The Vulgate of Experience

Fogbank

2011-12-13T15:53:00.000-08:00

The rigor-pains of coming to yourself again,
 (like the ice on the brow that, before it melts,
 for the moment vies with the fever for the laurel, 
or whatever branch it is, of whatever tree

you give to the champion that pains foremost)
 scatter (you hope) and slip away and into 
something sinuous. The alleyway fugues 
of birds. Uphill, along the bank of fog,

cold is the unkempt cultivar, bone-chilling 
cold and the cubes. They’re skittering behind 
the grocery door, unless it rains or warms. 
We’ve been waiting, and shaking less to boot:

so in the old crosshairs of the cold, the body
 sits supping under hallucinatory mohair– 
in waning cold we cover in our heads
shore-towns picking up a verdant view.

Plein d'essence

2011-07-04T11:21:00.001-07:00

That languor time American of nineteen-ninety-what;
the long divisible lots abutting Holiday
Hills and Dales; a polity of engine-trails, the plain
of sense, the tank that's full of gas.

Summer Mirabilis

2011-06-02T18:58:00.000-07:00

That was someone from the afterglow
saying it's hard to believe how unironic
things about love, and I couldn't trust
my closest friends, much less entertain

those notions. Plus ça change. The elements are there,
square-set but the contours got denatured,
like when a Frenchman tries to say "murmur,"
like when an apostate turns water into mud.

The funniest things can happen now:
life gets slow, grows small—which I can warrant,
as far as I can throw it—and it turns
right epistolary, and in turn the traffic

in envelopes diminishes with days
to stichomythia: "This is the way I want it."
"The way is down and through." It opens up
like parcel post with inventory chewed.

Antigenidas

2011-03-16T11:55:00.000-07:00

There once was a piper named Antigenidas, a honeysweet musician in every little note and, at the same time, an expert at arranging in every mode, whether you wanted the plain Aeolian, or the versatile Ionic, or the plaintive Lydian, or the reverent Phyrgian, or the warlike Dorian.

This man, then, since he was very well known for his piping, said that nothing vexed him or distressed him more in heart and soul than the fact that hornblowers near graves were called pipers.

But he would have borne with equanimity this sharing of names, if he had looked at mimes: there he would have noticed how, wearing nearly the same purple, some men rule, while others get flogged. The same goes if he had looked at our own entertainments: for there, as well, he would see one man in charge, and another fighting in the arena. The toga, as well, is readied both for weddings and funerals, and by the same Greek cloak cadavers are wrapped and philosophers clothed.

(Apuleius, Florida 4)

Weimar January

2011-01-15T15:50:00.000-08:00

I could never trust you, not even in the way
we trust strangers in the barroom dark,
much less in the matte and coastal light.

What was the shot I had, was it a shot?
Get off on the wrong foot, shoot yourself in it
and see if you can do the math of diffidence.

So on the plane in flight I did it,
I wrote a resolution on the airsickness bag:
to cultivate a cornfed Zen, to sow the plain

I'm in, to plow where trust is the dovetail.
All of it's easy to say right then, and then
after a week it's a hangover. Sometimes

I am so in it that I feel like a flatlander
shaking at the falling plumb, never convinced
that it fills the plane but is only passing through.

I take two aspirin with water. Someone's shot
a bullet through a congresswoman’s head.
It's hard not to remember the dream I had

a dozen years before. It was just a headline
on some imagined copy of the Star:
"Lecher-President Pumped Full of Lead."

On some strange planet a dream like that will sit.
And strange: we never trust prognostication till
the synapse sings it. On the way back up

the peninsula, the wind sticks in the tree:
de tal palo, tal astilla. Night steals in
and the chiming adage stills the night.

Such trees will always have such branches. Soft
ruminants will be underfoot and ask,
“How can you deny math instead of accepting it?”

That’s what the shooter wondered. I wonder how
to chew the sprouting shoots with any cheer
when clear days have grown so dear and rare.

Liberty Hill

2011-01-08T13:49:00.001-08:00

You said you were sitting in your room
and knitting. I asked: “What are you knitting me?”
I don’t need a scarf. You said, “A cage.”

In your hotel room, you and the dog ran free.
De trop, the spire of the Empire State
Building peered through the window.

It’s never like that here. You know you can’t
make out much of the Golden Gate
Bridge from almost anywhere.

Not from the tent we were in—just a white sheet, really,
on which some ingénue from Spokane drew
the sort of thing I’m afraid of doing

with either of you. Someday the white sheet
is going to get pulled down. For now, my Nordic
hands are warm. For once. I dream about

that house you’re always talking up,
friends and their dogs, land and sea.
I hover on the doorstep. Still:

it’s nobody’s business what
daylight brings, and three hours later
daylight brings.

Buyer Beware

2011-01-08T13:19:00.000-08:00

Don’t crowd the pan,
it clogs the works, we want to say, but
dolor de cabeza
y dolor muscular.

Digging holes in pea coats
mattocks in hand,
what kind of relief is that
in a downpour?

No one brought home a game hen,
and you’ve been playing at
strip backgammon
or the hi-hat.

Suppurating won’t dream a world
that looks like only riverbanks—
your cough still holds the trump
over Spanish guitar.

Hannah in the Loop

2010-12-19T08:30:00.000-08:00

One day, amador, the doors
shot open on the wrong side
at Rosemont and Montrose:
This is O'Hare, as far as this train goes.

Far be it from me to ride between the cars:
they opened on the right side,
and we commuted to nowhere.
Far be it from Midway to O'Hare.

Heading westward from above,
we mutter: "lover, l'envers, l'oeuf"--
an echo, amador, which moulders
in a city without shoulders.

Some day, amador, the doors
will open upside down,
and we'll translate into thin air:
far be it from Midway to O'Hare.

Pill Hill

2010-12-13T19:42:00.000-08:00

I

What orbit the sun—What a way to begin
the trivia question, not a trivial one:
What orbit the sun like planets do? How about
we size it down to the motes in the De Rerum,
running and never rerunning in Brownian
motion by erratic providence, so that
horse-head tells and impels horse-corpse
onto the thing it wills and will.

As from a horse farm in Crawfordsville
to the Times, from some copse
where jennet vied for jennet (lusty, young,
and proud) to the gelding runaway.

Runaway? We, too, would like out of this ward, we would
like to lift up the world with a steel pole
from the tool lending library in Temescal.

We had been running into our friends again
and again, and our friends our friends.

We would like to get out of the starting gate,
or get out of the ward.

II

The horse got out of the gate and broke its legs.
I lost it all on an underwater house,
and Lucretius’ race-horse.

III

We wanted him out of the ward, and yet:
someone had to be born at Methodist, and die young
in the age of a war president, and a Methodist,
having swerved to the right or the left, I can never remember,
get cremated at Methodist, ashes in the columbarium
of the Methodist church. Peace, shalom, and paz,
say it any language and don’t believe it.

IV

What orbit the sun like a theophany? The ghosts
of a brute decade, constellate and inconsolable.

My Block, Sister Act

2010-09-05T18:52:00.000-07:00

Notes on Stationery

2010-09-03T11:47:00.000-07:00

Back from Indiana. Hoping to escape
swami talk and the trappings of Edwardiana
for the leafiest folkways left. Penny dreadfuls
and farthings, dreadnaughts sailing pound locks
farther and farther from some sea until—

You’ve been thinking ill of the tumble mind,
hoping to hold the rind after the slices narrow
on their simple way to the maw. The rind
of a pear without appearances, of a quince
that bears no evidence of quinceañero.

Either way, the cargo floods from the outer places
to the inner folds. Every ship is laden, every word
is the maiden crawl of a string of sounds
against the shipping cranes. Back from the waterfront,
feet on the asphalt, an eye to Market and Main.

Headlands

2010-05-28T16:40:00.001-07:00

Yes, sick at the root is sick at the stem
is sick at the root. No, nothing else to it
than coming to grips with radicates and radicands,
and holding up their languor, with both hands,
for an offering. No, not living in a yurt
in the headlands. Not yet. Yes, still leaving,
considering the spine and how it bridges
the blading leaf and the stemming cleaver.

