Summer Photo-Essay / Cat Photo Essay

This post will consist of two separate, equally exciting photo essays.

1. Summer

Summer has been fairly busy here in Oxford. Angela and I spend the week days working and hanging out, and our weekends traveling—two weeks ago it was Michigan, and this past weekend, Bowling Green for Larisa and Cameron’s wedding. (My sister/brother-law.) Here is a photo, with Angela looking beautiful, and myself looking unpleasantly sweaty. A mixture of heat and champagne.

Today, Angela worked the morning shift at Butterfield Farms (A greenhouse/farmer’s market), then spent the afternoon grading the students enrolled in her online class. I revised some poems for send-outs, then drove up to the English office to take care of last minute business for my summer reading list. Afterward, while Angela graded from home, I drove to a friend’s and worked on a screenplay with him.

We’re grateful for Angela’s job, because besides the pay, we get lots of free food. Fruits, vegetables, different varieties of homemade bread, blocks of cheese…she usually comes home with something fun.

All free, except for the jars we bought to make the jam in.

Life in Candle Wood (Candle Hood) Terrace is good, besides children continuing to assault one another in a Lord of the Flies-esque manner. (I’ll post on that later.) A few weeks ago we found this dresser set beside the dumpster outside our front door, which we promptly carried it off.

It’s missing a couple handles, but besides that, it’s beautiful, and in great condition, so we’re going to repaint it and buy new handles. We're both thinking something fun, but I'm leaning towards a color like mint green, and Angela is suggesting a grey and blue, southern style striping. Any suggestions?

We’ve been having friends over for occasional cookouts, and visiting their homes (apartments) as well. Here is a cookout behind our townhouse, and a poker game at a friend's house.

I can't remember, but it looks as though Angela is miming a camera-taking motion in a story she's telling.

I don't know why my hand is in the middle of the table like that.

2. Cats

In the tradition of my past essay on the lifestyles and habits of feral felines in Marion, Indiana, I will post pictures of two interesting cats I have encountered this summer.

This first one is named, I believe, Rocky, and he is enormously fat, with thick, dirty, bear-like fur. He was outside a friend’s house, and turned out to be friendly when I approached him. The pictures really don't do justice.

The second is Willard, my own cat. Below is slightly shocking final photograph of Willard capturing a baby rabbit. He carried it around in his mouth for a while, before carrying it to his den (my parents garage) to eat it, where I took some candid photos. Unfortunately, my sister Taylor took the rabbit away from Willard and freed it across the street, where it hopped away, unharmed except for some chewed fur.

Zeitoun

I can't keep track of Eggers. This is his new nonfiction book, being released in a few weeks, and it looks like it was written very much in the manner of What is the What. Which is a great book.

Here's the synopsis from McSweeneys:

When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the days after, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. But, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared. Eggers’s riveting nonfiction book, three years in the making, explores Zeitoun’s roots in Syria, his marriage to Kathy—an American who converted to Islam—and their children, and the surreal atmosphere (in New Orleans and the United States generally) in which what happened to Abdulrahman Zeitoun became possible. Like What Is the What, Zeitoun was written in close collaboration with its subjects and involved vast research—in this case, in the U.S., Spain, and Syria.

Also, if anyone is interested, here is a link to an interview with Dave Eggers and his wife Vendela Vida about writing their new movie, Away We Go. He seems funny and sincere.

And, finally-- here is a link to the McSweeney's page where you can order the book, if you so desire.

I know these posts bore some people, sorry. Ang. needs to post a life update soon, but if she does not, I will handle it.

Book Review

My book review of Yusef Komunyakaa's newest collection of poems, Warhorses, was accepted by Jacket magazine, and will appear this coming October.

Jacket is a fairly reputable online magazine that specializes in book reviews, and my review will be in the same issue as a new Fanny Howe poem, which is fun.

Life update post containing insight into our weekend, and Angela's job at the Greenhouse/ Farmer's Market, coming soon.

Trailer for The Road

The trailer for the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's most recent novel, The Road, was released on itunes today, which you can watch by clicking here. I really enjoyed the novel, and was looking forward to the movie (I thought casting Viggo Mortenson as the father seemed like a great choice--just what I imagined), even though I was curious how watchable it would be, since the novel is pretty surreal at times (for instance, neither the father nor the boy were ever named) and is punctuated by images of grisly (and, I have to say, fascinating) violence.

