I’ve put this photo I took of a covered bridge here because I’m posting (after the jump) an annotation I wrote about Eleni Sikelianos’s book, The California Poem, and since I’ve never been to California, I did some thinking about what her book would be like translated into Vermont language. Vermont is my home state. And Vermont is very proud of its covered bridges.

The California Poem Annotation: The Delights of Cross-Genre Literature

In The California Poem by Eleni Sikelianos, the use of cross-genre/ multi-genre methods becomes a way for the boundaries of the work to expand beyond the words on the page, beyond the bindings of the book, and beyond the reader’s expectations. There is a feeling of extreme largeness to this book; this largeness is necessary for the book to be true to the largeness (in both size and personality) of its subject, the state of California. Reading The California Poem, I got the feeling that Sikelianos would have included, if it were possible, singing voices broadcast from between her pages, the smell and temperature of a Pacific Ocean breeze, and hands that could reach out to touch or pinch or tickle me. But of course these things aren’t really feasible in a book made of paper and ink, so instead there are words that flow across the pages in a manner that feels kin to Walt Whitman, and these words are supplemented with collages, photographs, reproduced postcards, and line drawings.

And the words themselves are not just in the form of expansive lines scattered across the pages, but also in quotations, charts, footnotes, endnotes. This could be termed scrapbook poetry, I think. Words, this book shows, can be a visual medium as well as a manifestation of language. As Sikelianos herself says about words in one poem, “RISE UP—–phonemes/ cum genomes, let/ language disintegrate, tiny/ technology in the compost heap; gumdrops; I mean/ our species; the ovicidal moonfish slips/ into Sirius, Canis Major-bright my words dive-/ bombing swallows angry at my hair & slip/ new gods// into the sky…” I’m not sure if I could dissect the exact meaning of those lines, but to me they create an impression of language as something organic, alive, and active.

To return to the idea of a scrapbook: I would define a scrapbook as something similar to a collage, a statement of self formed from fragments of both your own and other people’s creations. A scrapbook can draw from both the very personal and from the very public. A love letter next to a newspaper clipping, etc. So, too, with The California Poem. The book addresses both the author’s personal experience of the state of California and the public history and geology of the state. There is a photograph of the author as a child in 1972 and there is a photograph of earthquake damage in 1925. There are quotations from widely varying sources. Perhaps the inclusion of visual art is another sort of quotation. In any case, the effect is to tell the reader that this book doesn’t just have one thing to say-it has layers and layers of things to say. The inclusion of footnotes and endnotes especially supports this layering effect. And layers, of course, add to the book’s feeling of largeness.

I couldn’t help wondering, while reading this book about California, what a sister book about Vermont would be like, in the same style. I’ve never been to California, but I live in and grew up in Vermont, so it helped me in my attempt to understand Sikelianos’s techniques to imagine applying them to my own home and experiences. It seems to me that you have to truly know a place, to love it and to also know exactly what its dirt looks and smells like, to write a poem like this. What would a book-length Vermont poem be like? Just the idea of it half makes me want to write it right now. It would have to be packaged a little differently-a taller, narrower book to match the tall peaked roofs that Vermont houses have to shed snow in the winter.

The word Vermont comes from the French, means green mountains, which are really more like rolling hills. There’s a strong sense of shelter to this landscape. Perhaps the pieces of poetry would have to be smaller. It is not a land of extremes like California. No Death Valley here. Just narrow dirt roads to get lost on. And I don’t know much about the native Americans who lived here before European colonization, the Abenaki. I would have to learn more about them, and also refresh my memory of the revolutionary war history. Samuel de Champlain. Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys. Whereas California has the gold rush, western expansion, a sense of horizon. There’s no connection to the ocean here in Vermont, just Lake Champlain, which is shared with New York. I think there was a campaign a few years ago to register Lake Champlain as one of the great lakes but I really feel that the lake is something else, some other special category of its own. There’s legend of the Champlain monster, “Champ” or “Champie.” In the winter most of it freezes over. And I imagine the winter landscape here in Vermont as having something kin with haiku. The snow as a blank page, and the bare trees as brushstrokes forming characters forming poems. And the people of Vermont are different from the people of California, or at least I’m lead to believe so from movies. Hollywood. Vermonters see themselves as independent. Stoic, resourceful. The importance of privacy. The state motto is “freedom and unity.”

