the hero's story has already been told

To the Line: Living Pedagogy from the Bleachers

2012-01-25T20:07:00.000-07:00

Tonight I am spending my evening watching twobasketball games at the community college where I teach. I have, combined, onthe women’s and men’s teams, six current students, and at least half a dozen formerstudents. This is not the first basketball game I have been to for my students—Iattended one last spring, when the women’s team was tearing it up in the NJCAA tournament.Of the major competitive sports, I fully admit that basketball is the one Ifollow least. I am rabid in my following of baseball and ice hockey, and I putin a fair showing on the matter of European football and the NFL. I even gotfairly embroiled in our (no longer) local Rookie League baseball team, theCasper Ghosts, a Rockies affiliate that has since moved on to greener pasturesin Colorado.

But basketball has always been on the fringe ofmy sports-loves. I get caught up in the March Madness with everyone else, ofcourse, but I don’t understand the niceties of the game. Sitting here on thisvaguely uncomfortable moulded plastic, I still don’t understand them. I get therules in a fairly basic way—shot clock limitations, fouling out—but unless it’sNBA-level traveling, taking the ball for a walk on a leash, more or less, I can’tsee those sorts of infractions. And I watch too much ice hockey to see the foulin a little bump, in obstruction. So this is not a post about basketball, atleast not in the way that it could be.

What this post is about is about putting mymoney where my mouth is.

I said: I have been to a women’s basketballgame at my current campus before. Almost a year ago. At that time, I knew abouthalf of the players that I know now. (It’s a small school—if one teaches aTuesday/Thursday section of one of the required sections, wherein the athletesstand a lesser chance of missing classes due to their traveling schedule—it doesn’ttake many semesters to see a lot of them, very quickly.) I enjoyed the heck outof the experience; college athletics have a kind of energy about them that isdifficult to recreate anywhere else. It was also a playoff: no second chances,no takebacks, no do-overs. All of that is everything the movies chalk it up tobe, if one cares at all about the competition.

On Tuesday, in the first of my Composition IIclasses, the one in which I have six of our college’s basketball players (fivewomen, one man), I asked if there were any campus events going on this week,any announcements. And I’d looked at the schedule—I knew they had a gametonight. So I said that at least six people had something to say, and two ofthe women’s players dutifully announced the game times, and someone elseannounced an internationally themed dinner in the cafeteria, and then we movedon to our discussion of Annie Dillard and the various ways writers utilizeresearch. After class, I wished the hoopsters luck, and one of them said it wasgoing to be a big game—regional rivals, another quality bunch of players, areal contest—would I find time to come? Another one of the students, one I hadhad in class just the previous semester in Composition I, said, “She nevercomes to our games.”

And I couldn’t deny that, not to that student. Thisis her first year on the team. I’d gone the whole first half of the seasonwithout attending, despite my insistence that students get involved, despite myimploring that everyone take advantage of the many excellent entertainmentopportunities afforded by the college environment, despite my adamant imprecationsto support each other in their various endeavors. I was stunned, actually, thatshe said as much, stunned and then quite shamed.

I have to admit: I never thought my athletesnoticed. I’ve been to plays, musical performances, art sales, and galleryexhibitions—lots of things like that. Those students—the performers—they notice.They bask in the attention. They hug me after theatre performances while they’restill covered in greasepaint and sweaty from playing Russian bear wrestlers onstage. They make bad music puns smoothly and glibly while they preen. Theynotice because, to a certain extent, pursuing the fine arts is pursuing acareer in being noticed—it’s part of the game: showmanship, pride in the art,the practice, the skill.

But I love sports, too. I played. I have tomake conscious efforts to leave the house during baseball season. And I’ve beento lacrosse games, soccer matches, and rugby meets to cheer on students. I’vebeen to what I thought was my first and only rodeo, but I think I’ll have totry again because I’ve got a saddle bronc rider in Composition II and a barrelracer who was in creative non-fiction last semester who wrote about the sportwith the kind of frank clarity and long memory that comes only from doingsomething quite literally since she was in the womb. The players haveconsistently avoided eye contact—not that they’re ashamed of what they do, notthat they’re embarrassed because their completely dorky English teacher withthe weird hair has come and is waving, dear Christ, butbecause, for some of them, the game is a kind of private joy. It only happensto be public and they’ve had nothing to do with that. Maybe this isparticularly true for those students who are not—who know they are not—going topursue a professional career in sport. Maybe they’ll become coaches, maybe they’llbecome trainers or physical therapists or doctors specializing in sportsmedicine or maybe they’ll never look back after that last season ends and willdo nothing in athletics again.

Maybe it’s that, when they’re in the zone, theystay there. Win or lose, it’s hard to come out of that in-game mindset for mostathletes. I spent a dozen years playing competitive softball—no matter theoutcome, coming out of that space involves risk. Sometimes it’s the risk ofhaving to acknowledge failure. That Lady T-Birds game I went to last springended in a loss. I remember those days: I didn’t want to say anything to anyonethen; I didn’t want to look around for people in the crowd. And after a win,there is often the pressure to remain focused, to avoid too much opencelebration. No one wants coach to think she’s not serious; no one wants thereporters to think he’s unsportsmanlike. They name a lot of penalties for thatfor good reason.

Maybe it’s a lot of things—the only time I haveever been certain was in the case of the Binghamton Red Devils rugby match Iwent to as a graduate student TA. My student, who insisted I call him “Kooz”all semester, didn’t know I was there because he got severely concussed whilewe were standing at the sidelines. He did ask, though, the following class, ifI’d been to the match because someone had told him I was there. “Sorry,” hesaid, “I don’t remember much about Saturday morning.” I definitely get that.

Maybe it’s none of those. Knowing why isn’t thepoint. The heart of it is that I’ve become used to my presence at sportingevents going unnoticed. And it isn’t at all that I go to be noticed; I go because I love sports. (I am alone among mycolleagues in this, which is not much of a surprise in an English department.)But I will say that I’ve gotten a little lazy, a little slack in my attendancebecause I thought I was unnoticed. Teachingfive sections of composition, creative writing, and/or literature courses inany given semester has left me a lot more cautious with my evenings, withwhatever time I can legitimately claim as my own. I call this my reason, myexcuse.

But my students knew that I hadn’t been there. Theydid notice. It was my women’s players who brought it to my attention. I imaginethat my men’s players feel the same way, but they would rather die thanarticulate it. (I’ve never met a more tight-lipped bunch than my men’s basketballplayers. I think the rodeo lads say more than they do, and that’s a Herculeanfeat.)

I don’t think they noticed and said so becauseI’m a woman and so are they. (I think my students have long ago decided thatanyone who feels that strongly aboutthe Oxford comma cannot possibly be human at all.) I think it’s because they smelledthe faint scent of hypocrisy about me, and that is exactly as it ought to be. Pedagogy—eventhe bits on the periphery, the parts that have nothing to do with gradingpapers and everything to do with being kind, being generous, being true—cannot bea system in which we tell students to do as we say, not as we do. My studentshumble me, they keep me honest. It should always be this way.

I am sitting here in the gymnasium, and thegame is tied with two and a half minutes to go. I do not know how it will end,right this minute, but I surely will before I even finish this paragraph. My palmsand fingertips are blotched red-and-white with clapping, and here, while theteams are in a time-out and the court has stilled, save the little huddles toeach side as the trainers distribute water, I see another one of my students,one from Composition I. She is one of the student trainers, someone who istaking a class in that particular area, and she is in the process of learningto tape ankles and take care of sports injuries. I didn’t know she did this. Rightnow, she sits courtside with the rest of the team, intent on the game, withanother of my students who is a player but who has been battling an ankleinjury since last semester when she spent most of November on crutches.

I was wrong about the game: there’s stillnearly thirty seconds left. We’re up by seven points, and we’re at thefree-throw line. The other team has entered the phase where fouling isnecessary if they don’t get the rebound; time is everything now, and there maynot be enough seconds left, no matter what the luck. I know the outcome now: upby eleven with ten seconds left, and now the end.

The women gather in the center of the court,they join hands, they cheer: a ritual they are certainly used to, when they are12-1 this season, coming off back-to-back Region IX championships. None of themlook up at the stands; I can see no way that they can see or have seen me. Thisdoesn’t change anything. I have seen what they are capable of, and I am proud.I have done, also, what I know that I am capable of, which is living mypedagogy, which is not getting complacent, which is not taking a season offsimply because I think no one is paying attention.

Irony

2012-01-04T10:45:00.000-07:00

Irony in that my last post (a jolly six months ago) was about routines, or my lack thereof.

To recap: had a completely brilliant August that included a two-week roadtrip with one of my dearest friends. Then the semester started again. That takes us through to December and the holidays. A lot of travel then. Glad to be home now.

It's not a very good recap. For reasons I don't quite understand, this autumn was hard for me. There was a lot of good in it--Patrick Madden at the Casper College Literary Conference (read Quotidiana--just a beautiful collection of unexpected essays); CrossFit (yes, I can't believe it, either); starting to plan the 2012 Equality State Book Festival; a publication in Memorious with excellent company (Bob Wrigley! Nina McConigley!)--but also a lot of feeling like I was never on top of anything, never caught up, never where I should have been. I also lost a pen I loved. A really *nice* pen. One I don't know that I can replace.

The rational part of my brain says that it's only a pen. It's a material thing. I have other pens. I even have the financial means that I could probably replace it with something even better. But I'd make a terrible Buddhist because my life is all about attachments, and I loved that pen, dammit. And losing it makes me feel irresponsible. This paragraph is my obligatory confessional, apparently. There. I'm done now.

Autumn is always hard for me. The growing dark. The cold. Skip that. Move ahead.

I've read very few books lately, but I did tear through Mark Gatiss's Lucifer Box trilogy (The Vesuvius Club, The Devil in Amber, and Black Butterfly) with more joy and excitement than I've had while reading for a long time. They're just cracking good reads--perfectly aware of themselves, playful, but containing a surprising amount of heart. My friend Laura has an excellent review of The Vesuvius Club at LibraryThing.

I'd say I'd resolve to read more of Gatiss's books, but there are only three novels in the Box series. That's its own tragedy. Mark Gatiss, if by some chance you ever read this, a few more books set between The Vesuvius Club and The Devil in Amber really wouldn't go amiss. But even if I don't get any more stories about the indomitable, irreverent, and irresistible Lucifer Box, I can remember that this is what reading (and writing) should feel like: there should be something joyful in it. Even when it's difficult, there should be something to love. Because, as Laura and I have been discussing, it's clear that Gatiss must have been having a smashing good time writing these books. I'd like to remember what that's like.

But this is the season of resolutions, isn't it? I'm not going to make any. (I'm lying--I'm making them, but I'm not blogging about them just yet. I abandoned this blog for six months; I clearly can't be trusted.)

I am going to link you to Woody Guthrie's list of 33 resolutions that he made for 1942. All of these "New Years Rulin's" seem wise enough models to follow.

This isn't a resolution, but something else I thought was worth sharing:

Yes, that is a mug with a Beowulf quotation on it. Also, a nautical star shotglass full of milk and a gingerbread cookie.
Don't judge me.

Taking the time to make a coffee or tea service all for yourself is absolutely worth it. Especially when the coffee is from Raven's Brew. Maybe it's in the service of being kinder to yourself. We could all probably use a bit more of that.

Routine (of a flittertigibbet)

2011-07-30T17:48:00.000-06:00

I am interested in routines. I am constantly in search of a good one, of the right one, of the one that's going to fit and be productive and centering and lovely, forever and ever, amen.

I haven't found it yet.

That may be because my schedule is a completely different animal every four-five months, according to when my classes are. It could be that I haven't found a pattern I love enough to fight for.

Two weeks ago, I started a new thing with a friend. (Credit where credit's due--it was her idea.)

Running.

That's probably getting ahead of myself, actually. Let's call it "attempted running." Or "hike/dash/pant." I like the last one. It's the most true. We have a 4.5-mile loop that begins in the local Rotary Park and meanders up and down the midsection of Casper Mountain, a trail known as the Bridle Trail. It also crosses the top of Garden Creek Falls (and involves two in-trail crossings of Garden Creek).

This is not a post about the act. This is a post about what greets me nearly every morning.

Natrona County through the trees. If it were a bit less humid that morning, you could see to the Big Horns.

This wee streamlet is Garden Creek. A bit further down, and it's a respectable waterfall in this wet summer.

The first two pictures here are on the ascent of our path. The trees around the creek are thick, the air dense and cool. It reminds me of Pennsylvania in all of the best ways (and without the mosquitoes and woods' flies). The landscape is dominated by pines and aspens, though some birch and maple still make their way there.

The next images are the descent, and this is where it feels like Wyoming, the way I understand Wyoming. On this side, the bones of the earth are bared and raw, the rock red and white and vast.

I want to stand up there, with the lonely loose rock.

In this one, you can see the stark difference between sun and shade. My whole life on the East Coast, I didn't feel like it made much of a difference, courtesy of humidity and haze. Here, the sunlight is a palette knife's edge, cutting and turning the color over.

Every morning for me now is a melange of work and rest, sweat and chill, pine-needle cushion and granite. These have been the best mornings for me that I can remember.

Lens flare for J. J. Abrams and the sun demanding notice at 6:30 a.m.

Another little adventure

2011-07-19T19:40:00.000-06:00

I, like many other nerds in the world, have been spending a good bit of whatever spare time I have knee-deep in George R. R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons. (I'm not quite finished with it yet, so no spoilers. On pain of maiming.) I've also had some visiting family, and the family visit included a trip to Denver. This post is about that trip, and I'll be back with something a little more focused in the not-so-distant future.

We've been and will be in Denver a whole lot this summer, at least compared to our first year in Wyoming. That is, though, never a bad thing--Denver's a great city, full of a lot of beautiful spaces and good food. And Pacific Mercantile Company, which is where I have to go if I want to get any Asian comestibles that haven't been on the shelf for two years already. (That makes me sound a lot more sophisticated than I am--I bought udon and some black vinegar, sure, but mostly I bought three kinds of gummy candy, including a delicious mango/tamarind sweet, strawberry daifuku, Ramune to drink on the walk back to our hotel, and panda cookies. Japanese candy makes me so happy.)

We also made return visits to the Denver Botanic Gardens and The Denver Museum of Nature and Science for their Real Pirates exhibit so that we could share two brilliant places with the visiting family members.

I don't know much (or what kind of
plant you are, but I know I love you.

No photos from the pirates exhibit, alas, but it is the most excellent thing and only there until August 22, so if you're in the area, you really need to get yourself to the DMNS.

