The Rain in My Purse

friday confession: where on earth

2008-07-25T03:59:00.006Z

When I read the newspaper, I often mix Belfast up with Belgrade, requiring strenuous mental leaps.

Even more often, I mix the Pantheon up with the Parthenon.

This week I also read a poem called "Chad" about a man and his family posing for a photograph. At the end, I asked, "What does this have to do with Chad, landlocked south of Libya, population 10 million, broad arid plains, desert in the north, lowlands in the south?"

i've begun building a little city in my throat

2008-07-23T18:39:00.004Z

This fledgling In the Mist looks interesting, even if I disagree with their punctuation. I will read it when it comes out but I often hesitate to submit to brand new publications. Who knows what their tastes are? If they solicit something then I generally think at least they think I’ll fit in, even if it’s sideways. Otherwise it’s probably better to wait for a look at the first issue. Still, “outdoor poems from women" sounds refreshing. I hope for a lot of froth and panting, like crashing mountain bikes and near-drownings in the ocean, and not just women weeding their quite contraries.

I had a few poems accepted recently.
Barn Owl Review took Etiquette, a low-key party poem that begins “I was doing my best at the friendly gesture…” It includes wine and song.

Weave, a new publication, took three poems: Ground Shadow (“I’m going out with the storm cloud”), Dear Scum (“Many mornings I’ve seen you…”), and To the Benevolent State (“Give me liberty”). Weave just overhauled its website, too, and looks great.

Linebreak accepted Ghazal with Heavenly Bodies, which I’m so glad about. I never trusted myself enough to even try submitting there, though I was invited.

I also got an email from an editor this week who said she “really really really” liked my poetry and did I have anything available, so I hope she still likes my poetry when she gets my return email.

lost: savage

2008-07-23T16:19:00.010Z

last seen 1800 hours * corner of Bahnhofstrasse *
short-haired, black brindle with pronounced
underbelly * answers to its name alone and sometimes
it’s inevitable * the savage startles easily * $200
reward as loss leads to nothing better * my crutch
my stars my mettle, gone * $200 reward although
of no value to anyone but owner * although
these days the savage is of little use to anyone

ass-dragging

2008-07-21T15:46:00.008Z

I changed the blog links at left to show when they were last updated, which is a cool feature, but now it seems to take forever for my blog to load. It hardly seems worth it. Think I'm going to have to switch back, cut, paste, cut, paste, cut, paste, blah blah or just blast the damned thing to hell. Has anyone tried the new link system and also found it slow? I also dislike how the links now pop up in a new window. I haven't found the button that stops that.

It's 57 degrees Fahrenheit here today. I'm sure they'll still tell me next month that it was the hottest July on record. Not that I mind. I hate hot weather, probably because I hated wearing shorts as a teenager, and I still do,
and I feel like I'm supposed to
because everyone did
when I was 14.

friday confession

2008-07-18T08:07:00.002Z

I wrote nothing today except this.
I wrote nothing today, except this.
I wrote nothing today.
Except this.

reading while walking with the book up under his face

2008-07-16T16:23:00.004Z

head like a pin mounted in a map
head like John the Baptist’s, delivered
head like the sack of stones I couldn’t drag any farther than the middle of the field

lucid steer

2008-07-14T15:16:00.007Z

I dreamed that after work I was training to be a cardiologist. My mentor was a new doctor with long light wavy hair. I was to come in and take over from her a couple afternoons a week. On the second day of my assignment, I was late. I may have been an hour late but maybe more like five hours. That’s because I had to stop at my brother’s birthday party and deliver two pieces of salt water taffy and also consider stopping at the birthday party of my college boyfriend who had/has neglected me so long I considered killing him. The inner deliberation took time but soon I was in a taxi speeding to the hospital where I put on my white lab coat and stethoscope, hoping no one would experience any heart trouble on my watch since I knew as much about hearts as about the carnal ruse of the Buddha - nil. I put my life in the hands of a little plastic Jesus mounted on the windowsill. “Whatever you do, Lord, you’ll do because you’re doing it,” I said. My mentor came in, furious. Wouldn’t even look at me. It turned out she was the lady at the shoe store I’d been to Saturday who had brought me about five or seven pairs of shoes and then the next size and then the brown not the black and somehow she had found out I would be returning the shoes . . .

I knocked on the tin roof of the fish

2008-07-12T11:38:00.005Z

On vacation, I finished the Booker Challenge I began in January. It was easy - just read six Booker prize winners or short- or long-list nominees in 2008. My sixth book was Anne Enright’s The Gathering, a novel about a woman whose older brother commits suicide. The book has a strong negative charge that I enjoyed, but to be honest, although the writing is good, I found the first 2/3rds of it pretty humdrum. Nearer the end, the writer revs things up emotionally and psychologically, but it still didn’t make the book all that remarkable.

