Tangents

One fueled by rage over COVID ("Apostate"); the other, AIDS ("A Brief History of 歌 [gē]").

The issue (2024) can be read or downloaded for free at the Tabula Rasa site. (The 2022 issue remains available at that page, and has three earlier poems by me.) This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/186245.html.

The subject line's from a Willow Branch Song by Ch'ien Ch'ien-yi (1582 - 1664; translated by Irving Yucheng Lo). The full verse:

A crescent moon hangs on the tip of the willows,
New leaves are like eyebrows, the moon's like a hook.
Wait till the moon is round and reflected in a mirror
To lift from my eyebrows ten thousand layers of grief.

I generally try not to be around people the week of St. Patrick's Day. It's the anniversary of my mother's death, and today is the anniversary of Mama Nancy's death, plus even years outside of pandemics it's mid-term and not-quite-close-enough-to-the-end-of-the-quarter and almost everyone is so tired of winter and more than a little frayed.

Taking the whole week off wasn't feasible this year; to stay logged off on Wednesday, I worked until 4 a.m. that morning, and I'll be marking 40+ pages of proofs this weekend as well. But it did feel good and right to do some deep cleaning that afternoon, which included tossing out scraps of paper with topics I'd meant to blog about, but the moment(um) had faded (George Clooney's love of writing/receiving letters, contemporary songs about dementia/memory loss, the Megan Rapinoe/Sue Bird feature in GQ . . .).

Nashville journalist Natasha Senjanovic has an invitation for y'all:

It's been ages since a Diary Collective update, but I'm starting back up again, and want to know what people are proudest of about themselves in this incredibly difficult year. But @tedtoons turned the tables, like the emotional ninja that he is. https://t.co/fvQTpQraAn

— Natasha Senjanovic (@nsenjanovic) March 14, 2021

You can hear me talking about bao and Duolingo and reading "Climb" at https://www.bestofpossibleworlds.com/audio.

Also recently published: "Truth and Dare," at Autumn Sky.

Finally - written ten years ago, and published the following spring:



Measured Extravagance is out of print, but if you'd like a copy, send me proof of a donation ($6 or more) to NAPAWF, Tupelo Pres, or Postcards to Voters, and I'll beam a PDF to you. This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/173113.html.

Today is crowded with overlapping possibilities. Newark Museum's virtual Carnival Celebration runs all day, with the samba/capoeira session at the same time as Iowa's English country dance gathering. Says You's Kisses and Quips show was on my calendar for a long time, but my church's cabaret for Habitat for Humanity streams at the same time. Plus, there's tomorrow's Tuupelo poem to draft, doing enough Chinese/Welsh/Spanish/French to stay in Duolingo's Diamond League, putting ten postcards to voters in the mail, doing something about the butternut squash I roasted two or three nights ago before the next Misfits Market box arrives . . .

This week had a lot of crud. I'm trying not to brood about the things I cannot change, but I am reminded of other bloggers greeting February with EVERYBODY BRACE NOW There's something about the months before the equinoxes that make them feel like a long haul, even though in my case they also feature the birthdays of some of my favorite people. And fatigue with both the pandemic and the equally unrelenting and life-threatening banality of evil is also a thing. It took me five times as long to get to things I normally enjoy dispatching with ease, and some things that would literally make me feel better (working out, dancing, ironing . . .) keep getting shafted because it's easier to stay in the rocking chair for one more Duolingo/Mimo/Earpeggio lesson.

Anyhow, I do like the Befruary take on this gloomy gray stretch of the season, and I did my metal-dawg / Taurus-with-Virgo-rising thing and herded/hauled my mental sheeps to meadow and market. New poems up at Tupelo:

Day 6: "More than a Single Bound" (prompted by a motorcycle stunt)
Day 7: "Gazing at Tennessine" (prompted by Periodic Table Day)
Day 8: "Free As . . ." (prompted by National Kite-Flying Day)
Day 9: "Sweet Spot" (prompted by the Feast of St. Apollonia, patron saint of toothache sufferers)
Day 10: "Imperfect Fragment" (prompted by Edmond Halley)
Day 11: "Gathering Up All the Fragments" (prompted by Lydia Maria Child)
Day 12: "A Foot-Long Tongue" (prompted by Charles Darwin)
Day 13 (up later today): "Through a Screen, Darkly" (prompted by Absalom Jones, a Black Episcopalian priest and essential healthcare provider during a yellow fever epidemic)

The "someday" reading list is getting new titles added to it pretty much every day. There's an orchid display at Cheekwood this month; with Darwin's Contrivance by which British and Foreign Orchids . . . now in my Google library, I'd be keen to see it, but it's indoors, so I'll have to content myself with old photos instead, like these:



