Delightful: the temperature drops. I’ve realized off late that whenever I have a massive mound of critical projects, I watch a monstrous amount of reality T.V. (ideally of the competition variety) and nonfiction T.V. On the docket for today: mountainous amounts of Man v. Food and Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations as I work on transforming a stubborn, reluctant paper on Plutarch, Cavafy, and historicism into what I actually want it to be; I’ve been watching Top Design since Saturday while I tear through Coleridge’s Kubla Khan; Deadliest Catch and Ice Road Truckers are solid, too, especially for reading the new John Serio collected Wallace Stevens alongside the not-so-new Library of America collected Wallace Stevens.
August 10, 2009 • 8:35 pm 0
Doldrums
It’s not the doldrums–the ennui, the haze-induced lazing–that I hate most about the sweltering heat. I’m not remotely fond of that, but what I truly can’t stand is the feeling that my skin is either being grilled while still attached to me or dripping, liquidized, off of my body. I swear, sometimes I think I can hear the sizzle of the grilling or the splash of liquid landing on the pavement around my feet. After editing and researching all morning, followed by hunting down two fabulous pairs of pumps all afternoon, and then reading bucketfuls of Chaucer in the early evening, I had to cry uncle and crawl back to an air conditioned hole to salvage as much of my skin as I could.
This is not, I realize, an attractive image. And, I can’t wait for the temperatures to dip so the image can be released from my mind. Fall can’t come too soon. And after fall, winter! Glory be.
Filed under: misc.
August 3, 2009 • 9:51 pm 0
Illiteral:
Mahogany. Messet. Emication: capriped. Abetting. Phantastic.
Dispand.
Cogware.
(This particular dalliance into the wonderful world of nonsense was prompted by Ben Schott’s article here, where a lexicon to translate the above babble can be found. It won’t make any more “sense” upon translation–unless you read this article on malaria from a couple of days ago, which is actually where I got the idea for what to do with Schott’s lexicon–but hey, when a man posts a selection from “The Anglo-American Telegraphic Code,” a gal’s gotta play with it. By the way, the title of the post is part of the babble, and is also an apt description of it. Fun!)
July 29, 2009 • 10:55 am 0
Look!
Below, find two pictures of gowns made out of copies of POETRY Magazine! Many thanks to Don Share for the permission to post these and for showing them in the first place. They’re made by the Build Shop out of Columbia College Chicago. I have to admit, I would definitely wear these (especially the one on the left). In fact, I saw these pictures last night, and then I had a dream that I was auditioning for a spot as a Vegas showgirl for a bizarre new show, and we all got to wear gowns or skirts or leotards like these, made out of a bunch of lit mags, Nortons, etc. The main showgirl got to wear an OED tutu! There were headdresses with flowers and jewels! We all wore hot pink pumps! Outrageous makeup galore! And then I woke up.
July 26, 2009 • 12:23 am 0
I just learned that Lamb Chop’s Play-Along was real.
Let me explain. As a kid, I didn’t speak much English and was mostly in my own head; everything had a bit of a disassociated quality to it. Most of my memories of cultural things–T.V. shows, songs, movies, social events, trips–are logged in my brain in a sort of fuzzy way, as though I experienced them while immersed in a fishbowl filled with water. I remember some of the books I read as a kid as if they were movies, and I remember some movies as books (I actually thought I’d read ”Fantasia” for the longest time).
So here’s what I remember. I’d turn on the T.V. and I’d watch a bunch of stuff, most of which I didn’t understand, one of which was a show involving a woman who wore puppets on her hands–a lamb, a horse, a dog–and they’d play and sing, and do things I couldn’t quite comprehend, and over the years I spent watching this show I never really understood the logic of it, but I loved it to death. I did over that period of time slowly learn more English, and I got the name of the show down. I got a couple of the song lyrics, too. And then over the years that passed after I stopped watching it I began to think I’d made it up, that maybe what had really happened was that I was just sitting there looking at the T.V. and making the whole thing up. It wouldn’t've been the first time.
I don’t know what possessed me to tell a friend of mine this over dinner. We were talking miscellanea and weird childhood memories. I was telling her about partial memories and things that were probably not real, which brings me right back to my original point: I just learned that Lamb Chop’s Play-Along was real, and I don’t know how I feel about this!