Mount Diablo

2010-04-01T23:46:00.000-07:00

It sounds like a joke, I know,
but the august heads of state
called a census on the century’s
decennial. First, to count the flock—

"Only positive integrals," said the black man.
"Just one spouse a spouse,"
said the woman from San Francisco.
"Husband and wife,"
the Mormon hectored back.

—and next, ut describeretur universus orbis,
to find where in the lower forty-eight
the other three hundred million wheeled about.

A fickle omphalos, our button spot
sprang from Stavley Pond on the Chesapeake
and after a century settled eighteen miles
up the road from North Vernon, Indiana.

In twenty years it came to rest in Bloomington, off Bryan Park,
where I jogged for a summer five years ago.
Right when my grandfather rode back from the war
it crossed the Wabash into Illinois.

I wonder if he saw it coming at him,
head on, from the window of his train
nearly home again from California.

It sounds like a joke, but reckoning
from previous trends it will arrive
here at Mount Diablo in six hundred years.

My room in San Francisco will be warm
from floor to rafters with the brood of my brood,
our bones will sit in the yard, and little white
boats will sail on Stavley Pond and every sea.

Glen Canyon

2010-03-28T18:55:00.000-07:00

The art is overlong
but semiquaver—
nobody's nonchalance will do it.

We have the instruments
we held, we hold the ones we've got—

The crags are doublesharp
but matted still,
and the strain is still.

Fourtone, we’re enisled for now
in our Eschscholtz bed.

Mount Tam

2010-03-28T14:26:00.001-07:00

Tidy how the scape of landscape,
(Dutch, I think, for ship, for standing, not for boat,)
mirrored Anglo-French escape,
like two glottal plates on continental crust
aped another and escarped.

Tidier, if tourists saw the cape
(what foams between the landing and their boat)
mirror these toadstools and these ranunculi
then their bottles, plates, and occidental dust,
then each other in their long capris.

Aus dem Keime

2009-11-16T16:07:00.000-08:00

Imagine the doorbell rang, but every time—
if the doorbell rang so loud, if the ring had been so wired
that the clangor made you reel and cast away
visitor and open door. Nosotros, Los

Feliz, where the letter heads
both rosy and inviolate, lean and upright,
jogs the memory with stamp and pulp,
the two notes of the ring penciled underneath

the zip code. It runs like wax and plugs
the overweening tones. Still, why would you?
Why go two years and ask for quarter there
in the slightest, warmest pause between the notes?

Croquembouche

2009-08-30T14:24:00.000-07:00

It’s like when what you’re cooking is vacuum-sealed
in a silver sleeve, so you leave the stewpot cleaner
than before. Copy: we’ve been stretching certain tendons,
and the sun struck me at just that kind of angle.

Once, in the Ursprache, a walk in the park was;
same goes for a piece of cake, and what a kid
can do. Now, in the aftermath, it’s more often
muddy turf and toppled croquembouches

straight out of chapter eleven or Genesis
eleven and, on the other hand, child prodigies
sailing west on a barge of only black keys,
which hits the bridge, which the rest of us are on.

We’re the joeys here, and it’s difficult
to crawl from a sterling pouch. They said something
like out of the stewpot, into the flame—
some things stayed the same in the aftermath.

Via Negativa

2009-05-23T21:39:00.002-07:00

"O it's not a desert nor a web
Nor a tomb where I lay dead
Minor in a sound alone
Yes a clear commanding tone."
Bonnie Prince Billy, "A Minor Place"

"No it's not a lion's den,
but it's not a mother's love.
It's real."
Odawas, "Swan Song of the Humpback Angler"

Epyllion

2009-05-03T20:27:00.002-07:00

Singe us again, us: we felt the flame
of underwater caves and fire in the first
decade of the third—a minor third,
or so it seemed at first, or nine years in,
or so long as the seventh sleeper lay
suspended on the Theban bedrock, two sheets
to the westron winding sheet: shanghaied
below the crust, the seven gates, Five Points,
the Singer Building and the Hudson Terminal.

The Flats

2008-12-03T15:20:00.006-08:00

It was by Duboce that the bargain book
of odes first swept the English from the recto
side—et ingravatum est cor Pharaonis—
and then from the verso side to full wingspans
of white. There to the empty flat, where the phone
hums with some salute beside the grave
of the old man. What happened in Manila?

What did MacArthur say about returning?
That name swoops by the San Francisco train
already waiting on the opposite side
of the platform, already set for kabuki detachment
on the balcony, ready for an equal set
of absences: here and the Lake of the Woods,
here and those sad and funny lapels, and here
and trenches, holes in the ground like other trains
already waiting now in the outspread wings.

SMS

2008-12-01T17:31:00.004-08:00

J.S.: I got the most absurd txt last night from this guy I went on a bad date with a month ago. He was friends with ____. At 3 in the morning.
C.S.: Only for that moment?
J.S. The text came at 3 in the morning. It said, "I miss never kissing you."
C.S. Ooops. That's amazing.
J.S. I know. I still don't understand it.
C.S. Is it true? Did you not kiss?
J.S. We did not. So does he mean, "I miss hanging out but not kissing" or "I regret not kissing you"? I needed to ask another linguist, you know?
C.S. It means he misses never kissing you....
J.S. I wrote back this morning, saying, "What?" Which is great, because the last thing I said to him on the date was "I'm doubly disappointed."
C.S. Now triply?
J.S. Exactly. Mostly in his ungrammatical usage. I feel like he was using "miss" in the sense of missing a train... No, that wouldn't work.
C.S. That's how I read it at first... like really bad grammar for "Whooops! I missed it!" But then I got the sentimental about infinite inexperience.....that was sweeter.
J.S. Except that we didn't ever kiss, so it's not a state he can miss, since he's still in it. And will be, until he dies.
C.S. Isn't that sweet.
J.S. I guess it's this structure: "I miss (you), never kissing you." Sort of like, "I put on tying my shoes."
C.S. I miss spending all those moments I spent with you while never once touching my lips to yours.
J.S. I just wish the date had gone well. It would have saved a month of madness. And now, one month later, he writes me a 3 AM zen koan.
C.S. What's a zen koan?

2008-11-30T11:11:00.001-08:00

"The night is freezing fast,
To-morrow comes December;
And winterfalls of old
Are with me from the past;
And chiefly I remember
How Dick would hate the cold.

Fall, winter, fall; for he,
Prompt hand and headpiece clever,
Has woven a winter robe,
And made of earth and sea
His overcoat for ever,
And wears the turning globe."

-A.E. Housman

China Beach

2008-09-27T15:28:00.002-07:00

At the top of the rock outcropping
as if at the tip of a life, an older
man is lying very still—but still
he moves himself enough to ward
away the candid birds that flutter
in a sky bleached Indian summer's
changeable blue—

Indian summer that the sun
enacts but the moon decreed, dangling
above the hill they clambered wingless down,
and at whose base they stole the crossing spark
of the two uninsulated ends of the same
crossed wire, drawn taut again at daybreak,
as if to span from rock to top of rock.

Bay Window

2008-08-22T21:18:00.002-07:00

It’s been knots and subterfuge, the absence
of being around, for a while now. I want to say,
“If you aren’t coming into the room,
just turn off the lamp.” But logic strains
here, without thunderstorms to model catharsis
and where shorter days only get hotter. And still
I want someone to hit the lamp. Imagine it,
imagine the room, almost elegant now:
dark, wainscoted, curtains open wide
to the old noise on the block, the old scene.

The Book of J

2008-08-11T20:15:00.005-07:00

He scribbled everything we did, this errant
chronicler we’d let into our graces
before the G-men foreclosed on the farm, furnishing
the premise for his omnibus Book of J.

He retitled it in the Mendocino winter
Mundus Mendicantum. We shivered and he made himself
poet laureate of the leafless trees. We applied
fire and fur while he typed a dozen reams.

Even our dog in his own kind of speech
called the endless snow incommensurate
to our single crimes, like how the summer fog
sweeps everything from a pinprick in the coast.

But when summer returned, I almost guessed
we'd never come back to the city till, on a jog uphill,
the overhanging wires made a gunshot sound
from some other planet against the pantograph.

3046

2008-08-03T23:55:00.001-07:00

Whatever in the land of passing fancies
below didn’t rouse a little joy at least
stemmed the bleeding or evinced a grin
and an unsure grip on a two-by-four
or spiral pad—for a chicken coop, for a hundred paper cranes.

