You will perceive that I am as often talking to myself, perhaps, as speaking to you.

I am in training, as some of you may already be sussing out. I am in training for something as big as running a marathon, building a boat, walking cross-country, writing a villanelle. I am turning, heliotropic as I've already confessed to being, back toward something from which I fled half my life ago and to which I haven't looked back in any sustained way since. These posts are my practice laps, my technique shapers, my ways of relearning how certain flows and drags and slices through a given medium feel. I am in training for an audacity that I can feel coming closer. I am going to be ready to meet it this time. It will still be frightening, but now I know better what kind of fear I'll be facing: the fear not of failing but of embracing yet another part of what I'm actually meant to be doing with my life, and of having to admit that perhaps those old dreams of mine knew better than I've known since what my life's vectors would actually be.

It's not been uncommon for me to whinge about a lack of models for my life--some of you have gotten this earful first-hand--as if no woman in the history of the world had ever been single at 29 or uninterested in having babies. Nor has it been uncommon for me to realize, with relief, that some of the figures from whom I draw my greatest sustenance are, in fact, still viable models, chronologically speaking (which is to say, in the least intellectually rigorous but perhaps most knee-jerk emotionally satisfying way possible). Virginia Woolf's first novel? Published in 1915, when she was 33. George Eliot's elopement with the love of her life? Happened in 1854, when she was 33. Her first fiction? 1857, when she was 36. Elizabeth Barrett's elopement with her poet-lover Robert Browning (penner of the single best opening line for a first love letter, ever: "I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett")? 1846. When she was 40. After which her father never spoke to her again.

This morning, I'm warming my brain up for an onslaught of Jane Eyre (for the section we're discussing this afternoon is truly the onslaught, simply exhausting in the extravagance of its anguish) by reopening the slim volume I bought the day of the pageant, Henry David Thoreau's Letters to a Spiritual Seeker. Thoreau's age while writing the earliest of these letters to a friend, chiefly about figuring out what he's going to do in the world (make pencils in order to live? do surveying projects in order to feed himself and pay off the debt from an early book's utter failure?)? 31-33.

The main point of all this circling is to get you to the passages that look as though they'll be talismanic today, as the weather lowers and the wind picks up and I continue striding around purposefully, doing my daily work but also bearing around a pretty great burgeoning secret, a plan for myself that gets me downright giddy when I think about it, not least because it feels so utterly possible, even necessary, and yet has hit me up so unexpectedly, just when I thought everything in my life was settling down into patterns, fixing to be a particular way for the long haul. It continues to be a reassurance to me that both Woolf and Eliot also abjured child-bearing, for one reason and another; I add this point lest anyone misread my brazen cooptation of language that chiefly gets used for biological reproduction.

So, Thoreau. The rest of this entry will be yet another addition to this online commonplace book, because now the time is here, and then some, for learning yet again how Jane responds when Rochester seems "a man who is just about to burst an insufferable bond and plunge headlong into wild license."

Letters to a Spiritual Seeker is a selection of Thoreau's decades-long correspondence with a slightly older man named Harrison Blake, who wrote to Thoreau about six months after he'd finished his sojourn at Walden Pond and asked of him, "Speak to me in this hour as you are prompted." The aphorism-seeker in me is gleaning as I read--fully aware, in case you're concerned, that my earnestness has always conjured some of my most dangerous temptations:

March 27, 1848.
Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life as a dog does his master's chaise. Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still. Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.

May 2, 1848.
I am too easily contented with a slight and almost animal happiness. My happiness is a good deal like that of the woodchucks. [Which is a particularly interesting thing for this particular writer to say, since one of the most famous lines from Walden--the line about how in wildness is the preservation of the world--immediately precedes Thoreau's expressing a blazing desire to eat a woodchuck raw. As one of my dear friends here once pointed out in a lecture I was attending, L.L. Bean and the Nature Conservancy and all those other groups that put "in wildness..." on t-shirts and bumper stickers tend to leave out the part about the woodchuck.]

May 2, 1848.
My only integral experience is in my vision. I see, perchance, with more integrity than I feel.

April 3, 1850.
Let things alone; let them weigh what they will; let them soar or fall. To succeed in letting only one thing alone in a winter morning, if it be only one poor frozen-thawed apple that hangs on a tree, what a glorious achievement! Methinks it lightens through the dusky universe.... It is not when I am going to meet him, but when I am just turning away and leaving him alone, that I discover that God is. I say, God. I am not sure that that is the name. You will know whom I mean.

April 3, 1850.
[This bit is my favorite for today.]
Men make a great ado about the folly of demanding too much of life (or of eternity?), and of endeavoring to live according to that demand. Is it much ado about nothing? No harm ever came from that quarter. I am not afraid that I shall exaggerate the value and significance of life, but that I shall not be up to the occasion which it is. I shall be sorry to remember that I was there, but noticed nothing remarkable.

Never flinch. Be sorry to remember that you were there but noticed nothing remarkable. I am talking to myself, perhaps, more than I am speaking to you. Remember that moment in Beloved when Sethe remembers being told, as a child, the story of her mother's middle passage? "I am telling you, small girl Sethe," says Nan, the woman who is telling her the story, "I am telling you." This morning, I am telling myself, and I will keep telling myself, and eventually, you will know that I am telling you, too.

sources for, and a note about, today's images: I had the perfect Thoreau image to give you, but I don't want to flout the "do not reproduce" instruction at the bottom of its originating page, and so I'll let you find your way there yourself. What I love about this one is that it's so close to the way I spend every one of my mornings, except that instead of a pencil and notebook--and, you know, the top hat, which I only wear some days--I sit here in bed with my laptop and whatever I'm teaching later in the day. Instead of this image, you're getting a couple of Henry Fox Talbot's "photogenic drawings" and early photographs. Henry Fox Talbot, in case you don't know, was the English counterpart to France's Daguerre; the two men basically invented photography at the same time. 1) "The Oak Tree" (mid-1840s) comes from The National Gallery of Art; 2) "The Oriel Window" (1835) (which may well be upside down, something that I also like) comes from ThisPublicAddress.com; 3) "The Handshake" (1842) comes from Hans P. Kraus, Jr.'s member page at PADA; 4) "Wrack" (1839) comes from The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The created world can be both reliable and surprising.

I've just finished having my afternoon possessed by Kathryn Davis's The Thin Place, which is well-nigh undescribable. More than anything else, I suspect I'd call it a thinking book. It discovers strange life everywhere; like the world (as described in the title of today's post, a line which occurs about two-thirds of the way through the novel), it unfolds in images and sensations to which one becomes swiftly and yet somehow never certainly acclimated. Any novel that relies as much as this one does on Julian of Norwich is, I suppose, bound to seem simultaneously beautifully inviting and unutterably, unplaceably foreign. Rather than try to build a structure of my own words around the novel, though, I'm going to offer you a few of the stones I collected as I made my way through Davis's pages. For the most part, these bits are non-narrative, because the non-narrative bits are the ones that announce their unexpectedness most strikingly (and also won't ruin the plot, should you follow my lead and pick this one up):

In the beginning it was beautiful.... It was beautiful and it could have stayed that way, but Nothing reached its beautiful endless hand-that-is-not-a-hand into the infinite Nothing of itself and turned itself inside out, giving itself form. The hand of God, which has no shape, no up or down, no end or beginning, drew the world from itself like a rabbit from a hat.

Lichen speaks a language like some music, repetitive and incantatory: manna star fold star. star star fold reindeer. fold fold fold fold. starlight starlight.... So many things are alive: lichen, moss, grass. Also people. So many things are alive and that's what's strange, not that things like stones aren't, especially when you consider how everything's made from the same materials.

Life has nowhere to move, being everywhere, doesn't move though it's always in motion, is the leaf is the trash is the girl's pierced navel the worm the cat's paw the lengthening shadows.

When Thomas thrust his hand into Jesus' side, what he really wanted to feel was his own flesh and marrow. That's curiosity: the wish to know exactly what we're made of and to determine how fragile we are, or mortal, or even--clinging to that most romantic version of hope that's nothing more than wishful thinking--immortal.

The sea was calm, the sun shining. An iceberg drifted past to the east, the sunlight turning it to a world that seemed not only possible but also irresistible to enter, a shade of aquamarine verging on no color at all, crystal clear, like heaven. In the water, capelin and seals. In the air, razorbills and gannets.

It's the passage about lichen that stuck with me all day, fastened tight to me like the stuff itself. Our weather kissed 60 degrees yet again; a student met with me wearing a miniskirt and t-shirt and didn't look one bit cold. Even I threw the winter coat over for my leather jacket, its lining pulled away from its bottom seam, leaving the unparalleled soft of the leather's underside readily reachable on an already overstimulating walk home for lunch.

