Stay At Home, Dad

One Year Review

2011-12-20T10:27:00.001-05:00

I began being a full-time dad when Akiko was just about three months old. Karen went back to work, and I began to settle into this new position -- wildly rewarding, terribly paying (actually, I'm kept quite well, thank you very much) and strangely hard to define. Aki's not quite verbal enough to give me my one-year performance review, but I think I can be gimlet-eyed enough for the two of us. So here it is, my self-assessment of the SAHD performance so far, and some goals for the following year:

Feeding and Cleaning: On the basics, I'm scoring pretty high. It's a rare day that The Cuteness goes too long without being changed, and though we had some rough spots in the beginning, she took to eating as well as you'd expect, being raised by foodies like us. No choking, no major diaper rashes, she's eaten a wide variety of plants and animals, and has gained the right amounts of weight in the proper periods. Grade: A

Reading and Singing: I'm going to be straightforward here. I'm not much of a singer. But I've learned to belt out my tremulous lullabies without hesitation when needed. My repertoire is more or less the same three songs over and over (and one of them I keep making up different words to, even though it's a real song and I could just learn the lyrics dammit), which is definitely sub-par. Especially in this household of singers. But when she's sleepy, or upset, I can get the job done. As for the reading, you would think this would be where I shine, but it turns out that we like very different books. I've tried (oh, how I've tried) to expose her to materials more to my taste, but just taking Ted Hughes off the shelf can cause waterworks. I try to spice up the books she likes, but she mostly just wants to flip through as fast as possible, or gnaw on the pages.
Grade: B+

Dancing and Playing: This may be my weakest area. I can sustain maybe 1/2 hour or 45 minutes max, and then I tap out. The Cuteness, meanwhile is ready to keep going. So there's a lot of "Daddy needs a few minutes to ignore you and play with his phone now, honey" that doesn't go over so well. We started out strong, but as the fall has worn out, I've turned, increasingly, to wandering around after her, and watching her largely play by herself. No good! We're going to start the new year with some more organized playtime, including a playgroup on Wednesdays, and that should help. But definitely, improvements could be made in this area.
Grade: B-

Naps: She gets a lot of these. Too many? Hard to say. But they keep her well-rested and young looking.
Grade: A-

General Performance and Goals: This was a tough year. All the books say it will be, and it was. But we've successfully transitioned from a tiny little critter, through crawling, to walking and talking (a little). This next year is going to be about building on those skills, as well as developing some basic socialization. I'm looking forward to building vocabulary, continuing to try to expose her to more complex and interesting reading materials, and focusing on manual dexterity, as well as running and treating the cat slightly better. We're also going to shift some paradigms and try to focus on our core processes in order to create a better customer experience.
Overall Grade: B+

Setbacks

2011-12-09T09:15:00.001-05:00

I didn't write today. I don't want this blog to end up being a record of my setbacks, and to be fair, I wrote for 45 minutes to an hour every other day this week, so I don't feel like I've been set too far back. But I made plans to write this morning, I set everything up, and then I woke up in the middle of the night with a bit of a stomach ache, and made that my excuse to not get up. The alarm went off, I went and turned it off and got back into bed.

I mean, I'm only a week into this thing, but already I'm nervous about it. And my expectations aren't to knock Huck Finn off the bookshelf or anything. I just want to put a readable story together, that's relatively long.

But there's that word, "readable."

A year long goal

2011-12-07T09:49:00.001-05:00

So The Cuteness is now older than a year. A year. Some time back in my own prehistory a year was a Forever kind of time. I counted my own age in half-years and a month was a nearly endless thing, instead of slipping by like they do now. There some evidence that this isn't just me, that we all experience it. But having The Cuteness around makes it harder to let time slip away. It slows you down, literally and figuratively. She changes and changes, and all those little milestones have a way of marking time, hour to hour, week to week, month to month.

She's walking now, and talking. I like to joke that the next step is getting a cell phone and asking for car keys, but it's true that, basically until she's 20, these milestones will keep happening. Which is to say until I'm 54. Which makes me think a lot about my own writing. In the past, I tended to write in fits and bursts, sprinting, as it were. But my life isn't really like that much right now. It's more like a marathon -- a long run, punctuated by many little milestones. So it feels right that I should try to write like that.

So this is my next year: I'm going to write a novel. I've come to some kind of resting-place, poetry wise, and sitting down to write more poems at the moment doesn't feel like it would be a step forward in any way. I'm going to put out a book, soon, to punctuate the poetry-writing (have a manuscript, and an amazing designer who is working on it.) It'll be a self-published thing, but a beautiful one, and I'm very proud of the work in it. And maybe (probably) I'll get back to poetry after next year. But I'm going to put it on hold for now.

As for the novel: I've no idea what it's going to be like. I know way, way too many novelists (yeah that last one's a brag) to think that this will be anything but a long and difficult journey. And I've never tried writing prose at anything close to this length. I've only taken a few stabs at short stories, and I wouldn't say I've had much of anything like publishable success. But I'm going to give myself a year, plus some. From now, until January 1, 2013, I'll compile a lot of words all together, in a single document, on a particular subject, and I'll give myself until then to see if I can make anything readable out of it. Most likely it won't be. But who knows? I've learned a lot by watching and reading the very, very excellent writers around me. What I've learned most is that it's a matter of putting one word after the other, without fear.

I know I'm scared. I've worked on it for three days now, and even though I'm trying to give myself an hour each day to do the work, I only made it 45 minutes before giving up. But I'll sit back down tomorrow and try again.

In the meantime, The Cuteness has started walking all over the place. She doesn't like being held anymore. She figured out how to put one foot in front of the other, and nothing holds her back. Every time she falls, she gets up, re-situates herself, and starts again.

oh

2011-10-07T09:51:00.000-04:00

I put a thing over in the other thing.

A Break

2011-09-21T18:07:00.001-04:00

When I was thirteen years old R.E.M.'s Out of Time was released, and the music video to Losing My Religion came out on MTV, which still primarily played music videos. I watched a lot of tv then, especially after school, and whenever that video came out, I made sure to pay attention. The lyrics were unlike anything I'd ever heard before. I didn't know people could write like that, or sing like that. I didn't know words could mean like that. Part of it was the way Michael Stipe half-mumbled some of them, so that I had to lean in, listening, over and over, and try to understand and make sense of things. There wasn't an internet then, so I couldn't just look the lyrics up.

The album was released in March, the video came out sometime before that, and I asked for the CD (or tape, more likely) for my birthday in June. I already had the song memorized. I loved it. That summer a guy my step-dad worked for introduced me to the entire back catalogue of REM's music, and I began collecting everything I could. That fall, I went to high school, and, as typically happens around then, I began to listen to music more seriously, and to be introduced to cool new bands by older classmates and friends -- Morrisey, The Pixies, Nirvana, U2, Pearl Jam... these bands replaced Genesis, Paul Simon, and Bon Jovi as the new group of musicians that I listened to and talked about. And all of them were something that someone else told me I absolutely had to listen to.

Except R.E.M. They were all mine. I knew about them first. And I loved them -- loved their lyrics, especially off of Life's Rich Pageant and Reckoning. I loved their melodies, the way they reinvented themselves every time. The next year Automatic For The People came out, and my mind was blown. I would spend hours in my room listening to that cd over and over again. I got the special early-edition copy, which had clear yellow plastic instead of the basic black for the cd tray. I poured over the liner notes, and put Night Swimming on repeat. For a while I had every single song, single, b-side, and radio broadcast the band ever did, and was well on my way to collecting every bootleg I could find.

After Bill Berry left the band, a lot of my enthusiasm waned. I found myself no longer tracking down all the bsides and rarities. Then Up came out, and it was... kind of a disappointment. I didn't buy Reveal. I remember when Around The Sun came out, and a guy at a party went off about how R.E.M. was a total crap band that no one cared about, and they should just quit. And I thought about how, ten or even five years earlier, I would have leapt to their defense, would have jumped all over the guy. But I found myself agreeing with him. And it made me sad. R.E.M. was my favorite band in the whole world at one time -- a time when having a favorite band in the whole world was something one could do without any sense of shame or irony. But they were mine. I loved them. And I still love them.

Which is why hearing that they've called it quits feels more or less okay. These guys rewrote rock and roll. They put poetry into their music. They wrote dense, weird, complicated things, and they got huge off of it, and had millions of fans, and sold out arenas. And they sang songs like this:

also, hearing that Michael Stipe has started doing things like this makes me feel like putting my fingers in my ears and going "la la la" whenever anyone describes them after, like, 1998.

(ps if the video link is garbage and you're reading this on facebook, you can find it on the website: http://heyitsgogi.blogspot.com)

Oh right, I have a blog

2011-09-21T08:46:00.002-04:00

So this last week or so, The Mom has been out of town (off of the continent, actually, about 8 timezones to the right). Which has meant that I've had The Cuteness all to myself, more or less. Add to this the simultaneous facts that 1. We're moving apartments in two and a half weeks, and 2. I've been having some extremely stressful personal extended family issues that has pushed me into counseling, and it's been quite a time.

I have to say I was seriously worried about what this week would hold. How quickly, and how often would The Cuteness push me to my edge? How many times would we both break down? Would her first words be "Where the $%@# is mom?"

Truth is, it's been blessedly low-key. She's turning into a real joy to interact with. She's totally chill, and is mostly into exploring. We've gone for a few long walks, took a trip to the local zoo (otters and porcupines, not so much with larger animals). And her biggest freak-out so far was when she climbed under the giant plastic bin where we keep her toys and couldn't quite figure out how to get back out again. More cute!

The biggest deal was with the food. The Mom is still breastfeeding, which is a part of the bargain I can't really uphold. So we're doing the formula thing. But at night, she mostly wants to skip the real food dinner and has been sucking down like three times more formula than typical. Which means that she wakes up super hungry (cause milk isn't a meal for her anymore). But it's a comfort thing, I get it. So we're dealing with it for now, and she'll get mom back tomorrow night. We both will.

Oh, right, and she started walking about, with one hand on something. She circles the room like this. It's pretty awesome:

Brooklyn Rail

2011-07-13T16:24:00.002-04:00

Shameless self promotion time: I've got a review in the Brooklyn Rail that just came out. Three graphic novel memoirs: Are they true? Are they good? Does the first question matter?

It never ends

2011-07-07T18:27:00.000-04:00

So I’m talking with my buddy Matt the other day. Matt is also a new parent, with a child just a little older than Aki. And so he is also exhausted. And he says: “The thing they don’t tell you about parenting is how it just doesn’t ever end.”

I mean, sure, you can take breaks — get a babysitter, go to the movies. The baby goes down for naps and you can hurry up and shave or try to get, say, a blog post written. But for the last eight and a half months, even at my absolute farthest away from the babe, she’s in the back of my mind. I feel responsible for something — someone — like I never knew was possible. And it’s a pretty wrenching adjustment into the encumbered life, to be sure.

Not that long ago one of my favorite activies was to stare down a long Sunday afternoon and wonder what I was going to do with it. I’d contemplate which of several books to read, or noodle through the entrails of a poem, or just perch out on my porch with a beer, and consider my miniscule place in the universe. I’m a goddamned poet. It’s what I’m trained for. But I’m not alone. Most everyone has cherished, at some point, that kind of still-time in their lives. Maybe it’s the 5am sunrise after a Friday night out. Or the muffled solitude at the top floor of a library. But you take a breath, you note the momentary stillness, and you think “freedom.”

But I haven’t had that in eight months, and I don’t see a time where I’m likely to have that again for a while. And this is because I’m constantly on the verge of being needed. And not just needed, but NEEDED. There are barely enough hours in the day to get Aki fed (three solids, plus a couple bottles) napped, changed, socialized (have we spend time with other babies lately?) played-with (she’s learning to pass things from one hand to the other. We practice), nevermind grocery shopping (low on diapers!), house cleaning (yep, that’s a wad of cat hair in her hand), or the part-time data entry and editing I’ve actually been paid to do. And whatever it is I’m working on, I drop it all in a heartbeat as soon as I’m NEEDED again. It’s exhausting. It never ends.

On the other hand, (and how do I put this) … I’m needed. And not just needed, but NEEDED. It’s a particularly quotidian joy to be depended on like this, but it is absolutely a joy. Absolutely. And it comes fraught with the knowledge that I will always and forever be letting Aki down. Because I can’t be there for her the way she expects me to. I can’t catch her every single time she falls. I can’t immediately tell if the cry means “food now, kplsthnks” or “this teething thing sucks” or “how in God’s name do you not notice that awful smell in my pants.” But wow, is it actually very nice to be NEEDED. I have no worries about whether what I’m doing has purpose. I have, at this moment, no existential concerns.

It’ll be a joy - truly - to have free time again, when she’s older, and carving out a life that’s separate from mine, and no longer expects me to catch her every time she falls. But it’s pretty great right now when she wakes up and, looking for me, sees that I’m there and knows that everything is all right.

TBPH.

2011-06-29T16:56:00.004-04:00

So I posted this a little bit ago on the facebooks, but I thought I'd also post it here (where it will go back to the facebooks, in a regressive loop that reaches nigh unto infinity, or goes at least several clicks deep).

Thought I'd also post some updates: This past weekend we took The Cuteness to my cousin's wedding in Akron, where we slept in an oat silo, and ate Chrissy Hynde's vegan food. Aki met the very, very nice chef, who gave her vegan yogurt and fresh berries (and she pulled very hard on his arm hair). She spent much of Saturday and Sunday as part of the Giant Michel Family Litter, meeting various grand-uncles, great-aunts, and second and third cousins. A grand time was had.

Then we went south for a day or so, to Columbus to visit the 'rents. We slept in Teddy Roosevelt's favorite hotel (he apparently liked the sauna. We did not try it) and we ate sausage. A large man in lederhosen picked up The Cuteness, and she pulled very hard on his mustache.

She is, as you can see in the video, making rude noises with her mouth. She's also crawling like a champ (and straight for the cat box. sigh. but slowly, so far) and trying her damnedest to stand. She can pick things up with a thumb and finger and put them in her mouth (a mixed blessing at best) and she has two little teeth poking out of her jaw, like an inverted vampire. And she likes hair. She likes to pull on it, surprisingly hard.

There Will Be Crawling

2011-05-26T18:54:00.003-04:00

It's almost impossible to live with a young baby and not be constantly reminded about how temporary she is. I often look at her now 7 month-old face, and I look for signs of the teenager, the young woman, the adult who will one day have strong opinions about politics or writing or fashion, or something else I can't imagine. I imagine what her face will look like, longer and more defined. I picture her taking a vacation for the first time by herself, or watching storms out over the ocean, or putting in enough hours to get her pilot's license, or deciding to grow her hair down to her shoulders. I see her realizing she's been stood up, being surprised with an anniversary gift, running for city council.

We take pictures and videos of her cutest moments, and we share them when we can. We put up with her furious storms of crying, knowing as she does not, that they will pass. We watch her change every single day, and we impatiently wait for her to reach the familiar milestones -- sitting up, crawling, standing, walking, teeth, first words, first foods.

But it's easy to be in a hurry to see her do these things, to forget that our impatience to see her develop is a way of hurrying her along her own temporality. And when she crawls for the first time, well, then she'll be a crawling baby. And she'll be different than she's been. And she won't ever crawl for the first time again.

For now, she's not crawling. But she's trying. Any day she'll do it. I will be excited. Really, I will. But also a little sad.

We're into feeding now.

2011-05-09T11:37:00.003-04:00

Oh bloggy-blog. How I ignore you. You're like the cat — I got you when I was young and fresh-faced, and excited about our future, and now that I have something better, it can feel like I have forgotten you. But I still take care of the cat, and when she crawls onto my stomach in the middle of the night and stares pointedly at my no-longer-sleeping face, purring softly, I still sometimes reach up a sleep-deprived hand and give her a couple quick pats.

So here we are, and I haven't told you all the latest about the baby. Lessee... she's sitting up now, which is pretty darn cute. And she's wearing hats. We're starting her in on solid(ish) foods -- she knocked some creamed sweet potato off the table this morning, and she's spit back banana, apple sauce, yogurt and creamed peas in the last few days.

Pretty soon she's gonna be crawling. That's got me worried. But I'm sure we'll get through it. In the meantime, I'm content to let her sit, and wear hats, and only destroy the things within her immediate circle of reach. Soon as she starts crawling life is going to get a lot more interesting, for me and for the cat.

Socks, I say!

2011-04-07T09:34:00.003-04:00

If adult socks have a habit of getting eaten by the washing machine / running off to join sock militias on the far side of the world, (a problem I've largely solved with my two-pronged approach: 1. only ever buying one kind of sock, and 2. not caring if I happen to be wearing two kinds of socks), then baby socks seem to have the opposite problem. They multiply like super-soft bunny rabbits. They bloom like tribbles. I find them under the couch, under the cat dish, on the kitchen table, in my pants pockets. They're constantly slipping off the baby's feet, which I thought was because she has babyfat sausages for calves, but now I think they're trying to run off to reproduce in some dusty corner of the house. It's the only way I can imagine we end up with so many cute little socks. And she doesn't even walk yet!

Nap Resistance and why I can't get the lyrics to "Yellow Submarine" straight.

2011-03-29T18:15:00.003-04:00

I'm a terrible singer. It's unfortunate. I'm surrounded by great musicians and singers. My wife's family are pretty professional when it comes to folk music, and my mother in law is a classically-trained pianist and composer, with perfect pitch. But me? I've been told that the note I sing is lovely, just lovely.

Still, I have a baby, and if you could hear the screaming next to me right now, it would only attest to the fact that babies don't just fall asleep by themselves. They need to be rocked back and forth, and sung to. I can handle the latter, but for the former, I'm a lost cause. This is made worse by the fact that all the science says singing to your baby is best. So what to do?

I grit my teeth, and I sing my note. And since I can't remember lyrics to save myself, I sing a new song every time the baby goes to sleep. And for some odd reason it always comes out sounding like Yellow Submarine:

"Go to sleeeeeeep / little girrrrrrrrl. // Go to sleee-eee-eeep, / sweeetie piiiiiiieee. // Sleepy sleeeeeep, / little sleeeeeeep, / sleepy giiii-ii-iirl, / beddy bye."