But I am starting to write that Vermont book right now, which isn’t necessary. What I meant to say was that looking at my own state as if it were the main character of a book-length poem helped me to understand Eleni Sikelianos’s undertaking. The California Poem is something quite impressive and enjoyable to read, all the more so because of all the directions it draws its material from.

S and I found out recently that our landlady is selling the house we live in, so now we’re getting ready for yet another move.  I never thought that I would be as nomadic as I’ve ended up so far in my adult life.  We’ve moved about once a year since college.  I’m resigned to this next move, but there are parts of it that are rather difficult.  Getting rid of books, for instance.  I just love to own piles and piles of them, even ones that I know I’ll never read, or ones that I have read but likely won’t read again.  And I’ve been acquiring them like crazy over the past year because I thought we would be here longer and because I can’t help browsing the free book cart in the lobby of the library every time I go there.  Not to mention the book sale at the library, and the book sections at my two favorite thrift stores.  At least I’ve been spared the danger of having a decent used book store in town!

So, S and I are planning to have a yard sale next weekend.  Our criteria for removing books from our collection is that we’re either unlikely to read them or else if we did want to read that title, it wouldn’t be difficult to get from a library.  That means goodbye to some classics, goodbye to some random ones that could be great, goodbye to random ones I only picked up because I thought the title was funny (see below), goodbye to some that have been on the shelves for a long time, and goodbye to some we just got last week.  I promised myself before starting to sort them that I would be brutal.  There’s a good chance that we’ll be moving into a smaller apartment than this one.  Also, books are very heavy to carry.  And we’re paring down our clothing, art supplies, cds, furniture, and everything else we own with the same brutality.  I just feel saddest about the books.

So, Goodbye to this: Sometimes I feel like a Blob

And Goodbye to this: Your First Romance

Sometimes the character descriptions are my favorite parts of novels.  They often seem more vibrant to me than other parts of the same book.  Is this because the author puts in extra effort when describing a character?  To me they just seem great fun to write.

Here are a couple recent ones that I enjoyed.  They amused me.  Both are from The Dancing Druids by Gladys Mitchell.  It’s my current bathroom-reading mystery novel, obtained from the free discards rack at the library.

“Laura was as bold as a lion, but was as superstitious as a warlock.  She was full of dark fancies drowned in primordial deeps.  She also believed, with healthy, female instinct, that dangerous and delicate missions were less unpleasant in the daylight than in the dark.  With respect to the house itself, she was torn between a frantic desire to visit it and an equally strong determination not to go anywhere near its boundaries.  She was, in fact, like a child who both dreads and longs for a ghost-story just at bedtime.  The thrill would be worth it, the aftermath definitely not.  In other words, although Laura was both practical and hard-headed, and although she was brisk, jimp, and daring in all that she undertook, she was also the prey of an inherited belief in the legends, spectres and bogies of a Highland ancestry.  It was one of the many reasons for her adherence to Mrs. Bradley, who was legend, spectre, and bogie all in one, for she felt, without realizing it, that the greater demon kept the lesser demons at bay.”

I had to look up “jimp.”  It’s apparently a Scottish term that means slender or scant or neat or elegant.  Perhaps also archaic usage, since the novel was published in 1948.

And then there’s this description a little later in the book of Mrs. Bradley herself:

“Mrs. Bradley cordially agreed.  She herself looked very far from appetizing in a sage-green costume and a bright red blouse, an heirloom brooch of vast proportions whose only virtue was that it did at least conceal some of the blouse, stout shoes with crepe rubber soles, knitted stockings, and a rakish diamond clip on the side of her shining black hair.”

