A few notes from today.

I love how cities with some history have brick warehouses. The historian put several brick warehouses in Salt Lake City from the 19th century on the National Historical Register, including one designed by the same architect who designed the Lion House. Of course, the fact of these buildings having been put on the Register didn't stop recent owners from demolishing them.

***

John d'Ambrosio, on the warehouses in Chicago:

It [Chicago] was destroying itself, or sloughing off its old industrial self, and many of the brick warehouses and factory buildings in the neighborhood, gutted and windowless, deserted, were no better than caves hollowed from rock, with doors gaping open blackly, home to the homeless, the vast vacant interiors lit only by the light of fires burning in oil drums. In seeking the future a city like Chicago wrecks itself and returns to stone, at least briefly. There were piles of rubble such as you imagine in war, but the absence of declared enemies, and the lethargic unfolding of time, its leisurely pace, kept people from seeing the scale of the shift as catastrophic. Factories and warehouses and hotel, these old muscular hopes came down in heaps of brick and mortar, of pulverized concrete and cracked limestone, and then those cairns of rock, in turn, were cleared off to become barren lots as flat and featureless as the prairie they'd supplanted.

***

Today at the market we got a box of peaches. A dozen ears of corn. Asian pears from the Asian pear family. Fingerling potatoes. Romano beans.

And we saw this:

Eurasian Eagle Owl, according
to the guy who had him there.

***

This afternoon, I rested and slept for a quiet hour. As usual, I'm up late. I'm watching Song of the Sea, because my daughter told me it was 'weird and sad but literally the most beautiful animated film' she'd ever seen. I'm thinking about a poem, about islands and causeways, exiles, marauders, hermitages. The day's almost done.

Notes on glass houses.

I'm thinking about glass houses, because I am working (nominally) on a poem about the radical insufficiency of art.

The house on the bottom row, second from the left, is designed by Carlo Santambrogio, and is located in Milan.

It's a concept house--nearly everything in it, except the bed, is made of glass. It's theoretically livable, though--the exterior walls are thick, and sealed, and it can be heated.

I'm thinking about two things: first, the idea, one that I can't place definitively (a visiting scholar years ago when I was a grad student at the U talked about it, I think), that in the psychodrama of human existence, a common trope is that of mistaking a threat for a shelter. And second, the idea of art and art spaces as being shelters, temporary, that substitute in the moment for the shelter we need. Which, of course, is never quite available.

A third thing: Frost, writing in "Directive," about a lost home:

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
and in a town that is no more a town.

And a fourth thing: this discussion of how Philip Johnson and his companion David Whitney actually lived in the series of structures on the 49 acre Glass House compound. This note

The house was astonishingly tchotchke-free. "I don't think clutter was allowed," the painter Jasper Johns, a friend of both men, once said. "One was always aware of their ruthless elegance."

I find particularly telling, since my own house is not tchotchke-free, in fact it is the opposite of that, and in fact, I believe that it is in that tchotchke-ness that my house's artistry resides.

One more thing: I'm thinking about the Francis Bacon reconstructed studio in the Hugh Lane gallery in Dublin. I wish I had had time to visit it when we were there. That art space--the art made in that studio, the studio itself as a home--seems, if not sufficient, at least approaching sufficiency.

Notes on teaching: the first week.

The first week--exhausting. Also? a little bit of a thrill ride.

I can get away with an incomplete schedule--the day to day--because this is a face to face class. I said this to myself on Sunday, when one class, my online class, was mostly finished, but the other, the face to face, was not quite mostly finished.

If I have three weeks ready to go? I can start with that.

(Online, though? No. An incomplete schedule is just courting disaster.)

If, however, you are teaching face to face, you have the luxury of advancing your partially-made weekly schedule as if it were a  not-quite-hypothesis--a teaching hunch, one that requires more information to fully flesh out before it can become itself: a fully articulated question, the answer to which can only be obtained by the procedure of the whole class being taught.