Did it work? Judge thusly:

Let's Boogie

2011-03-07T15:07:00.002-05:00

So Mondays in the Baby Michel household have started to become days in which is scheduled a trip to the local YMCA. At first this meant Baby Boot Camp, until it was decided that SAHD had had enough of both the tiny little camouflage outfits (no, not really) and the painful days of recuperating as his legs, abdomen and ego took pretty heavy bruisings (seriously: women who just gave birth should not be able to be that physically active. Ugh.)

Baby Boot Camp thus gave way to Baby Boogie. What is Baby Boogie? I don't know if there's an official line, but as far as I can tell, it's the Park Slope baby version of pit-fighting. At the appointed hour (two pm.) between five and fifteen people arrive, each with a child between two months and one year of age. We all gather on a big blue mat (the field of play), in a circle. The coordinator/ref then opens the proceedings with a ritual chant that involves clapping and naming the contestants (and goes something like: "we welcome [insert baby name here] yes indeed, yes indeed, yes indeed. We welcome [baby name] yes indeed, we're so-oh glad you're here.") Then the ref dumps a big pile of implements on the floor (rattles, tambourines, egg shakers, clappers, etc) and all the kids crawl into the middle, grab something, and begin to whack everything around them with it.

Now, don't get me wrong: this is awesome (well, except for the chanting. It is an odd thing to sit in a circle and chant baby names, and it feels an awful lot like that scene in the movie "Babies" where all the San Francisco mothers start chanting "the earth is our mother and she will take care of us" and the little baby, Hattie, gets up and tries to leave). It's awesome to see a bunch of babies just crashing into each other (I mean, as much as parents will let them) for some unstructured time. And it's awesome to see the nervous parents letting the babies interact, a little unsure what will actually happen (is little Mathilda going in for a kiss or a bite? Do we interfere? Wait and see?)

And Aki loves it. She gets so excited by the bevy of babies wandering around and making noise with the noisemakers that she tries to crawl at them. Which is also awesome. Because she totally cannot crawl yet, not even a little. Then she puts her head down in frustration and begins to weep. Which is less awesome. But still! In a few months, she'll be up and about. And grabbing things. And teething.

And then, baby pit-fighting participants? Beware.

Been Thinking A Lot Today

2011-02-18T15:20:00.002-05:00

What with my baby's birth I've been giving a lot of thought to the future. It suddenly seems like less of a remote possibility and more of an actuality — I want Aki to grow up, to be a child, and a teenager, and an adult, and (predictably enough, I'm sure) I wonder and worry about what that world is going to be like. I'm not talking about environmental apocalypse. Alien races will enslave us and purify our air with their advanced technology before things can get too bad on that front.

But I wonder, specifically about what it means to live in a world that's so super-connected, and how it's going to affect her, as a child and as an adult. The world we're in is vastly different than the one my parents grew up in. It's vastly different than the one we were in fifteen years ago. What's the world going to be like five years from now? Or thirty?

So: a tryptic of essays, for your consideration, in order of erudition.

First: a primer on Ray Kurzweil from Time Magazine, by Lev Grossman. I tend to like Grossman's writing, but Time Magazine just dumbs the hell out of everything they publish. It's a perfect read if you don't know who Kurzweil is, or what he's about, but the best part of this is the Time-bot's choice of auto-links peppered through the article. Ironically demonstrative!

Second: a refutation of Kurzweil, sort of. Brian Christian has an axe to grind, and he does it with with wit, in first-person narrative. If the first article had me looking up books by Kurzweil, this had me reconsidering my rush.

And last, an article that puts the above two, and my last post, into some perspective. you just can't beat the NYRB for erudition. If anything helps point out where we're going, it's a clear eye toward where we've been, and where we are.

The last two articles, especially, are long but worth it. Hope you enjoy!

On Boredom

2011-02-07T19:27:00.002-05:00

When I think about Aki growing up, and the things that were foundational for me, one that I want most for her is time to be bored. I don’t mean that pervasive sense of purposelessness or ennui that seems to get confused with boredom, though I’m sure that she’ll have plenty of that. I mean the kind of boredom that comes from long stretches of unorganized time.

When I was young, I often had nothing to do. My periods of structured time were largely limited. I played soccer one year, baseball another, but they were both summer leagues, and we were too young to be truly competitive. During school I was allowed a few hours of entertainment: maybe half an hour of videogames or an hour of television. I had homework of course, which may have taken me an hour when I cared to do it with any real attention, which was rare. Other than that, all I had to occupy my time was my friends, my surroundings, and whatever we could find to do. I remember hours playing with G.I. Joe toys and riding bikes. I remember sitting on lawns and discovering that it only took an hour or two to find a four-leaf clover.

These days, its almost the reverse. I flit from activity to activity constantly soaking in or producing information. I spend enormous amounts of time online, reading books, magazines, journals, watching tv shows or movies, listening to the radio, to music, playing with my phone, playing games, reading reviews of things I don’t have time to watch, or read, or play.

Nowadays I end up scheduling time away from media, and it’s space I cherish— exercising without headphones, meditating, taking a walk to the grocery store with Aki and leaving my phone behind.

Human intelligence, I believe, is born out of a particular and peculiar non-computer-like ability to synthesize new information out of all that we take in. We learn by studying and repeating, but we create new things — we demonstrate and innovate our learning — by combining disparate elements to make new things that never were. This is what writers do, but it’s also what engineers and architects do. It’s what all creative people do.

But we need time to enact that synthesis. To be creative means setting aside time without input, to allow our brains to cull through what we know, and make interesting new ideas. But that seems to be something that, at the moment, we’re tempted not to give ourselves, and we’re scared to give it to our children. I worry about the pressure to raise Aki in an environment where we’re tempted to rush her from charter school to dance class to chess class to music lessons, filling every second of her day until bedtime, because we fear that otherwise she won’t be competitive.

But more than that, I worry about the toys, the games and computers and phones which already eat up so much of my day, and I want to raise her so that she has some space away from it. I want her to develop the ability to resist their temptation: to value contemplation and solace, and down-time. I worry about it for her, because I feel like I don’t get enough of it myself. And I don’t have the courage to throw out all my shiny toys, to raise Aki in a house without these things. Perhaps someday.

Also, just so this post doesn't end up entirely depressing, this afternoon she grabbed the bottle from me and shoved the nipple straight into her nose. We both looked surprised.

Continuing

2011-02-04T11:30:00.003-05:00

Well, so first, for those of you reading this on the facebooks or on rss feeds, I went ahead and redesigned the blog. Since it's not really about travel anymore, I thought the name, look, and little poem-let at the top needed changing. So there.

Okay, then. Back to SAHD-dom. This week we discovered growth spurts. Growth spurts involve more feeding and less sleeping (except for the SAHD, who just gets less of both). Luckily, GTWM (Goes To Work Mom) figured out a good solution to the Great Milk-Supply Problem Of Last Week, and now I text the exact amounts baby goes through for each feeding, so she can adjust. Hooray technology!

Growth spurts presage both physical and mental developments. In this case, she has started trying to sit up a little more, and no longer cries right off when she gets Tummy Time™. In fact, she seems to enjoy it a bit, which means we're that much closer to the dreaded crawling, in which we're going to have to figure out what to do with the cat box. By "we," I mean "me." I really don't want her to figure out anything about the cat box.

Seriously, this is the one fear that haunts my nightmares. I'm going to turn around for a minute, and suddenly find her halfway through the little cover flap, joyfully putting everything she can into her mouth. I think the reason I'm so worried is that, of all the pregnancy info that washed over us last year, the one thing that really stuck with me is that cat litter carries a bacteria that will give a pregnant woman a slight cold, and then KILL THE BABY. Aaaah! Why do we have that in the house? Because we love our cat, that's why. And we have so far failed to toilet train it.

But thankfully, we're still at least a month or two from this dreaded development. She's on her way to sitting up, which is awesome. And when she starts locomoting, well, I'll have something else to write about, won't I.

SAHD-dom, the Second Week

2011-01-31T15:45:00.003-05:00

Well, week-two of being the SAHD begins. It's been interesting -- after a fairly uneventful second half of the week, the weekend brought a brand-new baby: up all night, and feeding all the time. I thought it might be stress from the bottle/breast switchback, but that might be my stress more than hers.

I also thought the feeding all the time had something to do with the bottle being easier to drink from (requires less work to get a similar amount, etc) than the breast. But it may actually be a growth spurt: she just went through her entire day's bottle ration, and we still have one more feeding before mom gets back. Yikes. Also she hasn't really napped today. Which sucks. Because it means taht this blog won't be spell-checked, and most of my other work for the day won't get done.

This is like the moment on the SAHD roller coaster where we crest that first big hill: it's been calm for a little while, and suddenly, I don't think it's going to be calm for a long, long time. I'll let you know later this week how that turns out.

Holy Snow Day

2011-01-26T09:26:00.004-05:00

Day three of being a Stay-At-Home-Dad (SAHD) has turned into a snow day. This means that I'm putting off plans for the mile-long walk up to the main-branch public library, and the slightly shorter walk to haul laundry to the laundromat. I was all excited to see if I could get these things done, by my lonesome, with the baby strapped to me, but adding in the trudge through snow (slippery snow!) and I'm going to call that too much for the first week of SAHD-dom. Call me a wuss, if you like.

So, day one was pretty much nonstop crying and sleeping, as we adjusted to the non-presence of mom for the bulk of daylight hours. Baby Aki held up as best as a three-month-old can, trying to smile, but then bursting into tears because she was hungry and didn't like the bottle. But she drank. Tears streamed silently down her cheeks as she did it, but she drank. Then she slept, mostly just exhausted from the crying.

Day two, we were visited by Friend, Neighbor, and Professional Baby Whisperer Georgia, who taught me the magic of warming the milk by running it under water (since la leche league said to never warm the bottle on the stove, and since all my info on baby-rearing comes from these movies I was just using milk from the fridge*) and behold! There was no crying! So the day went very smoothly, except for the fact that now that she was enjoying the milk, she was drinking a lot of it. We went through twice as much, which is to say, twice as much as K is pumping. Oops!

Soon, though. Soon, this will all be working smoothly. She'll have all the milk she needs, she'll eat it regularly, I'll have figured out how to carry both her and the laundry (or the groceries) through the mean-streets of Park Slope without running into rival mommy-gang territory, and all will be well.

Then she'll learn to crawl.

*that is to say, mother's milk. Not, like, whole milk.

Judd Apatow is Caden Cotard

2011-01-20T09:05:00.003-05:00

So I just finally watched Funny People last night, and it struck me that Judd Apatow's movie is much more Meta than Charlie Kaufman has ever managed to achieve. I realize that I'm not necessarily saying anything new: a lot was made out of the fact that he got aging lazy sell-out millionaire comedian Adam Sandler to play aging lazy sell-out millionaire comedian George Simmons. But beyond that, with few exeptions, almost every character in the movie plays some version of themselves.

Actually, given that Jason Schwartzman's big breakout in Rushmore happened all the way back in 1998, it would have been slightly more appropriate for him to play a former child actor who made the rare transition into an adult career, but with that exception, you have characters/actors like Leo/Jonah Hill -- a talented scene-stealer looking for a big break played by a talented scene-stealer who got his break from the director who is currently directing the movie that he's in. In fact, most of the movie involves people playing either themselves or versions of their public personas to the degree that once you try sussing it all out you're liable to wonder if RZA may have actually worked at a deli. It's goofy.

Then you get to the casting of someone like Eric Bana as the handsome foil / Australian husband, which is even more meta if you've watched enough Apatow movies to remember the conversation that Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill had in Apatow's last film about the awesomeness of the movie Munich. How much did that conversation influence the casting? It makes my head hurt.

Embabied

2011-01-19T10:45:00.003-05:00

So I'm knee-deep in a whole set of New Year's resolutions which sort of snuck up on me. I haven't really done the NYRes thing for a while, and when I did do it, it was always half-hearted at best. The reason being that I figure 1) I'm pretty happy with my life, and 2) when I'm not, it's not worth waiting until the calendar changes to switch things up.

What happened is this: in October of this past year, my wife and I became embabied. She's gorgeous and we do all the typical parent things, i.e. get excited when she opens her eyes, get excited when her poop changes color, then put her down for a bit and hope she sleeps while we frantically try to clean/cook/launder/pee/pay bills/work/read all in the five spare minutes we weren't cooing over our mini-us.

It didn't take long (okay it took a while) to figure out that my general unorganized-ness just wasn't going to work for this experience. Nor was my general lack of physical well-being. Nor was my habit of having a drink to help me relax every night. All these realizations hit somewhere in December, when New Life responsibilities and Old Life habits collided into each other and fell down, dropping everything they were carrying.

So I'm in the midst of a giant life-organizing overhaul with a little help. One of the things I'd like to do is start typing here (by here I mean the website, not the facebooks, where the website auto-posts) more often. So I'm gonna. Whee! Tell your friends.

now here's a pic of the newest addition:

New York Story

2010-07-22T13:27:00.002-04:00

Today on the subway I watched a gigantic homeless man, who actually wore an actual cardboard sign around his neck, stagger up the train car shaking his cup and hollering “spare change.” This happens all the time, but this time, when he got about halfway up the train he stopped. There were about thirty grade-school kids all wearing blue shirts — a summer camp on a field trip. They were laughing and playing patty-cake. The homeless man stopped, turned around, and hustled to the other end of the car with his back to the kids, and his head down. He exited at the next stop. It was totally heartbreaking.

New York Experience

2010-06-10T09:05:00.003-04:00

So last night some friends and I went to the Bell House for a trivia night. It was put on by the fine folks over at Stuff You Should Know, and hosted by a man called the "Quizmonster.”

The gimick? The SYSK folks were competing against everyone with an all-star trivia team that included Christopher McCulloch (creater of the Venture Brothers) Joe Randazzo (editor of The Onion) Wyatt Cenac, Ira Glass, and John Hodgman!

We sat one table over from the superstars. I got a free shirt, and J. Hodgman was kind enough to sign it. I mentioned that I’d written a (fairly favorable) review of his latest book, and he asked if he owed me anything. Thus the shirt-note.

Who won? Our team didn’t, but neither did the superstars. The table behind us, named “Choad the Wet Sprocket” cleaned everyone’s clocks.

Drive, Ride, Walk.

2010-06-04T10:38:00.003-04:00

Lately I’ve wanted to walk. Down from Park Slope past the cemetery into Sunset Park or further into Bay Ridge’s Chinatown, or north up to Williamsburg. Across the park to the east or over the bridge and up into midtown. I’d walk to the Bronx if I could. To Yonkers. With this much city there’s always more to see, and even on my daily treks (to the laundromat, the hardware store, to get groceries) everything is always changing.

But I fall in love with the city when I’m in a cab. With the windows rolled down, zooming over the bridge or along the water, at night, staring at the lights on the buildings, I feel like the whole city is min, mine to watch and wonder at.

Last night K & her work friends decided to go out: a beer garden in Gowanus then the Bell House to meet up with more friends. Katie came in a car and wanted to keep drinking so when we decided to find a karaoke bar in Bay Ridge, and when it turned out no one else could drive Katie’s stick-shift Acura, she handed me the keys. We shot down Fourth ave., which I love, because the lights are timed: 14th street, 23rd, 34th, 44th, 62nd. Then a hard left up to 8th ave. and a perfect first-shot parallel park into the last open space. Driving in the city can make me fill like a God.

Being driven around can make me feel like an emperor. But at the end of the night, after the drinking and singing, when we all decided to take cabs home, I walked out to 8th and stared north as far as I could up the avenue. Forty-eight blocks north and two blocks west was my apartment. What would it be like to walk? What would I see at two, or three, or four in the morning?

It pleases me to feel like a God, to be treated like a king. But walking — walking makes me feel like a traveller, like a citizen. Walking takes me into New York like a seed in the loam of the city.

Fundamentally Distracted

2010-05-07T10:10:00.005-04:00

"But fundamentally, The New Yorker is something you want to sit with and not be distracted by. I don’t mean this in a spiritual way, but it’s a meditative experience. The Web is fundamentally a distracted experience."
— Blake Eskin, Web Editor, The New Yorker

I haven't tried to read anything on a Kindle. I've played with an Ipad (no, I won't capitalize it that stupid way) for about fifteen minutes in the store — enough to flip several pages on Winnie The Pooh, play a video game, and watch a short video.

My wife thinks I have an internet addiction, and I'll admit to reading a good dozen magazines, blogs, and web comics on a regular (daily) basis, including Achewood, The A.V. Club, XKCD, Dresden Codak, Slate, Silliman's Blog, and The New York Times

I also subscribe to paper editions of The New Yorker and Harper’s magazines (which I don’t read on line) as well as New York Magazine, The New York Review of Books, and The Believer (which I do). I write for The Brooklyn Rail and often advertise my articles on the web, but when I read it, I read it in paper format. And only once in my life have I tried to read a book on my computer. It's called The Story of Don Miff and, though you can now buy a print-on-demand copy on Amazon, at the time it was unavailable anywhere. I made it roughly 1/3 of the way through, on my laptop, before I gave up.

Blake Eskin and this ad both make a pretty good point — and it’s a point that, as far as I can tell, the Ipad, with its games and movies, doesn’t address. And that is that reading a book or a magazine is, in many ways, a very different experience than reading online. When I get my new copy of the NYRB, or New Yorker, in the mail, I will often read it cover-to-cover before the next issue arrives. Sometimes I zip through it, and sometimes it sits around for several days. Sometimes I get busy and don’t read it all the way through, but when I do, there’s a sense of satisfaction, of having really read the magazine.

