International Incidents

1.

Wang Ping asks if
we went to a seder
last night
She did,
in Minneapolis
No, I say, we're not
observant
as though we constantly
overlook details


2.

The teachers in the lounge
crowd around the
Swedish visitor
You must be very proud
one of them beams
to be Swedish
She has no idea
what that means
She says,
I don't _dislike_
being Swedish


3.

Who's ever met a Bulgarian?
he would shout in the bar
Then one night
two homely blond sisters
smiled and said
_We_ are Bulgarians!
They smiled for two weeks
then went away forever


Robert Hershon
Calls from the Outside World
Hanging Loose Press

The above is a poem that was retired from Poetry Daily archives last week.

Besides a bedpan I did acquire some other birthday loot. K. introduced me to the The Singing Loins with a double cd of their ballsy Celticish folk songs. (Check out their web site for some mp3s. )

I had to treat myself for the upcoming baseball season so I bought a Red Sox replica road jersey. I might have an opportunity to wear it at some Spring Training games in Phoenix or Tucson in a few weeks.

Since we are 'Talkin Baseball', I should mention that I had a good $3 find at The Book End yesterday. A hardcover copy of Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy by Jane Leavy. One of the better sports books or just plain books I have read about one of the classiest guys inside and outside of baseball. Jane Leavy does a wonderful job seperating the man from the myth and uses intercalary chapters to recap his perfect game from Sep. 9th, 1965.

Red State Librarian sent me this link to a Korean Food Journal. Hmmmm spicy squid. I feel a trip to Aoeshe for lunch coming up.

My friends treated my 40th birthday with grace and good taste. Especially the gifts.

The Assassination of Little Tree

Cats and plants are sometimes not a good mix.

I woke up one morning last week to find this crime scene in the kitchen. The prime suspects were sound asleep when picked up, literally, for questioning. It seems to be true that it is the guilty who sleep soundly. There was evidence in the water bowl that the culprit had attempted to clean up afterwards. The tree has been moved to the laundry room and after a few pints of soil is in stable condition.

I managed to survive last week's birthday celebration..barely. I will try and keep up some postings a little more frequently. Bookwise I have been working my way through Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer detective series...as one critic pointed out Macdonald essentially wrote the same book over and over but it was a very good book.

The wedding party photo from my parent's wedding in Honolulu, May 1965.

My grandfather was stationed in Honolulu for his civil service assignment and so my mother attended high school and business school there and met my father who was in the Navy.

My paternal grandparents John & Hilda with my Uncle Frank and his fiance shortly before his wedding in West Palm Beach. My Aunt Gerry still lives in this trailer where photo was taken.

My maternal grandparents (Roy and Alice) arriving in Tokyo (Aug 23 1969). My grandfather was working for the government and they traveled quite a bit.

My first Santa Pub Crawl...literally.

I have some more pictures of my parents and grandparents that I want to put up as a way of thanking them for my being brought into this world. It will take some time however and I must devote myself now to actual work if I want to leave here today and celebrate. A gathering at the Dublin Underground is scheduled for this evening. See you there. I will get those pictures up if I can though.

"Nobody Does it Better"

St. Valentine Baptizing St. Lucilla Jacopo Bassano

Sonnet XXIII

As an unperfect actor on the stage
Who with his fear is put besides his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength's abundance weakens his own heart.
So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love's rite,
And in mine own love's strength seem to decay,
O'ercharged with burden of mine own love's might.
O, let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love and look for recompense
More than that tongue that more hath more express'd.
O, learn to read what silent love hath writ:
To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.

William Shakespeare

Happy Valentine's Day!

Obligatory Cat Picture of the Month

Extremely bored from posing for one shot too many.

David Sedaris has an essay online about wild flowers and weed at The New Yorker. This is one of the stories he did in his show in Cedar Rapids in the fall and I imagine it will appear in his next collection.

Indexed

I added this site back to list of blogs (that word still grates). If I recall it was Ondine who first clued me into this site. I was catching up on the archives and there was a post about a short film clip which incorporates some of the graphs and charts. It is pretty cool. Although the narrator sounds like Werner Herzog from Grizzly Man and I keep excepting to see an animated graph about one's proximity to starving bears and the likelihood of being eaten. I think there is a correlation but I am no mathematician. The site for film is here. A direct link to movie is here. You need Quicktime/Itunes to run it.

