New developments.

Christmas is over. We opened--literally--all the presents. HOWEVER: I will not be taking my Christmas tree down anytime soon. I am waiting until my visitors have departed, which is a good week and a half. So settle down, anyone who thinks it should be taken down by now: I am still fill of Christmas cheer, dammit.

Actually, at the crucial moment, I found that my personal Christmas cheer was a tad intermittent. Here are some reasons:

1. No matter how many ways you have made yourself into the Zen, chilled-out boddhisatva of Christmas, you will find yourself kerwalloped by moments of loneliness, regret, and heartsickness. What're you going to do about that? That's your Intermittent Christmas Cheer Syndrome (ICCS) right there, and you need an Action Plan.

2. Do not count on Martha Stewart to help, necessarily. For instance, I made these cookies this year in my "New, Untried Fancy Cookie" category of baking:

I found the recipe in the December issue of Martha Stewart Living. They weren't hard, exactly, but they did require steps, lots of steps, and for what? An underwhelming flavor, even if they did, sort of, resemble a cross section of a cut tree. Which is what they were supposed to resemble. The takeaway here is that I have a whole bunch of underwhelming but visually attractive cookies. I can take them places or give them away, but I don't even feel good about that, honestly. Martha: you did not comfort me in my hour of need.

3. Even if you finish your grades well in advance of the actual Christmas holiday, you might nonetheless find yourself attempting too much. I didn't bake the date-nut pinwheel cookie of lore and legend, which is labor-intensive and cuss-inducing, and I didn't bake the surprise cookie (with a cherry or spice drop in the middle--surprise!). But even so, I made two kinds of caramel and three kinds of cookies, none of which really met the mark, and fruit cake. And almond bread. And the double butterscotch crescent rolls of my youth, a Pillsbury Bake-Off winner, if I remember correctly, and an altogether first-rate recipe. So--that's a lot of baking. One might say too much baking. Or, one might also say a too-quick and sadly-misguided abandonment of the traditional baking ways. One might say: Christmas cookie-baking is not the time nor the place for experimentation MARTHA. Well, whatever one might say, I'm probably going to let the inadequate and unsatisfying cookies take up space in my kitchen until I can work up the gumption to throw them away. And next year, I will make my old, tried and true cuss-inducing recipes instead of new ones.

It's true: one's efforts and failures, of the baking (and many other) varieties, confront one at the crossroads, i.e., where Christmas Eve meets Christmas Day, and one must find one's way to withstand the confrontation, and even to prevail. This is the above mentioned Action Plan. Such as:

a. plan to sleep the entire next day. December 26 found me still asleep until almost 10 a.m., and still in my nightgown until about 2 p.m. It was glorious.
b. cook and eat some vegetables, for the love of everything holy. Seriously, vegetables will not let you down. Good old, plain old vegetables.
c. read something good. I am currently dipping into four books: The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin, Incarnadine by Mary Szybist, Metaphysical Dog by Frank Bidart, and The Best Food Wriitng 2013 (ed. Holly Hughes). I read two poems today, one each by Szybist and Bidart, that made me gasp, they were each so good.
d. get a hold of yourself, and knock that self-doubt off. You're not so bad, you know?

 

Personal cinematic history: Peter O'Toole.

My first Peter O'Toole movie was more than twenty years into his movie career--My Favorite Year, in 1982. In it, O'Toole plays Alan Swann, an Errol Flynn-esque actor, who is mostly washed-up, but has been engaged to appear on a Sid Caesar-esque variety show. It's funny, it's charming. I love the movie, though, because it so thoroughly demonstrates the aura of a movie star, and there is no more apt actor than Peter O'Toole to embody that glamor, that charisma, that allure.

My real first Peter O'Toole movie was, of course, Lawrence of Arabia. As I have written before, I first saw Lawrence on a black and white television in the late 70s. This was not an optimal viewing experience. But when I saw the film later, in 1989 on a big screen, seven years after My Favorite Year, I was transfixed. This was the kind of movie for which the whole enterprise of movie-making was made. I understood then how My Favorite Year glossed not only Errol Flynn or someone very like him, but also the kind of outsize actor who cut a dashing figure, who lived flamboyantly and publicly, whose image might outlast the period of the actual productive work (as in the case of Flynn); one whose talents were prodigious and whose magnetism was equal to the talent--an actor like Peter O'Toole. There's a sense in which Lawrence, the character, is a similar kind of gloss on Lawrence the historic figure--it was as if history were invoked in this film to show the rise of a kind of monomania that would only be skewered, punctured; to illustrate a personality that took itself to be godlike, capable of great heroism, cruelty, and ultimately a lethal self-doubt. It is a towering performance in a towering film, a fitting document of imperialism. It is unforgettable.

The last time I saw Peter O'Toole was in Venus.  In this late film, O'Toole plays an aging, ailing actor, well past the point when he can ply his craft, who falls in love/lust with a very young woman. For this performance, O'Toole received his eighth nomination for Best Actor. He won none of these times. I found this film, and O'Toole's performance, to be crushingly moving. That ruined but still beautiful body and face. That voice. The way that desire is unruly, how one does or does not give permission for it to have its way. It is appalling and lovely and riveting.

I will miss him.

The Megastore Recommends.