I don’t do that with Slate, or with AV Club, or any of the other online magazines. I don’t think I even could, and I honestly don’t know what that would look like. The problem, for me, is two-fold. One is that the online editions of most magazines, with their archives, and blogs, and endless updates, are more or less impossible to fully read. The profusion of information is the point of on-line media. The other is that most online magazines now include profusions of hyperlinks (much like this post) and even if they didn’t, they often discuss subjects that I don’t know much about, and the temptation for me to launch off on a quest of, say, the history of the Knights Templar, or who built the Brooklyn Bridge is irresistible.

I don’t know much about the Kindle. I don’t know its browsing capabilities, or whether you can play video games on it. But if you can’t — if it’s just trying to be a book — that might be a good thing. That might, oddly, become its advantage over the Ipad. People will probably, at least at first, buy a lot of books (among other things) on the Ipad. But if trying to read on it is anything like trying to read on a laptop, then they might not get through very many of those books. And they might stop buying books so much, favoring instead more distraction-friendly activities.

Because, honestly, this post is only 650 words long, and how many times have you already clicked away, following links? How would it be if you were trying to read a 50,000 word novel?

2010-04-09T14:11:00.004-04:00

Ever since I read Matthew Crawford’s book on the value of physical (vs theoretical) work — especially repair work — I’ve looked for opportunities to fix things. My wife and I rent, and since we moved to NYC and gave up the car, most of the stuff we own is not all that complicated, or hard to figure out (not that I could figure out a car anyhow. Those things are complicated!).

So what to do? I poked around a bit when one of the range igniters on our stove got disconnected, and I spent some time reattaching one of the window balances in our bedroom, when the window wouldn’t stay up. But otherwise, there’s nothing much in the house that fits that sweet spot of being both fixable, and not so overly complicated that I couldn’t/shouldn’t touch it (when the gas line stopped working to one of the stove’s ranges, I just called the super and he fixed it).

Except the vacuum.

Vacuum cleaners are interesting machines. They aren’t complicated at all — they’re basically just a motor attached to some tubes that draws air in and deposits it (and the dirt) into a bag or plastic container. They aren’t yet (the ones I have access to anyway) overly computerized, but when they break most people still just chuck them out and get new ones. This means that I wasn’t surprised the other day to find a relatively new-looking hand vacuum sitting outside someone’s apartment, in the free-if-you-want-it zone between fence and curb.

What’s most fun about opening up a broken machine is you never really know what’s gone wrong, or how to fix it. So (at the behest of friends and spouse) after carefully inspecting this little street-find for bedbugs and other unwanted critters, I went ahead and took it home and opened it up.

At first, the problem seemed to be pretty simple: when I turned it on, the brush wouldn’t roll, and the belt that turned the brush was missing. I went to the store and bought a package of two new belts (cost: $6) and some new bags for good measure, and came home. But when I put the belt in, I noticed that it still wasn’t spinning, and I was smelling a burning rubber smell, as well. Uh oh.

So I went back and pulled the whole thing as apart as I could get it. Then I started fiddling around. I got it mostly apart, and (with it unplugged, of course!) put my fingers in the rotor and started trying to spin it. Sure enough, it was stuck. I felt around, and found something rubber that seemed loose. A few seconds later, out popped the old belt, which had gotten sucked up in the motor’s fan when it broke. Voilà! I put it all back together, put on the bag, and swept up the carpet.

Okay, but so I fixed a little vacuum cleaner, so what? Well, Crawford would say that I spent a little time engaged in my environment, not as its master (or more rudely as the helpless baby that demands all objects serve me) but as its servant — understanding the “needs” of the machine, and bending my own will to solve its problems. Through this, I’m able to develop some humility and also be a more useful part of my environment.

That’s all fine and good, but mostly I like the feeling of success — a real, solid I-made-something-right kind of success. The kind that people might only get close to when solving video game puzzles anymore. Plus, I got a working vacuum cleaner for $6. Nice!

In Defense of Trash

2010-03-23T09:06:00.003-04:00

Everyone needs both Serious Literature and Trash. Confucius said that. Or Sarah Bernhart. I’m not sure. But it was said, and it was true.

Lately, I’ve been drowning myself in a sea of serious literature, and I kind of forgot to read any real trash... so earlier this past weekend, when my neighborhood started playing a new season of its favorite fairweather game, Leave A Big Box of Books By Your Front Door for People to Take, I grabbed Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver — a monstrous brick of 17/18th c. steampunk (or maybe coalpunk?) that is, apparently, only the first in a trilogy.

It’s absolutely awful. It’s mostly written in modern English, but Stephenson keeps throwing in the occasional olde spellinge: “phant’sy” to let us know it’s that time period, and then quickly follows it with an anachronism (“he’ll have to ‘get in line’ as they say in New Amster- I mean New York”) to let us know that it’s not our version of that time period. But I love it. I’m hardly 60 of the 900+ pages in so far, and I don’t want to stop reading. It’s ambitious as hell, lovely and crazy, and weird, and not at all careful about what it’s doing. It reminds me of the best and worst of Orson Scott Card, or Douglas Adams — the ride is wild and that’s the only point. Awesome.

And it’s deliberately overwhelming in the best way — here’s a list of phrases the main character finds on a set of proto-computer punch-cards (all spelling and capitalization preserved):

Noah’s Ark; Treaties terminating wars; Membranophones (e.g. mirlitons); The notion of a classless society; The pharynx and its outgrowths; Drawing instruments (e.g., T-squares); The skepticism of Pyrrhon of Elis; Requirements for valid maritime insurance contracts; The Kamakura bakufu; The fallacy of Assertion without Knowledge; Agates; Rules governing the determination of questions of fact in Roman civil courts; Mummification; Sunspots; The sex organs of bryophites (e.g., liverwort); Euclidean geometry—homotheties and similitudes; Pantomime; The Election & Reign of Rudolf of Hapsburg; Testes; Nonsymmetrical dyadic relations; the Investiture Controversy; Phosphorus; Traditional impotence remedies; the Arminian heresy...

Wonderful! It reads like one of those lists of topics “discussed” in the Believer magazine, only gone terribly, terribly awry. My heart skips a beat hoping that all of these things will show up in this endless, crazy, book. I’ll let you know.

Which leads me to an overwhelming question: where is trash poetry? I’m not talking about pretentious crap, or amateur high school bloodletting. I mean where’s the lowbrow poetry, the poetry that’s not aiming for readers somewhere on the far horizon of time? Where’s the modern version of the great, terrible, popular murder ballads and limericks and, heck, I don’t know, the sci-fi poems? The vampire/werewolf/romance love poems? The superhero poems?

I think poemtry is suffering — has been suffering — from a decidedly over-literaturization of itself. Or, more likely, I think I just don’t know where all that stuff is, because my local bookstore is a little bit pretentious, and Amazon doesn’t care enough about poetry to separate it into subgenres. But I do know this: I’ve been reading a lot of really great poetry for a while now, and my brain is full. I think I need some enjoyable trash poetry to read. I think I’d find that pretty refreshing. So if you know where any is, send it my way.

About Time

2010-02-23T07:28:00.002-05:00

It’s getting within shouting distance of Spring, which means that there’s rain instead of snow currently tapping at the windowpane behind me, and I’m starting to get itchy about spending all day in the 10x40 ft space we’re calling our home. One thing about being in New York is that there’s several lifetimes of things worth seeing. And since this is, ostensibly, a travelogue, or at least it started out as one, and I’m committed to keeping it that way, I want to get out and see more of the city.

On Saturday K. and I got up bright and early and, after a couple false starts and a long detour at one of my favorite coffee shops we trekked out to the Queens Museum of Art, by the old 1939 (& 1964) World’s Fair fairgrounds.

The fairgrounds are way out past the Laguardia airport, in a big green field. It’s pretty empty looking— though both the old and new Mets’ stadium, and the Billy Jean King Tennis center (site of the U.S. Open) are out there, so that’s more a product of the season than any real abandonment. Both the stadiums and tennis center are right next to the subway stop, and the fairgrounds/museum are set back a bit, on a long, mall-style field, as you can see:

View Larger Map

There’s not much left from the fair: a giant steel statue of the world, and a couple once grand-looking buildings made of concrete, that look like the past’s idea of the future. But the museum is a real hidden treasure — the centerpiece of the museum is a scale model of all five boroughs that takes up a huge space. It was built, apparently, in 1939, and for a time they thought it might be used for city planning. They’ve done a fairly good job keeping up with all the changes since then (the twin towers are still standing in that little world, but I think there are plans to recreate the memorial, once the real one is finished) and K. and I had fun finding our little street (our building was nearly impossible to locate) and K’s workplace (a little easier) and NYU (fairly simple) etc. To give a sense of scale, the twin towers, by far the tallest actual buildings in the room, were about ten or eleven inches high. The model was about fifty feet east to west, and longer north to south. They even had little planes on strings taking off and landing at LaGuardia (not JFK, however, which seems like the opposite of my experience).

What I noticed about the map was just how much of New York there is to explore. Good thing Spring is coming.

Here’s some pics:

Oh Noes

2009-11-12T10:00:00.002-05:00

So, I agreed, somewhat innocently to write this review of a Glenn Beck book for the Brooklyn Rail. I gave the book the benefit of the doubt, and the review isn't a total pan, but it's also not two thumbs up (and you should buy that book).

But it was a funny experience, reading it. For one, though I carried the thing several times on my long bus trips up to Syracuse and back, I had the hardest time opening it up in public. I generally try not to care what strangers think about me, but it felt like opening up a Glenn Beck book in the middle of a bus station was asking for crazy people to wander up and begin ranting about my choice of reading material. So, mostly, I only read it at home.

Now that I'm done with it, I'm left trying to figure out what to do with the thing. It's not thick enough to help me reach the top shelf, or heavy enough to hold open a door. I'd put it on the curb, but who wants that kind of Karma? Sure, we have a little apartment-style webber, but that brings up too many bad associations. So, it's currently tucked into a corner on my bookshelf, awaiting the moment when I finally decide to sneak out in the middle of the night and huck it into a neighbor's trash can.

But then, the other day I get a notice that a package is waiting for me at the Post Office. A package? I'm not expecting anything. I troop on down, and find a slim little package from Simon & Schuster addressed to "Chris Michel, Reviewer" -- ohhh, I'm on a list! I'm starting to get books unsolicited! What fun! What little prize awaits me? I hustle home and tear open the pull-tabs, to discover, this monstrosity. Oh wait, sorry, no. I mean this monstrosity. Gaaaah! Now what do I do?

Re-viewing

2009-05-28T08:22:00.004-04:00

My first reaction on reading this article in the New Yorker, was, "oh, great, gimmick poets." They're twins! And they write poems! And they're twins! Then, a few weeks later, I was at this festival and it turned out that Michael Dickman was going to be on a panel, first, and then reading. The panel, which was decorously called "the audience of the future" seemed designed for mostly uninteresting responses from poets about how the internet has changed everything, and no one knows what to do... but Dickman did a neat thing -- he asked some of the grade-school students he teaches (in Portland?) how people would read poems in the future, and then simply read out the list of answers ("on iphones, on the moon, on iphones"). It was funny, and broke up the sententious mood that seems to naturally draw itself up around both Princeton and any academic poetry event. I liked him.

The next day I heard him read. The NY'er had printed some excerpts of both Matthew and Michael's poems, and neither had much impressed me. But this is the problem with my reading poems most of the time: it feels like "good poetry" is a moving target. Is it innovative? Is it satisfying? Is it world-changing? Does it comfort my afflictions? Does it afflict my comforts? Does it surprise me? It's always easy to dismiss a poem, especially a new poem.

But hearing Michael read gave me a sense -- a sonic sense -- of what he was after. And the poems, which seemed empty and unsurprising, became instead sparse, and filled with an austere reverence. They are not sonic boom boom fireworks, but they are sprinkled with a few words that surprise more than it even seems they should. For instance this, the first section of a poem titled Into the Earth:

The best time was the first time, on the floor of her living room
people walking past the apartment outside
talking loudly

Almost naked
on the carpet
Finally!

If you take me
into the bedroom
you know
you could fuck me

Streetlight beginning to pile up outside her windows, along the
couch, pooling into her
sunken hips

White
Cathedrals

... what begins as a very typical love poem, or first-sex poem, is turned by those last two words. The image of White Cathedrals seems out of place, and then strangely resonant of the reverence and the grandeur and the beauty of the "best, first time" of making love.

Talking with a friend, he noted that Dickman thanks Franz Wright for his support and friendship, and these poems seem to be heavily influenced by Wright's sparse style (and possibly also subject matter: both poets recount harrowing experiences with violence and drugs). I hadn't read Wright much before, and I've only read a little since. It might be that Dickman is cribbing everything from his mentor. But these poems are not Wright's poems. And to me, at this moment, they feel fresh, and personal, and most importantly, enjoyable to read.

All too often, as a writer reading poetry, I get caught up in the evaluating of another writer's poems. I think about that shifting target of what poems do, and all the many different (sometimes opposite) things I want my own poems to do. I lose sight of the idea that poems are meant to be read and enjoyed. And that, in a certain way, if they're not first and foremost enjoyable, exciting or interesting (even -gasp!- fun) then they're not doing what they need to be doing.

Dickman's first book isn't, maybe groundbreaking. I don't know the ground enough to tell one way or another. But it's lovely, and fun to read, and taken as a whole (not excerpted, as I have done) the poems build well on one-another, so that by the end you feel that you, as the reader, have changed a little, have begun to understand the world a little differently. That seems like enough to justify a book.

Drinking from the firehose

2009-04-04T13:45:00.002-04:00

what's your reaction to something like this: http://tinyurl.com/cdt65g? Mine is to be somewhat overwhelmed. I'm not sure exactly why, but it doesn't make me want to rush off and read everything. And yet, I'm happy -- sort of -- that it's up there. I'd much rather think that I have access to all of that than that I don't. But I'm not any more inclined, once I know that it's there, to do much about it.

Now, if I had a research paper to write about 18th, 19th or early 20th century american poetry, I'd be off like a shot. I'd dive deep into that archive. But when I'm home, and wanting to curl up with a good read? Forgetting that the computer is hard to curl up with, I'd be overwhelmed by all the options. I don't think I could do it.

And this, I think, is the one thing that the book still has, solidly, over other media. The internet, and its various portals are excellent as a content delivery system. So they work flawlessly for reading that we do for "content" -- news, academic research, classifieds, etc. But that's not the only reason to read. Poetry and fiction are the least content-oriented forms of writing. They are entertainment in a certain sense, but more often I think we conceive of reading a book as an experience. We look to novels and poetry to provide us with a state of being, and that is tied directly to their artifact-ness. It's why so many people like to get books signed. Actually having the thing in your hand is a reminder of a particular experience. And the experience of reading one book is different than the experience of reading another book.

Content delivery portals like the Kindle or my Macbook, are fine for certain types of reading. But for experiential reading, the sense I get is of being overwhelmed. Reading a book still needs to be a unique, special experience. It needs to be a connection, and that can't happen without the object itself.

On Photographs and Family Art

2008-12-06T10:19:00.002-05:00

An apple is being interrogated. In a color photo that is almost black and white in its range of tones, a knotty, pock-marked fist of an apple, lumpy and dull-skinned, sits in a splash of light so bright the background has faded entirely to black. A crisp black oval of shadow reaches out in front of it, as light of varying intensity and shade play across the curve of its surface. From the brightest edge of the apple, lost in the full glare of the spotlight, to the darkest corner, which is indistinguishable from the shadow, a full range of pale greens plays across the fruit's skin. The colors do not smoothly transition, however. They are mottled, like the skin of a person with Vitiligo. There are pale splotches, black spots. The stem is dusty with web from microscopic spiders.

Fruit can be exceedingly ugly. Not store fruit: that stuff is grown and waxed and arranged solely for its looks. But apple orchard apples, roadside squash, homegrown tomatoes and other garden vegetables often show the frustrations of their environment much more clearly than the over-coddled, over-produced produce of the supermarket. The apple in this picture is not a model apple. It is not vying for a spot on television. It is an apple with bad skin. It is strange, and slightly misshapen. Although it is exceedingly healthy, it is not beautiful. But it is made beautiful by the light it is in, by its simple arrangement on a wooden surface. By the light that lovingly caresses it, that defines it and sets it apart. This photograph has drawn a striking beauty from a homely apple.

The picture was taken by my father. Though he is not famous, his artistic aesthetic is a fundamental part of my world. And the things that drew him to this apple, and to light it, and frame it, and shoot it in the way he has, are the same things that draw me to pay attention, in particular ways, to the subjects of my poetry. I love the form and the sense of space inherent in the picture. I love the way the lumps of the apple resolve into the smooth, perfect lines of its shadow. I love the blend of the real and the ideal. On the one hand, this is clearly an apple made to be eaten. On the other hand, it has become a thing of beauty, and its complicated allure lies in the tension between these two things.

In Proust Was A Neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer makes the argument that the function of art is to surprise -- to bring new ways of thinking (of seeing, of hearing) into our world, to disturb our complacent patterns of thought. But art is also about delight -- about creating tensions of form and structure, about seeing what is not easily seen, and showing it to others. Art can disturb the comfortable, sure. But it also can comfort the disturbed. It can reveal hidden beauties in the humblest, overlooked things. It can make an ugly old apple into a plaything of light and shadow.

2008-11-05T09:57:00.002-05:00

For the most part, I feel like I'm pretty empathetic. I can understand, even if I don't agree, something about the motivations of people who vote solely in favor of preserving gun rights, or low taxes, borders or even (maybe especially) the right to life. Even if I disagree, I can see something that I understand and can connect with.

But, when it comes to Gay Marriage, I'm just dumbfounded. It seems, to me, like people standing up for bigotry -- and bigotry of the worst kind. I've never understood how denying homosexuals the right to marriage "preserves" anything, much less how allowing this civil right to spread to others would destroy anything. I can't connect with the intentions of any human who would make another's love life such a part of their business that they would bother to rally, or hold signs, in favor of denying legal rights to a segment of the population. It is meanness to the highest degree, and I can't really see past it.

So, in a time when America has demonstrated a tolerance that I hardly dared hope would happen, what is up with California?

