10 et Son

At MFA program and swamped--but had to share this. If Russell can go public, so can I.

MOJOMEME #1--FROM THE LIBRARY

BOOKS: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes.



That's all, folks.

Alphabetical Meme

accent: Sort of southern/Kentucky nasal variety

booze: Tequila, vodka, champagne (beer: Sam Adams)

chore I hate: Vacuuming

dogs/cats: 2 cats (Loco the Longhair, Shadow the Shorthair) and Frodo the dancing Papillon

essential electronics: Computers, bronze bedside lamp (Mouse reading a book)

Favorite perfume/cologne: Fleur d'Interdit, Chanel No. 5, Lavender Essential Oil, Fig Essential Oil. In an emergency, vanilla extract.

gold/silver: Yes, and also platinum.

hometown: Denver, Colorado

insomnia: Nope

job title: Medical Language Specialist

kids: Two (son, 22; daughter 8)

living arrangements: 1888 Queen Anne (our third and most expensive child) with my family, pets, and Harvey's cookie jar collection

most admired trait: Wicked sense of humor

number of sexual partners: It's a prime number.

overnight hospital stays: Childbirth, dehydration, hemorrhage

phobia: Riding lawnmowers

quote: Whut?

reading: Sugar Among the Freaks and am amazed!

siblings: I had one sister, who died last August.

time I usually wake up: 3:45 (if you need a wake up call, I'm available).

unusual talent: I am one heckuva poker player

vegetable I refuse to eat: Fried pickles--wrong on so many levels

worst habit: Perfectionist

x-rays: Bitewings are my weakness, although I'm partial to Panorex.

yummy foods I make: Milky Way cake is my newest confection. I'm not the best cook I know, but I am an excellent (and spontaneous) seasoner. You give me four ingredients and a spice rack--I can usually come up with something very edible.

zodiac sign: Cancer

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10: Summer hats that I own (plus a ballcap emblazoned with OUT FOR TROUT and an old straw fedora that's my secret weapon in bass fishing).

9: Pages of poetry in my summer workshop manuscript

8: Days till MFA

7: Books read for the reading list

6: New poetry drafts (4 are crap, 1 is puzzling, 1 is exciting)

5: Pairs of Nikes clotting my entry (this is amazing, because only 4 people live here and I wear Skechers)

4: Little Yodas sitting on my desk (although I loathe Star Wars, love Yoda I do)

3: Days till i'm 7 to the second power

2: Cups of coffee brought to me (one a.m. and one p.m.) every day. I am a spoiled girl who's slightly hyper.

1: Best husband and he lives here. I have a hosta garden now, where last week there was only mud and new steps where there was a rotten deck.

0: People with whom I'd change places

Dirt Under My Fingernails

Orange Prelude (solid fluorescent orange, early bloomer)
When I Dream (ruby outer petals with firefly-green throat--my favorite--reminds me of the old Crystal Gale song, too)
Siloam Star (yield-yellow, small front daylily)
Red Ribbons (tall spider lily, graceful as a Ghanan--this one is gorgeous and Harvey's favorite)
Strawberry Candy (pink and peachy-red with deeper red "lozenge" center--the "prettiest" but not the coolest--see above)

These are the 50 new daylilies we've planted in front of our house. When I Dream, Siloam Star, and Strawberry Candy are blooming. This gives us 9 daylily varieties total, which is enough. We have over 350 blooms right now--wish you could see it!

We (well, I) laid out, and then we (well, Harvey) planted the hosta garden (new side garden) and added ferns dug at Harvey's family farm. Caladiums are coming up "a treat," as my great-grandfather would say, but my bleeding hearts, well, didn't even break the soil, and our hydrangeas are sporting beautiful leaves but puny little mopheads.

We bought the new daylilies and hostas from a lily farm outside our town. There were HUNDREDS of blooms--not only daylilies, but cannas, callas, stargazers, Asiatics...doubles, triples, bicolors, tricolors, spots, streaks, spirals, variegated foliage (callas). I felt, well, plain in front of such a riot. We don't even have freckles, although Harvey has a very cute mole on his right cheek.

