c.t. phone home

How's it going, abandoned Blogspot?

2011-12-11T06:19:00.000-08:00

No promises.

Went to our nation's capital.

2011-10-07T07:57:00.000-07:00

Wi Recall

2011-08-09T06:09:00.000-07:00

Today feels like a scary/hopeful mix of "today is the final exam in your hardest subject" and "you are six and it is Christmas and you really hope you get that toy pony."

So much has happened since February 14. We have grown in ways we did not expect.

All my love Wisconsin, Wisconsinites. Vote wisely.

Love song to my CSA, part I

2011-07-07T09:38:00.001-07:00

I'm not really a foodie, because I don't really care about intermingling flavors perfectly to complement each other. My philosophy is to put stuff that I like together and hope for the best.

Today's enormous salad is a good example of that. Contents:

Snap peas
Carrot slices
Grape tomatoes
Sliced beets
Cilantro
Beet greens
Swiss chard
Romaine lettuce
Spinach
Button mushrooms
Cucumbers
Topped with garlic cheddar and Thai peanut dressing

This is also how I dress myself, some days.

July roundup

2011-07-07T05:22:00.000-07:00

Posts that should be on this blog right now but aren't:

Love song to my summer CSA: a refrigerator bursting with green things, the dramatic fight against time as I try to use everything before it goes bad, and the inherent feast/famine cycle of receiving one large crate of perishables every two weeks.
A list of the changes in store mid-August, when everyone in town changes households, and whole configurations of couplehood either conjoin further or pull apart or more people leave for grad school. It looks like Willy St. and the North side are the places to be in 2012. I'll stay squatting on my shelf by the Arboretum, a little solitary, with no where I can walk to except one lovely little beer hole and the Trader Joe's I've forsworn in favor of a co-op, but still within biking distance of most other desirable things.
I got a new job. It will completely reconfigure how my time and energy are spent. Back to more reporter-like tasks (though I won't go so far as to say it's journalism). Science writing of a sort. I'm excited.
Some failures in my non-job life. Some are the usual failures. Some are new. What have we learned about ourselves and what we owe the world, et cetera.
Pictures of spiders, boats, bicycles, clothes flapping housewifeish on the laundry line, and this t-shirt I turned into a tank top. A view of the street at 6 a.m. A view out a window that you hope no one looks up into. The particular trickles of sweat inside your elbow when you talk on the phone in Wisconsin in July. And so on.

After the job switch, I plan to focus a bit more on longform nonfictional writing of various types. This blog is second on the list of venues to benefit from that kind of attention.

May is almost done already

2011-05-24T10:22:00.001-07:00

I finally bought that bed I've been wanting since October. My next act will be to paint constellations onto my new black sheets and sew rockets on my pillowcases. I have a solar system quilt, and the cat has so much space that she no longer wraps herself around my head and makes me sneeze. I am learning how to sprawl when I sleep instead of furl into myself like a snail. Not that a twin bed is so small, but the queen is defeating my instinct for smallness.

This morning I woke up in the predawn glow and fell in love with my apartment. Herbs growing on the porch, bed with aesthetically pleasant frame, windows filled with orange light and one filled with Algerian ivy. And then I felt uneasy at the sense of settling into a rut. A pleasant, white-collar rut.

A friend is loaning me a really nice camera for a few days, so I'll probably post all kinds of smarmy photos at some point soon.

I'm about to start grad school applications, which panics me. I just was starting to figure out how to have time for everything except poetry, which I miss badly.

Up and Atom

2011-05-11T05:02:00.000-07:00

I have been getting up very early (for me) this week so I can spend even more time at work before I start getting phone calls and having to deal with things that aren't The Things I Need To Get Done.

It is hard work, convincing myself that 5:15 is a reasonable time to be awake and that I should not just resume sleeping until my more usual 7, but then the sun is rising and the birds are chirreeping and light begins to filter through the squirrel-ear leaves on the trees and no one else is stirring in the street except maybe a garbage truck or someone running their dog and I feel privileged to bear witness to the start of the day.

The way to work is so damn pretty, mist and lake and field, which seems unfair. Some mornings I loop Beethoven's Ninth in my car and the CD ends, rapturously, just as I pull into the parking lot.

Protest 2.0

2011-05-08T12:47:00.001-07:00

I guess I was supposed to forward-promote this, but a 5-minute audio diary version of my Capitol sleepover essay for Dane101 ran on To The Best Of Our Knowledge this weekend. There are archives.

I hate listening to myself talk in recordings. It unsettles and disconcerts me. Especially this one, because I had laryngitis that day and the whole recording process was a series of stops and starts while I variously coughed and drank more tea. But I managed to pin myself to my radio and do so. It's still odd. But they did some superb editing and mixed in sound (chanting, singing, bagpipes) that my friend Cynthia collected during the protests and I'm happy with the result.

It was odd to hear Jim Flemming say my name in introducing the piece, in a voice that has been part of my radio listening experience for more than a decade. Not that he's a hero per se, but it is a strange reversal of roles. I feel too young and unpublished for such things.

So, neat.

2011-04-26T07:21:00.000-07:00

Try this—close / your eyes. No, wait, when—if—we see each other / again the first thing we should do is close our eyes—no, / first we should tie our hands to something / solid—bedpost, doorknob— otherwise they (wild birds) / might startle us / awake. Are we forgetting something? What about that / warehouse, the one beside the airport, that room / of black boxes, a man in each box? I hear / if you bring this one into the light he will not stop / crying, if you show this one a photo of his son / his eyes go dead. Turn up / the heat, turn up the song. First thing we should do / if we see each other again is to make / a cage of our bodies—inside we can place / whatever still shines.

Nick Flynn - Forgetting Something

Replaced

2011-04-25T17:37:00.000-07:00

At the newspaper, the features editor would hang above his desk a different staff member quote each week. Usually it was an innocent thing taken out of context in true "that's what she said" fashion. Our readers weren't allowed in that part of the office, thank goodness. I still get these in e-mail form every week.

This week was rather touchingly prefaced like so:

"I had feared the departure of Christie "Ears Always Open" Taylor, a diligent reporter of unintentionally inappropriate comments, would hurt the flow of quotes. But then along came , who has no filter and speaks before he thinks. He's a Quote Board dream."

I'm glad they're not hurting without me.

2011-04-20T16:15:00.001-07:00

"At one point that night, she remembered, they spoke of how much they loved their country. In spite of everything. No Westerner would understand the love they had for the place. 'But I could never leave here,' Gamini had whispered.

'American movies, English books--remember how they all end?' Gamini had asked that night. 'The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That's it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He's going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That's enough reality for the West. It's probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.'"

- Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

Exciting mail we receive sometimes

2011-04-18T16:46:00.000-07:00

I am spending my tax refund on books I read and loved but never managed to buy and have craved often to re-read.

Today's arrival, Ann Carson's Autobiography of Red, the homoerotic love story of Herakles and Geryon set in pseudo-modern times in blank verse. Or something like that.

Things we flip to randomly:

"His mother was sitting at the kitchen table when Geryon opened the screen door.
---
He had taken the local bus from Hades. Seven-hour trip. He wept most of the way.
Wanted to go straight to his room
and shut the door but when he saw her he sat down. Hands in his jacket.
She smoked in silence a moment
then rested her chin against her hand. Eyes on his chest. Nice T-shirt, she said.
It was a red singlet with white letters
that read TENDER
LOIN. Herakles gave it--and here Geryon had meant
to slide the name past coolly
but such a cloud of agony poured up his soul he couldn't remember
what he was saying.
He sat forward. She exhaled. She was watching his hands so he unclenched them
from the edge
of the table and began spinning the fruit bowl slowly. He spun it clockwise.
Counterclockwise. Clockwise.
Why is this fruit bowl always here? He stopped and held it by the rims.
It's always here and it never
has any fruit in it. Been here all my life never had fruit in it yet. Doesn't
that bother you? How do we even
know it's a fruit bowl? She regarded him through smoke. How do you think it feels
growing up in a house full
of empty fruit bowls? His voice was high. His eyes met hers and they began
to laugh. They laughed
until tears ran down. Then they sat quiet. Drifted back
to opposite walls.
They spoke of a number of things, laundry, Geryon's brother doing drugs,
the light in the bathroom.
At one point she took out a cigarette, looked at it, put it back. Geryone laid
his head on his arms on the table.
He was very sleepy, finally they rose and went their ways. The fruit bowl
stayed there. Yes empty."

