BYE NOW

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QUICK TAKES

+ My poem "The Virgin Disambiguates" was nominated earlier in the year by Bat City Review for Best New Poets 2009. The results for the latter have just been posted & it looks like it didn't happen for me this year - but I'm still thrilled to have been considered.

+ In Madison. In the one unit without a claw-foot bathtub. It's a little too late at this point to start a public love affair with my fireplace, but I'm still so happy in my apartment: a freezer full of Trader Joe's, the boyfriend on the couch, and all of my books on the shelves. This is starting to sound like an entry in Stuff White People Like, so I'll move on.

+ Said boyfriend just secured a news internship with NPR for the next few months, which is completely up his alley.

+ Here is a lake full of stingerless jellyfish.

MAKING MY DAY JUST THAT MUCH BETTER

FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS

The only redeeming part of Eat Pray Love, I think, is the part where Elizabeth Gilbert advises her erstwhile reader (who, having suffered through her Italian gastronomical olympics and fifty pages of ashram antics, is at this point in it for the long run) to stop attempting to be anything other than what you are. She takes a vow of silence and then is informed by her ashram's administration that she's been appointed chief hostess for the new arrivals. Talk! God wants you to talk! And serve canapes!

I'll be the first to admit that I read most of this book while tanning in my backyard, when I would have sweated out anything more substantial, and that most of it struck me as a sort of fairytale narrative, vague enough to be a self-help book, full of enough unsubstantial specifics that the reader doesn't think he's reading the just-saved! journal of someone fresh from a tent revival. Most of it tries really hard to convince you to be happy that Elizabeth Gilbert is happy. 

I'm not happy lately. I haven't really been for about a year. There have been a few notable exceptions (two weeks in Scotland, a hands-down-best-trip-ever to LA to see my best friends), but I'm kind of fed up with dropping a few hundred dollars every time I want to see my favorite people. Also living in your parents' house after not living in your parents' house in seven years is about as easy as it sounds. Or working two sales jobs concurrently (that this month paid you a grand total of $450 after tax). Or your boyfriend living on a different continent. And you sprained both your knee and ankle last weekend. And the last three books on your reading list sucked. 

The end is so close, but my limp gets even worse when I finally see the finish line. I move to Madison on August first with J, and we have three weeks to play Mario Kart and sleep late until I start classes. And then I get to do this academic poetry thing for real, after seeing teaser trailers for the past three years.

It's been a bad, boring year, but it's about to be over, and I can go back to being the person I like and recognize. And maybe, maybe, if I accept my true self, I can also accept a huge book advance and they'll base not one, but two movies off my life and everyone will love me.  

Well, almost everyone.

WCW

QUICK TAKES

Slowly working my way through Women in Love this week, a Barnes & Noble copy with a (very apt) Schiele on the cover. I forgot how much I love reading Lawrence: a few years ago I picked up Lady Chatterley for the first time and felt within the first few pages that he was making explicit some undercurrents in my favorite pieces of literature, something muscular and dark and fantastically ugly. Enough people have said smart things - and well, unsmart things - about Lawrence, so I won't try. I think I'll read The Rainbow next.

(Though: If this was my old blog, the one where I didn't mind my manners, I'd be listing every ridiculous outfit Lawrence swaddles his protagonists in. Ursula wore canary yellow stockings, Gudrun pale rose - assuring us, of course, that they looked very fashionable.)

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On my bedside table: The Handmaid's Tale (Atwood), No Country for Old Men (McCarthy), some Julia Glass books, and a copy of Suskind's Perfume that I can't seem to get into. I've imposed a new, necessary rule for buying books: only those where the author is still alive; everything else can come from the library. It doesn't necessarily help out publishing houses, but I can only be so virtuous before I'm in the red. (Which is not very virtuous, really. I'm trying to save every penny in anticipation of being even poorer this fall.)

Looking at home dec blogs doesn't help. I've discovered Jonathan Adler (maximalism!), and I've talked myself out of buying about a million dollars' worth of ceramics for my apartment. Which I haven't moved into, yet. (For a mock-up, see my garage.)

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Otherwise - a big round of rejections this week. Beginning to wonder if this January was a series of lightning strikes; it's a little depressing to see so much of my work come out at once, when I've had nothing taken for six months. Cross your fingers for me. I have one or two more journals to hear from before this summer's hiatus.

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I'm putting together my syllabus for this fall (intro to creative writing) - a little early, maybe, but I'm really enjoying it, going through my books and notes from undergrad and before, beginning to appreciate my professors even more. Any suggestions? Anyone willing to share?

WRITING YOURSELF INTO A BLACK HOLE

Words that have appeared in my last four (unpublished) poems:

hands, teeth, tongue, lips, mouth; open, language, night; bed, sheets, floor.

I need either a dentist appointment or something new to read.