July 11, 2009 • 12:04 am 0
Not sticky fingers, but oily ones, to be sure
I saw the Venice exhibit at the MFA two days ago; it was dazzling as all get-out, and I almost touched a Veronese; I got a bit “sucked in,” psychologically, and didn’t really notice what I was doing until I pulled back in the nick of time. And, in many ways, I’m glad I did pull back. Museum guards would have leapt, alarms would have gone off, and some sort of trapdoor mechanism would have been activated, sucking me into the bowels that I’m sure the MFA has, where I’d have been told repeatedly about the importance of conservation and the damage the oil from my skin had wrought, and I’d have felt so deeply guilty, because the oil on people’s skins do cause damage, and a significant chunk of the exhibit was about conservation science, which I am incredibly grateful for, since I can now say that I have seen a Veronese (many of ‘em, actually, and Titians and Tintorettos too) with my own two eyes. Then again, if I hadn’t pulled back, I could be telling you right now about having touched a Veronese (“bumpy!”), but instead I’m talking about a museum’s hypothetical guts and my not-so-hypothetical lack thereof. It’s people like me–folks who fall into hazes at exhibits and have internal dialogues like the above–that make museums place wire around their possessions.
Filed under: art
June 19, 2009 • 7:24 pm 1
Jibber-jabber-ish
From the department of Small Talk, specifically the sub-department called “When in doubt, talk about the weather”: this wet flannel blanket weather that we’ve got here is driving me insane; it’s very “sweat lodge.” I continue to be fairly bad at the simple act of returning books to any and all libraries. My reclusiveness hit a special high point this morning when, upon leaving my place for errands, a very nice-seeming person waved and said “hey”: I returned the greeting, and then promptly turned around and went back inside. Close enough. I will have to prod my reclusiveness into seclusion (ha, ha) this evening to a drinks party in order to bid an adequate farewell to a gal pal of mine who is, devastatingly enough, moving out of MA: bye, Ro! In other news, I think Patricia Longwood’s funkily-titled poem “The Pro-Vivisection Poems” is fantastic. I have nothing really to write here today, but popular blog mythology says that if I only write here when I think I have something to say, I’ll never write at all, which defeats the purpose. I have now written approximately 200 words, none of which actually needed to be written. What an experiment . . . !
June 18, 2009 • 7:37 pm 0
Another take
A few ramshackle things about the past six months . . . I’ve discovered a fascination for the show Ice Road Truckers, and am eagerly awaiting the new season of that Everest show on the Discovery channel. I’ve also discovered fabulous furniture stores, Eddie’s in Somerville and his brother’s store Metamorphosis on Mass. Ave. in Cambridge. I’m more reclusive than usual off late. At the same time, though, I’m busy concocting elaborate plans to get in to this winter’s New York Fashion Week (the plans involve impersonating celebrities and police officers, imaginary foreign languages, imposing sunglasses, and most certainly will land me in jail if executed), and I’m writing about the problems and advantages that come with the idea of a “speaker” in poetry, especially contemporary poetry. I’m loving the assistant poetry editor gig at AGNI, and I cannot possibly be happier with the existence of a new BerryLine location a mere two blocks away from my digs. The very fine people over at Salamander and Free Verse have taken one poem of mine each, to be printed later this year, and I’ll have a microreview coming out in Boston Review some time soon. My little Mac is falling apart: one key is utterly bust (it’s the right arrow key, if you can believe it), and a gentleman caller had to essentially manufacture a new charger for me. I’m amazed that no one was electrocuted during the process, and even more amazed that the makeshift charger works; battery life is dwindling; oh, also, occasionally I get these fun little white lines that run all up and down my laptop’s screen, and the warranty’s long gone.
I’ve gone and wiped all the (six or something) entries from this blog that I’d written in 2008. In the next coming days, I may or may not (leaning right now toward “may not,” but who knows) post my clips on this under original pub. dates. (A friend of mine and absurdly brilliant critic, George Scialabba, does this on his site . . . I think it’s a swanky idea, and I also think that instead of reading my things, if and when I post them, you will have so much more fun reading his work at georgescialabba.net. Oh! Also! Definitely order his fabulous new book, “What Are Intellectuals Good For?” “What Are Intellectuals Good For?” is gloriously reviewed in many swashbuckling places, like here and here.) So it’s a new slate for “Deliberately”; a fresh start, or no start at all? Or an un-start? You decide. Speaking of the “you decide” phenomena, how on earth did Susan Boyle lose Britain’s Got Talent?
