Dark is when the sun is down.
Dark is when the lights are off.
Dark is black.
Dark is cobalt blue.
Dark is when you write in black, because black is a dark color.
Dark is scary monsters.
Dark is black.
Dark is dark stripes.
Dark is caves.
Dark is hair, because your hair is dark, Daddy.
Dark is maroon.
Dark is purple.
Dark is dark green.
Dark is black.
We are proud to announce the arrival on Tuesday April 13 of Cooper Robert Bennett Burt, 7lbs 5oz 19″ and all excitement, even when he is sleeping (it’s a mellow excitement).
More news as it happens! And even more on our facebook feeds, where much, or most, of the personal and family information that used to go here has migrated. For example, you’ll find some truly beautiful baby pictures there.
Nathan and Jessie and I spent the morning on a whale watch with Grammy and Kevin, had lunch at the place that says it invented fried clams, and– rather than dinner– had something better than dinner: a rock show at the Lowell Spinners field, with K and W (friends), and with Conor Oberst, whose work I still love, and Wilco, whose new record is just fine. We are having a summer!
During the brief interval of inaction at home this afternoon Nathan lay down in a dark room on a “beach” made of pillows and told me, and then told Jessie and Grammy, all about the African hawk seagull, whose friends are regular seagulls, but who is different from the regular seagull species: the African hawk seagull is purple and orange, has a light in the tail like a firefly, eats blowfish which it finds by diving into blowfish schools, and lives on the moon. I hope this sort of imagination persists into adulthood. Or else I hope for something very like it.
If you know Else Minarik’s Little Bear (the original series of four linked illustrated stories for small children, not the sequels) you probably think of it as a cute, warm story– certainly that’s what I expected when Jessie brought it home for Nathan, and that’s right as far as it goes. But when I realized that reading it all the way through, to Nathan, made me cry more than once, my interpretive organ got to work: what’s so profound, or so sad, or so happy, about it? Why does it feel as profound as (less mysteriously) The Giving Tree, a book that really is sad (so much so that I think it’s not really for kids), whereas Little Bear is consoling, and happy at last?
If you don’t know Little Bear, this won’t make any sense. If you do, try these hypotheses: in the world of Little Bear and Mother Bear, you can only become what you are: the best coat is your fur, the best planet to visit (the only planet you can visit) the Earth you know. Moreover– as Little Bear learns when he can’t sleep– the only wish that is ever granted to us is the wish for stories; and the only stories we end up hearing, the only stories we understand or want to hear, are stories about ourselves.
Nathan, by the way, loves it: he paid me the great compliment, tonight, of calling me Father Bear.
No, we have not taken a sudden dislike to blogging– we’re just so busy we can’t see straight. Some snips, some clips, some briefer-than-brief news:
For about a month now every object that comes into Nathan’s hands has turned into a guitar: this week he seems to have decided to play his real (toddler-sized, or ukelele-sized) guitars, and to turn other objects into drums. It gets out physical energy, but will it lead to a real drum kit, if it continues? If so, we’ll have to finish the basement by the time he hits fifth grade. He also, as always, loves dancing: watch him dancing at Uncle Jon’s wedding, and dig the nonpareil glee.
Book blogging continues to expand– partly through Jessie, and partly not, I’m discovering book blogs way faster than I can read them. Check out this Brooklyn bookstore book blog, which I encountered via Tom Rayfield, the person who is not me and yet has written a book called Parallel Play.
Also in the book-blog world, but in another corner entirely: Harvard’s Houghton Library, which collects rare books and manuscripts (they own tons and tons– Keats, Empson, Robert Lowell, Emily Dickinson, etc. etc.) has a modern acquisitions blog. Who knew?
I’m in the current London Review of Books, discussing Philip K. Dick and (less extensively, alas) James Tiptree; alas, too, non-subscribers can’t read it online. (You may just have to read the print version. Horrors!)
I’m in the current Believer praising Jenny Browne, potentially the only poet who cares more than I do (and I know that she cares more than I do) about the San Antonio Silver Stars. (In my defense, I began to write about her poetry, and had decided I liked it, before I had any idea that she cared about them.)
I’m also at Beacon Broadside today, celebrating GLBTQ poetry, and proud to be there. (There’s a poem in the new Yale Review, too, but the current t-of-c isn’t online.)
I’m told that blogging makes people feel better, but that hours staring at the Internet makes people feel worse, and that there are studies out now that prove both. I believe it.
I had nothing to do with this impromptu banner art, but having seen it, I almost wish I did.
We are going to hang out with Nathan at home for most of the summer (he’s taking a break from day care, i.e., school, and we’ve arranged our schedules so it makes sense, for these two months alone). I’m happy we’re going that route, but happy, too, that we can stop by school frequently (his school seems to want us to do so) in July and August, so that he can hang out with his friends. I had no idea that toddlers could be so extroverted– or, simply, so much fun.
We just came back from seeing Jessie’s mom and stepdad reenacting social dancing from the late 1830s at Old Sturbridge Village. We liked it. Nathan liked it, mostly because he saw his Grammy and Kevin, but also because he could watch a fiddler. War reenactors get attention all the time: how about some props for the people who learn some social history, make or otherwise acquire elaborate period costume, and re-enact the arts of peace?
I’m in the Sunday Book Review praising August Kleinzahler, whose new book you should read even if you have all the old ones, since some of the new poems in it stand among his best (especially the ones about his marriage– I couldn’t imagine him writing poems about married love at all, let alone good ones, until I saw that he had done just that).
