Accommodatingly

Another new post on the literary-professional-poetry blog, where posts wholly literary, professional, poetry-related, or academic will henceforth go. (This one’s a thank-you to recent poets who read here, to the former student who sent me a really promising book, a heads-up about my upcoming event in Glasgow, and a plea that you-all help me avoid plagiarism.) Matters personal, fun, music-, house-, Nathan-, or basketball-related, in addition to matters unclassifiable, will continue to result in posts (albeit, alas, infrequent) here.

By the way, Close Calls, the book, is now out!

This meme has been tearing through Facebook like a wildfire. Thought I might as well share my response here since I’ve been simply awful about blogging lately…

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

1. I received this from four people (well, one of them only had 10 random things) before I finally answered it.

2. I accidentally navigated away from the page when I had about ten of these things written and lost the whole list. If you decide to do this, write it in a separate text editor and copy and paste when you’re done.

3. I am constantly aware of issues related to class and financial status. I have a fear that is actually common among many women that I will one day be a bag lady (http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/Retirementandwills/Playingcatchup/P140989.asp ).

4. Being married to someone from a different economic class whose erudite schooling is almost comically intimidating does not erase my anxieties about such things.

5. I used to be a born-again Christian. I am still, to borrow a phrase from Susan Campbell, “Jesus haunted,” but I do not now, nor will I ever again, believe in hell. I agree with the Rev. Carlton Pearson that any God who would condemn that many people to eternal suffering would be worse than the most genocidal maniacs in history. (for more on that, listen to this episode of This American Life: http://thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1273 and I will pay you back the dollar for the download).

6. I don’t believe that you need to believe in God or in any spiritual realm to be a good person.

7. I comprehend faith in God, and understand that many people I love believe that my lack of faith means that I will be condemned. I feel sad that they carry that burden of worry, but I can’t carry it for them.

8. My son Nathan was born by emergency Caesarean. I had an easy recovery and am perfectly fine with the fact that I didn’t have to push him out of my body. This does not mean that I didn’t have to work really fucking hard to bring him into this world.

9. I used to live in New York City, and I still miss it.

10. I used to live in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and I miss it even more.

11. The first one of these notes that I was tagged in was from Alicia, and she said something really nice about me and Steve in her note. It made me cry because I miss her a lot.

12. Whenever I hear the phrase “Not Available in Stores,” I hear it as “Storrs.” Since there isn’t jack squat besides UConn there, it’s fitting.

13.I spent my 20s convinced that I hated my high school years, and in my 30s realized how much I actually loved them.

14. I have often wanted to be more of a tech geek, but coding makes my head spin.

15. I wanted to be an actress when I was young, and sometimes I still think that it’s what I should do with my life.

16. I know how to do a lot of things pretty well, but as soon as I get good at something, I devalue its importance and difficulty.

17. I sometimes use grocery shopping as a form of therapy. I just spent $150 at Market Basket, and I feel pretty good about it.

18. When I go back home, I am astounded by how few good restaurants there are.

19. I once rooted for the Yankees just to annoy one of my Red Sox fan friends. I still carry that shame with me every day.

20. I have done and said other shameful things, but nothing I want to admit on Facebook.

21. I used to really hate Elmo, but now I kind of like him. Barney, however, is the antichrist.

22. I wish I had more patience, especially with my spouse and my son.

23. I listen to This American Life on my iPod every week.

24. It won’t hurt my feelings if you never get around to writing your own note like this.

25. I’m glad that I’m done with this and hope I didn’t make anyone feel badly.

It’s called Close Calls with Nonsense, not coincidentally named for my forthcoming book about contemporary poetry. You can expect to find my impromptu thoughts on contemporary poetry– and on other contemporary bookish matters– there, starting with this neat Web discovery. Sometimes posts there will be posted here, too; sometimes not.

Nonliterary matters– Nathan’s accomplishments, basketball milestones, travel notes– will continue to turn up on the accommodatingly blog, when they turn up online at all.

