I love the calligraphy here, at neither snow. Graceful and a little sad and also a touch shaky, allowing for imperfection, the lines not perfectly straight. and a new sense of how to fill the outer space of an envelope.
Sometimes I think that this space could be more beautiful if I wrote everything I wanted to say and then posted it in my handwriting.
I was looking up solutions to raccoons and found this awesome story on the Berkeley Parents Network.
We also had raccoons who came in through the cat door. Not only did they eat the cats’ food, but they played with our son’s stuffed animals. We didn’t know why the stuffed animals started losing noses and ears until the middle of one night when we were awakened to the sound of Tickle Me Elmo laughing his little head off. Upon investigating we found Elmo stuck in the cat door unable to stop laughing and vibrating. The raccoons had abandoned him when they couldn’t squeeze him through the door. Elmo’s mishap started explaining a lot of strange toy problems in our house.
A beautiful essay in the New York Times Magazine: Against Meat, by Jonathan Safran Foer.
From Nature and the Human Soul
The Wanderer is, in Mary Oliver’s words, “determined to save the only life [she] could save.” This is not a recommendation for selfishness. This savable life is identified only by “[striding] deeper and deeper into the world” until she discovers the place where her life and the life of the world are one. She finds the place where, as theologian Frederick Buechner says, “our deepest gladness and the world’s hunger meet.” That place, that way of being in relationship with the world, is what I mean by soul. The life she saves is what Campbell calls “the core of us, the basic character of our being,” which leads to a life of fulfilling service. This salvation is an act of love, love of both self and world.
Per my friend Barbara’s suggestion, I listened to Mexican poet Coral Bracho and her translator Forrest Gander on Bookworm.
(This show, Bookworm, is simple and nearly perfect. It’s just such a gorgeous idea to have writers read their work, just a little bit, and talk just a little, to the host Michael Silverblatt. I do love writing on the page, and sometimes I don’t like how authors read their own words, but I think that a lot of poetry is understood by ear. And writers aren’t famous for being outspoken, so to speak just a little, read just a little, it makes them human, but in this context they are still revered. They have a chance to speak really intimately about their work to a man who really cherishes it. I would like to be him, to get a chance to give the public an earnest, complex, and intimate portrait of a writer in half an hour — with no call-ins, no questions from the audience, just the two of them. There’s a respect and reverence for poetry and poets, artists and art, that feels really important in this era, and rare.)
Coral Bracho spoke about poetry like it’s a painting. She talked about uniting the world that we see with the world we can only understand with our eyes closed, the concrete and the spiritual. She had such a complex way of explaining it — funny that, like a painting, I couldn’t repeat now what she said, but I can see the arc of what she meant in my mind’s eye. It’s refreshing to read her poetry, which feels timeless in a way that I don’t see almost ever.
They Touch Secret Stained Glass
Crickets (the termites damper
their scarlet discourse) set the fruits swaying by their trilled names,
and the ferns. They touch secret stained glass
(the termites bandy echoes in the silence)
with the vesperal vigilance,
the vertilicality,
of high calm nights.
This article, “Bringing ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ to the Screen” from the New York Times Magazine, chronicles the unlikely emergence of Spike Jonze into the moviemaking business — that crazy space where a tiny creative idea catapults into the public sphere and so people in suits give you more money. And it talks of childhood vs. adulthood, and the unlikely routes of the imagination. I’ve never seen Spike Jonze speak, but reading this article, feeling the energy the writer is conjuring, it took me to a space of artmaking that is sometimes hard to access: the ability to trust in the process, and to try out any idea just because. Maybe art school temporarily damages that ‘just because.’ I can’t wait to see this movie.
I love This American Life on NPR. When I was at Cranbrook I would draw quietly at my desk with my headphones on, plugged into the computer, streaming episode after episode. I have listened to almost all of them.
