Worried about climate change? Try "Glee" on for size!

Winter finally showed up with some snow.  While everyone else rejoiced over the warm weather, I've been having end-of-the-world horror-fantasies about melting ice caps.  Which I have sublimated by watching every available episode of "Glee" online.

I don't know what it is about "Glee" that is so addictive; the combination of an emotional teenage pregnancy, a self-assuredly gay character being embraced by his grease-coveralled father, and, you know, five or six pop song performances per episode is almost too much to resist.  Especially for an old musical theater hat like myself.  I really was as jazzed as those characters to be on a stage singing for people about emotions I barely understood at the time (I once played a jaded 40-year-old drunk hung up on her best friend, watching his marriage disintegrate.  Not sure how that worked out from an audience perspective.).  There's something cathartic in the whole thing, I suppose.

"Glee" is not without its faults, though. There's a fantastic critique of the show's ridiculous plotlines over at NPR's "Monkey See, Monkey Do," calling Fox out for forcing Schue to act like a base-line idiot about his wife's faked pregnancy.  Someone could probably also write a similarly critical article about roles of gender and sexuality in the show, but we'll start with that fake elephant.

Because I'm coming up on two weeks of crazy, I'm posting a video that will have to make it until I have time off again.

Happy snow.  Happy holding on.

Now With More Thao

Look outside your window.  If you're in Amherst, you will see: rain / wet leaves / gray / probably more rain.  If you are not in Amherst, I hope you see something nicer: kittens? / a baby? / woodsmoke from the neighbor's chimney?

Here also is something nicer to see: Thao Nguyen put out an album last month, and I almost missed it, but I didn't.  And it's great!  A departure from last year's plucky We Brave Beestings And All, Thao's Know Better Learn Faster funnels her powerhouse voice into a wistful, angry, clapping, brass-fed, strings-driven manifesto.  It's nice to hear her collaborating with other musicians on some tracks (I think I hear Sister Suvi on background vocals on "Body"), as well as branching out into probing and honest ballads ("The Give," "Oh. No.").

For a listen, head over to Stereogum, where you can download the title track for free!

For a gander, check out an old video (my favorite of the ones they've made so far):

Business Time with Balloons/Space

My life is a flurry of teaching-related responsibilities and escape fantasies.  And when things started feeling really tetchy, I turned to Dobby Gibson's collection Skirmish--not least because of 1) the title and 2) that he is reading this Sunday at the Jones Library in Amherst (where I'm hoping I'll hear another Ben Kopel original introduction.  If I ever do release my book of poems, I hereby request that Ben Kopel give my introduction every time I read somewhere). 

I don't have anything intelligent to say about Skirmish right this minute (see: "grading" redux), but I thought I'd share just a little bit from one of the poems early in the book:

From "Mercy":
The universe expands in every direction
simultaneously at the speed of light,
but expands into what?
At the edges, it gets extremely dense.
It's all held together by eye contact.
In the center stands your father,
and in his bowl is just enough batter
for one last pancake.
We are born in tiny collisions.
Buttoned into our best suits
we eventually drift apart.

So, I'm off to drift (more or less in my best clothing) into brief contact with my students.  And hopefully later into contact with a balloon-type present.  I hope you enjoyed your brief touchdown into a Dobby Gibson poem.  And I hope I can write some things later about his reading.  And about his poems.  And about Ben Kopel.

Who Needs Realism, Really.

These are some things we can learn from the movie "High Fidelity":

1. That, in Hollywoodland, it's possible to be a selfish jerk-face and still have a sexy girlfriend with a husky voice.

2. That there is something fundamentally attractive to the American consumer about list-making.

3. That maybe sometimes it's necessary to ask ourselves what we would want to be and where we would want to be it if historical time, money, and training were not obstacles.

That is to say, Fantasy Is Really Just A Way to Cope. That is to say, I offer you my Top 5 Alternative Life Choices:

1. A Sailor

2. A Member of the Landed Gentry

3. A Kindergarten Teacher

4. A Detective (but really I might just mean Humphrey Bogart):

5. Primary Set Designer For All Future Wes Anderson Films

Wild Airplane Rumpus

What to tell?