Who knew that some trees' new spring growth comes in red, marking the break between last year and this? I would like this image not to have so much of a utility pole in its background, but at least you can see what I saw, which in this case is more important to me than the quality of the shot. The whole way home, I double-checked the trees and the bushes I've been watching since January: the newest shoots, the nascent leaves, the shaping berries. Everything is turning scraggly, heedlessly throwing out and up and beyond. I continue to fear these growths will turn out to be flails, prematurities--that something is creepily, grimly slouching around some dark corner we'll push up against when March roars in, if not sooner.

And perhaps that's the most interesting thing about Davis's novel, to my mind: its theology--for theology it undoubtedly is, replete with struggles between good and evil, unexpected angels and unmistakeable fiends, even if you walk in forty pages without fully getting what you're getting, as I did--posits the fiercest and most remorseless of devourings, consumptions, needs, and fears, casts them relentlessly as chances and accidents and indifferences that are obviously patterned and willed, though in what order or for what purpose she rarely, if ever, has the arrogance to presume to know. And yet, in a novel where people get stabbed, have car accidents, and drown, where small animals are trapped, eaten, or heart-broken, the overriding feel of it all is fiercely, hopefully resolute:

Consider the souls of the extinct creatures.
Suppose there are many universes, each one called into being at the slightest touch, an action no stronger than a flower? Suppose our galaxy and all the others, instead of drifting more and more slowly, reluctantly even, away from one another, with heavy hearts and a lingering backward glance, are instead speeding up, as if the process isn't a long drawn-out endgame but an excited rush toward something? As if the end itself could be the exciting goal, even if that something is the complete extinction of space and time?
Would there be anything left over?

The rush of the central paragraph here--the hurtle, the push, the not-knowing, the curiosity--somehow makes the imperative (Consider) and the final interrogative (Would there?) both less final, less conclusive than they might otherwise have been. And much of The Thin Place works just this way. There's an unsparingness, a refusal (if not an utter inability) to flinch, steeling some of Davis's lines: "One being sacrificed to make to make way for another." (Be sure you read "being" as a noun, as the thing that is sacrificed, not as part of the verbal phrase "being sacrificed.")

My favorite line from one of my favorite poems, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse-novel Aurora Leigh, is almost ridiculously simple: "Never flinch." I once organized the whole first page of a take-home exam so that that part-line would obtrude itself into my students' gaze right away and, ideally, would not let up until they'd taken it into themselves, even if they weren't aware of it. Something about reading Davis both early and late today is giving me a different (though still potentially pathetically fallacious) way to read the resolute springing of my landscape. The yellow flowers in my yard don't have the agency to stop or start their growth; the signals come, and they grow. The noon sun hits them, and they open. If I were to flash-photo them when I reached home in a little while, my images would be differently washed out than this last one you'll get from me tonight, but the center of their overexposure would be tightly closed buds, perhaps turned back, ever so slightly, to whatever vestige of warmth these stones may have caught and then started releasing over the course of the day. They may well get cut down when the next cold shudders in tomorrow evening--the high wind advisories are posted already--but then again, they might not. They've made it through one snow already, after all. And if they do die early, there won't necessarily be a legible reason or bigger meaning behind their being sacrificed--but now, due to Davis, I'm wondering whether something else might not have to be making its way in to take their place.

Working on a love letter, listening to a love song.

Dearest

(by which I mean

you father of me with the eyes that never stop laughing and the wisest of listening ears and most capable of building hands; you mother of me with the indefatigable ability to piece and plan carefully for us all and to laugh all the while; you brother of me with the nonstop vision and the never-expected quip; you cheerfully deafest of beautiful mutts;

you owners of dogs and creators of the finest food I eat and makers of my second home, permitters of my canine-visiting trespass; you happy lover of a deserved conservator; you constant cultivator of all that is calm and simple in me; you crafter of color; you utterly constant facilitator of all my work life;

you red-headed fellow-explorer; you brown-headed fellow romantic, heart-broken by youthful arrogance; you timid-headed brilliant confusion of expectation and want; you curly-headed maddening wreck of my decade; you greying-headed superman hottness, hiply shod happy surprise of my season;

you elfin-faced maker of more love than I knew could be there, sufferer from exhaustion it pains me not to lift; you curly-haired secret brooder and planner; you perpetually outraged sensibility, sharer of so much; you coiner of best appellations (and that's craaazy!); you boundlessly generous watcher and commentator (hooray that you're coming closer); you best dancing partner of mine; you most serene of long-distance Batwives, you wackiest of long-distance Mr. Husbands, you happy reunion in pineapple wallpaper; you model for me in writing and in love; you powerful Latina, still questing; you oldest, most neglected friend; you buyer of Beetles, wicked of wit, cheeriest of countenance;

you epistolary friends, pieced together from words and pictures and quirks, unexpected gifts of my year;

you parts of me, majestic or miniscule, year in and year out; you shards I haven't picked up yet on beaches I won't find until later; you stones I have not turned over) --

I lost my belief in Hallmark days right about the time I lost all my other doctrines; the heart-shaped box of chocolates (with helpful answer key) this year went to the kids battling against the frat boys in the basement in order to talk about Dickens, orphans, and lawsuits into last night's late hours. But I'd get teary doing karaoke to Bette Midler for all y'all today, if you were here.

I can't pretend to give you my heart, because you are my heart; the love I can send is no more than the sum of the love I've been sent. May you see at least one truly lovely thing today, and see it without irony or embarrassment or fear of seeming schlocky if you tell yourself its audacious beauty. And may you not feel lonely, now or ever; know that you are, for your various reasons and in your various ways and to your various degrees, loved.

source for today's image: The Royal Academy of Arts Magazine. The other contender for today's image: Jim Dine's "Rancho Woodcut Heart," over at MOMA; it actually was today's image throughout the afternoon.

In case my "Nesting" post fails to distract sufficiently.

My introduction is up over at ModFab's site. I'm just so... mmm... vain is, I think, the word I'm searching for.

Nesting.

Some days, I walk around for half the day before I know what I'll write here. Today, after my class, after my lunch break, after my office hours, I walked from my office house to the village post office. As I stepped from a college road onto one of our gravel paths, I looked up at the trees that flank that junction of asphalt and gravel. In the spring, these trees are usually glorious. I am, as you know, full of low-level dread that our rapid-cycling weather will disrupt that glory, come May. The trees look as though they've developed some kind of growth that they shouldn't have and that they've already lost, to some extent--their berries are present already (surely too soon?), and they're desiccated, freeze-dried.

One of these trees has a low-hanging branch that often hits me in the face, because some people never learn. Today, I managed to dodge the branch, and as I looked over my right shoulder, I noticed the birds' nest just above my head in one of the other trees. "Nesting," I thought. Nesting: the word came across my brain like one of the weird hallucinations De Quincey has in that text we're still reading in one of my courses. I spent the rest of the day hoping to pick up scraps and bits, twigs and grasses and small pieces of cloth and maybe even a shiny thing or two, with which to construct a snug and stylish little resting-place for your thoughts.

Things haven't quite worked out that way, because my desires to indulge my meditative impulses never quite work out that way. Perhaps "meditative impulses," as a phrase, captures the oxymoronic nature of these desires. And so I'm afraid that this piece might itself be one of those tantalizingly unfinished scraps, a group of twigs you might tuck into some crevice in some branch, in the hopes that you'll be able to make something of it later. It also might not be a real loss if you forget where you left it.

I have long thought that cardinals were kind of prosaic birds. They're the state bird for my state and every state around here. I've just seen them everywhere for so long that I've stopped seeing them. But one thing I have to hand cardinals: they have a terrific song. The cardinal is the bird that sounds as though it's saying "birdie! birdie! birdie!" If you go to the cardinal page at Cornell's All About Birds and listen to the recording of cardinals' songs, you'll hear what I mean.

I bring up cardinals because last year, some cardinals flirted with the idea of building a nest in the tangle of grapevine and weeds occupying the corner of the dilapidated greenhouse behind my garage. This tangle is readily visible from the patio door in my kitchen, and if I stood very, very still, I could watch the birds making reconaissance missions into the thick of the vines. Not so long ago, my landlord took out some aggression on the rampant vegetation around my garage: he absolutely decimated one of the holly trees outside the house, and he cut the grapevine back to short stumps. The birds have popped in a few times in the past couple of weeks to scope the scene and decide on its feasibility. As I was doing dishes on Saturday, I looked over my left shoulder and saw a bird just sitting among those vine stumps, looking around.