I took a number of photos at the Botanic Gardens, though (with my phone, sadly, because I managed to leave home with a camera with a dead battery and no charging apparatus, but the phone did okay, all things considered). This image to the left is some plant that was housed in the Boettcher Memorial Tropical Conservatory. It was potted beside a resting bench, and there was no marker of what it was called, but I thought it was striking because of its center. The purple inner leaves that shade out to regular green are very cool, too, of course, but look: at its heart, there's a small tuft of what looks like moss, and it's sprouting its own flowers, tiny violet blooms with pointed petals. I was reminded of very, very small mountain harebell--it's just that color. The plant was also cupping a bit of water around the moss, making a wee island. I could have sat in front of it for hours, but I was already planning to spend an inordinate amount of time in the pirates exhibit, so one has to pick one's battles.

The visit also included a visit to Coors Field to see the Rockies play the Brewers. Coors Field is a lovely ballpark, and I have to admit a real fondness for the Rockies. My blood is Philadelphia red, but the Rockies (and their Casper affiliate, the Casper Ghosts) are great favorites of mine. (In August, when the Phillies play the Rockies in Colorado, it's going to be hard to not cheer for the Rocks, too. I might be that idiot at the stadium just clapping and hooting after every play, no matter what happens.)

Ubaldo Jimenez pitched for the Rockies, and I had a chance to watch him warm up in the bullpen, Coors Field being one of those places where fans can actually look down from the concourse into the bullpens. This is possible because Rockies fans are rather kind. You'll notice that, at Citizens Bank Park, where the Phillies play, the Phillies bullpen is not in open view to the public. That's because Phillies fans will harass their own relievers just as much as the away team's.

Ubaldo!

And then, because it was a bit rainy before the game, we were treated to a very lovely bit of rainbow above the Qwest building at Coors Field. The Brewers are on the field there. The Brewers got beat pretty badly at this game, but we did get to see Corey Hart hit a home run late in the game. The Rockies' Ryan Spilborghs also went yard. The only disappointments that I had at the game were that Carlos Gonzalez was still out following a collision with an outfield wall just before the All-Star break, and I didn't get a photo of our section's beer guy. Captain Earthman is apparently an installation at Coors Field, and I absolutely see why. I've seldom seen anyone who enjoys the job as much as he appears to enjoy his. If you're going to Coors Field, try sitting in the vicinity of Section 155 or nearby to get the most of the experience.

Èccolo World Traveler Journal

2011-07-03T15:55:00.000-06:00

I've been thinking about this journal for a long time because I originally thought that it would be my travel journal for my UK trip at the end of May. I ended up choosing a blank Exacompta journal for that because of the blank pages, but now I've got the Èccolo World Traveler Journal beside my bed for those middle-of-the-night ideas and so on. So let's talk about the wee thing, shall we?

Lovely shade of green, and the tree-in-relief is a great textural detail.

It's 5x7 inches (12x17 cm for the metric-using folks), and it contains 256 lined pages. I am a big, big fan of notebooks that are generous with their included pages. The little specifications sleeve there on the right (which is removable, of course--just a bit of cardboard) says it's got an "Italian Faux Leather Cover." I don't have any idea what that actually means, and the other side of the sleeve says it was made in China. Whether that means the cover material was made in Italy and it was all assembled in China or it's actually faux Italian leather which was made in China because it's only faux-Italian or the sleeve was the thing actually made in China (I'm guessing that is not the right answer), I don't know. I blame this on the vagaries of English and the deliberate vagaries of product labeling. And that's all of only secondary importance because the key thing here is that I love how this cover feels. It definitely feels almost like leather, but with a certain near-rubberyness that makes it feel like this journal would bounce if the cover were just a little thicker. It's supple and smooth and the center image of the tree is in relief on the darker green background. It's a nice textural detail that adds interest without being obtrusive.

Now the paper.

That'll do, Notebook. That'll do.

This is, of course, not Clairefontaine, not Rhodia, but it definitely does better than okay. The paper is a nice ivory color that's a bit more cream-colored than it appears in the photo, and it holds up pretty well to most of the inks I tried with it. There's very, very little feathering. If you click to embiggen, you'll see a bit of capillary action with the Levenger Cocoa and the Tsuki-yo, but it's remarkably crisp with the Raven Black, the 1670, and the Diamine Syrah. Also, I'll forgive this paper for feathering a smidge with the Tsuki-yo because that was put down with a Noodler's Flex pen, where there's a lot of ink to deal with. I was surprised by the Cocoa feathering--where I think it's the most pronounced--because that's one of my most well-behaved inks. Of course, it could be that the True Writer/Cocoa combo have declared themselves as being in a fully committed relationship with my Ecosystem notebooks only. They do see each other most often, and far be it from me to homewreck a happy trio like that.

Perhaps even more exciting is how well it works with the Lamy Studio F and the Raven Black. That's a pen and ink combo I hadn't tried before, and I wish I had. The Studio is sort of my last resort pen. I don't love it, though it writes well enough. It's a weight issue, mostly--it's a little heavier than I prefer. (If anyone wants to propose a trade for the Lamy Studio F, I'm more than willing to entertain suggestions.) But the ink, the pen, and the paper right here are lovely together--the line is fine and neat and smooth.

I couldn't get a clear image on the reverse side of the paper, but there's a bit of show-through. The worst line, predictably, is the Tsuki-yo because there was a lot of ink involved there (a few little dots of bleed-through, too), and the two True Writer combos follow. The rest of them, however, are quite tidy. Again, the Lamy/Raven duo is the best of the lot--barely so much as a shadow and definitely not enough to interfere with writing on both sides of the paper. The Lamy Joys (both sizes, both inks) also behaved quite well.

When I decided to move this journal to my bedside, I put the Pilot Prera with it because I liked the greens together. After this test, the Studio is definitely going to take up residence there.

The Èccolo is available many places (office supply stores, online, and so on). I think I got mine at Staples, and it cost $7. I definitely consider that a worthwhile purchase. I just wish that it were a little more clear on what the cover is made from. (I'm sure it's some sort of petroleum-based synthetic cover, and I'd rather it weren't. It's very cute, and it performs well, but I still would rather have something like the Ecosystem journal because I know what that whole thing is made from.)

On finding a quiet place

2011-06-29T14:57:00.000-06:00

Another photo from my travels, and one of a monument you likely recognize, of course. Stonehenge. I chose this image because it did what I wasn't quite able to: minimize the presence of people, of noise, of crowding. You can see a few folks in the background on the righthand side of the photo, but that's mostly it.

Stonehenge, which came after Strawhenge and Woodhenge. (*hat tip to Eddie Izzard*)

The reality of the situation is that the site was a constant stream of people. There is a paved pathway around the monument, and the stones themselves are (rightly) cordoned off and protected. (In touristing eras past, it was possible to hire a hammer from the smithy in Amesbury and break off a bit of magical Stonehenge souvenir. Stonehenge was also used for target practice during the Second World War.) Around the paved pathway, throngs of tourists (myself included) circle, mill, snap photos, recite bits of stand-up comedy routines, and think about how much more grand the postcards look. I won't lie--I have always thought the stones were a bit taller. They're still incredible, and even more incredible to think that a full third of the upright stones is still buried in the ground, to think that all of these things were cut and hauled and erected by hand. To think that, regardless of our technology, our advancements, our radiocarbon dating, we still don't know what Stonehenge's purpose is with any degree of certainty. And, it seems that no one, at the point of Britain becoming a literate land, knew, either. It had long been abandoned. There are early medieval mentions that the monument is attributed to Merlin, who built it to demonstrate Arthur's might. By most accounts, if there was an Arthur, the prime time for him is in the wake of the Roman occupation (let's have round numbers and say 400 A.D.-ish), leaving a scant few hundred years between Merlin's creation and the people who were making a connection between Stonehenge and Arthur. Stonehenge is, of course, much older than that.

The long and the short of it: we don't know much. We know it does work as a solar calendar. We know it was built in stages. We know where the stones come from. But we don't know who. We don't know why.

These were two questions I was trying to think on, shuffling around the great stone circle, trying to avoid stepping into someone else's photo, trying to avoid jostling toddlers and the people paying more attention to the audio guide device than anything else. I'm disappointed to say that all I really thought about was space, how I wanted it, how much I wanted to be alone in that place, to sit on the grass and "think deep thoughts" at it and about it. I thought about how all of these people were keeping me from thinking, from hearing whatever it was that I might hear. And I thought, if I couldn't do that, I wanted to walk out through the farmers' fields on the Salisbury plain and stand atop one of the many barrows that dot the landscape, and look from there. From the nearest barrow--probably a third of a mile? just a guess--Stonehenge would look even smaller. One would be yet further removed. I didn't do that, either--the forty minutes our bus tour allowed us there were fully eaten up by the queue, the circumnavigation, a trip to the necessary.

Then we were on the bus, zipping off toward Bath. Stonehenge: check.

It seems selfish now. To capture, to take that photo (and thirty-two more), to pretend in some way that I have that place. I do have it: the image, the brochure, the memory. To wish that I'd had it all to myself (I do that a lot--living in Wyoming, where the population is rather low, makes me even more of a misanthrope than before because now I'm sort of surprised to see other people, wherever I go), to think that I could get more from it alone than in company. To think that I could hear something if I could only listen carefully enough (and damn all the other people there trying to do the exact same thing).

I've been trying to distill all of those thoughts into something useful. (Tip: being annoyed at people for simply being in the same place one is isn't very useful. I continue to work on this.) What I've come up with: I don't think anything's been unduly harmed by the consumption of the place through gawking and photos--Stonehenge has been there for thousands of years, and it will be there a mite longer, too. That's not so much useful as it simply is. There are beautiful and mysterious places in this world. I'm all for seeing them in a non-destructive way.

But the desire to have the space to listen--I think this is a useful want. (And desire is at the heart of all suffering, but art is also suffering, if you believe a lot of people who've talked about it. Ouroboros.) It's a difficult thing to achieve, though.

One neighbor is doing a very ambitious renovation that involves the removal of a garage, an asphalt driveway, and the re-addition of those things plus a new kitchen. It's going to be rather beautiful. It's also been crazy loud (but bless him--all of the jackhammering and backhoe work have been done well after sun-up and have ceased well before sundown). There's no other way to do construction, and it's happening in as neighbor-friendly a way as is possible.

I live in a residential neighborhood. School is out, and so the kids are out. Children running about causes an equal number of excitable neighborhood dogs to voice their candid canid opinions on things. I was a child at one point, and I used to have a dog. None of this is surprising.

I have one cat who has declared lifelong enmity against her own tail. This results in her yowling and hissing and screaming at her own back half while running from room to room. This happens about five times a day.

I have a laptop that connects to the internet, where I can follow Facebook and Twitter and a thousand awesome blogs and can browse for recipes and books and obscure bits of knowledge I never needed until right this very second.

I have a phone that sends and receives texts to and from people I love. (And yes, phonecalls, too, but not nearly as often.)

I have MLB.tv. That's all I need say about that.

I have courses to plan.

I have books to read.

I have a lot of things that I think stand in the way of my being able to listen. Of my being able to hear whatever it is that something is trying to tell me. And right now, that "something" is my novel. When I can't hear it, I can't write it. And if I can't write it, what am I doing with my life?

There isn't ever going to be a (good) way to close all of the "noise" out. I certainly shouldn't want to. (Though I'd be forever grateful if I never got another Farmville Request or had to hear someone in the neighborhood screaming at their dog or child or missing left sock.)

And so what does one do? Find ways to listen. Set aside moments for clarity. This requires a certain kind of selfishness. I've certainly heard of this before. No, the laundry doesn't actually need to be folded this very second; no, I don't actually need to refresh my e-mail seven times in ten minutes because someone might need me; no, I don't actually need to go to Sportsman's Warehouse with my BFF to help him pick out a new pair of waders. Make the time where one is free to listen.

There's also the selflessness. Maybe the forgetting of self is what I really mean. Forgetting the ego, the part that likes excuses that protect vanity. Push back the self(ish)-pity that wants to say, "Well, my neighborhood was loud. I couldn't concentrate." My neighborhood will never be quiet. Push back the self-indulgent impulse that says "one more game of Bejeweled before I start working" because I'm not actually enjoying playing that damn game; I'm just avoiding starting because I'm afraid. Afraid that if I listen carefully, I won't hear anything. That the work has nothing to say to me.

Some days, of course, it might not. Not all days are marvels of creativity. So on those days, listen to something else. Or beat the work with a hammer until it talks. Don't take no for an answer. Wait. Wait. Be patient. (Everything talks, in the end.)

And, of course, do visit some of those places where no one else is. Where whatever speaks is there for you alone.

On the island of Tjärö, Sweden

Unpacking

2011-06-22T16:42:00.001-06:00

Okay, so this title is a bit misleading, since I've been unpacked (and back from my travels) for quite a while. But let's go with the metaphorical version of this, since this is the week when I feel like I have an actual chance to mentally unpack. The week after returning from the UK adventure, I spent trying to figure out what timezone I was in and getting the garden and such in place so that we could enjoy a few days of my sister-in-law visiting. Which we did, and that was awesome, and it involved a trip to Denver for delicious food and the Real Pirates Exhibition at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Before I say anything else, let me say that if you're anywhere remotely near Denver, you need to get yourself to that exhibit before it closes in August. It presents the story of Captain Sam Bellamy and the Whydah (as well as the recovery of the wreck of the Whydah), and it is a damn fine story. (Peter Jackson, would you please make the film adaptation of this?)

But. I have no photos of that. I do have a few photos from my UK extravaganza, though. (Operative word being "few"--I took almost 300 photos, but you don't really need--or want--the minute-by-minute play-by-play. This post is by no means a catalog of everything I saw. It's just a few representative of the things I liked.)

Death's head marker at Greyfriar's Kirk. Lots of Memento Mori goodness there.

Greyfriar's Kirk is in Edinburgh, which was--and still is--my favorite place anywhere. I've been trying to figure out why that is, and the best guess that I can come up with is that Edinburgh was the place where I first was on my own in any substantial way. In 2003, between finishing my BA and starting my MA, I did a 3-week summer program at the University of Edinburgh, and it was the first time I'd flown by myself, my first time out of the country, my first time negotiating a real city on my own. It was also a place where I met many, many wonderful people, two of whom I had a chance to meet up with again on this trip. (And somehow I managed to neglect getting photos of either of them. I am significantly useless with a camera.) But one thing that I did do, after seeing one of those friends in Edinburgh and chatting rather late into the night, was walk across the city at midnight, under a light rain and strangely warm skies. And that was the greatest peace that I've felt in a very, very long time. Edinburgh feels like home. I've been there three times. Every time I love it more.

Meconopsis flowers at the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens. I adore these flowers.

It's a fairly difficult to find truly blue anything in nature, and that's perhaps why I am so fascinated by blue flowers. The Edinburgh Botanic Gardens were lovely in all ways, but most particularly for this blue flower. I fear Wyoming is rather dry for such a plant, but I can think happy blue thoughts about them, anyway.

The Brazen Head, Dublin. The oldest pub in Ireland (dating to 1198) where we saw storyteller Johnny Daly and had the best Irish stew ever. Apologies, Mr. Man, for taking your picture while you were trying to take a picture yourself.