But whether asleep in a tent or up outside
the tents, scribbling asps and asterisms,
none of them could help mistaking parts of a face
for their own Antinous, or a tune from the weather-worn
piano as the strain drummed all along

on that walk downhill to waterfalls and burrs,
as from a crèche up to some spiral niche
of sky-icons: the One with the Hammer, the One
with the Fever, the Spectacles, the Pair of Dogs.

Feverish Dreams

2008-07-23T14:40:00.001-07:00

I dropped my wallet and my keys, and I'm hanging out with everyone else on a vast net above the street.

My friend transforms into his lover.

My brother has been hiding in Millbrae, all along. "Not too far anymore," I think.

In Which My Roommates Inspire Me to Subsist on Something Other Than Almonds

2008-07-23T14:35:00.002-07:00

fried squash blossoms stuffed with grilled anchiote (?) peppers, medjool dates, and fresh parmesan

served with wild arugula salad, fresh (!) toasted almonds, and a strawberry vinaigrette

coquilles st-jacques

(= classic fresh dish consisting of scallops in oysters mushroom cream sauce, bread crumbs, a melted parmesan)

OR (our vegetarian option)

brochette of achiote peppers, purple onions, and oyster mushrooms

Served with fresh black-eyed peas

Charentais melon sorbet with fresh toasted almonds

Counties

2008-07-22T20:21:00.001-07:00

Orange (3/07)
San Mateo (3/07)
San Francisco (3/07)
Alameda (3/07)
Santa Clara (9/07)
Contra Costa (11/07)
Marin (1/08)
Santa Cruz (3/08)
Los Angeles (4/08)
Monterey (5/08)
Sonoma (7/08)
Mendocino (7/08)

Christenings

2008-07-17T03:00:00.002-07:00

Like a bottle against a hull, like drops on a newborn,
like the thump of a new bed, it concatenates:
first the bed aboard the ship, then the newborn,
or the bed, and then the newborn child, asleep aboard
the ship. Nobody knows who sails the thing,
least of all when the bottle breaks the chain,
or the child goes nameless, or the strident thump
is all there is, like the first part of a name.

Bernal Heights

2008-07-02T11:42:00.000-07:00

Place names, the prefixes: inner, outer,
lower, heights. All together the cathodes
and anodes of a word-hoop, color wheel, a ville
radieuse. The circuits never close.

Not to fret. A moment comes and buds,
blooms its ruddy tantamounts. Atop the slope
the berries have a knack for dropping,
a dozen dying masks at four hundred feet.

The problem is what it’s always been: the endless
looping. Guard for disconnects, go and distract
from the bed and its bare facts. Always the outside, now,
its maps in bistre daylight and its breeze.

Albany Hill

2008-06-12T12:29:00.002-07:00

The one that looks like a bad haircut. But you can round
the crest, the skull, the crown, and watch a horse,
a car, a wave. Almost nothing’s fixed, you drag your feet in dirt.

You see off in the other hills the vantage point
from which you likewise thought a year ago, you thought,
some other revelation. But no worries about that,
not anymore. It’s like when the cat clambered up the branches
and the vines and ended up in the balcony. It didn’t have to slide
back down to the garden. It made a racket where it was
until somebody heard and opened the bedroom door.

University and MLK

2008-06-11T12:41:00.003-07:00

They've been tearing down the strip mall at the corner of University and MLK in Berkeley. I walked by the other day and caught a glimpse of the signs from the original U-Save on location, which was covered over with the signs for a auto repair place but never removed.

And so for a moment, before the building gets demolished, we get a glimpse into a certain supermarket in California.

It's interesting the magic you get from subtraction, demolition.

Lucus a non lucendo

2008-05-28T21:56:00.000-07:00

A happiness that springs from a long distress:
not like maize in a March thaw, not like larks from a cage,
but like the cage itself if you think of a tin balloon,
rumpled here, creaking and plodding, rusty there,
a nuisance to what’s around it, still a danger to itself.

Still, when the pressure pumped in that makeshift skin
meets with the wind that warms the crops and tends
the birds—nothing so smooth or clean as that.

Exercise

2008-05-13T22:00:00.002-07:00

I've been jogging almost every morning, about three and a quarter miles from my place, uphill along Woolsey St. toward the Claremont Resort, north to Ashby, downhill along Ashby, around the Ashby BART station and back to my place.

It's done wonders for my mood, which had been pretty touch and go for at least as long as I've been in California. I'd like to see it do more, but I suppose I should give it more than a month to see what happens. It seems like some of the benefits to the flood of endorphins and seretonin after a run (and the decrease of stress hormones) would materialize over the course of months.

I remember the second year I ran cross country, in the fall of 2001, when life felt (was?) utterly out of control. I thought that running wasn't doing anything for me, though in retrospect it was probably stabilizing what could have been a real physically palpable depressive spiral.

In a way, I guess, what's terrifying about exercise is how mentally, almost spiritually better you feel. You don't want to consider how dependent you are on your body, but there you go.

Not that it isn't enjoyable: I'm running downhill after hitting my second mile, and I catch a little glimpse (if it's not too foggy) of the Golden Gate. Life seems at least vaguely livable. Sometimes I catch sight of this adorable old Jewish couple, too: the old man has a "Bronx" hat and the woman a "Brooklyn" one.

I'm going to miss this route when I move.

Tessera

2008-04-24T22:46:00.001-07:00

Dreamed he knocked over an oil can, spilled a sludge
over the floor of the Flackville School—twenty years
on, he’s watching the traffic from the bridge
pour back into the island, into what one used to call the dark.

Two-headed things he’s cobbled together, that. Two halves
of the same pot, as if to prove: You are the one they sent,
which I wouldn’t have guessed—I mean, that shock of hair,
that cardigan. Or better put: You are the one you were.

Something rumbles toward them, too, and fazes even the birds:
a truck, headlights already on, either to mirror off
the looming wall of curtain walls, or to prove a class
of moving things that comes from past the island.

Hermeneutics (Nob Hill)

2008-04-24T22:39:00.004-07:00

So there are dreams:
mass weddings in volcanoes,
rediscovering long-lost sweethearts
and discovering their hearts aren’t worth the longing,
running into friends
who ask us out to drinks, who disclose
miraculous births, all sheer cliffs of happening.

But the rain on Larkin Street falls astride
the Maginot grid lines of the City, scrubs the sky,
and pumps it, bay to sea.
The same battered scripts resurface
in a bid to matter.

God, they try—
even when the mixture boils, they talk of the bliss of mixing,
water and the oil from a liner spill,
and the entrance, undisclosed, to every pipe and culvert.

Still, the rain lulls us to sleep,
sabotaging any one-to-one;
we dream instead the double of every town.

Alum Rock

2008-04-07T08:20:00.003-07:00

Floors in earthquake country, inverted umbrellas,
and the windswept plaza speak: the walk sign
is on across Van Ness. Left to the naïve warmth,
plate tectonics set aside. Six of us on the floor
that should have shaken, should have but held
an attenuated thing, like the slivers of peninsula
that folds us in, like shipwrecked Farallons
unreined from an ambling timescale by six galloping
mindsets (or the other way around?), the moment maps
its well-crafted filigree. Thin fire in wind and cold.

BART and the X-Files

2008-02-24T22:47:00.004-08:00

Three people struck up conversation with me on the BART this evening because I was reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. My personal favorite was the drunk man who lectured me on the impossibility of translation from Japanese even as the doors were closing on his train.

I hadn't watched the X-Files in years, and have been watching occasional episodes with my friend Simon. A lot of the strangeness of the show and its characters was lost on me as a 10-year-old, and it's been interesting to watch it as an adult.

One episode I really enjoyed was "Field Trip," which features a conceptual twist at the end that produces the kind of intellectual frisson (at least in the three of us watching) that makes the show so enjoyable.

Postmodern serenity

2008-02-18T17:37:00.003-08:00

Now that the pool's been drained of water, we can have a dance party at the bottom.

Thanks

2008-02-14T22:20:00.003-08:00

I would like to salute all of the power couples I know in the San Francisco Bay area for their general rejection of Valentine's Day. It allows the rest of us to remain psychologically stable.

Also, thanks to Jean, who sent me the most awesome Valentine ever.

