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– Joy of the pain

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Yesterday I took Eli, pal Cody, and Grace to Savers.  Cody claims it’s better than Goodwill, because everything hangs on racks in sizes.  And, indeed, it does.  Eli found a shirt, Cody two of them, and I got a pair of Ann Taylor cords and Old Navy canvas pants, $6.99 each, preworn and prewashed.  Grace bought $6.00 worth of knick-knacks and a pink basketball. We were moderately delighted.

As we went through the cashier’s line, I started paying attention to the music.  No Musak at Savers.  Perhaps in bargain stores the employees, and not headquarters, get to choose the music. Whoever made the playlist that was playing last night, chose good. When I heard “Black Coffee in Bed” by Squeeze, I turned to Eli and said, “This was one of my favorite songs when I was in college.”  He liked it.

And though I love the song, I had never seen the video, until a few minutes ago that is, when I searched for and found this on YouTube.  Watching it and wincing, I thought, Well, it was the ’80s.

Still…. GOOD song. The words matter. (And how many songs do you know that feature both “coffee” and “notebook” in the lyrics?)

– Parallel play

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It’s heaven to lose yourself in the company of others. In this instance, I’m thinking of Saturday afternoon in the Kind Cafe in Selinsgrove, PA with fellow writers James Black and Jimmy Guterman. For an hour, we sat together, ignored each other, and wrote. For me, it was utter peace, focus, and fellowship.

The two of them are fictioneers. I thought about joining them and taking a stab at a story, but couldn’t work up the energy (or was it courage?). I thought about starting a new essay, which feels like my writerly occupation now, and immediately my energy dropped — I’m temporarily tired of exploring the known. So, I took some notes (see top right corner of the page in my new notebook, below). Then, I thought about poems, and writing one. I mean, I like characters, and I can’t help but do setting, and yet I’m not so hot on plot. Don’t only narratives have plot? But, I’ve been reading again the longer poems of Louise Glück, and I like the story quality to them.

Jane's new notebook, 11.1.2008

Jane's new notebook, 11.1.2008

At the top of the page, after the bulleted notes, I wrote a note to self: “narrative poem — why not?” I dove in. After a couple of pages of 4-line stanzas (an impulsive decision), I stumbled over an image I liked and circled back and slapped a provisional title on it: “Ghost Dances.” Here are the first few stanzas. Very DRAFTY.

Where she stands. At the edge of the
yard, her back to the cedars, she
faces her own house, the life
inside, like a movie

playing for her. Or Hollywood Squares, each
window a light, a character, a
small stage. Not the world. The world
is a stage, but this is not

the world, only hers. Life is boxed,
parceled into bits. There, the kitchen:
a woman bowed, hair falling away
from shoulders, tipping toward dishes

that her arms, white and bare, wash.
Light glows down on her. Woman washing
is holy and this is what Grace, feet
planted on dirt and moss skirting

the trees, churns up at when she
watches this movie, the one with the good
golden girl. Even the audience wants her,
only Grace doesn’t. She wants the dirt

I wrote many pages of this in longhand, and experienced many discoveries, while working quietly alongside my friends. Note: Grace is simply the name of the main character of this narrative poem. She bears no resemblance to my daughter of the same name. It’s just a lovely name, and it was on hand, so I used it.

—-

P.S. Dr. Poppy also inspired me today with her post on handwriting.

– Everybody hurts.

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MIT, where I work, is a conglomerate of endless hallways.  Buildings are attached to buildings; one segues into the next.  Bulletin boards are everywhere, and, as I walk the long halls to my office in the morning and back to the car at night, I glance at a changing collection of flyers and posters pinned up by student groups and campus organizations.  I read some as carefully as I read cereal boxes, in other words, pretty thoroughly.

This one, taped to the interior window of room filled with public computers, has been up all semester.

Who sponsors it, I don’t know. Perhaps its simple, subversive reminder is the humane work of underground activists.

In the bottom right corner, all it says is love your self. savor living.

—-

P.S. Here’s the video of an R.E.M. song that tugs at me, every time.

– I missed something.

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“Joe Six-Pack”

Does it mean your average Joe, carrying a six-pack of beer?

Or, does it mean your hyper-muscled Joe Gym, with a washboard abdomen?

Help me.  Everyone’s saying it, and it’s shorthand that obviously refers to something about America and the election, but I don’t know what.

And whether it’s the beer guy, or the gym guy, or even some other guy, what does that even mean?

– That’s not a crow! That’s my grackle.

