Tuesday Musings

Kwe survived his first day at school. The highlights of my “parent” conference occurred when the trainer told me 1.) your dog is not other dog aggressive. He is other dog inappropriate. 2.) Your dog is insecure. In short, we have to provide Kwe with lots of structure and heavily socialize him with other dogs. I’m interested to see what the rest of the week brings.
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I’m still enjoying my creative writing class. Today was especially interesting…
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I’ll post more tomorrow. I’m starting to get the “I’ve stared too long at the computer screen” headache…

Monday Musings

Today is Kwe’s first day at doggie school. I think I (sort of) understand how parents feel when they drop their kids off at school the first day. I’ve been thinking about him all day, but I haven’t gotten any phone calls, so I assume he’s doing fine.
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Mac Update: Our computer problems are only getting worse. In addition to not recognizing the battery, now the back light for the screen doesn’t work. We’re going to pay the $280 to send it to Apple.
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This is pretty cool.
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Your fall poem for the week:

Underwater Autumn

Now the summer perch flips twice and glides
a lateral fathom at the first cold rain,
the surface near to silver from a frosty hill.
Along the weed and grain of log he slides his tail.

Nervously the trout (his stream-toned heart
locked in the lake, his poise and nerve disgraced)
above the stirring catfish, curves in bluegill dreams
and curves beyond the sudden thrust of bass.

Surface calm and calm act mask the detonating fear,
the moving crayfish claw, the stare
of sunfish hovering above the cloud-stained sand,
a sucker nudging cans, the grinning maskinonge.

How do carp resolve the eel and terror here?
They face so many times this brown-ribbed fall of leaves
predicting weather foreign as a shark or prawn
and floating still above them in the paling sun.

Richard Hugo

Friday Musings (thank the good lord)

Yesterday began as any day would. I came to school way too early, finished some grading, and taught my two classes. Later in the afternoon with all of my grading completed and entered into Blackboard, I began to edit some poems for my manuscript.

At about 4:00 my sister, who is in town visiting because she had an interview earlier this week, calls to say that my mother wants me to take her to the ER. Turns out she had this “rash” on her leg that somehow turned into a flesh eating disease during the course of conversations with my mother. The long and the short of it is she’s fine. We went to Urgent Care. They gave her two shots and three prescriptions and sent her on her way. Apparently she got bitten by something (spider, ant, rabid katydid) and then the bite became infected, hence the nasty looking welt on her leg.

I think I may have been more worried about this initially if a). I wasn’t so exhausted. By the time we left Urgent Care to go get her prescription, I had basically gone into auto pilot mode. b.) I’m not the personality type to think the worst in most situations. c.) I knew she didn’t have what some people thought she had because I’ve had it. Anyway. She’s fine. She’s heading back to Erie this morning leg safely in tow.
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Normally I would not be up in my office blogging at 7:30 on a Friday morning. I don’t even have to be here till 8 usually for my new faculty orientation meetings, but the powers that be finally aligned in the stars and my new office furniture should be arriving in about a half an hour. I’ve packed away all my paper, so all they have to do is come in and arrange it. I believe they are also going to put up a cubicle wall, which will give me a little bit of privacy.
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I received my Emerging Writer’s Network Newsletter this morning and see there is a review of Erin McGraw’s book The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard. I just finished her book The Baby Tree which I bought close to two years ago (I know. I know) when she came to give a craft lecture at MSU. Looks like this is another book to add to the stack…

Thursday Musings

It is amazing how shared space can bring about such tension…
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My twelve week creative writing class has begun. It’s hard to get a feel for a class until a few weeks have passed, but I think that this group seems enthusiastic enough. We discussed creative nonfiction and the sticky subject of what that “creative” really means. I showed them the famous passage from Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, after which one student declared he didn’t like writing that put him in the moment…right.
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I love this from Harpers!

Some of my favorites:

memoir: From the Latin memoria, meaning “memory,” a popular form in which the writer remembers entire passages of dialogue from the past, with the ultimate goal of blaming the writer’s parents for his current psychological challenges.

clandestine science fiction novel: A work set in the future that receives a strong reception from the literary world as long as no one mentions that it is, in fact, science fiction; for example, The Road, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

chick lit: A patriarchal term of oppression for heterosexual female writing; also, a marketing means to phenomenal readership and prominent bookstore space.

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Monday Musings

I’m back!

This past week was a bit ridiculous with grading and my propensity to over schedule myself…but I think I have things well under control. I still have a mountain of papers to grade, but I feel a little less scattered.

