Accommodatingly

Nathan has been doing, and learning, cute things faster than we can post them– but now that we’re back from Passover weekend with Bubbe and Zayde, we can at least run the highlights. (Also I have a couple of new-ish works in prose and verse out, but they’ll have to wait and then come in on the second chorus.)

1. Much of what Nathan saw on Thursday and Friday was “very looking,” as in “That’s a very looking flower!” “That’s a really very looking airplane!” “Does very looking mean it’s pretty?” “Yeah.” The young man digs his non-finite verbs.

2. Nathan slept in a big boy bed at Bubbe and Zayde’s house. On Friday he woke up from his nap in a big boy bed and said “A leaf comes from a tree! A stick comes from a tree too!” Was he thinking of family trees? Or of the fertile springtime plant life in Washington DC (whose pollen made our stay there just a bit less fun)?

3.  Nathan also had some trouble getting to sleep on the night of the Bubbe and Zayde seder– no surprise, given the continuing hubbub downstairs. So Jessie decided to ask him whether the loud talking downstairs bothered him. Nathan (rather sleepily) responded: “I like the loud!” (I like the loud too.)

4. I’m in the last-but-one TLS writing about John Ashbery, the last-but-one issue of the LRB with a poem (poem itself not online, sorry), and the new issue of Ploughshares (again, poem not online). And, in very academic news, I’ve just had an essay about Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Park and Hartford accepted at ELH.

5. My brief, snippy post at the Columbia University Press blog has generated an absurdly long
discussion thread over at the Valve, a longer discussion than I’ve ever seen (online) about anything else I’ve ever put up on the Web… which sort of proves the point my Columbia post was making: people like arguments.

6. Two books that just came in the mail, about which I hope I’ll have something to say somewhere soon: Devin Johnston’s third book, which I already prefer to his other two (some of you know him for the cool press that he runs), and Sandra Beasley’s first.

Having decided that– while we like Tilly and the Wall a great deal– we wouldn’t much enjoy a Tilly show that began sometime after 11pm, Jessie and I took advantage of my parents’ presence here, not to go out and paint the town some late-model indie-rock shade of red, but just to have a neat meal.

The place we chose for our neat meal, the Brazilian restaurant Muqueca, turned to have surely the best Brazilian food we have ever eaten, and probably the best meal we have had in any restaurant since we moved here. I’d recommend everything (even the light, cruncy frog legs), and I would recommend that you not tell your friends, since if the place becomes too popular Jessie and I won’t be able to go back there again and again.

I’m in the new Boston Review on Laura Kasischke, [UPDATE: LINK NOW CORRECT] along with a vivid and neatly challenging poem by my way-talented former student Linnea Ogden: if you pick up the print issue, you can read it while you wait to be seated for awesome Brazilian food.

(I’m still hoping to see one or two of you at this event at BU on Monday afternoon.)

Having decided that– while we like Tilly and the Wall a great deal– we wouldn’t much enjoy a Tilly show that began sometime after 11pm, Jessie and I took advantage of my parents’ presence here, not to go out and paint the town some late-model indie-rock shade of red, but just to have a neat meal.

The place we chose for our neat meal, the Brazilian restaurant Muqueca, turned to have surely the best Brazilian food we have ever eaten, and probably the best meal we have had in any restaurant since we moved here. I’d recommend everything (even the light, cruncy frog legs), and I would recommend that you not tell your friends, since if the place becomes too popular Jessie and I won’t be able to go back there again and again.

I’m in the new Boston Review on Laura Kasischke, along with a vivid and neatly challenging poem by my way-talented former student Linnea Ogden: if you pick up the print issue, you can read it while you wait to be seated for awesome Brazilian food.

(I’m still hoping to see one or two of you at this event at BU on Monday afternoon.)

Steve will be reading at Boston University this Monday March 24, at 5pm in the Katzenberg Center, 871 Commonwealth Ave., Boston. Also reading: David Blair, whose new book of poems looks worth checking out.

