Utter fawning.

I heard from one of my students today that she had an extraordinary time on a recent trip she took, in connection with research she's been helping conduct this summer. As part of this trip, she had to handle hundreds of birds every day, and she saw chicks everywhere. Apparently--and this is the part of the story I like best--she bet that she would not melt when she saw the chicks. But then she did melt at the very sight of them. And so she lost her bet.

Not an hour after I received the e-mail bearing this story, I was making my slow-driving way home from the officehouse to my excellent friends' dog, thinking about whether I'd feed him or walk him first. Suddenly, as I rounded the corner, I stopped short before the utterly unexpected sight of a doe standing in the middle of the road, nursing her tiny fawn, the tiniest fawn I have ever seen. I don't know from fawn ages and sizes; I'm not that kind of naturalist (yet). But I'd guess that this fawn was a good two weeks younger than any I've ever seen before. I stopped and waited, hoping that both fawn and doe (who had separated as soon as I materialized) would cross the road and reunite. The doe made it swiftly and surely, of course; that's what does in Gambier do. But the fawn, no bigger than a medium-sized dog (though with slightly longer legs), was still so rickety and tentative that it barely made it to the edge of the road. When all was clear, I eased on the rest of the way to my friends' house.

When I walked the dog a few minutes later, I was startled to find that the fawn had simply lain down at the edge of the woods, near the side of the road. It was the last thing I'd have expected that the fawn would do--or, more to the point, that the doe would allow. This mother was nowhere to be seen. She had made it quite a ways into the woods as I was driving past, but I had assumed she would come right back as soon as I was gone. And yet, there was the fawn, curled on its side, lying very still, looking out at the road, watching and waiting. The dog did not notice this small creature, for which I was grateful, since it was a good bit smaller than he is, and probably not nearly as fast (even with me attached to his neck). Nor did he spot it on the way back home from our walk.

Once we reached the house, I fixed the dog's dinner and then skipped out with my camera, hoping simultaneously that the fawn would be gone (rescued by its mother) and that it would still be there, still and silent and spotted. And there, indeed, it was. I tried not to get too close to it, since I guessed that it was probably already frightened enough. And it was clear to me from the moment I saw this fawn that it was not meant to be the best of all my life's photo opportunities. There was simply too much fragility and delicacy in the scene, and in the creature, for it all not to be the quintessence of ephemerality. You cannot imagine, from my picture, just how small this fawn was.

Before this afternoon, it had never occurred to me that one reason fawns are spotted might be so that they blend in with the sun-dapple on forest-floor leaves.

A clearing.

My soon-to-be-Chicagoan friend took off this afternoon, and I have spent my subsequent hours walking and reading and walking and thinking and walking some more and writing my newest poem, which is coming along, coming along. I must have walked four miles today, around and around the village, around and around my excellent friends' house, under the watertower, through the woods, to the bookstore and back, up the paths, down the paths.

On my evening's walk, a walk that garnered me not only fine chocolate but also Jane Kenyon's Collected Poems, I stopped in the middle of the street to take these pictures for you. That's twice--two streets, two middle-of-those-street stops, two pictures. I am loving my village tonight. (I am also loving the fact that the skunk that walked up to my screened porch tonight, so close that I could see it and could even have kicked it had I been so stupid, just kept right on walking, even though he could see me. Even though that can't have been a pleasant surprise. I know it wasn't for me.)

A new-twisted anxiety dream.

In my dream, I was heading off for a college-sponsored program in Tehran. We were lined up in a space like a laboratory, with long tables, while we received last-minute advice. Then, we were dismissed for our final packing and preparation. Language lessons had been involved somehow, but I was sure that my Farsi was not good enough, that no language learned anywhere but the place where it's spoken can ever be good enough. Nonetheless, I finished my packing and headed to the meeting place for the shuttles that would take us to the airport. When I got to the shuttle, though, someone needed to take my huge suitcase, the green four-wheeled Samsonite that my father bought in Japan after his colleagues made fun of his "stupid American luggage." The suitcase was definitely mine, mine from real life I mean, complete with the red, white, and blue luggage strap that my father also bought in Japan.

Anyhow: they took my suitcase, and I let it go, figuring that I'd know where to find it once I made my way to the rest of my traveling group. But then something went awry; I was delayed and detained and realized how dumb it had been to leave my suitcase with anyone. And then it turned out that the suitcase was up on a platform with an enormous ladder leading up to it. I am deathly afraid of falling, as I believe I have told you. And so getting to my enormous, heavy suitcase was going to be a problem. But lo and behold, there were two young men nearby, and so I flirted with them a bit, and they retrieved my suitcase for me. Somehow, this made me realize that flirtation could be a useful tool. (How old am I?)

I proceeded to where the rest of my group was, and somehow it turned out that the rest of my group had disappeared. Eventually I found them, but not before I'd lost something else--and decided that I really needed to change clothes and put on some makeup. Did I mention that this airport was also a post office? It seems to me that by the end of the dream, I had started getting my whole act together: all luggage in my possession (or safely in the airline's possession, in the case of the enormous bag), my group within sight, everything starting to gel. But then I awoke, which was a blissful turn of events, as it had just started dawning on me that Tehran might not be the best place to go on a study abroad program at this moment in time. And when I awoke, I realized that I had dreamt my way into a hot sweat.

