Poems About Oranges

If Zadie Smith and Douglas Adams Had a Baby . . .

2012-01-29T12:09:00.001-06:00

it would be precocious and aggressively clever and named January 2012.

Work has been so hectic this month that once January 23rd rolled around, I realized that I had only read one book since the new year: Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays. "Only one?!" I thought. "I'm shooting for 52 total this year! I can do better."

Besides the busyness, I can also blame my lack of book-reading on my scattered forays into essays and poetry and stories that were way too heavy for winter months, like Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and a few choice back issues of The New Yorker and bits of The Best American Poetry of 2011 and Great English Essays: From Bacon to Chesterton. It was all very intellectually stimulating and vocabulary expanding and also sludgy and dreary, and it contributed nothing to my Goodreads list.

Smith's essays went along this same erudite vein, and they were painful in the same way that stretching a muscle you don't use very much is painful: it's difficult, and it burns, and your butt may feel like it's all the way across the room, but it's also invigorating and relaxing and almost certainly (you tell yourself) "for your own good."

Changing My Mind collects Smith's previously published essays on a mixed bag of topics, from reading her favorite authors (Zora Neale Hurston, George Eliot, Nabokov, and David Foster Wallace) to touring through impoverished Liberia and fancy dress parties in LA, to reviews of bad movies and British humor, to her father's death.

Smith opens her collection with an essay about her love for Their Eyes Were Watching God. She describes her relationship with this novel as "extraliterary": she appreciates Hurston's style and skill as an author, but she truly loves the novel because she feels like she shares Hurston's values, her story, her struggles and loves. I felt the same way about much of Smith's writing: I thought she was at her most brilliant when writing about authors I already loved (Hurston and George Eliot, specifically), but she lost me where our opinions differed; I very dutifully read her essay on Barthes and Nabokov and her (very, very) long paean to David Foster Wallace, but those bits of writing didn't sing for me.

Still, I was happy to have found something from Smith that I enjoyed; I read the first 200 pages of White Teeth, her wildly popular debut novel from 2000, and loathed it, so I was happily surprised to enjoy so many of her essays so much. I've gained respect for her obvious intelligence; her muscular, efficient, nuanced prose; and her ability to make me look up words on my Merriam-Webster dictionary app ("patois," "lacunae," "apogee"--never stop, Zadie! you're making me a smarter person!).

But after Smith's weight, I had to cleanse my reading palate. I turned right to Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy at the recommendation of a friend, and I wished instantly that I had read it when I was 12: it's manic, sugar-coated, and wildly imaginative. It's also more over-stuffed with jokes than (as my father would say) 10 pounds of potatoes in a 5-pound sack. And while part of me thought, "Douglas Adams, this much funny is like serving me a bowl of gravy at Thanksgiving dinner. Yes, gravy is delicious, but where's the meat, buddy?" it was also quick and silly and just what I needed on January 26th, 2011.

What's next on my winter reading list? Definitely another tawdry faerie novel from Laurell K. Hamilton (after tackling Kafka for the first time, I've earned it!), as well as the steampunk YA novel Leviathan and maybe Game of Thrones or Ready Player One. Let my sci-fi/fantasy winter begin!

My Year in Lists: 2011

2011-12-31T19:04:00.000-06:00

Reading

Final count: 47 books, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry!
Most fun: The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, which I read twice! I also read the first five sequels in the Mary Russell series in a matter of months.
Biggest surprise: Eat, Pray, Love. I can admit that I found it profoundly moving when I read it last spring. Sometimes books live up to theirhype.
Greatest accomplishment: Vanity Fair. It was looooooooong. Fortunately, its awesomeness was proportional to its length.
Highest quality to quantity ratio: Winesburg, Ohio. Written about small town Ohio in the early 20^thcentury, Sherwood Anderson's tiny little collection of short stories was phenomenallybeautiful, sad, and honest. I have no idea why I left it collecting duston my To Read bookshelf for so long.
Best poetry: Sleeping Preacher.
Fictional character I was most in love with: It’s a tie between MaryRussell’s Holmes or Mr. Thornton from North and South. (Feel free to draw your own conclusions from this!)

Television

I was all about period dramas this year. My favorites were

The absolutelybrilliant Downton Abbey from Masterpiece Theater.
Granada’sbeautiful 1980s interpretations of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
The VampireDiaries. (Hey, there’s enough Civil War in there that I’m going to countit!)

All three of these were superbly written and beautifully produced andaddictive as all get out. Thank you, Netflix!

Music

What didn’t I listen to this year? Here’s a playlist of a few of my favorite songs from a few of my favorite artists this year. Most of these albums didn't come out in 2011, but they've all spent a lot of time on my iPod in 2011.

Bitter Hops 2011 by Lesley O on Grooveshark

Real Life

This year was tumultuous, at best, and while I was never bored, I was never quite at ease, either.

The good:

Three good friends got married and another got pregnant for the first time.
I got a new job that I love and am consistently challenged by.
I traveled to Denver and Winfield and Manhattan, Kansas had a great time with friends at all three locations.
I did a lot of yoga and played a lot of softball and even did a bit of belly dancing.
I started a book club with my friends.
I submitting my writing for publication again for the first time in years, and had a poem accepted for publication sometime in 2012!

The bad:

I had an icky bout of bursitis that kept me on the couch for a good chunk of the fall.
My university went through a substantial restructuring process, and not everyone made it out unscathed.
My mom was in the hospital twice and recovering from surgery for a good part of the year.
My grandma was in the hospital for a stroke and had to move to a nursing home with her husband in the fall.
My grandpa was in the hospital twice, first for a hip injury and again for blood clots a few weeks ago.

The confusing:

Even awesome new jobs can be terribly stressful, baffling, brain-addling things.
I set aside my first savings for retirement and taught myself about a bunch of grown-up stuff like building credit and buying cars and health insurance deductibles. Yay responsibility?
I spent a lot of time thinking about Occupy Wall Street and the recession and global warming and the crimes at Penn State. The future seems more complicated and challenging than it ever has before.

When I look back on this year, I think that I’ll remember itas the first time that I realized that whenever life gets harder, sadder, orscarier, it also gets more interesting, gains a richer texture, becomes moreprecious and vital in its complexity. Life is a bit like beer: yes, Bud Lite (i.e. college life) iseasy to drink, but it’s the bitter complexity of the hops that makes an IPA (being a 28-year-old) memorable.

I’m glad I was here for 2011, whatever challengesit’s held, and I’m glad I got the chance to drink it to its dregs. So if you're lucky enough to live in the Midwest, go find yourself a Boulevard Single-Wide IPA and have a happy new year. See you again in 2012!

The Vampire Diaries: A Comparative Review

2011-11-13T19:18:00.001-06:00

So for the past couple of months, I've spent a lot of time holed up in my apartment due to some epic hip pain. I have bursitis in my hips. That's right, bursitis. And, yes, this does mean that I'm an 80-year-old trapped in a 28-year-old's body: I also spend a lot of time cat cuddling and tea drinking and thrift shopping and grouching at the noisy youngsters who walk past my bedroom window and staying in to quietly listen to NPR. I'm cool with it. ;)

Anyway, my bad flare up has had one good consequence: I've had the chance to spend a lot of time sitting on my couch, icing my hips, and watching The Vampire Diaries. Created by The CW, The Vampire Diaries is one of those shows that shouldn't be good but is. It's a vampire show written for teenagers, but don't think Twilight--think True Blood with more high school and less nudity.

The Vampire Diaries

The Vampire Diaries follows a 17-year-old girl named Elena who just happens to have two really fantastic looking vampire brothers fall in love with her. She spends a lot of time tenderly embracing one of them (Stefan) and kind of flirting with the other one (Damon) and fending off other mean old vampires who just happen to not be in love with her. And, of course, there are some witches and werewolves hanging about and a lot of relationship drama and witty repartee. Add in a whole lot of painfully good looking people and a dash of gratuitous violence and it makes for a heady, addictive mix. It's not quite as clever as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but The Vampire Diaries has more plot twists than a spy novel and surprisingly complex characters who actually manage to grow from episode to episode (which is more than a lot of TV series can claim).

But after the first few episodes, I kept thinking, "Hmmmm, the names Damon and Stefan sure sound familiar." That's when I realized that the show was based on The Vampire Diaries novels written by L. J. Smith which I had owned and read when I was all of 13! I remembered not being a big fan of the series (I'm pretty sure that I sold them at a garage sale when I was in high school), but I adored (and--I will admit it--still own) her other four series: The Secret Circle, Dark Visions, The Forbidden Game, and Night World. I read and re-read those books, like, a lot. And I'm secure enough in my intellectual and literary tastes to admit it. ;)

The Secret Circle and Dark Visions. (Oh, yes, I did find these on one of my bookshelves!)

All of these books involve witches, vampires, werewolves, psychics, or some combination of these supernatural types, and they're all very romantic and soul mate-y and "tragic" and probably horribly obnoxious, but I loved them all. I doubt that they would hold up to being reread by my adult brain, but I can't regret those hours I spent as a lonesome, awkward, angry, dreamy junior high student, laying in my bed re-reading those novels, wishing that something, anything, exciting would happen to me. (Heck, I wouldn't have minded a bite-y vampire boyfriend, so long as I had one!) Those books were just right for me when I read them, no matter how horrifying I would find them now, with their lovely, thoughtless heroines and their menacing, controlling supernatural boyfriends.

The newest The Vampire Diaries edition.

But, of course, I had to at least try to reread The Vampire Diaries novels to see how closely they followed the show, and this proved to be one of those rare occasions where the screen version of something vastly improves upon the original text.

The writers and producers at The CW have (thankfully) taken a lot of liberties with the novels. The books are abjectly awful; I made it through the first one only by reading every fourth word and flipping a few pages ahead whenever I was annoyed or horrified or confused by a character, a plot point, or an adjective (this happened a lot). The main character was awful, the writing was insipid (yes, tell me more about how Elena's furniture was Victorian cherry wood and she wore a peach colored silk ribbon in her hair, because that is both realistic and vitally important to my understanding of her character!), and the plot was mainly about how making out with vampires is not just fun--it's fulfilling! I mean, these books make Twilight read like Hemingway, all precision and restraint and deep, deep feeling.

When will I ever learn not to read books whose cover blurbs start with "A DEADLY LOVE TRIANGLE"?!

But I would still highly recommend the show, no matter how sordid its origins. It does a great job of yanking out the best parts of the original novel's story-line and trashing the rest: Elena's personality is (thank goodness) drastically different, she's given a little brother and a slew of friends with compelling story-lines of their own, and the tumultuous relationship between the two vampire brothers is probably the most complicated and meaningful relationship in the show. Instead of being about vampires or (*shudder*) soul-mates, The Vampire Diaries manages to be about the strength of family bonds, self-transformation and redemption, and accepting one's past.

And let's be honest: who would ever turn down two really pretty vampire boyfriends for the price of one?

(Don't forget to wipe the drool off your keyboard before you go, ladies!)

Communication and Technology: A Smattering

2011-10-27T20:06:00.002-05:00

1. At a work event last week, I added a short PowerPoint slide show to a presentation that I regularly deliver to students. There were like eight slides. The information I conveyed was exactly the same as my regular verbal presentation, but the students were way more impressed. They kept saying things like, "I don't have any questions! That was sooooo informative!" I don't know if it helped them to have the visual representation in front of them, or whether they were just impressed that I had my stuff together enough to have real life slides with the real live University logo on them. Either way, for 15 minutes of work, it was a pretty major WIN!

2. I've ordered myself the new iPhone 4S for my birthday. It's completely unnecessary and expensive and a little bit pretentious, but I'm soooooo excited for it to arrive! Siri looks downright amazing; I imagine that talking into my tiny handheld computer and having it talk back to me is going to be one of those things that makes me go, Holy crap, it's the future and we're living in it! It's funny to think that only 10 years ago I had just started using the Internet, I had just gotten my first (brick-like, green-screened, hideous, non-texting) cell phone along with my first car, and I didn't know how to search for things on Yahoo or AskJeeves or whatever was popular then. What a crazy and awesome time it is we live in.

3. I've been watching Occupy Wall Street in the news, and I'm absolutely fascinated by the protesters' use of hand gestures and "the human microphone" to communicate (you can read about the history of the method at New York Magazine). By using simple gestures and group repetition, the protesters can communicate a single speaker's information and respond to his/her ideas without relying on megaphones and amplifiers (which are often prohibited in the occupied spaces). The process is so simple and old fashioned, yet it's still marvelously effective. Not to mention the fact that it's pointedly democratic and, in my opinion, downright inspiring. You can watch a protester teaching the method to the Occupy Boston protesters here:

The Bostonians by Henry James

2011-10-25T07:30:00.000-05:00

After a long and happy lifetime of never reading any Henry James ever except for "Daisy Miller" in a sophomore year English class, I finally tackled The Bostonians.

The Bostonians

In the past, James had always struck me as unbearably stuffy: his sentences had more clauses than a mall at Christmastime (ha!), and his paragraphs went on for pages and pages, and everyone was always making themselves so unbearably happy because of their tight, tight Victorian corsets. Basically, he seemed like a chore. But I had started The Bostonians in grad school, and I hate leaving a book half done, especially when I was enjoying it in the first place.

The Bostonians, despite being one of James's lesser-known novels, does not disappoint. I suspect that it's rarely read these days because it's so topical: it deals primarily with women's suffrage, or, as it was known in 1885, "The Woman Question." The novel centers around Verena Tarrant, a beautiful, red-headed young woman who just happens to be an electrifying public speaker interested in equal rights for women. Her family is poor, and her father is a disreputable mesmeric healer, which means that Verena is not only talented and on the rise in society, she is also dismally unprotected and without means of her own.

Woman with Red Hair, Albert Herter, 1894.

At her first speaking engagement in Boston, Verena meets Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransom (do I even need to mention those uber-obvious thematic names? oy!), two cousins who both begin, in their own ways, to woo Verena.

Olive wants Verena to stay unmarried, to live in Olive's home, and to travel the world, bringing a message of equality to the world. Basil Ransom, on the other hand, wants Verena to marry him and leave the public eye for good so she can spend the rest of her life entertaining and tending him (I'm not kidding--he actually says this). As the book builds toward its agonizing climax, Verena is forced to choose between a life on the world stage and a life that can be contained in a single sitting room.

What fascinated me about this book isn't its subject or even its plot, it's the fact that it's a novel without heroes. Verena is lovely and innocent and very sweet, but she also bends happily to the will of whomever's in the room at the time. She's a pushover by nature and by station. Olive Chancellor is zealous, brittle, tyrannical, and manipulative. Ironically, for all her passion for women's rights, she allows Verena no freedom of her own. Basil Ransom is handsome and charming but skin-crawlingly insidious: his love for Verena is a passion for possession and control. He wants to marry her, but primarily as a means of keeping her from "parroting" feminist beliefs that he doesn't believe she could possibly understand.

Verena is only given two extreme choices in the novel and no chance of winning, and that, I think, is the entire point. James refuses to espouse either ideology in this novel: he seems disgusted with the rhetoric of the women's rights movement (which he portrays as extremist and heartless), and yet he portrays their detractors (traditionalist Victorian males like Ransom) as pirates and captors.

Boston, 1880s.

Once she emerges into the upper classes of Victorian America, Verena cannot escape. In a world where she was truly free to build her own life, Verena Tarrant wouldn't have had to pledge herself to the rich yet spartan Olive Chancellor as her patron, ruler, and near lover, nor would she have to succumb to the seduction of the romantic but appallingly misogynistic Basil Ransom. If she were free, she wouldn't have to choose between being a feminist zealot or an obedient wife, a Northerner or a Southerner, a thinker or a feeler. She could be a little bit of all of these things and, most importantly, her own self.

But Verena is not free, which makes James's novel incredibly suspenseful and sad. If you're going to give James a try, I strongly recommend The Bostonians.

Albert Camus's The Plague (A Review)

2011-10-01T16:43:00.000-05:00

My excessively ugly cover of The Plague.

Look at this cover. I mean, look at it: it's terrifying. A bleary, blackened eye set in a glaring blood-red cover doesn't really make one think of light-hearted, cheering, summer reading material, does it? Who could blame me for putting off Albert Camus's The Plague for several years after buying it at a used book shop in State College? And let's not even talk about Camus's reputation as a snooty, fancy-pants existential French (French!) philosopher. I expected this book to be dark, miserable, and brutal in the style of The Seventh Seal (which is an absolutely beautiful movie about the plague that makes me break out in hives of morbid claustrophobia).

So this is why I saved The Plague for the sunny, broiling days of August. As I rode my bus back and forth down sleepy, sunshiny highways, I was transported to a fictional 1940s Oran (located in northwestern Algeria, where Camus grew up) during a bubonic plague outbreak. The book follows Dr. Rieux, one of first physicians in Oran to diagnose and fight the plague, and a small group of his friends and acquaintances. Rieux first starts to suspect that something is seriously wrong when he walks out of his flat one morning to find a dead rat on his front porch with a spurt of blood trailing from its muzzle. Things only go downhill from there: thousands of rats die in the streets, the cats and dogs disappear from the city, people start to sicken die, and the government quarantines the whole town for nearly a year.

I expected Camus's novel to be about death, but it was, in fact, about the living. His descriptions of death by plague are haunting, to be sure, but he focuses far more on who's left: the lovers yearning for each other across city gates and stone walls, the doctors and sanitation crews working through exhaustion and unbelievable danger to care for others, the priests and atheists alike who come to understand the plague not through dogma or religion but through sympathy. Camus focuses continuously on how the townspeople deal with "exile," or separation from each other, from their deceased loved ones, and from their regular lives.

"Thus the first thing that plague brought to our town was exile."

In his portrayal, the narrator (unnamed until the book's last chapters) chooses not to catastrophize or sentimentalize the plague, but to portray it objectively, accurately, and, above all else, kindly: he chooses to focus on how people continue to live and love in the face of death, not the death itself.

"The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant [. . .] The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness."

Albert Camus, damn fine writer and shockingly handsome devil.

As the novel nears its end, the narrator returns again and again to the idea that Oran's literal plague is just another extension of a larger plague that everyone suffers from, the plague that is inherent in life itself. I'm not sure that I ever quite followed what Camus meant, but I take it to mean that life is not just subject to trouble and illness, it is trouble and illness. It's a game that everyone always loses, no matter how hard or how skillfully you play. (As Mrs. E says over at Easy Street, "Never take life to seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway!") But it's the fact that everyone keeps playing the game that Camus focuses on, that the people of Oran keep getting out of bed every day and going to the cafes or movies or church or work no matter who is disappearing around them, that Dr. Rieux and his sanitation crews keep giving serums and sanitizing houses, no matter how few people they are able to save.

For all its gore and darkness, The Plague is a beautiful book: generous and warm, thoughtful and leisurely, discomfiting and uplifting at the same time. It's a book that makes a reader think not of death, but of why it's worth it to keep on living.

Dear Winfield

2011-09-25T22:39:00.000-05:00

Winfield, this year, on your 40th birthday, you left me exhausted, cranky, damp, bruised, and--let's be honest--slightly hungover. You confronted me with strangers who laughed and called me "a Winfield virgin" as they slapped parking stickers my windshield. You gave me a puddle to sleep in and a few hours at a laundromat manhandling wet sleeping bags. You gave me a tornado watch. You gave me a near death experience involving lighting, a nearby power plant, and a sky full of sparks. You gave me four pairs of wet socks in 36 hours. You gave me two sacks of damp, muddy, funky laundry. You covered my cowboy boots with a thick crust of mud. You did the same to my Ford Escort, which after some pretty serious off-roading will be forever known as Mud Puppy. You gave me epically sore feet and a crick in my back and a sleep deficit reminiscent of my sophomore year of college.

The new tent, which my friend Ryan helped me stake up using his ninja knot tying skills.

But, Winfield, you also gave me and endless sea of bluegrass and old timey folk music as far as the ear could hear. You gave me Ashes to Immortality, Hot Club of Cowtown, Fast Food Junkies, Eileen Ivers and Immigrant Soul, and Dumptruck Butterlips. You gave me strangers who shared directions and their campgrounds, strangers who offered me bags of wine and bowls of pasta salad and the use of their gas stoves. You gave me a new tent that has already proven itself both rainproof and seaworthy. You gave me lunches of cheese and bagels, pears, pumpkin bread, iced coffee, and brownies. You gave me gyros and kettle corn. You gave me two nights of listening to music and dancing with friends and happy strangers until 4:00 in the morning. You gave me music, adventure, camaraderie, and a really cool tee shirt.