The Last Picture Show

Grant Wood...

Overall I would say I was underwhelmed by our trip to the Figge. There are some good pieces there but the museum as a whole seems to suffer from an identity crisis. A very modern building with an eclectic but not very modern collection. It all depends on what the visiting or rotating exhibit is. We saw a bunch of quilts. Definitely check it out before going. We did luck out as the day we went there was no admission fee.

They did have some cool things for kids. They had easels and paper set up in the Winter Garden overlooking the river for sketching. And there was an interactive room with fancy architecture blocks.

...and Grant Wood's chair and table.

I took a few more pictures before security informed me that photos were not allowed. There are some good things in the permanent collection such as a Durer engraving and a Bierstadt painting of waterfalls but it is mostly a muddled hodge-podge of styles. I think we expected more modern art to go with the modern building and some photography, design etc. The chair above is in the collection but the design/museum store in the lobby is selling the Eames Lounge Chair. (My birthday is coming up so if anyone has six grand for a chair it's on the wish list.) Anyway I would definitely go back (in warmer weather) if there was a decent exhibition offered.

The Iris Dement/Pieta Brown show was very good although a little steep at 30 bucks a pop. Pieta sounded better than I remember and she of course was paired with Bo Ramsey who is always sublime backing her up. I can't recall the last time I saw Bo do a solo show although he did have a new album of blues covers out. Apparently Greg Brown was in the audience but alas my hoped for duet did not occur. Iris' set was almost identical to her Englert performance but still worth hearing again. She is comically neurotic and her stage banter plays off of that. Iris also has some great new songs about her mother, her marriage, and her husband etc... so I wish she would just record them and release an album. She sang a couple of amazing covers, Johnny Cash's I Still Miss Someone and Greg's The Train Carrying Jimmie Rodgers Home.

I liked the cabaret seating of the River Music Experience even if the energy seemed a little better at Englert and if the weather was better I would be inclined to return this weekend to catch Alejandro Escovedo. We managed to avoid the river boats and gambling completely. Not sure how that happened.

More Scenes from the Museum

Feast of the Patron Saint by Franklyn Gile Latortue

Behind the Scenes at the Museum

View from the Winter Garden of the Figge

Happy Birthday Elmo

My nephew Andrés sporting Elmo.

I was watching The Today Show before leaving for work. Elmo appeared on the show because it was his annual 3rd 1/2 birthday and to promote a literacy campaign. He also squeezed in some time for some serious macking on news anchor Ann Curry. Check out the video from Today show website.

Heading to Davenport tomorrow to explore the Figge and to see/hear Iris Dement & Pieta Brown at the River Music Experience. (I keep hoping Greg will show up at one of these shows and join Iris for a couple songs.) Naturally I also had to pick the coldest weekend of the winter to make this trek to the Mississippi.

Browsing the shelves recently revealed some great finds at the library's used book store as well as some eye catching titles from the library's new book shelves most notably Celia Rivenbark's Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank: And Other Words of Delicate Southern Wisdom.

I didn't check it out but made note of it for the future. I did grab another verbosely titled book, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose. She breaks down close reading advice with excerpts from other works and has a list of suggested books to read as she puts it "immediately". A list is always a good place to start arguing and she provides ample fodder by inclusion(Franzen) or omission(McCarthy) for such discussions.

Enjoy the weekend.

A little Husker Du in the morning usually gets me going too.

Sinus pressure from hell today. I tweaked up blog a bit and restored some links that were lost in the template migration plus some new ones. I need to work on figuring out tags. '...time enough and the world.'

Some quick hits for today...

The New Yorker has a David Foster Wallace story up this week.

The Sports Guy is in Miami for the Super Bowl and offers not only some travel advice...

"(Which reminds me, the people I know with Miami experience recommended the following tips for Super Bowl week: Keep your wallet in your front pocket at all times; don't tell anyone your room number; don't get on I-95 unless someone is holding a revolver to your head; hold your drink at all times; don't wear an expensive watch or expensive jewelry; double-lock your room door at night; look both ways as you're exiting an ATM; and if you hear what sounds like a car backfiring in a nightclub, lower your head and start running. Good times! Nothing gets the creative juices going like the ongoing threat of physical danger. I'm not even kidding.)"

