for a wedding. It’s that time of year.
Author Archives: weinberg
To the (current) owner of the gunmetal-gray old-school BMW 350i convertible with brown leather interior parked with the top down on St. Paul between 31st and 32nd
This is just to say
that I am going to steal your car after I get off work
and I am sorry for the inconvenience it will cause you
but not for the action.
You know it’s going to be a good weekend
when you wake up with the Norton staring at you, opened to “Oh, she was perfect past all parallel…” There could be worse things. I read “Church-Going” last night before going to sleep, and for some reason, it sent me wandering over to Byron. Something about the clippedness of it. Maybe I’m finally going to make it through Don Juan. Maybe Larkin has some Byron in him. I don’t know.
Today, going on a morning bagel run–then the composer/lyricist group is meeting at noon, for the last time this semester–then a liquor/party supplies run–then the Interdepartmental Flasker is happening this evening, a co-party between the graduate students of the English and Writing Seminars departments. It is definitely the end of the semester. It is definitely also summer: yesterday was the first uncomfortably muggy and humid day. The sky, right now, out my window, is unbrokenly blue and hot-looking.
I am furniture-sitting a friend’s comfortable, overstuffed striped armchair for the year, and its presence in my room makes me feel like I am an adult. Sure, I don’t own it, but it’s going to be around for awhile. Can’t say fairer, etc.
I made my neighbors dislike me from the first
This is from chapter 26, “Blindness,” from Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books Of The Odyssey, his Borgesian re-re-telling-telling of that myth and variations:
“I could have lived among light and ambrosia, bright forever-young things coming and going on each other’s arms and the wine and the night inexhaustible. But that world was flat to me, and for all that my father was great among them I wanted no part of it. Even if she had been true (I am not considered handsome, never have been) I think I would have preferred my island, my farm, my solitude. I have never had the island altogether to myself but I made my neighbors dislike me from the first–from time to time a farm-wife dropped by as in duty bound but I offered no more than politeness required, or a little less, to ensure my privacy. Sometimes in the distance I heard a girl’s singing and I needed no more company.”
I read the book months ago and marked it up with Post-Its to paste here. Getting to some of that now. It reminds me of Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams: the stories are brief, many of them just a page or two long. Each one is a different version of the Odyssey, or some part of it. It’s very good.
spinwheel
Summer is upon us. Baltimore rains, as if to say “Summer, yes, but on my terms.” Saying goodbye to students and to classmates. Classes are over: finals are almost over. We have all gone back to work, or have made preparations to leave town. We have had and are having more goodbye/hello/hello/goodbye parties. I am staying, and settling in. I have been exchanging a lot of emails with the incoming class of new MFAers, both poets and fiction writers. It’s exciting to think of them being here soon.
And in the midst of all these routine routines, today is a day in which something happened which had never happened to me before. (Isn’t every day?) Yes, but this one, especially.
rooms hidden above dodgy looking shops
Speaking of burnout, and coffee, here’s a selection of items from Ellie Harrison‘s Tea Blog. I like going through it and pulling out the ones that interest me and making my own list of her excerpts. It’s not possible for me to link to individual quotes, because of how the site works, but all of these that follow are hers.
4 April 2006
17:06
It’s so funny to think of us working in this studio, nobody knows we are here. I wonder how many artists there are working away in rooms hidden above dodgy looking shops?
21 November 2008
16:00
I just find discussions about materials and technique highly irrelevant and thoroughly boring
23 March 2006
14:52
I want to go and look round the artists’ studios, but I really don’t feel like I can string a sentence together
28 August 2008
12:35
A cup of coffee can be a very powerful tool and you must choose the optimum time at which to use it in order for it to have the maximum positive impact on your work
25 October 2008
14:48
I’m not looking forward to the day when I have arthritis
Yesterday’s consumption
(2) plays by Russian playwrights
(8) episodes of Burn Notice
(1) more cup of coffee for the road
What remains of my brain has been burned to the place known as “out.”
ps.
I recreated the “The Dead Echo / Death’s Echo” speaking experiment yesterday with another poet. We didn’t record it: we just read it, together, aloud, in the format with multiple voices on the verse and a single voice on the refrain. It was great to see chorus-type things poking their heads outside of rehearsal and into life that isn’t staged, or recorded. It made me remember that there was a time when it was not possible to record anything, and that some part of the virtue of experimenting with choruses is just that working on them gets you speaking with other people.
wrap-up
Concert was great on Friday, and I went to two panel sessions and a play for the New Russian Drama conference at Towson yesterday. More panels and plays today. I’ve been taking lots of notes and will put a more detailed report up here when it’s over.
My graduate classes are finished: all that remains in the semester is grading and studying for the final in an undergraduate music theory course I’ve been unofficially auditing. Not nothing, but considerably less something.
Dara Weinberg 