Lunch, day 2.

Winfield, what I'm trying to say is I love you. See you again next year, same time, same place?

Yours oh so truly,
Lesley

Purposeful Sight

2011-09-10T15:01:00.002-05:00

I've been reading a lot of fashion blogs recently. I love them: they're like subscribing to Vogue, but funkier, more egalitarian, more influenced by thrift store style, and much quicker (they change rapidly in response to street style). Even for someone who's never been known as a fashionista, they're strangely invigorating.

One of my favorite fashion bloggers Jessica Quirk.

I wish I could say that this has substantially changed my wardrobe--in a small way, it probably has--but it has changed a good deal about the way I see the world. I notice aesthetic details more often now, most often in others' clothing but in design in general. When I see a woman who looks stylish, I don't just think, "She looks cute," I think, "Look at that interesting ribbing on her cardigan. And what makes those shoes a little different? The higher ankle? I like her choice of watch size, etc."

I've made an active study of these details in the hopes of improving my own work wardrobe. I've taught myself to see differently to the point where, believe it or not, it's almost second nature to me to notice the impact of individual accessories on an outfit. To say the least, this is not something I would have ever thought I'd be doing!

But I wonder if what we choose to see always comes at a cost to those details we choose to miss. The human eye--and mind--can only take in so much at a time. It's a survival tactic: if we pay attention to every blade of grass on the plains, the fluffy clouds in the blue sky, and the grasshoppers zinging around our feet, we might miss the irate buffalo barreling toward us. We tend to see the most important thing in any given setting by nature. Charging buffalo: important. That cloud that kind of looks a little like a buffalo: maybe we'll notice that when we're not running for our lives.

Watch out!

But in the absence of a buffalo, the first things we notice are what we've trained ourselves to see by inclination and mental habit. This is why one of my first creative writing teachers encouraged our class to eavesdrop on others. She told us to keep our ears open on buses, in hallways, in our dorm rooms, to listen shamelessly whenever someone talked loudly on a cell phone in public. She said it would give us an ear for natural dialog, a familiarity with spontaneous human language which would seep into our own writing. I've always been thankful for her advice--it makes public transportation far more interesting!--and because it actually works: along with my writing style, she has altered my vision in some small way forever.

If you subject me to your cell phone conversation on the bus, be assured that I will be listening to you.

People choose their own systems of vision every day, seeing things and events as proofs of whatever interests, theories, assumptions, and prejudices that they have adopted most fervently (or allowed to be ingrained in them). We see the world through a lens shaped by our past, by our culture's ideologies, and by ourselves, a lens that actively reshapes the world whether we want it to or not. Without ever knowing why, a depressed person driving home from work will see gray clouds, all the lousy drivers cutting them off, and roadkill strewn along the median, while a relatively happy person might see the light shifting through the clouds, the green fields nearby, and that nice little Toyota that got back into the right lane right on time. The road may stay the same, but a person's state of mind changes everything.

Distorted vision.

My point is that it's important to be conscientious about the sight you choose to exercise in the world. Seeing is not passive but an active reshaping of our surroundings, our relationships, and, consequently, our lives. I may choose to be more cognizant of fashion, yes, but I don't want to forget how to see others' personal strengths and struggles and uniqueness. I want to remember how to look past nail polish and bias cuts to see people how their friends and mothers must see them, with kindness and understanding and completeness, as people whose lives stand for far more than what they wear, where they work, or who they text as they wait to get off at their bus stop and walk home.

Sleeping Preacher

2011-09-05T11:17:00.000-05:00

Have you ever put off reading a book for one reason or another, only to finally read it and desperately regret your years of hesitation? That's what happened to me last week with Julia Kasdorf's Sleeping Preacher. Kasdorf was one of my instructors at Penn State. I've always loved her poems (I wrote about one here), but Sleeping Preacher was her first book, a book that I knew she had a love-hate relationship with. I just wasn't sure that it would be as moving as her later work, so I put it off.

But this book was far better than I ever expected. Kasdorf has described it as her "where I'm from" book, the collection that she wrote about her Mennonite family, growing up in small town Pennsylvania, and leaving that world for New York. It's a stunning collection: clear, purposeful, understated, and sparklingly lyrical. Kasdorf writes the type of poetry that gives you a sense of not just a time or place or experience, but of the woman behind the poems, the personality and passions that paint her experiences with meaning. It's no wonder that, out of 900 other first book manuscripts, Sleeping Preacher won the 1991 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.

Kasdorf starts the collection out with a whammy of a poem "Green Market, New York", which places her in conversation with a Pennsylvanian farmers' market vendor in the heart of New York City. It's not just a good poem--it also serves as the book's thesis, flinging the whole text into tension and motion:

"'Do you live in the city?' she asks. 'Do you like it?'
I say no. And that was no lie, Emma Peachey.
I don't like New York, but sometimes these streets
hold me as hard as we're held by rich earth.
I have not forgotten that Bible verse:
Whoever puts his hand to the plow and looks back
is not fit for the kingdom of God."

From there, the procession of quiet, kind poems moves from Kasdorf's parents' childhood into her own childhood and adulthood. And while the book is known for its Mennonite subjects, some of my favorite poems were the later ones, the adult poems that are connected to other places and personalities far from Kasdorf's childhood. I loved "For Weatherly, Still in New York":

"This place could make you well.
Night, a black healer, comes so dark it kills
as it cures. Stars slice your fingers
if you try to catch them, falling.
This is no dinner invitation [. . .]
you can't stay on the Lower East Side,
or at least stay there and stay sane.
Come, lose your lease for this place."

"The View" was another favorite. The poem is dedicated to a friend who has moved to the shores of Lake Michigan. I especially love the subtle, lilting rhymes nestled within the lines of this poem. It's a technique that, I will admit, I plan to do my darnedest to steal from Kasdorf!

"[. . .] Last week, a wind charged
off the lake so cold pigeons froze to the walks,
four iridescent necks just on your block.
But all the cold carcasses in Chicago
mean nothing next to your view. Although
I never held still for your caresses,
I admit your talk makes me jealous:
the way you speak of the lake like a love
and refuse to hang drapes, the way you scrub
the panes until they seem to vanish into
the view. And lake and sky embrace you."

Julia has a new book of poems out called Poetry in America. Go get yourself some--I know I'm going to.

Strawberry Pie

2011-07-02T23:18:00.001-05:00

I'm jumping the gun a little bit, but . . .

It's PIIIIEEEEE!

Tonight I made Shirley O. Corriher's fresh strawberry pie recipe from Bakewise. It's only the second pie I've ever made, and the first I've ever made unsupervised. It was pretty easy to make, though the upside-down crust baking method Corriher recommended made my pie look a little rough around the edges. The filling, though, was super easy: put fresh strawberries in the crust; cook up a thick, jellied syrup for the filling; and stick it in the fridge. There's no second baking required!

I made the pie for my dad's birthday tomorrow. I've never been a big fan of pie, so I've never learned to make them, and I think he's suffered from the loss there many years! There were always cakes and cookies in the house, but the poor man couldn't get a slice of apple pie to save his life. But this is his year.

Dad, I hope it's fantastic when you cut into it tomorrow--this pie's for you!

Summertime . . .

2011-06-30T20:23:00.000-05:00

and the living is hot. Like really hot. Like "Oh, good Lord, where's the ice bath?!" hot.

The first 100 degree day of summer is upon us here in Kansas. Instead of getting cranky about it as I sweat to death on my couch, I want to write about my favorite summer things. The power of positive thinking and all that. ;)

Here's what I love about summer:

Produce, produce, produce. There's so much delicious fruit in grocery stores and at the farmers' market that I actually have to work to eat it all. It's fantastic: first come the strawberries, then the nectarines and peaches, then the melons, and, of course, there are always the apples to look forward to in the fall. And don't even get me started on the cucumbers and salad greens! Ooooo, the salad greens! (Okay, so I like food--can you tell?)
The smell of barbecue. I like the taste, too, but barbecue is so heavy that I prefer salads and hummus and veggie-based dishes in the summer. Ugh, who can handle a belly full of greasy brats and burgers when it's this hot? But the smell permeates my neighborhood as the college kids crack open beers and grill on their decks. All of downtown is rich with charcoal smoke, Frisbee games, and lawn chairs.
How cold things taste extra amazing. Ice cream. Popsicles. Frosted and dripping bottles of beer straight from a cooler. Enough said.
The lake. I haven't gone swimming this year, but I'm desperate to! I miss wasting a whole afternoon splashing around in Clinton Lake between rounds of laying out under the blistering sun. (Well sun screened, of course!) And it's weird, I know, but I love the smell of the lake--it's so rich, so fishy and dirty and musty and gloppy somehow. It smells alive. I like it much, much better than chlorine.
Music. There are silly summer hits on the radio and fantastic concerts in Kansas City every night of the week. I've only gone to one show so far this year, but I've passed up about four great ones due to time conflicts. The music industry (and the whole world, it seems) is so gloriously busy in summer!
Nighttime. For me, my least favorite thing about summer is that the heat makes it hard to get a good night's sleep (at least in my apartment!). But the upside is that everyone seems to stay up a little bit later to take advantage of the cool night air. Summer nights are great for parties, for camping, for movie marathons, and for reading late into the night. There's something truly wonderful about being up at 3:00 a.m. on a summer night to hear the cicadas singing in the cool, damp air, and watching the moon high and bright overhead.
The haze. I love how everything and everyone slows down when it's really hot. We have no choice in the matter: the air feels like molasses. It's hard to move, to breath, to even think. The promise of heat stroke makes everyone pant, sweat, and sprawl their way slowly through the daylight hours. It's a sort of forced laziness. You have time to hear the crickets creaking, to watch the lightning bugs flicker, to smell the damp grass when twilight comes. Summer may be the loudest season--full of bugs and animals, fireworks, outdoor festivals, and wind--but it always feels like the quietest season to me. It asks me to feel the sweat and salt on my skin, to stop moving so far and so fast, to hear my own thoughts moving through my own head.

Opinionated

2011-06-27T09:01:00.001-05:00

In the last year, I've found myself having more opinions, a lot more opinions: more opinions on music, on cultural figures, on literature, on fashion, on politics, and even on what I think are the best ways to live.

On the whole, I think this is great. I have more opinions not because I've started thinking more (trust me, I've always done far too much of that), but because I spent a large chunk of my growing up years thinking that the best way to get by in life was to not have any opinions. It seemed like a good way to get through the world without conflicts, without commitments, without ever making mistakes.

But now I know better: being afraid of having opinions doesn't lead to universal ease and understanding, it leads to being a damned milquetoast. Being opinionated obviously put a person at risk for experiencing disagreements and making mistakes, but not having an opinion means that a) you're not paying attention, b) you're not interested, or c) you don't have enough guts to try to be anyone at all, even yourself. To me, being opinionated means not that you're incapable of being wrong, but that you're confident and grown-up enough to handle being wrong every once in awhile.

But note the "on the whole" up above. What makes being opinionated less than perfect is that it's not all that useful for writing. There are some types of writing that are built on opinion and argument, of course--opinion columns, blogs, persuasive and academic writing of all kinds--but the types of writing I love aren't at their best when they're opinionated. Personal essays and poetry thrive on ambiguity, on challenging the pat answer, on withholding judgment for as long as possible for the sake of complexity, honesty, and surprise.

Keats's negative capability is probably the most famous statement of this--"when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason"--but I like Robert Frost's version, too: "No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." I like my writing best when I've gotten from beginning to end and realized that I've turned around on my initial opinion--I don't necessarily make a 180, but at the very least I prefer to end up at an odd angle from where I started. It helps if I write about topics that I don't already have a firm opinion about; it's much better for me to start of feeling intrigued or confused instead of confident.

Writing like this helps me to remember to hold my opinions lightly. They're great, obviously, and probably 100% correct and as brilliant as I am (like, duh!), but writing helps me remember that the world is a fantastically big, complex, and surprising place; we're all muddling through as best we can, and all of our dearest beliefs and conceptions of the world may be proven absolutely false tomorrow. Writing helps me to remember that it doesn't matter whether I'm proven right or wrong in my views, only that I must remember to laugh when I'm proven wrong and to be gracious on those rare, glorious occasions when I can call myself something like "right."

My Big Fat Summer Reading: Vanity Fair

2011-06-19T22:24:00.001-05:00

Last summer, it was Middlemarch. This year, I'm having a go at William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair. My annual way-too-long novel read has begun!

I was inspired to read Vanity Fair for two reasons: 1) Vanity Fair, the movie.

Actually, I've never seen it, even though it came out seven years ago. I make it a point to never watch a movie about a book that I might someday want to read. I get the actors' faces in my brain and I can never get them out again, which shapes the way I visualize the characters forever and ever and ever. I was afraid that I'd watch the film and never get Reese Witherspoon out of my version of Becky Sharp again. So, basically, I couldn't watch the movie (which looked really, really tempting) on Netflix until I committed to the novel.

And 2) I came across this awesome The Hairpin article about great classic novels with mean female main characters. It was funny and clever and totally convinced me that Thackeray was worth tackling. (Carrie Hill Wilner also wrote an article that convinced me to read Charlotte Bronte's Villette, which I totally enjoyed. So she's pretty much batting a thousand at this point!)

Anyway, a long jaunt through 19th-century England felt like exactly what I was looking for this June, and, so far, it has been! The novel is rife with earnest yearning and satire, innocence and deceit, creditors and debtors, outrageous wealth and the illusion of outrageous wealth. I sort of love Becky Sharp for all her shallow, back-stabbing, social-climbing ways--she's so good at what she does that it's difficult not to admire her. She's selfish and sometimes cruel, yes, but she's also doggedly clawing her way up in the world in the only way available to her, and her savvy and determination are remarkable.

But I also love her tender-hearted, naive, helpless best frienemy Amelia Sedley. In fact, I think that Thackeray is a great novelist precisely because he makes it possible for me to love both characters. Though the novel is known as a biting work of satire, I think that, at its heart, it's also a book written with a lot of empathy, understanding, and even gentleness.

I'm about 580 pages into its 800+ pages, and I'm on a pretty good tear (now that I'm past that really dull stretch about the battle of Waterloo--sheesh!).

In fact, the only thing I don't like about Vanity Fair's length is that I have a huge stack of library books on my kitchen table that I desperately want to get to. There's Lord of the Flies and Howard's End and Wives and Daughters and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (which is my new book club's first read!). I'm definitely looking forward to the last forth of Vanity Fair, but I have so many treats in store--it's looking to be a great summer so far!

Leading Ladies in University Administration

2011-06-07T18:23:00.000-05:00

There are plenty of things that I love about working at a university (good karma, student hijinks, excellent benefits, an abundance of general and free-floating intelligence, etc.), and a few things that I hate about it (bureaucracy, dowdy clothes, bureaucracy, student hijinks, bureaucracy, etc.).

But one of my favorite things about being a university employee is the number of brilliant women leaders hanging around. Of the two deans and three department heads I work with, four are women, so 80% of the leadership I'm exposed to is female. They're all brilliant in their own unique ways: this one's a great communicator and an excellent team manager, that one's efficiency and ability to think long-term is unrivaled, this lady bursts with a never-ending stream of fruitful ideas, and that one's kindness creates the type of team-oriented culture that makes working for her a pleasure. My last department at the university was also lead by a brilliant female director--one with a lot of invaluable stubbornness and savvy who was able to create and shape her program from the ground up. Trust me: I've worked with a lot of impressive ladies.

In institutions of higher learning, I love that there doesn't seem to be a glass ceiling in sight. Women can be leaders and managers here and still be genuinely respected and valued by their colleagues--and have I mentioned the fact that they're usually nationally respected, brilliant scholars leading research in their respected fields? Oh, yeah, that too. ;)

All this is great news for me because I'm surrounded by strong, intelligent, successful women who I can readily adopt as role models. It's also great news for the flood of young women entering college campuses (57% of all students graduating from universities are women, according to USA Today): they're frequently exposed to intelligent female leaders in their classrooms, heading their departments, and piloting their universities (including the recently appointed chancellor at my university!).

I like to think that seeing women in leadership roles at the university-level will encourage young female graduates to go out and believe that they can do great things in the world, because they can. Maybe in 30 years, that 57% of college graduates will translate to 57% female leadership in corporations and government--here's to hoping. :)

The Serious Wonder of Hayao Miyazaki

2011-05-24T18:48:00.000-05:00

Last weekend, I finally got around to watching The Cat Returns, which is an animated movie from the now-famous Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. It's the story of a teenage girl who rescues a cat from the road, only to realize that the cat is the royal prince of the Kingdom of Cats. As a reward, the King of Cats captures the girl and takes her to the Kingdom, where she must escape becoming the prince's bride. As far as animated movies go, it's a little weird, and very, very awesome.

"A little weird and very awesome" is applicable to pretty much all of Miyazaki's productions. His movies are whimsical, strange, and beautifully animated. They're also deadly serious. While most contemporary American animated movies (Pixar, Disney, Dreamworks, etc.) play tongue-in-cheek games with the conventions of fairy tales, creating films that they claim appeal to children and adults alike, Miyazaki takes fairy tales very seriously. His films are almost always about war and environmental destruction and the very real danger that comes from forgetting who you are. His movies inhabit worlds whose borders can blur at any second with eerie and dangerous magics. Aerial wars can break out between zeppelins and dragons. Birds can become staircases. Shadows can coalesce into henchmen. Even balls of dust and soot can come alive.

Dust sprites from Spirited Away.

I think that by taking fantasy seriously, by favoring whimsy and wild imagination over generic humor and contemporary references, Miyazaki is able to create movies that are truly fascinating to children and adults alike. My favorite is My Neighbor Totoro, which features a cat bus and trolls unlike anything you've ever seen.

OMG catbus!!

I'm also a big fan of Howl's Moving Castle (which is very unlike the original--and also excellent--children's fantasy novel by Diana Wynne Jones) and Ponyo, the Studio's most recent production.

Ponyo is, in theory, based on the fairy tale of the little mermaid, but Miyazaki's film is as different from Disney's The Little Mermaid as the Brothers Grimm stories are from Shrek. As a mermaid, little Ponyo is cute but creepy (she looks like a goldfish, occasionally sprouts bird-like feet, and really enjoys ham), and the film features massive flooding and prehistorical sea creatures.

Ponyo in her bucket.

I'm always surprised by the genuine delight that I still feel whenever I see a Miyazaki film. I'm fascinated with the little threads that flow through his movies--the stone ghosts, the dust sprites, the menacing shadow men, the omnipresent and insect-like war zeppelins--and how with every film he makes for children, he doesn't just play in the worlds of myth and fairy tales, he actively contributes to them. It's his startling originality--his ability to create creatures that are delightful and terrifying, beautiful and bizarre--that makes me rent his movies again and again.

The Art of the Nap

2011-05-21T15:07:00.000-05:00

This morning, I woke up and promptly decided to do nothing with my day.

I had plans to go to the farmers' market downtown and errands aplenty to run, but after a cup of coffee and two toasted pitas with peanut butter, I hit the couch and haven't moved since--except, of course, to transition back to bed where I could better enjoy the warm breeze coming through my bedroom window, the buttery Saturday morning sunlight, and my comforter (which is just thin enough to be perfect for warm spring-time napping).

I've never been much of a napper (though I have recently developed a fondness for falling asleep on my couch for a half hour each night as an overture to my real bedtime). But I do love a good half-awake, hour-long loll in bed when just I'm conscious enough to hear cars driving by but asleep enough to lose track of which of my thoughts are real and which are the bizarre result of half-dreams ("Why shouldn't the ghosts ride motorcycles to make it to their graduation day history tests?").

Between this morning's naps, I've had the good fortune to spend my time with Joseph Epstein's Narcissus Leaves the Pool: Familiar Essays. I'd never heard of Epstein before, but I saw this book's title on another blogger's list of favorite essay collections, and I had to get it from the library.

Epstein's essays are emphatically "familiar." He writes in the spirit of Michel de Montaigne--his voice is indulgent, leisurely, charming, and desultory, and his topic of choice is always himself. Whereas "personal" essays are usually about some event in the author's life, their form still tends to be somewhat formal and narrative-based. Epstein's "familiar" essays, on the other hand, feel like letters Epstein has written to a dear friend. I imagine that Epstein worries far less about keeping his meanderings on topic than he does about maintaining a relationship with his reader that is warm, relaxed, and consistently engaging.