I wish the field above was ours--but we don't have that much sun for a full-on garden spot. (The photo's from a place where we've ordered bulbs before). Shade gardening is much harder to plan. Hopefully these hostas will be as beautiful in the ground as they are in the sketchbook.

I miss the barenakedladies/magic lilies at our other house. Maybe we can find some and transplant.

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG

This gives new meaning to "I'm just holding it for a friend."

Word of the Day (and "maggie and milly and molly and may")

I wish I were littoral, literally.

How It Was Once In Our Country--Eavan Boland

In those years I owned a blue plate,
blue from the very edges to the centre
ocean-blue, the sort of under-wave blue
a mermaid could easily dive down into and enter.

When I looked at the plate I saw the mouth
of a harbour, an afternoon without a breath
of air, the evening clear all the way to Howth
and back, the sky a paler blue further to the south.

Consider the kind of body that enters blueness,
made out of dead-end myth and mischievous
whispers of an old, borderless
existence where the body's meaning was both more
and less.

Sea-trawler, land-siren: succubus to all the dreams
land has of ocean, of its old home.
She must have witnessed deaths. Of course she did.
Some say she stayed down there to escape the screams.

_______

She is one of my favorites--who else would split the lines in stanza 3 the way she did? (This is a real question and not a rhetorical one! A QUIZ--I feel like a teacher).

"The Blues Don't Get No Bluer"

The Penalty for Bigamy Is Two Wives
I don't understand how Janis Joplin did it, how she made her voice break out like that in hives of feeling. I have a friend who writes poems who says he really wants to be a rock star- the high-heeled boots, the hand-held mike, the glare of underpants in the front row, the whole package. He says he likes the way music throws you back into your body,like organic food or heroin. But when he sings it is sleek and abstract except for the pain, like the silhouette of a dog baying at the moon, almost liver-shaped, a bell hung from a rope of its own pure yearning. Naturally his life is exciting, but I sometimes think he can't tell the difference between salvation and death. When I listen to my Janis Joplin records I think of him. Once I got drunk & sloppy and told him I feared artists always had more fun and more death, too, and how I had these strong feelings but nothing to do with them and he said Don't worry I'd trade my onion collection for a good cry, wouldn't you? I didn't really understand,but poetry is how you feel so I lie back and listen to Janis's dead voice run up and down my body like a fire that has learned to live on itself and I think Here it comes, Grief's beautiful blow job. I think about the painter who was said to paint with his penis and I imagine one of his portraits letting down a local rain of hair around his penis now too stiff to paint with, as if her diligent silence meant to say You loved me enough to make me, when will I see you next? Janis, I don't care what anybody thinks or writes, I don't care if my friend who writes poems is a beautiful fake, like a planetarium ceiling, I want to hold my life in my arms as easily as my body will hold forever the silence for which the mouth slowly opens.

William Matthews

Writer's Cramp--Deep Breath...and Start Again

I finished my manuscript for the second MFA session two days ago--typed and proofed and worried and read aloud and paced and paced and twirled my chair in tight little pirouettes of panic, fretted and fretted and counted on my fingers (oh, Joe, I miss you)...Finally, I found four I didn't want to shred and sent 'em off.

Remembering Lamaze breathing and trying to calm myself into timing, which is everything and so close to timid...

These poems aren't so accomplished as my first semester's packet--but they're more me. Does that make any sense--well, it does to me, because I can write a safe little brown-paper-packages-tied-up-in-string poem easily ...but that poem will have little to do with me, or my life, or my interests, or my sanity (lack thereof), and hopefully these newer poems do.

I have a rhyming couplet poem in there, though--just in case you think I don't write those anymore. It's about flowers, patio furniture, and a former neighbor.

(UPDATE TO KENTUCKY LIST BELOW: All houseplants, from mother-in-law's tongue to cacti, are "flowers." Blooming is not the point, or maybe it is).

Here in Kentucky...where "sucker" refers to tobacco, not to lollipops or the gullible, and "fickinto" is a state of mind...

