorry I can’t be with you,” I said. “If not for the baby—”

My nearly six-foot-tall twenty-two-year-old cousin—the beauty queen we nicknamed Naomi Campbell—who says that she is hungry and has been sleeping in bushes with dead bodies nearby, stops me.

“Don’t cry,” she says. “That’s life.”

“No, it’s not life,” I say. “Or it should not be.”

“It is,” she insists. “That’s what it is. And life, like death, lasts only yon ti moman.” Only a little while.

Kochalka Artifact

I found this on the floor today; an artifact from the day a couple years ago when James Kochalka visited Fergus' "Comics Club" at the library in Montpelier. It must have fallen out of our copy of "Pinky and Stinky" (a story of two space-traveling pigs). If I post this online do I have to pay him royalties?

Maira Kalman: Back to the Land

Maira Kalman, she who re-inflamed my ire for Benjamin Franklin earlier this year, has written a lovely little illustrated thing about local-ness and chickens and slowing down and future generations. It's on the New York Times website.

Our chickens laid four eggs today. Thanks for sharing, chickens.

A Big Week for Univ. of Washington Poets

When I was a neurotic MFA-fiction student at the University of Washington, the poetry faculty included David Wagoner and Heather McHugh. One the students I knew there was Martha Silano.

This year, David Wagoner is guest editor of the Best American Poetry 2009 anthology (to be published at any moment), and this week Martha Silano is flying to New York to read alongside Billy Collins, Mark Doty, John Ashbery and the other poets included in "Best". And Heather McHugh has just been awarded a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" award.

National Public Radio:

Poet Heather McHugh mines words for contradictions and double meanings, offering the reader an expansive, fresh perspective on themes like love and mortality.

McHugh was recently rewarded a MacArthur fellowship for her efforts. The so-called genius grant comes with a $500,000 honorarium, which, the poet says, she will use to pay more attention to her work.

"I need to get back to my own work," McHugh tells Robert Siegel. "I've been teaching for 33 years, and to learn to teach has been to learn to pay attention to the work of others. And I've been doing that pretty ardently yea these many years, now and again taking a leave of absence."

The funny thing is, during my brief time in the Fiction program at UW, no one ever seemed to *see* Heather McHugh. She was always on some kind of sabbatical or leave.

Who was she paying attention to so ardently?

Maybe Martha Silano.

Woven into Our Lives

Lauren wrote in to Vermont Public Radio this week in praise of poet Galway Kinnell, who was being interviewed by VPR's Jane Lindholm. Here's a short excerpt:

Irish Poem While Driving

After dropping the kids off at school this morning I happened to listen to The Writer's Almanac on NPR, which today featured a well known poem by W.B. Yeats called "Adam's Curse".

While I wouldn't normally think that poetry and driving were compatible, as I bumped over the County Road this morning I heard this poem anew, so to speak, and it struck me again what a great poet Yeats was. Of particular note was his comparison of the moon to a shell:

A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time's waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.

...but there's a lot going on in the poem, and there's durn near something for everyone there:

We sat together at one summer's end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, 'A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.'

And thereupon
That beautiful mild woman for whose sake
There's many a one shall find out all heartache
On finding that her voice is sweet and low
Replied, 'To be born woman is to know—
Although they do not talk of it at school—
That we must labour to be beautiful.'

I said, 'It's certain there is no fine thing
Since Adam's fall but needs much labouring.
There have been lovers who thought love should be
So much compounded of high courtesy
That they would sigh and quote with learned looks
Precedents out of beautiful old books;
Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.'

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;
We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time's waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one's but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

--"Adam's Curse" by William Butler Yeats. Public domain.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day.

(The poem starts at about 2 minutes)

The Boots

Artwork by Karen Green, David Foster Wallace's wife; his boots.

"Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain, because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from." -David Foster Wallace

DF Wallace Ephemera

Briefly, because I'm working. The New Yorker has just uploaded a couple scanned manuscript pages from an unfinished David Foster Wallace Novel. The marginalia, the marginalia. Mr. Wallace killed himself in September.


More here.

