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2005-09-20, 11:13 a.m.:
RIP, Simon Wiesenthal: truth-teller, witness extraordinaire, humanitarian action hero, architect turned obsessive. The world needs more people like the man you were. (Jonathan Lethem has a Macarthur? Wow.) 0 comments
2005-09-19, 1:20 a.m.:
Also. Seven things I want to do before I die: 1. Visit Japan, walk the temple pilgrimages, "100 views of Edo" and all that. Visit Iceland, Morocco, China, Krakow, St. Petersburg. And, nearly most of all, Antarctica. I want to do this incredible (academic, learning) cruise in Antarctic waters which costs something like $10,000 per person. I don't know why exactly I want to do this when there is always Alaska and the like, but it seems absolutely crucial, a la "Island at the Top of the World" (or bottom, in this case). 2. Get good enough at kendo to enter a tournament. Learn enough Japanese to be able to talk about kendo in Japanese (and not just count to 20). 3. Go skating with one or both of my boys. Learn to skate well enough myself that I can stroke quickly and surely backwards, do a 3-turn, back crossovers, maybe even a walley and a waltz jump. And spins, of course. That would be the ultimate. 4. Have a wedding. Wear a wedding dress (something ridiculously goth-ish from Jeannie Nitro). Drink champagne and be toasted to and toast to a happy, healthful future as a family. Take black-and-white pictures of the entire ridiculously blow-out day. 5. Publish a book of poems, an entire book that is no longer an old frayed teddy bear that keeps cannibalizing old and new poems alike. Something new, something better. The thing I can be proud of flipping through page after page. The thing that moves on into a place I never would have imagined. 6. Be a good mother, and not a bad mother. Be a better partner. Work out my anger issues, my passive-aggressiveness, my emotional fakery. Be a little less socially anxious, at least to the extent that I can be functional in a handful of representative social functions. I can't survive like this, being both geographically isolated AND emotionally, socially so. Something must break. 7. Learn to sew. And then sew things. Learn to make weird crafty ridiculously fannish objects of desire (obscure ones, even) like Star Wars or Grateful Dead quilts, shrines of cheesy garish cheap scifi paperback cover art, altered books, diaramas, embroidered Yodas and transfer designs. I also want to learn some carpentry - how to make bookshelves and a table. 8. Drink vodkas at that frozen Absolut ice bar (everything - glasses, bar, seats - made from solid ice) I saw on "The Amazing Race."
9. Write poems, and poem-like things and weird little in-between artifacts, that I like better and better. Enjoy the process of everything more. Love the processs, the processes, the doings of it all, the footwork and the dirty work, the First Things, the undoneness of most everything out there, the tiny fissure in the perfect glazed vase. 10. Be happy, lastingly 11. Retire to the shore 12. Be able to speak French and not just read it, learn (speak) Italian, some Japanese and Chinese, be able to read Old English again as I once could. Silly things like know all the names of all the sumo techniques and be able to call the figure skating jumps before the skater is in the air and in spite of false calls from the commentators. 13. The 3,000 or so books I need to read in order to be just moderately well read. The poems, new and old. Will I ever really read The Faerie Queen? The Divine Comedy? The Decameron? The 19th century novel? Chaucer? And to think I wasted two weeks of my life on the fucking Corrections. 14. I knew there would be more than 10. At least i have given up wanting to perform a cartwheel before I die ... I can die quite happily without now, my dear. 0 comments
2005-09-18, 6:04 p.m.:
I got one of those nice rejections. Full and total rejection, but with the handwritten note "Please try us again." (Cimarron Review) This tops the to date nicest rejection I ever got, from Chattahoochee: "Good stuff." If it was that good, you'd think, they could have printed it. Anyway, I am taking care of business to get my chapbook published: get "author photo" taken (as opposed to regular old "Melissa photo"), artwork for the cover,** hoping to switch out one poem I've decided I hate, hopefully have some of these poems appear in journals before then or right around then (the impossible dream, nay?). Only two have so far. This year is the first I've ever actually sent work out, and now I'm doing it with a vengeance. I have been sitting on some of these poems for years. Looks like it will all come together in December, available from Main Street Rag (they're out of Charlotte). So get those Christmas lists going. Uncle Mort is just itching for a copy of The Language of Exile. ** Wish to god I could do some digital art. I can picture my cover exactly as I want it in my mind's eye. But I have no skills. Zilcho. Zilchetto. Zilchettissimo. (But maybe I could manage it somehow in collage form, as a basis for the real deal undertaken by someone with an actual artistic clue, i.e. an artist-type person?) ((My first day back online since The Dreadful Cold of Aught Five. Three days of migraine, five days of fever, three days totally bedridden and sleeping round the clock with Baby Ro at my side (still sick, poor small baby. His brother was over a year old when he got sick the first time; Ro is just 12 weeks). 20,000 boxes of kleenex and 6 Nebuchadnezzars of cough syrup. 800,000 self-pitying moments, five spent crying at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, two incidents in which I regretted not having "taken many brisk walks as a young woman," as had Miss Marple - secret to her general fine health and spry state.)) 0 comments
2005-09-09, 1:47 p.m.:
Five Days with Katrina. The only (real) way to view the album is one pic at a time, in order. Amazing. (Via MetaFilter) 0 comments
2005-09-07, 4:14 p.m.:
In other news: It's all illness (various colds and, on A's part, croup) and all Hurricane Katrina all the time here. As the news from nearly every place but here is appalling. Too sick to read poetry, if that can believed. We have watched "Monsters, Inc." 1,000,000 times and I have been slowly, deliberately mining an old issue of GRANTA ("The Factory"). The more slowly one reads GRANTA, the more one comes to appreciate it. 0 comments
2005-09-07, 3:34 p.m.:
Mikey, my old boss, has just sent me an e-mail in English:
A new world for me, wild west in far east, founder-days capitalism in red disguise (talking about his recent trip to China.)
I will do the favor of back-translating it to the original German that was in his head:
F�r mich eine neue Welt, "Wilder Westen" im Fernen Osten, Gr�nderzeit-Kapitalismus im roten Kleid. 0 comments
2005-09-03, 9:44 a.m.:
We knew it was coming. Personally, I blame the cold, cold universe. (Someone posted a great quote in a Katrina-related thread on MetaFilter, something to the effect of God being an unnecessary complication in an otherwise elegant universe, and I like this too.) 0 comments
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