1. Watching a really dark western during the run up to Christmas. The historian and I have been thinking about watching Deadwood for quite a long time. Perhaps because of our excellent run of binge TV last summer, we were ready again for something. So we bought a season on Amazon and have been watching two a day for the last week. We have two more episodes to finish. Its pluses:

don't ask where the women are, or what they're doing.
you won't like the answer.

• the much-vaunted Ian McShane performance (as the historic Al Swearengen) lives up to its reviews--and more.
• surprise! Timothy Olyphant, playing the historic Seth Bullock, who grew up a century and more later to become Raylan Givens on Justified. That was a bonus.
• surprise! Powers Boothe, playing one of the baddies.

There are more baddies than you can shake a stick at. When Raylan killed a Sioux in a particularly brutal scene, I turned to the historian and said, "I don't know if I can keep watching this if it turns out I hate everyone." But it's such a good show, the characters keep surprising you. And the writing is amazing: the most scruffy, profane almost-Shakespearean dialogue possible to imagine.

I messaged my son's friend, who loved Deadwood and even let us hold on to his DVDs until it was ridiculous. 

I suppose I ought to note that I have not yet watched one actual Christmas movie, for whatever that's worth.

2. Getting your Christmas tree! Obviously/finally. 

list-o-rama on my screen.

3. Making your list and checking it twice. I have lists of stuff I've got to do to get ready for when the people arrive at my house. Lists of stuff I have to buy to get the house ready for when the people arrive at my house. Lists of stuff I have to do for work over the break. Lists of butter to buy for when I start baking. What I honestly like is that when the grading is over (mostly), the list making is actually a signal to myself that I can turn my attention away from work (mostly) and give myself over to things like getting my house ready, and listening to music, and winding strings of little lights around a tree, and thinking about some new kind of cookie I will make.

Oh yes! There will be a new cookie! and I will blog about it!

4. Getting the grading done. (Obviously/mostly.)

so effing close.

Short letters.

Dear surprise yellow towel,

You are an inanimate object. I know this. 

little towel, who shoved thee?

Still, I wish you could tell me who shoved you into the heating duct, thus contributing to the Coldest Living Room in America Syndrome at our house. And we would never have known, had the contractor not found you, extracted you, and told us. 

If that was a con, it was a long con. Well-played.

Warmer now, no thanks to you,

htms

*

Dear Jacques Derrida,

yo francais!

Since the center of you is nowhere--(a) you are no more, and (b) I assume that when you passed, you immediately deconstructed--you probably weren't around, haunting the room, when my student said this today:

"The first time I read 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,' I was like, I don't get it. The second time I read it, I was, Okay. The third time I read it, I was all, I love you, Derrida."

If your meaning were not infinitely deferred, you might perhaps have found some satisfaction in that.

I know I did,

htms

**

Dear bag of spice drops,

there are none. NONE.

I assume there has been some fundamental redesign, conducted by the Task Force on Optimal Spice
Drop Flavor Distribution. I cannot imagine, however, how this effort could have resulted in the disappearance of all the purples. To repeat: no purples!

It's just not right,

htms

***

Dear lull before the onslaught,

How I am enjoying you. Caught up, for once, on grading, responding to the occasional frantic or not-too-frantic e-mail, talking with pleasure about Derrida, making lists of stuff I'm going to do when the grading is really done:

what is the sign for 'lull'?

• go to the museum
• go to the other museum
• go to the other other museum
• bake the same things I always bake
• bake some other things, possibly
• figure out other crunchy things to make brittle out of
• hang out with grandkids
• read
• take a long leisurely look at my manuscript
• nap
• watch television

Lull, you are but a foretaste, but you are delicious.

htms

Personal Cinematic History: The Traumas.

obviously terrifying, right?

I have often said that I am the person that The Scarers in the movie industry have me in mind when they devise their movie scares. I am perfectly calibrated to jump at the thrill of atonal strings, at the sudden, loud noise, at the lurching close-up. Blood and gore that other people categorize as cartoonish seems very bloody indeed to me. I trace it all back to Don Knotts and The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.

 It was 1966 and I was, therefore, nine. We were living in Japan, because I remember the house we returned to after the movie, the house where I was terrified. Have you seen the movie? It is terrifying! I'm pretty sure that it could scare me still today, if it caught me in the right mood, because there was

• a haunted house
• a murder (with blood in it). A possible murder (with possible blood).
• a scary, ghostly organ/organ player in the organ loft (very scary)--an organ that seems to be playing itself! or being played by a ghost! the ghost of a murderer!
• and so on.

listen: the screaming
has already started.

Well, it was all supposed to be hilarious--Don Knotts is, or was, the signifier of that--but all that dried, ancient blood on the organ keys just sent me around the bend. Also, it may or may not have been at that same time that the previews for Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte were on at the theaters--I know we were living in that same house, because I remember sitting on a fence and talking about how scary it was with one of my friends. Just the previews of that movie were the stuff of my nightmares: Bette Davis as Charlotte is haunted by the murder of her young love. As an aging woman, living in a terrible old Southern house, she keeps hearing harpsichord music (terrifying, obviously) and hallucinates the decapitated head of her lover. That, the people, is way too scary for a child! But this was back in the day when there weren't a million movies at a time, and especially not on an Air Force base, so everyone saw all the previews, scary or not, and therefore all the little children had nightmares. In Japan. I think you can see where I'm going here: this is how I learned to loathe scary movies.

