one year

I guess it’s been about a year–a little more–since we went on our first date. Of course, neither of considered it a date at the time, but in hindsight we realize:  it was a night for falling in love, a First story so lovely it’s practically from the books. A whole year ago! It’s such a very short amount of time–I feel ashamed to admit it to people who are older or more conservative than I–but it feels longer; I have changed and grown so much that the last year feels like lifetimes.

He is, of course, my former boss, who I agonized about seeing the last time I remembered I had a blog, who I was sure would break my heart. I moved away and in with him in february. Then it was much less than a year and I shocked myself when I agreed to it:  I have always been ponderously cautious when heartbreak is even a faint possibility, always slow to take risks. We had not publicly been dating for very long at all. But when I considered my options–leap or say goodbye forever–I felt it would be a horrible mistake not to go with him.

We live in Colorado now, which is much nicer than Wyoming but not as invigorating as big-city-California. We no longer work together, of course. I quit when he was promoted to manager and given his transfer. I found a job here at an independent used bookstore and it is the most perfect I’ve ever had–I never imagined that I could feel so content outside of academia, but now I’m not sure if I ever want to go back. I am paid very well to sell books to an array of the most interesting & dear people–it is my calling, I think. And when I come home I’ve got him.

Like everyone else, we muddle through this business of love and commitment. It’s not perfect. Yes, there is some of the heartbreak I’ve feared so much all of my life. We fight, I get hurt, I hurt him. But there’s a constancy, a surety, to our relationship that I thought myself too damaged to feel, much less live. It’s the most glorious thing in the world to see him in the morning, to hold and be held.

…

So, that’s the update. That’s my year past. Blog, consider yourself resurrected.

declaration

Dear internet,

I think I am in love. With a guy whose job makes our relationship completely amoral and tragic. Really, I never thought I was the sort of girl who’d fuck her boss. But he’s not just my boss–more importantly he’s this funny smart sweet silly kind excellent human being and I’m fairly sure I’m in for a lot of heartbreak. But, you know, I don’t really care, and that’s part of why I’m bandying about a word like “love.”

In the meantime, have not had much time for internetting. I’m only here now because I am sick-abed and he’s at work. It’s that dull stage of total immersion, I’m afraid. I’ve got nothing to say except reflections on the sculptural perfection of his nose and there’s no way I’m deluded enough to think that such dreck should escape the pages of a paper journal, so I’ll stop. But I did want to say something. Even if I’m just talking to myself.

love,

c.

p.s. Sarah Haskins is hilarious and insightful enough that I feel I can give it up for life. Go watch her on Target:  Women!

I found a bookmeme over at Booking Through Thursday and decided to use it as an excuse to post here again. After all, November is coming up… it’s either a novel or the blog, and god knows that I haven’t got a book in my these days, so.

What was the last book you bought?

A double-header:  The People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn and The Flip Dictionary (a birthday present for a friend). It’s surprising; my book buying has actually decreased since I started working at one, but every once in a while I can’t resist. The last book that I got for free as a perk at said bookstore job was Pillars of the Earth because I find it advantageous to read Oprah’s picks–I can sell any book so long as I’ve read it.

Name a book you have read MORE than once.

Pnin by Nabokov! I just finished my fourth reading of it–and I rarely read books more than once. I never tire of Nabokov’s sentences, and Pnin is such a tragic–yet resilient and hopeful–character. I’d like to meet him.

Has a book ever fundamentally changed the way you see life? If yes, what was it?

Probably. Probably I could write a whole post about these books. Maybe I will someday.

How do you choose a book? eg. by cover design and summary, recommendations or reviews

Never by cover alone! I choose books by recommendations, canon, reviews, and sales. In that order. The last is for the job. Recommendations and reviews (by a trusted reviewer, which is almost the same thing as a friend) have the most weight.

Do you prefer Fiction or Non-Fiction?

Fiction! I like nonfic, I start a lot of nonfic, but I tend to get bored or distracted before I finish. Fiction is always more riveting. Perhaps it’s the stereotypical escape from reality.

What’s more important in a novel – beautiful writing or a gripping plot?

What, can’t I have both? Which I find more satisfying depends on my mood, but really, an ideal book has both. Which isn’t to say that I don’t love things like Proust, which is all lovely sentences and little plot… Yeah, it’s mood-dependent. On rainy dreamy days sentences are the way to go. During weeks of drudge and boredom plot thrills me most. (Though there is, of course, a certain standard of quality that must always be maintained.)

