Housewife Grammar

For the past seven days, I have been living the housewife's existence. No wonder women have always been portrayed as shallow: when you're alone all day, with no one to talk to except maybe a cat, or your kids, you welcome any little thing to distract you. I've been reading The Tin Drum, and only have about 100pp left. It's a 550 page book, and Thom says that when he finished it, he felt like it could have gone on for another 550 pages. Not me. I enjoy the book, but it's probably not the best thing to be reading when you're home alone all day, really doing nothing but cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, unable to read anything else but a Latin grammar, which you think is better than most novels. Gunter Grass, I am convinced, has done a wonderful job in being able to cultivate such hate for his main character. Not that he's dispicable outright, but, in the guise of a child, he drove many people to their deaths and came off outwardly as innocent. Still, the book is really good. We have Dog Years here, too, which was written about the same time and same city as Oskar, but with different characters.

I've cooked some good things over the past few days: baked pesto tomatoes, tofu mushrooms and green beans, lemon cookies — it's good that I have this stretch of days off, to be able to get in practice with cooking. I rarely did any cooking at home. I baked sometimes, but never cooked. Now I'm learning half from my mom, half from Thom, half with recipes, half without, and it's all turned out pretty well.

As for the Latin grammar: it's truly an inspiration. I refuse to get behind in Latin this summer, or forget. I bought a little notebook, which will serve as my own personal grammar, in which I'm copying all the things I'm having trouble with. Most Latin grammars, like Latin texts, are very old. The language hasn't changed, so there's no need to write a new grammar, so just reprint the old one - why even reset the type? As far as I can tell, the last time the type was reset on my grammar (which was printed in 2004) was 1918. It's also a study in old typography, I guess. I bought this grammar at the beginning of the semester and haven't read through it much. It's not the most detailed one out there, intended for the use of schoolboys back when it was printed. Still, I'm finding out all these irregularities about the Latin language that I didn't know about before. Lists of messed up nouns and such. I guess they're just scared to spring all that stuff on you at first. It is said that Thomas Jefferson was always walking around with a book in his hand: a Greek grammar. No frickin' crap. Ancient Greek, let me tell you, is one bitch-ass language. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm sure that Chinese is like, 50 times harder than Ancient Greek, but out of all Western languages, Ancient Greek has to be one of the hardest. The only final exam that ever made me cry.

I think today I'm just going to go on a shopping binge. I'm so used to having no money that, to me, a shopping binge might cost $50. I'll start work in a week or two (that is, if I don't go insane first) and I'll easily be able to pay off my credit card bills. Let's see, what do I need?

• camera
• film
• address book
• thank-you cards
• tongs
• hanging kitchen basket thing
  

Looks like I'll end up going to the dreaded Wal-Mart. Actually, maybe I'll just go downtown and do some local business shopping.

WHAATT???

Here's a short post. I'll write more, of a less soapboxy nature, later.

Well, I can't say that this surprises me, but haven't we all agreed by now that the Cold War was nothing but a contest of firearms and paranoia, and that, in general, it wasn't a glorious thing? Are Americans STILL ragging on COMMUNISM? OK, let me break it down here, people:

Communism was something that was invented, mostly by Karl Marx, in the interest of all the poor people. Marx was pretty naive about it, but he only had the best of intentions.

The USSR, China, Cuba, the entire Eastern Block, North Korea, etc. have very little to do with actual communism. There was all this talk about communism, but no country (that I know of, at least) has ever adopted communism as Marx intended it.

Not that I'm big into communism, I'm not. To me, it was an OK idea, formed with the best of intentions, which does not work, and leaves it wide open, every time, for a dictator to come in and take all the power. The idea that US officials are still calling down the concept of communism, when it's pretty obvious that only the individual communist governments are to blame shows me how small a distance we've traveled. Bush is comparing terrorism, something that can be done by anyone, anywhere, anytime and can never be squelched out on its own, to our proud past of fighting an abstract idea that has the welfare of all people in mind. Nice job.

Terrorism interferes with your right to have a gun.
Communism interferes with your right to conspicuous consumption.

Ever think that you're constantly being pumped full of capitalist ideology? Hmm...why don't you ask the people in your local black ghetto why they're not as rich as you. Why don't you ask a homeless veteran why he chooses to sleep outside in 5 degree weather when he could be living the American dream. You'd be surprised to find that these people are not lazy, they just don't have as many opportunities. Whatever chicken-in-every-pot bullshit you've been fed, I ask you to think about it, and then ask yourself what fear tactics the government uses to help you get your mind off of it.

