Where the Magic Happens

Kitcat looked so cute curled up on that box that I started taking pictures instead of grading.

I am making bread pudding and reading. I think D.H. Lawrence is driving me crazy with his excessive, repetitive sensual adjectives. I just looked at my lists and realized that I have committed to reading a whole selection of supple mental texts.

Bismarck

is the name of the rabbit in Women in Love. I had to read 262 pages to get there, but it was worth it. I was somehow afraid that there wouldn't really be a rabbit, or that it would be there but I would miss it, that it would be some kind of arcane allusion that I would be expected to recognize as a reference to Plato's Allegory of the Burrow, or, more likely, Nietzche's uberbunsch. But no. It's just what I'd hoped, an imaginary garden with a real toad in it.

On a different subject, I know it is much maligned, but Wait Wait Don't Tell Me is really funny. I like to listen to podcasts of it while I run. Today, I heard a riff on financial and government-themed porn: "Bear Naked Stearns," "AIG-spot," and, of course . . . "the Stimulus Package." And then my favorite "Diane She's So Feinstein" with . . . "the Minority Whip." Maybe you had to be there, but I was laughing out loud and all the other wholesome Seattlites propelling themselves around Greenlake on Saturday morning gave me strange looks.

T.S. Eliot says:

"A poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness." Exactly! I'll have to remember that if I get really stuck in my exams.

But also: "that most dangerous kind of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead." Uh-oh!

An early valentine

"Over here is word, over there is thing, at which the word is shooting amiable love-arrows." (Lyn Hejinian)

I like the idea of amiable love arrows. It's kind of an oxymoron but kind of not. Word knows thing is never going to say yes, that they're never going to get together, but it's going to keep asking anyway. But it's not going to be a creepy stalker about it. It's going to have the kind of unrequited love that turns into a general love for the world, the kind that people around can feel and be a little sustained by. For everyone else, this unrequited love is sustaining partly because it's not directed at us--in a way, because of its impersonality. And this is what poetry is. It's a neat idea.

Too Roo Too Roo Llama

After a day reading James Joyce, it was somehow really perfect to hear a song called There's No One As Irish As Barack Obama on the BBC Newshour. It's really cute: "O'Leary, O'Reilly, O'Hare and O'Hara / There's no one as Irish as Barack O'Bama."

Wow

When I walked into my adviser's office yesterday, for a meeting about which I had been sleeplessly worrying for days, he was tromping around his computer screen in the person of a tiny adorable elf with purple hair and a big gun. It turns out he was playing World of Warcraft. He said it is restorative, after his departmental responsibilities, to kill things.

Then he bemoaned the willingness of grad students to write personal blogs, and I kept quiet.

zzzz

Afternoons are just sleepy times. I'm going to take a walk after this to stave off the inevitable nap.

Last night I discovered, while procrastinating, that in the entire history of this blog (four years!), a grand total of two posts have been linked to by other people. That's not very many. One was good old JK, and the other was a Boston site that randomly found a post I wrote about a visit in the summer of 2006. Weird.

In looking back, I also note how great my friends were (are) and how happy I was. I was really, really happy. Not all the time, of course. But it was special. Irvine was special. I miss it.

Sunday in the Books

Well, I avoided yesterday's problem by going to the library. I'm in my carrel right now. I love the library when it is squirrel-free.

I was very productive. Unfortunately, almost all for teaching. I'm still making some course materials for this quarter, but at least I'm totally set through the end of next week and mostly set for about a month after that. Being so ahead is a totally new experience for me and I think it might take some time for my anxiety to really be assuaged, which is the point--for me to believe that I am, indeed, ready for my classes so that I can concentrate on other work.

I decided that my spring class, which is my first upper-level course ever, is going to be on "Literature and Autobiography." That way, it will help me with my other work. I'm alternately excited and terrified as I think about it.

I'm working my way, right now, through a book of poets' essays about poetry. I was looking forward to this, but it's actually kind of hard going. A lot of manifestos. A lot of dense language. And a lot of tiny variation on similar points, which are kind of laborious to figure out how to distinguish.

Now I'm off to the gym. It's cold and dark.

Stress nap

Today I did something that is really dangerous for me. I finished reading a novella, which hardly counts as work, and then, on the couch already, I decided to take a nap. I didn't even want to take a nap--I felt awake--I just wanted to not deal. I had to force myself to lie there until I got sleepy, which was hard, because I also felt anxious. When I woke up, it was 4:00 and I was mad at myself and all off my game and massively behind on my schedule to the point where it seemed most sensible just to give up on the schedule and start over. I have to stop doing this.