After watching the trailer, some of my enthusiasm has diminished. It looks like the role of the mother (being played by Charlize Theron) has been expanded way beyond what it was in the book (and if you read the novel you know why her role was limited), probably because the film-makers wanted to give the movie more of a narrative, which I think will come at the expense of a vital aspect of the novel.

It still looks like the movie is following the book fairly closely (most of the scenes in the trailer were immediately recognizable)-- my worry, specifically, is that what made the book so fantastic was the sort of hazy, dream-like atmosphere. I think that the quest to make The Road approachable to a wider audience might end up turning it into another Children of Men--especially with the overdone news clips, which to be honest, I used to love, and now think is becoming extremely annoying (and evidence of laziness on the part of film-makers).

I really liked Children of Men. (In general, I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic lit. I even liked I Am Legend. ) But The Road should be something different.

So. Still interested in the movie, but now I'm in doubt that the film-making will be able to do justice to (what I thought) was a unique take on a genre where new ground is difficult to break.

I'm curious what others think.

Cincinnati Public Library Book Sale

Our neighbor needed a ride down to the Cincinnati airport on Friday morning, and since Angela had the morning off, we drove her down together. I wanted to go to Cincinnati on Friday anyway, because it was the final day of the Cincinnati Public Library book sale.

We left our neighbor at the departures area by 6:30 a.m. The book sale didn’t open until 9, so Angela and I ate breakfast and killed time at the Walnut St. First Watch, which was really great, and also within walking distance of the library. At 8:40, we left First Watch, and believe it or not, there was a already a line of 40-50 people waiting to get into the library. A “friend of the library” (volunteer) was walking up and down the line hawking large, red, plastic bags, because Friday was “grab bag day.” One bag cost ten dollars, and then whatever a person could fit into the bag was free. I wasn’t sure if I was going to find enough books worth buying to equal ten dollars, but I decided to take the risk. It was worth it.

Before I list the books that Angela and I were able to fit into our bag (we probably could have fit a few more), I need to try and communicate the unadulterated greed that my fellow book-buyers exhibited. (I wanted to write "bibliophiles," instead of book-buyers, but unfortuntately, I have a few theories that--if true--would result in several members of the crowd being anti-bibliophiles.Theories explained further on.) A bell began tolling at 9, and the line tightened so that the drifters who weren’t exactly “in-line” couldn’t squeeze in. I found myself boxing out a lost looking elderly woman who was meandering towards a spot in front of me. Once through the door, people began trotting past tables of books, to what I quickly surmised was some sort of prized destination. I didn’t know where we were going, but I followed the crowd.

One group forked off at the antique books, where—without looking at titles—people began shoveling books into their bags. I stopped at the table and glanced over the titles, wasting valuable time to see what was being scooped up, then returned to the deluge, which I was disturbed to find had flooded around the poetry section. I didn’t even think there would have been a poetry section, but the sale was much larger than I had expected. The table was completely surrounded, and people were pulling books into their bags faster than I could read titles, and then all of a sudden the crowd was moving on again.

They were like locusts devouring fields.

Although it seemed that the poetry section had been devastated, I performed a more thorough search and discovered that there wasn’t enough room on the table for everything, so more books were being stored in boxes under the table. Comeplete set of the Harvard English Poetry Collection? Yahtzee.

I made some good finds, and then decided to backtrack to the biography/memoir section, which is among my favorite type of reading, and seemed mostly overlooked. As I made my way over, one greedy bastard rushed by me (keep in mind all this has happened in a space of 5 minutes or so) with two bags completely filled with books on CD. He had a volunteer mark the bags for him, then bought two more empties and rushed away.

On one level, it’s nice to see people get excited (greedy, even) for books, especially poetry. Yet, it was also a little confusing. Are there enough people in downtown Cincinnati to get excited about deals on poetry that they would wake up early and bum rush the library? I don’t think so. Perplexing, but I have some theories. Some of the people looked like bums, and I developed a suspicion that they were only using the books for barrel fires, or to cook their Mulligan Stew. My other theory is that the books were going to be sold online for higher prices. Greedy-for-books-on-CD was a prime candidate for this hypothesis.

If you’re interested, below is a comprehensive list of what Ang. and I filled our big red bag with. I’m still reading Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, so I’ve only had time to start the book by Sarah Vowell—but the part I read was very funny.

I’ll list the price the book was marked at (If it had been purchased on a day besides grab bag day) after the title and author, so you can see what a great deal it was.