Heartache with Hard Work

A few weeks ago, Germanicus, trying to dissuade me from being with an older man, pointed me to a simile he learned in sociology: life is like a snake: a.k.a. something had to unhinge it's jaw to take you in, and after that it's all downhill, and really, you're just traveling through this digestive system we call Life, only to be shat out at the end. Why would anyone, fairly undigested, want to have anything to do with someone who is much closer to becoming shit? I dunno, Germanicus, why do you think we're standing here, a 20-year-old and a 53-year-old, having an intelligent, enriching conversation?

It is true that being in a relationship with someone much older than you is hard. I'm 21, Thom is 49, and while I'm young and fresh, full of promise, he's been fairly well beaten down by life. I know that I'm marrying a man with curmudgeonly tendencies, that I'll be looked upon as a gold-digger or something, or, at very best, as wired by my peers, and that I will have to nurse someone, who will probably not outlive my parents by much (if at all, although he's in much better health) on his deathbed when I am all of 50 or 60.

I'm also not going to sit here and be the 21-year-old (I had the conversation with Germanicus when I was 20) know-it-all. I know that life is hard, but I also know that I don't know just how hard it's going to be. I know that I haven't had "enough" life experience to do...well, anything that 30-year-olds pride themselves on being able to do: get married, have kids, get into debt, hold down a job. Well, I'm about to get married, I'm not about to populate this over-populated earth with my screaming spawn, I don't carry a lick of debt, and I've always been able to hold down a job (no matter how crappy) so...what is it that 30-year-olds insist they've got over me, aside from having been on this planet longer and having been able to think about stuff for a longer period of time? In Lost in Translation, Bill Murray's character said that growing older was easier than being young because you know yourself and you know what you like and dislike. Sounds reasonable to me. However, I think I have learned something valuable in my life so far:

Don't talk down to someone just because they're younger than you.

If someone is an idiot, THEY will out themselves as such, and THEY will be the only one to pay for it (hopefully.) So, instead of loading people down with the lessons you've learned, (like I did just now) let them talk to you, hear what they have to say, and then you can say, "Well, things may turn out differently for you [and isn't it funny how things turn out differently for different people coming from different backgrounds?], but here's what happened with me."

Life is suffering. I'm figuring it out, I promise.

At any rate, since being engaged to an older man and being criticized for your immaturity, even though you have never shown yourself in your entire life to act younger than your age, is hard work, sometimes it's nice to take a break from trying to convince people that you know life is hard.

That's where Heartache with Hard Work comes in. You need to download the Camera Obscura songs. Good things can and do happen, for instance, like falling in love with someone for who they are, even if the match between you both isn't "socially acceptable."

Burned Towel

Well, I just had my first kitchen fire about five minutes ago. It really wasn't a kitchen fire, I just caught one of our hand towels on fire. I'm glad to say that I didn't freak out. I let go of the pot that I was holding with the towel (the useless plastic handles of our steamer, which get nearly as hot as the metal itself), and let the towel drop into the sink, where there happened to be a dirty plate with water sitting in it, and it went out immediately. I then opened the kitchen window and the front door so the smoke detector wouldn't go off, wrung the towel out, and threw it away. Well, I was thinking about getting some new towels, anyway.

As opposed to yesterday, I've done a lot around the house today. Thom has been living in this cottage for 12 years or so and, well, no one has made that huge of an effort to keep it up on the outside. The tenants before Thom were mostly university students, including one who fell asleep in the attic on a couch with a cigarette and now the attic is burned and closed off, which is a shame, because apparently there is a lot of room up there. At any rate, earlier today I noticed that the back door was dirty, so I wiped it off with a sponge, and then I did the front door, and then cleared all the cobwebs on the front porch away, and then washed the porches down with buckets of hot water, then I scrubbed the rails...you get the idea.

I cleaned the bathroom a bit, too, by bleaching out the tub and the shower curtain, but I think I'll wait and do the rest tomorrow. The hardest part about it all was carrying the Adirondack chairs from the back porch (which is probably 10 feet from the ground) through the house and out the front door. They fit OK through the front door, but they barely fit through the back door, and only when bringing the second one back out did I figure out how to do it correctly. Oh, well, at least one thing I'm good at is learning from my mistakes.

I guess a lot has happened in the past couple of weeks that I haven't written about. Well, for one, I'm 21 as of six days ago. I didn't do any partying (not that I probably would have if I could) because I had an exam at 9am the next morning. We went to my parents' house for dinner and I drank one of their wine coolers that have been sitting in the back fridge for 6 or 7 years. Me, being the good teenager, never drank one. It tasted pretty much like kool-aid and I felt only the slightest of effects. My mom made burgers, veggie burgers for me and Thom, and Jello No-Bake cherry cheesecake, the birthday staple of our household. I got $400 as a down payment for a laptop and a $50 J Crew gift card, so I think I made out pretty well.