I started this blog to more or less keep track of what I was reading and thinking about reading and when I left my house to go listen to people read, I thought I'd talk about that, too.

Really I have no good way to explain how I got from Proust to Lisa Olstein to Kelly Link to A.S. Byatt to Foucault to Balibar to Elizabeth Hughey to Dawn Powell to Ralph Ellison in roughly a month and a half. But voila. Here I am. Still trying to process everything. One day I'd like to write more about it all.

I've also read Anne's poems in Juked and Front Porch; watched Jed read from The Manual of Detection at Amherst Books; shared in a victory dance with Miranda, recently published in Meridian (not to be confused with the magazine published by the Mormons).

I've manned the jib of a 16-footer on Jamaica Pond. I've sat uncomfortably through "Where the Wild Things Are," with its sad belief that humans really are incapable of communicating with one another in any nice way. I've been making sound effects for this bumper sticker. I've been writing poems about underwater cities.

I've been liking this song, even though I'm not sure that I'm ready to endorse a return to the 70s mustache, or the cheesy lyrics, or their particular (and kind of unfortunate) placement of the word 'encyclopedia.' But it's catchy:

How Sad It Was That We Could Not Believe

These breakfast-time quandaries from Kate Beaton, whose webcomic Hark! A Vagrant has been keeping me occupied (ie procrastinating/laughing), could very well be on the syllabus of one of my seminars.

A related object of study being: names for things. Truth in the representation of the thing (name). And, just to get everyone all riled up: capital-T-truth. In objects, in embodiment. Or, as Miranda would say, in Real Human Feelings.

This is where things get tricky. Accessing this truth might require the narrativization of it--blogging, for one. Poems for another. Letters. LiveJournal. You get the idea. That this process of putting all the pieces together, of making some of your own pieces, somehow provides more insight, realness, than Just The Facts.

Problem as solution. Problem as problem.

Paul Celan knew this, and so the Problem gets pastiched:

Landschaft

Ihr hohen Pappeln--Menschen dieser Erde!

Ihr schwarzen Teiche Glücks--ihr spiegelt sie zu Tode!

Ich sah dich, Schwester, stehn in diesem Glanze.

Brilliance in nature and its reflection. Brilliance in a kind of Recognition.

Take us home, Romantics. Take us home, indie kids:

Some Things Are Happening. Some Things Are Bound to Happen.

First, the changing weather.

Second, an overwhelming amount of projects.

Third, some possibilities.

Some things for you to look at:

1. The new issue of Fou.

2. My new favorite webcomic.

3. A movie with some good poet friends.

Some things for you to expect:

1. Fewer posts with a little less substance (at least for awhile).

2. A print magazine with big ambitions.

3. Everything else.

Spying on the campaign trail

Announcement: fall is in the midst of Arrival. The air is cold in northern Pennsylvania, and I am ready to don a trench coat and a knit cap. This could possibly happen in a spy-like scenario.

I tried my hand at spying in Philadelphia. My Subject had an orange shirt and a shock of gray hair at his temple. Who knew that orange was a popular color for men this season? Everyone in Philadelphia is anticipating autumn with their clothing choices. Although my Subject proved elusive amidst all this foliage-like fashion, I happened upon a bakery just as the rain started up. I think a scone is considered relatively little payoff in the spy world, but it is certainly a tasty kind of payoff.

If fall is for spy games, it is also, historically, a time for campaigns. I have some ideas:

Let's campaign for wood smoke and wet leaves.

Let's campaign for the badass super hero parade of princesses.

Let's campaign for vintage leather camera bags with corduroy linings.

Let's campaign for Nixon. Or, failing that, commemorative campaign glasses. More generally.

Let's just be on the trail.

Moving magic

Look out, world. I'm changing locations.

Look out, the world is magical.

Your faithful correspondent returns in an undisclosed amount of time.

Anatomy of water

Depleted by a week of reading more than 400 tiny blue books full of responses to the same two writing prompts that oscillated between heartbreakingly naive, unintentionally hilarious, and Just Plain Wrong. All written in the vaguely off-key notes of just-out-of-high-school Test English, which is not unlike the struggling plonks of a dilapidated carousel or the maddening strains of the "It's A Small World" Disney ride.

