"Through the innocent rectangle of the monitor one beholds a universe."

That's from a kick-ass essay by Robert Pinsky that I have assigned to my poor students, along with a shorter and pithier commentary on literacy by D.C. Poet Laureate-for-Life Dolores Kendrick. Her essay, "A Baptism of Words,"which first appeared in Liguorian magazine, isn't available anywhere on the Web, but it's short and I can send it to you if you send me your address. Just click on "view my complete profile" on the left here and you should be able to email me from the page that appears.

Anyway. Pinsky, Pinsky, Pinsky. Where were we? Ah yes: "Computers and Poetics."

The speech is a pleasure to read, poetry in itself: "The ancient technology of poetry is peculiarly intimate: the most bodily of all the arts." Pinsky argues that the physical intimacy of poetry is greater than that of dance, because dance requires expertise, while poetry can be mumbled by a humble mouth. He makes a dazzling leap, then, to the Internet, and sees eight years into the future--the speech was delivered at MIT in 1997--to a time when personal expression on the Internet is exploding beyond anyone's expectations, when the same attributes of a good poem--its ability to transcend geographical, cultural, and temporal distances--are embedded like HTML tags in personal Web pages and blogs.

Praising the "loud and proud, cussed individualism" that drives so many interactions within the Web each day, Pinsky declares it proof that on the Web, at any rate, "the idea of individualism flourishes at a time when in most cultural areas the concept seems outworn."

I particularly love this characterization: "My experience of the computer is the experience of a puzzle that is an aperture." Like a kaleidoscope. Or a Cornell box. Or another person.

categories: poetry teaching technology thought words

Berger Cookies: The Morning After

Well. I'm still married, is the good news.

The bad news is that I am a very bad, bad wife.

Stuart got two Berger cookies out of the four boxes he brought home.

And you know, he worked all weekend, practically. In Baltimore. At a trade show.

Hey. Don't look at me like that. I didn't act alone.

And it wasn't like I didn't try to do the right thing. Friday night I made a nice cut of salmon for us and chicken cutlets for the kids and apple pie and ice cream, which is really his favorite.

Guess I was feeling a tad guilty. Not only about the cookies, either.

But please, don't let me get started.

Then he called to say he'd be staying in the big city for dinner, and so we sat down to a lovely repast with...his ex-wife.

I like her.

categories: amusement home miscellany

Ginormous Bags of Weedy Goodness

Funny how you can spend more time putting off a job than actually doing it.

That's not what happened this time, though.

It took me virtually all weekend, and I had to do the thing I hate most about gardening--bag and tote a buncha buncha herbage around to the trash bins in back--but I did it. I restored harmony in my little eighth-acre of heaven.

Ah.

Now I'm going to get back to work on my new novel.

(Psych.)

categories: home garden

Xtreme Gardening

Comes a time in every woman's life when she must face the jungle.

For me, that time is the end of July.

I am all for spring and autumn. These are the gardener's gentle seasons, seasons of seedlings and sweet little blossoms on the one end, of exhiliarating foliage and honest hard work in the great outdoors on the other.

In between, comes summer.

And summer is not a friend.

'Specially not like the summer we have had. Sky-high temps and lots of rain. I'm talkin' bout trouble. And that starts with W and rhymes with "speeds" and I mean weeds.

Which brings me to why I am indoors blogging to you, invisible friends.

I am afraid. Very afraid.

categories: home garden

Beauty, too

(Violin d'ingres, by Man Ray)

Beauty is truth, truth beauty. So said John Keats. And the truth hurts, as many (including FOH -- Friends of Hercules) have said.

So: If B = T, and T = H, then B = H. Ergo, beauty hurts.

So say:

Christopher Morley: "Beauty is ever to the lonely mind a shadow fleeting; she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind the gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.”

and

Fyodor Dostoyevsky: "The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man."

And even Matthew Fox: "Another part of beauty is terror.”

(that Matthew Fox? I guess so).

Carl Jung wasn't above popping a few sour grapes, either: “A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.”

Carl, I've got someone I'd like you to meet. You won’t be disappointed.

And from hurtful beauty, it's only a sideways skip to painful love:

You are the beautiful half/Of a golden hurt.” —Gwendolyn Brooks

Thief-journaliste Jean Genet, patron saint of the mid-twentieth century Paris demi-monde, knew more than a thing or two about how beauty socks its beholder in the eye: "I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty--a sunken beauty."

Perhaps what's at issue here is strictly visceral, some exquisite point of sensation that borders on excruciating.

Christopher Morley again: "In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty."

Ouch.

Okay, I'll get to the point. See, I used to think I was the only person in the world who'd ever cried at a commercial. Those made by a certain burger-flipping emporium whose public representative is a flame-haired clown, in particular. But now I know I'm not alone.

Of course, I just told this to my class of 23 students at Montgomery College, and it turns out that in that roomful at least, I am alone. Go figure.

