word

"actually, i get really tired of saying, 'i.'" - Carrie

- "air hunger" is another official medical term for "shortness of breath" or "dyspnea."

- some poems upcoming in Verse Wisconsin.

Word of the Day

fulgurate: to flash or dart like lightning.

...To become strangers

we had to invent a system
of impenetrable sighs:
ah... ee... sh... oo...

interchangeable in patterns
because they hold nothing...

- D. Nurske, Syntax

Slate has the list of words David Foster Wallace circled in his dictionary.

Carrie's going to kill me, but...eh. I'd rather just circle my own damn words. I am not thrilled with putting the most inane detail about someone famous on display as if that would tell you How They Do It. Or even, How You, Too, Can Do It.

A room of tatami mats and sore knees, a table crammed with fried pork and tofu and horse meat (the kind of thing a person has to try if she is only 85% vegetarian and which is, admittedly, delicious) and super chocolate brownies, four Japanese conversationalists, two American teachers, two gawk-eyed tourists, lots of laughter, rain on a tin roof. Robin and I teach the Japanese "party foul" and "jail bait," after they tell us Hal has already taught them "cougar," and "sugar mama." 24 hours in the country, and she still has not knocked anything over. I have knocked over wineglasses (party foul), and several small old people who just bow and say the Japanese or Korean equivalent of "no problem." At least I think this is what they said. I have a photo of me next to a woman who is way shorter than me. I am big and klutzy and I keep forgetting that it's rude to yawn.

I'm (going to be) big in Japan

I am a famous reporter from America!

私はアメリカから来た有名な記者です。

I have mafia connections.

私はやくざの伝手あるよ！

Hold the mayo

マヨネーズなし

The words that have home phone

Based on the statistics which I sometimes track, I know that you can find this blog by Googling:

Hemingway look-alike
shaun macleod snake catcher south africa
craigllist

And, for some reason, the words that have home phone

I can tell already you think I'm the dragon / that would be so like me

After long struggle, I have fallen into the state of mind in which it is permissible to spend money on myself, even though I am saving for 1. a future in which my job could theoretically not exist and 2. a future in which I am most certainly going to Korea/Japan in a few months.

Either way, I just recently ordered Richard Siken's Crush from the internet (this has been on my "birthday list" and "Christmas list" since early 2005 and no one has given it to me) and am really excited to rediscover him. I wish he'd publish another slim volume of intense metaphor, but he's such a dense writer, I know there's so much I missed the first time I read that one little book.

Let me do it right for once,

for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes,

you know the story, simply heaven.

Inside your head you hear a phone ringing

and when you open your eyes

only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer.

- Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out

Um, un poco, perdoneme.

I finally have a week with an actual free evening to start the literacy tutoring (90% English teaching) I've been training for since August, so this morning I made the first call to my student and caught myself doing that obnoxious "speaking loudly and slowly because she said she couldn't understand" thing while we set up a time.

Her native language is Spanish. This is perfect because I just started my Spanish class at MATC. Clearly I should waste her time by asking her to speak Spanish with me and help with mi tarea and give me tips on rolling my "rr"s.

Isaac Asimov also predicted Michael Pollan. sort of.

This is what you get for letting me read old science fiction anthologies. I don't know who you are or why you had any say in what I'm currently reading, but for some reason two hundred pages of delightful speculative frolick turned, suddenly, deadly serious. I think suicide might be involved.

"...so the question is whether a non-nuclear war is really possible, and the answer is "No!" The trouble is that the advance of technology has made war into such a high-energy game, played with such high-sophistication pieces, that no one can afford to play anymore.

Under the best conditions, war is fought with a nation's surplus energy and resources. Or a nation can fight a short war even without surplus energy and resources in the hope of seizing and enemy's energy and resources and continuing the fight with those. Where no nation has surplus energy and resources large enough to support the current technology of war, the whole process becomes purposeless and a mere exercise in suicide, albeit one somewhat slower than the nuclear variety...

