The Specimen Box Project

I accidentally drank too much beer, and instead of acting like any other normal person--soporific, sprawled in bed--I'm most seriously awake.  And I have this idea.

For the last few months, I've been trying to write a series of "Specimen Box" poems, mostly in an effort to move beyond the interior spaces of the poems I'd been writing--my speakers were always naming things, were existing in these conditional spaces or relationships to other subjects, and these elements defined the parameters of the poem.  My aim with the "Specimen Box" series was to force myself to make my speakers look out at the world, even a very tiny portion of it, and to report back.

At the same time I began this project, Vintage issued new covers for Nabokov's work, all featuring--yes, you know it--a specimen box on the cover.  (This isn't, to be honest, prescience on my part.  I probably stole the idea from them in the first place.  In fact, I'm sure now that's what happened.)  They're beautifully designed and because I am a sucker for a cleverly designed book, I want them.  All 21 of them.  (Funny how a spin-off of Nabokov's naturalist habit inspires the collector in me, too.  Too bad books cost money and dead butterflies don't.)

Because I'm woefully under-read in terms of Nabokov and because I'm told it's good to set realistic goals, I am challenging myself to read one Nabokov novel every month until I've collected all of the nifty new issues.  I'm not reading them in any chronological order or order of importance to the literary community or whathaveyou.  I'm just picking whichever book strikes my fancy when I go to the book store.

I suppose if I were any kind of respectable writer, I'd challenge myself to write a "Specimen Box" poem after I read each novel, but I think my responses will come out in their own time.  And will, in all likelihood, have very little to do with Nabokov at all.  Or, everything to do with him.  Poems are capricious creatures.

First up:

Detectives.  Death.  Yes.

More to come on this (two-year, holy cow) adventure...

[For more on specimen boxes, or a version of them, see also this guy.  Every so often I'm reminded of him, and it's exciting all over again.  This time, someone threw out a reference in class, and I wrote down his name as one of three notes to myself.  Surprise!  You knew about him already!  (So, I'm never getting hired by an English Department.  Ha.)  Probably as close to a poem as you're going to get in a physical form, these things.]

Dispatches From The Black Sheep

1.  On break, a barista regales his friend with theories about philosophy in Ender's Game.  Passages are read aloud.

2.  Outside the large picture window, a man walks by.  He has the best mustache EVER.

3.  There is a delicious confection called a Budie Bar with perhaps five different kinds of sweetness, from coconut to M&Ms.  It's gone now.

4.  A German and an American argue politics.  The German is right about everything.

5.  In the small park across the street, a toddler makes a snow angel.  Her mother (?) leans down to show her the outline in the snow, how it makes wings, a skirt.  The little girl runs through the snow, trampling the image, laughing.

From The Mess To The Masses

1.


(They're so French I can't even stand it.)  (Also, the sound quality is unfortunately poor.)

2.

I'm reading Lilian Pizzichini's biography of Jean Rhys, The Blue Hour, and am enjoying (mostly) that Pizzichini has decided to approach biography via fiction.  The book reads like a novel, which I think is perhaps more appropriate than a cut-and-dry account of someone's life--details are always invented or reimagined, no?  What I don't like is the melodramatic overtones of Pizzichini's psychologizing of Rhys--something Maud Newton also pointed out in her review of The Blue Hour.  This tendency is especially off-putting considering that Rhys managed to render terror, grief, depression, and jealousy without ever sounding dramatic--just terrified or grieving or despondent or envious.  She was a precise, careful writer, and I wish her life was more precisely written, as glad as I am to see her written about.

3.

                                   

The Met is exhibiting this weird collage art--Victorian family photographs cut and pasted by Victorian women.  I think they're fantastic.  This one was made by Georgina Berkeley and belongs to the Musée D'Orsay.  Some more of my favorite images in the exhibit:

4.

I can't get Peter Terrin's story "The Murderer," anthologized in Best European Fiction 2010, out of my head.  After a man murders his neighbor--a spoiled "artist" who consistently blares loud music night and day--he is haunted by other real--and possibly real--murders that he previously committed.  Luckily (or unluckily), the character lives in a society whose New Measures grant each person two get-off-scot-free murders.  What follows is not so much gruesome as mesmerizing, not so much terrifying as captivating.  And that accomplishment is both terrifying and captivating.  I'm looking forward to reading much much more out of this anthology and hope that at least some of Terrin's work is translated from the Dutch...