I submitted an essay of mine to them recently, with a note gushing and bragging about how much I know This American Life and how inspiring it is. They rejected it with a form letter that suggested I listen to the show to see what work might best fit their style. I could only laugh. And resubmit it to them again. I really think that their aesthetic is closely aligned with mine, close enough that if I moved to Chicago I would work for them in a heartbeat.
I listened to their recent episode this past Sunday while I was making a really delicious dessert for some dinner guests. I cried through most of Act One, and felt inspired enough that even now when I think of that episode I feel full in my stomach, this feeling like I need to and should jump out into the world and save it right now. It’s about a man who had a child too young, didn’t know how to parent yet and didn’t know how to be a success in his own life. Then he grew up, and twenty years later he had a child again, this time with enough money and knowledge to raise it well. (Maybe that is relevant. Maybe that is the person I love.) He learns that it doesn’t take much to raise a child well, but those first few years are everything. He teaches what he knows — pretty much he just tells new, poor parents to read to their children — and the results break my heart and restore it.
Steve was nice enough to accompany me to Julie and Julia last night, which was great because we got to bash it the whole way home.
The movie made me angry at our generation, or rather at the depiction of our generation. It made Julia Child look authentic: strange, towering, loud, energetic, original with big dreams. Julie, the blogger who cooks her way through Julia Child’s cookbook in one year, is whiny, skinny, and smaller than life. Julia’s kitchen is gorgeous; Julie’s kitchen is rusty and claustrophobic. Julia is in love with her husband; Julie’s love for her husband feels spastic, sporadic, and false. Julie spends too much time in front of the computer, chatting on her blog. Julia is writing a cookbook on a typewriter with carbon copy sheets and real paper. Julie is ‘publishing’ without editing, degrading the language with drivel. She isn’t funny or original, and at the end, when she wants everyone to be proud of her for cooking so much, it feels like a huge setback: she wants me to be proud of her, not for creating a cookbook, not for creating anything, but for copying? for cooking recipes that someone else made and then telling people about it? It made our generation seem incredibly trite and intensely, disappointingly derivative.
The premise has a lovely form: two women with similar names find themselves through food, at the beginning of one girl’s adult life and at the end of another’s. The girl looks to her role model to learn how to be a woman. But she never does anything further than copy in a lesser form what the older woman made. And in the end we learn that Julia Child was uninterested in Julie’s blog project. Just as anyone would be uninterested if I typed out the books I love instead of writing my own. There is so much to be said for the lessons in imitation, but we hope that we learn to stand on the shoulders of giants to reach further than the giants could reach. I have to believe that that’s true.
I love the intimacy of the blog form. It is private and personal and has so much room to be whatever the writer needs it to be. I love the string the reader follows, as if it were an old-fashioned mystery we read in installments. I think many blogs can be beautiful, and I think that our generation is capable of more than any other generation before. It hurt me to see a young woman celebrated for copying someone else’s recipes in a less authentic form, in a less authentic space, with less authentic language to describe them. I am writing this on a blog: I have to believe that our era holds more than Julie in her ugly kitchen can see.
from Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees by Lawrence Weschler, p. 236
Years ago, when Bob and I were reading philosophy together — as a way of getting to know each other, really — we stumbled upon the formulations of a late medieval neoplatonist theologian and philosopher, a mathematician known as Nicolas of Cusa (1401-1464). Nicolas has this wonderful way of talking aout the difference between logic and faith or, alternatively, between knowing and truth. Logic, he suggests, knowing, is like an n-sided polygon nested inside a circle. The more sides you add, the more complexities you introduce, the more the polygon approaches the circle which surrounds it. And yet, the farther away it gets as well. For the circle is but a single, seamless line, whereas your polygon seems to be breeding more and more lines, more and more angles, becoming less and less seamless. No matter how many sides you add, no matter how closely the inscribed polygon begins to approximate the circle, it never reaches the circle, and at a certain point a leap is required, from the tangent of the arc, from endlessly compounding multiplicity to singleness of being. Another name for that leap, of course, is grace.
