Category: winter

Saturday Musings

We’re supposed to get freezing rain and 1-3 inches of snow later this evening. If I were back east, I wouldn’t think much of this forecast. It is fairly typical of this time of year and usually the snowfalls are much greater. However, I’m not living back east. I’m living in the Midwest and we don’t handle inclement weather well. I know this seems odd. I live four hours from Chicago and they’re perfectly capable of dealing with snow and ice and any combination thereof. However, here in Indy, citizens worry, drive to fast or too slow, and more often than not, end up in a ditch. Therefore, we’ll be hanging pretty close to home this evening.

We went to two farmers markets this morning. One was the winter market that we try to go to every Saturday. We got some meat, sweet potatoes, and squash. All the products there are fresh and locally grown. The second market is closer to where we used to live and offered brussel sprouts and green beans. This market is owned and operated by a local chef and once again all the items are fresh and local.

I think it is important to eat well. I’ve always thought this, but until recently I have not worked actively to follow my own advice. However, one of my resolutions this year is to eat better and cook more. I like cooking and in order to support that idea, I signed up for four “Cooking with Culinary” sessions at school. Also, I think it is important to support local growers and buy their product. I was psyched to learn that this newer farmer’s market we discovered is open till 9 AM Monday through Saturday! This is huge.

Finally, we attended an open house this afternoon for my school dean who is leaving for a new job in Minnesota. It was fun. I like my colleagues. Although, I do think it’s amusing that most people don’t think I’m old enough to be a full time faculty member. I am the youngest faculty member in the Liberal Arts Division, but there are several of us that are all in the same general age range. However, whenever I’m meeting spouses or other faculty members from different departments, they ask me if I’m administration first.
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Another brilliant idea from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. This is in reference to celebrating Kingsolver’s 50th birthday:

“Camille made the call, and it was inspired. The tiniest posy, anything would serve. And truthfully while we’d put prodigious efforts into our vegetable gardens and orchards, our front yard lay sorry and neglected. Anything people might bring to set in that ground would improve it. Thus began the plan for my half century Birthday Garden: higgedly-piggedly, florescent and spontaneous, like friendship itself” (106).
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To say that I’m an animal lover, is probably an understatement. Whenever a commercial comes on concerning the Humane Society or the World Wildlife Fund, I usually change the channel. It’s not because I don’t care, but these commercials really bother me. One of the worst ones I’ve seen is in regards to polar bears. This is put out by the WWF and has Noah Wiley (past ER fame) looking bright eyed and down in the mouth and he explains the plight of the polar bear. There are numerous shots of polar bears frolicking in the snow and diving for fish. However, the commercial ends with a mama polar bear and her cub jumping off a piece of ice and swimming off into the vast unknown, because of global climate change, the ice is melting and they will eventually drown due to exahuastion.

The first time I saw this commercial I bawled for five minutes. I’ve avoided it ever since, until the other night when RJ made me watch it again, at which point I started to cry when explaining how the fuzzy fur cub would end up as shark food. Needless to say, we immediately logged onto the WWF’s website and adopted a polar bear cub.

As you can imagine, there are many animals you can adopt, in many price ranges, on the WWF’s website, so RJ and I decided we would continue to support the cause (as our funds allowed) every month. If that’s not a successful public awareness campaign, I don’t know what is.

Thursday (Snowy) Musings

Recent Amaryllis photos:

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Linda came to Murray to give a reading on Saturday night, but I couldn’t stay for it. I’d like to check out Flight reviewed in The Atlantic:

Linda Bierds, whose poetry has appeared regularly in the Atlantic since the 1980s, has enjoyed a prolific and successful career; her work has earned multiple Pushcart Prizes, grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Macarthur “Genius” award in 1998. Her latest book, Flight, a collection of new and selected poems, showcases work from her seven previous collections of poetry, distinguished by a precise and musical voice, a passionate eye for detail, and a distinctive, decades-long exploration of the lives and voices of well-known artists, scientists, and historical figures.

It seems that ever since the Million Little Pieces debacle, false memoirs are popping everywhere:

Days after Berkley Books announced that it was canceling the publication of the memoir “Angel at the Fence,” after its author, Herman Rosenblat, acknowledged that he had falsified parts of his story, an independent publisher said it was negotiating to release the book as a work of fiction.