I want so much to make some significant remark about nesting, both literally and figuratively, and yet I'm suddenly debilitatingly tired. Perhaps my efforts to institute a reasonable bedtime for myself are, in fact, paying off. Perhaps whatever sugar high I derived from the food I fed my seminarians, in honor of tomorrow's holiday, has just fallen away. Perhaps the hot milk, my sleep aid of choice, has simply done its work. Whatever's doing it, I'm rapidly losing my ability to focus on any kind of nesting but that which involves my getting further (and warmer) under these covers. I'll reemerge and we'll resume tomorrow.

source for today's image: Cornell's online collection of images from the Hill Collection of bird books (this nest was taken 19 May 1879, according to the text that accompanies its image).

And so it begins.

Remember what Jerry Orbach and Rita Gardner sang in The Fantasticks? Try to remember to follow (follow follow follow follow follow follow follow follow follow).... Nathaniel's up first. I don't know when my intro will appear--all the more reason for you to check in daily!

My newest affiliation, thanks in no small part to you.

My boundless thanks to those of you who heeded my plea for votes last week; I have just found out that I am indeed among the ModFab Six, which means that you'll be hearing from me in my snarkier, less digressive and distracted celeb-and-culture-commentating voice on a semi-regular basis over at ModFab's blog. I suspect I'll start a sidebar category for said commentating, just so that you don't miss them, in case you're not a regular reader.

I don't suppose that either of these blogging projects can go into my Professional Activities Report for the year. More's the pity.

Get ready to tear it up!

source for today's postscript image: Artchive.com, which must have grabbed this one from the Musee du Louvre in Paris at some point. By the way: if you ever make it to the Louvre, make sure you hunt out the Nike of Samothrace (that is, this statue); its placement is absolutely stunning. I almost cried when I first saw it.

Getting it where you can.

Art, that is.

This morning, I decided I'd write about resolve, and so I did my daily google image search for "resolve" and "resolution" and then, because I was so disappointed in those first two, "courage." And things just continued to look ugly, as far as my chances of finding visual inspiration in this magic machine...

...until I found the O*H+T Gallery online, when I'd gone back to searching for "resolve" and hit upon one of the OHT artists' images. I don't want to use it because it's not to my taste, but I do want to meditate on online gallery-hopping for a few minutes before I plunge into my work for the day. (And what a gloriously small amount of work it really is, compared to recent weekends!) When I started writing nearly two months ago, I planned to write mainly about things within the purview of my daily experience and my own memory--the dragon I pass on the way to school (you've seen him), the piranha jaw I own and was fascinated by when I was a child, my fondness for instant coffee, the look of the light glancing off tiny icicles on tinier branches, my ecstasy at a well-turned sentence--the usual stuff of my life. But right about the time I started incorporating images from other websites--which happened pretty early, I realize--this project became something different than I'd imagined it would be. As do all projects, no? (Before I leave this paragraph, let me tell you that the image is "Key," by Ryan Steadman.)

Even if I were living in a city, I suspect I would have a hard time getting into the gallery scene, chiefly because I can get a little lazy once I'm in a groove I like. One groove I like but haven't been able to indulge so much this semester is the one that starts with me in bed on a Saturday morning, pretending that I'll just read a few pages of whatever novel I've been reading myself to sleep with--and then ends with me on Saturday evening, still in bed, still reading the novel, having accepted somewhere along the day that that's just the way things will be. That could have happened yesterday had I not been preoccupied by other trajectories. And what's more, there are even two candidates for the novel I could have finished! The pile-up is stupefying!

You see why I might never have gotten to galleries, even if I lived in a city with many of them. And in fact I live near a city with a slew of them, concentrated in a single district. There's a gallery hop once a month. I've never gone.

And this isn't because I don't love art. I do love art, and as you know if you've been keeping score at home, I love sheer creative power and energy more than almost any creative product. Watching a jazz quartet last night, I found myself not knowing where to look but finally settled on the upright bassist's amazingly fast fingers. It's not at all uncommon for me to get swept up in the movements of creativity at work. (Which is why my tastes go all over the place; this painting is "New Planet" by Wendy Edwards.) I suspect that, as is the case with so many things in my life, I have been shaped in this regard by growing up in a house with three artists: one mechanical, one textile, and one photographic. My father's right hand, possessed of a mouse (or, earlier, a pointing device for Anvil), darts about, clicking here, clicking there, highlighting, manipulating, and slowly but surely, machines and their products take shape. For the uninitiated, it looks as though his hand moves at the speed of his thought; I suspect that it's actually much, much slower than the speed of his thought, based on my experiences with trying to get onto paper the things my brain is doing when I write. My mother sits down with pieces of fabric and enters a sort of highly lucid trance state, in which she stays for hours, converting whole pieces of cloth into fragments into patterns into blocks into new wholenesses. Sometimes, when I'm home and lucky, she consults me in the late stages and we rediscover that my sense of color balance is vastly different from hers. My brother loads up his camera bag, goes out into the field, is jocular and inquiring with whomever he finds on whatever scene he's been sent to, then puts the camera to his eye and starts taking down visual astonishments. He's particularly good with catching facial ephemera, particularly in athletes: he gets the glimpses of devastation, of unbridled victorious pride, of knuckle-biting anticipation. He is an archivist of the countenance.

I, on the other hand, am an archivist of the word, the phrase, the verbal pivot, the predicative twist; I'm so glad to be writing again, and I'm so glad you all are reading.

So, now, the OHT gallery (I'm going to skip their weird punctuation for now, because it's just clutterful). (Had parking been less of a nightmare--and had that alley not been a dead end--I might have been able to tell you about what it's like to see Roller Girls in downtown Columbus while wearing a cocktail dress and high heels. But alas, some things aren't meant to be. Instead, I could tell you about what it's like to play Strolling Bowling--with what a lit-up face!--at a diner while rocking out to "Hey Ladies!"--and what it's like to find out that the person you're with can match you line for line (she's got a gold tooth... you know she's hard core!... she'll show you a good time... [and in unison:] then she'll show you the door!). But instead, I won't.)

In a perhaps totally predictable way, I'm digressing all over the place and am losing interest in telling you about this online gallery. (I should know better than to get into the Beastie Boys here, if I don't mean to follow through.) But here, look. Here's why I started writing this post. I love this pairing of colors. I love that these swirls and spots look as though they were probably entirely easy to produce but just weren't, I'm sure. That one's by Suzan Batu.

I don't know. Maybe I need say no more. I think you get where I'm coming from, today--the moral of the story is that it's good to have online galleries when you're a) living in a rural place and b) obviously too distracted to invest the time required to hie yourself to a physical place and walk around examining things. For now, I need to go off and decide which groove I'm in this morning. Dangerously, I've picked up Kathryn Davis's The Thin Place again; it's just out, and it's been reviewed fabulously, and it includes sentences like these:

there was something about him, about the way he lay there so perfectly still yet with a sense of something enormously alive inside him, something almost insanely teeming with slumberous hidden vitality deep inside, that made her feel like she was looking at a cave full of sleeping bats. (5)

It seems to me entirely possible that I'll need to read much more of it in one sitting than I've been able to thus far, if I'm to get swamped by it, possessed and tossed around and chewed over meditatively like some frisky deaf dog's tennis ball. And that, my friends, is always the goal.

The year of living now.

As I'm sure is true of many people in my profession, or any other profession that requires training and drive and foresight and desire, I have spent much of my life living a few years in advance of where I am. In high school, I was checking college entrance requirements. By the end of high school, I was figuring out the requirements for admission to Ph.D. programs. In college, I was thinking about postgraduate fellowships and graduate school. In graduate school, I was thinking about jobs. Until last spring, I continued to think about the job market, the next move, the place I'd head to in order to launch my career. (It occurs to me that there's a not-bad pun on "tenure" to be made in the phrase "tenure-track"; in my tenure year, if I count the years I was on the market or in temporary gigs, I'll truly have come to the end of a ten-year track. It's not an actual end, of course; in a way, it's a kind of arbitrary marker in a professional career. And yet, in all other ways, it's far more than an arbitrary marker. But--as befits my topic today--I'm getting ahead of myself.)

Once I had my feet firmly on the tenure track, I looked around, instead of straight ahead, for the first time in a long time. I started feeling out the contours of an actual, long-term life here, instead of holding my feelers in, tight, where they wouldn't be vulnerable. Since June, I've periodically found it difficult to explain my desire to pause in the relentless ongoingness of adult life--which isn't a desire to stop, by any means, much less to stop short. It's a recognition of particular ways that my life has been out of alignment, pulling to one direction, for more than half my life.

