All-School Chorus

Low

My friend Arda Collins has her second poem in the New Yorker this week. Arda and I sometimes split a piece of coconut cake after workshops and discussed our various phobias. I love her poems--they make me feel dreamy and anxious at once. Check her out here.



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High Art

I have always been a little ashamed about the number of classics, or Big Girl Books, as I like to call them, that I have not read. I was an English major in college and "studied poetry" in "grad school," but I haven't read major works like Great Expectations (saw the movie with Ethan Hawke, though), or War and Peace, or Ulysses. Looking over this (ridiculously long) list, I realized that I should start to fill in my 19th-century lit gap and move forward from there. This winter I read Pride & Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility for, um, the first time. Needless to say, Austen is a delight. I did not know that anything written in 1813 could make me snort and nod my head in recognition. A few weeks ago as I was wrapping up S&S, I bought Anna Karenina for my next big read. I was in a cozy book store on Roanoke Island. The shop was full of children and elderly folks, and Bach played in the background. I looked through the various editions of Anna Karenina on the shelf and settled on the one with a tragic looking lilac on the cover. How classy and elegant, I thought as I paid for my book at the register. The most ephemeral of flowers to represent... hey wait a minute. I showed the book to Brendan as we left the store, pulling it out of its paper bag and blushing.

"Is this what I think it is on the cover?"

"A flower?"

"Yeah, and, uh, that's a butt, right? That's someone's butt."

"Hmmm."

"Is that Anna's butt?"

"That is definitely a butt."

"Or is that her lover's butt? Is that a woman's hand holding the flower? The nails are so clean. What goes on in this book?"

"I think the fingers may be hairy."

"Look at this beautiful smut! This is going to be great!"

With a Touch of Pity

I recently helped edit an entry in the VQR Vault on Ezra Pound (written by Jon Schneider). The entry includes scans of letters between Pound and VQR's then editor, Charlotte Kohler. When VQR did not take Pound up on his offer to write a column for each issue, Pound wrote:

I wonder if ANY of your board reads ANY language but North American[.]

Oh, snap. Did Pound really read any language but "North American"? I was taught in grad school that his translations of Chinese and Latin poetry were mostly phonetic. But perhaps that lecture was only a vodka-fueled dream. In any case, the Pound/VQR correspondence is entertaining, and the final postcard from Pound contains the perfect balance of crazy and snark (and is worth clicking on just to see the gorgeous front image alone).

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Yep.

Get in, loser. We're going shopping.

I've grown tired of the Democratic race, and wish a resolution could be reached tomorrow. Not gonna happen. So, I've been turning my attention to John McCain. My younger brother insists he is planning on voting for McCain. This is the same younger brother who became a Quaker minister though his hippie high school. Now he is all into investing and becoming an entrepreneur. Whatever. I love you, Jake!

In any case, the one thing I've noticed about McCain on the campaign trail is his creepy-sleepy voice that he uses to deliver his speeches. It's like Grandpa is reading the nation a bedtime story. My brother says that this is the voice McCain will use to "hypnotize the terrorists."  For a while, I assumed McCain simply lacked the confidence to give a searing speech, or even raise his voice. After an article I read in the Washington Post yesterday, I think McCain's soothing cadence is one big act. Turns out he has a bit of a nasty streak.

According to the article, McCain has not only verbally attacked senators, governors, and congressmen, but he's gone out of his way to attempt to get two aides, Karen S. Johnson and Judy Leiby, fired because he felt they had crossed him in some way. Senator Dennis DeConcini, whom Judy Leiby worked for,

"politely told McCain to go to hell," according to a source close to the conversation, adding: "Not once in [DeConcini's 18-year Senate tenure] did another senator ask for an aide to be dismissed. Not once did anyone speak about an aide like that."

Episodes such as the Johnson and Leiby incidents, along with McCain's oft-chronicled blowups on Capitol Hill, have led critics to say he has a vindictive streak, that he sees an enemy in anyone who challenges him.