Doesn’t that seem a bit of fun to have written?  If I ever write a novel myself….

This photo is of an oddly-shaped carrot that I bought at the farmer’s market.  Not only was it interesting to look at, it was also very crisp and tasty!  But I’m not posting it here right now because of its flavor.  I decided to use this photo for this blog post because a lot of people told me the carrot looks like a hand.  A witch hand, perhaps.  And the following annotation on a poem by Rilke is also somewhat focused on strange hands.

“One of the Old Women”

I keep coming back to this one poem of Rainer Maria Rilke’s in the volume The Unknown Rilke, translated by Franz Wright. I keep returning to this poem because I don’t understand it, but it has enough interesting images in it that I want to understand it, so I read it over and over again. It’s not the kind of nonsensical poem that the mind just slides over without being caught by anything. Instead, it feels almost like there’s a part of me that does understand the poem, does draw meaning from the strange characteristics of the old woman, but the part of me that understands isn’t a part of me that my conscious mind is fully in touch with.
 

This is one of those situations where I wish that I was multilingual and could read the poem in its original language. If I could do that, I could weigh other possible translations of the words that attract and confuse me: “the enigma of their scabs,” “the hand, secretly waiting.” Unfortunately, I only speak English, and a little Spanish, so I have to make do with what I have-this one translation-to try to figure out why this poem attracts me so much. Perhaps also to try to understand the poem’s overall meaning, but I’m ok with having lingering questions about that. I do want to know about that secretly waiting hand though.
 

Starting at the beginning of things, I can at least pinpoint why the title makes me stop at this poem when I’m flipping through the book. It’s because, in general, I like the idea of old women. I will myself one day be an old woman, and I hope also that there’s still some lingering cultural respect for our elders, the wisdom of the crones, etc. And this title makes it clear that there are lots of old women, not just one. The subject of the poem is a single one of them, but the title implies that there are whole flocks of such women wandering the streets of Paris, where the poem is set, and the phrasing of the poem continues throughout to describe them in multiple.
 

I think perhaps that I have also managed to pinpoint why this poem gives me such a feeling of half-understanding it, even though I can’t quite verbalize exactly what it is that I think I understand. It’s because the poem is speaking to me directly! That is, this poem is written in second-person voice, and even contains a parenthetical aside to the reader in the first two lines: “(you know how that is, don’t you).” The only phrase that comes before this aside is “sometimes in the evening,” giving me, the reader, very little information with which to decide whether I actually do “know how that is.” But the speaker thinks I know. And these words, by addressing me directly, pull me into the poem.
 

So, suddenly I’m involved with this scene in which an old woman stops ahead of me on a Paris street, then coaxes me along beside “a building with no end.” When I read, in a poem, that something has no end I’m immediately vaulted into symbolic territory. And it may be due to that one line that I became so fixated on the meaning of this poem, and yet so uncertain. It seems possible that without that one line I might have viewed the poem as a description of an actual scene. But a building cannot be endless in real life, and knowing this I begin to see something beyond reality in the rest of the poem. Actually, this reminds me of an interesting statement in another one of Rilke’s poems in this book, “Walk at Night.” The two poems feel similar to me, although “Walk at Night” is much less image-centered than “One of the Old Women.” In it, Rilke says, “here a sudden brilliance or there a glimpse momentarily grazes us as if it were precisely that in which resides what our life is.” I think that “One of the Old Women” has grazed me, and now I’m trying to grasp what it says about what my life is.
 

And there are these few images in it that stand out to me with huge importance. First, there is the “enigma of their scabs,” which is one of the elements the old women use to coax you (me) along beside that strange eternal building. This stands out to me because scabs are such an unpleasant thought; whether they’re from some illness or from wounds, they’re not a symbol of health. So what is it about them that has a power of attraction enough to pull you (me) to follow the old woman? Maybe this question itself is the enigma. The woman is shabby and somehow unpleasant, yet fascinating at the same time. Why?
 

