Last, next.

67: Wednesday Green
68: Mile Marker (Deer)

Over the last few weeks, I have finally managed to begin focusing on reading in a sustained way again, which allowed me to finish two books. And there are several others I’ve been nibbling at for months that I may actually manage to finish quite soon.

This has been a rough year — and a rough week — for my attention span…

• James Clear, Atomic Habits (Avery, 2018)
• James C Scott, Against the Grain (Yale University Press, 2017)

Marjorie Perloff’s blurb on the back cover of Mark Scroggins’ The Mathematical Sublime is an inadvertant description of exactly what bothers me about too much contemporary poetics and criticism. Why shouldn’t a critic be able to handle both langpo and formalism? Why does such eclecticism strike Perloff as so remarkably rare? Everyone outside Academia is exuberantly, unapologetically, and often instinctively eclectic.

I agree with her that Mark Scroggins is “unpredictably brilliant and persuasive.” I’m just annoyed because her blurb reminds me that everything she praises him for shouldn’t be so damn unusual. If you’re a cultural critic, you have one job: to range as widely and deeply as possible through human culture and send back reports of your remarkable discoveries. Perloff is praising the window frame when she should be admiring the view. And her blurb implies she doesn’t look out very many windows.

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.

—Thomas Pynchon, born on this day in 1937, and who’s been sporting a face mask for years:

Last, next.

66: Coastal (Chesapeake)
67: Wednesday Green

on self-care, timelessness, and boundaries

I watched a few episodes of The West Wing recently. I joked that I was playing a West Wing drinking game. I would drink whenever:

• Josh has his backpack over one shoulder
• any reference to a musical
• “Just saying”
• “Jackass”
• Walk and Talk
• Donna asks Josh to explain something
• someone repeats verbatim what someone else just said

And I would take a double drink for:

• any Latin phrase
• Mrs Bartlet’s terms of endearment
• Someone refers to their SAT score
• The Jackal!

The implication here was that I’d be drinking pretty much constantly – which was the point, because it was that kind of night. I could just as easily have said I was playing a Stare At The Wall drinking game. You drink whenever you stare at the wall. Double for blinking.

I knew it was likely, after my post appeared in the Micro.blog timeline, that people would say something about how it’s too painful to watch a show like The West Wing now. Of course it is. But then, everything – even self-care – can seem too painful now. So I figured: if joy is laced with pain anyway, I might as well take comfort anywhere I can. And some of that comfort comes from watching escapist TV.

Where I’m escaping to is, of course, jarringly different from the world as it is now. But this, too, has been oddly helpful. It has let me practice the transition back and forth between these two worlds, the comfort world and the Covid world. That moment of reëntry is, I think, what we actually find most painful: when we look away from the screen and see, out on the sidewalk, people walking by with face masks on. Oh, that, we think. I’d forgotten.

I’ve worked from home partly or completely for many of the last twenty-two years. One thing I learned early on was how important it is to set clear boundaries at the beginning and the end of the work day or else everything might start to blur together. So, in March, I thought this quarantine wouldn’t be too unfamiliar, or too challenging. I was wrong.

Working from home is, of course, vastly different from living in quarantine. The numbers on the clock almost never seem to line up with my sense of what time it is. If an event isn’t on the calendar, if a to-do isn’t pinging me with a repeating notification, it simply doesn’t happen. I keep hearing Ford Prefect saying, Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so. (I’ve been trying to write this blog post for nearly two weeks and I just haven’t been able to get my shit together to finish it.)

One reason for this is that many of the normal boundaries around different activities and emotional spaces have broken down or disappeared (for instance, commutes). I have found that I need to be far more conscious than usual of what sorts of routines and rituals demarcate different activities for me.

When I have good days, it’s at least partly because I’ve managed to maintain strong borders. And when I have better days, it’s at least partly because I’ve been able to cross back and forth over those borders somewhat smoothly, with as little stumbling as possible (by which I mean, a lot of stumbling but not as much as on other days…).

And by letting (or making) myself drift away into truly escapist activities like old beloved TV shows, I am slowly learning, and practicing, how to cope with the shock of returning, again and again, to this world.

April 2022: Some tangents that I trimmed from the early drafts of this post went on to become this essay.

I haven’t managed to finish reading anything since mid-March. My concentration is shot, and so I have been drifting through easy books while rewatching TV shows. I’m trying to make a virtue out of my short attention span by concentrating on distracting things.

Last, next.

65: Nat’l Parks (Yosemite)
66: Coastal (Chesapeake)

Now that shoures soote the droghte of March hath perced to the roote, it’s time once again to breed lilacs out of the dead land, mix memory and desire, and generally stir dull roots with spring rain.

Yes, that’s right: it’s NaPoWriMo.

This year I’m returning to an old practice I did in 2004, ’05, and ’06. Each day this month, I’m doing an exercise from Rita Dove called the 10-Minute Spill, which I found in the delightful Practice of Poetry.

Here’s how it goes: With ten minutes on the clock, write a ten-line poem using five words from a predetermined list, and an adage or idiomatic phrase (e.g. a stitch in time— don’t count your chickens— that sort of thing).

And that’s it. Don’t try anything fancy: no rhymes or meters of any sort. Just spend ten minutes figuring out how to pepper the words and the folksy saying over the course of ten lines. How long is each line? Doesn’t matter! Is it even a poem? Who cares!