Thom and I are going to go on vacation next week to his boring, depressing hometown to take care of some stuff for his elderly aunt and visit his relatives. I'm looking forward to going, since it will be a change of scene, and since I grew up in a boring depressing town (only, mine is about 49,000 smaller than his) I don't mind. There's a lot of thrift shopping to be done. You see, in cities where people usually have good taste, like here, going to Goodwill or the Salvation Army sucks, but in places that are backwards and really behind the times, people just give stuff away, not knowing what they're getting rid of, only to be snagged by those of us who have good taste. Not to brag, but if you saw this city, you'd know what I mean.

In other news, we upgraded our phone service yesterday. We have DSL and were paying about $115 a month, but Thom called them up because we've been having a battle with the post office about our address (only now do they want us to add "B" to our house number) and he called them up to change the billing address. He was talking to this lady who said that they don't even offer our internet speed in their packages anymore, and that if we upgraded and got a faster speed, we'd only be paying $70 a month. Of course, it's kind of counter-intuitive, but I guess it's the same logic behind paying more for B&W camera film even though it came first. The new modem came in the mail today, so I guess Thom will set it up tonight and we'll see what happens.

Pretty soon I'm going to continue my task of making dinner. We have a couple of zucchini that need to be cooked, and I had no idea what to do with them, since Thom LOVES zucchini, but I can take it or leave it. At any rate, I decided to make a cold dish, consisting of lentils, chick peas, zucchini, and a couple cans of flavored diced tomatoes. Wish me luck because I have no idea what I'm doing. None.

Oh, and I added a counter to the bottom of this page. I haven't had a website counter in...hmm...probably 3 or 4 years now, but I guess that I'm just curious, so we'll see. That's all. I may do reviews of Anne Michaels or Dylan Thomas, and I still need to revise my Samuel Menashe review.

Samuel Menashe

One of my favorite high school English teachers disliked the haiku because she thought that it was too small a space to express anything worthwhile. Although she was ignorant of the development of the haiku and its aesthetic resonance with the Japanese, I will never hold it against her. She was right in some sense: seventeen syllables is probably too small for the English language, which is uninflected and depends on pronouns and prepositions. Not that it is impossible to write a good haiku in English. Many good English haiku have been written, but they are still dogged with the name haiku, a faint sense of awkward overreaching, and an even fainter tinge of Orientalism. The idea of compression, however, on its own terms, is a good one. Each language will compress differently: haiku of Basho, short poems of Celan, epigrams of Martial, each use language sparingly and get the greatest meaning out of the smallest medium.

Samuel Menashe's poetry is not the English haiku: it does not have rules, it is defined by no set form, it simply has a character that makes it play out the way it does, a character so developed and so distinct that would be foolish to try and imitate it. Menashe's book, put out by the American Poets Project, is the first and probably last book I will ever buy from them. I got it only because Menashe's stuff has got to be hard to find, published mostly in the UK. I am highly distrustful of The American Poets Project, a subcategory of The Library of America. They claim to put out 'affordable' volumes of our greatest writers that will last. Now, I've definitely seen some LoA volumes in used bookstores that are falling apart, but we'll not go into it. The idea that a work must be preserved in such 'finely bound' volumes is little more than a scam. Whenever I think of someone buying up the Library of America, I'm reminded of the library scene in The Great Gatsby where his guests discover that the pages of all his “classic” books haven't even been cut. Yeah, right, like I'm going to pay $45 for a partial collection of Herman Melville's works when I could find much cheaper paperback editions. Good literature is preserved in the mind, not in a volume. For the physical preservation of books, we have these things called “libraries,” which can usually afford to rebind books so that they will be around for a long time. And, besides, LoA covers are so ugly. Who picked out that font? Who thought the black cover with red, white, and blue stripes would be a good idea?

Anyway, back to Menashe. His book was worth the $20, even if a lot of the poems in it are lackluster. Lackluster is the word, as none are bad. The good ones are excellent, compressed, and masterful. Menashe is one of the few poets I know who can close a circle within a couple of lines:

A pot poured out

Fulfills its spout

This is hard to do, and I'm glad that I found Menashe at a time in my life when I knew better than to try to imitate him. The poet he reminds me of most, however, is one that I did spend a lot of time trying to imitate: Emily Dickinson. Just like Dickinson, Menashe has his own strange yet familiar form, one that's undeniably his. Although Menashe has made a great effort to get himself published (like Dickinson, although she tried to deny that she did), he's had little success, and even when we're reading these poems out of this overpriced hardcover book (cover designed by Chip Kidd, even!) we still get the feeling that we're reading from some manuscripts we found in a drawer. Like Dickinson, Menashe has spent most of his life living in one place: he's been in the same apartment for the past 50 years now and his poems have a “letter to the world” quality to them:

That statue, that cast

Of my solitude

Has found its niche

In this kitchen

Where I do not eat

Where the bathtub stands

Upon cat feet ---

I did not advance

I cannot retreat

There have been few remarkable poems in my life that have made me exclaim “This is the best poem ever” (age 15, “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”) or “Holy shit” (age 19, Byron's “Stanzas Written on the Road Between Florence and Pisa”), and this is one of them.