Books Bought

1. A Tidewater Morning- William Styron, 2
2. The Brooklyn Follies- Paul Auster, 2
3. The Bradbury Chronicles (The Life of Ray Bradbury) - Sam Weller, 5
4. My Wars Are Laid Away in Books (The Life of Emily Dickinson) - Alfred Habegger, 4
5. John Irving (Biography) - Carol C. Harter, James R. Thompson, 2
6. The Works of John Donne - John Donne, 2
7. From Chaucer to Gray: English Poetry in Three Volumes, Volume I (Harvard Classics), 3
8. From Collins to Fitzgerald: English Poetry Volume II, 3
9. From Tennyson to Whitman: English Poetry Volume III, 3
10. Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure- Paul Auster (Memoir), 3
11. Firefall: Poems by Mona Van Duyn- Mona Van Duyn, 1
12. Robert Frost: A One Volume Edition of the Authorized Biography- Lawrence Thompson, 3
13. Two Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage- Madeleine L’Engle, 3
14. An American Childhood-Annie Dillard, (First Edition Hardcover, Near-perfect condition), 2
15. July, July- Tim O’Brien, 2
16. Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World- Sarah Vowell, 3
17. The World as a Lie: The Biography of James Dickey- Henry Hart, 3
18. Robert Lowell: A Biography- Ian Hamilton, 3

Children’s

1. Miss Bindergarten Celebrated the 100th Day of Kindergarten- Slate and Wolf, 4
2. The Enormous Egg- Oliver Butterworth, 1
3. Numbers- Alan Snow, 1
4. One Little Lamb- Elaine Greenstein, 1
5. Grandparents- Roser Capdevila, 1
6. Where’s Pup?- Dayle Ann Dodds, 2
7. This Little Chick- John Lawrence, 4

Misc.

1.Fondue- Marlisa Szwillus, 1
2.The Education of a Poker Player- Herbert O. Yardley, 2

Total Number of Books: 27
Price: 66 Dollars
Sum Paid: 10 bucks

cheers

Yo Teach!

If you have a few minutes, these are some really funny "clips" from a fake show on hulu called Yo Teach! Jason Schwartzman plays the teacher...I guess they're being used to advertise Judd Apatow's forthecoming film Funny People.

Whoops, & Poem

Okay:

First of all, I accidentally deleted my blog roll last night, so it might take me some time to replace that, since I have no idea what most people's blog address is. I may email you for it, but again--all deletions were unintentional. Your writings are valued.

Second, I now have two blogs written, but have been too lazy to upload pictures onto my computer. So I'll get something up tonight. (I may archive the two already written and write something new today about Angela and I's experience in Cincinnati this morning.)

I feel so guilty that I'm going to do something I normally don't, and post a poem I wrote in the last couple of weeks. It's lighter than most of my more recent work, and has not been revised yet.


Summer in a College Town

The first warm day since October & the first
girls are displayed on lawns by ten, able to rise

early only for this, skin offered
to a fickle star, faces & stomachs

pale as birch bark before peeling, others
strangely dark, evidence of settling

for a false messiah. Eyes shuttered
behind dark glasses as others gaze

into the blinding white of open books
pretending at study, & all

lounge like cats under glass or
serphents along black asphalt—

& the young men who gather

on porches, or pause
their already slow walks

down sidewalks to stare, hungry
as animals wakening from hibernation—

daughters & sons spring
from these passing bodies.


That's the end of the poem. Summertime and Sexuality! Revisions will probably be based around trying to bring out more of a spacey theme (as in, outer space), and last night I thought about changing the title to "Heavenly Bodies," which is potentially the worst title in the history of poetry. (Although Mary Oliver has a million poems titled "Percy", "Percy #6", etc...Percy is the name of her dog.)

Oh more piece of news: Away We Go was released in select cities today, you should go see it if it's playing near you.

So, Shoot Me...I thought Synecdoche, New York was better than The Wrestler

I think the average movie-goer would prefer The Wrestler, if for no other reason than because it has an intelligible narrative. Of course, there are other reasons to appreciate this movie as well—Mickey Rourke does a fantastic job as Randy “The Ram”, and I like Marisa Tomei in every role I’ve ever seen her in, even if the movie is terrible—also, the story itself, and the details involved with being a professional wrestler were interesting. Did you know pro-wrestlers carried razor blades in their bandages (or, as I read in a recent interview with Hulk Hogan—in their mouth) to cut themselves with during matches? Or that the wrestlers themselves worked out much of the choreography of matches? I didn’t. Also, director Darren Aronofsky has some really cool camera shots, particularly when the camera follows Randy around the deli/freezer, and during matches. Here’s what I didn’t like: the heavy-handed, in-my-face Christ metaphor. Gran Torino pulled it off; The Wrestler did not.