Possums sleep in the middle of the road with their feet in the air. (They're not roadkill--yet).

Squirrels will eat anything (except possum).

Raccoons will test your watermelon crop and let you know when it's ripe.

If it grows, it sticks. If it crawls, it bites. If it's a snake, it's maybe pizenous.

A tractor is NOT an all-terrain vehicle. They do get stuck.

"Onced" and "twiced" are words.

It is not a shopping cart, it is a buggy. (If you gather them up at the grocery, you are "a-herding the silver buffalo").

"Upanunder" means underneath.

"Fixinto" is one word. (Variant spelling is fickinto).

There's no such thing as "lunch." There's "dinner" and then there's "supper." You don't cook any meal, not even breakfast. You fix it. You can be a good cook, but you fix all your meals.

Sweet tea is appropriate for all meals, and you start drinking it when you're two.

"Backards and forwards" means, "I know everything about you."

"Jeet?" is actually a phrase meaning "Did you eat?"

You don't have to wear a watch because it doesn't matter what time it is.

You work until you're done or it's too dark to see (known as dark-thirty).

You measure distance in minutes.

You have to switch from heat to air conditioning in the same day.

You see a car running in a store parking lot with no one in it, no matter what time of the year/time of the day.

Fix is verb that doesn't always mean "repair." Example: "I am fixing to go to the store." "I am fixing me a little snack."

All the festivals across the state are named after plants, insects, or animals. (I was the 5th Grade Possum Princess).

You install security lights on your house and garage and leave both unlocked.

You carry jumper cables in your car... for your OWN car. (Why is this weird???)

You know what "cow tipping" is.

You only own four spices: salt, pepper, hot sauce, and what's affectionately referred to as "Terbasker."

The local papers cover national and international news on one page and six pages for local gossip and sports.

The first day of deer season is a holiday. (And kids are released from school for Tater Day).

You find 90 degrees Fahrenheit "a little warm."

You know all four seasons: almost summer, summer, still summer, and Christmas.

Going to Wal-mart is a social activity known as "Goin' a-walmartin," or "Off to Wally World."

You describe the first cool snap (below 70 degrees) as good soup bean weather.

A carbonated soft drink isn't a soda, cola, or pop...it's a Coke, regardless of brand or flavor. Example: "What kinna coke you want?" "A small Coke--make it a R.C."

Fried catfish is the third white meat.

You know what lard is.

You know what a moon pie is, and why the Coke you drink with it has to be R.C.

_____________________
Every one of these is true for me--yet I have never tipped a cow. I'm fixing to when I turn 50.


PS "W-H-A-T" is pronounced "whut."


PSS The phrase "hooked up like a boy dog" is used in polite conversation.

PSSS Red-eye gravy is made from the grease of country ham to which cold coffee is added.

PSSSS You may say po-tay-to/to-may-to, he may say po-tah-to/to-mah-to--here we say taters and maters. And I am fixing to fix stuffed maters for for supper tonight.

Slow-Mo's of the Cosmos

You need to see these--they're fabulous. My favorite may be the clouds that puff out like Reddi-Whip. I also like the Colorado ones--since that's my birth state.

I think there are poems everywhere in these.

Emily and John--and maybe "Faith in a Tree"

"Faith" is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see -
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.

This by the divine Miss Em--and this by NYT on John Updike. (from "Gods and Monsters," by Gail Caldwell)

For all the hosannas or complaints aimed at John Updike, we tend to regard him as the author of a certain kind of novel: gorgeous prose, white-guy existential despair, sex in the suburbs. These are the cliches about Updike, of course, grounded in fact but limited and unfair. In his half-century as a grand master, he has written, sometimes beautifully and sometimes badly, about art, politics, witches, science, Shakespeare, and yes, lots and lots of brightly lit sex. But his greatest and most persistent eloquence as a subject has been faith -- faith in some semblance or possibility of God, faith in the crack of light that defines a day, faith in the presence, joyful or anguished, of the "inaudible tumult" of the soul.