So I retreat into cheesy, accordion-driven love song waltzes and Matthea Harvey poems and over-priced vintage stores and ridiculous hat fashion shows to re-boot. Jumbled up in my post-blue book thoughts: the tantalizing decision to leave behind the moderns for the messy, sprawling vistas of Contemporary Fiction. I am squinting to see it better.


Last weekend I tried to read Lauren Groff's Delicate, Edible Birds on the beach before the fog fell out of the sky like a brick. Or something really heavy. And sneaky. Until it falls on you.

Reading through the collection, indoors, in the ensuing week of rain, it struck me how present water is in the book: humid indoor swimming pools and rainstorms and lakes and flooded rivers. And then, as I'm having this thought, Groff gives me this paragraph, in the middle of a love story that turns out to be a jagged tale of loss, self-forgiveness:

There is no ending, no neatness in this story. There never really is, where water is concerned. It is wild, febrile, kind, ambiguous; it is dark and carries the mud, and it is clear and the cleanest thing. Too much of it kills us, and not enough kills us, and it is what makes us, mostly. Water is the cleverest substance, wily beyond the stretch of our mortal imaginations. And no matter where it is pent, no matter if it is air or liquid or solid, it will someday, inevitably, find its way out. (192)

I want to say that the other, complementary thing in the book has to do with little tragedies (absences, denials, misunderstandings, surrenderings), familial or creative or intellectual struggles that loom large on our personal horizons and so tiny on any other natural scale.¹ But those little tragic moments of giving up or letting go (sometimes to positive effect), fit so perfectly there amidst Groff's soundless depths, strung up in that "wild, febrile" tension between the quotidian and the monumental.

And there are some thoughts about To The Lighthouse floating around in my head. I am squinting to see them better, too.

---

¹ The phrase 'little tragedies' klinks a little bit wrong in my head, as the Germans would say. But it's a matter of translation and there's no fixing it tonight.

Vehicle: dirigible

A dirigible would be great for:

• permanently avoiding the Mass Pike and all subsidiary routes.
• examining strange coastal weather patterns.
• hats.

Books of War. Warbooks. Books not Bombs. Bookbombs.

Perhaps because I have been in a Class A Funk about grad school/Amherst/grad school in Amherst, the pile of Books to Read around my bed looks like a hilarious-grim mixture of books concerned with war or the aftermath of war.

To wit:

Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut (apparently I've been committed to the 9th layer of Hell for English majors/conscious people under the age of 30 for not having read this already...oh, well.)
Catch-22, Joseph Heller (9th layer of Hell redux)
Falling Man, Don DeLillo
Suite Française, Irène Némirovsky
Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson
and, on order, the new book about Artists Against Hitler, Red Orchestra, Anne Nelson.

I would add Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, but I'm trying not to kill myself here. What with all the talk of Ulysses being thrown around, and trying to finish Infinite Jest after a three-year off-again on-again fling, Pynchon might just do me in.

{Edit 23 July: Just looked down and re-noticed my abandoned copy of Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, which may be the culprit of this whole disturbing phenomenon.}

Saturday

with apologies to Emily Toder

I saw Seedy Underbelly and I went up to her
she was leaning against a parking meter that charged Saturdays
looking bored and chewing gum
in a way that announced calculated mischief
in a way that looked not calculated
What's wrong with you I said
It's Saturday she said
she held out her hand
it was quarterless
I slapped it
the sound was crisp like apples or dry wood
I heard campfires and felt hungover
I heard anarchy and discount superstores
and felt tired
she let me slap until I was done spoiling for it
I reached into my pockets
they were full of pennies and gum wrappers
I threw one at her
a wrapper
but it twisted in the humidity and she missed
it dropped like a bowling ball in the hypothetical vacuum
You littered she said, surprised or obligated
I'm leaving I said
Don't you dare recycle

Who knew Hyperbole was a ballet dancing transcendentalist?

I did what I always do when I'm a little perplexed--I made a ton of food: summer squash, zucchini, and potato gratin with olive oil, fresh parsley, and garlic scapes (almost all of the ingredients of which came from the farm) and enough chocolate chip cookies for all of my neighbors and some of Bartlett.

