17 posts tagged “vox hunt”
Share your current favorite song or music video.
I'm concerned by Mr. Byrne's apparent inability to find a suit that actually fit him at any point during the '80s. He had all those huge ones, and then this one is teeny -- the pants are in between Pee-Wee Herman and emo-boi jeans. This sort of thing is why bespoke tailoring will never die....
Audio: It's dedication time. What song are you sending out, and who is it dedicated to?
"(Walk Me Out In the) Morning Dew," by Canadian folksinger Bonnie Dobson, as covered by the Grateful Dead. This one's for you, Kurt Vonnegut. Maybe tonight we dine in hell, but this morning I eat the Breakfast of Champions.
Book: Show us one of your favorite works of fiction.
Anyway, I was going to mention: A bearded, not unattractive young man named Kevin Powe is participating in The World's Greatest Shave -- a fundraiser for research to curbstomp leukemia. Because, as you may have noticed, cancer completely, absolutely, devastatingly sucks. And so, on March 16, Mr. Powe will be shaving his head at the Pig and Whistle in Brisbane to benefit the Leukemia Foundation. (The hair should fall right off, really, since -- as we all know -- Australia is upside-down.)
Now, here's the really great part. He's offering various levels of hair removal, based on how much money people donate. At AUS$500, he might end up keeping his goatee. But if he raises AUS$1750, he will end up shaving his beard and waxing his chest, shoulders, and legs! If your thing is smooth-bodied men, and you'd like to help turn a hirsute guy smooth for a good cause, I urge you, follow the first link and donate generously.
Show us your lucky charm.
I can't yet. Hubby isn't getting back from Brussels until the wee small hours of our time; he has to drive back from JFK safely, and that may mean "with a nap somewhere," so... slowly. And he's got the camera! But. My friend, and imagine that word "friend" with a thousand stars around it, sent me a little package last week with a lovely necklace on it. It's got two eternity knots of golden cord tied into it, one on each side, and then the pendant is some green flower (Asphodel, that greeny flower?) from the artist's backyard, pressed and sealed into a sort of cameo. I'm not taking it off except to shower until NaNo finishes.
It's funny, though. From a distance, it looks like a tiny Japanese maple leaf, until you see the stamens? pistils? in the middle. However, since it has five palmate leaflets branching out from a central stalk, I'll be very much surprised if there aren't now rumors about "the teacher with the pot leaf around her neck." That crazy, La Loca is not.
Does anybody know how to say "Please don't lose your wife's watch" in Russian? (I do know how to say "goodbye" in several languages, and in some most impolite ways. I would be happy to say all of those to Rick Santorum and Donald Rumsfeld -- indeed, "Na na, na na na na, hey hey hey, goodbye" -- but this colleague is someone who actually knows what he's doing, apart from almost having lost his wife's watch.)
How did you meet your best friend(s)?
Laura and I were the only two girls on the first day of a brand-new resource class for the gifted in our school district. Naturally we were destined to be friends, still, in 2006. Our lives are different; each of us moved away from our hometown, and now a continent separates us. I have two cats; later this winter, she is going to have two babies. At the same time. Egads. But she's still her, and I'm still me, and we still have a 20-year running joke going on. She is a gentle beam of sun on the cloudiest day. I would do anything for Laura. She is on the very short list of people to whom I would donate a kidney, even though she was the person who got me sort of hooked on Hello Kitty.
Fran and I met through the niche science-fiction fandom that deals with anthropomorphic/talking/"furry" animals. We have many points of dissimilarity. She is a six-foot redhead, presently writing a brilliant fanfic about a TV show I previously couldn't have cared less about, who has ranched cattle, wears a Stetson, and drives a big silver pickup truck. Her Pagan, me Buddhist. We have some political dissimilarities as well. However, from the first time we met in person at a convention, even more so than in discussions on the Internets, we just hit a common wavelength that we've been on ever since. She, too, makes me feel understood.
Julia and I met in the adjunct English mines: she noticed me at orientation at College B and tipped me off that since I already had a free parking sticker from College A, I needn't buy the $160 sticker from College B, whose parking polizei would accept the one from College A as valid. She is the mother of three fascinating teenagers; a precise sonnetteer; and a dancer cruelly sidelined by a foot operation. When Doug was out of town and I had a horrible flu, it was Julia who showed up at my door with the ingredients for a hot toddy -- including Glenfiddich! The spring after my mother died, Julia and I went to the grocery store together and there was a huge display of daffodils -- my mother always used to tell a story about seeing daffodils in bloom on her way to the hospital to give birth to me. So I turned to Julia, said, "My mother," got no further, and burst into tears, pointing at the flowers. She just let me cry on her right in the entryway of the grocer's. She has the steely reserve and New-England-diva quality of a Katharine Hepburn or a Bette Davis (as interviewed on Dick Cavett, especially).