Noon, January, Vermont, Twelve Degrees

Noon, January, Vermont, Twelve Degrees. Dog on steroids nosing his Elizabethan collar into everything, direly in need of a walk. A perfunctory lunch of organic CSA applesauce and an 8 oz. Swiss Colony ham(let) dating from Christmas of 2007. The first week of school, ever, for my two children and already they seem to be louder then they were. And they giggle about the word ass--as in, he fell on his ass on the sledding hill and not as in, what's the difference between a donkey and an ass?--and L, stretched thin with lack of sleep and these changes we've made, is swept with emotion and backs out of the room. The boy wakes giggling uncontrollably over dreams of Caillou, the cartoon character, falling into a swimming pool into which a dog from Clifford the Big Red Dog has shat (this was followed by dozens of small cartoon animals turning their asses--my word this time--in Caillou's direction). Then it's an hour of breakfasts and dressing and toothbrushing and dinosaurs I've never heard of, and tales of fighting Bionicles, and the theatrical re-staging of scenes from Star Wars films I have not seen--with Young Padawans and Hutlets--and then off to the school in time for Morning Circle, and goodbye. After which the briefest of pauses. Then the shopping--antidepressants, groceries, etc. Home to clear yesterday's 8 inches of snow; to call Lou, who owns the local Sears, to arrange for a dryer-swap. And this lunch, which now includes coffee and Grape Nuts, and how can I possibly escape a stomach ache later?

All of which, somehow, might explain why this poem had some resonance for me when I read it this morning in the New Yorker:

Alien vs. Predator

by Michael Robbins
January 12, 2009


Praise this world, Rilke says, the jerk.
We’d stay up all night. Every angel’s
berserk. Hell, if you slit monkeys
for a living, you’d pray to me, too.
I’m not so forgiving. I’m rubber, you’re glue.

That elk is such a dick. He’s a space tree
making a ski and a little foam chiropractor.
I set the controls, I pioneer
the seeding of the ionosphere.
I translate the Bible into velociraptor.

In front of Best Buy, the Tibetans are released,
but where’s the whale on stilts that we were promised?
I fight the comets, lick the moon,
pave its lonely streets.
The sandhill cranes make brains look easy.

I go by many names: Buju Banton,
Camel Light, the New York Times.
Point being, rickshaws in Scranton.
I have few legs. I sleep on meat.
I’d eat your bra—point being—in a heartbeat.

Originally appeared in the Jan. 12, 2009 New Yorker.
Subcribe here.

There's a potluck at the school tonight. Shit; I've got muffins to make.

DeLillo: "They Have to Walk Slowly to Accommodate Their Awe"

Strangely, it appears that Don DeLillo blogged from the Democratic and Republican conventions for The Onion. Some excerpts (posted 9/26/2008):

He speaks in your voice, American, and he's blogging right next to me, as I type my own blog, in this our blogging age. Our faces fixated with vigorous purpose on glowing rectangular screens, measured in centimeters. In the air, invisible information. Uploads, downloads. Waves and radiation. Surrounding us both, on every side of the lobby, dozens more do exactly the same, typing with their thumbs into tiny silver death machines.

From across America, they come to Minneapolis, to Denver, in herds, teaming hordes filled with sounds, smells. In great tidal flows of seething humanity they ease around the I-beam sculptures and move into the sports arenas. They are loaded down with noisemakers and paper and special hats.

The crowds are a slowly spreading ripple and moan. They heave and surge with some unexplainable animal intelligence. They have to walk slowly to accommodate their awe. Snatches of unattributed dialogue—absurdist, yet paradoxically naturalistic—come out of the mass of pressing bodies:

"You cannot state categorically?"

"Not at the present moment."

"So that's that?"

"As far as we are aware."

"So the general consensus seems to be that we don't know enough at this time to be sure of anything."

"Let me put it to you like this: if I were a rat, I wouldn't want to be within a 200 mile radius of Minneapolis right now."

"What if you were a human?"

[....]

We've witnessed these spectacles every fourth September, every four years. The volunteers stand handshake-dazed near their supervisors, seeing images of themselves in every direction. Staffers greet each other with comic cries and gestures of sodden collapse. In Denver there were vendors nearby when we ate breakfast. Stretch limos outfitted with powerful communications technology stalled in murderous crosstown traffic. Helicopters shine searchlights down at the buildings, the crowd. Chanted rhymes emerge like a collective tribal memory. Allegations are advanced concerning faked pregnancies. "This is one of those moments." There is a meet-and-greet with the guy from the Doobie Brothers.

A voice from the subconscious: Toyota Corola.

