Bloxistential crisis

So. Not a lot of blogging of late. And I'm not really feeling exercised about that. I'm not really sure what this blog is for anymore. As you may recall, I started it as a valve for book-writing anxiety. But now my book has been burnt down and reborn and rebuilt and submitted and somewhere along that way the anxiety got jettisoned. I'm not really interested in journaling, and even if I were to treat this blog as a journal, my days are pretty much all the same, as I imagine all of our days are, and those departures from routine are probably more interesting as experiences than as reports anyway. I could blog about academia and its issues, but other bloggers do that far better and with far more thoroughness than I have interest or time to do. I could blog about teaching, but what's to say?: I love teaching, and, Grading takes time. I could easily focus on the food-porn, but again, other people already do that well and also I won't trouble myself to take pictures and besides I run out of interest and it starts to sound like I'm just congratulating myself on eating good things. (On tap for tonight: pumpkin gnocchi with a browned butter and brown sugar sauce, raisins, and crisp-fried sage leaves.) I could de-anonymize and turn this blog into some sort of PR organ to complement my real website, but I don't actually care about the Po-Biz, so I'm not sure what I'd say beyond promoting readings which my website already does.

The thing is that I have really valued the perspective of folks I've got to know through this blog, and I'd hate to lose that. But it's hard to justify the time-expenditure of blogging, and hard to commit to making a public utterance that's worth someone else's reading time.

Maybe I'll just stop feeling like this is an obligation, and post something when I feel moved to do so.

Juiced.

12 quarts of grape juice bottled and stored. Next up: apples.

From the Department of Shortsighted Civic Zoning

Just got back from Neruda-town, where on the main thoroughfare there is a crematorium next door to the Holocaust Museum.

My last month.

Grade, grade, race to keep up with reading for my classes, grade, homework with kids, grade, sneak time to write, grade, five days with Neruda here, catch up in both grading and reading after that pleasant but ill-timed lull, grade, get neutered, grade, cook some amazing soups, grade, finish conclusion, send manuscript off to cool editor at Big UP, grade, skydive.






_____________________________
* I don't mean to be crass or glib or TMI re: the "get neutered" thing; I had this procedure done, relatively recent in development, technically called "permanent transcervical sterilization." So noninvasive, such quick recovery (which is to say, immediate), and so freaking humane. I think its development constitutes a real and qualitative advance in women's reproductive health, and I'm really, really impressed. I have this impulse to let all the women know about it, because I wouldn't have known it existed if I didn't go digging for options.

Conclusion musings

No one really writes on Herrick, and no one really has for years. He's so out of critical fashion. Why is that? The poetry seems too cute, too playful, too much like "light" verse?

Thom Gunn used to say that Herrick is the English poet most perfect in his craft.

Grindstone.

Okay, so I bought myself a little time to write a real conclusion. Actually, that phrasing makes it sound like it was some kind of effort. I explained that my conclusion wasn't done, and the editor said, in effect, no big deal, send the whole thing when you're done. So that's what I'll do.

I'm going to try to impose, again, the paragraph-a-day rule that has served me well in the past. I only have to produce about 20 more pages, so it shouldn't even take more than three or four weeks. But have I mentioned: The. Grading. Oh. My. Lord. The. Grading.

Those people who can churn out fully-formed articles during the school year? During a semester? They're freaks.

Heh.

And just for the record, I remember well the night this was originally broadcast. I was glued to it. Glued, I say.

*

I am haunted by the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. In college, I had been a student leader of Amnesty International, and I had involved myself pretty actively in a number of international circumstances of injustice. I was not naive about the inhumanity that raged among the ranks of humanity, but still I watched that terrible mass-murder unfold over its hundred days with a mixture of astonishment and rage and horror and impotence. The Hutus were killing Tutsis in Uganda. Thousands of them, indiscriminately, to say nothing of the brutal ancillary violence against women. Every day. Until almost a million people had been butchered. A million in a hundred days. But nobody did anything. No jets were scrambled. Many days, it wasn't even a topic on the nightly news. And what was I going to do, big shot former human rights organizer that I was?-- Really, I was just a 23-year-old kid in a politically inconsequential section of the country, vaguely headed for grad school, with no money, no connections, no army at my disposal. I could only watch, futilely, dumbly. It still makes me physically sick to think of it.

*

When 9/11 happened, I was living in California. I had an infant. Every night I turned off the phones so no one could wake us early, sleep-deprived as we all were. I didn't really have time to watch television. By the time I knew that anything had happened in New York or Washington or Pennsylvania, it was after 10am Pacific time--1pm on the east coast. In other words, I didn't experience the events of that day in progress. I didn't have the jolt to the guts at the realization that something terribly wrong was unfolding before my eyes. I didn't have the transfixed numbness of watching the towers fall. I didn't know anyone who worked in any of those places. I didn't even know anyone who lived in those places. It was, in many ways for me, like a television show--a narrative I didn't feel I had any right to claim ownership over or sentimentalize, because I had and continue to have no more personal connection to the events of 9/11 than I had to the events in Rwanda. And if I allowed myself to grieve fully over Rwanda, the scope of it would incapacitate me.

*

Over this past weekend I attended a performance of John Adams' majestic piece "On the Transmigration of Souls." Adams was commissioned to write the piece after 9/11. It's a discomfiting and beautiful work, filled with city noise and lamentation and also anger and discord, and also transcendent hope. As I was sitting there in the great symphony hall, I thought that what that music resembled more than anything else in my aesthetic experience was a cathedral of sound. All echo and aspiring and sonic contradiction with a fundamental through-line of drone. It's not, at the end of the day, a work about 9/11. It's about the tension between the urge to monumentalize and the ephemerality of mortal life. It valorizes the cry without pretending to efficacy.

*

No mojo

So I brought home a batch of diagnostic short research papers from one of my classes on Thursday afternoon... And haven't looked at them since. I cannot work up the energy to deal with these papers. I so do not have the Eye of the Tiger, and it's only the second week of the semester, of the academic YEAR, for crying out loud.

Sigh.

If only someone would come do all the laundry, and wash my damned dishes.

Delight.

Have y'all seen this?