I guess there aren’t really any rules for making a character into a Christ metaphor, but for me, there needs to be more involved than allusions made between said character and Christ, feeling bad for the character, and then the character dying. In Gran Torino, Walt died for someone else. Through his death, the Vietnamese family found freedom. Randy’s death was more of an abandonment than anything—he had a daughter, and a woman that was arguably starting to love him. She too was getting older, and her body could no longer keep up with her profession—should she have committed suicide? (Which is basically what Randy did.)

Randy lacked the courage to live up to the expectations either relationship demanded. So he “Ram Jams” his buddy off a corner-post, knowing full well that his heart is going to go kaploosh. Was Randy’s a sad existance? Yes. And the movie was a striking portrait of a man who could do only one thing well, and had nothing left when that part of his life was gone—Springsteen’s proverbial one-trick pony. The Wrestler is a good film—but not great.

Synecdoche, New York, however, is unlike any film in recent memory. Written and directed by Charlie Kaufman (the first time he’s done both), it works on emotions in a strange, and fascinating way. (For example, I think of the weird and sudden sadness I experienced at the end of Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic, when Bill Murray sees the shark, and everyone in the sub puts a hand on his shoulder and he says something about fifth grade being his favorite year. Why did that make me want to cry? You could argue that it’s because the best year of someone’s life was over at 11, but I suspect there’s more going on…) S, NY is endlessly reflexive, to the point of being unbearable, but just when you think you can’t take any more, the bizarre (but strangely resonant, I think, especially toward the end) surrealism is taken up another level. (I was writing in the second-person there, but rather than fix it, I’ll just add this—I loved it. But it’s somewhat avant-garde (read: artsy), and I think many people would lose patience with it very quickly.)

It’s about a play-write (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who receives a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, and proceeds to start creating a play that closely resembles real life as possible. He builds a replica of NY in a theater, hires actors to play himself and people he knows...maybe you can see where this is headed, but some of that is reflected in the movie’s title. “Synecdoche” is a poetic term for a part symbolizing a whole, for instance: farmhand. The hand represents the person. Anyway. Philip Seymour Hoffman is brilliant the entire time, there’s some really incredible writing, and if you have any patience for somewhat incomprehensible films, stick it out until the end, the emotional payoff is (I think) worth it.

Cheers.

Poker According to Žižek

*A Warning: This post concerns political theory and poker. If that does not interest you, read no further.

Slavoj Žižek is a Marxist-communist philosopher from former Yugoslavia, and I’m currently reading his book Welcome to the Desert of The Real for my Secrecy and Spectacle course. (The full course title is “Secrecy and Spectacle from Cold War to War on Terror.” It’s easily the most influential course I’ve ever taken up to this point.) The book is basically about how the illusions of Americans should have been shattered after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but instead Americans used the attacks as an opportunity to create more illusions. This is an incredibly basic summary—so basic it’s actually wrong, but there’s really no other way to simplify it. Anyway--as you can see from the title of this post, this is in no way what I was planning on writing about, but since I’ve gone this far, I’ll go ahead and summarize what Žižek means.

Žižek believes that America pre-9/11 lived in a fantasy land of Us and Them thinking (Again, the problem of dichotomies. And “Them” equals everyone existing outside of the U.S.), and that when our own country was attacked, it was an opportunity to realize that we are part of a world where terrible things are happening. (For instance, all the Bosnian women who were terrorized, the mass killings in Congo—these are all things that happen to them.) Žižek claims that America did not take this opportunity, that instead, “it [America] opted to reassert its traditional ideological commitments: out with feelings of responsibility and guilt towards the impoverished Third World, we are the victims now!”

Anyway, Žižek fills the book with these little anecdotes and jokes he’s picked up from who knows where, and Saturday night there was a poker game at my house, and Žižek’s words kept bubbling up. Every aspect of the game corresponded to his text—part of me now wonders, in fact, if this book is actually incognito poker theory, only disguised as political theory.