Imagine your life's (or your consciousness's) existing in two time dimensions. One happens across time, working its way through from your past into your present and beyond, to your future. This dimension is the one from which Ebenezer Scrooge utterly disconnects himself in the part of his life that takes place before A Christmas Carol and that, as many of my students are working up arguments about right now, he must reclaim in order to be a moral and truly alive human being. If you want a fancy theoretical term for this dimension, you can call it "diachronic"--taking place through time. The other dimension is lateral, happening within any given present moment. This dimension isn't, ideally, disconnected from the diachronic one; that is, we don't live in just a present moment, with no sense of a past or of a future. Or at least--as we see through Scrooge's example in Dickens's novella--if we do live just in a present, we risk living in an utterly impoverished way. But, properly balanced by its complement, this dimension--call it "synchronic," or in the same time--is where we do our richest living in the present. It's in our synchronic experience that we know the strength with which we've put our roots out in the past, and the desire or hope or terror with which we're stretching out towards or shrinking back from what's coming next.

In those years of aiming at a target somewhere ahead of me, I had terrific synchronic experiences, to be sure. You're hearing about some of them in these sketches. But when given a chance and a choice, I nearly always sided with the needs of my diachronic existence, my future plans, the better thing that would be arriving within a few years. In all that time, I managed to stoke my inborn impatience, and to craft for myself some difficulties with staying put. I wouldn't call impatience and restlessness hallmarks of my character, particularly because they manifest themselves in strange ways that might read as completely different character traits to those around me. That is, my impatience doesn't make me a timely person. My restlessness doesn't prevent me from sitting still for hours and hours, focusing on a single task. But I do tend to need narrative trajectories into which I can slot whatever tasks I'm up to--some sort of story that helps my present make sense.

I suppose that one could say that since June I've been trying to cultivate a more modernist approach toward my own life--more of a focus on, or a relearning of, those aspects of my present moments' shapes and colors and textures. Rather than forcing myself into the next chapter of some master narrative, or moving on to the next project's beginning, middle, and end, I'm making concerted efforts to learn how to do what needs to be done on a given day, or in a given moment, without over-reference to what might happen days or months or years from now.

Reorienting one's way of being in the world is difficult, I'll tell you, particularly when one comes to those parts of lives that are already over-narrated and over-determined by abstract, impersonal forces and pressures. Some of those imperatives are things I've opted out of, one by one, over the years, but some of them have been pretty tenacious. The "higher standard of living than one's parents" narrative? I think I stepped aside from that as soon as I made the choice (which never, itself, felt like a choice) to go into academia, not the corporate world or law or medicine. That choice itself was, I do know, determined by my family's standard of living. The "marriage and children" narrative? That one has come apart a little more gradually. As I tell my students, when it's appropriate (which it turns out to be, for about one student, about once a year), it took me until age 25 to figure out that I wouldn't marry at 21 as my mother had. And I was 27 or 28 before it dawned on me that I was feeling absolutely no impulse toward childbearing. (My body may have its own ideas, but I think that I'm going to win this one.) The "nice house and nicer car" narrative? My verdict's still out on this one, but I'm honestly, honestly not ready to be in this one yet. Too many other narratives are starting and stopping, clicking on and off like the Krispy Kreme doughnut mechanized doughnut-making assembly line or some Allen-Bradley control panel or, oh, I don't know, my rapid-cycling washing machine over there on the other side of the kitchen, for me to tangle with this one very much right now.

My favorite one to debunk for my students is the "one true love" narrative, which my Bostonian friend helped me take apart for myself a few years ago, telling me her theories of how love and choice intersect and in some sense render "destiny" and "fate" simply irrelevant, except where basic dumb luck and timing come into things. In discussing Jane Eyre the other day, one of my students pointed out the strangeness of Jane's abiding, consuming love for Rochester, one of the first men she's ever spent any time around at all. At all. Some confessed feeling creeped out by the whole thing. Others claimed, in classic undergraduate speak, "I don't buy it." (I hate that commercial metaphor for disbelief or absence of persuasion. As if Bronte were selling us Jane's love. As if.) I warned them to beware of this one, because it's toxic, really. The hopeless romantic in me still wants it to be true. The hopeful realist simply says no, just as Nancy Reagan taught me to do when faced with an addictive intoxicant. The first time may be free, sure, but the second time will hook you, and eventually you'll end up gutted and flopping on a deck somewhere.

None of this is to say that life has taken some grim turn. Far from it: despite a prediction of snowfall today, right now we're looking at a sunny afternoon that could be yet another premature harbinger of spring. As last week's snow recedes more and more, those little yellow flowers are becoming visible. I could almost think that the snow will turn out to be a bad-dream kind of prediction--could almost hope that I'll emerge into the night tonight and not regret being in evening clothes, or that I'll wake up tomorrow and find that it's 60 degrees again and that (pathetic fallacy alert) the world is singing along with my happy heart. But I also know enough, can see enough, can imagine enough to know that it may well be cold and a tiny bit treacherous on the road home this evening, that I may need some more of those living-in-moment reserves, that I may have to call myself out later as having been a hypocrite liar-to-self or at least an overly optimistic believer in my own stoic capabilities. But seriously? it doesn't seem like too much to ask that I just be able to be here for now, whatever the lineaments of here turn out to be, now that I'm taking the time to trace them.

sources for today's images: Inner Vision, a tarot site (please note that I am not a tarot believer and am not offering these three cards as signifiers of anything but my appreeciation of their three representations; however, I also don't mean to be frivolous or flippant with systems in which others believe).

So your girlfriend rolls a Honda; or, an electric aptitude for seizing analogies.

On my way home from the pharmacy and the gas station this afternoon, I was more than super-excited to hear, on one of the few FM stations I can pick up in my area, the tell-tale opening beats of Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back." I decided while pulling up to a four-way stop that, since it's Friday and since I mentioned but didn't elaborate on my fondness for this song last week, I'd devote today's writing chiefly to this musical masterpiece. Remember the girls dancing on those huge yellow ass-hills? And the guy in the black fedora? This post is for them, baby--and it's also for the old, self-criticizing version of me who really needed that song when it came out.

"Baby Got Back" debuted during my senior year of high school, by which point I'd already been feeling self-conscious about my rear end for about five years. I have a pretty high waist, a fact only accentuated by those idiotic trouser styles we wore in the 1980s and 1990s. On me, a trouser with an eight-inch rise is a disaster, and it was even more a disaster in 1992 than it is now. And a trouser with pleats? I can't even write about it. My friends and I wore men's jeans, in attempts to figure out ways to dress comfortably without looking stupid, but I don't think we ever quite hit it. Now, my high waist wouldn't have felt like a problem to me, I suspect, had I not also had something of an hourglass figure--which also wasn't well-served by the high-rise jeans. Basically, in order to have jeans that fit my ass, I had to wear things that were enormous in the waist; I ended up doing my best to rock the hip-slung look before it was really available. And all of this nonsense added up--as I know it did for others reading this piece--to wearing enormous shirts that would hide the fact that I was wearing jeans that just didn't fit. I think back on this part of my life and just want to reach out and console my old self, offer her some insight into what's on the way: shirts that fit; jeans that usually fit; an ever-increasing confidence in what I've got (because, as I now know, my German/Polish genes bequeathed me not only a healthy pair of childbearing hips and good, working legs but also a damned sweet bustline, if I do say so myself) and willingness to show myself off at the right time. "You're going to get to be sassy," I would tell myself, "and you'll be glad to have the butt to balance you out when you get fancy uplift bras." It didn't help that all my friends were cross-country runners, at a time of my life when my chief exercise was rushing from class to class and from extra-curricular to extra-curricular. If you've ever known a cross-country runner, you know their physiques. Teenage runners are not often, in my experience, hourglass figures.

So, when I heard "I like big butts, and I cannot lie," my ears perked up. When Sir M. asked, "36-24-36?" and answered himself with that dirty chuckle and "Only if she's 5'3"..." I thought, "Hunh! I'm 5'5"!" and felt better about my measurements, which weren't far off from his numbers (a little smaller here, a little bigger there). Sure, I suppose one could say that it's as problematic to check oneself against a rap song as to compare oneself to the stick-teens in Seventeen and Sassy (now defunct, alas), not to mention the stick-women in the older people's magazines. But despite having already been able to recognize the potentially problematic nature of the affirmation I was experiencing, I knew that I was being affirmed, and I pretty much didn't care where the affirmation was coming from.

Plus, shit, man, dancing to that song is awesome. Many years after its appearance on our pop cultural landscape (as it were--remember the ass hills in the video), a then-somebody told me his theory (at a friend's wedding) that everyone dances with one part of the body. He illustrated this theory with reference to a bunch of different people in the room: a shoulder-dancer here, an arm-dancer there, a foot-dancer in the middle of the floor. "And you?" he said, "You're a hip dancer."

