Accommodatingly

Yesterday… me: “What are you thinking about?’
Nathan: “I’m not thinking about anything.”
Me: “I’m thinking about spaceships.” (We’re still enjoying the Martians.)
Nathan: “No you’re not. You’re thinking about French horns and trumpets and tubas and bass guitars and pianos and, and drums, and violins!”

Today (as we walked across an icy parking lot and felt the wind blow): “When it’s cold in the winter I like to think of the sun and the beach.”

In non-cute news, I’ll be in San Antonio on Thursday talking about poetry and stuff. I’ll try to bring back the sun, though I don’t think I can do anything about a beach.

Ten days ago we were in Puerto Vallarta. We recommend it.

Five days ago we were in Connecticut for Christmas. It is a very good thing that we can now see Jessie’s family without having to board (or pay to board) an airplane. There was warmth. And fun. And presents, especially for Nathan (see below).

Three days ago we were watching Dan Zanes’ holiday show with Nathan in New York. We recommend that too. He’s got several musicians from Semitic traditions who seem to have joined his entourage since his last album: there’s a singer whose bio calls her “neo-Hasidic” and who adapts Jewish festive and liturgical tunes, and several Arab-American players, including a guy with a buzuq. We liked the buzuq, but what I still want is a melodica. I’ve wanted one, vaguely, ever since I saw one in the Heavenly stage show…

But it’s churlish to complain about instruments we don’t have, at the moment, since Nathan got so many new ones for Xmas/Hannukah, which he has now arranged to his liking, now that (today) we are re-established at home.

He’s got a purple microphone with its own stand! and an electric keyboard just his size! And this ingeniously designed toy trumpet, which is actually a bath-safe plastic pan-pipe! Our living room has really turned into a music room. Which is good. I have become “Drummer” (as in “Drummer! Daddy Drummer! Can you play the drums now?”) which is good, except when it’s a bit rude. We’re working on the rude part.

Three pieces of text online you should probably read:

(a) the LRB’s Lanchester on video games. Yes, they are art.

(b) the Poetry Foundation’s staff year-end best-of list, which includes the inevitable (Jack Spicer, George Oppen), the international (my former student Hannah Brooks-Motl, whose work you should clearly watch out or, picks Robert Minhinnick), and the heretofore almost-unknown.

(c) the nation’s preeminent women’s-sports journalist explains why people keep doing things they don’t really love, and why, sometimes, they later decide to stop.

When you get done reading those things, there’s always my fake Virgilian ode to last month’s election, now with a quasi-permanent online home at InDigest, a web-mag I’d be reading even if they had never published me.

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.

We stopped at Malaprops bookstore in Asheville, NC, during a massive road trip a few years back, and this blog post at Publishers Weekly reminded me of how much I loved the store. And Asheville generally–such a beautiful, quirky town with so much to recommend it.

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.

I’m reading and answering questions at Brown University in Providence, R. I. this Wednesday, November 14: McCormack Family Theatre, 4pm. If for some reason you will be in Providence then, why not drop in?

I’ll probably still be reading (on the train, I mean, not in the auditorium) War and Peace, which I began last weekend mostly because I got about 100 pages into Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, liking it a great deal, and then realized that almost every chapter contained at least one play on a character or an event from Tolstoy’s much bigger book. So far I’m surprised by how much of the Tolstoy seems, not predictable in a bad sense, but familiar: it’s as if, having grown up among people who were pretty good at juggling three or four balls, I saw grainy film of the guy who invented juggling, who did it by juggling 58 balls at once. It’s extraordinary and impressive, and yet the procedure (i.e. large-canvas, detailed, moralized, omniscient-narrator realism) is one I think I recognize. And no, I don’t mind admitting that I have come this far in life without having read W&P already. Major writers of England and America are far more likely to send a young reader to Proust, or to Anna Karenina, than to send that young reader to the Napoleonic Wars.

As for other reading, I’m still blogging some of it here.

And as for Nathan’s linguistic inventions, which interest us more than anyone else’s, the latest is “fun guys”: I am a fun guy. So is Jessie. So are our friends, when he meets them, and so are my parents, whom he asks about all the time, and so are his friends at school– last night, Jessie says, he listed all the people who are fun– it took a while.

He also asked, this afternoon, about my parents (Bubbe and Zayde), concluding that since he wanted to see them, and they weren’t visible, therefore “Bubbe hiding. Zayde hiding.” It’s a good thing they will come out from hiding next week: he’ll definitely enjoy Thanksgiving.

Among Nathan’s new cool behaviors this week alone:

One of the things he wants to do his “own self!” (as he puts it) is read books. Typically he will let us read him a book and then insist on reading it all his “own self.” He flips through the pages and recites, sometimes all, often most of, the words, in order, matching them to the appropriate pictures. This is– how can I put it?– way cool.

Also cool: toddlers still acquiring lots of language are metaphor-generation machines. Metaphor dynamos. Metamos, if you will. Many of them have to do with the moon. Since last week we’ve been hearing that when the moon isn’t visible in the sky it’s hiding. “Moon hiding,” Nathan says, almost whenever he’s outdoors during the day.

Also on the metaphor front: tonight he identified the pictures of snowflakes in this book as moons. Then he began counting them. One moon, two moons, three moons!

