"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

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

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

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

book arts

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.

Eugenics in America

"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

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."

If the world is really ending in 2012

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.

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!"

This is a good thing

Margaret Atwood's Oryx & Crake: making my stomach curl in on itself like a pillbug since 2010.

yes

Crockpots are magical creatures. Take heap of browning apple slices, handful of water, plenty of cinnamon, and one long, amnesiac day later you come home to a nice surprise. Better than the housewife with the martini. Hi honey, would you like a quiet bowl of September before bed? Yes.

---

I have been reading the end of Ulysses repeatedly this week, Molly Bloom's cascade of "yes" et cetera. Aloud. This is difficult because there is no punctuation, and sometimes the stream-of-consciousness diverts midsentence. But a rhythm emerges slowly from the mess and the "yes" pulls you through it to the end. Yes, I should own this book, yes I will Yes.

---

Last night I dreamed about a plane crash. I think there were many loops, because at the end I knew it was going to happen, and I looked out my window in time to see the whole nose tilting down. Somehow I survived and there was no falling or dream dying to wake me up. I woke up thinking more about Lost than today's anniversary, though. And I think it was fed by a friend telling me about an airplane dream. That plane landed safely on State Street. I don't like planes much lately because they require a specific destination. I hate choosing and I hate sitting on my ass in a cold tin can.

on being a weirdo

It is so casual at the new workplace that some people do not wear shoes.

Finally biting the bullet and getting me some internet. My free time should return to being composed of unhealthy levels of internet browsing in T-1 week.

Unless, of course, my apartment has mold somewhere, which would explain why I have gone to sleep sneezing and rubbing my eyes nearly every night since moving in.

And anyway, I shelved all my books finally, sorting by category (nonfiction, science&Spanish, scifi/fantasy, literature, poetry, picture books, embarassing or nostalgic works from my YA-hood, moldering science fiction paperbacks rescued from my dad's house when he remarried that I have not read but will one day, and everything else I have not read) and there's a lot I still have to read. At the rate I rescue stray books from friends and $1 shelves and UW Library book sales, I will never not have a lot to read, of course. But the compulsion is strong after touching every single book in a single evening.

If the new job is comparable to high school, then I really haven't changed much, except I'm more secure about who I am and how I want to spend my free time. It's a nice feeling.

The Redemption of Christopher Columbus

From Pastwatch, a most excellent science fiction work by Orson Scott Card, 1996

Some people called it "the time of undoing"; some, wishing to be more positive, spoke of it as "the replanting" or "the restoring" or even "the resurrection" of the Earth. All these names were accurate. Something had been done, and now it was being undone. Much had died or been broken or killed, and now it was coming back to life.

This was the work of the world in those days: Nutrients were put back in the soil of the great rain forests of the world, so the trees could grow tall again. Grazing was banished from the edges of the great deserts of Africa and Asia, and grass was planted so that steppe and then savanna could slowly reconquer territory they had lost to the stone and sand...In great preserves the surviving animals learned how to live again in the wild. All the nations of the world had an equal claim on food, and no one feared hunger anymore...

It should have been a happy time, with humanity pressing forward into a future in which the world would be healed, in which a comfortable life could be lived without the shame of knowing that it came at someone else's expense. And for many...it was. But many others could not turn their faces from the shadows of the past. Too many creatures were missing, never to be restored. Too many people, too many nations now lay buried in the soil of the past. Once the world had teemed with seven billion human lives. Now a tenth that number tended the gardens of Earth. The survivors could not easily forget the century of war and plaque, of drought and flood and famine, of desperate fury leading to despair. Every step of every living man and woman trod on someone's grave, or so it seemed.

I first read this book when I was 14-15-16ish and think of it often. In that story, though, the world is saved from catastrophic climate change (you know, the one everyone's still afraid of) because some people go back in time and divert the mission of Christopher Columbus just enough to save the indigenous Americans and alter the course of the United States dramatically.

Hey, have I been talking about all of the same things lately? Yes, it is true. I'm chewing my way toward finding something productive to do with my "desperate fury leading to despair." Apologies, maybe, for dragging you through the process with me.

June is national ass-kicking month.

Please remember we tried. We rolled ourselves in Saran wrap and spermicides, we sacrificed eleven trillion virgins. One fatted calf. The cracks we filled with golf balls and Rubics cubes, wedding rings, erasers. Remember you were born like us. A disaster stamped on each earlobe like a prayer.

Excellent books about the end of the world:
Pastwatch, Orson Scott Card
Earth Abides, George R. Stewart
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick
Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula LeGuin
The Giver, Lois Lowry

Any other suggestions?

Have at you!

People often develop personal mythologies, right? When I was a kid, I latched onto Reepicheep, the sword-waving mouse of C.S. Lewis' Narnia series. He was so over-the-top fierce, sometimes to the point of getting himself into trouble, a bit like Scrappy Doo. But even though he was really cute and furry and whiskery, Lucy knew she wasn't allowed to cuddle him because he had such grave mousy dignity. Once she was allowed. But that was like, the end of the world or something. He was also my first short-person hero, and I was so impressed that in the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, he's the only one brave enough to walk all the way to the end of the world and chill with allegorical Jesus & Company....oh, swoon.