Well, in The Ghost, Don Knotts/Mr. Chicken vanquishes his trepidations, and the mystery of the long-ago murder is resolved in a fairly twisty denouement. But no big deal, just as things are getting all happily ever after-ish, the organ keys start to play by themselves again. I suppose that little turn was supposed to be witty and charming and lightly scary. It sent me around the bend all over again. I had to whimper my way through the "it's only a movie" explanations of my parents, who, I'm sure, were baffled and slightly annoyed and maybe just a little bit amused that the kid can't sort her Guignol from her Knotts, her ghoulish from her comic.

Also, Charlotte went insane, in case you are keeping track. So: murder, inexplicable musical shenanigans, insanity. Bette Davis gets driven away while Patti Page sings that song that is more terrible than anything, because insanity and murder and so forth.

I've never actually seen Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte. I think I might be able to laugh at it now, maybe. Maybe if I saw it on television. I would rather keep, I think, the power of that particular terror in memory. It is not a pleasure I seek, or seek rarely, to be terrified by a movie, but the memory of having been terrified is in the bones of my movie history, and thus of my movie love.

Gratitude.

The word gratitude:

gratitude (n.) 

mid-15c., "good will," from Middle French gratitude (15c.) or directly from Medieval Latin gratitudinem (nominative gratitudo) "thankfulness," from Latin gratus "thankful, pleasing" (see grace). Meaning "thankfulness" is from 1560s.

The word grace, with which it is intimately linked:

grace (n.) 

late 12c., "God's favor or help," from Old French grace "pardon, divine grace, mercy; favor, thanks; elegance, virtue" (12c.), from Latin gratia "favor, esteem, regard; pleasing quality, good will, gratitude" (source of Italian grazia, Spanish gracia), from gratus "pleasing, agreeable," from PIE root *gwere- "to favor" (cf. Sanskrit grnati "sings, praises, announces," Lithuanian giriu "to praise, celebrate," Avestan gar- "to praise").

Sense of "virtue" is early 14c., that of "beauty of form or movement, pleasing quality" is mid-14c. In classical sense, "one of the three sister goddesses (Latin Gratiæ, Greek Kharites), bestowers of beauty and charm," it is first recorded in English 1579 in Spenser. The short prayer that is said before or after a meal (early 13c.; until 16c. usually graces) has a sense of "gratitude."

Over the past few days, my heart has been flooded with gratitude. Because our friend David, who just last week was in a coma and for whom we all greatly feared, spoke with us about the oeuvre of Tarkovsky and how we should watch all of it--"all of it!"--because it was so beautiful. Because of the intelligence and sensitivity, the loving hearts and great energies, of my sons and my daughters. Because I am lucky enough to have smiles and happy greetings from grandchildren. For my wonderful, thoughtful friends. Because I have a friend who has known me for more than half my life. Because of a husband, the words for whose goodness will always be radically insufficient. For many comforts and great pleasures. For an education and a job. For enough, more than enough.

To see the etymological roots of gratitude is to acknowledge that the idea of blessedness, a favor bestowed upon the thing praised, is a part of its conceptual frame. To praise something is to articulate its pleasingness, how it is touched by favor--by God, by one's regard.

We live in a world where one's praise of almost anything must acknowledge how the thing praised is only part of that world, where the act of thanksgiving must acknowledge the radical insufficiency of one's own comprehension of that world; where so much of that world seems to be wrought of pain. Where is the praiseworthiness of this? The blessedness?

Do you know how to think about this? What is the frame in which any of it makes sense?

I am flooded with gratitude. From my window looking into a dark street, I am grateful for, and suffused with, more than enough. Still, I hope to find a way to do something more, give more, to seek a better understanding.

Personal Cinematic History: the not-very-good movies division.

I believe that we saw The Addams Family Values in a little theater in Kearns, Utah, that is no longer standing. We saw it for one of the kids' birthday, so it was in the winter time. It must have been a dollar theater, because it was all of us, seven of us, and that was a lot of people to see a movie and maybe also get popcorn. It was, as it turns out, twenty years ago almost exactly.

I remember thinking, This is hilarious! with some surprise. The first Addams Family was no big deal, in my view. We were at the second because it was nominally a family-ish film (okay, PG-13, go ahead, judge me.), and because it was a dollar, and because we were celebrating a birthday. But I was laughing. We all were.

The rhythm of the film is kind of static. The jokes had set ups, and the actors stood still to deliver them, for the most part. It's stagy. But somehow this works. Somehow, it is funnier than maybe it has a right to be. For all its static staging, it zips along, too, and all the good parts keep coming and coming. You're not counting the minutes between laughs.  

One of my favorite things about any film--excellent to risible--are the little bits. Last night, we watched a swath of A Few Good Men--we generally do if we happen across it on television. By now, I have seen it so many times that I have specific bits I look forward to. I said to the historian tonight at dinner, "I just can't get enough of Tom Cruise mugging his way through those courtroom scenes. That smug expression on his face." He laughed, and cited the Jack Nicholson character calling him something derisive. And there are superb bits of dialogue that I relish when they roll by--like when Kevin Pollak's lawyer character asks Demi Moore's lawyer character why she likes the two guys they're defending, when he's just called them bullies, and she says (I like to stand up with excellent posture when I say it with her), "Because they stand on a wall, and say nothing's going to hurt you tonight, not on my watch." Brilliant and kitschy and Demi has never looked more beautiful than she does in that uniform. I live for that stuff.