Errors in the pre-flight stage

2011-04-13T16:26:00.001-07:00

Hello blog.

My poems are condensing into thin, tight little clumps of words.

I blame technical writing.

Also feelings of spareness and economy that the world seems to encourage. The fat, rolling lyrics of Richard Siken seem like a relic of the 90s.

Note that this generalization is based on one example.

At work today I found a poem:

Everything is going so well for the personal lives of people I know. It's hard to believe, some days when the peepers chirp chirp in the wetlands, that the political landscape is so fraught, that there is so much misery in the public discourse.

Then I stumble back onto the news and my eyes are full of laserbeams.

Oh, spring.

No fooling.

2011-04-01T05:00:00.000-07:00

Just in time for poem-a-day month, Praxilla has published a couple of mine. The table of contents can't find me, though, so here is a link. My poem is holding hands with David Lehman, which causes this odd squiggle of famethrill.

Finding a home for this poem took more than 4 years, so I'm happy it is in such a lovely place.

But also, I regret conflating eating meat with good sex, because that is such a cliche.

I know, poems shouldn't have disclaimers.

C-c-c-cauliflower

2011-03-28T08:46:00.000-07:00

I wish I had a lengthy life update full of concrete points of interest. On your left, the blogger hangs a plant in her living room. Up ahead, the blogger survives another ulcerous workweek but has yet to repair a thing that is broken.

I opened this window and sneezed. Blogspot, you are all dusty.

I made some killer tomato/pepper sautee last night. I cooked all the food I'll need until Saturday. A seriously ulcerous workweek, blog. Chickpeas and kale.

Notice the differences in the capitals of columns. Each has a particular meaning.

Spring planting update: one little lettuce sprout unfurls in the germination machine.

Right here: a steady, cyclical, tired but undramatic existence, somewhat obsessed with plants and recaulking the bathtub.

Also I shouldn't watch Dollhouse before bed

2011-03-07T08:49:00.000-08:00

It is a time of strange dreams. Like: I kill my cat and someone I love and worry most of the time that I can't hide the evidence. only when I wake do I realize the void I've created in the act of murder. Like: I move back to South Africa and my fatherly-but-aloof editor hugs me when I submit my job application and says "Christina" like he already has an assignment for me. Like: an endless barrage of the #wiunion hashtag. I wake at 2:30 a.m. and can't stand to hear anything, not the cat purring, not my breath, not the water rushing through the pipes downstairs.

Pass it on

2011-02-28T08:24:00.001-08:00

From Dane101 reporter Michael Donnelly:

“Last night, I witnessed the most powerful event I have ever seen first hand.

At the time, the subtlety of it was such that several members of the national press I talked to believed there was no story there. I could not disagree with them more.

Several days ago the Governor’s office put out a press release stating that the Wisconsin State Capitol Building would be closed Sunday at four p.m. and that everyone inside would have to leave. The building had been occupied for nearly two weeks preceding that.

On Sunday morning, members of the TAA and other unions met to work out their strategy for the afternoon. The core of their plan was to remain peaceful but refuse to leave. At four, many of the people who were in the Capitol left, but hundreds stayed. The police present - and there were a lot of them - told the people on the ground floor that they had to move up to the first floor. Most did, but a handful politely refused.

And then nothing happened.

The police didn’t threaten or shout. They didn’t arrest anyone. They left all the protestors right where they were. In direct defiance with the Governor’s will, they didn’t do anything.

It took several hours for what happened to sink in. When you’re expecting an event that doesn’t happen, it’s tough to know when to relax. Many of the people there expected to be arrested. Not only were there no arrests, both police and protestors made strong statements in support of one another. Read Capitol Police Chief Tubbs’s statement in that link - it’s powerful stuff.

Please let everyone know about this. Some national media outlets are sure to report that this was a violent, unruly mess. Don’t let them get away with it. I was there. I have video. I talked to protestors and to cops. No one was scared, no one was violent. Don’t let the importance of what happened be overshadowed by misinformation.”

The ACLU is a good volunteer activity for a former reporter

2011-02-27T17:12:00.000-08:00

3:55 p.m., after two hours of handing out the legal hotline phone number to people determined to stay in the building and answering questions and squishing rumors, I tried to text something about the butterflies in my stomach, but it didn't make it to its recipient. Everyone's tweets and texts seemed to have been trapped at that point, bouncing from marble wall to marble wall like our various fears and apprehensions. Or something less flowery.

4:30, when Stacy (ACLU director) and I finally felt we had to leave (other legal observers had been cleared to stay past closing), we shuffled down the hallway to the State Street entrance with the rest of the people unwilling to be arrested and...I don't know. A million different feelings, all of them overpowering. We were arm in arm with a third woman. Faces scrunching up and fighting tears as the chants from the people on the balcony dimmed behind us.

I have to catch up on the bleak side of things (Fox, Walker's MSNBC interview, wtf is up with the national media misreporting things), but word has it that my Baraboo homeboy Dale Schultz is the first Republican to switch sides. I've got my fingers crossed that my other Baraboo republican homeboy, Luther Olsen, will also see the light of reason soon.

Guys. Guys. I know defeating the bill is just one thing that needs to be done. But what if we did that?

Politics

2011-02-23T06:14:00.000-08:00

I spent a couple nights in the Wisconsin state Capitol. Thoughts at Dane101.

Slept at home last night so I could catch up on sleep, but will probably return to the marble floor in coming nights. Beside donating supplies and keeping information circulating, it's one of the few things I can do without losing my job.

I think I've lost some Facebook friends because of my constant link posting. But news-sharing is one of the few things I use FBook for, so, shrug.

On Wisconsin

2011-02-20T15:43:00.001-08:00

I'm thinking about a tattoo shaped like Wisconsin. I was thinking about this before ("thinking about" in the sense of an idle, constant churning of small pebbles of thought in the vast ocean of daily life, /flowery prose) and now am really thinking about it. This seems strange on one level to me - I'm not terribly interested in permanently tossing transient "current events" moments onto my skin. On the other hand, this is a real, permanent place, and it represents a whole lot of love, 25 years of love, that I'm going to want to think about no matter where I go next. Assuming there is a "go" involved, of course. But I still think there will be.

And now I'm even more proud of my roots. No matter what happens in this battle, I'll be proud.

I predict the tattoo parlors are already overflowing with such requests. Good thing it will take me another three years to decide on size, location, and exactly what I want besides the fragile outline of the state itself.

I'm sleeping at the Capitol tonight. I think the overnight presence, while legally meaningless, is an important symbolic gesture and it needs people to keep going. I love the informal scheduling happening here - people say, I can do this, and they do it when they can. Work tomorrow will be ragged, probably, but I've been doing work most of today and there won't be terrible consequences if I'm a bit slow tomorrow. Throw your Mondays on the gears. It feels inadequate, of course, but I also realize that this whole thing would fall apart if people were needlessly throwing away all other parts of their lives. I guess I feel like the teenager collecting aluminum after school for the war effort. Useful in my small way.

I am sorry for threatening to leave you, Wisconsin

2011-02-17T10:05:00.000-08:00

Somehow I am actually getting a lot done at work today, even with one eye on all of the protests.

I love this state so much more this week.

I got in early again today so I'm leaving early so I can Be There, whatever the good it does or does not do.

I can't think about anything beside order transmittal (work) and politics.

