Moods, Shoes, Feet

Three or four days a week--sometimes more--I slog through what feels a lot like despair.  I say "feels like," because it's really a physiological thing, caused by a bad night's sleep, or not eating enough, or both.  A nap and / or a meal will fix me up, or at least get me out of the slough of despond.  When I'm in it, though, that simple cure is hard to remember, and when the mood passes, as it eventually does, it's hard to remember why I ever let it grip me so long.

"Our moods do not believe in each other," saith the Preacher (OK, saith Emerson, in "Experience"),

To-day I am full of thoughts, and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to–morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world; but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.

Got a good night's sleep last night, and woke up feeling great; now I'm getting "weed by the wall"-y again.

Time for second breakfast, I guess.

***

I clock about 3.5-5 miles a day on my feet, walking, and even when I'm not walking, I'm often standing (as I am when I write this, for example).  Two weeks ago I went for a lovely run with my wife, a little more than 4 miles, but the shoes I chose weren't nearly supportive enough of my ankles and arches.  As a result, I had to hobble around in pain for about 11 days, and even today my right foot feels a bit wonky.

Like most things, this had a silver lining:  I tossed out a lot of old, worn, ill-fitting shoes that I'd put up for years, mostly out of laziness, and I'm gradually acquiring some spiffy new footwear, all of it suited to my increasingly delicate "pedal extremities," as Fats Waller calls them. A sobering reminder, though, that I'm not the lad I once was, able to leap tall buildings--or, at least, to jog around them--without injury.

***


Here's a Neruda poem I discovered back in my teens--translation by Donald Walsh, if memory serves.

"Tus Pies," por Pablo Neruda

Cuando no puedo mirar tu cara
miro tus pies.

Tus pies de hueso arqueado,
tus pequeños pies duros.

Yo sé que te sostienen,
y que tu dulce peso
sobre ellos se levanta.

Tu cintura y tus pechos,
la duplicada púrpura de tus pezones,
la caja de tus ojos que recién han volado,
tu ancha boca de fruta,
tu cabellera roja,
pequeña torre mía.

Pero no amo tus pies
sino porque anduvieron
sobre la tierra y sobre
el viento y sobre el agua,
hasta que me encontraron.

Your Feet

When I cannot look at your face
I look at your feet.

Your feet of arched bone,
your hard little feet.

I know that they support you,
and that your gentle weight
rises upon them.

Your waist and your breasts,
the doubled purple of your nipples,
the sockets of your eyes
that have just flown away,
your wide fruit mouth,
your red tresses, my little tower.

But I love your feet only
because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.

(One quibble:  my Spanish isn't great, but doesn't this translation lose the snap and surprise of the linebreak in the final stanza?  "But I don't love your feet / Except in that they walked..."  That's too stilted in the second line, but you need, I think, to preserve the flatly negative "no amo" somehow.)

Here's How it Happens...

Here's how it happens, sometimes.

I'm noodling around on my mandola, and notice (again) that the fret edges are kind of rough.  Not an uncommon problem, especially in climates like this where you have very dry, heated air in the house many months of the year.

Also notice a little rattle on the low C string, though I can't tell where it's coming from, exactly. And, come to think of it, there are some broken brads on the tailpiece, and I'm missing a string.  Poor thing could use a little  TLC, couldn't it?

Now, if I get all those things fixed--a new set of strings, a new tailpiece, a fret job--that's going to cost...well, I'm not entirely sure.  Somewhere between one and two hundred dollars, I'm guessing.  If I don't do them, though, I'm much less likely to play the instrument.

In fact, if I put a little more into the instrument, adding a pickup, I might even play it more, since I could do the rhythm parts for the klezmer band on it.

But wouldn't I rather spend that money on something else, like some vocal lessons?  In fact, I've thought a lot, over the years, about selling this mandola, not least in order to help finance (and justify) buying something else.  And I don't enjoy playing it quite as much as the mandolin.  Never have.

But would it sell if I don't put some work / money into it?  

So I can spend one to two hundred on it, or try to get roughly the same amount out of it.  Which is the better plan?

10, maybe 15, 20 minutes gone!

***


I'm listening to The XX on my computer, and Rhapsody, the service I'm using, flashes a little description of the band on screen.  It mentions that you can hear echoes of this or that artist in The XX, one of whom is Chris Isaak.

Instantly, I think of Chris Isaak playing a big hollow-body guitar, and the thought comes to me: "what kind of guitar was that?"

A moment later, as I open a web browser to look up Chris Isaak's guitar--I think it's some kind of Gretsch--I'm picturing myself playing that sort of instrument, wondering whether I'd ever use the Bigsby vibrato on it, and recalling a guitarist I saw once, my sophomore year at college, playing a hollow-body guitar.  Was that a Gretsch, too?  What did he play? (It was for a production of some Garcia Llorca play, I remember.)