Joseph Epstein

One of my favorite essays so far has been "The Art of the Nap." In this piece, Epstein starts with his personal napping habits (a topic with an almost unimaginable potential for dullness) before waltzing playfully from the historical connections between writers and insomnia to sleep's purported similarity to death and back around to why it's important not to take Harvard too seriously. He manages, somehow, to transform the potentially banal into the delightful--a brilliant and surprisingly difficult trick.

Here's one of my favorite paragraphs from "The Art of the Nap":

I nap well on airplanes, trains, buses, and in cars and with a special proficiency at concerts and lectures. I am, when pressed, able to nap standing up. In certain select company, I wish I could nap while being spoken to. I have not yet learned to nap while I myself am speaking, though I have felt the urge to do so. I had a friend named Walter B. Scott who, in his late sixties, used to nap at parties of ten or twelve people that he and his wife gave. One would look over and there Walter would be, chin on his chest, lights out, nicely zonked; he might as well have hung a Gone Fishing sign on his chest. Then, half an hour or so later, without remarking upon his recent departure, he would smoothly pick up the current of the talk, not missing a stroke, and get finely back into the flow. I saw him do this perhaps four or five times, always with immense admiration.

Epstein possesses all my favorite traits in an essayist--he's light-hearted, well-read, subtle, intelligent, self-aware, and unfailingly kind--and he's made a lovely addition to my lazy Saturday morning.

Now the question becomes, where do I go from here? A trip to the gym is definitely in order, as well as a trip to Home Depot to look at paint swatches and perhaps a jog over to Old Navy to seek out sundresses. Maybe I'll make my way to the theater to see Bridesmaids tonight. Perhaps I'll find time to deal with the Jenga-like stack of dishes piled in my tiny apartment sink. It's possible that I'll even repair the complete lack of clean white socks in my uppermost sock drawer.

But, then again, there are essays waiting for me, not to mention more sunshine and that already well-rumpled comforter waiting on my bed . . .

Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends

2011-05-18T07:46:00.000-05:00

I have a strange (though not necessarily bad) habit of finding wildly famous writers of fiction, ignoring their novels, and reading their essay collections instead. I did the same thing with Jonathan Franzen last fall, and I just did it again with Michael Chabon's collection of essays Maps and Legends.

Maps and Legends with its gorgeous set of mythical layered dust jackets.

It's an absolutely stunning book to hold (way to go, McSweeney's!) and an engaging text to spend time with. For some reason, I kept comparing Chabon's book to Franzen's How to Be Alone--in part because they're both works by critically acclaimed and much lauded contemporary writers of fiction, and in part because they take on such similar topics (for example, The State of Modern Fiction and Reading) in such wildly different ways. Where Franzen is serious and brilliant and critical, Chabon is enthusiastic and blithe and mercurial. Franzen's writing is more precise and persuasive, but Chabon's is more engaging; I wish I could take a literature class with Franzen as my teacher, but I wish I could take Chabon out for a beer to talk about our promiscuous reading habits.

Chabon's collection contains essays on the state of the modern short story, the dangers of labeling novels by genre (he considers the library's system of categorization--science fiction, mystery, young adult, etc.--to be a sort of ghettoization), Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy, the history of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, the myth of the golem, the importance of comics for children and adult readers, and his childhood love of Norse mythology. (If you know my reading habits at all, you can see why the table of contents practically forced me to get my hands on this collection!)

Chabon with superheroes.

While much of the essays are what could be called light or popular literary criticism (usually a serious, if accessible, genre), at its heart, the book is a gleeful celebration of reading for pleasure and entertainment. I think that the world of literature might be a better place if all authors--Pulitzer Prize winners or not--were able to occasionally admit to Chabon's thesis: "I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain. Period."

Chabon, Franzen, Tom Wolfe, and Gore Vidal as seen on The Simpsons.

Earth Day, Patagonia, and the World's Diverse Passions

2011-04-22T13:19:00.001-05:00

Happy Earth Day, everyone! I completely forgot the holiday, but it's a happy coincidence that I bought a new Electra quick-release wire basket for my bike last weekend and a Patagonia messenger bag this week. Both I plan on using for environmentally friendly offices. I'm going to use the wire basket for conveying groceries from my local farmers' market and books from my library. It looks cute on my bike and is soooo fun to use!

The Patagonia bag is extra-special to me. I've wanted one since college. Patagonia makes high-quality camping, hiking, and bicycling products in an extremely earth-friendly way: they fund a lot of great causes, and pretty much everything they sell is either completely recycled or completely organic. They're a fantastic company, and I can't wait to tote my work computer around in their bag! I'm calling it a Happy New Job present to myself. :)

Finally getting a Patagonia bag is a big deal for me; their stuff is expensive (in part because it's meant to be used for decades without falling apart), so it's exciting to finally be able to afford one and to placate a consumerist fetish that I've been nursing for a long time!

Buying my bag got me thinking about people's unique proclivities and passions. Patagonia is an old one for me, and it's a passion that is unique to my geographic location, my class, my social situation, my values, and my temperament. It comes from being a former Enrivons member and a KU graduate and a Lawrence resident during the early 2000s. It's symptomatic of who I am and where I come from, just like my passion for bookstores and literature and education and vintage clothes and granola and pickles and who knows what else! Our loves and desires are created by more than just ourselves--they're organic outgrowths of our unique personal contexts, as well.

This has been on my mind as I learn about the students I'm involved with as an advisor. The personality types common to each of my academic programs are so distinctive from each other and often quite different from my own. Each day contrasts my values and understandings--those values and understandings unique to my background in the study of literature, writing, and the creative process--with those of my new co-workers and advisees.

I suspect that my job will be a great one for studying human nature and the variety of human passions. Whether it's service, professionalism, creativity, or knowledge that my students seek, I find it refreshing and fascinating to experience, at least for a few minutes at a time, how these lovely people perceive the world, themselves, and their career paths.

How Way Leads on to Way

2011-04-19T07:36:00.001-05:00

I've been away. You may have noticed. :P

My new job has taken a lot of adjusting to these past few weeks. I like the work, but traveling back and forth has eaten up much of my free time, and I'm still getting use to it. On top of that, my poor, lovely, stubborn mother has been in the hospital with an unusually nasty strain of pneumonia. She's back home and feeling better now, but I was worried for her. So, dear blog, I'm sorry, but you just haven't been a priority.

But since I've last visited, I've been reading a lot and enjoying my Netflix subscription and trying (trying!) my best to take it easy in my time off. I've been in a particularly fun sort of reading/television watching path--it's one of my favorite things about being out of school and being able to direct my own reading. I choose books with perfect freedom and whimsy, and I never run out of new strands of interest to follow. Each new book I read has the potential to sling me off into some new interest that I never expected to love. In reading as in life, as Frost puts it, "way leads on to way."

Most recently, I've been loving all things Sherlock Holmes, which I never in my life thought I would be interested in. I used to think that I didn't like mystery novels or crime stories, and police detectives in tweeds smoking pipes seemed like the dullest thing possible. But here's what happened:

I watched that fantastically witty Doctor Who episode where Agatha Christie solves a real-life murder mystery involving a giant space wasp. (Yes, that episode is as awesome as it sounds.) -->
Curious about Christie, I read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express, and Death Comes as the End. They were great--very clever and well written and British and astute. -->
Thinking that I now liked old-fashioned British mysteries, I rented the new Sherlock Holmes action movie with Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law. I surprised myself by really, really enjoying it. -->
Intrigued by the eccentricity of Holmes in the movie (drug use, bizarre fits of melancholia, a deep and curious jealousy of his friend Dr. Watson, etc.), I spent some time researching Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle on Wikipedia. -->
Curious about Doyle's writing and the oddity of Holmes as a character, I read two of the Holmes novels (A Study in Scarlet and The Hound of the Baskervilles). They were fun, easy reading, as clear and fast-paced as if they'd been written in the late 20th century, not the late 19th. -->
Because I enjoyed these novels, I decided to read Laurie R. King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice (which features Holmes in later life, living in semi-retirement in the 1920s and 1930s). -->
King's version of Holmes was fantastically appealing, even better than the original! On top of the typical Holmes-style plot lines, there was a brilliant feminist female sleuth to keep Holmes in check (Mary Russell!) and a romantic sub-plot and really cool flapper clothing. So I read the next two novels in the series (The Monstrous Regiment of Women and A Letter of Mary) and loved them. -->
Finally, I took Netflix's suggestion and started watching the Granada Sherlock Holmes series from the 1980s and 1990s with Jeremy Brett. I loved it and spent a good chunk of this weekend watching Holmes chase down Professor Moriarty and a dozen other amateur thieves and murderers. I never, ever thought I'd have an opinion about Dr. Watson as a narrator or the nattiness of Victorian-era men's clothing, but now I do. So yay!

So what's next? Inspired by King's Mary Russell novels, Downton Abbey's portrayal of pre-World War I Britain, and Ishiguro's conflicted post-World War II butler in The Remains of the Day, I'll probably track down some more great modernist British literature. But who knows where I'll end up next?

Goodness, isn't reading fun? :D

Terror and Pain and Other Awesome Things

2011-03-30T18:43:00.000-05:00

So, BIG HUGE FANTASTIC NEWS: I started a new job this week. I'm still working at the University, but in a different department with far more responsibility and freedom. It's a distinctly grown-up feeling job, with nicer clothes and an incredibly hectic Outlook calendar and a steep learning curve and a lot more pressure.

Obviously, this is a huge step for me career-wise, but it's also frightening. Terrifying, in fact. But I keep reminding myself to breath deeply, to trust myself, and to trust the search committee that thought I was right for the job.

I also keep reminding myself that a yoga instructor once told my class that "Pain is good. Pain is just the feeling of your life force actualizing." Of course, she told us this as we were sweating and trembling at least three minutes into an arm-aching balance pose.

I keep telling myself the same thing this week: If pain is just my life force actualizing (!), then maybe terror is just my life changing, expanding, moving forward before my mind can wrap quite comfortably around all the changes.

So that's my philosophy and my hope for the next few weeks. I'll let you know how it all turns out. :)

Howl, Howl, and Howl

2011-03-21T17:30:00.003-05:00

What sound does a working woman in her mid-twenties make the morning after her first softball practice in two and a half years?

Why, how did you guess?

Softball practice was fantastically fun yesterday, but I'm paying for it today. I'm having trouble opening doors, people--I mean, lifting my arm, turning a knob, and stepping forward hurts. Who knew that throwing a ball and crouching for grounders and darting across a muddy field for an hour and forty-five minutes could do that to a body?

In less painful news, I finally saw Howl this weekend. Howl is a "biopic" about the obscenity trial that followed City Light's release of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems in 1956, but the movie was nothing like what I expected.

I thought the movie would be a typical biopic in the style of Walk the Line or Lean on Me or Braveheart: conventional and predictable and utterly sentimental. Instead, the obscenity trial that the film is supposedly about serves as little more than a backbone for the 84 minutes of poetic action, a mere cage of plot line over which the filmmakers draped the central components of the film: the interview scenes with Ginsberg (played by James Franco) and the poem itself (which is read by Franco and beautifully animated). Really, the poem is what gives the movie all its heart and soul and interest; I wouldn't have minded a 45-minute movie with nothing but black-and-white scenes of Franco reading Howl in a Village bar spliced with bits of that lovely, vivid, frightening animation.

I was especially fond of the animators' portrayal of Moloch, the poem's "villain" (see above).

Once I got past expecting an actual plot to appear, I really enjoyed the movie, and I loved it best for reminding me of how much I used to love Ginsberg. He's one of my favorite 20th-Century poets, and I've read a ton of his poems and interviews. (In fact, the first poem I ever published was very Ginsberg-inspired, with long lines and stacks of lists and happy over-the-top joyful cosmic hysteria). He was severely out of vogue at my grad school, so I hadn't read him in years, but in 2004, I pretty much wanted to be Allen Ginsberg.

"You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a: sunflower!"

Watching Howl made me pull out my copy of Ginsberg's Selected Poems: 1947-1995, which (according the the receipt I found in the book) I bought from The Raven Bookstore in 2005. I reread my favorite sections of Howl (the "I am with you Rockland" section and "Footnote to Howl" with all its holy holy holy holys) and flipped through to see what poems I had marked back in 2005. It made for a lovely evening, actually.

I would definitely recommend Howl (the movie) to anyone who's read the poem and, while I'm at it, to anyone who hasn't read the poem. I believe that Franco reads the entirety of the poem over the course of the movie, and the filmmakers do an excellent job of getting to the heart of what Howl (the poem) is all about. They also did quite a good job of portraying Ginsberg as the complicated figure that I always imagine him to be: a poet, a revolutionary, an unloved lover, a square, a Beat, and an all-around brave and joyful human being.

Eat, Pray, Love

2011-03-13T19:01:00.001-05:00

Honestly, I was hesitant to read Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. It was just so damn popular--so popular that it spawned a Julia Roberts movie (an outcome that, I think, many a writer would dread). C'mon, I thought, how could Eat, Pray, Love turn out to be anything other than cheap tourism and stories about tiramisu and hunky Italians and faux-spiritual enlightenment and steamy tropical romances?

Fortunately, I was wrong. My mom convinced me to give Gilbert a chance, and I'm so pleased that I pulled one of my local library's fifteen copies of this memoir off the bookshelves. It's a lovely piece of writing and self-exploration, a breathtakingly honest and cleverly written chronicle of Gilbert's sojourns in Italy, India, and Indonesia.

Gilbert's memoir is not literary-ly ambitious but personally so: She's writing the type of confessional non-fiction that holds very little back, and so a reader's enjoyment of the book hinges not on whether or not you like the story, but whether or not you like Liz Gilbert, Narrator. And though I did occasionally find her neuroses irritating, I really, really liked Liz Gilbert: I admired her emotional and spiritual bravery (both as a traveler and as a writer), even when I didn't necessarily "get" her.

Of course, this is how most personal essays and memoirs are meant to be. For example, E.B. White's One Man's Meat isn't brilliant because of its stories (in fact, I don't remember any sort of "plot" anywhere in the entire book) but because of the richness of White himself. It's the same with Gilbert's book: despite the way the memoir was marketed (as a sort of chick lit/humor/travel memoir hybrid), Gilbert's writing is so rife with personality and literary references and carefully crafted scenes that she places herself squarely within the tradition of classic personal essayists. Even when there wasn't much action going on (especially in the Italian chapters), Gilbert's voice, her obvious intelligence, and her wide-ranging literary and spiritual references make this book rich and worthwhile.

I ended up reading this very quickly and with great pleasure and found myself marking favorite quotes again and again. Here are a few that stuck with me, even after I was done:

"But I felt a glimmer of happiness when I started studying Italian, and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt--this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight."

"Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don't you will leak away your innate contentment."

"But what I have come to realize is that, when the patriarchic system was (rightfully) dismantled, it was not necessarily replaced by another form of protection. What I mean is--I never thought to ask a suitor the same challenging questions my father might have asked him, in a different age. I have given myself away in love many times, merely for the sake of love. And I've given away the farm sometimes in that process. If I am to truly become an autonomous woman, then I must take over that role of being my own guardian."

"My thoughts turn to something I read once, something the Zen Buddhists believe. They say that an oak tree is brought into creation by two forces at the same time. Obviously, there is the acorn from which it all begins, the seed which holds all the promise and potential, which grows into the tree. Everybody can see that. But only a few can recognize that there is another force operating here as well--the future tree itself, which wants so badly to exist that it pulls the acorn into being, drawing the seedling forth with longing out of the void, guiding the evolution from nothingness to maturity. In this respect, say the Zens, it is the oak tree that creates the very acorn from which it was born."

And, finally, one very, very lovely bit of language:

"I walked home that night feeling like the air could move through me, like I was clean linen fluttering on a clothesline, like New York itself had become a city made of rice paper--and I was light enough to run across every rooftop."

All quotes taken from Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love (Viking 2006).

The Supposed Hazards of Creativitiy

2011-03-10T17:26:00.002-06:00

One of my co-workers and writing group pals sent me this video a few weeks ago. It's Elizabeth Gilbert (yes, that Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame) talking about how Western culture conceives of creativity. Basically, her argument is that it is necessary for writers, artists, and musicians to figure out a way to deal with the pressures of creativity in a positive, nurturing way. Gilbert does a great job with her talk, and I thought I'd share it here.

It also reminded me of Black Swan, which I really, really enjoyed. But . . .

***SPOILER ALERT***

why does Nina have to die at the end? Why does she have to go crazy to be a great dancer? Why can't she just evolve into a fulfilled, well-rounded human being who can dance like hell?

The movie is beautifully made, visually stunning, and genuinely (and I don't use this word lightly) thrilling. But I think that it perpetuates a stereotype about artists and, perhaps more importantly, about artists who happen to be women.

Take 20th century writers, for example. Sure, there are plenty of male authors who have killed themselves, but Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, two of the most famous and brilliant female writers of the 20th century, are notorious for their suicides. More people know them for their deaths more than for their writing. (C'mon, be honest--how many of you saw The Hours but haven't read the wonderful, revolutionary, life-changing novel that is Mrs. Dalloway?)

In fact, I don't know how many times I've heard Plath's breathtakingly beautiful and challenging poetry ridiculed by undergraduates simply because they don't like her personal story. They won't even give her poetry a careful reading because of how she died. She even gets the cliche of the mentally ill author permanently named after her ("the Sylvia Plath effect") while Ernest Hemingway gets to keep on being the lovable big "Papa" of Modernist literature despite his suicide by shotgun. He somehow has maintained his integrity in our culture; she has not.

These women, of course, are not the only writers and artists who have experienced creativity and mental illness at the same time, but their reputations are permanently marked by their suicides in a way that male writers' stories rarely are. And in some ways, I believe that our culture tells female artists quietly yet consistently that to be a great creator requires some sort of profound personal loss or damage: you'll lose your boyfriend, you'll lose your family, you'll lose your femininity (like the bluestockings), you'll lose your life. To create, the story goes, we must risk self-destruction and death. (See Dear Sugar and Elissa Bassist for more on this.)

Pretty much every time I've not gotten a job or gone through a breakup or had a fight with a friend or was in some other way miserable, I've been told by someone that "at least it's good for your writing." And every single time I've found it profoundly offensive. Why should suffering and writing--one of the most redeeming, life-affirming, challenging, and terrifyingly real acts I know--be wed together in such hideous matrimony? I don't want people wishing unhappiness on me as some backhanded means of pushing me toward success. What an awful way to live. What an awful way to be treated.

So even though Gilbert doesn't mention gender in her talk, it has sparked in me a belief that pursuing mental health as a female writer is a feminist act. And I truly appreciate Gilbert's thinking on this topic, even if I'm not entirely satisfied with her solution of the happy and distinct genius.

On the Benefits of Making Mistakes

2011-02-28T21:30:00.000-06:00

Last week, my boss and I discussed my 2010 job review. I wrote a few pages, she filled out a rating sheet, and then we sat around and talked about how awesome I am. No, I'm not kidding--she actually used words like "awesome" and "fantastic" and phrases like "you're so good at X, Y, and Z" and "I couldn't be happier"! Needless to say, I really enjoyed it--it's always nice to receive positive praise in exchange for a lot of hard work!

In my "narrative" portion of the review, I wrote mostly about how difficult it was this year to gain the depth of knowledge that I needed to do my job well. I also wrote a little bit about how I struggled to improve my communication with my boss by learning when to ask questions and what questions to ask.

But it's what I didn't write about that's been on my mind this week: the benefits of failure. I'm a perfectionist by habit, a terrible nitpicker who hates to let projects go. I used to think that my perfectionism made me a careful, detail-oriented, conscientious worker. I used to think that it made me a better writer, a better baker (well, that one might actually be true), and a better person.

But now I just think that it means that I'm afraid to make mistakes and have other people see my failings. It means that some part of me believes that I have to work harder and have higher standards than everyone else just to be a valuable, productive, and likable person.

But at this job, I've learned to let go of some of my perfectionism--I've had to. When I first started, I knew so little about my department and its processes and its many (many, many, many!) aspects that my days were riddled with mistakes. I had to let go of my perfectionism just to stay sane.

But I was also able to let it go in part because I began to develop a meaningful rapport with my director. During my first months on the job, I was terrified whenever I had to tell her I had made a mistake. I thought that whenever I told her there had been a typo in an advertisement or a forgotten email or a misdirected student that she would think that she had made a terrible mistake in hiring me. I thought that each mistake would mean that she would consider me unfit to write emails or work in an office or even live in civilized society!

