Celebrating St. Patrick and William Gibson

You'd have to be living the life of a total recluse to not know that today we celebrate the life of St. Patrick. Maybe it's just an excuse to drink green beer and to eat the Irish food you'd usually never let yourself consume.

But in a piece in today's The New York Times, Thomas Cahill argues that we should celebrate the life of St. Patrick by reading a book. He talks about the collapse of Rome, and the role that the Irish played in saving books:

"The glories of Christianity — particularly its books — fascinated the Irish. They came to love the Roman alphabet that Patrick and his successors taught them, as well the precious illuminated manuscripts that he presented to them. There was indeed nothing in their intellectual heritage to block their receptivity to the Christian faith.

There was also nothing in their heritage to draw them to master the intricacies of the Greco-Roman tradition. This turned out to be a stroke of luck, for the ancient Irish never embraced classical cynicism or the gloomy Greco-Roman sense of fatedness.

Instead, they remained in many ways remarkably unjaded, full of wonder at the unexpectedness of human life."

Cahill also talks about the delightful development of illuminated books under the hand of the Irish. That made me think about the new turns that mediums take as they become something different, yet at the same time a more intense version of the original.

Today is also the birthday of William Gibson, who is probably most famous for coining the term "cyberspace" and for his book Neuromancer. I first read his name after I read Marge Piercy's He, She, and It, and she mentioned him in the acknowledgements section. Piercy's vision of a connected world didn't seem impossible to me: I hung out with some computer geeks as an undergrad, and I had a glimpse of the future which we're emerging into these days (an intense sense of community with far-flung people whom you've never even met in person--cool!). But when I presented a paper about the book at a conference in the mid 90s, my English major colleagues expressed disbelief that so much life could be lived in this place--what did you call it?--cyberspace?

It would be interesting to read those early books about cyberspace again, to see how accurately they predicted our world. It would be even more interesting to imagine where we'll be in ten or twenty years.

So, celebrate March 17 by reading an old-fashioned book, and thank the Irish. Or go to cyberspace, where many of us read such an assortment of materials, and thank the early sci-fi writers who dreamed this world of electric sheep and Turing machines (O.K., it's a botched series of allusions in that last sentence, but I like it, so it stays).

Believing in Bound Books--and Giving Them Away

In the next day or two, I plan to join Kelli's cool effort to celebrate National Poetry month. Deciding on which of my books to give away is easy, since I only have my chapbook. But how to choose the other book to give away? There are so many wonderful possibilities. Will I choose Denise Duhamel's Kinky, or is that too Barbie focused? Will I choose a small press book, thus supporting those worthy efforts? Will I choose one of my old feminist favorites, like Marge Piercy's The Moon is Always Female? I just might. That was one of the first volumes of poetry I ever bought, and I read it fiercely and ferociously throughout my undergraduate years, underlining and cracking the spine and taking it everywhere.

When you only have one volume of poetry in your collection, it's easy to love it fiercely and often.

Of course I can't give away that copy. Let me wander away for a minute.

I am SO happy. That book is still in print. I wonder why so many poetry books published by mainstream publishers have gone out of print, but this one has not. I have to assume it's because the book is still making money for the publisher.

So, in a day or two, I'll make the final decisions and join Kelli's celebration. But today, I just had to log an encounter from yesterday.

My office is on a corridor which opens to a central location, where several times a week we have an administrative assistant sitting at the desk. Once upon a time, we did our tutoring in that space, so we still have a bookcase left over from those days. We have a much better tutoring center now, but getting someone to move furniture requires a celestial act, so the bookcase has stayed behind. When publishers send me books, I'll add them to the shelves. I also put old editions of textbooks there, the ones I don't use anymore, but don't have room for on the shelves in my office. They're worth nothing: I don't teach out of them anymore, but I can't bear to throw them away, and since they're older editions, no one will buy them.

Yesterday, I noticed a student standing by the bookcase reading the Michael Meyer's The Bedford Introduction to Literature. I said, "It's so good to see someone reading."