Sunday (Pittsburgh) Musings


Don’t blame this carnage on the recession or any of the usual suspects, including increased competition for the reader’s time or diminished attention spans. What’s undermining the book industry is not the absence of casual readers but the changing habits of devoted readers.


For a decade, consumers mostly ignored electronic book devices, which were often hard to use and offered few popular items to read. But this year, in part because of the popularity of Amazon.com’s wireless Kindle device, the e-book has started to take hold.

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Violence

Sometimes it can’t be avoided
even though you might decline
the invitation to step outside—
sometimes you are outside
maybe in the repose of your garden
among rose petal and fern, but the whole
unvarnished spectacle of do
before you’re done unto unfolding
as spider devours beetle, beetle, aphid,
and the cat red in the tooth and claw.
No need to bring up bombs bursting
in synch or the rockets’ red glare
or every laser fescue pointing out
all that’s erasable, good-bye good-bye.
It’s among school children now,
maybe even in your neighbor’s house,
eating ravenously at his table,
agreeing with everything he says.
Inside, your daughter is locking
all the basement windows, your son
is drawing a truth machine to zap
the bad from the good, and when
your wife comes home to tell you
of a small injustice she’s endured,
the arrow of your steely retribution
thwunks into a soft, imagined heart.
No one immune here, no one
merely a small flash in the pan:
everything hugely combustible.
In the garden, you’re deadheading
lilies, the petals spiraling down
like crushed wings, and your fingers,
steeped in pulp, are turning yellow,
orange, incarnadine, damage
creating its own aesthetic,
painting itself on your skin.
And if anyone asked you now
you’d confess you’re damage, too,
you’re for wreckage of heart and bone
wrenching out the smallest penance.
Above you, purple bruising the edges
of the sky. Even the heavens.
In another moment, someone
might come looking for you,
touch you on the shoulder
and you’d flame up.
Nothing seems so improbable
as the world of a few minutes ago.
Here’s the night full of stars.
Behind each one, the darkness
you can never see.
Gregory Djanikian
The Southern Review
Autumn 2008
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Those are pleasant thoughts, but awful poetry — probably the worst three lines Robert Frost ever put to paper. Tellingly it was work for hire: the opening lines of “Dedication,” the poem Frost composed for John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration.

Wednesday (Scraping ice off my car) Musings

We got some snow last night and then we got some freezing rain. This made for a lovely, hard mixture that greeted me as I walked out to my car this morning. After almost falling three times (yes, I know I’m a klutz but it was slippery!) I managed to get my car started, locate my snow scraper, and start hacking away at the ice. Twenty minutes later I was just getting into my car and heading to work. This is where the allure of winter starts to dim…

In other news, after crunching numbers, adding up student loans, and crunching more numbers, RJ and I have decided to wait a year before purchasing a home. I would advise anyone who has significant school debt to not add up all you loans unless you want to seriously ruin your day. Mine was ruined, to the point of tears ruined, but I bounced back when I realized that we could make a significant dent in all our other debt and be in a better financial position in a year and then look into buying a home.
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I subscribed to Poetry about a month and half ago, only to learn that my subscription does not start until January 2009. This irritates mostly because one of my mentors from MSU, Nicky Beer, is featured in the magazine. I plan to go buy it at the newsstand, but it would have been nice to receive it at home. Anyway. Both of the poems featured, Prairie Octopus and Ad Hominem, Nicky read to our poetry workshop this summer.

Ad Hominem

Nicky Beer

The Poet:

Fugitive lung, prodigal intestine—
where’s the pink crimp in my side
where they took you out?
The Octopus:

It must be a dull world, indeed,
where everything appears
to be a version or extrapolation
of you.

The birds are you.
The springtime is you.
Snails, hurricanes, saddles, elevators—
everything becomes
you.

I, with a shift
of my skin, divest my self
to become the rock
that shadows it.

Think of when
your reading eyes momentarily drift,
and in that instant

you see the maddening swarm of alien ciphers submerged within the text
gone before you can focus.
That’s me.
Or your dozing revelation
on the subway that you are
slowly being
digested. Me again.