Super Tuesday, 1912

2008-02-08T21:07:00.000-08:00

Super Tuesday 1912:

Romney as Taft, McCain as Roosevelt, and Huckabee as Wilson

Super Tuesday

2008-02-06T09:58:00.000-08:00

The Democratic nomination is anyone's game, and to be honest, I think that fact excites me more than Clinton's policies or Obama's oratory.

I vaguely wish my new home state had pulled through for the latter candidate, but I was ready to be content with almost anything.

Some polls in Alameda County were open two hours late, which is completely insane. The reason was ballot shortages on the Democratic side. That says more to me about the race on the Democratic side than the outcome per se.

Mishearings

2008-02-03T13:07:00.000-08:00

Since my first listen of Boxer, I've heard
"You're the tall kingdom I surround" as "You've been talking to Montserrat." And I've heard "You can drive a car through my head in five minutes" as "You can go for coffee like every five minutes."

I like my versions better.

Archaic Currency

2008-01-25T21:45:00.000-08:00

A strangely satisfying week. Cold and rainy since the long weekend ended. Endless rain, really, in a city unequipped with adequate drains. I barely see the sun, but it appears just before setting while H and I are leaving the library. I try to get her to notice the Golden Gate Bridge.

A cheery e-mail from Buenos Aires, gratitude for a friendship preserved. Walking up and down the interesting part of Shattuck, dodging puddles and feeling more than a little noir with my black umbrella.

Conversations: with DY, about characters from the Symposium and their psychological disorders. Alcibiades. And with DC, about the harm of fantasy worlds. Flying horses and long-lost loves.

Sleeping on my shoulder improbably badly and limping to campus. Jumbled thoughts about Horace. M misplaced her raincoat on the way from West Berkeley to campus, despite the logical impossibility of that fact. Caffeinated as usual, V and I see a lemon that fell into a puddle, washed to a perfect yellow; it’s the only colorful thing, and so it earns itself a song.

My shoulder still hurts. I pile into bed with Medea and my lexicon, archaic currency, Durrell, Barthes on Barthes. The party in the Mission seems awfully far away.

Und wer's nie gekonnt

2008-01-11T15:20:00.001-08:00

Old business or new, J. moved to table the topic
of heartbreak, on the ground's of life's duration;
which I seconded from the other coast, and voted up,
no longer, I suppose, the loyal opposition,
that hoped by sheer negation just to underscore
its distaste for cruelty in every circumstance
and everywhere. It made sense up in the mountains:
the leaves were turning terminal, and my aunt shot three clay pigeons,
and her son broke a glass, and a child started screaming at mazel tov.
So my ears were ringing still when I envisioned
J. in the gaps of Mid-Market, walking alone and to himself
humming something like O Freunde, nicht diese Töne,
as if the fogbound city had the chance to hear.

The Primary Season

2008-01-07T18:24:00.000-08:00

I still support Obama at least marginally over Clinton, but the ridiculous narratives that have been spawned after Iowa ("Surprise victory!" "Womany meltdown!") make me more than a bit irritated with the media.

Heimweh

2008-01-07T11:17:00.000-08:00

Last night I dreamed I was heading out of Chicago on the Indiana Toll Road and forgot to exit onto i-65.

Instead of heading toward Indianapolis, I ended up in this strange town full of Victorian houses and cable cars.

I don't think that requires much interpretation.

Reconstructing Midwesternism

2008-01-06T19:30:00.000-08:00

Me: Who was the guy in the car commercial that went "Stock 'em deep, and sell 'em cheap."
Kyle: Isn't it funny? You come back here, and you have to pick up the pieces again...
Me: It's all about reconstructing Midwesternism, I guess.
Kyle: I've been all about reconstructing lately. It's my term.
Me: Are you listening, Jordan?
Jordan: No, I'm still trying to remember who said "Stock 'em deep, and sell 'em cheap."

Resolutions

2007-12-30T21:23:00.000-08:00

I will jog.

I will drink less coffee and alcohol.

I will do my work from 9 to 5, and relax when I am not working. I will not doubt that this is possible.

I will be skeptical of the prospect of romance with anyone who shares my intellectual hobbies.

I will not let the election break my heart.

I will take poetry seriously.

I will write here more often, but only when I have something meaningful and able to be conveyed. I will proofread.

A Sadsack Metaphor

2007-12-11T23:31:00.000-08:00

"They don't have to be your favorite guests to steal the nice silverware."

Best Ten Albums of 2007

2007-12-09T18:55:00.000-08:00

1. The National – Boxer
2. Patrick Wolf – The Magic Position
3. Feist – The Reminder
4. Andrew Bird – Armchair Apocrypha
5. Beirut – The Flying Cup Club
6. LCD Soundsystem – Sound of Silver
7. Deerhoof – Friend Opportunity
8. Sunset Rubdown – Random Spirit Lover
9. Pela – Anytown Graffiti
10. The Clientele – God Save the Clientele

Me and a Cover

2007-12-09T15:12:00.000-08:00

R.E.M.'s "New Orleans Instrumental No. 1" has always been one of my favorite songs. It seems to be widely considered a throwaway, for reasons I've never understood, or perhaps simply because it's an instrumental.

For the 15th anniversary of Automatic for the People, the Danish band Figurines did a cover of the song that is, well, not quite instrumental anymore, at least not when Christian Hjelm breaks into a strange and (to me) quite heartbreaking wail.

My first images of the song were of post-Katrina NoLa, as if her once self-evident charms had been so violated by the idiocy and callousness of mankind that an instrumental appeal was no longer enough. This would make Figurines something like the Lorax.

But it came up on my iPod in early October, when I was heading out to my friend Emily's in the Inner Sunset. The timing was really bizarre: Hjelm started wailing right as my N-Judah train left the subway at Church Street, which left me almost shaken. And then he stopped as we passed by Duboce Park (the fantasyland of domestic canine reverie in the mind of my classmate Maria and me), and entered the Sunset Tunnel.

From then on, significances have only kept accruing.

Update

2007-12-06T22:51:00.000-08:00

It's been a rather insane five weeks. I'm excited the semester is coming to an end, although it has not been as academically perfectionist as I'd have hoped. Adjustment takes time, though, and I should remember that some of my peers are 25 or older. So though I did quite well in certain contexts, I'll be most of all content with surviving.

Having renewed a commitment to writing poetry both to a new acquaintance (with some intimidating talent) and to an old friend, I might be off to a different venue for those poems. I've written only one poem that I really like since coming to California, and that one will probably not appear here off the bat. Again, it's been a rather insane five weeks.

The days have gotten very short, and the temperatures cool for around here (in the 40s and 50s). And the rainy season has started up. But it feels like everything will be at least alright.

Soon I'll attempt a roundup of my favorite albums of 2007. Everyone's doing it these days.

Seismic Round

2007-11-07T00:30:00.001-08:00

A broadsheet from the paper drifting in the wind
And then—there wasn’t a single aftershock
But it shattered the row of windows at Dream Fluff
And left a festal tinge, an earthquake glow
Like a finger, pointing out from the high platform,
Past land, water, and land to water again,
There, the fault line strand where fog erupts
And swallows up whatever drifts, swallowing
A broadsheet from the paper drifting in the wind

A Day in the East Bay: South Berkeley

2007-08-23T20:39:00.001-07:00

South Berkeley is kind of amorphous concept in my head. Away from the hills, it's considered not nearly as nice as most of the rest of town, but it has a lot of charm.

First, this is the infamous cake shop: Crixa Cakes. People have dreams about Crixa. I left my Middle Liddell Greek dictionary there, and they held onto it for me. Their coffee is excellent, and I know at least one couple that brews it for themselves.

There are also lots of charming houses, schools, and churches that give the area a "small town done right" kind of atmosphere.

A Day in the East Bay: Elmwood

2007-08-23T20:17:00.000-07:00

After Rockridge ends (along the Oakland-Berkeley border, I guess, but de facto a few blocks up), you get a few beautiful blocks of houses and very classy, yet very California, apartment buildings.

After this sleep part, the commercial district of Elmwood starts up. Elmwood has great views of the hills, nice restaurants, and a decent bakery, Nabolom. It's where I want to move if I leave Rockridge.

