Accommodatingly

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.

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.

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.