... but also some of the themes for the week.

"5. The Maxim party and the Playboy party going head-to-head this weekend. Kind of like Grey's Anatomy and CSI battling it out Thursday nights, only with more cleavage and more dead hookers. "

The rest is here. Enjoy!

The Art of Losing

This is a painting by my brother-in-law's father. It was inspired by a picture of my sister and her husband with my nephew on the pier in New London. I took a shot of the painting when I was back in CT over Thanksgiving.

I am back from Ohio. The work there went well but it was too brief a trip to do much else except catch a cold, forget my phone charger in the hotel room, and leave a copy of The Peloponnesian War in the glove box of a rental car. (That reminds me we watched Troy this weekend and while not great it was infinitely better than Oliver Stone's swords and sandals piece of dung Alexander which we attempted last week and ended up fast forwarding the last 90 minutes with the subtitles turned on. Anyway, I was reading about Sparta and Athens in preparation for The 300 until losing the book but I digress.)

I excel at losing things on trips. I left a pair of dress shoes in Baltimore after a long weekend at Camden Yards to see the Red Sox. I misplaced a phone charger in Mesa after the most recent presidential election but at least they mailed that one back to me...for a slight fee. There also was a baseball cap in Columbus last spring along with another phone charger. Carelessness, I realize it as such but Elizabeth Bishop puts it in perspective.

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.


--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

"...Also, Dude, chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please. "

"To criticize it would be like tripping a dwarf."

-Wilfrid Sheed on Otto Preminger's "Hurry Sundown,"

My new favorite quotation and applicable to so many things. I ran across this yesterday catching up on book chats by Washington Post's Michael Dirda my current favorite critic and who I turn to first when looking for something to read. One comes out of a chat session with a multitude of suggestions. Links are below but you may have to register for free to read them in their entirety.

Dirda on Books Archive here.

Dirda Reviews Archive here.

American Poets Project

I love this multicolored collection of slim volumes of poems from The Library of America. I also have a few of their normal volumes like Tom Paine's Collected Works or The Novels of Raymond Chandler but the print is small and paper too thin for me to enjoy reading and the uniform black covers don't have much shelf appeal.

This series of American poets has a contemporary poet servings as editor for a particular volume such as J.D. McClatchy for selections of Edna St. Vincent Millay or Robert Pinsky on William Carlos Williams, and Whitman deserves no less than Harold Bloom. I am still hoping for them to come out with selections from Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens. They serve as great introductions to poets and are nice pocket editions to carry around.

The only one that strikes me as a filling a much needed space is the volume of selected lyrics by Cole Porter. He has written some great songs certainly but the words on the page read cold when divested of their music and it doesn't quite work for me. I would preferred a companion cd at least if they insist on publishing lyrics. I get one of these every couple of months directly in the mail and every fifth one or so is half off. I think the next one due out is Kenneth Koch so I will leave him with the last word. I am off to Ohio tomorrow and will return sometime on Friday.

from One Train May Hide Another
(sign at a railroad crossing in Kenya)

In a poem, one line may hide another line,
As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.
That is, if you are waiting to cross
The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at
Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read
Wait until you have read the next line—
Then it is safe to go on reading.

Kenneth Koch

"I need a camera, to my eye..."

Another random photo emailed to me from my friend Tom in Conn. This is probably from last years trip to Buffalo to see the Patriots. I went on the inaugural trip up 1998 but none of the subsequent games in what has become an annual event. (The Bills won on a Doug Flutie comeback drive but we bought some Flutie Flakes anyway.)

The first time we had just missed a huge snow storm it was piled up everywhere. Naturally we made a pilgrimage to the Anchor Bar, home of the original Buffalo chicken wings (or so they claim). I could not talk the boys into trying to find Righteous Babe Records though.

I picked up Anthony Swofford's (Jarhead) new novel, Exit A, from the library. It's about a military brat in Japan so it looks like it could be my bowl of miso. He will be reading Wednesday night at Prairie Lights. Of course I will be in Ohio. That's two in row of his readings I will have missed. I hope I will be in town for Jane Smiley in Feb.

Extreme Close Ups

(Iggy)

(Hopper)

It's been at least a month since I put up some pictures of the boys. They were not really that impressed with their first snow experience although they did eat it.