There are weaker poems, however, that the reviewers printed by American Poets Project, like Stephen Spender and Christopher Ricks, did not dare to point out:

Always

When I was a boy

I lost things ---

I am still

Forgetful ---

Yet I daresay

All will be found

One day

I have a feeling that this is the kind of poem that the people at the American Poets Project thought would appeal to the common reader. Menashe's gift for cramming image after image into a poem of a few syllables is not present here. We assume that the things he lost as a boy were physical, while the victims of his forgetfulness as an adult are of more gravity, and that he is depending on some sort of salvation at death to return to him what he lost or forgot. However, this is all assumption and Menashe gives us nothing definite to go on. If he had named a thing lost as a boy, and a thing forgot as an adult, and then slapped on the last three lines, it would be a much better poem, but as it stands it is vague and whatever insight into the human condition or his own that makes Menashe's poems so powerful is lost. Menashe is not one of those poets who never names what he is talking about, he can't afford to take that kind of liberty. Most poets nowadays avoid naming the subject of their poems by sketching it with a few startling adjectives or making use of the “write it, not about it” method. In the aftermath of modernism, we consider it awkward and tactless to say what we mean. The say-what-we-mean tradition, however, has an illustrious history, going back to Homer.

Of course, trying to figure out what tradition Menashe comes from is useless and trying to see him as the founder of a tradition is stupid. Now that The American Poets Project has done its job by putting him out on the scene, I sincerely hope that another, better publisher will get a clue and publish a larger body of his work at a lower price.

Done Done Done Done

Today is wet. Up at eight, put on white button-up shirt, rolled up sleeves, green pants, blue sneakers, and took an exam. The air was heavy, damp, oppressive, abrasive, and so on. Finished, got picked up by Thom, and we went downtown. We saw our friend Jason, known to us, however, as El Duce (Mussolini, not number two playing card) and walked with him to the tea house. I fell forward on the stairs. My shin now has a bump, and for a few minutes I felt how every muscle in my body had tightened (I can talk all I want about Buddhism, but my body freaked out at the first thing I didn't expect.) We got lunch and came home.

That was my last exam. I am now feeling end-of-semester awkwardness. It's always awkward. You wake up the next day, you read a book, you waste some time, and your reflex is: “Well, I guess I need to get to studying.” But there's nothing to study. Walked around for a little, restless, slept, showered, ate, had sex, slept again: still restless. I pulled a book of my shelf that I have not looked at in a long time: The Poetry of Our World. I see that it's still getting rave reviews on Amazon.com. Well, I'm glad. It's a good book. I'll call this book one of my “formative” books of poetry. Here are my “formative” books or poets:

At 13: Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost.

At 14-15: Saul Williams, Slam, and Aloud (all of which I can no longer stand), The Poetry of Our World

At 16-17: T. S. Eliot, Anne Michaels, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath

Although I have been influenced by others since, nothing that I look back on gives me that dreamy feeling of forming out of nothing, of being born out of a sack in a cosmos (that's bad but I'll leave it.) After reading through The Poetry of Our World today, I remember my first encounter with Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda, Zbigniew Herbert, Paul Celan, and Anna Akhmatova, among others. Out of all of the poems at the poets, it's sad to say that Bishop's “The Fish” stuck with me most out of a book of world poetry. She was the only one who stuck by name. The others stuck by poem. Flipping through the book now, I'm looking at the dog-ears (I used to dog-ear my books relentlessly) and I see that I have Paul Celan's section dog-eared. That's funny, because until Cassius and I stared going verse exercises with Celan's poetry a few months ago, I had only heard of him, but, really, I've read his poetry. I take that back. I took an immediate liking to Shuntaro Tanikawa as well. Out of all the prose in it, and there are many essays, the one thing that stuck with me the most was Helen Vendler's comment: “To turn over Dylan Thomas' thirty drafts of 'Fern Hill' made me feel that I had been admitted into the heart of creation,” which were the words that came directly to my mind when I found the facsimile edition of The Waste Land on the shelf in Barnes and Noble and opened it up.