I hadn’t been planning to read The Gathering, but when we flew to Italy, Alitalia lost our luggage and I sent a desperate email to my mother, who was coming to join us, asking her to bring along something for me since I was nearly done with what I was reading.

I also read Machado de Assis’s Epitaph of a Small Winner, written from the perspective of a dead man. It was original and very entertaining. It’s considered an obscure classic, but I found it more prosecco than champagne, and not a must-read.

I also read Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, a long novel that won the Pulitzer Prize in the early ‘70’s. It’s about a man confined to a wheelchair who writes about the lives of his grandmother and grandfather in the West, interweaving it with his own biography. The story was engaging and very good. I really hate the ‘70’s though. There’s something grotesque about them.

The best book I read on vacation was Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost, about the author’s great-uncle and his family who are killed in Poland in the Holocaust. It’s probably a prerequisite to be at least slightly interested in the Holocaust to enjoy this book, but if you are, it’s a fascinating, terrible and beautiful story. The story itself isn’t brilliant since unfortunately it’s similar to what befell millions of terrorized European Jews. What’s brilliant is the way the author uncovers the story, the riveting discovery of the story. He pursues it with such loving care and tells it almost unbearably well. I cried all over it.

I also read 12 of the 20 stories in The Best American Short Stories of 2002, which all in all were quite good. There are a couple more stories I want to read before putting this back of the shelf. So far my favorite story in the collection was Richard Ford’s “Puppy,” which you can read here.

Here are the books I’ve read so far this year, excepting poetry:

Schindler’s List – Thomas Keneally (Booker Challenge)
The Color of Blood – Brian Moore (Booker Challenge)
The Reader – Bernhard Schlink
When We Were Orphans – Kazuo Ishiguro (Booker Challenge)
Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro (Booker Challenge)
Rule of the Bone – Russell Banks
Last Orders – Graham Swift (Booker Challenge)
The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion
Eclipse – John Banville
A Dangerous Friend – Ward Just
This Republic Of Suffering – Drew Gilpin Faust
The Kiss – Kathryn Harrison
Stoner – John Williams
Epitaph of a Small Winner – Machado de Assis
The Lost – Daniel Mendelsohn
The Gathering – Anne Enright
Angle of Repose – Wallace Stegner

friday confession: leaky

2008-07-11T14:05:00.004Z

I went through airport security with four different liquids on my person: a vial of perfume, a bottle of hair detangler, a juice box and some patchouli body lotion. Is security sleeping on the job or what? I actually didn’t mean to smuggle these over the border. But since I don’t associate any of these liquids with potential hazard, I forgot. At check-in they even asked me if I had any liquids in my hand luggage. Since I wasn’t planning to bring down the plane, I guess it just slipped my mind.

I do love the expression “on my person.” It rejects all slavery.

-Do you have any liquids on your person, ma’am?
-I carry most of them inside, thank you.

I do wonder how much good it does making everyone throw away their liquids and fluids at airports. Aren’t there other ways to screen for danger without trashing everything wholesale? We must be talking mountains of (wet) plastic garbage. We could start a new ocean.

toast

2008-07-03T10:17:00.004Z

I'm still in Sardinia, but dropping in to say I have a poem in the new issue of Green Hills Literary Lantern.

I've read a bunch of books I may blog about later, but mostly I've just been sitting on the beach. Every blue day is a carbon copy of the last, cloudless, blazingly sunny and hot.

seemingly reasonable desires

2008-06-24T18:02:00.001Z

a little peace and quiet
whole milk instead of skim
a restaurant that doesn’t keep red wine in the fridge
a lunch break, occasionally
an optimistic fortune cookie
colleague not talking while I’m talking
absence of ant infestation the day before going on vacation

Any Major Dude

2008-06-23T15:44:00.008Z

I dislike going to work because it means you have to get prepared. Besides getting dressed, which must be preceded by selecting appropriate clothes, if you are conscientious you will also need to brush your teeth and wash your face. Maybe there’s shaving; maybe there’s makeup. We’re talking time.

(I’ve promised to use at least one semicolon every day, by the way. Sometimes when I'm talking.)

What makes me feel bad are the people going to work who apparently think they’ve done okay but who have failed dismally. This morning I saw a woman whose blouse didn’t sit right. I think she must have pinned the blouse above the top button but mis-measured before fastening, making the cloth into a peephole. Looking in one direction seemed fine but when she looked in the other direction the cloth opened like the mouth of a fat slow-swimming fish. She’ll be walking around all day like that and when she gets home she’ll probably forget the pin and tear the blouse trying to get it up over her head. That’s what I do anyway. I always pull the blouse up over my head when undressing. I never unbutton it. That’s because, of the two kinds of laziness, I belong in the avoid-spending-time lazy category rather than the avoid-trouble lazy category. I’d rather climb the fence than walk around it. This made me an outcast in my family. And means I spend a lot of time waiting for people who walk around the fence. Which is why I always have a book along.