I Do Recall Our Caravel

2008-11-03T22:55:00.001-05:00

My run-ins with The Believer

And I do recall our caravel
A little wickered beetle shell
With four fine masts and lateen sails
Its bearings on Cair Paravel
—Joanna Newsom, “Bridges & Balloons”

For a guy who grew up pretty far away from where cool things happened — high school in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio; college at a tiny, snow logged, mostly military school twelve back-road miles from the smallest state capital in the country, (Montpelier, VT) — it was often hard for me to believe that there were contemporary people doing interesting things, or thinking like-minded thoughts (or at least to believe they were talking about and publishing those thoughts). I read a lot of stuff by people who died long before I was born. I listened to a lot of folk and blues from the '60s, or even the '30s. To be fair, there was some good contemporary music that I liked. But it was mainstream: Nirvana, REM, U2, et al. It was so slickly packaged, so professional and so clearly far from me or my world that it might as well have been from a different time. Basically, I assumed that I was too late for everything. Even when I didn't really believe that anymore, I still sort of believed it.

In early 2003, a few years after college, I was working for a small nonprofit, writing a lot of poetry that ended up drying out in my desk drawer (or worse, being foisted upon unwilling family and friends in a desperate bid for some kind of response). I expect I was not much fun to be around. I watched a lot of movies, read a lot of books, listened to a lot of music, the best of which caused amazing things to happen in my brain. Those responses also seemed like they had nowhere to go; I had trouble finding more than one or two other people who were interested in talking about or thinking about poetry and music and books—in the ways I wanted to think about them, anyway. Maybe I'm wrong, and was just going through a late-stage self-centered form of adolescence. Either way, the arrive of The Believer magazine in February of 2003, at Bear Pond Books in Montpelier, VT was a revelation. The writers seemed young and idealistic, rough around the edges, but genuinely concerned with the things that concerned me. Most of my favorite articles were about finding and sharing gems in the cultural morass — novels, movies, music I’d never heard of, but needed to know about. I bought a subscription.

In 2005, The Believer launched the first of their annual music issues with a mix CD of cover songs. I still think the CD that came with this one is the best. What amazed me most, aside from the fact that I’d never heard of any of these people, were the lyrics. They weren’t just lyrics… they were poetry! Joanna Newsom, The Silver Jews, Postal Service. The songs on this CD have some amazing phrases. They are lyric, and sad, and true. This is a CD that you listen to with headphones on, cross-legged on the floor, just concentrating on the interaction of the music and the lyrics, and trying to understand why and how it affects you the way it does.

The magazine followed the CD with an essay by Matthew Derby, introducing the mix, and describing each of the songs. It felt like a personal, perfect mix tape made by a stranger. It wouldn't have surprised me if Matthew Derby had started the essay with “Dear Christopher.” Instead he started it like this:
The oldest recorded song we know of was etched on clay tablets in western Syria 3,400 years ago. But the first actual song was created much further back, before the creation of language, perhaps even before the invention of bread, or maybe in celebration of the invention of bread.

From music to bread! This was the way I wanted to think about music. This was how I wanted to hear about, and talk about it. As if it were important. As if it could change the world. Because, for me, it sometimes could. Then he ends it like this:
Some of the covers are faithful, others are barely recognizable, and some come from original compositions heard only by four people in Canada. All of them will change you slightly, make you more aware of things—even the one thing you've just noticed, which is the sudden and distinct smell of bread baking somewhere nearby.

And he was right. Even before I’d read that, the CD had changed me. It had amazed me. I wanted The Believer to be my best friend. I wanted to make mix tapes and send them back to Matthew Derby and all the people that worked there. Only I knew they wouldn't be as good. Instead, I became determined to make something else—a poem—as beautiful, as worthy of being spread around as the music The Believer had given me. I won’t say it was a direct cause, but that was the year I quit my job to apply to grad schools and write full time. So, in a sense, I'm still working on it.

Predators: a poet's eye view of Gordon Grice's The Red Hourglass

2008-10-19T21:30:00.000-04:00

"And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears ... I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food." Werner Herzog -- Grizzly Man

"We arrogantly see nonhuman animals as innocents at play in nature's temple, potential victims of evil invating humans. But cats kill for fun, wolves slaughter more than they can eat, and pigs destroy the vegetation they depend on. Many animals are just as intemperate and greedy as we are, though we accomplish more in the way of destruction." Gordon Grice, The Red Hourglass, pp 180

Gordon Grice's book The Red Hourglass covers seven different types of predators: black widows, mantids (mantises), rattlesnakes, tarantulas, pigs, canids (canines), and recluse spiders. He starts with the crackling, brush-fire sound of the widow's slovenly-looking web and its startlingly destructive abilities (it can kill a horse), then moves through the mantid's creepy, mamalian properties (one of the few bugs that hunts by sight, and can swivel its head), and the fearsome size of a rattlesnake bolus – the writhing ball they make before hibernation in their den. Eventually Grice arrives at both the disturbing assertion that "a pig will eat anything" and the outline of our long and troubled history with canids of all stripe. This is a creepy book.

Grice's main intentions seem to be twofold: first, he chooses creature we Americans know, or are familiar with (no lions or sharks) to remind us of the predatory instincts of animals right near us, and second he describes these creatures always in the context of associations with human behavior, refusing to let us see these creatures as evil, or malformed. The pig is dangerous because the pig thinks like us. The mantid is creepy because we can observe in it behavior similar to our own.

I feel like this books fits well as an answer to all of my poet's fictions about walking in the woods, and "reconnecting" with "nature" (where were we otherwise?) Though he was often accused of supporting it, Frost (our last well-known nature poet, I suppose) fought that stereotype as much as anyone. But it persists. The trouble is, of course, that we are just as much a part of nature as the birds and insects that surround us, and pretending we aren't is not much different than the prairie dog believing that her giant den is somehow separate from the rest of the world. Grice makes this point abundantly clear as he shows us animals that both feed on us, and upon which we feed – he reveals human predatory (and canibalistic) instincts by outlining the most gruesome practices of seven of the more gruesome species that inhabit our everyday world.

What's best about this book is that it isn't really about the predators we remember to fear. A visit to the zoo to see leopards and sharks may keep a child up a night or two, but heading out to the farm and accidentally stumbling on a mother sow eating her young will give you the fantods for weeks. It's not because you fear for your life, necessarily (although empathy for the litter is a part of it), but because it's so easy to see yourself in either part of that brutal game. And it's good to be reminded that the game is happening all around us, not just in far away jungles between hunters and pack animals.

Lions are scary, sure, but for most people, especially in the U.S., there's not much chance of running into one that isn't caged, or trapped behind glass. Wander out into your garage, or backyard, and you're likely to find black widows or recluse spiders, or possible a rattlesnake, depending on where you live. You'll certainly see some kind of monster, back in the dark corners of the basement, wrapping a few struggling bugs up in webbing with careful deliberation, delicately biting them, and waiting for their insides to liquefy.

Chances are good you've heard a coyote howl, or have seen a tarantula, or a live pig. And, as Grail makes clear, these are some of the most dangerous and deadly animals, to others and even to us sometimes. They are also amazing and beautiful. Grail's descriptions of the widow up close, or the lean readiness of a wild boar outline just how beautiful nature can make a creature.

Reading this book was difficult. Grail has a sparse, poet's prose, fluid and quick-paced, and his descriptions are beautiful. But the subject matter had me often holding the book by its edges, as if I were afraid it was going to bite me. Descriptions of necrotic lesions caused by recluse spiders, or the pack hunting tactics of even a tame dog had me cringing. And yet. The larger point that he makes – that creatures often brutally torture each other, causing unnecessary pain for fun and species advancement, is a good one to remember. In my view, nature is both beautiful and brutal. Ignoring either one does little justice to the importance of the other. Grail's book is great in that it helps me not forget.

No Matter What I Write, the Tao is Silent

2008-10-16T10:26:00.002-04:00

being sort of a (not really) review of Barbara Sprout's Primal Myths

One of the first myths in my life that I took seriously, that I believed in and made my own was Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching. The edition I have is an over-sized book, with black and white nature photography, Chinese characters on one side and the translations, by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English on the other. The form and layout of the book, its mysteriousness on one hand (side), and the sparse, clean language on the other hand (side), are tied up deeply with the content — Tzu's thoughts on mystery and clarity, the habits of water and the methods of kings. This, for me, has become a primal myth, and a centering force in my life. Even now, I have a hard time judging the quality of different translations. They all seem inferior to the one I have read and reread throughout my life, beginning in middle school and high school.

Myths can be provocative. I believe they need to reach us early, or at least during a period of intense questioning, if they are to become important, and not merely "useful" for a writer. When I first read this book, the first lines "The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao, / The name that can be named is not the eternal name." I felt that here was something I needed to keep deep inside me if I was going to understand it. It was not going to be something I could talk much about, or speak with others about. Speaking would, as Tzu says, limit my understanding. For these words to transform me, I had to consume them. I had to read them as if they were the key to understanding the universe (they are), and then I had to bury that key as deep inside me as possible, so that it would affect my entire being (it has). Otherwise, I felt, the words would be only words, written by a fallible human being, and I would have to evaluate them, and look for the humanness, and they would lose all effect. If I began to talk about, or try to explain the book, even to myself, I would not understand the Tao, but only my own explanation, which would never be enough.

Soon enough I began to come across other translations of the book. I started to understand that, as this was a translation, and since even the original was a translation of an experience — Tzu's own translations of his experience and understandings — that my best option would be to read closely, then to leave the book behind, and search for my own experiences of the Way — the Tao. This is, I think, the real, best, most vital effects of myth. Myth points a way to understand the world. But it is only a set of instructions — a guide for a practice. You cannot understand the myth unless you practice it. You cannot be moved by it unless you make it personal. And the practice is the way you adopt and solidify the myth.

Barbara Sprout, in her introduction to the book Primal Myths, makes a case that even the myths we don't literally believe in anymore affect our values — as evidence, she takes the Judeo-Christian creation myth (adam and eve) and shows how the values set forth it in (God giving Adam body and life) affect our western understanding of the body as sacred, divine gift made in God's image. I'm not sure if I would call myself a Taoist, but in this way the Tao has (and continues to) influence(d) my life. My sense of self is of one who is most successful overcoming obstacles through yielding. When I am unsure what to do, I take stock of my surroundings, and then make efforts to "align" myself with my "world" — to allow the universe to direct me, to "attend fully" and "be supple" to be able to do nothing, to receive the heavy winds like a palm tree and still stand. All this comes from a deep-seated sense of the workings of the universe as outlined by Lao Tzu.

And, of course, it follows that this affects my writing in great and terrible ways. On the most basic level, of course, the Tao Te Ching is a book of poems. A book of poems that I read deeply and seriously as a young kid. To say this influenced me to become a poet is to say very little. I don't all my own reasons for doing things but it could well be that I am only still writing poetry so fervently, because of this book. Also, I have a tendency to reach for the great and sweeping wise pronouncement when writing. It's easy to see where this comes from. I search — constantly — to write something as filling, as powerful, as world-organizing, as this book.

Of course that doesn't mean that I am now unavailable to other people's myths. Christian myth figures heavily into my value system (as it does to almost all of us). I remain fascinated by Greek, Roman, and Nordic myths that are always peeking in around the edges of culture. And I'm fascinated by myths that are near utterly unfamiliar to me — African and Vedic myths, for instance. In Sprout's book, which is as complete a collection of creation myths as I've seen, the Dogon myth, with its themes of ruined purity, numerology and spatial arrangement, food distribution and architectural symbolism is fascinating. I'd like to write a poem or several that incorporates some of those ideas. But the ideas feel interesting only at arm's length — like a curious story I would like to read more of. But the stories Sprout collects don't feel, in any sense, real. If I make the decision to use African, or Native American or Vedic mythology when writing, is a choice I can make. But I feel like it will always feel a little bit shoved-in. A little cold. I cannot make the decision to draw on the Tao Te Ching however. It is deeply a part of me. To some degree, it is present in everything I write.

Snails

2008-10-13T20:44:00.001-04:00

If nests and shells were without significance, their image would not be so easily or imprudently synthesized.

Images that are too clear ... become generalities and for that reason block the imagination.
-- Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard

I can't stop thinking about snails making their homes by rolling over and over in ever-hardening spit. In the mornings, I have allergies, and am often very clogged up. I'll lie in bed, tossing and turning, trying to find a way of resting in which I can breathe. My eyes water a little, and even if I sit up and blow my nose, it comes right back — a seemingly endless supply of snot welling up and threatening to seal off my nasal passages. Maybe I'm part snail. I wonder how the snails make it — what combination of vegetable matter or fungus, or whatever dissolves to create the sticky, thick slime that the snails use to roll up a carapace for themselves. And it's amazing to think that snot from a slug, rolled and dried, can form the delicately patterned, vaguely mathematic-seeming, thin thing of beauty — at once both a protection and camouflage from predators.

I was in Paris once. The particulars aren't important, but I had a lot of time, and more spending money than I knew what to do with. I am an adventurous eater. There, I discovered snail shells as a site for delicacies — little cups of sweet brown meat dowsed in liquid butter and herbs. Like perfect bowls of stew for gnomes. This is a different sort of beauty, but one no less compelling. Part of what is so interesting to me about this is the way that setting changes everything. I had no problem seeing what the waiter set down before me — a platter of tiny shells dribbled in butter sauce, a tiny fork — as food. And in that way, the lightly burnt shells, sweet-smelling and full of food are beautiful. But when I see snails in a garden, I do not think of them as edible in any way. But they are no less beautiful.

The other day, during a walk in the woods, I came across a slug, munching amiably on top of a mushroom. Feeling a little bold, I reached down and poked at the slug. They're surprisingly resistant — given that they look pretty much like bags of slime. They are strong, and do not move easily. When you touch a slug, it does not attack, or release some unpleasant smell to make you go away. It doesn't exactly ignore you either. Instead it stops eating, stops moving, and hunkers down, prepared to resist you to the best of its ability, but utterly unprotected. If I were a bird, it would be eaten already. How has a creature like this not been eaten to extinction?

For some reason I'm always predisposed to like snails. I will pick them up. Set them elsewhere. Let them crawl across the back of my hand. Slugs fill me with revulsion. In the Pacific Northwest, I saw banana slugs as big as a thumb and finger. I have pictures. Is it because they are exposed that I dislike them so much? Being sticky, it's harder to find a clean place to grasp them. They squirm and struggle in between your fingers. It seems like it would be difficult for them to keep clean, but given their habitat — rotting vegetation on the forest floor — maybe that's not a concern. A snail, however, can easily keep clean within its shell. I identify with the values of the snail. Being able to choose, I would spit myself a shell as well.

La la la

2008-08-04T19:55:00.002-04:00

This is the best thing I've read in a while. From David Remnick's "Lenin's Tomb" about the fall of the Soviet Union:

At the Kazan Station in Moscow a wanderer named Alik said he'd talk my ear off if I'd only buy him a bottle. I suggested we go to a store and join the vodka line. When he stopped laughing, he said, "Just give me thirty rubles." He snatched the bills from my hand and set off down the sidewalk. We walked ten feet before Alik found what he was looking for. A ghostly woman in a ratty coat reached into her pocket and the silent exchange was done. Alik quickened his pace and we headed toward a place marked CAFE. Three feet inside the door, he screwed off the bottle cap and downed the entire liter bottle in a few magnificent swigs. "Usually, in the morning, I like some potatoes," he said and then stormed out the door, singing.

brilliant!

A change in perspective

2008-08-03T17:35:00.002-04:00

So over the summer I moved from one apartment to another about a four blocks away. I was hoping that the move would provide a change in mood as well as perspective, but it's really done more than that. It's made me reevaluate all of my presumptions about Syracuse.

When I first came here, I was living in a slightly-run down neighborhood, across the street from a scary park that I had to walk through to get to school. I was driving several miles to the big box stores &mdash which are nice, but faceless &mdash to get my food. I didn't know anyone around me, and it was cold, and dark, and snowy. I ended up getting terribly depressed, drinking and smoking a lot, and escaping town whenever possible to see Karen in the city. Basically, my life was this book. (which, admittedly, is better than if it were the other book).

Since moving, the weather has improved considerably, but also I'm suddenly in a nice apartment, on a nicer street, with great downstairs neighbors, and a friend living across the street. I found a faster, safer way to walk to school, and it turns out I'm only five blocks from the local co-op, which means I can walk there whenever I want. Suddenly, it feels like I'm a part of a neighborhood -- a community. One I want to be a part of. I'm reading more, I'm getting out a bit. I stopped drinking in the evenings and I quit smoking.

What's curious to me is how much just a few things have really changed my whole world. It feels like I moved from a foreboding, slightly dangerous cityscape, where day-to-day life was unpleasant at best, to a happy neighborhood, where it's possible to make good decisions about living well.

Four blocks. You think it's possible that minor changes can have such drastic effects most of the time? Like, stopping a downward spiral? If I'd known, I would have changed spaces a long time ago.

oh horrible

2008-07-26T19:30:00.004-04:00

Have you seen / are you watching I Survived A Japanese Game Show? The concept is typical reality-show brilliance: a combination of a fish-out-of-water experience and clumsy Machiavellian idiocy. Some ten yokels who've never been out of the country (southern yokel, urban yokel, frat-boy yokel, New Yorker yokel, wall flower yokel, etc. etc.) are taken to Japan where they are routinely humiliated on a Double Dare-type program. The winning team is given a high-class tour of Japan, and the losing team is made to do some kind of traditional low-class work for a day -- a typical show has winners visiting a Shinto temple, or going to a traditional spa for instance, while the losers have to plant rice or shell clams.

Then the losing team has to vote two members to compete in an elimination round, so that one person goes home each episode. And eventually the "winner" (no one wins, really) will get $250,000. That seems a little light considering the humiliation(s) you have to go through, and given that a few years ago you could win a clean million just by putting up with Regis Philbin and answering a few questions.