At any rate, this book may be the most beat-up of all my paperbacks. There's a break in the spine that will cause the thing to split in two, sooner or later, and the pages are dirtied, the cover is creased and smudged, the corners are worn to a feathery soft consistency. Reading it, I know, I know what I must do this summer: read poetry. I will finish The Tin Drum, The Crying of Lot 49, and Titus Groan for Thom, but I must read poetry while I can. I don't mean to sound all drippy. I certainly don't want to be one of those public champions of poetry, those “Poetry can change your life!” people. I know how poetry has changed my life. It has changed the entire trajectory of my life. I really do not know what I would be doing right now if I had not found Emily Dickinson or The Waste Land. I probably would not have worked at Barnes and Noble, hence I wouldn't have met Thom, nor would I be going to the University right now.

I think I know why I'm not one of those “poetry can change your life”people. It's not that poetry can't change your life. I know first hand that it does. However, poetry is not for everyone. Some people just don't have the stomach for it, some people are too stupid for it, some people are too closed-minded for it, there are many reasons why people do not read poetry anymore. If someone wants to read poetry, I will encourage them all that I can. I've even bought several people books of poetry before. However, to assume that poetry can change anyone's life is foolish, and that's the mistake that most people make. In the grand scheme of things, poetry is just an attachment. The way I feel about poetry may be the way that some people feel about football, or poker, or gardening, or whatever they love to do. And anyone who truly, truly loves something knows this: it's far too sacred to talk about, unless it's with someone who loves it as much as you, or someone who's honestly willing to learn to love it. Period. The only person I've ever met in my whole life who was as serious about poetry as I am is Cassius. For all the crappy stuff in our “friendship,” there has never, ever been one other person who has been willing to sit there and make fun of bad poetry with me, or talk about good poetry, or weird things in the tradition of poetry and literature (like the fear that Dr. Johnson will come back from the grave and drop the atomic bon mot on you if you ever make fun of him. Wonder why no one writes bad stuff about Samuel Johnson? Now you know.) Thom, on the other hand, just has plain good taste. If I pick out a good poem and read it to him, he picks up on in immediately. The first day I met him he was telling me how he had just read Sylvia Plath's “Daddy,” and how he'd never read anything else by her, but that he thought it was so great. Ahh. A man who isn't on the “Sylvia Plath was just a bi-polar bitch who writes melodramatic poetry” trip. So refreshing.

All right, I'll wrap this up and go read some more.

The Right to What?

OK, after my nice, domestic post, here is my rant. I was thinking last night about the use of the word "rights" by people all up and down the political spectrum. It may be used like this: "It is a woman's right to decide if she wants an abortion" or like this: "It is the right of a person to use firearms to defend his or herself or property." As Americans, we're brought up believing that rights exist because our country is founded on "three inalienable rights": life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Now, say what you want, but life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are three vaguely defined, not to mention arbitrarily chosen qualities of human existence. Not that I don't like Thomas Jefferson or John Locke, in fact, it's the complete opposite. I think people should actually listen more to what Thomas Jefferson had to say, instead of saying, "well, he was a good writer, but he was a perv." There's so much more to it than that.

At any rate, TJ and Locke say that life and liberty are rights that every human being should have. Jefferson changed Locke's "property" to "the pursuit of happiness," but this is a country where a large portion of the population equates property with the pursuit of happiness, so it all works out anyway.

Let's, however, take inalienable rights down to a more basic level. Let's say that any living human being as the right to: continue living, be healthy, have enough food, have clean water, and have a reliable shelter. Now, that's not asking much. But isn't it funny that, all around the world, every day, innocent people are killed, babies are born HIV positive, people suffer from malnutrition and lack of clean water, and many have no homes or live in cardboard boxes? These basic things, requisite for people to simply live a normal life-span, not to mention live happily, are denied to millions of people around the world. Even if I say that people have these rights, that still doesn't give them what they need. The truth is that "rights" is an empty word.

This country has gone on long enough with its entitlement trip. I'm sure that at some point in the last couple of years, people were saying that it was the right of PC users to be able to use iPods. People in this country never tire of saying that it's their right to buy a house and a vehicle as big as they want, which will take up more energy than they will ever need.


I say that if we are interested in improving the human condition, we should stop using this term, which has done just as much evil, if not more, than it has good. We've been battling long enough about who has rights to what. Let's change the terms, get everyone who has never struggled to live off the idea that they are intrinsically entitled to anything, and we'll go from there.

