West Egg

The Enduring Complexity of Exile & Identity

2012-01-09T19:54:00.000-05:00

Laleh Khadivi in
my favorite magazine WLT

The current issue of WLT features an interview with Iranian novelist and filmmaker Laleh Khadivi in which she touches upon a topic that I often return to in poetry (or perhaps it's the very topic that drew me into poetry to begin with): exile.

Khadivi discusses identity and exile, and how the publishing industry will respond when faced with "narratives that take on the unending complexity of exile and identity that offer no clean and comfortable endings." In this response, she's also underscoring a theme of her recent interests: post-national identities in the 21st century.

Khadivi says:

As a writer who belongs more to Edward Said’s exilic consciousness than to any one particular country, I would like to think that literature is appealing because it rises above nationality and nationalism and draws people to places where they can suspend judgment, assumption, and belief.

Khadivi online:

- Emory University Creative Writing Program website

- Documentary "900 Women" website (the film is about the women's prison St. Gabriel in Louisiana)

Painting Heron Bay

2011-12-21T22:13:00.000-05:00

Heron Bay, 12"x12", acrylic on canvass

In the past year, writing for Artsee magazine, I've passed through dozens upon dozens of art studios, and have become more intrigued by watching artwork unfold rather than seeing the finished pieces in their assembled and ordered manner at galleries and exhibitions. It has to do, I think, with interest in process, and having the opportunity to imagine what a painting is going to become. The more I watch the artists work, the more I wanted to give it a try too.

This piece, "Heron Bay," is my first real try, the first time I have picked up a paintbrush in almost a decade (other than to paint a bathroom or bedroom). I also admit that the few attempts I took in the past lacked any sense of focus or patience.

It looks like I also need a little work at photographing, because the color in the photo of the painting is not as precise as I would like it to be, plus I am missing a little slice of the painting at the bottom left. I think that what I liked most about working on this was sitting still for hours. Plus it is nice to focus on color and texture and the feeling of a place. Also, I admit that after seeing a fabulous exhibit of Gerhard Richter's work at the Tate Modern, I had some serious inspiration to try to peel back a few layers of paint to see what could happen.

Artsee Magazine, Sightseeing Column: Greenville, S.C.

2011-12-20T06:16:00.000-05:00

The Art Bomb Company,
photos by Donn Young.

In a recent "Sightseeing" column for Artsee magazine, Donn and I explored Greenville, South Carolina, a hip Southern town that has a growing arts scene. A few great finds:

Greenville County Museum of Art. The Southern Collection is comprised of "Southern" works of a broad definition (by those born in South, those who moved to the South, depictions of the South, and so on), with works ranging from the 1700s to today. The Andrew Wyeth Collection features 35 works from every major period of his career. And on exhibit now: Jasper Johns, through April 15, 2012.

Hampton 3 Gallery. (A fine art gallery that's actually about seven miles outside of Greenville ...)

Art Bomb. A nonprofit shared studio space for artists ranging from potters to sculptors to painters.

SLAM / Saturday Local Art Market. An open-air art market features arts and crafts (mentioned in an earlier post when I wrote about folk artist Marlon Hunt)

Read the full story.

On Klee's Birthday: The Blue Rider Movement

2011-12-18T17:35:00.000-05:00

Paul Klee was born in Switzerland today in 1879. I've long admired the infusion of poetry and dreams into his works of art. So, today, a little about Klee, who I was first introduced to in high school by an old friend who was far more sophisticated and worldly than I was by that age.

Klee studied at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, and later became associated with the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group, an Expressionist movement from 1911-1914, which was based on a connection between spiritual truth in art. Its leader: Wassily Kandinsky.

To celebrate the Blue Riders and Klee, a brief bio, selected works by Klee, and a bit on the Blue Rider movement:

Tale a la Hoffman, 1921.
Watercolor, pencil,
transferred printing ink
on paper, bordered with
metallic foil

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
California State University at East Bay
About the Blue Rider Almanac
A translation by Michael T. H. Sadler of Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art

The Invention of Hugo Cabret

2011-12-18T10:44:00.000-05:00

With only four copies of Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic, 2007) in the Orange County, N.C., library system, I had to wait a week to pick it up. No doubt, the book is enjoying another wave of success following the release of Martin Scorsese's new film, "Hugo," which has been adapted for the screen by John Logan.

The premise: an orphaned boy, in 1931, lives alone in a hidden apartment in the walls of a Paris train station. He continues to care for the 27 clocks throughout the station, each of them offering their own challenges and views: inside the station, the clocks allow Hugo to observe the lives and relationships of shopkeepers; outside the station, where expansive, sparkling views of Paris look like they are always inviting him to make a wish. Hugo has been caring for the clocks in the way his uncle taught him, and now that his uncle is missing, Hugo knows that the only way to avoid being found in the apartment where he lives alone is to keep the clocks ticking on time.

As in Cinema Paradiso, the dream-like magic of filmmaking rests in the heart of a young hero who is at once generous and brave, yet vulnerable.

In the walls and in his pockets there are gears and cogs and bits of metal: Hugo is also on a mission to collect more of these pieces so that he can fix an automaton that is one of the two last remaining vestiges of a physical connection to his late father, who had brought it home from the museum where he had worked. Hugo also has a notebook that belonged to his father, which contains drawings that will help Hugo fix the automaton. In his quest to fix it, Hugo occasionally steals toy parts from a toy shop in the station. The relationship between Hugo and the shopkeeper becomes an integral part of the story, and as Hugo learns more about the automaton, he learns more about the shopkeeper, uncovering mystery after mystery, and bringing him back to the early days of filmmaking.

The automaton will light up like a movie screen with the insertion of a heart-shaped skeleton key: a metaphor that underlies the film yet resists heavy-handedness. As in Cinema Paradiso, the dream-like magic of filmmaking rests in the heart of a young hero who is at once generous and brave, yet vulnerable.

The book's illustrations are often packed together, beginning with a one-page text introduction followed by a sequence of 21 images, creating a rhythm throughout the book in which a series of text pages are often followed by a sequence of graphite illustrations. The book's clever design (by David Saylor, Charles Kreloff, and Brian Selznick) works so well with the story: the sequences of illustrations feel like a black-and-white silent film, and the chapter openings and introduction feel like text panels of movies from the earliest eras of filmmaking.

Scorsese's film really is a must-see, Selznick's book a must-read. And I was also happy to see that the Orange County library has more copies on order.

Selznick and Scorsese on "All Things Considered," NPR, Nov. 18, 2011
"Reads Like a Book, Looks Like a Film" by Mokoto Rich, The New York Times, Jan. 26, 2008
Publishers Weekly Children's Bookshelf feature by Matia Burnett, Nov. 3, 2011

Poems as Discrete Worlds of Language

2011-12-01T16:32:00.001-05:00

Nikky Finney's acceptance speech for Head Off & Split at the National Book Awards, introduced by Elizabeth Alexander and John Lithgow. Finney rocks!

Lithgow closes with, "That was the best acceptance speech for anything that I ever heard in my life ... And it's also the loudest I've heard anyone cheer for an award for poetry. Isn't that wonderful?"

More online:

-- At 6 p.m. tonight, audio will be available from NPR's "Talk of the Nation"
-- Chicago Tribune story by Carolyn Kellogg

The Great Depression in Kodachrome

2011-10-11T07:15:00.000-04:00

Street scene in San Juan, PR, by Jack Delano
December 1941

In the "Art Talk" column of the October 2011 issue of ARTnews, Rebecca Robertson writes about "Full Color Depression -- First Kodachromes from America's Heartland," an exhibit at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. The exhibit revisits a number of color transparencies in the Library of Congress archives, generated through the Works Progress Administration (and Works Projects Administration) -- by photographers well-known for their black-and-white images of the Great Depression.

Robertson notes that the photographers -- who included Russell Lee, Louise Rosskam, and Marion Post Wolcott -- may not have ever seen the results of their work, since they had to send their film back to Kodak to be developed. This was common at the time; Dorothea Lange -- also included in the exhibit -- occasionally sent her black-and-white film to Ansel Adams to develop, since he had a lab on site with him, and so she could see what she had accomplished before submitting to the WPA.

Street in San Juan, PR, by Jack Delano
December 1941

Delano traveled to Puerto Rico in the early 1940s for his work with the Farm Security Administration, and subsequently moved there, making a living as a composer and photographer. He and his wife Irene often collaborated -- she as a filmmaker, he as a composer -- and they also collaborated on children's books, with Delano writing music in the margins.

Delano was born in the Ukraine and moved to the United States when he was about nine years old -- and my recent personal interest with traveling to Puerto Rico, where I've never been, has been further piqued by his work in Puerto Rico and the fact that his assignment turned into a new home.

The two street scene images I've included were taken by Delano in December 1941.

More resources:

-- "Full Color Depression," Albright-Knox Art Gallery Exhibit, Oct. 21, 2011-Jan. 22, 2012

-- A selection of Jack Delano's work in the Library of Congress image library

-- Puerto Rico Mio: Four Decades of Change by Jack Delano

-- Smithsonian Institute oral history interview with Marion Post Wolcott

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick Dewitt

2011-10-10T08:00:00.000-04:00

When I closed The Sisters Brothers: A Novel by Patrick Dewitt, the first question was, What's next from Dewitt? This is also the first book in a long time that, within hours of finishing, I had already ordered and had it delivered to someone else.

The novel is told from the point of view of Eli Sisters of the notorious Sisters brothers -- two brothers who have been recently dispatched by the Commodore to set off for California in search of Hermann Kermit Warm -- to kill him. It's set during the Gold Rush, and it's a Western that shifts from shoot-'em to sad to downright funny. Eli is the heavier and angrier of the two brothers, or at least the one who can be wound up and set on a scene of destruction. Their path crosses a number of unforgettable characters -- twice past the weeping man, an encounter with a witch, a boy on his own.

Eli's wakening interest in self-improvement -- dieting, discovering minty tooth powder -- keeps the reader close to him, a necessity given his unspeakable violence.

There's also an endearing slight of hand by the author, who gives himself a presence in a few clever and well-timed turns of phrases.

More on The Sisters Brothers: A Novel by Patrick Dewitt:

-- "A Picaresque of the Gold Rush" by Patrick Vernon in The New York Times

-- "The Sisters Brothers: A Review" by Carolyn Kellogg in The Los Angeles Times

-- The Rumpus interview with Patrick Dewitt by Joshua Mohr

Gore Vidal's "Visit to a Small Planet"

2011-10-08T19:56:00.000-04:00

I recently finished reading the Broadway version of Gore Vidal's "Visit to a Small Planet," which was originally produced as a 1950s television drama. I had forgotten how much I love reading plays and scripts! Plus, I love alien stories. It's great fun -- a bit slapstick, but certainly fun. Plus, the edition I read had a fabulous introduction by Vidal, who lamented the decline of a place in American literature for the novel and the need to earn his keep as a writer through television and theater. Not much has changed since the '50s and '60s.

In "Visit," Kreton arrives from a distant planet to learn more about humans and take over the world.

More Vidal:

-- "Gore Vidal: Literary Feuds, His 'Vicious' Mother and Rumours of a Secret Love Child," The Independent -- interview by Robert Chalmers

-- Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer feud on the Dick Cavett Show -- I came across this while looking for clips of Vidal and laughed out loud with Cavett giving it to Mailer for his atrocious behavior:

Folk Artist Marlon Hunt & Hushing Time

2011-09-19T21:00:00.000-04:00

Marlon Hunt / Photo by Donn Young

The September/October issue of Artsee features a story that Donn and I wrote and photographed on Greenville, South Carolina. There are a number of reasons to enjoy writing for Artsee, and for the "Sightseeing" column in particular, but one of the best reasons is how much more a part of the community I feel, the more I travel and meet more the nearby artists. In part, I think this makes the Carolinas feel more like home.

From "The Faces" series

On our trip to Greenville, we met folk painter Marlon Hunt at Slam!, the Saturday local art market. The story features more about him and others at the market, but I wanted to share a sneak peek of some of his work. Hunt primarily works in oils, but has recently branched into acrylics. When he talks about his work, you get the sense that he's often talking in metaphor (he likes working in oils, for example, because it takes longer to dry, to set in, and you can continue to revisit it to shape it into what you want it to become over time). He's also just a lot of fun, and his work felt like a Marvin Gaye song.

As a folk artist, his work often includes simple symbols and metaphors, but most of them leap beyond telling the viewer something into making the viewer pause for self-reflection (the closed-eyed self-portrait in which he in front of a clock, holding a finger over his lips, hushing -- or quieting -- time, for example).

He also painted "The Faces" series, a series of 150 oil-on-canvas 8"x10" paintings created to see the number of expressions he could create on the same face.

More Marlon Hunt online:

- Hunt's website

- Selected work at the Christopher Park Gallery

John Acorn

2011-09-14T22:11:00.000-04:00

John Acorn is among the most memorable individuals or artists I've interviewed, in part for his disarming nature, and also his ability to maintain cognitive, creative thought in a non-air-conditioned studio on a day among the hottest in South Carolina this year. There's inventiveness too, of course. And also, his stories: where he found ideas for his work, somewhere between the bumpers of the cars in front him in traffic and the last Vonnegut novel he'd read. My story on him is on the shelf in the most recent issue of Artsee.

And while I of course recommend getting Artsee delivered directly to your home, you can also find archived issues online and a great blog too.

Where you can find some more Acorn online:

-- Hampton III Gallery -- Greenville, SC

Among the Lessons I Learned from Chris Bowler

2011-09-12T22:07:00.000-04:00

The Facebook list of friends available to chat says ofChris’s status that he is "unavailable but you can still send him a message.”

So I decided, Okay, Chris, I’ll send you a message.

First, it’s been almost two months since you’re gone. In thepast year, we’ve had too few times of talking or writing. We’ve exchanged acouple of emails, and shared most of our communication by commenting or likingthe same posts. If this qualifies as keeping in touch, then we’ve kept intouch. As far as I’m concerned, it was too little. But that is hindsight: I amhere, you’re gone, and I am sending messages to someone no longer on this Earthof ours. So of course it was too little.

I have tried, with minimal success, to live with a bit moreof your spirit these days. I am rarely as laid back, rarely as funny. When I amfunny, nine times out of ten it’s been too inappropriate to print or repeat.Unlike your humor, of course, which was fit for all ears.

I think about you all the time. At dinner tonight, forexample, when my daughter A. laughed like you. She doesn’t do it all the time,just when she really gets going and is laughing so hard she can’t stop herself—thenshe starts this very fast chuckle that is all yours. Although I have toldeveryone in my family before that sometimes A. gives a Chris laugh, Ididn’t repeat it again tonight. I kept it to myself. Now I am writing it here.