And tonight, tonight, he told his first (self-conscious, verbal) joke! (He’s done physical humor for a while.) Nathan pointed to a green cup he had filled with water (during his bath) and said “Nathan elephants in cup… no!” I laughed, he repeated it, I told him he had told a joke, and then he announced to us, proudly, “Nathan joke! Nathan joke!” We think the humor had something to do with this book, which he has been reading his own self.

Maura, who has been one of my favorite people since the years when Holiday were touring, has a great piece at the Chronicle about the attractions of a library career. Required reading, I’d say, for anyone on their way to a Ph.D. who isn’t quite sure she/he wants to move absolutely anywhere to take absolutely any job in a given academic field, and wonders if there’s a life path that could make more sense: for many such folks, there is. And she explains it.

If posts have been light around here, it’s (still) because we’re blogging here and here. And because I’m about to fly here. Apparently I am staying on the Queen Mary, which is not the same ship on which the Olympic basketball teams stayed.

Well, I had to call this miscellany-style post something, and it’s a neat ice cream flavor Jessie found last week. As neat as I’ve tasted recently unless you count the best ice cream store in the world. (Sorry, Izzy; you are tied for second best, though.)

Two hours ago we got back from Willimantic, where we celebrated Jessie’s mom’s birthday and Jessie’s mom’s husband’s mom’s birthday. Nathan got to chase a ball, and kick a ball, and watch a ball kicked by, his affectionate cousins, whose names he likes to say. It’s a bit of a drive, but not bad if Nathan (a) sleeps or (b) wants us to sing children’s songs— we got (a) on the way down and (b) on the way back– and it’s certainly easier than flying. Yep, that’s one of the reasons we moved.

Should I write an essay entitled “Science Fiction as an Ethnic Literature”? Somebody should. I’m afraid that I’ve taken on an assignment (no, a different assignment) that requires me to read all of Philip K. Dick, which is like, and yet in another way not in the least like, having to read all of Swinburne. For a third assignment short article, I need to find out– tomorrow if possible– whether it’s true, or whether it’s more of an urban legend, that few Americans cared much about Paul Revere until Longfellow versified his midnight ride. UPDATE: the Paul Revere archive-and-tourism folks say it’s true. (I still want a print source, though. [shakes head])

I owe about ten people mix CDs. And in a couple of weeks they’re going to get them.

I owe many more people than that thanks and some sort of detailed update on our first month or so in Massachusetts: it’s neat to get so many queries, but scary to think about how many I may not answer directly. Come visit us when you can, o friends who live elsewhere. And tell us, if appropriate, just what you saw and ate at the State Fair. We miss the fair: age cannot wither, nor can custom stale, its infinite variety of food on sticks…

Partial Nathan update: he’s super-interested in opposites– up and down, new and old (and the associated word “time”), on and off (bathroom faucets now say “on” and “off,” rather than “off” and “no”), small and tall, Sox and Yankees (really– he loves saying “Go Sox!”) and the fact that 6 becomes 9 upside-down, while N becomes Z on its side.

As Brazelton’s research predicted, our extroverted, neophilic child loves the stimulation of his day care but sometimes, about half an hour after we bring him home, gets cranky and needy and desirous of Mommy’s (in particular) attention, maybe in part because he can “misbehave” around us and blow off cranky steam, while at work at day care he wants to behave.

Jessie reviews a cool memoir in the new Rain Taxi; it’s also the Powells review of the day today.

Unless things go pear-shaped I should be blogging here soon. Stay tuned. Oh, and support the Mercury if you can. All they need now is two out of three.

This time, they’re art: Monday we saw an exhibit of (on? for? about?) Joseph Cornell. We journeyed to the traveling show in Salem with J and (unexpectedly) C and her friend from Brooklyn, A. We, um, like him. (We like J, and C, and A, as well.)

More here. Why don’t they sell posters?

Today– after two weeks!– we’re finally going to be able to watch television. Or, as I sometimes think of it, watch television. I plan– in all seriousness– to learn a bit more about how to lecture effectively as we, on occasion, watch television.

Bunch of new poetry-related projects: watch this space for updates as confirmations, contracts, denials, and such-like come in.

We’re at my mom’s place now, Nathan sleeping soundly upstairs in the same room we’ll be sleeping in an hour or so from now. I hope that this is still a workable option for him and he doesn’t wake up at three in the morning thinking, “Hey, Mom and Dad are here. Play time!”

He traveled well today. We arrived at the airport in plenty of time, and things were pretty quiet (Tuesday is a light travel day). We had a nice lunch at the new French Meadow restaurant, and then played with Nathan at our gate until we boarded. One of the games we played involved Nathan putting his baby doll in his cart seat/stroller combo and wheeling him around with our help. This meant that when I went to wheel the seat up to board the plane, while Steve lagged behind collecting Nathan and a bag or two, it appeared that I was pretending the Cabbage Patch doll was my actual child. This produced a puzzled look from the Northwest employee who took my ticket.

Nathan was very happy to see his Auntie Jen and Grammie, though he would only hug Grammie after she offered him Veggie Booty. Manipulative child.

And my piece for MNArtists.org on clothes shopping is up. It was fun to research, although I did spend well over my fee for writing the story. Can I still write off the clothes?