But I think what's doing it—me crying, I mean—is not sentimentality but beauty.

Yes, you heard me. I just admitted I find some commercials beautiful.

Now I know I'm alone.

And while we're at it, I am also really wigged out by clowns. And it turns out there's a whole forum for people like me.

I love the Internet.

categories: amusement miscellany words

Berger. Cookies.

To those in the know, these two words say it all:

Berger. Cookies.

Awhoo!!!

My hon brought home four packages from Bal'more last night and we've already eaten two.

Not to worry. Only 130 calories apiece. A mere 35 of those are fat calories.

Berger Cookies: The Anytime Cookie.

If you can believe the Berger family.

I think it's more honest to say: Corrupting Palates Since 1835.

categories: amusement home life love

Crossing the Desert of the Real*

I just got through teaching my favorite movie-to-teach, The Matrix (the exquisite first, not the absymal sequels). I don't know that my students necessarily ate it up (one astute coed suggested I next rent Videodrome), but we had a great time riffing on the many cultural references jampacked into the story: in the dialogue, in the visuals, in the soundtrack, in the plot structure. Just the names alone--Morpheus, Trinity, Neo/The One, Cypher--provide an excellent platform for getting my young charges to start thinking in terms of the layered midden that is our culture--that is, in fact, our own self-created Matrix.

More than one student stopped us at a particularly exciting point in discussion--cognitus interruptus--to ask if, well, uh, this was all okay. You know, with Them. Seems students were persistently worried that we might be reading too much into the symbols and scattered cultural detritus of, say, the Oracle scene.

Hello? I need a transport: the only way it's possible to read too much in is if you believe--as They want you to--that you are a passive reviewer, set to receive and not to interpret or, Architect forbid, to add.

But that's a radical idea. As is, ultimately, the desert of the real.

I need to teach them all about Virginia Woolf's theory of the active reader, she who once said, "'Few people ask from books what books can give us."

Or from life.

(*with apologies to Jean Baudrillard).

Hey. Wait a minute. The Wachowski brothers never apologized.

Jeez.

categories: architecture art film teaching thought words

Guys Named Lance

This has been on my mind ever since Lance Armstrong took the seventh and last Tour de France of his career. See, he's from my home state, Texas. And the only other Lances I have ever met--two of them--were also from Texas. Both of them were fairly quiet, intense guys. One became a doctor. The other became, well, possibly a mass murderer.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about. What I wish to say, faithful reader (all one of you), is that Lance is a very odd name that seems to appeal only to Texans.

If you believe one set of stats, Lance was quite a popular name from 1960 through 1980, but since then has been in steep decline. Though maybe now that LA has proven to be such an Iron Man, that's all about to change.

categories: amusement words

What an Unexpected Rose!

Last spring I worked on my first-ever poetry translations, in a class with Myra Sklarew of American University. Since Spanish is my strongest (one might say only) language, I chose a Chilean poet who deserves far more attention in the English-speaking world, Gabriela Mistral. Part of the reason for my choice was the odd and wonderful juxtaposition of Mistral's work with that of her most recent translator, alternate-reality writer Ursula K. LeGuin. I was intrigued by this pairing, almost as intrigued as when I found out that Langston Hughes had been among Mistral's first translators into English.

Even more intriguing, though, is the other-worldliness of Mistral's landscape, with its roots in pre-Columbian mysticism and its branches arching out to embrace Catholicism, Classical literature, and common child's play. Indeed, Mistral worked with and on behalf of children most of her life; part of her genius lies in the way she marries a child's magical thinking with the vast body of human experience, especially our experience of the natural world.

Pablo Neruda was an acolyte and life-long friend; they met when Neruda was only a boy and Mistral was the principal of his high school in southern Chile. They share a lush aesthetic that washes the reader's senses clean and renders the world anew. Compare this excerpt from Mistral's description of a fig with some of Neruda's work about the natural world:

Touch me: it's the softness of fine satin, and when you open me, what an unexpected rose! Doesn't it remind you of a king's dark cloak that blazed fiery red underneath? ("El higo"--"The Fig")

At the same time, the cycle of life and inevitable mortality are never far from the poet's sight:

After many years, when I am a little mound of silent dust, play with me, with the clay of my heart and of my bones. If a bricklayer picks me up, he will put me in a brick; I'd stay forever fixed in a wall, and I despise quiet corners. If they make me a brick in a prison, I will blush with shame to hear a man sobbing. If I am a brick in a school, I will suffer too, because I won't be able to sing with you in the dawns. ("A los niños"--"to the Children")

Stephen Tapscott did the translations of the above-quoted prose poems. I will be tackling some of these myself soon, and if the results are reasonably credible, maybe I will slap up a few here for responses.

categories: teaching thought words

Great Films for Kids

Though I'm a newcomer to the audacious work of Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki, that doesn't make me a total know-nothing, does it? C'mon, at least now I know he's all partnered up with Disney on gorgeous, edgy kidflicks like Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and the just-released-in-the-States Howl's Moving Castle.

