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.
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.
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.
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.
» Cover, write, and present every story with the care I would want if the story were about me.
» Assume there is at least one other side or version to every story.
» Assume the viewer is as smart and caring and good a person as I am.
» Assume the same about all people on whom I report.
Assume everyone is innocent until proven guilty.
» Assume personal lives are a private matter until a legitimate turn in the story mandates otherwise.
» Carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories and clearly label them as such.
» Do not use anonymous sources or blind quotes except on rare and monumental occasions. No one should ever be allowed to attack another anonymously.
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.
Acknowledge that objectivity may be impossible but fairness never is.
Journalists who are reckless with facts and reputations should be disciplined by their employers.
My viewers have a right to know what principles guide my work and the process I use in their practice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While I’ve continued to move slowly through several collections, everything unfinished last month remains unfinished. My reading has been dominated by nonfiction, and some new work commitments have begun to take up much more of my time.
Both the nonfiction and the work will continue through the winter, so I’m putting this project on hold until the new year.
I didn’t finish anything in September, since most of my reading time was devoted to my (I think) 19th re-read of Lord of the Rings. As I have long known, autumn for me is often a time to revisit old texts, like having a familiar TV show or favorite album on in the background while you’re working.