Ironically, as a household, we are not hugely into holidays. My belle-mère and closest cousin are by far more into (and better at) decorating; I mailed a Valentine to the BYM last year mainly to yank his chain (it was an adorable design, but it also had glitter); there have often been professional and/or performance obligations that had me on duty instead of at gatherings. That said, I'm weak for stickers and ribbons (even though they too often leave the ironing board and cutting mat weeks or even years after the festival they were originally purchased for), and every third year or so I work up the energy to donate something related to Lunar New Year to the church auction. This year's donation wasn't directly tied to LNY, but the winners of the bao subscription were easily gracious about me wanting to skip January, so I expanded yesterday's delivery of shrimp bao to include Taiwanese tea eggs, radish cake, and pineapple-ginger bubble tea:



The photos show my second take at mixing the tea; the first batch tasted fine but looked revolting. "Failing better" is definitely a thing here. ;)

[The subject line is from a valentine by Emily Dickinson that may be the most daft thing (outside of political/medical misinformation or art historical polemics, natch) I read this week.)] This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/172060.html.

I'm such a sucker for kawaii packaging. I hadn't planned on buying more mooncakes this season, having already splurged on two boxes and a CAAN festival feast last month. But, BUNNIES!!!

(The cakes are gorgeous, so I placated my household budget gods by designating three of the four as gifts to colleagues/family. And I subsequently received a box of four from a vegetarian friend who had purchased them before realizing that they contained lard.)

Autumn Sky Poetry Daily published my poem "Vinegar" this week.

Herding deliverables to their destinations has been grueling, and I missed dances, chats, and services this week. And an alternate service I attended for a few minutes was off-key enough that on five hours of sleep across two days, I couldn't take it. On an un-whiny note, though, it's indeed a silver lining to have multiple options for all three, and to be able to catch some of the recordings later. This week's video sessions also included London Art Week's webinar on 15th-century frames, whose presenters in turn recommended Closer to Van Eyck, which may be of interest to the medieval/Renaissance, restoration/conservation, and interactive programming nerds who happen to be reading this. Today's dance (hosted by Iowa English Country Dance) included "Hazelfern Place," which I had not encountered before, and a breakout-room craic with dancers/musicians in Atlanta (with bonus rubber chicken) and Bristol (UK).

Pounding through piles of pages (and spending hours de-snarling some tech tangles) also meant not restocking on groceries until today, so we'd run out of eggs, bacon, waffles, lettuce, and other staples by this morning. But I was able to produce Uncle Nearest jello cups and deviled eggs for a tiny outdoor gathering, and spiced banana muffins to cover a couple of breakfasts, so go me. I have more work and correspondence to whale through tonight, but first I'm going to make chili with some of the tomatoes I grew:


The green bananas are to help ripen the green fruit I'll have to bring in early because of rodents or frost. speaking of which. . .

The BYM (gestures toward scrabbling in the walls): Can you do something about that squirrel?
Me: Burgoo.
The BYM (shouts at the scrabbling): Hear that, mf? KENTUCKY IS IN THE HOUSE. This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/168645.html.

The subject line's from Louis MacNeice's "Snow." Which we don't actually have here, as it's above 70 F (according to @NashSevereWx, we hit a record-breaking 76 F a couple of hours ago). The temptation is to ignore the must-do list and putter about in the yard, but I would also like to get enough sleep before driving around the northeast later this week, so I'm sipping a glass of Barcelona cava (left over from Saturday's brunch, and still bubbly!) and mopping the floors, retouching my hair, de-skanking a heating grate -- you know, the things one must absolutely get out of the way before buckling down to paperwork and phone calls and the other things that shove aside mopping the floors and retouching my hair most weekdays.



Indoors, the largest of the Christmas cacti is magnificently in bloom, and my little quartet of romaine/bok choy stubs supplied leaves for today's salmon salad. There are also new buds on the kalanchoe.

I've noticed the cardinals out and about today, with two pausing on the fence just outside my window. I look at the cardinals on the holiday address labels sent to me by some charities. My other windows are open, and a couple of yards away, someone is attempting to force notes out of a wind instrument -- possibly a saxophone. I might be shaping some lines in my head about seasonal and boundarial messiness.

In 2016, J. S. Graustein wrote about trokeens at Folded Word and invited readers to submit them. Last week, unFold published "Lab(orare est orare)" as a video.

And, at Vary the Line, I posted "Calculations": http://www.varytheline.org/blog/2018/02/18/calculations/

This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/146665.html.