Everything is electric. I'm sure there's a name for this psychological/social/chemical process. One lone braincell cries out cynically.

VD = venereal disease

2011-02-14T14:26:00.000-08:00

Here are some concrete life updates:

Cut my hair again. This time it is pixie-short and I can see my eyes again. It’s my favorite short hair since the time R was going to give me a trim and instead hacked off more than 8 inches because she knew that’s what I secretly wanted but was too afraid to actually ask for. It’s an interesting social experience, when a person changes their appearance, how everyone else feels the obligation to weigh in. My officemate says, halfway through the day, “Oh, you cut your hair! I am the worst officemate!” For the longest time, I didn’t like to change my appearance dramatically because, I fretted, “People will NOTICE that I CHANGED something.” Yes, this is ridiculous. I have a moment in the bathroom where another coworker wants to talk in great detail about my haircut. We don’t otherwise really talk, so I am like, uh? Yes I cut my hair?

The speech for my grandma last weekend went well. My night ended pleasantly buzzed, carrying leftover party balloons down State Street while total strangers wished me happy birthday. I lost the balloons on the ceiling of a coffee shop. But today she is in the hospital with a broken arm and fluid-filled lungs, so I am trying to find flowers that are not red roses and hope she’s able to have visitors when I can escape work.

I am 1/6th of a neat little show that happens sometimes. Last night was our anti-Valentine’s Day performance. We sold out and had a great time and I feel very proud and happy. Audience members shared stories of bad Valentines, we read from great woeful books, my voice snagged on my favorite poem like razorwire and nearly tore in half. Laughter, lots of laughter, and my apartment is filled with red feathers. I have not done a lot of “making things happen” in the world, but I really like it and want to do more of it.

It appears that there will be a heart painted on my ass until the day I die.

And in case you didn’t already know, everything else in Wisconsin is terrible. This affects several of my closest people – my parents, my friends – and on principle pisses me off. But I don’t know what to do except shout it from the rooftops and keep circulating information. I can’t understand why this isn’t national news yet. An acquaintance has already said, “Thank God I will be leaving in a year,” and I wonder (perhaps prematurely, perhaps not) if 20 years from now Wisconsin will just be this place I used to be in love with, kind of like an ex who was utterly amazing before the cocaine addiction and who is now just a sad, broken reminder of better times.

Happy 6 Month Anniversary, My Job

2011-02-07T20:13:00.000-08:00

One person at my workplace is attaching Lisa Frank gifs to reminders for this project that has nothing to do with Lisa Frank except that she decided the theme should be Lisa Frank. I receive e-mails something like this: "(Rainbow Vomit Tiger says) Don't forget that you should be drafting content like you said you would be this week!" "

(Coked-out Space Unicorn says) Good job keeping the spreadsheet updated!"

Got my notecards and everything

2011-02-05T13:41:00.000-08:00

I'm giving this speech at a birthday party later tonight. I've never given a speech that wasn't homework before. I'm worried about details like, Is three minutes too long? What if the birthday girl can't hear me because I just had a cold and my voice is a croak and she is 90? Fluster.

"The first time I talked to Anna, it was homework. For my history class, I had to talk to someone who had lived through World War II. So I called Anna, at my dad’s suggestion. Now, most of you are probably familiar with Anna’s stories of World War II. That she was 18, in the resistance movement in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, smuggling weapons around the city, and doing other things that sounded really glamorous to a 15-year-old high school freshman. I remember feeling my entire life view of what a young woman can do rearranged and amplified exponentially during that interview.

Since then, she has become a dear friend and one of the most influential people in my life. In talking to friends, I’ve tried and failed to express how much I love and admire her countless times. I’ve adopted the word “slush,” (that would be Anna’s word for “slut” and “lush”) for my own personal use. She’s been the inspiration for everything remotely crazy that I’ve ever done, and when I’ve needed to push myself past fear, I’ve always thought of her and felt braver. Knowing her has taught me many things, not the least of which is that when we make mistakes, that’s not the end of the world, because at least we’ll grow from that experience. Anna has always encouraged me to grow.

When I was in South Africa two years ago and had the privilege to stand in the same room as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, I immediately wrote her to to say that his personality reminded me so much of her own warm, generous humor. It was uncanny. And I could keep going forever. Knowing her has been such a privilege and a joy. My only regret is that I’ve never traveled with her – I think the two of us would have gotten into some marvelous trouble together. I hope when I am 90, I am even a tenth as big-hearted, fearless, and “slushy” as she is today. Happy birthday Anna. I love you."

We wear our trousers rolled.

2011-01-28T11:01:00.000-08:00

I got a letter from my first internet friend yesterday. This is the girl I met on Dragonriders of Pern RPGs, who happens to share my last name (no relation), to whom I would write long letters about my teenage angst and put them in envelopes I'd painted the same vibrant pink as her then-dyed hair. I'd yell at my parents for accusing me of having "no real friends," because I spent so much time on the internet. But she was a real friend, in an era slightly before people accepted the internet as a real form of communication and connection. I visited her the summer before I started college, and it was my first solo cross-country trip. We hiked near Mt. Rainier and picked berries and rode the bus.

We managed to intersect a few more times. I visited her in Indiana. She came to Madison. I visited her in Michigan. And yet, it has somehow been four years since we saw each other or really communicated about our lives.

She gave me a list of her major life events, sorted by year, since 2007. The heartaches. The jobs. Somehow her mother has had cancer and a year of treatment/remission in that time.

I started my reply with a similar format, and quickly ran out of room on the card I was using.

It is so strange to me how time can slip away like that. I guess that is how these 20-something years go.

From the french passager which means "to pass by"

2011-01-21T21:04:00.001-08:00

I have been reading about the passenger pigeon, which reportedly roosted by the hundreds of thousands over areas of hundreds of miles in Wisconsin at one point. Martha, the last captive passenger pigeon and the last known of them all, died in the Cincinnati Zoo on Sept. 1, 1914. I always think about her on my birthday.

I have been reading Wikipedia and even Wikipedia is enough to break the heart:

"One method of killing was to blind a single bird by sewing its eyes shut using a needle and thread. This bird's feet would be attached to a circular stool at the end of a stick that could be raised five or six feet in the air, then dropped back to the ground. As the bird attempted to land, it would flutter its wings, thus attracting the attention of other birds flying overhead. When the flock landed near this decoy bird, nets would trap the birds and the hunters would crush their heads between their thumb and forefinger."

I think Wisconsin, my birthplace birthright and motherland, ought to be filled with dark clouds of pigeons.

Technobot

2011-01-17T09:51:00.000-08:00

Praxilla will run some poems of mine soon. I should "market" my writing better but one of the two is not a good reflection of how I usually write and I feel discomfort about it parading around on a website with my name attached. How the mind changes in the lag between April submission and January acceptance.

Discomfort is a place for growth, though, I guess. The other one was a lot of fun to write and I'm glad it found a home.

I spent my last freelancing paycheck on a widescreen monitor to hook up to my laptop, and it feels like I upgraded my attention span hardware. A nagging guilt - shouldn't every writer be able to write by hand? I really can't. Notebooks are for scribbles, wisps, outlines, to-do lists, & sketchy outlines of fixed biographical details and my feelings thereabout. In the end, though, everything coheres by type.

dispatches

2011-01-12T21:23:00.000-08:00

I have listened to Beethoven's 9th approximately 30 times since Christmas Day. The drive to work takes exactly the length of the choral movement, which makes me inappropriately glad to be on the way to work.
I have decided that if I limit my blogging I might do better at poems and other obligations that require me to stare at a computer and write. Blog posts are a pointless use of the same kind of energy. I don't think I have anything unique to say here, so why squander it on updates about my life?
Update about my life: decomP is running one of my detective poems in March. Thank you decomP!
A lot of things have stopped feeling particularly important. But I am reading some great things that I keep wanting to review before I finish them.
If you cannot have a standing desk at your workplace, take hourly breaks. Yes, this was a New Year's resolution. Also drink tea if water bores you and it's too late for coffee.
I am using my body to do things again. I mean, yes this means at its most literal "exercise," but I don't really care how my butt might look as a result. I'm fine with my butt as it is. I just like the sudden usefulness of muscle. I being more than just a machine of sensations. Feed the body. Rest the body. Give the body joy. Hey, body, let's accomplish this hard thing and watch it gradually become easier. Doesn't that sound like fun? This is why I like yoga. This is why I started up with roller skates. The body is suddenly this friend who helps you do things. I hope I don't break it in the process.