Most loved/memorable character (character/book)

I already talked about Pnin! Carson McCullers’ lonely teenage girls are also dear to me–Frankie from The Member of the Wedding and Mick from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. My fondness for them might be pure narcisism, though. Benji and Quentin Compton from Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury are haunting. I used to be in love with Daniel Deronda and spent a lot of time trying to manifest his doppelganger in my real life.

Which book or books can be found on your nightstand at the moment?

Life & Fate by Vasily Grossman, Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz, The People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Macado de Assis, the best short stories of 2008, and How the Dead Live by Will Self. I didn’t notice until this moment that (excepting the anthology) they are all male authors. Don’t tell my women’s college, they’ll take away my diploma!

Visible World by Richard Siken

I do not like ordering books online but I really should make an exception for Siken. Here’s another, with the formatting tragically stripped because I am all sorts of inept when it comes to these things.

Visible World
by Richard Siken
Sunlight pouring across your skin, your shadow
flat on the wall.
The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs.
You had not expected this,
the bedroom gone white, the astronomical light
pummeling you in a stream of fists.
You raised your hand to your face as if
to hide it, the pink fingers gone gold as the light
streamed straight to the bone,
as if you were the small room closed in glass
with every speck of dust illuminated.
The light is no mystery,
the mystery is that there is something to keep the light
from passing through.

graduated and unemployed

Well, I’m graduated. The period of stunned disbelief is slightly wearing off, though I still can’t shake the guilt I get on days when I don’t do reading or work that resembles study. It’s terrible, how ingrained the impulse to study is by this point. I feel like a lesser human being if I don’t read Derrida or literary criticism or Very Weighty Canonical Literature every single day…

I would probably better be able to snap out of this strange academic hangover if I had a job, but I haven’t found one yet, and, antisocial, I know no way to fill time but by study. I find I am shockingly unqualified for most work considering that I got my degree from a swanky, mad expensive, generally well regarded private school where I was considered a top student and a teacher favourite. I know english literature isn’t exactly the most employable major, but I’m smart, personable enough, highly literate, a quick learner, and I write well — shouldn’t these qualities make it, if not easy, at least not difficult to find employment? Maybe the problem is that I’m not looking for a career of any sort, and that I shy away from secretary and office work, which is what my job history most qualifies me for. I’d be perfectly happy making coffee at this point (at least I’d get to talk to people all day long), but I don’t know how to work an espresso machine or a cash register, and who the hell is going to take the time to teach me? They all want at least a year of experience.

I’m seriously thinking of selling my body to science. Take my kidneys, urine, blood, lung tissue! Seems like a fair enough exchange for a few hundred and a place to go during the day.

(Does anyone know of any job opportunities in the bay area?)

not done yet…

Every other day my friend L. calls me. Before I even say hello I answer her question, “Not yet. Not done yet.” Then we talk for two minutes in which I chatter about what I am doing and promise to call her the instant I send in my last paper.

If she called right now the interaction would be exactly the same. Not yet.

I stopped counting how many pages I produced last week after I finished my 23-page thesis and then immediately wrote a 17 page paper (that was only supposed to be 10). Still to do: minimum 14 pages? In 24 hours? No matter; I am a paper-writing machine. My confidence might just be delirium from sleeplessness and too much caffeine.

Here are some of my titles:

• The Interior Jungle: Articulation of Identity in Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding
• Of Parents and Portraits: The Moribund Identity of Aurora Leigh
• Deconstruction as Negative Theology: Mystical Undertones in Derrida (epigraph: “I pray God to rid me of God.” — Meister Eckhart)
• The Monologism of Madness (working title. clearly needs at least one colon & possibly an epigraph.)

In case you’re wondering, then yes, I did write almost solely about construction of identity this semester. Psychoanalysis, anyone?

two poems about words

Which one I believe changes pretty much from day to day. Words and I have a very complicated relationship.

I do not think the first is a very good poem, but I have always really liked certain lines in it, particularly the ending. The second I have just discovered and need to read outloud and write down before I can decide what I think. But the counterpart of them struck me.

“Words”
by Anne Sexton

Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
and leave not a sting but a kiss.
They can be as good as fingers.
They can be as trusty as the rock
you stick your bottom on.
But they can be both daisies and bruises.
Yet I am in love with words.
They are doves falling out of the ceiling.
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
They are the trees, the legs of summer,
and the sun, its passionate face.
Yet often they fail me.
I have so much I want to say,
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
But the words aren’t good enough,
the wrong ones kiss me.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle
but with the wings of a wren.
But I try to take care
and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible
things to repair.

