Today, I got up.

I get up every day, but today I got up with a plan. To be clear: most days I also get up with a plan. Today was Sunday. Sunday, I prefer to keep my plans a little loose. Today, my plan was tight, because my writing group was coming over, I had a lunch to prepare and a lunch, therefore, for which to shop. I had a poem to straighten out so it could fly right. Also, I have other writing to do and grading to do. Also, my environment, especially my study, is a little crazy. Okay, mostly my study. Also my side of the bed. Pretty much anywhere I am keeping my personal possession. So, as you can see, I really needed the plan.

Earlier this week, I had my instructional team over for our post-semester review, aka The Post-Mortem. I made some spinach lentil soup and a lovely salad. At the end of my preparations, as I was making the salad happen, I got in a little bit of a hurry and cut my finger. I cut my finger whilst preparing vegetables pretty often. Also, and in a perhaps not unrelated trend, I am often in a hurry whilst preparing vegetables, especially when people are coming over. The people: I should learn that hurrying and sharp knives are a bad mix. But I never do. There I am, slicing red onion super thin, because if you're putting raw onion into a salad, it needs to be super thin so all the sweet can be on the surface and the raw has to hide. That's a theory, anyway, a theory of how to slice an onion. Do you need more cooking theories? I've got loads. Slicing a red onion--right? that's where we were?--and then, a cut finger, which slows down your slicing considerably.

My hands have, ever since, been in motion and also a little bit on the raw side. It's cold, for one. A cut finger likes to take its time healing because hands are necessary. For work, you see. So this week, while I trimmed a billion anthologies on the big Duplo DocuCutter, and counted them a billion times in their boxes, in case I missed one, and hung up my clothes for the billionth time, and hung cold wet clothes on the rack, and made cookies, and decorated a Christmas tree, and picked five pears and two persimmons and a wedge of gorgonzola and four Christmas cactuses at Trader Joe's, and made scallion pancakes and squash laksa and a pear cranberry gingersnap crumble, my hands were on my mind.

In my practice, when I take a poem out to work on it, it means I open a virtual file and find the latest version of a digital document. If I'm lucky, I find I've left notes for myself on the poem, that will help me to remember where I left off, what I knew I hadn't yet done in the poem when I put it down.

I'm working on a poem called 'smart bomb,' set in a car while the speaker was driving to work and a story about the bombing in Syria was on the radio. This was a few months ago, after one of the cease-fires had yet again gone south. In the poem, the speaker turned the radio off, just as I often do, when an interviewer asks a muddle-headed question, or a caller's response is unbearable, or, as sometimes has happened in the past, the host has a cold and her voice sounds phlegmy. Sometimes, I just can't take the sound that the radio makes in my ears. In my mind. In my everything. I guess now is a good time to say that 'the speaker' in the sentences above is, for all intents and purposes, me.

I've been thinking about how information--ideas, events, cataclysms--detonate, how its blast ripples wide. I've been thinking about the what to do problem. About the what to feel. Also: about how much it feels like none of my answers are sufficient. Feeling isn't sufficient. Not even doing.

In my plans for the week upcoming, I have grading to finish. I have, perhaps, a few more meetings. A finite number, I hope I hope. I have more writing to finish. A lunch with a friend. Shopping for grandchildren. Two little grandsons who will just have driven in with their mom and dad from Arizona, coming over to say hi and bye really quick tomorrow night. I know I will get several reminders of daily political actions in the civic sphere, which is to say, in the world where we live: calls to make, emails to send, places to show up and lend my voice, however I feel. I have necessary sleep I must hold a place for. I hope for a day when I can stay in my quiet house and bake.

This last week, I bought some lights on an impulse at Target--dewdrop lights, they're called, little beads of light on copper wire that you can wind around things. In the dark, dark of winter, I do love a glow. The wire and lights came wrapped around a card. You had to unwind, then load three batteries into a little pack, then click a button. The first set of batteries made nothing happen, light-wise--I think I may have lodged one of the three batteries inexactly into its slot. So I patiently extracted the three, then tried another three batteries, and this time, they lit up, brightening at intervals along the wire.

I wrapped the wire around a vase of roses, which I also bought whilst shopping for my poetry lunch. The lights illuminated the glass urn, the stems crossed in the still water, the red and white blooming out the lip. I love roses at Christmas. Roses and lights. Roses, lights, and a tree. Roses, lights, baubles, and a tree. Roses, lights, baubles, quiet, and a tree. Unwinding and winding a string of light.

Just write.

The wreckage is such that it's hard to feel like saying anything is worth the words. Except that I wish there were something I could say, something I could threaten to withhold, some enactment, some words, some display, some theater, that would change it. All there is are the things that seem so paltry: write, email, call, connect. Just keep saying it. Just keep saying, we need meaningful gun control. Control, some system of controls.

This.
This.
This.


To the Honorable Representative Love, Senator Hatch, Senator Lee:

I am writing to express as clearly as I can my strong belief that we must:

1. establish universal background checks for people who want to purchase guns
2. establish much more serious and meaningful gun control efforts
3. allow the CDC to research the most effective kinds of gun control.

The gun lobby is a pernicious influence on policy related to gun violence in this country. It is unacceptable--it has never been acceptable, but it grows more intolerable by the day--that we allow, by our cynical indifference, mass gun violence to be perpetrated.

