It's still light out

I love summer!

I WENT tothe INTERNET becauseiwas LOOKING fora METHOD

I've been applying for lots of weird little jobs, and to just to make my random freelance life official, last night I posted some ads on craigslist advertising myself as a tutor and editor . . . well, today I got an email from an adult looking for ESL tutoring, asking--perfectly reasonably, I might add--about my "method."

So I went online in search of a method, and I discovered a couple of interesting thoughts about English.

1. Spoken and written English are so different that they should be considered separate dialects. Whoa! I'd never thought of that but I guess it might be true. So now we can all feel good because we're fluent in at least two dialects.

2. English speakers say "function words" (prepositions, articles, all the little words) EIGHT TIMES FASTER than we say "content words" (nouns, verbs, etc). I love the idea of the researchers sitting there with a stopwatch timing, I don't know, their friends? Or "Friends"?

Obviously, these have implications for ESL instruction, but they are also pretty relevant to writing poetry and creative prose. I'm going to think about them more.

Progress

The tomatoes are getting bigger, and the droopy basil seems to be cheering up. Still, we have another two weeks of June Gloom left to go, and I can tell the plants are sick of it. As am I. My teen student, on the other hand, claims to love it, which proves that growing up in Seattle makes you a freak.

Last week I couldn't find the key I use to get in and do laundry. Feeling kind of dumb, I turned my apartment upside down in various ways for several days and then finally found the key last night . . . on the kitchen table. Yup, I'm a keeper. At least my clothes are clean now.

Tomorrow I'm going to print out all my poems from my thesis and from this year and maybe some more that have been lurking in my files, and I'm going to see where we're at.

INSOMNIA!

C'mon, relax!

Tomato report: one new cherry tomato, one cherry tomato gone (eaten?). One tiny big tomato.

Other stuff report: nada.

Every day, and some questions

,I decided to start blogging again, like, every day or something. Why? Just because I enjoy it. That's all.

So here is the tomato update: each cherry tomato plant has five baby tomatoes, for a total of ten. The two regular tomato plants are doing fine, but no sign of babies yet. One of the basil plants is mysteriously droopy, which is worrying. I keep meaning to go to Home Despot and get some more herbs, and probably some more tomatoes too, so I have a real collection.

I'm in love with a certain chord on the guitar. E7/G#. I'm not sure why. I've never felt this way about a chord before.

One year + one week into the PhD, and school is still confusing. My poetry idol told me that I would know if I should be doing this or not, that if it wasn't right for me I would hate it. But, well, I do kind of hate it, I feel like I'll never be able to do and/or be satisfied doing what's expected of me, that the available lines of inquiry either a) are boring or b) require more knowledge than I'll ever be able to acquire or c) obviously, both. And yet, when it comes time to do my own work, I break what I understand to be the rules and write exactly what I want to write and I love pretty much every paper I've written this year and, well, love's a strong word but for the most part I'd say so do my professors. So is this just a grad school bubble where I'm getting good responses because the standards are relatively low but I'll eventually have to stop writing what I want and start playing the game? Have I just chosen the old-fashioned and/or easy professors? Or are the rules more flexible than they sound? I kind of hope so because sure, I complain about academic inbreeding and the narrowness of professional discourse, but it's not like Harper's is looking for an incisive discussion of the role of the comma splice in contemporary poetry . . . for better or worse, if I want to write about poems, academia is probably the place.

And finally, meet my friend Carafe, who counts being the coiner of the phrase "Summer of Excess" among his many important accomplishments.

Good Morning!

As of this afternoon, my first year of school is finished! I have to apologize because I have been MIA for at least the past week as I cowered in a hole and put off writing and then wrote my seminar papers. My phone is now back on. If you called me, I will call you back and apologize personally.

But let me just tell you for a second what I did in the last 24 hours. In 24 hours, I conceived of, researched, and wrote a perfectly respectable--in fact, I think quite insightful--twelve-page seminar paper. Perhaps that impresses you. Just wait. In the same 24 hours I also: got a full night's sleep, tutored my high school student, ran 4 and half miles, AND put in a serious effort partying not only at the College Inn but also at Earl's. I'm a machine!

And now it's over for a while. From now on, this blog is going to be all about my tomato plants.

Nerd Alert

I sent this to my Wordsworth and Coleridge / Gift and Sacrifice class tonight with a response paper about Wordsworth's Prelude. You will have to read the Prelude, which you should do anyway, to get the full extent of the humor. Anyway, I amuse myself, so here you go.

Not uselessly employed
Response here I have made, and stated how
The Prelude might be read, nor have I failed
To touch on how the poet's friend, the other
Poet, whom we have read and not without
Delight, might be addressed within the work,
Nor have excluded mention of the Gift,
And in the selfsame vein the Sacrifice
Have likewise I not shunned, nor will it seem,
To thee, dear Friends, that I in vain have read
And made response and summarized, as well
As fond and feeble tongue allows, the poem
Which you I need not dread neglected not
To read this one day that Seattle was
A visible scene on which the sun was shining.