“One Star Fell and Another”
by Conrad Aiken

One star fell and another as we walked.
Lifting his hand towards the west, he said–
–How prodigal that sky is of its stars!
They fall and fall, and still the sky is sky.
Two more have gone, but heaven is heaven still.

Then let us not be precious of our thought,
Nor of our words, nor hoard them up as though
We thought our minds a heaven which might change
And lose its virtue, when the word had fallen.
Let us be prodigal, as heaven is:
Lose what we lose, and give what we may give,–
Ourselves are still the same. Lost you a planet–?
Is Saturn gone? Then let him take his rings
Into the Limbo of forgotten things.

O little foplings of the pride of mind,
Who wrap the phrase in lavender, and keep it
In order to display it: and you, who save our loves
As if we had not worlds of love enough–!

Let us be reckless of our words and worlds,
And spend them freely as the tree his leaves;
And give them where the giving is most blest.
What should we save them for,–a night of frost? . . .
All lost for nothing, and ourselves a ghost.

stealing sugar from the castle

I have some latent dubiety about Robert Bly as both a translator and a poet, but this poem — specifically this poem declaimed in his voice on the radio (turned up very very high so that he almost shouted) as I drove too fast down the 580 late to meeting a friend, nervous jittery chainsmoking, drinking a quadruple-shot coffee — made me very happy for a few minutes, was a glorious beginning to a tough day.

Stealing Sugar From the Castle – by Robert Bly

We are poor students who stay after school to study joy.
We are like those birds in the India mountains.
I am a widow whose child is her only joy.

The only thing I hold in my ant-like head
Is the builder’s plan of the castle of sugar.
just to steal one grain of sugar is a joy!

Like a bird, we fly out of darkness into the hall,
Which is lit with singing, then fly out again.
Being shut out of the warm hall is also a joy.

I am a laggard, a loafer, and an idiot. But I love
To read about those who caught one glimpse
Of the Face, and died twenty years later in joy.

I don’t mind your saying I will die soon.
Even in the sound of the word soon, I hear
The word you which begins every sentence of joy.

“You’re a thief!” the judge said. “Let’s see
Your hands!” I showed my callused hands in court.
My sentence was a thousand years of joy.

I don’t know, I can’t tell. Maybe it’s only good in his voice. If you want, you too can experience the poem in his voice, if you wish–not quite as good in terms of force and movement as the one I caught, as he digresses a lot, but his comments are really delightful–here. I’d love to see him read…

back to Virginia

I must keep up with the reading of her; she is so good for my soul. This is from October 11, 1929, Vol. 3 of the Diaries:

“Hence, perhaps, these October days are to me a little strained & surrounded with silence. What I mean by this last word I don’t quite know, since I have never stopped ‘seeing’ people … No; it is not physical silence; it is some inner loneliness–interesting to analyse if one could. To give an example–I was walking up Bedford Place is it–the straight street with all the boarding houses this afternoon, & I said to myself spontaneously, something like this. How I suffer, & no one knows how I suffer, walking up this street, engaged with my anguish, as I was after Thoby died–alone; fighting something alone. But then I had the devil to fight, & now nothing. And when I come indoors, it is all so silent–I am not carrying a great rush of wheels in my head–Yet I am writing–oh & we are very successful–& there is–what I most love–change ahead. … And it is autumn; & the lights are going up & Nessa is in Fitzroy Street–in a great misty room, with flaring gas & unsorted plates & glasses on the floor,–& the Press is booming–& this celebrity business is quite chronic–& I am richer than I have ever been–& bought a pair of earrings today–& for all this, there is vacancy & silence somewhere in the machine.

On the whole, I do not much mind; because, what I like is to flash & dash from side to side, goaded on by what I call reality. If I never felt these extraordinarily pervasive strains–of unrest, or rest, or happiness, or discomfort–I should float down into acquiescence. Here is something to fight: & when I wake early I say to myself, Fight, fight. If I could catch the feeling, I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness & silence from the habitable world; the sense that comes to me of being bound on an adventure; of being strangely free now, with money & so on, to do anything. … I daresay I shan’t. But anything is possible. And this curious steed, life; is genuine–Does any of this convey what I want to say?–But I have not really laid hands on the emptiness after all.”