My week so far has included the rejection of eight poems (though one was a near-miss) and some aggravation (both of the near-to-firing-a-firm kind and the dammit-I-left-my-badge-on-the-piano variety), not to mention truly atrocious fantasy tennis results. But, I seem to be providing pleasure to assorted Kei Nishikori fans, there was plenty of butter and black pepper to mash into the neeps I boiled for supper, and I'm closing my evening with a glass of Beaujolais (slightly rough, but sanding down a bit of jag as I sip) and assorted phrases for pieces.

Also, Rattle published a poem on Sunday, both in text and audio form: "Look at that, you son of a bitch"

I also keep meaning to mention "Some Who Wander Become Lost," which the SFPA posted online a few months ago.

My calendars contain crossouts and calculations. So, for that matter, do the cards and scraps of paper containing what I might write or shape next. In the meantime, there are roses everywhere -- I saw these on Valentine's Day, just as I was about to cross White Station Road:



The back of the card I picked up was blank. It has me wondering about roses not sent. It brings back memories of roses I have sent, and thrown, and pressed, and attempted to propagate (not yet successfully). Not every Emily Dickinson poem pairs up well with "Yellow Rose of Texas" ("So much of Heaven has gone from earth"? No), but it's not as if the ghosts of Amherst or Austin ever insisted on that. Perhaps the roses really want to grow. Perhaps the mallows will survive this morning's freezing fog. There is more than snow between the glass and the huge roses. There is more to work than work. Earlier this week, a colleague and I talked about trading plants later this year -- succulents for peppers. The dog knocked over one of my pots while I was away, and happily hoovered up asparagus stubs two nights ago. Cleaning. Digging. Dreaming.

A name for a new rose: Mozart.
That's what I'd call the first rose on the moon,
If I got there to grow it.

-- Robert Nye, "Travelling to My Second Marriage on the Day of the First Moonshot"

This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/126908.html.

[The subject line is from Lu Yu's "Autumn Thoughts," which Dawn Potter quotes at the end of her Thursday post.]

There is much going on that has been frustrating, frightening, or disheartening. But there has also been great happiness:



My friend Daniel (left) was the groom at the wedding I attended in Brooklyn two weekends ago. We first met at a conference in 1985. (My honorary big brother, Steve, is the other guy in the photo. He was the officiant.)

My poem "O Clouds Unfold" has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

7x20 featured five pieces last week...

champagne...
spoon...
sweeping...
smearing...
half...

...as well as five pieces back in October:

Co-cola salad...
painting spells...
mother interred...
Persian calligraphy...
Code Name Taurus...

On a fandom note -- Peter Wimsey sighting, y'all! ...in a Soviet film poster currently at the Jewish Museum in New York. Which one of you is going to explain that? ;)

This entry was originally posted at http://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/395980.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.

Upper Rubber Boot prompt 18: spokesman

My copy of Jim Ottaviani's Suspended in Language is on loan to a friend, so you get this instead:



Sir Mark Oliphant, in Ann Mozley Moyal's Portraits in Science:

I was a member of a group that was led by Niels Bohr, after the test in Alamogordo, that was very much against the use of this new weapon on civilian cities. Niels Bohr, who was our spokesman -- which was a pity in some ways, because his English wasn't good and [laughs] his wife told me his Danish was almost as bad -- but he became our spokesman and was very very good and persistent in his approach.



Related:

Wikipedia's Pauli effect entry, which links to my sonnet about same

A Particular Truth--1941 - on Bohr and Heisenberg

At Teaching Resources, which obtained it via Moving Poems, which features Nic Sebastian's take as well: Othniel Smith's video remix of "Playing Duets with Heisenberg's Ghost"

This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/117814.html.

[subject line from Matthew Arnold's Lines Written in Kensington Gardens, which correspond to a UU hymn set to a Thomas Tallis canon that I often play when in need of solace]


(The Writing on the Pharaoh's Wall (detail), Gabriel Shaffer, Asheville Art Museum)

Hello, new month
of maybes, maybeings,
and wish-I-mays now here --
behold how bedecked
you already are
with swirls of stitchery

already a diary
of crossouts and detours
and acronymed prayers
and half-rehearsed words
and words for rehearsals.

To tally today:
how many angels
in toeshoes on
the sparkling tips
of pinwheel spokes?

Any minute now
the rules that you thought
were to keep you in line

will vault
with a vehemence
over the handlebars.

O brace yourself
for the many-tongued wind

its whipsharp accents
its cloudblurred vowels

you will grapple for years
with what it has to say to you.

~pld

This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/104979.html.