Presently the Teacup Stirred

I am missing out on a reading/discussion on James Merrill and his masterpiece, The Changing Light at Sandover next week.  But that does not mean you have to.  Here's some information on the event, and a bit of what I had to say on Merrill, thanks to the queries of Kathleen Kirk.

http://www.escapeintolife.com/uncategorized/familiar-spirits/

And here's Richard Fox saying things more cogently than I:

http://www.escapeintolife.com/blog/changing-light/

Finally, here's the man Merrill himself, reading a poem about using the Ouija board for the first time.

(As an aside, did you know that "Ouija" was just the French yes and ther German yes put together, because someone at Milton Bradley thought it made a foreign and mystical-sounding word?  it's better, at any rate, than communicating with the spirits on your yes-yes board.)

This Friday

On the Reading Shelf

I have been delving into Jenifer Karmin's amazing aaaaaaaaaaalice.   And Michael Dickman's Flies. Just got Your Father on The Train of Ghosts and am looking forward to reading more from it. Which reminds me that I want to re-read G.C. Waldrep's Archicembalo. And I think I am ready to tackle Anne Carson's Nox.  More about these in the future. In other news, the tulips on the back porch have opened today, and despite the plastic tag that promised white flowers, they are red as a cape worn by a little girl on a path in the woods.

The Last Wolf

I was in a hotel room in Washington, DC for a bookselling conference. After a couple nights of poor sleep, I came back from dinner and dozed off at 9:30. I woke up happy and convinced of my good night's rest.  It was 12:10 a.m. I was as awake as the sun.  So I started to read the book I'd brought with me, the book that despite being at a bookselling conference I'd not had time to read.  The book, a memoir by Mira Bartok called The Memory Palace, about how she lived with and fled from and returned to her schizophrenic mother, is so achingly sad.  Here is a passage that is not typical--She does not in general go for the poetic digression:

     "A friend in town says she heard the last wolf when she was ten and lost in the woods. Twenty years later, she heard it again. The loss of the wolf is like the loss of a mother. Somewhere she roams in memory, in darkness. Our bond with her is inexplicable, before the beginning of time. She is fierce love, she is sorrow. She is a howling in the wilderness we can never see, calling us home. She is what we fear--and what we long to return to--the heat of the cave and animal closeness, before all civilization and reason."


I have been rereading Grimm's fairy tales recently. The Memory Palace reminds me of stories of lost princesses, and witches under curses, and the wolf in the woods.

Mira also has a website that lists sources for grants and artist residencies, for all you art types out there.

Gotta Love Gertrude

I have been slowly reading Ulla Dydo's massive study, Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, 1923-1934, a work that delves deeply into how Stein wrote, how her daily life wove into her work, and examines how and where Stein's writing changed as it went from journal entry into finished work, typed by Alice's loving little hands. I find it slow going because of the minutiae--today I was reading about how often Stein used the word "basket" in her writings before she and Alice got the white poodle Basket, and how Basket the poodle thereafter figured into the work.

But then I come to Stein quotes like, "Think in stitches. Think in sentences. Think in settlements. Think in willows."

And I want to spend many hours thinking in willows and thinking in stitches and I wish to live in Steinlandia for all my days.