I love the Addamses because they are weird and because, in this movie, they wonder (as we all do) if perhaps they should try to fit in a little more. Hence summer camp for Wednesday and Pugsley. Hence the nanny, and the ever-superb Joan Cusack playing her. There are so many delights that it is impossible to name them all, but I propose the following as one of my favorite of all monologues in movies. The misfits play the Indians to the WASPy Pilgrims in the summer camp play, written and staged by the camp director (played by Peter MacNicol):

 

"Years from now, my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations; your people will wear cardigans and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the roadside; you will play golf and enjoy hot hors d'oeuvres. My people will have pain and degradation; your people will have stick-shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They have said, "Do not trust the Pilgrims, especially Sarah Miller." And for all these reasons, I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground."

I hope you, the people, have a happy Thanksgiving. As for me and my people, tomorrow we will wear cardigans (no highballs) and eat hot hors d'oeuvres, though I do hope our village doesn't get burned to the ground. Yours, either.

(As researched (!) this post, I found a couple of things I recommend--this delightful article from The Guardian, and this weird and interesting feature about the making of the film from the points of view of cast and crew.) (<< value-added feature of The Megastore*.)

(*but there will be no shopping on Thanksgiving, or on the day after Thanksgiving either. We do have standards around here. Some standards.)

Notes from my personal cinematic history.

I wanted to be her.

1. Nanny.
2. Neglected children.
3. Nun.

The three N's, the people, which lead us inexorably to The Sound of Music, where, indeed, the hills were alive with the sound of

4. Nazis,

(and also music, of course).

Were there neglected children in this story? Indeed there were--their mother had died. Did they need a governess, aka nanny? Indeed they did! And who better to be this nanny, aka governess, than a nun, or novice, or Julie Andrews with the hairdo of a boy five weeks past his haircut appointment? No one, that's who.

The Sound of Music, too, was in the heavy rotation of the Saturday chore-doing music of my growing up years. So it goes without saying that I knew all the words and could sing all the parts to each and every one of the songs. I don't know if anyone ever actually caught me singing all the parts of "So Long, Farewell," but I certainly could, whilst cleaning the mirror tiles on our entryway wall. And it is also true that I mustered a superb Mother Superior voice for "Climb Ev'ry Mountain," like a champ, epic and heartfelt, with the heavy vibrato that she pulled from the depths of her wise, epic soul.

But the secret "N" of The Sound of Music is nuptial, as in that spectacular wedding scene:

I wanted my wedding to have that much veil in it.

Holy amazing veil! and stately music that reiterates an earlier theme about how she was kind of a troublemaker but still lovable! And all those adorable Von Trapp children fluffing her trappings prior to the processional! Well, that's a wedding, is all I can say. Also this was pretty good:

YES.

Not too long ago, I went with friends to the sing-along Sound of Music at The Tower. It could not have been more wonderful. There I was, singing the second and third verses with rawther perfect recall, but softly, because most people had dropped out after the first verse. (That was probably good sing-along etiquette on their part, if you want to know the truth.)

But Christopher Plummer, the people! His faintly--and not-so-faintly--disdainful air. His patrician bearing and his way with a guitar. His courtly and--it must be said--sexy way with the choreographed Ländler:

Hell yes.

Good heavens. I'd forgotten that, but there it was: hot Captain Von Trapp, dancing his way into a confusing but very gratifying declaration of love to Maria. She runs away, the Mother S. tells her to quit her mousing around and meet her destiny. Awesome veil, cathedral wedding, Nazis, and a daring escape.

I guess Christopher Plummer didn't much like the movie when he was working on it. "The Sound of Mucus," he acknowledges now having said at the time. But that hauteur actually worked for the role, I think. And those songs are undeniably splendid, and Julie A. never looked more lovely, even working marionettes or wearing a dress made out of draperies, or glowing next to the super-refined but unlucky-in-love Baroness. Julie the Nun was the star, even wearing an unlovely dress.

"You brought music back into the house. I had forgotten," the Captain said to her. Yes: his heart beat and sighed with it, the hills alive with it.

What is praying?

I am asking myself. I feel I have never been particularly good at it, at least not in the form that I think of as prayer.

I was talking about it this week with one of my sons, then another. A friend of the family, my son's friend particularly, is in the hospital, in a coma. We are all thinking of him and waiting for news, hoping that the news will be good.

Does it comfort you to think that maybe just keeping him in your heart and your thoughts is a kind of prayer?  I asked my son.

Does it comfort me to think this?

I am trying to keep an image of David, our friend, in my thoughts. An image of him happy. A lively image.

Is this prayer? Is it important that it be prayer?

I remember when I was in Vermont at the artists' colony. The founders of the colony practiced Buddhism. At the time, I felt skeptical of this, and thought of it as an appropriation of a religious tradition from an entire other culture.

One of my new friends at the colony, a poet, said, The idea is that the person meditating thinks of the suffering of the world and holds it in her kind Buddhist heart.

Appropriation or not, how could this be wrong?