It seems clear to me that this dream is about a few things, among them the oncoming semester and the aftermath of my bibliography school experience (since it seems to me that at least one of the teacher-figures in this dream was someone from that school--and the institutional landscape of my dream two nights ago was heavily influenced by the University of Virginia and the homework assignments I completed while in Charlottesville). I suspect there's lots more bubbling back there, as well; who knows what this concatenation will produce tonight. I'm meditating on a sestina (which was the agreed-upon sign, earlier in the summer, that an intervention would be necessary), and so perhaps I'll be cranking math problems in my sleep.

source for tonight's image: Medicine at Michigan, the University of Michigan's med school magazine.

The game of champions.

This evening, I had the opportunity to play one of my favorite games for the first time in years. I think that it's safe to say that I haven't opened my vinyl-covered backgammon set since the night, five days before my dissertation was due, that my now-visiting soon-to-be-Chicagoan friend came over to help ensure that I'd eat my dinner and not feel utterly despondent. He kicked my ass in backgammon, too, but I was wound so tightly regarding the dissertation that (for once) I didn't mind. Tonight, we broke out the old set and went to town.

My first encounters with backgammon came when I arrived at Kenyon as a student. In the early 1990s, the Kenyon bookstore was still a site of, among other things, near-constant backgammon games. (Now, the backgammon sets are still around, but they're not actively played; I don't think I've seen a game since I arrived here as faculty.) The game always mystified me; it seemed to require some kind of occult knowledge. Not until I visited my father's best friend in Florida, in summer 2000, did I have an occasion to learn the game. During that trip, I kept finding my father's friend playing backgammon with his computer in the mornings. Eventually, I started watching what he was doing. Then, he told me how to play. I played the computer a few times. Then, we hunted out his old backgammon board. He defeated me a few times. But then I had it.

As soon as I returned to Ithaca, I bought myself a board--a really cheesy, over-the-top bad-vinyl board (a cheesier, cheaper version of the one you see above). It is two-tone brown, with a plastic handle and garish brass clasps. As soon as he arrived for the summer, I taught my then-somebody how to play. He always played the kidney-bean-colored pieces; I was always the ivory-colored pieces. We bought a notebook and kept score. We used the doubling die to great effect, sometimes building our games up to 32 or 64 points each. We would play for hours, racking up point totals well into the hundreds, sprawled out across my living room floor on hot Ithaca summer days. We took the backgammon set to the laundromat. I have never had such exceptional laundry experiences (except for the previous summer, when our game was mancala).

There's something extremely satisfying about my backgammon set: its pieces are perfectly weighted and deliciously smooth. They make perfect clicking sounds as they're raced around the board, powered by the sometimes frustrating, sometimes delightful interplay of skill and fortune. The dice cups are covered in yet more brown vinyl. I even have a trusty backgammon book, a gift from that then-somebody, that lives in the backgammon case, for easy reference.

What I'm trying to say, overall, is that I would love this game even if it weren't mentioned in Middlemarch--though George Eliot's notice is a powerful recommendation, as well (even though, as I recall, the allusion isn't one that makes backgammon sound like the best of pursuits--which, of course, in the grand scheme of things, it's not).

Now that I am back into the game, I suspect that tomorrow may turn out to be an all-day backgammon marathon--and that I may be twisting others' arms, forcing them to learn the game so that I don't have to wait another three years for my next match. (If you're one of my local readers, you may want to watch out: if you see me prowling the streets of Gambier with what looks like a tiny, striped vinyl briefcase in hand, I may be heading your way for a match-up, whether or not you already know the game.)

source for tonight's images: Wikipedia's backgammon entry.

Shopping for a lover.

Yes, that's right. Read them and weep. You might weep with laughter or with sympathy or with sorrow. That's your lookout.

...sailors' delight.

Today was just as lovely as the weatherpeople promised; tonight is the first truly gorgeous night we've had, temperature-wise, in a long, long time.

I've been sitting here for awhile, thinking about the fact that I don't have anything to write for you this evening. I could rehearse another litany of my day: here are the things I did; here are the things I ate; here are the people I saw. I could tell you that I finally saw Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic and thought that yes, it was funny, but the line between funny and offensive is fine and fraught and ultimately I didn't love the movie enough to care about arguing out which side of it she's on. The final image of the film proper--wherein she seduces her own reflection--is brilliantly done, though.

I could tell you about how it was a good thing to crawl back into Oliver Twist today, after too many months off.

I could tell you about how happy the dog has been today, and how nice it was to shut down my friends' air conditioning and open up the house.

I could tell you about how I'm excited that my Chicago-bound friend will be arriving in Gambier tomorrow.

I could tell you--and had planned to tell you--about the funny things that happened at a birthday party I attended tonight. For one, someone juggled first three bocce balls and then five croquet balls, performing some fantastic, unexpected feats there in the dusk light. But earlier, the youngest member of our party (who is, I believe, three) looked over at the setting sun and said to her father, "Let's run to the sun!" and so off they went into the sunset. Later, her mother held her, grown sleepy, while candlelight gilded them roseately in the center of our circle.

But instead, sitting here on the couch in the cool night air, I will tell you briefly my favorite thing about this time of year: the return of cool sleeping temperatures. I do not like to be cold when I sleep, but I love to be cozy in the middle of a mild degree of cold. When the temperature dips into the 50s at night, I am happy to sleep with my windows wide open and my blankets piled on. (When it dropped into the 40s at the outset of my summer course in June, I finally broke down and closed the windows, simply so that I'd be able to shower in the morning.) Tonight, I fully anticipate burrowing before I sleep. I suspect that most of the time I sleep with my head almost fully covered, though I'm not really sure. I know that in the winter I often wake up with barely the top of my head poking out above the quilts' and blankets' top edges.