The bad part: The show encourages us to revel in the schadenfreude, sense of superiority, and even a kind of xenophobic spectacle, as we see "how weird those Japanese are." It's typically insulting to everyone, even the viewers, assuming they need to be reminded after every commercial break what's happening. And it's truly awful watching loud, obnoxious Americans fulfill every Japanese game-show audience's expectations of Americans as loud, and obnoxious, and a little stupid. But that's one of the reasons it's so fascinating.

As an occasional tourist, I'm always at pains to not be such a fish out of water. I want to fit in, to be respectful, to learn about and experience different things. And I tend to really enjoy new experiences. It's why I keep seeking them out. But these guys had no idea they were even leaving the country when they signed up for this game show. They are *only* really here to compete and win. And yet, everything in the show revolves around showing these guys Japanese culture. So my favorite parts are always the non-gameshow parts, where the winning and losing teams head out for their respective prizes/punishments.

It's fascinating to watch a herd of yokels "win" something like a tour of the Tsukiji fish market, and then try to define their experience as one of pleasure. These are people who have never had sushi before. Which you can get even in Alabama these days. So, they are in many ways the least adventurous human beings the show could have found, and their "prizes" are always adventures. You can see the rictus-like smiles frozen on their faces as they troop through the market, a little scared, a little uneasy, trying to remind themselves that they're getting the good day. And the losers -- who earlier that day, or the day before, were on a game show, where they wore giant diapers, or rolled around in oil and feathers, then tried to pop balloons with their asses -- revel, revel! in the "humiliation" of being a rickshaw driver, or making mochi (both of which sound like a lot of fun, actually).

And that's actually the fun of the show -- it's the real fish out of water. Not simply Americans in Japan, (and certainly not Americans on a "crazy" Japanese game show, which is mild Compared to the ways that Americans find to humiliate themselves) but people who would never think of setting foot outside their country, suddenly coming face to face with tourism, and recoiling.

Someone Got Scotland All Wet

2008-07-25T16:04:00.002-04:00

My last day in Edinburgh, I got to do a little tourist-ing with my friend Fiona, and her husband Paul. Otherwise, I was stuck on a college campus, attending a very interesting conference, but otherwise not seeing much other than 60's architecture, rain and rabbits for a week.

Still, we got out Saturday night and went to the Holyrood Park, which was beautiful (and where I got the photo, above, and pretty much all the other photos posted on Flickr). Lovely! I want to go back.

Before I go

2008-07-15T17:37:00.002-04:00

...thought I'd post one of the pictures from my day at the Met.

more on the flickr site.

Touristward Ho!

2008-07-15T10:13:00.002-04:00

It's definitely tourist-time for me. Concentric circles of tourism. Last Thursday, I poked around Eastwood, a walkable neighborhood in Syracuse, and found a couple good bookstores (musty smells, huuuuuuuge poetry sections, and even a not-indecent comics section! Terrible cookbook sections in both though). Saturday morning I took a few pictures (mostly of flowers in the neighborhood, nothing super interesting) then I hit the Blues Fest with a friend. Beer! Heat! Blues! Sandwiches! Good times were had.

It's interesting how tourism can carry with it airs of both selfishness and generosity. On the one hand, walking through Eastwood and my neighborhood, I was much more open to what the space had to offer. I could appreciate my neighbors' flowers, or the signs and layout of Eastwood in specificly conscious ways. It is pleasant to be in "tourist" mode -- precisely because I feel alive and aware of my surroundings in such a different way. On the other hand, I also felt like an intruder, and a bit of an imposter. Eastwood may be "walkable" but it's by no means touristy. The bookstores were across the street from a strip mall and a gas station. I felt self-conscious carrying a camera -- especially in my own neighborhood -- and it was hard to get it out and use it. Basically, my presence was forcing everything to be on display for me -- and it was clear that both of these neighborhoods were not prepared to be displayed. Mostly, I left the camera in its case.

The Blues Fest was a little different, in that the display was obviously set up in advance. I didn't bring my camera, but I did try to be aware of my surroundings. Unfortunately, we were there for a good half an hour before my friend pointed out that we were standing in the (drained) central fountain. I had not noticed at all.

Today, I'm in NYC -- I've got a flight this evening taking me to Scotland. So I've got the whole day to wander around manhattan (a place that is perpetually on display) and take pictures, visit museums, etc. Tomorrow I'll be in Edinburgh, and will again have the day to wander and "take in" the sights. After that, I'll be at a conference in Stirling, but it is, I am told, a touristy little place. Let's see what that means! Unfortunately (ach.) I'm going to miss Edinburgh's Fringe Festival by a few days. This has happened before -- when I went to Austin, we left just before SXSW started up. Oh well.

Wait, why do I have this blog?

2008-07-10T18:30:00.003-04:00

Ever since I decided to revive my self on the internets, I've been trying to think about what to do with this blog. Do I need it? My other two blogs (three if you count livejournal, which no one does) seem to have reasons for being built-in -- they help to encourage me to write poetry, or make translations (or share the stupid stuff I found while goofing off on the interwebs). So when I post on any of those sites, I have specific ideas about what I'm doing, and when anyone visits those sites ha ha they can immediately tell what they will find.

But this blog is...generic.

I don't like that. I'm not sure why. Lots of people have generic blogs. I even read some of them. But it feels even more solipsistic than usual to me to come here and just post... generically.

Looking at the excerpt of the Bishop poem that heads this, I'm reminded that, like my good friend Jess, I began this thing as a way to keep track of my experiences overseas. I'm not overseas anymore, but I still like that quote, and the tourist and traveler is still a part of me that I'd like to encourage.

So that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to use this site to post reflections on exploration -- geographical and otherwise. I'm going to practice being a tourist more often, seeing the world around me with a little more readiness for awe. And I'll start posting long(er) musings about my adventures here. Maybe even with pictures. More, I think, tomorrow.

What a weird day.

2008-07-09T12:45:00.003-04:00

So, one of the reasons I haven't written much, meaning that likely there aren't many of you reading this blog (hello, is this thing on?) is that I've been spending most of my days reading, writing, cooking and playing a little bit of tennis, and otherwise not doing much at all. But today was definitely a departure. Usually, when I have those awful big-deal type chores to do, like renewing my driver's license,or oh, I don't know finally sitting down to pay taxes, they're things that I've seen coming for a while. But today, I got a spate of last-minute, emergency-type things which came out of the blue, and were weird and surprising. You know, for chores. The list:

1. Had to send soon-to-be roommate his passport, which he accidentally left with his stuff here. Since he is taking off from Atlanta at some point this evening, said passport had to be sent by plane, from the airport. Weird. I didn't even know Delta had a shipping service. Or that it was so expensive. Enjoy your first class flight, little passport!

2. Been waiting for tax refund since February (not the stimulus, the actual refund) and keep getting "oops, sorry, we filed that wrong" messages from IRS. K. gets a letter yesterday that mentions refund not at all, and insists we pay large sum of back taxes immediately. A desperate visit to H&R Block (best $300 I've ever spent, especially with this year's tax headaches which, believe me, neither of us want me to get into) and 25 minutes on speakerphone with IRS muzak later, turns out it's more "oops, sorry we filed that wrong" and I should be expecting said refund "in 3-4 weeks" (possibly with interest!)

3. Car Insurance autophones me last night insisting I get a "photo inspection" and recommending a website. I'm still not sure what it is, or what it's for, but the website seemed legit, and the inspection cost me nothing. Despite asking questions of several people and visiting the Car Insurance website several times, I remain largely uninformed about this whole "photo inspection" thing, except that it involves a camera, and apparently is required if CI is to not cancel my insurance. Confusing!

Bleah

2008-06-27T15:27:00.003-04:00

Spent a week at the DMV yesterday (and today). Mm, I love the smell of overwhelming powerlessness in the shadow of faceless bureaucracy. This was a direct result of my birthday, (Touché, Birthday. You win again.) and the car's registration finally expiring.

For those of you not in NY, count yourselves lucky. This place is sick with aforementioned bureaucracy. To get the car registered here, I need a NY driver's license -- nothing else will do. This despite the fact that I was able to keep my VT driver's license in Ohio, even though I had the car registered there. Whatever. I'll get the new license.

However, to get my new driver's license, I need to have my old (still valid) license, PLUS: a birth certificate, a social security card AND two OTHER forms of ID (only one can be a credit card). WTF? Is this a magic driver's license? Does this driver's license give me secret access to heretofore uknown places? Is this why I always have to stand behind the stupid red ropes on Chrystie Street? It's easier to get a goddamn passport. Which I have. Which counted (luckily) for the birth certificate (which, I have no idea where that even is) and the two other forms of ID, but NOT for the SSN card (though the number's right on there). ugh. Then it cost forty fucking five fucking dollars.

THEN I get to register the car. Only I can't, because the car is in both my and Karen's name. And so we need both signatures to transfer the title. In original ink. So the faxed forms I have from her won't work. Again: wtf? Plus we need a picture of Karen's NYC license. Luckily, she's more on the ball than I am, because if she had an out of state license, it would be no dice.

Seriously, it would almost be easier (and cheaper) to drive back to fucking OH and renew the registration in Hamilton. It would certainly take less time.

Because I have too much time on my hands

2008-06-24T20:41:00.002-04:00

I am, as of right now, five pages shy of being exactly halfway through Infinite Jest. That's page 485, if you don't want to look it up. It is both amazing, and funny, and nearly impossible to actually read. What's weirder, is that it mentions Syracuse NY several times, and prominently features Tennis (which is something I've been getting into quite a lot, lately) and AA (which is something I know a lot about) and Boston (a city I'm lucky to be pretty familiar with, despite never actually having lived there). And it's scarily accurate about all three of these things. It's also one of the more unbelievable books I've ever read.

Being halfway through, all I can say is it feels worth it just for the accomplishment. It's not at all boring or difficult in any traditional way. DFW uses big words -- sure, and the footnotes are sometimes silly, but not particularly annoying. Not nearly as annoying as you might suspect. Actually, I find that he has certain mannerisms of writing that stick in the head much more, that I'm much more tempted to employ myself, that I find far, far more annoying than the footnotes.

No, what makes this particular book almost impossible to read, I'm just not sure of. I like it, I'm already drawn to the material, but every time I sit down to read a section, I get through about 1/3 of a page and I start to nod off. I drink coffee, I change chairs, I put myself under bright lights -- nothing doing. And I *want* to read this book, god dammit! I *will* finish it! But it's like some kind of marathon. I've been reading it for the better part of the summer now. I've had to read other books in between, just to keep myself going back to it. I'm watching my potential summer reading list shrink because I'm determined to finish this book.

However, it's also funny as hell, and weirdly dated, given that it was only written ten years ago. And weirdly prescient, but only about a few things. There's no internet!

okay, enough. back to reading.d

Memories are made of this

2008-06-24T17:11:00.002-04:00

Wow!

I just found this video linking to a trip through lego's secret vault, where they keep a fresh box of every kit they ever made. I was a little skeptical when I touched off the video, figuring it would be a little lame. Then they started showing some of the boxes. It made me eight again! No kidding, this is like nostalgia crack.

Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker (and Tits).

2008-06-23T15:14:00.002-04:00

Peace out to you, Mr. Carlin.

Let's hope they don't have censors in heaven.

Cool

2008-06-10T13:53:00.003-04:00

So late this morning after about ten to fifteen minutes of what sounds like giant metal canisters rolling across the convenience store of the sky (or "thunder" if you want to be literal), a giant wall of rain marched up the street, knocking branches onto the street and causing little mini floods. Then there was a brief, terrifying succession of the loudest lighting I've ever heard. It did not decimate Syracuse, thankfully. Apparently these storms are called supercells.

Cool.

Ressurecting the Beast

2008-06-09T17:34:00.003-04:00

So in the spirit of summer ~~indolence~~ industry, I'm reviving this blog, among others. Actually, I'm mostly working on two other poetry blogs. Mostly, I type my thoughts there, but I may post on this puppy once in a while as well!

whee. Send me a comment.

Hooray A Bike!

2007-08-28T22:27:00.000-04:00

I just bought a bike for my touring around the 'cuse (yes, people actually call it that. Actually, they put it on t-shirts).

..so it turns out that instead of muscles, I have a conglomeration of wet spaghetti and putty in my legs. Who knew? My, god, bicycling is difficult. I get out of breath before I even climb on the thing. Suddenly, I'm thirty.

Foto Time

2007-08-17T09:27:00.000-04:00

I thought it might be nice to share a few photographs from the time that K and I were in Georgia.. with little descriptions.

This was a box of tiny little turtles (see how big the flowers are?) that K. found as we were walking through the big market in Vagzlis Moedani this spring. I wish we'd gotten a picture of the guy selling them -- he was a scraggly, grizzled old guy with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth, completely at odds with the pretty scene inside the box.

I. Am. In. Syracuse!

2007-08-08T15:46:00.000-04:00

Hooray...

So.. K. and I made it Syracuse, and met my new roommate, Nadxi (pron. nad-jee), and her fiance, Rob. Both of them are quite cool, and I'm looking forward to sharing a house for the next few years. They hail from NYC -- Rob's into film, and riding bikes, and Nadxi is in the poetry program.

The house was a little gross when we got there. Ah, college towns. The former tenants basically just moved out, leaving hair-and-dust strewn bathroom floors, gunk in the corners of the living room, and a stove that had the beginnings of enlightened civilizations forming in and around the oven. Yum. So K. and I threw all the boxes in the diningroom, and then mopped/swept/bleached/scrubbed/brought the fucking clean onto every surface we could. Then Nadxi and Rob came and brought even more of the cleaning.

Karen went back to NYC, and started her "I'm living in a far awesomer city than you" adventures. Tomorrow I head down there to pick her up and we're going to head out on thursday for jen and eliot's wedding, in Ohio. Then back, then orientation (and internets at the house!)

Then I'll update more often. Maybe. If you're lucky.

Crossing Books

2007-07-24T17:46:00.000-04:00

I just came across a book sitting in a little cubby outside Stauf's Coffee Roasters, in Grandview, OH. It's the Kite Runner, and on the front of it, there's a little sign: "I'm not lost, I'm free! Open for details..."

Turns out that it's a part of a game/website/thingy called Book Crossing. It seems like a neat idea. Everyone give away your old books, and sign them up for Book Crossing! People the world with books!

If they did this with cd's, the RIAA would shit monkeys.

I'm back in the states, and doing a little light summer reading.

2007-07-22T21:18:00.001-04:00

Hey all,

Back in these here contiguous 48, and I'm doing a little light summer reading. So far: Harukai Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains, and then A Crazy Book I Never Thought I'd Read (more in a sec).

God. Damn, I missed reading in English.

Okay, so on to the book I never thought I'd read:

I first came across this article (READ that article!) when it was published in 2004. It amazed and astounded me, and I went out searching for the book it mentions. After a lot of digging, the Ohio State Interlibrary Loan system managed to get me access to an original copy for all of seven days, but alas, I didn't have any time to actually read it.

Something caught my memory a few days ago, and so I looked at the Internet Archive (and their sister site, the Open Library, which has a way better system for reading than Google Books), and lo and behold, here it is.

Read the article first, and if you dare, download and read the book. It's the most fantastic science-fiction / humor/ post-modern / novel to be written in 1886, just after the civil war in the south.

But don't take MY word for it (thank you, Levar Burton) ...

Oh Jeezum

2007-06-29T02:11:00.000-04:00

The 'rents are in town, and it's been a crazy (uhm... erhm.. how long has it been a month?! yikes) time since I last wrote on this here interweb journal-log thingy.

We went *back* to Uplis Tsikhe and Atenis Sioni, saw Stalin's hometown again, walked up and down the mountains and ancient fortresses of Tbilisi, took a trip out to Sighnaghi, where K's dad/stepmom and my dad/stepmom both took many many megabytes of pictures, and the weather stayed beautiful. Then we took a long daytrip to Davit Gareji again, to look at beautiful half-destroyed frescoes and cave-monks. The days were interspersed with voraciously appetited meals consisting of all the high points of Georgian cuisine -- fried eggplant with walnut sauce, fresh greens, dumplings, shishkebabed meat, etc. etc. All in all it was like a brief, intense recap of our entire year here.

Needless to say it's been a little overwhelming. I haven't been able to post mostly because the internet ran out in a long, and frustrating, and mostly boring-to-anyone-but-me story involving Georgian bureauocracy, my stupid backfiring money-saving plan, and hours and hours in various lines and on the phone.

Internets are back. Parents are here. Today we check out the antiques market and tomorrow we go up to the ancient capital of Mtskheta to see some beautiful churches, and maybe I'll write something that makes more sense, or post a couple more translations in a bit.

The Town in Rocks

2007-06-03T14:15:00.000-04:00

Went to the cave-town of Uplistsikhe (pronounced "oop-leet--seek-hey") this morning.. Took the nine a.m. train out to Gori (town motto: Birthplace of Stalin! He Changed History!) and then a taxi to the caves. They're only a couple miles away from Gori.

It's a strange town, built mostly out of rock, sometime in the millenium before Christ. It reached its peak in terms of people (20 k) and size in the early middle ages. Now it's a bunch of empty caves with some strangely beautiful carvings in them, and a lot of mysteries surrounding them. Number one: why would an entire town full of merchants and traders decide to live in caves? Number two: where did they go?

On the way back, we discovered some of that legendary Gorian hospitality (motto: Our taxis will leave you stranded, but unlike Stalin, we probably won't have you killed!) and spent some time in the parking lot of the Uplistsikhe monument begging for rides back, to little avail (apparent Gori bus driver mottos: "Fuck you! We're Full!)

What's weird about this is that Georgians are, deservedly, legendary for their hospitality. So, not being able to get someone to help is very, very unusual. Ah. well.

Hit the roads to wander the seven kilometers back to Gori, there to take the train back, when a busload of school kids from Tbilisi stopped, and offered to pick us up. "Are you going to Gori?" we said. "We're going through Gori, to Tbilisi!" they said. "You're going to Tbilisi?!?" we said. "Eventually!" they said.

And thus began the adventure of the second half of our day. We went to an old church (Atenis Sioni, if you're paying attention to names) and then spend three or seven hours picnicing beneath a weeping tree, eating fresh pork roasted on the ground, and cheese bread, and cucumbers, and potatoes, and watching a busload of sixth graders run around like wild things.