But, in time, I learned that telling her honestly about those mistakes actually improved our relationship. Now that she knows that I'm willing to fess up to my mistakes and learn from them, I think that she has more respect for my integrity and character: she knows that I can admit a failing and willingly start again with her at square one. My mistakes strengthened our bond because I know that I'm allowed to be human and fallible at work, and she knows that I'm consistently upfront with her about my work and its results.

Though I wasn't looking forward to writing or discussing my annual review, it turned out to be a valuable exercise. Naturally, I'm pleased with the feedback I received--hey, who doesn't want to see a row of check marks beneath a "(5) Excellent" column?--but I'm more pleased with what the process has taught me about myself, work relationships, and the benefits of letting perfectionism go.

A Few of My Favorite Things: The Hippie Edition

2011-02-20T20:58:00.001-06:00

As I've mentioned earlier, it's been a busy month. First came an editing job on a tight deadline, which was followed by an intense drafting process for an essay that was due to my writing group, and then there was yet another editing job. (Oy! Freelance work seems to come in threes, just like deaths!)

Basically, I haven't had a lot of down time since January, so I've been trying to take it a little easy this weekend by enjoying a few of my favorite things. So, in the spirit of Mrs. E's "favorite things" posts over on Easy Street, here's one of my own--but a Lawrence hippie edition!

I've been watching a whole lot of Slings & Arrows this weekend. It's a Canadian comedy about a Shakespearean theater company struggling through various artistic and financial crises following the death of their artistic director. The former artistic director returns as a ghost to collaborate with (read: torment) his old friend and replacement as the company puts on Hamlet.

I love, love, LOVE this show--it's so smart, so well written, and so damn literate that I can hardly stand it. It's intensely funny (one of the main writers was an actor on both Kids in the Hall and Saturday Night Live), and the characters are amazing. I am so sad that there are only eighteen episodes of it (three seasons at six episodes each)--I'm almost done already!

So why's it hippie-tastic? Helloooo! It's all about arts funding and dramatic actors and romance and Shakespeare--with that earring, you know he wasn't precisely conventional.

I've been listening to a band called Pentangle. They're a British folk rock band from the late 1960s and early 1970s. I've heard them described as "folk-jazz" and "acid-folk." Yup, hippie-tastic.

I've been using my new Neti pot since my "seasonal" allergies have decided to make their appearance in this unusually warm February weather. It's been helping a lot with what I believe to be dust and mold allergies.

Why's it hippie-tastic? Neti pots originated in the Ayurvedic and yogic medical traditions. Also, look at this guy.

I've also been loving my newest thrift store find (wearing second-hand clothes is distinctly earth-loving and hippie-ish, by the way):

It's a fantastic khaki-colored blazer, which I got from the Salvation Army for $4.99. It's perfectly preserved and made of a somewhat yucky-feeling, stiff polyester-cotton blend (it's obviously from the late '70s or early '80s), but that just means it's the kind of garment that's going to last, like, forever. And it looks damn good with a colorful, flowy scarf; skinny jeans; and cowboy boots.

And last but obviously not least, I made homemade granola for the first time. I was buying Kroger's 100% Natural Cereal and eating entire boxes in three or four sittings--it was not a cost-effective way to live! So I thought I'd try my own version adapted from Alton Brown's recipe, a famous and somewhat complicated Allrecipes.com recipe, and what I had in my cabinet.

It turned out really, really, really well. I had a hard time not licking the spoon even before it was baked, and it's pretty fantastic now that it's cool and ready for some milk or yogurt.

Yum. Hippie life never looked so delicious. (See the recipe below.)

It's been a fun weekend, but I'm not looking forward to getting back to the grind tomorrow. But at least I can munch on granola before work tomorrow, and no one needs to know what I'm listening to on my iPod. More songs about knights and thyme and meadows, please!

---------------
Lesley's Granola

5 cups rolled oats
1 cup sliced almonds
1 cup sunflower seeds
3/4 cup shredded coconut
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 tablespoon cinnamon
1/2 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 cup craisins

Stir together rolled oats, almonds, sunflower seeds, and coconut in a large bowl.

Combine the vegetable oil, salt, honey, and brown sugar in a pan and bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and add the cinnamon and vanilla extract to the liquid mixture, stirring well.

Stir the liquid mixture into the dry ingredients. Spread the granola on two baking sheets covered in aluminum foil. Bake at 300 degrees for 30 minutes, stirring and flipping the granola every five to ten minutes to avoid clumps and stickage.

Allow the granola to cool on the pan before mixing together with the craisins. Serve hot with milk or cold with milk, yogurt, or cereal. Or just stick your face in the bowl and gnash--whatever floats your boat!

Dear Blog,

2011-02-10T21:56:00.003-06:00

I miss you. I really do. I want to write posts for you about snow days and this really good new sugar cookie recipe I found and Eat, Pray, Love and walking in the cold and writing essays and . . .

*sigh*

You get the idea.

But things have been busy here in Lesley Land. I took on an editing job last week that had a very tight deadline. It was a fun project, but it kept me busy all last week. Regular work has been unbelievably busy because of the snow days, and I've been furiously playing catch up for a solid week now. And then last week my writing group members decided that it was time for me to wrap up the essay I've been working on and submit it, so I've been furiously churning out 1,500 words per night all week long--and I'm still not done! Now I'm hoping to whittle it down and send it off early Saturday afternoon.

So, blog, know that I miss you. Know that I keep having ideas for you and writing them down, right before I go off and edit and/or write and/or work really hard and/or go to the gym to stay sane.

Anyway, I'll visit again soon.

Much love,
Lesley

Kay Ryan, the Peeving of Poets, and the Incredible Hidden Sedgwick Hall

2011-01-28T12:46:00.000-06:00

Last night, I drove out to Rockhurst University to see former Poet Laureate Kay Ryan read as part of the Midwest Poets Series. Typically, driving to the heart of the Plaza to see a poetry reading on a Thursday night isn't my idea of a good time, but Kay Ryan is a self-avowed introvert-curmudgeon. She makes a lot of fuss about not being a part of the poetry community, enough so that I thought that this event might be my only opportunity to see her read.

Kay Ryan

So I went, giddy and tired and easily disoriented as I was from my long work week. I had a very hard time finding Sedgwick Hall (mostly because I didn't realize that Rockhurst is just a tiny, unmarked, nearly invisible wart on the buttocks of the UMKC campus). I drove around for twenty minutes, walked around for another twenty, and asked four different people before I finally stumbled across the building completely by chance!

I was very late, but I decided that half a Kay Ryan reading was better than no Kay Ryan reading at all. And I was right. Despite her hermetic self-image, Ryan was actually very well-spoken and funny, and she charmed the audience with ease. She had the funny habit of reading her poems aloud twice, which was great, actually.

Ryan's poems are all small--clever, compact little things that work very hard to say something very smart in as little space as possible. Her poems are elegant and deep and often funny, and they really beg for two or three re-readings--despite their size and apparent accessibility, they require thought and patience.

Here are two of my favorites from the reading. I especially liked what Ryan said about "Leaving Spaces"--she believes that people are uncomfortable with emptiness and quiet in life--and I've always loved the humor, fantasticality, and burning truthfulness of "He Lit a Fire with Icicles".

----------

Leaving Spaces

By Kay Ryan

From Flamingo Watching

Found on The Poetry Foundation's website

It takes a courageous
person to leave spaces
empty. Certainly any
artist in the Middle Ages
felt this timor, and quickly
covered space over
with griffins, sea serpents,
herbs and brilliant carpets
of flowers – things pleasant
or unpleasant, no matter.
Of course they were cowards
and patronized by cowards
who liked their swards as
filled with birds as leaves.
All of them believed in
sudden edges and completely
barren patches in the mind,
and they didn’t want to
think about them all the time.

----------

He Lit a Fire with Icicles

by Kay Ryan

From The Niagara River

Found on The Poetry Foundation's website

For W.G. Sebald, 1944-2001

This was the work

of St. Sebolt, one

of his miracles:

he lit a fire with

icicles. He struck

them like a steel

to flint, did St.

Sebolt. It

makes sense

only at a certain

body heat. How

cold he had

to get to learn

that ice would

burn. How cold

he had to stay.

When he could

feel his feet

he had to

back away

----------

Despite how much I like Ryan, I did manage to rub her the wrong way when she signed my book after the reading. I asked her if she read a lot of Marianne Moore. In response, Ryan scowled at me. "Well," she said, "I read her long after she could have affected me. I read her when I was young. She bugged the hell out of me." She paused, squinted her eyes up at me, black fountain pen poised over my copy of The Niagara River. "You know, the problem with being a female poet is that you get compared to other female poets all the time." Another squint, a little scowl. "You know?"

"Uh, yeah," I said. "I suppose. Thanks again--it was a lovely reading!" I said, backing away from the table, trying not to giggle. I had peeved a poet! A poet laureate, in fact! (It seemed like some dubious sort of accomplishment.)

I was thinking, It's not like I compared you to Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton or Rita Dove, lady! It's a question that makes good sense to me. I was thinking about "To a Snail," one of my favorite poems by Marianne Moore. If ever a poet made a virtue of contractility, it is Kay Ryan, whether she likes to think so about herself or not.

----------

To A Snail

By Marianne Moore

If “compression is the first grace of style”,
you have it.  Contractility is a virtue
as modesty is a virtue.
It is not the acquisition of any one thing
that is able to adorn,
or the incidental quality that occurs
as a concomitant of something well said,
that we value in style,
but the principle that is hid:
in the absence of feet, “a method of conclusions”;
“a knowledge of principles”,
in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn.

Marianne Moore

Winter Is Magical!

2011-01-21T12:22:00.000-06:00

And then you have to go outside. Gah! The cold--it burns!

In case you don't live in Kansas (or are an inveterate agoraphobe who never leave his/her house), it's been snowy and then cold and then snowy and then really, really cold again. I haven't been going outside much. In fact, pretty much all I've been doing is sitting on my couch attired in sweatpants, a hoodie, thick socks, and a lap-loving cat. My constant companions have been soup and herbal tea and young adult fantasy novels (Suzanne Collins and Phillip Pullman!) and a very cozy knitted blanket. Occasionally a Boulevard Amber Ale (my new favorite winter beer) makes it into the mix. Aaaaand that's about all the variation you're going to get.

Besides hibernating, I've also been extremely busy at work with the beginning of the semester and enrollment season. I like being busy and all, but dang! I don't even want to think about how many enrollment emails I've been sending. Obviously, I've been completely unmotivated to turn on my computer at home for blogging. The thought of it makes my fingers ache.

All in all, things have been good here. Maybe I'll get back into the swing of blogging soon. Or maybe it's time to start Catching Fire. Hmmm . . . decisions, decisions, decisions!

2010 Recap

2011-01-01T15:01:00.000-06:00

As much as I'm looking forward to 2011, 2010 has already been incredibly novel for me. My life has changed drastically in the last year, and so have I. So instead of posting a list of resolutions or expectations for the new year, here's my list of my favorite novelties of 2010--I think they're worth commemorating.

Singlehood: Breakups are hell, but, damn, I love doing what I want to do when I want to do it. There are benefits to being single--I'm starting to remember that. :)
New Job: No, make that three new jobs, including two part-times and my first real nine to five (not to mention the occasional freelance editing work!). Entering the working world has been challenging, but I love paying my own way.
New Apartment: Downtown Lawrence. Hardwood floors. Big, bright windows. Terrible insulation and laughable wiring and one very pathetic window unit. But I love, love, love it.
New Friends: You know who you are!
Yoga: I am officially that obnoxious yoga-obsessed person! I think a lot about posture now, and balance, and the importance of feeling strong every day.
Healthy Living: In general, I've eaten a lot better, drank a lot less, and worked out a lot more than I have since before I started grad school. It's been great, and it hasn't felt like discipline, really--more like setting myself up to feel good every day.
Music: I've been listening to music constantly these past few months, especially more of the ladies (Ingrid Michaelson, Kate Nash, Nina Simone, Cat Power, Erykah Badu, and Janelle Monae) and indie stuff (Ratatat, Arcade Fire, Yeasayer, and Phoenix). I've missed it!
TV Obsessions: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Doctor Who have improved the hell out of my life. Thank you, Netflix, Joss Whedon, and BBC!
New Style: My hair is red again, and shorter, and saucier, with stiff little bangs. I wear my big nerdy hipster glasses every day now. I've bought all of my favorite clothes within the past six months. I look and feel like a whole new woman.
New Ways of Thinking: I've worked hard this year to think in healthier ways. I try to be kinder to myself, more understanding of others, and more protective of my own mental health. It's hard work, challenging my own assumptions about the world and shedding my mental poisons, but it's work that has made me feel happier and healthier than anything else this year.

As far as years go, 2010 has been both incredibly difficult and richly rewarding, and I expect nothing less from 2011. So I'll leave you with this, one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite books of 2010: Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet.

People have (with the help of their conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult: everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us.

Thanks, Rilke, and happy 2011 to all!

What I Learned from Bertrand Russell and Doctor Who

2010-12-27T22:50:00.002-06:00

I ran across this quote from Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness the other day:

Fundamental happiness depends more than anything else upon what may be called a friendly interest in people and things.

I think that this is fundamentally true. However, I must be honest: my evidence for this comes from a) my personal experience and b) Doctor Who. Yes, I know what you're thinking: Now she's taking life lessons from that silly show?! Well, yes. (And famous 20th-century philosophers! Don't forget about them!)

But, really, one of my favorite things about the Doctor is how excited he gets about things, even when he really doesn't have much reason to be enthusiastic. By most standards, he should be unhappy: he's a 900-year-old time traveler with no family, no home planet, no one to understand his crazy alien ways, a distinctly junky spaceship, a bunch of cranky alien enemies who would really enjoy killing him, and a really rocky love-life with his human lady friends. Oh, and he only owns one outfit, and it happens to be a pinstriped suit, which seems really inconvenient for adventuring. Not to mention the fact that he sometimes has to depend on 3-D specs to save the day. For realz.

But he's really, really, really fascinated by the universe and things and life and people, and so he manages to keep happy on a daily basis. Example: About to be killed by a clockwork android? Beautiful! He thinks it's a lovely bit of machinery and he'd like to meet whoever made it! Has to depend on a half-genius, half-birdbrained human scientist to bring him back through a worm hole and save the world? Great! Randy the Scientist is his new best friend when he's in south London! Meets Satan right on top of an inescapable black hole? Fantastic! It just means that he didn't know as much about the universe as he thought he did!

Pretty much every life-or-death situation turns into a kind of romp of appreciation for the Doctor, and it's contagious. Yes, he's a fictional character, but that sort of indefatigable enthusiasm for life, that giddy interest in our diverse and myriad world, seems like a great recipe for never really getting bored or growing old.

So for the last few months, one of my goals has been to get really excited over something, anything, everyday. It doesn't take much: some article about a crazy new scientific discovery, a mind-blowing Wikipedia article, a good trip to the gym, hearing to a fantastic song I've never heard before, listening to someone tell a crazy story about his/her life, whatever. The topic doesn't much matter. The point is to love something, anything, for the sake of loving, to appreciate something purely for the sake of appreciating anything.

Making a daily practice of loving some bit of the world: this seems like one of the easiest, more rewarding paths to happiness I can imagine. And I I'm glad to hear that Mr. Russell thinks so, too.

Baking a Bitter Cake

2010-12-23T12:56:00.147-06:00

In the winter of 2008, I tore a recipe for a Whiskey-Soaked Dark Chocolate Bundt Cake out of the New York Times's dining section. I was so excited to make it. It contained quite literally all of the best things in the world: lots of butter, very dark chocolate, espresso, and whiskey--lots and lots of whiskey! It sounded delicious and exotic and very rich.

But I'd never made a liqueur-soaked cake before. I was a little afraid, so I tucked the scrap of newspaper away in my recipe box and forgot about it until a week ago when I was looking for something special to make for a family holiday party. I unfolded the crumpled newsprint and thought Aha! It fit the bill exactly: it would look beautiful, taste delicious, and feel distinctly holiday-ish--by which I mean sophisticated and special and a little expensive. Simply put, it would be perfect for a Sunday afternoon Christmas party with relatives.

So I set to work. At its core, it's a fairly straightforward butter cake recipe: it starts with creaming butter and sugar, then come the eggs and vanilla, and then you add the dry ingredients at the end. The only quirk is that the recipe ends similarly to Nigella Lawson's classic Dense Chocolate Loaf Cake recipe (which involves beating in alternating parts liquid and dry ingredients to the batter right before it goes in the oven).

The batter turned out beautifully: fluffy and rich and very, very alcoholic. I licked the spoon as I cleaned up and got a little bit tipsy. I mean, the cake itself has a whole cup of whiskey in it, even before it's baked and sprinkled with whiskey again!

Boozy, boozy batter.

The batter tasted a little, well, intense to me, but I figured that most of the whiskey flavor would bake out. So I went with it. I threw the batter in my Great Aunt Shirley's burnt orange bundt pan . . .

and baked it up. It came out perfect-looking, moist, and very very fragrant. My entire apartment smelled like rich chocolate with a touch of whiskey and espresso mixed in, as if Starbucks started serving cocktails alongside their mochas and lattes.

I plated it on my beautiful new milk glass cake platter (thanks, Mom!), splattered it with a few hearty tablespoons of whiskey, topped it with powdered sugar, and mourned the fact that I couldn't try it until the party. (Let's be honest: taste testing is the entire point of making cookies and cupcakes. Even if you make them to share, you get to try them right away--I need that instant gratification!)

The completed cake.

But I was terribly disappointed once dessert time arrived the next day. The cake was bitter, unbelievably so. The espresso powder, unsweetened chocolate, and whiskey all worked together to give it bite and nothing but. I couldn't taste the sugar or the butter or anything but char. The cake wasn't burnt at all, but it tasted like a chocolate-covered espresso bean that had spent some time in a fireplace!

I think that public opinion on the cake was split: half the party thought it was fantastic, and the other half smiled very politely and left a big chunk on their plates. As I watched my relatives nibbling away at the cake, I thought about how I'd do it better next time. Melissa Clark, the recipe author, had written that her grandmother had been the originator of the recipe. Clark had taken the recipe, drastically upped the alcohol content, and switched to unsweetened chocolate to add "sophistication" to the dessert while reducing its sweetness.

I decided right then and there that old fashioned was definitely the way to go with this one. Next time, I'm doing it Grandma Clark style: I'll be using semi-sweet chocolate, halving the espresso powder, and replacing half the whiskey with water. And, if it still turns out bitter, I think that a nice glaze (I'm thinking whiskey, cream, vanilla, and powdered sugar) will do a trick.

I may have been bitterly disappointed by this recipe, but I wasn't beaten. Hear this, Whiskey-Soaked Dark Chocolate Bundt Cake: we shall meet again!

The intrepid baker, ready for round two.

Lonesome Literature

2010-12-22T07:52:00.000-06:00

When the title of a book has the word "lonely" in it, remind me to pay attention in the future.

I finished Carson McCuller's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter a few weeks ago. I bought it at The Dusty Bookshelf because I liked the cover and because I was in the mood to read a serious novel and because I wanted to read something set in the South. It's winter, goshdarnit, and I want to dream of hazy humidity and mossy trees and thick brambles of green.

I don't regret reading the book--in fact, I thought it was one of the best novels I've ever read--but this really wasn't the best time of year to read it. It's a book whose topic is loneliness. The novel follows John Singer, a deaf mute living in a small Southern town in the late 1930s. His best friend, another deaf mute, has been sent to a mental institution many miles away and, for the first time in his ten years of adulthood, no one can "hear" him speak.

As he copes with this loss, Singer moves into a new boarding house and begins to be visited by strangers who feel compelled to talk to him: Dr. Copeland, a black doctor who reads Marx and Spinoza and is desperately, painfully committed to helping his people escape oppression; Jake Blount, a half-mad alcoholic anarchist and labor activist; Biff Brannon, a cafe owner and recent widower who wants to understand Singer and the people who follow him; and Mick Kelly, the 14-year-old girl who dreams of moving to the snowy north and becoming a musician and who has Mozart's symphonies playing constantly in her head.

All of these characters, particularly Dr. Copeland, Jake, and Mick, and burning with a passion that no one else in the town is able to access or understand. And all of them, the quiet Biff and Singer included, are hounded by loneliness, the desire to be heard and to be understood. Singer follows his mad friend, aching to use his hands to speak directly to someone who understands him. Dr. Copeland and Jake and Mick chase Singer, feeling paradoxically that the lip reader is the only man on earth who understands them. Biff watches them all out of the new emptiness his wife's death has created, wondering what all this loneliness means in the world.