I also made about 10 alternative life plans in my head, a course of action I take when I am unsure of what I'm doing in life. Most of these plans included jobs in publishing or freelancing and lots of writing in apartments with nice lighting and a typewriter. These apartments were located everywhere from Paris to New York to Philadelphia to Lancaster. They were very definitely not in Amherst and far, far away from academia.

I think I've been so concerned with figuring out what I'm going to *do* to support the thing that I really want to do in life (ie write), that I haven't been doing what I need to do. That is: poems. Except I did write a poem this week, and it felt good. About dreams and Amelia Earhart and a personified Low Pressure System wearing a cravat.

It is confusing to be good at and praised for something that you enjoy but do not love. It is somewhat worse to be good at and praised for something that you enjoy but do not love in a town that is a postcard for a bourgeois, upper-middle class existence that is mind-numbingly boring. But for the farm, the small press, the Bookmill, the prospect of rowing in the fall, and the insane library access, I might run screaming off into the hills.

My next poem will feature a personified Hyperbole wearing a tutu and reciting Whitman.

Clearly Bad Decision Dinosaur is a powerful, powerful animal

I wish I had read this earlier, ha. Seriously, grad school isn't so bad. (YESSSSS)

Sorry for the random post. Will synthesize new happenings soon.

From the annals of Victorian research

Nothing says "Get out of my country" like an Indian sculpture of an automaton tiger mauling a redcoat. Complete with an organ that emits "man dying" and "tiger growling" sounds. A cheery find for this morning's image search.

(Image via Victoria and Albert Museum online collections.)

Why didn't anyone stop me?

Clearly this was a terrible idea. I'm enjoying reading The Odyssey (again) about 50x more than I am slogging through the first chapter of Ulysses (again). And I'm itching to get back to my stacks...still haven't touched Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances or the short story collections from Lauren Groff and Pasha Malla that I've been waiting to read since last semester. Listening to Chris Bachelder read some new stories a few weeks ago also made me want to finally sit down and finish U.S.!, but, alas, I have lent out my copy for the summer. Really what I'm finding is that, one week in, I am already losing heart in my battle to conquer Ulysses once and for all.

When the great Nick Hornby was still writing for The Believer, he scoffed (good naturedly?) at the idea that we should read books because "we're supposed to" or because they're classics or because other people talk about them, and we want to join in the conversation. I believe his opinion was something along the lines of: forcing yourself to read a book when you don't want to just because you think you should be reading it is not only unpleasant, but you don't actually get that much out of it anyway.

I find myself sort of trapped in the middle ground of the two arguments Hornby represented in that piece: need to finish Ulysses for school; don't want to do it because it's summer; will most assuredly not have time in the fall.

I am very, very tempted, à la the Nick Hornby school of reading, to put U down again to get to all the fun stuff I've been stockpiling. I'm just afraid I won't pick it back up...

***

In other news, I'm back from Pennsylvania with new running shoes and fresh laundry. Home is beautiful as always, but getting slightly more depressed as the recession kicks in. Saw both sisters--one is pulling more money as a waitress than I might this whole summer, the other is fresh back from Penland, where she made and sold some fantastic pieces for charity. She's really settling into her own as an artist, I think.

***

As promised, some summer music suggestions:

For running and other frantic activities, including driving:

Passion Pit, Manners
Columbia (2009)

With particular favorite tracks being "Moth's Wings" and "Little Secrets."




Miike Snow, Miike Snow
Downtown (2009)

The single, "Animal," may still be my favorite track off the album, which fizzes in and out of a solid listen.




For all-around good pop sensibility:

Dirty Projectors, Bitte Orca
Domino (2009)

Amazing.





Yeah Yeah Yeahs, It's Blitz!
Interscope (2009)

Still one of my favorite bands. A departure from the (for whatever personal reason/disposition) earth-shattering Show Your Bones, but still solid.



For best new Beirut/Arcade Fire hybrid and/or lost-at-birth sibling:

Fanfarlo, Reservoir
self-released (2009)

Category says it all. Still enjoyable.