It's true. And it's probably due in no small part to Sir Mix-a-Lot's having come onto the musical scene right at a formative moment in my groove-getting-on career.

I've lost track of the clubs and parties and even departmental functions where I've busted a move to the sylvan strains of "Baby Got Back." I know that at some of them, I've had more back than at others. I know that the most recent, awesome time I had with that song was in Savannah this summer, when my soon-to-be-back-home-again-in-the-south friend and my soon-to-be-Chicagoan friend and my Floridian friend and so many other friends found a party bar with a truly terrifying wall of machines dispensing grain-alcohol-infused slushees and a tiny, completely unoccupied dance floor and proceeded to tear that place up. I think that that song came around three times in our 48 hours and two venues of celebrating and dancing in that hot city.

You know it was all I could do to keep my ass in my seat last weekend when our penultimate Ms. Kenyon finalist did her self-satirizing turn with Sir Mix-a-Lot. Had I not been in row two, front and center before who knows how many of the young people I'm supposed to have respecting me on a daily basis, who knows what I would have done.

Now check it out: our karaoke girl is hardly the first to find inspiration for creative endeavor in this song. In doing my daily search for images to provoke and amuse, I've found Jeneieve McDonald's "Baby Got Back," which you can purchase through her website (if it hasn't already been snapped up). This figure is probably a little bit too "little in the middle," but she has "got much back." But the rendition which probably takes the cake--and would take it even if the Gourds had done a parody of this song as good as their version of "Gin and Juice" (my brother, I know you're going to smack your forehead again, since we missed that one for the top ten, too!)--is this guy Jonathan Coulton's cover of the song. It really has to be heard to be believed. Be sure you stay around long enough for the anaconda line. Someday, though I'm not given to list-making round about here, I may need to do a Top Five Covers, dedicated to my favorite remakes of others' songs. This one's a contender.

The second part of today's title, in case you don't recognize it, comes from Thomas De Quincey's Suspiria de Profundis (or, Sighs from the Depths) (1845), which I'm reading with my youngest students this week, despite the fact that it might be the hardest book I teach. De Quincey's got back, too, but it's a less concretized, substantially more haunting thing that follows him around than just a big ass he's willing to shake on the dance floor. More's the pity for him.

My dance song playlist just clicked over to the Arctic Monkeys' song "I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor," which seems like just the right thing to have bringing this post to its end. If you haven't heard this song yet and are at all given to jumping around in your dwelling while you play loud, driving, smart-lyricked dance music (namechecking the Montagues and Capulets, anyone?), these are your new boys. In a throwdown with Franz Ferdinand, I think these guys might come out on top. I bet I do look good on the dance floor, by the way, not least because I bring the butt. Maybe I'll get up and offer an affirmative answer to Nouvelle Vague's question, since they're up now: "Won't you dance with me, in my world of fantasy?"

sources for today's image: 1) a blog at the University of Minnesota; 2) ImagineArt.

The oral oddities of tiny birds.

Today I played peekaboo with two different birds over the course of the day. I found the first one on my way home from the post office before my afternoon class; I was walking along when suddenly I heard a small peep peep, and so I stopped by the side of the road and peered up, trying to dissociate a peeping something from the skyscratching branches along the roadside. Finally, I glimpsed the movement of a birdbeak. And I swear the grey bird to which the beak belonged was peeping around a branch, watching me watch it. Just then, a truck pulled out of a dorm parking lot, and the bird flew away. Nothing beautiful stays around for long.

Today was almost excruciatingly cold, maybe even colder-feeling than it would have been had the sun not been so brilliant. As I walked to the post office (again; it's a center of my life, really) after my afternoon class, to mail back the version of my new lap suit that isn't brilliant yellow, I saw that the daffodils in front of our public affairs office have grown enough that they have buds starting to swell out at the tops of their stems. I didn't have my camera, so I wasn't able to photograph them for you. But I think I would have felt awful about photographing them anyhow, and here's why:

I know very well that the pathetic fallacy is just that: a fallacy. When I project things onto the world, I know they're not really there. I know better than to believe some of the things I think, like: "These spring flowers that have sprung before their time and are now going to get mercilessly cut down by the indifferent brutality of winter's resurgence--these flowers are actually signs that I too have gotten ahead of myself, that I'm trying to let a wee shoot be too much, too soon, in the face of too much danger, again, even after all these years." When the weather turns sharp and cold, that turn has nothing to do with my needing to learn a lesson, if lesson there is to be learned. It's just a turn in the weather. And yet, probably because of what I do for a living, I see signs everywhere, and the fact that I know signs are arbitrary--that they're made up of meanings and (for lack of a better word) meaners, things signified and things signifying, and that those pairs aren't really ever locked into one another securely or lastingly--doesn't mean that I can discount every false signification that I feel during the course of a cold walk home.

The past few nights, going to bed has simply been difficult, not because I wouldn't fall asleep immediately but because I haven't been able to force myself up to my bed in the first place. Too many short nights in a row are starting to wear on me now--hence the darkening musings, following so fast upon the fleeting loveliness of the day's first peeking bird.

I saw the second peekaboo bird on my way home from class, and this one was a nuthatch hopping about on yet another roadside tree, seeking out foodstuffs and paying me absolutely no mind; I was the only one playing peekaboo, in other words. This second bird was making soft little bird-grunts as it moved around. They were almost coos, but they were so perfectly keyed to the exertions the bird was making to get around on the tree and pick away at it with its beak that perhaps they were more like "oufs"--ouf ouf ouf, up up up, ouf ouf ouf, over over over. Another car pulled out of another parking lot, but this bird was too busy with its foraging to fly away.

What I was striding home from was my second day of discussing Jane Eyre with my afternoon class. Because the day dawned in a strange way--I woke up a good half-hour before my alarm was due to go off, even though I had gotten to bed late, thereby suggesting to me that I'm actually developing a wake-up time--I felt a bit giddy in the early stages of the day's reading, and so I started collecting great lines from the second quarter of Bronte's novel (I'll italicize every other one so that you can tell them apart--these are all direct quotes):

a decent quiescence, under the freak of manner, gave me advantage.
she is not bright, she has no talents; yet in a short time she has made much improvement.
you had rather the look of another world.
she is bursting with repletion.
you stick a sly penknife under my ear!
your agent has called and wishes to see you.
I was arranging a point with my destiny.
My thin crescent-destiny seemed to enlarge; the blanks of existence were filled up.
Her appearance always acted as a damper to the curiosity raised by her oral oddities.

Today was also one of those days where one of my students, in the middle of a presentation, got so worked up about the indignities of his historical material that another student cautioned him, only half-jokingly, not to cry. While my heart swells every time that happens, I also worry that I don't help them find places for their new anger to go.

And now, this day, which began giddily and developed nicely (though coldly, and a wee bit worriedly) before dead-ending in a thoroughly, frustratingly static evening about which I can't even write (and which absolutely did make me miss the second week in a row of Dancing with the Stars, damnit), simply needs to come to a close, arbitrarily, now.

Don't forget to vote (comma) yo. ModFab reports that 150 votes were submitted today alone.

source for today's images: A site dedicated to Thomas Bewick and his various works; I've chosen images from his History of British Birds, over which Jane Eyre pores early in the novel bearing her name.

I'm asking for your support.

Faithful readers! I'm breaking from my usual Cabinetry tonight to enlist you in a project I'm attempting to join. I'm in the running to be one of fellow blogger ModFab's troop of "ModFab Sixers." I'd be a sort of commentator and opinionator for the hiply literate and culturally savvy blogger set (you can read a more specific description of what this honor would entail here). As ModFab sums it up, I'd be one of the guardians of popular culture. I'm one of twelve contestants for the final six slots, and, as requested, I've submitted my three-sentence bio and a wee image representing myself. Look for the bird on legs, just like this one here.

Now here's where you come in. ModFab is running an election--nay, a Dancing with the Stars meets Project Runway popularity + talent + style + snark smackdown. And I need votes. Your votes.

Here's what I have to offer (besides what I've already brought, over on the other page):

When I was about five, I had a Big Wheel. And it was not a girly Big Wheel. It was either just like this one, or it was even more badass because it was black. The more I think about it, the more I think I've been crossing mine (which I think might have been just like this one) and my brother's later one (which may have been inspired by Knight Rider, tonight's Story for Another Time). In any case, I was not selfish with the Big Wheel. I let other people drive it around the block (and man, we went SO fast, riding around town on that low-rider tricycle). Moreover, I gave other people rides on the Big Wheel. Because we were all so freakin' little, it was no big deal to kick the seat up to the front notch, thereby creating a place where a rider could stand behind the driver's seat and hang on to said driver's shoulders. This practice is what ultimately killed the Big Wheel, when the plastic over its back (non-big) wheels' axle simply collapsed.

