What's that? I wrote a poem.

Fort Rêve

How many houses

we have built up

inhabited, torn down.

The space below the bed

the table draped in sheeting

the leaning branches

elephant ear leaves attached with thorns

the grass-roofed

open-walled hut

the place beneath the stairs

dark and steaming

with the smell of noodles

tamped-down earth

blanket walls.

We invented rules

custom hung on a nail

a twist of ribbon

a certain page from a book

that remains there

the way you hitched

a knee to climb

up or under—through

a rough opening of tree branches.

Gaston Bachelard

speaks of “recapturing

the reflexes of the ‘first stairway’”

“The feel of the tiniest latch has remained in our hands.”

In my hands, so many

houses I’ve been building,

dreaming, destroying.

Always, with the primitive forts

came the moment of destruction.

Pulling down with our hands

what we immediately begin to rebuild in our dreams.

Walk and Photos

Went on a walk today with the dogs


Used "Shake It Photo" on my iPhone to take some mock Polaroids.


Got a little artsy fartsy. Not like me.


But, hey, why not?

Last Day of the Term

What happens when you teach in a private school, and a health class is taught in your room during your off periods, and that class is having a "condom party" as part of its review for the last unit test on contraception?

When you return to your classroom, the air is close with the cloying smells of bananas, latex, and teenage embarrassment. The trashcans are full of cut up pieces of condom, and on the tables smears of lube and ice cream glint in the late afternoon sunlight.


It has been a very long week, and I suddenly feed the impulse to teach some of James Joyce's very nasty letters to his wife, Nora Barnacle.

(pictured above, smeared lubricant)

Fiddled a Drizzle

Why Google translation services may be overrated...

"Go pom, pom, pom, I love my toasted apple and I imagine you next Wednesday enjoy your apple!!"

" Allez pom, pom, pom, je croque d'amour ma pomme et je vous imagine mercredi prochain savourer votre pomme !!!! "

As a word for word translation this doesn't look too far off the map, but in terms of conveying meaning, it shits the brick. In a similar fashion, my senior English students do a good job interpreting and analyzing words, sentences, pages and stringing them along into a reasonable approximation of an essay, but they need help combining these bits of analysis into something meaningful. They are smart kids, but we have plenty of work ahead of us.

So, to sign off:

"Do not you remember anything ????..But yes, the carnival, the blaring, music and slides of the beautiful Magic Roundabout. How many laps in winning the prize. You remember the booth candy coated peanuts and the good taste to caramel. There was this beautiful scent throughout the house. Just a board for the completion of the toffee, take an old pot. Otherwise, scraping hot. Redo the operation of the coating twice, because it makes bubbles at first. I fiddled a drizzle caramel to save it."

Shit that tasted good!

Obviously, I went with the pancake idea. I tried to make these Korean vegetable pancakes all last summer, but seldom got it right. This one was nearly perfect. Amazing how things can turn around like that!

Dilemmas

I love reading other people's blogs, and I love the idea of writing a blog myself, but where oh where is the inspiration? Where is the focus? Is focus actually necessary?

One thing I've been thinking about these last weeks is how easy I find it to waste time. What? It's 12:15 already? But I've accomplished exactly nothing so far except the boiling of some beet green stems for some undefined cooking plan. I'm not sure what I'll be doing with boiled beet green stems, but somehow, it seemed like the thing to do with them.

I envision them in some kind of tart, or maybe a soup, or a vegetable pancake, but can't actually decide what I will do with them. They sit, boiled, on the counter in the colander. Looking at them, I wonder how I am going to be able to teach a full day of classes at Rowland Hall in little more than a week, when today I can't even handle a bunch of beet green stems.

Poem

Boiled beet green stems
on the counter
bitter, stringy, pointless
end of summer.

Security Words

Sessibl

I have a fondness for those nonsense words that web pages make you type in as a security feature before you can comment, or click through to some other page. I like how they are word-like, but not words. I can imagine to myself how they would be pronounced, and used in a sentence, even, but they are still non-words. It is this quality of wordness (to make up yet another word) that makes them good for security purposes. Machines cannot guess them, because they are not real words and don't really follow any pattern, but any thinking person with a sense of grammar rules and linguistics (which is most everyone who has grown up with language) can recognize a funny closeness, an easy familiarity in them. I'm thinking about writing a poem using mainly these words, if I can collect enough of them. So far I have the word at the top of this post, "sweambo," and "ourse." Evocative, don't you think?

On a related note, I just completed a "spam check" security question on the utahfm page that required I DO MATH rather than type a made-up word. WTF? Why you gotta go ruin my fun by using math for security checks rather than spiffy word-like non-words? I know what 9 + 9 equals; that's not a problem, but don't start getting fancy and asking something like 2x + 7[y]/84 = z. I'll be screwed.

Vivas las palabras. (That's for Thomas, who is learning spanish.)

UPDATE: Here is the poem I just wrote. I particularly love the first stanza. I have a feeling more of these will be written shortly, after all, I'm in the middle of grading finals!

Shbusne

In sessible sweambo
viativis ourse.
Intae winglike nossun,
semming a zorter harchie.

Movence bycol uryngin
coosse the fabions,
tarous aryor so resotsho
then daursm termove nomou.

Deali bilito.
Deali bilito.
Sessa affiliaj,
sessa cernhog.
Dabings straion
over the prousti ingul

or in sessible sweambo.
Viativis ourse,
Intae winglike nossun.
Viativis ourse nossun.