And thus it was that I found myself today in my office, engaged in the slow, patient work of imagining how the projects I'm asking them to do might connect with the readings I've found (and the ones I have still to find), how the readings might connect with the poems they write, how their sensibilities might intersect with the sensibilities of the writers I'm assembling, one by one, for them to meet and converse with.

I've been thinking about how writing--composing--can, for me, edge into a flow state in which I lose track of time and get entirely absorbed in the problems and the pleasures of the task. Is it possible to teach that? Do my students in any writing course find themselves in it? In a required composition course, for instance? Can I teach them to recognize it and to let themselves go with it, if they verge on it? Can this be coached or taught?

Today, I found myself in my office, the door almost closed, the light coming in from the east. It was late morning, and I was entirely absorbed in the problems and pleasures of the task: assembling a teaching schedule, losing track of time, creating what I hope will be apt sequences and intelligible leaps, the premises of which will unfold over time and be achieved both in the process and in the arrival.

And then, I went to class.

Notes for September.

On cleaning out my office, in preparation for the big move to the new building:

1. If you put stuff in a box, and then you don't look at the box for one year or more, throw away the contents of the box, preferably without looking at each individual paper.

2. Magazines and newspapers = stuff to recycles. Why did you stack this on your shelves in the first place?

3. No need for self-loathing, now. 

4. HOWEVER.

5. Just get rid of it in the first place, for heaven's sake.

On the weather:

It is hot. This cannot be denied. But the weather is changeable in September. Today's high of 93 will turn into Saturday's high of 88. And then, as a colleague just pointed out, soon it will be snowing. We live in hope.

On things to look forward to:

New The Mindy Project! New The New Girl! Two Scandinavian novels awaiting me. More and more tomatoes and basil and squash and peppers. Soon: sweaters. And tights! A whole slew of great movies now and to come. Going to visit my daughter. A trip with my son and another daughter. A trip north in October. A solid revision of my (second) manuscript. 

On renewable pleasures:

So many of them: Walking every night with the dog. Watching television with the dog. Taking a walk with my tiny little shuffle, music in my ears. Watching the sky. Autumn dreaming. Sleeping with the window open. Feeling, actually, optimism.

What I really, really want.

Today, after rummaging in my purse for this and that and the other thing, I obtained my two (2!) notebooks and maybe a pen, and then, while rummaging in one or the other of the notebooks for some, you know, notes, I found this list:

The above says WHAT I REALLY REALLY WANT (sorry for the reverse view), and the rest of the list goes like this:

• a new car--My New Camry. [< this was in the dark days (after the carwreck, before the purchase of MNC).] 
• plant tulips. [< done.]
• go to Venice in the wintertime 
• desert

CATEGORY--

• house/yard in order for winter
• cooler cover
• lightbulbs
• tulips
• another lamp in BR

vacuum cleaner

fireplace

sweep in BR

wash couch covers once a week

[...it goes on like this for quite awhile. Can it be that what I really really want is lightbulbs? a cooler cover? to sweep in BR? what madness is this? ...]

oven--other stove element

4 burner tops

light over stove?

[SRSLY. ...but wait, new category:]

L.A.

Paris

desert house

cabin 

Dublin

Mendocino

Carmel

Maine/Montreal

Anasazi trip

Seattle

Mississippi River

Milwaukee

South

Everglades

Thank goodness for that second list! 

Apparently, what I really really want on the one hand is an orderly house, with a stove with four burners and a light over it, and on the other hand, I really really want to gallivant, but mainly in America.

But today what I really really really wanted was this:

• to go home and take off my shoes.
• to have my grading be done.
• to have Mexican food show up at my doorstep.
• to have one magical day appear between Wednesday and Thursday, a day that no one knows about, a day that is not on any calendars.
• and come to think about it, to have a stove with four burners and a light over it.

Also, probably,

• an iPad.

Notes on optimism.

As readers of this blog may have perhaps heard me say from time to time, I believe that, in a democracy, it is one's duty to be optimistic. However, today as I listened to a story on NPR about the Iowa caucuses, the probable role in this election of the young people who organized for Obama last election, and that full-o-crazy slate of Republican hopefuls, I admit that my optimism flagged. A bit.

