my house needs better insulation

I think that my broken power cord is perhaps too broken, because every time I plug it in the muscles in that arm begin to ache, and I can only assume an electrical current passing through is the cause.

V has found my blogs. We've traded so I've sat here noddling through old entries. Had I had my eyes closed, what would I have assumed I'd have remembered and what would I have predicted forgetting?

I've discovered that carrying around The Satanic Verses is quite a good way to meet people. I'm considering taking to reading it in public more often. My friend R once had a weird boxy outlet sort of thing in his room that we decided he should label, "conversation piece," and he did. I would like to label my book, "conversation piece," and wait for them to come. In class today S asked how many of us remembered the fatwah in the news, and I felt old, being one of two beside the professor who did. I felt older when it turned out S had been 5 at the time. My copy is my parents' from Royal Books in Franklin. I remember how everyone was talking about the controversy, and how my mom rushed out to buy the book, and it felt funny to write in its margins all these years later. It occured to me tonight that as awful as the fatwah is (and fun fact - it can never be revoked now that Khomeni's dead...it's an "endless arrow"), the severeity of the controversy is a kind of testament to the power of literature that seems oddly quaint in an age where controversal literature consists of Harry Potter, The DaVinci Code, and Danish cartoons.

I like sitting next to V on the couch and working (or not) together. Last night we dredged up old videos on YouTube, dreamed of playing PJ Harvey's basslines and rocked out to Snoop Dogg. We are total dorks and I love it.

I'm going to think about the postcolonial subject vs. the globalized subject now. And maybe do a little writing, too.

Synchronicity

In my dream I watched one of those "Monster Trucks" (as in Sunday Sunday Sunday at the Arena) drive over a smaller car and get stuck. I wanted to run away from the fire I worried would start, but PC was there and convinced me I should help rescue the children who she somehow knew would be inside. We broke in - suddenly it was an RV - and helped the children out. We had to step on hot flames. We had them jump into the mud and this was soft so they were fine. I was holding a child in my arms, running from the flames, when I woke up.

First thing I look at the news. On the Boston Globe Website, front page news, is a picture of a fireman holding a child in his arms, rescuing her from a fire. Not prescience, but still eerie.

Here at my favorite coffee shop in town, I am working next to a tapestry in the Velvet Elvis mode of Pope John Paul II. His thumb is stuck in a book.

Halloweeny

V and I went to the Grudge II as an effort to drive away the outside world. The theater was all but empy so we pulled up our hoods and watched between fingers and squealed at will. I think the last horror movie I'd seen in the theater was Scream. The scary things were so beautiful that I didn't want to cover my eyes -- only my ears for the crick crick crack sound that was so scary. And the pacing of the two narratives was intermeshed really well so that rest from tension gradually became points of even greater tension. And now it's cold and rainy and I'm going to go get coffee and think about reading and grading and reading some more.

Someone I know carved a pumpkin into a buddha. Sometimes all I want to do is facilitate seasonal fun.

this post is for

stove, who's right that I should be contributing more to the social experiment. So here's what I will say. This day began well, with actually getting up and making breakfast and writing. It began with waking up and not feeling the dread of alienation from loved ones. In other words, a relief of a morning. That the soy milk curdled when the espresso hit it was frustrating, the moreso that the soy latte was part of the treat for the writing, which though not entirely sucessful, happened.

You would do well to note the conjoined frustration and illumination; that was my day.

This morning: dear A sitting on the bed playing his guitar while his son P sat on the floor facing him, playing a recorder. They sang a song about a shark who turned into many different things, including a pumpkin. P did some rockin recorder solos. A kept asking P what happened next, and when P told him he would make up a verse around it. The verse about the pumpkin who drank juice that turned all his teeth red, except one tooth, who turned out to be named Fred, reminded me of one of the Camp Favorite Moose songs. You know the one.

Later P and I sang the most intense version of "Masters of War" ever. We stared into each other's eyes and I sang the real lyrics and he echoed with made up words that ended in the same rhythmic drawn-out growl as Dylan. That kid is one smart cookie. And he makes a good egg. I like that I can play the guitar well enough to sing a song about a museum with dogs on the wall instead of paintings.