There is also a great donut shop to which I have a sentimental attachment. One of my first nights here, there was a 4.2 earthquake (not massive, but one of the biggest in years), and it shattered the windows of Dream Fluff. Something about "shattering the windows of Dream Fluff" seems almost too poetic. So when a friend from college told me to bring donuts to a love interest at the Berkeley Marina, I felt they needed to come from Dream Fluff.

A Day in the East Bay: Rockridge

2007-08-16T21:43:00.000-07:00

After getting up and walking outside, I headed east on Kales Avenue (my quiet, residential street) toward College Avenue, the main drag in Rockridge, Oakland. On the left is Diesel Books, one of the best bookstores in the East Bay, and on the right is George & Walt’s, which totally encapsulates Rockridge: yuppies, Raiders fans, and art school hipsters.

Just a few blocks up College Avenue is Das Publik Haus, whose Tudor architecture and dimly lighted interior is supposed to be sort of European. It's another dive-y place, where I went with my roommate, Jan, and a visiting Frenchman, Didier.

You can probably see that Rockridge is a lot less Mistah F.A.B. and a lot less, I don't know, Rogue Wave.

And this is Pendragon, another great bookstore:

In the center of Rockridge is a freeway (boo) but with a BART station in the median that leads straight to San Francisco! And while it is a little odd architecturally, something like modernist Tudor, the view of the City from on top is kind of amazing. There's also a mural created after the Rockridge Fire in the early '90s, commemorating rescue workers and dead cats.

Just north of the odd hiatus that the freeway creates is Zachary's, which has Chicago pizza without the Chicago weather or the Bears fans.

Three Dreams

2007-08-14T22:23:00.000-07:00

1.

She is holding the other piece of my bicycle lock: the short, straight piece. I am holding onto the curved piece. I never met her. There's been an earthquake. She disappears into the fog.

2.

I'm flying over China, headed toward Mongolia. I realize I don't have my passport. I call my parents to have them send it to me.

It arrives immediately, in a big square box. My parents have written a note all over the outside about how the lusts of the mind are worse than the lusts of the body.

Now I'm sitting on a plane with my second cousin and her husband (whom I've never met). He keeps telling lies, and my second cousin and I keep calling him on them.

"That was only wordplay," he explains. I wake up.

3.

Some of us are patients and we are sitting in rooms as doctors rotate in and out to inspect various aspects of our health. A big black man comes in with a white lab coat and stethoscope. I cough violently.

"You're a handsome fellow," he says, "but you're dying."

Oakland, August

2007-08-04T13:20:00.000-07:00

--What are you doing about the cold?

--I haven't done anything. I get this kind of advice, which is no consolation, no strategy: to go looking for someone, or at least look like I am. It has sounded insincere, it's sounded manipulative. If I did that, I thought, I ought to to ditch the notion of love altogether.

But the problem isn't that. The problem is getting slightly older. In so doing, you've misplaced a childlike kind of play. It was the yoke to the egg white of deadly seriousness, separable in theory but never quite in fact. Once those two acts could have interpetrated. Their sheer dual heat would have radiated someone, if never who you were looking for.

--Well you are getting older. But what do you need? Look west; there's a postcard skyline. Look to the north, where the flatland disappears. The whole skein of ground below rises up. It carries along with it great houses and sheds. Once you walked by the door of a school, but the hills have raised you to the roof garden.

My Favorite 20 Songs of 2007 (so far)

2007-07-08T22:03:00.000-07:00

All My Friends - LCD Soundsystem
Beautiful Life - Gui Boratto
Bluebells - Patrick Wolf
Comfy in Nautica - Panda Bear
D.A.N.C.E. - Justice
Desiree - Caribou
Don't Lose Yourself - Laura Veirs
Ever Present Past - Paul McCartney
5000 Moons - Alex Gopher
Impossible Germany - Wilco
Keep the Car Running - The Arcade Fire
Matchbook Seeks Maniac - Deerhoof
My Little Japanese Cigarette Case - Spoon
1234 - Feist
Scythian Emire - Andrew Bird
Somebody Changed - The Clientele
Underwater (You and Me) - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
Rotten Hell - Menomena
Slow Show - The National
Your Desert's Not a Desert at All - Pela

You have to get out of the house

2007-06-26T21:32:00.000-07:00

You have to get out of the house. Indulge old fantasies
which have intermingled roots and grown
waxy leaves. Those are the oldest things.

You can’t sit idly by—already, gnats are swarming
the roof of your car. The fireflies stay on the lamppost.

You have to get out of the house—to Irvington
or Chatham Arch, or even kill an hour
on a roundabout with a planter in the center.

You remember the tree, and it sways back
five miles up the road. It overgrows, turns byzantine,
like it has no roots, but just the thought
of satisfying one of the oldest things.

Your mild billionaire mayor

2007-06-19T16:09:00.000-07:00

So Michael Bloomberg declared himself an independent.

If you can forgive him for whoring out his city and its tragedy to the Republicans during the 2004 convention, you can say that he's been a good mayor for the city of New York. He's sure a lot more progressive on most issues than Bart Peterson has been in Indianapolis, although comparing those two outliers in the "big city" category is like comparing apples and orchards.

The city is expensive, and has not become any more forgiving toward the poor in his six and a half years, but that sort of thing is the symptom of off-kilter national priorities. I would argue increasingly that it's not the "fault" of any place that has rapidly gentrified if the nation in general feels no commitment to the poor and working class. You can't provide affordable, non-slum housing to workers who are not paid a living wage.

If Bloomberg runs for president (as the talk has gone), I think he might take as much away from the Democrats as the Republicans. The sort of well-educated, affluent voter to whom Bloomberg would appeal nationwide is the sort that would have been a Republican twenty-five years ago, but it is now beginning to trend toward the Democrats. Even as late as '92 or '96, someone like Bloomberg would have hurt the Republicans much more, but things have changed.

What is interesting to me is the acceptability of New Yorkers as presidential candidates; imagine a Giuliani-Bloomberg-Clinton race. I wonder if Americans dislike the city as much as the perception holds.

Death of Rorty

2007-06-16T20:58:00.000-07:00

It didn’t break the door down, didn’t slink
Under the door, but it found its own way in.

The fireplace was bricked up, and books were stacked
Half a story up—art criticism, nature writing,

None of those came tumbling out. There wasn’t the familiar
Squeak of the back door, nor could anyone

Make out much in the basement. No one saw
Anyone in those deep co-corridors

That plunge perpendicular to our halls and streets,
Delivery lines for auspices, pneumatic tubes

For star-signs. It eschewed the all-familiar
Inroads. It invented its own way.

That was part of what it was. You might say
That was the newest face of what it was.

Unplug the kettle, someone must have said,
Smooth the wallpaper and snip that mess of ropes.

They held the house together like a ship;
They'd never been much good at cordoning.

Pragmatism

2007-06-13T00:42:00.001-07:00

She dresses him up, since he has no sense of style. She buys him drinks.

What he gives her back isn't as tangible: diversity, intellectual credit. A canvas, even.

It shouldn't work. It works.

Three Reactions to Richard Rorty's Death

2007-06-11T13:17:00.000-07:00

1. I am absolutely floored, in shambles over this. America has lost its greatest mind.

2. Be pragmatic. Everyone has to die eventually. Just don't go deconstructing death... or I will slap you.

3. No, I didn't hear that Richard Rorty had died. That's sad.

Transit Experiences

2007-06-11T00:07:00.001-07:00

b3co.com

The Death of Hephaestion

2007-05-27T13:12:00.000-07:00

Soda Names

2007-05-12T09:22:00.000-07:00

Thankfully, this map dispels the rumor (which I never understood) that "people in Indiana" refer to soft drinks as "pop".

Most people in central Indiana seem to prefer "coke", although "pop" is a pretty strong contender. Still, I always thought that "soft drink" was sort of common in Indy and Carmel, maybe as kind of a compromise.

On common success

2007-05-04T12:11:00.001-07:00

Like a lot of alums seem to, I can imagine paying regular visits to the University website. I’ll be genuinely curious: What are alumni doing? What are current students up to? And for what it’s worth, it’s nice to know that DePauw at least pretends to value Barbara Kingsolver as much as it values the pocketbooks of its captains of industry.