My Shakespeare professor from my undergraduate years, who had been knighted (seriously) by the Queen herself, once recounted the anecdote of the dog, who began his week-long stay at a kennel believing that all bees were flies, and ended his stay believing that all flies were bees. Point being--belaboring it--that neither optimism nor pessimism is realistic. But that's a dog, of course. What about optimism that is like an engine? that keeps you going?

Today while I was working away on my online course, I felt so hopeful that this would be a great semester. Not the kind of hopeful you have to talk yourself into--the kind of hopeful that just wells up. 

Here are a few things I am looking forward to: new episodes of 30 Rock. My son's Abbey Road party. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Reading Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Watching Mission Impossible tomorrow in the middle of my syllabus-writing. Writing every week. Making new flavors of ice cream (recent flavors: amaretto-cherry and meyer lemon). Mad Men. Teaching poetry this semester. Wearing my pink sweater. Watching the Jazz get better. 

But not, if I'm honest, the upcoming election. Just worried. Not quite pessimistic, not yet.

I am, though, way, way excited for the upcoming semester. Excited to keep going, building my courses, making plans, coming up with ideas that will make my teaching life a little more challenging and quite possibly just a little more amazing.

Short thank you notes.

Dear Monday,

Thank you for the little things. The canceled meeting, the quiet morning. The peach turnover, which, though it doesn't scream "February breakfast," was warm and delicious.

Sincerely,

Lisa B.

*

Dear Camel Colored Sweater,

Thanks for looking so good today. Even though I bought you from the Victoria's Secret Catalog, thanks for being so versatile, since there was actually no way I was going to wear you as a very short dress/sexy nightgown? Especially not to work.

Sincerely,

Lisa B.

*

Dear Tomorrow,

I would like to postpone you.

Thank you,

Lisa B.

*

Dear Chile Verde Burritos,

Thank you for being my dinner and thank you also for, in your flexible way, being not averse to being styrofoamed and taken out. Also, thank you for revealing your capacity to be a leftover.

Sincerely,

Lisa B.

A couple of notes on writing.

1. Your plan is nonsense. That list you've made of what you're going to do today, during the 3 or 4 hours you've got to write? You will almost certainly not accomplish what is on that list. And if you do, it won't be an actual accomplishment, more like a gesture in the direction of the eventual accomplishment. You hope. Because that's how writing is.

2. You are going to flail. Just because the last time you took 3 or 4 hours to write, you were able to draft two whole new poems about of your piles of notes, it doesn't mean you're going to turn this particular pile of notes into a whole new draft. Probably, what you'll do is add more notes to the pile. More notes do not add up to a draft.

3. Writing does not necessarily make you feel good, at least not right now. If only you weren't in a coffee house, with people studying for their math exams on the left, their chemistry exams on your right, and talking on their cell phones straight ahead of you--if those people weren't there, and if Christmas music weren't playing overhead, and if all the above weren't be punctuated by steam and clinking ceramics, you could just break down and cry like you want to. Come on. You know you want to.

4. Sometimes the notes you added to the pile of notes yesterday turn into a draft today. Yippee!

5. So it turns out, that list actually does help. It just might take you a little longer to cross stuff off. A little longer, or a lot longer.

Revisiting.

I am still writing like mad and it feels great. Because of the Poem-a-day project, I'm trying to get new poems going, but I'm also working off of old notes and ideas, and my confluence of methods seems to be keeping me in a groove. Today I looked at some notes about my grandmother's death and worked a poem out of that; I'm now working on another Dublin poem, working from some notes there (also doing research on bridges and rivers and ruins and conquest and maps). This has been a very pleasurable day--even the housework I've done has felt, well, satisfying.

Also, I just read a comment on my friend Ann's blog, about the crazy stuff dogs eat--someone noted that their dogs would eat wasps and bees and flies right out of the sky. That, my friends, is a poem just begging to be written. Somebody better get on it.