In any case: something about the first cool nights of approaching fall makes me a happy sleeper. And because fully sound sleep is only now returning to me, after its strange hiatus this summer, I am simply pleased by the thought of keeping the window near the bed open for tonight's slumbering.

Red sky at night...

At about 4:30 p.m., the heat-break we'd all been waiting for flew into town, bearing with it the tornado siren's sweet scream and the weather forecasters' vague warnings: possibly some tornadic motion somewhere near Fredericktown, about thirty minutes northwest of here. Possibly a cloud mass starting to corkscrew. Certainly a mass of red over most of Knox County. No tornado warning yet--but enough that my dog friend and I went to the basement of my excellent friends' house and jumped and played down there for a little while, until the rain

let

up

and

left behind a lowered temperature, lowered enough that I sit here with the curtains blowing, and I can feel that the air coming in is not hot. Lowered enough that when my young friends and I ventured out for one last summer game of bocce--for soon I will be grading first papers and screening films and conducting class discussions; soon they will doing reading assignments and sitting at seminar tables; soon we will all be so busy that I fear bocce seems all too likely to become a promise for another time--we walked into a lawn of rising fog. I have never seen fog come to visit a field before, not like that. I've seen it once it's there. But I haven't walked right into it, met it as it's come, seen what has been dew suddenly assume a third dimension, rise into the air, hang palely in the last light. That lawn is magic; I decided this tonight, as I tracked back through the wet grass, having gone to point out where the pallino landed.

I don't know how much longer we'll have this new, cooler weather around, but the sky was red at sunset tonight, and so I am hopeful that tomorrow will be cool and clear enough to open up my house and clean it down in honor of a dear friend's first visit to Gambier. Tonight, it was cool enough that my excellent friends' dog frisked through his walk for the first time in days; we traveled an extra distance, simply so that we could both stretch our legs.

Today, I finally finished Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, where I discovered Annie Dillard using a word I'd just pulled from the OED last night, searching for (and, I think, finding) a better title for a poem I'm writing. Today, I also read Donald Hall's lovely and moving introduction to James Wright's complete poems. Today, I taught two people how to improvise a chicken sautée using freshly ground herbs, salt, pepper, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar. They got right into the spirit: how about an orange pepper? how about an onion? how about some garlic? should we have angel hair pasta with it? (Answers: yes, yes, yes, and yes.) And one of them went on to make our dessert, his first pie. This was before the cat sat in my lap looking out at the sunset from under the porch table, while we ate our salads; this was before we ventured out into the fog for our last bocce throws. This was before I had to acknowledge, once again, that this strange and lovely summer is starting to end.

But o, o the larks of fall. This ending will be worth that beginning. To rub elbows and talk shop with poets, to watch the leaves brilliant out into reds and yellows again, to charge up for class again and again: life-blood stuff. Without which I would not be I.

The voice of the turtle is heard through the land.

This evening, I am on the brink of finishing my rereading of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek--which, if you're keeping score, you know has taken me some considerable time. I was strolling along toward the bookstore this evening, planning to read until closing time, when I spied my beloved Greek mentor's car, pulling up to our town's now-defunct gas station. Now, there are two cars of this make in Gambier, so it was possible that I was not seeing my friend after all. I approached casually, ready to veer back off toward the bookstore if it were not he. But it was indeed my friend, who instantly invited me over for talking. And so off we went.

The title for tonight's post both comes from and is a tribute to the kinds of night talking he and I have done for many years now. I have known this man for more than thirteen years; he is the reason I picked up a classics major while I was here as a student. When I was a senior, I knew the sound of his office door's opening and closing, and I knew him well enough to know when it was okay to stop in and say hello at 11:30 p.m. and when it was better to leave him working. When I graduated, he was one of the people I cried to be leaving. When he retired, not so long after I graduated, I cried all over again, though I wasn't quite sure why, that time; I suspect it had something to do with the beauty and justice of watching him be honored for twelve straight hours, during a symposium in his honor, and I suspect it might also have had something to do with my recognizing the onward passage of time in a particularly forceful way that day.

When I was in graduate school, Kenyon was about two-thirds of the way from Ithaca to my parents' house, and so I often stopped off in Gambier for visits, coming and going. I always stayed either with my excellent friends or with my Greek mentor. And no matter whom I actually stayed with, I nearly always managed at least one night's long conversation with this man who is among the dearest and most consequential people in my life.

Tonight, we swapped stories about bibliography (he has all these old books, and now I know how to interpret their physical make-up! and so we both just marveled) and neoplatonism, about poetry and mysticism, about religion and uncertainty and complexity. And we talked Elizabeth Barrett Browning, since he has just joined the fold of people who have read (and loved) all of Aurora Leigh. Paging through a volume of Barrett Browning's late essays, I discovered that the first line of her writing about the English poets is "The voice of the turtle is heard through the land," which happens to scan in precisely the way many of my poems' first lines--the first lines that often get shaped and reshaped and then scrapped, though they've birthed a poem--come to me: an iamb (stressed + unstressed: "the VOICE") and three anapests (two unstressed + stressed: "of the TURtle is HEARD through the LAND"). I wonder whether EBB's ear also ran to eleven or twelve syllables naturally and then had to be brought into line when she wanted the neat iambics of blank verse.