Pre-Birthday

Soundtrack as I type this post: dogs barking, my landlord John is playing his mandolin and the Timberlake kids playing in front of their house. Yes, my neighbors are called The Timberlakes, and yes, it's the kind of neighborhood you'd expect a family of Timberlakes to live in. At least it's quiet. I've opened the front and back doors of the cottage to let some fresh air through. I took my second to last exam today, came home at 11:30, received a kiss from Thom as he was rushing out the door, cleaned up the house, looked around on the internet a bit,and then went back to school at 2, studied and read until 5, when I had my very first “meeting” of the small, girly literary mag I joined. I'm usually not into doing group projects, or joining organizations at school, but at the university, there are so many organizations about so many things that you'd be a doofus, really, not to join. So, I'm the staff of a lit mag, and I figure if a join a political or religious organization and a club, I'll be set. I got the new issue, met a couple of people, distributed the issue in the library and stuff, and went on my way. Later, I was looking at it and saw that my name wasn't on the staff list, even though there was stuff in there that I contributed. Oh, well. It's probably better that way.

It was overcast for two days straight, and it didn't look like it was going to ease up at all this morning, but around 1, the sun came out and the temperature jumped up 15 or 20 degrees and it turned into a nice day. Not too hot, not too cold, and you were able to sit in the sun without being hot. It was nice.

I ran into Cassius today in the library. He complimented my haircut (over the course of the semester, my straight brown hair has gone from mid-back length, no bangs, to shoulder length, with bangs, to jaw length with bangs, to, as of last Thursday, the length of a boy's haircut), and asked me if we were still friends. I think it would be pretty stupid of me to cut him off, since he and I frequent the same places, but I definitely was not eager to say, “Oh, yes yes! Of course I'm your friend!” I just made a motion that said, “kind of,” and left it at that. I don't mind talking to him about literature and stuff, when I randomly run into him, but he and I are not going to be doing the hanging out that we used to. Since our “altercation,” I've found out from several sources that he's basically a creepy guy (something I knew already and ignored) and that more people than Thom have wanted me to stay away from him. Well, I saw the signs and I duly ignored them, so I guess this is what I get. I'm really not angry, just embarrassed.

At any rate, I must go study for my last exam. Considering that tomorrow is my birthday AND Thom has the day off, I can't imagine that I'll get the optimum amount of studying done.

Milton

“The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid, of Plato & Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by the artifice against the Sublime of the Bible; but when the New Age is at leisure to Pronounce, all will be set right, & those Grand Works of the more ancient & consciously & professedly Inspired Men will hold their proper ran, & the Daughters of Memory still become the Daughters of Inspiration. Shakespeare & Milton were both curb'd by the general malady & infections from the silly Greek & Latin slaves of the Sword.”

I cannot say that I agree with Blake about the writings of Homer, Ovid, Plato, and Cicero. I like all four, the third much less than the others, though. And I definitely do not agree with Blake about the sublimity of the Bible. I mean, it has its moments as a literary work. Parts of it are really beautiful. But, seeing as how the Bible is such a huge, unwieldy, and vague document, one must at least give Homer, Ovid, Plato, and Cicero some points for uniformity. I do agree with Blake, however, about the tyranny of tradition. This is from the preface Blake's “epic poem” Milton, in which Blake is more or less possessed by the soul of Milton so that he can correct the “errors” of Paradise Lost. Blake wrote it from 1804-08, when the Romantic movement in English literature, as we know it, had only been around a couple of years. Blake wrote this coming off the age of the Augustans. I cannot imagine living in the time of the Augustans, who believed that the classical authors had, in essence, ended western literature and that anything modern would only be footnotes. All forms were prescribed: odes, elegies, epics, tragedies, comedies, etc.

I just realized today how unreliable the Canon is. Not that the Canon is made up of bad stuff, but that it is necessarily exclusive. There are so many minor works of literature, good, reliable, influential, but unlucky, that will never be canonized, and they will be forgotten. To rely exclusively on such a thing as the Canon, in my view, doesn't make very much sense.

Ok, this is just a big ramble, I know. I think I'm just feeling now what T. S. Eliot said he felt in 1908: that I have no place to start from. “I have shored these fragments against my ruins”: I pieced together my own canon, because the Canon of Everybody Else is too crowded. Too many people are getting in on that action. Or, better, to use another quote from Blake: “I must create my own System or be enslaved by another man's.” The poetry scene right now is so boring because it is a scene. I've got nowhere to start from, so I'll just have to make it up. Not that I've (ever) written any good poetry, but mine is coming from a much different place than everyone else's, I think. I almost automatically go for verse now, structure of some kind, oh me, the champion of free verse at 15. Now I'm almost 21 and I still haven't found any answers. Actually, I wrote a lot more back then.

At any rate, I'm going to end this arbitrarily and go study for my exam tomorrow. Writing something and knowing that someone else will read it is a good feeling, even if it is only Aurelius, even if it is only for an exam.

