Perfection!

Opposition of lines: Red and Yellow
by Piet Mondrian



What work of art or artist turns you on? I was recently at the Dallas Museum Art (come on, don't be jealous) and I literally had to run by a Mondrian much like this one because L was running in one direction and K in the other. I was there because my in laws were in town and I was keeping the kids busy while they looked around. In the end it wasn't a great idea. You can't imagine how uptight those guards get when little children are bouncing around priceless pieces of art! The kids and I ended up spending most of our time in the lobby or the gift shop.

Anyway, I was so sad when I had to speed by the Mondrian and not even properly look at it. I always thought people like Mondrian were kind of laughable when I was a kid. Who can't paint squares and lines? Couldn't a kid do that? But now I realize Mondrian was a visionary who changed our entire aesthetic. The lines, color and composition of his paintings reflect the best in the modern aesthetic. They're literally perfect.

On Gay Wallpaper

by William Carlos Williams

The green-blue ground
is ruled silver lines
to say the sun is shining

And on this moral sea
of grass or dreams lie flowers
or baskets of desires

Heaven knows what they are
between cerulean shapes
leave regularly round

Mat roses and tridentate*
leaves of gold
threes, threes and threes

Three roses and three stems
the basket floating
standing in the horns of blue

Repeating to the ceiling
to the windows
where the day

Blows in
the scalloped curtains to
the sound of rain

*three-pronged

On Gay Wall-paper

Ugh

Good evening Off Hesperusians,

I am spent. Physically, emotionally, mentally. I feel like I haven't read a poem in five years. In fact, I feel like I haven't read anything in five years. I am so tired and decrepit that it's difficult to even type this measly little post because my nails are way too long and wild. That's right, folks. My children are transforming me into Howard Hughes. Or at least a very tired Howard Hughes. I started this blog, in part, to have a safe, warm intellectual nook of my own. Something that was just mine, apart from the demanding and sometimes gruelings days as a mother to my two young children. But I am afraid folks that these adorable children have finally stood on top of my lifeless body and declared victory.

Okay, I'm being dramatic. But it has been a particularly hard week. It has been filled with unholy things. Fluids and infections, runny tummies (for everyone!), endless whining, crying and an odd outbreak of fruit flies.

So I write to you to say I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I am so damn lame. I'm not even going to pretend that I've read or written anything edifying lately. I would though appreciate your thoughts on the whole Juan Williams debacle. The more I thought about it, I never did understand his arrangement with Fox and NPR. It did always seems odd to me. But I liked him as a commentator. I heard an NPR story on the whole matter and they made him sound like a very occasional guest commentator, but he was much more than that. He was an NPR all star, no?

The whole thing is really odd. It sounds like it was a conflict that was waiting to happen, what with his dual roles in very different news organizations. But I personally wasn't that offended by what he said. It sounded like he was expressing a personal feeling but wasn't purposely trying to be incendiary like a Bill O'Reilly on the View. And it is confusing. He isn't a straight reporter, he is an analyst and a commentator mostly. Can you never insert yourself if you're constantly giving your take on things?

Thoughts?

Photo of the day

Nikki S. Lee is an intriguing Korean-American photographer who has this series of photographs where she inserts herself into different subcultures and poses as one-of-the-gang. The photo above is called the Hispanic Project. Others include the Yuppie Project, the Lesbian project, the Hip-Hop project. They're really vibrant, dynamic photographs.

Geoff Dyer--Who is this guy???

Is anyone a fan of author Geoff Dyer. This guy absolutely intrigues me. I started reading him because of his book on photography called The Ongoing Moment. It's hilarious because he's not an expert on photography, he even admits in the book that he doesn't own a camera, but the book is insightful, expansive...I really learned a lot.

But then the guy is also a novelist. I recently saw a book he had written called Paris Trance. There was a naked lady on the cover so I was a little too embarrassed to buy it. I'm a prude, what can I say?

I just don't know how to peg this guy. He's an essayist, novelist, and goodness knows what else. Does he have a cookbook out as well? He's also written a sort meditative post-modern self-help book called Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It (isn't that the greatest title?). What an enigma!

Anyway, is this guy well-known? Is he really as brilliant as he seems or is he just all over the place? Paris Trance intrigued me but I was afraid it was going to be too similar to Henry Miller. It's a "Lost Generation" novel about ex-pats in Paris. It could be good or it could be really really bad. I don't know. Every time I read jacket copy that talks about a book being erotic or sensual, I just think it's going to degrade the female characters. My most recent attempts at both Philip Roth and John Updike left me feeling grossed out and alienated from their characters. Because it's always from the male character's perspective, the women just come across as objects the male characters vent all of their frustrations and anxieties on. What's usually described as "erotic" comes across as crude and in humane.