In any case, the line struck me as being so wholly unexpected that it seemed the perfect textual correlative for the pleasure of randomly encountering a dear friend whom I'd been meaning to call anyway (and whose opening salvo to me was "I could show you in the calendar where it says, 'Call her'") and then spending a lazily vigorous few hours with iced tea and old books. It's also a perfect example of the way our evenings have always gone: intellectual discussions with him are, have always been, pure play and sheer joy, experiences that leave me feeling younger and stronger and older and wiser than before, all at once. For thirteen years--and especially for the nine since my graduation--I have believed that something about our friendship manages to eradicate the decades of difference between us, leaving us roughly the same age--and an age that never groans on to growing old, at that. He has long been my mainstay; in that, I am blessed. It is one measure of how astonishingly hectic my first years back in Gambier have been that I have not actually spent so many more evenings perched in his red study, sipping tea and bandying about ideas.

Walking to my house a little while ago, I realized the extent to which we are now in the loud days of August, cicadas and night insects percussing away in the trees in a high-chugging call and response that would be maddening if it didn't fade out from my conscious hearing so swiftly each year (or each day that I recognize anew that it's part of my soundscape). I could rewrite EBB's line and make it true for this night: "The voice of the insects is heard through the land." I would rewrite it again and make it "The voice of the insects resounds through the land." And then, I'd be off and writing--as, perhaps, I am.

Unburying the fruits of summer.

Miscellanie has posted latter-day still lives of Michigan fruit, and I have just had a Proustian movement of mind, revivifying my grandparents' backyard in Detroit.

For about 35 years, my grandparents lived in a bungalow on Cadieux Avenue in eastern Detroit, near the Grosse Pointe border. In my memory, their house is perfect: everything is exactly the size it needs to be; we all fit snugly into it (my grandparents and me sleeping on the ground floor, my parents and brother sleeping upstairs in the yellow slope-ceilinged space that was my mother's bedroom in the late 1960s); there are always surprises waiting somewhere (candy bars in the basement pantry, strange boardgames in the furnace room, exquisite desserts in the cake container). And the garden.

City gardens strike me as being their own special kind of exquisite. My grandparents gardened in tandem; my grandmother had roses and black-eyed susans and snapdragons and, no doubt, any number of other flowers that I now cannot call to mind. And one of the reasons I cannot call them to mind is that they are dwarfed, in my memory, by my grandfather's vegetable garden. My grandfather grew up on a farm near the north of Michigan's thumb, nearest to a town called Bad Axe, and though he left the farm for the city well before World War II, the farm did not leave him. Behind the garage on Cadieux, he had a plot of perhaps ten feet square. And in those hundred square feet, he grew unimaginable riches: tomatoes and cucumbers and carrots and lettuces and, no doubt, any number of other vegetables that I now cannot call to mind.

And one of the reasons I cannot call them to mind is that they are dwarfed, in my memory, by the raspberries that grew along the wall of the garage. My grandfather fashioned a special raspberry-picking tool, a kind of long-handled fork that he could use for reaching the farthest berries; he also used this tool to carry the partial milk jug in which he placed the berries as he picked them, one by one. He was among the craftiest of men. He taught me how to pick my way through those narrow rows, how to seek out the fruits among those veined leaves, how to decide which berries were ready to be pulled (not so much plucked as pulled) from the bush. Every summer when we visited my grandparents, we ate more than our fill of raspberries. My grandmother was the one who taught me how to eat raspberries: the first few, sneaked out of the pail even before the pail reached the house, to be sure; but the rest in a bowl, sprinkled lightly with sugar and forced to yield up juice (I now know this process as maceration); and on exceptional occasions--otherwise known as most times we visited my grandparents--over the kind of vanilla ice cream that scoops into a bowl, perhaps a 50s-pastel plastic bowl with a white rim, with an unbearable whiteness of being, begging for those berries that were still on the bush thirty minutes earlier. Such gastronomical joys, right down to the drinking of the syrup and melted ice cream concoction left at the bottom of the bowl when the too-hurried devouring of summer's best goodness had ended.

My grandparents also taught me the beauty of the frozen berry: even in the winters, we could sometimes find square plastic tubs of raspberries in the basement freezer. I neither grow nor freeze raspberries now; when raw raspberries, raspberries au naturel if you will, materialize before me, I enjoy in them an aftertaste of childhood, with just the ghost of a melancholic twinge at that particular city garden's goneness from my life. I do not think that my having gotten terrible poison ivy while picking raspberries on a farm near Ithaca has anything to do with my not seeking them out when they appear in the stores and the markets. Instead, I think that quasiavoidance is due to my utter focus on the workings of blueberry season.

I had never eaten a fresh, raw blueberry before arriving in Ithaca for graduate school, but within days of my arrival, blueberries constituted the cornerstone of my diet. Every subsequent summer--even in these last summers, when freshly picked Finger Lakes blueberries are not accessible to me with every trip to the local grocery--I have watched as the labels on the plastic packages of berries bear the names of nearer and nearer origins: somewhere far, then New Jersey, then Michigan. Every subsequent summer, I have hedged my bets about when the season is at its zenith and the prices at their nadir and have frozen pints and pints of berries. In some ways, blueberries are even better than raspberries, as a freezing fruit: they lose nothing of their texture or flavor when they're thawed. There are few things finer, in my food life, than a surprise! fresh blueberry pie in February. Not even to mention blueberry pancakes.

sources for tonight's images: 1) GardenAction's raspberry page; 2) Oregon State's Food Resource.

Poems are a better fate than prosing.

Stopped at the bookstore today after a long lunch with a student I haven't seen in a year, I decided to continue building my twentieth-century poetry collection (so scant, so neglected) by buying James Wright's Above the River: Complete Poems. I have a bone to pick with the folks at FSG and Wesleyan University Press for having cast Wright's book into their lot of things to be printed digitally. I don't know if you've yet had an experience with books printed on demand, but mine have been vastly substandard: the type tends to be fainter than usual, as though everything hasn't quite printed--as though it's fading away from itself, and the covers are particularly to be lamented. I don't fully understand what corners publishers cut when they turn to this alternate method of printing, but I'd love it if they could get their acts together and make demand-printed books indistinguishable from regular books.