It would not be fair to mention Beverly without putting in that she is a striking Black and Native American former model, over six feet tall (all of the women in this post except Julia are significantly taller than me -- go figure) and generously freckled. She now teaches African American literature and has an office on the same floor as mine. She warned me of her bad influence, but I don't think I've been negatively influenced yet; I already had a bad attitude. Beverly is a Buddhist in the Kadampa tradition, so maybe it was karma that started us talking. She gives me advice. She lends me books. She makes me tea. Recently, she took me shopping for makeup for my role as a homewrecking hussy in the play that goes up a week from tonight -- I ended up with a lipstick called "Decadent"; maybe that's the bad influence! We actually met because she was on the committee that interviewed me for my current job, and the conversation threatened to become a two-way dialogue just between us, especially when we discovered we were both Friends of Ethelbert. Without Beverly, living where I do would be at least 80% more boring.
The Vox Hunt today asked me to show you something I couldn't live without. Besides the above, here goes:
H_H
|
O
We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
-- Ooh, suddenly I have an evil plan for SOC 101B on Tuesday! La Loca, over and out.
I can't show you the puzzling things I saw today because I didn't have my camera. What I did have was the Head Cold That Ate the Entire English Department; had I tried to call in sick, nobody would have been available to cover for me, because we were down to a miserable, coughing skeleton crew as it was. But anyway, here are two puzzling things I saw today:
- Parked outside the used-car dealership on the way to work: one hearse. Either somebody died on the lot from sticker shock, or the hearse is for sale and somebody has an unrivaled opportunity for a cheap ride to pimp out for Halloween.
- In a professor's office on the disease-ridden second-floor: A poster that says "Ike and Tina Workin' Together." Only it wasn't Ike Turner. It was Dwight "Ike" Eisenhower next to Tina. Buh?
My husband; my baby sister; my Aunt Mary; my book-drenched upbringing; birds; horses in fields, especially this beautiful pinto I saw today; other poets; my mentors; stumbling into Buddhism; my students; my colleagues; old friends; the drawing my nephew made me of Luke Skywalker using 15 lightsabers at once; my bosses at both schools; a little sunshine today; a decent amount of drawing ability; getting my book accepted; my purple Leatherman knife/tool; my chiropractor; my digital camera; the ability to have conversations with all kinds of people over the Internets; my cats; being cast in this upcoming show; sushi; Doc Martens; soy cheese; the Grateful Dead; my iPod, which was a birthday present earlier this year; candied ginger; positive evaluations; my alarm clock with the ginormous numbers on it that I can see even with my glasses off; BBC America; interesting dreams; drivers who actually stop for pedestrians in the crosswalk as they're supposed to. I think that might be more than 20, but I can't count.
Show us someone who inspires you.
Right, since I've already put in Bruce, this seems like a perfectly opportune time to introduce Carolyn. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome poet, translator, and teacher Carolyn Forché.
If Bruce Weigl, to whom I referred a few entries back, is the godfather or spirit-father of my poems, Carolyn is their godmother. I first met her in January 1993, when she was visiting professor at Penn State. I knew her work, and I knew how much my mother was into her (she'd seen her years before at a writers' conference at the University of North Dakota), so I was quite interested in working with her. She was teaching a graduate seminar, no undergrad classes, but Bruce, then head of the creative writing program, had confidence in the quality of my work and signed the permission slip that admitted a mere undergrad to Carolyn's class. That was when I started using gold-tone paperclips because Carolyn did. The Grateful Dead-derived expression "What a long, strange trip it's been" starts to apply here.
Speaking of "apply," not eighteen months later, I would find myself enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts program in poetry at George Mason University in Virginia, with Carolyn as my thesis advisor. I have a great many Carolyn stories, some of which would no doubt mortify her; I can say that there were times I feared she hung around with me mainly because I could only ever finish about half a glass of white wine, so that when we each had a glass, she would end up drinking a glass and a half to my half-glass. The picture above was taken in the office-studio she had while I was her student, and which I deeply envied: the bookcases behind her were built directly into the wall, for example. More, it just felt like -- this is about to sound very silly -- a holy place, a place full of seriousness of purpose, of study and of making-it-new (cf. Ezra Pound). Part of that, of course, was that on a bookstand, she had this ginormous Russian Orthodox Bible open to some random page of Cyrillic, and closer to the desk there was a small, framed picture of her guru, Kalu Rinpoche.
I write to Carolyn (who now teaches at Skidmore College in New York State), but I miss having her around. You read all this deeply serious stuff about poetry of witness and genocide and El Salvador, and none of it would give you a clue that she's just fun to hang out with. Part of what continues to inspire me about her is that she's from my same general ethnic background, Slavic (I'm mostly Polish), and social class (my grandfathers were solidly prole, my parents each the first generation in their families to go to college), and she's just a model of how a woman makes a life in poetry.
*stops gushing now*
Show us something with wings.
That's her real handwriting, traced from a birthday card. I miss her every day. She was my best reader. The design is my own; the bird is a female Rufous Hummingbird, Selasphorus rufus -- Mom loved and fed hummingbirds. Someday there will be a cure for multiple myeloma.
"Hope" is the thing with feathers --
That perches in the soul --
Emily Dickinson, #254