Despite the characters' passions and yearnings and hungers, it's a novel where very little happens. Usually, I dislike plotless novels, but McCuller's characters are so brilliantly drawn, so lifelike and complex and beautiful and sad, that I was rapidly pulled through the 300+ pages of the novel by pure curiosity. I desperately wanted to see these characters' lives become better because I understood their motives in the same way that I understand my own. McCuller's creates true empathy in this novel, and she does so brilliantly.

Mick Kelly especially comes to life. She made me remember being 14, feeling constantly confused and over-excited and angry and hungry and passionate for art--books in my case, music in Mick's. I get the impression that McCullers (who was only 23 when she wrote the novel) modeled the character after her own childhood and, I presume, her own desire to be a writer.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is a novel I would recommend to anyone, but not in November or December. It's the kind of heavy reading that's best reserved for the summer months, when there's sunshine and plenty to do and the world feels all fat and lazy and happy and slow. One needs the summer to counteract messages like "deep and soul-wrenching loneliness is intrinsic to human life and is its greatest and most painful motivator." Ack! The winter is just too cold for novels like this.

I thought I learned that lesson a few years ago when I read Ethan Frome and Jude the Obscure, two of the saddest novels ever written in America, in the same week in December. No, thank you! This time, the lesson's going to stick! It's only The Golden Compass and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Tamora Pierce from here until March, people! Loneliness is an excellent topic for excellent novels, but a terrible topic for mid-winter ruminations.

Gifting the Good Life

2010-12-20T12:42:00.000-06:00

This weekend, I made my first, last, and only Christmas shopping trip to Wal-Mart, Dillons, and Sports Authority. To be honest, I wasn't really buying any Christmas presents for anyone. I was looking for a yoga mat for myself and a heaping mound of baking supplies. I didn't buy a damn thing for anyone else, and I have to admit, it felt pretty great!

I'm not Scrooging it up or anything, but I just didn't want to this year. I didn't feel like barreling through crowds at the mall or Best Buy or Borders. I didn't feel like agonizing over trying to make the people in my life happy by buying them something they didn't necessarily need or even want for themselves. I didn't want to deplete my bank account for gifts that could very well end up sitting around the house, collecting dust. Shopping just seems like a tiring routine this year, one that benefits corporations without really making the holiday any more enjoyable for me and my family.

So I straight up opted out. I took my dad to a KU basketball game for his Christmas present, which we both thoroughly enjoyed. I'm taking my mom for a short wine tasting road trip in January, which sounds like a blast for both of us. My mom's family does a white elephant-style gift exchange on Christmas Eve, but instead of buying something at, say, Target, I bought my gift from my farmers' market; not only did my gift directly benefit my local economy, but shopping there made for a really fun Saturday morning with a friend! My grandparents on both sides will get a pan of homemade cinnamon rolls, as will my friends (Sorry if I'm spoiling the surprise for anyone!). And that's it! I'm done!

Psychologists have discovered that people are happier when they spend money on experiences rather than things, and I hope this proves true for receiving gifts, too. This year, I'm doing my best to give experiences, not gifts: the experience of a basketball game or trying new things or enjoying a lazy, delicious, properly fattening breakfast on Christmas morning without any effort.

And along the way, I'm working on enjoying the Christmas season more, even as I spend less money and less time doing so.

The Peanuts kids, experiencing the Christmas season.

Happy December

2010-12-01T12:25:00.000-06:00

Happy first of December, everybody!

I'm always a little bit excited about December. It's not the holidays I love--I'm not a huge Christmas person--and it's not exactly the weather; I don't usually like the cold, and I hate having to wear gloves to drive my car or type at the office. But I've always liked winter. At the beginning of the season, the cold feels crisp and new and intoxicating. The first snow flakes look cleansing and bright, and roads and cars aren't yet covered in that awful salty, sandy, dirty sludge that seems to epitomize the February doldrums to me. It feels like a new world is beginning each December, and I like that.

Besides, I've been ready for November to be done for awhile now. It was not my best month ever. :P

In other news, last night, I walked out in the cold and the dark to see a reading downtown. The two authors were local-ish (native Kansans from a town an hour away). One wrote essays and the other poetry, and they were both underwhelming. They did not write excellent or surprising or even terribly engaging literature, but I tried to listen to it with a better attitude than I used to. In the past, I've been a terrible literary hater; I've gotten angry over the success of poems and essays and even people that I don't like or respect. But that's a cheap and miserly way to live, and it certainly wasn't making me any more successful when I ripped on others' work.

These days, I'm trying to remember that all literature, even literature that I *ahem* disagree with, was written by someone who was doing his/her best to write, to survive, and to be happy. All literature is written by someone who is trying to learn his/her own song and sing it, and their bravery, persistence, and stubborn individuality is something to respect, even if the writing itself irks me.

The Mystery Engine

2010-11-21T14:30:00.000-06:00

This week, I've been reading my first Agatha Christie novel: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I've read a few mystery novels before, and I've never really liked them. I either guess the murderer way too early, which leaves me bored and impatient, or I'm completely lost and confused and I just want the author to tell me who did it already.

But Christie is different. Despite the shortness of her novels, her characters are astonishingly complex and surprising and funny, and she colors them richly with just a few deft strokes of very British humor. She also doesn't write straight up "whodunnits," as far as I can tell. What propels the reader through the book isn't solving the mystery, it's figuring out what each character is hiding--it's discovering what each person wants, who each person really is, and what he or she believes that they must hide from the world. It makes for fascinating reading.

I suspect that writers of bad mystery novels tend to think the wrong way about the mystery genre: people don't really care about crime or culpability. Instead, I think that we all care unfailingly about people, the complexities of the human mind and human motivations. As in all literature, people and their personalities, our neighbors and their passions and secrets, are the engines of mystery novels, not the mystery itself.

Nerd Girls

2010-11-19T18:52:00.001-06:00

Velma Dinkley from Scooby Doo

Annie Potts from Ghostbusters

Tavi Gevinson, author of The Style Rookie, a fashion blog

Me, newly shorn and be-spectacled

Six Things Worth Knowing About Me

2010-11-17T14:20:00.000-06:00

I'm the kind of person who has to carry a Band-Aid in my backpack at all times. I used to carry Neosporin, too. If placed in the right habitat, I'm almost comically prone to cuts and scrapes and bruises.
I kind of love bad weather. I hate getting cold or wet like anyone else, but there's something I enjoy about a semi-catastrophic weather forecast. Snow? Tornadoes? Big windy electrical storms? Exciting! I think it comes from all those tornado drills and warnings in elementary school. We'd all get to hang around in the basement where the kilns and art projects were kept. We were safe-ish and bored and we got to goof off for an hour or two. When bad weather is imminent, the world seems to sing with gleeful possibility: I always know that true disaster is unlikely but that I'm pretty much guaranteed an hour or so of a break from my regular day.
When I was little, I used to run everywhere. I think it's a sign that, deep down, I'm pretty much excited about everything.
I really, really, really dislike fake laughter, especially the kind that ineffectually masks anger or displeasure or nervousness.
When I was younger, I never thought I would like getting socks for Christmas; having a sparklingly clean kitchen; NPR; or drinking boring old caffeine-free, sugarless herbal tea. Sometimes I wonder what else I'll come to enjoy as I get older. Watching the six o' clock news? Cooked spinach? Sweaters with ribbons and spangles on them? The sky's the limit!
I've never particularly wanted my life to be like a TV show or a movie (though I really wouldn't pass up meeting a time traveling adventurer in a snazzy suit, if given the opportunity), but I wouldn't mind life being a little bit more like a novel: it would show more unity, have clearer themes, and have most of the duller parts lopped out.

Enamored

2010-11-08T12:35:00.003-06:00

I'm having one of those days where all I want to do is lay on my couch and read about a zillion books and do a little writing. Maybe I'm just growing weary of daleks daleks daleks all day long, but it's come upon me suddenly, the hunger for words. It happens. I've added five or six books to my Goodreads To Read shelf in the past few days. I want to read lots and lots of sci-fi and steampunk and cyberpunk and go back to my gloriously nerdy roots. I'm hungry not for high literature or for sentimental feeling or for postmodern ambiguity but for thinking. I want ideas, big, chewy, crunchy ideas with lots of vitamins and fiber and nutrition and maybe some sprinkles on top.

Anyway. You get the idea. It's lunch time, obviously. Here are some other things I'm enamored with:

My new iPod Nano, which my lovely parents bought me for my birthday because they are awesome and because they love me
Putting together lots of new playlists for my new iPod Nano after the gym tonight
Laurell K. Hamilton's Meredith Gentry series. I mean, the woman can make faeries (faeries?! are you kidding me?) into fantastically creative and compelling mystery novels for adults. She is obviously some kind of genius.
70 degree days in November, warm breezes, cool skies, the chilled and rainy days to come.
My birthday tomorrow. I plan on getting a massage, buying a bottle of red wine, ordering Indian take-out, and settling in for the night with a good book, which sounds like pretty much the best idea I've ever had.
This brief essay by Lera Auerbach on The Best American Poetry blog.
This fantastically textured, moody, profoundly beautiful poem by Claudia Burbank on the same blog.

Enjoy, folks, and have a happy Monday.
---------------

Geranium

Thank you for the dead geranium, red
memory of a short-stemmed city.
For nickel shows, tea rooms, the rotten-egg
mill-smell that crept between the fretted sheets.
For elms that divided our limbs with dusk,
and twisted things in ash trays, girls lit with gin,
long trains moaning, the night in a plum.
Thanks, too, for captured Kaiser helmets stowed in attics,
the Alligator Man and Monkey Woman at the circus,
and rented clarinets, and dented trombones,
ladies in a savage dance, hair bound high.
Thanks, perhaps, for noon, the dark bird’s love call,
being born on ice, out of wolf, wolf.
For the stately progress of capped men
towards a gray chowder, something shaken by the gills.
And all that we devoured, and all that didn’t drown.
--Claudia Burbank

Halloween & Doctor Who

2010-11-03T09:33:00.000-05:00

Halloween was a little disappointing this year. It used to be my favorite holiday, but as a grownup, I've gotten a little tired of dressing up for what usually turns out to be a disappointing, bar-fueled debacle. I used to love Halloween because it's about imagination and playfulness and not taking life too seriously. It's about dressing up and taking a chance on being somebody else for a night, and it's about laughing at death and all the other scary things that go bump in the night. I mean, it's a holiday centered around candy--candy, people! It's obviously awesome.

Or, if you live in a college town like I do, it's a holiday about getting schwasted, wearing stripper heels and a miniskirt, and yelling outside my bedroom window until 3:00 a.m.

Ugh. Obviously, I've become that cranky old lady who wishes all those damn kids would just put some clothes on and go to bed already.

Anyway. I went out with a few friends this year. It was a nice time, but I wish I'd had enough time to come up with a costume. Going out as just myself in a bar full of witches and Chilean miners and Anchorman characters was really a drag. But next year, I already know what I'm going to be:

"Party time, excellent, whoooo!" I wonder if I can find a Flowbee to carry around with me . . .

In other news, a friend recommended that I start watching Doctor Who now that I'm done with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'm completely addicted now.

If you don't know Doctor Who, it's a British sci-fi show that's been on BBC since the 1960s. It's about the Doctor (a time-traveling alien "bloke" with a penchant for saving the world) and his travels with whatever lady "companion" he picks up off the London streets. The show's premise (the bored Doctor explores the universe for fun and do-goodery) provides the show's writers with ample opportunity to combine wildly imaginative story lines with strange British slang ("wotcher!") and silly British humor.

Of course, Doctor Who is sometimes serious and dramatic and philosophical . . .

but usually it's just plain silly.

He fights goofy-looking aliens . . .

and old fashioned robots . . .

and even Satan when necessary . . .

How could it not be the best thing ever?

Feel the Burn

2010-10-21T16:58:00.000-05:00

I've been a little out of commission this week. I didn't expect to be, but my car got broken into over the weekend, causing a helluvalot of unnecessary hassle. I think that everything's finally under control on my end, but I'm still pissed about it. I feel like I've been gritting my teeth all week.

On a related note, I've been going to the gym a lot recently. It cuts into my Buffy time and my writing time, but it's the best thing in the world to do when I'm feeling stressed or angry or frustrated.

I used to think that people who liked to work out were nuts--completely off their rockers. But about two years ago, after six months of daily bike riding through hilly State College, I realized that I was addicted. I needed those endorphins. I needed the release of pushing my body to work through tension and pain, that feeling of reaching deep and steeling myself against that burn in my legs.

So now I work out. I like the gym: I like the elliptical machine, I like free weights, and I think that I'm really going to like yoga, which I did for the first time ever last night. It burned (I can't hold my arms at shoulder height for more than about three seconds today), but it made me feel really strong to settle into a pose and hold it, and hold it, and keep on holding it, even when I was shaking and tired. Somehow, that burn helped put out the burn of anger in my gut. I feel a little less pissed today. A little. ;)

Curiosity

2010-10-14T11:36:00.001-05:00

As you know, I'm working on putting together a chapbook out of some old poems from my thesis. Most recently, I've been grappling with a poem about Greek water clocks. It's a topic that I find complex and strange and absolutely fascinating, but I know that most people have no idea what a clepsydra is and, to be honest, they don't give a damn.

And that's perfectly fine. The problem is that this poem is dependent upon a knowledgeable audience or, even better, an audience willing to hit up Wikipedia when confusion strikes. It's also a poem that draws my attention to my own knowledge, to my own academic backgrounds. It makes me hyper-aware that I've spent more of my life learning about Greek history and literature than most people care to, and yet I still know so little about it. It's a topic that sounds very learned and obscure, but really I'm only scraping the surface of a whole fascinating field of study that some scholars of Greek archaeology have dedicated their lives to. I'm an amateur at best.

This makes me think about my other areas of "expertise": poetry, American literature, personal essays, baking, etc. But what I know about, say, poetry is just a smattering in a huge field that's bursting with poets and poems I've never heard of. I can name at least twenty people I know personally who know a heck of a lot more about poetry than I do. I know that, even in this, my primary field of expertise, it's absolutely impossible to know everything, and it's nearly impossible to gain mastery over even a fragment of such a wide field. For example, it would take a lifetime of study and reading and thinking to master a tiny category like Post-Modernist Midwestern American Poetry By Women written after 1960.

Sometimes, I find my persistent and unavoidable ignorance to be depressing, but more often I find it thrilling and even comforting. A friend once told me that libraries make her sad because she walks into the stacks and knows that she will never be able to read all the books that she sees. But this is the exact reason that libraries make me so happy: no matter how hard I work to learn, there will always be too much to know in my lifetime, and there will always be some work left for someone else to do.

There is a limit to what one man or woman can know. In a library full of hundreds of packed shelves and millions of volumes, each of us can only read a few shelves worth in a lifetime. No matter how boundless our curiosity is, the world is always much vaster and much greater than our aspirations, and this, I know, is a gift.

Skillz

2010-10-13T10:50:00.001-05:00

Fact: Administrative work is hard and scary.

Maybe not in every office, but it's true in mine. Before I started this job, I thought that administration would be fairly easy: somebody else would come up with the ideas and take all the risks, and I would just shuffle the necessary papers.

But that is absolutely not true. Somebody else does come up with most of the ideas that I implement at work, but I have to make them happen. My job requires a lot of flexibility and creative thinking. When my program director or one of my faculty members has an idea, the onus is on me to follow it through. I'm everybody's go-to girl. I'm the nitty-gritty techno-wrangler, the smooth bureaucracy surfer, and the (supposedly) omniscient fact-knower about how to navigate the university.

When I first started this job, this responsibility scared me. I didn't know anything, and I didn't know how I was going to learn anything. Now I have a little more faith in myself, and I know my most valuable resources: our genius office manager, our dedicated IT guy, the department's knowledgeable HR liaison, KU's Google-based search engine, and the University's plethora of help videos and training workshops.

Now I can hire a new lecturer in three days flat. I can school a scanner so that it doesn't flip pages. I can track down a student ID based on little more than a misspelled first name and a department. I can tell you how to enroll in or drop a class at any point in the semester. I'm good.

It's pretty great that I can do this stuff, but the most important skill my administrative job has taught me is how to problem solve, how to take a question that no one else can deal with and track down the answer. My new greatest skill is my dauntlessness, my confidence in my ability to take an idea and make it into a reality.

My 15 Albums

2010-10-05T08:35:00.000-05:00

Have you heard of this? It's a facebook trend where you write a note listing 15 albums that "will stick with you" or that "changed your life." My Aunt Janet tagged me in her facebook note, but I thought it would be more fun to share my list here.

The only constraint is that you have to write the list fast, in no longer than 15 minutes. My self-imposed constraint is that I have to pick albums that are personally important to me, that carry a lot of emotional weight with me, not just really excellent and obscure albums that make me sound cooler than I really am. ;)

So here it goes!

This Fire, Paula Cole--Great music for dealing with 14-year-old feminist-ish anti-establishment rage. And (let's be honest) 26-year-old feminist anti-establishment angst. I still listen to it!
Jagged Little Pill, Alanis Morisette--Could any female who grew up in the 1990s *not* include this in her list? I feel like I grew up with this one.
Blood on the Tracks, Bob Dylan--I'm pretty sure I listened to this every night of my freshman year of college. This is my official Favorite Album of All Time.
Astral Weeks, Van Morisson--Something about Van Morisson makes me feel more okay with life. It also reminds me of driving to Lawrence in my dad's truck.
Stunt, Barenaked Ladies--I listened to this album non-stop between the ages of 14 and 16. Don't judge me--"Light Up My Room" is amazing.
Moulin Rouge Soundtrack--I learned a lot about classic pop music from this soundtrack. If you want to judge me, see above. Also, how cute is Ewan McGregor?
Want One, Rufus Wainwright--I bought this album because I thought the cover was pretty, and I was completely enchanted. It holds up to zillions and zillions of listens, and it's still my favorite Wainwright album.
Everybody, Ingrid Michaelson--I started listening to Ingrid Michaelson really recently. Every song is awesome *and* useful.
Nashville Skyline, Bob Dylan--Connected to summertime and old boyfriends. 'Nuff said.
Dawson's Creek Soundtrack--Hey, I promised honesty, didn't I? I really liked a lot of the songs on this album. Thank goodness for cross promotion and The CW.
I Am a Bird Now, Antony and the Johnsons--Heart-wrenching. Antony goes after death and gender. Reminds me of KJHK and driving home in the rain.
Portions for Foxes, Rilo Kiley--I probably listened to this on the way to class every single day during my first year of grad school. Up-tempo and super-dark.
Bat Out of Hell, Meat Loaf--I can sing you every single song on this album word for word. Just ask. ;)
O, Damien Rice--Another college favorite. Pretty, melancholy tunes. Good for rainy days and dorm rooms.
Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Lucinda Williams--I like all of Williams's albums, but this is the one I've listened to the most. Every single song kills.

Runners Up*

???, Steve Miller Band--I listened to a couple of old Steve Miller Band albums when I was in junior high about a million times, but I can't remember their names for the life of me. But they made me happy.
Sky Blue Sky, Wilco--This didn't make the list because I'm passionately in love with about three songs on this album, but the rest are only okay. Those three carry a lot of weight, though!
A Love Supreme, John Coltrane--This is the only jazz album I've ever loved. It makes my brain feel all buzzy and profound.

*Is this cheating? If so, it's pretty fortunate that I do not care.

Random Five for Friday

2010-10-01T10:23:00.002-05:00

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!
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?!
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.
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!"
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. :)

Guess What I'm Doing Tomorrow

2010-09-22T17:02:00.000-05:00

Oh, nothing much, just flying to State College, Pennsylvania to see Susan Orlean read as Penn State's 2010 Steven Fisher Writer in Residence. Which Susan Orlean? Oh, yeah, that Susan Orlean who just happens to be my favorite living writer of non-fiction. I'm going to drink Yuenglings with her and stuff. At least I will be when I'm not stuffing my face with Waffle Shop and carousing with my friends from grad school who I haven't seen in a year and a half.

So, you know, no big weekend.

*pause*

AHHHHHOMIGOODNESSSOEXCITEDIT'SGOINGTOBEWAYAWESOMEYAY!!!

*ahem*

You get the idea. ;)

I'll see you next week, blog friends!