My sister will be in town this week. She has a job interview at Butler, so we’re both hoping that goes well. It will be good to see her and hang out for a few days.

This weekend RJ and I volunteered at Camp Rover Romp for the Humane Society. It was a lot of fun. We ran the water relay and I think we were a hit. The weather was beautiful.
The baby pools were a big hit 🙂

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Mary Karr pays tribute to David Foster Wallace in the Washington Post.

The National Book Festival takes place this Saturday.

More than 70 authors will be in attendance including Salman Rushdie, Bob Schieffer, Michelle Singletary, R.L. Stine, Paul Theroux, Neil Gaiman, Philippa Gregory, Kimberly Dozier and more.

Robert Olin Butler waxes poetic in the Washington Post:

Every morning when I sit down at my desk to write, I feel I am called upon to try to give voice to something true about the human condition. From the place where I dream, I have learned that I must see this not as an act of judgment but as an exploration of our shared humanity. ·

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Your fall poem for this week:

After Apple Picking

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

Robert Frost

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This hits home for me. Big time. This is very true:

The benefits have proved appealing enough to draw thousands of writers into the university fold, and while a couple of generations ago it might have been a surprise to find a writer who taught at a college, now it’s a surprise to find one who doesn’t.

Thursday Musings

Ridiculously busy….more later.

Tuesday Musings

Mark Sarvas is once again off on his book tour, so his guest blogger for this week is Todd Hasak, whose post this morning really resonated with me. Check it out.

I do remember when I just loved reading. I still get that feeling a lot, but I think a “love” of reading is complicated. For instance, I love Woolfe’s To the Lighthouses, but I don’t think I’d necessarily curl up with it on a rainy morning. It is beautiful and complex and even though I’ve read it and studied it, I’m still not convinced I completely understand it. I’m OK with that. I think that’s partly why I like the book so much. On the other hand, I read books like Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim At Tinker Creek or Joan Didion’s A Year of Magical Thinking or Barbra Kingsolver’s The Posionwood Bible and I can’t put them down. These are books I would curl up with. I like reading books that challenge me and I like reading books just to read them (Harry Potter falls into this category) but it is a complex question to ask, why do I read?

Speaking of reading, I started Harry Revised the other night and am now on page 48. I love books that make me laugh and so far this one is doing a smashing job.
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I like to follow the blog of Sara Tracey, Mindful Ramblings, because I feel a certain kinship with her. Her post this morning takes me back to when I was in grad school at UNT and I was trying to teach three comp classes, work on my thesis, and finish up theory and literature classes. When she says that begin a PhD student isn’t really helping her poetry, I want to chime in with an exuberant “Yes!”

It is difficult being a full time PhD, MA, or MFA student while teaching and working and writing. I always say that after I’m done with my MFA, I will have more time to devote to writing. As it stands I have a few ideas for some new poems, but I have yet to sit down and committ those ideas to paper, because, well, I’m f**king swamped.

Recently I came to the realization that this problem will not get much better once I’m done with my MFA. I’ll still have a full time teaching gig, I still have a dog, and friends and family, and an apartment. In other words, I will still have many demands on my time, and the MFA will soon be replaced by something else. I used to think my graduate professors were trying to screw with me when they would assign a poem, a 300 page reading assignment, and a literary critque on top of the mound of narrative essays I had to grade for my comp classes, but now I understand. They were not screwing with me. They were teaching me how to be a writer, specifically a poet, and survive in the real world.

So cheers to you, Sara. Hang in there and know that I’m out here too trying to figure out just what the hell I’m doing.
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Monday Musings

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October (section I)

Is it winter again, is it cold again,

didn’t Frank just slip on the ice,

didn’t he heal, weren’t the spring seeds planted

didn’t the night end,

didn’t the melting ice

flood the narrow gutters

wasn’t my body

rescued, wasn’t it safe

didn’t the scar form, invisible

above the injury

terror and cold,

didn’t they just end, wasn’t the back garden

harrowed and planted–

I remember how the earth felt, red and dense,

in stiff rows, weren’t the seeds planted,

didn’t vines climb the south wall

I can’t hear your voice

for the wind’s cries, whistling over the bare ground

I no longer care

what sound it makes

when was I silenced, when did it first seem

pointless to describe that sound

what it sounds like can’t change what it is–

didn’t the night end, wasn’t the earth

safe when it was planted

didn’t we plant the seeds,

weren’t we necessary to the earth,

the vines, were they harvested?

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Louise Glück
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RETRACTION

The Sarah Palin banned book list is false. I was a tad suspicious of it considering that the books were all highly targeted on other, genuine “banned lists.” If you type Sarah Palin and banned book list into google, you can find all the particulars. Snopes.com also has a post about it.
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Agatha Christie on tape.

