A card for Cynthia:

Four of Swords:

"Instinct: Stabilization and keeping still. Goal: Repose and peace (self-knowledge and renewal through the experience of suffering). Light: Social justice, tolerance. Shadow: Forced retreat (illness), isolation. Quality: The lull in the fighting showing prospects of peace.

This card reflects the need to pull back and defensively protect oneself against the external world. Since the ego has not yet recognized that the true obstacles come from within and the external circumstances only trigger them, it digs in and seals itself off in order to avoid a defeat. The St. Andrew's Cross formed by the four swords then represents an apparent stability, yet on a deeper level it means that we learn through suffering until we are released."

--Banzhaf

Count down: seven days

Sandy Beach, Rocky Point, Mexico

For Suzanne:

who has an empress in her house.

"We recognize the Great Goddess, who represents the source of all life, in the Empress. She is the boundless power of nature continuing to bring forth new life, and the inexhaustible source stimulating our creative potential and ability to accept impulses, letting something new develop from them. She also stands for the necessity of dissolving old life structures so that new ones can be formed, and for the urge to break taboos and rise above oneself in order to fathom the mystery of life."

And one of my favorite details, her hands:

"She is holding a phallus-like lotus stem, representing masculine procreative power, with her right hand; the left one remains softly open as if it would embrace an invisible child."

from The Crowley Tarot, Akron Hajo Banzhaf

Cynthia gives me a star:

Isn't she lovely? Let's see what I can find out about her:

"I am the blue-lidded daughter of Sunset; I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky."

--from Crowley's The Book of the Law

"The Star is the card touching the longing in the depths of our unconscious, and this longing is equivalent to the longing of life for life itself."

"The Star is not only the card of hope, the unconscious will of life, and the insight into higher correlations; it also stands for the unconscious desire to abandon oneself in the streams of flowing delight and cheerful irresponsibility: 'What do I dream about? What is it that dreams of me? What is dreamed about within me? If a person knows what he dreams about it does not really make him into a person or truly human, nor does he move anywhere with it--he then becomes a psychologist; a dreamer who knows his own dreams.'"

Devotion to the moment, renewal and rebirth, hope, trust in the future.

Star of Bethlehem.

--from Akron Hajo Banzhaf's The Crowley Tarot


Huh. Does this sound like Mexican beach to you? That's what I'm thinkin'.

On reading, or: Indolence, the Eight of Cups

Anybody dig tarot? Want a reading?

Friday was the last day of class and the end-o'-the-term bash for my students and advisees. Party at Gina's house. You know they plowed through the munchy food, all of it? Strawberries, grapes, bread, cheese, guacamole, chips, goldfish, cookies, on and on--eight pounds of strawberries, if that says anything. So clean up wasn't bad because there was nothing to put away.

Invariably somebody starts asking for a tarot reading, and I put it off because invariably people start leaving when I start giving readings. Maybe it's boring to listen to somebody else's reading; maybe I put it off until late in the party and it's time to go: late. I think it has to do with people being uncomfortable, too, though. As if sitting around listening to somebody else's reading means you also have to think about the nature of the universe, and about God versus gods or no such thing as god, and about Satan and his minions if you believe in that sort of thing, and about the credulity of the human mind or the skepticism of the human mind or the neuroticism or hysteria of the human mind, if you'd rather think about Freud and would rather not think about fate or chance or luck--not that tired shit again--and about how sad it is that we all want so much, we want so much, and about how there is so much something about death here though it is just a card game, a reading, and like any other reading (for we are all literary people here) or any exercise in realisim, it is devoid of authenticity, or authority, for it isn't true anymore than a reading of a poem is truth, or a reading of a painting is truth, or a reading of a book of paintings is truth, for a deck of cards is like a book of paintings, but less so: a parlor trick: a house of cards: a house of cards:

So yeah:

except for those cards that seem to follow you around, the ones that come up more often than not and you remember them because they speak to you darkly and you're in no mood to hear it, ever? My eight of cups runneth over:

"a rotting sea whose last water is moldering in mud holes. In the air there is a stench of fever swamps where contagious viruses lurk....and on the horizon a pale, sulfurous light is falling.... Although water still streams into the bowls and fills the ones below them, the farmland has long turned into a cesspool and the fresh water is sucked up by the morass."