Donn says this will happen for the rest of my life. Thatthere is no hope of going long stretches without a reminder of you. I wouldlike to say this brings peace, and a sense of knowing that you will always bewith us, but I am afraid it will also always mean that I will always rememberyou are not here, with us.

Which brings me back to the passage of time, and how toomuch passed with both of our lives going in different directions. This, too,seems inevitable. I don’t know how we could always stay in touch with everyoneand keep making room every day for all of the new people who show up, but sometimesyou have to step back and wonder. I am not sure what exactly I am wondering,but I spend a lot of time thinking about it anyway. Wondering.

Chris, Grandpa, Katie

This is a picture of me and you with Grandpa:

I asked Donnto scan the photo for me and he did. Then he put it in an envelope that Ipassed along to a colleague without realizing the photo was in it. She stoppedin my office to drop it off before I even realized it was missing. Well, of courseI ended up in tears. Now the photo sits beside me at work. I might even get ita frame. When T. dropped it off and I was suddenly, unexpectedly, in tears, shesaid, “I don’t know what you believe, but I like to believe that this is yourcousin, coming to tell you hello today.”

I could use your hellos every day (and I also wonder: what is that pink cape I am wearing?).

I used to look at this image and think it was the only photoI had of me and Grandpa. He died not too long after this photo was taken. Now Ilook at it and think I am the only one still living.

Ah, I see: this is also a photo of mortality!

I called my dad one night shortly after you died, frantically looking in my attic and in box upon boxof photographs for a photo taken of the two of us on my tenth birthday. Could he look at his house too? I asked. I had a1950s party. Most of the kids from our class were there. The girls wore poodle skirts. The boys slicked back their hair.Everybody danced. Do you remember how we got everybody to dance? We were theones who had to dance together first. I remember being very nervous: all those eyes on us, no one wanting to dance. Somehow, you made it easy, and before we knew it everybody was dance, dance, dancing. It is very likely that the firstboy I ever danced with was you, my cousin and pal, and both of us looked like veryhappy kids having great fun in that photo.

The photo isn’t here, in this message to you, because Ihaven’t found it yet. It is etched in my mind though. It’s there so deeply thatI know the strands of your hair and the smile in my cheeks and the lift of yourright foot as you step into rhythm.

Ground Zero

2011-09-02T17:46:00.000-04:00

Silver Poem Studio

2011-08-11T21:19:00.004-04:00

Lynn Stanley practices the craft of Asian brush painting in the River Arts District of Asheville, N.C. She appears in our recent story on the River Arts District in the most recent issue of Artsee -- too brief of a mention, though.

In front of her studio: a Zen garden made of bamboo from Black Mountain.

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Lynn learned her craft from a man who lives in Florida and whose history includes painting Mao on barns in rural China as part of his service while imprisoned for 30 years.

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"I realized how visually gorgeous the [Chinese] language is," said Stanley.

"If you don't have a poem with your painting, it's not quite finished."

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The name of Lynn's Silver Poem Studio is derived from a haiku by Kyoshi:

Deftly the new moon

brushes the silver poem
on the tips of waves.

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Asheville River Arts District

Live As Art

2011-08-10T18:37:00.005-04:00

Donn and I have covered a handful of "Sightseeing" columns for Artsee magazine this summer, and one of the earliest was an excursion to the EnergyXchange in Burnsville, North Carolina, where glassblower Aaron Baigelman hosted us for the day.

We arrived early on a Saturday morning, with the quonset huts high on a hill above the landfill from which methane is pumped to run the artists' studios, and stayed all day. By the time we left after sunset, we felt like we had made new friends.

Read the story.

Or, better yet, subscribe to Artsee.

Photo by Katie Bowler

Anil's Ghost

2011-07-07T21:29:00.011-04:00

Eleven years after Anil's Ghost was published, West Egg has finally read it.

Since putting it down a few days ago, I have struggled to start a new book. I've picked up a few others, but not gotten more than ten pages in without missing Anil and the characters encircling her.

Michael Ondaatje brings together characters, weaving together their histories with such grace. I don't know how his mind possibly threads all of this together and produces such a riveting, beautifully written story in the process.

Richard Eder, writing for The New York Times in 2000, noted that form of the book is "that of a river with tributaries feeding into it," an apt analogy for the converging stories of Anil and the two brothers caught in the horrors of the Sri Lankan civil war.

A Storm in Singapore

2011-07-05T15:18:00.001-04:00

While editing photos from my recent trip to Asia, I came across this one -- too out of focus for any of my online galleries, but one which I like for the memory -- just before a rain in Singapore, our view from a 17th floor.

Waiting by Ha Jin

2011-06-26T19:43:00.000-04:00

Last weekend I stopped into The Regulator Bookshop in Durham and picked up a short stack of books from the used fiction shelves downstairs. There's little order to the madness of these shelves, or no order I could intimate, given that alphabetical was certainly not among the organizational techniques. Among the finds, though, was Waiting by Ha Jin, which I spent this week reading, cover to cover.

Here is a tough love story set against the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, a story in which all of our main characters are all left in waiting -- Lin Kong waiting 18 years to divorce his wife, his wife always waiting for him to come home, his friend always waiting for him to divorce his wife, and all of them, somehow also waiting for other endings. And, also, reminders throughout the book about the passage of time, and how nothing ever really ends, just happens all over again, in memory, in conversation--old events taking new meanings and contexts.

The book is beautifully written: Ha Jin can certainly turn a phrase. And I am also taken with the animals and the plants and the blossoms, and how, in the midst of turmoil or great transitions in the book, an entire world is painted around the characters.

The scene in which the divorce finally comes to pass happens with so little effort it surprises Lin. But right before it happens, Ha Jin spends a very long paragraph describing the world outside the courthouse:

It was half past eight. The poplar-lined street was speckled with people bicycling to work or returning home from their midnight shifts. The concrete buildings, their red tiles covered with dew, were steaming and glistening in the sun. As the jeep was passing an elementary school, groups of boys were playing soccer on the sports ground, shouting ... At the corner of Peace Avenue and Glory Street a walking tractor was laying on its side, knocked over by an East Wind truck. Zucchini were strewn on the ground; a crowd gathered there watching and chatting; the truck was left on the sidewalk ... Several old women were pushing carts ... A siren was screaming a few blocks away, growing louder and louder. The jeep carrying Lin and Shuyu nosed through the crowd ...

I could spend a long time reading and re-reading this paragraph, trying to decide which of the images are there by voice of narrator only, and which are there as observations of Lin Kong. There are so many turns like this in the book: turns in which a moment of significant action is so compactly grounded in the space in which it is occurring, though one cannot help but notice that the enclosed world in which the action is happening is detached from that world around it, and yet there are so many more significant ways in which those backdrops are playing important roles in creating decades-long tension. There's the overall tension of Lin's struggle to live between two worlds: his wife in Goose Village, living in the ancient ways, and his girlfriend and colleagues at the hospital where he is posted, living modern and urban during the Cultural Revolution.

I am also taken with Shuyu, and how she is the character for whom I maintained the most empathy--and yet, she's the one we seem to know the least. We know few biographical details, and people who might be the clues to her history -- her brother, her daughter -- are instead merely well-drawn characters orbiting her. We know how she influences their lives more than we know what inspires her. It isn't until the final third of the book that her dialogue -- the words chosen for her -- begin revealing her heart.

And no sooner do I write that of Shuyu than I wonder how true that is. Is it possible that I, as reader, ignored the same things Lin did?

Maybe so.

Perhaps I need to start again at the beginning.

(The sign of a very good book.)

Photographer Bryce Lankard at Through The Lens

2011-06-21T20:23:00.003-04:00

Chicken Drop, Salt Bayou Lounge,
Slidell LA 1996© Bryce Lankard

The work of photographer Bryce Lankard is on exhibition at Through the Lens, a fine photography gallery in Durham (and my favorite photography gallery in the Durham/Chapel Hill area).

I first met Bryce through a couple of exhibitions at the Louisiana State Archives in the years following Katrina. He was living in New Orleans at the time, and was one of the co-founders of the New Orleans Photo Alliance, one of the greatest post-K developments -- an organization created to protect the art of photography in New Orleans and to help support artists through exhibitions, workshops, and educational programming.

Bryce's work on exhibition at Through This Lens explores the culture of Louisiana: rural and urban Mardi Gras, communities and neighborhoods, including Central City. The images themselves are captivating, and I'm equally impressed by the quality of the prints themselves.

Bryce grew up in North Carolina (and graduated from UNC) and is now based in Charlotte. He's also teaching at The Light Factory. His work will be on exhibition at Through the Lens through August 13.

Through the Lens, 303 East Chapel Hill Street, Durham, NC 27701.

Changes of Geography

2011-06-15T05:17:00.011-04:00

Returning home has its obvious advantages: my own bed, my own refrigerator, my swing overlooking trees. In the morning, if I am able to sleep late enough, the sun streams through those trees to create a tangle of silhouettes and shadows before falling into my bedroom. There is, of course, my family. And, perhaps an obvious point: for any trip to be a trip, it must involve a return, because, despite any previous experiments, one simply cannot be gone forever and get anywhere new. (Or, at least, where one is me.)

Still, I am always puzzled by returns and the emotions involved in changes of geography.

I was happy not to even have to mention it. D did. He said, Now it's over and you are back and you will never be able to fully explain where you were and there's something lonely in that. I nodded. He said, It's that way for me every time I go out on an assignment.

So I try anyway, or, at least, I have been culling through notes with the expectation that there's at least one poem ready to be made from fragments in my journal. And also a growing reading list, since writing and reading are the ways I hold onto distant places and times. My list includes titles suggested to me by my travel companions along the way, when something we saw or did or talked about reminded them of a book they'd once read; titles suggested by those living where we visited, if I wanted to better understand their communities; and, finally, titles by poets whose work I caught a glimpse of.

(List to come.)

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Returning still reminds me of Andy Rooney: Tidy, saccharine endings.

A Seven-Hour Walk in Singapore

2011-06-12T05:18:00.047-04:00

Almost evening now, I am in the windowsill of the AmaraHotel, overlooking a street ofshophouses and high-rise apartments with laundry lines protruding from many ofthe windows. It was a full day, my last of the trip, and I love nothing morewhen traveling than a day like today: it’s nine a.m. and I start walking …

I return more than seven hours later, having made two stopsin the same coffee house, one at the beginning of the day on my way out, andone on my way back.

The Day Starts with Coffee

Nanyang Old Coffee
Chinatown, Singapore

Nanyang Old Coffee offers a traditional Singaporean coffee,which came to Singapore through the early Hianese immigrants in the mid to late1800s. When they arrived, they discovered that most of the other lucrativetrading businesses had already been assumed by earlier Chinese immigrants,primarily from Fujian and Guangdong. So they began taking service jobs, such asworking as housekeepers or cooks for Western families, who, of course, wantedcoffee. This eventually turned into businesses for them – coffeeshops inChinatown, many of which, after World War II, were sold to later immigrantsfrom Fuzhou when the original immigrants began returning to China.

Coffee Pots at Nanyang

Their coffee is brewed manually, and watching them pour thecoffee from pot to pot is a treat: the stream of coffee pouring from one long,narrow neck into the other pot, through a strainer filled with grinds. I hadone (two, actually) of the best iced coffees of my existence at Nanyang. Andalso a cha siu bao, or pork bun, forbreakfast.

Singapore Buddhist Tooth Relic Temple

The first temple I visited today was the Buddhist Tooth Relic Temple, and I tread lightly and quietly with so many devoteesworshipping. I arrived in time for the chanting of the Great Perfection of WisdomSutra.

Being on tour in a house of worship is a little like beingon tour in a hospital: it feels rather intrusive. I did my best to be asunobtrusive as possible, and made a small offering and some sort of prayer forpeace.

On the first floor, I arrived in 100 Dragons Hall, where 100Buddhas adorn the wall. The place was too peaceful to consider taking photos.

Then I arrived in Avalokitesvara Hall, where a stunningBodhisattva Avoalokitesvara is surrounded by Zodiac Protectors. Before I evenknew what the Protectors were though, I found myself drawn to one inparticular: Akasagarbha Bodhisattva, which turned out to be my own guardiandeity -- for those born in the year of the ox and tiger (I am the latter).

From the Buddhist Temple to the Hindu Temple

I took off my sandals and crossed into the Sri Mariamman Temple, the oldest Hindu temple in Singapore, founded in 1827. I sat down for alittle while and watched all of the families, especially the little childrenrolling about on the ground while their mothers gathered together and ate andtalked.

At Sri Mariamman Temple
Chinatown, Singapore

Lunch in Little India

And then, onto Little India, where I wandered for hours andlunched with an old friend from Tulane and his wife – both of them living herenow for about six months. (It's worth noting that this is the second time I have caught up with a friend -- or relative -- by discovering through Facebook that we were both in the same city.)

I.'s wife has a background in maternal and child health, andhas been gleaning information where she can. Nearly everything she said, Iwanted to write down. She talked about the population growth incentives here(monetary), but a contradictory and unexpected unavailability of prenatal care -- which seemed further at odds with the infant mortality rates (which are the lowest in the world, according tothe U.S. CIA).

Tan Teng Niah Residence, one
of the last surviving
Chinese villas in Little India,
Serangoon Road, Singapore.
Converted into a health shop.

And so we talked a long time about health care services andclinics and dengue fever and the like, and I felt like I was seeing Singaporethrough a new lens. I am curious about this place and all of its controls: onthe one hand, working so functionally, and on the other, demonstrating suchpainful disparities.

If I wanted to better understand Singapore’s character andcontractions, A. suggested I read Neil Humphrey’s Complete Notes from Singapore:The Omnibus Edition, which appears to be quite a fun read.

Nanyang Old Coffee

2011-06-11T22:36:00.000-04:00

Where "a good chat come together with an good cup of old coffee."

And "rediscover the good taste of olden Singapore traditional coffee"

Last Days in Singapore

2011-06-11T05:06:00.027-04:00

So here I am, in my final hotel room of this trip, with twodays off to explore in Singapore. Music options are limited in this room, soI’m singing along with the Hollies on the radio, while outside the first rainof our trip threatens again – a good pour earlier this afternoon.

Dinner in Laguna, East Coast, Singapore

For the first time in two weeks, I have nothing to do fortwo hours and nobody to do that nothing with, which works out well for findinga little time to write although the lack of camaraderie is noticeable.