It was... well, incredibly fun. I played a little soccer (I wish I'd been thirty when I was in sixth grade. I totally would have been picked first every time in Gym class) I ate a bunch of pork. I hung out with an incredibly determined kid, who used all twelve of the English words he knew to convey a surprisingly large and subtle amount of information. I received a gift (an orthodox rosary, courtesy of the sixth graders) and became a "guest" for the Georgians, which is much like being a "mascot" especially when the "guest" is "American" which means "exotically cool."

And I hung out and chatted with the tour's English teacher, who was very kind, and helpful. And when she asked what I did, and I told her I was a poet, she sighed with the kind of dreamy exoticism that I cannot even begin to describe, and said "A poet...? Oh, wooooowwwww." I'm sorry Karen, but she did. It made my whole day.

Then I watched the students' history teacher wrap up all the garbage from the picnic, and throw it into the stream we were sitting next to. And I thought "I should say something!" Then I thought "I really don't want to walk home from here." And so I kept my fool mouth shut, as about three and a half kilos of unbiodegradable plastic bags and cups and knives sailed down the stream, toward the river, and eventually out toward the Caspian sea. Unless a cow eats it.

On the way back the bus driver graciously dropped us off near a metro station, and when we got on the train, we realized that we had been gone almost exactly twelve hours. So there must have been some kind of kismet going down.

All in all a good day. Maybe I'll upload some pictures of the cave cities soon. Meantime click the link waay up there. The website's awful, but the pictures are descriptive.

Galaktion Tabidze in Translation: My Heart - Today The Black Sea - Drums

2007-05-15T03:01:00.000-04:00

Written in 1934, this is one of Tabidze’s poems in celebration of his country. Note the rhetoric — the way that it seems, at first, to be a love poem, and then moves toward a national poem, confusing and conflating the two, and never fully explaining itself, or its subject matter.

Is the metaphor that of woman as country, or of country as woman? There are elements that suggest each.

Typical themes in Tabidze’s work — darkness, bitterness, suffering, endurance and just enough hope to survive. Many of Tabidze’s poems read like dirges — but what is interesting is that they don’t sound like dirges.

The lines are short, and almost spry, with flutters of internal rhyme liberally sprinkled among the stanzas, giving the sound of it an almost sing-songy music. Although I wasn’t able to capture all of the internal rhymes, read just the first line in the original: “chemi gulia dghes es shavi zghva” — the rhymes between “gulia” and “shavi zghva” as well as the “dges es” punctuation make this a nearly unforgettable first line.

It’s the tension between the darkness of the subject matter, and the poem’s musical insistence on making it sound lighthearted that makes the poem as interesting as it is. Sort of like dancing in a thunderstorm.

My Heart - Today The Black Sea - Drums

I was travelling, night approaching,
The sea showed me its gardens.
—Shota Rustaveli

My heart — today the black sea — drums
and leans against Adjaran slopes.
I have weathered here such furious storms —
Let them miss your placid boats.

And though the others cannot tell,
Your pine and fir will understand
that I’m not carved from mud or shale,
but made of doubt and faith — a man.

As such, I’ll suffer what may come:
Thirst, thunderstorm or freezing rain,
As long as, with the rising dawn
one hope has light enough to shine.

I’ll suffer every obstacle —
each prison cell, each bitter slight
As long as I can still see well
enough to know my country’s plight.

The darkest taste of loneliness,
the saddest unbefriended state:
I’ll suffer all, as long as I
can see my country’s shining light.

First printed in Georgia Today

The Poetry of Galaktion Tabidze in Translation: To Gautier

2007-05-15T02:55:00.000-04:00

During the early part of the 20th century, the French intellectual and literary world had a great influence on Georgian writers. In the mid-19th century writers such as Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud had defined a poetic movement, called Symbolism, which was just beginning to make waves in Georgia. It would be only a few years later, with the Communist Revolution, that exchange between the Caucasus and the West would be largely cut off, but in 1920, when this poem was written, Georgian Symbolism (as denoted by the “Blue Drinking-Horns” group of poets) was at its peak.

Though Tabidze was not ever formally a member of the Blue Drinking Horns, he was obviously highly influenced by the Symbolists.

This poem, dedicated to Theophile Gautier, is filled, in its first 4/5, with references, both obvious and obscure, to “Western” literature in general, and to French literature, art and history specifically. In the Georgian, Tabidze uses a number of French-sounding words, in addition to naming specific people and places.

The last third, which I have taken the liberty of placing in italics, is much more specifically Georgian in tone and style, with a clean, almost anti-baroque imagery all the more evocative for its contrast with the elaborate style and philosophical/historical/artistic references in the first part.

To Gautier[1]

You named your native haven Pimodan[2],
A place forever Delaroche’s[3] hues.
The light awaited us, and it was laden
Laden down with laurel and with “petit choux”
This blessed time is even now more perfect!
In each: the lightning of Brumel[4] and Lauzon[5].
And please, please where are all the altruistic
Poets, painters, passing ladies, mimosian?
Surrounding us are white streams of remembrance.
Surrounding us are streams, light and clandestine:
The place glowed — a snug, erudite Parnassus,
It was a legendary lifestyle of the mind.
But we were seeking something profound, something Georgian…
Rhyme — and subtle nuance, rhythmic shadows.
Where were all the people from the pattern:
The Maenads[6]— swan and wing — Infantas[7]?
For now the road is thornier than thorn,
And no one else is trampled as this soul.
Now I’m an empty mountain church, forlorn,
And the dying sunlight dooms me with a smile.

1920

[1] Theophile Gautier (1811-1872), French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist and literary critic. An influence on the Symbolists, from which Tabidze drew inspiration.

[2] Hotel on the ile de Saint Louis, famous as a gathering-place for poets and artists.

[3] Hippolyte (Paul) Delaroche (1797-1856), French painter

[4] Antoine Brumel (1460-1513), French composer.

[5] poss. Jean de Lauzon (1584-1666), French Governor of New France (Canada), or poss. one of several dukes “du Lauzun” — courtiers and soldiers in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

[6] Female worshipers of Dionysus, Greek god of wine.

[7] Spanish title given to a royal daughter who is not heir to the throne.

First published in Georgia Today

The Poetry of Galaktion: An Angel Held an Endless Scroll

2007-05-11T06:16:00.000-04:00

[The poem’s meaning] is almost completely obscure. In such a case, the only freedom left to the reader is the certainty that his reading is wrong, his task unfinished. The connotations in this poem are much more important than denotations.

—Irakli Kenchoshvili

Here is a poem that, upon initial reading, seems entirely confusing. Images appear that seem to have no relation to the rest of the text. The main speaker, an angel, discusses trees, and the Holy Grail, and Asian skies, without making any obvious connections to them. Curtains suddenly appear, and then disappear “in a whirlpool of fire.”

Are these metaphors? Are they symbols? Are we supposed to understand what the Angel represents, much less the curtains, or the dying roses? These are the kinds of poems that make schoolchildren’s heads ache.

And yet, there is a logic at work. When the reader removes her focus from trying to assemble a story, and instead focuses on the connotations of the words, as Kenchoshvili suggests, we see strong religious/mythical images suffused throughout the poem — the grail, a tower, a scroll, shrines and an angel. And reading over the adjectives — words such as soft, ashen, wan, trembling, cautious — imparts a sense of both frailty, and loss.

This is clearly not a celebration of religion’s strength.

The poem is full of destruction and chaos — leaves are hurled, fire consumes, love has been useless. And the ending line, a triptych of goodbyes (in Georgian, literally “peace”) completes the sense of loss for a melancholy ending. So, maybe the poem isn’t as incoherent as it first appears.

An Angel Held an Endless Scroll

An angel held an endless scroll,
gazing sorrowfully at the world.
I loved you in vain! And so, farewell
luminous night of diamond jewels,
soft lips praying, shrines and glory.
Someday, you shall speak of me!
The Grail’s tower, the Lydian belfry
broke at your feet and I heard your misery.
And the dream of a heaven’s equality
waned as you planned it, its absence of essence—
an ashen cloud and stately cypress tree
which you moved from Asian firmaments.
An angel held an endless scroll.
Its wan sense was the hurling leaves.
I loved you in vain! We both wholly
desired each other. And so, I must leave.
The curtains fell in a whirlpool of fire.
Evening trembled, cautious, fearful.
The night subsided. The roses expired.
Farewell! …Farewell! …Farewell!

..as originally published in Georgia Today

Learn Georgian!

2007-05-03T04:26:00.000-04:00

Even if you can't be in Georgia, these phrases will make you feel like you've been here.

The Poetry of Galaktion in translation: Your Cottage Where the Woods Begin

2007-05-01T00:50:00.000-04:00

I love this poem for its sweet imagery, and for its gentle, happy nature. Though many of Tabidze’s poems are dark dirges, accurately reflecting the time they were written, poems like this show that he was no less talented when it came to subjects of lightness, and joy.

Some believe that only darkness, despair, and anger are worthy subjects for a poem, but look at the subtlety of this work — how the mood Tabidze creates is not one of simplistic ecstasy, or overpowering joy, but a complicated sense of pleasantness tinged with an understanding that the feeling involves a forgetting of one’s troubles — not necessarily their actual disappearance.

It begins in the middle of a pleasant walk — late in the evening, almost dawn — to the edges of the city. Immediately the narrator discovers a place. It reminds him of an incident as resonant as it is strange. The reader is given only a few images to hang onto: sisters, roses, some kind words. Are these potential lovers? Fans of the poet? Friends of a friend? Guests? It’s not clear. Neither is it particularly important — the sweetness of the words and the memory of the flowers become more significant because their setting cannot be located.

“da gavida ivlisi” — and in this fashion July passes. This is how he remembers spending that summer, being complimented by ladies, and laden with flowers. What a life! And yet, in the middle of this incident, there is one word — “shpotiani:” anxious — a reminder, like a distant bell, that all is not sweet words and summer days. Again, what makes Tbilisi anxious cannot be located. But its very presence tinges the rest of the poem’s sweetness with a pinch of salt. It is an acknowledgement that all is not perfect. And ironically, it is this acknowledgement that makes the roses and sweet words that much more poignant, fragile, beautiful.

All of this is tied together with a sweet little song of remembrance. If you read the original over and over, you can even hear the melody…

Your Cottage Where the Woods Begin

And now before my eyes I find
your cottage, where the woods begin,
And this night like a river, winds
into an azure opening.

Sisters proferring with roses
whisper such sweet haunting words:
“You’re such a noble,” one proposes.
“You are a poet,” the next avers.

And in this fashion July passes,
every second, every hour,
City of Tbilisi: anxious
kingdom of the troubadour.

The Poetry of Galaktion Tabidze in Translation: “You’re Going Away”

2007-05-01T00:48:00.000-04:00

This poem, from 1956, is from Galaktion’s “late” or “classical” period. The imagery is simple, the voice is direct, and as the poem progresses, an entire story begins to unfold about the relationship between the speaker, and the addressee.

A great part of Galaktion’s strength lies in his ability to produce evocative, surprising, and intense images and settings out of relatively general descriptions and words. By allowing a word like “torment” in the first line to go unexplained, he gives it both a great amount of weight, and also allows it to hold a multitude of possible meanings, so that the poem may become personal to whomever is reading it.

The risk in a poem like this is a certain flattening out of the images — if descriptions are too general, then they lose all weight. If they do not seem real, they have no real meaning. Galaktion invests his poems with strong music, which invest each word with memorable importance, and so his poems’ images become resonant, even personal — and are allowed to do so, by virtue of the ambiguous imagery

***

You’re going away… and reaping your torment,
like hay from a seaside recently shorn.
Whoever said you’ve lived your last moments?
No: today is the day you were born.

You’re going away… but no one is angry,
either on earth or in paradise.
Whoever said that you were unlucky?
No: today is the day you were blessed.

You’re going away… may your journey be sweet.
Tales of your other dwellings are fiction.
Whoever said that you slept on the street?
No. You are sheltered now: you have protection.

You’re going… and many long for such fortune.
For anywhere else, fortune doesn’t exist.
Now you are finally up in the heavens—
now you reside as Eternity’s guest.

...first published in Georgia Today

Saturday Night at the Ambassador's

2007-04-30T03:02:00.000-04:00

So last Saturday K. and I were invited to the ambassador's house. This past weekend was "New Orleans Days" in Tbilisi, which involved bringing a band from New Orleans, as well as a cook, and hosting a concert and cooking demonstration. So, being that famous Americans were coming to Georgia, the ambassador had a buffet/shindig at his place, and somehow we (because we are Amercians, I assume) were invited.

The ambassador's place is swank! High walls, guards every ten feet, waaaay out in the middle of nowhere (the cabbies both there and back got lost trying to find it)... but it was very fun. Plus, I got to wear my nice jacket. Since I work from home -- in my pajamas more often than not -- it was a good excuse to dress up and get out.

While we were there, our friend M. from the public affairs office handed K. and I tickets to the evening's event -- a performance by Sharon Martin, and her band. We drove back across town, to a theater that almost looked deliberately run-down. Although the stage was intact, it was unvarnished, and the sides of the theater were alternately covered in raw 2x4 scaffolding, or being held up with rebar-reinforced metal. In lieu of theater seats, there were (comfortable) chairs, set up on what looked like makeshift bleachers. Exposed plaster, bare light-bulbs, and ceiling rafters were all visible.

So, in a lot of ways, it was the perfect place for old gospel and jazz staples such as "Nearer My God to Thee," "When the Saints Go Marching In," and "What a Wonderful World."

All in all, a great saturday evening.

Hey Cool!

2007-04-23T11:53:00.000-04:00

A whole bunch of my translations have been published by the National Parlimentary Library of Georgia.

~~there's a few typos at the moment, but I think they'll fix them soon..~~ and they may even add a picture.

American Poet Captures the Melody of Tabidze's Verse

2007-04-23T01:52:00.000-04:00

he he he...

This is pretty cool.

2007-04-17T10:31:00.001-04:00

I'm back again on the Lost Writers.

Tomorrow Has Made A Phone Call To Today

2007-04-15T16:03:00.001-04:00

Official word is in -- Syracuse University has a spot in their program with my name on it. I'll be teaching two classes in the fall, and shoveling nine feet of snow off my car in November. As of Friday, I'd officially given up hope -- seeing as they told me I would hear by April 15th, if I was to be moved off the wait-list. On Sunday morning (my time) I got the email.

Whoo hoo!

Ah, Bano!

2007-04-14T06:09:00.000-04:00

Tbilisi is a warm place. The city's name is a derivation of the Georgian word "tbili" -- which means "warm." It's named after the geothermal sulphur springs which run underneath the old part of the city, making parts of the metro system smell like rotten eggs, and supplying the bath house district ("abano ubani") with its wonderful, warm, rejuvenating water.

The bath houses are this:

a series of underground rooms, presenting themselves as little brick domes to the surface-dwellers, comprising a small block of space about five minutes walking distance from my apartment. Inside each of those domes, there's a marble-and-tile room. The nicer rooms have a hot pool, a pool of cold water, and even a hot-brick sauna. Every friday a group of expats meets to share the 50 lari ($30) per hour room rental fee. Generally we get beer, and chips, and at some point get the "massage" -- wherin a man with what feels like a diamond-tipped loofa and a pillowcase full of soap suds assumes that you actually need to be about two centimeters smaller on all sides, and attempts to scrub you down to proper size. This costs five lari (three dollars).

Now, when I first heard that a bunch of guys get together each week, and get naked and hang out in a hot pool of water, my first thought was "not for me." My second thought was "not for me. ever."

But the more I thought about it, the more I felt like that was unnecessarily prudish, and so I decided, as a challenge, to go for it. Yesterday was my second time.

The feeling of being pampered is amazing. The water is wonderful -- the sulphur softens your skins, and the heat and humidity literally melt away the stress. Then, when the massage comes, all the dirt, and newly softened skin gets systematically scraped away, and you walk out feeling, as so many people put it "like a new-born baby."

It's been a while since I've been a new-born, but my sense is that they are frequently cold, frightened and in some amount of pain -- given the crying and shivering, and blue-redness that seems to accompany their sudden presence in the world. For me, I think post-abano is much more pleasurable than all that.

The Grand Keystone Tradition

2007-04-13T04:57:00.001-04:00

This was too funny not to post. I spend a lot of time making my way around the city in buses -- they are cheap, reliable, and they have huge, glass windows so you can stare out at the street. I fully enjoy watching the passers-by smoke their cigarettes, engage in their fights, walk, mill, etc. etc. It doesn't tell me all that much about Georgians, but it's still fun to people-watch.

But today I saw something unexpected -- two policemen were standing and talking together, when a young man bowled the both of them right over, and kept running. One fell back against a wall, but the other one sprawled out like a first-time ice skater, his hat going cockeyed and everything. The two cops looked at each other, dumbfounded, and then scrambled up and took off after their perp, hands on their guns.

Unfortunately, they ran the opposite direction of the bus, and I didn't see what happened next, though based on scene, I wouldn't be surprised if, after they caught him, they put him in a black and white horizontal striped suit, with a heavy lead ball chained to his leg.

All still wearing his black mask and everything.

The Poetry of Galaktion Tabidze in Translation: From The Fields

2007-04-08T03:44:00.000-04:00

This is one of my favorite poems by Tabidze. Written in 1925, it seems to mark a change from Tabidze’s earlier, more experimental writing, to a simpler, more naturalistic style, which he was to carry into his later poems. Note the vignette-like feel of the poem, this could be a description of a painting, one imagines, from one of the Impressionists, or perhaps the Russian Formalists.

And yet, its’ also deeply musical — the “soulful hymn of farewell” the village virgin is singing could easily be the poem itself. There’s a distance, a remoteness to the poem, with its end-of-day imagery, and its undescribed woman, whose form appears on the horizon. There’s also, you might note, some strongly christian imagery. In the original poem, the last two lines read “ the lambs are driven home by a village madonna / madonna will return to the huts.” — the obvious play on the word “madonna” — to stand for a young woman, and for the Mother of God — is evident. Also note her role as shepherd.