This triggers another round of associations.  One of my colleagues has a Gretsch, at work, I think.  Billy Zoom played a Gretsch, but not a hollow-body.  Wasn't there a signature model?  Click and check:  yes there was, but it's hideously expensive.  And would I want to play something that flashy?

Picturing myself with it, playing with the Alte Rockers, reminds me that I don't play on all that many songs, because I'm not really all that good on the instrument.  But it would be fun!

That's five, maybe ten minutes I could have spent practicing the lovely instrument behind me.  I have a piece I'm trying to memorize, and every five minutes helps.

Hmmm...

To Be Read?

I quite like the title of this book by Michael Wood:  Literature and the Taste of Knowledge.  I don't know how useful it will be, and not knowing that, I'm not likely to read it, at least under current circumstances, but it's a title worth savoring.

***

My friend and colleague David wrote up a list for me of "50 good books of poetry published this century, and two that are forthcoming."  I don't know when I'll get to these, if ever, but I'd like to preserve & publish the suggestions.

52 21st Century Books
Paige Ackerson-Kiely, In No Man’s Land
Cynthia Arrieu-King, Manifest
Beth Bachman, Temper
Quan Barry, Controvertibles
John Beer, The Wasteland and Other Poems
Jaswinder Bolina, Phantom Camera
Joel Brouwer, And So
Suzzane Buffam, The Irrationalist
CM Burroughs, The Vital System
Ashley Capps, Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields
Arda Collins, It Is Daylight
Eduardo C. Corral, Slow Lightning
Olena Kalytiak Davis, Shattered Sonnets Love Cards and Other Off and Back     Handed Importunities
Michael Dickman, Flies
Lidija Dimkovska, Do Not Awaken Them with Hammers
Russell Edson, The Tormented Mirror
Graham Foust, Necessary Stranger
John Gallaher, The Little Book of Guesses
Hannah Rebecca Gamble, Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast
Stacy Gnall, Heart First Into the Forest
Gabriel Gudding, A Defense of Poetry
Saskia Hamilton, As for Dream
Matthea Harvey, Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form
Terrence Hayes, Lighthead
Bob Hicok, Animal Soul
Jay Hopler, Green Squall
Laura Kasischke, Space, In Chains
Suji Kwock Kim, Notes from the Divided Country
Jennifer Kronovet, Awayward
Katherine Larson, Radial Symmetry 
Ben Lerner, The Lichtenberg Figures
Sandra Lim, The Wilderness (forthcoming)
Cynthia Lowen, The Cloud that Contained the Lightning (forthcoming)
Sarah Manguso, The Captain Lands in Paradise
Anna Maschovakis, You and Three Others are Approaching a Lake
Malena Morling, Astoria
Meghan O’Rourke, Halflife
Cecily Parks, Field Folly Snow
Patrick Phillips, Chattahoochee
Kevin Prufer, National Anthem
Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
Srikanth Reddy, Voyager
Kay Ryan, The Niagara River
Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark with Sugar
James Shea, Star In the Eye
Zachary Schomburg, Fjords, Vol. 1
Frederick Seidel, Ooga-Booga
Richard Siken, Crush
Tracy K. Smith, Life On Mars
Peter Streckfus, The Cuckoo
G.C. Waldrep, Disclamor
Jean Valentine, Little Boat

***

As long as I'm listing books to read, here are some award-winners that the PCA just announced--not the whole list, but a trio that I might want to come back to, on leave: 

Ray and Pat Browne Award Best Reference/Primary Source Work:  
Sianne Ngai
Our Aesthetic Categories: zany, cute, interesting  
Harvard University Press 2012 

Susan Koppelman Award Best Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Work in Feminist Studies:  
Alma Garcia
Contested Images: Women of Color in Popular Culture
AltaMira Press 2012  

John G. Cawelti Award Best Textbook/Primer:
Timothy D. Taylor
The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture 
The University of Chicago Press 2012

Wistfully, 

E

Afresh, Afresh, Afresh

As I walked around the park with my wife this morning, we noticed that the trees were finally leafing out, some quite exuberantly.  This poem came to mind, by Phillip Larkin:

The Trees  

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief. 

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain. 

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

I hadn't noticed until now the pun that links stanzas two and three:  "grain," as in the grain of a piece of wood, setting up "thresh," which is what one does to grain after it's been harvested, as well as a lovely bit of onomatopoeia for the way those leafy branches move in the wind.  The same way that a Nativity painting will often subtly foreshadow the crucifixion, Larkin's spring poem foreshadows the fall.

Not sure what to do with "castles" yet, but it will probably come to me.