Then there’s the strange hand that the old woman hides somewhere within her layers of clothing. In the poem it sounds almost as if she has an extra, mutant hand, just for the purpose of keeping hidden “secretly waiting in back of and under their collar, longing for you.” The longing of this hand has an echo of motherhood. I picture it curled at the woman’s breast. But the most interesting thing about it is the specific idea Rilke gives to the hand’s desire: “longing maybe to wrap up your hands in some piece of paper they’ve saved.” Hands are sensitive, active things. In this poem, and in general, they are a point of connection between two people. And I immediately thought that the scrap of paper in the poem had to be the poem itself. Since this phrase is the end of the poem, I’m left with a feeling of circularity. The poem has reached out its strange old woman’s hand and wrapped itself around my own hands. I’m not sure exactly what to do with it, this scrap of paper, this poem, but I can’t put it down.

I got this from S’s blog on myspace. I don’t really use myspace anymore, so I’ve exported it here because I was interested enough to want to fill it out.

“This short survey is to encourage readers, writers, and poets to share a few simple things about ourselves. There are only twelve questions, and none of them have to do with eye color, sexual preferences, or high school crushes. Please read, answer, and repost. We might learn something from each other.”

1. Three authors that have inspired or influenced my writing are:
It’s so hard to pick just three! Um…Lorine Niedecker, Elizabeth Bishop, A.S. Byatt

2. The hardest part of the writing process for me is:
Making the transition from an amazing idea in my head to the limits of my words on paper.

3. One book I have always intended to read, but I haven’t yet is:
J was talking about some classics recently and I jotted them down to add to my reading list. They’re books I’ve heard of repeatedly, so I guess that could be defined as “always intended to read.” I trust J’s judgement, anyway. The books he listed were: Madame Bovary, Silas Marner, and Moll Flanders.

4. (True or False) I sometimes read non-fiction for pleasure.
True. I read a great book about dirt recently. And I need to get that book about female pirates back from A sometime. I don’t read nonfiction as often as I read fiction and poetry, but I will pick it up if the subject seems interesting and the book seems well-written.

5. (True or False) I came from a family that read a lot.
Very true. My mom read aloud to us at bedtime, and I’ve loved reading aloud ever since. And reading in general.

6. My favorite movie adaptation of a book is:
It would be totally cliche of me to say the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, but that one is rather good. I also really loved Brokeback Mountain. And the movie version of Orlando.

7. The most boring book I ever read all the way through is:
A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes. I’ve had two teachers urge me to read that book, and then when I finally did it just bored and irritated me. I mean, the alphabetical arrangement is sort of interesting, but not interesting enough to sustain the entire book. And the content just sounded like a bunch of whining to me.

8. Poetry is:
essential language.

9. My favorite place to read is:
curled up somewhere nest-like with lots of blankets on top of me. Or on the toilet.

10. The funniest thing I have read recently is:
I’m reading a silly mystery book about monks right now, and it’s pretty entertaining, funny. I especially liked the scene with the drunken Santa Claus.

11. The most mind challenging thing I have read recently is:
Lyn Hejinian’s My Life.
12. When I stop by my local library the librarians must think:
Nothing drastic, probably. I don’t think I stand out from the other library patrons. I had a happy moment with one librarian when she expressed pleasure that my overdue fines were from books and not from movies. That was fun.

And that’s the end of the quiz!

It’s snowing pretty heavily outside, which actually looks quite lovely, despite the fact that I’ve had enough of winter.  But the snow is a sleepy, peaceful, pure sort of image, so I’ll take it for now.  I’ll take it and let it guide me to a warm place in the bed and a nap under cozy blankets while that bluish light sifts into the room.  Yeah, I couldn’t sleep again last night.  But I’m sleepy now. 