+ + + + +

It has been a while since I traveled alone, and truthfully Ihave been looking forward to being on my own tomorrow.

Still, good travel companions are not always easy to comeby, and any change in rhythm creates, well, change.

+ + + + +

Among my discoveries on this trip:

The Raintrees

One tree: the raintree

One flower: Flame of the forest

One fruit: The longan, or the eye the dragon

One poet: Leung Ping-kwan, a Hong Kong poet who writes thatthe “city is always the color of neon,” and becomes a poet whose work I need toread more when he writes:

So sing me a song then

On the winding midnight street

Yesterday and us, we’ve come face to face

But however we try we can never recall today –

+ + + + +

Also, I am so happy I wrote down a number of fleeting imagesthat otherwise would have been lost; I had already forgotten them until Ire-read them:

A child standing

On the guard rail

Of a winding road

Beneath the Great Wall

Waves to cars

To stop

For his father’s

Fruit stand.

Little girl wearing tiara

White sparkle gown

Rides on the front

Of her mother’s bicycle

Boyfriend and girlfriend

Riding together

On an electric bike

Eating popsicles

Apricot trees on the Great Wall

A grey gallipot from the Han Dynasty, 206 BC-220AD, isdescribed as “This is a kind of life’s tool for ancient people.”

A mall food court has books painted on the wall.

“Dust-free,” says R.

+ + + + +

S says I have been quiet all day on the final day that we are all traveling together. It is true, I was quiet all day long. There has been little time to sit and absorb. On our final evening together, we sat at a table on the coast of the Singapore Strait, which leads to the South China Sea. For most of the evening, my back was to the sea, and those trees were what I watched. My photo doesn't quite capture them or the quiet that comes in the day before going home.

+ + + + +

More photos from Singapore

Lisel Mueller in My Marginalia

2011-06-08T11:16:00.001-04:00

Today, in a meeting about a completely different topic, I heard someone use a phrase that reminded me of Lisel Mueller's poem "Alive Together" (which is also the title of her Pulitzer Prize-winning book of poetry published in 1996). I wish I could recall the context of the discussion that prompted me to scribble her name in the margin of my notebook.

Mmm: I love Lisel Mueller.

Salgado in Hong Kong

2011-06-04T20:14:00.002-04:00

Blinded by sandstorms and
chronic eye infections, this
woman is waiting for food.
© Sebastião Salgado
Amazonas images, 1985
Gelatin silver print, 24x20"

Yesterday in between appointments we hurried up Hollywood Road to the Sundaram Tagore Gallery to see an exhibit of Sebastiao Salgado's work. I don't know how he does what he does with light.

Salgado is, of course, one of the finest living photographers -- whose depth and difficulty of subject is matched only by the dignity with which he treats all of those subjects. I continue to be stunned by his place in time and geography, and also by the textures he sees and light he creates.

The prints themselves at the gallery are unbelievable. I admit that my favorite way to see any photography exhibit is with Donn, who sees details in the images that I myself cannot see until they are pointed out. Among the details I have come to look for, though, is the quality of the white in a black and white, and the tonal ranges therein. I think that spending time with these prints and a loupe would be a real treasure.

I was curious where these prints were made, and whether Salgado printed his own, a question I might not have considered if I had continued to only see his work on paper in a book or on the screen of a computer -- which reminds us that so much of the work of art in a photograph is not just in the seeing and capturing of it, but also in the printing of it. Why I can forget this periodically, until I am looking at the print or holding it in my hand again, I do not know (in fact, I think this is a topic I spend a lot of time thinking about, especially given my mild obsession with Larry Levis's poem "Sensationalism" about a photograph by Josef Koudelka).

Now where was I?

Ah, Salgado's prints and a little of what I have learned of his printer.

Notes from Beijing

2011-06-01T20:49:00.002-04:00

31 May 2011

Today we leave Beijing. It’s been quite some time since I left a city I had never been to before knowing that I would be here again. When, who knows, but some time, I am sure.

The trip has been so packed – gracefully whisked from one meeting or social engagement to another by the most generous host on Earth – and assisted by his staff, each of them dedicated and hospitable and also, after only a few days here, our friends.

There’s been very little down time, outside of the first night we arrived, tired, jet-lagged. We went for a walk, in part to see where we were and in part to keep ourselves awake. S, R, and I sat down in a square to people-watch: young girls on roller skates and neon lit skateboards, teenage boys on skateboards. Their parents and gradnparents dancing: Susin translating the lyrics for us – something about "my beautiful bride."

Even now, as I sit here in my hotel, reflecting for the first time since arriving about all that we have seen and done rather than seeing and doing what we’re seeing and doing, I have the sense that I shouldn't be writing, that I should get up, get dressed, and go for a quick walk before I need to come back to finish packing.

I like to see the shopkeepers outside sweeping their thresholds – and another with a van pulling up so a man can swing open the door and reveal a load of fresh meat – or the gardener on a rickshaw, riding through the square with a load of fresh flowers to plant and weeds he has picked, passing with a nod and a Ni hao.

More images

Roots Studio, River Arts District, Asheville

2011-05-21T12:45:00.001-04:00

Creating Websites for Writers

2011-05-06T21:14:00.001-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, I had a conversation with a colleague who is imminently publishing a new book with a new press. This led me down the road of looking for author websites that we, the authors, can reasonable build or maintain ourselves to help support the the small presses that support our work -- or, in the case of some, the marketing departments at publishing houses.

Building and maintaining websites is also a significant part of what I do for a living, at a larger scale, and with more support than most of us, as individual writers, ever have the luxury of having (short of having the commercial success and website staff of, say, Stephen King). And that goes for most of us who write because we love it, whether we're poets, fiction writers, or scholars whose interests launch us
into niche audiences or onto front lists with small or academic presses that have talented publicity offices but ones that need us, the writers, to take on marketing our work with pride and enthusiasm.

One blog post is certainly not going to provide all of the solutions, but as I began putting together some resources for my colleague, I realized I was doing something that might be of broader use.

First, I started looking for sites that shared common organization of information (similar navigational structure).

Below is an outline for possible navigations for a simple site of just a few pages -- which will of course need to be adapted for the individual author:

An "About" or bio page -- one paragraph, perhaps an artist or teacher statement, and a link to a C.V. if the author is also an academic
Publications page -- including books, articles, clips, links to online pubs, etc. (most book pages include blurbs too)
Media/News -- This can include interviews, reviews, and the like
Appearances/Events -- for readings, signings, presentations, and other appearances
Contact

Now, a few examples of sites I particularly love for the ease of use, visual aesthetics, and good representation of the voice and spirit of the writer's work:

Debra Spark -- quirky and creative

Dilruba Ahmed -- beautifully composed, just like her poetry

Stacey D'Erasmo -- elegant, thorough, and well-organized

There are a number of low-cost and free options to building out attractive, clean websites (consider WordPress and Yola).

Hope this is helpful.

P.S. I want to take this opportune moment to mention that the Associated Press formally accepted "website" over "Web site" last year. That was in 2010. Early 2010. Let's do everything we can to build traction. One word. It only needs to be one word. Thank you.

"Action" by Max Klinger

2011-05-04T10:35:00.000-04:00

In a Beautiful Country by Kevin Prufer

2011-03-25T21:54:00.003-04:00

I recently started reading Kevin Prufer's In a Beautiful Country -- and it is, without hesitation, the most beautiful book of poetry that I have picked up in months.

In one moment, we are moving through the landscape of war, a discarded body making its way from neighbor to neighbor until it is left in a less-traveled road and then finally fully lost when "bombers unzipped the sky." And then, from war, he moves to the hospital, where the speaker's love is dying:

God in the field over there
building trees from the dirt.
God in the woods pasting on flowers.
God crouched on those high branches
nudging black clouds
across the sky.

+ + + + +

I do not know how he moves from such sadness and horror to God and bees "ravishing" flowers, but he does, without hesitation. His rhythm, narrative, and leaps into lyricism -- they are heartfelt, genuine, and written with precision.

+ + + + +

More online at Poet's Choice: "In a Beautiful Country," The Washington Post, January 26, 2010

Li Ming's Global Market

2011-03-25T19:37:00.006-04:00

Here, in my wonderful new hometown 160 miles inland, I have learned to accept frozen and shipped sea-dwellers, and few options of those, at that. I have tried not to recall a time in which I picked up shrimp from a fisherman on the side of the road--or spent weekend afternoons at an outdoor seafood farmer's market. Instead of bemoaning the access to fish and crustaceans, I instead say, "It is so nice to have so many organic farms nearby." Milk and cheese, greens and veggies.

It is true that I am happy to have those farms nearby.

It is also true that, deep in my soul, I have missed those fish and crustaceans like all the home they are.

I have been to a number of seafood markets here, and left with a sack of fish in-hand, although have found nothing quite like home, at the quality, the price, character, or diversity in options ...

So when two of my new colleagues were talking a couple of weeks ago about a seafood market, my ears perk uped. Oh those magical words: seafood market.

In addition to "seafood market," they also said, "Circuit City," my only clue. And so I found the closed-out, left-behind Circuit City has been re-made into Li Ming's Global Market.

Every once in a while, I walk into in a store in which I end up so overstimulated with excitement about everything on the shelves that I do not know which direction to go next or how to concentrate. This is not to be mistaken for the overwhelmed reaction I am known to have in a fancy boutique, which is significantly closer to panic. Luckily, on my first trip to Li Ming's, I had my whole family in tow, and so we were able to share our squeals of delightment:

- Mom, come see the crabs!!

Live blue crabs, crawling about.

And flounder and catfish and salmon and tuna, heads intact, stacked on ice, waiting for my choices at a pound apiece.

Bok choy and roots, herbs and ginger, leafies and greens. Bean curds, stinky tofu, rice ovalettes, and soup bases and assorted frozen fish for hot pots.

Oh, yay for Li Ming's, in the ways that this new place continues to become home.

+ + + + +

It should also be noted that although the market is dominated by Asian food options, there's also a select offering of Latin foods. You'll also find fresh meat from a butcher. All of this at a very reasonable cost.

+ + + + +

Dear Li Ming,

You are my new favorite Durham destination.

@ Maple View for ice cream and a moon

2011-03-19T19:56:00.000-04:00

Humpty Dumpty at the EnergyXchange

2011-03-12T10:48:00.000-05:00

Window in the Garden, Burnsville, North Carolina

2011-03-11T20:19:00.001-05:00

Salsa, salsa

2011-03-07T20:25:00.002-05:00

So my mussel spinach lasagna didn't go over well with FB readers. O ye of little faith, I promise it is worth trying. However, I offer a new dish: broiled catfish over lemon, garlic pasta with a side of salsa salad. The salsa is what I offer tonight:

1 tomato, diced
1/3 medium yellow onion, diced
1 toe garlic, minced
1/2 avocado, diced
Cumin, salt, turmeric, chili powder to taste
Cilantro and oregano
1 to 2 tsp rice vinegar
2 cups shredded red leaf or green leaf lettuce

In a mixing bowl, combine onion, seasonings, herbs, and vinegar and let sit twenty minutes. Add remaining ingredients with exception of lettuce and avocado. Chill. Serve over bed of lettuce. Top with diced avocado.

The World with Paper and Glue

2011-03-06T08:48:00.000-05:00

JR's TED Prize wish -- to use art to turn the world inside-out

Fragments

2011-03-05T14:38:00.002-05:00

A long time ago,
or it was just a myth--

+ + + +

Only invisible people
see invisible
things

+ + + +

Shadows of clouds on clouds

+ + + +

I was in the U.K.
and I had no notion
of coming
to this continent.

+ + + +

On geography, to an expert on ancient maps:

KB: How often do you become personally obsessed with places that are gone?
RT: [Laughs] And what of the places that are no longer available? ... Be careful where you go in the Nile Delta!

+ + + +

Many a dissertation is waiting to be written
on the value
of the thumb.

+ + + +

This was a salon which I don't usually darken the doorway of.

+ + + +

This is our week in the sunlight.
And then we get archived.

+ + + +

Questions my daughter asks:

1. Is there an end of the world?
2. How does the earth spin on its axis?
3. How did gravity come to us but not other planets?

Mussel Spinach Lasagna

2011-03-03T19:55:00.000-05:00

Frozen mussels are a staple in my kitchen. Tonight, it was my night to cook and I thought that rather than a big soupy bowl of mussels, which is usually how I make them, I would do something different. I have never heard of mussel lasagna, but thought I'd give it a try. It turned out just fine. Here is a recipe for a serving for 2:

6 pieces of lasagna noodle
1/4 pound fresh spinach
1/4 pound sliced mushrooms (baby bellas tonight)
10-12 ounces of tomato sauce (home made, your favorite jar, a combination of sauce and fresh tomatoes, etc.)
Cheese (tonight I used what was on-hand -- freshly grated Parmesan, a little bit of goat cheese, and two slices of mozzarella)
1/4 onion, sliced thinly
1 lb. mussels

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a large saucepan, blanch the lasagna noodles and set aside. Steam or blanch the mussels for three to four minutes until they open. Separate the mussel meat.

Use a 9"x5" loaf pan. Place one layer of lasagna on the bottom, cover with 1/3 of the sauce, 1/2 the spinach, 1/2 the mushrooms, and all of the mussel meat and sliced onion. Sprinkle with cheese. Add 1/3 of the sauce.

Add a layer of lasagna and cover with remaining sauce and mushrooms. Cover with slices of mozzarella.

Bake at 350 for 30 minutes.

Serves 2. Costs less than $8.

Served tonight with a fresh salad of spinach, mixed greens, carrots, artichoke hearts, sliced celery, and sweet dried cranberries.

Yum yum.

A Little Bit of "Little Gidding"

2011-03-02T20:05:00.001-05:00

I do not usually mix work with blog, but I must let you know that I recently started the coolest job in the world. I am now the director of global relations for UNC Global.

+ + +

Also, I have become a bus rider. A friend who received an email from me about the conversations I am overhearing on the bus remarked that he suspects I am about to begin a series of bus poems. This is possible, and also, likely, wanted, needed.

Consider, also, that in graduate school I spent one semester and approximately 50 pages dissecting one poem, "The Moose" by Elizabeth Bishop, which took place on a BUS. So there is some part of me that expects, every time I get on the bus, to have a community-based, life-altering experience.

So far, all I've done is read 42 pages of The Coming Democracy by Ann Florini, plus a few articles in the most recent Sun magazine, while occasionally looking out the window as we rumble down Highway 86, which is sometimes named for Martin Luther King Jr., sometimes the historic airport, and sometimes is simply South Columbia Road.