My point is, I had a cool thing, and I wasn't stingy with it. I've tried to make this my life's work: having cool things (material or not) and being un-stingy with them. And what I'm trying to say is that if you help me get this particular Big Wheel, I'll let you ride it around the block with me any time. So get on over to ModFab and help me be a contender. You can vote for up to six people (and there are some people pretty dear to me in that group, I'll tell you--so rock out choosing the other five people you want to vote for, too), and you have to vote by 11 a.m. EST on Sunday. Play along. You know you'll enjoy yourself.

source for tonight's image: Feeling Retro. Check out the Big Wheel Love on that message board!

Fish heads for your Wednesday.

At dinner on Friday, my excellent poet friend and I regaled everyone with a performance of the Barnes and Barnes song "Fish Heads," which I was so tickled to find she knew. I have finally remembered to go hunt out my own copy of "Fish Heads," after all these years. (My brother and I used to watch the Doctor Demento countdown every time it was on MTV, because "Fish Heads" was always the #1 video.)

For those of you who don't know the song, here's a taste, as it were, though one cannot get the full dementedness of the song from its lyrics alone. However, it reads not unlike Seussian absurd. Imagine many of these lines (chorus in particular) delivered in falsetto (a mid-post postscript, from Wednesday afternoon: go here, or to iTunes, for a sound sample).

Chorus:
Fish heads, fish heads,
Roly poly fish heads,
Fish heads, fish heads,
Eat them up, yum. (repeat!)

In the morning, laughing happy fish heads;
In the evening, floating in the soup. (chorus)

Ask a fish head anything you want to.
They won't answer. They can't talk. (chorus)

I took a fish head out to see a movie.
Didn't have to pay to get it in. (chorus)

They can't play baseball.
They don't wear sweaters.
They're not good dancers.
They don't play drums. (chorus)

[all in a rush:] Roly poly fish heads are never seen sipping cappuccino in Italian restaurants with Oriental women. Yeaaahhh.

(chorus)
(repeat)
(repeat again)
(repeat, sans music)
Yeah.

And there you have it. An anthem of my youth. If you only have time to check out one song I've referenced tonight, I wouldn't have this be the one (go for Hem!), but if you have the spare time, it's worth digging this one out, simply for the unbelievable weirdness of the thing.

source of tonight's image: I've gone easy on those who may feel squeamish about seeing actual fish heads; tonight's image is obviously of fake fish heads, from the Gallery of Functional Art.

A problem with days.

Last spring, I taught a Tuesday evening seminar that was one of the best experiences of my career. The students were wonderful; the discussions were wonderful; people had good-natured arguments; I went home every week exhausted but happy. This semester's seminar is still in its formative stages, and we've just come off of an extraordinarily grueling novel--one of the hardest novels to read, in my experience, much less to teach and study. But right now, the seminar's biggest problem, for me, is that it makes me think Monday nights are actually Tuesday nights.

Every week of the semester so far--and hard to believe, we've had four meetings--I've left the seminar, headed home, and then thought to myself around 11:30, "Oh! I should check iTunes and see what's new this week! And oh, rats! I need to put out my garbage." Generally, though, I swear a lot more when I talk to myself.

It usually takes about a half-hour for me to figure out that, in fact, it's not Tuesday. By which point, of course, it is Tuesday--just early Tuesday, not late Tuesday as I've been thinking.

This continuing problem probably has a lot to do with my weeks' feeling so long. But then again, so does waiting for Saturday evenings to get here.

Meanwhile, as is always the case at about this semester, I feel (as I told a student today) as though I'm shedding time like old skin. It just keeps falling away, being cast off, getting wriggled out of and left at the side of the road. My student, astute thing that he is, wrote back, "This reminds me that the future always feels closer to us than the present." He is of a philosophical turn of mind.

Tonight, I'm trying to balance on the knife's edge between time's speeding away from me and its stretching out before me in mocking slowness. On my way home, I made the impulsive decision to drive to the grocery store, even though it was 8 p.m. Hating my grocery store is a topic for another time. But tonight, it wasn't too awful because, well, it was 8 p.m. on a Tuesday (not a Wednesday). Nevertheless, I saw an eleven-year-old girl who was on a phone when she entered the store and was still on the phone when I saw her again in the milk aisle. Sometimes I think that vigilante parenting is an underrated concept. Maybe childless people like me are childless precisely so that we can catch those kinds of things when parents are harried, or buying avocados: "Excuse me, little-though-you-don't-think-you-are girl, you're damaging your cognitive abilities by walking around in this Godforsaken store with that thing glued to your ear. There cannot be a single thing you actually need to be talking about right now, particularly since you're barely saying anything at all and look as though a zombie sucked your soul out your nostrils."

The two things that are helping me with the time management (of a different sort) tonight are a lovely pinot noir I picked out at the Kroger (pronounce it krojhay and you'll like it more) and my new Hem album, released today and courteously delivered by Amazon to me at the village post office this afternoon.

Hem is well-nigh unclassifiable, and it's not a band I would have lit onto myself. It's Brooklyn-based (yeah, 718/347--I don't just shout out to the fashionable area codes [comma] yo), but at least one of its members is someone who was working on a musicology Ph.D. with friends of mine at Cornell when I was there. And when Rabbit Songs came out in 2001, people started loving it pretty quickly. A Canadian friend of mine gave me a copy for my birthday in 2002, telling me that it was one of her favorite albums of the past year; this was during something of a blackout period in my musical awareness and consumption, a time when I just kept listening to minidiscs of songs I already knew and loved, rather than seeking out anything new, and so I was grateful. For a long time, I stopped short at the third song or so, though I thought the first few tracks were great. It wasn't really until I got my iPod and started making playlists (another topic for another post) that I started to appreciate the simple grace of Hem's music. And when "Half an Acre" came on during a mysterious iPod shuffling expedition that a particular soon-to-be-relocated-to-the-south friend and I were on on the road from Ithaca to Rochester one March day, I fully realized what I'd been missing by not getting past those early songs. To this day, "Half an Acre" occupies second place on my iTunes's "most played" list. And you can bet I'll be sporting a Hem t-shirt this summer, when I'm not wearing Vendetta.

And so, when I discovered last spring (on a Tuesday night after my seminar, in fact) that they had another album out, Eveningland (2004), I not only got myself a copy but also sent a copy winging its way to my beloved Brooklynite, whose instant response was, "To know Hem is to love Hem." Eveningland is more polished and melodic than Rabbit Songs, which made one of my excellent Gambier friends decide that she liked Rabbit Songs better. You see how I'm a proselyte for this band.

Today marked the release of No Word From Tom, an album of outtakes, rarities, demos, and covers from 2000-2005. I can't quite tell you how beautiful it is. The bit coming through my computer speakers as I type is a sequence of two people's humming in harmony that concludes the album.

If I had to describe Hem's music (in order, for instance, to get you interested in following my links and getting some albums for yourselves), I'd call it slightly citified, bluegrassy folk--beautiful from start to finish, even when the songs are about longing and pain and loss. But this description isn't really not doing them any justice, and it's revealing my weakness when it comes to taxonomizing musical forms. The best thing you can do, if you're intrigued, is to visit them and listen to some of their streams. Any band that namechecks Terre Haute can't be all bad, in my book.

I have hopes of catching Hem in concert eventually--especially now that their album of live recordings has shown me just how terrific they also are in person--but it looks as though every pass they make anywhere near where I live happens in mid-week during the semester--with the exception, maybe, of their Indianapolis show, which happens on a Saturday night and might thus be doable in a quietly crazed kind of way.

It'd be my luck that I'd show up the day before the concert, anyhow, if we weren't out of term yet.

source for today's images: all Hem, all the time (the non-Amazon way to get your fix).

But I'm not tired!

When I was small, I took naps in the afternoon. But I didn't want to take naps in the afternoon. "I'm not tired!" my mom says I would tell her. And so she brought out a Mom trick: "Just lie down for ten minutes," she'd say, "and then you can come back downstairs." And so I'd go to bed for ten minutes.

Two hours later, I'd call down the stairs, "Has it been ten minutes yet?"

"About two more to go," she'd say.

"OK!" And I'd go trotting back into my room to read a book or something. I can remember the bright sun of those afternoons, coming in through the high windows in my bedroom. A few minutes later, I'd go downstairs.