After the jump: an annotation on Franz Wright’s book Ill Lit: Selected and New Poems.  And discussion of an insomnia poem.  You can read it while I’m snoozing.

Hello Darkness, My Old Friend: Franz Wright’s Flavor

            To show you how close Franz Wright’s poetry struck to my bones, I present to you the final poem from his collection Ill Lit: Selected and New Poems, and I inform you that I read this poem in the early hours of the morning after a night of insomnia, right at that time when the sky slowly loses its darkness outside the living room windows.

“First Light”

It’s raining

in a dead language.

The empty house filled with the sound

of your name

abruptly whispered,

once,

before you finally slept.

            So, in some ways, this feels like a poetry that I could have written myself.  Certainly, this particular poem feels that way, except that these are Wright’s words, not mine.  For instance, I doubt it would have occurred to me to use the word “abruptly.”  I probably would have said “suddenly” or perhaps nothing at all, letting the timing of the whisper be described only by the title and the last line.  I respect “abruptly,” though, and it is a decent indicator of what Wright’s poetry is like compared to my own-a little rougher.  More abrupt, even.

            My experience of reading this poem about sleeplessness while experiencing sleeplessness myself makes a nice anecdote, and easily illustrates why I felt an instant connection to Wright’s poetry, but there’s a lot more to my experience of this book that isn’t so easily reduced to anecdote.  And it comes back to that sense of instant familiarity.  The thing is, I’m not used to entering a book of poems exclusively through its subject matter.  My education has trained me to experience poetry from the angle of craft, appreciating word choice, line breaks, rhyme, imagery, symbolism, structure, etc. with subject being just one element out of many.  But some of Franz Wright’s poems engaged my emotions so quickly that they circumvented the education-formed section of my thoughts, and I was left feeling but not necessarily understanding. 

            Reading this book, I was constantly forced to ask myself whether my reaction to a poem was just because I empathized strongly with its subject matter or whether it was due to Wright’s treatment of that subject matter.  Did Wright’s poetic craft make the emotions sharper, more universal, heightening the intensity of any basic factual similarities between my own life and the events in the poems, or did Wright’s craft have little to do with my reading experience?  Or, in other words, was I affected by something simple or by something complex?  And since my emotions were engaged, I found it that much harder to look at these poems objectively.  At the end of each one I felt a haze, a sense of things slipping through my fingers.  The emotion remained with me, but clarity about the elements of poetry I’d just experienced was lacking.

            Of course I know that it’s really impossible for me to read a poem without having a reaction to the way it’s put together as a poem.  Franz Wright has practiced craft in writing each poem in this book, and even if I can’t see it at first because I’m distracted by other things, that craft is still playing a part in my reading.  If these poems weren’t carefully crafted, then I would have noticed, jarringly, problems and inconsistencies and been ejected from the poems, frustrated.  This did not happen.  I remained engaged with the poetry throughout the book.  But to see and understand exactly how Franz Wright’s craft was keeping me engaged, I had to go back and look at a poem over again until I’d got over that initial emotional reaction that so clouded my intellectual capacities.

            Take that poem “First Light” for example.  My very first reaction to it was a shiver of self-recognition, almost a mystical experience, as if the poem had told my fortune.  If I’m remembering correctly, I think I focused on the idea of my name being called, and thought something about how the poem itself had sort of just called my name.  I would have said “ooooh” if there had been someone else in the room to talk to.  But as I re-read the poem in that moment, and again as I typed it out at the beginning of this annotation, I began to see the many things that Franz Wright had done to craft the poem in ways that went hand in hand with its subject matter to create my strong and vivid reaction.