I like that P listens to me. A good egg. Stove. I like my good eggs.

first week

Last night we went to the house the sculpture teacher is house-sitting and he made a nice stew, though it was probably 1 am. We went there because he had to put the sheep back in their home so the coyotes wouldn't slaughter them all. But the dance teacher and I miscounted 1o over and over, so everyone had to go mucking about looking for the 11th sheep. There's somthing funny about counting sheep at night. In the end it turned out the 11th sheep was in the pen all along, but we hadn't seen it. I swear we both counted 3 times. Sheep have little brains. It's amazing how they really do have one hive mind, move in a herd. Pee when they're scared. Their tongues are soft.

Today I've been reading Brautigan and The Catcher in the Rye, again. The latter to remind myself where my students are, the former because I'm really into reading fiction that is whimsical/absurd but entirely without irony. It's such an earnest sort of fiction, but it isn't exactly realism. Maybe it's just that it's such a particular reality - that it gives off that "truth is stranger than fiction" vibe. At any rate, I'm finding the sincerity of both first person voices refreshing.

I love my students. I love the fervour with which they reference things like Rashomon and The House of Mirth and Pillow Talk and MacBeth, as if they were the first/only ones to discover these wonders. I love how much they love to write. I love how they feel they've found a place for themselves here. I love their red leggings. I love their phrases of the day (moist gazebo). I love how much they love making little in jokes out of things like the word "meat" or the names of characters in old westerns. I love how insightful they can get about global affairs. I love that they can spend ten minutes discussing the rape line in Harjo's "Horses," unfacilitated. I love that they love each other's writing, even if it's different from their own. I love how amazing their letter poems were. I love their monkey haiku.

good eats

The connection between my Boggle word, "tony," and the pre-Boggle pic-a-nic was serendipitous and illuminating for those who didn't know the definition of the word. A Putney pic-a-nic includes grilled swordfish and pesto pasta, for those who were wondering. How am I ever going to manage to feed myself again?

at the putney school

Last night I saw these amazing mists dividing the verdant mountains. The frogs around the puddle make mating noises that sound like rubber bands. I wished I still knew all the names of the constellations. It's unfortunate that the Hubble has stopped working. The best words I acheived in Boggle were "dais" and "pieta," though someone had the latter. Among the longest was "latest" which I find amusing somehow. The stars here are outstandingly bright and make me want to travel out into Bloomington's open space more often. Everyone here is a Vermonter or is terribly transient or both. It seems to represent the two paths artists much choose between. I mean, not being a Vermonter, but being settled in a vibrant place that's cheap to live. Well, I guess the third path is NYC but everyone knows how I feel about that.

It's beautiful here, an oasis. Someone's utopia.

The kids show up tonight. I have a lot of work to do.

Up North

It's cold in Montpelier, finally, after the storm that blew the breezes from the river up. Miciah's furniture is all nicely arranged in her new living room that is so full of plants it inspires me to be better about getting and buying them. There are mermaids clothed in turn of the century frock-coats and holding parasols over the mantel. I really love river towns, especially ones in old, gentle landscapes akin to that of the Hudson Valley with rolling mountains in layers. But this town is so small that she runs into people literally everywhere we go, and B-town is seeming small enough to me these days. But it's been lovely to have nice coffee in round purple mugs on the porch, to talk all day - four hours accidentally, and now to be reading our journals together in the waning day with the nice music on. If only I didn't have to do the work I've been putting off. In a space like this, though, the work is much easier to do. I'm trying to make mental notes to cultivate this kind of environment on through the year. Please, can I collect you all together?

13 Lately things

1. Finally saw Rashomon. I know the nesting doll structure, the story told from the different points of view was what was supposed to be amazing, but I was most impressed by the baby at the end. Theme and variation - the unexpected that jolted the narrative and allowed the film to end.
2. I'm tired of random carpenters and plumbers in the room next to my bedroom. I don't want to wake up to tiling. That said, I think the new bathroom is going to be lovely.
   