2011-01-08T16:27:00.001-08:00

I think I might have some friends in common with this Madison woman who blogs at Your Ill-Fitting Overcoat, whose blog I don't remember how I found, but which I love.

Her latest post had me going yes, yes, and I wanted to hug it/her.

I don't own real furniture. I don't put paint on the walls. I've been saying this for years and for years, but every time I think to change, something in my gut says no. I have this sense, all the time and all the time, that this is not my Real Life. I am living an Intermission Life, a Pre-Life before the main event. And at any moment, my train could arrive, you know? The one that takes me there from here. And if I get the chance to go, I don't want a thousand-dollar couch weighing me down.

This strikes me as a strange way to live.

Sometimes she posts things just as I'm thinking them. Right now I want a real bed, but I've been saying that for months and doing nothing about it except making do. With similar hesitations. But I'm not waiting for a train - I think I know which train I want and when it's coming. I just need to get myself to the station at the appointed hour. Platform 9 3/4? Maybe this metaphor has gone too far. & everything in the meantime is still Life. I just don't know if it's bed-buying Life.

Dear blog, my life is tiny butterflies with sharp teeth. How are you?

Bears, beets, Battlestar Galactica

2011-01-06T07:29:00.001-08:00

Everything that has died in large numbers recently starts with B: birds, bees, bats, bastardfish.

I finished a TV show I've been watching since August. Getting through all four seasons this fast required (though no one really required) that I have at least several undignified evenings of solo TV: TV while washing dishes, TV while doing yoga, TV while putting plastic on the windows. I feel like someone I love has gotten married and moved far away and taken several good friends along with.

I cried a few times in those last scenes. There were things I didn't like, too, but part of love, even TV love, is agreeing to it. And I agreed months ago I was going to see this through to the end.

Now I am covering my TV with a blanket. I want to put together a chapbook manuscript this year.

2011-01-03T23:01:00.000-08:00

Mysterious dull pain stewing in my "LLQ." That is the lower left quadrant, in medical abdominal pain speak.

I like speculating about what organs, exactly, are in that zone of tenderness. Perhaps my liver is protesting, belatedly, the holiday decadence. Perhaps I have been invaded by a thousand dead birds or two dozen fretful mice, or every political sadness felt in the state of Wisconsin this afternoon.

Thanks to my job, I know it's not my appendix (that's RLQ), and since it's not terrible, just weird, I can leave it for tomorrow. In my head, I am already signing in as a fake nurse and documenting the duration and intensity and characteristics (dull? sharp? throbbing? mostly not) of the sensation. If I remember right, there about two dozen adjectives we allow for describing the shape of a pain. The rest is location and intensity. It seems inadequate.

New poem, new endeavors

2011-01-03T09:32:00.000-08:00

My Brahe/Kepler poem is up on For Every Year today. Thanks to Crispin Best!

Also I'm doing recreational level roller derby starting next weekend until I either break my legs or run out of steam/time. I will learn how to fall on my ass without fear. This is good, because I will fall on my ass a lot.

2011-01-02T12:55:00.000-08:00

2011 so far:

A circus, many naps, a night locked out of my apartment, 4 coffee spoons. Nearly everyone I went to the circus with left with a clever disguise. I saw a young man spin on the floor in a hula hoop like a coin embossed with da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. Never faltered. It was beautiful. When he finished, he couldn't stop grinning. It felt like a moment where someone should be hugging him. I wonder how it feels to create dynamic art. You never get to keep it, the way I do my poems. I speculate that this might be both a relief (the mistakes disappear behind you like engine smoke) and a sorrow (the good things are only there when you're doing them?). I want to have this conversation with a dancer or a singer or C's cellist.

And also a thousand dead birds thudded across Akansas.

2011-01-01T11:54:00.000-08:00

My fiction-writing friend Matt got engaged over Christmas. I e-mailed him when the news broke.

I: "Congrats on the engagement, sir. Obviously I want to know when the wedding is, and can I throw shredded-up poems at you at the reception? Of all the people who are on the verge of marriage, you're my favorite."

He: "You most certainly can toss shredded poems. We're thinking about an October 2012 wedding and doing everything at the Orpheum. The Orpheum doesn't like confetti of any sort, but you won't get any grief from me. The more literature at the reception the better."

This is a party I'm already looking forward to.

Fragments, fractals, relevance

2010-12-31T09:55:00.001-08:00

I write a lot of things that I don't know what to "do" with. Homeless fragments stacked up in Word documents with names like "drivel written on the bus" and "ongoing drivel" that pile up in my "needs work" folder without ever really "going anywhere." (The scare quotes are because I question still what "doing" something with a piece of writing means, and what it means to "go somewhere" beyond the obsessive stringing together of images and words. I question what "finished art" really is. I am often confused when I think about writing in the big picture.)

I'm considering that either 2011 should be a year to try earnestly to publish more, or to take a break from "trying to make it" and just burrow into deciding what I want from my writing. But does this need to be decided? Resolve, unresolve. Pace. I feel like I am wearing circles in the worddirt.

M. and I were talking about "relevance" and the thirst to be "relevant," and where it takes us. This is an idea for more thought.

2010 overview

2010-12-30T10:32:00.001-08:00

This year: I started freelancing in earnest; moved back to the city I was born in; got a new job I like less but, for now, want more; lost a cat; nearly lost one of my closest friends; gained but then at least temporarily lost another friend; got poems in 3 publications and another 2 upcoming; wrote a lot of unpublished poetry; became a co-producer of a local literary/theatrical group and wrote several press releases; had great ideas that actually bore fruit; cemented a sort of plan for the eventual future involving grad school not in Wisconsin; cut my hair repeatedly and gleefully even after deciding my face looks better when it's long; got a tattoo; went to Japan and Korea; fell out of touch with pretty much everyone who isn't in the same city as me and many who are, and decided that in 2011 I would get better about that.

Still, it seems like a period of few permanent gains. I realized I sometimes measure my life like it's a level-based RPG. Problematic. But let's say that I gained lots of experience points, but my armor is still pretty shitty and my spell proficiency is still only 62%.

Hello train, goodbye train.

Away message vs. spambot

2010-12-29T21:32:00.000-08:00

I win.

Old/Young

2010-12-28T09:52:00.001-08:00

Robins, both of them, found a white hair on my head. I found it too, later. It's three inches long and sticks straight out. I will probably hunt for it in the mirror out of odd vanity, the way I do the one white hair I discovered on my wristbone last summer.

I alternate between feeling very old and very young. My sister expressed a similar sentiment at Christmas. She's teaching high school in rural Mississippi, speaks jadedly of feeling lucky when one student understands her lesson and follows directions, agrees when I wonder whether it feels like pulling "whatever you can save" from a burning building.

In retrospect, fire metaphors are not good for her - she lost a house in Minneapolis that way three Decembers ago. Then, she saved her roommates and a pair of boots.

Anyway, later we both have a little much wine at dinner, and traipse mercilessly onto topics that are not necessarily appropriate for Christmas. Young young young.

2010-12-26T19:15:00.000-08:00

I only said one terribly awkward thing in front of family this year, so I am calling this Christmas a success. I also called my sister "fast and easy," but I was talking about her birth as described by my mother, so I don't feel awkward about that. I was "fast but not easy." I like this phrase.