While the poem is, overall, quite straightforward, there is still some evidence of Tabidze’s suprising symbolistic imagery, and the image of the setting sun, like a spider, descending into the web-like branches of distant trees is one of my favorites.

The Fields

Swaying, a slender figure appears
walking alone, sickle in hand,
singing a song, her voice is the pasture
at village’s edge, where an old outpost stands.
The song is a soulful hymn of farewell
sung to a row of cranes facing the sea,
while the sun, like a spider is closing itself
in the delicate criss-crossing thicket of trees.
But what does the soul know of slavery? Nothing!
The rustle and braying of sheep fill the streets:
a young village virgin and flock are returning.
And the Virgin will soon return to the huts.

First published in Georgia Today

My Conference Trip

2007-04-06T07:20:00.000-04:00

I just got finished attending the first international symposium on literature, at the Institute for Georgian Literature. I met a lot of great people, heard some really interesting papers on various aspects of historical and modern Georgian and world literature. All in all, it was pretty cool. Plus, I finally got to wear my corduroy jacket.

Here's some pics from the event. click for titles and descriptions:

I live in Georgia. This is my life.

2007-04-04T11:08:00.000-04:00

So I was taking the bus home this afternoon, and it was packed up like one of those pictures from the '40s of kids in a phone booth. Only this was a bus. And at every stop, more people would just look at the wall of people when the bus doors opened, and sigh, and then shove in. And this was making the bus driver angry, apparently, which made him reckless.

Check that. Georgian bus drivers are reckless when they're calm and carefree. There needs to be a superlative of the word reckless in English, which will be able to describe an incensed Georgian bus driver. It will need to include concepts of blindness, homicidal and suicidal behavior, and will conjure images of a person randomly punching at the air. He kept driving with the doors open, which wouldn't be bad, except that I was at the outside edge of the wall of people -- facing the open air. Did I mention that these new busses have a history of catching fire? So I'm not saying I was in the most dangerous spot.

Anyway, I got to my stop, got off the Goddamn bus, threw my change at the bus driver's head, and went to buy some bread from the bread maker around the way. He works in the basement of this building, and there's a huge, hole in the ground, with clay walls around it, and basically he takes the dough he's rolled out (something like a ton of dough two or three times a day) and then leans waaaaay in on the edge of the clay wall, waaaaay down into the burning hot hole-in-the-ground oven, and slaps the dough on the side of the wall. When the bread is finished baking, he scrapes it off with a long stick, with a hook at the end. It's blistering hot in his basement all the time -- like Hephaestus in Hell hot. And he works something like eighteen hour days, every day of the week. So, I don't blame this man for being generally grumpy. We've developed a rapport -- wherein I gingerly set money down on a nearby table, and he throws bread at me.

But it's amazing, fantastic, warm, delicious bread. So I'm figuring he means well. But today, I came in, and he greeted me with a big smile, and said "welcome" -- in English (I think he's been practicing) and I noticed that right by his hole-in-the-ground oven, there was a little black and white kitten, all curled up and purring. I pointed at it, and he shrugged, and looked grumpy about it. And then he threw two loaves at my head.

And... I love Georgia again.

You’re Thirteen: The Poetry of Galaktion Tabidze in TranslationYou’re Thirteen

2007-03-27T09:15:00.001-04:00

This is one of Tabidze’s earliest poems — it was published in 1919, in his first book, Crâne Aux Fleurs Artistique. Possibly written in 1915 — when Tabidze was only twenty-two — it looks at the infatiuation of a very young girl, from the point of view of a much older man. Little evidence exists to suggest that the poem is autobiographical — in fact, Tabidze rarely wrote directly of his own life, preferring instead to adopt voices and personae, playing with various points of view.

Interestingly, the only detail the poem’s narrator gives concerning his love interest (and the poem’s addressee) is that she’s thirteen. This is used as a launching-point for a meditation on the shame of corruption, the cruelty of ageing, and finally, the beauty that only comes when a thing is fragile and fleeting… quite a lot to pack into twelve lines. Note also the deliberate uncomplicatedness of the original — often only four, or even three words per line, the poem itself becomes what it embodies: fragile, fleeting, simple and beautiful.

You’re Thirteen

You’re thirteen and you’ve ensnared
a graying lover’s evil dreams.
Line up thirteen bullets here:
I’ll take my own life thirteen times.

Another thirteen years go by,
soon you’ll come to twenty-six.
The tallest iris gets the scythe:
time and poem mourn their necks.

How hastily youth slips away—
remorseless wishes of the lion.
And everything glows tenderly
when Autumn sunlight’s pouring in.

First published in Georgia Today

Kari Hkris: The Poetry of Galaktion Tabidze in Translation

2007-03-27T09:12:00.000-04:00

This is possibly the most famous poem of Tabidze’s. The smooth, swooping rhythm, indicative of the wind it describes, make it a popular poem for memorization. Additionally, the yearning, lost-love theme is beautifully symbolized in the image of a blustery day, bad weather obscuring everything from sight.

The poem is, for me, most reminiscent of Robert Frost’s poetry — poems like “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” or “Nothing Gold Can Stay” similarly conflate weather and loss. They also similarly make use of simple-seeming words and imagery to create a poem that lingers with you long after you’ve read it.

Galaktion distinguishes himself by pushing the music to the forefront of his poems. The sonic effects nearly overpower the meaning so that, like any good song, you can sing along almost before you begin to understand the words.

This poem is often taught to foreigners studying Georgian. Its relative simplicity, reliance on repetition — either exact phrases, or words like “how” and “every” that repeat within the line — and the song-like nature combine to make this short, sweet little poem eminently readable.

Sweeping Wind

Sweeping wind, sweeping wind, sweeping wind,
Brushing leaves, rushing up, gusting through…
Rows of trees, whole armies, bow and bend
Where are you, where are you, where are you?
First it rains, then it snows, then it snows.
Where you are, I’ll never know, never know!
Everywhere, haunting me, is your face.
Every day, all the time, every place…
An endless sky sifts its misty musings in
Sweeping wind, sweeping wind, sweeping wind…

Take You A Ridin' on the Train-Train

2007-03-19T09:12:00.000-04:00

So Saturday night last, K. and I left our cold, cold apartment at 9 in the post meridian, and caught the subway to the train station, where a sleeper cabin to Batumi awaited...

The "new" train turned out to be an old Russian thing, leaving us to wonder what the "old" train was. And purchasing first class tickets seemed to mean that we got the entire cabin, which usually sleeps four, to ourselves. Either that, or first class tickets still kind of suck. Basically there were four benches, two attached about midway up the wall. There was a tiny little table, and some rubber curtains which velcroed shut, so that we wouldn't be bothered by the light. We ate some oranges and chocolate that we brought with us, drank a little beer, and tried to sleep to the gentle rocking/swaying, and occasional stopping of the slow train. It was actually quite a nice ride.

Our train pulled into the station around seven in the morning -- far to early for anyone other than street cleaners to be up anywhere in the country. So we got our meager belongings together and set about exploring Batumi.

Batumi is a small city in the far bottom right corner of Georgia -- in the "Autonomous Republic of Adjara" I think back in 2003 and 2004, before the Rose Revolution, and before Saakashvili put the boot to the local warlord/Supreme Comander "Aslan Abashidze," Adjara was far more autonomous and bananna-republican than it is now. Now there are well-dressed polite police, just like everywhere else, and trash cans that most people seem to avoid using, and a brand-new looking amusement park, and more. The city is actually pleasantly not in need of too much repair. Despite the (untrue) assertions of a recent slate.com article which claimed that all the manhole covers had been stolen and sold for scrap -- I'd say that Batumi was one of the most clean, orderly, un-broken places I've been in Georgia.

It was wet. Spring is the rainy season, also the cold season, so K. and I walked around waiting for the hotels and coffee shops to open up, and tried not to get rained on. We walked to the beach, and played a little bit among the rocks. We found the only early-bird cafe in the city, and drank some steaming hot turkish coffee.

We found a great hotel -- called the Montpelier. And this is when K. turned to me and said "you realize that we're starting a trend here. When we got engaged, we celebrated at a little B&B. When we got married, we went to Montpelier (vt) and stayed at a hotel. Now here we are on our first anniversary, and we're at a hotel." So next year we're going to Montpellier, France, and going to a hotel. It's only right.

We then spent most of the rest of the day wandering around. First we went to Gonio -- supposedly a huge, completely intact ancient Roman fortress. It was a little bit out of town, but the minibus took us right to the gate. The castle wall was huge, and stretched a good New York City block to each side. And peering in past the gate, you couldn't even see the back wall. But it was closed.

Then we went back walking along the beach. A big, brand-new ferris wheel, which looked really nice was sitting right on the waterfront. It was a bit windy, but we walked up anyway. I was impressed by how new and safe it looked --most everything in Georgia has at least a hint of danger to it. But it was closed.

Walking on, we found the Aquarium. Apparently during Soviet times, this was a dolphin research center. Statues and pictures of dolphins are all over the city -- there are dolphin statues in different parks, a mural of divers swimming with dolphins -- this place was known all over the USSR for their dolphins. walking in, we saw a beautiful coi pond full of giant goldfish. And we walked up to buy a ticket and go see the much-touted dolphins. You can guess what we discovered. It was closed. A pattern began to emerge.

Luckily, they couldn't close the beach. It's a rock beach -- which was actually nice, since the sand didn't get in our shoes, and it was way too cold to swim. And the waves made a lovely crackling sound as they beat on the shore.

For dinner, we ate at this little English tea shop.. then to celebrate our one year anniversary, we bought a bottle of champagne, and headed back to the cold, cold hotel. Next year can only be more luxurious.

Upon waking, we discovered, to our chagrin, that the 10:00 train home wasn't actually arriving, and we were five minutes late for the 8:25 train -- which normally wouldn't be a problem in Georgia. That would still give us time to eat breakfast and have a leisurely walk to the station. But apparently trains are on schedule here, so we missed it.

No problem, there's marshrutkas (mini busses) that leave every hour. We ate, paid up, and went to catch the bus. And proceeded to have the most harrowing drive of our entire lives. While Batumi is a rainy sub-tropical haven on the Black sea, with palm trees everywhere, and Tbilisi has had the driest, warmest winter in years (in the five months we've been here, less than a week of rainy days) the between parts of Georgia, are apparently a giant snowy mess. Add to that our driver who was working his way through a pack of cigarettes (and a box of matches) as well as engaging in a series of increasingly red-faced phone calls concerning a young ten-year-old boy in his care in the front seat (who kept stealing his cigarettes) and the only thing more engaging than the drama in the front seat of the bus, was the drama out the windshield, as we drifted around the road like a sailboat. I kept wishing our driver would use more than (or at least) one hand to drive, especially given all the freezing sleet that was pelting the road, the windshield, and us, every time he rolled down the window to smoke another cigarette.

This is the danger I'm talking about. I finally had to go to sleep.
And then we were home. Hooray!

Train Car

2007-03-17T12:29:00.000-04:00

I just saw Orion out on the back porch. It's one of my favorite constellations, probably because it's one of the only ones I can recognize. Still.. I have many fond memories of wandering around way, way late at night, and seeing it in both HS and college. Thinking about stars, and light and distance, and wondering what's out there and up there, and thinking about how long it took all that light from all those very, very far-off places to come, at the same moment, to my eyes, and remind me of a box with a little line in it. hm.

Tonight, in about an hour and a half, K and I are taking a train to Batumi for our one year anniversary. It's in the far western/southern part of Georgia, a little port city on the Black Sea. We'll be sleeping in our fancy little train car, and arriving tomorrow, to what all the internets and weather sites tell us will be a rainy, cold, sleepy little town with not much in it except a beach, some coffee, and a little natural park. Sounds just perfect, actually.

As buying things that are not drinking horns or wildly fuzzy hats seems to continue to present problems here, K is not getting her anniversary present until April 2nd -- when she returns to the U.S. for a couple weeks to check out Grad schools and compete for a big-time fellowship at NYU. This is okay. I think she will like her present well enough, despite its tardiness.

I will tell you about Batumi when we get back. Karen will have to tell you about the present.

And Edgar Was Third

2007-03-17T09:16:00.000-04:00

This poem is an homage to Edgar Allen Poe. One of Tabidze’s earliest Western influences outside the Symbolist poets, Poe shared the Symbolists love of and focus on the musicality of poetry — alliteration, meter, complicated rhyming, etc. Galaktion shared Poe’s grim disposition, even from a young age, and themes of impossible love, loneliness, sadness and desolation are prevalent throughout his work.

Here Tabidze refers to Poe’s muse, Lenore, (as well as to Poe himself) creating an appropriately dark, vaguely religious and lovelorn setting for “the stroll). The poem was published in 1915, during the beginning of Tabidze’s career, before the Communist revolution, during a period of relative literary freedom.

Some notable themes, which Tabidze was to continue exploring throughout his life, include the melancholic, romantic individual as well as elements of mystery, and the use of certain symbols (wind, bells, temples) which are given weight because of their roles as multifaceted (thus indefinable) symbols.

As you read the poem (especially in Georgian) read it out loud; listen to how artfully the poem moves, how the sounds flow together. This is where Galaktion’s genius lies.

And Edgar Was Third

We two toward the temple bore,
sunlight fading. Prayers. Tolling.
On our eerie way, Lenore,
the wind was snapping branches, howling.
These wings were pining for a bold
dispassion toward your isolation.
But suddenly there was a third
between us, quelling conversation.
And a hollow voice intoned:
The final hour’s drawing near.
In the crying, dying wind,
we three toward the temple bore.

(The Window Tangled)

2007-03-17T08:58:00.000-04:00

This is an untitled poem by the poet Galaktion Tabidze (1891-1951). Galaktion was widely considered during his time (and after) to be one of the greatest poets in Georgia — and for good reason. The breadth and depth of his body of work is impressive — he wrote about a variety of subjects, in a variety of forms, and blended an easy accessibility with a complex symbolism, allowing for multiple levels of interpretion in even his most accessible poems. In this way he is not unlike the American poet Robert Frost.

According to the scholar Irakli Kenchoshvili (irakli kenWoSvili) this poem was first published, undated, in 1940. It was republished in 1957, backdated to 1915 — before the Communist Revolution — thus making the darker subject matter “appropriate” for the Communist censors. According to Professor Kenchoshvili’s speculations, the poem was written after Tabidze’s wife was arrested and shot, during the terrors of the “Great Purge.”

During this time, obviously, Tabidze couldn’t write directly about his loss. However, the obscured imagery and deft blurring of focus on background imagery (curtains, a candle), combined with the chaotic imagery of storm, thunder, and avalanche serve to create a sense of powerlessness, an inability to even see rightly in the face of uncontrollably destructive forces. It is this powerlessness that ironically gives the poem its force, and it is the hammering last line — the inconceivable loss, repeated over and over that makes the poem so moving.

* *
*

The window tangled
night and curtain,
a candle flickered
there, uncertain,
when your image
in the night,
left home
and did not return.

Your graceful, ardent,
bitter tears;
the glowing genius
of your stares—
so glorious and dismal;
Your tempest of ideas,
left home
and did not return.

Your brilliant eyes
which, when heightening,
expelled the darkness
with such brightening
it was like a
flash of lightning—
left home
and did not return.

And when the light
went out, I felt it:
an avalanche
of mourning melted
my life was wrenched
from where I held it —
it left home
and did not return.

First published in Georgia Today

Yum

2007-03-10T06:37:00.000-05:00

This is for all you squeamish readers out there.

I like to go out to the food markets, where the Georgians shop. Incredibly tasty vegetables, interesting sauces, spit-strewn concrete floors... but I haven't been able to bring myself to buy meat there. As interesting as it would be to get a piglet corpse, or a freshly-plucked, ungutted chicken, I can't bring myself to make the purchase yet. I'm scared. I'll admit it. Thousands of people buy their meat there every day, and mass contamination is not hitting the city, but I'm scared.

So, when I decided today that I wanted some ground beef for spaghetti sauce, I made for the brand-new, bright and shiny european super-duper market, replete with gleaming linoleum, sneeze guards, bright fluorescent lights, and styrofoam prepackaged goodies.

But some things only change so much. So when I went to the meat section and asked for a half kilo of ground beef, the kindly kid behind the counter grabbed a plastic grocery bag, scooped a couple handfuls of meat into it, and held it out to me over the counter.

We'll be cooking that thoroughly.

Avante Garde

2007-03-09T14:24:00.000-05:00

Went to the theater tonight -- Hamlet. K and I even rejected the English-language live-translation headphones in favor of watching the play in Georgian (Hey, we already know the story, and some friday-night language study is a useful thing)..

It turns out that Georgian theater is awesome. Who knew? The play was directed by Robert Sturua -- a world-reknowned Shakespeare director. The play was wild-- very, very strange. Lots of technicolor coats and fedora hats. And Claudius looked just like Mikheil Saakashvili, the current president of Georgia. That's ballsy.

But this was a performance that -- I kid you not -- would have been right at home on any Broadway theater, whether in Georgian or English. The acting, the set design, the costumes, and the directing were all first rate. And this was one of the most inventive takes on Hamlet I've ever seen. First off, he was bat-shit crazy the whole time. There was no "I'm pretending wink wink" ... he was just insane. And Claudius was so vivid -- intense, wild. He seemed like he could murder someone pretty easily. And Gertrude was a slut. She just did this lurid come-on to whomever was nearest whenever she felt bad. The actors climbed all over each other. It was really a fantastic play. I wish Sturua had made it into a movie. That's how good it was.

I got drunk on national television

2007-03-06T01:06:00.000-05:00

..and wrote about it in Lost Writers.

I also went to the turkish baths -- a luxurious experience, which I'll write about soon. Right now I'm putting together a paper for a literature conference here (what? I know!) so that's taking up a lot of my time.

Toot Toot

2007-03-02T08:43:00.000-05:00

http://georgiatoday.ge/article_details.php?id=2448

The first of what will hopefully be many...

