slow progress

My avocados. Not much to report--this one has developed the tiniest of cracks. And the other one? Nothing.

This blog here, though? Avocado EXTRAVAGANZA. Beautiful, beautiful!

pictures from the interstate

"Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants." -- Dorothy Parker

And every fall the leaves drop and the farmers harvest their fields. Soon, a good hard freeze. The great cleaning. Bravo. No longer mucked.

I spent quite a bit of time on the road last week. Last Friday afternoon I drove to DeKalb, then drove with Allison into Chicago for the Mike Doughty concert, where we sat on the floor with our backs to the wall, the reverberations coming through us like whale song while we listened and laughed and cried.

Then--because the Uni High class of '98 loves one another--on Wednesday I dropped everything and headed to Starved Rock with Karl and met Vivian, who was in Chicago from Tokyo at a neuroscience conference. We ended up having a semi-spontaneous reunion there with Ursula and Sri, culminating with dinner in the city and a sleepy drive back down I-57.

headphones hooray

Full Strict Joy album on NPR. Also this artists den on hulu:

Also swell (!!!):

caught up among the dark places in the trees

How to Like It

(Stephen Dobyns)

These are the first days of fall. The wind
at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,
while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns
is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,
the desire to get in a car and just keep driving.
A man and a dog descend their front steps.
The dog says, Let's go downtown and get crazy drunk.
Let's tip over all the trash cans we can find.
This is how dogs deal with the prospect of change.
But in his sense of the season, the man is struck
by the oppressiveness of his past, how his memories
which were shifting and fluid have grown more solid
until it seems he can see remembered faces
caught up among the dark places in the trees.
The dog says, Let's pick up some girls and just
rip off their clothes. Let's dig holes everywhere.
Above his house, the man notices wisps of cloud
crossing the face of the moon. Like in a movie,
he says to himself, a movie about a person
leaving on a journey. He looks down the street
to the hills outside of town and finds the cut
where the road heads north. He thinks of driving
on that road and the dusty smell of the car
heater, which hasn't been used since last winter.
The dog says, Let's go down to the diner and sniff
people's legs. Let's stuff ourselves on burgers.
In the man's mind, the road is empty and dark.
Pine trees press down to the edge of the shoulder,
where the eyes of animals, fixed in his headlights,
shine like small cautions against the night.
Sometimes a passing truck makes his whole car shake.
The dog says, Let's go to sleep. Let's lie down
by the fire and put our tails over our noses.
But the man wants to drive all night, crossing
one state line after another, and never stop
until the sun creeps into his rearview mirror.
Then he'll pull over and rest awhile before
starting again, and at dusk he'll crest a hill
and there, filling a valley, will be the lights
of a city entirely new to him.
But the dog says, Let's just go back inside.
Let's not do anything tonight. So they
walk back up the sidewalk to the front steps.
How is it possible to want so many things
and still want nothing? The man wants to sleep
and wants to hit his head again and again
against a wall. Why is it all so difficult?
But the dog says, Let's go make a sandwich.
Let's make the tallest sandwich anyone's ever seen.
And that's what they do and that's where the man's
wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator
as if into the place where the answers are kept—
the ones telling why you get up in the morning
and how it is possible to sleep at night,
answers to what comes next and how to like it.

malt-o-meal tutorial

I do not enjoy oatmeal. I want to like it, but I don't. Why is it so gooey? So snot-like? I much prefer Malt-O-Meal, which is what my mother raised me on, like her mother before her. (My mother's mother also uses the term "Oleo" to occasionally stand in for the less-specific "lard." Two of many Depression-era household terms carried from yore...)

But Malt-O-Meal requires specific preparation in order to be palatable, and here I have prepared a tutorial, consisting of five photographs, detailed instructions, and a video.