3. I sounded really goofy when I was ten and trying to rock Belinda Carlisle acapella.
4. Devon is as wonderful as ever and he can still pick me up.
5. I'm too nice. Everyone in NYC wanted me to take their pictures. Corollary: digital cameras are a pain in the butt because people can be rude and ask you to take their picture over and over because they dont' like how they are smiling and then they can ask you to tell them Eddie Murphy jokes to make them crack up.
6. Never go to a "jeans" party with a bunch of beauty product publicists if you want to feel reasonably confident about your body.
7. I never realized Toxic would be so fun to dance to. Why is it that I can meet people in one night in NYC at some random loft, but I can't meet people in months in Bloomington? Espanol? No.
   
8. I'm not sure a terrorist zombie movie is such a good idea, in the end.
9. What's a strawberry moon?
10. Two days until Vermont. Farms, lovely Vanessa, good people.
11. I still love public libraries.
12. Mysteries written in the voice of the Prince of Wales circa 1900 are tremendous amusement.
13. An audio tape exists of my parent's wedding reception. My long-dead grandfather (mother's side) is speaking in Spanish to my then 14-year-old uncle (father's side). My father is so softspoken. Still the same rhythms of speech, thirty years later, but a slightly more Indiana accent. I've only listened to bits and pieces of it but the whole thing is a study in cognitive dissonance. There's lots of talk about Italian sausage and bringing in the beer in spite of the rain. It should make me sad, and it will, I know, but it's such a tremendous artifact that right now it simply makes me amazed. My father is 25 (!). But he seems just the same.
    

Funny Eyes

I've had them all my life. They are set wrong, like salt and pepper shakers that want to season each other instead of the food. At the optometry school where the exams should be cheap but are instead pricey and long, they make me a curiosity, a case study. And so I place one hand over my left eye, one hand over the right. Over and over I place and remove demonstrating the rapidity of the jump, how I compensate, accomodate. How accomodating I am. I am tired and my vision is bleary and it frustrates me to say, again, I can't see the two crosses at once. I do not have strong binocular vision and I'll never see the magic eyes. I don't want to be a lab rat any more. And this is all before, long before, the health center. Where unasked for prescriptions are filled and my history is taken by a frowning woman with cold, demeaning eyes.

Kicks

I own pink sneakers now. Sorry, Moose, didn't go for the Roos. But they're cute and you'd like them. The great state of Vermont will not apologize for its cheese.

Wednesday Night at the Harmony School Gymnasium

Contra-dancers all over the country are the same. The same grey-haired boomers with ponytails and shirts with ponies or lizards or sunsets on them, the same elderly men with small visible injuries tottering around too slow for the cadence, the same eco-friendly young-uns with gypsy skirts and bounce like they're listening to Phish, the same engineer-types who grit their teeth through the dances as though they're planning to socialize if it kills them. I get just as dizzy in Bloomington, though I miss Holman's afterwards with Extreme Television and absurd dialogue. It was nice, though, to find that after two years away, it came back easy as pie. That a man said, "I saw that gentlemen giving you directions, but you don't dance like you needed them!" For some reason tonight everyone asked if I sang or played music. Perhaps it's that the community here is so much smaller that people tend to immerse themselves in all aspects of the scene. I sort of got the feeling people were recruiting me. I never know what to say when anyone asks if I sing. Yes, all the time, in my bathtub, in my car, at karaoke, with friends. But not in a chorus, not out, not anymore. Someday I'll buy that concertina and be the sea-shanty queen. But jeez, I'm getting tired of pipe dreams.

too many nights out

The bag is full of underwear and the sweater song is on the player in the warm car. I am remembering the way my friends dance, bending my torso into those shapes, the shimmies and hip thrusts of tall slender women. The double wide gay bar is empty, relaxed, but the Vid is hopping, comfortable if sceny. Will I dream tonight? Old men haunt the crack between my pillows. Days I spend on the internet pricking those who have injured me. I am going to try on my bag full of underwear. The girls ride off in their cars to contact the boys and we string something that looks like love between our hearts like fishing wire.

seasonal change

Upped the weights today. We are all officially gym rats, what with the trash talking by the squat barbells. My arms are sore and it's pleasant and I got all the recycling out so there is that little bit of accomplishment. If only I didn't have the insomnia that makes you uncover pictures of your high school crushes and listen to "Crash" by the Cure over and over like you haven't in ten years. Rather, I should take out Vlad or Ernest or even Marjani, tuck into bed. But the house is so empty with Mary gone. It sings, this emptiness. So that I have to wheedle the ladies into dinner on the pretext of fragility in order to not be alone in it. Summer is a funny time here, full of new discoveries. In the kitchen some sort of rose is falling open fragrantly, reminding me of a moment of attention. There is room for strangers now, for library books and six days a week of workouts and drives down to the lake where billboards of eagles glow eerily in the mist. I saw a heron by the river yesterday. They are, I was told, "our largest bird."