One of the major highlights of the trip for me was this trip to The Brazen Head. It was a night of stories, music, and excellent food. If you're in Dublin, check out Johnny Daly and Irish Folk Tours. You shan't be disappointed.

For the fountain pen folks: in London, I found Penfriend, in the Burlington Arcade, which was a perfectly lovely little shop. The clerk was very friendly and kind to me, even though I clearly was not going to be the object of a large sale (or any sale at all, actually). Definitely worth a visit, particularly if one is interested in vintage pens. (They do have things for sale through the website, too.)

I had only one real disappointment on the trip, but it was a big one: Beowulf wasn't on display. Despite what the British Library website said. It was off for conservation. I didn't weep openly, but that was a very near thing. It was crushing enough to completely put me off my game, direction-wise, too, which also hurt my pride. I suppose that simply means I'll have to go back. (Gawain and the Green Knight was also off. That's two reasons.)

I did, however, see the Sutton Hoo hoard and the Franks Casket. Yeah, for medieval nerds, that's like seeing Becks and Posh. You don't even know how much hand-flapping there was in the British Museum (which, by the way, is completely overwhelming and brilliant and lovely).

I'm going to leave you with a Rodin sculpture that I couldn't stop looking at. It's housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum (which is a thousand times more awesome than any of the descriptive blurbs in travel guides make it sound). The sculpture is titled La France, and it is a likeness of his pupil/assistant/lover, Camille Claudette.

It doesn't matter where you stand. She isn't looking at you.

In future posts, perhaps, I'll toss in another photo or two from this trip, as they seem relevant. Really, I'm no photographer. I take pictures to remind myself of the narrative of the trip, to remember structural details for research purposes, to please my inner Boswell. The best course of action, claro, is to see all of these things with one's own eyes.

If I had a hammer...

2011-05-19T09:17:00.001-06:00

...an enchanted one, made of uru-metal, forged in the heart of a dying star, I'd use it to fly (or literally throw myself) to the UK tomorrow. But since I don't have one of those, and there's no Rainbow Bridge across the Atlantic, I have to settle for United Airlines.

In twenty-four hours, I'll have the first of tomorrow's four flights complete. (I like early, but the wake-up time for the first flight out of Casper is ludicrous.)

I'm off to Ireland and the UK for two weeks, one of which will be spent doing class prep (for future potential study abroad/travel courses), and the other will be spent actually teaching in Londinium. (Yes, I am sort of ridiculously amused by using the earlier historical names for places. We'll be spending a day in Yorvik, too. Have to show some love for the Danes, as well.)

I'm going to see the Beowulf manuscript.

I have scouted its location in the British Library. I have packed a handkerchief.

Also (all forces willing), I'll get to see some friends I haven't seen in years, which makes me so happy.

Carry-on, my wayward son...

And all of this fits (more or less) neatly into my one personal item, and the trip is being done with a carry-on only. I'm confining myself to one journal, but I am sneaking along a number of pens. There are currently six, though I might pare that down by two. (The Signos are fine and all, but I'm not in love, and I likely won't use the green and the blue that often, since I'm taking the Prera and some blue-black cartridges.)

I'm also borrowing the iPad you see in the back of the photo. It's currently loaded with George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones because I haven't read any of that series yet and I probably ought to, as it, with the advent of the new television series, may become another one of those popular touchstones with my students. (Also, Sean Bean is in the series. So I'll watch it at some point.) I will try not to be a fantasy snob at it.

I've also taken advantage of some of the free e-editions: Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein, Treasure Island, Passage to India. Yes, yes, I am aware that I am a perfectly shoddy English major with no right to my degrees for having those books on a to-read and not on a have-read list. But, honestly, for someone who loves the Anglo-Saxons so much, all of these novels are frankly new-fangled. They've not been out for a full two hundred years. So no spoilers, folks. No spoilers.

May manage an update or two as I go, but I'm not certain. Haven't attempted anything half so complex on the iPad, with which I have only a very shaky peace.

Book recommendations left for when I get back (when I'll have some proper "summer") would be ever-so-much appreciated.

Spring Cleaning

2011-05-01T21:20:00.001-06:00

I flushed, cleaned, and readied all of my pens (save two) for new ink on Saturday morning.

I will likely do this again later this week because it was rather therapeutic (and because I didn't take any ruddy pictures and because my four favorite pens are currently not at home). The failure of it was, though, that I managed to leave my two favorites (my True Writers) in my office and my next two favorites (the new Prera and my Parker Vector) at a friend's house last night. I also left my day planner, my blank Clairefontaine, and apparently my willpower at said friend's house. (There have been Cadbury Egg casualties in large numbers this weekend.)

But: I did have the experience of cleaning out two cartridges for refilling. What a nifty and painless experience when one has a syringe for such a task. The converter for my Prera is so incredibly petite that I will likely use the empty cartridge for swapping ink colors, thought. And though I have no photos just now, the Prera is refilled with Noodler's Black Swan in Australian Roses (I'm kind of in love with that ink. Don't judge me) and the Vector has its empty cartridge refilled with J. Herbin Bleu Myosotis. I filled my Lamy Studio with some of the Noodler's Kung Te-Cheng sample I got last week. Lovely ink. The pen continues to underwhelm me, but I'll give it some more time.

All of this is in preparation for the Great Grading Odyssey that will be the next two weeks for me. I graded a huge whack of papers today, too, alternating between the Lamy Studio, a blue Signo, and the .3 mm Zebra Sarasa. Okay, so I "alternated" for about eight papers, and then I clutched the Sarasa tight and wouldn't let anyone else play (since my go-to pens are partying elsewhere without me and I'm a bad pen-custodian). I wasn't sure I'd like the superfine tip on the Sarasa, but I do. It writes in a lovely chocolatey brown, and there were no smudging problems.

Another experiment in this arena soon. It's hard to decide what will go into my True Writers next. It's likely that Black Swan will go in the stub (again. still) and my trusty Levenger Cocoa will end up in the Waterlilies pen, as that is absolutely my favorite grading combination, but I'll go through so much ink in the next two weeks, I can likely let everyone play.

A very lovely weekend

2011-04-24T20:06:00.002-06:00

The fact that this was a three-day weekend two weeks before the end of the semester certainly didn't hurt its quality. There was a great deal of grading, of course, but there was also a lot of cooking, two excellent meals out with friends, and baseball. Roy Halladay pitched another masterpiece today for the Phillies. Glorious.

One of the other things, though, that made this weekend so lovely was the amount of time I was able to spend engaged in making things. I finished knitting a baby sweater for a friend in the most perfectly delicious Malabrigo (Silky Merino) in a brilliantly cheerful creamsicle color. Just have to find some buttons for it and sew up the seams. That was mostly what I did between grading sessions over the past week, and it was comforting to have a knitting project that I really enjoyed again. (The last two times I knit something, it was with yarn that I really, really disliked. My next project is the same way, alas, but I'm hoping that large needles and such will speed it along.) More significantly, it was lovely to have something to do as a break between necessary professional tasks that felt both purposeful and relaxing.

That brings me to the other exciting part of this weekend.

As I mentioned in my last entry, I ordered some new journals and some pens. And some ink. I was particularly excited to finally get my paws on some Noodler's Black Swan in Australian Roses, and for good reason. I adore it in my Levenger True Writer stub nib. The ink behaves quite beautifully on all manner of paper (as I discovered while using it for grading--bright enough to see, not red-red enough to give things the Ink of the Damned feeling), and the slight shading qualities are enhanced by the stub. Inkwise, I also picked up some samples of Noodler's Kung Te-Cheng, Diamine Green-Black (currently in my True Writer Fine and currently lovely), and Diamine Syrah from the lovely Goulet Sample Shop. In the same Goulet order, I also picked up an Exacompta Basic Sketchbook. With which I am in love. In which I am trying not to write until it's time because that journal is going to have a specific purpose. I'm staving off my desire to use it by using a blank Clairefontaine journal, and that's been a pretty good fixer. (I got a blue cover. I am so pleased that my randomly-chosen cover was blue. It is, so much, my favorite.)

And then, because I was having a crisis over writing implements on my upcoming trans-Atlantic jaunt, I skittered over to JetPens for some non-fountainy options. I did get a few Uni-Ball Signo 207s (black, blue, green) and a Zebra Sarasa (0.3 mm brown) for my travel workhorses because both have gotten such positive reviews on PenAddict & OfficeSupplyGeek. I also had an artsy whim and got a Uni-Ball Pocket Brush Pen. I am, of course, quite pleased with all of them--they'll serve their purpose and give me some color options with very little fuss.

I also might have blacked out and ordered a lime green Pilot Prera with a fine nib.

The lime green Pilot Prera is not a pen I expected to be interested in. For one, it's lime green. You can tell by the color scheme on the blog and by the inks I mentioned above that I'm not really a lime person. (They're quite delicious fruits, and I may occasionally be limey, but I don't do much in the "bright color" spectrum.) It's also a glossy, single-color barrel. But I love it so much I actually woke up at 5:15 on Friday morning (the day that I had designated as my "sleep as long as you want" day) because I was excited about using it again. (I stayed up past midnight on Thursday--well, into Friday--doodling with it.)

And I think that's why I was so excited. I was actually drawing things with it. Before I graduated high school, I made certain to take an art class every year. I was, by no means, any kind of natural talent, and I don't have one of those spatial memories that can envision--with great clarity--the far sides of objects or what something might look like lying on its side and so on, but I did okay. Most importantly, I loved it. And because I had my life-goals set out in front of me (and they didn't involve visual arts), I could love it simply, easily, without pressure or expectation. I hadn't realized how much I missed that in the past few years.

In the past three days, I've doodled a lot of my favorite, recurring subjects: fruit, trees, branches with cherry blossoms, bamboo. I also tried drawing a few faces, based on some useful tutorials (proportions, and so on) that I stumbled across. I've never much liked drawing people, but I managed a few who actually look like people, and I really enjoyed it.

And I drew this bamboo. I really like drawing plants. They don't give me any lip.

I did this with the Prera, fine tip, with a Pilot/Namiki cartridge in blue/black. The color is really lovely, and I'm sad that it isn't waterproof because I'd love to do a watercolor-tinted sketch with this pen. (I don't get many options for FP-safe waterproof inks, do I?) I think what I love best about this pen is its ability to make soft, sketchy lines. I'm a big fan of my True Writer for writing because, despite its fine tip, as a Western fine, it makes a pretty assertive line, especially given my usual inks (Levenger Cocoa, Iroshizuku Tsuki-yo). When I write, I generally do feel assertive. Writing isn't always easy, but I feel like I know what I'm doing. I know my strengths, my weaknesses, how to play to one, how to challenge the other. When I'm drawing, I am much more tentative. I certainly feel rusty at this point, but even when I was drawing something in class, two or three times a week, I still made the same line, lightly, a dozen times over, before I would commit to a bold line. (And even then, I kind of resented it.) I should get into the habit of sketching in pencil and then doing cleaner lines in ink for that reason, but I also like instant gratification and can never find a pencil or a decent eraser when I want one.

The only problem is that now, I will want to have this pen and a blank journal (in addition to my lined "everything" notebook and all of my other pens) with me at all times. That runs counter to my (often futile) attempts at traveling light. Ah, well. Small price to pay for a rekindled love.

Recharge & Refresh

2011-04-17T19:15:00.001-06:00

This is a strange post title for anything that happens in April for an English professor (as April & May, like November & December, are The Months of Interminable Grading), but this has been a good weekend for feeling a little more refreshed. One thing that has contributed to that is the stubbornness of greenery. It's cold here, still, in Wyoming. We haven't had lots of snow like certain parts of the Dakotas and Colorado, but it hasn't been very warm, either. There haven't been many overt signs of spring from the atmosphere. The ground, though, refuses to be contained: we have a few tulips sneaking up around the front porch, and folks lucky enough to have daffodil bulbs planted are seeing persistent knots of brilliant yellow ringing their steps. The grass is the kind of saturated green that I have missed from the east coast, the kind of color that doesn't last long here. We're not really getting leaves on trees, not beyond the limy fuzz of buds, but there's promise. I'm holding onto that.

There's been grading, too (there always is), but I also spent an hour this afternoon playing with some Derwent watercolor pencils and a thoroughly ancient set of Prang watercolors. (Yes, I know. We used the exact same sets in middle school. It's likely that this set came from middle school.) I didn't turn out anything that I was particularly excited about, particularly because I went into it without any kind of plan, and it's been so long since I've painted that I need some sort of visual reference. Which I didn't have. None of that is the point. The point is that I was inspired a few days ago by Lavinia Spalding's book Writing Away. We're using that book for the travel-writing component of a study-abroad class I'm co-teaching with some colleagues in a few weeks. Spalding talks a great deal about journaling (which I'm not very good at, in any kind of organized way), and she talks a lot about creating pictorial art of varying kinds. I got the itch. I'm now waiting for an Exacompta journal and some other shiny things from Goulet Pens & JetPens.

When those things come in, I'm going to try to have an organized journaling experience, at least in the context of this trip. We'll see how that turns out.

The other point of it is how excited I am about this trip, now, in this context. It's not that I wasn't looking forward to it before; it's that there's an anticipation associated with the creation of the artifact around the trip, too. (And it's not just the anticipation of new stationary fumes, of course, though that's certainly attractive.)

Hopefully I'll have some pictures of something sometime soon. Right now, there's The Fall of Sam Axe and more grading to fill my evening.

No Pelikans, So How About Pelicans?

2011-04-03T10:16:00.002-06:00

So, as I am wont to do every time I go to some sort of major urban center, I checked out St. Petersburg for fountain pen stores. I didn't find any. (Granted, my search wasn't super-thorough, as I knew I'd be confined to the area near my conference, but I didn't get a sense of there being much choice in the matter.) Thus, instead of Pelikans, you get pelicans, and the pelicans are doing their thing at the St. Petersburg pier.

This pelican is a rock. He is an island.

Hail, hail, the gang's all here.

I spent a full day squeaking every time I saw an anole. Which was a lot of times. They are so cool. Almost as cool as stegosauruses.

And, because we went to a Tampa Bay Rays game, have some baseball players. None of them appeared to be using fountain pens at any point in the game. That's probably wise.

Vladimir Guerrero & Brian Roberts, warming up at the Rays vs. Orioles game.

Also, this seems like a fine time to show off some new pen gear I got for my birthday: an Aston pen case and a small, blank Rhodia Webbie. My delightful husband picked them up at GouletPens. Oh, I have a new appreciation for a blank journal. I don't use blank journals much, since I'm far more a writer than an artist (and I have an inability to write in a straight line), but getting this little blank journal made me want to sketch a few things. On the page spread that you can see below, I sketched one of the conference presenters' water glass. It's not by any means masterful, but I can tell it is, in fact, a little cup. The Rhodia paper is, of course, dreamy. It's a very pleasant cream color, which I didn't expect that I would like, but I do. Particularly for my sketchy little embarkations.