Anyhow.

I'm preparing to leave the officehouse (and its glorious, terrible-heat-index-defeating air conditioning), and so, as is my wont to do, I have opened Wright's volume and dipped in. And so you get a poem from him instead of a prose reflection from me, tonight. And it's fitting, really, given that Wright studied here; he graduated in 1952.

The Quest

In pasture where the leaf and wood
Were lorn of all delicious apple,
And underfoot a long and supple
Bough leaned down to dip in mud,
I came before the dark to stare
At a gray nest blown in a swirl,
As in the arm of a dead girl
Crippled and torn and laid out bare.

On a hill I came to a bare house,
And crept beside its bleary windows,
But no one lived in those gray hollows,
And rabbits ate the dying grass.
I stood upright, and beat the door,
Alone, indifferent, and aloof
To pebbles rolling down the roof
And dust that filmed the deadened air.

High and behind, where twilight chewed
Severer planes of hills away,
And the bonehouse of a rabbit lay
Dissolving by the darkening road,
I came, and rose to meet the sky,
And reached my fingers to a nest
Of stars laid upward in the west;
They hung too high; my hands fell empty.

So, as you sleep, I seek your bed
And lay my careful, quiet ear
Among the nestings of your hair,
Against your tenuous, fragile head,
And hear the birds beneath your eyes
Stirring for birth, and know the world
Immeasurably alive and good,
Though bare as rifted paradise.

--James Wright

It is just so very possible that I would love it if someone's quiet ear cared to hear the birds beneath my eyes.

Driving home, illuminated.

Herewith, my visual record of yesterday's drive. I think that prose of substance will resume tomorrow. (To follow along with your map, start in Amherst, VA. Follow 60-E to Cumberland, VA, observing disused buildings all along the way. Turn around and go back to square one. Then, follow 60-W over the Blue Ridge Mountains to Buena Vista ("Boona Vista"), VA. Take I-81 north to I-64 west. Follow I-64 past the fallen signs at the exit for the West Virginian "mall" that consists of a KMart, up more mountains and near mountaintop cloudcover, until you get to Charleston. Just after you see the gilded dome of the West Virginian state capitol building, swing north on I-77. Follow I-77 north into Ohio, breathing a strange sigh of relief to cross the river and reenter your own state, even though you experienced some serious doubts about living there, while you were away. Love the corn's extreme, stalky bordering of the highway. Love the fields of fog all around you. Love the quiet deer at the side of the road. Love the single firework that erupts silently up ahead, somewhere near the I-77 / I-70 interchange that alerts you to the fact that you're nearly home. Love the moon in the dark, as you always do, always, no matter where you are. Love the end of the drive in quiet and solitude, the camera gone quiet in your lap as you eat up the last miles home.)

Home again, home again.

Once again, I have nearly completed a post and then lost it. And once again, I have had this experience while pushing the bounds of my own wakefulness. And so, though I hate to say it, you're going to get the merest of safe return announcements from me tonight, to be followed up by images and reflections in the morning. Images weren't uploading earlier, anyway, so the original version of this post would have been completely unillustrated. At least now I can give you the bookends of my day, as my constant promise of more to come. Before I set out early this afternoon, I enjoyed a lovely morning of porch-sitting and coffee-drinking with the recently relocated friend I'd traveled to see (and her three terrifically friendly and goofy dogs). By the time I was drinking cup number three, the shadows on the porch had gotten just so. Near the end of the trip, just as I crossed the Ohio River, a perfect crescent moon appeared in the western sky, hooked me silverly, and led me the rest of the way home. I didn't get a good picture of the moon, so the sunset will have to suffice.

Again, I'll say more about the trip in the morning. You know I'm good for it.

The voyage out.

Off, now, with my new books and my new knowledge and (in a more figurative sense) my new friends. One night a little further south. And then homeward bound, which means my next dispatch should (d.v.) reach you from lovely Gambier.

Just in case you're feeling bereft by this short post, I'll give you a brief text to discuss. I cut Whitman some serious slack here, on the question of his pronouns' gender. I've excerpted from the Preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855):

The known universe has one complete lover and that is the greatest poet. He consumes an eternal passion and is indifferent which chance happens and which possible contingency of fortune or misfortune and persuades daily and hourly his delicious pay. What balks or breaks others is fuel for his burning progress to contact and amorous joy. [...] His love above all love has leisure and expanse ... he leaves room ahead of himself. He is no irresolute or suspicious lover ... he is sure ... he scorns intervals. His experience and the showers and thrills are not for nothing. Nothing can jar him ... suffering and darkness cannot--death and fear cannot. To him complaint and jealousy and envy are corpses buried and rotten in the earth ... he saw them buried. The sea is not surer of the shore or the shore of the sea than he is of the fruition of his love and of all perfection and beauty. [...]

The greatest poet has less a marked style and is more the channel of thoughts and things without increase or diminution, and is the free channel of himself. He swears to his art, I will not be meddlesome, I will not have in my writing any elegance or effect or originality to hang in the way between me and the rest like curtains. I will have nothing hang in the way, not the richest curtains. What I tell I tell for precisely what it is. Let who may exalt or startle or fascinate or soothe I will have purposes as health or heat or snow has and be as regardless of observation. What I experience or portray shall go from my composition without a shred of my composition. You shall stand by my side and look in the mirror with me.