Design and formatting on the new blog, of course, all done by Jessie, without whose labor, attention, and design sense I’d still be using only 12-point Courier on white backgrounds for everything. Which might look neat for a while but would get got old fast.

…and also because the post ROCKS, I give you this link:

The Porning of Miley Cyrus

When I started working for Beacon, I never thought I’d have a Hannah Montana post on the blog, but there it is.

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.

I had a vulgar, incoherent post in the feed reader, and now her blog seems to have disappeared!

Digging back in the unreads in my feed reader, it looks like she had some technical difficulties in Dec. (the link won’t work until she’s back online), and her last post before the vulgar one, titled “Site Deletion,” is “Sorry about the RSS flooding. I thought the hackery was behind me, but a month’s worth of posts disappeared and I was again unintentionally advertising Tramadol.”

Zoiks! I suspect Adam Kirsch! (just kidding)

Knowledge gleaned from today’s pre-hacking posts on Maud… Mary Jo Bang got a much-deserved National Book Critics Circle Award for Elegy. Also honored, Alex Ross, who thanked “the book critics for helping to propel his book from ‘potential total oblivion to a glittering semi-obscurity.””

I’m a successful male teen wrestler as well! My Googlegangers are a wily bunch!

Nathan is remarkably resistant to sleep lately. I am resistant to the idea that nice o’clock is a good bedtime for a two-year-old, although that’s when he’s been getting to sleep every night (although it’s 8:59 now and he’s still chattering away), in spite of shutting off the light a little after 8pm. What to do with a toddler who thinks he’s nocturnal?

It’s often said that only a few thousand people bought the Velvet Underground albums when they came out, but every one of those people them formed their own bands. Though far more popular during his own career (at least with the under-ten set), Dan Zanes seems to have a similar effect: after a few weeks of nonstop Zanes-listening, Nathan first decided that every object between 6″ and 3′ long (e.g. hairbrushes, cardboard boxes, push-toys) had become a guitar, and then decided (with some help from his teachers) to organize his friends at day care into a band. He even named the band after one of the other band members (much as Carl Newman called his first band Zumpano), though Nathan (unlike Carl Newman) created a unique identifier by adding a comparative suffix to his friend’s first name. The band, so far, practices daily and play, mostly, Dan Zanes covers, including a rockin’ version of “Pay Me My Money Down.”

In other name news, Jessie signed us both up for Google Alerts so that we know when our names get mentioned elsewhere: not only cool, I thought, but professionally useful, since I do need to know when if my new book gets reviewed. So far she’s discovered that she is a star of teen wrestling, perhaps the most accomplished female wrestler in Connecticut, and I have discovered that I am a high school track coach in Winona, Minnesota. Who knew?

I also discovered this blog, though a related blog hosted at Mizzou seems to have vanished without a trace. Clearly I should have put a Spidey-tracer on it.

New Year’s Resolution (one among others): learn to say no more often to short assignments in my professional life. Years ago I knew a very extroverted young journalist who had recently been through rehab: he often wore a denim jacket with a button that said “Please don’t offer me drugs.” I wish, this morning, that I had a button reading “Please don’t offer me any more books to review.” Though I’m not sure that I could wear it honestly…

…at least not at AWP next week: both Jessie and I will be there! We’ll attend literary panels, see readings, see friends, and help out a bit at the Rain Taxi table: if you’re likely to be near the West Village next Saturday afternoon, Feb. 2, you can hear several winners of the Colorado Prize, including Craig Teicher and myself, read their work at 4pm at 58 W. 10th St. (the Lillian Vernon House), around NYU.

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.

Just a reminder: Jessie continues to post, get cool authors to post, and moderate the comments at Beacon Broadside, which has new content on most weekdays and comment streams ready for action at all times. Right now it’s veterans week, with a post today on the troubles our women and men in uniform face once they come home.

It’s also Jewish Book Month: the first of a few projected JBM postings has Jerusalem Syndrome blogger, editor and rabbinical candidate Danya Ruttenberg recommending David Grossman’s study of Samson, a book I’m now convinced I ought to read.