Some Saturdays, when our apartment has barely survived the week’s wreckage, my partner-in-domestic-crime and I spend an hour or two on what we call “Six Things.” I suggest something (wash the kitchen floor; we do it), she suggests something (hang a Nabokov poster; we do it) — and, after six things, we quit and move on with our day. It’s not a major undertaking — we’re not pulling up floorboards or ripping down walls — but it’s enough to make us feel that we haven’t completely given up on everything. Which brings me to the writing of blog posts. As Tamiko touched upon yesterday, each owner of this virtual space has to figure out how best to use it. Do we want breadth or depth? Lyricism or links? And aren’t we allowed to change strategies, from post to post? At times I feel occupied by a single idea, or poem, or event — and I like that I can investigate that occupation in this ever-elongating WordPress text box. At other times my cataloguing impulse takes over, and I want to use this space for a bit of mental housekeeping.
In the spirit of that latter impulse, then — Six Things:
1) What a treat, last night, to drive to Grosse Pointe South High School and hear Marilynne Robinson read from Gilead and Home. I went with a friend who’s teaching Housekeeping next week in his Great Books class; on the ride home, he quoted most of this passage from memory:
“She’s had so much trouble and sorrow.” So much, yes, she has, it’s the Lord’s truth, it’s a pity. It is.
“Really, she’s all right,” Sylvie answered.
Murmurs. One of them said, “She looks so sad.”
And Sylvie replied, “Well, she is sad.”
Silence.
My friend’s hope: that his students hear the wisdom, the humanity, of that italicized is, that final silence.
2) A refrain, among teachers: we only have time to read the books we’ve assigned. (And sometimes not even those. Here’s a joke that’s all punch line: “Read it? I haven’t even taught it!”) But somehow this week I found the time to read Laura Kasischke‘s soon-to-be-released novel (or novella — which might account for how I found the time), Eden Springs. It’s an odd book, full of court transcripts, photographs, sex, gravediggers, and God. I liked it a lot. Here’s how it starts:
You dig a hole in the sandy dirt, and you lower the casket into it. You shovel the dirt and the sand back over the box.
And all the time you’re thinking about the sun on your back, or the rain. The sweat making stains on your shirt, the sound of a few crows screaming in the breeze, or you’re thinking about a girl — your girl, someone else’s girl — naked, posing, like in a postcard. Or you whistle the last song you heard, whatever song it was.
But there’s a smell.
A silence, and a weight.
That silence is a weight, and you can’t pretend you don’t feel that.
3) “What are days for?” asks Philip Larkin. “Days are where we live. / They come, they wake us / Time and time over. / They are to be happy in: / Where can we live but days?” Solving that question, of course (or so says Larkin), brings “the priest and the doctor / In their long coats / Running over the fields.” From life to death, in ten short lines! With a stanza break allowing one to (not quite) collect one’s self! Earlier this week I taught several of Larkin’s poems — “Days,” “High Windows,” “This Be the Verse,” “The Old Fools” — and tracked, with my students’ help, the poet’s dark leaps of un-faith. Asked in a 1982 interview if growing old worried him, Larkin answered,
Yes, dreadfully. If you assume you’re going to live to be seventy, seven decades, and think of each decade as a day of the week, starting with Sunday, then I’m on Friday afternoon now. Rather a shock, isn’t it? If you ask why does it bother me, I can only say I dread endless extinction.
4) George Starbuck kept Larkin company on last week’s syllabus. We followed Starbuck’s lead and wrote clerihews and double dactyls, while steering clear of his more rococo forms. (“Sonnet with a Different Letter at the End of Every Line,” anyone?) My favorite Starbuck take comes from Eric McHenry, who wrote, in an otherwise admiring appraisal for Slate, “Reading some of Starbuck’s poems is akin to watching a man who has taught himself to solve a Rubik’s Cube with his feet while parasailing. You’re amazed that he can do it, and you’re amazed that he would want to.” (McHenry is equally insightful about Larkin.) I closed class on Thursday with a similar figure, saying that Starbuck, like Frost, wanted the tennis net up — but that he also wanted the court made of ice, and the players sliding in clown shoes, and the ball boys replaced with snipers.
5) Weren’t the Grammys easy prey for clerihewists? (Lady GaGa? HaHaHaHaHaHaHa! Starbuck would’ve turned that rhyme in his sleep.) And does anyone under fifty hear the gramophone in the Grammy?
Dark Solace, Post-Grammys
1
Taylor Swift
Has a gift:
No one’s as gee-whiz
As she is.2
Ms. Swift’s
Rifts
With the Jonases?
Bonuses.
6)* I’ve probably mentioned at some point over the past year that I’m from Baltimore. So was Babe Ruth; he was born 115 years ago today. He had a sweetness to him, as heard here:
Plus, he could (sort of) sing!
* Do you remember how, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino promised six things, but only delivered five? And do you remember how weirdly satisfying that felt?