You may think that McCain has a thing for humiliating women after reading about Leiby and Johnson, and oh yeah, that other incident where he called his wife the c-word. But the wrath he dispenses is not limited to one gender. After McCain won his Senate seat in 1986, he gave a speech at Arizona's Phoenix hotel. According to the Post:

After McCain finished his speech, he returned to a suite in the hotel, sat down in front of a TV and viewed a replay of his remarks, angry to discover that the speaking platform had not been erected high enough for television cameras to capture all of his face--he seemed to have been cut off somewhere between his nose and mouth.

A platform that had been adequate for taller candidates had not taken into account the needs of the 5-foot-9 McCain, who left the suite and went looking for a man in his early 20s named Robert Wexler, the head of Arizona's Young Republicans, which had helped make arrangements for the evening's celebration. Confronting Wexler in a hotel ballroom, McCain exploded, according to witnesses who included Jon Hinz, then executive director of the Arizona Republican Party. McCain jabbed an index finger in Wexler's chest.

"I told you we needed a stage," he screamed, according to Hinz. "You incompetent little [expletive]. When I tell you to do something, you do it."

Not very nice. Not very nice at all. If there's one thing I hate, it's a bully. I couldn't help think of Mean Girls when I read about McCain's behavior. He's totally Regina George. Of course, that means Obama is totally Lindsay Lohan.

 

Some Asshole

Last night was the finale of Project Runway. I braved the crowds at the supermarket, bought some wine, cooked a nice meal at home, and settled in to watch my darling Christian take the crown (at least, I hoped he would). Just then, something exploded outside. From our window, it looked like a fireworks display. I felt a little flurry in my stomach and thought of War of the Worlds (the Tom Cruise version). As I took a long sip of wine and atrophied further couch, it hit me that when the aliens attack, or the bombs drop or whatever, I will be dead in two minutes. Honestly, at the end of the day, who really has the fortitude to evade the enemy? Also, didn't Tom Cruise play a macho carpenter or something in that movie? Bitch, please. And as I was thinking those terrible things, our power went out.

Turns out some asshole here in town stole a Mercedes, promptly hit another driver, that person (stupidly) gave chase, and somehow these two ended up in our neighborhood, where they drove down our (extremely narrow) street at 80 or 90 miles an hour. Mercedes man slammed into a telephone pole on the corner, splitting it in two. He then dragged his bloody self from the car and took off on foot. I don't know if he's been caught.

Listen, asshole. I work pretty damn hard every day, proofreading some extremely dry text. I need my simple pleasures to keep me going.  I mean Jesus, it was the goddamn finale. Because of you, I had to stumble around in the dark, shivering, while the rest of America had fun. Because of you, I had to abandon my glass of wine, which I'm pretty sure my cat later drank because she vomited at five in the morning beside the bed. Thanks for that.

To my two readers: Sorry I've been away from All School Chorus for so long. I've been kind of down, but I'm feeling a little better now. I think it's all the Cadbury's eggs now available. Also, to the car thief: If you are alone and bloody in the woods, I'm sorry I called you an asshole. I know we all need to get our kicks somehow. But next time, take your joyride on a Tuesday. Damn.

Simply and Truly, My Dear

I want to apologize to my two readers for my absence from All-School Chorus. I have a job that keeps me on my toes, and by that I mean keeps me at my desk for 10 hours. When I come from work I am so exhausted that I can only muster the energy to drink homemade salty dogs and watch America's Next Top Model marathons on VH1. I love Caridee.  Anyone with psoriasis, depression, and sass is okay in my book.

Lately I have felt so far away from my old self that when I remember where I was last year, it feels like that moment in Dolores Claiborne when Jennifer Jason Leigh looks at herself in the mirror on the ferry and sees the back of her head instead of her face. Today at my desk, I thought of myself a year ago, just-moved into the 19th-century house in Iowa, making sad tofu burgers for one at night and wrapping myself in a quilt because I had to keep the heat down to 62. I remembered taking a bath in the dark because the ice storm had knocked out the power, and then later writing comments on my students' poems by the light of a menorah I found in a cabinet. When spring came, my friends and I sat on the back porch of that house for hours and hours, eating cheese and drinking bourbon. We watched baby rabbits hopping through the garden, and we invented ghost stories about the rickety loft in the barn.