            I’ve already mentioned the word “abruptly.”  There’s also the way the third line first hints at the sound of the rain, then connects to the sound of the name being whispered, creating an element of surprise.  There’s the way the word “once” stands alone on its own line, reinforcing its own meaning.  There’s the strange idea of the “raining in a dead language,” enough to engage the mind in many rich thoughts while seeking the meaning of that phrase.  And then the idea of the dead language connects to the speech later in the poem, the whisper of the name.  And the fact that the name is whispered rather than spoken.  I could go on.  And I could create similar lists for all the other poems in this book.  But the light of morning is lurking behind my curtain, and I really should get to bed.

I’m reading a little book right now called Einstein’s Dreams, by Alan Lightman.  I picked it up at my new favorite source for books–the free cart at the library.  Libraries only have limited space on their shelves, so they have to discard stuff sometimes to make room for new books.  I guess I’m just like the library, really.  My personal library can’t stop acquiring new books either.  I just can’t stop!  And then I discard ones I’m done with.  Then they can join someone else’s book collection.  It’s a literary cycle.  Actually, I’m writing this right now from the library, and I just picked up five more books on my way in here–two mysteries, a young adult novel, a historical novel, and a book by an author I like (Kate Atkinson–try her out if you’re into quirky).

Anyway, before I started rambling I meant to write about this particular free-cart book, Einstein’s Dreams.  It’s rather good.  The book jacket compares it to Italo Calvino, which makes a connection for me between my casual reading and my academic reading.  As if there needed to be a distinction…  I told B in my letter to her that I really did see the similarities with Calvino.  That’s praise, by the way, in case you haven’t heard of Italo Calvino.  But there was this one little thing, a problem, the last time I was reading Einstein’s Dreams and it was enough to make me put down the book.  I’ll pick it up again, but I had to walk away and think about editing for a while.  There was a scene in the book where a character takes up needles and starts crocheting.  As someone who both knits and crochets, I know that you don’t crochet with needles.  You crochet with a hook.  Singular.  It’s a very small detail, unimportant to the plot, as much as there is even a plot, but it reminded me that even the tiniest details matter sometimes to a reader.  Or, from the point of view of a writer, every tiny detail matters, because you don’t want to make your reader annoyed.  You don’t want to cause them to put down your book.  I just hope that when I’m trying to get published, in the future, that I can catch all tiny problems in my writing and soothe and fix them to perfection, and that I’ll have a good editor to help me.

Here’s another annotation.  This one’s on Lyn Hejinian’s book My Life.  As you will gather if you read on, I was kinda baffled by this book, and it took me a long time to get through it even though it’s rather small as a physical object.  In the end I decided that I didn’t feel confident enough to write something essay-ish and academic about it, but I thought I could manage to approach it creatively, so I tried to imitate the style without exactly understanding what I was doing.  It seemed to be an appropriate way to express the jumble of my thoughts, though, and maybe I’ve developed a slightly higher level of understanding in the process.

Click to read the annotation:

An Annotation on Lyn Hejinian’s My Life in the Style of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life

smell of black rubber

The snow was so white that it made my teeth feel quite yellow.  Standing in a warehouse.  Smell of black rubber.  Leaning on a stack of winter tires.  Reading a small white book.  The way words taste like the room you’re in.  Reading a storybook with a small child.  Pointing to the pictures.  Carried in a pocket for months.  The struggle to understand someone else’s personal language when your own language intrudes and questions every word.  A mother spreads her children around her.  Gratitude.  Patience.  My new black boots like winter tires for my feet.  There’s a sort of dusty halitosis to the room, as if it were an old man with no one to care for him, all the people too busy to sweep or vacuum.  And yet this waiting, nothing else to do but read the little white book, my attention forced on it so that the memory of reading is quite vivid, although my memory of what I read dissipates quickly.  My pink ankles, burned by the deep snow, desperate for dry socks.  There are products arranged on the shelves, faded and jumbled, and it seems that no one ever buys them.  Here I am in a pile of words.  The effort of searching for meaning, the related effort to hold on to a thread and free it from a tangle.  Shifting from foot to foot.  If you’re a mother and you need to change your infant’s diaper, you just do it on the floor, quickly and efficiently.  Need is met.  What wizardry is this?  Later we hide that sort of thing.  I keep thinking that I’m just about to be flooded with the light and energy of understanding.  Just around the corner.