Sleeplessness

2010-09-20T12:01:00.002-05:00

After a weekend full of plentiful and restful sleep, I had a bad bout of insomnia last night.There aren't many pleasures to insomnia, except for the quiet reading time. Once I accept that I cannot sleep and drag myself out of bed, I usually enjoy the quiet, late-night time, the sense that I have no place to be and nothing to do.

Last night, I read a fascinating New Yorker article about Colorado uranium mining towns that have been gutted and razed due to radiation. Despite the health concerns that plague the towns, the "uranium widows" would happily welcome back the uranium mining industry. You can read an abstract here, but it's definitely worth tracking down the whole article.

I also read more of The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing, which I've been working on for awhile. It's not the cheeriest late night reading, but it's a great anthology, in part because editor Kevin Young does such an excellent job of mixing old and new poems. The poems in the collection are varied in age and style and message, but Young is nearly unfailing in his ability to choose compelling poems from excellent poets.

Here are two of my favorites from the collection. The first is a poem by Mary Oliver that I heard her read last fall. I liked it then, too, but these days it seems so important to remember these lines: "When it's over, I want to say all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms."

I read the Galway Kinnell poem for the first time in this anthology. It's so beautiful, so simple and spare, that I couldn't resist posting it here. It has that ring of trueness to it that all poems should have, no matter what their message or style.

----------

When Death Comes

Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

----------

Wait

Galway Kinnell

Wait, for now.

Distrust everything, if you have to. 

But trust the hours.  Haven't they 

carried you everywhere, up to now? 

Personal events will become interesting again. 

Hair will become interesting. 

Pain will become interesting. 

Buds that open out of season will become lovely again. 

Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, 

their memories are what give them 

the need for other hands.  And the desolation 

of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness 

carved out of such tiny beings as we are 

asks to be filled; the need 

for the new love is faithfulness to the old. 

Wait. 

Don't go too early. 

You're tired. But everyone's tired. 

But no one is tired enough. 

Only wait a while and listen. 

Music of hair, 

Music of pain, 

music of looms weaving all our loves again. 

Be there to hear it, it will be the only time, 

most of all to hear, 

the flute of your whole existence, 

rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion. 

Becoming Buffy

2010-09-12T23:07:00.000-05:00

I'm pretty sure that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was instrumental in getting me through the first month after my breakup.

There's something deeply rewarding about watching a strong female character beat-up some grody-faced vampire dudes. More importantly, there's something deeply rewarding about watching a profoundly cute, intrinsically girly blond girl with a great sense of humor beat up a bunch of vampires while growing from a teenager into a mature-ish adult. Grrrrl power, much?

Buffy is part of the feminist-y kick I've been on lately. I'm listening to a lot of Madonna and Lucinda Williams. I'm reading Wonder Woman comic collections and rereading some of my favorite novels that feature strong female characters, like Thea Kronborg from The Song of the Lark. I'm reading excellent articles like this one on the importance of just getting over yourself and "writing like a motherf****r."

In general, I don't feel like I see nearly enough strong, independent, fierce female characters in movies, books, and television. When I do see them, these women are rarely allowed to be both independent and happy. Instead, we're usually shown uptight career women who can only be happy when they let their guard down, give up control of their lives, and marry a hunky Mr. Right. And don't even get me started on how terrifying it is that so many young women choose Pretty Woman as their favorite romantic comedy . . . oy, vey!

But I digress. Basically, I find it difficult to find role models for how to be a woman who is single, strong, successful, and genuinely happy, which is precisely what I'm going for these days.

So what can I do about all this, besides watching all the Buffy I can lay my hands on? I guess I'm given no option but to do it for myself: If there aren't enough Crazy Badass Amazon Warrior Artist Women in the world for me to emulate, then I guess it's up to me to be one of the first.

Now, don't worry, I'm already on my way. My hair is already superhero red . . .

and the new Buffy-esque pleather jacket is already hanging in my closet.

If I can look like a superhero, why can't I be one?

Bringing It All Back Home

2010-09-10T09:05:00.000-05:00

So I'm back.

I took a long Blogger break for a couple of reasons. The most important one is that I broke up with my boyfriend of four years. Naturally, it's been a very hard few weeks. The adjustment has been extraordinarily difficult. I didn't just break up with Charlie, I broke up with his friends, his family, our shared hobbies, our plans, and some of my hopes for the future. It's left me shaken in a way that I haven't felt in a very, very long time.

The breakup has made me question a lot in my life, including this blog. I considered quitting it permanently. I started writing here to help with my job search--the idea was that I could use this space to showcase my writing ability, my journalistic style, and my ability to write lots of prose really fast--but it's outlived that use. It's transformed into a place to talk about things that I love, about what I read and write and bake and listen to and watch and experience. It's become a place to connect with family and friends and other bloggers. It's become a casual place, a place of impressions and expression.

Largely, I like it that way. I like that my audience has changed from an anonymous potential employer to people I truly care about. I like that this is casual, that I can post as frequently or as rarely as I would like, and I like that I write this largely for me, not for anyone else.

So I've decided to return to writing here for as long as it makes me happy. I'm also working on a chapbook of poems, which is, honestly, a much larger priority than this; if you ever wonder why I haven't posted here in awhile, just assume I'm neck deep in poetry! I'm also taking a class in letterpress printing, spending a lot of time with friends, going to concerts, and listening to music voraciously. I'm spending a lot of time on me and on doing my thing, on figuring out who I am and what I have to do in my life to be happy.

As hard as the last month has been, all this, I know, is a good thing.

And now, an extremely beautiful and extremely convoluted Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that's been on my mind lately.It's a tough read, but it's lovely to hear out loud. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Yours with much blogger love,
Lesley

------------

Carrion Comfort

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me	5
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,	10
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

As you may have noticed . . .

2010-07-30T16:46:00.000-05:00

I've been on hiatus for a couple of weeks. I'm taking some time to set up my apartment, figure out what writing project I want to work on next, and taking it easy in general. I love this blog, my blogger friends (and family!), and sharing my writing here, but I'm not sure when I'll be back. But rest assured that . . .

I WILL BE BACK.

Random Reads

2010-07-13T21:53:00.001-05:00

I always keep a list of books somewhere that I mean to read. In high school, I kept the list tacked to my wall. In college, I kept it in my journal. Now, I keep it on Goodreads.

But no matter where I store it, the list doesn't ever seem to grow any shorter. In fact, it only gets longer and longer and longer, and it develops a desultory stink about it. No matter how excited I am when I first type a new book into my list, the excitement never lasts. The longer the book sits on my list, the less I want to read it and the more it feels like a chore or an obligation. Right now, the most tenured book on my list is One Hundred Years of Solitude. At this point, I'm pretty sure I'd rather sift through my old trig textbook than crack the spine of Solitude.

However, there's something truly invigorating about choosing to read a book that I've never heard of before, a book that I know absolutely nothing about. I decided to snatch Barbara Vine's The Minotaur off the shelf at the KU library purely because it was a stranger to me.

Before I started The Minotaur, I'd never heard of Vine and I didn't realize that the book was a mystery. All I knew was that I loved the first sentence of the jacket blurb: "As soon as Kerstin Kvist arrives at remote, ivy-covered Lydstep Old Hall in Essex, she feels like a character in a gothic novel." Awesome.

So far, I like it. I want to know what's wrong with John Cosway, and I want to know where Kerstin will find the labyrinth, and I want to know what's locked inside the library. Right now, that's good enough for me.

In the meantime, I'm doing a lot of walking, sweating, swimming, and editing, with a little baking thrown in (pictures are coming, I promise!). Mostly I'm just sweating, but that's July for you. More specifically, that's July in an apartment with a single window unit, weak fans, and a dryer constantly running outside the front door! :P

Editing: A Short, Short Post

2010-07-07T22:26:00.001-05:00

I've been doing a few freelance editing jobs this week. They're keeping me busy (oh, boy, are they keeping me busy!), but there's something I find deeply satisfying about revising someone else's writing. It's lovely to take a knotted, dense, nearly meaningless sentence and force it to unfurl itself into clarity. I enjoy making it possible for a reader to see through grammatical snarls and into what it is the writer really means.

It's tricky work, and tiring, but I love helping others slip into the flow and clarity necessary to expressing themselves. The trick isn't to make the writer sound like me or any other "good" writer: it's to help them sound just exactly like themselves.

Vacation

2010-07-06T12:35:00.000-05:00

For the Fourth, I spent spent a long weekend in Milwaukee. I was doing a dual-visit, meeting up with a couple of old friends (Jennifer and her husband Mike) and visiting some family (my aunt, uncle, and cousins) who live there. I was also there to experience Summerfest, a massive annual music festival beloved by Milwaukee natives. At Summerfest, I heard a couple of great bands I'd never heard of, and I heard a few terrible bands whose names I made a point of forgetting! I also got to see Devo (they were wacky--what's the deal with Booji Boy?!) and Modest Mouse (an old favorite from my college days) in concert; they were both excellent! But the best part of the weekend was definitely seeing people I don't usually get to spend time with.

I also enjoyed being away from home and work and my everyday life. I have a theory that vacations are rarely about the experience of seeing someplace new; usually, they're about home. They're about taking a break from the places and people you see every day so that you realize how much you miss the familiar faces, the familiar landscapes, the familiar rooms you usually live with. I usually take vacations less to broaden my horizons and more to re-familiarize myself with the horizon I live under everyday.

Wisconsin was a beautiful place, full of lush vegetation and long, rolling hills and gorgeous, glimmering lakes. But one of my favorite views from vacation was driving down Mass Street toward my apartment on Monday night!

Her Name Is Ida.

2010-06-29T21:03:00.002-05:00

Isn't she beautiful?

*sniff* I tear up a little bit when I look at her . . .

My aunt, grandma, and mom bought me a KitchenAid stand mixer as a housewarming present. I was so excited. I've wanted one for years (years!), and now I finally have one of my very own. *sniffle* It was the best present ever. *sniffle* *snuffle* *snort* And she's red--I always dreamed she'd be red!

Look at her go!

She's already helped me make fresh whipped cream, a dense chocolate loaf cake, and a batch of cinnamon rolls for my dad's birthday. And I've only had her ten days.

Why's she named Ida, you ask? Well, duh!

Secret Geniuses

2010-06-28T09:54:00.000-05:00

I don't know if you were aware of this, but I am a secret genius of jai alai. Yes, that jai alai, the game with the big plastic scoops and a wiffle ball. I'm amazing at it. I'm like a graceful, athletic ballerina when I play it. A ballerina with a giant blue scoop!

I'm also a secret genius at working the line at a restaurant, doing marching band drills, and knowing just how much spaghetti sauce you can fit into a Tupperware without having it overflow. These are my "secret geniuses," my strange, small, innate talents that came pre-packaged with my bizarre little brain.

I believe that everyone has some bits of secret genius in them. These talents have little to do with training and everything to do with nature. For example, one of my friends is an expert cat charmer; she can have the most skiddish feline cuddled in her arms in less than a half hour. Charlie is astonishingly good at arranging furniture; he can glance around a room, draw a little sketch, and tell you exactly where you should put your couch to make the best, most elegant use of your living room space. My mom is an extremely talented gardener, capable of casually tossing some flowers or tomatoes in the ground only to see them flourish into a beautiful backyard garden with the minimum of watering and tending. Her thumb is neon green!

Of course, it is important to understand one's greatest natural talents and aptitudes, those skills that define one's professional life. I have a strong aptitude for writing, editing, managing detailed projects, juggling deadlines, and fitting into team settings. These are all very nice things to have on a resume.

But I think it's also important to understand and nurture my smaller geniuses, even if they're completely tangential to my "serious" work. Maybe these talents are nothing more than party tricks ("Just wait: your mind will be blown by how small of a container I can put this queso in!"). But they can also be the source of great pleasure.

For example, my secret genius for baking has led to an incorrigible baking hobby, one that consistently makes me happy. And it's always nice to think that, if I ever get sick of writing, baking is always there for me: a second talent, a second life, a second world that's always waiting for me to explore it!

Killing Time

2010-06-24T13:24:00.001-05:00

So far, the most surprising thing about full-time work is how short the evenings feel. It's summer, and the daylight lasts forever, but each day after work I'm surprised by how quickly the clock hands spin from 5:00 p.m. to my bedtime. I want to tell them, Take it easy, guys! It isn't a race to 11:30, you know!

If I get, say, six hours of free time each evening, I spend an hour eating out or making/eating/cleaning up my own dinner. On average, I spend another hour paying bills, cleaning, running to the grocery store, setting up my apartment, etc.--doing all of that responsible stuff adults have to do. After that, I spend another half hour on play time with Willa and another half hour for making tomorrow's lunch and getting ready for bed.

If I'm lucky, that leaves me with three hours for hanging out with Charlie, going downtown with friends, calling friends on the phone, reading, writing, blogging, baking, planning vacations, checking Facebook, and renting and watching movies. Three hours sounds like a lot of time, but it sure doesn't feel like it when there's so much I want to do! And if I'm not careful, a whole evening will sneak away from me in a rush of shopping and chores; I'll be left holding a few Wal-Mart sacks, a ball of dirty dish towels, a glass of wine, and a very strong urge to pass out on the couch!

But this time crunch has helped me prioritize my life and avoid time-sucking habits. It's made me glad that I didn't sign up for cable; I don't feel like I have hours to spend with Bravo and Lifetime and VHI each week. I also spend less time on the Internet, which is bad for blogging but great for avoiding Twitter and mindless Amazon browsing.

When I was unemployed last year, I killed time. My biggest challenge was to fritter away my hours without frittering away my money. I resented my boredom. But now I feel more grateful for my leisure time, for every bike ride and long walk and book chapter. I appreciate spending time with people I care about and those half hours when my kitty crawls into my lap and sleeps. Staying up past midnight on Friday nights feels like a huge treat, as does greasing up my baking pan for a batch of cookies.

I'm especially fond of the feeling I get when I walk home right after work: I feel like a kid being let out of school for the summer because that evening time is mine, truly mine. I've earned it. There's no homework to do, no resumes to tweak, no deadline waiting in the wings. There's just my apartment, my people, my life.

Phillip Lopate on Michel de Montaigne

2010-06-18T12:54:00.000-05:00

I've started reading Phillip Lopate's Against Joie de Vivre: Personal Essays. I've been enjoying some of the essays, but others have left an unguent, unpleasant taste in my mouth. (Lopate is a bit of a confessionalist, which is a tricky mode to write in.)

However, I'm loving "What Happened to the Personal Essay?", especially the parts about Michel de Montaigne:

"It was Montaigne's peculiar project, which he claimed rightly or wrongly was original, to write about the one subject he knew best: himself. As with all succeeding literary self-portraits--or all succeeding stream-of-consciousness, for that matter--success depended on having an interesting consciousness, and Montaigne was blessed with an undulatingly supple, learned, skeptical, deep, sane, and candid one. In point of fact, he frequently strayed to worldly subjects, giving his opinion on everything from cannibals to coaches, but we do learn a large number of intimate and odd details about the man, down to his bowels and kidney stones. 'Sometimes there comes to me a feeling that I should not betray the story of my life,' he writes. On the other hand: 'No pleasure has any meaning for me without communication.'"

Ah, Montaigne, I want to be just like you when I grow up! :)

Food Envy

2010-06-17T22:28:00.000-05:00

Look what I just got in the mail:

Shirley O. Corriher's BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking. Corriher is a chemist turned chef, and her books give you the recipes for awesome food and the reasons why awesome food happens. I love Good Eats for the same reason: when I read BakeWise, I don't just get more recipes, I get a little bit closer to knowing how food works and being able to modify recipes on my own. And, as you know, chemistry is cool.

I'm sixty pages in (yes, I'm actually reading a cookbook through!), and I want to stop and make something every time a turn the page. I want to try these recipes out and make them mine. I want to put my new knowledge about baking powder and bundt pans to the test!

In other news, I desperately want to know how to make Indian food. Charlie and I went to India Palace last night, which is my favorite restaurant ever in terms of pure deliciousness. I could eat their food every night for a month and never get tired of it. (Of course, I'll never know that for a fact because it's way too expensive to eat there every night for a month!)

Indian food seems so simple: as far as I can tell, it's only tomatoes and onions cooked down into a paste and flavored with a blend of spices (most of which can be found in American spice racks). So, really, it's not so different from Italian tomato sauces except for its consistency, its spices, and its pairing with rice instead instead of pasta.

But, for the most part, I'm baffled as to how it's made! I've never found a recipe that actually turns out to be anywhere near as amazing as the stuff you can get at a good Indian restaurant. I don't know if it's the spices or my technique. It's a mystery to me, that cooking of banal ingredients into something that makes me groan with gluttonous delight.

So, I have food envy: I want to know how to calculate fantastic cake recipes, and I want to know how to make mind-bendingly good chana masala. Just a few more items to add to my long list of life goals!

One Man's Meat

2010-06-14T13:08:00.001-05:00

I finally finished E.B. White's One Man's Meat, and now I don't know what to do with myself. I was really sad to leave it. I dreaded the last page and made a little "Awww . . ." sound as I turned to it. I wanted more!

I've been reading it at lunch time over my sack lunches and cafeteria salads. White's essays on country life are so calming, so rejuvenating, and he somehow made subjects like patriotism and World War Two and freedom feel immediate and fresh and important. His essays created a truly quiet space in the middle of my work days; they seemed to clean out my brain for a little bit, sort of smoothing down its rough edges before I took out my notebook for my mid-day writing session.

Finishing a beloved book is a sad event, and also an exciting one. I get to choose a new book now, with a great deal of apprehension (will it live up to White's essays?) and a little bit of hope (could it possibly be even better than White's essays?!).

I think that I'll stick with essays at lunch time. They seem suited to the noon-hour. Poems, which are all impression, emotion, and instinct, seem right for foggy-headed mornings, and novels are purely evening fare, with their human camaraderie and thrilling imaginative leaps. But the honesty of non-fiction, the way that essays inch their way from fact toward wisdom, is steadying and filling, sort of like a turkey sandwich on whole grain bread.

So what's next? Hmmm . . . here are the possibilities:

Walter Benjamin's Illuminations
Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem
Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk
Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self-Reliance and Other Essays
Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
Marilynn Robinson's Absence of Mind

Any suggestions?

Anita Blake, Vampire Hunting Feminist Badass

2010-06-12T16:23:00.000-05:00

I just finished another Anita Blake novel. This one was Cerulean Sins, and by God, isn't that title laughable? And the cover art . . . sheesh . . .

Cerulean Sins

But don't let's talk about it. Anyway, this is book eleven out of nineteen in the series. The books have--like all novel series--gotten worse and worse as the series wears on. They've become increasingly melodramatic and sexually gratuitous and repetitive, but I can't quite give them up. I think it's because Anita Blake, the vampire hunting heroine of the novels, is such a fantastic character.

Now, you all know that I love me a good vampire series, and I don't mind their conventionality: the main character is almost always a woman who is somehow embroiled in vampire culture. She's always both afraid of and attracted to the vampires, and she always becomes involved with at least one Vampire Boyfriend who's usually very old and seductive and dangerous and really good looking. And usually he has really long hair.

Gary Oldman as Dracula from Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Brad Pitt from Interview with a Vampire.

Jean-Claude, Anita's long-haired Vampire Boyfriend.

The Anita Blake series follows this pattern just like the Twilight books and the Sookie Stackhouse/True Blood novels. But the difference between Anita and characters like Bella Swan (Twilight) and Sookie is vast. Typically, the "heroine" of a vampire novel is a victim, an innocent who stands in for the reader. She's constantly put into great danger by the vampires, but she is also is seduced and loved by them. She survives in the vampire world largely by luck and the protection of others, not because of her own abilities.

But Anita is no victim. She's known as "The Executioner" because she's an officially licensed vampire hunter. She takes care of her own bad guys and doesn't fall to bits every time someone tries to take a bite out of her. Bella and Sookie are both protected by their Vampire Boyfriends, but Anita spends more time taking care of her friends and lovers than they take care of her. Both Sookie and Bella spend their novels crying and running away and huddling in a corner while the big, tough male vampires do all the talking, but Anita assumes that it's up to her to save the day. And if a vampire tries to eat her, she just shoots him. Her self-reliance makes for a refreshing change of pace.

She's part detective, part necromancer, and part assassin, but there's nothing victim-like about her. In fact, thought the novels, she doesn't worry about getting killed so much as she worries about losing her faith and innocence. She worries about becoming a hardened sociopath too ready to take a life, and this internal conflict is far more interesting than the ones in other vampire novels.