I think this is a dead-on evaluation of John Updike's thematic concern--this same "vision quest" is evident in his books on art, too. I have Terrorist on my to-read-after-MFA list.

_____

The NYT also had a recent survey of the best book of American fiction published in the last 25 years: Beloved was the top vote-getter. Updike's Rabbit books were high in the ratings, too. Toni Morrison is a fabulous writer--so is Mr. Updike. She writes gorgeous, emotional "poetic" prose--he is master of the sentence, of characterization. I don't know for whom I'd vote--does it have to be either/or? I was surprised to see that some writers really slammed Morrison--Cynthia Ozick, for one. I think she's retreading the ground where Stanley Crouch (think that's his name) first trampled on Beloved. Morrison is a genius--I don't know whether I prefer Song of Solomon to Beloved, but I'm glad for me it doesn't have to be either. (And Song's outside the 25-year limit).

Where were the other women on the list? Marilynn Robinson's Housekeeping was there--but where was Gilead? Joyce Carol Oates? Anne Tyler? Shirley Hazzard? Jane Smiley--Horse Heaven and A Thousand Acres are fabulous, totally different reads.

And, if Raymond Carver's Where I'm Calling From qualified, where was Grace Paley's Enormous Changes at the Last Minute? Where's Andre Dubus?

Edwin P. Jones made the list--and should for some time to come...his writing's smart and heartbreaking. And so did Tim O'Brien..."The Things They Carried" is the sort of fiction to which I aspire. I cannot think of a better story.

Don Delillo's work I have trouble reading. Ditto for Cormac McCarthy--but the work there is worth it. I like big books, though, and I wonder about Richard Price--where's Clockers? No one else writes like he does...

Just curious...I guess I'd have to expand the list and add Nabokov, N. West, H. James, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor--on a list of best American fiction writers of the 20th century? Whom do you think deserves to be there?

Add John Cheever and serve immediately...

"Gacela of Unforeseen Love"

This is Lorca's birthday. Here's a poem that I've always loved.


Gacela of Unforeseen Love
(translation by W.S. Merwin )

No one understood the perfume
of the dark magnolia of your womb.
No one knew that you tormented
a hummingbird of love between your teeth.

A thousand Persian ponies fell asleep
in the moonlit plaza of your forehead,
while through four nights I embraced
your waist, enemy of the snow.

Between plaster and jasmines, your glance
was a pale branch of seeds.
I sought in my heart to give you
the ivory letters that say always,

always, always: garden of my agony,
your body elusive always,
the blood of your veins in my mouth,
your mouth already lightless for my death

BB, What's Behind Those Pearls?

This is just too weird!

Ladies' Home Companion--WARNING Gushing Follows

From the shelter/rescue website: The Papillon's original use was that of ladies' companion. It has never had any job other than to grace the home and heart.

We've been to the pound again and found a 2-year-old Papillon, already housebroken, able to heel, sit, and stay. His name is Frodo (I guess because of the ears and hairy feet). He's a great dog--his previous owners did not take care of him. He's been starved and never let outside--Despite this, the animal shelter said he had the worst case of fleas they'd ever seen--those must be some fleas if Animal Control was amazed. Despite the infestation, his fur is beautiful (tricolor), and he has the most alert, adorable face. I wish my eyebrows were as well groomed as his!

He's had his Frontline flea medicine, and after that he'll visit the vet, then come home with us Saturday morning (there's a 48-hour waiting period--24 for the shelter, and then the vet keeps him overnight after neutering). He loves us and Raleigh, and he has been kept in a room with cats, which he adores. We'll see what the cats--Loco the Grey and Shadow the Good--think about him when Frodo comes here on Saturday. I think he'll be intimidated since he only weighs 10 pounds and Loco is easily 13 pounds. Shadow and he will be buddies immediately--Loco will take some time. He's the alpha animal here.

When Raleigh, Harvey, and Daniel go back to school, I'll have a reason to break away from transcription and go for walks now.

I encourage everyone who wants a pet to check out shelters--there are animals who will respond to the slightest bit of caring with lifelong love. Also, please spay/neuter your pets.