In the spiritual tradition of my people, there is a scripture that calls upon the believer to cry to the Lord when ye are in your fields and over all your household, morning and mid-day and evening. Other places, too--the volume and breadth of the locations of this cry to God seemed to me, always, to suggest that a person could keep a prayer--a cry, a thought, a gesture--always with her. Often, at least.

I am remembering the times he was in my house, when he ate something I made, when he and my son were talking.

I am thinking about my sons and my daughters.

I am hoping soon to hear that David is awake and alive. I am hoping. In my heart, he is awake and alive.

Personal cinematic history.

The first movie I loved was Mary Poppins.

(The second movie I loved was The Sound of Music. I think we can see a theme here, a Julie Andrews related theme. O! Julie Andrews! what a wonderful set of pipes you had! What a range! And such impeccable diction!)

What Mary Poppins was about, firstly, was the children, the poor neglected children, who just wanted a nanny who did not

my first cinematic fixation.

• smell of barley water

and who would

• love them as a son or daughter,

and a few other sundry qualifications such as

• no warts,
• rosy cheeks,
• witty
• very sweet
• fairly pretty.

And also, and for good measure,

• play games, all sorts
• sing songs
• bring sweets
• never cross
• nor cruel
• never feed them castor oil or gruel 

(Jane and Michael Banks had mad flow and rhyming skillz.)

It goes without saying, of course, that they wanted no

• scolding nor dominating.

I loved this song so much that I rehearsed it so I could sing it at parties. Even though I was never actually invited to sing it at a party. My performance may not have been as delightful as I imagined.

I could have watched that movie all day, every day, for a protracted period in the 1st to 2nd grade era of my life. I have no actual memory of seeing it in a theater, although I'm sure that I did. I do remember, however, watching it with avid attention on The Wonderful World of Disney.  I am pretty sure that I also had Mary Poppins paper dolls, although I might be making that up, since I also remember with great vividness a cloisonné ring, white with a tiny pink rose, that I apparently had when I was, like, five, but my best friend stole it from me. Or maybe I dreamed it. 

I am, however, pretty sure that I listened to the music from the movie every Saturday of my young life, because, starting fairly early each Saturday morning, my father always played a reel-to-reel tape with all sorts of music for our enjoyment while we did our chores. I believe it was Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, The Singing Nun, and Camelot.  Why The Singing Nun? "Dominique," that's why. 

I also liked to let my voice and spirits soar with the Bird Woman of St. Paul's. Who didn't? If you ever go to St. Paul's, which I highly recommend--definitely go up to the Whispering Gallery--I defy you not to hear this song in some ancient chamber of your mind, where the old movies are playing on a continuous loop, and you are still trying to appeal to the perfect nanny to come to you, bringing sweets and carrying a carpet bag with all manner of mysteries inside.

The Megastore recommends.

I would like a patch for the
weather eye. Wouldn't you?

1. Keeping a weather eye open. I am, perhaps, in the minority here, but I do love a storm, and I do love a bout of weather descending upon us. I like the dark descending and I like it to descend decisively. This, however, is not what I am about to recommend. In fact, I'm starting to feel a little sheepish about my all snow or nothing at all! mentality.

What I'm recommending instead is the historian's weather eye, which is focused on the warm afternoon and the opportunity for a bike ride.


"I don't know if you're interested, but I thought I'd take Bruiser over the playground and let him romp around," he said to me, peering into my cave/study. Where I was huddled over my laptop, grading.

"Give me five minutes," I said, thinking, I can just finish this discussion.

Which I did, almost, and then put my shoes on.

"If you wanted to, you could ride your bike over," he said. "Or otherwise, we could take your car."

That's because the back of his car is filled with his bike. In case beautiful weather breaks out and he can take a spontaneous ride.

"No, I'll ride my bike." And, reader, that bike was a good reminder that on a golden afternoon, regardless of whether it happens to be in the first part of November when by golly it oughta be cold, you should bust out your bike for a spin if you can. And for heaven's sake, wear your helmet.

I personally like to don a pinafore
for my Friday morning writing.

2. Writing. This past Friday was my writing group. I kept thinking there might be a poem about to happen. I had been hauling around a lovely image for a week and a half, and then I came across another image and I thought I could get the two images together and they might copulate, as it were, and a bouncing new poem might be in the offing.

Alas, no. Even so, I did get the two images together and I thought some more about the slightly disappointing Michaelmas daisies that are in my front yard (they are a slightly wan color, where many Michaelmas daisies are a lovely more intense lilac), and so I looked up Michaelmas, which gave me plenty more material and I am BAM on my way to a poem, maybe. Feels good. I recommend it.

My quiet afternoons would totally
look just like this, if I were in Tuscany.

3. A quiet afternoon. Oh how I love a quiet afternoon. I sometimes fight with myself about the overflow of joys I have in my life (the fact that I fight with myself about them is absurd and yet ongoing). But when a quiet afternoon happens--unspoken for, without claim--I love it, and when I seize it with all my energy and powers, it makes me feel restored and capable, like I am living my life and it is not living me. You can grade, read the paper, and eat a sandwich, take a break. You can make a list and check things off the list one two three. Quiet afternoons are so choice! Should you have the means, I highly recommend that you pick one up.

Did you know that naps had science?
They do! This graph is science!