I stay very, very busy now, editing away my days and trying to stay on top of deadlines.  There are fewer dinner parties and prank phone calls. There are no more lunar golf sessions to attend at the Coralville Mall in the middle of a Tuesday. Also gone are the Sunday afternoons spent on the long, embroidered couch in my old living room. I remember when anything could make me cry—the ducks on the frozen river, the broken sunflower stalks in the front yard, a plate of cheese curds.  I remember when Mary, my beloved friend, and I went walking through Hickory Hill park in April.  We walked beneath an archway of trees and everything was murky, like a mudroom. In that moment I thought of all the mistakes I had made that last year and felt very small. Mary may have seen my eyes hot and filling with tears. Look, she said. In the next moment, we were upon a field of goldenrods. They hadn't been there the week before.  That was the thing about Iowa; for such a seemingly tepid place from afar, it kept me hanging on for years. 

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What He Saw

Everything outside has that odd, phosphorescent look that winter dusk creates. The cars and trash cans look laced with snow, but it's only a reflection of the sky. I am sitting in my study drinking tea that has gone cold, and looking at a painting hanging on my wall. It came from my parents' attic and it is one of the most desolate pieces of art I have ever seen. The painting is of a dirty white pony standing alone in a  snow-covered field. "Snow-covered field" sounds cozy, like something out of Anne of Green Gables or a holiday Folger's commercial. But this snow-covered field looks like what you see stretching out before you as you drive from Moline to Cedar Rapids on I-80 in January. The kind of snow-covered field in which you would freeze to death should your car happen to spin off the highway and you have no roadside assistance coverage. No one can see you out here in the blizzard. It might come to burning your car's tires for heat and eating your own hand.

In any case, this horse is very much alone. Stunted fence posts tilt behind him in a line that disappears into the fog. The horse's mangy tale is gusting around his legs in the wind. His neck is arched down to the ground, but he is not eating. He seems to be staring at the sparse tufts of brown grass at his feet and thinking, Is this all there is? Really? The worst thing about the painting are his eyes, painted as black holes. No pupils, just black holes in his face. When I was a child, I often had trouble going to sleep because I was convinced a ghost was standing in my doorway. She had wild, Piper-Laurie-in-Carrie hair, a torn, bag-lady dress, and those very same eyes, which I suppose were actually eye sockets. Lord, there is nothing worse than dead eye sockets staring at you in the face.

The thing that haunts me most about this painting is that it hung in my father's room when he was a child. This was what greeted my toddler father in the mornings when he stood up in his crib in 1951. This was the backdrop to his play and his dreams before he was sent to boarding school at age eleven. I think of my father running most mornings through the dark woods at 5 AM, or only allowing himself two crumbling Fig Newtons for dessert, and I know where these impulses started.

Baby steps, baby steps.

I was wrong about Dirty Dancing. It was filmed on Mountain Lake. Oh the confusion! However, What About Bob was filmed on Smith Mountain Lake. I much prefer Bill Murray to Patrick Swayze anyway.

Last month I'm eating Jujubes to keep alive, and this month women are stuffing diamonds in my pocket.

We are headed down to Smith Mountain Lake to spend New Year's Eve with my dear friend Bird. I plan to buy champagne along the way, and perhaps one of those little disposable cameras as well. I might get one with black and white film, because I am a classy lady. And yes, I am still living in 1996 and do not own a digital camera. I don't even think I can take pictures with my cell phone. Christ.

Apparently, Dirty Dancing was filmed at Smith Mountain Lake. I will keep this in mind if I happen to take a drunken midnight dip. Surely that swan-dive lift can't be all that hard to recreate?

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