We cleaned my mom's house today and played the Beatles really loud, a holiday tradition as of 2009, and after re-discovering a high-quality record player, the 9 symphonies of Beethoven and the War of the Worlds on vinyl, and a lot of sentimental old books that date back to at least my mom's childhood (I wish I'd brought my camera), my dust allergy is apparently worse than I thought. I am about to take a Benadryl and go to sleep, no doubt snoring wetly all night.

Why I do not like The New Yorker/or top 10 lists

2010-12-25T10:40:00.000-08:00

This is from Dan Chiasson's list of top 11 poetry books from 2010, in the New Yorker blog last week.

The Changing Times

There is not much to say now, though of course there never was. Whatever was said was just a repetition, perhaps a slight rephrasing, of something someone already said, as this is, and as whatever is said after this will be. No one is fooling anyone, though that does not stop most people from pretending they're fooled, because pretending feels much better. Even if no one now feels much better than anyone ever did. It's not even hard for anyone to think things are different. In fact, the most amazing thing is just how easy it is to think anything at all.

- Craig Morgan Teicher, from Cradle Book

I have read 3 other books from this list and barring Nox (my opinion: fistful of paper hearts rolled in black glitter and dropped into the ocean) they are 75% of the time very boring (Sorry Don Paterson, Paul Muldoon). Anyone who doesn't have Nox on a top 10 list this year is going to look like they have been living in a cave, so I feel like at some point it will just be on every list just out of posterity. I have also seen good reviews of Cloud Corporation from people I share tastes with, I know I like Terrance Hayes already, and I'm curious about the rest, most of which I have on hold at the library right now. So I don't want to dismiss everything there. Just 4 of the 11 (Muldoon is there twice).

Anyway, my reaction to the list pretty much sums up how I feel about the magazine in general. I generally suspect they just have a scheduled rotation of Big Names like Charles Simic, Robert Pinsky, and "someone diverse like Ann Carson or maybe someone who is not white for a change." This is surely not what they think they are doing, but even when they run Ann Carson's stuff, it is not her best work.

A writhing multitude of "blah."

For a while I thought I was the dragon

2010-12-23T06:18:00.000-08:00

Amazon e-mailed me the other day.

"C.T., sell back 'Crush (Yale Series of Younger Poets),'" Amazon pleaded in the subject line. So I read the rest of the e-mail, a bit aghast.

Then Amazon said I should be pleased to know I can trade in my used copies at the Book Buyback store.

I suspect this is a tool for reminding students they can get rid of their unwanted textbooks, even if they bought them used, but why, Amazon, would you come after a book which I am mentally clutching tightly and ferociously for fear that you would actually want it back from me? Is a booknapping imminent?

"Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it
Jerusalem.
We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not
what we sought, so do it over, give me another version,
a different room, another hallway, the kitchen painted over
and over,
another bowl of soup."

- Richard Siken, litany in which certain things are crossed out

2010-12-22T20:58:00.000-08:00

Christmas so far: no eclipse, but fantastic socks and cookies (not pictured because they've been my dinner and breakfast since I received them), and I've finished my shopping. This means I get one night to wrap them and mop the winter shoe-slush tracks off my floors and Be Alone before I leap into family time. That itself is a gift.

Things I can change at any time but won't get around to until 2011

2010-12-22T08:11:00.001-08:00

I think one reason so many people do New Year's resolutions is because they're too busy to effect change in their lives in November & December. So all of that resolve piles up until the holiday season is finished and you fall with relief into the new pattern you've been plotting for months and wish to really, actually enact in the hope of making it permanent.

Like, I want to get back into going to yoga regularly for mental and physical health, but all of my good after-work times are filled with Christmas shopping and dealing with my job and my not-jobs and seeing friends who are dipping into town from far-off places for the holidays. I am left cycling through lazy sun salutations for 20 minutes before bed. Paying someone to tell me which poses to do for how long is a good investment, even only once a week. I leave ready to take on the whole world.

Mostly I can't blame the holidays for lapses, though.

Like, I also want to start eating breakfast again, instead of junk food over my keyboard at work, and wake up earlier after fewer alarm clock reminders and really, seriously, I mean it, regularly take the bus to and from work, even if it means walking many blocks or driving to the transfer point.

And I want to respond to those little e-mails people send me for nice reasons that I let languish because I'm too busy at the moment and never get back to. And be better a friend in general.

And as always, I want to write more, better, usefully.

Acceptance

2010-12-19T19:50:00.000-08:00

New Wave Vomit published some of my poems. Hooray!

& Crispin Best's For Every Year project will feature me for the year 1601.

Now all I need is a lunar eclipse and to finish my shopping and this holiday season is complete.

book arts

2010-12-19T11:58:00.000-08:00

The Minneapolis Center for Book Arts is right by the Megabus stop. I am waiting in a coffee shop facing a glass cabinet full of slim volumes that their authors all, one exciting day, received in the mail as proof that they had indeed published a book.

I am suspicious of most books that have pictures of attractive women on their covers. Unless it is Divisadero, because the image is made interesting in its mirroring.

Like so:

When are you allowed to call yourself a writer? I think I am because all of my jobs since 2008 have been for stringing words together. But if I were not so lucky?

My dystopian impulse assumes that one day, all books will be locked behind glass.

What is a book.

I have a large backpack and a cumbersome laptop bag, so I am afraid to wander too much in this building. I could knock things over and cause trouble.

2010-12-18T15:13:00.000-08:00

This was my favorite moment in Dead Man, even though it didn't really contribute much to the overall story. I think I liked and am still chewing on what the movie was trying to do: I don't think it quite made it. It was something like, but less than, Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, how you stumble across something bizarre in a voyage and just pick it up and take it with you. Or shoot it. But too many long shots of people traversing the wilderness. Too much obvious elegy.

Eugenics in America

2010-12-18T07:18:00.000-08:00

"One of (the American Eugenics Society)'s popular traveling exhibits, consisting of a board with blinking lights, was titled "Some People Are Born to Be a Burden on the Rest." Every fifteen seconds a light flashed to warn onlookers that American taxpayers had just spent another $100 caring for defectives. Every thirty seconds, a light flashed to signal that another defective had been born. At intervals of fifty seconds, a flashing light told of another criminal being carted off to prison, with the audience informed that "very few normal persons every go to jail." Finally, after seven and one-half long minutes, a light blinked to announce that a "high grade person," at long last, had been born."

"To further its point, the AES organized 'Fitter Familes' contests, with entrances submitting family histories, undergoing psychiatric exams, and taking IQ tests, all in the hope that they would be deemed Grade-A humans. Winning families joined other best-of-show livestock--pigs, goats, cows--in the end-of-fair parades, the humans riding in automobiles decorated with banners proclaiming them the state's 'best crop.'"

- Robert Whitaker, Mad in America

2010-12-17T05:07:00.000-08:00

I have all my best ideas somewhere between the 4th and the 5th alarm.

Hat collector

2010-12-15T20:29:00.001-08:00

Multiple corners of my life have been strange, strained. But I swear, I've been having fun. And the first major winter has hit us, the bonesaw-cold, the icy roads, the scarves hiding everyone's identities. When I said December is clearheaded, it is definitely not clear-eyed. So much of winter, really, is a problem of vision. Darkness, snow, water stuck to and clouding our various glass. I've got the plastic on the windows, after waiting a little too long so I could slap another coat of polyurethane on my astronomy-plastered kitchen table. I am almost done with Battlestar Galactica and there are good books lying all over my apartment, waiting. I got myself back to yoga class and remembered how lovely it is to surrender to that kind of discomfort. To sweat, but slowly, to watch a drop of it plunge off my fingertips while the rest of me holds still as an easel.

Also I've learned that I really like The Killers. They give me shivers. The way I discover music now as a young adult, after spending my NPR-only teenagerhood having driveway moments with Beethoven and Prairie Home Companion, I tend to be way too excited about something that everyone else I know has already loved to the point of cliche.

