What Poetry Does
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30 December 2010
I called the tree a butternut (which I don’t think
it is) so I could talk about how different
the trees are around me here in the rain.
It reminds me how mutable language is. Keats
would leave blank spaces in his drafts to hold on
to his passion, spaces for the right words to come.
We use them sideways. The way we automatically
add bits of shape to hold on to the dissolving dreams.
So many of the words are for meanwhile. We say,
“I love you” while we search for language
that can be heard. Which allows us to talk
about how the aspens over there tremble
in the smallest shower, while the tree over by
the window here gathers the raindrops and lets them
go in bunches. The way my heart carols sometimes,
and other times yearns. Sometimes is quiet
and other times is powerfully quiet.
-“The Butternut Tree at Fort Juniper” by Jack Gilbert
Let It Dough
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29 December 2010
Thanks to JW for turning me on to Chris Niemann‘s Abstract City Blog at the NY Times. The Christmas cookie ritual is sacred for me, so I love this. “Sloth” is my favorite.
27 December 2010
Well, no. But he did get me…. a KINDLE!
Max, I hear what you’re saying. The Kindle is the future; if you can’t beat ’em – and why would you want to, anyway? – join ’em.
Amazon just announced that the 3rd-generation Kindle is now officially the bestselling item in Amazon history, surpassing Harry Potter and the Death Hallows.
I futzed around with it for a few hours; browsed and downloaded some free content from Project Gutenberg; played with font size and style, turned on the text-to-voice function (ack!), explored the look and feel of Kindle-version magazines. What I learned: I’m a much more visual person than I even realized. The impersonality of the text and layout, the absence of images and fonts, disregard for use of “white space” and margins and columns – it changes reading for me, and not in an appealing or exciting way.
Flipping through a book’s or a magazine’s pages is exactly that and not some digitized version of it; I want to see the words and images and title fonts laid out on the pages as I flip, I want to be influenced and guided by layout and design. I want to remember and revisit that quote or passage, including its location and shape on the page, relative to other words and passages. And yes, I want to feel the pages pass through my hands, experience a book’s weight and surfaces as well as its intellectual and emotional content. A book is more than just an aggregation of text to me, as it turns out. I sort of knew this, but now I know it.
So Kindleena is going back to Amazon. (Thank you anyway, hun.) This is not to say that I’m averse to e-readers in general. But the Kindle is, I suppose, to me, the communist version of reading – egalitarian, yes. True or beautiful, no.
Tony’s Burgundy
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24 December 2010
It’s beef bourguignon a la Anthony Bourdain tonight. Use the cheap stuff, he says. And so we will.
Family, “Family”
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23 December 2010
Of course, ’tis the season of family – awareness/appreciation of, along with (re)consideration of who these people are and what it all means. We watched THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT the other night, a meaningful and complex portrait of a new kind of family, i.e. one with two moms + sperm donor. In the end, the film seems to be less about “lesbian family” and more about — as the philandering Jules (Julianne Moore) says, tearfully and remorsefully — “Marriage is hard.” (It’s also, a little bit, about “men are clueless,” or at least Mark Ruffalo‘s character Paul is; but there seems to be hope for boys, and girls too, i.e. the kids are all right.)
I’m haunted a little by a recent re-reading of Toni Morrison‘s A Mercy. It’s a story of makeshift family – a white couple, a Native American slave, two indentured servants, two black slave girls, a free black man — of misfits coming together in the wilderness, shedding conventional obligations and communal connections, partially by choice and partially by no-choice. In the end, their ties are not strong enough to hold: “They once thought they were a kind of family because together they had carved companionship out of isolation. But the family they imagined they had become was false. Whatever each one loved, sought, or escaped, their futures were separate and anyone’s guess.” Of course all this takes place in a ruthless, slavery-centered, 17th century world. Have we made progress?
Random, but possibly related: I recently learned that a pretty good friend of mine comes from a quite famous family. It’s striking to learn such a thing, both for the fact itself and for the intentional belatedness of the revelation. There are the people who come before us, and everything/everyone that comes after, blood-wise, inheritance-wise; this pattern of breaking from one’s familial past/being unable to escape one’s inheritance seems to me The Story of Life. I’m thinking also of Jean-Michel Basquiat (another recently-watched film, i.e. THE RADIANT CHILD), whose father apparently disapproved of his “lack of respectability,” and it pained Jean-Michel deeply, to the bitter end.
I seem to have blogged myself into a rather dark place here. So let me return to the beginning: may your holidays be filled with appreciation, hope, and progress.