Another happy happy birthday

I love to post about my birthday while it's still May 7 and I can enjoy seeing the date up at the top of the post forever and ever. May 7 is such an excellent date. If I could have chosen a birthdate myself, that's the one I would have picked.

So! I woke up early in the pleasant knowledge that with the day off I could always go back to sleep again. But at 6 am I wanted to know if the Library millage had passed, so I reached for my iPod touch and poked up Facebook. The first thing I saw was not the millage news (though it did pass--hooray!) but this lovely post from my lovely daughter, far and away in France:

And to preserve the record, this is what I answered her:

Ruth Wilson Thank you for the lovely greeting, Sister Bear--it was the first thing I saw this morning. Those lilacs are gorgeous! The bush here has just barely got leaves on it. Quite a while ago I revised my purpose in accompanying you anywhere--it's to have the best time ever! Looking forward to having you home from your travels again so I can hear all about them first hand. And if you feel like baking or cooking, I'm willing to sit up at the table to be served. 

6 hours ago · Like

Then I got out of bed and commenced practicing on the piano. First thing in the morning is the best time to practice because Ben is still in bed then. When he's awake, he likes to pound on the bass keys and bug me. This week my teacher gave me my first polyphonic piece, "Fairest Lord Jesus," to work on, and it was tricky but very pretty and nice. After while Betsy came nosing up to me to be petted and perhaps to intimate that I had played the piece about a thousand times too many. 

After Ben got up I desisted, and switched to cleaning and organizing my sewing room--always more work to be done on it, but pleasant work. Around noon I knocked off and drove into town for groceries and a pizza for Benny. (Heaven send he never gets sick of pizza and chicken fingers, the child will starve.) Included in the groceries were some cookies that you would identify as Girl Scout thin mints and Samoas if you hadn't seen the box. These I reserved for a special purpose, as you will see.

The rest of the afternoon I spent in equal parts running about outside with Betsy, hassling Benjamin, and puttering around the sewing room. And so lucky am I that the birthday presents we ordered from Amazon actually arrived via US Mail on the precise right date. So exciting--we got a piano lamp! It's just exactly what we needed. See, you can adjust it to shine right down on your sheet music. I just love it. 

Also I got "100 Snowflakes to Crochet" so that I can participate in the Crochet-A-Long that Martine is hosting on her "iMake" podcast and blog, which seemed like such a fun thing to do that it needed doing immediately. Also a journaling work book. And that's not counting the seven dolls I bought at the Allegan Antique Fair last week, all of which I count as birthday dolls. Buying dolls for a girl's birthday was not a tradition in my family, so I'm filling in those missing years myself.  

This evening was our church's weekly "Challengers" program for first and second grade kids, at which I have the privilege of leading one of the tables--five marvelous eight-year-olds who were all seven when we started out together last fall. They've all had birthdays too. 

The highlight of my day came during the evening when my kiddos and their 35 or so fellow Challengers, all precious and beautiful, sang a good loud rousing chorus of "Happy Birthday to You" for me. They were all grinning at me and I grinned right back all the way through, plus I got two hugs. ("How old are you, Mrs. Ruth?" "Fifty-seven!" "Wow!")  At the end of the evening, that's when the cookies came in--cookies plus a 40-pack of Tim Bits I'd picked up on the way in. There was enough for seconds and thirds for everybody, too.    

My official birthday dinner is postponed until May 8, but that is a good thing because May 8 has always been kind of a blah day, after the exhilaration of May 7. If Ben will go with us, it will take place at Bilbo's Pizza, but if he won't then maybe Friday's or Red Robin. 

And do I have an official birthday cake? Yes I do! Ray brought me a Boonzaaijer Bavarian cream-filled birthday cake--the best cake ever. And there were birthday cards, and many lovely wishes on Facebook for me.

Now I will finish up this lovely May 7 and this happy recap by reading another chapter of "The Hobbit" to Benjamin as he settles down for bed. Betsy will settle down with him. She used to sleep in a doggie bed on the floor, but when she discovered that the bottom-bunk in Ben's room was untenanted she established occupancy there for herself. Her mama didn't raise no dummy puppies. 

And then when his prayers are said and lights are out and the fan is on and his iPod is lulling him to sleep with "Just So Stories," I will happily settle down into bed myself, so content with the pretty way our room turned out, and especially with the new mattress that is so-ooo-o comfortable you barely have to try to sleep. And I'll listen for a happy while to a knitting podcast, or Don Quixote, or some iTunes radio, and be soothed, be composed and quieted, so that when this May 7 slips away the last glimpse of its going will be unknown.