faced with a lack of imagination

Perhaps I am leaving a few blonde hairs on the blue cloth of the train seat, in return for the chocolate stains the seat is leaving on my canvas pants.  Do you know which side to sit on, he asks, to see the view of the river? Clanging and tapping.  At what point am I justified in building a brick wall?  A large white bird.  I’m going today to spend some time with a friend.  On Coney Island we suddenly stepped into open space.  It was too cold, but refreshing.  She asks a lot of questions.  Perhaps the book just jumbles the order of the sentences, just as the mind is a jumbled landscape.  I record the words of the graffiti in my little notebook to use later in poetry.  Faced with the limits of my imagination, I must travel in order to fill my mind with new images.  She was startled to come downstairs and see me sitting on the couch where I’d been awake all night.  There is a paper taped to the wall in the guest bedroom for keeping a list of adjectives describing the noises made by the ancient heating pipes.  Hissing and struggling.  I read the first chapter out loud.  It is often justified to question the genre of things like this.  For a long time we walked in the wrong direction, thinking that the yarn shoppe would be on the next block.  Wind off the ocean.  A construction site hidden behind a plywood wall.  She said she understood why the book was confusing to me.  Was it poetry?  But if so, I was fooled by the shape on the page.  Frequently we found ourselves on trains.  A stranger will speak to you and it will be an awkward moment.  The employee of the bookstore who said he never reads.  Loose boards on the boardwalk.  She said she though she’d be exhausted by all that stream of consciousness stuff. My legs are tired, but I have to keep walking.

thinking in circles

I must admit that I’m irritated by one of the repeated phrases, “a pause, a rose, something on paper.”  On the couch, three crocheted blankets and a cat on my lap.  The wheeled cart of free books in the lobby of the library.  I have a task to do, and I feel like it’s taken me years.  Thinking becomes hazy and circular.  A blue quilted bag with many pockets inside.  A white book small enough to fit in a pocket.  My birthday.  She’s caught up with me now, and maybe it’s better that way.  Imitation is how I deal with confusion.  I still haven’t figured out the significance of that repetition.  All I wanted was a new friend.  Should I be counting sentences, digging in the upturned earth for a key?  The ethics of writing a phone number on a slippery scrap of paper.  The idea: to cheat and make this into a creative writing assignment-an annotation on, in the style of.  Too many sweet delicious white chocolate balls in one sitting.  It seems a foreign language that I failed to learn how to speak.  They say that if you watch television it helps.  I could have just asked her what she thought, I suppose, but I didn’t.  Instead developing strategies for becoming a grand wizard on a computer game.  Just the one idea.  Theory of the importance of each sentence, like poetry.  Each word.  In the end, I have little patience with puzzles.  A sea bird just skimming along the top of the waves.  Isolation.  I have to pursue my one idea because it’s all I have.  Traveling again soon.  Even if I never reach the cold, wise depths.  Eat more salt.  Walk in black boots until my feet hurt.  Hands crouched at the edge of the keyboard.

Late last night I sort of felt like watching a movie, but also felt rather tired.  I was yawning, but didn’t want to go to bed yet, and a movie would have been a cozy thing to do.  Then again, I was uncertain that I’d want to stay awake for an hour and a half, or whatever a movie would take.  I have several books scattered around the house that I’m in the middle of reading, but none of them felt attractive to me right then.  Maybe I should have just given in to the sleepiness and gone to bed, but I frequently resist bedtime, like I’m a stubborn girl again, or something.  Anyway, I decided against watching a movie and started scanning the bookshelves for something new to read a few chapters of.  What I finally selected was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.