Steve will then be reading, and giving a talk or two, at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh on Thursday March 27 (evening) and Friday March 28 (during the day). That distinguished university and its English department perhaps have some issues with their website, but if you’re in or near Pbgh and want to come, you can probably get the complete where and when right here. I’m looking forward to the event quite a bit, especially since I get to see this scholar and this fiction writer, and with luck this Jewish historian too.

At Beacon Broadside, the latest of many cool posts is an expert examination of political dreams. If you woke up last night believing that Barack Obama was hurrying to Christina’s in Inman Square in order to bring you ice cream, and John McCain was blocking traffic and preventing him, that probably means that you’ve been eating too much ice cream from Christina’s great rival, Toscanini’s. And by “you,” of course, I mean “I.”

Also at Beacon Broadside: a very funny anecdote, self-analysis and warning from a memoirist who is a lesbian mom.

Finally, an NPR-style puzzle: Nathan has a set of big, colorful wooden letters with which we spell words— but we can’t spell, or can’t spell accurately, some of his favorite (for example, “MOMMY”) because we only have one of each letter of the alphabet in that particular carved letter-set. What’s the longest word in English that we could spell with that set (that is, the longest word in English which uses no letter of the alphabet more than once)? Without trying too hard, we came up with at least one twelve-letter word you can say on the radio, and with one fifteen-letter word you certainly can’t.

Jessica Bennett is now the second female wrestler in Connecticut history to win a state-level medal; her coach credits “technique, vision and dedication.” More technique, vision, and dedication, as always, at Beacon Broadside, where– among recent posts– I was especially struck by this one, which begins: “It’s an interesting historical moment to be a white mother of a Black child.”

New work by Steve online in the last few weeks: on Robert Creeley, on DC history (thanks, Zach!), on science-fictional poetry, on several poems (with two poems of my own) in the brand-new Drunken Boat, on poetry in general (up since December). I’m also in the new Pleiades, though not online, and I’m coaching high school swimming in Winona, and rowing in New Zealand. I don’t know where I find the time. (The things you learn when you sign up for Google Alerts.) UPDATE: I’m also in the current issue of Modern Philology, though you may need to sign in through certain academic websites in order to see the articles there.

Alison Frank, whom I knew in grade school, and whom we see all the time at Nathan’s school (because she has a child there too), appears as a reviewer on H-Net, more than once, and as the author of a book reviewed. Go Alison!

And finally– I should have linked to this blog months ago, but better late than ruined by inappropriate ethics rules: if you are at all interested in the taking of oral histories, the conduct of research in history, folklore and the social sciences, and the weird rules that threaten all those things, you ought to be reading Zach’s Institutional Review Blog. I know I will be.

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.

Well of course I thought highly of today’s post at Beacon Broadside, about an education official in Texas who got fired for forwarding an email about a speaker who argues against creationists. But it’s not what I think that matters, in such matters: it’s what they think at Pharyngula, the very good and hugely popular science blog by P. Z. Myers, whose referral today broke records for Beacon’s blog traffic. Thanks, Pharyngula! (More science posts on the way?)

Also around the Web from one or both of us: I recommend more poetry books at Harriet, as do Ange and my other co-bloggers there; Mike puts online– I didn’t know it was up, really, officer!– an essay on Young Marble Giants I wrote about twelve years ago; and we attend our first Crimson women’s hoops game.

Also in music news: I still owe several people mix CDs– perhaps in the New Year, after I’m done with a talk about Stevens a review of Ashbery a troublesome piece about Philip K. Dick some other stuff? And track two on this great CD spent most of November in my head. It may even come back. Look, Mike reviews the same record! Small indiepop world.

Yes, it’s another one of those hi-out-there posts consisting largely of links:

More praise from another political blog for  Beacon Broadside.

Nathan loves Hannukah. Not just the presents: the group singing, and the candles, and the Hebrew letters. He also likes to say (among several other new phrases he’s picked up): “Guten tag!” (from a teacher at his school who speaks German) and “Stay in bed all day!”