Suffrugate City

Yesterday was our anniversary. Thom couldn't get off work, but we still had a good time after he got home. I stayed in and studied all day, made some miso soup with HUGE chunks of kombu floating around in it. Man, do not underestimate the ability of Japanese seaweed to expand when you cook it. I studied more and read out of the Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes before going to bed while Thom did some stock research. We thought about going down to the fated parking lot for a while and hanging out, but it was cold and rainy, so we didn't.

This morning we got up at 10, way too late in my book, and went downtown to get some coffee, much needed by both parties. We saw several friends up and down the mall. It seems that we can't go to the mall without seeing someone we know. Oh, well, I'm not going to complain about having friends.

I now have two exams to go: English lit and Japanese lit. The former tomorrow, the latter on Thursday, with my 21st birthday in between. I actually got a birthday card from the president of the University, 'wishing me to have a happy birthday and celebrate responsibly.' Well, considering that I have an exam at 9AM the next morning, I think I will be celebrating responsibly. We're just going out to my parent's house for dinner. Maybe they'll give me some wine, or one of those strawberry daiquiris that have been hanging out in the back fridge for about six years. Who knows.

Yesterday was the anniversary of such a landmark in my life that I had to go back and look through my old journals. What a year. That's why I posted those dopey poems and the 'Where I am' list. I showed that to Thom. He found it amusing. At any rate, I have to get back to studying. I'll have the house to myself all night and I had better make good use of it.

Random Poem from 11/27/04

(My Brother, Franz Kafka)


Our throats were lined with dust,
Our breath made not a sound,
So lifeless were our bodies
As we lay upon the ground.
We made no smell or move
And were ignored and leaped
By the wild wolf hounds
Running to the town.

Random Poem from 12/21/04

Like a fool I threw my words
Like corn-seed in the grass,
To be eaten by the wild birds
Or crushed as people passed.

I threw them without thought or need
Of tilling any land.
I threw them out with graceless speed
And with no skill of hand.

But now that I have met with you
My words have so improved
that could I give you reason to care
You might, in fact, be moved.

I've fashioned all my going words,
Like those I speak of you.
Unlike the seed, they're now like flocks
I tend lovingly to.

Because every word or thought of you
I've rendered by such art
That in or out, 'fore mind or mouth,
It tugs first at my heart.

Until now, I had totally forgotten about that poem. I vaguely remember writing it in the middle of the night, in one of my many noctural sessions at the time. If you couldn't pick up on it, it was to a guy that I had a crush on and felt infinitely inferior to. It's not good at all, but I was amused at finding it, so I put it up.

Where I am

I found this from my old journal:


4/27/05 Wednesday

Where I Am

1. Last week of 4th semester at P —
2. Thirteen days away from being twenty.
3. Waiting to hear from U —
   
4. Just ended with Mr. B —
5. Slightly smouldering over B —
6. I like my body, especially with clothes.
7. Wounds: left big toe on bush stump, elbow on picinic table, picked left thumb by the nail raw
8. Actively reading: nothing
9. Reading Philosophies of Art and Beauty, finishing The Box Man, need to finish To the Finland Station.
10. Moods are up and down, but have been consitently pleasant for three days now.
11. Not anxious, except about U —
12. OK at Latin
13. Horrible at Greek
14. No new love interest
15. No religion
16. I just saw a crow tree a squirrel. Very interesting.

Well, here's the follow up:

1. Last week of 1st semester at U —
2. Three days away from being twenty-one.
3. Got into U —, but only after a wait of several months and several angry emails.
4. Met Thom in the parking lot one year ago today
5. Apathetic about friendship with Cassius
6. I like my body, especially without clothes
7. Wounds: picking at right middle finger.
8. Actively reading: nothing.
9. Reading: for my exams.
10. Moods are good for the most part.
11. A little anxious, but not overall.
12. About 10 times better at Latin than I was, but still OK at it.
13. Completely forgotten Greek, forgetting my one semester of German.
14. Engaged. Will be married a year from today.
15. Buddhist leanings.
16. Vegetarian.
17. I see squirrels all the time. They are like my power animal. How wierd that I was writing about it a year ago.
    

A Ghost is Born

The day before yesterday I was on grounds studying for my Renaissance and the Epic class when I decided to get my hair cut again. This time I went in and told the lady to give me a boy's haircut, which is the shortest I've ever gotten it. I'm really pleased, though. I feel so free. It's not on my neck, over my ears, or in my face. I was a bit apprehensive at first, but I've grown into it. That night I pulled out Wilco's A Ghost is Born to listen to. Thom had never heard it before so we sat there and listened to it. What a great album, I forgot how good it was. Thom was really impressed, too.