But there’s something I’ve never cared about, but which website people seem to find critical: the accomplishments of DePauw-bound high school students. I get annoyed every time I read one of these stories, usually complete with a link to a story in the Nowhere Herald-Gazette.

For the record, I was a lot like those people, if you replace “small town” with “midsize suburb.” Most of us were. The Midwestern work ethic, pride in high school academics and in your extracurricular activities – these show possible success in college and are genuinely impressive in a high school student. But note that I said “possible success in college” and “high school student.”

Over the past four years, I’ve met a lot of small town darlings, and not all of them have succeeded. Like the sterling examples on the University website, they may have been really into organizers and lists. They might even have been vice presidents of Spanish clubs. But should an elite institution suggest that these will be enough? Whatever you consider success to be, what’s so uncommon about all that?

Suppose you are not the favorite son of Nowhere (population 16,000). Instead you are a worldly prospective students – you grew up in Indiana, or in Brooklyn Heights for that matter. What are you going to think of a place that fawns over a high school no-hitter? This school should decide: Are we an elite liberal arts college, or are we impressed with Key Club?

Yes, I’ve benefitted immensely from my four years here, both inside the classroom and outside. But many other liberal arts colleges have great academic programs and a few nice old buildings. They have murals, not bare brick walls. They have warm courtyards instead of corporate-looking atria. They have Great Books programs, not pseudo-MBA programs. In short, they have a sense of fantasy.

Maybe fantasy sounds superficial, like something out of a Lisa Frank folder. But fantasy is more than escapism. It’s a sense of what could be, in the world of ideas and the world at large. Other institutions look at Advanced Placement stars in their incoming class and see potential there. But do they glorify that as “uncommon success?”

In John Ashberry’s poem “The Instruction Manual,” the speaker turns away from common success – writing an instruction manual – and starts to consider what could be. So for the bulk of the poem, he imagines he’s walking down the side streets of Guadalajara. When he returns to the instruction manual, something changes, as if the “colored houses” and lively public square had given him some new perspective on his mundane task.

I love that bittersweet image. It hints at what can happen when imagination collides with work ethic. And as I leave this place, it’s what I wish success had meant all along.

Nemo Propheta in Patria

2007-04-14T08:10:00.000-07:00

"I would have felt more triumphant, I would have been happier, if this city had become what I thought it might become after the second World War. I thought this might become a marvelously liberal city, because that potential was there."
-Kurt Vonnegut

"Breaking Away" from Greencastle

2007-04-13T18:17:00.000-07:00

Little 5 is upon us again, and my thoughts turn once again to the Cutters.

To the uninitiated, the Cutters are a cycling team in the 1979 film “Breaking Away.” I recommend this movie. Not only was it filmed in my native Hoosier State, it is also the best movie about cycling that I’ve ever seen.

Come to think of it, it’s probably the only movie about cycling. (I should have asked Jeremy Brok about this.) But anyway, the Cutters are a band of Bloomington, Indiana residents who compete in the university bike race held in their town. Their team name celebrates what their fathers do: cut Indiana limestone.

Class differences arouse a lot of ill will between the Cutters and those “college boys.” But they are solved, in the only truly Hoosier way.

No, not increased funding for education, or a fairer tax structure. If Indiana wanted those things, it wouldn’t have voted for Republicans for forty years.

I’m talking about sports.

So what does that have to do with us? You’re right, nothing. Bloomington is in southern Indiana, not west-central Indiana. And Indiana University is a big public school, not a small private one.

What’s more, the IU race is called the Little 500, not the Little 5. Thankfully, we at DePauw are two digits short of an unpleasant relationship with our community.

Irony aside, I get sad when I think about the Cutters. Mostly, it reminds of my beloved high school debate coach, Mrs. Kestner. She had a poster for “Breaking Away” in her classroom, and she passed away three years ago, right around my first Little 5.

But the Cutters also bother me because I've never seen them here.

Some days, this town seems wonderful. The employees at National City bank are great. So is Sue Parson, the program director at the Putnam County Public Library. I haven’t been as good as some about engagement with the community, but I’ve had lucky moments.

But other days, I have terrible interactions. People with Putnam County license plates shout unrepeatable things from cars. This year, I stopped shaking my head and started telling them where they can put it. It was a long time coming.

And just recently, a professor told me that he went back to a stationary store in Greencastle to pick up business cards. They hold him they had run out of cardstock, and printed the rest on flimsy paper. Forget limestone, you can’t trust some people to cut paper.

But Greencastle’s just like anywhere in this regard. Some people are wonderful, others are hateful or incompetent, and you’re left wondering what this humanity thing is all about.

But neither group is like the Cutters. Where are the young Dennis Quaid and Daniel Stern? Who is going to warm our lukewarm hearts? Who will deliver us from ever having to worry about our differences?

I’ve been waiting for four years now. One year at Phi Delta Theta’s Maui party, I saw someone who looked like Dennis Quaid, but that’s about it. And next year, I’ll be “breaking away” to somewhere enlightened, where people just mug you instead of shouting bigoted things. And where not even bike races will redeem you.

If Not

2007-04-05T14:33:00.000-07:00

I hate most linguistic gripes, but this is basically an observation: the combination of "if" and "not" is really ambiguous. It can mean three things: "unless," "but not" and "or even." Each of these has a completely different sense. The second and third meanings have the most danger of confusion.

The Lower Midwest

2007-04-05T12:37:00.000-07:00

There is a lot of talk about the Upper Midwest. But not much; the problem seems to be that the concept is too expansive. No way does it extend down to the Ohio; across from there is the South.

I would like to propose the following categories:

Great Lakes States / Rust Belt / Upper Midwest: Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan; Chicagoland and Northern Indiana; Northern Ohio from Toledo to Cleveland; cities on I-70 like Columbus and Indianapolis become border cities

Lower Midwest: everything south of I-70; parts of Missouri

Outer Midwest: everything east of the Rockies and above I-70 that doesn't touch the Great Lakes

Middle South: parts of Missouri; the landlocked Southern states; northern Virginia; Charlotte and the Research Triangle; Atlanta

The Past Week

2007-03-28T18:53:00.000-07:00

Things have really improved for me in the past seven days.

Last Thursday, I went to the health center with dehydration. They had to hook me up to an IV.

I went home on Friday. Friday night, I learned I'd been funded at Berkeley.

I decided to go to Berkeley on Monday.

Today I found housing in the Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland. It's a really good deal for a decent arrangement. I will be two miles from campus (10 minutes by AC Transit bus, even at night), a block from a neat shopping district, and four blocks from the BART. And in the parking lot of the Rockridge BART, these people from the Province of the Mists dress up in armor and fight each other.

Notes

2007-03-16T08:01:00.000-07:00

Some places are κατ᾽ αισα, and others παρ᾽ αισα. Some places were once the former and are now the latter.

The borrowed title for a novel, or a chapter in a novel: The Consequences of Pragmatism.

The War on Genre

2007-03-09T22:02:00.000-08:00

I

Homer said everything, or he said nothing. You’ll wake up
from the rigor mortis of epithets or live with them
like the eccentric neighbor dangling charms around her neck
who paws at them while she fixes turkey sandwiches,
goes for an evening jog, asks for the time. Her phrases are fixed
for the sake of time and sound, on the grounds of internal rhyme,
and their sense hovers over the dull background, collapsing
back to paraphrase, flat kennings that make the workaday
part of a ruined whole, the keystone of a cupola.

II

Consider the same tiled bathroom this year. A year ago
the stage allowed for misidentification, for comic bloom.
But the bloom was grafted to epic bark, and the bark was sailed
for an overcast year, then anchored by the window,
at the spot between two rows of mirrors. There he tells him
he doesn’t enjoy himself anymore. He answers him,
saying that everything is fine in Ilium, so keep your chin
up and shaved now the bikes have raced around the track.
It’s warmer now and there’s time to catch his breath. He can’t complain.

III

Swift-footed or beloved of Zeus, he’d never clamber up
the flight again just to talk to someone. On the other hand,
if he were those, there’d be nothing left to say. He’d be the moon,
whole and round, which sails in through the open window
into their conversation, admits no parts, and doesn’t speak.

Anniversaries

2007-03-04T08:15:00.000-08:00

May 20th is my graduation, but it is also my parents' 35th anniversary. I feel a little bad about this. Any anniversary would be okay, but one of the 5s or 10s is a little different.

