Here’s a short (11 question) test from the Pew Institute on basic political awareness that Larry sent me this morning.
I scored in the 22nd percentile; he’s in the top 2%. He say’s I’d probably score lower if I didn’t have breakfast with him every morning while he reads the paper. I’m sure he’s right.
Okay, the weather is decidedly odd. But I refuse to jump to apocalyptic conclusions. Instead, I’ve been noodling around the web. I discovered several wonderful British blogs about books, including Harriet Devine’s blog. This led me to discover an online article about Patrick Hamilton, a previously-unknown-to-me British author. I’ve reserved two of his books.
I am a total library addict; can’t bear to pass by one without going in and browsing and taking something out. It’s sort of like dating. No commitment—you’re just borrowing a book. Then I buy the ones I want to keep, especially the best contemporary authors who need me to buy their books (like Julie Orringer and Louis B. Jones) so they can keep writing. I have two credit cards, but six active library cards—a good ratio:
And now that I can reserve books online, I have a continual stream of good books available at any one time. The more scholarly ones and obscure poets I get from UC; cookbooks, how-to, and general fiction from whichever public library near me has what I want. Continue reading “Rain and libraries”
The tag line for this blog includes “a labyrinthine life,” because that seems to me the perfect metaphor for the shape of a life. We can always craft stories about what happened afterwards, but while it’s happening, life is mysterious, counter-intuitive, lots of backtracks and strange turns, which is what I find so compelling about labyrinths. I love that the path to the center is not straightforward and that they have no real “reason” for being.
When I visited my friend Maureen about 10 years ago, she had made one in the field next to her house using a lawnmower to cut the circles into the tall grass. Over time, her friends brought her rocks, fragments, small pots, etc. to put in the center. I was so jealous! But I lived in a space with no flat surface. I had a hill, but it was too steep for a labyrinth.
A few years ago we moved, and the house we bought had a space we could make into a small (16’ diameter) labyrinth, a project I’ve been working on since about August of last year. I decided to plant kitchen herbs and small flowers in the labyrinth rows, and modified a plan to fit the space. I cleared and weeded the ground, and took a stick and a string to make the concentric circles, then made the pattern by mounding the dirt:
The idea for me was that it would work a little pause into my day—I tend to move very quickly. I planted the herbs I use most (parsley, oregano, cilantro, sage, chives) in the outer row, so I wouldn’t have to walk the whole labyrinth if I just wanted a sprig of one of them. I bought seedlings at Annie’s Annuals, the best retail nursery I’ve ever seen.
After three months, the labyrinth looks like this:
I have many interim shots, including one with the just-planted labyrinth filled with hail, which gave me the idea for the pale pebble walkway. But like pictures of one’s children, I may be more in love with them than you are, so I thought these two would suffice for now.
I pick from the labyrinth daily, and tend to walk the whole labyrinth at least once a week, gathering flowers for small bouquets as well as lettuces and herbs. I’ve been adding to the plantings as I go. It’s an ongoing project. And as it’s right in my entryway, it gives people some idea about who I am as they come in. I like that!
This morning I was chatting with friends about poetry over tea and muffins. We were talking about workshops, etc. I told them about my worst workshop experience, one with Mark Doty at the Walt Whitman Birthplace. Despite the awful workshop, his work is luminous. We talked about how you can’t equate the work with the person. This came home to me years ago, watching a poet I know who wrote stunning love poems to his wife and treated her like the dirt under his shoe soles.
In any case, Marcia, here’s a Mark Doty excerpt for you. Other poems of his I love include: A Green Crab’s Shell, Apparition; A New Dog; The Embrace, Migratory, A Display of Mackerel. There’s a transcendental strain in his work that he weaves in with such skill. I find it extraordinarily moving. You can find several of these at poets.org, and hear him read. He’s a good reader. Fire to Fire, his new and selected poems, is worth owning, and I even like his blog.
from “Atlantis”
I thought your illness a kind of solvent
dissolving the future a little at a time;
I didn’t understand what’s to come
was always just a glimmer
up ahead, veiled like the marsh
gone under its tidal sheet
of mildly rippled aluminum.
What these salt distances were
is also where they’re going:
from blankly silvered span
toward specificity: the curve
of certain brave islands of grass,
temporary shoulder-wide rivers
where herons ply their twin trades
of study and desire. I’ve seen
two white emissaries unfold
like heaven’s linen, untouched,
enormous, a fluid exhalation. Early spring,
too cold yet for green, too early
for the tumble and wrack of last season
to be anything but promise,
but there in the air was the triumph
of all flowering, the soul
lifted up, if we could still believe
in the soul, after so much diminishment…
Breath from the unpromising waters,
up, across the pond and the two-lane highway,
pure purpose, over the dune,
gone. Tomorrow’s unreadable
as this shining acreage;
the future’s nothing
but this moment’s gleaming rim.
Now the tide’s begun
its clockwork turn, pouring,
in the day’s hourglass,
toward the other side of the world,
and our dependable marsh reappears
—emptied of that scratched and angular grace
that spirited the ether, lessened,
but here. And our ongoingness,
what there’ll be of us? Look,
love, the lost world
rising from the waters again:
another continent, where it always was,
emerging from the half light,
drenched, unchanged.
Mark Doty
Okay, I finally found a copy of the poem that was published in the (1967?) Harvard Advocate that elicited the fateful fan letter from Larry that changed the course of my life. It was printed with a long footnote, which I include here. I remember that in Larry’s letter (which will be harder to find, but will appear here eventually), he suggested that I lose the footnote, but I love the last sentence, so am leaving it in, despite the grammatical error (do you see it?). In any case it’s more authentic this way.
I remember pacing the Radcliffe library one night trying to write a poem and stumbling on the volume of the Cambridge Natural History. Was it open on a desk? Feeling somewhat caged myself at the time, the captive chameleon seemed the perfect subject.
Image from the Markov Thought Chain Blog
Chameleons in Captivity[1]
Silent, they bide their time.
Turning brown or green as the mood suits them
they swing on a twig,
and steady themselves
with a flexible tail.
Until, when their prey flies by,
they slyly become the branch.
With one cool thwap of an eight-inch tongue
they get their meal,
no sentiment spared
for their breakfast or dinner.
They slit their eyes and sleep.
And yet in winter, they wander.
Restless, insatiate, refusing to eat.
Aloof, they hiss
and swell, swaying
in gold indignation
and bite their keeper’s hand.
They no longer care who feeds them.
Some urge, half forgotten, intrigues them despite
the warmth of their cage,
and they crave the dark
and solitary
cave, drawn back towards the earth.
And what strange joy they must feel
As they watch their iridescent skin
fade and peel
in the long months
of slow starvation.
What absolute power they hold
over the foolish keeper
who thinks to deny this swaggering beast—
when weary of summer
and the hoards
of beetles and flies—
the privilege of death.
[1] From the Cambridge Natural History, Vol. III. Chameleons are notoriously difficult to keep successfully, whereby we do not mean keeping for three to six months. This is easy enough, since it takes them several months to die of starvation. The difficulty is to keep them through the winter. To enable them to do this, it is absolutely necessary to fatten them up during the summer and autumn. Otherwise, although kept in a warm place, they are liable to lose their appetite in autumn, when they become restless, probably with the desire to hibernate. Those few individual which get over this critical period, say during the month of October, and do not refuse food are probably safe. But those are doomed which refuse to eat meal-worms or cockroaches or such food as can be procured easily during the winter.