Now, while I drive off into the sunset, you can talk amongst yourselves.

Sometimes there's just no question.

When my computer crashed a few minutes ago--or should I say, when my computer wheezed and sighed and shut down a few minutes ago, since it was nothing so dramatic as a crash--I thought, Well, at least I didn't have anything open that was unsaved.

I've just realized that my entire writing for tonight was still waiting to be posted. And that means, my friends, that you'll have to wait for those deep thoughts, because I'm just not going to be rewriting them right now.

The high points:

I shopped successfully at three used bookstores tonight, and yea, it was good. They were all really good used bookstores. I have not gotten to have such a spree since I lived in Ithaca. (My excellent friend, you will be glad to know that I now own several Ann-Marie MacDonald and David Mahlouf novels!)

I ate dinner at a fine restaurant tonight and had a chance to read the beginning of Kate Atkinson's Case Histories while I sipped my French Syrah and waited for my medium-rare steak to materialize. Dining alone is its own special kind of gustatory pleasure. I feel this way about seeing movies alone, as well.


I acquired a new Bloom bag that turns out to have cost me at least 25% less than the going rate for these bags. Whereas I was happy about the bag before I came back to this room that has come to feel like home, I was downright gleeful to discover this extra piece of information. The bag features enough pockets that I suspect I could lose everything--I could lose it all!--in this one bag. Plus there's a flowered lining.

It was suggested during class this morning that I'm ready to open my own bibliography shop.

Which of these things was my favorite? No one of them is separable from the others. What a good day it's been. And another poem? Two, in fact? Yes, please. Keep pointing me in the right direction; I'm listening.

What we talk about when we talk about books.

This morning, it occurred to me that you might not have the foggiest idea of what I'm doing down here at bibliography camp. Here's the short overview: my current research project centers on how a certain body of auto/biographical (that slash signals autobiographical + biographical + the things that are a little of both) texts got put together, and I decided toward the end of my dissertation work that it would be a mighty good idea to get some actual, professional training in how to study printed materials, at some point. That point is now. I'm enrolled in a week-long descriptive bibliography course, in which I'm learning how to pick up a book from either the hand-press period (i.e., c1500-c1800) or the machine-press period (c1800-present) and write down a detailed description of its format, collation, signing, and pagination. There's a lot of other material to describe, of course, but this course is the introduction, and so we stop short at pagination and a little bit of transcription (copying out what's on a title page).

These words may mean nothing to you, and so let me practice what I now know and explain myself. When I'm handed a book in this course--and we're actually handed boxes of six books for each night's multi-hour homework session, which comes fast on the heels of our six hours of lab, museum, and lecture during the day--the first thing I do is start nosing around in the opening pages, trying to ascertain what the book's format is. In bibliography, to determine a book's format is to determine the relationship of the book's gatherings, or folded and stitched pages, to the sheet of paper on which that gathering was originally printed. In the hand-press period, in particular, books were printed on sheets, folded, and quired or gathered. Those gatherings then got stitched together into books; after the stitching, they received some kind of binding, though at that stage things get complicated and beyond our purview this week. There are a few very basic formats. If a sheet has been printed and then just folded in half (imagine the way a greeting card is printed and folded), the book's format is called folio, and we say it has two leaves (each leaf having two pages). If it has been printed and then folded twice, it's a quarto (four leaves, eight pages). And if it's been printed and folded three times, it's an octavo (eight leaves, sixteen pages). If I didn't have class again in 40 minutes, I'd draw you some pictures. For now, take my word for it (and go out looking for diagrams on the web, if you're super-curious). There are all kinds of ways to determine format. Some of the coolest involve looking at the chain lines (the lines left on a sheet of paper by the mold in which that paper was made), which go in different directions depending on how many times the paper has been folded; and looking at watermarks, which end up in different places on a leaf depending (again) on the number of folds. The more complicated formats are things like duodecimos, where there are twelve leaves; and things like sixteenmos and eighteenmos and twenty-fourmos. (We haven't had any from that last group yet, but I have a feeling my moment of reckoning may arrive in about four hours.)

Once I've determined format, I get to determine a statement of collation, which basically involves paging through the entire book, taking notes about its gatherings--where those units of two, or four, or six, or eight leaves are, and how they're attached together. As I've told a couple of people, here and elsewhere, this work is so simultaneously lively and methodical that I feel almost meditative while I do it. I have to keep my mind completely in the game, or else I'll miss the moment when I switch from gatherings of four to gatherings of two, midway through a book, and then switch right back. Or I'll miss the moment when the printer put the wrong signature on a leaf. Now, the signature of a leaf is the little number or letter that shows up somewhere in what's called the direction line on the page. Generally, it's going to be alphabetical or numerical; one gathering will be signed A, and then the next B, and so on. You may be able to find books in your own possession that display such signatures, especially if you have anything that's fairly old. Look in the center or the gutter (i.e., inner margin) of the bottom of the right-hand pages, and keep your eyes out for the alphabet, or for what looks like a weird, intermittent page number. That's your signature. Printers were not always so perfect about getting every number into a signature, which is where the fun comes in. This morning, for instance, I worked on a book that had two different signatures, one (numbers) for the groups of six in which the book was actually gathered and one (letters) that was obviously left on the printing plates from an earlier, larger format edition of this book. Sometimes individual letters will just go missing, or will get missigned. There's a whole grammar for writing this stuff out, and it looks remarkably mathematical, which is part of the reason I was having all those dreams about math before I came down here. (Now, I'm sleeping so happily exhaustedly that I wake up not remembering my dreams at all.)