One of Nathan’s Hannukah presents: more music by the great Dan Zanes. It’s a good thing D.Z. is talented enough to make music that parents like, too, because Nathan likes his songs (and likes us to sing his songs) so much that otherwise we’d go bats. Odd discovery (well, it was a discovery for me– Jessie pointed it out): all waltzes are sad. Especially “Sidewalks of New York,” in D.Z.’s version, even though he and his band make it delightful too. Odder discovery: the talented and relentlessly perky accordionist and keyboard player with D.Z. has another life as a very good alt-country and live theatre act. Of course, the Del Fuegos weren’t bad themselves.

One of my longest, most speculative, or maybe most whimsical, essays about poetry is now available as a pre-print online (pre-prints are online versions of essays that will be published soon in scholarly journals; they’re standard in the sciences and show up every so often in fields like mine).

Wordpress still hates Firefox: if you clicked on the links in this post quite soon after I posted it, you got nothin’, because Firefox’s interface changes a href into a xhref. Fortunately I remembered to go into Safari and change everything back. Grrr.

I recommend another poetry book. Amanda recommends a science book, and Meghan recommends a novel, at the same place.

I’ve been thinking about poems about snow.  Also thinking about Wallace Stevens: do Stevens scholars, in general, realize that the Connecticut River for part of its length is tidal, i.e. “flows nowhere, like the sea”? The fact’s not in Eleanor Cook’s new, good reference book on Stevens; I shall spend part of next week trying to see who has and hasn’t noticed the fact (the relevant poem is “The River of Rivers in Connecticut”) before. If it’s not generally known, I’ve got something else to say when I talk about Stevens in Chicago in a week and a half.

Macalester’s women’s hoops team is winning games now that we’ve left– and Helen is seeing them. No fair! We see our first live Harvard women’s hoops game (knocks on wood) this Tuesday. Unless we get a ton of snow again.

For about the past week Nathan’s favorite activity, by a large margin, has been the making of visual art. He wants to go into his playroom to draw with crayons when he gets up, he had trouble leaving school yesterday when it was time to go home because he wanted to do more work on a picture at his easel (where the kids have taped-up paper on which to draw), and when we got home, he headed for his playroom to draw some more. He’s sometimes fascinated by the abstract-ish patterns he can make with monochromes (”circle!” he says) or with combinations of crayons, but he’s also figuring out how to make patterns that look (at least to him) like attempts to represent objects in the visible world.

In fact, he’s so intent on making such representations, and so exacting about them, that he’s asking us to draw them and then telling us when our drawings fall short: this morning he was happy to have Jessie draw, and then happy to have me draw, heart shapes, but yesterday evening he got very frustrated when he asked me to draw his “chapeau-hat” (a kind of round hat Jessie used to wear, which Nathan now wears, and which his Uncle Andrew, who lives in Montreal, has named) and my crayon drawings didn’t look enough like the hat to please him. Jessie saved the day by drawing a batting helmet, which (we explained to Nathan) was what Manny and Big Papi wear.

Nathan also has ideas of abstract art that come in part from the bit of Jackson Pollock in the first Olivia book, in which Olivia sees a Pollock at a museum and then comes home and tries to reproduce it on the wall, the result being not a Pollock but a mess: “Jackson Pollock” and “mess” are Nathan’s favored terms for big scribbles. It turns out there’s a Pollock at the Fogg. We’ll have to take him there quite soon.

Not today, though. I do think that Nathan can expect (if not today, then sometime before night eight) another art-making tool or two for Hannukah.

New writing elsewhere from us (not related to children’s art): Jessie herself writes for the Beacon Broadside today, on injustice at Guantanamo; I apply anti-rust treatment to an early poem by Donald Revell. (Also, I don’t think I ever mentioned in this space the flatteringly attentive review I got from a Minnesota writer named Stan Sanvel Rubin last year: I think it’s the most, and maybe the best, in-print attention my poetry has ever received.) Happy Hannukah!

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.