Tonight, I would kind of like it if my mom were here to tell me, "Just lie down for ten minutes"; too much of me is fighting against the heaviness of my eyes, petulant and protesting.

source for tonight's image: Choo Choo's Online, a pretty great-looking source for train toys. I'll say more about loving trains some other time, when I'm not trying to convince myself to sleep; for now, all you need to know--in case you didn't have the good fortune to grow up in a train town--is that Chessie System's logo is the profile of a sleeping kitten, tucked in a blanket, and thus wins the contest (which no one even knew we were having) for cutest train logo, hands down. Won it many years ago, in fact. Sometimes, when my brother and I were little, we would end up sitting in the Malibu with Mom waiting for a train to pass; I always liked the Chessie System cars best.

Office gazing.

if there's one thing I
like to watch, it's hopping birds
on winter branches

source for today's image: the webpage of artist Robert Hower. "Winter Birds" (1997-8) is what he calls "an iris print on arches," a description that makes me feel, all over again, how little I know about the production of visual art--and how much I want to learn. In his artist's statement, Hower writes, "The viewer, if willing, should find an emotional connection or a constructed personal narrative within the digital field." You can let my haiku hop around in this image like the birds on the sunny tree outside my office. That's the personal narrative I'm offering today: me, in my office, watching.

I have a friend.

My temporarily Floridian friend turns a year older today. We are in the eighth year of knowing each other--it will be nine years in mid-August. He has been my favorite sparring partner and my best confidant for nearly a decade, in other words.

When I first met my friend, he was wearing his yellow U2 PopMart t-shirt with the lemon being orbited by the shopping cart; this image is as close as I can get, because apparently no one took a picture of a yellow PopMart shirt and put it on the web (bastards!). We were at a barbecue in a backyard on North Cayuga Street. We talked for awhile at that party, but (because I hadn't yet figured out that one doesn't go to parties simply to leave them) I was mostly focused on figuring out when to drop my excuse for going home--which was (ironically enough, given my later track record) that I needed to mow the lawn.

We ended up in several classes together--four, at first, then only three. I was there when he explained Michael McKeon by drawing an analogy to the catalytic converter. We were both there when our Victorianist professor did the spot-on imitation of Rosamond Vincy that still shapes the way I teach Middlemarch. I watched in horror as he and another of my friends got savaged by the rest of our cohort (and probably me a little bit, too, conflicted thing that I was, over what we were discussing) during a seminar they had foolishly been directed to lead. We were both there the afternoon that it snowed a foot in four hours, during two make-up seminars in December, and my friend fell down several times on the way down Buffalo Street's giant hill.

We were in classes together again--especially, unforgettably, the Bulgarian's bad French class--in the spring semester. By summer, we were good enough friends that my father, visiting from Indiana, cut spare ribs (or maybe even chicken that he and my mom had specially bought for him) off the bone so that my friend could eat, because he doesn't like meat on bones. I don't remember when we started having our marathon phone conversations, when we started logging the arguments that we still wheel out and have occasionally now, even though we've had them, and mutually acknowledged they'll never really be settled because that's never really the point, for years.

My friend is how I know what I was like, all those first years in grad school. He took the pictures that show me how I looked--including one so bad, from such a bad angle, that I never wore that particular dress again and also destroyed the picture. He cracked the jokes that still make me remember certain people in certain ways ("slopy Lacan," anyone?). When I started loosening up a little, as our graduate career wore on, he was the one who let me know I'd been kind of uptight and self-righteous when we arrived. He is the person who remembers when my e-mail signature line was "Do not taunt Happy Fun Girl."

We danced ballroom together, and I wanted to kill him, to polka him to death because his feet wouldn't work right. But he's also the other person who remembers what our teacher looked like, lying on her side in the middle of the dance floor, laughing so hard that she'd fallen down. We learned to bowl together, in the semester of recovery after we'd finished our master's degrees, and we didn't even do that in corresponding ways. I helped paint his old apartment, along with my then-somebody. He helped pick out and stuff a pinata for our friend's wedding. (He is also the person most likely to hope that something horrible is about to happen to the small child in this picture of a pinata that is nowhere near as cool as the one we picked out. And he's the one who [with my help] convinced our friend, when we visited her the next summer, that we should open the pinata and eat the stale candy, even the stuff we had to microwave in order to be able to chew.) He went with me when I needed to buy a dress for a friend's friend's wedding, and he was patient throughout the six hours I looked for the right thing, before settling on the one I'd tried on within twenty minutes of arriving at the mall. He talked me through the arguments I kept having with my then-somebody about the 2000 election. He expressed the perfect combination of genuine regret and utter lack of surprise when I left that somebody. Nearly two years later, he laughed at me when I felt funny about confessing that I was trying to "date on" someone else. Another year later, when that someone else completely dropped the ball in the overnight leading to my turning in a done dissertation, my friend not only called up to see how I was doing but even came over and proofread half a chapter for me. He sat up with me several nights in a row, helping me pack my crap so that I could get out of town on time when I was moving. He made the trip to Rochester; he offered a couch in Ithaca; he helped me have something like a home in both places during a difficult year.

He is the person who drove me to the airport. He is the person who always sends postcards. He is the person I called up when one or both of us needed to go to the Pines for burgers and pinball and that awesome bowling game. He is the person I've fought with most in my life, the person I've been genuinely angriest at (and the person who, I think, has been genuinely angriest with me) but then always made up with. He is the person who, inadvertently, taught me to be less competitive in playing certain games, simply because it's too much effort. He is the person who has never begrudged me what I do or where I've gone. He is the person who both broke and repaired my mirrorball--and was the person from whom I'd learned I could buy a mirrorball in the first place. He is the person I know most likely to use the phrase "pert sawcebox"; he is the person I know most likely to say bo to a goose. He is the person I know most likely to be excited to hear that the Spice Girls are reuniting. He is the only person with whom I've gone shopping for lingerie for someone else. He is the person who helps me remember that my taste (in all things, really) is not shared by all. He is the person with whom I love to eat sour cherry gels around this time of year, even long distance (and he is the other person for whom my mother buys them, when she buys me my annual supply--don't worry, guy, I'm still going to send you yours, and I haven't opened mine yet). He is the person who reviewed my first online personals ad, when I was still feeling embarrassed that I'd even taken that step, and let me know that it looked all right but that my picture was selling me short because it didn't have enough in the way of "boobages." He is the person for whom I have high hopes, and the person to whom I devote some of my most sustained worrying and fretting and feeling powerless to help. He is the person whom I've sometimes neglected without meaning to or wanting to, though sometimes it's been because I've needed to, for all of which I'm sorry. He is the only person with whom I've ever had five-hour phone conversations, lots of which I can't even remember afterwards. He is the person I call to giggle and guffaw with after a tremendous night out. He is the person I would call if I were really in trouble. He is the person who's already pretty much heard it all from me.

Happy birthday, my friend.

(Those of you who share him with me--and you know who you are...it's possible you were even at the Bistro Q craziness several years ago!--feel free to leave him some mad props and love here.)

(And a postscript: the man himself has told me--and of course I remember this now--that his U2 shirt was not actually yellow. My memory has made the requisite correction, but his second birthday gift is my compliance with his request that I let the mistake stand here. I will think of it as something akin to Amish quilters' building an imperfection into their work so as to maintain contact with their mortality.)

sources for today's images: 1) a big ol' fan site about U2 stuff; 2) a British site selling kids' party supplies; 3) OH. HOLY. JESUS. a site where one can apparently buy THIRTY POUNDS of sour cherry gels (don't do it! don't do it!).

Dream a little dream.

As I sit in bed doing work on this dark, rainy Saturday, I've just remembered a dream I had this morning. Because it's Saturday, you're probably going to get two posts today; it seems the least I can do, given that tomorrow's and Monday's will no doubt be attenuated and slightly crazed, as seems to be my wont this semester. Also, I hear that it's supposed to start snowing here later, and that's always a provocative shift. Here's your first, short one:

In my dream, I travelled to the Academic Mayhem, which was being held in some vaguely exotic, resorty place that I think was actually meant to be San Diego but of course was a Daliesque version of San Diego. I was in at least two of the conference hotels, as part of this dream, and at least one of them had an extraordinary pool. That one was, I believe, not the one where I was staying. My hotel had a restaurant where some kind of ceremony was going on, even as my family (!) and I were eating our dinner on the first night of the conference. I think that the ceremony might have been a bar mitzvah. In any case, the restaurant was vaguely buffet-style. And someone involved in this operation started closing up shop before we had finished eating. Not minutes earlier, we had seen a couple at a nearby table stack all of their food onto two places--stack it two feet high, I'm talking--and ask to take it with them. A bad piano player was massacring out tunes in the background. I grabbed an extra piece of pie, in order to substantiate the notion that we needed more time than the restaurant was going to offer us. It's possible that this dinner was my second one of the night, anyway. We went on to be transgressive in some other way, after we'd left the dining room, and all the while, if I remember correctly, I was thinking that we'd have been better off staying in the other hotel, where some friends of mine were getting fabulous benefits--and no criticism from the wait staff about how long it took them to eat their dinner.