I would offer you an example of a formula, but I don't think I have an option of doing superscripts and subscripts, which are everywhere in this stuff. So, you'll have to take my word for it: these formulæ read like a different language. I can show you one signing statement, which is just the string of symbols that alerts a reader to how each of a book's gatherings is signed--what the marks are that distinguish one gathering from the next. This part comes after a statement of format and a statement of collation, and a simple one looks like this: [$1,3 signed; signing $3 as '$*']. (This book, by the way, had gatherings of six leaves, which were signed with numbers rather than letters.) Translated, what that statement means is "the first and third leaves of each gathering are signed; the third leaf is signed with an asterisk added to the number of the gathering." On the page, this means that in the first six leaves (or twelve pages) of the book, which are all stitched together, 1 should be signed (but because it's the title page, it's not), and 3 is signed 1*. In the second six leaves, leaf 1 is signed 2 and leaf 3 is 2*. In the third six leaves, leaf 1 is signed 3 and leaf 3 is 3*. See?

As you who have taken languages may have experienced, learning a new language can be a continually epiphanic experience. At one moment this morning, I sat looking over a somewhat bizarre string of data I had assembled, and I had no idea what to do with it all. I sat and looked, sat and looked, and suddenly, the patterns came erupting into my mind, and I had the notation for them, too. One of my favorite experiences of these mornings has been recopying my messy pencilled ideas into neat, inked versions, just before we go to the lab where we work through our night's work. I am so pleased when I find out I've done my work capably and well. But I'm also so pleased when I find out just how I've done it wrong and can then fix my other errors before it's time to put another formula up on the lab's whiteboard and go to work critiquing it. In some sense, though, I'm an overly distractable bibliographer (which doesn't seem to be keeping me from rocking the house; yes, all of you "told-you-so"ers, you can tell me so when I talk to you again; I turned up here knowing just plenty, and knowing where to find what I didn't already know). I can't help but notice things on the pages that I'm working through, though I notice them in fits and starts.

Yesterday's title, for instance, came off an early page in a music book we were examining. Another book in that group, The Gleaner: A Miscellaneous Production in Three Volumes, By Constantia (1798), featured a character named "Flauntinetta," whose name ended up in the bottom corner of one page as a catchword, to tell the printer what needed to go at the beginning of the next page. So of course I couldn't ignore a catchword like Flauntinetta and proceeded to read, and then transcribe, the next page:

Flauntinetta, the long incorrigible Flauntinetta, became a widow; and both herself and children were totally destitute!! It was in the moment of her calamity, that the eyes of her understanding being opened, she consequently beheld the revered guardian of her youth, adorned with every virtue which can dignify humanity, and, once more sheltered under the maternal wing, she hath, at length, learned to estimate the value of rational tranquillity.

From then on, I picked up bits and pieces out of that book, as I picked through it, page by page, seeking out the details I actually needed for my homework. "Lucinda was her creditor." "Just returned from a tour of friendship." "The most rapt sensations rushed on my soul, while the poverty of words necessitated me to remain silent" (that's my favorite one). "The experience of every day evinces that humanity is subject to error." "but that pang was transient."

I could offer you more pieces of text, but instead I will draw this writing abruptly to a halt (because it's time to go learn about printing) and tell you that the pictures scattered through this post are also things I've been gleaning from the books, now that I've gotten the all-clear from my lab instructor to take whatever pictures I might want. The guy at the top of the page was my sign, last night, that the books were winning and it was time for me to go to sleep; but this morning, his puckishness is so friendly that I know I misinterpreted him. (It is possible that I had not yet read the right books to interpret his looks.) The volcano in the middle, well, how can you not take a picture of a volcano when it shows up in the middle of a black letter volume? And I just liked this pair.

You'll undoubtedly get more book snippets from me before this week is out; my eye doesn't seem to want to stay fixed only on what I'm meant to see. In other words, I am seeing those things, plus all manner of others. And it will come as little surprise to those of you who know me well that I am utterly in paradise.

From what do varieties of measure arise?

I take my title (so as not to keep you in suspense) from The Golden Harp, or Boston Sacred Melodist, one of the books I collated for this morning's lab session.

A combination of counting leaves, inspecting papers, feeling animal hides (used for bindings, bien sur), and drinking a good caffeinated beverage after each of these activities has left me feeling expansive beyond myself, desrious of writing at least two poems before doing some homework before having dinner in ninety minutes. So, let me take this quick pause to show you my favorite images from yesterday.

The icon of the "academical village"

Early evening in the Rotunda

My favorite entry in the "I Saw You" column of the Charlottesville Hook's personals section

The view from my dorm room

A somewhat skeptical title-bearer in one of the books I collated (correctly, even!) last night

I have high hopes of getting actual, reflective prose to you all sometime soon. But it might be later than I'd like, rather than sooner. I know you understand. I'm repriming the pump. Expect intense goodness (and/or good intensity) in the near future.

Ways that I loved the 456 miles to where I'm now sitting.

Singing along, for one thing, and in that many miles, one can listen to quite a lot, and then listen to it again. Issuing dispatches from my driving self to my poet and critic selves (by way of my iPod+iTalk combination). Grinning and even laughing a bit to myself about feeling so very much as though I were on the lam, slicing southward alone, even though I was actually driving a longish haul to bibliography camp. Getting sunwashed, just enough to pink-glow my nose and chest and to give me abundance of more freckles on my left arm.

But mostly, looking:

(Mossy and Oak Hill, it turns out, are separate places in West Virginia.)