Update

Yesterday it was like 80 degrees, and I went to a Wordsworth party. The day before I hung out with sailing officials and got a "beer rating" ("double-handed novice"). Being financially sensible, I'm missing the Irvine MFA prom, which I'm sad about, and instead spending Sunday watching a marathon of some Canadian mystery show that K Dub and L are obsessed with. I don't feel like doing any work. I REALLY don't feel like doing any work. Maybe I will buy some papers online.

By the way: for the past couple of weeks I have been feeling unusually phone-averse. I mean, I hate the phone anyway, always have. But I miss you. So don't think that I don't encourage any and all drunk dials, texts, emails, and/or carrier pigeons.

It's raining, it's pouring

Scenes from the University District street fair: lots of booths selling insurance or pictures of wolves or recruiting people to be atheists or bus commuters; people eating fried dough in the pouring rain; me walking through it clutching a giant tome about punctuation.

My new-poetry-mentor called something in one of my poems a "self-dissolving declaration," and I've realized that all my poems kind of work that way. Everything turns into its own opposite pretty much as soon as it hits the page. No wonder people say my poems are cryptic. I'm very pleased that NPM thought through them and understood.

Here's a question: should I write my second paper of the year about Wordsworth and Coleridge, or should I write about someone more contemporary? It might make more sense to work in my actual so-called period, but the class is about W&C and I'm kind of getting into them. Plus, poor Wordsworth! He's so maligned I always want to defend him.

Gertrude Stein taught me how to read Wordsworth

As you know if you've had the minutest discussion with me about my academic work, I've been on the defensive all year about my unwillingness to align myself with a specifically "experimental" tradition in poetry. In a conversation with my friend J(2) today, I formulated the reason like this. To me, the virtues people ascribe to experimental or avant-garde writing are the virtues that distinguish good poetry, period. If it's not inarticulable, irreducible, and counter-intuitive, if it doesn't take the world apart and put it back together off-kilter, it's not a poem. That makes me a postmodern reader, I guess. So if you're going to read like this anyway, if you're going to approach everything looking for what's off, what's inexplicable, what's a "site" of (linguistic, cultural, personal, etc) conflict, then a lot of effort in the writing intended to make you read this way just seems obvious. Rather than actually deconstructing your reading practices, it didactically congratulates itself for doing so--in the process undermining the very deconstruction at which it aims. For this reason, true experimentation within an "experimental" idiom is, at this literary moment, very difficult. Weird paradox.

Or that's my opinion, anyway. Now off to shower and then party.

Magic!

Obviously, blogging about sickness is the best way to get over being sick. Today on my run, I barely wheezed at all.

I also got to exercise my new motto, "Friends don't let friends take a cab to the airport." It's true!

I'm sick

of being sick. I will write more when the tribe of tiny guinea pigs decamps from the inside of my sinuses. Actually I will probably write more before that but it will probably sound like the world does to me right now, like it is coming from very, very far away.

Business as usual in Seattle

from today's Seattle Times: Two vehicles were swallowed by a giant sinkhole under the south end of the University Bridge.

Funny

Anyone who has been in a writing workshop has seen someone distort his gift by trying to make his writing funny. This always fails. The writer might be able to eke out a yuk or two, but you can tell when someone is exerting all his will and all his intelligence toward comedy, and the feeling of self-consciousness, of forcing, is murder to a joke. For some people the anxiety of this extends to all areas of life; others are funny in conversation but their writing is serious. Anyway, it's a terrible bind to want to be funnier than you are.

I always felt I had kind of dodged this bullet. I have a quirky sense of humor I would describe as weird but square, which amuses some people a lot and most others not at all. I'm usually fine with that. Unlike some of my friends, I've never felt like a failure because I'm not, you know, told I should do stand-up or something (god forbid! even the thought makes me queasy). I'm not a funny writer and, with the exception of a few one-offs and occasional poems or whatever, I've never tried to be.

But recently I've been (squarely) thinking about humor and writing, and thinking that it may be necessary after all. Not for the reasons usually associated with funny writing--rebellion, truth-telling, etc.; as a square, I don't like trickster-type figures, and I think "Fuck you, society!" is a dumb thing to say. I like my humor inclusionary, as far as that's possible.

What I've been thinking is that humor may be the only way to leaven a bleak worldview without conceding anything to consolation. If meaninglessness is the precondition of your writing, it's easy to end up in nihilism, and this is both irritating and boring. Humor avoids nihilism because it is of the tangible world, but it operates outside belief systems: the feeling you get when someone slips on a bananna peel doesn't suggest that there's any explanation for anything, that suffering has any purpose or reward, that we will all be reunited when we die. But it's still a nice feeling, an empirical feeling--it tells you you exist and that something outside of you exists. There are other pleasures like this, but they are physical, sensory, abstract--humor is the only one that does it in language and in connection with other people.

To laugh makes you feel alive. To be alive is tragic. As one of my writing professors (I forget which one) used to say, you can take that to the bank.