Here in Minneapolis, a woman with a clipboard, frazzled, efficient. She reads from a printout to a group of staffers a change in schedule from the coordinating committee: the station wagons arrive at noon. In the Free Speech Zone, a man dangles from a wire, the famous performance artist from New York. Everywhere, security: badges, metal detectors, small plastic cards with magnetic stripes. Police, silent in riot gear, truncheons like humming, efficient software. Someone says: "So she was technically never the actual Miss Alaska?"

They feel a sense of renewal, of communal recognition. The women, crisp and alert, knowing people's names. Their husbands in little hats shaped like elephant heads, something about them suggesting massive health insurance coverage.

Second Life and Polygamist Haikus

I often find poet and National Public Radio commentator Andre Codrescu to be insufferably cute, in a writerly/Latka Gravas kind of way. But today's commentary caught my ear, and held up to reading, and so here it is:

October 9, 2008.

I was sharpening my chain saw when they called me from Washington, D.C., to ask me how to fix the economy.

This request focused my thoughts, or the lack of 'em, to such a fine point, I gave my 14-inch Echo an edge it never had. Good enough for cutting half a cord at least, to keep the wood stove going through October. I love not paying the oil company a nickel. Except for the half-gallon of gas and the chain oil, but I'm fixin' to make the thing run on plum brandy. I've got a plum tree.

Ah, where were we? The economy, yes: $700 billion is more than enough money to buy every able-bodied American a chain saw, a solar-powered generator and a stake in a communal well and windmill. Also, red dirt and plum trees. That would probably only cost about $100 billion, and you can use the other $600 billion to buy everybody their house outright.

Now everybody can own their house and be green and self-sufficient, and can go back to whatever they were doing before the world ended: watching TV. Except for me. I was sharpening my chain saw.

So I go back to it, and I see a line of refugees coming up the road to move in with me. Oh my God, it's the '70s again. All my deadbeat friends — dead and alive — are being chased out of their homes and heaven for not owing any money. They are debt-free in a world that can't exist without interest rates. The dead are especially egregious in this regard; you can't squeeze even an extra penny out of them.

Oh, no, now that they are getting closer, I don't even think it's people from the '70s: It's people ... from the future!

It's worse than I thought: These are people independent from foreign oil, carrying solar-powered chain saws, full of American ingenuity. After the bailout, they owned their own homes, they didn't pay into a corporate energy grid, and they didn't worry about food because they grew it on the roof. They didn't drive, because they didn't have any jobs to drive to, and every garage in America was the site of an invention that was so darn beneficial nobody needed anything from the store.

Without worries about money, without a job, and with extra space in the garage to grow food and invent, these people forgot about the stock market, stopped borrowing money, even forgot how to shop — in short they stopped being American. These un-Americans got their exercise raking the compost instead of circling the mall; they home-schooled their children and were never again embarrassed that their kids knew more than they did. Heck, they were in heaven, the place where the pursuit of happiness leads to when you stop pursuing it.

Such self-sufficiency made the economy grind to a halt, so the government had to do something again: They called in the Army to chase everyone out of their self-contained greenhouses.

And now they are coming up the road to my place because I'm a poet, and I live in a compound defended by polygamist haikus.

"What did you do wrong?" I asked the first of the refugees to get over the palisades.

"Nothing," he said. "We just got out of debt and stopped watching TV! So the urge to buy things on credit disappeared. So they sent in the troops. First thing they did was to put a 40-inch plasma TV in every room and fixed it just so we couldn't turn it off. Just like in Orwell, only with much sharper images. They are calling this the Second Bailout, or the Bail Back In."

"At least the Second Amendment is safe," I said. "Nobody took away your guns, and the Founding Fathers didn't say anything about TV."

And with that, my chief haiku welcomed them thus:

make yourselves at home

you won't be bailed in or out again

you're safe in Second Life

Source


Second Life

Shipping Out

David Foster Wallace:
February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008

"My own terror of appearing sentimental is so strong that I've decided to fight against it, some; but the terror is still there....Do you identify with a distaste/fear about sentimentality? Do you agree that, past a certain line, such distaste can turn everything arch and sneering and too ironic? Or do you have your own set of abstract questions you drive yourself nuts with?"

....In an note to his editor at the New Yorker.

For those unfamiliar with Mr. Wallace and put off, say, by the sheer poundage of "Infinite Jest," please spend an hour or two with his charming and feverish essay about cruise ships. It's marvelous.