Accommodatingly

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.

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.

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.

Nathan slept well last night in the portacrib next to our bed. He woke up cheerful and remained so throughout the day, in spite of, or perhaps because of, an overwhelming number of people doting on him. His young cousins in particular were really charmed/charming, and as a result of their tutelage, he now can point at a Red Sox cap and say “B!” It appears that the relocation will go smoothly for him, at least sports-wise.

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?

Our Xmas in Connecticut is was nothing like Xmas in Connecticut… but it’s been important to us, and worthwhile. We have seen many– but not all– of the family-members-of-Jessie whom we travel here to see.

If you are a fan of Jawbox, Government Issue, DeSoto Records, Threadless T-shirts, or giving to people in need, you should seriously consider helping Callum Robbins, the 10-month-old son of Jawbox songwriter J. Robbins; Callum has been diagnosed with the scary childhood disease Spinal Muscular Atrophy, and Callum’s family friends of Callum’s family are hoping indie-kids chip in to help with whatever therapies the family believes will make Callum’s time on Earth happier and more hopeful.

Superblogger Chris Bowers has a very plausible short account of the success, failure, collapse, and partial resurrection of liberalism from the end of the Civil Rights era to the present age of Kos Dean Era war-driven realignment day. Bowers’ stories reminds me of Todd Gitlin’s very plausible long account of what went right, and wrong, in the 1960s. If you are a fan of DNC chair Howard Dean, as I am, you’ll almost surely like it too. (Note that you do not have to be an admirer of 2004 Presidential candidate Howard Dean to be a devoted fan of DNC chair Howard Dean. I’m iffy on the first, crushed-out on the second.)

Did you know that the villanelle wasn’t really a form until some mid-19th century French people committed conscious literary-historical fraud? It seems to be the case. Thanks, MLQ! Thanks, Julie Kane!

If I know you and you’re going to be at the MLA in Philly this week, and we haven’t made social plans, and you want to make social plans, do get in touch. Note that I am not free during daylight hours on any of the convention’s four days: mostly I’ll be interviewing people who want to teach at Macalester. We have some very, very cool applicants.

I am also giving a paper on Wednesday night at 8:45pm about the poetry of Laura Kasischke. Here’s one of her many good poems. She’s about to become at least a bit better-known, because one of her novels is about to become a film starring Uma Thurman.

It’s our last day in Connecticut for a bit, and we are sad to leave but it is time to go home, as the events of the past hour have reminded us…

(1) Nathan has recently developed real circadian rhythms: he’d like to start the multi-stage going-to-bed process between about 8:30 and 9:30pm Eastern (we expect that this will become 8:30 to 9:30 Central in about a week, and move slowly in one or another direction as the weeks and months go by). If he’s not on his way to bed by 9pm or 9:30pm, he expresses his displeasure with increasing force.

(2) Nathan now eats lots of things– avocado, green beans, oatmeal, yams. They go in at one end, and they come out the other. This will not be news to readers who are parents themselves, but the speed and volume with which the process takes place can surprise us.

Tonight we celebrated Chris’ graduation with an enormous family restaurant dinner meant to start at 6:30pm. Due to car trouble, the dinner ended up beginning at 7pm, which meant that the entrees began to arrive around 8:30, perilously close to Nathan Collapse Time. He fussed, and then he fussed, and then he fussed some more, and then he spit up. Time to go home, we thought– for reason (1).

In fact, it was (2). It was, so to speak, a number (2). Or maybe a (2 x 4). We are now washing the clothes, and the car seat. Baby diapers are simply not made to handle the mass and the velocity of material which comes out of the back of a big baby who has just started with solid food. Anyone who invented and marketed a diaper that began at the waist in the front, but extended almost all the way up to the shoulderblades on the back, would meet with our immediate praise.

We brought home more than we left with. Most of the new stuff is the cute, soft, mostly blue baby stuff we received at our shower the other day. Sorting through it all is an excercise in cuteness-almost-overload.