I have high hopes for another good dream tonight, because weekends (when, I suppose, I get through more REM cycles than during the week) are often good for dreaming. A couple of weeks ago, I dreamt, with uncannily good resonance, that my possibly somebody had turned up in the company of many of my graduate school friends, who looked at him and said to me, "Who's this?" And so I introduced him, and everything went on as it had before, a seamless integration of my past and present people.

source for (and a note about) today's image: I thought twice about putting this mosaic, "Dreaming Lady," on my post; it's from Antonietta Di Pietro's Mosaicando Co.; you can commission mosaics there for all manner of things (including swimming pools and home floors). I think this is a lovely image, and in some ways it really resembles me in my bed; note all the covers (some of which are even the right colors!) and the fact that yon woman even wears a tiara. Now, I don't wear my tiara in bed. I don't really lie around bare-breasted in my bed all that often, either (and certainly not today, because it's cold). But I never said my illustrations were self-portraits, so I decided to go with it. I don't think anyone's going to get mosaic tiles and me mixed up anytime soon--at least not in any way I can control.

Gasps of laughter.

Today was a day of high creativity, exhilarating from start to stop. Not only did I compile a handout of which I actually was proud. Not only did I watch with mounting glee as my students rose to the challenge I kept setting them--"What else do you see? What else?"--to pull every detail out of two images we were exploring in my morning class. Not only did I rewrite the constitution for an organization to which I belong, thereby getting us at least a few steps closer to understanding a document that hasn't been updated since 1933. Not only did I set a ball in motion that may make life substantially more pleasant for a segment of my campus's population about which I care deeply. After all that--which would have been enough for a day, really--and after yet another wondrous Friday meal with my friends, I headed back to campus to help judge a pageant that nearly defies description. Suffice it to say that it involved a karaoke talent show, and that the first person who performed in that late segment of the competition was a swimmer wearing a "diamond" belt buckle spelling out his name, and bling in his ears, and two layers of polo shirts, and a Burberry scarf, and shorts, and he was singing Carly Simon's "You're So Vain," while three girls danced behind him in purple sequined tops. It only got better from there. I think my favorite of the night was the performance of "Baby Got Back." Some of you know my fondness for that song. The girl who chose it was dead-on and dead-pan and as white as white could be, and it was a sight to behold.

By the end of the evening, I had been laughing hysterically for two hours--hysterically, I tell you, the kind of laughing that makes my face hurt, the kind of laughing I do when I dance and then realize I can't make the corners of my mouth come down. The kind that throws me into graceless convulsions, rocking back and forth, hugging myself, covering my face.

I grew up laughing. My mother has an enormous laugh; I know when she's around, even if I can't see her, because I can hear her laughing. (This fact was useful when I was a swimmer, because I always knew whether or not she had arrived at the meet, simply because her laugh would come galloping across the pool deck to me from where she sat writing out ribbon labels with other team parents.) I didn't quite inherit my mother's laugh, but I think I inherited her laughing. My father is tremendously funny, in a catch-you-off-guard way--and also in a way that I can only describe as open and genial. (It's not to his discredit that I can only come up with these banal words; so much of my week has involved writing recommendations and evaluations that I feel as though I've slipped into that lingo. What I mean about my father is that he uses his humor to get to know people, to get them to open up about themselves, rather than to boost himself or to take others down.) My parents thus make a very funny and fun pair. And then there's my brother, who has the best dead-pan and the wackiest wit of anyone I've ever known. He knows exactly how to make me laugh so hard that I can't talk, in no time flat and with the greatest of ease.

Laughing until I can't breathe is a crucial element of my being a fully present self. I have been looking for a long time for somebody who can make me hysterical, and not in any forced or learned way--just genuinely, easily knocked-to-the-floor, totally unembarrasedly and uncontrollably hysterical. Happily, I may be getting there.

In the meantime, I didn't mind settling for tonight's pageant. During the final performance, a truly crazed rendition of Tina Turner's "What's Love Got to Do With It?", the woman beside me actually did start to cry. I eventually had to put my head back against the top of my seat, I made myself so weak with the shaking and the gasping. I don't know how any of us saw straight to our scoring sheets to write down points for her. In all, it was the right way to end the week, the right event from which to step out into thick fog and make my way home to giggle to myself a bit more.

source for today's image: the American Artists Series website, where you can buy this painting, "Patches of Laughter," by Ann Broadaway!

Everything I learned tonight, I learned from Terry Tempest Williams.

This evening, I received a recharge, one that came almost before I even realized I needed it.

My students and I have been working hard this week; I've been knocking down obligations and duties and assignments like dominos, but there are still many to go. I'm in a holding pattern--and not the kind I'd prefer, and not for any reason that I can legitimately regret, and not in any lasting way (which just makes the holding pattern all the more slow and overlong)--in another particular development. I'm missing people who are only near to me telephonically. The weather came up yellowy grey this morning, and I was up early enough to see it, and then it rained. Nothing has been particularly wrong, nothing particularly right; it's just felt as though we're moving through one of those weeks, and tomorrow it will be over.

Terry Tempest Williams was on campus today. Because of other things I was learning and doing, I had to miss her morning conversation about creative writing, but I wouldn't have missed the evening lecture for anything--in fact, forced another meeting to be pushed back an hour so that I wouldn't have to miss it. I know Williams from her book Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991), which I read late in my teeth-gritted time in Rochester. I have a particularly lovely memory of sitting with Refuge in my favorite Indian restaurant, to which I treated myself innumerable times in those last weeks, knowing how heart-achingly I was going to miss it, and the waiters who knew who I was and who always gave me free desserts. Refuge is Williams's narrative of her family's fights with cancer (the result of nuclear testing in Nevada), intertwined with her record of the Great Salt Lake's unprecedented, unstoppable rising in spring 1983, a rising that ravaged local ecosystems. It is a minutely, painfully realized book, unsparing and surprising and haunting. And so it was tremendous to see her in person. She lives now in southeastern Utah, in Castle Valley near the instantly recognizable Castleton Tower and Arches National Park.

At the beginning of her talk, Williams read from her Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert (2001), selecting for us a letter she'd written to a friend, describing why she writes. I had time to write down every seventh or eighth of her sentences, which worked out to be perfect, because the ones for which I was ready were the ones I wanted most anyway:

I write to make peace with the things I can't control.
I write to know beauty.
I write to migrating birds with the hubris of language.
I write as an act of slowness.
I write because I am unemployable.
I write by grace and grit.
I write knowing I will always fail.
Words are always a gamble, like broken glass...a bloody risk, like love.

She asked three students who had attended the morning conversation about creative writing to produce writings for the evening lecture, and she gave them time and space to read what they'd written. The first young woman, who hails from Utah, seemed nervous, the kind of nervous I get at the edge of the one-meter diving board, but she had me at these lines, singing a paean to her home state: "You know, they have a paint color called Utah Sky. And it is the exact color of my sky."

She asked us three questions, then proceeded to tell us stories that might help us think about answering them. "What are we in the service of?" she asked. "What is our jurisdiction, and what is not? What do we choose to act on, and what not?"

She told us of a man known as Big Man, in Philadelphia, a recovered addict who became a tremendous mosaicist and helped to create an Alley of Angels, full of mosaiced Ethiopian angels, that could serve as a refuge for fearful children, a place where they could count on finding him or some other community elder. "The mosaicists took broken things and made them whole," she said.

She told us of a place where rocks tell time differently.

She told us that to care is neither conservative nor radical--that, instead, it is a form of consciousness.

And, when a student asked her how she had been able to spend a month in Rwanda this fall, acting as scribe for an artist who was designing and constructing a genocide memorial in a village of survivors, and to come out of the experience undamaged--when this student wanted to know, how do you witness and live, how do you listen and create and not sink under the weight of it all--she told us that when she'd come home, she hadn't been able to move, and that in the aftermath of her younger brother's death a year ago, she'd only written two pages. But, she pointed out, you get through things by going to them, by doing them, going through them, thinking about them, caring for others during them. "When I'm incapacitated," she said, "I'm thinking about myself."

And she quoted one of Emily Dickinson's letters, gifting us words that I wouldn't try to surpass tonight, even if I thought I might: "Life is a spell so exquisite, everything conspires to break it. How can we not respond?"

sources for today's images: 1) a webpage about climbing around Moab, UT; 2) Abrahm Lustgarten's article about how he captured this fabulous long-exposure nightshot of stars around Castlerock. The dotted line, he tells us, is the regular blink of a passing airplane's winglights.