Laura, again

Saving Laura, Part 2; Or, Nabokov’s Walled Garden

A year before his death, Vladimir Nabokov responded to a Book Review survey which asked authors for comments on their three most enjoyed books of the year. The last book that he mentioned was his own, the controversial and never-published manuscript Laura. It seems as if the book will be published after all, a turn that has me torn between !!!! and regret. The scale has been tipped a bit towards !!!! by the last paragraph of the NYT blog linked to above, which quotes Nabokov’s comments on The Original of Laura:

“The third, as he wrote, is ‘The Original of Laura. The not quite finished manuscript of a novel which I had begun writing and reworking before my illness and which was completed in my mind: I must have gone through it some 50 times and in my diurnal delirium kept reading it aloud to a small dream audience in a walled garden. My audience consisted of peacocks, pigeons, my long dead parents, two cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible. Perhaps because of my stumblings and fits of coughing the story of my poor Laura had less success with my listeners than it will have, I hope, with intelligent reviewers when properly published.'”

Lovely, lovely Nabokov! I want that book despite myself.

adore the way this poem starts / not so sure about the end

Other Lives And Dimensions And Finally A Love Poem
Bob Hicok

My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers
of my palms tell me so.
Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish
at the same time. I think

praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think
staying up and waiting
for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this
is exactly what’s happening,

it’s what they write grants about: the chromodynamics
of mournful Whistlers,
the audible sorrow and beta decay of Old Battersea Bridge.
I like the idea of different

theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass,
a Bronx where people talk
like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow
kind, perhaps in the nook

of a cousin universe I’ve never defiled or betrayed
anyone. Here I have
two hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your back
to rest my cheek against,

your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish.
My hands are webbed
like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed
something in the womb

but couldn’t hang on. One of those other worlds
or a life I felt
passing through mine, or the ocean inside my mother’s belly
she had to scream out.

Here, when I say I never want to be without you,
somewhere else I am saying
I never want to be without you again. And when I touch you
in each of the places we meet,

in all of the lives we are, it’s with hands that are dying
and resurrected.
When I don’t touch you it’s a mistake in any life,
in each place and forever.

miss this view

I used to smoke in the stairwell of my dorm, breaking all sorts of California laws and school rules. It was technically indoors, but was really more like an outdoor passageway with a roof. I sat directly in front of this window and watched it at every gradation of day and light imaginable. It reminded me of something from an ascetic nunnery or saint’s hovel with its stone and cracked, moldy plaster and barred windows with gorgeous sky and flowers beyond. This photo is probably almost exactly a year old now, and it has me awash with nostalgia. Miss those stairs, miss this view.

four for the price of one

• How many reviews/pieces of lit crit/essays/books/&c. begin by quoting my darling Keats’ maxim about Beauty=Truth/Truth=Beauty? If I were at all statistically minded, this is exactly the sort of question I would set out to answer, but I don’t really need the numbers to reach my conclusion: too goddamn many. Despite this annoyance, I am intrigued by the NYT review of George Johnson’s The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, a book, as the title suggests, about particularly transcendent instances of beauty in the search for scientific truth. I do love a pop-science book every now and again, so long as it is well-written. I should go iron out my library fines and see if anyone’s got it. If the author is appealing, it’s possible that he could be a gem of amusement for weeks to come.

• Robert Falcon Scott’s journals of the lost Scott Expedition are online and free at Gutenberg! I am very excited to have discovered this, can’t wait to read them, & must remember to look for Shackleton as well, as I have been flirting the edges of an obsession with polar exploration ever since January, when I began to have dreams of wandering through Antarctic landscapes. In my dream my fingers fell off every time I removed my mittens, but always seemed to regenerate. I refused to throw them away, and carried them with me in my pack. The dreams were pervaded by a great sense of looking for something, though I didn’t know what, and would spend days after I had one pondering, trying to remember, eventually resorting to playing unsuccessful divination with Freud in hopes of interpretation. I gave up after a bit, accepted them, and decided that rather than it being any very significant subconscious event it was probably just Annie Dillard saturating my mind. I was deeply affected by her essay “An Expedition to the Pole” in Teaching a Stone to Talk. Religion! the Absolute! Antarctica! history! poetry! all in one gorgeous essay! O, she is a sublime synthesis:

“I have a taste for solitude, and silence, and for what Plotinus called ‘the flight of the alone to the Alone.’ I have a taste for solitude. Sir John Franklin had, apparently, a taste for backgammon. Is either of these appropriate conditions?