Memorials

Last night the party was lovely, tomato plants in the windows, fragrant. So Portland what with the salvage wood houses and the full bar, the punk rock anarchist kids and the bike art. Bloomington is shrinking. The same people are everywhere, the nighttime people popping up during the day at the library or the coffee shop; the nighttime people look hazy in the light of day, not quite fully rendered. I must look like that as well, though the backs of my pants drag through puddles and the day thumps solidly around in my heart.

My aunt died today. Mother's Day of all days, proving the studies my mother oft cites about how people hang around for the big events: birthdays, Christmas. Her daughters were by her bedside. I remember the photograph of her in the faux fur and the red-tinted sunglasses walking along the Charles beside my far-less-glamorous mother. The diary en francais she sent me special for my birthday in the fourth grade, just after she had become an expatriate. The accent, muddled and continental, that my family mocked for years until I came to understand it, just this year, how she could forget she came from Chicago, Kansas, lands of flat and arid syllables. The scarf I gave her rich against her skin, festive over the purple pajamas. Her feet like a monkey's, little groping things. The separation of spirit and physicality so pronounced, her sharp mind a moving thing within a wizening body. How she was a writer and how important that always was to me. How it seemed to connect us at the end.

It's so cold and rainy out. This midwestern landscape she left behind. I feel very alone today in it. And I wonder again why they all scattered, those siblings, to nest in different parts of the world. What was so much more vital than kin? They're all hearing the news now. In California, Oregon, Georgia. In Connecticut my mother is alone in her little house in the Colonial woods. It just pains me, that solitude. And the solitude it begets.

I went to a cemetary today and read the names to myself. The gravestones without flowers. The old ones, the forgotten ones. It's comforting to me to think that someone is visiting my grandmother that way, her gravestone with the wheat etchings in Santa Cruz where none of her children live anymore. My grandfather in his mausuleum in Chicago -- someone will walk by and peep in and wonder who is buried there, what the stained glass means, who the flag was for. They're scattering my aunt's ashes in the channel. Between homelands, just like she always was.

so full

of pretzels. The Boston Globe didn't know what they were starting fifteen years ago when they published that street vendor First Night hot pretzel recipe. I think it could seriously contribute to peace in the Middle East. We just need to sit down the heads of states and let them gorge on soft and salty goodness.

The valentines were made, though for the most part not by me, who expended my creative energies on the aforementioned pretzels. The kids didn't get into the Hustlers, which was good. The girly magazines did provide for some funny Valentiney jokes. Thank you Kinsey.

Rick Moody is Cream of Wheat

At least that's what he says he's trying to make of himself, in people's eyes, so his work can speak for itself rather than being mediated by the public's conception of him as Author. (I am really tempted to make a Foucauldian Author-function joke here, but that's just too geeky). It's a great image though, Rick Moody and Cream of Wheat all mixed up together, and now the two will always room together in my mind. At the reading Rick Moody sang a realio trulio protest song. He made up lyrics about a soldier in Iraq and sung them to the tune of a traditional ballad that Fairport Convention once covered, which explains where I knew the melody. Later he said he was sad that there weren't any protest songs around anymore, with their directness, like in the old tradition. Well, he didn't say he was sad, he said something more eloquent than that, but I extrapolated a sweet desolation. There's something so brave about someone getting up in front of a roomful of people and singing a song a capella. His voice wavered at first and then he grew confident (there were about seven verses). Toi Dericotte sang at her reading too, just burst into song in the middle of an essay. She sang that heartbreaking Motherless Child song that is probably an old spiritual but that Eric Clapton revisioned. My Dad put the Eric Clapton version on a mix for me once. I wept when Toi sang, it was so beautiful. Rick Moody did not make me cry. But he did make me want to put on old protest songs and get fired up. Later, at the Runcible Spoon, we talked about Elvis Costello, karaoke, how thank goodness the O'Henry prizes are judged blind. He has an amazing Brokeback Mountain anecdote that I would share but this is a public forum and I feel funny sharing other people's anecdotes about famous people on it. But if you ask me I'll tell you. Tonight I have come to realize a sad truth about myself. I have the awkward habit of proffering ridiculous confessions/personal details when confronted with the need to make small talk with semi-famous people. I told Rick Moody about my embarassing experience karaokeing Mercedes Benz. I even mentioned the "soundrack" of handclaps. I told Toi Dericotte about my affinity for cooking with real pumpkin. Toi and I bonded over Icebox Cake so in the end I guess it all turned out ok. The Mercedes Benz conversation led to enlightening Rick about those cheesy videos they run while the karaoke songs play. Perhaps he'll go sometime and see them, and then he'll remember me.