The conduit for all this 411? My six-year-old. Thank goodness I bred.

We totally bonded watching Spirited Away about three hundred times this past week. I'm not being sarcastic either. That's my point here. A Miyazaki is a thing of beauty: a family film you can watch. And watch. And watch. She finally got over it before I did. And the tie-in merchandise is mercifully scarce. Not a peep at the toystore.

I haven't been this happy eating popcorn next to a small person since Wayne Wang's sleeper family movie Because of Winn-Dixie (get the excellent indie-folk soundtrack available here).

categories: film home life family

Really Stacked

Remember what Italo Calvino said about going to bookstores?

In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered....Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:

the Books You've Been Planning To Read For Ages,

the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success,

the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment,

the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case,

the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,

the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,

the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.

And so on. If you want to read the rest, you can always go here.

Or here.

I was pondering Calvino's words during a brief interlude of clarity at Broadside Books in Northampton, Massachusetts the other day. I managed to escape the store's awesome, Calvino-inspired selection with only three books this time, a mere $70 poorer (richer, I'd say).

One new acquisition was Refusing Heaven, the new volume of poetry by Jack Gilbert, who now lives in Northampton, as it happens. I saw him read at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC last spring after I read a wonderful profile in Poets and Writers. Here's a sample:

Maybe Very Happy

After she died he was seized
by a great curiosity about what
it was like for her. Not that he
doubted how much she loved him.
But he knew there must have been
some things she had not liked.
So he went to her closest friend
and asked what she complained of.
“It’s all right,” he had to keep
saying. “I really won’t mind.”
Until the friend finally gave in.
“She said sometimes you made a noise
drinking your tea if it was very hot.”

categories: life teaching words

Counting Gargoyles

Local literati Richard Peabody and Lucinda Ebersole launched the unbelievable 50th issue of Gargoyle magazine a couple of weeks ago, with a gorgeous cover by Colin Winterbottom (who coincidentally did the cover for my novel Borrowed Light).

The important thing to know, for me anyway, was that this issue of the magazine contains what I consider to be the best story ever written by R. Gilad Schamess, my first husband (how I hate that phrase, and all the history that attends to it). The story is called "Lucky," and it is also readable online here:

Lucky
by R. Gilad Schamess
1965-2000

They kept the luck they found in ledgers. Making it their business, their noses into everything.

There was the car that wouldn't start that kept a family safe from black ice on the highway and twenty-eight deaths, so much twisted metal.

There was the drycleaner's number misprinted in an advertisement that brought together two strangers who fell in love and married.

There was the clumsy painter who knocked a hole in the plaster of the baby's new room, revealing a wasps' nest built in the wall.

There were lottery tickets and gambling sprees and answers to important questions guessed out of the blue and old coins found in attics; they were entered in columns and dated and totaled and covered by the turning of a page.

She kept no food in the house except spices, and she brought home every day what they needed and they ate it all as if there were no dog begging or as if they were preparing to be gone for a long time.

He came home with the papers folded under his arm and more stuffed into his briefcase and some days with magazines in a bag.

They finished the meal and he looked for stories of luck, reading aloud when he found them, and she kept the books.

There were coins in the attic and lottery tickets and lightning striking out of a clear sky the exact spot a man had stood just one second before; he had moved when another man called his name. The other man did not know him but a man with the same name who looked like him.

There were the brothers adopted by different families who married and moved from their homes to the same town to the same neighborhood to meet when their children became friends.

There were hunches to stay in and hunches to go out and to not board that plane and to buy or sell that stock and to look under that cabinet and to try a new route home.

They went out on weekends, driving past where they had left off the last time, with clipboards and the forms they had made and favorite pens, and they found luck that way among houses showing nothing from the outside.

They kept track in ledgers.

She was home earlier and had the dinner ready. He brought the papers and, when they were new, the magazines. When they climbed into bed there were only spices left and the fresh page covering the old.

"We are lucky," they whispered at night. Not remembering how they met, they whispered.

"Lucky. Lucky." Huddled in the dark, only spices in the kitchen, the papers outside in the trash with the clean bones.

-fin-

(with gratitude to Stuart for putting up with my gargoyles, as I put up with his).

categories: life love words

Love and Memory

I've been tearing my hair out trying to write my first real syllabus for my first college teaching gig. English 101 of course. See, I placed out of that. Which means I am so smart that I actually still don't know basic composition. Now I'll have to learn. I think it will be good for me. My poor students...

Anyway. I was looking for my favorite quote about writing, to inspire my students or at least make them laugh:

“Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”

I found out it was written by the eminently quotable newsman Gene Fowler. And I also found this resonant loveliness:

"Love and memory last and will so endure till the game is called because of darkness."

Hard to believe the same hardboiled journalist wrote that. The beauty of that sentence stopped me cold. Almost made me want to run to my journal and rub together two of my own sentences.

Almost.