I met with Aurelius today to talk about the upcoming exam. We also just sat there and talked. I'm really glad that, out of all 20 sections for this class, I got Aurelius as a TA. So much of our lives, good and bad, seem to be dictated by chance. The completely different way of looking at it is that our lives are dictated by karma. Either way, I'm still amazed at how much people agonize over matters of chance. If it IS chance, then what could you have done about it? If it's karma, then you did it to yourself, so suffer through it as best as you can, ask people for help, but don't despair. So much easier said than done. At any rate, whether it was good karma or good luck, I'm glad that I met Aurelius. It's just nice to feel that you have an ally. I've actually got many allies, just all in different sectors of my life.

After I got home I folded the laundry, ate, got a shower. I still have to get down to doing a lot of studying. Now that I'm not really tired, since I also took a nap, I think I should be able to. Thom got off of work seven minutes ago and should be home soon. It rained here. It is now very green and the most humid day so far this year.

Time Takes Time, You Know

I'm so glad that today is over. Last night I worked on my 16 page paper till 12:30, and after desperately trying to regain my second wind with dinner and black tea, I just gave up and went to bed and woke up at 6:30 to eke out a few more pages and finish it. I had finished my 3 page paper the day before, so I just attached both papers to an email to myself and sent it. When I got to school and went to print out the three page paper, I opened up the file and found that it was an older, unfinished version from a few days ago. I called home, thinking that if the full version was on the computer and I attached the wrong file, Thom could email me the full one. But no, it was not there. So I had to go see my professor and tell her what happened. After that I went to take my Latin test, which wasn't really that bad. Between the part I took yesterday and the part I took today, I think I did pretty well. After that, I went to Buddhism class, which was just a review session, and then to Epic class, to turn in my epic 16 page paper, talk about The Waste Land, and get out of there.

On days when Thom is at work when I get off of school, I walk home. I live way too close to pay $100 a semester for a parking pass and pollute the ozone layer and use more gas, but at the same time, even though I'm really close, the university bus doesn't come out to my house. Not close enough for it, yet not far away enough, either. I can get a city bus there, but I'd have to sit on it for an hour before the loop came around again. Oh, well, I need the exercise anyway. I totally booked it home today because I wanted to finish re-writing that paper as soon as possible and send it to my professor.

After I finished the paper and sent it, I thought, "wow, the semester's over." It isn't technically. After all, I have exams, the first one being the day after tomorrow, but by next Thursday, I'll not only be 21, but I'll be DONE. (OK, I know my profile says that I'm 21 already, but that's because I didn't feel like writing 20 and then having to change it.) I laid down on the bed for a little while and then got up to clean. The cottage has gotten pretty messy over the past few days, since Thom's been working and I've been too busy to even wash dishes or put clothes away. OK, I know I'm not too busy to do that, but I FEEL I'm too busy to do it. Once I got off the bed, the cottage was straightened back up again in five minutes. I'm going to make an entry about the cottage, tonight I think. I've wanted to do it for a few days now, but haven't gotten around to it. Maybe I can put some pictures up, but I really just wanted to describe it.

Untitled, May 1st

No clouds but one small scuttle
not thick enough for shade,
so far away they're
dimensionless, in fact,
sliding like a foggy
glass door frigate.
Don't be fooled,
I exist for the same reason.
I slide a little,
yes, me,
against the sky.

Paper Time

My cold has gotten much better since yesterday. My nose is still a little runny, but my throat isn't nearly as sore. I'm just talking with a lower, huskier voice today. So today I had my last class of my English lit lecture, and I also took the first part of my Latin exam. I actually did really well on the Latin, I think, at least. It was just a bunch of forms and vocabulary.

Thom helped me study for the Latin last night. We went over my vocabulary words right before I went to bed by lying in the bed next to one another as he read (or tried to read) words from my vocab list. It's not that pronouncing Latin is really hard, since no one actually knows how to do it. Usually, we just bastardize it in class, and just follow the basic rules: v's sound like w's, c's always sound like k's, j's and i's at the beginning of words always sound like y's, so some things just sound wierd to us: Yulius Kaesar said "weni, widi, wiki." I'm not kidding.

My work for the day has been cut out for me: finish two papers. One paper is only three pages, and I already have three and a half, so that's no big deal. The other one is 16 pages, and I have 11 on that one, so it'll be the bulk of my work. After that I can simply start studying for exams after I get out of class tomorrow. I am SO ready for the semester to end, and I've been ready for a few weeks. But just now I'm starting to feel the need for summer. When I signed up for classes in mid-April, I was simply ready for the next semester to begin.

My last exam is the morning of the 11th, and later the next week we'll go on a little vacation before I start to work again. Ahh...just a few days to sit around and do NOTHING. I'm so grateful. I'll probably work on the template to this blog. Not that I don't like this one, since it's super minimal, but since I have the chance to actually mess with the look, I figure I might as well while I'm able.