All this Happiness

I took a few weeks off from blogging and other on-line life--a little longer than I'd planned, actually.  Meant to come back a week ago, but a nasty virus really walloped me just as the school year began, and every moment I didn't absolutely have to be doing something (teaching, prepping classes, family business) I pretty much had to lie down and sleep.  At one point I tried to sit down and get some things done, and I promptly fell asleep in the chair:  it was one of those bugs.

Anyway, I felt a little better yesterday, and this morning the swollen glands and awful fatigue are both fading, so here I am. Huzzah!

***

The Christmas break was taken up with lots of nicely physical projects.  We redid my son's bedroom, giving it a new coat of paint (a lovely earth-tone called "toasted cashew," instead of the pastel he'd had since childhood) and buying him some new furnishings to go with it.  My wife and I then swapped work spaces here at home, as I've urged her to do for several months now.  That was a bigger job:  my son and I had to get a treadmill down two flights of stairs, and the whole family pitched in to bring her files and computer equipment upstairs and mine down, along with doing another fresh paint job.  Very joyous work, though, and since R works at home, it's a real transformation of her day-to-day, hour-to-hour life.  Me, I'm snugly situated back on my treadmill, my body in the basement and my mind in cyberspace, surrounded by twice the bookshelves that I had upstairs.  Improvements all 'round.

***

Today, one more make-over is on the agenda:  a new couch!  One of my wife's friends from quilting turned out to be selling a lovely matching couch and easy chair, both leather, both quite out of reach for us, new, so we're off to rent a truck and bring them home.  We've practically worn through our current couch, which we've had for about 15 years, so the timing is fortuitous.  Nice to have a strapping nearly-17-year-old son around for these big moving jobs, though--I gave my lower back quite a hard time, doing the study-swap.  Might need to focus on strengthening that, rather than on pushups or pull-ups, in the coming year.

***

Well, the couch moving went quite well, with lots of handy activity associated with it (driving a truck, taking screen doors off hinges, etc.).  When it was done, though, my son needed to drive off to school to work on lights for an upcoming dance concert.

A short while later, frantic ringing on the doorbell:  my son had been in an automobile accident on the way to school.

No one hurt, thank goodness, but the other driver's car needed to be towed, and he'd been so flustered at the accident site he'd locked himself out of mine.  My daughter was on our phone at home, and neither R nor I had our cell phones on us, so we'd missed his calls and texts.  Finally, the local police had simply given him a ride home to get an extra key.

I gave him one, and they drove him off, back to the cars, to get things sorted.

What a slender thread it all hangs by, all this happiness!

Baseline 49

So, with 363 days left until I turn 50, where am I, on various fronts?

Professionally, I feel pretty good.  The promotion meant a lot to me, as you probably know; having gotten it, I've relaxed a bit about productivity in the abstract, although I'm still doing more editing and less writing than I'd like.  Over the coming year I'd like to shift that ratio somewhat, by working on my romance book:  first the Susan Elizabeth Phillips piece, this winter and spring, and then the Mary Bly / Eloisa James one in the summer.  I'd also like to systematize my work on the Popular Romance Project, so that it doesn't feel quite so scattered.  The product, I'm happy with; it's the process that needs work.

One professional goal I do have is to invest a bit more in my teaching.  It's suffered, in the last couple of years, as I've focused on getting my publication record up to snuff.  I'm less connected with my students than I'd like, and also with the courses themselves--often I feel like I'm flailing, unsure of what to teach and why I'm teaching it.  So some reflection on all that seems in order, in the year to come.

The other is to improve my mind through extensive reading.  I feel like I've grown a bit stale, both in terms of the primary texts I know (in romance and even more so in poetry) and in terms of the secondary reading and ideas I work with, day to day.  Going back on Facebook immediately cut into my blog reading, I've noticed, so I'm going to need to push back against that, not least because, where romance is concerned, blogs are often where the scholarly action is, well before it reaches print.  (They're also prime recruiting ground for the Popular Romance Project.) 

Overall, though, the anxieties that beset me, professionally, not long ago seem to be melting away as the reality of the promotion sets in.   As the year ends, it's more like:  "Professional life? Check!

Family life?  Things looking good on this front, too.  Wonderful marriage, wonderful children:  the joys of my life.  Plans for this year?  Just to try and make things a little nicer for my wife by switching offices--hers has been in the basement since we moved into the house, and mine in a spare bedroom--and for my son by helping him repaint and refurnish his room.  He'll be off to college soon, and wants, he says, to "leave the room better than he found it."  Me, I want to enjoy this last year and a half at home with him as much as I can--not sure what that will entail, practically speaking, but I'll keep my eyes open.