Closed journal & open pen case. True Writers, both of them.

All of these things in action.

Because some of you may wish to know: the writing is done with a True Writer stub filled with J. Herbin Bleu Myosotis, which is the black pen in this photo. The Waterlilies pen is filled with Iroshizuku Tsuki-yo. These are easily my two favorite inks thus far in my inky experimentations. Interesting thing about the Bleu Myosotis: it seems to mellow and lighten with age. By age, I mean a few hours. When it's newly dry on the page, it's a much more saturated and dark tone, nearly purple. After a few hours, it gentles to its highly shaded periwinkle. Mostly, I point this out because it's neat.

It's going to be a hard choice when I have to pick a journal to take with me to the UK this May. I purchased a slightly larger one (lined, not a Rhodia) for that purpose, but I really do like the blank paper in this Rhodia because of the urge to sketch things. And, well, the paper behaves gorgeously. It is a bit small, though, to do a whole lot of real writing in--I feel like I should write much smaller than I usually do in the small pad, and that slows me down a bit.

Decisions, decisions.

A picture of that stegosaurus

2011-03-31T19:58:00.001-06:00

This is the stegosaurus I was talking about yesterday. I thought you needed to see it.

Stegosaurus = coolest dinosaur ever. Just sayin'.

Update on Florida: we are here and that's pretty glorious (humidity! heat!). Last night, we hit up the Red Mesa Cantina for dinner. That was pretty transcendent. I had a duck taco with red chili jam. And fried yucca, which I'd never had before. Deliciousness. And even through I didn't order a margarita (and our waiter was pretty disappointed in our choice of plain unsweetened iced tea), he showed us cell-phone videos of the Grand Prix race that had taken place in the city last weekend. (He was a great waiter. I wish he'd told us his name.)

Today, I spent a big chunk of my day learning about literary studies & American studies topics I didn't know about and hanging out with a former grad school colleague that I never really knew very well while we were in the same grad program. It was rather lovely. I'm inspired (doubly) to actually make my own peanut butter, and now I have a few South American authors to check out. (This is the magic of conversations with English majors: you learn about new writers and exciting things to read.)

Also, there were tornado warnings/watches all day, so plans to go exploring in St. Pete got considerably derailed. But baseball has begun, so we spent the evening watching the Cardinals/Padres & the Giants/Dodgers games. I just wish I hadn't run out of books to read: I read all of Kingsolver's The Bean Trees on the flight to Tampa. I'm now bookless (though I'm hoping to find something exciting at the conference book fair tomorrow for the way home).

Feeling like Georges Perec

2011-03-30T09:02:00.001-06:00

Let me start this post by saying that I adore Georges Perec. (Look at him on this French postage stamp. How can you not love that face?) Species of Spaces and Other Pieces is, for reasons that astound and befuddle me, one of the most important books that I've ever read. I encountered this book in my History of the Essay course at Ohio University where it was included on intense and fascinating reading reading list assembled by Dr. David Lazar. (This course was one of my favorites through six years of graduate work, but maybe more on that another time.) The amazing thing is that I don't particularly care for things like Perec's work. I'm one of those people who is all about the narrative--give me story, give me character, let me latch on and sink in. Perec's work--even his fiction, which I have not successfully read--resists all of those things that I usually love. Species of Spaces is playful, experimental, resistant. It uses footnotes and marginalia, but not in any way that clarifies. It puzzles and paces in the Oulipo manner. Each note, each point, spirals the reader off into another direction. The book, which is a collection of a number of Perec's writings, changes topic quickly, easily. It discourages immersion in any one direction, and yet, he asks, seriously, for the reader to consider teaspoons, the blank center of a page, staircases and airports and how we might live in them.

It's that last, of course, that rings in my brain today. And I'm wickedly vexed that I don't have my copy of Species of Spaces with me, that I have to do my quoting from memory (bound to be inaccurate) and without citations (blasphemy, horror, crisis), but I can't get it out of my mind. Because I am in an airport this morning, on this, my twenty-ninth birthday, due to spend most of the day flying. (It began with getting out of bed at 4:00 a.m. I am definitely calling a Mulligan on my birthday and re-celebrating sometime next week.) An early flight out of Casper has led me to a two-hour pause in Denver, early in the day, and I am thinking of Georges Perec, who was fascinated by airports, who asked, in Species of Spaces, how we might live more in them. Perec was writing well before 9/11, before the days of intense airport security and screenings, before only the people going somewhere had any business in the airport proper. I am "going somewhere," I belong here. I have the right to these small shops and all of these convenient (and overpriced) dining options. Here in Denver, I have the right to look at these tiled floors with their metallic dinosaur inlay. (Okay, that one I'm grateful for. How freaking cool is that? Stegosaurus--world's best dinosaur--hanging out on the floor.) In many airports, those "rights" include things like access to art displays that aren't anywhere else. (It includes the right to duty-free purchases of very expensive things like perfume and alcohol. Every time I'm in an airport, I think I should do all of my holiday shopping in one fell swoop, but how would I get everything home? When I'm in an airport, the last thing I want to do is add to the things I carry. This entry is feeling like a reference to everything. Hello, Tim O'Brien. Hello, Pico Ayer. Hello, hello, hello.)

On the whole, if it weren't for the strange alienation that is modern traveling--the immediate separation from whomever has dropped you off at the airport, the invasions of privacy (and I understand the precautions and I accept that, but I do feel a little twinge every time I toss that clear plastic bag on the scanner belt: yes, that's my astringent, yes, my skin has no idea how to cope with this dryness and this altitude; yes, that's my deodorant, yes, friendly agent, you now know what my underarms smell like)--airports would be amazing places to "live" in. I don't literally mean like that Tom Hanks movie from half a decade ago, but they are fascinating. There's such an intersection of humanity in these places, so many things to see and watch. It is all of life's experiences, gathered in one space.

And it isn't even just our species in these spaces. Here in Denver this morning, I have been watching, with a kind of ridiculous glee, the sparrows that have somehow found their way into the place. They seem fat and happy, picking up the crumbs of our terminal snacking, gathering in small groups of three or four to bounce into this corner or that for a stray French fry or the flakes of the passable pain au chocolat that I can never contain.

But I have seen a man towing a small rolling trunk as his luggage, strapped around with leather, clasped tight in brass. A woman does yoga--downward-facing dog to child's pose--at our nearly-empty gate. All around this place, complete strangers catch bits of sleep. Where else do we act at such an apparent level of comfort in the presence of people we have never met?

We do it, to a certain extent, in places like this, in blogs and on the internet more generally, but there's some sort of connection. In a blog post, we usually have a sense of who the audience is. A community rises up around such a thing, whether small or large. And information on the internet must still be sought out. In airports, we do not know who we're looking at. We do not know their history unless it's shared overtly, through dialog or through the trappings of their travel. (I like to try to piece together people's travel stories by watching, by looking at bags and the places their snacks have come from, by their shoes and their hats and their glasses.) But there's no way of confirming any of that. We can only see what we see--that these two business folk, with large rolling bags, have set themselves down beside the woman doing yoga, and now she is not doing it anymore. Now she has gotten up, gone off somewhere else. Is she discomfited by their presence? Is she off getting a coffee before the flight? This airport attendant, driving a cart, is singing an actual blues tune. This airport attendant, pushing an empty wheelchair, interrupts the song to borrow a radio.

We are so naked here, though we're often wearing coats and scarves and another layer in case the plane is cold. We are unarmored, even though we are clad with bags and backpacks and rolling suitcases that prevent anyone from crowding too close.

It's fascinating. I don't know what Perec would think of this new system, the way we cannot wait with family and friends, that we cannot eat in this cafe because it is past security, that we cannot carry our own cafe au lait into this foreign space. But I think I can say, with a fair amount of certainty, that he would look for a way to live in it.

In honor of that, I'm going to go take a photo of that stegosaurus on the floor. I'd put it in this post, but the DIA wifi set-up will not allow me to add an image to this post for some reason I cannot even begin to fathom.

Between Seasons

2011-03-24T10:30:00.001-06:00

This post is certainly wishful thinking--spring in Wyoming generally has very little to do with the month of March. However, last week we had some properly warm days--I even opened a window or two once or twice--and it fooled at least one crocus per block into springing forth. We have some tulip greens inching their way up. But there will, certainly, be more snows on the way, and I'm not putting away my wool coat yet.

Still, everything feels strangely in-between right now. I know that winter is not over yet, that spring hasn't quite arrived, either, but the weather bounces from sixty to snow in the same afternoon. Spring break has come and it has gone (and it was lovely, lovely, lovely, by the way), so we're not headed toward any big breaks, but we're also a full six weeks from finals, so it's not yet time to put the sled on that slope. I'm grateful that I don't get seasonal migraines or other ailments connected to things like humidity and barometric pressure shifts--the way March and April yo-yo here, I'd be toast.

We're almost to the start of the professional baseball season (blessed be), but not quite. (Right now, mostly, I wish we could skip the rest of pre-season entirely because my Phillies keep getting injured.)

Both music and silence sound wrong on my ears. I listened to fifteen seconds of twelve songs in the last ten minutes, and then I turned off my iTunes. It's almost all I can do to keep from bouncing up and down at my desk, but I'd also very much like to go back to sleep this very second. (But what I'm going to do, in half an hour, is go talk about Rosetti's "Goblin Market" and Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens.)

And so, I'll leave you with a link to this phenomenal interview from The Paris Review with Anne Carson to get you through the in-betweens, if you're feeling them to. She's genius. Pure genius.

Reality Check

2011-03-14T13:16:00.001-06:00

Last week was the lead-up to our Spring Break. The past two weeks have felt like a manic blur, but I didn't quite realize just how ridiculous it was until mid-week last week. This is what happened:

I have ten minutes between my classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Out of those ten minutes, I try, barring student emergencies/questions, to at least get back to my office for about six of them so that I can refill my mug with tea (or just plain hot water some days) and so that I can check my e-mail to be certain that any of my students in the upcoming sections who are trying desperately to get in touch with me on my teaching-barrage days can get some kind of response. On Wednesday of last week, I was in the middle of this process--one hand on the HotShot for my tea refill, standing in front of my desk, leaning over the keyboard to send a quick reply to an e-mail--when a colleague walked by my office. He saw me, stopped in my doorway, came into my office.

He said, "Leaning over your desk like that is going to kill your back when you get older." He grinned, but he had legitimate concern, as anyone who spends a lot of time at a desk knows. (And nevermind with any of that "when you get older" business. Two years ago, in the midst of dissertation madness, my back and neck crackled like cellophane every time I moved because of my bad desk--and lack of desk--habits.)

I said, half-laughing, that there just wasn't time to sit down. My colleague just shook his head and went on his way.

It wasn't until I was actually in the classroom a few minutes later that I realized that I'd meant what I said. And how ridiculous that was.

Making time to do things that are good for one's whole well-being--sensible, easy things, like having a seat before working at the computer (unless one is going to commit to an actual standing desk that is designed for a standing person)--shouldn't be a hard decision. I'm not talking about large life-changes or even the cultivation of significant helpful habits (like waking up earlier to read or meditate or write or spending twenty minutes a day tidying one's place to avoid Imminent Cleanliness Disasters in the future). There are lots and lots of blogs that address these types of habits and decisions. (Zen Habits is one that I rather like.) I'm talking about accepting that sitting down is worthwhile. That eating lunch with both hands (instead of having one hand on a keyboard) is a valid thing to do.

This is one of those times where my mother would point out that no amount of education can create common sense. This is one of those times where my mother would be ever-so-right.

So. Once Spring Break started properly (Sunday afternoon, really), I decided that I would work all Spring Break on things that made me feel accomplished, as opposed to busy. That's not to say that I won't be busy; I still have a to-do list and a number of work-related tasks that have to be completed. But my break work-load was specifically engineered to avoid a lot of imminent things (like grading masses of papers), so there's actually time to do things that add up to some sort of sense of pleasure and usefulness.

Yesterday, that manifested in putting together some packages for friends, which were mailed this morning. Today, I wrote, I am making granola, and tonight I'm actually going to cook something from my Moroccan cookbook (which I've had for five years but have only ever thought wistfully about). Creating and cooking are both useful and fulfilling to me. (I have tried--and may keep trying--to accept that sometimes it's okay not to be useful, but all that does is make me feel guilty. I try to find a happy medium in things like this, then, to steal from the Enlightenment: sweetness and light.)

What both refreshes you and staves off that feeling that you should be doing something else?

Discovering My First Fountain Pen (Not Where I Expected It)

2011-02-27T11:53:00.001-07:00

I had been under the impression that my first fountain pen was a black plastic Manuscript pen that I bought at Hobby Lobby around the holidays last year. (I purchased it in the hopes that it would somehow stave off my coveting of the Levenger Waterlilies True Writer. It didn’t work.) Then, a few weeks ago, I was rummaging in my little drawer-unit of office supplies (a wretched mess of old ballpoints, metallic gel pens that don’t not-work enough to allow myself to toss them, 3.5” disks, and shop bags from special stores). And I found a pen I’d forgotten I’d had: a blue-plastic-barreled fountain pen with silver accents. I remembered: one of my uncles (the same one who loaned me The Lord of the Rings trilogy for my first read through the series) had gotten me a fountain pen—one that used cartridges—for a birthday. It might have been my sixteenth, even, or it was a gift for high school graduation—I’m ashamed to say I don’t remember what the real occasion was.

Pen photographed on a bit of Japanese cloth given to me by a coworker

And I don’t really remember using the pen. Even without having the accurate memory, though, I can tell you why I don’t remember using the pen: the cartridge. It likely only came with one or two cartridges, and I grew up in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania (an honest hour to anything like a Staples). This was before I could have ordered anything on the internet, too. And so I would have saved those cartridges, hoarded them until the perfect moment. Then, when I used the first one, I would have thought that the line was too bold, too dark, too certain or too arrogant or too permanent. Too wide. Too something. At sixteen, or eighteen, or whatever, I remember using pencil nearly exclusively, and if I forayed into pen-usage, it was with black Bic stick pens, the kind that left gossamer strands of that viscous ink between letters that smudged, faintly iridescent and sticky. (Those metallic gel pens? I really only used them for drawing on myself and for the occasional whimsical note—on black paper—to friends or my boyfriend, now husband.)

Ink was too permanent. I wrote—poetry, fiction, papers—in pencil. (Still, I didn’t erase much. I’d strike through something in graphite instead of erasing it, oddly enough.) My preference was for the disposable mechanical pencils, though if I could have gotten my hands on a gross of the fat, dark blue Ticonderoga pencils we used in kindergarten, I’d have used only those forever. (In a drawer, in my parents’ house, there’s a two-inch pencil stub with my name—on a tiny slip of paper—still taped to its barrel.) I don’t know if they still make those pencils, but the leads were so smooth, so yielding. I don’t think I’d call them soft, not exactly, because I don’t have much memory of that lead smudging, but they wrote so easily.