For writing endeavors:

Elvis Perkins, Ash Wednesday
XL (2007)

Dear god, please skip "May Day," if you know what's good for you.




Jeff Hanson, Madam Owl
Kill Rock Stars (2008)

Poor Jeff Hanson. Hopefully in Dead Rock Stars heaven.

Let's go find summer.

Yes, Heidi Swanson, yes let's.

So far, summer has been alternately lazy and hectic. Roller coasters and concerts jostle with libraries and placement tests. My CSA share is yielding all the lettuce I could ever dream of. And delicious strawberries almost better than the occasional ice cream cone. I tore right through Jedediah Berry's The Manual of Detection last weekend and am excited to start working at Small Beer Press with Jed and Gavin and Kelly (and fellow interns!).


So far, I've seen Thao Nguyen rock The Iron Horse and Ted Leo & The Pharmacists blow up the Easthampton High School gym (an interesting change in venue, for sure). Missed what was probably an amazing TMSR show in Boston, but am looking forward to their new album, due out July 14. Bowerbirds are playing Northampton in a few weeks, and though I don't think anything can top when they played an opening set for Bon Iver last summer in Philadelphia, I'm planning on heading over. Slightly weirded out by the death of Michael Jackson, but John Richards's amazing kickoff to The Morning Show yesterday celebrated the spirit of a pop genius in exactly the right way. The whole first hour of that show was top-notch, and if you feel like you need a summertime pick-me-up, you can stream the show over at KEXP.org.

Headed to the home region for the 4th of July weekend. Starting Ulysses as of July 1. These are probably bad concurrent moves to make. If I fall behind, I suppose there's always the new (and beautifully drawn) Ulysses SEEN project by Throwaway Horse to keep me motivated.

Tonight: final reading of the Juniper Summer Institute: Chris Bachelder, Arisa White, and Matthew Zapruder (oh my).

To come: playlists!

"Daylight" on a rainy day

Between the gloomy weather and struggling through research for work today (a book-length scholarly study on the cultural importance of tea in Victorian England), I was in need of motivation from the new-ish Matt and Kim single, "Daylight." Their new album Grand is poppy as ever, but I enjoy their new stuff much more than tracks like "Yea Yeah," which seems less complex and flat in comparison to their latest efforts. I must admit, though, that I enjoyed the continued theme of food fights in this video, though Matt and Kim seem to have downgraded, trading a cardboard cut-out kitchen for a garbage dumpster...



Is anyone else not surprised that Matt threw out his back and had to cancel tour dates this spring?

Vermont Summer Round-Up

Vermont was cold. Beautiful, but cold. This might have something to do with being on top of Mount Mansfield, where the temperature dropped about 10 degrees just going up the mountain.

To remind myself of the season, here are a couple of sweet links (sweet=summer? warmth? something.):

• The fledgling issue of Jellyfish Magazine premiers
  
• The Morning News hosts "Infinite Summer," a three-month challenge to read DFW's tome Infinite Jest in its entirety.
  
• A new story by Lauren Groff is now online at Open Letters
• Hobart gives Brady Udall (an F&M alum!) and Pasha Malla the thumbs up
• Cool factor: a Rubik's Cube font generator

In other (personal) news, I started my new job as a proofreader of an academic manuscript today. Between that, spending some time on the farm, and my own reading/writing, this summer should be busy--a good thing, since I need a schedule to keep me from devolving into a full fledged couch potato/insomniac caffeine addict.

Because sometimes you just need someone who will throw knives at you

I enjoyed La fille sur le pont way more than I thought I would. After reading the description on the Netflix sleeve, I despaired: what on earth had made me request a film about a suicidal, sex-crazy French woman who falls for a gambling (possibly telekinetic) knife-thrower (played by the great Daniel Auteuil)?

I still don't have an answer for you, there. But, I can tell you that La fille is a great, fun summer film: it pokes fun at its own noir-ish ambitions and, amidst all the lusty jokes (somewhat irritatingly at the female character's expense), the movie somehow succeeds in portraying a love story based on mutual need rather than overwhelming physical desire.