Mean grumpiness

Monday nights, post tutoring, are all the same. I sit in the kitchen, I eat some approximation of dinner, I flit around the internet, and I think about my apartment getting broken into. It was a Monday night that that happened, and I had blogged some cheerfully inane ephemera about tutoring that in retrospect looks self-satisfied and clueless. Hindsight. Changes things. So now as I write this I think, what will this look like to me if two hours from now I have a traumatic experience? I guess that's not so hard to figure out . . . it will look like self-satisfied, clueless meta-ephemera.

In other news, I'm going to train with two friends for a half-marathon. We're also going to run a 5K in Vancouver (Canada) in a few weeks just for the hell of it. In still other (pseudo-) news, I've been super social recently. However, I'm experiencing an strong wave of misanthropy. Not toward individuals, mostly . . . and not really toward the species either. Maybe I just mean grumpiness.

Teen Shakespeare

So we went to see Shakespeare in the Park today, even though it's not summer yet and that should have clued us in as to what to expect. First off, there was no lawn! Just two tiny strips of grass that sloped downhill from the stage, divided by a bike path. The show itself, A Midsummer Night's Dream, was recognizably a college production: mismatched costumes seemingly taken at random from the actors' closets (the velvet tracksuit, the low-rise jeans), and line readings cycling through the four basic types of Shakespearean over-enunciation--declamatory, angry, beseeching, and seductive--also seemingly at random. The whole production team consisted of one guy to the side of the stage hitting various things with sticks, and at one point he wandered off to take a cell phone call. As one friend said, the parodic play-within-a-play pretty accurately captured the spirit of the whole thing--a ridiculous but high-spirited amateurishness. It has a certain charm.

I hadn't thought about this play for a while, and--wow! First of all, it's obviously impervious to the vissicitudes of production, because if this version couldn't ruin it . . . The unmagical quality of the production also meant that you could see Shakespeare's brain more clearly than usual: the incredible efficiency of the storytelling, the tension between rigid structure and inventiveness, the orderly interweaving of the different plots always just managing to contain their centrifugal force . . .

But what I'd really forgotten is how cynical the play is about love. Maybe all of Shakespeare's marriage comedies are, because the fairy potions, the disguises, the mistaken identities all seem like ways of talking about the same thing, which is love's cruelty. In this play, love is an arbitrary, miserable compulsion, an open wound. Love meets with scorn; love turns into scorn; love is about vulnerability and vulnerability is about contempt.

To illustrate: two friends, Helena and Hermia, each love a different man, but both men love Hermia. Helena's scorned love has the purity of desperation. She completely debases herself: she says, "I am your spaniel." But neither her devotion nor her being generally considered a pretty good catch has any effect on her man, who is willing to say to her face, "I am sick when I do look on thee." A fairy prince tries to fix this unfair situation magically, but his assistant mixes things up. Suddenly, both men love Helena. The scene is chilling: neither woman understands what has happened. When Hermia reaches out for her lover, he says, "Out, loated medicine! Hated potion, hence!" He says he hates her, that he never wants to see her again. Bewildered, she reaches out again. Meanwhile, Helena doesn't buy the sudden reversal and begs the men not to mock her. This scene is not funny, and it is not about the supernatural; it is about the door between two people slamming shut. In the end Helena gets her man, but only because the fairy spell stays on him; their love is not real or permanent. The wall can always come down between them, and in that condition, trust is for fools. It's no accident that in the play-within-a-play Pyramus and Thisbe kiss through a wall; the truest and tenderest love, maybe, is the one that is already destroyed.

Or the truest and tenderest love in the play may actually be for the players themselves. Flawed and ridiculous as they are, they inspire and seem to be created out of a deep fondness that seems more genuine than anything the lovers feel for each other. This thought has been formulated many ways: agape versus eros, bros before hos. There's a mixture in it of disillusionment, renunciation, consolation, and hope. I don't know if I'm glad or not to see it here, in one of Shakespeare's sunniest plays (despite its nighttime setting). I appreciate the wisdom, but romantic that I am, I guess I just want to think that the Bard was happy with someone.

Pithy

Next to one line of my poem: "This is the dynamite." Next to the next line: "This is the tender swaddling." Isn't that a nice way for my latest poetry-professor-hero to put it? I'd like all of my poems to contain both dynamite and tender swaddling. It's a side benefit of studying with poets that they say really pithy things about your work. My favorite, though it wasn't exactly a compliment, is still that my poems have an "I was raised by wolves" clarity. The point was that this quality is trying on the nerves. I mean, of course it's trying! What do you think it's like to live with it?!

(I was not really raised by wolves, though I was raised in a cave and therefore don't know anything about the 80s.)

Life, ungrammatically

Anne Carson is a genius with the comma splice, she makes me want to use it to excess.


I loved the train today, I was thrillingly unconscious the whole way to Boston.

It was probably eighty degrees, the sun was shining, the North End is fancier now, luckily the binnoculars are exactly the same.

Josh is a year older, so are Shakespeare and Nabokov.

The sea of people looked sad, I guess the Red Sox lost.

I still don't know what you do with being sad, I guess you talk about other things.

My grandfather died last night.

I was on my way and I didn't make it in time, but I'm here now (Connecticut).