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.

Last, next.

66: Coastal (Chesapeake)
67: Wednesday Green

Six Zoom Meetings Before Lunch: 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.

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.

Last, next.

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

Last, next.

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

So my DVD of Until the End of the World has arrived.

Because of travel plans over the next two weeks, I’m saving my first viewing until the week between xmas and new year’s. I’ve waited this long, I can wait a little longer.

My excitement over this film’s re-release is in several parts.

1 / The circumstance of my first viewing

I saw it in a theater in Edinburgh the summer of 1992, when I was living in Scotland during a semester abroad in college. I was visiting an old friend who now lived there. We came out of the theater well after midnight. It had rained but now the sky was painfully clear, and shards of the Moon flickered in every stark puddle. But the real world was a dream and only the movie seemed real.

For the next few hours, beneath backlit castles, black towers, and a solstice sky that never quite got dark, we walked the city streets that bustled even in the middle of the crepuscular night, lost in our heated discussions and divagations. It possessed us both for days afterwards.

(And I instantly regretted not going back to see it again as soon as possible. By the time I returned to the States, it was no longer playing in the theaters there, and I had to wait what felt like a very long time for it to appear in the video stores.)

2 / The difficulty of finding it to rent, and its eventual, almost complete, vanishing act

I rented it on VHS many times over the next few years, but it rapidly grew more and more rare. And I never managed to buy a copy. So, soon, it became even more dreamlike than it already was.

3 / The soundtrack

I can’t even.

4 / The story itself

I instantly loved the rambling mystery of it, and how the story turned suddenly several times until I couldn’t quite classify it anymore. I found this sort of slightly surreal, polyphonic, even “slipstream,” storytelling extremely compelling. I still do, of course — but back then, I’d certainly never before seen a movie that was such a direct hit to so many of my preoccupations.

5 / The fact of not having seen it for a quarter century

I freely admit that the brute fact of its scarcity has caused its emotional value to skyrocket. Now that I’ve shelled out for the DVD, I have already been cautiously entertaining the grim possibility that the Suck Fairy will have visited its malign magic up on it, and after feverishly ripping open the case, I’ll find myself watching a rambling, messy piece of shit with mounting annoyance, irritation, betrayal, rage, nausea…

But sometimes, I still think I can play whole scenes in my head as if I had just watched it yesterday, and I really want to see how much of it is Wim Wender’s dream and how much of it is mine.

Last, next.

62: Shenandoah (Oak)
63: Shenandoah (Maple)

At more or less this moment, 30 years ago, I walked into Chris & Dave’s dorm room to see who was heading over to the Caf for dinner. They were the only ones on our floor with a TV in their room.

A crowd had gathered, watching the news.

The Berlin Wall.