It strikes me that this clip is a little Moulin Rouge-ish, though the film itself is not. Allez-y.

Summer like a fire sale -or- I'm feeling kind of list-y

Summer means big books and ridiculous pop music...as soon as I can pay attention long enough to do anything about the pile of novels I've been meaning to read and (imaginary) CDs I've been meaning to crank through my nifty globular speakers. Also on the summer agenda:

• vegetables
• Zumba
• Research Assistant-ing
• apartment hunting
• my Southern Odyssey (Lancaster/Philadelphia [whatever; it's the Mason-Dixon line], Virginia, and Florida [twice!])
• silly French movies

Since I can only seem to think in lists right now, here's the line-up for summer reading here at paper alphabet:

The Fortress of Solitude
Jonathan Lethem

My friend Jessica swears by this book, and I love Jessica, so I'm reading it. Despite my reservations about the whole Brooklyn publishing phenomenon. Also, I like superheroes.




A Fraction of the Whole
Steve Toltz

Recommended months and months ago by the great Maud Newton (who also lives in Brooklyn...). I've been itching to read it all year. Jail. Australians. I have to do something now that House isn't on anymore.




The Manual of Detection
Jedediah Berry

Jed Berry is a UMass MFA alum, so I've had the opportunity to listen to him talk a few times since being here. He was especially encouraging about working with/for small presses, which I think is admirable and exciting. Also, Jensen wants people to read this book, and I love him, so I will.


Delicate, Edible Birds And Other Stories
Lauren Groff

I've sort of had a girl crush on Lauren Groff ever since I met her at the Emerging Writers Festival in Lancaster two years ago. Her novel, Monsters of Templeton, hadn't even come out at that point; I've been following her ever since (you know, on foot, and everything. [I probably shouldn't joke about these things on the interwebs.])


Pretty Monsters
Kelly Link

I've been meaning to read Kelly Link for two years now, and I think I'll start with her YA collection of stories, since the summer makes me want to write stories with magic and monsters and people carrying their own heads. Her other collection, Magic for Beginners, is available for download (for free!) over at Small Beer Press--also where Jed Berry works as an assistant editor (the world is a small place.).


The Withdrawal Method
Pasha Malla

I think Pasha Malla is great. I think this interview with Pasha Malla, conducted by his mother, is possibly greater.

Did I mention that I love Canadians?




Super Natural Cooking
Heidi Swanson

Heidi Swanson knows how to make great food--and how to take beautiful photographs of the great food that make cooking look glamorous instead of time-consuming, and, if you're me, kind of a messy, tasty disaster. What I've read of this book has since become an indispensable resource for many of my cooking endeavors. A lot of these recipes are available for free on her website, 101 Cookbooks, but the book is worth getting--even if I don't think I'll ever purchase quinoa flour, she makes developing a pantry sound like quite the adventure.

I also plan to read lots of George Eliot. And Virginia Woolf. And July will be devoted to finally reading Ulysses cover to cover. Because I wouldn't be in grad school if I weren't a huge, huge nerd.

Bicycle Cure-All

On Sunday I went for a bike ride in the best kind of weather: the gray skies of almost-rain that make the whole world explode with color. I had no idea that the little town I live in extends so far to the west of the north-south road I travel everyday. Although at times it felt like I was in Amherst suburbia, there were also old farmhouses, tilled fields, horses, chickens, rabbits.


And the roads were quiet and flat, good for a jaunt. In many ways it felt like riding through a shrunken version of home: town and country all in a few square miles.

Biking cleared the air in my head, let some bugs out. This week still looks like: grading free-for-all seminar paper seminar paper presentation collapse repeat.

The sight of bridges and balloons

makes calm canaries irritable / and they caw and claw all afternoon / catenaries and dirigibles...


I just realized that the same reason I love Shannon Burns is quite possibly the same reason I love Joanna Newsom. Breadfruit.

And this is kind of what I feel like right now. Archive. Palimpsest. Paper! Except my clothes aren't as nice.


And I'd much rather be here, on the water.

(I promise to make more sense in a month, after a massage and a bubble bath and a pot of chocolate fondue.)

Remember that $20/month on books rule?