And so I wrote in pencil. Either out of ease (little pressure required), out of uncertainty (so much less assertive-looking on the page), or out of habit (very little work was done in pen during my pre-college days—just the final copies of papers). In college, I lost track of my blue fountain pen. It was probably always with me, in that messy drawer of writing utensils, but it certainly wasn’t on my radar.

Fast-forward through three degrees. I still wrote a lot of things in pencil (particularly while grading), though I’d switched to writing my fiction exclusively with the black Bic stick pens. (I learned that pencil-on-looseleaf, carried around on a clipboard shoved in a backpack, leaves one with smudged and often difficult-to-read results.) I wish I’d noticed during my Ph.D. years that the Bics were probably contributing to my massive wrist/hand pain because they require a good bit of pressure to work well, but I didn’t. It wasn’t until my move to Wyoming that fountain pens really hit my radar, completely due to the aesthetics of the pen itself. (I’ve never much cared for a bold line while writing. Growing up, I envied those wispy sketch-lines that come out of taking certain art classes.)

I thought I could stave off the (expensive) urge for a Levenger pen by getting any pen with the “fountain” quality. It didn’t work. My black plastic Manuscript served its purpose, though it also was prone to covering my hands in black ink at any given moment, of getting me used to a bold line. I discovered I liked that. I don’t know if it had to do with having my first “real” job—a full-time position as an instructor; if it had to do with accepting my writing as a legitimate, worthy thing; or if it was simply time. (Having that “real” job also made it possible to even consider a pen that cost more than all of my office supply budget for a four-year graduate degree. And now I know that the Levenger brand pens are on the gentler end of the fountain pen expense scale, for the most part—but that’s another thought for another day.)

The rest, of course, is the current history: fountain pens have become one of my enthusiasms, though the symptoms are relatively minor by comparison to others’. But let me bring this all back to that blue-plastic-barreled pen.

It is, as I have discovered, the most basic model of the Parker Vector, probably from about 1997. The nib is petite, and the point is quite rounded.

Nib very shiny. It says Parker across the base of the nib.

I’m sure there are terms for these features, but I don’t know them. It is extraordinarily light in the hand because the blue plastic is quite thin. It uses cartridges (which I can now get at the local OfficeMax, though they only have black in stock). My current evil plan is to use up at least one cartridge and then refill it with more interesting ink until I have a good reason to order a converter for it. (I much prefer converters to cartridges. I can’t even tell you how much more.) I may even consider making it an eye-dropper pen, though I’ve not done that before.

Have an ink-haiku!

The line it makes is fairly smooth, somewhere around the Western fine that my Levenger True Writer produces. It is a little bit dry-writing, though it cooperates more easily the longer I write with it. It also seems to like the Levenger annotation pad (with a slight bit more tooth to it than the Rhodia) more than other paper options.

Paper is Bloc Rhodia, no. 16

At current, I will likely not use it very often—just to have something inked in black when I need it, as my other three everyday writers are always done up with something a bit more colorful—but I am glad to have it. This pen came to me because my uncle recognized, more than a decade ago, that I was someone who took writing seriously. My uncle Dennis has always done this; from him and his wife, I received writing and reading tools (bookmarks, particularly, and the refillable planner I used from freshman year of college until I graduated with my Ph.D., the year that finally killed it) that were both beautiful and functional. Things that were serious business. More importantly, these gifts said that he took what I did seriously, and that interest goes a long way in bolstering the confidence of a young writer and academically-minded person.

Whirlwind of Writing: AWP Recap, Part 2

2011-02-21T19:46:00.001-07:00

This is the post where I put together the oddments (and there is much that is gloriously odd about AWP).

Let's start with reunions. Now that I've moved 1,800 miles from anything that remotely resembled home for me, AWP events are very much reunions because the odds of bumping into anyone I know from all parts of life previous to August of 2009 out here in Wyoming are rather slim. As someone who has wanted to be a writer & an English teacher since the fifth grade, there are a lot of old friends and acquaintances that I stand to see at AWP. There are people from the poetry class at Susquehanna University when I was a high school student (and I have seen at least one person from that class at each AWP event I've been to since that semester in 1999). That one class (and freshman comp, also taken at SU, with the same professor) was incredibly instrumental to my development as a writer. It was with those classmates--including a very, very tall young man who wore an authentic Tom Baker Doctor Who scarf before I even knew what Doctor Who was--that I learned how to accept workshop criticism gracefully. How to do that is a difficult thing to learn, and I'm grateful to have had that opportunity when I was a young writer.

These classmates--from however brief a period, even when I was a high school student well aware of just how out of my depth I was in this class--are a reminder of all of the things that I learned from a really well-run writing classroom. That prepared me to go into my own B.A. program at Lycoming College. There are a lot of excellent people from that program with whom I am close friends, and seeing them becomes one of the major draws for the whole conference.

And then there are the many writers who I've had the pleasure of hearing read, of meeting once or twice, who I don't know very well but whose presence I look forward to beyond simply enjoying their work. Seeing these many folks--once a year, once every other year, even longer in between--reminds me that distance is less material than I often think it is. There are so many ways to connect with the world, so many ways of knowing and interacting, of meeting new people, too.

Having this reminder is an integral part negotiating these wide swathes of space that are part of the way our lives take us across the globe. The literary journals and artistic projects that arise from these connections, the way we gather threads from everywhere we've been and everywhere we're going.

Whirlwind of Writing: AWP Recap, Part 1

2011-02-13T17:35:00.002-07:00

So. I've been away a bit, and that was due to AWP and the resultant plague that not only laid me low but also a few friends as well. I had minor thoughts of blogging AWP, but my internet access was spotty and carrying my netbook around meant less room for potential AWP treasures. I did exercise restraint, though--I came home with one book of poetry and two issues of the remarkable Tuesday: An Art Project. More on that in a future post! (But don't worry--my bookquisitions were limited by the size and weight of my carry-on luggage; I did take copious notes for books to order.)

Little bits of AWP will filter through as time passes. This blog is certainly not on the cutting edge of anything.

I want to talk about AWP and some of the senses today.

The Associated Writing Programs annual conference is a surfeit of excess, and I mean that in every one of the best ways. It might not be so for other writers and readers who come from one metropolitan area to another, but for those of us who have always lived in smaller cities and yea, even in true towns and on dirt roads in Pennsylvania, it's something of an overwhelming thrill.

The process begins with travel. For me, it involved two flights that luckily arrived in glorious due time (I felt a bit guilty because there were many, many folks who couldn't get out of places like Chicago last Wednesday). The airport is a strange melange of stimulation and dullness, hurrying and waiting. I waited to board my flight and watched a man with hair dyed in an amazingly perfect replication of leopard spots. I guessed at whose carry-ons were filled with books already. I spied on knitting projects peeking from purse-edges. I tried not to smell the greasy weight of McDonalds food, which I haven't eaten in years but which always smells somehow good when I'm in an airport and know for certain that it's a terrible idea for so many reasons. I averted my face from clouds of perfume and cologne. Airports are, for me, such a furtive place, but that's likely because I'm nosy and because everyone's going into a story in my head. To the gentleman sitting beside me on the Denver to DC flight, I hope you had good fortune at the job interview you were preparing for. I didn't say anything to you about it because I didn't want to admit watching you add notes on your laptop.

As I exited that flight, I resolved to be more social at AWP. It is a gathering. Those are meant to be social, or so I have heard.

The Metro--my first real experience with public transportation in the United States--is a sonic bombardment. The slushy noise of the tracks mixes with the unintelligible gravel of stop-announcements, the gentle chatter of frequent rail companions, the less-gentle summations of the most recent Wizards' game. One platform made a shrill scree from some cause I couldn't identify, and it might have actually been the most awful non-language sound I've ever heard.

The Walt Whitman quote that rings the escalators into and out of the Dupont Circle Metro station was a fantastic welcome. I'm not sure why, but it felt so congenial to leave such a strange bit of underground, ringed by Whitman.

There was food and a reunion, several reunions, with friends. More on that in another post.

I want to go back to sound: specifically, I want to go to one particular panel. This was Thursday morning, a panel titled after the Emma Goldman quote, "If I can't dance, you can keep your revolution." This panel featured five poets, five fantastic poets, four of whom were brand new to me.

Leading the panel was Sean Thomas Dougherty, whose work, since I saw him at Writing By Degrees at Binghamton University, way back in 2005 or something like that, has been a constant source of happiness for me--and for my students. Sean's work is revolutionary and rhythmic, and in the segment below (not from AWP, but from a BOA Editions event), Sean reads his poem "X" (begins around 3:35):

Also participating on the panel were Crystal Williams, Silvana Straw, Roger Bonair-Agard, and Dora McQuaid. All of these writers were new to me. Straw's poems in the voice of her mother--in the voice of her mother's voicemail messages, in fact--crackled with humor and political bite, and I don't know when I laughed so hard and felt such energy for serious change at the same time. Roger Bonair-Agard's "The Black Penguin Speaks" might have been the most badass poem about a penguin that ever happened. And yes, it is totally possible to have a badass poem about a penguin. Williams brought Detroit to life with startling beauty, steady clarity and music, and Williams's work made me think on a dear friend of mine who lived in the Detroit area for a long time, how that woman used her pedagogy to find, to make beauty in difficult classrooms where students' discoveries of their own voices brought their own revelations. McQuaid's poems covered the ground many writers cover--love, loss, family--but with passionate freshness.

This panel illustrated what is, for me, the best part of AWP: discovery. I went to the panel to see Dougherty read because I know I love his work, and I wanted the chance to at least give a personal wave, to say hello. What I took from the panel was an appreciation for four more writers, a renewed sense of hope, and ears full of song.

Oddments

2011-01-30T19:41:00.001-07:00

I'm heading into one of those wacky-busy weeks (it involves papers coming in in five out of five classes and two trans-continental flights in February), so this post is going to be an assortment of oddments.

1) I'm doing some knitting for charity, which is awesome (how much do I love organizations who appreciate support demonstrated in yarn?). What is slightly less awesome is that the knitting has to be done with yarn that was given to me for the project, and the yarn is not pleasant to knit with. If the same event happens next year, I'm going to try to find a way to suggest that knitters may also wish to make a donation of yarn, too (which may save on the basic cost of the endeavor as well as entice more knitters to take part). I know that many knitters' love of natural fibers and such can pose issues with regard to allergies, but perhaps some careful labeling could help.

2) The object of the trans-continental flights is the Associated Writing Programs conference. Four days of writerly and readerly chaos. I'm looking forward to seeing some old friends and some new ones, as well as possibly finding plenty of good reads.

3) I'll be within a long walk of Fahrney's Pens. I don't have much hope of having enough free time to make the trip there, but it is terribly tempting. Of course, I'm planning that my next fountain pen purchase will be an Edison Mina, so I should probably resist that temptation.

4) I write my fiction long-hand for several reasons. The most immediate of those reasons is that I occasionally have problems paying attention when I'm at the computer. The less immediate, but likely more substantial of these reasons is that I find that I feel much closer to a scene, to a character when my hand is forming the words, the curves of letters. I think my access to my vocabulary improves, too (which is key when I do most of my writing between 5:45 and 6:45 a.m.). And so while I really loathe the act of typing up my hand-written process, the system works for me, and that typing gives me a chance to do a very rough first edit.

5) Writing my fiction by hand is also a pleasant sensory experience with the advent of my fountain pen interest.

6) Have a photo. This is from the end of June, above Alcova Dam, somewhere in the vicinity of eight-thirty in the evening. I miss summer. I miss it terribly.

A Room of One's Own

2011-01-22T18:06:00.001-07:00

Post title stolen, of course, from Virginia Woolf.

Over the summer, we moved (one of those cross-town moves that seems a little silly when you rent the truck to go nine blocks but is ultimately much better than carrying your couch through cross-walks). We moved into a house that was significantly larger than the one we'd been renting, and one of the really exciting things about the move was that there was finally room for both my husband and I (notorious book-hoarders both) to have our own nerd-caves. Since July, my books had been shelved at complete random (in the order they were picked up off the floor, really), and two weeks ago, I finally organized them.

(This is mid-organization. The good news is that, at the end, all of the books had a place on a shelf)

After the fit of book-organizing, I rearranged the office itself, too, because I'd had the room since July and barely used it, and since, I've been in here, actually being productive, pretty much every day.

One of the major changes was that I pulled my desk away from the wall, turned it so my back wouldn't face the door. Somehow, that helped an awful lot. (One of my students told me that's a huge issue in Feng Shui, and hey, I use the space now, so there's probably something to it.) It still feels very strange to have a piece of furniture that's sort of in the middle of the room, but it's functional and I wasn't doing anything else with the middle of the room.

And so, the end result:

For those of you who may be library-minded, there is a system in place: the first two bookcases (on the left, above) are fiction (in alphabetical order). The bottom shelf of the middle bookcase is the tail end of fiction and the shelf of drama--dominated by Shakespeare. The bookcase in the corner has a shelf and a half of poetry, then "academic books" that I will use often (folks on writing, a few theorists and meditative folks), then there is a whole shelf of anthologies, a shelf of non-fiction, and the bottom shelf is manga and composition textbooks. Not that I think manga and textbooks really go together, but the two collections were the correct sizes to be on a shelf together. The short bookcase is two shelves of Medieval Stuff, and its bottom shelf is the heavy-hitting theory from the Ph.D. exam days.

The final two bookcases contain reference books that I use often and literary journals, respectively. Then the desk and the curtains I finally hung! (I sewed them in July.) The wooden box on the desk is a manuscript box that my dad made for me, and atop it are my three current journals. The grey one is all-purpose, the purple one (an Ecosystem that I love) contains 2/3 of one novel, and the black one (my first Rhodia webbie) is for all of the new writing projects so that the purple can remain dedicated to its novel.

And then, most importantly, The Scoo appreciates my renovation of her office.

This cat won't leave this chair now, though she had no interest in the room before I "fixed" it. Even when I am sitting in it, she sits across the headrest or she sits behind me.

The alluring scent of new stationary

2011-01-14T22:59:00.002-07:00

For those of us who have never grown out of the excitement of getting new school supplies, the start of a new semester is a heady thing. (Getting high off those fumes is may be what makes the impending mountain of grading bearable, perhaps. And no, I'm not talking about the fumes from those giant, black, industrial-strength markers with the metal bodies that really did make you loopy after five minutes. ...or those Trix-scented markers that came in the cereal boxes somewhere around 1992. Anyone else remember those? They were freaky.)

Right now, though, I'm talking about the much-more-intangible scent of fresh notebooks that are destined for particular classes. The odeur of possibility, of promise.

