Category Archives: Baltimore

a propos of nothing, Baltimore, gradschool

the morning after the night before

Last night, department holiday party – shades of ON BEAUTY. I feel relentlessly adult, attending a department holiday party that is not my father’s, but my own.

It’s snowing. It’s Baltimore and it’s snowing. Unlike with rain, I always wonder how the sky doesn’t run out of snow. It seems so laborious to produce.

Some days, days when lots of work needs to be done and words placated, you start the day by losing your phone, and spend an hour and a half looking for it, before you discover that you dropped it inside one of your rain boots.

Still snowing. Downstairs, my roommate and friends are singing and playing acoustic guitar, a Saturday-morning service. The sound of voices and strings.

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Baltimore, education, science

from the backhanded department

Last week, there were people standing outside the Hopkins bookstore handing out free copies of The Origin Of Species to everyone who passed by. The edition was published, and I have to assume the effort was funded, by these people – “publishing the changeless word for a changing world.” It’s a Florida-based Christian publisher – and the back cover tells us, “A wealth of scientific discoveries since 1971 give a resounding answer to whether Darwin’s theory has been proved,” and otherwise refers to evolution as “an unproved theory.”

An interesting way to make your point, handing out copies of the foundation text of the theory you’re arguing against. I would think that the arguments of the Darwin would outweigh the commentary they’re trying to package it with.

Also fun, from the cover: “This [edition] is for use in schools, colleges, and prestigious learning institutions.” Not for the un-prestigious. I wonder how many colleges in the South they’ve been handing these out in? And if one more person tells me that Baltimore isn’t in the South, I’m going to have to refer the matter to the enormous statue of Stonewall outside the door. It may not be the deep South, but it sure isn’t the North.

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Baltimore, the chorus

many are the monsters

Yesterday I taught a chorus workshop in the home of a professor here in Baltimore, to two faculty and four students. We worked on a passage from Judith Molina’s translation of Brecht’s adaptation of ANTIGONE. There was quiche. It was good. Things observed:

– Brecht completely rewriting choruses (Many are the wonders, but none more wonderful than man; Love undefeated in the fight) by simply changing the thesis statement (Many are the monsters, none more monstrous than man; Lust, not love…etc.)

– Why should the members of the chorus have the same point of view, or objective, even when they are all reciting a speech with a unified objective? They don’t have to. They can each have a different approach to it. Complexity = good.

– It is always worth it to get off book, no matter how long it takes, for the text exercises.

I then went to the Towson mall with one of my friends here, and bought a watch. Then I couldn’t use my eyes any more, so I got nothing done. And today I have to catch up on work. I’ve been sick a lot lately – five days of strep throat, several days of not being able to use one of my eyes.

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Baltimore, Judaism

Challah at your boy

A is walking, very quickly, up Charles Street to One World to get some work done, for once. It may or may not be Sukkot. Suddenly, A is approached by a group of decked-out Baltimore Jews, spearheaded by a small boy of about 5.

Kid: Are you Jewish?
A: Uh…yes.
Kid: Do you want to say the blessing with us?
A: Okay.

At which point, the kid recites the blessing with A, one word at a time.

This happened to me, as it did to many unsuspecting Hopkinsians. We had a nice conversation afterwards about Poland – I was carrying the bag from the festival, and they saw the Polish and wondered. These particular Jews were from Belgium, originally, although they’d all been born in the US. They tried to recruit me for their Chabad. Although I’m not going to get recruited on any kind of serious basis, I will probably go check it out at some point. I visited a Chicago Chabad two Yom Kippurs ago and it was very interesting to observe.

It was pretty awesome the first time, but the kid, and various other kids from the Chabad, staked out Charles all that day and the next day, accosting students and having them do the blessing. I eventually started telling them “You guys already got me.”

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Baltimore, film, gradschool, poetry, writing

it must be some sort of diabolical mind control

On Wednesday and Thursday of last week, I had individual meetings with about two-thirds of the students in my class. I’ll meet the rest next week. We talked about their artistic tastes and their writing experiences. It took a lot of time to meet with all of them, but I hope it will be worth it in terms of establishing a good workshop relationship.

On Friday, we discussed Elizabeth Bishop’s “In The Waiting Room” and Seamus Heaney’s “Digging,” and got into a spirited discussion about enjambment.