Is it wrong to be disturbed by the fact that the current number one best seller in hard cover non-fiction is Stori Telling by Tori Spelling? Not only is the rhyming terrible but notice how she spelled “stori.” Yikes!

As a bright spot, D. Sedaris’s When You Are Engulfed in Flames is #4 after Obama Nation. Sigh…

It appears that poets are beginning to follow celebrities in that they are branching out into other mediums and talents. This isn’t anything new but I have to say that these collages are pretty neat.

Here are some of my favorites courtesy of the NY Times:

Rainy Sunday

Thanks to Ike, the weather today has been gray and rainy. Luckily Kwe and I got in our two mile walk yesterday afternoon. Today, we’ve had to settle for short jaunts outside, while I try to keep the rain off my glasses and Kwe tries to keep the rain out of his ears.

Speaking of Ike, thankfully the damage was not as severe as it could have been. I lived in Denton, TX (45 minutes from Dallas) when I was attending UNT for grad school, so I have some friends who braved the weather this weekend in Houston.

A biker rides along a portion of the sea wall that had been cleared of debris from Hurricane Ike in Galveston, Texas, on Saturday.

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I consider myself and animal advocate, and I don’t really understand how you hire someone who is unfamiliar with animals to run Animal Control for the city of Indianapolis.
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Sadly, the literary community has suffered another devestating loss. David Foster Wallace killed himself September 12, 2008. I first became aware of Wallace when I took a seminar at MSU about the power of humor in non-fiction. The professor leading the class gave us Wallace’s essay, Consider the Lobster. His work is brilliant and difficult and I am sorry to hear of his death.

From Salon.com:

Every author wants to sell books, to please his or her publisher, to reap critical accolades and to bask in the admiration of colleagues, and Wallace did want those things, at the same time that he was more than a little embarrassed by such desires and acutely aware of the fact that none of it could make him happy. However, all great writers — and I have no doubt that he was one — have a preeminent purpose: to tell the truth. David Foster Wallace’s particular vocation was to allow us to see just how fraught and complicated, how difficult yet how necessary, that telling had become — not just for him, but for all of us. What will we do without him?

From the NY Times:

David Foster Wallace used his prodigious gifts as a writer — his manic, exuberant prose, his ferocious powers of observation, his ability to fuse avant-garde techniques with old-fashioned moral seriousness — to create a series of strobe-lit portraits of a millennial America overdosing on the drugs of entertainment and self-gratification, and to capture, in the words of the musician Robert Plant, the myriad “deep and meaningless” facets of contemporary life.

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Saturday, Saturday!

An addition to my little post about SP earlier this week:

Here is a list of the books she tried to have banned from the Wasilla Public Library, according to the official minutes of the Library Board. When she was unsuccessful at having these books banned, she tried to have the Librarian fired. Please pass this list along.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Blubber by Judy Blume
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Carrie by Stephen King
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Christine by Stephen King
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Cujo by Stephen King
Curses, Hexes, and Spells by Daniel Cohen
Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Decameron by Boccaccio
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Fallen Angels by Walter Myers
Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) by John Cleland
Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Forever by Judy Blume
Grendel by John Champlin Gardner
Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
Have to Go by Robert Munsch
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Impressions edited by Jack Booth
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
It’s Okay if You Don’t Love Me by Norma Klein
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Little Red Riding Hood by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Love is One of the Choices by Norma Klein
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
More Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
My House by Nikki Giovanni
My Friend Flicka by Mary O’Hara
Night Chills by Dean Koontz
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women’s Health Collective
Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl
Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz
Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
Separate Peace by John Knowles
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Bastard by John Jakes
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Devil’s Alternative by Frederick Forsyth
The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Snyder
The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks
The Living Bible by William C. Bower
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
The New Teenage Body Book by Kathy McCoy and Charles Wibbelsman
The Pigman by Paul Zindel
The Seduction of Peter S. by Lawrence Sanders
The Shining by Stephen King
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Snyder
Then Again, Maybe I Won’t by Judy Blume
To Kill 20 A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary by the Merriam-Webster Editorial Staff
Witches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts: The Story of the Halloween Symbols by Edna Barth
I’d like to know why conservatives continue to pick on To Kill a Mockingbird. It seems like it’s a right if passage or something. Also, does anyone notice a theme among these books? A lot of them are fantasy….I stress the word fantasy.
Thanks T for passing this list along.

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Today is our orientation for Camp Rover Romp. Get excited!