You quit your house and country, quit your ship, and quit your companions in the tent, saying, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’ The light on the far side of the blizzard lures you. You walk, and one day you enter the spread heart of silence, where lands dissolve and seas become vapor and ices sublime under unknown stars. This is the end of the Via Negativa, the lightless edge where the slopes of knowledge dwindle, and love for its own sake, lacking an object, begins.” –Annie Dillard, “An Expedition to the Pole”

• Sometimes I like to perambulate the entire circumference of my school’s library with the posture of a monarch surveying her domain: head up, spine straight, arms crossed loosely behind the back. I often pause to kiss the books like babies — Nabokov, 100-year-old copies of Keats and Shelley, misshelved french philosophers. At other times, when I have been studying for hours and just want to weep, I lie on my back in the poetry section and cover my face with an open book, not even someone who I love, just a pretty book with a pungent comforting library smell.

• I dream of living nearer to the lake so as to become well acquainted with the ducks and the geese. Observing them has been my central delight this week, though I have to be careful about my propensity to make meaningful eye contact with the geese, as it makes them react with aggression. It’s just that I want to approach the world from now on with a strict policy of meaningful eye contact in all interactions. But geese are not people even if their yoga poses might fool you into thinking they are!

justifiably proud

It doesn’t matter anymore if the work I churn out in the next few weeks is shoddy; I have garnered an academic and personal achievement sweet enough to mediate it all:  the response to my philosophy midterm, particularly the Heidegger/Nietzsche question:

“C — This is outstanding writing on an enormously difficult subject. A+ (circled twice)”

I cannot emphasize enough how enormously proud of myself this makes me, and how significant this pride is. I tend to meet even the best grades with stubborn dissatisfaction and a sense that I could have done much better, but in this case I couldn’t have worked any harder to reach a level of understanding of this most difficult and fascinating of philosophers, and to articulate this understanding. I did everything right when I worked on Heidegger and the midterm — rereading, working with the OED and the oxford dictionary of philosophy at either elbow, taking voluminous notes, thinking long and deeply and critically on the question before I began writing — and it shows. Despite earnest intentions, I rarely work so well because I usually do it for the wrong reason:  to prove myself to the teacher or my father or my friends, to garner favor and affirmation. This time I worked honestly, because I was fascinated and truly wanted to understand as best I could, and not because I adore my professor and wanted to impress his enormous intellect, and it is reflected in the writing that I produced. And it tastes really incredible.

confession

I know teachers say it’s evil and unreliable and all, and there’s no way I would ever cite it in a bibliography, but I totally have at this moment eight tabs open to various wikipedia articles relating to Derrida and deconstruction. If I fail on this paper I am going to blame this heavy wikipedia supplementation for perverting my understanding. But if I do well? Then I will have discovered the key to surviving philosophy as a non-philosophy major.

Those Graves in Rome

This is rather long, I know, and sometimes the eye, even the poem-loving eye, (I am talking about myself) balks at long poetry. But this — about Keats!! I like it, think it’s worth the length, and so am lifting it from this website without permission to repost here. Martha at April_is sent out a Levis poem today — based on that and this I hunger for more.

Those Graves in Rome
by Larry Levis
There are places where the eye can starve,
But not here. Here, for example, is
The Piazza Navona, & here is the narrow room
Overlooking the Steps & and crowds of sunbathing
Tourists. And here is the Protestant Cemetery
Where Keats & Joseph Severn join hands
Forever under a little shawl of grass
And where Keats’ name isn’t even on
His gravestone, because it is on Severn’s,
And Joseph Severn’s infant son is buried
Two modest, grassy steps behind them both.
But you’d have to know the story—how bedridden
Keats wanted the inscription to be
Simple & unbearable: “Here lies one
Whose name is writ in water.” On a warm day,
I stood here with my two oldest friends.
I thought, then, that the three of us would be
Indissoluble at the end, & also that
We would all die, of course. And not die.
And maybe we should have joined hands at that
Moment. We didn’t. All we did was follow
A lame man in a rumpled suit who climbed
A slight incline of graves blurring into
The passing marble of other graves to visit
The vacant home of whatever is not left
Of Shelley & Trelawney. That walk uphill must
Be hard if you can’t walk. At the top, the man
Wheezed for breath; sweat beaded his face,
And his wife wore a look of concern so
Habitual it seemed more like the way
Our bodies, someday, will have to wear stone.
Later that night, the three of us strolled,
Our arms around each other, through the Via
Del Corso & toward the Piazza di Espagna
As each street grew quieter until
Finally we heard nothing at the end
Except the occasional scrape of our own steps,
And so said good-bye. Among such friends,
Who never allowed anything, still alive,
To die, I’d almost forgotten that what
Most people leave behind them disappears.
Three days later, staying alone in a cheap
Hotel in Naples, I noticed a child’s smeared
Fingerprint on a bannister. It
Had been indifferently preserved beneath
A patina of varnish applied, I guessed, after
The last war. It seemed I could almost hear
His shout, years later, on that street. But this
Is speculation, & no doubt the simplest fact
Could shame me. Perhaps the child was from
Calabria, & went back to it with
A mother who failed to find work, & perhaps
The child died there, twenty years ago,
Of malaria. It was so common then—
The children crying to the doctors for quinine,
And to the tourists, who looked like doctors, for quinine.
It was so common you did not expect an aria,
And not much on a gravestone, either—although
His name is on it, & weathered stone still wears
His name—not the way a girl might wear
The too large, faded blue workshirt of
A lover as she walks thoughtfully through
The Via Fratelli to buy bread, shrimp,
And wine for the evening meal with candles &
The laughter of her friends, & later the sweet
Enkindling of desire; but something else, something
Cut simply in stone by hand & meant to last
Because of the way a name, any name,
Is empty. And not empty. And almost enough.