For my list of words, I’m using the Swadesh List. There are a hundred words, and so I roll 2d10 five times. And for my “adage,” I’m throwing the I Ching and choosing something meaty from the trigrams' names and the resulting hexagram’s image and judgment.

I’ve done three “poems” so far and they may be kinda crappy but none of them are about Covid-fucking-19, so I’m calling it a win.

• Robertson Davies: World of Wonders (Penguin 1975) (comfort food reread)
• Mary Ann Mattoon: Jungian Psychology after Jung (Round Table Press 1992)

• Robertson Davies: The Manticore (Penguin 1972) and Fifth Business (Penguin 1970) (comfort food rereads)

• Luis Sagasti (Petch, trns): Fireflies (Charco Press, 2017)
• Clarice Lispector (Entrekin, trns): Near to the Wild Heart (New Directions, 2017)

• Anna Burns: Milkman (Graywolf, 2018)
• Ariana Harwicz (Moses & Orloff, trns): Die, My Love (Charco Press, 2017)

Burns: Riveting, with a delicious gallows humor. Perfect voice, perfectly sustained.

Harwicz: My god, how brutal. But tonally flawless.

• Ann Quin: Berg (And Other Stories, 1964/2019)
• Su Hwang: Bodega (Milkweed, 2018)

Quin: A wonderful balance of experimental writing and slapstick comedy. It actually seemed a bit Pythonesque at times – which is appropriate, considering it originally came out during the great British absurdist fever of the mid ’60s. Berg was my first Quin, and I hope her others are as fun and as wicked.

Hwang: She has said that she turned to poetry only in recent years, after working at fiction for most of her adult life. It shows. Many (though not all) of the poems have a strong narrative propulsion to them, often reading like sharp moments from a short story. The best poems do something truly powerful and compelling with this hybrid, the weaker ones fall between two chairs.

A reminder of one of the many, many reasons why I left Oregon. From the New York Times, 21 Feb 2020:

In Portland, a city often portrayed in popular culture as a progressive paradise, the killing of the men provoked outrage, along with reassurances that the city would not tolerate hate. But it also set off a new round of questions about whether Oregon had fully shed the legacy of its founding as a racially pure Cascadia that white supremacists still fantasize about.

Oregon was admitted to the Union in 1859 with a constitution that, uniquely, forbade black people from living, working, or owning property in the state; the provision was not repealed until 1926. In the 1920s, the state legislature barred Japanese immigrants from owning or leasing land. By the 1970s, extremist groups like the Aryan Nations had found fertile ground for their beliefs.

Last, next.

64: Nat’l Parks (Zion)
65: Nat’l Parks (Yosemite)

• Antonio Damasio: Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Harcourt, 2003)
• Claire Wahmanholm: Redmouth (Tinderbox, 2019)

Wahmanholm: Absolutely unerring choices. Always surprising and inevitable. Lucid nightmares. And much the same could be said for the other volumes I read last spring.

Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism

1. » Do nothing I cannot defend.
2. Do not distort, lie, slant, or hype.
3. Do not falsify facts or make up quotes.
4. » Cover, write, and present every story with the care I would want if the story were about me.
5. » Assume there is at least one other side or version to every story.
6. » Assume the viewer is as smart and caring and good a person as I am.
7. » Assume the same about all people on whom I report.
8. Assume everyone is innocent until proven guilty.
9. » Assume personal lives are a private matter until a legitimate turn in the story mandates otherwise.
10. » Carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories and clearly label them as such.
11. » Do not use anonymous sources or blind quotes except on rare and monumental occasions. No one should ever be allowed to attack another anonymously.
12. Do not broadcast profanity or the end result of violence unless it is an integral and necessary part of the story and/or crucial to understanding the story.
13. Acknowledge that objectivity may be impossible but fairness never is.
14. Journalists who are reckless with facts and reputations should be disciplined by their employers.
15. My viewers have a right to know what principles guide my work and the process I use in their practice.
16. » I am not in the entertainment business.

(via Kottke, who notes, “In his 2006 Harvard commencement address, Lehrer reduced that list to an essential nine items, marked with » above.”)

• James C Scott: Seeing Like a State (Yale, 1998)
• Anna Kavan: Ice (Penguin, 1967)

Credulous, Cowardly, and Vicious

David Bentley Hart (via):

The 2016 U.S. election proved that, even in a long-established democratic republic, just about anyone or anything, no matter how preposterously foul, can achieve political power if enough citizens are sufficiently credulous, cowardly, and vicious.

• Keith Thomas: Religion and the Decline of Magic (Penguin, 1971)

• Elaine Pagels: Revelations (Penguin, 2012)

• Clarice Lispector: The Hour of the Star (Benjamin Moser, trns; New Directions, 2011)
• Ishmael Reed: Mumbo Jumbo (Scribner, 1972)
• Jenny Odell: How to Do Nothing (Melville House, 2019)

Last, next.

63: Shenandoah (Maple)
64: Nat’l Parks (Zion)

In 2019, I tracked what poetry I finished reading each week.

New plan. Until my poetry reading gets back up to speed, I’ve decided to track any book I finish each week, regardless of genre.

Also, beginning in 2020, I will try link to Indiebound or Powell’s and, whenever possible, the publisher’s or author’s website. I hope to go back and retrofit older posts from 2019 in the same way.