I’m also in the new Believer praising Juliana Spahr, and on the Poetry Magazine website admiring A. R. Ammons, in a piece about Ammons’ superb book A Coast of Trees. Lots of praise, I know. Maybe I should attack something soon. Or not.
Here’s an attack worth reading, though not from me: Linh Dinh disembowels the commercially successful translations and adaptations John Balaban has been bringing into American English from Vietnamese. I hope Balaban responds.
I just finished Robert Markley’s good book about Mars in fiction and in popular science. I recommend it highly if and only if you read seriously academic books, either lit-crit or history or history-of-science, for pleasure. It is not a sexy exciting fast read. It is a fine book with multiple strong arguments and memorable discoveries in every chapter– and, since so much of the writing Markley deals with is not known for the verve of its style, it’s the sort of book (more commonly written by historians than by lit-crit types) that makes me glad he’s read all these books so that I don’t have to read them all myself. (He’s also got something to say about the usual suspects of quality sf– Wells, for example, and Kim Stanley Robinson.)
And speaking of Mars, the University of Arizona is going there. I can’t say I’ll follow the Phoenix lander’s descent live, but I will be reading about it with attention– and some anxiety. Imagine the life of a xenogeologist, or areologist: years and millions of dollars on each mission, and a serious chance, with each attempt at a landing, that it will all go away.
I woke up one morning and found myself responsible for a short article in the forthcoming revision of this famous book: it’s the article on the word “refrain.” While the first edition of that book covered poetry in European languages, the current edition looks all over the globe, at least some of the time, and the next one ought to do so more thoroughly, which means that not even Auerbach read all the languages the volume should cover. And certainly I’m no Auerbach.
So: if you know anything about refrains (chorus, “burdens,” substantial repetitions of other kinds) in the poetry of non-Western languages– most of all, but not only, in South Asian writing– please let me know what you know, briefly, and fast. I’m not depending on blogging for such information– but I do like help from friends.
In other matters: we’ve been having fun but too busy to post, what with Jessie’s Beacon blog and with my other blogging gig (where my term has expired, though I’ll continue to post there and then). In fact, I’ve been too busy to post much at our other other blogging gig, a busyness which would distress me a lot were it permanent (fortunately Helen Wheelock is on the case). Coming up here sometime in the next ten days: lots of links to new writing by me (some of it online), and maybe an announcement about a CD– and, of course, more on Nathan’s burgeoning musical career.
Upcoming gigs and new writings online by us: I’m in the new Believer on Noah Eli Gordon, whose book with a fiddle in its title I liked a lot; at Harriet, I recommend a Romany poet (not Roman; Romany). I’m also going to be at the Wallace Stevens society session next Saturday afternoon at the Modern Language Ass’n Big Thing in Chicago, the first time I’ve been to the MLA in eight years in which I was neither seeking a job, nor interviewing job-seekers for Macalester. I’ll be talking about Connecticut in Stevens’ late poems. And speaking of Macalester, the Scots are finally winning some women’s hoops games. You had to wait till after we left, didn’t you?
All this is by way of ground-clearing so I can talk about what’s really fascinating this minute: Nathan’s new set of arts-related behaviors. This afternoon he woke up from his nap and told me he had “a dream, with letters– C and D.” Whenever we look at pictures, or at picture books (e.g. Frog and Toad, a set of kids playing basketball) he tells us that one of the bigger people or creatures is the littlest one’s mommy (or, usually on a second try, his daddy).
He’s long been able to recognize himself in photographs, but now he looks at photographs of himself from 2006 and says “That’s Nathan– little.” This morning he named his stuffed orangutan: the orangutan’s name, we now know, is “Owie.”
And most recently– that is, say, two hours ago– he made up his first song: given an out-of-tune guitar to play with (he’ll be getting a sturdy toy banjo for Xmas, but he doesn’t know that yet: this was a closely supervised real guitar) and about twenty minutes to touch the strings, he came up with a song called “My Tuba.”
He knows it’s his song, too– he’ll sing it again if you ask (while playing guitar). Here are the lyrics: “My tuba, my tuba, my tuba, my tuba, Mommy tuba, Daddy tuba, Nathan tuba, my tuba.” Elvis Costello had better watch his back.
Feeling very meta, very thankful, and just a bit frustrated as school rolls back around…
Just before Thanksgiving I posted about Adrienne Rich to the Beacon blog. I haven’t read Rich’s very new book yet; if you have, let me know what you think.
Sally Williams, who used to be my editor at the Strib in Minnesota, and who is a very thoughtful and very busy person, has a useful take on the recent NEA report that says kids have stopped reading. (My own take came last week.)
This Friday I sit on what appears to be my first dissertation orals committee. Weird feeling. A bit like Halloween: I’m going to dress up as a grown-up. (Giving lecture classes doesn’t feel half as weird, perhaps because I’ve been doing it intermittently without meaning to all my life. Which either means that I talk far more than I listen, which is a character flaw, or that I’m in the right line of work.)
Am I derelict and irresponsible because there are boxes of books I still haven’t unpacked? Probably. I felt so this afternoon, as I kept looking for Andrew Osborn’s chapbook Plato’s Aviary, trying to find his poem “Self-Portrait as Amputee.” The book has amputated itself from our collection, apparently, or flown away… if only our cats could shelf-read and alphabetize!
On the other hand, it’s good to be home.