Step 1

Prepare the ingredients, because once the water gets boiling, this has to happen fast. As the universe moves toward increased entropy, Malt-O-Meal evolves toward becoming a rock. Not much fun to be had in chewing rocks, even if they are conglomerates. You will need a pan, a whisk, 1 cup of water, 3 tablespoons of Malt-O-Meal, 2 thin pats of butter, a splash of milk, and a smallish dish of chocolate chips. And fire. Prepare the Malt-O-Meal bowl before you start--it should have a large surface area for maximum enjoyment/chocolate-chip placement. (Unless you are a slow eater... then maybe a deeper bowl with less surface area? I am not you. Let's keep that in mind. Find your own way.)

Step 2

Bring the water to a boil. Slowly add the Malt-O-Meal; concurrently whisk and pour. Concurrent whisking prevents rock formations. (Lumps.) The Malt-O-Meal will start to thicken, and determining when to remove the pan from the flame requires skill. Remember that the stuff will continue to thicken even after you remove it from heat, as it tries to become a rock. So just boil until it's a little thick. Maybe a minute. Whisk continuously.

Step 3

Pour the Malt-O-Meal into the readied bowl, and add the butter and milk. Take the bowl, a spoon, a beverage, and the small dish of chocolate chips to wherever you plan to eat.

Step 5

Enjoy! But... this part is really important. You can't just eat straight Malt-O-Meal. It needs chocolate, and there's a proper system! Please take a moment to watch the video, and notice that chocolate chips are never stirred into the Malt-O-Meal. You don't want it muddied.

Woo-hoo? Woo-hoo.

alligator pears, paired

I started a second one, from a different store. To double my potential for failure.

avocado, week 1

This fellow keeps ridiculing my inability to sprout an avocado, and insists that I'm doing something wrong. It's not supposed to be hard: avocado pit, toothpicks, pointy-end up, clean water. Every time I try the pit splits within a few weeks and then nothing happens. I figure I'll take a picture of this one every week until Christmas. Keep it in your thoughts.

The other plants are in for the autumn/fall, and my apartment is small enough that it feels like inviting company in for an extended stay. This is the kitchen window (no counter space, so recipes are on the music stand), one of two windows in the apartment that get any light at all. I live in a cave. Which is fine. For now. That avocado pit could choose to sprout and hang out with me, lying dormant.

for serious?

Music can go here? Like this?

the same fire is touching us around the edges

Just back from a Lucie Brock-Broido reading here in Champaign, which was spectacular. Currently enjoying macaroni and cheese, from the box, and am about to go to bed without completing nearly enough work. What indulgences.

Above, the Craig Arnold poem from the last page of the new Poetry.

one good thing about teaching high school

Dioramas.

from "Boys and Girls" by Alice Munro:
The winter I was eleven years old we had two horses in the stable. We did not know what names they had had before, so we called them Mack and Flora. Mack was an old black workhorse, sooty and indifferent. Flora was a sorrel mare, a driver. We took them both out in the cutter. Mack was slow and easy to handle. Flora was given to fits of violent alarm, veering at cars and even at other horses, but we loved her speed and high-stepping, her general air of gallantry and abandon. On Saturdays we went down to the stable and as soon as we opened the door on its cozy, animal-smelling darkness Flora threw up her head, rolled her eyes, whinnied despairingly, and pulled herself through a crisis of nerves on the spot. It was not safe to go into her stall, she would kick.

wrecka sto'

A good autumn Sunday. Old linoleum, vinyl, dollar bins. Room to spread out and ponder toward some decisions.

so may the sunrise bring hope where it was once forgotten / sons are like birds, flying always over the mountain

Last night The Books and Sam Beam from Iron and Wine played at Krannert Center. I love a performance that involves red velvet seats, autumn, the first opportunity to wear boots, tasty mocha over intermission. Sam Beam played without the band; he stood in the middle of the stage and let loose. The challenge, now, involves carrying that intensity through the rest of the weekend, while I work on a website, finish some editing, read up on educational assessments.

fricassee de poulet a l'ancienne

Midnight in Chicago, and we just finished dinner. Fricassee de poulet a l'ancienee from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, mushroom risotto from Cook's Illustrated, and raspberry sorbet with iris blossoms.