Now, this is a book that I’ve read before.  I went through a R.L. Stevenson phase at some point in high school, although I’ve actually never read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  There’s something nice about re-reading a book that’s very different from reading a book for the first time.  If the book is worthy of a second reading (or a third, fourth, fifth, etc.), then it’s like an act of returning.  Going back to a place, a city or a landscape, that once welcomed you or changed you.  And your friends are still living there, even though you’ve been away for a long time.  Re-reading is a much more relaxed sort of reading than the first encounter with a book, which is why it was the right thing for me to do last night.  You already know what’s going to happen, so there’s no anxiety.  Instead, you just enjoy the scenery, and collect details and emotions that you didn’t see the first time.  It has been a really long time since I read Treasure Island, so most of the little parts of the story feel new to me.  I really just remember the broad arc of what happens.  I was going to say something cheesy about finding new parts of a book when you read it at a different time in your life than the first time, how your relationship with the book changes because you’ve changed, etc. but I feel like I’ve been cheesy enough already, so you can think that one out for yourself.

It’s also interesting to me how this book in particular has been one that people return to.  There have been a lot of movies made based on this story, too.  I’m partial to the Muppet version, personally.  It’s an exciting story, lots of action and whatnot, so I guess that helps it to translate well to movie adaptations.  Also, people love pirates.  I think that Long John Silver is one of the archetypes of exactly why people are so attached to or attracted to pirates.  He’s confusing.  Should you like him or dislike him?  Is he good or evil?  The bad guy is so much more interesting than the good guy.  We all want to be the bad guy, right?  We want to get away with things.  Or maybe some people want to date the rebel.  Like Captain Jack Sparrow.  Yes, Johnny Depp is sexy, but I think it would be much more interesting to be Captain Sparrow than anything else.

I hate having to throw vegetables away, like these poor parsnips, just because we don’t have anywhere to compost them.  It feels really wrong to be putting biodegradable stuff into the trash can in plastic bags, which will then go to the town dump, where we drop them into a big metal bin with everyone else’s plastic bags, and then I don’t even know where they go from there.  Most likely to a landfill, where I know this stuff will just sit in a huge pile with all the other waste, not given the opportunity to return gently to earth like it’s supposed to.  I recently read a book about the importance and beauty of decomposition (Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, by William Bryant Logan), so this concept is especially prominent in my mind at the moment.  But my family has always composted, made new earth to spread on the gardens, nourished gigantic wayward pumpkin vines, tolerated the mess made by squirrels and crows who loot the compost pile for food, etc.  And when S and I lived in Burlington, we happily took part in the town composting program, saved our scraps, brought our smelly white bucket to the recycling center, dumped it out, and then started over again. 

But we don’t have that opportunity where we live now.  At first I thought I’d like to install some kind of composting system in the backyard here.  Even though we’re renting, we do have a small, shared, backyard where we can garden, and our landlady said she didn’t mind if we composted.  But there are a lot of hurdles to make it work in the backyard.  Our back steps are treacherous.  The space is bordered by four other houses, with people who might complain.  Stray cats and squirrels and such would potentially make a mess.  Even with a closed system, we would have to go outside over snow and ice in the winter to bring our scraps. 

I do believe that all of these problems could be overcome, but I’ve instead fixated on an exciting alternative:  worm composting!  This idea makes me happy because I like the thought of keeping the worms as pets.  I already have three cats and a dog, but still…  It’s also a practical idea because the worm bin can be kept inside.  We feed the worms, and they help us break down our waste, which also produces lovely garden-enriching moist brown stuff, and everybody’s happy.  If worms can be happy.  I’m certainly anthropomorphizing them a good bit as I imagine them blissfully munching our wilted lettuce and flaccid carrots.  Come to me, worm-friends!  I have my fingers crossed that my birthday wish will be answered.  In the meantime, I’m channelling wriggly worm-like energy.  I bought a slinky, and sent it walking down the stairs several times as soon as I got home with it, just like a kid again.  In fact, I think I’ll take it for a little walk right now.