Not sure if this counts as "family life," but I'm very excited about starting jazz guitar lessons this January, also.  I've been trying to switch from thinking in terms of acquiring instruments to thinking about acquiring skills on the ones I have:  what are the songs I want to play, really?  What do I want to be able to sit down and do?  One of my biggest successes from the summer was learning the chords to "Summer Samba," which I play with great pleasure all the time; I'm currently working on some changes to various torch songs ("In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning"; "One for my Baby and One More for the Road") and really enjoying the process.  Much more interested in playing such songs or taking on bossa nova than in learning rock riffs or licks, and with five months of lessons lined up, I'm quite hopeful for the coming year.

What else do I want to use as a baseline, so that I can measure how the year plays out?

I'm holding level at about 155 pounds, more or less.  (The home scale isn't terribly accurate, so that might be a pound or two off, but I can use it for comparison's sake.)  I can drop and do 60 push-ups in a single set, no problem. (Just checked:  yup, 60.)  That number has been higher in the recent past--I've hit 100 a couple of summers in a row--but only at the end of steady workout regimes.  Let's call 60 the baseline as the year begins.  I can also do one pull-up, unassisted, and I think those will be my new fitness focus, if I can keep the push-ups going, too.  More metrics:  according to my friends at RescueTime, I'm spending about 3 hours a week on social networking, and anywhere between 30 minutes and...can this be right?  3 hours on "shopping," which is the category that includes all of my instrument browsing on line.

Wow.  So there's something to work on:  paring that down.  I've managed to do so with "News and Opinion," on which I never seem to spend more than an hour, week by week, and usually less.  (Blogs count as "reference and learning." Let's see if we can get that number up, shall we?)

OK--if I were going full-on Bridget Jones here I'd start noting alcohol units and such, but I think this is enough to get me started on the new year.

Off to Home Depot for primer and paint--my son's room awaits!

Update and Baseline (1)

Whew!  What month--well, a good three weeks--it's been.

First there was a book manuscript to review for a press.

Then, really quickly, there was that paid leave grant application to write and turn in.

To do that, I had to think through and write up an overview, chapter by chapter, of my romance fiction monograph.  Which isn't written yet.  Which I've avoided thinking through and writing up, because whenever I do, I see all the holes had problems with it.  But which I had to do, so I did it, and it felt good, looked good, sounded good.  Well, good enough.

Then I had to get a bunch of ducks in a row for PCA, and send a lot of overdue emails and things for JPRS.

Then I had to report for jury duty, which meant that I had to have a day cleared out, to spend at the courthouse, with the rest of the week cleared out, too, just in case I got called to serve.

Then I spent the day at the courthouse, and wasn't called.  Huzzah!  Free for another year, at least, and I got to read some fun P. G. Wodehouse novels on the Kindle while I waited.  Not a bad day.

Which was a good thing, too, because it turned out there was a bunch of work still to do for PCA.

Which I did, and started writing up lyrics for this year's Purim songs.

Which has turned out to be harder than I remembered, but I'm plugging away at it.

(So far, the only one that's come easily is the Paul Simon parody, "(You must read) Fifty Shades to be a  Lover.")

Then there was, what?  Well, the schedule cleared, and I did some holiday shopping, some birthday shopping, some fun.  Put some smooth-wound strings on my guitar, and signed up for jazz guitar lessons at the local cultural center, which will start in January.  Calmed down, and as I did, seemed to get happier and happier, as the days progressed.  Yay!

A lesson there, somewhere.

***

In the Jewish calendar, there's a 10-day period of soul-searching, etc., between Rosh Hashanah, the new year, and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement.  I don't really celebrate either of those, but I do find that the 10 days between the Winter Solstice and the secular New Year pretty much do the same thing for me.

Psychologically, I find that having the days start to get longer really boosts my mood, even if that's more a fact I know than a turn I perceive on my daily walks, at first.  Also, I tend to set the 21st as the target day for me to finish work and start my holiday, since that's when my kids get off from school.  It feels like a turning point, or rather the start of a slow curve into something new.

Then comes my birthday--49, this year!--more on which in a moment.

Then there's Christmas, which always gets me thinking about time's passage.  (I used to be very uncomfortable with the family celebration, and now I'm not; in fact, I quite enjoy it.  Noticing how much I do, and thinking back to my old aversion, always gets me musing about how things change.)

Then there's the big one:  the 28th, my late father's birthday.  I think about him a lot, at this time of year, partly because I miss him keenly, partly because I think about what he'd say about things that I'm up to, and partly because I always compare who I am now, and what I'm up to, to what I remember of him at my age.  A lot of soul-searching stirred up by all that, and sometimes resolutions, too.

After which--perfectly timed!--comes the new year.  There was a time, 7 or 8 years ago, when I felt so cocky at the end of the year that when someone asked me my New Year's resolution, it was "Keep Up the Good Work!"  Not quite at that point now, but I feel pretty good about where things stand on many fronts.

Next post will be about that, and where I want to go from here.