But other songs come on and the whole room gets electric because everyone in it feels the exact same way. When Wolf Parade cries out, "I'll believe in anything." And that old difficult word "duende" shivers down from eyebrow to heel.

Mircea Cantor

2010-12-14T06:49:00.000-08:00

"The Landscape is Changing"

"Tracking Happiness"

Mircea Cantor

2010-12-14T05:45:00.001-08:00

The front hallway of my building smells like old cigarettes (from my downstairs neighbor) and, in winter, wet wool. This is rather like what my mom's house used to smell like when she took up smoking again when I was 13. It's an odd set of smells to feel at home around, but I do.

examples of the crap I write these days

2010-12-11T10:27:00.000-08:00

One thing I do a lot lately, writing-wise, is write poems that are really letters. My lines grow long and sloppy. The more I write, the more I realize I need 40 years in a hole writing to get anywhere close to the people I want to write like.

Tycho Brahe to Johannes Kepler:

I do not miss the smell of autumn ambling toward me. I do not miss my father or the enfolding shorelines of that first observatory. When I die, let the shadow of the moon wheel along my face slow enough to measure.
Yes, we will falter in our orbits. Retrace our footsteps. Err predictably.

Calypso to Penelope:

I had a pet bird for a few years. She sang Wagner and the hymns of extinct peoples. But then a storm blew up and Zeus sent her away. She spent forty days and nights searching for land for some jerks in an Ark. Her heart gave out when she finally succeeded, and she died in my palm, warbling que sera sera.

Have you ever been alone on an island? I mean really alone.

Humphrey Bogart to Philip Marlowe:

Thanks again for the invite to your office Christmas party. Enjoyed meeting your assortment of solitudes, the whiskey, the slant trajectory between sorrow and a point unknown. Found it awkward to be the only actual guest, chewed noisily on ice cubes and made small talk with the venetian blinds whenever you wandered off to paw at a question.

Love Train

2010-12-09T11:28:00.001-08:00

Oh Wisconsin. I love you so much. It's the kind of love where I want you to be even better than you are because it will be good for you, not because it will be good for me. For what it's worth, Wisconsin, I think a train would have been really, really good for you. Especially a train that went from Chicago to Minneapolis and stopped in Madison. Think of that glittering modern future, laid out on tracks. The movement of people is the movement of ideas, and the movement of ideas is a good way to stimulate a knowledge-based economy. Not to mention ship goods efficiently in an age when oil is increasingly dear (money-wise and environmental-cost-wise). You know, no one outside America really knows Wisconsin? We are a wasteland. North of Chicago, south of Canada. I want everyone to know how lovely you are, how good and caring your people are. Even when sometimes your people are actually a lot like people everywhere - dumb, easily mislead, and yes, sometimes actually selfish and not at all caring.

My 5-year plan, not so much a plan as a "Eureka!' scribbled on a a napkin, includes grad school. Even though I believe firmly in sticking to a thing you love even when it's cranky and run by idiots and not so fun to be around, I've now, today, this minute, decided I am not going to bother applying to Madison. Not even as a "might as well give it a try." I have lived here so long. I am curious about other places. The near future is as good a time as any to seek them out. That's still at least 2012, anyway. Maybe the world will have ended by then, like they say it will.

We live in interesting times, friends.

2010-12-09T06:58:00.001-08:00

Lately I have stopped really reading about global warming. The Cancun talks. Ocean acidification. Ice melt. The Republicans' plan to hold Scopes-esque hearings on climate change next year. It grinds at my kidneys to think about. There's too much else on my to-do list. Poems and plans and projects.

Plans abound to dive back into the world of bad news in 2011. Flippers & oxygen tank at the ready.

2010-12-09T06:51:00.000-08:00

It's winter again so I'm back to placing too many holds at the library based on other peoples' "top 10 books of 20**" or "top books I read in 20**" lists.

In theory I'll get to them all eventually. 4 weeks + 2 free renewals is a lot of time.

This is the year I will finally read Foucault and "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves."

2010-12-08T18:14:00.000-08:00

A person has a project collecting poems for every year since 1400. I'm submitting one soon for 1601. I was going to aim for something nonWestern, but then I remembered 1601 was the year Tycho Brahe died. And so.

Sue Miller wrote this for 1577 (a comet, also Tycho Brahe):

(excerpt from "Superlunary")

Imagine a race, today, run without
a stopwatch. Imagine a scientific observation
that waits on the day's catch.
Imagine a future unfurling
beyond capacity
at a pace navigated,
stargazing.

Postcards received by e-mail

2010-12-07T06:45:00.000-08:00

If the world is really ending in 2012

2010-12-06T18:55:00.000-08:00

More people should read books with science fiction and fantasy and any other word for "alternative version of life as we know it" involved. The world is a strange place, and the likely future seems in many ways sadder and more wilted, but it is stranger and harder to cope with if you've never mentally visited the "what ifs."

I think, if we are parachuting into a new universe, and it is in one way or another dystopian, at least those who have read The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx&Crake, Pastwatch, The Player Piano, etc etc etc, will not be shocked that such things can exist. We have visited that country in our minds. It's grim country, but we will not be flattened by shock. Maybe we'll get our sleeves rolled up and get started on whatever meager repairs we can that much sooner. I like to think, anyway.

I also have this theory about zombies. Because we've incorporated them so smoothly into our pop culture mythos, we're more likely to survive them because we already know what they are and have a set of possible survival strategies to start out with. They may be completely wrong, but at least we won't be paralyzed. I like to think, anyway.

2010-12-05T20:35:00.001-08:00

I am ridiculously excited about the fact that I have finally hit the point in Battlestar Galactica where I have no idea what will happen next. In July I made the mistake of watching the very last episode of season 3, in which we learn a lot of ridiculous plot points that I mostly forgot, but key parts of which I still remembered and would try to figure out the moment I began watching the series, from the very beginning, about a month later.

All of season 4 is uncharted territory! Anything could happen! I can't believe I have avoided all other spoilers for this long. I have probably just jinxed myself terribly.

These things happened

2010-12-04T18:37:00.000-08:00

Wheat field Yo Yo Ma approves of everything you do.

Where did you park?

Seasonal synesthesia

2010-12-03T22:47:00.000-08:00

Even the word "December" is airy and light. Cold, but clear-headed. If somber, than musingly so. A seriousness in which you discover things the snow (snow!) has buried.

2010-12-03T17:49:00.000-08:00

My downstairs neighbor is my future self.

Clues:
- she lives alone with her cat
- she enjoys yard work
- she has a take charge, do-what-needs-to-be-done attitude about living in a neglected building that I find inspiring.
- she left me this note today with my new package of books

"This was at my door w/a pile of mail. I opened without looking because I've been ordering a lot of books recently too. Sorry!"

2010-12-01T20:01:00.001-08:00

1. I hope they still make kids watch Cosmos 50 years from now. It is hands down the best introduction to all manner of science that also works in our responsibility to not destroy the world/ourselves. Sagan is so earnest that no one can laugh when he says the word "cosmic" or makes you feel very small-yet-also-big.
2. I guess they will soon have to update it with what we've learned about the universe since the 1970s.
3. I hope they don't redo it without Carl Sagan just because kids probably laugh at his 1970s clothes and manner of speech.

2010-12-01T08:07:00.000-08:00

Dear blog,

Did you know I have a pseudonym? An e-mail address specifically for it? It's true. I have projects that I'm not ready to tie concretely to my real name.

In ninth grade I found a book by my then-favorite author that included a beautifully-written group sex scene. Pure poetry. I was enthralled! I tried to show it to a friend I'd known since elementary school, who also liked that author. She was weirded out. The writing didn't matter as much as the content. It was the first of many tiny gaps between us.

This was my first lesson in not telling people everything that's worth talking about in your life.