My new work inspires me at nearly all levels: professional, creative, personal, etc.

For example:

1. I began a new poem today while walking down the stairs from one meeting to another.
2. It was not a completely new poem, but a new way to get inside a poem I have been working on for three, four, five, or six years.
3. My work has been shaken up: it is similar to what I have done for the past sixteen years, but different in so many ways that I am happy.
4. People sunbathe outside my window, which was unlikely when I overlooked a parking lot, and mostly impossible when my view was from the 24th floor, helicopter pilots excepted.
5. I am immeasurably impressed by so many people I am merely in near-proximity to. Rather, I am simply happy to be within inches, feet, floors of their presence.
6. I met a new colleague who is a current student in the MFA program at Warren Wilson!
7. When I walk past the classrooms in which people are learning, I have the desire to stop and read the words from the overhead projector and secretly wish the door was open so I could hear more.
8. Do you recall "Little Gidding," No. 4 of the "Four Quartets" by T. S. Eliot?

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Frankly, it is a returning I could not have expected, predicted, or even imagined, but know that I really, really wanted.

Carolina Theater, Durham, NC

2011-02-20T20:54:00.001-05:00

Audrey's owl

2011-02-20T20:51:00.001-05:00

John Ash, Eugene Smith, To the City, and the Jazz Loft Project

2011-02-13T12:28:00.002-05:00

JOHN ASH /
Carcanet Press

John Ash has been working his way into my short list of all-time favorite poets. Yesterday, I finished reading To the City, which I have owned for years but can't recall reading entirely, only in sections, which is unlike my regular reading habits for books of poetry. I am nearly certain, though, that a number of the poems were being read for the first time, since I'm sure they will sit with me always and would have already, had I ever read them before.

Much of Ash's work has been published by Carcanet Press, a British publisher based in Manchester and one of the finest publishers on earth. To the City is not one of their titles though, but they do have a short bio of Ash, as well as a bibliography of his published titles with a handful of excerpts. To the City was composed--composed, not "written"--from his experiences living in Istanbul, where he has lived since the mid 1990s. He writes deliberately of place, and also of a different kind of exile, even the exile of returning--

He is also very much a street poet, and by this I am not referring to the chaps on the corner who will write you a poem on the spot for a few bucks, though certainly those poets might be called street poets too. I am referring, instead, to a poet who works in the style of the great street photographers, such as Robert Doisneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson and Josef Koudelka. And, also, I think of street photography as being less of a style or school of photography and more of a way of moving through landscape, or a certain kind of seeing. In Magnum Landscape, Henri Peretz writes that landscape

"is an actual place that we may traverse or alter, as well as the personal viewpoint of an artist or artisan,"

and which is the theme I return to when I contemplate what a street photographer or street poet does, or translates for the reader/viewer.

So this is also what Ash does: he moves through landscape and carries you with him, so that everything around his speaker--who one might assume is him--as well as his speaker's perspective, is made clear. Also, like Paul Auster, John Ash creates fictitious names that I find myself researching to see if perhaps they are really real. I never find evidence of those real beings, although I continue believing they are. Also, his family and friends show up in his landscapes and environments, and thus, I find my own personal preferences as a poet inspired by reading his work. In short, I love John Ash, and hope you will read him if you haven't already.

+ + + +

Country Doctor, 1948,
by W. Eugene Smith

Today I will be seeing a photography exhibit that I have really been looking forward to since I heard a presentation by Sam Stephenson, author of the book based on the Jazz Loft Project, at Flyleaf Books a few months ago, perhaps almost a year ago. The project includes the photographs and audio recordings Eugene Smith made of notable jazz musicians who found their way to an apartment in New York City, often when they were living nearby or passing through on tour, and playing late into the night, or early into the morning, in pick-ups. A number of the photographs themselves appear carefully orchestrated with lighting techniques that don't (seem to) appear in the work of his that I most admire, such his country doctor essay for Life magazine or his images from the South Pacific during World War II.

After seeing the orchestration of some of the Jazz Loft photos, though, I am left with the need to revisit a lot of Smith's other work to see what sort of orchestration when into those images as well. And one can't help but feel some resistance to undertaking this process ... as I'd rather believe that the images that have stayed with me the longest are ones that weren't orchestrated. At any rate, today I will visit the Nasher Museum at Duke to see the Jazz Loft photos and, hopefully, hear some of the recordings as well. Perhaps more on that soon.

Finishing BLINDNESS

2011-01-26T07:07:00.003-05:00

Last night I fell asleep having just read another twenty or thirty pages in Blindness. The exceeding darkness of it influenced my sleep, and I realized when I woke how much this novel is getting under my skin. All of the blind were long ago gathered together in a former mental institution, quarantined and herded and left together like animals. They are unkempt, fed too little, and beginning to turn on one another.

Saramago's style of long dense paragraphs adds to the weight of the story. And the characters have no names, because in this environment names have no meaning. They are instead "the old man with the black patch" and the "girl with dark glasses" and "the doctor" or "the doctor's wife." That single features set them apart for the narrator rather than given names makes them somehow all the more familiar -- or real.

Blindness and The Moon Is Down

2011-01-19T19:50:00.001-05:00

I'm reading Jose Saramago's Blindness, which reminds me a bit of John Steinbeck's The Moon Is Down, which was written as propoganda in World War II, takes place in an unnamed territory we may imagine to be Switzerland or a country that expected to maintain neutrality. Instead, a village is occupied, and what follows is the story of human nature, and how some humans turn on one another, or how they feign friendship while devising their own way out. I haven't read Moon in more than a decade, but scenes of it, and the feeling of it, are as close as yesterday.

Saramago's novel comes from a similar place. Rather than war, though, we arrive at the onset of the outbreak of an epidemic of blindness. In the turn of a phrase, Saramago slices right intentions and subverted expectations and human planning. He sees through these characters and all of the obviousness of human nature. I picked up the book from the library after hearing Mylar Goldberg's piece on NPR, which will be enough of an introduction to inspire you too to read this novel if you haven't done so yet.

Reading a magazine on my iPad

2011-01-17T21:09:00.003-05:00

Tonight I am typing my first blog entry on my iPad, following a couple of days of reading my first iPad magazine subscription (World Literature Today). I previously subscribed to the print version, but hadn't renewed the subscription in a while.

A few thoughts on my ezine subscription.

First of all, I didn't want to like it. For all of my fascination with gadgets and technology and new forms of communication, I wanted to hold onto my love for paper magazines with all of their pass-it-on and dog-eared pleasure. I wanted to NOT like the ezine at all. And yet I kept finding myself drawn to articles in magazines such as Wired about the future of magazines and the business issues facing magazines that want to sell app subscriptions and so forth. And I wanted to find a system that was working, successfully.

Without losing my old print version.

So, I searched for a magazine to subscribe to that I wasn't already receiving via snail mail (although it turns out that a number of magazines that distribute online via Zinio will let you convert a print subscription to a Zinio subscription if you call and ask. Skimming Zinio's newsstand, I couldn't help but be wooed by WLT's cover story on contemporary poetry and literature in India.

A few observations after reading my first issue:

1. I wanted the magazine to be fully web-ready: I wanted text URLs to be links, for book titles to take me an online store where I could read additional reviews, and so forth.
2. The richness of color in good photography is unbelievably beautiful on an iPad, and is perhaps the best reason for an e-subscription.
3. I never figured out how to place a bookmark. I had to flip all of the pages to get back to the beginning or to a piece whose page number I had remembered. I am confident this is a user error and not a disfunction of the technology ... I will figure that out on the next read.

On "The Disastrous Rise of Misplaced Power"

2011-01-17T08:54:00.001-05:00

Today, on MLK Jr. Day, I am taking a moment to reflect on politics and government in America today, and particularly those in relation to the recent tragedy in Tucson, an horrific situation that has occupied the media and will occupy the media until the next story distracts, while remaining a hauntingly familiar story that we have seen too many times in our communities and headlines. And all of the reading of stories or obituaries or tributes does not seem to lend to any explanations beyond the instability and unpredictability of humans, particularly those with mental health crises, armed with weapons.

I read this morning “Isak’s” tribute to MLK Day, which focuses on the military industrial complex and “the disastrous rise of misplaced power” that Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of in his presidential farewell speech. Her analysis of misplaced power made me recall a few stories I've read on Jared Loughner and the Tucson rampage, those that have struck me as the most serious in their approach, well beyond the scope of news entertainment, and pieces that are at least looking for some explanation of how and why these awful situations occur.

Lee Siegel (in “American Nihilism” in The New York Observer) cuts through political rhetoric battles that began in the wake of Loughner's rampage. Both conservatives and liberals held the other side at least partially accountable for the “vitriolic” state of political affairs that led to the shooting, with a few very targeted accusations. Siegel assesses the situation with a candid observation that “we all dwell complacently among the same cultural assumptions.” I would prefer to be exempt from Siegel’s collective cultural assumptions, and yet cannot help but wonder why there are so few voices asking his questions.

Another piece that frames what Siegel notes – that “America has more mass murders, unrelated to politics or criminal business, than any other prosperous, peacetime, democratic country” is a piece in the Bloomsberg Business Week, “Glock: America’s Gun – How Austria's Glock became the weapon of choice for U.S. cops, Second Amendment enthusiasts, and mass killers like the alleged Tucson gunman Jared Loughner.” The piece chronicles the development of the weapon by former curtain-rod-making entrepreneur Gaston Glock in suburban Vienna -- and the weapon's arrival in the American drug crime scene by the mid-1980s. Somehow, seeing the weapon's history as a product helps explain how we have arrived at a time in which these situations are even possible.

Kenya through Anna Clark's Writing

2011-01-16T09:55:00.003-05:00

Bernard Ndichu Njuguna

My grad school friend Anna Clark's blog "Isak" has often been re-posted and shared here at "West Egg," and this morning I took some time to catch up on her writings from Kenya, where she's on a Fulbright Fellowship in creative writing this year. She's a wonderful writer, and there's so much more to the world to see when you see it through Anna's eyes and words. I just finished watching a video that she shared; it includes the work of Bernard Ndichu Njuguna, an artist who grew up in The Caine Prize for African Writing 2010: 11th Annual Collection, and then she posted it on her blog for all of us to share too. Her posts from Kenya are as dependable as all of her other writings: worldly, insightful, and inspiring.

Saturday Morning Banana Bread

2011-01-15T09:49:00.002-05:00

When I'm up early and the house is still quiet, I usually prefer to read or write. But today's schedule includes a stop at a friend's house and I have wanted to bake her a loaf of banana bread. So as I sit here typing in the kitchen, with the winter sun over my shoulder, making the screen somewhat difficult to see, the room is filling with the sweet smell of two loaves of banana bread baking.

The first baker of banana bread in my life was Georgiana Clements, the mother of my high school best friend. At first, a piece would arrive, perhaps on a plate on the counter at her house, and then an extra slice in my friend's backpack for me to have at lunch, and then, finally, on my birthday, a whole loaf unto myself. In short, I was hooked.

I began baking banana bread the first time I noticed a store selling pecks of ripening bananas. I asked myself, "What does anybody do with a whole peck of bananas?"

Which, of course, I immediately knew the answer to.

I have, at times, expected to move onto other breads. Real breads. The kind that one has in a meal rather than with coffee for dessert. I bought a book destined to inspire my bread-making, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking. It was recommended by a dear poet friend who has always loved to bake bread but who has begun suffering from arthritis, which has made kneading more difficult -- and so she turned to this book to, well, revolutionize her home baking. I was confident it worked; I ate the bread; it seemed revolutionary; I bought the book; and now it lives on the bookcase, watching me bake banana bread.

I start my bread by using a recipe found online, although any recipe will do. What makes the bread different each time is what you do to alter the recipe. A few of my suggestions:

1. It's best to use a combination of flours: whole wheat, oat, whatever you have on hand. I always have plain old white flour around as well, and I use it for at least a quarter of what the recipe calls for, but the rest comes from better, more flavorful (and healthier) flours.

2. I also substitute milled flax seed for a small amount of the flour that's called for -- usually as much as 1/4 to 1/3 of a cup. One time I substituted a lot more, but it was not the best loaf I ever baked, so I recommend not overdoing this substitution.

3. Sometimes I use honey or applesauce, depending on what's easily on hand, for some of the butter that's called for. Some recipes call for cooking oil, which I never use.

4. Vanilla. The recipes usually call for a small amount of vanilla. The better the vanilla, the better the bread. I am a recent convert to a New Orleans product made by Ronald Reginaldo -- Melipone Mexican Vanilla.

5. As for the bananas, my family goes through bunches and bunches each week. I purposefully let some of them over-ripen so I can freeze them. Ideally, I have at least 4 or 5 frozen bananas at a time, which I take from the freezer to thaw when I'm getting ready to bake the bread. I find that most recipes call for a little more banana than is actually necessary, and I say that even being a huge fan of bananas.

6. I never put nuts in my banana bread. I like nuts and usually have a nice variety of them in the pantry. Still, I don't use them.

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P.S. Another very short reason I love bananas.

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Benjamin Porter's Photo Journal from Indonesia, Saigon, Hong Kong

2011-01-14T20:08:00.003-05:00

The first time I came across Benjamin Porter's work a couple of years ago when I was at a conference in Asheville, North Carolina, where Benjamin lives and works. There was an exhibition of his work, and I wish I could share with you right now the images that I found most moving, those from Bolivia, in its shops and on its streets, in its crowds and single faces.

We struck up a conversation at the conference that led to an invitation for coffee on his front porch the next day, and since then we've stayed in touch periodically and have had the opportunity to work together once or twice. I am a huge fan of Benjamin's work, particularly the many years' worth of images he has made in his travels to Bolivia.

He recently shared photos from his trip to Indonesia, Saigon, and Hong Kong. There's a lot of great work in here, and it's also a lovely photo journal of his travels.

Jean-Christian Rostagni

2011-01-11T17:40:00.000-05:00

I've had a draft blog sitting here to address since the holidays, when I received a New Year's message from photographer Jean-Christian Rostagni, who is working on a series, "La Nature Humaine." There are a number of images in the series that I want you to see -- actually, see all of them, but I really wanted you to see the light in the woods, particularly in "Lifting." I met Jean-Christian at Through This Lens in Durham, N.C., a gallery that is within days of closing an exhibit of Wojtek Wojdynksi's, "Capturing the Artistic Muse."