New Lost Writers

2007-02-22T00:29:00.000-05:00

My article at Lost Writers is up.

... I'd repost them here, but I don't know if I can do that... I figure its better if you go to the site..

New Article at Lost Writers

2007-02-06T02:37:00.000-05:00

Sorry I'm not writing so much here.. I'll try to post in the next few days. Meanwhile.. here is a new post at lost writers

A good article

2007-02-02T04:05:00.000-05:00

There's another good article (by someone very familiar) here, at a site that seems to be increasingly about a small city in the central Caucasus.

It's fantastic, and very, very accurate.

So Goes January

2007-01-27T04:03:00.000-05:00

Hello my nestlings. The poetry translation is going -- I'm feeling a bit behind schedule at the moment (about 17 poems translated, want to have 25 by the end of February). This isn't bad, but I don't like feeling rushed.

We've been exploring the city more, during this freak warm-spell that Tbilisi's been having. As those of you in OH, VT and CT have been dealing with temps in the teens (or the pre-teens, in VT's case), we've had warm days up nearing the sixties. It's eerie. But we've taken advantage by touring through old turkish sections of the city, finding old out-of-the way bookstores and yarn shops, and a place that actually sells mops (!) and visiting the giant new church that stands out on the skyline. It's big. It smells like frankincense. Lovely.

Otherwise, I've been writing for Lost Writers, which, with their every-other-tuesday schedule, has been a nice change of pace. So far, I've got two articles up, one linked below, and one here. I like the formality of the writing, and also the idea of writing for a different audience.

Plus, my friend Holly writes awesome articles for them.

I'm a lost writer

2007-01-09T14:15:00.000-05:00

I've got an article up at Lost Writers. I'll be writing for them every other tuesday, I think.

Livin' in the Ci-tay

2007-01-06T02:37:00.000-05:00

Well, we're out in Sighnaghi for a while. We put off going b/c K. was applying to grad schools, and needed the reliable internet and heat/light that Tbilisi provides.

And good thing we did it like that: we arrived to frozen pipes and cold, cold cold. The pipes are frozen mostly because of the Miracle of Georgian Engineering, which basically involves tiny, tiny little pipes, and, for no apparent reason, periodically running them up, out of the ground, and across the yard, then back into the ground a little later on. I'm not sure why. In the spring, when the ground thaws, we'll have to have someone attach larger pipes (which won't freeze so easily), and actually bury them.

An unusually warm day yesterday thawed the pipes (oh, happy day!) so we took hot showers and K. started some laundry. We've got enough wood to last a little while, but this is definitely tougher living out here. Still.. fun and very worth it. The past few days have given us the clearest skies, and the crispest views of the lower caucasus range -- all dusted on top with snow -- that I've ever seen. I like mountains and all, but this is literally, literally breath-taking. I can't stop gasping whenever I see them. Wook up this morning, and everything was covered in snow. Maybe we'll lose water again, or maybe the snow will act as an insulation (around the insulation that we already packed over the pipes in late fall. Or maybe that's just a pipe-dream.

Stay warm, everyone.

I now know enough georgian to be dangerous.

2006-12-29T06:51:00.000-05:00

Case in point: I was out buying groceries today, and decided to pick up some yogurt. You can buy the store-brand variety, with fancy labels and such, or you can purchase home-made yogurt, which is better and cheaper, and comes in glass jars which you have to return. There's a small shop around the way with delicious homemade yogurt, where I've bought a couple jars, but of course, the kind woman there speaks no English, and so I am usually spoken to slowly and patiently, (and loudly) which I actually appreciate.

So I came in today, and she said something to the effect of "You still owe me two empty jars from when you last bought yogurt." Which wasn't true -- I'd returned the cups, but it was when someone else was working there. So I said "No, I am coming cup two week ago!" Then I pointed to the jar, and pointed over my shoulder -- which, thinking about it now, could have indicated either the past, the front door, or the woman behind me.
An awkward pause, and the owner said something too fast for me to catch. So I said: "yes!" And she said "Ah! Okay then! Would you like anything else?"

So either everything is all right, or she's going to be put out when I only return one jar next week. I should study the past and future forms of "to give" before going next time.

Punks and Little Bastards

2006-12-21T07:11:00.000-05:00

Outside the house right now there are periodic pops and cracks, that sound like gunshots -- m80s or cherry bombs of some kind that a little gang of punks has been blowing off pretty much since we got here. Sometimes they blow up cans, sometimes they throw them into the air. They are loud in our little narrow street. In fact, one just blew off and set off a car alarm, which is currently getting all hysterical.

Little kids, and even men here can be remarkably bold punks. I'm kind of amazed. Walking by a crowd of the little bastards is always a tossup -- are they going to say "hello" in English? or taunt you in Georgian?

This afternoon I was at the grocery store, and a couple kids, maybe fourteen or fifteen tried to cut in line ahead of me. Lines in Georgia are nebulous things, as most people tend to just crowd around the escalator or booth or doorway. Still, this was one of the rare instances where there was a legitimate line. Not only did they cut in, but then they started mocking me... since I'm obviously a foreigner. ARGH. so I yelled at them in my limited Georgian, which caused more mocking. "Hey, boy! I'm standing here?" "What, I didn't hear you?" "I said, I'm standing here!" "Georgian, georgian georgian, laughing, laughing, Georgian." I stood my ground and stared them down... and they eventually went over to another line, which was shorter, and paid for their stuff and left. At which point the people on either side of me to start bemoaning "where are their families" and "it's the school's faults" and such -- at least as much as I could catch. When I left the store, they were hanging around outside. Before they could say much of anything, I took off.

And when I came home and told K. about it, we went out onto our porch to drink some tea and relax and enjoy the weirdly good weather -- and watched a man with a gas can and some hose wander down the street casually checking cars for unlocked gas tanks.

But what bothered me most is that he was doing it while smoking a cigarette.

A Little Mood Music, Please

2006-12-17T13:36:00.000-05:00

(click to make it big)

The view from our back porch -- all lit up at night, and now finally properly photographed. I like the crazy old, falling-apart stairs and apartments obviously built on top of each other in the foreground, contrasted with the ridiculously overbuilt "hey we're not falling apart" ode-to-electricity sitting up on the hill for all to see.

2006-12-06T13:23:00.000-05:00

Being in a foreign country is a lot like becoming a child again, only you get to do it right this time. At first, you feel embarassingly helpless -- unable to talk, you wildly gesticulate whenever you need anything badly enough (to eat, to pee). Everything is curious and interesting -- you find yourself staring, wide-eyed around you, in curious wonder.

As you begin to learn a few words -- "I want" "I like" "please" "yes" etc. -- some things settle into place. People beam brightly and (at least here) congratulate you whenever you use your few words. A lot of things are still scary, but you have a limited amount of comfort, and from there, can make a few, tenative forays into the unknown. It's like (to make a metaphor for the metaphor) climbing under the covers in a cold room in the winter -- after the small space where you are is warm, you start stretching your feet out to the cold spots, making more and more of the bed comfortable.

Maybe you find yourself eating one particular food -- that you know you like -- all the time. You eat it and you eat it. But then, hopefully, you try something new. And you keep trying things, until you have a small range of things that you know you like to eat, here in this strange place. And you learn the names of these things, so you can ask for them.

Soon, you begin wondering "why?" It's a question that is on your mind constantly. Why are there so many street kids? Why do the women wear these crazy boots? Why is that house falling apart, while that house is brand new? Why do Georgians drive so crazily? Why? Why? Why?

This is the stage that we're at now. I still speak poorly enough that I'm complimented incessantly every time I open my mouth. But I've learned enough to be, like a five year old, pretty constant with my questions. Only I'm old enough to keep them to myself. Or to just write them on my blog. Which is awesome.

Plus, I can eat snacks whenever I want. Second childhoods are awesome.

The Economics of Freshness

2006-12-04T15:53:00.000-05:00

So. At yet another supra. I'm sure this will become something of a recurring theme -- in fact, it already has. I'm slowly mastering the art of being able to drink toasts for seven hours and remain sober. I'm not exaggerating about either of those things. We started our supra at five p.m. this evening, and it's now a quarter till one. And the trick is to only wet your lips three out of every four toasts. There will come the toast where you're expected to drink from the drinking horn. The horn is big, and you can't set it down without drinking the whole thing. But this comes early in the evening, and if you only wet your lips for the next five toasts, you will be fine.

Okay. Enough of that.

One thing I noticed, this evening, is that the fresh food tastes great. My father always used to say (he still does, actually) that if you don't like X (here, X might be spinach, or green beans, or apples, or anything else that's food, really) it's because you haven't had really fresh X. And if you had, you wouldn't dislike it. I'm still not convinced this is true about beets. But about 3/4 of the way through the supra (totally stone-cold sober) someone cut up an apple and handed me a slice. These are your traditional, red-hued apples. They look like anything you'd buy at a grocery store. Except this one was delicious. And not just by name. It tasted like you'd think an apple should taste.

And this isn't just with apples. Tomatoes, potatoes, cucumbers, lettuce -- they all taste far, far more incredible here. I'm not making this up. Mostly it has to do with the fact that nothing is shipped from California. It's all locally grown, and locally sold. This is also part of what makes the peasant wine so fantastic. It's also what makes it nearly impossible to export. The bottled wine that they make here is good, don't get me wrong. But the peasant wine is out of this world good. I've had glasses of wine that tasted like fireworks. But it's also highly inconsistent -- and impossible to mass-produce at the same level of quality. Just like tomatoes. So, when we go to a supra, and someone has gone out and picked the best of the lot from a local farmer, what we get are amazing, amazing tomatoes. Same with wine. But the downside is that you can't ever get them at a grocery store.

Ah well. You will all just have to come visit. *sigh*. The things we have to do in life. Well, let me know when you're coming, we'll make sure there are fresh sheets on the guest beds.

I have Shame of the Faces

2006-12-03T15:42:00.000-05:00

So, I'm on the phone with my mom and she says "Your blog is really good. How come you never responded to your uncle's posts?"

...my what? It turns out you all have been commenting and commenting, and here I had the little thing that sends me an email when I get a comment turned off. I never really read the site, aside from checking to see that the post got up, and never noticed that lots of people have been posting comments. Ach.

Deepest, deepest apologies. I'm going to comb through the archives and post/email responses to questions and such now. Oh...sorry.

In the meantime: tomorrow we go back to Sighnaghi for a birthday party! I'm sure more adventures will ensue.

History and Such

2006-12-01T13:30:00.000-05:00

So today Karen and I decided, after language lessons, to go to the museum. The museum is a huge, imposing looking building (set among a number of huge, imposing looking buildings) on Rustaveli Ave, the main drag in Tbilisi.

We walked up the huge steps, and went to buy tickets to get in. The woman behind the glass, who seemed to be doing something unrelated to selling tickets, impatiently waved us off. So we stood, for a few minutes, looking confused, and deciding what to do, when another person, who also seemed to be coming to the museum for a visit, stopped, and asked us what we were doing. I mentioned that the museum appeared to be closed -- figuring he didn't know either. He looked at the woman behind the glass, and then opened the gianormous front door, and ushered us inside.

Whereupon he proceeded to take us downstairs, past several guards, and through what looked to be firmly closed doors, to one of the most amazing exhibits of ancient gold jewelry I've ever seen. And then he gave us an hour long guided tour. In Georgian and French. I understood enough to be amazed. A piece like this is fairly tame, detail-wise. All of the jewelry dated from between the 7th and the 2nd century before christ and included necklaces with thirty or forty detailed little bird (or corn, or ram) charms, intricately detailed, and about the size of your five-year-old cousin's pinky nail. There were delicate little earrings made from gold leaf, and details so fine that they had to be viewed with magnifying glasses. Keep in mind that this was done when Northern Europe was still figuring out Bronze.

Our guide kept ushering us around to different exhibits, explaining the blending of pagan and christian ritual, the small details of necklace, or bracelet, or wine goblet that showed sun worship, or wine worship. He re-explained the history of Jason and the golden fleece. (You see, Jason went to Colchis, which was Western Georgia, to get the golden fleece, and in the ancient times the Colchisians would gather gold from the rivers by sifting water through sheep pelts, so there's some historical accuracy to the myth). He pointed out the odd presence of swastikas on jewels and rings. And then, just like that, he took a phone call on his cell and ran off. I still have no idea who he was -- maybe a curator. Maybe the janitor.

What stood out to me was not only how beautiful it was, but how wearable it all was. There were belt buckles, and rings that I would be proud to have. Most museum stuff to me either looks half-rusted and destroyed, or so godawfully opulent that I'd be embarassed to actually see it on anyone. But this was... elegant. Beautiful. Simple. Intricate, but not too much. It was neat.

I wish I could find more pictures to link to, but if you want, you can download a powerpoint presentation, which has fuzzy pictures of some of the really beautiful pieces.

Haircut Pictures

2006-11-29T00:37:00.000-05:00

Okay, so here's before:

and here's after:

Sigh. Well.. at least it's short now.

It just needs a little time

2006-11-28T06:57:00.000-05:00

so. I got my hair cut. uch.

Right around the corner from our house, there's a little collection of salons (or sometimes, if it's written in English, "saloons") that cater to both men and women. I picked one and, armed with my two phrases ("I want a hair cut" and "how much?") steeled my resolve, and entered the shop.

I was immediately welcomed, my coat was taken, I was spoken to almost entirely in Russian, despite saying several times that I only speak Georgian and English. ("you only speak Georgian?" "Yes, Georgian and English. And French." "And French? Oh, dearie. Russian Russian Russian.")

Then, using a complicated series of gestures and simple words ("big, little. no. yes. okay.") I explained what I wanted -- short on the sides, a little longer on top. Then I took off my glasses, offered a short prayer, and closed my eyes.

Now, for many of you, you might be able to say something if you see the barber beginning to go awry. But, with my glasses off I'm nearly blind. When I look in the big mirror in front of me, I see a large, bib-colored splotch with a smaller head-colored splotch on top of it, with a large multi-colored splotch moving around the whole thing, and scissor noises.

So haircuts are a matter of trust, even when everyone speaks English. Still. she did a good job. I'll put up a picture soon.

Bigger Things

2006-11-26T06:14:00.000-05:00

Last Thursday night was Thanksgiving. On Wednesday we packed up a few things and left Tbilisi for Sighnaghi. Back in the States, after K. and I discovered that we were going to be living here, P -- K.'s mom, decided to extend her stay a couple extra weeks, and celebrate Thanksgiving with us.

About two weeks ago, our painter-friend J., who also lives in Sighnaghi discovered that the day was going to be considerably bigger for him. After the Russian ban on Georgian Wine (which is primarily from this area), there's been a big push to find new markets. The Georgian gov't had put together a press tour for a handful of freelancers and journalists from big-time european and american media (bbc, washington post) and was bringing them through the region. On Thursday, they wanted to have a big supra, and wanted J. to host it. All the food and wine would be brought in -- J. just needed to provide atmosphere, and Tamada duties. So we were invited, by J., as guests. Whoo!

This would be much more exciting than a traditional thanksgiving dinner, plus it would have all the same trappings -- too much food, lots of conversation, family (not all of them, unfortunately), and news. Although, instead of just having people talk about current events, we got to have journalists.

I haven't seen the articles -- I'll link to them if I see them. But the day was...surreal.

Although everything was supposed to start at 10:30 sharp and end by 1:00 pm (the junket was on a tight schedule) they didn't actually arrive until a quarter to noon (nothing is on a tight schedule in Georgia) and didn't leave until three or four o'clock. The supra was going to be held in J.'s basement -- a huge, stone room with a fireplace that had been roaring for two days straight to get it warm enough, and a long table that filled the whole room. An outer room, with stairs that led up to the street, was outfitted with a traditional trough for a grape-pressing demonstration. The press arrived, and a couple people jumped into the grapes and started pressing, with a couple journalists eventually joining them. As this was clearly a photo-op, lots of pictures were taken. Then the press drank some "professional" wine -- bottled by a local company. Afterwards, we retired to the room with the big table for the meal, accompanied by copious amounts of "peasant" (traditionally made) wine.

It started off fun enough. By now, I'm used to the traditional fare at Georgian supras. There's always fresh tomatoes and onions, shish-kebab, hot cheese-bread, these little pickled greens, which I love, called jonjoli, and strips of fried chinese eggplant rolled up with a walnut sauce and pomegranate pips. This stuff is so good, I could eat it for hours. In fact, I have.

And the company was nice. I enjoyed talking with the lone american (wash. post) and a couple of the brits (bbc, guardian) and made encouraging gestures at the spanish/italian/german press that was present. One guy from the bbc got drunk and made kind of a fool of himself, in a very endearing way. The rest of the reporters, who had not yet filed their stories, stayed sober, as they were working. But our host got drunk in a less pleasant way. And, after the journalists left, when the local and regional governmental officials returned, we had another supra, this time with a much more visibly sloppy host. But then, they made their excuses, and left.

and there was another supra, with just a small amount of friends. And a very, very sloppy host. Who stumbled and fell. Who kept drinking. Even after we left.

To be honest, this was the first time I'd seen this kind of behavior from anyone here. Georgians drink a lot -- but you rarely see a Georgian, even in the city, so publicly drunk that he's unable to walk or stand. Typically, people get expansively drunk, celebrating life, and friends. You never see anyone drinking alone.

It was a big day. Sighnaghi -- a tiny little town of maybe 8,000 people on a hill, with a great view, is getting a reputation as one of the cultural centers of Georgia. Millions of dollars are now going to be pouring into the city for renovations, and soon it will be restored and rebuilt, and made ready for tourists interested in woodcarving, and winemaking, and rugweaving, as well as painting, dance, music, and (hopefully) poetry. A lot of this has to do with P. and with J. and their work. It's heady getting to see all this. But it was also kind of a weird day. I don't know if J. is under more stress than usual, or if this is a side of him I just haven't seen before. But I found it oddly incongruous amidst all the positive signs.

Or maybe it was just more of Thanksgiving, shining through.