rattlesnake

Reeve 60631, originally uploaded by otisarchives2.

Following a text-message discussion about snakes, I spent a while looking at pictures and x-rays of their skeletons online. Conclusion: I like snakes metaphorically, mythologically, biblically, and skeletally. In flesh and movement they are frightening.

I do tend to think that everything looks delicate and poetic in x-rays. But snakes especially.

not even solitude in mountains

Sometimes my eyes won’t stop counting and everywhere I look the world is made of odd numbers and then an internal narrative starts up in responsive overdrive, flooding sentence fragments of description and allusion. And between the whispershouting of it all — the numbers, the words, the world — I am deafened.

…

Less morosely, April is national poetry month. I am sure there is a T. S. Eliot joke somewhere in this fact but I am too tired to find and deliver. I am sad that I missed the first day, failed to commemorate and post a poem, but maybe it’s a sign that I should not attempt daily poems. I have not, after all, prepared a warehouse of pre-picked poems, and I do not trust serendipity to lead me every day to the necessary gems and masterpieces.  However, if you crave that sort of thing I recommend you go here and sign up for the mailing list. The person who runs it has a nose for great stuff, and few things are as delightful as getting daily poetry without having to go through the trouble of seeking it out for yourself.

archaeology

Home for spring break. Very windy here. Not much else to report from the homefront.

I have found a few ancient notebooks of mine — from when I very first began to keep them. It is fascinating personality archaeology, a phrase which I say with special relish because the one I just read was oriented specifically towards my imagined future career as an archaeologist:

“11/15/99

This is a new thing, just started today. I want to prepare for my future profession (archaeologist) by keeping this record of my days & doings & my current historical intrests [sic]. There, it’s official now. My new Archaeological practice journal. I will do my writing in ink, and my drawings in pencil. To be continued…”

“11/17/99

Katie is still out of school. Jess is really mad. I am too, kind of. Sometimes I wish I had mono. Following will be an ink drawing that will practice my drawing skills:

[a (rather impressive!) sketch of a pot, in ink, as promised]”

“11/22/99

Did you like my pot picture? I did. Next (on the following page) I will draw Giza, compleat with a sphinx and a camal. [ed. note:  sic, sic!]”

The picture on the following page is titled C. A.K.’s New & Improved Giza. I should take a photo & post it because, though my pyramids are strikingly one-dimensional, the camel is cute and the sphinx shows remarkable character — it’s golden. A later, much less refined picture of the Parthenon, features a donkey that looks more like an alpaca. I was big on infusing these historical scenes with dramatic sunrises and token animals, it seems. Because everyone knows that the ability to draw passable camels and donkeys is necessary for any budding archaeologist.

on the bright side, I’m now officially on spring break

Holy god.

I just wrote a NINE PAGE philosophy midterm. Nine pages. TWO QUESTIONS. Heidegger! Marx! Horkheimer & Adorno! Nietzsche! Habermas! HEIDEGGER!

The man is fucking insane.

(But have I mentioned lately how stunningly mad smart hot he is? Emphasis on the smart, of course. I love him. I would not put myself through this level of torture for anyone less.)