Say what you will about C.S. Lewis (I'm not religious, so that's already something I have to say about him), but I'll always be glad he gave me a fierce mousey role model to egg myself on with when I'm not feeling equal to the things that are demanded of me.

I massively trimmed down my Facebook account because even though I didn't really have any secrets up there, I'm not interested in providing Mark Zucherburg salable data. Photos - gone. Most of my groups / "liked" pages - gone. Interests - privacy and being a nerd. I hate seeming unfriendly, but I think it's fair to have a minimal "profile" and say that if you want to know anything about me, you can e-mail me. Or come to this blog and hear me rattle on about creative writing and, occasionally, the joy of being a reporter on working weekends, crouched in the office while the sun shines on and on outside.

I am still sneezing all over the place. Wet doggy sneezes. Red murky eyes. I popped into Barnes & Noble yesterday for "a mother's day card" and "my next high-quality notebook" and "$2 copy of Ariel" and someone at the front door tried to make me try out a Nook. There are "Nooks only" tables in their cafe. Buy one for your mother.

"did the book keep her from visiting
her mother and asking about MS,
did he hold the book between his face
and his wife, is it how he asked
for a divorce, by not speaking, by saying
the name Leaky over and over to himself,
by letting the pages stand in for his face?"

Bob Hicok, The Active Reader

the future is coming, the future is coming

I think what I need to do is hire a hooker (but not a really skinny weightless one) to just lie on top of me when I get hit with anxiety and insomnia. I read in someone’s blog that this was a trick farmers use with livestock, but I cannot verify this with Google. Either way, it helps me a lot.

I wrote my poem-a-day while socializing last night, an amazing feat of ignoring the sound of giggling and Rachel Maddow long enough to try to get creative about my feelings about immigration law. It’s weird when friends do laptoppy things right next to each other.

On the radio, long discussions about e-books. I don’t think anyone’s going to be challenging my ability to read paper books for as long as I should choose (though I’m betting they will get more expensive, and it might be harder to find particular titles In Paper, unless more services pop up to print & ship books on demand, kind of like Netflix-ish). Anyway, I still get bummed because I think about libraries and bookstores and how many good times I’ve head in them, and I have this Luddite worry that they will all turn into rooms full of people interacting with computer screens and not smell musty at all. And you know some e-readers don’t even paginate? What is a page, anyway, in the digital world? Just an arbitrary division of text into manageable segments. At least when we do that on web pages, we use some kind of logic. But when you quote your favorite author in a research paper, how are you going to cite "52 percent of the way through The Last Unicorn"?

Okay, my friend says, my ancestors used to hang out in vomitoriums and were very attached to them. Okay, I say, I’m 24 and already a dinosaur.

I get excited, too, about the digitization of the world. I’m primarily a words person, but I think about how visual and audio art could synch up more perfectly with the written word to make someone else’s creativity a completely different experience for consumers of art. To the point where we’re going to look at today’s online poetry mags in a museum some day and laugh at how flat and quaint they are in comparison. I hope there’s still a market for people who only know how to write, though. Also, I hope I can eventually have a slim volume of my own work, in paper, before we’re done with dead trees. No one has to buy it, I just want to wave it around.

A warning

Competitive Goodreads is not conducive to actually absorbing what you are reading, fyi.

faster, faster

Thoreau went to the woods in 1845, and stayed until 1847. He then spent the next seven years polishing his manuscript. Today, he would have been expected to tweet the whole time: "Pulled bean field weeds, thought of great line about hearing/stepping to different drummer, need Indian meal 4 bread, pond looks nice today." - Bill Leuders

I think there's a place for the rapidfire communication we're evolving into. One of the big drivers of innovation is the exchange of ideas, the introduction of novel thoughts and problems into your sphere of understanding. This could mean reading books, but it could also mean reading your friend's Facebook status, or an offhand comment in an e-mail. Or a meandering Gchat that turns into an idea for a short film. Isn't that how it happens in most movies? Someone is conversing about something completely unrelated to their problems, and then, AHA, problem solved, they run off excitedly to their chalkboard full of numbers. I can never find anything I'm missing until the moment after I've asked someone else if they've seen it.

But I agree that any trend toward valuing the immediate at the expense of slow, thoughtful ideachewing and factverifying (when you are in a field that requires factverifying) is not just sad, but frightening. I shudder at how many asinine political slogans are being ReTweeted as absolute truth, with a "word, sister" tacked on at the end. Republican or Democrat, I don't care. And the Thoreaus of the world (writers or inventors or chemists) all need time to be alone with the creative energy they've gained from communication, to turn fodder into fuel.

Even poem-a-day-writers will be spending the next four months on revisions.

Here is a good day off:

Not pictured: sunshine, bicycle, cats, fresh coffee, Baraboo River, birdsong, crabapple blossoms, a couple decent rough drafts, a good, good friend I will soon be seeing.

Coming soon to hermits near you