My thoughts about laziness are many, but I digress.

There are plenty of people walking failed into the morning. It’s easy to fail when you’re half asleep. The guy in white socks. The bling people. The woman in the very wrong outfit. And all the people, myself included, pitifully overdressed for what awaits them.

lemonhead

2008-06-22T08:21:00.012Z

We’re off to Sardinia for a two-week vacation on Wednesday, to Cagliari, Carlo’s hometown. We’ll be staying outside the city at the beach. I’m sure it will be warm enough to swim, not like last year’s vacation to Denmark, where the only one with nerve enough to brave the cold was the dog. We haven’t been in to Sardinia in a long time. Carlo’s brother recently visited us, so the kids and I are all polished up on our Italian.

Most important is my reading list:

1. Personal Memiors of Ulysses S. Grant. I’ve been very very busy not reading this very very slowly, but plan to see it through, probably with copious skimming.

2. Epitaph of a Small Winner by Machado de Assis. I’m about a quarter of the way through, and enjoying this. The beginning was not particularly promising, then the narrator began hallucinating.

3. The Best American Short Stories 2002. I especially like reading short stories in summer, and especially on vacation. I’ll also bring The O. Henry Awards from 1998, which has been on my shelf ten years. I’ve read a couple of the stories in there but just notice it includes "Brokeback Mountain," which Laurel insists we all read. I’m trusting her.

4. The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand.

5. Either Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose or Ward Just’s The Weather in Berlin. Decision deferred until I’m walking out the door.

6. Poetry is up in the air at the moment. I like to take a big anthology for variety, but the ones I have I’ve pretty much devoured already. I may have to take The Random House Book of 20th Century French Poetry, though I’ve got it nearly memorized. I really could use some recommendations on anthologies. I'm reading one at the moment - Language for a New Century - which is just not doing it for me.

I think I’ll also take Jay Hopler's Green Squall, Pier Giorgio di Cicco's Living in Paradise and Mercy Seat by Norman Dubie, three of my favorites. I’ll need something by Lucie Brock-Broido and a couple journals, too.

Friday Confession: Late Sleeper

2008-06-20T16:42:00.005Z

You’ll never find that line in my bio "she was born with a pen in her hand" or "she has been writing for as long as she can remember." I didn’t write a poem until I was 38 or 39 years old. I was born with a pen in the back of the bottom drawer of my desk.

My bio should say something like "When she began writing it was about 7 o'clock in the evening."

doorstop and spitoon

2008-06-19T18:50:00.010Z

What is it with journals that don’t take simultaneous submissions but also don’t send rejections – only acceptances? And on top of that don’t indicate how long their response period is (for accepted pieces)? What do you do? Grow cobwebs?

And ezines that only take postal submissions? The word that comes to mind is hypocritical. I understand the logic of this policy, but this policy is selfish.

I prefer if journals allow electronic submissions. I live in Germany, modestly. It gets kind of expensive. Don’t even ask about SASEs.

I also like journals that answer me in one or two days, and the answer is ‘yes.’ Call me if you know any of these.

Speaking of ‘yes,’ I love the last passage of Joyce’s Ulysses: and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

I also love Aretha Franklin singing "I Say a Little Prayer." That is hard to beat.

I do enjoy fat novels, too. Anna Karenina, Les Miserables, Bleak House, Cloudsplitter, Daniel Deronda, The Stand.

Don’t tell my colleagues but I like the coffee from the office coffee machine.

I am extremely fond of Paul Klee’s painting Fish Magic. It’s in the Philadelphia Museum of Art where I have seen it many times. Paul Klee is one of my favorites. I once seduced a very handsome man by talking about Paul Klee. It wasn’t my intention when I started talking. Other Paul Klee paintings I like are Landscape with Yellow Birds, Pastorale (at MoMA) and Vocal Fabric of the Singer Rosa Silber (MoMA).

I am a big fan of thunderstorms, too.

Not to mention Camper shoes.

et Guillaume Apollinaire!

dice

2008-06-17T17:39:00.013Z

cinched just enough sleep. pockets of melancholy,
but there’s room for everything.
no appointments today!
it continues to be cool.