This semester, a passel of Maruman Token notebooks from JetPens.com is what's perfuming the air. I was looking for an affordable option for course-planning notebooks, something spiral-bound and ruled fairly narrowly that would still stand up to fountain pens, and the Maruman Token fits the bill perfectly. They're not very large--only 40 sheets in each--but that's pretty much perfect for class planning (45-ish class meetings and many days when I can double up notes for two classes on one page). Also, I think they're pretty good-looking critters: quiet, unassuming, smooth covers; very attractive blue-coated wire binding; nifty accented "a" as the cover decoration. (I also like that the design color is reminiscent of Iro Tsuki-yo--more on that in a minute.)

But how does it stand up to what I actually wanted it for? Well, pretty awesomely, even if I cheated and tried out another new toy (a pair of Lamy Joys in 1.1 & 1.5 nibs) on it.

That's Levenger Regal ink in a Lamy Joy 1.5 calligraphy nib. I am already so extraordinarily pleased I picked up this pen: it makes this saturated purple display the best of its qualities. In a fine nib, it's a very dark, very assertive ink, and that's nice, but it doesn't advertise its purpleness as much as I'd like a purple ink to do. This pen really makes it look, well, regal. Also, this ink can feather a smidge, but it behaves well on the Maruman paper. Huzzah!

Quote is taken from the Anglo-Saxon poem "Deor": "Þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg" or "That passed; so shall this." It's a favorite of mine.

Then there's a bit with Iroshizuku Tsuki-yo using a Lamy Joy with a 1.1 nib. I can't get over how much I like the shading/outlining quality of this ink. I will continue to work at my photography skills so I can someday get a picture that captures that. This time, the quote comes from Beowulf (2890b-2891): "Deað bið sella
eorla gehwylcum þonne edwitlif!" or "Death is better to any earl than honorless life." Those Anglo-Saxons are all about saying it like it is.

Three other pens/nibs to look at, though the Regal makes a repeat appearance: Levenger True Writer F with Levenger Regal, True Writer M Stub with J. Herbin Bleu Myosotis, Lamy Studio F with Levenger Cobalt.

And this is the reverse side of the page. There's a little show-through, which doesn't bother me one bit (it's a working notebook, not a journal, and I usually only use one side of the page for planning so I can take any necessary in-class notes on the reverse), and no bleed-through.

Okay. There. Review. Sorry to get all infomercially on you, folks, if you're really not here for that sort of thing.

Let's talk about what's going into those notebooks in the morning.

There's going to be Annie Dillard. I'm teaching Composition II using Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as a touchstone text (because if there's anyone who can pull together a thousand different kinds of research effortlessly and fascinatingly, it's Annie Dillard), and I love that book to the ends of the earth. ...I quoted Annie Dillard on New Year's Eve, too. That makes me happy. (She shows up in my Composition I course, too. And I will pull The Writing Life into one of the independent studies I'm directing. That's three out of five classes she's guaranteed to come up in. ...Beowulf will come up in five out of five, though, because I don't know how to not-talk about it.)

The other two courses are all about the other side of the pond: British Literature after 1800 & a Jane Austen independent study. That means I get to talk about Robert Burns and Pride and Prejudice and Oscar Wilde and James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and A. L. Kennedy.

I get paid for this.

Life is good.

The proper place of things

2011-01-09T17:45:00.001-07:00

I spent a big chunk of my Sunday adding books to my LibraryThing account. I had a basic account for a rather long time, promptly filled it with the allowable 200 books, and then let it lie dormant for a long while. Last week, I upgraded to a lifetime membership, and yesterday, I received a CueCat ISBN scanner from two brilliant folks--*waves at Laura and Linda*--so today, I dove in.

The awesome part is that I was able to log two and a half bookcases in around two hours. The less awesome part is that the other half-bookcase was made up of books that were too old to have ISBN barcodes, and so all of those needed to be logged by hand. So I gathered them up, two totebags at a time, and carried them downstairs where I could log books and watch football at the same time.

(Yes, I am aware that my process is needlessly complicated.)

And that turned out to be rather pleasant, like visiting with old friends. You see, most of those books I had to log by hand had, at one time, belonged to a professor I had at Lycoming College: Dr. Emily Jensen. When she retired from teaching, she invited the campus's English majors to her office to empty her bookshelves because, she said, her best copies were at home. At the time, it was a bittersweet moment, of course: I was losing one of my favorite instructors, the one who'd really turned me on to Anglo-Saxon poetry, to Beowulf (hlaford of my heart), but there was also the excitement of getting an orange crate's worth of Old English grammar books and strange little treasures. As a nerdy wee undergrad, I was ecstatic: these weren't anthologies, these weren't "textbooks." These were the kinds of books that full-fledged scholars used, and it didn't matter at all that many of them were printed before my parents were even born. That was even a bonus: the alluring scent of yellowing pages and glue from far-off book binderies.

Today, as I said, I spent time with those books. What stood out this time were the notes inside of them, the thin, pink-orange sheets torn off the cheapest of those old notepads covered in Dr. J's peculiar small handwriting. She wrote everything in a very upright cursive, and though her letters didn't slant back toward the left, there was always the suggestion of it, as though her hand was shaped by the Carolingian minuscule that comprised her subject areas of choice. I thought about taking a photo of her notes, but those still feel very much like hers, that they should stay between the pages where I found them.

I'm going to spend a few more hours on my book-space tonight, too, and I will be in the best of company.

I'm not sure it counts as fine craftsmanship, but--

2011-01-02T14:45:00.001-07:00

After a bit of inspiration yesterday from this article, I decided to break out some of the crafty things I've been saving up. Over the summer, I got turned on to book arts by the inimitable Deborah Poe, and since then I've been gathering up interesting odds and ends with the intention of making some hand-made books.

I have, of course, done very little with them.

Today, though, I settled in with twelve open tabs in Chrome pertaining to Coptic Binding, a stack of art paper, and a very beautiful greeting card sent to me by my friend Laura.

This was the result:

This experiment confirmed several things: 1) greeting cards are an interesting and green source of potential cover materials 2) but they really need to be reinforced with something before being used 3) a proper cover-punch or something along those lines would make much nicer holes than my awl 4) Coptic binding is super easy when doing the signatures and it's a right bitch where the covers come in.

I am generally pleased with this experiment, though, as this will make a useful jotter for lists and things and it should be fountain-pen friendly because of the paper weight. It's multi-media paper, and it's certainly not as smooth and precise as Clairefontaine or Rhodia, but it doesn't feather like mad and it is thick enough to not suffer bleed-through.

Yesterday, too, I broke out the new inks and some Tolkien quotes. Please forgive my inability to make certain letters in consistent fashion (I seem to swap between t-forms a lot). Paper is a Rhodia No. 16 graph pad, and all of this was done with a Brause dip italic nib.

Iroshizuku Tsuki-Yo:

I'm as bad or worse photographer as calligrapher, and so I don't think the fantastic outlining really shows here. But the "Tolkien" at the end exhibits some really lovely dark, almost burnt-looking edges. The color is generally that saturated deep teal, but there's a warm quality to the ink that comes out where the lines are quite wet.

Iroshizuku Kiri-Same:

What really geeked me about this one is the range of color. It starts out as a very dense pewter and shades to a fairly ephemeral cloud-like grey. The lighter end is really washed out and so wouldn't be good for things like grading or professional use, but as a shade, it makes me ridiculously happy.

J. Herbin 1670 Rouge Hematite:

The fabled 1670. My photograph doesn't capture the range of color at all. The lighter areas are a very vibrant red-orange (there was a hibiscus flower at the Binghamton Zoo at Ross Park that was exactly that color), and the darkest areas are evocative of rust (in a really good way). There's also a gold fringe that appears where the line was quite wet (not feathering outside of the line, but inside of it), and I wish I'd had this for Christmas cards. It's magical.

I like magical.

On Timing

2010-12-31T17:04:00.001-07:00

It is, of course, the last of the year. This is the day that we finish things, or we lament what we have not finished, or, perhaps most commonly, we ignore all of the unfinished things in that chrome-bright anticipation for tomorrow, for starting new things. All around the interwebs, we lay out our new clothes for tomorrow (I'm laying out my Mario Lemieux jersey), we prepare new journals and planners (Jackie at Letters & Journals has given me the urge to organize my paper-based life), we resolve, resolve, resolve. We have hope. It is glorious and invigorating, and I try so hard to save that feeling up, to say, I will hit the ground absolutely pell-mell this year.

I am, of course, not at all immune to any of these things. I'll spare you my resolutions: I break so many.

But I started a new thing today, a new written thing, and I don't even know what to call it. It thought at first it was some sort of prose poem or at the very least an experimental sort of narrative. It thought it was short. One version of it may, of course, be short. But short narratives don't sit well in my soul, and so it may become quite long (it wants a novel, of course it wants a novel, I am desperately sick of things that want a novel because one can't write six things at once that are all three hundred pages long and research-intensive, and yet that's what I love, and so I continue to be convinced that writing is the most contrary of actions anyone could take).

I started the new thing in a new journal, too (one I'd meant to save for something else, but I don't remember what the something else was, and so this new thing trumps the unknown), a lined 8x5 Rhodia. I had wanted to do my new writing for the year with one of the new inks, but the Lamy Studio was waiting, full of Levenger Cobalt, and there was no sense in waiting, in giving the idea a chance to squirm away.

I should, of course, know this already. I have read Annie Dillard.

"One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better." ~The Writing Life

But the real point of this is this: it is the day for finishing, tomorrow is the day for starting, but I'm starting today. I am hoping the momentum carries me forward. The method is something like the writerly advice to stop in the middle of the sentence when it's time to quit: if one always does that, there is always a place to start.

Unexpected Marvels

2010-12-21T08:52:00.001-07:00

I'd been introduced to the nyckelharpa through the music of Väsen a little over a year ago by a dear friend, and through that lovely chain of discovery that is the internet, yesterday I found the music of Bardou. I certainly don't claim to be a source of real knowledge on the band, but it appears to be two blokes, one with the incredibly fascinating nyckelharpa and the other with a 19-string arch/harp guitar.

Yes. Chew on that for a moment. I barely understand what that means, either. But I don't play the music, lady--I just listen to it.

But here are these amazing fellows doing "Greensleeves," which I found to be a really lovely boon to my less-than-festive spirits.

Definitely check out the rest of their tunes at YouTube.

The video is certainly the most interesting part of this post, but there is a wee stitch more that I've been chewing on. That thing is something that I'm certain many folks are experiencing at this part of the year: holiday burn-out. This year, I know it's a combination of a) my job is at its most stressful from November 29-December 18, which kind of puts the damper on getting super-festive in preparation for holiday things b) poor planning (the job stress has been a constant since 2003--by now, I should know this and perhaps do my holiday shopping ahead, no? yes.) c) piling on a lot of holiday travel (also not new, of course).

The preparation issue is the only one of these things that I really get to control. But I do get to control that, so I ought to put something on my calendar in July that says "do holiday shopping now, you cricket-brained farthingale." I always put it off, hoping that I will be able to find the perfect gift for my loved ones, which never actually happens, and then I'm stuck bad-temperedly flinging things into a basket at the mall. And that's something no one wants.

What's your annual holiday bane, that thing you swear you will never do again and then repeat year after year?

Regarding Parking Lots & Loafers

2010-12-07T09:23:00.001-07:00

The campus parking lot this morning was a thin sheet of black ice, or perhaps just the result of an incredibly vicious frost on asphalt--whatever it was, I skated from my car to the door on the flats of my loafers. It's probably time to stop wearing loafers, and that's likely the universe telling me that, but when one is in the habit of sitting on one's right foot, it's best to wear shoes that come off easily. (My right shoe spends an awful lot of time on the floor under my desk, hollow and footless.)

Perhaps this is also the universe's gentle suggestion that I ought to learn to sit like a grown-up, with both feet on the floor.

I have no recollection of asking the universe for its opinion on either my footwear or my desk-side posture.

But the thrill of scooting along on the parking lot, that I'll keep, dear universe.

The Pony Express or How Mail Gets to Wyoming

2010-11-21T19:12:00.001-07:00

Or maybe the mail doesn't get to Wyoming at all. I'm starting to think that's the case--my mother sent me my calligraphy set last Friday. As of the last post (on Saturday, a week and a day later), it still hasn't arrived. I'm miffed about that because noodling about with some ink and so forth is what I'd like to do just now. I spent literally all of my Sunday grading (all right--all of my Sunday minus a longish tea break at 10 a.m. and a very shortish dinner break at 5:30), and if I were a smart person, I would return to my stack of papers before I go to bed.

If I were a smart person, I also would do something else with my night that doesn't involve holding a writing instrument. Or typing. Or knitting. Generally speaking, I would do something with little or no involvement of my wrists and fingers.

Does anyone have any actual hobbies that fit this bill?

Perhaps riding Pony Express and getting the mail to Wyoming faster than its current pace would suffice.

Now I have my good and practical reason to get that horse I've always wanted.

Reading and also writing

2010-11-14T09:24:00.001-07:00

I'm currently reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Williams (yes, I know: me and everyone else on the planet). The link goes to the book's LibraryThing page. What a cracking novel. I'm only about a third of the way through it, and I am dazzled by the number of significant and interesting narrative threads Mitchell's braiding here. The one that I am most interested in (the most human of them, perhaps) is, of course, the one the reader gets least of, but rather than feeling slighted by the choice, it's easy to recognize a) the narrative necessity of that construction b) the practicality of how that thread may weave itself through the rest of the plot with consideration to the novel's reality. And, well, it's lovely enough to want to keep that one set of interactions rare and striking and not dull itself with too much familiarity.

All that said, though, if the last 200 pages of the book want to be nothing but Jacob and Aibagawa, I would surely not complain one bit.

Segue.

I am needing, in a very significant way, to get past a wall of inaction this weekend if I don't want to call my writing goals for the month a sham and a mockery. (And, lest anyone be confused, I surely do not wish to do this.) The most prudent way to approach this, of course, would be to open up the Word document the novel is in and start typing, But I have the attention span, of late, of a sparrow. Or of my cat, The Scoo. See photo.

And so I think that I'll turn to pen and paper this morning. And, for those of you who like that sort of thing, the choice will be my True Writer Water Lilies pen filled with Levenger Cocoa ink, and the paper is the Ecosystem notebook that has been dedicated to this single project. (Seriously--Ecosystem notebooks, available at your local B&N or on the interwebs, are brilliant things. No crankiness at all with fountain pen ink, and mine, which is roughly 8" by 5", has held up to much, much rough treatment. I first discovered this gem through the Letters and Journals stationary giveaway, which I was fortunate enough to win in July.)

Anyroad, it's time to get on with it.

Compartmentalizing on a Snowy Day

2010-11-09T14:38:00.001-07:00

Today is the first substantial snow of the year. The ground is too warm--from its 67 degrees yesterday--for any flakes to linger on roads and sidewalks, but the grass and the trees are powdered sugar-dusted, and the fall has been constant since it was light enough to notice the flakes.