What I'm reading

Just finished a fine coming-of-age novel called Jim the Boy by Tony Earley. I have never heard of this writer but I was browsing in the bookstore, the cover caught my eye and I felt in the mood for a well-written but not too serious novel. And that's exactly what I got. I really respect writers who write what they know. And I think Earley is that kind of writer. His characters and setting ring true and I trust that he can recreate this world that is so foreign to me.

Although, in some ways the idyll of a small farming town in the south isn't that foreign. It's reminiscent of other great American writers like Faulkner or Harper Lee or Willa Cather. Although it's foreign to me personally, I'm familiar with the place in my imagination. Just as I feel familiar with the mid-century world of prep schools from books like Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace and Lord of the Flies.

Earley has written a sequel to Jim the Boy called The Blue Star. I hope to start reading it today. It's been a long time since I read a novel I really enjoyed and didn't feel like work but also felt satisfying.

What are y'all reading?

Thug: ok or not?

A friend runs the SF Examiner crime blog but I had to call out the use of "thug" in this story about an arrest on the Muni platform:

If it “walks like a duck with a gun, talks like a duck with a gun, it’s a duck with a gun,” police said.

Bayview cops couldn’t avoid getting into a shootout Saturday. Two officers exchanged gunfire with thugs by a public housing development, though no one was hit, police said.

He said that the use of thug is to meant to denote "would-be criminals" but I think it's too presumptuous. On language: what do we really mean by "thugs"?

Apologies that this is not poetry-related.

Zone

Thougths on "Zone" ? I found some quotes from this poem in a book I'm reading and thought them quite striking. Although it's fascinating that the language is different in Poetry Foundation's version because of variations in translation. I liked the lines in the book I'm reading better.


Comment: More to come. The end of August was funky for me. I had a surprise appendectomy which set me back a few weeks. We were also visiting my family in CO for a few weeks. Hope you all are well!

Photo of the day

January 8

by David Lehman

The wind does whistle but it also hums
if you say it does, because you have
that power: language makes it possible,
and you have the choice: you can revile
the slogans and shibboleths of groupthink
or you can watch TV commercials as if
they were aesthetic products to be
appreciated and analyzed: not much
of a choice, is it: let's go beyond
"either/or" and see if we can't just ignore
what offends our nostrils, and makes
something out of our minds, out of our
minds in both senses: let's see
what happens when the imagination as
conceived by Wallace Stevens marries
the language as conceived by millions daily

From The Evening Sun, 2002.

Image of the Day

photograph by Garry Winogrand, 1963.

Correction: Casey doesn't know what ephemeral means

I don't know what ephemeral means. I improperly used that lovely word in my last post. I meant religious ideas that are theoretical and unprovable.

Thought of the day

"There is no God higher than the truth."--Mahatma Ghandi

Comment: I agree with this statement, but it also brings up a lot of big questions. First and foremost, what is the truth? Does any one person know the truth? Can we, in our lifetimes, claim to finally know the truth? Ideas and concepts that are ephemeral and ethereal like the presence of God, the beginning of the universe, the existence of Grace, the immortal soul, Heaven and Hell...I can not prove that these concepts are true, but I also can not prove that they are false. Are these things that we can not prove the whole basis for "faith"? But does that diminish our faith in things that are real, that are hard-earned and proven.

I guess, for me, the only truths I know are my values. And I think that that's what Ghandi means when he says the truth. No God is greater than your values. You should not go against your values in the name of religion. Religion should uphold and bolster the values most dear to your heart. The ones that you know in your gut. If this is what Ghandi means then I could not agree with him more.

But then again I was not brought up in a creedal religion. Perhaps if I had been raised within a religion I would feel differently. Does anyone else have a different perspective? Your thoughts, as always, are welcome.

Thought of the day

His Holiness said his experience was that the American people in general tend to react quickly to developments, being very joyous when something good happened or feeling depressed when something bad took place. He suggested that they needed to take time to think over the development.

— The Dalai Lama’s Web site, reporting on his visit to New York last week

Comment: I read this great quote in John Kenney's hilarious Op-Ed in the NY Times. I'm just so sick of this endless cycle of conflict and bickering. If you listen, read or watch the news we do come across as a nation's of chickens without heads. Squawk! Squawk! Squawk! All over the place. We never stop and think. We just judge and then judge some more. There needs to be more gestation and less pontificating. Can't we come together on the important matters and stop tearing each other apart?