* *

last trip to Paris i swear i found the Rue Obscure.
i’ve lived on Marlboro Ave., Ten Eyck St., Baldwin, Main, 21st St., Watchung Ave., Martorff and Parcusstrasse, Adelaide St., Somerset and Nanshang Rd. others, too.
best name was Via Copernico.
there was a fireplace in the kitchen.
how it snowed that year.

serve your notion

2008-06-16T18:32:00.003Z

K: By the way, H. says 9.00 doesn’t work for him as a meeting time. Better would be 9.07.
A: Well, we could also have it at 9.04 or 9.08.
M: What about 9.05?
K: He has a comment to write at 9.00 and can’t make it. 9.07 is the best time.
A: Anytime is fine, just have to decide, so we don’t stand here waiting.
M: What’s wrong with 9.05?
A: 9.05, 9.10, anytime is fine.
M: How about 9.07?

friday confession: singing in the wires

2008-06-13T10:27:00.011Z

I like my greying hair. I don't have so many grey strands, but the lighting in my office elevator reveals every one. They're strong and wiry, different in texture than the brown. I'm almost sorry when one falls out, though it gives me the chance to inspect it closely. In all its literal brilliance.

Finding a grey hair always reminds me of when, as a kid, I'd find those colored telephone wires on the roadside. They stood out so sharply against the pavement. I wondered why the telephone linemen would leave those beauties behind.

new musical directions

2008-06-10T05:41:00.004Z

for erik satie

Aggravato
Andante
With abrupt intelligence
Drunkenly
As if walking backwards
Pianissimo
As if to make deadline
Rococo
With great pretension
On tip-toe, with candlestick
A la bonne heure
Downhill
As if to lecture
Somnambuloso
Maliciously, ma non troppo

.

so as not to lose these

2008-06-09T10:13:00.001Z

chestnut / odious / apparatus / vellum / nanate? /
bullfight / gypsum / barista / potion / Belair /
appartchik / etiolate / tapioca / sorcery / syncophation

friday confession: half a werewolf

2008-06-06T07:38:00.006Z

My daughter got one of those girl’s how-to books that has a section on palm reading. She asked me if my ring finger is longer than the index, so I looked at my left hand, which I instinctively look at, and it was. "Good," she said, "that means you're creative." She went on reading and I checked out my right hand, and believe it or not my index finger on my right hand is longer than the ring finger! I never knew this! Right in front of my nose!

Everyone knows if your ring finger is longer than your middle finger it means you are a werewolf, but I figure I’ve come pretty far with my weird constellation and I am half a werewolf. Maybe I am an arrested werewolf. Or maybe I am active already - I do wake up pretty exhausted some mornings without any recollection of what happened while I was asleep. Supposedly asleep.

Anyway, I googled “ring finger longer than index” and found that this not only suggests I may be gay but I am also at risk for “a painful joint condition” called osteoarthritis, which affects the knees and hips. And I am very worried how I will pursue my nocturnal work as a werewolf, possibly a gay werewolf, bounding across moors and forests, leaping from behind trees onto my surprised victims, with bum knees.

the moon like the rhine moves northward

2008-06-04T17:33:00.007Z

Splash is a nice word but plash, which means the same thing, is even nicer. I suppose it’s because there’s no initial /s/ to detract from the pla with that long /a/ and the pl of plush, plop and pleasure.

Both words require liquid so maybe it’s the kind of liquid or its consistency that determines if it’s to be splash or plash. Like is it mud or is it ocean or is it 7Up? Or maybe it’s the agent entering the liquid that decides, although strictly speaking an agent may not be necessary. Bubbling hot oil, after all, splashes up like a goddamn. (And this is not a case for splatter, which needs an object. A new white blouse is good.)

Most dictionaries don't differentiate but some suggest it is a matter of degree separating plash from splash. To my ear it sounds that way, plash being a damped-down version of splash. People should use plash more often, helping to prove that -

1. All bath beads dropping into water plash.
2. Cream being agitated with a churn to make butter splashes.
3. Wooden spoons whacking the surface of a thick, simmering pudding plashes.
4. Suicides jumping from bridges into rivers splash.
5. Children playing in a pool plash, until things get out of hand, when they splash.

The boy I love

2008-06-04T09:28:00.004Z

turns 10 today.

mix n match bathing separates

2008-06-03T18:00:00.006Z

i'm writing a ghazal. it's taking a long time.

that said, i’m going to have a poem called “Canaan Ghazal” in the next Unsplendid, i hear. it actually adheres to the form. they are considering another ghazal, too, which semi-conforms.

i’ll have a poem called “Scullery” in the Dossier section of the next issue of Court Green. This is an epistle to a mop, froth, and futility in general, which abounds.

i am not going to have a poem in the next Rhino, which has rejected my submission.

i am going to have two poems – “Why Pregnant Women Don’t Tip Over” and “Reading Kolyma Tales” – in issue #3 of Bateau. I am really glad about that. I am really glad about everything.

i’m going to have a poem (“Hive,” previously published in Boxcar Poetry Review) in an anthology called “Crazed by the Sun” being put together by Lynn Strongin. i do not know how this happened. i was informed.

i hate the smell out today

2008-06-02T15:31:00.003Z

it's so cellophane tape
it's so old cigar extinguished in Guinness
it's so board the humongous bus to Nowa Huta via Dortmund
it's so mechanic's ass