4. Nap Saturday. I don't want all my Saturdays to be nap-centric. But sometimes after a very busy week, when you haven't slept all that well and you have run hither and yon and you are perhaps behind in your work, a nap will be just the thing. A nap will make you lie down and stop running hither and yon. A nap will slow you down. A nap will let your cells unclench their cellular fists. A nap will make your limbic eyelids stop twitching. A nap will put you in your comfortable clothes and make you soak in the sunlight pouring in the window. A nap, in short, will save your life, if not forever then for today, and today is something worth saving, now, isn't it?

Stuff.

Graphic credit: Carl Richards via The New York Times

We have a lot of it.

That is not all.

We have made the monumental decision to improve the basement of our house by getting sheetrock and better ceilings and a couple of power outlets in the hall and new carpet in the bedrooms and some other shenanigans I don't know what all.

This necessitated removing stuff from the rooms that are to be improved.

So. Much. Stuff.

The untidiness!

The Gatorade bottles, empty, under certain people's beds!

"We have got to get rid of some of this furniture," I said, emphatically, to the historian, while sitting on some of the furniture that we might have to get rid of.

"I promise," said the historian.

Tomorrow, the wrecking ball.

I mean the contractors.

As God is my witness, we will get rid of some of that stuff.

And that IS
all.

The dark.

Darlings! I am officially at that moment of the year when it is 6:43 p.m. and I feel like, what, is it bedtime yet? So dark. Also: cold. And I feel a tad sniffly, like maybe there's a cold about to happen, because my sleep, she is all mixed up.

But never mind. Today, I added yet another item to my permanent collection of long cardigans (cozy division), and have spent time burrowing into the cinematic (not really) archives of my screencasts, only to come to the inescapable conclusion that

• although the screencaster seeks to make a durable instructional artifact,
• time and tide do transform the landscape of, well, everything, and lo the screencasts of yesteryear do in the cold light(-ish) of day seem veritably old-timey and unbearably dated, and thus
• the screencaster feels called to make a new one. Yes,
• a new screencast, on an old topic, but with new examples and less static slides.

Therefore:

• woe.

But never mind. Today for lunch I made a sandwich on a pretzel roll which, whoa, they are good. What was on my sandwich, you ask? Well! 

• since we're working in bullet points, it was
• melted gruyere and
• avocado and
• lots of little cut-up cherry tomatoes and
• Maldon salt (infinitely better than regular salt, I swear it!), and
• pepper, obvs, and
• arugula.

I made it

• open-faced

so that I could prolong the pleasure. And lo it was very good.

Also, I made a new screencast, and captioned it. And I made a

• list of the other tasks I have to do,
• none of which I have actually "accomplished."

So: good day.

Recently, my friend Ann, whose writing I have been reading for more than 30 years, true story!, asked me to answer these questions, called The Blog Tour. (you can read her answers here.)

1. What are you working on right now?

Right now, I'm revising a manuscript of poems. I'm writing new poems from time to time as well.

2. How does it differ form other works in its genre?

Hey, Blog Tour questions, when I read this question yesterday, it sent me into an existential crisis! How the hell should I know how it differs from other works in the genre? I can barely wrap my mind around these two facts:

• (a) I am a poet. And
• (2) WHY.

Welllll, it's a manuscript of poems. It still has some religion in it, which maybe is out of style these days? Or not. It is lyric. It feels urgent to me, and also late (maybe this is because I am getting older?). But in that it is lyric and deals with the usual lyric questions (beauty, joy/melancholy, death and loss, the persistence of song), I guess it is kind of of a piece with lyric poetry, that ancient art.

3. Why do you write what you do?

My answer to this may sound flippant, but it's true: because I can. Because I can, I do.

4. How does your writing process work?

I am currently not in much of a writing groove. But when I am, I more or less regularly write stuff down that I mentally tag "poem-ish" or "possibly poem-ish" or "smells like teen poetry." I have a document called "Daily Writing" that I write in semi-annually, which is where I record the poem-ish material. Sometimes--lucky times--a poem will come to me almost whole, or at least the whole gesture, or nearly the whole gesture. In that case I write it down, if I'm smart. I'm not always smart.

If I don't get the whole poem or the whole gesture, then periodically I go back through my notes and see what seems interesting. Sometimes, I take the interesting bits and create a new document to see if I can make something happen. Sometimes the "Daily Writing" document will give me an idea and I let that idea stew for a while, and then I see if I can make something out of that stewing.

I remember reading Stanley Kunitz, who said that when he was young he wrote all the time; as he got older, poems came to him less frequently. Philip Levine said that John Berryman told him, "When you are young, write everything that occurs to you." I did that, when I was younger. Right now, not so much is happening. But it will. I actually, now, kind of have faith in poetry. Right now, I am revising and shaping that manuscript. That is part of my process as well.

I am supposed to tag some of you, so watch out! I WILL TAG YOU.

To bake a pumpkin pie.

First, you must have purchased a pie pumpkin. These are generally round and compact and not of jack-o'-lantern proportions, rather smallish, modest, without aspirations for Cinderella transport or anything of the sort.

A Google Images reenactment
of my pumpkin pie/tart.

Next, you must assess your time and space availability. Because you will need to make a crust. You will need to roast the pumpkin. You should allow for the possible difficulties, crust-wise, and you must assess your butter stores. This is important. Without enough butter, your pie crust will be tricky, and you will not be happy.