The student said, "I love this book. It's got such great poetry in it." Keep in mind that this was not my student; she had no reason to know that professing admiration for poetry is a sure way to impress me.

I asked, "Would you like to borrow it?"

The student said, "Oh, no. I go online to get poems. I come here to read poems, and then I go online to see what I can find. I love this Maya Angelou poem."

We chatted some more, and I said, "Why don't you just take that book and keep it?"

She said, "Oh, no, that's alright." But her hands lingered on the pages.

I insisted. I wanted to believe that I saw a longing for poems and a bound book. And even if I didn't see that longing, I wanted to believe that the book would find a good home. I wanted to believe that the student would read the wide selection of poetry in the book to expand her horizons beyond Maya Angelou (not that there's anything wrong with Maya Angelou--it's just that the poetry world is so much larger than one writer).

I want to believe there's still space in our world for books, the old-fashioned bound kind. And I want to give them away, because my bookcase space seems to shrink with each passing year.

Happy Pi Day!

Today is Pi Day; it's March 14: 3.14. Think back (way back for some of us) to your Math classes to remember the concept of pi and then look at the date again.

The Writer's Almanac tells us how some people will celebrate today: "There are legions of people worldwide devoted to memorizing π to as far as they can memorize it. And today around the world, there are π recitation contests. The world record, according to the Guinness Book, is currently held by Lu Chao, a grad student from China, who over the course of 24 hours and 4 minutes recited pi to the 67,890th decimal place without error."

Other people will have pies to eat (pizza pies, dessert pies, ah the possibilities, ah the irrationality).

Why celebrate the irrational number? I just really can't tell you. I don't remember enough Math to even be able to explain the importance. But I can respect other people's healthy obsessions. These obsessions are the things which enrich our lives, which keep us from descending into drudgery.

It's also the birthday of Albert Einstein; spend some time contemplating these alliances. Think about time and space and relativity, and what it means for us.

Or just spend some time with this Einstein quote: "The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives."

Sylvia Beach's birthday is also today. Without her, we'd have likely had no James Joyce, a writer whose work seems appropriate for a day that celebrates the most famous irrational number and the birthday of Einstein. Ah to have a bookstore around which wondrous writers orbited! Ah, to believe in young artists and to have enough money to share to keep them all afloat.

So, how will you pursue truth and beauty today? Right now, I'm listening to one of my favorite physicist/cosmologists on the radio program Speaking of Faith (go here to listen). I think I'll write a poem inspired by Janna Levin's comments in which the quantum particle thinks about the rigidity of the human, which can only exist as one thing, not as particle and wave at the same time.

Or maybe I'll just bake a pie.

Call to Collage

I've been feeling drawn to the idea of collaging on cards, cards that could be used for inspiration of all kinds.

I know that Kelli Russell Agodon uses these regularly (go here), as does Sandy Longhorn (read about the process here and here).

I have used collage occasionally, but it never ends up looking as beautiful as the cards pictured in those posts. I'm not good at composition yet.

I also have a colleague at work who collages so skillfully that you have to look really closely to see the seams. My collaging still looks like something a five year old would do. An awkward five year old.

Allow me to demonstrate:




For a few months in the early part of 1997, I was trying to decide what I really wanted out of life. I was thinking about what was lacking, what I wanted more of, what I wanted the future to be. I wasn't trying to create art, so much as I was trying to find a new way to my subconscious. The above collage tells me that I wanted more time outside.

I have always wrestled with insecurity, and I've always been drawn to sayings and slogans that tell me to walk away from insecurity. I almost bought a No Fear t-shirt, except it cost $18 in 1995, and that seemed exorbitant.

Here's the larger collage. Clearly I wanted rest (the woman in the bottom is in a hammock) and a slimmer body. At that time I had just lost 50 pounds, and I desperately wanted to keep it off. I was successful for a time, then I gained 30 pounds back, then a few years later, I lost that, and over the past few years, I've slowly gained it back. Sigh. Clearly some work to do in that area.