Now I won't be able to get my hands on G.C. Waldrep's new book Archicembalo (Tupelo Press) until 2012, at the earliest. Clearly, I have a problem that is not strictly monetary. But I do have a birthday...in four months...


{Edit, 5 May: Totally caved and bought a $10 copy at the Juniper Festival. Worth every penny.}

Fly me to the moon...

So, I've been thinking about a writing strategy Caroline explained to me over spring break--that is, writing a line (or so) every day and at the end of the week putting all the fragments together into one joyous poem (style copyright Dean Young, or something).

I've started trying to write this way, and it's going fairly well. Except I didn't do it yesterday or today (yet). But the line from Thursday was great!

One of my writing/image obsessions is with the backs of things. Fire escapes. Behind old buildings and train stations. Water stains. Crumbling brick. Dumpsters. The things that people don't want you to see. I used to try and take pictures of these things with my old film camera.

In other news, in other words, I've been a bad phone correspondent these days. I needed time to do work and to catch up, since I was behind on everything, so I was hermiting. I feel more on track now (despite spending an inordinate amount of time looking at photos online and writing blog posts about random things today). I will call soon soon.

Dear Jalapeño. It's springtime.

I tend to make playlists when the seasons change, though mainly during winter and spring. This winter I was obsessed with every single Bon Iver song I could get my hands on. And with Nina Kinert, who gave me some alternatives for my need to listen to "Peach Plum Pear" at moments of transition.

Now that the weather is crazy, wavering between late fall and early summer and wreaking havoc on my sinuses, I'm pulling out songs that always always remind me of springtime: Arcade Fire's "No Cars Go," as cheesy as it may seem, is a big spring song for me--I first heard the EP version several years ago while I was living in England, and I listened to it on my long walks into town from my flat, everything shrouded in mist and drizzle. I prefer the momentum in the newer version, though I don't know if it will fit into "Dear Jalapeño." Arcade Fire tends to overpower everything else in mixes.

The Most Serene Republic's song "Phages," is pretty much the song I put on as soon as the sun comes out. Renewal! New beginnings! I am pretty much desperate to see them again in concert.

All this talk of playlists and music because I'm going to the Margot & the Nuclear So & Sos show next week with Gale and Jess--I'm excited for the first taste of live music since last semester. I like Margot, I do, despite the fact that I think they milk the melancholy in their songs. I think I am more looking forward to being against the stage and trying to hear what the person next to me is saying.

"Dear Jalapeño" because I went to a Zach Schomburg and Emily Kendall Frey reading last week, and Emily read a slew of her "Dear Jalapeño" poems. I like the idea of tying poems together through the repeated use of one phrase, with the aim of changing the meaning of the phrase itself and how we think about it in relation to other lines (at least I think this is what's going on here). Gale and I talked about how "jalapeño" becomes an endearment: her word was "tender." You can read some poems with tender "Dear Jalapeños" in them at La Petite Zine here.

Zach Schomburg read new poems from his MS "Scary, No Scary," and I liked them, of course. I almost liked my friend Ben's introduction of Zach Schomburg even better, though. A kind of amazement about the brain that gave us The Man Suit, which made me realize I could be writing very different kinds of poems. You can read some new Zach Schomburg over at Typo.

And now...a bad spring playlist:

***

Dear Jalapeño--it's springtime (in the works)
1. The Changeling (Get Guilty) / A.C. Newman / Get Guilty
2. Fitz and the Dizzyspells / Andrew Bird / Noble Beast
3. Nightlife / The Muslims / The Muslims
4. Blindness / Metric / Fantasies
5. Zero / Yeah Yeah Yeahs / It's Blitz!
6. Take Me to the Riot / Stars / In Our Bedroom After the War
7. LES Artistes (XXXchange Remix) / Santogold
8. Phages / The Most Serene Republic / Phages
9. Swimming Pools / Thao Nguyen & The Get Down Stay Down / We Brave Beestings & All
10. Only Pieces / Here We Go Magic / Here We Go Magic
11. Dance Dance Dance / Lykke Li / Little Bit EP
12. Take on Me / A.C. Newman / Cheesy Starbucks compilation

{Edit: also, apparently I can't spell but I do know how to use a tilda. Who let me into grad school, anyway?}

Ultimate Geekery

It's Tournament of Books time again! Well, it has been for a week or two now, which I realize is pretty much the equivalent of the internet Paleozoic. But I'm guessing if you're reading this, it's not for hyper-connectivity or insta-blogging (apparently this is what Twitter is for. I'm trying to Twitter. I've avoided it for almost a year, and then curiosity got the better of me. That or the fact that it provides another reason to avoid grading essays.)