2010-11-30T12:57:00.000-08:00

November is over, and with it poem-a-day month. Usually I like to print all the rough drafts I write (26, in this case), but I'll give up that satisfying stack to save paper until I can decide exactly what merits pen-and-paper editing/scribbling. I've yet to develop a real strategy for revising things, anyway, and sometimes it seems type works best. And sometimes not.

I'm pretty happy with all the new Word files in my "needs work" folder, though.

As a writer, I want us to have a gender-neutral pronoun to stand in for "generic human being." My only solution is to write in the second person when I want to dodge all the assumptions people make about gender. It's true - I don't trust readers to not make these assumptions. Perhaps one day I will. Meanwhile, "you" has a nice genderless intimacy about it, true. But what about when I want to pull my voice back, be deliberately distant, speak less to you and more about you?

You see what I mean.

I also want this pronoun for political reasons, but that's for someone else to argue more eloquently.

2010-11-28T12:54:00.000-08:00

I sold something on Amazon that turned out to be malfunctioning. Sometimes I feel good just knowing I'm not a total jerk:

I just got the refund notice. Thank you very much. You have been fantastic to deal with. In a time where internet related deals can be complex and frustrating, it's a pleasure to be able to work with someone in a good way.

2010-11-28T12:02:00.000-08:00

That poetry is made of “words” and not “ideas” makes for a good line, but it misses the point. That a poem is made of words puts too much emphasis on getting the “best words” in the “best order.” That’s only part of the case. It makes people want to create apt similes. This spoon is just like my mother. When I look into it, I see myself reflected back upside down. And on and on.

- John Gallaher

2010-11-27T17:26:00.001-08:00

"So write...Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherfucker."

Ketchup ketchup ketchingup.

My name is not "Writer"

2010-11-26T14:32:00.000-08:00

"Dear Writer:

Thanks for submitting your work to (publication). We're sorry this submission wasn't right for us. We appreciate your interest in our magazine, and wish you the best of luck in placing your work elsewhere.

Sincerely,

The Editors
(publication name)"

I need to go back to submitting poetry by mail. These e-mail rejections are flimsy, brittle things.

I like little pieces of paper that I can put in a folder. All different colors, sizes. I want a physical mountain of rejection. I'm going to decoupage something with all those scraps eventually and place it somewhere prominent.

2010-11-24T19:54:00.000-08:00

Dear friends. Let's build a lighthouse in Montana, and wait for the sea to find us there.

2010-11-23T22:14:00.000-08:00

The Nerve presents sex advice from poets today. Though mostly it's relationship advice.

Except this - "If the Ezra Pound was a sex position, what would it be?"

David Lehman:

The step-over toe hold.

Mark Bibbins:

It would last longer than it should, you’d never know what’s going on, and it would get you thrown in an asylum.

Jill Alexander Essbaum:

It would be less shuddering than the Shakespeare, less taboo than the Dickinson, more euphemistic than the Anne Sexton, cleaner than the E.E. Cummings, less coy than the Sara Teasdale, more flaccid than the Thomas Hardy. Something like doing your chick pressed against the shower wall under lukewarm water.

Island with too many birds

2010-11-23T06:32:00.001-08:00

Digital artist Jim Kazanjian. He also does video games!

This is my 500th post, apparently

2010-11-22T08:39:00.000-08:00

Via "A Journey 'Round My Skull" today - illustrations for 1970s science textbooks by Phil Kirkland.

You do not have to be good.

2010-11-22T07:39:00.001-08:00

Mary visits and we speculate that Mary Oliver is, perhaps, like your mother. Full of sage truisms that you embrace in your early years, reject as you learn more about the world and then return to, at last, weary (poetry says "weary" but no one else does), accepting.

She was the first contemporary poet I read, 10th grade maybe? Wild Geese was the first poem another person had written that got me truly excited about poetry as a still-relevant form of writing. She plugs in well to a teenager's unremarkable catastrophes, with her, "You do not have to be good," and "What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

Now, I've been rebelling against such elegant simplicities for years, but thinking more and more about them anyway. My internal monologue is along the lines of: "Fine. I won't walk on my knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. Fine. Whatever."

Then we intersect with Carrie and fume about the reduction of Kurt Vonnegut to a "so it goes" tattoo on your wrist.

And so.

2010-11-20T16:10:00.000-08:00

Sometimes repetition isn't boring:

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."

- Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

The latest

2010-11-18T20:49:00.001-08:00

There's an owl who lives in the tree outside my apartment.
I have a bruise that looks like dragon smoke, but purple.
My remaining cat is love-thirsty and cries when I touch her. Then after a while she settles into rumbling peace.
A much-missed visitor coming.
My poems are slack, limp little things.
Minor legal troubles.
My job is interfering with my work.
I want to learn to play banjo. Thanks, Dark Dark Dark.
I am considering moving again (elsewhere in Madison), this summer. Most of the good things are east of here. This building feels like a shelf lonely people stick themselves on to gather dust. I feel like even my occasional visitor is a disruption of this. We talk and the walls rattle and threaten to fold. I exaggerate.
Meteor shower tonight. I think I am getting up supremely early instead of staying up late.

This day needs a poem about dinosaurs

2010-11-16T20:13:00.000-08:00

They've explained us away a dozen times: some passing
meteorite or another, the rat-like mammals
eating our pitiful young, all kinds
of new weather. Issueless, but far too stupid to be forlorn,
we trundle along the pink quartz shore
to sip at the lukewarm edge of yet another evaporating sea.

From "Feeling Sorry for Myself While Standing Before the Stegosaurus at

the Natural History Museum in London," by Michael Derrick Hudson.

This happened

2010-11-15T18:01:00.000-08:00

My eye doctor said I was farsighted and should wear reading glasses at work so I would stop having days in which I feel like my eyes are whole miles apart and will never focus again. Now the whole world is going to know I like Battlestar Galactica.

Also, I cut my bangs myself. Then Robin fixed them for me (results not pictured). But only a little. Self reliance +.5.

I'm behind on everything important, but slowly making progress.

I'm fighting November's 4:30 sunsets with vitamin D and strict dental hygiene. Routine is soothing. So far, okay. My poems are all lists dancing around a telephone pole.

Snowfall against the streetlights last night, wet, radiant, too brief. Is this a metaphor, blog? Choose your own adventure.

2010-11-14T18:52:00.000-08:00

My friend Matt visited from Chicago this weekend. At breakfast today he told the story of his night curled on the floor by his friend CJ's bed, driven there (from the couch) by ghosts. Strange footsteps in the hallway (there are no neighbors on that floor) and, "It sounded like it put my shoes on and was walking around in them." CJ swears the place is haunted, and the cat was mewing at shadows.

"I was going to call you guys," he tells me and Carrie over our respective scramblers.

I kind of wish I could have gotten that phone call. If only because no one has ever called me while in the process of being haunted. I am not sure I would have said anything useful, but I like giving useless advice.

I listen to this on loop and I feel optimistic.

2010-11-11T20:57:00.000-08:00

I haven't figured out how to fix the way this site chops off photos and videos that are too wide for it.

Forward

2010-11-11T16:10:00.001-08:00

Dear blog. I want to talk about politics, I want to talk about poetry, and I want to talk about the things I am doing that are not my job.

There is just too much happening.

I do miss my cat, though.

Also, I kind of want to give Wisconsin a big hug. We'll make it, guys. In one form or another, we'll make it through these politics we do not like, which scare us, which make us clutch our guts in pain at their illogic, and we'll do what we can do limit the damage, and when we get the chance, we'll turn things around in a better direction.

I hold up the hope that the new Republican leadership will somehow stumble upon success by accident, and, worst case, I hope they are somehow right about what will fix this state's economy. Because that's better than them being wrong and all of us suffering for it.

With a big "I am an atheist" disclaimer

2010-11-10T06:27:00.000-08:00

So! U.S. Rep John Shimkus, who is vying to lead the House Energy and Commerce Committee next term, is a bible-thumping climate change denier of the first order.