Christine Poreba in "The Sun"

2010-12-07T06:43:00.000-05:00

Check out Christine Poreba's "Without Tending" in The Sun: "Just down the road a row of basil stands tight / in plastic bags, a line of buoys in a frigid sea ..."

-- and from that row of basil to a wider scope of the garden, and then a shift to her students "who speak an English / I don't always correct."

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

2010-11-30T07:21:00.007-05:00

Yesterday I started reading The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. I haven't been able to put the book down and expect that I will have finished it within a day or two -- it's a beautiful and heart-breaking book, one that demonstrates cultural miscommunications between an immigrant Hmong family -- following a daughter's illness -- and her American doctors.

Although Lia's parents make multiple trips to the emergency room with following her epileptic seizures, she's misdiagnosed twice. There's no one to translate, and that leaves them unable to explain what had happened. What follows is a continuous series of miscommunications and misunderstandings.

Fadiman is a fine writer, and I'm impressed with how she withholds information -- I've been curious, for example, throughout the first third of the book, to know how she came to know what she knows, given the repeated problems of language barriers. Her "cultural broker," not her "translator," arrives in the narrative at a time when she needed to back up and de-escalate the situation for the reader. She also shifts from the personal stories of this family to larger, sociological and historical perspectives of the Hmong of southern China and northern Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand.

She examines the Hmong traditions, as well, and uses their historical narrative to contextuale their decisions and values. Among her observations:

The Hmong never had any interest in ruling over the Chinese or anyone else; they wanted merely to be left alone, which as their later history was also to illustrate, may be the most difficult request any minority can make of a majority culture.

The book is incisive in its examination of cultural misunderstandings, and Fadiman really shines in her ability to reveal human nature, from culture to culture.

The Radical Transparency of Cablegate

2010-11-29T07:17:00.000-05:00

Among the many things I like about Facebook: a conversation begun yesterday is another reminder of how it can create dialogue that would have been impossible, or extremely unlikely, in any previous platform. Yesterday, on the heels of the WikiLeaks, I posted a link and comment, and within hours, had the thoughts of a number of folks in my life, from law professors to writers from here to Germany -- all with perspectives that are helping me to see the wide ranging dynamics of WikiLeaks' most recent dump.

I am inherently interested in the actual content of Cablegate -- I can't seem to help my instincts, as a communications professional and someone interested in the Foreign Service, to seize this opportunity to be a "global voyeur" (as the New York Times called it). I am interested in how the things that were said, were said, or written, rather, and am also interested in the moments in which individuals lost their self-censored filters that might have inspired them to say the same thing in a slightly better way. I am also, I admit, terribly interested in what global leaders, who are responsible for the lives of many, think about certain situations about which we could only surmise or infer before -- and now, what precise language we have.

I dreamt about the cables all night; I am, despite my voyeurism, deeply bothered by a number of aspects of this, most notably that the information was stolen. I question, for example, why some of the same individuals put on edge by the idea of China hacking into computers to obtain information about U.S. businesses can, on the other hand, find this act heroic. Is it possible to feel triumphant about the use of information as a weapon and as a tool to obtain power as long as we are not the individuals most at risk? I use "we" when, in fact, I do not see this dump as heroic action. I found myself contemplating these questions about who does what with stolen information, knee-deep in a game of hypothetical what-ifs.

When I woke this morning, another person had commented on my Facebook link. He responded, in part, to my questions about why this moment might be heroic for anyone when it also represents a radical faction that could be precedent-setting for other radicals to obtain information and use it as a weapon. Writer and friend Frederick Weihe called this "radical transparency," which seems to sum up my concerns much more succinctly.

My Black Friday Was Spent Reading

2010-11-26T17:44:00.002-05:00

I read and wrote today from around eight in the morning until five in the afternoon, with a brief break to contemplate taking a nap (which, ultimately, I didn't do). And just when I finished my book, the mail arrived, and in the mail, a package, and in the package, a book. My next read: Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.

Most of my reading and writing on Black Friday 2010 has been for my public health course (the process of which is revealed on my blog "A Voice for Public Health"). I suggest this as the best possible alternative to shopping.

How I Am Spending My Thanksgiving Holiday

2010-11-24T10:57:00.000-05:00

1. Reading for my Health Policy & Management course.
2. Writing!
3. Cooking.
4. Reading for my Health Policy & Management course.

A New Ending for My Magical Childhood Pet Rabbit "Spring"

2010-11-24T08:52:00.000-05:00

I dreamt last night about Spring, the only rabbit-pet I ever had. In the dream, I was back in the house in which Spring and I grew up, and we were in the backyard, and she was old and tired and sitting in a cage with almonds all around her. Apparently, in this strange world, rabbits make almonds. I asked my mother, who was standing right over there, if this was really true, and she said, Just wash them well.

There appeared to be too many almonds though for Spring to move around, so I scooped them and carried them bowl by bowl to the kitchen until all that was left was one of the two small bowls I had been using to scoop. When I grabbed the bowl, it held two mice -- so I dropped it, unsure where Spring was. Had these mice been in the cage all along, I wondered, or had they scampered in for some almond dust once Spring left?

Spring was hopping and running around the yard like old times,

so I chased her. And for a while, my body was small again, like a child's body, and my eyes were at the same height as the shrubs and my four o'clocks in the garden. I rushed through the garden looking for her, and lifted her, her body in my hands turning to leather, like a stuffed animal.

Spring was becoming unreal again, right there in my very hands!

But when I put her on the ground, she hopped around again, like a bunny.

I let her run around for a little while, watching her, and I stood on the back porch. Inside, inside the familiar glass door through which I have not looked in nearly twenty-five years but through which I looked through again last night while dreaming, I saw my daughters taking turns brushing hair. So I found Spring again to take her inside, her body becoming more and more leather, first on the belly, then on her back, and I sat beside my daughters to let them pet her while she was still a furry little bunny

but suddenly she began turning into girl

who was very confused by her surroundings.

She looked to be about four years old and, also, looked just like my daughters.

We all petted her hair, which was sort of what rabbit's fur feels like, although it was gradually becoming silkier and longer, like my daughters' hair, and I asked her, Would you like to take a bath? I said, I could wash your hair too.

And she shook her head no, unsure of language, unsure what a bath was.

I asked her if she wanted to smell A's hair, since I had washed it just a little while ago, and she would see that it smelled like strawberries and pomegranates, and perhaps she would like her hair to smell like that too [Hers probably smelled like almonds, although I didn't notice]. She now nodded yes, but instead of rushing off to give her a warm bath, I held her, wondering

if the forty years she had spent as a rabbit would be grandfathered into her life, or if her whole life was just starting over.

Smelling the Pigs & Seeing Color with Steve Orlen

2010-11-17T21:24:00.010-05:00

I first met Steve Orlen at Warren Wilson College, in a poetry workshop shortly after Hurricane Katrina. He workshopped a couple of my poems, including one that had a long way to go, and ultimately, went that long way. When the poem was in its earliest stages during that workshop, he dimissed 95% of it, but identified a few lines about which he hollered, "THIS is where the MUSIC is!" with a great punch into the air as he then recited the lines. I am grateful for how he helped me to find my music as a poet, but even more grateful for having the chance to know him as a person and friend. He was a wonderful human with a great laugh and a kind spirit.

Years after that workshop, as a winter residency at Warren Wilson was drawing to a close, I decided to take a final walk to the stables alone. Along the way, I ran into Steve, who was, in his own way, taking his own walk alone to the stables.

We decided to walk together. And when we reached the pigs, we took a look for a while. Then he said, “Let’s sit down where we can smell the sh*t.”

And so we did, and I spent the afternoon reading to him, talking with him, and occasionally taking deep breaths to smell the pigs. Mmm, he would say, take a deeper whiff now, then laugh about how good it all was: the day, the sky, the pigs, the stink.

The world lost a fine poet and good old soul today. Amy Grimm wrote:

Our Steve, who art in heaven, has been assigned to hang out with God, who also smokes, to help make the clouds. So if you look up into the sky and think you see outrageously funny things happening and more erotic formations than usual, it’s not you.

That afternoon when we sat on a rock smelling the pigs, Steve asked me to tell him my life story. I started the abbreviated version, and he said, No, no, start over, and tell me the real stories. And so I did, and now I have an afternoon in memory to always treasure.

There are many ways Steve Orlen influenced me as a poet – forever I will hear his voice reading Anthony Hecht’s “little click / Of ice as it broke in the mud under my feet,” and I will remember standing with him outside to look toward a scene of stark black branches heavy with snow, the ground covered, and then, Jen Grotz standing out there in a bright red jacket while the snowflakes fell on and all around her. He asked her if she would stand there longer, that we might all watch this Zhivago-white scene and its unforgettable bit of color—

Where I Want to Go

2010-11-16T21:03:00.002-05:00

For the past year or so, my interest in going to Puerto Rico has been at an all-time high, which is to say it is very high, given that I have wanted to go since I was about six and first heard the place existed, and tasted its food right there in my own kitchen, and then became interested in its history and struggle between statehood or independence.

Lately I spend so much time on websites related to Puerto Rico -- rain forests and villages and islands accessed by ferry -- that nearly every day I receive Travelocity emails advertising flights for this much or that much, only adding to my *need* to travel to Puerto Rico. Here are a few things I want to explore in Puerto Rico:

El Yunque National Forest
Vieques Island
Culebra
Bahia Mosquito
Puerto Rico Museum of Art
Jayuya

A Landing in Tampa & a Smithsonian Folkways Vodcast

2010-11-14T11:48:00.003-05:00

A sunny and blue-sky morning made for one of the most beautiful landings ever. The plane circled over Tampa Bay, a 360-degree turn to give us a tour of the bays -- and I had a window seat. Looking over the tip of the wing to the sandbars and seaweed and grass flats and palm trees. Then the plane tilted on its side to reveal a wall of water dotted with sailboats, and long streams of white-crested waves left in the wake of a passing boat, and long reaching lines of beaches upon which people were walking, all visible from the window of the plane. Those were waters that looked ultra-snorkel-able.

+ + +

And what's the chance that you'll depart from the same gate at which you arrived, just a different plane a couple of hours later?

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Here is what I'm going home to:

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While I wait for the plane to board, I am downloading new podcasts and syncing my iPod. I recently discovered a vodcast called the Smithsonian Folkways Videos, featuring the stories of musicians around the world -- sometimes exploring their traditions and lyrics and songs, and at other times exploring the making of their instruments. One of my favorites was about the making -- and carving -- of harps in Paraguay. You can view the videos on the above website or subscribe to a feed, although I have been downloading them through iTunes.

A Morning at Grandma's

2010-11-13T10:01:00.000-05:00

So, here I am sitting at the dining table with my grandmother, an aunt, a nephew, and my sister.

My grandmother is across the table reading the newspaper with her magnifying glass. She shares small bits of news: who isn't accepting Medicare any longer, the few number of names in the obituaries. Then she leans back, puts her magnifying glass down, and says, "Oh, I hate to see the word 'cholera.'"

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My sister is cooking breakfast. I already had a bagel at a coffee shop hours ago, where I read a little of the news on my computer and waited for my sister to wake up. Which turned out not to take as long as it used to.

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My grandmother tells stories: a walk along the beach for three miles when she was ten or twelve, a walk to the out-house in the dark, and a kerosene lamp in the window.

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Then she is back to The Times-Picayune with her magnifying glass.

What Happens While We Sleep

2010-11-13T08:51:00.001-05:00

Right there, in writing, in the New York Times, it says that Aung San Suu Kyi was freed.

One day you go to sleep, and the next day you wake up and Aung San Suu Kyi has been freed.

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I'm in Louisiana for a brief visit and a family wedding. I fly out again tomorrow morning, very early, and last night was the first night I've slept here, just a couple of blocks from the Mississippi River, in a very long time. In the middle of the night, a foghorn.

I woke to listen to it blast a few more times.

Whooomp, whooomp, whooomp.

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Southwest

2010-11-12T09:37:00.000-05:00

ARGH!! Why did I forget I was flying Southwest?!

B57!

I will do better on the return trip.

B57.

B57!

Revising My Way into a Ghazal

2010-11-10T07:09:00.001-05:00

I've been working on a poem that feels like a small rubber band changing shape. I keep fussing with the line and stanza breaks -- sometimes tercets, quatrains, and the other day it began moving toward a very informal ghazal, and I contemplated trying to revise it again into a (more) formal ghazal. And in a timely turn of events, Shadab Zeest Hashmi, with whom I overlapped at Warren Wilson for a semester or two, has just published "The Ghazal: Expressing the Inexpressible" on the Contemporary World Literature website. She writes:

Let me begin with a couple of generalizations:
1. Pattern and variation are part of what constitute all art.
2. In formal verse, pattern and variation are prescribed.

The essay comes at a perfect time for me, as I return to the poem I'm revising and have in hand Shadab's discussion of how a number of poetic traditions have prescribed their own versions of the ghazal.

A Challenge: Can you make a soup? he asks.

2010-11-09T18:33:00.002-05:00

Do I even know how to start a soup without a roux?

Probably not.

It's true that as much as I have always liked to cook, and as often as I spend weekend mornings or afternoons making breakfast or bread or an occasional Cajun or Creole dish, for the most part, I have happily given over the cooking task to D. But tonight, he says, Can you make a soup?

Let it be known that in all of the years I have known D., he has never requested that I make a soup (gumbo, perhaps, but no soup). So, can I make a soup that doesn't become gumbo?

Let's see. Working with ingredients already here, I find:

1. A pound of frozen mussels
2. Celery, 2 stalks, chopped
3. Onions, 1 medium, chopped
~~4. Cauliflower~~
5. Lobster stock (made and frozen about a month ago -- see old post on stocks), 16 ounces
6. Leftover sliced tomatoes from last night's salad, 1/2 tomato?
7. Fresh herbs, hanging in the window to dry, brought in from the garden last week -- use whatever you have

Also, I have put on John Prine. And when this song is over, we'll move onto to some other tunes. For now, we're all sitting on a rainbow and against all odds, we're the big door prize.

Step 1
Thaw stock and chop onions.

Step 2
Pull out crock pot to start stock with veggie parts.

Step 3
Recognize I don't know how to do this without a roux and find

8. Whole wheat flour, white flour, and milled flax seed

Step 4
Make a roux (instructions to come another time when I do not need both hands to stir and drop #8 into butter)

9. Butter

While the roux is cooking, I add a little salt, fresh herbs, and ground thyme. Also, this is the first time I've put milled flax seed in my roux, and it's a home run.

I usually add a couple of tablespoons of my stock to the roux around the same time as adding celery and onion -- celery always first for about five minutes prior to the onion.