And on that note, I'm going to go drink more tea.

How To Get Somewhere

1.  

7

Obsessed, bewildered

By the shipwreck

Of the singular

We have chosen the meaning

Of being numerous. 

2.

3.

4.

---
1.  in a short book of poems, Of Being Numerous (1968), by George Oppen.  There is something to be said about Oppen's idea of clarity, but also about the differences he draws between seeing and knowing.  Between knowing and relating to other people.  Check back with me on this.

2. "Stone Animals," from Magic for Beginners, by Kelly Link.  Kelly Link has something to tell us about the precision and economy of language.  Also of beauty.  Also of grief.

3.   from The Arrival, by Shaun Tan.  I spent an hour yesterday getting lost in these drawings.  How perfect that the book doesn't attempt the act of translation, but still articulates that there is no possible language for the act of immigration.

4.  from Matt Kish's project to illustrate Moby Dick: Page 46 : "...and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and earth..."

I'm fascinated with these illustration/collage projects.  And maybe more by the technical diagrams he keeps drawing over.

Mysterious Houses in the Woods

I read Le grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier in high school and have only just realized how much the vague recollection (and in French, too; how confusing!) of this story is influencing my own.  If I still had Netflix, I'd be putting this movie in my queue:

Sister At The Glass Mountain

Reading The Annotated Brothers Grimm, I've been captivated by the turn-of-the-century illustrations for the tales, many of which I've never actually seen before.  Above, one of the most provocative, by Arthur Rackham (1909): in an attempt to find and rescue her brothers, cursed and turned into ravens, a young girl cuts off her finger and sticks it into a keyhole in order to gain entry to the Glass Mountain, where her brothers now live.

I've also been reading The Paris Review Interviews (vol. III), specifically an interview with Joyce Carol Oates, which ended up to be especially helpful today.  Since Oates writes enough material for the entirety of contemporary literature, I thought reading her might provide some insight into my problems with plot.  No magical insights into how she produces so damn much, but she did make me think about writing, no excuses, even if I have to cut off my finger to access the story:

INTERVIEWER

Do you find emotional stability is necessary in order to write?  Or can you get to work whatever your state of mind?...

OATES 

One must be pitiless about this matter of "mood."  In a sense, the writing will create the mood.  If art is, as I believe it to be, a genuinely transcendental function--a means by which we rise out of limited, parochial states of mind--then it should not matter very much what states of mind or emotion we are in. Generally I've found this to be true: I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes...and somehow the activity of writing changes everything...

--from Joyce Carol Oates, "The Art of Fiction," The Paris Review Interviews, III, p. 173.

Right, right.  ShThFuUpAnWoOnYoNo.

Arts & Crafts for a long January

As a poor graduate student (with few realistic career prospects in Academe), I decided to make presents for my family this year.  I spent a few days locked away in my room, ripping pages out of musty old French paperbacks not worth a damn (though I still love them), drenching them in water color, then using enough Modge Podge to feel a little light-headed to glue the conglomerations together.  Voilà!  A collage backdrop for my poems.  This one went to my sister, with whom I will also be collaborating on a chapbook in the coming months.  A metalsmith, she makes intricate, tiny things out of silver.  Like this ring, for instance, which looks amazingly like some mountain-scapes in our Pennsylvania neck of the woods:

Not sure how this particular art project will come together, though it might look like something like this new Matthea Harvey poem in Tin House (is this illegal?):

Aside from the chapbook project, I've decided to more or less take a break from poems for awhile, after last month's mad dash to complete a working manuscript.  I'm working on a novel (if I write it very small, it seems less scary) and have decided to spend the bulk of my break drafting sections of it.  After all, it is ShThFuUpAnWoOnYoNoMo, that is, "Shut the fuck up and work on your  novel month."  Okay, Mr. Colson Whitehead.  Okay.

Maybe because it's winter, or maybe because I've been thinking a lot about good old multiple narrative thread story-telling, I'm stuck on fairy tales, the Victorians--George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Lewis Carroll, others--and A.S. Byatt, who I've come to think of as an honorary Victorian, in my reading choices.  I'm especially looking forward to diving into The Children's Book and not coming up for air for awhile.

If you need me, I'll be in my blankets.