You must develop a Plan A and a Plan B and possibly a Plan C. Plan A is the one where you make the pie dough the night before, so that it can "rest" and be at peace with itself. Plan A is the one where you come home from the movie on Friday night, get out your butter--ample and sufficient--and cut it into tiny cubes and rub it with your fingers into the flour, &c. &c. until the dough "gathers" into a "ball," and you press it into a flat round and put it in the refrigerator.

Plan B is where you decide you can do all of that the next day, the day the pie is to be taken to a party. And why not? In Plan B, you remind yourself of all the pies you've recently made, very successfully, you remind yourself, and also why be so ahead of yourself, when you're tired, heaven knows you are? And you still have to walk the dog?

Fourthly, at 4 p.m. the day of the party, you must reckon with the fact that you may have left yourself only barely enough time to make this damn pie.

Fifthly, you must reckon with the fact that you have only barely enough butter. Maybe not even quite that much.

Sixthly, you will forge ahead and make a pie dough that perhaps exhibits the symptoms of the not-quite-enough-butter factor, and thus the mark of a smallish bit of over handling. Alas.

HOWEVER: The fact that you have engaged with pie dough with great success and quite recently to boot will mean that the pie dough does not quite get the best of you. Almost but not quite. It will be crack-y and difficult, it will not quite cohere, it will show the seams. It will, in fact, deconstruct itself.

BUT:

When you whip up the roasted pumpkin with half and half and eggs and spices, &c. & c., when you dice up candied ginger and strew it in the bottom of your tart pan, when you in fact use a tart pan, which elevates your difficult crust into something slightly more suave, something slightly more European, when you bake the pie/tart, and an ineffable aroma disseminates and insinuates itself into the kitchen and then into the byways of the house:

THEN your pie will have arrived and fulfilled its destiny, and you will have nothing to apologize for. You will take it to the party and serve it up in tiny slices, and you will be glad yet again not just for this pie, or the arrival of pumpkin season, but for the category of pie itself.

And that will be that.

Even tinier letters.

Dear student consultations that lasted the whole of last week,

Man, you really took it out of me.

still tired,

htms

*

Dear The Blacklist,

Even though as late as last week, I was still watching you, despite the fact that I really could see pretty much all of your flaws, when I read that Emily Nussbaum called you "torture porn," I now do kind of have to quit you.

sorry, but she's right,

htms

**

Dear all the committees,

I am tired of your shenanigans.

now, which one of you shall I quit?

htms

***

Dear fallen leaves,

When I saw you all over the back lawn, it was like the atmosphere was yellow.

you're really beautiful,

htms

****

Dear harbinger of the storm,

I walked straight toward you, from meeting to meeting, and I closed my eyes and breathed you in.

I've been waiting for you,

htms

Tiny little letters.

Dear Work Outfit,

I selected you on the basis of strict criteria:

• cute
• comfortable
• in it for the duration.

And for meeting all those standards, you were good, you were very good. You did your job and more.

But how deeply moved I felt, when day was done, to take you off and resume my soft, stretchy, which is to say giving, home outfit.

I won't forget you, but still.

htms

*

Dear Last Student Conference of the Day,

It wasn't even a long day, really, student conference-wise: just six. But you, Last Student Conference of the Day, were at 7 p.m., when I was already in my soft, stretchy, which is to say giving, home outfit. And I was hungry. 

It helped that the student was a good one. That she was genuinely interested in talking about her writing. That she told me she liked my class, and yes, I did believe her.

And yet, upon your conclusion, Last Student Conference of the Day, my energies did finally flag. And thus, Rubio's and The Big Bang Theory. Last week's episode and tonight's. And a big, deep sigh.

whew,

htms

**

Dear Slightly-Better-Than-Fast-Food Taco,

Thank you for being there in my hour of need. You are not the best taco in the world. But you are not the worst, and you are ready and willing when my energies do flag. Also, no one will complain if I wear my soft, stretchy, which is to say giving, outfit to acquire and eat you.

srsly, thank you,

htms

***

Dear End of the Week,

Even though I still have eight more student conferences tomorrow, and ten more assignments to read before that, and even though I must go into work to conduct said conferences, it is a fact that, when the week you come at the end of has been full of student conferences and other things, including appointments that I've forgotten and tasks piling up and not enough writing or reading and the mounting of deadlines:

Even so, End of the Week, OMG you taste so sweet.

So very sweet!

htms

thanks to Ann for the

inspiration!

Dear some things to think about,

I try to keep a running list of you, some things to think about. But you are slippery, like thought itself. For instance, I was thinking about something as simple as it's time to put the clean sheets on the bed. It's simple because there are, in fact, no sheets on the bed at the moment. So the time is optimal for clean sheets, or any sheets, although where sheets are concerned, clean is preferable to any of the alternatives, as I see it.

Well, there the bed sits, naked and without sheets, but it so happens that several important and fat catalogs arrived in the mail today, which clearly needed perusing. It also so happens that an unmade bed is, if not optimal, just fine for perusing catalogs. So I did: I perused them, which led me inextricably to consider the fact of my nail polish, which was chipping. Nail polish remover, a new coat, and here I am with nails too fresh for making a bed, obviously. Obviously!