I am the fever dream
in which you see your loved ones
as executioners. I am also their axe.

Friend, while you’re exhausting
the end of a day
with your sad approximations,

I’m a mile deep
in the earth, vamping
my most flawless impression
of the abyss
to the wild applause of eels.

Source: Poetry (December 2008).

Prairie Octopus, Awake

Nicky Beer

The night’s turned everything to junipers
shagged & spooked with cerulean chalk-fruit,
weird berries whiffing of Martians in rut.
I forget this isn’t my universe
sometimes. Sometimes I think I was falling
most of my life to land here, a lone skirl
in the immaculate hush. In my world
I waltzed with my ink-self, my black shantung.

Owls swallow vowels in stilled trees. It’s not
sleeplessness, it’s fear of what the dark will
do if I don’t keep a close eye on it.
Blue minutes leak from the pricked stars’ prisms,
seep into the earth unchecked. Just as well—
I’ve hardly enough arms to gather them.

Source: Poetry (December 2008).

Thursday (Winding Down) Musings

This could explain why I always look forward to winter:

Snow is the weather to which poets’ imaginations are most beholden; more often than any other it’s given centre stage in a poem rather than providing the incidental music, as rain or sunlight might…

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I am slowly but surely making my way back to my stack of unread books. This new job and my thesis have kept me away from recreational reading this fall, but I am bound and determined to read more this spring.

I finished Lee Martin’s River of Heaven about a week and half ago, took a brief respite to decorate my Christmas tree and do laundry, and then began Barbra Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

I love Barbra Kingsolver. I read Bean Trees when I was a sophomore in high school and read The Posionwood Bible last fall. I think her writing is beautiful and this new nonfiction book is no exception. I’m only about 30 pages in, but I’ve already copied some of the passages down so I won’t forget them. This passage is from the opening of the book:

This story about food begins in a quick-stop convenience market. It was our family’s las day in Arizona, where I’d lived half my life and raised two kids for the whole of theirs. Now we were moving away forever, taking our nostalgic inventory of the things we would never see again: the bush where the roadrunner built a nest and fed lizards to her weird looking babies; the tree Camille crashed into learning to ride her bike; the exact spot where Lily touched a dead snake. Our driveway was kist the first tributary on a memory river sweeping us out.
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These days, poetry readings might seem a strange concept. Why would you give up an evening of watching The Biggest Loser or Dancing with the Stars to listen to someone read what you could easily read, and perhaps more easily understand, on your own?

Friday (Are we done yet?) Musings

I’m here at school at 8:47 on a Friday morning. Again. I’m gearing up for new faculty orientation. Again. I feel like I’ve been oriented almost to the point of exhaustion. It isn’t that these sessions aren’t helpful. It’s just that I’ve been here long enough where the information is starting to repeat.
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It is a rainy fall day. There is a mild chance of flurries next week and the temperature is supposed to slip down to 20. Welcome winter…believe it or not, I’ve missed you.
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I’m playing with an idea for a poem, which has begun in the form of a free write about flannel sheets. This is what I have so far:

I was lying in bed the other night and it was the first night this month, October, where it felt like fall. The temperature was about 40 degrees. I’ve had flannel sheets on my bed since September, as if I am trying to will the cooler air through the windows. Finally, my cool air came and I twisted myself up as tight as I could in those sheets.

What is it about flannel?

For a time, my flannel sheets smelled like cedar because we used to keep them in a cedar chest that my grandfather built. There was something primitive about the feel of flannel, grainy but soft and the smell of cedar that made me feel like I was sleeping in dirt.

Flannel means comfort and nurturing and a sense of home. I associate flannel sheets with Christmas and holidays.

It is difficult to climb out of a bed made with flannel sheets.

Flannel means bargain. The last two sets of sheets I bought were one sale. High quality. Laura Ashley.

Flannel means sleep, hibernate, tunnel down and don’t come out.

Flannel smells like a wet dog when it is being washed.
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National Novel Writing Month is upon us once again. Despite the fact that I have no spare time and currently no computer at home, I’m going to give it a go.