Please do not write and tell me that the second amendment protects the rights of individual people to own guns. Please do not write and tell me that the fetishization of the gun is what makes America America. Instead, please write to me and tell me that you are willing to do what is hard and courageous, and work on fixing this terrible failure of public policy. We can effectively end most gun violence by doing some fairly straightforward things. Other countries have done so. Please work on doing these sensible things, I beg you.

Lisa Bickmore
West Jordan

I'm back! or, Action movies, an essay.

Today, I bought eggs from Chad, went to the Roasting Co. to work on a poem (why do I have to go to another place to write a poem? another post for another day), ate lady fingers (but not really--they were actually langues des chats, and they were both darling and delicious), and cried my head off at a movie (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close--you will have to decide for yourself if a movie that insists that you cry this much is your poison, but I expected to pity and perhaps despise it, and did neither, really). But that's not what I want to write about.

What I want to write about is action movies. Yesterday, when I came home from a day in which I got up at 6:30 a.m. (boo hoo hooooooo) to go to school so that I would be ultra-ready for my 9 a.m. class, which went swimmingly thank you very much, then had a meeting and a post-meeting chat, wait: where was I? Right: yesterday, when I came home from that day (see above), I met the historian who was finishing up some dishes, and as I plunked down my burdens (computer, purse) and poked around for the entertainment section of the newspaper, and didn't find it, I asked, "Where's the movie section?" and the historian said, "I took it to work, but there's really only one movie to see, I think, and that's The Artist," after which I predictably sulked, privately, because: who says? But then I said, "Great!" because I am nothing if not a trouper (< -- patently not true). So off we went to enchiladas and The Artist, and it was good.

But this morning, as I was scanning the long-lost entertainment section for what other movies there were, I saw that Haywire had also opened this weekend, and then I was all, "What? Soderbergh!?" (because white people love to talk about movie directors, I guess.) So I went to the historian who may or may not have just been waking up, and I was all, "You know what else opened this weekend? Haywire. And do you know who directed it? Soderbergh." And he was all, "Oh!" Honestly, that's not necessarily the conversation you want to have before you've eaten your pancakes.

But then, while we were driving hither and yon on our adventures, I said, "I am lately kind of taken by action movies."

The historian said, "Oh? Why is that?" Polite like that, because he really could not care less about action movies. Even after I made the fine distinction that I was only talking about well-made action movies, not stupid ones, not the ones where stuff blows up and the hero walks away in slow motion while things are erupting behind him in sheets of flame and a power ballad amps up on the soundtrack. But whatever: I am pretty sure I will not convince him at this point that action movies are a category worth making allowances for, when your movie-going choices are on the line. At this point the historian knows his own tastes, and what he likes is (a) nothing set in a fantasy realm: no wizards, elves, dwarves, fairies, or orcs; (b) nothing where a bunch of stuff erupts in sheets of etc.; (c) no movies that are stupid; (d) small, human-scale movies that are plausible and something interesting and thought-provoking happens; (e) no gratuitous arty stuff, although he can tolerate that if the movie also exhibits characteristics of (d) above; (f) so-called little, "quirky" movies (also, see (d) above) (upon reading all of this to the historian, he points out that "little" and "quirky" are not necessarily the same category, so you can divide or merge the categories as you see fit--I'm leaving it up to you); (g) comedies that are actually funny (unlike so-called comedies that are not funny); and (h) the occasional good thriller and/or heist movie. [note: after reading this whole post to the historian, he points out another category all this leaves out, the western, and particularly old westerns, which he loves. And I also think of the sports movie, which is an action movie of a kind, but not really what I'm talking about here. Also: dance movies omg.]

I agree with most of the above, by the way: the differences between us are mostly a matter of degree. For instance, I don't love fantasy movies, and found the latter two of the Lord of the Rings films to be excessively orc-filled. But I can enjoy a fantasy element or so in a movie, if the movie is good. I really, truly loathe action movies that have the explosive elements mentioned above. On the other hand, a movie with awesome fighting or chases or kinetic forms of intrigue--that movie I will probably enjoy, and may possibly love.

For instance, I really, really loved Collateral, that Michael Mann [again with the director fetish] thing that had Tom Cruise as a killer who seemed composed entirely of nerve and muscle and an assassin's instincts. And I loved The Hurt Locker, which was both a war movie and an action movie, and the more awesome for being both. We both liked the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmeses, but one thing I liked about them was the chasing and the fighting. The Bourne movies were swell, for sure (I liked them a fair bit more than the historian did). And--this is probably the clincher--the art-house martial arts films, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and House of Flying Daggers and Hero (others as well). I'm pretty sure I haven't seen any of the early great martial arts films, no Bruce Lee, none when Jackie Chan or Jet Li were in their prime. But I was absolutely riveted by these arty films. And recently, I enjoyed myself enormously at Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol--perhaps just a tad too long, but otherwise, fantastic action sequences where I marveled simultaneously at the gorgeous well-framed sequences and shots, and the spectacle of the human body in motion.

Isn't that really it? what movies can do, show us--the human body, strong, vulnerable and irrepressible, at the thin margin between life and death? When it's made well, the action movie shows us this, and it's thrilling.

I may or may not persuade the historian that he will enjoy Haywire, but I am pretty sure I will have to see it. Also, I may need to see MI:GP on an Imax screen. I hear it's mind-blowing.