Boy, do I love the ToB. Mostly because it's ridiculous and mostly because it being ridiculous makes it amazing. For example: today's final judgment came down in the form of a dialogue between the judge and his therapist. Example 2: the winner wins this:

That's right. A rooster. What writer wouldn't want a rooster as a prize? It's not like there's money in this business anyway, unless your last name begins with "Rowling."

Last year, Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life... won The Rooster, and I was over the moon. I haven't read many of this year's contenders, but I think I will be majorly put out if 2666 wins. Because then I will attempt to read it and probably hate every second.

I wonder what the poetry version of ToB would look like? Maybe the winner could receive a brick stolen from Tintern Abbey, or a lead daffodil. Of course, Zachary Schomburg would stomp all over Billy Collins in the Zombie Round...

(image via The Morning News)

I can't believe we got warm by a fire / fed with my manuscript

There's a spate of new articles (okay, two that I've found) floating around the web about David Foster Wallace's unfinished manuscript, "The Pale King," supposedly to be published by Little, Brown, & Co. in spring 2010. I accidentally read The New Yorker article, which goes into depth about DFW's suicide, while listening to Margot and the Nuclear So & Sos's "Broadripple is Burning." I do not recommend this combination.

I still haven't finished Infinite Jest, though I've stuck with it over the course of three years. Every so often I come up against a section I just can't work through and set it down. When I finally slog through the passage some time later, muttering about footnotes and circuitous sentences, dragging my feet the whole time, he will surprise me with something simple and beautiful and clever and he wins me over again.

I've never worked so hard for a fiction writer before, and I can't think of any other writer--even amongst the Modernists I study, with all their deliberate obfuscations and esoteric obsessions--with whom I've had such a long-standing, grudging, awestruck relationship. DFW was a big thinker, taking wild leaps across subject matter and storylines, and his work evoked a certain charm and candor that convinced me to come along despite myself. Even now, I find this persistence impressive and annoying and wonderful, the fuel behind my reading experiment, what keeps me from closing the covers of Infinite Jest at page 737 with any sense of finality.

(links via Maud Newton and Bookninja, personal favorites)

Those who can't write, edit--

Okay, so I don't actually believe this. But right now I don't have the space to create--my current mental capacity is full: of theory, half-baked research ideas, response papers, books read and unread (these unread books cause massive amounts of anxiety. Like Anne Lamott's fear of being run over by a truck before she can fix that shitty first draft. All the books peering down at me from my carrel shelf represent, by proxy, some unfinished opus. I don't even know which direction the pickup truck is coming from.)

To help calm anxieties of non-productivity (both creative and academic), I've been trying to lend a helping hand to some small, and fledgling, presses here. Despite all my worry-wort talk, I am very happy and very excited to be helping with two (two!) exciting projects:

Pocket Myths is a zine series dedicated to exploring and re-writing mythological characters. Perspectives and narratives are queered, cool art is made. And I get to help my friend Andrea make these very beautiful publications. The next one is "Dionysus," and it's coming out maybe in late April or early May. I think we still need submissions, so don't be shy.

Jellyfish Magazine is a new online poetry publication founded by my friend Gale. And guess what? I am an editor! Oh, boy am I psyched. I am completely humbled by Gale's generosity and incredibly pleased to be part of this team. So run to your computers! Send us your poems!

**

In completely unrelated news, you can now stream the entirety of Neko Case's new album, Middle Cyclone, at NPR. It's fantastic and will help you create poems to send to Pocket Myths and Jellyfish. And if you send poems, I promise to cut back on the self-aggrandizing posts with Neko Case references. At least a little.

(don't you just love her?)