I think the above collage is most interesting, in terms of what I was thinking about the future, and where I am now. In many ways, I am that woman in the central image: department chair who hands out business cards while spending lots of time in an office. I see a longing for downtime and vacations (and I have learned to scuba dive, although I don't go often). The woman in jeans is Sandra Bullock, I think, and I like that casual style: jeans, boots, boxy jacket.

I wonder if my collage cards that I'm about to make will be different. I wonder if they'll inspire me in terms of my writing. Will I return to them in 13 years to be astonished at what I knew then, what I've managed to accomplish?

First, I need some magazines. I've let my subscriptions expire. But I have a plane trip coming up. I'll use it as an excuse to buy those lush magazines that I love, but that I never purchase because they seem extravagant in price and sparse in content. But if I'm buying for images, a new corner of the world opens up.

Next Experiment with Animated/Video Poems

This week, I created another animated/videopoem. I wanted to be sure I returned to Movie Maker before I forgot how to use it. I still haven't experimented with sound. Perhaps I'll do that in the coming weeks.

Here's the stanza of the poem as it appears traditionally, on the page or on the screen (scroll down to see the whole poem):

If God is an old woman,
She saves all our old clothes. She alone
has a vision of a collage of cloth.
She cuts new shapes out of our discards
and pieces them into an intricate quilt,
even though she knows we will fail
to appreciate her demonstrated skill.

Here's my animated/video version:

This morning, I had a horrifying thought: without sound, am I just really making PowerPoint presentations? I haven't really done much with that program, because my early years of seeing other people's PowerPoint presentations left me with such a bad taste in my mouth. If no one ever reads a slide show to me ever again, it will be too soon.

So, I must continue to work to make sure I'm creating the best projects that I know how to do. But I think it's instructive to post these early efforts too.

Here's the poem in its entirety. It first appeared in Interdisciplinary Humanities.

The Precious Nature of Junk

If God is an old woman,
She uses no recipe.
Long ago she learned
what she needed to know:
how to make do with scarce
resources, how to create successful
substitutions, how to create
magic from simple kitchen chemistry.

If God is an old woman,
She saves all our old clothes. She alone
has a vision of a collage of cloth.
She cuts new shapes out of our discards
and pieces them into an intricate quilt,
even though she knows we will fail
to appreciate her demonstrated skill.

If God is an old woman,
She longs for closer connection.
She sends cards for every occasion
and fills the answering machine with cryptic
messages. She has such important
information to pass on and such little
time left. We listen
and wonder at her mental state.

If God is an old woman,
She knows that everything could have a larger
purpose. She hoards items we’d have discarded
long ago. She understands the precious
nature of junk.

My Happiness Project--Choose Joy

An atheist, a Lutheran, a Hindu, and a Buddhist convene their book club meeting to talk about Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project.

Now you're waiting for a punch line, aren't you?

But there is none. We actually did that on Tuesday. We talked more about our ideas of happiness and its place in our lives than we did the book (I liked the first part of the book better than the second part, and I'm not sure that I like the book better than the blog).

Oddly, our resident atheist had the most rigid Protestant work ethic. Happiness is the reward that you get when the work is done, and you can turn your attention to the activities you enjoy.

Some of you already know the problem with this mindset. The work is never, ever done. There are always surfaces to be scrubbed, paperwork that demands attention, the gaping maw of familial need.

Why is it so hard to carve out a bit of time? Even if we can't carve it out each day, surely we could find an hour or two a week?

I'm the Lutheran who spent a great deal of time in the middle 90's figuring out what I wanted, what society said I should want, what outcomes deserved which amount of effort. I was living in a communal household, with competing agendas of housemates and husband and self (all of which seemed reasonable), trying to balance a teaching/grading heavy job at a community college, while not losing my artist self. I spent a lot of time writing morning pages, creating collages, and taking a constant inventory: "Is this what I want? Does this activity fit with my goals and my values? If I had only myself to consider, what would I do? If I was selfless, what would I do?" It seemed endless, but it really helped.