So war will vanish not because of a growth of goodness in the human heart, or of understanding in the human mind (would that it were so!) but only because war has already priced itself out of existence, except as a form of world suicide."

From, "Is there hope for the future?" Isaac Asimov, 1974

Okay, so I'm still thinking about fictional writing

I am lucky enough to have friends who force me to watch special features on DVDs. For example, Cloverfield, which had me thinking weird paranoid thoughts I as I drove the treacherous, drunkard-infested streets of Madison on my way to my Capital City crash space. What if University Square fell on me! What if that lightpole was covered in spiders! What if that freshman's head exploded onto the wall behind her for no obvious reason except maybe that the Army had shot her/spiders were bursting from her brain sac!

Anyway, the guys who invented the Cloverfield monster were so excited about how much it changed everything for them that they could imagine it as this big bumbling baby animal that doesn't understand anything and is very confused about land and is rather blameless but even more frightening because it can't be reasoned with. That this, in some ways, made the whole movie happen, even though we the viewers couldn't necessarily see the difference between what they, the film monster makers, imagined, and a malicious intelligence that just couldn't get off the damn island.

Conversations like that get me very excited. The creator of anything has such power over those who view it, if they do their job well in not telling you everything. Confessions get boring - I'd rather read a grocery list full of seemingly unrelated items. Backtrack - sometimes confessions are very interesting. But the best part about Cloverfield was also kind of the most infuriating: at pretty much every turn you're left still not knowing what the hell is going on. Just like the protagonists! Isn't that awful? Aren't you glad you didn't die not knowing anything useful? Because a lot of people sure did!

On another note, this botched execution in Ohio made me very angry and I'm going to say some things when I'm less sleepy and don't have to wake up for 231221 catch-up coffees with friends.

"Somebody's always giving me guns," I told him. "I'm weighted down with them until I walk all crooked." - Says Marlowe in The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler.

"fressen" is German for "to eat like an animal" or "drunk eating" or both.

"Then I understood that he had won, and my father had lost. Tata Ndu came here personally to tell us that the gods of his village did not take kindly to the minister of corruption. As a small sign of Their displeasure, They ate his daughter alive."

"The next morning we heard the search party had found what the lion killed in my place: a yearling bushbuck. I wonder about its size and tenderness, whether the lion was greatly disappointed, and whether the bushbuck loved its life. I wonder that religion can live or die on the strength of a faint stirring breeze. The scent trail shifts, causing the predator to miss the pounce. One god draws in the breath of life and rises; another god expires."

- Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

Is there another lamp in the room?

A Chinese woman I just met today has difficulty distinguishing between "thighs" "hips" and "waist" when her reading tutor tells her to point to each. What is the difference anyway? Don't they all blur into one excessively scrutinized but generally awesome region? The picture dictionary is full of gleaming kitchens and lavish dining rooms and women in party dresses from the 1980s. Throw pillows, candalabras, whole rooms just for entertaining guests you see once every two weeks.

When I start tutoring, I am going to assemble a Baraboo picture-dictionary from things I cut out of magazines, and it's going to include important terms like "thrift store dresser" and "crookedly-hung photos of my most wife-like platonic friend" and "window hung with purple cloth, overlooking rain."

An English girl I know would object to the section in the books that focus on pronunciation and stressing syllables according to American standards. The short objection is that as long as everyone can understand what you are saying, variations in pronunciation based on your first language should be allowed as expressions of regional autonomy. This, she says, is especially important in situations where the English teacher, often young and idealistic and anti-empire, has come from a far nation with a history of meddling, and must be careful to avoid furthering nascent empires. There is a long objection but I am not subscribed to the proper scientific journals.

Bears make the best poets

I love this. Anyone could have written it. Nobody else could have written it.

excerpt:

"let me go eat a salmon
last night i cried onto my salmon
the salmon was sad but it still wanted to live
it wanted to swim and be sad and i ate it under moonlight"

another excerpt:

"i’ll ride the moose into the shopping mall and ram the humans
the moose and i will ride the escalator and i will hug the moose and the moose and i will cry
i will eat the moose
i don’t care"

a poem written by a bear, by Tao Lin, who agrees s/he is fucked if s/he thinks all people are terrible assholes.

two items relating to previous travels

1. I found these old blobs I wrote after leaving Lesotho. I guess I have been very piecemeal about sharing stories from abroad. So here's some stuff, since the original purpose of this blog was to streamline the whole anecdote-sharing process.