there must be a birthday...

A few nice things about birthdays:
*Waking up to a paper hippo that says happy birthday and a breakfast burrito from a dear roommate who understands that birthdays are important even if they make you feel self-conscious.
*Travel Scrabble.
*A herringbone rosette that matches your herringbone shoes.
*A waiter who's clearly taken some drug that makes him very very happy.
*Two painters painting outdoor Bloomington (town and gown) on a summery fall day.
*The girl with the parasol.
*Realizing a new friend is suddenly an old friend. Being able to talk about melancholy with someone who understands its inherence to fall, to seasons turning, to milestones.
*Getting all the critiques done. Not reading 131 drafts.
*Dinner outdoors at the Runcible Spoon, still chuckling at the feel of its name on the tongue.
*Hearing old, beloved voices.
*Maple sugar candy and all the right presents, none asked for, because Mamma just knows you this year. For example, the cake slicer for the fancy cake that's still emerging from the imagination and the cookbooks.
*A card with a chicken boy. Hooray for whimsical animals.
*Text messages about surprises which turn out to be ferny and rosy and sweet smelling.
*When you freak out about the weird eye problem and it turns your stomach and you think the day has taken a sharp downturn, truly new friends stopping by with cherry nut brownies and photographs of gourds and dogs in trench coats.
*Spontaneous Milne recitations and then the corresponding realization that you've always thought of those books as birthday books. When We Were Very Young. Now We Are Six.
*Conversations on the porch swing, strange things afoot at 813 W. K.
*That the party is Thursday, so it's not over.
*That your birthday allows you to indulge both sappiness and the second person.

Turkey Trot

I've been saying I wanted to experience more of Indiana, since I'm out here and all. So Mary and I took off for Montgomery's annual Turkey Trot. We missed the turkey races, but managed to witness plenty of other kinds of rural fun. Oh, Indiana.

Back in Bloomington

Bloomington assaulted me with its smells, its reckless undergraduate drivers and its naive earnestness as soon as I rolled in yesterday. Here are some other signs I was back:

*At the Vid (the Video Saloon, our local) last night a chick wandered up to my table of three, interrupting our conversation by thrusting a mason jar at us. The jar was topped by paper and contained a chrysalis hot-glued to a stick. She told us her friend saves the Monarch butterflies one by one. The little gold filament will be part of its wing. The coccoon will become transparent. Then she will let it fly away. She was sorry for interrupting but she just had to tell us, she said, it's the coolest thing.
*At the farmer's market I got an application packet for becoming an assistant leader for a Girl Scout Troop (don't get too excited, it will most likely go unfilled) and a free bottle of water stamped with "Jesus Christ offers you God's love as a free gift - just like this free water."
*Tonight I did the dance of eye contact with this dude at Laughing Planet. Fresh from NY, Boston and Montreal, I've been in the tunnel gaze of the city dweller, and last night I was chided for it, so I decided I should not just avoid his glance but attempt to be Bloomington-y and smile. He rewarded me by trying to pick me up via dropping the fact that he's visiting from Chicago because he knows the owner of 420 (as in, a pipe tobacco shop). My confused look didn't seem to phase him. Do I look like a stoner chick?
*When it storms in Indiana it storms. For the past few hours the sky has been lit up every few seconds, that's every few seconds by lightening. For short periods there will be booming thunder or sheets of rain, and then that will stop, leaving the bright lights illuminating the clouds like a broken flourescent light.

Off to packing up all my worldly goods.