I was overweight and trying to get healthy when I came across this quote in the first edition of Christiane Northrup's Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom: "Mary Catherine Bateson's book Composing a Life documents that the presence of a man in a household increases the workload significantly--not because he leaves that many more dirty socks around but because of the expectations that he has of those around him and that those around him have of themselves" (emphasis Northrup's, page 569).

Read that last bit again. I found it shocking when I first read it, and I was sure I had avoided that bit of socialization, but as I moved through my weeks, I realized how many activities I did simply because I thought that's how grown-ups--wives in particular--behaved.

I'm luckier than many people in terms of the expectations I must meet. I don't have children, and I have a fairly capable husband who isn't a sexist. But I still have some deeply ingrained expectations of myself, partly societal, and partly from the fact that I've been married almost 22 years. For example, I've almost always been the one who does the grocery shopping, and thus, some internal voice tells me to feel guilty if I can't do it. But I'm married to a grown up who is perfectly capable of doing the grocery shopping.

If I had children, I'd have a tougher struggle carving out time for the art which brings me joy. Children have needs which they simply cannot meet themselves, at least not when they're very young.

It's interesting to discuss our notions of culture and socialization and the approach to happiness. I tend to think that once we realize that our attitudes are a result of our socialization, we can work to overcome it. My atheist friend thinks that cultural messages are just too tough for most people to overcome. We both have degrees in Sociology, although she has a Ph.D., and I stopped at the B.A. level. Does she know something I don't? I suspect it's just because of our different experiences.

Our Hindu friend has a completely different view of happiness and joy. She says that her religious tradition mandates that she find as much joy as she can in each day. That idea just astonished me.

I've spent two days thinking about how our lives would change if we felt we had a mandate to experience joy and happiness, as often as we could, each day, day after day.

As I worked my way through graduate school, I had a photocopy of a bumper sticker above my desk. It said, "Anything is possible," and I wrote down the impossible things I accomplished along the way: "even writing a thesis," "passing comps," "writing a dissertation." Later, I adopted the mantra: "Magic happens." I saw that as a statement about making a way out of no way, even when you aren't sure how to do it.

Now I might have a different mantra: Choose joy. I haven't been doing enough of that lately. That may be my motto for the rest of the year. Choose joy.

"Shenandoah" and Migrations to the Online World

In January, Steven Schroeder wrote a post in which he took a look at all of his poems published in his wonderful book Torched Verse Ends and counted which of those journals that originally published the poems are still with us. Now the book has only been out about a year, and five of the journals which originally published his poems are gone.

And yesterday, the news that Shenandoah will soon be an online only journal.

Since I first started sending out poems in the late 80's, Shenandoah has been on my list of places where I'd like to see my poems published. And just in the last year, I got a personalized rejection slip. Progress!

I realize that I'm living in geological time when it comes to the idea of progress in my writing career. I like to think that the tectonic plates are shifting, even if I can't see them. I remember when I first sent out chapbook manuscripts. For a few years, I felt like I was making no progress, and then, wham! One got accepted, and a few months later, I had the beautiful chapbook in my hands.

I'm ready for that next earthquake.

But back to Shenandoah. At least the journal isn't going away entirely. It will be online, unlike so many journals which just cease.

I have become one of those people who does most of her reading online. Once upon a time, only a few years ago, I only read a few newspapers online, and I'd have told you that I'd prefer the print editions, if I could afford to have them shipped this far.

Not anymore. When I read print newspapers, I'm annoyed at having to flip pages. I'm annoyed at the unwieldy size. I'm annoyed at not being able to look things up quickly, at not having a hyperlink.

For the individual poem, I think I could be happy to read it online or on paper. I read online journals in the same way that I read paper journals: I flip around.

For a collection of poems, I think I still prefer a book of poems. But my recent experiments with animated poems have made me think that an online book of poems should be more than a print version that migrated online. I may be moving to that idea when it comes to individual poems too.

There's so much that we can do with technology to entice the reader. We've only begun to explore those ideas.