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So much for it being crow season.  The birds in the yard right now are grackles.  They swarm and sound like they do in this YouTuber’s yard:

Eerie, huh?  More eerie than the cawing of crows, which is how I figured out I was wrong about that.  Jimmy came home this evening while I was sitting in the kitchen with the window open, listening to the chatter and screech of hundreds of birds in the trees around the house and on the street.  He said, “Hear the crows?  Amazing.”  He added, “Your blog post didn’t capture the sound they make.”  The instant he said the words “crows” aloud, I realized I had gotten it wrong.  Crows caw.  So, I looked online and in the Sibley Guide to Birds until I figured out that what we’re annually witnessing is the migration of the common grackle.

Still, grackles or crows, the sound they make is like a shrieking call to pay attention, pay attention, pay attention, pay attention!

– Crow season

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Jan sent me a link announcing new work by Vermont artist Carol MacDonald, in which she “examines the tradition of knitting through a variety of print-making techniques.”  I love it, especially that the featured image is “Red Skein I.”  (What is it about red yarn?)

I looked deeper into MacDonald’s portfolio and found even more that I liked, especially her paintings and prints with crows as their subjects.  Her works have titles like “Convergence,” “Bearing Arms,” and “Resolve,” and they are more than portraits of crows.  There occasionally seems to be a bit of string in them, too:

"Accord," Carol MacDonald, silkscreen/thread

"Accord," Carol MacDonald, silkscreen/thread

It’s crow season again.  Yesterday and today, in the mild, fall weather, the crows are landing and taking off in the yard, again and again.  Continue reading →

– Feels like this

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In an essay, Patricia Hampl writes:

I was attracted too to the in-between position of the writer. More exactly, I was after the suspended state that comes with the act of writing: not happy, not sad; uncertain of the next turn, yet not lost; here, but really there, the there of an unmapped geography…

The elusive pleasure to be found in writing (and only in it, not the before of anticipation, not the after of accomplishment) is in following the drift, inkling your way toward meaning. (126)

I agree: not the before, not the after, the in.

And yesterday, walking to the train and having one of those imaginary conversations that I often do with those who populate my head, I said (internally and not out loud), “Didn’t you know that I am secretly a detective?”

And while I’m not actually a detective (yet how would you know?), I am when I’m writing.

___

Hampl, Patricia. “Other People’s Secrets.” The Business of Memory: The Art of Remembering in an Age of Forgetting, ed. Charles Baxter. St. Paul, MN, Graywolf Press: 1999. 116-131.

P.S. Thank you to Lowry Pei for recommending the essay, which is interesting in many ways.

– Daily wonders

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Some of Tuesday’s unconnected moments:

A woman, riding her bicycle and standing up on the pedals, was smiling and crying, too.

Only one wing, still attached to the body, of a monarch butterfly rested on the sidewalk.  Uncrushed, it seemed fresh and recently alive.  Where was the other wing?

There were figure skates on the floor in someone’s office.

The girl on the bus, waiting at the front for her stop, asked the very boyish bus driver if this was his regular route.  I could tell they liked each other.  After she got off, he looked at her out the closed door.  She walked away from the bus for a few feet and then looked back.

Afternoon coffee was delicious, and I remembered to drink it while it was still hot.

– Japanese paper diet

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In class, giving my students some advice on adding context to their scientific reports on Pfu DNA polymerase, I suggested that they return to their course texts.  “Make sure you digest the lab manual.”

I heard myself and smiled.  I looked around the table; some of them were smiling, too.

“I mean,” I said, “Make sure you read the lab manual carefully and digest the information in it. Please don’t actually eat it.”

The mind works associatively.  My verb/object error opened an unlikely file drawer in my head, one that contains moments from NBC’s 30 Rock.  Deciding to digress — and I rarely exploit my students as audience, but this time I did — I told them where my internal attention had landed.

Liz and Jenna

30 Rock: Liz and Jenna

“Did anyone see that 30 Rock episode where Jenna is on the Japanese paper diet?”

I looked around.  They waited; they smiled; no one said anything.  I continued.

“Jenna is one of the stars of a television comedy show, and she’s trying to lose weight.  All she eats is paper.  In the show it’s called the Japanese paper diet.” I paused.  “And so, after I told you to eat the lab manual, I pictured you all eating paper and thought of this.”

Students laughed.  It was so nice of them.

Later, in the van with Jimmy and the two girls, I share the classroom anecdote.  From the way back, Lydia hoots.  “Mom, it’s not called the Japanese paper diet!  It’s called the Japanese porn star diet!” Lydia, who also watches the show, is correct.

Oh, god.  I always meddle, unconsciously, with gags, stories, and jokes, and get them wrong.  My own twists make sense to me, but not usually to anyone else.

In this case, however, I’m so glad I misremembered the diet’s name (although I did remember the gist of the joke: Jenna was eating all the paper she wanted).  There are some things you can say to your students, and some you cannot.  To mention a porn star diet in a science writing class, in any class??  Totally inappropriate.  A paper diet, though?  Just quirky, I hope.