It's interesting which anniversary years (for events as well as people) matter relative to the importance. Some events merit only "big" anniversaries, while others (Pearl Harbor, Kennedy assassination, 9-11) are noted every year, with significant attention on every 5 or 10. A quantitative study would be really cool.

Wikipedia informs me that a "golden" or "champagne" birthday is when you turn the same age as the day your birthday is on. I will be turning 25 on November 25th, 2009. It's nice to be born on a day that is after the 21st (to make good on the "champagne" part) and to have a nice solid number like 25.

If you were born on February 29th, would you celebrate yours when you turn 28 or 29? You would turn 28 on a leap year, but on the 29th. You would turn 29 on the 28th. If you were born on February 28, 1872, you turned 28 on February 28th, 1900. But if you were born in 1972, you turned 28 on February 29, 2000.

I see a really foppish family saga coming out of this.

States I've Driven in my Car

2007-02-14T11:28:00.000-08:00

States I'll Have Been To (March 2007)

2007-02-14T11:15:00.000-08:00

After Juvenal 1.51-61

2007-02-10T17:00:00.000-08:00

So shouldn’t this stuff take some heat and flak,
in the light of a lamp like Quintus Flaccus’?
Shouldn’t I attack it? Or what else
would I do? Some belabored Hercules,
or Diomedes of the drawn-out battle cry?
Or should I take a crack at cretin tales,
like the bovine yelping in the labyrinth,
and the lad-smacked sea and hovering handyman?
That while a husband pimps his wife for dough,
like a feather in his cap? The court’s still out
on female “takings.” Hence his expertise
at gazing upward at his vaulted ceiling
and piping snores inside his champagne flute
with wakeful nose. While a minor Automedon
invests his trust fund in a stable stock
(so to speak) which rolls down Flaminian?
After going broke in high-speed wheels,
he sets his sights on a flashy army post.

A Real Shipwreck

2007-02-10T15:12:00.000-08:00

Chip, if I were an elegant elegist
who still delights in company, I'd trump
you in chipper life and art. For whoever tries
with hasty sails to skirt the middling Scylla
gets swallowed by that versing whirl, Charybdis,
and dies after the shipwreck. Disembark.
Your friends aren’t still aboard. Nor are the nine
beloved Muses. And you’re more vacant still.

(The o riginal.)

Whistle-Stop

2007-02-02T22:04:00.000-08:00

“Boys, like you to meet Roy Ipsow, without whom I’d still be back in Outer Indianoplace, waiting for some interurban that never comes.”
Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

A pair of us close to the Union Station,
Editorializing, or what have you. Then a whistle like
Professor Naylor’s whistle: the first four notes
Of the verse, then the fifth and fundamental.
Einstein, the Austrian physicist has proven it,
That light at any rate outraces sound,
So we must have looked from the Big Four train
Or the interurban bound for Madison
Before the one who saw us whistled out
The first note of the verse of the song,
Not even the fifth and fundamental!

Dear Professor Naylor, if you’d been there
Would you have whistled there on Louisiana Street?
And I have a second question, about the first note,
Which is: would you have whistled the first note first,
Or the fundamental first, so the first shall be last
And the last note whistled first and all that dross?
Would you think we were ready for the ambush-whistle
After drinking a fifth and talking about the fundamentals?

Me and Gorgias had just come down from Indiana Avenue
Where the Negroes played the queerest brand of music
With the fifth and the fundamental both off-kilter;
But the Interurban isn’t fast—you could ride all day
And still not make it far enough to keep the surrogates
Of Professor Naylor from whistling, on the grounds
That the echo of the whistle in the very Romanesque
Great Hall of the Union Station would resound
With the first four notes, the fifth and fundamental.

Underwood

2007-02-01T22:03:00.000-08:00

Almost forty years ago
when Dr. Lucien Underwood
died at his own green-thumb hands,
did the silence of a poison
plant concoction, or the noise of
gunfire (just an instant long)
bring him to the era when,
beneath the shade of elms on Elm,
he was not the botanist
of the Bronx, but of this little place,
fresh from writing Mildews, Molds,
and Mushrooms, in the shadow of
the thornless honey locust on
Locust and the sycamore?

Botanists, you’d come to think,
control not just botanical
nomenclature, but the names
that crisscross every middle-range
Midwestern town, like this one where
Dr. Lucien Underwood
got lost exploring underground
railroad caves, and the Stone Wall,
as if the streets named after plants
were not enough, and other things,
stony, subterranean
and slick were all that suited him.

So Dr. Lucien Underwood
found the Bronx Botanical
Gardens. But their flora grew
just as vivid, evergreen;
and if he’d stuck around, he might
have seen Greencastle not as green
with fewer trees, broader roads
as the Chinese elms collapsed
into a mushy detritus:
the opening for mildews, molds,
and mushrooms to disseminate.

Fontanet Mill

2007-01-31T22:03:00.000-08:00

Everywhere we start to build we are carried along
On the kind of arcing wave that starts out graceful
And breaks with white-caps and beach-strewn jetsam;
This is an easy metaphor in Maine
Or in Oregon, since the thought is always salient,
A mile away from one great ocean or another.

But in landlocked Fontanet, fifteen miles
From industrial grit and the rough and tumble Wobblies,
You would hardly believe that water’s the same as water
In Portland or in Portland. First, there was just a spring
And from it, Fontanet, which clogged up quick
With brick kegs to house DuPont gunpowder
And brick huts to keep the powder-makers in.

That said, you would need no more imagination
To know what happened to make our buildings rock
And rumble till our windows broke their glass,
Than it took for any mariner from back at home
To hear the sound of the sea and call it up
In an unconscious moment. For everywhere we think,
We’re carried along on a tide from thought to thought.

Lucky, then, that the tremors didn’t seem
Like the sea—in the moment, I’d have thought
The Atlantic had come to Indiana. This was the morning
When the steady earth, cajoled to match the ocean now
At snatching workingmen and scarring up,
Left whitecaps on trees that never dissipate
In the swift of surf’s continuance.

Thirty miles away, there was a lecture
On San Juan Hill when a window flew apart.
Everyone turned their eyes to what it made,
A frame and broken glass. The cold October wind
Came in, the visitor from the west,
From Fontanet, like the dark of a seaside day.

States I've Been To (February 2007)

2007-01-27T01:55:00.000-08:00

Two Things

2007-01-22T00:27:00.000-08:00

1.

May I propose the conflict between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs as a suitable topic for a play? Or for a public sculpture?

2.

I was in Indianapolis for second half and the aftermath of the Colts game. Pennsylvania St. was a whole lot nicer than I remember it being. Having closure on the library can't hurt. There are plans to fill the gaps along the area with 5-7 story buildings. Sounds like somebody finally realized how to plan. Skyscrapers are nice, but if you build too many for a city your size, you end up with a Potemkin village. Despite the supposed complaints about choosing the shorter hotel for the expanded convention center, I think the new wisdom is probably, "Fill up the 'spaghetti bowl' first, and then we'll talk more skyscrapers."

As for the game, it was very exciting. I'm not really a football fan, but it was the first time that being in Indy felt like being in the tumult of a big city to me. And Colts fandom no longer feels contrived, which is how it felt until maybe about four years ago.

Pragmatism

2007-01-21T00:00:00.000-08:00

When I had my thesis proposal last fall, I was presented the question of whether I was trying to put my thesis to the test or put it into practice. I wholeheartedly said the latter at the time, but now I wonder what the difference is. Isn’t practice the test?

Kerrytown

2007-01-01T22:00:00.000-08:00

Michigan is bright and melting; a stranger slips
on the ice. But the nights will lengthen after this—
And in the summer—someone’s crying into tonic limes,
someone’s cynical friend insists I won’t believe him
given the circumstances, but the sun won’t set.

It’s a different kind of Michigan. Someone’s sobbing still
into a tumbler. The days will stretch, interconnect;
you’ll bite into apples of endless summer.

And the juice won’t stain our shirts. Night won’t come
into this courtyard of the gods, which lies at once
above the Arctic and inside the Tropics,
both. For the beneficent Lord
redecorates when it pleases him, and lo,
he’s managed to move the stars, to change the globe.