Waterwings

by Cathy Song

The mornings are his,

blue and white

like the tablecloth at breakfast.

He’s happy in the house,

a sweep of the spoon

brings the birds under his chair.

He sings and the dishes disappear.

Or holding a crayon like a candle,

he draws a circle.

It is his hundredth dragonfly.

Calling for more paper,

this one is red-winged

and like the others,

he wills it to fly, simply

by the unformed curve of his signature.

Waterwings he calls them,

the floats I strap to his arms.

I wear an apron of concern,

sweep the morning of birds.

To the water he returns,

plunging where it’s cold,

moving and squealing into sunlight.

The water from here seems flecked with gold.

I watch the circles

his small body makes

fan and ripple,

disperse like an echo

into the sum of water, light and air.

His imprint on the water

has but a brief lifespan,

the flicker of a dragonfly’s delicate wing.

This is sadness, I tell myself,

the morning he chooses to leave his wings behind,

because he will not remember

that he and beauty were aligned,

skimming across the water, nearly airborne,

on his first solo flight.

I’ll write “how he could not

contain his delight.”

At the other end,

in another time frame,

he waits for me—

having already outdistanced this body,

the one that slipped from me like a fish,

floating, free of itself.

Comment: Happy Mother's Day from the Poetry Foundation. This poem made me tear up. There is so much love and beauty in the details of watching your child grow up. But there is always an underlying tenderness because we know all of those little moments are ephemeral. Time marches mercilessly on. It is as Nabokov's poet wrote in Pale Fire, "The melancholy and the tenderness/Of mortal life; the passion and the pain."

Sentimental Education

by Tony Hoagland

And when we were eight, or nine,
our father took us back into the Alabama woods,
found a rotten log, and with his hunting knife

pried off a slab of bark
to show the hundred kinds of bugs and grubs
that we would have to eat in a time of war.

"The ones who will survive," he told us,
looking at us hard,
"are the ones who are willing to do anything."
Then he popped one of those pale slugs
into his mouth and started chewing.

And that was Lesson Number 4
in The Green Beret Book of Childrearing.

I looked at my pale, scrawny, knock-kneed, bug-eyed brother,
who was identical to me,
and saw that, in a world that ate the weak,
we didn't have a prayer,

and next thing I remember, I'm working for a living
at a boring job
that I'm afraid of losing,

with a wife whose lack of love for me
is like a lack of oxygen,
and this dead thing in my chest
that used to be my heart.

Oh, if he were alive, I would tell him, "Dad,
you were right! I ate a lot of stuff
far worse than bugs."

And I was eaten, I was eaten,
I was picked up
and chewed
and swallowed

down into the belly of the world.

"Sentimental Education" by Tony Hoagland, from Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty. © Graywolf Press, 2010 . Reprinted with permission of the author.

Comment: Another poem I snagged from The Writer's Almanac. Sudeep took classes from Tony Hoagland and got to know him quite well in college. I never took a class with him in college, but I have read a bunch of his poetry and even saw him read here in Dallas. When I got him to sign my book, I told him about our G.W. and Sudeep connection and he said, "You're a long way from D.C." I don't know. It made me feel sad. He was right. It's odd where you find yourself 10 years later. It made me feel old and far way from those carefree days. At the time he was teaching at a university in Houston. I wonder if he is still there. I'm sure poets, especially ones who teach live a nomadic life. Anyway, I thought this poem was a good example of his work. He's so effortlessly funny and sympathetic as a narrator. His poems are always tinged with sadness and contradiction, but they feel honest. I love too the title of the book!

The Wreck of the Hesperus

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It was the schooner Hesperus,

That sailed the wintry sea;

And the skipper had taken his little daughtèr,

To bear him company.

Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax,

Her cheeks like the dawn of day,

And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,

That ope in the month of May.

The skipper he stood beside the helm,

His pipe was in his mouth,

And he watched how the veering flaw did blow

The smoke now West, now South.

Then up and spake an old Sailòr,

Had sailed to the Spanish Main,

"I pray thee, put into yonder port,

For I fear a hurricane.

"Last night, the moon had a golden ring,

And to-night no moon we see!"

The skipper, he blew a whiff from his pipe,

And a scornful laugh laughed he.

Colder and louder blew the wind,

A gale from the Northeast,

The snow fell hissing in the brine,

And the billows frothed like yeast.