Flashback: How to Read More Books

Novel Goals

So many great books to read—so little time!  How can you get through everything on your “to read” list?

I don’t want to read faster because I like to take my time and savor it. But I do want to read more efficiently so I can get more done. Here are two methods that have helped me.

 

Reading_glasses

If you have bifocals and you’ve been reading down your nose with your head cocked up in the air, let me show you a better way!  With prescription reading glasses, you can read “full face” to the book—so much more comfortable and natural. It makes me feel like a kid again, pouring over Eight Cousins head-first! I wear my reading glasses most of the day at work, too, because they are much better than bifocals for working on computers and searching library stacks.

Second—know your approximate reading rate. How long does it take you to read a page of your book? Get a stopwatch and time yourself, either one page at a time, or read several and find the average rate per page. Don’t rush! Your rate will vary with the book, since some pages have more text on them or take more time to ingest. Test yourself on several types of books and you’ll find your range. Mine varies from about 60 to 90 seconds a page.

Why will this help you read more? Because activities that can be planned are easier to accomplish than activities that cannot be planned, or planned only vaguely.

For every book—or stack of books—you want to read, you can form a pretty good idea of how many hours it will take you and then plan accordingly. Without that knowledge, you'll just have to wonder, more or less glumly, how you'll ever get them read, and maybe give up.

This fall I had to read five books in thirty days for work--plus finish House of the Seven Gables just for me. I wasn’t sure at first that this was even possible. But then I added up how many hours they would take, set up something almost like a schedule, and finished them all by their deadlines.

Why not try it? Here's an online stopwatch you can use--you don't even have to make a trip to the sporting goods store before testing your reading rate.

Keeping track of reading rates is fun as well as practical. Want to know how long it took me to read War and Peace? About 26 hours. How long will it take me to read Moby Dick, which I have to do for work also? Looks like about 16 hours. If I read for a half-hour during lunch and another half-hour after dinner, I can finish in a little over two weeks. Even the whole Bible doesn't take so long as you'd think--about 72 hours from Genesis to Revelation.

Now, doesn’t that make reading Moby Dick sound like just a lazy walk in the park? Just think: if you took a vacation from work, you could knock off Moby Dick and War and Peace both in one week! You could be the first person in the history of the world to do that. And with prescription reading glasses, you won't even get a stiff neck.

November 2, 2008

Flashback: A Scent Can Break Your Heart

September, 2009

I breathed in a most evocative scent today. For a moment I didn't know where I was.

I'd been walking back up the mall toward the library at lunchtime when I passed a young woman going the other way. While she was still in view I noticed that her nonchalant air was being undermined by one's sense of its being assumed. That set me reflecting about whether it is possible ever to be nonchalant, if trying doesn't work.

But then all that was forgotten as she passed me and I breathed, in her wake, the exact, long-forgotten scent of the powder hand soap that was used, in the 1960s, in the ladies' bathrooms at White Cloud State Park. I recognized it immediately, as if forty years were nothing. Oh, it wafted me back to that park and to my childhood, to the playground and the foot-trail and the log fences, and it made me want to laugh and cry, because I used to own that smell, I used to carry it away with me on freshly washed hands, and it was part of me. It was a nonchalant part of my world, uncherished and almost unnoticed, because we camped there so often, summer after long summer as I grew taller, and how can something that was a part of me be so gone? So gone.

And what was that smell? Is it really gone forever again, so soon after rushing back to me out of nowhere? Should I have run after the girl crying, "Wait, Wait!"?


Happy happy update, spring 2016:  We took a vacation South this year to look at Civil War battlefields and see some Presidential homes. Waiting for the tour of Benjamin Harrison's house to begin, we looked around in the gift shop for a while. I was interested in the different varieties of artisan soaps they had there, and to my amazement, one was the long-lost scent I wrote about here! Of course I bought it immediately, and now it lives as a sachet in my sock drawer! Every few days I lift it out and travel back to White Cloud State Park again.... 

Flashback: Summer of 2009

Verbal Snapshots from our Vacation

 

Overheard: On a trail at Hartwick Pines forest, a young boy and girl rushing down a hill together: 
     Girl: "I don't want to run, but I'm running! I don't want to run, but I'm running!"
     Boy: "I know!  Our feet are running automatically!"

Overheard: At a craft store, a woman examining t-shirts with Husky dogs on them:
    Woman: "Gawd, I'd love t'git Butch one o'them."
    (Me, unspoken: "Is Butch a boy, a teen, or your husband? Your brother? Does he own a husky dog? Would he really like a t-shirt with a husky on it or is it only part of your illusion of Butch that he would like a t-shirt with a husky on it? How well do you know Butch, really? Would you like a husky dog t-shirt yourself? Or are you actually saying that you wish Butch were the kind of person you could give a husky dog t-shirt to?"  My brain contains an extra nosiness nodule or two, apparently.)