By now, I realize I am cooking some version of a gumbo, so I search the freezer for the emergency bag of frozen okra (8 ounces, and fresh is much better, of course). Also, consider my instructions on the best way to prep okra for use in soups or gumbos, and this goes for fresh and frozen okra.

(Also, we have moved on from John Prine to Los Hombres Calientes, which is easier to dance to.)

10. Creole seasoning of choice

11. Chopped new potato

Everything is simmering: the roux with about half the stock, the onions and celery and tomato, plus potato and seasonings. In a few minutes, maybe six or eight, I'll put in the okra, and then two minutes later, the remaining stock. Then the mussels. And then, I'm done while it simmers and waits.

P.S. The cauliflower is back in the refrigerator.

P.P.S. Salt to taste.

Mark Doty Reads "The House of Beauty" @ 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival

2010-11-07T20:41:00.000-05:00

A great read from the YouTube/Dodge Poetry Festival files:

What I did today, by Katie Bowler, at 10 a.m.

2010-11-07T09:59:00.002-05:00

Katie likes a day in which, by 10 a.m., she has finished writing and revising an Op-Ed she started this morning, in response to an article on Obama's visit to India in The New York Times. Katie loves any excuse to pull a couple of trusty old-friend books off her bookcase to pound out a preaching-to-the-choir piece that gives her just enough spirit to bundle up, find a scarf and a hat and a thicker pair of socks so she can go to the shed, find a rake and a shovel, turn the compost, and plant some chrysanthemums.

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10:28 a.m. -- The chrysanthemums are in the ground, although I am somewhat regretting the location of one of them. Perhaps a photo soon.

In the meantime, you should check out photos from Holly's hike with Uncle Raja in Dharamsala. I first met Holly at a mutual friend's child's birthday party, and a mutual interest connected us, personally and professionally, and, next thing I knew, or perhaps almost a year later, we collaborated on a project that sent her to Peru to document a public health course.

(A personal favorite: her photos of FOOD!)

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And, as long as I am endorsing the online: consider joining the Kepler Mission group.

A Non-Recipe

2010-11-06T22:05:00.000-04:00

For dinner:

Cracked-wheat, barley, sliced almonds, and chopped crispy apples over romaine lettuce and sliced tomatoes with Annie's papaya poppy seed dressing.

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Sorry there are no measurements to help with this. Put it all together anyway.

Czeslaw Milosz Reads "Encounter" and "Bypassing Rue Descartes"

2010-10-31T09:48:00.002-04:00

A morning in front of the fireplace, goofing off on YouTube -- listening to clips from "War of the Worlds" and taking tours of Pompeii -- then decided to look for Czeslaw Milosz, and the first click brought me to him reading "Encounter." And then, from "Bypassing Rue Descartes":

There is no capital of the world, neither here nor anywhere else,
And the abolished customs are restored to their small fame
And now I know that the time of human generations is not like the time of the earth.

(Read "Bypassing Rue Descartes" in The Witness of Poetry in GoogleBooks -- better yet, read the poem while you listen to his voice.)

A Piece of the Berlin Wall on My Bedside Table & My O-Coats Box

2010-10-26T07:39:00.004-04:00

About eight months ago, I started a poem about a rock. It turns out that the rock is a piece of the Berlin Wall, a piece I dug from the ground with my own hands in the months after the wall began being dismantled. The poem is not only about the wall and the rock, but how the rock got here, to my house in my lifetime. Which means the poem has a few unruly tangents: there's my grandfather, who ran a dry cleaners, and who once saved the life of my father, and who spent the younger years of his own life in WWII in Europe. And there's the box, which was once his and which, after he died, became a secret box at the back of a closet in my house when I was a child. I used to sneak into the closet to open and close this box, which was empty at the time, and which I decided I needed, and thus I have spent the rest of my life collecting small treasures and trinkets -- letters, postcards, even a few unmatched socks over which I have somehow gotten sentimental. I've always called Louis's box my o-coats box.

My daughter found the box about eight months ago, which is what started this poem's little engine: we opened the box and there was a piece of the Berlin Wall.

The o-coats box is unadorned, a dark brown wood, stained, and with hinges black with age. In the face of it has been scratched O-COATS. I theorize that my grandfather kept the receipts in here, or tickets in here, from customers who had brought in their overcoats. So, their overcoats are also in the poem, along with some concern about why so many people have to put their arms through coats and set off ...

A friend who read the poem has suggested it is still an essay and that I haven't refined the language and lost the adornments. This is probably very true. I thought I would take some time to re-read some Larry Levis, though, because I feel like the poem is asking to run a thread the way he does. I will probably return to "Sensationalism," which was one of the poems I included in my graduating lecture at Warren Wilson. Levis always seems to get from a to b to c to d to z so effortlessly. So before returning, again, to trying to reign in my meandering poem, I will look for a few lessons from Mr. Levis.

Falling Back & Mary Oliver

2010-10-20T19:02:00.001-04:00

I understand the reasons people want their extra hour of sunlight in the evening, but I'm always happy to have this time of year coming upon us. I like a day in which the sky is dark before dinner, or at least by the end of dinner. Time doesn't pass this way in all parts of the world, of course, but I am happy to live at a latitude in which I can expect an early dusk and particularly at this time of year. This has been the case a long time, and it's also quite possibly why November has always been my favorite month, it being the first full month with time passing this way. Come on, November. I am ready.

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Recently, I finished reading Mary Oliver's Swan. One day, I would like to be as wise and smart as Mary Oliver. In the meantime, I will remain satisfied with treasuring her poems. Here's one of her prose poems:

How I Go to the Woods

Ordinarily I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable.

I don't really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of praying, as you no doubt have yours.

Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing.

*

If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.

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Mary Oliver is 75 years old. That this is the first biographical fact I provide must mean something, as it has meant something to me in the entire time that I have read her work, which is to say that Mary Oliver continues to teach me something about age and agelessness and time and its passing, which must also mean that Mary Oliver's work tells me something about the story of being a human, and being consciously aware of time passing, and honoring it as it goes. Here is another poem from Swan that I read half a dozen times before turning the page:

I Worried

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not, how shall
I correct it?

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.

Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.

Saturday Morning Reading

2010-10-09T09:23:00.000-04:00

By afternoon, we'll be in Duke Forest for a hike with L and her family. Right now, it's late: 9 a.m. and I am just getting to my computer. Usually by this time on a weekend, I have read something or written something, and today all I have read is one NY Times op-ed on my Blackberry, since Reggie Shuford posted it on Facebook. "The Seat Not Taken," he says, tells a story with which he's too familiar. I had reached over to check the time on my phone, and next thing I knew, was scrolling through the Facebook line-up.

Todd Drake asked the other day, Do you read Facebook more than you read anything else? I thought, Of course not.

And yet, by 9 a.m. on this Saturday morning in which I have read little and written only this, I discover that I know more about Facebook folks than anything else new this world: that S. has is in Gujurat looking beautiful with family; that K. is in a hospital, concerned about her child; that Christine Fadden is on a roll with journals accepting her fiction; and that, sad news, A.G. received a fortune cookie that was empty inside.

Another cup of coffee and I will be ready to return to The Social Transformation of American Medicine for my health policy and administration course, and then, later, that walk in Duke Forest.

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P.S. UNC Press featured a guest blog post by me recently. Check out "The Need to Respect Books That Other Cultures Value."

The Cost of Poetry in the Digial Age @ Zeitgeist NYC

2010-10-08T08:04:00.000-04:00

Read Jonathan Farmer's analysis of the cost of poetry in the digital age--he offers compelling arugments and reminds us why and how to support good presses and publications.

An Exhibit by Kendall Messick, the Clouds Right Along with Me, and "Shy"

2010-10-06T19:49:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago I heard about a film series at the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History and noted two short films I wanted to check out at a lunch-time double feature, both about issues affecting African Americans children or teenagers in difficult circumstances. So K and I took a walk across campus to the center -- something I wish I could make time for more often, because it was a really wonderful way to spend a lunch break -- and inspiring, personally and professionally.

We arrived two or three minutes early and noticed that there was a photography gallery next to the room where we'd see the short films. The work of Kendall Messick was immediately arresting: "Corapeake," an exhibition documenting the lives of those who live there, in the eastern North Carolina village on the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp. The village is predominantly African American, and the images evoke life-history. Though taken in the past decade, many of the images have hand-written captions, or stories, that read like lines of poetry, as memories that have traveled a great distance of experience to arrive here for the sharing.

Messick is a multimedia artist, so the experience of seeing his show extends beyond the usual visual stimulation of a photography exhibit. Though we don't, for example, seem encouraged to actually touch the artifacts, the well-worn clothes and fine Sunday church hats and the fabric of everyday life and patterned backgrounds upon which photographs float in their frames brings a texture into the room that evokes a visceral response, a sense of being amongst the people of this community, of getting to know them.

We only saw the exhibit for five or ten minutes at most--a few minutes before the films and a few minutes after, and then needed to head back to work. I intend, though, to return to the exhibit again, and possibly again after that, and especially at a time when an entire lunch break can be spent in front of Messick's work, and perhaps also finding the time to watch his documentary on the people of Corapeake.

Among the caption-stories was a memory from Bertha Harrell:

"When I was a child they always loved for me to go to the store for them because I'd go and come quick. I'd be running and the clouds right along with me."

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Then we saw "Shy," a 12-minute film written and directed by April Rouveyrol about an agoraphobic boy living with his grandmother in Crenshaw, Los Angeles. The film opens with him discovering that she has died, but he appears to have no one else to rely on--his father is not in the picture; eventually he reveals that no one knows where his mother is. He sets out to buy his grandmother some coffee, since certainly the coffee can wake her, and along the way makes an unlikely friend who follows him home. In only 12 minutes, we're given a glimpse into a complicated story and one that seems to be sticking with me.

Chicaloungin

2010-09-16T21:31:00.001-04:00

Chris Fadden is back.

And she's funny.

"1926" by Weldon Kees

2010-08-26T08:14:00.000-04:00

I have a short commute of ten to fifteen minutes, at the most, so the Essential American Poets series of podcasts tends to be a good one for me. The poets and works were selected by Donald Hall and Andrew Motion for the Poetry Foundation. Some of the podcasts are longer (George Oppen's is about 30 minutes), but most are about 9-11 minutes. This morning, Weldon Kees. I enjoyed hearing him read "1926" and thought you may too.

1926

The porchlight coming on again,

Early November, the dead leaves
Raked in piles, the wicker swing
Creaking. Across the lots
A phonograph is playing Ja-Da.

An orange moon. I see the lives
Of neighbors, mapped and marred
Like all the wars ahead, and R.
Insane, B. with his throat cut,
Fifteen years from now, in Omaha.

I did not know them then.
My airedale scratches at the door.
And I am back from seeing Milton Sills
And Doris Kenyon. Twelve years old.
The porchlight coming on again.

- Weldon Kees

Have You Read "Deliverance"?

2010-08-25T20:33:00.000-04:00

The lovely Ms. Chris Fadden has published her first short story. Kudos to Chris.

Check out "Deliverance."

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Also, did you know that Ross White is going to emcee a reading with three Bull City Press poets? If you're in Chapel Hill this weekend, check us out:

August-itis

2010-08-24T07:02:00.001-04:00

It's been a long time since I woke early to blog. It's not even that early, just a little before 6:30, and outside the birds are awake and the sky is the azure shade of blue that says the rooster will be calling any moment. There's a single porch lamp on down the road, and single glow in a swath of dark green between the trees. I didn't wake up to write about this though. I think I have missed having this blog as a place to share thoughts, observations, dreams, since trying to focus on what I've been reading.

And I have been reading -- the plays of Maria Irene Fornes, a handful of histories of the Outer Banks --

I think I woke up to write about home.

B.M. might say I am suffering some August-itis. Katrina in the news and on the mind. Mostly trying to ignore it although I myself having at least two K-related events/readings at which I'll be speaking. Having to reach into the dreaded handbag of memory to fetch something new to say. And what I find is that there are new things to say, less about Katrina than about home and the loss of it. It's been on my mind all of the time since I moved here, this an area with so many Latino immigrants, all carrying their own stories of migration. Todd Drake read me a story he painted in Give Me Eyes: Crossing Borders to the Heart, and afternoon that will stay with me a long time. So many ways to tell the story.

I recall Czeslaw Milosz's introduction from Koudelka's book Exiles, and his observations about the reasons people leave home -- political persecution, drought, war, all of which can be stacked by side by side as some of the most troubling issues -- and then he addresses our more self-imposed reasons for transience -- new jobs and so forth. One thing is certain, he notes, that people leave their homelands because life there has become too difficult to bear.

It's that too-difficult-to-bear part.

At night these past few days when I am falling asleep I imagine the rows of houses I have known my entire life and the order in which they come and who I have known to live there. I am not even surprised that I know what grows in the gardens, the color of the doors, the changing hues of their wood and bricks at different times of day. I recall the shape of shadows in the evening as I drive along a levee beside the river and the shadows of power lines cross the road before me in a rhythm through which I'm driving. These roads are so familiar I can be eight or nine or ten again and hopping off my bike to clang it against the rack at the library and hear the fans of the air-conditioner working hard at the donut shop next door. Then, the images go to a darker place and time and I am walking empty roads. Sometimes, J.K. says, the storm feels like so long ago, and then sometimes it's right there, like it's happening all over again.

That feeling doesn't last too long. A few minutes, a half hour, a night of dreams. Then, morning. And the rooster crows.

My own writing since I moved here though has taken a turn to immigration. Other than my fellow post-K transplants here, they are the ones I watch for lessons in moving on and starting over, and I realize how much easier it must be for me, with my common language and my skin. There is one rental home on this block and the families come and go. A Mexican family moved next door last summer, their son in my daughter's school. I worried about them sometimes, usually in the middle of the night when I heard the sound of a passing car. At least three generations and perhaps four lived together in the small house, and they worked hard to keep it looking the nicest anyone has treated it since we've been down the street. And they found their way into my poems, and then, just like I was concerned, one day they were gone, packing their truck at night and gone by morning.

And now I don't know where they are.

Which is a sadness from some of the deepest sorrows of August-itis.

A Poem by Urszula Koziol

2010-04-27T19:24:00.001-04:00

At lunch shortly after the AWP conference, M.O. asked which book I'd be reading on the plane ride home. It turned out that I had bought only one book at AWP (my previous trip, in which I had bought so many books that my luggage hurt, was fresh in memory -- so I had been determined to make only the most careful selections in newly acquired books). In the spirit of finding new gems, however, I also committed to subscribing to a few new journals -- and now have subscriptions to a few journals including Jelly Bucket, published at Eastern Kentucky University.