It's just like that, some things to think about. My office, for instance, is a den of madness. (My office at home--at work, my office is pristine, immaculate, worthy of worship, a shrine to what is good and right in the universe.) A den of thieves, I want to say, although that's Biblical. Actually, though, Biblical is the frame of mind that the den of chaos that is my office puts me in. Hellfire and Old Testament punishments.

If I could keep track of you, some things to think about, maybe I could make something happen in the Orderliness quadrant of Desirable Qualities to Have [DQH™]. Yet here I am, blogging. When all else fails: blog. But blogging doesn't put the Order back into the DQH™. It just doesn't.

Some things to think about, I wish that the list of you would stop running. I wish it would stand still so I could take the measure of you. Stop moving and slipping, some things to think about! When will I ever [X] if you don't?

disorderly but with super shiny nails,

htms

Dear the Internet,

A visualization of routing paths through a
portion of the Internet. (Wikipedia)

I tried so hard to find you.

In West Yellowstone, you were not to be found in coffee shops, nor bookstores, nor brewpubs, nor restaurants, nor in the streets.

In Yellowstone National Park, not that I'm complaining, you were nowhere.

In my hotel, the threshold to you--a tiny little wireless signal--diminished and disappeared as I walked down the hall to my room, in the door...and poof  you were gone.

The internet in this town was
scarce indeed.

Do not ask me, the Internet, why I cannot do without you. I did without you, so it isn't a matter of cannot. But at this point in time--in history--the Internet is like oxygen. It is like oxygen, bonded with hydrogen. It is like a molecule of water, joined with other molecules of water in a heedless flow of information, like a river. Like one of the many rivers we walked beside in Yellowstone, where, it goes without saying, you, the Internet, were nowhere to be found.

In the end, we went in the tiny, tidy little library of West Yellowstone. The librarian looked at me. He know without my even saying.

"Do you by chance have wireless?" I asked, weary and pathetic.

He held out a slip of paper with the network and password.

The Internet, thank God for libraries. And librarians.


next time, don't be such a stranger,

htms

The Way to Grace.

Dear The Way to Grace,

Tonight, I saw you in Pocatello, Idaho, just past the parking lot of an Applebee's. It seems to me that I have crossed you before, although I never before saw the sign. Your sudden appearance raises a few questions for me.

Are you, The Way to Grace, only a Pocatello thing? Or are you in other Idaho towns? Is Applebee's on The Way to Grace? Or was that just coincidental?

Perhaps it was that enormous wedge salad I ate, or the small headache I had from driving? Although I don't think it was an hallucination.

Was it the hour, after dark? the season, late? the particular crossroads?

Will you appear to me again when I least expect it? I know I will think of you. If I want to find you, where shall I look?

sincerely,

htms

Posted with Blogsy

Dear difficulty,

Ordinarily I would not begin by calling you "dear."

Of you, difficulty, there are various kinds. Of the first order, the trivial. To this category belongs mislaying one set of keys in yesterday's purse. Forgetting one's water bottle. The fact that the battery in the garage door opener is, apparently, kaput. These difficulties make the project of leaving the house in the morning a small ordeal. But small: an ordeal, but just a small one.

The order of the second kind of difficulty is the trial. To carry on with the courtroom metaphor, a trial of the small claims court variety, wherein one goes in to speak to the judge, to argue--suggest, really--that one's ill temper in the morning meeting* was occasioned by a series of small ordeals upon leaving the house that morning. At this sort of trial, not really a trial at all, the judge is inclined to let one off with a warning or perhaps a small fine. The thing that makes this trial a trial is that being cautioned or fined by a judge is in itself a trial, the kind that leaves one muttering about injustice for the rest of the day.

Dear difficulty, in the third order, there is the aching back that cannot be entirely eased, not even by stretches performed behind one's desk, accompanied by a small dose of anxiety that people can perhaps see the stretching through the not-quite-opaque glass. The aching back, added to the rest-of-the-day meetings, added to the sixteenth day of the government shutdown and the endless posturing by smug, bloviating bastards. The third order of you, dear difficulty, is a difficulty added upon, a difficulty by means of compounding: a difficulty that is, by virtue of its many parts, magnified and aggregated and addendum'd and be-densified until it seems very like a juggernaut: a whale of a difficulty, verily! an ogre and a golem of a difficulty.

But when the day is done, dear difficulty, one arrives at one's home, despite the aching back, to find that there is half a pizza. One enters to find a home which, despite its various slovenlinesses and disarrays, has a dog who finds one's arrival, and a husband who is prepared to watch Modern Family and the hot mess that is Nashville. One can dress down, and seize upon one's most comfortable clothes and one's slippers. One may read, upon refreshing Facebook and the New York Times website several (dozen) times, that the government shutdown has ended and the debt default is staved off.

And, dear difficulty, yet again one finds that without you, none of these comforts would be half so sweet.

But no more debt ceiling shenanigans--that was too far, times a million--

Exaggerating only a little,

htms

*the "ill temper in the morning meeting" is a fiction enacted here to illustrate the second order of difficulty. There was no actual ill temper this morning. No indeed! The author arrived at the morning meeting in fine fettle and full of good humor. In fact, the author is creating this entire fiction because (a) she has taken the government shutdown and debt ceiling brinksmanship rather hard, perhaps even personally, and thus (b) she is srsly relieved that it is over. 

(--at least for now.)