Night will go, but the day won’t be too hot. The sun
won’t get in your eyes—Those sunglasses suit you, though—
and we’ll walk in perfect twilight under the spires

of Kerrytown. In Greencastle, a one-tooth drunk
fumbles for a set of keys. My keys
fit some door I’ve never been. When I find it,
I’ll know where I was going. No fairy gives him
a fiver for his missing tooth, or cries into
a tumbler, or waits in the courtyard with a drink.

I am the Turnstile

2007-01-01T16:13:00.000-08:00

"Mission: to be where I am.
Even in that ridiculous, deadly serious
role--I am the place
where creation is working itself out.

...

But to be where I am. And to wait.
I am anxious, stubborn, confused.
Coming events, they're there already!
I know it. They're outside:

a murmuring crowd outside the gate.
They can pass only one by one.
They want in. Why? They're coming
one by one. I am the turnstile."

-Tomas Tranströmer, The Outpost

A Lack of Realism

2006-12-27T17:58:00.000-08:00

I am extremely unrealistic. And often hopelessly bourgeois.

I was day-dreaming about good company at my duplex over the winter, adorned by gin and tonics and argyle sweaters. And all of a sudden it hit me: duplexes don't have fireplaces.

Top 10 List

2006-12-16T12:39:00.000-08:00

10.
Grizzly Bear
Yellow House

View in terms other than Smile or Animal Collective. It goes other wonderful places that neither of those references go: truly old-fashioned Americana, twilit brooding.

9.
Hot Chip
The Warning

So much warmer than the last album. On the other hand, the whole thing is held together by an aggressive ideal of defending their sound and attacking the critics. As if the best defense is a good offense.

8.
Girl Talk
Night Ripper

I remain a skeptic about this mash-up dance stuff. But just about halfway through "Friday Night"...

7
TV on the Radio
Return to Cookie Mountain

Some of the only music of the pat few years to sound genuinely new. Or maybe I'm just not well-versed enough in their influences. For better or worse, it goes a little further down roads that other people thought were dead ends six or seven years ago.

6.
Juana Molina
Son

This is an album that has suffered to much from a reductio ad Starbucks. It sounds superficially like that kind of music, and has received too many superficial listens. Listen harder. It's like stepping out of a barfight into a chill starscape, hearing the same intensity recast through psychedelic funhouse mirrors. A song like La Verdad captures that inward turn toward lyricism.

5.
Yo La Tengo
I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass

"Beanbag Chair" talks about "making misery out of fun." This is an album that does the opposite, in that distinctive Yo La Tengo way. There's not much else worth saying, except that they do it here at least as well as they do on average. "Black Flowers" matches the brilliance of anything on And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out.

4.
Belle & Sebastian
The Life Pursuit

Part of me is sad about Belle & Sebastian's movement away from twee-pop, even if the genre is a bit exhausted. Dear Catastrophe Waitress struck a nice balance, but this goes all out in the absorption of Motown and Swinging London. And they pull it off brilliantly.

3.
Califone
Roots and Crowns

Dark, brooding collages. With two kickers: "A Chinese Actor" and a cover of "The Orchids."

2
Destroyer
Destroyer's Rubies

There is a moment in virtually every one of these songs where lo-fi yields to full instrumentation, as if their almost solipsistic self-referentiality opened up to a full studio audience, the listener included. It's addictive as hell.

1
Joanna Newsom
Ys

The Milk-Eyed Mender has the long-neglected Great American Songbook thing going for it: every artist who got into it could find a song worth covering, presumably with a more standard voice and instrumentation. Ys doesn't have that. But it's a phenomenal morass of instrumentation propelled by a dozen perfect moments.

Election Round-Up

2006-12-12T19:45:00.000-08:00

Ciro Rodriguez won a final House seat for the Democrats, TX-23.

I like this for two reasons, one of them quite partisan.

1) Along with Lampson, Rodriguez is the second '04 victim of redistricting to make a comeback in 2006. Gerrymandering is indefensible, whether it helps Democrats, Republicans or (as in California) incumbents overall.

2) The Democratic majority is now the mirror image of the Republican majority in the 109th: 233-202.

I am ready to give up on Jennings...in FL-13. Don't need to prolong the unnecessary.

Tableau

2006-12-11T22:49:00.000-08:00

For not much more than three months in the spring
Of the year two thousand five I was neither lacking
Nor a paired-up half of a twofold roundness tumbling,
As Aristophanes would have it. I was a candle on an oak desk,
An inkwell, an open leather book small idylls jumped across.

Those were green and portable; they approached a calm
In the reader’s heart with only shades of loneliness.
But who was the reader? That was the question then.
And where was the oak desk? Was there a flame?
No one question made more sense than another.

When I was the candle, after all, the inkwell and the book,
I was giving myself to artifice: I could have been electric
And lit an electric screen projecting out,
And in not being those I’d made a subtle choice.
The intersection of those things for the span of months
I was, till the door began to rattle loud.

Performing Arts

2006-12-04T21:25:00.000-08:00

Progress is progress and bad architecture is bad architecture, but there is no replacing the practice rooms on the upper level of the Burkhart Hall. There is something inexplicably bizarre to me about walking Locust Street and looking up and seeing someone you know washed in bad light, framed by those ridiculous pink and yellow bars. Whoever it is always looks so important to the plot.

Inanity

2006-12-03T17:58:00.000-08:00

As Christmas drew near, there was much inanity in the kingdom. All conversations resembled Abbott and Costello routines, all tears were negligible, and all touching was vaguely inappropriate.

Where I Am From

2006-11-29T13:13:00.001-08:00

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The West
Boston
North Central
The Inland North
The South
Philadelphia
The Northeast
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

When they say "southern Indiana" or "southern Illinois," I assume they mean non-Chicago, non-Michigan.

Oklahoma

2006-11-28T17:34:00.000-08:00

Oklahoma is the weirdest state: all the Democrats come from rural areas, and all the Republicans come from Tulsa and Oklahoma City.

Women in Politics (Two & Trois)

2006-11-18T12:36:00.000-08:00

2

Upon ascending to the speakership, Baltimore-born grandmother Nancy Pelosi will be the fewest numbers of heartbeats a woman has ever been from the U.S. presidency. Secretary of State Albright would have been ten years ago, if she were native-born. Instead, Janet Reno kept the record for all of Clinton's presidency. It then slipped a number of spots to Gale Norton in Bush's first term, before Condi Race set a new record in 2005.

("Baltimore-born grandmother" is the new "San Francisco liberal," by the way. Interestingly, the most powerful Marylander in the country is Steny Hoyer, but Hoyer was born in New York City.)

3

What if the dominant political figures in this country were still Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill? Or even two earlier (but living) figures like Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford?

That's a little bit what it's like in France.

That's why I think it's astounding that Ségolène Royal, a 50-year old woman, is being given a 50-50 shot at ascending to the French presidency. If she won, half the countries in the G8 would have or have had woman leaders.

It is telling, though, that Merkel, Thatcher and Canada's forgettable Kim Campbell were all right-wing or center-right. There are two explanations, if any explanation is necessary. Either left-wing women are unacceptable to a certain number of left-leaning voters in the G8 countries, or women in general soften the image of right-wing politics, so that conservative parties seek them out. I would go with the latter, and would keep Royal's odds at about 50 percent heading into next spring.

Last Night

2006-11-16T13:21:00.000-08:00

1. I slept for 11 hours last night. My dreams were exceedingly vivid, like a brighter Tim Burton movie full of circuses, elegant interiors, and '50s kitsch. I woke up to our terrible weather and listened to Murmur.

2. Karl Rove approached a freshman in the House, and told her he couldn't believe she had won. He thought he had "the math," as he famously announced. I don't know how you can see benefit in a political system that sees voters as locked away (for either party), or how you can see the failure of such a view as anything but a positive development.

3. It's strategically odd when the party you support goes from minority status to majority status in a legislative chamber. I looked over the list of potential races in '08, and tried to think how many pickups would be good. Then I realized that simply holding most seats, maybe putting one or two in play (Allard and Coleman, say) would be absolutely fine. All this talk about Lamar Alexander and Mitch McConnell reminds me of the way Republicans talked two years ago, about building a filibuster-proof majority and what have you. Now look what happened in Minnesota, Maryland and Washington.

Once you are in the majority, the best offense is a good defense.