Two thoughts

1. Today by the fountain I walked by a little flock of waterfowl and, when one came close to me, I said to it, "Goose-cat!" And then felt silly. I love animals, but they all remind me of Kitcat.

2. While all the living former presidents had lunch with Obama yesterday, I think all the losers should have gotten together too. Kerry, Gore, and Dole could have welcomed McCain to their fraternity of disappointment. (I guess Bush I and Carter would have had to be in two places at once . . .) I don't know, I think it would have been an interesting event.

For today

It is raining like the end of the world and people are paddling around the streets in kayaks.



I thought I'd start posting every day again. It helps me feel less alone while I'm reading. Therefore I've got to get this finished before midnight so it'll have today's estimable stamp on it, and then I can post again tomorrow.

I just ate a Caesar salad, roasted carrots with walnuts, a grapefruit, and an apple. I feel very full.

I also feel very sad. Very, very sad.

Today

Today I feel sad. It is raining. The squirrels in suits are still scuttling my study plans. Brahms in orchestra rehearsal makes me feel sad. Other things make me feel sad. Henry James makes me feel exquisitely frustrated. One of my advisers makes me feel terrified by promising that during my qualifying exams she will ask me the name of the bloodthirsty rabbit in Women in Love. ("Bunnicula?")

On the plus side, I have gotten some really delightful emails recently, and today is a day of people I know randomly being famous on the internet, so that's always cool. I'm going to take a shower, do my dishes (which is a very Zen experience, because something happened to the water pressure while I was away and now the kitchen sink can only produce a trickle) and then read some HJ in bed. That will be nice.

Interview

Also, if you go to the main page of the Atlantic Monthly you will see my latest interview! At least, it should be there for the next few minutes before being superseded by some cutting-edge discussion of a cutting-edge development in the world of important things. After that, my little discussion of the news that stays news will still be here.

First Day of School

Last night while I was busy being nervous for the first day of school it snowed. It was beautiful, and then the power went out so I reread my syllabus by candlelight.

The library is no longer in the blissful state of pre-term emptiness, and the carrel I wanted turned out to be taken, but even with everyone around me eating an early lunch it still has a certain broad and scholastic peacefulness. The thing about teaching is that, even when you have done a lot of planning and photocopying in advance, there's still a lot to do on the spot. My goal of having to do nothing but show up isn't going to work. Still, my class seems nice and it was good to see my returning students again.

Update: Okay, this is just weird. In the assigned-carrel section of the library, there are all these undergrad guys in suits, all eating lunch. It's must be some kind of fraternity thing. They're also working--the one closest to me is reading photocopied poems--but still, like ants or mice, what in the singular would be harmless or even cute is horrifying when encountered as a swarm.

Update: I feel like I'm in some kind of performance art piece. Every time I look there are more of them. And now they have reached the critical mass at which the imperative to be quiet in the library stops seeming important. Most are working but at any given moment two or three of them are walking around, crunching potato chips, whispering. What I don't understand is why, if they must make of the library their private lunchroom, it has to be here in the assigned-carrel section where people obviously only go if they really want to study.

And your hair looks great today!

I'm procrastinating from looking at someone else's edits of my writing. Looking at them is making me nervous. I'm very much aware that I'm out of practice from writing. This is weird since of course I write all the time, but it's been a while since I have tried to construct large numbers of artful sentences. (Interestingly, to me, my poems, which have been described as elliptical, tend to have very simple, stripped-down sentences that don't really work translated into prose.) That writing is not like walking or breathing but is a skill that needs to be kept up is one of the true things that they say in MFA-land.

Anyway, I'm writing this from a coffee shop with "complimentary wifi," and I'm taking solace from the way I can't help but misread the sign. I'm expecting a little window to pop up any minute saying "Great job!" "That was a terrific sentence, that one there!" "Just write a few more like that one and you're golden!"

UPDATE: Well, it's okay. Also, yesterday I hatched this great plan to freely and essayistically write out my thoughts and impressions at the end of every study session, so as to get into better fighting form for writing, and also to keep a better record of what I read, and to try to develop ideas that might be useful later. There might be some blogging connection to this; I'll keep you posted.

Also, (a propos of my coffee shop neighbor, who wasn't able to get a word in around her friend's earplug-penetrating conversation) isn't "edgewise" a great word?