Later, I'll offer some pictures of where I'm calling from (room 33 on the West Lawn at the University of Virginia, for those of you keeping score at home; room 13 was Poe's, during the short time he was here). You can expect me to be probably at least a day behind, this week, while I'm cramming my head and my fingers even more full of format and collation and foliation and pagination and patterns and pattern-breaking. Here, everyone is a bibliophile. Here, we get to roughhouse (gently) with old books. Here, I think I'm going to start sleeping soundly again, under the enormous fan and behind the screen-shutter-doors of this historic accommodation. In my optimism, I've even brought along the books I haven't been able to make progress in reading, all these intense and far-flinging weeks: Dillard, Ammons, Stern, Whitman, Faulkner, Keats, Plato. In my optimism, I am carrying my poetry notebook and my camera. In my optimism, I've brought my bocce set and my new dress, the black-on-black one with the pockets, and my dangly necklace and my sparkly shoes. For the one thing I know is that one never, ever knows, and there is that Thursday evening antiquarian bookseller expedition to anticipate.

Two sweet songs for my road trip.

I feel no small trepidation about posting poems while this hilarity is ongoing (be sure to read the comments; I defy you not to chortle in your chair, even if you don't know all the originals--or even if you not only know but also revere all the originals). I don't want these two poems to get tagged when I mean them in such great earnest (even though I think that #1 would actually be a great candidate for the joke). But I'm going to brave the danger anyhow, never having been one to let my earnestness get in the way of a terrific joke, or vice versa. (One reason I like the joke so much, by the way, is that it reminds me of a grad school friend who suggested that all dissertation titles should end with the words "Who knew?"--as in, "Figurations of Masculinity in Romantic Poetry: Who Knew?"; "Lacanian Theory Goes to the Movies: Who Knew?"; and so on.)

Without further ado:

The One Thing in Life

Wherever I go now I lie down on my own bed of straw
and bury my face in my own pillow.
I can stop in any city I want to
and pull the stiff blanket up to my chin.
It's easy now, walking up a flight of carpeted stairs
and down a hall past the painted fire doors.
It's easy bumping my knees on a rickety table
and bending down to a tiny sink.
There is a sweetness buried in my mind;
there is water with a small cave behind it;
there's a mouth speaking Greek.
It is what I keep to myself; what I return to;
the one thing that no one else wanted.

The Sweetness of Life

After the heavy rain we were able to tell about the mushrooms,
which ones made us sick, which ones had the dry bitterness,
which ones caused stomach pains and dizziness and hallucinations.

It was the beginning of religion again--on the river--
all the battles and ecstasies and persecutions
taking place beside the hackberries and the fallen locust.

I sat there like a lunatic,
weeping, raving, standing on my head, living
in three and four and five places at once.

I sat there letting the wild and domestic combine,
finally accepting the sweetness of life,
on my own mushy log,
in the white and spotted moonlight.

--Gerald Stern

Traveling explosions.

Through the night, I slept like a fretful thing. The rain started to fall sometime in deepest dark; I think I woke to it three, maybe four times. After the second of these awakenings, around 5 a.m., I thought I was awake for good. The last time I had that experience was during the summer of my dissertation, when I awoke in a situation that I had, in that instant of awakening, outgrown. That morning, I crept out to the kitchen, made a pot of coffee, watched the blue backyard, and then wrote, wrote my heart out, wrote my heart, wrote my way to my new life.

Today, I did sleep again after 5 a.m.

In my dream, I encountered two celebrities who recently had a child that no one has yet seen; we were in the living room of my high school best friend's house when I asked this famous purported mother about her child. "We're getting a divorce," she whispered to me. Later, I drove my car through a rural place a bit like the roads east of Gambier. No one else was around. As I drove, there was suddenly an explosion and an enormous plume of black smoke beside a farmhouse at the left side of the road. The house's dilapidated barn caught fire. I pulled my car off into the hayfield at the right side of the road--or so I thought; when I returned to it a few minutes later, it was still in the middle of the rural highway I'd been traveling--and ran to find someone who could help. No one could help. I gave up and fled the scene. I spent the rest of the dream--even the part where I went to the strange bar/bowling alley and walked between some children and their horseshoe game's target; even the part where I went to the vintage store and found it staffed by a whole group of people vaguely my own age who seemed interesting but away from whom I walked instantly--wandering, fearful of the police, fearful that I'd be implicated in what had blown up. I should note that when I returned to my car after the abortive attempt to find help right after the explosion, I discovered that several other houses near that stretch of road had also been burned. I should note that the art house movie theater that I discovered in the same town with the vintage store and the bar/bowling alley was showing Paradise Regained.

I should note that the rural vistas in my dream were the very stuff of hopeless beauty and implacable longing.

I should note that, despite my dream, I managed to get a couple more hours of sleep but that I've now given it up.

How empty can a fullness be?

That's the question for your consideration this evening. I am in high-order bibliographic training right now, suffering lots of my old student anxieties. And today has been particularly wrenching, in a way that you'll understand best, perhaps, if I tell you that when I looked out my car window and saw this image earlier today, it felt like a recognition, the making manifest of a gathering inner blank:

Fortunately, though many things are lost, many others remain, and some turn out to be not so much lost as transmuted, which is its own decidedly non-blank blessing. And so the question pivots on itself to become "How full can an emptiness be?" I think these two are inextricable. They certainly are for me, certainly for today.

I'm hoping that my writing here will be decidedly more full (though perhaps not empty-full) again very soon, but it may get quieter for a little while, first. There are all these book details to know and to wield, you see. But first, there's all this fatigue to be slept away.