poems

A plug for Mary Austin Speaker's new work at failbetter. Go read it.

brooklyn is a long cab ride away (in indiana)...oh just google brenda kahn

I'm back in Bloomington and somehow, the moment I got home, I managed to get sick. Some of my Ledig momentum was currtailed by the illness, but today I woke up feeling moderately more human. There is laundry to be done and lawns to be mown and man I need to get back on that thesis. (So I can move on to the next project!)

Here are a few little snaps of where I was. There're lots of good ones C took of the other people there, but I'm starting to feel funny about posting pictures of people on my blog without asking them. So you have to imagine them. Or ask me and I'll show them to you one-on-one.

Oh, and sorry to renege on the book posting deal. It's a long story (or a short story, depending on how you look at it). Basically, my reading dropped off rapidly as my conversations/adventures with the other residents grew. But here's a bit of To the Lighthouse: "The sky stuck to them; the birds sang through them. And, what was even more exciting, she felt, too, as she saw Mr. Ramsay bearing down and retreating, and Mrs. Ramsay sitting with James in the window and the cloud moving and the tree bending, how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach."

dispatches

The only bad thing is the sulfuric water. There is a sound installation in the woods so that when you walk there at night everything is defamiliarized, frightening and also thrilling. The phrase "thrilled and chilled and existentially satisfied." We've written our messages on the slate gravestone. All the baby animals are out; the goslings stick close to their mother. I'm armed with pancake recipes. We are encircled by stud farms. I've met a German publisher who only prints books that have some connection to the ocean. The story is coming. I'm not ready to leave.

a machine that could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour

I'm working on my poetry portfolio and listening to August and Everything After for the first time in god only knows how long - I'm not sure which house I was living in when it disappeared from my collection, but it's been since Portland, at least. Someone here at Ledig has it on her itunes, so I'm listening in. Man. It really was a formative album for me. And one remarkably devoid of associations that make me feel sad, like many other albums I listened to obsessively at various points (see Elliot Smith, Tori Amos, Ani Difranco, Neutral Milk Hotel...).

It's so beautiful outside that I would really like to take a walk through the magical sculpture fields, but the portfolio is already past due, so I'm holing up like a good girl and plugging away.

Apparently Chris and my arrival doubled the number of Americans here. We've got writers from Spain, China by way of India, Austria, Germany, England and the Congo. Indiana? Not so exotic. Interesting dinner conversations, for sure. I have a king-sized bed and ate zucchini with mint last night and organic berries all day. We may stage an informal reading, since many of us are leaving before the next formal reading. I'll let you know how that goes. There's a beautiful wood-paneled library full of all the past residents' books. I also have a big white chair that's good for reading in.

I've been trying to read a book a day, so I might post bits of ones I've read. I started out easy, with a funny book about the personals blurbed by Ira Glass. Now I'm rereading The Great Gatsby. I'd forgotten how much I love that book. I haven't read it since I've been seriously writing fiction; it's so different now. What a brilliant characterization his introduction of Daisy is. I know I'm not saying anything new here, but the narrative perspective is so well handled. I keep being amazed at how Fitzgerald manages to tell a story about such compelling individuals as Gatsby and Daisy without ever losing sight of the fact that Nick's is the central story, and that all the drama of Gatsby's parties is simply one aspect of a summer in which so much more happened in this character's life. Plus, who can get over Chapter 3? "A pair of stage twins, who turned out to be the girls in yellow, did a baby act in costume, and champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger-bowls. The moon had risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawns." Wow.

Finally, the aftermath of car accidents is no fun. Although my agent reminds me a little of Steve Carrell on The Office in that he's a bit overly personal (read flirtatious), but he's good hearted and seems like his fierce loyalty might get the job done. Cross your fingers.