Down came the storm, and smote amain

The vessel in its strength;

She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed,

Then leaped her cable's length.

"Come hither! come hither! my little daughtèr,

And do not tremble so;

For I can weather the roughest gale

That ever wind did blow."

He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat

Against the stinging blast;

He cut a rope from a broken spar,

And bound her to the mast.

"O father! I hear the church-bells ring,

Oh say, what may it be?"

"'T is a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast!" —

And he steered for the open sea.

"O father! I hear the sound of guns,

Oh say, what may it be?"

"Some ship in distress, that cannot live

In such an angry sea!"

"O father! I see a gleaming light,

Oh say, what may it be?"

But the father answered never a word,

A frozen corpse was he.

Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark,

With his face turned to the skies,

The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow

On his fixed and glassy eyes.

Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed

That savèd she might be;

And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave

On the Lake of Galilee.

And fast through the midnight dark and drear,

Through the whistling sleet and snow,

Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept

Tow'rds the reef of Norman's Woe.

And ever the fitful gusts between

A sound came from the land;

It was the sound of the trampling surf

On the rocks and the hard sea-sand.

The breakers were right beneath her bows,

She drifted a dreary wreck,

And a whooping billow swept the crew

Like icicles from her deck.

She struck where the white and fleecy waves

Looked soft as carded wool,

But the cruel rocks, they gored her side

Like the horns of an angry bull.

Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice,

With the masts went by the board;

Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank,

Ho! ho! the breakers roared!

At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach,

A fisherman stood aghast,

To see the form of a maiden fair,

Lashed close to a drifting mast.

The salt sea was frozen on her breast,

The salt tears in her eyes;

And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed,

On the billows fall and rise.

Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,

In the midnight and the snow!

Christ save us all from a death like this,

On the reef of Norman's Woe!

Comment: I had to include this gem of a poem. The blog's namesake just keeps showing up in poem after poem. I love it! And another serendipitous discovery was I have known this poem practically my entire life. I just never knew the title. And do you know why I knew this poem? Alright, anyone who doesn't have a high tolerance for dorkiness better shut down their computers...this poem is featured in the Canadian cinema classic "Anne of Avonlea". For all of you lame asses, "Anne of Avonlea" is the sequel to the much beloved film adaptation of "Anne of Green Gables." Anne herself did not recite this poem. She has the great misfortune of having to read Alfred Noyes's "The Highwayman" after an accomplished and much older actress recites "The Wreck of the Hesperus" at a poetry recital at the White Sands Hotel. Are there any other "Anne of Green Gables" fans out there? Are you feelin' me on this one? No? Okay, just forget I ever disclosed this about myself. Now I want to recite this poem and clutch my breast at the end. Get the smelling salts!

Breakage

by Mary Oliver

I go down to the edge of the sea.

How everything shines in the morning light!

The cusp of the whelk,

the broken cupboard of the clam,

the opened, blue mussels,

moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—

and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,

dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.

It's like a schoolhouse

of little words,

thousands of words.

First you figure out what each one means by itself,

the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop

full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

*whelk: a common sea snail

Comment: Mary Oliver is a really extraordinary nature poet. She's not as flowery as lthe transcendentalists, but of course, she is influenced by them. She's not quite as dark (at least the little I've read of her) as Elizabeth Bishop, but nature holds the answers for her. She's a supreme observer like William Carlos Williams. When she writes, it's as if all the mysteries of life are in that "scallop full of moonlight". I wonder if I could ever look at nature in that way. I think about nature a lot because of K. He thinks about it all the time and stops to looks at the birds and insects and asks me questions about things I take for granted like eggs and nests. I wonder if I'll ever look at nature again like a child or Oliver does. What can I learn from observing the scene just outside my window?

Today

by Billy Collins

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,

so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw

open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,

indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths

and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight

that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight

on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants

from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,

holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,

well, today is just that kind of day.


Comment: Happy birthday to my dear friend, Eugenia. I have no idea what the weather is going to be like in San Francisco tomorrow but I hope it is like the spring day Collins has described. Or at least I hope your mood is like that spring day. I am ultra-bummed because in finding and reading this poem I realized that Billy Collins had given a reading in Dallas. In fact, at a venue not three minutes from my front door and I completely forgot. FORGOT, folks. That is the state of my brain. Oh, well. I'm always slightly disappointed at readings. They're very rarely what you think.

Wishing you sunshine, warm breezes and gardens bursting with peonies!