Random Five for Friday

1. Dead Tired. I've been planning to write a blog post all this week, but I didn't expect for my travel hangover to last quite so long. I have been beat. My trip to State College was fantastic, as was my family reunion in Marion, but they made for a whole lot of traveling and not a whole lot of sleeping. So my post in praise of Susan Orlean will just have to wait until next week!
2. Spicy Food. This week, I attempted vegetarian chili, which is basically a bunch of beans with some spices and tomatoes thrown in. The problem with vegetarian chili is that meat adds a good deal of fat and flavor that is indispensable to the whole chili experience. I was forced to turn to lots and lots of red chili flakes to make my chili appetizing. My taste buds have been feverishly thrilled all week, but every day my stomach growls at me and says, WTF, Lesley! Are you kidding me? MORE of this stuff? Ahhh! Stop it!!! Where's the Tums?!
3. Good Reads. I finished two really excellent books this week: The Art of Losing (a collection of poems on mourning that I wrote about here), and Jonathan Franzen's How to Be Alone. I picked up Franzen's essay collection because I was curious about his writing, but I didn't want to commit to taking part in the Freedom "best novel of the century" hoopla.Though many of the book's essays are about reading and the state of the novel, How to Be Alone consists largely of an old-fashioned curmudgeon's complaints about modern society (its disinterest in serious fiction, its mindless passion for new technologies, its meaningless passion for privacy, etc.). It can easily be read as a work of late adopter naysayer-ism that frequently contradicts itself, but Franzen is so brilliant in his thinking and so adept in his prose styling that you're willing to growl and harrumph along with him, just for the pleasure of spending time with his voice. The collection made for surprisingly good airport reading material, and it's convinced me to put The Corrections on my to-read list.
4. Writing & Wranglin'. The last week's busyness has put a serious crunch on my writing time, so the writing has been going slowly. I'm in the process of radically revising my chapbook, and I'm trying to work my way through a new process of drafting and revising. In grad school, I had to write fast to keep up with the pace of workshop (I wrote one poem a week for years!). Now, I'm trying to write more slowly and to think more deeply. Instead of playing with images and making up the substance as I go along, I'm trying to clarify the ideas and feelings I want to express before I start worrying about image and diction and line length. I think that this will be an excellent method in the long run, but it's trying right now. Writing more truthful, more emotional, more intellectually interesting poetry is hard. I'm trying for a sort of clarity that is extremely difficult to achieve. So, like one of my Penn State MFA Reading Series t-shirts says, I "Just Keep Pounding Those Keys!"
5. Wedding Weekend. Last night, one of my third cousins got married. She's having her wedding reception in Abilene this weekend, and I'm going with my mom. Though I'm not thrilled to be traveling for the second weekend in a row, I'm really looking forward to it. Charlie's stepfather once told me that the quality of a wedding always depends on the feeling between the couple. If the couple is joyful and deeply in love, the wedding celebration will feel joyful and easy and sincere. Consequently, I expect this weekend's celebration to be an excellent one. :)