I'm not supposed to be blogging just now--my to-do list is rather daunting at the moment--but I feel like I've been sprinting through my day and I need fifteen minutes of quiet, of stillness. I suppose writing a blog entry demonstrates how poor I am at actually achieving real stillness, but I am completing a single task in doing this, concentrating on one thing, and that's a milestone for me. (I even tried to manage to screw that up--the title of this post reminded me of a poem whose title I don't remember and whose author escapes me and whose lines I can't quote. Locating the poem, then, to reference properly, was not a success, and I spent five minutes with one hand on the keyboard and one hand poking the books on my shelf, willing one of them to turn into the anthology I wanted. If I had the correct anthology in my office, I could find it in a tick, because I remember where in the book it is, but I don't remember what it's called or who it's by. Memory is such a strange and fickle thing.)

My Tuesdays and my Thursdays often feel like this. I teach back to back classes (which fill nearly three hours) in subjects I love, and I am always breathless by the end of the second. This afternoon found me having meetings with some students and then with a poet from the community who was looking for some basic feedback: was his writing "good enough" to bother continuing to write? It breaks my heart that he even considered this a necessary meeting, but I understand the anxiety. The best part of it is that I got to meet a cool new poet (who has apparently been writing his entire life) who isn't a student, and I invited him to the open mic night that the awesome Casper College poetry class has started to hold twice a month. Hopefully he comes to that.

But that was another conversation to leave me somewhat breathless. (Maybe the real moral of the story is that Holly should learn to breathe between her sentences.) And so here I am, taking a few minutes to re-center before embarking on the rest of my afternoon. I do, at least, take a breath between the period and the next capital letter. Most of the time.

Lazy Sunday

2010-11-07T13:03:00.001-07:00

Well, it's not exactly lazy-lazy--I still have a to-do list, but the weekend has felt incredibly decadent in that I didn't/don't have anything to grade. To that end, I've been rather productive in the sense that I've gotten a nice-sized batch of stories out into the world.

I've also decided that perhaps the more effective option for my November challenge might be to ensure that I do one writerly act each day. I say this because, while I've been accomplishing things, I haven't exactly been following my own plan. Mostly, I've been striking while the proverbial iron is hot--instead of revising one story, I did two. Instead of sending one story out to three places, I sent two out to a total of nine journals. So, I'm resolving not to be particularly fussed over what gets accomplished in what order, so long as something gets done.

One thing that has actually helped me to be productive is the acquisition of some new writing tools. I try to avoid relying on "stuff" whenever possible, but when there's a basic pleasure in using the instrument, I find myself far more interested in completing tasks. Most significantly, I'm talking about fountain pens. In March, I acquired my first fountain pen: a Levenger True Writer in a pattern called Water Lilies. It has since been discontinued, which is heartbreaking because it's really, really lovely (and inspired by the Monet painting, of course). In the past month, too, I added a black Levenger True Writer with a stub nib and a Lamy Studio to my new collection.

There are countless blogs devoted to the art of the fountain pen--to fine-tuning and appreciating the nuances of these instruments. At this point, I'm not qualified to comment on any of these issues, but what I can say is that there is a brilliant and beautiful simple pleasure in writing with a quality pen. The ink flows without any kind of pressure--not only is it much, much easier on my hands (which makes it easier to write for a long time), but there is a lovely metaphorical reassurance in that, too. The writing instrument isn't fighting the writer, so that leaves one with only the idea and the words themselves to wrestle.

New Set of Challenges

2010-11-03T21:30:00.000-06:00

Well, the first three days of the month went somewhat successfully. I did manage my transcription task (by almost twice my goal), and I managed the pencil-edits on a story. But then I got kind of involved in the editing process, and I decided that I'd do pencil edits on three stories. Which is still better than I'd been doing, of course.

My new set:
Nov. 4: Electronic edits on one story
Nov. 5: Mail out one story to three journals
Nov. 6: Transcribe & edit 2 pages

In other news, I've figured out how to make the ginger tea that I've been mad for since I had it at the local Thai place. It's stupendously simple--boil X inches of thinly-sliced ginger in X cups of water for ten minutes, and then add a bit of sweetener of some sort. I added agave nectar to mine, though I think a mild honey would be an even better option. Right now, though, all I have is some super-robust German honey that is a bit too overpowering for beverages.

Sometime soon, too, you'll be hearing about my new fountain pen obsession. Stay tuned.

We all know what tomorrow is.

2010-10-31T21:45:00.000-06:00

And, of course, if you don't know, it's the beginning of National Novel Writing Month, i.e. NaNoWriMo.

I'm not in a place where I can truly do NaNo, in the actual sense of the thing. (The last thing I ever need to do is to begin a new project. My troubles always have to do with finishing--and revising--what I have already begun.)

And so I set my own NaNo goals. I'm going to try to set out three days' worth of goals tonight, to be accomplished, of course, before the end of Wednesday. If all goes well, at the end of Wednesday, I'll put up another three, and so on through the end of the month. Because this is also the middle of the semester and I'm teaching four writing-intensive classes, I'm going to try to be realistic, rather than over-ambitious. But here goes, anyway.

Monday, Nov. 1: Retype 2 pages of handwritten work
Tuesday, Nov. 2: Print & pencil-edit Story A
Wednesday, Nov. 3: Complete edits on Story A & draft submission plan

In times of cold, everything draws inward.

2010-10-27T10:24:00.000-06:00

Well. Except for water. But I'm not here to talk about water.

In truth, I'm not entirely sure what I'm here to talk about today. I suppose I'll start with difficulty.

At this time of year, everything starts with difficulty for me. I am happiest waking up early--truly, 5:15 agrees with me. In August, that hour is tinged with gray, and the sky warms and warms (at least here in Wyoming, where our days are sunny more often than not), and by the time everything has lit and the world's begun, I'll have written, I'll have had breakfast, and I might even be clean and ready to start all of the other parts of my day.

Here at the end of October, in a week that's showcased our Casper winds, "early" means having to shed the blissfully warm cocoon of blankets for a chill, chill room and no promise of daylight until seven has come and gone. The clock changes in November will perhaps help a little, but December shortens the days more, and we'll be back where we were. This all translates to me abusing the snooze button, and I know that's not an effective or useful strategy for me. I feel like the trees, the sap in my limbs slowing and slowing, and then there's very little in the way of growth. This is all well and good if one is an Ent, but I am, alas, not.

So I'll be looking for solutions to this issue as we trundle forward into winter. It's the same problem, every year. It's high time to do something about it.

The return of the weather report

2010-04-19T12:12:00.000-06:00

This week, it seems, shows Wyoming's weather turning the precipitous corner toward spring. All this truly seems to mean is that there is no snow actually in the forecast, and there's been some balmy weather. None of this is insurance, none of this a guarantee. My students, and some of my coworkers, delight in reminding me of a year, not so far off, when it snowed on the fourth of July. I can see Independence Rock glazed white and slick on Independence Day, and I have to think back to all of those many travelers who stopped at Independence Rock on their long way west and thought of reaching it as a safety point. Make it there by early July and exit the Rockies before snowy doom. One small solace in a world of uncertainty and equipment failure. What would it have meant to those travelers that day, even a handful's scatter of wet, dense flakes, when they had to think so very hard about the continuance of summer? My own soul sinks looking toward a weekend of rain and a temperate fifty degrees; I can't quite think of what snow means anymore, not until we're well into the leaf-crunching days of October.

Anomaly

2010-04-15T08:59:00.000-06:00

I have seen seagulls in Wyoming for several days now. I cannot think that they are here by design, unless the design is the wind's. I don't know enough about the West to know if seagulls go to the Great Salt Lake, west of here, but if they did, the winds pulling toward the continent's center are surely strong enough to push a few wayward sea birds with them. I think of them finding the snaking Platte and following it, low as they can fly, and wondering where the thick, salty sea air has gone. They tilt their wings for each winding turn, going very little distance for how far they fly. I wonder if they find the ocean again, or if they stand on some prairie plateau, flatten their wings for the sun until it leeches all sense of sea from their feathers. I wonder if they perch on beef cattle, lift themselves to our mountain just south, scrape up bits of bone and sand in their beaks, and commit themselves to fossils and pronghorn skulls when they can find no spilled popcorn, no teeming shoal.

Fog

2009-12-06T09:17:00.000-07:00

I'm not referring to real, actual fog. That's something I haven't seen since moving to Wyoming. I hear that it exists in this state, sometimes even densely enough to warrant a warning for road safety, but it's not here. There is only one forecast for the state it seems, for everything that isn't tucked into a corner so far it's nearly another state. Yellowstone creates its own weather. The rest of us share one report, though the state is as big as three or four other states (or more, but let's go with averages along the mid-Atlantic).

No, the fog I'm talking about is much more localized. You know, the kind in your head and behind your eyes. We've reached the end of the semester, and it's its usual, exhausting self. Add in the first proper cold of the winter (both the rhinovirus and a cold snap that is going to keep us in the single digits for the better part of a week) and a kind of dry my body doesn't understand, and there you have the thick, gray curtain of hazard. There is grading to do, and it will get done, but the pace is glacial. There is not enough liquid in this world to keep my throat from seeming to crack.

I know what I have to do. I have to buckle down and buy a dehumidifier. It's not that hard, it's not that expensive, and most everyone I know in this state has one. "You have to," I'm told. And it's not that I don't believe people, and it's not that I don't notice how much better I feel just out of the shower, when there is a protective cloud of steam that seems to ease the spiny air. It's that I am from the shaded, misty bones of the Appalachians. I have never lived in a house that didn't have a dehumidifier. Both the house I grew up in and the house I left in New York were damp and dark enough to grow mushrooms in the livingroom if one were so inclined. One had a dehumidifier that had a large plastic tank that my dad emptied nearly every day. The other ran nearly constantly, and there was a hose connecting its tank to a sump pump in the basement. To consider now purchasing a machine to deliberately wet the air makes my brain ache. Also, perhaps I've already grown a western stubbornness: it bothers me to understand that my body cannot take this climate. My fingers crack and my lips chap and my skin feels like the dust in my throat. I don't want to change my environment. I want to adapt to it. But I can't last for eons while my skin changes how it responds to water, while it learns to absorb moisture wherever it encounters it. I need to respond to students and can't wait while these soft tissues grow more dense hair to protect them, bison-like, or until they scale and harden to a lizard's imperviousness.

I have to go to the store, and I do not want to do it.

Overheard

2009-11-23T14:21:00.000-07:00

This morning, I found myself walking behind a single person in the hallway, and with every step, I heard the corduroy swish of said person's trousers. I have yet to meet anyone who can walk silently in corduroy--no matter if one has thighs the circumference of a stork's shins, one walks loudly in the cozy, ridged fabric. Blue jeans, too, have their quiet sound, though perhaps not if they are old and worn enough. There is little opportunity for me to wear that perfect, butter-soft, decaying denim at work, though. Perhaps if my office were not a scant hallway from the college president's, I might be so bold.

The sounds of walking aren't a revelation--how many odes have been written on a leaf's crunch or gravel's grate or a new snow's peculiar hush, and how many have I written myself, of course--but indoors, they are different. No one waxes about the flapping slap of flipflops springing from carpet to heel, or about the purposeful clack of someone's sensible business shoes on tile. I remember high school: the principal's shoes--always the boxy shine of professional's leather, always with heels so dense and hard that they exploded on the linoleum like little firecrackers as she walked--harbingers of doom. She couldn't catch a soul at anything because we heard her coming for miles.

I remember that, and I dress as quietly as I can. I walk toe to heel on the short indoor-outdoor nap of the halls. My arms do not swing in any jackety rustle. Sometimes I hear my trousers make their muted swish--not even corduroy, but polyester and wool blends--and I slow myself. I take more care. I do not think I am visibly bow-legged in my efforts, but I suppose I couldn't see myself to know. I wear boots with thick rubber soles or sneakers cut low and close to my feet so that when I am trying at all, I can turn any corner with surprise.

I don't know what I'm hoping to sneak up on, but I certainly won't find it if it hears me coming.

Slant of Sunlight

2009-11-17T10:54:00.000-07:00

For the first time in my life, I am in an office where I have had to close my blinds so that the sunlight doesn't render my computer screen unreadable. I am fairly certain that this is the first office I've ever had where there's been any sunlight at all, and I feel quite guilty shutting it out in the name of productivity. I'm hoping to find a happier solution by rearranging my office at the earliest convenience, as it's still a very ecru-walled institutional space.

The first addition to the office, though, is a very lovely, warm-glowing floorlamp that a friend picked up for me from Ikea. After having been on campus last night well past the hours of natural light, I can say that it creates a very pleasing atmosphere for work. The one thing that does concern me is that the dimness might make people think I am not here (though my door is open).

On a discarded corduroy slipper

2009-11-11T08:09:00.000-07:00

I've been taking a slightly different route to school these days, essentially the L side of the L7 square that is one full block in my walk. I'm not entirely sure why I changed--perhaps the perception of it being 50 less feet in the sometimes rather chill mornings, but more likely I've changed because it's on the less-traveled sides of the streets. It's a mostly unremarkable change--still residential, still perilously sidewalked, and perhaps skirting a marginally less affable block, but nothing that anyone can honestly notice at eight in the morning or four in the afternoon. I think the reason I keep walking that route is because one of the yards contains a discarded black loafer. It's got a red plaid interior, and the shoe appears to be in fine condition. It doesn't look chewed or stained or soiled. But it is certainly a black corduroy loafer near the farthest reach of their fence (because most yards have fences here--to keep dogs in or to keep dogs out or both, in fact). I don't stop to look more closely at it--no one wants an odd, trenchcoated person eyeballing her yard before lunch--but I wonder who is looking more closely at it. Certainly it's not the yard-owners, because it's been there more than a week. But there is a spindle-armed shrub that grows through the fence not ten feet from the slipper, and every morning and every afternoon, it's full of small, busy sparrows. I have to walk around the naked hedge because it spills over the sidewalk, but I am close enough that the little flock--four or five of them, not dozens--puffs and flits to the next shrub. I pass that one, too, and they hop along to the next, and it's only after that do they mutter into their stitching feathers and go back to their original place to contemplate that single slipper. They rattle like crumpled paper in the dry branches, making leaf-crunching noises where there are no leaves to crunch.

Vampire Bats

2009-11-05T09:26:00.000-07:00

Seems like a more appropriate title for a post from last week, no?

Yesterday, I attempted to be a responsible, health-conscious adult.

Yesterday, I failed pretty spectacularly at it.

There was a free campus blood draw & test (the kind where they take your blood and then mail you an analysis of all of those things adults are supposed to know and monitor: cholesterol and glucose and triglycerides and so on), and I decided that I would go. (Not only because doing so would help along a program we have for reducing one's insurance premiums, but because I'd never done so before, and I would like to know what's going on with my hemoglobins.) Friends of mine were also going, and so it was going to be a group activity and, because I was expected there, I couldn't chicken out. (Believe me, I thought about it.)