It's very easy, in a conference with so many books and publishers and presses and people, to gravitate to the tables and presses with which I've been familiar, but I had set out one afternoon to find works in translation, previously unknown to me. After spending ten or fifteen minutes browsing the rack at Host Publications Inc, I found a book they published in 1989 -- Urszula Koziol's Poems (translated from the Polish by Regina Grol-Prokopczyk). I thumbed through long enough to determine that I had come across a work I needed to know. And now, one short poem from the collection, which I hope you too will find worth searching for:

A White Butterfly

When a white butterfly appeared in the garden
carnations grew inflamed with passion
water lilies looked at their reflection
fearful that they aren't beautiful enough,
tulips kept bending their necks
(who can resist their exotic lips?)
but the butterfly chose a cabbage.
It has a family to support.

Measuring Distance by Obstacles

2010-04-20T19:33:00.000-04:00

So the other day I bought myself my first bike since 1992.

I have had other bikes, one of them for many miles all across the United States and Canada, lugging it along on the back of our car on a year-long road trip, and occasionally setting out on my own on two wheels in a state or national park, traveling amongst Indian mounds and cascading hills and beaches along the Pacific, sometimes in the very early morning, when the sky was barely awake. I have been without a bike since I moved to North Carolina, and effectively without a bike since my children were born. That's about eight years for anyone counting. Given the impracticalities of one child in a seat and the other on the handlebars, single motherhood did not provide many opportunities for bike riding and, frankly, I gave up.

I never took riding very seriously, other than as a mode of transportation that allowed me to find adventures:

On my bike, as a child, I had favorite alleys, one of which led to my dear friend B.L.'s home, another of which was only accessible by sneaking through a neighbor's back yard. There were also forbidden haunts, like the cardboard box I visited to inspect the skeleton of a dead cat. It was there for weeks and weeks, first with flies, then without, and then, suddenly gone, box and all. I am not sure if it's possible for a ten year old to miss a dead cat, but I think I did. Looking back on it, I am puzzled both by my own curiosity and also by the mystery of who thought it was okay to dispose of a cat that way. Also, I rode to school, to the library, to the bowling alley where, for a quarter, you could get a handful of hot cashews -- warmed, not spicy.

I have been saying for nearly a year that I would get a bike: I have played on websites and stopped in stores. I have thumbed the price tags and contemplated. I decided I would get a bike with my tax return. So I filed it in February and given my locale in the great state of North Carolina, finally received that refund in mid-April. And I set right out for the bike.

This is unlike any bike I have ever had. No banana seat. No bells. No lock tied around it. Here is a bike that sits beside my bookcases of poetry books. This bike has taken one ride thus far on the hills of Carolina where the road is close to silos and cows and fields that roll. My dear D.Y., hollering over my shoulder, trying to advise when to shift gears, coaxing me up the hill at the top of which I would quit for the day, said that on a bike you must measure distance by the obstacles ahead. The first obstacle, it turns out, your own front door, through which you must go if you want to get anywhere.

Dearest Creature & Amy, Tony, and Tom

2010-02-27T10:10:00.005-05:00

A reader recently noted that he missed my blog, which gives us at least one thing in common.

So why haven't I been writing here? The problem has been two- or three-fold.

First, it was as though I had pigeon-holed myself into writing about that which I was reading, which, apparently, I didn't want to do all the time, even though today I would like to take the time to tell you what I thought when I read Amy Gerstler's Dearest Creature a few weeks ago, and shortly before the book was nominated for an L.A. Times Book Prize -- that I would love the opportunity to see Gerstler and Tony Hoagland in a boxing match of sorts, where punches were taken with the turn of a phrase. I'm not sure if Gerstler is Hoagland in a woman's body, or if Hoagland is Gerstler in men's clothes, or vice versa or all of the above or what but let's do what we can to create the next generation of slam poetry with these two as matriarch and patriarch: poetry boxing! We could draw and animate them and give them funny hats and gloves and then put them in a ring on screen and put them to work hurling phrases that give you something to think about and laugh about for a very long time.

The next reason I haven't been blogging as much has been that my job now takes up a higher percentage of my writing and editing energy. What is left has been completely directed to poetry and (sometimes) fiction. A few years ago, I sat down with a literary journal editor over a cup of coffee, as we often did, and he suggested that his next career move could be to let go of the editorship so he could devote more of his effort to his own writing. Available time to get the writing done is not actually the issue at hand -- it often comes back to how much effort has already been spent taking care of words, as though they are little animals to be shepherded and there are only so many animals we can keep track of. And in my new job, which I've now had for nearly two years, I process a lot more text than I have in a long time, maybe ever, including the times I worked for magazines or newspapers.

The third reason, if this one is significant enough to add to the list, is the amount of time I spend online all day every day looking at words. Reading them, responding to emails, and so on. And somehow this translates to a lack of attention to my blog. It is nice to be back here though in this little text editor, talking to people out there. Hello, hello.

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I've read a couple of other books on the L.A. Times Book Prize list, and the one that I would really like to take a moment to give notice to is Tom Healy's What the Right Hand Knows. I recently wrote my first book review in a hundred years, and I went through a rigorous process trying to find the right book to review. Perhaps the editor gave me too much flexibility in choosing -- I literally started a couple dozen books before settling on Healy's. I take a lot of notes in my books -- marginalia, notes on inside front covers or title pages -- and when I sat down to write the review, Healy's book and all my notes with it were gone. I looked everywhere, but eventually had to move onto another book for review. When his book finally revealed itself at the bottom of a travel bag, the other review finished and submitted to the publication, I felt I had found lost treasure.

I contacted a handful of journals. Did they want a review of Healy's first book? Apparently, they did not.

Nobody wrote back.

I accepted this more as a dismissal of my inquiry than of the book and plodded along re-reading his work, hopeful that at some point someone would reply.

In Healy's book, there is a tight tension between the desire and want of body and the ephemeral nature of the body, or how it is a shell -- and then add to that tension the shared commonality of these experiences, or the familiarity of those moments at which we are suddenly aware of our lives as a body moving through the world, as though our body is an ornament to the soul and self. Consider an excerpt from "Mirror, Mirror":

What do we do when we hate our bodies?
A good coat helps.
Some know how to pull off a hat.

And there are paints, lighting, knives, needles,
various kinds of resignation,
the laugh in the mirror, the lie

of saying it doesn't matter.
There is also the company we keep:

....

What else am I reading? An anthology of Cuban poetry and Emmanuel Moses' Last News of Mr. Nobody. And soon, Gabrielle Calvocoressi's Apocalyptic Swing -- also an L.A. Times Book Prize nomineee -- will be in hand.

Dream Song & Berryman

2009-11-16T20:23:00.000-05:00

Twice I have accidentally bought the wrong book. The same wrong book. I was trying to buy a used copy of The Dream Songs online and instead ended up with Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman in my mailbox. The first time, I discarded the biography, passing it along to another reader. The second time, I decided its arrival must mean something, that there was too much determination in this book to let it go again. So I put it on my desk at the top of the pile of books to read ... eventually. It's been there two months, maybe three, and today I finally began reading it. It will be the first biography I read about Berryman. It should be no secret that I instinctively distrust all biographies, but read them nonetheless with a sense of awe and admiration, always wanting to know whether this is a version that ought to be trusted, and wanting it to be so. Thus far, just a few chapters into the book, I instinctively trust Paul Mariani, and am happy to be sitting in my comfy old poetry chair reading the life of Berryman.

Melanie Henderson and the Folks on Langston Way

2009-10-23T09:59:00.001-04:00

At the Poesis reading, I had the pleasure of following Melanie Henderson, a D.C.-based poet. Check out her blog -- and a wonderful shot on her site, "The Folks on Langston Way."

Sitting Next to Lord Byron

2009-10-22T19:22:00.001-04:00

A photo by Regan Armstrong at my reading at the Pentagon City Border's Books "Poesis" series, 10.21.2009. A really fun night -- a great audience, other wonderful readings, and a night with a few old friends. I admit to feeling very cozy next to Byron and wish I could stay longer. Alas, the book sold out after the reading!

"I Love You, But ..." -- From the Best Letter Ever

2009-10-14T20:57:00.001-04:00

From S, age 7:

October 14, 2009

Dear Mommy,

When are you going to get me a prize? I've been wondering for a long time. What time is swimming and soccer? When is A's soccer practice when we are at the park? May I please have your computer soon? I love you a lot but how did Martin Luther King Juner get the whites to free the blacks? If you don't know does Donn or people that work with him? When can I have a playdate with A, M and E? I know that I have a lot of stuff to ask. I bet you know that I have a lot of to ask you also. Can you help me with wrighting my books that I am making at our house?

Love,
S

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That just might be my favorite "I love you, but ..." ever.

A Weakness in the English Language

2009-09-14T17:40:00.000-04:00

Question: Why doesn't the English language have a word that means "and/or"?

It's such an unattractive phrase, although sometimes one that cannot be deleted nor changed.

Oh, future with "andor" as a word: hurry, hurry.

NYT Review of "The Anthologist"

2009-09-06T16:06:00.000-04:00

"Novels about poetry are a dodgy proposition. After all, novelists already have a near monopoly on narrative and discursive fiction — turf once claimed by poetry — and it seems almost impolite for our prose writers, havi ng triumphed so thoroughly over their sister art, to set themselves up as tour guides to poetry’s dwindling estate. And let’s face it, stories involving poets tend to be hokey or, worse, excruciatingly literary ..."

Check out the full review of Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist on NYT, by David Orr

State Street's Official Release

2009-08-27T19:53:00.001-04:00

Thanks to Bull City Press, State Street has been released. Woohoo! Listen to a recent interview on WUNC's "The State of Things" with Frank Stasio.

The Case for Science Writing

2009-08-22T07:04:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, I read "Unpopular Science" by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum in the Aug. 17 issue of The Nation. Mooney and Kirshenbaum analyze the space given to the beat of science writing, providing a history of the specialty: how it matured following World War II; became a mainstay in journalism by 1957, when the Soviet launched Sputnik; then reached a popular culture level in the '70s and '80s when Carl Sagan's Cosmos had an audience of more than 500 million. They question why specialty science sections in newspapers are a breed dying faster than the newspapers themselves, and why only 1 of every 300 cable news minutes is about science and technology. They pose important questions about the future of journalism. Among those questions, they ask, "How did the US media--serving a country that leads the world in virtually every aspect of science--reach this point?"

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

2009-08-13T20:28:00.008-04:00

A friend at work recently recommended David Eagleman's Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlife, a series of clever, independent vignettes about what happens in the afterlife. The vignettes are often contradictory and always witty or funny -- and often have a twist of sadness. The book starts with a bang: the afterlife in which all of your life is re-lived with moments that share a quality grouped together:

"You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without oepning your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet.

"You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it ... Once you make it through, it's agony-free for the rest of your afterlife. ... But that doesn't mean it's always pleasant. You spend six days clipping your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items ..."

The book is imaginative, and though presenting possibilities for the afterlife, brings us back to the possibilities that shape how we see our living lives -- and in that way, reminds me at times of Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book.

My favorite vignette is "Mary," which, in a book about the afterlife, is an endearing surprise: Mary is, unexpectedly, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. It turns out that when you arrive in the afterlife, Mary Shelley is seated on the throne. After a bit of questioning, the narrator discovers that God's favorite book is Frankenstein. He was irked with the book in the beginning, thinking that Mary had made creation look far too easy. By the end of it, he knew she really understood what it meant to be a creator.

Another standout is "Metamorphosis," in which we discover we don't have one death ahead, but three. "The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time. ...

"So you wait in this lobby until the third death. There are long tables with coffee, tea, and cookies: you can help yourself."

Eagleman notes that, "tragically, many people leave just as their loved ones arrive, since the loved ones were the only ones doing the remembering." And then ones who stick around the longest are the ones whose names are still spoken in tales on Earth, those whose fabricated stories are repeated for generation upon generation, told and re-told so many times that the life of the owner of the tale is long forgotten, and he remains stuck in the lobby forever, wanting to be forgotten since he is only remembered for something that has long been meaningless to him.

The tales are deeply imaginative, and the book is a very fast read. It's entertaining, thought-provoking, and sometimes unsettling. Eagleman is a neuroscientist by day and a fiction writer by night, and a lot of science works its way into the afterlife tales of God and god, and, well, Mary Shelley.

One Hundred Poems from the Chinese

2009-08-06T19:35:00.001-04:00

Tr. Kenneth Rexroth
ISBN 0-8112-0180-5

I often return to poetry translated from the Mandarin, and yesterday, at a used bookstore, I picked up a copy of Kenneth Rexroth’s translations One Hundred Poems from the Chinese. It includes the work eight poets, a number of whom were new to me, although more than a third of the poems are the work of Tu Fu, whose speaks to us from T’ang Dynasty as though he is alive today, his work a familiar place to which I enjoy returning.

(Overall, these are important translations to read, but this reader will admit to occasional annoyance with the ticks that are of the translator and not of the poets – phrases and words used too often from poet to poet, as though assigned to too many possibilities.)

Among Tu Fu’s to note:

VI
Moon Festival

The Autumn constellations
Begin to rise. The brilliant
Moonlight shines on the crowds.
The moon toad swims in the river
And does not drown. The moon rabbit
Pounds the bitter herbs of the
Elixir of eternal life.
His drug only makes my heart
More bitter. The silver brilliance
Only makes my hair more white.
I know that the country is
Overrun with war. The moonlight
Means nothing to the soldiers
Camped in the western deserts.

I read “Moon Festival” a few times last night, re-read it again this morning. On my second reading, I looked for the turns that began directing us toward that ending, seeing it first in “The moon toad swims in the river / and does not drown.” On another pass through it though, I saw it right there at the beginning: “The Autumn constellations / Begin to rise.” Said another way: the fall is beginning.

The book moves from Tu Fu to the Sung Dynasty (10th–12th centures), including the work of Mei Yao Ch’en; Su Tung P’o, who I have read before at length and yet found new and alive in these pages; Li Ching Chao, always one of my favorites and one whom Rexroth reminds us is a “poetess”; Lu Yu; Chu His; Hsu Chao, who has only one poem in this book, “The Locust Swarm,” which is the most haunting poem in the book; and Chu Shu Chen. The notes are also helpful, not to be overlooked for what they share about the biographies of these poets and brief explanations of objects in poems, how the poem will signal an introduction to a period of Japanese poetry, and histories of China that I always seem to need to re-learn when reading its poetry.