And thus far I have obeyed the Department of Health and Safety mandate of taking at least 24 consecutive hours entirely off from all kinds of work each week: from Friday at 2 pm till Saturday at 2 pm, all I did was watch movies and hang out with friends. It was wonderful. We went to the Evergreen House, a very creepy museum and house belonging to a Baltimore railroad baron’s family, and saw screenings of the animated TELL-TALE HEART and the live-shmaction THE RAVEN projected outside, as part of a Poe exhibit. We also saw an old edition of Poe with illustrations, and one of his signed letters. The man’s handwriting had more flourishes than a fencing match.

And then I also watched TANPOPO, which I would watch again this very second. You couldn’t pay me enough to sit through THE RAVEN again, except for the magician’s duel section – which I would like to get an isolated clip of. Clearly, Dr. Scarabus’s powers extend far beyond the walls of the castle.

We were hoping someone would read Poe’s The Raven aloud, but no one did – so that situation was rectified later in the evening through recitation. I have never read so much poetry aloud as I have here, with these people. It’s great. The Raven, as a poem, is perhaps just slightly too long – but, my God, there are great lines in it.

Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!

I also read Annabel Lee last night, and, as usual, it blew what remained of my mind. Did you know it was one of the last complete poems composed by Poe? I did not.

I am now sort of back on the clock, now. I have a new first draft going. It has to use imagery – we have assignments for workshop – and, as you all know, imagery is my weakness. So this was good for me to try. In writing the draft, I found some stuff I would not normally have found.

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Baltimore, books

one potato, two potato

This morning, I walked with C2 to The Book Thing. We were there at nine, as if it was a farmers’ market and the freshest-baked and locally grown books would be all gone by 10 AM.

This was my first visit to Baltimore’s Charles Village book-recycler, and, oh, oh, oh, was it gorgeous. This alone may be enough to get my parents to come visit. Free books, guys. Free. Although I don’t know how you’re going to get them back to LA…but bring a truck!

This is what I came away with: a restrained count of seven items.

1) Art & Error: Modern Textual Editing (ed. Ronald Gottesman and Scott Bennett)

2) A Reclam edition of the Nibelungenlied

3) A Mathematician’s Apology, by G.H. Hardy with a foreword by C.P. Snow

4) The Selected Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson – C2 made me get this. It remembered me that I haven’t read any RLS since I was a kid, when I tore through KIDNAPPED and TREASURE ISLAND and DR. JEKYLL in a very short period of time. I think we read KIDNAPPED for a 4th-grade lit unit and we had to make a movie poster for it. That was fun. I have always enjoyed imitating advertising.

5) Madrigal’s Magic Key to French (having passed my language exam, I am inspired to review the finer points* of grammar)

6) Das erste Jahr, second edition, Margaret Keidel Bluske and Elizabeth Keidel Walther

7) America The Beautiful, in the words of Walt Whitman – an art edition of 7 of Whitman’s poems with huge photographs of famous US national parks and scenic sites accompanying the poetry. One of them is next to a characteristically Arizonan rock formation, and we agreed that Whitman had probably never been there. It’s a little silly.

I am not going to keep or read them all – some will be wending their way to unsuspecting recipients. Beware. Beware!

* Why? Why the “finer” points? Why?

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Baltimore, gradschool, poetry

diseases of the poem-organ

After completing WriSems boot camp, I am much more comfortable using the words “poetry” and “poet” to refer to myself. We had to identify which genre we were in so many times that the words lost some of their preciousness. I went to a party with a bunch of med students, and got to be part of this conversation:

“What’s your specialty?”

“Gastroenterology. What’s yours?”

“Poetry.”

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Baltimore, F&F, travel

The new software requires that you restart your computer now

I’m back from a weekend in Ithaca and my friend’s memorial service.

We had no official religious people present, so the four of us made our own ceremony, out of our memories and a few objects. A housed me and J, in her new apartment on Geneva, and L came the next day. Many others wanted to be present but couldn’t.

We felt a great pressure to properly represent both the absent people and our missing friend. It was a very hard weekend. I was sick, one of my friends threw out his back. None of us slept well. We wanted so much to do justice to him. We were so stressed out that I got into this argument with one of the present friends:

A: This is really stressful.
B: What do you mean, this is stressful? This isn’t stressful. Why would this be stressful?
A: I mean that we are stressed out.
B: What do you mean, we are stressed out?