Makes me feel dirty. And lazy:

"Success abandoned. Decline of interest in anything. Temporary success, but without further result. Things thrown aside as soon as gained. No lasting even in the matter at hand. Indolence in success. Journeying from place to place. Misery and repining without cause. Seeking after riches."

and sorry for myself:

"Instinct: Renunciation, self-denial, resignation to one's fate. Goal: Finding purpose and meaning in the depths of seclusion. Light: Relinquishing control, transformation. Shadow: Depression, suicide, self pity. Quality: Nullification of values; destruction of the form."

and pigheaded:

"this picture warns us of the rotten swamps we are approaching or in which we have already lost our way. It shows that our perspective of the world and our attitude towards life has become mouldy and is deperately in need of fresh waters. No matter if we are threatened with decay because of self-complacent indolence or have become stuck in a dangerous sectarianism: it is urgently necessary to change our ways":

That's some kinda scary shit, depending, of course, on how you read it and on how many times you read it, and through what lens. I think I prefer new historicism to speech act theory here, though I don't know why I say that other than my desire to deconstruct historical assumptions about "indolence" to suit my own purposes--to reassert the etymological [Late Latin indolens, indolent-, painless: Latin in-, not; + Latin dolens, present participle of dolere, to feel pain] sense of painlessness and to challenge the more paradigmatic pejorative sense of sloth, for example--and to avoid at all costs letting that thing speak with any kind of performative authority: "This is my blood. Drink me." Was that Buffy or Christ? Oh, it was Indolence? Somebody please shut that thing up before I kill it.

How is it, shadows, that I knew ye not?

Suzanne wants to know what you're reading. Now you know what I'm reading.

**********

"The Eight of Cups is called Indolence. This card is the very apex of unpleasantness. It is ruled by the planet Saturn; time, sorrow, have descended upon pleasure, and there is no strength in the element of water which can react against it. This card is not exactly "the morning after the night before"; but it is very nearly that. The difference is that the "night before" has not happened! This card represents a party for which the all preparations have been made; but the host has forgotten to invite the guests; or, the caterers have not delivered the good cheer. There is this difference, though, that it is in some way or other the host's own fault. The party that he planned was just a little bit above his capacity; perhaps he lost heart at the last moment."

--Aleister Crowley

**********

A story a day:

as the story goes (I didn't hear it first hand), one of my lit students proposed an independent study in my department this term inspired by Ray Bradbury who'd said, in response to a question about writing and accomplishment ("how do you do it?"):

"I write everyday."

So B.J. took him seriously and proposed to write a story, 2,500 words or so, every day. Here 's his url.

Marvelous, no? Puts me to shame, anyway.

Meeting with the kiddies

this week, all fifty of them. After grading their papers I realized their revisions might be poor if I didn't talk to them in person about the work. And I distrust grading as feedback anyway. They make cosmetic revisions, a few cuts, a few change of phrases and turn it back in. More and more I'm thinking of grading in conference rather than marking papers at home and giving them back. I end up meeting with them anyway.

So that was my day yesterday. Got there at 7 am, left at 8:30 pm, and today's looking about the same. And tomorrow.

Monday they turn in the finals. Then I will grade them again!

Oh, Mexico...

But I wanted to be Shelley:

This was a test for me. My Ph.D. work was on Romantic poetry, so I sat there trying to match response to poet (and still answer honestly, yes), and feeling sorta shocked at how fucking crazy you'd have to be to be Shelley--hear me, you Shelleyans!--though I already knew that having lived with him for the last several years (I will finish my article on The Cenci).

Okay, but Coleridge is pretty awesome. A labyrinthine mind. "Frost at Midnight," without which my life would be missing something necessary. Jake told me recently he was "the last man to have read everything when it was still possible to read everything." And this from the Biographia over at Mike's Sonnetarium on the "faults of our elder poets and the false beauties of the moderns." Go Coleridge. (And will this discussion never end?)

Well, don't get me started on Romantic poetry. I'm a little insane about it.



You are Samuel Taylor Coleridge! The infamous
"archangel a little damaged!" You
took drugs and talked for hours, it's true, but
you also made a conscious choice to cultivate
the image of the deranged poet in a frenzy of
genius. You claimed you wrote "Kubla
Khan" in an afternoon after a laudanum dream,
when you pretty manifestly did no such thing.
You and your flashing eyes and floating hair.
And your brilliant scholarship and obvious
genius.


Which Major Romantic Poet Would You Be (if You Were a Major Romantic Poet)?

Look what I got in the mail today:

Suzanne and I exchanged books, which I have to admit, was not only her idea but the best idea I've heard in a long time. This morning I woke up, thought about grading more papers, went downstairs to the mailbox hoping Red Paper Flower had arrived, and there it was. A gem on a sunny Saturday morning, and a signed gem, at that. First thing I thought: here is the person after all. She blogs, I know, but look: she signs in both blue ink and black, in cursive, with her hand and two pens. And with her hands she put this gem into an envelope, addressed it with her pens and penmanship, and sent it to me, from her house and lovely garden in the east to my place here in the midwest. If that ain't magic, I don't know what is. And she does all kinds of things in this little book that I can't do. I don't know how you do all of this, for example, in one tiny lyric narrative, but God I admire it--I've been looking at this poem all day:


The First Signs

And forsythia tumbles
over the fence
wild with yellow--

When I was seven a wasp
landed on my lip
drawn by the sweetness
of my mother's red lipstick.