[Although now, five years later, what I notice about this utterance is the wistfulness of it. The impossibility of giving even so modest a gift to someone dear, a world of regret over many such chances gone.]

Observed: From a picnic table by a parking lot at the UP's "Mystery Spot," as I elected to sit quietly and knit in the sunshine instead of going inside:
     A sea gull walking along the road. He glanced about with rapid eye, like Emily Dickinson's bird, but he did not hop sideways nor hop anywhere. Nor did he fly, which you'd think would be his best option for travel. He just walked. Straight on and on, along the shoulder of the road, with no visible emotion, the whole length of the parking lot, at least five car lengths, he walked. Then he stopped, looked both ways--and walked across the road!
     Well! I guess that's why it's called the Mystery Spot.

And now, a real snapshot from my vacation, of an activity which prompted this essential question: When digging in wet beach sand, do fingernails get dirty or clean?

Ben at Lake Huron

Answer: Clean!  I can't help with the eternal mysteries of jaywalking sea gulls, feet that run of their own accord, or the true nature of Butch, but I'm glad we could clear up one question, anyway.

Why Frank O'Hara Wasn't a Painter

Below is another of the essays I wrote for my online "Modpo" (Contemporary and Modern Poetry) class I took from the Unversity of Pennsylvania through Coursera.org.  I've been putting these essays on my blog as a way to preserve them after the course content disappears.

Assignment: In a close reading of the following poem, explain in approximately 500 words why O'Hara is not a painter.

Why I Am Not a Painter
by Frank O'Hara
I am not a painter, I am a poet. Why? I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not. Well, for instance, Mike Goldberg is starting a painting. I drop in. "Sit down and have a drink" he says. I drink; we drink. I look up. "You have SARDINES in it." "Yes, it needed something there." "Oh." I go and the days go by and I drop in again. The painting is going on, and I go, and the days go by. I drop in. The painting is finished. "Where's SARDINES?" All that's left is just letters, "It was too much," Mike says. But me? One day I am thinking of a color: orange. I write a line about orange. Pretty soon it is a whole page of words, not lines. Then another page. There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life. Days go by. It is even in prose, I am a real poet. My poem is finished and I haven't mentioned orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

Sardines? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Sardines!

Frank O'Hara is not a painter because he is incapable of abstraction, or at least very averse to it. He can't just tell us so because that itself would be abstract; instead, he gives us his I-do-this-I-do-that "Why I Am Not a Painter" poem, and we must abstract it for ourselves. The poem is not an explanation but a demonstration.

He begins with a three-line introduction re-stating and emphasizing the title. He tucks the interjection "Well," at the end perhaps to give the impression that he is writing extemporaneously, but also to pull the reader into the next, long verse, which begins, appealingly, with "For instance." This drops us in front of Michael Goldberg at his easel, where we watch how "The painting / is going on, and I go, and the days / go by."

O'Hara devotes a thirteen-lined stanza to Goldberg's painting process, then another one to his own writing process, during which the same days are going by. Giving the same number of lines to each suggests balance and fairness of consideration and also the equal weight of the finished works of art: O'Hara considers his poem to be equal, in terms of artistic importance, to the abstract painting.

Of the painting, O'Hara observes, "You have SARDINES in it." The capitalization of SARDINES indicates he is referring to the word only, not to pictures of sardines. Goldberg answers, "Yes, it needed something there." Later he will partly obliterate it because "It was too much." O'Hara understands that neither word nor object relates to the aboutness of the painting; it is merely using the shape of the word and perhaps a touch of its dadaist shock value.

Contrast what O'Hara says of his "Oranges" poem. At one point it is "a page of words" which he adds to just as Goldberg adds letters to his painting. But his poem is at all stages representational; it is thoroughly about orange, even though the word itself never appears in it. While Goldberg's expression must be curtailed, ("It was too much"), O'Hara goes on adding to his until he has twelve poems about orange, and still feels that "There should be so much more." He may even take a gleeful pride in that he has produced twelve poems in the time it took Goldberg to produce one painting.

At the end, we discover that both works of art have been titled with that one key word which they do not contain, "Oranges" and "Sardines." In this concuding irony O'Hara's demonstration is complete: Goldberg's painting bears a label which signals no aboutness; O'Hara's poem bears a label which signals absolute aboutness.