You see, I have an incredible aversion to needles. It's not the pain level (it's really a very tiny pinchy feeling), but it is the kind of pain and the concept of it. It's invasive, and having teeth drilled doesn't freak me out even a third as much. Also, it's traumatic: I have small veins, and I have blood that doesn't really want to come out of them. My one trip to the Red Cross Blood Drive left me with a collapsed vein and a full hyperventilation. How very embarrassing, on top of everything else.

I reasoned that yesterday would be different because they weren't trying to fill a bag; it was just a wee test-tube. I was nervous, though, and just holding my arm underside-up is enough to give me palpitations. The elbow is there to bend and protect, like the knee, and I don't even like to look at the insides of my elbows, let alone bare them for needles. It's against every instinct I have. But I survived the stab, and I felt the needle withdraw, and I was relieved. I hadn't cried, I hadn't hyperventilated, and it was over. And then I was told (because I certainly wasn't looking at the process) that she'd missed, and rather than stab me again, I was to be sent to Roanna, two tables down, who was an expert, and she'd get it in the other arm, no problem.

Roanna did, indeed, get the blood lickety-split, with no fishing or anything, but the damage was done, so to speak. While I didn't hyperventilate (thank God) this time, I teared up, I shook, and I was thoroughly mortified (because there's nothing like being sniffling and blotchy in front of people you've only just met).

Luckily, there was a good 2.5-hour cushion between that and my needing to teach, so I sat in my office and answered e-mails until I calmed down, and then I had coffee with one of the friends who went along and tried very valiantly to be comforting and cool about the whole thing. And I survived. But I'll be wearing long sleeves and avoiding my own elbows for days.

Here's the question for discussion, then: how does one get over fear of something if doing the thing consistently contributes to the fear?

An Alcove of One's Own

2009-10-31T19:38:00.000-06:00

I spent my afternoon trying to carve a suitable writing space out of the downstairs room with the books. It's not an office, as it also houses our dressers and so many bookcases that there isn't room to put a desk down there. It's not a spare bedroom, as there is no bed (or any other furniture on which to sit or lie). It's just a room, and its predominant feature is books. There isn't, in fact, a spare 6 inches on any of the walls against which to put a desk, a card table, or even a collapsible tray table, which is what I have right now as a working flat surface. There is an empty space in front of the closet (a seldom-used closet that houses seldom-worn coats and boardgames), though, and so I set up my folding tray table and one of those collapsible canvas camping chairs in front of the closet, facing one of my bookshelves. I set up a lamp, too--effectively in the center of the room--and toted in my electric space heater (as the "downstairs" is half underground and the carpet, I am certain, is the only thing between my feet and the cement foundation, and therefore I could also hang a side of beef down there without worrying about spoilage). My goal is to procure an electric blanket instead of the space heater as it has greater efficiency and practicality (when the writing is done, I vacate that room post-haste), but so far, this is a decent stopgap, I suppose.

I also made an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of my writing for at least the month of November. For some reason, I am motivated by numbers, despite my general hate-hate relationship with them, and I am willing to take any motivation I can rustle up. Why November? It's National Novel Writing Month. I'm not officially a NaNo participant, but the aura of writing floating in the ether is helpful. I'm not tallying on a single project, but I'm taking the month as a chance to finish up some things I've started or to get some projects onto a running start. Words are words: however they come, I'll take them.

Arils

2009-10-26T12:45:00.005-06:00

I was in the seventh grade when I first encountered a pomegranate. My enrichment group was putting on a pantheon supplement for the whole grade's Greek Week, and, of course, we had a Hades and a Persephone in our group. At the time, I refused to be anything so domestic as a member of that (or any) complex couple. I was Artemis, solitary huntress, and I made a bow and arrow from slim branches and string. I stole my brother's model paints to make it all silver, and my fingertips were stained ungoddessly gray, too. But my gray fingers are not the point of this piece. They did, however, factor in: our teacher--flawlessly hip and hatted in rural Pennsylvania where no one was hip or hatted in any way beyond the baseball cap--had purchased pomegranates. They were to illustrate the Hades and Persephone story, and to give our very limited palates something new and striking to process during our historical and mythological course plan. I don't know where she got them. She must have driven the forty miles south to Harrisburg; our grocery stores didn't carry anything more interesting than kiwifruit until 2000. And those pomegranates turned my fingertips a wet kind of ruby, and I'm certain that some of that model paint wore off under the fascinated touch of my tongue. I was and am a lover of all things sweet, but the tart, bright burst of each aril amazed me. Amazed us all, standing in the basement hallway of our aging middle-school, wrapped in togas made of the cheapest bedsheets our mothers could buy. We picked the seed-shards from our teeth with our fingernails and ignored the grapes and the plates of dense bread and olive oil, and we were all of us far, far away, clustered around red-stained paper plates, tasting the legend of longing, of hunger, and of a kind of soured passion we were a decade from even scenting.

Sunday Quiet

2009-10-18T14:43:00.001-06:00

It was mid-week when all of the leaves quit Casper. Taxed limp and brown by too-quick snow, they leapt into the lost Wednesday wind (some balmy remnant of September curls around Natrona County until Monday's sweep east, taking shelter in the mountain's lee before the work-week starts again), but the cold melted their crisp spines, left them without the capillary bones to kite the air, and they fell, muddied and silent. There is no crunching underfoot, no sound to echo back for the bare, waving, sunlit limbs.

Early and Often

2009-10-09T09:39:00.003-06:00

I won't apologize for the blog being something of Wyoming Weather Report central.

This morning we had our first shushing kind of snow: enough depth and heft to quiet everything on the surface. The clatter of dry stones in the side-streets of Casper halted; there was no rustle in the cottonwood leaves. The cottonwoods themselves have their frosty jackets on always: silvered leaf-backs that flutter up and show with each breath of the west wind (don't tell me that has come from some bag, Ulysses and Aeolus--it comes from the Absaroka Mountains and follows the snakelike North Platte). But today the trees show nothing because the snow is white gravity, holding down even the air. The small, white flakes fall vertically today, dense as wet sand, and it's just the kind of thing that gives me reason to read to my class my favorite paragraph in modern English: the last 160 words of James Joyce's "The Dead."

Redeemable

2009-09-30T15:22:00.002-06:00

Today is the sort of day that made me hate autumn less: nothing bare and raw in the wind, no lingering, distant promise of snow. The temperature waits, held at sixty-eight: the overnight low and today's high. Stop, it says. Rest in this one day where no season slides forward or back. This is fall for its own sake.

Even the trees are held between: half-changed and patchy yellow-green. The forecase promises snow before the weekend, and yesterday was capped with the kind of sun that can boil the inside of a closed-up car and turns cats to languid pools in the light. The month pulls polar, but today, autumn is arrested, its own creature for the sun's full arc.

Walking In

2009-08-31T14:04:00.003-06:00

Obligatory disclaimer regarding posting frequency and my delinquency goes here.

This morning, on my walk in to school, I came across two mule deer in the residential streets of Casper. A doe and her fawn from this year, they cut across three streets and several lawns (disregarding the broken sidewalks the way I'd like to do), and they bounded further into town as I watched. The doe had some manner of growth dangling from her neck: a striated dark ball of fur and scar, perhaps, but still attached. Some cervid goiter or tumor that bounced like a tennis ball below her neck, suspended by a thin strand of flesh. If it had been hanging from me, I'd have ripped it off, but her grinding teeth wouldn't sever and her deery neck wouldn't let her bend to reach it, even if she could pull it away.

It bobbed, grotesque and unnoticed and even more ugly for her ignorance of it: she knew only machine: wait and two legs: go faster, and the fawn followed after, learning their unmarked crosswalks and the yards with no fences.

such a liar

2009-05-28T00:26:00.003-06:00

I'm in Portland, Oregon at this very moment (having been here for 3 days now), on vacation. The last time I was on vacation--real vacation, not hosteling & cold-sandwich-in-the-rental-car-ing it across Sweden--was somewhere around 2002. I've read books, I've eaten excellent food (fleur de sel caramel macarons at Pix Patisserie, most notably), and I've done some shopping for things I can't get where I live (like many flavors of mochi and an onigiri bento box).

Even more notably: I've gotten a job. On Tuesday, I received a phone call inviting me to join the faculty at Casper College, in Casper, Wyoming. I am exhilerated, relieved, and no small bit anxious (to get there, to start, to find a house, to sell the house I have--and all of that in no particular order). It is wonderful, just now, to have that pressure of applying lifted (especially in these market conditions). I am privileged and blessed (and now I can finally hit up the optometrist again) to be in this position.

My body, however, cannot handle the lifting of stress, apparently. Today, on the drive back to my brother-in-law's place, I had a migraine kick in. I had one the day after my dissertation defense, too, and one the day I turned in my dissertation to my committee. Letting go of tension has become the difficult thing for my body, it seems, and that strikes me as remarkably backward. I'm going to try to use the remainder of my vacation doing as Yan Martel encouraged: increasing my stillness. Or at least in the effort of unitasking a little more.

To that end, I'm going to resume my reading. I'm starting Greg Ames's Buffalo Lockjaw, and I've been looking forward to sinking my teeth into Greg's book for weeks.

Dashed

2009-05-22T05:27:00.003-06:00

It occurs to me that I will likely bore people to tears with odd little snippets every single day, but. Well. That's what the internet is for, innit?

This morning I'd like to talk about plans gone awry. You see, I am a (somewhat lax) participant in the lunch phenomenon known as bento. The tiny, lovely lunchboxes, the inclusion of actual food in said boxes (from the person whose past favorite lunch was a bag of Cheetos and a granola bar), etc. etc. Now, I've been rather remiss in doing any such delightful lunch-packing lately, and today was the day I was going to do it again, properly. I rinse and get my rice on the stove, get the water going for my tea, start peeling carrots. (It's all very productive for 6:45 in the ante meridiems, yes?) The tea kettle whistles, and as I'm reaching for a mug, my vision goes rather fuzzy, darkish, you know. I've had this happen before. I get a good grip on the counter with one hand, get the mug settled with the other. Somewhere in the vicinity of reaching for the tea kettle, I apparently lose my grip not only on the counter, but on consciousness. Apparently I fell rather gently (which is always nice) because while I feel where my head hit the floor, it doesn't hurt. I did, however, in the process, knock my rice pot over, and I just haven't got the mental wherewithal to start over with that.

I'm not particularly concerned about the fainting part. Mostly I'm vexed because I'd had my hopes up (and maybe that's telling--my hopes were up regarding the packing of my lunch? but in my defense, I had a bloody nice bit of leftover steak and some roasted broccoli from last night that were going to go with said rice) and now things have gone pear-shaped. I don't like pears.

(Honestly. Nothing against those who do, but I just can't get my palate around the durn things.)

I don't like pears, and I like my plans going pear-shaped even less. Ever since I was a child, I cannot stomach disappointment. It's not so much the problem of things changing--that's okay. But I'm definitely of the Colonel Hannibal Smith (you remember--George Peppard from The A-Team) way of thinking: I love it when a plan comes together. And I am disordinately distraught, I think, when it doesn't.

I should probably work on that.

Reading: Moab is My Washpot by Stephen Fry

What an intensely charming and addictive read. His section on his absent musical ability is--well. Brilliant. But you'll have to read it for yourself.

This was a good idea.

2009-05-20T18:32:00.002-06:00

I started the next novel. 227 words. That's not much. But it's a starting point, and I'm stopping there--mid-sentence--so that I will pick it up tomorrow.

My reading for the day isn't done yet--that comes next, I think, as soon as I make some cocoa. Or some other seasonally inappropriate beverage. I did read a few pages while printing out things today, and I'm very much looking forward to getting back to The Air We Breathe.

I feel like I should have something interesting and pithy to say, but I will just say, instead, that I am very glad to have found my missing notebook in the empty plastic bag that my cap and gown were housed in. I was certain I'd left it on campus somewhere, but there it was, while I was cleaning the bedroom today: black and spiral bound, 1/3 full of things that someone might find interesting but only if that someone were someone like me (enamored of trivia and things that aren't meant for us to see). I also found the pen that was with it, a black Bic stickpen, possibly the cheapest kind you can buy, and the kind that I love to absolute pieces. I lose the caps for them, and then they roll off every surface in my house, because nothing here is level.

100/200 Challenge: Day 1

2009-05-19T18:53:00.004-06:00

I'll start with what I'm reading, which, as I said in the previous post, is Andrea Barrett's The Air We Breathe. I'm not done with the novel yet, so I won't talk about the book itself just yet, but reading it did get me thinking more about something that I've been thinking about a lot lately. And that something is, terrifically mundanely, the weather.

I love talking about the weather. I check the weather several times a day, I look at thermometers, and whenever I (misguidedly) sit down to write a poem, it always ends up being, in one way or another, about the weather. And I don't know anything particularly about the weather--I have no scientific knowledge of it beyond the basic concept that different kinds of weather meeting (warm systems meeting cold systems) generally makes for even more interesting (or intimidating) weather. But I find something compelling in the seasons' change--possibly because I dread the cold months (and for me, there's nine of those a year)--quite enough that when I first meet people, that's often my topic of choice. And I'm certain I seem terribly awkward and uncreative ("Oh, she has nothing to talk about but the weather," they say), but it's not a lack of interest that motivates me--rather, it's the opposite.

And this little postlet, I suppose, beyond being in keeping with my resolution, is also to say that you may find more about the weather here, in future days, in general, or in specific.

What is your favorite topic that no one expects to be a favorite topic?

Greetings by way of resolutions

2009-05-19T11:47:00.003-06:00

These first posts are always difficult--we have such want to be momentous all the time, don't we? I'm probably a little more predisposed to it than most, too, but I'm doing my best to refrain.

It's hard to blog as a fiction writer--I get jealous of my time and words and I know I should be working on a novel right about now. I also have a predilection for untruths (because my reality is seldom as interesting as other people's), which seems to be at crossed purposes for this kind of endeavor. However, I also don't want to be entirely cut off from the reading and writing community, which is the peculiar situation I found myself in while finishing my first novel. I was working really well--and not reading and not talking to people. And now that the draft is finished and revised and I'm searching for a home for it, I find myself neither writing, reading, nor really conversing about reading and writing, which is a very dull situation.

So: I am posing a challenge to myself (and anyone is welcome to play along, either in the comments or in your own blog):

The 100/200 Challenge. (I made it up in the shower this morning. It's not a very good name, is it?)

The goal is to read 100 pages of something and write 200 words of something, every day, whether it be 200 words about what I've read, 200 words of fiction, or 200 words of non-fiction (because I have essays I always mean to be writing--I'm certain you do, too).

I'm adding to that goal an admonition to write about the experience here, what I'm reading and what I'm writing. I likely won't be posting those 200 words here if they're fiction or part of a larger essay, but I will be talking about what I'm reading and also looking for suggestions for what to read next.

I'm kicking off the reading with The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett, who is one of my absolute favorites.

I'm going to get down to business. What are you reading now?