--while purple flagstones
split with grass

The same day a child next door
squeezed six new kittens dead.
That's when I knew--

there are two shades of still.


Thanks so much, Suzanne, for your beautiful book.

Federico Correa, "Innocence"

Where the magic happens:

my study at home. Now you know I'm sitting at the little yellow desk and working from a laptop when I post. I am sitting here now. The blue chair is where Romulus is perched now, as I write, and where he sleeps most of his day. There is a thick veil of fur on that yellow comforter and on the navy blue rug.

A few things have changed since I took this picture. The bookshelf is full. I've traded in the school chair for an antique wooden desk chair that swivels and creaks and tips back just a bit too far. It's a good chair. From the window in front of me I have a view of my neighbor's vegetable garden; many labels, not much sprouting yet. From the window on my left I'm watching the clouds overhead build towards the storm we're about to get. It's windy. The sky is all shades of periwinkle and gray. I'm listening to Lhasa and the usual train hailing through town. This is the hour for trains.

Show me yours?

Ah, shit:

Any kin out there? I'm very short, actually. Well, not very. But short.

kitten Romulus in bowl 10 pounds ago 

Yes! Image Power!

Romulus, Trystan, clouds

Glenda badass with drill 

Trystan the sand sculpturer in hat and mittens 

Me, Glenda, and Chris, last time I was in Tucson.

Look, I've got image power:

playing with pictures

Free weight, dead lift:

lifting terms. I think they're strange and beautiful.

Ten days ago, before getting hit with fever and snot, I joined a gym. I've managed to avoid joining a gym for nearly two years. After all, I've got free access to the facilities at the college and it seemed an unnecessary expense--which is to say I've not only not been in a gym since I moved here from Ithaca but also that I must have learned nothing in grad school because it was the same story there. Cheap gym facilities on campus: why join off campus? But eventually I did join the gym in downtown Ithaca, a little grungy place I'd run to when the rest of my life was out of control.

Because my campus life is out of control. I accept it.

The new place is also small and grungy and packed to the square inch with free weights and machines. Utililty is beautiful: in the back room, two punching bags, a squat bar, a bench press, a jump rope and a set of gloves, and red brick walls where a set of belts hangs on a nail.

Oh, and the perks of a small midwestern town? They let me have a key to the place so I can make my own hours. Membership: 25 bucks a month, no deposit, no membership fees.

I went back this morning, flicked on the lights, the stereo, and got to work. Upper body day, as they say.

Something's wrong

with spring. It's just over 50 degrees, dark, windy, and the house is cold, and the plants on the porch are wilting from their cold nights. I have seedlings on the kitchen counter waiting to take root, but the frost hasn't given up. The heat in the house just kicked on. Did I mention it's dark?

May in Tucson is a scorcher. SPF 50, sunglasses, AC all day. I'm dying to put on something short and sleeveless, to go barefoot and to go swimming, to put my hands into warm wet soil. To smell rain on hot pavement. When it rains in the desert it smells like wet rock and rosemary and the rain is warm. Once again: desert homesickness. Something's wrong with me.

I'm wondering if I should try to meet Charles while I'm home? If you're reading Charles, let me know. We could talk Buffy.

"The Box"

That funny little experimental poem I'd just as soon file into the bone yard as tinker with some more? For lack of what to do for it? I sent it to Fence. They took it. Thank you, thank you Fence.

More work rant: Trying to find a better system. Just last week I managed to get their papers off my desk and back into their hands and the letters of rec written and the pre-enrollment advising done--and then I got sick. Five days with fever and chills, and all I wanted was to lie on my couch and watch Buffy and sleep, and still the kids were writing "can we meet can we talk about my paper can we talk about my absences my good intentions my catching up" and when I absolutely had to be on campus with my fever, I went to my office and hid behind my closed office door. I coughed and the lurker outside heard me cough and knocked on the door. I suppose one response to that is don't answer when you need not to answer. I'm starting to get it. But I'm slow, like I said.

I've got 52 fifteen-page papers coming in on Monday that I've got to turn around by Friday. It's going to hurt, but I'm feeling cheered and nearly well again. Plane ticket: by 10:40 AM on June 5th, I'll be in Tucson, Arizona with a suitcase full of books and a swim suit. By the 7th, my godson and I will be making the great sand sculptures of the 21st century on Sandy Beach, Rocky Point, Mexico. His parents can come too, I suppose, since they invited me. We're staying in somebody's condo. We don't know how long. Now I wish I had an ipod.