O'Hara writes this poem to tell us metapoetically that he prefers poetry, where words have meanings that create pictures and interesting for-instances, over abstract paintings that tell no story. His point is confined to the fashions of his day, however: O'Hara might, in a different lifetime, have become a realistic painter whose works did tell a story; instead, to be a "real" poet he must not use rhyme or meter, just as Goldberg, in his day, must never paint a "real" sardine.

Emily's Sailor Dresses

No wonder Emily loves to travel--look how we dressed her!

Horatius at the Bridge

The "Massive Online Open Course" (MOOC) class in Modern and Contemporary Poetry I've been studying with great enjoyment for ten weeks ended last Monday. Fortunately, the discussion forums and videos will remain open for another year, so my 36,000 fellow students and I can continue participating on our own.

Following is my fourth and final essay for the class. The topic is aleatory or "chance" poetry, and our assignment involved performing chance operations on any poem to create a new version of that poem and do a close reading of it.

Option A: The Mesostomatic (based on John Cage's Mesostics)

Visit the link to the Mesostomatic exercise: www.euph0r1a.net/mesostomatic/. Fill in the fields for the spine and textual data and select any number of mesostics before submitting. Please insert into the "textual data" field a URL (web address) for one of the poems we've read in ModPo or the URL of another poem that interests you. Insert a word or phrase or a name as the "spine." Using the Mesostomatic, you will be "writing through" the chosen poem. 

Horatius at the Bridge

                    Hand
                   cOmmons seized
                 baR,
                    And
               smoTe
below. MeanwhIle
                   tUscan
                 flaShing

                   bAck
                     The

                 lighT, rank
                  beHind
                   likE,

                     Bright of
         gold, fouR
                   wIth
          measureD
               ensiGns
                 sprEad.

With its antique diction, gasping rhythm, and flickering images of war, this could be a fragment of some ancient eyewitness account. 

Accidental though it may be, this version has grammatical integrity and a logical progression through the stanzas--a steady enlargement of the pictorial frame. First a hand, then a Tuscan soldier, then by synecdoche many Tuscans, then banners streaming above the assembled ranks of Tuscan soldiers.  

It begins "in medias res" with a main character, the Roman hero through whose eyes we see the battle, but whom we know only by the action of his hand, seizing a bar and smiting the enemy below him. "Meanwhile" our mental eye is drawn upward again, because the Tuscans' armor reflects the light back upward, revealing rank upon rank of soldiers "bright with gold." The impression of vast expanse is heightened by the assonance of "light," "like" and "bright." As the picture expands to its maximum breadth with overarching ensigns coming into view, it also gains energy for a conclusive ending with the assonance of "measured ensigns spread," the nasal resonance of /m/, /n/, and /r/ in the same phrase, and the repeated stops of /d/ and /p/ in "measured" and "spread." These evoke, though don't quite speak, the word "dead" --can there be any fate for this outnumbered hero, but death?

The poem offers several other points that its phantom poet might have arranged on purpose: The ragged, staggered rhythm of the stanza breaks (8,2,3,6), not corresponding to any natural phrasing, suggests the lurching motions and confused disorder of battle. "Rank behind like" does the work of "rank upon rank," but is fresher and emphasizes the disciplined unity of the Tuscans. After this numerless multiplicity of soldiers, specifying that exactly four ranks have banners spread is a welcome contrast and realistic touch. The definite article does not always appear where expected, (eg. "seized bar" instead of "seized the bar") giving the utterance, depending on how you read it, what might be a breathless, hurried effect, or a stoic brevity.

Following is the source text (verses 34 and 35 of 70 ) by Thomas Babington Macaulay:

XXXIV

Now while the Three were tightening
Their harnesses on their backs,
The Consul was the foremost man
To take in hand an axe:
And Fathers mixed with Commons
Seized hatchet, bar, and crow,
And smote upon the planks above,
And loosed the props below.

XXXV

Meanwhile the Tuscan army,
Right glorious to behold,
Come flashing back the noonday light,
Rank behind rank, like surges bright
Of a broad sea of gold.
Four hundred trumpets sounded
A peal of warlike glee,
As that great host, with measured tread,
And spears advanced, and ensigns spread,
Rolled slowly towards the bridge’s head,
Where stood the dauntless Three.

The distilled, mesotic version of these stanzas actually does echo, recognizably, the action and tone of the original, but is pleasingly open and compelling. Stripped of the high-toned mythic quality, a real person seems to emerge. 

I not only like this  mesotic poem, I like the process of making it and the fresh language which resulted from the process, so different from what I usually produce, and so invigorating! This exercise has also increased my tolerance for tackling difficult poems: if I can't get everything out of one, I will nevertheless see what can be got, for have I not, on my own like Horatius, just made something like sense out of four computer-generated clusters, with measured ensigns spread?