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.