To be honest, the Anita Blake series has jumped the shark so many times that, every time I read one of the novels, I find myself thinking, "Well, this is going to be it: no more for me!" And then the book always ends with Anita being a total badass and raising a hundred bloodthirsty zombies or staking some big scary vampire or shooting her way out of trouble, and I just can't stop myself from going back to the library for just one more: it's a pleasure to read about a female character who is tough, capable, funny, and complex. Besides, let's be honest, who doesn't love a good zombie massacre?

Anita killing some zombies.

Gaaaaahhhhh! (An Update)

2010-06-01T22:27:00.000-05:00

So, since last Saturday, I've been packing, driving, camping, driving, packing, moving, unpacking, driving, cleaning, and shopping nonstop, and I am pooped with a capital P!

I had a fabulous Memorial Day weekend camping with my family, and I'm just getting settled into my new apartment, and this has all been great fun, but I haven't been on my computer at all. However, you can expect the following next week as I start getting back on track:

pictures of my new place
why thrift store shopping is awesome
why I love "The Farm"
and why Anita Blake is the best fantasy novel heroine ever.

I promise, I'll be writing again soon. In the meantime, wish me a full night's sleep--I sure as heck need one!

A Book By Any Other Cover

2010-05-24T15:33:00.000-05:00

Once I've started reading a certain copy of a book, I can't switch to a different copy in the middle of the process. It doesn't matter if the two editions share the same exact content and same exact page numbers, once I've switched, the reading experience is ruined for me. If I manage to finish the book at all (sorry, One Hundred Years of Solitude, you didn't make it through the transition!), I do so crankily, feeling out-of-sorts and cheated for having to hold some stranger of a book in my hands.

I can even feel copy mourning long after I've finished reading a book. When I thought I had lost my first copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (the copy I had read at least three times) . . .

. . . I went out and bought a new copy, but I didn't even like to touch the thing, with its matte cover and Photoshopped Prague:

I sold it to a used book store just as soon as I got my old copy back.

And then there's Middlemarch: I was only halfway through it when I had to return my copy to the public library. I considered buying a copy of my own that I would never have to return to anyone, but I couldn't find the same Modern Library edition. I almost panicked.

It's not that I'm so very much in love with Modern Library editions. It's true that this copy had a nice hard cover, a decent dust jacket, and Biblically thin pages (which I love). But more importantly, I worried that I'd run out of steam on the fat novel once I was holding some cheap paperback in my hands (I almost lost The Brother's Karamazov that way).

The body of a book means something to the human brain, or at least it means something to my brain. If a book does not provide some sort of sensually pleasing experience (soft, floppy pages; a pleasantly inky smell; alluring cover art; etc.), I have a poorer relationship with it. No matter how intellectual of a process reading seems to be, the way a book is constructed will always color how it is read. It's kind of like poetry: no matter how good the ideas inside a poem are, it's hard to love them without a startlingly beautiful image to plug those ideas into reality.

I know that I would never have finished Middlemarch if I had switched over to the Penguin Popular Classics edition:

I'm pretty sure that its pages would have been rough and pulpy, but the cover is obviously the worst part: the Penguin copy looks old and dull and, let's admit it, drenched in the sort of thing that collects in the main characters' chamber pots. No one wants to read a book with that lurking in their subconscious.

This is why I've spent so much money on slightly nicer copies of books that I could find cheaper elsewhere, and this is why I've hesitated to buy a Kindle or a Nook or a Sony Reader: if all e-books have essentially the same feel to them, some part of me wonders whether the content will all start to feel the same, too.

This is also why I drove to the public library one town over just to check out the exact same Modern Library edition of Middlemarch. And it was totally worth it: my brain was never distracted by pulpy pages or a flimsy cover. It was just me and my idea of Middlemarch, getting down to business.

Life at KU: New & Old

2010-05-20T11:27:00.087-05:00

I've been working at KU for two weeks now. It's constantly strange to me how much I still remember about my old surroundings, even though it's been four years since I was a student here. But I've spent so much time here that life at KU is still second-nature to me.

But there are plenty of differences, too. Here's what I've noticed over the last few weeks:

Old:Walking everywhere.
New: I still walk all over campus and downtown Lawrence, but I don't blend in anymore. I'm obviously different from the students swarming the sidewalks. My clothes are more professional, my "luggage" is different (now I have a red leather purse instead of a tattered khaki messenger bag), and my face is obviously that of a twenty-something. I'm not going to get mistaken for a freshman anytime soon!

Old: Camping out on campus.
New: I still spend my free lunch hours on campus. Fortunately, my memory for KU's public spaces (lunch tables, study areas, etc.) has proven surprisingly strong. I still know where I can go for a quiet hour on my own. But I'm no longer squatting in hallways to study or nap or scarf down a To Go lunch from the dining hall. Now, I'm eating home-made veggie sandwiches and writing during my lunch hours.

Old: Those damn hills!
New: They're still everywhere, but now my old lady hip hurts when I trudge up them. :(

Old: KU email and Blackboard.
New: I'm still checking the same sites, but now I'm using Outlook to check my email and using the faculty section of Blackboard. I'm also trying to figure out Microsoft Access to manage my databases, considering Google Wave to collaborate with my boss, and learning how to update the department's website with Adobe software. I'm way, way more tech savvy than I used to be!

Old: Feeling baffled by the University's vast, complex, and highly specialized bureaucracy.
New: The bureaucracy's the same, but now I'm supposed to understand it all! In the past, I showed up at my advisor's office and asked for help when I was lost. Now, I'm expected to help lost graduate students figure out how to navigate the University. Ack!

Old: Constant school-related anxiety.
New: I'm pretty nervous about learning how to do my job well, but I'm not worried about classes or finals or studying any more. That is one major perk of being a staff member instead of a student: no finals week ever, ever again!

"Gaity, or Truth in Sheep's Clothing"

2010-05-17T22:59:00.001-05:00

I got home from a reading a few hours ago. There were five readers: three fiction writers, one non-fiction writer, and one poet turned non-fiction-ist. The reading was fine--it was a little long, a little dry, and in a restaurant filled with smoke from an over-heated pizza oven--and only one writer really stuck out to me. She was one of the non-fiction writers, and she was writing about growing up as an evangelical Christian in a public high school.

In most ways, her writing was no different from her peers': her language flowed smoothly, her scenes were rife with clear imagery and distinct characters, and her prose felt polished and lively. But she differed from everyone else because she made the audience laugh, and not in a cruel way. Even though she was writing about the misadventures of an overeager young girl fumbling her way toward an identity outside of her religion, she was tender about her past self and her former friends. She acknowledged that her audience might not identify with her upbringing or her past beliefs, but she never sacrificed her past self cruelly, selling herself out for cheap satire. Her essay worked because she was unashamed of her past and because she treated her past self gently, with great kindness and great levity.

Her writing made me think of Dostoevsky, a little bit, and of Michel de Montaigne and Jane Austen in that she was capable of telling her story with both levity and compassion, something which is exceedingly rare. The other readers read very nicely crafted pieces, but they took themselves awful seriously. There was a lot of imagery and profound symbolism in their pieces, but not a lot of joy.

I've been thinking about the importance of gentle humor because of E.B. White's excellent One Man's Meat. Early in the book, White describes "a certain writer, appalled by the cruel events of the world" who has "pledged himself never to write anything that wasn't constructive and significant and liberty-loving."

"I have an idea that this, in its own way, is bad news. [. . .] Even in evil times, a writer should cultivate only what naturally absorbs his fancy, whether it be freedom or chinch bugs, and should write in the way that comes easy. [. . .] In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone. A despot doesn't fear eloquent writers preaching freedom--he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold. His gravest concern is lest gaiety, or truth in sheep's clothing, somewhere gain a foothold, lest joy in some unguarded moment be unconfined. I honestly don't believe that a humorist should take the veil today; he should wear his bells night and day, and squeeze the uttermost jape, even though he may feel that he should be writing a strong letter to the Herald Times."

After a long stint in graduate school, where satire and self-deprecation often took the place of true gaiety and good-humoredness, I'm a little more appreciative of writers who, like E. B. White and tonight's reader, can combine humor and kindness to get to the heart of whatever they're after.

Sunday Randos: A List!

2010-05-16T11:57:00.000-05:00

I've finished my first week at the new job! Each day, my thoughts swung from "I can totally do this! Yay me!" to "Oh, God, I'm lost and confused and destined to be a failure at life. I'm going back to the cafe!" So far, it seems like the biggest part of my job is learning the ropes. I'm going to have to learn how to navigate KU's staggeringly complicated bureaucracy, learn all the quirky little software programs I'm working with, and learn the myriad tasks and procedures associated with running an academic department at KU. It's intimidating, but I know that (I hope that?) I'll eventually figure everything out!
I finally finished Middlemarch. The end was a little disappointing--the happy ending felt out of sync with Eliot's world--but I'm glad I stuck with it. The plot really picked up around page 500 so that the last 300 pages went quickly. For all the time Eliot spent on small-town dynamics and politics, the novel was ultimately about marriage and the way people perceive themselves and people's expectations about their lives. It wasn't the best novel I've ever read, but it was definitely thought-provoking, and I think it will stay with me a long time. Here's Virginia Woolf's brilliant quote from the back cover of my edition: George Eliot "was one of the first English novelists to discover that men and women think as well as feel, and the discovery was of great artistic moment. Briefly, it meant that the novel ceased to be solely a love story, an autobiography, or a story of adventure. It became, as it had already become with the Russians, of much wider scope."
I haven't done a thing about the fact that I'm moving to an apartment in Lawrence in a couple of weeks. I should start packing, but it doesn't seem real yet! I walk past my apartment building every day on my walk to work, and I gaze at it longingly. I can't wait to move in and decorate it and start living my life there. But it won't seem real until I'm holding the keys and my cat's litter box is moved in!
Speaking of kitties, I've been cat-sitting this weekend. The parents are in Virginia for my cousin's graduation, so I'm feeding the cats, picking up the newspapers, and taking out the garbage. It's strange to be in Olathe, but it's made for some good shopping. I love New York & Co. way more than I should!
I've been writing over my lunch hour at work. I like it a lot: it's nice to be creative for a half hour every day, especially in the midst of all my phone calling and spreadsheet wrangling. But it's also making me want to buy a netbook, so I could type on a tiny little laptop instead of scribbling in a notebook!
One of my inspirations these days in One Man's Meat, a memoir-y essay collection by E.B. White. Each brief chapter covers a month in his life and contains a handful of tiny essays about anything and everything, from chickens that lay too many eggs to the approach of World War II. There's a sense of happiness and relaxation to White's writing that's very appealing. The book is not entirely memoir, and it's nothing like the research-based nonfiction so common today. It's full of good-natured, free-form ramblings in the style of Michel de Montaigne. Reading White's book feels like chatting with an old friend who is candid and funny and smart and true, and it's a wonderful thing to read at lunch before I start my own writing: it makes me feel as if writing naturally is the best and easiest path to writing well.

E. B. White with his evil and affectionate dachshund Fred.

Morning Walks & Mary Oliver

2010-05-10T21:57:00.001-05:00

If you're in Kansas right now, you know what sort of day today is: it feels more like early March than mid-May. It's all bluster and chill and gray, spitting rain. I could have picked better weather for my first day of work, but this bleariness had to do! (My first day went swimmingly, by the way!)

But despite how damn cold my arms were as I walked to work this morning, I was gloriously happy to be outside walking in Lawrence. I love this town with its old, bright houses, its soft grasses crowding up between brick-paved sidewalks, its many trees thick and green and writhing in the wind.

I've missed walking, too. I've always been a bit of a peripatetic, maybe not in the philosophical sense but in the sense that I love walking and thinking and, when I can convince someone to come with me, walking while I talk. It made me brilliantly happy this morning to hoof my way up "Mount" Oread. I saw pale lilacs and wet stones and robins dark-feathered with rain. Walking makes me mindful of the world, and I miss that when I spend too much time in a car.

This morning got me thinking about Mary Oliver, who I got to see read last week on KU's campus. I've always liked her poetry (especially American Primitive, which is one of my favorite books), but the clarity and peacefulness and passion of her poems is even more apparent when she's reading them aloud. Her poems feel like blessings, somehow, in the same way that What Whitman's "Song of Myself" and Marilyn Robinson's Gilead do: they're not religious works, per se, but they are works of careful attention and love and praise.

I've posted Oliver's "Peonies" below. It's one of her most famous poems, and it's one that she almost always performs at readings. It's a beautiful poem, full of death as well as life, as so many of her poems are. And I absolutely love that, in the midst of all her rich, sensuous specificity, she's ballsy enough to ask "Do you love this world? / Do you cherish your humble and silky life? / Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?" She's not afraid to ask the big questions or to say just what she means, and that's what makes her so damn good.

---------------

Peonies

By Mary Oliver

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart
as the sun rises, 
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers

and they open ---
pools of lace, 
white and pink ---
and all day the black ants climb over them, 

boring their deep and mysterious holes
into the curls, 
craving the sweet sap, 
taking it away

to their dark, underground cities ---
and all day
under the shifty wind, 
as in a dance to the great wedding, 

the flowers bend their bright bodies, 
and tip their fragrance to the air, 
and rise, 
their red stems holding

all that dampness and recklessness 
gladly and lightly, 
and there it is again --- 
beauty the brave, the exemplary, 

blazing open. 
Do you love this world? 
Do you cherish your humble and silky life? 
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath? 

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden, 
and softly, 
and exclaiming of their dearness, 
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers, 

with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling, 
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
nothing, forever?

Christopher Pike & The Last Vampire

2010-05-03T12:06:00.000-05:00

Have I mentioned that I'm still neck-deep in George Eliot's Middlemarch and only getting deeper? I like the novel a lot, but Eliot's world of small-town politics and foiled idealism isn't always a pleasant one. So I've been reading a few crappy novels on the side to keep my brain fresh and happy.

You stay classy, The Last Vampire.

One of my side reads has been Christopher Pike's The Last Vampire. I've talked about Christopher Pike on this blog before as one of my favorite trashy reads, but I decided to reread The Last Vampire precisely because I don't remember it being trashy (except for its fantastic neon-toned, mid-1990s cover!).

Sure, Pike's favorite subjects are vampires and murder and time travel, but I remembered his writing as being creative, surprising, and relentlessly dark. Between the ages of ten and sixteen, I read almost all of his forty-plus novels. But he wasn't my favorite author because he wrote about common horror themes (plenty of writers do that); he was my favorite author because he wrote about these themes with the kind of daring imagination, ruthlessness, and existential angst that I couldn't find anywhere else in the Young Adult section.

Turns out, I still agree with my thirteen-year-old self: The Last Vampire is still a compelling read. Stylistically, it's a strange little book. Pike writes in the voice of Sita, a 5,000-year-old vampire with an insatiable lust for life (and blood--har har!). Her voice in the novel is consistent, unerring, and a little unnerving; its not often that such a violent protagonist is allowed to tell her own tale. The novel also moves extremely quickly: there isn't a spare detail anywhere, and the book reads more like a short story than a full-blown novel.

Yet, in a very small amount of space (less than 200 pages) Pike tells Sita's contemporary story (blackmail, abduction, dynamite, yada yada yada) alongside a vampire creation story. According to Pike's version of vampirism, vampires were created by demonic possession in India 5,000 years ago. They were largely wiped out, however, by the first vampire, who decided to kill them all after he lost a flute-playing competition with Krishna. Yes, that Krishna.

Frieze of Krishna playing his flute.

The Hindu deity is arguably the most important character in this book. Sita spends the novel fighting for her life, but she's also trying to come to terms with her past, her relationship with God, and Krishna's ancient blessing.

Anyway, while the form of the Pike's novels is pretty conventional, his imagination is exceptional. Pike is no Stephanie Meyer, and he doesn't have a damn thing in common with R.L. Stine or J.K. Rowling. He's a different kind of Young Adult novelist: his novels follow groups of dying teenagers in hospice beds and serial killers who converse with giant cockroaches in desert caves. They're more blood-soaked than sugar-coated, and he doesn't shy away from confronting his teenage readers with mortality and insanity and loneliness. And I think that, more than anything else, it's his dark vision of life that makes his novels unique and worth reading.

If you're interested in learning more about Pike, check out Emily Hainsworth's great post on his best novels. I completely agree with her selections, and I love her picture, which I've reposted below: it looks just like my bookshelf circa 1997!

Emily Hainsworth's fantastic Christopher Pike collection.

Employed.

2010-04-29T20:18:00.000-05:00

Yup, I have a job.

It only took me ten months, eight interviews, half a dozen informational interviews, and at least thirty job applications, but I did it, and good golly I'm proud! And I'm moving back to Lawrence, which makes me happier than pretty much anything ever. So basically I feel like this right now:

Go, panda, go!

Here's what I learned from my long, long job search:

Relationships are important: At several of my interviews, I felt like I said all the right things and had all the right answers. Did I get those jobs? No. What job did I get? The one where I had fun in the interview. My future co-workers laughed at my jokes and I laughed at theirs, and I was impressed by their intelligence and energy. I liked their questions, so I answered them well. Ultimately, we wanted to work together, so now we're going to!
"Work" is a relative term: I wasn't appreciative of most of the job titles, job descriptions, and salaries I saw on-line, at least not until I started working at the cafe. That's when I figured out what real work was. My feet ached, my head pounded, and I was in bed every night before eleven. And, even though I was nearly full-time, I still didn't have health insurance or enough money to live! After that, I realized how lucky I was to have the opportunity to earn my living with my mind, not just my hands.
There are many ways to be happy: Despite its more grueling aspects, I love my cafe job. I love my co-workers, and I like how high-energy and physically demanding the job is. I like the choreography of working the line, how we all learn to weave smoothly between each other and prepare dishes with an unthinking, almost instinctive grace. I know, I know, it sounds over-the-top, but I'm being serious! I'm good at being a line cook, and I'm glad that I know that about myself. I can be happy making food in a restaurant, and I have a talent for it, just like I have a talent for writing poems and doing marching band drills. So maybe there's a second career as a trained chef waiting for me in the future!
Tangents are okay: I had a hard time finding a job. So what? I also got to develop a blog that I now love. I learned HTML and CSS and SEO. I learned how to bake bread and cinnamon rolls and make cafe mochas and cappuccinos. I got to teach Othello to a fantastic group of business students, some of whom had never read Shakespeare before. And I got to experience the restaurant business first-hand. I could never, ever say that these months have been wasted.
The (mental) readiness is all: After grad school, I felt entitled to a job. Not a great job, just a job, because I was smart and nice and responsible. But around February, I realized that nobody owes me anything. Nobody owes me their attention, their good will, or their employment. The only thing that could earn me anyone's attention, good will, and employment was being truly willing and eager to work hard. Somehow, during my time at the cafe, I went from thinking like a student ("Give me a task to do and I'll earn an A!") to thinking like an employee ("Give me a chance to put my nose to the grindstone, and I'll impress you this week, next week, and next year. And I'll out-think the next guy to help you and your company grow, all while building my own knowledge and career.").
I am not my job: I felt awful about not having a job for a very long time. Part of it was hating the boredom and the constant horror of job applications and interviews and cold calls and emails. But most of my self-loathing came from considering myself a failure. Working at the cafe made me realize that I could still be me and have a good time even while I mopped floors and plunged toilets and sliced croutons. It taught me that I am not my job, or my lack thereof. Success is not the result of succeeding at one limited task (finding a full-time office job), and it doesn't come with any set job title or a salary. It's about feeling like myself and following my gut and finding a way to do something I love every day.

Homemade Strawberry Cake

2010-04-28T22:01:00.019-05:00

Ever since a recent lustful encounter with a boxed strawberry cake mix, I've been wanting to make a homemade strawberry cake. I wanted a recipe that incorporated fresh crushed strawberries and would pair well with fresh whipped cream frosting. Fortunately, this Fresh Strawberry Cake recipe from Recipezaar.com really fit the bill.

My strawberry cake!

The question is, is homemade strawberry cake really better than Duncan Hines's marvelous, monstrous, candy-flavored version? I mean, it's the tacky, bright-pink, sugary smoothness of it that's so appealing, right?

Mr. Hines's Strawberry Supreme.

The answer is yes and no. The box mix cake is extra moist and super fluffy and tastes just like a strawberry Skittle, so it's pretty much the best thing in the world. However, real strawberry cake is similarly moist, but it isn't so tender or so fluffy. With real fruit in the recipe, I don't think it's possible to obtain the same texture as a chiffon cake. And the homemade cake definitely isn't baby pink!