The shower had many wonderful people, some of whom I hadn’t seen in a while: Aunt Donna and her daughter Corrine (along with Corrine’s two daughters, Brianna and Sierra); Aunt Bert and her partner Mel with the New York City girl who is their Fresh Air Fund kid this summer, Daniela; Marge (and, later, her husband Dave); Margo (who brought pics of her new granddaughter, the offspring of my childhood crush and one of my best friends, Chris - the pics show that he’s still a cutie pie); my stepfather’s mother; my old roommate Catherine and her six-week-old daughter, Sarah; my grandmother; my dad and stepmom; my sisters and their kids; and Steve’s mom and my mom.

One uninvited guest: a coyote, who wandered in the backyard for a while before heading back to the woods. Yes, there are coyotes in Connecticut. I’ve decided that we should read this as some sort of sign, or at least make a note of it as something significant to share with our son. There must be coyote legends out there that are inspiring for a young, eco-conscious boy.

We’re getting ready for a baby shower. My mom is here. Various relatives will shortly arrive in Windham.

I have been blowing up blue balloons. Or maybe they’re green: not for the first time, this morning I insisted on calling a gray-green garment blue. In the past, I’ve called garments gray or steel-blue when others agree to call them some sort of dull green. Jessie thinks I’m blue-green colorblind, a variety of colorblindness which may not exist. Obviously I have some reading to do.

Friday night between 5 and 6pm we heard a truly superb hour or so of radio on WCNI, New London, Connecticut, 90.9 FM: a set of great Fifties rockabilly, a set of neo-garage rock including the new Fleshtones, a cover of Love’s “Can’t Explain” by the Swingin’ Neckbreakers, and a group called the Charms who have the Donnas beat all hollow. Later that hour, the quiet set included some very pretty psychedelia: if you know who does a midtempo acoustic psych song whose chorus includes the line “I can no longer hear the music,” drop us a line. Is it Sufjan Stevens? The DJ– whomever he was– also recovered well from mistakes, and gave just enough information in breaks (the Charms are from Boston, “Can’t Explain” wasn’t the Who song) to sound knowledgeable, without getting in the way of the music he played. 100 points to WCNI, I guess. Good air.

This part of Connecticut is just full of green, green, green back roads. Or are they really blue?

It looks like my roundup of underrated literary magazines will not be appearing in a national newspaper after all. Shorter version: check out maisonneuve, get serious with the American Scholar, and read Black Clock, where I discovered a truly superb, racy, and disturbing excerpt from Emily White’s forthcoming novel. She lives in the Northwest, where it rains a lot.

Last night we saw another sort of shower: the New York Liberty made it rain threes.

I’m in the new Believer, writing about Angie Estes, whose new book of poems I certainly recommend.

Jessie and I are in Windham, Connecticut. You can see New England brambles and second-growth forest from three sides of the house, and grassy slopes from the fourth: it’s in between second-home pastoral and outer-suburb cute, and a calm place to spend a week or two in itself– not to mention the attractions of our extended family (neat adults, cute, energetic nieces), who are the reason we came. (No, we are not here in order to see the league-leading Connecticut Sun’s home games– that’s just a bonus. As is the extra time in which to read novels.)

If you are planning to break into our house while we are away, you should be aware that a very fierce fiction writer has been living there in our stead, and he won’t let you get away with anything. (Nor will Geno.)

Oh, and almost anyone who reads us on a regular basis will find things to like in Joe Wenderoth’s crazy new book of prose, out soon:

“For us, the moment of the roadrunner’s decisive escape– which is at the same time the moment of the coyote scheme’s backfiring– produces a return that we find we had secretly wanted all along. The decisive withdrawal of the roadrunner is understood not only as a blow to the ego of the coyote; it is understood, more significantly, as a destruction of the whole way in which the thinking animal, the ‘genius,’ meant to capture and devour ‘what must be thought about.’ A great vanity, that is, is destroyed in the coyote’s fall, and in this destruction we are allowed to see the coyote again– he comes out of the concealment and re-inhabits his true condition: a body, alone, returned to the earth he should never have hoped to transcend in the first place.”