Author Archives: weinberg

Baltimore

Snow day 3

The street is plowed, and a snow-topped taxi and #3 bus just sped south on Saint Paul at something like usual velocity: but the sidewalks, the steps, are all buried again. Looks like less than six inches: nothing like the 20 inches of Snowpocalypse I, but it’s still coming down.

A lone hooded figure, beating its hands about its face like trying to cast away a demon (not my simile, but I don’t remember where I read it) struggles north on the opposite side of the street, wearing a backpack. And now, someone else, walking a bewildered black Lab puppy that runs in circles.

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Baltimore

snow day 2

No classes, again. The campus would be accessible easily by those of us who can walk to it: the problem is vehicle and wheel access.

Working from home and from the neighborhood coffeeshops, which are all closing at 5 in anticipation of the upcoming onslaught. Frequenting the raided supermarket, where certain distributors have come through, and others, not. The block of sidewalk in front of my house is navigable by a path etched through the foot-high bank of snow: it is only wide enough for one person to pass at a time. The cars drive through similar trenches, just wide enough for one car. St. Paul is down to one lane. Good thing it’s a one-way street. I imagine the bigger streets, like York Road, have been plowed, but I haven’t been off of these two blocks in three days to see.

More snow to come this evening.

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music, theater

lost Meyerhold-intended Prokofiev music

For NYC’ers, the music premieres Tuesday night. More: “The music is part of a 1939 composition, which didn’t see the light of day again until 2004, when a facsimile of Prokofiev’s manuscript was published. It’s one of several pieces Yale faculty, alumni and students will perform Tuesday night. Berman says Music for Athletic Exercises was written to be performed on a grand scale.

“There was a project of putting on a huge athletic pageant on the Red Square in Moscow in the summer of 1939, which would involve thousands of athletes from all over the Soviet Union,” he says.

Berman explains that V.E. Meyerhold, a famous Russian director, was hired to stage this extravaganza, but one morning he didn’t show up to work on the piece.

“Nobody could find him,” Berman says. “He was arrested, as was the habit in these years of the Soviet history. He was arrested, imprisoned and subsequently shot to death.”

Traumatic as it was, Prokofiev finished the piece.”

– NPR via AJ

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poetry

bishoprics

1) I must not fall.
The spangled sea below wants me to fall.
It is hard as diamonds; it wants to destroy us all.

2) Everything only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and.’

3) Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where would we be today?

– Elizabeth Bishop, from, respectively, “The Unbeliever,” “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” and “Questions of Travel”

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Baltimore, music

time for you and time for me

It was a slow snow day:
And the sun was beating
On the soldiers by the side of the road
There was a bright light
A shattering of shop windows
The bomb in the baby carriage
Was wired to the radio
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby, don’t cry
Don’t cry

– Paul Simon, “The Boy In The Bubble,” Graceland. Happy snow day, Hopkins.

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Baltimore, poetry

how many things have become silent?

There is a layer on top of the banisters on the outside stairs that’s as tall as my elbow to my extended fingers, and it’s still falling: little fluffy specks. Not cold, not icy – not yet. But lots and lots of it. So, in the absence of snowplows, here is a snowpoem by RPW.

LOVE RECOGNIZED
There are many things in the world and you
Are one of them. Many things keep happening and
You are one of them, and the happening that
Is you keeps falling like snow
On the landscape of not-you, hiding hideousness, until
The streets and the world of wrath are choked with snow.

How many things have become silent? Traffic
Is throttled. The mayor
Has been, clearly, remiss, and the city
Was totally unprepared for such a crisis. Nor
was I — yes, why should this happen to me?
I have always been a law-abiding citizen.

But you, like snow, like love, keep falling.

And it is not certain that the world will not be
Covered in a glitter of crystalline whiteness.

Silence.

– Robert Penn Warren, “Love Recognized,” Now and Then (link is to him reading, in his very dramatic voice)

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poetry

new and rejected poems

I read on Monday. 7 poems, 4 new, 2 heavily revised, and 1 somewhat revised. Mostly botanical. I was planning, up until right before the reading, to read poems about people sandwiched in between all the plants, and then I cut them all out and only read things that had some vegetable elements.

As before, the most popular poem was the “easy” one, the one I revised the least, and almost cut for being too light and fluffy. Eh. It goes to show, I guess, that things that come easily to you come easily to others, and things you agonize over bear the marks of that agonizing.

Forgive me for not telling you about the reading, Baltimoreans, but I wasn’t ready: I have resolved that for the next two, I will do a better job of being willing to tell people.

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