The naked strawberry cakes.

The cakes turned out to have a sugary, slightly dense texture, with an almost crispy crust; they were a little like a scone on the outside but were purely cake-like on the inside. They definitely tasted just like strawberries!

Crushed strawberries for the cake batter.

I had been wanting to make fresh whipped cream frosting for some time, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to try it. I used strawberry puree (strawberries, a bit of sugar, and a dash of lemon juice) to take the frosting from plain to strawberry flavored.

The strawberry puree and fresh whipped cream frosting.

The pretty, petal-colored strawberry frosting.

The cut cake.

However, I ran out of frosting for my last cake round, so I used the strawberry glaze recipe that comes with the cake recipe. It was pretty tasty, too, though I didn't like it as well as the whipped cream frosting. The whipped cream was light and fresh and smooth and darn pretty. But the glaze looked chunky and *ahem* a little unappealing. Besides, even though it was delicious, it somehow made the cake taste more like a muffin than a proper cake.

The glazed cake.

But that just means I'm allowed to make this recipe in cupcake form and and eat it for breakfast, right?

A slice of the glazed cake.

I liked this recipe quite a bit, but I would like to find a chiffon version (if, indeed, that is possible with fresh fruit!). This cake was a touch heavy for me, even though it was wildly popular; pieces seemed to fly mysteriously from the platter every time I turned around! But it was a great way to deal with the vast amount of strawberries I usually buy each spring, futilely hoping that I can finish them before they start to go bad.

My favorite fruit.

Oh, and did I mention the best part of all? I suspect that all my frozen leftover strawberry puree will make some pretty fantastic margaritas come summer time! Hooray for buying in bulk!

Food, Inc.

2010-04-23T21:43:00.000-05:00

On Wednesday night, I finally got the chance to watch Food, Inc. on PBS. It's a documentary about the American food industry, more specifically the meat, corn, and soybean industries.

Now I've seen the PETA video about the horrors of slaughterhouses, chicken houses, and feedlots (Warning: Do NOT click on the previous link unless you have a strong stomach!), and I was expecting more of the same: excruciating scenes of sick and dying animals, fetid killing floors, and desolate swaths of polluted ponds and fields.

Instead, I was surprised to find that the documentary focused on the human costs of industrialized farming and food processing. The film covered a wide range of abuses, many of which I had never heard of before, including

food corporations' gross exploitation of immigrant worker communities,
the coercion of American farmers by giant seed and meat corporations,
the rising diabetes epidemic as an unintended consequence of government subsidized corn products,
and the prevalence of e. coli and salmonella contaminations in slaughterhouses across the country (which the USDA is largely unable to regulate).

I know that these bullet points seem unbelievable--you may be thinking, what a bunch of hippie, anti-capitalist babble!--but the documentary does an excellent job of talking directly to the persons involved and explaining these issues clearly. So I highly recommend that you check it out for yourselves and form your own opinions.

One of my favorite things about the documentary was its concluding message: each of us has the power to change our food by "voting" with our money. By buying conscientiously, with an eye toward human costs as well as the more obvious monetary costs, we can change the way food in America is grown and raised. So buy locally, choose sustainably raised and organic foods when possible, and go to your local farmers' market this weekend!

AWP 2010

2010-04-15T00:18:00.000-05:00

This year, AWP did for me exactly what a professional conference should do: it made me feel refocused, motivated, and, in the words of Gary Snyder, famous poet and environmental activist, "way stoked."

In years past, I've spent a lot of time in AWP's panels on writing and pedagogy. The AWP panels are one hour and fifteen minutes long, and they cover a wide range of topics. You can hear talks there on anything from charming magazine editors and teaching poetry in high schools to discussing trauma in a workshop setting and writing effective sex scenes.

This year, I didn't force myself to sit through too many panels. I went to three talks (one on on-line journals, another on writers collectives, and a third on careers in the literary arts), one reading (Anne Waldman and Gary Snyder), and I went to the book fair. The panels ranged from so-so to fascinating, and Gary Snyder was a let-down while Anne Waldman lived up to her reputation as a "human dynamo" with a highly theatric reading of her poems. And, yes, she was wearing one heck of a green and fuchsia scarf!

Anne Waldman

But, as always, the book fair was my favorite part. It's always an overwhelming/disheartening/inspiring experience due to its size: I would guess there were nearly 250 tables packed into a single warehouse of a room.

One half of the book fair.

Some of the exhibitors were literary journals, some were large publishers, and some were writing programs. But my favorite tables were the small presses, many of which were publishing visually gorgeous books of fiction and poetry. This year, there were more handmade publications than I'd ever seen before, beautiful books printed on vintage hand presses and bound by hand individually. I found myself lusting after hand-printed calendars of typographic art and chapbooks covered with reclaimed leather covers and literary journals bound in strips of carpet insulation!

The other half of the book fair.

What makes the book fair overwhelming is its size and the impossibility of really examining every book and talking to every interesting publisher. What makes it disheartening is seeing the thousands and thousands of new books printed each year, most of which are purchased and read by very few readers (selling 700 copies of a book of poetry is considered pretty successful). It can make you realize what a saturated, competitive market writers work in, and it can make you wonder whether the world really needs another book ever again.

But it's inspiring to see so many people writing, designing, and printing based purely on love. These people don't hope to turn a profit--even big publishers rarely do that any more. They just hope to create something beautiful and have it picked up by a few admirers. It reminds you what we all write creatively for, anyway: not for money (though it would be nice), not for fame (though it would be fantastic), but because we love literature, enough to travel to Denver and spend too much money on literary magazines and limited edition chapbooks!

Besides the book fair, my favorite part of AWP was meeting people. At past AWPs, I slipped soundlessly through the book fair and never asked any questions at panels. This year, I made the effort to meet my local writing community. I talked to one of the New Letters publishers, shook hands with an NEA program officer, met a slew of Lawrence's Bathtub Writer's Collective members, and even encountered a poet-programmer while chatting with a table full of on-line publication editors.

I wasn't networking to find a job or create "business" connections. I networked to meet my local writing community and to experience the pleasure of speaking to enthusiastic people. Meeting these new people and getting excited about their ideas was almost--almost!--as rewarding as spending time with old friends from grad school who love writing as much as I do.

Me, Alita, and Stephanie.

My grad school friends and I drank excellent Colorado microbrews, talked about critical approaches to the memoir, bitched about poets who can't read their own poems out loud, and hoofed all over downtown Denver together, and that alone was worth the price of admission!

So, Washington, D.C., watch out! You're next!

"The Food's the Thing"

2010-04-11T20:23:00.000-05:00

Hi, folks! AWP was simply wonderful. I loved seeing my friends from grad school, basking in the warm Denver sunshine, drinking really good microbrews, listening to poetry, and hearing talks about professional development and on-line literary publishing. The conference was extremely rewarding, but it was also extremely tiring! I need a day or two to sleep it off before I write a longer post about it!

But I did want to share this with you: a fascinating little article about a Ph.D student writing her dissertation on food in Shakespeare's plays. Keri Sanburn Behre of Lawrence studies the impact of food on Shakespeare's language and metaphors, but she also bakes Renaissance-era pastry in her spare time. Obviously, I should be this woman's best friend. I'll try to attend her talk tomorrow night and convince her of this fact, without coming off too stalker-y.

Anyway, check it out: it's a great little article that talks about the transient nature of food trends and why Europeans used to think that cantaloupe could kill you.

AWP

2010-04-08T00:57:00.000-05:00

I'm off to the AWP conference in Denver for the weekend! I'll update here when I get back. Expect pictures, poetry reading reviews, and Denver sightseeing stories!

I'm most excited to see this lady: Anne Waldman, famous Beat-era poet and one of my personal favorites from college. I'm certain that she'll be wearing a scarf at her reading, and I'm certain that I'll want one of my own afterward!

Best wishes, folks--I'll be back soon.

Springtime

2010-04-05T17:39:00.000-05:00

Okay, okay, I'm back!

Last week was one of those unofficial vacation weeks when I wanted to be miles away from my computer. I didn't want to write anything or check my email or tweet or do anything except exist.

Besides working at the cafe, the only business I handled involved 1) planning my upcoming trip to AWP in Denver, 2) the mall (new khaki shorts!), 3) reading yet another Anita Blake novel, 4) frosting sugar cookies and eating Easter candy, and 5) sitting on the back porch generating vast stores of vitamin D and watching the birdies. I couldn't even muster up enough energy to take pictures of the budding hyacinths and sprouting daffodils and fluttering birdies for this blog--I was too busy actually enjoying them!

April and May are my favorite months of the year. I don't know if it's the lengthening days, the shifting color of the sunlight, the warm breezes, or the hard-earned eruption of green grass and tulip shoots, but I get positively giddy in spring. I'm always full of energy, but, fortunately, I'm never bothered with any industrious inclination to do anything practical with that energy. I turn lazy and frivolous, and it is wonderful.

Come to think of it, I believe that frivolity is highly underrated: isn't it basically a useless, desultory, meaningless joy and an appreciation for life's happy minutiae? Isn't a touch of frivolity here and there--especially when the springtime air smells like earth and rain and tangy green things--a necessary, life-affirming thing?

Anyway, go outside. But if you're stuck inside for some reason, here are a few of my favorite spring poems that might help you through your captivity. The first, William Carlos Williams's "Spring and All," captures the difficulty of spring, how each year it is truly a challenge for the earth to recreate itself whole from nothing but scraps of gray grass and soggy roots. I love how Williams depicts the miraculousness of spring's rebirth in this poem, even while paying close attention to its gritty, grimy specifics.

The second poem, Billy Collins's "Today," is a typical Billy Collins poem: it's simple, playful, and true. While Williams's poem is better crafted, Collins's seems just as true to me and perhaps more relatable: why yes, Mr. Collins, I do want to "rip the little door from its jamb" in springtime joy, I do!

---------------

Spring and All

By William Carlos Williams

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken

---------------

Today

By Billy Collins

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,

so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw

open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,

indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths

and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight

that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight

on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants

from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,

holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,

well, today is just that kind of day.

Experiments in Frosting

2010-03-30T00:13:00.000-05:00

Velcome to my lab-OR-a-TOR-y!

If you read this blog regularly, you've probably noticed that I'm always fussing over frostings. Frostings are hard, unlike the cakes themselves, which almost always turn out. But matching the correct frosting with the right cake has always been much more difficult for me.

So what's a girl to do when she knows nothing about making a good frosting? She makes three in one night, of course, to teach herself how!

I decided to try my experimental frostings on Magnolia Bakery's Vanilla Cake, which is the cake I used for my last birthday cake. I knew that it would make a delicious base for my frostings without getting in their way.

I decided to make three kinds of frosting: royal icing, "Mom's Chocolate Frosting" from Ann Hodgman's Beat This!, and a chocolate ganache. Unfortunately, my royal icing refused to fluff with beating (pasteurized egg whites just don't work, unfortunately!), and I was left with some sugary glue instead of frosting.

Yummy! Royal glue destined for the garbage disposal.

Fortunately, I had enough butter in the house to make Gale Gand's Quick Vanilla Buttercream frosting instead. That turned out to be a fantastically good plan B.

The drool-inducing, spoon-licking buttercream goodness.

I mean, this stuff was good, way better than the buttercream frosting recipe that Magnolia Bakery uses on their vanilla cake; that frosting was heavy and cloying and crusty. But Gand's frosting, even though it's about 70% butter by volume, isn't overwhelmingly buttery or sugary. Instead, it tastes like fresh whipped cream, only sweeter and richer and, miraculously enough, whiter.

The trick to this amazing stuff is beating the butter and sugar together for three full minutes on medium power. This extra beating time transforms the butter from yellow and clumpy to pale and airy and delicate. And the dash of heavy cream beaten in right at the end makes the frosting taste unusually fresh and smooth. This was so good, that I literally had to stop myself from eating it by the spoonful! And I never do that with frosting (just cookie dough) (and cake batter) (but never frosting, I promise!).

The first nine-inch cake round frosted with buttercream.

The second recipe I tried was Mom's Chocolate Frosting. I had never made a chocolate frosting before, so I felt like I should try a recipe that was simple (Check!), required few ingredients (Check!), and called for a ridiculous amount of pure melted chocolate (Double check! This calls for twelve ounces of chocolate in a full recipe.).

However, besides the royal icing, this frosting was the most touchy one to make. Once the chocolate was melted, I added room-temperature vanilla and refrigerator-cold sour cream to mixture, which caused tiny bits of the chocolate to seize up and solidify--ack! But I whipped the mixture furiously and the ugly little chocolate crumbs melted away to reveal a beautiful, smooth, light brown frosting.

The sweet rewards of my furious beating.

To be honest, I didn't like tasting this frosting without a cake beneath it. It was just too sour for me, due partly to the sour cream base and partly to the Ghirardelli chocolate I used (which, to me, always tastes a little sour).

But once it was on the cake, this frosting was scrumptious and accessible. It's the kind of friendly, palate-pleasing frosting that a batch of ravenous six-year-old birthday party attendees would enjoy smearing all over their faces. (Hence the "Mom's" title, I suppose!) And it would be exceptional on a yellow butter cake.

Mom's Chocolate frosting on its cake round.

The final frosting, the ganache, turned out to be my runaway favorite. It's unbelievably simple to make: just heat heavy whipping cream to a simmer, pour it over finely chopped semisweet chocolate, and stir them together until . . .

A smooth goop of mind-bending goodness.

. . . it becomes a smooth goop of mind-bending goodness.

After the ganache cools for a few minutes, you pour it over the cake and smooth it out with a spatula. If you're more patient and less greedy than I am (and if you have a cooling rack to frost on), a ganache can actually turn out beautifully. Done my way, it turns out . . . well, you know:

"I'm pretty on the inside, darnit!"

As I wrote in my tasting notes, this frosting is "the most amazing thing that ever happened to anyone ever." And I made this recipe with cheap old Baker's chocolate--with really high quality chocolate, this would probably make a piece of soggy cardboard taste delicious.

At the end of the night, I ended up loving all of these recipes in different ways. I can't wait to try Mom's Chocolate Frosting on a yellow layer cake, I know that I'll make the vanilla buttercream at every chance I get, and the ganache--oy, the ganache!--will soon find itself smeared on strawberries and spritz cookies and chocolate crisp cookies and very moist and dense chocolate cakes.

The triumverate.

I'll leave you here with one last tasty idea for trying these frostings: cut out the crumby middleman and go straight to the good stuff with the frosting shot.

Sweettarts Chicks, Ducks, & Bunnies

2010-03-26T19:29:00.000-05:00

I can't remember a time when I haven't loved them. My grandma used to pack their rattly little bodies into plastic eggs for our annual Easter egg hunt, and my mom used to nestle them in a bed of plastic grass in my Easter basket. I love them because they're nostalgic and delicious and they only come once a year. They always remind me of spending time with my family and the emergence of spring.

However, they hurt my teeth badly. More than anything else in the world, they make my molars ridiculously sensitive. Therefore, during the rest of the year, I have a strict moratorium on Sweettarts of all ilks, along with Nerds, Lemonheads, and Sour Patch Kids (all of which, btw, I love). It's only the week before Easter that I allow myself to have Sweettarts, and then only the Chicks, Ducks, & Bunnies because their superior size and powdery texture make them absolutely irresistable--I would be a fool to even try! And by "have them" I mean I buy a whole damn bag and eat it in two to three days.

This is, I know, a terrible idea, and a terrible idea that I will have annually without fail. I already have my bag this year, and my teeth are already aching! But I wouldn't give them up for anything.

I think that candy is important. Like really important. It's important to be a kid every once in awhile, to occasionally eat something that induces pure, giddy, stupid pleasure, no matter how bad it is for your teeth or your waistline. And, yes, I believe in moderation, but I also believe that I will only live once, and I would be a damned fool to ever want to let an Easter slip by without a mouthful of tooth-gouging, tongue-savaging, tummy-pudging Sweettart happiness!

Twilight: New Moon--A Review

2010-03-22T12:20:00.000-05:00

Last night, I rented Twilight: New Moon and watched it with my mom. It was . . . long. And pretty boring. But it did give us plenty of opportunities to make cracks whenever a character took off his shirt. We could have made it a drinking game: take a shot every time you spy a bare pectoral!

The Twilight: New Moon poster.

I've mentioned before that I've read all of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books, and that I enjoyed them a little too much. Her writing is terrible, her characters are shallow, and her plots are predictable at best and downright silly at worst. But they're also fun: Meyer can entertain an audience nearly indefinitely, dragging out her frivolous storylines and serious sexual tension for thousands of pages. I wouldn't read the books a second time, but they made for one great weekend's worth of reading!

What the Twilight movies miss is just that: fun. They're long (both films run a little over two hours) and exhaustive (they include every minor detail from the novels, necessary or not) and relentlessly serious. Their color palette is muted--all blacks, browns, and silvers, with occasional dashes of red and yellow--and their soundtracks are painfully emo. (I'm not saying that the music is bad, mind you, just very angsty teenager.) The movies show no sense of humor at all. Instead of a gentle awareness of Twilight's innate camp, we get a lot of awkward, twitchy teenage conversations; yearning half-kisses; and lovelorn staring.

Teenage Bella being moody, missing Edward, and thinking about how all grownups are phony.

While watching New Moon, I couldn't help but wonder where Stephanie Meyer's deliciously silly, hyper-romantic, super-dramatic cheese-fest sensibility has disappeared to? Why is New Moon a meditation on teenage depression instead of a thrill ride of yearning and vampire make-out sessions and unnecessarily frequent werewolf fights?

The only thing that the movies get right is that everyone is incredibly good looking. In the books, the main characters are blatantly shallow, and that blandness if effective if not entirely purposeful: their vapidness allows a reader to imagine herself in Bella's generic little sneakers and imagine her own tasty versions of Edward (the vampire boyfriend) and Jacob (the werewolf boyfriend) to vicariously lust after.

The casting directors have done a great job of choosing attractive young actors who are capable but not too interesting: Bella (Kristen Stewart) is dull, likable, and very pretty; Edward (Robert Pattinson) is dreamy and has the deliciously tortured air of a pouty consumptive; and Jacob (Taylor Lautner) combines a cute, boy-next-door sort of appeal with a whole heap of well-tanned muscles.

Battle of the beefcakes.

I think that the producers of the Twilight movies know that as long as they produce a set of four decently made movies full of pretty faces and meticulously accurate plotlines, teenage girls (and their mothers) (and 26-year-old bloggers) will show up for the spectacle. But I would have loved to see the filmmakers make Twilight their own, to make a movie with a little lightness, charm, and romance, maybe something with some rock music or characters with actual personalities. Then maybe their films would stand a chance of being watched twenty years down the road.

Instead, these filmmakers are happily raking in the cash by creating a suite of films whose expiration date seems to already have passed. Or will have passed just as soon as Robert Pattinson gets his first wrinkle or Taylor Lautner goes squishy around the waist.

Big, Fat Novels

2010-03-20T17:00:00.000-05:00

My limit is one a year. This year, it's Middlemarch.

The serialized first edition of Middlemarch.

Anything over 500 pages is enough to make me leery, and Middlemarch weighs in at a whopping 800 pages. I've managed to read longer, but not often.

Why do I live in terror of long novels? I fear my inability to finish them (there's nothing I hate like starting a novel and never finishing it!), but I also worry that I've chosen poorly and will find myself committed to a dullard of a novel that I have ceased to enjoy. But I also love finishing a novel and adding it to my "Already Read" list on Goodreads. It's as thrilling as checking off a daunting item on a to-do list!

It's not that I'm incapable of committing to a long book. I read Bleak House (1000 pages) twice in one month for a class, I tackled Anna Karenina (850 pages) over my dining hall lunch tray during one semester at KU, and I worked my way through The Brothers Karamazov (750 pages) while I finished writing my thesis at Penn State. Obviously, I can do it, and, obviously, it's always worth the effort: I loved every one of those books, and Brothers is now one of my all-time favorites. But still, I never look forward to the mental fortitude that big, fat novels require of me!

I'm enjoying Middlemarch thus far--Eliot is scathingly funny, incredibly smart, and darkly satirical--but when I'm not reading it, I find myself daydreaming about reading something really cheap and tawdry and fast. Something with a werewolf in it. Or a dragon!

But I won't. This is my once a year--I'm in it for the long run, even if I find myself panting a little in the home stretch!