If you can find this small treasure of a book, welcome it.

"Break It Down: Stories" by Lydia Davis

2009-07-28T17:12:00.001-04:00

My introduction to Break It Down: Stories by Lydia Davis was through the story "Cockroaches in Autumn," which Karen Brennan used on a class in collage at Warren Wilson this summer. I've been reading the book for about a week now, am about three-quarters of the way through, and here is what I have decided: I have no idea where Davis gets these ideas, but I like that they've come to us in the form of this book.

Among the stories that stay with me:

"Mr. Burdoff's Visit to Germany," for the subtle twists

"The Letter," for observations of a mind we probably know or have known and are happy not to inhabit, except again in this story

"City Employment," for changing how we see the hat

"Two Sisters," for annoying me most of the way through in all of its wrong-headedness, until I realized my own wrong-headedness in its final sentence

Davis has a tight control of these stories, the language stripped-down -- and a narrative style that re-shapes what story is (consider that when I read one of her stories, "City Employment," aloud to a friend, the response was, "That's great. But was that a story?"). I have to admit though that I have fatigued with the book at this point though because, as consistent as the style is, and as intriguing as it is at times, I feel like I'm always inside the same world, whether we're in language class in Germany or in a cottage in the woods or analyzing relationships between people like an algebra problem. I recommend reading this book while you're also reading something else, so you can return to it for exercises in storytelling.

Marjane Satrapi's "Embroideries"

2009-07-25T09:20:00.002-04:00

For the past few years, I've been taking a trip to the Ozarks in the spring. My friend S.C. joins from Colorado, a sort of meet-meet halfway. S.C. had recently finised reading Marjane Satrapi's Embroideries -- someone else had given it to her, and I have since passed it on to someone else.

A raucous and wicked graphic novel about the life and love and gossip of Satrapi's Iranian family -- all told in the course of their conversations, which range from sex to secrets to gossip. I read the book in the car on my way back from the Ozarks, finished it before we crossed the Arkansas state line, and laughed my whole way through. Sophie would say, "What's so funny, Mom? What's so funny?"

It's funny, occasionally sad, and a brief glimpse into a world whose familiarity is surprising. An entertaining and quick read, good for pool-side, vacations, and times when you just want to laugh.

Kudos for "Big Machine" by Victor LaValle

2009-07-25T08:36:00.003-04:00

Victor LaValle's Big Machine, his third book, has received kudos from the Wall Street Journal to Publishers Weekly. LaValle has been compared to Ralph Ellison and Thomas Pynchon. Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg offers a glimpse of LaValle's life as a writer and introduces us to the novel in a recent column at the Wall Street Journal.

In the novel, recovering heroin addict Ricky Rice receives a letter summoning him to the woods of Vermont, where he meets a group of paranormal investigators who, at some point in their lives as criminals and addicts, have heard "The Voice." Publishers Weekly have called Big Machine “a high-stakes mashup of thrilling paranormal and Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man.’"

It's on pre-order, out Aug. 11, and will be on its way to me very soon.

A High Wind in Jamaica, Finished

2009-07-21T18:58:00.008-04:00

I finally finished reading A High Wind in Jamaica. It has rocketed into my shortlist of favorite books of all time. I am in love with how it was written, by its adept psychology and sense of awareness.

Consider:

1. We never know who the narrator is. The story is told in the third person omniscient, and our godlike narrator, who mentions God just enough that we can be certain he is *not* God, has too much personality, too many personal observations and so many comments that we come to know him too as a character, even if he is only a vague and all-knowing character who lives in the minds of humans and animals alike from time to time, and remains a mystery.

2. You want to see clever syntax that is not clever for the sake of being clever: read this book.

3. There are metaphors and similes you have never heard, read, or thought before.

4. The book reminds us how differently we each process the same events.

5. You like to question reality. You aren't sure what reality is. You are of a generation that thinks 42 is the meaning of life. You don't know if the meaning of life has anything to do with morals. Or ethics. Or perspective. You aren't sure if we are born amoral beings. Or how we get our own perspective. You recall, once, as a child, discovering you were your own person. If you fit into any of these categories, you need this book in your life.

Hundreds of Drafts Letters

2009-07-18T09:57:00.003-04:00

Today I saved a draft email and realized that I hit the century mark of draft emails in an account I've had only a year or two. Compare that to the hundreds, or at least dozens upon dozens, of draft letters I have, as hard copy in my own handwriting or in Word files, that have never been sent to the intended recipients. Sometimes, I come back to them a year or two later, add a section, edit the previous, and wonder if I'll ever send the letter.

Are you in there? Maybe so. All the letters you haven't received. And whether anything would change if you did.

Or, maybe that is why they go unsent.

Or, perhaps they are waiting for a final revision, and I'll put them in an envelope in a decade or two

when I am ready for any changes a letter could bring

or at least ready to say that, in that way.

From A High Wind in Jamaica

2009-07-13T22:07:00.002-04:00

Gifts come in all forms. One of the best is an unfamiliar book from the nearby used book shop, sitting there in an empty room, waiting for me. It was A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA by Richard Hughes, and though I am less than a quarter of the way through it, and not yet prepared to divulge plot or synopsis or review, what I can say is that I am fully and totally taken by the language, by the syntax. I re-read paragraphs multiple times.

The book, first published in 1929, is about the Bas-Thorntons, an English family living in barely post-Colonial Jamaica. The book jacket calls it "a classic adventure novel and one of the most startling stories in all of English literature." What I'm moved by is how the narrator tells the story, how the writer paces the story, and how we are inside the heads of multiple characters who often aren't talking to one another, and who are moving through the same landscape seeing and feeling and experiencing it so differently. Then there are lizards and the crabs and rest of life going on around them.

A few passages for your consideration:

"The people who lived there at the time I have in mind were called Bas-Thornton--not natives of the Island, Creoles, but a family from England. Mr. Bas-Thornton had a business of some kind in St. Anne's, and used to ride there every day on a mule. He had such long legs that his stunted mount made him look rather ridiculous: and being quite as temperamental as a mule himself, a quarrel between the two was generally worth watching."

"The stream which fed the bathing-hole ran into it down a gully through the bush. It offered an enticing vista for exploring: but somehow the children did not often go up it very far. Every stone on the way had to be overturned in the hope of finding cray-fish: or if not, John had to take a sporting gun, which he bulleted with spoonfuls of water to shoot hummingbirds on the wing--too tiny, frail quarry for any soldier projectile. For, only a few yards up, there was a Frangipani tree: a mass of brilliant blossom and no leaves, which was almost hidden in a cloud of hummingbirds so vivid as to outshine the flowers. Writers have often lost their way trying to explain how brilliant a jewel the hummingbird is: it cannot be done."

Now I am off to read more of the book. Perhaps a little more to come.

A Reading List from Warren Wilson

2009-07-12T18:53:00.003-04:00

A list drafted after conversations, lectures, classes, and afternoons lingering in used bookstores during my alumni residency fellowship at Warren Wilson College. Some re-reads, some first-reads -- or, the list ahead:

Break It Down: Stories, Lydia Davis
The Roots of Romanticism, Isaiah Berlin
Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, Pound
The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song, Ellen Bryant Voigt
Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling
The Art of the Poetic Line, James Longenbach
How to Hold a Woman, Billy Lombardo
That Summertime Sound, Matthew Specktor
The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz
The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance, Richard A. Lanham
The Complete Stories, Flannery O'Conner
Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris
In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965-1990, Frank Bidart
Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey, Hayden Carruth
In the Dreaming, William Dickey
A High Wind in Jamaica, Richard Hughes
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison

She Who Loves the Dripolator Loves Black Mountain, Alone

2009-07-07T16:23:00.003-04:00

Wandered around Black Mountain the first half of the day, which began only about four hours ago due to the unforeseen consequences of my first late-night dance at Warren Wilson in years, still suffering some sleep-deprived zombie-like existence until I realized I had, hark!, not yet had any coffee. The best solution remains the Dripolator. Did I mention I am back at Warren Wilson as the alumni residency fellow? Being here in this role is -- don't let it out -- the best gig in the program. I get all the enjoyment and satisfaction, can soak up hours of lectures and readings and classes, and never epxerience the anxiety of what will be due when and how I will do if, and so on. I did, however, also have the slightly disappointing realization while walking across the cold dorm room floor that I am very unlikely to ever stay in Baulfield B again.

Me & my earPods are are back in Black Mountain, listening to the Traveling Wilburys, which puts me in a much happier mood after too many hours with Tracy Chapman, who makes me want to sob, even on a good day.

I find myself oddly happy, all the time, to sit in this coffee house and know no one. What would I do if I lived here and had to look up to say hello every fifteen or twenty minutes? Yes, that must be one more good reason I do not live in Black Mountain.

Although, secretly, I keep searching for the right shop window for my future imaginary art gallery here.

Would I have to give up the anonymity that makes my love for Black Mountain so successful?

The last time I was in the Dripolator must have been a weekend. The chatter and commotion was too much. Today I am here long enough that soon I may approach the counter for yet another drink. It would be unreasonable to ingest any more caffeine, but I do love the talents of these barristas.

And, since it *is* true that this seat is more comfortable than my dorm room bed, I am also considering moving in.

I wish the Dripolator's website had photos on it so you could see where I am sitting. We could have coffee together, sit across from one another reading or writing, each with our own seat of earPods so we can also ignore one another until some slight thought pops and makes one of us take off our pods to inspire the other to do the same. Listen, listen.

If I were to offer you a wideshot of this place, I would have to get up and go over there to take a picture. That would require putting the computer to the side and abandoning the Traveling Wilburys. I am sorry to tell you I am unwilling to do this, even for a minute. Instead, I offer you one small photo taken from this happy seat (I uploaded to Flickr, right column). It's just a small section of two of the three pieces of a painted triptych.

The floors here are hardwood, and the big picture windows have seats facing outside, and the French doors are capped by a sunburst light window, the address, 221, visible and backwards when seen from behind, --

--(Ack! Oh, no! Familiar faces walking through the door! -- ah, they settled on a wave and let me go back to my hideously anti-social writing) --

Where was I? Ah, the big picture windows, the counter seats where a woman reads and occasionally watches outside, where the cars pass slowly and the bicyclists zip by on West State Street.

(Not exactly a coincidence, just another little reminder that helped fuel title at right.)

-- Ooh, I love "Tweeter and the Monkey Man." Full-on-blog would have a soundtrack. --

There are also blown glass bulbs hanging from the ceiling -- red, blue, swirls of colors -- and some carved wooden creatures that are half-insect-like, half-mythical.

+ + +

The dear familiar faces sat down for a few minutes. Everybody agreed we came to Black Mountain so we wouldn't run into anyone we knew, and thus after a few cordial minutes, the crowd dispersed. One to a table, one outside, and me still right here in my corner at the Dripolator.

+ + +

I never tire of the shared sense of social sensitivity common to my dear and fellow writers.

+ + + +

One cool thing I have done since arriving in Black Mountain (other than picking up a used Howard Nemerov book at Black Mountain Books), was upload, edit, and print 50 copies of a photo I took since arriving on campus. I spent half an hour fiddling with the image, and nine minutes later, it was ready for pick-up two blocks away. At times, I just love this efficient little world.

Soon I will close down my machine for the day and pick up the photos that I will give to friends at Warren Wilson, all of whom I am looking forward to seeing and talking with as soon as I escape this solo adventure in Black Mountain.

I Let the Rhythm Take Me

2009-07-05T14:28:00.001-04:00

I Let the Rhythm Take Me
Originally uploaded by gatzgirl

On a walk at Warren Wilson, I find the skateboard ramps and this message.

What I Know about Stocks

2009-06-30T21:30:00.001-04:00

Who knew West Egg had the makings of a cooking blog?

At Taiyyaba's request:

I make a stock a couple times a week. The easiest way to do this, I have discovered after years of trying other ways, is to do it in a crockpot. Nearly every scrap from my kitchen goes into either the crockpot or the compost. Most of my stocks are veggie, the others seafood. I rarely make chicken stocks, but it's been heard of. First, I'll write about how to do it, then how to store it.

MAKING THE STOCK

I have a small crockpot. It helped me survive years as a single mother. While I do not recommend single motherhood if it can be avoided, I do highly recommend a crockpot. Who knew this would happen?

Almost every meal I cook involves veggies, onions, garlic, etc., and the scraps (ends, skins, and so on) are thrown into the stock. When I have shrimp, I also throw in shells. A good seafood stock should be at least 3/4 seafood scraps, and only 1/4 veggies. Any veggies will do, although onion, garlic, and celery are great.

I started making stocks in my crockpot when I could toss the scraps in while cooking dinner, fill it with water, and cook it on low overnight. I'd then strain it and store it in a pitcher/container in the refrigerator and use it in the next meal -- or sometimes in a few meals. A quart or so can easily make a soup or help a sauce along, but even a 1/4 or a few tablespoons are great for sauteeing veggies, adding to rice/pasta while cooking, and added to breakfast items like home fries. I often use stock instead of butter.

I liked this process of cooking the stock overnight, although sometimes by morning the smell was a bit much, or I wouldn't have time to strain in the morning and would then cook the stock in the crockpot all day until I came home the following evening -- strong stock; super stink.

Then I discovered that stocks can be cooked outside, assuming you have outdoor electric outlets, and that makes your house stink less, which is generally a good thing. (The more your stock stinks, the better it will work. This goes for fish, seafood, or veggies.) And despite living in the almost-country, where squirrels and raccoons dig in my recycling and deer eat my gardens, nobody seems to want the stocks. I just put the crockpot on a little outdoor table under the porch, plug it in, and have a good stock the next day. I should warn you that it's easier to forget about a stock cooking outside, and that attention must be paid to the pot so it doesn't run out of water. Crockpots tend to cook on a low enough temperature that this is not an issue, but it's something to take seriously.

STORAGE

I store two ways: short-term and long-term. Most stocks I make do a little of both. Some will go into the refrigerator and some will freeze. I use the refrigerated stuff in less than a week. I freeze in small containers, with enough room for expansion, so that I can use an entire container in one thawing. I use containers of all sizes so that I have options when I want stock for soup versus just a little stock for a sauce.

A friend once suggested pouring the stock into ice trays, freezing, and then putting the cubes in bags. She suggested I adopt this as a standard gift to bring the hostess at parties. I think she was asking me to bring her some stock. It took me six years to figure that out ... I still haven't tried the cubes. You try it. Let me know how it goes.