1. Welcome to the Desert of the Real

The Desert of the Real is a place one ends up after illusion—or reality—is shattered. I lead many players to this desolate place Saturday night, as what they knew as reality—their ideological constructs—were shattered.

Playing your pocket jacks when there’s face cards on the table? Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Raising me on two pair when I’m holding an open-ended straight? I’m all in, and I catch my card. I rake your chips, and the only thing you can do is stare blankly at the table, pretending not to be upset. Pretending is all you can do, because you have nothing left. Welcome to the Desert of the Real.

2. Economics Always Trumps Politics

This is how Žižek explains America royally screwing Iran from the 1950’s on, and how I explain pretending to have nothing when I truly hit trips of the flop. You raise, I reraise—sorry “friend.” Secrecy and Spectacle exist not only in government, but at my kitchen table as well. Welcome to the dictates of capitalism—and subsequently, The Desert of the Real. It’s hot out there, maybe you should have another Guinness before you buy back in.

3. A man must desire life like water, but drink death like wine.

This is an idea attributed to G.K. Chesterton—the soldier surrounded by enemies can’t cling to life, or he won’t escape. “He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.”

Many players experience a chip flux, where they go really low or high. In either case, the reaction can be the same—to tighten their greedy fist around their pile. Inevitably, this results in chips slowly being depleted. The trick is to drink poker death like wine, make your enemies look down the barrel of your all-in. Force a show-down where only one person gets to keep their money, and their ideology--and the other is left numb and alone in The Desert of the Real.

Yesterday in Church

Yesterday in church, there was a boy sitting on front of Angela and I, maybe eleven or twelve years old, skinny, pale, bad haircut, and I noticed that beneath his seat was The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan, which is book two of The Wheel of Time collection—easily the greatest fantasy series ever written. Some people might argue that The Lord of the Rings trilogy is the greatest fantasy series ever written, but those people have never read The Wheel of Time series, and they are wrong. In the early twentieth century, the Wright brothers figured out how to get an airplane flying. It was a landmark, an impressive feat—but I do not want to ride that first airplane.

The boy in church yesterday reminded me very much of myself. I remember following The Wheel of Time series starting when I was about ten years old, and discussing the books with friends as dorky as myself until the next volume was released. (And, since dorkiness knows no age, every now and then I’d bump into someone at the bookstore, or a friend’s parent, who read the series as well. Always a jolt of excitement, to meet a fellow lover of The Wheel of Time!)

Bringing the book to church was a classic maneuver by my little pal in front of me. It was a nostalgic moment. But, since he wasn’t pouring over it in his lap, either mom had set some strict regulations, or he was purely a car reader. I remember church being a great space for reading Robert Jordan. My older sister’s volleyball and basketball games were harder.

My love for fantasy started to fade away sometime after I went to college, and eventually I stopped following all my favorite authors except for Robert Jordan. I had read The Wheel of Time for over a decade, and I was determined to read it until the last novel was released, and I figured out once and for all what would happen to Rand—would he defeat the dark forces at Shayol Ghul? Would he have to give his life in the process? My heart said no, but what about all the old prophecies? (I had a Wheel of Time reference book to help me keep track of these important questions.)

When Crossroads of Twilight was released, I was a freshman in college, and I bunkered down in my dorm room and didn’t leave until it was finished. By the time Knife of Dreams was released, I had stopped checking the WOT website for updates, and didn’t find out until I was in Alaska. I hitch-hiked to Anchorage, and the first thing I did was go to a local bookstore to finish before I flew home. Book twelve, A Memory of Light, was supposed to be the final book in the series, the end of a seventeen year odyssey, and when I was in Africa, I checked online to see if a release date had been set—and instead, I saw a picture of Robert Jordan, with the letters R.I.P. beneath it, and a date from a month or so before.

Throughout the sermon yesterday, I kept wondering—does this little boy know? Should I stop him after the service and say, you know RJ’s dead, don’t you? That he never finished?

The story is that on his deathbed, RJ told someone the ending, and that he kept prodigious notes on the final book, so another writer was hired to finish the books as RJ originally intended-- part one (yes, the “final” volume has now been separated in three parts) owill be released this fall.

I don’t have much time for reading fantasy these days, and I don’t have all my old novels around anymore. Before Angela and I got married, I loaded all my old fantasy novels into the trunk of my Grand Am, drove to Hyde Brothers books in Ft. Wayne, and sold them for four-hundred dollars.

This was actually not a bad price for memories.