"M. complains in Malube-lube that there is too much electricity in this, the 'remote' part of Lesotho. He wants to start a lodge somewhere you cannot see even 5 tiny lights in the distance. The electricity here is solar. Kids charge their phones at shops. A girl asks me to buy her a phone, but I cannot(?). Wherever you travel, these days, people (who are not hungry) tell you not to give handouts. To reduce the culture of begging, we say. 'A hand out is not a hand up.'

...What is a Lesotho? Remoteness, "Real Africa," proof that you care enough to get close to people? We say, look at this cute village with cute animals and cute candles and etc, etc. Meanwhile, they want electricity and a dam is coming to provide that. And money (mishandled) from South Africa for the water. 20% of Durban now, and hopefully 80% of all S.Africa by 20__. I want to research what it would do to the ecology. Rudy insists nothing but good will come of it for all parties. Alexandre, who says he will be the prime minister some day (or maybe a priest, or maybe a teacher), wants to bring farm machinery to the mountainside cornfields, and feed the people. He asks about America, and when I say Madison is okay but not great, he says, 'You have roads and lights.' What I mean is, Lesotho does not want to be cute."

2. The best single quote from the book that kept me company in that particular two weeks of my life.

"The woman's figure is naked from the waist up, moving forward, just about to break free of focus. The tanned body willful, laughing, because she has woven the roots of two small muddy plants into her blond hair, so it appears as if mullein and rosemary are growing out of the plastered earth on her head. There's a wet muck across her smiling mouth, and on her lean shoulders and arms. It is as if her energy and sensuality have been drawn from the air surrounding her. We look at this picture and imagine also the person with the camera, walking backwards at the same pace as the subject so that she remains in focus. We can guess the relationship between the unseen photographer and this laughing, muddy woman, weeds around the fingers of her hand gesturing to him in intimate argumentative pleasure. This person who is barely Anna." - Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero

"...how I would live without the human delicacy to which I am witness?”

Literary Lesson: Authors, Poets Write the News

Letter from Jerusalem

By Daniel Estrin

It was on an average Wednesday that a very serious Israeli newspaper conducted a very wild experiment. For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news.

This wasn’t a Sabbath supplement, a chance to balance the news with extra color. This was a near complete replacement of the newspaper itself. Save for the sports section and a few other articles, all the reporters’ notebooks were handed over to poets and novelists, both bestselling and up-and-coming. Their articles filled the pages, from the leading headline to the weather report...More

If I could romanticize in florid language how hot it has been

This ardent June/near-July/summer, murky with sweat, clasping us to her hot breast & the swampy creases of her arms. Our lungs thrashing in the sun like stranded, smothering fish. So on/so forth. It is damn hot.

(Or, as my friend Bryan says, "like being trapped in a giant's armpit." A sleeper hold, perhaps. Say "uncle.")

No one can sleep, we swap tips on keeping the air in the apartment circulating without AC. Some of us consider buying AC. This may be the final step to becoming an adult. My last night at the survey center, a woman in California tells me I should come visit her and we'll go to the beach.

I left my liver in San Francisco

I am reading Donald McRae's book about the first heart transplant. This was in Cape Town, South Africa, in the 1967, following a space-race level scurry by surgeons worldwide.

McRae complains frequently about the abuse the human heart has taken from poets and other creators of metaphor throughout history. Namely, it has wrongly been constructed as the seat of the so-called human soul, and this put law in the way of heart surgery for years.

The point being, I decided he had a point, and have set for myself the challenge of making a lot of metaphors using every other bodily organ except the heart and the throbbing canyon of the heartless chest. This is what I do when I'm bored at work.