Around 3 o’clock on Saturday, we began. We began at the falls, but it was too crowded there. We adjourned to Telluride House. It was the last day of the TASP (summer program for high school students at which we met, ten years ago). We walked into the house as the last TASPer was walking out.

We were dressed all in black, carrying an egg crate full of flowers and a folder of photographs. She, the last TASPer to leave, was carrying a suitcase and wearing a white T-shirt. I wanted to tell her our errand, but I think she knew without knowing.

We sat on the second-floor balcony, overlooking the hill. We laid out pictures of him, and lit a candle. We drank rum and smoked cigarettes, and shared them with the ground. We read poems and tributes from those who could not be present, and those who could. J had composed an aphorism for the occasion.

How silent is a flash of lightning:
thunder marks its noisy memory.

A bee rested gently on the white card with his face on it in the center of our setup. Ignoring the flowers to the left and right, he crawled in a circle around the picture.

We hid picture icons of his face in the House, and tacked one to the TASP bulletin board in the main hall. We cast walnuts into the river. We planted a native columbine by the little creek that adjoins the House on the Cornell campus, and placed a stone next to it. We laid flowers on the stone. Then we burned the papers we had brought.

It rained lightly (leap up like that, like that, and land so lightly) throughout. So lightly.

Almost six hours from when we had started, we walked to the Ithaca Commons, and ate dinner as if we had fought a war.

Having returned to Baltimore now, I can see that there is no “justice” with things like this. The only justice the living will allow is for the dead to not be dead. No funeral can be adequate. No memorial can substitute for the person. Whatever you can do – and we did all we could – is good enough.

The heavy rain came on the return trip. Driving back from Ithaca in it, slowed by fog and construction traffic, J played Arlo Guthrie on the Ipod, and then we caught a radio special about Dylan going electric at the Newport Folk Festival. They played an all-electric version of “Maggie’s Farm.” Then a documentary historian told about how, after the negative crowd reaction to the electric guitar set, someone went back stage and convinced Dylan to come out again and play some of his acoustic songs.

He didn’t have a guitar, so he borrowed one from the crowd – and he sang “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”

J and I reached Philly so late last night that I couldn’t go on to the bus to B-more. I stayed the night in a room belonging to one of my brother’s co-telecommuter co-workers, J’s roommate, in another instance of the world being small enough to fit in your pocket.

I met S, a philosopher, and J and I spent much time lying on the floor and bemoaning our hurting backs and hearts to her.

J’s roommates are moving out of the West Philly house. The room was almost empty. I wrote a poem about the green glass bottle on his bookshelf. The next morning, I carried the bottle down the stairs, helping him move out. And he dropped me off at 11th and Market, by the bus station, and I caught the 10 AM bus back.

I am here now.

I mean more by this than that I am sitting, sweaty and dusty, in my empty room, in the house where I pay rent, typing on my Frankenstein laptop. When I move to a new place, often I feel that I have left most of my self behind. This is why we move, sometimes. But now that I have been to Ithaca and back, on such a task, I am all here now.

Click Restart to shut down all applications and restart.

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Baltimore, theater

enter, with tigers

Yesterday, I did some research for J’s CYRANO at the library. She was perplexed by a stage direction in the Burgess translation that reads:

Onto the stage comes a coach, with drivers and tigers

for Roxane’s act 4 entrance. I went through a whole bunch of other translations and the original, looking for another reference to the tigers, but couldn’t find any. It must be a production-specific thing.

I then went to Trivia at the Wharf Rat again. Met one of the WS folks’ friends, a woman who teaches English in a Baltimore public high school. She was sharing horror stories about teaching in a converted wood shop with no air conditioning.

After Trivia, I listened to two of the people I was there with, friends for the past two or three years, tell stories about the program, how they became friends, etc. One of them is leaving in a few days. The city and the atmosphere around this program are both very seductive, and I think a lot of people keep staying on for quite awhile, for that reason. But he thinks it’s time for him to go.

I always like to listen to stories like that, because two people tend to have different memories of how, exactly, they met in the first place. When I think about it, I can’t even remember how I met these guys, and I’ve only known them for a couple of weeks. I believe it was at a party. But we were somewhere else before that, and I don’t know where.

I’m writing a poem based on Trivial Pursuit answers.

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