Not feeling very write-y lately. Too full?

nine nine nine

September 9, 2009, and mostly, I want a nap! Or at least the nap option... I almost never actually sleep during the day. But campus is all bustle, when what I'd really enjoy is watching the fog through my screen door, book in hand and turn table... turning. (Last week: a trip to the dollar bins at the record store. Top find: Those Special Songs, a compilation of radio classics from the sixties and seventies.)

I did make some number 9 cookies to celebrate.

every now and then on my mind

swell season cliplet on Vimeo.

an endless number of thickets

From Eye Rocket. Cheering, no?

strange business; and i'd make an ocean

I've been anxious this entire week, though it's definitely been an undercurrent, with an undefinable source. My last semester of courses toward my Ed.M. degree, new students on campus, and all the business of late August are distracting me in a way that feels good--good to keep the brain engaged in an interesting world, but I also feel pulled away from something that swelled in me all summer. Such a private summer.

Not sure, exactly, what I'm missing, though it has to do with a sense of home. Central Illinois feels like home, yes, with every street turning up memories, familiar sights and smells. Tonight I took a walk behind the old YMCA building and watched bats circle above the brick tower, smelled chlorine pass into the already humid night from the indoor pool. Shift my attention slightly and I could easily be back in preschool, high school, undergrad, the MFA. Same setting. In the Northwest this summer, I missed that. Loved the mountains, cities, ocean, but didn't feel connected in the ways I do under the prairie sky.

But so many old friends are gone now. Either moved away or buried. Which leads to the question, I suppose, of how to create a home when the world disintegrates, and how to move while carrying such intricate grief.

Then again, I am only twenty-eight. Does anything ever feel particularly solid at this age?

from Home by Marilynne Robinson

I Want to Paint My Bathroom Blue

(Ruth Krauss,

with illustrations by Maurice Sendak)

I want to paint my bathroom blue

--my papa won't let me paint it blue--

once I painted a rocking-chair blue

and it was pretty.

I want to paint my kitchen yellow

and my sitting room white with turtles

and all my ceilings green.

And I'd put a window here

and here and here and here and here

and on the outside walls of my house should

be a big big picture--a funny big picture like

the mother is blushing because her two

children put their feet in the cake--

and I'll sprinkle seeds all over the land.

I'll make a big white door

with a little pink doorknob--

and a song about the doorknob goes

a doorknob a doorknob

a dear little doorknob

a dearknob a dearknob

a door little dearknob--

and stairs going up to another floor

and upstairs a horse in the bedroom.

I'll make a house the kind I dream about

not the kind I see. It's a house like a rainbow.

And my friends all live with me there.

And someday will be grass and trees

and I'd make and ocean.

cairn

you should be getting stoned in a prom dress; you should still believe in an endless world

And here, the rubber tree plant I purchased impulsively from a Treasure Island grocery store, and carried on the L for the rest of the evening. It's seriously a great plant. Very chipper. It has personality; it brings happiness to all who behold it.

Brunch at Tweet, my favorite Chicago brunch spot. Look at my friends with their iphones! It was constant. Oh, world.

Good times, good fun. Classes start next week!

(The song that this post is titled after, here. Still listening to a lot of George-esque music. Still in the fog of high school nostalgia brought about by last month. Bought tickets to see Mike Doughty in Chicago with George's partner, Allison, in October.)

poemz

Hellzyeah, poets!
Jason Shinder, from Stupid Hope.

Spencer Reece, from The Clerk's Tale.

Lorca, from the book pictured below.

The Penguin Poets. Pretty, no? (Though, yes, odd formatting. And no, I do not read Spanish. But this was how I first read Lorca, in smushed paragraphs at the bottoms of yellowed pages. And I still love it.)