Look! A link to a video! I apologize for the expletives in the subtitles. If you are too lazy, basically he reads a passage or two about the Flood, to the gist of, "After the Flood, God promised there would be no other catastrophes," and says that some religious theorists think the earth is actually carbon-starved, there is no surfeit of carbon.

I don't understand religious people who think that if God has promised them something, it means we as human beings have to do nothing to fulfill that promise.

I realize there is a lot about faith that I was never exposed to. But I also have read enough to know that there are plenty of people who think that even if they've been promised something, they have to WORK for it. And that shall-we-say-God might not say verbatim what will happen, but rather the gist of what will happen. Riddles might be involved. Nothing looks like what it turns out to be. Etc.

And if shall-we-say-God has assured there will be no world-destroying events, perhaps really what shall-we-say-God has said is that human beings are going to pull through with the skin of their teeth because they worked their asses off to keep climate change from getting as terrible as we have heard, over and over again, it has a high likelihood of getting. It seems ridiculous, even if you live in a universe with a conscious, benevolant Creator, to assume that if they have promised you safe passage, you should just go ahead and keep punching holes in your rowboat.

Also, in the passages Shimkus quotes in that video, there's really nothing that says, "Global warming won't seriously screw with the human race." Instead - "Man will not destroy this earth." The big worry about climate change is that we will change the earth so much that it destroys us, and other life. The earth itself will be fine, honeybee.

A sort of nuclear glue

2010-11-09T21:02:00.001-08:00

Days like Carl Sagan's birthday make me miss my brother. He can do a pitch-perfect impression. I am sure I have said this before. One Thanksgiving he just erupted with the most beautiful "billions and billions," and we all gawked and laughed.

I called him tonight to demand a performance and he obliged and I laughed and clapped my hands. He is not, however, thrilled about my "Let's bake billions and billions of apple pies and watch Cosmos and call it a party" idea. Oh well.

2010-11-09T10:49:00.000-08:00

Unsustainable quantity of hats.

2010-11-05T12:07:00.000-07:00

This week has been like a dream, crawling from one bizarre task to the next. Today I am in a strange city with no time to really explore it, after a long night wandering a hospital, befriending nurses, breathing in time with the beeping of a thousand different machines, trying not to gawk at the neurosurgical patients with wires and tubes streaming from their skulls like futuristic hair.

I want more than anything else to be home in Wisconsin, stirring up the strange brew that our politics have become. I am trying not to be scared about the future, but I am feeling particularly fiercely in love with/loyal to the concept of "a Wisconsin" now that its fate is in the hands of people whose values are not mine. This is probably normal for political losers. I just feel like there's more to hash out, and I feel personally responsible for fixing it all, somehow. This is narcissism, truely, but I'm not alone.

This press pass is already falling apart.

2010-11-03T22:49:00.000-07:00

November

2010-11-03T20:27:00.000-07:00

I spent my election night at the victory party for the guy whose victory I feared most. Some thoughts on Dane101 today.

Then I went home and said goodbye to an old friend.

I'm a one-cat cat lady now. This was also my first non-goldfish pet death, so I'm wallowing in it a bit. I think burial feels especially grim when you walk away from it with a shovel in one hand and a lantern in the other.

There are good things ahead, though.

all your sanity and wits, they will all vanish

2010-11-02T12:57:00.000-07:00

At Gogol Bordello on Sunday night. A dancing pixie successfully resisted arrest by two burly security guards, then was lifted out of the balcony by a police officer. A lighthouse and the wheel of an imaginery ship. Reunion with long-lost friend. Someone in a Barney costume came to the front of the balcony at the appropriate moment to remind us all that s/he has always worn purple.

2010-11-01T13:07:00.000-07:00

it was after the fire but before the flood
after the ashes, the dust, similar sordid particulates
before fifty words for water-needle

November is looking to be productive. I just have to get through this week.

The state of things

2010-10-31T07:42:00.000-07:00

Carrie: POETRY MONTH TOMORROW
I: AH I AM NOT READY
I: MUST HIDE SEVERAL DOZEN ROUGH DRAFTS IN THE ATTIC

2010-10-29T23:34:00.000-07:00

My apartment is 50 degrees right now because I hate calling my landlord more than I hate being cold. Cold is an excuse to hide in bed with a book/cat/cup of tea, so it's actually pretty great. Actually.

2010-10-27T21:56:00.000-07:00

The Odyssey is a story I've been obsessed with since high school. So naturally it should be the subject of my first tattoo. Better than Icarus, all that yawing tumbling angst, right right right? Maybe there will be more. Maybe not. This one took me so long from conception to realization, I might not have that persistence in me again.

The pain was awful, I thought the needle was going to buzz right through me at times. David Foster Wallace helped me pull through, bless the man, and the sweet strains of a metal band that sounded kind of like Donald Duck. I mentioned this and my tattoo artist said I'd ruined "Skeleton Witch" or something like that forever. When I got home, wobbly-legged, I messed up my wrapping bandage right away but had brown mailing tape at home so now I am bandaged up like an express package and smell like a post office and various other grime I will have to live with for now, as I cannot shower yet. In the morning begins an awkward cycle of wash, moisturize, do not scratch or pick or form a scab.

Of these adventures, Muse, daughter of Zeus, tell us in our time, lift the great song again.

Southeaster

2010-10-26T05:51:00.000-07:00

I decided to compile a list of today's wind-related news. This will be updated until I get bored with wind.

7 a.m., Dodgeville: Winds down power line, close US 18
7:40 a.m., Sun Prairie: Semi rolls over, blocking traffic (maybe this is not wind)(but it is probably wind)
8 a.m., Milwaukee: Tornado touches down in Racine, other ill omens and portents
12:30, all over: School's out!
1:30, Madison: Fallen tree limb cuts wires, damages roof

Also at work we were told not to use the external doors (they're heavy, they could knock about and hurt us), and had to creep from building to building via tunnels and skyways. I discovered more crazy art as a result.

2010-10-25T18:30:00.000-07:00

Despite miracle crust, this pie was better for throwing at things than eating.

Carrie says, "It's worse when vegan desserts fail. It's like being told you are not allowed to have desserts at all."

October

2010-10-23T22:04:00.000-07:00

I am making my kitchen table less boring.

And I very intently watch my cat eat. He is not doing it so much. I am like Hansel & Gretel's witch, trying to fatten him up with tricks. Like following him around and setting his food dish next to him a lot.

Mostly he's not impressed.

Also I leave my apartment sometimes.

Changed a bike tire today

2010-10-23T13:25:00.001-07:00

Professional bike mechanics must have the strongest thumbs imaginable. People must think they are constantly hitchhiking.

2010-10-21T08:09:00.000-07:00

Justin Taylor on Ted Berrigan:

"He makes a great muse for aspiring hipsters who want to move to New York and
get laid and never work and write all day and steal from bookstores and be poor
all the time but not care too much and stay up all night collaborating on rad
projects with their awesome friends--but who don't want to do all of this under
the aegis of Jack Kerouac, like their lame-ass parents (and Ted Berrigan) did."

More "Letters from a Young Poet"

New blog find

2010-10-19T06:19:00.001-07:00

The Wooster Collective documents street art and other ephemera:

The first one's from downtown Cape Town. Any day now I'll figure out where that wall is relative to my old apartment and get extremely nostalgic.

2010-10-17T13:40:00.000-07:00

How about that 3-D art?

small hearts

2010-10-14T06:32:00.000-07:00

Mosquito heart. Jonas King, Vanderbilt Unviersity: "The green structures are the muscles and the blue dots are cell nuclei. The narrow tube running from left to right is the actual heart of the mosquito and the fan shaped structures are called alary muscles."

Crystallized soy sauce. Yanping Weng, Beijing Planetarium.

Originals, and other very small things via Discover